Singapore was my greatest high. I was desperate to explore the Future Schools Programme launched by the MoE and had started to look for contacts in every avenue possible and I experienced the real potential of the EWC network, as it played such a crucial part in every step of my three weeks there. I was talking about getting a lead to someone who is in the MoE with Nina and within days I was able to connect with Siva Gopal (yet to be student of APLP - part of the G15 intake). He needs a special mention as he was my one point contact to every Future School, and there are 8 of them. Siva meticulously mailed key leaders in each of these schools and helped me follow up with them as well, as I was there during festive times like the Lunar New Year. The Future Schools@Singapore is Blended Learning in action. It’s one the most advance thought process coming from a top-down approach and every single person I could meet, every school I visited, felt like it could very well be something happening 10 years from now. Each of their body of work and scale of their progress is monumental, be it Hwa Chong’s progressive teachers training, how they are driving self-directed learning and taking learning beyond campus; Canberra Primary’s approach towards taking play beyond using it as pedagogy and their 3 key programmes: Discoverer, Global Learner and Attuned Learner or Beacon’s diverse digital spaces, to state a few. Singapore being the startup capital of SE Asia, led me to people like Keith Ng and Damon from Gametize and organizations like Hub Singapore. While I was there, I took up an online course on Blended Learning. I also connected with Michael Horn, who in turn put me on to Anna Gu and we had a lengthy and detailed conversation on application of Blended Learning in various structures across America. My recap of Singapore’s vibrant culture and people would be incomplete without mentioning Dr. Seng (EWC Alumni) and our Chinese New Year adventure. She invited me to a friend’s lunch and the two of us went around the city, asking for directions from locals and depending on our GPS for the rest of the journey. I was pleasantly surprised by all the formalities and its similarity to Indian festivals where the entire family gathers. The hosts were more like parents, ensuring I got my share of vegetarian food and even gifted me with two Mandarin oranges and some money, in a beautiful red pouch. While I was there, I learnt all about the significance of symbols, colours, food and rituals associated with that date.
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Kuala Lumpur is fascinating both demographically and culturally. The intricate functions of the system for ‘sons of the soil’ and expatriates caught my fancy. So most of my conversations were around the penetration of not just technology but also international schools. I spotted a magazine called Essential Education 2015, the ultimate guide to learning in Malaysia and that served as a bible for everything from contacts to schools. Wan Mohd Hilmi B Wan Ahmad, helped me with education plan documents while this magazine complimented with other materials. Thanks to really warm people like David Neudorf and Emily Roth, I had a chance to spend an entire day at The International School’s elementary campus in Melawati. I was amazed at how they used technology to support learning, designing it right from curriculum structuring stages. Emily plays a key role in the professional development of the teachers and tech know-hows, and as a former teacher she provided a very balanced approach towards creative teaching. On the other hand, there are innovative startups and also established companies in the market such as MyMobileUniversity. I was introduced to it’s co-founder Rani Wemel, through a startup event in Hawaii and she ever so graciously invited me to a Mix n Fix event, where her company was a key participant. This opened up doors for many more contacts and the scope to have a conversation with different people and listen to their perspectives.
Siem Reap has a large penetration of NGOs. Their work in education significantly focusses on basic education - predominantly English language skills. Technology-wise, Siem Reap did not have too many leads, but Phnom Penh on the other hand has pockets of incredibly significant efforts such as GRIT by Sam Ng (http://www.gritlearning.com/what-is-grit.html). In Siem Reap, I was privileged enough to meet up with James from CESHE and understand their seamless flow of volunteer teachers who teach English to various groups of students, classified by age group. Maintaining a schedule and tracking lessons they complete is one of their biggest strengths but also one of their most delicate structures. Ably managed by James, it’s one of the highest ranking places for volunteers from Australia and Europe.
When you read an article such as this: http://www.thebetterindia.com/20727/when-a-beedi-rollers-child-designs-robotic-devices-akshara-foundation-government-schools/, titled 'When A Beedi Roller’s Child Designs Robotic Programmes' wouldn't you want to see this in action?
That's what drew me to Akshara Foundation's pet project - the robotics wing in a government school. Mentored by Sridhar P, these children come before school hours or after to explore and play with their lego pieces, in addition to a slot in their regular timetables. I'm always in awe of leaders in government schools willing to go that extra bit to allow for something new. Akshara's robotics project is one such pilot projects. Back home, Altius Foundation was also able to design the Karka Math Lab project entirely thanks to the willingness of a corporation school in the city centre. The children across states be it in Karka environment, robotics or SinC; they all embrace the opportunity they've got. It's all got to do with a small input from the technology front, leading to really huge outputs in their learning curves. They're all incredibly engaged and feel a sense of pride that their school is different and is willing to do something new. At the Robotics lab, the enthusiastic children showed me a robot that saluted to humans and a sensor based robot that navigated around a particular path drawn out with obstacles. Through my conversation with Sridhar I learnt that he initially only introduced them to the concept, taught them the very basic and today, they've surpassed what he knew of the software. He's only been facilitating since and helping them think out loud and solve problems. He says the kids, in groups work on projects and figure it out entirely themselves. They've even delegated roles based on their strengths, like the builder, the programmer, the sequence planner and so on. Although these children were of different age groups, they did not once boss around, instead they checked in with one another as they made decisions. These junior engineers bowled me over with their optimism and enthusiasm to experiment more. This lab, fondly referred to as SinC was an investment from the TED prize money that Sugata Mitra won in 2013. Started out as 7 labs, there are 5 in India and 2 in UK. I was following their work online and as soon as I read a newspaper article on the launch of Area Zero, I was sure I had to visit.
Vietnam wasn't turning out to be as I had planned and cafe-hopping was getting expensive. So I decided I'd get in touch with projects I've been quite fond of, in India and check if I could visit them. It's amazing how far and wide the EWC name has a reach. Here is what happened. On one hand I'd decided I wanted to visit these SinC labs, rain or shine. I was talking to my close friend Swetha back home explaining their work and telling her how I can't seem to get access to anybody in leadership there. The very same morning she's had a conversation with her boss, who in the passing had mentioned reading the recent article about this project and was proud of her friend, Suneeta. Swetha immediately connects the name and tells me she might know a way I could get in touch and introduces me to her boss the next second. Bingo! When I got in touch with Suneeta Kulkarni, I was a little apprehensive about which part of my journey I could start introducing myself with. Did I have to go all the way back to volunteering days, developing an interest in this space or start from the SE Asia research? To my surprise she asked me if I'd gone to the East West Center campus in Hawaii. A graduate from the United States herself, she knew EWC really well and has always been a fan of how unique their work has been. Let's say from then on it was smooth sailing. After a detailed Skype call, I followed up on her schedule and checked if I could join her for one of the field visits. She quickly got back with dates about her trip to Phaltan, near Pune in Maharashtra and I started looking for tickets to join her. It all came together really well and I spent a good two days at PSS SinC Lab 4 - Pragat Shikshan Sanstha. First day I was introduced to all the ways in which the lab was being a part of the regular school functions and how SOLE/SOME was weaved into their timetables. In the evening, two girls living on campus with their mother took me to a nearby temple and showed me around the town. Next morning, 6am the kids were on campus, cleaning the place and setting up their school for the morning classes. The school functions in two parts - Primary level in the morning and Secondary level in the afternoon. So I stayed on till the secondary students came back to the lab and interacted with the ‘grannies on the cloud’. As I had gotten accustomed with the students quite easily, although I didn’t speak their mother tongue, Marathi, Suneeta had requested me to conduct a feedback session with them about SinC and what they feel about it. So most of Day 2, I spent observing primary children use the lab for play and exploration while I’d steal half an hour chunks with the secondary students for group feedback sessions. The school has wonderful staff, an incredibly knowledgable IT person and a visionary heading it. Together they work so well that SinC is no doubt a success there! To know more about the School in the Cloud project, visit www.schoolinthecloud.org BBC.com > News > World > Asia > India > Education Given these keywords, the articles that we come across are usually not as tickling as the ones that came out yesterday and day before. Both of them featured serious offences, both related to exams, both involving significant effort from a parent/parents and both incredibly innocent. As much as I see the "wrong doings" in these, I cannot help but appreciate the parents mentality towards educating their child. If you have not read them before, click on the images below and it should take you to the respective news articles directly. Bihar is pretty much having an elaborately executed open-book test with multiple parties involved. Might as well allow all the students to look at their books and answer, but just make the questions a lot more reasoning-oriented.
The father who sees no difference between his 2 boys and 3 girls and believes in equal opportunity, probably forgot the first half of the "Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao" campaign. This is no way to have treated her, but I do like his belief system "My daughter will not die if I take her to school. But she will surely die if she does not study." It's high time exams are done away with. What's the point in assessing your knowledge on something annually? Shouldn't you be able to get immediate feedback and test yourself on concepts as soon as you understand them? The theory and history of SDL is interesting, but how much of it has been applied, how have pioneers done it and are schools applying this? Possibly in elementary/primary levels?
Self-directed learning in the school context is viewed as a type of learning where learners are allowed to work on authentic problems and tasks of their choice, but provided learning support in context to their problems whenever needed. It's range of audience is as wide as the methods in which it is applied. Broadly, it follows a four-step process that has a striking similarity to HR processes like skill-gap analysis, goal setting and performance appraisal. The Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo outlines these as key components: 1. Readiness to learn: Being autonomous, organised, self-disciplined, able to communicate effectively, and able to accept constructive feedback and engage in self-evaluation and self-reflection 2. Setting learning goals: Goals for the unit of study > Structure and sequence of activities > A timeline for completion of activities > Details about resource materials for each goal > Details about grading procedures > A section for advising faculty member feedback and evaluation as each goal is completed > A plan for regular meetings with the advising faculty member and other unit policies, such as work turned in late. 3. Engaging in the learning processes: Understanding learning styles and approaches, which include
In most high schools, teachers seem to find it comfortable to state options of projects/problems and let their students figure out which one to pick and the approach to solve it. This I find is extremely specific but limiting, as the control is still mostly in the teachers hands and the period is too short for the learner to explore their self-directedness completely. Given this approach, there are equal number of successes and failures. Although SDL is largely accepted as an essential skill, it is used only as one of the learning approaches. Transition to going hands-off As early as 1996, Sanneke Bolhuis published a paper titled "Towards Active and Selfdirected Learning. Preparing for Lifelong Learning, with Reference to Dutch Secondary Education." It's a short read and gives a really nice perspective on a much larger idea of SDL including learning in real life, how this compares to learning in schools, teachers as facilitators of learning and examines teaching for active and self-directed learning. The self-directed learning process by Bolhuis is a 5-step, non linear approach:
Going hands-off and succeeding One of the finest success stories has been The School Without Walls project. It's been elaborately explained in an article by Deborah E Schweikert-Cattin and Raymond J Taylor, titled "Throw-Away Kids: A Successful Self-Directed Learning Approach". If SWW could achieve this with students who were unwilling or unable to learn in a traditional high school setting, I wonder what the scope of it would be with self-managed learners in any learning environment. My fascination towards understanding various learning pedagogies has been on an all-time high since I started GIST (Group Independent Study Travel) began. GIST is designed in such a way that it provides complete freedom; I have absolute control over where I can travel and who I can meet, with the only constants being the scholarship funding and overall duration of travel. 5 of us embarked on this 7 weeks back and shared our progress recently at the rendezvous meeting. The conversations I had with fellow GISTers really got me thinking about how given the same framework, we'd all designed completely different and unique approaches to achieve our goals and in a short period of time learnt so much, mostly about fields we were completely new to.
This sort of self-directed approach is not new to learning though. One of the first definitions of self-directed learning was given by Malcolm Knowles in 1975. "In its broadest meaning, 'self-directed learning' describes a process by which individuals take the initiative, with or without the assistance of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identify human and material resources for learning, choosing and implement appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes." As an Adult Educator, he is famous for adopting the theory of Andragogy (the adult version of pedagogy, literally translates as 'man-learning' in Greek while pedagogy is 'child-learning'). He is best known for 5 assumptions of Adult Learners that he laid out between 1980 and 84 and the 4 Principles of Andragogy which he suggested that same year as well. 1984 has been a good year for this man. The 5 assumptions were:
and the 4 principles were:
With so much focus on DIY-generation and 21st century-skills that most modern schools wish to drive, these assumptions and principles fit perfectly well with children too. So these could actually be self-directed learning 'peda'gogies. The question is how young can we start? The GIST team rendezvous was scheduled on the 27th of Feb and all of us flew in from our respective project locations to Bangkok the 26th night. Genie, DJ and I managed to book into the same hotel, so we caught up a little earlier. Genie and DJ are soon going to be Design Thinking and Start Up ecosystem gurus :) 27th morning at The Sukosol, Bangkok felt like a family reunion! Dan was a little delayed due to BKK traffic, but the joy of meeting familiar faces was unexplainable. As we chilled at the lounge and caught up on our projects, adventures and crazy stories, our rooms got done and we moved on to discussing our POA for the GIST project in Chiangmai. Kru-Na (Teacher-Na) was appointed as the director of Sornsarunlion Rattanakosin School in Chiangmai less than six months back. In this short period, she has transformed the infrastructure of the school from a pile of rusted metal and broken wood to a colourful, well-functioning space. She has eager students, almost like a mini-army with their daily duties, interested to learn their subjects but lazy teachers who do not turn up on time or ensure that they design lesson plans. Kru-Na's hope is to make enough money so she could hire good teachers and in the next five years make her students 100% literate. Our contribution was to see ways in which we could make her sustainable environment a social enterprise, inviting volunteers and travellers for school-stay and market all that's going on in and around the school. After our four day adventure - hiking, visiting other home stays, volunteering in the school, going up and down the hill in search of good internet to design the website, working hard on chopping content, cooking and pitching in parts almost seamlessly - we were able to give her a working website she could update, a FB page and a brochure for locals. If you plan to visit Bangkok, do take a day or two off to go to Chiangmai and visit this rustic, beautiful, well-designed school. It'd be awesome if you could stay the night there too. For more information visit: Website: http://maewangschoolstay.weebly.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maewangschoolstay In my TED(G14) Talk, I had touched upon two key observations. One, we all look at education from a school's perspective - what the infrastructure looks like, what amenities they have, how their ranking has been, the quality of teachers and the quality of other students already in that structure. Two, the use of technology as an addition to the infrastructure and it's influence and impact. I then tried to look at this entire structure from a student's perspective. What if we brought the student to the centre, making him/her the focus and made everything else accessible, but optional? If we do consider that, how can we optimise technology and what are the roles that the other elements could evolve into?
My curiosity to experiment with this perspective made me design my GIST plans predominantly to observe the penetration of technology in Education and the impact it was having. The age group I chose was elementary/primary education. The more people I met, the more schools I observed, the more I learnt about their philosophies, their interest in a student's growth and the significance of structures. I have so far covered International schools in Kuala Lumpur, NGOs in Cambodia and Future Schools in Singapore. I have met, mailed and video conferenced with policy makers, education theorists, disruption innovation experts, education psychologist, gamification ninjas and educators. One thing they all believe in is in understanding future job needs, leading the next generation towards that and equipping students with 21st century skills which includes critical thinking and problem solving. Technology supports this massive education machine by plugging in and simplifying many things. All these educationhacks are fabulous and have lured me into digging deeper and understanding them a lot better. Asynchronous and Synchronous Learning Management Systems, STEM, Multi-modal assessments, iNACOL standards and so on. My conversations have helped me gain insight into the application end of how adults are facilitating learning. The biggest take away so far has been the sensitivity with which education institutes handle the idea of making their students active learners and the immense focus they have on 'engaging' them. So far, I feel like we're definitely on the right path towards making the student the centre in his/her learning path. I am no expert in this field to comment or criticise on what the right approach is or what's not and as I discover more, I understand a new angle with which they lay the path for learning. The real question I am yet to find answers for is: Are student's capable of making these decisions themselves? Instead of an adult or school exposing them to what is available, given the tools and access to information we have today, can a child customise their education and choose what they learn? One of the biggest education program with ongoing research that institutes all over the world are quickly converting to is Blended Learning. You've probably heard of names or terms that fall under this umbrella from the early 1990s including hybrid learning, Online learning, MOOC, Clayton Christensen, Innosight Institute, Blooms Taxonomy, Flipped classroom, computer-based learning etc. Ever since I embarked on exploring my passion in education and technology, I've also stumbled upon way too many terms and solutions that it all started overlapping and sort of getting muddled up. So, I got in touch with Michael Horn, one of the most well-known writer and researcher of Blended Learning and got a few leads in SE Asia (Singapore and Vietnam to be specific). My conversation with Anna, his research assistant gave me a lot more clarity on business structures and how typical blended learning systems function. In my own interest to get a lot more familiarised and study theories beyond what I learnt from books including Disrupting Class, I signed up for a course on Coursera 'K-12 Blended and Online Learning' and this has been one of the best decisions I've made. The GIST team meets again on the 27th of Feb and I can't wait to share my experiences in-person. My own learning journey so far has been a key motivating factor to explore self-directed learning and I truly hope that by the end of GIST, I'm able to find systems where the student is the focus and he/she can be the master of his/her own learning. If not, I'm confident, I'd make one :) |
SHARANYA DilipFun | Learning | Innovation | Education | Technology The more I read, the more I learn. The more I see, the more I understand.
Education is a complex system, how about we start at "I"? Archives |
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