A culture of co-learning
Aditi Mathur and Ratnesh Mathur
We all know that a school is a place of learning. And learning comes from a yearning, a desire. How the school can create such a yearning environment is perhaps what all educators, principals and teachers wonder about.
Our belief is that one important ingredient of the above is the school culture – primarily created by the school (teaching) staff. So here is question no. 1: “Is our school culture that of learning or that of teaching?”
One way to answer that question is to ask question no. 2: “How much am I, as a teacher, learning? – not just about the subject (that is actually less important) but about teaching, about children and about all the stuff life (and learning) is made of – like motivation, discipline, values, self-esteem, beliefs, feelings, creativity, etc?”
Another way to answer the first question is to ask question no. 3: “Who leads – the learner (student) or the teacher? So is the school learning-led or teaching-led?”
Another question (no. 4) arises: “What would happen if the children took over the task of teaching and the staff took over the task of learning?”
And one more (no. 5): We get calls asking for teacher training. While each call is a reason to celebrate (this school and its staff want to learn), it’s also a reason for anguish. Does not the school already have an amazing pool of resources (the staff) to design and create their own learning journey? Does a team of teachers really need another teacher? What an amazing environment of learning can be created if the teachers themselves train each other? Isn’t the (staff) group’s synergy the perfect example for children to see an interdependent ecosystem of collaborative learning?
This article hence is an appeal to all schools to look inwards, to draw from their own resources, to empower their own learning ambassadors and harness their creativity and energy to create a school that embodies a culture of co-learning. In such an environment, we believe, yearning for learning will automatically happen.
Here are some guidelines, just in case you need some:
Let’s start with six beliefs we have:
• Each teacher is a beautifully capable trainer.
• Each teacher enjoys learning.
• Each teacher wants to make the classroom a wonderful place for all learners.
• Each teacher is ready to collaborate and wants to benefit from collaboration with others (staff).
• The best learning for teachers does not come from outside (trainers), but from within (self and co-creation).
• Teachers, like anybody else, benefit from continuous learning.
(You can, if you want, generalize the above to all human beings including the children in your school.)
We are not debating whether the above six are true or not. We are inviting you to visualize what will happen if each school approached its teachers with the above perspective. We’re also emphasizing that it is imperative that we believe in these if we want to believe in our school as not a teaching but a learning ecosystem. And it is equally important to communicate, regularly, in no fewer words, the above beliefs to the teachers – for just like children, teachers too have been unfortunately exposed to societal messaging that says ‘you are not powerful'(among other put-downs). We need to undo that conditioning: we need to show teachers their true poetntial, their greatness. Let’s do that by believing in them.
- Since teachers are capable, the staff room will be the place that will drive the teacher training or learning process. No externals are required. What is required is that each teacher is involved in it from the beginning, given the responsibility (maybe by turn), and the teachers give each other feedback. There are no awards, rewards, appreciations, or chiding – only feedback.
- Since learning has to be continuous, and bit by bit, it is imperative that time is allocated every week for this training. Half an hour every week with all teachers or subgroups is much better training and learning than a day-long program with (the so-called) experts once in while (most TED talks, for instance, are just 20 mins long).
- Somebody (probably the principal) from the school management team needs to create a buzz around this learning. Let the whole school know what the teachers are learning about. Posters in the staff room, quotations in the assembly, articles, stories, videos, presentations shared via email, photocopies, WhatsApp – whatever the staff is comfortable with.
- Invite children to teach teachers (in the weekly training session). They can do small presentations or drama, bring stories, or even get teachers to do activities on the topic. Invariably the children will involve parents, so much better for the school as we’re tapping more resources.
If you are wondering what kind of topics a school should pick – then this is a good start. The school and the teachers need to think about what they want to explore, teach and learn. It could be values, multiple intelligences, pedagogical innovations, how children learn, or even how to add humour in the classroom – any topic the teachers desire is okay since yearning is learning.
Over time, as the school culture becomes a learner-led learning culture, the teachers will embrace a different role altogether – that not of a teacher, but of a facilitator.
For every teacher knows that the subject matter by itself is not important, the child is; the teacher is not important, but the environment she creates is; the learning per se is not important, but what it does to the learner is.
The authors run an open unschool called Aarohi and invite all readers to visit and see how open learning can be an amazing way to work with children. They also conduct training retreats and online training for teachers and parents. Visit www.aarohilife.org.
