Alright, hold tight, I'm a highway star (Deep Purple)

A recent story about Finland did the rounds at school. Seems they've boldly done away with subjects! Yahoo! This is something I thought may have eventuated in NZ when we moved to standards based assessment with NCEA. But, no.

I thought about Finland and NZ's NCEA when I read a recent post on mind/shift. It was written by Thom Markham. During his post he asked this great question:
Are we making 21^st century competencies the centerpiece of instruction? 

The inquiry method places 21st century competencies bang in the middle. As Mr Markham says:

Inquiry isn’t designed to teach information; it’s designed to set up the conditions under which students become more skillful. That’s why it’s inherently student-centered. Successful inquiry requires skillful competencies, which are a deep amalgam of habits, personality, and an experiential knowledge base.  

The NZ curriculum set out a number of skillful competencies, five in fact:

• thinking
• using language, symbols, and texts
• managing self
• relating to others
• participating and contributing

that suit perfectly the inquiry method.

To me this equals Synchronicity Part... um, I forget what number we're up to, but it must be a lot!

Suddenly subjects DON'T matter. Skillful competencies do.

Your witness...

Hey there Mr. Blue, we're so pleased to be with you (Electric Light Orchestra)

I read a pretty sad blogpost recently themed around the idea that exams are killing student creativity (http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/feb/07/secret-teacher-exams-students-thinking).

That's not the case with our New Zealand system of Internal Achievement Standards and External exams.

Students can generally pick and choose subjects/ courses that are heavily weighted one way or the other, depending on their strengths.

Our girls certainly love (and excel in) the Internal standards - they gain Exellence passes through their creativity and skill in English classes and, more and more, we're exploring how they can tap into their curiosity and creativity.

The blogpost from The Guardian (world's best newspaper - fact!) bemoaned the lack of thinking being encouraged in the UK system (I've taught A level English in a sixth form college so I sympathise to a degree) with this:

“Will this help us in the exam?”It is no wonder this is all students care about because this is all they are conditioned to care about. Every student has Ucas predicted grades, internal predicted grades, minimum expected grades, personal expected grades, AS grades, and A2 grades. It cannot be said enough that we should teach students to think, not just to learn the syllabus. All they want is to follow the rulebook and pass exams.

NCEA - love it or don't - it does allow our students to think and be creative if teachers can think and...um...be creative!

I've given my Level 3 class the freedom to work on either a connections unit, and/or a critical text unit, and/or a close viewing assignment. They choose the themes, the texts, the delivery system. 

They are engaged in thinking and planning some breathtakingly fantastically creative things. Sky is the limit and it's blue and wonderful!

What if the water and wishes appear? (Bob Mould)

I've spent a lot of the last week thinking about our senior English courses for next year.

It became time to finally move from the theoretical to the practical and actually design the courses with my colleagues.

We ended up introducing a potential student inquiry/thematic aspect to the year's programme (and deliberately separated internal NCEA standards and external standards so that all the internally assessed work is done early in the first half of the year).

I like our aim for these courses: 

This course aims to cater to student diversity, creativity, collaboration, and to foster and reward student curiosity. A student driven inquiry in Terms 1 and 2 may be used to include the internal standards.  

With that in mind I have now turned my attention to creating a framework to help students engage their creativity and curiosity. I found this cool diagram via Twitter:

It's that first column- posing real questions, that I'll be working on next week at school using, as a starting point, a powerpoint that a colleague is designing to help students understand the possibilities on offer. 

My excitement and own creative juices are flowing!

It took me so long to find out, and I found out (The Beatles)

What do we want?

Apparently one of the things we want is a project based format for learning.

We want/need adaptable learners/thinkers who can be more independent in their approach to learning so that they are better prepared for a rapidly changing world/ job market.

Is there anyone out there who would argue with that?

We have Student Learning Systems (like Schoology) and we have the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) that lends itself to an inquiry learning approach. I am no longer solely a teacher of content, I am a facilitator.

Again - is there anyone out there who would argue with that?

So - let's adapt. Let's practice what we preach. Let's think!

I can see how we can chunk our English courses into discreet blocks.

We block our classes - we can offer this chunking and we can staff it. We can let the students elect various areas of interest within a structure. We can timetable it and, to a large extent, we allow the students to elect how they use the opportunity.

Maybe it's face to face tutorial time with a teacher, maybe it's working in a learning space using Schoology, maybe it's working in a collegial way with other students.

The Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) is a great example of this kind of project learning.

Students form their own company and learn all the aspects of setting up and running their own business. They create a company, set up roles and appoint individuals, develop a product, manufacture or import the product, market and sell their product, manage their finances, report in an annual report and hopefully make a profit.

Not only do students become visibly more motivated (I've seen it as some of my reluctant English students become energised by a practical project) - often working far beyond the classroom's timetabled hours. They enjoy independent experiences and success along the way that cannot be gained to the same extent in a classroom.

Why have other subjects not built their own YES. Why couldn't English develop a film or writing scheme like this?

What would it look like?