Category: 17. Teachers’ PD

it’s exactly the 2 weeks’ mark from the first lesson of the 2nd run of ICT for SDL and CoL Clinic course that i am facilitating. this time round, i have 7 participants, 3 less than the first. the make up of this group is very unique: 2 CL master teacher colleagues, 2 ex-NIE students, and 3 other eager pairs of eyes that i met for the first time. it’s always exciting to befriend new fellow CL teachers and catch up with ‘old’ CL teacher friends/colleagues alike (:

so how did the online interactions go so far? to-date, 3 online activities i’ve designed as part of the online interactions were initiated. the 1st introductory post was completed without much difficulties, and the “1+2” interactions too. good job teacher participants!

the 2nd post on SDL streamed in more slowly. there was not a single post past the deadline. i emailed a gentle a reminder and was glad to see one post appearing soon after. and another, and another, and soon the rest came in. all except one, cos the teacher is away in shanghai on a study trip. there was a case of OPAL script causing trouble, and a participant lost all her effort and time in the posting work! need to remember to highlight such possibility to participants in future, and suggest some precautionary measures. my bad for forgetting to do this earlier 🙁   let’s hope the repost will come in soon.

content-wise for the SDL posts, there were some exchange of ideas and a couple of questioning. more than the first round in fact. however, critical questioning that attempts to “dig deeper” into underlying meaning, assumptions, and conceptions are still in lacking. my hypotheses include (1) teachers are more comfortable with being friendly towards fellow teacher/participants; critical questioning steps outside such cultural norm, and (2) teachers are not familiar with the ‘expectation’ to pose questions to further clarify things that may not been spelt out clearly, yet. i’ve tried to post some questions to dig deeper. let’s see if the behaviour gets replicated.

the 3rd activity is the first of a series of weekly reflections. it’s meant to be completed two days ago. but to-date, there’s only 1 piece of “我觉得……” up. it’s posted by Sean, he who asked if “participants need to post reflections, do ‘teacher’ also need to also conduct reflection” during the first f2f session. looks like this could be taking up the 2nd position 😛    i’ve sent out another email reminder. and 3 participants already responded to my instruction to acknowledge receipt.

tmr marks the start of the 4th online activity — threads on CoL. but before that, i hope more weekly reflections will come in (:

acknowledgement: Photo by marionberaudias

一个星期又过去了，这一周的线上交流活动在开始前主要做了两项更动，一是将廿四小时的规则从行动转为常态；二是将当周话题从一周延长至两周，即取消帖子D的活动。

这一周我观察到只有三位老师有“动静”，所以便给其余的老师发了电邮问候一下情况。一位老师病了，一位老师家中出了点状况，其余的老师都正好碰上学校里一周特忙，绝对可以理解和体会。想到这里，应该探讨是否24小时较不适合在职教师的作息，或许48小时会精神压力没那么大？ something to think about and tweak during the next round in october.

此时脑海里早已开始筹备下星期三我们见面时要聊的内容了。重点是回顾与总结这一个月来的经验。当然还是得谈谈 SDL、CoL、ICT的问题，毕竟是这门课的主要课题。希望老师们能接受没有“定案”的分享。最后一块就是延续这门课的交流部分，即第二门课Studio和CoP的事了。

希望接下来一周交流空间与反思园地的活动能持续直到我们再度见面为止 (：

2 weeks have been put behind for my new Clinic course at SCCL, and today marks the end of the 2nd discussion forum posting (帖子B). my observations for the past 2 weeks are as follows:

1. the 10 teacher participants are highly motivated & on-task, and all of them have shared a lesson example as 帖子B and most of them had reviewed 2 peers’ shared lesson and posted questions and comments. **WELL DONE TEACHERS**

2. content of 帖子B is however missing in focus. while some teachers have highlighted 不满意的地方。But none of these are related to self-directed learning (SDL). it appears that teachers have no issue with carrying out SDL. is this true? why is this so?

3. the discussions were superficial. teachers only agree with each other, and there were no alternative views? why?

4a. i have sent out 2 brief emails (and cross-posted to the DF). for most teachers, i do not know if they have read my email and acted on it.

4b. in a related note, i also do not know how often the teachers were (re)visiting the online discussions. OPAL does not provide details of last login/visit timestamp of participants (which blackboard does).

5. there were multiple technical-related issues. in all, 9 feedback to OPAL helpdesk were sent.

in response to the above observations, i would carry out the following refinements:

for (2), i hypothesise that the instructions in the handout weren’t clear enough. to rewrite instructions in the handout to spell the 2 parts that are expected; hopefully this makes instructions clearer.

for (3), i hypothesise multiple causes. [1], the 1-week interaction cycle may not be long enough for teachers to have multiple answer-reply iterations to dwell deeper into the SDL topic. to overcome this, i will modify the existing plan and try out a 2-week cycle instead. [2], the 24-hours rule is not enforced throughout the entire interaction period; thus teachers may not have caught up with the momentum to have more extensive discussions. to overcome this, i will remove the 廿四小时行动, and extend the ‘game rule’ to be constantly abided throughout the 2-week. [3], teachers only agree with each other, and there were no alternative views. to overcome this, i could perhaps provide some scaffolds on the question types.

for (4a), i would add a line towards the end of the email requesting for read acknowledgement.
for (4b), this is an OPAL design issue, which is beyond my control. i could file another suggestion to OPAL team via OPAL helpdesk.

i hope the above refinements will help to bring discussions to a greater depth so that participants may reach a deeper understanding of the upcoming 协作学习 (collaborative learning, CoL) theme.

(acknowledgement: photo shared by realhardwork)