👨🏫 Teaching:
Have done a lot of thinking this week about the tasks I set students. Mark McCourt put a wonderful tweet out listing the different parts of a learning sequence for students. See tweet here. It nicely puts into words some of the ideas I was thinking about myself. I then also listened to Craig Barton's podcast with Tom Francombe and they spoke about giving students tasks that distract their attention but have them practicing the skill taught in the lesson. From this I have been writing tasks and noticing other tweets with exercises on that distract student thinking. So for the next half term one of my focus points is on creating and regularly using these distraction tasks in lesson.
🔊 Listen:
Walter Isaacson on the Knowledge project discussing Creativity. He talks about how some of the most creative people of all time, Davinci etc, immersed themselves in learning as much as they could and then linking things together. So tying the art knowledge to his engineering knowledge to create masterpieces. My key takeaway is to keep learning from all areas of life whether they seem relevant or not because you may start to find links between things and that is where creativity lies, in the connections. Listen here.
🔊 Listen:
Craig Barton speaking to Tom Francombe about Mixed Attainment teaching. Tom makes a very good case for mixed attainment teaching. Have never taught mixed attainment until Year 7s this year post COVID, definitely makes me think about exploring it more in the future. Also had me thinking about task design and how it's really useful to have those tasks that allow students to practice the skill while thinking about something else. E.g. for the expressions 'x + 2' '3x' 'x - 4' etc place them in order if x=7. Students are practicing substitution but thinking about ordering.
Listen to the podcast here.
📚 Read:
Rebel ideas by Mathew Syed. I really enjoy Mathew Syeds books and this is another cracker. It starts by talking about the flaws in the FBI and why they failed to notice key bits of information that may have prevented some terrorist attacks. Syed speaks about the importance of collective intelligence. Having a team of similar thinking people creates overlaps in intelligence and lots of ideas are missed, your team has blind spots. Diverse groups have diverse ideas that cover all areas. Grab a copy of the book here.