Post on 27-May-2015
description
Narrative inquiry into K12 teachers’ change in classroom practices
Beatriz de los Arcos
@celTatis
http://oerresearchhub.org
@OER_Hub
reflection
Photo: think hard CC BY-NC-N
D 2.0 by M
utiara Karina
Photo: CC BY-NC-SA by David Lee King
flippedlearning
Photo: Upside Down Roller Coaster CC BY 2.0 by Austin Kirk
How has your use of OER changed the way you think about teaching?
“Fundamentally it’s changed my role: I’m not so much the all-knowing Oz behind the curtain that we
grew up with… teachers were the holders of all knowledge and we were students, lucky to be in their
presence. My students are able to see the fact that I’m a learner alongside of them and we can learn from
each other (…) I by no means profess that I’m the only one that has this knowledge, I’m the only one they can learn from, the only one who knows the right answers. This has changed the way my classroom
operates”
English teacher
“It used to be that when I thought about preparing for a lesson I would look at a book and see what they did and then I would teach a lesson similar to it. But now I
can go online, watch a video or look at somebody else’s materials that they put out there, see what they are doing and either modify what they are doing and
bring it into my classroom, or just get a totally different perspective on it and allow my students to get multiple perspectives on a topic (…) so I guess
searching what’s out there online allows me to be a better teacher”
Math teacher
“In most courses, teachers use a reference textbook combined with their own material to teach. In some courses, teachers or teacher teams develop their own materials instead of a textbook, but those materials are usually private or unable to be shared openly due to copyright restrictions connected to how they were made. This course has been fully developed from scratch without such restrictions and is released free on the web for any teacher or student to use or remix. As a result, I do not treat this curriculum as "mine" -- it belongs to the class and to the world. This also means that I encourage and expect you to contribute to its development and improvement.”
“I make my students do a course improvement project; they have to make the course better, so I actually give them edit access to my website and have them changing things. My kids are actually making the curriculum better each
year (…) I know [the course] can be better and I feel the same about other people’s resources: if
I know I can’t modify as a starting point to improve, it’s a waste of investment for me to
use those resources”
Math teacher
“I was on a teaching team: I taught all the Math and one Social Studies, another teacher taught
all the Language Arts (…) From our view point VS connected to all four subjects: because they had
to do some graphing, there’s your Math; they had to identify species, there’s your Science; to
write field notes it was all Language Arts, and for us Social Studies, it’s the five themes of
geography: location, movement, human-environment interaction, place and region”
Math & Social Studies teacher
“Vital Signs hasn’t really changed the way I think about teaching. It’s made my
teaching that much richer”
Math & Social Studies teacher
Photo CC BY-SA 2.0 by Michael Mandiberg
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