Creativity or standardisation - the choice we face.

It seem a given that schooling is a good thing but is it? Schooling has both the power to open learners to new horizons or restrict them to past thinking; the reactionary ‘new’ national standards are case in point.From Homer Simpson: ‘How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides anytime I learn something new it pushes old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that course on home winemaking and I forgot how to drive.’Let’s hope that the exciting new New Zealand Curriculum isn’t sidelined by an unhealthy emphasis on National’s standards which are more political than educational. An emphasis on standardized ‘best practice’ teaching (which morph into ‘fixed practice’) has been growing since Tomorrows Schools and, as a result,...

Read more »

Posted in: Big Picture,Creative teaching,national standards,Personalized Learning,teaching and learning

Motivation - the drive to learn.

Daniel Pink’s latest book, ‘A whole New Mind: Drive’, subtitled ‘the surprising truth about what motivates us’, is truly exciting. He writes that for too long school have relied on an extrinsic ‘carrot and stick approach’ (or ‘name and blame’). The three things, he writes, that motivate us all are: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Real learning is achieved when the joy of learning is its own reward We need to help our students ‘direct their own lives’, to ‘learn and create new things’ and to continually ‘better themselves’ and his challenge to us is apply this to education. Students need clear purposes, immediate feedback and challenges well matched to their abilities. Creative teachers, like Elwyn Richardson, have long appreciated the power...

Read more »

Posted in: Big Picture,Creative teaching,Creative teaching Educationalists,national standards,Personalized Learning,teaching and learning

Wrong 'default' position?

A lot of people students still know lived their formative years in the 1940s and such individuals would make a great primary source to research to note similarities and differences between then and now. Such topics make authentic, or rich, research studies for children in upper primary and middle schools and would to help such students get a 'feeling for ' life in such times as well as reinforcing inquiry mindsets.When visiting primary and middle school classes it is not hard to see the 'default position' of most teachers.Literacy and numeracy times take up the 'prime time' during the day - study topics and the creative arts are all too often a 'tack on'.This is the opposite to my own position and the creative teachers I have worked with over...

Read more »

Posted in: Creative teaching,inquiry learning,Integrated Learning,project based learning,teaching and learning

Big ideas about school leadership

At a early New Zealand Principal's Conference I heard Australian educator Hedley Beare say the an ideal 'leader' principal would be a customised Indiana Jones - ready and able to take risks and happily cut through red tape but aways on the side of righteousness.Such 'leadership' is not part of the DNA of many principals who prefer to play it safe and comply with imposed regulations. I see schools going along , to get along, with National Standards.Recently I read on the Internet list of ten big ideas of school leadership written by a Middle School Principal of the Year.They seemed to make sense to me So I have picked them over to share with whoever reads this.1 The focus of 'your' school must be on the success of kids 100% of the time. All...

Read more »

Posted in: Big Picture,change,Leadership,Rants and Raves,School Vision

A lesson from the UK re Standards

Our Government is determined to going ahead with imposing of National Standards against the advice of teachers and reacted New Zealand educators. Only John Hattie is with them (I think) .His organisation is setting itself up to provide ( distort) the future direction for education in New Zealand with its obsession on 'objective' testing.The technocrats, fragmenting and measuring learning bits, are wining over those with a holistic progressive educational beliefs.In the meantime the standards experiments are being shown to fail in the UK and the US while the most successful country, Finland, wins the literacy and numeracy race without them.They have put their faith on trusting a well educated teaching profession! Ironically New Zealand is well...

Read more »

Posted in: Big Picture,national standards

A lesson for Mrs Tolley?

Education is all about changing your mind when facing new evidence. Mrs Tolley ( NZ's shrill Minister of Education) by this definition fails relying on simplistic sound bites to answer all critics. She would , however, do well to read about Diane Ravitch's astonishing about face before it is too late and we all head down the American failed way to a standardised McDonald's approach to learning.Diane Ravitch has long been a passionate advocate of injecting greater competition and accountability into the US education system but she realized, three years ago, that her ideas had evolved to a point that she had changed her mind. In her latest book 'The Death of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice are undermining Education'...

Read more »

Posted in: Big Picture,change,Educationalists,national standards,Rants and Raves,teaching and learning

Weighing the Pig -an exercise in national Standards testing

Another fable from my guest presenter Mac. It is obvious that the idea of each school working out each kid's standard will be become a nightmare of data collecting and inter school moderation and that, sooner or later, a national test system will be imposed. And then on to league tables... It was Wednesday 9.30 a.m. the 5th week of Term 3 and in all classrooms, in all schools throughout Aotearoa, children were preparing to commence their National Standard test in Writing. Teachers were now able to open the sealed instructions and start their children on the test taking care of course not to give any instruction. Janice read through the instructions and rolled her eyes skyward as she realized what her class would be writing about “What I Did...

Read more »

Posted in: Assessment,Ministry NZCurric,national standards,Rants and Raves,teaching and learning