Connected Learning

Jarrod Lamshed

Mar
13

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The Education Debate: Teaching vs Learning

Category: 1. Know students & how they learn, 3. Plan and implement for effective teaching & learning, 4. Create and maintain supportive & safe learning environments Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

 The best teachers in the school sit by their kids during an assembly and treat them as if they are good.” #schoolculture

@ToddWhitaker – Twitter

 

I saw this quote on twitter last week and it hit a nerve with me. So often we see teachers take an approach to behaviour management that assumes kids are going to do the wrong thing. In fact, the term ‘behaviour management’ bugs me too. I prefer ‘behaviour learning’. As adults, we shouldn’t be managing anyone’s behaviour but, instead, should be teaching our kids to control and regulate their own behaviour.

Kids will be kids and mess this up sometimes, but this doesn’t mean that this should be the expectation. I believe if we set high expectations for behaviour, talk about trust and respect and have open and honest conversations with kids about how they would like to be seen by others, they will take charge of their own behaviour learning. We in turn can offer support and guide them along their way.

Too often in schools the focus becomes about the teacher. How will the teacher control their class behaviour, how will the teacher teach the class. This seems to be the conversation being had by our politicians as well. All week I have been hearing interviews with our would be education minister talking of the need for the teacher to return to more traditional teaching methods and about what type of information he feels the teacher should impart to the students. I really thought we’d moved past this. If my students are sitting around waiting for me to impart knowledge, they are going to be severely disappointed. I can teach them how to learn, I can challenge their ideas and provide experiences for learning…. but for knowledge imparting, they are better off elsewhere.

In this current education debate, it worries me that there is no talk about about looking at how students learn. No talk about asking students what works for them. No talk about improving learning…  only about changing teaching. To me, these are very  different things and the emphasis needs to be on the learning rather than the teaching. I’m not sure how to get this message across to the people in charge, but it’s a message they need to hear.

Mar
2

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Not Quite Flipped

Category: 1. Know students & how they learn, 3. Plan and implement for effective teaching & learning, 4. Create and maintain supportive & safe learning environments, 6. Engage in professional learning Tags: , , , , , , Leave a Comment

The ‘flipped’ classroom has become a huge topic in a reasonably short amount of time. There has been some great discusion and there have been some good points made on both sides of the discusion. Personally, I’m not convinced that there is one right way to do this. In fact, I think if we get caught up trying to follow the rules of ‘flipping’ the classroom we can do more damage than good.

For the last year or so, we have been experimenting with our own version of a flexible classroom. I say ‘we’ because the changes that have been made are based on discussions with students. Our students have fed back to us about what works for them at school, and what doesn’t. This has been a big learning experience for me and at times a very confronting one.

We have avoided calling our classroom ‘flipped’ because I don’t believe we conform to that mould. We have set up flexible learning spaces to allow student to work both collaboratively and individually as they need. We have worked hard to give the students a large amount of control over their learning and the teacher has absolutely stopped being the focus of the room.

The part of the flipped model I disagree with is the emphasis on students watching ‘lectures’ or ‘classes’ at home. I believe we still need to offer students a chance to access this base information at school. For many of our students, accessing technology is not possible and neither is accessing appropriate support for their learning. If we value the information we are sharing, we need to make time for it in our day. Students should be provided with opportunities to access learning at home in different ways.

By taking the best bits of a lot of different ideas, I hope we are on track to creating a flexible learning environment that works. It’s an ever evolving process with the goal of worrying less about how we teach and more about how kids learn.

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