skills to focus on

For all of us teachers that work on vocational guidance and counselling of students, it's essential that we use the latest resources concerning skill needed in a fast changing world.

Truly worrying about how fast school curriculum changes to adapt to these needs and how well teachers are trained to teach these skills, I'm publishing the infographic of Guthrie Jenssen, as mentioned in the World Economic Forum post on the 10 skills you'll need to survive the rise of automation.

1. complex problem solving
2. critical thinking
3. creativity
4. people management
5. coordinating with others
6. emotional intelligence
7. judgment and decision making
8. service orientation
9. negotiation
10. cognitive flexibility

Reverse thinking: How could we block students from gaining these skills?
By continue teaching independent subjects, in competitive instead of collaborating classrooms, without art that ignites creativity, without social and emotional intelligence courses to develop empathy, without keeping in mind sustainability.

Questions to feed our thoughts, now that we're on holidays and have time for something new to learn:
How much updated do we keep ourselves to new trends in education?
What is our personal Continuous Learning Development?

educational innovation

Today I discovered this publication of the European Schoolnet
Open Book of Educational Innovation



It's a collection of 115 educational innovations in Europe, in an attempt to make these innovations visible.

Starting reading this booklet, 3 things came in my mind and I highlight them:

1. The importance that the European Schoolnet initiatives have in my own professional development

2. The importance of Personal Learning Networks, twitter in my case. I find amazingly interesting things from my contacts, to learn and to share

3. The importance of innovation in schools that actually derive from innovative minds and collaborations, from individuals that had "A ha!" moments of inspiration and shared them successfully with like-minded people.

Investing in quality education for all European youth is vital for the future of Europe. No matter how deep technology will be embedded in educational practices, the human factor, teachers, will always play the most important role in motivating students and developing their social skills. Investing in empowering teachers to give their best in the classroom will be the crucial factor for successful education in the future. That's where European Schoolnet seems to have succeeded.

keep learning

The Course in Teacher Academy is over, but learning never stops. So I decided to keep this blog as a reflecting place, collecting resources and sharing ideas. Blogging about what I learn, what I like in education, my attempts, my failures. Sharing seems to be the only way ahead.

Here is an example of what collaboration and sharing can achieve!
Some way or another, etwinning is behind every successful learning path I've chosen so far.

peer review

One of the highlights of this course, is the peer review, for sure.
My personal feeling about it?
I was anticipating to see how teachers from different schools, different cultures, see my project idea.
I want to thank Theodosis Theodosiou and Vasiliki Archondi who reviewed my 1.3 exercise.

But mostly, I enjoyed reading about the ideas of my course-mates!. It's a trip into some other person's mind, isn't it?
It's very difficult to review a project idea of another teacher, especially when he/she comes from a different country, from a different school level, teaching different subjects. I was more or less afraid to write my review, because maybe I was seeing things from a different perspective. It's the foreign language  too that doesn't help in explaining.

To review we must reflect on what we have  learned so far, so there is deeper learning while reviewing but I'd love to collaborate with some other teachers to build the final product together. It's not easy in a Mooc, I know and as Benjamin Hertz mentioned in one of the fb group posts: what this course is missing is a more structured and committed form of collaboration, especially if it would attempt to replicate a PBL process for the learners. The cooperation that you are engaging in is very much up to everyone themselves and it is in fact not collaboration but cooperation (the difference between collaboration and cooperation will be explored in Module 2). A more structured collaboration is very difficult to implement in a MOOC, simply because there are so many learners. We are working on a technical solution that will hopefully help us to address this as we would love to have some real group work happening on our courses. So keep an eye out for it in the future!
I keep an eye out for it in the future!!!

my PBL Design: Formulating my driving question m1-1.6

class?

topic?

driving question?

This question should be the guiding principle for the entire PBL process that you will go through with your students"

That's how I have imagined my next pbl course

we will focus on our area

Will it work?

I can imagine students gathering local information on the topic and making some 

infographic? presentation? flyer? to inform farmers of our area 

The driving question seems: 

open-ended: since there are specific agricultural activities in our area (greenhouses mainly), different aspects of the environment are influenced and the final product can be different for each team

engaging and inspiring students by creating curiosity: because it is related to their own area and the activities of most of their parents

be aligned to your learning goals: because it's clearly curriculum based

and at the same time being non-Googleable: because students will need local data 

(Update 11th of June - brainstorming)

On a second (and third and forth) thought, I think that it's not a very good driving question.

Maybe the "What should we say to the farmers of our area about the environment?" is better...

or What does the soil want to say to our farmers?

What does the micro-world think about our farmers?

What would be the verdict in a trial between farmers and environment?

I guess that the smaller the project, the easiest to find a good driving question.

components of good pbl 1.4

Here they are! My creative concept!

which of the 5 components I feel will be the most challenging for me to realize and why?

• effective collaboration? 
• I can handle it.
• is it assessment because your curriculum requires very regular and rigid summative assessments that you are worried will get in the way of PBL? 
• No, I can handle it, although it's time consuming. 
• Or maybe you are more concerned about the passivity of your students in lessons and getting them to take the initiative? 
• Hmmmm....the passivity that will be connected with a wrong driving question, yes. But I'm mostly concerned about the right connection with a real world problem, and how I will combine it with my teaching subjects. It seems that not all subjects are ideal for pbl. If I could collaborate with other teachers and subjects, I think it would have been easier. Anyway.... since every year I teach different subjects, I must use my summer for reflecting, planning, getting organized. 

Reflections on my current teaching practice m1-1.3

1.3 task is not just a course task that has to be completed, but Interesting questions that I was reflecting on, even while cooking!

What teaching strategy do you use most commonly? 
Depending on the  teaching subject, a mixture of traditional and project based strategy.

What do YOU do most of the time in the classroom? 
explaining...

What do the students do most of the time? 
During my theoretical courses, they are mainly listening, taking notes.
But actually, they are talking to each other, getting distracted when they are not engaged in the learning process.

Do you feel your current approach could be easily complemented with a PBL approach? 
Easily? No. But it would be more effective, for sure.

Do you sometimes have the problem that students don't remember what they "learned" the day before? 
Yes!...
How do you address this? 
repeating and repeating and repeating.....

Do you already use some of the PBL approaches mentioned in the video? 
My most successful etwinning projects where fully integrated into my teaching subjects and the lessons were following project based learning approach.
Odysseus - research project on Human Rights
Planning our sustainable town - research project on sustainability
Two islands inspire - research project and landscape design
In fact, etwinning has played a major role in the change of my teaching.

What works, doesn't work? Why? 
In the end of each pbl attempt I make an evaluation of my planning, of my implementation, of students' engagement and learning. I'm not satisfied with the result and I try to spot my mistakes. That's why I'm following this course. I like this pedagogic method and I want to improve myself as a facilitator of knowledge.
The fact is that there is no magic recipe to follow. There are some directives that the educator must know and use flexibly, depending on the students of each class.
What keeps impressing me is that later, students remember details of those lessons that I wasn't expecting them to remember. Learning by doing, right?
I've faced problems on late planning, on the way to form teams, on forming the right driving question, on the use of technology and the available resources, on the students' evaluation. Each case was different and I had to adapt to different situations. It made me be more careful with planning and improved my organization skills for sure.
I feel that I'm an amateur. Sometimes things went wrong because I didn't know how to be flexible.
BUT, no matter how many difficulties I have faced during my attempts for pbl, I don't regret. I remember each of these  attempts with joy and I keep the enthusiasm, my own enthusiasm that most of the times was/is being transmitted to my students. 

How do you find out about your student needs and how do you incorporate this knowledge in your teaching? 
It's a major issue! In the beginning, I was deciding the course where I would use pbl, on my own. Then I realized that it was a mistake. If I had the consent of my students they would engage more, so I started asking them, in the beginning of the school year, about how they would like to learn the specific subject. Then we brainstorm on the final product. I have to admit that I'm trying to influence them, in favor of my choice!...
I ask them to fill a questionnaire too, to identify their strong and weak points, so that I adapt my techniques and the teams.

A class and a subject topic that I teach which I can use to experiment with PBL.
This is the perfect timing for me, to reflect on this. The curriculum is being changed again and next school year I'm about to teach "environment and agriculture" in my B class of the department of agriculture, ages 16. I want to find a way to follow a pbl approach and I believe that this teaching subject helps. Time to experiment again! 


(It ends up quite a pleasure to keep this diary!)