Co-operative Education East is the first post-COVID client to specifically use Cooperative Learning to manifest a trust-wide coherency that will support the unique ethos of their individual schools'; CEO Paul Bunn shares some of his thoughts in this five-minute interview. First of all, I'm very happy that Drew Howard and I finally have a publication... Continue Reading →
Bouncing back from COVID with Cooperative Learning #1
Eons ago (in 2019), Cooperative Learning was being embraced by schools as a cost-effective way to improve academic performance and social skills that effortlessly operationalised the key themes found in the new Inspection Framework. However, the pandemic has added entirely new levels of value and utility, and some degree of urgency, to the adoption of... Continue Reading →
Cafés are wonderful – but don’t try one at home
I am pleased to republish this article by Dr Peter Atkinson, warning those who believe that it is a simple thing to facilitate a successful Knowledge Café, let alone the much more complex venture of Co-Creative Conversation (compared here). This article is a natural addendum to the third article in the Corona Conversation series describe... Continue Reading →
Corona Conversations #3: Lessons from a Co-Creative Conversation; Why it actually isn’t just talk.
This is the third of three articles originally published on Medium.com in connection with the public Corona Conversations in April and May 2020 by Dr Steve Ellis and myself tackling sense- and decision-making, agency and collaboration in the post-pandemic world. If the future of all communication in the pandemic-prone world is online, we need to... Continue Reading →
Corona Conversations #2: Stick a pin in your filter bubble; On the value of talking to people you disagree with
5 min read This is the second of three articles originally published on Medium.com in connection with the public Corona Conversations in April and May 2020 by Dr Steve Ellis and myself tackling sense- and decision-making, agency and collaboration in the post-pandemic world. On the brink of the new millennium, a young duo trapped in a... Continue Reading →
Corona Conversations #1: “But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little virus said.
7 min read This is the first of three articles originally published on Medium.com in connection with the public Corona Conversations in April and May 2020 by Dr Steve Ellis and myself tackling sense- and decision-making, agency and collaboration in the post-pandemic world. ____________ LIKE the little boy in the H.C. Andersen story, the Coronavirus has... Continue Reading →
University of the future – A Knowledge Café at Regent’s
Yesterday I had the exquisite pleasure of attending the first of David Gurteen's new series of open Knowledge Cafés. The event took place in the surreally beautiful oasis of Regent's University London, which I approached at dusk with the sense of entering a DreamWorks version of a wizard's boarding school, replete with wild and ancient... Continue Reading →
Creating a High-Performance culture: Powerful systems or empowered people?
One of my new partners, Dragonfly Training, has the same idea as me. Call it the belief that there is some form of logical progression between being a child and being an adult and that the world of schooling and world of work have something to offer each other. Turns out they do. This theme... Continue Reading →
Picking off the 7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching: #3 “No time for practice”
Engineering enough fine-grained practice before moving on. Third in the series. Cooperative Learning does not magically generate more minutes in your lesson. It does, however, increase what you get out of the minutes that you do have: Henderson Green Primary Academy, "the worst school in Norwich" two years after their first Cooperative Learning inset. There... Continue Reading →
Picking off the 7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching: #2 “Some get it; some don’t.”
Second in the series of 2 minute reads on how Cooperative Learning takes out each of the 7 deadly difficulties in teaching summarised by Tom Sherrington. Here comes the ogre of "Diverging attainment." Deadly Difficulty #2: Some get it; some don’t. Diverging attainment. In a sense, divergent attainment can be more difficult than when the... Continue Reading →