As I sit on a sofa in the open learning area at Concordia College in Adelaide, around me are educators ‘playing’ – working on projects, developing ideas for their students and learning new tech tricks. Great learning is ‘hard fun’.
The premise of professional learning underpinning Making It Mobile is to provide a context for self-directed, passionate engagement and deep-thinking, in a way that doesn’t look like the usual teacher PD.
‘Embrace the Paradigm’ was the title of Stephen Harris’ opening keynote – that’s not ‘would you like to’ or ‘perhaps you should’ but you must. The world has changed dramatically and the paradigms are shifting, Kodak, Borders and Blockbuster didn’t keep up and didn’t reinvent and now they are obsolete. Education will always exist, but what if it becomes culturally obsolete? There is practically nothing worse than tick-a-box education.
Working with the team Making it Mobile team – Steve Collis, Lou Deibe, Mark Burgess and Stephen Harris – we set up the space and asked the question…
‘How do we create the professional learning environment that looks and feels like The Zone* at NBCS?”
(*The opening learning space at NBCS in Grades 5 and 6 for 180 students and 6 teachers who call the space their learning ‘home’)
The professional learning space needed to provide:
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flexibility
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choice
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personalised learning
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collaboration
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cave, watering hole and campfire spaces
Making it Mobile messes with educators’ heads. It has content to absorb, along with teacher-talk from experts and thought leaders, but there is also freedom, choice and trust. PD that looks and feels like the way students need to learn is an essential element of the experience. These two days provide the luxury of time to listen, process, absorb and think.
Just when do educators have the luxury to learn and then think?
Next stop Newcastle and then Auckland in November 2013. And in 2014?
Who knows where we might end up.
@anneknock
Anne this was a great experience and wonderful to be amongst a group of leaners prepared to take risks! Whilst I have experience with using Learning Matrixes and currently access most of our curriculum via PBL, it was great to see other examples. The potential of student driven learning via the LMS is my next challenge.
It is always lovely to hear Stephen Harris speak and see the examples provided by Steve Collis on the great things happening at NBCS, but the greatest impact for me was having the opportunity to “chat” with yourself and Mark Burgess and talk about the process of change and developing a genuine student centred learning culture. It is not often you have “access” in an informal nature to people with the real experiences.
Thanks again to yourself and your team, I can’t wait to continue our journey and look forward to further opportunities to share our experiences.