July 2010 Blog Posts (27)

If you have ever walked into a factory that produces a finished good from raw materials, it is frankly an amazing process. Dating back to the early 1900's, Henry Ford revolutionized the world and the way it manufactures goods. How could one argue with a process that can take different materials and products, and in one smooth motion put them together to produce a brand new flawless product exactly identical to the previous…

The school does not enclose pupils in there, but it produces them!

Do you agree?

If you walk into a teacher's lounge, and your goal is to get the teachers really fired up...then ask them how they feel about merit pay! Teachers across the nation are torn in their beliefs when it comes to merit pay. For every teacher that supports merit pay, there is a teacher who firmly disagrees with merit pay. Educational reform would not be complete without some kind of overhaul in the way teachers are compensated.…

Online education can present itself in many ways, and shouldn't necessarily be a virtual incarnation…

Our Year Six team were keen to get the children to look at other countries around the world. The children went away and thought about which cultures they would like to study. A cultures day was held for us at one of our partner high schools and a theatre group and dance troupe came into school to work with the children right at the…

I am 26 years old. I like to play video games. I like to play computer games. I think I am somewhat computer savvy. I am a member of generation Y. So, naturally I use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google, Youtube and blogging on a daily basis, right?. "Jain," which in German means yes and no.

Some questions to ask when planning

What does our pedagogy look like? What would you like learning to be like?

At a recent staff meeting we asked these questions and discussed how we had moved forward with the curriculum over the last few years. We made the decision a while ago to break away from the more…

Some questions to ask when planning

What does our pedagogy look like? What would you like learning to be like?

At a recent staff meeting we asked these questions and discussed how we had moved forward with the curriculum over the last few years. We made the decision a while ago to break away from the more…

Why are most schools so badly structured for achieving their publicly stated goals? Taking mostly bright, inquisitive, active young children away from the real world for which we are supposed to be preparing them, keeping them locked in rooms in the company of an adult who will drone at them for forty minutes before releasing them to another adult who will do the same...ten times during the day...days punctuated by bells... days that run into a dozen years interrupted only by vacations which…

Here is an updated version of a presentation CULTIVATING HUMANITY IN A SCHOOL.ppt that I gave at my school in 2005. The title was inspired by Martha Nussbaum's book.

Although the presentation was prepared with the help and support of a few colleagues, it went down in flames because it was so badly timed. It came right after a workshop conducted at my school by two of the foremost…