About to ReDiCo

What does ReDiCo stand for?

 The resilience of educational institutions through Digitalization – A reaction to COVID-19 (ReDiCo) in Great Lakes Region (ReDiCo) was founded in 2021 by a group of teachers and academics who shared concerns about the prevalence of passive, unreflective, dependent student learning, even in successful lessons.  They set out to research classroom approaches that would stimulate and support student learning that was more informed, purposeful, intellectually active, independent, and metacognitive. The project was unfunded and not a result of any system or institution-level initiative. ReDiCo teachers agreed to meet regularly, in their own time, to share and analyze experiences, ideas, and new practices.

The original project was intended to run for two years at one (secondary) school, however, the process of collaborative action research, the development of so many new ideas for practice, and the changes in a classroom environment all proved very rewarding for the teachers. Consequently, at the end of the initial two years, the teachers refused to let the project end, and a year later it began to spread to other schools in Australia and then in other countries. This spread was driven by teachers in those schools who had similar concerns about learning, as well as the lack of opportunities in a normal school day for collaborative reflection, and who wished to set up ReDiCo groups of their own. While the initial spread was in secondary schools, it became just as prevalent in primary/elementary schools. In 2023 38 years after the original project, there is no longer a network of ReDiCo professional learning communities, however, there is still some research activity going on and the resources developed over 38 years are still available and highly relevant to educators today.