Don Ledingham’s Learning Log

 
I was listening to someone recently who was talking about educational attainment in Scotland and the need to close the gap between our lowest attaining children and the rest - our 20%. This goal has taken on a mantra-like term in Scottish education - although much easier to say than to do.
The additional comment was [...]

sculpting.ppt
I’ve been invited to lead two seminars on the Seven Sides of Educational Leadership at the Association of Headteachers and Deputes Scotland national conference this Friday.  Here’s an outline of what I might be doing. Learning Intention – We are going to learn how to use the seven sides of educational leadership to help us [...]

 
It’s peculiar how sometimes things just seem to come together in an unexpected and unplanned manner but I had a meeting today where that very thing happened - and I would put it down in no small part to the discipline of keeping a Learning Log.
The various elements of this web of connections are as [...]

I came across this critical finding from the unesco research report I’ve been reviewing:
“One way to consider these results is that there is a critical transition from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”. For most students this happens at about age 8 or 9, typically by the end of the third grade. If children are not able to [...]

 
In my last post I considered the possibility of learning intention being the point at which the teacher’s intention and the learners interpretation of the intention come together. In order to explore this further I’ve had a go at an example:
I walk into a room as a teacher with a specific intention in mind – e.g. I [...]

Up until last week I’d been using teacher intention and learning intention as interchangable terms.
However, when I was took part in a discussion with our newly qualified teachers last week I began to wonder if they might actually be different - or at least one being a sub-set of the other?
Ann McLanachan made very useful [...]

 
We had our neighbours round last night. Chris works for IBM and was telling me that he had just been at  virtual conference with colleagues from around the world. He had used his own avatar and attended the conference in Second Life on an island which IBm had created.
Checking it our today I found a link [...]

I’ve been reviewing a Research paper from UNESCO “Learning Divides: ten policy questions about the performance and equity of school and schooling systems”

The paper uses results from Wilms and Somers, 2001, which explored the relationship between results from Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and socioeconomic status.
Not surprisingly, in every country [...]

 
I led the first session on Learning and Teaching with Newly Qualified Teachers in East Lothian this afternoon.  This is the third year that I’ve been asked to run this session and each year I’ve tried to move on from the previous year.
My intention was to influence the teachers to always reflect on the connection [...]

Intellectual chat - (Mark Walker is in the centre of the photo)
I received an unexpected, yet very welcome, comment on my Log today from someone I’d met at Harvard in the summer (had I mentioned I’d been in Harvard?)
Mark Walker and I had I struck up a mutually abusive friendship during the course which our [...]