The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is designed for teachers and educators of all abilities and backgrounds; from those who are new to the classroom and looking for development, to experienced teachers ready to reboot their skills for modern education. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your professional skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. This course will help you consider how to develop appropriate learning goals for individual and groups of students. You will learn how to plan learning activities to engage your students in ways that will achieve these goals. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.
Lecture 1: Weaving the Ways: Wise, Strong and New
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來自 Commonwealth Education Trust 的課程
Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Planning for Teaching and Learning
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Commonwealth Education Trust
82 個評分
從本節課中
What Do We Know About Teaching and Learning
In this week you will think about your planning from three perspectives: considering, reflecting, and understanding. You will use these three perspectives to better understand how you can use learning principles to incorporate different worldviews into your teaching. We are going to ask you to think about how you could weave together practices from these three perspectives in your own setting.
與講師見面
Dr Judy HalbertCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Dr Linda KaserCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK
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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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