The Secret to Life (Well, to this Academy Anyway)

I would ask you all to stop and take a deep breath - you have been working very hard and diligently - and think about a few things before I toss your next assignment at you in a few hours :)  I have been very impressed with your attitudes and your work, and you have already changed my notion of some things to do for the academy.  I want you to think about the process to date: from the moment you heard about the academy, to when you learned a few more details, when you did your first assignments, when you started to interact with each other on the blog, to when you started to read new things, etc.  I want to share with you now the method of my madness, or what I call "the three critical things in a good training."
I believe that three basic things should happen in a workshop, training session, really any educational setting where we talk about teaching, helping, serving others.  The first is that the participants should learn about the concept or the construct involved - If the workshop is about student interaction, they should learn about the theories of interaction and related activities.  The second is that they should learn about their students or clients - They should learn about students and how they interact naturally, what stops them from interacting, their fears, etc.  The third and final thing is that the participants should learn about themselves - Before we endeavor to get students to interact, we should think about how we do in different settings, how we did as students, what we liked, what was difficult, etc.  These are the three keys I think, and I hope you start to see the flow and logic in our experience.
There are more layers of this process of course, moving from doing these three things on our own to doing them together, to sharing them with others outside the academy. The discovery process also unfolds in other ways, as we integrate different forms of language (consolidation) and we engage various levels of challenge and difficulty (ZPD and Flow). Finally, we take these socially constructed concepts, ideas, and truths, and we begin to apply them to the world around us.  This creates another strata of activity, as we collect feedback and reengage many of the same processes to evaluate it all. This is why we are an academy, a cohort of people that will work together indefinitely creating an environment of trust and encouragement.  And you thought you were signing up for a week's course - ha ha!
Your next set of readings and questions are coming, baad schwaya inshalah.  Think about this process as you attack the assignment with your usual gusto.  In the meantime, I have a few follow-up thoughts on some of the things we have done already - you do not need to reply to these to me unless you want to (and I will respond if you do), they are not part of the official homework:

Given what you have read now about creativity (and I bet you thought about the third aspect of a good training - yourself), how would you change your classroom environment to promote the development of creativity? - I cannot believe you could read that article and not think differently!

Looking at the second part of intelligence, assisted performance, how would that change some of your classroom activities?

I am very excited about how things are going - keep working hard, exchanging ideas on the blog, and getting ready for January!