Facilitation Report 3 Article: Putting Students at the Centre in Education Reform Author: Benjamin Levin Facilitator: Sharnjit Moondi

Group Members: Bavina and Erica Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 Introduction: This being my third facilitation in this course but fifth facilitation since spring 2012, they have really grown on me. The facilitations were actually one of the reasons for why I decided to take this course. I find that interaction with another individual or a small group of individuals in class has really enhanced my learning. It has also brought about a change in my comfort within the class. I feel much more comfortable contributing to small and large group discussions in this course, it is partly because of these facilitations and getting to know the other classmates much better. I have always been a bit of a shy person in the beginning but when I get to know people, I open up and feel more confident to share my ideas without over analyzing whether they are correct or incorrect. This facilitation was done within a new group of classmates and I felt confident and comfortable going into the facilitation. For this facilitation I took on a few different approaches just to see how it would work out. I decided to add a few more components to my facilitation such as a section on relating other literature in this course with this article and also a section on future research that can and should be done. I found that adding these to components would add to the overall knowledge that we gained thus far in the course. I began my facilitation by briefly going over Benjamin Levins background, the purpose of the article, so we all had a clear understanding of the focus of this article and then went over the

agenda for my evening facilitation. I had split the facilitation in a way that was easy to transition between all the main points. For each section, I had picked out a few quotations that I felt really emphasized the point in that particular section and then I discussed it further. For most I also created discussion questions that we were all able to share our opinions along with relating some experiences with them, so that we could all understand them even better. Discussion: The very first section of my facilitation was on the five reasons why students should be involved in reform according to Levin. I first outlined them and was going to go into each one separately again after but we actually ended up having a long discussion from a great question that Erica brought up. Erica mentioned that she thought the idea of including students is great but at what age and grade do you take their opinions more seriously? When do we know that they really know what they are talking about? She gave us a great example of how she teaches preschoolers, age 3 and 4 and how she asks them about what themes they are interested in but she said that the problem with kids that age is their choose changes in minutes. We had around a 15 -20 minute discussion revolving around this question, which went into a few other questions, it was a great open-ended discussion. My perspective on the question was that in the article he mentioned young students having an opinion as well and that we should be taking it into consideration. From the article I understood that we need to ask students for their opinions and feedback but we do not need to incorporate it all the time. We need to try to engage them by trying to implement as many of their ideas so that they feel that their innovation and creativity pays off. Bavina added by saying that she was thinking about that and about the importance of parent involvement. She was saying that at the end it is their kids, so

shouldnt they be considered as well in what the students are taught and how they are taught? I mentioned that that was one of the criticisms I had toward the article because even though it was targeted towards involvement of students, it made it sound like parents should talk through their children. Erica made a quick note to say that she believes after our discussion that it all depends on age and the students maturity. We all agreed that we felt it was dependent on age. I said that I never considered age to be such a major factor but it is true, as students get older, we may consider their opinions much more because we feel that they thought it through and that they have an idea of what they want. We talked in more depth about the time that we felt that our opinions were taken into consideration more. We all agreed that university is really when we felt the freedom and the appreciation for what we wanted. I gave the example that when we got into university, we were given an outline and mostly every professor asked us if we had any feedback on the outline to let him or her know and they will consider it but that there was never a guarantee that the change would take place. We all appreciated the fact that our feedback was even considered. Bavina mentioned that she found it difficult to go from structured to a bit unstructured when she first went into university. She said that she has found it even more difficult in some of the masters courses because they are even more unstructured. Bavina and I brought up an example of a class that we are both attending on Tuesdays, which has given us an open-ended assignment due in the next week. We are both having difficulty trying to figure out what should be done for it. We have both written things down and then scratched them thinking we were overanalyzing everything. The instructions are only two lines and this actually stresses us both out, we feel overwhelmed with it all because we dont know entirely what to

expect. I said that it goes back to something that Hargreaves brought up in his article about the ability to be innovative but that it is difficult to be innovative in a structured environment that is filled with rules and then we are so use to structure that it produces great difficulty to go to an unstructured environment where we dont receive any rules or guidelines. Bavina was then curious on whether starting at a younger age with a bit more flexibility would make it easier to adjacent to lack of structure that we face in reality most of the time. We discussed as a group about how it would make it easier and we do try by including more critical thinking within our lessons but that in the end it is still not enough for the big adjacent that we all face eventually. After talking a bit about the fourth importance, which revolved around constructivist learning, Bavina brought up the point on whether students even knew the best way of learning for them since they have been in a structured environment for so long? Erica and I had similar thoughts on how not everyone knows but that we believe that everyone establishes some sort of idea of what works best for them from previous years in school. We felt from our own experiences that we established a better idea of what worked best for us when we got into university and we felt as though that was due to university being unstructured and forcing us to understand how to study and learn and become successful. Erica brought up the final point by saying that from a teachers perspective, we believe we know what is best for our students through observations and experimentation and seeing what works best and we take on that approach. It was a great point to end it by because from a students perspective they are learning about what works best for them throughout the years and as a teacher we believe we have the correct approach according to observations and results. Towards the end of the facilitation, I went over a few quotes

within the article that I felt related very well to other literature that we have read in the course this far. students work in schools cannot be separated from the changes happening in their lives outside of school. This was a great statement that Levin made, that corresponded directly to Hargreaves article on the paradigm that teachers face. There was also a great statement that Levin made that corresponded with what was said by Hinde in the article titled Reflections on reform; when teachers are not committed to reforms, those reforms do not take root It went directly with the idea that the culture must accept the reform especially the teachers who are actually implementing it. Last but definitely not least, there was a statement made about experimentation and parents being a barrier when it comes to changes. I mentioned that this statement had reminded me of when the Mary Ward Independent School was first introduced because during the guest speaker, we came to find out how much parents questioned the system because it was non-traditional. We concluded this section by saying that throughout the article, there were many examples that lead us to think about other articles we read in the course. Conclusion: I believe this facilitation compares very well to the one I did with just Sultan because there was great participation from everyone. We were all very open with one another and had some amazing discussions over the text. I believe we all enjoyed being in a group together because we all were able to work off one anothers comments very well. All of our discussions were lengthy in time and we talked about many perspectives and many points in the article and so I hope I have been able to sum everything up for you within this report very well. Thank you for the fabulous opportunity to facilitate this article

and within small groups because it is a much a more comfortable environment to share personal experiences.