I love Prezi. I need to use it more for my own work. It is a fantastic way of providing a clear narrative to information. It’s also gradually growing in popularity and with this, becoming a great resource-bank for ideas and creative expressions of understandings of the world around us. Here’s a Prezi from Alison Blank that was tweeted by Andy @BryanstonSquare…

See the full gallery on Posterous

I’m on the road early this year and I’ve come down to the wilds of Somerset for the night. It’s not very wild, in truth, as you will see from my photos, entitled, “Table for 1”. I have been immersed in preparing for tomorrow for a long time and I love the thinking-workout it has given my brain. Tomorrow, however, I will share what has been locked away in my head for the past few months, ready to be lain bare for public/peer scrutiny.

It makes me think about what we really ask students to do when we say, “…and at the end of today’s lesson, you’ll be presenting your work to the whole class.” because it’s so much more than just sharing your work. It’s putting yourself on the line, inviting others to question, critique and risking outright dismissal of what you have invested which is, if you really care about it, of part of yourself. And now here I am, about to do the same thing and it makes me reflect upon the ways in which we prepare our very often fragile learners for this incredibly vulnerable position that peer-scrutiny puts them in, particularly at this time of year, with the rush of new relationships being established as we open our doors to the new academic year. 

I’ll be talking a lot about emotional resilience tomorrow and I am finding that the older I get, the more I seem to consider this when I talk about what makes an effective learner and how we can draw out the talents and abilities of our students. The importance of teaching to the emotional ‘age’ of learners first and foremost seems to be most critical. The emotions are the biggest keys to effective learning, ahead of the intellectual and chronological age of learners. Every time I work with educators to develop their own learning, I hear the baggage that they still have connected to certain subjects and activities, “I can’t do maths” or “I’m not creative”. 

Much of my thinking has been informed by the time I spend with my cricket club. Every Friday evening all the way through the summer, a swarm of under 9 girls and boys appear to consume the entire pitch under the watchful eyes of the tallest man in the world, Graham, our coach. Admittedly, his height is exacerbated by the cumulative stature of his charges, but, still, he is REALLY tall. More striking than this, however, is the care with which he encourages, cajoles and coaches the future cricketers of our club and it is this that is testament to his expertise as a teacher and a coach. They are all under 9 in chronological age, but his adept differentiation comes when he applies his teaching methods to the diversity of their emotional ages and resilience. To some, when they miss the ball, he shares a joke, knowing they will respond in kind. To others, their mishap is greeted with earnest words of encouragement (helped with a soft Bathonian drawl). For others, he instigates the harsh rules of the competition provoking their determined and scrunched-up faces to stare back at him, resolved to try again and get those elusive runs.

It is exactly the same differentiated approach that he employs with his other budding group of cricket stars…yes, that’ll be us, the womens team.

Our squad’s average chronological age is around 42 (oldest is 54 & youngest is 25) but we present him with a far more mixed ability proposition when it comes to our emotional resilience in this very alien situation. On Graham’s watch, however, we are met with the same differentiated provision, (and if I ever manage to upload the podcast, you’ll be able to hear from the players themselves about this!). It is this personalised approach of our very own gentle giant that encourages us to return to training twice a week, all learning and laughing together, in a safe-to-fail environment. Progress is unavoidable, (as is occasional injury, but this is always the fault of our depressingly obvious and conscious incompetence).

In the most effective practice, this is exactly what I observe and hear about as I meet educators from around the country. People who are skilled in the art of establishing just such an emotionally differentiated learning environment, creating their very own ‘tall learning man environment’ in schools and colleges. It is here that learning is differentiated along these lines of emotional resilience and where the positive emotional tags are created and learning really is memorable. 

This post was inspired by some of my twitter buddies…

“EdintheClouds RT @gippopippo: Mini-lecture: The#neuroscience of laughter (that creates empathy & communication before language). http://is.gd/efQqS>> :-)”

To mark my 50th post, I thought I’d post about the importance of accommodating human emotions in our thinking about learning. I find that when I hear people talk about ’emotional literacy’ in the classroom, they are often referring to developing an awareness of ‘negative’ emotions in the classroom and a need to avoid those emotional outbursts that lead to conflict, discomfort or barriers to learning. Whilst I acknowledge the importance of recognising this particular aspect of emotional awareness in the learning environment, I like to think about emotional literacy in a holisitic way. In doing so, I seek to actively encourage positive emotional ‘outbursts’ or expressions as an integral part of learning.

I know that I still have my own barriers to certain subjects or activities that hang over me like a spectre from my own school experiences becasue I am yet to shake off the negative emotional ‘tags’ that I still associate with them. Many of my friends and colleagues share similar reactions when asked to do some maths, draw a picture, write at length or get involved in the most-dreaded of all adult learning activities: role play. 

Through my research exploring creativity over the years, one fundamental message keeps shouting its way through to me and that is the importance of FEELING safe and brave enough to try express our positive emotions and have constructive emotional ‘outbursts’ when we experience something new, unfamiliar or simply something that we haven’t done for a while.

Being the ideas magpie that I am, one idea always sparks a new quest and curiosity so after I’d seen the first film, I researched ‘the science of laughter’ and I came across this short film. This suggests that COLLABORATIVE laughter is the most powerful, requiring groups to be formed to share the joke publicly and together in order to illicit laughter from a united community of laughing.

So yet again, collaboration and community contexts appear to me the most likely settings for us to share, interact and experience positive powerful emotions. It looks good for all those collaborative learning experiences I’ve got planned for the new academic year!

I hope you enjoy them both and that they pose some questions about how we might go about deliberately incorporating positive emotional reactions and ‘tags’ to learning experiences. Perhaps it requires us to ask our students what makes them laugh and why, as part of students’ feedback on how they learn and how we teach? More for me to do on this, as ever, but this is a start, and that, after all, where all our learning begins.

I’ve really enjoyed the recent surge in connections I’ve been able to make thanks to a great initiative started on twitter using a hashtag-link 

to generate a list of all educators in one place. I found out about all this through @PrimaryPete_  who explains all of this far more eloquently than me on his blog here. Basically, the hashtag sets up a blastfollow site (a shared search page), so that when you tweet, you include #twittereducator in your tweet, your tweet will appear on the list, along with your Twitter name and you will be able to connect with even more ‘tweeps’ from the fabulous range of global twitter-educators. As a result, you will then make even more learning connections to enrich your Personal Learning Network just by going to this page.

It has worked really well for me this week, and I wanted to reflect on this by including just TWO examples (of many) that demonstrate the impact of this #twittereducator  project for me. I’ve framed my statement with a simple impact-sentence stem that I use when undertaking focused reflective practice with learners (educators & students alike) to talk about key influences and influencers for them and to analyse the impact these have had on their learning.

“As a result of #twittereducator, I have now connected with…

1. Some spectacular resources on pedagogical research and practice, plus some great links to educators in New Zealand who have conducted 

some excellent action research around the Key Competencies. These people and resources all connect brilliantly with the learning that I am involved with at the moment, looking at the relationship between skills, knowledge & understanding and dispositions in the secondary curriculum.

2. I have also connected with @pdonaghy who has suggested that I check out and register my blog on the International Edubloggers Directory, which I didn’t know about before this link, and, probably more importantly, would never have had the confidence to even consider registering with until this tweet was sent to me.”

It will be interesting to hear about the impact that the blastfollow has had on other twitter-educators over the next few weeks, but thank you to the whole educator-community for being so innovative and collaborative when it comes to harnessing the power of twitter once more.

I’ll be able to post more about this when I’ve pulled some of it together in a more coherent form, but for now, I really am on holiday, and for those who know me well…

‘…it’s all about learning…’ so Inever really stop.

It’s a shame that the frenetic nature of schools often makes it really difficult to be reflexive in our practice. Note, I say ‘difficult’, not impossible. Truth be told, however, I’m shattered and really looking forward to an easing of pace now our school communities have dispersed. I’ve got quite a few presentations to pull together for next term and two whole staff INSET sessions to deliver right at the start of the academic year, so I’m looking forward to tidying these up this week, finalising the resources for them and putting them to bed before my two week holiday at the start of August.

In the meantime, I will enjoy the reading time I now have and start thinking about books I want to take on holiday. These will include John Hattie’s Visible Learning and I recommend getting the book…my copy is looking very well-thumbed and scruffy.

In addition, with a new role beginning for me in September, I’ve just stumbled across ‘Multipliers’ by Wiseman and McKeown which came out on 1st July but I bought on my new iPhone4 in the iBooks application…which I am also loving – fabulous for keeping and reading pdf documents. Anyway, I’m off to begin the down-shift into a lower gear and to do some reading.

Happy holidays, all.