Not 'just' another tool....

My parents just about remember writing in chalk, on blackboards. Then along came the pencil and paper and revolutionised learning. Well not really. It just let teachers and students do what they had always done, but better, faster, and more conveniently.

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So how do we make sure that technology doesn't become another story of the pencil and paper, and just make things better, faster and more convenient?

To me it seems obvious. And yet so often I see technology employed to do pretty much exactly the same things as have always been done in class, but on a screen. And sometimes, even the 'electronic worksheet' makes an appearance, a more depressing use of technology I can't imagine.

I think, a clear indicator of how effectively you will use technology to support learning is how you facilitate learning without technology? Do you seek out imaginative methods of supporting learning? Do students have autonomy in your class, do they understand the bigger picture of what they are learning? Do your students look forward to coming to your class and enjoy the challenges of learning with you?

If these things are not happening at all in your current teaching and learning, then dumping a bunch of technology in your class is mainly going to be a large waste of everyone's time and money.

http://pr0tean.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/transformational-technology-simple.html

If you don't want to waste time and money, have a read of this explanation of the SAMMS acronym. Match it up with the commonly referenced SAMR model of transforming learning with technology. Then reflect carefully on your practice. It's too important an opportunity to let your students down on.

Using technology to increase engagement?

Don't.

Simply put, it's a mistake. If you use technology purely to increase your students' engagement with their learning, then you are wasting your time, and more importantly, your learners' time.

Yes, it may happen that you can perceive an increase in students engagement when using technology, but that is not a reason to use it. This is because as the technology becomes embedded, it loses its initial excitement, the novelty factor, and becomes another facilitator of learning. Like a pencil. An incredibly powerful and effective pencil. But still like a tool to be used for learning. How many teachers claim to introduce the use of a pencil to increase student engagement? None, you'd be mad to. Unless pencils are used so infrequently that they then become a novelty, then they may work, briefly. 

Guess what? Technology such as iPads are not a novelty to students. So many have them, or have used them already that although they may be new to the teacher, they are not actually that special to the students. Being allowed to use them in school is a novelty. But that soon wears off if you are using them to achieve the same things that you have always achieved. If one of your main foci is to increase engagement, then there is the temptation to miss the opportunity to take learning to different levels. In fact, if engagement is a substantial issue for your class, then you probably need to take a hard look at how you are organising learning in your class anyway, never mind throwing technology into the mix.

The novelty of technology increases engagement for almost all students.  But as soon as the tasks on technology becomes schoolwork, then play becomes work.  If the students are not motivated by their schoolwork, it doesn't matter how it is completed, they'll still not be motivated.

The antidote to 'meaningless' school

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I have already written about managing time constraints by focusing on in-depth learning experiences. But over the break I have read a couple of books that have clarified my thinking on this and helped me to form a plan of how to achieve this more consistently with my own students. The hugely popular 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' has been on my 'must read' list for a while now. Of the three tenants of the text, it was Robert M. Pirsig’s focus on the idea of 'quality' that resonated with me in particular. The notion that truly worthwhile actions and achievements can only be deemed worthy or significant if they could be accepted as being a true representation of 'quality'. The depth and discussion on what this means is obviously best addressed by reading the book for yourself. But it prompted me to think about how meaningless are some of the activities teachers ask students to do. Particularly if there is no outcome of quality and no clear pathway from what they are practising to achieving quality. The obvious next step was to relate this to my everyday experience; what part does 'quality' play in my students’ activities? What do they need to be able to produce real quality and how can I support them in reaching it?

Let's agree that some tasks do need to be short and some need to have a degree of repetition to aid learning. How can I ensure that these are still worthwhile and meet the 'quality' criterion? I think this is where sharing the big picture with your students is essential.

If they know the overall aims of all the small steps, what they are building towards, then they see the value and know they can achieve the 'quality' output eventually.

For the longer 'project' based tasks, the quality is easier to recognise for the students. The end product represents their research, their organisation of information and the tools they have used to communicate their learning. This is where the quality should shine. As I say to my students, if they make a film, I don't want the audience to see a film that looks like it has been made by a ten year old. If they write a story, I don't want a story that looks like it was written by a ten year old. Having these high expectations and drilling down with students what these end products need to have to be considered quality, takes time. This is where 'Creativity, Inc' comes in, which was recommended to me by a colleague.

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It's a book by Ed Catmul who describes the culture that he has developed in Pixar to make the incredibly successful animated films that are a shining example of 'quality' in their field. The process of story development, fine tuning and reworking is ongoing and collaborative in the true sense of the word. The company has a 'braintrust' where directors bring their work so far, they receive feedback on what they have done in a truly supportive environment, successes are celebrated and problems and inconsistencies are observed. But the directors are not told what to do about it. The braintrust actually trusts the directors to solve the issues in the most creative ways possible. This is just a brief outline that doesn't do the process justice. He describes how nobody can claim to have all the answers at the outset, but instead there is a team that is confident that they will get to an end point of quality through their methods, processes and critically, by giving each project proper time to grow. Usually four years.

This notion of 'time' is a reoccurring theme. And yet how many examples of quality work in human history can we honestly say have been achieved quickly? And yet we put time limits on writing pieces, on projects, on completing Maths work. Now being able to work to a deadline is something that humans are always going to need to be able to do. But also, we need our students to produce quality. 

And that takes time.

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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.