E. rubecula's Education Blog

A number of parents at our school have expressed concern that our assessment strategies are too 'soft' and others have said that our assessments are too 'subjective'. I take this to mean that because MIC does not favour examinations as a valid way of testing our children, that we are somehow molly-codelling our pupils with a sort of 'anything goes' attitude. This smacks of the misguided view points that took a (probably perverse) neo-Freudian view point that children should never experience failure of they are to grow up without severe personality traumas.

I'd like to dispel the myth that somehow assessments other than the examination hall are the 'soft' option by definition, or indeed that they are subjective. To be sure there are such…

Imagine that you’re on an operating table and you somehow learnt that your surgeon is an ‘A’ grade student, but their ‘real’ scores in their final surgeon’s exam was actually 45% (which means the rest of his class did worse than this). Would you be happy to know that you’re about to be operated on by a 45% exam scoring surgeon? Would you assume that the reason for the low marks was that the examination set for the relevant year was too hard? Would you instead consider the possibility that the whole class were poor learners, or perhaps they had a terrible lecturer/demonstrator? I know I would err on the side of caution and ask for another surgeon. What has this to do with education?

Examinations appear to be a rite of passage for the vast…

What will humanity look like in the medium term future? According to a recent Disney-Pixar film called Wall•E, humans will have distinct balloon features complete with sausage fingers and toes, and who are otherwise so weak that they cannot stand on their own, but need to be carried around on hover chairs. It’s a funny film but it has many serious messages for us, such as our tendency to pollute our environment, and of course the way we abuse our bodies through lack of exercise and poor nutritional choices.

I’m personally interested in this because my PhD involved sports psychology; because I definitely feel that my own physical education was lacking (my nickname at school was ‘Sack’o’Potatoes’) and to this day I’m still struggling with…

I should have talked about our maths programme before at the Multiple Intelligence Centre. In reality it's very exciting for us. It came out of a curriculum workshop that we were doing at MIC and somehow we stumbled through our maths programme.

Focusing on 'backwards design' and 'understanding by design', we suddenly realised that we were taking the logic of our maths curriculum to it's logical extension and suddenly we had a completely new curriculum that not only made sense to us, but we think will make even more sense to our children.

Let's start at the beginning.

I wrote before about the issue of 'backwards design' and 'authentic learning'. In our workshop we were wondering aloud about the authenticity of our modern maths curriculum.…

One thing I love about the web, is that for access to information that one admires and respects, it's the great equaliser. So although I live in the middle of the Pacific, I can read quality Op-Eds from the New York time. One of which, Bob Herbert, has always impressed. That is until today. It's not terrible, Mr. Herbert continues to write quality. It's just that he's reporting an opinion on something that has many subtleties and thus he is most likely unaware of them. To give you a flavour of his (positive imho) mindset, he states that "... America's greatest national security crisis is the crisis in its schools." I don't know if this is true about America's education system, but in all the countries that I know something about (UK,…

Authentic Learning Anyone?

Any one who was born in, or is a fan of the 1980s could surely not have missed the classic film with Dan Moriarty and a very young Ralph Macchio in the 'Karate Kid'. The story (in case you don't know) involves a young kid in a new town learning how to cope with the local bullies by being taught karate by the school's Japanese janitor Mr. Miyagi (Dan Moriarty). His first days of training however, appear to be spent as a dogsbody, polishing the cars and floors of the janitors house, except he has to do it a very certain way. Put the polish on with one hand with a circular motion ('wipe on') and then take it off with the other hand ('wipe off'). In the end Daniel (Ralph Macchio) has enough and complains that his…

I like reading the blog titled Authentic Learning. This term is mainly associated with the gentlemen that talked about 'communities of practice' and John Seely Brown who focusses a bit more on the issue of assessments that demonstrate authentic learning.

Who cares?

Or rather who should care?

Clearly I do, since I'm writing about it. The link between what I blogged about before ('Backwards Design') is highly relevant and one of the major approaches that we use at the Multiple Intelligence Centre in utilising the multiple intelligence theory in our teaching & learning.

With regard to backwards design, the process starts by stating what the actual 'end goal' of one's education is supposed to be. Now very few people would argue that the 'end…

One thing that is becoming increasingly clear from taking the OU 'H800' course is that there really needs to be more of a discussion on what 'technology' actually means. I say that because in the curriculum that we're adopting in our wee primary school, we have a 'technology' component - which to everyone normally means 'computers' or 'the internet'.

It's clear that for the most part the course in H800 is thinking more along these lines. I guess their argument is that it's the use of 'modern' technologies that is being considered as part of a distance learning course. The key issues appear to be how to use the modern technology to engineer interactions or replacements for what a student or pupil might receive if they do not have 'face to…