| « Changes in the last ten years | Chris Sessums - on teacher education, learning technologies and social media » |
Link: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12
Chris Sessums on the future of teacher professional development: reconnecting people & practice (Elluminate presentation available). The sound quality is not brilliant - but not impossible. It means you have to listen hard - not such a bad thing.
Chris's blog is at: http://elgg.net/csessums/weblog/
He started by focussing on the school as a community for practice. Schools must be more than a place for instruction or knowledge sharing. It must be a place where community members can find support, explore, play and negotiate their practice - all the while remaining congruent (brilliant term that) with the institution's policies and procedures.
Teacher professional development should not be additional - it should be part of what we do as a teacher.
There is scant research about how new media is being used to support teacher professional development. Chris suggested that we need to "move beyond the blog" to get our experiences written up.
Chris outlined some of the ways that new media, ie. blogs, wikis, RSS feeds etc, support teacher professional development. He focussed quite a bit on the skills that it develops, such as writing, synthesizing, problem solving, negotiation, team building, leadership, judgement, discernment, responsibility. All of which are critical parts of what it means to be a learner (or citizen) in the 21st Century.
How do we get educators to participate in the new media environments? One at a time - bottom up, or top down mandate?
Chris proposes that one of the main influencing factors will be allowing teachers to take more control. Teacher development and curriculum development are closely intertwined. If teachers are merely implementers of curriculum guidelines then professional development is unlikely be very relevant to them.
Individual teachers can make changes. It requires them to be first comfortable and confident with the technology. Once they are comfortable and confident users they will become creative users.
Chris sees the new media technologies as a way of bridging the communities of practice with the academic teacher education communities.
Who will lead the development of these communities? Should it be the teacher education institutions? Should we just leave it to happen organically? Should it be the policy makers?
Successful (organised) CoP's survive as long as someone is there to manage it (or, perhaps, more to act as the editor/filter/pivot around which the community will work)
I think that's the role that the institutions should play.
1 comment
Hi Mark - didn’t see you there!
I suspect CoPs are organised organically/bottom-up at the moment because individuals have identified a need for them and have decided they can’t wait for their organisations to get it sorted. Now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, there is no way of getting it back in!
If organisations now decide to get involved and try to impose some top-down controls, I think they’ll encounter fierce resistance from those who have become accustomed to doing things their own way.
I suspect the only avenue open to them is to wake up and smell the coffee, to recognise what has been happening without their intervention, to work with the existing participants to set down some community-owned guidelines, and to provide facilitation and support for what has become a fact of life.
Perhaps late adopters will then feel freed to dip a toe in this scary water.
