Who's it For?

Workload is always a hot topic for teachers and I have just come through a particularly tough time myself.  I really love my core job.  Teaching young people is great.  Being with youngsters day in day out may not be everyone's cup of tea, but they have enormous energy and they do not have the cynicism and world weariness of so many adults.  Young adults so often live for the moment and enjoy life and being with them is a real privilege.

Introducing them to new ideas and new skills is an enticing challenge. Thinking through a way of introducing a difficult concept and then leading learners through a well planned and resourced sequence of lessons is what I enjoy; it is why I am a teacher.

Unfortunately, during the last few weeks I confess, I have taken by eye off the teaching ball and I have been concentrating on admin.  If I don't complete admin tasks on time I will get it in the neck from someone, but if my lessons are a little below parr when I am not being observed, then no-one will notice - and that's my core responsibility.

The main problem I have been dealing with is completing different tasks for different people - all in the same time frame.  I am sure that some of you are already thinking that with a little better time management I could have spread these tasks out.  Actually, if the documents that I have been working on are to be current and valid, I could not spread out the tasks; they all really did need doing in the same time span.

Teachers do not have one boss, as most people in other industries do.  For some tasks I am responsible to my department, for other to my pastoral team, for others to the senior leadership team, and for others to outside agencies such as the local authority or exam boards.  Nicky Morgan, the current Education Secretary, recently ran a workload survey in conjunction with the TES, which was certainly a step in the right direction.  I am certain that one of the main drivers of teachers' workload problems is that we all serve several bosses.  If each of these bosses demands a time limited task to be completed at the same time, the candle gets burned at both ends and the teacher in the middle gets burnt out.  Each of the tasks will probably be very valuable but the different bosses do not liaise with each other and coordinate the work, and in some cases this would be impossible, but it is still the teacher who is left to square the circle of demands on his time.

It seems to me that despite schools' best intentions - and my school really does prioritise teaching and learning - it is too easy for the teacher's core activity to be superseded by admin that come from too many sources, which cannot be right.

Too Late?

In another time and in another place, I used to be a physics teacher.  Everyone in the department had dreadful problems introducing simple formulae, such as speed = distance/time, to GCSE classes.  The resistance to the idea that we could use mathematical techniques in science lessons was immense and deeply rooted.  It was very clear that in the learners' conception of science, there was no place for calculations.  Of course their view of science and what it included had been formed by their experience in school over the previous nine years.  Let's face it, if they hadn't encountered formulae in science in all this time, then perhaps they had a point.

All those years ago, we came up with a radical solution.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of GCSE learners found using formulae too challenging, we decided that learners in Year 7 should get to grips with these same simple formulae.  These Year 7 learners, who where still forming in their minds a picture of science and what it included, could easily do the calculations that GCSE students couldn't cope with.  They could manipulate the formulae so that they could work out distance traveled given speed and time - those GCSE learners certainly would not do this.

I am certain that this was nothing to do with 'ability'.  I am sure that it was more a case of learners closing their mind to things that they did not want to do, or to things that they perceived had no place in the subject.  By introducing the concept as early as we could we broke down these barriers and learners accepted that the concept had a valid place in the subject and that it was something they should embrace.

In the last couple of months I have encountered something similar.  As you will no doubt know, ICT is no more in schools and it has been replace with Computing.  For all of our Key Stage 3 learners this is new, although we have been teaching aspects of Computing for a considerable time.  In Year 9 we are teaching all sorts of concepts that will probably end up in either the Year 7 or 8 curriculum, once things settles down.  One of these concepts is binary.  I have devised a series of lessons to take learners through the basics of binary.  When I taught these lessons to Year 9s including 'top set' learners, I met a great deal of resistance.  Many of the learners had the opinion that concepts of number had no place in their lessons with computers.  Several learners really struggled with the work.  This was a big contrast to the way in which the Year 8 learners tackled the exactly the same work.  Almost without exception, my mixed ability Year 8 learners tackled all of the work quickly, accurately and without complaint.  The only explanation can be that the Year 9 learners, who were on paper 'higher ability', had created barriers to learning in their minds.  I am certain that it was more a case of digging their heels in and not engaging with the task as well as they might.

So, what can you take away from these anecdotes?  Learners construct their own vision of the limits of a subject, which may be different from the teacher's conception of the subject.  These limits are set by experience and their experience needs to be broadened out while they are still creating their idea of the content of the subject.  Also, don't under estimate younger learners; they are often capable of more than you might imagine.  So, if your exam classes are struggling with a concept or idea, try introducing it to them when they are younger when their ideas are still developing.

What's The Point?

As any experienced teacher will know, being crystal clear about the objectives of a lesson is vital to success.  But an even more vital question is: what should those objectives be?

We all have national curriculum programmes of study or exam specifications to cover and rightly, if we don't get these covered in the allotted time then we will be pulled up for it.  Most schemes of work are devised with the idea of covering the material in a given specification and the scheme will ensure that everything is covered in a given number of lessons.  There will also be time allocated to completing any controlled assessment or coursework, if there is any for that subject.

This is all very well, but inevitably, some learners will not make the progress that they should and some will be frustrated when they don't 'get' things that they think they should.  These learners can be in danger of their progress stopping altogether and they can become stuck.  Once learners are stuck, as any teacher knows, it can be a really difficult job to get them progressing again.

If learners are to progress at all they need certain attitudes.  Some learners come to us with these attitudes fairly well embedded and others come to us without them.  There has been a lot written recently about Dweck's growth mindset and encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset.  To an extent I am thinking of the attitudes that learners need in order to display a growth mindset, attitudes such as perseverance, reflection, risk taking, independence, collaboration, and realising that they are responsible for their own learning and that learning is not inflicted upon them.  I am certain that learners will not make the progress expected of them unless they are at least aware of these characteristics or even better, they have them embedded in their actions.

It is clear that lower achievers, and in fact some higher achievers, do not have these characteristics and progress for them, at least in some areas is difficult.  I firmly believe that for this group of students it is worth having lessons where the objective is to improve an attitude to learning, such as perseverance or risk taking.  The lesson can be successfully delivered through the medium of the subject that the learner is studying.  This is one of the occasions where displaying the objectives at the start of the lesson would make the lesson less effective.  It is important they the learners believe, at least initially, that they aren't doing anything out of the ordinary.  The lesson will be more effective if the objective emerges naturally from the tasks that the learners are engaged in during the lesson.

In my subject, computing, it is vital that the learners are risk takers and will persevere in the face of failure if they are to progress.  It is vanishingly rare a programmer working on a program will only meet success.  The usually experience is that a programmer will meet a series of setbacks - failure - that need to be overcome before the program works properly.  Recently I gave my Year 9 class a series of programming tasks of increasing difficulty.  The first ones they could do without too much effort, but when they were attempting the later ones they were experiencing more and more failures - increasingly they needed to persevere and take risks.

At the end of the lesson I asked the students how they felt when they were doing a task and failing repeatedly.  They could describe this really well; they talked about anger, frustration and annoyance.  I then asked them how they felt when they had completed a really difficult level.  Once more, their replies were excellent - elation, ecstatic and overjoyed.  I asked them to relate these two feelings and they soon realised that there was a direct relationship: the more they suffered the greater the feeling of success.  I then related this to perseverance and risk taking.  Most of them took on board the idea that these too attitudes are a requirement for success in programming.

I am certain that this experience will help the learners when we go on to more complex tasks.  At the very least I will be able to say to them, "Do you remember how you struggled and how you felt when you were successful?  You need to persevere and take risks on this task too.  Then you'll feel the success."

So, You Want To Engage Your Learners More Effectively?

Do you want to know why some learners are really disengaged from lessons?  If you want to get an idea across to your learners then you have to give them some sort of emotional stake in their learning.  Advertising executives and politicians have known this for years.  Cars are not sold on their mpg figures and the capacity of their boot.  They are sold by appealing to the buyer's emotions.  For years Audi has sold its cars with the slogan, "Vorsprung durch Technik."  The fact that few people know what it means does not matter.  People just assume that it has something to do with quality German engineering and therefore it must be good.  All the talk in the political arena about immigration has little to do with the facts; politicians are blatantly appealing to voters' emotions.

So, what has this got to do with the classroom?  If you want to engage your learners then you really should try to engage their emotions.  Imagine a lesson about nuclear power.  Imagine that the teacher has put the objective on the board: to understand the advantages and and disadvantages of nuclear power.  I bet that more than 50% of the class would turn off as soon as they read that.  Now imagine the next door classroom where the teachers has put up a headline: "Permission to Build Nuclear Station in [insert name of the next town] Granted," along with a photo of a nuclear power station.  I bet there would be a buzz in the room straight away.  Suddenly, the learners have a stake in the lesson.  The lesson could be constructed to look at the advantages and disadvantages and next lesson there could be a full blown debate about the issue.  I am certain that, in their research, learners would unearth most of the hard facts required in this science lesson.

Recently a colleague started a Year 10 lesson by telling the class that Facebook would be enforcing a strict minimum age limit of 16, and that all the accounts of those under this age would be wiped.  As you can imagine, the learners were engaged from that first moment.  The only problem was containing and channeling the students' reaction effectively.  I am sure that the lesson was far more memorable than, objective: the advantages and disadvantages of social networks.

A few days ago I taught a lesson about copyright.  I put up on the board a series of scenarios for the students to consider.  Is it alright to copy homework?  Is is alright to copy a cd to listen to in the car,  or to give it to a friend, or to sell it?  What about downloading music?  Or using a photo you have found on the internet on your Facebook page?  All the questions were designed to be issues that the learners deal with themselves.  I put the questions up and let them talk.  I did not intervene, I just let the discussion develop and it was very interesting hearing the different points of view that the learners expressed.  Eventually we came round to the idea of copyright and why it exists.  Again, the learners' reaction and engagement was far better that if I had started with, objective: understanding copyright.

If you really want to engage your learners in their learning, you must engage their emotions.  You must provoke a reaction so that they really think about what you are presenting them with.  this is especially important if what you are teaching is very factual.  It is a bit like poking a stick into a wasps' nest; you get a reaction, you get emotional involvement, and you get engagement.

Playground Culture

I was amazed to hear my son utter the immortal words, "Quis...ego," when he came home from his school, which is a 'bog standard comprehensive'.  When I was a schoolboy - in the depths of the last century - at a traditional English school where we studied Latin, there were often cries of "Quis" closely followed by "Ego".  Us boys were so lacking in gumption that it took our Latin teacher to explain to us why we used these terms.  Quis is Latin for 'who?'  Quis was called when someone had something that they did not want any longer.  It may have been some food, a marble, a conker or other small item.  So, quis was code for 'who wants it?'  Ego means 'I'.  So the call of 'Ego' simply showed that the caller wanted the item.  The first person to call ego received it, which meant that at times there was a veritable chorus of boys shouting 'Ego!' You has to watch out as sometimes the item was something that you really didn't want, rubbish, for example.

As soon as I heard the phrase I quizzed by son about it and how it is used in the playground.  He confirmed that it is used in exactly the same way as it was in my school which is over 300 miles and over 30 years away.  I asked him if he knew where the words came from and he had no idea - much as I hadn't all those years before.  My son had more of an excuse though; Latin is not taught in his school and hasn't been for decades.

I have to say that I was secretly pleased that this tradition from my own school days is being continued but I would love to know how it has survived.  I would like to think that it has been used in the playground all that time and it has been passed on from generation to generation without a break.  There is another possibility.  Perhaps it has been reintroduced into the school by a pupil from another school who has brought the tradition with him.  I think I may well have to do a little detective work on this one.

How ever this piece of playground lore has survived, it is interesting that it has.  It has also outlived the school subject that brought it into being by some margin.  This devise clearly has an ongoing currency in schoolboy culture or it certainly would have fallen out of use.  It would be interesting to know if my son's children will use 'quis...ego' in their playgrounds in years to come; I know my father would have certainly have recognised it.

In a Position to Learn?

Some of you will know that besides teaching, I coach rugby. I was coaching scrummaging recently to two groups. One group consisted of fairly experienced scrummagers who had played regularly for both the school team and their rugby club for a number of years. The other group were complete scrummaging novices.  I went through the absolute basics with both groups, mainly concerning achieving the correct body positions. It was interesting that at the end of the session, all the novices had better technique than all the experienced players.  It was clear that the experienced players had got away with poor technique and had been fairly successful with it and they were not very receptive to having their technique questioned and making an effort to improve it.

For me, there are several lessons for the classroom here. First, people who have no preconceptions can often progress fastest as there is nothing to unlearn, providing that the learner wants to learn the new skill. The learner's mind must be opened up to learning and then rapid progress is possible. This emphasises the importance of high quality first teaching. If the skill is taught rigorously and robustly then a new skill can be established quickly.  On the other hand, if the skill is taught poorly and a less than optimal technique is taught, then the learner can be at a permanent disadvantage.

Second, if the basics are not practised then the skill will deteriorate and bringing the skill back up to scratch can be difficult.  The learner may well think that they can perform the skill sufficiently well, let's face it, their experience tells them that they are right.  This shows that basics must not be taken for granted and that they need emphasising and making explicit especially when more advanced skills are being worked on. It is important that previous work is revisited and key points brought out before more advanced ideas are introduced.  This can lead to people moaning that they've done this before.  The trick is to dress up old ideas in new clothes so that learners don't necessarily recognise that they are doing the same thing again.  Changing context can work well here.  We have already seen that a skill can be established quickly with high quality first teaching, but it can only become embedded if it is revisited.

Third, people who think that they know what they are doing can be reluctant learners. Perhaps these people believe that they are expert because there experience tells then that they are doing well.  They are often unaware that another level of learning exists and, because they do not believe that another level exists they are unable to access it. These people simply rehearse their own tried and tested method without really engaging with a more expert mode. Perhaps they need to be put in a situation where their method no longer works and they are forced to confront the shortcomings in their method.  The challenge is to get these people to realise that their own method can be improved upon and that a more refined method may be more efficient and require less effort on their part.

Finally, I really do believe that teachers who get out of the classroom and do other things become better teachers.  I often find it interesting when inspiration strikes.  So, get outside the classroom and keep your eyes and ears open, you never know when you might get a deeper insight into your teaching.

It's Hard...

Computer Science; it's hard, and here's why.

Imagine a spreadsheet.  A spreadsheet that is being developed by the manager of your friendly local cinema.  He has been told to make a spreadsheet to predict how many seats he needs to sell on a Saturday night to break even.  It wouldn't be a huge surprise if the manager couldn't do this, despite spreadsheets routinely being used by school children.  The difficulty is that the problem is definitely at the top end of Bloom's.  It's hard.

First of all the problem has to be broken down into more manageable parts, perhaps the income and expenditure.  Let's look at the income in a little more detail.  There is ticket sales.  There has to be a prediction of the number of tickets that are likely to be sold.  This prediction could be based on how well similar films have done; the time of year and the weather amongst other factors.  The manager has control of the ticket prices so now it should be a simple matter to work out income from the tickets.  But how many of these punters will buy popcorn? Or coke?  This will require more analysis.  What about advertising?  You can see that modelling the income is not straight forward, and I haven't even touched on the expenditure.

Even at Key Stage 3 level, it's hard.  Using the scenario above, a KS3 example spreadsheet might automatically add up the number of seats occupied by adults and the number of seats occupied by children.  An instruction might be, "Add a formula to the spreadsheet to work out the total number of seats sold."  At first sight you might think that that the instruction is fairly straight forward but learners fail at several levels.  First they need to be able to understand the question.  Some lack the literacy skills needed to do this.  Then they need to analyse the question to work out the arithmetic required to solve the question.  Then they need to add a further layer of abstraction to translate the arithmetic into a formula using cell references from the existing spreadsheet.  This one seemingly simple instruction must fit well up on Bloom's taxonomy.  In other words, easy spreadsheet tasks are hard!  They rely on well developed skills from other areas, plus an extra layer of abstraction.

Footnote: If I was writing this post last year I could have written exactly the same thing, but with a different first line - ICT; it's hard, and here's why.  It is curious that in society at large, ICT is seen as 'easy' and Computer Science is seen as 'hard'.  I cannot understand this.  Is it because the majority of the population use computers and think that they are doing ICT but are bewildered about how they work?

Mentoring

I have frequently had the privilege of mentoring teachers who are new to the profession and it is certainly an aspect of my role that I really value - and I know that not all mentors do.  I have learned more about teaching from my role as a mentor than from almost any other CPD experience.  Observing a new teacher's lessons forces you to reflect on your own practice.  Sometimes you will see things that new colleagues do that you could incorporate in your own teaching.  Certainly, feeding back on other people’s work forces you to reflect more critically on your own work

No matter how much my own teaching benefits from me being a mentor, the main task is to nurture a young professional.  My best advice is that you have to start the process from where they are and not where you would like them to be.  Before a new PGCE student's first lesson I will tell them that however it goes, that is their starting point and we will move it on from there - and all first lessons will be different.  It is crucial to identify what a trainee’s initial steps will be in improving their practice – and these next steps will be different for different trainees.

One of the main skills of a mentor is knowing how to encourage your trainee to move on.  I am certain that I could write a huge list of suggestions after that first lesson, and if I concentrated on everything that was wrong with the lesson I could crush a fledgling career very quickly - but that would serve no purpose.  The trick is to use your judgement to decide which is the most important aspect, or possibly two aspects, that trainee can work on and improve first.  Once these aspects are improving, then it will be time to move to another aspect or two.  For some colleagues, progress will be faster than it is for others and that is absolutely fine.

The progress rate of trainees can be frustrating for mentors.  There are always times when progress is really rapid and this is really satisfying for the mentors.  This is often followed by a period of little or no progress which is when a mentor can become frustrated.  In fact, this is usually the time when the previous rapid progress is being embedded and it is a necessary part of the process.  With most trainees, after a short period of slow progress, another period of rapid progress follows.  If you drew a graph of progress against time, it would look a little like a stair case; it would have periods of rapid growth followed by slow growth, with the process repeated several times.

Expert experienced teachers are reflective teachers.  Reflection is an intrinsic part of being an expert teacher and it is important to start building this characteristic early on in a new teacher's career.  Initially, trainees will need help with reflecting on their work and asking questions that are too open or too closed will not be helpful.  It is very important that trainees reflect on their successes.  As a profession we are very good at focussing on what needs to be improved and we are not so good at recognising what we are good at.  I am convinced that we all need to recognise our successes, new trainees especially, and then it is easier to look at what needs to be improved in a positive way.  Initially the key questions to ask trainees are: what went well, and secondly, what do you need to improve.  That second question can be tweaked to, what is the one key thing that you need to improve.  As time goes on and the trainee has more experience of teaching and observing more experience colleagues, I change the second question to, what could you do to improve the lesson.  As always, it is far more powerful if the trainee can learn to solve his own problems.

At the start of the process the mentor will be driving the process quite hard.  Over time this should change and with a good trainee, by the end of the process they should be driving it.  Remember, all trainees are different and they all progress at different rates and need help with different aspects of their work.  They are all individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses that they need to work on.

One final piece of advice that I would like to add.  Don't forget where you came from.  Once upon a time all mentors were inexperienced teachers with a great deal to learn once.

Self Regulation

Self-regulation must be one of the qualities that teachers hope to instil in young people but too often the actions of teachers actually undermine self-regulation.  Research has shown that state school students do better at university than public school students.  I am certain that self-regulation - or lack of it - is at least partly behind these findings.  Public school pupils' lives are regulated from when they get up until they go to sleep.  They do not have the opportunity not to do homework because they are supervised in prep.  There is no surprise that this system gives good exam results especially when you factor in that distractions such as paid work are missing too.  But equally, it is no surprise that former public school pupils do not cope so well when they have to organise their own lives.  The urge to party that little bit too hard at the expense of work can be too hard to resist.

Average state school students will have had a different experience.  They will usually have had to organise their own homework and when they get older, typically they will get part time jobs.  In the short term these can be distractions and a certain proportion of them don't do well in the exams because the job becomes a little too full time and study a little too part time, but those who succeed will have learned the art of prioritising and will have started on the path to being self-regulated adults.

Teachers can, for the best of motives, undermine their learners' self-regulation.  I was talking to a well-respected and experienced teacher recently who said that if she didn't get an A* for a particular young man in his class, she would have failed - we'll see how she did in August.  This comment worried me.  If she meant that she would have failed if she did not create the right environment with the right stimuli do enable the young man to gain an A* for himself, and hierversion was only a short hand, then I have no problem with her stance.  But if she really meant what she said I am concerned.  Ultimately all our learners have to take responsibility for their results, not only at school but throughout their lives afterwards.  If a teacher thinks that she can get a result for a learner then that teacher is taking power from the learner and certainly undermining self-regulation.  Success is only true success if failure is a possibility and can only really be truly celebrated if there is real responsibility for that success.  I was also worried because the comment was made with a number of less experienced teachers present and I worry that they will take this comment to heart.

In a similar vein, I recently saw some work about inclusion, and in very large letters I saw, 'The teacher is responsible for behaviour.'  I am so pleased I don't work in that school, and if I did, I wouldn't for much longer.  Whichever way you look at it, every person in a school is responsible for their own behaviour.  I can only imagine the stress level if I was told I was responsible for the behaviour of every child in every one of my lessons.  I am not responsible for anyone else's behaviour and no reasonable person would expect me to be.  I am, however, responsible for carrying out the school's behaviour policy and maintaining an environment where poor behaviour is challenged and good behaviour is rewarded.  I am responsible for maintaining good relationships with all the learners I have responsibly for.  But this does not amount to, 'The teacher is responsible for behaviour.'  Once more, this statement undermines young people's self-regulation by making someone else responsible for their actions.  There is only one person responsible for their actions, and it isn't their teacher.

Building self-regulation must mean that young people take responsibility for their own actions.  This must also mean that they have the space to get things wrong and to make the wrong choices, and teachers need to recognise this.  If they have the opportunity to do this in the relatively safe environment of school then they should became more self-regulating which should mean that they have more fulfilling lives into adulthood.

What Do They Think?

Hattie tells us that feedback has one of the biggest effect sizes on learners' outcomes.  If this is the case, then surely feedback on teaching should have a large effect on teachers' outcomes too.  Having said that, in many schools teachers receive very little feedback on their teaching except from the more formal observations required by performance management.

Everyday, teachers are observed by people who see more lessons that any headteacher or inspector I know - the learners themselves.  These people know intimately what teaching styles, activities and methods work for them.  They know what attributes a good teacher has and they know what they can get away with!  The learners know their teachers better than anyone.  They are a massive reservoir of knowledge of teaching that should be tapped into.

I did tap into their collective experience that other day.  I asked them to reflect on my teaching and everything that I do in the classroom.  I gave each of them three sticky notes.  I asked them to write down the things in my teaching that they want me to Keep.  I asked them to note down those things that they like about my teaching that they would like me to do more of; the things they want me to Grow.  Finally, I asked them to write about the aspects of my teaching that they would like to Challenge; the aspects that they did not like or those that they would like me to change.  I divided my board into three sections: Keep, Grow and Challenge.  I told them that they could use their sticky notes for 3 Keeps; or 3 Challenges; or 2 Grows and a Challenge; or any combination that they liked.  When they finished their notes they stuck them on the board in the appropriate column.  Actually, there was a fourth category.  If they wanted to tell me something personal to them, then they could stick their note on my desk.

The results were very interesting and showed me that I am doing a great deal right although they have challenged me too.  I was really pleased that the learners liked some of the quirky things that I have tried, such as using music to time things.  I have pieces of music that last 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds and 2 minutes.  They told me to keep these, along with the Thunderbirds 5,4,3,2,1, countdown that I use.

For a long time I have tried to reduce the amount of time that I spend talking to the class.  I have tried to get more from my students through questioning and other prompts, rather than just telling them.  I was really pleased that the learners liked the quality of explanations that I give them.  They liked the way that I explain things and make them appear simple.  They did, however, say that I still talk too much.  This is something I will have to reflect on and look into ways that I can reduce the amount of time that I spend talking to them even further.  I already have some ideas!

With one of my classes have I taken time out of teaching my subject to reflect on what it is to be an effective learner.  I have introduced them to the idea of 'My Learning Universe' in order to get them to realise that they are the most important person who can influence their learning because too many of them, particularly the lower 'ability' ones, think that learning is done to them.  They have reflected on the qualities that their learning hero - Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games - has that makes her able to learn effectively.  They have transformed this to look at the qualities they need to have to be their own learning hero.  I was really pleased to see that some learners identified this as an area that they would like me to grow.  It is very clear that many learners are interested in their own learning, which has to be a good thing.

In my higher group it was fairly clear that they did not like a seating plan and that they wanted to sit where they wanted to.  At the end of the feedback session we had a class chat about this and why I use a seating plan.  The seating plans stay but at least the learners understand their purpose a little better.  My lower group said that they wanted to be allowed to listen to their own music more when they are working.  Again, it won't happen but we discussed it and they know the rationale behind my position!  It was interesting that the quality of the feedback that I received from the higher group was in the main more informative than the quality of feedback from the lower group, which really is not surprising.  The higher group concentrated on things that affect their learning whereas in the lower group there were more comments about peripheral issues.

All in all, this was a really worthwhile exercise and very reassuring that I am going in the right direction.  One of the most reassuring comments was - Keep: your teaching style.

Independent Learning?

We all want to foster independent learning in our classrooms, right?  Be careful what you wish for!

Independent learners in the end take charge of their own learning and use their teachers to help them on their own learning journey, which will lead them to the peak of academic success in the form of outstanding exam results.  Over the years I have come across these learners and perhaps I have played a part in creating them.  Paradoxically, these learners are also the ones who take up a lot of teacher time because of - not despite - their independence.  They will be asking more questions, and questions at a deeper level.  In my subject they will be looking to make products in novel ways or using advanced techniques that others would not consider.  In fact these independent learners demand more support than more dependent learners: strange but true.  More dependent learners are not aware that they need the support, are reluctant to ask for it or are unaware of the next level so cannot ask about it.  These independent learners that any teacher loves to teach; they challenge themselves and they challenge their teachers.  They also deliver exceptional exam results. 

There is another breed of independent learner that I have come across.  These come fully formed into the classroom; I cannot take any credit in their creation.  These learners also take responsibility for their learning but they do not recognise the constraints of the school curriculum and I have to say that computing and physics - my subjects - attract more than their fair share of this breed of independent learner.  These learners also explore levels that ordinary learners are unaware of.  One of these learners once tried to produce a laptop version of an old Amiga computer.  You may well ask why?  He did it because it was a challenge and he thought he could do it.  Another decided to make a touchscreen computer, long before the iPad, and he got it to work.

These people are the true independent learners.  They really are driven by their own interests and their own curiosity and if it does not correspond with the demands of the exam board it does not matter to them - they'll ignore the exam board and carry on ploughing their own furrow.  There is something to admire in this attitude although these guys (and they are almost all guys) can be infuriating to teach.  Also, they rarely achieve the exam grades that they could because they will not focus on the artificial constraints put on them by exam specifications.  They often underachieve, sometime massively; however, if they had to opportunity for a viva voce with an examiner they would fly through it.  They often know and understand more than their teachers within the field that they are interested in.  These people are the mavericks who have the potential to change the world but our current educational system, with its league tables, value added tables and floor standards does not cater for them.  It is a shame that the educational system as it currently is formulated, does not respond better to the needs of these students.
 

Front Page of the Sun?

My Year 10 class came into my room the other day to see the screen above on the whiteboard.  “They can’t do that,”  “What,”  “No way,” were just some of the comments.  I’d got the reaction I wanted.

Next, they were asked to come up with reasons why people might think that it would be a good idea for young people not to be able to access the internet at home.  They responded really well and they did come up with many valid reasons, for example, to stop young people accessing inappropriate content and to make them less vulnerable to cyber-bullying.

Then I asked them for reasons why this was a bad idea.  Once more they came up with a good list: entertainment; keeping in touch with friends and family; and even doing homework.

On to the main task.  I told them that if they did not want young people to be banned from accessing the internet at home they would need to launch a campaign.  I asked them what they would need to do.  They decided that a big publicity campaign would be a good idea and they set to work making posters, leaflets, PowerPoints, etc.  They were very keen to put forwards the benefits to young people of using the internet and minimising the dangers.  Their writing was pitched appropriately and their writing was very persuasive.  The ICT skills that they were applying to the task where at a pretty high standard.

At this point I spotted one young man who was demonstrating excellent Photshop skills.  He had found a photo for the Home Secretary on the internet and he was turning her into the devil – with horns and a tail.  The Photoshopping was exceptional but in my mind’s eye I was seeing the front page of the Sun with the story “Teacher Makes Pupil Turn the Home Secretary Into Devil” on its front page.

The lesson succeeded brilliantly in getting the objective across to my learners because I succeeded in getting them emotionally engaged.  At the end of the lesson I remembered to tell them that the original story was a hoax and, to be fair to them, they weren’t very surprised.  But my biggest relief was that the Sun did not get hold of the Photoshopped Home Secretary Devil.

Coaching

I have just finished a rugby coaching course organised by the RFU.  I've found it quite refreshing to be at the receiving end of some tuition for a change and to reflect on the philosophy that the RFU embed in their programme.

The player is placed at the centre of coaching.  This might seem obvious but it isn't.  It is too easy to coach by rote: this week we are doing handling, next week is contact, the week after is kicking, etc.  For some players and teams that might be fine, for others it won't be.  So, it is always the player's needs that should be considered when planning a coaching session.  All players should gain from every session although some players may benefit from a session more than others, depending on their starting points.

There is an emphasis on coaching people through rugby and not simply coaching people to play rugby, which is a really enlightened approach.  We were made aware that most of the barriers to player's improvement are due to social, personal and emotional issues but rarely due to any rugby related skills or talent.  The RFU encourages coaches to actively nurture these aspects of players in their sessions.  This should not only make them better rugby players, but in some sense, better people.  They acknowledge that only a tiny percentage of players will 'make it' but that it is important to encourage all players to stay in the game as long as possible whether as players or in other roles.  There is certainly no elitist agenda at work.  I have to say that this emphasis on nurturing the individual can be lost in British schools today; I have never heard anyone advocate nurturing people through English, or Maths, or Geography, or...

Players should be encouraged to solve their own problems and create their own solutions which will give them greater confidence, more ownership and give them a greater understanding of the game.  The days when the coach is the seat of all wisdom and the players are his minions should be over.

Most coaching should take place in a game environment - but not full contact 15 man rugby.  The games should be devised to bring out the skill or tactic that is the objective of the session.  The game environment will encourage creativity as players will have to solve problems as they arise in the game situation.

To sum all of this up, coaches are encouraged to coach less but to get more from the players who are the focus of the process.  Coaches are expected to create an environment where players can grow as individuals through playing rugby.  All players are valued no matter what their ability but the coach should enable all players to improve from their own starting points.

As a set of principles, I think that these are just as applicable in the classroom as they are on the training pitch.  Learners should be at the centre of their learning and they should all be able to make progress.  I want my learners to solve their own problems and to create their own solutions.  I really want to concentrate on developing people through my subject rather than simply getting the best exam results out of them that I can - and they are really not the same thing at all.  If I can do this, then the course will have been worth it - and I might be a better rugby coach too!

Digital Bloom's

I've had Bloom's taxonomy on my classroom wall for a while.  To be honest, it fills up a display board but I doubt very much that students look at it and I don't refer to it as often as I might - so I decided to give it a make over and make it more relevant to my subject which is Computing/ICT.

I decided that I would associate applications or websites with the different levels of the taxonomy.  It was easy to find websites concerned with Knowing - Wikipedia, BBC News, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Huffington Post - the list could go on.  Equally, it was easy to find applications that are designed to be used when the user is Creating: Adobe Flash or Photoshop, Scratch from MIT, any programming environment.  Again, the list could go on.  The levels in between were far harder to fill.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the subject.  Some of the thing that we do, particularly in ICT are at a fairly low level and others are at a very high level, with little to bridge the gap.  Maybe this is why some people regard ICT as a 'Micky Mouse' subject whereas Computing is often regarded as appealing to a niche and looked on as being inaccessible.  Perhaps this stems from the thinking required in these areas.  Having said that, some of the applications that I have mentioned as requiring high levels of thinking belong in the ICT domain, but most people will not encounter them.

Anyway, here is the finished product.  You could argue whether I have associated the correct applications to the correct level, but for the time being I am happy with it.

Learning Lifecycle

The system life cycle has a central role in ICT.  It describes the evolution of a product.  First of all the features of the product have to be identified; there has to be an analysis into how it will be used and its precise requirements; it has to be designed in detail; the product must be made; it must be tested; then it must be evaluated to see what its limitations are, what extra features could be incorporated in an upadted version and how the existing features could be improved.  Then it all repeats - over and over.  Microsoft Word, for example, has been through this cycle more than ten times.

This systems life cycle takes up a big display board in my classroom and I refer to if fairly often in my teaching.  It is helpful to remind learners where their current work fits into the systems life cycle.  For some time I have wanted to replace it with a learning life cycle so that I could show learners where their current task fitted into a learning life cycle.  I have thought long and hard about it but I could not really get anything to fit.

Eventually I hit on the idea of a learning spiral which I could make to fit the idea of a learning cycle, however, ICT is coming to the end of its life and will be replaced with computing so it seemed more fitting that instead of a learning spiral, I should have a learning flowchart.

The learning flowchart could be applied to many, if not all subjects and soon it will replace the system life cycle - or at least a horizontal version of it will.

Process or Outcome?

Have you ever felt like a bus driver who has just got to the end of his route - when he stops and changes his destination sign?  This is what many teachers do with their objectives; when one class leaves they rub the old ones off the board and write up the new ones for the next class.  They know fine well that they would be marked down in an observation if they do not 'communicate their objectives' - but why?

There are times when communicating the objective can kill a lesson stone dead.  I have teach a lesson about trusting information found on the internet.  I dress it up as though it is a straight lesson about research into endangered species.  I start off by telling the students that they are going to research a particular species, giving them specific questions to answer and some websites to use.  Then they repeat the process for a couple of other species, but one of them is the North West Pacific Tree Octopus.  Most students do the research without questioning the task and it is only when I go through the answers with the class that they realise that something is not quite right.  They fall right into the pit and then they start to put the clues together and it dawns on them that this species does not really exist.  It is important that they go through the process in order to come to a fresh understanding.  Putting the objective on the board and communicating it to the learners up front would lead to more superficial learning, which would be counter productive to say the least.

Most Sunday mornings during the colder months of the year, you will find me on a muddy windswept field coaching rugby.  As you can easily guess, the objective of a rugby match is straight forward; it is to win.  To some coaches and some teams winning is everything.  They concentrate on the objective too much.  When these teams fall behind in a match they try too hard and make mistake after mistake and usually end up losing by a bigger margin than they should.  They are fixated on the outcome.  In the team talk before a match I never mention the objective; I concentrate on the process.  The players must concentrate from the first whistle until the last, execute the skills that they have learnt and work for each other.  If they carry out these processes correctly then they have the best chance of achieving their objective - but they have to focus on the process.  Sometimes they come across better teams than they are, and they lose.  I don't have a problem with this providing that their processes are right.  As a coach, the performance is everything, the result - the objective - is a poor second.

Carol Dweck's work on mindset has found that praising the outcome will lead to a closed mindset which will ultimately limit achievement.  This closed mindset will mean that someone when faced with real difficulty will not be able to work through it.  She shows that it is the characteristics that lead to achievement that need to be brought to the fore if a learner is to develop a growth mindset.  This growth mindset will allow learners to grapple with difficult problems and it will give them a better chance to overcome them.  Again, it is the process that is important.  Indeed, focussing on strategies that learners use is confirmed as a a sensible way forward in this post, which includes a thorough research based analysis.

By now you might be getting the impression that I think that objectives are, at best, a waist of time.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  The teacher must be very clear about the objectives for an activity, a lesson and a series of lessons.  The teacher must plan with the final outcome - the objective - clearly in  mind.  What I am questioning is asking the learners to concentrate on the objective.  I am certain that if they concentrate on getting the process right then they are far more likely to achieve the objective.  To be fair, higher ability learners often do get the process right, but even they are prone to taking inappropriate short cuts.  It is lower ability learners that more often than not, do not get the process right.

In the classroom there are definite characteristics that successful learners share: resilience, adaptability and determination are a few of them.  Too often teachers emphasise the outcome - the objective - with too little emphasis on the process.  There should be far more emphasis in classrooms on making the process of learning explicit and making learners far more aware of the characteristics that successful learners share.  I am certain that many of the students who do not succeed in education fail because they have not developed the characteristics necessary to be successful learners, and they don't engage with the process of learning fully.   In fact, sometimes these learners do not realise that there is a process for learning, and if they don't know that there is a process then they have little chance of getting it right.  You could construct a powerful argument that lower ability learners are only low ability because they have not grasped the process of learning and have not developed the necessary characteristics sufficiently.  If there was more emphasis on process rather than outcome then lower ability learners are the ones who will benefit the most.  If we spent more time in school developing the characteristics of successful learners, and making the process of learning visible, especially with the less able, then they would be far more likely to achieve the objectives that we set for them - even if we don't always make those objectives explicit.

What Does Success Look Like?

The photo above was taken using a technique called previsualisation.  This means is that I knew what I wanted the finished image to look like before I pressed the shutter button.  As it was made on slide film, I had to get it right in camera - there were no darkroom tricks that could be used to save the photo if I made a mistake.  If I had simply released the shutter without first deciding how I wanted the final image to look then the shot would have looked very different and It would have had far less impact.  I had to intentionally underexpose the image and use a couple of other tricks to get it as I wanted then - BANG - the shot was made.

A similar process is necessary in teaching.  Before starting on an activity, a lesson or a series of lessons it is vital to know what you what the process will be; you need to know what success will look like.  A colleague was struggling with this recently and he said that he could see a series of snapshots rather than being able to play the video in his head before he taught a lesson.  The video is the plan for the journey to the destination.  If you can see the video playing in your head before starting the sequence then you are previsualising your teaching.  You will be able to select the correct pedagogical tools and apply them at the right places along the journey to enable your learners to progress.  Without the previsualised journey it may be that at some points in the learning sequence the correct pedagogical tools are not to hand.

Slides were great but unforgiving and certainly, a print could never match the colour saturation and intensity of a projected slide.  But there was a downside, once the slide was shot there was nothing you could do to improve it; you had to get it right in camera.  It is the same with teaching.  It is a live performance and a second take is impossible; you have to get it right first time.  If the complete learning journey is previsualised in the teacher's head before it begins then there is likely to be a greater intensity, involvement and pace in that learning journey - and you will get to see what success looks like.

[If you want to see more of my photography, visit my website or my photo blog.]

Learning Intervals

My son recently qualified for the county championship in the 1500m.  He came second in his qualifying race and although he ran well he knew that he could not have won his race that day.  He is determined to do better at the county championship.  As he trains for the county championship it would be pointless just getting him to run 1500m over and over and hope that his time would improve.  It may well improve a little but the improvement would be small and take time - in fact his times may not improve at all.  Instead of this, he is doing interval training.  He is running 300m at a faster pace, then jogging the next 300m; running 300m at the faster pace, then jogging the next 300m, then finishing with a fast 300m.  Over time the fast sections will increase in length and the jogging sections will get shorter until he can run the whole 1500m at the new, faster pace.  That's his training plan to do well at the county championship.

The same method can be used in the classroom.  Many of you will be familiar with the think, pair, share technique which is often used before a discussion in class.  The idea is that everyone is given a set amount of time to think about the question.  At the end of that time each pair of learners talk about their ideas to refine their thinking; again they are given a set amount of time for this.  Finally each pair's ideas are shared with the class, usually with the teacher asking named learners - no hands.

Think, pair, share usually leads to learners working hard - which is the whole idea!  The idea can be adapted to incorporate other learning.  For example, individuals can be given a section from an exam paper with a set time to work on it.  When the time is up each pair can compare answers to produce their best answer, and then share it with the rest of the class by pinning it to a display board.

This is were the interval idea comes in.  The first time this is done with the class, give then a short amount of time to work independently.  The amount of time will depend on the group, for some it might be 3 minutes, for others it might be 10.  When the class can concentrate for this time, increase it but not by too much, perhaps by an additional 10% or 20% - use your judgement.  The learners probably won't even realise that they are concentrating for longer.  Over time these working intervals can become longer and eventually they can be very long indeed.  Certainly, this idea can be used to prepare learners for long GCSE or A Level exams.  For many students the idea of working for the length of time required in these exams in daunting but this technique can be used to build up to it gradually without the learners noticing that they are putting in too much extra.  This should be especially useful with people who suffer from exam nerves, and with lower ability groups.

Recognising Effort

If I am working hard, I know it.  If I am slacking a little, I know it.  I have the self awareness to accurately assess my own effort level, but do children in our schools have the same ability?

I gave my 'bottom set' year 10 class a set of real GCSE exam paper questions a couple of days ago.  When I gave the questions to them I stressed that I wanted them to try them.  If they didn't know the answer that was alright; they could move on and look at other questions that they could tackle.  i told them that their scores really did not matter.  I wanted to know how they would react when they were faced with the reality of GCSE question.

When I told them to start, there was an outbreak of spontaneous silence, which lasted for fifteen minutes - believe me, that is not normal behaviour for this group.  Everyone in the class was fully engaged with the paper.  In fact it was one of those times when the teacher was truely superfluous.  They would have carried on at the end of the fifteen minutes, but I wanted to show them the mark scheme and the examiner's report.

On the wall of my room I have the school's effort grades and descriptions: 1 is always on task, 3 is acceptable effort and 5 requires improvement.  I asked them to think about their effort while they were doing the exam paper.  I gave then a few moments thinking time and then I asked them to tell me their effort based on the scale.  Everyone one I asked rated themselves as 3.  I was shocked.  I could not see how those learners could have put in more effort during the time they were working on the exam questions.  I then told them what I though.  I told them that, in my opinion, everyone had been working at effort 1 - always on task.  I went on to say that if they could continue to work at that level then I could not ask for more.

As you can imagine, I have reflected on this since.  The learners in that class were in a 'bottom set'.  It is clear to me that they could not accurately assess their own effort.  It was almost as though these children had internalised being labelled as 'Effort 3'.  It appeared that no matter what their actual effort, they were 3.  For me, this is a massive problem.  I wonder how much these children had been involved in assessing their effort previously.  Was it the case that when their assessment arrived year in year out it said Effort 3?  I wonder how many of the teachers who gave those grades involved the learners in the process of giving effort grades.  Certainly, that is what I have done myself.  Faced with giving effort grades, and other information, for several classes in a year group, the easy option is to go down a column and fill in figures quickly as they are other, more important, things that need to be done.  This is a natural reaction.  Having seen how my year 10 learners were unable to assess their own effort I am going to ensure that I involve my students far more in the process of assessing effort.  Let's face it, the only person who really knows how much effort someone is putting in, is that person - or at least it should be.