There was a mix-up in the kitchen. Lucy was using my blanket to dry the dishes. We now have very secure dishes! Linus van Pelt
Whilst only some of us will admit to Linus like thumb sucking, blanket clutching behaviour in our past, most of us will admit to a retreat to “comfort food” when life folds in on our present. Comfort food as the "answer" when things go wrong.
“Poached egg - all mashed up in bread” works for “The Microscopist” and serial black olive scoffing work for me. When pressed, “The Magnet” admits to finding salvation in peppermint creme biscuits, “The Mistress of the Template” claims “bangers and mash”, “Lo Snowboarder” suggests something with a fork in a bowl with cheese and “The Geek” alludes to chocolate, vodka and sex but not necessarily in that order.
I am stuck in milestone reporting mode again – you probably picked it from my recent predilection for measurement and outcomes – but I’ve ground to a halt tonight with the MoE ms_request that we report on our progress in “Establishing a sustainable professional learning community”
By happy coincidence SC has proffered some consoling thoughts today on the “Learning Community” he is developing through the Chess-squared blog
Despite replying reassuringly on the progress of our learning community in previous MoE ms reporting I know that in doing so I am guilty of writing “telling the teacher what they want to hear” stuff. SC’s reflection and self doubt marry with mine I don’t know if our cluster schools are learning communities, I am not even sure that I know what constitutes a learning community. Let alone how a sustainable one differs from an unsustainable one, or where we sit on the continuum.
And I suspect the reason I don’t know is that “learning community” is a “comfort food” term
Its “comfort food” nature allows “learning community” to be portrayed by our MoE as the “answer” to ictpd cluster progress rather than an idea to challenge. And that is its weakness.
We agree without too much critical thought that a “learning community” is a good thing, something we ought to tilt at. Community promises security, worthiness, and when connected to “learning” suggests an educationally meritous outcome that we don’t critique.
This allows us to ignore some real tensions for the learners involved in a learning community that are not so evident for learners involved in more tightly controlled learning groups (such as those found in lecture theatres in tertiary institutes) where direct instruction means we anticipate clearly articulated learning expectations in terms of LO’s and LI’s.
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“Community” suggests a sharing of the control and responsibility for learning amongst members – the whole “guide on the side” is somehow better than the “sage on the stage” thing. Community implies participatory practices where teachers within the community co-operate, collaborate and critique when learning together. There is looseness in the term – a kind of “constructivist” sense of we will make sense together.
Thinking about a group of adult learners as a “learning community” (with its notions of an ever changing distributed learning leadership, where all participants share responsibility, where specific roles emerge rather than being assigned, where peers influence peers and everyone learns from the exchanges that take place), creates tension when the community members also belong to hierarchical institutions that require compliance.
We do not usually think about the fact that the learning communities we aspire to create have to also accommodate “privileged differences and identities” different authorities and power hierarchies. Yet when we attempt to create a learning community within the structure of existing schools this is just what they involve. (refer Lefstein on Dialogue in schools for a more elegant take on this idea wrt dialogue)
I think this is why I cannot really tell whether I’m part of a learning community or not –
In valorising the collective, the cooperative, the collaboration – the collegial support, and the sharing we neglect the difficulty communities based within institutions will have with self critique.
It is not that the learning community rejects the value of collaborative critique. If you ask they will accept that they should be responsible for the assessment of learning outcomes within the community, and often reject the idea that their outcomes should be critiqued by outsiders - things like those parlous ictpd online surveys.
But in reality members of “learning communities” often feel uncomfortable about honestly critiquing the learning outcomes of themselves and of colleagues who may well be friends.
When the learning community is based within an institution/s, the learner's attempts at assessment of what has been learned are compromised by the opposing forces of compliance and institutional authority.
When the community is charged with assessing the learning outcomes of members who may well hold positions of deferential authority within the institution, the smart response is often to look the other way, to play under the radar.
I suspect that assessment of what has been learned is far easier for learners within instructional groups with well defined notions of authority and the consequent need for parameters, performance measures and compliance.
I have seen this lack of an honest critical eye in “learning communities” result in whole groups of adult learners in New Zealand schools becoming lost in pursuit of edu_fads like “learning styles”
This is probably why I accept the irony of being charged with creating a learning community and then having to report against externally imposed sets of performance measures. The irony being that my ability to report against externally imposed performance measures reveals that our cluster is not a learning community at all – despite my claims to the contrary
If I am honest the roles of the cluster director and facilitators in the contracts we work with involve direct instruction in learning experiences we have determined to be meaningful rather than us acting as fellow learners on journeys of collective co discovery -
For example after the first 18 months clusters teachers across all our schools could claim WALT statements as follows
We are learning to:
- identify the “powerful” idea/ insight/ “universal” in the curriculum strand
- integrate AO’s and LI’s from the draft curriculum that develop the concepts and skills needed to understand this insight
- develop a “fertile question” to engage and scaffold learning experiences when students are researchers
- select and integrate the key competency threads that support the powerful idea
- identify the support different students will require when engaging in the research process at the different research stages of - formulating the question/ locating relevant information and data/ research data collection/ analysis/ creating new knowledge/ and presenting of new knowledge and understanding.
- plan learning experiences for when “students are researchers” differentiated against SOLO Taxonomy,
- integrate ICTs, visual thinking filters and thinking tools as interventions of value for different SOLO coded learning outcomes,
- anticipate/plan possible social action/ performance for understanding, and
- design differentiated “student self assessment rubrics” across every level of SOLO coded learning experience
And in response to the ICTs identified above contract teachers could add
- We are learning how to use (software application)
- We are learning how (software application) can enhance the conditions of value for differentiated learning outcomes
There is a commonality and consistency of outcome here that betrays everything I am about to claim about our co-constructivist sustainable learning community status in the ms report. I wonder if I can work in something on comfort food, security blankets and thumb sucking to rescue the deceit in what I am about to write.
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