In Class Activities - 14th January
In Class Notes/Wonderings
Overarching Question
Who do we ensure education evolves to reflect the needs of today and tomorrow?
* Schools are not moving/keeping up the rest of the world espci
* The Five Whys technique - " by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." Taiichi Ohno (Toyota)
Homework
23 things they don't tell you what about capitalism
*But an influential Marxist school of thought argues that capitalistsdeliberately ‘deskill their workers by using the most mechanized production technologiespossible, even if they are not the most economical, in order to make the workers more easilyreplaceable and thus easier to control.
- Margaret - Uni of Toronto
- Bruce Hammond - Rip van Winkle
- Guy Claxton - Learnacy
- Anita Roddick - We need to teach children to .....
http://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Ministry/Initiatives/Lifelonglearners.pdf
page1: what does 'Anton' tell us about lifelong learning as opposed to school based learning?
Page 2: What does "Lead with Pedagogy, accelerate with technology actually mean? What (if anything) is missing from the ministry's vision ?
Using Coggle
https://coggle.it/
Activity: What's your School Vision Statement?
http://padlet.com/david146/f0iayapy7k8l
What common themes are there?
What distinctive themes are there?
How Might we lead change?
Kotter (1996) suggest there is an 8 step process for change management.
Change Management
Change does not happen in a vacum. It happens in the context of:
Multiple Stakeholders - who are they in education>
Stategies - What is your school's strategic visions?
Evidence - How do you find evidence to support and monitor change?
Overview
In this session we will consider the leadership challenges that inherent in innovative change, and techniques of change management.
For school improvement efforts to be successful, teachers, parents, community and business partners, administrators, and students must share leadership functions. Likewise, the principal's role must change from that of a top-down supervisor to a facilitator, architect, steward, instructional leader, coach, and strategic teacher (Senge, 1990).
Class Notes
Innovation in education impacts on multiple stakeholders . Those seeking to enact change need to be aware of how their proposed innovations fit into wider strategies, priorities and resource constraints. Evidence is important, both prior to introducing an innovation, regarding how likely the innovation is to achieve its aims, and during the innovation, in order to monitor its progress and effectiveness. Leading change require the support of robust change management policies.
This week one of our main resources comes from the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA). Their Education Change Management Toolkit has been developed to assist schools in implementing effective change for improvement, following identified best practices for educational change.
The toolkit contains general principles for implementing successful education change in schools and a series of questions to answer before, during and after a change is trialled and includes a draft policy which branches can discuss with their boards.
Overview: Successful school transformation requires establishing a clear educational vision and a shared institutional mission, knowing how well the school is accomplishing that mission, identifying areas for improvement, developing plans to change educational activities and programs, and implementing those plans or new programs effectively.
Educational transformation is nothing less than
the positive and purposeful transformation of
every individual who is involved in education.
Having arrived at the end of my two years I realise I've spent most of that time thinking about what I haven't achieved as a teacher and what my students haven't achieved academically. I've given no thought as to any changes or transformation that has happened for us all. Taking the time now I think back especially to that first term and it really is just a blur. I've always thought about my role as one in which I teach and the students learn. I've never used the term 'transform' for them. Certainly not for myself and yet that is what I want for myself. I'm guessing that some of that positive transformation will happen but the purposeful? That I think needs to be purposeful purpose. Planning, thought, reflection, adjusting, more thought and reflection. I'm already liking this website. Let's continue.....
The Transformation of Education is really about transforming ourselves — encouraging our own growth as well as our awareness of our growth. This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, nor is it something that can be accomplished quickly. It is a continuing process, this shifting from RED to GREEN, this moving and improving.
As you explore this learning object, reflect on yourself and the culture in which you live and work. Ask yourself, "Where am I on the continuum of transformation?" Consider what pressures you feel and the clarion calls to which you choose to listen.
Where are you now? Where would you like to be?
Some very useful scales with tips and examples of moving from the red to the green. Have bookmarked this - will refer to this during my planning for 2016.
Class Notes
The target of true 21st century education should be the advanced knowledge processes that scientists, scholars, and employees of highly innovative companies engage in daily.Compared to the rapidly changing face of information technology, the rate of change in schools appears several orders of magnitude slower. This evident gap has caused anxiety among school people and impatience in the surrounding society.
According to Jenkins (2006) the group of core literacies needed to be achieved by a 21st century graduate include:
- Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes
- Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
- Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
- Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
- Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
- Judgement – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different sources
- Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
- Networking – the ability to search for, synthesise and disseminate information
- Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
Readings
Transforming Education starts in your Classroom
So how do we take this existing model and the expertise of its pieces and use it to craft something truly spectacular? Something that works for everyone by design?
One that is designed to disrupt itself endlessly so that it cannot stagnate because there are too many catalysts and applications?
One where the spectacle of ideas—and the endless, meaningful, collaborative navigation of content—replaces the gearing of grades, testing, compliance, and teachers that drone?
Where students can see, feel, and trust that they can have an effect on the world around them?
Where students walk out of your classroom—or whatever place that makes sense—on a daily basis and ask themselves, What do I know, and what should I do with that knowledge?
Transforming education with digital technology
The EU-funded iTEC project – the largest of its kind in Europe – has already run pilots in 2 000 classrooms across 17 countries to help teachers to integrate technology into the way they teach.
The EU’s
Survey of Schools: ICT in Education study revealed that 80 % of students are in schools where teachers believe radical changes are needed for technology to be fully exploited.
‘There’s been lots of radical visions of what a future classroom will look like, but none have really been mainstreamed,’ said Ayre. ‘Many schools have looked at these and said “how can we ever get to this stage?”.
That’s why one of the main aims of the project is developing a toolkit which teachers can use to integrate technology into the classroom. The toolkit helps teachers develop scenarios and learning activities they can test out at school.
Change theory
A force for school improvement by Michael Fullan
In this paper I want to take this question a step further and ask what ‘theories of action’
really get results in education reform.
There are seven core premises that underpin our
use of change knowledge.
are
- a focus on motivation;
- capacity building, with a focus on results;
- learning in context;
- changing context;
- a bias for reflective action;
- tri-level engagement;
- persistence and flexibility in staying the
course
Premise 7: Persistence and flexibility in
staying the course
Lastly, because the above six premises are
complex to manage and must be cultivated
over time, i
ncluding bumpy cycles, a strong
resolve is necessary to stay the course. It takes
what I would call resilience – persistence plus
flexibility. Rigid persistence begets pushback
in equal or greater measure. Failure to
keep going in the face of inevitable barriers
achieves nothing. Being flexible, in fact, is built
into the action theory. Because the theory is
reflective and inquiry-based, and because it
is cultivated in the minds and actions of key
players operating with a similar theory of
action (the seven premises), there is plenty of
self-correction and refinement built-in.
Prospects for future use
of change knowledge
Third, and critical, we now have more
leaders – what I called ‘system thinkers
in action’ – who are actively using and
refining the knowledge. The reason that
this is so crucial is built into our seven
premises. The change knowledge is not a
disembodied set of facts, but rather a deeply
applied phenomenon in the minds of people.
Moreover for this knowledge to have an
impact it must be actively shared by many
people engaged in using the knowledge.
Fullan's Educational Change
Fullan (1982, 1991) proposed that there are four broad phases in the change process: initiation, implementation, continuation, and outcome.
What can we learn from the complexity of change process?
Fullan (1993) provide eight basic lessons about thinking about change:
- You can't mandate what matters: complexity of change in skills, thinking and committed actions in educational enterprise. Fullan commented that "effective change agents neither embrace nor ignore mandates. They use them as catalysts to reexamine what they are doing." (p.24)
- Change is a journey not a blueprint: changes entails uncertainty with positive and negative forces of change.
- Problems are our friends: problems are the route to deeper change and deeper satisfaction; conflict is essential to any successful change effort.
- Vision and strategic planning come later: vision comes later because the process of merging personal and shared visions take time. This different from Rogers'conception of innovation, as an idea, practice or object, that drives the change process. Rogers' model is similar to what Fullan's critics on Beckhard and Pritchard's (1992) vision-driven, which emphasizing the creating and setting of the vision, communicating the vision, building commitment to the vision, and organizing people and what they do so that they are aligned to the vision. People learn about the innovation through their interactions with the innovation and others in the context of innovation. Deep ownership comes through the learning that arise form full engagement in solving problems.
- Individualism and collectivism must have equal power: Stacy's concept of "dynamic system" helps clarify Fullan's ideas of innovation collaboration:
"The dynamic systems perspective leads to a view of culture as emergent. What a group comes to share in the way of culture and philosophy emerges from individual personal beliefs through a learning process that builds up over years." (Stacy, 1992, p. 145)
- Neither centralization nor decentralization works: the center and local units need each other. Successful changes require a dynamic two-way relationship of pressure, support and continuous negotiation.
- Connection with the wider environment is critical for success: change should recognize a broader context, to which change asserts its constant action.
- Every person is a change agent: " It is only by individuals taking action to alter their own environments that there is any change for deep change."
EDUCATION 2020
Step into the classroom in 2020 and see powerful forces at play. A global
shortage of skilled talent propels career-focused learning. Virtual learning,
digitization, and augmented reality have made our old definitions of a classroom
obsolete. Evolving learning needs redefine what education means, who delivers
it and how. Students become teachers, learning from one another through
project-based learning and self-organized learning environments. Education
funding shifts to pedagogical approaches proven to work via real-world trials.
Unbundled, personalized, and dynamic education is the new normal.
- Classroom or playroom? Now it’s both
More and more schoolwork is
game-based, allowing students to
learn through playing, building,
and discovery.
- The augmented classroom
Augmented reality (AR) applications become a common
feature of interactive learning in schools, transforming a
static learning experience into something immersive and
dynamic. For example, instead of looking at diagrams in a
book, a student learning about the human circulatory system
points an AR-supported device at a classmate to visualize her
heart beating.
Portal Clips
TASK
I've chosen the following 3 clips because they remind me once again about why my style of teaching has not worked for myself or my students. Engagement is not Entertainment. Listening is not Learning. The common thread through Dan Brown and Ken Robinson's talk was that educators are not their to impart knowledge. We are there to prepare our students for a future where the future is not clear. Their world is constantly changing and will continue to do so. If we don't change then it will be us who will be left behind. Eventually the rest of the world will take over educating our children so they can teach, collaborate and create with them in the different areas and businesses.
Ramsey Musallam challenges teachers to be the drivers that foster and encourage curiosity within our students. He also spoke about deep and active reflection as vital for teachers. This notion of deep thinking reflection for my teaching practise resonates strongly with me once more.
I'm thinking that the use of this blog for recording my note taking and reflections will be a valuable forum for my future reflection.
Open Letter to Educators from Dan Brown
Midst of a Revolution - Internet means that the monetary value of information is approaching.
Music, government, businesses have made significant changes but Education?
Knowing facts is no longer valuable because Facts are Free and institutions that are operating this way are NOT preparing students for the Real world.
You don’t have to change because the world is already doing that and if you don’t want to change with it then it will leave you behind because it won’t need you.
Ramsey Musallam: 3 Rules to spark learning
RULES TO TAKE INTO PLANNING
Curiosity comes first
Embrace the mess
Practise Reflection
We are Cultivators of Curiosity bringing meaning to their school day and sparking their imagination.
* students questions are the seed to their learning.
* those questions can be windows to great instruction
Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson
Trying to meet the future by doing what has been done in the past and in the process alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose
Modern Epidemic - ADHD - kids are being medicated in the most intensely stimulating age and penalising them for getting distracted from the boring stuff. We are anaesthetising them.
Arts are victims - Aestthetic experience - when senses are operating at their peak - FULLY ALIVE
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have VALUE
Divergent thinking - an essential capacity for Creativity:
Book - break point and beyond
Most great learning happens in groups - COLLABORATION is the stuff of GROWTH
An excerpt from ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’ by HaJoon Chang
Why - are we only wanting to be interested in productivity
Why - teach counting if machines e.g. in shops do it for people
Why - is profit more important than people accomplishing satisfying results in their work
Why - is the Marxist school influential
Why - is productivity the main measure of success for a society
