Claire Amos

A focus on leadership & well-being amidst great challenges and opportunities. From the programme: While previously considered a profession that offers a balanced lifestyle, more recently the education sector has gone through a steady professionalisation and a stagnation in the lifestyle benefits it can offer. As the responsibility of teachers continues to grow, and emerging interest in the profession declines, schools and the education sector more broadly must appropriately respond to the current and future needs of educators. In this session Mark will provide a practical, data-driven and engaging guide to these education trends, how these massive shifts are changing the way in which students engage with their education, and teachers engage their students, and why work wellbeing is a non-negotiable for the future and how to achieve it. Demographic growth and change Australia's 2.2% annual growth rate More people and more students Internal migration Rise of the regions 60% have ...

Below are the slides I shared at NZQA's 'Assessment in the Age of AI' symposium.   This is my brief overview of how we are approaching AI at Albany Senior High School and some of the concerns and some of thoughts I have about the topic.  In short, I am worried we are so damn busy we aren't giving it the attention it needs. I also worry that leaders will try and ignore and/or attempt to ban and that this ignores the fact that Pandora's Box is well and truly opened and this thing is developing faster than we can imagine and is increasingly woven into platforms and tools we already use. We are sitting at a fork in the path where both options lead to a world fundamentally altered by AI and we need to choose whether to work with it or stick our heads in the sand. That decision is going to have a tangible impact on how well our young people are going to be equipped to thrive in the future.  We need to embrace AI, and approach it with curiosity, criticality and care.  ...

Introducing PPSTACK! The last few days (and weeks) has had me reflecting on many things: what did it expose in terms of social and digital divides; what did it expose in terms of school systems and leaders and their agility and agency; what have we learned from teaching and learning over lockdown, and what do we need to change moving forward so as to harness the opportunities and how do we ensure change we introduce is effective? Time and time again I found myself wondering what our recent experiences would have been like had the government of the day taken up the recommendations of Nikki Kaye's 21st Century Learning Reference Group? This was a group I was lucky to be part of back in 2013-2014 and as a group we came up with the report Future-Focused Learning Connected Communities which recommended the following: Commit to meeting the needs of 21st century learners Achieve equitable access to digital devices for every learner Invest in people and innovation Create fu...

Source: TV3 News Journalists love a bit of scaremongering and in many ways I can't help feeling that the reporting of a recent OECD report on the impact of technology on results is just that. As I read news report after news report last night (many of which seemed to be either directly taken from Reuters or an OECD press release with little or no critical analysis) I could nearly hear the shrieks of delight from the pearl clutching naysayers bubbling with excitement at the "evidence" that, clearly, change is bad. Now don't get me wrong, I have no issue with the report itself, or the fact that the OECD are looking at the impact that tech has on results such as PISA. Look at the actual OECD site and it is interesting reading (you can also see the full report here), their discussion actually focuses on the need for a "new approach needed to deliver on technology’s potential in schools" - and they are absolutely right. Technology integration needs to b...