Modern Learning Environments (MLE) are all the talk in educational circles right now. Schools, around the world, are knocking out walls and creating bright stimulating classrooms with multi purpose furniture and giving students access to technology. On the surface it looks fantastic, however I am concerned that without a big pedagogy shift, students will be […]

I was honoured last month by my speaker colleagues – National Speakers Association- as NZ’s Educator of the Year. Last year I won NZ Speaker of the Year. It is always wonderful to have your work acknowledged by your colleagues and the hundreds of congratulations emails, posts and messages are always lovely to receive. However, […]

Choosing a new phone for many may be an exciting task, however when I took my Dad to get a new phone recently he said “I don’t want a smart phone, I just want one like the one I have – so I don’t have to learn anything new.” This is not the first time I […]

What has happened to personal responsibility? I again wondered this while on an aeroplane recently. As always the crew showed the safety demonstration. I have heard this literally hundreds of times, (as of writing this post I have been fortunate to travel on 1752 planes in the last 35 years – yes I keep a record) […]

“To get to easy you have to go through hard.” This was a recent Mountain Dew advert on the back of a bus and on billboards in Wellington. This parallels a message I have been teaching students about learning – “Everything is hard before it is easy.” When students are studying for an exam, the best […]

For thousands of years the human body has been walking, sleeping, leaning, running, doing or squatting. As Howard Gardner states, “I believe in action and activity. The brain learns best and retains most when the organism is actively involved in exploring physical sites and materials and asking questions to which it actually craves the answers. […]