It's November already

Wow - it has been over a month since I last posted. It's a busy time of the year after all, but something happened today that I wanted to reflect upon.

A student took the time to phone me to say how much she had enjoyed the class she had just completed with me and another Teacher. The things she liked about the class were the informality, the fun, the involved style of learning that allows students to contribute and learn from each other. She likes the fact that we as Teachers are not intimidating, are friendly and seem to enjoy the classes too.

What is good for that student is also good for us as Teachers. Teaching is about relationships to me. Unless a learner feels safe enough in the learning environment to try new behaviours, new patterns of thinking, how is s/he to learn? Respect in the classroom is a foundation. There is definitely room for humour that does not denigrate or humiliate too.

And I wonder how long I would continue to be a Teacher if it was not enjoyable? It is rewarding to me to see the changes in people's thinking, in their expanding horizons.

They expand my horizons too.

Post-Profiler Training Reflections

It's the week after I comlpeted my profiler training. What a difference that week made. I really was doubting that I would be able to synthesise the data from the first week and make sense of everything. The second week really consolidated the learning for me and I now feel comfortable being a profiler. I just hope I get plenty of practice from people asking me into their classrooms. It is invigorating to have a space to talk about teaching in a professional manner....

More later - am in the middle of downloading an update on Mozilla Firefox!

Good intentions are not enough

It is 10 days since I completed a profile on a Teacher and I have not yet been able to sit down with her and give her any feedback. She does have the score sheets, thank goodness, but she will not know what they mean.

Work is so stuffed full of things that have to be done - how is it that I am going to be able to fit proper profiling sessions into my workload? The Teachers deserve to have feedback and in fact there will be no cultural shift to best practice this way without it. How do I make profiling more of a priority in the midst of the overdriven teaching workload? Already I am wondering about how I will catch up with the marking and planning and so on that I will miss out on next week when I am on the second week-long training session with Mark and Denise.

Is it just because it is so late in the day and I am still buzzing around trying to be 'productive'? That's part of it, but I am concerned about this matter when I am not tired, too....

Profiling tomorrow

It is the eve of my profiling assessment. I am not sure I am ready for this - how will I remember all the different behaviours I am supposed to be recording? More importantly, will I be able to give some meaningful and useful feedback to the Teachers I profile? Let's see if I can get some thoughts about all this down on 'paper'.

It is important that the Teachers do find the process of use - a way of reflecting on teaching practice and a doorway to discussing pedagogy. We have so few opportunities to do this sort of thing as a profession. I want it to work. I hope it will be a way to help people become better Teachers, and to confirm what they are doing right. I hope it will also make it easier to ask for ideas when a Teacher has a new challenge that seems insurmountable. In particular, I would like Teachers to be able to discuss strategies for behaviour management whenever necessary. I don't know any TAFE Teachers who have huge problems with behaviour management except when they have classes largely made up of high school students. Maybe I will discover that this impression is not quite correct.

It's going to be interesting, either way it turns out.

Random thoughts about Teacher Profiling as a learning experience

I am part way down the journey to becoming a Teacher Profiler. Part of the reason people seem willing to be profiled seems to be that they want to improve their profesional teaching skills. This is voluntary learning in action - no course needed, no book, just a trained observer willing to spend 40 minutes in your classroom and tell you what they have seen afterwards.

It is an interesting experience to be in different teacher's classrooms. We have never really had a system that allowed such observation before. What does go on in classrooms? They are a public place for students enrolled in them, and usually not for anyone else. This is a form of practical privacy really. The potential for the abuse of power is incredible for the Teacher. The student is not without influence but in most classrooms, the teacher sets the standards for learning, treatment of the truth, attitudes and behaviour.

Blogging about this topic with other Teachers should reveal some interesting ideas and comments. Blogs can be sort of like classrooms too - only interested people read what you have written and participate in the discussion - they sort of 'enroll' themselves....it's another form of learning.

Motivating adult learners

'First day back fog' lifted pretty early in the day today - it was a productive day and I was pretty content to be back, once I got there!

So to get back to the topic of motivating adult learners, some things happened today that motivated me to learn - a colleague and I discussed how we could learn more about teaching practice and how we could develop a community of interest around skills that enhance teaching and learning among teachers who are deliberately studying these things. We decided that while we would need some f2f meetings, we would also develop a web site so we could

• post interesting information for each other,
  
• have discussions,
• keep track of useful stuff we find, etc.
  

The motivator for me was that we were driving this - no one was making us do it, no one else would gain as much as we would from it, no one would join the group without a genuine interest in the subject matter, and it was fun to think about how we could be collecting information in a unique way - no idea is really new after all - we develop our ideas in an environment of input from so many other sources it amazes me when people take entire credit for thinking up 'new' stuff...yet if we don't do it we miss out on noticing a lot that we could be using. I guess that's what I see as a major purpose behind developing reflective practice habits
.
So we'll see where this leads.

Reflection on adult learning environments

Tomorrow I return to work. I am feeling the heat wave that has hit our area in the past two days and am wondering if my returning students will feel it too and be a little reluctant to return to their learning.

It takes a lot of organising to get back on track with work/study for me. I would like to have more felixiblility in my own work envirnonment.

How does this fit with some of my random thoughts about an adult learner's learning environment?

One of the obvious keys to adult learning must surely be the degree of flexibility that can be built into a learning environment - accessible whenever the student has time, space, motivation, convenience, etc. Yet most adult learners I know still need some sort of structure to enable them to get their learning done. The need for structure does vary enormously. Online learning only suits a certain few and others need face to face (f2f) learning either in a classroom or a seminar or one on one with the teacher/tutor to got them through. Some can cope with online learning after they have made sufficient personal connections with other students and learners.

What about the assessment environment?

Some adult learners need time limits to get assignments in - some even beg for due dates! While others want to take on the whole course in their own rapid time, finishing well before anyone else does. Then there are those who appear to ignore all due dates, end of year closures, etc - and don't ever get their assignments in. Some are happy to learn for the learnings' sake, never showing the slightest interest in assessment. Yet for me, assessment is one of the keys to learning. Assessment should consolidate learning and cement it in to the long term memory....as well as give some positive feedback about the progress a person is making.

I have really encapsulated and simplified some complex issues here - and I don't think I have said anything new.

Sept 29th

I recommended Mozilla Firefox to a friend today who shot back this comment:

"I am quite happy with internet explorer at the moment and do not want to complicate my life with 3rd party stuff that miscrosoft will possibly stuff up in future updates. Just call it paranoia. It is wierd that my contempt for microsoft actually creates an uneasy allegience - perhaps Billy Gates has got me. Arrrghhhh!!!!!"

I think I'll submit it to Mozilla too for comment.

So far so good with my own downloaded software.....

Sept 27th

Thoughts about educational matters for this morning:

• It's hard to think of educational matters when you are on Non Attendance Leave
• It's hard to think of educational matters when your husband goes to hospital
• It's hard to think of educational matters when you have the chance to visit your daughter who lives 5 hour's drive away
• It's hard to think of educational matters when your sister asks you to come over and sew
• It's hard to think of educational matters when the house is dirty and you are home
• Thinking about educational matters will come back to me when I go back to work in a week.......

http://susanlhl.blogspot.com/

September 23rd

Another day is passing and I want to write a few things down before it does.

I installed a new browser this afternoon. It got me to this site without any worries, so we shall see how it performs over the long haul.

It isn't easy to find the chance to reflect on new learnings. I guess that is what happens to all of my adult students. Life just keeps happening, regardless of whether a person is studying or not. On the other hand, you don't want to study all the time - an e-mail buddy just wrote and said her husband claimed she would be the brainiest corpse in the cemetery! I know people I care about won't remember me for the amount of study I did in my life. It's just something I like to do and find useful almost everyday...

Wonder what would happen if I subscribe to this blog at the blogline site then ask it to find similar blogs?

September 22nd 2004

Today I learned how to create a blog, among other things. I attended a session where Stephen Downes presided and while I have known about blogs for some time, I had not really considered how useful they may become to me.

Blogs have some great applications for teaching adult learners if only I can encourage them to give the technology a try. I think I would have a lot less trouble getting teenagers to embrace blogs - in fact they will teach me much about them if I can incorporate them into the online learning environment I am developing for them for next semester. Though that attitude is probably outrageously from the 'old school', and not about the new paradigm for learning at all - I just used the language of the stuck-in-the-old-paradigm-group. Probably I am going to be unable to shed that paradigm, pragmatically, though I guess I can think about ways I can become part of the subtle and gradual shift to a new way of thinking.

I like the idea of open access, open learning, sharing, networking and community knowledge dissemination. I'm a collaboarative community worker/developer in the 'real world' after all. I like the ideas Stephen revealed about some new ways to handle huge amounts of data intelligently.

Stephen, you have left me with more questions than answers today though. Thoughts about Wikis and RSS files and the nature of online learning in general are spinning around in my head. While I like to know about the theory and the back room stuff, I really am a very practical and hands on type person - I like to get in and use things straight away without spending TOO much time contemplating....but you may just make me spend some more time doing that very thing - contemplating.

It is late, and as I can do anything I like with my own blog, I am going to stop now and think some more before adding more to it.

Maybe tomorrow things will be a little more crystallised for me - or not.

:-)