At one point, I realized that I was teaching the course in a way that was sort of timeless.
And it's really about, I really wanted to think about it much more in a way that was
set in context - of today and the history of education in the past. And I wanted to
do that in a way that felt like, again I was embodying the constructivist principles that
I really think are important to learning. And so the first thing I brought in was Current
Events. I wanted students to bring in, to understand what's going on in the world of
education today because it's changing very rapidly in terms of what we know about teaching
and learning, what technologies we're using for teaching and learning, and the policies
surrounding all this, and people's attitudes towards it.
So rather than sort of me... sort of telling them about this, I wanted the students to
take some ownership over that, and we brought in Current Events. And so students... investigate
current events, choose things that are important and meaningful to them, and bring it into
the classroom for discussion. And then, over time, we've sort of changed the way that we
do that, so that we think about the ways that - can we use the online components more effectively
so that students are doing some of the... thinking about the issues before they get
to class, and then use the class time for something that's unique?
For the Current Events, we actually think that there's enough that you can get out of
an article and some questions online and some online forums so that actually some of that
conversation can happen before they even get to class. So, in those cases, there's a current
events article that goes up - usually relatively short - and some questions that are posed
with it, and students need to read the article and respond to those questions.
And then what happens in class is a follow-up to that. So sometimes there's themes that
happened in student responses. Sometimes there's an issue raised that was, that maybe the people
who were responsible for the Current Events that week didn't think of in advance. And
that's a chance to kind of follow up on some of that.
And this year actually for the first time we were actually saw, started seeing some
groups do some interesting activities that were follow-ups to those as well. Not just
pure discussion, but activities that sort of brought out some of the big issues, or
sort of pointed out some similar thinking or dissimilar thinking that was happening
in the class.
There was some that were sort of like voting with your feet. So it was a matter of like
looking at distributions on... in terms of viewpoints on issues, where, you know, people
who thought like "Yes" about one issue and "No" about one issue went to different sides
of the room. And then there was some debate around the issues around there. So it was
a nice way to sort of call out, "OK, there's distributions on issues. There's people that
think different things about this, but there's reasons for that, and let's have some dialogue
within people that have common thoughts, and people who have disparate thoughts as well."