Exploring Learning

  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...

Feedback has long been recognised as one of the most significant factors influencing student achievement. Quantitative evidence, particularly from large-scale meta-analyses, consistently demonstrates that feedback interventions produce some of the highest effect sizes of any educational practice (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Wisniewski, Zierer, & Hattie, 2020). Yet, these same studies reveal a wide variation in outcomes, with some forms of feedback accelerating learning substantially, while others appear ineffective, or even detrimental. This paradox highlights a crucial challenge for educators: the mere presence of feedback is insufficient. Its impact depends on how clearly it communicates goals, how effectively it guides students’ next steps, and whether learners possess the capacity to interpret and apply it. This capacity is increasingly described as feedback literacy; the skills and dispositions students require to make sense of, use, and seek feedback to improve their learni...

In the evolving landscape of education, schools must respond to the growing complexity of factors, including rapid technological changes, shifting pedagogical expectations, and diverse student needs. These demands call for increasingly adaptive leadership models. Distributed leadership is a compelling approach, shifting leadership from hierarchical structures to a shared responsibility that leverages the expertise of multiple stakeholders. International schools offer a vibrant context for this, as their structural and pedagogical complexity, paired with diverse student populations, requires consistently agile and inclusive leadership. Middle leaders, in particular, are well-positioned to enact this vision by fostering collaboration in curriculum and assessment planning, as they straddle leadership while remaining firmly rooted at the chalkface.  This review examines how middle leaders in international schools can enact distributed leadership as a foundation for collaborative practi...

One of the greatest joys of this process has been the conversations. Teachers and students have welcomed me into their classrooms with openness and trust, and our discussions have been equally generous and insightful. This culture of dialogue, where wonderings are met with reflection and opportunity, is a bright spot in itself. It reflects our shared belief that we are already strong educators and learners,  and  we can continue to grow together. When we plan, we give shape to an intended curriculum . In our context, this sits in Stage 1 of our planners (learning goals) and Stage 2 (assessment criteria). From this, we design the taught curriculum  - Stage 3 - where sequences of learning engagements and classroom experiences bring those goals to life. But between these stages, a gap often appears. This is not unique to us; it is a familiar challenge across schools. The Balcony View In conversations with colleagues, one theme that surfaced is how easily we, as teachers...

This year, I have been a little slack on updating my blog. However, it is with good reason! This year, I have the utmost pleasure in establishing a media studies department. It is challenging to set up and run a department single-handedly, particularly when compounded with technical issues that arise from working for a company that has very tight security and imposes extreme limitations - think 'exercise yard' rather than 'walled garden'. These restrictions have resulted in a school that has been protected from the advancements afforded in more liberal environments, which proves very challenging to a subject that requires access to online resources for success. In addition, the requirements of media courses now are much more demanding than my earlier experiences, particularly in technical aspects, meaning I am on as steep a learning curve as my AS learners in taking a subject for which they have no prior experience. All this compounds to formulate a very trying term. ...

As a fairly experienced educator, I was VERY shocked at the opening statement of Wayman & Stringfield’s (2006) article that student data is an “untapped resource in helping educators diagnose student learning needs.” I find it hard to believe that teachers do not use data to plan out teaching and learning, as “data use is central to the school improvement process” (Chrispeels 1992; Earl and Katz 2002 in Wayman & Stringfield, (2006)). Thinking more closely however , I thought of a few fundamental reasons why data may not be used or may not be used effectively; namely lack of access, lack of time, and lack of training. One of the major components to why data is not used or is used but perhaps inefficiently, is due to the way it is stored and accessed. Historically, data has been collected , but storage systems effectively rendered that data “inaccessible to most practitioners” (Wayman & Stringfield, 2006) which can only “frustrate flexible analyses” (Stringfield et al. 20...