Wednesday, November 29. 2006Blended learning environments for effective teacher professional development in rural areas of Colombia
The Colombian Ministry of Education and three regional secretaries of education (Turbo, Atlántico, and La Guajira) have worked in collaboration with the Concord Consortium and Metacursos to offer the CONGENIA pilot project. CONGENIA is the Spanish acronym for “Genuine conversations about topics important to learn.” This project is co-sponsored by the Colombian government and USAID through the dotEDU project. This project has been implemented in three regions where there is a critical need to improve the quality of education. Results from “Pruebas Saber,” a set of standardized tests that measures basic education competences of all 4th and 8th graders in Colombia, show in 2005 that students in the selected regions perform below national and state averages. Other indicators, such as retention and promotion rates are also in the “red” zone. To address this issue, three teachers colleges and fifteen elementary schools with computers and a connection to the Internet were selected to participate in the project. The CONGENIA project has offered teacher professional development with a combination of online and onsite interaction between participating teachers and facilitators—blended learning environments—to help teachers reflect on their practices and to coach them in the introduction of changes that lead to the solution of critical educational problems in their institutions. Effectiveness of teacher professional development (TPD) goes beyond participation of teachers in events that seek to increase their competencies as educators. It needs to produce positive changes in the way they teach and their students learn. CONGENIA thus added another dimension to the blend: we integrated work, learning, and training by fostering technology-based local and global communities of practice over an 18-month period, beginning in July 2005. CONGENIA invited participating teachers to videotape classroom sessions at the beginning and at an advanced stage of the project in order to reflect on their own teaching practices, to share their thoughts in face-to-face and online forums, and to discover and record changes in methods. Each teacher selected at least one episode from his/her classroom. Teachers at participating schools shared their teaching episodes and discussed them locally. Additionally, distributed study groups of elementary teachers discussed issues related to content areas, relevant literature reviews, and current video-documented practices in the three regions in a blended format. Participation in both local and global communities of practice helped teachers understand the meaning of “genuine conversations,” a core concept in CONGENIA. When they viewed their own classroom video episodes, teachers discovered that their classes were teacher-centered and that conversations with students were mostly didactic. Online and face-to-face workshops helped teachers realize that project- and inquiry-based learning strategies could foster student participation and allow teachers to become co-learners, willing to listen to student thinking and able to build knowledge collaboratively. CONGENIA has been an occasion to rethink teacher preparation and TPD strategies in participating teacher colleges. It also has been a way of making synergies in participating elementary schools between continuing TPD and institutional efforts that seek to improve the quality of the education provided to students. Blended communities and blended learning environments have accomplish their function in CONGENIA. The experience—as documented by teachers in institutional video cases—is very positive. It is now time to expand this successful initiative to other regions.
Concord, MA, November 20
Monday, October 23. 2006Report from the ATE Conference
ATE (Advanced Technological Education, one of the NSF education programs) is different!
For one thing, their audience is different: two-year community colleges and secondary “vocational” schools. A far cry from the Caltechs and MITs that NSF normally hobnobs with. Still, as I found at my their meeting last week, ATE is far from “NSF Lite.” For one thing, in contrast to the rest of the science ed programs, ATE’s goal is not to prepare their students for the next run of the academic ladder – for the most part, the graduates from ATE-funded programs, go straight into the high tech job market, where they will work as technicians, lab assistants, or network administrators. This means that the program is driven, for better or worse, by external market forces, and is correspondingly insulated from some of the kookier pendulum swings of educational policy. This leads, among other things, to a refreshing concern with bringing course materials up to date. While the “academic” educators tweak a curriculum that considers Mendel’s Laws (1866) synonymous with genetics, and relegates Relativity (1905) to the chapter on “modern” physics that never gets covered, ATE is busy funding initiatives on hybrid cars, nanotechnology, renewable energy sources, and biotechnology! Our CAPA project, of course, is about none of those things – we are the only project in the portfolio, in fact, that deals with assessment, rather than content. But there again, I’m finding the ATE community ahead of the curve. Performance assessment (inferring kids’ understanding by their manipulations of models, rather than their answers to questions) has been something of a hard sell to the more academic programs of NSF (to say nothing of the Department of Education!) In contrast, the community colleges and technical high schools recognize that not everyone “tests well” on multiple-choice items – their clientele, in fact, comprises a disproportionate number of intuitive problem-solvers who are “good with their hands” but score poorly on tasks requiring abstractions and the extensive use of language. I talked to a lot of people at the meeting, and when I explained why I was there everyone “got it.” I collected a lot of business cards. It was a peculiar feeling to attend a PI meeting where the only familiar faces, aside from NSF folks, belonged to my co-PI John Chamberlain of CORD, and Bob Tinker and Amy Pallant, who were there representing the Molit project (you should have seen Amy’s hotel suite – ask her about it sometime!), But was a more exciting meeting than the ones I’m used to, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s. |
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