by Roger Holdsworth

As a teacher, I’ve been interested for a long time in educational approaches that engage students in real projects in which they have roles of value - learning which aims to do something to change the world.

            As a teacher of teachers, I am interested in how to encourage others to think about and develop such approaches in their classrooms.

            So the chance to work with a group of pre-service teachers to make a bridge between their learning about education and these pedagogical practices, is always exciting and challenging.  In this class we simply began with a commitment to work on something ‘real’, that would focus our learning and communicate our growing understandings to others.  Instead of writing essays, we decided that we’d write this book and website.

            That’s not easy.  The class met weekly for nine weeks.  We had to make decisions about what to do, who to write for, what it would include, how to write as a group, how to publish the outcomes.  We had to keep in mind how we would meet the course’s objectives.  It’s always difficult to work closely with others, especially in a group of over 20 students, many of whom had not met before, but who were now meeting briefly around this task for a short time.  But that’s the situation that will face many of these people, not just in their classrooms, but also in staffrooms and wider community involvements.

            There were strong learnings for us all, not only about the topics that the course covered.  Class members also learnt about compromising, working with others, dealing with frustration and disagreement - also areas of skill development for classroom and staffroom processes.  And hopefully, as teachers, we all learnt more about ways of including authentic learning and assessment into our future classes.