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...

There are five fundamental features of what is termed "modern learning". Students decide: What learning to work on Who to work with Where to work What platform to use to effectively complete their learning When to complete work.  Lots of teachers find this scary, for many reasons. Some of the most common are: How will students decide to learn the right things? They won't. The students deciding what learning to work on doesn't mean they decide by themselves and teachers have nothing to do with it. Teachers need to guide students into it by giving them options of mini cross curricular projects to choose from, by co-constructing deep cross curricular projects for students to complete, and by skilfully guiding them towards AO's and LO's. What if students decide to always work with the same people? This relies heavily on the classroom culture. The classroom needs to be set up to be an inclusive environment. Students choosing different people to work...

I wrote this blogpost last year but never actually posted it. At the start of this year we started doing flow inquiries with students. Flow inquiries are an inquiry into whatever they want to learn about. Many of the students at this point replied to our idea with "I dunno what I want to learn about." or "I dont really want to learn anything." or "I just won't do a flow inquiry and will just do what you tell me to do." Slowly over the year, these reluctant students watched others in the classroom become engaged in their flow inquiries and started to experiment with their own ideas. Now two of the most disengaged students that we had at the start of the year are making the most creative things in the classroom. They are having a resurgence of passion into their learning. A resurgence of creativity that has really come into it's own, and students are starting to take control of their own learning again. The traditional school system that they...

Engagement is a key word in todays pedagogical discussion around education. Engagement, or the lack of, is one of the key reasons that so many schools in New Zealand are now transitioning into "modern learning". It is not the spaces that define whether students are engaged in their learning or not, but the teaching. Malone and Tranter (2003) discuss authenticity of learning and it's role of engaging students inside the classroom. Learning must be connected to the physical world, and through the eye of authentic contexts. Students must have meaning in their learning - their learning must be geared towards an authentic purpose. In a classroom (and Mike Scaddon would say above year 4(ish) where students are starting to read to learn rather than learning to read) concepts should be a focus. The Glossary of Education Reform suggests that "...a well-planned curriculum built around authentic-learning experiences can cover all the academic subjects and concepts that stu...

This was written by a friend of mine - a science graduate. It is a very interesting blogpost about current school pedagogies and thoughts for the future. "Teenagers are coming out of high school with an extreme lack of scientific literacy." This was said by my flatmate, an experienced teacher, and experienced in modern learning pedagogy. I asked her why, and her response was "because teachers do not know how to teach it." I find this incredibly interesting as a student who fared very well in the traditional schooling system I grew up in. I want to explore this sentiment, and my own reflections on how it fits into today's scientific arena. In school, and to the most extent university, science is taught as a recipe, where each instruction in the recipe has a logical flow from the instruction before it. Each question has its own "right answer"; in NCEA physics, you can miss out on an Excellence grade if you do not put the right term in your answer. Te...

https://www.blendspace.com/ This is a very interesting little program. It's basically a course creator and manager for the classroom, which lets your students self direct their learning through a number of guided steps. There is a lot of scope for you as a teacher to design pretty cool learning programmes using readily available information on the internet and lets you curate it for your learners. Advantages:  - One advantage I see is organisation. Creating a lesson is really easy, and because it google searches for you it is simple to find things that relate to your chosen topic. - It is also very simple to use. Students can wade through content you have provided systematically. - It is a great way to scaffold learners. Learners can start really simply and gradually progress through your learning program to immerse themselves deeper in the content. Disadvantages: - If we are trying to promote digital citizenship and independence in our learners, I don't think it...