The Learning Project at St Mary’s

Many of the projects being undertaken by leaders at St Mary’s concern themselves with assessment and the role it plays in shaping learning and how to improve learning. Driving home today I listend to a podcast by Dr. Richard H. Hersh wherein he makes some very powerful points; two of which I will try to paraphrase for the benefit of our current research:

1. Perceptions about assessment vary wildly from administrators to teachers to students. At its worst and in the boldest of terms, admins see assessment as accountability, teachers see assessment as a summative statement and student see assessment as punitive and perverse. The grand, missed opportunity here is that assessment, in its truest sense, can be the most powerful tool for learning. This is framed by deep questions about knowing, such as “How do we know that we have learned what we need to learn?”

2. The usual way of organising learning goes like this: curriculum, aims, objectives, pedagogy, assessment. In this model, it is almost natural that assessment is an afterthought, barely related to the lofty purpose of the curriculum. The danger is that assessment, looked at in this way, becomes a ‘checking’ of content, rather then a driver of learning. Hersh asserts a model which places assessment alongside curriculum as the starting point of planning, prior to any other of the mechanical processes of education. This, then becomes two powerful questions: 1. What is it that students need to know and be able to do? and 2. How will we and they know that they do know and can do these things?

Many of you would have heard me speak of assessment as being the driver for learning and curriculum design. The research projects are a great opportunity for use to give assessment the profile it deserves as a life-centred and meaning making process which runs as a rich seam through learning.

As you may remember, the word wiki comes from Hawaii and means ‘quickly’. Our learning projects wiki is now established and will be the repository for all our research materials, our wide reading and the data from our enquiries. In time, it will be made available to our Board of Directors and our parents.

Each coordinator has been given a folder on the wiki, which you can do with whatever you please! Keith has already begun to work on his blog, so I’m sure his wiki will not be far behind.

It would be appropriate to place copies of documents, surveys, images and recordings into this space so that they are accessible to other researchers and so that we can offer each other support and critique as we proceed.

No need to get too carried away… we don’t want people suffering from Wiki-envy!

Well that is what the subject coordinators have been given for 2008.

They headed in to this new year with the resources to study, measure, design and implement a plan to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Using the principles which underpin the NSW Quality Teacher Framework, these leaders and their teams will create a cycle of action learning as courageous and innovative as their imaginations will allow.

This blog, and the associated wiki is the repository for our research.

70 hours! Imagine how many questions you could ask in 70 hours! Imagine how much our students could tell us if we listened with intent to their voices! Imagine how we could grow as teachers if we took the time to read, reflect, argue and dream.

Any teacher will tell you time is precious – but this time is sacred.

Some people would be familiar with how much I thrive on change and development.  I get energised by thinking about and playing with the potential of new ideas, new technologies and newer ways of doing necessary and valuable things.  Thus, I love the idea of disruptive technologies.  Wikipedia says of this phenomenon:

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market.

In business, a disruptive technology changes a market by offering an alternative product that shifts the way consumers think about the entire market.  Mobile phones have done this to fixed line telephony for example.  Although the term is commercial in origin, it has fascinating application to learning and especially the art and practice of teaching.  Wikipedia would be one such technology.  Consider this:

Traditional teaching has a model of information exchange that is tightly controlled and has the teacher as the centre and controller of these exchanges.  Simultaneously the teacher is the information authority (and sometimes sole authority).  Drop the WWW and wikipedia into this paradigm and you have a disruptive technology.  If the consumer’s (student’s) understanding of information exchange is radically altered by universal and instant access, so too is their understanding of the role of a teacher.

Social networking, class wikis and blogs, content creation and publication have all had the same disruptive effect on schools and classrooms. 

 As in business, we engage with the technology, we innovate or we become irrelevant.  As in business, we have to know our tools and our students or we will lose both.

Have you been asking yourself how students could use iPods and podcasting in their learning?  A 9 year old girl I know pretty well picked up the iPod this morning and said “Can I use this to record my voice?”.  “Sure” I said, thinking she would just have a play.  The podcast below is the result.  What if your students could work on their speeches in the privacy of their own home, and when they’re ready record and upload a polished version for publication and feedback.  I wouldn’t necessarily replace speaking in front of an audience, but it does offer an exciting addition to the preparation (or an alternative for phobic kids).

Download Imagination!  by Maddy

My colleagues will soon be famous. Tune in to this great podcast, where educators respond to the question “How will student learning be improved or enriched with these Web 2.0 tools?” The answers were broad, thoughtful and varied. Enjoy!

Download Our Last Breakfast.

We have come to the end of another Big Byte Breakfast course – 5 weeks of dazzling learning at an alarming speed.  The presentations of the project by the course participants was mind blowing, considering that a few weeks earlier, many did not know their blogs from their wikis and thought RSS was a sports car.  What became immediately apparent was that teachers are expert at spotting potential.  These Web2.0 tools sprang to life in the hands of experienced educators, and many took on a life that their creators may have found surprising.

You can see the complete Show and Tell at our Next-Ed Wikispace here.

One of the favourites of the morning was Professor Stcky-beakers’ Toon-do cartoon of a Science Fair Project Proposal.  Click here to see the cartoon.

On my way home on the train, Tuesday, I was listening to an interview with James Farmer, founder of edublogs.org which you can hear here (herehere!)Download Interview.

The interview is not particularly earth moving, but what I really loved is being able to put a name and a voice to an innovation that is so obviously designed for me as a teacher and for my students.  Farmer speaks about meeting a need in a way that made sense and was convenient.  Based in Melbourne, Farmer’s edublogs.org hosts over 100 000 teacher blogs and may more student blogs.

Some of the new features include tools to manage classes and free (and ad-free) Wiki’s at Wikispaces.

He challenges us to let go a little bit and see what uses students can put a blog to.

One the same topic, Lynn P sent me a link to 5 good reasons for students to blog. Check them out.

pl.bebo

My daughter and I just had a look through her Bebo site (social networking). We checked that there was no identifying information on there (there was!) and who was hanging around.

This is not a fear post about the dangers of 50 year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls. She told me how people seem so much more polite online than at school. This was surprising. People who usually don’t have much to say face to face are happy to engage in conversation through Bebo or MSN.

I’d love a crystal ball to see how social networking will be leveraged into learning in the future. It is not a matter of if, but how. Shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of possibilities and potentials, instead of only risks and dangers?

 Yesterday, Jacob and I watched his older sister compete in the NSW finals of Tournament of Minds – a great challenge based competition for teams of students across age groups.  According to their website ” Tournament of Minds is an opportunity for students with a passion for learning and problem solving to demonstrate their skills and talents in an exciting, vibrant, and public way.”  The passion of the young people solving these problems is palpable, and engagment with learning is through the roof!

Makes you wonder if problem based learning would solve many of the engagement problems teachers report having in their classrooms.  Boys, in particular, love the idea that their work will produce something real.  Many schools around the world have embraced Problem Based Learning (PBL) as their entire curriculum including New Tech High School in California, Eltham College in Victoria and Canningvale in WA.  In these schools, the problem IS the curriculum.

With such powerful technological tools at our disposal, it seems a waste not to employ these students and their computers, phone and iPods in collaborative activities that confront real world problems and create real quality products and solutions.

That’s what the Tournament of Minds teams do every year.  Congratulations, Rebecca.