Designing a Public School From Scratch

"Here, we understand that every child learns at a different pace. We let them take the wheel, but help them navigate the way.”


“If school were a place where…? Then we would need teachers who…? Students who…? Parents who…?” The questions pushed everyone to dream big.

Ditching Awards and Assemblies to focus on Kids and Learning

abundant research showing that awards, rewards and other external incentives undermine intrinsic motivation

“To say ‘do this, and you’ll get that’ makes people lose interest in ‘this,’ ” said Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards. 

Awards are that much worse than rewards, Kohn added, because they are simply prizes made artificially limited.

“A key takeaway here is that awards aren’t bad just because the losers are disappointed; everyone (including the winners) ultimately lose when schooling is turned into a scramble to defeat one’s peers,” Kohn said.

In May of 2017, Gosal told parents in her weekly newsletter that the June awards ceremony was off. Instead, the school would be hosting a success showcase for all students. 

‘We hope that they continue to develop their best selves for their own benefit—not because someone tells them to or because there’s an award at the end of the year.’

“Every single person in school has strengths, skills and talents, and it’s our job to bring them out more,” Wejr said.

“It’s not an award at the end of the year that drives achievement,” Wejr said. Excellence comes from a school culture that fosters collaboration and provides opportunities for students to lead, especially in those areas where children have special talents and skills, he added.

Teaching as Inquiry

Inquiry grows the professional practice of teachers by facilitating deep and personal reflection. Deep and personal reflection of the Information gathered during a rigorous inquiry process allows teachers to draw valid conclusions as to their impact on students learning which energises teachers to keep making changes that may lead to improved student learning. Inquiry contributes to the process of heightened responsiveness to students needs and deeper reflections by teachers. When teachers responsiveness to the learning needs of their students is heightened, inquiry practice and the measured impacts that result contribute to deeper teacher reflection about the impact of their teaching actions on students learning.

inquiry results in professional growth by changing practice and informing as to the impact teachers are having on students learning. Inquiry makes the connection between actions - impacts and resulting reflections. Inquiry practice facilitates the connection between the measurement of the impacts of teachers actions on students learning and deep reflection of these impacts. Inquiry WILL change your practice. Through planning a change when undertaking an inquiry, teachers inevitably change their practice.

Four Types of Mistakes

If we’re more precise in our own understanding of mistakes and in our communication with students, it will increase their understanding, buy-in, and efficacy as learners.

Stretch mistakes are positive. If we never made stretch mistakes, it would mean that we never truly challenged ourselves to learn new knowledge or skills.

We can gain more aha moments from mistakes by being reflective. We can ask ourselves What was unexpected? Why did that result occur? What went well and what didn’t? Is there anything I could try differently next time? We can also ask people around us for information we may not be aware of, or for ideas for improvement.

If we make a mistake because we’re not focused on the task at hand, or we’re too tired, or something distracted us, upon reflection we can gain aha-moments on how to improve

In a high-stakes event, if we don’t achieve our goal of a high test score or winning the championship, let’s reflect on the progress we’ve made through time, on the approaches that have and haven’t helped us grow, and on what we can do to grow more effectively. Then let’s go back to spending most of our time practicing, challenging ourselves, and seeking stretch mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

Letting Go Of School

What I have come to understand, however, is that we will not achieve better education systems or outcomes without stepping back from the constraints of “school thinking.” I need to let go of what I know and think about school - its structures, history, and influence - in order to be able to think more openly about education and its possibilities. And in order to do that it feels necessary to break some rules, to upset some conventions, to seize authority rather than wait for it to be granted.

Different Types of Conflict Styles

Community Capacity Building

Threshold Concepts Rebecca Tushingham

Threshold Concepts


‘A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally)’
Meyer and Land, Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines, 2005

‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: implications of course design and evaluation’ provided me with the detail that I need which I have slimmed down into a summary for my own learning and maybe yours:

Jewels in the curriculum

The importance of engagement

Listening for understanding

Reconstitution of self

Tolerating uncertainty

Recursiveness and excursiveness

Unintended consequences of generic ‘good pedagogy’

Good table in article for planning concepts.

The Power of Interest In Learning

The Article

Interest is a psychological state of engagement, experienced in the moment, 

When we’re interested in what we’re learning, we pay closer attention; we process the information more efficiently; we employ more effective learning strategies, such as engaging in critical thinking, making connections between old and new knowledge, and attending to deep structure instead of surface features. When we’re interested in a task, we work harder and persist longer, bringing more of our self-regulatory skills into play.

The great educator John Dewey wrote that interest operates by a process of “catch” and “hold”—first the individual’s interest must be captured, and then it must be maintained. The approach required to catch a person’s interest is different from the one that’s necessary to hold a person’s interest: catching is all about seizing the attention and stimulating the imagination. Parents and educators can do this by exposing students to a wide variety of topics. It is true that different people find different things interesting—one reason to provide learners with a range of subject matter, in the hope that something will resonate.


“Research has found that interest is a more powerful predictor of future choices than prior achievement or demographic variables.”

Non traditional Schools

The Article


The best games are those that can be used in multiple classrooms at all grade levels. 


A school, though, is only as good as its teachers and the vital role they play in education is often forgotten, 


There is an emphasis on producing curriculums which teachers can just follow. For us it has always been about helping teachers become designers of the curriculum and empowering them to create materials that will engage kids in learning and help them become 21st century citizens.”

Reflections and Resolutions- Claire Amos

Reflections and Resolutions


Like the concept of enabling constraints.

Sustainable agility- very cool to be working towards for us at TKAS as well.

Celebrating Success- What We Value Sally Hart

Blogpost


So many similarities to us.  Very affirming. Some things we could look at adapting too.

Would like to see how we could adapt the ambassador idea into our student leadership plan.

On the Edge of Chaos

On the Edge of Chaos Article


“Creativity is not an option, it’s an absolute necessity." Ken Robinson


“The truly creative changes and the big shifts occur right at the edge of chaos,” Bilder said.

“It was that freedom to explore that led them to be increasingly engaged and allowed them to forge connections that allowed them to be more creative.”


“In the school environment, creativity can be considered pathological behavior as opposed to the compliant traits of being reliable, sincere, good-natured, responsible, tolerant, and peaceable — the qualities associated with the lowest levels of creativity,”


“You have to cultivate these behaviors by introducing them to children and recognizing that the more you do it, the better you are at doing it,” Limb said.


Some teachers are moving in that direction, loosening the rules, giving students choice, celebrating ideas and behaviors that challenge the status quo, but without a drastic reimagining of the structures within which educators work, true creativity could be hard to find in school.

The Meaning of Pedagogy-Steve Wheeler

Socrates once said: 'Wisdom begins in wonder.' 

Good pedagogy is about guiding students to learning. It's about posing challenges, asking the right questions, and presenting relevant problems for learners to explore, answer and solve. True pedagogy is where educators transport their students to a place where they will be amazed by the wonders of the world they live within.

Blogpost

Doing What Comes Naturally

The Link


Why is it automatically assumed that students have to be controlled? Why does this idea have such a strong grip on how we view education? The answer is pretty basic: fear of losing control. I call this the primal fear of most teachers. Teachers have nightmares of people especially their principals leveling this criticism: They don’t have control of their classes. To most teachers, this is tantamount to saying that they are incompetent and irresponsible. Social media and technology represent something teachers can’t control so no wonder it is such a threat to them and everything they have been taught about education.

Why Kids Need School To Change

The Link

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• PROJECT BASED LEARNING. Project-based learning has shown to be a much more effective way to think about learning, “particularly when you live in a world that’s incredibly unclear on what content is going to be relevant in not just 10 or 20 years, but in three years,” she said. “Over and over business leaders say kids need to be collaborative, work across time zones and cultures because problems are so complex.”
• ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT. “You don’t have the opportunity to show what you know in a regular school because standardized tests that are mandated only show what some kids know, but leave out a whole bunch of kids who aren’t able to show what they know in different ways,” she said. We should have alternative criteria for gauging students’ knowledge and ability to show what they know.
• SCHEDULING. Neuroscience research on sleep is becoming more compelling by the day, particularly around depression, Levine said. “We’d always thought fatigue is symptom of depression, but now it’s looking more like lack of sleep causes depression, and that’s something looked at seriously.” Kids needs nine hours of sleep, and if schools were in synch developmentally with teenagers, should would start at 10 a.m., especially when kids enter adolescence. Teachers should also coordinate their exams with each other to ensure that students are not taking multiple tests on the same day.
• CLIMATE OF CARE. Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school. “Almost every private school has advisory, a person for each kid to go to,” Levine said. “But in public schools, there are just a few counselors for a thousand kids or more. By the time you’re hitting high school, you need someone apart from parents to test ideas with, to kick around problems, a go-to person who a kid feels knows them.”
• PARENT EDUCATION. Well-meaning parents are confounded with how to approach managing their kids’ times. Kids needs playtime, downtime, and family time, Levine said. “We’ve robbed kids at each stage of childhood and adolescence of tasks that belong in that particular stage,” she said. “You can’t push kids outside their developmental zone and expect them to learn. You want to push them towards the edge of it, but not over.”

Radically Different View of School

The Link


“Modern learning is about the ability to self-organize your education, to create meaning for things that have value in the world and not answer to this institution,”

Simple INnovation Framework

Simple Innovation Framework