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We need to be safely, appropriately, and powerfully using technologies like videoconferencing to engage students and connect them with other novice as well as expert-learners more than we are in most classrooms today relative to the cost of fixed-room videoconferencing equipment. I had a conversation yesterday with a first grade teacher who said she would LOVE to do videoconferencing like this, but doesn’t know where to start and doesn’t have anyone to help her in her school building.

Here’s an idea:

Since each of us including each student has strengths, let’s identify them and use the experts.

ratorium's Teacher Institute, explains the conceptual design of their new-teacher-induction program. "Beginning teachers are immediately introduced into an established community of exemplary science teachers who themselves are part of a professional community of learners at the Exploratorium

mentees

nsylvania. The program provides technical and writing support as well as an opportunity for teachers to collaborate with their peers on the development of Web-based resources

Collins, Brown, and Holum suggested we adopt a model of cognitive apprenticeship as a teaching strategy.  This model encourages teachers and students to verbalize their thinking in order for the student to recognize gaps and to be brought to a more expert level of thinking. 

Modeling – This method requires the teacher to perform a task and to allow the student to observe and to build a mental model of the processes required to complete that task. Coaching – This method requires the student to perform a task while the teacher provides hints, feedback, and reminders to bring their performance closer to an expert performance. Scaffolding – This method requires the teacher to provide supports for the student to perform the task.  As the task is repeated and mastered less supports are provided to the student. Articulation – This method requires the teacher to pull out the student’s problem-solving processes through inquiry or by the student assuming the role of a critic to a set of activities. Reflection – This method requires the student to compare their own problem-solving processes with that of an expert. Exploration – This method requires the teacher to cultivate an environment of problem-solving independent of the expert

The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes (even for Gawande’s own surgical team). The best-known use of checklists is by airplane pilots. Among the many interesting stories in the book is how this dedication to checklists arose among pilots.

A SME is the subject matter expert, not the documentation expert (that's you).

In order to change to a learner-controlled instructional system and to maximize interaction, I had to change my role from that of a teacher at the front of the classroom and the center of the process to that of facilitator who is one with the participants and whose primary role is to guide and support the learning process.

The result was a course designed as a learner-centered system based on dialogue and cooperation among students (1992, p. 61).

Such a move engenders a radical shift in the power and interaction structures in the classroom as the students must accept the responsibility for their own knowledge creation, and the instructor must relinquish a certain amount of control over the process.

Characteristics of Adults as Learners

When the class ends, students should be able to do more than just pass the final test. They should have gained knowledge in the subject, and they should see how that subject fits into the bigger picture that includes personal professional goals and relationships. Creative instruction is needed to help students see these links.

Similarly, assigning four different articles in one week might mean than they aren’t getting as much as they could out of any of them. Less can be more.

Novices and experts. Many of the above points relate to the fact that we read as experts while our students are still novices and are really learning how to read appropriately to build up their expertise.

Marc Prensky

What many educators often forget is that reading and writing, although they have enjoyed primacy for hundreds of years, are very artificial ways to communicate, store and retrieve information," he says.

Prensky argues that only 10 per cent to 20 per cent of people in any society are highly literate and points out that YouTube already hosts more video content than was produced in the entire history of broadcast television, including millions of how-to videos that show, not tell.

. In fact we encourage that kind of exploration. It is how children explore and gain information about the world around them.

Can you share some of what you learned about student-directed learning

What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

And that's why we set objectives high, and we never set objectives in the way that they would prevent teachers [from using] their own capacity to broaden education.  We only talk about the objectives, not the methods of education.  Because teachers, if they have high-level education, should be given leeway enough to use their own innovation capacity.