Student agency, student-centred learning, learner inquiry, reflection, learning how to learn, parental interest and participation, and making sense of the real world, all the good things that education should and could be, have been enabled through the Covid 19 pandemic level 4 lockdown.
We all know that school is a societal construct to enable all children to participate in education but as the economy and social organisation has been evolving away from industrial models, through information societies and into knowledge societies, not all has changed at school. And so this lockdown should not be seen as a restriction of education, it is an opportunity to see how things could be so different if we are prepared to make changes.
Let's look at each of the "good things' listed above to start with.
Simplified,
student agency is when learners have choice and control over what they learn. Perfect in the home situation - let learning fit in with what you are doing at home!
Student-centred learning is when learners seek out and find their own understandings, rather than being given screeds of instructions on what to do or tasks to do. Students build their own understanding rather than being told the answers.
Learner inquiry (inquiry learning) often arises with a "hook" - a video or a book or a discussion which piques the learner's interest. It is often embedded in a framework which enables the learner to focus on answering questions that they are interested in finding out the answers to in relevant and meaningful contexts.
Reflection is an important part of this process - what have I learned, how have I learned it and what else should/could I learn? Frameworks often give learners the structure through which they can learn about anything - that is, they are
learning to learn.
Parental interest and participation is something that parents often feel less confident about. Parents are the first educators, we know this well. They help their children learn and develop through a wide variety of contexts and experiences to grow their literacy skills in oral language, reading and numeracy. For example, they spend time developing attention to language, symbols and texts, and they also instill social norms through their behaviours. And then they send them off to school, and while they may support them to develop even further, they may often feel that they are really on the sideline or do not have the expertise to be the "primary educator."
Now parents are forced into a situation that is beyond their control - they
are the primary educators in lockdown. They are the people that the learner sees every day, the person that their children (the learners) look to for advice and direction on what they should be doing to be "educated". Here is the opportunity to
make sense of the real world. What nature stories are the children learning now? They are having more time than ever out and about in their yards or going for walks. What observations are they making? Now is the time to encourage children to think, by asking them open-ended questions. Here are a few that can be applied to many different contexts.
- What do you think about that?
- Why do you think that?
- What do you think Hemi thinks about that?
So we ask our parents - have your children been managing themselves, getting themselves out of bed at a time you have agreed, helping out with household routines, being where they should be, following the routines of washing their hands, having a bath, eating healthily, getting their clothes into the wash or cleaning up after they have made that fort out of blankets and chairs? Are your children participating and contributing to the household conversations? Are they ensuring that everyone has a part to play including them?
Recognise a few of those phrases? Yes, these are the key competencies that our curriculum aims to develop in every child in New Zealand. If parents can focus on continuing to ensure that their children work on these, then their education will be in great shape.
In addressing the New Zealand Curriculum, teachers have always been urged to focus firstly on the front of the document, not on the achievement objectives of each curriculum area.
Teachers may start to focus on achievement objectives for their learners when they are teaching online. When they do this, I can only hope that they will be clear about learning outcomes i.e. what they need to learn and why, rather than the way they learn it. While teachers around the country are working hard for online learning to be a thing, it is also important to reassure parents that they do continue to educate their children in so many ways. After all, education does not start at the gate of the school and stop when the learners go home. Children learn constantly. They will at school and they will at home.
It is also the time to learn to relate to others. Are you showing respect for people from different cultures or circumstances to your own? As Jacinda Ardern says - are you being kind? How are you demonstrating that kindness? Do you appreciate the kindnesses shown to you by others?
Are you continuing to use language, symbols and texts to make sense of the world, by reading, allowing your child to read and write about their days at home? Can your child tell a story about a photograph that they took with your phone? Can they make sense of digital clock faces, pedometers, visual representations of data that they see on the television or on the internet? Keep the oral development going - try a challenge for all of your family of learning a new word every day. Model learning. Keep repeating that phrase, well I learned something new today.
The most important thing for parents to remember is that their children will be alright and that they will continue to learn, just in different ways and in different contexts.
So is there anything that learners are missing out on during lockdown? Yes, a few things but that's a subject for another day.
In today's connected world, parents should not be afraid of their children missing out on education. They are not missing out on learning and that's what it is all about.
