MIC Shared Learning Ecosystem
Everyone is familiar with the term “Sharing is Caring”. This concept is very important nowadays; majority of people is aware of that. But how many knows how important it actually is? In reality, a large number of industries are still not implementing the above-mentioned concept. Sharing shouldn’t be the focal point. In addition to that, peer collaboration, teamwork and cooperation is the core of being successful in most industries and this includes the education industry. Indeed, the education industry will achieve increased effectiveness in teaching results by implementing the concept.
For quite some time, collaboration in education is usually seen as teachers exchanging teaching plans over the weekend. In the professional environment of schools; teachers formulate assessments, teaching concepts, and practices. Ironically, the main goal of education — which is to prepare students for the next level in learning, and in life — is practiced in an isolated classroom by educators who seldomly thinks outside the box to consider different teaching practices. However, this situation is being cracked down one school at a time in the education sector.
This situation is currently what students at Thoreau Middle School in Vienna, Virginia and James Madison High students that has Thoreau Middle School graduates are facing. Realizing and wanting to solve this, the principal wholeheartedly and openly accepted the idea of establishing a professional learning community for educators in the school, and by using the formative assessment method to start this change.
In Thoreau, being a part of the professional learning community the school with core curriculum arrangements that has its educators collaborate and share towards a better teaching method for students. Its operational structure and culture are integrated into the school to ensure the success of students. Teachers of all subjects even have a dedicated “planning” period in school to develop strategies for evaluating and discussing methods by trial and error. By using Formative Assessments, it aims to help teachers collaborate and form a common understanding in building strategies and learning methods.
Educators review the results of the assignments every two-weeks, to find out the strengths and weaknesses of students and in turn, share the results with their colleagues. This is based on data obtained by research, and they also focus on the most successful practices of the school. Thus, this is viewed as a very strategic approach.
Once every month, seventh and eight grade teachers meet to discuss on how to improve students’ performance, and what can aid students for success in their coming years. For example, President Merrell of Madison High requires every high school student to take at least one pre-university course for university. To prepare middle school students, all students in Thoreau took honor classes in science and social studies, while all eighth-grade students did so for algebra. “It is preferred to have the best practices of your school teachers and applying them to all children in the school, rather than having a superstar teacher that only 120 students are fortunate to have.” Principal Mark Greenfield added.
Even though Thoreau was an excellent school when Principal Greenfield took over six years ago, it is now elevated to be one of the best schools in Virginia in terms of state test scores and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This really helps to narrow the performance gap between minority students and other students, and currently no group of students have a proficiency level below 90%.
When Principal of Madison High introduced the concept of a professional learning community to the faculty and staff, he said it was an effort to re-educate the school. Allowing educators to collaborate by sharing their best methods, and ensure the best performance for all of the students. Traditionally, 11th grade Teachers in Social studies may only care about their 150 students in that are taking their classes. After this concept was introduced, Principal Merrell emphasized to all faculty and staff that they are all now responsible to all 500 students in the 11th grade and are expected to share the best practices to benefit all students.
“Initially, some teachers were reluctant to participate.” Merrell said. Some said “I have been teaching for so many years with good results, why does it have to change?” Merrell replied: “My point is that all of us will always be stronger than one of us. If we all take responsibility, the children’s chances for failure will be reduced. When we use research data instead of intuition and anecdotes to drive decision-making, decisions are more obvious to be made. If you don’t have the data to support something, it is difficult to hold your argument.”
As you can see, the concept of sharing is caring has been widely used in these professional learning communities. However, despite its effectiveness in improving student achievement and motivation, traditional methods of collaboration pale in comparison with the digital advances of the technologically driven world.
We can use the same concept in different ways to achieve better results, so as to achieve higher efficiencies too. MIC as a blockchain-based education platform can perfectly aid in achieving this goal as uses IPFS-based distributed storage. Books published by educational publishers, teachers’ teaching and research, scientific research, and even everyday teaching plans and courseware can all take advantage of the technical features that can’t be tampered with after the release of MIC to obtain intellectual property protection. Even if there is an intellectual property dispute, since each data has an independent time stamp authentication and verification, investigation and evidence collection are easy to handle, ensuring that the rights and interests of the publishers are not violated.
At the same time, the MIC chain values transparency and timely response. Through smart contracts, when products such as teaching aids, courseware, handouts, test questions, educational videos are purchased through MIC’S exclusive network, the benefits will be instantly distributed to the content provider. By doing so, this solves the enthusiastic problems content creators may have. On one hand, it shortens the entire education industry chain, and on the other, it encourages content creators to produce higher-quality knowledge content.
