Tag: DLmooc

Assessing learning dispositions/academic mindsets

A few years ago Ruth Deakin Crick and I spent a couple of days with the remarkable Larry Rosenstock at High Tech High, and were blown away by the creativity and passion that he and his team bring to authentic learning. At that point they were just beginning to conceive the idea of a Graduate School of Education (er… run by a high school?!). Yes indeed.

Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 16.56.56Now they’re flying, running the Deeper Learning conference in a few weeks, and right now, the Deeper Learning MOOC [DLMOOC] is doing a great job of bringing practitioners and researchers together, and that’s just from the perspective of someone on the edge who has only managed to replay the late night (in the UK) Hangouts and post a couple of stories. Huge thanks and congratulations to Larry, Rob Riordan and everyone else at High Tech High Grad School of Education, plus of course the other supporting organisations and funders who are making this happen.

Week 7 coming up is focused on Assessing for Deeper Learning, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing from the panellists. So in this post on Learning Emergence, I share some thoughts about how we go about assessing what some of us call lifelong learning dispositions, while others refer to academic mindsets, and welcome comments from DLMOOCers and others.

Moving: children taking charge of their learning

For me, there’s nothing quite so moving in the world of learning than witnessing teachers give young people the responsibility and safe freedom to show what they are capable of, and then seeing those children talking about how that felt, and showing what they did.

Tragically our national curricula often crush this possibility out of school life, but when it happens, it’s startling. And the network of people sharing the evidence and stories is building. The movie below is an example from my local primary school, with whom I work:

Bushfield Y5 Fashion Project 2013 from Bushfield School on Vimeo.

Full details:

Small, T., Shafi, A. and Huang, S. (2014) Learning Power and Authentic Inquiry in the English Primary Curriculum: A Case Study, Report No. 12, ViTaL Development & Research Programme, University of Bristol. [pdf]

This report documents progress in a two-year action-research programme at Bushfield School, Milton Keynes, with two main purposes: firstly, to build on the School’s success in developing children’s capacity to learn; secondly, to track and measure the impact of its interventions for this purpose. The school combined the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) with the Authentic Inquiry learning methodology from University of Bristol. Qualitative and quantitative data are combined to examine the impact of the pilots from the perspective of staff and pupils, comparing learning power against a range of demographic and attainment datasets, in the distinctive context of a primary school already experienced in the Building Learning Power approach.

One community who are active right now is the Deeper Learning MOOC (DLmooc), which is doing a fabulous job of catalysing conversations about the future shape of learning, with a good dose of student voice. Check out the YouTube/Vialogue replays of their live Hangouts.

I just added a couple of stories to the set they’re compiling, from the above work with Bushfield School, which has benefited from working first with Guy Claxton on ‘building learning power’, and most recently with Ruth Deakin Crick on assessing learning dispositions and authentic inquiry, both strands of work originating from University of Bristol Grad School of Education (disclaimer — I’m a visiting fellow there: now you know why!):

I have no idea how “massive” this MOOC is, but they’re doing a good job in this course of bringing together reflective practitioners and students.