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Over the edge…transforming teachers with mind-body PL

27 March, 2019 By Hilary Purdie 2 Comments

“Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.”

Christopher Logue – New Numbers

A new era

More than ever before we are asking teachers to step out of their comfort zones. 20 years ago, most PL meant tweaking existing practices in known content areas.  A chalk and talk session where teachers could sit and listen, and take notes on new ideas was a perfectly appropriate and effective forum.  Soon, the buzz of collaborative teams began to infiltrate PL, and the power of teacher voice meant we could learn from each other, not just the sage on the stage. In reality though, pedagogies and content areas in PL still sat neatly within the paradigms of teachers’ own educational experiences as a student.

With the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies in our students’ lives, we are, in a comparatively short time frame, asking teachers to make monumental shifts into areas that appear quite foreign.

  • Let the students lead the learning What?!
  • Integrate digital technologies Sorry, I’m just not good with all this techy stuff…
  • Move from the safety of the classroom into authentic real world learning But I won’t be able to cover the curriculum!

Like an abseil, these big conceptual leaps about how teachers perceive their role in a school often evoke fear and anxiety, resulting in either active resistance or passive avoidance.

PL that acknowledges fear and uncertainty as legitimate starting points, that embraces risk, and guides and celebrates learning through vulnerability.

It is clear that leaders who are committed to advancing cultures of innovation need to be intentional in providing PL that addresses not only content and pedagogies, but also supports teachers’ emotional growth. PL that acknowledges fear and uncertainty as legitimate starting points, that embraces risk, and guides and celebrates learning through vulnerability.

A fresh lens

In the past 18 months, I have sat through too many PL sessions (sat being the operative word) about emotional connection to learning, student centred learning, active and inquiry based approaches and found that 50 minutes in we are all still sitting in our chairs, digesting a PowerPoint of words, without having had an opportunity to share, experience, reflect or challenge our assumptions with our peers.

Let’s add a fresh lens to PL.  A lens that is unashamedly intentional about modelling the very ways in which we are wanting students to learn.

A time for doing

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”  Benjamin Franklin

We know learners need to do.  We know learners need multiple avenues to explore new ideas and connect to existing knowledge.  It may be do first, reflect later. It may be think first, do later.  It may be thinking and doing concurrently.  Irrespective of the order, for something to become deeply understood, a learner must have the opportunity to engage in the body-mind connection, and develop meta-cognitive awareness about their own learning experiences.  Mindset alone is not enough.  Teachers need to know their competencies in teaching in a new and exciting way.

Last year I took my 14 year old daughter climbing on the Organ Pipes – large dolorite cliffs over 120 metres tall, on the eastern face of Mt Wellington.

After climbing two 30 metre pitches, she looked down and was hit by the reality of the 50 metre rockface we had to abseil.  I’d told her about it, so it was in her mindset before we started the day “yes, I’m going to abseil down that cliff”.  Sitting on top of the cliff, knowing it was the only way down she frantically sought both active and passive avoidance “I’ll pay for a helicopter” or “I’ll just sleep up here”.

Talking about abseiling and actually leaning backwards over the edge are two completely different things. In theory you can know that it will be safe but scary. Experiencing abseiling is completely different. Heart racing, palms sweating, legs shaking, the internal dialogue of the mind “I’m gonna die!”.  The complex emotions involved in knowing these feelings of uncomfortableness, of fear, and feeling out of control, YET pursuing it anyway, and the subsequent elation and pride are things that can only be felt and experienced, not taught.

Teaching in scary territory

We are asking teachers to take a leap into scary territory.

If a teacher hasn’t recently experienced learning in an experiential, inquiry based way, how can they possibly trust that the chaos that they see in front of their eyes will in fact lead to deeper learning?  The confusion, frustrations of problem solving with technology, heated discussions, multiple dead ends that they see their students go through as they try to navigate complex learning may well turn a teacher off rethinking the ways in which they teach.  But having experienced and reflected on learning like this themselves in PL, teachers will recognise that their students are not only learning about content, but about learning itself, and specifically, about their personal capabilities as a learner.

teachers and students are learning about their personal capabilities as a learner

Are we, as leaders, empowering, trusting and supporting teachers to work through challenging emotions in order to grow themselves firstly as learners, and then as teachers? PL needs to be carefully planned so that the risk is calculated, and perceived risk only.  In the same way I wouldn’t send my daughter off a 50m cliff with a 30 metre rope or a frayed harness, leaders need to make sure teachers are provided with the right tools and guidance to ensure their own, and consequently their students’, success.

Our Leadership Challenge

The challenge in encouraging teachers to integrate Digital Technologies into teaching is not addressing the question “is this possible?” coz we see it around us all the time, on every innovate teacher’s YouTube channel, Tweet or Facebook feed – of course it’s possible! At the heart of Digital Technologies PL in regular schools with regular educators is getting teachers to answer “can I do this?”  And the answer is undoubtedly yes –  if equipped with the right resources, mindset and competencies, and the FEELING of having moved through the unknown and the challenge themselves.

As leaders, if we allow teachers to take the helicopter and never experience and reflect on the feelings associated with learning in a risky way, it is unfair to expect huge shifts in practice.  We can’t impose our redefinition of the role of educators without firstly guiding teachers to understand their own competencies in teaching in a new and exciting way.

Plan to Pump PL:

  1. Be clear about intended emotional outcomes of the PL. Is it to generate enthusiasm, build teams, push into new areas, challenge assumptions, consolidate understanding?
  2. Guide learners to make body-mind connection (meta-cognition)
  3. Include reflection time to connect teachers’ own learning experiences to student learning
  4. Be transparent about the intentional structuring of the PL
  5. Plan appropriate scaffolds to ensure success

I am presenting at the Leading a Digital School Conference in August in Melbourne and would love to see you there. One of my sessions is under the Mega Theme of Advancing Cultures of Innovation and the Sub Theme of Rethinking the Role of Teachers.

Session: Pump your PL

Why mindset alone is not enough for teacher transformation – a practical workshop on how to use digital tools to pump teacher PL. More than just novelty, each of these strategies models intentional pedagogies that has teachers firstly ‘doing’, then reflecting on their own engagement as a learner in order to transfer progressive learning experiences for their students. Flipped learning using AR, peardeck, 365, secret pedagogy missions, solving complex problems, flipgrid, mission impossible, YouTube, Padlet, virtual wellbeing gallery. Feedback from teachers – this is PL that sticks and initiates action…in fact it was named up in school data as positively contributing to teacher wellbeing!

Filed Under: Advancing Cultures of Innovation, Leadership Tagged With: professional development, Professional Learning

Flipped Learning, a brief grounding in the research literature, by a teacher, for teachers

5 May, 2018 By Steven Kolber Leave a Comment

Flipped Learning, a brief grounding of the research literature

I was recently challenged to show the effectiveness of flipped learning through research by a member of leadership at my school. What follows is a brief summary of the research that I had at hand that situates a reader generally within the literature and opens some avenues for further exploration. It also gives a good overview of the general direction of flipped learning research with many recommendations of where further research needs to be aimed to produce a greater understanding of the methodology. Keep in mind this is simply an excerpt of my current understanding, as a full-time teacher, not currently participating in any part-time study. I am pursuing research into flipped learning, purely as a hobby rather than any structured academic study. For a broader overview of flipped learning in regards to adding to the research base, I would recommend this blog by Robert Talbert: http://rtalbert.org/what-does-the-research-say/

With that in mind, I hope that teachers interested in the concept of flipped learning, educational technology or using instructional video in their classroom would find this an interesting starting place and jumping-off point for further investigation of these ideas in their own practice. Or in a pinch, use this to justify the interest and emerging nature of flipped learning and some of its positive findings in regard to learning outcomes for students.

Firstly, as meta-analyses are all the rage at the moment, let us begin with these two-literature review/meta-analysis style articles that give us a good aerial view of the research and a good grounding in some of the already completed research.

The Flipped Classroom: A Survey of the Research

View the paper

This document provides a good summary of the research circa 2013, it sets out some of the pedagogical practices and ideas that underpin the practice and allow it to be used. It is an approachable and easy to read piece that defines key words and ideas well and establishes some of the intellectual lineages of flipped learning. It is especially valuable for people with a limited understanding of flipped learning in the way that it outlines key ideas that most teachers and educational practitioners will find familiar and easy to engage with. It focuses mostly on qualitative information (numbers) and is therefore easy for a person wired in this way to engage with quickly and without requiring much of an analysis of complex results.

A critical review of flipped classroom challenges in K-12 education: possible solutions and recommendations for future research

View the paper

A very recent paper (2017) that comments on the paucity of K-12 flipped learning research and discusses some of the issues that are presented by this pedagogy for teacher workload and other key factors. Appendix 1 provides a summary of a number of studies and their results, whilst Appendix 2 provides a brief summary of the ways that class time was being used in each of these studies. This is useful in the way that it can be used to understand the myriad ways that flipped learning can be used to transform the classroom environment and the activities that take place there. It must be noted, however, that a number of the studies cited do not very closely align with flipped learning as it is generally defined or best practice. As a result, some of the studies show less than favourable results due to a number of reasons, which I will refer back to in a future piece of writing. It also gives a good overview of the way that different uses of this methodology can be applied and as a shortcut around where it would be best to begin a practice of flipped learning for an individual or school aimed in a positive direction. In summary, the paper shows that without looking too closely at what is or isn’t flipped learning, all studies that purported to be flipped learning showed positive results or no significant loss or gain (stayed comparable). Looking more closely, those studies that made use of video in the individual space and used group discussion or some other form of active learning in the class space showed improvements in student’s learning outcomes. These two simple factors being present could be used as a rough proxy for best practice and something to be expanded upon in further research. The two aforementioned appendices also show that deviating beyond the accepted knowledge of best practice in regards to flipped learning does not show a positive result for student outcomes.

The Impact of the Flipped Classroom on Mathematics Concept Learning in High School

View the paper

This paper is a more recent (2016) study that took a small scale (82 participants) approach and used the traditional lecture vs flipped learning approach. Notably, this paper used genuine high school students, aged 14-15 years, a group that many practitioners tend to presume will not complete the pre-class work of watching videos. This study showed that this was not true but rather showed that the FL participant group outperformed the control group and were highly satisfied and positive towards the methodology. Notably, the study showed that the ‘low achievers’, as recognised via pre-test results, had greater success than the control group who received conventional teaching. It is suggested that this is due to these students with higher learning needs receiving more attention from teachers and greater time for the deeper discussion and engagement with mathematical problems.

The flipped classroom and cooperative learning: Evidence from a randomised experiment

View the paper

A recent study (2016) that comparing the flipped learning classroom with lecture-based lessons. It found a 12% increase in test scores when comparing these two methodologies, in favour of the flipped learning classroom. The study drew its participants from undergraduate students and used a simplistic multiple-choice style test form of testing. The sample size (235 students) is significant and indicates support for flipped learning, but also more specifically the types of active, collaborative pedagogies that it allows to take precedence over traditional lecture style teaching.

Optimizing Learning From Examples Using Animated Pedagogical Agents

View the paper

A laboratory-based, experimental based study (2003) that looks specifically at the levels of knowledge retention by undergraduate students based on the learning/teaching resource involved in the delivery of the content. The content was presented through three forms: text only, text and audio, or text and ‘animated agent’ (a small cartoon character who gestures and refers to key elements of the text). I interpret this study firstly in the sense that a teacher, known to the student will always be more effective than the noted ‘animated agent’, as well as more knowledgeable. More simply, however, this study posits that learning through video is simply more effective than more traditional and conventional means. Extending this concept further, this seems to indicate that even without flipped learning being applied, but simply replacing learning resources from text or worksheet towards instructional video would show an improvement in knowledge retention just as was shown in this study.

Learning from Examples: Instructional Principles from the Worked Examples Research

View the paper

This study (2000) is a very exhaustive summary of cognitive load theory which I believe holds many connections and associations with flipped learning. I believe it also suggests a number of practices and understandings that should become mainstream within the practice of producing instructional video and flipped learning. Rather than go over some of the complex interaction between the pedagogy of flipped learning and Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), I would suggest you look over this short summary of how these ideas and those raised by the previous research study are applicable in this video I made on the topic here:

Overall, I hope this limited overview of some of the recent research on flipped learning has shown you some of the ways that different ideas are being applied under the umbrella of flipped learning. As well as giving you some things to provide to interested individuals to begin their own learning journeys into flipped learning and its applications in a variety of contexts. If you are interested in any of these ideas please let me know, or if there is anything that you believe here is improperly covered I would love to hear about it. You can email me on kolber.steven.s@edumail.vic.gov.au

I’ll also be presenting at the international flipped learning conference, RESCON in October 2019 – see https://www.resconanz.com/program

Filed Under: Flipped Learning, Leadership Tagged With: academia, academic, Action Research, Best practice, Cognitive Load Theory, Critical, Education, evidence base, evidence-based, findings, formal, Guielines, improvement, informal, Inquiry, justification, K-12, Leadership, learning, meta analysis, Overview, professional development, proof, research, Review, Robert Talbert, scholarship, survey, Teacher-led, teaching

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