Embed these learning goals in your youth program

I created this graphic many years ago to visualize all of the work that needs to be done to create high quality, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs and make them available for 10-20 years to youth living in ALL high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other places with concentrations of persistent poverty.  I've used it often.  One place was in this article about building personal learning habits.

In that article I also showed a concept map created in the mid 2000s to show Internet-based learning goals that I was trying to embed in the Chicago tutor/mentor program I was leading at that time.  I updated it today.  You can open it at this link.

I circled three additions I made to the cMap today.  

One points to the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) goals of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, CASEL. On their website they say, "We envision all children and adults as self-aware, caring, responsible, engaged, and lifelong learners who work together to achieve their goals and create a more inclusive, just world. How? Through a commitment to SEL."    

The other two point to articles by my Connected Learning  (#CLMOOC) friend, Terry Elliott, who is a retired college teacher from Western Kentucky.  We've connected via the Internet since we first met in 2013. 

The "Tips for Deeper Learning" node points to this article on my blog, and this article on Terry's blog. Neither of these is a "short read".

That brings me to the node on the concept map titled "Invisible Practice".  I read this article on Terry's blog a few days ago. Then I posted this comment:

In this article you describe “invisible practice” and how do we practice it? My question is “How do we reach every newborn and coach them to develop these habits, during the first few years of life, so they are embedded and used for the rest of their lives? 

I’m reading a book titled “The Bitcoin Standard”, by Saifedean Ammous. It talks about the role of money in developing economies and the quality of life. In one section he talks about people who defer immediate reward to invest in future productivity. He says “the most important economic decisions to any individual’s well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self.” 

Your description of “invisible practice” would fit the description of this deferred investment.

At the bottom of Terry's long article I saw the link to a podcast. I listened to it and it was a man and a woman talking about what Terry had written about "invisible practice".   

Then, I looked at an article Terry had written prior to the one about "invisible practice".  It included the graphic below, which includes another podcast discussion of the poem on Terry's blog.

I encourage you to listen to these. They sound like real people taking a deep look at blog articles Terry wrote. 

So I posted this comment.  Terry, was the podcast generated by AI? Two people talking to each other, making sense of your poem? If yes, that is amazing! I’d love to have a couple of people reading my blog articles and discussing them with the depth and insight that this video offers. Thanks for sharing it. 

Within a few hours Terry sent me an email, with a link to a new article he'd written, titled, "Daniel's Query".  He said "it took him less than an hour to pull this together". 

Terry started his article saying,   "One of my wonderful online colleagues, Daniel Bassill, asked me previously to run one of his blog posts through Google Notebook LM. I did so using this prompt:

 “Please connect these sources and explain how they fit into the idea of small voices.” There were two sources: his blog post and the book “The Bitcoin Standard“. 

For those who know little (or nothing) about Bitcoin, or "The Bitcoin Standard" book, Terry's AI query provided quite a lot of information. And, the podcast discussion does a lot to help you understand what's in the book. 

The podcast focused totally on the book, and not the Tutor/Mentor blog article, so Terry created another prompt, saying: Please analyze this source and explain how it might fit into the idea of bitcoin.  

The podcast generated by that prompt is at the bottom of the article.  I really hope you'll read it. It is an example of the type of conversation I'd love to see happening all over the world.   

I said earlier that these are not short reads. However, what the author of The Bitcoin Standard, and what the "invisible practice" article is saying, is that if you spend the time now, you'll be rewarded later.

I added these links to the concept map because these are habits that need to be embedded and modeled in every youth serving program and every public school.  Kids as young as one or two-years-old need to be introduced to these habits.

Figuring out how to do that and how to pay for it is the type of problem Thomas Edison might have loved to solve.

I've been sharing these ideas for over 30 years. And I keep learning. I read Terry's blog, and those of other #CLMOOC educators regularly, because they are always introducing new ideas to me.  I've a section in the Tutor/Mentor library with links to many valuable blogs.

I hope you'll spend some time reading this and try your own hand at creating podcasts using Google Notebook LM.  I've more than 1000 articles on this blog that you could be sharing with others!

It's a new year and my FundT/MI campaign starts again.  I received my first 2025 contribution last week from one of the volunteers who built the computer lab at the Montgomery Ward/Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program back in the 1980s.   It's greatly appreciated!   I hope I'll hear from many others as we move through January and the rest of the year.