Knowledge acquisition in Rockaway College
Children ought to be themselves: All children are natural learners with different neurological construction, abilities, interests, temperaments, information receiving, processing and communicating styles and rates of emotional, cognitive and social development. Healthy growth-mental and physical, emotional and intellectual-require formal learning environments to fully allow for the differences among children and permit them to grow in their own way and in their own time according to their own neurological construction, abilities, interests, etc.
Neurological Atypicality as exhibited in the Spectrum of Gifted and Talented is a synthesis of Strength and Weakness: Here strength complements and compensates for weakness presenting a fusion pathway to learning, a blend inseparable and, thus, unamenable to divided treatment called the Neuro-Learning Style. Formal learning environments for the neurological atypical must fully support the whole child rather than divide and serve separate aspects of cognitive functioning.
Talent Development is the basis of Neurological Atypical Learning: With Talent Development strength areas determine the course of learning, rather than the rough equality among cognitive processes derived through the combination of strength and remediated deficit. Talent Development requires the emphasis on student differentiated learning and on quality differentiated outcomes rather than the demand for uniform general education curriculum study and outcomes, as each neurological atypical youngster brings to leaning different Neuro-Learning Styles which determine what is learned, when learning occurs and how learning happens for each youngster. In Talent Development learning through deficit is a student's choice and comes well after self-esteem is assured as happens when learning is developed through strength first. And when a youngster chooses to learn through weakness compensatory strategies are learned rather than the deficit being remediated.
Emotional readiness to accept a task comes well before the task: Any learning first depends on how a child feels about herself, empowered or powerless, competent or stupid. Compelling a task when a child feels powerless or stupid just frightens, discourages and deepens helplessness. Formal learning environments intended for the younger above average neurological atypical where there is a definite possibility of emotional disturbance must cultivate a balanced emotional disposition in each child as its primary education outcome. And formal learning environments intended for the older above average neurological atypical where there is definite emotional disturbance must provide a time for emotional healing, a time of taking off the pressure, of reassurance, as in time these youngsters will gain the energy and the courage to accept any task.
Play as the activity of emotional wellness: Children ought to engage in whatever play the environment supports for as long as they wish. Play for the younger of this population would be the means to uncover natural leaning instincts, to avoid the pain of emotionally damaging experiences and to gain trust in their own way of knowing. Play for the older of this population would be the means to recover their natural learning instincts, to recover from the pain of prior experiences and to regain trust in their own way of knowing.
Children move from learning through impulse to learning though intention: Children grow naturally from intuitive to conscious learners, from impulse to intention. Very young children’s engagement with the world is through impulse rather than through conscious intention. They discover the characteristics of the world and the relationships between and among people, places and things and themselves through an intuitive engagement with everything around them. There is an absence of a thought through, goal oriented process devised prior to action; rather there exists an overwhelming presence of impulse as motivation to action, to decision making. And the impulse is the expectant feeling of joy, of pleasure, an object or activity will give.
Children of about five or six years of age continue the process from their very young childhood engaging with whatever material causes good feelings, and not because on considered reflection the use of objects or the participation in an activity is “calculated” to yield a high degree of joy, and not at all of any deliberate decision to learn what is intrinsically there to learn. Impulse to play, to feel good, that's the motivation. Yes, there is intention choosing what objects and activities to engage. And in that respect there exists in the child a rudimentary reflective decision making process. But, conflicts over the choice of material or activity to engage is at the impulse level, two competing impulses, and the decision to choose one over another rests on feeling which would give the more pleasure.
By about age seven or eight, depending on the individual, there begins a transition from strictly impulse to conscious intention. The more frequently the child says to him/herself, hey this looks cool, and then reaches for whatever is the cool object or activity, or asks questions about things and goes searching for the answers, the more conscious decision-making happens; and the more conscious decision-making happens the deeper the learning is about self and relationships of self to the world and to others and of relationships among and between the things of the world. And as the child grows into adolescence, and young adulthood the more frequent the practice of conscious decision-making the deeper the habit of goal oriented, self-directed learning and the deeper the habit of taking individual responsibility for self becomes.
Learning through direct engagement with the stuff of the world: All people, places and things possess intrinsic characteristics open to children’s learning. Children take away through intuitive curiosity, at first, progressing later to conscious, focused intention, selected intrinsic aspects of the things of the world with which they engage.
Academic learning is all about the student’s felt need to know: Youngsters must feel the need to know academic skills and subject content before undertaking specific skill acquisition and subject study. Motivation is first placed within each youngster; they must come to feel the need on their own.
Responsible children grow into responsible adults: To cultivate a responsible adult requires giving responsibility to the adult when a child. And giving responsibility to the child requires empowering the child to make substantive decisions on the individual choices in his and her education.
Children ought to be free to choose: Freedom to choose that which affects the child individually, that which is of interest, of passion, of felt need, is essential for only under this kind of freedom can the child grow in his/her natural way and in being responsible.
Freedom to choose means doing what you feel you need to do, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the needs of others: Between compelling a child to stop hitting classmates and compelling him to learn Geography lies the meaning of social restraint and individual learning responsibility. Hitting classmates involves others, but learning Geography involves only the individual. The community has the right to restrain the antisocial individual because he is interfering with the needs of others to be within a safe, caring and friendly society but the community has no right to compel an individual to learn Geography, for learning Geography is a matter for the responsibility of the individual and his/her felt need to learn Geography. But when the child feels the need and freely chooses to study Geography he should be supported with all the highest quality assistance he is willing to accept.
Supporting the learning independence of the bright neurological atypical must fully acknowledge the need for a mentoring relationship of adult to child where an adult mentor and a youngster enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to attain a common understanding of and an agreement on learning goals and the action steps required to reach those goals; this includes a mentor working with children on social-emotional, psycho-dynamic and learning deficit issues.
Compelling assessment of learning destroys learning: Children learn through a slow process of inquiry where, by way of natural intuitive observation, they form extremely tentative hunches which are tested against experiences. Hunches become a bit stronger each time children test one and have it confirmed by experience until the point where they will say with conviction that they know that such and such is true. Children compelled to constantly prove either they know or do not know stop trying to confirm and to strengthen their faint hunches and just give up. Nonetheless, when freely chosen, self-assessment and peer assessment as well as staff assessment of reports of learning are taken as valued tools in following and in demonstrating social, emotional and cognitive growth.
Elevating “learning to learn” well above content mastery. Content mastery focused learning cannot cultivate in youngsters the quick adaptability required of the wired life of the twenty-first century and beyond. Within an era of total social diffusion of information technologies and the information saturation these technologies’ have wrought, the ability or the desirability to store in one’s brain a set of Core Knowledge has become grossly irrelevant. Rather, the basic skills of learning itself, the abilities to define a question, to identify needed information to satisfy the question, to locate where and how to access the required information, to analyze the information according to the demands of the question, to synthesize the information with prior knowledge, to create new knowledge to answer the question, then to generalize the new knowledge and the process itself across other questions, are the keys preparing youngsters for the quick adaptability necessary for life today and in the future. And these learning to learn skill sets ought to be taken by any modern learning environment to be the principal objectives of its education.
All forms of human expression are of equal weight: When neurology bars one form of symbolism another form takes it place. Thus both discursive and presentation forms of symbolism ought to be available for use with weight given only to those forms best suited to the neurology of each child.
Cooperative self-directed learning: where mixed age children work together to exercise their distinctive interests and ways of knowing; where individual inquiry is accomplished through cooperative learning groups; where learning group members act together to achieve individual learning objectives; and where Cooperative Learning strategies are employed for whole group learning.
Resource Rich Learning Environment: The scope and breath of learning in an environment full of cooperative self-directed learners is limited only by the amount of resources available from which to learn. To develop the widest scope and the deepest breath of knowledge of the world, especially of the learned world, a necessary objective for an academic oriented institution, requires substantial aggregation of learning materials from manipulatives to research caliber library.
Integrated interdisciplinary content learning: Focused thematic studies on aspects of subject content from the intersections of multiple disciplines.
School community self-governance: Children cannot feel they are taking full responsibility for their learning decisions unless they feel ownership of their learning environment. Ownership is derived through participation in learning community governance which determines policies on such as curriculum and instruction, projects and assignments, learning benchmarks and graduation requirements, ceremonies and social events, expectant behaviors consistent and inconsistent with the norms of the school as well as the means by which inconsistent behaviors are resolved.
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