At last year’s 21C Roundtable, there were many conversations about how to spread “best practice” around the province.
Over the past year, speakers such as Pak Tee Ng and Simon Breakspear have emphasized that learning is contextual, and a “best practice” in one setting might not translate well into another setting, but educators can adapt and adopt the ideas of others to suit their environment.
One great way to spread “best practice” is to have educators share their work and their thinking openly on their blog.
While I read Jamie’s blog faithfully, I was particularly drawn to her post entitled “Team Teaching“. It’s a powerful post, in that Jamie reflects on her own state of mind during this busy time, her conversations with her colleague, Andrew Bieronski, and his visit to her classroom. But the real gem is the documentation of the student voice after the visit, and Jamie’s reflections on how team teaching might change the learning opportunities for her students.
As leaders, how can we enable, encourage and nurture this type of open practice (team teaching, deep conversations about learning, and blogging/sharing openly)?
Take a moment to comment on one of Jamie’s rich posts, and consider how her work can inform the work of other educators in 2016.
One of my favourite lines is, “We can use a lot of terms to describe math, but ‘new’ is not one of them …”. Brian provides some valuable logic about the meaning of “back to basics”.
Parents exist in a world bombarded by media reports of declining math scores. Our work as education leaders is in helping parents understand more clearly the importance of the processes we are using to ensure students fully grasp numeracy, rather than memorizing algorithms (as many of the parents were forced to do in school).
David writes about his thinking around the read-write web and how our ability (and, perhaps, our obligation) to contribute, changes the way we need to interact with our students.
How many of us have taken the time to think about this?
Where do we share our ideas around this shift?
His post reminded me of an example we used in our “30 Days of Getting Connected” Series. Ira David Socol writes about how change is not new, but in the Web 1.0 days, change was happening at a different level, and was not as apparent to us. Web 2.0, the read-write web, allows the ability to create and contribute, which results in change that impacts all of us.
For an excellent overview of Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0 -> Web 3.0 and its impact on learning and teaching, refer to the work of Dr. Jackie Gerstein here.
So how does the read-write web change our dynamics as a teacher?