In our culture, learning more - for those of us
who don't have indigenous backgrounds - through literature is a powerful way.
So, lots and lots of us now are exploring our novel list
and learning more about a different world view in that way.
And that's been a richness for us.
A second way that we think, though,
that is really absolutely makes teaching now so exciting,
is that we also have a strong research and knowledge base.
I mentioned earlier that both my parents were teachers,
they didn't have the research knowledge -
and I didn't at the beginning of
my career have the knowledge about learning
and about which strategies are the most effective
to draw on in my early professional practice.
And I wish I could go back
and recreate the early part of my career with the knowledge that we now have.
We call these strong ways,
because they're research based and evidence informed -
and they are global.
That is, we think the strongest researchers are making
sure that they connect their ideas over the world,
and they're not just keeping it in their own countries.
So that we can draw, for example, on John Hattie's incredible amount of reading that
he's done and synthesizing in
books like Visible Learning for Teachers, where
he's shown what the research base is for those strategies that are most powerful.
And we think that that's -- along with, for
example, we'll be talking later on about some of
the assessment for learning work that Dylan Wiliam
and other colleagues have done in the assessment area,
and the powerful impact when you know effect
size, when you can make decisions about what you're going to learn, and
how you're going to apply that in your own planning for learning and teaching.
This really is a gift to us, as the profession.
However, we want to draw on the wise ways because they've -
in a sense - been field tested for a long time.
Cultures that know how to work in a respectful way with
nature, how to do deep storytelling, how to listen with real
intention, how to use the oral tradition
to capture history and have decision-making processes
that say "If we do this, what will be the impact over the next seven generations?"
That's a powerful way of thinking that we think we all need to learn from.
We absolutely also want to draw on our scientific