[MUSIC] Welcome to week six of Planning for Teaching and Learning. In this final week, we're going to review some of the key ideas that underpin the course and also introduce you to ways in which teachers around the world are working to change the learning experiences of their learners. We hope you find this interesting and we hope you find some ideas that you can apply in your own setting. At the heart of Linda's and my work, and we hope that this message has come through throughout the course, is the understanding that at the heart of what we believe and what we do and what we teach, it's connected to system transformation. In the past, and still maybe in many parts of the world, it was alright for school to sort learners, so that some would go on to successful careers, to post secondary education, that others would be asked to leave, that others would fade out and some would just disappear. That's not alright anymore. We know that for young people to have long, healthy, successful lives that there's a direct connection to secondary school completion. Research in the United States and in North America and Canada has shown that if learners complete high school plus get a couple of years of post secondary training, whether it's an apprenticeship, whether it's skills training, whether it's two years of college or two years of university, that's a direct predictor of life expectancy, of happiness, of healthy relationships, and also of contribution to a civil society. So, for us it's a moral imperative to think about how can we actually create the conditions, where every learner will cross the stage with dignity, purpose and option. The big moral purpose, one of the big moral purposes that we introduced to you to in the first week. At the heart of shifting the system, there are six ideas that we think are really important for us to think about and then we're going to see how schools are doing that. The first is shifting the focus from instruction and teaching to deeper forms of learning. You may have noticed throughout this course that Linda and I use the term learner more often that we use the term student and we do that deliberately. It is our belief that as teachers, we need to model that we're all learners, and that we're all teachers. The focus for too much of the time in our profession has been on getting the perfect lesson, getting the management down right, and now we really need to thinking about, how do we construct the opportunities for deeper forms of learning. We've also made the point that we need to create a balance between summative assessment and formative assessment. We need to be thinking about how do we create the opportunities for learners to coach themselves, and also to learn from their teachers as coach. We also believe that shifting the system means moving from teaching in isolation to teachers working together in learning communities. We hope that through this course in an online environment, you're becoming somewhat of a learning community yourselves and that within your schools, your settings, your communities, you're finding new ways to connect with your colleagues. That's what's going to move us forward. We also believe very firmly that we need to move from schools working on their own to schools working together and with their communities, and we're going to provide you some examples of what that looks like. Our notion of leadership is changing as well. We are not thinking about leadership by position and hierarchy, but leadership by contribution. We see every teacher as a leader and every teacher has the potential to make a contribution to their school and their community that will really make things a lot better for their learners. And it's not about doing the old things just better, it's about really genuine transformation through inquiry, through innovation and through trying new things. So, why is that so important and what does it look like? Canada, where Linda and I clearly are from, and where we're very proud to be Canadians, it is a dismay to us that on international assessments 40% of our 15 year olds say that they are disengaged intellectually at school. Our learners do quite well on international assessments. The big one for us is PISA, which is the Program for International Student Assessment, which many, many countries participate in and that's organized through OECD which is the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. And it's a disgrace that this is what the experience of our learners are. We need learners to be engaged, alive, and genuinely to become life long learners. It's not enough just to get through, we need to make it truly engaging. And our premise is, is that for learners to be intellectually engaged, they need to work with teachers who are intellectually engaged. If learners are to be curious, they need to be surrounded by adults who are curious. And we see inquiry and curiosity as really the drivers for change. We introduced earlier on, the notion of weaving three ways, where we need to draw on the strengths of our local traditions. We need to draw on the strengths of our profession and what we know from research, and we need to create space for new ways of thinking. I just want to introduce two terms that come from the wise traditions of British Columbia, particularly of the Lil'wat people. The first one is the idea of watchful listening, and this is an openness to listening beyond our personal thoughts and assumptions. And as we explore some of the case studies from around the world, we would like you to approach it in that spirit of getting beyond your own assumptions about what works and what doesn't work and just enter into the spirit of ingenuity of these other schools. The second term that we find really, really valuable in our setting is the term "cwelelep". It's that being in a place of dissonance and uncertainty and anticipation of new learning. So, in this course, if we've created some uneasiness, some dissonance, if you are squirming in your seat sometimes at some of the things that we've said, we'd say that's a good place to be - because that's an acknowledgement that learning is sometimes challenging. So, new ways, imagination and innovation. We need to be looking at how do we think about our learning environments in terms of responsiveness to the needs of the learners. How do we think about our use of time, of space, of place, of the curriculum, and of our relationships between the adults and the young people in our settings? A big question internationally right now is what if learning environments were designed around the needs of learners and reflected the current knowledge from the natural learning sciences? We introduced you earlier on to the Seven Learning Principles from the OECD work, "The Nature of Learning". And just as a reminder, here they are. The next step in this OECD study was to look around the world and ask different systems to submit examples, case studies of where schools were actually redesigning what they did to meet the needs of learners. And that's led to this new report that's called Innovative Learning Environment, and it is a wonderful set of case studies of what's happening around the world. So, what we're going to do in the next session is we're going to give some specific examples from this, and we're going to ask you to think about ways in which what's happening in Australia, in Finland, in Canada, in Switzerland, in Portugal can impact the way that you're thinking about your own setting. So, we look forward to picking this up in lecture number two. [MUSIC]
