First Five Days: Day 3 from Alas Media on Vimeo.
I've spent the week back at Building Learning Communities in Boston, working alongside my colleague Tom Barrett and hanging out with great friends old and new. AlasMedia, my LA pals with whom I spend far too much time into the wee small hours talking about film, education, music and life, produced this clip to sum up the urgency with which we need to take what we learn from intensive weeks like this and put it into action in our classrooms.
What are you going to do on the First Five Days of school to make that dent in the status quo? Tell us using the Twitter hashtag #1st5days
Yesterday the Pearson Foundation launched its new site, Five Things I've Learned, and I was honoured to be amongst the first educators to contribute five key things I've learned in my career so far about learning, teaching, life and the universe.
I've still got plenty of dues to pay in my career, so it is incredibly flattering to be amongst such august company, from Jeb Bush to Stephen Heppell - it's quite a mix! More Five Things are due to appear in the weeks and months to come.
You can read my five things on the site, in full:
When we're working with schools on our Design Thinking School programme, one of the easiest ways to explain what we're looking for in the way a project is set, is whether the statement or questions being asked can be Googled easily: is this a Googleable or Not Googleable topic?
Every topic, every bit of learning has content that can be Googled, and we don't want teachers wasting precious enquiry time lecturing that content. We want students, instead, to be using class time to collaborate and debate around the questions that are Not Googleable, the rich higher order thinking to which neither the textbook nor the teacher know the answers.
One of our schools in Brisbane, Star of the Sea Cleveland, took my "Googleable" / "Not Googleable" to a very literal end, when they pinned up two headings and got students to post-it each and every question in the class, categorising those which could be searched quickly (the lower order questions) and those which they should dwell on in class time.
This is the kind of meaty discussion that we want in class, and making it explicit in this way means that we cut to the higher order thinking so much quicker.
Read more from our Brisbane school, and how the rest of this particular lesson worked out, on our shared blog.