Supporting Future Orientated Teaching and Learning

Changing the Script: Re-thinking Learner’s and Teacher’s Roles My experience was with my year 3/4 class during reading time. They were all close to reading at their expected curriculum level, however they were not always engaged and their comprehension (literal and inference) was not improving. We had been on a trip to a local farm and the children had been fascinated by all the animals and how animals “worked” on a farm. I decided to design my reading programme around this interest. This fits in well with the concept of teacher’s needing children to ‘generate’ knowledge rather than the teacher’s merely ‘transmitting’ knowledge (Bolstad et al, 2012). I was feeling very optimistic at the start of the unit as the children were very keen and it also meant they could work with peers of their choice rather than in their usual ability groups. The programme required some thought during set up. Rather than focusing on the reading, I wanted the main focus to be on the gathering and synthesizing of information about their topic. I set up initial workshops on identifying what they would need to research, how they could collect this information and record it, and what to do with the information they curated. I spent quite a bit of time with the children initially working on where they could get their information from. We discussed the pros and cons of websites and ‘googling’ and from here set up key words to search for both in books and online. The children enjoyed putting the ‘skim and scan’ skills they had learned the term before into good use. The students became very focused at reading time. Although I was working with the children as a whole class each day, we also did focused workshops on topics where need was high. This meant I was still working with all the children as I did not want this to become a ‘hands off independent’ activity. I felt this greatly improved my teaching practice in the area of assessing their needs, working out which groups had similar needs and then planning workshops around these. It also meant I improved my pedagogy in working with mixed ability groups. The children needed support in recognizing their strengths and using these to the benefit of the group. The links with my chosen theme revolve around sharing power with the learners (Bolsted et al, 2012). The children brainstormed all types of farm and working animals and from there chose their animal of interest. This helped to decide their groups and some were very good at recognizing when they felt their group mate was not always a good choice, and made adjustments to this. I was concerned that their interest would be limited by their own personal experiences (Bolsted et al, 2012), however this actually made them more determined to fill their own knowledge gaps. I have found that children’s knowledge and skills in ICT can be very shallow. While they can play games and do simple activities, there tends to be a lack of depth in research – especially in the area of relevance, reliability and integrity of the information they discover (Delafosse, 2011). By designing some of my workshops around these principals, the children became more discerning in their collection of information and began to question what they though may be unreliable or not relevant. As stated in the presentation created by Delafosse (2011), they began to validate their information and to collaborate and communicate between groups to help each other. Rather than being about facts and content, the programme became about building skills. In conclusion, I have used this concept again when planning my reading programme. The more the children experience the programme, the more adept they become at building their skills. This in turn meant our workshops became more focused and built on the skills the children had used the first time. Implications for future use are ensuring the children have equitable use to devices for research, and as the facilitator I need to be very aware of pre-planning some of the resources they will use. I found the children were sometimes distracted by more visual websites that had a lot of videos. I will need to do some work on teaching the children that videos have useful information in them too if we know where and how to look for it. Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306). Delafosse, S (2011). Teaching in the 21st Century. Video retrieved from Mindlab website: https://app.themindlab.com/media/68050/view