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"If the Age of Sport has been all champagne and roses hitherto, then expect our love affair with its newly-acquired prominence to become increasingly tainted by scandals about cheating. Sport is losing its shine and allure" -Attributed to Martin Jacques Recently, an event occurred that captured the attention of the entire country and evoked outrage, disgust, and feelings of betrayal by the everyday citizen. Members of the men's Australian Cricket team were caught cheating. Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull labelled it "a shocking disappointment" and the furore on social media has been predictably savage. There are, I think, two parts to the conversation that we as a country need to have. Firstly, why are we surprised? I have been refereeing football (soccer) for several years (though taking a year or two off to be with Ms One) and I have heard from coaches, from parents, from players a disturbing amount of vitriol that all amounts to win at any costs. I have even seen this in under five's football. Five year old children being told to "cut him down," "run harder," and "what were you thinking? that was a stupid pass."  “Get to that Snitch before Malfoy or die trying, Harry, because we’ve got to win today, we’ve got to.” Oliver Wood, Gryffindor Quidditch Captain— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets What message is being given to our kids who idolise so many sports stars when this happens, what message do we give them when we coach our local Underage sporting team and we give messages akin to win ant any costs? We get athlete's who lose sight of professionalism, ethics, self-pride, and do whatever they can to win. Steve Smith, now ex-Captain of the men's Australian Cricket Team, said in his emotional press conference that "We spoke about it and thought it was a possible way to get an advantage. Obviously it didn't work." The Rules of Cricket (rule 41.3.2) state that "It is an offence for any player to take any action which changes the condition of the ball." Therefore, any action in breach of this, such as using sandpaper to scrape the ball, is cheating, not a possible way to get an advantage. What message are we sending to our kids when we coach them when we scream from the sidelines about how they are not trying hard enough or making stupid decisions? Are we in fact coaching? Or are we confusing them and hurting their ability to learn given that there is (generally) one coach for the team and it is probably not you?  When I was a pre-service teacher, I was involved in helping coach the school's Touch Football Team and attended a Gala Day with them and the actual coach, another teacher. We had one student in particular who was one of those kids; brilliant at any ball game he tried his hand at. He was, unquestionably, the star of the team and had a hand in nearly every try that was scored. Between two matches (we played four matches that day), he was involved in some deplorable sledging against another team, using language that I would never accept in the playground. I felt that it was enough to pull him from the team for the remaining games, and if it was my choice, I would have pulled him and had him returned to school immediately, with a long conversation about appropriate language, sporting conduct, and the role that off-field behaviour has for selection. However, I was over ruled. He was too important to the team and we did not stand a chance without this boy on the field. What message does that send? How will you address this cheating with your children? With the kids sports team that you coach? The second conversation that I think we need to have is why is this the thing that grips the nations attention and creates a furore and a national sense of self-righteous indignation and a feeling of betrayal, and demands for a change in culture and that action be taken, with the three players involved handed lengthy bans? Why was it not the 2002 Cronulla Sharks' pack-sex assault against a nineteen year old woman? Why was it not in 2009 when Adelaide Crows gave an indefinite-ban to Nathan Bock after was admitted to assaulting his then girlfriend but lifted it a week later because they were playing a strong team the next weekend? Why was it not a few years later when Bock received a two-match suspension for dodgy gambling about his own matches - a sentence twice as bad for hurting gambling as for hurting another human. There are so many other incidents that could be pointed to that it is not worth listing them. Credit to Clementine Ford for those I have listed, drawn from her article on 27 March, here.  I have to admit that I got caught up in the indignation and shock when I first heard about the cheating by Smith, Warner, and Bancroft. When I stopped to analyse it though, I think it was because we have become so used to hearing about various incidents from other sporting codes, such as rugby league and AFL, that it's not a surprise to hear about issues in those sports. For cricket, however, it did come as a surprise.  If you coach, or are a parent with a child who plays sport, consider the message you are sending when you yell and shout and carry on at sporting events. Think about the message it sends about the value of a game compared to the value of a person's dignity.
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“Seeking out people with different views, different perspectives, different ideas is often challenging, because it requires us to set aside judgment and open our minds. But we have to remind ourselves that to get beyond where we are, where I believe most of us are, we would all be be well served to choose our music carefully, to stop talking and listen to one another.” ― Susan Scott, Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst "Best" Practices of Business Today How often do you get to engage in research and conversations about what you have read in research with colleagues?
I have engaged ain and heard many conversations in staff rooms and classrooms across NSW. Many of them, most of them if am being honest, are about anything but pedagogy or education research. I peppered a colleague with questions about L3 when they were being trained in that, and learned a lot about it, and I have had sporadic conversations but there has never been a sustained focus. Recently I was visiting schools in regional NSW as part of my role with ClickView and happened to be able to tee up a time to catch up with Pete van Whiting and John Catterson. I was expecting to catch up for dinner and a few drinks at a pub; but they had other ideas and roped me into joining them as they recorded an episode of their podcast, Teachers Talking Teaching. I had only started listening to the podcast recently, but had managed to catch up and I thoroughly enjoy it. The banter is amusing, however, I enjoy listening to the conversations about educational research, or about articles that have been published about education. It is my experience that learningful conversations are not very common and so to be able to engage with the podcast is actually quite mentally stimulating. It also is interesting hearing two high school science teachers' thoughts on other sectors of education. In this particularly episode, John was reviewing a book chapter which discussed the problems around having specific teaching standards and curriculum, while Pete was discussing an article about violence towards teachers. It was a late night by the time I left, however, it was actually thoroughly enjoyable. The opportunity to engage in discussions around education theory, pedagogy, issues etc. is not one that comes up very often, and when it does, it has usually been with other primary teachers. So to be able to do so with two secondary teachers, who have a very different experience and perspective on teaching, was great. If you have not listened to the podcast before, I do recommend it, as Pete and John are both quite articulate when they decide to be, and also hold some differing views in some areas which makes for great conversation. To be able to discuss education from a more theoretical-practical perspective based on the articles was thoroughly enjoyable from a professional level and a nice change from the typical conversations that I hear in staff rooms revolving around whether or not assessment tasks have been written, or around the activities of certain students, or what was on television the previous night. Do you engage in pedagogy-based conversations at all? Occasionally? Sometimes but not as an instigator? I would be curious to understand why you do or do not. Leave a comment here or over on twitter. "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought." - Attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi The penultimate unit in the Flipped Learning Level II Certification program was focused on understanding how to find and engage with research, and was with Dr. Robert Talbert of Grand Valley State University (MI). This unit I think was one that was extremely accessible for everyone and that all teachers should work through. Given the rhetoric that is often present in the media and from politicians around the need for research-based teaching practice, this segment provided some very practical strategies for engaging with research. Robert acknowledged the challenge that paywalls present in preventing easy access to research, however, Google Scholar is a very good tool to utilise to help with that. It may be worth approaching a nearby university campus to see if you can arrange access to their library and therefore their databases and access research that way. Anyone who has been required to read research will know that journal articles are often dense, long, heavy on statistics, and use overly-complicated language. One strategy, as obvious as it is, to help determine whether it is going to be worth reading an article or not, is to read through the abstract, which provides a summary of the article. I discarded a number of articles in my research after reading the abstract, however, I still found myself reading articles that I would decide partway through were not actually going to be useful for me. Robert's advice was to skip straight to end and read the sections labelled discussion and conclusion. Robert pointed out that if these two sections, typically only a few paragraphs each in length, end up not yielding useful information then diving into the remainder of the article is not going to be worth the investment of time. It is such an obvious thing to do that I am disappointed in myself for not realising it while doing my own research. Robert also spoke about some strategies to help determine if the research was quality, well-conducted research or not. Initially, this revolved around the clarity of the questions that the research was investigating. If the question being asked is not clearly defined or not explicitly stated that should raise some potential alarm bells. As part of this, any variables, or restrictions that relate to the research need to be stated, including any survey instruments such as questionnaires. Critically, the methodology needs to be laid out clearly in order to allow for replication. Good research should be able to be replicated and achieve the same or very similar results.
There does often seem to be a disconnect between research and the classroom, however, there does not need to be. Google Scholar allows you to set alerts so that you receive an email with the titles of a number of articles that meet search criteria that you set. This allows you to simply scan through and perhaps identify one or two articles each week that you want to invest the time into reading. Another way of engaging with the research is to listen to podcasts where they explore research. Two very good podcasts that I listen to and recommend you listen to are The Education Review by Cameron Malcher, and Teachers Talking Teaching by John Catterson and Pete Whiting. Teachers talking Teaching is the less reverent podcast, however, both podcasts tackle education research and policy, and its implications for classroom and are worth listening to. As always, thank you for reading. "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun." - Mary Poppins Gamification (also referred to, sometimes interchangeably, as game-based, game-inspired, or game-centered learning) is something that I have written about in the past (such as this article) but not something that I have ever invested time into exploring or implementing. I refer to myself as a gamer, but a casual gamer rather than a hard-core gamer. I will happily escape into (at the moment) the Uncharted world and pretend that I am a treasure hunter, relax into some low-cognitive load FIFA18, or watch my wife play the incredibly beautifully written Final Fantasy series and marvel at how far computer graphics have come in the last thirty years. Take ninety seconds and watch the below video which shows the original Final Fantasy released in 1987 and reminisce about how amazed we were at the time to see these little pixels moving about the screen controlled by us, and then compare it to Final Fantasy 15 released in 2016 and marvel at how photorealistic much of the scenery is, the change in the music quality etc. However, gamification is not something that I have ever explored more deeply. I had my hands full on developing my pedagogy and classroom management. It was exciting to see that someone I know, Pete Whiting, was facilitating the gamification component of the Flipped Learning Certification Level II course. Flipped learning is the meta-strategy that supports other pedagogical approaches and Pete makes a very interesting comment early on that he could not see how they could get to gamification without using flipped learning as the backbone as flipped learning allows for the decentralisation of the classroom (i.e. the teacher does not need to be at the front of the class) that is needed for gamification to be implemented. Gamification, implementation of game mechanics, is also more familiar to us and students than we realise and this makes it easy to implement from an explanatory perspective. Think about your loyalty and rewards cards; buy nine coffees and get the tenth or similar. That is gamification of commerce. It is important to note that merely changing the mechanics from do this for an A to do this for 10XP is not in itself gamification. Gamification requires more thought than that and needs to be implemented well for it to be effective, both as a tool to generate engagement and as a tool for learning. This comes across in Yu-kai Chou's TEDx talk above when he comments that all games have some form of points, badges or leaderboards, yet not all games are engaging. Gamification should be about changing the focus from academic ability to academic effort. When students can see that if they put in the effort to complete the mission and therefore get the loot and the associated XP, thus leveling up for the next mission or quest, that changes the way they think about learning. This has ramifications for the I'm no good at [insert subject] so I don't bother trying. When genuinely implemented, it changes that mindset to being about effort, not about how good they are at something. By engaging in the missions and learning through them those students will potentially become more comfortable with the topics and thus change their mindset and openness to further learning. It is witnessing the eureka! moment that makes, in some ways, teaching such a joy. Paul Andersen says in the below TEDx Talk that it is "[t]hat look of learning, trying something new and failing and trying it again is something that we aspire to see in the eyes of our kids" and I think it is interesting, and somewhat disheartening that when it comes to video games, children are happy to fail and try again over and over until they achieve success, but in the classroom, when it comes to academic learning, our children are often defeated and want the answer when they fail the first time. What has happened that this is so? One thing that really came through is how the feedback to students and the application of different expectations is critical. This is not particularly revelatory, however, the way in which it is implemented is tweaked. The explicit expectations around students success criteria for the missions, the effort required, is different. Rather than have one expectation for all students and when you complete the mission you get the XP, there are, if you will, different difficulty levels. Those who could be referred to as being good at the game of school might be put on the hard difficulty level and have different expectations to achieve the XP than the student who struggles with a concept. This helps, as Pete remarks, with rewarding effort rather than the genetics and home life. Jon and Pete are both quite clear that the pedagogy behind gamification is much deeper and broader than the scope for the gamification unit of the flipped learning certification allowed for and that to get a true understanding, more time an exploration through other sources would be needed. One which they recommended was Goblin.Education, an online professional learning course which goes through the elements of gamification in education through game-based learning. Pete's unit was a little bit more in depth and practical than what I had been exposed to on gamification in the past and is something that I now feel a bit more comfortable with using in the classroom than previously. If you wanted to hear what Pete had to say, then I would encourage you to click on the button above to register for the Level II flipped learning certification (after you have completed the level I certification). I have added Goblin to my list of courses to look at but for now, gamification is something that I do believe has a solid place in the classroom, when it is implemented well.
As always, thank you for reading. 
“This is going to be really stats heavy and so I won’t be offended if you want to leave.” – Peter Whiting
Welcome back for part four in my review of FlipCon Adelaide. If you have missed the previous articles, you can find them by clicking here. For whatever reason, I had not registered for a session after Aimee Shattock’s and I decided to drop in on Peter Whiting’s (@mr_van_w) session where would be exploring the results from an action research project which was recently peer reviewed and published (you can find it here). Statistics and research is not a flavour that everyone enjoys and it was a small group in the room, however, it was, for me, an incredibly interesting session and I got a real kick out of hearing about the methodologies and the statistical results; it reignited a desire to engage in education research. It was a good session even before Peter spoke, however, as I saw this on the wall, encouraging a growth mindset and a persistent attitude to learning.
Peter spoke about his background, that he was a scientist before entering the teaching profession and so his research was driven by a science mindset, looking at the story told by the data. He also indicated that his working environment is hostile in many ways to flipped learning as a pedagogical strategy, but that the school has moved to action research as a basis for professional development, which sounds strategically sensible, depending on what guidelines are provided for topics of research and the structure. I had some conversations around this topic during the social event which I was intrigued by and will discuss further in a later article.
The action research was driven by two focus questions, what was the impact on student engagement and student learning outcomes when flipped content is made either by their own teacher, a team teacher or an external provider. It is an interesting question as the general feedback that highly experienced flipped educators give is that creation is better than curation for flipped content. Peter spoke about the relationship that he and his team teacher have which other as being very productive and safe vis-a-vis their ability to provide open and frank feedback to each other and that this was essential to the quality of their flipped content and also to the action research project.
This also provided the first departure point from standard flipped learning discourse as Peter noted that they do not necessarily have students engaging with video content in the individual learning space and therefore refer to the flipped content as learning objects or LOs.This allows for a discussion about the flipped content without limiting the discussion to video content.
The research was structured to allow for a number of data points. Peter explained that in a typical action research project, for each query, three data points are required. To this end, the research was structured to allow for a number of data collection points, with two sets of two parallel classes being utilised (an A and B class in each of Stage Four and Stage Five science) to allow for comparisons in different learning contexts. This enabled a comparison of the effect on engagement and outcome as a result of teacher-created, team-teach created or externally created LOs. The overall sample size was fifty-five students and Peter said that he would have liked to have had a larger sample size, however, that was what he had to work with. If you are not familiar with what team teaching is and why that is a topic of potential interest for research, you can find a good overview here.
Peter then did what he promised and went into statistics-mode. The first results that we were shown were the overall results around the engagement levels in the individual space (what would traditionally be referred to as homework). These showed markedly different results between teacher-created LOs and team teacher-created LOs; 91% completion in comparison to 85%. This trend continued when examined in the same way with the data clustered by the unit of study or topic.
The above photo is not the greatest, however, the darker column is Class A and the lighter column is Class B. The results demonstrated that students engaged with the LOs much more frequently and with greater interest when they were created by the class teacher, irrespective of the topic of study. The Class A teacher developed the LOs for the second unit, whilst the Class B teacher prepared the LOs for the first and third units and you can see the interaction patterns quite clearly in the results. It is interesting to note that the subject or topic of the unit (appears) not to have had any impact on the average results and I would be curious to hear about any inferences or conclusions that were made around that.
Following on from that, bookwork results were examined, and student effort was recorded using predetermined success criteria, with the results being clustered together by alternate and classroom teacher. It was reported that there was a significant different between the two sets of results; when students’ book-work marks were clustered together according to the book-work marks from their own and the alternate teacher. Peter reported that this indicated to them that students were taking detailed notes beyond the bare minimum when the learning object being used was created by their own teacher rather than the alternate teacher. Interestingly, it was also reported that as the end of the year drew closer the disparity between the two columns (book work marks for own vs alternate teacher) lessened. I am not sure what results you could infer from this other than potentially an impact of studying for impending exams or major in-class assessment tasks/tests. I do not recall what Peter said, if anything, about this, but he noted it as interesting.
Students were asked directly about whether they had a preference for the LOs that their teacher created in comparison to an alternate teacher and it is telling that although 70% of students thought the LOs were equivalent vis-a-vis quality, that 47% preferred the LOs developed by their own teacher. Peter did acknowledge that 49% of students were neutral on that question; that they did not mind either way. I found it very interesting that such a large proportion of students indicated they did not mind either way. A question along these lines was asked during the primary discussion panel (read the article here) and Matthew Burns (@burnsmatthew) responded that he asks his students about whether they prefer flipped pedagogies or traditional pedagogies. It is a slightly different question with a different focus, however, as far as I am aware, Matt creates the vast majority of his content and he indicated a roughly 70% / 10% / 20% split between preference of flipped/blended/traditional pedagogies. I do not know if Matt has done any similar research into the impacts of third-party created flipped content/LOs.
The above graph was shown to us next and it is a very intriguing set of results. It demonstrates that although there is a preference for teacher-created LOs, that the measured summative metrics revealed no statistically significant variance in the achievement of learning outcomes. This has significance for teachers interested in flipped learning as a pedagogical strategy. Engagement in the classroom or group learning time is an important factor in classroom management and the perception of whether you are a good teacher. John Hattie (@john_hattie) has written extensively around effect sizes, and engagement has an effect size of 0.45 which is not insignificant.
One potential reason for the preference for teacher-created LOs is that students are used to you; your vocal rhythms, patterns, tonal quality, and lilts, however, it is key that we remember that the LOs are not everything. Flipped learning is about videos, primarily, but that is not the goal of flipped learning. The goal of flipped learning to reclaim time for deeper learning and engagement with higher level thinking as envisioned on the reimagined Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Retrieved from tinyurl.com/zh44r2v on 30 November 2016
Peter related that Derek Muller (@Veritasium) completed a study for a PhD, which he (Peter) summarised as can we learn stuff from videos – the short answer from Derek is no. The learning happens in the class.” He pointed out that a video provides background and foundational information, but that it does not necessarily provide a context, an application or a synthesis of the skill or concept; that is what the classroom time needs to be used and as Jon Bergmann pointed out in his keynote address earlier that morning, the biggest mistake in implementing flipped pedagogies is not using the reclaimed group space time well.
The video does not teach students how to think critically around a topic or provide them with strategies for synthesising new information or evaluating the impacts of something, that is our role as teachers, to provide the opportunity for students to take that information and apply, analyse, evaluate and create with it. It provides the opportunity for teachers to build and strengthen the relationships with students which has a sizable effect size (0.52) on student learning outcomes according to Hattie.
We moved onto discussions around the human research ethics approval (HRECs), requirements around which varies depending on the jurisdiction. Essentially though, if the research is in-house for reflection and improvement of practice, ethical approval is not strictly necessary (unless otherwise indicated in your State or Territory), though it is still a good idea. If you intend to publish or share the results externally, then it becomes necessary. Even if it was not necessary, the process of completing a HRECs application is very useful. I found that it helped me to crystallise exactly what my guiding question was and how was going to go about researching that and understanding the results. Peter also said that there is money available via grants for research assistants and that we simply need to go through the processes. This was not something I was aware of, however, it would be very useful to have someone who can collect, collate and assist in data analysis.
We were told that the most basic interpretation of action research methodology is to ask a question, enact a plan to gather data, reflect and reiterate. The complication or the challenge comes from the need to continually ask so what and where to from here when the data is collected and conclusions have been drawn at each iterative step.
The question was asked how far away from your own institution do you go before content becomes external? Is it external content if it by anyone outside of your own Stage or Faculty? Your own school? your Local Learning Community or Dioecese? That, Peter indicated, is the next step for the research.
I personally found the session with Peter to be exciting and reinvigorating. My current long-term career goal is to end up in the education research space. I feel like this will be ongoing or multiple over a period of time, action research projects where specific questions are researched and iterations made to pedagogical practice and strategy with the end goal being to share results at each step for feedback and peer review (whether this is formalised for publication or merely social peer review through trusted colleagues I do not know). I am a teacher first and a researcher second, however, I genuinely enjoyed the process of reviewing the literature, synthesising it, researching, analysing the data and then writing the thesis. I would like to take it to the next step and be able to make iterative changes to my practice and to be able to share those results with peers. That is largely why I maintain this blog and also try to maintain the formal-ish academic style of writing, so that I do not lose the ability to write in that style when ( am determined it will be when not if) I get the opportunity to dig into some research again.
Thank you as always for reading this rather long article. I know that research and statistics is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I personally really enjoyed Peter’s session. We enjoyed a long conversation around it later on over dinner and drinks, and I daresay that when I read his article that I will have further questions for him. I would like to hear your thoughts on the research described and what direction you think it could go in next and what questions you feel would be valuable for research. |
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