Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

A comment on a recent post about the new Standards discussion pack got me thinking.  I have blogged before about the importance of having a common language for having professional discussions.  PLOT talks about the difference between dialogue and discussion and David Andersons EdTalk is stunning for sharing with teachers about the importance of professional language and how we talk about things.

The Maths Standards introduce a new set of understandings and descriptors into the teacher professional vocabulary.  This in itself will make the implementation process a more difficult one.  Each  curriculum document already has its own terminology and the glossaries at the back of them seem to be getting longer and longer each time we get a new one.  We can’t have discussions about things we don’t have common understandings for the terminology around.  Who had heard of phonological awareness 10 years ago?

Maybe it is time for a “plain language” curriculum as much as plain language reporting to parents?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, Pedagogy, opinion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.