“Have our schools reached their limits?” Will Richardson

In his blog The Huffington Post, Will Richardson discusses the paper “Right to Learn: Identifying Precedents for Sustainable Change”
He says:
As a parent and a former classroom teacher, I for one hope all of the current ideas for “reform” fail because few, if any, of them put our kids’ learning lives first. Right now it’s about more standardization in our classrooms, more competition between our schools, and whatever is easiest and cheapest to implement. In many ways, it’s embarrassing the depth to which the conversation has sunk.

And I agree with the premise of the report: if we continue to place our energy toward “fixing the system,” literally millions of kids will be under-served in the process. Instead, what if we put a laser-like focus on improving real student learning, not test scores? (And yes, the two are decidedly different.)

Let’s start talking about how we can begin to deliver more personalized, relevant learning to kids right now. Let’s rethink our definitions of teacher and classroom and school, in some profound, albeit, radical ways. Let’s deeply consider the affordances that technologies bring to the learning equation, despite being made decidedly uncomfortable by those potentials in some big ways.

Read this thought provoking blog entry and click on the paper if you want to go further.
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Sir Ken Robinson: “Out of our minds: Learning to be creative”

On 16 March 2011, Sir Ken Robinson presented a talk to the Learning Without Frontiers community on valuing the arts in the redesign of education. He advocates including the arts as a core part of the curriculum to encourage creativity that will lead to innovative and creative thinking.

This talk was followed by a panel discussion available here: http://tinyurl.com/4saejqn
If you are interested in Educational Policy and change these videos are a must!

Ralph Pirozzo visits Broughton

Ralph Pirozzo will spend Monday 28 June with our staff developing work units using the Planning Matrix for which he is well known in educational circles. His website spells it all out www.pli.com.au

Staff will spend some time during the Professional Development week curriculum planning following his workshops.