One of the trends I am personally excited about is that of students sharing what they have learnt digitally.
This can come in the form a domain as the insightful article by @tvanderark points out, a blog, a portfolio or other web-based platforms.
There are three underpinning concepts here: CHOICE, AUDIENCE and PROOF.
Students have to make choices about what they are going to include in their learning diaries. They have to think of who is going to read their digital aritifacts and finally their assertions have to be backed up by examples - theoretical and/or practical - from the subject of study.
I think I'll stop here so you can read the post below and while you're at it, see if I am practising what I preach about the THREE CONCEPTS in my own writing.
Education growing more & more student-centered - 2015 awaits Encourage Writing with a Domain, Blog & Portfolio http://t.co/plRp3dan4j
Reading through the archive of this Twitter chat got me thinking about how more and more teachers are seeking development and connecting with likeminded educators by means of Twitter. I compiled some of the tweets from @TyrnaD's story about teachers and their Twitter story and put them together here The ideas that bounced around raised some questions about
how teachers really develop professionally
how relevant social media is to education and vice versa
how teachers can use Twitter as a springboard for self-learning and student facilitation
Since one of our tasks is to speculate on the future of the education, I thought I could use this video to look at the present as a means of preparing for the future. This sketch produced during the SNL show, is supposed to be caricaturely funny about the American way of life in general, but this one looks at education. What is useful here is what Morgan Freeman has to say about the topic. Watch and enjoy!
Gets you thinking - what kind of questions about education will they be asking in the future ahead?
I start my
reflection with the song for a reason. Education has to be connected.
According to Mark
Weston, Ph.D, it is a system that is interconnected and all the parts are
interdependent. Changes in one system should affect
the other parts of the system.
IF that is my ideal of education, then the
responsibility of ensuring the success of the system is truly a team effort –
legislators, administrators, coordinators, supervisors, teachers, monitors,
students and parents, as long as each group is aware of their role and how they
fit in the big puzzle.
What are some
of the roles of education and how do some of my colleagues see them coming to
play?
Only way to
progress = education 4 all (Mehreen Ali)
Education
builds tomorrow's society (Aline Chiracu)
An entrance
exam to make education inclusive (Maria Stewart)
An effective
education system is that brings the best out of the individual
(@beautyinthemist)
Education is
not received. It is achieved (Einstein - Sona Ashtoyan)
3 essential
inputs - well-trained teachers, state-of-the-art textbooks, adequate school
facilities - the 1st being the most important (according to Laurence Wright)
Upskilling and
work experience as part of education in Singapore (Debbie Wong)
How do we invest
in better public schools? The answer goes back to the connectivity: use a holistic approach
Stephen Ball's
mantra of economic and political competitiveness being dependent on human
academic capital has pushed governments into a quandary: it is cash-strapped,
making it impossible to invest directly in education and as such have
sub-contracted services. Education has become an industry and learning has been
held hostage by numbers, results international standard tests.
This week I was supposed to talk about how my experience of
school shaped me as a learner, and as an adult. Then, I had to think of ways my school expeience could have been improved, and the priorities for schools today.
I may have
touched on the issue of how my school experience shaped me for what I am today
in an earlier post. This is evident by the fact that I look back on those days
and seem to only find rich and meaningful experiences that have helped me to be
who I am.
The other day
during one of my postgrad lectures on ELT (the subject was on grammar,
prepositions and linking elements to be more exact) a student teacher asked me
if I had always had this funny and engaging way of seeing things. While I stopped
in my tracks for half a minute to answer, my mind catapulted back to secondary
school days. It was as if I was unconsciously attributing that time of my life
to person I have become – socially, culturally and intellectually, if I am to
use Bourdieu’s theoretical proposition for the role of school in shaping students.
My past experiences as school prefect, scout troop leader and class rep enhanced
my social skills; my musical, dance and theatrical endeavors brought cultural
appreciation and the competitive academic environment that we were made to
thrive in from year one could only bring intellectual gain.
Quite honestly,
I find it hard to come up with a sufficiently unbiased view of my schooling to
be able to say what could have been improved. Thinking back on it stirs up
immense pride and gratitude for the fruits it has borne me and continue to do
so even today. It leads me to think of some of the points raised in the videos with
Dr. Jane Perryman and the assigned readings about what makes a good school. As
a start, Perryman’s contention that a good school is the one that enables
students to be more than they can ever imagine being summarizes the priority of
any school or educational institution. For me, ranking a school based on exam
data or on inspectional reports diverts attention from the really significant
issues of whether students are learning critically and reflectively. It also
creates a test or result-oriented culture in which schools are concerned with
attaining the government or international standards, which do not necessarily
take into consideration the socio-economic background of a given school
(something which Perryman says plays a pivotal role in the final result). Schools
then train students to get the scores - “learning” starts becoming mechanized instead
of being socially and culturally relevant.
The hurdle of
our schools today is not whether education has
to reflect in microcosm the inequalities of the society surrounding it, or
whether it is possible to challenge such inequalities. What stands in their way
is the obsession with rankings, international standards and inspection service reports.
It is a waste of time and effort no to try to reflect these differences, not to
mention hypocritical. They will continue to exist when the student sets foot
out of the school boundaries, and the fact that the school doesn’t prepare them
to deal with their realities is what most probably frustrates our learners and
takes away any chance of wanting to be part of that school. Typing students,
like that outlined in Hargreaves, Hestor and Mellor´s study is natural. The problem
is when we fail to see students beyond the pre-conceived or idealized type. Schools
have to want to be wrong about pre-determinism in education.
If the answer is yes, then why can't we talk about a good or bad ...
?
What makes a teacher good is not WHAT he/she is, but WHAT he/she DOES. In other words, how his/her actions stimulate and inspire learning and motivate those under his/her care to excel at whatever they are doing IN and OUT of the classroom.
Teachers who go beyond the classroom and makes knowledge accessible by drawing parallels with our lives fall into the smaller category of educators who ARE teachers, not educators who perform fulfill teacher-like duties.
My choice of good teacher went to Ken Carter,http://coachcarter.com/ for the very reason that it was not OFFICIALLY his job:
by seeing beyond the basketball court, he was
more concerned with helping his players win in life and not just shoot some
hoops to a championship title.
He could have simply not cared ...
He could have pretended he had nothing to do with it
He could have looked the other way
If the million-dollar question is what makes good teaching, then Carter shows just that. Good teaching is asking yourself how much are my students being challenged to think beyond the book or content and look towards the environment in which he is inserted.
All of my school
life I would hear that I was extremely intelligent, above average. Many thought
that I would go on to win a national scholarship (the top students sitting the
Cambridge exit exams for secondary schools called A levels are awarded
government-funded grants to study abroad, in addition to all the local prestige
showered on the winners). I grew to understand that this “intelligence” was
usually equated to “grades” or “marks”. Acing school tests meant you were a whiz
kid, in other words, the focus was on cognitive or linguistic or mathematical
intelligence.
Giving it more thought though, most assessment instruments like
tests end up showing how well a student executes the tasks therein, instead of
giving an insight as to what each student is capable of. Success in these tests
was based on memorization and compliance; creativity and innovativeness held
little sway.
My being “labeled” as intelligent drove
teachers and parents to pressure me to study more and more, to keep the top
marks so as to land the national scholarship. I remember my father and some of
my teachers strongly advising me to drop extra-curricular activities like
football and basketball, two sports that I excelled at and played on the school
teams.
If I had stuck to at least one of those sports, I might have had a
chance to excel. Even colleagues saw me as “brainy kid” who was an all-rounder
with the national scholarship in the bag. For the record, the much sought after
grant didn’t come, but my grades were the school’s highest in the ten to
fifteen years that preceded my candidacy.
Luckily, I “stuck”
to these extracurricular activities with lesser intensity than needed to become
a top player. All that time, I was a boy scout, which helped me work on spatial,
kinesthetic and musical intelligence. The experiences gave me ample chances to
learn and collaborate with others. Experiences for which I am eternally grateful.
I consider myself a learner for the simple fact that observation,
experimentation, application, and reflection are fundamental to be able to deal
with new and not so new knowledge.
Education today has a lot to do with getting connected - with the right people and the right resources to boost your knowledge and enhance your expertise.
Read this blog post from Nicloe Kruger, which provides some clear hints about how to do just that. One of them - believe it or not - is to blog! So I guess I am on the right track. The other one that caught my attention is the sharing of ideas by creating a survey to get people's ideas on a topic I might find interesting and then divulge the collected data. A tip that coincides with my academic research vein very strong at the moment. So I'm going to definitely give it a try.
This forum thread started by Eleni Politaki drove home a truth we sometimes forget:
By teaching you get a chance to see if you have really learned
It also reminded me of the importance of challenging yourself. When you push your limits, or raise the level of difficulty of a task, you are bound to get much more out of the learning experience. A point that is stressed in the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset concept.
Genise White shared this idea in a nice image:
The video validates the ideas we tossed around in the thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brpkjT9m2Oo
This MOOC is YET another opportunity to be challenged.
This idea of a padlet is a great idea to bring the point home to us that the ways we learn are as diverse as we are individually, yet there are many common threads that weave these diversities together. To a certain extent, the wall has become a multicultural, multiperspective quilt of our perceptions. Hopefully, I am going to come back and reflect some more on these points.
Our first task for this MOOC is to talk about a successful and unsuccessful learning experience and highlight the conditions that contributed to their outcomes. Frankly speaking, a learning experience is just that: an experience. What we do with that learning can lead to success or to failure. Not wanting to philosophize, but even when we find ourselves in a situation that favors very little our preferred learning styles, there is something we can take away from it. For instance, I remember when I get a fat round zero in a 3rd-year Maths test. I attended one of the leading secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, Queen's Royal College. This school took pride in its academic tradition of grooming skilled and civic-minded professionals.
One of the ways this was implemented was to group students into four classes according to their academic performance. I formed part of the class considered "the brightest", so a zero was unimaginable and shameful for a student of my caliber. Initially the mark shook me, but it instilled in me the understanding that a mark or grade is not a legacy written in permanent ink. I had a chance to learn how I could learn better.
