Educational Pedagogy

When I moved to the USA from the southern hemisphere 20 years, I had to learn to drive on the other side of the street. This required me to “unlearn” what I knew and “relearn” how to drive. There was no choice or reason to delay. If I did not adapt, my safety and the safety of those around me would be at risk! Similarly, workplace employees do not have the luxury of slowly adapting to change. The pace is fast, constant and often overwhelming.

We know that an organization’s ability to adapt to change is critical to business success. Do we also appreciate the impact of individual behavior on successful transformations? For this to happen, individuals need to unlearn what they have previously learned and then relearn new and relevant information. This “learn-unlearn-relearn” cycle may repeat many times over.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

This special briefing explores personl learning as the future of learning, explores why it's important, the tools which enable personal learning and the significant potential of personal learning as a key to life-long learning and the skills agenda.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Guy Claxton is professor of education at Bristol University, and author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (1997). Among other concepts, he is interested in how people learn.

And so are we, so that’s awfully convenient.

Over at teachingexpertise, they recently overviewed Claxton’s work, including four “new Rs”:

“Resilience: ‘being ready, willing and able to lock on to learning’. Being able to stick with difficulty and cope with feelings such as fear and frustration.
Resourcefulness: ‘being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways’. Having a variety of learning strategies and knowing when to use them.
Reflection: ‘being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning’. Getting to know our own strengths and weaknesses.
Relationships: ‘being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others’.”

Via Elizabeth E Charles

In addition to literacy strategies, approaches to assessment, and grouping strategies (among many others), knowing the right teaching strategy for the right academic situation may not be a matter of expertise or training, but memory: out of sight, out of mind, yes?

Which makes the following infographic from fortheteachers.org useful.

While it doesn’t offer definitions and explanations for each strategy (it’s an infographic, not a book), and many great strategies are missing (e.g., 3-2-1, exit slip, project-based learning, accountable talk, ask a question, etc.) it does work well as a kind of reminder for what’s possible, even offering categories for each strategy, from progress monitoring (think-pair-share, KWL charts), to Note-Taking (graphic organizers).

There are 87 instructional strategies listed below, but several are repeated across categories, so let’s call it “50+” strategies.

Via John Evans, Dean J. Fusto, Elizabeth E Charles

Learning anything comes with some kind of labour whether it’s time spent, a search for meaning, or a simple struggle to understand. After all, every learner is different. With those differences will come the process of overcoming learning barriers of every definition. You won’t always see them coming if you’re a teacher, but there are ways to help your learners get over them.

Here we have 6 of the most efficient methods for giving your learners the upper hand with overcoming learning barriers as they appear.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Science is constantly changing, and although we’ve come a long way since the days when it was widely believed that older people couldn’t learn new things, a number of learning myths have stood the test of time despite having no grounding in scientific research.

Via Elizabeth E Charles