I must be doing something right. As each year goes by I try my best to help our students develop their independence and become more responsible. Every year I see small but positive improvements in our students.

This year in the first 3 days of class I have had several year 11 students pressing me for the dates I am going to run the after-school coursework club.  Having spent so many years chasing them, it is nice for them to be chasing me for a change. Even more impressive is that I don’t even teach them this year and they have hunted me down in their own time.

Our qualification results were excellent with our KS4 GCSE students getting 81% grade A*-C.

My A-level classes are fired up and I have a good feeling about their commitment this year. Once again, developing independence and responsibility is paying off.

I just came across this article at the productivity website Zen Habits.

It is the longest post I have seen on Zen Habits. It is clear that the subject of education strikes a chord in people when they start to evaluate “the system”.

Reading the article reminds me of the TED video by Sir Ken Robinson. If you value education you MUST watch this video and can find it here.

While researching “Learn to Learn” programmes I came across this quote from John Holt that sums up really well how I feel about educating our children.

“Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.”

While this looks like a modern quote written for a technology driven world with a high rate of change it is in fact a lot older as John died in 1985. Like many of the best quotes it is enduring and timeless.

We had Cath Daley a ‘Learn2Learn’ consultant in our school today giving a team of seven teachers, including myself, some training on improving the level of independent learning that goes on within the school.

It was an interesting day and gave us a lot to think about. It is difficult not to get excited about it. Do we want:

• our children to learn independently?
• our children to be able to attempt and solve their own problems?
• our children to leave the school as life long learners?

The hard part is going to be to put these ideas in to practice and share our enthusiasm with the rest of the staff. The next step is for us to meet again having given this some thought and set our objectives for the future of getting our students to become better learners.

For those working in education this TED video by Sir Ken Robinson is a must watch. It is both inspriring and funny. It really makes you think about our current education system and what we can do to help us prepare our children for a changing world.

Take a look at Infinite Thinking Machine. This short video, in the form of ‘show and tell’ shows what students are capable of given the right tools and guidance.

Quite inspirational and a reminder that we shouldn’t forget to stretch and challenge our students to achieve things beyond our expectations.

I see a lot of papers and blog entries on the changing role of education from being a teacher-led learning activity to a student-led teaching activity.
While I see, and agree with, may of the benefits of students directing their own learning activities what I think many of these studies ignore is the fact that a large proportion of young learners do not know what they want or need to learn. They turn up at school and need the guidance of the teacher and the education system to provide them with a broad education to prepare them for later life.
Most students, as they enter their teenage years, challenge why they have to learn what is being delivered in the classroom. What to a sensible, mature adult seems appropriate and important is dismissed in an instant. Given the ‘choice’ of what to learn many students during this period would choose to learn nothing.
Rather than provide the choice and freedom during this period of what to learn, perhaps we should be providing the freedom of how to learn. We should be encouraging our students to develop their own strategies for making sense and meaning of their studies.
Ideally, I would like to see more papers address this issue when discussing the transition from teacher-led to student-led learning.
Incidentally, I am a strong believer in student-led learning and an advocate of the transition of the teacher from “the sage on the stage to a guide on the side”. What I need to see for this to work are educational strategies for ensuring a student-led learner covers an appropriate curriculum for their future needs.

I attended a launch meeting for the new AQA ICT A Level at the start of the week. An update is long overdue and the proposed changes address most of the shorcomings of the present A Level.
A nice feature of the AS is that there is no longer an assessed coursework module (which was a turn off for the more academically inclined students) and instead a short project report is to be brought into one of the two exam modules. The practical nature of the new specification will allow for better engagement while still allowing plenty of scope for deep levels of understanding of “ICT as a subject”.

Do you manage to teach using constructivist teaching methods?

How do you balance the requirements to follow the national curriculum with helping students to construct their own knowledge?

Do you have enough time on your timetable to effectively cover everything that is required of you as a teacher?

Please drop my a line or leave a comment.

I would be interested to hear about:

• which country you teach in
• what subject you teach
• how much teaching time to you have for each class/year group
• do you create your own resources, buy in or a combination of both
• do you have any success stories to share about helping others to learn

It is the time of year when there is a lot of course work to assess.

I have always been a strong believer in providing the marking criteria for students to follow. After all, I have to mark to the criteria so the students should be allowed to know what I will be looking for.

All year long I have been providing my GCSE and GCE groups with the marking criteria I will be using. I have given them frequent and regular reminders that they need to look at the criteria and ensure that their work fits what I will be looking for. I create presentations, provide handouts of ‘tips’ and give print outs of the marking criteria for the students to keep.

Even with constant reminders I am amazed how few students pay attention to those guidlines. Their work often resembles anything but what the marking criteria is asking for. Often the criteria is quite clear in that you have to include a certain section, part or comment to get above minimum marks and still many students fail to include that section.

Even worse, I am still seeing coursework copied from other students within the same class. One daft fool even handed in a piece of coursework which was a direct copy and paste from the examination board exemplar coursework.

It is easy to get good marks and as adults we can see that. However, many of our young adults have yet to discover the benefit of using assessment criteria to get good marks.

Proportions? About 15% follow the assessment criteria, 70% fail to meet the critera and 15% don’t seem to have even taken the effort to look at it.

Assessment for learning – good in theory but not the silver bullet that us adults see it as!