It was refreshing to listen to what Guy Claxton had to say in the video embedded below (shared by Derek Wenmoth and cross-posted in full below). His pragmatic stance that, while students need to achieve in assessment, they also need to develop and use metacognitive and social skills (key competencies), made a lot of sense. I did have to laugh at his anecdote of a maths teacher grumbling that not only did he have to teach his students maths, he now had to teach them how to think.... Highly recommended.
One tiny grumble...and less irritating in a video, Guy does have a tendency to read the quotations from his slides in full. But, hey!

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Original post "Can schools prepare you for anything?", by Derek Wenmoth, April 18th 2012.
I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of attending the 2012 Graham Nuthall Annual Lecture at Canterbury University where I heard Guy Claxton present an engaging talk titled 'Can Schools Prepare You For Anything?' His abstract read:

Traditional education aims to raise standards by any means, but we are coming to see that preparing young people for tests, and preparing them for life, are different goals. How do we deepen learning so that it systematically builds the learning dispositions that the next generation will need? As work on ‘key competencies’ and ‘21st century skills’ evolves it is becoming clearer just what it takes to raise standards in a way that helps kids be ready for anything.

In Guy's typical provocative and well informed style, he challenged us to think more critically about many of the things we're carrying forward from our traditional education system, and to think more creatively about how we might conceive of and implement a truly 21st century approach where we maintain the focus on a future-focused curriculum as well as raising standards for learners.
As with all of these sorts of talks, there was so much to take in and reflect on, but thanks to the team at EdTalks we can all enjoy the change to view Guy's talk again and engage in a bit of 'rewind learning'!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2012 at 7:1