We do not consider ourselves experts in any of these topics, and we do not try to offer simple off-the-shelf formulas or total solutions. What we are willing to do is enter a conversation with you and share what we have learnt through our own on-going exploration of educational challenges. If we are skilled in anything it is facilitation and maintaining mutually beneficial conversations. Our strength is also that we are willing to experiment with novel ways of doing things, learn from our misadventures, and then sharing our notes (and comparing them) with others who are passionate about integrating transferable skills into education.
Most of what we have done has been customised to specific contexts. Our approach is collaborative. We don’t like to think of ourselves as service providers who parachute in, offer an intervention, and then leave. We would prefer to see ourselves as partners, fellow seekers on a journey of discovery. This is why we are reluctant to create a menu of services. We would rather start a conversation, listen to understand what it is you need and then work together with you and your staff to create new learning experiences. If you do want us to offer a once off to see what we do, we are willing to oblige.
All of the themes below can be offered as:
- Teacher training
- Classroom conversations with learners
- Workshops with learners (integrated with teacher training)
- Curriculum design and strategic planning
- Support for teachers (project and lesson planning)
- Whole-school conversations
- Talks to learners, teachers and parents
Click on each theme below to view their main outcomes
Integrating transferable skills into curricula, teaching practice, assessment and school culture
- Use international best practices in order to move beyond a focus on prescribed content towards focusing on transferable skills, often referred to as 21st century skills, that can be used to engage any content
- Articulate, categorise, scaffold and assess transferable skills
- Understand the role of transferable skills in achieving sustainable livelihoods and personal fulfillment
Initiating critical thinking for young learners
- Recognise the skills and performances that critical thinking is contingent on (including the ability to ask questions, increased self-awareness, willingness to risk experiment, sharpened observation skills, giving and receiving feedback, participating in dialogue)
- Explore techniques for using language, media and art making in innovative ways that reinforce critical thinking skills
- Create a scaffold for critical thinking skills acquisition that can help to identify a learner's strengths and barriers to learning across all grades
Challenges that the fourth industrial revolution poses to education
- Understand the impact of machine learning, automation, Big Data and the Internet of Things on the way we learn, work and play
- Recognise the skills that will help learners to become multi-disciplinary, highly adaptive, experimental, life-long learners, critical consumers, active citizens and independent thinkers
- Explore the dynamics of innovation, the impact of disruptive technologies, and ethical dilemmas in relation to the fourth industrial revolution
Rapid gains in critical thinking
- Experiment with small interventions that produce disproportionate results, and promote critical thinking in every subject
- Start creating a checklist that can help you reflect on your strengths and challenges with regards to teaching critical thinking
- Apply these small interventions, or rapid gains, to lesson planning in a specific subject
Moving from rote memory to trial-and-error learning
- Understand what recent research in neuroscience is teaching us about the nature of memory and why the way we teach and assess is flawed
- Explore the value of integrating more bottom-up, learner-led, trial-and-error learning (moving beyond the reproduction of inherited knowledge towards enabling learners to become agents of their own knowledge production)
- Grapple with moving beyond coaching learners for matric towards preparing learners for life
The elements of project-based learning and integrated studies
- Create learning experiences that are relevant to learners' lives, reinforce their sense of agency, enable them to master a skill, encourage collaboration and facilitate the feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves
- Encourage learners to risk carefully-designed experiments in order to explore possibility, while equipping them with skills for experimenting effectively and as safely as possible
- Make the connections between different subjects and disciplines, exploring what different forms of knowledge production have in common, enabling the transfer of knowledge from one context to another
Introduction to inclusive education and diversity literacy (the skills of reading power)
- Recognise and include diverse dispositions, abilities, prior learning experiences, home languages, identities and points of view in the learning experience
- Consider the diverse experience of learners (and their communities) with a genuine interest, and make an effort to use language, examples, activities and narratives that are more inclusive of diverse life experiences
- Design learning experiences and assessment strategies that recognise skills and knowledge beyond the narrow definitions of success that are usually privileged in schools
- Create a scaffold for skills acquisition that can help to identify all learners' strengths, barriers to learning and growing edges, wherever they are on their own learning path (enabling accurate feedback about a learner's growth, rather than simply comparing them to other learners)
Rules of engagement, exploring dialogue as a teaching methodology
- Facilitate dialogue that continually strives to deepen understanding, going beyond the content, and modelling the skills that enable learners to build knowledge together, participate in democratic process and resolve conflict non-violently
- Move beyond the antagonistic opposites of a debate commiting to maintaining the conversation for as long as is necessary to produce the best explanations and solutions possible (have a conversation in order to understand, rather than an argument in order to win)
- Understand how the production of knowledge depends on agreeing on the problem being addressed, precise definition of terms, and shared criteria for mutually beneficial disagreement
- Recognise how power and positions of privilege can distort dialogue and limit participation
Exploring the anatomy of values
- Understand the biological and cultural origins of values, how this perspective empowers us to become aware of our own unconscious bias, and learn how to choose values (sometimes having to break a default pattern) rather than accept them as absolute truth.
- Explore the different ways that shared values coordinate the actions of groups, and contribute to identity formation and conflict based on identity.
- Create participate experiences that help learners to explore the nature of values, enabling them to make critical and creative choices about the values that serve them and their community.
Ethical thinking
- Understand the difference between knowing what is right and wrong (moral abstractions), and knowing how (ethical thinking) you have come to believe what you think is right and wrong.
- Explore how your understanding of what is right or wrong determines your behaviour and affects the world around you – especially with regards to the value systems, worldviews, ideologies and paradigms you bring into the classroom with you.
- Use cognitive tools (like systemic thinking, the ability to project into the future, and diversity literacy) for thinking about ethical dilemmas in school-based and classroom-based scenarios.
- Apply practical techniques for dealing ethically with sensitive and controversial issues in the classroom (so that your classroom and your school can model what it is like to be a community that builds knowledge about ethical thinking together).
Errors of reasoning: identifying the limitations of arguments
- Recognise and question harmful generalisations, cultural assumptions, superstitions, stereotypes, irrational prejudices and unjust discrimination
- Use deductive reasoning to analyse the internal structure of claims explanations and arguments, being able to identify common errors of reasoning
- Apply deconstructive techniques in order to help expose propaganda, false advertising, misinformation and superstition
Evolution as a model for innovation
- Use insights from the way that nature creates diversity (evolution through natural selection) to inform your learners’ understanding of human innovation.
- Explore what the difference is between non-deliberate innovation in nature and deliberate human innovation (focusing on the invention of technology and the use of symbolic language).
- Help learners to reflect on the relationship between order and change, predictability and flexibility, orthodoxy and heresy, habit and novelty, convention and invention, or what a Doors’ song called “safety and surprise”.
- Critically assess the use of evolution as a metaphor or a model in attempts to explain the social and economic behaviour.