Creativity and education

Ewan McIntosh is a Scottish educator who who produces a blog on Education, ICT and other related matters. He has recently written in response to a new book by Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity in Education which raises some challenging ideas about the role of the teacher and schools in promoting creativity. To read more go here.

National Strategies

The DSCF have gathered all the National Strategies for schools on to one site. As they say:
The National Strategies have brought together all their web materials to one place to make it easier to access resources, particularly through improved search capabilities.
The new area of the Standards Site has been developed taking account of user feedback and now provides a consistent experience, no matter what area of guidance you are looking for.
In addition the site enables users to:
communicate and share knowledge with colleagues;
create an account and build their own personal profile; and comment on all content and help shape the National Strategies' future work.

Users can also add bookmarks to personalise the content so that repeat visits take them to areas of specific personal interest.

You can find the site here.

Distributing innovation

Professor David Hargreaves has been writing perceptively about education for many years and has recently been focused on the changes linked to the new curriculum and personalised learning. For him one of the key factors is sharing the responsibility for innovation amongst as many people as possible. Below is one example of his common sense approach:
Those who pioneer radical innovations need to keep track of
the lessons they learn during the innovation, and these lessons need
to be transferred to the recipient as an inherent part of the innovation.
Distributed innovation is effective in part because members of the
innovation network are constantly sharing the lessons learned and so
easing the innovation and transfer processes. There is always a
danger that innovators offer an innovation in too polished a form to
others. When innovations are 'good enough' , with some rough
edges, and not too far from a recipient's current practice, they are
easier to transfer.
Read more here.

New curriculum resources

The DSCF has provided a new website to support teachers planning the new curriculum.

You need to register to use it but it is worth it.

It has some useful resources including videos and a curriculum planning wizard which offers support with planning.

Check it out here.

Learning and Teaching Update

The Teaching Expertise website produces a monthly newsheet called Learning and Teaching Update. The April issue has some useful articles on

• Creativity and the new cuuriculum


• Teachers views on pupil achievement

Download a copy here.

Developing and accrediting personal skills and competencies

Futurelab is an organisation that aims to develop innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) commissioned Futurelab to carry out a review and consultation project which aimed to:

• draw together a review of current projects and initiatives which provide insights into different approaches to developing young people’s skills and competencies (broadly classified as ‘21st century skills’) through non-subject led approaches
• identify how these different approaches might be developed and supported at a national level by QCA
• make recommendations as to assessment and accreditation practices which could be used to promote and develop personal skills and competencies.

The project ran between January and March 2007 and comprised desk research, meetings and interviews with lead practitioners. They have produced a report that provides guidelines and strategies for delivering and accrediting the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills that are a key part of the new curriculum at KS3 and beyond.


Download the report by clicking here.

Character strengths and virtues for the learning age

Professor Guy Claxton has written a stimulating article on the subject of personalised learning and has outlined what he considers to be the eight character strengths and virtues for the learning age that we should be encouraging in schools. Read it here.

System redesign

Teacher's TV has produced a half hour programme that looks at how some different schools have redesigned their curriculum and pastoral systems to help deliver more personalised learning. You can view the video online here.
If you're not familiar with how to view the programme online, just click where it says Windows Media to the right of the main image.

There are some more resources on the subject available here.

Learning Futures: Next Practice in Learning and Teaching

The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in partnership with The Innovation Unit, are promoting an exciting project that aims to look at Next Practices in curricular or cross-curricular models of learning and pedagogy.
They have published a booklet that sets out the reasons why innovation in pedagogy is needed in order to inspire young people, and enable all of them confidently to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. It argues that some key emergent (and some well-known) practices, taken together, might transform learners' (and teachers') experience of schooling. Learning Futures proposes a way of thinking about these approaches. It is offered both as a contribution to the increasingly urgent debate and it also issues an invitation to secondary schools wishing to develop and extend their work in this direction more profoundly, to engage with the Learning Futures project, commencing in 2008.
You can download the booklet here.
Schools who are interested in participating in the project can sign up for one of two one day conferences. For further information go here.

Outstanding

There is a great deal of discussion at present about what makes an outstanding school so it may help to know that there are examples out there.

Ofsted has rated Outwood Grange College in Wakefield as Outstanding in all areas.
Read more about them at their website here.

They are currently adopting a two year KS3 and a three year KS4. To read more about their curriculum structure go here.

They are also adopting vertical tutor groups. To find out more about that go here.

To get a flavour of what the school does download a copy of their school magazine here.

Teaching resources from Essex

Essex is another county that has created a website for their schools to allow them to share good practice rather than letting individual teachers or schools try and go it alone.
There are subject specific resources as well as materials that address more general issues.
Check it out here.

Personalised Learning

Guidance and resources on Personalised learning, including AfL here.

Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills

Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS)are an integral part of the new KS3 curriculum.
A wide range of resources including more video clips on how to develop and support the development of these skills can be found at the same site where the videos in the post below come from. Check them out here.

Competency based curriculum down under

It's encouraging to see that the debate about what a new competency based curriculum might look like is an international one, as this site from Queensland in Australia indicates. They have been trialling a new approach since 2003 and have some guidelines that could be a useful model for developing practice in the UK.

As far as I can tell this initiative has links to the Learning by Design project which took/takes place across Australia and Malaysia.

Developing and accrediting personal competencies

FutureLab is an agency that describes itself as
'passionate about transforming the way people learn. Tapping into the huge potential offered by digital and other technologies, we develop innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century.'

They have a wide range of resources available at their site, including this report on developing and accrediting personal competencies within a new curriculum.

They also produce newsletters that you can sign up for, including Vision which is published every six months and which is available to download.

new curriculum scotland

There is a lot of curriculum innovation going on North of the border. Check out Extreme Learning and a Curriculum for Excellence

Personalised learning USA

While the debate over what exactly personalised learning means continues, here is a description of one approach used by the MET schools in the USA.

Curriculum 2008 subject training

The Educational Trust CfBT are running regional training events in Leicester for Subject leaders on Curriculum 2008. Register your interest here. Better hurry as events start in January.

Leading Learning

One way that Campion School has been leading learning in the last few years has been the Opening Minds scheme which has been piloted at the school under the leadership of Helen Boyle.
The scheme uses a competency based curriculum in KS3 and is already being used by schools elsewhere.

Innovation

One place to start if you want to keep up with new ideas, projects and debates is the Innovation Unit.
They describe their work like this:

The Innovation Unit promotes innovation to improve education and children's services. It acts as a catalyst for change and draws on expertise from both the public and private sectors, combining practitioner expertise with the ambition of policy makers.

You can sign up for information and there are opportunities to collaborate with others. So far I feel like I've only begun to scratch the surface of what they offer so let me know if you find anything of interest.