Headteachers meeting, Ayasofia Primary: “Facilitating 21st century skills through Cooperative Learning”

For attendees and those who missed the term’s Muslim headteachers’ meeting: Please find links to materials and topics covered in my presentation “Facilitating 21st century skills through Cooperative Learning.”

From the presentation:

Dual crisis

In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, two there are two crisis:

In education i.e. results in relation to business survivability AND crisis in community cohesion and cultural DNA, both locally and on the globalized arena. PIC As for the first, Poor results must be seen in relation to our education system generally struggling with systemic issues preventing it from meeting the requirements set by DfE in relation attainment – in spite of the continuing lowering of test standards – and UK business routinely complaining that school leavers have neither the practical nor personal skills required by increasing globalised competition. The critique of the education system abounds from teachers, researchers, parents, and include accusations of being outmoded, to controlled, management issues, too goals driven, not concerned with humane education, etc.

In spite of initiatives to improve “emotional health and wellbeing” such as The National Healthy School Standard, the vision of the current primary and secondary school system is restricted to the A-C band of GCSEs, with a functional human being as a wholly accidental – and rare – bi-product. Quoting Tesco director Lucy Neville-Rolfe verdict on school-leavers: “They don’t seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping … Some seem to think that the world owes them a living.”

On a social level, this disenfranchisement of our youth indicates that UK secondary education simply does not equip young adults to handle life as it looks in the 21st Century.

As for the second, and highly related to the first as we shall see, the crisis in community cohesion and cultural DNA, it is immensely more important, as it relates to the worldwide undermining of social cohesion brought upon by postmodernism and amplified by globalization, leading to chaos and disenfranchisement as traditional narratives fail to provide valid identity formation.

Related links and resources

Slides in Google Docs

21st Century British Muslim course and the ensuing evaluation of the course.

As for Bologna process and Tony Wagner’s book “Global Achievement Gap” you will find more details in Thinking children are the future? – Cooperative Learning & (Higher Level) Thinking (and werdelin.co.uk, under “21c Skills – the new paradigm of education”)

The video interview library from Stalham Academy is found here.

A Deputy Head response after observing my own teaching with cooperative learning our new mosque outreach programme Enquiry & Immersion is is found here.

For more information on Cooperative Learnong in relation to community builiding see Healing Fractures Ii –  Beyond Birmingham.

A number of posts on the Sutton Trust report on collaborative learning strategies and pupil premium is found here. Links to the report in Stalham Academy Head on: Cooperative Learning & the Sutton Trust on Pupil Premium.

I am hoping to upload at least some of the video shot during the session. Get notifications on twitter.