What a month November has been. For schools in NZ this is a time of exams for many students, and for most teachers and schools, a time when the 'end of year' activities are being planned or engaged in. Besides these celebrations of what has been achieved, the end of the year is also an opportunity to 'look forward', and this month I've been spending time with a number of schools, assisting with their planning for 2021 and beyond. In this newsletter I have includes some resources and links that have been a part of the future focused planning work I've been doing with several schools.
Increasing student agency
The concept of student agency is key to equipping learners with the skills and dispositions they need to thrive into the future. Not longer can we be satisfied with a view of education that is simply about 'passing on knowledge. I've included a couple of resources below that may be useful to you if you're thinking about how you might increase the focus on developing agentic learners in your context.
First is a research report that I had hand in helping to develop that is published by CORE Education. The report synthesises a wide range of research and distills findings into ten conditions to foster agentic learning. There's also a useful tool at the end of the report that I've been using with a number of schools recently to help them assess where they're at in the process of creating truly agentic approaches to learning. This resource is particularly useful for school leaders seeking to create the right sorts of conditions for agentic activity to flourish in their context.
Next is a resource I came across recently from Best-Future.org. The Self-direction Toolkit is a collection of resources for teachers to use in the classroom for instruction and assessment that focuses on self-direction. The toolkit includes the self-direction rubric, self-direction activities and targeted resources for teachers. I can see it being very useful for educators looking to increase student agency in their classrooms and schools.
Focus on wellbeing
Another area that has been highlighted during the year we've had is the need to address the social and emotional needs of our learners. There has been a plethora of resources appearing this year, but among these I came across A Trusted Space from All It Takes.
A Trusted Space provides foundational training for educators on how to help mitigate the effects of the grief, trauma, anxiety and other emotional stressors that so many students, families, and even they themselves, are feeling as they walk – or video conference – into school.
The 43-minute film features teachers, parents, students, and renowned experts including Pamela Cantor, M.D., Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera among others. The accompanying research-based SEL curriculum provides a practical, empathetic, and scientific understanding of how trauma impacts behaviour and learning, and how to manage it within any classroom setting.
This video could provide a useful resource for shared viewing with your staff ahead of the start of a new school year, providing opportunity to follow up with discussion about how you might incorporate some of the suggestions into your context into the new year.
Online Teaching
This year has seen a huge increase in interest and activity in teaching and learning online. I came across this Online Teaching Toolkit from Delloites this month, and found it to be really helpful in the way it outlines many of the key considerations to be taken when working in this way.
This toolkit is one of the better resources in this area that I've come across. It has been developed to help schools navigate the challenges of online learning and is usefully laid out in sections that make the ideas and information easy to access, with loads of embedded links to resources with practical ideas for teachers to adapt or adopt. The resources are practice-based and can be applied to a school’s context and staff professional learning needs. It's well worth exploring and may be a useful item to share with staff and discuss in team meetings.
That's it for this month - just a few weeks to go to Christmas and a well deserved break (for my colleagues in NZ and Australia at least).
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Working online with your staff
I have worked in the field of distance education for more than 25 years, and can provide a range of services to your school and staff online. If this is something that interests you please feel free to contact me atderek@futuremakers.nz.
