Interested in a one-year action-research ?

And a more comprehensive approach for your context?

TRY TRANSFORMING YOUR CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE!

  You are a school or a team of formal or non-formal schoolteachers and educators, decided on taking the time to understand and address complexity in your learning environments.

  You are keen on participating wholeheartedly in an action-research that will transform your classroom experience, both for you and your learners. This one’s for you.

  Five 2 to 3-day workshops, each in person and spread over one year will help you understand the basic notions; experiment with strategies, methods and tools to absorb them into your classroom practices and subject teaching; and address core standards.

COMMON MODULE FEATURES

  Your observations/themes/issues will form the basis for exploring and understanding all the concepts.

  Although not explicitly mentioned in the module descriptions here below, the program covers most of the ideas exposed on this site.

  The workshops include a diversity of activities, methods, tools and collaborative and social approaches for use in your own classroom environments. Complementary online resources will also be indicated.

  The last session of each module will be devoted to designing concrete plans for classroom experimentation. Modules 2 to 5 will begin with a feedback session on these experiments and adapt to emerging ideas and problems.

  Participating teachers will identify specific subject matters, lessons or projects that can suitably be handled with the methods proposed and the prescribed core standards that are addressed in the process

  And last but not the least, the entire program has complex thinking imbedded in it:
diversity, flexibility, cooperation, empathy, coevolution…

Demystifying complexity and complex thinking

You will

  Be initiated to the theoretical underpinnings.

  Explore complexity in your own classrooms.

  Understand and identify factors that create your experiences in this context.

  Understand the notion of “emergence” and learn to observe it in your own learning spaces.

  Collectively define one or two areas for action-research.

  Experiment with methods and tools in the chosen areas.

  Design a plan for changing your classroom experience.

From objective to contextual knowledge

You will

   Be introduced to the concept of contextualisation – making sense of knowledge in a context

   Discover the principles and characteristics of a “context" or a “whole"

   Discover a few methods and simple tools to learn

              ⇒ to “read" or make sense of a context as a whole

               ⇒ to identify leverage actions for desired futures

Reinforcing systems intelligence

You will

   Be introduced to systems archetypes

   Be introduced to the systems thinking habits

  Explore opportunities to reinforce these habits within the existing curricula

  Create a systems thinking toolbox

Design a plan to introduce systems intelligence in your classrooms

Dialoguing with reality

You will

  Be initiated to some characteristics of complexity: connectedness of the whole, emergence, uncertainties, unexpected events, ambiguities, contradictions

  Explore the strategies needed to deal with such phenomena

  Experiment with methods and tools to

         ⇒ develop divergent vs convergent thinking

⇒ develop resilience (diversity and flexibility) to deal with the unexpected

⇒ underline observation, risk-taking, letting-go, successive approximation

Assessing our experiences

 We will discuss the overall experience of our experiments with reality. But this last module will also cover complexity features that may have escaped the yearlong process.

  It will conclude with a collective self-assessment exercise with ‘nature’ as a benchmark. Nature has been handling complexity and sustaining life since a few billion years. The idea is to check if we have acquired some of its soft skills?

Testimonials

Wilbshi Fred, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

Saving energy is better than having to set up too many systems to produce energy.

Wilbshi Fred, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

Grégori Naémia, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

I liked the session where we created our group diagram (in math class) because it gave our vision of things.

Grégori Naémia, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

Mendes Oamé, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

What I liked this about this project is that it linked several subjects.

Mendes Oamé, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

Laurence Magnin, Physics teacher, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

It makes for coherent learning, links elements of knowledge, develops critical thinking, and widens your viewpoints which helps make informed choices. So a lot of positive in it going forward.

Laurence Magnin, Physics teacher, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

Hilal Erdem, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

I did not know that we could install wind turbines in the sea and that there were cause and effect patterns that went around in circles and came back to us.

Hilal Erdem, 8th grade student, Aimé Césaire Middle School, Les Ulis, France

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