Deep support for the 24/7 learning environment

 

Mr Derek Wise Cramlington Community High School Highburn, Cramlington, UK

 

Deep learning and deep experience within personalisation need deep support for students. Rethinking advice and guidance and introducing mentoring and coaching would be challenge enough for a traditional schooling structure but for the 24/7 future we envisage it might seem to be the Everest of all challenges. Or is it?

In this short think piece I wish to postulate that:

• the type of deep support needed may depend on the form of the 24/7 learning environment;

• although coaching and mentoring are conduits between deep support and deep learning, an at least equally effective one is to embed deep support within pedagogic processes and organisational and assessment criteria;

• we have promising signs that transition to 24/7 schooling/learning may not be as difficult as we think.

I'll illustrate this second point, first because, if we get this right, many of the misgivings about 24/7 schooling will be alleviated. Higher education institutions give us a lead in this respect. In America, for example, the Kentucky Community and Technical College system adopted a textbook with its own built-in essay review service and Kaplan University, concerned that some of their students were insufficiently well prepared, partnered with an online tutoring company that provided content, assessment and tutoring to improve undergraduate mathematics and writing skills. Naturally, this online service was available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.

The Alpha Digital Learning Environment of the Alpha project in New Zealand can accommodate up to 40,000 online students. This teaches the students how to locate information, establish its validity and to sift, discuss and apply knowledge. Each student is professionally assessed for their individual learning preferences, including absorbing and processing information, and every student's individual learning programme is based on the results of the in-depth assessment.

Specific emotional and social literacy programmes are taught online, initially via a forum, and then followed by discussion and debate via the audio conferencing facility. Each term begins with negotiated learning plans and a social contract that details how students will interact with their local community. Online mentoring chat rooms and the like are available as and when needed.

The sense of community here is very strong as it is with the UK 's Notschool - a 'virtual' school for permanently excluded or ill students who are connected at home to a broadband network. A powerful multimedia home computer links to a network of experts and peers.

The use of students as a resource for deep support seems to be integral to the success of many of the 24/7 virtual approaches. Consider how much easier this would be in a school/learning environment that has a physical as well as a virtual presence. Training our students for Assessment for Learning, mentoring, coaching and general peer support is likely to become as important as the training of teaching staff.

What then may a 24/7 learning

nvironment/school be like? We will assume that there is a physical site. This can be the focus for virtually all community activities, with students working both on-site and off-site. In order to accommodate different lifestyles, such a school might run a choice of different sessions where a physical presence is necessary, for example, morning, afternoon and evening, with the remaining time devoted to off-site or online learning. Other models might include the 'dissolved school', where learning is in large blocks of time but largely dispersed into the community, for example, college, multimedia site/hairdressing salon, radio station, and so on. Again, this is combined with online, work-based training and on-campus support.

Each model will throw up different support and management issues

For example, how are we to engender a sense of belonging with a dispersed community model? Some students will need this sense of belonging in order to thrive; hence support might be focused on 'study buddies', 'peer mentoring' and 'online communities'. In a non-dispersed model - the 'extended' school that incorporates a whole range of community activities and facilities on a single campus - belonging may not become an issue. In either model, students will need negotiated learning plans, regularly reviewed, and considerable help with the wide range of choices available.

Staff also will need considerable support. There will be much a greater emphasis on their new role in negotiating skills, one-to-one advice, the development of high quality online material, and so on. Staff will need web designers to help them turn their ideas into online reality.

Management, too, will need to change. Perhaps a chief executive to take overall control of the programmes, logistics, networking and a headteacher, if not a redundant term, literally in charge of the teachers' teaching and learning pedagogy, and so on.

The good news is that the evidence from America and New Zealand, together with the Notschool project, indicates that students learn and make progress, feel supported and retain a sense of belonging. If this is the case in a virtual environment, then it should be even easier where there is a combination of physical and virtual environments available so that students with different learning styles can benefit from an appropriate balance, 24/7.

 

Mr Derek Wise is Headteacher of Cramlington Community High School, in the UK.

The Discussion Forum on this Workshop Paper is now closed.