Ramblings

In looking at trends affecting societies around the world, the word 'globalisation' crops up time and time again, in many varied contexts. Power (2000), National Intelligence Council (2017) highlight how globalisation can accelerate the growth in disparities between the rich and the poor, the have and the have-nots. In education, Core Education announced their top ten trends in 2016 on their website . Computational Thinking (CT) jumped out at me because I had done my Literature Review on that topic. They pick CT as one of the top ten trends because they see all students needing these skills, even if they are never going to become computer programmers. They say it is a fundamental way of thinking about, and seeing the world. I think that CT being many people's pick as one of the top trends in education is another form of globalisation.   NMC Horizon Report (2016) says that developing CT skills  "has  been  linked  to  economic  growth."  C...

The debate about the comparative underachievement in education of children from low  Socioeconomic status (SES) is one that governments and societies have gnashed their teeth over for generations. Still clear in my head, are the images of the forced busing of black students in the USA in the 60's in an attempt to change local school demographics.  Statisticians, and even worse, politicians can argue the numbers. Salvatore Gargiulo's sabbatical report quotes research that says that 27% of NZ children live in poverty. The UNICEF's report, Measuring Child Poverty shows NZ as mid table for OECD countries, just behind Australia, just ahead of the UK, and way ahead of the USA.  In education over the last thirty years, schools have been measured, and by some, even judged by measuring their SES. The decile system has ranked schools in an attempt to try and level the playing field and increase the resources that schools with predominantly lower-SES students. In some ways,...

Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning  in a  shared  domain  of  human  endeavor.  (Wenger 2011, p1)      When I started my teaching career in the 80's, I definitely belonged to comparatively fewer Communities of Practice than I do now. My job was rather insular, in that I belonged to a profession, I worked in a subset of a school called a syndicate, and I worked within the four walls of my classroom. I had very little interaction outside of my immediate collegial community. And even then, my interactions were limited by the social context of the times. Colleagues shared resources, divided up workloads, and very little else. It was rare for anyone within that narrow model of what a Community of Practice is, to ask for help, change the status quo, experiment, or venture on a new path. Change in education was not rewarded, therefor...