LIFE LONG LEARNER is A WINNER

"lifelong learning is an essential challenge for inventing the future of our societies; it is a necessity rather than a luxury to be considered … It is a mindset and a habit for people to acquire. It creates the challenge to understand, explore, and support new essential dimensions of learning such as:

(1) self-directed learning, (2) learning on demand, (3) informal learning, and (4) collaborative and organizational learning.” Fischer explains that lifelong learning “requires progress and an integration of new theories, innovative systems, practices, and assessment.” For teachers, putting in this kind of lifelong work will help better amplify their capabilities, collaborate with colleagues, and transform in turn the way their students navigate the world.

Past and contemporary scholars have emphasized the importance of job-embedded, systematic instructional inquiry for educators.

• Continued learning is particularly important because the nation's schools have been increasingly challenged by policy initiatives to "do better, and to do differently" (McLaughlin and Oberman 1996: iv). At the core of educational reforms to raise standards, reshape curricula, and restructure the way schools operate is the call to re conceptualize the practice of teaching (Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin, 1996).

children need a broader range of skills, including higher order thinking skills and technological expertise. Teachers must learn to teach students in ways that promote such skills. At the same time, teachers face the greater challenges of rapidly increasing technological changes, greater diversity in the classroom, and a push to teach in innovative ways (often different from how they were taught and/or from the formal pre- service training they received).

In order to meet the changing demands of their jobs, high-quality teachers must be capable and willing to continually learn and relearn their trade. This learning begins prior to entering the classroom (as discussed in the previous section). However, beginning teachers are often not fully prepared for the requirements of classroom teaching (Fullan with Stiegelbauer, 1991).

Continued learning, the second aspect of teacher preparation and qualifications addressed in this report, is key to building educators' capacity for effective teaching, particularly in a profession where the demands are changing and expanding. Continued learning takes multiple forms; the two key forms discussed here are formal professional development and collaboration with other teachers.

Intelligent people are in a continuous learning mode. They are invigorated by the quest of life long learning. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this habit of mind are always striving for improvement, growing, learning, modifying and improving themselves. They seize problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn.

A great mystery about humans is that we often confront learning opportunities with fear rather than mystery and wonder. We seem to feel better when we know rather than when we learn. We defend our biases, beliefs, and store houses of knowledge rather than invite the unknown, the creative, and the inspirational. Being certain and closed gives us comfort, while being doubtful and open gives us fear. We have been taught to value certainty rather than doubt, to give answers rather than to inquire, to know which choice is correct rather than to explore alternatives. Unfortunately, some adults are content with what they already believe and know. Their child-like curiosity has been extinguished. They are reluctant to discover the wisdom of others. They do not know how or when to leverage a love and lust of learning. As a result they follow a path of little value and minimal opportunity.

• Teachers who continue to learn throughout their professional careers display the humility of knowing that they don’t know, which is the highest form of thinking they will ever learn. Paradoxically, unless you start off with humility, you will never get anywhere. As the first step, you must already have what eventually will be the crowning glory of all learning: to know –and to admit – that you don’t know and to not be afraid to find out.

Professional Development and Teaching Experience

In an era of education reform, continuing professional development is equally relevant for both new and experienced teachers as many aspects of teaching may be changing. Teacher participation in professional development may be influenced by several factors: personal motivation, school or district requirement, and state initiatives requiring or encouraging certain types of professional development. Moreover, while certain kinds of on-the-job training, such as classroom management and curriculum development, may be more relevant to the needs of new teachers than experienced teachers, those who have taught for many years may have a greater need to upgrade their skills in the use of educational technology. It is, therefore, useful to examine whether teaching experience makes a difference to participation in professional development in various content areas.

Constructive Learning Opportunities

It is often said that we learn from experience. A more accurate statement, however, is that we learn by reflecting on our experience. Human beings, as meaning making organisms, reflect upon and sift through our experiences through personal and social filters to form beliefs and ways of knowing. We interact with others and with the surrounding environment to form personal action knowledge and internal guidance systems for our decision-making. An inquirer is not a spectator but a participant within a problematic situation, seeking actively to understand and change it. Inquiry results in a learning outcome when it yields both new insight and action steps and, to a degree, a commitment to implement that action.

The vicissitudes of day-to-day classroom life and the culture of the school provide fertile arenas of meaning making and knowledge formation for teachers. This rich environment provides numerous opportunities for learning and professional development if we can take the time for reflection and dialogue with others.

Six Domains of Continuous Inquiry

Here are six domains in which teachers can continue to learn throughout their professional careers. Sample questions provide invitations to reflect upon the experiences and derive meaning, which can be internalized and applied in future situations.

1. Continuous Learning about Collegial Interaction

While teachers may conduct their craft in the ‘privacy’ of their own classroom, they also function as a member of a team. Learning to work interdependently is a necessary professional role that does not develop without mindfulness, training and commitment to self and to others. During staff, department or grade-level interactions, colleagues develop teaching materials together, plan together, seek each other’s help, watch each other teach and reflect together about their students and their teaching.

“The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.” John F. Kennedy

“ A great mystery about human sis that we often confront learning opportunities with fear rather than mystery and wonder.”

Coaching skills are a vital component in the collegial relationship. In too many settings collegiality is confused with congeniality. Constructive discussion moves beyond idle staff room conversations to real structured dialogue about student learning and the craft of teaching.

2. Becoming More Aware of the Cognitive Processes of Instruction

Teaching i s decision making . Our instructional actions are driven by sometimes invisible, undisclosed and un articulated mental maps. These maps are the essential planning, in-flight monitoring and reflecting tools that support high performance teaching and continuous professional renewal. Discussion with others provides an awareness of what goes on in your head when you teach. Surfacing, by talking aloud about our thinking and classroom decisions, energises us and causes us to refine our cognitive maps and opens the possibility of reshaping and reforming our belief systems.

According to Costa and Garmston, a teacher’s meta cognitive processes before, during and after teaching may be the most important component in his or her professional portfolio of skills and awareness.

3. Expanding our Knowledge of the Structure of the Discipline(s)

To ensure high quality instruction in the academic disciplines, we must continually deepen our knowledge of the structure and organizing principles, modes of inquiry and habits of mind that distinguish that discipline. Each content has a logic which is defined by the thinking that produced it: its purposes, problems, information, concepts, assumptions, implications, forms of communication, technology and its interrelationships with other disciplines. What makes a discipline a discipline is a disciplined mode of thinking.

The terms: biology, anthropology, psychology, and cosmology, for example, end in ...logy’ which comes from the Greek, meaning logic. Thus, bio-logy is the logic of the study of life forms. Psycho-logy is the logic of the study of the mind, etc. Mathematics means being able to figure out a solution to a problem using mathematical reasoning.

Any subject must , therefore be understood as a mode of figuring out correct or reasonable solutions to a certain range of problems. Teacher’s manuals and in-service sessions seldom open up this territory. The critical arenas for exploration here are: What do experts currently believe is the most valid content in a particular field? What are the processes of solving problems peculiar that field? How do they think about this field? What are the pathways from novice to becoming expert thinking and action in this field?

“ A teacher’s meta cognitive processes may be the most important component in his or her professional portfolio of skills and awareness.”

Exploration and dialogue with other adults is as much our work as is our time in the classroom. It is not what is keeping us from our work. How we talk together matters as much as that we talk together about important matters. The mutually constructed learning environment is a resource for learning, not the byproduct of learning. Our prior knowledge, complete with misinformation and misconceptions is the starting point for learning. Trust, listening with understanding and empathy and valuing (not just ‘tolerating’) individual differences is essential here. Through dialogue and collegial coaching, teachers reveal and build their knowledge base. Such an environment needs to be safe.

4. Learning More about Ourselves :

Self Knowledge

True professional capacities are rooted in the essential knowledge of self. As we search for clarity about the essence of our professional identity, we uncover our values and beliefs about living, learning and how to be successful.

Related to these areas of understanding are the issues of standards for performance and standards for products. These standards apply to our own work and to the expectations we hold for our students and others. Self-knowledge here is not enough; we need to constantly filter for congruence between our inner values and beliefs and our outer actions and communications.

5. Enhancing our Repertoire of Teaching Skills

Like the queen on a chessboard, the teacher with the most moves has the most options and the greatest degree of influence. There are always alternative instructional strategies. Marzano, Pickering and Pollock believe that as a profession, we must move beyond the folk wisdom that governs discussions about teaching and learning and reach out to the knowledge bases to constantly expand our repertoires. This area of the map interacts dynamically with the other elements . In specific disciplines there are content specific repertoires. The nature of the learners involved also has a major influence on choices and options in this area. How bright, affluent secondary students learn mathematical constructs is very different to how primary, underprivileged, limited English speaking primary students learn mathematical constructs.

6. Learning More About Students and How They Learn.

Students bring their own unique characteristics to the learning process and to the culture of the school and classroom. Who they are to us as individuals and who we are to them matters first and foremost at the human level. In any group of learners we face a variety of learning style differences, requiring multiple approaches to both content and process. Within a typical classroom we also encounter a remarkable range in developmental levels, often spanning a four to six year spread in cognitive age within a grade level cohort. Added to this are the significant variations in cultural beliefs, values and approaches to learning embedded in our changing student population and their families.

“ We learn by reflecting on our experience.”

Collaboration with Other Teachers

Collaboration with other teachers is the second feature of teachers' continued learning addressed in this report. Unlike traditional professional development activities, peer collaboration has been heralded by teachers, researchers, and policymakers as essential to teachers' continuous learning. Initiatives to improve the quality and efficacy of continued learning emphasize the development of learning communities within and across schools and highlight the importance of these mechanisms to foster teacher learning.

Opportunities for collaboration include those that are provided within the school and those that occur within professional networks across schools and other institutional structures. Teacher participation in school-based activities is likely to produce positive and long-lasting change because such activities provide the basis for transformative learning. Such collaboration revolves around joint work and teacher networks. Joint work such as team teaching, mentoring, and formally planned meetings are important mechanisms for productive exchange of ideas and reflection about practice. For instance, the focus on specific subject matter and teaching strategies helps teachers to improve their content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Mentoring is an effective mechanism for one-to-one professional guidance and for cultivating a teaching culture in which expert teachers serve as an essential resource for new teachers. All of these teaching-related activities are consistent with the view of professional development as a lifelong, inquiry-based collegial process rooted in the development of schools as collaborative workplaces.

Collaborative relationships may extend beyond classrooms and school buildings to school-university collaborations or partnerships, teacher-to- teacher and school-to-school networks, and participation in district, regional, or national task forces. These communities can be organized across subject matter, pedagogical issues, and significant school reforms. These networks can be powerful learning tools to engage professionals in collective work and allow teachers to go beyond their own classrooms and schools to engage in professional discourse about their own experiences and the experiences of others.

Participation in Collaborative Activities

To provide a national profile of teachers' peer collaboration, the 1993-94 survey asked teachers about their participation in the last 12 months in various mentoring and collaborating activities related to teaching, and the extent to which they felt each of these activities improved their teaching. These activities were:

A common planning period for team teachers;

Regularly scheduled collaboration with other teachers, excluding meetings held for administrative purposes;

Being mentored by another teacher in a formal relationship;

Mentoring another teacher in a formal relationship;

Networking with teachers outside your school; and

Individual or collaborative research on a topic of interest to you professionally.

MENTORING

Mentoring can be an important way for teachers to share information and experiences about teaching in a one-on-one relationship. Such relationships may be particularly useful to new teachers as they seek to develop effective teaching practices. The study found that about a quarter of the teachers indicated that they had mentored another teacher in a formal relationship in the last 12 months, and 19 percent said that they had been mentored by another teacher in such a relationship The relatively low levels of teacher participation in mentoring reflect a pattern in which newer teachers were more likely than more experienced teachers to be mentored. The likelihood of mentoring and of being mentored by another teacher varied substantially by years of teaching experience (Figure 10). Teachers with 3 or fewer years of teaching experience were the most likely to have been mentored by another teacher in the last 12 months and the least likely to have acted in the role of mentor to another teacher. In fact, almost three out of five new teachers had been mentored by another teacher in the last year, suggesting that schools and/or teachers recognize the importance of such relationships early in a teacher's career.

Frequency of Participation

Teachers were also asked how frequently they had participated in the activities, within a range of at least once a week to a few times a year; survey results showed considerable variation on this dimension (Table 16). Among teachers who reported engaging in a particular activity, they participated the most frequently in common planning periods for team teachers, with 60 percent participating at least once a week. This was followed by mentoring another teacher in a formal relationship (42 percent) and engaging in regularly scheduled collaboration with other teachers (34 percent). While many teachers (61 percent) indicated that they had participated in networking with other teachers outside the school (Figure 9), the frequency of this kind of activity was low; 60 percent of these teachers reported such interactions only a few times a year.

CONTINUOUS LEARNERS ARE HIGH QUALITY TEACHERS.

High quality teachers are lifelong learners. This assumption is based on the recognition that teaching is a complex profession with changing and growing demands. In order to meet the demands they face in their classrooms, teachers must be willing and capable to learn and relearn their trade. Opportunities for continued learning addressed in this chapter-formal professional development and collaboration with other teachers-are two key features of teacher learning.

Teachers Adopt a Lifelong Learning Mindset because....

1. Lifelong Learning Helps Teachers Face Challenges

Professional development days don’t necessarily target the areas in which teachers want to focus their learning or address their concerns. Teachers who adopt a lifelong learning mindset have access to information and use it to collaborate with others. Learning teachers also view mistakes and challenges as part of the learning process rather than as failures.

2. The Best Learning Happens on the Job

Teachers should adopt a lifelong learning mindset, teachers must understand the ways in which it benefits their career and themselves. The best teachers are willing to learn from their students. Every teacher should contend hat she/he “learned more from other teachers, my students, and their parents than I learned from any class in my teacher-credential program…. In turn, when they see your own enthusiasm for learning, students should be more inclined to learn from you. And that’s how our own happiness and growth could be translated into the success of our students.”

3. Lifelong Learning Makes Big Transitions on the Job Easier to Process:

You can become a lifelong learner: “By embracing a student-like mindset and learning to turn self-education into a daily habit, you can hone your current skills and develop new ones while enriching your mind. Then, when the time to adapt arrives, transitions are less bumpy.” Teaching is by far the career that demands the most flexibility as schedules, students, standards, and regulations change nearly constantly. Teachers have to think on their feet when students ask questions, and the only way that they can approach the daily challenges of their career is to be a lifelong learner.

4. Lifelong Learning Fosters Creativity

Similarly, You should adopt a lifelong learning mindset, and two of them are the most critical for educators. First, in the information age, people lack creativity (a debatable claim, but for the purposes of argument, let’s run with it for now). The lifelong learning positively influences creativity in individuals, groups, organizations, and countries. For people to thrive in the 21st century, they must have the ability to proficiently use new technologies and media; learning to use these new technologies and media is a key component of lifelong learning.

Lifelong Learning Enhances Technology Usage

The pace of change in the 21st century is being “so fast that technologies and skills to use them become obsolete within 5-10 years.” Ask any educator if he or she was using Edmodo, iPads, apps, Chromebooks, or other such technology in his or her classroom ten years ago, and you would likely get a negative response. Yet, technology is an essential part of teaching and learning today, and teachers must be knowledgeable about technology in the classroom to meet state requirements and prepare their students for their futures outside the classroom walls.

Fortunately, teachers who adopt a lifelong learning mindset are not intimidated by technology in their classrooms or in their students’ hands. They are willing to learn about technology from theirs students and fellow teachers and adapt their teaching practices to meet the demands of their 21st century students. Moreover, digital literacy is a critical component of education today, and teachers must know how to teach and assess it in their classrooms. The bottom line: Being prepared to teach in the 21st century automatically equates to being a lifelong learner in the 21st century.

Lifelong Learners Are Innovative Teachers

Though the current state of education promotes standardization and common curricula and teaching methods, teachers must be innovative to engage and inspire 21st century learners. In fact, the days of teaching through rote memorization and organizing the classroom with desks in rows are long gone. Teachers must adopt a lifelong learning mindset to continually push themselves to learn new ways of facilitating learning and increasing student engagement. By taking courses and collaborating with colleagues on creative teaching methods including collaborative learning environments, flipped classrooms, and student-centered learning situations, teachers will reap the benefits of adopting a lifelong learning mindset and being innovative educators.

CONCLUSION

A teacher can never educate students successfully without becoming a lifelong learner. In the age of accountability and high stakes, it is unlikely. With all of the benefits and advantages that lifelong learners accrue, teachers who adopt this mentality are more than excellent educators: they’re excellent models for their students.