Powerful Learning starts at the Basis

Being a teacher brings with it the privilege of long summer holidays. That quite some teachers are not idle during that time, becomes clear when you read the great number of posts on the online 'Future Classroom Scenarios' course I am taking currently, by European Schoolnet Academy. I started this course while on holiday in Italy, and trying to connect to the EUN site proved very difficult. Wifi is sporadically available here, and very unreliable. I repeatedly have been kicked out of the site, only to find that my half-written posts have disappeared in some cloudless space. It reminds me of our school situation, and serves as a practical reminder that our utopic classrooms where freely roaming students interact, create and research online, are quite some broadbands away. Until the day that connectivity is as basic a provision as sidewalks, teachers have to improvise in order to be as effective as possible. Start with the basics, such as 'write offline, post online'. In the mean time, we need to focus on the pedagogy and didactics involved with, for instance, BYOD, while the technicians (read; wired teachers) work on practical solutions. I teach a bilingual English/German class at an international primary school and am lucky to have 2 classrooms and a fantastic co-teacher, enabling us to work in smaller groups whenever there is a need. Keywords in our school are collaboration and student-led learning. To organise this better, we are looking to replace our awkward and huge square tables that were devised for 'chalk and talk' teaching, with round tables that could fit 4-6 children. According to the self-organised learning environments (SOLE) theory by professor Sugata Mitra,  four kids are ideal for group work. But again, in order to achieve those noble, higher-end goals, we have to start with the basics: where to find round tables that are suitable for the classroom? Recently I saw the perfect set-up at a highway McDonalds, but we decided against that big M in the centre - so if anyone has any ideas?

Dumbing Us Down

'Dumbing us Down' about institunionalised education was written by John Taylor Gatto in 1993 . Rather dated, even though it was updated ten years later, yet what he wites is still so relevant. It is saddening that school has the ability to destroy children’s natural curiosity, teaches children how to sit still and listen to the teacher. Yes, frontal learning is as alive as ever in most classrooms. Yet, handing all responsibility to ‘the family’ would not work for a lot of kids and parents – Gatto has this ideal picture where children learn best in an informal setting, but kids need people on the sideline keeping a close eye on the learning process, whether these are parents or school teachers. The more I think about these things, the more I see contemporary learning as a process where experienced learners support starting learners… informal learning doesn’t mean that there is no more teaching involved - because teaching happens whenever learning takes place - it may just not always be intentional. Perhaps we should speak of intentional teaching versus random learning. At the moment I have five kids in my kitchen trying to bake a cake by themselves – no three, my ten-year old and his friend just left for the supermarket because they realised we didn’t have enough eggs in the house. They wanted to do the baking, I only told them to do it by themselves (but I do sit at the table, keeping an ‘ear’ on things…) Random learning with an intentional edge. In the end self-propelled learning all comes down to motivation and fun and there is no reason why teachers should have a different perspective...