Pedagogy and Practice

Learning is the driving force behind all that we do here at St Andrews College. Learning, by its very nature, is enduring, evolving and challenging. Learning requires growth and innovation, for it is only when change occurs that evidence of learning can be observed. Learning is not confined to the individual: it also applies to communities and to organisations, where collective efforts manifest as new ways of thinking, new paradigms and improved lives for those who make up the community.

An area of growing interest within the educational field is the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digitally-enabled teaching applications might play in the perennial drive to find improved teaching and learning methods and practices. Teachers have today a wide range of digital tools designed to make the learning process more effective, more enjoyable and more relevant for students of the 21st Century, tools which just one generation ago were little more than science-fiction, hardly capable of transforming the world and how educators approach the practice of teaching students in their classrooms.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided every parent with a glimpse of just how much ‘school’ has changed since the 1980’s and 1990’s. Winessing live-stream classes via Zoom could never have been imagined as little as 20 years ago, whereas now we can “zoom” easily, almost at will, connecting with anyone, at any place at any time. Students submit work via Google Classroom or might even email it to their teacher. Forget about recycling an older sibling’s essay on Shakespeare, as Turn-It-In now scans all written texts to detect even the slightest degree of plagiarism.

Rapid advances in AI and digital technologies have created great opportunities for innovative pedagogies to re-shape traditional, or ‘old-school’ constructs that dominated schools in the past. Increasingly intuitive machines are capable of adapting to the real-time needs of learners, offering feedback and guidance that supports the role of the modern teacher as well as contemporary students. The challenge for teachers today is to create opportunities in their own practice that take advantage of advancing digital technology as an integral part of the learning process.

Time needs to be given to this as part of our ongoing professional conversations as it is not an “either/or” scenario. New ideas and methods will continually be introduced at schools and inside classrooms. It is up to the teachers to ensure those innovations are achieving the learning outcomes desired for each student and that learning gains are optimised as a result. 

Mr Paul Haras
Leader of Pedagogy and Practice