Welcome back for the continuation of my review of session one of the ClassTech conference stream. If you missed the previous article, you can find it here. I have sat down today to write this article and have discovered that when I was writing last night, I was turning two pages in my notebook rather than one page and so was getting my notes mixed up. While I had written that this article would focus on the remainder of session one, with talks from Cathie Howe and Jill Margerson, when I realised what I had done, and double-checekd the agenda in the FutureSchools app, I realised that Cathie Howe’s talk was the close of session one, and that Jill Margerson was actually speaking later in the conference. So this conference will be a nice short one, holding only Cathie’s talk, and then I will write about session two in tomorrow’s article.
Cathie Howe (@Cathie_H) from MacICT (@MacICT) did still speak after Jennie Magiera, under the title of Telling Stories with data. I heard Cathie speak at FutureSchools last year, and last year, I found that the talk did not hit my interest then, and when I saw what the title of this talk was, I did switch off a little. Cathie made the point that data is becoming more and more important to us as teachers and that it is becoming more important that both teachers and students understand how to interpret data.
Cathie spoke about how storytelling and data can facilitate the melding of skills from computer science, statistics, artistic design and storytelling in an approximately four to five-minute long video. She related how narratives are how we, as humans, simplify and make sense of a complex world and that infographics are a starting point for this, specifically that many charities have found that infographics or information pamphlets with a narrative base generate greater donation levels than those which are primarily statistics.
Cathie spoke about the wide range of free datasets that are available online and suitable for use with students of varying ages, and that it is easy to download a data set, upload it to Google Sheets and share it to students for analysis, and that the use of pivot tables can generate a strong basis for historical inquiry.
Cathie commented that students need to get to the point of frustration and that it is our role to then provide the scaffolding to help them move beyond that point. Cathie closed out by providing us with the above photo showing a range of sites from which to obtain data that can be utilised to generate inquiry before we moved into the morning break.
I did note, whilst making my way into the Expo hall, that the organisers had, this year, put up a display of a map and all of the roundtables along with who had registered for each roundtable, which was a fantastic idea, and incredibly useful.
I also found this sign:
I have not attended the EduTech conference in the past, given that it is in Brisbane, so it will be interesting to attend that next year instead of FutureSchools, as it moves to Melbourne.
Thank you for reading this article, and as always I would love to hear your thoughts on this article. If you have missed any articles in this series you can find them all by clicking here.
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“What is your superpower?”
– Dr Jenine Beekhuyzen, Founder and Director of the TechGirls are Super Heroes Movement
Welcome back to my review of the FutureSchools conference. Today I will begin reviewing the ClassTech Conference Stream which I attended. If you have missed the previous articles, you can find them here.
I elected to attend the ClassTech conference for FutureSchools2016, having attended the same conference in 2015 as I felt that it was still the best fit for me and where I am, currently, in my teaching career. Day One of the ClassTech conference (Day Two for FutureSchools2016 overall) began with a welcome by Dr Jenine Beekhuyzen, who is the founder and Director of the TechGirls are Super Heroes movement (@TGAsuperheroes), and her introduction of our first speaker, Anita L’Enfant who spoke, briefly, under the title of Discover Authentic Learning in the Makers Playground. Anita’s talk was very short, approximately fifteen minutes and the two main notes that I have from that talk were that authentic learning, for her, was learning that was relevant, involved real-world problem-solving, was meaningful and was useful. Being relevant does not mean that it has to be relevant to their immediate area; just that it had to be relevant to them in some fashion. The other key point was in relation to safe internet usage. Anita related that everyone in her house uses the internet, as is the case in many households and that part of the discussion around the internet involved ensuring safe usage. She spoke about a pair of websites (one aimed at parents and teachers and the other at students) called Think u know which has been developed by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in an effort to provide useful information about using the internet safely, particularly in regards to the various forms of social media.
I did visit the AFP stand on the FutureSchools Expo floor and spoke with the Officers running it (yes, they had actual AFP Officers there) and they spoke about how the information and handouts on various forms of social media that were currently popular (such as Instagram, SnapChat, Kik and Twitter) had been developed based upon what they had learned as a result of incidents that had come to the attention of various Police Agencies. The leaflets they had on the desk were available in both adult-friendly and student-friendly form on the respective websites. I do believe that the resources put together are well worth using as a way of teaching students about cyber-safety in particular forms of social media as, despite the required age to register being thirteen years old, I know of a number of my students who have and use social media such as Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
After Anita had spoken, we were introduced to our first keynote speaker, Jennie Magiera, and while a lot of what she said I had heard the previous day during the master class, there were some points of difference. Jennie opened with a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien: “I am looking for someone to share an adventure that I am arranging,” which she used to launch into a discussion around the Polynesian seafarers who left their homeland centuries ago to discover what was beyond the horizon and the fact that all they would have been able to see from their home shores, which is apparently believed to be Taiwan, was the sea, and so they were taking a big risk.
These seafarers were leaving behind two types of people and were themselves a third type of people, which neatly fits into the Rogers’ Curve for Early Adoption. There were the Innovators, which Jennie referred to as the hooray! group; those in the middle of the bell-curve, the large majority of people, whom Jennie referred to as the hmmm group, and then finally the laggards, who were dubbed the heck no! group.
We are used to thinking about early adopters of technology when we discuss the Rogers’ Curve for Early Adoption and typically the discussion is focused on the innovators or early adopters, with little thought or discussion of the remainder of Rogers’ bell curve. Jennie’s talk, however, focused on those people who are seemingly oft-forgotten in talks at conferences or are discussed in simple reference to how we, as innovators or early adopters of technology, need to drag them to where we are.
Jennie asked us to consider that the laggards are often saying “I cannot….” out of fear or disbelief. The point being made here was that rather than admonish the laggards for not being on board, as often happens, we should instead take a leaf from the Polynesian early explorers. It was pointed out that they had to have said something powerful to convince others to join them on their exploration voyages. What can we say to the laggards around us to convince them to start their adoption of technology, and support them along the way.
Jennie then continued to outline some steps for ensuring a good Edventure (her use of puns was high and deliberate…and fun!) and she said that we need to find a crew; gather those around us who are on the same page, willing to learn, or who will support us, even if they do not wish to be involved actively. We need to name the ‘ship’ that we are edventuring aboard, take the obligatory pre-voyage selfie and then our briefing needs to include that we need to make sure that students fail and fail often.
Jennie elaborated on this point by reminding us that we are often told that we need to ensure our students are successful, whether it is in testing, in sports or socially; that it is our responsibility as teachers to ensure they experience success. Jennie (and I, for what it is worth) disagree. It is in the iteration and reflection upon failure that learning can occur. The acronym FAIL, meaning First Attempt in Learning should lead, with reflection and constructive feedback from the teacher to SAIL, or the Second Attempt in Learning. We need to allow our students to fail so that they learn how to fail. Failing is part of life, whether it is a test, or not getting the job or promotion you wanted. Jennie continued by asking us to let go, commenting that “like all fascist dictators, even though we think that it is for the greater good of our students, it is not.” We do not need to micromanage each stage of learning for the students.
Jennie’s next piece of advice was that we need to charm our inner student. We forget to be gleeful and to allow our lessons to be gleeful. If we are not enjoying a lesson, chances are that our students are not either. Following on, Jennie reminded us, again, that innovation is an ongoing process and that we should not judge others for their starting point, which generated an interesting conversation with Rhoni McFarlane (@rhonimcfarlane) via Twitter on this subject:
I believe that although it appears we were coming from different places, that ultimately, Rhoni and I are on the same page in regards to supporting the laggards, those who are reluctant to take up technology in the classroom, we need to do so from their starting point, as Rhoni puts it, “we need to meet them where they are.” Though we are most likely technology leaders, and the laggards around us perhaps see us as some kind of mystical technology wizard, we need to remember that the basic and mundane for us is likely equivalent to Jedi mind-tricks for them. Innovation is a never-ending continuum and we have to start somewhere.
Following this was a reminder to audit our innovations. Jennie spoke about how the recent National Education Technology Plan (#NETP16) noted that authentic learning in non-technological contexts abounds if we let go of our assumptions. Often as leaders, we operate in a bubble, an echo chamber, that is impenetrable to the heck no group. We need to emerge from that bubble and audit the answer to why are we a proponent of this piece of technology? Jennie encouraged us to teach beyond the standards, to go above and beyond and spoke about her Year Four students, who surveyed other students about how they could give back to their community, with the typical response being “we can’t, we’re just kids.” Her students subsequently made a video with the core message “no matter how small you are, or how small the change is, yes, we can [make a change].”
Following this was a reminder that as the Polynesian’s reached each island on their voyage, they did not stop there and rest on their laurels, they kept going to see what impossible goal they could achieve next. Jennie spoke about introducing Google Explorations to a class for the first time and having a student exclaim that “I can’t wait to tell my parents where I’ve been today!” Not that the student said where she had been, not what she had learned. The what will be embedded, but for the student, the where is the immediate thing of importance.
Jennie’s final note was that we need to “share our crazy pills,” that whatever it is that excites us, our “poison of innovation. Rebecca Hepworth (@bechep2) put it succinctly via Twitter:
The vibe in the room at the end of Jennie’s keynote was energetic and invigorated. Jennie is a fantastically engaging speaker, and as you can see, despite having experienced a master class with her the previous day, I still learned a lot from this keynote.
There are still two speakers to review from session one, so I will close out this article now, and focus on the talks from Cathie Howe and Jill Margerson in tomorrow’s article. As always, thank you for reading, and I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts on this article or the ideas contained therein. You can find the other articles in this series by clicking here. Welcome back for my review of session three of Jennie Magiera’s master class at FutureSchools 2016. If you have missed the previous two articles, you can read about session one here and session two here. The day to this point had been full of energy and excitement, had been engaging and for me, personally, very much worthwhile attending. I feel that the badging concept discussed in session two was something that I could potentially implement in my classroom whereas when I have heard about badging in the past, such as here, I have been left feeling that it falls into the too hard basket. This session, however, was full of activities that I feel confident that I could take back to my school and implement in either the staffroom or the classroom, within the appropriate context. Jennie spoke about IEP’s, or Individual Education Plans, a document utilised to help with planning for and making adjustments for students with additional needs (whether that be below or above the grade standard) and how they are a document often perceived negatively and that we need to change that perception by using them positively, for ourselves as teachers, as a method of focusing on a single problem, what Jennie termed a problem of practice. When Jennie first entered the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) within her school district in the United States, she said that she found she would enter a school and that teachers there would literally turn and run in the opposite direction; “she’s the tech lady who’s here to make us use tech!” Jennie wanted, and needed, a way of changing the perception of technology in education, this ethereal and magical thing that Jennie heard teachers downplay their self-efficacy with “I’m no good at technology.” It is a refrain that I have heard far too often. The Teacher Individual Exploration Plan (TIEP) that Jennie formulates is a different approach to thinking about technology in the hands of teachers. The object is to shift the focus from getting better with technology to getting better as educators. The second goal is one that we should all be striving for, one which teachers the world over invest time and money out of their own account, investing in their ability to be a better teacher. Jennie came up with what she called gripe jam. Gripe jam is a process which consists of every teacher in the room having a stack of post-it notes (side-story: Jennie found that having too many post-it notes in your luggage registers as bomb-components with customs! Apparently it has something to do with the adhesive used on them), and when presented with various daily scenarios, the teachers write down all the problems they encounter in that scenario with one problem per post-it note, and generally only one to two minutes per scenario. We all complain about something in our lives, but when was the last time you were not only given permission, but encouraged to do so? The scenarios were daily situations that she refers to as problem catalysts, linking this process to the wonder catalyst from session one, and were typical situations that any teacher would be able to relate to; arriving first ting in the morning, the middle of the first teaching block, planning / marking time, professional development sessions run by the school, preparing for the start of a new school year etc. The key here, as with the wonder catalyst process, is not to audit the problems. It does not matter what anyone else at your table, in your school or in your district office thinks of that issue, if you perceive it as a problem, than for the purposes of this exercise, it is a problem. Step two involves arranging all of your problems into a continuum from most frustrating to least frustration, in a single line. For this, participants need to spread out so they have approximately an arm-span worth of free space to allow them to order their post-it notes into one continuous line. Jennie indicated that there can be no ties, that you must have a single line of problems, ranking every problem as more or less frustrating as the others. It is also critical here that you rank them based on how frustrating you find the problem. Not your colleagues / students/parents / administrators etc., just your frustration level. The next step turns this ranked list into a scatter plot and is aimed at reflecting on how many people are frustrated by the same thing. If you are the only person who finds something frustrating, then you would move it down the y-axis, if everyone is frustrated by it, then you would move it up the y-axis. This process allows you to reflect on then audit for the purposes of creating the scatter plot, how widespread the impact of this problem is felt within your context, and can end up looking something like this: At this point I was wondering what the point of the exercise was. Despite being intrigued and finding it personally useful to categorise the problems and their relative levels of importance to each other, I could not yet see the overall purpose. The next step was brief; leaving your scatter plot in place, draw a star on those problems that you think you may be able to address or fix with the right resources. This was about looking at a problem and thinking “if I had x then I could probably do y about it, which might resolve part of the issue.”Additionally, we were to place a circle on those problems that we were passionate about, that thing in your school that you see as catastrophic and that you want to engage with and solve where no-one else is interested or sees a problem. This was something that I could understand in terms of its purpose relative to the task and my career as a teacher, and there were a few problems or issues in my scatter plot that, with the right resources and support, I believe I could potentially influence and accordingly added a star to those issues. It was the subsequent step, however, that I found to be the most powerful and useful. With scatter plots in place, indicating how frustrating the issue was to you personally as well as how many people also felt the frustration, with some indication on the post-it notes of your passion or belief about your ability to influence the problem positively, Jennie instructed us to go on a gallery walk. This involved us leaving our scatter plot in place and moving about the room, looking at other people’s scatter plots, looking for two things and leaving a mark on their post-it note, or a post-it note of our own per the image below. Looking at other teachers’ scatter plots and seeing problems that I was facing as well was reassuring; as it meant that I was not alone in facing x, that it was encountered by others, and from conversations with others in the room, I was not the only person who felt relieved in making those observations. The second aspect of the gallery walk was to leave either an idea or our contact details whenever we came across a problem that we felt we could positively contribute to. Personally, I returned to some advice on one of my post-it notes, which I will be able to follow-up on later, and I noticed a number of other scatter plots also had ideas and contact details, hopefully which the owner of the scatter plot found useful. At this point, we returned to the TIEP form, which Jennie has kindly given permission for me to share via the blog, asking that I note that it will be included in her upcoming book, Corageous Edventures. So I include a blank template of the TIEP here for you to access, in Google Doc format. After selecting one problem to focus on, and ignoring the rest for the moment, you need to get to know the problem, detailing as much as you can about what the problem is, factors impacting on the cause or the lack of a solution, what has been tried in the past as a solution to the problem, and what parts of that solution did and did not work as well as why, which looks like this on the TIEP form: Jennie related problems to the radio waves by reminding us that at any given moment there are dozens of radio station signals in the air in a big city, but that it is only by focusing your tuner on one radio band that you can listen to a station clearly. We need to select one problem of practice to focus on, otherwise our attention and effort is diluted across many issues, and each will suffer because of that. Jennie indicated that it is the same with attending conferences, that we should go with one problem of practice to which we want to obtain some ideas, help, tips or solutions for in order to focus our attention, our note-taking, and before all of that, our choice of conference stream and workshop enrolment, a tip that I have heard previously from Kirsty Nash (@NasherK), via Dr Inger Mewburn’s blog The Thesis Whisperer (@thesiswhisperer). This led to a discussion about teacher-led models of professional development. EdCamps are a crowd-sourced model with no presenters’ per-se , which does not need to be done face-to-face as they are now often offered via Google Hangouts. EdCampHome (@edcamphome) offers kits that lay out how to organise and run an EdCamp if that is a route you wish to go down. Further to that, Google Hangouts on the air (GHOTAs) allows you to have up to fifteen actively engaged participants who all have @education.gov accounts. This of course does not take into account the ability for an unlimited number of others to participate via simply watching the GHO and participating via a back-channel such as Twitter (GHOTA FAQ page) A virtual Professional Learning Network (VPLN) is also an important tool to continuously access professional learning on a topic or area that is of interest to you, outside of the professional development that is being offered in your school community. The added bonus here is that you can access a VPLN anywhere and anytime you are connected, which, with the ubiquitous nature of smart phones in society, is essentially anywhere, bring us around to a current buzzphrase: There is one more activity which Jennie took us through, another hands-on process which can be implemented easily in the school, which I will leave for the next article. For now, thank you for reading this, another lengthy article, and as always, I would appreciate any feedback whether here or via Twitter.
View the other articles in this series here. “We forgot the third date!” – Jennie Magiera Welcome back for the last article in my review of the masterclass run by Jennie Magiera as part of FutureSchools 2016. If you have missed the previous articles, you can find them here. This final article will be shorter than the others, I suspect, as it will focus on one particular activity that Jennie took us through, called app speed dating. This activity is an excellent tool for sharing with a large number of people what an app was called, its purpose and how it could be utilised in the classroom. This exercise is also an excellent opportunity for students to show off the apps they love and want to see utilised in the classroom and teach the teachers. In the first instance, it requires willing presenters who know an app inside out and can explain in four minutes what the app is, what it does, why they love it and how they think it could be used in the classroom as a learning tool. Teachers are allocated a random number (according to how many student-presenters there are set up) and start with that number student. In the four minutes allocated, the student delivers their presentation, and if a teacher likes the app and wants to see more, they add it to their dance card. The teachers may only ask questions if there is time at the end, and when the end of the time is up, they must move to the next student-presenter. Jennie related that they had to teach their student presenters in one school to power down like a robot (with the sound effect!) and ignore any teacher who continued to try to ask questions in order to have the exercise proceed smoothly and without large time delays “Teachers are the worst students for not moving on when they’re asked.” -Jennie Magiera The second date is a little more structured and involves teachers having a playdate with one app in which they see the most potential for them to use in the classroom. They are given a specified time-frame (Jennie nominated one hour as the time they use) in which the teacher in that play-date group can play with that app; press buttons, try things out, fail and learn on their own, without intervention or assistance from the student presenter. Jennie made clear that the value in this phase is that the teacher should be learning and experiencing success and failure on their own playing, rather than with the instruction of another. Anyone within that play-date group with prior experience of the app should be focusing on developing it further and trying more advanced things rather than instructing others. The above video is from the EduSlam (@eduslam) YouTube Channel in a Google Hangout session with Jennie where she talks about what App Speed Dating is and you can see some video of it in action. The third date is a concept that arose from a conversation Jennie had with Miriam of LearningBytes.net who reached out to Jennie and said that she had forgotten to include the third date in the overall concept. A little bit of digging found the below excerpt from an entry on the Learning Bytes website about this very topic: “So what happens on the third date? The third date is where the teachers’ trial an App they like in their classroom. Ultimately, this is where they will decide whether they want to go all the way with their chosen App and integrate it into their pedagogy. The PD session next week will incorporate staff who went on the ‘third date’ as a result of participating in the PLAYDATE. They will each have a couple of minutes to present about their favourite App and what happened when they used it in the classroom.” – Miriam Scott. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/j3tnzhx on 7 March 2016 So we have the first date, where, as Jennie put it, we meet some of the fish in the sea, the play-date where we get to know the app a bit more and try it out, followed by the third date, which is where we give the app a test run in the class to see how it works out. Jennie said that failure at this point can be an important part in subsequent success as it can create cognitive dissonance, which, when pushed through, can assist in embedding new information into our schema. Jennie placed a caveat on this, however, saying that we need to fail with purpose, to reflect and understand why we failed in order to improve on the next occasion.
Reading through the Learning Bytes blog article, it was interesting to note that Miriam took this one step further, where teachers were required to come back to the following Professional Development session and present, briefly, about the app that they chose to take on the third date. Jennie did note that the whole process can be distilled into a one-hour professional development session, similar to how she put us through the exercise. The first date is dropped off entirely, and the session begins with a playdate. Each teacher is assigned to a table with pre-loaded apps, and teacher’s have thirty minutes, under the same restrictions as in the regular roll-out of the concept, in which to experiment, explore, fail and learn with an app. The members of that table then need to decide who will remain on that table to present to the next group in the rotation, after which, they choose someone from that group to stay and present to the next group. For example, Jill from Group Two might be elected to stay and present on an app to Group One as they rotate into Group Two while Group Two rotates onto Group Three. Jill presents to Group One and then elects someone from that group to stay and present to Group Four while Jill remains with Group One who rotate around again. We did not have time for the full set of rotations, however, I was nominated to present in the first set of rotations about the Google Cultural Institute, and then I heard presenters speak about MoveNote, Canva, YouTube360 and Storybird. After this, we went through some closure activities, sharing with others in a series of rotations how we were feeling at the end of the day, what we had learned over the course of the day and would put into practice, and then general chat. I am very glad that I took the opportunity to attend the master class, and will be speaking with my Principal to see if I can get the ball rolling for the school to fund someone else attending along with myself (I will self-fund again to ensure my ability to go), especially someone who is not particularly keen on technology in the classroom, as if that person attends, gains some insight into the potential and what can be achieved and have the opinion changed, then it could have significant ramifications for the school. It could of course completely backfire, but as the popular saying goes, you have to buy a ticket to win the lottery. As always, thank you for reading and I hope that you have found some benefit from these review articles. Tomorrow I will begin publishing reviews of the ClassTech conference stream I attended this year. I have seen some useful review articles other conference streams (such as this review of the Leadership stream by Michael Eggenhuizen (@M_Eggenhuizen) or this review by Anna DelConte (@annadelconte) on the Young Learners Stream). Find all articles in this series here. “Rubrics are the death of curiosity” – Jennie Magiera Welcome back for part two of my review of Jennie Magiera’s master class, entitled Transforming School Culture: Curiosity Based Learning for Students AND Teachers. Click here to read Part One if you missed it. After returning from the morning break, Jennie returned to the exploration of Wonderable questions. Out of a class discussion around questions from a picture of a garbage truck emptying its contents at a rubbish dump, the what if question that emerged and captured the class’ interest most effectively was what if zombies are real and thought it would have been very easy to generate an entire unit of work based around that topic, Jennie continued exploring the question with the students, until they had generated a focus question; how can you survive the Zombie apocalypse? Jennie took a sidestep here, halting the discussion on the zombie apocalypse to talk about rubrics, leading with the statement that “[r]ubrics are the death of curiosity as they tell students how to wonder, how many lines or minutes to wonder in, what size font to wonder in and students stop wondering about anything outside the literal box of the rubric.” I found this intriguing and given the prescriptive nature of many rubrics I can agree. My initial instinct was to push back, mentally with my rubrics are not like that (I have a preference for single-point rubrics as outlined here by Jennifer Gonzales from Cult of Pedagogy), but I stopped myself to question why single-point rubrics are any different and was unable to answer the question. They may not be quite as prescriptive as multi-point rubrics, however, they still outline specific criteria with specific indicators of success and so they still serve as wonder-killers. Jennie turned us towards badging, which immediately turned my mind to gamification or game-based/inspired learning (which I have written about previously here). As with anything, Jennie told us, badging can be implemented brilliantly or disastrously, but the success of a badging program can be distilled into two areas; the frequency and the level of care. We were asked to consider how many loyalty or discount or frequent purchase cards we have in our wallet and how many of those we actually use on a regular basis. If, for example, you happen to purchase a coffee one day and are given a frequent purchase card of the after you purchase ten coffees, the eleventh is free is free variety, but you do not normally visit that coffee store, or you do not normally drink coffee, then the frequency of use is going to be low and you will not engage with the company meaningfully. This translates into badging in the classroom. If there is little to nor frequency of use or reference to the badging system or program then the students are unlikely to engage with the badging. This leads to care, which is itself based around two sub-factors. Jennie reminded us that there are lots of social situations with these structures that we participate in on a daily basis, particularly in the consumer market where companies make use of influencer marketing encourage people to engage with and purchase the new product. In the classroom context, prizes should be intangible for the sake of sustainability of the badging system (and for the sake of your wallet!), but there does need to be a shift, over time, towards social motivation. Social motivation can be achieved by gaining the support of the influencers in the classroom, as those students will be the ones with influence over the rest of the class and allow you to gain traction and the badging system to embed and become part of the class culture. As a side note, there is an interesting ethical discussion that could be had around this topic and the use of marketing tactics in the classroom in this manner. Jennie did also note that there needs to be a conscious decision as to whether the badges will be digital or physical and that there are plenty of options for both, including Mozilla OpenBadges, Schoology and Credly. As with many things creative in the classroom, you require an activator to set the scene, which, when working through the process of creating a badging system, can come from the task itself. Some of Jennie’s class created the below activator for the task, which was simply an image of a TV with a YouTube video over-layed in place of the TV screen, which was quite effective in generating ideas. Students are used to the structure of video games and the badging or achievement structures therein, and so instigating a badging system in the class, or for a particular unit of work is not necessarily that big a stretch for their imaginations, or for them to grapple with. Another way to gain buy-in is for the students to design the badges and the achievements required to achieve those badges themselves. This is a method that is more applicable to some tasks or activities than others. For the escape from the zombie apocalypse task, the end goal was fairly clear; to escape from the approaching zombies and survive. Knowing this end-goal allowed students to generate a range of achievements that would result in the awarding of an appropriately titled badge and so the students, in their teams, were required to create the badge or achievement title, what was required to achieve the badge, what the evidence would be that the achievement had been completed and the design of the badge and Jennie had us complete this task in our table groups. Here is a screencap of some of what my group came up with. Our group got right into this task, and we realised partway through that we had been going about it thinking as teachers, with some very prescriptive descriptions for what was required, but that what we were putting in the how to achieve it column actually belonged in the evidence column and that we had to rethink our approach. We managed to do this and came up with the above badges, plus some more which were on the next slide in our GSlides document. The next step was for us to complete the task, plan how to escape the zombies and also achieve our own badges, which we had to then make a two-minute presentation to the cohort about, and then using a GForm which Jennie had set up, had to rate how well each group’s plan would allow them to survive the zombie apocalypse and how achievable their badges were.
Jennie closed out session two by stating that the difference between badges and rubrics is that badges are open and based on choice, allowing students to choose what they do while rubrics are prescriptive and tell students what they need to do. Students can choose to continue to the higher level, whereas in a rubric a grade that is less than an A is perceived as a failure by the students. From this point, we went into our lunch break which makes this a convenient place to end this article. As always, thank you for reading, and feel free to leave a comment or contact me on Twitter if you have any further questions or thoughts regarding this article. Find the rest of the articles in this series by clicking here. The next few articles will be based on reflections of my time attending the 2016 iteration of the FutureSchools conference and expo, which, for the 2016 iteration, consists of master classes on Wednesday 2nd March, and the conferences and expo proper on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th March respectively. When I attended last year (2015 review articles here), I commuted down and back each day, a return journey of approximately three hours total, which made for a long and tiring three days. When I decided to attend this year I made the decision that to engage with the networking aspect of the three days, and in order to not arrive each morning already tired, that I would stay in Sydney for the two nights. Accordingly, I wrote this particular article whilst sitting on the end of the single bed in the small (but very clean and well-kept) room, using an ironing board I borrowed from the staff to iron my shirts for tomorrow as a table of sorts, with my notebook propped up on the obligatory teacup provided in the room. It is certainly one of the more bizarre writing setups that I have used. Wednesday was the day for master classes, with three different full-day master classes on offer (you can read the blurb for each by clicking here, here and here). After reading through the synopsis of each on offer I made the decision that the Jennie Magiera’s (@MsMagiera) facilitated master class, entitled Transforming School Culture: Curiosity Based Learning for Students AND Teachers was the best fit for where I am at, currently, as a teacher in regards to my pedagogical approach and interests and the master class from which I would gain the most benefit vis-à-vis being able to put what I learn into practice when I return to school. When we started, Jennie stated that she wanted us to think about “…building a culture of curiosity…” in our schools and that cognitive dissonance would be the goal of today, to challenge us and to draw us out of our comfort zones in order to open us up to thinking about questioning from a different reference point. She was open that the day would be interactive, practical and not a five-hour long keynote with some breaks throughout, and that the first activity we needed to do was to smile. She attributed this activity to Roni Habib (@Roni_Habib) and referred to it as clapping for happiness and that it worked with both children and adults. It was a very simple activity wherein we all stood up in a rough circle around the outside of the room, and Jennie timed how long it would take for what was effectively a Mexican-Wave clap to make it all the way around the room, with the goal to achieve a sub-ten second time. It sounds very simple, and it was, but you could sense the competitiveness in the air the moment a time-goal was mentioned. At the end of the activity, however, everyone was laughing, smiling and had reawakened from their early-morning lethargy that many suffer from in the short period after arriving at work, and you could feel the energy in the room shift. Jennie took us through an interesting series of analogies and explanations, beginning with Project Based Learning (PBL v1), extending to Project Based Learning (PBL v2) and then to Curiosity Based Learning (CBL). Jennie indicated that she wanted us to think about PBL v1 as a quadrilateral. There are specific qualities needed for a shape to be a quadrilateral though these criteria are quite broad and accordingly many things can be a quadrilateral, though it is often clear when something is not a quadrilateral. To refine a quadrilateral, we need to take the definition a step further. Jennie asked us to think about PBL v2 as being a square. Though still a quadrilateral, it has further criteria that define it as a specific type of shape, and the delineation between a quadrilateral, in general, and a square, specifically, is fairly clear. The message here is that all squares are quadrilaterals, but that not all quadrilaterals are squares. Jennie stated that “…all problem-based learning units are project based learning, as in order to solve the problem, typically, there is some form of creation, an output at the end, achieved by completing a project. But not all Project based learning units are problem-based.” To situate this in a context we can grapple with more easily, we often ask students to create something, a presentation, a diorama, a poster or some other output. However, the question that Jennie was asking, or my interpretation of the question that Jennie was asking here, is how often is the project based on solving a problem, in contrast to creating an output that meets a specific, already known and quantifiable purpose/rubric/metric? Jennie’s advice was that in PBL v2, a student being successful is not required. In actuality, the greatest learning in PBL v2 may arise from a failure. She provided us with the seemingly trite, but potentially powerful and liberating acronym of FAIL; standing for First Attempt In Learning, and that too often she sees and hears of teachers providing problems that are too small, with teacher’s labouring under the notion that the problem they are working on MUST be situated locally in order to be of significance to them and their learning. Jennie exhorted us to think bigger, to think on a grander scale, and that she and other teachers she has worked with find that the questions, the problems which generate more interest, engagement and learning are those that are deemed impossible. Jennie gave us a current example from her own career as a Year Four classroom teacher in Chicago, Illinois. Currently, a large contingent of her students are genuinely fearful that if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee in the 2016 United States Presidential election that he will come to the south side of Chicago, put them all in trucks and deport them. The question how can we stop Donald Trump becoming the Republican candidate generated a lot of high-quality teaching and learning moments and is of great significance to those students. This exact same unit of work, if it was to be bundled up so neatly, would likely not interest any Year Four class outside of the United States, and even within the United States, would only appeal to particular class groups, depending on their ethnic make-up, based upon Trump’s speeches. The problem is a large-scale one, not situated locally vis-à-vis their specific school, but it is a large scale problem, that has generated curiosity in the student, which takes us to the next level. PBL v2 starts with a problem, CBL, the next step in Jennie’s analogy, starts with a question. The problem for the students was that they might be deported if Trump succeeds in his Presidential campaign. The problem generated curiosity which led to the question, how can we stop Trump from succeeding? This chain of thought brought Jennie to reminding us that children do have an innate curiosity and need to ask questions, particularly as young children (pre-school age), but that the process of schooling often stamps out that curiosity and consequently we need to re-instil in our students a sense of wonder and curiosity, and also how to audit their curiosity in a productive manner. To achieve this Jennie offered up an activity which we all completed which she referred to as a Wonder Catalyst. In essence, this activity involves providing students with a pad of post-it notes on which they are to write any question that comes to mind, without censorship or auditing for sensibility or practicality or answerability as long as it starts with one of the question stems (who, what, when, where, why and how) based upon a series of images, each of which is shown for a short period of time (I believe each was shown for around thirty seconds today, which was okay as adults, however, I certainly think that younger groups would need longer). After this has been done, then the auditing process begins. Questions are to be sorted into three question types; those that can be answered simply by asking Siri, or Google and to which a definitive answer is immediately returned, which Jennie referred to as Googleable questions; those that can definitively answered with some research, whether it is through a series of web searches, phone calls, tracking people down to get dates or places etc, which are referred to as researchable questions; and finally, those questions to which, though there are best guesses (educated or not), there is no definitive answer, which Jennie referred to as Wonderable questions. You can see an example of what this might look like below. The next level in this process is moving away from sentence stems, and towards a shift in mindset towards the curious, asking students to suspend disbelief and ask what if questions. Instead of asking when/where/why/how something occurred, ask what if……something else occurred. Two tools which Jennie provided us to help with this process were rightquestion.org/education and 101Qs.com, both of which generate a series of images and allows you to note down any question which springs to mind about or based on that image, and to also see what questions have been asked in the past for that image.
Jennie related this process back to Understanding by Design (a topic I have touched upon very briefly in the past, following the Teaching for Thinking conference I attended in 2015), and how the process of planning a unit of work in that model is based upon achieving a particular learning goal, getting to which is based around a single essential question, which may then have three or four guiding questions. It was also noted that utilising prompts to generate questions in this fashion, as opposed to simply telling students to write down any questions they have on any topic, may also help to reduce the incidence of choice-paralysis which may also bring about fear of failure to ask the right questions. Another method which Jennie said she has used to help generate questions in the past is the Earthview extension for Google Chrome. It sets the new tab background to a satellite photo of Earth, which students then generate questions about in order to attempt to determine what or where the photo is of. Each photo also has a link to Google Earth so that more information can be looked at if something appears that you want to pursue further. This little segue was the close for the morning session and lead into our morning break, which makes it a good place to stop for today. I hope that you have been able to draw something out of this article, as I have found it useful to reflect upon what I learned this morning, and what practices I want to add to my pedagogical quiver when I return to the classroom. As always, thank you for reading, and feel free to leave any questions or comments below, or to contact me via Twitter if you want to engage in a discussion around this topic, or get more information about anything. You can find the other articles in this series here. “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics, and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right…. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman, and child can realize his or her full potential.” ― Attributed to Kofi Annan How do you structure your morning literacy block with your students? How do you choose your texts for guided reading, independent reading, and how do you choose the tasks to be completed by students while you are reading with the other groups? Mrs. W. and I are going through a process of refinement as we work to find the balance between structure and student choice, between finding texts that are interesting and engaging, yet also have a purpose behind their selection, and tasks for our Must Do / Can Do list that engage whilst also serving the educational purpose that we want. as a side-note, as you read, be aware that I am writing this on Monday afternoon, and thus any references to yesterday, today or tomorrow are made within that context. At this point, the literacy block on my days looks something like this:
We are finding mixed standards across our class, both in regards to the quality and the quantity of what is being completed and handed in, and thus far, we have worked on finding a structure for the morning that provides independence to students to carry on with their tasks without needing our guidance every step of the way. Initially, we provided a list of the tasks that must be completed and those that are then able to be worked through afterwards, whilst we were with the guided reading group. This seemed to be too much independence, at this point in the year, as we found we were constantly having to answer questions from students about what they needed to do next, what they could do when they were finished etc. and it was completely ruining the flow of what we were looking to achieve with the reading group. Following this, I had students decide in advance the order they were going to complete tasks in, thinking that having a plan of attack would allow them to focus on completing the tasks, give them confidence that they knew what they were doing, and allow me to focus on my reading group. This also failed, as some students spent far too long vacillating about the order in which they wished to complete tasks. Last Wednesday I tried a different scenario and it worked very well, with students on task, engaged, and asking each other questions rather than disturb the reading group I was with. Today, I thought that I would use the same structure, given that it worked well last week, and discovered something that veteran teachers probably are well aware of: Last week I structured reading groups loosely akin to reading groups that you would find in an infants classroom (indeed, they were very similar to how reading groups were structured in the Year One class in which I completed one of my professional experience placements). I put on the board the order in which I would see the reading groups, and the tasks that the other groups were to complete whilst I was with each group. I suspect that it failed today, whereas it worked last week, as today I attached group names to specific tasks, indicating what I wanted them to start on first.
This cause issues as some of the tasks required less time than I was with a reading group, and those students were left, apparently, floundering, not knowing what to do, and unable it seems to take the initiative to move on to the next tasks on the board. Having thought about it this afternoon, I know how I will structure things tomorrow to hopefully resolve that issue. Tomorrow, when I indicate to students to move into reading groups, I will put on the screen the exact tasks and the order in which they are to be completed. In between each group, I will take a few minutes to quickly circulate and check students’ progress through the tasks (something I did not do today, which I think compounded the issue), signing off on each student so that I can track how they are progressing through the tasks, knowing that I am spending approximately ten minutes with each reading group. This will also help me gauge the appropriateness of the tasks they are being asked today in a certain time frame. I feel, upon reflection on the term thus far, that I was so frustrated by lost time early in the year due to a variety of factors (some of which I wrote about here) that I forgot to spend time bedding down good structures and process in the class in an effort to catch up to where I needed to be according to the scope and sequence documents, and am now paying the price, with structures still somewhat loose which is having repercussions in regards to what we are achieving. I would very much like to hear how you structure your literacy block and reading groups, so please, leave a comment either here or on Twitter, and as always, thank you for reading. I am unlikely to post an article tomorrow (Wednesday) as I will be attending the FutureSchools expo and conference. If you are going, let me know. It would be great to catch up with some Tweeps. If you have not heard of FutureSchools before or are unable to make it this year, you can find the review articles I wrote from FutureSchools 2015 by clicking here. This year’s reviews will appear over the week or two post-FutureSchools. “Recognizing George Miller’s information processing research showing that short-term memory is limited in the number of elements it can contain simultaneously, Sweller builds a theory that treats schemas, or combinations of elements, as the cognitive structures that make up an individual’s knowledge base.” – Sweller, J. 1988. As you read through today’s article, I would like you to consider how you go about teaching multiplication and the times tables to students as that is the focus of today’s article. I am basing on my post today on my (admittedly limited) understanding of cognitive load theory (CLT) from my recollections of the educational psychology course that was part of my Initial Teacher Education (ITE), so if I err in my understanding, please let me know so that I can correct it. One of the things that I have been doing with my class is Timetables Clocks.This is the first thing that I do with them when we commence our Mathematics block straight after our lunch break. The simplest explanation of this is that students draw a jumbled clock face, with the multiplier going in the centre, as in the image below. Students are given up to one minute to complete the twelve questions, and they write down their time. The students really enjoy this activity, and there is fierce competition to be the one with the quickest time, as they receive a bonus under our class economy program. I have only brought this program into our mathematics block recently, and on Wednesday I had them complete their four-times tables, and the results were abysmal. My understanding of CLT is that our memory is divided into working or short-term memory and long-term memory, with only a small amount of what is in our working memory being retained and transferred into our long term memory. Our working memory can only process a certain amount of information before some of what is in our working memory must be either transferred into our long term memory or dropped from our conscious memory. When answering a question, if part of the question can be answered by drawing upon our long-term memory than our working memory is able to bring a little bit more of itself to bear on answering the question. For example, if a student has a question such as 6×4(3-6 x24) and they can draw upon their long-term memory to know that 6×4 is 24, then their working memory is free to focus on the remainder of the question. A rather simplistic explanation and I hope it articulates clearly enough my understanding on this. Times tables are embedded into daily life, from estimating the groceries, to budgeting, to planning a holiday, knowing and being able to easily recall times table facts is something of a basic skill, and any question or problem or problem involving multiplication is going to be significantly more difficult to solve mentally (or in writing for that matter) if you are required to utilise your working memory solving those aspects of the question than if you are able to simply recall those facts from your long-term memory.
Indeed, from the conversations that I have had with secondary mathematics teachers, and correct me if this is not your experience, it appears that students’ being unable to recall multiplication facts from their long-term memory is a source of stress and frustration for both secondary students and teachers. As an example, it seems that when algebra is introduced, or when teachers are dealing with conversions between fractions, decimals and percentages; that students are struggling to deal with the multiplication aspect of the question, and are therefore unable to process the skills and knowledge needed for the particular mathematics concept being dealt with at the time and transfer that knowledge into their long-term memory causing a flow-on effect. So, and this is where I am looking for feedback from my PLN, my thinking is that this is one instance where rote-learning still has a place, and to my mind and understanding of CLT it seems logical. By memorising those multiplication facts, ensuring they are in students’ long-term memories, students will then be able to focus more on the remainder of any question of problem, rather than becoming stressed about multiplication issues (which is an issue for some students). Is my understanding of CLT reasonably accurate, and more specifically, accurate for the purpose I need it to be accurate for? Additionally, what other strategies have you found successful for ensuring multiplication facts make their way into students’ long-term memory? As always, thank you for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on this topic. References
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” – Attributed to Michael Jordan Recently I have been writing about the struggles, the frustration and the challenges that I have encountered to this point in the school year. Yesterday, however, I wrote, very briefly, that something had changed, and that I was feeling much more positively about things. I was unable to expand on what I felt that was as I had to go to a referee fitness test in Newcastle. The good news on that front is that I hit the goal I had set for myself for the test in order to be eligible to be appointed to a particular level of match during the season. I made the decision on Sunday, after having a stress attack, that I would go to bed, get up early and get started with a clear mind. Accordingly, I was in my classroom at 0600, and I found it to be an incredibly productive two and a half hours until the bell rang for the start of class. I began that day with a better idea of what I needed to achieve in my teaching, which meant that my teaching was clearer and more concise, with less waffle. I made the decision to be at school nice and early, again, for Tuesday morning, and began teaching on Tuesday with a very clear vision of what I wanted to achieve, how I would achieve it and what I could afford to drop if there were time constraints or unexpected interruptions. Today, I was again in my room at 0600 preparing for the day ahead I feel like I have turned a corner. The key, rather obviously, is my planning. I have a very clear idea of what I want to get done today, what I can afford to drop if there are time issues, and what the learning goal is for each session., and it is showing, both in my teaching and in the way the students are behaving and engaging with the tasks they have been asked to complete. Last year, as I mentioned in a previous article, I was tasked with teaching digital literacy skills; skills that I could utilise standing on my head whilst asleep. Having been thinking about it, I believe that I allowed some bad habits to creep into my planning. Whilst I had a program that I had put together, I was rarely looking at it, making decisions about next learning steps based upon what I felt made sense from where the cohort was, how they had coped with learning a particular skill or piece of knowledge, and what fitted around the multitude of interruptions that we were experiencing in the school. This is not the way to teach. I was utilising the seven-step planning process (that is, planning what you would be doing in the seven steps before you reach the class door) more regularly then I care to admit, and I allowed those poor habits to carry over to this year, in conjunction with struggling to wrap my head around all of the extra responsibilities and tasks that go hand-in-hand with having a class. A colleague who habitually arrives at school early each day commented to me this morning that they had noticed I had been in early the last few mornings, and when I replied with how productive I had been finding it, they gave me a knowing grin, and replied that when there is no one else here, there is no onto distract you but yourself, and that having a clear plan can create incredibly productive mornings.
The key, I believe, is that my planning has been more focused. Rather than focusing on what I want to achieve, I am also allowing myself to consider how I will achieve that, how I will check for understanding, what aspects I can afford to drop if we run out of time, or there are interruptions and also what resources I need to achieve the goal. Today was, for the year so far, the most productive day that I believe I and my students have had, and that was with losing essentially the whole middle session to scripture. Tomorrow is my day off, however, I will be back in here at 0600 tomorrow morning as it is school photo day and if I need to be in here (I do not, of course, but I want to be here for my first school photos with a class of my own), then I may as well make it a productive day. As always, thank you for reading, and I hope that your day has been as productive and left you with the same sense of achievement as mine has. “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” ― Attributed to Edward Everett Hale What a difference a day can make. In my previous article, I perhaps sounded rather more woe is me than I intended. Today, I actually felt like I found traction in my teaching. I got through most of what I planned for my literacy block, all of what I intended for my numeracy block and, unfortunately, none of what I had planned for my science lesson this afternoon due to a guest session about mindfulness from the school counsellor that I had unfortunately forgotten to diarise.
That said, I feel like today was a success and am leaving school happy. I was here at 0600 this morning to achieve that, having left yesterday evening at 1800, and continued to get work done at home, despite planning to relax, but I got there. I am now off to Newcastle for a fitness test, which I mentioned in yesterday’s article and need to leave now in order to get there on time. It will mean another late night and early morning to get myself ready for tomorrow, but I am feeling much more positive as well. I hope to have time to reflect further on the differences between today and the last few days tomorrow morning, but we will have to see how that goes. Until next time, thank you for reading, and enjoy your afternoon. “Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.” – Attributed to Jamais Cascio What strategies do you employ to weather the storm that is the beginning of the school year and the mental chaos and stress that it generates? What advice would you give to pre-service teachers or new graduates to set them up to get through the chaos of term one mentally intact? I have been finding this term mentally and physically stressful, draining and tiring, despite my contract being for three days as opposed to the four days of last year.That said, last year, I was tasked solely with teaching digital literacy skills in an RFF capacity, a role that I think, as I was reflecting last night whilst talking to Mrs. C21st, I took too lightly, as the skills I was teaching are skills that I think I could perform in my sleep whilst standing on my head, and so allowed some bad habits to creep in, in regards to planning for specific lessons. This year, I am finding that there is so much more to do than what I was aware of from my ITE and even from last year. There are whole facets of teaching that do not get touched upon in, well, not the ITE program which I completed. The actually planning and programming from a scope and sequence that has been prescribed by the school, the administration required on a daily basis including everything from marking, checking books, interacting with parents, staff meetings, committee meetings, extra-curricular activities such as sports teams and debating, reassuring the student who’s struggling to feel comfortable socially that they do have friends, giving your banana to the kid who has no lunch, buying a water filter because the water in the taps tastes bad and on top of everything else, changing numeracy scope and sequences halfway through the term (though when the one that was being used made no sense, I actually do not mind that one, as frustrating as it is), having to prepare Individual Education Plans for any student who requires an adjustment for their learning. In addition, this is also the start of the football (soccer) preseason, which brings its own time requirements, especially given that I am refereeing with a branch that is an hour away. Pre-season seminars, courses to upgrade my Referee Assessor (coach) qualifications, pre-season trial games, an FFA Cup match, training, fitness tests and other meetings have seen me spend about four or five hours just travelling each week, on top of the actual time at the event. Then there is the chaos that comes about from Mrs C21st now being pregnant, which though things have been relatively smooth so far, with more nausea than actually being sick, it has brought its own challenges, especially in regards to food and working out what smells set her nausea off. Thus far, it has not been as bad as it could be, with the smell of red meat cooking, chia seeds, and some yoghurts being the main things that set her off, and our (her) consumption of white peaches necessitating the purchase of a fresh bag of six peaches every two to three days. At the end of my first day of my first practicum back in 2012, in a Year Six class, I was hooked, I had the buzz, the rush of adrenalin that comes when a student has an a-ha! moment and gets it, and I thought to myself that, yes, I was in the right profession. I would be lying if I denied having wondered about the truth of that thought in the last week. Recently, I asked for feedback about pursuing a permanent posting, and Corinne Campbell (@Corisel) commented that I should continue to pursue a permanent posting, as being granted that would also see me gain access to significant additional funding for mentoring and guidance in planning and programming and early professional development opportunities. I think it is fantastic that new, permanently-employed teachers have access to that resource to help gain their footing, and I do remember hearing one my friends from university who was permanently appointed straight out of university, talk about that and how she would be struggling even more than she was, without the time that it gave her to get her head around all of the tasks that were never mentioned during our ITE. As far as I am aware (and if I am wrong, please correct me!), as a temporary or casual teacher, I do not have access to this assistance. Whilst I understand, from a practicality and management point of view why casual teachers do not have access to it (which school manages it etc), I think it is as important that temporary and casual teacher’s gain access to it in some format, even if only on a pro-rata basis. I am contracted, for the year, at .6. Why should I not be able to access .6 of the full amount in order to gain some guidance, mentoring and assistance in wrapping my head around everything? Why could a casual teacher with a good working relationship, whether with a particular school or a particular teacher, not nominate that teacher/school to be their mentor, and some sort of agreement is negotiated to provide the assistance to the new teacher? There has to be a way for this to be better, and more equitably managed. There seems to be a regular discourse about the shortage of teachers and the rates of new teachers that are leaving the profession within their first five years being abominably high. Why can we not seem to come up with a way to put in place, for those new graduates who want it, access to assistance that is currently restricted to one small portion of the workforce? I have not had one of those days since my last article on that topic, however, I have not particularly enjoyed my teaching lately as I am too busy stressing about getting through everything I have ben told I need to get through. I suspect that my desire to complete my referee qualification upgrade this season will fall by the wayside as it will be the first casualty of the year due to the amount of time that refereeing sucks up. On the plus side, other than a few nights, (including tonight, but Mrs. C21st is out at a training night), I have done well in not doing work at home when Mrs. C21st has been at home as well. That said, I have been getting to school at around 0630, and have often only left earlier than 1800 due to appointments. I had a bit of a stress-out last night. I had lost Saturday as I was refereeing an FFA Cup (the assessor was happy, I got a result in regular time, ran just under fifteen kilometres according to my GPS unit, and took just under sixteen thousand steps) and then spent the remainder of the day completing paperwork and reports and going through my post-match recovery program. Sunday we spent in Sydney seeing some family and friends we had not seen in a few months, and it was dinner time when we arrived home. I ended up getting a little bit of planning done for what I need to do, and was in bed at 2030, and then here this morning at 0615, with a fresher, cooler head. Today did actually go well. I get through everything I wanted to, except for three activities, and only half of my reading groups.But I think that, despite what I wrote earlier about taking work home, that I will take the night for myself to relax, go for a light run (I have a fitness test tomorrow afternoon) and then an early night.
I do have faith that I will make it through this term, we are, after all, halfway through. I do remember feeling like this when I first started working in one of my previous occupations, and asking my manager at the time what I was doing wrong that I was not getting through my workload each day, and stressing out about it. I do not know what changed, but it did and suddenly one day, I was the one helping others get through their workload. I believe I will get there, and that at the moment I am somewhere in transitory phase between consciously incompetent and consciously competent. That said, I would love to hear strategies, whether mental or physical, that you use to get through this chaotic time of year. As always, thank you for reading. Mrs 21stC and I are super excited to announce that sometime in August, we will be joined by our first child, whose in-utero name is Youngling, and that all the scans and tests thus far have shown a healthy baby. The image above is from the twelve-week scan, which we had on Monday afternoon and it was amazing to see this baby live on the screen, waving two arms all over the place (clearly a boy, with the poor dance moves on display), hearing the heartbeat, and seeing the blood pumping around.
“You have to fight through some bad days to earn the best days of your life.” – Unknown As you ready this, I would like you to consider how you deal and then recover from those days in your teaching, and would very much like to hear anyone’s strategies, either in the comments or over on Twitter. I am writing this on Monday afternoon….although it is closer to early-evening that afternoon, if we are being strictly honest. Today was one of those days, you know the kind I mean, and I am sure it means something slightly different for each of us. I was having a shocker and, unfortunately, it meant that my students suffered. I had had an ordinary weekend, attending a pre-season seminar (I referee football/soccer) that left me fuming for a variety of reasons, in addition to it being hot and humid. When I finally got home, I had a vent to Mrs. C21st (who also had a vent, as she had had one of those days at work). It did not help, at all. I suspect the fact that it was thirty-three degrees celsius in the coolest room of the house may have played a role in that. So we ended up going out for dinner and some drinks to escape the weather. I grew up in Tamworth, where, while it might have been forty degrees celsius, there was also zero humidity. I am of course not a fan of such temperatures, but the dry heat I am used to. It was what I was born into, and grew up with, I am adjusted to it and my body can deal with it. Although I have lived in the Gosford area of NSW for close to ten years, I still find that I do not handle the humidity down here. Yesterday and today were both, to my body, very humid days and I felt like I was wading through sludge in the fog. I completely botched the introduction of a new process I want the class to follow, causing huge confusion and much frustration amongst both them and myself. I got frustrated when, as I was circulating through the room when I found that things were not being done the way that I wanted them done…I was completely off my game. On top of that, the air conditioner in the room is broken (it was flagged in October last year) and so the students are struggling in the room with only ceiling fans and whatever cross-breeze we happen to get through the windows.
This afternoon I had to leave early for an appointment and with so much that I needed to catch up on I decided I would prefer to spend more time in my room now, rather than come in super-early tomorrow, and it has helped me regather my focus and find my calm center. I received a call with an offer for casual work on Friday of this week, at a school I have not worked at previously and was told that work would be left for me, and that the middle session would be sporting rotations for Stages Two and Three, that I would need to come prepared to plan and deliver (using their equipment of course). I have also been able to sit and focus on getting through some basic administrative tasks with some music I find relaxing playing (Pink Floyd’s The Endless River, in case you are interested), and get some preparation completed for tomorrow, so that I am already set up and ready to go in the morning, and am able to focus on helping my students rather than just getting by. Tomorrow (Tuesday) will be better. I will have had a better night’s sleep, will be better prepared and in a much calmer place mentally, ready to get on with another day’s teaching and learning. As always, thank you for reading, and please, if you have any particular strategies that you find useful for dealing with and/or recovering from bad days, leave a note in the comments. EDIT: Tuesday and then today have been much better, both temperature and pedagogically. “Time stays long enough for those who use it.“ – Attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci I am looking for some feedback on my teaching career progression and am hoping that you, my readers, are able to help. Last year I was fortunate enough to gain regular casual employment each week until I was eventually offered a temporary contract from Term Two through to the end of the year.That role was as a Release from Face-to-Face (RFF), or as I have heard it called elsewhere, Non-Contact or Supply Teaching. In this capacity, I had a timetable wherein I moved from class to class at set times, teaching digital literacy to students from Kindergarten up to Year Six.
This year, I have been offered a contract for the full year on a Year Five and Six composite class, for three days a week. I am discovering a great number of tasks that last year went unnoticed by me, as they did not fall within my purview, mainly administration issues. I had a conversation with another teacher recently who has gone the other way, from teaching a class in a job-share arrangement, back to an RFF role, and it was interesting that she is discovering all of the things that she no longer has to worry about. It makes me glad that I was not offered a permanent position immediately after graduating, as I am not sure how I would have coped, worrying about programming and planning, accreditation, the actual teaching and building relationships with my students, if I had also been required to complete the various paperwork and administration with which I am now faced. It enabled me to spend a year focusing on my pedagogy and classroom habits, which I believe has put me in a position for this year where I am not as stressed about juggling everything. It has also made me think about my career progression. The end goal, for myself, at least, is to gain a permanent position in a classroom. However at this point in time, and I am open to feedback on this, I am considering that I am better off not applying for permanent jobs this year. That might sound odd, however, I feel that in the long run, my teaching, and therefore, my students would be better served by having a full year in a class, with a full year’s worth of teaching a single class with all of the associated experiences which come with that, rather than potentially being offered a permanent position mid-year, causing consistency issues for myself and both sets of students. Students are resilient, and would get over it, however as someone who changed schools a lot as a student, I feel that the disruption, and the time for students to adapt to a new teachers routines, processes, and quirks, mid-year, would cause significant issues in regards to classroom more issues than would be worth it. Of course, the alternative would be to simply ask my Principal to not release me until the end of the year, should I be offered a permanent position elsewhere, which I have heard of happening. However, I am not sure how well that idea would be received, both by the current Principal and my new Principal. My reasoning makes sense to me and I am happy with the decision, but I am open to feedback and other ideas on the issue from those more experienced. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. – Attributed to John Dewey I have sat down to write this particular article on a number of occasions and for various reasons, have ended up not doing so, however, I am determined to write it today and thus am staying back at school, with no, or rather no domestic, distractions. Whilst I checked out of social media, from an educating point of view, for the duration of the Christmas holidays, I was still perusing the various tweets and reading linked articles when they struck my fancy, e-mailing many of them to myself for later use. I have written previously about Initial Teacher Education (my Musings on Initial Teacher Education series can be found here) and there have been some articles that have made for interesting reading around the topic of initial teacher education, as well as teaching in general, that I believe are worth discussing. Greg Ashman (@greg_ashman) is someone whose style of writing I tend to enjoy reading, and his article The bad ideas that hold teachers back was no different. This particular article discussed, very briefly, the pedagogical practice of differentiation, citing it as seeming “…truthy enough…” but that ultimately, it does not have a solid bank of evidence supporting it. To demonstrate this, Greg included the below graphic: It is an impressive looking graph, however, I am not conversant enough in statistical analysis to understand whether what is being represented is actually statistically significant. I understand enough to understand that I am looking at a graph that would appear to demonstrate that the greater the percentage of lower secondary (which I take to mean Years Seven to Nine) teachers who profess to differentiate by providing alternate work either frequently or in almost all lessons correlated to a lower PISA mathematics mean score in the 2012 iteration. Greg provided a link to a pdf file from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented which he summed up as finding that: “…the teachers weren’t doing it right. So it is either something that works if you have particularly talented teachers who can implement it – although this has not been demonstrated – or it is an idea that doesn’t work at all…” I have mixed feelings regarding the concept of differentiation. I agree that in theory it does sound “…truthy enough…” but that in practice it often seems to result in learning opportunities of a far lower standard than the student needs (or, perhaps, is entitled to) or at the other end of the scale, fails to provide a sufficiently high challenge. I must note that at this point in my career, that I have not had a great range of exposure to how specific teachers differentiate specific skills, concepts or pieces of knowledge, and so I am drawing from a limited well, that being my own experience, which in this area feels like wandering in the dark, to a degree.
The next article I noted was also by Greg, and was titled A guide for new teachers. It contained a number of ideas and thoughts that I feel would be beneficial for new teachers to be aware of, and I think which the pre-service teacher I wrote about last year would have appreciated reading had I come across the article then. The final article was regarding teacher qualifications, job shortages, and accreditation issues, which I believe I will leave for another time, as those issues are complex enough, and have the potential for a lengthy article in their own right. I am also conscious of the fact that it is now just after five pm and that I still have a number of other things I need to do before I go home. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. – Attributed to Maya Angelou In a previous article, I began to write about the classroom ecology and digressed into talking about one of the programs that my teaching partner for this year, Mrs. W, and I have put into place, the classroom economy. In this article, which I am writing on Monday morning, with the sound of a leaf blower out in the playground and cars rushing past on the main road the only accompaniment, I want to talk about instilling a love of learning and ask that you think about how it is that you instill a love of learning in your students. One of the reasons why I teach was the two fantastic teachers I had when I was in Year Five and Year Six at West Tamworth PS. Mr. Davies and Mr. Hawkins were vastly different characters, yet both managed to impress upon me a love of learning.
In Year Five, I had Mr. Davies, short of stature, thinning hair, glasses and a love of challenging us with logic puzzles, including us playing, as a class group, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago? on the class computer. I have no recollection of any particular skill or knowledge which he imparted to us in that year, however, I do remember feeling privileged, that I had been allowed to leave the class for portions of time to go to the school library and research (which likely meant copy from the encyclopaedia) Ancient Egypt, a topic with which I had discovered a fascination for at some unknown point in time prior. While I was, most likely, merely copying information from the encyclopaedia, I was doing so with the feeling that I had to do it well, and that I had to collect as much information as I could to justify Mr Davies’ decision to allow me this opportunity. I did not want to disappoint him, which resulted in my typing up many pages of text, systematically copied and painstakingly re-typed and then printed out at school. I distinctly recall being asked by Mr Davies what I had discovered so far about Ancient Egypt and being an excited nine-year-old boy, promptly rattled off a string of facts, much of which I suspect I did not truly understand at that point in time. Whether Mr Davies choice to allow me such unfettered, and in my memory, relatively unaccountable access to the library during class time was good pedagogy I do not think I could answer due to my own bias about the subject. However, it did instil a sense of excitement with learning, which was sustained and repeated on many occasions that year as I learned more and more, as I elected to do Ancient History throughout my HSC years, and which, even to this day, I still feel when I become consumed within a new topic which interests me, and that love and excitement for learning is something that I would sincerely like to impart to my own students this year. Achieving this will be difficult, however, I am confident that by being excited or passionate and appropriately animated while I am teaching, that by encouraging my students to take calculated risks, trusting in the supportive environment of our classroom, that my students will take their own steps towards becoming excited about learning. How do you create excitement in your own students about learning? “It is essential for students that all teachers — casual, temporary or full time — meet the Proficient Teacher standards within a reasonable period…[e]ven casual teachers should have a supervisor to support them…this is a reasonable expectation of schools and school systems.” the [Department of Education] spokesman said. – Alison Branley, The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 13th February 2016 I entered university to undertake my initial teaching education at the start of 2010, and I have distinct memories of hearing, for at least the ten years leading up to that point, that there were significant teacher shortages, which, coupled with the apparent looming retirement of thousands of teachers nationally, was leading to a crisis in education. This narrative has continued every since, and I recall when I was in my third year of my ITE that there was an uproar after this article was published by The Sydney Morning Herald. I was not overly concerned at the time, confident that I would be able to find casual work, as I had also heard that there was a shortage of casual teachers on the Central Coast. There was also an element of that’s-a-problem-for-future-me in my putting off worrying about it. I am conscious of the fact that I was very fortunate that I had no problems gaining regular casual employment almost straight after finishing my ITE and that I was was then offered a contract for four days a week from Term Two last and then for this year as well. I attribute this to a few reasons. Firstly, I had an excellent relationship with my supervising teacher, the staff, and students whilst on my first practicum, to the point where I was offered a place on the Year Six Canberra excursion which occurred during my final week there; an invaluable opportunity from which I learned a lot about being on an overnight excursion. After I completed my practicum, my supervising teacher invited to come back in whenever I wanted and help out, an invitation I took him up on, going in to help out when my university timetable allowed.I continued to visit and help out throughout the remainder of my studies, keeping my face known and building rapport with the staff and students, and continuing to learn about myself as a teacher. I was told in no uncertain terms to be sure to let them know when I received my approval to teach so that they could add me to the list of casual teachers. I built that relationship, worked to develop and maintain it and reaped the benefits when I graduated. The second reason was that in week two of 2015, having allowed schools a week to settle back in, I printed out and hand delivered a copy of my resume and the relevant paperwork to twenty schools, meeting the person who managed the casual teacher list where I was able to, and finding out the name of that person, if unable to do so. I hear a lot of anecdotal stories about people complaining they are unable to gain casual employment, and many of them, from what I hear, have not gone out and done the rounds of their local schools, beyond a small selection of up to four or five. I delivered resumes to twenty and heard back from only four schools, one of whom was the school at which I completed my first practicum and another from whom I did not have a call until around August after I was already engaged on a temporary contract. I may have ended up working casually at only three schools, however, that was three callbacks from twenty resumes. Recently, there has been another round of articles talking about this issue, both from a job shortage point of view as well as from the point of view of the tertiary sector’s responsibility to the education industry as the provider’s of ITE programs, as well ongoing discussions about this topic within the education community on Twitter. “I’m really angry especially with universities because the universities are the ones pushing the line ‘come and do a teaching degree and you’ll get a job’. They must know that’s false.” – Steve Elliot, ABC News 13 February 2016 The ABC News article, written by Alison Branley, indicates that up to forty percent of graduates are unable to find work within four months of graduating, which can make it difficult to fulfil the requirement to work one hundred and eighty days within a five-year period, which is the time limit to complete the movement from Provisionally to Proficiently accredited. As someone who is on a temporary contract, I have access to Professional Development opportunities through the school and support to piece together my portfolio of evidence for my own accreditation. As a casual teacher, however, that support is not as readily available to you, as schools’ funding is for professional development is limited, and does not often allow the provision of professional development to casual teachers, without those teachers bearing the cost of the course. Alison cites (uncredited) some interesting statistics, which, if taken at face-value, are frightening:
For those who undertake a three-year ITE program (my own was a four-year program), this has a significant cost to the taxpayer, which is essentially wasted money.
Workforce management within education, particularly the training of new teachers is an undoubtedly complex and difficult task. Anna Patty wrote an article for The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014 indicating that the just under seven thousand teacher graduates in 2013 were fighting for a mere two thousand two hundred jobs, of which only a thousand were advertised. There were, I believe, around one hundred and thirty (ish) who graduated in my cohort. I am only aware of around six or seven who received permanent positions under the NSW Department of Education’s Targeted Recruitment Program, with the remainder fighting for casual work and temporary contracts, with a small number having gone overseas or put teaching on hold to raise a family. The situation is confusing as we are being given seemingly contradictory information, that there is both a teacher glut and a teacher shortage, and this comes back to the treatment of ITE programs as cash-cows, so dubbed by Stephen Dinham in January 2013. In contrast to Finland, where entry into an ITE program requires a Masters degree, as a starting point, a brief search of the UAC Education courses today (13 February 2016) showed that the majority of cut-offs for ITE programs is only sixty. “We need other measures of suitability to teaching to augment ATAR scores.” – Stephen Dinham, The Conversation. Retrieved 13 February 2016 I agree with Stephen’s call for other measures of suitability, but what they are, how they are judged and how you can tell if someone at nineteen years of age will be a suitable teacher when they graduate at around twenty-three, is open to debate. I have heard calls for an interview process similar to what I understand is required for entry into Medicine undergraduate programs, but I know that if I had gone into one of those interviews in Year Twelve, I would have been deemed unsuitable, as I would likely have been very unsure of whether it was what I wanted to do, and I know of many teachers my age, who did enter university to become teachers straight out of high school, and completed the degree very casually, just looking a Pass mark.
Whilst I am not old enough to know much about the Teachers College indentured employment system which many of my senior colleagues went through, whereby they were guaranteed a permanent posting straight out of university, perhaps a similar program for those willing to be posted to rural and remote locations, or to take postings in areas other than where they had originally considered is an idea worth investigating. Alternatively, one of my Professors during my ITE who was trained and began his teaching career in the UK told us of how a similar issue was managed over there. Apparently, and I would love to hear from someone who can provide more concrete details of how it worked out, the offered voluntary retirement packages to a large percentage of teachers who were close to retirement age, which freed up a large number of positions higher up the ladder, which allowed those wanted to do so to move further up the chain, freeing up a large number of permanent teaching positions on the bottom rung. There are some obvious potential pitfalls to this concept, not least the loss of corporate knowledge, however, it is an interesting concept. This is a complex topic, and I welcome any constructive discussion around the issue. “All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion As you read this, I would like you to think about the ecology of your classroom; the physical structure, the ambience generated by the posters, your bearing and voice, outside influences, are you near a train line or a highway, or do you have construction work going on, as we do in our school that is impacting on various aspects of the school? I would appreciate any feedback on my room and the various initiatives that Mrs W and I are putting in place. The new classes were put in place on Tuesday after the final numbers and class mixes were determined. The initial mix for Stage Three was two classes of just Year Five students, two composite Year Five and Six classes and then a straight Year Six class. Due to the vagaries of enrolment numbers, this meant that Mrs W and I would have twenty students, another would have had only a few more and then the others would have had high-twenties, which is not particularly equitable. The final mix is that all five classes are composite Stage Three classes, with everyone having either twenty-four or twenty-five, which I am sure you would agree is much more equitable. Having a composite class presents its own challenges, which I discovered about ten minutes after getting my new class back to our room when all of my Year Six students left to go and be with their Kindergarten buddies. I effectively did not see my Year Six students again until the final session in the afternoon, which was rather frustrating as it made those initial stages of setting up the room, in regards to the basic mechanics of the classroom, very difficult. So far, between the last session of yesterday, and the morning session until Year Six went to join their Kindergarten buddies, we have been able to play some getting to know you games, have a conversation about rights and responsibilities and then brainstorm rights and responsibilities for both the teachers and the students as a more positive option than just a classroom rules, given out the various books, and discussed the classroom management system that Mrs W and I are putting in place this year, which is a classroom economy system. We wanted something that would be relevant and actually useful for students and that would actually have an impact on students, encouraging to be positive with their behaviour, rather than a negative structure that tries to control their behaviour, and after talking about various systems that we have both come across, decided on the classroom economy system. Students will earn a daily wage, with the opportunity for bonuses for a variety of things from returning permission notes and monies on time, to improvements in various learning contexts. In contrast, they will also be required to pay living expenses as will be required of them in them in the real world; rent, wifi, electricity, groceries, and occasional unexpected costs such as a broken window, or repairs. We will be using real amounts, divided equally amongst the class. They will also be fined for things such as forgetting equipment, negative behaviour, and will need to pay levies for borrowing equipment, requiring a loan from the bank (Mrs W and myself) to pay their fines. This system will require a lot of real-world mathematics skills, and will, we hope, a method for encouraging positive behaviour, and learning improvements in a manner which has some real-world contexts, including the obvious literacy and numeracy skills, as well as budgeting, planning, and personal traits such as organisation.
It is going to require significant work to maintain throughout the year, but we are hopeful that it will be worth it. I have already had the conversation that we may tweak the system as we go, and that if it is not working that we may decide to scrap it, but that we want to give it a go. Thus far, the students have been very intrigued and excited by the idea. We are also planning on placing a significant level of responsibility for their own learning on the students by putting in place some simple routines that will generally remain the same and allow the day to commence with a minimum of fuss and need for direction by us. This will be enhanced, hopefully, once our building is internet-enabled and we are able to utilise online distribution to prepare a day’s routine. I have left multiple pages of notes for Mrs W of things that have occurred around the school that she needs to be aware of, particularly in relation to tomorrow’s swimming carnival, but also to let her know what I have been through with the class, what I have not been able to get to and various other minor things. I would like to hear how you plan and execute the first few days in a class at the beginning of the year, how do you create a classroom ecology that is conducive to a positive learning environment, and how do you go about creating an environment of trust in the room? “The thing I loved the most – and still love the most about teaching – is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.” – Attributed to Mike Krzyzewski I thoroughly enjoyed the role that I had last year as an RFF teacher focused on teaching digital literacies. It afforded me the opportunity to experience a wide range of students, to try pedagogical strategies with different class groups to see what worked, and on occasion, what most definitely did not work, and to get a greater feel for what kind of teacher I want to be, without the pressures of being a permanent teacher on a single class and the associated additional responsibilities that are attached to that role such as the extra administration, reports (though I had to complete reports, it was significantly less stressful and time-consuming than my colleagues), PLAN data, parent communication etc.
This year, as mentioned in my previous article, I am job-sharing with a more experienced colleague on a Year Five class, and while I am feeling more nervous about teaching a single class and having those additional responsibilities, I am also more excited than I was last year. In particular, I am excited about the sentiment expressed in the opening quote. I saw growth in many of my students last year, and formed some strong working relationships with various students, however, I found it difficult jumping from class to class, or even Stage to Stage and regularly not being able to continue with a particular lesson that the class was thoroughly engaged with and where deep learning was occurring because my timetable required me to move on to the next class. This year, whilst there is a timetable that needs to be adhered to, learning milestones that need to be hit and external factors that need to be allowed for, I will have the opportunity to really connect with my students and see them day-to-day, rather than once a week, and see learning opportunities through to completion and experience the growth across the year that students will undergo. I met with my teaching partner, Mrs. W, a few times throughout January to get some planning and programming completed, to determine the mechanics of how the classroom would function, management strategies, division of labour across particular Key Learning Areas etc. and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, largely, we were on the same page to begin with. Mrs. W had some fantastic ideas that she wanted to implement and she was accepting of many of my ideas. This start makes me believe that we will be able to successfully work together during the year, as long as we continue to communicate. I have never worked in a job-sharing arrangement in any of my previous occupations, though I know many who have, and have heard both horror and success stories. I am encouraged that my school has a strong history of successful job-sharing partnerships in recent years. The year ahead promises to be exciting, and Mrs. W and I have had lots of conversations about various programs we want to put in place including both literacy and numeracy, and classroom management. Have you taught in a job-share arrangement before? What strategies made it successful or unsuccessful? Let me know in the comments. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” – Attributed to Neil Gaiman Welcome back to a new year! I hope that the Christmas and New Year break was relaxing and you have returned refreshed and ready to start with your new class. Personally, I am looking forward to an exciting and eventful year, and will be achieving some goals and going a long way towards achieving others. What are your goals for the year? Have you set any?
As my regular readers may recall, I have been offered a year-long temporary contract for three days per week on a Year Five class with a more experienced teacher which I am excited for. I am hoping to utilise this year to complete my accreditation to move into the proficient bracket, as well as to expand my skills and abilities. I am attending FutureSchools again this year and am also hoping to attend FlipConAus in Adelaide in November. I will once again write up a series of review articles based on my notes from the conferences. I am also attending a THRASS Foundation Course in the April holidays, which I am looking forward to. I plan to continue with this blog, posting an article each day, Monday to Thursday, however, that may scale back to only Monday to Wednesday, depending on time management needs as I have a lot going on, as we all do, outside of education. I am in the process of an upgrade certification as a Football (soccer) Referee, which when completed will see me refereeing in the third tier of football in Australia, National Premier League Division Two, and this goal will require a considerable amount of time and energy for training and matches. My biggest goal for the year, however, is to manage my time more effectively. I have decided that in regards to working outside of school hours, I will, where possible and practical, only work while Mrs. C21st is at work, and I will not be working outside of school hours on Thursdays or Fridays unless absolutely necessary (such as during report season and the beginning few weeks of the school year where there is still a significant amount of planning and programming going on). I feel like this is going to be crucial to not burning out this year, given the time, physical and mental demands that I will be under with everything that is happening. I will also allow me time to complete any marking, planning, blog writing, Tweeting etc, but also provides me with time off (Thursday and Friday, though I will be looking to undertake some casual work on these days). Thank you for reading, and I would love to hear, either in the comments or over on Twitter, what your goals are for the year. After completing my initial teacher education (ITE) last year, I began casual teaching and then was targeted for a temporary teaching block this year. After tomorrow, I cease being a First Year teacher. The conversations I have had with my job-share partner for next year, Mrs W, and our classroom neighbour, Mr H, about next year leave me feeling more nervous than I did this year.
Next year I am on a class, three days per week in a job-share arrangement, and while there will naturally be some negotiation going on as to how Mrs W and I structure and run the class, I am actually feeling more nervous about my capability to actually step up. This year I have been teaching in an RFF (release from face-to-face, or non-contact) capacity, specifically teaching technology skills, and at most, I have each class for only one hour, once a week. Next year, this is no hiding, no giving them back after an hour if they or I are having an off day. While I have plenty of support around me, colleagues, mentors, Mrs C21st and a number of students telling me that I am an excellent teacher, I still have that whisper in the back of my mind that laughs at the concept of me being a good teacher. For many teachers, or so I am led to believe, the first year old ur is the make or break year. I feel like it will be next year for me and am rather nervous about it. This is not helped by the fact that my room for next year currently is non-functional in so far as there is no network or internet access, meaning that in a class which is supposed to be BYODD, I am unable to even mark the role or view notices on the school’s intranet. Not the most positive start to the year. Mrs W, Mr H and I have arranged already to meet during January to plan and program together, as it makes sense, given that we have the only two straight Year Five classes and are in adjoining classrooms, to work together. We have brainstormed some ideas already, and Mrs W and I are hoping to sit down after the SDD on Thursday to begin hashing out our own workload division to enable us to begin our own planning. Additionally, I hope to find out a provisional class list so that I can sit down with the teachers in whose classes my students next year have been in this year for a handover discussion. It makes sense to me to have those conversations before the end of the year, while the students are still fresh in the various teachers’ minds in order to begin constructing a 365-Chart to allow Mrs W and myself to learn about our students, as much as we can, before the beginning of next year to enable us to build strong relationships from day one. While I am most definitely excited to be on class next year, I am also incredibly nervous. Do you do a handover of y students? How do you manage that process? What would you like to be able to do? Let me know either in the comments, or over Twitter. This will most likely be the last article for the year. I have spent the last few days running the AV controls for Presentation Day and the Year Six Show, and intend to spend the remainder of the yea, after tomorrow and the SDD on Thursday enjoying the new Star Wars movie (I am very excited to have tickets for the midnight premiere. yes, I am a nerd) and spending some time with Mrs C21st, preparing for Christmas. Have a safe and happy Christmas break. Take some time for your own well-being and be ready to hit the classroom refreshed and rejuvenated next year. Thank you for reading this year. Just a brief article today. I have spent the last week fighting off, according to the Doctor, an upper respiratory tract infection. The antibiotics have been working well and today, on my birthday I feel almost normal. I have spent most of the last week in bed feeling woeful and thus have not posted anything since, nor been on Twitter and was rather surprised when I logged on this morning to see this tweet. What a surprise! There are some top quality educators in the list, and I would encourage you to read through and follow some of them. So thank you to whoever nominated me, to whomever votes for me; and best of luck to all others who are finalists in the Eddies “No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.” – Attributed to William Osler Just a short article today, posting from my bed. I had a blast at the school Christmas Carols last night, running the photo booth with the help of a number of fantastic Year Six students. Unfortunately, I think I stayed too long. I had been coming down with something for a day or two and had that slightly flu-like feeling in the back of my throat.
I left school last night, got home and went to bed with the shivers. Mrs C21st took one look at me and went to get the thermometer, which showed a temperature of 38.6 degree C. I felt as healthy as Darth Vader, and like a little child huddled up in bed under the blankets shivering. Mrs C21st rang my Assistant Principal to tell her I would not be coming in tomorrow, which apparently was not a surprise as I had looked rather unwell. I have spent the day alternating between the bed and the couch, and while I felt better earlier on, with my temperature dropping back down to 37.5 degrees C, it is back up to 38 at the moment. Teacher Fever is something I had often laughed off, but not now. I have not felt this low since I had pneumonia several years ago. The thing that somewhat frustrates me is how guilty I feel for calling in sick when it is just a fever. Intellectually I know that I am better off here at home in bed resting and recovering, yet there is still a feeling of guilt that I cannot shake. Look after yourselves over these last few weeks of the year, and here is hoping I am well by the weekend as Mrs C21st and I are due to stand as Godparents for a friend’s first-born down in Wollongong. “We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” – Attributed to David Warlick This latest video takes you through the process of setting up Google Classroom on an iPad. Remember to watch, pause and rewind as much as you need to. “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Attributed to Carol Buchner With three weeks left in the term after this week (for NSW Public Schools, at least), things are beginning to wrap up. With my Stage Three classes, we have been learning the Cornell note-taking strategy and I have one class who have completed and submitted their assessment task (which I plan to mark on Saturday), and the other three classes will be submitting their tasks in next week’s session. Stage Two are in a similar position while Early Stage One and Stage One are still learning some fundamental skills and working on mastering others that we have learned over the course of the year.
When you get to this stage of the year, what do you move onto? Do you have mini-units of learning that you can pull out? Do you do fill-in activities? What are your ‘go-to’ tasks for this end of year time? I will be spending time with Stage Three doing some green screen work and Stage Two will be learning some coding using Logo or Scratch. Let me know what you are using with your students to finish out the year as you wrap up your units of learning. |
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