“The aim of teaching is simple: it is to make student learning possible”  ( P. Ramsden, 1992:5)

While the aim may be simple, the process is not. The variety of teaching approaches shows the breadth and depth of the learning process and no one approach is suitable for all learning all the time. All approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.  So rather than pontificating on one teaching approach over another, we need to ask ourselves the following:

• What do my students need to learn?
• What is the best teaching-learning approach to make that learning possible?
• How do I mediate the learning to ensure students are learning what they need to learn?

Sometimes direct instruction can be more effective than an inquiry based approach. Sometimes problem based learning  is exactly the approach we need to help students acquire certain skills like critical thinking.

Some interesting info on teacher time from:

http://www.guide2digitallearning.com/professional_development/u_s_teachers_need_time_plan_share_and_learn

•    In South Korea – much like Japan and Singapore – only about 35 percent of teachers’ working time is spent teaching pupils. Teachers work in a shared office space during out-of-class time, since the students stay in a fixed classroom while the teachers rotate to teach them different subjects. The shared office space facilitates sharing of instructional resources and ideas among teachers, which is especially helpful for new teachers. Teachers in many of these countries engage in intensive lesson study in which they develop and fine-tune lessons together and evaluate their results.

•    In Finland, teachers meet one afternoon each week to jointly plan and develop curriculum, and schools in the same municipality are encouraged to work together to share materials.

•    In Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland more than 85% of schools provide time for professional development in teachers’ work day or week. 

•    In Singapore, the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers in addition to the 20 hours a week they have to work with other teachers and visit each others’ classrooms to study teaching. With the help of the National Institute of Education, teachers engage in collective action research projects to evaluate and improve their teaching strategies.

Last week in Surrey, B.C., David Warlick gave a presentation on the need for change in our classrooms.  I don’t think anyone would argue that the opportunities for students today to  share, present knowledge and dialogue with others has changed not only the way we gather information and make sense of the world , but also forces us to examine the whole educational landscape.

Neil Postman, an educational theorist and media critic once argued that schools have always been about information.  However, schools have not always been about primacy of the need for our students to know how to:

•  collect accurate and appropriate information from all formats of socially constructed    knowledge
• organize and store searchable and retrievable information
• interpret and analyze all data types and extend new ideas
• present new learning that is ethical and articulate and transmodal

Warlick’s notion that we need to stop talking about integration of technology and instead talk about literacy makes sense.   

The development of the BC ICTI performance standards, outlines very clearly these  skills or “new literacies” and how teachers can evaluate these skills.  http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/perf_stands/icti/incs/quickScaleTbl.html 

In a recent conversation with a younger colleague who teaches in an urban highschool in Vancouver,  I was told that the 5 part essay is irrelevant to today’s students who are using more media rich tools to convey their knowledge.

I was somewhat taken aback when I heard this and hoped that teachers are not abandoning this form of expression.   However, in a New York Times article ” Journal Showcases Dying Art of the Research Paper”  a nationwide survey of public history teachers in 2002 showed that about 95% of teachers said assigning essays was important but 9 out 10 said they never did.

The more I thought about this the more I realized that what we are really talking about here is the value of written language and structured expression and that the rebellion against formalism is not new.

There’s nothing wrong with the 5 part essay as a vehicle to encourage precise and thoughtful thinking.  As a former English teacher,  I always maintained that clear writing means clear thinking and the 5 part essay helped formulate clarity of thinking for students.  I also wondered whether teachers receive enough training to evaluate images or ppts or youtube videos as expressions of clear thinking.  While its easy to spot where style overides substance in multimedia productions, depth and support and elaboration of ideas is more difficult.

Again, it may be a case of keeping the baby in the bathwater.  I think we need to give assignments to students  that require  written expression merged with multimedia to support the new literacies.  But let’s not simply abandon the 5 part essay…

There’s a general movement adrift that’s advocating a return to thoughtfulness, reflection, appreciation of the moment and each other. (There’s even a “World Institute of Slowness”  http://www.theworldinstituteofslowness.com/)  Professor Guttorm Floistad summarizes the philosophy of slow:

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

After 15 years of supporting educators in implementation of technology,  I’ve come to the realization that not only is less is more, but slow is better.  In the race to “engage” students with new creativity and production tools in classrooms, we’ve sidelined “thinking”.  Students are engaged when they are thinking.  It’s not about what students are doing so much as what they are thinking about what they are doing while they are doing it;  I believe this is what is called “active learning”  … which is more about learning than the activity itself.  Active learning requires critical thinking.  Otherwise, is it really learning?

Let’s slow down our teaching and give students opportunities to think and not just do!

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies then ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods
but slow digestion;
Tall men but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It’s a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

The 14th Dalai Lama

So what does a personalized or student centred learning environment actually look like?  What needs to happen in the classroom for teachers to begin to address ”21st Century” learning ?

Well, the older one gets, the more one looks back.   I’ve always liked this definition from David Jonasson 2000, an educational leader in constructivism and technology:

In a student- centred learning environment, the focus is the question, issue, the case, the problem or the project that learners attempt to solve or resolve.

• actively engaged in their own learning?
• encouraged to think independently?
• given choices?
• given authentic problems to solve?
• assessed for learning?

• have opportunities to investigate and discover?
• work collaboratively  and independent?
• receive active guided support and instruction?
• monitor their own learning?
• demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways?

• needs and interests determine course activities?

Perhaps by keeping these questions in mind we can keep our focus on what we’re really trying to accomplish in our classrooms.  And perhaps we can even keep students like Huckleberry Finn interested in schooling. 

About 10 years ago, when I was a Learning and IT consultant at the VSB, I gave a number of presentations talking about technology and implications to schooling as we know it.  I found a wonderful quote and seemed to me, to say very clearly what the problem was and what was required to solve it.

Since then I’ve seen a lot of creative uses of technology for learning but not a whole lot of creative thinking  when it comes to adjusting schooling.  I spoke to this year’s  graduating class of student teachers at UBC last week and I urged them to ask their administrators not what teachers are expected to do to address personalized learning , but what administrators and districts are expected to do to address this trend as well.  If we don’t change how schools are structured and teacher workloads including face-to-face contact hours, change is going to happen very slowly if at all.  We need to ask what works best face-to-face in schools and what works best in distributed or online environments.  Why do secondary teachers need to meet 3 times a week with their students, when they could, for example,  meet 2 hours a week and spend the 3rd hour online?   Asynchronous discussion tools are one of the best educational tools to hit education and yet we are so behind in using this in our practices.  I believe quite firmly that every teacher should be using this tool in their classes but not something that is simply an add-on to what teachers are already doing.

Welcome!

I’ve finally decided to have a blog…..ERAC has this wonderful new tool and its time for me to start passing on my experiences as a teacher, consultant, curriculum co-cordinator and professional learning and training manager.  With almost 30 years in the field, I figure its time to start to catalogue and share what I’ve learned in this professional journey.  My banner  is a fairly recent picture of my father’s village in the Ukraine.  One of the reasons I choose this is because as we move forward ever so quickly with new technologies, and sometimes without any direction, I find it helps to stop and think about where we’ve come, where we want to go and why.

The ‘personalized learning’ imperative is not new.  What is new is the breadth of the discussion and changes that are taking place in BC classrooms and other educational sectors.  I see much of this change coming from students who are becoming more and more vocal about their own learning.  However,  we need more thoughtful discussions by teachers on the implications of what “personaized learning” really entails and how we can manage this approach so that every student improves deep learning and critical thinking.

One article, I’d like to pass along is called : Transforming Public Education: A Regional Call to Action.  This comes from Wisconson and its one of the most forward thinking and pragmatic vision for  what schools need to be.  The executive summary is a worthwhile read! :http://www.cesa1.k12.wi.us/cms_files/resources/CESA1TransformationInitiative_E xecSummary.indd.pdf