Time flies when you’re having fun
I am now on day 15 of a stint away from home, and my own bed is looking more luxurious every day. However it has been great being out in the clusters again, and seeing real classrooms and real teachers working away at the development. All the teachers I meet are goal set on improving opportunities for kids and are generally striving to achieve that. While it is great to see the focus on moving forward, there is still that niggling feeling that the direction is not yet fully clear and that at some point there is going to be need of a strong wind or a storm to alter course and point them in a new direction that will actually turn out to be better.
I still often hear people saying that the PD needs to be renamed so that people actually focus on the right things - I would have to disagree. All that is needed is a broadening of what ICT really encompasses, and a clearer focus on what the world is really like these days and how our students of today will be required to work in the future. If we remove the ICT wording, we could get a back to basics mentality, whereas what we need is a forward to the new basics mentality. We need to keep strongly focused on learning and what that entails and the processes (ICT = process just as much as product) that will lead us there. Currently there is too much focus on the activities and the stuff that goes on in classrooms, and still a shortage of reflection on what is really being achieved. There is talk about key competencies, and even goals that relate to these, but few are really focused on deciding, for example, what a self managing learner is really like and what skills and attributes we need to explicitly teach in order for them to become self managing. The vocab alone does not suddently produce the goods.
Work on development of a school curriculum aligned to the NZ Curriculum (which should have stopped being new by now), should create the opportunity for schools to really focus on what it is that they believe and want to work towards with learning. The process of consultation, information and discussion that is part of that curriculum design, could then also focus on what the learning looks like, what needs to be inputted and how teachers and students can monitor and reflect on their progress towards the goals at each level of the school.
Good things are happening out there, but lets keep sharpening the focus, and also sharpen ways of monitoring how much learning is really occurring.
