A propósito de la relación tutora: Cómo las nuevas pedagogias encuentran el aprendizaje profundo.

A rich seam

How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning

 

 Authors           Michael Fullan & Maria Langworthy

 

In a final example of the power of peer tutoring, the Learning Communities Project in Mexico incorporates peer tutoring in rural schools throughout the country.[1] The program developed tutoring networks where students taught each other, using the curriculum as a map with each student “teacher” developing their own area of expertise.[2] Six thousand schools across Mexico have joined this movement. Data available from the first 4,000 schools to participate shows that they have significantly increased the proportion of students scoring at ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ levels in the national ENLACE examinations.

The new pedagogies require a teacher to have a repertoire of strategies, which may range from project-based learning through direct instruction to an inquiry-based model. But the key is that the teacher takes a highly proactive role in driving the learning process forward, using whichever strategy works for a specific student or task (and analysing which strategy works best). In the new pedagogies, this means interacting with students to make the students’ thinking and questions about learning more visible. Here it is valuable to consider one of John Hattie’s clustered findings from his analysis of over 1,000 meta-studies worldwide into the impact of different teaching and learning strategies on student learning.35[3] This work covers research studies that were conducted with a total of 240 million students. The impacts of individual teaching strategies were measured through the ‘effect size’ of a strategy on students’ learning (Hattie notes that an effect size of less than .40 is not worth considering). He developed two categories of strategies, and called these categories ‘teacher as facilitator’ compared to ‘teacher as activator.’ These categories can be seen as possible teaching strategies in the new pedagogies:

Table 2: Hattie’s ‘Visible Learning’ Analysis of Effect Sizes of Categories of Teaching Strategies:

Strategy Category	Effect Size
Teacher as Activator (teacher-student relationship, reciprocal teaching, feedback, meta-cognition, teacher clarity)	.72
Teacher as Facilitator (inductive teaching, student control over learning)	.19

 

We can see that the teacher as activator category garners more than three times the effect of the facilitator category. In the new pedagogies, teachers do not have less of a role; they have a new active role, more engaged with students and other teachers than ever before. Thus, popular notions of the ‘guide on the side’ may in fact be less powerful versions of the new pedagogies.

Teachers who play dynamic, interactive roles with students – pushing students to clearly define their own learning goals, helping them gain the learning muscle to effectively pursue those goals, and supporting them in monitoring how they are doing in achieving those goals – have extremely strong impacts on their students’ learning. Such teachers do not ‘let the students learn on their own’ but instead help them master the process of learning. Such teachers do not ‘let the students learn on their own’ but instead help them master the difficult and demanding process of learning.

Such teachers have highly-developed pedagogical capacities. In short, new pedagogical partnerships with definable features, are one entry point into rich seams of deep learning.              

 Tomado de: A Rich Seam. How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning. Michael Fullan & Maria Langworthy. January 2014. Pages 19 and 20.

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[1] See the story of Learning Communities from Maravillas, Mexico: http://vimeo.com/70279241

[2] Rincon-Gallardo and Elmore 2012

[3] Hattie 2009; Hattie 2012