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>>So when we look at skills: and so I’m again coming back to the instructable learnable.
In relation to skill development, if I simply instruct, I will stay at the level of basic
skills, although the learnable stay at the level of basic skill. If I want to take them
to capabilities, then to where the skill becomes much more complex, where it’s a routine
skill that I’ve taken on board; I’ve appropriated, I’ve adapted, I’ve used differently myself
in a new context which is really what a capability is all about, then I have to move into the
learnable space. If I’m after information only for kids, then in terms of information
then it can be instructable. I could instruct you to learn the first twenty elements of
the PO8 table and you could rehearse it over and over and you would know it. But if I want
to move to median then I need to move into the learnable space. So the point I want to
really try get to here, trying to make sure you can see it, is that there is a place for
the instructable but it isn’t the higher order level of capability and meaning that
we want kids to take away from school. >> We dig into the instructable to help narrow
the gap, and I was looking at Jude Hines sitting over here, we’ve had a sort of session recently
where I was doing some work with some of the teachers in the Teaching for Effective Learning
Team (DECD), and we were involved in a mathematical problem that was really put up here where
the teacher had created an opportunity for a learnable side of mathematics. But the interesting
thing was some learners were not likely to be able to enter into that learnable activity
because the level of the gap for them was too high. So the personalizing bit is for
me to individually work out now, hang on a sec, where does this person stand on this,
what's their need at this particular point in time? Maybe I need to really scaffold their
thinking to help them get some success, which in turn will scaffold them up or catapult
them further up the chain. >> So when I’m thinking about the instructable
versus learnable the big challenge for me is then to personalize it. Although I want
to live as much as possible in this domain about it being the kid driven learnable opportunities
which I might design and create for them, but I have to be really careful about how
big a challenge is that for the individual and then how do I actually respond and adapt
to their need at the time? >> It’s not as simple as either or. I was
reading what I suppose is the dying message I want to leave you with, is that it’s not
as simple as instructable or learnable. We have a terrible habit in education of flipping
between the either or. The challenge is when to instruct and when to allow people to learn.