Food for Thought: Heads Conference reflections

Dear all,

Hope you have all had a good week, I'm sure it was busy as normal. The Cognita Head's Conference was very interesting and provided me with an excellent opportunity to meet Chris Jansen's new team and get to know them better and their ideas regarding education. I do believe that the team Chris has put together sincerely believe that the number one target for a serviced based education business is building good schools that provide a quality education for its clientele. During the conference there were keynote addresses from Sir Kevan Collins on the importance of character education; Sir Clive Woodward on how to create High Performing teams and lastly Andy Buck talked about how leadership matters in schools. All three were interesting but none were that far away from where we are, or are going at ISHCMC. 

This week's Food for Thought links directly to our classroom pedagogy and is linked to some of the ideas that the speakers above touched on in London. The first is a short video by Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion, a book that I highly recommend that every teacher should have read and have in their pedagogical library. He believes that great teachers are not born but made, and that through careful attention to practice and pedagogical techniques it is possible for every teacher to grow. This short video, Practice makes Perfect links well to the final article for this week

This article is a summary of the findings of two researchers, John Hattie and Robert Marzano. Their work is famous and shows that there are certain characteristics that 'Great' teachers display that produce consistently high outcomes in the classroom. Although bringing the work of these two researchers together does involve nearly 100,000 school studies one still has to reflect upon the data before jumping to conclusions that it i sall correct. The article identifies the key characteristics identified by both researchers that we should all be thinking about in our classrooms. However, I do have one reservation and that is that most of the schools in the studies are not schools that are employing inquiry pedagogy to deepen student learning and understanding. Regardless an interesting read.

"John Hattie and Robert Marzano have each conducted significant reviews of what works best in the classroom.
There are some clear differences in their work.

• They use different terminology to each other
• Marzano uses more isolated strategies, while Hattie combines strategies into broader approaches
• Marzano’s findings are based heavily on teacher-designed assessments, while Hattie’s findings make more use of standardized tests

However, as you can see, there is significant agreement between Robert Marzano and John Hattie when it comes to what works best in the classroom."


I will see you all late morning tomorrow.

Yours
Adrian