Reflecting on my Practice
During the last 24 weeks I have been studying towards a Certificate in Digital and Collaborative Learning at MindLab at Unitec. During this time I have learnt many things about me as a learner.
I have learned that my learning was enhanced by collaboration with colleagues.
Before the course, I tended to work by myself and not consulting with others on my practice. However, meeting and collaborating with fellow teachers was great. When we needed help, had questions or just want to rant about an assignment. I have learnt that learning is best done as a collaborative process. Collaboration with other educational practitioners and students, allowed me to critique and analyse the reasons why I was doing certain things in the classroom. Those reasons were challenged with evidence from both peers and students through feed back and feed forward. Because of this, the reasons needed to be critically evaluated, modified and/or changed.
For example, the need to teach topics the students may already know. From diagnostic feedback from students, this created a change in practice, where I began to teach to individual students based on their strengths and weaknesses rather than whole class teaching.
This was time consuming initially, but once processes were developed that allowed individual students in my classes to be tracked by incorporating applications like kahoot, education perfect and socrative the results for the students have begun to improve as more time was spent on developing on what they knew rather than teaching stuff they already did know. I have learnt that as a learner, collaboration is a very effective way to learn!
Twitter has allowed amazing personal learning development of my learning as an educator. The biweekly #edchatnz and #scichatnz has allowed me to make connections that would have not previously been possible. I have been able to see that some of my ideas in the classroom are not as crazy as I thought and has allowed me a sounding board to some of those ideas allowing me to refine and develop them.
This has meant as a learner, I have obtained quick access to what the rest of the educational change agents are thinking about and hence this changed my practice as I have become more of a leader than a follower in my school when in comes to learning about developing pedagogy in the classroom due to the added confidence I have as a learner and not just 'a lone 'nut'
As an example, discussions with @MissDtheTeacher or Danielle Myburgh at HPSS gave me the confidence as a learner to not be constrained by year levels when it comes to content. Hence, I have been teaching some year 12 physics to my year 8 classes, who are actually getting it! However, I do worry in such twitter groups that they can act as echo chambers for like minded people, so the incorporation of the 'devils advocate' in recent months has been exciting and as I have gained confidence in the communities I have also liked to challenge some ideas that the majority have held.
I learned that as a learner, a range of hands on, practical activities effectively reinforces my learning.
I learned that as a learner, a range of hands on, practical activities effectively reinforces my learning.
During the course, I applied my theoretical learning in a variety of ways.
Hands on practical activities during the course made the theory more real and engaged me further within the content. Times have changed. As a learner I need to be able to think flexibly and creatively, solve problems, and make decisions within complex, ill-structured environments.
As an example, the activities on coding with scratch showed my assumptions on learning with regard to code were out-dated, forcing me to change my assumptions that the skill was only applicable to digital technology. The skills and knowledge acquired by these activities were then applied back to the theory to evaluate and reinforce effective learning strategies as discussed by Grabinger (1995).
The effect on my practice is that I have moved from a limited range of learning techniques to including more varied practical problem based activities. This has allowed me to identify new methods to learn to develop and apply to my practice which will improve my pedagogical content knowledge.
As an example, the activities on coding with scratch showed my assumptions on learning with regard to code were out-dated, forcing me to change my assumptions that the skill was only applicable to digital technology. The skills and knowledge acquired by these activities were then applied back to the theory to evaluate and reinforce effective learning strategies as discussed by Grabinger (1995).
The effect on my practice is that I have moved from a limited range of learning techniques to including more varied practical problem based activities. This has allowed me to identify new methods to learn to develop and apply to my practice which will improve my pedagogical content knowledge.
I have learnt that as a learner I should focus on the learning not the performance
I have learnt that as learner a focus on the process of learning improved my performance, whereas a focus on the product of the learning reduced my performance. This meant, as a learner, I needed to be autonomous, active and collaborative to enhance my performance. In terms of performance, I defined this as not being related to grades but did I actually learn something new which I could apply?
As an example, during the process of preparing assignments for the course I learnt about other ways to present work not only in the essay format I was familiar with. This required me to become adaptive, creative and flexible as a learner and focus on the process of preparing the assignment (critiquing references, challenging ideas, using evidence) not only the content required.
In terms of my practice,changing from the focus of the learning being the product to the process of the learning was necessary for me to select and use appropriate strategies and to be an effective learner. Knowledge is increasing at a very fast rate and the ability to learn quickly is increasingly important, the focus on learning about learning stands in its own right as a key goal ((Watkins, 2001) for me as a learner.
As an example, during the process of preparing assignments for the course I learnt about other ways to present work not only in the essay format I was familiar with. This required me to become adaptive, creative and flexible as a learner and focus on the process of preparing the assignment (critiquing references, challenging ideas, using evidence) not only the content required.
In terms of my practice,changing from the focus of the learning being the product to the process of the learning was necessary for me to select and use appropriate strategies and to be an effective learner. Knowledge is increasing at a very fast rate and the ability to learn quickly is increasingly important, the focus on learning about learning stands in its own right as a key goal ((Watkins, 2001) for me as a learner.
References:
Grabinger, R. S., & Dunlap, J. C. (1995). Rich environments for active learning: A definition. Research in learning Technology, 3(2).
Watkins, C. (2001). Learning about learning enhances performance.
Watkins, C. (2001). Learning about learning enhances performance.
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