22 April 2020
How to keep relationships at the forefront of learning and teaching from home
Relationships and Common Sense
This time is ideal for learning new things we’d otherwise never have had time for. During the time of polio outbreak in NZ in the past - New Zealanders learnt other skills. This time doesn’t have to be perfect, time to be creative and work with what we have - resources, time, energy. Technology might change, but human behaviours are most important. This is temporary, time has become more gentle, it is a time to make and create things which will sustain us. Remember that nobody knows what is going on in your world!Covid history!
Our kids are embodied in history - comic book daily diary, time capsule, they are all living inside Covid history. Don’t replicate what is at school, think interdisciplinary - read a book, illustrate it, new chapter, set projects that can be realised in flexible ways, put the potential for growth at the forefront, create activities relevant to time and situation in which students are living.
Learning is not a glass full of water, you are not going to be worse off for it - your child is learning brilliantly in a world outside of school...they are not going to forget how to read, each child is a sponge and will use whatever context wraps around them…
Let's think about what learning really is - your child is just learning just in different ways!
Human's over curriculum!
The child being at the center of learning. It is easy to become remote from the humanity of educating. Ask kids about what is good about learning this way, and what would they change and what is worth keeping. We should have positive discussions with kids, and put humanity back into learning. How do you learn? What’s the best way for you to learn? Why?
We should encourage passion project learning, and flexibility to learning where our role is to facilitate the context around these passions. When a person is involved in the question they are learning, there is buy in.The wonder of learning in a different context. Community care - i.e. teddy bear everywhere in the neighbourhood, look at how communities make environments and how they can support education. It doesn’t necessarily need to be technology based.
Some questions to ask ourselves
How do we recover from failure and carry on? How do we work with a difficult situation where you don’t have the resources that you think you need to carry on? How can we best meet the needs of our most at risk students? I don’t think we can realistically solve situations now that we couldn’t solve before this, we can get insights and this experience may teach us something.
Flipped Learning Lens
One lens is never as good as multiple lenses offering different takes on a situation - flipped learning lens. An interesting point is that while Professor Welby Ings couldn’t read and write until high school, his parents never let him think he was stupid, while still being logical parents they did preserve belief in him. For some who have trouble learning in formal environments they may have found great value in the current situation.Things that may be challenging in school are not challenging in the same way. School is not the god of education, we function as educators. There is a greater realm outside of school - do the best that we can!
