Barriers to learning#1 – The tyranny of the timetable.

I’ve been doing a lot of pondering recently about the barriers that exist to genuine project led learning of the sort that I think we need to be moving to. The often quoted one is exams, but something more practical, that schools can control is the way the school day is structured.

Most people agree that while arranging teaching in hour long blocks after which everyone shuffles around the building may be an efficient of organising people, it isn’t a very effective way system for learning. Some schools have played around with themed days for various things, but I’d like to go even further. Why not make the basic building block the week?

You could take an Opening Minds / Project based learning approach and bring together various subject expertise around a particular theme or enquiry. You could even try delivering a discrete subject in that block if you wanted (although I think you might be missing the bigger picture if you did). But by changing one thing, you force those in education to rethink everything else, and hopefully provide a much more effective learning experience.

So who’s brave enough to go first 😉