There were two articles in the New Zealand Herald yesterday that caught my eye. One was about student disengageent and what can be done about it and the other was about e-elearning and how e-learning can be used to improve student engagement and learning.  It was all very depressing really and has sparked off more questions than answers.  These articles instantly reminded me of Stuart Middleton’s statistics from his 2010 Learning at School keynote.

Out of this I am again reminded of the following quote I heard but can not recall the source: “Of all the governmental,  commercial and industrial sectors, education is the only sector that commissions its own independent research and consistently fails to act upon the overwhelming evidence for change.”

The internet has been and continues to be, a massively disruptive technology.  Look at what is happening to industry sectors such as news, music, books etc.  They are all undergoing massive changes and education sails on mostly oblivious or conciously ignoring the societal changes happening around it as a result.  It is as if we are saying; if the education system of my father’s generation worked for me, it is damn well going to work for you! (despite the fact I was bored too!)

We know that there is massive underachievement in New Zealand schools.  Students do not suddenly disengage in year 10, therefore every teacher in the system from pre-school to Year 13 is part of a process that produces this disengagement.  Yet, collectively, we do nothing about it. Do we believe that it does not happen in our school, but the school down the road?  Both of the Herald articles point to e-learning as a tool to re-engage and make authentic learning opportunities for the students.  Yet, overwhelmingly,  teachers still resist changing their pedagogy.  Why?

Is complacency at the heart of this?  Subliminally are we as a profession saying to the students in our charge; I choose to be here, but you have no choice, so get used to it?  I hope not, but we do a pretty poor job at marketing learning to our students.  Maybe we should put a little more PR spin into our lesson planning, making the efforts we are asking out students to make a lot more explicit.  Sounds like relevance to me.  Are we also not walking the talk we espouse in class?  We want our students to be innovative, to be life long learners, to collaborate, to be resilient.  Do teachers really demonstrate that in their classroom pedagogies?  When it comes to integrating e-learning teachers tend to be resistant to change, insular, and traditional.  Why?

We keep seeing articles about disengagement, we see class disruptions increasing.  I think that the two are related.  Students do not not want to learn.  With the wealth of information at their fingertips via the Internet they have started to cut out the middleman, us.  In an agrarian export economy such as New Zealand’s we need to ensure that our next export boom is the innovation potential contained in the brains of our students.  It is up to teachers to start to be the change, not to wait for permission from the torpor at the top. We need to re-engage our students in their learning by making it engaging relevant and authentic to them.  E-learning is the key to that innovation.

This is yet another clarion call for change.  But is anyone listening?  Who amongst you has the appetite for change, to be challenged, to re-engage all of our students for the benefit of us all?  Ultimately the failure of our students is a societal failure, one that will make us all the poorer morally and financially.

Recently in several schools where I am working, staff have raised the issue of appraisal.  As they integrate e-learning into their programmes, they are finding that they and their students are publishing more and more work to the virtual 5th wall in their classrooms.  The publishing of this work online is having an obvious effect on the amount of work being ‘displayed’ on the physical walls of the classroom.

Students like to know that there is a genuine audience for their work and prefer the virtual wall space to share their work, to the physical.  The 5th wall also creates a virtual window for parents into the class of their child which allows them to be part of the learning process of their child and their child’s class.  This clearly assists in the strengthening of the pupil, school, parent triangle.

There is however a dichotomy in all of this.  When it comes to appraisal time many teachers are complaining that they are getting feedback from their SMT that their physical environment is not as ’stimulating’ as it once was, that there is less student work on the wall.  To combat this they have taken to printing off the online 5th wall content and have started to display this on the walls of their classroom.  This is clearly a time consuming exercise for the teachers and a gross waste of paper and printing resources.  It is interesting to note that in these same schools the SMT are complaining at the increased printing costs that e-learning seems to bring, without recognising  their role in this increased cost.

It is clear that whilst teachers in individual classrooms are making the pedagogical shift to e-learning and embracing the change enthusiastically and also reporting that student motivation and attainment is increasing.  However what is also clear is that over the same period the SMT of those same schools have not made the same pedagogical shift.  If e-learning is to be a sustainable initiative in schools it is time for school leadership to shift their thinking and pedagogies too.  Work published on the internet by students has to be acknowledged with equal importance to the work in their exercise books and of that on the wall of their classrooms.  The focus of the stimulating learning environment, like so much else has moved from the physical to the virtual world and appraisal procedures need to keep up and give equal credence to the online world that teachers and students are adding content too.

I have been working with staff from Westmere School since late 2009. Melissa is a Year 1/2 teacher and is in charge of e-learning integration at Westmere. In this video she shares how e-learning has impacted upon her pedagogy, classroom management and student attainment this year.

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As we come to the end of the academic year, teachers who I have been working with all through 2010 at Wakaaranga School are reflecting on their personal growth with e-learning this year and the effect that this pedagogical shift has had upon student learning outcomes. In this interview with Megan, she also sets herself some interesting targets for 2011. I will be working with the staff at Wakaaranga again next year and as a result will be tracking this continued progress.

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http://www.sonyclassics.com/layercake/index_flash.html

As I work in schools with a wider and wider range of teachers, my ideas for the layer cake are starting to crystalise.  I was working in a school recently and the teacher I was with had an “Aha!” moment.  She had made a pedagogical, if not that then a conceptual breakthrough about e-learning and how it might look and be delivered within the space she teaches in.  It is her quote that is the title of this post.  I am still working on the full variant of the Layer Cake post, but do not want to release it too early, until I have fully ironed out the wrinkles myself.  However, in parallel with the Layer Cake e-learning methodology that I am developing I am also developing support materials in the form of templates, resources and rubrics etc to support teachers once I am not working with them.  I shall be devoting more time to this entire endeavour in the coming days and weeks, but work is un-relenting at the moment, which is good!  It is also clear that there is a desperate need for retro fitting the new paradigm/pedagogy/methodology, call it what you will that is e-learning to good many schools and teachers alike.  All new inquiries welcome.

I have been busy these last weeks working on a variety of projects, some of which are coming to fruition and others that have a distinctly long gestation period.  What is so exciting about all of the projects is their diversity and the range of clients too.

I have been working in a range of secondary schools working with different LMS systems, in fact across the schools I have encountered all of the MOE sanctioned LMSs.  What is interesting is how each of the schools are addressing how they will integrate these tools.  Last Friday I was speaking to a teacher who was recounting some behaviour that he witnessed in a class.  He is a keen advocate for the particular flavour of LMS his school has opted for and as such has put up lots of resources and assignments to his page.  The behaviour he witnessed was three pupils being completely off task during his lesson, they were not disrupting the others in class, just not doing the task at hand.  However what the teacher noticed was that when he checked the logs for his LMS page, those self same students who were off task in the physical space of his class had later, much later 1:00 AM later, gone to the LMS page and had completed the tasks as set.  This prompted us to further discuss the nature of school in a few years time.  Will it be necessary for example for students to physically (at the secondary level) to be at school?  Will it be a requirement of time credits, served either in the physical space of school or via the LMS, in order to have successfully racked up sufficient time at school to qualify for the 40 weeks attendance?

This has been a feature of several advisory conversations that I have had with other schools, how to plan for the future in terms of infrastructure for the school if the only certainty is constant change?  Interesting times and interesting conversations.  It is also very interesting to have the privilege to sit a broad swathe of  schools, both primary and secondary and see how differently they have all approached or want to approach integrating ICT into their particular environments and the unique challenges that each school is presented with.

There are many challenges ahead for these schools and for me.  I am really looking forward to them and to the challenge of guiding these schools along their individual paths.