The painter Barnett Newmann wrote that “only time can be felt in private. Space is common property. Only time is personal, a private experience”. I believe the same can be said for learning space – a common property where learners meet and experience together – and learning time – where each learner lives a private and intimate experience.
Visionary edtech solutions must be looking for this thin line between the intimate experience adapted to each learner and the communal one targeting the class as a group. Innovative learning experiences play around the concept of time delivering a mix of online – fully flexible – and offline experiences.
Students engagement should be the end objective. It is all about renewed connections between students on the one hand and peers on the other hand. And this requires time and motivation.
A lot has been written about teachers’ motivation. Susan Headden and Sarak McKay in their insightful study: Motivation Matters: How New Research Can Help Teachers Boost Student Engagement talk about the goal of education to develop innate curiosity and an intrinsic love of learning. How can we envisage teachers’ role in and outside the classroom to “develop love of learning”?
Helping teachers to better manage their time is one issue, giving them more time to attend most needed students and unleashing students capacity by letting others move forwards without their help. This is for instance the main focus of Unió by Harness, an innovative learning solution we help to develop. A key innovative feature is having adopted a development process based on the perspective of the teachers. This is what my friend Yishay Mor helped to develop with his learning design studio and the concept of “collaborative design inquiry as teachers”.
But learning time is also about having more time for learning. Expanded time has been identified as a key ingredient in successful schools, especially to overcome the negative effects of poverty on learning.
Going back to Barnett Newman, the need for more learning time may help redesign the frontiers between an intimate learning experience and a communal one.
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