What are …..
My current feelings and reactions to my experience in this course:
At the moment I feel sort of isolated. I appear to be the only one posting anything. Is this a learning community? Who am I supposed to be connecting with? Perhaps I’m missing something? The readings and video’s are engaging me and I am thinking around these. Some of these issues are not new to me such as the notion that education is built on a production line mentality. I would like to respond to this but I don’t want to cloud the atmosphere.
What I am learning and what have been the most powerful learning experiences for me:
I have always had a deep respect for Bloom but I lingered on the old taxonomy. Recently I took a concerted look at the new taxonomy and was blown away. Why didn’t I do this earlier?
The knowledge dimension
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The cognitive process dimension
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Remember
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Understand
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Apply
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Analyse
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Evaluate
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Create
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Factual
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Conceptual
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Procedural
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Meta-cognitive
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Another thing I have learned is how the normal distribution curve applies applies to the human construct. This helps me understand why I need to differentiate my teaching and learning.
What I feel my students are learning:
I spoke to my students about metacognition today. We talked about why it’s important to articulate and think about their own thinking and learning. I did this because hopefully it will lead to self awareness and contribute to a sense of maturity and empathy. Being empathetic helps collaboration and leadership skills and makes for better learners. My desire is to keep this conversation going with students for the next couple of years.
A significant event for me and how I felt and reacted:
Last year we tried to establish a digital learning relationship with a Chinese school. It not only didn’t work but I felt we didn’t get off first base. It turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined even though the research we read up on predicted the exact same outcome. We are still getting overtures from similar schools but I am now very wary. It took a lot of time and effort for very little result.
Issues or questions: (include professional learning needs, problems, concerns, frustrations)
Frustrations … Hmm that’s a good one. I’ll save this when I get to know you all a bit better.
Hi Phil, I understand totally your feelings of isolation - initially in these courses there can sometimes be a dislocation of the group before participants start to realise the benefit of communicating and sharing online and really contributing to building a vibrant, rich PLN. This doesn't come naturally to everyone and so we need to gently coax others to do this - in your mentor group hopefully this will start to happen this week! (We might even do this metacognitively too :)
ReplyDeleteHi Phil. Rest assured the other members in your group are finding their way into the course and will be beginning to share and respond this week. With your confidence and willingness to share I can see that you will be a valued colleague to each member of the group. Keep up your enthusiasm.
ReplyDeleteIt all comes down to assessment and reporting, mainly reporting.
DeleteLike most schools we are driven by the VCE agenda. In order to adequately prepare students for the rigors of VCE and the ultimate goal of a wealthy study score we prepare students early. Reports to parents emphasise the importance of the end result and not the journey. Our timetable organisation supports this entirely and the idea that subjects should coordinate practice rarely gets considered. Early in the VELS journey we decided that ICT would be a distinct subject for years 7&8 and not a general capability mashed into other subjects. We hoped that by doing this students would cope better with a digital environment. As part of the mix we were given the general capability of Personal Learning. This is where the understandings of metacognition comes in. Getting students to think reflectively takes time and they have to have lots of immediate feedback, not six weeks later. This can put a strain on teachers and is difficult to implement. On the whole they like traditional, time proven methods and blogging with students is not generally one of them.
I look forward to the continuing student discussion on metacognition and I'm wondering if your students feel they have much opportunity to develop their metacognitive thinking in classrooms generally? Will they be able to suggest ways that they can leverage digital tools to articulate their learning and meaning making?
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DeleteI totally understand your frustrations from your attempted relationship with a Chinese School. I have a continuing role developing these relationships within a network of schools and it can certainly be a challenging experience, with huge investments of time and resources for little gain at times. I'm interested to learn more of your experiences, how the relationship was built and the digital platform/s you chose to engage with.
ReplyDeleteTime is a major issue. I'm feeling more than ever the need to prioritise and choose my battles carefully. I am really excited by the possibilities of Asian engagement but matching different educational paradigms is tricky. Throw an Asian language into the mix and effective communications become quite confusing.
DeleteHey Phil, Rob is so experienced at global projects with students. Check out the work of IEARN (Rob is the Aussie contact for them) but I also know Rob is closely involved with a number of cross-national student led projects. His expertise will be invaluable.
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