week 5

Week 5 Journal Entry: 

• In an ideal world, how do you think education should be organised?
• What priorities do you think it should reflect? and who should be responsible for ensuring that it is of a good quality?
• Is there anything from the padlet wall that has informed your position?

In an ideal world, how do you think education should be organised? Structured around the student and what they are want to learn working with adults as peers / apprentices . If you look at online gaming communities and Paul Gee concepts of gamification you will what eduction can learn form the commercial gaming world. http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/jamespaulgee2print.html will give to a good starting point. What priorities do you think it should reflect? Equipping all students to be self-actualized citizens. Within this concept that has been around for a while there is lots of flexibility. We are not talking about creating schools that are sausage machines producing an institution's perception of a "self-actualized person" or something that can be fully measured in a quantitate sense. I would also emphasize we all operate within a community and being part of this rather than individuals or sub-groups is very important. This is always a delicate balancing act with shades of grey which students must actively engage with on a regular basis. As Ken Robinson has been saying for a long time the exam system and the ways schools and students are organised along industrial lines are not really working for us in the 21st Century. Who should be responsible for ensuring that it is of a good quality?Perhaps we should think about who should not. Those who should ensure quality are religious groups of any kind. In a modern society education must be fully secularised with church and state separated. Governments always like to ensure good quality in education. In principe I do not have a problem with this, rather we should be looking at what is measured than who measures it. Those of us from the UK will know about the Trojan Schools and the problems of handing schools over to "organisations". While the Trojan schools are an extreme example there are stark warnings and lessons to be learnt about "quality control".

week 3

Week 3 Journal Entry: 

• Reflect back on the teachers you considered in the first reflection task at the start of this week. Reconsider what it was about them that made you consider them to be so good. Would others that were taught by them have the same conclusions?
• They were the teachers that were fun to be with, that even though you may not have shared their passion for their subject they still managed to get you interested in the learning as a passion. They were kind and listened to you and never embarrassed you in front of your peers. The best teachers were those that were always making jokes about themselves and those pupils whom enjoyed the banter, but never made jokes about students behind their backs or those that could not take the joke in good spirit. The good teachers were never the ones that spoke about standards and expectations and traditions but these were still very much in the classroom as given and known quantities. It was almost like a code, you did not mess about in certain lessons because the teacher was nice and "on our side". They let me mess up lots of the time and spoke with you calmly and gently about why things went wrong and suggested ways to prevent it from happening again. But there was always that understanding that people do make mistakes, especially kids, and that you need to make these mistakes yourself and learn from them. At the end of the day I knew if things went really wrong (which they never did with me) there were certain teachers I could trust and go to. They were much more like coaches or mentors than teachers. A hidden force of support behind my journey through being a horrible, spotty, irrational and irritable teenager. Compare this to the OFSTED definition of a good teacher which talk about setting homework, following National Curriculum guidelines and so on. Is it any wonder that so many students are turned of school.

Week 2 Journal Entry:

Week 2 Journal Entry: 
After completing the activities and engaging with the resources this week, end the week with a final reflection. Here are some questions to guide your thinking:

• During your own education, how has your "intelligence" been assessed?
• How has this affected the educational opportunities you have been given? 
• What judgments have people made about you that have been affected by an assessment of your "intelligence"?
• Do you consider yourself to be a "learner"? why?More often than I would care to think, some of the time this has been through test which actually have very little to do with intelligence and more to do with jumping through hoops and doing as you are told. Other times arbitrary assumptions have been made about my intelligence based on the neatness of my hand writing and ability to spell. Back in the good old days if University applications when applications were done by hand there is no doubt in my mind that my messy scrawl was cast away in preference for some one with impossibly neat hand writing. In my early years of education it was decided not to put a too finer point on it that I was not intelligent and was put into a special needs class by a teacher whom I did not get on with, mainly because she was obsessed with hand writing and spelling. I can remember being punished for not learning my spellings and my messy hand writing and being really stopped form learning until I got these things up to standard. The point her is that I had very supportive parents and was always seen by my peers as "the professor" at school a nick name that I loved. Students would come up and ask me questions all the time. Back then I really did the learning for myself at home rather than at school which seemed to be one painful day after another trying to improve my hand writing. I can remember learning how to minimise this pain on a daily basis and adapting to the situation as it developed. Mainly this meant keeping a low profile from the hated teachers in class and learning for myself at home and in the local library (yes this was way before the internet had even been thought about). At about 8 I can remember taking a book from the school "How the earth was made" thinking it was a geography / geology type book, when in fact is was a Christian text. As a leaner that was a very important turning point in my life where I started to question what I had learnt in school which was quite religious at the time. That upset my teacher even more and there was even a sense of enjoyment on my part when I would tell her what I had learnt about with my dad and how this conflicted with her religious teachings.

Based on your experience as a learner, what do you think you will be able to get out of this course? And what ideas do you already have about the future of education?

• Based on your experience as a learner, what do you think you will be able to get out of this course? And what ideas do you already have about the future of education?

An improved understanding how people learn and ways to equip my students for a world that does not as yet exist and is constantly changing. Most importantly helping my students to operate within society but at the same time be confident and comfortable with being independent and be able to make their own judgements on how to deal with a situation in an ethical, productive and creative way. Events are currently unfolding in Hong Kong that demonstrate this very well. So far up to 100,000 people have occupied parts of the city, a movement that was started by students, some as young as 12 years old. These students have taken charge of the situation in an incredible way, going on strike and attending open air public lectures of democracy. These are probably the best learning experiences they will ever come across. This they have done themselves with very little input from teachers other than their support. Is this the future of education? Students as young as 12 taking charge of a situation they are unhappy with and "doing what our parents have failed to do on our behalf". I have really relaxed with my classroom practise and handed so much of the "power" over to my students. Of course it does not all go to plan, but that's the point. When things start to go wrong we have discussions about how to go forward or prevent the scenario occurring again. If the students are learning let them learn, stand back and observe.