A Mechanistic View
A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown explains and shows the best way for students to learn in their classrooms, online or perhaps at their home. They show that our education system is falling apart piece by piece and I honestly see that happening in the world today. Many people are trying to twist learning using their preferred way and not letting our students trust their judgment when they want to learn a specific way in the classroom or online. My blended learning innovation plan lets students take control of their learning and allows them to network online and connect with other students going through the same things they are. In order to create a blended learning environment, we need to first start with figuring out what students want when they are learning. Do they want guided help? Would they prefer online materials? When we start asking ourselves those questions we can begin to understand and formulate a shift over to blended learning. Some students prefer the online touch where their teacher posts an assignment online where the students has plenty of time to complete it and not having to complete it in class with their teachers starting them down. A lot of the time, teachers will just follow the curriculum they are given and not try to make it better themselves. I understand they are busy with their lives and classes but if we do not try to make an effort to shift our learning to adapt to modern day, our students will begin to falter because they are constantly changing with the world while education is at a standstill.
Introducing Creativity and Passion to Learning
In Douglas Thomas’s ted talk he says ” It hit us early on that learning is a fundamentally easy thing that we do, that we do from the day we are born until the day that we die. And for most of our lives, it is natural and effortless everywhere but school.” That quote directly outlines that the way we run education right now is not natural and effortless like it should be. This quote significantly highlights how important it is to start creating a blended learning environment in our classrooms. Yes we have a long way to go but it starts with that one teacher who goes the extra mile to help their students learn the best way possible. Even if it is just a new way of engaging with the class for one worksheet. It always starts with that one interaction. If we engage our students by being passionate and excited about the material, they will be excited as well because you are giving off the energy that learning is a great thing. In my innovation plan that I created, I am working on it with creativity and passion so its not just another online platform that students can go to with content that does not engage them as much as it should. It would be a lot easier for me if I just focused on a specific path brought to me by the education board but instead I am trying to work harder to make this online platform accessible to everyone and make it with creativity so it will be a fun way to learn about college admissions.
Embracing Change
Of course change comes with its challenges and in A New Culture of Learning, they say “Embracing change means looking forward to what will come next. It means viewing the future as a new set of possibilities, rather than something that forces us to adjust.” If we look at the curriculum and think to ourselves that a change in something is horrible and that they are just forcing us to adjust without prior notice, we never have an expanded mindset and we start to steer away from a blended learning environment because your just trying to get by. We need to accept that things are changing in this world and not look at it with disgust or the feeling that we can’t change the material but rather we need too look at it as an opportunity to teach students thorough a new way of learning. In Thomas and Browns book, they mention that “Its not so much what the kids were learning, but it is how they are learning.” If we just stay with the same old curriculum or lesson plan, we never see the impact in our students’ learning when we change how they learn. Many people might see change as a bad thing and that kids are only supposed to learn a specific way as it has been for years but when we look at it from a new perspective and we see that our digital world is changing every day, we can accomplish great things and start to recognize that our kids are changing along with the world.
Thomas and Brown write that “Memorization, one of the basic staples of education, is not a bad way to learn about things that seldom change, such as spelling, the periodic table of elements, and date in history. However, what students memorize are things they don’t actually use very often in their day to day lives” (Thomas & John Seely Brown, 2011). The type of material in schools that students learn have often been criticized as something that students don’t actually need to learn. They say we need to be teaching them instead about how to do stuff in the real world once they are on their own. If we look at classes such as English 2, we ask ourselves why do we need to teach that class if the students are never going to use what they learn. Yes, we need to embrace change but that does not mean that we can’t stay with some of the same information students are given. For example with English 2, students are learning how to write good essays and how to do research which is highly needed in college. They learn how to have proper grammar and how to write from their heart so they can succeed in their classes. In my personal experience I have wrote multiple essays in college and I always give credit to my English teachers in high school for teaching me how to write and speak my mind about things. Embracing change in my opinion means that yes we do need to start changing the things that we teach but we also need to keep some of the original curriculum brought to us by the higher ups while having a great attitude about it and having that desire to help kids succeed in this digital world.
The New Culture of Learning
When It comes to the new culture of learning many teachers have not been exposed to this new way of teaching. They are being shielded by the lesson plans and having to report to their bosses about how the classes are going and they do not have the time to see that a new type of learning is emerging. In the New Culture of Learning book, they mention “A second difference is that the teaching-based approach focuses on teaching us about the world, while the new culture of learning focuses on the learning through engagement within the world.” This means that instead of us teaching our students the lesson plans, we need to let them discuss it with each other and form online and in person collaboration with each other because that is the new way that students learn. If a student is afraid of asking their teacher a question in the class, they might be more comfortable talking with a student in their same class in the online group forum they created. Embracing the New Culture of Learning can benefit us and our students in so many ways.
References
TEDx. (2012, September 12). A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U&t=1083s
Thomas, D., & John Seely Brown. (2011). A new culture of learning : cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Douglas Thomas And John Seely Brown.
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