Tag Archive for Teaching

16 Jun 2011
Teaching & Learning

“Issues” or “Facts” ?

I found this report on an American ‘blog’ – quoted in its entireity below…

U.K closer to Removing Climate Change from the National Curriculum

If a government official’s recommendation is followed, children in the United Kingdom will no longer learn about “climate change.” Instead, British science teachers will go back to teaching “the basics” of that subject.

Earlier this year, Education Secretary Michael Gove called  for a review of the nationwide standardized curricula in core subjects. Upon announcing the review, Gove promised to reverse the “profound mistakes” made by the previous government and to restore “academic rigour” to the classroom.

Under the previous Labour government, the national standardized science curriculum had swollen to 500 pages and given precedence to “scientific issues” over the basic and undisputed science principles.

Following up on Secretary Gove’s proposal, Tim Oates, the head government advisor reviewing educational plans, has completed a study of the curriculum currently being taught to English children ages five to 16. The results of his review and his recommendations will be published later this year, but Oates has previewed the findings by telling reporters that he believes that individual schools should determine their own approach to subjects related to how “scientific processes” affect their lives.
In an interview with the British daily The Guardian, Oates further explained the purpose behind the soon-to-be-released study of the national curriculum. Expressing a need for schools to “get back to the basics,” Oates commented, “We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don’t date.” “[We’re] taking it back to the core stuff,” he added.

Given the revelations made in the wake of “Climategate,” there is good, scientific support for the government of Prime Minister David Cameron to rein in the overzealous climate-change cabal that has for years imposed its disproved sensibilities on the minds of British youth.

The Climategate scandal, which first exploded at East Anglia University in Norwich, England, was succinctly summarized by The New American’s Bill Jasper in an article published late last year:

In late 2009, an unknown source released thousands of e-mail communications of some of the top names in global-warming alarmism, showing evidence of fraud and deception: deleting and withholding of inconvenient and contradictory evidence; efforts to get colleagues with whom they disagree fired and to prevent them from being published; and much more. Many of these scientists — Michael Mann, Phil Jones, James Hansen, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa, Tom Wigley, et al. — are the “experts” who have provided research for the UN’s IPCC reports that are driving the AGW [manmade or Anthropogenic Global Warming] campaign. Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph, which figures prominently in Al Gore’s movie and the IPCC reports, is a prime example. It shows a relatively straight shaft extending from 1000 A.D. to 1900, when a blade turns sharply upward, suggesting that warming in the 20th century was “unprecedented,” and caused by man’s activities.

This widely accepted “evidence” of AGW has been proven to be a colossal sham. 

“I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple,” says Princeton physics professor Robert Austin. Harold Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years, says Climategate is further proof that “the global warming scam … is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” 

“The climate-change establishment has tried to eliminate any who dare question the science,” Princeton physics professor William Happer said in testimony before a congressional committee. “This was made very clear in the Climategate Letters, which reveal the blacklisting of research that strays from the party line with the aid of hostile peer reviewers and helpful editors, and threats to any journal that did not cooperate — in some cases leading to the removal of editors.” Clive Crook, senior editor for The Atlantic, said of Climategate: “The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

According the article in The Guardian, “climate change has featured in the national curriculum since 1995. In 2007, the topics ‘cultural understanding of science’ and ‘applications and implications of science’ were added to the curriculum for 11- to-14-year-olds.”

Such a winnowing of settled science fact from speculated science fiction in the national curriculum has detractors. One official associated with a climate-change institute based at the London School of Economics worries that the elimination of the requirement to teach climate change in school may result in the complete disappearance of the subject from school, especially in classrooms led by teachers skeptical of global warming.


“This would not be in the best interest of pupils. It would be like a creationist teacher not teaching about evolution,” the official claimed.

The analogy breaks down, as do most of the faulty ones, by a misidentification of the parallels. There is no appeal to faith in the climate-change controversy, as there is in the creation versus evolution debate. There are accepted principles of science that are beyond debate (gravity, for example), the teaching of which would conflict with the faith of only a very few.
However, when a teacher presumes to foist a contrivance such as climate change on unsuspecting children, he exceeds the scope of his authority and confuses the noble mission of teaching with the ignoble mission of indoctrination.

For the interest of readers, we include an overview of the current required teaching on climate change in the United Kingdom as provided by The Guardian:

Age 5-11: Pupils should be taught to care for the environment as part of a topic on life processes and living things.

Age 11-14: Pupils should be taught how human activity and natural processes can lead to changes in the environment and about ways in which living things and the environment need to be protected. Teachers are encouraged to examine issues such as the finite resources available to us, waste reduction, recycling, renewable energy and environmental pollution.
Pupils demonstrate exceptional performance if they can “describe and explain the importance of a wide range of applications and implications of science in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, such as addressing problems arising from global climate change”.

Age 14-16: Pupils should learn that the surface and the atmosphere of the earth have changed since the earth’s origin, and are changing at present. They should also study how the effects of human activity on the environment can be assessed, using living and non-living indicators. Under “applications and implications of science”, pupils should be taught to “consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made, including those that raise ethical issues, and about the social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions”.

The full scope of the review includes a suggested overhaul of the curricula of 12 subjects, including math, science, art, and English.

So there we go …
I think this report is interesting for two reasons – and perhaps some interesting source material for lessons in crictical thinking in schools.
1) Whilst it, the article, contains information about the proposed curriculum changes in the UK, it does appear, at least to me, it expresses a particular bias. The references to ‘climate-gate’ for example. which to certain sections of the population suggest ‘fraud’ to others ‘poorly expressed discussions on how to present data’ – to most a flagrant breach of privacy.
2) There is also a confusion, again in my opinion, between the nature of ‘fact’, ‘opinion’, ‘scientific principle’ and rhetoric.
This links back to my earlier post on ‘teaching facts’ and the idea that whilst we need the building blocks upon which to base thinking, it is the skill of asking the ‘questions’ to drive the ‘learning’ which is important. Also, as noted earlier, being TOLD something is perhaps less educational that discovering something for yourself.
The danger with teaching “facts” is that there would appear to be no room for question; if there is no room for question what is the point of discovery?
Issues based education, when used effectively,  does try at least to contextualise the topics being studied and give some kind of relevance. I totally accept the challenge of avoiding ‘issue overkill’ and the need to be critical when selecting the ‘issue’ upon which to base the learning. The Climate Change debate is an issue that if managed well in an educational setting highlights the soical. political and scientific agendas that feed the media… surely this can make for dynamic, relevant and “principle defining” education.
Here’s a useful tool you may not have come across which helps you look for the key theme, agenda and possible bias in any website, document or electronc text. Woordle is an on-line ‘java’ progamme which ‘scans’ any textual input to create a ‘tag cloud’. In essence it is a pictorial representation of the content of the document or website.
The Wordle output for the article above is:-
Remember the bigger the word the more times it is used in the article – Climategate, Curriculum and Science are clearly the most used words and could, perhaps, represent a bias in the article. Remember the article purportet to be about taking the issue of climate change from the curriculum and not about the rhetoric and often misrepresented hype around climategate – a topic much reference by those indivduals who have a specific agenda.
Alan
Wordle can be found at www.wordle.net
The New American Article :

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/7876-uk-closer-to-removing-climate-change-from-national-curriculum

Alan | No comments | Tags: , , , , ,
08 Mar 2011
Teaching & Learning

Mind, Brain Education

I came across this article (source : New Horizons for Learning) and thought I could share it here.

It makes for interesting reading.

Alan

What Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Can Do for Teaching

Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Ph.D.


Director of IDEA (Instituto de Enseñanza y Aprendizaje or Teaching and Learning Institute), and
Professor of Education and Neuropsychology at the of the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador

The following is an excerpt from Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A comprehensive guide to the new brain-based teaching (W.W. Norton) a book based on over 4,500 studies and with contributions from the world’s leaders in MBE Science.


“What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.”
—James J. Gibson, “More on Affordances” (1982, p. 408)


Evidence-Based Solutions for the Classroom

How do we learn best? What is individual human potential? How do we ensure that children live up to their promise as learners? These questions and others have been posed by philosophers as well neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators for as long as humans have pondered their own existence. Because MBE science moves educators closer to the answers than at any other time in history, it benefits teachers in their efficacy and learners in their ultimate success.

Great teachers have always “sensed” why their methods worked; thanks to brain imaging technology, it is now possible to substantiate many of these hunches with empirical scientific research. For example, good teachers may suspect that if they give their students just a little more time to respond to questions than normal when called upon, they might get better-quality answers.  Since 1972 there has been empirical evidence that if teachers give students several seconds to reply to questions posed in class, rather than the normal single second, the probability of a quality reply increases.[1] Information about student response time is shared in some teacher training schools, but not all. Standards in MBE science ensure that information about the brain’s attention span and need for reflection time would be included in teacher training, for example.

The basic premise behind the use of standards in MBE science is that fundamental skills, such as reading and math, are extremely complex and require a variety of neural pathways and mental systems to work correctly. MBE science helps teachers understand why there are so many ways that things can go wrong, and it identifies the many ways to maximize the potential of all learners. This type of knowledge keeps educators from flippantly generalizing, “He has a problem with math,” and rather encourages them to decipher the true roots (e.g., number recognition, quantitative processing, formula structures, or some sub-skill in math). MBE science standards make teaching methods and diagnoses more precise. Through MBE, teachers have better diagnostic tools to help them more accurately understand their students’ strengths and weakness. These standards also prevent teachers from latching onto unsubstantiated claims and “neuromyths” and give them better tools for judging the quality of the information. Each individual has a different set of characteristics and is unique, though human patterns for the development of different skills sets, such as walking and talking, doing math or learning to read, do exist. One of the most satisfying elements of MBE science is having the tools to maximize the potential of each individual as he or she learns new skills.

Figure 2.1 Discipline and sub-disciplines in Mind, Brain, and Education Science

Source: Bramwell for Tokuhama-Espinosa

Education is now seen as the natural outgrowth of the human thirst to know oneself better combined with new technology that allows the confirmation of many hypotheses about good teaching practices. Past models of learning, many of which came from psychology and neuroscience, lay the path for current research problems being addressed today to devise better teaching tools. For example, early in the development of psychology, Freud theorized that part of successful behavior management techniques, including teaching, was the result of actual physical changes in the brain, not just intangible changes in the mind.[2] This theory has since been proven through evidence of neural plasticity and the fact that the brain changes daily, albeit on a microscopic level, and even before there are visible changes in behavior. These changes vary depending on the stimulus, past experiences of the learners, and the intensity of the intervention. What were once hypotheses in psychology are now being proven, thanks to this new interdisciplinary view and the invention of technology. On the other hand, other past beliefs about the brain have been debunked. For example, it was once fashionable to think of a right and a left brain that competed for students’ attention and use. It has now been proven beyond a doubt that the brain works as a complex design of integrated systems, not through specialized and competing right- and left-brained functions. These examples show how past beliefs are now partnered with evidence about the functioning human brain to produce this powerful, new teaching–learning model.

The Five Well-Established Concepts of MBE Science

The following summary of the well-established concepts in MBE science comes from MBE Science: The New Brain-Based Education,[3] which I wrote:

  1. Human brains are as unique as faces.[4] Although the basic structure is the same, no two are identical. While there are general patterns of organization in how different people learn and which brain areas are involved, each brain is unique and uniquely organized. The uniqueness of the human brain is perhaps the most fundamental belief in MBE science. Even identical twins leave the womb with physically distinct brains due to the slightly different experiences they had; one with his ear pressed closer to the uterus wall and bombarded with sounds and light, and the other smuggled down deep in the dark. There are clear patterns of brain development shared by all people, but the uniqueness of each brain explains why students learn in slightly different ways. Many popular books try to exploit this finding by using it as an “excuse” for the inability of teachers to reach all learners. This is simply irresponsible. The uniqueness of each brain is not to be overshadowed by the fact that humans as a species share clear developmental stages that set parameters for learning.
  2. All brains are not equal because context and ability influence learning.[5] Context includes the learning environment, motivation for the topic of new learning, and prior knowledge. Different people are born with different abilities, which they can improve upon or lose, depending on the stimuli or lack thereof. How learners receive stimuli is impacted by what they bring to the learning context, including past experience and prior knowledge. This means that children do not enter the classroom on an even playing field. Some are simply more prepared for the world from birth. This is a harsh reality to face because it explicitly establishes a definitive framework for potential. The key, however, is to maximize this potential. There are thousands of people who are born with the potential or circumstances to be quite smart who do not live up to this possibility, while there are thousands who are born with modest potential, but who maximize this “limitation” well beyond expectations. Genes, previous experiences, and what the child does with his or her potential contribute to the child’s success as a learner.
  3. The brain is changed by experience.[6] The brain is a complex, dynamic, and integrated system that is constantly changed by experience, though most of this change is evident only at a microscopic level. You will go to bed tonight with a different brain from the one you had when you awoke. Each smell, sight, taste, and touch you experience and each feeling or thought you have alters the physical form of your brain. Although these brain changes are often imperceptible unless viewed under a powerful microscope, they constantly change the physical makeup of the brain. With rehearsal, these changes become permanent—which can work in both positive and negative ways. Areas of the brain that are used together tend to be strengthened, whereas areas that are not stimulated atrophy. This truth gives rise to the Hebbian synapse concept (1949): Neurons that fire together, wire together. The “wire together” part is a physical manifestation of how life experiences change the brain. In short, it is nearly impossible for the brain not to learn as experience—broadly defined as “knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone”[7] —changes the brain on a daily basis.
  4. The brain is highly plastic.[8] Human brains have a high degree of plasticity and develop throughout the lifespan, though there are major limits on this plasticity, and these limits increase with age. People can, and do, learn throughout their lives. One of the most influential findings of the 20th century was the discovery of the brain’s plasticity. This discovery challenges the earlier belief in localization (i.e., that each brain area had a highly specific function that only that area could fulfill), which lasted for hundreds of years. It has now been documented that neuroplasticity can explain why some people are able to recuperate skills thought to be lost due to injury. People born with only one hemisphere of the brain, who nevertheless manage to live their lives normally, are an extreme example of this plasticity. Antonio Battro and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, offer documentation of people with half a brain. Antonio Battro’s work on Half a brain is enough: The story of Nico (2000) is a remarkable documentation of one child’s life with just a half a brain and defies previous concepts about skill set location in the brain. Taking Battro’s lead, Immordino-Yang offers the detailed story of two cases in her recent work, “A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains” (2007). She shows how the entire brain works as a single large system, and when parts are missing, as in the case of these two children who were born with only half a brain each, then other parts of the brain can “take over” and learn functions with which they are not normally associated.Researchers such as Paul Bach-y-Rita make it clear that “we see with our brains, not with our eyes” (as cited in Doidge, 2007, p. 14). That is, the brain as a whole is responsible for sensory perception, not necessarily a single part of the brain. Bach-y-Rita explains this point using a simple metaphor: Let’s assume that you are driving from point A to point B. You normally take the most efficient route, but if a bridge is down or the road is blocked, you take a secondary road. This secondary road might not be as fast as the “natural” route, but it gets you to point B all the same, and it may even become the preferred route if it is sufficiently reinforced.
    Perhaps the author who has done the most to explain neuroplasticity to the public is physician Norman Doidge, who has documented studies that “showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that is brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many ‘circuits’ and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not.”[9]. Neuroplasticity has implications for brains that have been damaged, but also for basic learning in classroom experiences and how we think about education. Whereas it was popular in the 1990s to think of the “crucial” early years, it is now acknowledged that learning takes place throughout the lifespan. Does this point speak against the privileging of early childhood educational practices? Not at all; it simply means that under the right conditions, the skills that identify normal developmental stages should be seen as benchmarks, not roadblocks, because humans can learn throughout the lifespan.
  5. The brain connects new information to old.[10] Connecting new information to prior knowledge facilitates learning. We learn better and faster when we relate new information to things that we already know. This principle may sound like it needs no evidence—we experience it every day. For example, let’s say you are going somewhere you have never been before. When someone gives you directions, it is very helpful if they offer you a point of reference that is familiar to you (“You’ll see the post office; from there, turn right at the next corner”). Similarly, when a child learns, he or she builds off of a past knowledge; there is no new learning without reference to the past.

It is unfortunate that new concepts are sometimes taught in schools in a conceptual vacuum without anchoring the information to what students already know. This vacuum is the reason that students who have a poor foundation in a particular subject will continue to fail. How can a child who does not understand addition move on to understand subtraction? To use a house-building metaphor, if we have a weak foundation, then it is irrelevant how sturdy the walls are, or how well built the roof is; the structure cannot be supported. This is an argument for quality instruction in the early years. Without a firm foundation in basic mathematical conceptualization (or basic concepts in language, values, artistic or social content, for that matter), then a student will have a lot of trouble moving on to build more complex conceptual understandings.

The well-established concepts in MBE science are not new ideas. All five have been around for decades, if not centuries. What is new is that all five concepts have been proven without a doubt in neuroscience, psychology, and educational settings, adding to their credibility for use in planning, curriculum design, classroom methodology design, and basic pedagogy. What is new is their consistent application in best-practice classroom settings. These five “truths” should guide all teaching practices as well as future research on better teaching tools.[11]


References

Chiles, O. (2006). Test taking time and quality of high school education. Master’s thesis, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL. AAT 1433221.

Chun, M., & Turk-Browne, N.B. (2007). Interactions between attention and memory. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 17(2), 177–184.

Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself. New York: Penguin.

Gibson, J. J. (1982). More on Affordances. Online memo taken from E.S. Reed & R. Jones (Eds.), Reasons for realism (pp. 406–408). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Available online at http://www.computerusability.com/Gibson/files/moreaff.html

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 103–199.

Posner, M. (2004b). Is the combination of psychology and neuroscience important to you?  Impuls: Tidsskrift for Psyckhologi, 3, 6–8.

Posner, M. (2004c). Neural systems and individual differences. Teachers College Record, 106(1), 24–30.

Posner, M. (Ed.). (2004a). Cognitive neuroscience of attention. New York: Guilford Press.

Sarter, M., Gehring, W.J., & Kozak, R. (2006). More attention must be paid: The neurobiology of attentional effort. Brain Research Reviews, 51(2), 145–160.

Smallwood, J., Fishman, D.J., & Schooler, J.W. (2007). Counting the cost of an absent mind: Mind wandering as an under recognized influence on educational performance. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2), 230.

Stahl, R. (1990). Using “think-time” behaviors to promote students’ information processing, learning, and on-task participation: An instructional module. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University.

Thomas, J. (1972). The variation of memory with time for information appearing during a lecture. Studies in Adult Education, 4, 57–62.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2010). The new science of teaching and learning: Using the best of mind, brain, and education science in the classroom. New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2008b). Summary of the international Delphi expert survey on the emerging field of neuroeducation (Mind, rain, and Education/educational neuroscience). Unpublished manuscript.


Books on this topic by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa:

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2010). The new science of teaching and learning: Using the best of mind, brain, and education science in the classroom. New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2010). Mind, Brain, and Education Science: The new brain-based learning. New York, NY: W.W: Norton.

[1] Studies that offer evidence to this effect include Chun & Turk-Browne (2007); Pashler, Johnsyon, & Ruthruff (2001); Posner (2004); Sarter, Gehring, & Kozak (2006); Smallwood, Fishman, & Schooler, (2007); Stahl (1990); Chiles (2006); Thomas (1972).

[2] Doidge (2007).

[3] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2010).

[4] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2008, p. 356).

[5] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2008, p. 356).

[6] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2008, p. 356).

[7] Dictionary.com (2010). Definition of learning.

[8] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2008, p. 357).

[9] Doidge (2007, p. xv).

[10] Tokuhama-Espinosa (2008a, p. 357).

[11] For a thorough review of each OECD category, readers are invited to read Mind, Brain, and Education Science: The New Brain-Based Learning (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2010a).

Alan | No comments | Tags: , , , , ,
18 Jun 2010
CPD INSET • motivation • Teaching & Learning

Motivation – The Five Step Process

So back from Wiltshire (again? Yes I do seem to spend quite a bit of time with Wiltshire and Dorset LA’s – nice places and nice people).

On Tuesday I was honoured to be invited to deliver a Key Note address at the Wilts PE Teachers Conference – a superb event which was very well attended. I was sharing the ‘platform’, as it were, with their first key note speaker Talan Skeels Piggins.

What can I say?

Not only was this mans story inspiring and inspirational; it was moving and motivational and very difficult to follow.

For those not in the know, Talan was a member of the 2010 UK Paralympic downhill skiing team.

He told his personal story of triumph over adversity starting in 2003 when he was involved in a horrific motorbike accident which left him paralysed from the chest down. His description of the accident and the aftermath had his audience horrified, amazed and amused.

If you get the chance to hear Talan speak then please take advantage of the opportunity.

During his talk I was not only as moved as the rest of the audience, but because I knew I had to follow his presentation, was forced to reflect more immediately on what he was saying. I remembered being in a similar situation having to ‘follow’ the Falklands vetran Simon Weston and a broad generalisation struck me.

It seems that it is only after a major life trauma, when we, as human beings, take careful stock of what it is we really want to achieve. When we are introduced to our mortality we have to take stock of what is important and valuable to us.

I recalled one of my early teachers/trainers asking me

“Alan, if you were given only six months to live hat you would you do?”

A question was followed with a challenge about “why” I wasn’t doing those things now?

Both Talan and Simon describe their feelings after the events that shaped their lives as being those of anger, frustration, depression… a sense of ‘why me?’

Both Talan and Simon describe a ‘turning point’ after which something ‘inside’ clicked and gave them a new direction, a new focus.

Both Talan and Simon then engaged almost ‘single mindedly’ in a course of actions (behaviours) that led them from where they ‘were’ to where they ‘wanted to be’.

So what can we learn about motivation from their stories?

Firstly it is about accepting CHANGE – having some feelings about that change and more importantly looking beyond the fear, uncertainty and resistance to that change into some alternative future.

Secondly it is about CONTROL – psychologists talk about LOCUS of CONTROL. Individuals with a ‘high locus of control’ will make themselves responsible for their own actions. Those with a  ‘low locus of control’ will tend to put responsibility for change onto other people and situations.

In both Simon and Talan’s case their accidents were completely out of their control. The resulting physical limitations where also out of their control. The became ‘motivated’, for want of a better term, when they started to focus on the things they could control and take responsibility for.

Thirdly it is about the ‘NEED” for a ‘DREAM’ an aspiration or a target.

The popular (cranky and fluffy) notion of The Secret (see my Rational Mystic blog post of Rhonnda Byrne) takes sound psychological and  behavioural advice and turns it into a ‘psuedo-mystical’ belief system. But as Talan, specifically noted, the idea of having a dream and surrounding himself with images that reminded him of his ‘goal’ was very motivational.

Fourthly there is the need to work back from the dream in order to identify the STEPS that need to be taken from the NOW which lead into the FUTURE.

In education we have spent so much time thinking about motivation rather than being motivational that we forget the real value of what have been called SMART targets.

Simple Statements of outcome with a Measure linked to success, based upon Achievable and Realistic steps set within a valid Time frame. Whilst many of you who have heard me speak on the topic of motivation know that I think this model can be improved, I feel that the value of stating goals in terms of steps, timescales and measures is essential to getting where you want to go.

Fifthly it is about celebrating any success that is a ‘step in the right direction’. Such celebrations are reminders that there is a journey and that there have been changes. These celebrations will also allow for review and reflection so ensuring that the ‘goal’ remains valid and relevant.

What the stories told by Simon, Talan and many many others tell us is that motivation comes from emotional connection to a goal; a willingness to take control of what you can; to be responsible for your own future and having the strength to bring your behaviours in line the steps you have identified.

It’s about D+PMA+A…

Dream + Positive Mental Attitude + Application

Alan

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29 May 2010
Teaching & Learning

Wiltshire…

I’ve just returned from a couple of really interesting days in Wiltshire.

On the 27th of May I presented some thoughts about “modelling learning” to an HLTA Conference.

What a great group of inspired and inspiring people. For me it was an honour to be the “two slices of bread” either side of a sandwich that had Michael Rosen (Children’s Laureate 2007 – 2009) as an exciting ‘filling’.

Michale’s talk was superb, and I was pleased to note that the ideas he shared were very closely aligned to those I had presented in the morning session and was going to present in the afteroon workshop.

Of all of the things Michael Rosen spoke about his  “four essential qualities” of a learning activity struck the deepest chord with me.

What are Michales four essential qualities of learning activities and materials?

DISCOVERY : INVESTIGATION : INVENTION : CO-OPERATION

Does the work you ask learners to be involved in call for DISCOVERY (and that’s not simply filling the blanks on a worksheet or completing some kind of comprehension exerise)?

Does the work you ask learners to be involved in call for INVESTIGATION – exploration, research, information finding?

Does the work you ask learners to be involved in foster INVENTION – ‘what if?’ thinking; creativity and application (innovation)?

Does the work you ask learners to be involved in call for CO-OPERATION – working with others, in teams, collaborating, sharing?

Perhaps these four simple questions could help transform learning – what do you think?

On the 28th I was again fortunate to be invited to offer a few thoughts on effective communication to Langley School’s Staff and Governors at their training day. The venue was incredible and the staff warm, welcoming and passionate about their school and the children in it.

As someone who has the privilidge of visiting schools, speaking to teaching teams and local authority managers I am constantly being reminded of  the passion and drive so many educational professionals have when it comes to wanting the very best for the learners in their charge. It seems that inspite,or perhaps because,  of the political football our education system as become,  at its very core there beats a heart which remains commited, true and set upon doing the best that can be done with the resources that are at hand.

Education is a topic about which everyone has an opinion… many of those leading the educational debate at senior levels seem to be out of step with the real needs of learners and educators and are so far removed from the ‘chalk face’ that they do not understand the impact of their latest initiative or educational experiment.

The people trying to do the joined up thinking are the people working hard to implement the initiatives whilst still striving to maintain the quality of learning in their classrooms. They are doing so, on the whole, in the absence of time for professional dialogue and personal reflection on the bigger issues. The professional educators are distanced from the educational policy makers (professional politicians)…

Seems rather crazy to me…

Ah well

As promised the materials used in the two conferences can be found on the XTRA materials page. Please feel free to download as an aide memoir for the topics discussed.

Alan

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