Why the NCEA Review misses the blueprint for change

I have been enjoying the invitation of the NCEA Review to dream big and look again at the structure of our national assessment. At school we have talked regularly about the ‘Big Opportunities‘ and there have been other conversations across the Wellington region too amongst the Loop schools. Everyone has had plenty to say and there […]

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.” — […]

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 […]

Dichotomies: Round 1 | #28daysofwriting Day 6

A few things swirling around the head today, largely as a result of chat on Twitter and elsewhere with folks in the UK, tapping back into some of the shifts in systems and structure over there in the last few years. There were one or two interesting tweets about how some folk saw trendy ‘rubbish’ […]

Key Competencies book review | The future’s bright….

I must confess that, the references to ’21st century education’, and the memes that surround it, are ones I am increasingly trying to avoid in favour of more precise descriptions of what we are actually trying to achieve with education that suits our learners, their needs if they are to thrive in society, knowledge and understandings […]

#fuse14 | Hanging out, talking design

It was great, this morning, to be invited to join Grant Lichtman (check out his Learning Pond blog and his #fuse14 posts), Claire Amos, Steve Mouldey and Meghan Cureton (Director of Innovation at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School) for a shared discussion about design thinking methodologies in schools, in the US and here in NZ. This was part of […]

The ethics of digital technologies

“We need to ask, ‘who benefits?’ in any of the visions of the future we are offered or that we are working towards” (Facer, p. 9) Sometimes I find myself being A Little Bit Concerned. And the more time I spend in the e-learning / digital tech space, the more these niggling worries draw me […]

Teaching as inquiry and e-learning: 3 questions

I have done a fair bit of work with schools recently exploring what the ‘teaching as inquiry’ professional learning cycle looks like in a school that has e-learning as a focus. There seem to be a handful of key questions that keep coming up that I thought I would touch on in this post 1. […]

Design thinking | An approach for our world

I was lucky to be invited to facilitate a design thinking workshop at the Emerging Leaders Summit with 55 stunning educators – and with another session coming up in a few days focused on inquiry for future-focussed learning, I thought I’d capture some of the ‘why’ here. Both sessions adopt creative/design thinking as a dynamic approach to […]