I hope you are all having an enjoyable and relaxed Easter weekend.
Last week I spent two days at the INTASE World EDULEAD conference in Singapore listening to some incredibly inspiring educational thought leaders and researchers discussing reinventing education. The two days were very reaffirming for our mission and vision for education and the direction that we are moving at ISHCMC, although there is some fine tuning needed and a few things that we need to learn and improve upon. I left feeling in no doubt that our ISHCMC students are and will be well served by the direction that ISHCMC is developing as a learning community. There was so much interesting thinking raised that I want to share with you, that I have decided to use my next three Food for Thoughts to firstly introduce you to the speakers and then provide you with the key points that they were making about education today.
The speakers were:
Sir Ken Robinson ( Live from L.A.) the most viewed TED speaker with over 300 million views of his TED talks. This was like a private TED session and he spoke and answered questions for over 2.5 hours. It was clear from what he was saying that a great deal of his thinking today is captured in his tow most recent books; "The Element" and "Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education"
Dr Heidi Hayes Jacobs, is the founder and President of the Curriculum Designers group that provides professional services to schools and organizations internationally to upgrade curriculum and support teaching strategies to meet the needs of 21st century learners
Sir John Jones, ex- Head teacher at three secondary schools over 17 years is now working for the UK government as part of the Governments Polcy action Team as well as being a resident expert for Educational Leadership at Mancester University.
Dr Marcia Tate, is the founder and CEO of Developing Minds. she had a 30 year career in classrooms and as an administrator and won awards for her contributions to staff development. Today she is very much focused on ensuring that teachers have pedagogical strategies that allow students the opportunity to achieve in their classrooms. Her latest work is around Formative Assessment and Brain- compatible classrooms: focusing on how we know students are learning.
Prof Tom Guskey, is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Kentucky, he has written over 20 books on education and in this conference focused very much on assessment and the need to create well designed assessments tasks as part of the instructional process.
Deb Masters, works very closely with John Hattie and his research into visible learning. her talks were very much based around the efffect size findings of Hattie's research and what we should be discussing in schools that has the biggest impact upon student learning.
Deb Masters summarizes Visible Learning Plus from Cognition Education on Vimeo.
Now you know something about all the speakers that I was privileged to have listened to last week. next week i will try and synthesize some of the thoughts that they shared.
I want to end with something that has been talked about before at meetings and that is the introduction of a management information system at ISHCMC. We were due to be installing iSAMS for August 2016 but during its delay we have been investigating more appropraite systems for our school and have moved to introducing PowerSchool instead. We believe this will be far more useful to us and allow a gradual move to a single platform for the majority of our work with students as well as providing immense capacity for tracking student progress. As I said last Monday Michelle had to pick an admin project for her Head training that covered collaboration, change management and school systems and she deiced that the area she could help most in was our move to PowerSchool as ISHCMC's Management system.
So just to whet your appetite her are two short videos that introduce PowerSchool. the first is 2 minutes and is an advert from Powerschool. the second 5 minutes is a more in depth coverage of what PowerSchool provides.
Have a good Sunday,
Yours
Adrian
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