Check the Chair

Why trust is important
Trust can be a very confusing and somewhat elusive concept, despite it seeming simple and being widely understood in general terms. It is a feeling, something intangible and yet easily altered. For trust to occur there needs to be emotion, feeling and thought involved. It can be simplified to a sense of comfort, ease or relaxation within specific context such as with a person or object which requires interaction. It would be entirely unnecessary to trust in something or someone who will have no impact on your life or the situation.
Trust is not an isolated thing, it is connected to and relies on experience and pre-established knowledge. When sitting down in a chair, most people would not give a second thought to whether the chair would hold them, even if it is the first time in that particular chair. This is simply due to the vast number of experiences with chairs in general and knowing they are most likely able to support their weight. This is a trust in an object and is important in order to reduce the amount of time wasted in a day, as a lot of time would be spent checking a lot of chairs if every person had to check every chair they sat in before they did so.
This idea translates equally well into person to person interactions within a school or classroom. Levels of trust are earned by the teacher and learners alike and each day new levels are established, build up or broken down by simple actions and how they can be interpreted or misinterpreted. When a level of trust is established, it removes the “checking time” taken and allows for content to flow more freely. When a learner trusts that a teacher will deliver only factually correct information that has been well researched, much less time is spent by the learner evaluating the correctness of the information and more time can be dedicated to the understanding of the information at hand. Trust is a relationship with what is not known, the learner accepts that the teacher has done the research but unless the learner does the research themselves and finds out for themselves, they will not know. In this instance trust in a classroom holds great importance as a lack of trust between a teacher and learner could drastically reduce the potency of a lesson as he learner grapples internally on how much time to dedicate to deciphering and understanding the content verses identifying whether the teacher is correct or not.
As a teacher, you would naturally want the best for each of your learners, if not for their own growth then at least for the results which you will have to display come end of year. Trust for a teacher is very similar to trust as a learner in that the teacher cannot force a learner to undertake in any task, nor can the teacher do daily check-ups on every learner with regard to homework etc. the teacher is simply to trust that each learner wants to achieve their best and will do the work to make that happen. However this is not always the case and when a learner proves that they cannot be trusted to work on their own or ae not able to cope on their own, then the teacher is required to take note of this and follow up on the learner. In doing so the teacher puts steps in place for the leaner to achieve and also builds trust with the learner who may in time reciprocate it.

M.

Societal Disability

You are more than your circumstances. The only disability that you have is the disability...or rather the inability to work at adapting to where you are and what you have been blessed with.

Yes there are people who will have more than you. Yes there are people who will be better than you. But nobody.... not even your mother who carried you inside her, nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Life may throw superficial knowledge at you and expect that you accept it as truth, someone may know how you like your coffee or your favourite flower, but none of them will have lived in your shoes or experienced what you experienced.

It is for this reason that you cannot allow anyone to make predictions on or direct YOUR life by what they feel or think. They are not you. I don't mean for you to tell your doctor that they are wrong and that your smoking habit is making you healthier as absurd as that example may be. But what i mean is that you alone determine where you end up in life, your attitude, your level of effort which you choose to put in.

My father always told me never to blame anyone else for my own mistakes or shortcomings, he'd say "if you were pulled over by a police man for speeding, you cannot moan about the person who was speeding in front of you and how they got away. You are the one who was caught and the act that someone else may have gotten away with what it is you were caught for does not detract from the fact that you had done something wrong."

The responsibility to succeed is yours and you cannot be trapped within your own mind or hold back your potential based on what the world tells you, you can and cannot achieve. Prove them wrong what could you possibly have to lose in proving someone wrong. 

As far as ability goes, no one can say they are disabled, merely too lazy to adapt to a world which was not designed for them, why limit yourself to what is already established when you can create so much more.

M.

Interactive Science: The White-Board way

The sciences tend to be filled with a large number of figures and tables as well as drawings and graphs. These graphics can often lose their effectiveness and value when printed in black and white or at a highly reduced size as most schools tend to do.

With the new wave of technology cane the recent implementation of the interactive white board, a technological spin off of the classic chalk board. This option combines the two most used media in schooling, the black board and the computer. It makes use of a projector which projects the images from a computer onto a board which is also linked to the same computer allowing changed to be made on the board which show on the computer as well. This very useful tool allows for good quality imaging to be showed as well as “interacted” with. A useful way of engaging with this technology for one would be the option of zooming in on large images, giving a bigger picture which is often not seen by many students. In doing this one can show a number of processes which interlink in a way learners can identify well with, reducing the compartmentalisation of certain subject matter. The reduction in compartmentalizing could significantly improve the understanding of these processes. A second and by no means less significant use for one of these boards is allowing for students to come up and make their own notes on the board which can be shown to the entire class and aid in everyone’s grasping of concepts.

There are a great many avenues to progress down regarding the use of these boards for a science teacher. Many uses for these boards are yet to be fully uncovered as it may find new use in the hands of innovative and hardworking teachers who do their best to make learning fun and effective.

Meaningfully Involved?

"Meaningful.....Involvement....."

What does it mean to be involved? I mean like really involved in something. Can you ever be involved in everything as a student? As a teacher, can you really involve all of your students? All 30-40 students in each of your 2-3 classes which you are required to see at least 3 times a week for 3 months at a time!!!

To be frank, not once had it never dawned on me that there would be different types of involvement. I mean to me either you were involved because you chose to be, or you weren’t involved, again because you chose to be. This narrow minded way of thinking is something I am very happy to be growing out of more and more every day.

What is meaningful inclusivity though, I think to me it’s more of how the person whom it concerns feels rather than a set list of rules or guidelines. The emphasis for something like this is placed more on the word “meaningful”. Who is it meaningful to, what is the definition of meaningful and so forth. This essentially boils down to the learner and this learner’s experience. While as a teacher it is near impossible to try and make a classroom environment which will cater for every student in it, it is still possible to allow for MEANINGFUL involvement. Meaning that though a student may only be employed to answer a single question, said question should be of such a nature that the learner would feel involved and not isolated, no matter their answer or interpretation of it. Educators should include many different methods of promoting meaningful involvement, such as making use of the learner’s opinions and views on a subject. Being a facilitator rather than a teacher of knowledge is what it is all about. The long and short of it all is that a student needs to feel as though they matter, whether it be in a class or in an extramural activity, it is the educators responsibility to make that learner feel like their voice matters. This applies to all students, from the loud mouth child who has to be told to keep quiet, to the shy student who has to be begged for an answer.

Inclusivity, although difficult to achieve on many levels is most probably the best education tool one could ever make use of as it draws on the learners own personal wealth of knowledge and resources and allows for that to be shared with everyone and not just a select few. Because all students have something to contribute, no matter how small the contribution may be, this exercise allows for everyone involved to benefit one way or another.

Not just Thinking but Learning Outside the Box

It pains me to say that in my journey through the education system, having been put through multiple curricula and making the many transitions from pre-primary school all the way to tertiary studies, that I have not once questioned what I was doing or why I was doing it. I merely followed the rules and did what I was told because it was what was expected of you at schools and in society in general. With the knowledge that I am so grateful to have obtained as of late, I know I would make better decisions regarding learning if I could go back and make those choices again.

The education system has become less of a means of raising intelligent thinkers and more of a method to box up people into individual categories which not everyone will fit into. It is undeniable that not many fit into the boxes that education has set up and if you do, then you are part of the lucky few who has not had to give up their identity in order to move forward in life. As far as the system is concerned, we all face these issues and must grapple with them in silence. The art student who failed math and was held back because of it but makes the most amazingly creative art pieces one could imagine, or the math genius who failed biology because the concepts were just too difficult to grasp for his mind. All held back and had their potential stifled because they did not fit into the predetermined box. Why would a person willingly choose to be graded and judged on something they have no interest in, or do not perform well in, and why would a system choose to judge a person based on their weaknesses alone.

This is the flaw in the education system today, a new means of education needs to be put in place, one which is flexible and allows learners to do what they are passionate about and not restrict their learning to textbooks or the extent of an educator’s knowledge. To understand the world you are in you need to be involved in it and not isolated from it.

The independent project is a student orientated way of learning, it is dynamic, it is flexible, it caters to the individual and allows from that individual to express who they are and do what they are interested in. this system creates an openness whereby students are not afraid of criticism because they understand that it will help them do better, and who would not want to do better in something they enjoy.

The knowledge is out there it just needs to be found. Another great aspect of this independent project is that students come to find that they do enjoy certain subject which they previously did not, and this is because they find the parts they enjoy and focus on that rather than be forced to do an entire subject and only enjoy one small part of it.

The sheer vastness of possible learning areas and subject matter is so immense that learners can find themselves wanting to know more rather than simply doing what is required of them in order to get through. This is the beauty of self-mediated learning, allowing the students to grow in their curiosity and have a desire to learn more. Essentially the students are learning how to learn rather being told what they needed to know. This dramatically influences the potential for learning and opens so many doors to a real world education. It has also placed the learning in the hands of the learners themselves which ultimately allows for the obstacles of “teacher-learner” roles to be overcome so that the learner may benefit even further than the teachers knowledge would allow.

The Undeniable Power at your finger tips!

Right off the bat I can without a doubt agree with the well placed quiz of Vicki Davis. The Quiz, while never explicitly referring to it, promotes the idea that social media is just a new form of communication in an ever updating world. Whenever something new begins there will without a doubt be new dangers and new unexpected consequences which could never have been foreseen. This has been true for many modern communication forms which are taken for granted in today’s technological lifestyle, such as the invention of the telephone, opening doorways for communication with possible strangers by simply dialing an incorrect number which can be done very easily. 

The scary part of this form of communication known as social media is its sheer power over so many aspects of life, be it the director of a company researching your interactions in order to determine who you are before you even get to an interview, or even a current employer keeping track of his/her employees to ensure they are not misrepresenting the company. Social Media’s power is only growing by the day and with the amount of information available to anyone willing to pay the possibilities seem endless for things to go wrong.

Social media does not however have to the enemy. The misconception that it will disrupt the learning process is too wide spread and needs to be redefined. Social media could prove to be an invaluable tool for educating the next generation in a way which is best suited for them. The fact that social media is so vast and we have no idea how far it can extend makes it a perfect platform for learning, where teachers can come up with new and innovative ways to use it in a way which benefits the learners as well as follows the required curriculum.

As a new age educator many of us need to understand that social media is not just a name …

We need to unpack what it really is, a social form of media, we need to understand what this means and that we should not allow ourselves to be constrained by what we are told, but to learn things for ourselves such as how to work with it and not treat it as a distraction. 

Nicholas Provenzano was able to actively include multiple forms of social media in his teaching process not only as a means of keeping the students up to date with their work but also giving them the opportunity to learn more outside the classroom and expand their learning beyond textbooks and exam papers. He also mentions how he has used but a fraction of the social media tools available, if this was possible and successful for one educator, why then would it not be possible for others. 

All it takes is a bit of effort on behalf of the educator, in understanding how to involve the social media correctly and not allowing it to become a distraction.

The Teaching of Learning

Recently I find myself confronted more and more by the notion that digital learning or pedagogy is in no way the same as or on the same level as mere online teaching, online teaching may contain forms of digital learning but the fact that it is online does not necessarily make it a digital learning process.

Not every teacher can be a pedagogue and in the same breath, not every pedagogue is found in a classroom. At the very center of pedagogy you find the key concept of leadership, this leadership can take many forms, be it group leaders in school projects or a speaker at a conference. This leadership transcends the mundane, “teacher is the leader and students follow”, attitude that can be found in most learning institutes. Pedagogy does not favor one learning style over another but instead attempts to do whatever it takes to bring out the best possible result for the individual and not the most correct answer according to the textbook.

A pedagogue should have the initiative and out of the box ideas on how to tailor online technologies to his or her liking. Just as one would tailor their physical environment to their own personal pleasing, so too must one redesign the learning environment. This being done in the physical and online sense.

One need not wait to be in an authoritative position to become a pedagogue, all you require in the ability to inquire and adapt, and to base your practice on the real world which is relevant to the “students” you encounter.

Taking all of this into account, Pedagogy is not something a person can truly learn. It is purely a state of mindfulness in terms of the ever adapting and shifting world in which we live. No person will ever master the art of pedagogy simply because the world advances so quickly. However to become a good pedagogical educator one must be immersed in the world of pedagogical thinking and practice, interacting with the information and not just memorizing the content. Our technological age should not serve to replicate our educational history but to progress it, make it relevant and fun.

A digital pedagogue should not let their technologies dictate to them where and how they can be used, but instead they should make their tools work for then and allow creativity to produce better learning. We need to be more critical about the educational tools that we make use of and how they can be used more effectively.

Along with being bold and moving forward, we must be careful not to become too specialized and not to focus on a single aspect as this could lead to a much narrower view on any problem which could present itself. This fits well with a remark from Cathy Davidson which I am quite fond on, she speaks along the lines of being “perpetual learners”, setting the groundwork for lifelong learning in all aspects of life.

The best way to learn is to encounter something new for the first time, and how better to encounter new things then to forget the old things which hold you back.