Learning Styles Rock Poland

Earlier this week, Barbara Prashnig caused an outbreak of public excitement when she addressed the audience of the First Neuro-didactics Conference in Poland. Learning Styles, it seems, is exactly what the Polish education system needs in order to overcome forty years of communism followed by three decades of not knowing how to apply the political freedom to bring about a learning revolution.

The attendees of the conference hope to shape the necessary changes in education systems around the world and find answers to the following questions:

·        Do today's schools facilitate or hinder brain function?     

·        Why do students lose their motivation to learn?     

·        Does it make sense to focus learning on testing outcomes?     

·        Is student potential realised in school?     

·        Does school help students develop a positive self-image and build self-confidence?

Creative Learning and Learning Styles will be behind them all the way.

 

Our Company Turns 20!

That's right! Creative Learning Systems is now twenty years old. Scary how time has flown. We've survived the Big Auckland Blackout of 1998, the introduction of NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) in 2002, the Global Recession of 2008-2009, and the birth of National Standards in 2010.

We've had several website looks and we've added heaps of new products to our offering. Our client list expanded to include Carter Holt Harvey, Bell South, Air New Zealand, Flight Centre, University of Auckland Graduate School of Business, Nokia (Finland), Northland Health, TV New Zealand, Motorola, and many others.
We could spend many happy hours philosophising about the two decades of fun. We could recount all the highlights. Not that we're not tempted, but what we thought we'd do instead is to celebrate our success with you.

More about that in next week's blog.

New Productivity Rules... Or Are They?

Business consultant, Gihan Perera, has this to say about our productivity:

"The old rules of goal setting, productivity and time management don’t work. Our goals become meaningless when the environment changes, it’s difficult to stay productive when we’re constantly interrupted, globally dispersed teams make in-person meetings impractical, and the 9-to-5 workday just doesn’t make sense anymore. The new principles for high performance and super productivity are direction (rather than goals), signals (rather than interruptions), collaboration (rather than meetings), and flow (rather than time management)."

All the new terminology. Sounds scary, doesn't it? The good news is, it shouldn't. Although the words are different, we at Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions have been advocating them for decades. We agree with Gihan Perera that the golden rules include:

• Working when your energy levels are high (this may mean morning for some of us, evening for others) - check your own Working Style to see how to increase your productivity.
• Process information faster and more effectively - your Working Style will help you do it in an optimal way.
• Collaborate - this will come to you easier if your Working Style has a preference for working in groups.
• Manage your email and mobile phone interruptions - if your Working Style allows global information processing, so much the better.
• Know the direction and the destination.

Work smarter. Work with your Working Style.

What's better - books or reading online?

There's no doubt about it: exposure to fiction is essential for developing children's imagination. In a way, it matters less whether the format is listening to a book, reading together with a parent or reading by themselves, just as long as they get lost in the imaginary world of book characters.

We usually include e-books and online reading in the same set: as long as it's a book, it doesn't matter whether it's on paper or on the Kindle. However, as early as 2006, an eye-tracking study by scientists at the US-based research group, Nielsen Norman, indicated that people read web pages and books on iPads in an “F” pattern. This means that they scan the top line all the way, then halfway across the next few lines, and then only down the left side of the page, all the way down to the bottom of the article.

This kind of reading is helpful when we're trying to form a quick overview of the text (non-fiction reading), but it doesn't work to yield a deeper understanding of what we’re reading. Wall Street Journal had this to say: "as much as rich multimedia-laden content captures our attention, with a mixture of words, sounds, and moving gifs, videos and image galleries, studies have shown that together they can lead to lower comprehension than just reading plain text."

Something to ponder, for sure, especially if your Learning Style is visual.

Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society

This blog post is a tribute not only to Robin Williams, but also to all the great teachers out there. In the movie "Dead Poets Society", Williams played the role of John Keating, an unconventional English Literature teacher. John Keating's teaching style - it involved tearing "boring bits" out of textbooks - would have horrified sequential thinkers and delighted simultaneous ones. (To read more about Learning Styles, please click here.)

Some famous John Keating quotes include:

• When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think.
• No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
• We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer: that you are here; that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

John Keating was their inspiration. He made their lives extraordinary. He was a real teacher.

Finland and South Korea - The Best Education

Recently, Finland and South Korea were proclaimed the two countries with the best education systems. Shocking? Indeed. You would be pressed to find two countries so different in their philosophy towards learning, and yet, both systems yield results.

The differences are staggering. South Korea has large classes and relies heavily on hard work and repetition. Finland has tiny classes with very few school hours, withe the emphasis placed on students thriving outside the school.

There is only one similarity we could find: in both countries, teaching is a highly respected profession. Could the answer to the world's schooling problems be as simple as that?

Best Learning Quotes

“Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.” – George Evans

“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” – Plato

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin

“A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.”
― John Grogan, Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog 

 

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” ― Robert Frost

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela

“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky