High trust kōrero for appraisal

Sitting listening to the opening speech from the Teaching Council at the NASDAP conference today, I reflected on the changes ahead for us in schools around appraisal. Currently, we know very little about what is to come. There has been discussion around the Accord signed by PPTA and NZEI recently, and much talk on the […]

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.” — […]

#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 […]

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. […]

My CORE Breakfasts 2014: Digitising professional learning – or not.

“You actually bring about real change by working with … people. Not by demonstrating, but by working alongside them and getting into the core of what it is. To really bring about change, you’ve got to get an understanding about what that person is about and what drives that person. You can’t just do it to […]

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 […]

Trialling technology to grow writers

A recent Teacher-Only Day saw me invited to work alongside the teachers at Wellesley College. We were kickstarting inquiries into how we can best integrate technology into effective literacy practice: The key points we explored included: the way technologies can help us integrate contexts that are meaningful to the students into effective learning – and […]

ICTs in education: What’s important?

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at a couple of conference days in Taranaki and Napier – and the highlight of Friday was a day spent with the Digital Daze cluster, in workshops and with a keynote, before their community celebration that was their DigiAwards. A key idea that I and colleague, Chrissie Butler, […]

How to assess impact of ICTs on learning?

It’s certainly an interesting question – to what extent ICT raises student achievement – and I appreciate the accountability that schools have, especially after significant investment from the BoTs:-) While we do need to be asking questions about the impact of our teaching, I’m not sure that focusing on the impact on ICT alone is the right […]

Waving – or drowning? | Professional learning for 21st century

A new report is out this month from NZCER that adds to the ’21st century’ schooling conversation that they have been championing for several years: Bull, A. & Gilbert, J. (2012). Swimming out of our depth? Leading learning in 21st century schools. Wellington, NZ: NZCER. They set out to explore the extent to which schools have […]