How to Succeed with Creating a Learning Community

There’s been enough talk across the education sector about student-centred approaches to teaching and learning that you’d be hard-pressed to find any educator comfortable these days to continue with a tried and true ‘sage on the stage’ routine. At the same time, you’re likely to find any number of educators ready to be ‘guides at the sides’ of their students who remain desperate for practical advice. After all, since the principles and policies and rhetorical flourishes have all been said and done, the need now is for practical strategies: okay, okay, experiential, learner-centred cooperative learning communities, I agree already – just show me how to do this stuff.

Luckily, the Little Books of Big Ideas series does exactly that. In How to Succeed with Contracts, How to Succeed with Cooperative Learning, How to Succeed with Creating a Learning Community, How to Succeed with Learning Centres and How to Succeed with Questioning, you’ll find practical reference books that put the detail into what’s often an amorphous concept: lifelong learning. How do you develop individualised learning plans or contracts for a diverse range of students so that activities facilitate and motivate learning? What exactly is a learning community, why should you build one and how do you do it? How do you get your students really learning cooperatively? What might a learning centre look like in your classroom?

Some of the most artful teaching I’ve ever seen was back in the late 1970s in a lower-primary school classroom where many of the practices outlined in this series had been developed by a master practitioner. She’d built a range of ways for her students to learn – without naming them. There was any amount of cooperative learning going on, there was a learning centre, and the classroom was a true learning community. As a secondary teacher in the 1980s, my first assumption was that the sorts of approaches I’d seen in her classroom must only be possible in primary schools since I, like my colleagues, remained chained to the whiteboard. That was a long time ago, at a time when information and communication technologies and the learning possibilities they enable were restricted to two BBCs in a cupboard, and the teaching and learning strategies of educators have moved a good way beyond the fraud at the board. Even so, my feeling is that this series will receive a better reception from facilitator focused primary educators than from secondary educators. I hope I’m wrong.

The Little Books of Big Ideas series typically suits the classroom-based practitioner, although other titles in the series, which includes How to Succeed with Communication and Conflict Resolution, How to Succeed with Developing Resilience and How to Succeed with Making Schools Inclusive, suit those interested in a school-wide approach to teaching and learning.

Steve Holden in Teacher magazine, ACER

| May 2005

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