Key change in Professional Practice

During this year of learning for me, through the Mind Lab course, I have changed a number of elements of my professional practice. I will explore and reflect on one change that encompasses 4 of the key concepts as outlined by Hack Education.

What?

One of the aspects of my professional practice that I have changed is the move towards real world and authentic contexts for learning, where my students make connections with other learners both in the classroom and on a global scale. Through this learning, their digital toolkit is increasing as they find meaningful purposes for using these tools and applications.

So what?

Stage 1: Problem Identification

I observed many of my learners, on entry into my classroom, mainly focused on the end point of learning tasks. They wanted to complete the task as quickly as they could and many wanted to hold onto their knowledge without sharing their expertise.

In terms of inquiry topics, they liked to regurgitate information, without applying this knowledge to making a difference in our community or to taking some kind of action.  They weren’t thinking about an audience for their information.

Stage 2: Observation and Analysis

In our last inquiry unit, most students ended up with taking an action to share their learning about climate change with others. We had google drawings made into posters and visual prompts, slideshows, and kahoots that were then posted onto the students’ blogs.  This was highly motivating for the students and a huge change from the copying and pasting of information and use of copyright material.

Stage 3: Abstract reconceptualization

Unfortunately, even though my learners were excited to share their learning on their blogs, we didn’t receive many comments from our parent community on our work. So I searched for a way to encourage commenting on our blogs so that my students would continue to value the learning they were sharing and to see if we could make some wider connections.

Stage 4: Active experimentation

This term we are have joined the global student blogging challenge. Each week students are choosing from the menu of learning tasks, which they then share on their blog. There is much excitement when a student receives a comment from another student and this is also extremely motivating for other students in the class. They are keen to respond to these comments and begin a conversation. Because they know the tasks are going to be looked at by other students, and that those students are working on similar tasks, there is a real world and meaningful context for their learning.

Initially I shared all tasks with the students and let them choose and found that the wealth of choice within the blogging challenge was too much for them and few students were taking up the invitation to participate. So, over the last few weeks, I have narrowed the options and selected 2 or 3 that I think would give my students most value or interest them the most. In addition, I have specifically taught workshops around particular tasks and made sure these are completed so that they are shared with the blogging challenge community.

What next?

I really want to pursue the connections between our whanau and our classroom learning programme and to see how I can get family members commenting on our blogs. Some of the tasks from the student blogging challenge will help us to do this but I need to educate my parent community on how to comment on their child’s learning and why this is important.  

Next year, we are undertaking professional learning into the new digital technology curriculum and I am excited to learn more about engaging my learners and leveraging digital skills in order to create deep learning opportunities for my students.

Osterman, K. F., & Kottkamp, R. B. (2015). Reflective practice for educators : professional development to improve student learning.(2nd ed.) New York: Skyhorse Publishing.