foolfillment: the blog

Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything – and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry – whichever industry that may be at the time.

I also hope deep down that design will feature heavily in a way that will embed design into everything that we as technology teachers do, and also into what every other teacher does.

Awkwardly that date coincides with something else which you may, or may not hear more about later – although that may actually save my skin a little (anyone worked out what I’m on about?)

Image credit: Red Bridge – Originally uploaded by El Fotopakismo

“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.

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!