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.

Which write is right? The future of text....

Which write is right? The future of text....

There is a debate raging. Well that's a slight exaggeration; there is an ongoing polite discussion. And as far as I can tell, most of it is occurring inside my own head. So it's time to expand the scope of this critical conversation: the future of text communication.

Let's start with the first two dimensions (third and fourth to follow, be patient). Most folk would probably agree that handwriting, cursive or otherwise, is something worth learning. But the chances are, that learning to touch type is likely to be a more useful skill for our students in their future working lives. So just how much of their finite learning time should we be spending on perfecting handwriting compared to touch typing? Leaving aside the comparative potential benefits of each, to other skills such as motor control, grammar and spelling, what is the right approach?

I believe that if I were not a teacher, I would probably hardly ever handwrite anything. The benefits of recording text digitally so far outweigh the analogue version for me that it has to be a specific application such as writing a card, or a personal letter to my Granny, before I employ my 'bestest' joined-up handwriting.

So, if handwriting is becoming a dying art, much like calligraphy or darning socks, we should be teaching students to touch type instead, right?

Well, possibly not. Just as I regularly spurn my hard won cursive writing skills, isn't there a high probability that hours dedicated to getting above 40 words per minute touch typing will also be obsolete for our current students in their future working lives? With technology like Siri and Google Voice and other speech recognition applications (the third dimension), isn't it just a matter of time before writing, in the form of physically recording text, is relegated to a niche craft? And as fanciful as it might sound to us now, how long before speaking it out loud becomes passé as technology that can read our thoughts is developed? (The fourth dimension!)

What now?

So if handwriting is already dying, and typing is soon to be usurped, what should we be teaching our students as the best way to record their learning? The growth of various media as communication tools is relatively new (think writing - thousands of years old, recording sound, moving pictures etc just over 100 years), but will these ever be acceptable forms of communication for business and qualifications purposes? Will they be accepted as replacing written word? Or will they forever need to be accompanied by the artificially manufactured communication form of written text?

It would be foolish to predict, but I am a fool, so here are my best guesses:

• The world of education (in general) will be almost the last to carry on clinging to the written word as the mainstay of ideas communication, i.e. exams.
• Written language will cleave further into standard written and text speak.
• Accepted forms of ideas communication will continue to expand to absorb more specialist media as visual, audio and experiential communication tools continue to be developed and melded into different forms.
• An increasing range of tools will be available for producing written text and choosing the most appropriate will become a necessary skill of the writer.

So where does this leave us as present day educators? I guess that depends on whether you believe the potential for learning capacity is a finite measure, or infinite. If students have an infinite capacity to learn, and we can match this with our teaching, then the answer is easy; teach them every method. If students have a finite capacity for learning, or more likely - we have a finite capacity for teaching them, then we focus on what we think will be the most beneficial in their immediate future. But build within them the capacity to adapt, so when the time comes, they can be the entrepreneurs of change.

The Commercialisation of School

Commercialisation

With my 'modern teacher' hat on, I was partaking of a Twitter chat the other day. During the chat I was struck by the terminology the moderator of the chat used. He was discussing how you promote the 'branding' of your school. To me, branding is a word with a whole world of commercial and capitalist connotations and it felt unnatural to be using the term in an educational sense.

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2009/07/25/the-significance
-of-establishing-a-prominence-brand-identity-for-your-website/

So with this in mind, I began to think; is education becoming more commercialised? Should it? Is this inevitable progress? And should schools really be adopting marketing and business approaches to their 'core business'? Think of the terminology: 'performance related pay', 'target setting', 'data tracking', 'intervention strategy' in fact, I don't know for sure where these terms originated from but they sound like terms that could have come from industry, and there are many other examples. I was sat in a meeting just this week where the students were referred to as ‘customers’. Students or parents as customers is a worrying thought to a progressive educator when that old adage ‘the customer is always right’ comes to mind.

I enjoy sport, football in particular (the version where the ball is kicked more than any other action), and the podcasts I follow deride the word 'brand' in football. To them it represents the money-grabbing marketeer approach to club ownership. They believe this approach often means the club can afford to pretty much ignore the needs of the match going fans.

So on the one hand, we are bowing to the demands of the customer by giving them what they think they want, while at the same time ignoring what they actually need. This is because we are scrambling to maintain our own thin veneer of success as dictated by the narrow gauge of data.

What happened to the 'industrial' school?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory

In his oft aired talk on the state of schooling (RSA version), Sir Ken Robinson uses the industrial features of schools to question how appropriate the current school design is for the task of learning (recognise that staff meeting anyone?). It's interesting to see that we are being guided away from the industrial model of schooling, the old fashioned world where things were actually made; I loved making stuff at school. To a creeping commercialisation of schooling where things are measured, tracked, compared, publicly evaluated and ultimately judged on how well they sell. Where schools are in competition with each other to develop their unique selling point. Where the actual ‘product’ seems to be lost in the wake of the more important job of reporting the numerical values that reflect the right image for protecting the reputation of the schools, areas/local authorities/districts, political policies or even countries (thanks P.I.S.A.). And we all know how well that model worked for the banking world.

What now?

Naturally, I am not necessarily recommending we go back to the old industrial model. In fact I'm not entirely sure what I am recommending. But as far back as 2008 (and probably earlier too) reports of school’s using tactics which ‘game’ the system, not dissimilar to what the banks got up to, were calling for the end of the targets and results obsession. We are not churning out products. We are not manufacturing, assembling or marketing. We are learning. How can the impact of school life ever be effectively measured when the outcomes last over a lifetime and people's judgements on success are as varied as there are people?

What I really need is some way of measuring how empowered my students are to achieve what makes them happy over their lifetime. That they are wise enough to choose their own success criteria, and that the very same success criteria has a basis in consideration for the world around them.

Find a way to measure me that, and I'll sell it for you.

Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

"The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."
- Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century

So I set up a Powtoon account not long ago. This is an animated film and presentation making website, and mighty good it is too. In the first tutorial the fella announces you have a full 7 seconds to capture the audience's attention, before they decide if it is worth watching further. I wondered to myself how long people's attention spans are for reading, or more precisely reading blogs, before they decide it's time to move on to something different? I fear I may already have overrun my attention grabbing window. It's only the hardy, or foolhardy from now on.

So for those still with me, welcome!

As a fresh faced NQT I remember vividly the experience of being enlightened, by some gnarly expert visiting our authority, that teachers had been doing teaching all wrong for years. That students needed to have their lessons delivered to them in a new way, which took into account their 'learning style'. This was news to me and my peers as we all sat around studiously filling in questionnaires to identify our learning styles. It made perfect sense at the time. And who were we to disagree with some such educational Goliath? Even if we had suspected there was something not quite right about it.

So we toddled off back to our schools and dutifully create three different learning style activities for every lesson we teach, as if we weren't busy enough already. Which we just about managed to keep up every time we got observed, for the first year at least.

From: https://everettcc.instructure.com/courses/1054908/pages/learning-styles-and-elearning

Now we are told this was misguided (which is handy, because in the form it was first presented to me, it turned out to be pretty unsustainable). Now we are told that it isn't actually how learning works at all. And yet, a huge proportion of people (82% - find out more here) still believe the learning style myth to be true. This has been learnt, assimilated and then entrenched into popular belief. How long before society manages to 'unlearn' this concept? Then how much longer to learn that everybody uses all methods and it depends on what is being learnt, as to which method is employed? And then, how much longer to unlearn that actually, even this is not exactly how it works but....? (Of course this hasn't happened yet, but it probably will).

This is a specific educational example of learning, unlearning and relearning. But I truly believe that in their working lives, much of the true success of our students will depend upon their adaptability. Indeed, this has always been the case through human history. But as the pace of change seems to be accelerating, examples of the increasing usefulness of this ability are already apparent. 

Recently, in my school, we migrated from an Outlook based email solution to a Gmail one. This was carefully planned for and orchestrated. Colleagues' comfort levels with the new email system were measured, a variety of support put in place, and a number of training sessions laid on. Some folks were so far ahead they could have run the sessions themselves, others neatly switched in line with the programme, and still others are yet to come to terms with labels and filters months after the event. I wonder what impact this has had on each group's effectiveness since the switch?

In the recent past so much effort was put into things like 'learning styles' and the much maligned 'brain breaks' etc, I wonder how long before our Gmail training becomes so equally old fashioned and obsolete? When we communicate by using devices that we dictate to (still can’t get these to work reliably for me yet!) and then devices that even read our minds to compose 'thought messages', the hours we spent learning and teaching a new way to type a message will seem quaint indeed.

http://www.learning-mind.com/mind-reading-device-can-convert-thoughts-into-words/

This makes me wonder, how much have I learnt in the last year that I will need to unlearn, how much have I taught, that will need unteaching, and how many things will I need to relearn this year?

Voice recognition? So twentieth century, Sir.