Tomorrow our school has a professional learning day for all teachers from Year 1-6. The goals are to further embed our learning principles and to encourage some exploration of tech tools at the same time. The day will start with a workshop revisiting the learning principles. We will view pictures and videos of great learning to see evidence of our beliefs in action and discuss what works and what doesn’t in creating learning experiences to support these beliefs.
For Session2, teachers have chosen a presentation tool to learn and practice in small groups facilitated by peers who have volunteered to share their own expertise to support their colleagues. The tools offered allow for a range of abilities and interests such as Prezi, Glogster, Voicethread, Photo Story and Moviemaker.
Session 3 brings the first two together. In small groups teachers will further unpack one of the learning principles using the Project Zero thinking routine ‘Compass Points‘. Their task will be to apply the morning’s learning by creating a presentation to illustrate their assigned learning principle using their newly learned tool. Sharing some of the presentations during the last session should be a fun way to reinforce all the learning and the rest will go on our new teacher blog.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
If it’s successful, the day itself should be a perfect illustration of several of our learning principles in action. The focus is on the forth one and here’s how it looks in practice:
Principle #4: Learning includes acquisition of skills and knowledge, constructing meaning and transfer to different contexts.
So..
- There is explicit teaching of trans-disciplinary skills.
- Learners sit in groups so as to construct meaning by talking with others.
- Learning experiences provide opportunities for the application of learned skills and knowledge.
- Students create expressions of their learning for an authentic audience through presentations, blogging, video and drama.
- Assessment is through meaningful tasks that require transfer of learning to other contexts.
- Learners might be given a real life problem to explore so that they are motivated to learn the skills required to solve it.
- Learners have opportunities for higher order thinking and creating meaning, through authentic learning tasks and situations, even if the basic skills haven’t been perfectly mastered.
Posts in this series:
Principle #2: Learning is active and social and is enhanced by collaboration and interaction.
What Ed Said 
This sounds like a stimulating and interesting day. We have a public holiday tomorrow – maybe I should have flown over 🙂 Seriously though Edna, this is by far the best type of learning and puts the teachers in a similar position to their students. It also gives them some accountability for their learning instead of, what you see so often, ,just sitting there and having information poured in but not being able to do anything with it later.
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We’re trying hard to move away from the ‘sit there and listen’ model. Also giving teachers much more choice.. eg choosing what external PD they want to participate in, as I posted here https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/how-do-teachers-learn/
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Great series of posts, and like the video too 🙂
As a member of the Learner-Generated Contexts Group obviously I like Principle 4!
You might find our presentation Craft of Teaching 2011 useful;
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Edna, this post is fantastic. I can only wish I would have this PD day tomorrow, instead of 2 accreditation committee meetings, one session on maths curriculum and another on the PYPX to our mentors!
I teacher grade 5 in a PYP school, so much of what you say is familiar to me; we continually strive to achieve much of what is included in the Learning Principles (LPs). I believe that this kind of direction and focus will be increasingly beneficial to learners in the long run, not only but also because Problem Based Learning is gaining such momentum at university level — and rightly so. What I like about your PD day plan is that you are exploring web 2.0 tools collaboratively and using them as vehicle for constructing and sharing your common understanding of LPs in theory and practice. Can you expand on the new teacher blog you mention just above the video (which I for some reason can’t get to play).
Thanks!
Ana Tetley
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Thanks, Ana. It’s just a blog we recently set up for teachers to see and share examples of great practice in our school. We plan to post photos of learning in action and things to think about! The PD went really well and I’ll post some of the presentations that people created over the next week or so.
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