We had our E-learning co-ordinator come out from the big bosses today. Lovely guy, quite knowledgeable on the e-learning stuff. Like the old one, he was also good about acknowledging other people’s work publically, which I see as a sign of good leadership.

What I thought was quite funny though, was the meeting with one of our co-ordinators, who obviously thought that the meeting was a waste of time, in his arrogance, tone and body language. E-learning guy talked about wikis, and the other guy asked “I’ve seen wikis before, and really…I haven’t seen anything useful for them in the classroom”.

Fair enough.

E-learning guy: Well, you could construct a collaborative essay response, so that each student built on an answer to an essay, until you had an exemplar.

Me: I use it for collaborative summaries, where each student gets a section of the topic they need to summarise and post.  I know you do this in the classroom already, Co-ordinator guy, is just an easier way to do it.

Co-ord guy: So what you’re telling me is that I can more easily do it on paper with better learning?

Me: Well, I use wikis, becuase it means that the better kids can also build and comment on the weaker sections, without targeting particular students.

His attitude after that totally changed. He crossed his arms across his chest, and steadfastly refused to be involved. It was funny to me, because while E-learning guy was presenting stuff that would still centre classroom focus around the teacher, he was fine, but when it was more student centred, he put his hands up and went “Bad Learning!” and “Hard”.

I consider him a good teacher too, so it was a funny thing for me to observe. How do we react to these sorts of attitudes?

Image from Flickr/ Creative Commons

Attribution: http://flickr.com/photos/maebmij/