My friend and fellow educator Chris Craft, left me with these challenging questions. I love the way he provokes my thoughts and ideas and so has given me direction to my documented learning journey on pedagogy as he so rightly referred to it.
“I’d love to hear what this is all based on. You have some great thoughts here, but what’s the basis?”
It started with a conversation with Simon during a break at ULearn07. We were walking downtown in Auckland discussing the reasons why we do the “technology thing” in our classrooms and whether we were past the “doing it for fun” factor and was it really making a difference with our students. I replied that I didn’t actually know why I was doing IT, it just felt right to be doing IT. That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that I really needed to find out why this way of learning and teaching felt so right and it felt necessary, almost urgent for me to redefine my own personal pedagogy to ensure that I wasn’t just bombarding my students with the “bells, and whizzy stuff” available on the “net” simply because it felt right or because I liked it. I’m also feeling an increasing need to be able to justify why “that’s what we do ’round here”. At first I wasn’t sure if that was a parental expectation need or a school administration need or just my own personal verification need. Actually, it’s a combination of all of those, bought about by my own perception of a year that hasn’t been as “successful” as I would have liked.
Is there research that backs up what you want to do and why?
I’m looking at this very carefully, hence the slowness in the posts regarding my learning journey on pedagogy. At the moment, there is an awful lot being said about Pedagogy. How important it is, why sound pedagogy is necessary for this way of teaching, with these kinds of web2.0 tools available. The value of Cooperative Learning is well documented, as is Authentic Tasks within Rich and Relevant Contexts and The Sharing of Learning Intentions and Success Criteria (Assessment For Learning) by Shirley Clarke.
If you implement all of this, will it work? How do you determine whether it’s effective or not?
Jeff Utecht’s presentation on Sustained Blogging in the classroom raised a very important point, not just in relation to blogging, but for the use of web2.0 tools and online educational practises. We need new assessment tools, we need new ways of assessing. We need to change the way we do things. I need to think very seriously about how to measure it’s effectiveness. There are targets to meet in our school and there are curriculum areas to be covered in our school but I need to look at these as contexts if I am to successfully implement the ways I want to work in the classroom and the ways I would like students to work, learn, teach, explore, grow and reflect. I also need to be prepared for the possibility that not all of my original list of 10 things will be successful in the classroom at the same time.
Thanks Chris. Your questions gave me some much needed focus and encouraged me to look at some research that I quite possibly would have missed. I will blog more about that research in a later post.
