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Figure it Out - Owning Learning

Over break I kicked the tires on Udemy for the first time. Being that Big Data and Personalized Learning are my current obsessions I choose Educational Big Data and Learning Analytics as my first class. Above is a video from that class - I was surprised I had not seen it yet. Warning - it is put out by Ericsson - but they aren't selling broadband plans with it ( at least not directly). There's plenty of good sound bites in here, but Sugata Mitra's line toward the end jumped (19:07) off the screen at me - "the teacher needs to step back and say, 'today's topic is this, now open your notebook and figure it out.'"

An exciting (at least for me) and simple statement on his vision of education. I have hear and read a lot about holding students and adults responsible for their own learning. Frankly I think that there's a lot of focus on student learning and not near enough on teacher learning. This statement certainly asks the learner to own it. Potentially scary stuff, but I think its becoming more main stream. I remember my first half-day workshop 5 years ago where I did a quick presentation and provided resources for teachers to use. I had so many blank stares as if to say "that's it?"

This afternoon I was working on planning a professional learning event in one of our schools and we are doing a great deal of - "here's the information, here are people to help, ask when you need something." We're starting out with a 20-30 minute presentation on the digital direction of the district, with supporting commentary from leadership who have been there, done that in another district and teachers who are doing great things despite our lack of current resources. Then it's off to "figure it out" with plenty of available resources, in any one of four areas you'd like to try out. If you don't like what you're learning, move on. The principal mentioned the only thing that isn't an option is not taking one of the options! It's very refreshing to be working with leaders that believe in this type of professional learning.

I hope by providing useful resources and the professional respect they deserve on in-service days, that will start to get them to wonder about how they might structure class time for their students. I've said it before, the more I read about where learning could/should go, the more I think John Dewey and Maria Montessori had the right ideas a LONG time ago.

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