Today I attended another fantastic Leaders of Learning session. I feel very lucky to be part of a group of people from my cluster who are diverse, supportive, thoughtful, caring and pretty funny. The thinking from many of them challenges me and I always come away feeling very privileged (and having learnt a lot) to be part of this group.
Today was no different, however, it was a day that I was especially looking forward to because I had missed out on 'The Day' (as we are calling it) where the group spent 7 hours unpacking the Learn Create Share pedagogy.
I had begun to grow my understanding through conversations with some of the members of the group and because of my involvement in the Delving Deeper presentation but I need more.
Prior to this session my understanding was:
Learn - what we know (prior knowledge) and what we need to know.
Create - All the things we create to share our learning.
Share - How we put our 'creation' out into the world.
But I knew it to be a little more than this, not linear but circular, all interconnected and intertwined.
This is now my current understanding (and I still don't think I have it embedded yet) based on our conversations and discussions:
Create = using and combining prior knowledge and new knowledge to synthesize the learning. It involves learners proving their understanding, creating brand new knowledge and learning skills as they create.
Share = connecting and collaborating with the purpose to gain feedback/feedforward and it is done on the learners' own terms. It's about the connections with others, their own agency and feedback/feedforward.
I believe I witnessed this in action today when two Year 8 girls worked near me putting together a video to explain bedmas to others. They came up with a plan, asked for permission to use a cell phone to create the video, worked on the video by discussing, correcting, editing as they clarified each part of bedmas until they had a finished product. Is this not a great example of Create & Share in action?
And finally, Learn.
Learn created a lot of discussion amongst the group, as those of us that hadn't been at 'The Day' had a different understanding of it. Learn isn't learning, learning is embedded in the whole process. Learn really should be called knowledge because it is about the prior knowledge the learners have.
For example when you take a guided reading session and you start the lesson with "What do you know about ..." you are at the Learn part of the pedagogy. Everyone shares and the group has then a shared knowledge. As soon as you pick up the text and start reading you are in create. Basically, 10% of a lesson sits in Learn. As educators, we provide access to Learn when we provide resources for children to access.
Now I'm thinking about Learn Create Share in terms of time spent to help me with the thinking around this. 10% for Learn, 70/80% on Create and 20/30% on Share.
Therefore my next step in my own learning and understanding is to begin to think about this as I work to improve the work the students are accessing. I also need to be able to explain it to my teaching partner and further to this help the whole staff have a shared understanding of this. The journey continues.
So School Leaders out there, have I got this right, or what thinking do I need to tweak?
