teaching and learning

I tend to be a little skeptical sometimes about the ACER presentations, centered as they so often are around research, and not real life as it is lived. However, Geoff Masters presentation, Realising the promise of education in the 21st Century, was able to bridge that gap between research and practice.

Masters reiterated how well Australian students do internationally in tests such as PISA (outperformed only by Finland in reading literacy) but reminded the audience that Australia has a low secondary school completion rate (I didn’t realise that it was as low as 62% compared with 88% for USA, but also that Australia has gaps in learning outcomes. Interestingly, rather than focus on the socio-economic, ethno-centric or NESL status Masters argued that group based intervention hasn’t worked and that good learning is good learning. His advice was summarised as:

1. Focus teaching and learning opportunities on individuals and where they are at.
2. Begin with the belief that every child is capable of high achievement
3. Identify each child’s current learning needs (level of knowledge, learning style etc)
4. Develop better ways of diagnosing individual needs and better ways of monitoring a child’s progress across the years of school.
5. Address individual learning needs with evidence-based strategies (recognise that there is a teacher knowledge base, and learn from it)
6. Identify learning needs as early as possible
7. Provide a safe, cooperative, learning based (not competition based), risk-taking learning environment
8. Find ways to involve families and the wider community

I wasn’t able to find this presentation in the list of presentations from the conference. It may be up at a later date.

Powered by ScribeFire.