Workshops: The Changing Classroom
The Changing Classroom: A Professional Learning Journey
Workshop Presentation Benjamin Gofton, Janet Johnson
As an online learning provider how can we deliver a holistic educational program using evidenced based, high leverage practices that work in any classroom at any school through a new learning management system? The presentation will focus on how the school leadership team has used the research of John Hattie to challenge and inspire the teaching and learning program. It will describe how we utilised these pedagogies as a lens to increase student feedback and engage with our learners more interactively online. We will share our journey of how the school has moved from paper to digital to interactive and unpack the professional learning journey of the staff in our commitment to improve outcomes for learners at the Tasmanian eSchool.
Teaching for Thinking in an Online World: Nurturing the Values of Inquiry through Questioning and Feedback
Workshop Presentation Kirsti Ellerton
Traditional paper-based research for the secondary school student was pre-curated, either by the editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, or by the school librarian who selected the books and resources that were included in the library’s collection. News articles were written by journalists, and the quality of the journalism generally correlated to the physical size of the newspaper itself. The school student of today is living in the midst of an information overload, or as Mark Andrejevic (2013) terms it, an "infoglut." Whilst it sounds clichéd, the era of fake news is very real. Never has the need for critical thinking skills been greater. The need is particularly pressing for students whose education takes place exclusively online. By nurturing a respect for the values of inquiry such as clarity, significance and relevance (Kuhn, 1970; Lipman, 2003; Ellerton, 2017) in the online classroom through both questioning and feedback, students become curators and critical consumers of information.
