foolfillment: the blog

Castellers by pepesaura [old skool pride]

Robert Jones did me the dubious honour of tagging me for this passion quilt meme. Actually it was a pleasure, most memes are a bit rubbish - just cheap content creation for blogs. This one was a refreshing change. Think of something you are passionate about teaching to your pupils, then find an image to illustrate that.

I love challenging young people to work together and create something remarkable, I first found out about castelling after seeing a a photo taken by my friend Diarmid when he lived in Barcelona, but I thought this photo illustrated this passion better because it is mid-construction and actually involves younsters. I suppose there is a point to be made about usefulness of what is created but, the sense of community that seems to abound castelling has got to count for something doesn’t it?

Now I have to tag 5 new people: Krysia Smyth, Robert Clements, Ollie Bray, Eddie Mack (no blog, yet), and Duncan Smeed.

Here are the rules:
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

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!

The first thing we did at the Learning and Teaching session on Thursday was to spend a little time on our own, quietly thinking about what our most intense learning experience was. No more detail than that, it was up to us to decide what that meant. I thought I might share what mine was and some of my thoughts about the task.

I had a couple of ideas, obviously to pick out one period in particular is hard, but I first thought about what the task really was. Is the emphasis on ‘intense’? (and what does that mean?) Or is it on the learning bit? A single experience? Initially I thought back to my first year at uni. I was studying Electrical Engineering and throughout the year had a number of assignments to do for maths. These were usually fairly short notice and a lot more work than anything else we got. The questions often seemed really distinct from what we had covered in lectures and tutorials so it was usually a fairly frantic time working out what the questions meant in relation to all the bits we knew and somehow piece them together to get the answers. It felt intense, but thinking back did I learn anything from them? It was tough and I was using things I had been studying, but can I remember any of it now? Certainly not.

What I might have learned from it is the value of working with others to solve problems, or some skills in breaking problems in to smaller pieces. In truth all that I learnt was that if you don’t know what the question means then just try something, anything, and if it still makes no sense then just try a few other things and hand in all of the different bits of work and you’ll get a handful of marks rather than none. Tactics, nothing more, nothing less.

The experiences I came up with that represent some real learning are both caving related. One was the first time I did SRT - this is doing things with ropes at the tops of things like cliffs. You have a harness and a whole range of bits of complex metalwork and lots of ropes. If you don’t use them properly then there is every chance that you will hurt yourself, and when you hurt yourself in a cave then it is usually very serious. So, the first time I went into a cave that required SRT I had to learn how to do it, and I had to learn fast.

The other one was a little later when I learned how to rig caves for SRT, not just going in and using a rope that someone else has put there but being the person who puts the rope into place. Again, make a mistake here and someone could get hurt, or worse. The difference was the person who gets hurt wasn’t just me any more but other people too, now that is responsibility.

In both of these situations I was safe because I was with someone who was teaching me how to do things properly and would stop me before I made a mistake, but I still had to make sure I knew not just what to do but also why I do those things. Without an understanding of all the equipment and knots then I would not have learned how to do things safely, I wouldn’t have learnt anything except how to cope if I found myself in the same cave in exactly the same situation. Instead I worked out what knots to use when, why you route the rope that way in this cave and when you would do similar/different things in other caves. How to go through a procedure of checking in a way that means I am safe and so are those with me. A huge number of things that all fit together into a much bigger picture.

What links these experiences, and what made them intense experiences is that I had a big responsibility, if I didn’t learn then things could have gone horribly wrong if I were to get to a cave in the future without support and realise I didn’t know what to do, or worse thought I knew but got it wrong.

These are very personal experiences, and they were situations where I learned because of a stick more than a carrot. I had to learn so I did, it was that or make both a physical and psychological retreat. The question is how does this relate to my teaching? Of course I can’t put my pupils into a situation where they have to learn else lives are in danger. I think the idea of advance or retreat is important. I learned because I had to but also wanted to. The aim is to find a way to make pupils want to learn rather than to make them learn.

I was at a Learning and Teaching session for NQTs this afternoon led by Don Ledingham. What a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon it was. I left feeling challenged, positive, and invigorated. Most of all though I felt completely sure that I am in the right job in the right place at the right time.

I wanted to write something up tonight before I being to forget bits, as I write it up though it is turning into a bit of a long post, so I’m going to give a brief overview of some of the challenging questions we were asked then focus on one part. Don has already written a short post on his thoughts on the session.
What was your most intense learning experience? What made it so?
What was your best lesson? What did you do in it? What are some keywords that sum it up? And what about yesterday, how did those lessons compare? Could they have been similar?

In typical Scottish fashion we found it hard to find examples of a good lesson at first, but they did come eventually. It was great to hear the different stories that people had. Some common themes cropped up: shared intentions; collaboration; interaction; discussion; tangible success for the students - which they define.

I don’t think I heard anyone say their best lesson included times where they went off at tangents. For me one of my best lessons was last year. I had a ten minute slot to fill, like a warm up act for the class teacher. I had been asked to introduce timber to some 1st years - cue the groans. “Why on Earth would we want to know about different types of tree!?” Well, I began by asking about the types of tree they knew. Christmas tree inevitably came up. Good, everyone knows the shape of them so it’s easy to talk about identifying softwoods. But what about hardwoods? Do they have many branches? Can you climb them? No, you can’t easily climb them - not that any of them realised that at first, nor why. I showed them this picture which I took in Romania on a caving expedition.

We were doing some SRT* practice above ground - the only thing we could attach a rope to was a huge tree, but it’s branches are way off the ground. I didn’t explain how we got the rope up there… But after that they did know lots of ways of telling apart hard and soft wood trees, they found a way of linking the trees to the types of timber you get from them. They thought about how that affected the possible things you can use different timber types for. They thought about where different trees grow. Why, for instance did none of them know about climbing hardwoods? Because they don’t see them, yet they are surrounded by hardwood timbers in their homes and in the school, in particular the workshops they work in which were kitted out in beech benches and cupboards. (The likes of which PPP schools can only dream of.)

“What about uses for wood?” I asked.
‘Paper’
‘well done’
‘tables’
‘very good’

Then I asked
‘What about for drinking from? What about making every single thing you own from wood?’ This didn’t really make them happy - “how could you possibly make everything from wood? That’s crazy talk” I showed them some photos I took in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle…

I also showed them a photo taken on the floating islands on Lake Titicaca (teehee) where the islands and almost everything on them are made of reeds that grow on the lake bed.

My 10 minute slot over-ran a bit, because they were so engaged with something that minutes earlier they had no interest in whatsoever. They were full of questions and stories, what did they learn? They thought they learned that you can get Mr Meldrum to go waaay off topic just by asking him about travelling, but they also learned that different types of timber have lots of different uses, they learned about sustainable development, they learned about appreciating different cultures, they also learned a bit about respecting the environment around you and the wildlife within it. If they’d pushed in the right directions I could easily have gone on to talk more about SRT which would have given them a huge opportunity to learn all about cams, pulleys, friction, and a host of other mechanical systems/properties that otherwise wouldn’t have been covered in their 1st year of school.

So, that was one of my best lessons, and I think the best bit of it was that I had the scope to go off on a tangent and follow up on the things that the pupils engaged with. I was able to give them not just knowledge in discrete packets, but to give them a meaning and context to those packets of knowledge. I don’t think I heard much talk of tangents today, are probationers all scared of being unprepared? Do we all over-plan? I know I am and do.

I’ll write up more on this, I found it a hugely enjoyable and worthwhile session. I just wish there’d been more time for discussion/debate at the end.

*Single Rope Technique - a way of gaining or losing height in caves and other hard-to-access areas using a system involving one fixed rope and a guddle of bits of metal and other short ropes.

I just picked up a post on the ScotEdublogs feed from Glassary Primary School. The pupils there were set a good challenge - to get their Headteacher from the school to his brother’s house in Tasmania, all by public transport. They had to scour the internet for information about buses, planes, hotels, and everything else they’d need, then present their route to the class. A great challenge and a great use of technology with maths, geography, and other skills.

Even more interesting was a comment left by the Head’s brother - his route from Britain to Tasmania was more challenging than public transport - he cycled all of the 21000 miles from Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to Mount Wellington. Quite a feat!

Historically when a new technology comes along the trend is to initially use new medium in the same way, with the same content as what already exists, in education the example is to use the internet to post papers, or to make lectures available outside of the lecture theatre. This is fine, but it doesn’t aid learning, in a lot of cases it can have a negative affect. Making available a set of lectures that were recorded one year isn’t a replacement for giving the lectures again the next year. The challenge is to use the new technology in a new way that makes use of its potential, a good analogy might be using teletext just to present a newspaper review of a football match; later it was used to present real time scores and match summaries.

One thing the internet is very capable of is storing information and making it available to you. It is very easy to make your own information available to everyone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by putting information on the net you are helping people to learn about whatever topic it is. Sharing information isn’t the same as sharing knowledge.

For a learner what is important is finding the right information and then constructing some sort of understanding of it. This understanding can come out of discourse the learner engages in - with their peers, their lecturer/teacher, themselves. This is what needs to happen with the internet, it is what is happening in the places where it is being used well. Face to face discourse shouldn’t be disregarded though - very little comes close to that - but it can be complemented with blogs/wikis/podcasts/VoIP…

This is a post that I’ve had in draft for a while, then over the last few days there has been discussion about Blended Learning with a comment on why there will probably never be such a thing as a ‘Glow lesson’, and a presentation from BarCampScotland has been made available to listen to on why lecturers shouldn’t record their lectures. All this has prompted me into finishing this post off.

So what is it that I actually have to say? Well, my main point I suppose is that it is going to be interesting to see how Glow develops and what use teachers make of it, I personally don’t know enough about what is going to be possible for me to do (I don’t know what school I’ll be in, what subjects I’ll be teaching, what access I’ll have to computers; I also don’t know enough about how Glow will actually operate) but I will have to keep in mind that what I am doing with Glow has to be something worth doing with Glow, if it can be done as effectively without it then I need to change what I’m doing, or do it another way.

Another point I wanted to make is the importance of teaching not just certain subjects from the curriculum, but also teaching people how to make use of the information available to them and how to select the useful bits from the useless bits. With such a wealth of information available we need to know how to cherry pick the good bits - this is a more important skill than ever before.

And one final thing was the importance of making the most of new technology and not just using it in the same old ways, and also making other people realise this too. It is all to easy to just share resources that enable pupils to complete course related work (don’t get me wrong this is enormously useful - you shouldn’t expect every teacher to create a great resource for every topic, and often it is good to see things from another person’s perspective), but the best part comes when you can take the resources and create new activities around them that maybe weren’t possible before.

[tags]learning, glow, web2.0, education, collaboration[/tags]