Learners as Teachers

We both love this You tube clip.

Kid President's Pep Talk to Teachers and Students!

We have been thinking alot about our curriculum especially in terms of opening our MLE next year. We need to ensure that our Learners are Teachers and that we are future focussed and their learning is shared.
I was doing some research the other day from the Manaiakalani Cluster and in particular Pt England. Their curriculum is based on 3 principles. "Learn, Create, Share"
With this in mind we wanted to ensure that our Inquiry Model had an element of doing something with their learning, making a difference. So we re-developed the Inquiry Model for our School.

Tuakau Inquiry Model

We particularly value the stage "Keep and Discard'  With the wealth of information available to the 21st Century Learners this stage is really important. In previous Action Learning models I have used with children. They often just find the first source and we really need to spend time looking at what is relevant information, and is their a better source and comparing and contrasting information.
Also the stage "Use your learning to make a difference" is important to our school. With our learners as teachers they  have a responsibility to make a difference to the world we live in.

21st Century Learners

We have been doing lots of reading about the Skills and Dispositions of 21st century learners and we have been comparing these with the skills that our parents want for their students. We surveyed parents recently on what they want for their Year 6 pupils. (See below)

Click on this link for more readings on skills and dispositions

Vanessa really liked this graphic

The Skills and Attributes of Today's Learner. It includes some very important ones like "collaboration across networks" We have been having big discussions about this point. Its related to Derek Wenmoth's key driver of change 'Connectedness" where learning happens across networks, social media and personal learning communities. This graphic has skills like "grit' and 'hope and optimism' and 'adaptability'
Very interesting skills and something to think about in terms of how to we ensure our curriculum gives opportunities for our learners to develop these skills.

One of the readings that interested me was ...

Especially the Digital skills. We need to discuss with the leadership team and Whanau about these digital skills and providing opportunities for students to use these skills in their learning. Things like tweeting. We need to discuss as a leadership team about using social media such as twitter in the classroom. Implications of this are about cyber safety and I would like to work with students to create proposals to present to the leadership team on how we could use Social media in the classroom. I would like to survey a group of senior students to test their abilities in those digital skills as my assumption is they will be able to do most of them, and then use this group of students to help plan ways to use these skills in their learning. 

Tina 

The 3 drivers of change..

Tina and I have been discussing the 3 drivers of change - what are they and what do they mean?

Student Agency - The ability to make a choice and act on those choices to make a difference in their lives. What does this mean for learners? Learners are active in the learning process, contributing to learning, creating learning and collaborating in learning.

Connectedness - (Connected Minds) Being connected and engaged with information. Promoting collaboration through the use of technology. Through the use of networked technology, learning can happen outside the learner, within personal learning communities and social networks. Ready and instantaneous access to expert information.

Ubiquity - Learning is no longer bound to a particular place in time - learning can happen anywhere, any time and does not stop at the school gate. 

The future... and how do we prepare our students?

This clip from Andreas Scleicher got me thinking.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--7Dd2sAwPA

I find it exciting to be thinking about, and challenging, my own mindset around the purpose and intent of education in the 21st century. However, the idea that we are charged with preparing our students for a largely unknown future is daunting. How do we bridge the mismatch that is occurring between the skills, dispositions and competencies that we are developing  in our students and what is required of them in the "real world" (a world that we can only make predictions about!). This poses huge questions for, and demands upon schools to become educated, forward thinking, future-focused, while still retaining the unique culture and identity of learners at their school