This week the major topic was “Personalized Learning; Learning Structures; Social Media; Personal Learning Networks” and we had a guest speaker, Jeff Hopkins, who spoke about his work with inquiry based learning. Jeff is the founder and co-principal of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. It’s a school structured and developed around inquiry-based learning. If you’ve seen the film Most Likely to Succeed, it reminded me a lot of the school featured in that film.
I love that people are looking for new models for learning and different ways to support education. The current structure of public education, compulsory, free upon delivery, and groupings based on birth year, doesn’t really make sense for our modern society. The structure of public school hasn’t really changed at all since it first began in Canada in the 19th century. There is a serious need to look at the overall structure of public education but it’s very cost prohibitive to be making significant changes to a model that has existed for so long.
Looking at learning models is a major part of my M.Ed project. Rather than focusing on learning models for students, I’m looking at options for teacher professional development. In their article, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) explore why minimal guidance in learning can be an ineffective model. They state “Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when students acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge” (p. 84), which supports the idea that guidance through new learning is important. As I’m moving through my M.Ed project I’m having to make decisions about how to approach the learning for the program I’m creating.
In exploring adult education models and professional development models, it’s tough to decide which model or structure would make the most sense for my project. As the goal of my project is to improve teacher digital literacy skills, I need to reduce the possibility of teachers developing misconceptions and incomplete or disorganized knowledge regarding education technology. I know I want my program to be collaborative, with some social learning involved. I want the learning to be continuous and on-going with multiple entry points. Krismanto (2023) suggests teacher professional development that is technology related should be “built actively, self-regulated, sustainable, and based on social and contextual processes according to the teacher’s problems and needs” (p. 21).
One of the things that Jeff spoke about in his presentation was really understanding what the student interests were. I think the same thing can be said about understanding the teacher’s interest in developing their digital literacy skills. Each teacher is going to arrive with a different set of skills and experiences and this needs to be considered when developing the program. There are absolutely times when there is critical information that all teachers need to understand, such as student privacy and data management.
The question is, how do I make all these happen?
References
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1
Krismanto, W. (2023). Teacher Professional Learning in The Perspective Of Educational Technology. Jurnal Teknologi Pendidikan, 11(01), 21–46. https://doi.org/10.31800/jtp.kw.v11n1.p21–46
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