Wednesday 11 December 2013

Gateways to Learning...

Intense Interest Gateways

Like the story about the teachers who missed the potential of their block builders, some parents think their job is to smooth things out — e.g., if a child already likes art, then we need to gently push them into other areas.
Both at home and at school, we tend to focus on deficits. We concentrate on smoothing, balancing, trying to make things even.
We miss the opportunity to use that intense interest as a gateway.
That intense interest is so valuable — it shouldn’t be tossed away. It should be exploited.

Intense interests as opportunities for learning - not for "smoothing out" or  diverting to fill a deficit in knowledge.
I connected with this article quite a lot as I can feel this with a number of particularly disinterested learners. Those ones that cringe when you say "time for writing" (which I now fully attempt NOT to!)

I have found that for those learners who are having trouble in our traditional learning environments you really MUST find a way to turn their intense interest into their curriculum.

This is my argument for MINECRAFT in our classrooms... my suggestion still not taken seriously by anyway I have spoken to in my current range of colleagues!
Perhaps mostly due to fear of the unknown?

Sunday 8 December 2013

Teacher Leadership Challenge...


This is a multipart series of posts intended to help teachers grow their leadership practice and ignite conversations about education online and in person. The goal of a teacher leader is to improve the learning of all students through their efforts, collaboration, and influence. The 2014 Teacher Leadership Challenge is a weekly installment activity that poses a prompt on an educational topic or issue. Your challenge is to respond within one week to the prompt via a post you publish to your blog. Responses to the prompt that you publish to your own blog should be around 500 words or less. The aim is to get more teachers thinking globally about their classroom practice and their own connection to the wider education community. 

http://abud.me/teacher-leadership-challenge-september-6-2013/


EDIT: Unfortunately this arrived to my attention at the wrong time of year to be fully useful!