Thursday, April 13, 2017

Introduction - Why I'm here?

I "list" myself as an Education Technologist / General Education Instructor / Language Instructor who has been living and working in the Arabian Gulf for more than two decades now. .. but a more apt description might be to say that I'm an eclectic lifelong learner with a voracious appetite to pursue topics that catch my fancy .. which the Internet seems to do a pretty good job of satiating.

I'm a bit late in getting started ... but am diving into this course anyways. The attraction? Keen interest in how to realize change .. especially in education .. in the MENA region. EFL instructors of varying standards work in various parts of the region and seek training. I am currently working on ways to promote self direct professional development by such EFL instructors. I am hoping to do this in partnership with a not for profit organization - TESOL Arabia - which has as its mission to promote professional development for EFL educators in the region. I am eying doing this via the use of online PD tutorials. This is to be complemented by the use of digital badges as a way to recognize this learning which should be both evidence and standards based. The need for this is certainly there - many efforts are being pursued by various Ministries of Education in the region but with little coordination or apparent effect. Needless to say there's also a lot of change being proposed here and

I'm hopeful of finding design thinking strategies to help realize at least some of it.
I have traditionally drawn from the work of Schon (reflective practice) and Boyer (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning) .. to promote such change. I've also been using learning communities (Wenger) to help promote "buy in" from interested stakeholders. This course seems to re-frame the same material but uses different language and processes to explain how.. It also pays much more attention to how designed thinking needs to involve the input of "stakeholders" to ensure change is well founded and sustained.

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