March for Intellectual Disagreement

Bring on cognitive conflict, march for intellectual disagreement, lobby for dissonance, blog for provocation.

For there is no easier way to subvert academic norms, than drowning in a culture of niceness.

Instructions on how to seriously compromise your learning.

• Take fifteen thousand hours of schooling.
  
• Break it into nine hundred thousand minutes of caring.
  
• Fragment it into fifty four million sharded seconds of cooperation.

Yep am re-reading Adrienne Alton-Lee on Quality Teaching for Diverse Students in Schooling: Best Evidence Synthesis June 2003.

And it seems niceness can undermine learning both in teacher-student and student-student interactions. My punt is that the same goes for teacher-teacher interaction. For "Research indicates that, when conceptual disagreements cannot be addressed, learning can be at risk."

Now Hattie (2003) reckons Teachers – They account for about 30% of the variance. It is what teachers know, do, and care about which is very powerful in this learning equation. And it is the one source of variance that can be enhanced with the greatest potential success.

So if John Hattie is right, and he so often is, then we need to be employing teachers who are prepared to allow a culture of cognitive confrontation in their classrooms and staffrooms. Let us set some new criteria for teacher appraisal.