INNOVATIVE BUILDING REGULATIONS ON RESEARCH LEARNING: IMPERATIVE FOR GOVERNMENT TO RESPONSE TO THE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT SELECTION COMMITTEE The transformation agenda in Nigeria goes beyond Information Communications Technology (ICT). Merely having technology inside the classroom does not by itself change teaching and learning. For ICT to be effective, educators need to adopt and use the very skills they are seeking to instill in their students: collaboration, real world problem-solving, knowledge-construction, self regulation, and the use of ICT for learning. Partners in Learning School Research can be an important first step in bringing about this deeper transformation of the teaching and learning experience. Brainstorm Associates Partners in Learning School Research is a free, online survey sent out by a school administrator to school leaders and teachers to gain their individual self-assessment on the current state of innovative teaching practices in their school and their own class. Everyone is encouraged to participate (it only takes ten minutes), and all responses are anonymous and confidential. As Brainstorm Associates easily create data driven, action oriented reports yet, once your surveys have been taken, your school receives a data-driven, action-oriented report with concrete recommendations for how your school can develop and expand its innovative teaching and learning. The surveys can be used to measure progress by establishing a baseline of your schools current teaching practices using the initial survey results, and then conducting subsequent research every year thereafter to assess how those practices have evolved. The inevitability of lifelong learning in knowledge-oriented societies implies that school systems should have different objectives and characteristics than if education were considered to have been completed when a student leaves initial education. Yet in practice, there remains a tendency for school education to be assessed in terms of the achievements and targets that systems have set themselves, rather than their broader success in laying the foundation for lifelong learning. In the knowledge economy, memorization of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated workers need a conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge. They need to be able critically to evaluate what they read, be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalised and de-contextualised facts. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, life-long learning. Therefore Building regulations contain the rules for building work in new and altered buildings to make them safe and accessible and limit waste and environmental damage. People carrying out building work must usually arrange for their work to be checked by an independent third party to make sure that their work meets the required standards. In some cases the installer can certify themselves that their work complies. Building practices, technology and construction techniques are constantly evolving. Brainstorm Associates ongoing Leadership in community Development Project 2014 need to make sure that building regulations are fair, efficient, up to date and effective. Obviously, building regulations controlling as an aspects of the African Communities now demands: • Brainstorm Associates in lengthening the time in which local authorities can bring a prosecution from two years to three years after the completion of the work so that defects that come to light only after some time can still be prosecuted in appropriate cases. •Increasing the level of fine available (now a maximum of £5000) on conviction for a breach of the Building Regulations to a level that would more effectively penalise serious breaches of health and safety or persistent offenders and which would also act as a greater deterrent to non-compliance. Though it would be impossible to indicate with certainty any action to be taken forward or a timetable for the introduction of these measures as Brainstorm Associates Research Council are currently analysing all the comments and suggestions generated by the consultation; yet, the members of Brainstorm Associates Research Group are: • BLA, Nigeria Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; • Department for International Communities and Government; • Department of Health; Resilience and Safety Executive; • Partnerships for Innovative Schools Development • The Federal Government of Nigeria and it National Assembly Government. As coalition African Government continue to made a commitment to review public bodies, with the aim of increasing accountability for actions carried out on behalf of the state. The Brainstorm Associates Building Regulations are designed to: ensure the health, safety, welfare and convenience and safety of people, including those who are disabled, in and around buildings; promote the conservation of fuel and power and the prevention of waste and water. These Brainstorm Associates research reports with the ongoing project 2014 aim to provide a sound innovative research basis to underpin these regulations. The latest reports can be found in the Related Publications on our social media pages. In the interest of transparency, Brainstorm associates is publishing on the corporate web site, a number of Building Regulations research reports that were commissioned by the previous government. These do not necessarily reflect the current governments policies and priorities yet Brainstorm Associates are working with industry and provincial/territorial governments to support model-codes development with new methods that are harmonized, simple, and cost-effective. In collaboration with clients, Brainstorm Associates is also advancing methods to evaluate innovative products and systems to demonstrate their compliance to code requirements. The goal is to allow for more innovative building products and their increased sales, as well as improve and harmonize building regulations. Brainstorm Associates is helping industry/government commissions and ministries/agencies become more innovative and competitive in these areas: • Performance-based technical solutions: Responds to manufacturers needs to develop and commercialize innovative building products and systems complying with code requirements – particularly in the areas of energy efficiency, weather-protection, and sound transmission control. • Research-based codes development: Responds to industry and government needs to develop construction codes and related tools that enable business growth and address changing societal needs and emerging technologies, specifically in areas of fire safety and clean and safe indoor air. • initiating discussion across research and policy making communities on the strategic importance of a comprehensive data framework for buildings and energy use • arguing for and demonstrating the strategic importance of buildings in the development of a flexible, resilient and robust energy system for the African Countries; • • arguing for and demonstrating the importance of high quality empirical research and innovative research strategies to support learning and capacity building; Partner benefits Partner benefits include: • access to a multi-partner network to develop stronger industry relationship and leverage their own investment, resulting in larger gains and faster progress with less investment; • participation in multi-year collaboration research projects allowing for impartial performance evaluation and validation of innovative solutions; • reduced time for evaluation of innovative products; and • access to Brainstorm Associates vast resources, which include world-renowned expertise and testing facilities. • Analyze and code learning activities to see how deeply they integrate 21st century skills • Collaborate in designing new learning activities that provide deeper 21st century skills development • Examine the impact of these learning activities on students work • Use ICT as part of the process Other Services and Facilities For over four years, Brainstorm Associates has been providing a competitive advantage to the Nigerian Research Institutions. Our world-class research facilities combined with our expertise and customized technical and advisory services make us an important resource for industrys construction innovation. Foot note: The explosion of knowledge about the brain and the nature of learning, combined with the growing power of technology, create the potential to transform even the most fundamental unit of education -the interaction of the teacher and the learner. Moreover, huge social changes, such as growing diversity and population mobility, present educators with new and constantly changing circumstances. Above all, the understanding of literacy in the brain is one important area where brain research can inform reading instruction. The dual importance in the brain of sounds and phonological processing, on the one hand, and the direct processing of semantics or meanings, on the other, can inform the classic debate between top-down and bottom-up approaches –“whole language” text immersion and the development of phonetic skills, respectively. Learning sciences have also charted the inverse relationship between age and the effectiveness of learning many aspects of language –in general, the younger the age of exposure, the more successful the second-or third-language learning. This is at odds with the education policies of numerous countries where foreign language instruction does not begin until adolescence. This is a good example where learning science confronts educational practice to ask whether attention to the evidence base calls for significant change to conventional practice. The study of the brain also highlights the importance of emotions. Emotional states induced by fear or stress directly affect learning and memory. Brain studies have illuminated how negative emotions block learning and have identified the amygdala, the hippocampus and stress hormones, as playing a crucial role in mediating the effects of negative emotions on learning and memory. Some level of stress is essential for optimal adaptation to environmental challenges and can lead to better cognition and learning, but beyond this modicum it activates responses in the brain associated with flight and survival and inhibits those responsible for analytical capacity. Hence if the student is faced with sources of stress in an educational context which go beyond the positive challenge threshold –for instance, aggressive teachers, bullying students, or incomprehensible learning materials whether books or computers –it triggers fear and cognitive function is negatively affected. Therefore, it might end up showing that concepts which place emotional factors to the fore in various forms of “alternative schooling”, which had previously been grasped intuitively or philosophically, may in fact have very sound neuro-scientific underpinnings. One of the most surprising elements to emerge from the recent report on understanding the Brain concerns the more general, practical issue of how the science of learning should be applied in education. Beyond informing general policy and practice, the eventual application of the results of neuroscience to individual learnersmay is highly beneficial in order to find out such matters as whether a student really does comprehend certain material, or about their levels of motivation or anxiety. Used properly, this individual focus may add fundamentally powerful diagnostic tools to the process of formative assessment and personalised learning, as discussed above. At the same time, studies of the brain show that individual characteristics are far from fixed –there is constant interaction between genetic function and experience and plasticity, such that the notion of an individual‟s talents/capacity –as if this were fixed and open to scientific scrutiny -should be treated with considerable caution. Personalised learning. The aim of “personalising learning” is of growing prominence in thinking and policy discussion in some countries. It springs from awareness that “one-size-fits-all” approaches to school knowledge and organisation are ill-adapted to individuals‟ needs and to the knowledge society at large. This emerging idea is that systems capable of achieving universally high standards are those that can personalise the programme of learning and progression offered to the needs and motivations of each learner. Personalisation can mean adopting a more holistic, person-centred approach to learner development, as well as more demand-driven, market-friendly approaches to system change. In part, it reflects a change in social climate, driven by the affluence and value change that arise from sustained economic growth. Finally, as the scale of the challenge should not to be under-estimated: it certainly will not be achieved by the optimistic hope that repetition of the need for change will somehow magically bring it about. Education is not a technocratic process which, with a little tweaking here and there, can be shifted to a new paradigm –school systems are both resistant to change and highly adaptable. At the very least, major reform will need to arrive at basic consistency and resolution of the contradiction whereby assessment and accountability regimes may stifle the very approaches to learning and innovation that the reform seeks in principle to encourage. Source: Brainstorm Associates Research Council
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 13:53:11 +0000
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