Using Critique to develop an ethic of excellence. Quite a few twitter followers have been asking me about how do we get such beautiful work from our students and others have been asking me to share ideas about critique. I have to say, there is a multitude of great blogs and useful videos on this subject, but here is some advice which I live by. Establishing a really clear, co-constructed success criteria for ongoing work is absolutely essential for students to have a platform for effective critique and a view of excellence. This can be effectively done in two ways. Exemplar work of excellence. By using exemplar work of excellence from previous students, you can pick out the key criteria for work of excellence. First timers, make sure you know what excellence looks like. If it is a new project, then the teacher should create all the elements of the learning themselves to provide a benchmark from which to agree the criteria. Learning on the Job. As teachers, we are, or at least we should be the greatest exponents of this.
SOLO Taxonomy So. Howard Gardner: ‘Multiple intelligences’ are not ‘learning styles’ The fields of psychology and education were revolutionized 30 years ago when the now world-renowned psychologist Howard Gardner published his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” which detailed a new model of human intelligence that went beyond the traditional view that there was a single kind that could be measured by standardized tests. (You can read his account of how he came up with the theory here.) Gardner’s theory initially listed seven intelligences which work together: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal; he later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence and says there may be a few more.
The theory became highly popular with K-12 educators around the world seeking ways to reach students who did not respond to traditional approaches, but over time, “multiple intelligences” somehow became synonymous with the concept of “learning styles.” By Howard Gardner Two problems. Problem #2. 1. Justinwolfers : Brilliant. A flowchart showing... Here’s my infographic on how to get involved in education twi. Advice to New Senior Leaders | Leading Learner. #SLTChat is providing a whole raft of great issues to blog on and I’ve picked up another one this weekend proposed by @ChrisHildrew.
He posed the question, “What single piece of advice would you offer to someone taking up a senior leadership post in September?” The chance of me limiting myself to one piece of advice is negligible but I do have some thoughts. This February we attracted the largest and most outstanding field of applicants, for two Assistant Headships, that I have ever seen in my time at St. Mary’s. In taking a number of candidates around the College, prior to the closing date for applications (by the way it is a really good idea to go and have a look at a school and meet the headteacher when you are applying for this type of post), I was asked various questions.
I tried to give them honest and frank answers so they could determine whether St. Mary’s was a place where they could be happy and make a contribution. Outstanding Teaching Publicly Support, Privately Challenge. Kids are failed by The System, not their genes. I have argued before that the usual left/right distinctions can be meaningless in education.
Instead of a left/right spectrum I preferred this 2-dimensional version which separates the issues of what should be taught (the content axis) and who it should be taught to (the entitlement axis). Lazy thinking (shown by those who look only at positions on the red line) suggests that a traditional curriculum should be accompanied by an elitist view of who is to learn it, and an egalitarian belief that everyone is entitled to a high quality education should be accompanied by trendy beliefs about content and pedagogy which completely undermine any notion of what a high quality education actually is. Normally this “red line” thinking results in smearing supporters of a knowledge-led curriculum and traditional teaching as right-wing advocates of inequality by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the top-right quadrant.
Yesterday, it led to confusion over the bottom-left quadrant. Like this: Designing a new post-levels curriculum and assessment model from scratch. This is the 5th post in a series about how we are designing our own post-levels curriculum and assessment model from scratch. The story so far: This latest update contains a miscellany of information and ideas that I’ve shared at our second curriculum conference and most recently at the Dare to imagine – Education for the 21st century conference and the Cramlington Festival of Learning TeachMeet.
It attempts to pull together more detail on: context and why we are moving away from levelsthe interplay between curriculum planning and assessmenttracking of progress It also includes a number of curriculum planning tools that could be used to adopt a common planning framework. A new taxonomy? Most of us are familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy and the SOLO taxonomy, however, the end of statutory levelled assessment has brought with it a new kind of taxonomy that can be used to describe the various behaviours people often seem to exhibit in response: Some thoughts on levels Big ideas …in advance? Tracking Dan. What is differentiation and why should I care? | Are your students thinking? “Differentiation is marking” @learningspy “Differentiation is planning to challenge the most able and scaffolding down so everyone can make progress.”
“Differentiation is all….most…some…” “Differentiation is by task.” (=different worksheets) “Differentiation is by outcome.” (Inevitably) “Differentiation is planning for the students you are about to teach.” “Differentiation facilitates personalised learning.” “Differentiation involves catering for different learning styles: VAK, global vs analytical etc” One of the many good things about training from Ofsted Inspectors (controversial though it is) is that it gives you great confidence as a teacher.
So we should all feel empowered re “differentiation” which I am guessing is the word that most frequently pops up as an area to improve in whole school reviews and individual lesson observations. And this is why, apart from @LearningSpy’s, I reject most of the other definitions above. Like this: Like Loading... Learning Theory - What are the established learning theories? DianeRavitch : A playlist from Sir Ken Robinson, the most-watched speaker on TED.com.
Education Get ready for TED Talks Education, airing May 7 at 10pm TED is coming to a TV screen near you. On Tuesday, May 7, our first-ever television special will air on PBS at 10pm. Called TED Talks Education, the special is a deep dive on ideas to make our education system stronger – with talks from teachers, learning experts, education researchers and more. The speaker roster […] Sugata Mitra shares his 5 favorite talks about education Sugata Mitra’s bold efforts towards advancing learning earned him the first-ever $1 million dollar TED Prize. Learning Experience Typology- Using Student Voice to revisit staff values | letchp's Blog. How can a school investigate the students’ experience of learning?
Do students and staff value the same learning experiences? Do students’ experiences of learning correlate with what staff believe them to be? How far are the learning experiences in the school from where staff and students would like them to be? These questions were raised by a working party in my school and as a result we needed to devise a way of gathering some meaningful evidence which could be presented to staff and students in a coherent way. Remembering a school culture typology analysis I was involved in when working in Bedfordshire 10 years ago (unfortunately, I am unable to find an author to reference), I waded through my old folders in the loft to find the technique and adapted it with the aim of encouraging thought and discussion. I wanted to get qualitative data which could be presented in quantitative way to show findings easily.
Thus was born…… The Learning Experience Typology Analysis. So how does it work? Designing lessons for learning. Letchp's Blog | Thoughts from a rock near France. Learning Experience Typology- Using Student Voice to revisit staff values | letchp's Blog. How can a school investigate the students’ experience of learning? Do students and staff value the same learning experiences? Do students’ experiences of learning correlate with what staff believe them to be? How far are the learning experiences in the school from where staff and students would like them to be? These questions were raised by a working party in my school and as a result we needed to devise a way of gathering some meaningful evidence which could be presented to staff and students in a coherent way.
Remembering a school culture typology analysis I was involved in when working in Bedfordshire 10 years ago (unfortunately, I am unable to find an author to reference), I waded through my old folders in the loft to find the technique and adapted it with the aim of encouraging thought and discussion. I wanted to get qualitative data which could be presented in quantitative way to show findings easily. Thus was born…… The Learning Experience Typology Analysis. So how does it work? The Myth of Progress Within Lessons « kevenbartle's Blog.
My heckles are risen so I need to post this and post it quick. Let me nail my colours to the mast here and make a bold, unequivocal statement: There is no such thing as progress within lessons. There is only learning. And let me make a second, equally bold and unequivocal statement to back it up: The main perpetuators of the myth of ‘progress within lessons’ are leadership teams within schools, not Ofsted. Right, now that we all know where we are let me explain further, and let me start with my evidence that it is NOT Ofsted asking for the mythical ‘progress within lessons’ by picking out some key quotes from the Inspection Handbook rewritten as recently as December 2012. “The most important role of teaching is to promote learning and to raise pupils’ achievement.” Nothing any of us wouldn’t agree with in that and no sign of the phrase ‘progress in lessons’ either. “The judgement on the quality of teaching must take account of evidence of pupils’ learning and progress over time.
Wrong. Is there a right way to teach? It’s become a trite and hackneyed truism that if they’re not learning you’re just talking. We’re all clear that teaching only happens when the little tinkers manage to make some sort of progress – preferably that of the rapid and sustained variety. But this simple truth, like so many others, seems to have been systematically and catastrophically misunderstood by many school leaders and inspectors. Until recently it was universally accepted that the key to a good lesson observation was showing that pupils are making progress in the 25 minutes available to us, and that the only way we could demonstrate this progress was by shutting the hell up and letting the kids do some work. If a teacher was observed speaking to the whole class they’d be exposed as being a bit rubbish and fast tracked on to the capability process. But is this right? Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for a spot of constructivism.
When I began my career, direct instruction was all the rage. I get that things move on. Like this: John Hattie, Visible Learning. Pt 2: effective methods. Secret Teacher: 'Dear Ofsted inspector, I am giving you notice to improve' | Teacher Network | Guardian Professional. Dear Inspector, At the beginning of the year I asked all my new pupils to write down a description of their ideal maths teacher. I found their jottings very helpful and have used them to improve my teaching; I thought you might appreciate a similar opportunity.
My ideal Ofsted inspector would, at the very least, be an outstanding and inspirational teacher. They would renew my passion for teaching by letting me know what I'm doing right and giving useful, readily usable tips to develop mutually identified areas for improvement. They would model good practice in the classroom and they would also be willing to learn from me and provide an experienced ear for my many ideas. I teach with the door open. I am a good teacher. I also get good feedback from colleague observations, parents, pupils' progress and exam results. All I can remember of your 'feedback' is the fact you said: "But I can't give you outstanding because...
" Will I still teach with the door open? 6 highly unusual schools. At TEDGlobal, educator Eddie Obeng highlighted a disconcerting thought — that the answers we learned in school aren’t necessarily true anymore. Eddie Obeng: Smart failure for a fast-changing world“This is what happened to us in the 21st century — someone changed the rules about how our world works,” says Obeng in this energetic talk. “The way to successfully run a business, an organization, even a country has been deleted. Flipped! There’s a completely new set of rules in operation … My simple idea is that the real 21st century around us isn’t so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world we understand but which no longer exists.”
In the past 40 years, the world’s population has doubled. It is this challenge that inspired Obeng to found the virtual business school Pentacle. To hear more about Obeng’s philosophy, watch his fascinating talk. This post was originally written in October of 2012, to accompany Eddie Obeng’s talk from TEDGlobal 2012. What OFSTED Say They Want.
7 Steps To Effective Feedback. Cc licensed image shared by flikr user HikingArtist.com Last week, our educoach chat (a twitter chat dedicated to instructional coaching and professional learning) focused on the topic of giving feedback. We shared our own experiences giving and receiving feedback and reacted to articles from the most recent issue of Educational Leadership (September, 2012, Vol. 70, No.1). Feedback is a topic we delved into in depth this summer as part of our book discussion chat on John Hattie’s . Synthesizing more than 900 educational meta-analyses, researcher John Hattie has found that effective feedback is among the most powerful influences on how people learn. (John Hattie, , Educational Leadership September 2012, Vol. 70, No. 1) Feedback matters.
I’ve recently come to embrace the idea that great principals and great teachers have at least three important habits in common. They offer feedback effectively. They show appreciation. Giving feedback is not easy for principals for a variety of reasons. The Passport to Perfection. For the skills we are learning in Pebble to be internalised, understood, reflected upon and improved, we have for several years tried to find the best way of making sure that the evidence for this is created in a way which forms a coherent dialogue between teacher and learner. I think, at last we might have just about got it right! We use the PLTS as our focus for each Pebble unit, but the same could be done for any learning skills or dispositions you were focusing on.
Students embark on a skills week before recording their understanding. This allows students to explore, try out and understand what this skill is. Firstly, we use a questionnaire- the sort you might find in a teenage magazine. “Your group have to give an embarrassing talk about contraception in PSHE. Would you (a) hide behind a picture and giggle, (b) Think I know this might be embarrassing but, …..” you get the picture.
Here, I have added my own comment about how a student has used a particular skill. AND…. Anyway. Teachers Use Twitter As Their Preferred CPD Tool. Letters: An exam that will define failure, not success. Monitoring the learning experience in our classrooms. 20 ways to get involved with your schools teaching and learning. Michael Gove must pay notice to skills, says former Blair education adviser | Politics. Secret Teacher has had it with WALTS, WILFS and other education jargon | Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional. Making the right connections.
Stay Passionate by Asking "What Am I Excited About?" Creating-a-self-improving-school-system. Think you've implemented Assessment for Learning? Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really. - The Answer Sheet. Cageless Thinking: Innovation and Creativity in Education. An End To Homework! Where's your head at? | Lots of good stuff about project based learning, thinking on learning and amazing Art projects. What are the attributes of excellent teachers. Essential Resources: AUTHOR SEMINARS. Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking. 101 Things You Take for Granted Being a Teacher in the UK (and Shouldn't) - Independent Thinking from Independent Thinking.
At the Blue School, Kindergarten Curriculum Includes Neurology. Dr Mark Evans: The Finnish education syst... What is it exactly that we are supposed to be preparing pupils for? Geoff Mulgan: A short intro to the Studio School. What’s deep learning & how do you do it? Using observation to sharpen your behaviour management. 10 Infographics for Learning. Schools strive for pupils' happiness. An Alternative 'Good School' Check List - Independent Thinking from Independent Thinking. What should learning look like in 2012? Top 10+ TED Videos On Education & Learning. Skilled to learn - pedagogy.
All We Know Is... - Independent Thinking from Independent Thinking. Top artists reveal how to find creative inspiration.