Mumbai is dirty! There are piles of refuse and waste littering the streets, the waterways are black and their banks littered with plastic. Its Hot, sweaty, smelly and crowded. There seems to be no plan in how the city has developed.

Mumbai is a city of contrast, with extremes from “wow!! to whoa!?”. From poverty to riches.

But I look at Mumbai from my western perspective.

I was driven past slums and my first western glance was these are sad places, people are suffering, are abused and used, and it is abject poverty. Its not right! Its unacceptable! Its wrong! I think most of us would associate them with lack of choice, disease, filth and poverty.

The teachers attending the economics workshops here, had the opportunity to do a slum tour. I did not have the chance to go and I regret this as an opportunity missed. I suspect that I would have gone in with a preconception of the slum based on my limited experience and sheltered perspective. I know from talking to the workshop leaders and the participants that these pre-conceptions would have not been changed they would have been shattered.

Those who went saw a vibrant community, where every one had a job, where people shared and community was central. The slum they visited was incredibly productive, generating over 100 million dollars per annum. The people they saw had a happiness quotant that was higher that most people in the western world. The families there were close, with positive relationship, supportive and caring. Many of the people in the slum chose to live there. There were airline hostesses, lottery winners and people who owned apartments in South Mumbai. There were businesses exporting to Europe, including a very interesting bakery producing pastries for a major retail chain.

Yes, the slum was disorganised, ramshackle and dirty. Is there poverty and disease Yes. Yes, some of the industries there were unsafe and dangerous and Yes, people there were (in some cases) be exploited. Its not perfect, but it is also not what it appears on the surface from our, often limited, perspective. many choose to live, many happily work there to. My driver from the hotel, immaculately presented and bueatifully spoken, lives in the slum.

I was guilty of using a broad brush to paint my opinion. The conversations I had have caused me to step back and reconsider what I have believed and the assumptions I have made.

Interesting Huh? I wish I had gone on that tour.

My time in Mumbai has been frantic. Over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I ran 12 one and half hour long sessions on the ITGS syllabus and assessments. It was intensive, demanding and immensely beneficial.

I frequently refer to Dale’s learning cone in my presentations and consider it as I teach, but this workshop reinforced the accuracy of this research. The best way to learn something and retain it is to teach it. My level of understanding of the ITGS course has improved dramatically. This experience has been, on a professional level hugely beneficial.

One of the expectations set for me as a workshop leader was to model appropriate teaching techniques within my workshop. This is a dilemma in many ways as with any course of fixed and limited duration (we only had 18 hours), and a vast volume of content we had to cover, the first port of call for conveying this information is “The lecture”. I have to be honest, for some of the sessions it was a chalk and talk approach. But I tried to build into each session interactive elements, often collaborative to reinforce concepts and processes, to illustrate and elluminate, I tried to model teaching techniques I had used successfully with my ITGS students to stimulate the delegates. Providing different styles of media, varying tasks from butcher paper to wikis and wordle, providing video stimulus material and engaging in delegate presentations and reviews marking examination and assessment material to writing specimen questions and publishing these on the wiki. These thing help to provide variation for me and to engage those learners.

18 hours seems like a huge amount of time at first glance. It seemed to me as I approached and prepared for the workshop to be a lifetime, but the reality is that it is too short a period of time if you are going to engage in more than just lecture style, chalk and talk teaching. If you want you participants/delegates/students to learn by: doing, demonstrating, or by teaching; if you want them to participate, engage, consider, question, practice, experiment, attempt, reflect, evaluate, debate, argue, disagree, critique, support and contribute then 18 hours is too short a timeframe.

One challenge is to pick what is essential and to deliver it in a mode that maximises it value for the participants. I was provided with access to my participants via email for weeks prior to the workshop and I was able to get from them an indication of what they wanted from their learning experience. This combined with the goals and objectives of the workshop made the job easier. My role was easier still by the commitment of the participants who works happily through out the 3 days.

The second challenge is to not sit back and just recycle the materials I have when I next come to present a workshop, to learn from my experiences and to change and modify my approaches as a result. But this is how we should approach teaching too. It is not acceptable to develop a course of work, or a unit of learning and deliver it verbatim year in year out. Our teaching practice and our curricula should be living things changing, adapting, maturing and evolving.

The last two weeks have been filled with preparing the 12 x 1.5 hour sessions for the workshop I am running. I had thought that my knowledge of the IB ITGS course was pretty good, but it is fair to say that its has grown considerably.

One thing we have been asked (told) to do is present and teach our delegates as exemplars of good teaching practice. Given the volume of work and material I have to cover in the 3 days this is a challenge. I have to cover the syllabus, all aspects of assessment, Theory of knowledge, extended essays, general information about IB and then more. It would be easy to resort to the traditional chalk and talk or perhaps slide & talk. But we will see, I have tried to vary the approaches I use.

Dale’s learning cone has again proven itself accurate as what I thought  I knew and how much I have learnt as I prepare to teach are leagues apart.

So 4 days in Mumbai and then straight back home.

Students are asked to engage in discussion and debate about the social and ethical issues arrising from these technologies and  there impact on society. Here are two great articles for starting this debate.

1. Autonomous tech ‘requires debate’
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8210477.stm

2. Call for debate on killer robots
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8182003.stm

The increased development of robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence is continuing and proceeding unchecked. We already have the use of robots in warfare, the home, hospitals, pharmacies, warehouses, industry, space, security and so more. Robotics and Ai have increased well beyond the realms of Azimov’s “I, robot” but his three laws of robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/photos/steel_2.jpg

Resources:

http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/072309kp1.pdf

• assessment
• exhibition – personal project – extended essay
• inquiry to TOK
• Action to CAS
• Learner Profile across the 3 programmes
• Role of language
• International mindedness

This was really interesting. The flow through the curriculum is well structured and planned. The links between each school are profound, relevant and consistent. Each stage of the IB syllabus supports the next stage. Its building and developing and relevant.

The afternoon was presentations by the delegates with a focus on TOK (theory of Knowledge) within our subject areas. Theory of knowledge is essentially a philosophical approach, looking at issues and ethics etc. It looks at knowledge issues, ways of knowing, knowledge sources, knowers etc.

Very interesting and insightful

1. Adults are self directed and need to be integral in the learning process.
2. Adults learn through concrete experiences where they can interact with the others and discuss.
3. Adults must work in a climate of respect, trust and regard/concern for the other learners
4. Adults need the program to be meaningful, relevant and immediately useful
5. Learning creates change and change creates anxiety. This can have huge impacts on the persons responces, attitude and behaviour.
6. Adults come to the table with many experiences etc that will influence their learning. Past experiences cloud judgements, alter motivation and influence knowledge.

(SOURCE: summarised from resources from B.C.Teachers federation)

This is important as a teacher I am used to working with students who are in many ways easier to teach. Changing to adult education does require a shift in process and consideration of these points.

Multiple Intelligences

One of the other task we undertook was to use a questionnaire on Gardner’s MI to work out our most prefered and least prefered Intelligences. Once we had these we were grouped into our LEAST prefered MI and asked to do a presentation on a key issue effecting the Asia Pacific region in the style of that Intelligence.

Boy, this was revealing.

The motivation level and enthusiasm of not only myself, but also of the group was at a very low ebb as none of use enjoyed working in this mode. People were hard to motivate, slow in providing answers and disengaged. This was a group of top teachers from the whole of AsiaPac who had volunteered to be here.

It stressed to me how important Learning styles and specifically in this case Intelligences are. A student working in their least prefered mode is not going to be productive.

Methods of Learning

Another exercise of interest was looking at most and least prefered methods of learning. On the walls around the room were placed learning approaches and people were asked to position themselves by their least and most prefered modes. The methods were:

• Discussion
• work alone
• work in groups
• worksheets
• lecture
• music
• noise
• role playing
• visual
• hands on

Its was interesting to see the approaches/methods people like and disliked. Its an exercise well worth doing and then reflecting on your own teaching style.

More to follow…

“The flight has been delayed as the engineers have found a crack in the engine”

Well I must admit at this point I was skeptical about the possibility of leaving. 30 minutes laters he announced that the engineers had taken a picture of the crack and sent it to singapore – This was not inspiring us. 10 minutes later we were told Singapore Airlines said they could fix the problem, they had and we could start boarding….. What did they fix the crack in the engine cowling with? Duct tape?. However inspite of this excitement the flight was a breeze.

We had a brief stop over in singapore (8 HOURS) So we hoped on the MRT (Metro Rail transport) and for the cost of $2.00 were whisked into downtown Singapore at speed. Oh the difference a good public transport system makes.

Did the usual things – Visit Raffles

Wandered round the town and headed back to the airport. Nice

We flew into ChiangMai and were taken to the Prem Center. What a facility!. Miles from no where is this stunning school. We are staying in a purpose built block one of about 12 on this side of the campus.

The course thus far has been very good. The format this time is an experiment with all three aspects of the IB program together for the first and a half of the workshop. (Thats PYP – primary years program, MYP – middle years program and DP – Diploma program). This has been really beneficial as we are getting a much more holistic view of the IB program from our shared experiences.

A lot of the focus of today has been adult  education. This is interesting and quite worthwhile. i will write more on this later.

So thus far the courseis very good and I am looking forward to tommorow and also tonights dinner and performance.

More to follow