Tag: schools

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success

There’s much to muse about in this article recounting the important (and largely ignored) lessons of the Finnish education system. Given the plight of things in the UK and particularly the rush to privatisation of Higher Education, much is also relevent here. Two things stand out. The first is that there are no private institutions in Finnish education – all education, from playschool to PhD research, is publically funded. And second, teachers are competitively selected, highly paid, unionised and given responsibility to do their jobs professionally. Partenen summarised this last beautifully:

“Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic.

The UnCommon Core

is anyone surprised that a huge swath of our population can’t speak intelligently about the larger issues that face us? No doubt, the financial mess we’re in and climate change and the Middle East and the rest are complex, fast changing issues that can be difficult for anyone to keep up with. (I’m no exception.) But again, have our schools really been cultivating the learning dispositions needed to grapple with those topics as they evolve? We give a lot of lip service to problem solving and critical thinking and the like, but I’m not convinced that those and other really important skills and literacies are showing up meaningfully in more than 10% of classrooms in this country because in large measure, they’re not on the test. It’s about content and knowledge, not learning.

via weblogg-ed.com

Will Richardson with another welcome rant on the nature of teaching, learning and how the schools are simply getting it wrong. How about Universities Will?

Brightworks: An Extraordinary School

Brightworks is a school that reimagines the idea of school. In September 2011, we will offer a one-of-a-kind K-12 curriculum: students explore an idea from multiple perspectives with the help of real-world experts, tools, and experiences, collaborate on projects driven by their curiosity, and share their findings with the world. Brightworks does away with tests, grades and homework, instead supporting each student as they create a rich and detailed portfolio of their work. Brightworks offers a sliding-scale tuition option to all applicants.

At Brightworks, we believe that a school should serve as a learning commons and a community workshop, an intellectual and creative heart of the neighborhood it resides in. Brightworks will also offer after-school, evening and weekend workshops for children and adults.

everything is interesting, we can build anything

via sfbrightworks.org

Current ICT and Computer Science in schools – damaging to UK’s future economic prospects? | Royal Society

Numbers of students studying computing are plummeting across the UK, with a fall of 33% in just three years in ICT GCSE students, a fall of 33% in six years in A level ICT and 57% in eight years in A level Computing students in England and similar declines found elsewhere in the UK*.  Concerns over these declines and the constraints in the way that computing is taught in school are so great that an unprecedented range of organisations, including learned societies, professional bodies, industry corporations and higher education establishments, as well as school teachers themselves, has come together to launch a study of the issues and possible solutions today (5th August 2010). 

It is believed that design and delivery of ICT and computer science curricula in schools is so poor that students’ understanding and enjoyment of the subjects is severely limited.  The effects of this, coupled with dwindling student numbers, mean that, unless significant improvements are made, the deficit in the workforce numbers and capability could have a highly negative impact on the UK’s economy.

via royalsociety.org

UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech

The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.

Since 2006 there has been a 33 per cent fall in pupils taking ICT GCSEs, and numbers taking A-levels in ICT have fallen by a third in six years. The number of candidates taking A-level Computing has fallen 57 per cent in eight years.

The Society is working with other organisations to find out why schools are failing so badly, especially when so many kids are obsessed with gadgets, computer games, social networking and playing music really bloody loudly on their mobile phones.

Professor Matthew Harrison, Director of Education at The Royal Academy of Engineering said: “Young people have huge appetites for the computing devices they use outside of school. Yet ICT and Computer Science in school seem to turn these young people off. We need school curricula to engage them better if the next generation are to engineer technology and not just consume it.”

Professor Steve Furber is chairing the study for the Royal Society, and said the UK had a proud history of technological innovations – including the World Wide Web.

Furber said: “From this bright start, we are now watching the enthusiasm of the next generation waste away through poorly conceived courses and syllabuses.  If we cannot address the problem of how to educate our young people in inspirational and appropriate ways, we risk a future workforce that is totally unskilled and unsuited to tomorrow’s job market.”

The BCS, Microsoft, Google and several universities are also involved. The group expects to have finished the report by winter 2011. More info is available here.

via theregister.co.uk