Sweden-Day23 18th June

Monday, and the conference has begun.

We are based in Nörrkoping (pronounced Norshopping) and staying at the Strand Hotel which is a quaint older style hotel with a great staircase. Our room has high ceiling and a writing desk and sitting area and a view out of the window onto the river and bridge. The toilet has a warning sign in four languages that says there is a shredder attached to the flushing mechanism so don’t throw anything into the toilet that shouldn’t be in there.



The conference opened with some Swedish folk music and dancing and then we were off. As it’s a conference on thinking, there are topics from the brain and neuroscience (which may be interesting), to topics on how can we teach for better learning and how to work together on innovation or shared futures. As usual, conferences are a good measure as to your own knowledge/understanding and some of the presentations have been a bit ho, hum, while others are stimulating and expose you to new ideas. Peter Gärdenfors kicked things off explaining how we became human and explain the evolution of thinking from primeval man to now. Also went to Bo Ekman who gave us a rather pessimistic view of the world and the state of global warming and economical development. More questions that answers. Britt-Mari Barth in her talk, Knowing - Process or Product, gave us a wonderful example of a learning activity which encouraged primary school aged children to think (hard) about what they saw in a painting. They went on to discover different types of painting styles and how light and colour where used. On evaluating the lesson, one student commented how they learnt a lot and the teacher didn’t even help! Just how it should be, although there had been a fair bit of preparation involved.



Wendy and I had a chat to Guy Claxton who had given a good presentation regarding the need to think about the language we use to talk about learning. He mentioned a macro-language to talk about learning dispositions and a micro-language to talk about student ‘learning’ rather than student ‘work’. He said we should build learning power through; gently, systematically coaching the development of positive learning dispositions in three ways:
        •        broadening: becoming more ready
        •        strengthening: becoming more willing
        •        enriching: becoming more able
He has written about the new three ‘Rs’ which are resourcefulness, resilience and reflectiveness etc.

Bill martin was the last plenary presentation and he was replacing John Edwards who couldn’t make it (quite a few keynote speakers have been unable to attend). Bill gave a talk on Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Leadership, and suggested that to have a successful organisation things need to be aligned, everyone needs to be on the same page and leadership has a responsibility to provide this through providing values and mental models of how to be. So, rather a big day with lots of things to think about.

The food has been excellent, the venue is amazing (not too much walking between any of the 12 concurrent talks) and we’ve met lots of people. There are about 1300 delegates and many of them are teachers from Australia and New Zealand, so good to hear some familiar accents. After the talks ere finished we went on a guided tour of the industrial landscape of Nörrkoping which introduced the historic buildings and how things have changed in the last 150 years.