Hack Your Classroom: Week Nine - Making future-focused innovative teaching infectious!


Welcome to the last official post for Hack Your Classroom!

First up, a great big thank you to everyone who participated either by blogging and sharing or by simply joining the conversation via Twitter. It has been heartening to see so many teachers willing to reflect so openly and publicly whilst sharing and inspiring lots of folk along the way. It's impossible to say exactly how many people have participated, but the number of people I have encountered on and offline up and down the country (and across the world) suggests the reach may have been greater than one might suspect.


So here we are, a term into hacking our classroom and developing and encouraging future-focused teaching. So, what do I mean when I say 'future-focused innovative practice'? I mean everything we have covered in the #hackyrclass curriculum and then some - developing a growth mindset, getting to know your learners - hacker style, design thinking, maker culture, blending learning, universal design for learning, handing the power over to the learners, free range learning and students developing robust self-direction plus all those other future-focused skills such as complex communication, critical thinking, collaboration and basically anything that helps students (and teachers) to become adaptive experts. The innovative part comes in because I believe it can't just be about looking back to the tried and true, we also need to be willing to try the new along side the proven pedagogical approaches. We need to willing to take risks and see our responsibility to extend our students beyond National Standards, NCEA or even University Entrance and more about helping students to help their future selves and our future societies and economies.

So what? What now? For me the biggest hope of something like this is that it can provide a trigger or plant a seed for ongoing innovation and sharing. So how might we encourage the #hackyrclass and growth mindset to continue to propagate? For a starter, if that everyone of us takes the responsibility of purposely infecting a handful of others around us to start questioning their practice and to start sharing their practice we could expand the amount of educators engaging in future-focused innovative practice with relative ease. Think of it as viral marketing of awesomeness.

Source: http://www.sanketj.com/2013/03/viral-marketing-pointers.html
However our major challenge will not be continuing to encourage the converted to whom we mostly preach to, or those who encourage and support us with the confines of our conference, meet ups and online echo chambers. It will be the challenge of engaging the others - the unaware, the disinterested, the disheartened and even the 'happy oblivious' who have been lulled into a false sense of security bought on by good or even great National Standard and/or NCEA attainment.

So, what are your suggestions? How can you/we lead the charge and lead change from the ground up? How can we make future-focused innovative change less daunting and more delightfully infectious?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Education in Aotearoa - the fairy tale we are being fed and the fairy tale we need.

Image
Maybe it's the English teacher in me, but I can't help coming back to two fairy tales when I think about what is going on in education in Aotearoa at the moment. One fairy tale we seem to be currently living through, 'Chicken Little' and one fairy tale we could very dearly learn from 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'.  Part One: Chicken Little and Maths education in NZ - There's no crisis like a manufactured crisis!   The fairy tale of Chicken Little, also known as "Henny Penny" or "The Sky is Falling," tells the story of a small, fearful chicken who is struck on the head by a falling acorn. Mistaking the acorn for a piece of the sky, Chicken Little believes that the sky is falling and sets out to warn the king. Along the way, Chicken Little meets other animals like Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, and Goosey Loosey, who join the journey to alert the king. However, they are eventually deceived by a clever fox, Foxy Loxy, who invites them into his...
Read more

The Principal Diaries - The Annual Plan and putting the plan into action!

Image
It was an interesting process pulling together my first annual plan as Principal at Albany Senior High School. School Charters and Annual Plans are interesting beasts. To be honest, they appear to be box ticking waffle and weasel words which gather cyber dust in some virtual filing system. My belief was that a plan can be bloody useful, but only if it was actually designed to be useful. For that reason, I set about researching and reading as many as I could lay my hands on. What I found, for the most part, was (I thought) unnecessarily long winded and either attempted to capture so much in so much detail that they seemed insurmountable or so vague they read like paraphrased business as usual. In the end, the easiest approach was to go to The University of Auckland Centre for Educational Leadership to look at their resources and templates and have a crack of building something from scratch. The following is my attempt to craft an Annual Plan (this obviously doesn't include the br...
Read more

EDUCATION - Where there are things that other countries have done well, we should steal it!

Image
Source: NEWSHUB.CO.NZ In an interview with NewsHub on Monday the Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said his Coalition Government has set some ambitious goals they want New Zealanders to focus on and will take inspiration from other countries to achieve them. "We are here to improve the country by these targets and as a result, we look at whatever is working around the world," Luxon said. He talked about three countries in particular due to them being a similar size and examples of success. Going so far as to say “Where there are things that other countries have done well, we should steal it!” Concerns about " used futures " put to one side, let's investigate this idea a little further. So who were the three counties he named? Estonia, Ireland and Singapore. So that got me thinking, what does education look like in these countries? And when and how do we start our plundering?  Singapore: Holistic Education: Emphasising the development of students' character, ...
Read more