What Can We Learn From a School Where Teachers Don't Teach

What Can We Learn From a School Where Teachers Don’t Teach and Children Choose Why, What, How, When and If They Want to Learn?

This week Independent Thinking founder Ian Gilbert had the opportunity to visit a very interesting school within a school in the Netherlands and took away some interesting lessons for educators everywhere.

Agora is a school within Nikée School in Roermond in the south east of the country. They regularly host visitors from across the world who are keen to learn more about their approach to learning. And it all about ‘learning’ and not ‘education’ as our host for the visit, coach (‘don’t call me a teacher’) @robhouben was at points to point out.

The driving force behind the school’s set up is that the traditional education-driven school model makes children learn things they don’t want to learn in a way that doesn’t suit them at a time that isn’t right for them and is a ridiculous process shored up by a regime of energy-sapping behaviour systems, time-consuming classroom management and testing regime that has the same effect as taking the carrot out of the ground every few days to see how well it is growing[*].

What the educators behind Agora did was to rip up the rule book about what education is all about and focus instead on the innate power children have to learn combined with the fact that responsibility and control, like respect and hugging, are things you get by giving. In Agora, children choose their own challenges and then set about achieving them inside and outside of the school environment (a remarkable student-designed environment in itself — see pic) with the support of — but not the teaching by — their coaches, qualified teachers embracing the Agora way.

On our visit, children were happy, eloquent (in Dutch and English) and motivated, loving the freedoms and real-world challenges of the Agora model and glad to be away from the ‘boring turn to page 10 and copy’ processes they had experienced elsewhere.

While there may well be no middle ground between a conventional school intent on hanging onto its traditional education-driven structures and a school like Agora, what is interesting are the ‘Seven Habits’ they say underpin this model, habits that we believe any educator can learn from, regardless of their setting:

1. Own you own development and growth

You’re in charge of your life, not us. Want us to teach you? We won’t. Want us to tell you what to do? We won’t. Want us to make sure you succeed? We won’t. So, what do you want and what are you going to do about it?

2. Discover and orientate

What is out there? What does the world have to offer and what does the world need? That’s where your challenge lies. Think beyond what you already know. What do you need in order to succeed and who and what can help you?

3. Connect

You’re never more alone than when you’re in an exam. But learning doesn’t have to be that way. Identify and develop the web of connections you need to be part of to achieve your goals.

4. Communicate

The better you are at communicating the more successful you will be. But remember, it’s a two-way street. What will you give in return when you reach out to the busy world beyond school?

5. Reflect

How can you be better in the future — what worked and what didn’t? And how can we better — what helped you and what didn’t? And what did we all learn from the experience?

6. Share

While the challenges you set yourself are yours, that does not mean you are working on your own. By sharing your learning you can benefit from the wisdom, skills and knowledge of others — young and old — as well as help them with their goals.

7. Research

What worked? What did you do, where did you go and who did you turn to in order to help you achieve what you have achieved? What sources did you cover, uncover or discover? What have you learned about learning?

This, of course, is a very quick overview of a fascinating school and we look forward to sharing more in due course. In the meantime, please do hook up with @robhouben if you want to learn more or maybe visit for yourself.

No-one, let alone Agora, is saying you have to do it like they are doing it. But what schools like this prove is, as we at Independent Thinking keep saying, there is always another way. (ITL)

Ian Gilbert founded Independent Thinking nearly 25 years ago and has lived and worked in the UK, the Middle East, South America and the Far East. He is currently based in The Netherlands.

Caring and Compassionate

Caring and Compassionate Confrontation https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/caring-and-compassionate-confrontation/ When I was in my Doctoral program, I met in one of my classes Debbie who was the Corporate Education coordinator for the university. She ran workshops for teams from profit and non-profit organizations and corporations. I had mentioned that I had a background in adventure education with a focus using outdoor team building activities. She got excited and said that the university does team building on their off campus site and asked me to join her as a facilitator. At the time I was a chain smoker, about 2 packs a day, and had been smoking like that for about 10 years. These activities were outdoors so I would smoke during these day long team building days. We would have the clients fill out evaluation forms at the end of the day and use these evaluations to do our end-of-day debriefings. During one such debriefing, Debbie had found several comments about how my smoking disturbed several of the individual clients. She looked at me with such a caring look and said, “You are so good at what you do. It’s such a shame that your smoking detracts from that.” On the way home that evening I threw away my cigarettes and never smoked again. This ended up being a peak experience in my life in that Debbie’s unconditional caring facilitated major behavioral change in me. compassion-desmond-tutu Fast forward to present day . . . this is about a 5th grade student in one of my gifted education classes. Last semester, J. was incredibly annoying. He got on both my and his classmates nerves way too often. He was a “know-it-all” with both the other students and me. He was loud, often claimed he knew the answer (he often did), and when he was correct, he would exclaim loudly, “I told you so.” When we had competitions such as with board games and Kahoot, he often won and would gloat. I had lots of one-on-one talks with him telling him that I believe that he is smart and insightful, but that he often alienates others (including me) with his comments. I emphasized that I wanted others to see his talents but with his comments and attitudes, others would not see them. I also told him that winning competitions does feel good but that he should congratulate himself silently as not to get his peers angry. We’ve been back from break for several weeks (I meet with them twice a week for a few hours each time). I noticed that he is not so loud, doesn’t make such antagonist comments, and lets me help him with technology-based assignments. On several occasions, I told him that I noticed his changes and that I am proud of him. When asked, he said he made a New Year’s resolution to make changes. Last semester I didn’t think he was listening to my suggestions, but he was! The following excerpts from the Harvard School of Education’s The Troublemakers (http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/18/01/troublemakers) support the idea of caring and compassionate confrontation. We teachers all have our Joes, our students who consistently call out, talk back, refuse to participate or sit down or stay on task. They throw our lessons into disarray, make our heads pound. They keep us up at night strategizing, worrying. How can I connect? What strategies might work tomorrow? How do we reach and teach our troublemakers? Most teachers have binders brimming with ideas: shuffled seat assignments, tracking systems, rewards for on-point behavior. But when these fail, what can you do when it’s you alone in your class balancing 29 personalities, the clock ticking and your 40-minute-long class is almost up? Some strategies for working with these kinds of difficult students include: Seek out our students’ strengths. All students have strengths. Perhaps they are avid photographers, basketball players, coders, or poets when not in school. But when it comes to our troublemakers, it can be easy for their assets to be overshadowed by behaviors that disrupt the carefully cultivated cultures of our classrooms. We cannot lose sight of these strengths. Yet it is not enough to know that our troublemakers are budding artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs. We must also seek to reframe and better understand the qualities we find most frustrating. Strategize with students. We can only guess as to why a student might call out or fail to do homework. Rather than assume we know the answer, ask. From our students we can better learn what hurdles they face and in what ways we can support their success. And in doing this we demonstrate our commitment to our students. Create opportunities for students to realize their potential and be publically recognized for their academic achievements. All students are capable of achieving remarkable things, they just might need our help to do so. In raising the stakes, but also the support, we can create opportunities for students to explore at the edge of their capabilities. And when they do succeed, celebrate these achievements. Our troublemakers are too often only publicly acknowledged for their disruptions. We can change this pattern by intentionally creating opportunities to publicly recognize their strengths.

DECEMBER 8, 2017

Incendiary Learning

We’ve always stated that meaningful learning is flammable. It starts with a spark and then ignites! You know when learning has caught fire….. agency ensues and the student drives their learning and not too much gets in their way. The difference between a flame and incendiary learning can be categorized quite easily in terms of duration, desire and determination.

A flame burns during a specific period of time (unit of inquiry) and usually reduces to embers, just like a typical fire. The student wasempowered and energized, yet there was a point that they moved on to the next thing.

Incendiary learning catches fire and stays burning bright, long after a unit of inquiry. The student is empowered and energized, and they are still in the fire taking their learning even further, long after the next thing.

A stark contrast. One is perishable and one is enduring.

The subtle difference between ‘was‘ and ‘is‘ has a remarkable difference at the same time. This changes the whole complexion of learning as the ‘energy of learning’ has been sustained and has the learner enthralled.

Last week, I visited a previous School I was at and a number of the students I taught literally, hunted me down. One of those students was Nicole.

This is Nicole as a Grade 5 student articulating to the Head of School (Adrian Watts) the message she is trying to communicate through her art piece. Her art work is an incredibly personal and powerful piece as she is expressing the importance of finding her voice and expressing who she is. The mouth in the background are all those who have told her that she can’t do anything. With Nicole at the center of her art work, her positive is radiating out and drowning out the negative and judgmental voices. This was a real turning point for Nicole in developing her self believe. She had a teacher who saw something special, and it was all about allowing her to see that too. This was step 1 in Nicole’s journey of finding herself.

The next learning experience pushed her even further. Enter the Exhibition. Nicole’s artwork was the first step she needed to take and this naturally led her to explore and better understand her next self-discovery…. putting her new transformative experience of who she is becoming into action and finding direction in the process!

This is Nicole during the Exhibition selling her ‘FABTAB’ (comes in different sizes and colours) at a market at Saigon Outcast. This is the moment that shaped her to be a confident and articulate communicator as she interacted with dozens and dozens of people interested in her entrepreneurial idea. Incendiary Learning! Students, parents, teachers and customers where truly astonished!

As I mentioned above, I saw Nicole last week. We got talking and she said that she just made her first International order to Ireland of 100 FabTabs…..  Nicole is still producing, refining and taking orders, now International orders, for her FabTab. What a journey she has been on and is still very much on. It all started from her artwork, that was the first step she took in believing in herself, because she had someone who believed in her.  We must believe in all of our students. Personalize learning, individualize learning, whatever form it takes or looks like, choose the right approach at the right time to connect, develop and strengthen their identity of who they are. Work from that point, work from within! Let students determine their own identity and not the other way around! It is our role to play a hand in nurturing and nudging them in positive ways to see their own potential.

This is exactly what I mean by Incendiary Learning! The fire is still burning bright and Nicole has stretched in ways where she can confidently talk about the learning experience….. long after the ‘unit.’ Nicole has led her learning and is proud of what she has achieved. Agency…… yeah, true Agency at its very core! This is Nicole now in Grade 7 doing a photo shot for this very piece. The relationship and connection seems just like yesterday, still very much alive too!

Again and again…. keep our eye on the ball!

https://timespaceeducation.wordpress.com/

10 Steps...

https://eduwells.com/2017/11/26/10-steps-to-climb-out-from-educations-silos/

10 steps to climb out from education’s silos

In New Zealand we do a number of things differently from the rest of the world. We like to elect female prime ministers under the age of 40, we run the most future-ready education system in the world, but most confusing of all, we start our school year in February and end it in time for our January summer! Being currently late November, I’m starting my penultimate week of the school calendar, a week in the school year that I feel is the most telling about what schools do right and wrong in developing young people.

The penultimate week means that reports and assessment are over but the goodbye party is still a week away and so it becomes the week with students reflect on the year, or do they? Most reporting and assessment judges the success to which the teaching has enabled students to retain information and to a lesser extent develop skills. I and the New Zealand curriculum like to judge the success of a child’s education differently.

• Firstly, how much can a child articulate their personal growth during the year and whether that reflection is carried out independently or requires the teacher to make it “school work.”
• Secondly, particularly in this non-assessed penultimate school week,  how much is a child inspired that they are already in the middle of a personally devised project, in or outside school, that they expect to lead somewhere. 

Killing time more than using it

In a modern world of iPads and Netflix, most young people can easily kill a week, my question here is what percentage of school children would already have a clear idea of how they would want to use the week productively. These two educational goals of personal growth awareness and inspiration are what Ken Robinson was talking about when he discussed revolutionising education (For the sake of this post, I am going to assume you have heard of the world-renowned educationalist Ken Robinson). But despite millions of readers and viewers, Robinson’s impact seems to have been relatively small so far and I wonder if this is due to educators misunderstanding his focus on the term creativity.

It’s hard to climb out of silos

When you have existed outside education (like Ken has), It is easier to see creative people as a generic term for those who solve the problems in the workplace, but in schools we use labels to divide people. In a world where maths and art exist in separate hours of the day, Robinson’s use of the word creativity would, in the minds of many educators and administrators, automatically silo his message to one of only improving the promotion of the arts in school. This has lead many administrators to believe they’re already doing roughly the right job and little real change is required. Nearly 2 decades after the publication that formed the basis of his message and fame, schools across Europe and America continue standardised education and in some places, like the U.K., increase the amount of standardised testing. 

New Zealand starts to dance Ken’s dance

Ken loves The Arts, but by too often using Dancers and Musicians as his examples, he leads too many of his silo-minded audience to not envision what his revolution for education as a whole looks like. It is here I return to my New Zealand’s education system as it is written in policy, not that all NZ schools have yet achieved it’s goals. Here I will list 10 aspects or goals listed by official New Zealand educational policy that even most kiwi teachers are struggling to come to terms with. When moving from a standardised educational model, it is understandable that these might challenge the views of educators towards what they feel their role is in schools. Here’s 10 challenging statements in NZ official educational policies and guidance:

1. Teachers and learners hold equal status in school. (Ka Hikitia, p.20)
2. Learning should not be siloed into seperate subject areas (NZ Curriculum p.16)
3. Learning is based on identified interests of students ((NZC p.44)
4. All School activity encourages Innovation, inquiry, and curiosity, diversity, and sustainability (NZC p.10)
5. Activity encourages learning how to learn. (NZC p.10)
6. Students are active participants in creating the learning environment  (TKI)
7. Students independently use self and peer assessment (TKI)
8. Students are able to reflect independently of the teacher (TKI)
9. Students evaluate and adjust their learning to meet their needs (TKI)
10. Learning activity is focused on producing people who are:
    1. Positive in their own identity
    2. Motivated and resourceful
    3. Enterprising and entrepreneurial
    4. Member of their community
    5. International Citizens
    6. Contributors to well-being
    7. Critical thinkers
    8. Creative thinkers
    9. Active seekers and creators of knowledge
    10. Informed Decision makers
    11. Resilient

Time to stop dabbling and start a fresh approach

In New Zealand, education was issued new priorities (National Curriculum) a decade ago and it is understandable that existing schools we’re going to take some time to drastically alter their habits and their understandings of roles and responsibilities. Now that many schools in New Zealand and a scattering around the world have dabbled with initiatives to augment the 20th century approach, it is now time to learn from all the schools who have tried various aspects of these new goals and design a fresh approach towards education Based around such things as the New Zealand curriculum and Ken Robinson’s revolution for education.

Here’s a request from numerous industries for the same fresh approach to education.

Here’s my summary of the NZ curriculum.

… there are more practical ideas in my book too 

Forget Guide on the Side…Students Need a Guide on the Ride

http://ajjuliani.com/forget-guide-side-students-need-guide-ride/

Forget Guide on the Side…Students Need a Guide on the Ride

By AJ Juliani, 8 comments

164

shares

ShareTweet

You may have missed it along the way, but your class has a story. You might have been caught up in the everyday grind, or overwhelmed, or possibly just enjoying the moment…but your class and your school has a story.

We eat, live, and learn with our students for almost 10 months. We watch them fail. We watch them grow. We see them connect and collaborate. We help them create and build. Yet, as the school year comes to a close it’s time to look at your class story. Because every class is different, and every story has a different ending.

Empowered students are ones that see their story continue beyond the walls and doors of our schools, beyond the seven hour days, and beyond the final bell. Empowered students craft their own learning stories, and relish the opportunity to add to this story while in school, not waiting for a graduation to do something impactful.

How to Tell a Story

I recently read Donald Miller’s eBook, “How to Tell a Story”. It was a quick read, but one that caught me a bit off guard. Sometimes we take stories for granted or think that they are “just for kids”; but as adults, we shape our lives through stories. Each day has a beginning, middle, and end. Each life situation, each job, and each year is shaped in much the same way.

The same goes for your class and the school year. Miller gives a simple story structure that is used in thousands of books, movies, and in our own lives. Let’s look at how this applies to your class:

The character in your class story could be an individual student or the entire class. Once you’ve defined the character, the next step is understanding what the problem is/was.

My Class Story

I’ve written a lot about the “20% Project” in my class a few years ago. That class story would looks like this:

The character (my students) had a problem (they were solely focused on what grade they received and not the learning experience). They met a guide (me) who gave them a plan (the 20% Project) and called them to action (learn what you want and what you are passionate about…not because I’m giving you a grade). That ended in a success (happy ending when the presentations came through with amazing work that was not tied to grades).

Inside of this class story would be many individual stories. One such story could look like this:

The character (a girl in my class) had a problem (she was afraid to share her own music with the world). She met a guide (a mentor we found through the project) who gave her a plan (you don’t need to perform in front of people at first) and called her to action (record yourself and put it up online anonymously at first…and write about it), that ended in a success (she received positive feedback online and eventually added her name and more songs).

As a teacher, we are often the guide who calls the character (class or student) to action. However, we can also sometimes point the character to a different guide (it doesn’t always have to be us) who may be able to help better for various circumstances.

The point is to view your class and each individual student as a story waiting to happen…

Crafting Your Class Story

Teaching is not always easy.

And learning can be a struggle for many of our students.

As educators, we are called to this back and forth process of teaching and learning. We push and challenge, and then support and guide. It’s easy to get lost in the grind. It’s why so many teachers get burnt out…and why so many students complain about school.

However, if we think about each school year as a journey — one that will not only come to an end, but also lead to new journeys — then our mindset changes from dealing with the grind, to crafting the best story possible. When talking to students at the beginning of the year (or throughout the course) make sure they understand the journey you are about to take, because as Miller points out, people understand complicated concepts when presented in story format:

If you want people to understand and identify with a complicated concept, tell a story about it.

Telling a story often creates a “clicking experience” in a person’s brain allowing them to suddenly understand what someone else is trying to say. As such, those who can tell good stories will create faster, stronger connections with others.

Here’s the piece that many teachers (me included) often miss.

Sometimes the main character in the story isn’t the students. Sometimes that main character is the teacher.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through a school year and had my students guide me and call me to action. In fact, the best stories are when I’m joining them on the adventure. When we are embarking together and learning by each other’s side. We may be learning different lessons along the way, but the journey is shared.

There is a popular phrase in education that teachers must be a “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage”. The thought is that we should be facilitating the learning from the side instead of preaching to students on what they should learn.

If we look at our students’ learning stories as shared journeys that we take an active role in, then we are more than a guide on the side.

We are guides on the ride.

We are active participants in this adventure, and learn just as much as our students do throughout the process.

When students are empowered to craft their own learning stories and go on shared learning journeys, they’ll often take the chance to dramatically impact their own life (and the lives of others) through what they make, create, design, and explore.

Consistency or Creativity - You Make The Choice

Thursday, 14 September 2017

Consistency or Creativity - You Make The Choice

I quite often hear teachers talk about the need for consistency in using a certain format or platform in schools.  For example, when making art work, some teachers want their students' work to all look the same because it looks more effective on their classroom walls.  Or when choosing a digital platform for school, the teachers want senior leadership teams to make a decision for the whole school - to use Microsoft 365 or Google Suite or Schoology or Edmodo or any other that they have seen in operation.

When I ask teachers why they want "consistency," they reply so that the teachers and learners will know what to do, so that everything is the same, so that everyone is on the same page etc.   I hear no really valid reason, in my books.  I dispute the need for consistency and I am all for giving teachers and learners choice.  Choose the product that works well for you at the time.  If you have the opportunity to use a variety of platforms, then pick one that you and your learners like.  As long as we perpetuate the myth that students will not know what to do, they will continue to remain in a state of learned helplessness.

So how could this work in art?  There are a variety of different techniques that learners could be exposed to.  Making videos on how to do these different techniques would provide learners the opportunity to have choice and control over what they do.  Giving them the opportunity to investigate and try different techniques is important in my view.

But then comes the practical side of things.  How can you cater for a whole lot of different techniques and media in one classroom? I am thinking that this is where the whole idea of student agency is exposed for its true meaning.  Not only do learners have choice and control of what they do and when they do it, they have to be self-organising.  They would need to organise researching and finding the resources themselves, and this will require teachers to let go of the control as well.

Good things take time.  If I were a teacher thinking of transitioning to this way of working in Art, here is what I would do.  I would take videos or collect videos of different techniques and post them up in a central place (maybe a site for example).  I would ask learners to investigate different techniques and learners could make videos about what materials were needed and how to carry out the technique.    This way the learners would become a lot more creative rather than following a set "lesson plan" for art.  I would be there to help, suggest, guide.   You know, the whole idea of guide on the side.

And yes it would be very messy.  Am I just dreaming about what could be, or is this far too impractical?



Photo:  A Duck Out of Water.

http://royalhynesight.blogspot.co.nz/2017/09/consistency-or-creativity-you-make.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Hynessight+(Hynessight)

Can e-learning be better?

http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2016/01/can-e-learning-be-better-learning.html?utm_source=CORE+MAIN+LIST&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=38b3f9ed82-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_term=0_04d3146655-38b3f9ed82-321224269

Can e-learning be better learning?

By Stephen Lowe on Jan 28, 2016 04:00 am

Photo: John Scott under CC

Every now and again something comes along that really excites you. For me that’s usually the discovery of a new connection. It’s like life is a jigsaw puzzle, and you push the pieces around on the table, and then, suddenly, about seven pieces go together all at once. That’s what happened for me this week.

You know, e-learning has its own design protocols: keep it short and to the point; make it work well on mobile devices; hook it into social media; be sure to tell a story; and, always create links to further reading. There are more, depending who you talk to.

But there are higher-level questions I always ask up front:

• Why are we doing this?
• Is this about better access to learning?
• Or, is this about better learning?
• Or, are we going to attempt both?

Almost by default, e-learning creates better access to learning. Assuming the learner has a smartphone (by 2018, New Zealand will have 90% smartphone ownership, Frost & Sullivan) then you are putting the learning materials into the learner’s hand; whether they are sitting in the classroom, riding on the bus, or lying on their bed bored on a wet Sunday.

The added value comes when you can also make it better learning.

The seven pieces of the jigsaw that fitted into my big picture were called, “The seven models of co-teaching”. I was building the Moodle component of one of CORE’s programmes of professional learning and became seduced by the content. Gosh, I thought. Golly. This could inform online learning design! The source for this materialsuggests four types of co-teaching, but the principles are the same.

Let’s go off down a side road for a minute — well, a cul-de-sac really — and look at how online learning design hasn’t changed much since its early beginnings in CBT Computer Based Training in the 1990s. Read a passage of text, answer a quiz. That’s just not true, I hear you cry! We do engaging videos with images of people talking and moving their hands overlaid on PowerPoint slides, and then we have a quiz, and a forum where the learners can discuss their ideas. I rest my case that e-learning design has not changed much, only the media have: ingest by some means this chunk of content, do a quiz. Nobody uses the forum anyway; only where a lot of resource is poured into it.

Admittedly, that’s a bit of a jaundiced view of e-learning design, and I am not trying to deny that there are people doing a whole lot better than that. But they are not the majority. Our Learning Design team at CORE are always looking for new ways to make e-learning easy to access and better learning. But in reality, change is incremental not radical.

So now, let’s look at the seven models of co-teaching, the content about modern learning practices that had grabbed my attention.

I want to roll the first three into one:

One teach; one observe — Large groups co-teaching strategy which is useful when doing things like gathering data for teaching as inquiry.

One teach; one drift — One teacher leads the instruction while the other moves around the learners, checking for understanding, clarifying, checking correct process etc.

One teach; one support — One teacher takes more of a lead role, with the second teacher providing something that complements or enhances the instruction.

Imagine one teacher teaching in the online space, with lectures, texts, and readings, and the other teacher moving about in the forum acting as a catalyst to discussions: challenging ideas, teasing out the thinking, offering further resources tailored to the individual student’s interests. Those forums could suddenly come to life and become vibrant learning communities.

---

Team teaching — Both (all) teachers take an equal role in leading the instruction of a large group.

I have actually experienced ‘Team teaching’ on a Coursera course Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects. Professors Dr Barbara Oakley and Dr Terrence Sejnowski took roughly equal turns to deliver the video lectures. Coming from different disciplines (Oakley is an engineer, Sejnowski is a biologist), but teaching the exact same subject, they gave participants two distinct approaches to the material. Oakley came across as a little wacky at times, but the more conservative Sejnowski endorsed her ideas. They complemented each other well.

---

Parallel teaching — Small group strategy where groups of learners cover the same material with different teachers.

Imagine if two teachers taught the exact same material to two discrete groups? That’s a little like the Caves Tour model of e-learning design. The metaphor describes participants queuing for a guided tour of the caves (materials), the next tour starts soon and each group goes around together, but separate from other groups. E-learning like this usually runs in a weekly cycle and each week the teacher covers a new topic. Suppose as an associated activity the two groups did teachback in a forum? The slightly different take on the subject as described by each of two teachers would lend a gnarl and a richness that could be compelling. The metaphor holds. It’s like visitors to the caves exchanging highlights of the tour in the carpark:our guide said this, our guide did that! Did you see the stalactites? Did you put your hand in the freezing water?

---

Station teaching — Small group strategy where groups of learners cover different material with different teachers.

Consider a branching approach where one third of the students learn one third of the material with one of three teachers. The other two study teams learn their third with two other teachers, all run in parallel. Then they all come together in a forum at the end and assemble the three parts. It would take a lot of orchestration and effort on the part of the teachers. It would require buy-in from the learners. But, if it could be made to work, it would create a rich and rewarding learning experience that had a high chance of sticking.

---

Alternative teaching — One teacher leads the instruction for a larger group, which frees up another teacher to work with a small group on a very specific learning need.

Experienced online facilitators can manage large groups of students, especially if the course has been well designed. Twenty-five participants is often cited as the largest viable cohort. But I think that, for a short duration at least, an online teacher might manage fifty. Freeing, perhaps, a colleague to develop the next topic or module. In the next term or semester the two might exchange roles, because a change is as good as a rest. A two-person team working in this way would have long legs.

---

The challenge is to find management who are not expecting e-learning to create staffing efficiencies and save them money. For teachers (tutors, trainers) to get sponsorship for approaches that will make learning better at a greater cost conjures up camels and the eyes of needles.

If you think of e-learning design as designing spaces in which to learn, this approach may lead you to some new thinking and some new ways of doing things.

Links

Dr Richard Villa, Effective Co-Teaching Strategies

Coursera Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects (Professors Dr Barbara Oakley and Dr Terrence Sejnowski)