foolfillment: the blog

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus - recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over - so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful - both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment - evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)

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.

So, as I said earlier today there was a session at Campie Primary on ‘ICT in East Lothian’ for all the new probationers. I tried to keep schtuum yesterday when people seemed to think it would be a day on how to get your emails.

Needless to say people were pretty surprised to see just what is going on with edubuzz and I spoke to and heard people who were excited by the possibilities of what the tools could offer for learning and teaching this year. When it came to my turn in the blogging session my cover was blown and I was named as an active blogger, and that of course set the challenge of finding my blog.

Hello to anyone who finds me, why not leave a comment? You can start by saying how chuffed you are to get a free 2gig pen drive!

Tomorrow is the start of a new life, I suppose.

The first of three induction days for all East Lothian probationers (that’s me), then two in-service days, then a week tomorrow I’ll be a teacher.

How about that for a daunting thought.

I don’t want to make a habit of these short posts so I’ll try to make this the last.
I found out my school today - Ross High in Tranent. I’ll not say any more than that for now, I’m hoping to manage a visit on Monday and after that I’ll maybe have a firmer idea of what I’ll be teaching next year and how much blogging I’ll be able to get in. Afterwards I’m planning to make it along to the next edubuzz open meeting.

On an unrelated note I was at uni today for a session on Inspiring Creativity and Design with 3D Modelling, I’m going to try to write up some of the presentations here soon but it’s looking like I’ll be bust for the next wee while. I will really have to nag Eddie Mack (one of my lecturers and the organiser of today’s event) to get around to putting his presentation online using youTube and technobuzz.

I got a letter today!

I’ve got lots of other things I was going get around to blogging about soon (like teachmeet07) but this gets immediate attention! I’m delighted to get placed in East Lothian for next year and I can’t wait to find out which school I’ll be in. It’s great to know finally where I’ll be and I can start making some more concrete plans. As well as it seemingly being a great place to start out in, it’s also a lot easier for me as I don’t need to start looking for a place to live.

It was a bit of a shock to find out today, I wasn’t expecting the letter until Wednesday but I should have taken a hint when I got an email from the GTCS yesterday wishing us luck in our probation year.

I went along to my second eduBuzz meeting this afternoon, and there was again a lot of interesting discussion which covered a few different topics. I think it is a great sign that these meetings are open and the likes of me are welcome to come along and take part (or just listen as I mostly did), it shows a great deal of openness, but also gives them the chance to hear a perspective from outside East Lothian.

One of the first areas discussed was the edubuzz site itself. There was also time talking about how to get more people on board and push it beyond those who are already using it. I’ll try to cover these in more detail below. (more…)

I’ve been thinking a bit more about where I’ll be teaching next year. As there is nothing I can do to influence the decision I can only guess about where I’ll be living, but I wanted a better idea of the possibilities so I had a little play with Google’s new service My Maps. It took a lot of copying and pasting but I eventually got all of the secondary schools from my selected areas stuck onto a custom map. After a little more playing I’ve added it to my Google Earth places and arranged them into subfolders, and uploaded an image of the aerial view.

Looking at them this way was a bit of an eye opener. I knew that my choices meant I could be placed pretty much anywhere but seeing them all mapped really shows how remote some of the Highland ones are. I’ve not used Google Earth much but I did wonder (after finishing this) that there must already be a layer that has all of the Scottish schools? I wouldn’t know where to look, but surely I can’t be the only git sad enough to do this?!