Delighted!

I really am delighted at how well all the children and teachers are getting on in our learning community with their rich task blogs. I have this notion that the curriculum for excellence is about depth of learning and developing the skills of teachers to meet pupil needs. This rich task is doing that. It wouldn’t really have mattered what the “topic” was or even that its a rich task. The most important bit is the teachers are doing a degree of responsive planning, they have loosened the timetable and are bringing in some sensible interdisciplinary work (without the old topic web of fitting everything in whether it fitted or not), but most of all they are developing their own learning community (blogging is a tool which is helping them do this) where they and the children are interacting with each other. I hope this aspect continues to grow – its down to how useful the teachers and children find talking and sharing! I think they are finding it pretty useful and feel less isolated by doing things together at the same time – and what’s best of all is they are all doing it differently depending on their own school’s context.

So here’s my plea to those who are currently unpacking CfE outcomes. They don’t need unpacked – stick them back in their case and just use them! Don’t replace 5-14 with the same thing under a different name. Upskill on the teaching skills – no more folders of “topics” and banks of stuff. Get people sharing and working together – and dare I say it – let’s stop making new planners! Can we just do more stuff about how to teach even better?

Duncanrig Learning Community blogs

Here are the links to the blogs now going about our Africa/Malawi rich task. These are pupil blogs and I’m really pleased with how well they are getting on. Hopefully the pupils and teachers involved will feel a community of learning starting to build and will continue this in the future.

http://castlefieldrichtask.wordpress.com/

http://greenhillsp56.wordpress.com/

http://southparkrichtasks.wordpress.com/

http://mossneukp7a.wordpress.com/