Week 18 - Future-Oriented Learning and Teaching

Week 18 - Future-Oriented Learning and Teaching

Activity 2: Reflecting on changes in my future oriented teaching practice

Theme 1: Personalising learning

Albert Einstein couldn’t have made it any clearer.  One size does not fit all and yet today, our education system is still failing our ever growing diverse learners.

One of the first things they teach us at Teachers’ College is that a student is the centre of the learning.  Person-Centered Approach "Self" or "Self-Concept" - the perceptions and beliefs about oneself (Rogers, 1959).  Building relationships and getting to know your learners take time, but is valuable information to know.  A change I made in my classroom was using learner maps. Getting my learners to tell me how they liked to learn and what helped them learn.  Knowing this information I was able to plan lessons to meet their needs.

I was excited about getting to know how my learners liked to learn, because I felt the information I would gather would give me light bulb moments on how I could support them more.  So yes, I was fired up in using this process, but as old habits do or stuck mindsets, I only allowed my learners to tell me how they like to learn one way. After I realised I had stopped half my learners from expressing themselves freely, I started again.

At first the students thought it was an odd question:  

“What do you mean you want me to tell you how I like to learn?”

The students reaction is almost the same as their parents/caregivers when you are telling them at parent-teacher conferences how they can help their child at home:

“I’ll get their big brother and sister to help them with that.”

For me personally, it was hard to hear parents feel they didn’t have the ability to help their child/ren at home, even though they did.  Changing mindsets are hard, but not impossible.

Has this experience improved my teaching practice?  Well, I can definitely say, it has made me work harder to build relationships with both parents/caregivers and students, so conversations about school and home life become the norm.

Theorist Lev Vygotskys’ (1978) Zone of Proximal Development explains the area between what the learner can do independently, and what they can do with help from others.  This as well as other theorist work by John Dewey (1904) Progressive Education and Jean Piaget (1936) Cognitive Development focused on how student learn which is better known as student-centered learning.  The three theorist had the student at the center of their theory, from a hands on approach to a peer collaboration or adult support. This goes back to getting to know your learner and how they learn best.

With everything, nothing is ever perfect, there is always room for improvement and reflection.  Some students were not sure how they learn best, so they could not answer the question truthfully but copied their friends answer so they had a response.  For students who are not sure of how they like to learn, I would give them different opportunities to learn using a range of materials, in several environments.  Allowing the children the chance to think about their learning in the actual environment supported their responses.

One thing I did get from implementing this change was know matter how much work I put into planning it out and thinking it was going to work, there was always something I would miss or I didn’t think of.  I don’t mean this in a negative way, but more of a reminder to myself that when things don’t work out the way I planned, I need to then look at the situation from a different angle.

References:

Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. London: Constable.

Rogers, C. (1986). Carl Rogers on the Development of the Person-Centered Approach. Person-Centered Review, 1(3), 257-259.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  Retrieved from http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development/

Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Piaget, J. (1959). The language and thought of the child (Vol. 5). Psychology Press. Chicago

Piaget, J. (1976). Piaget’s theory. In Piaget and his school (pp. 11-23). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Retrieved from https://www.learning-theories.com/piagets-stage-theory-of-cognitive-development.html