Brian's Blog

Formative assessment has emerged as a powerful and transformative tool. It has the capacity to reshape the relationships and dynamics between educators and students, fostering a learning environment that is more tailored, adaptive, and student-centric. The impact of formative assessment in today's modern classroom is profound. It enables me to gain a deeper understanding of each student's unique learning journey, paving the way for a level of personalised instruction that was once inconceivable. In this post, I will share a journey through the multifaceted world of formative assessments, presenting a diverse array of tools that I have used to gauge student progress throughout my career. I will describe some of my personal experiences with these assessments, shedding light on their pivotal role in steering and adapting my pedagogical approaches. I will also attempt to reinforce this with the academic research I have been working through as I form my understanding of how it can b...

  The Potential of Personal! In the evolving landscape of education, the concept of personalised learning has gained considerable attention. This pedagogical approach tailors the learning experience to cater to the unique needs, interests, and strengths of individual students. With its origin deeply grounded in academic research, personalised learning holds the opportunity to transform the classroom into a dynamic environment that fosters engagement, motivation, and deep understanding supporting the student to flourish academically, socially and emotionally. Academic Backing for Personalised Learning Research consistently highlights the advantages of personalised learning in the primary classroom. According to Black and Wiliam (2010), students thrive when their educational experience aligns with their personal interests and preferences. Hattie (2012) emphasises that by catering to learners' needs and strengths, educators can improve students' academic performance and confidence...

This is a guest blog written by my Stage 3 Co-ordinator and year partner Richelle Hatton. This post first appeared on the Stage 3 Learning Journey   on 10 August 2016. It is a wonderful reflection on the experience Richelle and I had with our class. I would strongly encourage any reader to explore the possibilities and see if there is a place for Self Organised Learning Environments within your own context. Educational researcher Sugata Mitra claims to have discovered accidentally that students can teach themselves. He put a computer in a hole in the wall in a slum district in India and walked away. Eight hours later he returned to find local children browsing the internet and teaching each other how to use the computer having never seen one before! You can watch his   TED talk   and hear about it straight from him. Totally fascinating. The concept of SOLE - self organised learning environment - came from Mitra's research. He suggests that "if you allow the educati...