“Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.” -Paulo Coelho. The Devil and Miss Prym When I enrolled to undertake the Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) / Bachelor of Arts degree through the University of Newcastle, it was with the certainty that yes, THIS, is what I want to be doing for the remainder of my working life. Accordingly, knowing that this was what I wanted to be doing gave me a drive and focus that I had never possessed throughout my primary or secondary education. I pushed hard throughout my degree, other than the first semester where I floundered a little, getting used to having to utilise my brain after ten years of not using it, and came out at the other end with Honours Class I. This evening, whilst doing some grocery shopping with my wife, I decided to check my e-mails while my wife was bagging up some mushrooms and discovered an e-mail from the university letting me know that I had been awarded the Faculty Medal. I’m absolutely chuffed to have received this award, and it comes on the back of an amazing few weeks. I almost feel like breaking into a dance à la Christopher Walken.
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Respect, like trust, is a two-way street. If you’re not willing to give it, then you definitely don’t deserve it.” – Attributed to Nishan Panwar All through my own primary and secondary education, teachers were referred to as either Miss [Last Name] (regardless of whether they were a Miss or a Mrs), or for the men, as Mr [Last Name]. The same went for any adult that did not require some sort of familial moniker, such as aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa etc. That was just what was expected, because, we were told, it showed the teacher or adult respect. Now, as a teacher, I find that the same naming conventions still apply in all the schools that I have been asked to teach, and I find myself asking why? Why do students need to refer to me as Mr Mitchell, in order to show me respect? Students can certainly be disrespectful when referring to me as Mr Mitchell, as I am sure that any secondary teacher can attest to, so why do we force our students to be so formal with us? This thought randomly though whilst I was working on the series of blog articles reviewing the FutureSchools conference, and I made a short tweet about it, asking what message this sends to our students about respect, and the mutual relationship that we share with each other in the classroom. It is an issue that I believe should be talked about, and I would very much like to hear other people’s opinions on this topic. The only place, and I hesitate to call it a place, that I’ve heard of students being referred to by their family name is at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry, where right from the beginning the students are referred to in writing and in speech, as Mr or Miss [Family Name], whilst the teaching staff are referred to as Professor [Family Name]. This is deemed, according to naming conventions, as showing respect for the other person. If we demand to be called by our family name, and I’ve never come across a teacher allowing otherwise, as a sign of respect, should we not be showing the same level of respect that we demand for ourselves to our students? Respect, we are told after all, is a two-way street. Further to this point, when successful teaching requires strong teacher-students relationships in the classroom, what message does it send to our students about our level of respect for them when we only refer to them by their given name? Again, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. “dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” Translation: “While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next day.” -The Horatian Odes 1.11 I would like to think that I have managed to impress my readers that I enjoyed and valued my time at the FutureSchools expo, ClassTech conference stream and the Masterclass with Jon Bergmann. I also was able to spend some time wandering around the exhibitors stalls, chatting with a few, and networking with other educators from around the country. Whilst chatting with an e-learning Leader from Melbourne and an Assistant Principal from Brisbane, I received a text message from a Deputy Principal at one of the schools at which I do casual/supply/relief teaching (I discovered during conversations at FutureSchools that the term ‘casual teacher’ is not universally used) with an offer for a temporary block at their school for term two. I would be acting as a teacher-librarian, and the role would be four days a week for the full term, with the remit to teach computer and research-skills as appropriate for the various age groups from K-6 within the school. Naturally, I said yes, and have since spent much of my time plotting through what I want to achieve, how I can implement some of my learnings from FutureSchools to this block and how to go about setting the students up to achieve the skills and conceptual understanding I want for them, and also to be able to transfer those skills and concepts to other disciplines. I very much will be working to incorporate flipping, whether it be in-flipping or out-flipping, as well as leveraging student interests such as Minecraft, and trying to shift the locus of control to my students, away from myself, as recommended by Gary Stager when he said during his closing presentation for the ClassTech conference, “Every time you have to engage in an educational transaction, ask if there is more they can do and less you can do to give your students more agency.” It is a rather exciting time, and at the moment I feel a little bit like this guy: So it is time to switch off the modem, and take my own advice and start Planning for Learning so that I can provide a draft of my program to my supervisor for feedback asap.
I think the hardest part is going to be remembering all of my students’ names when I only have the classes once or twice a week. Wish me luck! After looking through the Masterclass options (as outlined in this article) I opted to enroll in the masterclass with Jon Bergmann, focusing on the Flipped Class. Primarily, I selected this class as the class I was in during my internship was trialing, at that point, 1:1 BYODD utilising iPads, and was ‘sort of’ using the flipped class, using what Jon Bergmann calls in-flipping where the instructional videos are watched by students in the classroom, rather than at home, and I found it to be highly effective, and wanted to learn more about how to implement it. If you are currently scratching your head, wondering what the flipped classroom and flipped learning is, then I recommend reading this article, or this article, or watching the below video, which together, do a good job of explaining what flipping is about. Much of what Jon talked about in terms of the why to flip, during the masterclass, is covered in either the above articles, or the below video. The one point which I don’t believe is made clear in the video or the articles is that flipped brings a visual element to the explicit teaching of our students, an idea which Ian Jukes made plain in his presentation, is something we as educators should be doing more of. A lot of the masterclass consisted of Jon walking us through various tools, pitfalls, and strategies for success when flipping, and there was a wide range of people, from myself as a K-6 casual teacher, to a high school mathematics teacher, to IT or e-learning people, all with different levels of experience, in different parts of Australia, in different educational structures (government, non-government, primary, secondary, tertiary). I will try to condense the nine pages of notes that I took down to a reasonable length, which I think will be quite manageable. Jon did also mention that he and Aaron Sams have released some books in the “How to flip….” series, starting with“Flipping Your English Class to Reach All Learners.” First of all, three key resources that Jon listed were flippedclass.com, flippedlearning.org and flippedclassroom.org. While they do all sound the same, they serve very different purposes. From memory, flippedclass is the for core website for starting off on the discovery of how and why to flip, flippedlearning.org is a not-for-profit organisation and flippedclassroom.org is an online community of flippers. The first thing Jon showed us was part of his toolbelt for the presentation, which was mirroring his laptop onto his iPad using an app called Doceri. This allowed him to move around the room while he talked, and still interact and manipulate the laptop, not only moving back and forth between the slides, but to change applications, make notes and do anything else that he would ordinarily need to be at the computer to do. Jon was quick to point out that any subject area can be flipped, telling us the story about the PE teachers that he mentions in the above video, and reiterated that the key question you need to ask yourself is what is the best use of my face-to-face time?” The answer to this question conceptually be the same for all subject areas – more time to do stuff. What that stuff is, will of course differ from subject to subject. Jon showed us a clip, which I have included below, which anyone who lived in the 1980s will know, and which I will not give any further introduction too, as an example of what teaching often feels like for our students, and said that it has to be better than this, or as Gary Stager put it, “those that know better, should do better.” Interactive whiteboards are simply glorified chalkboards and don’t actually change the pedagogy, resulting in classrooms that are still teacher-centric. He pointed out that everything we teach is already on the internet, in some form, and that we need to move towards more inquiry and discovery, a theme which I suspect Gary Stager would agree with. Jon then spoke about some strategies for flipping particular subject areas. English, he said, you would only flip partially. You would still need to read the book, but the explicit instruction about particular themes, ideas, or plot lines could be done via flipping. He also pointed out that the writing conference could be flipped. He pointed out that teachers have to mark and provide feedback on writing anyway, so why not film it as its being done and providing higher quality feedback than you can write in just a few lines. Session two of the day was about the tools. Jon strongly recommends recording your own videos, as it lends the personal touch, and helps foster the relationship between you and your students, and also you and your students’ parents. It will also help with the claims that you are no longer teaching your students. There are four tools to master in flipping your classroom: video creation, video hosting, video interaction and learning management. The first two, I think, are fairly straight forward as to what they are. Video interaction is about setting the videos up to have interactions, such as formative questions during the video, whilst learning management is about the management of the process of tracking and recording and monitoring students’ learning progress. Jon quickly pointed out that there are a plethora of options when it comes to tools, and that the best tool is the one that you’ll use, and that tools need to be easy for all to use. Jon spoke about his thirteen tips to making a good video.
Jon went through some of the software options for each of the four tools that need to be mastered. Thankfully, he has included a very brief (a few dot-points) review on the flippedclass website. For the video creation tools, click here. For the video hosting tools, clickhere. For the video interaction tools, click here (It does need to be noted that there is one tool missing from the video interaction list, which Jon only discovered whilst at the FutureSchools expo, and that is myEd. I’m currently trialling it, under a thirty day free trial option, and am very much leaning towards purchasing myself a single-user license. Jon said he would explore it and include it in the list once he had done so). For the Learning Management tools, click here (myEd also fits into this category). After discussing the different tools and their features, Jon challenged us all to select a tool that we had not used before, and to make a one-minute video including a subtle reference to a kangaroo and the opera house. I had not come to the masterclass with an iPad or a laptop, which in hindsight was rather silly of me, and so I paired off with a high school mathematics teacher from the Gold Coast who was experimenting with Screencast-o-matic. The third session was a continuation of the discussion around tools, including showing us where to access the repository of (unscreened by Jon or Aaron), videos created by teachers around the world for flipping, which are organised by subject, with notes for the age/year level the videos were made for and who made them. This can be accessed here. We watched short sections of a few videos and as a group discussed what did and did not work for those videos, and what made them engaging (or not). He also showed us the collection of two other, separate teachers Jonathan Thomas-Palmer’s Flipped Physics (example below) and Mr Brown’s 3rd Grade Class website. The question was asked about how to convince skeptics of the flipped movement, and Jon thoughtfully showed us how to access the bank of research that he and Aaron have collated onto the flippedlearning website, which includes case studies, white papers, and research done by both Jon and Aaron, as well as other educational researchers. The conversation again turned to the pitfalls of flipping, and Jon reiterated the point that it’s not just creating the videos and sending the students home to watch them. We need to teach them how to interact and engage with them, which is different to just watching Spiderman or Star Wars. This is best done by doing it together, in the classroom – in-flipping, for the first period of time, the length of which will vary depending on your context (age of students, topic etc). It is largely about teaching them how and why to take notes and to organise those notes, and recommended the Cornell system for doing so. Taking the time to ensure that your students know how to engage with the video and not just watch it will provide dividends down the road, with improved effectiveness of the flipped structure and improved outcomes accordingly. The final session of the day, was the what next? step. After we have been flipping for a few years, and have got Flipping 101 down pat, what comes next? Jon talked about their being different paths, and which one is taken will vary, again on the context. The choices are flipped mastery, peer instruction, the introduction of growth of project based learning, mastery with gamification, and genius hour. A lot of this discussion centered around the fact that flipping creates more time in the class, and it needs to be decided how to use this time. Providing choice days for students (as opposed to activity days) where students are empowered to pursue any question, problem or interest that they choose provides agency, and can lead to higher levels of engagement when it is an activity day, as students are aware that they have time for for self-directed and self-chosen learning. It does of need to be done within a framework, where students are held accountable for their learning through having to provide evidence of learning, in some form. Providing time for students to be metacognitive about their learning also provides benefits, and can be done either by the student on their own, with a peer or as a student led student-teacher conference. Coming to the end, Jon outlined the four biggest hurdles that need to be overcome to successfully implement the flipped classroom.
I am incredibly glad that I opted to attend the masterclass. It was a day well spent, and I feel much more comfortable about flipping my class, when I get one. If you’ve ever thought about it, I encourage you to give it a go. Like any new ‘thing’ it will be scary and daunting and feel hard to start with, and you will most likely be ridiculed for it, but be brave. There is a whole network of people who will support you. #flipclass is an ongoing Twitter conversation, and the Flipped Learning Network contains a series of discussion forums to help you, encourage you and give you feedback. As always, thank you for reading, and I would really like to hear from anyone who is flipping, or is thinking of flipping to hear how you are going with it, in the comments section. In closing this series of articles reviewing my time at the FutureSchools expo and conference, I will leave you with a video, to encourage you to be a leader in your school, and a follower within the Flipped Class movement. Gary Stager’s presentation was one of the presentations I was particularly looking forward to, for a whole range of reasons. He was recommended to me as a ‘must follow’ on Twitter and as someone who was at the forefront of pushing for a move towards combining curriculum and practicality through doing by one of my professors in the final year of my undergraduate degree. Accordingly, I followed him on Twitter and it is an interesting read. Gary is certainly not someone who is backwards about coming forwards, and can be highly dismissive of ‘education revolutions’ that are often touted, even amongst many other educators who are seen as being ‘heavyweights’ in the education world. I have not had the pleasure of a deep dialogue with Gary, and so I cannot speak to his thinking behind his dismissal of many educational theories. That said, his presentation was highly engaging, and Gary was clearly full of energy and passion. Gary did plug his book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, co-authored with Sylvia Libow Martinez, which I bought a copy of and which Gary kindly signed for me, and having read the first chapter, it’s a book that gets the brain excited to change the pedagogical practices used. Gary opened by describing computers as laboratories for expression and by saying that “young people have a remarkable capacity for intensity, we need to leverage that or it manifests as boredom,” a sentiment that I think most teachers will have seen at some point over their career. Gary quoted Seymour Papert, who said “when ideas go to school, they lose their power” when saying that the maker community has had it with school. Given that kids are the ones at the centre of the maker movement, where they have genuine choice, agency and power, and are being valued and appreciated for their skills, thinking and ingenuity, this sends a strong message to educators that our pedagogical choices are stifling our students. Paul Hamilton said in his presentation that “[y]ou don’t start the creation of a new amazing building with a tool. You start with a design. So why on earth would you start the creation of an amazing learning experience with an app?” Gary echoed this sentiment by saying that“[…]it would be irresponsible to build a pen around a student. We need to use the materials of the environment.” He elaborated on this by commenting that when the same skills are required in the physics laboratory, as are required in the arts studio, the design room and the English class, then the lines between the discipline have been obliterated. This destruction of the traditional demarcation between the scholastic disciplines is not possible if the disciplines continue to constrain their students within specific, formulaic pens. Educational institutions have overvalued learning with our heads and undervalued learning with hands and hearts, according to Gary. To demonstrate this point, or rather, to show what can occur when the constraints are removed, Gary played us a Sylvia’s Super Awesome Maker Show video. I’ve not been able to find the specific one that Gary showed us, but the below is one of the videos on the SuperAwesomeSylvia YouTube Channel. Sylvia’s energy and passion is indicative of those involved in the maker movement and demonstrates that programming can go from digital to analog, or soft copy to hard copy as the programming takes place in the ‘soft copy’ or digital environment and is then turned into a hard copy when the code is activated in it’s physical; construct, whether that be a robot of some description, or some other device constructed by the maker. The quote by Gary in the above image stunned me, until I thought about the current trend of helicopter parenting, where our students’ lives are often scheduled for every minute of the day, and that often they are short-term events such as play-dates, extra-curricular classes, and often for very short amounts of time. At school, students are told to learn in discrete blocks of time, mathematics is half an hour today, spelling is fifteen minutes, science is another half an hour and so on, and there is still very little use of discipline/curriculum integration, or sustained sessions where the students have the opportunity to dive deep into a skill or concept. The isolation of the curriculum subjects from each other also makes it hard for students to learn how to transfer skills and conceptual knowledge across the disciplines into various applications, both within the academic disciplines and the real-world applications. This is another area in which the maker-movement is seeing great success, where skills and concepts from a range of disciplines are brought together to solve problems, with students getting their hands dirty in the actual problem solving process, as the problems are real ones that they need to be solve, as opposed to contrived ones that many teachers, myself included, either make up themselves, or pull out of a textbook for the purpose of learning how to find the length of the hypotenuse or other such ‘problems.’ These are contrived problems because the answer is already known, meaning they are not real problems, they are tests to check for students ability to remember how to apply a specific formula to a specific type of question. Gary reiterated this point when he commented that “[…]students learn a lot of vocabulary without any context.” Gary continued along this train of thought, saying that not only do schools have a “sacred obligation” to introduce students to things they have not seen before, but that as teachers, we cannot teach twenty-first century learners if we have not learned anything this century. Unfortunately there are still a lot of teachers who have not gotten on the twenty-first century train, and still require all learning to be done on paper and written by hand. Whilst there is certainly still a place for paper and handwriting, there is more and more, no reason why much of what we do with students and their output, cannot be submitted digitally, whether it be via e-mail, Google Docs, video submission, or one of the plethora of digital submission options. I’ll leave you today with two powerful comments that Gary left us with, to close out the ClassTech conference stream of FutureSchools Expo 2015. “Every time you have to engage in an educational transaction, ask if there is more they can do and less you can do to give your students more agency.” “Those of us who know better, should do better. If we won’t stand between them and the madness, then who will?” My next article (perhaps the next two or three, depending on how much I write from my notes) will be a review of the Masterclass I attended, lead by flipped learning pioneer, Jon Bergmann. As always, thank you for reading, and please leave a comment. I would love to hear from anyone who has successfully incorporated a makerspace into their pedagogy, or their school, and how you went about doing so, the hurdles you overcame and the opposition you faced, and how you won the naysayers over. See here for the list of articles in this series. After an excellent lunch with some debriefing about the round table sessions with some new friends, it was time return to the ClassTech conference stream for session three of the day, with Cathie Howe and Dr. Nerida McCredie presenting under the title Transmedia storytelling for education. It was a title that left me perplexed, as the concept of transmedia was not one I’d heard often, and never in conjunction with literacy or storytelling. They defined transmedia as being “the systematic unfolding of elements across a story world, with multiple elements in multiple platforms.” and gave Star Wars Uncut as one example of where transmedia has occurred, and listed some research papers that had informed their own project (two of these are included at the end of this article). Cathie and Dr. McCredie elaborated on this by speaking about a project they ran called Weaving a Storyworld Web (WSWW), which was based around three principles of transmedia storytelling:
This can occur through students mining a story point to uncover a hidden gem, such as creating a list of Cinderella’s chores; through partnering with the author to expand and explore the storyworld, wherein students become ‘co-authors’ to explore and add to the storyscape by adding to the storyworld, either before, during or after the story setting, such as adding what happened in the world of Harry Potter after the final book, or telling us about the lives of Harry Potter’s families; or by dreaming which involves students re-imagining, re-examining or recreating the story in a new way, such as re-imagining Little Red Riding Hood as a science-fiction story, or if Peter Pan’s nemesis, Captain Hook, was a woman. This process involves significant analysis of the story, prior to the mining, partnering or dreaming stage to determine story points across themes of either character, plot or location, to ensure a thorough understanding of the storyworld, and those story points are then the triggers for learning. Story points act as anchors on discussions, and the creation of the story web, where possible should be a physical act. Transmedia, it seems, aims to put the reader into multiple sets of shoes as they play the part of reader, viewer and co-creators through the production of transmedia artefact as part of the process. I’m ambivalent on the practicality or effectiveness of the concept of transmedia in as far as the process of weaving a story world is something that many teachers do as part of any literature study, but not necessarily with the physical web creation, or in quite the same format as has been described here. The second presenter for this session was Susan Bowler, under the title of Robotics in the Classroom, a topic I had heard much praise for, but with which I had no experience, and only limited curiosity. For some reason when I think of robotics in any context, I get one of two images in my head, that of Short Circuit, from the 1986 movie of the same name, or ‘Arnie’ as The Terminator. I’m not sure why that is, but there you have it. It seems that Robotics in the classroom can be as expensive as you want to make it, but it can also be done on a shoestring budget, with prices starting, at this point in time, for around USD$30 for Arduino and Raspberry Pi all the way up to the top end, which is apparently the Lego MindStorms.
Robotics can serve a wide range of cross-curricular purposes, encompassing science, technology, engineering, mathematics, design, and software design and development. Robotics appeals to students as they represent an open-ended challenge, and can be as simple or as complex as the users skill level, starting with such simple programming needs as back and forth movement, all the way up to multiple sensors and other complexities. Two online resources were mentioned as being particularly useful: the Lego Education website and Damien Kee’swebsite. Other sites of interest include the RoboCup Juniorwebsite which also contains a document with a draft unit of work in scope and sequence format, StemCentric, and the Dr Graeme site. Additionally, Robogals is an organisation that focuses on increasing the rate at which females become involved with science and technology, and are able to do school visits to drive robotics interest among the girls of a school. I didn’t find this session as interesting as I had some other sessions, but the foci were on two areas that I’ve not had any dealings with, nor feel any particular interest towards. My next article will focus on the final session of the ClassTech conference stream, a presentation by world-renowned Makerspace proponent, Gary Stager. As always, thank you for reading, and please leave a comment. I’m especially interested to hear from those who have utilised robotics or WSWW in their school, and how it played out for you. See here for the list of articles in this series. Journal article references from the Transmedia storytelling for education presentation.
I have to be honest upfront. I have very mixed feelings about this particular session. There were some positives, and I did learn more than a few things, but overall, I have to say that the organisation and planning for this was abysmal and that it needs to be very differently next year. I attended two round tables and a breakout session, and whilst I did make some notes and there was some learning going on, for me, overall, and in conversation with a number of other people, many people are in agreement with me, I felt it was a shambles and close to being a waste of time. You may be thinking at this point that that sounds a bit harsh, and you would be correct, it does sound harsh. Unfortunately though, it is true. There were seventeen tables spread throughout a portion of the unused space on the expo floor, each clearly signed as to what number round table it was which allowed delegates to check the back of their the name badge in their lanyard and know which round table to go to for each of the three sessions. The two round tables that I went to, and from conversations with others, most of the other round tables were the same, were heavily oversubscribed. Consequently, when I arrived at my first roundtable (table ten, we have technology, now what? Using iPads for older students struggling with literacy, with Greg O’Connor), even though it was definitely the table I was supposed to be at, I was three rows from the back and struggled to hear anything. The expo hall is a cavernous, concrete floored, steel-beamed shed, and noise bounces around. That, combined with the large number of discussions going on, with all of the presenters trying to speak up so everyone at their table could hear, the susurrations of movements as people moved around the floor all combined to make it hard to hear. That would have been ok, if there wasn’t approximately thirty people crowded around the table, all trying to see what Greg was doing, meaning those at the back again, either missed out, or missed a lot of what was covered. A few tips I caught were that the ‘reader’ function on iPads/iPhones is also available as an extension on Chrome, produced by Evernote, called Clearly which removes distractions such as advertisements and menus, which for students with poor literacy can help them focus on what they need to be reading without the distractions of advertisements or sidebar menus. Greg also pointed out that we need to consider the reading age, not just of our students, but of the texts and materials that we are providing or recommending. He listed some tools to help with this including Simple Wikipedia, which takes Wikipedia pages and simplifies the language used. As an example, see the two screenshots below. This first screenshot is a portion of the regular Wikipedia page on Wormholes. Utilisation of Simple Wikipedia, which I had never heard of before, could be highly beneficial, especially for those students with low literacy levels, or English as a Second language, or even for students with no literacy issues in primary schools to help them with complicated concepts or ideas. Another app/extension recommend was the TL;DR extension for Chrome, which summarises web pages into more manageable paragraph sized chunks. He also recommended utilising image searches where possible to help with vocabulary instruction, particularly for ESL students, as the research shows (and this theme also came up in Ian Jukes’ presentation) that comprehension is increased when we pair images with text. There is also a function within Google Search which allows you to search based on the reading age of the content. I’ve included a screenshot of this below. EDIT: I have not included the screenshot in the republished version of this article on c21teaching.com.au ,as this function, unfortunately, is no loner available. Clicking on the search tools button brings up the options based on country, time, reading level, or to clear filters. By selecting reading level, as I have, it then displays the percentage of sources against basic, intermediate or advanced reading level, and clicking on those levels then filters the results accordingly (As a side-note, I was surprised there were no entries against the advance option, given that I searched wormholes). Greg also said that leveraging the capabilities of Siri and predictive text in iOs devices can be useful. After the first round table, it was off to table number two, Minecraft: utilising student interests to empower accessibility to curriculum with Heath Wild. Heath spoke about the incorporation of Minecraft, as a common student interest, to foster engagement in learning and that the logical nature of Minecraft (I am still trying to work out how to use it, so I cannot speak to the logical nature at the moment) appeals to, and captures the attention of many students on the Autism spectrum. Heath spoke about needing to have obvious, verbal countdowns when it was approaching time to finish up, due to the immersive nature of the application and the flow that it generated. Minecraft can also be utilised to teach numeracy skills, particularly the four basic operations, and place value, due to the constant size of the various blocks that are used, and the range of different coloured blocks that can be used to represent the different place values. Heath said they use Paper, an iOs app to allow students to draw on their iPads and then took those drawings and created them within the Minecraft space as a method of allowing students to demonstrate their comprehension of texts as they could take screenshots of the worlds they created, which could be used for assessment purposes. Heath also uses Brushstroke, an app allowing photos to be manipulated to appear as if they have been painted, and has used this for art studies, including the famous Ned Kelly artwork by Nolan. Students recreated this artwork in Minecraft, and then discussed how it’s feel and emotion would have been changed if Nolan had painted it as occurring at a different time of the day. Students put their Minecraft screenshot into Brushstrokes, manipulated it, and then imported them into Diptic to create class collages. Epic Zen Garden was leveraged to help students manage their emotions and to have strategies for dealing with stress and change. This concept was then taken into Minecraft, where students were encouraged to create their own Zen gardens, places where they could ‘go’ to feel calm when they are stressed, upset or angry. I was fortunate to snag a seat next to Heath for this particular round table, however, it, like the first one I was part of, was massively oversubscribed, and so many people were unable to hear Heath, especially those on the fringes, This was a massive negative to the whole experience, and the organisation structure of the round table session needs to be better dealt with for next year. The final session was labelled as a ‘breakout’ rather than a round table, and was actually in one of the rooms upstairs, and so was far more conducive to hearing the speaker. It was titled 40 students, 40 devices, one classroom, one teacher. How can a School make it work? and was lead by Philip Linscott. Having never been to a conference before, I committed a rookie error when deciding which events to go to during the roundtable session, and didn’t look to see who was presenting or where they were from. If I had, I would have realised that the session would not be, as I thought, a talk on strategies for leveraging devices in larger classrooms, but was in fact a sales pitch. Philip was from Lightspeed Systems, a company providing content-control systems to educational institutions. I have to admit, that a lot of what he said was rather interesting, but that it was not at all what I was expecting. It was, ultimately, a sales pitch, one which I could easily have received if I visited the company’s stall in the expo floor. Again, a lot of what he said was interesting, from the point of view of the level of control and accessibility their systems could provide to teachers, but it was not what I was looking for. I gained a lot from the roundtable session, not the least of which was to check who was presenting and where they were from so as to avoid the sales pitches, but I was disappointed at the seeming lack of organisation. All the round tables that I could see were oversubscribed, by two or three times the number of spots actually at the table, this combined with the din created by the combination of the number of voices, having to speak loud to be heard, and the echo-y nature of the expo hall made it difficult to hear. And many presenters either started early, or ran late, with the only indicator that time was up for each roundtable, a handheld bell that was rung by one of the organising staff members (in their delightful orange shirts!) as they walked around the expo floor…further adding to the noise levels. Anyone with noise sensitivities would have struggled. There is a large amount of space available in the area that Future Schools was booked. Even holding a series of the round tables in the hall/foyer of Bay eight at the venue would have helped, as the carpeted floor would have reduced the amount of noise being carried. There were other conference rooms that could have been utilised, some of them being capable of holding four or more roundtable sessions inside, spread out, in carpeted environments that would have helped reduce the din and create a more enjoyable experience for everyone. That session then took us to the lunch break, where I spent some time chatting with teachers from other schools, checking out various exhibitors’ stalls and, of course, having lunch. Tomorrow’s article will cover the presentations from session three of the day, Transmedia storytelling for educationand Robotics across the curriculum. As always, thank you for reading, and please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from anyone who was either at FutureSchools, and your thoughts and suggestions on the roundtable session and how to improve it, or from anyone who has been to a conference with something similar, how it was organised there and what lessons FutureSchools may be able to learn from that. See here for the list of articles in this series. “Minecraft is not a game, it’s a toy.” – Bron Stuckey My alarm went off at 5.30am Tuesday morning, and I rolled out of bed, ready for the ninety minute train ride back down to the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. The structure of day two was slightly different. Session one was the same, with two presentations followed by a morning tea break. The session between morning tea and lunch, however, would consist of all the conference streams coming out from their conferences and taking part in a series of roundtables. Delegates had seventeen different roundtables to choose from, across three different thirty minutes slots. The round tables were followed by the lunch break, which led into session three consisting of two more presentations, the afternoon tea break, and then the final presentation of the conference. After a welcome back for day from chairperson Sue Waters, the day began with the keynote presentation by Bron Stuckey titled Game Inspired Learning – how it offers us a chance to change the paradigm. Game inspired learning is a concept that I have heard discussed, under the banner of ‘gamification’ and I was curious to hear what it was all about, in more depth and from someone who has put the concept into practice. Bron was very quick to break Game Infusions Learning down into three areas; game design, game-based and game inspired learning and to discuss the subtle difference between the three areas. Bron listed two distinct points for each of the types of game infusion learning. Game design is about engagement through design, wherein students are involved in designing games as part of the curriculum. Game based learning is about engagement through game play, where games are brought into the curriculum. Game inspired learning, often termed gamification is about engagement that is guided by elements of, or as Bron termed them, ‘atoms’ of gaming being brought into the learning structures, where a gameful approach to the curriculum is mapped out. Bron provided some examples of applying ‘game atoms’ (game-inspired learning) to non-game situations, which you can see below. Bron also provided some examples of Game based learning, where game attributes are brought into the curriculum. Two of the examples Bron mentioned were Murder Under the Microscope and Atlantis Remixed, both of which feature a variety of game attributes (including narratives, avatars, levelling, economy, cascading information, feedback, prizes/badges/points, virtual goods, friending) and are game inspired ways of learning curriculum concepts and skills. There were a number of other game inspired platforms mentioned, including Duolingo, Race to the White House, Undergrad Life run by the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a degree that has been structured using game-inspired principles run by Concordia university, as well as a game-inspired professional development platform and 3D GameLab. Bron also stressed that being game-inspired is not necessarily synonymous with being digital. If game attributes are applied to a learning context, then it does not matter whether it is being done in the digital environment, or in the real environment. Bron then moved onto the question that I suspect most people were wanting the answer, or at least some insight, to; how to get started. Bron listed four signals types that may indicate a benefit from utilising a game infusion approach, which you can see below. If any of those four signals are present, then utilising game-design, game-inspired or game-based learning may be a viable and productive option. There are, of course, some potential pitfalls to be aware of. At the end of the day, you arenot building an actual game, you are creating a learning environment with some atoms or attributes of gaming, so it does not need to look and feel like a game necessarily. A few strategies that Bron has noticed increase the chances of successfully implementing game-inspired learning being a gamer yourself (I have that box ticked), leveraging your students current knowledge as to what they like in a game, and utilising platforms such as 3D GameLab to help build the learning structure. My key learning from hearing Bron speak was that game inspired learning as not as daunting is it sounded or felt, and that in many ways, many of us are likely already utilising some elements of gaming in much of our pedagogical techniques. “You don’t start the creation of a new amazing building with a tool. You start with a design. So why on earth would you start the creation of an amazing learning experience with an app?” –Paul Hamilton Following on from Bron, was Paul Hamilton, with a presentation titled Augmented Reality in Education. I had had no experience at all with AR prior to hearing Paul talk, but what he showed me left me somewhat curious. I think that AR holds some potential, but that you would need a significant amount of professional development to effectively implement it. Paul was quick to differentiate AR and VR from each other. Where VR is immersion in a different, a virtual world, AR is augmenting what we see, by adding an additional layer over the top. Paul showed us an example of what this can look like, via a video, which I have found on youtube and you can see below. Afterwards, Paul discussed his first efforts to utilise AR, and that it was a complete flop. It had no impact because the lesson had been designed around the tool – the iPad and AR, rather than around the learning goal, and that Paul indicated that was something of a Eureka moment for him. Paul believes that we, as teachers, are creators and designers of learning and that when we design a learning experience around an app, that we negate all of our training. Paul indicated that he also utilises QR codes as part of the AR process as these are easier for students to utilise than hyperlinks written on a board, but that anecdotal evidence indicates greater learning retention and application from utilising the AR as opposed to the QR codes. Paul also listed some of the apps that he recommends using for AR planning and programming, including Aurasma, Daqri, Layar and Blippar, as well as plugged his book, Augmented Reality in Education, which is available, free, in the iBookstore. The biggest key to success, according to Paul, was having a strong and genuine connection between the object of learning and the trigger. Paul believes that this is critical to a successful implementation of AR in education, and it does make sense. We say that learning must be genuine and authentic and significant to learners, and it is logical to apply this same thinking to the utilisation of any technologies in an educational setting. The next article will cover the Breakout and Round table sessions, which went until lunch, and maybe some observations from the expo itself. Thank you for reading, and as always, please leave a comment. I’d particularly love to hear if anyone has any experience with AR and/or Minecraft in the classroom. See here for the list of articles in this series. “The smart phones and tablets that our students have now are the most primitive technology they will ever use.” – Ian Jukes The fourth and final session of the day began after the mid-afternoon break and saw Ian Jukes speaking under the title Strategies for teaching digital learners in today’s classrooms. I was looking forward to this, as based on the title, I was expecting strategies for engaging students who were otherwise disengaged. I found Ian’s talk to be like a whirlwind; fast and furious with lots to be aware of and take in. Ian started off by commenting that student expectations about learning are fundamentally changing the way in which we teach. There was little elucidation as to what, exactly, he meant by this, but it seems, intuitively, to be reasonably accurate when you take a cursory look at the way in which teachers are adopting, piecemeal, various technologies and new pedagogical techniques. Ian went on to comment that children are currently maturing, physically, at an earlier age, but that neurologically, they are maturing differently to how we, or any previous generation matured due to the constant digital bombardment to which children are now subjected, and that occurs mainly outside the school context. My generation (according to the image above which is from this article, as a 1983 baby, I’m the tail end of Generation X, or The Baby Bust generation) and those that came before me, were textual learners, wherein we learnt from the text,whether it be on the blackboard, the textbook or our own writing. Any images used in the text, were used to compliment and provide some additional information or context to the information in the text. Those born since 2000 have grown up in an age where they are constantly bombarded by digital and visual stimuli, whether it be advertisements on TV, the internet, electronic signboards at sporting events or in the cities. These advertisements, being designed by marketers to capture attention and deliver a short and sharp message, are highly visual, with limited text. Ian posits, and I’ve read articles elsewhere to support the claim, that this has resulted in the brains of today’s students being wired differently; where they seek the bulk of the information or learning from the visual communication, and only then look to the text to get some complementary information. This has an impact on teaching practices, wherein teachers now need to ‘rewire’ their pedagogical techniques to account for this. A Google search using the terms Literacy crisis yields over sixty-nine million hits, with some of the excerpts seeming to echo the shift from textual to visual, but without the realisation of what has occurred. Some of these excerpts include:
What the search results tell us is that as a society, we are yet to recognise the shift in our children’s communication preference, or understand why it has occurred. Ian talked about how the digital generation find it natural to communicate visually through images, as seen with the explosion of image-driven social media such as Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Snapchat, amongst others, and that this change is what is driving the shift to visual expression, away from textual expression. From this, and I must point out that this is my inference, not what Ian said, the shift to preferencing visual communication over textual may be a partial explanation for the apparent ‘literacy crisis.’ This shift is also seen in the way in which the generations read. Mine, and those before me, traditionally read, and learned to read, in what is termed a z-pattern whilst the digital generation it seems are reading in what is termed an f-pattern. This has significant connotations for teachers when they are creating lesson plans and setting texts for reading etc, as the f-pattern appears to be more conducive to skimming, which Ian commented is fast “…becoming the new normal.” Ian provided us with some strategies for leveraging this knowledge. To get students to read the full text, he said, get a real image (a real photo, not a clip art or a stock photo) and put it in the bottom right-hand corner, and rotate it so that it ‘slingshots’ the reader back to the top of the information. This is a strategy commonly utilised in advertisements, particularly for tobacco or alcohol, where they are required to put disclaimers in the advertising. These disclaimers often appear in the bottom left or right-hand corner, above or next to which is an image that ‘slingshots’ you back to the top of the ad, wherein you’ll again be exposed to the brand name, brand logo, or brand slogan. This can be seen in the advertisement below, where the brand name is in the middle of the image with the disclaimer, consisting of two words (live responsibly) is in small font in the bottom left-hand corner. A much larger block of text, in a large-size font sits in the right hand corner, to which the western-eye, (being that we read left to right) eye is naturally drawn, above which the rippling water catches and draws the eye in, taking you back to the image in the centre. I suspect that in those countries where reading is done right to left, that the contents of the bottom corners would be switched.
was a bit surprised by his casual dismissal of this, however, when he explained what he meant, it made perfect sense, as I have felt the same way when playing computer games. Ian stated that gamers’ are required to make a decision every half to one second and are punished or rewarded for those choices every seven to ten seconds. Anecdotally, as a gamer on various platforms and of a range of different genres, this sounds about right. This is the immediacy of reward and punishment – the instant gratification/punishment system. But note that there is also a significant amount of choice involved.The drop in gaming platform prices has resulted in many children owning their own gaming platform, whether it be console, PC, or mobile device. Many of these games offer instant gratification or rewards for doing certain things, and you gain trophies/points/upgrades and feedback about the achievement along the way. Gaming is certainly a vehicle for instant gratification. I currently own an Xbox 360 and love seeing the little icon pop up when I hit an ‘achievement’ in a game. Additionally, as someone who plays Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, I love the instant nature of, again, seeing the icon pop up that I’ve hit an achievement, or leveled up – instant gratification. Gaming also encourages delayed gratification and effort. One of the games I engage with is EA Sports' FIFA, a football/soccer game. To win the various trophies and competitions within a football/soccer season takes a significant investment of time and effort, to not only play the individual matches, but to make choices about manage the team. It also requires constant decisions-making, for which I am instantly punished or rewarded (do I pass the ball this way or that, shoot or not shoot at goal, passes intercepted, or completed, shots made or saved etc). Playing Star Wars: The Old Republic also requires a massive investment in time and effort to work my way around the various worlds, complete individual missions, solve puzzles, find objects, and collaborate with other players to take on large-scale missions and high-level enemies. All of this results in, over time, me gaining access to the highest level abilities, armour, weapons and missions. It provides delayed gratification, and finally getting to the highest level, or defeating a certain enemy that you’ve been struggling against over a period of time, and have attempted to defeat multiple times as you increase your abilities provides a huge sense of satisfaction, at finally after all this time and the choices made around tactics/weapons/abilities etc finally pay off. So whilst yes, gaming does provide instant gratification, it also encourages effort and delayed gratification (amongst a range of other benefits, a topic which itself has been the source of much discussion. You can read one paper for gaming here) and as such digital learners are capable of, and display, delayed reward acceptance. The other aspect of gaming that is vastly different to current education systems is the feedback. Feedback in gaming is an ongoing affair, with continual feedback coming from the game as a result of choices that you make as a player. Currently, in education systems, feedback might consist of a tick, a stamp and/or a sticker in the student’s workbook, maybe a comment, maybe even a few sentences, and then the half-yearly and end of year school reports. It has been my experience, both as a student, and yes, I’ll own up to being guilty of this, as a teacher, that feedback is not often ongoing in a genuine and constructive manner, unless it is negative. A two-way dialogue is rarely engaged in, it seems. Ian closed his presentation with a few final thoughts that tied everything together. He pointed out that students, outside of the school environment, are largely engaged and in charge of their own learning. Students then have to come to school where they have no control of influence over their learning, and that often when they ask, quite genuinely, “why do I need to know this?” and when the answer is “because it’s on the test” it only serves to further disengage them. Ian pointed out that “…digital learners are highly developed critical thinking, social people and are driven learners, it is just that they are these things in ways different to that which is currently recognised and accepted,” which alludes back to his point about the need to ‘rewire’ our pedagogical techniques and teaching practices.. Ian’s final thought was a question, which struck me as being quite a meaningful, insightful challenge to the conference delegates: “If we keep trying to force students to do what we want them to do do, when it does not work, who has the learning problem?” I’ll stop here, as this has been a much longer article than I anticipated. My next article will be around the first session of Day Two of the FutureSchools ClassTech conference. As always, thank you for reading, and please, leave a comment with your thoughts on the article. See here for the list of articles in this series. “Whomever sets up the blog, owns the blog.” Sue Waters and Richard Byrne As promised in the previous article, I will be covering three presentations in this review of session three from day one of the FutureSchools expo ClassTech conference stream. Initially, I will be reflecting on the ‘ask the expert’ mini-presentation that occurred during the lunch break, led by Sue Waters and Richard Byrne which was about blogging, after that, I will cover the two presentations that occurred session three proper, including 3D printing and the Connected Classroom. At the end of session two, there was of course a bit of a mad rush out to the expo hall where lunch was being served, in order to get that, and then get to the ask the expert session with Sue and Richard. This was a topic I was keen to hear about, as I had started this blog with the aim of using it as a place of reflection on my teaching practice (which is yet to occurred), to share insights from my teaching practice (also yet to occur) and to reflect on events and professional development sessions, such as FutureSchools, which is, obviously, happening right now. The discussion was targeted, primarily, at classroom and student blogs, but much of what they said also applies to personal or professional blogs, such as mine. Richard and Sue believe that as teachers, we don’t self-promote enough about our achievements. They pointed out that there is a different between self-aggrandisement and self-promotion, with one being excessive and over the top, and the other being celebrations about successes, acknowledgements of struggles and the little things that make us smile (my interpretation of their words). There were some pitfalls around blogs that need to be avoided in order to have a successful blog. We need to be persistent with our writing. A lack of comments, shares, or likes, or views does not negate the value of the writing we are doing. Blogs need to have a clear purpose. For those using them as a learning tool in the classroom, blogs need to be fully integrated into the classroom infrastructure, rather than considered an add-on, and we need to provide our students with the tools to understand how and why to use it, and make it a tool that they will want to use. Pitfalls facing classroom blogs in particular are the optional nature of blogging. If we are going to have our students blog, make it something for which they are held accountable, as much as you would any other piece of learning. The posting schedule needs to be consistent, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly should be negotiable, but it should be consistent so readers know when a new post will be up. The purpose of the blog should be clear, both to the students and to the audience. Sue indicated that classrooms in which blogs are used successfully have set routines and strategies that are used consistently around the blogging requirements, including some schools where the blog forms part of an e-portfolio which stays with the students as an artifact of their learning across their entire school career. As teachers, we should have a goal for the blog – whether it be a presentation of facts, a discussion starter, or a demonstration of has been learned or achieved. In achieving this, we should not constrain our students creativity by limiting them to literacy skills. They should have the opportunity to use other forms of expression, including vlogs, though there should of course be dialogue around when this appropriate in regards to the age of your students. Statistically, it appears that for younger students, up to around years five to seven, that the majority of students will be on the one class blog, and that the older students are more likely to have individual blogs. That said, there is some intermingling or crossover of when this shift occurs and would depend on your specific context and your students and community. Additionally, both Richard and Sue agreed that whomever sets up the blog, owns the blog, so in order to allow students ownership of the blog and the likely engagement that comes from that, it is important to allow students to change things such as the theme of the blog, allowing some appropriate non-school postings as both of these encourage not only ownership, but creativity. The debate over the public vs private nature of student blogs continues on in various settings (including here, here, here and here) and that decision may be made by the school or education department as a matter of policy, or you may have some scope to make a professional judgement on a case by case basis. As with BYO programs though, opening up a dialogue with the parents and students, about the how and why of the blog, whether public or private, is important to its success and the engagement and discussion that it can foster in the school community. Additionally to this, it is vital to have the conversation about privacy and not identifying anyone personally by name or other descriptors that people are able to know exactly who is being talked about, and there are special considerations to take when uploading media such as images or videos such as not showing faces of minors. To get the blog noticed within the public sphere, it is important to write, and to write often, but not too often. Richard Byrne is a successful blogger and posts up to four or five blog articles a day, however they are only a few hundred words longs. Alternatively, posting once or twice a week, with longer posts may be more effective for you – it is going to vary according to the individual context. If you are curious to see some examples of how classroom blogs have been sued successfully, Richard has provided a list of examples of blogs from the readers of his website. In closing, Richard and Sue pointed out that YouTube is a form of blog, or rather a vlog, and that links or YouTube videos can often be embedded directly into a blog post. Once the lunchtime break finished, it was time for session three. The first presentation in this session was titled 3D printing – start small, think tall and was delivered by Teresa Deshon, Deputy Principal and Kirsty Watts, Academic Dead of Technology and e-Learning, both from Kilvington Grammar School. I have to admit that this session didn’t engage me as much as those before had for the simple reason that I had had no exposure to 3D printing beyond what I had seen on the news. I can see some applications for 3D printing, however it is not something that I can get excited about at this point. Teresa and Kirsty spoke about some of the challenges of working out how to use the 3D printing technology from storage, to the time frame required to print objects, the safety requirements, getting used to the CAD software and the need for calibration after moving the devices. They also spoke about their successes, which they said included increased engagement in learning by students, by staff interest in the technology once it had been applied to some school projects that were displayed around the school and the different thinking skills that were required, such as working out the best way to print objects that required physical support, such as printing cylinders vertically instead of horizontally to reduce the stress load on their frame during manufacture. They felt that the 3D printers were being successfully and authentically used, and from the intial seven students they had utilising them, now have a dedicated room to store the printers and their products in, and have now purchased a total of six printers. They were able to implement the 3D printing in cross-curricular ways, and were investigating ways of further increasing their use, including investigating the use of the 3Doodler, a 3D pen. The second presentation within session three was titled The Connected Classroom and was delivered by Anne Mirtschin. This topic interested me more, as I can see application for connecting with other classes, domestically and internationally for a wide range of learning opportunities in a variety of curricula areas. Anne started out by saying that a connected classroom is one that is not just connected internationally. A connected classroom is connected with its students, its teachers, its parents and its local community – that it is about relationships, a theme that has started to emerge from the conference thus far, with it featuring in Richard’s, Matt’s and Simon’s presentations. Anne also pointed out that teaching netiquette is very important to foster those relationships, especially when forming them with online communities. Anne talked about tools that she has used, including Blackboard Collaborate, which allows for virtual classrooms, and the use of back channels to allow sub-discussions to go on at the same time, such as additional questions, or insights from students, and that videoconferencing encourages engagement by students when a back-channel is provided for students not engaged directly in the conversation to be engaged. Anne pointed out the logical nature of using global days to connect with other schools, such as World Peace Day, World Wildlife Day, World Poetry Day etc (a list of World Days observed by the United Nations is available here). She also indicated that video conferencing needed to be regular and genuine, and that doing so would help break down the barriers of geography and language, as students would engage more with others when they were used to engaging with others through the medium of a webcam, and that it allowed students to ask questions of other peoples that would not ordinarily be able to ask. Some tools that were mentioned as being useful by Anne included Skype, Flat Connections, Backchannel chat, Padlet, WeChat,WhatsApp, QQ International and Viber. This is another area of learning that I can see potential for, but at this point in my career, as a casual teacher, I don’t feel that I can implement in a genuine way. It is certainly something that I hope to be able to implement in the future, but as a casual teacher, I don’t see it being a viable tool. The next post will be the final presentation from day one of the ClassTech conference stream at FutureSchools, and possibly a run down on the expo, and the networking drinks and then dinner. As always, thank you for reading and leave a comment. I would especially like to hear from any educators who do use a blog in their classroom, and how you utilise it. See here for the list of articles in this series. “Moving to BYOD as a financial choice, is a financial choice for the school, not the parents.” -Simon Crook At the end of session one, I was genuinely excited to go back home and test out some of the ideas that had been discussed, so knowing that Simon Crook was the first speaker for session two, with the presentation title BYOD, mobile devices and apps in K-12 schools had me champing at the bit to get back into the venue. Simon started out by saying something that I have observed, that many implementations of BYOD are in actual fact, implementations of BYODD, or bring your own designated device. Schools either give a list of acceptable devices, sometimes with one device listed, sometimes with multiple devices listed, or they give a list of minimum specifications that need to be met for the device to be acceptable. This came about due to the end of funding for the DER (Digital Education Revolution) program, and saw schools wanting to continue with the use of devices, but without the funds to do so. The choice to move to a BYO program is therefore a financial choice. Simon strongly believes that it is a financial choice for the schools and not the parents. Simon also discussed that the move to a BYO program as a drive for pedagogical change is a contentious factor for some people. Simon posed the question to the audience is BYOD for everyone? Of course the answer is not quite as simple or straightforward as a yes or a no, but is a combination thereof. BYO programs are not for everyone if the teachers within a school are not ready for it. Teachers need significant professional development and support to move to a BYO program to facilitate high quality teaching in a different pedagogical framework and utilising a different infrastructure. It is not enough to simply move everyone to devices, they need to be used appropriately and teachers need the professional development to understand how to best achieve this. I’ve written previously about the SAMR model and its application for BYO programs and believe that it plays a significant factor in genuine use of devices in classrooms. At the very least, Simon pointed out, teachers need to have devices of their own to utilise. I have known a school who rolled out a device to each teacher for twelve months to use as they were able to, with support, in the classroom before opening up the door to BYO programs. Only one class went ahead with a BYO program, and that teacher was highly engaged with using the provided device and worked to learn how to gain best results from the BYO program. Three other questions were listed that need to be asked, to determine if a school is ready for a BYO program:
“Using technology in school should be about using it to complement the already excellent pedagogy going on, not about the ‘keeper of the kingdom’ saying no to ‘protect’ the school systems. The pedagogical needs should inform the IT decisions, not the other way around.” Buy in from the school leadership is critical, as those schools where the leadership is on board and directs the IT team to find the solution often see more success than those schools where the leadership are ambivalent and simply ask the IT team if it is doable. There are factors to be considered, such as coverage v capacity as previously mentioned, and a genuine need to consider the security and protection of the students from undesirable content on the internet, but it needs to be considered intelligently, rather than simply whitewashing the internet en masse. Additionally, part of the conversation should be about teaching digital citizenship, which may form part of the conversation around Communicating and interacting for health and well being and Contributing to healthy and active communities, both of which are part of the Australian PDHPE curriculum and for which a variety of age targeted resources are available on the Cybersmart website. Following on from this was the discussion of ‘equity’ which can often be a cause for consternation around BYO programs. Simon made his position clear – equity is not about the lowest common denominator, it is not about making one software suite dominant and that cloud computing is the way to go. Simon indicated that decisions about hardware and software are going to vary from family to family and that where possible, utilising cloud-based storage would facilitate engagement as it would remove the problems of “I forgot my flash drive” or the issues of “I don’t think that’s the right version, there’s a newer one on my computer at home” that teachers often hear, from both students and colleagues. Ultimately, BYO programs are for everyone. Hardware prices continue to drop and there are an increasing number of options for those families who are price-point sensitive. The critical thing to remember, however, is that a dialogue needs to be opened up, early in the thinking about BYO programs to address concerns from parents, students and teachers, and that the dialogue needs to be ongoing. If you are curious about implementing BYOD, there are a growing number of schools who have implemented it, and many of these schools are open to visitors to find out more about what it looks like in practice. Some online resources that Simon provided include the NSW DEC website BYOD Sandpit and the Sydney Boys High BYOD page. We had a few minutes after Simon finished speaking to stand and stretch, while the second speaker for session two, Matt Richards, set himself up to present Makerspaces. Matt Richards spoke about the phenomenon known as Makerspaces which are student centered spaces where students are able to utilise technology in various forms to create objects. Matt talked about how he took a disused space in his school and transformed it into a student-owned space by allowing groups of students to paint the walls with differing images, and the leveraging of the tech-savvy students, who ordinarily hide away, as mentors for others wanting to learn more about technology. His aim, he said, was “…to create a space where kids learn how stuff works.” Makerspaces doe not require large amounts of cash to get started, and Matt related how he started simply with a number of old defunct computers, and the students were dismantling them and attempting to repair them and get them to work again. These achievements generated confidence and a buzz of accomplishment in the room which led to an increase in student self-efficacy as they experienced success, even if it was in the creation of ‘useless devices’ such as the one shown below. Beyond utilising defunct computers, Matt spoke about a range of low-priced resources including Goldieblox,Osmo, Littlebits, Raspberry Pi and Unity amongst a range of small kit computers. Matt said that the Makerspace movement changes teachers roles from content leaders, to relationship facilitators. Matt’s final point was significant, and I believe ties his, Simon Crook’s and Richard Byrne’s talks together: “We need to evolve learning spaces from teacher-centric to student-centric, and getting there is going to see different paths taken for different schools.” This sentiment can be applied to BYO programs, as well as game inspired learning. That is the end of day one, session two from my FutureSchools ClassTech wrap up. The next article will include the brief lunchtime session with Richard Byrne and Sue Waters which took place in the expo hall, as well as session three of the ClassTech conference Stream, covering 3D printing and the Connected Classroom See here for the list of articles in this series. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw My key takeaway from Richard Byrne’s talk was that EduTech is not as scary as it seems, but that you need to dive in and test it out for yourself, and this sentiment flowed nicely into the next speakers presentation. Michael Beilharz, of Knox Grammar School, spoke under the presentation title Games for a creative curriculum, which was a presentation about how he has utilised Minecraft effectively in classrooms and the outcomes from this in regards to learning and engagement as well as the change in the organisation structures of group assignment tasks. This was a talk that I was excited about, having utilised Minecraft whilst on my internship, admittedly in a rather superficial way, to test out the impacts it would have on student engagement. Michael related how he utilised Minecraft to teach his students about the Australian gold rush as part of a history course. Through the creation of an epoch-accurate replica of Bendigo within the Minecraft world, students were challenged to explore the world and build a goldmine. This required research about the tools available, and incorporated mathematics, geography, science and literacy skills. Michael showed us two videos. The first video (above) as the teaser video that was shown to the students prior to the learning to whet their appetite and generate some interest, and is available on Michael’s YouTube channel here. The second video that we were shown was a video of some of the student’s products, also available on Michael’s YouTube channel, Whilst showing us a video of what the Minecraft goldrush world looked like, Michael pointed out that we need to be willing to take risks, as teachers. We need to be able to ground our risks in pedagogical value, to justify their value to the learning process, and to the supervisory personnel that invariably want to know why we are trying that crazy new tech stuff. Michael made reference to the above quote, as noted that it is a sentiment which often seems to be forgotten when teachers lay down methods of completing presentations – speeches, written compositions, posters etc. We need to encourage our students to be creative and take risks when they present the evidence of their learning; just because speeches, written compositions etc. work as methods of evidence of learning, does not mean that they are the best options, or are providing students with a skill that they will need. Encourage them to make a video as part of their evidence of learning, it could be a news report, a documentary-style video, or a skit, but it utilises other skill sets and will challenge them to create something that puts their understanding of the concept into a new application, which will help deepen their understanding and apply it to other disciplines. Michael went on to talk about a range of functions available to create a safe environment within Minecraft, including the use of Bucket Servers which allow you to set up white lists of approved users within a server to monitor conversations and deal with griefing more effectively, and how to set up zones within a world that allow students to view other and interact with other group’s zones, but not to be destructive. This allows groups to collaborate and share ideas, but forces groups to do their own work to put ideas into action, and prevents sabotaging of other groups efforts. It is highly important, when looking to implement Minecraft as a teaching tool, to provide professional development opportunities to staff members, to allow them to explore the Minecraft world for themselves so that they are able to help their students, and this can be rather amusing to watch and listen to, as is demonstrated in the below video where a group of teachers are let loose inside the goldrush Minecraft world for the first time, with many of them never having used the software at all. If we were not told that it was a group of teachers, I would have assumed it was some students sharing the world with some friends. Minecraft as a learning tool also provides opportunities for interscholastic collaboration. A group of students within Michael’s class were actually completing a learning task within Minecraft, collaborating with students based in the US, which then brought about a different learning curve, including dealing with time differences, cultural differences such as language (e.g. Year Five as opposed to Fifth Grade), and units of measurement. As a learning tool, Michael found that Minecraft promoted a lot of core life skills, including communication, conflict resolution, critical thinking, problem solving processes and collaborative skills. All of these are skill sets that will assist students across a multitude of disciplines as they grow. Returning to professional development for a moment, Michael snuck in a Star Trek reference (whether it was deliberate or not, I don’t know), when he said that designing learning experiences through Minecraft should based on the PRIME Directive: Problem, Research, Investigate, Make, Evaluate. The problem that students are to approach needs to be genuine and real, it should encourage research skills to determine what is known, what isn’t known etc, encourage investigation of the phenomenon to fill in knowledge and skill set gaps, provide an opportunity to make something that provides an authentic opportunity to demonstrate their new knowledge and understanding in a creative way, and then an opportunity to evaluate their production. Minecraft as a learning tool is not just about building or making objects. Students should be required to justify decisions and this can be done through a portfolio approach instead of the traditional written report. There is nothing stopping students from screen-casting a tour of their production, as the students in the below video have done, affording them the opportunity to explain the thinking and reasoning behind their design decisions. As I mentioned earlier, I have attempted to use Minecraft as a learning tool in the past, once. It was excellent as far as the engagement side of things went, but it was done rather superficially, as a homework task, where students had to build a rocket ship. I feel much more confident, from a pedagogical perspective, in being able to utilise Minecraft in a learning situation after having heard from Michael. My own ability to actually build the environment in which my students would be learning, however, would require a lot of practice to improve.
That is all for session one, on day one of the ClassTech stream of the FutureSchools expo. Session two will be covered in the next post, and I will be endeavouring to make it a little shorter. See here for the list of articles in this series. I arrived at Australian Technology Park on the Wednesday morning, bright eyed and excited to get a taste of my first conference experience, the networking opportunities and the chance to hear some excellent speakers and, hopefully, learn a lot that I would be able to put into practice in the classroom. The day began with a brief talk from Sue Waters, an editor and author on theedublogger.com who exhorted the ClassTech delegates to take the opportunity to interact and engage with the various speakers that day and the next and to make contact with them after the conference finished. The first speaker was Richard Byrne, from Maine, USA, owner of Free Technology for Teachers, and as I was to find out, an invigorating speaker. The first point that I noted down, and that really stuck with me was the fact that we and our students will be Googled, and that we will be Googled for the rest of our lives. As educators, we hold a position within our various communities of respect and responsibility and it is therefore incumbent on us to remember that when we post to social media accounts, whether it be texts, images or videos, irrespective of whether it is a sharing of someone else’s content, or something that we are posting as ourselves, that it can and probably will be seen by someone within our educational community (parent, student, colleague). In this age of ‘Googleability’ our reputation is ever present on the internet, and easily besmirched by our own careless social media postings, especially given that kids will never know not being able to Google something, and that Facebook likes to hide away the privacy settings to make them somewhat difficult to get to. Richard went on to talk about the challenges of teaching students who are always connected in the classroom and at home, but that it is so often the case that “two places in the world that cell phones aren’t allowed are schools and Al Qaeda caves.” Richard indicated he felt the need to question the banning of cell phones in school, and related that he would rather they be leveraged as engagement devices. If students are engaged with conversations on their phones, why not leverage that engagement purposefully? It can lead to engagement of not only the student, but also the parent/s. In the same vein, Richard spoke about how he felt that BYOD/1:1 programs and web-filtering were counter-intuitive, and that web-filters limited the content potentiality of the internet, as well as the dialogue that should be engaged with, around the themes of digital citizenship and internet responsibility. He pointed out something that I imagine every teacher is aware of, in that if students are not accessing it at school, through the school’s infrastructure, then they are probably accessing it at school through their own ever increasing and commonplace, access to 3G and 4G devices, or at home, or somewhere in between. Moving along, there was as discussion about what are we, as educators, actually preparing our students for? Are we training students to do jobs that won’t exist in ten to fifteen years? Or are we teaching them to be flexible, to be able to evolve and to be ongoing and independent learners with the resilience and skills to retrain and move on as needed? Jobs that exist now, such as Web Content Manager, and Social Media Manager were not even ideas at the turn of the century, and yet, now, they are big money earners for those who are high on the ladder within that industry. Richard then flipped the thinking around and asked “What would Shakespeare or Twain have achieved if they had had access to the internet? What kind of website or blog would they have run?” which saw no small amount of laughter ring throughout the conference attendees. But it goes to show that, as Richard subsequently commented, that “the thinking economy is preparing students for jobs that don’t exist.” I found this to be quite the sobering thought, as I thought about the kinds of jobs that exist now that didn’t exist when I completed my secondary schooling in 2001, and the kinds of websites and social media tools that we now take for granted. This lead to the topic of responsibility, or digital citizenship, also infringing upon the realms of understanding validity and credibility of information sources. We need to move our students beyond Wikipedia, and the first few pages of Wikipedia when they are doing their searching, and teach them ways of more efficient and effective searches. Richard related an activity he utilises, wherein he provides a stimulus image, and students are required to come up with questions they can ask about the subject of the image, which invariably pushes students to write down what they know about the topic, or as Eliezer S. Yudkowsky puts it “what do I know and why do I think I know it?” (I should acknowledge that I can’t recall where I read it, so I may be wrong in attributing the quote to him.. If anyone can help me be a bit more accurate about where it came from, I would like to hear from you) Google’s Inside Search lists lesson plans for teaching about searching, as well as how the search engines work. Richard pointed out that we need to challenge our students to collaborate more effectively on research projects. I worked with a year five and six class last year who were researching our solar system for a class project, and one of the students asked if it was okay to airdrop the web link to a useful resource he had found to a friend working on the same topic When asked why, the students said that it would help his friend who was struggling to find information, indicating that students can collaborate when given the freedom and encouragement to do so. Richard said that he doesn’t like to share quotes attributed to business people who meddle in education often, but nonetheless shared a quote attributed to Sir Richard Branson from June 19, 2013: “Education doesn’t just take place in stuffy classrooms and university buildings. It can happen everywhere, every day, to every person.” Richard followed this up by discussing some websites, such as Connected Classrooms and Project Noah that provide opportunities to extend the learning outside the classroom, whether it be figuratively or literally, and that with the ever increasing levels of connectivity, and the freedom of the internet, that there are fewer gatekeepers of the knowledge than ever before, reducing the prohibitive nature of ‘the internet’ in learning. He followed this up with a quote from Napolean Hill, who said in 1937 that “Our only limitation lies in the development and use of our imagination.” Richard said that this still applies today, and that it is important to have students students solving real-world problems as often as possible, problems that they do, or will face, or that their parents face such, as this encourages the development and use of the imagination in determining various methods to solve the problems, as well as provides solid links to the real world, increasing the significance of the learning for students, and raising the likelihood of the skill or concept being not only remembered, but mastered and able to be applied to other disciplines. Richard’s final point, was that if, in classrooms where allow students access to the internet, and our students are ‘wandering out’ in the ether, than it means our lessons need to be better as it indicates we are not engaging our students. It felt harsh at first, but the more I think on it, the more realistic an assessment it seems to be. I will stop here, for now, and will post part two of session one later on, probably tomorrow. As always, thank you for reading, and leave a comment. See here for the list of articles in this series. I was fortunate to be able to attend the Future Schools Expo at the Australian Technology Park, Sydney, this week, on Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th March with five different two-day conference streams on offer. Additionally, there was a pre-conference master class on offer, which ran on Tuesday 10th, and then six different masterclass options which ran on Friday 13th. The conference streams were targeted to different areas of education: Leadership (FutureSchools stream), ‘coalface educators’ (ClassTech stream), educators who are interested in coding for their students (Teaching Kids to Code stream), educators wanting more information on how to utilise inclusive and assistive technologies in their classrooms ( S.E.T.N (Special Education Technology Needs) stream), and those involved in early childhood and infants education (Young Learners stream). As a classroom teacher in my first year out, I felt I would get the most value out of the ClassTech conference, and nominated to attend that. In regard to the masterclass options, there were five. The pre-conference masterclass was Agile Leadership and was run with Simon Breakspear on the Tuesday. The remaining four masterclasses were run on the Friday. Charles Leadbeater ran Innovation in Education, Ian Jukes headed up the Aligning technology initiatives for measurable student results, Gary Stager ran a masterclass titled after his newly released book (written with Sylvia Libow Martinez), namely Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Richard Byrne led the Making Media with Mobile Apps masterclass, whilst I attended Jon Bergmann’s masterclass, The Flipped Classroom: What’s Next? My blog articles over the next week or so will be a wrap up of my thoughts and my learning from the various sessions of the ClassTech conference Stream, the Masterclass with Jon Bergmann and also the expo itself. I’m aiming to get a blog post up, each day over the next week to get my thoughts out as quickly as I am able to. In the meantime, I would like to point you towards Matt Scadding’s blog posts from his time at FutureSchools this year. Matt attended the Teaching Kids to Codeconference stream, and so his reflection will come from a different place to mine. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out over the next few days. See here for the list of articles in this series. As tomorrow marks the beginning of the new school year for many students here in Australia, so it is also the first day of their new career for many graduate teachers, whom, having completed their teaching degree and having attained full time appointments straight out, seek to start out the new, and for them, first, year on a positive note. There are many sources of advice and tips on how to approach your first day in your classroom available on the internet (for example,here, here, here or here) and of course you will be regaled advice, tips and secrets used in the past by your new colleagues and you will hear how they survived their first days in the classroom. Without getting into the debate about the value, quality or nature of advice found on the internet (I would like to think that we are all aware of the fact that just because something is on the internet does not make it so (as made all too clear in this example from 2012). Further to this, just because an experienced teacher told you about a strategy that worked for them, it does not necessarily that it will translate into your classroom. I would like to point out that I am not saying that all advice you are given by experienced teachers is suspect, irrelevant or out of date. Indeed, you will likely receive a lot of valuable advice, particularly from those teachers within your new school, which brings me to the point of this short article. You are going to be teaching within a particular context this year. That context will be different to the one in which you will teach next year, the year after that and every year until you retire, or move into a non-teaching position within the education hierarchy. This is because you have students this year who have lived certain experiences. Those experiences are different to those experiences they had lived last year, and so the students’ themselves are different. A teacher may explain to you how they survived their first day of teaching ten years ago, and there will be some nuggets of usefulness within what you are told. However, those strategies worked for that teacher, with those students, in that year. The nature of children, the education system, technology and teaching means that you may not be able to use the same strategies as that teacher did (unless by some freak of Whovian time-travel you end up in that exact same classroom, physically and temporally) because the context is different. Unless you happen to know the current Doctor you will have to make adjustments to any advice you are given to suit your specific context. The children you teach this year have lived through their own particular experiences, as have you. The technology, and to some degree the pedagogy and curriculum, are also different, and you need to factor that into any strategy you are given as ‘advice for surviving your first day.’ Listen carefully to the advice you are given. It is offered freely, based on experience, and well-intended. You do not have to use the advice. You also should not reject it out of hand, even if you wholeheartedly disagree with it – you do not have to use it just because it has been offered. You may have come to teaching with particular ideals of what education is for, how classrooms and schools should be run, and what learning means. Ultimately, you will teach in a way that fits who you are, within the context of your classroom. Your students will change over the course of this year, and so the way you teach may also change, as you and your students grow and develop in your separate but conjoined pathway of learning. This of course is all advice, and so although I feel that it is useful, you do not have to use it, and that is perfectly legitimate. It is, after all, only advice. Good luck for the year to all teachers, but particularly to those of you whom are new to the profession. When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people. – Chinese proverb. This was supposed to be (and I suppose it technically still will be) the final post in this series on Planning for Learning, examining the make-up of the Teacher’s Program, that elusive document that I did not see or hear any hint of during my four year degree, up until my internship, when I asked my cooperating teacher about his, which launched a series of conversations that I felt were quite fruitful, challenging and educational. Part one of this series was about the first component of the Teacher’s Program, namely, the Vision, and examined the Teaching Philosophy, Class Analysis and the Explanation of Special Programs therein. Part two examined the Planning component, and different methods of curriculum planning, particularly thematic planning. This final part was supposed to examine the Monitoring component, including Tracking across the Literacy and Numeracy Continua, keeping assessment records, creating learning plans and class groupings. In sitting down to write this post, I have realised that I do not know enough to expound upon what is or is not good or even best practice when it comes to the Monitoring portion of the Teacher’s Program. So this post will instead simply identify some of those methods that I have come across, and I will ask you, my readers, to provide feedback on the tools and methods that you utilise to complete this section From what little I have seen in practice in regards to tracking on the Literacy and Numeracy Continua, one effective method appears to the use of sticky notes, or post-it notes. For example, when designing a rubric for, let’s say, an English assignment, you may assign a particular cluster for different components for the ‘pass grade’ (whether you use A-E, or another variation of grading) of that assignment. This then allows you to scale up or down for the actual output of each student, making note of where that student is on a particular stream through use of a sticky-note, which simply has the students name, and which is then placed in the relevant cluster on the Continuum chart. If you decide, for example, that Cluster 9 is the ‘pass’ mark for Aspects of Writing for a particular assignment, you can then adjust a student’s placement on the continuum for that skill set based on their output in that assignment and in consideration of previous demonstrations of ability. You can also make a note elsewhere, whether it’s in a spreadsheet or on a tracking class role in order to keep a consolidated record of ‘marked’ clusters across the school year. I’ve seen that done quite effectively as it allows you to move students around at any point, for each of the skill sets, and is quick and easy to do so. That leads, then, into keeping Assessment Records. The vast majority of teachers with whom I’ve had discussions about this keep a class role with students’ names down the left, the name of the assignment/learning output/test across the top and the mark, of whatever variety in the appropriate matrix square. This can be particularly effective when done such that it allows the side-by-side placement and therefore comparison of marks for similar tasks (whether by KLA, skill or concept) across the year. I would love to hear from anyone who is doing things differently in this regard, as to how you do it. Learning Plans, from my limited experience, appear to be done via a pro-forma which seems to vary from school to school, though, again, I would love to hear from anyone who is creating custom Learning Plans for their students. Class Groupings is something that very much differs from school to school, and even teacher to teacher. There are a number of teachers that I’ve seen who still utilise rows of desks, those who use table-groups of four or six students, those who allow students to sit wherever they wish to, set groups for reading/mathematics/spelling (whether leveled or mixed ability) in their day to day teaching. I’ve seen a lot of teachers who utilise a variety of grouping strategies without realising they are using a particular strategy, such as DeBono’s Hats, think-pair-share etc., and with varied levels of success. My understanding, from conversations with my cooperating teacher about this component of the Teacher’s Program is that it should contain a list of those strategies you envision using, when (as a general indicator), and why it is an appropriate strategy. But again, I’m open to hearing other thoughts on this structure. The Teacher’s Program can be a huge working folder containing the complete set of resources a teacher possesses. However this seems unwieldy, unlikely to be reflected upon with any sort of regularity, and unlikely to be usable as a true program, wherein a casual teacher can open it up and get a general idea of the content that is being covered in the classroom at that point. These last three posts have been my attempt to solidify my own understanding of what the Teacher’s Program can be based upon a series of conversations with my internship cooperating teacher, and my observations of a few examples since then. It will most likely be 2015 before my next post, so have a safe and happy Christmas break, and as always, thank you for reading. See here for the list of articles in this series. Reference list
de Bono Thinking Systems. (n.d.). Six Thinking Hats. Retrieved April 8, 2014, fromhttp://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now. -Attributed to Alan Lakein One of the core tasks of a teacher, one that must be completed before any teaching can happen is the completion of the Teaching Program. The contents of the program often varies from school to school, and even from stage to stage and year to year in its requirements, but in its simplest form, and the form I have come to prefer, it should simply be a plan for learning for that year or term. Whatever your school’s requirements for the program, it should contain some basic elements and ideally have a simple structure, such as below, which is how mine is laid out (taken from my internship supervising teacher):
Within most schools, some variation of the above, with more or less information/detail will be required, but this, I think is a fairly sensible and succinct program format and will be the basis for the next few posts, forming a mini-series on Planning for Learning. The first thing to consider when setting out to create your program is what is its purpose? What are you trying to achieve, other than to conform to any required policies? It should of course be noted that a teacher’s program is a legal document, and can be (and I have been told, at various times has been) entered into court as evidence in legal cases but it is not, nor should it be, why you write your Program. There are a number of reasons for writing a program.
Programs can be daunting. I have seen programs that are lever-arch folders, full to the brim, with every lesson, every resource or idea seen, permission slips, multiple scope and sequences; out of date, useless and irrelevant information, and have been told that it is a “working folder.” My view at the moment is that if it is a working folder, it should be up to date, and concise, and should reflect why you are writing it. My view of a program is a single folder for a year, broken into four terms with dividers. Each of the three sections (Vision, Planning, and Monitoring) should be present within each divider, reflective of that term. If you want to keep a resource folder, by all means do so (and I do), but do not keep it in your program folder, or your program becomes a massive paperweight that is difficult to navigate and use. Your program folder should contain your program, and your resource folder should contain your resources. Of course, once you know why you are writing your teaching program, it can be rather daunting to sit down to a blank screen for the first time as the cursor winks mockingly at you on an empty page. I personally keep each specific document within my program as a separate word document to make editing and updating quicker and easier. The first, and arguably the most important section, particularly for a beginning teacher, is the Vision segment. Why? The first component within your vision is the most important aspect of the entire Program: your Teaching Philosophy. This is a very personal document, as it should be an explicit accounting of why you are a teacher. It does no’t matter necessarily what the reason is, as I said, it is a personal document in as far as why you teach is a personal reason, but you need to be honest with yourself about why you turn up every day. I’ve written previously about why I teach, and when I first wrote it out, I took it to my Supervisor and said to him, this is why I teach, but it doesn’t sound ‘right.’ I was used, at that point, to thinking in an academic, or more specifically, a university assignment frame of mind, which tends to frown upon personal opinion and ideas. It does need to be edited to sound professional after you have made your first draft, but it is not about having the right reason for teaching, it is about having your reason for teaching. That said, you can certainly make a personal vision of why you teach sound academic, and being able to speak and write in fluent Academic-ese is a great skill to have, particularly if you are of the progressive research-based and practice-driven frame of mind. You will likely take more than one attempt to distill why you teach down to an honest reason. My first draft Teaching Philosophy contained clichés and platitudes such as wanting to make a difference for the future, wanting to give back to society, loving working with children, and enjoying teaching children. These are all reasons why I have chosen to pursue a career of pedagogical practice, however, in and of themselves, they are not the reason why I turn up every day with a smile on my face. Accordingly, they don’t appear in my Teaching Philosophy. You may be stuck wondering now how to write your Philosophy. You may very well never have seen one (as a fun and interesting exercise, ask your colleagues when the last time they updated their Teaching Philosophy was, or, do they have a formalised Teaching Philosophy). There are many different formats that can be used, but none of those that I have seen are conducive to honest articulations of why you teach. My Philosophy is structured around three simple premises, and indeed, these are the specific headings that I use to organise my Philosophy:
This format, if done honestly and rigorously, will naturally cover the majority of the AITSL standards that we are now required to conform to, and will do so in an authentic and easy to read manner. Once you have articulated your Teaching Philosophy, it is important that it remains a living document, and changes as you and your circumstances change. Why I teach at the moment, married with no children, is different to some of my colleagues who may be single with or without children, married with multiple kids, on the verge of retirement, or in the prime of their practice, and how I teach and how they teach will therefore be different. When it comes time for my wife and I to start a family, the why I teach, I would expect, will change, and how I teach may change accordingly. Your Teaching Philosophy should therefore not be written and filed, never to be looked at again. It should be the subject of reflection on a yearly basis or as circumstances make appropriate. It may not change each year, but it forces you to re-examine and stay engaged with your personal vision for the role and purpose of education and how and why you engage with it. The class analysis is the second component to the Vision segment of the Program, and is one that does need to be completed yearly, and also needs to be updated on a term by term basis. The class analysis should contain a basic overview of the class; the gender split, the year split, the gender per year split (if a composite class), any general diagnoses and any other general information relevant to your class as a whole, and then delve into more specific information about your individual students. This section should reflect your understanding of your students and how they learn and may contain information such as their preference for learning styles (Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences), ESL information, specific topics or areas of interest that can be leveraged to increase engagement, or areas of particular disinterest. It should be an analysis of your students and thus will change from term to term, as your knowledge of them grows. At the beginning of term one, you may be working from what you know of them from conversations with their previous teachers, but your knowledge will rapidly grow, and I this should be updated fairly early within the year, and then each term. The Explanation of Special Programs is an area that you write nothing, little, or a lot about. This section has to do with programs that are specific to your class and not the whole school. For example, my classroom at the moment is running a 1:1 BYOD trial, which is not present in any other class in the school, and accordingly, this program is detailed in my ESP. Some examples include BYOD programs, thematic classrooms (i.e. a classroom is driven by a theme such as performing arts, sports, science and technology around which literacy and numeracy are based), specific literacy or numeracy programs that are in place such as L3, Focus on Reading, Mathletics or anything else that is appropriate. If you have a Special Program in your class, you will know what it is. That is a brief overview of the first segment of the Teacher’s Program, looking at the Teaching Philosophy, the Class Analysis and the Explanation of Special Programs. The next post will focus on the Planning segment of the Teacher’s Program, and will look at how I program, why I think it works and how to cover the incredible amount of content we are required to, succinctly. See here for the list of articles in this series. “He who fails to plan, is planning to fail” – Attributed to Winston Churchill First of all, I would like to apologise for such a large gap between posts. This last few months has been very hectic with the conclusion of my Honours research project, and the process of conducting the data analysis and writing my dissertation. It has now been submitted, and I am now awaiting the results to come back from the examiners, which I am hopeful of receiving prior to Christmas. I am feeling quietly confident about getting a strong result, and have plans for further research in mind already. In my previous blog, Planning for Learning Part 1, I wrote about the first aspect of the Teaching Program, which is the Vision, encompassing the Teaching Philosophy, the Situation Analysis and the Explanation of Special Programs that are running in the class. This post will be focusing on the second component of the Teaching Program, which is the Planning segment, made up of the following sections:
This post will work through what each of these consists of, how to create them, and why they are a vital part of the Teaching Program. 1. Overview of Curriculum The Overview of Curriculum provides an opportunity to plan holistically, mapping out when outcomes will be covered within each KLA across the two years and linking the KLAs together conceptually, creating integrated units. When complete, you have a visual planning map, that enables anyone can pick up and utilise, either in its original form, or modified to suit the specific context. What this looks like will depend on how you plan, and how you think, in as far as linking the concepts together. Below is an example of what one might look like, showing a portion of a Stage Three Overview of Curriculum. 2. Timetable The timetable is simply your time-to-teach, or when you plan to teach what, but will include Release from Face to Face (RFF), scripture, assemblies, sport etc. What your timetable looks like will vary according to your school’s timetabling processes, priorities and the allocation of time to Sport, Physical Education, RFF, Library times etc. This is an example of what it might look like: The timetable will vary from school to school, according to how time is allocated to stage or whole-school sport, assemblies, scripture and other school specific programs, such as the fitness program you can see in this example. This is also where the utilisation of integrated units allows for multiple concepts/skills to be examined in the classroom, covering the required syllabus content in a significant way, allowing for transferal of skills and conceptual knowledge across learning and life domains. 3. Scope and Sequence The scope and sequence for any KLA or unit of work will be utilised, usually, in one of two ways. The first will map out when skills, concepts and knowledge will be covered in the learning across a period of time, usually a term, as can be seen in the below example. You can see the specific outcomes that are being drawn upon from the NSW Science and Technology syllabus (Board of Studies NSW, 2012), as well as the English outcomes that are being focused on each week for this unit. There is a key idea that drives the learning for the week, and then some suggested activities to provide a starting point. The numbers at the start of suggested activities are a reference to which piece of content that activity conforms to from the Science and Technology syllabus. This method of implementing a scope and sequence provides a Launchpad for the week, with the central focus and a suggested activity, leaving it to the teacher to make a professional judgement as to how they provide the learning for their class, based on their specific context. The other form that is commonly used looks something like the below sample from a Stage Three Program. It utilises Bloom’s Taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002;) to guide the framing of tasks across the KLAs or an integrated unit. You can see in this example that for the English KLA, based on a unit around social interactions and communication, the specific syllabus outcomes that will be targeted through the learning, the literacy concepts that are being incorporated, and the tasks that will be used to help facilitate learning across the different levels of thinking. I have also seen this form of scope and sequence combined with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences to form a learning matrix. Anecdotally, I have seen this labelled as a Pirozzo Unit, named after Ralph Pirozzo from Promoting Learning International, however I must note that it is not a structure I have much familiarity with, though I can see how it has some potential to be useful. 4. Daybook / Weekly Plan The details of how a Teachers’ Daybook or Weekly Plan is implemented vary almost as much as the weather and with similar levels of vigorous discussion as to the benefits and disadvantages of various formats and structures. There are advocates and critics for every form of this process that I have come across in my short time in the profession. I am going to work with the assumption that most teachers are familiar with the standard diary format (which in itself contains significant variation depending on who you talk to). Personally, I believe a combination of different methods is the better way to go, as this allows you to cover the macro (school or stage wide events, professional development events etc.) with the micro (specific session objectives, materials required etc.). The macro events should be addressed in a Teacher’s Planning Diary or calendar to allow for an overview of events, however the specific day to day learning activities and goals can be tracked in a fashion similar to the below planner. This is a fairly simple planner and is quite versatile. Across the top row you can input some basic details including the term, the week number and the core outcome being targeted that week. The next row specifies the key concept/skill/idea being examined and may include both a long and short-form. The remainder of the planner outlines the specifics of what is being done in such a way that it is succinct, but any teacher could walk into the class and take over from where you have left off. You will note in this screenshot that the columns are labelled not by day, but by the session number. This allows for the unpredictability and fluidity required of teachers due to disruptions. It is designed to be printed out and as each session is delivered, dated and signed to indicate that the specific session has been covered. This allow for disruptions as you are then able to work through the sessions, doubling them up, combining them or making other alterations as required due to interruptions. This particular screenshot is from an English day-book, and is broken down into three different components; however the specific layout of the planner can be altered to suit the specific context. You can see, however, that the descriptions are quite brief, and that there is a liberal use of abbreviations in order to save space. I have seen variations of this that include an equipment/materials list of either the week as a whole, or on a session by session basis, as well as an extra row that breaks down the overarching goal for the week into its constituent components, in this case, for reading, writing and spelling. This format lends itself well to Integrated Units of work, due to the nature of the layout. This is of course only one of many options, and I would be very interested to hear what other formats people are using to help plan their teaching and their students’ learning. See here for the list of articles in this series. “There can be infinite uses of the computer and of new age technology, but if teachers themselves are not able to bring it into the classroom and make it work, then it fails.” - Attributed Nancy Kassebaum In the previous post, I wrote about the SAMR model, and how I have understood it so far, having only just discovered it myself earlier this year. If it is the first time you’ve heard of it, I hope that it made sense, and that it has inspired you to go and research authentic technology integration. By way of a brief recap, the SAMR model is a way of thinking about the use of technology in the classroom that breaks technology use into four categories; substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. Previously, I wrote about the first two categories, and this post will complete the exploration of the SAMR model. The third category in the SAMR model is modification and it is the first of, continuing the Bloom’s Taxonomy analogy from the previous post, the higher order [technology uses], in the SAMR model. Modification allows for significant task redesign, such as recording a student’s presentation on a student’s iPad, and then using the playback of the recording to assist feedback delivery, providing the ability for the student to see themselves and see specific aspects that you are talking about. This use of technology, the iPad recording, modifies a typical teacher task (providing feedback) transforming the quality of the feedback and the way the students are able to process the feedback. The use of technology in this way is the first where there is any real benefit to the students. Prior to modification, there has been, essentially, no change in pedagogy. All you have done is made things easier for the students. Modification can change your pedagogy, and can improve the students learning outcomes. At the pinnacle of the transformation process, is redefinition, which is using technology to redefine the way a task is completed, in a new and previously not achievable method. The example I would offer of redefinition is the way that my CT has been using iPads to redefine his mathematics teaching. A traditional lesson involves some chalk-and-talk, some modelling, some independent work, and sessions of practicing with varying levels of achievement within a topic, followed by a summative assessment. It might be a week before you get a chance to mark it, identify that student x did not fully understand the concept, but you have moved on to the next topic as dictated by the scope and sequence. The way that he/we are using the iPads redefines the task of maths teaching and learning. We utilise iTunes U to push out content to the students, including an overview of the topic, the learning goals and how the learning goals will be achieved. The content includes a video which contains the explicit teaching, which is made available for the students to watch back as often as they need. We either work through the video as a class, or deliver the explicit teaching through chalk and talk. The students then work through their Mathletics play list, and this is where we reap the real benefits, I believe. The students complete two to four sets of ten-question activity, generated by Mathletics. As the students complete each set of activities, we are able to see their results populate, live, and then with a simple click, Mathletics provides us with groupings of <50%, 50-74%, 75-84% and 85%+. The expectation is mastery (85%+) and Mathletics provides feedback to the students in terms of their results by way of showing not just the results at the end of the activity, but also allowing students to click on a question which will allow them to see the question, their answer and the correct answer. Students also see a bar next to the activity on the topic screen, which will either be red, blue, gold with “Good Work” or gold with “Perfect” on it, and the students want the Gold bar with perfect. We use these live groupings to be able to identify those students who are struggling with the skills, and can straight away either work with them individually, or conduct small group sessions as needed to address the skill deficiencies and ensure deep understanding. Technology is a great tool to have, but that is all that it is, a tool. Without an understanding of how to leverage its potential to change the pedagogy and redefine tasks to maximise student’s learning outcomes, the digital education revolution, whether its funded by governments or parents, will falter and stagnate, as a result of same old same old with more expensive tools. Thank you for reading, and please leave some feedback and share among your PLN. See here for the list of articles in this series. Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an afterthought, or an event. – Heidi-Hayes Jacobs Initial teacher education (ITE) does give you a lot. I certainly feel like it has given me more than some of my peers indicate that it’s given them. But one thing that I don’t feel like it prepared me for was meaningful deployment of technology. Oh, certainly, we were told about SMART Notebooks, and to use ICT meaningfully, but we were not told what this actually meant in different contexts or how to ensure we were doing it.
Then, this year (2014), I walked into my Internship classroom; a Stage Three combined Year Five and Six class with a trial 1:1 iPad Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) system in place. Awesome I thought to myself, iPads! But then I realised that I had no framework for actually enacting pedagogical strategies through an iPad, no point of reference for how it would work in practice, or what could actually be done on iPads other than what I do on my iPhone. I’ve written previously about why I teach, but why I teach does not prepare or assist me to make technology integration meaningful in and of itself. Fortunately, my classroom teacher (CT) is rather progressive, and very much driven by research-based best practice. He introduced me to the SAMR model, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura and a way of thinking about EdTech that had never occurred to me before. The SAMR model outlines four ways in which technology can be used in an educational context, with two tiers of use which can be likened to lower and higher order thinking tiers in Bloom’s Taxonomy. The first two ways of utilising technology in the classroom are akin to Bloom’s lower order thinking skills, and are where technology is used only as a substitution to traditional pedagogies, or to augment traditional pedagogy. The second tier of the SAMR model is where technology is used to modify or to redefine the learning activity. This blog post will deal with the first half of the SAMR model, substitution and augmentation, which my CT likened to the lower order thinking components of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The way that my CT described SAMR to me was in comparison to the recent laptop program Australian high schools, formally known as the Digital Education Revolution which, among other things, saw every Year Nine to Twelve public high school student provided with a laptop. Whether it was a success or failure seems to depend on who you talk to (I know some teachers and administrators who are completely against laptops and tablets on the back of the laptop program). My CT said to me that if you ask parents buy a tablet/laptop as part of a BYOD program, such as is being trialed in his classroom, and all you do is used it as a substitution for a writing book or a textbook, that you will not necessarily have improved the learning outcomes, but you will have made the learning outcomes more expensive for the parents. That made perfect sense to me, and I can see that using them substitutionally would annoy parents. I see using interactive whiteboards (IWBs) purely for their projector as being merely a substitution for an overhead projector/tv and VCR or DVD player, and yes, this does happen. Substitution is an easy trap to fall into. You feel that you are using ICT, so you feel like you are contributing to Twenty-First Century Teaching, however, you are not actually changing anything, other than the medium being utilised. Changing the medium is in itself not necessarily a bad thing, but if that is all you are doing, then it is not enough. The next stage after Substitution is Augmentation. This is where the deployment of the technology only utilises a small portion of its potential. The technology is acting as a direct substitution with some functional improvement. An example of augmentation, I believe, would be using the often built-in functions of many e-textbooks available on digital devices, such as dictionary definitions, bookmarking, chapter hyperlinks etc. You have gained some functional improvement, but not really any pedagogical or learning outcome improvement. I have already mentioned that my CT likened substitution and augmentation deployment of technologies as being akin to the Lower Order Thinking phases of Bloom’s Taxonomy because they serve a purpose and are useful, but you will fail to challenge students much by doing so. Next weekend, I will examine the top half, or to continue the Bloom’s Taxonomy analogy, the ‘higher order thinking’ components of the SAMR model; modification and redefinition. I’d appreciate any feedback on this or my previous blog posts, but thank you for reading. See here for the list of articles in this series. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – Attributed to William Arthur Ward First of all, I apologise for being tardy with getting this blog entry up far, far later than I said I would. I spent the second week of the school holidays at a football (soccer) tournament as a referee coach, mentoring and coaching young referees, and as much fun as it was, I came home on the Saturday before Term started, and was asleep by 8.30 that night, and didn’t wake until 10 the next morning. Then it was headlong into my Internship in a Year Five and Six class. This coming week is my third week, and I absolutely love it so far. I’ve got an excellent CT (classroom teacher), who is incredibly supportive and challenges me to justify what I want to do in a lesson, not to discourage me, but to help me focus on what the specific purpose of that lesson is.
Moving along. As you read this post, I’d like you to consider why it is you teach. What makes you get up every morning, get to school at seven-am for a nine-am start, and leave the grounds at five-pm, when the students all left at three-pm? For what reason do you do this? I promised last time that I would post my teaching philosophy, which was partly about making myself accountable for actually writing it, and partly about opening up dialogue on this topic. We were told that we had to write a teaching philosophy for our internship portfolio for university, and that it should reflect why we teach and what we believe about teaching, but beyond that, there was no guidance. I have never seen a practicing teacher’s philosophy, and so had no benchmark or starting point and so asked my CT about his. This led to a long conversation about the purpose of a teaching philosophy how to write it, how to structure it, and what it should be about. From that conversation came the realisation that it is an incredibly personal document, that should be revisited regularly (my CT said he goes back to his at the beginning of each year) as our lives, and therefore our reasons for teaching, change regularly. I have adopted the same structure for my teaching philosophy as that used by my CT as it makes sense, and helps to make it a real document to me, as opposed to a useless of piece of academia, submitted for an assignment and then consigned to the dustbin. It is based on three questions, which form the document structure. The first section is headed “Why” and is an answer to the question “why do I teach?” The second is informed by the first, and is headed “How” and outlines how I will teach. The third section, “What” is what I will teach, and is mandated by the syllabus documents we are all required to work within. I thought I knew why I teach. However, when I sat down to write my philosophy, I found myself writing a series of clichés such as I like working with children, all children should have the opportunity to succeed, and I want to make a difference in the world etc. Although I do agree with those statements, they are not what compels me to teach, and makes me excited to be going down this career path and so they felt hollow when I put them on paper. I knew inside myself what the real reason for my desire to teach was, but have always felt that it was not right/rigorous/academic enough, and so have always shied away from using it on those occasions when the question of why I want to teach comes up. When I made that comment to my CT, he nodded and said that that is the reason why it’s a personal teaching philosophy, and not an academic assignment. It has to be something that we as teachers can look at on those days when we want to headbutt a brick wall and that will make us smile and remember why we do this. It should be personal to each of us, and so will be different for each of us and it will then influence how we teach. S/He who teaches for money teaches differently than s/he who teaches for a desire to create change in the world. This, then, is my first draft of part one of my teaching philosophy. I am still working on translating the why into the how in such a way that it makes sense on paper. Why Do I Teach? I teach for two reasons. I had two amazing male teachers in my own primary education. Both were strong men whom I looked up to, as both had a strong presence, as they were encouraging of my strengths and chiding of my weaknesses, pushing me to work on them. They were men who were able to work with all of my peers, challenging each of us at our own academic level. My three younger siblings on the other hand, across their combined eighteen years of primary education, had a total of one year with a male teacher, and the difference that that year of a strong male influence every day at school made on my sister and her self-confidence in dealing with her brothers and in talking to other male, non-immediate family members, was tremendous. My youngest brother needed a strong male role-model as a steadying influence and to provide guidance on interpersonal skills in the day-to-day situations at school that a father does not have access to. I teach because I want to be the positive male role model for those students who otherwise may not have one. The second reason that I teach is due to a love of learning and discovery, a love that was instilled by my family, but nurtured by my primary school teachers. It is that love of learning, the desire to know more about areas of interest, and the excitement of the moment when the dots are joined between prior knowledge and new understanding that provides the second reason why I teach. I would love to hear from other teachers as to how you set out your teaching philosophy, how you utilise it, and even just why it is you get out of bed to teach every morning. This is my first draft, and I’m still working on cleaning it up to make it more academic sounding, but at the same time, if it’s a personal document, do I need to? I’d love to hear your thoughts. See here for the list of articles in this series. “To infinity…and beyond!” -Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I am undertaking the Honours stream as part of my degree. My research, after funnelling it down from is the degree worth doing? has become an investigation into the beliefs of pre-service teachers about the Arts in education and how those beliefs have been shaped by discourse and experiences, both personally and through the initial teacher education program, and the positions taken-up by pre-service teachers as a result. The literature that I’ve read thus far indicates that the benefits of the Arts in education are well-known and acknowledged, however there is a gap in what is understood about the beneficence of the Arts in education, and the take up of the Arts in pedagogical practice.
The broader area of is the degree worth doing is something that I plan to return to/continue examining in the future, though I suspect that the focus area will change, and it seems prudent to stay in touch with what is happening in education research through an online professional learning network combining social media and the longer form of blog articles. I also intend to use the blog as a platform for professional reflection as my practice evolves through the combination of continued pedagogical practice, professional development, educational research – both my own and others - and hopefully I will receive critical feedback from other educators through this medium. I will be considered a new scheme teacher here in Australia, and accordingly will be required to conform to the AITSL accreditation process, part of which will inherently involve, I believe, remaining up to date with twenty-first century teaching practices, including challenge/problem based learning, ICT integration, KLA curriculum integration, flipped classrooms, self-directed learning and the like. The school at which I am undertaking my final practicum has a class trialling 1:1 iPads, and the Executive have advised other teachers in the school that they can take part in the trial if they present an action research project that it will be trialled under, as that was one of the parameters for the trial already underway. I am incredibly excited about what I’ve seen so far, as it represents my understanding of what education should be, based on what I’ve been hearing about twenty-first century learning for the last few years over the course of my degree. The plan is to excel during my internship (I certainly don’t plan to fail or be mediocre…no Ps get degrees for me, thank you very much. (That’s the (unjustified) snob in me coming through)) and sit down with my cooperating teacher and the principal, who I have formed a strong working relationship with, and put forward an action research project indicating how I would utilise and track usage of and the results of 1:1 iPads and the ‘anywhere, anytime learning environment that it would create, so that if there are any full time teaching positions coming up, that my name is at the very least, towards the top of the list of contenders they have in their minds. Ambitious, I realise, likely naively so, given that I will also be in the process of conducting my Honours research, but I’ve found that I do my best work under a bit of pressure. Also, if a career in educational research is part of my future, then from what I understand, it’s quite common to have multiple ‘pans on the stove’ at any one time. So that is where my focus will be moving to next; the flipped classroom, associated pedagogical practices, and the ‘anytime, anywhere’ teaching mindset and the challenges of changing planning/programming/teaching practices accordingly, and it very much like going down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or diving into infinity and beyond, as Buzz Lightyear likes to say, as I suspect that no matter how much reading I do, there will always be more to learn. Some names that I’ve come across in my own readings, or had recommended to me as being highly relevant, insightful, challenging or futuristic in their thinking, include Sir Ken Robinson, Seymour Papert, Sugata Mitra and Ralph Pirozzo. There are of course many others at the forefront of education research who are helping to pull the education system kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. Feel free to recommend others. I’ll be aiming for weekly blogs during this ‘introductory’ phase, and accordingly my next post will be next weekend, and aim is for it to be an elucidation of my teaching philosophy. Thank you for reading. See here for the list of articles in this series. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – Frodo Baggins, quoting Bilbo Baggins as written by J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, ch.3. As this is my first blog post, it seems prudent to write about who I am, and why I have started this blog. I’m currently in my fourth and final year of a Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) / Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Newcastle, and as part of that, am undertaking the Honours stream. I will be commencing my final fifty day professional experience placement (‘prac’) in during term three of the NSW school year in a stage three classroom.
Teaching for me was a career change, and at times, I have been able to relate to Bilbo when he described stepping out the door as being a dangerous business, except that for me, it was changing careers that was and is dangerous business. Like many people, I did not know what I wanted to do after I graduated from Year Twelve, and over the ensuing ten years worked in a variety of industries including different sectors of the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, and also within the electrical industry where I worked for a commercial and industrial firm. It was a good friend who was five years younger than myself graduating from university with a degree in Forensic Science, that made me realise that if I didn’t get over my fear of taking that first step into the unknown, that I would be stuck in a job and working environment that I had grown to dislike. I had considered teaching for some time, but had been afraid to give up my reasonably-paying job for the ‘uni student lifestyle.’ I am something of a (completely unjustified) snob at heart. I took steps to change my situation, and the cards, metaphorically speaking, were exceedingly kind to me, and so began the journey of a lifetime. In the ten years since high school, I had found myself numerous times, being responsible for either designing, teaching/training or a combination thereof, new systems, processes, skills, methods and structures for various aspects of some of the different occupations I had held and had quite enjoyed the role. I was also fortunate enough that during my own primary and secondary education I had some male teachers who were both excellent teachers and strong role models as men. As the eldest of four children, I had watched my siblings go through their own education, and realised that there was a dearth of strong male teachers in the education system. I put the two together, enjoying teaching roles I had taken on in the past, and the apparent lack of male teachers, and decided to enter the teaching profession. Having family members and friends who are in the education system already, my eyes are wide open to the trials and tribulations that will come over the next forty-plus years of my teaching career, but it for those moments when you see a child’s eyes light up as they ‘get it’ that I have become a teacher. Out of everything that I’ve ever done, nothing comes close (so far) the feeling of satisfaction that ensues having witnessed that moment all the jigsaw pieces form a coherent picture for a child. That’s a little bit about who I am. I daresay that more will come out over the course of my teaching journey as it is expressed through this blog, and I did say that I’d write about why I’ve started this blog. This has become somewhat wordy, so I will leave the ‘why’ for tomorrow. Thanks for reading. See here for the list of articles in this series. |
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