Tag: nickdennis

Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference [#TLAB13]

On Saturday 16th March Berkhamsted School will be hosting The Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference. The brain child of Nick Dennis and others, the conference is shaping up to be a ‘must attend’ event. Priced at just £40 for the day, it can well be considered a steal when you consider the eclectic mix of educators who will be speaking and leading workshops at the conference.

I am fortunate to be one of those workshop leaders.  As such, I wanted to share my recently submitted workshop outline:

‘Leashes not required’ – In(ter)dependent Learning Inside and Outside the Secondary School Classroom

Spoon-feeding and teach-to-the-test culture seem to pervade the secondary school classroom, as teachers strive to meet increasingly demanding targets. This workshop will demonstrate that such approaches are not necessary; that adopting a strategy that encourages independence, critical and creative thinking; and values the use of new technologies produces equally outstanding results. The workshop will share both the guiding principles on which such an approach is built and also give specific examples of what in(ter)dependent learning is like in practice.

The workshop will expand on my most recent TeachMeet presentation which is based on my developing practice as and educator, as well as research I completed into Independent Learning as part of the Masters in Education I am study towards.

I am excited about expanding on the approach to learning I have been taking with my students and will be bringing some of them along to participate in the workshop, sharing their views and answering questions.

I hope to see you there!

Busting a hole in the wall (the purpose of education)

purposed-badgeWhen Sugata Mitra put a computer inside a hole in the wall of the NIIT building in New Delhi, he took the first step in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, that education was a universal connector craved by people the world over; and that the traditional notion of classroom education was by no means the only way to do it. Now, more than ten years on from the beginning of the HITW experiment, the lessons remain unheeded by many of the people involved in mainstream education. In fact, concepts such as ‘self-directed learning’ and ‘the student voice’ are still scoffed at as Dawn Hallybone was reminded this past week, attending a debate on the National Curriculum review.

Are there still that many people connected to education that truly believe, we, the adults know what’s best for the next generation and the one after that? Nick Dennis spoke of the need for us to focus on principles in this debate and at first I disagreed, as principles like ‘purposes’ are rarely universally shared. However, I now see where he was going, and while I appreciated Doug’s question about whose “better” was Nick referring to, I think Nick’s conviction was what was most important. He asked the big questions about what we want education to be and what we are doing for each other as a community, not as definable roles but as human beings.

It is make or break time for humanity and we have a responsibility to draw a line in the sand, admit our mistakes and create a system of education that can begin to undo the harm that we have done to the world. For all the talk over the last twenty years of the ‘global village’, it has not stopped us continuing to destroy our planet, to wage wars and to continue to ignore the inequalities in society. What is the purpose of education? Surely, it is to create unity by helping future generation to recognise the values that humanity share.

Fred Garnett grapsed this when he argued that new (social) media can foster “collaborative, discursive learning, the kind of learning that creates a healthy, open and participative society.” Is this the extension of Mitra’s experiment? Is social media the natural evolution bringing learners to the stream rather than the well? Some of us embrace change, recognising the merits of experimentation and creativity; others fear it, seeing new as dangerous. I’m not suggesting that we should plunge head first into wildly unstructured models of learning but if it were not for people who dared to be creative, who dared to experiment, we would not be able to stare into the vast ocean that is our solar system, or be able to listen to Mozart on a device, so small, it can fit into the palms of our hands.

When Mitra began his experiment he was giving education back to the people and his observations of the children showed happy, creative, collaborative learnings, the sort of learning Tom Barrett hopes his son will continue to experience. I’d intended to say that education is about more than opening doors; it’s about what you do once the door is open. Now I’m asking who needs doors? Why not work together and bust a hole in the wall instead?