Back into it! (goodbye summer)

Well, the first full timetable cycle is over and schools is well and truly back. It’s always a challenge coming back after the long summer break and, in Australia, the return to school time often coincides with the hottest part of the summer and not the ideal environment to begin working with eager young minds. [...]

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The Key is Good Teachers

A little while ago I was involved in a forum convened by the Grattan Institute which was looking at teacher performance and evaluation, and how that all fits together. So, I was interested to see a report coming out of that institute by Ben Jensen called ‘Investing in Our Teachers: Investing in Our Economy’. All [...]

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Time has run out for NING

Let me begin by saying that nobody owes anybody a free tool, and that schools aren’t always the best customers. Money is always tight and anyway the teachers don’t have their hands on the credit card; that’s down in the Bursar’s office because we’re happy to trust our children with you, but not our credit [...]

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PLNs; why connect?

One of my goals this year is to promote the concept of PLNs (professional or personal learning networks) as a core component of future teacher learning in the connected world. These two videos take up some of the concepts around ‘why connect?’ in very different ways. The first is from a blog I just discovered [...]

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Managing Professional Learning and Development

In his always readable learning blog, Derek Wenmoth this weeks shared a NZ report on Managing Professional Learning and Development in Secondary Schools which I think is worth reading.  Maybe I think that because I agree with most of the findings and recommendations, some of which are summarised below. One-off external speakers and reliance on [...]

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Professional Learning Networks

Ever since the Expanding Learning Horizons Conference in Lorne and particularly Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s presentation which I blogged about earlier, I’ve been thinking about the importance of professional networks, formal and informal, between schools and within, particularly in their potential in promoting change. I think it will be my big curriculum theme next year. Those thoughts [...]

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The 9 wants of professional learning communities

Went along to a Australian Government Quality Teacher Program (AGQTP) network meeting last week and one of the documents we looked at was ‘The 9 wants of professional learning communities for sustained “long haul” culture rather than short term buzz’ by Ron Ritchart, who we’ve been working with over the last couple of years. I’d [...]

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Professional Learning Teams

I’ve been a bit of a fan of Neville Johnson’s work on the power of professional learning teams engaged in projects for quite a while, and it’s been at the back of a lot of my thinking about the way professional development and staff learning should be mainly organised: in-house and about the real work [...]

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Thinking mathematically

I spent the last day and an evening working with a group of Maths teachers, mainly listening and supporting because a lot of the time I was pretty much out of my depth with the things they were working on. The emphasis though was on thinking in mathematics, and building tasks that require thinking and [...]

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Summer school for teachers

The renewed emphasis on education, in terms of funding, was refreshing to see in the budget this week. In the small print though, I was disappointed in the scrapping of the Summer School for Teachers Program. I know three teachers who were involved in that program last year, who gave up considerable parts of their [...]

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