Learning Networks
Reflection is best carried out when part of a supportive network. You can draw on the support of colleagues by asking them to observe and give feedback. You can also draw on student feedback. Reflection should trigger discussion and co-operation.
Drawing on support from colleagues will allow you to cement understanding and get involved with others’ ideas and best practice.
Cambridge International Education Teaching and Learning Team
What is it?
Shared planning is where you draw on support from colleagues to plan lessons together. You draw on each other’s best practice to help create innovative and improved lessons.
What happens?
Shared planning can take many forms:
• Planning a lesson with another colleague together from start to finish.
• Using a lesson a colleague has produced and adapting it to suit your style and class.
• Planning a lesson and asking another colleague to review it.
The shared-planning process should encourage talking and co-operation. You should draw on support from colleagues to help develop practice and share ideas.
Table of contents
About reflective practice
Personal Reflections
Feedback from others
Learning in networks
Learning Networks
Participation Research Cluster, Institute of Development Studies
A group of peers who meet on a regular basis to learn and reflect together can be a powerful supporting element of individual reflective practice. The group, which decides together how to use and organize its time, may discuss work-related issues, share learning journal excerpts or try out a form of collective reflective practice.
Co-operative Inquiry is a reflective practice method for groups which was initially developed by John Heron to support the reflective practice of participatory researchers. Heron, a pioneer in the development of participatory methods in the social sciences, describes the theory and practice of the method in his 1996 book, Co-operative Inquiry: research into the human condition. It involves a group working through a structured, four-stage cycle of action and reflection, through which group members move towards developing new ways of acting.
Personal Learning Networks
We cannot stop the desire to know. The desire to know is balanced with our desire to communicate, to share, to connect, and our desire to make sense, to understand—to know the meaning.
George Siemens, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, December 12, 2004- www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htmWe used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, of course, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything. Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker… if you know how.
Communities of Practice
Being open to collaboration is a key to building a personal learning network (PLN).
We are essentially social beings. We live in societies, of course; but more fundamentally perhaps, it is our participation in social communities and cultural practices that provides the very materials out of which we construct who we are, give meaning to what we do, and understand what we know.
Etienne Wenger, Communities of practice: where learning happens, Benchmark Magazine, Fall Issue 1991 - www.ewenger.com/pub/index.htmYour own network of collaborators might be made up of dozens or even hundreds of people with different interests and areas of expertise. You probably engage with them through a variety of modalities: face-to-face conversations, texts, or over a multitude of social media outlets. Consider all of them as members of your personal learning network.
(This video comes from the Extend Collaborator module.)