New thinking about learning and 'education'

Tonight I spent two and  a half hours with the senior leadership team of Hornby High School. I have been incredibly privileged to have been offered the position as their Principal at the start of term 2.

Now for a start, these are very talented people. The school is to be almost entirely rebuilt over the next two to three years, and so we are digging deeply into pedagogy in order to make sure that the architects give us a built environment that meets the needs of the pedagogy.

Some things that come to mind:

1. The national curriculum may be organised into learning areas, but that doesn't mean that the learning has to be delivered in discreet chunks that map onto those learning areas.
2. NCEA is not a set price meal but a rich smorgasbord, and like a good smorgasbord you don't have to eat everything on the table to satisfy your hunger
3. We all excel at things that excite us. As teachers we need to stop assuming that because we have a degree in a subject our students will be excited by it (when often we may not be either)
4. Young people care about their world (possibly even more than we older folk do). Give them an opportunity to solve real world problems, big problems, problems that matter.
5. Knowledge matters, but knowledge can be gained from anywhere these days. The online revolution has seen to that
6. Soft skills matter. No employer wants an employee who cannot work with others, an employee who cannot think creatively and critically, and NO amount of maths will give you that.
7. As a team we can solve problems that seem insurmountable when we sit alone.

There's a heck of a lot more, but that's enough to be going on with. Whatever we come up with, the community deserves an aspirational school, a school that makes them go wow!! A school that takes their breath away.

Collaborative learning spaces

I'm thinking a lot bout design of learning spaces, and the issue of facilitating collaboration.
This Edutopia blog post is  a nice summary of my thinking so far:

Collaborative learning spaces

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?"

Some books are so profound they leave you gasping, both at their clarity and their message, and at the basic question of why you never saw things like this before?

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?" by Katrine Marcal ( ISBN 978 1 84627 564 7) is almost one of those, although the last statement less so I am pleased to be able to say.

Marcal (lead editorial writer for the swedish newspaper Aftonbladet) presents what is billed as a feminist critique of the economic theory that lies at the basis of modern market economies. She questions the complete omission of women from economic modelling, particularly the billions of dollars of unpaid work that women complete every year around the globe.

Her analysis then proceeds beyond that to the underlying assumption of economics at the micro level: the existence of 'economic man' and his capacity for rational decision making.

It is this latter part on which I am pleased to say I often teach the shortcomings of economic theory and models. In my classes I describe what I call the 'weirdness quotient', our propensity to behave in ways that are most often very far from rational.

If you were to dismiss this book as a simple feminist attack on economics you would be selling Marcal and the book short. Her book questions at a deeper level what it is to be human, and how effectively we can ever hope to 'model' the erratic messy irrational ways in which we behave.

The proponents of 'Big data' may well take issue with her basic contention that we are far too illogical to be as predictable as economics would have us believe, but this work is to me one of those timely reminders that we need to keep asking questions about the 2008 GFC and its causes. We need to question the economic environment of which we are a part.

We need to stop accepting without question the theorising of economists as a valid representation of human behaviours at both the individuals level and en masse, and we need to ensure that we retain our critical thinking capacities, we need to 'keep our wits about us' in this far from logical world.

The translation from the swedish is at times clumsy and makes the book read less elegantly than I suspect it would have done in swedish, but at just short of 200 pages it is still eminently readable and engaging.

Thoroughly recommended.

A new take on 'literacy learning'

Today's Literacy PD with Dr Ian Hunter was fascinating.

Some opening statements:

"Good readers make good writers" ..  it's a myth!!

However, "Good readers read a lot good writers write a lot".

We discussed perceived shortfalls in boys’ writing and came up with this list:

• Ability to plan/structure an argument and link ideas together
• the logic of deeper thinking (or they can say it but they can’t write it)
• Range of technical/subject vocabulary (meta language)
• Ability to structure sentences with simple grammar
• Lack of general knowledge.. do we prepare our juniors sufficiently wrt general/world knowledge

First weapon to improve writing is the questions we ask, and how we phrase those questions.

The question you ask effectively ‘trains’ the students in analytical thinking skills. Boys will write the way we model. Hence our own writing skills are paramount to our boys' improved writing,. and their improved results.

There is no correlation between engagement and confidence. With boys confidence is the route to success.

The best pattern of paragraph length is short intro, shorter paras, one good e.g. per para,

40 130 130 130 etc this rains boys for thinking skills. Most over write.

Conclusion should be as long as a body paragraph.

Regardless of whether external exam or internal we should impose word limits on all tasks to develop better writing skills.

Year 11 650

Year 12 800

Year 13 1000

Maybe Art and PE require a few more words.

This is harder work but you reclaim the ground as a teacher. The boys will learn to be sharper writers. Train by active policy of refusal. Imposing word limits will push boys to use their subject language. Boys are being overworked and are expected to write far too many words.

This was a fascinating PD session, successfully engaging staff and boys in ways I've never seen before. The number of emails I've had from staff commenting on how good they thought the PD was has been huge. They were engaged by both the presentation style, leadership, and practical nature of the presentation material.

This won't end here. It's the beginning of the next phase in our own long term literacy development project.

For the greater good ... altruism lives?

I've noted the development of an interesting behaviour amongst boys in my class. Many of them take notes/develop meaning using Google Docs. In economics there are often complex diagrams that are quite a mission to draw electronically. Some will search the web for something appropriate, but increasingly one of them will take out his phone, check with me for permission, and then take a photo of the diagram that we have just constructed on the whiteboard.

The diagram is then tweeted using the class hashtag so that anyone can use it in their own notes. It looks like this:

Boys don't formally take turns, but they do seem to informally share the task around. I think they quite like being the one to do this first.

I rarely give notes these days, but rather have the boys construct meaning that we then test and share. This seems to be  a good tool for the purpose.

School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.

Eric Mazur on "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"

Last week I had the privilege of attending this year's Edutech 2015 conference in Brisbane. Much about the conference was a mere shadow of the previous few years, but the stand-out session was the opening keynote address by Eric Mazur of Harvard University titled "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"in which Mazur posits that current assessment is not fit for purpose.

My colleagues and I co-constructed some notes during the session, but it is doubtless easier to watch an earlier version of the same address given by Mazur in 2013. It is very similar to that which he gave last week.