Readings for creative teachers: John Hattie ??/ maths ( Jo Boaler)/ John Holt / John Cunnningham / and lots more...

With a new government in NZ time to think out of the box!

Education Readings

By Allan Alach

If you are a creative teacher who has not yet read Bruce’s article below “Creative teaching:Learning from the past - John Cunningham teacher 1970s” I really suggest that you prioritise it.

I welcome suggested articles, so if you come across a gem, email it to me at allanalach@inspire.net.nz

‘The Cult of Hattie’: ‘wilful blindness’?

Yet another ‘debunking’ of Hattie - got the message yet?

Debunking John Hattie

‘Unfortunately, in reading Visible Learning and subsequent work by Hattie and his team, anybody who is knowledgeable in statistical analysis is quickly disillusioned. Why? Because data cannot be collected in any which way nor analysed or interpreted in any which way either. Yet, this summarises the New Zealander’s actual methodology. To believe Hattie is to have a blind spot in one’s critical thinking when assessing scientific rigour. To promote his work is to unfortunately fall into the promotion of pseudoscience.’

http://bit.ly/2BRTG9e

Five Ways To Shift Teaching Practice So Students Feel Less Math Anxious

‘Rather than focusing on the algorithms and procedures that make mathematics feel like a lock-step

Jo Boaler

process — with one right way of solving problems — Boaler encourages teachers to embrace the visual aspects of math. She encourages teachers to ask students to grapple with open-ended problems, to share ideas and to see math as a creative endeavor. She works with students every summer and says that when students are in a math environment that doesn’t focus on performance, speed, procedures, and right and wrong answers they thrive. They even begin to change their perceptions of whether they can or can’t do math.’

http://bit.ly/2HdWgpE

Why forcing kids to do things ‘sooner and

faster’ doesn’t get them further in school

‘Why do some children who learn to read earlier than their peers do so poorly in ways that matter later on? Why do children for whom every aspect of their education, from kindergarten onward, is tailored toward graduating from college often struggle to graduate from college?’

http://wapo.st/2CiMvm0

The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s "How Children Learn

‘This clearly is a corollary of the point that children learn because they are motivated to do the things they see others do.  They are, of course, motivated to do whole things, not pieces abstracted out of the whole.  They are motivated to speak meaningful sentences, not phonemes. Nobody speaks phonemes.  They are motivated to read interesting stories, not memorize grapheme-phoneme relationships or be drilled on sight words.’

http://bit.ly/2G9jdJe

Contributed by Bruce Hammonds:

Creative teaching:Learning from the past - John Cunningham teacher 1970s

‘

Diversity and creativity 1970

John wrote “It was the students themselves who effected the changing nature of the classrooms and I had to accept the children as who they are than what I wanted them to be”. Those who visited John's classroom could not but be impressed with the quality of students work on display and of the way they were able to work independently.’

http://bit.ly/2DBcjLT

Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic

‘Education, at its most engaging, is performance art. From the moment a teacher steps into the classroom, students look to him or her to set the tone and course of study for everyone, from the most enthusiastic to the most apathetic students. Even teachers

Teller - all about magic

who have moved away from the traditional lecture format, toward more learner autonomy-supportive approaches such as project-based and peer-to-peer learning, still need to engage students in the process, and serve as a vital conduit between learner and subject matter.’

http://theatln.tc/2G7n5Kr

Personalized Learning Vs Personalization of Learning

‘Before she started speaking, I was skeptical because I have seen the idea of “personalized” learning happening in many schools where a student jumped on a computer and based on the information they share, the technology creates a pathway for that student.  Although the technology is impressive, it doesn’t mean that it is good.  Seeing a student completely zone out in front of a screen and letting the computer lead the learning is not where I hope education is moving.’

http://bit.ly/2G3uGtO

Technology can hurt students’ learning, research shows

Giving school students access to iPads, laptops or e-books in the classroom appears to hurt their learning, new research has found.However, putting this technology in the hands of a teacher is associated with more positive results.’

http://bit.ly/2EUJATy

Non-Math Essentials for Learning Math

Focusing on these five qualities of thriving classrooms can help foster confident young mathematicians.

'

As a math consultant, I’m in many classrooms, and I get to witness lots of math instruction. I find that there are similar qualities among the classrooms that are really thriving—and those qualities quite often don’t really have much to do with math. There are five non-math qualities I see in the best-run classrooms.’

http://edut.to/2ElxhD2

The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids

(USA): Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less.

Until recently, school-readiness skills weren’t high on anyone’s agenda, nor was the idea that the youngest learners might be disqualified from moving on to a subsequent stage. But now that kindergarten serves as a gatekeeper, not a welcome mat, to elementary school, concerns about school preparedness kick in earlier and earlier. A child who’s supposed to read by the end of kindergarten had better be getting ready in preschool.’

http://theatln.tc/2o2col4

From Bruce’s ‘goldie oldies’ file:

Control your own destiny - do something!

‘The answer is for principals and schools to work to share their expertise and insights and to

develop a group consciousness able to stand up to outside pressures. There will need to be courageous individual principals prepared to start the collaborative ball rolling. I can see problems with so called ‘successful schools’, or the competitive, ‘look at me' schools, wanting to share, and as well schools who are struggling ‘owning up ‘and agreeing to being helped. But, if someone starts the ball rolling then, as Dean Fink writes, schools can, ‘shake off the shackles of conformity and compliance and imagine and create.... do something. ‘So the answer to stress is to work with others to ‘do something’ and to develop, what Fullan calls, ‘local creative adaptability.’

http://bit.ly/2o3UUF6

A new metaphor : Assessment tasks as performance.

“It is somewhat surprising that some educationalists have only just picked up on this way of assessing learning, one used naturally in the real world. The problem is that schools have been diverted from such an understanding by believing in tests, written exams divorced from reality, and an obsession with assessing atomised bits of learning. Such educationalists have not been able to see the wood for the trees. It is exiting to read, in a recent Ministry pamphlet 'Assessing Key Competencies' (written by Dr Rosemary Hipkins), that one way to think of assessment is to consider the demonstration of competency as a complex performance’.”

http://bit.ly/2o4AnjP

Marina Bay students Auckland