foolfillment: the blog

One of the great things about being an NQT is that you get a lot more time to do the sort of things that other teachers can’t quite fit in so easily, one of these is the chance to observe other lessons throughout the school.

This afternoon I was able to watch Digital Katie’s friend Jack Tennent teach computing to a 3rd year class. One pupil in that class is also in my 3rd year Craft and Design class – a class that has not been going as well as it might. This afternoon’s lesson was with a much smaller class but the difference between then and my classes was still very marked. The main reason behind that I think is the different environment and a few missing faces, but one big contributing factor to my problems, I think, is the content of the lessons. Today there was a series of short achievable tasks, a whole class game related to the material, and then some free time as a reward at the end, whereas in Craft and Design at the moment the class are working on a long running project with not a lot of scope for doing anything else but the project.

Allow me to use a metaphor, if I was planning a long walk for myself, say from Lauder to Dunbar, then I would probably plan to follow the Herring Trail route – pretty much a direct route over the Lammermoors but one that is fairly committing and offers no easy escape route. On the other hand if I was taking someone along with me who isn’t a big walker and is really more interested in learning a few more outdoor skills then I would plan something different like an easy coastal walk that could be split into little bits and allowed us to escape to a road and catch a bus home or spend a night camping.

At the moment my 3rd years are somewhere on the Lammermoors and while some of them could be making good time and enjoying the scenery there are enough of them who have blisters so that everyone is being held back. Basically they are not able to cope with the project and I need to find a way of getting them onside again. I also need to find a way to spend time with those at the front so that they don’t go the wrong way and get lost.

I had a brief but very worthwhile conversation this afternoon with the pupil who is in both this class and in mine, he told me that what I am doing with him is no fun. I totally agreed, being in that class at the moment is no fun for me or for them, but making it better with the current project will be hard. This was not news to me, I had a conversation at SLF last week about just this class. The suggestion was to throw out all the course content as it is and come at it from a different direction, I know this is what I need to do but I feel like I’m committed at the moment and my only option is to push on and try something new when we start the next part of the course. Unfortunately that is their final project in Standard Grade and the one which they get graded on, I need them on side before I start that so I’m trying to work out what short bits of work I can do with them to win them over in between now and then.

I’ve also been given a maths class to watch tomorrow, again with the same pupil – the lad will think I’m deliberately following him!

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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Ewan writes today about access restrictions to certain websites in schools, about how the filtering systems is different in each school. He makes the point that there should be some sort of guidance to enable progress:

So what are the main issues halting progress?

1. Fear of…
* Inappropriate material
Yet, teachers will use Google Images (unmoderated by a community) instead of (the blocked) Flickr.

Source: Ewan McIntosh, Dear Head of Education: Please don’t check my briefcase when I come to school

I came across this on my last placement. I was helping out a class in my last week that needed emergency cover. They were given a task of looking for examples of projects that they could make when they come to do their Craft Project in fourth year – looking for things like small tables, jewellery boxes, mirror stands, that sort of thing. I was told to use google images.

I didn’t have time to query if flickr was accessible, I would have first had to explain to the PT what flickr was, then explain to the pupils how to use it (it could have been the perfect lesson to introduce ideas about copyrighted material and how to find usable materials but that wasn’t what I had to get them to do).

Anyway, I got them sitting down infront of a pc and searching for images. A couple of them wanted to make snooker cue cases, ‘fine’ I said later to have a minor uprising when they discover one of the top results is of an injured 11 year old boy. I’ll not explain the injury, rather leave you to see it if you want. Google Search.