Skills and Guy

Yeah, some pretty good reflections coming out of our talk yesterday and from Guy.

Language that Identifies individuals was about permenancy of labels as being destructive, not talking about sharing how they did in a piece of work or unit / test.  EG anything that may be construed as a statement about their forever after level of achievement.  If they see themselves as a Booster maths kid, then this might create the mental picture that they are no good at maths.  Therefore if I am no good at maths, why would I try.  The same could be stated for GATE, what mental model does this create and therefore effects of this?  Imagine being in GATE on year and then not the next... how destructive is that to self perception?

"No competition between test scores and key competences. Focus on competences increases achievement, and is not at the expense of achievement."

I thought this had a great message, but wasn't so sure about the robustness of the research.  Guy's research has shown that the time taken out of the day to explicitly include a thinking component has not been at the expense nationally standardised achievement levels.  He had some graphs of a number of schools pre, during and several years post implementation.  The argument used has been that the time spent on these skills will have a negative impact on achievement as we have less time on content, but his result show the opposite in most cases.  I guess, in regards to our conversation yesterday, the answer is added value in focus on skills is seen in existing assessment, therefore not needed to assess the skill themselves (that last bit is my interpretation, not his words).  So if we wanted to see an area improve in the curriculum, we might as a school, have a focus on associated skills which will add value to the existing content assessment?!?)

Yeah, BLP ones he gave us are his current incarnation, revised since his book. there is a reference at the top to the Expansive Education Network which is where his latest stuff is, and also hints and tips from schools using his approach.  Remember, this is taken from and English education context, so some of it is...well duh.

The last one was a nice catch phrase I thought.

Newlands have adopted this for the last 2 years, and are further along, so could be a good group to sit down and chat with.