Myself and two leaders from my school presented at the 2018 ACEL conference “Evidence and Experience”. Our topic was “Cultivating Growth: Our assessment revolution”. It was really well-recieved, loads of people showed up, and have had quite a few follow up emails already.

So myself and some leaders from my school will be presenting at the 2018 ACEL conference. Our topic is “Cultivating growth: our assessment revoution”. In it we will talk about how our school implemented developmental rubrics, as developed by the Assessment Research Centre. We are going to talk about the project, what, when and how,… Read More ACEL conference presentation

Great article here about assessment featuring two of Australia’s leading lights on the matter: https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/podcast-special-john-hattie-and-geoff-masters-in-conversation They actually say a lot of stuff I wasn’t expecting. It is interesting how often great thinkers get misunderstood – especially John Hattie. It is heartwarming to note how much he rates Australian teachers! I guess not everyone, not even… Read More Hattie and Masters talk assessment

So this book was so awesome I took notes summarising it so you don’t have to read it. Unless you want to. It is a great book. Why don’t students like school? – Daniel Willingham the brain avoids thinking if it can but it like solving problems make sure there are problems to be solved… Read More More about why students don’t like school…

So I’ve been reading this enthralling book called “Why don’t students like school?”. It is written by a cognitive psychologist. It is absolutely brilliant and I think it is going to have a profound impact on my teaching. He goes through nine chapters, showing you stuff about cognitive science that will change the way you… Read More Why don’t students like school?

The fundamental error I see in the concept of school is that it takes the responsibility for learning off the student and places it externally – whether it is on the school, the teacher, or whatever. In fact, the school hijacks the learning experience totally, determining (in kahoots with the government) what to learn, how… Read More Responsibility for learning

We often hear that education is a triangle of some kind with three important stakeholders – teachers, parents and students. However, I’m not convinced this is right. In my experiences with parents, they often just want to make sure that their children are happy and are roughly fulfilling the social role of a student. There are… Read More The missing point in the triangle

Online search strategy should be seen as part of a greater whole – the research process. There are many ways to divide up the research process, but a common one is the “Big6” model: task definition information seeking strategies location and access use of information synthesis evaluation This article will focus on the first three… Read More Online search strategy

So teachers are there to teach things to students, or so our contracts say. But we do so much else. Developing skill and delivering content knowledge are an important part of what we do, but so are unleashing talent, building interest, improving capabilities, and a million other things. It is interesting how little known this fact… Read More The many hats of the teacher

School is often quite boring for students and teachers. So, if we can learn by playing games, why shouldn’t we? While ‘fun’ isn’t necessarily the best reason for introducing games or gamification elements into your teaching practice, its a pretty convincing one! Play is an essential part of our learning, as indeed it is for… Read More Playing games