Teaching and Learning

I've been reading Peter Gray's book Free to Learn recently, which has made me reflect widely on my last 6 years in the education profession. I have thought about the different schools that I have taught at, and the different experiences and challenges that have lead me to where I am now. Peter gray offers a fresh perspective on school. I'm going to start this blogpost with some quotes from his book.  "[One of the sins of education is] Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating. It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do."   "We rely now primarily on a system of incessant testing, grading, and ranking of children to motivate them to do their schoolwork."  The system itself has fostered what it has been fighting so long to weed out. The system itself has created a culture of shaming students, ranking students, and making learning a chore. "By the time they are eleven or twelve year...

An author recently visited our school, he addressed the assembly of students and suggested to them that two words create a world of opportunity in writing. What if... I liked this concept, and decided to apply it to my thinking when looking at assessment of learning in the classroom.  My big focus lately has been on assessment in the classroom, and how can we create visible learning assessment that is more authentic for students, that is more student driven, and creates more onus on the student to drive their own and each other's assessment and feedback. So I did what I usually do when I come across a conundrum in teaching; I thought about the real world.  How do people get assessed in the real world? How do they get judged? How do they find out if their projects are working or not? There's obviously statistics that they gather, but I thought there had to be more than just that, more than just quantitative data.  I was driving at some point in the e...