Reply by Hélène Fournier on September 8, 2008 at 12:49pm

Key Success PIllar: Focus on the Student

What values do you feel this pillar represents?
How would you define this pillar?

I wonder if we would want to talk about student-centred learning as a key success pillar rather than "focus on the student". Student-centred learning brings deeper understandings to curriculum, instructional design, pedogogical approaches, course content, and issues of interactivity and collaboration. We might argue that we have always been focused on the student - sometimes without consideration of student learning needs.

Reply by Hélène Fournier on September 17, 2008 at 9:12pm

I went through my notes from the workshop where we worked together to identify these pillars. It seems that the group who titled this pillar was trying to capture the following ideas that were shared by the larger group:

student centered learning; promoting active citizenship; students gaining a sense of agency-pride in self and self advocacy; student engagement; non-traditional timetables; fulfilling students' needs for peer-to-peer interaction; all students having access to communities and gateways.

The challenge, of course, is to capture all of these ideas in a defined pillar. I agree that student-centered learning brings deeper understandings to the various facets of our work in education. We need to ensure that the idea of 'student-centred learning' is not lost in these pillars. I wonder if the idea of student-centered learning is also represented in the pillar - personalized program design and assessment?

Are we losing the essence of student-centered learning in these Key Success Pillars?

Reply by Carol Bazinet on October 20, 2008 at 7:53pm

Your last question is a good one. Should the Key Success Pillars be rewritten from a student perspective?

The student doesn't care about flexible and equitable funding. They do care about flexible and equitable access.

" Policy to support seamless transitions between learning environments" may not be important to a student. Seamless transitions between learning environments are important but a policy is not to the average student.

I am not sure the student cares what type of governance is behind the scenes.

It is all about student outcomes - students who are engaged in their learning because they have been offered to courses they want at the time they want and delivered in the method best suited to the individual student.

Some of the Key Success Pillars may be Key Success Pillars for Alberta Education. Also important but not as important as what a DL strategy will mean for Alberta students.

Reply by Dr. Brian Boese on October 21, 2008 at 9:56pm

I believe the student would care about the governance behind the scenes if they only knew its relationship to DL opportunities through the provision of resources, teaching and learning strategies, and structures. While it is the adults in their respective positions that will determine the possibilities for DL, I agree, it is the student who will choose the level of engagement. If we don't provide opportunities for students to discuss possibilities, the barriers that exist, and the enabling factors (governance?), we will not be able to deepen their connection to the learning opportunities provided.

We all have to take responsibility for the roles and responsibilities that our positions in the educational context can provide . . . even our students have to take responsibility--of teaching us how to enhance their learning environments . . . through governance and administration.

Reply by Joseph Clark on September 12, 2008 at 10:42am

In looking at the changing learning environments, it comes down the the teachers ability to understand how the social aspect and the learning aspect of school is shifting, The environment the student is in while they are in the school is actually so much larger that the conventional teacher is used to dealing with.

It is in fact be more encompassing and larger than the individual school the student is in. My daughter regularly talks to friends she went to school with who are in different provinces, she has maintained a connection that is otherwise harder to do, via technology.

Conversations and learning for students now can start in person, move to a phone text chat and then to MSN and then Facebook to a note passed in the hallway in the morning and then back to in person the at lunch hour…to students this is one conversation to an adult this is 5 or more distinct and seperate events…this is something we have to understand, the concept or the core of what the student is doing is the same...the communication methods is what is changing…teaching can be the same thing, one long, intertwined, intertech learning experience that teachers guide, not ‘teach’ in the old lecture sense of the word.
This 'seamless' switching is not only a methodology it is a mindset, a comfort level and an attitude of flexibility in dealing with communication methods..and being a subject matter expert and guiding a student along the path of learning the material. You cant have the canned presentation anymore, no 'daily set of notes' instead you will have blocks of information that the student has to come to incorporate into their learning. For some students this will indeed be a lecture, for others they will read it, others will want to discuss it and so on. We are truely entering an era of the individual learning plan that is tuned to the students individual learning style.

The key is having the content..the curriculum..the data and the information ready to be switched to which ever learning environment the student is best capable of using so they can turn it into usable and personal knowledge.

Reply by Terry Anderson on October 6, 2008 at 12:18pm

I too am late to this conversation, but wanted to make comments about 2 of the 'pillars'.

5. Collaborative coordination of standardized resource development and shared access
I am not sure what standardized means in this pillar. We are entering a world of nearly infinite learning resources, most of which will not be standardized by anyone. A teachers responsibilities will shift from teaching using standardized tools and resources to developing, creating and recreating activities and resources that work in their distributed contexts. We meay need to retain standardized assessments and capstone activities, but the rout that individual students and teachers use to achieve these 'standards" will not be standardized.

7. Focused social network:
There will not be a single "focused social network" for teachers, administrators or students. Rather many social networks, some spanning large geographic boundaries, will become the norm. Beyond this, collectives of aggregated activities, ideas, opinions will also be a ever growing resources for learning. My colleague Jon Dron and I have a paper Collective, Networks and Groups in Social Software for e-learning at http://www.editlib.org/index.cfm/files/paper_26726.pdf?fuseaction=Reader.DownloadFullText&paper_id=26726 which goes further into these ideas.
Cheers
Terry Anderson

Reply by Ralph Helder on October 16, 2008 at 2:45pm

Terry

Thank you for joining the discussion.

I just read an interesting article on Web 2.0 technologies and I was intrigued by the analogy that was presented by Tony O' Driscoll where he asked readers to think of their business environments (or in our case the educational environment) as a balloon and to imagine that our respective organizations reside within that balloon in a larger encompassing chamber. "If the molecules within the balloon are not moving as fast as the molecules in the chamber, the balloon will shrink."

In other words, any organization that cannot or will not adapt within a broader encompassing environment will eventually be destined to failure. My question is this; Are we, in education, in a balloon that is shrinking as we maintain the present speed of our molecules within our domain while in the broader more expansive chamber outside of our domain the molecules of Web 2.0 (or School 2.0 ) buzz around at a much faster pace?

Ralph Helder

Reply by Steven Greene on October 17, 2008 at 7:10am

I like the question that you pose Ralph.

One of the most important things that I have learned as I focus in on 21st century learning skills using web 2.0 tools is that the students react differently. If someone were to walk into my class, they could make an argument that the students weren't really working.
So to continue with your metaphor, my students are buzzing around at a pace that mathces the outside environment (using social networks, second life and collabing on docs. and vids.), but that pace is not conducive to traditional skill building.
The students that excel in the faster domain have more difficulty reading, rather than skimming, entire texts. They do not have the patience or concentration to write a 5 page essay quietly on their own.
The dilemma I face is, should I, as educator, be teaching the traditional literacy and represetation skills, which take more patience and concentration, or should I be teaching the hyper-fast, multiple intelligence, higher-order thinking 2.0 skills?
It is obvious which side I have bought into, but I have a fear that I may be doing something wrong because of it.

Reply by Elaine Soetaert on October 20, 2008 at 3:38pm

Steven,
It is a dilemma... and I share your concern - we always want to do what's right for kids!

I am thinkin' that we can teach the "traditional skills" such as reading for deep understanding and writing for clear communication (the 5 page essay?) within the context of an authentic learning situation where the kids "get" the importance of the activity enough to put their attention to it, focus and engage with it. I certainly know the sense of "flow" that I get when I am engaged in a digital game; I also get that sense of "flow" when I am working on a major paper. We need to connect with that thing that the kids care about enough to take the time and energy required to experience "flow" as they engage in the learning experience. Perhaps they need to craft a "5 page essay" on why it's important for all kids to experience technology and active learning in their classrooms - something to present to their school council, perhaps?? Something that has real meaning for them that they can relate to. Perhaps they need to deeply research and understand the nuances in some documents around an environmental issue that ALSO requires crafting a written document that they can present to someone in power to DO something about the issue that they care about.

I believe that BOTH the fast-paced "buzzing" kinds of activities you describe and the deep understanding sets of skills are higher-order 2.0 skills (to use your terminology) and aren't (and shouldn't be) mutually exclusive... I believe we just have to find the project/issue/experience that will allow & encourage & support kids learning some of these (very important in the 21st century too!) "traditional skills".

What do you think about my POV? Am I still building buggy whips as the Model T is delivering the materials? :)

e

Reply by Steven Greene on October 23, 2008 at 4:28pm

A few things, I really like your idea about Flow, it came up at the recent emerge conference almost at the same time I was reading your message. I believe whatever tools get students to that highly commited effort where they are working meaningfully is the ultimate goal. Whatever path they take to get there that works for them is the best way, regardless of the tools used. However, the more traditional approaches achieve this goal with only a small minority of studetns, and they are rarely emotionally invovled in their high quality work (usually just chasing the grade). I don't mean this to be a blanket statement, only what I have experienced in my 12 short months of teaching.

The reason I called 2.0 skills higher order is because student created content that will reach a larger audience then my classroom automatically creates that emotional engagement, it may not lead to a meaningful flow or deep interaction with the content, but it does ensure high stakes.

My problem when I enter unit design is that I want to, and I believe I am required to, build the tradtional skills in students. The way it usually looks though is that we will have a high-stakes emotionally involved project that will take us through an entire unit. The students will be very invovled in making a presentation for the elementary students and their parents using SMART tech. stuff, especially because we will give the best one to SMART tech when completed, for example. That is the high stakes project, they love doing it, blog about it, they are excited to work with it in class, nervous for their presentation day, and they hope they get to be submitted to SMART tech. However, because it is Social 10-1 I feel like I would not be doing my job if they did not have to write a formal essay about it as well. You can imagine the groans when I assign them the essay after they have worked on the presentation.

My question to you Elaine, and other teachers, do they still have to write that formal, reflective, and more academic essay, or is the high stakes elementary presentation and competition project enough? Is it required in the curriculum? Is it my responsibilty as a humanities teacher to say, "the presentation is great and you learned the knowledge objectives, you understand the attitude objectives, you acquired new skills, but I still have to get you writin at grade level?"

Reply by Dr. Eugene G. Kowch on October 17, 2008 at 3:57pm

To me, these pillars are principles for powerful changes in the way we percieve and 'do' education. The keywords to are: "Collaborative; Flexible; Focused; Support; Improvement; Personalized and Equitable". While subject(ive) and open /. inviting to a multiplicity of interpretations, I think these pillars are really like a scaffold - creating a space for a new kind of change at all levels. What fascinating principals for moving forward toward 2013. What is a challenge to me is that these ideas have roots in the global discourse/discussions on education so taking these ideas into a specific, powerful context for learning in Alberta will be a very broad (but great) discussion indeed!