The Art of Learning

2017 looks like another big year with lots of courses planned for teachers, students and parents in all parts of the world, new resources to create, new books to write and (hopefully) a totally new, more useful, more accessible and more up-market website.

Eric's work expanded hugely in 2016 and in 2017 he will be powering ahead with lots more courses in French and in English and he is working on Spanish as well.

My books and courses are also being translated into Mandarin at the moment and we are looking at a big expansion into China and the rest of Asia over the next few years.

2016 saw the completion of my student workbook of ATL skills for MYP. This is a workbook for students, one ATL book to last them all their MYP years. This workbook gives them simple exercises they can complete, by themselves or in class to practise all the 134 ATL skills listed in the MYP ATL framework.

Once all MYP students in any school have a copy of this workbook, ATL programme design and implementation becomes an incredibly simple exercise. See my ATL page for details "The Easy Way to Design Your Own ATL Programme"

I now have over 1000 IB teachers currently subscribed to my ATL page - please give me your email address if you would like to join.

Always working hard to improve our service and make ourselves redundant if we can - like all teachers do.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FAILING WELL

A study of intellectually gifted students at a New Zealand high school has revealed one significant factor that distinguishes the highest achievers from the lowest achievers.

This factor was 100% significant - present in all the highest achievers and absent in all the lowest achievers.

This factor was their ability to fail well.

The Discovery:

From 2006-2008 as part of the requirements for my Masters degree, I was lucky enough to get to work with a wonderful group of GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) students in my local high school. The group included students from all grades, from 13-18 years old, all bright, interesting and interested and a pleasure to work with. My investigation was into any links between their resilience and their academic performance.

Their resilience was gauged using a standard questionnaire approach focused on measuring both their Locus of Control (LOC) and Learned Helplessness (LH) orientations.

During the study all the students sat a major end-of-year examination in their school subjects. Based on their exam results their teachers then classified them into either the High Achiever, Achiever or Underachiever group of students.

My first discovery was that with these students there was no connection at all between their academic success and their resilience. Some helpless, external LOC kids were succeeding well and some resilient, internal LOC kids were bombing out.

See more...

[More... Opens in a new window]

Welcome to the Art of Learning