Creating a class of leaders

It is an often repeated aim or aspiration of schools, to 'develop the leaders of tomorrow' or some similar refrain. This seems to me to be usually met by creating 'posts' that students can hold where they weld some sort of responsibility to a house, or class or team. But by their very nature, these posts are exclusive and not each child has an opportunity to lead in this formal respect. Often, they are leading a competitive group, which I believe misses out on developing some of the most important leadership skills, truly collaborative ones.

si.wikipedia.org

For many years in my class teaching I have placed particular emphasis on students becoming 'independent'. What I wanted from that was for them to take their learning into their own hands, to make decisions based on their experience on what the most useful route would be for them to take. To have confidence in their own abilities, to know what works best for them and to make good choices and decisions. Now as a classroom is a learning environment, I expected them to make mistakes, and this was developed as a natural part of learning.

But recently I have decided that I want to rebrand my emphasis. Independent is good, but it focuses students' attention on the individual. I am now beginning to realise the power of leadership within groups to collaborate and work together, independently of outside guidance, to achieve greater things than any individual could on their own. Now, as always, I realise this is nothing new. But it is a change I want to instigate in my work this year.

www.flickr.com

All of my students will be expected to lead either 'loudly' (active) or 'quietly' (passive). They will all make decisions which affect the classes' progress as a whole. We will be a team together. I will expect them to notice when something needs doing in class, and I will expect them to act upon it. If a student recognises they need help, as a leader they need to seek it from the most appropriate source, which will often not be me. If a student recognises someone else needs help (even me!), as a leader, they will offer it.

My job is to facilitate this environment where every student is responsible for the progress of the class, themselves and of each other. When they learn something, discover a new way to achieve something, make a mistake and adapt or find a solution to a problem, I expect them to share it. They will need to decide the best way to share it, and the best time. Most often it could be instantaneously by interrupting the class to share so everybody can benefit immediately, or it could be at the end of the session, or the start of another. This caring about the needs of the collective, making decisions to benefit all, and taking responsibility for the progress of all, this will be the beginning of developing true collaborative leaders in my class.

Key points for my class to know this year;

• Leaders notice things, think carefully and act.
• Leaders recognise their mistakes, and reflect and improve.
• Leaders share their expertise.
• Leaders know when to follow.
• Leaders ask questions and take every opportunity to learn.
• Leaders support each other with recognition and praise.
• Leaders support each other through observations and suggestions to improve.
• Leaders empower themselves, and others, to improve.
• Leaders care about each other.

The enemy of learning

I don’t think I could have designed a better childhood for myself, than the one I had. I had glorious amounts of freedom growing up in the countryside, building dams, climbing trees and making dens. My brother and I, with our friends, used to explore our surroundings. We used to try stuff out, like balancing on a fallen tree to cross a stream, seeing how far we could run down a hill before our legs couldn’t keep up with our body. When the ground was frozen, I even remember taking all the wheels off a skateboard and boarding down a big hill on the solid earth, with no way of controlling direction or speed. They were great times. And I think we learnt a lot about ourselves. We learnt how to run, how to take risks, and how to fall.

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I realise I tend to start many of my posts with a quick reminisce. I think that happens because these memories spark off a thought that gets me thinking about how things are right now. And I don’t see many children having the same kind of childhood that I had. Kids at my school are sometimes so mollycoddled that they are not learning these things. Their whole day is already planned for them. They have no time to explore. They are not learning how to fall.

My students can now probably repeat the mantra, ‘use failure to learn, you just haven’t got it yet’. Even now I am rethinking my phraseology here, Maybe ‘failure’ isn’t the right word, it sounds too permanent. But, equate experiencing failure to falling, and an analogy starts to form.

Falling happens when you take a risk and it doesn’t pay off, or something unexpected happens that causes you to fall. If you trip over a step, you learn there is a step there. If you fall off the tree crossing the river, you learn where the slippy bit is, and try again. Or you learn that slippy logs are not the best way to cross and find another way. When you fall running down a hill, you learn where the limit is, if you want, you can adjust how you run to see if you can make it all the way. But you also learn how to fall without destroying your confidence, you learn how to get up, dust yourself off, and move on.

When you don’t get it right when you are learning, you realise you need to find another way. Or you need to practise more. Or you need to adjust. You definitely learn to dust yourself off and get on with things without collapsing into a jabbering wreck.

My concern is, just like children these days are less able to learn their limits and less able to practise dealing with falling. They are also less able to deal with being wrong, with failing, with making mistakes. They are so often required (by parents, themselves, ill informed teachers) to get things right, that they are inhibited by a fear of being wrong.

And the fear of being wrong, is the enemy of learning.

4 ways to deal with 'Content Explosion'

From when I was young, I remember a conversation between my Dad and my Uncle Keith. Uncle Keith worked for the navy in a job which involved the use of computers in their early form. Dad was pointing out how easy these computers must make it for Keith to do his job these days, and in response Keith just sighed and shook his head sadly,

"Naaaa, not really, all that happens now is that I'm given even more to do, and expected to do it better and faster."

This is the crux of my 'content explosion theory'. In my day at school, producing a project of some sort would require quite a bit of handwriting, drawing, colouring, cutting and sticking. All this is time consuming to a left-handed ponderous worker like myself. The resulting masterpiece would be handed in and marked by my long suffering teachers. This process was likely to take a couple of days, a week or even longer. Therefore the balance of work produced to work returned marked, was relatively easy to maintain for my teachers.

Spring forward to my internet, iPad and 1 to 1 enabled classroom and it doesn't quite work like that anymore. Were I to let them, my students could produce one of those type of projects every day, 'internet' researched. Including professional looking graphics and a decent amount of design awareness.

Similarly my students can produce extended pieces of writing, shoot and edit films, create an Explain Everything to er... explain something and more. This volume of material just keeps coming forth, mounting up like European wheat waiting to be consumed by an overnourished and time-poor populace. Pearson refer to the ‘Digital Ocean’ in regards to data on students, but this is also a mass of content that is growing daily, not just data, and it is all out there.

This became a real problem in the early days of the 1 to 1 roll out in my class. The students were on a creation frenzy, encouraged by me to choose their own method of demonstrating their learning, they began creating piles and gigabytes of 'stuff'. Stuff that there was never any chance that I was going to have enough waking hours to consume, mark and feedback on. I caught myself contemplating what I could do to 'slow them down' but soon realised this was not the kind of place I wanted to be in. Slowing down students who were desperate to create was the antithesis of what I was after.

So I came up with a few techniques I have begged, borrowed and stolen from wherever I could to turn this opportunity into a much deeper and more powerful learning experience. These are things that good learning and teaching has always needed, but become particularly relevant in the creative 1 to 1 environment:

mountpleasantgranary.net

1. Focus heavily on the audience.

For each piece of learning where my students will be creating something to demonstrate their understanding, I give them an audience. Peers from elsewhere in the world or younger/older children from my own school have worked well. Parents and other adult audiences can be used effectively too. This focuses the students on how their work will appeal to the chosen audience, and consider the needs of that audience when assembling their pieces. For example, my Y5 maths group created iBooks to teach Y2 children all about shapes. They also designed a lesson, with activities, to teach Y3 students about how to stay safe when using the internet. Getting them to teach the lesson was a huge learning experience.

openclipart.org

2. Focus on the process.

How are they going to achieve what they need to? What do they need to know? How can they present what they know? Which methods will be most effective? As they are working, how can they check that their approach is working? A colleague and I are developing a template proforma with guiding questions to facilitate these kind of questioning activities and to develop a process based approach to learning tasks.

blog.drorhelper.com

3. Focus on the quality of the end product.

Now there are better tools for the job, the job needs to be completed to a higher standard. This will generally still be reflected in the amount of time students spend on creative projects. If it is quick and easy to do, has it been done well enough? For example, authoring an iBook is a task that can be done very quickly, but usually a much better end product will result from taking time to draft and redraft the text, create the artwork and carefully design the layout for maximum effect. During this process is where you as a teacher can use timely feedback/advice to guide and influence the learners towards improvement. If you want to know more about assessing learning at a deeper level, check out some great thinking here, at Mindshift.

4. Do something 'real' with it.

Although I am probably more interested in the process the students have gone through, than the end product. It is still something that needs to be valued. Follow through with the audience anyway you can think of. Skype, exhibitions, sharing times, blogs, film shows, exit point events, teaching a lesson and publishing a book are just some of the ways. Remember, a truly good audience will be able to give some kind of feedback, and enable the students to reflect on how successful they were this time.

Is everything I do with my students set up like this? No, it's not. But I do connect the other learning tasks we do to the overall end products, so students can see the reasons for each task, and how it leads into their wider learning.

Badge-ification!

In my last post, I noted how I had set myself the target of blogging every three weeks. So this one is early. But I’ve just achieved something, and I wanted to share it now!

I’ve taken a bit of a leap. Our school learner profile may well describe me as a ‘risk-taker’. Either way, I should get a merit sticker for my efforts I reckon!

An enforced lay off has given me the couple of hours I needed to do something I had been planning for a while; creating a ‘Badge System’. We set up a hashtag on Twitter for our school back in the Autumn term. It was inspired by the excellent #SISrocks hashtag and we called ours #BSJbytes. It has been ticking along nicely. Teachers share inspired moments of learning, links to pertinent articles, celebrations of achievement and observations from their daily experiences. We even used it as a backchannel during INSET days. It’s a great way to connect folk who are often physically separated on our fairly expansive campus.

http://www.visionair.nl/politiek-en-maatschappij/nederland/
openbadges-de-opvolger-van-universiteit-en-hogeschool/

But to take it to the next level, I wanted to recognise those folk who contributed to our community. I’d heard about ‘Badges’ and it intrigued me as a way of giving people the little push of extrinsic motivation needed to get them involved. Mozilla has developed an ‘Open Badge’ platform for anyone to use as a recognised format to award people’s achievement. Visit the site to check it out.

http://kstreem.com/2015/02/badgelist/

I have made use of Badgelist, a free community that allows you to easily set up a badge and create all the necessary elements to be able to award on to the Open Badge platform. It really is nowhere near a scary as it sounds. But it was definitely some new learning for me.

There are currently seven #BSJbadges that anyone can earn. Just create a Badgelist account, join the #BSJbytes Open Learning Group and upload your evidence. Boom! You’re in. You can add the badge to your Open Badge ‘Backpack’ and display it on your social media.

What more could you ask for??

  

Now the risk is, that nobody can be bothered to join in. But it is a risk I’m willing to take, after all, if it doesn’t take off, at least I have learnt that much!

Creating An 'Audience - Motivation' Loop.

http://sites.middlebury.edu/thekeystodanbrownsinferno/chapter-45/

Seven years old and shivering, I sat in the cloakroom outside Mrs Cope’s classroom. I’d been sent here for the dastardly crime of not writing enough. In half an hour I’d managed two sentences about a picture that bored me. I now awaited my punishment of being ‘seen’ by the head teacher, Mr Ella. Now I don’t hold any grudge towards Mrs Cope, she was just dealing with a reluctant writer in the way she knew how. But her methods sure didn’t make me want to improve as a writer. Looking back, I wonder, why didn’t I want to write and what could Mrs Cope have actually done to motivate me as a writer?

Jump to today, and perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that I have survived my early days as an unenthusiastic writer to present you with my blog. And you are currently reading it. Which I appreciate greatly, so thank you. But really what am I expecting from this undertaking? What is the purpose here, who is the audience and how am I serving them?

These are exactly the questions I ensure my students can answer before setting them off to plan or complete their writing.

Todays Authors

Little Johnny busts his guts writing his story. He even goes back and checks it against the success criteria we have agreed in class, making changes, choosing some more powerful verbs, more engaging vocabulary and even fixing some punctuation mistakes. But what now? Maybe we’ll have time for the class to peer assess each other’s work. I will read it of course and perhaps his parents will flick through it on consultation day. But what is the point of writing it with almost no one to read it?

Now I am aware that intrinsic motivation has been proven as the most effective motivation for self improvement, however it would take an incredibly motivated and self aware 10 year old (boy?) to write just for the purpose of improving writing. Many adults would struggle to manage that. So there has to be another reason for writing. ‘Because the teacher said so’ is not going to be enough in most young authors’ minds.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Find_your_voice._express_yourself._creative_writing..jpg

So writing for an audience does motivate students to produce their best writing, let’s agree on that. But where does this audience come from, how do we get the texts to the audience and how can we be sure they have even read it?

Today, teachers have many more tools at their disposal for generating an audience for their student’s work. Most of these are due to technology. Pioneers such as @deputymitchell are busy spreading the word for developing an audience for students’ writing using blogs. In fact, he works especially hard to develop a ‘Global’ audience for young writers. It’s a great idea, and I believe it is very effective.

Audience from?

But here is the crux of the developing problem. If everyone is writing for this audience, who is actually going to be the audience? Of course the same people as are writing you say. But does this actually happen? Everyone is motivated by the reaction they get for their writing, but are they giving a reaction to other people? Everytime they post something, are they reciprocating by reading and reacting to another writers post? I’m not convinced that this is actually happening. But it needs to, otherwise everybody will be so busy creating that nobody will have time to be the audience.

Unchecked, I think this could lead to ‘capitalist literature’. A sort of 'Top of the Pops' where only those exceptional pieces create any real audience for themselves and the vast majority of work goes unnoticed. Is this a positive message for our emerging writers? Do we really want to be making our students compete for an audience? I guess that is a personal choice. But for me, everybody deserves a chance to have their achievements recognised, even if they are small achievements in comparison to others’.

Top of the Pops chart, BBC TV 1960s,
The Lowry, Salford exhibition August 2013

I think of the tools at Mrs Cope’s disposal. I guess she could have been more enthusiastic about my attempts, more positive in praising my efforts, and maybe she could have taken some of my work and displayed it. That could have helped. This last method was the only real method she had of widening the audience for my work. And even back then it was recognised as something worthwhile doing.

I have set myself the target of writing a blog post every three weeks. In that time I think I read about 15 or so other blog posts. So, all things being equal, I think I should receive around 15 views per post. Currently I get more, but I’d still be perfectly happy with that. However, one piece of writing per student every three weeks is not going to cut it as enough writing ‘volume’ for students to improve their skills sufficiently.

Possible Approaches?

• Be very selective with what is blogged, only the very best finished piece is allowed. Everything leading to this piece is working towards that final goal.
• Sign up for @duputymitchell’s ‘Quadblogging’ where classes around the world are matched to read and comment on each other’s blogs. Highly recommended, I’ve had great experiences using this.
• Use Lend Me Your Literacy to share your student’s work.
• Put work up on the wall, particularly in shared areas.

Most importantly, be an audience for other writers and encourage your students to do the same.

The experience of learning

What is the experience of learning?

I went to a small country school until I was nine years old. There were three teachers including Mr. Ella, who took the oldest class. He was also the head of the school. My time at this school was a happy one, and I have many memories of things that happened. However, almost none of them are about the learning. Amongst recollections of Mr. Ella with his blue tracksuit during Friday afternoon football, being made to sit in the cloakroom as a punishment, snow days when the boiler broke and the look on Mr. Ella's face when he contemplated my back to front left handed handwriting, there is only one specific learning event that marks a prominent place in my memory; standing on a chair, that was on top of a table, wearing a hat made out of sugar paper, holding a kitchen roll tube to my eye and shouting 'land ahoy' as we recreated Captain Cook's arrival at the southern islands. I distinctly remember the taste of sauerkraut, the path the Endeavour took, naming the bay he landed in as Botany Bay and plenty more. Ask me what else I learnt at that school, and I can assume I learnt to write, although I don't remember it, I must have learnt some Maths too, but I don't remember it actually happening either. 

http://www.2gb.com/article/captain-james-cooks-endeavour-mystery

I presume there are all sort of reasons for this, mostly that writing and Maths are ongoing skills developments that I am still consolidating and improving now. Whereas the Captain Cook topic was a one off event, learning was not usually conducted like this in Mr. Ella's class, he must have just been on a course.

So, what about now?

As educators, what kind of importance do we place on the experience of learning, in relation to the process of learning?  It must be impractical that we attempt to make all learning memorable events like my Captain Cook episode, and are memorable events even the best way to learn? How many times have I needed to draw on the knowledge I gained from that learning experience? I think I may have got my team a point in a pub quiz once, and of course it was useful for this piece too. But that’s about it. Perhaps the functions of my brain were improved by the process of gaining and sorting that knowledge, otherwise, what was the point?

So I look to my own class now and how our curriculum is organised with special events marking the beginning and ends of topic units. Are we trying to do a ‘Captain Cook’ for every topic? Should we? Is the only reason I remember it, the fact that it was so different to the rest of my school experience? If so, doing ‘Captain Cooks’ all the time will lose impact surely?

The recent introduction of iPads on a 1 to 1 basis has enabled a huge sea change in the way my class operates. Independence, autonomy and responsibility have grown within my students, and it’s pretty incredible to experience. I would love to know how they will view this experience in 10 years time. Will it be something that stands out in their schooling memory, or will these current activities just merge into day by day drudgery of ‘Death by Explain Everything’? I guess ensuring that doesn't happen, is my job now. 

I suppose what I am really skirting around here is how we harness the process of learning. What kind of emphasis do we put on big events and how often do we have them, without them becoming mundane? What role does consolidation, through repeated practice, play in our classes? How is what I call ‘On the Edge’ learning (brand new learning) balanced with the consolidation work, and how do we ensure mastery of this learning?

For our topic work, I try to ensure an authentic reason for the work and opportunity for the students to decide for themselves what they need to do. Then I aim to facilitate and guide them to the best possible outcomes. This is my ‘Captain Cook’ time.

Trying to shoehorn something like multiplication practice into topic work doesn't work easily and this is where a different approach has to be used. Practice to consolidate, can be livened up using games and various other novel ways of practising. But the authentic motivation for this must be intrinsic to the student. They have to understand the relevance of this knowledge and skills to their own lives. This is the key to the 'mundane' learning.