Page 154 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Introduction
Assessment can be a powerful enabler to prepare current and future leaders of education for a lifetime of learning. ‘Whatever else it achieves, it [the assessment] must equip students to learn beyond the academy once the infrastructure of teachers, courses and formal assessment is no longer available’ (Boud & Falchichar 2006: 399). To do this it must build on students’ capacity to learn for themselves and to assess the learning of others, enabling them to ‘make evaluative judgments, to be agents of their own learning, and to see learning as a process’ (Jessop, El Hakim & Gibbs 2014: 74).
Against this backdrop of research on assessment for lifelong learning, this chapter focuses on one assessment that serves as an example of how this could be practically achieved. The online module ‘Future Trends in Education Leadership and Management’ was designed to explore the current education leadership landscape. The module aims to equip future and current leaders with the skills needed to keep abreast of the ‘pulse’, of what is trending, and of responsive approaches to leading education for an uncertain future. Hence, the module worked towards inviting ‘living’ conversations related to leading a culture of learning for
the era of 4IR. When Covid-19 brought with it a ‘forced opportunity’ (Marwala 2021) that resulted in school principals, Department of Education officials and education policymakers communicating on social media the challenges and solutions in response to a crisis, and the idea of research through Twitter engagement was born.
A Twitter-linked infographic assessment assisted students with exploring assessment for lifelong learning. They were able to do this by engaging with other leaders and their peers on topics of current interest in real time. The assignment design required two sets of activities:
a.
Online research inquiry using Twitter
Students were required to create or use an existing Twitter account. The Twitter handles were shared so that students and the teaching team followed each other. The #FutureTrends were created and used in each tweet or retweet so that each student’s contribution could be ascertained. Students were expected to find an issue on education leadership in relation to 4IR that was trending and to create a body of tweets (50 tweets, at least 20 responses to fellow student tweets and a minimum of 5 threads) that would assist them in creating an infographic on a chosen issue.
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