My dear friend Bill Ferriter is writing about another one of my hot topics!!! Go Bill. His wondering is about how we will change our profession into lifelong learners. I have to say that this is a topic that is very close to my heart...probably because I really believe in the whole idea of lifelong learner and how it keeps me young and curious....
Also this fall I am teaching another grad school class on Teaching and Learning with Technology. My introductory unit is all about Lifelong Learning. I make the case for it by citing some pretty well known stats....only 7% of teachers who use technology use it effectively (ie seamlessly and appropriate for the learning target). Parker Palmer says it so well.....“good teaching is rather more than technique: 'good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher'. This is where we find the push to be better than we are today...when it comes from our identity and the integrity of finding out who we are as a teacher. That is the heart of the reflection process and that I learned during my National Board process almost 10 years ago. The folks in these grad school classes, for the most part, are very motivated, committed individuals...they are smart and have developed a good sense of their cohort community. I think they are really helpful to each other although they are mostly online, virtual classmates. Their discussion forums last summer were inspiring, so I'm excited to see what they do with this kind of challenge.
I am going to be bold in this class I'm teaching. I designed a learning activity where my grad students will have to join a virtual community. I picked Classroom 2.0 because it fits the wide range of content areas and age groups that are reflected in my class demographics...and because it offers something for the beginning to the experienced user. What is bold is that they must pick one aspect of the community to investigate each week and then use a reflection blog to record what they learned. Many may believe this is too much to do...many may believe I should be more directive...and I'm hoping that many will enjoy the freedom to define for themselves what it is they want to learn while....many will benefit from the requirement to reflectively blog. I'm not "grading" the blog so we'll see how many will do it....
For 6 weeks they'll investigate, try things out and write about it...then we'll post our individual conclusions and do an online discussion to try and generalize the experience beyond what each person found out by themselves.
I think if we gave teachers more learning experiences like this, we might begin to develop more independence. Yes, they'll hate that it's not more defined and prescriptive. But as we do more and more like this...places where we can't really fail or there isn't one single path to follow, we can develop a culture that embraces this kind of learning. How many PD experiences have you attended where this open-ended, long term learning is the target or objective? I can tell you I haven't been to many.
Great question Bill. I'll let you know how my 6 week experiment goes.
