Learning never stops, it just keeps building up in our minds. In this discussion I will reflect on the last 24 weeks and talk about three things that I have learned about myself as a learner and three key changes in my own practice.
Myself as a learner
1) The one thing I never saw myself as was a leader, but upon reflection I have a duty to lead my children and other teachers around me into understanding 21st century learning concepts. Learning about different leadership styles has allowed me to adapt my practice when dealing with different stake holders. Situational Leadership theory allows me to adapt to different circumstances in the classroom whether it be academic or behavioural and Transformational Leadership allows to empower others to use technologies and other teaching practices that I've learned in their classrooms. Next year I will be able to confidently start the classroom with a new mindset.
2) I don't have to know everything. One thing that I've learned is that I don't have to know all nor do I have to do everything. As an inquiry I provided a statement for the children to prove or disprove, all I had to do was give them a learning process. Students were able to form opinions about the statement based on research they had done and all I did was facilitate their learning. Currently I am rule governed when teaching a learning process but feel that with more practice I can become more intuitive and less rule governed.
3) I love to learn. This statement seems pretty simple but I hated school. This was because I thought I was dumb and school was boring. I think I was board because I never learned how to learn, everything was learned by route and to me that was not my style of learning. I'm going to continue to read articles and watch clips about things that will grow me as a professional and build my skill set.
Key Changes in my practice
1) Flipped learning is a model that stood out to me as being something that I really wanted to trial and use as a tool to prepare my children for learning. The core of my motivation was to teach knowledge outside of teaching time, thus freeing up room to reinforce knowledge with meaningful activities. I discovered a video about Katie who taught to the middle of the class and used flipped learning to reach more children (McCammon, 2011). Others have commented on flipped learning to have create a space for collaborative learning and freeing teaching time to be more meaningful (Clay, 2015; Khan, 2011). There have been some successes and frustrations. When the children had access to tutorials they were able to lead their learning but time was the biggest barrier. Creating and finding tutorials took up a lot of my time outside of class.
2) Collaboration is something that I've always believed in. Encouraging collaboration is said to be beneficial for behavioural and learning outcomes, learning should be social (Dumont, Istance & Benavides, 2010). In the article they say that collaboration needs to be structured and I feel that I haven't got that bit quite right. At the start of the year I should have set up activities to practice this properly, setting a criteria with the children.
3) Beginning as a BYOD classroom this year I had lots of ideas. One thing that I learned while on course is that a device is a way to enhance learning, to facilitate children's ability to access resources. Web based apps such as Blend Spaces and Google Sites have enhanced children's learning by giving them access to knowledge that helps them to lead their learning without the teacher. When children are working on our Google Maths Site I become a facilitator and answer questions that may arise, the children are learning knowledge from the tutorials set for them. This is helpful for me because it gives me time to work with children who need more teacher time.
References
McCammon (producer). (2011). Why I Flipped My Classroom. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGuLuipTwg
MindLab (producer). (2015). Chris Clay-Flipped Classrooms. Retrieved fromhttps://app.themindlab.com/media/4229/view
TED (producer). (2011). Salman Khan: Let's use videos to reinvent education. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTFEUsudhfs
Dumont, H., Istance, D., & Benavides, F. (Eds.). (2010). The nature of learning: Using research to inspire practice.
Paris: OECD/CERI.
No comments:
Post a Comment