Remember the days of the old school yard — moving into a new school yard

This is a reflective post I wrote after taking my daughter into the new Innovative Learning Space she will learn in this year

Walking out of my son and daughter’s school on the first day of the school year, a great song by Cat Stevens popped into my head. The song was “Remember the days of the old school yard” — you know, the one about imaginings, and all kinds of things, and laughing a lot.

Check out the rest of the post on the CORE Education Blog

Design Thinking in Education - slowing down to speed up

I am enjoying the opportunity to have a foot in both camps, so to speak, one foot as a teacher and one as a facilitator. I feel this gives me a great perspective when looking to extend my own knowledge.

Today I rocked up to a Design Thinking in Education seminar as a time poor teacher with a full day of commitments ahead of me. I quickly became disillusioned with the session as I was wanting the 101 ideas for Design Thinking to use back in the class. Luckily my growth mindset kicked in and enabled me to get over myself and engage in the learning opportunity provided.

A couple of statements from the presenter really reinforced this

• We need to slow down the process in order to speed up the thinking
• Urgency doesn't get us anywhere

These statements were very timely and made me reflect on my work with a cluster, where I am constantly pushing to get to the actions, to be able to see and do something tangible. Luckily in that cluster I have a very sensible colleague in the form of Rebbecca Sweeney who is staunch in slowing down the process to ensure deeper thinking. I now have more clarity around the value of this approach.

I may be time poor however, I also have to put some skin in the game if I wish to develop my own knowledge around Design Thinking and reflect on this which is the reason for this blog post.

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” 

― John Dewey

Another statement that resonated with me especially with my knowledge of the Golden Circles was 

• Have a purpose to your inquiry - my why

The purpose of attending the session today was to deepen my understanding of Design Thinking. I went in with the expectation of having some magic bullet shot into my head that would give me all the answers. This was never going to happen, however by changing my mindset about this during the session enabled me to develop a deeper understanding of Design Thinking. Reflecting now I think the 101 Design Tools for the class session I imagined would have lead to a shallow understanding of Design Thinking. 

I had already seen Design Thinking in action a couple of times and have a resource to read as well as connecting with another colleague to unpack Design Thinking some more. So in the big picture today was just another piece in the puzzle of developing my learning around Design Thinking. I would have loved to have attended the morning workshop after the seminar to continue to unpack Design Thinking.

Overall a very valuable session for me. 

The Politics of Distraction - Appease the Parents

Making parents happy at a political level is not necessarily in the best interest of the children. The parents are not part of their children's schooling system on a daily basis, however, they have the power as voters over the schools. 

This choice can be seen at a national level with a change of government or at a local level with parents voting with their feet and changing between school's. Hattie states that data from the OECD shows the percentage of students attending a government- funded school are dropping around the world. 

This is due to a number of reasons, the brand strength of a private school, the perception of a higher quality of education, the children meeting the right people, higher student achievement, higher in-school teacher variability at public school's.

When Hattie looked at the data of student achievement between private and public school's, it often showed little difference in student achievement between these schools, especially when the prior incoming achievement data was taken into account. I wonder if we looked at the progress of the learners from when they entered a school to completion of learning at that school whether the private school's outperformed the public schools?

Implications for Governments, Schools, and Teachers

• Governments need to stay strong against public opinion and get the messages across to parents and the community of what actually makes a difference to student achievement. These messages must be research and evidence-based and use examples of "Pockets of Promise" happening in schools already. With the media attitude towards education in New Zealand, this would be a difficult task.
• Remove the Decile Rating system as this create bias against a school and community.
• School's need to continually communicate with their wider community and de-silo the school's practice around teaching and learning, creating an expectation and ethos of 'visible teaching and learning' within the school community.
• Promote a culture of teacher learning within the school to reduce some of the variability between teacher practice, develop collaborative teacher practices so teacher's can learn off each other, provide mentoring for teachers with recognized weaknesses in their practice.
• Teacher's need to open their classes and share their practice with the wider community, making their teaching and learning visible to the public. This can be done through Class Sites and Blogs, Parental education of the new pedagogies and technologies for learning, greater public / private relationships with opportunities for the learners to work with individuals and businesses from within the community, teachers taking the time to watch weekend sport or activities of their learners and building connections and relationships with their parents and community.