Checking for Understanding

They say a picture paints a thousand words and this is a great wee graphic that speaks volumes. It came through on twitter from @impactwales Some great tools to encourage understanding and reflection in your learning setting.

Deep and Powerful Learning

I have been reading a lot lately about powerful learning. I particularly like this Ted talk as it brings together many truths and resonates with core beliefs about aligning vision and practice.

Children need to have a say in their learning, it needs to be relevant and real. This relates to Fullan's ideas of the needs to connect, create and help humanity.


Well worth taking the time to view.

More thinking about 21st Century Teaching

I love the suggestions that this post offers about teaching children reared as a google generation. A few years ago Ewan McIntosh from No Tosh, was talking about the non-googleable question and here it is again. This article is full of ways to encourage our children (and teachers) to really become learners.

Websites for Learning

Worth a look! Try to learn something new over the break.

Preparing Children for their Future

This a provocative and entertaining clip that suggests a future outcome for a student taught in a restrictive learning environment. It might be useful to share with teachers or learners about the kind of future that we are preparing our students for.

• What can we do differently?
• How can this be avoided?
• How are we equipping them for a future?

Learning needs to be...

• engaging, personalised, real life, collaborative, relevant, responsive and messy
• connected - subjects don't occur in isolation in real life
• helpful to our students
• changing to meet the needs of a changing world, we can't keep doing it the same way
• flexible

Our students will need to...

• deal with data
• work globally
• self manage
• organise, collaborate, plan, reflect and assess
• learn through real life enquiries
• work with different people; ages, cultures, thinkers
• be digitally responsible

What are we doing to encourage this kind of thinking and learning?

Challenging Practice

Why do you do what you do?

Would you want to be in your class?

How much of your day is having an impact?

How do you use student voice in your learning design?

Mindmapping and Beyond

When I had the privilege of teaching Year 6 students a few years ago, I enjoyed introducing them to the skill of mind mapping. I love these diagrams and ways of recording notes. I would have a lot of fun making them and they are far more interesting to revise than pages and pages of written notes. Maybe time could be spent in reading and/or writing lessons developing this skill.

Click on the picture to visit te@chthought and explore this idea further.

Guy Claxton and the Idea of Building Learning Power

Guy Claxton is an English educator, researcher and scientist who has made his life work investigating and spreading the word about learning power.

His website is well worth investigating and can be accessed through this link.

The basic premise of this is that teachers will work on building students power to learn and creative capabilities. The brain is always growing and intelligence can be developed through experience.

" When teachers focus on building learning power in their classrooms, the impact on learners can be startling. I've seen this happen in schools across the UK when teachers have begun to think creatively about the ways in which they can help young people become better learners."
Guy Claxton, 2007

More learning opportunities

I often thought when I was actually attending University how great it would be to be able to slip in and attend many courses that I was interested in. Now you can, here is another link to open source education that is free. You can attend the courses and achieve a certificate or you can keep on learning about something purely for interest.

Have a look by clicking here.

As Adults We Need to Keep Learning...

I am always astounded by the links that you find to quality material to learn new things online. The challenge is now to find the time to listen to and absorb all the wonderful things that are out there. Here are a couple of worthwhile links.

Have you always dreamed of studying at MIT? Well now you can.



Jonathan Fields has a very good blog with links to all kinds of fascinating material. Use this link as a starting point to explore further. This particular links provides seven keynote sessions that are listed in the comments as being more worthwhile than 2 years of a reader's tertiary education.