Have you heard about the word that's goin' round? (Iron Butterfly)

What's goin' round?

All Blacks! All Blacks! All Blacks!

...and now - back to the blog...

1 Portrait data
We start this edition with a long read on portraits and the data we give off/away with our portraits. It kinda broadly fit into my education world blog but who cares if it doesn't - it's interesting and therefore...erm...educational! 

That bloke on the right looks well dodgy innit! Is he smiling? Is he thinking, "Is this my neutral expression?" or is this just the way Kiwis celebrate being CHAMPIONS? Read that article!

2 UDL
This bookmark alerts me to the continued importance of UDL in personalised learning,  and we all need these continual reminders right?

3 Craig Kemp
I've probably blogged enough about Craig and his wonderful site but in case you were snoozing, or join us late - here is all you need to know about starting a Twitter account and using it for good!

4 A companion piece to Craig
This by Teacher Toolkit is the next thing you need to read after you've followed Craig's advice!

5 Project based learning
And we finish with this timely reminder about PBL as we head into our end of year activities with the juniors.

He's going through the same old grooves (Robin Trower)

The eleven plus draft

A recent Times Educational Supplement opinion piece had me aghast. 

Oliver Beach is a teacher in the U.K. who has taken umbrage at the Conservative government's idea to have Year 6 students do a resit test if they fail to meet expected standards.

[Year 6 in the U.K. comprises students aged about 10 years old. In NZ it is the time students move from primary school to intermediates. In the U.K. Year 7 is the first year at a secondary school]

Oliver believes resitting the test is wrong. Instead:

Those in Year 6 who aren’t achieving what is expected of them, or what is necessary for their future options, should be kept back to repeat Year 6 until they are up to speed.

'Kept back...until they are up to speed' eh? Oliver would have some people never leaving primary school until they pass the Year 6 exam. Social promotion is a hoary old educational topic and something of a straw man argument in that it diverts attention away from some critical thinking about Year 6 tests. I suspect Oliver will get a well deserved bollocking for his suggestion and it will blur the issue.

Economics and business studies
teacher, Oliver Beach. 

My God! Is the U.K. educational system that Dickensian still? Are they ever going to consign these industrial models to history?

To me this sounds like the old Eleven Plus qualification is alive and well in 2015. That qualification, a drafting mechanism to send students to grammar schools, technical colleges or a secondary modern, was introduced in 1944 in the U.K. and largely removed in the 1970s, about 40 years ago.

Standards based assessments (NCEA in N.Z.) and modern blended learning paradigms have moved social promotion conundrums to the educational margins where they belong.

Oliver (and the Conservatives it seems) would like to drag education back to the 1940s rather than look to the future and learn from places like Finland and N.Z. where reforms conducted over the last 25 years have increasingly embraced individualism. 

The wonders of the Universal Design For Learning model? Fiddlesticks and balderdash says them!

PLONKERS!!

[Here's the full article: https://news.tes.co.uk/b/opinion/2015/04/08/39-the-tories-have-the-right-idea-but-the-wrong-solution-hold-pupils-back-a-year-to-set-them-free-from-failure-39.aspx]

I don't want to come back down from this cloud (Bush)

As you read in my previous post: I'm convinced that a peculiar hybrid of UDL/inquiry/ blended/ personalised learning is right for senior English classes right now! My next few posts will be using that premise as a basis. Hang in there - it might get bumpy!

• I'm always interested in what people think makes 'a good teacher'. This may appear to be a detour from that first sentence but bear with me.
• Recently I came across some University of Birmingham research that set out to specifically explore the most important character strengths, or virtues, needed for good teaching, and what character strengths, or virtues, were held by today’s teachers.
• It would be good to compare the findings with the views of New Zealand teachers. I suspect there would be a high correlation.
• Anyway, let's cut to the chase! What did they find out?
• There was widespread agreement on the personal qualities that are needed to be a good teacher.
• The six most important character strengths for good teachers were:

1. Fairness (78% of teachers )
2. Creativity (68%)
3. A love of learning (61%)
4. Humour (53%)
5. Perseverance (45%)
6. Leadership (40%)

• Sidebar #1: However, in describing their own character strengths they reported kindness (49%) and honesty (50%) in place of leadership and perseverance in those top six.

Sidebar #2: 37% of experienced teachers claimed that they do not feel that they have sufficient time to do their job to a standard they believe is right.

So what's this got to do with my UDL/ inquiry/ blended/ personalised learning hybrid?

In a word - compatability!

Think back twenty, ten, or even five years - would that list be different? I think so. Then, the teacher was the knowledge holder so students wanted  teachers to teach to the exam, have good subject knowledge, and ensure students understood things before advancing (yes this is stuff from an actual list from 20 years ago).

Check that Birmingham list again. That's right! It's different.  If good teaching now involves those things, and I believe it does, then it's imperative we embrace systems that are more compatible to those good teacher attributes and allow students to work to their individual strengths in their own time.  

To be continued...