New Wave Pedagogy

I have been hearing a lot about how the pandemic could positively impact people’s behaviors. I am an optimistic and positive person, so I hoped for the same too. After more than a semester of not going out, I expected to notice changes once I resumed social interactions. I hoped for more empathy, environmental friendliness, kindness, and appreciation. Sadly, I left my house and exposed myself to the same crazy drivers, lousy customer service, and littered streets as usual.

Pretty negative beginning, I am aware. However, it doesn’t mean that nothing has changed. Here in Panama, technology has made many things more efficient and has even saved costs. To mention a few examples:

• The government, and we taxpayers, are not spending $3,000,000 on printing Social Security slips. Now we can get them online in digital format.
• Before the pandemic, only one of the country’s supermarkets claimed to offer a home delivery service, which, by the way, was not efficient. Now, even the smallest supermarkets get your order to your place in a reasonable time.
• Opening a bank account here was complicated even when doing it in person. Now you can open a bank account from an app on your phone.
• Only one bank promoted the use of contactless credit cards or digital credit cards on your cell phone, and now most banks do.

We can affirm that there have been advances in technology and that these have helped facilitate processes. But only that. How we use these platforms and the culture surrounding them still have a long way to go. Let’s use the last scenario as an example. When paying for something, most cashiers will ask you to give them your card. Then, they will either insert it into the chip reader slot or, in the best of cases, hold it close to the scanner. Indeed, a significant tech advance, but an utter lack of understanding of its purpose or benefit (or of what contactless means).

We can also observe this behavior in education. The need for virtual learning forced most educational institutions to adapt (a minority of which can do this in Panama). We approached this need with a trial-and-error mindset, implementing an improvised or experimental infrastructure, which has allowed us to keep our educational system running. And that’s about it. We have focused all of our energies on learning infrastructures and platforms. Still, we are just scratching the surface of what this transformation can do for our students and teachers.

The achievements are notable. There are now infinite recently developed and already tested resources to solve many problems that we didn’t even know we had. Schools have more equipment and understand the importance of having these resources. Teachers understand the value of being proficient in the use of technology and are more skilled in it. It makes me wonder just how much more we can achieve by riding this wave. KOWABUNGA!

My COETAIL journey has found me regularly reflecting on this and has provided me with tools to promote these necessary changes. In my previous post, Make your Frame Work!, I explored different educational technology frameworks such as SAMR and TPACK. Implementing these frameworks may be a good starting point for moving us toward using and integrating technology in a more authentic and meaningful way.

What comes next?

Easy! The next step is ‘new pedagogies.’ Just kidding, not easy at all.

What’s that?

‘New pedagogies’ are great forms of teaching and learning that happen more genuinely, as their nature moves closer to real life and implies a lot of doing and creating. Ideally, this doing makes a difference by generating solutions to our world’s current problems. I see this as more learning and less teaching as the student-teacher partnership evolves. The teacher becomes a discovering partner, an equal creator of knowledge. They guide the learning process but are also recipients of knowledge, as opposed to vessels full of it. These models foster ‘deep learning.’ Now, let’s dive into it.

What is Deep Learning?

I find it hard to define deep learning concisely. I believe we can describe it as the learning outcome we get from the best education possible. Deep learning occurs when best practices are the only practices; when the school embraces the use of proven-to-work frameworks; when teacher-student relationships become partnerships; when activities and projects are of the students’ interests and connect to the real world. When these conditions, among others, are present and balanced, they create the perfect fertilizer for deep learning to flourish.

In my current school, a lot is happening that embraces these new models of education. About three years ago, we started a whole school initiative around inquiry-based learning. Different cohorts met in the form of a book club to discuss “The Power of Inquiry” by Kath Murdoch.

This book club was part of our then newly implemented Professional Learning Pathway process. The inquiry cycle guided our inquiry question for a whole year and still does. The structure was well designed and promoted interaction among colleagues from other divisions that we would never have had the chance to interact with otherwise.

Posters with engaging visual representations of the inquiry cycle were printed and placed in every classroom. Looking back at these, I see how this process generated a change in our culture. We are inquirers first, and we model that for students. We speak that language as a community.

The school offered another great option, an on-campus Project-Based Learning (PBL) Professional Development (PD). ISP allowed me to attend this PBL course from the Principals’ Training Center when they offered it in Rome.

There I found out that the presenters were coming to Panama, specifically to ISP, to provide our staff with the same PBL training. These opportunities pave the road toward deep learning for the teachers at our school, providing a different lens on how student learning should look.

During the training, I learned about a resource I love: the UnBoxed Project Cards from High Tech High. This set of cards contains project-based learning ideas for many learning areas and includes a teacher and student reflection.

PBL and inquiry-based learning have a lot in common. One of these commonalities is that both create experiences based on great open-ended questions.

At ISP, at least in Middle School, teachers are expected to include guiding questions in their unit planner and make these questions visible. I see this happening in plenty of classrooms, and I have helped teachers refine their questions to make them more open-ended.

There are still many growth areas, but it is a big deal that these practices are a reality for students and teachers. We set our professional goals in the form of an inquiry question. We have the opportunity to choose our own and follow a path through the inquiry cycle. When we were at school, we posted all of these questions outside our classrooms and offices for students, colleagues, administrators, or visitors to see.

When I was teaching Math, I was lucky to work with a curriculum that, even though rigorous, fostered (with some adjustments) inquiry and deep learning. The connections to the real world were visible inside and outside of the classrooms, as on my Math Fails bulletin board.

When co-planning, many of my colleagues already consider these best practices. For those who are not there yet, I try to expose them to these ideas. My goal is to create more colleague partnerships to help my school put together the pieces to dive entirely into deep learning.

Let’s do real things that matter, authentic stuff that makes a difference today.