Shaping Learning in the 21st Century - Teachers Leading Innovation: Key shifts and enabling factors (2)

The ACE presentation was well attended and I have received some very affirming comments from particiapnts. The powerpoint show is available as a box.net share file located in the right hand column.

Below are a couple of comments:

"I was at your ACE presentation at our school on the 23/6. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt very energised after it in terms of our own projects. ...We are fortunate in being a laptop school that has really good technology access and innovation. However, I think that your presentation provided that overarching paradigm that is sometimes lost in our everyday practice."

"Thank you for presenting such a thought provoking and complex issue for your seminar last night. I am not sure how you fitted it all in, in seventy five minutes but you did. It should be the start of a great conversation at many schools. I would love to have had the opportunity to work with you in a school setting."

"The first part of Andrew's talk with audience participation stimulated thinking. I think it is also time for strategy implementation."

"Congratulations on an excellent thought provoking lecture."

Shaping Learning in the 21st Century - Teachers Leading Innovation: Key shifts and enabling factors

I'll be presenting a workshop on Monday 23rd June for the Southern Harbour Chapter of the Australian College of Educators (ACE). Details can be found in the newsletter.

Whilst it is an opportunity to share some of the learnings from my Churchill Fellowship, it's also an opportunity to reflect on where my thinking is at and the challenges faced by education, schools and schooling.

I'm particularly interested in how others understand the challenges to learning in the 21st Century and particularly teachers leading innovation.

The death of education ... the dawn of learning

This is a wonderful and inspiring clip (sponsored by the Pearson Foundation for CosN) that is doing the rounds at the moment.
It opens up thinking about what is and what could be and should be in education, schooling and learning.

At the 2008 ICSEI conference, Susan Rona, a Hungarian-born Canadian who has worked on a project to achieve basic educational opportunities for the Roma (gypsy) children in four countries in Central Europe, put forward the proposition that education is important, but also put the question as to whether school is important.

Stephen Heppell was stronger in the clip in saying, "It's the death of education but the dawn of learning; and that makes me very happy!"

Imagine if schools were the "nearly now spaces".
Imagine if we did view schools as community sytems rather than a classroom systems.
Imagine if teachers had opportunities for global connecting.

Imaginings to develop innovation through networked learning

I'm excited because I have been able to organise David Jackson to come and spend a day working with colleagues.
In 2006 as part of my Churchill Fellowship I spent a day with David Jackson at the Networked Learning Group of the NCSL. The conversations and learnings from this day were significant.
It was from this day that I was introduced the the Three Fields of Knowledge.

From Networked Learning Communities: Learning about learning networks.
http://networkedlearning.ncsl.org.uk/knowledge-base/programme-leaflets/learning-about-learning-networks-international-issue.pdf

David, in my conversation with him in 2006, described the model of learning as follows:

In a learning activity there are three fields of knowledge and they should be represented in roughly equal proportions.

One of those fields is the knowledge that practitioners bring to the table. And that is where we should start, just as we do in the classroom with children. We build on prior knowledge. So we should honour, respect and build from the knowledge of practitioners.

Practitioners’ knowledge has two dimensions to it. One is their practitioner knowledge. The other is their context knowledge. The second one is really important because no one else has it. The knowledge of how to do it in our school is really a very important thing to bring to the table.

The second field of knowledge is the publicly available knowledge which we define as theory, research and the best practice elsewhere.

The third field of knowledge, which is where the whole construct of networking comes, is the new knowledge that we create together through collaborative, inquiry-based practices by building from the first two fields.

- David Jackson, Director, Network Learning Group, National College of School Leadership (meeting: 09/06/2006)

There is much that interests me about Networked Learning Communities in supporting innovation. The concepts of networking, learning, and communities when brought together can be quite powerful - as well as complex.

New concepts and learnings emerge from Networked Learning, Learning Networks, Networked Communities, Learning Communities, Networked Learning Communities.

I had this notion in my head that even if we had this holy grail of knowledge in our hand, if we had the knowledge that could transform the system, the system wouldn’t change because it isn’t orientated towards learning.

- David Jackson (meeting: 09/06/2006)

There are several things that I would like to follow up with David. These include:

• Orientating systems towards learning
• Working with the Three fields of knowledge to build system capacity
• Designing and learning from networked learning communities
• Identifying some of the pitfalls, danger spots and road blocks in working with large scale networks
• Working with next practice thinking around professional learning, system learning and school improvement
• Imagining a system where amazing practice was made visible and readily transferred to other sites
• Imagining a system where the learning is transferred laterally across the system
• Reskilling/reorientating the profession to networked learning and innovation.

At the heart is a focus on learning!

Probably the most powerful thing in our work is our model of learning. One of the points we make to people is that everyone is talking about learning, but what are the constructs in our heads when we use the word. Unless we all share a construct and understand what the disciplines are of the learning work we’re talking about then we are actually not going to go forward.

- David Jackson (meeting 09/06/2006)

One thing we know is that ‘top down’, outside-in change approaches are not working well in the medium to long term. School reforms have not succeeded in closing the gap in educational achievement between the most and least advantaged. Part of the solution lies within the profession, working within specific contexts. How are the insights and imaginations of practitioners and users to be employed in powerful and generative ways to develop innovation?