Hermann's and my brains

It's the first week back in classes (well, it was when I started this... ) and I am meeting my hublings as a group for the first time. Some of them know me well and some are new this year, so we all need to learn about each other at the same time as we learn about ourselves and our learning.

As a tool, I have used the Hobsonville Point modified version of Herrmann's Brain analysis which calls the four sectors strategising, organising, imagining and relating. Each of us used a set of cards to find out what sort of characteristics we have in our learning, me included, and made a pie chart showing the different aspects of our personalities.

As you can see, I am strong in organising, can do some strategising, and am not so great at relating and imagining. This is not a judgement about my character or anything, it is simply a screenshot of how my brain works at the moment, and it shows me where I have strengths, as well as the things that I can be working on.  I can also relate this to other things that I know about myself - like the fact that my desk is either beautifully tidy and colour-coordinated, or it is carnage; or that I know I am extremely introverted, so relating for me only happens easily on a small group or individual basis - and from there I can set some goals going forward.

At Hobsonville Point, we have modified the traditional Herrmann's Brain four quadrants to align with the learning that our students do in hub, so that our hub curriculum is structured like this:

The four quadrants reflect the original Herrmann's Brain model, but we have also added in the communicating idea as a central hub, and surrounded the whole lot with our Hobsonville Habits, which are the dispositions we need to make all of the other things happen.

My own goals for the year will be very much around the relating strand, both carrying on from my teaching inquiry from last year, as well as extending my practice in other ways. I feel I should also be doing something in the imagining direction, but there are so many truly creative types at our school that I feel a bit overawed, and I need to put the formal learning (which would be where my imagining strengths are) on hold while I sort out a few other important things. Maybe next year...

Anyway, my students have also been formulating goals based around what they have learned about themselves doing this exercise. They have used the hub learning objectives and built their own goal statements using the generic hub curriculum ones; so for example if they are not so good at evidencing their work in hub they might have chosen the last LO and modified it to read: to GENERATE by communicating my learning through my blog more. (I don't think anyone has actually done that one; as a group, my hub feel they do plenty of blogging, thank you very much). 

The whole point of this is that it is a tool, one of a range of many, and we are using it in combination with other tools to think about our learning. This meta-learning is really what this is all about - if we understand how we learn, and why certain kinds of learning work for us, we can make our learning more successful. At the same time, we can work out strategies to make the types of learning that we find challenging less so. After all, in life, things are not going to be presented in the way that we find easiest or best, whether that be in the workplace or elsewhere, and so we need to know tools that will help us make sense of what we are coming up against, so that we can make it work for us. 

If my hublings are learning that from this exercise, then they are learning a whole lot more than just how to answer questions. I am too.