Improvement vs Transformation

I'm being changed by change, its a place I relish professionally, and as I'm challenged to explore the impact of change on teachers, I realise that change is what defines my practice personally. At some point, I stopped worrying if I was doing it 'right' and started trying different approaches, that are based on a mixture of hunch, intuition, courage, and best practice. 

I've viewed Derek's video today on 'Improvement vs Transformation', and its really helped me to start locating my 'balancing place' amongst the shifting thinking of education in Aotearoa and further afield. I'm not sure if balance is the right word, for me, teaching has become about constantly looking for levers to destabilize practice, and yet if I hope to be taken seriously in my work, I feel that I should be providing anchor points. There's not a lot of 'anchorage' in my practice presently, I find it difficult to explain myself, but I know I'm 'onto something'. Maybe this ocean-going metaphor is useful, perhaps I spend a lot of my professional time 'at sea'...

Derek Wenmoth's short explanation and model helps to create an 'anchorage' of sorts, to refine my understanding, a set of 'coordinates' to locate myself maybe... linking improvement and transformation, and bringing together the best of centralized and decentralized systems into a 'networked' model makes sense of my thinking. 

It also makes me think about NetNZ, a new model for video-conference or online education for secondary school students, that is replacing the cluster model in the South Island of NZ with a 'next generation' model for sustaining online, video conferenced based learning and teaching. It does represent a 'networked' approach I think...

Experimenting with Art History Teaching

My school has allowed me to experiment with my teaching this year, which is great, I'm really thankful for this. For one trimester (thirteen weeks), I'm teaching a middle school art history class. Its a small class of six, an absolute luxury. Two year nine students, and four year ten students. We are about halfway through the course now. I've discovered that when I consider the design of a course through the lens of technology, I get a lot more creative and imaginative now. This has happened since my engagement with Knowledge Building Communities theory and pedagogy - this learning has helped me 'integrate' elements suited to 21st century or modern learning practices.

We've decided to learn how to write an art history essay, and to make stop-motion animated art history timeline movies over the thirteen weeks.

Students started selecting art works of their choice and storyboarding ideas for their movies. They asked for plasticine and had a play with that too. I've encouraged them to think about hand-made as well as digitised settings for their movies, and we've seen how simple it can be to make a movies - for example, a white board and marker... while looking at some examples of stop motion animation from the web.

http://whsmsarthistory.weebly.com/

I set up a Weebly site for the class with some starter resources, also with the goal of 'publishing' their essays on it, as well as their movies, once completed. The only challenge is that I don't want to pay for Weebly, which means that students can edit anything on the entire site, so we had a discussion about that, and all is well (though the title of the site keeps changing into random cheerful messages...). Having the website served a number of purposes:

• An accessible place to access resources anytime, at school, and at home
• Create authenticity for the work done in class - it will have a public audience
• I'm working away from school regularly - students can still access me and their work
• The assessed work will be digital and in one place, accessible for external moderation

Student have almost finished their essays, and the quality of the work is high. Because of lack of computer access, I ended up having to make way too many decisions about our work for the students. I don't like doing this anymore - I want learning centred on students ideas, not my ideas. However, I just need to 'lump it' till the digital environment at school improves.

We looked at the choice and application of media and processes in the work of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. Students had a template to help focus on what information would be needed to structure their work, and we shared reading tasks, feeding back to each other about key ideas, and filling in templates with notes and ideas. This worked really well, and was a compromise I could live with. It turns out that this group has sound literacy skills; they were able to read unfamiliar texts and gleen meaning, doing a great job of targeting their reading to find particular content. They were able to discuss what they learned articulately with each other, and their reading enabled them to generate great questions. I was really impressed, and this raised the question for me about why students can't work at the level they are at, for example, there is a year none student in this group who is clearly capable of completing year 11 work... 

I'm looking forward to a time when schools are able to leverage technology to put students at the centre of the learning process, to truly meet their learning needs, to give them much greater agency, meaningfulness, and authenticity... I can also see that this will make teaching so much more authentic and meaningful for teachers, as well. Its frustrating having to wait for existing 'ways of educating' to shift, but I'm determined to support the process.

I'll reflect on this class again at the end of the trimester, to see where we got to. There are challenges to face yet to make the whole stop-motion animation idea fly... not enough technology to use at this stage, but the students are positive, so I'm sure we'll end up with some interesting movies. Something I've noticed already is that students are forced to 'contextualise' their choice of art works against relevant 'backdrops' in their movies, inviting students to question and research more authentically and responsively.

Teaching IS Inquiry

At some point in the last three years, I stopped being a teacher who accessed professional learning from time to time and rarely due to my somewhat remote setting, and became a teacher who's teaching spaces became sites of continuous professional learning and inquiry. 'Teaching' and 'learning about teaching' blurred, then all teaching became inquiry...

• writing courses and assignments became instructional design
• internalised reflection became socio-cognitive and shared
• I realised my student-centred teaching approach wasn't really
• my collegial interactions expanded beyond the limits of geographic location
• I became fascinated with assessment for learning and formative assessment, and even more than before, external assessment in its existing paradigm makes me want to scream
• my students found authenticity in their learning by participating in and co-constructing my inquiry and research efforts with me
• every aspect of education became 'fair game' for questioning
• I discovered and owned emergent design as my educational practice
• I became obsessed with Knowledge Building Communities theory
• learner agency and the centrality of the notion of 'improvable ideas' rather than 'tasks' became super important
• my super organised and successful teaching practice became a mess (in a good way, though it didn't always feel good, and surprisingly for me, students remained successful)
• I became really excited about my future as an educator
• I discovered my creativity
• I became a courageous educator (mostly - work in progress)
• I discovered my own agency as a teacher, and realised that in a twentieth century environment, teacher agency is as controlled and limited as student agency is

The combined opportunities of targeted mentoring in the virtual professional learning and development three year programme; becoming a practitioner researcher in a small TLRI funded team investigating Knowledge Building Communities in secondary schools; and my school allowing me to engage and participate in these opportunities... projected me onto an unexpected path.  

This all happened because I asked an inquiry question that has brought me so much more than I bargained for... 'how do I teach an online class effectively, and in a way that is engaging for students?'. I discovered teaching principles and technologies that destablised and exposed my twentieth century education practices, and bridged and supported my shift to twenty first century education.

My secret inquiry, the one where I ask myself if I'm good enough, if its worth the effort, if  I can cope with another year, if being an educator is my 'thing', is getting an answer too.

I want to figure out how to share this, so that other teachers can take this journey of transformation too... not the 'Breaking Bad' teacher transformation, the other one... hehe

An Over-Looked Learning Environment

In education, the most important, primary, and over-looked 'modern learning environment' is the space between our ears. How we think, what we think, and why we think it, catalyses and forms functional and inhabitable learning spaces wherever we present ourselves as educators.

How I cultivate my mindset with a focus on growth, and how I choose to nurture my neurons, will ultimately shape the physical, virtual, and energetic spatial fields that will take shape around me. How I think, my pedagogical beliefs, shape the learning spaces where I work, and I want to be increasingly conscious of this. My beliefs shape my environment, regardless of whether or not I'm aware of them. Addressing what exactly modern learning practices and environments are allows us to re-engage with our own beliefs and values about what education means in the 21st century.

To uproot a garden of learning ideas shaped by an industrial, consumerist, competitive paradigm, driven by fear and scarcity, with a new bed of learning ideas shaped by knowledge building, learner agency, collaboration, and connectedness, informed by the notion of 'growth' and by environmental awareness, is no 'mean feat'. To operate balanced with a foot in each world is our challenge as educators, as a shift between ways of thinking about learning and the resources and infrastructure required, will take time. 

A growth mindset and an emphasis on 'process praise' is as much about an empathetic expansion of the heart and its capacity to feel, as it is an expansion of the mind, of growing neurons to increase the capacity to think. Having an expansive heart and mind located in the learning space of my body will inevitably change the quality of my actions and interactions with the people and living things surrounding me. In a good way too, I trust.