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The Mind Lab by Unitec: Flipped Preparation for Week 2


A self-assessment of my 5 Key Competencies in my teaching and leadership practice. What are my strengths and weaknesses?

See here for a google doc




TED talk "What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skill"
My reflections on how 20th century and 21st-century skills differ? Do we need both?
The main takeaway for me is the message that ‘change can be hard’. Schools are risk averse - the downsides are greater than the upsides to taking a risk. I feel that this may apply more to American schools than NZ ones, but we definitely suffer from inertia, the feeling that ‘that is just the way it is done’.


But solutions to the problems we have do exist. These solutions exist in individual schools. Grant Lichtman states that although change seems hard, it is just uncomfortable. We are trying to fit the Victorian model of pedagogy into a 21st century ecosystem, and finding it won’t fit. We need to change our systems from the bottom up.
Anchors that stop us changing...
  1. Ego. This is my classroom, my subject, my time
  2. Dams - We content rather than context. Especially in post-primary, we split kids into packets
  3. Silos around ourselves - they stop us collaborating and communicating. We are inwardly focused

Cognitosphere. This is a neural network that our students will have to compete in. Most of the world now has access to the World Wide web through their cell phones.

To prepare our children for 21st-century challenges
  1. Teach into the unknown.
  2. Teach children to be self-evolving learners.
  3. We need to become self-evolving organisations. We need to be comfortable with constant change and the methodology of constant change


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