As I facilitate the transfer of the VITAE course to a new project network I can sense that what the project partners expect from me are a series of presentations, articles and activities. These would then be seamlessly transfered to their institutions.
Instead I give them learning outcomes and a template as carried out in Denmark which quite clearly won’t transfer wholesale to other countries and contexts. And I begin to feel inadequate as I explain that it is the process which is key.
The VITAE course is about training VET teachers to coach their colleagues in the integration of ICT in their everyday classroom practice. On both levels, that of coaching training and of integrating ICT in the classroom, I would argue that process is the most important part.
On the coaching side, learning to ask powerful questions is a key skill and can only be learned by trying it out and practicing. On the ICT integration side, there are many key factors, but let’s take the institutional context as one. It would, for example, be clearly inappropriate to push the use of blogs as a classroom noticeboard in a context where the institution has a Virtual Learning Environment and insists on this being the medium of communication between teacher and learners.
Content is still clearly needed but process has risen in importance as good content is easily available from sources other than the teacher. Here’s a list of useful questions that you might want to use when in a coaching conversation for example or how about this short video about listening skills from You Tube?
But I still have this sense that I’m somehow shirking my responsibilities by not presenting a neatly packaged stack of materials so I was so grateful to find this excellent 30 minute presentation by Michael Coghlan in Australia about what’s changed and why process has suddenly shot up the list of priorities (make sure your audio is on).