Thursday 13 June 2019

Learner agency - who drives the learning?

I've been thinking about learner agency and who drives the learning. My online art history class uses a knowledge building approach. For us, this looks like lots of discussion, lots of student led activity, and generally working as a bit of research team. We're always trying to delve deeper into ideas to improve everyone's understanding.

Last week we had a power cut at my school during the scheduled video conference time. I was able to email my students on my cell phone to let them know to work together online without me using the structure on the class blog as a guide. I had a response from a student (I'm paraphrasing here) letting me know that she had tried to elicit a bit of verbal korero, but the others weren't comfortable taking the lead in the VC without my guidance.

This got me to thinking, have I unconsciously made the video conferences too teacher-centric? Or is this just the kind of learners I have this year? I am conscious that I am pushing a lot of their boundaries and expectations of what learning is.

Teachers using a Knowledge Building approach what are your thoughts?

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