I began my career in the formal educational system as a physics teacher at the Danziger High School in Kiryat Shmona, on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. This was prior to the outbreak of the First Lebanon War when rockets fell on the town constantly, which only served to intensify the gap between the center and periphery of the country. Although I had studied mechanical engineering at Tel Aviv University, I changed career and went into education, when I realized that I had no desire to continue working in my specialty. I have always loved to teach, and this love continues to this very day. As a physics teacher in Kiryat Shmona, I set myself the goal of preparing my students for the Bagrut (matriculation) exam in physics at the highest level of 5 points, which would enable them to build their future wherever they chose. My students rose to the challenge and received high grades in the matriculation exam in physics.
In the summer of 1991, we were already living in Jerusalem and I participated in an international conference organized by the Feuerstein Institute. There, for the first time, I observed a mediated interaction as Reuven Feuerstein worked with a young girl. He listened to the fine details of her cognitive processes and explained them to the audience. The girl reacted happily to the conversation with Feuerstein and the changes in her learning and cognitive processes were discernable within the short time frame of the demonstration. Over the course of the years, I have observed Feuerstein in countless mediated interactions. He believed that the goal of teaching is to enable learners to create a structural cognitive change in their thinking in real time. Feuerstein did not wait until the final exam to take note of the changes that had occurred in the learners. He listened to the realistic mental place of the learners during the learning dialog and mediated for them accordingly. I decided to study and practice the unique method of teaching developed at the Feuerstein Institute and I worked there for ten years.
Meeting Reuven Feuerstein changed my attitude to teaching and learning. The Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) method he developed emphasized the importance of creating a feeling of dynamics in both the learners and the mediator. The cognitive change is expressed as the two work together during the mediated interaction. Many learners experienced significant change in thinking and functioning. Even learners who were considered very low functioning, changed their cognitive processes and their functioning reached unexpectedly high levels.
Reuven Feuerstein emphasized the development of thinking without using learning content, as he believed that improving cognitive functioning would enable learners to improve their functioning even if the actual lessons would not be changed. The very fact that the learners’ cognitive ability had improved, would lead to improved learning functioning. I felt that the mediating process could also form the basis of the actual lesson, and that lessons could be constructed using mediated interactions. I believed this to be the case because, even when significant cognitive change did occur, it was unclear to what extent the change could be transferred to other lessons since the cognitive change was not automatically transferred. I held many long conversations with Reuven Feuerstein on this matter, and he encouraged me to conduct research into my idea. The second year after I started working at the Feuerstein Institute, I began teaching astronomy to 9th grade students, some of whom had learning disabilities. It was in this class that I developed the Thinking Journey approach. The idea was to invite the students to use their imagination and create a journey in their thinking in environments that are appropriate and relevant to the learnt concept. The journey in unfamiliar places made it possible to compare how the learnt concept is represented in the familiar environment. During this and later years, I showed that it is possible to create teaching processes based on mediated interactions in the fields of astronomy and physics and later also in other subject matter topics.
While at the Feuerstein Institute, and also after I stopped working there, I worked for six years at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where I developed the Dynamic Learning model in which students experience sensory-linked learning and visual conceptual changes. To bridge the gap between teaching and learning, between the mental place of the teacher during teaching and learning and that of the learners, the two sides must communicate about the learnt concept or the subject matter. The teacher must “listen” (in a figurative sense) to the overall mental place of the learners. The teacher will observe and try to mediate the person facing him or her. Each student is a unique individual with a rich internal world of knowledge, feelings and cognitive processes that come together to achieve understanding of what is being learned. This is
The Mediated Interactions, Dynamic Learning and Thinking Journey are tools used to create Attentive Teaching in schools and kindergartens. The dialog may refer explicitly to various contexts within which the learnt concept or subject is expressed. Understanding is reached by studying the learnt subject over a period of time and referring to its various aspects and connecting it to the world of the learner. Acquisition of additional knowledge allows for a better observation of different representations of the learnt subject in various environments. By using their imagination, the learners and teachers are able to express innovative ideas about the learnt subject. The teaching and learning processes of the Mediated Interactions, Dynamic Learning and the Thinking Journey allow for the creation of intensive, varied and lasting communication between the teacher and learners, while enabling them to understand the subject matter and become aware of each one’s learning processes.
With mediated interactions, the dialog with the learners is focused on their realistic mental place with regard to the learnt subject, enabling them to make changes in their understanding. The teachers mediate simultaneously at the class and at the individual level. In order to create Attentive Teaching when teaching various subject matters, the teachers must use teaching languages that allow them to listen, in real time, to the mental place of the learners in the class or kindergarten. Attentive Teaching involves creating outputs such as drawings, AI visuals, models or written texts through which the learners can express their position on the learnt subject. Teachers are partners in the learning processes, either by creating together with the learners or by actively listening to the different learners’ places. In an attentive lesson, the learners can arrive at new horizons of understanding of the learnt subject, far beyond the teacher’s initial planning. The teacher can listen to the changes that occur in the learners during the lesson. The classroom dialog allows the learners to express their personal perspective and be active partners in designing an understanding of the learnt subject. The use of visual representations enables
During my discussions with Reuven Feuerstein, the question arose whether the mediated learning model could be applied in any lesson, and to all fields of knowledge, and whether it could be adapted to the different student populations in the class. Feuerstein believed that achieving this challenge is a very difficult task. He felt it was more important to focus on developing learners’ cognitive processes, while emphasizing the transfer of improved cognitive functioning to the learning processes needed for the different fields of study. He told me that in the development of thinking, innate tools such as Instrumental Enrichment, enable the creation of mediation appropriate for the different learners. However, attempting to implement mediating processes in the various lessons would require the development of similar tools for all fields of study. Nevertheless, while I was still working at the Feuerstein Institute and also in later years, I have been searching for the answer to this challenging question. After many years of experimenting, I now believe that development of mediated lessons can be entrusted to teachers and kindergarten teachers. If they are given appropriate tools such as Mediated Interactions, Dynamic Learning and the Thinking Journey, and if they experience implementation of these tools in regular subject matter teaching and learning, there will be no need to employ an army of paid experts. Instead, the educators will be responsible for being creative and developing mediated lessons according to the student population in their class. Using the Mediated Interaction, Dynamic Learning and Thinking Journey tools enables teachers to devise creative and varied lessons which are greatly enriched by mediated dialog in the class. The teachers can create the learning interactions based on the learners’ outputs that are appropriate to the lesson content, to listen to the variety of viewpoints raised in the class and to talk to the different learners, with reference to their realistic mental place.
In recent years, I have observed hundreds of Thinking Journeys and applications of Dynamic Learning which were developed in lectures and training courses that I taught in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in the David Yellin Academic College of Education, where I am currently teaching, and at the Institute of Attentive Teaching that I founded and that is active in the educational systems in Israel and abroad. I assert that educators have the ability to enable the learners in their classes to express their insights and feelings about the learnt subject through visual outputs and written and oral explanations. I have learnt and continue to learn a lot from talking to my students in lectures and from their experiences in classrooms and kindergarten. The outputs of their work in classrooms and the outputs of students are presented in this book. Over the years, the number of student outputs worthy of inclusion in