Week 3 Group Task --- WU Hao (William)

Identify an innovative classroom
Analyse teacher roles in the classroom

Six dimensions of classroom practices were introduced in the class last week. Speaking of designing an innovative classroom, it is a good idea to talk about this issue based on the 6 dimensions.
1. Intended curriculum goals of the innovative practices
    Similar to teaching objectives, the purpose and objective of using innovative application in education should pre-considered during the preparation part. If the traditional instructive teaching could reach the objective of acquiring knowledge, then the teaching with innovative practices should be conducted on a higher level.

• Acquiring the knowledge and content of the curriculum
• Getting familiar with the innovative applications
• Utilising ICT for academic and daily purposes
• Developing continual and lifelong learning habit
• Cultivating students with teamwork spirit, collaborative senses
• Creating a culture of creativity

2. Pedagogical roles of teachers
    Teacher is expected to be a saint for students, whom is required to have various outstanding qualifications. In the pedagogical process, teachers are not just the person who instruct lectures, they have many identities as:

• Director: An important part for teacher preparation is lesson planning. The whole class was pre-designed and rehearsed as a play, the teacher is the one who directs all the happenings.
• Facilitator: Teacher is expected to be a facilitator who assist students' learning instead of instructing all the time.
• Supervisor: During some activities, teachers should supervise the going of the activities.
• Evaluator: No matter the instructions or students' participations, which are all need to be assessed, teacher, as the head of the class should evaluate the work they do and also students' work.
• Co-learner: learning is not just happening to students' side, but also it happens to teachers. It's a mutually beneficial thing.

3. Roles of students

    With the transformation from teacher-centered to student-centered, the classroom design now is fully focused on the students. Despite of the controversial part of students' behaviours, what kind of roles should students have at class should be concluded as the followings:

• Active learner: students should gradually change their way of learning from a passive receiver to an active learner, which requires them to be more sensible in their learning.
• Participants: during the group work, students could share their ideas and opinions freely to collaborate with team members. The participation of students' in the group is encouraged as the progress of analysing and summarising ability.
• Feedback collector: students may come across various problems or question during their collaborations, and teachers to some extent cannot well-roundedly solve all the problems right away, therefore, students may collect the problems and questions they met during their group work and later represent to other students and teachers for solutions. Moreover, students could also present their concerns and advice for the course and the activities.
• Co-learner: there may be a situation which is the priority from students with good scores and the depression of ones with not so good scores. In the classroom design, "good" students should be averagely divided into different groups with lower score students. Every student should be respectful to others. Only by this way can they learn from others.

4. Nature and sophistication of the ICT used

    In some way, people judge whether a class is innovative based on how much ICT was used. Although it's not exactly a standard for innovative classroom, it is still a necessary part of it.

• Active and sensible presentation of knowledge: obviously, PPT or Keynote is a good example. It enables learner to learn the knowledge from boring reading to comprehensive understanding. Audios, videos and texts, when combined, could activate the 5 senses of learners.
• Teamwork building: when an assignment was given to students in groups, they have to sort out the question and make agreements and progress. The process of group work is building teamwork spirit. ICT used could be various, the choices of application platform, the discussion of how to use it and also the integration of media files and textual typing

5. Connectedness of classroom

• A shared communication platform should be build, no matter a hashtag twitter or a Facebook page or even a google sites. Students could freely communicate on that with teachers and other students.
• Email is a very effective way of notifying latest information. Students could send emails to teacher for inquiries and teachers could send assignments via emails.

6. Learning outcomes exhibited by learners during learning
    There exists arguments on learning outcomes, is it just the outcome of a work or the knowledge building within the process? I personally think an innovative classroom should base the learning outcomes on the premise of independent learning and critical thinking.

Resource:
http://www.hbrc.govt.nz/HBRC-Documents/HBRC%20Document%20Library/StormwaterMgmt_Pt10.pdf