The Emergence of Rotating Leadership for Idea Improvement in a Grade 1 Knowledge Building Community
The purpose of this study is to elaborate theory-driven models of collaborative engagement in Knowledge Building/knowledge creation. Assessment methods from Collaborative Innovation Network theory and Knowledge Building theory were integrated to investiga
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The Emergence of Rotating Leadership for Idea Improvement in a Grade 1 Knowledge Building Community Leanne Ma
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Introduction
Creative, collaborative engagement with ideas defines Knowledge Building/knowledge creation and is fundamental to work in today’s knowledge society: “At its best, the Knowledge Society involves all members of the community in knowledge creation and utilization” (United Nations 2005, p. 141). Collaborative Innovation Networks—in knowledge-creating organizations, research laboratories, and design firms—are advancing the frontiers of the knowledge society (Gloor 2005). Correspondingly, there is growing recognition that schools must shift from preparing students to be consumers to producers of knowledge (e.g., OECD 2015; Tan and Tan 2014). Knowledge Building pedagogy (Scardamalia and Bereiter 2014) represents a longstanding effort aimed at transforming education into a knowledgecreating enterprise by empowering all students to take collective responsibility for creating and advancing knowledge for public good. Creative work requires flexible, distributed social configurations that support collaborative improvisation and group flow (Sawyer 2015). In Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), members have a strong sense of autonomy and selforganize around shared goals, with members rotating leadership as new tasks emerge (Gloor and Cooper 2007). Similarly, in the Knowledge Building classroom, both the teacher and the students share a sense of collective responsibility and all members improvise within the context of 12 Knowledge Building principles that support self-organization around idea improvement (Scardamalia 2002). For example, the principles of idea diversity, improvable ideas, and rise above prioritize ideas at the center of class discussions and highlight the iterative nature of idea generation, refinement, and invention in knowledge creation processes that enhance
L. Ma (*) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M.P. Zylka et al. (eds.), Designing Networks for Innovation and Improvisation, Springer Proceedings in Complexity, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42697-6_2
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the breadth and depth of group understanding and achievement. In a recent study that aimed to assess the Knowledge Building principle of collective responsibility (Ma et al. 2016), rotating leadership was uncovered as an emergent phenomenon in three successful Knowledge Building classes, with children as young as 6 and 9 years of age. The current study is exploratory in nature, with the goal of extending this work on rotating leadership by assessing idea improvement and addressing issues surrounding conceptual depth and coherence of student ideas. Two research questions were developed for analysis at the group and individual levels: 1. Over the course of their Knowledge Building, how many students emerge as leaders? What are the pivotal points in the discussion that indicate idea improv
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