How can we ‘Change Learning’?
I’m over in Melbourne this week at the Education Changemakers Educhange conference, with innovative teachers, school leaders and changemakers from all over Australia (and the world!). Over three days, the conference is split into a suite of 5-hour Masterclasses, a day of keynotes and break-out sessions, and an ‘Innovation Spotlight’ event on the final evening.
First up, I headed along to a Change Learning Masterclass, which left me with a lot of ideas and one burning question (more on that below).
The Change Learning stream (designed mostly for teachers) wasn’t necessarily my natural home, but across this year, I’ve been getting more and more interested in innovative curriculum and pedagogy — in simple terms, what we teach and how we teach it. So I decided to take the plunge, and I’m so glad I did.
In this session we were joined by some serious star-power as far as education goes — Laura McBain of High Tech High and now Stanford d.school, and Eddie Woo of Youtube and Australian of the Year fame, to start with. We also heard from Justin Hill and Tim Osborne, who had some great insights from St Paul’s College in Brisbane where they’ve been putting innovative teaching into practice.
The Masterclass focused on Project-Based Learning (PBL), in a very practical way — we were led through a design process to create our own units of work. For me this was less relevant (though I used it as a chance to flesh out a vague idea for an EQ experience design club that’s been bouncing around…), but it was great to get an insight into the process behind a great PBL unit. One of the most interesting comments was that “the process is the content”. Often we just assume that students know how to work in groups, set goals, track progress, and resolve conflicts within a project, but if we’re not teaching them these skills explicitly, we’re not setting them up for success.
The key question that came up for me in all of this, though, was broader than PBL. In our design process we started by setting some learning objectives, then coming up with ideas for what a project might look like to help us reach them. But what was missing for me was the question of why we would decide to take a PBL approach in the first place.
Go with me here. Let’s assume that the role of the modern teacher is to design and facilitate learning experiences, rather than just deliver content. It seems to make sense that different kinds of learning experiences are going to be good at achieving different kinds of learning outcomes, right? A group project done well might be great for learning teamwork, and rote learning might be great for learning times tables (leaving aside the question of whether that’s a useful thing to learn).
If that’s true, it would make sense for a teacher to start by deciding on learning objectives, and then to ask themselves “what kind of learning experience is most likely to achieve that objective?” I asked every teacher I could find in the room about this process (including Laura, Eddie, our facilitators, and fellow attendees) to find out more. Incredibly, all of their answers were a variation on “yeah, they don’t really teach you that.”
This isn’t to say that the Masterclass wasn’t useful — I think leaving with a juicy question to explore is probably better than leaving feeling smart but not curious. I’m sure I can’t be the first one to have wondered about the question above, so my quest now is to find out who’s thinking about this, and what I can learn from them. One of Eddie Woo’s final tips for the day was “PBL isn’t always the answer,” and I really want to know what process teachers can use to find the ‘answer’ for any given learning objective.
Maybe someone at the main EC18 event will be able to help!
If you want to learn more about project-based learning, a lot of the resources from the Masterclass were adapted from the Buck Institute of Education, so that’s a great place to start!