foolfillment: the blog

I visited Prestonpans Primary School today and I was taken amazed by what I saw. This was the first time I’ve been in a primary school since I was a pupil myself so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I was fairly certain that I’d see teachers there showing me a thing or too about how to deliver great lessons: learning intentions shared along with negotiated success criteria, all the pupils active and collaborating; and colourful classrooms that are exciting places to be. This is almost exactly what I saw, I’m shattered now and I didn’t really have to do much – turns out observing in a primary school is a much more involving event than observing in a secondary. The energy that all the teachers put in to their lessons and the enthusiasm from the pupils was quite staggering, and I should take the chance to say a huge thank you to all of the staff who let me take part in their day.

Somewhere along the way from primary to secondary there seems to be something that removes so much excitement about learning, that stifles the boundless creativity that children have. I’m going back in to school tomorrow with a fresh determination to make every lesson count. Something that I find difficult in my subject area is making every lesson count in it’s own right as a learning experience. So often what I am working on with my classes is a project that spans over more many lessons, where the learning comes from practising practical skills, or where because of resources pupils all work on different things on different days, this makes teaching things to a whole group in 1 50 minute slot near impossible.

Something that was said to me the other week was that Graphic Communication is one subject where you can really work on your teaching skills, it is the subject where you can work on much smaller pieces of work and have a lesson dedicated to each part. It offers challenges to explain difficult concepts and procedures to a variety of different abilities. This idea came up because I was delighted to have regained an S2 Graphics class, I was sharing them on my original timetable back in August but lost them for a while when the timetable changed a few months ago. Thankfully I got them back the other week and I am thoroughly enjoying taking them again, I hope they are too! Now the challenge is to make every lesson with them count, to share those learning intentions better…to have them more active too I hope, I have some plans for this which you may see on the RHS CDT blog (if technology doesn’t let me down).

Dave McLeod, amazing rock climber and fairly prolific blogger writes this today: I hated school:

Before I found a focus, I was in the same situation as many kids. I went to school and sat in classes where teachers spent a big proportion of the time keeping order and not developing interest. I didn’t enjoy it, and even as a kid I could recognise there was much time being wasted.

Once I started climbing, and began skipping school, I was the opposite from a draw on resources. I learned by myself, eagerly.
…
The solution for teachers? Find a way to communicate the power of the ideas, rather than force feed the detail of a world youngsters can’t connect easily to. It is possible, even within the constraints of ‘the system’. If you don’t dig deeper to find a way to achieve it, who will?

He makes it all sound so easy! Real learning becomes happens when there is a meaning to the information you are getting, so if you can find something that you love doing then chances are there are all sorts of things you need to learn about to enable you to do it better. The thing you love becomes the way of creating meaning around discrete pieces dry information. Like Dave says, it stops being a chore and becomes just something that you do, something that you want to keep doing. The challenge for a learner is to find that hook, the challenge for teachers is to find 20/30/60… of those hooks!

This is everyone’s favourite advert at the moment – surely?

I spent a happy Saturday morning playing on the milkmatters site, not only can you watch the adverts and download ringtones (my phone screams as though I’ve no milk whenever I get a txt now;-)) but you can learn all about stop frame animation and play with the characters to make your own short films, and learn a bit about the commercial side to the production of milk. So it’s not entirely frivolous fun – it’s educational too!*

Great fun!

*I don’t know how well they treat their farmers though so I still probably wouldn’t buy Cravendale milk – apart from the fact of being dairy intolerant that is…

Ollie Bray wrote tonight about how much he likes the Commoncraft video tutorials. I felt compelled to leave a comment.

I first saw their video on RSS a few months ago and I couldn’t watch it all the way through, being perfectly honest I found his voice hugely off putting. I was put off by the accent and the silly humming at the start. It meant I didn’t pick up on how well a difficult subject was put across until relatively recently.

Anyway, I felt compelled to leave a comment for Ollie saying just that, but as I typed my comment it grew into a post in it’s own right. I got thinking that if only the videos had regional variations then I’d like them much more, as I was watching the new one on photosharing I was struck just how simple it was to put together – I mean the technology for doing so, actually coming up with such a clear an engaging presentation takes a very clever person indeed.

I got thinking that it would be dead easy for a group of pupils to recreate these presentations, they’d pick up a lot of skills in doing so, and even if they just copied the story it would still be an exciting and beneficial task there for pupils of any age.

Now, how is this tied into Graphic Communication? For those of you outwith the subject: in Standard Grade one of the folio pieces that pupils usually make is a storyboard of how to…make a cup of tea/iron a shirt/draw a monkey etc. These are always paper based and hand drawn, it’s a fun task for most pupils. Now, my argument is that these are great skills to have (manual illustration, information layout on a page, choice of colour and typeface and so on…) but, these skills are already used in lots of the folio pieces. In terms of the literal meaning of Graphic Communication videos like these are a perfect example, and if you were to make them like the common craft videos then you still have the manual drawing skills.

This is just another thought about where the subject could go to keep it relevant and interesting for pupils – as well as future employers. What do you think?

I’m sure many subjects could claim this sort of task so why not me? I may look into trying this with my S4 Graphics class sometime…

“We learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience” – John Dewey.

I have never been one for doing an end of year, navel gazing post,* instead I tend to be pretty reflective all the time, but now that the new term has begun I’ve found myself thinking more about how things have changed since August. There have of course been huge changes in myself professionally, I have gained a huge amount of curricular knowledge from teaching subjects I’ve not taught before, but it’s all the other areas that have changed the most (as an aside I wonder how many teachers well out of probation ever look at their practice compared to the Standard for Full Registration…) like classroom/workshop management, managing pupil behaviour, and short/medium/long term planning.

It’s the last one I want to pick up on. Last term the only constant was change, and things are continuing to change this term. It’s no doubt the same in every school: staff come and go; people get promotions; but it feels like there has been more upheaval than is normal. We are about to start with a new timetable on Monday and I will be losing a couple of periods a week with 2 of my classes. This means I’m going to have to plan out material for those periods for the foreseeable future. This would be quite a big task normally but this time it’s made more difficult by the fact that it is classes sitting our 2 year Highers – the first time we’ve run them. It means that while we have plans for the courses both long term and short term the classes are still being ironed out as we go to an extent.

I’ll try to let you know how things go, though hopefully you’ll be able to track the progress on the RHSCDT edubuzz blog.

*In fact I always find the New Year quite a bizarre idea, an enjoyable, but bizarre nonetheless. After all it’s just a moment in time, man just happens to have picked this day as the start/end of a cycle he has noticed. Nature itself makes nothing of the date – waves continue to come crashing in, the moon does it’s own thing.

With only a few days left before the start of the new term it’s time to come back here and write something new. It’s hard to believe it’s been so long since my last post. Needless to say I’ve been busy at school, but next term things should return to something more like normal again, and you should also begin to see more activity on the Ross High CDT blog.

One thing I have been meaning to post about has been the fantastic start that my friend Krysia Mrs Smyth has made with her first year class at St Luke’s. Towards the end of the term there was a flurry of posts, written by the class, all about the projects that they have been working on.

This sort of thing is what I had really hoped to be able to do at Ross High. The excuse I’ve been using I suppose has been ‘I don’t have the time’ – the same excuse that I’ve argued against in the past. Truth is I really don’t know how I will fit class blogging into my classes, there isn’t space in the timetable in 1st year, especially when I lose my class a lot from Monday holidays, and with doing Standard Grades in S2 and S3, again I feel like it is a race against time to get the students prepared for their exams. Another obstacle to class blogging, and I mean real class blogging where the pupils do it not me, is that I am in workshops most of the time and getting access to the graphics room – and internet – is a rare occurrence. My other class, an S4 Graphics Higher/Int2 course over 2 years should be giving my loads of chance for class blogging, but the obstacle there is the pupils themselves – they aren’t so keen on sharing their work online, something that I’m going to badger them about. I know there are a couple of S4s who know about this blog, so maybe they can spread the word?

One final thing, Nick Hood, physics teacher and all round good guy, has closed down his wiki after it being blocked in his school.

I’ve also found that skills in “ICT” are so threatening for some in education that they have been a distinct career disadvantage for me. For this reason, I am not going to waste my time on these things I cannot use to advantage me or my students.

This is a huge shame, Nick had put a huge amount of his own time and effort into his wiki and previously VLE. That he has been left feeling he has no choice but to abandon it I think is appalling. I find myself feeling equally frustrated sometimes, using ICT in the classroom comes with a large number of advantages, often just using the usual stuff on your PC is enough. However it is so much better when you have control over your system and can configure it to work for you – something you can’t do with the locked down school systems; then when you find yourself some great software while using your machine at home you are fighting a losing battle, trying to use your machine at school is not worthwhile (you can’t get on the network) and trying to get software installed on your school machine is often not worth the effort (takes too long to get a licence, get it installed, or the machine doesn’t have a good enough spec). Why should teachers with the expertise to run their own machines, to securely set up a good productive working system (or run a webserver in the case of many teachers) not be granted privileges to either use their own machine on the network, or to tweak their work machines to suit them? On a related note, why should pupils not get similar rights?