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| http://www.slideshare.net/MikeGunn/setting-up-byodpptx |
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
BYOD - A viable alternative
There were a lot of people at the National Academies Show today who asked me for a copy of my presentation, and whose names and emails I didn't have time to take down (really sorry! Other people waiting to speak behind me!), so here, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment and want to go through it a second time, is the thing...
Saturday, 10 October 2015
Well-being
I've read a lot of really good blogs recently about teacher well-being, and what a tough nut it is to crack. Depending on whether you come from a leadership point of view or a chalk-face view, you will have different interpretations of where the problems lie, and what the solutions might be.
@kevbartle talked recently about the tokenism of some approaches (free tea and coffee anyone?), or the tick-box approach we are often forced to adopt by external agencies who also want to be seen to be "doing something" to solve the problem. Surprisingly, none of them seem to work. Surprisingly.
For what it's worth, here is my contribution to the debate. I hope it gets to the nub of the problem:
The first given in the debate is this: The business of schools is to produce students who, be it through good exam results or just more ambition, self-respect and belief, are ready for the outside world. We are there to give them "life chances" in the jargon. In a utilitarian view of education, they are the product which feeds the economy, and the product has to be top-notch. From a more humanitarian perspective, students are individual humans whose contribution can improve society if we have done our job well.
The second given is that our job as teachers and school leaders is to deliver that. The ultimate needs of the students must come above our own. Unfortunately, this very often includes the needs of staff well-being, or the needs we may have as normal human beings to have a life. We have chosen a career which, if we let it, can degenerate into a massive black hole for all our energies.
In this context, my contention is this: If students are the products of the system, we are the craftspeople who shape the product. We, and I realise I am risking derision for my choice of words here, are tools. If you're happy for me to carry on with this analogy, it works like this: A craftsman chooses how well he keeps his tools. He can buy them cheap, use them until they wear out, and then just get rid of them. Or, as is the case with real craftsmen, you can look after them carefully, keep them sharp, and produce excellent work with them for a long time.
For me, the well-being debate boils down to this: As a school leader, do your actions contribute towards wearing the tools out prematurely or do they contribute towards keeping them as sharp as possible for as long as possible?
To make my point, under which of the two categories would you place the following activities?
@kevbartle talked recently about the tokenism of some approaches (free tea and coffee anyone?), or the tick-box approach we are often forced to adopt by external agencies who also want to be seen to be "doing something" to solve the problem. Surprisingly, none of them seem to work. Surprisingly.
For what it's worth, here is my contribution to the debate. I hope it gets to the nub of the problem:
The first given in the debate is this: The business of schools is to produce students who, be it through good exam results or just more ambition, self-respect and belief, are ready for the outside world. We are there to give them "life chances" in the jargon. In a utilitarian view of education, they are the product which feeds the economy, and the product has to be top-notch. From a more humanitarian perspective, students are individual humans whose contribution can improve society if we have done our job well.
The second given is that our job as teachers and school leaders is to deliver that. The ultimate needs of the students must come above our own. Unfortunately, this very often includes the needs of staff well-being, or the needs we may have as normal human beings to have a life. We have chosen a career which, if we let it, can degenerate into a massive black hole for all our energies.
In this context, my contention is this: If students are the products of the system, we are the craftspeople who shape the product. We, and I realise I am risking derision for my choice of words here, are tools. If you're happy for me to carry on with this analogy, it works like this: A craftsman chooses how well he keeps his tools. He can buy them cheap, use them until they wear out, and then just get rid of them. Or, as is the case with real craftsmen, you can look after them carefully, keep them sharp, and produce excellent work with them for a long time.For me, the well-being debate boils down to this: As a school leader, do your actions contribute towards wearing the tools out prematurely or do they contribute towards keeping them as sharp as possible for as long as possible?
To make my point, under which of the two categories would you place the following activities?
- Free tea and coffee at break-times
- Creating support systems around the school (ICT, SIMS, First Aid, school comms etc) which just work reliably day in day out
- A reliable and easy-to-use VLE
- Time to meet in teams to plan lessons together
- Audits of lessons, learning objectives, marking etc
- Staff socials
- Timetables which minimise split classes, room changes, etc
- Timetables which give staff time to socialise and discuss daily problems
- Setting up a staff well-being committee
- Staff freebies, such as health insurance or discounts on well-being services
- Thinking hard about any new initiative, and whether it adds to or distracts from the "main thing": Teaching and learning.
To me, anything which allows teachers to teach more effectively and more efficiently is a sharpening tool: Anything which gets in the way of that is blunting the effectiveness of the tool. Ultimately, that will have knock-on effects for the outcomes we produce as schools.
Monday, 17 November 2014
The perpetual anxiety of education
This blog post follows a series of events which have clearly contributed to its central idea: These events include (in no particular order), a summer holiday where I truly reconnected with myself for the first time in ages, a set of excellent exam results across the Faculty I lead, a first half-term which nigh-on wiped that feel-good factor out, a Middle leadership meeting that left me feeling the overwhelming weight of national educational change coming soon, a well-being meeting where we tinkered around the edges but never really got to the crux of the problem, and a graded observation which was Good (with some outstanding features) but didn't really reflect what I've been doing this year.
What I've been doing this year is mostly consolidating a range of pedagogical tweaks I've learnt, mostly thanks to Twitterati (@headguruteacher, @HuntingEnglish, @ICTevangelist, @jkfairclough, @kathydarlison85, @hgaldinoshea and @ragazza_inglese to name a tiny proportion) but also some fantastic colleagues at my school, and formalising them into concrete lessons via our new FROG OS VLE (a school development area). The VLE has been useful in helping me get to a really deep level of flipped learning, which I've always wanted to do, to the point where I have several classes where some students are now lessons ahead of others, and really powering through the learning. It has increased the independence of a significant number of the most motivated and able students I teach, and at the same time highlighted just how teacher-dependent some of my least able are. It has also, frustratingly, pushed me back in pedagogical terms by preventing me from combining the VLE with all of the great things I've learnt from two years of working with iPads, because the two won't talk to each other. All of which is irrelevant to the actual post, but you need the context to see why this topic is important to me.
The feeling I have at the moment is a horrendously negative feeling that I hate, because I'm not that man. I see myself as a positive person, someone who leads by example and encouragement. But at the moment I feel like quitting. I don't feel that moving up the career ladder to leadership positions is the answer, but I'm not enjoying where I am either. And I can't work out why.
Except today, it hit me. Like an epiphany. A more bleeding obvious epiphany you will probably never hear, and I appreciate that the first sign of publishing this will be greeted by a chorus of "Duh!"s, but here it is anyway. It's called the Perpetual Anxiety of Education. It's the result of the Accountability Matrix. Yes, probably very similar to the one your heard about in the Wachowski brothers' film, but not quite as entertaining. It starts with targets. As soon as targets are formulated, your job is to meet them. Aspirational or not makes no difference, you still have to meet them. And as a teacher, you spend your entire year in this state of anxiety about students meeting their targets. This of course is exacerbated by senior management, who have the same worries, but spread across the whole school, and with often only indirect power to do anything about it: Hell with a side order of chips! The less control you have, the more anxious you are likely to be. Hence the plethora of "accountability measures" deployed in order to keep checking that everyone is doing their utmost to hit those targets.
As a teacher, this constant surveillance makes it very difficult for you to put it out of your mind, hence why I called it a perpetual state of anxiety. And there are few teachers who can do their job effectively without communicating this anxiety to the students. Thus the students themselves are also afflicted by the same perpetual anxiety. Ask the Year 11s in my mentor group who, despite my support and encouragement, feel this overwhelm from all sides. Because of course it's not simply teachers who are putting the pressure on, but parents as well. Are their kids doing as well as the others in their class? In their year group? In their school? What about other schools? Could we be sending our kids to a better school? What about the education system itself? Is it too soft? Is it "fit for purpose"? Is it really preparing my child to do career capital battle with that wiry, hungry little Singaporean kid I hear so much about in the papers, with his 25 hours extra tuition a day on top of his fifteen hours of regular school, per day...? Perpetual anxiety.
Now let's go back to this situation in schools. We have leadership whose job it is to deliver the targets, who have least classroom time to do it in. Their only weapons are by proxy, and they have to deploy these increasingly atomistic dictats to get the rest of their staff to get to "best practice" at all times: Do you have your MUST SHOULD COULD? Do your students know their targets? Their Working at Grades? Was the homework you set meaningful? Was it marked that day? Was it responded to in a meaningful ongoing dialogue which lasted until seconds before the exam? Did you push the students along at the perfect pace for them to cope while maintaining consistently high expectations etc? Don't get me wrong: This is NOT an anti-SLT rant, because I've been on the verge of going for these sorts of positions myself for a year or two, and the thing which has always stopped me is this very question: What would I do differently? You see, I think the vast majority of teachers and leaders are good people with the best of intentions, but these are too often warped by the target culture. The accountability matrix. What happens when you meet your target? That's a moot point to be honest. Because the vast majority of teachers only hit their target when the exam results come out. Even if you've hit them beforehand, the criticism is that you've under-estimated your target, you haven't been aspirational enough. So here's a higher one. But once the exam results are out, we have a week to celebrate the achievement of 51 weeks of anxiety-ridden stress, before 1) sending the students off to their next life stage, which will be even more target-riddled than the last, and 2) beginning a whole new round of targets of our own. Hamster-wheel, anyone?
And then we come to the staff well-being meeting. Where nobody can work out quite why staff aren't responding über-positively to the Friday morning cakes, the fruit bowl in the staff room, the staff silly jumper day and the disaggregated day off. These are drops in the ocean of a culture which is otherwise dominated by doubts about whether you could be doing that little bit more to hit those targets. The anxiety is the permanent, low-level background noise which defines the existence of many teachers on a day to day basis.
What's the worst thing about this state of perpetual anxiety? I'm not sure that this is just about education. There is a very good argument for saying that this pretty much covers the majority of our social ills at the moment, in a society which seems hell-bent on better and more rather than sufficient and happy. But I know which I would prefer if given the choice of how to live my life. And that's a BIG "if"...
What I've been doing this year is mostly consolidating a range of pedagogical tweaks I've learnt, mostly thanks to Twitterati (@headguruteacher, @HuntingEnglish, @ICTevangelist, @jkfairclough, @kathydarlison85, @hgaldinoshea and @ragazza_inglese to name a tiny proportion) but also some fantastic colleagues at my school, and formalising them into concrete lessons via our new FROG OS VLE (a school development area). The VLE has been useful in helping me get to a really deep level of flipped learning, which I've always wanted to do, to the point where I have several classes where some students are now lessons ahead of others, and really powering through the learning. It has increased the independence of a significant number of the most motivated and able students I teach, and at the same time highlighted just how teacher-dependent some of my least able are. It has also, frustratingly, pushed me back in pedagogical terms by preventing me from combining the VLE with all of the great things I've learnt from two years of working with iPads, because the two won't talk to each other. All of which is irrelevant to the actual post, but you need the context to see why this topic is important to me.
The feeling I have at the moment is a horrendously negative feeling that I hate, because I'm not that man. I see myself as a positive person, someone who leads by example and encouragement. But at the moment I feel like quitting. I don't feel that moving up the career ladder to leadership positions is the answer, but I'm not enjoying where I am either. And I can't work out why.
Except today, it hit me. Like an epiphany. A more bleeding obvious epiphany you will probably never hear, and I appreciate that the first sign of publishing this will be greeted by a chorus of "Duh!"s, but here it is anyway. It's called the Perpetual Anxiety of Education. It's the result of the Accountability Matrix. Yes, probably very similar to the one your heard about in the Wachowski brothers' film, but not quite as entertaining. It starts with targets. As soon as targets are formulated, your job is to meet them. Aspirational or not makes no difference, you still have to meet them. And as a teacher, you spend your entire year in this state of anxiety about students meeting their targets. This of course is exacerbated by senior management, who have the same worries, but spread across the whole school, and with often only indirect power to do anything about it: Hell with a side order of chips! The less control you have, the more anxious you are likely to be. Hence the plethora of "accountability measures" deployed in order to keep checking that everyone is doing their utmost to hit those targets.
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| Copyright: Jantoo |
Now let's go back to this situation in schools. We have leadership whose job it is to deliver the targets, who have least classroom time to do it in. Their only weapons are by proxy, and they have to deploy these increasingly atomistic dictats to get the rest of their staff to get to "best practice" at all times: Do you have your MUST SHOULD COULD? Do your students know their targets? Their Working at Grades? Was the homework you set meaningful? Was it marked that day? Was it responded to in a meaningful ongoing dialogue which lasted until seconds before the exam? Did you push the students along at the perfect pace for them to cope while maintaining consistently high expectations etc? Don't get me wrong: This is NOT an anti-SLT rant, because I've been on the verge of going for these sorts of positions myself for a year or two, and the thing which has always stopped me is this very question: What would I do differently? You see, I think the vast majority of teachers and leaders are good people with the best of intentions, but these are too often warped by the target culture. The accountability matrix. What happens when you meet your target? That's a moot point to be honest. Because the vast majority of teachers only hit their target when the exam results come out. Even if you've hit them beforehand, the criticism is that you've under-estimated your target, you haven't been aspirational enough. So here's a higher one. But once the exam results are out, we have a week to celebrate the achievement of 51 weeks of anxiety-ridden stress, before 1) sending the students off to their next life stage, which will be even more target-riddled than the last, and 2) beginning a whole new round of targets of our own. Hamster-wheel, anyone?
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| Copyright: Cartoonstock.com |
And then we come to the staff well-being meeting. Where nobody can work out quite why staff aren't responding über-positively to the Friday morning cakes, the fruit bowl in the staff room, the staff silly jumper day and the disaggregated day off. These are drops in the ocean of a culture which is otherwise dominated by doubts about whether you could be doing that little bit more to hit those targets. The anxiety is the permanent, low-level background noise which defines the existence of many teachers on a day to day basis.
What's the worst thing about this state of perpetual anxiety? I'm not sure that this is just about education. There is a very good argument for saying that this pretty much covers the majority of our social ills at the moment, in a society which seems hell-bent on better and more rather than sufficient and happy. But I know which I would prefer if given the choice of how to live my life. And that's a BIG "if"...
Monday, 27 October 2014
Twelve Ways for teachers to reconnect with themselves in the holiday
It's a long-held belief of mine that teachers work bloody hard. Too hard, very often. Twenty years of practice at chalkface (now the digital interface of course), bags under the eyes and an alarming number of wrinkles I swear never used to be there can help me attest to this fact from personal experience. Whether all of this work is always efficient, effective, or indeed has ANY effect on my students' learning may well be a matter for debate, but not in this post.
In this half-term post, I want to come back to an idea I've out out a while ago, namely how teachers can remain healthy. As part of our appraisal systems this year, we've been asked to write down the number of days of absence we had last year, and I found that these stats had all been pre-compiled for me. The nice surprise in this otherwise fairly worrying surveillance trend was to find out that this year marks 5 years (and here I am currently touching enough wood to reconstitute an entire forest!) without illness. In a secondary school as full of snot and lack of hygiene as any teen-dominated environment, I was pretty impressed by this statistic.
I try to take care of myself. I try to devote time to myself, my physical and mental well-being, and I will take on anyone who thinks you have to be "pragmatic" about these matters. "Sometimes you've just got to get your nose to the grindstone and get it done Mike, and things like exercise go out of the window for a bit", I'm told. As far as I'm concerned, that's the thin end of the wedge. If you're going to work ridiculous numbers of hours and devote your life to teaching, at the expense often of family and friends, then you'd better be fit enough to do this for the duration, otherwise you WILL drop. I've seen this happen to too many good teachers to doubt my convictions on this one.
So half-term has come around again, I have shedloads to do, but I've started the half-term on a positive footing. Every day of this half-term, I will do something for me, something for my family, and something for my spirit. Only I couldn't think of anything. Hence, the quest began to think of activities to get myself off the work treadmill, or rather fit the work around, and between us, my daughter and I have come up with some good ones. I share them here in the hope that
a) You will get some inspiration to look after your own health;
b) You'll pass on your own recommendations for me: A virtuous circle if you like.
Anyway, here goes...
Twelve ways to reconnect with yourself this half-term...
1. Watch a good film that inspires you: For this half-term, I've chosen John Favreau's fab performance in Chef: One man's journey from Michelin-starred chef de cuisine to taco-van owner as he rediscovers the roots of his passion for cooking. Don't watch on an empty stomach.
2. Try t'ai chi or yoga. It might be new, it might feel a bit hippy, but try it. I've been doing this since the day I started teacher training, and trust me, it works. Disengage your brain, take time for yourself, take stock of where your body is at. It will thank you later, possibly in old age, possibly by making sure that you're still around to have one!
3. Play cards, or board games: Let's face it, the cards are just an excuse for a good conversation with the whole family, a drink, some nibbles. Play Top Trumps if you like. Nobody cares. Just enjoy each other's company, and laugh.
4. Read something for pleasure, not work. Read something to give you a new perspective. My personal recommendation at the moment is The Kite Runner - Great book about Afghanistan, which will help you see that country and culture in a new light.
5. Cook a meal with or for someone you love: Take care over it. Get it perfect. Enjoy the process of making, tasting, rolling, kneading. The eating isn't the only sensual part of the meal.
6. Get to know your own area as you've never quite seen it before by trying geocaching: Free membership, and millions of ready-made treasure hunts around your area.
7. Switch the heating on. Go out for a walk in the dark and the wind. Come home. Relax in the warm under a duvet. Reconnect with nature, and then appreciate the modern comforts which seclude you from being at its mercy all the time.
8. Seeing as it's October half-term (I promise I will try and update these every time we have a holiday so that all advice is guaranteed seasonal and organic!), go see a firework display with friends and children. Make an occasion of it. Take some flasks of mulled wine, roast chestnuts etc to share. Better still, make your own bonfire, and learn how to light it without matches. Get those neighbours you never have time to speak to properly round, and enjoy each other's company.
9. Switch off all your electronic devices for 24 hours: Phones, ipads, laptops, TV, the lot. Spend the time listening, to yourself, to your friends, and to your family. See what type of day you had compared to normal. If you're a digital addict like I am, you'll be amazed at how you feel after this one, once the initial frustrations wear off!
10. Get in touch with your creative side: Now that the nights have drawn in, go outside and light paint. You need a camera with a long exposure setting, then take a torch or any light source, and draw
11. Do a taste test. Indulge your palette and reconnect to your senses. Wine, chocolate, smoothies, doesn't matter. Make loads, invite people round, and enjoy talking about your senses, including what they make of your weirder concoctions...
12. Go to an independent cinema. Watch an independent film. Watch a British film. Pride is my recommendation this month: A great (true) story about the support the LGBT community gave the striking miners during the mid-80s, and a chance to see Dominic West as a true Dancing Queen.
In this half-term post, I want to come back to an idea I've out out a while ago, namely how teachers can remain healthy. As part of our appraisal systems this year, we've been asked to write down the number of days of absence we had last year, and I found that these stats had all been pre-compiled for me. The nice surprise in this otherwise fairly worrying surveillance trend was to find out that this year marks 5 years (and here I am currently touching enough wood to reconstitute an entire forest!) without illness. In a secondary school as full of snot and lack of hygiene as any teen-dominated environment, I was pretty impressed by this statistic.
I try to take care of myself. I try to devote time to myself, my physical and mental well-being, and I will take on anyone who thinks you have to be "pragmatic" about these matters. "Sometimes you've just got to get your nose to the grindstone and get it done Mike, and things like exercise go out of the window for a bit", I'm told. As far as I'm concerned, that's the thin end of the wedge. If you're going to work ridiculous numbers of hours and devote your life to teaching, at the expense often of family and friends, then you'd better be fit enough to do this for the duration, otherwise you WILL drop. I've seen this happen to too many good teachers to doubt my convictions on this one.
So half-term has come around again, I have shedloads to do, but I've started the half-term on a positive footing. Every day of this half-term, I will do something for me, something for my family, and something for my spirit. Only I couldn't think of anything. Hence, the quest began to think of activities to get myself off the work treadmill, or rather fit the work around, and between us, my daughter and I have come up with some good ones. I share them here in the hope that
a) You will get some inspiration to look after your own health;
b) You'll pass on your own recommendations for me: A virtuous circle if you like.
Anyway, here goes...
Twelve ways to reconnect with yourself this half-term...
1. Watch a good film that inspires you: For this half-term, I've chosen John Favreau's fab performance in Chef: One man's journey from Michelin-starred chef de cuisine to taco-van owner as he rediscovers the roots of his passion for cooking. Don't watch on an empty stomach.
2. Try t'ai chi or yoga. It might be new, it might feel a bit hippy, but try it. I've been doing this since the day I started teacher training, and trust me, it works. Disengage your brain, take time for yourself, take stock of where your body is at. It will thank you later, possibly in old age, possibly by making sure that you're still around to have one!
3. Play cards, or board games: Let's face it, the cards are just an excuse for a good conversation with the whole family, a drink, some nibbles. Play Top Trumps if you like. Nobody cares. Just enjoy each other's company, and laugh.
4. Read something for pleasure, not work. Read something to give you a new perspective. My personal recommendation at the moment is The Kite Runner - Great book about Afghanistan, which will help you see that country and culture in a new light.5. Cook a meal with or for someone you love: Take care over it. Get it perfect. Enjoy the process of making, tasting, rolling, kneading. The eating isn't the only sensual part of the meal.
6. Get to know your own area as you've never quite seen it before by trying geocaching: Free membership, and millions of ready-made treasure hunts around your area.
7. Switch the heating on. Go out for a walk in the dark and the wind. Come home. Relax in the warm under a duvet. Reconnect with nature, and then appreciate the modern comforts which seclude you from being at its mercy all the time.
8. Seeing as it's October half-term (I promise I will try and update these every time we have a holiday so that all advice is guaranteed seasonal and organic!), go see a firework display with friends and children. Make an occasion of it. Take some flasks of mulled wine, roast chestnuts etc to share. Better still, make your own bonfire, and learn how to light it without matches. Get those neighbours you never have time to speak to properly round, and enjoy each other's company.9. Switch off all your electronic devices for 24 hours: Phones, ipads, laptops, TV, the lot. Spend the time listening, to yourself, to your friends, and to your family. See what type of day you had compared to normal. If you're a digital addict like I am, you'll be amazed at how you feel after this one, once the initial frustrations wear off!
10. Get in touch with your creative side: Now that the nights have drawn in, go outside and light paint. You need a camera with a long exposure setting, then take a torch or any light source, and draw 11. Do a taste test. Indulge your palette and reconnect to your senses. Wine, chocolate, smoothies, doesn't matter. Make loads, invite people round, and enjoy talking about your senses, including what they make of your weirder concoctions...
12. Go to an independent cinema. Watch an independent film. Watch a British film. Pride is my recommendation this month: A great (true) story about the support the LGBT community gave the striking miners during the mid-80s, and a chance to see Dominic West as a true Dancing Queen.
Hope this gives you some ideas for starters: Please leave me yours in the comments.
Happy half-term!
Sunday, 11 May 2014
BYOD in schools - Part 6: Engaging parents
One of the most important factors in moving forward towards a roll-out of any form of mobile learning school, whether it be iPad 1:1, or BYOD in our case, is getting teachers, students and parents on board with the process simultaneously. Try shooting five basketballs towards a basket at the same time: It's more or less the same exercise. Or planning, teaching, marking, answering a thousand e-mail requests for paperwork and having any sort of life outside of school, for that matter.
I've dealt elsewhere with our general strategy and rationale for the roll-out , and looked specifically at the issues of staff training, student engagement in the process and the part played by Digital Leaders in this process, so forgive me if I don't revisit old ground here. We developed our strategy, worked out how we could train teachers gradually, and interviewed and trained our Digital Leaders to help us with our class trials. But now the big step to a whole-school roll-out looms, and we really need to get ALL of our parents on-board, or they won't allow their students to bring their devices in in the first place.
These are the key points we need to communicate to them, in my opinion:
A fundamental building block of this strategy would be the involvement of students who already use mobile learning, and Digital Leaders in particular. Alongside the teacher-led workshops and model lessons, the student leaders could lead "Genius bar" style sessions including videos of other lessons throughout the year, the students' own thoughts on mobile learning, and the advantages it gives them over other learners. They would be able to show how they themselves support the process in school, answer technical queries, and could also talk to parents knowledgeably about the different sorts of devices they have used, the advantages and disadvantages of each for different subjects, and they could blog about this afterwards so that this advice is permanently there for parents to refer to, with direct links from the school website.
One of the other things this type of festival would facilitate is for other teachers who are less confident about tech use in lessons (from other schools, or from within our own) to get the same information, to interrogate the possibilities for themselves, and to make their own first steps. This would be great CPD for all involved, sharing best and next practice widely, and also enabling schools like ours to clearly demonstrate our role as a support school to those in the wider community. In fact, I think it would be great to follow this up with an hour's TeachMeet at the end of the day for teachers to share their best apps and resources, divided into different categories (AFL, BFL, differentiation and personalisation, etc), so teachers can get what they want out of it. That would act as a great summary of everything which has been shared that day, and really send people away with lots to think about.
After an event like that, I think very few parents will be in any doubt about the school's rationale for using mobile devices to enhance learning, and I would hope that teachers and students would be enthused, and that the wider community would be able to see just what a forward-thinking institution this was...
If we don't engage parents, and show them the realities of modern education, and the potential mobile technology brings within that environment, we risk them not understanding what we are trying to do, and we all know where that leads...
I've dealt elsewhere with our general strategy and rationale for the roll-out , and looked specifically at the issues of staff training, student engagement in the process and the part played by Digital Leaders in this process, so forgive me if I don't revisit old ground here. We developed our strategy, worked out how we could train teachers gradually, and interviewed and trained our Digital Leaders to help us with our class trials. But now the big step to a whole-school roll-out looms, and we really need to get ALL of our parents on-board, or they won't allow their students to bring their devices in in the first place.
These are the key points we need to communicate to them, in my opinion:
- They need to understand that this is not a gimmick to engage students: There is a clear educational rationale behind the move, which we consider will help improve the performance of our students on a long-term basis. In other words, they have to understand that our move is fundamentally about teaching and learning, and that the use of mobile devices in lesson will occur when there is a clear way in which it can augment, modify or redefine the learning in that lesson, and not otherwise.
- They need to understand why we have decided not to specify a particular device (often iPads in these types of schemes), or indeed pay for the roll-out ourselves from school funds. Essentially there are two key reasons for this move, which are economic and pedagogical. Economically, we as a school cannot afford to pay for them ourselves (£70000 every three years?), and if we passed the cost on to the parents, many of them may not be able to afford it either, especially in times of recession, economic insecurity etc. So not only are we saving ourselves money (three more teachers potentially to help their students?), we are also saving them money, as 99.6% of our students already own devices which they probably bring in to school on a daily basis. Pedagogically, much as I am a fan of the iPad itself, I can't pretend that other devices are not catching them up quickly. Each new iPad seems less of an education game-changer than the last, and yet the premium is still charged. More importantly, I think there is real benefit to be had from giving students and parents the choice of what to bring in, and getting them to discuss issues of what each phone/tablet can and cannot do in the context of teaching and learning, rather than mere functionality (my graphics card is faster and bigger than yours, sort of thing).
- We as a school need to address insurance worries head on: Many parents could quite reasonably object to their children being asked to bring mobile devices into school on the grounds that they could get damaged or stolen. But what if they currently allow their child to bring their phone into school at the moment? Then there is no change in the situation. The phones can still be insured as part of household contents insurance or, as many people already do, can be insured as discrete devices. Having said that, we as a school do also need to make it as secure an environment as possible for our students to bring their phones and devices to school safely. That means addressing potential areas where students might have to leave their devices unattended (changing rooms for instance), and ensuring that we are vigilant at all times, and have water-tight security systems in place to protect student property. To my mind, we should be doing that already. Similarly, in this new digital learning environment, we as a school ought to be pressing the insurance industry for easy, cheap and viable schemes which will allow us to protect our students' devices without costing the earth. Already, some financial institutions are beginning to respond to these requirements.
- Finally, I think it is imperative that parents can SEE the enhanced learning which occurs as a result of using mobile devices. They need to see it in action: We should be inviting them to watch model lessons with students, with a debrief showing how it has enhanced the learning, the students' organisation, their motivation and the differentiation which devices can enable. They need to see these enhancements to lessons in order to understand just how much difference mobile learning can make to their child's education. If we can accompany these sessions with Q&A at the end, with both the teacher and the students involved, (as happened here when I taught a lesson in front of colleagues from across the city using the same techniques as part of a rolling programme of CPD observations "for real"), then I think parents will be a lot more positive about the use of mobile technology as an integral part of their child's learning experience.
A fundamental building block of this strategy would be the involvement of students who already use mobile learning, and Digital Leaders in particular. Alongside the teacher-led workshops and model lessons, the student leaders could lead "Genius bar" style sessions including videos of other lessons throughout the year, the students' own thoughts on mobile learning, and the advantages it gives them over other learners. They would be able to show how they themselves support the process in school, answer technical queries, and could also talk to parents knowledgeably about the different sorts of devices they have used, the advantages and disadvantages of each for different subjects, and they could blog about this afterwards so that this advice is permanently there for parents to refer to, with direct links from the school website.
One of the other things this type of festival would facilitate is for other teachers who are less confident about tech use in lessons (from other schools, or from within our own) to get the same information, to interrogate the possibilities for themselves, and to make their own first steps. This would be great CPD for all involved, sharing best and next practice widely, and also enabling schools like ours to clearly demonstrate our role as a support school to those in the wider community. In fact, I think it would be great to follow this up with an hour's TeachMeet at the end of the day for teachers to share their best apps and resources, divided into different categories (AFL, BFL, differentiation and personalisation, etc), so teachers can get what they want out of it. That would act as a great summary of everything which has been shared that day, and really send people away with lots to think about.
After an event like that, I think very few parents will be in any doubt about the school's rationale for using mobile devices to enhance learning, and I would hope that teachers and students would be enthused, and that the wider community would be able to see just what a forward-thinking institution this was...
If we don't engage parents, and show them the realities of modern education, and the potential mobile technology brings within that environment, we risk them not understanding what we are trying to do, and we all know where that leads...
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| Add caption |
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Effective revision sessions
Yesterday I ran a revision session as I often do for my students before their A level exams kick in. Usually it's a fairly dry affair, what-do-you-know, what-don't-you-know (with raised eyebrows hinting at the "and why don't you know it yet?"-ness of the latter). It's never really something I've got my head round how to do well. There must be an answer, but I'm damned if I ever found it. This year, inspired by a particularly brilliant NQT in the department, I decided to try and do things differently. Apparently, according to the students, it was brilliant. This is what we did...
First, I stopped assuming the student know HOW to revise. We went right back to basics, getting them to think about their state of health as they approach their revision tasks.
Next we looked at the environment for revision: Getting rid of anything extraneous, anything on the desk apart from what is required. We looked at creating an environment which isn't comfortable, on the basis that comfy and cozy equals sleepy. So the whole session was conducting without sitting down at all during the active bits, with fresh air through open windows so it wasn't too warm to concentrate, and we did the whole session in music-less silence, apart from our own discussions.
And finally we talked about sucking lemons. Old trick I think my Dad taught me before my A levels: Sets the teeth on edge, horrible taste, but my lord does it concentrate the mind!
Apparently, nobody had ever spoken to our students about this stuff, about how to get yourself in optimal condition to learn. That surprised me, but I liked the way they responded to being treated more like Olympic athletes than teaching fodder. Their response was excellent, and they really seemed to get a lot more out of it that other revision sessions they'd done.
The important bit for me was that we not only thought about these things, but we modeled them during the session: We had water stations for everyone and herbal tea if they wanted; We provided complex carbohydrate (sugar-free) flapjacks and bananas, and we kept them standing for the 25 minute sessions in a relatively cool classroom.
Lastly, before we got onto the material itself, we talked about what time of day their bodies and brains work best. We thought about timing, and what your brain can hold at any one time: We discussed working 3 hours a day, beginning early in the day. Morning is always better to get revision out of the way, and it gives them the rest of the day to look forward to, with the sense of achievement and the feel-good factor that goes with it. We talked about never revising for more than 20-25 minutes at a time, and being strictly disciplined with five minute breaks in between: Not over-eating. Rehydrating. Re-energising through breathing before the next session. And no more than 6-8 sessions in a day. And we talked about reflecting on what they'd learnt before they ended each 20-25 minute session, to increase likely retention of material. We talked about maximising this with one session reviewing this revision either later that day - 20 minutes or so - or perhaps first thing the following morning.
And finally we talked about resting and relaxing after the work is done. If they're disciplined, and they've stuck to their schedule, they've earned it as far as I'm concerned.
Oddly enough, this was probably the most important bit of the day for the students, according to the feedback we got. The whole motivation industry is well and truly established within education, but many of the students complained that once Mr Motivator had pumped them up and buggered off, they didn't necessarily know how to set about their task. This gave them an idea of what needed to be done on a daily basis in order to achieve those long-term goals, and they seemed to appreciate that help.
The rest of the sessions were dealing with particular skills and content important to my subject. We worked out how much there was to revise, how often we'd need to review each topic before the exam, and created the revision timetable we needed as a roadmap for the journey. Then we thought about the revision tasks themselves: We talked about summarising content, synthesising ideas and finding links, mind-mapping topics, applying ideas and theories to examples, practising exam tasks, but above we made it clear: NEVER simply read through notes! Revise actively, with colours, different layouts, mind maps etc, but don't just sit down. That way lies death and boredom... Or at least poor results.
And there you have it. It looks like there was no magic bullet all along. It's all just a matter of teaching the students to be aware of how they learn optimally. We'll see if it worked on results day...
ADDENDUM: If by any chance there is a magic bullet, and you've found it, please share it. I'm still curious.
First, I stopped assuming the student know HOW to revise. We went right back to basics, getting them to think about their state of health as they approach their revision tasks.
- We talked about getting the body fit every day: Fit body = oxygenated brain = more effective learning
- We talked about the importance of good sleep patterns, getting early nights, and switching off well before they went to bed. Most of them seemed to have no idea that being plugged in to the telly, the computer, Facebook etc just before bed meant their brains were still free-wheeling for a good while after they stopped.
- We talked about the importance of fuel: Eating a balanced diet, with plenty of vegetables and fruit, and complex carbohydrates for slow release of energy. We talked about eating little and often while you revise so that your body isn't sluggishly dividing its energies between the brain and the digestion. We talked about water to hydrate the brain.
- We talked about the quick energy releases of caffeine and sugar and sweets, and how the come-down is worse than the temporary benefits gained, and leads to lack of focus.
- We talked about deep breathing to oxygenate the brain: We started with three deep in breaths, and we showed them that deep breathing is in the diaphragm, not the chest. We let those three deep breaths out as slowly as possible (record was 40 secs for one constant out-breath - pretty impressive). We followed this with three deep in breaths and let them out as forcefully and quickly as possible. They could feel more awareness, more focus (and at nine in the morning, more awake than most of them had felt all year apparently!). We explained about the importance of oxygenating the blood and the brain for peak performance.
After a while they started to see that we were in training: We were athletes, in it for the long haul, and we needed to get ourselves ready.
Next we looked at the environment for revision: Getting rid of anything extraneous, anything on the desk apart from what is required. We looked at creating an environment which isn't comfortable, on the basis that comfy and cozy equals sleepy. So the whole session was conducting without sitting down at all during the active bits, with fresh air through open windows so it wasn't too warm to concentrate, and we did the whole session in music-less silence, apart from our own discussions.
And finally we talked about sucking lemons. Old trick I think my Dad taught me before my A levels: Sets the teeth on edge, horrible taste, but my lord does it concentrate the mind!Apparently, nobody had ever spoken to our students about this stuff, about how to get yourself in optimal condition to learn. That surprised me, but I liked the way they responded to being treated more like Olympic athletes than teaching fodder. Their response was excellent, and they really seemed to get a lot more out of it that other revision sessions they'd done.
The important bit for me was that we not only thought about these things, but we modeled them during the session: We had water stations for everyone and herbal tea if they wanted; We provided complex carbohydrate (sugar-free) flapjacks and bananas, and we kept them standing for the 25 minute sessions in a relatively cool classroom.
Lastly, before we got onto the material itself, we talked about what time of day their bodies and brains work best. We thought about timing, and what your brain can hold at any one time: We discussed working 3 hours a day, beginning early in the day. Morning is always better to get revision out of the way, and it gives them the rest of the day to look forward to, with the sense of achievement and the feel-good factor that goes with it. We talked about never revising for more than 20-25 minutes at a time, and being strictly disciplined with five minute breaks in between: Not over-eating. Rehydrating. Re-energising through breathing before the next session. And no more than 6-8 sessions in a day. And we talked about reflecting on what they'd learnt before they ended each 20-25 minute session, to increase likely retention of material. We talked about maximising this with one session reviewing this revision either later that day - 20 minutes or so - or perhaps first thing the following morning.
And finally we talked about resting and relaxing after the work is done. If they're disciplined, and they've stuck to their schedule, they've earned it as far as I'm concerned.
Oddly enough, this was probably the most important bit of the day for the students, according to the feedback we got. The whole motivation industry is well and truly established within education, but many of the students complained that once Mr Motivator had pumped them up and buggered off, they didn't necessarily know how to set about their task. This gave them an idea of what needed to be done on a daily basis in order to achieve those long-term goals, and they seemed to appreciate that help.
The rest of the sessions were dealing with particular skills and content important to my subject. We worked out how much there was to revise, how often we'd need to review each topic before the exam, and created the revision timetable we needed as a roadmap for the journey. Then we thought about the revision tasks themselves: We talked about summarising content, synthesising ideas and finding links, mind-mapping topics, applying ideas and theories to examples, practising exam tasks, but above we made it clear: NEVER simply read through notes! Revise actively, with colours, different layouts, mind maps etc, but don't just sit down. That way lies death and boredom... Or at least poor results.
And there you have it. It looks like there was no magic bullet all along. It's all just a matter of teaching the students to be aware of how they learn optimally. We'll see if it worked on results day...
ADDENDUM: If by any chance there is a magic bullet, and you've found it, please share it. I'm still curious.
Monday, 28 October 2013
Creating a feedback loop with students: Written formative assessment made easy
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| Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Weston |
One of the key improvements I've been wanting to make to my teaching and learning this year has been to put a system in place of improved formative written feedback within my KS4 and KS5 classes. My feedback has always been decent, but I have a tendency to over-mark, and to get little action from students as a result of my efforts, which can be very frustrating. In addition, I hate having spent a load of time on marking which consequently gets lost by the students, or tucked away in a folder never to be referred to again!
This year, as those of you who follow my blog will know, I've been trying to exploit the potential of mobile technology to improve a whole raft of areas of my teaching. But before you stop reading because you have no access to this kind of tech in your schools, the solution I've found to the marking issue is simple, and doesn't require anything more than the computers most schools and students have already: GoogleDocs.
There are several key advantages to using electronic cloud-based media for your work portfolios, regardless of whether or not your school has iPads, Mobile technology etc. Try some of these for size...
1) Students just need a gmail address (free) to get their own Drive. Drive is like a huge hard disk in the sky. You can store anything on it, and it will be there any time and anywhere you can access the Internet. If you use the Chrome browser - again free, it will be at the top of the page every time you open it and sign in.
2) There are no more excuses for "forgetting" homework: It's always there, online and accessible.
3) Students can no longer get away with saying they have made huge alterations to drafts when they've barely touched them. At the top of their documents, you can see the date they were last modified, and you can even see previous revisions: Anything that's pink is new.
4) Another key advantage is that there are no compatibility issues between versions of software, such as when Kevin can't access his homework because he has a more up-to-date version of Word at home!
5) Similarly, there are no issues with losing work: Every keystroke is saved.
But the main advantage is the ability to save all your work and organise it into folders, and then share it with anyone else who has a gmail address, for assessment by a teacher or a peer. This is how it works in my classroom...
Students create the essay in Documents, or a spreadsheet, or presentation.
Students share it with the teacher and other students, and can specify whether or not they want the document to be editable, commentable or simply viewable to each individual. The teacher or partner receives an email telling them a document has been shared with them, with a link which takes you straight to the document.
Personally I tend to organise my Drive into folders, and put shared work into a folder I set up for each individual student, that way I know all of their work is in one place. Once it's in there, I start reading.
| Leaving questions and comments |
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Finally, at the start of the piece, I will leave formative feedback: A maximum of three things which deserve praise (What Went Well), and two key areas to improve (Even Better If). This I have found focuses my marking on the most important aspects which will help the student to get to the next level.
Recently, a couple of additional features have suggested themselves to me. The first is simply to highlight areas of good practice, so that the students can see examples of what they are doing well (you can choose any colour - I use green, below) . This also helps if you ask them to share a piece of work with other students as a model.
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| Highlighting elements of good practice |
1) Print directly from GoogleDocs: The essays will print out without any of your formative comments, which you can then annotate by hand;
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| Annotated coursework for the moderator |
And there you have it. An easy way to show progress over time, to evidence marking, but more importantly, to enter into a meaningful formative dialogue with students so that they improve with every piece.
Simples...
For easy tutorials on how to use GoogleDrive, please check out our department Youtube Channel.
Saturday, 22 June 2013
What's wrong with education policy debate
I am not prone to ranting. People who know me will tell you I'm neither confrontational nor particularly hard-line. I like to compromise, and find common ground. So this blog may seem out of the blue, and will eventually turn extremely controversial. You read on at your own risk.
I have several problems with current educational policy, but before you start accusing me of party politics, I would say that the political interference in education by Left or Right is equally bad, and that we ought to aspire to educational aims which are based on future-proof principles, and not constantly vacillating back and forth at the whim of the latest cabinet minister who wants to "make his mark" and stake his claim as the next Prime Minister. Seriously, is that a good basis upon which to decide the future of hundreds and thousands of children?
Current education policy does, however, seem to me to take the biscuit. It often seems formulated on the basis of very little evidence, which is in turn often flawed (remember the farcical uncovering of the "poor historical knowledge of modern youth" which was based on surveys for Premier Inn and the Sea Cadets?). Nevertheless, if a conclusion can be turned into a mantra and repeated frequently enough, and exaggerated further by the press who are looking to arrest their declining relevance in society (i.e. sales), it becomes the truth, does it not? This, in my opinion, is no way to conduct a debate about the nation's education.
To illustrate my point, let's turn the tables a little... What if we as teachers behaved in the same way as the education debate is being conducted?
What if we... told our students just to make one point in an essay, repeat the same point ad nauseam, and put it in capitals to make it more convincing and OBVIOUSLY true?
No, we tell them to evidence everything: Point, evidence, evaluate. We tell them to look for potential counter-arguments so they can see both sides, and then to evaluate for themselves what they think the answer might be. Memorisation of facts is not nearly as powerful as the ability to analyse those facts, take them apart, and find out the truth. Unfortunately, in the current climate, the truth, and the evidence which might prove it, and the nuances of the debates, are all simply collateral damage in the quest to gain political capital. What grab the headlines are not the measured nuanced debates of professionals, but the daily kickings from the Secretary of State and Michael Wilshaw which appeal to the confirmation bias of the 40 plus generation who read these things and nod sagely about how much better it was in their day (Was it really, by the way?).
What if we... started telling the whole class off when the naughty child at the back starts making too much noise? And then went out into the playground and started telling every who will listen that everyone was just as bad as that naughty child? Which of us has not been told that this is the first thing you never do in teaching? And yet the journalistic tendencies of making sweeping generalisations from those at the top is remarkable. I'd contend it's not appropriate for education, though. And one of the ways in which citizens would know that is if they had been trained in media criticism, such as is the case in Media Studies, and taught not to accept things at face value. Oh, but it's one of the subjects Michael Gove wants rid of. I wonder why? The journalist is someone who knows a lot of things superficially, and then claims the mantle of the expert. But the very nature of journalism is that it flies from one subject to the next so quickly that 1) it does not develop true expertise, and 2) it looks at things from the skewed perspective of what will sell/scare/interest/amaze the reader rather than reveal what is necessarily true. And these are just the good journalists. As we all know, there are plenty more in the industry who are hacks who will be far less thorough in researching a story, and simply find a couple of provocatively different views from which to formulate a story, and then let rhetoric do the rest. Did you notice I did that myself at the start of the last sentence? Clever and subtle, isn't it? This is how Gove and Wilshaw are winning the battle of the media day by day, and unless teachers fight fire with fire, and can convince the news media that there is a genuinely interesting story to be had in the misuse of statistics and in the manipulation of data for political and commercial ends within education, then we may well be doomed to lose the debate.
Clearly education must be failing: It says so in the papers. Despite the fact that OFSTED's latest data on inspections puts around 70% of schools as Good or Outstanding (not all under the new framework, to be fair). We have a major problem in education: Again it says so in the papers. Every day. Last week we were (collectively, all of us, remember?) responsible for failing pupil premium students, the higher achieving students. Oh, and we were responsible for the rise of the EDL. The problem has been identified, and repeated again and again, so it must be the problem to focus upon. Privatisation of education has been identified as a key solution, as well as making everything harder. That will automatically tell us how to do our jobs better.
Let's look at this situation in a little more detail. A perceived problem has been identified, repeated forcefully and often: People who disagree have been demonised (anyone else an "enemy of promise"?), and we have been told that these enemies threaten our very future. This sounds almost exactly like the way newspapers create a moral panic, and for exactly the same reason, to inspire the feeling of trust in a protector who is looking out for us. You can see where any sense of nuanced debate is being lost here. As for the solutions, clearly privatised schools would not fail: Private companies never fail. And harder exams will obviously inevitably lead to better outcomes, despite the fact that teachers are not being told how to get their students to achieve these higher levels of attainment.
Indeed, if you think about it, how can we possibly get future students to be cleverer when half the profession are a product of the declining educational standards of the last twenty years?
What if we... scared the hell out of our students about their future, and then told them to do everything we say and that will get them home safe and sound? Like sheep.
So here's the controversial bit. Having worked incredibly hard for years to raise my own game as well as that of my students, the last year has coincidentally seen me think seriously about quitting this great profession several times. The egotist in me asks why on earth I should let politicians force me out of a profession I love and am, as an outstanding teacher apparently, quite good at. But then I started thinking of the other people who've probably had similar thoughts.
What if we, as a profession, quit en masse?
Not going on strike. That makes us easy targets to demonise. Governments are great at getting the public to turn against anyone who inconveniences them. But actually quit. Said "We are not prepared to participate in an education system which we believe damages the future of your children, and decreases the life chances of a significant number of them. Find someone else to teach what you want taught."
So far, I've had a variety of gut negative reactions to that suggestion, including my wife's. Gove isn't forcing me to quit a profession I love, goes the line. Except you love the ideal of the profession, not, very often, its actual current substance. We teach despite the fact that we don't like the direction. But then I would argue we are more or less complicit, or at the very least placing ourselves at the mercy of the whims of each Secretary of State. We have long talked about the depoliticisation of education, and even Mr Gove himself has alluded to this as a noble aim of his. But do any of us seriously believe he has that intention?
So I go back to my point. Quit. What would happen?
First, if Heads and teachers quit together, we could not be blamed for holding the nation to ransom. The Secretary of State can simply replace us. In a year, when new teachers have been trained. Oh, and since most PGCE courses have been replaced by in-school training, who is going to do that training? And who's going to do the appointing? I seem to remember the Khmer Rouge getting rid of all Cambodian teachers because they were bourgeois professionals who undermined the Marxist revolution. The effect was catastrophic. Parents are not going to like the fact that their children have nowhere to go. But we aren't withholding our labour: We quit. Perhaps parents after the initial anger directed towards those who have inconvenienced them, would want to know why teachers would actually be prepared to leave their jobs because of the Secretary of State's policies? Maybe then we'd have slightly more informed debate on the subject, and the public would demand our reinstatement?
Maybe I'm an idealist.
But I'd rather be an idealist than a collaborator who fears there is no other option. There always is. And the vast majority of answers I've had about this, while intelligently rationalised, have always been reactions of personal fear.
I have several problems with current educational policy, but before you start accusing me of party politics, I would say that the political interference in education by Left or Right is equally bad, and that we ought to aspire to educational aims which are based on future-proof principles, and not constantly vacillating back and forth at the whim of the latest cabinet minister who wants to "make his mark" and stake his claim as the next Prime Minister. Seriously, is that a good basis upon which to decide the future of hundreds and thousands of children?Current education policy does, however, seem to me to take the biscuit. It often seems formulated on the basis of very little evidence, which is in turn often flawed (remember the farcical uncovering of the "poor historical knowledge of modern youth" which was based on surveys for Premier Inn and the Sea Cadets?). Nevertheless, if a conclusion can be turned into a mantra and repeated frequently enough, and exaggerated further by the press who are looking to arrest their declining relevance in society (i.e. sales), it becomes the truth, does it not? This, in my opinion, is no way to conduct a debate about the nation's education.
To illustrate my point, let's turn the tables a little... What if we as teachers behaved in the same way as the education debate is being conducted?
What if we... told our students just to make one point in an essay, repeat the same point ad nauseam, and put it in capitals to make it more convincing and OBVIOUSLY true?
 |
| Copyright: Jim mentalindigestion.net |
Clearly education must be failing: It says so in the papers. Despite the fact that OFSTED's latest data on inspections puts around 70% of schools as Good or Outstanding (not all under the new framework, to be fair). We have a major problem in education: Again it says so in the papers. Every day. Last week we were (collectively, all of us, remember?) responsible for failing pupil premium students, the higher achieving students. Oh, and we were responsible for the rise of the EDL. The problem has been identified, and repeated again and again, so it must be the problem to focus upon. Privatisation of education has been identified as a key solution, as well as making everything harder. That will automatically tell us how to do our jobs better.
Let's look at this situation in a little more detail. A perceived problem has been identified, repeated forcefully and often: People who disagree have been demonised (anyone else an "enemy of promise"?), and we have been told that these enemies threaten our very future. This sounds almost exactly like the way newspapers create a moral panic, and for exactly the same reason, to inspire the feeling of trust in a protector who is looking out for us. You can see where any sense of nuanced debate is being lost here. As for the solutions, clearly privatised schools would not fail: Private companies never fail. And harder exams will obviously inevitably lead to better outcomes, despite the fact that teachers are not being told how to get their students to achieve these higher levels of attainment. Indeed, if you think about it, how can we possibly get future students to be cleverer when half the profession are a product of the declining educational standards of the last twenty years?
What if we... scared the hell out of our students about their future, and then told them to do everything we say and that will get them home safe and sound? Like sheep.
So here's the controversial bit. Having worked incredibly hard for years to raise my own game as well as that of my students, the last year has coincidentally seen me think seriously about quitting this great profession several times. The egotist in me asks why on earth I should let politicians force me out of a profession I love and am, as an outstanding teacher apparently, quite good at. But then I started thinking of the other people who've probably had similar thoughts.
What if we, as a profession, quit en masse?
Not going on strike. That makes us easy targets to demonise. Governments are great at getting the public to turn against anyone who inconveniences them. But actually quit. Said "We are not prepared to participate in an education system which we believe damages the future of your children, and decreases the life chances of a significant number of them. Find someone else to teach what you want taught."
So far, I've had a variety of gut negative reactions to that suggestion, including my wife's. Gove isn't forcing me to quit a profession I love, goes the line. Except you love the ideal of the profession, not, very often, its actual current substance. We teach despite the fact that we don't like the direction. But then I would argue we are more or less complicit, or at the very least placing ourselves at the mercy of the whims of each Secretary of State. We have long talked about the depoliticisation of education, and even Mr Gove himself has alluded to this as a noble aim of his. But do any of us seriously believe he has that intention?
So I go back to my point. Quit. What would happen?
First, if Heads and teachers quit together, we could not be blamed for holding the nation to ransom. The Secretary of State can simply replace us. In a year, when new teachers have been trained. Oh, and since most PGCE courses have been replaced by in-school training, who is going to do that training? And who's going to do the appointing? I seem to remember the Khmer Rouge getting rid of all Cambodian teachers because they were bourgeois professionals who undermined the Marxist revolution. The effect was catastrophic. Parents are not going to like the fact that their children have nowhere to go. But we aren't withholding our labour: We quit. Perhaps parents after the initial anger directed towards those who have inconvenienced them, would want to know why teachers would actually be prepared to leave their jobs because of the Secretary of State's policies? Maybe then we'd have slightly more informed debate on the subject, and the public would demand our reinstatement?
Maybe I'm an idealist.
But I'd rather be an idealist than a collaborator who fears there is no other option. There always is. And the vast majority of answers I've had about this, while intelligently rationalised, have always been reactions of personal fear.
Saturday, 20 April 2013
Obeying our seasonal rhythms
Last week I blogged about teacher's health after a particularly nasty shock about my own.
This week I decided to do something about it.
Last week I said I didn't have the answers to the problems I raised.
This week I tried looking for some. Over the next few weeks I'll do a few mini-blogs on each of the areas I raised during my last post, which will become more and more specific hopefully, and more and more useful.
Here's what I came up with. Please, if you're serious about maintaining your own health, may I first urge you to do two things in response to this post:
1) Have a go at some of these things, and give me some feedback on how you feel as a result: Does it work for you?
2) Please post some ideas at the bottom which you've tried, so the rest of us can try them. We're using this notion of collaborative working through Twitter et al to improve our teaching, so why should it not work to help us find solutions to over-working?
So here we go...
The first point I talked about last week was our seeming inability to obey our seasonal rhythms. I went away and tried to find something which was always very sensible advice when I used to train many years ago, and finally found it. They still ring true for me.
If you read my last blog (here), you'll notice that in TCM we talk about the 5 element system, which has correspondences in every area, including our own bodies (emotions, mental state, organs etc) and the outside world. Each element therefore has a season associated with it, and the nature of the element reflects the sorts of things we should be doing in each season to live in harmony with nature and not struggle against it so much.
Let's start with the element of Fire. Fire is the element associated with Summer (more detail here):
Earth is the element associated with Late Summer, and this is what its associations are:
Metal is associated with the Autumn season:
Finally, Water is the element associated with Winter:
And finally, let's talk about the present. Spring has finally sprung, and it is associated with the Wood element. You can read its key associations in much more detail here. However, here are a few things TCM philosophy recommends you can do to make the most of Spring's energy...
So there you are. Not rocket science. Just a way of making sure we're not fighting our environment too much. My experience (when I choose to listen to it!) has always shown me how much easier my life is when I don't struggle to overcome what is going on around me, and go with the flow. It is a wise teacher, and in Spring, it is reminding me that I'm as much a part of nature as everything else.
Good luck. Hope you haven't all turned into tree-hugging screaming hippies by the end of these blogs! And let me know how you get on...
This week I decided to do something about it.
Last week I said I didn't have the answers to the problems I raised.
This week I tried looking for some. Over the next few weeks I'll do a few mini-blogs on each of the areas I raised during my last post, which will become more and more specific hopefully, and more and more useful.
Here's what I came up with. Please, if you're serious about maintaining your own health, may I first urge you to do two things in response to this post:
1) Have a go at some of these things, and give me some feedback on how you feel as a result: Does it work for you?
2) Please post some ideas at the bottom which you've tried, so the rest of us can try them. We're using this notion of collaborative working through Twitter et al to improve our teaching, so why should it not work to help us find solutions to over-working?
So here we go...
The first point I talked about last week was our seeming inability to obey our seasonal rhythms. I went away and tried to find something which was always very sensible advice when I used to train many years ago, and finally found it. They still ring true for me.
If you read my last blog (here), you'll notice that in TCM we talk about the 5 element system, which has correspondences in every area, including our own bodies (emotions, mental state, organs etc) and the outside world. Each element therefore has a season associated with it, and the nature of the element reflects the sorts of things we should be doing in each season to live in harmony with nature and not struggle against it so much.
Let's start with the element of Fire. Fire is the element associated with Summer (more detail here):
Ways to tend your inner Fire
- Have fun on a regular basis, even if you have to work at it at first. Make it a priority - schedule your fun, if that's what it takes. Don't compromise. Consider fun as important to your well-being as work or anything else you do.
- Give of yourself to others. Take the time to listen. Take the risk of dipping into your own heart and finding what you have to give to others unconditionally - then just do it.
- Live your passion, whether it be the church choir, rollerblading, preserving the environment, or writing poetry. If you don't know what your special passion is, be willing to admit that you don't. Meanwhile, stay amused and don't stop looking. When you find that great interest, dive into it wholeheartedly and enjoy!
- Get physical. Get into your body and out of your head. Love, exercise, dance, run, play. Get your circulation going.
Earth is the element associated with Late Summer, and this is what its associations are:
Suggestions for living in harmony with the late summer season
- Enjoy the abundance of fruits and fresh vegetables
Be aware of their special qualities, each succulence different from the next. Carrots are crisp, cucumbers cool, tomatoes luscious, peaches sweet. Look at the seeds, and reflect on the fact that within each harvest lie the seeds of the next. - Be thoughtful of how you can nourish others.
In this season when nature gives her bounty, we also rejoice in giving, with attention to the special needs of others. You need not wait until you can give a "great gift." A word, a courtesy, a thoughtfulness - given today - is a great gift. - Be conscious of the harvest of your life.
Think about yourself, your relationships, and your work. What parts of your life are bearing fruit? Where is the harvest rich? Where do you find it stunted? - Consider what you need to do to make ready for the letting go of autumn.
Holding your harvest in mind, ask what is overgrown or unneeded. What distracts you from your dearest concerns? What might you wish to simplify in yourself or in your life?
Metal is associated with the Autumn season:
Suggestions for living in harmony with the autumn season:
- Go through your closet, desk, garage, medicine cabinet - any cluttered storage area-and discard what you no longer need. Then donate, sell, or otherwise circulate what might be of value to others.
- Do a mental inventory: Examine attitudes (prejudices, envies, hatreds, jealousies, resentments) stored within your psyche. When possible, contact those with whom you harbor old "stuff." Attempt to resolve the hurtful old issues, and then let them go.
- For issues you cannot resolve directly with others, or for old issues with yourself, write them on paper, being as specific as possible. Then burn the paper, symbolically releasing the content.
- Take time each day to breathe slowly and deeply. As you inhale the clean autumn air, feel yourself energized and purified. Feel the old negativity, impurity, and pain leave your body and psyche. Then contemplate briefly who you are without these identifications.
Finally, Water is the element associated with Winter:
Suggestions for living in harmony with the winter season
- Get more rest.
This is nature’s season for rest, repair, and regeneration—a phase important for our next cycle of growth. The Nei Ching,oldest-known document of Chinese medicine, advises: “[In Winter], people should retire early at night and rise late in the morning, and they should wait for the rising of the sun.” - Schedule more time for your inner life.
Use the energy of the season to discover more about yourself through reflection, reading literature that “restores the spirit,” being more aware of your senses, paying attention to your dreams. The winter season is an especially good time to begin the practice of meditation. - Choose more “warming” foods.
As the weather cools and the body needs to generate more warmth, include more cooked foods and complex carbohydrates in your meals. Try dishes made with whole grains, squashes, beans, peas, and root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and garlic. - “Gather around the hearth” with people who mean the most to you.
Winter evenings are an especially good time to rejuvenate and deepen relationships with those closest to you. Keep gatherings simple and relaxed.
And finally, let's talk about the present. Spring has finally sprung, and it is associated with the Wood element. You can read its key associations in much more detail here. However, here are a few things TCM philosophy recommends you can do to make the most of Spring's energy...
Suggestions for living in harmony with the spring season
- Begin your day early, with a brisk walk.
Feel the sunshine pull you up and out, like the plants and animals. Watch buds rush into leaf, often doubling their size in a day. Look for birds' nests - you'll find them everywhere, even on top of air conditioners. Feel the life within you, like that outdoors, thrust up out of darkness into new possibilities. Make a garden. Eat greens. - Begin new things - at home, in your work, and in yourself.
In this season when nature reinvents itself, we too can see people and situations with new eyes. Let new tissue grow over old hurts, and take fresh hope. Be creative. Make things, do things. Begin! - Consider how you wish to make ready for your summer harvest.
Spring does not last forever. Use its bountiful energy wisely, so that the crops you sow - again, in yourself, in your work, and in your life - are those you wish to harvest. The energy of spring brings vision.
So there you are. Not rocket science. Just a way of making sure we're not fighting our environment too much. My experience (when I choose to listen to it!) has always shown me how much easier my life is when I don't struggle to overcome what is going on around me, and go with the flow. It is a wise teacher, and in Spring, it is reminding me that I'm as much a part of nature as everything else.
Good luck. Hope you haven't all turned into tree-hugging screaming hippies by the end of these blogs! And let me know how you get on...
Saturday, 16 March 2013
Making Learning Irresistible
Mick Waters
Making learning Irresistible
Last weekend was my first experience of the Coventry Learning Partnership Plus conference, and unfortunately I didn't really get the full flavour of all the excellent workshops going on because my school volunteered me to run one! What I did have was the privilege of hearing Professor Mick Waters talk to us on the Friday night about making learning irresistible. He talked for 90 minutes. It barely felt like 10.
I talked to several people afterwards about what they'd taken from the speech. We were all inspired, but could we put our finger on what exactly the thrust of the talk had been? Could we hell! This blog is my attempt to try and draw some conclusions from what I heard, and summarise where Professor Waters thinks we should be heading in education, a direction I have to say from the outset that I whole-heartedly agree with.
By way of personal context, there has been a lot of talk in our leadership team at school about the role of character in a child's education, about teaching more than simply content, "subjects", and even learning skills. Our current education system seems intent on reducing the really important things we teach our children to lip-service, as it is perhaps not deemed to be measurable, valuable or, dare I use the jargon du jour, "rigorous". This isn't a party political point, as I think the last government's focus on targets, attainment etc are equally blame-worthy in this respect. And nor am I saying we shouldn't be accountable for our results. I am simply arguing that our present focus on what can be measured has created an unhealthy obsession with those things over the other important areas of our educational remit, namely to help students to discover who they are, what they can do, to foster their curiosity, to nurture their talents and interests, and to get them to understand how to accomplish their goals meaningfully in a way which is as beneficial to society as it is to them. Children who care, rather than children who spend, perhaps. Though I'm told this is bad for the economy. By which of course we mean the rich folk at the top of it. Moving on...Professor Waters' starter for the ten is the contention that, in order to prepare for and learn about the outside world, the UK for some reason corrals students behind a fence, in institutions where we actually ignore and fall behind the real world all the time. We are obsessed by the need to get on, get through the content, and miss out on the chance to make things come alive. In our efforts to have our students undertake "meaningful" activities all the time, while taking the register for example (we make them do planner checks, numeracy activities, give them tonnes of information etc), we fail to realise that the real world is always there to be tapped into.
Our focus on results has another very negative effect on students: We label them. And we label them in a way which stigmatises them deeply, despite the fact that what we are labelling is transient. One child can't do equations yet. Another has difficulties focusing at a certain time of day. Another can't get to grips with a couple of particular subjects, so we label them "Not achieving 5 A*-C grades"! Here's the thing though: If you were to grade yourself in different subjects at different times, how would you fair? On a scale of Outstanding to Unsatisfactory, how would you rate your own abilities in relation to gardening, decorating, writing, taking photographs, playing an instrument or learning a language? I imagine few of us would be excellent all-rounders, but that's not to say we don't have serious talents in one or more areas: Just look at Einstein. Bit of a failure in school by all accounts. Likewise, students are at different levels in different subjects at different times, but our need to measure things makes it easy for us to focus on the numbers and not the child in front of us. Do the numbers really tell the story? Oddly enough I was listening to a Radio Four business programme the other day where several chief execs were agreeing on this very point, and saying that the data they got on their desks every day was a deeply inferior diagnostic tool compared to direct contact with their people on the ground floor and their customers. A lesson for us all perhaps...So back to the students: Most of us start out positively in school, but even with the best of intentions, because we can't invest sufficient time to master a skill to the outcome level we want, we end up as "disillusioned triers" who give up on our ability to learn it. Waters does a great experiment with kids: He asks them how they would rate themselves in all of their school subjects. Apparently you never get more than 40% say they're any good at something. But if you ask them about how good they will be at driving and learning to drive, and whether they'll be any good as drivers, they respond overwhelmingly positively. About something they've never tried before. Is it the learning experience which puts us down, or the labeling which occurs along the way?
Similarly we could ask as professionals whether a teacher whose lesson is described as "satisfactory" is actually a satisfactory teacher? Or is this just a label? A snapshot. Under pressure too. Like a terminal exam even. Strikes me as a bit unfair to judge us this way on an annual basis, never mind judging a whole school every four years using that method. But boy do we bust a gut to get the "Outstanding" label! Professor Waters' conclusion was that the Outstanding teacher teaches good lessons consistently, but more than that: He or she also looks after the lonely child in the corridor. Is the latter any less important that the former? Are the teacher who have left a life-long impression on your lives the ones who taught tight formulaic "Outstanding" lessons every day? Or the ones who cared? Who took the time to listen to you? Who took a genuine interest in you as a person?
Many Outstanding schools are outstanding because they follow "the trudge", and they do it well, and have hit the right formula. The relentless focus on "5 A*-C grades", "RAISEOnline", CVA, the systematic monitoring, the countless interventions: All of these serve to get as many students as possible over that finish line which the data says they should cross, based on mathematical probabilities and algorithms we shouldn't question because they're far too complex for us to understand. And then they suspend the timetable for a day occasionally so that they can do a whole-school activity which will provide the rounding out of their characters (!) which society also requires. Are we really delivering that? Not according to Mick Waters', industry, the government, the parents or the Daily Mail!A futures learning outlook
What we really need is to focus on what we hope for our students. The government is more focused on the core of knowledge, but we should be producing rounded human beings, and enthusiastic, curious learners. An outstanding teacher's role is to raise the spirits and self-esteem of their students, and to raise their gaze so that they look up at the world around them and see themselves as part of it. Our role is to help them find out who they are, and how they can make a positive difference to the world, and find a sense of their own happiness within the roles they choose for themselves. Our curriculum should be based on the big questions, with students clear about how the small matters fit into the bigger picture. It should prepare them to tackle big questions, and connect to the real world every lesson. Every child should be able to see the relevance of lessons for life in the big wide world as it is today. But I would suggest that this is just one aim. The second, and more important one as far as I am concerned, is this: If we start by showing students how their learning connects to the real world as it is, we should also be fostering the kind of curiosity and thinking which will help them shape the society that we could have. Because demonstrating to students how they could fit into modern society means we implicitly accept everything about that society, including its values and priorities. And I for one think that this demonstrates a real paucity of ambition. I would hope that our children can do a better job of society than we have. But it's unlikely to happen if we persist in telling them that what we have now is the only way it can be done.
The best summary of this perspective I've ever seen was written by a man named Kahlil Gibran, in a brilliant book full of wisdom call The Prophet. Given the daily vacillations in education policy and debate in this country, these thoughts help to anchor me as a teacher and a parent.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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