As a teacher, I found Curious Minds episode 41 with Liz Wiseman on Why Learning Beats Knowing, sparked a number of ideas that connected with my recent posts emphasising the need for self-learning practice in schools over that of receiving teaching. Liz explains with numerous examples, why a ‘rookie’ approaches problems and projects from possibly a better starting point than an expert might. I thought I’d offer you my takeaways from this podcast (although I highly recommend listening to the whole thing). Liz’s book is available here.
Be Rookie smart not Expert smart
The most important role a teacher has theses days is to model learning and encourage curiosity. If we continue to base classroom practice around our expert status, we present ourselves as the endpoint of any expectation or debate. Teachers develop better learners when they model trial & error. Nurturing a classroom culture where everyone, including the teacher, is in a constant state of personal development means expectations and possibilities are left open-ended rather than fixed to the teacher’s ‘correct answers’.
Hide your inner expert to inspire your rookies
Rookies make for better learners than experts.- Ability to learn has more value than what you know in the 21st Century.
- Rookies aren’t weighed down with prior assumptions and have a larger need to seek and build new knowledge. This leads to new ideas and approaches to problems.
- A rookie has to make smaller but more regular development steps, constantly needing feedback and assurance. ‘Expert’ teachers often make giant leaps towards known answers. The rookie’s baby steps require a rapid feedback loop, which leads to a more agile learning process more suited to the 21st Century economy/society.
- Acting as if no expert exists in the room, rookies need to connect with others, which encourages collaboration and participation.
- Lacking knowledge resources leads to more adaptive and resourceful approaches to problem solving and knowledge acquisition.
It’s time for teachers to ask their students:
- What makes a successful rookie?
- What do we need and where might we get it?
- Who can help us? etc.
It’s best teachers present the idea that no correct answers exist in the room and even if they secretly do, it’s the challenge for teachers to guide in such a way that students might arrive at their own answers but hopefully in new and inspiring ways that the teacher can learn from. This completes a rather neat circle of learning.
Here’s a great video (via @geomouldey, via @Dwenmoth) that outlines many of the reasons why we need rookie rather than expert approach to classroom practice.
Want more ideas and initiatives like this one? My book A Learner’s Paradise by Richard Wells is full of them. Available now on Amazon.com
Richard: Challenge your students to find their own workflows. They are great at discovering and sharing their own solutions within the class. Set class expectations to what any of these workflows should achieve, but make sure the learning requires an app and it’s not the app that forms the learning.
‘Split View’ (new devices only) has made the iPad even more productive than it was. Simultaneously seeing 2 apps at once solves many problems that keep many people using their laptops etc.
Siri is getting really clever. If you’re not using Siri, I highly recommend giving it a go. E.g. If wanting to show the class last week’s pics: “Hey Siri, show me photos from last week” The new back button makes working on the iPad that much easier and more convenient. Toggle between two apps with a tap of a button.
The next lesson gave me a chance to reflect and act on this mistake. The type of game the activity produces is a platform game of 3 levels. Before they started, I reminded them of the 
The app encouraged me to focus on skill competency and open ended creativity:
Adam Bellow
Derek Muller
to see yet more great evidence of blogging’s potential.
To meet 
This is a BIG shoutout to the wonderful tribe of educators I spent my time with in Miami. 
Fantastic to meet my namesake 
Thanks again to 
Another thank you must go to the amazingly organised 
And finally, my most important thank you goes to the amazing 
It all started in 2011, the iPad was still either new or just a dream to most schools and we were all REALLY excited by its potential. I started my blog to help just 12 teachers in my school, who’d been bought them to trial. (Classic! Buy the teachers iPads but not the students). But they weren’t the only ones in need and soon iPad4Schools.org had 1000 readers a day.
My current opening line to any student task is “find yourself a solution for …” I find the students are always capable and are used to searching for and sharing solutions with each other, even in the personal lives. They are also used to a fully personalised approach to life and have multiple solutions that achieve the same goals. I no longer discuss apps, except when a student highlights one to me. Some apps are really impressive but my primary goal is to cultivate independence and confidence within each student. This comes from the empowerment of personal choice and the collaborative approach.
When I regularly divide my classes into groups, I often notice that a number of the groups have a member who seems distant or unengaged and I wonder how I can energise these kids to engage with the group or task during the short time that I’ve got them? (I teach in a high school still restricted by segregated, hourly subject lessons) Most of my class activities involve an element of problem solving. Examples might be, How are we going to reduce cyber-bullying in the school? What do the students need in a school app? Or even, How can I start my music career in New Zealand? It is the problem-solving part of the brain I want to activate in my students who are not in that frame of mind when I need it.
To carry out an initial trial, I projected a problem-solving game on my board and invited individuals to have a single turn to complete the puzzle/level. After 2 minutes, pairs were coming up to have a shared turn. This turned into small groups and after 10 minutes had 8 people competing to make suggestions for the next move. What I noticed was that these 8 were not a normal grouping within the class but had selected themselves to share an experience. This had an immediate effect on the dynamics in the class. I have found that after this exercise, new pairings started appearing in the class and it definitely made it easier for me to suggest new groupings without any backlash.
Ads: “The Games have too many Adverts!” Airplane mode (in the control centre) will remove most, if not all the ads that pop up.
Minecraft is one of the most popular games in history and has been used by many schools as an educational tool. The key is the collaborative nature of building worlds and objects together. The planning and teamwork required to accurately build a specific thing is something that naturally develops but can be planned by teachers. How about this incredible example of Classroom Minecraft Authentic learning where 
You might think that the quote above that came from one of my students this year is unusual but what was more unusual was that he didn’t think anything of the statement! It was me, his teacher, who had to point out how special his circumstance was. The context was that we were doing a project on world connections and he was an avid player of “Clash of clans” on his iPad.
