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Explorative nature of learning

I believe in the explorative nature of learning. That means students should be allowed and supported to explore the world and encouraged to find the answers by themselves. It is basically aligned with inquiry-based learning, including problem-based learning, project-based learning, etc. However, the difference is that I would like to have students ask their own questions, starting with the “why”s and “how”s. Meanwhile, the teachers are to elicit their curiosity and facilitate the inquiry process. It also means sharing the power in the classroom and transferring the responsibility of learning to students, treating students as equal beings, and having trust in them. As someone growing up under an over-structured education system, I remember almost every single time when I was provided with options and was allowed to make my own decisions. The rule is simple here- I would love to put effort into it because I choose to do so.

 

Prepare students to be lifelong learners

Life-long learning is highly emphasized in Education 3.0. To operationalize this idea, this first step is to have learning fun and enjoyable, as people won’t be willing to do painful things for a lifetime. Also, we need to infuse learning into every piece of life, making it ordinary not some unique experiences that only happen in school. It also means breaking the boundary of school walls and bringing different parties, roles and stakeholders into the classroom.

 

Support knowledge building, not knowledge feeding

In my classroom, I want to treat students as knowledge builders who learn actively and collaboratively creating their own knowledge (Scardamalia et al., 2010). The effort to support knowledge building is to formulate a knowledge community, inside the classroom or even broader, and also create motivation to do the work that goes into the construction of collective knowledge. This also focuses on students’ core role and responsibility as well as collaboration among peers to create meaningful tangible and cognitive artifacts.

 

Connect with the open world 

Pedagogically, I aim to connect my students with accessible resources all over the world. More importantly, I shall support students to explore how to find their own appropriate resources, evaluate the resources, apply them and even recreate them for future use. This could be a long process with a series of activities and practices, but when students start to bring their own resources into the classroom and support each other’s learning, the effect would be outstanding.

 

Nurture a positive collaboration

culture Collaboration as one of the most critical 21st-century skills will be strongly emphasized in my classroom. Students are expected to work together very often and reflect on their learning and collaboration on a regular basis. I don’t think good collaborators are born to be, instead, they have practiced many times on multiple projects and reflected to improve. Schools can provide such opportunities for them to practice and to fail if necessary, and they will grow to be better collaborators from their failures.

 

Empathy and understanding

Empathy and understanding are not on my teaching philosophy list until the pandemic. When people are suffering in different ways caused by the sudden lockdown, I realized the importance to have empathy and the ability to understand others’ scenarios. The world is changing and unexpected things happen, thus besides knowledge and resources, people should be able to emotionally support each other, which in turn leads to a more humanistic view of the world.