Learning in Playful Environments

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...