Changing role of teachers in classroom

Grade 7 teacher Royan Lee is so committed to making learning collaborative, he won’t call himself a teacher, preferring the moniker “lead learner.”

He sees himself as guiding his English and math students at Beverley Acres Public School in Richmond Hill, Ont., in a space where they don’t just do the usual group work, but constantly think together and critique each other.

His classroom is profoundly social and virtually paperless. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones – some belonging to pupils, some supplied by the school – link each learner to Web-based spaces where everyone interacts, not just the bold few who would have dared to raise a hand.

At times, Mr. Lee will pose questions such as, “Look at this picture: what equivalent fractions do you see?” and the pupils tackle them together in chat rooms or multimedia Web forums. They have also experimented with a Twitter-based “back channel,” an ongoing stream of pupils’ feedback and questions projected at the front of the class.

Even individual work is shared: Pupils submit assignments, notes and thoughts to networked personal blogs, forming digital portfolios they can all see and comment on.

“We try to learn out in the open,” Mr. Lee says. “[My pupils] feel like they can’t achieve the heights they want to without one another. … It’s almost a method of crowd-sourcing understanding.”

The key is less what students learn than how they learn it: The Googles of the world have decentralized knowledge, meaning the teacher’s role is now much more about helping students assess information and apply it.

The Wieman Initiative changed [the teacher's] mind when it linked him with a science teaching and learning fellow to help him transform his upper-year optical physics course.

He started assigning the raw materials to be absorbed as homework, as well as short online quizzes before class to keep students doing the readings. In class, he presented students with activities and problems, had them split up any way they wished to solve them together, and offered help where it was needed.

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