Guided learning for rich learning

Kia orana everybody,
I've wondered what to put into Runanga Marama for July- I've only just made it!- and we decided to report on the two big seminars held by Dr Ross Todd in Auckland and Wellington. All the Library advisers and about 300 other people attended, teachers and school library people. It was an exciting seminar.
Dr Ross Todd is Research Director at the Centre for International Scholarship in School Librarianship (CISSL) and Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University, USA; he is an Australian who has taught in New Zealand.

Ross talked about rich learning- the sort of learning that takes place when students are actively engaged in learning, in the "information to knowledge" experience- and what needs to take place for this to happen. He calls it "guided inquiry". Students (and their teachers) need to know what information they need and why. Research shows that most of the time when teachers and librarians think about the Library they are thinking about finding information. But what do they do with it once they have found it? He talked about squirrels who hoard stuff- is that all that inquiry learning is about? (It got me thinking about other animals- ants who just seem to move stuff from one place to another- like kids who just copy pages into their books; or pigs who wallow in the earth- learning should be absorbing; or birds who find things to build a nest with- learning should be useful.)

So learning should be purposeful. It is the job of teachers and librarians to help children to think about what they need to know. And then guided learning involves helping students to manage themselves and their learning environment (the information resources of people, places, books and internet, etc.)

Libraries need to keep pace with the needs of rich learning, and teachers need to know how to guide students as they learn, how to set up an inquiry and how to intervene when students need encouragement or help with learning.

CISSL has a very useful website that tells us more about the thinking and research of Dr Todd and his colleagues. Have a look at: http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided/guided_inquiry/ constructivist_learning.html

Over here we are just about ready for the end of winter, so we are thinking about you in the tropics. Welcome to August and ra manea, from Rob