Claire Amos

This post was originally published in Education Review: SECTOR VOICES 2015 One of the toughest things about being a champion for educational change is that you need to take people with you. In fact sometimes it is even tough to take yourself along for the ride. Many times I have written and spoken about the need for educational change. I know I am not a lone voice, in fact I get the sense that there is a veritable tsunami building up behind what initially felt like ripples and then waves of educators talking about this very issue. People like Sir Ken Robinson have popularised the notion that schools need to change with his TED talk ‘How Schools are Killing Creativity’ and ‘Changing Educational Paradigms’ . This was echoed and reinforced by the work of Sugata Mitra with his ‘Hole in the wall’ project and his TED talk ‘ Build a School in the Cloud ’ and I know we all cheered for that Logan LaPlante for whom Hackschooling made happy. Locally we have a growing number of educat...

Professor Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair, University of Oregon, USA Slides available at: http://zhaolearning.com Held up Air New Zealand as an example of innovation - making safety videos you actually want to watch. Born in a tiny house in China, a "failed Chinese peasant". Has spent his old life running away from his failures - ran away from China to US.  A lot of money is spent on children's education a year. In NZ approx 10,000 U.S. Per year which is more than 70% of adult's wealth globally. Zhao questioned what students get for this, he believes we are short changing our children. Our children are differently talented. We are driven my different motivations. Where does passion come from? He identified 16 human motivators.  Diversity of motivation. The is no universal motivator. Natural born diversity is a great asset. Family and nurture can suppress or enhance these motivators. E.g. curiosity can be suppressed or enhanced.  If you spend 10000 hours doing something...

Leadbetter opened by talking about his paper that addressed Personalised Learning in 2004, which at the time was challenged and picked and apart - it is heartening that the discourse around personalised learning is so strong now.   There's enormous agreement about where we are at and what we need to do. Now we need to move on. The system that we have inherited is running into the sand. There is a sense that we want different things. We need to do something different to do something better.  But education is gripped by a cartel of fear.  Even when we praise the new we are holding on to the old models. Pisa is measuring measuring success of a an old model.  Making change is the blue arrow and often feels tumultuous.  There is a universal dialogue about competencies and fluencies needed for the 21C Learner. What do we need to learning why? How do we do it systematically?  Where does it happen and who's involved? He then used the analogy of self checkout at the...

This session focused on ways of knowing and what is worth knowing informed by indigenous/First Nation perspectives, the growing diversity of our populations and the needs of society and economy.  To begin the session Valerie Hannon (Co-Chair GELP) set out the foundation for the discussion looking at "What is learning for?". The old narrative about 'economic competitiveness' and 'fulfilling personal potential' seem increasingly inadequate.  Globalisation, climate change, demography, resource depletion, conflicts and problems of personal meaning present challenges - it is these things we must address. We lack an organising framework for rethinking curriculum design and this is meaning we are struggling to make the necessary changes. Four Dimensional Education by Charles Fadel, Maya Bialik and Bernie Trilling address the foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild curricula around the needs of the modern world. In response Four-dimensional educ...

How NCEA works (from NZQA website) Each year, students study a number of courses or subjects. In each subject, skills and knowledge are assessed against a number of standards. For example, a Mathematics standard could be: Apply numeric reasoning in solving problems. Schools use a range of internal and external assessments to measure how well students meet these standards. When a student achieves a standard, they gain a number of credits. Students must achieve a certain number of credits to gain an NCEA certificate. There are three levels of NCEA certificate, depending on the difficulty of the standards achieved. In general, students work through levels 1 to 3 in years 11 to 13 at school. Students are recognised for high achievement at each level by gaining NCEA with Merit or NCEA with Excellence. High achievement in a course is also recognised.   See the NZQA website for more details:  http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/qualifications-standards/qualifications/nc...