ULearn15 Day Two - Key thoughts

Wow!  So much running through my head after two days of ULearn.  So much to process. There certainly seem to be some common themes constantly coming up and remaining in the forefront of my thinking that I need to share.

• Explore, learn, create, share - children need opportunity to freely explore and experiment without the teacher controlling the environment unnecessarily.  I know I need to learn to take my hands off more readily and allow the children to do this.
• What learning is important for the children's future? - How can we best prepare our students for the future that is changing so rapidly. The following clip reminds us of the future we are heading to. Did you know that in 2028? What has to go so that focus can go on the things that truly matter...and what is that?  What do we truly value in learning?  Is this reflected in our timetable?
• Value children's voice - How do I access this and do I really respond to it?  Some key questions to ask them - "What makes your learning real?  How do you learn best?  What do you enjoy most about your learning? What makes it hard to learn at school?  What could I do differently to help you? What's the best thing about our school?"
• Authentic context - Take the classroom into the world and bring the world into the classroom.  Give students a REAL purpose for their learning.

Plus so much more...A lot of questions - not to many answers yet but...life is a journey.  I look forward to coming back to these ideas regularly and reflecting on them.

Is change really hard?

A challenging keynote today at Ulearn15 from Grant Lichtman!  I was really taken by the fact that when we were challenged to decide on one word that would encapsulates what our school "reeks of" (or what we want our school to "reek of") we came up with lots of values, key compentencies, learner qualities, attitudes etc.   When challenged to go back to school and ask our children at the end of each day what their day "reeked of" would their words be the same as the words we came up with?  WOW!  Do I dare?  I hope so.  

Some key thoughts from his talk...

Great learning is based on experience that leads to engagement that leads to passion that leads to learning - authentic contexts are needed to truly engage our children in their learning. How can i do this better. Ideas talked about were "Make it Monday" and "Take apart Tuesday". Love it. Why as teachers do we have such a need to control learning? Hmmm.

Problem solving and critical thinking are different - critical thinking is where the children come up with the problem to solve. How much of this happens in my class?

You can’t just tweek a traditional way of teaching - you have to make a fundamental change to transform it. We need to blow up our assumptions. What do I need to blow up?

Change in school is uncomfortable not hard. Get over it!

A lot to process:)