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 ...