Bring Your Own Device in schools - an implementation strategy Part 1

Forgive me in advance, this might be a long one. Cartoon at the end for your efforts? Deal...

The following describes our arrival at a scheme for deploying SMART Learning across our school, a scheme to use mobile devices as a learning tool. But it might need some context first. Quite a lot of context actually. Bear with me...

(Quite a lot of) Context

As part of our ideas for moving the school I work in beyond its current "Outstanding" I have undertaken a project as part of my ASLDP course. We were asked to identify "gaps" at the start of our course, which we would have to close with a whole-school project. This isn't so much a gap as an area where students cannot always move beyond at present. We have really good, keen students in general, but very often they are not as independent as we want them to be. There is some excellent practice across the whole school, but not consistency. One of the things we are hoping to achieve is a level of student autonomy and independent thinking which will free them up to work at their own pace, to their own potential.

I've talked about the idea of "flipped learning" before, as it caught my eye a year or more ago. While I don't subscribe exclusively to Salman Khan's methods, I think the principle of getting students learning content at home and putting it into action in class is a sound one, as it allows the teacher to look at how well learning is applied, and to address misconceptions more individually, and more quickly, thus keeping students all moving forwards, albeit at a pace which is appropriate to them. I also think the idea of using videos is a good one for many students, but I'd be foolish if I told you it was the only way to do it (and who am I to tell you I'm not a fool, eh?). Some students work much better from reading material, others from videos, with examples and short tests, while others prefer something more auditory like a podcast.

At the same time I have been exploring the fantastic opportunities to work with iPads in my classroom, and I could see immediately the potential they had for integrating with flipped learning and enhancing it further. My early attempts were limited, but at least I could see the potential, so I started using the iPads in class, and invested in them within the department so that each student could have one whenever they were in my class. This has been a huge step forward, as the quasi-ownership of the devices has allowed students to store some work on there, but there are limits to this when other students come in for the next class, and want to use the same apps. Sign the last student out, sign yourself in, yada yada, faff faff faff. Not a good use of "bell work". Ownership is definitely key when it comes to using mobile devices in schools, so it soon became apparent that we would need to get a device into the hands of every student if we were to move this forward. We started talking about iPad roll-outs, leasing schemes, BYOD, and pretty soon were lost in device considerations, and getting into pointless Android vs iPad vs Microsoft Surface (obviously that last is a joke) arguments. At the end of it all, we've had to remind ourselves that the learning is the key goal here, so our iPad or BYOD scheme ideas have now given way to SMART Learning (© Jason our fab techie)...

SMART Learning:

SMART Learning is predicated on the idea that we can use mobile technology in classes in order to achieve the following aims:

• Increase student motivation and engagement in class, especially boys
• Stop students relying on teachers as their first recourse
• Promote student independence and inquiry
• Allow for personalisation within class, and more individual and effective interventions by teachers
• Remove the ceiling over highly motivated students' heads
• Get students ready for the demands of the future workplace

Following on from this, we have discussed ideas for overcoming key obstacles which present themselves to us currently. The key areas, and our solutions for them so far, are as follows...

Cost:
We live in a relatively affluent catchment area, but the recession is biting everyone, and now isn't the time to ask everyone to pay for new devices, to lease them, or the like. However, the key factor of ownership must still be tackled, so we have opted for a system where we allow students to bring their own devices (BYOD) over a roll-out of one particular type of device. While it is true that in my media class we use iPads only, that is largely because of the productive rather than consumptive nature of what we do with them, and I have to acknowledge that many teachers will not need as much out of the devices being brought into their classes as I will. Students already own their own phones, and bring them in every day anyway (because as we know, and contrary to the evidence of hundreds of years of children getting to and from school without them previously, the poor darlings can't be without their phones in case of an emergency). Why not make use of what they already have? Indeed, many of them also own tablets, or laptops, and feel eminently more comfortable working on those than they do on school PCs. Cost bullet dodged...

Technical Obstacles:
The right infrastructure is key to enabling a solid, reliable use of mobile devices in all lessons. The whole advantage of mobile devices over computers is the fact that I don't have to set half an hour's worth of bell-work just to kill time while the damn things boot up! Why would we then negate that with a network which slows to a crawl when all the students are on it? Besides, if we save money not issuing all students with devices out of our own pockets, then we can afford to invest in the best servers, bandwidth and access points to ensure full coverage anywhere in the school.

Technical obstacle number two is app incompatibility. "Sir, I can't get that app on Android", that sort of thing. When you're used to the iPad, the limitations of other devices can be a pain. But there are two answers to this. The first is to use web-based apps as much as possible: Popplet, Socrative, Prezi, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, Evernote are all excellent web-based solutions which cover all sorts of key workflow areas, from mind-mapping, to document creation to storage and sharing: They have the advantage that once students get home and need to access what they've been working on that day, they don't have to do it on the phone, they can do it from their laptops, computers or whatever.

A more intriguing second argument for a "deal with it" attitude to incompatibility issues was put forward to me a while back when someone suggested to me that different devices forced students to examine the needs of tasks, and to find different solutions for themselves. They then often ended up engaging in meta-cognitive discussions about the relative merits of different apps, and by extension different devices, to assist their learning. The creativity and awareness of their learning needs which this generates are perhaps a price worth paying for the odd compatibility issue.

Test, Test and Test Again:
A new idea is hard for many people to accept. In the ever-changing world of teaching, it is too easy for teachers to dismiss new ideas as "yet another initiative" in an already over-initiatived system. Any technical difficulties presented by new technologies are the perfect excuse to ignore the idea, so you have to make sure that issues of workflow, technical problems etc are ironed out well before everyone gets into the training phase. We are going to run a variety of class trials by teachers who are more tech savvy, who can try to raise the technical issues which were unforeseen, and get them dealt with promptly. God knows, in the last year, I've come up with a lot of them, and it's important to overcome them, and give the technical teams time to get to grips with these issues. We assume that because they're techies this should all be easy for them, but this technology moves them largely out of their PC and network-based comfort zone, and that can be hard for them. In my case, bringing in iOS devices alongside a PC system has raised some issues (as well as hackles!), but better they're raised now than when every single student and teacher in the school is using them.


The limited class trials I'm running will be accompanied by student voice surveys to measure the initial impact of the technologies on learning. So far, I can tell you that it started as a distraction, and sometimes an obstacle whenever technical issues occurred, but students are now reporting that the technology is almost a non-issue for them, and talking about the learning opportunities they have offered, and the efficiencies they have brought into the classroom: There have been plenty of cheers for the "photograph the notes from the board rather than copy them down approach" for a start. Students have appreciated the ability to dictate notes sometimes, to share their work easily, to show work to the class through the AppleTV, and to collaborate on projects online in real time. More importantly, the students are also the best people to tell me what the problems are: Brutal honesty can be instructive, as long as I've forgotten my ego hat at home.

We are also hoping to put together a "Dangerous Teaching" Group, a cross-curricular forum for teachers who are interested in using mobile technolog to enhance learning and student independence in their areas. I get some great ideas from Twitter which I can share with them, but they will all have ideas of their own, and the power of group collaboration will bring swift advances in our use of the technology to enhance our core activities.

Once we've tested these things in a few lessons, with a few regular classes, and evaluated the impact on learning, the next stage will be a wider trial. It will probably involve opening the wifi network to Sixth Formers, a safer option perhaps than lower down the school at first, and again they will give us plenty of evaluative data.


Student Training:
What training do students need in using mobile devices? They use them every minute of every day they're allowed to, and many more when they probably shouldn't in all likelihood. Well, that doesn't make them good users in an educational sense. Students need to be taught how to use the devices responsibly as educational tools, but also as social tools. If the wifi network is always available, then break time use is likely to be a very different beast compared to classroom use, with cyber-bullying more than a possibility, and we need to teach students about the safe use of these devices, social networking etc. Internet Safety Day next week provides us with our first opportunity to talk to students about these issues, about social networking, about what they think are their rights and their responsibilities. We would hope to expand this so that students can use PHSE sessions to devise a whole-school Acceptable Use Policy, which could then be reviewed annually as the technologies change. Education in digital citizenship is one of the most pressing needs our students have in this decade, and as my good friend @Gripweed1 is fond of telling me, you can't leave these things to the ICT department alone (this may largely be about avoiding doing any more work though!).

(This last phrase is an excellent example of something which, though written online, is nevertheless clearly libellous, and I expect he'll use it to exemplify cyber-bullying to the students on Tuesday, after he's had me arrested!)

And finally, there's the issue of digital leadership. This idea has been written about a great deal on Twitter by folk much more practised at developing it than we are, and we'll be nicking their ideas in due course! You know who you are. Suffice it to say that the students are probably your best advocates for any mobile technology roll-out, and if they can be convinced of the merits of using them for learning, they will probably be more than willing to engage in training in how to use the devices, how to trouble-shoot them, and how to help staff to get the most out of them. Our intention is certainly to get students trained up so that they are as much learning ambassadors as they are technical support, and attaching them to departments will enable departments to get to grips with the potential of mobile learning with digital natives by their sides. We hope the students can trouble-shoot for staff, can find them appropriate websites and apps to teach certain tasks and concepts, and whenever anything tech goes awry in the room, they will be the ones who should come to the rescue. Teachers may take a while to get used to this role-reversal (I know I did!), but for the students, their new role is nothing short of empowering, helping them to become much more equal partners within the school's learning community. Not a bad place to start when you're trying to foster independence, engagement and inquiry...


This is just the first phase of our plan, and any feedback would be really useful. We appreciate there will be issues, but this blog is a bit of thinking out loud, in the hop that many of you may have walked down the same path, and be able to share your experiences with us, and help us avoid too many mistakes.

Next issue: Staff training, parental involvement and buy-in.

Will keep you posted.

Oops, your cartoon.

2012 - What a year!

2012 was the Chinese Year of the Dragon. By reputation it is a stormy year, literally and metaphorically, with change as its only constant characteristic. Think of 1916, 1940, 1976 and 2000 and you get the idea. For those who can ride the storm, it's an exciting ride full of opportunities. and such has been the case for me this year.

Specifically it has been one of the most inspiring years I can remember for a long time. It's been the year of Twitter discovery, the year of turning the iPad pedagogy dream into reality, my first year of Outstanding teaching (apparently), and the first year I've begun to accept I may have something to offer at a level higher than middle management. The encouragement and inspiration I've received this year have been overwhelming (a lot of it from Twitter), and have pushed me along at a rate somewhere between uncomfortably hard sprint and mach 2 with lips gibbering comically. So I thought I'd finish my first month of blogging with a reflective one, looking at the things which have inspired me most this year, and hoping they inspire you too...

1) Teachers were heroes, and presidents were real people (whether this a real person with courage still remains to be seen, but I imagine 90% of the world's population will be willing him on in the New Year).

Felix Baumgartner - The mightiest of leaps

2) Science equated to discovery and inspiration: 

Higgs Boson, the Mars Rover, Felix Baumgartner's colossal jump from the edge of space - A year when Science re-discovered its cutting edge and inspirational qualities, but a year in which the real science (of saving our species' place in this planet's history) was once again subsumed by the interests of those with profit as their main motive.

3) Teachers innovated: Teachmeets and Tweachers came of age, and teachers reacted to an ever-growing chorus of criticism from government and the media with professionalism, integrity, and continued strife towards improvement. But these testing times, when politics and ideology rule over education, are also beginning to sift teachers and leaders into two groups: Those who acquiesce to the demands and play the game, and those who have the moral courage to stand up for what's best for their students. The latter group is in the ascendency I think.

4) The little people stood up for their future: Pussy Riot in Russia, democracy protesters in Syria, Libya and Egypt - A year when the little people stood up to be counted, and gave their lives for a better future. And the web played a pivotal role in that process, allowing people to communicate freely with each other across social and geographical barriers: On a lesser scale, we saw the growth of crowd-funded Kickstarter projects, and in the teaching profession we saw the formation of HeadsRoundtable and its massive online petitions, consultations and deluging the DfE with over 5000 tweets in one hour to protest against the EBacc "consultation" (if such it can be called). There's your moral conviction...

5) Gay Marriage Bill: Even though the church continues to object to gay marriage, this was the year that the rest of us saw it as a complete non-issue. For Heaven's sake, if the Conservative Party are advocating a more liberal stance than the church, what is the world coming to?! I just loved the picture opposite, which showed a grown man as though ashamed of his own message, and a young lad with courage and love in his heart. Who says the next generation is going downhill?

(Do love this video response from the gay community on what might happen if we don't let them marry each other: Hilarious!)

6) The Olympic legacy

I'll admit to being a nay-sayer when it came to the Olympics, and then it changed my mind, for so many reasons. The inspirational performances were just one aspect of the whole thing to be honest. I loved the fact that we saw immigrants as accepted parts of our society who wanted to help make this a great country rather than simply a racially homogenous one; I loved the way we came to see 

Paralympians and disabled people as heroes rather than as scroungers, benefits cheats, or a drain on the nation; And most of all (as a media specialist), I loved the fact that the people we idolized were for once not over-paid ponces (footballers, looking at you here!) or people with little talent who'd made it through "reality TV" and been told they were the next big thing. The Olympians were people who excelled at their sports, achieved their success through incredible hard work over a long period of time, and when they'd finally achieved it, had the humility to admit that they were only part of a team, and that their achievements were only a blip on a much larger scale. People who are often aware of their own lack of importance in the grand scheme of things are often the ones who achieve and give most in life. That's a true legacy.

Finally, I had to leave this year's review with two of my favourite videos of the year: You're going to tell me they're the same: Same tune, same theme, same Olympic footage. But there is a subtle difference. While the first is a celebration of the Olympics and its trials, tribulations and successes, the second I think is more powerful.

Because it's about more than the sportsmen and the sportswomen who did us so proud. It's about us as well, and our role as ordinary people. It's about everybody who made it happen, made a difference, and made it such a special time for Britain (not just London). It's about ordinary people clubbing together to show how great a nation's people are, without jingoism or feeling any need to be better than anyone else...

If we're going to do anything to leave a legacy in 2013 (and seeing as yesterday went off without a hitch, and Mayans are still investing in pension funds, we can assume we do still have a future on this planet!), it should be to realise our potential as a species within the great ecosystem which is our planet.

It should be about looking out for each other.

It should be about looking out for our resources, and sharing them equitably.

It should be about realising with humility that our survival depends on working in harmony with this beautiful planet, and not simply in our own selfish interests.

A final quote, to leave you with this year. It's from a book I read years ago that is unique in its ability to constantly remind me of how tiny my place in the world is. As my Christmas gift to you all, may I recommend "Tuesdays With Morrie", and may we all continue to strive to make this a better place to live next year... Merry Christmas!

You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.

“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.

“Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air–until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.

“My God, this is terrible,” the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’

“Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’

“The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’

“The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’”

I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again.

“Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean.” I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.

Extract from the book Tuesdays with Morrie 
By Mitch Albom
All rights reserved.
New York : Doubleday, c1997.

My iPad journey - Updated

Cards on the table: I've been teaching 17 years and have always been a huge fan of computers and their potential for learning. I'm not an ICT teacher, nor am I any more than a gifted amateur in the ICT world. I am not a geek, except insofar as I watch The Big Bang Theory. And love it. OK, I'm a bit of a geek. But I have some semblance of social skills, so I'm not sure it counts really.

My journey with ICT began with computers, always Windows, big Apple hater to be honest. Then the iPad came out, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. But it bugged the hell out of me the number of work-arounds I had to find for functions which would have been simple for a PC. As a media teacher, it irritated me that I had to wait until iPad 2 for a camera, but once I had the camera, it didn't take long before the iPad gradually rendered my computer almost obsolete. The iPad started as a replacement for computers, in the classroom as well as at home.

And so the iPad began to replace many PC functions in my classroom, as a simple swap. There were limitations, but more advantages than I'd thought. the "switch it on and it's on" facility (revolutionary, I know: Who thought that one up?) was a huge time-saver, meaning I didn't have to plan whole lessons around computers just to make switching them on and the 10-minute boot-up worthwhile, or introduce lessons with 20 minutes of board-work just to kill time so the damn things were ready to go. (Honestly, all the tasks were really useful, promise)

At the same time I started on twitter, where all my best ideas came from. More or less all my ideas, if I'm honest. I am not one of life's creative thinkers, it's fair to say. But I do have a much under-estimated skill of being able to look at things which are beyond my creative capacity and give them a slight tweak to improve them. This was more or less how I treated most of my PLN's contributions: "Like that, how do I make it work for me?".

Our school has been on a three-year drive to improve AfL, and this was brilliantly served by Socrative quick tutorial here if you've never seen it before), which had the advantage of being usable on computers and phones as well, useful for classes where we didn't have enough iPads to go round. In fact, it's the ideal tool for any BYOD environment too. I started realising that the iPads had loads of advantages, but these were often negated if you didn't have a device per person, so using web-based apps helped as I could supplement the ipads with conventional PCs. This was enriching the learning in my class, with a greater variety in my students' educational diet which was keeping them on their toes.
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By now I was starting to see the creative potential of the iPads for making movies, podcasts, comic strips, posters etc. It started out as a solution to my attempts to "flip the classroom", buy allowing me to create simple tutorial videos I could set as homework preparation for lessons (Our Youtube channel gives you a few examples which you are welcome to share). I could even put them into Playlists so that the videos became more advanced, and students were able to go as fast in their learning as they wanted to, which was really useful at KS4 and KS5. Using the camera on the iPad and iMovie enabled me to make these short videos within half an hour sometimes, and as they are all online now, they are permanently there for students to refer to. Which means I've stopped repeating myself in class, a lot. Apart from the phrase "Do you know where to look for your answer?" which is getting trotted out more...

My own forays into creativity also showed me the iPad's potential for increasing the number of ways my students could respond creatively to tasks rather than just using them to find out information, browse the internet and write notes. Creation is perhaps the one area the iPad really has it over other tablets, as it has a huge amount of potential. So my students would be using creative apps to illustrate their learning, and this, I realised, was enhancing learning dramatically, by deepening the way the students were thinking, and really getting them to synthesise and apply the information in new and creative ways. Twitter and @Gripweed1 added more apps from a fabulous website of the week feature he does, eg Explain Everything, and the ways in which my students were able to demonstrate their learning continued to grow.

Explain Everything has been a great case in point, one which I am developing my use of consistently. At first it was me making tutorials, or explaining concepts for students. But after a while I started asking the students to use it to explain the concepts themselves. The beauty of it was that it allowed them to use pictures, labels, extended writing, but also make these into movies which they could produce verbal commentaries for. A lot of my students with special needs have benefitted from this new way of accessing and showing their learning, or boys especially who never quite get round to writing things in any more detail than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Tell them they can explain it verbally or make it into a movie and they're mad for it. Tell them how brilliant the answer is but they now have to write it in ten minutes for an exam response, and they suddenly realise that succinct writing is a skill they also have to learn. Importantly though, those who always thought they were not much good in class because their written responses got low marks now realise that the knowledge is more than adequate, and that the only obstacle to good marks is writing. Somehow, that seems to make the task of improving slightly less daunting to them.

Then the enhanced learning led logically into sharing our work. Students were so proud they wanted to be able to show their work to everyone, through the Apple TV, and to their parents. Students sharing their work with each other on Twitter has increased the collaboration in class dramatically, for a start. QR codes, tweeting, Creative Book Builder (another easy tutorial here for those of you who've never tried it), were my first steps into this curating work and bringing it together. Again, @Gripweed's app of the week showed me countless possibilities for doing this, such as Wallwisher, Edmodo, Scoop.It. And my eyes began to open to the number of different ways I could do that.

I ignored virtually all of them, because if there's a down-side to Twitter, it's that it can deluge you with too many ideas. But I had enough to fulfil the functions I was after, and it was clear that sharing work was having an additional unexpected effect: It was extending learning. What students were producing was changing, the way in which they were doing it was changing, and they were now learning outside the classroom much more. I'd been toying with flipped learning for a long time, but suddenly these tools made it not only possible, but also driven by the students.

So the next stage was to stop exploring too much, and sit down and rationalise things. I spent time thinking about the functions I wanted my students to be able to undertake using the iPads, and created a list: Mind-mapping, AfL, writing and recording, researching, demonstrating learning, sharing learning, creating posters, word clouds, videos, demonstrations, podcasts, revision, online accessible storage.
Here are the tools I used, for those of you with an unhealthy interest:

AfL - Socrative
Mind-mapping - Popplet, iThoughtHD
Note-taking and recording - Pages, Evernote, GoogleDocs, Keynote
Research - Safari, Skype/Facetime, Khan Academy, TED and TED-ED
Word clouds - TagCloud, Word Collage
Demonstrating learning - Explain Everything, Skitch, Timeli, VideoScribe, Creative Book Builder, iBooks, Apple TV
Creating - CeltX, Cinemek, Pinnacle Studio, iMovie, PS Touch, PS Express, StripDesign, Phoster, Flipbook
Revision - Quizlet
Storage and sharing - Evernote, Dropbox, Cloudon, iBooks, Twitter, QR codes

Way too much info, huh? Up until the list you were busy thinking "Wow, great, cool, I should try this!" And then this turned into those, and I can feel your enthusiasm waning with the immensity of the task! I've been there. I sympathise. I call it "My inspirational Twitter PLN hell". But here's the thing: To quote my favourite philosopher Lao Tzu, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". There is no minimum speed limit on this journey. There is only DO or DO NOT. So pick one app. Try it. When you've got it wrong a few times, try it some more, get the students to help you out, or find work-arounds, and get good at it. Embed it. And then add another, and so on.

And add in your other learning styles: Flipped learning works brilliantly with iPads, as does SOLO Taxonomy. As, I would imagine, does co-construction. It's only a tool after all, and there are a whole load of ways it can help you do your job more effectively. The final thing you'll discover on this journey is that, beyond changing how you do things, varying your educational activities, deepening the learning of your students, and extending the ways in which they learn, you will ultimately have empowered your learners to take charge of their own education. Which is technically, I reckon, Outstanding, is it not?

The process so far has taken me a year. I now have four classes using iPads most lessons, for a variety of tasks, and constantly coming up with new ways to learn. Sometimes I feel like a spare part, but it just gives me a precious second or two to sit back and smile to myself. Before I get back on their backs expecting even more!

Thank you. Once again, you've made it to the end of the post. Here's your cartoon... At least I'm getting more consistent with my rewards system, eh?

Keeping teachers healthy

A while back I read a rather brilliant blogpost by the equally rather brilliant John Tomsett entitled This Much I Know About... Staff Well-Being. It was so inspiring that, like any good professional, I nicked it and tried to pass the ideas off as my own at our staff well-being committee the following week. Unfortunately, my DHT who chairs the meeting was trying to do likewise. Fortunately for us, if rather ironically, everyone else was too sick or busy that week to be there, so between the two of us we quietly buried the whole plagiarism thing and just decided to focus on the merits of the ideas therein.
#dodgedabullet

I've written elsewhere in a post on Leadership and Integrity that the teacher is the most important tool in the education process. Technology is great, supportive management are too, but at the end of the day, the teacher is the tool which crafts the final product, the holistic education of a child: no tool, no product. The logical corollary to this is that teachers are the most prized asset a school has, and should therefore be looked after and enabled to do their job as best they can, rather than prevented from doing so. Staff well-being is a critical issue in this respect, but I can't help feeling we're often our own worst enemies.

OK, so, cards on the table. I'm not one of these teachers who gives everything in the service of the students and the profession. Don't get me wrong: During the hours of 7.30 - 6.00 while I'm in school, I'll be giving my best. And when I'm marking work and doing the other bits and bobs at home in the evening and at the weekend, those tasks too will have my undivided attention. But here's the thing. When I get all my To Do list done, I'm done for the day, and that's that.  I'm damned if I'm going to be one of those teachers who martyrs themselves for the job. Because you know what I've noticed all martyrs have in common? Their deadness. The fact that none of them walk away happy, or indeed walk any further at all. For them, it's all or nothing.

Now I know teachers who are like this. And believe me, there is a point up to which I admire their dedication. But here's my question: Who do you think you're helping with this sort of attitude? Are you seriously trying to tell me that your über-dedication and consequent constant exhaustion are the best way to help your students? And if you're busy having a jolly good laugh at those martyrs, ask yourself if you've ever come in to school despite the fact you KNEW you were too ill to do so? Cover too much hassle to set? Kids can't do without you? Feel guilty about the cover you're causing? Leave it out! Someone ought to seriously try calculating the knock-on effect of that valiant act. For starters, how many other people did you infect? And how many days of work were lost through that? How many students lost time because of the same thing? (And we're never exactly enamoured of the fact that students miss our lessons, no matter how legitimate the reasons) and how many of those lessons you did deliver were actually good lessons? I can imagine the looks of horror on people's faces as I criticise their devotion to duty, but I can't tell you how misguided it is.

If you're dedicated to your job, you have a duty to look after your health. And to be honest, you've got a duty to look after your health full stop. If your life is one of giving to your students, then they deserve your best, and you cannot give that unless you take care of yourself. If you actually have other centres of interest in your life other than teaching, heaven forbid, like loved ones who need your time, then you owe them too. That means disciplining yourself to stop with enough energy left for those people too. The ones you love. Remember?

Anyway, I hate my own tendency to be critical, so here are my own ideas on how to achieve that balance which might be a bit more constructive. They are by no means perfect, but they really help me.

• Reserve early mornings for yourself. Bit of exercise, deep breathing, meditation, whatever you want, but give yourself you time. It's not about "allowing yourself", it's about disciplining yourself. It's not an indulgence, it's a need.
• Learn to cook. Properly. I love lots of sweet indulgences, but they don't love me, so I ditched them and tried to fill myself with good stuff, and find other things I look forward to eating just as much. Check out this banana cake recipe for starters!
• Set time aside: I set aside two evenings a week for friends and exercise at the same time. My friends are great at keeping me motivated to keep fit. Surrounding yourself with good, positive friends who want the best for you also goes a long way.
• I started learning t'ai chi the week I began teacher training, some meh years ago, and it really helps. Not just with staying calm under pressure, and giving me bags more energy than I've ever had before, but also with awareness of when I'm over-working my system, and when I need to slow down. It ended up doing me so much good I started teaching it. Now, several years down the line, those people I taught are keeping me from spending my energy unwisely, because they're now teachers in their own right. How cool is that?
• Professional guilt: Get rid of it. Sacrificing your health for short-term gain isn't worth it, and is actually helping fewer people than you think.
• Time for loved ones. If you can't spare your children an hour a day minimum, and more for your partner, that's not making you a good person. Why should they have to sacrifice their energy to make up for your lack of it all the time? Dinner times are sacrosanct in our house, and cooking together is an even better way to get time with the people you love. My brother even has a fab "cocktail Wednesday" which he and his wife never deviate from. Oh, and quit trying to multi-task. When you're dealing with people at school, you wouldn't be checking your phone or answering emails at the same time, so don't do it to your family.
• Weekends: I know working at weekends is inevitable, but try to put aside a full day for yourself, your family, your friends and yourself: You deserve it.
• Sleep. Lots of it, especially in winter. There is less energy around at this time of year, so you need to conserve what little you have if you're going to stay fresh. The rest of nature hibernates for good reason. If we, the so-called "superior animals", think we can ignore nature's cycles, then we're not as clever as we like to think. Try switching off from work at least an hour before you go to bed, and don't go to bed after eleven. Statistically it is far more difficult to get to sleep thereafter.

And if you look at the actual amount of time you're taking off work by completing the above, it's not too much to expect is it? Assuming you want to have a life, at any rate.

In conclusion, to paraphrase the greatest taoist master of them all:

Get a life. Do not get a life. There is no try.

This post is dedicated in memoriam of the greatest teacher ever, Trevor Edney, who taught me not only to love learning, but also to love the health I'd been given, and to enjoy my time on Earth. RIP

Blowing OFSTED away!

So I started a blog entry on Thursday evening, fresh from the most amazing fortnight of my professional career, possibly. A Carlsberg fortnight if you will. It had started with an SLT observation which had been Outstanding, albeit after some negotiation. There were then several meetings where I felt I made good contributions, including a coaching meeting with someone in my Faculty which both of us felt had been really productive, and had reaffirmed me in the need to connect personally with the people I work with, and help and support them, as well as challenging them. I had two sessions for the Aspiring Senior Leadership programme (which I realise I keep banging on about - sorry!), both of which were filling me with more confidence that I might actually have a contribution to make at that sort of level, and in the last one, I even felt I was developing a bit of my own thinking, having been a bit critical of a session where we learnt all about the primacy of data before being told "It's really about people and doing the best for your students". Why, I wondered, were we kow-towing slavishly to statistics and data which measured us on such narrow criteria if we were supposed to be about the whole child? Why, if academies had been given such freedoms to formulate their own curriculum, were we all trying our best to play "Look at us, we're the best!" using even narrower ranges of measures such as the E-Bacc? Was this really the best we could do for each of the students we teach? I've written about this elsewhere, so I won't labour the point, but you get the idea...

So a bit of observation success, some jolly nice pats on the back, a few green shoots of thinking for myself, all topped off with an HMI visit which stamped the school's reputation as Outstanding, World Class, and "blowing the lid off outstanding" indeed: Apparently this was a comment made about my own lesson. Well, I was quite chuffed. Blog, here I come, ready to show the world I know some serious stuff. The Internet would have to sit up and listen now. Might even get past the 200 followers mark on Twitter. Then everyone would know who was the king of this damn castle! Hell yeah....

Fortunately for me, the week had also pretty much exhausted me, and I feel asleep before being able to hit the PUBLISH button (except with my slumping forehead, which wasn't accurate enough to hit the screen in just the right place).

Thankfully.

None of the self-congratulatory crap of the original post has since survived, as you can possibly tell (except in an ironic, disdainful, faux can't-believe-I-was-nearly-that-shallow kind of a way). By the time I reviewed it, most of the puffed up self-confidence had gone. Having read some brilliant blogs over the weekend, and some thoroughly humbling ones (my thanks to @Headguruteacher, @kevbartle and @Gwenelope for their contributions, whether they realise it or not), I came back to the realisation, which I've known all along, that chasing plaudits leads to an ego boost, and ego boosts are exactly what divert perfectly well-intentioned people from doing what they know to be right, by their students and their staff. Some may call it pragmatism in an imperfect world, but you have to ask yourself whether, by playing along with the rules of the imperfect world, you aren't condoning it, and won't eventually arrive at a rather unquestioning acceptance of it. In the name of pragmatism. Realpolitik, and all that.

So while my mind is feeling refreshed, and my ego is on a lull, I got on, and planned some more excellent lessons which will push my students harder than they've been pushed before, which will win no popularity contests, but which will get them to be able to think for themselves, hopefully with the same level of integrity I'm aspiring towards. That's my job. Every day. Even when HMI have gone.

Fortunately for me, the pace of a teacher's life and the sieve-like nature of my memory will combine hopefully to ensure I've forgotten all about last week by the time I hit the starter thunk in tomorrow's Year 10 lesson! Nothing like students to keep you grounded and focused on the main thing...