Teaching and Learning

Today this article came up on my facebook feed. https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/23/tossing-out-teaching-by-subject-as-part-of-a-modern-high-school-education/ Which is quite an old article, but talks about how Finnish schools are phasing out subjects, to value contextual learning, and learning through projects. When we examine the New Zealand Curriculum, we normally skip straight to the back, where individual subjects look like they dominate, and have major priority (indeed it was the first thing I was taught to look at.) But if we look at the front we see a very different story. We see quotes like this: While the learning areas are presented as distinct, this should not limit the ways in which schools structure the learning experiences offered to students. All learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the values and key competencies.  -New Zealand Curriculum pp16  And this: School...

Much research around the terms 'modern' or '21st century' or 'future focused' learning have placed several values at it's centre. Learners having a choice in what they do, and teachers creating activities that are authentic to their students are two of these such values that we hear discussed in the education sector. I believe that educators need to explore deeper than these values. Giving students choice about which activities they complete is no longer enough. To ask them to complete a list of "must do's and can do's" or choose from a "learning menu" is not going to prepare learners for their future well enough for them to thrive in a technology-driven world. We need to grow their thinking by scaffolding them to actually own and drive their own learning, which means students need to be in control of their learning from the beginning of the planning process, to the outcome of the learning. As long as adults are planning lea...

Knowledge. What is it? The oxford dictionary states it as "The sum of what is known." School's job historically has been to impart knowledge to it's students. To continue to build on humanities' knowledge by understanding what has gone on before. Until around the 1900's, the sum of human knowledge was doubling every century.  After the first world war, knowledge was doubling every 25 years.  Now knowledge doubles every 18 months, and IBM predicts in the future to double every 12 hours. ref.  http://www.bostoncommons.net/knowledge-doubling/?doing_wp_cron=1479671423.9828670024871826171875 The curve is exponential, and shows no sign of slowing down. So now education stands at crisis point.   We have two options going forward. Either 1. We keep teaching the small portion of knowledge that we can in the 13 years we have students for, whilst letting them miss out on the huge array of knowledge that presides before them, or 2. We offer students...

Learning. Many educators see it as something we need to stuff into learners. As some information that the learner is a vessel to be filled with. Many look at teachers as the shovers of stuff into the vessel, or the crafters of learning to hit the most targets at once.  I don't.  I look at learning as something that students need to love. That students will love if just the right combination of environmental elements are met.  If the environmental elements are just right for learning to occur, then it will happen in a much more meaningful and fun way than if it is poured into someone.  Teachers are the creators of the environment. Their purpose in school is to create the traps of learning that students will fall into. Take an example we discussed today as a group. A toy baby is left lying around almost haphazardly in a junior classroom with a towel, and a bowl of water. Play will inevitably lead students towards a discussion of bathing a baby. This is t...

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...