A bit of quality-improvement poetry from Michelangelo: “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals”. I love this; it seems far richer than my version: ‘A learning outcome should set out how you intend your learners to be ‘different’ by the end of the lesson’. Both, however, have the strong potential to challenge the practice of writing effective learning outcomes. It this ‘Learning Outcomes for Independent Learning’ session, we’ll […]

[You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/SSxlxcHptJg] In his 1970s book ‘Future Shock’, Alvin Toffler wrote: “By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education…Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” By contrast, in the 21st Century, Ofsted told Birmingham Met College to: “Improve the progress that all students make at level 3, by ensuring that […]

There’s something very special about training at this time of year, on any subject, but particularly self assessment. Formal teaching is still going on, and learning cultures and study routines are all, hopefully, working their magic – helping learners fly evermore independently towards the end of the year. The mad rush of assignment deadlines, marking and those extra one-to-one support sessions haven’t hit their high point either.. (I hope this isn’t sounding too utopian!) So now is the perfect time […]

On Tuesday, March 30th, we’ll be unpicking the four common issues that can ruin your development plan. ‘Perfecting Development Plan Writing’ is an engaging and interactive online workshop that has its roots in the analysis of thousands of providers’ development plans. The session uses some wonderful online collaborative tools to help give delegates a new lens through which to see their development plan – or to confirm what they might already have suspected.. And did you know who one of […]

At the beginning of last month, I learnt the term ‘Connectivism’. The lovely irony of this was that I learnt it when I pulled together a team of FE professionals to form the ‘Learning Theory Research Group‘. The ‘lovely irony’ was that the process of connecting with this team was, itself, a Connectivist approach. An approach, I have to say, that I’ve loved long before learning the term. The group kindly contributed to my work on ‘A Unified Theory of […]