AiFL

Hmm. I've blogged about this before but having Twittered (Tweeted?) about it on Friday at the AiFL day in Inverness I thought I'd say some more.

For a curriculum which purports to be heading towards Active Learning and for an initiative (AiFL) which puts itself firmly at the heart ("embedded" being the current buzz word) of said curriculum, how is it still possible for a roomful of teachers to be talked at rather than interacted with?

I don't wish to appear rude or disrespectful towards a man who's clearly a respected authority on such matters, but it does strike me as odd that something which appears to be so firmly at the core of AiFL (namely "meaningful dialogue") is not firmly at the core of presentations on the subject.

Perhaps the very nature of presenting to a large group is unsuited to engaging in dialogue but surely we could use the formative assessment-based models of "think-pair-share" to discuss ideas and engage with the concepts? Could meaningful links be better made between theory and practice if we attempted to learn by doing?

How can we expect our learners in the classroom to be motivated by this area if we ourselves are turned off by the way in which it's presented? Or perhaps it's a clever and cunning ruse to make us examine our practice closely and to say "now, I reckon an active approach would be better here, think I'll try it back in class..."

Or am I being too hopeful?

Lousie Hayward made a lot of sense though. Which was nice. I can now use the phrase "systemic compatibility" and know what it means AND know that it's a useful concept.

Edit: Here's the stuff I was after about practicing what is preached...Doug Dickinson (see 9th March entry) and Will Richardson.

Assessment is for...?

Learning? Is it? I'm still trying to embed this notion within my own head never mind in my own practice. Too much jargon clouds the issue I suspect and it can be all too easy to begin to lose sight of the point of the whole thing - enhancing the children's learning and trying to provide a happy, stimulating environment within the class and school.

Anyway, as a small step towards ensuring that the learning is in some way valid (whose criteria?) I'm trying to focus on getting those all-important learning objectives up for the children on a regular basis.

This point could be argued all day/week/year - indeed on my initial degree course (a BA in Sport in the Community) we spent seemingly endless hours on coaching modules where we looked at ideas around objectives, targets and aims. Asking questions like "are objectives stepping stones towards aims or is it the other way round?" and big ideas like that. I'm unsure to this day if we ever got an answer but I'm willing to consider - and try - anything which might benefit the learners.

For that reason I'm going to keep a note of all the "We Are Learning To" points (thanks Shirley Clarke for the jargon but I think we all had the idea anyway...) and post them along with the "evidence" pictures. We shall see how it goes.

Assessment is for Life. Not just for classroom observations. Discuss...

I've seen the future...

...and it's Skype shaped. I'm liking the look of that very much indeed. We've been approached by a television programme with a view to linking up with them for a question & answer session to help us with our topic work and they'd like to do it as a Skype video linkup.

Up until today I'd not even bothered looking at Skype, thinking that GLOW would take care of the sort of video-conferencey type thing. However, the slow implementation of aforementioned GLOW by Highland council has meant that we need to look at other ways of doing things.

Skype looks simple, effective and user (child?) friendly. On top of that (in true Formative Assessment style) we'll be learning to:

• use technology to communicate
• research questions to ask others
• talk & listen effectively

Successful learners? Effective contributors? Confident individuals? Responsible citizens?

(Rhetorical questions?)