Posts by Mark Taylor
Kognity with Karin Bjerde. LF032
Karin Bjerde joins me on the Learning on Fire podcast and explores the most important learning and educational moments that shaped her life.
Our guest – Karin Bjerde
Karin Bjerde is Head of Strategic Growth at Kognity, and a true global citizen having lived abroad most of her life. She has been named one of the world’s 75 future global leaders by Goldman Sachs and the Institute of International Education, and is now channeling this to challenge, rethink, and ultimately improve existing norms in education, firmly believing in the power of combining technology and pedagogy. Karin has a MSc in Economics, and worked at Morgan Stanley for 4 years before joining Kognity.
Questions asked on the Learning on Fire Podcast Interview
1. Who are you?
2. What does your life look like now and how is it different from when you were growing up?
3. What was valuable about your school experience?
4. Which teachers do you remember and why?
5. Who did you admire when you were young?
6. What was it about that person that had such an impact?
7. What was the best piece of advice you have ever been given and who gave it to you?
8. What advice would you give your younger self?
9. What does your future look like?
10. What podcast, book, video, film, song or other resource has had the biggest impact on your life and why?
Resources mentioned
Contact information
Show Sponsor
National Association for Primary Education
Our aim is to achieve a higher priority for the education of children from birth to 13. High quality learning in the early years of life is vitally important to the creation of an educated society. Young children are not simply preparing for the future, they are living a never to be repeated time of life and the best way to learn is to live.
Reading for Pleasure with Prof. Teresa Cremin – NAPE 025
National Association for Primary Education in collaboration with the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, present the Annual Schiller Lecture
READING FOR PLEASURE : developing readers for life
Prof. TERESA CREMIN
The lecture will explore the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of reading and in particular will focus on how, when teachers share their reading lives and books in common with children, new and closer relationships develop reader to reader and human to human.
The Annual Christian Schiller Lecture commemorates the work of an enlightened and inspirational figure in primary education, who was especially influential in the post-War years through to his death in 1976. It is fitting that this year the lecture is to be given by Prof. Teresa Cremin, one of the most articulate and distinguished figures in primary education, whose commitment to the creative dimension in education is very much in line with Schiller’s values. Teresa has written and edited nearly 30 books, including the forthcoming Experiencing Reading for Pleasure in the Digital Age (Sage, 2019); previous examples include Writer Identity and the Teaching and Learning of Writing, Teaching English Creatively ; Researching Literacy Lives; and Building Communities of Engaged Readers. All are welcome to this event.
You can find out more about Teresa Cremin and Reading for Pleasure on the Open University website
http://www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242#tab1
https://researchrichpedagogies.org/research/team/reading-for-pleasure
National Association for Primary Education
CHRISTIAN SCHILLER CBE, MC, MA
Christian Schiller was born on the 20th September 1895. He went to a prep school and then to Gresham’s School where he was head boy. Military service in the First World War followed and he was wounded in action.
After the war he read mathematics at Cambridge and then studied with Percy Nunn at the London Day Training College before beginning his teaching career. In 1924 he was appointed HMI and then followed a long period of work with the schools in Liverpool where his
contact with poor children and their families was a deeply formative experience. He became District Inspector and later filled this role in Worcestershire.
In 1946 he became Staff Inspector for Primary Education and his influence, often in partnership with his friend Robin Tanner, HMI and etcher, was strongly felt as elementary schools developed into primary schools with a distinctive child centred approach which drew on children’s innate creativity and which recognised the powerful learning which comes from direct experience.
On his retirement in 1955 he began a new career as he created a one year course at the University of London Institute of Education for teachers and heads seconded from their schools. Each course was kept small, no more than 12 people who spent their year visiting schools and in discussion led by Schiller who often remained largely silent until he revealed his vision and optimism about the future in a brief summing up. There were no examinations or required coursework yet, as this writer will testify, everyone worked extremely hard. The course was hugely influential and most of his former students have gone on to hold senior leadership positions in education.
Christian Schiller died on the 11th February 1976. The following year the first memorial lecture was presented in London and the annual lectures, now organised by the National Association for Primary Education, continue to the present day. We are pleased to be able to celebrate the work of this great man who contributed so much to the principles and practice of primary education. To those who say look at us, obsessed with children being coached to pass tests, schools competing rather than co-operating, I reply , look more deeply , beyond today’s political froth. Schiller’s work continues and one day, will prevail.
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‘Christian Schiller in his own words’ was published by the Association in 1979. The book is available price £5.00 from the NAPE national office.
094: Reading for Pleasure – Prof. Teresa Cremin
It was my privilege to be at the NAPE Annual Schiller Lecture last week to listen to Prof. Teresa Cremin speak on the topic – Reading for Pleasure: developing readers for life.
You can find out more about Teresa Cremin on the Open University website
http://www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242#tab1
https://researchrichpedagogies.org/research/team/reading-for-pleasure
National Association for Primary Education are the sole sponsor of the Education on Fire Podcast Network and it is my pleasure to be able to share one of their events with you to support this English & literacy season.
A Story about a Catalan school.
Guest blog post by Jeremy D Rowe.
This story starts in a very unlikely way: we went to a symphony concert at Barcelona’s Auditori, with the Orquestra Simfonica de Barcelona, which was to include Brahms’s 3rd Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Before the concert started, a short video was shown about music teaching in a local school. Suddenly we were listening to (and watching) a headteacher talking about her school’s commitment to the arts, and how this enhances all the children’s learning in all other subjects.
Following the video, the first item of the concert was a co-operation between the school and the symphony orchestra. The school had worked with a guest musician to develop instrumental and vocal music, based on the Firebird, and had added some mime and dance. The piece was called “Gall de Foc”. There were about fifty children on stage: nine playing junior double basses, about a dozen on violins, and at least twenty-five plastic guitars. Through the audience came another fifty or so, dancing and singing, and going up onto the stage to join the full orchestra and their peers. The children appeared to be from years 5 and 6. I counted at least five teachers working amongst them, keeping everything going.
The performance was wonderful, with the children playing alongside the professional orchestra, and singing with Festival of Voices gusto. I cried all the way through.
The concert programme said: “The school was born in 2014 as a unique project based on all artistic languages ….. our principal objective is to create a centre working on all the arts to make a social transformation.” It’s a state school, in a working class neighbourhood near the airport. During the weekend, they did three performances (Friday evening, Saturday evening and Sunday morning).
Back home afterwards, I looked for the school on the internet, and from its website it’s possible to guess that it has a very mixed population. I discovered a large number of videos of the work going on in the school, not just music, but all the arts, and with all primary ages. ….. how wonderful to find everything we believe in alive and well in an urban school in Barcelona.
The kind of work which is vanishing from schools in the UK, the kind of work which gives children a basis for a fulfilled life, bursts from the screen in the videos you can find on YouTube. Just look up “Escola Pepa Colomer” on YouTube and see what can be done with an enthusiastic staff, and a local authority willing to fund a “radical” approach to primary education. The children are exploding with enthusiasm. These kids will not be turning to knife crime to justify their existence!
Oh, and by the way, the Auditorium gave all parents tickets for the concert for only €15 (most seats cost about €50 or more), so this venture was supported in many and various ways.
Jeremy D Rowe
April 2019
Brave Young Heroes with Bolaji Oyejide. LF031
Bolaji Oyejide joins me on the Learning on Fire podcast and explores the most important learning and educational moments that shaped his life.
Our guest – Bolaji Oyejide
Bolaji O is the creator of Brave Young Heroes – a series of 50 superhero books featuring diverse kids who find their inner strength. Despite differences like anxiety, autism, dyslexia, obesity, shyness, OCD, and more.
As Doctor Hero, Bolaji helps kids to write themselves into a heroic story.
He founded Superhero Academy: A reality role-playing adventure game that helps kids master character development by putting them right in the middle of an epic struggle for the future of childhood.
He also invented I, S.U.P.E.R. – a proprietary method for creating a confident, bully proof, growth mindset in children.
Bolaji has been featured on ABC, TEDx, the News & Observer, and school counselor conferences across the country.
Questions asked on the Learning on Fire Podcast Interview
1. Who are you?
2. What does your life look like now and how is it different from when you were growing up?
3. What was valuable about your school experience?
4. Which teachers do you remember and why?
5. Who did you admire when you were young?
6. What was it about that person that had such an impact?
7. What was the best piece of advice you have ever been given and who gave it to you?
8. What advice would you give your younger self?
9. What does your future look like?
10. What podcast, book, video, film, song or other resource has had the biggest impact on your life and why?
Resources mentioned
The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
Contact information
http://www.BraveYoungHeroes.com
http://www.Facebook.com/BraveYoungHeroes
http://www.Instagram.com/BraveYoungHeroes
Show Sponsor
National Association for Primary Education
Our aim is to achieve a higher priority for the education of children from birth to 13. High quality learning in the early years of life is vitally important to the creation of an educated society. Young children are not simply preparing for the future, they are living a never to be repeated time of life and the best way to learn is to live.