Teaching for Learning - Paul Ginnis 22-23/03/08

Finished parent conferences this week and wanted to make some notes about the Paul Ginnis course I attended at NIST, Bangkok last weekend.

...so many good ideas, but I got a much better understanding of:

• constructivism being the theory behind how an individual child puts knowledge together in a way which s/he understands the best, and this is affected by
  
• Learning styles - the way learners concentrate on, process and retain new information. Do teachers teach too much using their own prefererred learning style?
• Gregorc's mind styles takes this further and categorises 4 types of learning styles by looking at the way people perceive and order information. Concrete random, Concrete Sequential, Abstract Sequential and Abstract Random.

A couple of quotes from the course stick out in my mind:

"Neurologically, passive learning cannot take place"

"random (in the Gregorc sense of the word!) learners don't fit the systems that schools love so much"

"the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth of the hole"

"we forget to physicalise their learning as they (children or maybe Concrete Sequential children) get older"

"three is the magic number"

"problems create the natural environments within which generic learning (metacognition / thinking skills) can occur"