HPSS - Day 1

The day finally arrived. Even though I'd been so excited about it in the lead up, and getting nervously restless over the past few days, the first day still did come as a bit of a shock. At one point I even found myself longing for the comfort of the familiar. The old place where I knew where everything was and what I was supposed to do.

One thing hasn't changed (much) though - Amos is still Amos!

So what did I learn from today?

The kids are already 21st century learners – that’s when they were born.

• Nearly as much as considering that it has been 20 years since I was in 6th form, that freaked me out a little. We don't need to worry bout turning our students into 21st century learners anymore - they're already here. As Russell always tells me - we can't look at our students' future through old eyes - through our past. Their world is different, and we have to adapt to them.

Netflix, Amazon, Air BnB, Uber, Spotify et al are all responding to the modern demand for personalisation.

• Schools can’t expect to be free from that demand.
  The world is changing quickly but schools aren’t changing quickly enough.
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  Don’t leave it too late to respond to change.

Kids are not inspired by shallow learning.
Like it on the edge.
They like rigourous, challenging learning - that is more engaging for them than constantly being entertained and not active participants who are discovering new things for themselves. I'm always reminded of Picasso's criticism of this: We educate kids out of creativity. Something I'm always so aware of.



LEARNING DESIGN
Making things is still fun. For years I've had playdough in my room to engage all the senses and build learning. Today, presented with pipecleaners and pompoms and jigsaws and string and... Making the concepts - connected, deep, and visible - was fun. It was fun because it was challenging.

CONSISTENCY
Having a language that is familiar to everyone all the way through the school has been something that I've always felt important. It brings clarity for everyone - staff and students - when we all know what it means.
I love how I see this being achieved at HPSS - the key verbs are visible everywhere. Time is put into explaining to students what they mean for different subjects. An example was "Test" in science could mean to carry out an experiment and see if what you thought would happen actually happened, whereas to "test" in English might be to see if what you wrote actually communicates your purpose or intention to the reader.

From there, lunch (Mmmm - highly recommend the crispy duck salad at Catalina Cafe), timetables, computers, and logins. And though I had my pick of computers, hybrids are me. So, in a school full of macbook pros and airs, I will be the HP hybrid, writing on the screen of my computer with my pen.

It was a full day.
It was a busy day.
It was a good day.

And I'm grateful for the reminder of blogging to help me to process the day, in preparation for tomorrow.