Learning in Playful Environments

An article I wrote for our school eBrief with advice to parents on supporting reading UWCSEA Library With the December break only a week away, a question we are asked as English Teachers is “what can I do to support my son or daughter’s holiday reading?” In their final English classes of the term, students will be borrowing books to bring home, but you may also be thinking of buying books as presents or heading to the local library. Here’s a few thoughts and suggestions for choosing books. Firstly, if a book engages and sustains reading then it is doing good. If a book is “boring,” it is probably at the wrong level. Our classroom libraries are stocked with books we know are great for Middle Schoolers but only some of our books are “just right” for your child at this moment. We work with the students to develop their skills for choosing the books that best engage and support their reading development but it’s not an exact science. If a book isn’t working, it’s important to try a differe...

In Soviet Russia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24727079-symphony-for-the-city-of-the-dead Under Stalin When everything Had meaning But nothing Made sense Shostakovich was denounced As "anti-people". Stalin sat At the Bolshoi, Listened To the music, Stood Half way through And left. An orchestrated Moment perfectly timed To set vibrations Through the audience. Shostakovich asks: "What was the Composer trying To say?" And answers: "Questions are naive" He asks: "Can music Be evil?" "Can it make man Stop and think?" ... Each of us Sits in the pits Bowing our parts, Playing to a wider Score. When the End comes, There is A brief moment Of silence; We hold Our breath And wait For a reaction.

Evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that one useful way to understand the brain is as a collection of modular units each evolved to solve particular functional challenges. Let me give an example:  You’re standing on the curb ready to cross at the pedestrian lights on your way to work. The lights turn green and you start to step onto the road. Just as you step forward a flash of red in your peripheral vision causes you to step back quickly onto the curb. Several things have happened in this scenario. Because you are familiar with the process of crossing roads and have crossed this road many times before, your brain is following a script for how to read the green light and where to walk. You do this relatively automatically, perhaps directing your attention to a podcast you’re listening to or thinking about your day ahead as you stand at the lights. When you step forward onto the road and the flash of red light is detected in your peripheral vision, anothe...

This July I had the great pleasure of spending several hours in the Archive Library at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was Kurt Hahn’s second school, dating back to the time of his exile to Britain from Germany in the 1930s. Admin building, Gordonstoun School, Scotland - my photo The challenge of a library is how to find one’s way in. In the case of Gordonstoun, the literal path is through the front arch of the Round Square building then up some stairs to the main library - quaintly monastic with it’s raw wooden beams and thick stone walls - and through a rear door to a room which feels every bit like a chapel.  The intellectual path is the more challenging. The archive is a forest of documents and memorabilia and the fear is that hours can be spent exploring one small region while other, more dramatic spaces, will be missed. Without a plan, you might walk in circles or find that you visit only the most well-trod routes and fail to discover something unique. So I began my navi...

Photo by Alistair Christie-Johnston Peat in Shetland Islands In my email this week was a message from my uncle who lives in the Shetland Islands, far to the  north of Scotland. He sent me this picture of his “peat bank” and wrote that, between his peat bank and his million dollar view, he has a unique kind of wealth. I sent him in return a poem by Seamus Heaney called “ Digging ” in which Heaney compares the work of his grandfather digging peat and his own work as a poet digging for the good earth with his pen.  Heaney writes about the way we find meaning in our lives. His father, like his grandfather, dug ‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods /Over his shoulder, going down and down/ For the good turf. Digging.’ What I read in the poem is a celebration of the way we can find purpose in our lives and a humble respect from a nobel laureate for his labouring forefathers.  Meaning emerges in this poem through the juxtaposition of shovel and pen. Nowhere does Heaney write ...

CC - Wikipedia. Writing about the brain Is like a camera Photographing itself in a Mirror - a series of Endless reflections signifying Nothing Beyond Perhaps The elegant architecture Of the camera itself - A miraculous configuration Of parts in which A world is reflected.

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow My rating: 5 of 5 stars It's hard to put labels on this book. It's about complexity and systems theory and sociological analysis of workplace relations on the surface, but in drawing all these areas together it also presented a fundamentally humanist analysis countering the pragmatic and rationalist perspectives that are more common in this field. Beginning with the idea that in complex systems predicting all eventualities is, by definition, impossible, Perrow argues that we must accept that some kinds of accidents will be inevitable or "normal". A key concept he introduces is that of coupling. When a system is tightly coupled, one event will lead to another without opportunity for intervention; when a system is loosely coupled, buffers of time and human expertise allow for intervention and the possibility of avoiding accidents. On the surface, this might sound dry and not a very compelling read, ...

How much is our present shaped by the uneasy shadows of the past - the half-forgotten spectres that lurk at the periphery of our cultural vision? As a kid in 1980s white Australia, I remember there were three kinds of jokes: one kind was about Irishmen; one kind about Jews and the third about Aboriginals. Jokes about Irishmen centred on how stupid they were, Jews were money-grabbing and Aboriginals were pitiful and dirty. At the time I had no experience of people who were Irish, Jewish or Aboriginal. I know now that I was surrounded by people from all these backgrounds - some of whom would have been conscious of their heritage and others who were not. It’s an uncomfortable thing to remember as I think about the way these jokes were traded for cultural capital. We were kids passing narratives we didn’t fully understand, but we knew enough to sense the power they gave the teller and the power they sucked from their victims.  Penguin Books Australia I’m reminded of these “jokes” as I ...

Understanding is to education what entropy is to physics, emergence is to complexity and the sublime is to aesthetics. Stretching the analogy further (perhaps too far), it might be what heaven is to religion. What each of these concepts has in common is both a level of significance that makes them central to their disciplines but also a level of abstraction that makes them very difficult to define. We can feel that concepts such as beauty, order, emergence and understanding make sense, but it is very difficult to describe exactly what they are. In education, knowledge is much easier than understanding to define and recognise. A knowledge question such as “what year did Shakespeare die?” is unambiguous and easily taught and learned - for this reason it is often prioritised in high-stakes assessment. Understanding is hard. An understanding question such as “why is Shakespeare so important to our culture?” is much more of a challenge to teach and to assess. Indeed, “knowing” whether a stu...

A couple of months back I started working on a presentation to parents explaining how and why we teach writing in the Middle School at  UWCSEA  East. It was a surprisingly difficult thing to write: focussing on the "how" seemed uninspiring; focussing on the "why" seemed too abstract. In the end what seemed to work was focussing on a specific example of student writing and using this as the narrative focus to talk through both the "how" and the "why". Making the abstract "real" through a concrete example helped to give my presentation a little more vitality. I delivered the presentation to parents last Thursday evening and then we all headed off to classrooms for a hands-on writing experience. Once in the classrooms the parents took the role of students and two teachers worked together to teach the lesson - one in the role of classroom teacher and the other as a pedagogical commentator interjecting occasionally with explanations about th...