Future Learning Blog

Last year I spent plenty of time thinking and reflecting about my own practice as a classroom teacher - I developed a need to question everything I was doing - you could attribute this to the action research process, but also the necessity to understand why I was even in a classroom with other humans trying to teach them - whatever that entails, I was challenging myself with questions around what learning, knowledge or even teaching was - and why were we spending so much time doing whatever we were doing for around 8000 hours ? I had started thinking about this again as I watched an EdTalk that had just been released that was filmed during the whirlwind which was ULearn 2014.  The talk was about the learner agency work I had been focussed on, this again rekindled my ideas around the term and questioned my understanding of agency, and how I was supporting the concept in my teaching.  I feel I need to revisit this again after watching myself talk so enthusiastically abou...

This video is a summary of the work I have done around learner agency this year as part of my  +CORE Education Limited  eFellowship.  It has been an amazing year and I have had several opportunities to talk about my research, I recently returned from the #PENZ inspired leaders conference where I presented on the research panel, it was rewarding to know there were other people who were interested in what I was doing as this was a topic I chose through seeing a gap in what was known about how we could change education in traditional settings to fit a more agentic approach - there is plenty written, tweeted and blogged about around what is happening in new innovative institutions (which is great) but it can get disheartening for people who teach in schools that are not so dynamic and set up for modern learning practices. This whole process has been amazingly valuable for my students and myself, hopefully it can also be constructive for others in similar situations...

In this second instalment of the adventure Han Solo, Chewie, Luke and the droids have escaped Tatowiine and are embarking on a mission to Aldaraan to rescue Princess Leia….to keep in with the monomyth plot we are now entering the road of trials, where things will test us and many challenges await.  To read the first part of the adventure have a look at this post . This is how my brain works when I’m mapping out what has happened this year….Illustration: Andrew DeGraff  This enquiry has been a cyclical process, and at this stage as a class we have been successful in co-constructing agency, investigating metacognition, and exploring how we learn as a class - but as on

These are some of the thoughts floating around in my head on the flight home, a roaring cold southerly pushing the tiny plane and my big ideas back up to Gisborne…...The past e-fellows experience in Wellington has been a challenge, however - at this point in time I don’t feel as mentally or physically drained as on previous e-fellow trips,  we had plenty of time to synthesise our inquiry’s at the amazing beach front house we called home for 3 days.   In this trip I grappled with what true agency meant, and rolled between the notions of freedom of thought, choice and direction and the underlying aspects of effectiveness, efficiency and academic rigour - and how agency has a part to play in all of these - and is true agency ever obtainable, or is it as elusive as the green flash at that moment where the sun sinks into the ocean beside Kapiti island? This all melded together into a timely reinforcement of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how that can relate to ...

In my CORE Education e-fellowship this year I have been investigating learner agency, this blog post summarises the first steps I took during term one on my ongoing journey to enlightenment (I’m still not there yet).  I have employed an action research method for the investigation, and to help unfold the narrative of my experiences I’m going to use Joseph Campbell's traditional 'monomyth' outline as it fits well with the developments and cycles in this research process; this blog post is the introduction, the first part of the story where everyone is just milling about and life is carrying on as normal, but then something disrupts the status quo and there is no turning back.   To contextualise the media reference further, it is a bit like when Luke Skywalker is on Tatooine staying with uncle Owen and aunt Beru wishing he was somewhere else, he find’s a message in R2-D2 with Old Ben (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and before he knows it he is jumping on the Millennium falcon with Han Solo...