Why Michael Gove's invocation of Gramsci misses the point of his work | Peter Thompson
For someone like me, who left a fairly "bog standard" comprehensive school at 16 with no qualifications and, as far as I can remember, having never read a book – let alone all the classics that the education secretary said we should return to in his speech to the Social Market Foundation yesterday – Michael Gove's choice of the Italian revolutionary Marxist Antonio Gramsci as an intellectual buttress for his views on contemporary education in Britain seems both fascinating and instructive. Gove started with a statement of sympathy for Jade Goody and the way in which she was an object of derision for her general lack of knowledge. Of course he then promptly blames the comprehensive education system for her failings, claiming that if only she had been taught "properly" then she wouldn't have been so stupid. Using Gramsci he maintains that a proper grounding in the basics is missing from the structures of contemporary education and that this lack is failing working class children.
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The pen is mightier than the sword Part 1 | Carping From The Side Lines – Iorek's Blog
Handwriting is not dead. Despite reports to the contrary, despite a plethora of technologies for creating text, nothing yet matches the speed and immediacy of a quick note jotted down with a mark-making implement on a scrap of paper. It’s probably not a stretch to suggest that a handwritten letter or card remains one of the most intimate means of non-verbal communication of thoughts, ideas and feelings. It is certainly true that the majority of students hand write the bulk of their work, at least at primary level. With this in mind, it is frustrating to witness students struggle to master basic ‘stylus skills’ (a non-gendered alternative to ‘penmanship’). As with many things that we could do better in schools, a focus on improving handwriting sits comfortably with the concept of marginal gains, beyond the opportunity to clinch a couple of extra test points. 1. 2. 3. 4. This is part one of a two-part post. Like this: Like Loading...
535: Made for students. By students.
Beginning of Visible Learning Beginning of Visible Learning On August 2 1999, John Hattie gave his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Education at the University of Auckland. You are what you eat. Have you ever been on a diet? There are the crash diets (or fad diets) - The Beverley Hills diet and Cabbage soup diet are 2 examples. Goldilocks Feedback. This blog is not about Assessment for Learning. Where's the evidence? I listened to a great podcast. The gentleman, let's call him Stephen, was heavily into the science of his craft. Tuck your shirt in! One of the many perennial questions that teachers have to field from pupils (and in some cases parents) is regarding school uniform. Supply or demand? As a young boy I used to spend time playing in the playground of my junior school.
Is retreat the only option? - news
Comment:5 average rating | Comments (8)Last Updated:31 January, 2013Section:news Arguments against the government’s planned GCSE replacements are coming from all quarters. Will Michael Gove continue to pursue his goals regardless or will he be forced to reconsider?, asks William Stewart Michael Gove appears to have done that rare thing in politics - he’s come up with a policy that almost no one supports. Teacher union opposition might be seen as par for the course for an education secretary wanting to shake things up; it might even be viewed as a political necessity for one wishing to keep the right-wing press on side. But classroom “militants” are not the only ones up in arms about Gove’s plan to introduce English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs) in core subjects as a replacement for GCSEs. Major doubts have been raised by the heads of the schools supposed to use them, the exam boards that will provide them, the watchdog that will regulate them and the employers that will consume them.
Getting the scale right: attitudes before systems.
After millennia of battle the surviving G’Gugvuntt and Vl’hurg realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog. Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I love this Hitch-hiker’s Guide story. 1. Short-term accountability pressures force us to be diverted from thinking about the heart of our business: the quality of teacher-student relationships and interactions. 2. Here we have a fleet of policies and systems, reinforced by OfSTED and the latest accountability drive. I’m a pretty good teacher. Here is my radical contention: If we burned or deleted all the Performance Management files it would be a long long time before any student noticed a difference. 3. But that is all.
The Learning Arc: It takes the time it takes.
The Learning Arc: Timed in minutes or hours or weeks … it all depends. The pace of learning is one of the many variables we need to consider in planning lessons and in understanding the context of a lesson observation. As with many other aspects of learning and teaching, there is no formula. In thinking about pace, I often refer to learning processes as forming an arc: first, teeing up, then processing before eventually landing: The teeing-up phase throws out the key elements of what needs to be learned. In a successful learning arc, this is usually laced with intrinsic incentives to sustain learners through the journey ahead. The processing phase is where learners battle through the struggle as their brains make all the necessary connections. The landing phase is where the ideas and skills take root and learners can apply and present them coherently; this is when progress is finally evident and the extent of the learning can be assessed. What about feedback? Like this: Like Loading...
How to make RSA Animate style videos with your class…
Here is a post on how to make RSA style videos with half the work and time, and with a lot less tech experience needed. And another post on RSA-lite style videos. If you like the idea in this post, then you might also enjoy my other post 24 Assessments that Don’t Suck. Nothing fancy in this post, just the nuts and bolts of how to make an RSA Animate style video with your class! What is an RSA Animate style video? Let’s start with the most popular one: And the one most popular with educators: If you want to start at the end and see a student’s final product before getting to the steps involved in making them, pause and watch an example of one of the final videos below before reading on: This is a unit that was built from the beginning to end with an RSA Animate style video. So let’s start there… 2012 was coming to a close and I still noticed some important things that my kids could not do yet. The other problem was that the words they were reading were just that…words. Day 2-Drawings
Bloody, bold and resolute
