Are Habits of Mind still relevant in today's AI world? Certainly, maybe more so than ever! Here are some ways to link each of the 16 habits of mind with relevant AI skills.

Chat GPT and Gemini are very good at generating MCQ-type questions, and Blooket is a great way to have some fun in class while assessing learning. But how to quickly and easily get the questions into Blooket? Here are some prompts and the steps that I used. 

It would be great if there was no such thing as exams, but for those of us in the formal school system, they are a reality that we have to deal with every year, possibly several times. So... how do we make the most of them, so that they serve some educational purpose? And how do we as teachers really help our students to do well, given that so much judgment about them is based on exam performance?

‘If today we were to meet with Martians, freshly arrived on planet Earth and looking for tips on designing their own education system, what would we suggest?’ 

The Google engineers and the world’s best linguists had worked extremely hard to develop a new version of Translate that could accommodate the weird Martian language. But they had accomplished the seemingly impossible task, and it had become possible to communicate effortlessly….

“Successful countries treat their teachers as nation builders” according to Andrew Hargreaves and Michael Fullan.
Do you feel like a nation-builder?

As teachers, we take many things for granted. We operate according to the received wisdom of how things ought to be done. Take the time to consider how some of those assumptions can be challenged and how you might do things differently.

We all know why we are teachers and our schools have a very clear Vision and Mission which we all accept. We would like our students to leave school as values-driven, empowered young people, prepared for tertiary studies, and ready to take up a leadership role in society. By working with our students, we hope to transform not only their lives, but also our society. 

So, we all know why we do what we do in the classroom. Isn’t it obvious? It is what we do in the classroom that brings about the transformation we desire in society. Or is it so obvious? Do we have a theory of change? 

One way of becoming a truly great teacher is to change the way you see yourself.  If you see yourself as a teacher, the focus of your energies tends to be on content that you need to teach. It is all about you and the content. 

Reading is a national crisis! According to the 2016 PIRLS study, 78% of children cannot read for meaning by the end of Grade 3.  Are we sure that our students really know the key skills in reading? What can be done to improve reading? 

When it comes to reading, a good place to start is by acknowledging that reading is difficult and not natural, that we have to work hard to build the skills - all of us, teachers and students.