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Welcome back,

I'm pleased to be back here with you.

Judy and I are thinking through these ideas that we've been exploring with

you ourselves and with our network of

educators around the province and around the world.

We hope that you're finding what we've been exploring

so far useful to you in your own thinking.

Our teaching profession has been become one very much where our planning outside

of the activity of learning

and teaching itself is critically important.

We hope you found at least one partner

who you trust and respect to have conversations with.

And, we hope you're having a chance to explore some of

the reading and some of the websites that we've been talking about.

This week were going to explore something that we find fascinating in our context,

and that is a perspective about teaching and learning that comes from really

three sources of knowledge really is how we think about it.

And we call this, "weaving the ways", and we've written about it

in a book called Spirals of Inquiry, and we hope you

find this provocative in terms of

thinking about your own country, your own place,

because in a rich ecology we have lots of variation in our

countries, and here's a way that we think about it, which you can

think about as an application to your own setting.

We think we need to be thinking now as educators about

three ways forward, and we call these wise, strong and new.

From the wisdom tradition in our context in Canada, which is very similar

to other parts of the world Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, many other places.

There are strong indigenous populations that have

lived on the land for decades and decades

in many cases - in our case, at least 10,000 years.

And their learning principles have worked for them in

very effective ways.

And we believe that from a wisdom perspective, those of us

who don't come from that background can learn a great deal.

So, our aborginal people in our province have put together what they call

the first people's principles of learning that you can see on the screen.

I think three of them, that we might like to

consider for the purposes of this week are thinking about "Learning

requires patience and time".

Sometimes as teachers we want to go too fast in

our urge to get everything done that we want.

But in our planning, I think from a wisdom perspective, we need to think about

how can we build patience and time

walking beside each other as learners into our pedagogy.

And we also think that the learning principle that says "story is important"

is critically important for us all to think about.

And Judy had talked about Kieran Egan's work

and in the imaginative repertoire story is critically

important in teaching math, and science, and each of the disciplines.

And, when we remember our great teachers, they're often people who were, in fact,

powerful storytellers, and were able to bring

learning and pedagogy to life through personal stories,

through historical stories, they captured our

interests through the power of their story.

I think another thing that we're just beginning to explore in our own learning

and teaching in our province that we're

finding fascinating is the role of intergenerational learning.

As we look more broadly outside of our schools to say,

how are we using all of the resources of our community?

So, one of our favorite,

teaching examples in our province,

is a teacher near the Rocky Mountains,

who has taken-- she works with young children, five

years old -- and she realised that

they didn't know very many seniors in their community.

They didn't have grandparents that were local,

and so she made an arrangement to have

her young people move physical location out

of their school and into a senior zone,

where for one morning

a week, the little people and the senior

people had a chance to interact and learn together.

That's become so powerful, that now it's an ongoing feature of the work

in that area, and in fact, has

captured the imagination of educators across Canada.

And also, the people in seniors homes now are reaching out

to their schools to say, "Can we have something similar in our place?"

Now, in traditional

communities, intergenerational connectivity and elders helping

young people learn was a way of life.

We think that this is a wisdom tradition that we need to draw on.

Not every country

that's a part of the Commonwealth and

part of the world has that indigenous tradition.

But, every country that we visited has rich,

cultural practices that are powerful from a learning perspective.

When we were in Wales, we were very impressed with the music and the language.

These are things that we consider wise to keep

and as educators, we're part of helping that continue.

In our culture, learning more - for those of us

who don't have indigenous backgrounds - through literature is a powerful way.

So, lots and lots of us now are exploring our novel list

and learning more about a different world view in that way.

And that's been a richness for us.

A second way that we think, though,

that is really absolutely makes teaching now so exciting,

is that we also have a strong research and knowledge base.

I mentioned earlier that both my parents were teachers,

they didn't have the research knowledge -

and I didn't at the beginning of

my career have the knowledge about learning

and about which strategies are the most effective

to draw on in my early professional practice.

And I wish I could go back

and recreate the early part of my career with the knowledge that we now have.

We call these strong ways,

because they're research based and evidence informed -

and they are global.

That is, we think the strongest researchers are making

sure that they connect their ideas over the world,

and they're not just keeping it in their own countries.

So that we can draw, for example, on John Hattie's incredible amount of reading that

he's done and synthesizing in

books like Visible Learning for Teachers, where

he's shown what the research base is for those strategies that are most powerful.

And we think that that's -- along with, for

example, we'll be talking later on about some of

the assessment for learning work that Dylan Wiliam

and other colleagues have done in the assessment area,

and the powerful impact when you know effect

size, when you can make decisions about what you're going to learn, and

how you're going to apply that in your own planning for learning and teaching.

This really is a gift to us, as the profession.

However, we want to draw on the wise ways because they've -

in a sense - been field tested for a long time.

Cultures that know how to work in a respectful way with

nature, how to do deep storytelling, how to listen with real

intention, how to use the oral tradition

to capture history and have decision-making processes

that say "If we do this, what will be the impact over the next seven generations?"

That's a powerful way of thinking that we think we all need to learn from.

We absolutely also want to draw on our scientific

tradition of evidence that affects us because that gives

us some sense of what the most intelligent

directions to focus our own professional learning on.

But the third area that we also think

is unique, perhaps now, in the profession, is that we

live in a time in the educational

profession where we can also be thinking about new ways.

And, we think that innovation and

imagination and curiosity are for everybody.

They're for young people and

for us, as adults.

And that we need to weave these ideas in as well.

So, we're very interested-- John MacBeath

has written about the children's university,

and, you know, that's looking at time

and space, and location and relationships and curriculum

quite differently,

And we think that each one of those has the

opportunity for us to think in new ways.

Let's just take time.

In our culture, as in many cultures, it has been traditional always

to teach math or reading first thing in the day when learners are fresh.

What we found, and this is a school example, is that learners who get

a chance to do some brisk movement first thing in the day, for example they get to

dance for half an hour before they approach the task of learning to read,

are much more calm, they're much more alert, they're much more selfregulated.

And if they come to school

anxious, they're much less anxious and they're much less depressed.

This is new knowledge that's entered. Space -

we have an

explosion in schools that are learning how to be nature schools,

so that they're not confining their learning so

much to inside the school as it's always been,

but they're looking at space and location in very different ways.

How can they use all of the space? Including building farms

in very urban locations and using farming as a hands-on activity in

K to 12 in our setting, and beyond.

Looking at relationships in a different way than perhaps we've seen before with

the teacher at the front, and the learners gathered in front of them, expanding

those relationships through the use of technology

and expanding the relationships - as in the

example of the young people with the elders in a senior center -

why can't these people be in together?

What the teacher, the researcher, what she found -

her name is Barb -

that the learners,

the older learners, many of whom had been non-verbal because they were

depressed at the stage of life they were in and many of the

young learners didn't have confidence in oral language and in their beginning

literacy experiences, by putting the two

groups together in relationships, in powerful relationships,

in meaningful relationships, in the same space outside of the school,

that both groups grew tremendously.

And adults who had been non-verbal found their voices again, and young people

became very emotionally and intellectually connected

with a significant adult with rich life experiences.

Curriculum is being rethought

in many, many places. In our curriculum, we're

moving more to a notion of competencies,

around personal and social identity, around critical thinking

and, not giving up knowledge, but not focusing

so much on every single outcome that's ever

been placed in a curriculum being something that

we would cover. Much more an exploration in depth.

And we are finding some very

thoughtful uses of technology, particularly to

link people across areas and interests, just

in the way that you're linked through this course, and hopefully with other people.

But also, we have a number of teachers who are

exploring using their cell phones to capture learners in action

and then making short digital videos that they can use to

help their family members, and the people in their extended family

see how they're doing as

they progress as learners.

So, we think that these three

perspectives, which we call weaving the ways.

Taking the wisdom from our own tradition, in our Canadian, Western Canadian

context, this is very much thinking about things from an aboriginal world view.

Thinking about the things that we know that

we really have a strong evidence base for.

For example, when we talk about formative assessment, we think that evidence base

that we should be coaching as teachers more than just judging all the time.

There's such a strong effect size that we say to each other and to our colleagues,

once we know this matters so much, not to do it

is a form of professional malpractice.

If we haven't heard of it, that's a different issue but when

something really, really works for learners, we think

we should be building it into our repertoire.

And we should also be open and curious about, can some of the new technologies

like the cell phone, can they really enhance our

learning? If we're trying to learn a language,

for example, can hearing a language on a cell

phone, can that make a big difference to learners?

If it can, let's explore it and we

won't have effect size or research evidence, but staying open and observing,

we think that that's a powerful perspective to bring to our planet.

So, this is what we would encourage you to be thinking over

the next week or so - what are the strengths in your particular culture?

That you think the world would be a worse

place if you didn't build that into your own

thinking and planning? What are the places

of evidence?

Maybe you're curious about your assessment practices.

There are some superb resources now available easily

to think about how to shift that.

And what are some new ways, you know, just one or two new ways that we could

think about exploring with a colleague to make

our learning for young people much more powerful?

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Lecture 1: Weaving the Ways: Wise, Strong and New

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Planning for Teaching and Learning

Meet the Instructors