Exploring Learning

  Why collaborative planning and responsive teaching need each other There is a tension in teaching that I keep returning to. We need to plan well. We need coherent curriculum, shared learning intentions, thoughtful assessment, and collaborative decisions about how we will design learning. Yet once students enter the room, the plan cannot become the thing we are trying to protect. The plan is not the learning. Perhaps a better way to think about it is that the plan is our best shared hypothesis about how learning might happen . Then teaching begins, and we find out. Planning matters This distinction matters because responsive teaching should not be an argument for everyone doing their own thing. Collaborative planning is fundamental to creating a coherent experience for students. Teams need shared clarity about what students are learning, the conceptual understandings that matter, what successful learning might look like and the experiences likely to help students get there. Marsch...

  At the end of the last academic year, I wrote about the work of untangling the threads . I reflected on several years of sustained work to create greater clarity and coherence across curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, and collaboration.  When I first stepped into my role in 2022, many of those elements felt like threads within a tangled ball. They were all connected, but it was not immediately clear which thread to pull first, or whether pulling too hard in one direction might tighten the knot elsewhere. I decided to begin with the written curriculum. Not because documentation itself was the goal, but because shared clarity about what students should understand, know, and be able to do provides the foundation for everything else. It allows teachers to make more purposeful decisions about learning design, assessment, feedback, access and challenge. It creates a common language for collaboration and helps connect what is intended, what is taught, what is assessed, and what stud...

  This week’s readings on instructional design for digital learning prompted me to think carefully about how different teaching strategies sit within an inquiry-based school context. In my setting, inquiry is not optional. It is part of our shared pedagogical approach, although we use the Marshall and French inquiry cycle rather than the 5E model outlined in some of the course materials. Even so, the underlying principles are closely aligned. Both approaches value curiosity, investigation, sense-making, reflection, and application. What I found most useful this week was not the introduction of entirely new strategies, but the opportunity to distinguish more precisely between strategies that are often grouped together. Inquiry-based learning, discovery-based learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, game-based learning, gamification, and immersive learning are all related, but not interchangeable. Each carries different assumptions about the roles of the teacher and ...

As the year draws to a close, I have found myself thinking a great deal about the work of change. Not the kind of change that comes quickly, loudly, or neatly, but the kind that takes time. The kind that requires patience, persistence, careful listening, and the willingness to keep returning to the purpose of the work, even when the pathway is complex. Over the last few weeks, I have been deeply moved by messages from parents, colleagues, and students. A parent who has seen several children move through Middle School over many years shared that the experience now feels noticeably different: clearer, more cohesive, more intentional. Another parent reflected that they had never felt as heard as they have this year and valued the openness to feedback, dialogue, and improvement. A colleague shared that the learning culture they see among students is not accidental but has been shaped across the school. A student wrote that school felt like a place where they were heard, known, and able to ...

Conversations about technology in schools often begin from a place of legitimate concern. Families and educators are right to ask questions about distraction, wellbeing, social media, sleep, attention, and the amount of time young people spend in front of screens. These concerns should not be dismissed. They matter because children’s digital lives are complex, and schools have a responsibility to think carefully about how technology shapes learning, relationships, identity, and wellbeing.  However, one distinction is often blurred: Unmanaged recreational screen use is not the same as intentionally designed digital learning. Passive scrolling is not the same as collaborative inquiry. Social media consumption is not the same as learners using digital tools to research, create, communicate, receive feedback, organise ideas, or participate in meaningful communities. When all screen-based experiences are treated as the same, schools risk making decisions based on anxiety rather than on ...

From Brain-Based Learning to Heutagogy: Designing Agency With Care How do we design learning that develops agency without assuming learners are already fully independent? In my research this week, I found myself returning to the same question: how do we design learning that supports agency without assuming that learners are already fully self-directed or self-determined? The readings move from brain-based learning, to the space between pedagogy and andragogy, to the history of andragogy, and finally to heutagogy. Taken together, they challenge the idea that teaching and learning models can be neatly organised by age or stage. Instead, I see that they suggest effective learning design depends on context, readiness, purpose, motivation, and the kind of support learners need to grow. Jang et al. (2022) provide a useful starting point, reminding me that learning design needs to be grounded in how learning actually occurs. Their review of brain-based learning research highlights the import...

Belonging is not granted after learners prove they can access the curriculum. Belonging is created through the way curriculum, instruction, assessment, relationships, and evidence-informed responses are designed. That idea has been sitting with me deeply. In schools, we often talk about belonging as something relational, cultural, or pastoral. Whilst it is, of course, all of those things, I also think belonging is a curriculum and learning design issue. Learners experience belonging, or exclusion, through the tasks they are given, the examples they see, the feedback they receive, the ways they are invited to participate, and the assumptions adults make about what they can do. Inclusion, then, cannot sit only in intervention structures or individual support plans. These matter, of course; some learners need targeted and specialist support, and schools need strong systems to provide it. But if inclusion begins only after a learner struggles, we have already accepted a design problem as a...