Keep up to date!

Peter and I were discussing over coffee this morning the article by Peter Wilby in the Education Guardian yesterday on David Hargreaves, and his radical ideas for the education system. (Who? Where?)

We thought this was the kind of material which should be discussed on every teacher education programme, including of course PCE programmes, and especially ours. I said I would post a link on this blog, but then it occurred to me that it would make more sense to include a permanent link in the blog side-bar, so you could easily access the Education Guardian (and the Times Ed, and the Timer Higher, and the Independent Education...) from one place. No excuse!

So look to the left of this post and you will find links to those places. We may add more, particularly if you suggest them. And I may (no promises) post here about particularly useful news resources as they come up.

The important thing is that you need only to bookmark this page—the one you are currently looking at—to have direct links to all this material. Go on! You know it makes sense!

(Oh, and of course you can easily find the Hargreaves article linked from the bottom right of the Guardian page.)

AND! Special bonus back-to-school offer, never to be repeated! (etc.) The learningandteaching.info sites have been revised and up-dated for the start of the new academic year.

Coffield's latest

Frank Coffield has done it again. All you ever wanted to know about learning and teaching but were too cool to ask is a counterpart to Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority. As before it is available as a free download from Learning and Skills Network Publications. While the former pamphlet was addressed to college managers, this one is aimed at actual students, and based on conversations with a range of them on courses in further education.

It's arrived too late to go into the essential reading section of our course handbook, but we shall plug it hard.

"Professor Coffield writes in a personal capacity"

From last week's Times Educational Supplement, in case you missed it, Frank Coffield is following up on "Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority" (2008), which is required reading for the course.

Incidentally, if this blog is correct, it looks as if he has won one victory; the DfES (remember when we had a ministry with "education" in the title?) appears to have withdrawn its booklet on learning styles.

Latest working papers now up-loaded

The latest versions of the working papers, the 2009-2010 handbook and mentor briefing materials are now available at the link above. Please let us know of any hitches you encounter with them.

We do it slightly differently...

... but there are some useful observations here!

Beyond threshold topics to magic?

Penn (of and Teller) makes a great point while illustrating the threshold topics label.

Threshold topics in mathematics

Fascinating Horizon programme on BBC2 last night, in which Marcus du Sautoy tried to introduce Alan Davies to the joys of maths (while interestingly demonstrating that for a professor of maths, he's not that good at mental arithmetic). Of course, threshold concepts or topics were never mentioned, but that was what this was about, as it opened up a host of new perspectives on the world for Davies. The heading link is to the BBC iPlayer; watch it now before it disappears!