A TEACHER'S DIARY

...thought of the time

TOPIC 8

Value Based Schooling Initiatives

I was brought up by middle class parents who were convinced that that their three children should be rooted in Christian faith. Hence all the three of us grew up with the best institutions that were available in my home town in the early 80’s. The quest for giving the very best started with these institutions run by the Christian missionaries –the Italian nuns and the Jesuits. For my tertiary education and professional learning, the story continued …

When I look back after all these years, I find a lone aspect of my old schooling greatly relevant even now in the 21^st century learning environment -- The values it nurtured in me as an individual and the traits it had inculcated deep within me to be a better person, to take on the life’s challenges for today and tomorrow with no regrets.

As rightly said 'Values start at the door'! The front drive of a school will start the story of values it institutionalizes! When you step in you find yourself at home! The welcome you receive, the physical environment, the people you meet with. The school will clearly speak for itself. It will tell you a story of caring and acceptance. It will connect you easily with the people living in it. It will help you to understand the importance of valuing yourself, others and the environment.

In a value based educational environment a happy, positive minded, caring community thrives. Trust, love, friendship, self-esteem and healthy relationship happen naturally here. Family relationships are strong and respected here. The student community is aware of the core values the school the society and the world at large expects from them. The students will feel its relevance in the various curriculum and life contexts, where it will empower them to be successful and confident!  They will speak about it and develop an emotional affinity towards it. 

Educators should always remind themselves that the children pick up intuitively what their teacher is as a human being! The teachers and staff exist to be their role models in ‘walking the talk’ the school preaches and practices. Hence, to facilitate its happening, values will be celebrated within the campus so that every member of the school community will feel its proud ownership and there will be consistency in these practices year after year.

Coming up next as extension...

Values v/s Technology 

TOPIC 7

e-learning

“Technology won’t replace teachers, but teachers who don’t use technology will soon be replaced”- Dr. Ray Clifford 

The success of a school, its teacher skills, the teaching and learning philosophies it nurtures are all evaluated, benchmarked in today’s world based on the technological interventions it excels in. As I said earlier (Ref below: Technology in education) quality schooling will “depend not on the quality of tech- infrastructure provision but how creatively the basic technological infrastructure is permeated to the learning process... Teachers would be masters of re-inventing learning strategies, driving pedagogical changes and establishing successful learning spectrums. Technology will be the driving tool for these ventures.” The relevance of e-learning or electronic learning or internet learning is clearly explicit here. The only choice left for schools now is to define how far it should be embedded into the practiced curriculum.

The Team

Providing extraordinary or exemplar learning experiences is the key to any successful schooling. This is the same case with any e-learning approaches. Any group of committed professionals who has the ability to work together as a team with a common vision, strong collaborative vibe and strong work ethics in focus can make this happen. An inspirational team leader, a curriculum designer or an instructional strategist, subject expert/s, the LMS expert, graphic or animation designer together with an IT expert can make a wonderful team to create and establish meaningful eLearning experiences for learners. However, the ground reality is that many exemplar and aspiring schools do not employ this line-up! Reasons can be several – low budget allocation, derailed short term and long term schooling vision, inconsistent or undefined recruitment and employee retention policies, ineffectively prioritized curriculum and instructional needs, professional development strategies run on adhoc basis and lack of ideal skill set in employees.

The Magic

However, one is sure to come across several leading schools in many countries that have prioritised e-learning projects within the basic infrastructural provisions they have embraced! What then makes them succeed? Their stories highlight a prospective vision, unfaltered planning, dedication, perseverance, creativity and above all inspiring individuals who make it happen! A lot of these schools have kids and teachers who might not have the opportunity to use technology at home. These institutions strive to build a strong lasting relationship with their community and try to be the best they can in what they stand for.  

The Advantage

Learning was confined to school or home in the past. With e-learning, you learn anywhere anytime. The only provision you need is an internet connection. It can be in a café, in the bus stop, in a vehicle or in a different country during your holiday trip! Resources and tasks can be picked based on the interest and pace of a learner, and not that of the teacher. Thus differentiated and individualized learning happens. The rising costs of education and the spiralling costs of text books are two other great benefits of online learning. Above all affordable quality learning is accessible to the deprived. Today projects like ‘Coursera’ provide quality online education by taking the best courses from the best universities free of cost to anyone on the globe!!! Never had one imagined in the past that you could get the best curriculum content in the world totally free of cost!

The Learning

e-learning procedures and delivery differ from school to school based on the institutional infrastructure, defined objectives, teacher competencies, academic initiatives and expected student outcomes it facilitates. Designing a unique format or structural procedures that ‘fit not for one but all’ should be the main objective. This should then help children follow a personalized curriculum which ultimately does not attempt to ‘assess them for what they don’t know but what they know’! A variety of content rich resources that support all kinds of learners and help them to be engaged, is what an educator or resource developer should look forward to. Constant feedback provision, meaningful practice questions, effective assessment procedures all should be embedded into the adopted e-learning practices along with peer grading procedures. These should be data driven and help establishments identify what good learning strategies are and how weaknesses could be addressed in the learning and teaching cycle.   The resource content should instigate learners to 21^st century learning practices like critical thinking, collaborative learning, digital literacy skills and instill a set of global values that is needed for their future success and life skill development.

The Conclusion

As Sir Ken Robinson says “Technology in its right and proper, should be built into the heart and soul of education…’. An attempt in this path then is for sure the right approach and decision that modern educators and academic leaders should look forward to. To module e-learning into the core of our learning procedures and make it relevant to each individual is the pressing need of hour.

TOPIC 6

Blended Learning

A mixed-mode, web enhanced instruction with a sea of opportunities for personalized learning is how I would define this 21^st century educational pedagogy.  The teacher, however in a different role, still and will remain the limelight of classroom instructional process, driving the instruction but delivering a curriculum that is designed and facilitated on a digital platform. 

What makes this learning highly effective and competent is its student friendly adaptability. The methodology will facilitate both independent and collaborative skill competencies; develop positive learning attitudes like confidence, self-motivation, people sense, worldliness, open mindedness that makes the future-ready digital natives. The facilitator (most preferred tag for a ‘teacher’ now, as they don’t ‘teach’!) will then be a digital literate who is expected to practice and instill a culture of new values, norms and rules that shall change the way we learn, work, play, communicate and socialize.

“It’s not about technology, it’s about people…The minute you fall in love with any given technology, it’s outdated. It’s like a philandering girlfriend. Technology is not going to stay faithful to you.” – Chris Sandoval /via Brains on Fire 

Tapping on the natural, self- initiated life skills of a learner is the best way to keep them engaged in learning tasks. Kids today are growing up in a sea of information. Traditional classroom setting, conventional classroom procedures, orthodox teacher behavior will only continue producing students who do well in standardized tests. The question every educator or school should address is whether they need to operate on creating ‘answer factories’ without skill training in focus or they want learning to take place anywhere, anytime.  Do they want their students to feel at home, making active learning choices that are designed to be functional at their convenience which can assure them of successful outcomes?

The potential of blended learning is vast and unlimited.  Schools and educators have to take risks, try stuff and share their stories of success and failures. If the former and latter can scaffold out expected competencies with the help of an objective driven curriculum design, and define it with rubric led levels of assessment strategies, it will set challenging learning contexts that will re-define learning. New and innovative ways to address diverse learning needs of today’s and tomorrow’s learners will not be a curriculum option but an obligatory objective of institutions. Exceptional schooling will then exist to cater to help their learners to master competencies in their own way, using their own mix blend of resources, at their own pace. This then will reinvent and reformulate personalized learning to next levels.

TOPIC 5

Forest Schooling

It’s rather disturbing to witness an early morning haze-lunged outdoor panorama when you are awake, ready to embrace a glorious day! Is the present generation losing or have they lost the charm of a healthy, genuine outdoor that yesterday’s classrooms naturally nourished or failed to explore to the maximum? Is it too late to rethink?

I am not a seasoned outdoor freak! However, I consider myself as a growing learner who is keen to experiment with the enormous possibilities that are scattered around us every day and seek to embed them into the learning process designed for the learners whom I am indebted to. This I believe should be my job! 

Today’s early morning experience sparks within me the importance of why schools and educators should pay more attention to embrace outdoor learning environments.  The rush to adopt sustainability, conservation, innovation, creativity, enquiry-based learning, technology integration, skill based learning focus, soft skills like empathy etc, all prioritised into the 21^st century (future) learning skills clearly explains this! Schools now embed these aspects into their guiding statements and proclaim loudly the vision of education they are going to build for the next decade or more for the learners they are obliged to and the communities they are indebted to!

Nature is a wonderful portal to achieve this ‘need of the hour’ (which we fail and have failed to employ consistently and holistically)! A visit to the local Wild Life Centre, the Zoo or the Orangutan Sanctuary should give our children an opportunity to respect the creatures that share the world with them. At a tender age itself they should ‘learn to care’ by holding these creatures without fear. An emotional attachment developed at an earlier stage of life will definitely create a staus-quo of well-being in the growth of every child/learner. The school fish pond or aquarium, the school garden or the school playground (often the largest untapped immediately available local resource) should thus be substitutes for inspiring extended learning experiences.

Technology could then be used spectacularly for creating virtual real-time experiences for learners. This will help them to identify, engage, establish connection and transform their learning into real life contexts. With the swift advances in technology and boom in multiple devices they should be taught to record sounds, videos, images and data for their geographical or science studies. Social networks should be explored to share these observations and researches with other learners and communities around the world for extending their learning experiences and knowledge.

Innovative ways of conducting outdoor exhibitions is another scope that promotes potential learning, a chapter that is left to be yet embraced. A multi-purpose school garden could teach children agricultural basics, water and energy conservation, community service and above all a life-long appreciation of the natural world around them. One should never forget that the much acclaimed Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare would not possibly have been a success story at the performance level, if the setting had not been surrounded by trees and wildlife!  Nor would poets like Victor Hugo, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, P.B Shelly, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Robert Frost have composed masterpieces that romanticised nature to appeal our dying senses in the 21^st Century!  

Teachers and schools should work hand in hand to create a difference, by promoting nature, through inventing a curriculum that embraces it consistently, by championing a passion that blends indoor classroom experiences with the breathtaking beauty of mother Earth! As Dalai Lama rightly left it - “When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.” True learning stems from the heart! Let nature be the heart of today’s and tomorrow’s learning endeavours.   

TOPIC 4

Inquiry Based Classrooms

Learner – centred approaches are the bible codes for 21^st century classrooms. Creative thinking aptitude, critical thinking, collaborative learning, technology integrated approaches, problem solving skills…etc are considered to be the main objectives of education today.

Enquiry based learning should then be prioritised into our teaching and learning pedagogies as they drive the above mentioned 21^st century skills. Children should be taught to observe, collect, analyse, discover and create after reaching their own conclusions in their learning journey.

How this could then be integrated into classroom learning is a challenge for educators. Defining the expected outcomes at the end of a lesson or learning process, planning backwards and across subjects, making connections is one way that could help educators achieve this. Such meaningful interactions in active learning, cross-curricular contexts through a series of activated learning experiences is where it can be nurtured.

One could find its roots in ancient Socratic teachings where learning is activated through questions rather than teacher supported answers. Self- discovery is the objective here. Learners are put to the world of curiosity rather than teacher transmitted knowledge acquisition. Learning then, is discovering problems both by the teacher and the learner, answers to which both of them may not know. They both walk hand in hand to discover the process of real learning together. Classrooms then become a learning community, rather than teach-oriented space!

Content is not an end, skills are what matters in the real process of learning. Yes, we want our learners to know the definitions of types of landforms, identify cultures around the world, spotting the natural resources of a country. But won’t it be more rewarding if they are looking at relationships, comparisons and similarities and the reasons for the same? Won’t it be cool if they find something that is not identified in the secondary resource that they use for their references? And what a meaningful learning opportunity would the educators be giving if this approach is applied across other subjects?   

Sharing best classroom practices such as helping learners create learning structures that they could extend into real life experiences, skill acquisition, establishing connections from known facts in adopted or adapted secondary resources, promoting reading through engaging materials that can sustain the interest of the learner, establishing motivation and above all building confidence are some of the tips that could be considered. The success, as always, lies in the WOW factor embedded into learning environments created intelligently by the facilitator.

  

TOPIC 3

Technology in education

Technology has become an essential part of modern life - style.    It has created the necessity for challenging tech- spaces all around us. All computing devices - from laptops to tablets to smartphones - today manage our daily schedules, communication and decision making. We are moving towards better efficient 'hotspots' as information is omnipresent.

Watching a class with technological gadgets spread on the learner's workspace and the expertise of a teacher merging with the environment will be the ordinary sight of tomorrow's competent classroom. Are our schools moving for it? Quality of schooling will then depend not on the quality of tech- infrastructure provision but how creatively the basic technological infrastructure is permeated to the learning process. The role of a teacher will then be more than a facilitator and a coach! They will, as we believe, be not obsolete but 'application experts'. Education will bid adieu to the walls of a concrete classroom and exist only in 'learner friendly environments' where freedom, leisure, collaborative opportunities exist. Teachers would be masters of re-inventing learning strategies, driving pedagogical changes and establishing successful learning spectrums. Technology will be the driving tool for these ventures.

Innovation and creativity will push existing educational systems to the verge of disruptive extremes. Learning endeavours will push educators to the verge of extreme risk taking as they will not be safe in the long run with mechanically propelled curriculums. Organisations will be forced to facilitate continuous changes in their schooling patterns as learners will be exposed to better meaningful, personalized learning contexts that promote genuine motivation and effective outcomes.

Learning through technology, rather than learning about technology will help us transform teaching and learning towards new dimensions where both the teacher and the learner will constantly explore better ways of succeeding in skills relevant for the next century. Problem- solving, decision making, creativity, knowledge processing, critical thinking, collaborative and social skills will cease to be emphasised or advertised. They will simply be a part of the learning process!                

  

TOPIC 2

READING - How to help your child succeed in school and life!

Reading will always improve student performance. Every effective learning strategy explored in any classroom will integrate methods to inculcate reading habits in learners. It is most likely that genuinely interested readers have acquired their skills from their parents (adults) who have read to them interestingly at some point of their childhood. Often the bond that is created with this role-model is an ever-lasting relationship.

Being aware of latest trends in developing this skill is one of the best ways to imbibe it. Providing ways for a child to access a variety of materials that interests (choices in reading) him or her at an early age is a primary step. Digital, audio or video materials/books that can be of quick access any time will be really effective. On-line magazines of various interesting topics, newspaper apps that can generate eagerness and sustain it in a young reader will be another.  Further, availing apps or software that creatively pulls a reader to enjoy an understanding of the theme, the concept etc can also be effective.

Both, classrooms and school facilities (library/Literary activities) should complement each other to develop the right attitudes and aptitudes in a learning bud by providing interesting opportunities that can help him discover and analyse various materials. Integrating library sessions into daily classroom teaching, adopting reading focus into curriculum objectives, reading aloud and model reading practices will help the children experience the effects of this skill through their schooling.  

Helping children access, as said before, with a multitude of resources in today's connected world and promoting lively discussions on topics online will be an added ingredient that helps them generate a love for the skill.     

A love for reading and effective reading habits will expand their vocabulary, improve their attention span, teach them social values, generates curiosity in them, builds confidence, independence and self-esteem and above all equips them with one of the best life skills - reading for life!     

TOPIC 1

A classroom concept taking shape - Flipped Classrooms

Learning is not done merely sitting and 'absorbing'. When strategies of teaching are explored with the help of traditional 'helpless' expertise, learners continue to be 'expected functional absorbents'. We often forget the fact that 'real learning' is not merely absorbing concepts, but an 'understanding' that is interactive, experimental, self-discovering, self-corrective, critically investigative in form and above all, one that leads to be applied in the learner's 'living' world of tomorrow. It is a continuous progression of concepts from the school to tertiary level, with strategies explored (for our multiple senses), finding their flow or relationship in a linear path.

Learning is contextual too, and hence a learner’s ability to retrieve what is learned depends on the quality of context on which it is learned. Effective memory skills supportive to future learning endavours should be re-inforced so that the process becomes powerful and enduring. The statement 'Learning is messy' (Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum) is functionally relevant here.

The common practice of taking up daily/weekly homework, over -dependence on lecture notes and teacher propelled inactive oral-visual consolidation of facts during classroom engagement is a retarded procedure in modern tech-guided world.  Administering classroom learning based on set hourly lesson plan procedures with compartmentalised activities for 'imparting the concept' will only lead to a quick end to the much wasted teaching (learning) hour! By the time the application of the learned concept is to be tried, students and the teacher are off for a break!

It is here 'flipped resources' takes effect! All resources (with attention to learner ability/skills...in focus) are provided or referred to for a flexible, self-paced reference at home/before class. Technology stands the only solution to this! Resources are built, that is common to all and can be accessed but with individualised plans set. These should be free and created from a local context but befitting the expected standards. A quick click access with a choice of instant communication will enable the learners to progress towards a set achievable target by learning self, with and from others.

Flipped classrooms appear to be one of the most accepted, effective solutions and hence thriving in the education field presently.  The strategy encourages active forms of learning refraining from the usual practice of the teacher as the resource and instructional centre. The shift from a teacher-directed, teacher-controlled and teacher- focused learning, to a learner oriented education takes shape here. Interaction and critical thinking becomes the medium of understanding concepts. Both the teacher and the student 'learns'.  They design, collate, manage and explore. Every moment of this learning is an experience to know oneself better and each other and in the process they re-discover true learning. Classrooms will then be meeting place of smart, creative, confident and thinking children (and teachers, of course!). 

Flipped classrooms also encourage desegregation and equality in opportunity in classrooms. This voices a firm proclamation to end 'level' grouping in our classrooms (imagine a sixth grade teacher in Kansas City or Detroit government schools having to teach students of 14 levels!!). Hence, the conventional set of classroom procedures and practices have to be changed in order to attain this with grouping done primarily on skills rather than levels. Learning here as said before, becomes self-paced and flexible, but with sustained, gradual competence slowly being built up in the learners by themselves. The students will slowly start to take ownership of their learning. Teachers will be facilitators and designers of learning. Learning ultimately becomes autonomous and productive with challenging outcomes.

However, if younger or secondary learners are not ready for it, it is again a question of commitment, self-discipline, level of interest in both the teacher and the learner. A better researched practice in our day-to-day classroom procedures (irrespective of the level of learning, the subject of learning or again the concept of teaching) alone with the teacher creativity and initiation stands a solution to its effectiveness.

However, well-thought out,  and anticipated corrective procedures should be scheduled by a teacher to avoid 'fossilization' of the concept/s. Teacher's timely interventions by correcting timely errors  before it is committed/ on spot or before being tattooed in the learner's understanding should be efficiently resolved. 

To continue, our short classroom sessions are to be energized with fully learner (student/teacher) engaged activities, providing ample opportunities for all to enjoy, understand and experience learning with creativity and critical thinking should be our guiding lights. We need to look not only at the outcomes of learning, but the process of learning too, building the right challenging and conducive environment.

My contribution to the topic: enchantedcollar.com (comments posted)