Learning Community – Page 3

Tag: Learning Community (page 3 of 3)

How Do Adults Learn?

Differently than children is the obvious answer, yet we often don’t remember this when creating professional learning opportunities for teachers. Picture a library or large room with adults listening to a guest speaker hour after hour. This is a case where adults and children are similar. Direct instruction and passive professional development might not be the way forward regarding educator professional growth. However, we continue to follow the model of setting aside a few days a year to rush through a learning topic that supposedly will meet everyone’s needs. We preach differentiation but don’t apply it to our peer learning opportunities.

Moving on from current professional development practices, we need to focus on the learning needs of adults, looking at how we can design learning communities with ongoing learning practices instead of one-shot PD days.

One of the pleasant aspects of my instructional technology graduate program was a seminar class where we studied the learning needs of adult learners. The following are some of the main points I remember from the class and the past few years working with teachers individually and in small groups.

The purpose of the learning must be relevant and useful.
The adult learner brings a vast amount of life experience to the learning that, in many cases, will be applied to any new learning.
If you want to connect and get buy-in, individualize the learning to one-to-one and small teaching team groups.
Many teachers sitting at a bank of computers for a PD session quickly forget that other teachers are in the room. This sometimes leads to their going in different directions, which means that the session provider must diligently work individually and with the group simultaneously. 🙂 Look to support technology learning in one-to-one situations for many adult learners.
Please work with the practices already taking place in the classrooms and build on them by facilitating discussion and sharing with the team.
Immediate application, ongoing practice, and follow-up support of adult learning work.
Adults need to guide and direct their learning.
Adults deserve differentiated instruction that meets their learning styles and speed, just as all learners do.

Making the Shift Happen & Kim Cofino

March 1, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Kim Cofino continues to add to the discussion in the blogosphere on various topics. She recently posted about Making the Shift Happen, and I added the following comment. Kim will be a guest on this week’s Shifting Our School Podcast: SOS. We will be discussing the EQ “How to connect?”. In a few weeks, we will be looking at the big question of how to make the shift with Brent Loken of Hsinchu International School as the featured guest.

Terrific insights here, Kim. Your points add to the growing discussion at the Shifting Our Schools: SOS podcast as we work to answer our guiding question: “How to shift?”. We look forward to hearing from you in this week’s show.

The discussion on the podcast has brought up some other points that can be added to your work here. The process of shifting with its focus on the curriculum development process, guiding professional development around the formation of learning communities, and the need for leadership must be validated by the appropriation of time during the school day to do the work to change how we do business in our schools.

Shifting cannot be set aside as an after-school meeting activity.

As you point out, the leadership must come from the administrative team to build the vision and the framework to make the shift. The SOS team would add that a trained instructional/educational technologist and library media specialist must be hired in each of the school’s divisions to drive the efforts in the curriculum and PD processes. We must have our point people follow through and make the vision a reality in our classrooms.

As for the curriculum review process, the administrators should also have the administrators on board to attend the meetings, especially the end-of-unit reflection gatherings where everyone is held accountable when reviewing the common assessments. Your point of celebrating and publicizing successes plays nicely during these meetings.

I would add that a big part of the paradigm shift is again making the time for ongoing discussions as school leaders “seek to understand” where individual staff members are when learning 2.0 instructional and assessment strategies. I have experienced that understanding how to construct essential understandings/questions and learning what a concept-based curriculum looks like takes time and understanding as we work with adult learners. We don’t learn in the same way as our students.

As much as we think about how to shift, we also need to consider the barriers to moving our schools to become 21st-century learning communities. Your three bullet points hit home on this point and, as other commenters are saying, need to be presented to our school administrators to start the discussion as we look to change our schools’ cultures and begin shifting our schools.

After commenting on Kim’s blog post, an additional thought came to mind. I would add another question to Kim’s three bullet points. What are administrators doing to hire teachers with the skill set for constructivist, concept-focused instruction and assessments who are passionate about helping our students learn 21st-century skills?

How to Expand the Learning Community to the Parents?

February 19, 2008 / David Carpenter / 3 Comments

Technology has a massive role in supporting the inclusion of parents in our school learning communities. The first step is to build on what we already have to include parents in the school, connecting to their talents and interests. How are parents already involved in our schools?

They participate as coaches, tutors, classroom supporters, school board members, etc. By using Web 2.0 tools, we enhance their experiences while improving communication and increasing opportunities for learning for everyone. When parents feel a part of the school where their ideas are being heard and responded to, they are more apt to be supportive and protective of the school in the broader community.

A well-designed school portal/virtual learning environment using wikis, blogs, shared calendars, vodcasts, etc., leads to two-way communication, especially in the busy lives of parents who sometimes have trouble making it to campus. Just think of the little league baseball coach or scout leader wanting to share information about their team. Give them a Web page in the school portal, a blog, an image gallery, etc., and you will have a parent feeling connected to the school while modeling how to make connections for other activity leaders.

With our telecollaborative efforts to extend learning beyond the school walls, we should remember that many of our parents are subject matter experts. E-mail, Skype, and simple telephone calls to interview and gather information bring parents into our learning circles. Students producing news shows can record interviews over Skype for upcoming telecasts. Parents can watch or listen to teachers’ media files, sharing some of their recent lessons online. How about using Ustream for live webcasts, sharing panel discussions, parent education presentations, etc? The videos can then be posted on the school Web site for parents unable to attend in person or via cyberspace.

Looking at supporting 21st-century learning initiatives, it makes sense to engage parents in discussions from both the parental and employer viewpoints. If we want to shift our schools, get the corporate parents in to discuss the skills they want from their employees. This real-world information can only support efforts to change how we teach. From there, get parents involved in big-picture curriculum discussions. Use the school portal to educate and engage parents in discussing our learning environments and instructional strategies to develop creative, collaborative, and adaptable thinkers.

Passion for Learning, How to Nurture and Grow It?

February 4, 2008 / David Carpenter / 2 Comments

My 4th grader, son Maxwell, shared a few instances this past week demonstrating a passion for learning. Max enjoys science fiction and fantasy in his reading. He also loves to be creative and social while finding ways to add humor whenever possible. Leadership and wanting to direct his learning also come into play with Maxwell. Combining these personal attributes and interests, Max connected with a couple of friends to start writing a book about fantasy creatures.

Max’s writing team is now on their third chapter and plowing ahead. Each writer brings different skills to the team, according to Max. They recently searched for and found a skilled artist among their classmates to design a cover for their book. Max says that he enjoys working with his friends. The only barrier slowing the writers down is that the Word document is on the school server. Max is now contemplating working in Google Docs to have 24/7 access for his team of writers. And by the way, this book is not a school assignment. The students are writing for the joy of being creative. My capitalist son plans to market the book to his classmates.

Max has another project going on that involves a few other classmates who are members of a club. They came up with a club name, symbol, and roles within the club. They then went to the computer to create club IDs with photos, names, ID#s, their sex, their role, the club symbol, and name and fingerprints. With no ink pads, the problem was solved using magic markers to ink their thumbs on the printed-out IDs. The next step was to laminate the IDs. Again, this effort had nothing to do with a class assignment.

So, how do we nurture and grow this demonstrated passion? If I were to search “student-centered classrooms,” “love for learning,” etc., I would come up with stories of teachers who connect the curriculum with student interests, passions, love for social interaction, and enjoyment of using one’s talents. I also find learning projects and assessments that reflect actual life activities (i.e., writing memos and briefs, creating video demonstrations, designing information pamphlets, etc.) that students share with a real audience. The more we know our students, the better we can design learning activities around their desires and interests where they direct the action.

How to Shift? Part 1

January 16, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Many factors come into play to support an individual and school’s shift to Learning 2.0. The institutional shift is much more complex. In either case, the shift starts by knowing where you want to go with your shift. My previous post and the Shifting Our Schools podcast discussion offer a few ideas on why to shift. Jeff and my arguments hopefully make sense for most teachers. While we spoke and wrote about the value of Information Literacy and Communication skills, we also focused on learning outcomes that place students at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy in their learning. It isn’t about the technology; it is about the learning.

Many schools have mission statements and student learning outcomes that might not fit the world our students are heading out into. It is time for school communities to review their documents. With an eye on the ever-changing nature of modern life and work, it makes sense to see how our school learning goals must be adapted for 21st-century life and work skill sets. These discussions guide where the shift will take the school.

Using the UbD model, we can work backward to re-design how we teach and how our schools function to say students are learning according to mission statements and outcomes. We all know that lots of time goes into wordsmithing the mission and learning outcome documents, but we often need to remember to put in the time to construct action plans to connect the goals to the classrooms. We also often leave the reflection and assessment of our efforts out of the picture, so good leadership and accountability must be applied to the review and follow-up processes.

This brings me to the second of many hopeful, solid, meaningful actions that need to take place to help individuals and schools make the shift. Thomas Hoerr wrote “What Is Instructional Leadership?” in the Dec/Jan 2008 issue of Educational Leadership. (You can access the article yourself.) In it, he points to the importance of administrators being the instructional leaders for their buildings. Hoerr writes that we all hear this phrase repeatedly but that it makes so much sense. While our very busy principals are only sometimes the top dogs of pedagogy and curriculum in their buildings compared to many of their teachers, they still can be the instructional leaders for their schools.

Hoerr shares that principals as leaders can facilitate “collegiality” among teachers, which supports good communication, reflection, coaching, and learning from one another. Many of us are more familiar with the term “learning community” as the basis for professional development and building a culture of learning for everyone in a school.

A second part of being the instructional leader is participating in and facilitating the reflection when teachers review their instruction and assessments. Hoerr uses the following questions to start the discussion to get teachers thinking and learning about their efforts in the classroom.

How did this lesson address the needs of your three strongest and three weakest students?
What would you do differently the next time you teach this lesson? Why?
How will you know your students know?
How will you create an assessment tool that would help you teach these concepts?

(Educational Leadership December/January 2008, page 85)

OK, so there you have it. The first plank will eventually be connected to many more as I plan to build the boat to sail us to the promised land of a shifted school. 🙂 We start with the end in mind, as Dr. Covey would remind us. We update our school learning goals to fit the times. We take non-educational items off our principals’ plates so they can provide the vision and leadership to build learning communities within their schools while using the power of questions to guide us to be better teachers.

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness