"Friends and colleagues are very sustaining. They're the people who get you through it... It's no good to be on your own." - Attributed to Dame Judi Dench When has a lesson you've planned out not worked? Did you scrap it midway through or persevere? How did you move past that moment of failure in practice? What was your learning?
My regular readers would be aware that this year I am working in a team teaching context. Four weeks in and I have to say that it is working out fantastically well. On a daily basis I am learning new strategies for different needs; negotiating with challenging students, getting alongside students with low self-efficacy to build them to undertake the learning task without doing the task for them, different strategies for whole-class reading, strategies for managing assessment of learning and using it as data for the next phase of learning and am very slowly building my own self-efficacy as a Stage One teacher. It is a completely different world to Stage Three. The strategies are different, the questions you ask and the questions you answer are different. The learning tasks are different. Yesterday I was leading a whole class maths lesson focusing on place value. It seemed to go well to start with, but when we got to the guided learning part, it fell apart a little. I think where I went wrong was that I brought in the the number zero and started including that in our discussion (it had been our focus in the previous) and I think that it confused students as from their perspective it seemed like I had changed topic. I had been asking questions such as if i have 421 sheep, how do I write that number? We were talking about the need to write 421 rather than 400201 or 40021 etc. When I brought in zero it was on the back of if I have 100 sheep why do I write 100 and not just 1? which generated some very productive discussion about why zero is important as a digit. The next task was where I got things wrong. I split the class into three groups and asked them to use their bodies to represent the three place values we were working with for various numbers (hundreds, tens, unit). I.e. I gave them 342 as a starting number, modelling this with one group, and asked for three people to stand together to represent the hundreds, four to represent the tens and two to represent the units. They struggled to get past the hundreds as they each wanted to form that group, then they each wanted to form the tens group. We got through one number successfully, eventually, and then tried it as a class. It did not work. I pulled them all back in as a single group and we moved on to a different activity. I asked my colleague afterwards if it made sense what I was trying to achieve, and he said he could see exactly what I was trying to do but that it was perhaps a little too abstract for this particular age group. It may have worked with Stage Two students, or if it was just a group of Year Two students, but not with this particular cohort. It was a valuable lesson in reminding me that I need to spend more time thinking activities all the way from through from start to finish and consider ways to bring it back to the focus if things start to go off the rails to ensure that the students are achieving the lesson focus. It was also a reminder of how valuable having a colleague in the room can be to not only remind you that are a capable teacher after failed lessons, but to pick up on questions or ideas that you have missed or forgotten or to help manage a small group of students who need additional support.
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In today's Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how you can utilise Google Forms to create a check in/out system. This could be used for tracking who is borrowing classroom resources from you, sports or science equipment, hall or toilet passes for students, who has the iPads or laptops etc. For more helpful videos like this one, please click here. "I like to approach every day like it's the only day I will ever have." - Attributed to Gene Simmons Disclosure: My attendance at FutureSchools 2017 is under a media pass provided by the organisers. FutureSchools is shifting to a new home for the 2017 iteration. The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) will be hosting educators from across Australia in a setting vastly different to that of Australian Technology Park where previous FutureSchools events have been held. I am looking forward to attending, not least because I genuinely enjoy being in Melbourne, but it will be a chance to see FutureSchools from another perspective. Time is running out to register your place in one of the six masterclasses or the five conference streams. If you are not sure which conference stream is right for you, then keep reading. if you have not yet booked your place, include a Gala Dinner ticket in your registration and use code BTS150 by 11:59pm on Friday 10th February to receive $150 off which effectively makes the Gala Dinner ticket is free. The Future Leaders conference is focused on looking at the future of teaching and learning through examination of current global trends and developments in school education, including changes to the: schooling system; society; behaviour; pedagogy; curriculum; technology; professional learning; and learning spaces. This conference will include the plenary keynotes from Dr. Milton Chen, Jan Owen AM and Prakash Nair as well as case-studies and presentations from current education leaders and teachers. To read more about the Future Leaders conference, click here. I am hoping to hear Michael Ha's session which will focus on taking the professional and student learning opportunities that arise from technology. The Teaching Kids to Code conference is focused on teaching students to code through professional development for teachers around the Australian Digital Technologies curriculum. This conference stream will explore the challenges of teaching students to code and why we should be teaching students to code as well as provide a forum for collaboration in driving STEM, computational thinking and coding beyond the classroom. This conference will include the plenary keynotes from Dr. Milton Chen, Jan Owen AM and Prakash Nair as well as case-studies and presentations from educators currently utilising coding as part of their pedagogical practice. To read more about the Teaching Kids to Code stream, please click here. I would particularly like to hear the panel session focusing on the national digital technologies rollout and the opportunities and trouble areas that have arisen thus far for integrating the curriculum. My usual FutureSchools home, the ClassTech conference has a broad agenda which focuses on how to use various technologies and technology-based pedagogical practices in the classroom. I've written extensively over the last two years from the ClassTech conference stream and this year looks to be as good as ever. This conference will include the plenary keynotes from Dr. Milton Chen, Jan Owen AM and Prakash Nair as well as case-studies and presentations from educators currently utilising coding as part of their pedagogical practice. As I am currently working in a team-teaching context, I a particularly looking forward to hearing Sally Wood and Simone Segat speak about how team teaching can enhance digital technology learning. I have heard Joel Speranza speak about using videographic feedback previously and can also recommend his session with cnofidence. To read more about the ClassTech conference, please click here. The Special Needs and Inclusion Conference (SNIC) is aimed at presenting practices that are working for educators around the country when it comes to integrating and support students with difficult backgrounds or who have learning disorders and disabilities such as auditory processing, Autism Spectrum Disorders, behavioural issues, dyslexia, as well as those students whom are identified as being gifted or talented. The focus is to provide innovative, proven and practical ideas that can be implemented in your classroom within existing frameworks and taking advantage of special needs technologies. Delegates will also hear the plenary keynotes from Dr. Milton Chen, Jan Owen AM and Prakash Nair. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Karina Barley speak about creating a space in which an autistic student can feel secure and engage with their learning. I am actually looking forward to a number of the sessions on the Young Learners agenda this year. I have to admit that in previous years I have not looked at the agenda as I have been teaching upper primary, however, this year I have shifted to Stage One and so it has become rather relevant. This conference stream is focused on examining how Early Years through to Stage One teachers can tap into digital technologies to provide new and enhanced learning opportunities, with practical sessions allowing delegates to get hands on and confident with various tools. This session does include the plenary keynotes from Dr. Milton Chen, Jan Owen AM and Prakash Nair. As a new parent, I am particularly interested in hearing from Dr Kristy Goodwin who will be addressing the impact of digital immersion on a child's physical development, health and well-being, and learning and how this can redefine not just the role of educators, but the approach. There are also six Masterclasses to choose form, however, I will publish a separate overview of those early next week. I look forward to meeting some of my readers at FutureSchools 2017 and remember to register before 11:59pm Friday 9 February to take advantage of the BTS150 giving $150 off the registration price when a Gala Dinner ticket is included. “There can be infinite uses of the computer and of new age technology, but if teachers themselves are not able to bring it into the classroom and make it work, then it fails.” – Attributed to Nancy Kassebaum Some time ago I signed up to be notified when the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) program would be beginning this year and recently received that notification. After reading through the requirements (not onerous) and the process I stopped and did some thinking, ultimately deciding not to go through the process of applying to become an ADE this year.
I stumbled on this article by Stephanie Thompson (@TraintheTeacher) and subsequently read through each of ADE-based articles. It got me to thinking about why I wanted to undertake the program. I am already good with technology in the class and have had lots of positive comments about that aspect of my teaching, so I do not need the help of learning the technology. I do not think it would actually lend any weight to applications for permanent teaching positions (though it would be a nice feather in the cap) and I can think of areas of opportunity that would provide far better benefit to my students as a professional development focus. Why then? I realised that it was a badge that I have seen and respect as it implies a high level of knowledge and in some circles, respect. It was something I wanted to do because I felt that it might serve as proof that I am not a fraud when I talk about teaching and technology and it occurred to me that it would not actually achieve those goals and at this point in time, I was wanting to undertake the program for the wrong reasons. I need to focus on my pedagogy and classroom management skills, my time and organisation skills. I am also teaching on Stage One, a group I have not previously taught and accordingly have a significant amount of professional learning to do this year simply to do my job to what I feel is an acceptable standard. In that, I am blessed to be job-sharing with someone whom I know has vast experience with this Stage and whom I also know socially. Further to that, we are in a team-teaching context with our Stage Assistant Principal who has been nothing but understanding and helpful thus far. I will certainly be looking at the ADE program, but not this year. "Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible." - Attributed to Tony Robbins As you read this article, I would encourage you to consider the process by which you arrive at your professional development goals and decide which activities, courses, or conferences you will give your time to in the pursuit of your professional development. Outside of education, my biggest passion (after my family of course) is (association) football, affectionately referred to as the round ball game, and accurately known as the world game. I did not come to the game until my mid-twenties, and accordingly I was, if I am being kind, completely rubbish as a player. I also did not really understand the things I kept being penalised for and that frustration, combined with a lack of match time from the coach due to my rubbish-ness meant that it was not really serving its purpose for me, which was to help me lose some weight. So I attended a local referee course and became a referee. I love it. I have the best position to watch football. It is great fitness (I average around ten kilometres a match as a referee and around seven kilometres as an assistant referee in each match, depending on the level of football), it is outdoors amidst the fresh air and the sun and has provided me with some incredible experiences and many new friends. Recently I attended a Level One Theory course run by the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) designed to give me the skills to be appointed to referee the second tier of football in Australia, the Sony PS4 National Premier League and in theory, would mean I am eligible to officiate on the Hyundai A-League, the top tier of football in Australia should I pass my practical assessment matches. If you are interested in reading about the referee development pathway, you can find the Australian Officiating Development Schedule (AODS) here. Part of the course touched on a number of elements that many educators would be familiar with, particularly around psychology and goal setting. We are required, as part of the program to develop and track a series of goals at the short, medium and long term, and were told we needed to use SMART Goals. The instructor for our course is a Secondary English teacher and he really pushed us to develop SMART goals that would be useful, as they formed part of the program assessment; the making, tracking and if need be, modification of them.
It occurred to me during my drive home that the goals I had set as part of the course were genuine SMART goals and did meet each of the criteria. My regular readers will be aware that I set some goals for this year. Reflecting further, I realised that those goals, my professional goals, were not all particularly SMART goals and were in fact rather vague in some instances. They are all things that I want to achieve, but they were not necessarily specific or measurable and I need to review them and change them if need be. I also realised that for some reason I was more comfortable codifying my goals for my referee development than I am for my professional development. I am not entirely sure why, though I feel like it may be because I am aware there is so much development in so many areas needed that it feels rather paralysing and constricting to pin down only three of four goals as is required for my mandatory Professional Development Plan. How do you determine, whether now or in the past, which of the numerous potential areas for development to concentrate on? I feel, as an early career teacher, that there are so many areas I still need to focus on that I am paralysed for choice. I would appreciate hearing anyone's process for selecting development areas. "There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." -Attributed to Colin Powell Given that it is Wednesday afternoon it is the end of the week for me, and what a week it has been! I have learned so much already and there is obviously still a fair distance to go. We have begun completing the Schedule for Early Number Assessment (SENA) Test with our Year Two students and I am finding it a real eye opening system of assessing a student's mathematical thinking as it is very structured and provides a thorough indication of not just what a student can do but provides insight into how a student completes certain mathematical tasks.
We have also administered the ReST Test, which I have not been able to find links or references to online, but is essentially a spelling test that is testing students' ability to phonographological choices at age appropriate levels. It begins with Early Stage One questions (what letter makes a particular sound) and then steps it up through Stage One with digraphs (students are asked to spell the word shin for example, but are only marked on the /sh/ sound, consonant blends, vowel sounds, split vowels, y as a vowel (as in fly for example). We have a Stage One class so we also completed the first part of the Stage Two test portion which asks students to be able to spell triple blends (which are not triple blends at all, but are actually digraphs blending with a graph) such as /nch/ as in bench. There is a Stage Three component, but overall, the process was fairly quick to do, but it will provide rich useful data that will feed into our programming. I have more I want to write, but I need to drive to Newcastle and I thought I might go home and see my lovely wife and daughter for a while before I left. How has your week been so far?
"It's a good feeling to come away from a day's work feeling like you've achieved something. Tired brain is good."
-Attributed to Dominic Cooper
Welcome to the 2017 school year! I hope you are as excited for the year as I am and that whatever your context for this year, that you are hopeful for the year. This year I am teaching in a job share arrangement for three days per week which is also in a team teaching context with a colleague teacher. I spent some time thinking out loud about my goals for the year on the way to school yesterday.
I also rambled some early reflections on the way home yesterday over Periscope (safely mounted in a holder).
The class space, which used to be the library/librarians office/computer lab is starting to feel less like that and more like a class space which is fantastic. It is definitely still a work in progress, but I'm quite happy with it so far. I hope your first few days back have been exciting and filled you with hope for a great year.
“Years end is neither an end nor a beginning, but a going on with all the wisdom that experience can instill in in us.”
–Attributed to Hal Borland
I am mentally drained and physically exhausted. It has been a monumental year, both personally and professionally, with wins and losses on both counts. Last year was my first full year as a teacher and I wrote at the end of the year that I did not feel that I had had a first year such as I was expecting due to being employed in an RFF or non-contact position teaching fundamental digital technology and research skills. I perhaps spoke (wrote?) too soon and received my comeuppance this year in what was perhaps the most challenging year, both personally and professionally, that I have ever faced. To celebrate surviving my first year teaching a class of my own here is a list of lists reflecting on the year that was.
The Professional Wins
The Professional Challenges
Looking Forward
Personal Realisations
I have a lot to learn and I am realising just how much I have to learn and wondering how much I do not know that I need to learn. It is a rather scary and terrifying thing, to feel like you are fumbling in the dark all year, realise you survived and actually did a decent job and then recognise just how much there still is to discover and develop in your teaching. Thank you to my readers for supporting me this year. I look at the hit numbers and it is nice to know that people are reading, and being told by a few people that they have found my writing useful and valuable is a humbling (and mind-boggling) thing. I began writing for my own reflection and published only as a way of being held accountable in my own mind for continuing to reflect and to share my experiences. I will (aim to) continue to publish FTPL videos over the break, but I do not expect that I will publish anything else. I hope that the summer break is relaxing, enjoyable and safe for you and yours and I will see you again in the new year. Merry Christmas. Brendan. “Our kids have digital thumbs, we shouldn’t cut them off when they enter the door.” -Stephanie Kriewaldt FlipCon Adelaide had thus far been a success for me on a personal and professional level. I was feeling reinvigorated for the remainder of the year with new ideas, new contacts and friends, and a revitalised drive for flipped learning and research, which I hope has come through in my previous articles from the conference. My final session at FlipCon Adelaide was with Stephanie Kriewaldt (@stephkrie) who was presenting under the title Flipping the Primary Classroom. I spoke briefly with Stephanie during the Primary discussion panel and was happy to have met another Kindergarten-Year Two (Infants) teacher who was also a flipper as I only know one other Infants flipped educators; Alfina Jackson (@GeekyAusTeacher). I feel bad for anyone presenting in the last timeslot at any conference or event, many people will have left the event already or will leave partway through in order to catch their plane/train. Stephanie’s session in the last timeslot of the day was similarly impacted with only three delegates in total in attendance, despite their having been eight registered to attend. Stephanie introduced herself and spoke about her background, including that she has only ever worked in 1:1 contexts, which seems rather amazing to me and is currently working as an innovation and learning leader. Stephanie showed us a short video of a Year Two classroom where flipped pedagogies were utilised as part of the rotational groupings during literacy sessions. Given that I am going to be teaching in a Stage One context next year, this gives me some hope that what I was thinking might work, does work in practice. Utilising either computers or tablets with pre-loaded videos to play a short (sixty to ninety seconds long maximum) video modeling how to form letters and numbers, how to spell words and a range of other simple yet foundational skills that need to be repeated multiple times was what I was thinking of doing next year. Stephanie spoke next about the SAMR model and its application in flipped learning. It would be very easy to stay with substitution and augmentation, however, we need to strive to also reach the modification and redefinition levels. Stephanie spoke about how she utilised QR code posters on the wall that linked to short videos that explained basics such as what a noun is or how to construct a paragraph as that was something that could be done once and made available via video when students needed the refresher. This process frees the teacher up to continue to be available for students who have more complex questions or needs that need her immediate focus and also gives the student some ownership of their learning. Whilst they are still using the teacher as the source of the information, they are able to access the information whenever they need without disrupting anyone else’s learning. Stephanie also spoke about how to utilise flipped learning to engage with Parents. Sometimes a student will go home and ask the caregiver (you cannot assume it is a parent anymore) for help with some task for school and the caregiver will do their best to help. Sometimes this help is actually hindering the student because the caregiver does not have the knowledge needed or uses incorrect terminology. This happens for various reasons and Stephanie said that a simple way to combat this is to create videos that are ostensibly for the student but also show the caregiver how the concept or skill is being taught. It is not about diminishing the knowledge or skill of the caregiver, but about ensuring that they are aware of how the particular concept is taught now as it is likely to have changed since the caregiver was at school. Stephanie spoke about using a short hook-video to capture student interest in a new topic or unit of learning. The idea of a hook to capture student interest is not a new one, however, being reminded of old ideas that work is often useful as it is easy to forget about them with the ongoing plethora of new ideas and practices that are thrown en masse at teachers. Knowing how to create and use QR codes and link shorteners is a very useful skill to have as it opens up a range of possibilities, such as the use of QR codes for refresher videos as mentioned earlier in this article. If you are not sure about either, you can find a video showing how to create QR codes here and a video for URL shorteners here. Stephanie spoke about how she uses Explain Everything to make short videos on the fly and how it is also simple enough to use that Infants students are able to create videos using it. A flipped worksheet is still a worksheet we were told and accordingly, the homework that Stephanie sets is designed to be something that is likely going to occur anyway to reduce the stress around homework; do a chore, read a story, do something to help a friend or a family member etc. This kind of homework I could feel comfortable issuing to students, rather than the traditional style of homework, which I have written about recently. Homework needs to be achievable for the student and for us, the teacher. Given that we were such a small group, we spent some time sharing about our specific teaching and learning contexts and sharing some ideas about moving forward with flipped learning. It was a useful time, though short, however, I think everyone in the room was happy to move on to the end of conference drinks as it had been a cognitively-draining (and refreshing at the same time) two days. Stephanie’s session was interesting and I did gain some ideas and a fresh perspective for moving into 2017 in a new context. As always, thank you for reading. I think there will be one more article to come from FlipCon Adelaide, which will be a more general reflection on some issues as a result of various conversations I had with people outside of workshops which have significantly impacted my thinking and will impact my practice. Day one of FlipCon Adelaide was fantastic and you can find the articles for day one by clicking here. You can also find the Storify of the tweets from day one here. Additionally, Peter Whiting (@Mr_van_w) and his colleague Bill Tink (@BillTink) recorded their own reflections as a podcast which is available here and is a great reflection on the day overall from some different perspectives. Day two promised to be a great day. Part of FlipCon Adelaide was a school tour. Delegates were offered a choice, a few weeks out, of touring the host school, Brighton Secondary School (BSS) or of touring Glenunga International High School (GIHS). Having heard Jeremy LeCornu (@MrLeCornu) speak on multiple occasions (for example, here and here) as well as Olivia O’Neill speak (here) I felt that I would be better served by and would learn more from touring a school of which I knew nothing and therefore had no preconceptions about what I would see or hear.
The initial statistics we were provided were impressive in my mind. Years Eight to Twelve and just fewer than two thousand students representing seventy-four nationalities on the one campus blew my mind, in addition to running the International Baccalaureate Diploma program as well as the South Australian Certificate of Education as parallel courses. Upon arrival at GIHS, we were greeted by the incoming Prefects as well as some of the school Executive staff. In their Performing Arts Centre, we heard a welcome address from Harry Postema, who also introduced the other speakers who would be following him, including Principal Wendy Johnson, Deputy Principal Jeremy Cogan, Innovative Pedagogies Leader Cindy Bunder and incoming Prefects Indigo and Layla.
Part of the tour would be about viewing flipped classes in action, both a technical or academic class, and a hands-on or practical class. We were advised that delegates were arbitrarily divided up into the four groups for the school tours, with each group viewing different classes. There was no consideration of our own teaching contexts or faculty background as it was about seeing the flipped pedagogy in action rather than the content.
Wendy Johnson, GIHS Principal and Flipped Learning International Ambassador, was introduced next, and she spoke about the importance of pedagogy for flipped learning. The role of Innovative Pedagogies Leader at GIHS was focused on helping teachers change their pedagogy to make the best use of the reclaimed class time as a result of flipping their classes. This was facilitated by making a decision to start classes later on Wednesday mornings and make the morning a time for staff professional development and collaboration on developing pedagogies that would assist in taking the school from good to great.
As a primary teacher, we are continually reminded that the first two hours of our school day are the critical learning times when students are at their freshest cognitively and therefore this is where literacy and numeracy teaching is to take place (which makes me question the value assigned to the other key learning areas by policy makers). It is for this same reason that the decision was made to move staff professional development to the morning. Teachers typically feel the same as students in the afternoon; tired and worn out and so the retention of learning and the cognitive engagement is lowered and therefore the value of that time is reduced. I was curious about the late start and what impact it had on the students and the opportunity to ask came during the morning tea break. The Prefects remained with us and quite confidently and willingly engaged the delegates in conversation and so I asked them about what they used that time for and whether those two hours were added back into the timetable somewhere else with late classes. We were told that they were not added back in and that what they were used for varied, as would be expected student to student. The two Prefects we were speaking with said that typically they would use it to either catch up on sleep or would get up at their normal time and use it to complete individual space tasks or study for exams. Returning to Wendy’s address, she advised that they made a conscious decision to invest time and money in professional development on technology use and on pedagogical practice. The then-current model of professional development and learning was not working as teachers would draw on their own experience to form their pedagogical framework or paradigm and then listen to what was being said and take they already know or what they wanted to know. Changing that mentality was a significant challenge.
As you would perhaps expect there was some strong resistance to this change in focus on professional development but that traction won over the period of a few years and that they now have a pedagogical framework that all staff members are committed to. They utilised the mandated Teaching for Effective Learning framework as a starting point and the final GIHS Pedagogical Framework evolved from there. The clear focus from each speaker was on pedagogical improvement for students’ benefit and it was coming through not just in the words that were being said, but in how they were being said and the way that the Prefects held themselves and spoke.
We were told that the capture of learning cycle documentation (lesson plans, programs, assessment schedules etc.) was revamped to make it more a more valuable process rather than merely the satisfying of policy. I do not have notes on what that revamp looked like which leads me to believe we were not told the specifics of that. Given my current career status as an early career teacher, any guidance on making the development of learning cycle documentation more beneficial and useful is welcome. The above statement is an interesting one and requires some unpacking. The first inference is that if you only have pockets of excellence than by deductive reasoning you must have large amounts of stagnant and / or stale teachers and pedagogies; a sad indictment on a beleaguered teaching profession. It would seem intuitive that teaching, as with any other profession or sector contains a continuum of practitioners of varying qualities and abilities. I do not know if I agree with the surface implications of the statement, however, I can understand the position that the statement is made from.
We also heard about how it was critical for the success of the change in focus that parents understood the goals and to that end, the school hosted an information night showing a unit taught using traditional pedagogies and then using contemporary pedagogies, including flipped learning. They were expecting around fifty parents, however, ended up with two hundred and fifty. Part of the education process for the parents and the students alike was that the change to flipped learning, improved pedagogies, and improved learning outcomes would not be instantaneous. For a change of pace, we heard from two of the incoming school Prefects, Indigo and Layla. One of the key messages that came through in their address was that the change to contemporary pedagogies was not about teachers providing all of the answers to students, but that it was about the teachers guiding students to understand what questions to ask. The message in here is one of trust and strong relationships. Students are used to playing the game of school and of being given the answers when they are unable to work it out themselves. This focus on relationships between teachers and peers is also building trust that the teachers want to work with the students for the students’ benefit.
The vision for the pedagogical framework moving forward into 2017 is that any teacher can walk into any lesson and see the required characteristics and that if that is not the case, then a conversation about why not needs to occur. It is a tough stance; however, given the process that the school has gone through to reach this point, it seems fair. The impact of this framework is especially critical given that teachers need to plan for effective use of the group space with flipped learning to ensure that students are engaging more deeply and using higher level cognitive skills and processes than in traditional classrooms. We next heard about the flipped content or learning objects (LOs) and the delegates heard, once again, that getting hung up on the quality of the LO is not useful. The LO prepared by the students’ own teacher is the best option, and having high-level production values does not make or break the quality of the instruction imparted in the video. This assertion, which I have heard from numerous flipped educators as do you want it perfect or on Tuesday? is supported by research, such as that conducted by Peter Whiting which I wrote about here. A key factor in this is knowing the content and the learning goal for the LO that is being developed to enable it to be created quickly, with minimum fuss and with no post-production, a practice that Joel Speranza (@JoelBSperanza) promotes and which can be seen in the below video. Flipping does not happen every lesson, however, deep thinking and deep learning can [happen every lesson] was the message we heard next, as Cindy Bunder took the podium. Flipped classes should be more active, both mentally and physically with a focus on the Four Cs. She posited that the individual learning space should take no longer than ten minutes maximum, and should not be meaningless homework. I asked two prefects during the morning tea break about this and was told that on average they were both completing roughly three hours of homework most nights. This was across all of their courses and they included their general revision and studying load in this time. On further probing, they both indicated that they felt that the actual homework component of their nightly workload was less than prior to flipped learning, however, that the time spent on a specific course varied depending on the context of what was being covered and how much time was spent engaging by pausing, re-watching, and taking notes from the LO. It was interesting to hear that with flipped learning in place teachers now feel that they have time to teach key skills that are not part of the explicit curriculum such as note taking, time management, critical thinking and how to use individual time and group time to gain the maximum benefit for their learning. Direct instruction is still important within flipped learning; however, it needs to be appropriate and minimal. At that, the opening addresses concluded and it was time for morning tea, pockets of delegates peppering GIHS Prefects with questions formed. I will leave off here and discuss the conversations I had with the Prefects and some other students as we completed the tour and our lesson observations. Thank you for reading, as always, and I would appreciate any feedback on this article. The clear message that came through from all of the speakers was that flipped learning is about and has resulted in improved pedagogies and relationships.
After attending a masterclass with Jon Bergmann (@JonBergmann) at FutureSchools in 2015 (review articles here) and the subsequent FlipConAus on the Gold Coast later that year (review articles here), I was excited to get to be attending this year’s Flipped Learning conference in Adelaide. It came at a good time for me personally, with the preceding few weeks having been very stressful for a number of professional and personal reasons. The Storify of the lead up and day one of the event has been storified, which you can find here.
For me, the trip to FlipCon began with a train trip, a long wait (not to be confused with the long weight that many apprentices have been sent to get from the hardware store) at Sydney Airport with an overpriced lunch, a flight which involved a random conversation with the two passengers sitting in my row on the plane and then randomly running into Heather Davis (@misshdavis) and her entourage at the baggage collection. We all ended up going out for dinner together and it was a great way to get to meet some new people beforehand as well as being a nicer way of spending the evening than dinner alone and getting some work done in the hotel room.
The actual conference began with a welcome address from Val Macauly of organisers IWBNet and the Principal of hosts Brighton Secondary School, Olivia O’Neill.
Following Olivia was Rupert Denton (@rupertdenton) of Clickview who spoke about the need to make technology educational, rather than make education technological. It was an important distinction and one which he spoke passionately. It is, I have to admit, the only opening address that I have heard where the Cambrian Explosion and the Cambrian Extinction have been so seamlessly woven into the talk.
For those of you who have not heard of the Cambrian Explosion, it was a twenty to twenty-five million years period of time in which the vast majority of animal species originated. He likened the current period of educational technology to that period of time as it seems that there is a new toy, app, gadget, tool or technological pedagogy emerging and becoming a favoured flavour every other day. There was competition for food (teachers to use the product), competition for resources (schools to use the product school-wide rather than a single teacher) and competition for growth (developers to create more apps, gadgets etc). The clear underlying message of Rupert’s address was captured succinctly.
Rupert exhorted delegates to critique the value of technology which purports to be educational and question what is it that makes it educational? If you follow Rupert’s analogy vis-a-vis the Cambrian Explosion to its logical conclusion, there must be a Cambrian Extinction event looming on the near horizon.
The distinction is important, as it feels like education is being made technological sometimes, rather than making technology educational. I hear complaints from colleagues both in my own school and from other schools that it feels like there have been more fads in education in the last five years than in the preceding ten, particularly as technology in our daily lives becomes more ubiquitous and companies realise that by promising much, they can sell even more. This sounds like a similar line of thought to the digital natives vs digital immigrants discussion to me. It should always, however, come back to the pedagogy and the good of the students’ learning. After Rupert spoke, Jon Bergmann was up to deliver his keynote address. Before he did that, however, he mentioned that Battledecks (or PowerPoint Karaoke as it is called in my classroom) would be on again at the social event. Along with that, to ensure that everyone was up and fresh for the day, Jon also mentioned that he would be holding a FlipCon 5k event starting from Glenelg Pier the next morning.
I have to admit that I was not sure how much value I would receive from hearing Jon speak. Not because I feel that I know everything about flipped learning, I most certainly do not, but because I had heard him speak about flipped learning on a number of occasions prior to this and I was not sure how much of what he said would be new. The initial stage of his keynote was mostly familiar content, however, the middle and latter stages held some new nuggets of ideas for me to consider.
Jon spoke to the concern about replacing teachers with YouTube videos that is often levelled at flipped learning as a pedagogical strategy by reminding us that our value as teachers and professionals is not in our information dissemination but in our ability to analyse and deep dive on a subject with our students so that when they resurface, they have gained a new understanding for not just the surface understandings but the more nuanced subtleties of the topic or skill. I saw the below tweet by Jeff Atwood this morning and it resonated very strongly with me along this same theme.
Jon also defined some new terminology as a way of differentiating flipped learning from traditional pedagogical methods and to reframe the discussions around learning activities.
This shift in the framing language of flipped learning should also encourage a shift in thinking about the way in which time with our students is used. It is easy to add to students workload rather than replace the homework with individual learning tasks, however, that is not how we should be flipping, reminding us that flipped learning is not about the technology or the videos but about the reclaiming of our face to face time with students for more meaningful and deeper learning activities. The reminder was given that we need to train our students as videos are often merely a source of entertainment and that flipped videos should be engaged with rather than just watched. The new tip (though obvious when said) was that we also need to invest in professional development for ourselves and colleagues when implementing flipped learning. I maintain a list of resources, articles and contacts to start out with flipped learning, however, you can now complete a Flipped Learning Certification course through the Flipped Learning Global Initiative. Jon shared the top twelve mistakes that educators make and which get in the way of flipped learning success, beginning with lecturing when students have not watched the video. “Do not rescue them from that choice,” Jon told the audience. Making content too difficult or inconsistent to access is another. This last comment can be interpreted in a few ways. The literal interpretation is, I think, fairly clear. The other consideration, particularly in secondary and tertiary education, is that it is not too difficult insofar as students needing to remember a large number of access details with different faculties using a different learning management system. Keep it simple. Joel Speranza (@joelbsperanza) spoke about this during his masterclass at FlipConAus 2015 and reminded us that the learning management system does not even necessarily need to be technology based. The next mistake Jon said he sees in flipped classrooms that do not work is that the teacher is not active in the classroom after flipping, that they sit at their desk and do not engage with students. This defeats the whole point of flipping a classroom. Following this was giving up too easily. This seems fairly straightforward, as any big change requires a period of acclimation for all those involved and flipped learning is typically a significant change in pedagogy. Another problem consistent in those classrooms where flipped learning does not work is that there is no interactivity in the ILS beyond any notes the student takes. It is important that there are engagement points to ensure that students are actively learning and processing what they are seeing and hearing. There is a range of tools that allow you to do this, such as Camtasia (my favourite), EdPuzzle, and Clickview to name a few. Jon spoke about something that makes a lot of educators nervous and overly self-critical; making their own flipped learning content. Peter Whiting (@Mr_van_W) has recently published a peer-reviewed action research study that examined the impact on student learning outcomes of using flipped learning content created by either their own teacher, a team teacher or an external third party (for example, Khan Academy). I attended Peter’s session where he spoke at length about the methodology, the results and the implications of the research project and I will discuss those findings and my thoughts on the implications in that article. There is a significant reason to create your own videos. You are their teacher and therefore the relationship is with you, no with Salman Khan or Mathantics or another provider. That said, even if you do create your own videos but do not teach students how to watch (read: engage) with them, you are making another of the more common mistakes that Jon sees. Using a video to learn a concept or skill is significantly different to watching a movie or a music video and it is a skill that needs to be taught taking time appropriate for your context. Lower Primary students might need a number of weeks of learning to engage and reinforcement of how to engage, whilst upper Secondary students may only need one or two sessions.
Although it may seem obvious, not ensuring buy-in from key stakeholders is another common mistake that Jon sees worldwide. It is not just your Supervisors and Executive staff who need to buy-in, it is the parents and the students. One way of achieving this is to have your students and parents from this year record short messages talking about why they like flipped learning as a pedagogical approach. These can be stitched together to form a single video and serve as a hook for the sell to stakeholders.
However, the number one mistake that Jon sees internationally in contexts where flipped learning has not worked: This comment gets to the crux of what flipped learning is about; the reclamation of class time for deeper and broader learning. If that time is not being used to go deeper and broader then it is not being used wisely. Jon then spoke about the continuum of pedagogical strategies and posed that flipped learning sits in the middle of teacher centred and student centred, providing a good balance between direct instruction and student-led constructivism. He reminded us that students do not know what they do not know and that our job as professionals is to guide them to ensure that they have the conceptual and skill knowledge When being in the position of wanting to flip, but not knowing where to start, I would point you to my Starting Point for Flipped Learning page and remind you of how Jon finished his keynote: If you have made it this far, thank you. I will aim to get the next article out in the next few days. Given the time of year, with everyone busy working on writing their end of year reports and a variety of other activities, I am sure my readers will be understanding of the delay. “Education is like a tapestry. Wiggle one thread and many others will move as well. –Alfie Kohn Following on from his lecture on The Case Against Competition, which I reflected upon here, and a break for dinner, Alfie Kohn delivered a lecture on The Homework Myth, As much as I struggled to reconcile some of what Alfie said during his Competition lecture, much of what was said during this lecture mirrored a lot of my own thoughts on homework. The lecture was introduced using the above quote and then Alfie spoke about what would happen if we abolished grades. Students, we were told, would question the point of why they attend school and completed the tasks they are assigned. This means that we, the teachers, need to reconsider what and how we teach; to reexamine the curriculum and the pedagogy. This is an interesting challenge and one that seems to fail on the curriculum front. The Australian curriculum is not remotely national, with NSW, Victoria and Western Australia implementing their own curriculum, which encompasses the Australian Curriculum. We also, connecting it to the lecture topic, need to consider the purpose of homework and what it is connected to. Alfie’s next point was interesting. He pointed out that we as adults have all been on the receiving end of homework and typically the vast majority of us as students neither liked nor wanted (and often did not complete) the assigned homework. Why, therefore, does homework persist? We do it because of rather than in spite of that history. I do wonder why so many parents continue to want their children to have homework. I had a few parents asking me about homework this term as I had not sent any home in the first two weeks and I responded with a message to all my parents via Class Dojo that I wouldn’t be assigning any homework other than some reading of interest and perhaps some SumDog, which they love. The students were relieved and I had a few messages from parents who were relieved as well. So why does homework persist? Homework has the capability to cause stress and frustration in students, frustration in parents; it can cause conflict between parents and their children, loss of time to other activities that a child would rather be doing and is passionate about. So why does homework persist? For those students who are interested and passionate about a topic, homework or a unit around that topic has the potential to cast a pall over it and kill the passion and desire for learning (there is still mixed evidence for this either way from what I could see of a very quick search). When even those students who consider themselves academically inclined are pleased to have completed their homework and would rather be doing any one of a number of other things, often involving friends we need to ask ourselves why homework still exists. Alfie singled out reading logs as being particularly harmful. There is no better way, stated Alfie, of killing a passion for reading than the enforced use of a reading log to monitor how much a child is reading. It becomes a thing that must be done to get a reward from their teacher of a sticker or a stamp. If you are not sure about rewards and why they are potentially bad, read the previous article in this series. One of the alleged reasons that support homework is that it supposedly improves achievement. Before going into what Alfie had to say on the matter, the definition of achievement here is very important to this statement. In conversations that I have had, the achievement that is typically being referred to is testing scores. Testing scores are useful in many ways, but they are an indicator only of how well a student answered a specific set of questions at a particular moment in time. The familiar adage that goes something like what is tested is not important and what is important is not tested comes to mind here, though I do not doubt that there are those who would argue that testing is a valuable source of data. Alife stated that no controlled study demonstrates any measure of improvement before a student reaches the age of fifteen and that even then, there is only a correlation not a causative relationship of statistical significance. Furthermore, at the High School level, the correlation between increased levels of homework and increased test scores is only a very modest correlation and explains very little of the growth. Including the above graph is perhaps a tad facetious, but the website provides some laughs at the bizarre correlations that can be made between unrelated data. Alfie continued by commenting that the relationship between homework and improved achievement is only measurable in standardised tests which do not measure anything other than a student’s ability to answer that set of questions. An additional factor that needs to be considered is an interesting one, particularly in the case of internationally administered tests such as The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). These tests are initially developed in the English language and are then translated into the other languages required. What impact does this have on the terms chosen and the clarity of the question vis-a-vis the raw wording? How about the way a question is composed and understood culturally? How are questions transliterated (I hope that is the right term, please let me know if it is not) to ensure the meaning and underlying spirit/vibe/focus of the question are retained across cultures with different understandings and interpretations of different events and contexts? These tests are initially developed in the English language and are then translated into the other languages required. What impact does this have on the terms chosen and the clarity of the question vis-a-vis the raw wording? How about the way a question is composed and understood culturally? How are questions transliterated (I hope that is the right term, please let me know if it is not) to ensure the meaning and underlying spirit/vibe/focus of the question are retained across cultures with different understandings and interpretations of different events and contexts? Alfie also told the audience that the modest correlation disappeared altogether when multi-variables are taken into account. Alfie’s next point is an interesting one. He commented that cross-cultural tests, such as PISA and TIMMS show a negative correlation between tests and the amount of homework given. I want to believe this, and it feels instinctively true partly because I want to believe it (confirmation bias?) because a quick Google Scholar search returned a few articles that allege to have found positive relationships between the amount of homework given and general test scores (such as here, here and here), though that is based on reading the abstract only as they are all hidden behind pay-walls. The SmithsonianMag website has one very brief article which indicates that some homework has a positive impact on test scores. The above image was sourced from a well-written blog by Darren Kuropatwa (@Dkuropatwa) (though it appears to have been sourced from a PIRLS document) examining the value of homework based upon the Assessment Matters! publications by The Council of Ministers of Education Canada examining the data using The Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP), PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS. The results, it seems, are still inconclusive when looking at this data. Another reason that is often touted for the ongoing assignment of homework is that it builds character, self-discipline, organisation and other similar non-academic benefits, which I have recently seen referred to as soft-skills. Alfie remarked that no study has ever validated this belief, and to my mind, it is not even particularly logical, and even if it were, there are far better ways of teaching children those characteristics. I do not see it as logical due to the fact that the student has to do the homework, whether that is enforced at home by the parent/s or at school by the teacher and therefore no learning of such characteristics is going to occur. If it those type of soft-skills (are we really using that term?) that you want to teach your child/student, then look into having them take up a team sport to teach them getting along, collaboration and teamwork. Or a martial art for resilience, organisation and focus. Or have them complete minor age appropriate chores, involve them in conversations about organising the grocery list or the household budget. The next argument for homework Alfie indicated he hears regularly is that it creates a window into the class which seems completely nonsensical to me. If you genuinely want to develop a relationship or connection between home and school, invite the parents to visit and help out with reading or maths groups, set up a class Twitter account for students to share what they are learning, or a class blog so they can publish their writing, art or audiovisual creations and reflections. The final argument for assigning homework that Alfie spoke about was what he called the Beguti argument; better get used to it. This is, again, illogical and is used to justify a range of tools such as competitions, marks and group-work and, remarked Alfie, developmentally inappropriate. It seems silly to me, to use that argument. Because you will have to complete this task which is dreary and you will dislike it later in life, to prepare you for that dreariness, it will be inflicted upon you earlier than necessary. Children do not get better at dealing with negative things by having negative things happen to them at a younger age and using the beguti argument is, Alfie noted, akin to giving up the game. Parents are often sent home a homework letter that states something along the lines of your child will receive homework on x days or is required to complete the following tasks each week. This sends home the message that the individual needs of the child do not actually matter. Further to this, the audience was told that where schools advertise as teaching the whole child, but then assign homework, that they are paying the whole child lip service by assigning additional academic tasks. We did hear some of the arguments against homework that Alfie has heard regularly. Parents opposing it on a value basis; that school work is for school and the family home is for family time, not school work. Additionally, homework exists, he has been told, because we do not trust children to occupy themselves without wasting time on Facebook, computer games etc and as an argument, implies that homework is merely busy work anyway. I find that an intriguing statement as I know that I, and every other adult I know, likes and needs to spend some time doing nothing, or, wasting time, to relax and unwind after being at work or to deal with stress. Alfie qualified his dislike of homework by indicating that he can see some occasions when homework should be assigned, but that there should be some criteria for it:
Assigning homework should be done after a class discussion with all students and the teacher agreeing that the homework is genuinely needed and that the default setting for homework should be no homework. Students who can complete a task and understand the task and how they completed it initially do not need to complete the homework, and those students who need the homework are likely unable to complete it and having to try and complete it will result in frustration, Googling the answer or a parent/guardian completing it for them. What are your thoughts on homework in general and what I have written about Alfie’s lecture in particular? What are your thoughts on how this relates to cognitive load theory and the completion of basic tasks? I have reached out to Jon Bergmann for his thoughts on how Flipped Learning and the research which Alfie spoke about are related and I have also reached out to Alfie for feedback on both this article and the previous article and to check the accuracy of my interpretation of what he said. I would very much like to hear your thoughts on this topic and I thank you for reading through both this and the previous article which are both rather lengthy. Competition is a recipe for hostility. By definition, not everyone can win a contest. If one child wins, another cannot. This means that each child comes to regard others as obstacles to his or her own success. Forget fractions or home runs; this is the real lesson our children learn in a competitive environment. -Alfie Kohn. Retrieved from tinyurl.com/nc288ej on 19 November 2016 As I sit here at Adelaide Airport after an excellent few days at FlipCon Adelaide with Jon Bergmann, Ken Bauer and many other fine educators (review articles here), I thought it prudent to begin organising my reflections on the evening spent listening to Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) speak. There was a lot to take in that evening, with two sessions, The Case against Competition and The Homework Myth and I was left with a strong sense of cognitive dissonance as a result. As you read this article and the next, I would like you to consider your own philosophy about punishment and rewards. I had heard of Alfie Kohn during my Initial teacher Education (ITE) during my first-year Sociology of Education and my second-year Classroom management courses. All that I could remember from then was that Alfie promoted a laissez-faire approach to classroom management, however, I could not remember anything that was discussed vis-à-vis his views on competition. Alfie opened by remarking that the best teachers do not talk, they let the students do the talking. He also noted that the best teachers also do not test and find another way of fulfilling their requirement to provide a grade. Rewards are as bad as punishments –Alfie Kohn This statement was, for me at least, a very unexpected and odd remark. Fortunately, Alfie spoke about some of the research behind the comment. He commented that in studies that have been undertaken about the impacts of rewards, that on average they reveal that providing rewards to participants for completing a task or achieving a goal results in less success than those participants who are asked to complete the same task knowing that there is no reward. This is particularly the case in studies where the goal has been to quit smoking or to lose weight with one set of participants being offered a reward and the other set receiving no additional intervention. Two studies, he continued, show that being praised for characteristics such as generosity, niceness, sharing etc. actually results in the participants becoming less generous, less kind, less willing to share; that the reward tends to undermine the characteristic being praised. Alfie then asked us to pair up and develop a hypothesis for why being praised for social characteristics has been shown to be counter-productive. When many people moved into groups of three or four, he commented at the end that he did not mind that we had not actually followed his instructions worked in pairs for the task; however, he added that he hopes we are as tolerant of our own students doing the same thing, a remark which elicited a smattering of slightly nervous laughter. He commented that he is often asked questions along the lines of “but what about acknowledging rather than rewarding?” and that he sees that there are many ways of distinguishing between the two. I do not actually have any notes indicating what he said about that topic and I cannot recall whether that was because he made that comment and then moved on or if it was because I simply did not write anything down. Personally, I do not see that acknowledging a student’s effort or results can be the same as rewarding them for the same. Something as simple as “I can see that you have been practicing x” or “I can tell that you have been working on y” is not, in my view, rewarding them, but merely acknowledging that you can see the effort, particularly if you then move on to providing feedback or whatever it is that you are doing. Alfie then began to speak about punishments, or as they are often called; consequences. He remarked that the language does not change the fact that if a student feels like it is a punishment then it is a punishment. Forced social isolation sounds terrible, yet it is often referred to as detention or time-out and spoken as being a consequence of some action he said. Alfie continued by noting that to understand rewards, we need to understand punishments and that punishments (and rewards) can work. They can achieve temporary compliance in a specific context, but only at a great cost. Alfie posits that when we tell a student “Do x or I will do y (or y will happen to you)” we are teaching them self-interest as it encourages students to think about the action as being necessary for the reward or avoidance of punishment. It also, in the case of punishments, enacted when the student is caught doing whatever the act is that is being frowned upon, which means that if they can avoid being caught in the act then they will do the act irrespective of the threat. This creates distrust and fosters selfishness. “The best way to ensure that something happens is to ban it.” -Unknown This desire to avoid being caught doing something deemed wrong and therefore avoid being punished stifles conversations about the kind of woman or man the child wants to grow up to be. The implication here is that the paradigm of how we teach children about right and wrong and about consequences, punishments and rewards is ineffective and detrimental to achieving what we want. However, this assumption depends on what the goal is. We should be asking students to consider what kind of person do I want to be? I struggle with this. My (admittedly limited) experience tells me that students struggle to think about abstract things in a concrete way. That considering what their personality will be like when they are adults is a very difficult feat to achieve to with real sincerity. I have tried to talk with students about their goals for the future, some with very specific goals, and encourage them to consider how their learning now will impact their ability to achieve their goal and it is not something they are able to do. Additionally, I struggle with the concept of removing punishments or consequences, which I get the impression is what Alfie is arguing for when I know that there are students with whom that approach will only exacerbate their behaviour, escalating it to be dangerous. I have friends who have been in classrooms and have had chairs thrown at them, or tables have been flipped and fights have broken out amongst students. I agree with the premise that all actions occur for a reason (Aristotle, Rhetoric), yet how do you educate a violent child that violence is not the answer when, in their experience, violence gets them what they want? I have heard it said that if your lesson is engaging enough that you will not have class management problems. But with more experience and (a little) less naiveté, how can you deliver a lesson when you cannot engage the students because they are violent and disruptive or disengaged with school, or there is no support for education at home? Alfie posits that punishments and rewards are as manipulative as each other and are therefore merely two sides of the same coin. Rewards, he said, disrupt the vertical (teacher-student) and the horizontal (peer-peer) relationships and trust. Rewards reinforce power that the parent or teacher holds over the child or student. Alfie remarked that in classrooms where a reward is offered for a certain level of achievement, or grades that a student who needs and wants help is less disposed to ask for help in order to conceal the weakness. This on reflection seems rather counter-intuitive. If a reward is offered for achieving a certain grade and assistance was required to achieve the grade and therefore achieve the reward then why would you not make the request for help? Am I being too simplistic here in my understanding of the scenario? Perhaps this is the kind of context that Alfie spoke about, that if the reward is large enough then the result will be temporary compliance. One of the greatest predictors of learning, Alfie informed the audience, is being part of a caring community; with a sense of us rather than a sense of me. This links back to what was said about the way in which punishments create a sense of if I do not get caught and implies that a strong community will actually contribute to a reduction for the need for punishments. He also stated that just as punishments change the thinking to be ego-centric, to avoid punishment, so too do rewards change thinking to be ego-centric, to be given the reward. An award is simply an artificially rarefied reward. Alfie posits that creating a competitive culture in the classroom tells students that others are an obstacle to their success and that their value or worth is only as good as the extent to which they defeat others. We were also told that competition makes students less communicative. The point that was made here was that why would a student communicate openly or trust others when it potentially creates a situation where their help will be used against them, fostering a culture where people are envious of winners and contemptuous of losers. Perhaps this is remedied by changing the system and removing grades and marks? In this day and age we are all aware and understand the dangers of second-hand smoke. Alfie said that “the impact of competitiveness is as bad as second-hand smoke in the psychological sense as it creates a situation where students cannot feel good about themselves in one context or another without others failing. I have not read enough of the research (read: I have not read any of the research) to have a grasp on the accuracy of this statement. My initial reaction was that it is a gross exaggeration and that that could not possibly be true, however, I have seen advertisements from the days when smoking was considered a good thing and I remember the arguments and the gradual social shift that took us from a society where smoking was acceptable to it being seen as a disgusting and smelly habit, with smokers shunned in many ways. Alfie began to wrap up the session at this point. He reminded us that rewards and punishments focus on the end-result, not the underlying reason for the end-result and all behaviour happens for a reason. Rewards undermined the interest of students in whatever it is that is being rewarded, the audience was told. I have not seen this for myself, however, I have seen how schooling can destroy a student’s interest in something through the edufication of a student interest . My school is putting on a musical this year to celebrate the school’s sixtieth anniversary, calling it Dancing through the decades. Each Stage has been assigned two (non-consecutive) decades and will be performing a ten-minute block for each decade. Stage Three has been assigned the seventies and the current decade (are we really calling it the teens?) One of the songs chosen was quite popular when we first began but is now very much less so because they are sick of hearing the music and practicing singing. The model is wrong, to the point where students are sometimes rewarded for a reward. Being rewarded for a reward, whether it be a car for good exam results in the case of those at the end of their schooling or something much smaller such as a toy, lollies or fast food for a perfect spelling test is wrong. We did not get explicit reasons for this, however, I feel that it is an amplification of the overall problem with rewards, that it undermines whatever is being strived for by limiting growth and putting a cap on excellence. The topic of motivation arose, and Alfie reminded us of the typical understanding that there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic, and that, he alleges, research shows that the kind of motivation has a much more significant impact on the outcome than the amount of motivation. He went on to say that research indicates that as levels of extrinsic motivation increase, levels of intrinsic motivation shows a proportional decrease. Rewarding someone for doing something actively damages a person’s interest in that thing. Alfie spoke about research that was done to study this using soft-drink. A new flavour was tested and those who drank it knowing that they would be rewarded showed more negative feelings about the product a few weeks later. In contrast to this, those who drank the product knowing they would not be receiving a reward demonstrated the same or slightly better feelings about the product afterwards. Alfie posed a hypothetical: what is the alternative to rewards? Ultimately, it varies according to what the end goal is and no one alternative is a panacea to solve the issue. He indicated that it is his view that programs such as Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) do not achieve anything more than produce mindless obedience and that they do not result in more proficient learners. Giving students more say in the way that classrooms are run is one way of impacting attitudes and behaviours and I have heard of a system where a class runs their own court system (as outlined here) which apparently works quite well. Alfie’s talk raised lots of questions and I feel like I still do not have answers for them. I did not have an opportunity to speak to him after the session as he, like all of us, needed a break to eat some dinner before the second session began. Reflecting on the ideas and what he spoke about, though, I can agree with much of what he spoke about. Where I begin to struggle is with implementing the changes that would be necessary to change my own practice. What does this look like in a classroom? What does it look like in a school? Even if you negotiate the rules within a class and punishments for breaking them with the class and everyone is on board, is that generating the same results as rules arbitrarily set down and enforced by the teacher? Consequences are a part of life; touch a hot stove and you get burned, commit a crime and you face the consequences set down in law. If that is wrong, then the fundamental fabric of how our society functions is wrong and needs to be re-examined, which I do not see ever happening due to a large range of factors, not the least of which is tradition and a need for control (which in and of itself speaks to a lot of what Alfie was saying). If you do manage to create a model without punishments, how do you correct the behaviour which is socially unacceptable; swearing, derogatory language, violence, and disrespect of self and others; in students who see those things modelled as acceptable at home? How does this model fit with research from The Dunedin Project? This world-renowned longitudinal study has found that there is actually a genomic predisposition towards violence and extreme violence in some people, amongst other traits often regarded as socially unacceptable (Caspi, A. , McClay, J., Moffitt, T. E. , Mill, J.S., Martin, J. , Craig, I., Taylor, A., Poulton, R. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children. Science, 2002, 297 (297), 851-854). . What impact does that have on this issue? I often hear that secondary education cops it because things that happen or do not happen in primary school. I also often hear parents ask why I am trying a particular approach or idea when their child is off to high school and it will straight back to traditional classrooms, masses of homework etc. How does this concept fit within that constraint, the transition from primary to high school? There is a lot to consider here and I would very much appreciate hearing your comments on the topic, as well as any feedback on the article or your own interpretations of Alfie’s work in this area. As always, thank you for reading. Alfie's session on Homework will be reviewed in the next article. “You have to stick out the toughness of the business and form relationships with the people in it.” – Attributed to Rocco DiSpirito It is only week three of term three, and already I feel like I have been battered from pillar to post. I am struggling to get into this term, and a few colleagues across a few different schools have made similar comments, so I know it is not just me. There have been a number of issues early this term which been high on the urgent and important scale, the building project in our scale continues to progress and cause anxiousness amongst many staff members about the changes, there is the ongoing stress of not being a permanent teacher, a number of units of work I am planning for future use, ideas and things that I want to try in my pedagogical practice, our semester two programs are due shortly, and to top it off, Mrs C21’s due date for our first child is only a few weeks away (25th August), but we have been told it is likely to come early given its size (Mrs C21 is terrified the baby will be size of my brother who was 10lb 9oz / 4.8kg). I (rather foolishly, in hindsight), wrote late last year that I did not feel like I had had a proper first year out as a teacher, as I was in an RFF position. I should have kept my mouth closed. The conversations have already started about staffing for next year, as there is a huge shift going to occur in the school with the rebuild, a number of retirements this year bringing in different teachers, and a number of temporary teachers, including myself, who are going to be hoping for a new contract, some teachers going on maternity leave, and some permanent full-time teachers hoping to drop back to part-time. I do not envy our Principal his job, especially given that it looks like we are going to be on the threshold of crossing to having enough numbers for another staffing allocation. I was away for the entirety of the first week of the mid-year holidays, acting as a referee coach and mentor, along with eleven others, to thirty-two teenagers at the Kanga Cup Youth Referee Academy, a part of my year that I look forward to, but which is incredibly draining mentally and physically. Week two of the holidays was essentially spent at school, planning with Mrs. W for the term. Of course, two weeks in, having been happy with what I had planned for my literacy sessions, I decided that it was not working the way i wanted it to, and have had to change it again. Ugh. Life is hectic at the moment. I am tired, frustrated, have too many things I want to and not enough time to do them in, am not sleeping, am eating chocolate like it is going out of fashion, and have not been able to get engaged with the term so far which is frustrating me a great deal. I have also not been able to get any writing done so far this term, and likely will not for a while. Take care of yourself, especially in light of the 2015 Principal Health and Wellbeing Report which was published recently. In this episode of Flipped Teacher Professional Learning, I show you how to use QR Codes to share web links (and some other resources) with others via a QR Code. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. “Phonics is one essential part of a comprehensive reading program that includes good literature and the development of literacy in the broader sense, but it must be taught well.” –Jennifer Buckingham, The Australian, 8 December 2015, Retrieved from http://www.acara.edu.au/news_media/testimonials_2015_12.html 5 June 2016 In 2014, I was in the final year of my initial teacher education (ITE) and thus was required to complete an internship. In my program, that meant a ten-week stint during Term Three. I had completed two professional experience placements prior to this (four weeks each in a Year Six and a Year One class) and was looking forward to this next opportunity to embed myself into a school, learn from a supervising teacher and perhaps actually see a unit of learning through to completion. When I walked into my classroom for the first time there were a lot of things that surprised me; each student had an iPad under the school’s Bring Your Own Designated Device (BYODD) program, the room was in a non-traditional format utilising beanbags, stairs, low tables and cushions rather than rows or groups of tables, and they were using a system for teaching spelling that I had never heard of previously, but which, after having the underlying concept explained to me, I wondered why that was the case. The system is known as THRASS (Teaching Handwriting, Reading, and Spelling Skills) and the two-day course was led by a teacher from Melbourne. The underlying principle of THRASS is an explicit understanding of the phonemes (speech sounds) in the English language and the graphemes (spelling choices) chosen to represent those phonemes in writing. As a child, I was taught, like most of us, that within the English language, there are twenty-one consonants and five vowels (a, e, i, o and u), with a number of spelling rules such as i before e, except after c. This understanding of what a consonant and a vowel is is actually incorrect. Additionally, many of the spelling rules have more exceptions than they do words that conform to the rule. THRASS utilises the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which follows the primary definition of what is a consonant and a vowel, which I have shown in the below image. There are in fact twenty-four consonants and twenty vowels within English. Additionally, THRASS posits that there are no spelling rules, only patterns in the language which we can use to help us in understanding how a word is spelled and pronounced. This requires a significant shift in thinking and some people, myself included, struggled to wrap our heads around this new knowledge. THRASS takes the forty-four recognised phonemes in the English language and places them on a chart, divided into a consonant section and a vowel section, with the most common graphemes (spelling choices) for each phoneme shown with a pictorial example. You can see what that looks like in the below image. The /b/ phoneme is typically represented by one of two graphemes, (b) or (bb). Though there are other graphemes, such as (pb) as in cupboard, these are not as common, and so are represented on the THRASS Chart with an asterisk and are referred to as Grapheme Catch-Alls (GCAs). This means that some phonemes have only one grapheme on the THRASS Chart, whilst others may have several, depending on the commonality of the phoneme and the related graphemes. Take the below image as an example. Please remember in reading this, that we are concerned with the phoneme, the speech sound in our understanding of the THRASS Chart; we are interested in what we hear rather than what we see. As indicated in the previous paragraph, /b/ only has two graphemes on the THRASS chart. However, the above image is of the most important phonemes in the English language, the schwa (which surprisingly does not have its own letter representation). The graphemes shown in the above image are the most common spelling choices for the schwa phoneme. Again, as with /b/, the graphemes in the schwa box are not a conclusive list of potential graphemes. Indeed, in the THRASS Phonics Handbook (page eighteen of the catalogue), there is a total of seventeen different graphemes for the schwa phoneme, including those on the THRASS chart. We were shown some videos of students who have been learning with THRASS, and the confidence and abilities of those students were incredible for their age. TO see some amazing examples of what students as young as Kindergarten can achieve with THRASS, please visit the THRASS Institute – Australasia & Canada’ Facebook page. THRASS represents a tool that can provide students with skills and strategies to build confidence and competence within literacy. If students are spending less time trying to work out how to spell a word, they can focus on their writing. If students are able to confidently work out how to pronounce a word and understand the meaning of it, then they are able to focus on reading and comprehending the text as a whole and make various connections. THRASS, as part of a balanced literacy session, utilising the Four Resources Model as outlined by Luke and Freebody in 2002, can assist with this. I began using THRASS with my students at the beginning of the year. However, it was not a strongly embedded component, as I did not quite understand how to utilise it well enough. Since attending the course, I have embedded it as a core part of the class literacy session, and the students have begun to grasp the system and see the benefits. We are very much still in the process of learning the chart, however, I have seen some lightbulb moments occurring already. There has been a conversation in the media about the need to return to phonics-based teaching for literacy (for example; here) and THRASS represents a fantastic way to achieve that. However, we cannot return to explicit phonics instruction, as it has never left. Explicit instruction in phonics often underpins the pedagogy of foundational teaching in reading, writing and spelling. If you have never heard of THRASS prior to this, or want to find out more, I strongly recommend visiting the THRASS website and attending a Foundation Course. The two-day course is fast-paced but well worth attending to gain a solid foundation from which to embed THRASS as a strategy in your class. I have seen the potential of what THRASS can allow students achieve and understand, and while it has elements that may be sour to many that profess a progressive education philosophy, it works. There is a longitudinal research project beginning next year with Murdoch University, including the THRASS Foundation course within that institution’s ITE program and tracking the learning outcomes of those pre-service teachers and their students over the coming years, as well as other research supporting THRASS from previous studies. I hope that this article has sparked a curiosity within you to at least investigate what THRASS is about by visiting their website and doing some research of your own. I have included below some links to other useful resources and websites, and I would be happy to engage in a discussion with anybody who is genuinely curious about learning more. Additionally, there are a number of schools who have implemented THRASS as a whole school system and I daresay that a school visit would be able to be arranged through THRASS to see how they are implementing it (I would also be happy to arrange for interested educators to come and visit my classroom).
Disclosure: My attendance at Education Nation (#EduNationAu) was through a media pass provided by the conference organisers.
If you have missed the previous articles in the Education Nation series, you can find them here. Lila Mularczyk’s presentation closed out session one of day two at Education Nation and took us into the morning break. I made the decision, still feeling like I had conference brain, that I would sit out during Murat Dizdar’s (@dizdarm) presentation about the national education reform program which commenced session two. I spoke to Murat briefly who gave me permission to record it so that I could listen to it later on. When I sat down yesterday to transfer the photos I had taken from my phone and tablet to my computer, I saw an image of some carpet and, thinking it was an accidental photo of the floor, hit delete. My brain processed, about two seconds later, that it had also had the film strip icon. So I, unfortunately, have nothing to show for Murat’s presentation, for which I can only apologise. Following Murat’s presentation was Professor Ken Wiltshire speaking about the future of curriculum in Australia. I have only a few written notes from Professor Wiltshire’s presentation, however, there was an active Twitter conversation throughout his session, which I was involved with and have captured via a storify, which you can find here. Some of the key points that I have noted down that Professor Wiltshire sees learning as having four dimensions:
He commented that few of the recommendations from the review of the national curriculum had been adopted and brought up a number of reforms that he felt should occur, including but not limited to an enforcement of compulsory schooling and the enactment of the National Curriculum as well as a national forum on the purposes of education, values and foundations which should underpin education. Further, he proposes that we need a national body, that is apolitical to be tasked with writing, reviewing, developing and overseeing education curriculum and assessment, labelling ACARA as a “…horse-trading and political body, not an education body…” Professor Wiltshire made an interesting comment regarding initial teacher education (ITE), which you can see at the top of the below photo: I invite you to read through the storify of Professor Wiltshire’s presentation which you can find here and invite anyone who has written about either Professor Wiltshire’s or Murat Dizdar’s presentations (or any other presentation from Education Nation, for that matter) to send me the link to include in this article. Thank you for reading. If you have missed any articles in this series, you can find the full list here. “They do not know how to talk to educators” -An Education Nation delegate’s observation regarding vendors. Disclosure: My attendance at Education Nation (#EduNationAu) was through a media pass provided by the conference organisers. I would like to begin this article by sharing a personal story, and I would like you to try to place yourself in my shoes throughout. I arrived at an education conference last year wide-eyed and more than a little naive about what was going to see and hear from the vendors. It was my very first conference and the first time I had been exposed to an educational vendor expo. I spoke with all of the vendors who had something that intrigued me or made me curious, and they all went something like this: “How are you?” “Well, thanks, you?” “Yeah, good. Have you heard of our product before? It can do x, y and z.” “Ok, can it do p or q?” “I don’t think so, no.” There were also a number of vendors, actually, the majority, who made no effort to engage me, or other delegates. Their body language was closed off, their facial expressions were bored and disinterested and they appeared more interested in chatting with their colleagues on their own stand and those around them. Many of them had signage that told a delegate everything they needed to know about the product and discouraged talking to them. If you did approach those vendors, they answered the questions with product knowledge drawn from within their box of knowledge about that product. Though I was asked questions by vendors such as what year group do you teach, what subject do you teach, and have you tried competitor A’s product? Because ours is far superior, they were superficial questions which were asked from a superficial interest, driven by wanting to sell me the product or get my details for later promotional e-mails* as opposed to wanting to understand what I am trying to do in my classroom with my students at the moment and what challenges I have that they can work with me to solve. The vendors were also, it appeared, unwilling to leave the safety and comfort of their stand to get amongst the delegates and get to know and understand them and their needs. The vendors had no understanding of how to get to know me as an educator and my needs, challenges and goals. They knew how to rattle off their sales pitch, and could do so with aplomb. This is, I believe, a distinct difference in approach and attitude. I suspect that many of you are, whether figuratively or literally, nodding your head in agreement at this point, as your experience with vendors at expos has been somewhat similar. I had a conversation with someone recently who pointed out that it is partially our fault, as educators, for going in and often just asking “what can it do? as opposed to going in and asking “I teach x to y students and am trying to do z but have come up against problems a, b and c. Do you have a solution?” When I initially came across Education Nation during a twitter chat earlier in the year, one of the aspects which caught my eye was the way in which the organisers had positioned the traditional vendor exhibition floor, which they were dubbing The Playground. It sounded like it would be different. In case you are unable to read the text on that image from the Education Nation website, this is what is says: Let’s face facts – people who attend education events are normally there for the learning opportunities they offer… NOT to speak to ‘vendors’ in the expo. I was excited by the prospects of this. My imagining of The Playground would be that the Vendors would not only know their products but would have an understanding of education and specific challenges in at least some of the areas that are faced on a daily basis. More importantly, though, I had imagined that the vendors would be intermingling with the delegates, engaging in discussions about education and specific contexts within which the delegates are teaching and the specific challenges we were facing. This was not the case. Acer came to the Education Nation party, and had, inarguably, the largest stand there and were the official coffee provider with a barista at one end of their stand (who made consistently great hot chocolates, but from what I heard, terrible coffee). Although I am going to explicitly use Acer as an example in this story, it applies equally to all of the vendors, not just at Education Nation, but at any educational conference. I stood in line for my hot chocolate on several occasions and not once was I engaged in conversation by an Acer representative; no sales pitch, no good morning, how are you? I did approach the Acer stand at one point with the express purpose of scoping out what they had on offer and approached a computer that had a driving computer game on display. However, what captured my interest was actually the monitor, which was a wide-screen curved monitor. An Acer representative approached me, just as I was starting to look at the monitor and told me that the game was playable and to just use particular keys on the keyboard to drive the car. He then turned and moved away. There was no discussion, no sales pitch, no what has you interested in this computer? No what computer are you using at school or at home at the moment? Nothing. Sadly, that is not the worst part of the story. One of the presenters at Education Nation was Nick Patsianas (@nickpatsianas), a current Year Twelve student who is also, and I use this term as a compliment, a huge computer nerd (I would only label myself as a minor computer nerd). He was engaged in a conversation with one of the Acer representatives about some of the laptops they had on display and was explaining to the representative about how a particular component of the laptop works and why that was good for him as a student. He also explained to the representative that another feature that was purported to be in benefit, was actually a flaw, and why that was the case. A delegate had more knowledge of the product the vendor was promoting, and its real world uses and flaws, than the vendor himself did. PC Locs had a stand there as well, and the representatives looked bored, disinterested and disengaged and made no effort to engage those walking past their stand, in any way unless someone actually stopped to look at a product that they had. The Brainary stand had a robot that could walk, dance and talk, and it gained some attraction, but I do not know how much genuine interest there was, and how much was due to the gimmick of the robot. Latitude Travel also showed little interest in engaging people in conversation, they certainly made no attempt to draw me in. ABI were there showing off their Snowflake system. They had a flat screen touch panel, upright, showing a simple screen, and a banner with all the info you needed to know about it. The representative, as did many of the company representatives there, looked bored and did not show off the fact that the flatscreen touch panel could go from full vertical to horizontal and was height adjustable, and then when he did show that off, could not explain why that would be of use to a teacher for collaborative learning and publishing of work for a wider audience. The vendors did not know how to engage educators appropriately. Vendors, there is something you need to understand about educators. You complained we were not talking to you at Education Nation but there is a reason for that. We can find out everything we want to know about your product online. You cannot find out anything about our teaching context and the challenges we face in our specific room without engaging in conversation with us. Talk to us, not at us. Ask us what we want to be able to do and what our challenges are, rather than rattle off the specifications of the product. Leave your stands and have lunch or coffee with us. Ask us who we have just listened to speak and what we took away from that talk. Or, be even more genuine, and sit in on the talks, show an interest in education rather than just selling us products and tools and services.
Educators, there is something we need to realise about vendors. If we continue to simply ask what a product does, the vendors will continue to sell to us and talk at us. We need to go in and tell them what we want to do, whether it is a concrete function or an abstract dream. We need to share our real, genuine, everyday systemic, policy, process and people-power challenges with them to give them insight into what we face and allow them to go back to their companies and brainstorm ways of surmounting those challenges. Until we change how we engage with the vendors, the vendors will continue to not know how to engage with us. UPDATE: I was contacted by the CEO of a company at this event via e-mail afterwards who requested to chat regarding her company's representatives and their conduct, wanting specifics. Although I rang and left a voicemail and followed up with an e-mail I did not hear back from that person. *There is an exception to this. Rowan and Yohan from MyEdApp engaged me in conversation very differently and did make an effort to understand my context. Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not. -Ken Robinson Last week, students across Australia in Years Three, Five, Seven and Nine were required to sit the annual NAPLAN testing. NAPLAN is ostensibly inflicted upon students to assess their growth over the eighteen months since their previous NAPLAN (or to serve as a benchmark if it is the student’s first NAPLAN). This testing process has a significant number of flaws and causes stress, anxiety and frustration, amongst students and parents, but also amongst some teachers. This year was my first involvement with NAPLAN, as while I am teaching a combined Year Five and Six class this year, last year I was employed in an RFF capacity and had only been in that role for a few weeks when NAPLAN arrived, and thus felt only a minimal impact as a result. I remember sitting the Basic Skills Test in Year Five sometime in the early 1990s (though I have no recollection of sitting it in Year Three), and my recollections of it was that it was a low-key test, where my parents received a booklet which talked about grade-level expectations, and indicated where my results across the various tests sat in relation to my peers at my school, and then either across the state or across the country, I cannot recall which. My teacher, Mr. Davies, who is one of the reasons I entered the teaching profession simply told us that we had to sit this test to assess our progress and to just give it our best effort. Mr. Davies was a fantastic teacher, and as far as we knew, the test had little importance beyond what it told him about our results. We sat the test, I rushed through it as I always did (and still do) with multiple choice tests, and then went outside and read a book while I waited for my classmates to finish. Mum and Dad received the results sometime later, we chatted about them, Mum asked if I rushed through the test (cue the head hang, “Yes Mum, sorry, I just wanted to read my book”) and life moved on. I do not doubt that there was more to it than that, however, from my perspective at that time, as a ten-year-old boy, was that it was just something we had to do, but not something that was particularly important. Things have changed, however, and not for the good. My students seemed to do ok. I had two or three students who were a little anxious, but otherwise, they did not seem overly concerned. There were, however, students across the Central Coast, from conversations with other teachers, who could not cope and actually made themselves sick, including one student in Year Three. Additionally, there were students who would ordinarily write a high-quality narrative, with excellent character development, a complex plot twist, and a clever resolution, who simply froze because of how little time they were given. I do not know what approach other teachers took in the lead up to NAPLAN, whether much preparation was in class, or set at home; nor do I know how much preparation my students’ put in outside of school, of their own volition (or at the behest of their parents). Personally, I sat down on Monday afternoon to talk to them about it for the first time (I had studiously avoided mentioning NAPLAN) at any point prior to that), and the reaction was immediate. Some students I could tell were worried about it, some were ambivalent, and some were annoyed that they had to complete them due to the time they took out of class. My Year Six students were ecstatic, as they would be spending the time undertaking Peer Support Training with another teacher and myself. I talked to them about NAPLAN for a little while, telling them about my own experience with the Basic Skills Test, and then made it very clear that as far as I was not worried about their NAPLAN results, as long as they put in their best effort. I reminded them of the formative testing in literacy and numeracy that we had completed at the beginning of the year, and that we would be completing those assessments at the end of this term and again at the end of Term Four, and that I was focused on the growth they showed across the three iterations of those tests. I reminded them that NAPLAN did not know or care whether they had slept well the previous night, or had eaten breakfast or not, or are more athletically inclined, or anything else, other than the results that they put on their paper and submitted for NAPLAN.
We talked about the way they get feedback on their learning outputs in class, through the marking systems we use, or through one to one conversation during class time and that I do not get to see what they write and so cannot give them feedback, or know how they went, other than the number which is given for each test result. I could see some of the tension leaving some of my students, and my Year Six students were helpful as well, talking about their experiences and that it was not as hard or as stressful as they thought it would be. I have a great group of students. Whether or not we like NAPLAN, it is here, and it is here to stay, though I do not doubt it will evolve over time into something else (such as the move to digital completion which has been discussed for some time). There is a body of research about the impact that it has across the education sector and in the current education environment, where we continually here about the fourth-grade slump and the drop in results across PISA and TIMMS, short-sighted politicians are looking for a quick fix that will get them votes at the next election. There is talk about planning for the future, but I sincerely doubt that it actually means anything, given the way that politicians lie in order to get the support they need. Students across the country have teachers who know and understand that NAPLAN is relatively meaningless, a single snapshot in time which takes twelve weeks to develop, and where the original negative (student submissions) are not available for checking. NAPLAN is a broken and flawed tool which causes stress and anxiety in students and teachers and from anecdotal reports, some parents far above what it provides in return. I await the result of this year’s NAPLAN test for my students, which will mean little as the text-type for the writing test was a different text-type to what they were required to write when they were in Year Three, making the data comparison invalid from every point of view I can think of. What was your experience with NAPLAN this year? How did you, your students and your students’ parents cope? Do you prepare your students with pre-testing or give them a speech similar to what I gave to my students? Is your school one in which NAPLAN is a highly important test, or is it largely disregarded? I would appreciate hearing about your experiences with NAPLAN and the strategies you employ in your context to survive the infliction of NAPLAN each year. As always, thank you for reading. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― Attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien There is something to be said for the positive impact that sharing a meal with colleagues in a non-work context has upon your mental state, your happiness, and your stress levels. Term one was eleven weeks long, and by week eight, I was feeling mentally and physically drained. My goal at the start of the year to maintain a healthier balance between work and home life was not going particularly well, and I felt like I was not achieving enough in the classroom. I and a few other colleagues are what you might term early birds in regards to when we arrive at school to begin our preparation. I am typically in my room at 0600 and the others not long afterwards. Wanting to actually spend some time having social conversations with them as opposed to purely educator conversations, I suggested that we all meet for breakfast one morning at a cafe which is a comfortable five-minute stroll away from school in the last week of the term. There was immediate acceptance and “oh, what a great idea!” We met up at 0615 on the Wednesday of week eleven for breakfast, and I cannot overstate how enjoyable it was. The food was great and very well priced, and the company was excellent. I learned more about my colleagues over the course of the meal than I have in the last twelve months. We banned any shop-talk and after enjoying our breakfast, enjoyed a very casual stroll back to school in the beautifully warm sunshine, enjoying a nice relaxing and fun start to the day. For me, that short meal changed my mental state. Whereas I had arrived at school that morning a tired and frustrated teacher looking forward to the end of the term, I arrived back in my room an hour later feeling refreshed, invigorated and excited for the day. As educators, we underestimate the importance of taking time out to socialise with each other, and get to know our colleagues without the pressures of listening for the bell to the get to class or playground duty, without the hustle and bustle of students knocking on the staffroom door, or the phone ringing, or trying to contact parents, or complete the never-ending marking. We are looking to get together for breakfast again in week five of this term, before the insanity that is report writing begins, and I am already looking forward to it. If you have not shared a meal with colleagues, make the suggestion that you all meet up for breakfast, or go out for dinner together. When I was on internship, the Stage Three teachers banked all of their release time for a week into one day and took the day as a collaborative planning day. It was incredibly productive, collegial and relaxed. Share a meal and enjoy getting to know your colleagues. It is good for your mental health and you might just have fun. “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” – Attributed to Peter Drucker Recently, I had the opportunity to take part in a Ph.D. research project being led by Penny Bentley (@penpln). Penny is researching (paraphrasing here) the role that social media plays as a tool for professional development, particularly in STEM contexts. My initial engagement was via an expression of interest survey which was linked to on Twitter which Penny was using to recruit participants. One of the questions on the subsequent survey, which took about twenty minutes to complete, was if you would be interested in completing an interview with Penny to go deeper into the thinking behind your responses in the survey. Having utilised interviews as a method of data collection for my Honours thesis, I can recall how difficult it can be to obtain enough interview participants for your data to have real credibility, so I volunteered to take part in an interview. The interview process, conducted using a Skype video call, was a largely reflective one and, for me, an eye-opening experience. I believe there is something different about verbalising your thoughts and reflections to another person as opposed to simply writing them down. The questions were focused on how my practice has changed as a result of the professional learning gained from social media, which for me, is predominantly Twitter. It was not until engaging in this process with Penny that I realised how significant Twitter has been for my growth and learning as an educator. Without it, I would not have found out about a number of events that I have attended over the last few years, including FutureSchools, FlipConAus, and various TeachMeet events (review articles for all three here), I would not have made connections with and learned from a large number of diverse and experienced educators in a variety of contexts, now would I have sustained my blog writing, which I feel provides a useful outlet to verbalise, in a manner of speaking, my reflections vis-a-vis my professional practice. If you are not using Twitter in a professional capacity and you are an educator, please watch the five-minute video in yesterday’s article to find out why you should be using Twitter as an educator. I also found the process of contributing to a research project rewarding in its own right. Having conducted interviews as part of my Honours research, I recall how difficult it can be to find a sufficient number of participants to ensure credibility in your data and conclusions. I do not feel like the process of reflecting, either with Penny during our discussion, or in general through this blog, has generated any Eureka! moments, however looking back at older blogs, I can see how my beliefs and practices have changed, and I believe that engaging in reflecting upon my practice through this blog, as well as engaging with other educators via Twitter, has allowed me to grow as an educator and improved my practice. As always, thank you for reading, and please leave any comments or feedback below or connect with me via Twitter. “We need to think different [about education]” – From a personal conversation Disclosure: My attendance at Education Nation (#EduNationAu) in June is through a media pass provided by the conference organisers. I enjoy conferences, a lot. There is something about being in a venue full of people who are typically like-minded, hearing from a variety of speakers on a range of topics, coming away with pages of notes, a number of new teaching tools, ideas or pedagogical changes to implement in my own practice and the feeling of energy and excitement that permeates the air. However, there are drawbacks to conferences, specifically, around how they are structured. In my (admittedly limited) experience thus far, there appears to be one main style of conference structure; a range of concurrent conferences streams each loosely based on a central theme with attendees locked into the conference stream for which they registered. I have enjoyed the conferences I have attended that follow this structure, yet the loose thematic organisation enables a range of ordinarily unrelated topics to fall within one conference stream. Conversely, in the conferences I have attended thus far, within each conference stream, there has been a vast array of topics bundled which appeared quite disparate in their nature. While there have been no speakers from whom I learned nothing, there have certainly been speakers from whom I learned more than others, as well as some speakers whose presentations I largely switched off from as the topic was not in my sphere of interest. When I saw a Tweet advertising a conference with the tagline Time for Change, my curiosity led me to follow the links and read more. The conference was Education Nation which has positioned itself as a conference organised based around uniquely Australian issues, such as our size and population spread, the diversity of educational institutions (from public to Catholic, Montessori, Anglican etc.) and the relationships between the various diverse stakeholders as well as the big ideas which permeate education in general. The organisers are looking to make a real difference in education by provoking conversations between sectors and stakeholders. “It’s a new kind of education event. One that’s ABOUT Australian education, BY Australian education and FOR Australian education.” This concept intrigued me, and it held up when, whilst looking through the speaker list, I saw that every speaker is part of the Australian Education industry, from classroom teachers through to those in various leadership roles; there are no high-profile international Edu-Stars being flown in for this conference. The tipping point for me, where I started to buy into its premise of being about, by, and for Australian education, was when I discovered that one of the speakers was a High School Principal by the name of Wayne Chaffey. Unlike the impression we get from Alec Guinness’ face when he hears Luke Skywalker ask about Obi-Wan Kenobi, my recollection of hearing this long-unheard name was positive. Mr. Chaffey was my physics teacher when I was in Years Eleven and Twelve (and after all these years, I still cannot bring myself to call him by his given name), the Deputy Principal of the school at that point in time and the father of a kid who was one of my best mates all through high school. He was an excellent teacher, well-respected and liked by the vast majority of the student body, and one of the few teachers whom I would have gone back to in order to show off what I have achieved since graduating if I was to do that. Education Nation now had credibility for me; you trust and believe in something more willingly if you know and trust someone who is involved. Mr. Chaffey was a fantastic teacher and one for whom I had (and still have) nothing but respect. I also know that he would not sign on to something on a whim. If he is involved, then I have faith it will be worthwhile attending. So I went digging, learning about how the event would be structured, how the conference streams would be classified, who would be speaking and of course, what the costs would be. Education Nation has structured itself around ten key ideas that drive education in our country and has created a structure of two Forums and four Elements, with each focused on a different thematic challenge within education, yet all six streams contain the ten key ideas. You can read the agenda for the two forums and each of the Elements by clicking on the relevant link below.
My read of the programs across each of the six areas is that the presentations will be tightly focused around the core theme and that speakers have been asked to get gritty and real, acknowledging the issues, bringing up new issues and addressing potential avenues of opportunity to solve those issues. I recently had a conversation with one of the organisers and was told that (paraphrasing) “speakers were asked to rock the boat, do not bring the party or company line, deal with the issues and rip the band-aid off.” The thirty-minute conversation has left me more excited for what is to come. This approach differentiates it from other conferences which I have attended, where we typically hear about a new program/app/gadget/technological solution, or some context-specific solutions to a context-specific issue that is not often transferable. Those are not bad in and of themselves, however, the near-constant rhetoric around the crisis in Australian Education requires us to think different about education, to rip the band-aid off and deal with the issues. The structure and program for Education Nation is such that although you are registering for one of the streams, you will find that they are more tightly focused around the theme for that stream, rather than the loose association of presentations at many other conferences. So I would encourage you to register as soon as you are able, particularly for the Elements as numbers for those streams are capped With the impending Federal election, we are sure to see education being used to score political points over the coming months, and so the presentation by Senator The Honourable Simon Birmingham (@birmo) on Day Two of the Rethinking Reform forum (ministerial commitments pending) is timely. Given the moderated Q&A session that will be part of his session and the advice to speakers, the questions asked will be sure to rock the boat, and test Simon’s ability to think on his feet and spark conversation and dialogue amongst all involved in education. The presentation by Dr. Kenneth Wiltshire titled “What’s the future of curriculum in Australia” is sure to make an interesting follow-up to Simon’s, especially given the furore around ACARA and the National Curriculum. Simon McKenzie’s presentation which asks the question technology in our schools – identifying if we have just made everything worse will be an interesting presentation, and I suspect will evoke strong feelings one way or another, as will the following presentation by Leanne Steed and Elizabeth Amvrazis which is asking whether technology is making us forget what education means, which is sure to spark some interest given that the meaning and purpose of education is not at all universally agreed upon. The panel discussion that is scheduled for the Digital Dimensions conference which focuses on the seeming inevitability of social media in education will also be an interesting session, given the plethora of teachers who utilise social media both professionally and in the classroom. From The Leader Element, the Rebecca Dao / Graeme Green led workshop focusing on developing a framework to support wellbeing, is dealing with an important theme which I believe is often left out of educational discussions. It is certainly one which I will be putting on my list of presentations to engage with. Additionally, the Peter Mader lead session focusing on the ever-present and often difficult to navigate the divide between policy and practice will be interesting. The Learner Element contains two particular presentations which I am hoping to look at; one on helping students to understand and become active participants in their learning (led by Ed Cuthbertson and Prue Gill from Lanyon High School), which is a concept I am grappling with currently in my own practice and so has professional relevance, and the other is the final session, examining whether the benefits of technology are seen similarly by both educators and learners. The Educator Element contains a number of presentations which I would like to attend, but one in particular, led by Matt Esterman (@mesterman), focuses on how we as educators choose to spend our time and money vis-a-vis professional learning experiences, which holds great relevance for me personally. This follows on from, and links in well with a session led by Jacques du Toit which focuses on how educators can become twenty-first-century learners themselves, through practical examples of the use of technologies and social media. The Community Element contains the presentation my former teacher, Mr Chaffey, will be facilitating alongside Rachael Sowden, and focuses on engaging our students’ parents as a resource for student learning. Additionally, at the outset of The Community, Matt Esterman is leading a session which focuses on how schools communicate to their community, given the plethora of platforms now available for doing so and dealing with communication expectations from parents and staff. Education Nation is not limited to the Forums and The Elements. There will be a live #aussieEd event and The Great Debate, featuring Dr. David Zyngier and Dr. Kevin Donnelly going head-to-head on the age-old public education versus private education debate. A future article will contain more information about those events though I would encourage you to register your interest for the live #aussieEd event to assist the organisers with arranging the venue and pricing for that particular event. Conferences often leave you with an afterglow of conference excitement, yet the notes that are taken at conferences so often never see the light of day afterwards. I feel that this conference, with its topic tighter focus, and its spotlight on specific problems within education will create a situation where, after attending, you will be able to return your specific context with a series of steps of what you can do to begin resolving a specific problem or challenge that you are facing. I believe that the timing is right for a conference where we stop charging forward, taking on board a raft of new ideas, pedagogical strategies, tools, gadgets and fads and pause for a moment. We, and I include myself in this statement, need to ask ourselves more often why this tool, or pedagogical strategy? Education Nation will provide an opportunity for us to work with others to explore solutions to existing challenges in our education system and our specific contexts. I know that not every challenge I face will be addressed at Education Nation, nor would I expect it to be, however, after looking through the agendas, I am confident that I will come away with ideas on how to tackle at least one of my challenges with a view to resolving it, in addition to some ideas for chipping away at some other challenges.
On a personal note, I am very much excited to have an opportunity to see Mr. Chaffey (I just cannot bring myself to call him by his given name) again, as well as a range of other educators whom I know thanks to Twitter and my online PLN. I am also excited by the prospect of a conference which is working hard to think different and provoke constructive conversations. Will I see you there? “A teacher does not need to teach everything.” – Gavin Hays Welcome back for the review series from FutureSchools 2016. If you missed the previous article, you can find it here. This article will focus on the presentations by Gavin Hays and Jill Margerson, taking this series through to the afternoon break of day two. I have to admit that I entered this third session rather numb, mentally, feeling a touch of conference-itis, that sensation of having heard too many ideas and struggling to process them all. It still amazes me the number of people who sit there and do not appear top be taking any form of notes for later reflection, whether it be manual with a notebook and pen, or digital via some form of word processing app or Live-Tweeting. I would be lost without my notebook, but then, as the saying goes, different strokes for different folks. Gavin Hays (@gavhays) is from the Parramatta Marist High School and was speaking under the title PBL and STEM Mashup. Gavin began by speaking about how they had implemented Project Based Learning (PBL1) across Years Seven to Nine and then Problem Based Learning (PBL2) across Years Ten to Twelve. Gavin spoke about how PBL1 and PBL2 are both based around three key skills (top row in the PBL Jigsaw) that are supported by three attributes. Projects require authenticity, but this not necessarily mean based in the real-world or their local context, it means real and of significance to the students in some way. Limited PBL learning to the local context limits the scope of problems and projects. It was also discussed how groups are formed, sometimes teacher assigned, sometimes student formed, and that group roles are allocated, again, either by the teacher or determined within the group, as that is a realistic function of how groups often function in real-world contexts.
The second attribute that is required is that there should be active exploration involved, that it should generate wonder and curiosity and focus, acting as a springboard for possibilities rather than a ceiling for activities. Gavin stressed the point here that the teacher does not need to teach everything, that students do need to grapple with learning and pushing through struggles. Gavin then spoke about how they felt that they needed to explicitly teach the STEM content up front and how over time they eventually learned to trust their program and teachers were adding in the STEM content, concepts and skills organically. Students need to get to the point of frustration, and teachers need to provide scaffolding to allow them move beyond that, however that does not mean the scaffolding is provided immediately, at all times. There needs to be an opportunity for students to, potentially, work through something on their own. They found that students would often need three to four years to properly embed the attributes and skills that were being taught. The skill of collaboration did need to be explicitly taught, including how to manage differences within a group, assign roles, set deadlines and that over the four year program, students would complete in the vicinity of one hundred and eighty projects and that it was early in Year Eight where students seemed to connect the dots with group management, task delegation and deadlines and the impact that those skills could have on the final product. This led to a discussion about communication and how students needed to learn to communicate with each other and also with the whole cohort, which was facilitated through the requirement for a presentation of projects, with the audience expected to listen and ask probing questions, forcing the presenters to really know and engage with their product and the skills and concepts underpinning it in order to be able to answer questions on the fly and with confidence. STEM was additionally offered as an elective subject and was underpinned by a driving question which would necessitate being chunked for easier engagement, and assessment of the underlying problems and issues but that these driving questions would require significant understanding of a variety of concepts and skills across a range of curriculum areas and that the final design was first prototyped and tested, refined, re-prototyped, retested and then the final product produced. Gavin’s final point was that we, and our students, need to continue learning, always, as life never stops teaching, which was a sage point to finish on. I will halt this article there as it is Friday afternoon and I am still at school rather late and I very much want to go home. I will endeavour to get the next article, finishing out session three, tomorrow at some point. Until then, as always, thank you for reading. “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
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