Someone, I’m not saying who but follow this link, someone asked me the other day if I could explain Learning Transformation in a tweet.
My response, as a tweet, was;
“Learning Transformation is accepting that the way we taught in the past is no longer appropriate and taking steps to change it”
You will notice that I do not mention ICT in my definition, even though I consider ICT to be central to successful learning transformation. The emphasis would now seem to be more upon teaching, learning and on the teacher themselves. I believe this is correct.
I am a great enthusiast for ICT in education but I do not believe that equipping a school with brand new ICT equipment constitutes learning transformation: maybe this is where many BSF implementations have been going wrong.
I believe that transformation must originate from the school, the staff, creating a vision that recognises the need and the benefit of a transformation. Once the need and the benefits have been identified and accepted by the school, then the school should seek to provide the necessary ICT facilities to support and enable that transformation to take place.
For the staff to accept that learning transformation is required will require some degree of ‘awareness raising’, training and exploration. It will also entail the nurturing of teacher skills, experiences and insights to give them the confidence that the transformation can be implemented and be beneficial.
A problem is, however, that any transformation and almost all training offered carries with it the inference that what the teachers are currently doing is somehow wrong, inadequate or not up to scratch. Nobody likes to be told or to believe that these adjectives apply to their work, perhaps teachers least of all. This is why I believe there needs to be a careful plan and approach in place to enable staff to understand, develop and own the learning transformation in their school.
In an earlier paragraph, I mentioned the ‘nurturing of teacher skills …’ , I believe nurturing, or maybe cultivation, is the correct term to use in regard to this sort of training. This is because I believe that in most cases, teachers already have knowledge, ideas and many of the skills required, so the training that is to be called for is not necessarily training in the traditional sense, i.e. it is not necessarily imparting new skills or new knowledge. It may, however, involve new ways of working and new ways of approaching learning with pupils.
For me the purpose and, I guess the outcome, of a learning transformation is an approach to education that is based upon the learners’ needs. As far as the use of ICT is concerned, this means that the transformation may be less about how teachers use ICT but how they allow, enable and support the learners in using ICT.
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