Tag Archives: learning

It’s time to talk about the new normal for schools⤴

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The class of 2020 will never forget their summer without exams. But what seemed unusual last term will pale in comparison with the seismic changes Scottish education is about to witness.

The First Minister has announced that physical distancing must remain in place until a vaccine is available. We must re-think – radically, deeply and creatively – how we “do” school in line with our new way of living.

For much of the coming session, schools cannot have all of their pupils in the building on the same day. Who should be prioritised? Senior pupils working towards qualifications and transitions, or younger year groups with perhaps greater wellbeing needs? Should secondaries alternate between dedicated days for BGE pupils and days for Senior Phase (S4-6)? Would alternate weeks be better? Safer? Just what is the maximum number of pupils you can fit into a Covid-safe classroom (a question considered brilliantly by Blair Minchin). Perhaps English and Maths teachers will finally discover the benefits of practical-sized classes, de-bunking the myth that children need greater supervision with the Bunsen burner than with the gerund (despite all our disagreeing). (Sorry).

Spring time is when many of us cover topics that simply must be taught outside. Where else can you teach Housman properly but under the shade of a cherry tree? Danish schools returned this week, taking as much learning as possible outdoors and Scottish teachers will exploit this opportunity to the full. As we head into autumn though, I’d guess this will become a less attractive option for all 5 periods of Higher Physics. Perhaps schools will follow the example of supermarkets and have clear lines at 2 metre intervals throughout social spaces. But what should we do if (when?) young people, deprived of peer contact for so long, decide to cross them? What happens for the young child who is stuck with their shoe laces, can’t wipe their nose, or just needs a hug from a friend?

In larger schools, having even two year groups in a building means 400-500 youngsters. Will it actually be possible for them to move through corridors every 50 minutes and observe distancing rules, or do we need something different? How will our transport (and teaching!) contracts cope with flexible school days? It is the time in the academic year when timetablers, having elegantly re-arranged the last few periods of S3 French, step-back with a hubristic grin and gaze at their gleaming matrices, desperate to explain their marvellous creations – slowly – to colleagues unfamiliar with the dark arts. Should they rip them up? Will these timetables ever be fully realised if the new normal needs new structures? We need to adapt the school day and week to minimise risk and maximise learning.

Across the country schools set up, seemingly overnight, new ways of teaching remotely and providing childcare for key workers; these will still be needed. Every pupil will need access to an engaging, user-friendly digital platform for the days it’s not their turn to be in school. Every single classroom in Scotland just got flipped. Royally. We must think deeply about how this changes our pedagogy for the coming session.

How employers and unions advise on PPE will be a crucial factor in the big question of “when?” we return. And, as advice on shielding becomes more detailed, we will learn which of our colleagues and pupils will stay at home indefinitely and consider how to support them.

But all of this is merely the starter task. Highly complex challenges lie ahead. How do schools continue to deliver their role in identifying and responding to wellbeing needs, GIRFEC and child protection concerns? How can we best support pupils with complex needs over the next year? The world of work changed unrecognisably overnight and, if economic predictions are even half true, the labour market for future school leavers will be even more complex and challenging than it was 5 weeks ago. Preparing young people to navigate this has never been more important but business and industry will have less capacity to support our DYW activity.

With the current focus on estimates for this year’s SQA candidates, it seems a tad gauche to pose a question about the 2021 exam diet. But it needs to be asked. By August, an entire cohort of Scottish children will have had their learning certified, and been awarded qualifications, without ever knowing the chill of an exam hall, the sound of 200 pens scribbling in synergy or the smell of a fusty invigilator. They have learned deep knowledge, skills and concepts. They will go on to wonderful things and they will cope with them. The next destination in their learner journey will welcome them with open arms (and will probably never make them sit an exam either). It turns out that we can trust teachers after all. We will have evidence that we do not need exams.

If we know now that the 2021 qualification cohort will have significantly less direct teaching than their predecessors, is it fair to assess them using the papers that are already written and locked in a Dalkeith vault? No. They too will need something different.

The rationale for Scotland’s Curriculum and the indispensability of the 4 capacities have been reinforced by the Covid-19 crisis. That same crisis has exposed the irrelevance of exams to real-life challenges. We have made commendable progress over the past decade in our approaches to teaching, learning and curriculum. I am not arguing we abolish our national exam system overnight (thought about it!) but it is time for certification to catch up. It is time for Scotland to stop being the country that assesses practical woodwork and hospitality with unseen written tests.

The Scottish education community has risen admirably to the challenges of the last few weeks. It will embrace the coming session with the same courage and creativity. Let’s take our inspirationally resilient First Minister at her word and engage in a grown-up conversation about how we do school for the new normal. Let’s be optimistic: from crisis comes progress.

Caveat 1: In the unlikely event anyone (I know) reads this, I am not saying any of this will happen in the school I am privileged to call my workplace. It is merely an attempt to un-burst my head! (“I write to know what I think”, Joan Didion)

Caveat 2: Timetablers are good people, especially our timetabler.

Caveat 3: Invigilators are really good people. You all smell lovely and I’m sorry.

 

How often do you reteach?⤴

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During this academic session I have had one class that has required me to reteach topics quite a lot. Perhaps this could be due to poor instruction in the first instance, however I could argue that due to skilful checking for understanding I have identified that I don’t have an 80% success rate.

We know from Barak Rosenshine that the most effective teachers “frequently check to see if all the students are learning new material” and we do this by asking a lot of questions. For me, the expert teacher is one who knows what to do with this information that they glean from their students.

When teaching new material it is vital that lots of questions are asked and that you never ask ‘are there any questions?’. In your questioning you will ask recall questions, explain questions, comparison questions and so on. If the students are providing satisfactory answers then you are ready to move on, but what if the students aren’t getting it quite right.

Mark McCourt in Teaching for Mastery would argue that unless all pupils are having above 80% success then you should absolutely not move on and apply some corrective teaching. It is important to note here that McCourt outlines that this is not the same as reteaching material but a part of an expert teachers arsenal they can use with small groups of students. He writes that we should celebrate mistakes in low-stake quizzes as the teacher “now knows something new about you….. it means I can help you nail it right here, right now”

Sometimes, however, we do need to go back and reteach material. If students aren’t achieving success in our low stake quizzes and assessments then we need to be brave, bold and imaginative so that we can help them attain an 80% success rate. When reteaching we should look to explain differently, try new tasks, identify groupings and model our explanations.

A powerful reteaching strategy is Thinking Aloud. This is where the expert teacher will model and speak their thinking process in order to unpack the material for their students. Many teachers do this while using a visualiser so that students can see their thinking as well as hear it. While modelling in this way the teacher doesn’t simply reteach the material in the same way that they introduced it, they use different explanations in response to the students misunderstanding, misconceptions and mistake. Reteaching must expose the mistake and extinguish the error so that the student achieves success moving forward and is ready to learn new material.

A teacher can also use Purposeful Grouping when reteaching. A teacher can place 1-3 pupils in a group and tutor them in small groups to clear up misconceptions and mistakes. This does require a deep subject knowledge from the teacher as they will need to keep the other 28 students busy while they focus on reteaching the material to smaller groups.

Finally, when reteaching the teacher should use Explicit Instruction. This is where the teacher talk might increase and the volume of questions to deepen understanding of the material also increases. A large volume of questions to all students will help build a clear picture of misconceptions and mistakes. Explicit Instruction is where the teacher talks directly at the students while modelling their thinking and finding a new approach to explain the material at hand.

Teachers need to be brave and bold when making the decision to reteach and commit to doing this when students aren’t achieving a high success rate. We do this because we believe that all students can learn well and base this decision on our continuous assessment of their progress through low stakes quizzes, a large volume of questions and pre- and post-assessments. In my own teaching I often try to fly through work and move onto new material without securing the knowledge and having a high success rate. Moving forward I will commit to being braver and ensuring a high success rate by asking lots of questions, reteaching where necessary through modelling my thinking to extinguish errors and misconceptions.

How to nurture a community of online learners⤴

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Community.....
“Community…..” flickr photo by Kamaljith shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

I’ve been involved in open learning for several years now. It started almost by accident, when some guy called Dave ran a crazy learning experience that we called rhizo14, carried on serendipitously into a sister experience called CLMOOC, and gradually became a part of my daily ritual as I started participating in Daily Creates. Much of what happens in these open, online experiences can appear to be random and unstructured, but beneath and behind them is a set of core principles and values and a tried and tested design. Those can be broadly summed up as belonging to an educational framework called connected learning. That’s helped me to learn some tricks to help all of us (staff and students) to teach and learn online. They’re at the end of this post, for those wanting to skip straight to the punchline.

Connected learning is a work in progress. It begins from an (intuitively plausible, I think) set of beliefs in the value of learning that is interest-driven, peer-supported and academically relevant, and harnesses the power of social media in order to make these types of learning better integrated into learners’ lives while attempting to make it accessible to anyone who wants to participate (equity is a core value). As such, it is platform and technology agnostic, although the values of open education are central to what practitioners do.

At the heart of connected learning is the thought that we live, nowadays, in a participatory culture. Sometimes people describe this as “Web 2.0”, but participatory culture is actually a richer concept than that. Henry Jenkins contrasts the concept of “interactivity”, which he describes as a relationship between a customer and a software company and a property of some social media platforms, and “participation” which is a relationship between people (which can be facilitated by use of social media). This means that we can’t take student engagement for granted, we have to explicitly design it into our courses. For those familiar with the terminology, I might use this distinction to explain the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs. I say this to note a difference, and not to imply that cMOOCs are always superior – knowledge acquisition and participation in learning are not, imo, contradictory concepts – each has its place. Anna Sfard makes this point better than I could.

To an outsider, learning in the open can look unstructured and random, and those new to this type of learning and teaching can feel overwhelmed, out of their depth, unsure of their own abilities, frustrated, scared or even angry. This goes for both learners (often called participants) and educators (often called facilitators). This is why it is so important to design these experiences carefully, and to think carefully about the types of support that can be provided. I think, in the interesting times that lie ahead of us, we are all going to need all the support we can get – both to keep ourselves going, and to help our learners. Teaching and learning online can be an isolated experience, as those of us who do it know only too well.

So how can all of this help us now? First of all I should stress that I’m not suggesting that everybody immediately abandons whatever they are doing and redesign their courses so that they are connected learning experiences – I’m not trying to make more work for anyone. What I am going to tell you about is some tried and tested strategies that have helped the community that I am a part of to emerge and continue. I’m not pretending to have invented any of these strategies either – just to have used or experienced them for myself.

  • Remember that your learners will be in many different time zones, some of which will have better connectivity than others. People who can’t participate are likely to feel very left out and uncared for. Think about asynchronous activities as well as synchronous ones.
  • Some learners will have state of the art technology, others … won’t. Think about designing activities/resources that can load on different devices.
  • Realise that there is no such thing as a digital native: some (staff and students) will find it easy to adapt to this new way of teaching and learning others … won’t. We can’t predict who will and won’t adapt. Think about how to support staff and students who just can’t work out how to log in/submit/engage.
  • Don’t rely on one platform or one mode of delivery. Systems could be overloaded, or not available for a particular device, or not available in a geographical area (YouTube content, for example, can be restricted by geographical area). Yes, this could mean duplicating important content/messages in order to ensure that everyone who needs can access them.
  • Don’t force anyone to use a particular platform (other than official, institutionally supported ones). Your students might well have ethical objections to using a particular one. Respect those. Never require anyone to sign up to a (non-institutionally supported/“official”) platform in order to participate. Data rights are human rights.
  • Tap into the altruism of others. Nurture a community that helps each other (both staff and students). Model this yourself, watch for others doing it and publicly thank them. Think about the types of roles that might be needed to build a learning community: as well as you (the teacher), you might look for particularly active and/or knowledgeable students to become mentors.
  • Structure informal activities that people can engage in if they want. These don’t have to take a lot of time to design – you might ask students to share something unique about where they are living, to tell others about their hobbies, pets, or family. You could ask them to do this by sharing a small image, a link to a website, or a forum post. These help participants to feel that they belong and can build a sense of community over time.

And, finally, reach out to others around you. Use your networks and don’t be afraid of saying that you are finding something hard. My initial experiences of all of this was a baptism of fire. Those who watch me nowadays often think that I always find it easy to participate, and have always found it easy, but that’s not true. In fact, I nearly dropped out of an early connected learning experience (CLMOOC 2015) because I was feeling lost, confused and overwhelmed. What happened next was, I realise, due to the carefully designed support structure that was in place. I shouted out into the void and someone answered. The rest, as they say, is history.

Motivation 3.0 in our schools⤴

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I asked recently why staff at our school love teaching. I got back some amazing responses as to their why of being a teacher. It is important, I feel, to ask this of staff from time to time. We should also ask them to tell their story of why they became a teacher. Many can share this with the same enthusiasm as they do when you ask them how they met their current partner. It is rehearsed as it was lived by them and can evoke great memories and feelings.

There are times, however, when we as teachers can forget why we do what we do. Think of those dark nights in December when we’ve been working non stop for a while and lesson after lesson brings with it new challenges, the marking pile gets ever bigger and more work is asked of you by your leaders. It is at those times we need to remind ourselves of our why!

What has interested me of late is the tremendous motivation that teachers have for the young people in our care. We will do anything to help, encourage and support them in their times of need. However, do we support teachers well enough in their time of need. Some teachers are often so overworked they suffer from burnout but this should never be the case. We must question why we do things? why must always ask.. does this add value to the learning and experiences of the young people.

When discussing burnout, stress and other factors that cause teachers to stay up late at night and miss days at work I came to the conclusion that maybe we don’t have, what Daniel Pink describes in his book “Drive” (2009) enough Type I teachers. In his book, released in 2009, he sets out a new vision for workplace motivation that he calls “Motivation 3.0”. He does so because he explains that we have moved on from “Motivation 1.0” (think our primitive responses for survival and “Motivation 2.0” (think of a culture of reward and punishment). Does judging teachers simply by their exam results from 30 pupils after 12 months of hard work with 300 pupils seem like a fair way to reward or punish them? Does this motivate staff to work even harder next year? Daniel Pink would argue that it doesn’t.

“Motivation 3.0” is described as intrinsic. motivation (or Type I). This is manifested when people are self-motivated and they are given the freedom to do the work they enjoy. In an environment which support this innovation and creativity are key and people are allowed to thrive by doing the work they love. Which brings me back to why you got into teaching in the first place? This should be the energy and driver to you being self motivated. Another reason why it is important to remind staff about this at regular intervals as I mentioned earlier.

Pink (2009) outlines the three key components of eliciting intrinsic motivation in your staff: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Autonomy

This is defined as the need to direct your own life or work. To be fully motivated you need to be able to control what you do, when you do it and who you do it with. It is difficult to offer all of this to teaching staff the children are timetable to you. Given this how many of you feel that you have the autonomy to do what you want and are given the space to think creatively with your classes. Yes, we have a curriculum to enact b ut teacher are the ‘curriculum makers’ who bring it to life. Through our Curriculum for Excellence Scottish Teachers have this opportunity and autonomy to deliver the Benchmarks in any way they like. I remember attending an event which empowered me to assess children using any of four criteria can they say it, make it, write it or do it.

Contrary to this are you forced to deliver lessons plans for you, do you have a rigid lesson structure you must follow or do you feel that you have no autonomy at all? The beauty of schools is that we come across a wide variety of ideas, styles and creativity. This should be harnesses and heralded for the great opportunity it is. If you are a school leader I want you to consider if your staff have the autonomy to teach how they want? of course, they have to report, monitor and track under, perhaps, a rigid system but how they get their should always be up to them and how they see the curriculum being enacted.

Now I’m not saying we can go all footloose on curriculum as children must learn to read, write, run, jump, throw, create, explain etc. But to be truly motivated as a teacher or in any line of work you must have some autonomy.

Mastery

Mastery is defined simply as the desire to improve. If you are motivated by mastery, you’ll believe that your potential is unlimited and you’ll seek constant improvement. In schools e have a tremendous missed opportunity for improvement. Each other. How often do we feel isolated, like an island all on its own when teaching our classes. With the staffroom becoming slowly a thing of the past it is now even more important that we get out and watch others teach. We ask them why they chose that approach, why they moved that child there and why they used the language and tone they did with 2D. In any school there are 1000s of years of experience and we are very poor at sharing that experience and quick to judge others, even if we haven’t been in their rooms for more than 10 minutes. EduTwitter is a great place to share ideas but this community must be built in our schools as what we learn there directly impacts on our young people.

Purpose

People may become demotivated and become disengaged if they understand or invest in the “bigger picture”.

Regardless of whether your school leadership, faculty head or mentor is good, bad or ineffective we should never stray from the big picture in education – the young people. It must always be for them and only them.

As I mentioned earlier always think back to why you became a teacher. It will serve you well, even in the worst of moments in your career.

With this knowledge in mind, how do we create teachers and schools that are full of intrinsically motivated staff. Try out the following ideas and let me know if they work in your context (note: they are all ideas from Daniel Pink’s book, it is worth a few hours of your time)

  1. Take steps to give up control – involve people in setting their own goals, reduce controlling language like “you must” or “you should” use terms like “consider doing” or “have a think about doing” and have open door hours when people CAN come and speak to you on matters arising.
  2. Give staff “Goldilocks Tasks” – these are tasks that are neither to hard or too easy but encourage focus and flow and encourage them to develop mastery.
  3. Always promote collaboration – make your school a place with a learning culture, think ‘when you open your doors and let others in, magic can happen’

What motivates others is a real interest of mine and of many teacher. The ideals discussed here can also be applied to the young people learning in your classrooms. Think about the past week and consider how much autonomy and purpose you gave the children. Where any of them in a state of flow? where they developing mastery skills? or were some of your tasks far too easy which results in boredom and challenging behaviour?

For me, I can think of at least 3 classes I had where the tasks I set were simply too easy. This happens for everyone but that is why I want to continually learn and develop mastery in my teaching craft.

Recipes⤴

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Bubble and Squeak

My Granny taught me a lot about cooking. She’d read a recipe – say for pork chops with apple – and say that she thought she’d make it for tea, and maybe alter it a little bit, because she realised that she had some lamb chops and apricots that would make a good combination. Whatever she made was delicious – she was a great cook.

I thought about this today when I attended a seminar which was advertised as being about Team Based Learning (TBL). TBL is a very structured approach to active learning, and it has a fairly formulaic recipe. Some proponents say that it should be followed to the letter, others say that there can be some leeway in modifying it – but my experience today got me wondering: when does a learning design stop being a modified version of the original and start being something else altogether? The version I was told about today was an interesting type of active learning, but it was very removed from being TBL. It was not bad teaching and learning, in fact I think it was very good – but I don’t think the presenter had understood what the original design was all about.

So where do we draw the line? If I tell you that I am making you a Shepherd’s Pie, but actually I substitute the original filling with apple and the topping with meringue, is it still a type of modified Shepherd’s Pie? Surely not. How about if I keep the original filling and top it with meringue – is it now a not very palatable Shepherd’s Pie? Possibly.

To return to Granny’s cooking, of course in the example above she wouldn’t have told us that she was giving us pork chops with apple – she’d present the dish as her own, maybe as inspired by the original. And, importantly, my Granny understood cooking – she understood why the original elements worked together and why her substituted ones would also work together well. I think that’s the same for teaching and learning – before we can start swapping bits in and out of a successful design, we need to understand how and why the original design works.

Some people might say that TBL is poorly named, and that others can be excused for not understanding that it is a particular type of design. That might be so, but I don’t think that’s much of an excuse.

Our ‘thinking biases’ that interfere with learning⤴

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You may think that you are always clear and rational with your thoughts but perhaps that is not always the case. I was recently introduced to research around ‘cognitive biases’ by Bradley Busch, a chartered psychologist and director at InnerDrive. He taught me that cognitive biases are thought processes that can change how we perceive things and can prevent us from making the logical decisions we think we are making.

Psychologists have identified over 100 thinking biases but not all of them are relevant when thinking about Education. It is important to note that thinking biases occur in your everyday life in all aspects of it. Thinking biases especially occur when there are a lot of human interactions, a school for example.

There are three main cognitive biases that Bradley taught me about. They have really peaked my interest and got me thinking about them when I am interacting with colleagues and students. I have also started to look out for these biases now that I am aware of them.

The Ikea Effect

Work produced from this study found that people place a higher value on things they have helped to create (like some flat pack furniture). The bias states that if someone has an idea and put in some work for it, then they are more likely to believe that it must be a good idea.

In schools, this can apply to teaching staff who hold onto to failing strategies and interventions for longer than they should be. You can protect yourself from this but reminding yourself that just because a project was your idea it’s not necessarily a good approach to take.

You could also consider school leaders who hold onto curriculum changes or new policies even though they are not fit for purpose. Perhaps inform them of the Ikea Effect first before telling them their idea just isn’t working. Help each other learn when to let go of projects.

The Bandwagon Effect

I bet you already think about this one in your classrooms especially when devising your seating arrangements. The Bandwagon Effect notes how you are more likely to agree with something if lots of other people already do. A good example in modern culture is the “90 minute bigots” where you can find people you would least expect joining in with sectarian singing and bigotry at a football match.

The Bandwagon Effect notes how easy it is to go with the flow, as someone else has done the thinking for you. You could also think of fashion in the same way. If many people begin to wear a certain style of clothing you start seeing many others adopt the same fashions.

So what about in schools and in classrooms. Teachers and schools leaders can benefit from the Bandwagon Effect by actively highlighting and praising the norms they want to see with the view of others following suit.

Confirmation Bias

Put simply, this bias is the idea that people pay more attention to ideas they have already agreed with. For example, if you label a pupil as one that displays challenging behaviour you are more likely to pay attention to the challenging behaviour and possibly disregard the times they have not been challenging.

Confirmation Bias is difficult to get around as once you have an opinion you are more likely to collect data that confirms your theory which boosts further your confimation.

An example of this could be the tough lower ability class you teach (we have all had one). One student disrupts the lesson and it reinforces the opinion you have of that group. However, you haven’t taken account the multitude of issues which could have caused that one instance of behaviour.

Confirmation bias is pervasive in schools and its impact cannot be underestimated.

There are 100s of other cognitive biases to sink your teeth into if you want to know more.

Over the next week really have a look out for students, colleagues, school leaders and yourself showing one of these biases. It really does get you thinking.

Poinsettia⤴

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poinsettia

One reason that I like participating in daily drawing challenges is that it encourages me to try to draw something new, rather than doodling the same shapes that have become familiar to me. So when I saw that it was a poinsettia for Thursday’s drawing I was a bit daunted, but luckily I had a few minutes before going into a workshop to do and image search. I searched for poinsettia outline and scrolled through the results to get a feel for the basic shapes. Then I grabbed some crayons and a notepad and headed off to the seminar room. As the prof spoke, I sketched some basic shapes in pencil without worrying too much what the end result was going to be – I wanted to get the shape of the petal/leaf right. Then, when I was confident drawing them freehand I got out my 0.5 micron pen (I usually have one of these in my bag) and drew the basic outline. Then I got out my crayons (I could sense at this point how envious the others at my table were that I had something to occupy my hands!) and coloured it in. The end result is not perfect – I’d meant to sketch some more leaf detail on the red petals, but the workshop was over.

Imagine how pleased I was to see this post by Sheri talking about how she’d taken inspiration from my drawing – this is connected learning at its best.

PS: tomorrow it’s a narwal. Um, eek?

Why you should start a reading habit.⤴

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“Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching”

I love reading.

I believe that it makes me a better teacher and that it could make you a better teacher too. After all, who wouldn’t want to be a better teacher and to learn something every single day. It is what we want for our school children so why should we stop when we are an adult. Henry Ford once said “Anyone who stops learning is old whether at twenty or eighty. Any one who keeps learning stays young” and I want to stay young that’s for sure so if Mr Ford is right I’m going to read every day.

I didn’t always read. Not because I wasn’t able to but I told myself the famous old excuses, the same excuses that our students will give us:

‘I read too slow’

‘The book is far too long’

‘I don’t have the time’

‘Books are boring’

Do these sound familiar? I bet you have used one of them at some point. We all have.

Reading is highly enjoyable, informative, thought provoking, it can clarify thoughts that have been swimming around your head and bring new perspectives that you may never have had. As teachers, of some subjects more than others, we wax lyrical about the benefits of reading to our students who just aren’t interested. We must, however, ensure that we have a love for reading and that we have built a reading habit. This will allow us to model to students our good habits and share with them our joy of reading.

If you already read then please share your successes with others. Tell them about the books you read and what you are learning. How it is shaping your mind and your life. It will amaze you what comes back and how people love to share what they have read also.

If you don’t regularly read I implore you to start. It doesn’t have to be non-fiction or books about education (although I’d love to share my learning with you if you want to chat about it). We can learn so much from fiction as the characters and their personalities came from somewhere right?

So why should you start or have a reading habit? Why don’t we start with this study published in Neurology in 2013. The researchers demonstrated that reading can slow the cognitive agin process as when your mind is engaged in intense mental activity (reading a new book) it does better. You could compare it to working hard in the gym the more you train the stronger you become. Books are like protein shakes for the brain!

In short: Read. Use your Brain. Be better.

The biggest excuse for most of the adult population is that of time. Consider this, if you read only 10 pages per day you would read 3650 pages per year. This equates to 18 200 page books. Imagine the knowledge you could gain in one year from simply reading 10 pages per day. It’s not that much is it?

Here are some tips on how you could easily make reading a habit in your daily life:

  • Set a time. You could read while having breakfast. Read while using the toilet. Read after dinner. Read before you sleep (we have all heard about not having technology in the bedroom but books are encouraged!!) If you read at all those times for 10 minutes that would be 40 minutes a day (roughly), plenty time for you to get your 10 pages done.
  • Have a set place. Some places are just full of distraction so to give it your full attention I’d recommend having a quiet place at work or at home. If you don’t have one make one, it is worth it.
  • Always carry a book. I listened to a podcast with Ryan Holiday (a brilliant author) and he spoke of always carrying a book with you so I have started doing this. In a queue, read your book. At your Childs gymnastic class, read a book. Waiting at the airport, read a book. Waiting in line at Starbucks, read a book. You get the gist.
  • Instead of watching the news use that time to read a book. The news is bad for you according to this post in the Guardian quite a few years ago. The news is full of hyperbole and negativity. It fuels your negativity bias and encourages people to post on social media about the catastrophe and drama it promotes. How often does the news share good and great stories about the many amazing people in the world? Instead use that time to read a book. Instead of a newspaper, read a book on the science of how we learn. Wouldn’t that be much better for your students and children?
  • If you have children read to them every single day. Reading books to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It develops their language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. Do I need to say more?
  • Have a reading hour. Further to having a set time you could adopt a reading hour. Many personal development advocates like Tony Robbins, Robin Sharma, Hal Elrod etc etc. All advocate a power hour of learning. Adopt it and read as much as you can. The more you learn the more you grow and the more you know the more you realise you don’t know. So you learn some more. Isn’t that just magic?
  • Start or join a book club. Sharing and collaborating is one of the great joys of life (in my humble opinion) so reading with an aim to share is a great way to build reading into your life as it will make you want to do it and contribute to the discussion. Being a part of. book club helps with decreasing the stress of reading as you are ‘in it together’, encourages you to finish books, allows you to gain new perspectives as everyone will understand t=it differently and it has also been shown to boost teamwork skills!

I hope this post helps you foster a love of reading. It really has moved my thinking forward and I feel confident when offering my thoughts and opinions as I have worked through them in the books that I read.

Happy reading!

 

 

Are you research informed?⤴

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Theres been a groundswell in the past decade of teachers becoming more research informed. This has been evident in the creation of organisations such as pedagoo and researchEd. Pedagoo is a large community of teachers which aims to support and encourage teachers working collaboratively to improve teaching and learning. They have organised grassroots events called TeachMeets where teachers can go along in their own time and share best practice in the form of learner conversations where they discuss pedagogical approaches and what works for them in their context. It has grown from a simple idea to connect Teachers to what it is today. If you are on twitter I would highly recommend reading through and perhaps sharing your own #pedagoofriday, which was created for teachers to share their highlights. It is a great read on a Friday evening.

ResearchEd is another growing grassroots organisation. It was created by chance in 2013 by Tom Bennett and is now growing to have events worldwide. Their mission to explore work works and raise research literacy through bringing people together has been a key to the event growing. I have just purchased my ticket for their event held in Glasgow in February 2020, I can’t wait to hear some excellent people speak about their research and how this will then translate into my own classroom.

For a while now I have been wondering how much of what I do in my teaching practice is because someone somewhere said it would be good to try and how much of what I do is backed by meaningful research so I have engaged with organisations like Pedagoo & ResearchEd to help get some answers to my question. Is what I do day to day what actually works for improving the outcomes for young people? So I have sought to become research informed but what does this mean to be a research informed practitioner?

As Mark Enser wrote in 2017, teachers should engage with research to tackle through all the misinformation that we are given, but what is the misinformation and how do we know? An example of this is that of Learning Styles, this was used for a number of years to help differentiate in classrooms for Audio, Visual & Kinaesthetic learners but this has since been debunked by research. Do you still use learning styles? it is maybe worth looking at the research to see for yourself, after all in a profession like Teaching shouldn’t we be at the cutting edge of research if we really want to be efficient, effective and high performing in our classrooms.

How do we become research informed practitioners? our time is precious and also limited with workload being a key feature of almost every discussion in education. Earlier this year the OECD published ‘Education at a Glance’ and they highlighted that teachers in Scotland have the biggest teacher contact time with young people in the developed world. So time really is an issue for most and with so many priorities (marking, meetings, SQA deadlines, coursework, reporting) it is difficult to find the right amount of time to sift through research, so are there easy ways to engage with research that are quick, easily digestible and can translate into making an effective change in my practice.

A quick and easy way to engage with research is by joining twitter. The online community of teachers sharing their practice, offering up research, practitioner enquiry and simply asking challenging questions of one another is growing daily. If you join twitter I can offer up some useful tips that can get you started.

  • Use your own name or a professional name depending on whether you want to make your profile private or not
  • Choose education as a topic to follow
  • Follow as much people as you’d like (you can always unfollow them). I would recommend the following to start with: @teachertoolkit, @teacherhead, @researched, @UKedreschat, @AceThatTest, @DavidDidau & @ImpactWales
  • You can follow hashtags (#) to join in or just follow along with a conversation: I would recommend the following to get started with: #pedagoofriday, #LrnSciChat, #2ndaryrocks, #PrimaryRocks, #NQTChat, #ScotEdChat & #UkEdChat

There is also an excellent guide by Erin Miller to getting started with twitter here.

Another way to become more research informed is by reading books. I love to read and have really built a good habit of reading. I set a target of 10 pages a day minimum for an education book to help me master my craft. If you like to read there are a plethora of excellent books out there that can make an impact on your teaching practice. So much so that it is worth a blog post on its own. However to get started I would recommend the following books.

  • The Learning Rainforest by Tom Sherrington
  • Just Great Teaching by @TeacherToolkit, Ross Morrison McGill
  • Teach Like Nobody is Watching by Mark Enser
  • Oops! Helping Children Accidentally Learn by Hywel Roberts

If you want to go further with books and book recommendations I would encourage you to read this blog by @87History Kate Jones on her Love to Teach blog.

There are a range of websites out there that are run by educational researchers. These sites are filled with strategies and research that are proven to work in classrooms. The best websites for me are the following.

A final recommendation to becoming research informed is to engage with your own action research. This can be as big or as small as you would like. Some local authorities in Scotland offer practitioner enquire courses which helps you focus on one or two things to investigate and improve in your classroom. It is important with any research you do that you prioritise the impact on young people. A basic structure to conducting action research in your classrooms can be found here in a blog post by @TeacherToolkit. He breaks it down simply for the reader and things of action research in as four point.

  1. Ask – what do you want to investigate? What types of evidence can you gather?
  2. Investigate – What types of evidence are available? How do we best investigate our practice without impacting too much on workload
  3. Innovate – What tentative claims can you make once you have tried new ideas and gathered evidence? What is working and what isn’t? Is the evidence reliable?
  4. Reflect – What did you learn about your practice? What do yo now know? What can you celebrate and share with your colleagues.

Ross articulates it much better than I do in his own blog. I would recommend you read that if you are interested in action research.

Becoming a research informed teacher isn’t as time consuming as you think and starting with as little as 15-30 minutes a day will build your knowledge quickly. Whatever you read or see it is important to consider whether it will work in your context and if you would be willing to put the time into investigating whether it works for you. Collaborating with colleagues is an excellent way to do this and some schools have some excellent examples of working groups and book clubs. I have recently been reading ‘Research-Informed Practice’ by Jennifer Ludgate and it would be an excellent addition to your own and your schools CPD Library.

I hope you do engage with research as I believe that in doing so we can only become more effective and efficient teachers who become masters of our craft, which will improve outcomes for our young people as the better we become as teachers the better it will be for the students in our classes.

 

 

Who owns a hashtag?⤴

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Got Hash Tag?

I’m doing a MOOC from Futurelearn at the moment with some friends: Social Media Analytics: Using Data to Understand Public Conversations It’s interesting, I am getting to use some familiar software (TAGS) and some new stuff (Tableau), and it’s good to think through all of this with others. One of the topics for this week is the concept of public spaces – how a hashtag can create them. And, as a result of that I’d started thinking about public and private spaces, and conversations I’d had in the past about how, though Twitter is public, sometimes one does not like to join in a conversation one sees as it’s not clear whether those speaking would welcome the intervention, or see it as an intrusion. (For the record, if I am tweeting to some people and others want to chip in, that’s great – that’s one of the reasons I’ll be tweeting and not using email, Facebook, or any of the other more “private” spaces I have.)

But, as I say, the MOOC has got me thinking – and one of the things it’s got thinking about is this: who owns a hashtag? This post has been brewing for a couple of days now – and at the back of my mind was the idea that I’d introduce it by telling a funny story, then something happened that gave me pause. Well, I’ll tell you both stories …

Ages ago, probably when something like a rhizo or a pop up CLMOOC was happening, some of us happened upon a hashtag. You know how it is – you’re chatting, you hashtag your tweet with #SomethingYouThinkAmusingOrApt and think no more about it. Maybe your friends also use the hashtag. Tweets and Tweeps can do that. But not this time. Oh, no. This time was different. As we carried on conversing (without the #AmusingOrApt hashtag), a very angry person replied to us all. Apparently we were USING HER HASHTAG. Hers, just hers. Her hashtag for her personal use. She had bagsied it and that meant that nobody else could use it. NEVER. NOT EVER. Well, as I recall, we ignored her and left her to her solitary tweeting (honestly – she was tweeting onto a void using the hashtag – nobody was replying to her or “liking” her tweets), but it made me think: can somebody really own a hashtag? Can one person, or a group of people, dictate to others how they can and can’t use it? Surely not – that’s just not how Twitter works. But then this happened …

I noticed a Tweet this morning that interested me. It was hashtagged #LTHEChat, and hence came up in one of my columns in TweetDeck. It was about learning and teaching in HE, the person tweeting was an #LTHEChat “regular” as were the others in the conversation. It seemed relevant. I replied, also with the hashtag. That’s how Twitter works. But, then, I got a notification of a reply to us and saw this:

Hmmm. Well, I am not sure. Is that how it works? Do the volunteers behind the “official” Twitter account get to be hashtag monitors? Maybe. The chat happens on Wednesday evenings from 8-9pm, and I can see that part of a facilitator’s role might be to keep conversations roughly on track. Maybe. But does that mean that nobody can use the hashtag for other conversations, at other times? Surely not. So if we, as a community (I think that #LTHEChat is a community now, by the way), want to use the hashtag outwith the regular chat times, should we be policed? Of course, in a sense, nobody can STOP me using any hashtag I want, but if we’re talking about social niceties (which I think I am), then what sort of conventions would we like to see in place, or follow ourselves?

I don’t have hard and fast answers to this. I do think it’s worth talking about. So I am going to publish this now and tweet it. And I am going to hashtag it #LTHEChat. You can tell me if you think I am out of order for doing this.

“Got Hash Tag?” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license