Sunday 6 November 2011

Exploring Institutional contexts on the innovation – An innovative case from Spain

Written by Liu, Feifei
Ø  Case Background
The case chosen is ES001 which focused on the innovation practice inside a primary school in Spain, called Lavinia School.
The case happened in 1996 and in this case, 6th grade pupils from four different schools participated in an innovative co-operative project with ICT. Every week, students from the four schools share meteorological date in the internet with partner schools. They then finally carried out comparative research on weather variables. Specifically, in Lavinia School, teachers provided suggestions and guidance for students learning, whereas students working in groups made the final decision of what they wanted to learn and how they were going to do.








Ø  Case Analysis
Overall speaking, this case is a well designed innovative one as shown in the 7-point likert scale below.  The case achieved a high score in all the six dimensions of understanding innovativeness. With a broad community support, the school successfully achieved its curricular and methodological goals. Along the process, students took charge of their learning, contributing to knowledge building, while teachers only coached for building a learning community. Additionally, the project involved specific ICT use to facilitate the collaborative project.

The table below shows the institutional contexts on innovativeness at school level analysis.

Ø  Conclusion
The successfulness of this innovative case is not happened by accident, but with detailed design, well support and facilitator. At the national level, the government education policy encouraged the innovation and provided sufficient support which made the fundamental basis for the implementation of the innovation.
At the school level, as analyzed above, the principal and school policy highly supported the innovation, which created a collaborative and innovative working environment for teachers to carry out the innovative practice. The teachers had done and were willing to do the necessary effort of time and training to implement the innovation.  
In addition, even seemed old fashion and not advanced enough, the ICT and technological support were enough to carry out the innovation at that time in 1996.

Written by Liu, Feifei (2011882300)

3 comments:

  1. The case was a successful one, as we can see that students were highly involved in the activities.

    The principal had put the school in a facilitator in the community, in which several schools were working together with students in Lavinia School. Through the collaboration, community relationship was fostered.

    ICT skills of the students were also well integrated in the normal curriculum. ICT skills were integrated in all different subjects. This was an approach to widely adopt ICT, however, as an ICT teacher, I don't believe that the ICT skills trained in this manner can be compatible with those trained by ICT-major teachers.

    I believe that the case could be improved nowadays through tailor-made ICT course, with the context provided in the scenario. With a clear learning goal, students can learn more advanced ICT skills in specific ICT lessons. More decent works could result.

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  2. Hi everyone,

    That is a very good case about making an innovative co-operative project, although it happened in the year 1996. At that time, it is not an easy thing that teachers tried to change their role from a teaching-based way to a guidance way, which means to lead students from a follower-oriented learned to a more active self-learning one.

    As well-supported by school level and the government level, I think there is also a way to improve the ICT is to have a communication with parents. They will get some basic information about this innovation, and then can help to assist or supervise in their children's learning when at home.

    What do you think? Any other ideas for the innovation in teaching?

    --
    Post by Ricky CHAN KWOON KAY

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Ricky,
    I quite agree with you that parents and teacher make efforts together to change teacher-centered classes. Teacher should try to change the situations by using some ICT tools.In mainland China, the real root of education is the education system.

    ReplyDelete