TeachMeet Birmingham: Primary Edition

Just a quick update to let people know about a TeachMeet I am helping to organise: TeachMeet Birmingham: Primary Edition . Since attending TeachMeet BETT 2010, my colleagues have been really interested by my reports of what an inspiring event it was, the links I have made as a result of my talk on blogging, and the ideas I have discovered as a result.

For those that are not aware, TeachMeets are informal meetings where teachers can present and share their practice and ideas. They are fantastic events for CPD and gathering inspirational ideas for your practice. The format is probably best explained by Tim and Moby from BrainPOP:

Our event will be taking place in Robin Hood Primary School in Hall Green, Birmingham. We are hoping to get together lots of teachers from Birmingham and the West Midlands to discuss Primary practice. We have found the discussions between our staff and those of nearby schools surrounding our MA in New Technologies really valuable, and would like to cast the net wider in sharing effective practice and ideas with other local educators. Whilst TeachMeets are often technologically focused, we are keen to share practice in any area, and it would be great to have some ‘non-techy’ presentations. Therefore, it would be great if people could share the Facebook event link with any non-tweeting teachers to get them involved.

Having presented at My first TeachMeet at BETT I cannot over-emphasise how rewarding and developing it is to share practice with others in this way. I would urge anyone in the area who is interested in pushing their practice forward to jump right it, sign up and give a presentation. Your subject need not be groundbreaking- what you take for granted will be new learning for others. Just pick something you are passionate about, or that has some impact on your class or school, and start sharing!

Comments

Documenting negotiated projects

For the last two weeks I have been working with a different group on a negotiated project, as part of our Learning Agreement Time. I was really pleased that this was the first project which has been totally child initiated. Whilst completing the previous project, a girl in my class approached me and said she would like to complete a project about Space. I encouraged her to some back when she had thought about what exactly she would like to do. Two days later she returned with a bouncy ball shaped like the Earth and said she wanted to make clay models of the planets and the different animals that lived on other planets. She formed a group of others who were interested (as well as two experience project planners I encouraged to get involved), and we planned and carried out the project.

During the first research stages of the project the girl became frustrated trying to find pictures of animals from other planets that looked like they were real. She said she had searched the internet for pictures and there was nothing there. I asked her why she thought that there would be no pictures on the whole internet of animals from other planets. She thought about it, then held her head in her hands and exclaimed “Because there aren’t any; my project is ruined!”. I think moments like this are really important in negotiated learning. I could have told her there were no animals on other (known) planets when the idea was generated, and thus allowed her to focus her efforts on planning something that would come to fruition. However, now she has gone through that process she has learned the importance of research to inform even preliminary planning, far more powerful a lesson than me just telling her. Luckily the project was quickly adapted to a model of just the planets.

Once again another great idea on encouraging the reflective learning process I am trying to scaffold came about through this project. Whilst making their planets one of the group asked me if he could use the flip video camera to make some video for the accompanying powerpoint they are making. I agreed, left them to it, and the result was the video below. I have been really impressed by the quality of their documentation of their own learning. Once again, a child has suggested a way of further supporting the process I am trying to encourage. I intend to make documenting learning in this way an integral part of our Learning Agreement projects from now on. Ok, it seems an obvious idea, and perhaps I should have thought of it before, but it is another piece in my puzzle of supporting rigorous learning through open outcomes.

Comments

Digital thinking in maths

Another day, another anecdote of children basing their point of reference in ‘traditional’ areas on technological experiences.

Today we were looking at 3D shape, and the group I was working with was finding it difficult to classify and describe the shapes of prisms. We discussed the two main faces, their properties and the fact that he other faces were rectangles, but they still found it hard to express exactly what a prism was.

Suddenly it clicked for one boy. “I know what it is,” he said, “It’s like in Google Sketch up- you draw the shape, then you pull it out with the pull tool- that’s a prism!”. What an explanation, and what a knowledge base. Fancy ‘getting’ Google sketch up before you get basic geometry- these children really do think differently.

Comments

Can we ‘unplan’ the KS2 curriculum?

In my transition from PGCE student to NQT one of the big changes I have had to get to grips with is that of going from producing Osfted style lesson plans for every lesson, to a real world situation where time is at a premium and less detail is possible.

In the last few weeks I have been teaching forces to year 4,revisiting the topic which comprised much of my teaching on my first PGCE placement. I remembered being really happy with the outcomes of those lessons, and thought it might be useful to return to such detailed plans after a term of more real world planning. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but on reflection these ‘perfect’ plans that I spent hours writing seemed no better than the recent occasional lessons when circumstances have forced me to plan on a post it note during the preceding lunch time.

I have always struggled with the idea of unplanned lessons being hugely successful. On the one hand a lot of my teaching values are based on early years practice, and I believe that fundamentally if we just let Primary age children do what they want, whilst providing them with high quality opportunities and intervention at the point of learning, then they would achieve success appropriate to the stage of development they are at. As the research of Ferre Laevers suggests, as long as children have a high level of well being and are provided with opportunities for tasks they can engage with to a high level then they will learn. This supports the suggestion that a more ad-hoc and ‘unplanned’ approach to the curriculum will promote children to work in their own zone of proximal development for the greatest amount of time, and with high quality interactions with teachers produce the most profound learning.

In my own experience it is when my classroom operates like this that the most exciting learning opportunities happen. On a very basic level, in the unit on explanation writing we are just finishing I allowed my class to choose their own subjects for explanations in a very free way. I began by allowing them to explore a range of high quality explanations on the BrainPOP website, discussing the usual structure for explanations with them and giving them totally free choice as to what they wrote their own explanation about. I exerted no control on the subject matter they chose, and they could easily have chosen something which was not appropriate to the genre of explanation writing. However, because they all had a high level of involvement and interest in the topic based on their free exploration of high quality examples, not one of them chose a subject that was not appropriate to the task. The vast majority chose examples that were appropriate to their own level of development, with those who find writing challenging opting for something along the lines of a playground game they were comfortable with, and those who are more confident writers choosing a subject that challenged them.

Despite my base experience in teaching being based in a forward thinking Early Years setting, I was trained to be a follower of the Primary Strategies, and this is where my difficulty with ‘unplanning’ the curriculum occurs. As someone educated to deliver the ‘three part lesson’ I find it a challenge to convince myself I am ‘doing the right thing’ when I allow lessons in my class to occur in a more freeform way. There is a fine line between genuine child centered learning and ‘messing around’, and through my work on Learning Agreement Time this year I have been challenged with locating where this line actually lies.

The problem I have with ‘unplanned’ lessons is that when one occurs that I feel has gone really well I always find myself questioning whether it seemed good because there was a genuinely high level of learning going on, or simply because there was some learning going on in an unexpected way. If you tightly pre-plan a lesson and the expected level or learning occurs then the lesson ‘feels’ good. If you do not rigidly plan a lesson and some learning occurs, does the excitement of unplanned learning lower your expectations and make you ‘feel’ that a lot of learning has happened when it is actually below the level you would have expected had you tightly structured and planned the lesson? Now I am not suggesting that those following Early Years practice are not planning, just that the planning of providing provocative resources and situations which they children are free to engage with or reject is hard to square with conventional practice in key stage two.

I can’t help feeling that some of this thinking is a hangup created by the strategies oriented focus of my recent teacher training. However, if we are going to move towards a more ‘negotiated’ curriculum, it has to be one that builds on the academic rigour of the ‘three part lesson‘, and not simply a return to the more woolly practice of primary and early years schooling of many decades ago. I have spent much time looking for information online regarding schools that are taking this early years approach to key stage two, and so far have come up with very little. However, I am convinced of the merits of ‘unplanning’ (in the conventional sense) the key stage two curriculum in order to provide every child with the genuinely personalised learning experience that even those advocating rigid planing say should be our aim.

Comments

School Radio: Phase two

During a very busy first half term as an NQT I only really scratched the surface with my school radio project. I carried out an experimental project in our Learning Agreement Time, but in my second half term I decided to develop it a little further. As this had to be balanced with a similarly hectic half term for me, I only really managed to being to lay the groundwork for what I want to achieve. However, we managed to do some really good work, and I am feeling positive about kicking it all off ‘properly’ now I am in my second term.

Types of radio

I have felt for a while that there are two main strands to school radio work, and that each can be hugely beneficial in terms of learning. The first is what many school are doing; that is pre-recorded, content heavy podcasts. By their nature these can be linked closely to other curriculum subjects, and provide a focus on planning, content creation and perfecting delivery. This medium offers opportunities for tightly focused, well planned content delivery, and detailed reflection as part of the recording and editing process.

The second is that of live broadcasts. I think this offers slightly different benefits, as more of the focus is on the live performance aspect than creating perfection. Although planning and preparation are equally important here, live radio also offers opportunity for ad-libbing, problem solving, and immediately facing the consequences of any deficiencies in the preparation, and having to problem solve your way out of it. I have always found live radio incredibly exciting to be involved with, and think it is a very important part of the experience of school radio I want to offer to my pupils. Unfortunately live radio often requires more equipment than pre-record (which can be achieved with only a PC and a mic), but luckily we have the technology at our disposal to push live radio forward in a big way at our school.

Developing Podcasts

Following on from my previous work testing the water with school radio, I decided to continue to develop the medium of podcasts that we had started earlier in the year. In that case a small group had spent a one week producing and recording their own podcast. I am really keen for Robin Hood Radio to become more than just an ‘extra curricular’ activity, so I decided to focus on producing a podcast that could link in curriculum work and be used as a vehicle for sharing this. Mixed in with a rethink of how we organised Learning Agreement Time we implemented this as a project group working on learning how to use the radio station equipment, whilst satellite groups from years 3 and 4 created spoken pieces based on the work they had been doing leading up to Christmas. This took place in the first hour of every day for a couple of weeks, and the pupils produced and presented a podcast which you can find at our radio blog.

Going live

During the work on the Christmas podcast I was really impressed with how quickly the pupils took onboard the technical aspects of producing a radio show. As I taught them skills I asked them to do short ‘mock shows’ to put these skills into practice. They were so competent at this that I decided to set up a series of live broadcasts in the week leading up to Christmas.

Using Icecast and WinAmp plugin system (both free), I set up a live stream of the output from our radio studio which could be picked up on any computer on the school network. One of my pupils suggested that we should broadcast into the classrooms and main hall where the children eat their lunch, so I set up the PCs in those rooms to tune into the station using Windows Media Player, and set them up before lunchtime every day.

I then began by presenting a show myself, inviting the pupils who were trained up on the equipment to observe and listen to the output. I think this modelling is very important, as our radio station is new the children had no expectation of what they could achieve using it, and I think a standard needed to be set for them to aim to replicate. With the equipment we have there is really no reason why our radio cannot sound as professional as any FM station, and I wanted to show them that all they needed to do was develop the skills and they could reach this standard. After one modelled show I invited groups of children to join me, and I supported them in the organisation of hectic live shows. I was really impressed with their technical skills. The fact that they seem to find these so easy to take on board is brilliant in my eyes, because it allows us to concentrate on the really valuable learning surrounding the radio station- developing their speaking ans listening, planning, presentation and content creation skills.

The shows were really well received by children and staff, and pupils didn’t want to go outside after their lunch as they wanted to carry on listening. Some outdoor speakers would be a very valuable next purchase… On the final lunchtime we had our staff Christmas lunch, and although I spent some time doing a show I asked the girls who were producing the show if we could finish early. They were very reluctant, so I let them carry on- thinking it might not go very well but that by then most of the pupils had moved outside anyway. I left for the staffroom and tuned into the station to hear a fantastic show which they presented completely without planning. They had interesting chat, smooth mixes between songs, jingles and a real confidence to their delivery. With me out of the way they really started to make the show their own, talking about school issues that mattered to them, and presenting a great discussion of advice for children when they fell out with their friends. I was left very impressed, and excited for the next stage of our radio station.

Phase three

The next phase begins this week, and after experimentation in both live and pre-record I now want to start developing the radio station in a more organized way. A colleague and I have set up a weekly afterschool club, where I will teach groups technical operation of the station while she works with them on content production skills. Given the speed that my previous groups have picked up the technical skills I am hoping that by Easter we will be able to start a rota of regular lunchtime shows several days a week. This should also create a pool of pupils who are skilled at the technical side of producing content, and I am hoping to encourage these pupils to lead their peers and their teachers in developing use of the radio station to support work across the curriculum in lesson time. Luckily I am surrounded by colleagues who are really open to the children taking the driving seat, and more than happy to suggest ideas for utilizing resources like this and letting their pupils run with them, despite the fact they may not have direct experience of using this medium.

Despite successful work already, for me the truly exciting side of radio at our school is just starting. It is an ambitious project, but I think the really valuable learning will start when the pupils have to start delivering shows on a regular basis, evaluating each other and building up their skills. I ran this by an ex colleague of mine from my student radio days and he seemed to think I was slightly mad. However, lots of people thought that when I proposed taking our student radio station from 4 weeks of the year to full time and we managed to make that a huge success. It might be hard work, but if we let the children take ownership of it and delegate the responsibility to them I think it will be a manageable and very beneficial undertaking.

Comments

I worry about the iPad

Much has been written about the iPad in the few days since it was announced, and most of what I have read has been negative. Many commentators have rushed to depict it as a solution looking for a problem, disappointing in comparison to the wild rumors before it’s release, and not something for serious computer users.

That was my initial reaction, but I think I initially missed the point. After all, those of us who blog, comment and generally use the internet to create with are not the target market for this device any more than serious musicians are the target market for iPods. This is a device designed for passive consumption of content, and this is something it apparently does very well. However, the use of a version of the restrictive iPhone operating system means that it in many ways actively discourages users from doing anything else. Let’s be honest, you might be able to type with it, but who is going to type much whilst holding the thing in one hand? The lack of a camera or microphone also seriously limits user input of original content. The OS also means that Apple has control of everything that happens on it, a control they have demonstrated they will exercise when developers challenge the accepted view of what their hardware should do, or simply because they don’t like the name of an app. On a phone these kinds of restrictions were annoying, but on some level understandable, on a device that is meant to be a computer replacement they are harder to deal with.

I worry about this because I really believe that one of the biggest strengths of the internet is it’s interactivity and they way it enables sharing and development of ideas. Certainly there are many people who do not give much back, but devices like this actually frame the users experience of the internet as something that they simply consume rather than get involved in. Will a  young person whose early experience of the internet is through such devices see it as something they are a participant in, or will their view be more akin to how my generation saw magazines?

Apple’s attempt to mediate (and siphon off revenue from) content supplied to iPads (and iPhones) through the iTunes store, and the new iBooks, only further supports this notion of the device as a supplier of content in the old fashioned model of the entertainment industry. Could such a precedent put an end to the ‘all is free’ era of the internet? It will likely make users more accepting of companies charging for content they used to get for free, as Rupert Murdoch plans to do with online versions of his newspapers. It also seems that the announcement of the product has caused Macmillan to make Amazon increase prices for their digital books.

Maybe content shouldn’t always be free, but comment should be. I wonder if devices like this could begin to define users’ (especially childrens’) experience of the internet as a passive one, therefore eroding their motivation to get involved and contribute. Last week I saw a powerful presentation from John Davitt where he mashed up clips from Lord of The Rings with a talking sheep. With this he showed how in less than a minute, students could “reframe their understanding of their relationship with the dominant media of their time”. The ability to exercise such creativity is so important, but I worry about the effect of children brought up with ubiquitous access to content on devices that are too locked down to creatively engage with it.

It would be going to far to suggest that one device portends an Orwellian/Huxleyan  world of totally subjugated consumers- but there are some interesting parallels.

Comments

Negotiated projects and Random Activity Generator

Since blogging (Pt1, and Pt2)about my efforts to create a framework to scaffold our negotiated projects I have worked with one group who produced a play for our Reception classes. Over the two week period we had a lot of time for reflection. Some of this was facilitated half way through execution of the project by the National College coming in to film what we are doing as a school around negotiated learning. Although this occurred in what would have been a practical session, it was actually really useful as it allowed us some time to sit down around a table mid project and reflect at length on how the project was progressing and how they could ensure it achieved its outcomes. The pupils were fantastic at this, even though we were being filmed, and my general structure for the planning and execution of the project seemed to make a lot of sense to them.

To be honest this framework had not progressed hugely since my last post on the topic, and is still fairly loose other than the phases of ‘Planning’, ‘Doing’ and ‘Sharing and Reflecting’. I originally intended to hammer out this framework myself and then present it to the pupils, but due to constraints on my time it has really slowly evolved in response to the needs of the pupils I have been working with. Today I was really glad that I have ended up approaching it like this because I stumbled on a great, but very simple idea.

We were working on a group session gathering lots of initial ideas for projects and were running into the recurring problem that the children have lots of interests but find it hard to frame these into a project they can plan. One group was throwing around lots of ideas about space such as black holes, other stars, life on other planets whilst the other was concentrating on mediums of expression such as clay work, powerpoints and podcasts. Whilst trying to help them frame these into projects I remembered John Davitt’s (@johndavitt) ‘Random activity generator’, which I had had a go with in one of his workshop sessions at the SSAT primary conference last week.

Bascially this is a random generator which contains a large number of concepts, an randomly combines them with a long list of ways of expressing them to create cognitively challenging (and often wacky) challenges. Things such as presenting the history of weaving as a 20 second sound file, or expressing chemical changes as a stop motion animation. These are great for challenging children (and grown ups alike!), but what really grabbed me was the structure. The challenges are separated into two sections: ‘Do’ (containing the concept or knowledge to express), and ‘As’ (defining the medium of expression or end result). It struck me that this structure was exactly what my group needed to frame their myriad of ideas into achievable projects. Luckily I had a copy of the Generator iPhone app on me, and I explained it to them and showed the results. After generating a few random activities they soon ‘got’ the structure, and as a result found it much easier to combine their ideas and frame the concepts they were interested in learning about as achievable projects. In this case I want to remove the random element, as I really want them to define the ideas, but I can see this part of it being very interesting in other contexts.

‘Do x , As y’; a simple framework, but something I think could be a great addition to my structure for negotiated projects. This has really encouraged me that going with the children and developing the structure through their work is the way forward, as it needs to be simple enough to translate across year groups in the school, but powerful enough to allow their ideas to take their own course. I hated the idea of imposing structures on something so free, but I am glad that with some thought even this element can be defined in response to pupils needs.

Comments

ICT skills should be portable

During my training last year by far the most talked about of the ‘dreaded’ TDA tests was the I.C.T. test. This test involved completing a variety of tasks such as answering an email and bookmarking a website under timed exam conditions. All of the tasks were things that my colleagues did all the time- yet they still dreaded this test most of all, and many repeatedly failed it. Chats with those who attended other universities has suggested this situation is not out of the ordinary.

The problem people seemed to have was that the test took place on a made up operating system.

Most people’s complaints seemed to be centered on the argument that the test was not representative of their IT skills as it was an irrelevant system that they were not used to. Whoosh.. there goes the missed point.

After conversations with colleagues at different schools it worries me that many teachers and ICT admins are so reluctant to shift from Windows centric thinking. A colleague I was at University with told me that his school decided to spend their budget on a limited number of Windows machines rather than significantly more Linux ones because, “Linux is for geeks”. This saddens me. Certainly there are issues of support staff needing the skills to do their job (lets hope those are transferrable enough to manage the ‘made up OS’). However, I think it is hugely important for children to experience different systems for them to gain a true understanding of ICT, and truly transferable skills.

In order to develop these ‘portable’ skills and real understanding of IT systems, I really believe children need to experience different operating systems. Someone who has only used one system may easily have got by learning step by step instructions of how to achieve their goals without actually understanding what they are doing, or how the tasks are structured. For example, such a child can learn to find a file by clicking point 1, then point 2 etc, and replicate this every time. To locate that same file on a PC, a Mac and a Linux machine on different occasions requires them to actually think about how the file system is organised, and negotiate it through understanding of the concepts rather than simply learning a procedure by rote. This is a simple example, but as a long time Windows user I gained so much real understanding when I started using Linux and OS X simply because I had to translate my knowledge and skills into a different paradigm.

Surely as schools we should be setting up our systems in the way that has the biggest impact on childrens’ understanding, not that the one that is easiest to manage or conceptualise for support staff. This should be argument enough, without looking at the possible cost savings involved with using Linux based OSes on at least some machines in a school.

I am probably preaching to the converted with this topic on this blog, but I think it is so important that we provide children with a range of ICT experiences in schools, lest they end up like my supposedly ‘computer savvy’ colleagues.

Comments

Sentence level starters

I’m not sure if it’s the way I teach, or the way the PNS framework sets out areas of study, but I find most of my Literacy lessons end up based on text level objectives. APP assessments on my class before Christmas confirmed my gut feeling that the area they really needed to develop was their sentence level and grammar skills.

I decided to borrow an idea I came across at Aldermoor Farm Primary School, where I spent my final PGCE placement. There every Literacy lesson started with a starter activity, much like a mental & oral starter in Maths, all based around sentence level work.

I went through the APP assessments and listed the ‘next steps’ that the children were not achieving, and devised a collection of short activities to hit these objectives. I find this kind of work hard to come up with ideas for, but the old Literacy strategy ‘Grammar for Writing’ resources are great for giving ideas for simple grammar activities.

This seems to have worked really well, with children often being observed implementing the skills from these starters in the rest of the lesson. One thing I have found a challenge is maintaining the pace of my lessons when including these activities. I think I just need to move away from the idea that they all have to ‘get it’ during the starter. I think instead I need to see it as an ongoing practice which we will repeat on future occasions, dripfeeding these sentence level skills.

A simple idea, but I have found it really valuable for making sure I cover the sentence level objectives in a rigorous way.

Comments

Embedding 21st Century technologies presentation

A short interview with me, and some of my class’ work have been used in this presentation by Neil Hopkin at the National College, and on the Manchester University PGCE course.

It’s great to see that some PGCE students are being encouraged to use web based tools. During my own training only last year ICT was presented in a very Web 1.0 way. I think this was partly because many of the students did not appear confident even with that use of technology. However, I would argue that Web 2.0 tools are closer to those that people use in their everyday lives than ‘educational technologies’ such as interactive whiteboards and virtual learning environments. I would urge all trainee teachers to get on the web, get some ideas, and give them a go. After all, shouldn’t your training really about experimenting and exploring what works for you as a teacher? Unfortunately, due to the pressure of constant assessments and the model of measuring up to rigid standards rather than reflectively developing own practice, trying forward thinking approaches on placement can be difficult.

It’s great to see some trainees really diving in headfirst.

Embedding 21st century new technologies in the primary/elementary classroom
View more documents from neilhopkin.
Comments
« Older Posts