In the other blog I write and manage, Technoblog, I wrote once about the importance of children developing thinking and information skills while at school, as these are what will truly empower children to operate successfully in the 21st Century world they will step out into. I shared this personal belief of mine with the parents who attended our Parents & Friends association meeting last Wednesday and listened to my presentation on learning with technology at St. Michael’s. It’s important to teach a certain amount of important content, but without the lifelong learning skills, how will children the content they specifically need, and the new content that will be created, over the course of their adult lives?
As such, I’m a fan of the information skills process. Not that I believe I’m an expert (or even a good teacher, for that matter) of it, but I like to do my best to teach it, simply because it so accurately reflects what we actually do as independent learners. If nothing else, my liking of the information skills process makes me popular with teacher librarians!
So before the beforementioned P&F Meeting last week, I told my teacher librarian that I would be referring to “the process” in the meeting. The first response I got was “oh, they’ve just reviewed it.”
And so they have. The NSW Department of Education and Training is sharing its work on the process on its website. As all its work is complete, the full results will be available from their school libraries page. They’ve done some good work here. I really like the lists of indicators of what behaviours and strategies children should display in working through different stages in the process.
You can also download it all in a pdf. A bit crowded for my liking, but it’s all on one page, which is always a good way of not losing people’s attention with a document.
The thing is, we’re currently working through the process in my class at the moment (we’re working towards writing explanations on the cycles of the seasons and the phases of the moon). I don’t I’ll have time this term to update my process posters. It’ll have to wait a little while until I can get these reports finished.
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June 4th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
What a great summery of such an important part of teaching! It’s often easy to just focus on the content – to ‘get through what they need to know’ without paying as much attention to the ‘how’ of the student’s learning as much as the ‘what’. Having spent quite a few years teaching senior secondary students, I’m all too familiar with ‘making sure the kids know what they need for the exam/assessment task’ etc. The demands on time are immense (as you point out at the end also – need to get the reports finished??). Also, the first and last steps in the process can sometimes be ‘done’ for the students – i.e. the ‘task’ is defined without too much consideration of the learners, and, similarly, the assessment is often external to the students, perhaps making it less relevant? It’s also very important to focus on the process, so, as you point out, life-long learning becomes second nature to the students in their future after school. The ‘what’ of learning is certainly important but it’s the ‘how’ that is more likely to be with them for life, particularly as the students learn to engage in a world of ever-increasing information.