Authentic Intellectual Work

At the Gates meeting on Tuesday the discussion was around "Authentic Intellectual Work." What is meaningful, intellectual work? It doesn't happen in isoloation and is typically from the constructivist model of learning. Learning can happen when students construct their knowledge through organization, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis of prior knowledge to help solve problems. Authentic Intellectual Work comes when students engage and construct knowledge through a variety of modalities. Their cognitive work usually come in the absence of the teacher. Most "deep" thinking can be done via- so called- hight level thinking. What is this? What does it look like? Accessing prior knowledge is the start of developing authentic intellectual work. To come to a deeper understanding in learning the learner must test their understanding with other opinions and theories (compare\contrast). Must build new understandings (transfer) from previous knowledge and develop new theories to test their understandings. The testing comes when we analyse the work done and come to a new conclusion about what our new learning is.

What seem to be missing in the conversation was where creativity fits in. In the world of high stakes testing and standardized learning, creativity seems to be a lost art. Bloom's new taxonomy state that when we recreate a new understanding and create something entirely of our own making- this is the highest level of knowing, understanding and being able to do what is necessary to show evidence that learning has occured. This is what I would argue to be "authentic intellectual work."

What happened to inquire, discovery, trial and error? These are the things that test our true understanding (authenitic if you will) of our own learning. Jean Jacques Rousseau said "The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences." Learning come best through our experiences, and without this our creativity is lost.