What makes learning meaningful? And how could we increase the meaningfulness perceived by students?

We already know from research how much easier is to deep learn anything that makes sense and piques interest, so just utilizing that basic understanding about learning fundamentals would help schools achieve better results. Of course it is ridiculous to assume the same things interest all students, so introducing choice would be a good place to start.

Meaningful learning[1]…

Quite often, developing powerful and meaningful key understandings is an area that teachers struggle with as they create and plan authentic rich task units. This is a critical step that many teachers can gloss over in planning but can make a profound difference to having clear, powerful units that provide great learning opportunities.

What we have experienced…

We have been approached by a number of teachers over the past few months to discuss the value of streaming students in ability groupings as a way of improving performance. There is also a big push amongst education unions to lower class sizes as a way of again improving performance of students. The logic behind such requests is that, given the increasing variance of competency that is occurring in classes (can be up to 7 years variance between students) , then reducing…

Great teachers are invaluable, yet too often their tireless work goes unnoticed or worse, unappreciated. While teacher appreciation week is in May, why wait to recognize the incredible work of our educators? These individuals dedicate their lives to developing the next generation. They come in early to prepare…

Most of the teachers I work with, in schools all over Australia, have for some time included Learning Goals or Learning Intentions in their planning and use these with their students. Some teachers use WALT (What Are we Learning Today?) or simply begin with the phrase ‘Today I am learning to...’ In some learning spaces, the Learning Goal has a designated space on a whiteboard or noticeboard so that the students can refer to it as they work. If the learning community is further along on their…

I have this belief that the planning documents need to lead teachers through the thinking and behaviour you are trying to encourage in them. They are not just to capture information (although this is an important part of the process). How the teachers fill in the documents will tell you a lot about their current thinking.

So when you look at HOW the teachers fill in their current documents, their detail, their use of the current planning documents, and so on ...…

This week's blog comes from Narelle Wood. Narelle is our Australian Curriculum expert and has worked extensively across a range of schools in supporting powerful learning in the literacy and English domain.

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An indulgence of mine is jigsaw puzzles. I will sit for hours trying to complete a particular section and it has got to the stage where I have sat at the table for 2 days…

This is a Smartboard Notebook tutorial on how to create an interactive study game board in which students can move game pieces along the board if they answer the questions correctly. This gameboard use tiles that on one side has the answer and on the other side has the question.

For those of you in the wider world who don't get a chance to catch all of our newsletters and blogs I thought I would include this quick blog post to capture some of the resources that have dropped off our web page which might be useful for you. We are consistently researching and developing ideas, resources, thinking, viewpoints, templates, workshops as we work with schools. We rarely have the time to make them available to everyone (although you can buy our Resource CD from the shop which…

For those of you who are new to this blog, we spend a lot of time working with teachers and schools at  the fore-front of shifting their school learning culture and their pedagogy. This week we had an revealing experience with one of the schools we are working with. It is early days in this school and the individual is receiving push back by internal (students, certain staff, etc) and external forces (e.g. parents). By the way this is normal as schools' shift their practice and habits. I…

The following is an except from my book Exceptional that will be published later this year. For those of you who are first time readers - welcome. For those of you who are constant readers - welcome back for 2012!

Everyone has an opinion about education. I do. You do. Kids do. Parents do. Grandparents do. Teachers do. Politicians do. The media…

This past week of visiting a range of schools has reinforced my perception about the critical importance of structures and non-negotiables in creating a powerful learning and working environment.

In everything we do as individuals we have habitual ways of operating, thinking, and organising ourselves. They are so habitual that we are unconscious to them. In fact, it is just part of how our brains operate efficiently - making the…

Have you ever noticed that different students have different attitudes towards learning?

Have you noticed that your more highly accomplished students relate differently to failure and what it means to develop mastery in an area? Have you noticed that some of your students take it quite personally and experience helplessness when they fail?

Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist, has written a fabulous book called “Mindset: The new psychology of success” that I…

Nicely Done! Over 200 people -- better than 1/3 of all AV-1 members -- responded to the second AV-1 survey (Salary and Education). Significant sample data such as these enable us to feel comfortable suggesting that some of these statistics fairly represent the learning space microcosm, as a whole. (We expect that you will let us know otherwise!)

Later this week, we'll share some organizational demographics gleaned from your responses, however, today…