COVA
- rachhull
- Mar 9, 2022
- 3 min read
Choice, Ownership, Voice, Authentic Learning Experiences
This past week, I felt like my students were disengaged and bored, which is completely opposite of how I feel with the ADL program. I know that I am engaged in authentic learning that is meaningful to me. Everything I am creating and synthesizing, I know I can use.
So what is missing in my classroom? Are students feeling like they have choices or opportunities to find their voice? Do they have opportunities to design or create something authentic and meaningful to them? Am I a control freak? These are all questions I have been asking myself. I really need to design a PBL for them that can get them excited about school again. We are learning about angle measurement in math and the sun and earth’s patterns in science. I know what to do, but how can I make the curriculum meaningful to them? Maybe I need to ask more questions before presenting. Like, why is a circle 360 degrees? Hey, look at these protractors, how do you think they work? Why are there 2 scales on the protractor? Sometimes, I have to check myself. No one wants to sit and get. When I am not facilitating, I can feel the mood in the room negatively impacted.
I have been exposed to some of the ideas and concepts similar to COVA through professional development with the New Tech network. Project based learning is built on the concept of building a significant learning environment and creating authentic learning that is meaningful to students. Projects are designed to give students agency and opportunities to present, communicate and use their voice.
Like most teachers, I want to team with students to make learning irresistibly engaging and focused on real life problem solving. I want to be more of a facilitator.
After reading, A Rich Seam, How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning, it is clear that there are some barriers and constraints on how the system is set up. Many current curriculum standards, alongside standardized assessments that primarily measure content reproduction, are the greatest barriers to the widespread adoption of new pedagogies (Fullan & Langworthy, 2014). It was also stated that the new pedagogies should include deeper learning tasks that restructure the learning process towards knowledge creation and purposeful use. We know what should change and we know the constraints. It is important that we make it work regardless of the standardized testing.
The COVA framework and creating significant learning environments is effective. If we cannot remove the barriers, then it is going to be important that we find creative ways to give students the choice, ownership, voice, and authentic learning experiences they deserve. It takes hard work, but it is worth it.
As I go back and reread about COVA, I am reminded that I am not the only educator who feels like the traditional system is not working for students and there needs to be a change.
It troubled me to recognize that if I continued to utilize recipe and regurgitation models of teaching and learning, I was essentially treading on our students’ passion and their futures. This was extremely sobering because I believed it was my responsibility to prepare my learners for the future—but I began to realize that the traditional system I was using wasn’t allowing me to do this. A change was needed but making a shift to a better way is not going to be easy. It is easier to plan our instruction on standardized activities that we develop for our students and ask them to either replicate or regurgitate the content. While this method of instruction is more efficient and easy to measure, it ignores the needs of the students, the pace that they may need to effectively learn, and all too often ignores the student’s motivation. (Thibodeaux, 2018)
In conclusion, education needs to change because traditional methods are not fair to the learner, even though it is easier to plan for. There are solutions like the COVA framework and other new pedagogies. Educators will need to use these to design better learning environments even with the barriers. Learners deserve it and it is the right thing to do. Time to plan.
References
Fullan, M. & Langworthy, M. (2014) A rich seam, how new pedagogies find deep learning. ISTE.
Harapnuik, D.,Thibodeaux,T. ,Cummings, C.(2018). COVA eBook. https://www.harapnuik.org/?s=cova+ebook
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