Disturbo di apprendimento o di insegnamento?

Una concezione di insegnamento che prevede un modello unico di funzionamento e di risposta, sempre uguale per tutti, aumenta gli effetti negativi dei disturbi di apprendimento. Cosa sono i "disturbi di insegnamento"? Vere e proprie distorsioni del modo di concepire il proprio ruolo di docente. Una concezione che prevede un modello unico di funzionamento e di risposta, sempre uguale per tutti. Quello che conta è imparare nel modo standard, spesso lo stesso con il quale il docente ha imparato quando era studente, molti anni prima. Per questo l‘insegnamento è immutabile, non cambia con il mondo, rimane fermo. Non che si debba inseguire ogni cambiamento, ma nemmeno rifiutarlo pervicacemente. Oggi i documentari scientifici prodotti con tecniche di animazione consentono di visualizzare alcuni processi e di renderli più facilmente comprensibili. Perché non si usano nella scuola? Perché si continua a considerare la trasmissione orale l’unico strumento didattico? Perché si considera la memorizzazione come l’unico modo per apprendere? Le interrogazioni basate sulla verifica delle nozioni memorizzate cosa valutano? L’apprendimento o la quantità di studio? E se un soggetto ha difficoltà di memorizzazione come faccio per valutarne lo studio? La caratteristica principale del "disturbo di insegnamento" sembra nascere dall’idea che ripetendo si impara. Se una serie di nozioni, o un algoritmo, o una regola non vengono imparati si deve insistere, ripetere. Per alcuni insegnanti non esiste possibilità alternativa alla memorizzazione, alla riproposizione dello stesso modulo e degli stessi schemi. L’idea di una alternativa è talmente remota che anche quando lo studente è il proprio figlio e quindi il docente/genitore può effettivamente verificare la mancanza di risultati nonostante la quantità di esercizio, non si riesce a trovare nient’altro che la punizione. L’impotenza genera rabbia e annulla la possibilità di vedere altre soluzioni anche perché, nel modello classico di apprendimento scolpito nella testa di alcuni docenti, non è previsto l’uso di supporti, o strumenti compensativi. Quelli sono la negazione dell’apprendimento. Per un insegnante può esistere il disturbo di memoria? Probabilmente da alcuni insegnanti anche il deficit di memoria viene considerato un’invenzione degli psicologi per giustificare la scarsa volontà e applicazione degli studenti. Lo studio neuroscientifico dei disturbi di apprendimento ha dimostrato che esistono alcune condizioni in cui l’esperienza lascia una traccia molto debole e a volte non lascia alcuna traccia. Le neuroscienze hanno in questi anni evidenziato il ruolo centrale della memoria a breve termine nell’acquisizione del linguaggio e hanno sviluppato modelli per spiegare le conseguenze dell’inefficienza della memoria di lavoro, cioè nella capacità di manipolare le informazioni nello studio e nella sistematizzazione delle conoscenze. Il linguaggio verbale è uno stimolo che scompare appena viene prodotto e per questo siamo dotati di un meccanismo biologico chiamato memoria a breve termine che trattiene traccia delle informazioni verbali per un tempo molto breve (circa due secondi) in cui possiamo consolidare la traccia, manipolarla o trasformarla. Chi ha un deficit nella memoria di lavoro, però, non riesce a compiere le operazioni di consolidamento perché la traccia si deteriora mentre viene prodotta, come accade ai bambini che non riescono a ripetere il numero appena ascoltato, ma ne ripetono uno simile. Come potranno scrivere i dettati, o prendere appunti se dimenticano immediatamente quello che è stato detto? Perché l’insegnante non concepisce o non conosce un altro modo di insegnare, senza che esso comporti un insulto alla sua autorità? In ogni caso il risultato è che il "disturbo di insegnamento" aumenta gli effetti del disturbo di apprendimento, un disturbo che, senza la rigidità di alcuni docenti, potrebbe scomparire.

Reading and writing. Paper or Screen?

Some tests show that reading from a hard copy allows better concentration, while taking longhand notes versus typing onto laptops increases conceptual understanding and retention. Reading, unlike speaking, is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurons. The earliest writing, however, emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes. It’s not only words and letters that we process as objects. Texts themselves, so far as our brains are concerned, are physical landscapes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we respond differently to words printed on a page compared to words appearing on a screen; or that the key to understanding these differences lies in the geography of words in the world. What exactly was going on here? Age and habit played their part. But there is also a growing scientific recognition that many of a screen’s unrivalled assets, search, boundless and bottomless capacity, links and leaps and seamless navigation, are either unhelpful or downright destructive when it comes to certain kinds of reading and writing. In 2013, researchers compared the effectiveness of students taking longhand notes versus typing onto laptops. Their conclusion: the relative slowness of writing by hand demands heavier “mental lifting”, forcing students to summarize rather than to quote verbatim in turn tending to increase conceptual understanding, application and retention. In other words, friction is good; at least so far as the remembering brain is concerned. Moreover, the textured variety of physical writing can itself be significant. In a 2012 study, they tested five-year-old children who did not yet know how to read or write by asking them to reproduce a letter or shape in one of three ways: typed onto a computer, drawn onto a blank sheet, or traced over a dotted outline. When the children were drawing freehand, an MRI scan during the test showed activation across areas of the brain associated in adults with reading and writing. The other two methods showed no such activation. Similar effects have been found in other tests, suggesting not only a close link between reading and writing, but that the experience of reading itself differs between letters learned through handwriting and letters learned through typing. Add to this the help that the physical geography of a printed page or the heft of a book can provide to memory, and you’ve got a conclusion neatly matching our embodied natures: the varied, demanding, motor-skill-activating physicality of objects tends to light up our brains brighter than the placeless, weightless scrolling of words on screens. In many ways, this is an unfair result, effectively comparing print at its best to digital at its worst. Spreading my scrawled-upon printouts across a desk, I’m not just accessing data; I’m reviewing the idiosyncratic geography of something I created, carried and adorned. But I researched my piece online, I’m going to type it up onscreen and my readers will enjoy an onscreen environment expressly designed to gift resonance: a geography, a context. Screens are at their worst when they ape and mourn paper. At their best, they’re something free to engage and activate our wondering minds in ways undreamt of a century ago. Above all, we must abandon the notion that there is only one way of reading, or that technology and paper are engaged in some implacable war. We’re lucky enough to have both growing self-knowledge and an opportunity to make our options as fit for purpose as possible, as slippery and searchable or slow with friction as the occasion demands.

Handwriting vs Typing: who will win?

No one can say precisely how much handwriting has declined, but a British survey of 2,000 people gave some idea of the extent of the damage. According to the study, one in three respondents had not written anything by hand in the previous six months. On average they had not put pen to paper in the previous 41 days. People undoubtedly write more than they suppose, but one thing is certain: with information technology we can write so fast that handwritten copy is fast disappearing in the workplace. This minor revolution is causing quite a stir but it is by no means the first of its kind. Ever since writing was most likely first invented, in Mesopotamia in about 4000BC, it has been through plenty of technological upheavals. The tools and media used for writing have changed many times: from Sumerian Tablets to the Phoenician Alphabet of the first millennium BC; from the invention of paper in China about 1,000 years later to the first codex, with its handwritten sheets bound together to make a book; from the invention of printing in the 15th century to the appearance of ballpoint pens in the 1940s. So at first sight the battle between keyboards and pens might seem to be no more than the latest twist in a very long story, yet another new tool that we will end up getting used to. What really matters is not how we produce a text but its quality, we are often told. When we are reading, few of us wonder whether a text was written by hand or word-processed. But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills: feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought. Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter. Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. It’s a big change. Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not. Furthermore pens and keyboards use very different media. Word-processing is a normative, standardized tool. Obviously you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep setting margins or not, superimposing lines or distorting them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued. An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing. The software does keep track of the changes somewhere, but users cannot access them. With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin and later additions are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages. But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.” Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition. Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory”. Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works? Some studies suggest this may indeed be the case. They say that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject. Students who took longhand notes were better able to answer questions on the lecture than those using a laptop. For the scientists, the reason is clear: those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a preliminary process of summarizing and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to take a lot of notes, sometimes even making a literal transcript, but avoided what is known as “desirable difficulty”. Handwriting is not a routine exercise but is a learning process in cognitive development. It’s not just a question of writing a letter: it also involves drawing, acquiring a sense of harmony and balance, with rounded forms. There is an element of dancing when we write, a melody in the message, which adds emotion to the text. After all that’s why emoticons were invented, to restore a little emotion to text messages. Writing has always been seen as expressing our personality. With handwriting we come closer to the intimacy of the author. That’s why we are more powerfully moved by the manuscript of a poem than by the same work simply printed in a book. Each person’s hand is different: the gesture is charged with emotion, lending it a special charm. Which no doubt explains the narcissistic relationship we often entertain with our own scrawl. Handwriting plays an important part in everyday life. We write by hand more often than we think. Writing is still very much alive in our surroundings: in advertising, signing, graffiti and street demonstrations. In a certain way, they compensate our soulless keyboards.

Finlandia: el mejor sistema educativo del mundo.

Desde el último informe PISA del año 2012, nuestros sistemas educativos son continuamente cuestionados, medidos y estructurados. Finlandia cuenta con el reconocimiento internacional de su modelo educativo igualitario y gratuito. Los 5 pilares en los que se sostiene este sistema y las características principales que lo hacen ser apreciado e imitado por muchos países del mundo son:

Los Docentes.

• Ser maestro es una de las profesiones de mayor prestigio en Finlandia, con cinco años de preparación.
• Solo un 10% de los aspirantes consigue entrar en la carrera y hace falta un 9/10 de nota.
• Se requiere, además de vocación, una gran sensibilidad social. La gente acude al maestro para tratar diferentes temas, debido a su alta preparación.
• La formación se realiza en escuelas normales, que forman parte de las universidades, con un periodo de práctica profesional extenso.
• Son profesionales muy bien preparados y con un alto sentido de responsabilidad por la educación.
• Los profesores no imparten tantas horas de clase como en otros países, sino que destinan horas a preparar sus lecciones, investigar, organizarse o colaborar con otros maestros.
• Trabajan en grupo y continuamente buscan el “feedback” de los alumnos.
• El profesor es evaluado y recibe recomendaciones de los maestros con más experiencia.

El Modelo educativo

• Los niños comienzan el colegio a los 7 años, cuando están preparados y tienen la madurez intelectual suficiente.
• Los estudiantes de primaria tienen solo tres o cuatro clases al día, con descansos de 15 minutos entre cada una de ellas y con tiempo para comer. Tienen pocos deberes, el trabajo se hace en clase.
• Hasta 5to grado no son evaluados mediante notas, para evitar la competencia y comparaciones. Los informes que elabora el profesor para los padres son descriptivos, no numéricos.
• Hasta 6to grado tienen el mismo maestro tutor en las asignaturas.
• Las clases nunca superan los 20 alumnos.
• Se promueve la curiosidad, experimentación y  creatividad por sobre la memorización.
• Fomentan el desarrollo analítico de los alumnos, se les enseña a pensar.
• No se utilizan pruebas y actividades estandarizadas.
• Desde los primeros cursos, se apoya a los alumnos con necesidades especiales, evitando que sus dificultades aumenten con los años.
• Se fomenta la importancia del juego y el descanso.
• La imaginación y la capacidad de emprendimiento son muy valoradas en la sociedad finlandesa, predominan los profesionales en los campos artísticos, creativos y también los de tecnología e ingeniería.
• La jornada escolar comienza a las 8:30 horas y acaba a las 15:00 horas. En total, suman 608 horas lectivas en primaria, frente a las más de 800 horas de otros países.

Los Centros educativos

• Cada escuela y sus maestros diseña y organiza su propio currículum, basado en unas líneas generales, con un marco en común, pero con total autonomía.
• El centro realiza su propia planificación para conseguir los logros establecidos y se hace mediante consenso entre maestros y alumnos.
• Primaria, secundaria y universidad unen sus esfuerzos para un mismo proyecto y así alinear el sistema educativo.

La Cultura educativa

• La cultura luterana de la disciplina y el esfuerzo está fuertemente arraigada en la idiosincrasia finlandesa.
• Los padres creen que la responsabilidad de educar a sus hijos parte de la familia por delante del colegio.
• El 80% de las familias acuden a la biblioteca los fines de semana.
• La sociedad y las familias consideran que la educación es fundamental y la potencian con actividades culturales continuas.

La Política educativa

• El gasto que se le asigna a la educación es casi del 7% del PIB nacional.
• La igualdad de oportunidades es un valor esencial para la sociedad finlandesa. Existe un consenso político frente a las políticas educativas, lo cual genera estabilidad en la educación.
• El reparto del dinero público se hace de forma ecuánime. Los fondos del estado se reparten de forma equitativa entre todos los centros y varía de acuerdo con las necesidades de cada establecimiento.
• El sistema educativo público establece que la educación es obligatoria y gratuita entre los 7 y los 16 años y debe ser impartida por centros públicos. La gratuidad incluye las clases, el comedor, los libros y hasta el material escolar.