● The times call for educational researchers to go deep into teaching practice, and the times also require teachers engaged in teaching practice to be not only executors of teaching plans, but also researchers of teaching problems. The era of pure "teachers" is over.
● Teachers are not waiters who crawl at the foot of educational theory, but judges who test the theory with critical eyes. Rather than saying that "theory first guides practice", it is better to say that "practice first identifies the truth of theory".
As early as 1980s, American scholar M Knowle5 put forward an adult learning theory supported by four theoretical hypotheses from the perspective of the differences between adult learning and children learning, namely, individual experience forms individual learning style; Willingness to learn is closely related to social responsibility; Self-awareness began to change from relying on others to self-guidance; In other words, adult learning is not reserved learning, but applied learning.
We believe that teachers' learning not only conforms to the general characteristics of adult learning, but also contains the distinctive characteristics of their own profession. In his book The Power of Change: Perspectives of Educational Reform, Mike Fran vividly wrote: "When teachers sit together at school to study students' learning situation, when they relate students' learning situation with how to teach, when they gain knowledge from colleagues and other excellent external experiences and further improve their teaching practice, they are actually in an absolutely necessary process of knowledge innovation." This process of knowledge innovation is actually a teacher's learning process. At the same time, this process of knowledge innovation also reflects the distinctive professional characteristics and times characteristics of teachers' learning.
Case-based Situational Learning
The research since 1990s, especially the study of situational learning theory, shows that learning is situational cognition, and "what to know" and "how to know" are integrated. Knowledge learning is inseparable from the situation of knowledge application; Knowledge learning without context can only memorize some meaningless and boring knowledge, which can't be connected with personal experience and real society, so it can't produce the effect of transfer and practical application. Therefore, based on the constructivist view of learning, learning is not to obtain some cognitive symbols, but to participate in real situations.
Spiro, a constructivist, proposed in 199 1 that learning should be divided into primary learning and advanced learning. Traditional education and training only confuse the two, and take simple, well-structured knowledge learning as the only way. Primary learning is some well-defined learning with language symbols, and the requirements for learning can stay at the level of repetition and reproduction, so you can achieve proficiency through a lot of practice and feedback. However, for advanced learning which is huge, complex and poorly structured and needs to be able to flexibly transfer new knowledge to new situations, the original single language interpretation and mechanical training often seem pale and powerless. Therefore, spiro believes that for advanced learning, whether it is school education or teacher training, "because of different intentions, we must create situations in different ways at different times and visit and know the same material from different angles many times."
The experience of teacher training in various countries also tells us that teachers' effective learning is not simply the rote memorization of concepts and the acceptance of new theories, but the situational learning under the vivid case background. It is a vivid case that bridges the gap between the expert theory discourse system and the teacher practice discourse system.
Problem-driven action learning
The concept of action learning was put forward by an Englishman, Reg Levin, in the 1950s. It was widely used in the training of many enterprises and institutions at that time and has been popular ever since. Teachers' profession is challenging, and society, schools, students and their parents almost invariably require teachers to be masters of all-round development. High-load daily work and study for professional development are often contradictory in the face of time bottleneck, so professional development action learning is carried out to solve the problems in teaching practice, and practice and study are well combined, so learning becomes a part of work, and many problems in practice are solved in learning. Therefore, teachers' learning is problem-based action learning.
Teachers' action learning includes three meanings:
First, the purpose of learning directly points to teachers' teaching behavior, and the need for learning directly comes from the problems in teaching.
Second, teaching practice becomes a learning resource. Teaching practice provides vivid materials for learning, and learning is not beyond the scope of teaching practice.
Third, the teaching practice process becomes the main carrier of the learning process, and learning is carried out in the teaching practice process. Teaching is learning, and learning lies in the process of teaching.
Teachers' action learning can also be simply summarized as three sentences: learning to improve their own teaching; Learn from your own teaching problems; Learn in your own teaching process.
Problems based on action learning are often practical problems that school administrators and teachers encounter in their daily education and teaching work and need to be solved urgently. This kind of problem is often closely related to the development of the school itself and the professional development of teachers, which has important practical significance. As the former Soviet educator Suhomlinski brilliantly commented: "Only by studying and explaining the interdependence and mutual restriction between the most subtle and complex educational phenomena can educational science become a definitive science and a real science." We can fully believe that teachers' problem-based action learning will greatly promote the healthy development of educational science.
Group-based cooperative learning
In the view of social constructivism, "learning is the social negotiation of knowledge", and the process of learning is also the process of cooperation and exchange. Vygotsky, a psychologist in the former Soviet Union, believes that human learning is a social activity in the process of interpersonal communication. First it appears as an activity of social cooperation, and then it is an internal thinking activity. The essence of learning is the communication between people and the dialogue between others' thoughts and self-opinions. For a long time, people have unilaterally emphasized that knowledge is an accurate and objective reflection of the real world, and that learning is the process of learners' internal psychological processing, thus drawing a narrow conclusion that learning is entirely personal behavior. This goes against people's sociality and knowledge. As Flair said: "Disdaining teamwork and fighting alone is undoubtedly the best way to commit suicide."
As a functional community, different teachers have differences in knowledge structure, wisdom level, thinking mode, cognitive style and many other aspects. Even teachers who teach the same subject can show their personal style in many aspects, such as the handling of teaching content, the choice of teaching methods, the creation of teaching situations and so on. This is because every teacher constructs his own understanding of things with his own experience as the background, so he only understands different aspects of things, and there is no one who understands things correctly. It is in this sense that every teacher should go beyond his own understanding, see other people's different understandings, and see other aspects seen by others, thus forming a richer and closer view of things. Therefore, the difference of each teacher is the teaching resource, and the difference is the power and source of cooperative learning. Research shows that teachers learn new teaching ideas from their peers at most. In schools with strong cooperative atmosphere, 90% teachers think so; In schools with weak cooperative atmosphere, the overall teaching mood tends to stagnate.
As the representative of the founder of group dynamics, Lei Wen specially studied the interaction and cooperation of group members under the common goal. He concluded that in cooperative groups, individuals have strong work motivation, often can inspire each other and understand each other, and the information exchange between individuals is frequent, and the work efficiency is obviously higher than that of non-cooperative groups. In this way, in the community of teachers' cooperative learning, heart-to-heart dialogue, hand-in-hand mutual assistance and ideological collision finally promote the integration and all-round development of teachers' cognition, motivation and emotion in cooperative learning.
Teachers' group cooperative learning can be summarized into the following three types: guided cooperative learning: the guidance of external experts, teaching researchers and academic leaders; Phenotypic cooperative learning: open class, teaching achievement display, reading report meeting, etc. Research-oriented cooperative learning: special discussion, subject research, etc.