<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Saturday 14 March 2009 08:30:59 pm Caroline Meeks wrote: > Greg's point is that if we use the standard process that Shawn used in > industry, we'll never get anywhere. Its not scalable, its expensive and > isn't crowd sourcing friendly. I don't agree that it's either unscalable or crowd-source unfriendly. Doing it in a room with a whiteboard isn't feasible, but mailing list discussions certainly are. Scaling it up just requires getting plenty of educators on board, and they become part of the crowd. There are a *lot* of great 4th grade teachers who have decades of experience teaching these concepts to a lot of kids with different learning styles. It sounds to me like we need to recruit some and get them involved with the discussion. I'm traveling for a couple of weeks, but when I get back I'm going to start talking to some of the teachers in my area. Shawn. </blockquote><div> I think we are in agreement here. The goal is to create a process that uses the internet to support teams of people working and learning together. One of the principals I am learning in my class on school reform is to think symmetrically at every level. We want the students to be thinking about their learning and how they can continuously improve. Similarly we want the teachers to be thinking about their practice, their learning and how they can improve. As designers of instructional materials, we also have to think critically about our learning and how to create processes that support continual improvement. We know collaborative learning is important for students. It is also important for teachers. Our best case scenario is that grade level teams of teachers will work together to implement this in their individual classrooms. We hope that together they will be able to work through unfamiliar issues around using technology and probably also around some of the math and mathematical thinking. Remember that the average 4th grade teacher with 10 years of experience may not be a math curriculum or pedagogy expert. Symmetrically this process could support collaborative learning by have individuals, each implementing different activities work together in teams as the teachers work in grade level teams. Perhaps 4-8 people, who can create learning communities to help work through unfamiliar issues especially around concepts that may not be familiar to any of them, such as pedagogy. We can hope that these grade level teams will have some support from techies and math curriculum specialists. However, we face the reality that many of them will not have these resources. Symmetrically our teams can hope to recruit teacher and math pedagogy experts to support them. You can recruit teachers locally or through the Internet and such places as Classroom 2.0 Ning community and facebook. But Greg has some real legitimate concerns about keeping it simple and making forward progress. Just as we imagine the isolated teachers moving forward without "expert" support from their districts, diving in and figuring things out for themselves, probably the teams here will also need to do that also. Furthermore, f we think about our teacher teams, this stuff is so new that some teacher teams may well end up with an "expert" or "coach" that doesn't know any more then they do. Our goal is to empower the teachers to figure it out for themselves and to believe that they can work together, learn together, and experiment to find ways of making this technology help their students learn. I'd love the tech teams here to model a symmetrical attitude even when they don't have an expert in pedagogy and learning theory. Thanks, Caroline </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ FourthGradeMath mailing list <a href="mailto:FourthGradeMath@lists.sugarlabs.org">FourthGradeMath@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath</a> End of FourthGradeMath Digest, Vol 2, Issue 18 ********************************************** </blockquote></div> -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax