Breakout 4 - Tony Ryan (Solutions)

Tony Ryan - Rather than talking about problems, let's start thinking about solutions.

Here's a range of suggestions:

1. Fun theory - take a problem and get kids to suggest a solution to it.

2. Elizabeth Gilbert, on TED talks, on nurturing creativity.

3. Get rid of small talk: Mindless banter, gossip, inconsequential comments' often use the word 'but'. Get into Big Talk, proactive dialogue, solution focus, challenge, paraphrasing. Teaching kids to paraphrase is a really valuable exercise - using "so...what you're saying that...".

4. If you want to get into solutions with kids, use student voice. Soundout.org has a whole range of ways of doing this and getting schools to measure their use of student voice.

5. Kids have to have good strategies, they also need to know how to use them in particular contexts. We need to teach them to self talk and to think about their thinking (to be cognisant of their thinking - metcognition).

6. Use of thinkers key cards, to get kids thinking.

7. Reflection - what did I do well? What can I do differently? (reflective journals).

8. Another interesting way of getting kids thinking is to photocopy a whole bunch of famous people in shots, or people in different situations, then put speech bubbles above them - get kids to enter dialogue into speech bubbles. Must be plenty of ways of doing

9. Celebrate - we need to do this more. Love the idea of 1000 Awesome things blog.

Now putting this into practice - can I answer these questions...

1. What are three concepts/processes you are most likely to put into practice?
2. What could you do with it?
3. What will you do with it?
4. What will be the process of implementation?
5. How will you keep it going?