Developing a Learning Community: Learning by Doing

Ako and Whakawhanaungatanga: The reciprocity of teaching and learning and how this helps to create a learning community

Whakarongo  ki te tangi a te manu ki runga i te rangi

Tui tui tuia.Tuia i runga, tuia i raro.

Tuia i roto, tuia i waho.
Tuia i te here tangata

Ka rongo te ao, ka rongo te pō.

Tihei Mauiri ora!

(Listen to the cry of the bird in the sky

Stitch, stitch, stitching.Stitching above, stitching below.

Stitching within, stitching without.
Stitching all people together

The call is heard at daytime. The call is heard at night.
Sneeze the breath of life!)

In te ao Māori, people work together. Everyone brings their skills and knowledge to contribute to the group. In the traditional tauparapara (evocation) above, a mātui (messenger bird) urges people to adopt a sense of oneness. So it is with teachers, whānau, advisers, and the local community all working to achieve the best outcomes for students – kia tuia te muka tangata (to stitch together a fabric of people).  

(Image and above text source http://www.nzkindergarten.org.nz/Senior%20Teacher%20hui/whakatauki )

Much has been said about the transformation of learning as we begin to truly absorb the opportunities and challenges of the new era of digital technology: the decentralisation of learning away from traditional classrooms, the need to focus on learning dispositions to prepare learners (and teachers) for dynamic change, the need to hold on to the valuable and make education more equitable and empowering given the huge opportunities available to us today and in days to come.

But there seems to me to be one group that is sometimes left out from this conversation: parents. They have come from an industrial age education system and are feeling the impact of the digital change more than most, caught between seeing their children navigate it with ease and their workplaces becoming landscapes they were not often trained for. Since parents are one of the biggest assets of any learning community, how might we go about opening up the conversation of 21st Century learning with them in meaningful ways to help them understand the changing landscape of education?

Next year (2017), I've been given the amazing opportunity to collaborate with the wonderful Amy @amybrt5 and set up an ILE hub of Year 2 students. One of the first thoughts we had was that we needed to take our parents with us on this journey, and share with them the Why we do what we do, a little bit of the How and get them involved in some of the What.

We wanted to immerse them in what is current in education and so designed an evening to share our teaching philosophies and methodologies, the changes in the 21C educational landscape, and most importantly, how technology can be embedded through a series of student/self directed (SD) and teacher directed (TD) episodes. We wanted them to understand that the 'teacher at the front' learning model is no longer at play for us, and why we feel that this is a change for the better. Here is what we designed (the size of the bubble represents the level of time spent in each activity).

A pathway of experiences

Connecting

What are powerful learning experiences made of? To begin with, Amy and I shared a memorable moment from school. Next, we asked our parents to try to remember a memorable learning experience from their early schooling and share it with someone else. Then we collected their three key words of what had made the experience memorable using a Google Form which we turned into a word cloud using Tagul:

Collaboration, Communication and Creativity:

From then on, the learning journey we designed became an evening of hands-on immersion for our parents of the tools and ways in which we will design learning for our tamariki. The technology was ubiquitous but purposeful: Kahoot quizzes, short information videos for self-directed learning, QR codes as access, Google forms to collect information to help us forward plan, Seesaw to share reflections, and Makerspace as a way to share personalised learning. These are all tools we will use with our students and we wanted parents to feel enabled to participate and understand what it's all about. Yet the true messages were about how these modalities create connection, collaboration and communication and how these are some of the cornerstones of active learning.

 Self-directed: Accessing short clips using QR codes

Collaborative self-directed learning

Using flexible learning spaces

Connecting, collaborating and communicating

Creating and having fun!

So we've started the conversation, and their reflections on the evening were varied and positive. We know that this is the beginning and there is room to grow. We welcome our parents on board because we want to create a 21C learning community where all the stakeholders are enabled to participate and contribute, and because we trust our collective intelligence to help us find the answers to how best go about creating it for our learners. Together.

PS- These are the clips we used for the session, which we shortened for ease of use and relevance.