The Learning Success Blog

What is STEM and why did it become STEAM?  

I asked John Burfoot, a STEAM teacher in a New South Wales Primary school to explain and we recorded our chat as an episode of The Learning Capacity Podcast.         

John also told me about how STEAM lessons enable students to learn valuable 'soft' life skills, as well as technical and technological skills.

His journey from a student who failed all his final high school exams to a degree qualified teacher is inspirational, and can serve as a reminder to students that their lives are not defined by what marks they achieve in school exams.

He worked as an electronics apprentice, a job in avionics, and making explosives for special effects in films before realising his passion is teaching.

Listen to the interview  

Is it possible the neurofeedback tools elite athletes are using to lift their performance can also be used to improve learning for students? And not just for top of the class students, but for all students regardless of their current learning achievements?

You may have heard about educational neuroscience, the science of learning, but what about sports neuroscience?  What do you know about that?

Well, sports neuroscience uses brain science to investigate how to improve the performance of top professional athletes, where a very small improvement can help them stand out from the pack.  And they have discovered neurofeedback can make the difference between a gold medal or just missing it by the finest margin. 

Sydney University has published a very interesting article about how it's classrooms have changed.  To read Sydney Uni's complete post, go here.

Here is a summary of the article, which starts with this comment: 

"Today, the classroom is flexible, creative, and agile – our students are logging in and learning from all over the globe. The modern tutorial room, lecture theatre and laboratory are still hives of activity, but not in the way you remember it. Here are a handful of ways the classrooms at Sydney have changed."

The premier educational neuroscience conference in Australia & New Zealand, ENS2017, is expanding to Asia following well attended events in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland in August this year. 

Principals, school administrators, teachers and other education leaders from Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand will be able to attend the Educating with Neuroscience 2017 Conference Asia (ENS2017 ASIA) in November.

This idea of “spoon-feeding; students gets kicked around a lot these days. But what really is meant by this phrase? Is it a bad thing and should we stop it? If so, how can we?

In an interview on The Learning Capacity Podcast, learning specialist Richard Andrew described spoon-feeding as:

“Any process which robs students of the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning.”

According to Richard there are two types of spoon-feeding – explicit and implicit.

Explicit includes behaviour such as providing notes to students so they can “pass” an exam (here Richard really emphasises the idea of merely passing).

Implicit spoon-feeding includes the teacher-centered learning approach that many schools have in place. Through this, teachers teach to or ‘at’ students – “do what I do and know what I know” as Richard puts it.

Cultures of Thinking is an educational framework that emerged from the work of Ron Ritchhart and the Project Zero team at Harvard University.

On the Learning Capacity Podcast, I have been speaking with educational consultant, Simon Brooks about each of the 8 cultural forces in the framework. In this discussion we look at what it means to create ‘opportunities’ for learning in our classrooms.

This is Part 5 of the 8 part series with Simon Brooks about implementing cultures of thinking in our schools.

Listen to the podcast.

Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day. Is that your school day?

Cultures of Thinking is an educational framework that emerged from the work of Ron Ritchhart and the Project Zero team at Harvard University.

In a series of interviews with education consultant Simon Brooks I have been delving into each of the 8 cultural forces that, according to Ron Ritchhart, we must master in order to truly transform our schools.  Simon has spent years implementing cultures of thinking into his classrooms, and now helps teachers introduce the framework in their schools. In this episode of The Learning Capacity Podcast we discuss the cultural force of time.

This is Part 3 of the 8 part series with Simon Brooks about implementing cultures of thinking in our schools. 

Listen to the podcast.

The use of language in our schools: Do we take it for granted? 

Cultures of Thinking is an educational framework that emerged from the work of Ron Ritchhart and the Project Zero team at Harvard University.

This article belongs to an 8 part series, based on discussions on The Learning Capacity Podcast where I delve into each of the 8 cultural forces that, according to Ron Ritchhart, we must master in order to truly transform our schools.

My guest in the series is Simon Brooks, who spent years implementing cultures of thinking into his classrooms, and now helps teachers introduce the framework in their schools.

In this series, we take a closer look at practical ways to implement the theory behind it all. This is part 2, where we discuss the cultural force of language.

This is Part 2 of the 8 part series with Simon Brooks about implementing cultures of thinking in our schools. 

Listen to the podcast.

Do we have expectations ‘of’ our students, or ‘for’ our students?

My guest in the series is Simon Brooks, who spent years implementing cultures of thinking into his classrooms. He now helps teachers introduce the framework in their schools.

In this series, we’ll take a closer look at practical ways to implement the theory behind it all.

This is part 1 of the 8 part series with Simon Brooks about implementing cultures of thinking in our schools.

In part 1 we discuss the cultural force of expectations.

Listen to the podcast.

Unless you are a special education teacher, or are familiar with someone who does this work, you probably have no idea of their extraordinary skills.

Special education teacher, Sophie Murphy, recently handled an inflight emergency that was preventing a plane from landing in Melbourne. What she did to persuade a child with Down Syndrome to get up off the cabin floor and strap into his seat so the plane could land would seem remarkable to most people.

But for Sophie, a teacher with two decades of experience, it was just what special education teachers are trained to do.

Read what she did in this Sydney Morning Herald report.