Ethics

Ehrich et al. (2011) takes as a starting question “What ought I to do, all things considered ?”I like the all things considered part. In issues of ethics if the answer is instantly clear you probably haven’t thought deeply enough about the problem or any unintended consequences a solution may bring.

The digital ethical issue I had to deal with was online racism. I found Rolfe’s model of reflection (2001) useful to reflect on this incident. While I was at a robotics tournament one student said another was racist and that his school login started with N and rhymed with trigger. To which the student turned and said “Yeah so what, you just said it.”

What: At this point I had a definite ‘what’ he earlier was shocked to see two Seik men wearing turbans and pointed and said “Those guys are Muslims.” in a denigrating way. At the time I started the conversation about different belief systems. Now that he admitted using an unacceptable password I tried to make clear how unacceptable those attitudes are to which he replied “All my friends are racist.” I was slightly shocked. I found the Connecticut’s Teacher Education and Mentoring Program (2012) concepts useful in reflecting on this situation.

So what: “What possible issues/concerns might this scenario raise? The first concern is really for the student, the boy didn’t learn to be racist in isolation and he believes his friends are racist too. My first concern was that the student had no idea of the effects or consequences of his actions. I said to him that one day someone was going to walk up and punch him in the face and he would have no idea why. He was shocked. Was it ethical to say this, I’m not sure. Do I believe it is a realistic possible consequence? Yes.

How could the situation become a violation of the code? The situation is a clear violation of the teachers code 3.3 respecting the diversity of heritage and 4.1 “promoting and protecting the principles of human rights”

Potential negative consequences: For the teacher, not acting would be a terrible consequence to be seen as condoning racism is unacceptable and would reflect badly on the school as well as the teacher especially in the context of a national competition. As well as the potential physical repercussions I reinforced the negative consequences to the student by telling him the true story of my nephew who was expelled for using the same word.

Now what: Actions and proactive measures: I talked about this event with the students learning mentor, form teacher and the principal who promised me they would monitor his attitudes. I still teach this student so my key ethical task now is to not let this incident colour my interpretation of his actions. That would be prejudiced which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

 

References

Connecticut’s Teacher Education and Mentoring Program.(2012) Ethical and Professional Dilemmas for Educator: Facilitator’s Guide. Retrieved from http://www.ctteam.org/df/resources/Module5_Manual.pdf

Ehrich, L. C. , Kimber M., Millwater, J. & Cranston, N. (2011). Ethical dilemmas: a model to understand teacher practice, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 17:2, 173-185, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2011.539794

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001) Critical Reflection Model. Retrieved from: https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf

 

Contribution of Teacher Inquiry Topics to my Communities of Practice

Hi all, I am just back from the First Lego League National robotics championships in Auckland and this fortuitously is one of my communities of practice Wenger (2002). I am linked in to a network of teacher/coaches from Kaitaia to bluff who take a team to   robotics championships each year. But more on that later.

For the last two years I have taught coding and robotics one day a week during Impact project day so my inquiry questions relate to robotics and impact projects

Topic one: What Robotics hardware, software and online courses available today, produce the best educational outcomes? Interestingly Communities of practice may be very relevant to this question. Over the past two years I have experimented with Mbots, Lego EV3s, Littlebits and Edison robots only one of  these comes its own community of practice, the Lego  Bots. It is a community that meets annually and through competing with each other we learn from each other. The community has shared core values the first being COOPERTITION to compete and share. The coaches have an online facebook page and share ideas when we meet.

 

Topic two: Does didactic, 1 teacher teaching the same thing to many students have a place in Impact project teaching?    I love teaching impact projects, it is great the way students can explore an area of interest rather than linearly working to a goal. For some students they embrace the project with passion and treat the teacher as a sounding board to discuss what is happening. For other students spending the whole day doing the same thing with nothing to make one block different from the rest takes them from exploring to lost. My community of practice here is not only all the other teachers here at Campion College who teach impact projects, but all the other teachers in New Zealand who teach impact projects.

So I have two communities of practice both of which I would like to develop further. The Lego robotics COP is already well developed, with the same competition being conducted internationally at the same time. However apart from Facebook almost all our communication is on just one day. For my Impact project COP I have worked collaboratively with many teachers from school but I am disconnected from all those other teachers who teach impact projects. I would like to improve communication in both  these areas.

So, if you teach impact projects or robotics or even better both I would love to hear from you.

 

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

How have I changed my practice in the context of personalizing learning?

The two biggest changes I have made is greater collaboration and using online tools to foster that collaboration. In the past I have had a focus on students working together collaboratively, but not on teaching collaboratively with other teachers. I am now part of an online flipped classroom with two other teachers and 25 students. Bolstad (2012) when discussing personalising learning states

new resources that may be needed, beyond those traditionally thought of as part of the schooling system, and to think about how best to support learners’ access to those resources.

This fits with my own experience by providing lots of resources the students can choose which resources they want to use and what they want to do with it, which helps personalise the learning. When the students were making board games I bought some old board games from the Salvation Army which the students used as a starting point for their games.

Why did I make this change? Well it was unplanned, another teacher asked me to work collaboratively with her. The teacher was running a flipped classroom with another teacher and was having difficulty getting the students to use it. She added me as the third teacher so I could see the students work and contribute to the class Bolstad (2012)

“How to deploy the resources for learning (teachers, time, spaces, technology) more flexibly to meet learners’ needs”

We decided to add more resources to the classroom and together we uploaded lots of board game board designs and pictures of items places and people from the story. The students had physical resources like actual boards and cards that they could paste images over and also had online design elements to create images. The result was a huge range of games made from Monopoly, to Snakes and Ladders to Cluedo to some which didn’t even have boards, no two games were the same

What have I learned? Resourcing does appear to have an influence in personalising learning. Limited resources might lead to limited options. The students loved having commercial boards and cards as a starting point, it made it easy to make a game that looked and felt authentic.

I have also changed my practice in personalising learning during impact projects. Impact projects by their nature are already individual and personalised. But the many new technologies and software we have learned about on this course like augmented reality and digital design have allowed me to help students find new ways of creating their own personalised impact projects.

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Educationve. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306

Ministry of Education.(2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching: A New Zealand perspective. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306

Reflecting on reflecting, like two mirrors facing each other creating infinite corridors

When I first read about the Zeichner and Liston model of reflection (cited in Finlay, 2008, p.4) I was a little sceptical. The lines between Rapid, Repair and Review reflection seemed unclear. Rapid and Repair reflection seemed intertwined, throughout a lesson we are continually monitoring who is engaged and who is not and we change what we and the students are doing to alter that. This seems to capture some of the elements of the first three types of reflection.

To look at my own reflective practice I have chosen the reflective cycle model of Gibbs (1988),. This seems to contain the emotional element of ‘how do I feel?’ tied into the evaluation analysis and conclusions.

Reflection for myself is often just learning from my glaring mistakes. I was recently asked to share some resources to a Google classroom to enable an English class make Scratch games about a Roald Dhal book. I found images from the book which could be used in the game and sent them off to the teacher.

The response came back “Nice but you got the wrong book”. I felt embarrassed and slightly gutted. But I had been through a process which worked. So, I thought about my feelings, analysed what had gone wrong, communication, and what had gone right, the process. This the drove m e on to repeat the process for the correct book.

This then I turned into an action plan. I prepared a three lesson plan, first get them all to make a game, second get them all to make an adventure game and third get them to make a game of the book.

At the end of lesson two they all had made an arcade game and an adventure game, which was when the teacher said: “Great tomorrow we start on board games, we can come back to Scratch in a couple of weeks.” I was gutted again, and the Gibbs cycle was going around for another turn. After reflecting on how I felt and what to do, I made a new plan with communication being central.

This time I talked to the other teacher about how we would go about this, what type of games the students could make and what resources they needed. She uploaded a heap of game board pdfs to Google Classroom and I uploaded images from the correct book there also.

The students had complete agency over what type of board game they made and several did not even use boards. On reflection this was a huge success, there are so many ways you can overlay a book narrative onto a game.

 

Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file…

Gibbs. (1988). Gibbs’ (1988) reflective cycle. Academic Liasion, Employability and Skills (ALES), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004

A manager in the classroom.

What would it be like if you weren’t a teacher, you were a manager, and you weren’t there to teach, but to get a team together and to get a job done?

CampionCollegeRobotics

This blog is for the Mindlab Diploma in digital teaching.

Hi I’m Ed and this is my best friend Rosie.

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