seminar
Shifting the Culture of Traditional Classrooms to Knowledge Building Communities
For over a decade, Dr. Katerine Bielaczyc has worked with teachers toward creating classrooms that function as knowledge building communities (KBC). One of the greatest challenges facing the creation of KBC in "traditional classrooms" is the change process that teachers and their students must move through --- the change in cultural beliefs, norms and practices, and teacher and student roles. In this talk, Dr. Bielaczyc draws on two case studies --- one from the United States and one from Singapore --- in order to describe the ways in which teachers worked to shift the culture of their classrooms in order to support knowledge building.
About the speaker(s):Dr. Katerine Bielaczyc is currently an Associate Professor in the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Kate was formerly an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in Technology in Education and Teacher Education; a Senior Scientist at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman; and Director of the Learning Communities Research Group at Boston College. Kate has worked as a cognitive researcher and systems designer at the Learning Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh and at universities in France and Italy. She has been a visiting scholar at the Open University, UK, and at the Ecole Normale Superior in Lyon, France. Kate was the Director of Research on a large-scale school reform effort through the NSF Vanguard for Learning project, and also worked with colleagues at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Secretary of Education in Bogota, Colombia, on the evaluation of an ICT project in the Bogota School District. Kate's research centers on individual and collective metacognition, teacher and student learning and epistemic change within contexts of classroom innovation, and exploring new methodologies for classroom assessment.