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| It is not too late to escape the standardized box |
By Allan Alach
I welcome suggested articles, so if you come
across a gem, email it to me at allanalach@inspire.net.nz
'World's best teacher' warns on too much
testing
Mind you I’m not sure who chose her for this
honour, nor what the criteria were, so I’d take the ‘best teacher’ claim with a
pinch of salt.
“… she warned against education systems moving to what she thought
was an over-prescriptive curriculum.
Such an approach would limit children's range of reading, she
warned, so that they would spend too long focusing on a small number of texts
in order to pass tests.
"Parents are recognising that their children are being tested
rather than taught," she said of US schools.”
Innovation: What Does it Really Mean in Schools?
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| Tony Wagner |
“Technology alone will not make it happen. Indeed, the technology
will achieve little unless the ecology of learning and the purpose of
technology have been clearly established. It’s about culture, imagination,
creativity, risk-taking, failure, learning, questioning and the amplification
of this entire process – especially the innovation piece – through the
appropriate use of tools and technologies that help extend our ambition and
learning outcomes. It’s about how we use those things.”
The Timeless John Dewey
If you don’t know much about John Dewey, here’s
your homework - research him!
“Dewey wrote much about the power and importance of experiential
learning (learning by doing,outdoor education, hands-on experiences), and how
the teacher should be more of a facilitator or guide in a child’s learning
experiences rather than the “sage on the stage”, which sadly became the
traditional approach.”
“Peak indifference”:
Cory Doctorow on surveillance in education
An important topic, given the ever increasing
eyes of the state on our every day activities, and there’s no reason to think
that education will be spared from this.
“In the
educational domain we see a lot of normalisation of designing computers so that
their users can’t override them. For example, school supplied laptops can be
designed so that educators can monitor what their users are doing. If a school
board loses control of their own security or they have bad employees, there’s
nothing students can do. They are completely helpless because their machines
are designed to prevent them from doing anything.”
What if everything we thought we knew about learning was wrong?
Here is a series of articles exploring the
nature of learning.
’It is time to go back to basics of teaching and learning, not those
of the 3 R’s, or of rote learning, of the industrial revolution or that of the
information technology revolution but instead the basics of relationships and
trust in education. It is time to rethink our pedagogy. A time to wipe the
slate clean and rethink things from the beginning and not keep adding things
that we think will or should “work”.’
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 5:
Contributed by Bruce Hammonds:
Bruce Hammonds
- Lessons from the Masters
Want to know what
Bruce thinks – his ideas are captured in this PowerPoint presented at a
creativity course.
45 Design
Thinking Resources for Educators
“Design
thinking consists of four key elements: Defining the Problem, Creating and
Considering Multiple Options, Refining Selected Directions, and Executing the
Best Plan of Action.”
'I can be
happy – or I can be a teacher’
“I come across
weary, disillusioned teachers on a daily basis in the course of my visits to
schools as an author. Now here’s the rub, not one of these good professionals
references the very real stresses and strains of the classroom as the factor
that could drive them out of teaching. It always boils down to workload, the
endless collection of data, the subordination of teaching and learning to
tracking, testing and "accountability", which invariably means
stress-inducing targets and anxious over-the-shoulder concerns about the next
Ofsted inspection.”
Contributed by Phil Cullen:
Swamp Drop For
Skills and Learning.
Here’s an
interesting little task to work through.
“This exercise
will build your skills in recognising how communications can activate
unproductive cultural models. It’s an essential first step in keeping your
messages from being eaten by dominant understandings of your issue.”
From Bruce’s ‘goldie oldies’ file:
Survival of the fittest or the best
connected - Market Forces or creating conditions for all to thrive. A new look
at Darwin.
“Competition it is still
believed leads to innovation but when you look at innovation from a long term
perspective competition turns out to be less central that we have been led to
believe. Survival of the fittest has been oversold - from a long term
perspective openness and connectivity may be more important.”
And:
“Shame is that our current market
forces competitive orientated government seems prepared to destroy such an
environment by introducing competitive league tables which will destroy the
valuable aspects of collaboration and connectivity and, in the process, narrow
the curriculum as teachers will naturally begin to teach to the test - a
version of the outdated ideas of ' survival of the fittest.”
Importance of School Values
The importance of shared values in a school
“A vision gives an organization a sense
of direction, a purpose, but only if it is ‘owned’ and translated into action
by all involved.But vision is not enough in itself. The values that any
organization has are just as important or even more so because they determine
the behaviours that people agree to live within. Alignment of people behind
values is vital but too often both vision and values are just words hidden in
folders are rarely referred to. What you do must reflect what you believe if
there is to be integrity. And any alignment needs to include students and
parents as well.”
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