Week 2 Homework Leadership in Digital & Collaborative Learning (LDC)
OVERVIEW
This week allows to look at how we are leading the key competencies as educators, in role modelling them to our learners, as well as exploring how well we interact, collaborate and learn from other professionals. What are our professional strengths and what would we like to work on, how are we enabling these steps to develop? Are the KC’s important, and if they are how do we develop an understanding of these beyond our education circles?
CLASS NOTES
The key competencies element of The New Zealand Curriculum brings with it exciting possibilities for making students’ experience of learning more relevant, engaging, meaningful, and useful.
Key competencies-rich programmes will enable students to be confident, connected, actively involved learners in the present and in the future. They will encourage lifelong learners who are equipped to participate in rapidly changing local, national, and global communities.
What are the conditions that teachers and students need, so that key competencies can develop? There are leadership practice demands on these areas (culture, pedagogy, systems, partnership/networks) – what are also those exactly?
Leadership and the key competencies
Learners are most likely to develop and strengthen their capabilities for living and learning when they learn with teachers in a school whose leadership creates conditions that stimulate key competencies.
The key competencies element of The New Zealand Curriculum brings with it exciting possibilities for making students’ experience of learning more relevant, engaging, meaningful, and useful. Key competencies-rich programmes will enable students to be confident, connected, actively involved learners in the present and in the future. They will encourage lifelong learners who are equipped to participate in rapidly changing local, national, and global communities.
Giving effect to key competencies in ways that address their complexity will entail significant challenge and change. Tackling those challenges and compelling change to support key competencies is a vital role for school leadership. Effective leaders create the conditions required for key competencies in teaching and learning. They need to ensure that the culture, pedagogy, systems, partnerships, and networks in their school support key competency development. Leaders also need knowledge and skills in leading change since, for many, key competencies require, and make possible, a significant change in practice
Leadership of the key competencies requires a school culture that signals that those competencies are important and valued. Importance can be signaled through goals for teaching and learning, through the explicit and implicit values of the school, through traditions, and through the things that are celebrated by the school.
Reflective Practice
On the fourth course on this programme “Applied Practice in Context” you’ll get to critically reflect upon different aspects of your practice. If you want to start that journey already you can start to blog about your learnings. Even if blogging is not assessed as part of the official assessments during these first courses, all the previous students who have started blogging have told it has been essential to their professional growth and improvement. Blogging can be a really good way for you to explore and record new ideas for your future research. If you are anyways making notes, why not share them and build your online identity at the same time?
Recommended readings for this week:
Hanuscin, D., Cheng, Y., Rebello, C., Sinha, S., & Muslu, N. (2014). The Affordances of Blogging As a Practice to Support Ninth-Grade Science Teachers' Identity Development as Leaders. Journal Of Teacher Education, 65(3), 207-222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022487113519475
Overview: Increasingly, teacher leadership is being recognized as an essential ingredient in education reforms; however, few teachers consider themselves leaders. Becoming a leader is not just acquiring knowledge and skills for leadership, but developing a new professional identity. As teachers become leaders, however, this identity might put them at risk with dominant school culture where norms of egalitarianism, isolation, and seniority persist. Luehmann emphasizes the value in offering safe spaces in which teachers can take risks as they “try on” new identities. We utilized an online environment to support ninth-grade science teachers in the development of common perspectives, commitments, and visions for teacher leadership as they implemented a new freshman physics curriculum. Our findings illustrate the potential benefits of blogging in terms of providing identity resources and opportunities for identity work. Specifically, by participating in pedagogical transactions, social interactions, and intellectual deliberations via blogs, teachers were supported in their efforts to be leaders in their classrooms, schools, and districts.
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (recommended)
Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Overview: Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention.This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, after school programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play.
- Reflect: How might teachers’ strengths in developing capabilities in thinking, using language, symbols and texts, managing self, relating to others, and participating and contributing, be recognised and celebrated?
- Reflect: How might students’ capabilities in thinking, using language, symbols, and texts, managing self, relating to others, and participating and contributing, be recognised and celebrated?
- Group task: Choose a KC and create a working definition which would explain the skill to a non-teacher
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