I welcome suggested articles, so if you come
across a gem, email it to me at allan.alach@ihug.co.nz.
This week’s homework!
Promoting a Culture of Learning
‘Learning
is a culture. It starts as a culture with the students as human beings needing
to understand their environment. And it ends as a culture with students taking
what we give them and using it in those physical and digital environments they
call home.
Even the practices that promote or undermine the learning process
itself are first and foremost human and cultural artifacts. Literacy,
curiosity, self-efficacy, ambition and other important agents of learning are
born in the native environments of students’ homes.
Further, learning is ongoing, perishable and alive — just
like culture.’
Creativity in the young learner classroom
‘A
creative classroom is a joyful and motivating place where children feel empowered
to learn, where all ideas are welcomed, and where learning is deep and
meaningful. Children
who are allowed to be creative are better learners, and
they are more aware of their own learning styles. Creativity is a lifelong
skill that our students will take with them into their adult lives to solve
problems and help build a better world.’
 |
| Need to tap creativity |
If Not for Those Darn Kids
‘I
have long considered that the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools view
children as widgets, as little programmable devices, as interchangeable gears,
as nothing more than Data Generation Units. I had considered that these MoRONS
were indifferent to children. What I had not considered was that reformers are
actively hostile to children.’
The Right Questions, The Right Way
‘What
do the questions teachers ask in class really reveal about student learning?
The
fundamental flaw in the traditional questioning model is that it makes
participation voluntary. The confident students engage by raising their hands—and by engaging in classroom
discussion, they become smarter. But others decline the invitation to
participate and thus miss out on the chance to get smarter.’
Vygotsky,
Piaget and YouTube - Steve
Wheeler:
 |
| Piaget |
The
Universe of Learning and a Sense of Wonder
‘There is no body of knowledge that all
students need to learn. We do not have scientific evidence for
this. In this standards-based era of education, we’ve
been convinced that all kids need to learn the same set of standards or same
set of content. We shouldn’t
support this idea. Instead learning should be about a sense of wonder.’
 |
| New leaning tower! |
How
Does PISA Put the World at Risk (Part 1): Romanticizing Misery - Zong
Zhao:
‘PISA, the OECD’s triennial international assessment
of 15 year olds in math, reading, and science, has become one of the most
destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of
excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational
authoritarianism, and
most serious, directs the world’s
attention to the past instead of pointing to the future. In the coming weeks, I
will publish five blog posts detailing each of my “charges,” adapted from parts of my book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why
China has the Best (and Worst) Education.’
 |
| Zong Zhao |
This week’s contribution from Bruce Hammonds:
The educational world
according to John Hattie. - controversial conservative?
.JPG) |
| John Hattie |
Bruce’s
latest and very good blog article:
‘It is not that
I disagree with all he says but I find him contradictory and very much in the
conservative camp for all his criticism of current teaching. At times over such
things as National Standards he seems to hunt with the hounds and run with the
hares.’
Contributed by Phil Cullen
New era of accountability: Reducing
students to "anonymous data points.”
‘Data, instead of informing decisions about real kids, serve instead
to displace those real people, substituting virtual representations based on
selective bureaucratic decisions about what is important to know about them,
often based on what is easiest to measure and classify about them. When these
selectively constructed virtual students
replace real kids as the focus of
education, teaching and learning veer off the tracks. Most fundamentally, as
data points, these young people and their teachers lose their humanity…’
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