Blog the Second by Kevin II

Driving home today, I was thinking about a six-year-old boy in the workshop who tried his best to articulate what happened to the piece of fabric he dyed.  He had just taken off the rubber bands to reveal a beautiful pattern of circles.  I said, “Wow!  That came out great!”  His mom jumped in to do my job as the facilitator and asked, “Why do you think it came out that way?”  The kid stammered for almost a full minute trying to explain why the dye didn’t go on some parts of the cloth.

What was interesting to me was that he seemed to know why the rings appeared but couldn’t say it in a coherent way.  He was saying things like, “Well the blue parts are more down… and they get… because.. blue is…”  He ended up stopping his thinking aloud by concluding, “I don’t know.”  I tried to prompt him to keep going by saying I could tell he was on to something and that he was close.  I think that his problem wasn’t that he didn’t know how it worked, but that he didn’t know how to say it.  I’m curious if his inability to explain affected his understanding because he left with the stated conclusion that he didn’t know what was happening.  I was bummed that I didn’t get to sit with him longer to help him suss out his thinking.  I’m wondering how can we support learners in their ideas with limited time and without putting words in their mouth.  I think that this visitor still had a productive experience, but I that there was an opportunity for his learning process to be extended had he reflected in a different way. 

I was also thinking about the light program cart.  One visitor connected the idea of the prism glasses to rainbows in the natural world.  She said, “But it’s not raining.”  And then said that the glasses must act like the rain.  This was a fascinating real-world connection that I hadn’t anticipated.  It made the encounter feel more organic because it took our conversation in a new direction.  It felt like we were collaborating on something new instead of me guiding her through a series of steps.  As a back-pocket facilitation technique, I’m going to ask for visitors to make connections with something from their own experiences.

Part Two….

What I’ve learned from improv is to prepare to be unprepared.  It’s so hard to approach a situation without expectations of where it’s supposed to go.  It’s helpful for me to remember this as I approach visitors so that I can react purely to whatever they’re laying down.  In one of the scenes I did with Sophia, I felt like I kinda threw it off track by not being present with what she was offering which took it in a different direction.  It would have been more successful if I had listened more carefully to what she was presenting and affirmed it (i.e. saying yes to it).  I’ve been doing my best to enact this with visitors. Providing an enthusiastic affirmation of their energy (sometimes it’s not even verbal) and extending with whatever I’ve got in the moment.  I have to remember that the nature of open-ended inquiry is infinity.  The more yes-anding I do, the more unexpected places learning can go.