Category Archives: 7: LOCUS

Learner Orientated CampUS – Collaboration and Development documents and discourse. (Introduction to LOCUS)

A Good Teacher

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A good teacher should love the people she will be teaching – be they adults or children. She should have knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject she will be teaching. She should be lateral thinking, flexible, warm and able to guide without being intrusive. A good teacher should be encouraging to the more advanced student. Nurturing to the more needy. She should be passionate about what she is doing, be aware of all aspects of ‘learning’ and should also herself be eager to learn and glean more knowledge for the growth of self and pupil. ‘Light and Life’

A-MM – educator

A good teacher is an educator in the fullest sense of the word i.e. someone who cares for each and every child – academic, social and emotional. That person should never be intrusive but at the same time must act when necessary. As regards the academic side the good teacher must encourage those in his care to think out of the box-lateral skills are essential. You know all about it with your wide range of interests.

Frank Simmonds – educator – ex head St Andrew’s School

A person who is passionate about what they do and who has great enthusiasm for the task.  It goes without saying that a love of children or young people is a given as is a marked intellectual capacity for the discipline/subject that they are teaching.  I hold firm on the importance of subject specialists at Roedean.  I hope this helps.  If teachers are passionate and love what they do, they will deal with all the other challenges that they face in the current educational climate.

Mary Williams – Educator – Head of Rodean

one who shows people where to find a beam of light that illuminates them and waits around till he/she sees their eyes glow?

Dorian Haarhoff – English Lecturer – Author

As a teacher and a trainer of teachers, I have a deep commitment to accountability and to what I believe that we can realistically hold teachers accountable for. Included on this list are:

  • A classroom that provides the structure and discipline needed for effective learning
  • Teacher knowledge of the subject, for teaching effectively
  • A teacher’s personal commitment to work hard, to be caring, to be a learner, to be enthusiastic
  • Paying attention to each child and treating each child fairly
  • Working with students’ families to help children learn

The work of teaching and learning is more complex than we know. There is increasing discussion these days about "highly qualified teachers" as if that alone was going to solve all educational problems.  Evaluation and testing, much emphasized today, do not turn poor students into good ones. They are not teaching tools. At best, they check in on what is test-able, not necessarily on what’s been learned. While good tests serve diagnostic functions, just as X-rays and MRI’s at the doctor’s, most testing in school is still used for grading and sorting purposes. Many test results don’t even come back until the end of the school year…too late to do any good.

Education is about the transfer of knowledge and "lighting the fire." This occurs in an environment that supports it. One of the biggest lessons I have learned as a teacher is about the extraordinary value of encouragement. This is often seen by "macho" politicians and educators as a soft and weak concept. Quite the opposite, encouragement is a key to educational improvement for teachers as well as students. And it is vastly underused.

Dorothy Rich – American Educator

Additions to this list invited

LOCUS Principles and Elements

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(‘Design’ refers to the modus operandi and ‘curriculum’of the LOCUS as much as to the physical spaces it will occupy.)

The final LOCUS design must take into account that :

(To save time and space please only agree silently. Submit comments of only debate, requests for clarification, suggestions for other items for inclusion on this list)

  • LOCUS is an acronym for Learner Oriented CampUS. In order to be truly learner-oriented and to foster a healthy internal locus of control for the children who attend, it is important that the LOCUS be designed in harmony with the latest and most complete understanding of children’s rights possible, including children’s right of participation. Thus, furthermore:
    • It is important that children are actively involved in the design of the LOCUS, even if all of them do not end up attending it. This active involvement should take the form of ethically meticulous ‘co-search’ with interested children, and no false hopes must be generated.
    • It is important that the children who do eventually attend the LOCUS are actively involved in the ongoing development and further evolution of the LOCUS.
  • It is important that different age-groups, as well as children with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, as well as different arrays of ability can learn from each other vs being artificially segregated as is currently common in South African educational facilities.
    • In an environment that focuses on individual ‘next readiness’ rather than group aggregates, it should be viable to accommodate the so-called ‘differently abled’ child alongside their peers.
  • Peer mentoring is NB – opportunity for a child to really learn and integrate by helping another child understand as well as chance for other child to be facilitated in an age-suitable way vs only by an adult.
  • The importance of being actively part of the overall human and natural ecology vs being either an artificial ‘consumptariat – child factory’ or an isolated ‘freak farm’.
  • The need for different levels of access to the LOCUS – e.g. full-time, part time, occasional, casual ; as well as structured and unstructured, special activity, etc to accommodate both ‘home-schoolers’ and families with full-time working parents, as well as different desire in kids
  • Balance between voluntary self-chosen ‘curricula’ and facilitated navigation, boundaries, deadlines ‘completions’ etc. NB to ensure sufficient literacy, numeracy, and a degree of rounded spread; as well as solo and group; mind, soul, heart and body activity.
  • Total accountability of LOCUS for learner’s needs – not necessarily by direct supply, but by facilitation of research into options, etc.
  • Necessity of educating whole family in order to support child in LOCUS learning culture. e.g. issues around participatory communication, nutrition, TV, discipline, etc.
  • Importance of starting in womb, through baby-hood, all the way up.
  • Balance between LOCUS ‘recommendations’, bottom-lines, and accommodation of different choices.
  • Child-empowering facilitated learning resource-centre angle vs the dictatorial ‘school’.
  • Importance of rights and respect – that all adults and all children are all equals, just with differing needs and roles.
  • The importance of the inclusion of nature and animals as respected participants rather than as ‘objects’ of study.
  • Need to evaluate and/either translate or grade different methods e.g. de bono shades, so that they can be offered and used appropriately to age\developmental and next-readiness levels.
  • Need to create evaluation structures that leave children relatively free of external pressure and labelling while still allowing parents to monitor their child’s learning progress relative to children in other educational models.
  • Need to de-emphasise competition between children while fostering a culture of personal excellence and mutual supportiveness.

LOCUS Meeting Dates

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  • February 22nd when we will brainstorm ‘the best and worst of our own school experiences’ in order to inform what we do and don’t want the LOCUS to be.
  • March 29th when the suggestion is that we have input from Lola on the Waldorf model and input from Nicky and Anne-Marie on the Montessori approach.
  • April 19th (TBC)
  • May 24th
  • June 21st

contemplating LOCUS

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hmm, yes interesting, again I am struck by the fact that it is not the availability of information that is holding us back, but our difficulties in navigating organisation and implementation.

By the way, I think your choice of Rogers as a kind of meeting and collective departure point is wise and I interpret it as a kind of ‘orientating generalisation’ that lies close to the vision that aspirates you in this, the LOCUS process. Are you open to start formulating a kind of dna code, for what LOCUS intends to be, nothing cast in stone tablets or such like, but a kind of conceptual handle for us to use as a kind of landmark? I would like to see such formulation happen as collaboratively as possible, and gauging from what I’ve heard about what you have in mind – I imagine it will – if we accept that LOCUS will be a a Point of Learning.

squeakyG wrote:
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/index.html

Rogers’ main objective was ‘Learner Centeredness’, if my investigations into contemporary emerging thinking has suggested anything, it is a move towards ‘Learning centeredness’, I think learning in its truest sense is an open ended <a xhref=” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_%28system_theory%29″>Open system</a>. Say we codify learning as the primary focus and fundamental objective and governing principle of LOCUS.

Which I think suggests a “what’s next?” question around what we understand and believe ‘learning’ to be.

” Learning is sense making that enables manifestation of purpose.

Education is the conscious attempt to promote learning in others. The primary function of “teaching” is to create a safe, viable, productive learning environment. Management of the total learning environment to promote enhance and motivate learning is a paradigm shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning.”

(above quote from Wikipedia again)

I could gurgle supporting theory and citations indefinitely but instead I would like to just express my hope that we are engaging with something that looks at learning, and by implication ‘education’ not as something like a machine or factory, but instead as a collaborative endeavour. A pursuit of Co-creative Mutual Development.

axis shining out space

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To sleep or wake, that is the issue. Only the secrets you keep from yourself matter, and they remain – Secret – until the others you cling to, are no more…
Half awake half asleep, I close my eyes and gaze upon the picture, of us staring face to face, the universe and I, and it seems now also you.

There is a word for this, what it is, still unknown, but I shall speak it in four lines. I shall write it in four lines for you to gaze upon. I shall window-dress these lines, in utter humility, three with broken infant rhyme. The third, as a matter of suspense, shall not rhyme but rather push and pull, a meta-graphics device, preparing in subtlety, a departing implication of infinite return. But I digress, here then the lines
I present and beg you to speak out loud:

This great orbit, its folly and spin
the dream and surrounding mind
is an axis shining out space
where we shadows end and begin.