Principles of Effective Learning

These principles are compiled from an article by Julia Atkin. 

Every educator needs to reflect on how well their teaching practice and the learning environments they provide meet these principles.
As a facilitator how well do I embed these principles into my workshops?

Principles of Effective Learning

Changing practice

As a part of my professional inquiry I am looking for and planning ways I can change my facilitation practice.  I am trying out new ideas and changing the way I do things.  My main goal is to involve teachers more.   To be more transformational rather than transactional. 

I have used the 'discuss with people around you' technique a lot.  This works well in a conference workshop where teachers might be from different schools.  However, when I am facilitating a staff meeting for teachers from one school I want teachers to be thinking, discussing and co-creating - to put together planning and frameworks which are meaningful for their students and school community.  I feel that my facilitation skills in doing this successfully could be improved.

Getting teachers to co-create successfully is not always easy. I want teachers to include new ideas, not recreate the something that is pretty much the way they've always done things.  It's very important to set the scene well, provide new, relevant information for discussion and to pose thought-provoking questions.  Motivating teachers so they are compelled to contribute is also a major factor and often the culture of the school comes into play here.

I used group brainstorming (below) to get teachers to unpack the elements of effective pedagogy.  This followed a discussion about the pages related to effective pedagogy in the New Zealand Curriculum Framework.