Learning & Teaching
The Learning Space’s Vision for the Future of Learning and Teaching….
Learning to Learn (L2L)- Key distinguishing features:
Students
• Psychologically prepared – ‘ready’
• Process is explicit – the ‘how’
• Good communicators – talk encouraged
• Cognitive tools & emotional keys for success (emotionally literate)
• Empowered – able to take responsibility
• Resilience – mistakes not failure!
Adults
• Relationships – integrity & strong values
• Process explicit, emphasised & transferred
• Flexibility and variety
• Mediating, facilitating & modeling (much more possible when children talk about their thinking)
• Adults see themselves as life long/wide learners
• Out growing traditional classroom
Schools
• Culture – L2L shared language & tools
• Shared responsibility at all levels
• High moral and morale & supported risk taking
• Links & connections across initiatives
• Effective leadership with a shared passionate vision that’s genuinely ‘ours’.
• Cycle of innovation - small steps (innovate & contextualised into our situation) leading to radical change (timetable, curriculum, learning community)
Basics of learning
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Old
• Literacy
• Numeracy
• Obedience
• Punctuality
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New
• Multi literacy
• Creativity
• Communication
• IT
• Teamwork
• Lifelong (wide) learning
• Adaptation & change
• Environmental responsibility
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Tomorrow’s learners
• Wrap around convergent technology
• Choosing what and how to learn
• Responsible
• Information migrants
• Appointments for access to learning services
• Learning in a range of places from home, drop in schools and multi sensory centres
• From non-nuclear families
• Brain supplements for learning
• Technology aided fitness
• Choosing time to learn as and when it suits with no learning year
• Shaping their own learning
• Mixing learning, work and pleasure
Slow ways of ‘knowing’
• Given time, the unconscious mind
– Patterns and links
– Degrees of subtlety
– Make sense of things too complex to analyse
• Tolerant of the faint, fleeting, marginal, ambiguous
• Willing to think on details that don’t fit or make sense
• Relaxed, spontaneous, leisurely & playful
• Willing to explore without knowing what for
• See ignorance & confusion as path to understanding
• Value ideas ‘out of the blue’
Getting creative
Adopt your mistakes
• Value them – don’t associate with failure
• Share them to identify misconceptions and to reformulate internally
• They are more powerful learning opportunities for us all
Share skills
• Learn from working with other people and areas of specialism
• Make links in your own learning
• See things from a wider perspective
• To celebrate your strengths and to develop more
Get talking
• It is stimulating, exciting and a great way to think
• Say things out loud to test ideas, realise meaning and express yourself
• Work alongside people from the wider community to broaden ideas and experiences and increase richness and vibrancy (E.g. artists, storytellers, actors, sculptors and dancers)
Let students teach
• Facilitate students to teach each other and adults for more profound learning experiences
• Learn how to work with students – let them talk about their learning. It is the only way to begin to know what is going on in their heads!
• Understand, accept, support and celebrate their learning
The Challenge Framework
Challenge Principles
Values driven
Emotionally intelligent
Safe, healthy & happy
Citizens & workers who contribute to society
Flexible, adaptable to change
Multi-skilled
Interdependent
Self directed & motivated lifelong learners
(Every child matters agenda!)
Challenge Aim
Transfer from teacher to learner:
• Ownership
• Responsibility
• Drive, motivation & confidence
• Learning process
• Assessment (for learning)
Challenge Design Framework
• Scenario / story (Big picture, teams & spaces)
• Challenge (Situation, roles for all, outcome & deadline)
• Input (Plasmas, network, internet, experts, resources)
• Success Criteria (See, hear, feel grids- see picture)- explored, shared, agreed, made tangible and concrete using VAK, revisited by self, peers and adults
• Action Planning (Who, what & by when)
• Team doing by deadline (include monitoring)
• Presentation to audience (Rehearsal time)
• Feedback (Revisit success criteria & evaluate)
• Celebrate success (Newsletters, certificates, assembly)
Challenges need to be cross-curricular and relevant to the learner. They also need to incorporate skills and attitudes, in addition to content:
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Skills
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Attitudes
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· Problem Solvers
· Decision Makers
· Think things through
· Generate & link ideas
· Organisers
· Communicators
· Make things happen
· Take people with you
· Inspire others
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· Always learning
· Self motivated
· Want to do the best
· Want to do the right thing
· Value others
· Are interested & amazed
· Make a contribution
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