facilitator’s log (12541 primary)

last friday, we held our first session of ICT for SDL and CoL Clinic for primary school teachers (TRAISI code: 12541, or 12541-00003). as the traisi code suggested, this is the 3rd round of primary clinic. the first round was facilitated by dear wu jing cher, and the second round was facilitated by me when wj left for her full-time studies.

this 3rd round of primary clinic returns me to a dual-facilitator role – to facilitate the learning of both teachers who signed up for the course, and the instructor of the course (Wen Yun who joined us to take up the position vacated by WJ). unlike the previous round of handholding, WY is expected to conduct this course without a chance to ‘witness’ nor much time to co-construct the (ideal) conceptions of the course.

as a reminder to self, this blended learning course is designed in attempt to work towards 2 ideals: 1. to find a new approach towards CL teachers’ PD (tying short-term courses, with a larger CoP in the long run); 2. to be a student-centered course situated within a social constructivist paradigm, where learning is facilitated through discourse (both f2f & online).

to facilitate our further conversation, in this log, i would like to capture some observations and thoughts. the ‘source’ of these ideas came from our conversations prior and after the f2f session, and observations during the f2f session).

  • “我是传统的师范毕业生。”
  • – this line came up i think at least 2 or 3 times during our conversations. i am not sure if WY realised she had emphasised this idea many times, but my guess is this is a reflection of an internal struggle with theoretical understanding, and existing practices in teaching. “传统” & “师范” connote a teacher-centered, teacher talk-dominated, learning = passive copying and listening type of teaching. the source of internal struggle probably came from (1) her deep understanding of CSCL principles based on her phd studies, (2) the ideal #2 of this course that demand (1) to be put into practice. this is perhaps a reflection of the saying ‘expoused beliefs is one thing; actual actions is another’.

  • “my beliefs about learning have changed, but i may have difficulty putting it into practice” (approximation, can’t recall exact words)
  • – yes, what i thought of when i heard this is “if action is powered by beliefs, actions thus reflect our beliefs”. if we are unable to do certain thing, is it that our beliefs have not changed to the extent we thought it would have changed? change in beliefs over time will be something useful to track (researcher’s talk) 😛

  • “我从来没有感觉上课那么没底儿。”
  • – what does “底” mean? my guess is fixed structure coupled with fixed load of contents to talk about and pushed into the black boxes of the participants? clinic has a course structure, so structure is not the issue. so we are left with the contents part. following the student-cantered ideal, we will be facilitating discussions and learning in ideas that participants would raise in the course of our interactions. this is really the most unsettling feeling that i get based on my personal experience. some qns that have ever passed through my mind include,

    “what if there’s things that i cannot answer?”;
    “what if participants think badly about this ‘teacher’ who doesn’t appear to know anything becos s/he doesn’t spoon-feed us the textbook defns, and provide us with loads of contents and resources?”;
    “what if there are important ‘learning’ to be taken away but the idea doesn’t surface from the participants at all?”

    for the 1st qn, i convinced myself that no one can truly know everything, but it’s important that we are willing to go and find out things that we don’t know, and know how to go abt finding out what that we needs to find out. and this is an important lesson about ‘learning’ that i want my participants to takeaway, if they takeaway; and i do this by modelling the behaviours (it’s OK to say i don’t know; i demonstrate how i go about finding out abt new things; i demonstrate that learning takes TIME, a forgotten or simply ignored fact in the production mode that we conduct teaching in schools (too little time, too many things to be taught and assessed. 填鸭填鸭再填鸭; stuff, stuff, stuff)

    for the 2nd qn, this is the greatest ‘risk’ that we have to take, especially if participants possess naive personal epistemology, and deeply entrenched in a content-cum-resource loaded expectation of ‘learning’. Victor mentioned he had his fair share of such experience, cos we all need to face the ‘reality’ of SFT. based on my experience so far, i just have to hold on to my beliefs and ideals, and trust that teachers will be able to see and appreciate it at the end of the day. if there are some starfish that i couldn’t move this time, it’s just not enough time i have to engage them. learning takes time; changing of beliefs take even more time i believe (and i think we can find literature to support this, which i haven’t really done so, yet.)

    for the 3rd qn, over the past 3 secondary clinic and 1 primary clinic that i have facilitated, i am not so worried about this anymore. cos if the issue is so important (for e.g., conception of ‘affordance’, TPACK), we will be able to make links to it one way or another. probably that’s why as teachers, we always say teaching is a science, but is also an art. weaving is the ‘art’ part.

below is a record of things that i caught my attention (incl. being shown, being said):

– defining what is ‘e-learning’, and relate it to MOOC
– “ICT=vitamin是相对主流的用法。”
– “这些原则(ref to the 4 interaction guidelines)你的学生也可以用。”
– “我们可以聚焦一些课题来讨论。” (this is not suggested by WY)

a few other notes:
– too little time is left to go through the details of the activities, and check for understanding that participants know what to do where to do when to do what
– there’s a rich repertoire of ideas surfaced by participants that i would use to build on. use them to raise questions to keep them thinking, no answers’ required there and then.

that’s all for now (:

post-workshop thoughts

yesterday’s our first Clinic session for primary school CL teachers (TRAISI: 12541). we have a total of 16 participants (13 prior signup; 2 walk-ins; 1 sit in). the largest class size we’ve experienced is 10 prior to this. 6 more participants may possibly change many things, especially the discourse dynamics (are the participants able to interact well? are posts/threads from 16 an overwhelming number? how many of them will be proactive contributors, and thus influencing the answers to the previous 2 qns?)

on the whole WJ is steady, and facilitated the session well for a first-timer. no doubt some teachers appeared hesitant on the “outcomes” of the workshop, we managed to close the first session with full participation in the first introductory post (帖子A), as evident in the df.

after looking at WJ’s reflection, i begin to have a deeper appreciation of ‘struggles’ she’s experiencing as a facilitator of such dynamic/fluid workshop that’s set to achieve broad outcomes (cf. lesson objectives). coupled with an audience that may be so familiar (and fixated) with SIOs, it’s not an easy session to facilitate.

on my part, i am also thinking of what i should do more, in terms of handholding future facilitator who would like to try out our blended learning approach.

things that i have done for/with WJ:

1. sharing of past workshop resources
2. reviewing and planning of activities (incl. schedule, instructions in handout)
2. logistical assistance (online: including setting up of coursespace wiki & df, ironing out of course publisher, setting up of fb groups; classroom: furniture arrangement, electrical wirings)

one single thing that stood out which i felt strongly i could have done more:
– to do a recap of the set of slides, and clarify the meaning and the link between slides starting from 缘起 part. i did not take this step as i safely assumed that these ideas would have been clear to WJ as she has sat in two previous sessions. a good reminder for me to rethink how to make my presentation clearer the next time in a single round. i felt it is important to make them see (or at least let them relate to some past experience) on the usefulness of pure f2f workshops, regardless of length. then we follow to sell why our experimental approach may work better.

– my failure to do this also affected the explanation of the 2-part design (Clinic-Studio). making a clearer emphasis of the design, and how the two are related yet focused differently, may also help to allay the doubts of some participants on the ‘takeaways’.

教学相长 as we often say. in the process, may we both improve on our facilitation skills. that’s all for now, “more later!” (Wu, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) (:

lake photo(acknowledgement: photo by LoggaWiggler)