Kicking off LearnFest 2

Having answered the call for open-minded free thinkers able to reimagine schools we are interested to hear from you in the blog.

Throughout the LearnFest we will post articles and ask provocative questions to inspire and guide our journey

To start this process this we offer you something recent from Yong Zhao. http://zhaolearning.com/2020/04/16/tofu-is-not-cheese-reimagine-education-without-schools-during-covid19-2/

Our opening provocation:

After reading Zhao, and listening to Conrad Hughes during the LAHC Octoberfest, which ideas resonate most strongly with you when reimagining schools and not going back to the same education?

Be brave and make an opening comment and others will develop the conversation by commenting. If you have other inspirational resources start a new post and initiate a new thread.

11 thoughts on “Kicking off LearnFest 2”

  1. “… Global and digital competencies have long been advocated as important capabilities for the 21st Century (…) But schools have rarely seriously devoted much effort to these two competencies, despite the wide acceptance of their importance in theory…”

    I agree with this statement 100%, ad lately I find myself trying to figure out WHY. WHYYYY?!

    To convince people to change, they need to be sure that it is worth the effort… why is it, then, that people aren’t convinced?

    Has it got to do with the fact that it is hard to show proof of the acquisition of these competencies? Are we lacking evidence? Or is it something else?

    Reply
    • A good question Sol. I wonder if the main reason is that cultural practices have an enormous inertia. Schools everywhere invested in computers but nothing changed. In our public systems the computers often remained in their boxes. I think it is a mixture of not knowing how a new technology can transform things, and the pervasive feeling that what I have always done worked for me and that these new toys do not seem to ‘improve’ things, so why bother…

      Reply
      • Agree…
        I wish we would stop thinking of “what has always worked for us teachers” and start focusing on what might work best for learners today…

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        • I agree; I think is the fear of letting things go and working out of your comfort zone. But not only for teachers but also with parents, change can be scary. We have an opportunity to prove them wrong.

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  2. Teaching in a new environment online has brought to light, in a very tangible way, the construct that is education. Once we view it as a construct, which has been developed over time based on the socio- economic needs of societies we can then evaluate its efficacy in terms of dealing with the needs of today´s youth. It calls to mind a graduate school teacher of mine who basically described our current form of modern education as a slow process of deadening individual thought and stultifying the intense creativity we all initially possess. I don´t fully agree with his condemnation but there is some truth in his idea which I see in Zhao´s reflection, suggesting that the basic framework of education as we know it , “standardized organizational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into subjects” does not always promote real learning.
    Our new teaching platform has no walls, is geographically limitless and has the potential to do away with the divisions Zhao cites. As educators, we are finding ourselves probing the landscape for meaningful experiences for our students in order to reach them, new methods we perhaps have never been so desperate to find before. This situation has propelled us to re-imagine and re-design our teaching and learning space. I have found virtual class to be a powerful tool to unite new communities through service learning, invigorate the accessing of global content, heighten the engagement of students with course content and real life applications and even re-think priorities in terms of the utility of assessments and meaningful takeaways from activities. Strange that a new landscape has appeared considering we are in quarantine and supposedly in confinement. It is a telling illustration of the space we now occupy as educators; seemingly limited but perhaps if approached in the correct way, limitless.

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  3. I like the idea of a ‘grammar’ of schooling, so pervasive and invisible that it seems natural to us… We all have frustrations with what we call traditional learning, as opposed to inquiry-based or project-based learning, and those of us who have started down the latter road have had our work cut out for us in terms of matching those objectives to the designing of appropriate timetables, not to mention appropriate forms of assessment of student work, etc. I look forward to discussing ways in which we might reconsider how schooling (or education) is organised!

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  4. I think there were several interesting ideas in the article. For example, I think that how we divide learning into lessons, units, years is problematic. Each individual learner’s experience and progress is different, and there needs to be a great deal of awareness of this.

    Similarly, we tend to treat learning as subject specific. Often this is appropriate, as a students progression is always underpinned by knowledge. However, there are times when different subjects may be closely aligned and could better cooperate.

    Reply
    • John, I love this and use it all the times with kids, and the right adults. I generally link it with David Perkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysbpbEmh1g (there is a 2 minute version) and there could not be a greater contrast in approach to the same message. With adults we can also go to Dewey (anything) and then we have all the bases loaded.

      Reply
  5. Kevin Bartlett just suggested that he does the same at CGC workshops. Perkins is so good and is in the background of all the changes we have been introducing in our schools. Lifeworthy learning sums it all up, but there is also the balancing act of national curriculum requirements, etc.

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  6. This year has brought us many important and deep reflections to our lives both personally and professionally. Focusing on the latter, it is interesting to see exploration on how we can reimagine our schools without schools themselves. Regarding Zhao’s view on this topic, “Instead of speaking schooling, let’s speak education. What the public wants, and the society needs is not schooling; it is education” which is tightly connected to this witty rap ‘Don’t stay in school’, many queries come to my mind about how we could reinvent the system. Nevertheless, I understand it is not an easy thing, otherwise we (the system) could have done it long before. We have received training to make our lessons livelier and inquiry-based, however, we cannot forget the national curricula, in which we devote much time. So how could we make this happen? Focusing more on developing those personal and academic skills and concepts that are worth for life, especially now that we have brought the schools to our homes… I think this is something that still needs to be inquired and reflected on.

    Reply

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