From teacher to 'learning coach'

For a long time, I have felt that the title 'teacher' (in my language, Finnish, too - 'opettaja') is misleading or wrong in the 21st-century context. A teacher is somebody who has sole access to secret knowledge, and stands in front of the classroom giving lectures. He/she is the deliverer of knowledge, in a one-way process, which was believed to automatically lead to student learning earlier, but which we all now know is not necessarily the case. Wouldn't it be about time to think of a new, more appropriate title for ourselves - one that would describe what is expected of us, to make education more learner-centred?

Today, I came across an interesting article on the World Future Society website: The World is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning by Maria H. Andersen. And there it was - the title I've been trying think of: LEARNING COACH! Ms Andersen describes the new role like this:

As the learning coach, my job is no longer to “deliver content” to the students. ... Now I can use my time to help students search for good questions, help them to understand the content they are learning, provide activities to help them work with the concepts or connect the material in an applied way, and foster discussion with other students on these topics.

Ms Andersen's model for personalized learning sounds really fascinating, although slightly sci-fi at times, too, but that's what futurists of education should present us with, to boldly go where no teacher has ever gone before.

A system for personalized learning will not grow from inside formal education. Education is like a field that’s been overplanted with only small patches of fertile soil. Too many stakeholders (parents, unions, administration, faculty, etc.) compete to promote various ideas about how to change, acting like weeds or plagues that choke off plant growth. The fresh and fertile soil of the open Web can foster the quick growth of a personalized learning system. Then, like a good fertilizer, it can be used to replenish the soil of formal education and help us to reach that “Holy Grail” of education: personalized learning for all.

EDUCA fair in Helsinki

Yesterday I visited EDUCA, the largest educational fair in Finland. For two days, hundreds of vendors, educational organizations and interest groups had set up their booths to promote the latest trends in education.

IWBs were prominently displayed as a must in any classroom these days.

This particular company marketed the concept of ActivClassroom, but looking at these people here, I couldn't help wondering what was so active about it? Looks very much like a glorified version of the old teacher-centred demonstration devices. In my school, we will get a few new IWBs in February, and one of my goals for this school year is to learn to use one. I am interested in seeing if I will be able to find the much hyped, revolutionary, interactive element in it. New technology is only any good if it shakes stuck-in-a-rut pedagogical practises, too.

My most interesting insight at the fair came from a lecture by Professor Andy Hargreaves from Boston college. In his engaging and humorous lecture he went through some of the educational policy changes in the last 50 years, and introduced his latest recipe for school systems of today, 'The Fourth Way'. He had labelled each policy with different planets. So from the lovey-dovey Venus 60s and 70s, he took us through the Mars years of the 80s to the present Mercury atmosphere of imposed targets and data-driven accountability. And then he left us thinking about the fourth way, illustrated by the Earth.

He had been specially commisioned to do some research on Finland and our much praised educational system. His dream for us was the following: build on our heritage and reputation for being one of the most inclusive nations in the world (e.g. gender equality, including disabled students in mainstream classes) and extend this to be know as the world leading country of cultural diversity. That will be a challenge for a country that has been very homogeneous for so long, and is now finding it terribly hard to come to terms with the arrival of more and more immigrants in the last decade.

The magic of social media

Back from my two days in the Finnish national conference of 'Interactive Technology in Education'. First time ever for me, and being there all alone, it took me some time to get the hang of things. A few keynote speeches and then a wide variety of parallel 40-minute forums. Naturally, a lot of exhibitors marketing their products. It seemed to me as though, now that many Finnish schools have switched from overhead projectors to a combination of teacher laptop and dataprojector in the classroom, it's then the smartboard that is being flogged as the next prerequisite for good education.

I always want to question the merit of any new expensive device being pushed into schools, as to me it often serves the purpose of appearing modern and up-to-date, possibly to attract new and better students. If I think of my school, what difference has it really made in student learning whether a teacher demonstrates ideas through text and pictures on an OHP, screen or smartboard? Basically, these are still all part and parcel of the same old teacher-centred lecture-style class, aren't they? What I would like to see in learning environments, is the shift into classes that truly activate students into critical thinking, finding some structure in the overflow of information and formulating their own understanding of the world around them - briefly, transforming the passive student audience into active and curious learners, at least some of the time. I am by no means undermining the useful role of lecturing in certain circumstances.

My main interest in the conference was the forum of SOMETU - an open network for anyone interested in social media and how it supports learning. With its close to 1200 members it is quite a significant group on a Finnish scale (NB. our population is only 5 million). Active Sometu members gave several talks on different aspects of social media all through Thursday afternoon. The atmosphere in the room was very enthusiastic and positively charged. The organisers seemed to have underestimated the popularity of this topic, since, for every forum, so many attendants turned up that some ended up standing along the walls, sitting on the floor (!) or staying outside in the hallway.

True to the spirit of social media, the Sometu team had set up an arsenal of equipment and tools to dazzle the audience - ConnectPro video conferencing for those who couldn't come to the conference, two screens, one displaying the actual presentation, the other one what was going on in Sometu Second Life, video, pictures, net applications, mini laptops going round for audience feedback for those who didn't have their own to participate in the backchannels, and the list goes on...

Of course, it's to do with technology, but at the end of the day, it's not only that. I'm glad to see that at long last we are moving away from the closed land of tech geeks into many ordinary teachers of different subjects asking themselves how technology could help them motivate and activate their students.

On a personal note, I have to admit that my brain is probably too old for this type of multitasking, since I found it almost impossible to follow several channels at the same time, eg. listening to the presentation and simultaneously typing something sensible on Twitter. I'm forever hopeful, though - maybe even my brain could still evolve with more practice!

Photos: 'Sometu ITK-foorumilla' by rongasanne on Flickr