Fifth week: Reflections about training

We have many tools to innovate around us, many articles to read and many opportunities to experience, or it is supposed to. But, how can we be sure that we are well trained to innovate?

Knowing all the theory is positive for us as future professionals to have some guidelines to follow, or an initial idea of how we can develop our ideas to create positive and innovative changes inside the school, but theory is not the only tool we need to have.

The idea is to be able to innovate in a real context, once having all the information we need. But it is not easy to apply design thinking if we are not having a direct relation with the method, so we need people to educate and teach and help us to use these methods in the proper way. This is, we need a coach that can show us the process from the inside, and this process takes lots of time and effort from both parts.

A good way to promote this kind of learning about innovative methods is making them closer to the future and current professionals of education, both in training or working in the field, who need extra training outside the universities and school classrooms.

As current students, we have to opportunity to learn new things to innovate, that teachers who are not being trained at the moment unknown, and this gives us an extra point when changing the scholar system in which we are going to teach in a near future. The problem is that there are not enough curricular hours to develop the methodologies in a deep way and we learn only the bases of them, we have an initial idea of their functioning, but we are not capable to apply them when we are alone in front of a challenge. Then, if we want to get extra training, we have to do some research and find people who can explain us more about it, and most of the times we cannot be sure if the information will be trusty and we give up our search.

We know there are training courses but most of them have to be paid or they are difficult to find or even not announced, what makes people interested also give up, as they don’t have time to be constantly checking the nearly events. So, it could be a good idea promoting different courses and meetings from the different departments in order to help us develop the contents worked during the lessons.

Let’s imagine that someone finishes the degree and he/she is supposed to be innovative, as he/she has recently studied and has been trained in that field. The thing is that he/she knows all about theory, has learnt different methodologies to apply, but when he/she has to make them work, he/she realizes he/she is not able to do it because he has never done a practical work on innovation or has done it group and only referring to one specific context, which, in fact is more an obstacle than a tool.

I hope things will change and university teachers will have some support someday to help their students develop their possibilities in order to be real innovators, as subjects as this one pretend to start. Then, having all these possibilities in our hands it would be easier for us to innovate inside the classrooms.

Fourth week: Educational approaches

From a point of view of a scientist, positivism will be the best perspective to use in all aspects of life, for a curious person, the interpretative paradigm will reveal all he/she wants to know, and for an activist, the socio-critical point of view will have all the keys to change the world. But should we need, as teachers, to choose one of them, or is it fair to select the best part of each one?

A positivist person will see education as quantitative data, will extract information from experimentation and will arrive to some real and general conclusions, always scientific and realistic. To do it, he will experiment, measure and quantify all kind of data founded during his/her investigation. whereas an interpretative one will ask, investigate, observe and find qualitative data to get closer to the feelings, emotions and needs of the community. Nevertheless, the one that will be inside the community, using all this information, and all the experience acquired during a long period of coexistence and making a change, will be the socio-critical person.

Then, it is not fair to chose only one of the approaches. We can select the veracity of the positivism, and obtain quantitative data to have an objective idea; use qualitative tools, such as interviews and observation to understand better the way of functioning from an interpretative point of view and use all this information obtained through the two different approaches to help us be involved in a change, getting inside the matter and helping it to get better, as socio-critics.

The process could begin by an analysis of the class: how many kids are there, who are boys and who are girls, which kids have good marks and which ones don’t… and so one. Once having this quantitative data, we could analyse deeper the group by making brief personal interviews or questionnaires to know how they feel, with whom are more comfortable with and other personal questions.  The, having all this information, we could change the necessary things we have discovered are going wrong or need an improval.

This process could be applied in many other fields,as we don’t have to discard all the possibilities that these three paradigms provide us and that can enrich our research in order to innovate and make things better.

Third week: School without walls

Utopia is something that all of us have in our minds, but this doesn’t mean utopia can someday be real, that is why we call them like this, it is something idyllic, something we wish will happen someday but it is probably impossible to make it work.

The fact is that we can imagine lots of ways to educate children in a better way, forgetting about the curriculums and focusing on real needs and experiences kids have to live in order to learn how to grow up in a society full of changes, inequalities and lies. But the matter here is how we can make the society forget about these strict plans they have for us, and here it goes the perfect idea of an educational community: a place where children can move freely, with no barriers, no walls and no exigences, just the information that people from different places can show them. But, is it a really

good way of making children learn what they really need for they lives?

I have proved that it is nearly impossible to get an agreement in terms of providing this kind of free-sharing education for people. The idea of avoiding closed spaces is something that has been through before and that could work, but with some regulations to follow or some way to organise it to avoid the chaos that can be created if there is no one responsible of that. The fact is that in our current society a child can not be alone outside, in the streets, as there are many dangerous situations that can happen, and it is not a kind of overprotective thinking, it is the reality Nevertheless, this could be solved by creating some kind of net which will provide the opportunity for people to help this children learn, but not alone in their walking time, which could also make them learn things, because learning can be everywhere, as this theory of the bucolic school pretends to demonstrate. So once we know children have to be always accompanied by someone, there can be a chance to this idea.

Another problem that is emergent is the fact that everybody can be a teacher, and this is not true. Everybody can be an expert in something at that could be a really good starting point, but taking into account that someone who has to be teaching things in a powerful and meaningful way has to be trained for doing it. Then, taking these people interested in showing their abilities to the kids have to learn how to do it, which methods they can use to catch the attention, how they can deal with many kids that are asking questions all the time and want to learn more and more things and also how to provide the most important information they have to be informed of.

By the moment, the proposal has been changed in a bureaucratic way, but still has the main concepts working as they are thought to: free spaces, freedom to learn and freedom for people to show them things. In addition, safety is guaranteed and a training program has been added to train these people who are willing to work with this project.

And now the thing is: who is going to pay these people and how will the “lessons” organised to avoid the chaos? These two things are the most difficult to apply, at least in a capitalist society, where order, power and money have last word for everything. The main idea is to conserve the identity of this free education community, but adapting it to the needs of the current society. So the step here is the creation of a network that connects all the spaces and makes them work efficiently. Having this idea in mind, this network had to guarantee the right to choose and select the contents to work, not repeated, creating a sense of protagonism but guiding the process through the introduction of an online program, where interested students can ask for a vacancy in one of the activities proposed, until the list is full. Then, there would be different sessions talking about the same topic and students could organise themselves to go to one or another, depending on their preferences and their timetable, without forgetting the fact that they need to learn all the things there are proposed.

This is obviously a supposition, neither a near reality nor a change easy to make. But there are many ways to get closed to this kind of freedom education respecting the nowadays thinking and way of working. As this utopia has no limitations, we can just take what we think it is interesting for us as part of the society and try to change the way of learning bit by bit, making this kind of idyllic image, more realistic and suitable, but guaranteeing what I think it is the main objective of this system: a learning free of barriers.

Second week: The obsolete system

If the school system as we know it nowadays is obsolete, how should the current schools be?

It is really clear that our ways of living have evolved a lot since the schools as we know them appeared, but there has been little change in terms of education, and the way students are taught doesn’t correspond to their needs and demands.

The thing is that we need to start the change inside our classrooms, and the rest will flow. If a teacher, who knows each one of his/her students, is able to recognise their needs and make changes in order to adapt the lessons to each one of them, because the main objective is not to make students memorise the same things, the aim is to teach each one of them all they need to live in a plural society, depending on their differences.

The problem in this case is that, as upper in the pyramid we go, as more difficult is the change.

The idea of top-down innovation is seen as a help in many cases, but it is more an obstacle. The thing is that with a common curriculum, a common system of funds, common resources and common techniques is not enough. Each school has different objectives, different ways of teaching and different necessities and this cannot be seen from the uppest perspective. The thing is that governments are comfortable controlling what is happening under their influence, but they are not seeing that what they really do is to damage the system and make it be even more old fashioned.

Thus, we need to change it and make them see that down-top innovation is the better way to improve the schools and make them match with our daily and future lives and the students ones too. So, the innovation has to start inside the classroom, then, the whole community has to be involved and decide which is the better path to follow and convince, with the rest of the schools the government to change the policies and give more flexibility to develop a system in which the students are the center of everything, no matter what is needed to do it.

Now, the task is ours and we have to work hard if we want to change it and start the long and though process of changing, in our way, the world.

First week: Education of the future

Technology is present in our daily lives, and schools are an important evidence. Everyday new tablets are brought to schools, new electronic books are used in order to work with inside the classroom and new computers are introduced to facilitate researches and interactive activities without the necessity of going to the computers lab. But will be able to do a good use of technologies inside the classroom?

There are many things that come to my mind when asking this, as if  teachers will be able to deal with the excess of ICTs inside our classrooms, or if technological devices will be the only tool present in our future classrooms.

Education is clearly connected to technologies and so, the terminology Educational technology has emerged. Wikipedia describes it as the effective use of technological tools in learning. As a concept, it concerns an array of tools, such as media, machines and networking hardware, as well as considering underlying theoretical perspectives for their effective application.

This means that technology is a tool that helps education to be more effective, but we have to use it consciously and carefully if we don’t want it to overshadow our own way of teaching, which is more traditional in some aspects, but has to be conserved in some way if we don’t want to lose our culture and way of living. For example, devices gives us the opportunity to write faster and provides us with different tools which correct our spelling and grammar, among other things, avoiding the necessity of knowing how to write properly or have a good hand writing, which nowadays has importance in our society.

Knowing that, there are many things to analyse, which include the good things that technology has. For example it technology helps us to browse anything we can imagine and find it in few seconds and there is a lot of information to compare and analyze, which is pretty useful when we want to do activities with the students related to browsing new information that the kids propose. Furthermore, we can have free and instant access to every web page or app connected to a WI-FI network from our devices or use the cloud, which is the safest way to save and share our documents and also we can create an online community or a virtual campus to work all together.

But, obviously, there are some cons to have in mind, such as the problems of technology as distraction and even worst, an addiction which can be dangerous both because of the prejudicial effects in our body and the waste of time that generates and makes us forget about other important things . Moreover, we have to be careful when surfing on the internet, avoid some kind of web pages and be aware of the different kind of virus that can infect our devices, and students have to be aware of this issues if we want them to surf on the internet safely. Therefore, the excess of information can confuse and stress us if we don’t know how to manage it in a proper way.

So, taking into account what we can do or what we should avoid when using our devices inside the classroom, it is a matter of time to get used to them and make them work as a tool and not as a distraction, using them for specific activities that could be more significant and enjoyable this way, but without forgetting about the more traditional ways of teaching and learning, that can be equally effective for both, teachers and students.

The best way of making it possible, is understanding the way technologies can benefit us, and take profit of them in a safety and conscious way, creating activities and situations in which they can be useful for learning and developing the basic skills students have to acquire during their education.