Learning in Playful Environments

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is not an easy book to quantify. Emre begins with a critique of the Myers-Briggs test but, having explained that the test in not valid in the scientific sense, she goes on to write a book which is far more interesting than a simple critique. Her project is to explore where the Myers-Briggs test comes from - a fascinating slice of 20th century history on its own - and how and why it has become so deeply embedded in modern society. It was in Emre's discussion of Michel Foucault's concept of the "laboratory of power" that much of the power and danger of the test emerged - for me at least. Foucault argues that in framing the world in particular ways, the scientific project limits understanding to those dimensions. In the case of the Myers-Briggs, the 16 dimensions based on 4 binary constructions subtly define and confine the insight...

I have just found the following post in my "drafts" folder. I wrote it several years ago. I think at the time I didn't want to publish it as it seemed a little unfair to mention relationships between my daughter and her teachers. Now, with the passage of time, I think the ideas are important enough to share. ................. As a teacher it's always interesting to be a parent - interesting and sometimes a little challenging. This week my wife and I had Parent-Teacher Conferences for our daughter. The conferences are structured so as to be "3 way" with the emphasis on engaging the student to explain their learning and planning for next steps. We had 7 interviews and what I found increasingly fascinating was watching the way my daughter responded to each of her teachers. Her body language changed noticeably from one subject to the next. With some teachers she was confident and forthcoming, with others she was visibly smaller. There was no correlation between ...

Creating the Schools Our Children Need: Why What We are Doing Now Won't Help Much by Dylan Wiliam My rating: 4 of 5 stars Not surprisingly Wiliam's key advice to those with the pursestrings in education is to invest in teachers and particularly in improving their abilities to use formative assessment. For those who've read anything else by Wiliam, this isn't going to be new. What is new and well worth reading are the chapters leading up to this conclusion. Wiliam carefully and systematically works his way through the many other possibilities for investing in school improvement and explains why either they don't work or they aren't cost effective or we don't have good evidence. The overarching theme that came out of the first two thirds of the book was a reminder that teaching and learning are complex and, like any complex system, when you tweak one element, the effects ripple in often unpredictable ways. Treating education as some kind of linear machine whe...

A baklava city With its traditional Forty layers of paper Thin pastry, honey, pistachios. Our guide told me it's Best turned upside down So that the crisp Foundation sticks To the top of your Mouth - like words Struggling for articulation. All that history: One religion built On another and Another. Pagan temples, Under Cristian churches, Beneath Mosques, Shadowed by office Buildings with Telecom-tower minarets. And through it all, 1700 years of tourists Wearing away at the stone, Crawling through the layers, In the honey-sweet Sickliness of history. Link to my photos - a week in Istanbul April 2018

Lemon poltergeist Got it in two - At least according to   Google who knows all About the digital world. But what of the millennia Before the internet? Did some child in   A distant town   In a far away time Utter without understanding These exact words? Or was it the code-name Of a Russian spy With a penchant For English mysticism   And a love of citrus? Maybe a dying   Colonist at the   End of his tether After yet one more Year watching   His trees and dreams Wither. Two words seem Unlikely. The real challenge Would be to create   New meaning From only one Prodrigue

From time to time a group of my Middle School English colleagues travel down to the Kindergarten to learn with and from our remarkable Kindergarten teachers. We use a protocol from their Reggio Emilia practice to explore student learning and become smarter teachers together.   One teacher presents a brief snippet of learning from their classroom: something they videoed; a piece of student learning; an observation they have made. The rest of us listen as the teacher explains what they have brought and why. Then each of us responds one at a time exploring the learning through the various lenses of the student’s perspective, pedagogical perspectives and conceptual understandings. Finally the teacher who has brought the snippet reflects on what they’ve heard and there is discussion about how to push learning forward for this student or class. When we met recently, we were asked to direct our focus to a new learning space that was being established just outside the classroom. From wher...