Thoughts on the review of ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’

The following opinion piece was originally published on Education Central in preparation for the Chalktalks Event about the Tomorrow’s Schools report on 27 February 2019. I have found the ‘Our Schooling Futures: Stronger Together’ report reviewing the ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ policy to be a fascinating and bold read. I bring a unique lens to […]

Of policy and practice

Nature abhors a vacuum, so the saying goes. And right now, we are in the calm eye of the storm when it comes to education policy in New Zealand. While some policies have been abruptly swept to the wall (such as National Standards, charter schools), others are still waiting to hatch. With no fewer than 16 […]

Critical Pedagogy: How to respond to ‘future-focused’ discourse

“So it was an instrument of radical change, that’s what they thought it was. And then around about the middle of the 1980s …this computer got into the hands of school administrations and the ministries and the commissioners of education, state education departments. And now look what they did with them … The establishment pulls […]

Five tips for holding ideas lightly

Note: This post was my final piece for the CORE Education blog, published last week. I will be exploring these ideas at their ULearn16 conference in October. Join me? Go on — it’ll be fun:) “One should never bring a knife to a gun fight, nor a cookie cutter to a complex adaptive system.” — […]

Watershed

Today marks my last day working at CORE Education—Tātai Aho Rau. For over five years (which is a long time in a job these days, so I’m told;), my worklife has been a never-ending ride that has offered a heady mix of professional ‘push’ in terms of practice, knowledge and research, all in an environment […]

Keep the fear off the set

Do you remember the actor/director John Cusack? He of ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’ fame? I recently heard about ‘The John Cusack Rule’. When asked in an interview how he saw his role as film producer, he said his main job was, ”To keep the set free from fear.” This ‘rule’ was offered to […]

Can we create conditions for transformation?

Apparently, I once taught a ‘Grade A’ lesson. I know this because it said so, on a slip of paper in the small, brown envelope that appeared in my staffroom pigeonhole following a UK school inspection (because that is how we received feedback in those days). I therefore assumed that my careful grouping of students […]

Transforming learning

This post originally appeared on the CORE Education blog (Feb 2016)] toka kāhuarau: (noun) metamorphic rock. Ko te toka kāhuarau: Ko te momo toka ka hua mai ina huri te hanga me te āhua o tētahi atu o ngā toka mā te pā mai o te wera me te pēhanga i roto i takanga o […]

Students, computers and learning: 5 takeaways from that OECD report

It was with breathlessness more suited to the daily rag that the BBC ran the headline Computers ‘do not improve’ pupil results, says OECD while the Register yelled “Don’t bother buying computers for schools, says OECD report”, prompting an outpouring of reaction that, predictably, asserted the opposite. Still, we are sensible professionals who are quite capable […]

Innovate from the outside in

In a local school near me, the staff has spent a couple of years iteratively redesigning the way they prepare students to change classes at the end of the year. It used to be a done deal, classes allocated by SMT and Deans, with families informed by letter in the last week of the school year. For some students, […]