CG Learner: A tool to plan with.
The CG learner website has offered what its acronym stands for, a Common Ground with which to work and plan with other professionals. As a planning tool it allowed a number of teachers to work together online with the same resources and electronic documents. Planning used to be a hodge podge of different worksheets, matched with different textbook chapters all photocopied and put on teachers’ desks to be delivered over a semester. It was unwieldy and more about “what do we want kids to do?” as opposed to “what do we want kids to learn?” CG learner gives teachers a chance to edit a common learning element, teach a common learning element, reflect on a common learning element and sharpen a common learning element. This in turn makes teachers reflect more on what is it we wanted kids to learn.
A reflection that I had having written both English and Mathematics learning elements is that the learning processes vary greatly from subject to subject which may account for the different thinking between teachers of different subjects. This may seem like a no-brainer but there is a lot more conceptualising by naming and theorising in mathematics and science than there is in English. English lends itself to critical analysis. This is where the different subjects will spend a greater amount of time. However, during the planning with the learning processes, you have to consciously account for the different learning processes so that students are thinking in a variety of ways. Furthermore it pushes teachers to think outside their traditional ways of instruction. For instance if you were to diagnose a maths textbook and put each activity into a learning process I would guess that 80% would be “applying appropriately” and 20% would be “conceptualising by naming”. However if you don’t think beyond those boundaries you would never consider there to be something missing from your classroom. Furthermore you would never consider that other elements outside the parameters of your subject may influence your students understanding and thinking about what it is they are learning.
This brings us to the important point of collaboratively planned units. Having this virtual common ground means that teachers learn from each other, share resources and also push each other to try new teaching methods and think to think differently. It also means that the person you teach with is your critical friend and able to help you adjust and change the teaching to better engage students with the learning. It took teachers time to learn how to use the website but because it aligns quiet neatly with Microsoft word, it was reasonably intuitive and familiar. In fact two teachers helped write most of the probability unit without much guidance from me, instead they explored and interacted with the icons and click and drag functionality of the website (that being said one criticism of the site is that it has crashed a few times meaning work that was being written was lost).
Being electronic it was also easy to go back and edit the learning element after teaching rather than re-writing a curriculum manuscript. This means the document aids the reflection process and is more organic and responsive, which also promotes diversity in the classroom and change in teacher practice.
