#OnlyLearning

There has been much said about the perceived drop in standing of the teaching profession. Some of this I put this down to familiarity. A doctor understands the darks arts of medicine, the lay person has no understanding of this as it is cloaked in scientific and latin jargon and they have never opened a living body or studied the internal workings therein. Similarly, a lawyer understands the dark arts of law. A lay person has no understanding of this as it is cloaked in latin jargon and they have seldom been in a courtroom or studied contracts. However, though a teacher understands the dark arts of teaching, the lay person knows feels they also understand this having witnessed and experienced its effects as a learner, made clear by the professional using simple English to help them thoughout. But there is also a lack of confidence shown by the professional teachers themselves. Teachers experience failure, often. But they have also allowed external actors to dictate elements of their pr...

Amidst a very busy week, I really benefitted from listening to Martin I. Jones, Jonpaul Nevin and Nathalie Pattyn (via the Optimising Human Performance podcast) discuss how good training programmes build both #robustness (how long it takes to knock you down) and #resilience (how quickly you get back up after you are knocked down).  We often discuss teacher resilience, especially in Initial Teacher Education (#ITE), but we perhaps don't talk as much about the need for robustness. A particularly difficult criteria to identify during the application and interview process. With Student Teachers currently on placement in schools, Nathalie's comments that screening and interviewing can only accomplish so much, was a great reminder of one of the core strengths of the #PGDE school experience module: the chance for qualified teachers to scrutinise the #values and #character of a student teacher before we potentially accept them into the profession (à la the GTC Scotland standards) If yo...

Dr. Steve Munby's advice to School Leaders and Senior Leaders when asked, "How can we change the system?" has lived rent-free in my head for over three years because of the power of the embodied sentiment: "Don't try and think you can change the whole system, but you can operate within your sphere of influence. Some fundamental things... believe and behave that children's learning in other schools is as important as children's learning in your own school. And once you really accept that we're here to enable all children to be powerful learners, not just the ones that happen to be in our school - that's a fundamental shift in approach. It means, when a school down the road is struggling, you don't say "Oh great! The parents will send their children to my school". You pick up the phone and say, "How can I help?" and "Come and do things together". Because improvement of all schools in the area - and the learnin...

  School Leadership is more than timetabling and discipline. School leaders can set the climate for learning and teaching. Where done well, increasing personalisation and choice for learners ( learningpathways ) and teachers ( autonomy ) allows for both staff and students to see meaning in their efforts. A meaningful life will be built of Purpose, Belonging and Personal Growth, according to  Voluntās '  Meaningful Quotient . But it is good Leadership that provides the climate in which these grow. With the Curriculum Improvement Cycle in full swing, I truly hope that we collectively build an education system that proves meaningful for all involved. Empowered decision making which brings about meaningful change - leading to better learning, secure jobs, happier communities, and everyone involved thriving. Imagine if the metrics by which we judge the success of the system included the sense of belonging every child and every member of staff feels in school, and h...

Leaders, Teachers, let me ask you some questions... When d id you last admit that you had made  a mistake? When d id you last own a failure and discuss it with the people most affected? When  did you allow someone to show you that you had got it wrong, then stop and change direction? hashtag changedirection ? There is a popular tale that the great Renaissance master, Michelangelo, scribbled the phrase Ancora imparo alongside a sketch he was working on, deep into his 80s.  This creative genius - sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer - supposedly recognised that, despite his many achievements, he was "still learning". At the other end of that lifelong process, my little one reminded me one day that she couldn't possibly be held accountable for the mess she was making, because "I'm still learning, Daddy". It was humbling to be reminded that she had yet to learn the very lesson that was causing me become frustrated. Even more so that she helped me...

 Clip from The Triumph, the Ron Clark story. A great depiction of both the power of video to captivate learners and the importance of relationships in building an effective classroom ethos.

  Have you ever taken a moment to consider what you share online?  What about all those photographs of your children? Have you even asked your child if they are happy with you sending their digital likeness into the ether, at a time when an ever-greater number of  tools  are being launched, and used, with minimal thought for their longer term impact. The  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child  was written a long time before we had any reason to worry about online presence - after all the the UNCRC came into action in 1992, a year before  CERN  placed its World Wide Web technology  in the public domain and gave birth to the phenomenon of online communication. Yet the UNCRC has incredible relevance for our children, especially given omnipresent online access and these new  AI   tools : Article 3  - The best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children. Article 8 ...

In Initial Teacher Education programmes, we spend time and effort clarifying for our student teachers the importance of collaboration and partnerships. Rightly, much of our emphasis is put on the importance of keeping the child at the centre of our decisions and working with partner agencies and colleagues to ensure our young people are Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible and Included. Worringly, it can be all too easy for classroom teachers to withdraw into their own classrooms, developing tunnel-vision in their pursuit of improved professional practice. For these soloists, the pressure mounts as the year moves on, they gallantly struggle to deliver the type of learning expected by management and parents, heroically accommodating the needs of all their learners whilst simultaneously ensuring their students jump through all the right exam-prep hoops (at just the “right” time), all whilst spending their evenings marking and painstakingly pouring over dat...

(CC) Black Claw Hammer on Brown Wooden Plank A place for everything and everything in its place Our old house was once owned by a professional gardener. When he had lived there, he had only single glazing, bars on his windows, no central heating and no kitchen. He had cooked using a single gas hob in the little shed behind the house. Whilst small, this was not a rudementary setup, the garden was both irrigated and lit using a complex network of subterranean cables and piping which all led back to the shed. This man, as many men of his generation were prone to, spent an inordinate amount of his free time in his shed. It was the control centre of his realm, a place to tinker, to cook, to think, and to escape from the world. A large workbench dominated the shed. As testimony to the years of thinking and tinkering, this bench was peppered with nails, all pointing in different directions and hammered in to lesser or greater degrees. Despite their number, it was clear that each nail had been...

Like art, hashtag coding enables self-expression. Also, like art, it can be a catalyst for political and social change. Finding solutions to global and societal problems involves the same set of computational thinking skills as finding solutions to programming problems. Learning to code is not just about learning to use a powerful, modern 'lingua franca' to develop clever apps, but about developing the ability to understand how to break problems down, to spot patterns, to collaborate, to ideate-try-fail-tinker-and try again, to make sense of the world around us. Learning to code is about learning to change society (hopefully for the better) - it gives citizens agency (see Jennifer Pahlka's TED Talk  and read more about her work in ' [Re]:Coding <America/> ') and the tools to leverage impactful change despite the traditional political machinery being broken (as Jon Alexander champions in his book, 'Citizens'). Jennifer Pahlka's TED Talk Jon Al...

As a social studies teacher, you know how challenging it can be to engage your students in meaningful and rigorous learning experiences. You have to cover a lot of content, meet various standards, and prepare your students for high-stakes assessments. But you also want to spark their curiosity, foster their critical thinking skills, and help them develop a deeper understanding of the world. How can you achieve all these goals without sacrificing your sanity? The answer may lie in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an educational framework that offers flexibility and choice for all learners. What is UDL? UDL is based on research in the learning sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, that shows that learners have different strengths, preferences, and needs.  UDL guides the creation of learning outcomes, resources, and assessments that work for everyone by providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression . In other words, UDL is not about findin...