Food for Thought: My 3E Reflection

Dear all,

Hope you are having a relaxing weekend after the thought provoking and stimulating two days of 3E. A huge thanks to all of you who ran workshops, facilitated inspiration groups, and gave Inspire talks. A very special thanks to Sam who is the originator of the thinking behind this conference style PD and to the team around him that allowed an idea to become a practical reality.

With my head whirling round with ideas and thought originating from the 3E workshops and Inspire talks I thought that it would be a good idea if this week's Food for Thought focused on some of my reflections. This will be a long post with lots to watch and read and should be enjoyed over a longer period of time.

• The Need to Redefine our Schools

As I have expressed countless times since doing an educational Master Class with Yong Zhao and listening to Tony Wagner, Sugata Mitra and Pasi Sahlberg talk about the revolution that is needed in schools. Our 3E's conference reinforced the potential for that change to be led by teachers working with students in their classrooms using modern pedagogy that engages and motivates learners to be innovators, thinkers, creators and problem solvers.

This first video is of Yong Zhao explaining the need for World Class Learners and why education needs to be revolutionized if we are to prepare our students adequately for their futures.

At 3E the documentary Schooling the World was showing in the iMac lab. This documentary was directed by Carol Black and many things that were discussed in the workshops that I attended resonated with her thinking about redefining school. Here is an extract from an article on her website and is followed by a twelve minute video of her talking at a conference about Happiness. 

This is a long post but definitely worth reading with a cup of coffee or tea as she is a very good writer:

"Any wildlife biologist knows that an animal in a zoo will not develop normally if the environment is incompatible with the evolved social needs of its species. But we no longer know this about ourselves. We have radically altered our own evolved species behavior by segregating children artificially in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from text-based artificial materials instead of contextualized real-world activities, by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all of this will have complex and unpredictable results. In fact, it does. While some children seem able to function in this completely artificial environment, really significant numbers of them cannot. Around the world, every day, millions and millions and millions of normal bright healthy children are labelled as failures in ways that damage them for life. And increasingly, those who cannot adapt to the artificial environment of school are diagnosed as brain-disordered and drugged. "
http://schoolingtheworld.org/a-thousand-rivers/

Carol Black: Reclaiming Our Children, Reclaiming Our World

Once one has listened to the compelling arguments of  Yong Zhao and Carol Black it becomes even clearer that there is journey that must be embarked upon to produce an education system that looks and feels different from that of the 19th and 20th century models.

• Engaging and Motivating our Students

With out doubt the most common train of thinking about redefining schools that arose in all the workshops that I attended was ensuring that students were engaged with their learning. This might be related to teacher pedagogy, application to real world examples, relevant to a 21st century students life or simply and interesting activity. Of course underlying all these is motivation and what ingredients are needed to engage students with their learning. This is where the work of Daniel Pink and his book Drive becomes an important resource that is worth reading. This book pulls together so many of the ideas that are prevalent in education today. For those of you who might prefer either a preview or a short cut, I am sharing a 15 minute video which delves into all the important concepts covered in the book. Every time that ideas such as Google Hour, Think Tank Thursday, Passion Time etc were mentioned their success was dependent upon the key facets of motivation, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose. Watch the video to find out much more.

The question of how well do we really knowing our students came up in several of the discussions that I was involved in and blends perfectly with ISHCMC's year long inquiry of  getting to know who we are. It makes a great deal of sense, if you stop and think about it, that our teaching will be enhanced by really knowing the students in our classes so that we can understand who they really are. Of course from this knowledge grows empathy and trust which will make the classroom learning environment safe for all students. This article is from the New York Times  and, although it focuses on Primary students, I think this exercise would be equally applicable to all students across the school and could be done at least in advisory class.

• Why We Need to Ensure the Right Side of our Brain is Leading our Thinking

As you know we start all our days at ISHCMC with 10 minutes of mindfulness. This is part of our progression towards Positive Education and providing students with the skills to take control of their lives. (empowerment) It is also vital for allowing the right section of our brains to establish control from the left. This struggle is so important in many ways and is essential if we are to live positive and happy lives. If our left brains are allowed to dominate our lives and thoughts our ten positive emotions will be overwhelmed and we will never be able to achieve the positive to negative emotions ratio of 4:1 promoted by Positive Psychologist like Barbara Fredrickson. In this blog post by Eric Barker he analyses the neuroscience around Mindfulness and the control of our left brains

The importance of the Right Side of the Brain was first brought to my attention whilst giving an MYP Leaders Workshop in Beijing by a fellow workshop leader whoi asked if I had read a Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. From a different perspective Pink identifies the importance of right brained thinking for the future. In many ways this links back the the work of education researchers such as Sir ken Robinson, Yong Zhao and Tony Wagner who stress the importance of right brained thinking for our schools. Here is a concise presentation that will take you through Pink's argument.

A Whole New Mind from Lisa Whittington

Having taken this time to reflect upon the 3E conference it is clear to me that the majority of the challenges facing education today were discussed at some level in the conference. It will be the bringing together of these discussions to transform ISHCMC classrooms and student learning that will redefine who we are as a school.

Have a lovely weekend and extra day on Monday.

Yours
Adrian