1. Perceptions about assessment vary wildly from administrators to teachers to students. At its worst and in the boldest of terms, admins see assessment as accountability, teachers see assessment as a summative statement and student see assessment as punitive and perverse. The grand, missed opportunity here is that assessment, in its truest sense, can be the most powerful tool for learning. This is framed by deep questions about knowing, such as “How do we know that we have learned what we need to learn?”

2. The usual way of organising learning goes like this: curriculum, aims, objectives, pedagogy, assessment. In this model, it is almost natural that assessment is an afterthought, barely related to the lofty purpose of the curriculum. The danger is that assessment, looked at in this way, becomes a ‘checking’ of content, rather then a driver of learning. Hersh asserts a model which places assessment alongside curriculum as the starting point of planning, prior to any other of the mechanical processes of education. This, then becomes two powerful questions: 1. What is it that students need to know and be able to do? and 2. How will we and they know that they do know and can do these things?

Many of you would have heard me speak of assessment as being the driver for learning and curriculum design. The research projects are a great opportunity for use to give assessment the profile it deserves as a life-centred and meaning making process which runs as a rich seam through learning.

They headed in to this new year with the resources to study, measure, design and implement a plan to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Using the principles which underpin the NSW Quality Teacher Framework, these leaders and their teams will create a cycle of action learning as courageous and innovative as their imaginations will allow.

This blog, and the associated wiki is the repository for our research.

70 hours! Imagine how many questions you could ask in 70 hours! Imagine how much our students could tell us if we listened with intent to their voices! Imagine how we could grow as teachers if we took the time to read, reflect, argue and dream.

Any teacher will tell you time is precious – but this time is sacred.

My daughter and I just had a look through her Bebo site (social networking). We checked that there was no identifying information on there (there was!) and who was hanging around.

This is not a fear post about the dangers of 50 year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls. She told me how people seem so much more polite online than at school. This was surprising. People who usually don’t have much to say face to face are happy to engage in conversation through Bebo or MSN.

I’d love a crystal ball to see how social networking will be leveraged into learning in the future. It is not a matter of if, but how. Shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of possibilities and potentials, instead of only risks and dangers?

Makes you wonder if problem based learning would solve many of the engagement problems teachers report having in their classrooms.  Boys, in particular, love the idea that their work will produce something real.  Many schools around the world have embraced Problem Based Learning (PBL) as their entire curriculum including New Tech High School in California, Eltham College in Victoria and Canningvale in WA.  In these schools, the problem IS the curriculum.

With such powerful technological tools at our disposal, it seems a waste not to employ these students and their computers, phone and iPods in collaborative activities that confront real world problems and create real quality products and solutions.

That’s what the Tournament of Minds teams do every year.  Congratulations, Rebecca.