Let’s Do This!
Excerpt from Dr. Harapnuik’s site: http://www.harapnuik.org/?p=7456
Chances are these great teachers and coaches created significant learning environments in which they gave you choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. Learning has always been personal because until you take ownership of your own learning by making meaningful connections you do not learn. Effective teachers have always known that learning is the responsibility of the learner and their role was to create the environment in which this could happen.
These types of teachers have always used the latest technology to enhance the learning environment and recognized that technology, big data, and algorithms as simply tools that can be used to help make this happen. Unfortunately, we have the tendency to look to the tools to solve our problems. We need to head the warning or confession of the foremost tool maker and remember that: The map doesn’t exist, the measurement is impossible, and we have, collectively, built only 5% of the library.
Instead of looking to technology to solve the personal component of personalized learning we need to look to the great teachers who have been doing personalized learning all along by giving their learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. These people have also been using technology in those authentic learning opportunities to help their learner explore, create, collaborate and communicate.
Personalized learning is one of the many educational technology quick fixes that we have a tendency to hope will solve our learning challenges. There are many more ideas, issues, and topics that need clarification and we are looking to you and our Digital Learning and Leading students to join us in exploring these significant issues.
Consider the following list as a starting point and let us know if you would like to write an article, post or other publication that will bring real clarity to the learning environment:
- Never been a better time to be a learner and/or teacher
- Growth mindset & Grit criticism
- STEM instruction is mostly delivered via lecture
- The much-needed shift to mastery learning
- Personalized learning problems & benefits
- Individualized instruction
- Differentiated instruction
- Additional names for competency-based education
- Why technology isn’t a Quick fix
- Silicon Valley’s failed promises with edtech
- Problems with SAMR and related quick fix methodologies
- Learning styles and related educational Zombie myths (bad ideas that just won’t die)
- Problem-based instruction that isn’t
- Shift from passive to active learning
- Choice
- Ownership
- Voice
- Authentic learning opportunities
- Why all elements of COVA must co-exist
- COVA from a student perspective
- The issue with taking ownership and agency – why folks don’t do this
- Creating significant learning environments
- Future of education
- Connecting the dots – making meaningful connections
- Why – go & show rather than sit & get
- Digital leader vs digital manager
- Design thinking for designed learning
- Confronting the Myth of the ‘Digital Native’
- Decades of evidence…but where is the change? Translating educational research to practice
- 18 years into the 21st century – how are we doing with 21st Century learning
- Communities of Practice (CoP’s) and their impact
- Problems with STEM/STEAM initiatives
- Importance of Learning How to Learn
- Importance of asking good questions vs finding right answers
- Reality of Thorndyke vs. Rhetoric of Dewey – more to be said
- Failing forward
- Feedback to Feedforward
- How to Avoid the Hype/Getting Caught in the whirlwind of day-to-day processes
Please contact either Dr. Thibodeaux or myself (Dr. Harapnuik) if you would like to research, write, and publish on one or more of these topics. This list is also just a starting point so if you have other ideas with which you would like to collaborate write, just let us know.
