Mandared

I’m in the process of having a grump about a pile of assessments that I brought home to mark, only to discover that they don’t come even close to demonstrating the kind of knowledge and understanding that my students have, or look anything like the notes they made (in a well structured framework), followed by writing up, followed by peer assessment, followed by taking home to type/write up in finished form. The problem is that I have so many really poor pieces of work, I think the problem is far more likely to be the way that I presented the work rather than the effort that the students put in! I like giving my students my assessment criteria before they start work, but over and again I’m finding examples of them getting halfway through something and stopping wherever they’re at, or writing something that obviously makes sense to them but has very little relationship to what we were actually looking at.

So I now need to try and make sure that I tidy up/streamline the information I give them so that it’s absolutely clear. A second batch from the same students that I wrote the assessment & criteria myself has been more successful than my attempts to add my own criteria to department resources, which gives me some hope at least! I’m hoping that as we go into next year I’ll have examples from this year to spur my students on a little, but I’m also thinking that my own ‘modelling’ skills are something that I need to work on more consciously for a while.

Would be interested to know if this is a common problem that anyone has any obvious solutions to that I’m missing!

(p.s. they’re year 8, so can’t even blame year-9-I-don’t-care-I’m-not-doing-it-for-GCSE-itis!!)

Yesterday I read a blog by Jonathan Martin discussing the power of the way that we (and if you’re reading this then you’re probably included in that) are radically changing the way that we are able to learn, through the way that we use technology to create online collectives of individuals working towards similar goals.

In that post he recommends the book A New Culture of Learning, by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, and his high praise for the book is well deserved.  Whilst not specifically about schools, the book has plenty to say about education and the way that we need to try and integrate the power of the collectives that we find so valuable for our own learning into the way we allow our students to learn in and beyond our classrooms. It’s a quick read, but the arguments put forward in the book have my brain working overtime thinking about how I can start working the ideas into my teaching, working with my students in the ways that I have already found so valuable in my own learning.

Tying into this was another blog that I read yesterday, this time from ICT Envangelist in response to the question ‘WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION? ‘and he reaches similar conclusions – that as the world around us is changing, so is the purpose of education.  Like him,  my ideas about the kind of teacher I want to be are shaped by the kind of teachers that I want for my own children.  Too often I find those ideas at odds with the structure that I teach within, and as a result I’ve also been reading Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson, which makes a lot of the same arguments from the perspective of students needing to be less conformist than they would in a traditional model of teaching if they are going to succeed in the world beyond school.  Then finally, I watched this TED video from Kathryn Schulz ‘On Being Wrong’, which reflects the ideas that come through in all of these sources – it’s no longer good enough to get the ‘right’ answers.  We have to ask questions, and keep asking questions, and often make mistakes in order to move forward to the next set of questions.  If we know what we know, then what are we learning?

My journey to all of these links is an example of the power of collectives: the book recommendation came from a blog post; the blog post came from a Twitter link; my Twitter account came from a recommendation from a friend; the friendship has been maintained mostly on Facebook and only occasionally in person for several years; the friend was someone I ‘met’ online in a student support group while I was studying for my degree through distance-learning – I have been part of collectives that have literally changed my life for 8 years now, but it’s not something that I’ve been able to articulate or to recognise the value of beyond my own circumstances.  The quote from the book that Jonathan Martin uses is also the title for this post:

Teach a man to fish and feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and feed him as long as the fish supply holds out.  But create a collective, and every man will learn how to feed himself for a lifetime.

I’ve never been able to fish, but I have learned how to feed myself.  Now I’d like to help my students learn to feed themselves too.

I spent Friday & Saturday this weekend at the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference in Guildford. http://www.geography.org.uk/cpdevents/annualconference/programme/

My initial reason for booking was the keynote speech by Hans Rosling – I was first introduced to his work as part of my degree with the OU, have used the website in lessons, then when The Joy of Stats was on TV I got excited all over again.  And he really is excellent – you don’t have to be a geek or a geographer to be impressed by his work, but even more by his accessible style of presentation.  Follow the link and watch the programme if you don’t believe me!  Actually, I think you should probably watch it anyway…

What I wasn’t sure about though was how useful the rest of the workshops would be.  How different would they be from last year?  How relevant would they be now that I’d been teaching for a bit longer?  I’ve not worked with anyone else that’s ever been to the conference since qualifying, and I was worried that I would find out why!  Thankfully I didn’t, and the conference was excellent.  I got to meet lots of teachers at different stages of their careers (although attending NQT/PGCE sessions as a teacher who qualified a little later than most did make me feel incredibly old!), and attended workshops that I am certain will prove to be incredibly influential on my own teaching.  I have no idea why so many teachers don’t see the value in events like these and make the time to attend, but I hope that I always will.  I enjoy learning from other teachers, I enjoy reflecting on my own practice, and the food was excellent – what more could I ask?!  Next year I will make sure that my phone’s been upgraded though – I’d have liked to be able to take pictures and participate in Twitter a lot more so that I could share with those who wanted to make it but couldn’t.

What is becoming clear as I progress through my NQT year is that the more I learn, the more I realise that I don’t yet know.  I’m also realising how much I enjoy continuing to learn, and am very seriously considering continuing with my own studies via an MA as a direct result of a workshop yesterday.  Gulp.

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Following on from my own thoughts on behaviour management, I followed this link I was sent for the DfE Behaviour & Attendance consultation to see what the ‘official’ approach was.  It is a fairly disappointing read, but also helps to make it clear why it is so difficult for individuals to break away from the idea that good behaviour in the classroom is something that the teacher is responsible for imposing and that any deviance from these expectations by students should be dealt with in a punitive way.  There is no mention in the document of any positive ways to manage behaviour, let alone the idea that individuals might be capable of taking genuine responsibility for their own actions, and definitely no indication that punishments of whatever kind (and the document details plenty) should only ever be used after alternative approaches have failed.  If government and society have such a negative view of children, is it any wonder that teachers and young people themselves find it so difficult to see themselves in a more positive way?

My resolution for the new term?  Detention as a last resort only!!

Reading Mrs Ripps’s posts has given me plenty to think about and prompted me back to some of my original reading about the kind of teacher that I’d like to be. http://mrspripp.blogspot.com/2011/01/after-publishing-my-discipline.html http://mrspripp.blogspot.com/2011/01/put-your-name-on-board-tale-of-why-i.html I’ve always had an idea of the way that I want to relate to students, and am also very aware of how far I need to go to achieve that goal.  At around the same time as I began my teacher training I was reading books by Alfie Kohn and Adele Faber / Elaine Mazlish.  This was originally about the kind of parent that I wanted to be, at a point when my toddler son was making his own demands known and I was struggling to reconcile my ideals of child-rearing with the experiences from my own childhood.  However, as he started school and I started teacher training those ideals became more important than just the conversations between the two of us – what kind of teacher would I want him to have, and what kind of teacher did I want to be?  I grew up in a ‘Because I said so!’ household, and all too often those are the words that I find tripping off my tongue.  They’re the default setting that I revert to when I’m stressed or tired, but they’re definitely not who I want to be, or who I’d want to be teaching my children.  The difficulty is in un-learning that reaction, and substituting it for a more considered response that reflects both who I want to be and the kinds of young adults I want to raise – both from my own young children and the teenagers that I spend my working days with.  I want my students to be able to think for themselves and to solve their own problems, asking for input from me when they need it rather than to get to a quick answer.  I don’t want them to behave well ‘because I said so’ but because they want to get the most out of their time with me and with each other.  I wish I could say that reading such authors had changed my behaviour, and that I was now able to realise the goals that I started out with.  Unfortunately un-learning all those years of behaviour management is proving to be a lot harder than I’d ever imagined.

What has helped enormously though is to know that I’m not mad for wanting to do things another way – there are others who share those ideals;  some of them are a lot further along the road than I am, and they’ve got some really positive results to prove that it is worth the effort of making the change. Making the change sometimes seems harder, rather than easier, as a result of the systems and routines of a large secondary school.  The fact that X behaviour from a student should always elicit Y response from a teacher, in order to maintain consistency across the school, does mean that students always know where they stand in relation to the adults around them and what the consequence of any particular misdemeanour will be, but I fear that it prevents them, perhaps more than anything else, from being able to recognise the real consequences of their actions and to take responsibility for those.  In protecting our children from real consequences, we’re also hiding from them the real value of making any effort at anything.  We spend so much time enforcing rules and imposing consequences, that students become focused on those rules and consequences, rather than on the reason for having them in the first  place.  Every single student can tell me, by rote, why it’s important to listen to each other respectfully in the classroom, and yet a huge number of them fail to do just that frequently.  They associate quiet with learning, and look very confused when I point out that the reason for being quiet is so that they can hear what someone else is saying rather than just that it’s rude to interrupt; or that it’s OK to continue talking when the head walks into the room, since talking was the basis of their learning at that particular time.  I’m convinced that it would be much easier for me to make the changes that I need to my own approach if students weren’t expecting to be ‘controlled’ quite so much – I am by nature too controlling to start with, and I would like to reduce that aspect of my character, rather than hear students tell me that in order to learn they expect me to control their behaviour ever more strictly.  However, I’m also worried that it’s too easy for me to blame a system beyond my control rather than continuing to plug away at changing myself.

What I’d really like to read is examples from teachers in secondary schools who manage to have more autonomy within their own classroom, regardless of the approach in the rest of the school.  Will behaviour really continue to improve as my own teaching becomes more engaging, or will it be my experience at looking/sounding scary that leads to improved behaviour?  I came across this blog post by Seth Godin in which he argues for employees to act a little less like students who respond to bosses/teachers with – say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a ‘good student.’ If this is really what our ‘good’ students are doing then I’d like students to act a little less like students too!

I know this is something that comes naturally to a lot of people and is obvious to me when I stop and think about it, but unfortunately the most difficult thing about an NQT year on a full timetable is the lack of time to do any sort of stopping and thinking.  As I was writing year 7 reports at the weekend, I realised just how many fantastic students I have in those classes, and what a disproportionate amount of my lessons is spent dealing with ‘problems’ so that those students rarely get much from me in the way of praise or recognition.

I decided that I needed to make a specific effort to address that this week, and in the corner of my board normally used for the names of those students in need of a warning, I stuck a note that I was intending to recognise the best work with merits in every single lesson, and for students to remind me if I ever forgot.  Only 2 students have actually noticed the sign (which explains why I’m always being asking me the date when it’s written in the same corner of the board every day!), but the prompt has helped me enormously.  Sometimes I make a big deal of someone making a great contribution and write them up, sometimes I look for one or two people and write their names without saying anything – other students immediately look around to see what those singled out are doing wrong, and quickly cotton on to the idea that attention is being given for something very different.

The affect has been fantastic – I’m finishing my days with a much more positive impression of my lessons, and so are my students, and it is having a very definite impact on behaviour.  I’m hoping that this is a habit that I can learn, and so move away from managing behaviour in a more negative way.  I’d be interested to know if others have similar tactics that they consciously employ, or if this is something that really does come naturally to most people?  It’s always in my head as fitting the kind of teacher I want to be and see myself as, but far too often that doesn’t translate into action.  It’s made me realise how much of having a good or bad lesson or day is down to me and my perception, as much as what the students do or don’t do.

My Japan lessons have gone well, with surprisingly different reactions from different groups.  I trained in a school that set all students right from the start of year 7, and I expected that teaching in a mixed ability school would mean more uniformity between classes and am always surprised at how different the responses can be.  I started showing the ‘Bang Goes the Theoty’ episode that gave a very scientific explanation of the earthquake, but that generated a really silly response from several students who hadn’t watched much of the news coverage and really didn’t get it.  So instead I’ve been showing a 25 minute documentary from BBC News that covers the scientific angle more briefly, but also covers the human impact of such a huge event.  That’s gone down well with most classes, until today when I was faced with 3 students who couldn’t bring themselves to discuss events at all and spent most of the time weeping in the corridor.  However, this was also the class (and those 3 were the most enthusiastic students) who wanted to know what they could do to help people in Japan and are already going full steam for a fundraising drive across the school.  I’ve promised to set something up that will allow them to communicate with students in Japan and am thinking of two options – the Japan Society is coordinating a letter writing project (http://www.japansociety.org.uk/earthquake/schools-letter-writing/) and managing and necessary translation, but I think I will also take this opportunity to get the students involved in blogging and see if we can contact a school directly that way.  Another year 7 class were really keen to share their writing/presentations about the disaster, and several of them also made really impressive contributions – one who decided to say a class prayer (we’re a CofE school but it’s unusual for the students to bring this up in lessons), and a few who used the opportunity to put their own difficulties and complaints into perspective.

The year 9s instead were given the task of answering some of their own questions, and barring one particular student who refuses to accept that this is not proof that the world is going to end in 2012, have used the information that I gave them to make lots of really good points.  The fact that they were answering questions set by their own year group (if not their actual class) really seemed to make a difference, and they have mostly been very well engaged.

Then on top of that, I had a lovely lesson with a difficult year 9 class this afternoon with what was planned to be a session looking at indicators of development.  A few of them got really angry about the racial stereotyping that was shown in this image that was shown as a prompt to consider different indicators of development.  I gave them a minute to be angry, then stopped them, told them they were right to be angry, and we ended up spending the majority of the lesson having a fantastic discussion about racism today and in history as a result.  They didn’t get much of anything written down, and it definitely wasn’t what we’d planned, but they enjoyed the discussion and I suspect that it’s one of the most valuable conversations that class will ever have.  If only because they learned that they don’t have to shout at each other to realise that they agree about more than they disagree!

What things could we measure to know if one place is more or less developed than another?

I’m planning a lesson for my year 9s on the Japanese earthquake & tsunami, and am planning to set it up as a ‘marketplace’ activity that allows them to answer their own questions (I asked them what they wanted to know on Friday, so that’s my starting point – we’ve already covered the causes in our tectonics unit).  I’ve got lots of ideas and information already, but any extra advice would be very welcome!  Our 6 key issues are going to be:

1. Are earthquakes getting worse? – this is the one I could really do with ideas for.  The data for largest/deadliest earthquakes is fairly straightforward to assemble, but I’m not sure of the best thing to get a group to do with it to prove/disprove their idea that the world is coming to an end.  Is there a simple way of producing a graph to show the spread?
   I’ll probably also give them some resources to think about the way news is produced to respond to their idea that things are worse than they’ve ever been.
   If anyone has a link for debunking the film’2012′ that would help too!
2. How have the people in Japan responded to the situation (stories of heroism & abandonment)
   How people respond & help to come up with solutions (use of OpenSource software, Twitter, Google PeopleFinder)
3. What actually happened? (a timeline of events & the subsequent nuclear problems/rescue operation)
4. Nuclear power (looking at previous nuclear leaks & the location of existing/planned nuclear plants, history of secrecy)
5. Protecting against earthquake/tsunami damage (better building design, tsunami warning systems and effectiveness of sea defences)
6. How has/will this affect the Japanese economy. (consider the wealth of the country, the need for outside charity donations, economic stagnation & rising debt, need for growth & stimulation of re-building)

I’ll be planning something for my year 7 & 8s too, but they haven’t studied tectonics so really want to know what caused it – theirs will be a very different lesson.

Will very happily share all resources once I’m done

I don’t get to watch news in the mornings, instead reading an e-newspaper on the bus. It was almost the end of lunchtime before I realised what had happened in Japan this morning, but I quickly decided to scrap my planned lesson to year 7 and spend the time showing them some of the news footage and answering their questions as we researched together. I had BBC News playing as the first students arrived and they were instantly curious. However, as they started to take in what they were looking at one student realised the danger to his uncle who is currently visiting Japan. He had no idea where his uncle would be, but was unsurprisingly upset. I quickly re-adapted the off-the-cuff lesson to answer questions in as un-frightening a way as possible and without showing any of the pictures or news footage that I would have otherwise wanted to use. This worked well for about half an hour, but by then the fidgety students needed more to occupy them and I found it difficult to balance engaging them with not distressing others. Am still glad that I showed them what was happening, but have been trying to think of things that I could have done that would have kept the students more occupied – some did just really want to ask lots of questions, but some got bored with that and I’m struggling to figure out how to balance those needs…

Finding the best way to utilise TAs in the classroom is something that I’ve found difficult from the  beginning.  In an ideal world I’d like to know exactly which TA will be in which lesson well in advance, and have the opportunity to share some planning time with them.  In reality it doesn’t work like that – individual classes/students will have different TAs on different days, and although these usually run to a timetable it does make it difficult to build a consistent relationship.  And the TA timetables are even more full than mine, so there certainly isn’t any time for collaboration outside of the classroom.

However, last week we managed a minor breakthrough.  In one lesson over my 2 week timetable a particular student is allocated a TA that he doesn’t know well and won’t let work with him.  His issues tend to be behavioural rather than learning; he spends large amounts of any lesson off task, often out of his seat, and is unaware enough of his surroundings to be threatening when he doesn’t intend to, added to which he will frequently refuse to acknowledge someone talking to him about whatever the problem is at that particular moment.  During his last lesson, instead of focusing on him, the TA and I had agreed that she would instead hover near a group of students that his off-task behaviour was often directed towards, to see if we could attack the problem from the other end.  She observed that every time he was off task during the lesson, it was in response to quiet comments that had come from someone in that group.  As a result, I spoke to him before the next lesson and agreed to move him to the opposite side of the room, well away from that group (and coincidentally near the door to make removal easier if it became necessary!).  As a result I was then able to hear the comments from the group, which were unpleasant and clearly bullying, but had previously been too quiet for me to hear and never reported by the student they were aimed at or anyone else in the class.  Once that had been addressed, the difficult student proceeded to be the most cooperative in a classroom that I’ve ever seen him, produced some really good work, and cooperated well with the new group that he’d joined.

This has felt like a huge step forward for me, and is apparently the first time that this student has had any acknowledgement that his difficulties in the classroom are not entirely of his making.  The information is also being passed onto his teachers in other subjects so that they can take it into account with their own seating plans, but his relationship with me has improved enormously.

Now to try and figure out how to make Israeli/Palestinian water conflict accessible to a year 8 student who has trouble comprehending anything beyond ‘draw a neat picture’.  Thankfully she is well supported by a single TA in all her geography lessons, but neither of us has much idea of how to approach the subject with her…