ICTlogy

Seminar on innovation in education: making up a hypothetical case of educational innovation
Chairs: Quim Brugué, UAB-IGOP.

In groups of 4-5 people make up a hypothetical case of educational innovation. This is what happened in my group.

Needs

• Autonomy.
• Collaboration.

Deficits, challenges

• Compartmentalization of learning.
• Compartmentalization of the curriculum.
• No work for competences, focus on certification. Assessing content vs. skill-centred processes (not skills).
• Teaching skills, professional identity. Specialization vs. pedagogical skills.
• Excessive focus of the educational system towards the university. Academicist vision.
• Lack of answers for diversity, for flexibility.
• The system focuses on providing answers, not on putting good questions.
• Censorship to critical thinking, servitude to the authority.
• Passiveness, inertia, comfortability.

Conceptual turn

• Lay out questions instead of providing answers.
• Projects instead of subjects. Multidisciplinarity.
• Work teams instead of class groups.
• Oral exposition.
• That the students prepare topics and share what they know. That students can bring in their own knowledge. Learning with a purpose.
• Cotutoring.

Proposals for intervention

• Importance of the role of student. Empowering the student.
• Change of roles of teachers.
• E.g. students leading their own assessment meetings with teaching staff and parents.

Operational turn, organizational changes.

• Changes in the learning environments, that not everything “happens in presence of” the teacher.
• Shift towards personal learning environments (PLEs).
• Spark learning through questions (the teacher puts questions, instead of providing answers).
• Be able to welcome questions (the teacher is able to manage the questions of the students).
• Transform assessment centred in learning (of skills).
• Change schedules to generate a reflective practice of the teaching staff upon what they are doing.

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