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Last week I decided that a good home cooked meal was in order. Lacking inspiration it turned to a recipe book I had been gifted the previous Christmas and found what appeared to be a tasty and nutritious option. I read on with enthusiasm and was soon imaging myself dining on this wholesome meal. If the end result looked half as good as the glossy picture that accompanied the recipe, I would be in luck.

We are living in interesting, frightening and rapidly changing times. Where rapid changes and transformations through technology, politics, globalisation and the climate, conspire against normality. These times demand a fresh approach to education, one that provides learners with the thinking dispositions they need to turn challenges into opportunities.  "All that was 'normal' has now evaporated; we have entered postnormal times, the in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense." But what thinking might guide us through this time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity?

It is soon the start of a new school year for students in Australia. In other parts of the world, the year continues after a short break for Christmas while New Year festivities are just around the corner for those observing the lunar new year. The start of the year is considered an excellent time to reflect on key ideas that matter to our learning and potential for success. But does this equate with goal-setting?

Two resources that might appeal to educators pondering the future.

As schools and organisations move to remote education, there are potential gaps in our professional learning of which we should be aware. While many of us are discovering fresh opportunities for online and remote professional learning through podcasts, webinars and online courses, one of the most significant aspects of our professional learning has been curtailed thanks to social distancing.

To ensure reflective practice is more than an activity added to our schedule, we need to take a reflective stance. Too often, reflection becomes the thing we do at the end of a task or the end of the day. We look back and contemplate what was, and with that in mind, we look forward to what we might do differently next time. It is in this way a very reactionary process. By all means, this form of reflection has its place, and it can be a powerful strategy to deploy as we seek to learn from experience. If we value reflective practice, we will be sure to set aside time for this form of reflection on a routine basis. By engaging in reflection habitually, we ensure that it is a routine part of our day. But adopting a reflective stance can make this more powerful.

This page makes it easy to find information and resources that are relevant to particular concepts, approaches and strategies. Each Collection is curated to serve a particular need and shares a set of resources pooled from The Learner's Way. In time this set of Collection will grow. In addition to articles from The Learner's Way you will be able to find resources designed to help you get started with the key concepts presented. The aim is to produce a set of resources which are readily accessible and of immediate benefit to classroom teachers and school leaders.

When we adopt an inquiry stance towards learning, we start to see things differently. Taking an inquiry stance towards learning involves a shift in mindset and practice for both student and teacher. It allows us to move beyond doing inquiry towards being inquisitive.

When we approach this task with key questions in mind, we focus our thinking on how we might plan learning experiences and opportunities that will have the impact we desire.

n practical terms, any change effort that does not consider the culture into which it is introduced is unlikely to succeed. The worst-case scenario is that the change effort is resisted to such a degree that it is never truly implemented. In many cases, however, the change effort fails to produce the sort of results initially imagined despite the efforts of all involved to adopt the change. Although the new behaviours are adopted, something goes wrong, and it isn't always that the new idea itself is to be blamed. - Maybe it's culture?

Not all learning is created equal. Sometimes the learning that we achieve and the success generated through our engagement with a learning opportunity is spectacular. At its very best, our learning unlocks fresh understandings for ourselves and sometimes even for others. What conditions allow for such spectacular learning, and how might we bring these conditions into our classrooms?

On Saturday PZ Sydney Network hosted Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church for a conversation about their new book, "The Power of Making Thinking Visible". What follows is a summary of some of the key messages from this conversation. You can watch the whole conversation above. For more learning opportunities like this visit the PZ Sydney Network or follow @pzsydnetwork on Twitter.

Recently I have been contemplating how we might define inquiry. Like many terms in education, it is often used in multiple contexts and has a range of meanings attached to it. Coming to agreement on what inquiry is, requires negotiating seemingly divergent understandings. If we are to avoid oversimplifications and dichotomous thinking, we need to explore these multiple perspectives and find a balance point.

Number Talks are a wonderful way to see where our students are with their mathematical thinking. As a part of a daily routine, a Number Talk promotes number sense and mathematical reasoning. In this post, I revisit what a Number Talk can reveal about our students' understanding of mathematics, and how they might be used to promote a fresh perspective. In addition, I examine a success criteria for Number Talks that is more expansive and recognises their true power.

With our goal of deep-learning in mind where do we begin and what learning opportunities might result in this? Having clarified our key terms of understanding, learning and deep, we can turn to a set of questions which might be of use as we plan the learning our students will engage in along their way.

This much-maligned question seems so appropriate for education's recent history. All that was normal, everything that was routine, all of our structures, have been turned upside down and hurled into the wind of COVID19. From having spoken of a future dominated by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), we have found ourselves living in it. Innovation and creativity became the new normal as we "Apollo 13" schooling into a model that met the demands of emergency remote learning. The pressure, the workload, the demands on our time and the cognitive load have all been immense, and so it seems fitting to ask "Are we there yet?".

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

Perhaps the disruption of a global pandemic will prompt a rethinking of how education might be framed to best serve the needs of those who rely on it most? Perhaps now is the time to rethink the curriculum?

Framework for setting up flexible courses for in-class, remote, or hybrid/blended.

One of the key ways by which we make sense of our world is by analysing the stories that we and others use to describe it. These stories are a construct of our experiences, our beliefs, our cultural perspectives and the interactions between these things. Even when the context in which the story is set is the same, the details and nature of the story that particular individuals or collective share can differ vastly. Only by listening to each story with empathy and genuine desire to understand each individual's telling of this story do we develop true insights. Making sense of the stories of education should be a key process for all educators.