2009 has been a kind year for me as I have had the opportunity to travel widely around New Zealand to share ideas about creative teaching - ideas that are being placed at risk by the Government's imposition of National Standards - so the challenge continues.My thanks to all who have asked me to work with them. They have all helped me have my house painted!
Ka kite ano
Bruce
3 comments:
Thank you for your ongoing inspiration. Best wishes and blessings to you.
Happy Christmas Bruce,
Enjoy the sun. It’s been colder than usual here, and, more usual, chaotic.
Always glad to read your words and here in the UK you will know we have trodden that "standards" path and it is finally breaking down. Learn from our mistakes. I train teachers in the UK and in Sweden and Sweden in response to worries about pupil achievement is simply copying us ten years after we have begun to realise even officially that testing and inspection are not all they are rated to be. They came to study our strategies but seem unable to avoid our mistakes. Ten years on you and they could be where we are now, not yet free but on the way to opening a new chapter in primary teaching and learning.
I work voluntarily for our national charitable association working to stop small school closures and I have picked up from Google the news that your government is also trying that attack too. The English and Welsh governments have set their minds on re-discovering the tired old big organisation is better myth, and by the way cheaper. It is neither. But they are creating bigger and bigger schools, primaries over 500 and many now over 800, and, worse, making schools share Heads. And they even admit this last one is nothing to do with standards but just to save money. I hope you will all recognise the virtues of your small schools even if you do not work in them and defend them to the hilt. We have abundant evidence of their virtues as a model of virtue, academic, social and community, good for parents, teachers and children, and especially for disadvantaged children. Why can't the kids in our bigger towns and cities have the benefits of small-scale, human-scale education?
Good wishes for 201
Mervyn
Shutford UK
www.smallschools.org.uk mbenford@bigfoot.com
Thanks Jody and Mervyn.
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