Teachers and change

How is teaching changing in the 21st Century?

Ontario LBS Practitioner Quote

In traditional methods the instructor lectures, assigns work and assesses learners. In today's world, this has changed. Technology offers more information than a instructor can have. The instructor's role is to lead students to access that information. The instructor is a facilitator that presents learners with options and gets feedback about how those options are working. The instructor is a learning expert and tech support - like tech support who specializes in learning - a guide on the side.

- Adult Educator, Toronto, 2016

From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able 

(18 minute Ted Talk by Michael Wesch)

Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. Yet these developments are not without disruption and peril. Familiar long-standing institutions, organizations and traditions disappear or transform beyond recognition. And while new media bring with them new possibilities for openness, transparency, engagement and participation, they also bring new possibilities for surveillance, manipulation, distraction and control. Critical thinking, the old mainstay of higher education, is no longer enough to prepare our youth for this world. We must create learning environments that inspire a way of being-in-the-world in which they can harness and leverage this new media environment as well as recognize and actively examine, question and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world.

Are You Innovating or Simply Changing? 6 Essential Considerations

Design thinking people say innovation is only used for things that we have never seen in the world before – so it is all change really. The questions are helpful I think.

1. Student Ownership & Student Autonomy

   • To what extent would you allow students to control their own learning? What would that look like in your learning space?

   • To what extent would you allow students to ask and answer their own questions?

2. Teacher as Facilitator

   • To what extent would you be willing to allow students to be the center of learning in your classroom? To what extent would you be willing to be a guide, rather than a director, of student learning?

3. Collaboration

   • To what extent would you be willing to allow students to work together to create, research, and answer questions?

4. Real-World Learning

   • To what extent would you be willing to connect learning across disciplines and subject matter?

   • To what extent would you be willing to connect students to learners, experts, and organizations outside of your school?

5. Assessment

   • To what extent would you be willing to change assessments to better reflect personal learning and growth over time?

Why Good Classes Fail 

by Michael Wesch 

This is a quick little essay about why a teacher can employ all the “right methods” (pick your buzzword: student-centered, learning-centric, participatory, collaborative, problem-based, etc.) and embrace all the most rich, compelling, and engaging technologies, and still fail. ...

So rather than focusing on emulating particular techniques and methods, we should be doing everything we can to embrace, inspire, and use our own empathy in order to better understand and relate to our students. It is only from this space that we can effectively generate and use the appropriate techniques and methods for any particular task. In this way, there is no “recipe,” “secret sauce,” or “silver bullet” for teaching effectively that can be used by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Instead, I’m proposing a “generative” method, one in which we “generate” the appropriate method that takes into consideration the broadest range of factors that we can manage to accommodate.

This is in no way a call to abandon method. Quite the contrary, it is a call to learn about as many methods and techniques as possible, and as many technologies as possible – not so you can load up your course with as many “good” ones as possible, but so that you can call forth those that might be good given the way your particular encounter with your students and work evolves.