TED Community » Chris Chivers

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Children and adults learning from and through experience and developing the skills to understand their own learning processes, within the context of a broad society.

An idea worth spreading

The world is made up of many millions of individuals, each with their unique situation, caused by the lottery of birth, but each with a unique set of skills and talents. If each individual was empowered to release these to the common good, how much could the world situation be improved? We are "all in it together" as far as living on this world is concerned.

Talk to me about

Anything really.I have an eclectic approach to learning.

People don't know that I'm good at

Playing the bodhran, or at least I used to be when I had time to practice regularly.

My TED Story

Mine is a distant involvement, restricted to on-line viewing of very interesting talks and now occasionally submitting a tentative comment or two.I would love to attend a conference at some stage.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +1.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +4

  A comment on Talk: Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

  Oct 17 2011: This talk should be presented to the Education Secretary and be the first item on the agenda at every meeting.
  
  Education is about discovering and nurturing talent or it becomes training. The two serve different purposes. Once talent has been identified it can be moulded and trained to achieve at higher levels. Passion, as Sir Ken discussed is integral to performance. Listen to competent musicians, it is often the integral passion that differentiates one from another, empathy with the composer, interpretation to an audience.
  
  Sir Ken opened with a joke around climate change, encouraging people to " get out more". young peole should be encouraged to see and enjoy the spleandours of the external world. Only by doing so can they become the guardians for future generations. Only by doing so will they notice change.
• +4

  A comment on Talk: Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids

  Oct 17 2011: It was uplifting to hear a young person articulate many reasoned and thoughtful ideas, one of the most insightful being the statement of the obvious that children are the next generation and that they will one day be responsible for the adult population. If successive genarations do not take care of the next, what will be the mindset of care when it becomes their turn to make strategic decisions?
  
  Currently in the UK, adults in Government have decided to increase the costs of extended university level study significantly. In twenty to thirty years time, the current generation will be the decision makers. In that timescale, I will be between 80 and 90 years old. Should I worry for my pension?
  
  Children should have a voice and it should be heard. Keep talking Adora and say this loud and clear. Children also have one chance at childhood, although Shakespeare offers the opportunity to consider a second, which I hope that I will be able to enjoy, in the same way that I hope my grandchildren will grow through theirs with love and care.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Are Educational Institutions responding to the challenges of teaching and learning in the 21st Century?

  Feb 28 2011: The use of the term "creative process", or "creativity" is something which appears in many curricula. The understanding of how ideas emerge, either as evolutionary ideas or as novel solutions seems to me to be fundamental to improving the education system. The making of links and allowing students to imagine from the known allows them to play with their own creativity an perhaps to become creative themselves. The processes of thinking, and understanding one's own learning journey, at whatever stage of education, is fundamental to learning progress. Teachers need to have the capacity to walk alongside the learner and act as guide and counsellor as misconceptions appear. Too often the potential for creativity is stifled by the personal need to impart a body of knowledge.

• A reply on Conversation: Are Educational Institutions responding to the challenges of teaching and learning in the 21st Century?

  Feb 28 2011: The problems as I see them are that we need to have a very sophisticated approach to the integration of technology into the education system. At the early stages of learning, children need to experience, explore and develop the skills to explain what they have done, and learned through the experience. This can often be determined by the extraneous adults who may seek to validate their role as teacher by interpreting for the child. Children need a careful mix of introduction to novel situations and experiences, time to "play" and assimilate, then time to reflect and explore means of capturing thier ideas.
  Often the bigger issue is simply time. By incorporating technology too early, the time for experiential play can become more limited, restricting the early experience to delivery and reception.
  Technology can certainly broaden experience, bringing ideas to life and bringing experiences from around the globe into the learning space. Awareness of the world an be heightened. Image and sound capture is important to support early language, ordering and organising ideas for later use. This is the use of technology as a tool supporting learning, the development of ideas.
  
  Poorly used, it can replicate the use of worksheets,restrictive approaches which pay lip service to the incorporation of technology in learning. Most UK classes have an interactive whiteboard. It would be an interesting study to see how they are put to use to enagage children with learning, or if they are used as a teacher notepad and presentation of tasks.
  
  Technology, well deployed can significantly enhance learning. I have on occasion been blown away by the use of technology by a student teacher, which has not just captured the children's attention, but engaged them in ways which have added real value to their life experiences, to me, a definition of learning.

• A reply on Talk: Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

  Jan 12 2011: The essential issue to good grading,in any system, is to establish what would be the attributes of an adequate, good or better submission, preferably personalised to each child, but derived from a generalised list of criteria. In that way, there are two possible grades, 1 compared to others 2 compared with previous personal performance. Pupil self assessment supports this process- I got better by... or I could do better if....
  Process based learning does not happen out of a context. Each lesson is the context, so the process of learning happens within that subject, with its own criteria. However, the skills derived from oracy, literacy and mathematics are often deployed in the service of other subjects, but not given credit, yet they are supporting the thinking in that subject. It would be interesting to have a system based on the three "E"s, experience, explore and explain.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

  Jan 7 2011: In marking university level papers, these are marked to defined capabilities, to establish a grade. The English National Curriculum has level descriptors, which in themselves are capacities and can provide a developmental level. Grading work should derive from known challenges, in personalised targets, which can be partly defined by the children themselves,especially as they get older, choosing from a pre-determined criterion list. Essentially they'll be saying "I think my work shows that I can......." At this point, the teacher can agree totally,partially or not at all, then give developmental feedback. This approach engages children more, as it brings them into the evaluation cycle. Evaluation should not always be something that is done to the child.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes

  Jan 7 2011: It has been interesting to note that the issue of standardised testing has dominated much discussion, rather than considering the benefits or otherwise of experiential approaches. Life for each of us is a series of experiences, some will be defined,as in a linear school approach, while the majority of experiences will simply occur, some of them requiring problem solving at a deep level. In these situations, errors happen. It is our skill at seeing these, remediating and being able to move on, that enables us to negotiate life in general, providing some resilience in the process.
  Children need to know stuff, they also need to know how to use this stuff to support their learning development. Unless they are placed in safe situations, where problems need to be solved through whatever means are available, with appropriate support, backup and guidance from an interested adult, they will not have the skills to face problems in their lives.
  Measuring regularly does not make children grow.