Learning Flowchart: A Diagnostic Tool

I first mentioned my learning flowchart in a blog post nearly a year ago.  I am pleased to see that it is now proudly on display in my classroom.

This flowchart gives a good representation of the learning process.  Certainly, a year on from creating it, I cannot think of a way of refining it.  It certainly cuts out all the surrounding fluff that can interfere with any learning experience and only shows the essential features.

When I was putting the display on the wall and indulging in some 'cut and stick' a new revelation hit me.  Obviously, as it is now on my wall, I intended using the flowchart with my learners so that they can easily see where they are in the learning process.  My thinking went a little deeper than that and I realised that this flowchart can be used as a diagnostic tool to find out where learners are having difficulty and where they are not engaging with the task effectively.  It could well be - and often is - that they lose direction at the very first step, understand what you need to do.  Overcoming this was the subject of my recent post, Will They Really Answer The Question?  It could be that the quality of feedback from their fellow learners or from their teacher is simply not good enough for them to improve.  Or it could be that they are unwilling or unable to refine their work.  Having the flowchart will make it easier and clearer for me to find out where learner's difficulties really lie, and, equally importantly, it will allow me to communicate this to my students more easily.

Mise en Place

Mise en place, is a term used in professional kitchens that refers to having equipment and ingredients organised and arranged in their correct places in order to make the preparation of a dish efficient in a busy kitchen.  The term means, "putting in place."

This is something that teachers should take seriously too.  I'm not talking about a tidy classroom, that is an entirely different matter.  What I am talking about is setting up your classroom so that you can conduct an impromtu discussion, or use the visuliser at a moment's notice, or carry out any one of a range of pedagogical techniques while the lesson flows seamlessly on.

Plans are essential for effective teaching but we all know that no plan survives first contact with a class.  Plans should be flexible and reactive if the objectives of the lesson are to be delivered.  A lesson based on the same plan could be delivered to two different classes and the lessons could take on quite different courses depending on how the learners react to the plan.  A perceptive teacher should be able to react to the learners' needs and use whatever pedagogical technique is appropriate - even if it was not on the original plan.  Having the correct equipment to hand, in the right place will make this really easy to achieve.

If teachers follow this idea through they will find it very easy to move from one teaching technique to another, because they have all been thought through before hand and resourced appropriately, and the necesary resources will be available at any time.  The down side is that a teacher will be very efficient in their own classroom but they could well be lost in another room because they will not know where things are - or even if the required resources are in the room at all - and will therefore not be able to move effortlessly through their pedagogical repertoire.

Professional cooks know that having things organised and in the right place before starting to cook is essential.  Equally, teachers should do the same so that they have their whole pedagogical arsenal on standby at all times.

Will They Really Answer The Question?

I have seen answers to GCSE mock exam questions similar to the one above for many years.  No matter how many times I tell my learners to read the question, a substantial number of them don't recognise the important words in the question.  I've used samples, including the one above, to try to persuade learners not to make the same mistake, but it hasn't had much impact.  This is important as it costs learners many marks because they answer a question similar to the one that was actually asked, rather than the one that really was asked.

Thanks to John Tomsett, I think I might have found a technique that will make this more explicit to learners.  The idea is to model your approach to an exam, from your first sight of the exam paper, going through the process of understanding what is required in the exam from reading the information on the front cover until just before answering the first question.  This technique goes further than just highlighting key words in the question, in the words of my colleague Heidi, "It shows pupils what we are thinking in order to carry out the steps that we teach them in order to approach a question. We tell them to read a question carefully and highlight key words. But this method shows what we are thinking as we read the question and how we decide which are the key words. This is written evidence, that pupils can take time to process visually, of adult metacognition."  You can read more about Heidi's experiences with this technique here.

I've tried this technique with my Year 11 GCSE group, going through a past paper, highlighting key words and instructions, and making notes on the paper to illustrate my thinking.  I was really pleased when, a few lessons later I gave them another set of past exam questions to do and the first thing that many students did was to get out their highlighters and mark up the questions showing key words, and making notes to help their thinking.  Interestingly, the learners who struggled with the questions were those who had dived into the questions straight away without taking the time to really understand what was required.

I also tried this with my AS Level Computing class.  Again, a few lessons later I gave them another  past exam paper to do.  I asked them if there were any questions that they wanted me to go through with them.  With the one that they chose, the first thing I did was turn on my visualiser and pick up my highlighter.  Once I had gone through the question itself and explained my thinking to them they were far more confident in answering the question - without me actually going through the answer with them.

My AS Level Applied ICT group have also been victims of this technique!  Earlier this week I was in their real AS exam as technical trouble shooter, to sort out any problems that might arise with the computers that they were using.  I was really pleased to see that the first thing that the vast majority of them did when they started the exam was get their highlighters out and start marking up the paper.

So perhaps this technique is having some impact.  In the future I will introduce this to my learners earlier.  For example, I would use it with my Year 11 GCSE class when they are preparing for their mock exams in the autumn.  This would give them an opportunity to try out the technique in a real exam situation and it would give them longer to embed the technique before it really mattered in the summer.  Certainly, this is a technique that I intend to grow.

[I would like to thank Heidi for her continual support and challenge.  Without colleagues who are willing and able to listen to our ideas and experiences it is difficult to grow as a teacher.  Heidi certainly offers that for me.]

Poles Apart?

A few days ago I fell into a conversation with a hospital doctor who happened to come from Poland.  The conversation covered a wide range of topics but it touched on education and his perceptions of education in this country and in Poland.

He said that in Poland every child is pushed.  The children from the poorest backgrounds are pushed as hard as those from more affluent homes.  It is possible for poor children to 'make it' because of the push that they get.  He was very clear that the this idea of valuing achievement was ingrained in Polish culture.  The push came as much from parents as it did from teachers.  He was equally clear that high achieving children were pushed just as hard as lower achieving children.  Children were always made aware that there was another level to be conquered.

He contrasted his understanding of the Polish system with his experience of his own children going through the English system.  He said that in England no one was pushed.  At parents' evenings everything is sweetness and light and achievements are celebrated but there is no apparent aspiration for the next level and there is little recognition of children's faults.  He did finish off by saying that despite these differences, it is the Anglo-Saxon (American) culture that has 'conquered the world'.

I was very interested in these opinions from someone who obviously achieved highly throughout his education.  The obvious question is, should children in England he pushed more?  Should they be more aware of the 'next level' and how they can reach it?  And more crucially, does English society as a whole value education?

Another whole area is opened up by this conversation: the difference between perception and reality.  A conversation with one Polish doctor is a pretty poor foundation for research.  Equally, this man's view of each education system may be wide of the mark.  He may have thought that he was telling me about the education systems but he was really telling me about his perception of the education systems.  Perception is reality filtered through our experiences and preconceptions.  In fact, for all practical purposes, it is our own personal reality.  In many ways, perceptions are at least as important as the underlying reality.  The only problem is that two people may have different perceptions of the same reality.  This relationship between perception and reality has many implications for teachers in the classroom, and for schools in general.  For instance, one learner my perceive a task to be hard, and another may perceive it be to easy.  One learner may think that a sanction was harsh and another think that it was lenient.  These perceptions will be based on differing previous experiences and preconceptions.  It is important for teachers to remember this.

Justifiable Workload ?

The start of the Spring Term is always a busy one for me.  As a Computing and ICT teacher, my subjects have a great deal of controlled assessment and coursework.  Long assignments certainly have a part to play in assessing these subjects.  There is no other way of assessing the learners ability to analyse and break a large problem down into smaller parts that themselves can be solved.  This is the time when the learners need to get their tasks finished with as many marks as possible.  Once the learners have done their bit, I need to get a sample of their portfolios prepared to send to the exam boards.

Recently I was talking to a friend who is high up in the international construction business - I think he spends as much time flying as he does with his feet on the ground.  He was saying that if he saw a workload bottle neck coming he would rearrange tasks and organise it out of the way.  He saw immediately that in my job that organising the bottle neck away was not an option.  Preparing these controlled assessment and coursework portfolios is certainly one of these workload bottle necks that cannot be organised away.

Over the last few weeks, at a conservative estimate, I have spend 50 hours getting these portfolios together.  The work needs to be marked, and the marking annotated to explain it to the moderator so that I can justify the marks that I have awarded.  The portfolios need to be put into the format that the exam board demands.  Then the portfolios can finally be sent off to the moderators.

Certainly, the exam boards need this task to be completed on time in order for their systems to function and for the results to be available on time in August so that universities can issue offers and students can start their courses in the autumn.  But...should this be the job of a teacher?  As I have said, I can see how this benefits the exam board but I cannot see how it benefits my learners - at all.  This is a terminal assessment and there is no time for the learners to make any improvements to their work - the exam board deadline looms.  Effectively I have used 50 hours working solely for the benefit of the exam board, that time could have been used profitably to benefit my learners in many different ways, through lesson preparation, formative assessment, development of new courses, arranging out of lesson experiences, etc, etc, etc.

I will never get those 50 hours back - and neither will my learners ever benefit from them.

Stress - You Bad?

Stress!  The teacher's enemy.  How many times have we heard that teaching is a stressful profession.  The workload is stressful.  The children's behaviour is stressful.  New initiatives are stressful.

Ross Morrison McGill recently wrote a blog post about stress and teaching.  It read as though stress is necessarily bad.  It read as though stress is something that should be avoided and that there might be some stress free utopia out there - abroad.  The implication of the post was that stress is bad with a capital B.  I have some news for you - and Ross.  Stress is not all bad.  You read it right. I'll say it again - stress is not all bad.

We all need a certain amount of stress in order to function.  A certain level of stress gets us out of bed in the morning.  This is why some long term unemployed people don't get up in the morning.  They've lost hope and they have little stress; they really don't have a reason to get up.

Have you every wondered why the vast majority of people work to deadlines?  It's stress.  Most people have a certain level of stress that will spur them into action.  Until that level of stress is reached they won't do anything, but when that crucial level is reached then they get on with the task.  It is stress that makes them do the task.  It takes time for this system to be calibrated which is why young people need help with this.  Also, if the task is not perceived as important then is won't trigger a stress response and the task will not get done - sound familiar?

As you can see, stress is unavoidable and it can be seen as a good thing and a call to action.  Having said that, some stress can be very difficult to deal with.  There have been psychological studies that show that the level of stress at the top of an organisation is far lower that at the bottom - the reverse of what many mangers think.  The reason is control.  Those at the top of an organisation have complete control over what they do.  If there is a task that they'd rather not do or is too difficult for them, it gets delegated.  Those at the bottom have no such luxury.  They have to do all the tasks given to them.  This problem gets worse when that person has several bosses (head of department, head of year, etc) who are all loading tasks onto the lowly individual.  They have no control over the tasks that they have to complete and they can easily get overloaded.  This lack of control leads to real stress as it cannot be avoided.  (Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many young teachers leave the profession.)

In fact, if an individual experiences too little stress, little gets done and what is achieved probably won't be done that well.  As stress increases to the trigger level I mentioned above, actions get more effective and efficient.  You will be performing at your optimum level and probably feeling really alive and happy with life.  When stress gets too far beyond this optimum level then performance drops off again and this is when people feel 'under stress' and anxious.  They don't know which task to do next and the tasks that they do perform will not be completed very well.

Interestingly, there has been some work done looking at how stress affects health, and it may well change your attitude to stress.  Kelly McGonigal has recorded a TED talk about this.  One of her main arguments is that stress itself is not bad for us; it is the belief that stress is bad for us that damages our health.  It is not stress itself that is unhealthy; it is our response to stress that can be unhealthy.  This is not at all self evident but it does in fact make biological sense.  If you want to know more, watch the video from the link above, it really is worth the time.

We need to acknowledge that stress is a necessary part of life and we need to train ourselves to better deal with the stress that we are under.  We need to accept that stress is a necessary part of live and that it is preparing our bodies for action.  Also, we need our bosses to acknowledge that overloading people leads to poor performance.  In fact, a good manager will be ensuring that their charges are at optimum stress levels most of the time to give the best results.  This would also mean only one person managing each individual in the organisation, and the management structure of most school being redesigned.  I'll leave you with that thought!

The Principles of Teaching - Part 2

I hope I've whetted your appetite with part one of this series.  The first principle of teaching that I'm going to propose is relationships.  I am certain that cultivating a mutually respectful relationship with each of your learners is a key to success.

When learners are younger they do not do their work for themselves, no matter how hard we might wish that they would; they work for their teacher.  They might like to learn new facts and acquire new skills but very few will value the work necessary to embed these facts and skills.  During this time the students will be working for their teacher and so the relationship really matters.  I am certain that learners who feel that their teacher really cares about them will do more than learners who feel that teacher is indifferent to them. Note that this is about the learner's perception of the teacher.  It is perfectly possible that the teacher cares deeply about the learner but the teacher may not have communicated this effectively to the learner.  It is communicating this caring and building the relationship that is important.

You know that it really makes a difference if someone connects with you and talks to you about things that are important to you.  It makes your your day a little better and helps you to tackle the next task.  It is the same with the learners in your care.  I know that in my classes there are certain people who love football, others have a passion for horses.  I could name the favourite bands of several of my students.  There are many other interests that individual learners have that are important to them.  Sometimes, it is worth a few words about their interest; it fosters a connection and it makes them think that they are important to you.

Some of you may well be thinking that you don't have time for this, that the time spent cultivating these relationships would be better spent delivering the curriculum.  I would strongly argue that the time spent on these relationships is an investment and you get it back several times over because the learners will be more involved and so they will get through tasks more quickly and with deeper participation if they know that they matter to you as people.

As we know, it is important for learners to fail and to bounce back form failure if they are to progress.  It is the willingness to try things out and take risks, allied with the response to failure that brings real progress.  Learners have to feel that they will not be judged as failures if they 'get it wrong'.  There needs to be a climate in the classroom that failing in fine providing that the failure is a step to future progress.  Part of building this climate is building relationships with the learners in the class.  When we are with strangers, or with people who we feel will judge us, we are reluctant to try things out that may not work as we fear being judged as failures.  Maintaining respectful relationships with learners is a step along the way to creating a culture where failing is alright.

There are times when we as teachers need to deliver difficult feedback, "Jack, that really was not good enough."  We have heard of 'two stars and a wish' and the 'jam sandwich' technique for burying critical messages.  No matter how hard we try, many people take critical messages as a personal criticism and not simply a criticism of their work.  I am sure that the teacher who has a genuine relationship with the learner will be more willing to deliver the message and the learner will be more willing to act on it and make the necessary changes to progress.

Put yourself in your learner's shoes.  Who would you rather have as your teacher, the one who makes you feel that they know you and care about you, or the one who does not even know your name?  And which of those teachers would you work for?