After working with you for the past several days, and thinking about the common threads that are tying these SI experiences together for me, I wanted to direct you toward an article, specifically the section on networked learning communities: If We Didn’t Have the Schools We Have Today, Would We Create The Schools We Have Today?
This article has guided me in thinking about my own role in leading the SI, and may inform some of your own thinking about your role within the SI. Please take some time to read the first section of this article, including the section regarding Networked Learning Communities. Here are some of my thoughts…
A Networked Learning Community is constructed as its members collaborate to achieve common goals, learning together as they develop solutions for problems they are addressing in common. As the learning community grows, the members of the community develop new knowledge and skills through their participation and contributions. Everyone becomes a learner in a Networked Learning Community, and the distinctions between students and teachers fade away.
The description above sounds very much like what the Summer Institute looks to achieve with their community of teachers, who are all working “to achieve common goals and develop solutions for problems they are addressing in common.”
He goes on to discuss the varying roles in these communities, and the importance of a shift from the rigid definitions of teachers and students, to that of learners:
Everyone plays an active role in a networked learning community, contributing to the community’s construction of knowledge as its members collaborate to address problems (whether the goal is learning to read or learning to fly a rocket to the moon). In the networked learning communities of the future, expert learners (we call them teachers, educators, scientists, and researchers today) are going to be recognized for their ability to learn and help others learn, as they continue to construct new knowledge and develop their own expertise. Their job will not be to teach – but to help others learn, as they model learning through collaboration to solve problems and achieve goals they have in common. (A significant part of the expert learner’s role will be organizing and managing the collaborative learning community.)
This is a shift in thinking for me in terms of how I choose to interact in the classroom where I teach. But perhaps that is exactly the point. It’s the classroom where “I teach” and “students learn.” At least I know most of them do. Even so, I return again to Carroll’s article, which points out the relative disconnectedness of our current educational system in regard to student teachers:
Those K-12 students, in turn, leave the teacher’s classroom and use that knowledge in ways that are not known to the faculty, the next cohort of student teachers, or to the teacher in the classroom.
Although I present myself as a learner more readily with adult peers, it’s not as common for me to do so in the middle school classroom. It does happen, but I wonder now if it’s happening often enough, and if not, if I have the skills, support, and (bravery?) to make the change happen.
Food for thought:
- In what manner and to what extent do we all find ourselves moving along the path of novice–mature learner?
- Are there ways in which your students could take on the role of mature learner in the classroom?
- How applicable are Networked Learning Communities to your own environment? Could you, would you, in a box? Could you, would you, with a fox?
Filed under: KMWPsi09, Reading , article, networked learning, Reading
