[MUSIC] Welcome back, I'm pleased to be back here with you. Judy and I are thinking through these ideas that we've been exploring with you ourselves and with our network of educators around the province and around the world. We hope that you're finding what we've been exploring so far useful to you in your own thinking. Our teaching profession has been become one very much where our planning outside of the activity of learning and teaching itself is critically important. We hope you found at least one partner who you trust and respect to have conversations with. And, we hope you're having a chance to explore some of the reading and some of the websites that we've been talking about. This week were going to explore something that we find fascinating in our context, and that is a perspective about teaching and learning that comes from really three sources of knowledge really is how we think about it. And we call this, "weaving the ways", and we've written about it in a book called Spirals of Inquiry, and we hope you find this provocative in terms of thinking about your own country, your own place, because in a rich ecology we have lots of variation in our countries, and here's a way that we think about it, which you can think about as an application to your own setting. We think we need to be thinking now as educators about three ways forward, and we call these wise, strong and new. From the wisdom tradition in our context in Canada, which is very similar to other parts of the world Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, many other places. There are strong indigenous populations that have lived on the land for decades and decades in many cases - in our case, at least 10,000 years. And their learning principles have worked for them in very effective ways. And we believe that from a wisdom perspective, those of us who don't come from that background can learn a great deal. So, our aborginal people in our province have put together what they call the first people's principles of learning that you can see on the screen. I think three of them, that we might like to consider for the purposes of this week are thinking about "Learning requires patience and time". Sometimes as teachers we want to go too fast in our urge to get everything done that we want. But in our planning, I think from a wisdom perspective, we need to think about how can we build patience and time walking beside each other as learners into our pedagogy. And we also think that the learning principle that says "story is important" is critically important for us all to think about. And Judy had talked about Kieran Egan's work and in the imaginative repertoire story is critically important in teaching math, and science, and each of the disciplines. And, when we remember our great teachers, they're often people who were, in fact, powerful storytellers, and were able to bring learning and pedagogy to life through personal stories, through historical stories, they captured our interests through the power of their story. I think another thing that we're just beginning to explore in our own learning and teaching in our province that we're finding fascinating is the role of intergenerational learning. As we look more broadly outside of our schools to say, how are we using all of the resources of our community? So, one of our favorite, teaching examples in our province, is a teacher near the Rocky Mountains, who has taken-- she works with young children, five years old -- and she realised that they didn't know very many seniors in their community. They didn't have grandparents that were local, and so she made an arrangement to have her young people move physical location out of their school and into a senior zone, where for one morning a week, the little people and the senior people had a chance to interact and learn together. That's become so powerful, that now it's an ongoing feature of the work in that area, and in fact, has captured the imagination of educators across Canada. And also, the people in seniors homes now are reaching out to their schools to say, "Can we have something similar in our place?" Now, in traditional communities, intergenerational connectivity and elders helping young people learn was a way of life. We think that this is a wisdom tradition that we need to draw on. Not every country that's a part of the Commonwealth and part of the world has that indigenous tradition. But, every country that we visited has rich, cultural practices that are powerful from a learning perspective. When we were in Wales, we were very impressed with the music and the language. These are things that we consider wise to keep and as educators, we're part of helping that continue. In our culture, learning more - for those of us who don't have indigenous backgrounds - through literature is a powerful way. So, lots and lots of us now are exploring our novel list and learning more about a different world view in that way. And that's been a richness for us. A second way that we think, though, that is really absolutely makes teaching now so exciting, is that we also have a strong research and knowledge base. I mentioned earlier that both my parents were teachers, they didn't have the research knowledge - and I didn't at the beginning of my career have the knowledge about learning and about which strategies are the most effective to draw on in my early professional practice. And I wish I could go back and recreate the early part of my career with the knowledge that we now have. We call these strong ways, because they're research based and evidence informed - and they are global. That is, we think the strongest researchers are making sure that they connect their ideas over the world, and they're not just keeping it in their own countries. So that we can draw, for example, on John Hattie's incredible amount of reading that he's done and synthesizing in books like Visible Learning for Teachers, where he's shown what the research base is for those strategies that are most powerful. And we think that that's -- along with, for example, we'll be talking later on about some of the assessment for learning work that Dylan Wiliam and other colleagues have done in the assessment area, and the powerful impact when you know effect size, when you can make decisions about what you're going to learn, and how you're going to apply that in your own planning for learning and teaching. This really is a gift to us, as the profession. However, we want to draw on the wise ways because they've - in a sense - been field tested for a long time. Cultures that know how to work in a respectful way with nature, how to do deep storytelling, how to listen with real intention, how to use the oral tradition to capture history and have decision-making processes that say "If we do this, what will be the impact over the next seven generations?" That's a powerful way of thinking that we think we all need to learn from. We absolutely also want to draw on our scientific tradition of evidence that affects us because that gives us some sense of what the most intelligent directions to focus our own professional learning on. But the third area that we also think is unique, perhaps now, in the profession, is that we live in a time in the educational profession where we can also be thinking about new ways. And, we think that innovation and imagination and curiosity are for everybody. They're for young people and for us, as adults. And that we need to weave these ideas in as well. So, we're very interested-- John MacBeath has written about the children's university, and, you know, that's looking at time and space, and location and relationships and curriculum quite differently, And we think that each one of those has the opportunity for us to think in new ways. Let's just take time. In our culture, as in many cultures, it has been traditional always to teach math or reading first thing in the day when learners are fresh. What we found, and this is a school example, is that learners who get a chance to do some brisk movement first thing in the day, for example they get to dance for half an hour before they approach the task of learning to read, are much more calm, they're much more alert, they're much more selfregulated. And if they come to school anxious, they're much less anxious and they're much less depressed. This is new knowledge that's entered. Space - we have an explosion in schools that are learning how to be nature schools, so that they're not confining their learning so much to inside the school as it's always been, but they're looking at space and location in very different ways. How can they use all of the space? Including building farms in very urban locations and using farming as a hands-on activity in K to 12 in our setting, and beyond. Looking at relationships in a different way than perhaps we've seen before with the teacher at the front, and the learners gathered in front of them, expanding those relationships through the use of technology and expanding the relationships - as in the example of the young people with the elders in a senior center - why can't these people be in together? What the teacher, the researcher, what she found - her name is Barb - that the learners, the older learners, many of whom had been non-verbal because they were depressed at the stage of life they were in and many of the young learners didn't have confidence in oral language and in their beginning literacy experiences, by putting the two groups together in relationships, in powerful relationships, in meaningful relationships, in the same space outside of the school, that both groups grew tremendously. And adults who had been non-verbal found their voices again, and young people became very emotionally and intellectually connected with a significant adult with rich life experiences. Curriculum is being rethought in many, many places. In our curriculum, we're moving more to a notion of competencies, around personal and social identity, around critical thinking and, not giving up knowledge, but not focusing so much on every single outcome that's ever been placed in a curriculum being something that we would cover. Much more an exploration in depth. And we are finding some very thoughtful uses of technology, particularly to link people across areas and interests, just in the way that you're linked through this course, and hopefully with other people. But also, we have a number of teachers who are exploring using their cell phones to capture learners in action and then making short digital videos that they can use to help their family members, and the people in their extended family see how they're doing as they progress as learners. So, we think that these three perspectives, which we call weaving the ways. Taking the wisdom from our own tradition, in our Canadian, Western Canadian context, this is very much thinking about things from an aboriginal world view. Thinking about the things that we know that we really have a strong evidence base for. For example, when we talk about formative assessment, we think that evidence base that we should be coaching as teachers more than just judging all the time. There's such a strong effect size that we say to each other and to our colleagues, once we know this matters so much, not to do it is a form of professional malpractice. If we haven't heard of it, that's a different issue but when something really, really works for learners, we think we should be building it into our repertoire. And we should also be open and curious about, can some of the new technologies like the cell phone, can they really enhance our learning? If we're trying to learn a language, for example, can hearing a language on a cell phone, can that make a big difference to learners? If it can, let's explore it and we won't have effect size or research evidence, but staying open and observing, we think that that's a powerful perspective to bring to our planet. So, this is what we would encourage you to be thinking over the next week or so - what are the strengths in your particular culture? That you think the world would be a worse place if you didn't build that into your own thinking and planning? What are the places of evidence? Maybe you're curious about your assessment practices. There are some superb resources now available easily to think about how to shift that. And what are some new ways, you know, just one or two new ways that we could think about exploring with a colleague to make our learning for young people much more powerful? [MUSIC]
