Tag Archives: Student Learning

The Creative Profession⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

I love this video from The RSA. The idea that teaching is a creative profession dawned on me a few years ago, and this idea I think has influenced many of the decisions I’ve made since. In actual fact, I think it has come to dominate what my job now looks like…and I hope that it can inform the direction my career will take in the future.

The ironic thing is that I left school ‘knowing’ that I was not creative. Creativity to me then was interwound with ‘the arts’. My art lessons had taught me I was rubbish at art. My music lessons had taught me I was rubbish at music. My english lessons had taught me that I was rubbish at creative writing. This is despite me leaving primary school thinking I was good at all these things and, crucially, enjoying them.

Becoming, and more importably being, a teacher has gradually convinced me that I am indeed creative – as everyone is! If creativity is

the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness,

then we do this every time we sit down to plan a lesson, or write a course, surely? And yet, if we were asked to describe a creative profession, I wonder how long it would take us to include ourselves in this list? I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, but this is actually the reason why I’ve stopped wearing a tie to work. If you ever visit a ‘creative’ workplace, no one wears a tie. Wearing a tie makes me feel distinctly uncreative, and so one day I decided not to wear one anymore. I know this is only a tiny thing, but it helps me.

Creativity underscores more aspects of my professional life than just what I wear however. In fact, I would argue that the things I’m most passionate about as an educator all relate to creativity…

  • I believe that my passion for developing approaches to involving learners in the learning process is a truly creative pedagogy. Not only in the sense that it changes the way I approach introducing a topic with a class, but it then changes the entire dynamic of the topic which follows. The learning becomes much more of a collaborative enterprise with the students become co-creators of the topic.
  • In my opinion, professional enquiry is a powerfully creative process. This is an actual mechanism by with teachers can work together to achieve what is envisioned in the second half of the video above. Enquiry, when done well, is a process which supports teachers to create and evaluate their own pedagogies…that’s why I love it so much.
  • I also think that the real power of technology lies in creating new ways of working, and new ways of learning. There is a tendency to introduce technologies in the classroom in such a way as to replicate what currently happens – but just move these practices online. There can be some, mainly financial, benefits to such an approach – but for me it fails to fully realise the real potential of technology to change the way we learn and teach.
  • Technology of course also has the potential to revolutionise the way we learn from each other as a profession. The creation of Pedagoo in all its various forms is obviously also a highly creative event which continues to this day.

Thinking of myself as a creative professional has therefore really revolutionised my career thus far…that’s why I’m beginning to wonder if I could somehow find a way of using my passion and experience to the benefit of others, and also somehow make this sharing with others a bigger part of my working week? It’s very early days, but I’ve mocked up a little webpage to try to see what this might look like: ownlearning.co.uk

So, what’s stopping me (as mentioned in a previous post!)…what I’m wondering is, would others value my experience enough to actually pay for my time to allow me to work with them and share it with them? My fear is that there wouldn’t be enough of a demand, however watching the video above makes me think that my experience as a creative professional could be highly valuable to others…?

I’m not really expecting anyone to answer this question here…it’s not really possible for any one person to anyway…but I would welcome your thoughts if you happen have any.

Reflecting on Involving Learners⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

I recently mentioned the powerful questions which my S1 class came up with when I involved them in planning our first topic together. Well, I’m pleased to report that we’ve recently finished this topic with a high degree of engagement and learning, from my perspective at least. However, an outstanding question for me was what did they think of being involved in planning the learning? There’s an obvious tension in my pedagogical approach here in that I’m trying to involve them in the planning process, but without first asking them if they want to! I’m comfortable with that tension as I believe that as a teacher I have a role in leading the learning still…however, although I had no real intention of stopping this approach, I did need to find out what their perceptions of it are in order to review, adapt and improve it.

It just so happened that the night before I was planning on asking their thoughts on our learning in the first topic that I was reading this paper in preparation for the Edinburgh Uni professional enquiry masters module I’m involved in delivering. The paper shares an approach to supporting learners to share their thinking by using thought and speech bubbles – I reckoned this would be perfect for my purposes and so gave it a go the following morning!

The class completed various thought and speech bubbles in pairs for the stages in our learning process so far, including being involved in the planning process. You can see the full document I asked them to complete by clicking on the image below.

Screen Shot 2014-11-09 at 13.47.18

Their responses were fascinating. I’ve included the raw thought and speech responses for the planning stage in the table below.

Write the things you were thinking here… Write the things you were saying here…
“i was thinking i hope i will learn a lot”
“i was thinking i think this is going to be fun!”
i had lots of different question to contribute when we were writing them on the post it notes.
i had lots of different ideas and questions that i wanted to find out while doing the topic.
I was thinking about all the questions we were writing and how we were going to learn them.
I thought the planning of the topic was a bit boring because it took over 3 lessons to have a planned topic.
i was wondering what topic we were going to do.
i was wondering if this was going to be fun.
This planning just plain boring can’t we just do it.
i was thinking i barely know anything about biodiversity or the other things the teacher was talking about.
i was thinking what a wierd name for a topic
If it was going to be a hard topic.
What will be the name of our topic and what will it be about? this class is funny!
i wanted to do it on volcanos
What if I don’t know anything about anyone of the topics.		 i was saying “i dont know a lot about this”?????
i was saying “i think i am going to learn a lot!”
i was saying some of the questions i was thinking of to contribute to the topic .
i had lots of different questions but most of the time i didn’t say them in front of the class.
I was saying about how long is the topic. I was saying that the topic contains alot of variety in the tasks we would do. (experiments,writing,reasearch)
what topic are we doing.
what do you do in this topic
wow this is fun.
will it be very hard and will i understand it
i was saying what order to do things in.
Saying ideas for the topic.
lets call our topic the wonderful wizard of life?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
same as thought
What if you don’t know what the topics were.

There were a few interesting responses here. Firstly, some of them thought that the planning process had taken too long, or was ‘boring’. Also, others clearly felt a bit threatened by the process and so I then asked them the following question in order to stimulate a discussion around the purposes of involving them in the planning process.

photo 1

Obviously, my question was clearly loaded in the positive, but that is because I had no intention of stopping…the purpose was to share the reasons for the approach, which I think we managed.

I also responded to their request to try and complete the process quicker. So, for the next topic I set a homework task which involved a few pictures which were related the learning and asking them to come up with some questions with someone at home to bring to our planning lesson.

The planning lesson then consisted of a series of quite controlled stages which they completed in groups within the hour…

  1. They shared their homework questions with their groups and transferred them to post-it notes.
  2. They then organised their questions with the four experiences and outcomes associated with the topic.
  3. They then devised further questions which they would need to be able to answer in order to have successfully learned each of the four experiences and outcomes.
  4. They then had to decide on the order we should learn the four experiences and outcomes and come up with a title for the topic.

You can see their completed planning sheets in the images below. The yellow post-its are their own homework questions, the green post-its are their added curriculum questions.

photo 1-1 photo 2-1 photo 2 photo 3-1 photo 3

They completed this process remarkably effectively in the hour, so they were right – it can be done quicker! We were lacking in time though to discuss the topic as a class and I’ve had to bring their separate plans together on my own without their input, which is not ideal. It was great though for them to have responded to the challenge of completing the process in an hour.

And so, we now begin the process of learning our new topic…I’m not sure what it’s called yet as they haven’t voted yet…but it will be one of the following titles;

  • We are Stardust
  • Everything is Atoms
  • #supercalafragilisticexpiealadoshusubstance
  • #Atoms
  • #supercalafrajalisticexpialiatoms!

Now we’ll see how we get on with our new Chemistry topic…

Demonstrate⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

At our in-service day today, teachers had opportunities to attend workshop sessions on four of the stages from our school’s learning cycle. I was on demonstrate. I used the prezi above to talk through why I think it’s an important part of the learning process and then got them to come up with the features of a good demonstrate stage and what approaches you can use. You can see their fab ideas at the end of the prezi.

I really do think that providing challenging opportunities for learners to show you, themselves and each other how much and how well they’ve learnt is a crucial element in the formative assessment process and yet this is only a relatively recent realisation for me. I think in the past I too often gave students something which I knew they would be able to do in order to allow us to proceed with the content, rather than stretching them to see if they’d really got it and what they still needed to learn. I suppose this is why I’ve become slightly obsessed with the demonstrate stage and therefore really enjoyed the opportunity to share this obsession this morning! Huge thank you to my fab PL colleagues for tolerating my obsession and contributing so much to the sessions.

Switching kids on…⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

Earlier this year I shared the outcomes of approaching a new topic with my S1 class differently. Basically, rather than starting the topic with the title, learning outcomes etc., we started with a discussion which generated questions…

Screen Shot 2014-01-24 at 19.07.04

Once we have the students’ questions, we add in the experiences and outcomes and begin to bring together a topic together as a class. They then name the topic. This year it’s called ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Life’ - a fantastic title which I would never have come up with myself. What has really blown me away this year however has been their questions. The following questions are the ones they came up with which we were able to easily align to our experiences and outcomes:

  • What species are there?
  • Is there life only on Earth? How and why was life on Earth formed?
  • How was life on Earth found?
  • Why did humans evolve on Earth and not on Mars?
  • How did we change from monkeys to humans?
  • Could there have been life on Mars because there was water?
  • How does life continue every day?

However, for some reason we had a much greater variety of questions this year which left us with the following to answer…

  • Why do hammer head sharks have a hammer head?
  • What made the countries split up?
  • How do natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes occur?
  • How was the Earth made?
  • Could humans survive a meteorite hitting Earth?
  • How can animals survive in Chernobyl (Ukraine) and we can’t?
  • Where do deadly viruses come from?
  • Why were the dinosaurs killed through meteors?
  • How do viruses transfer to humans?
  • Will there ever be WWIII? What will happen if it does?
  • How does gravity work?
  • How do volcanoes erupt?
  • How far away is space?
  • What did space look like before Earth was created?
  • How does Earth stay together?
  • What will happen if meteors hit the Earth?
  • How did the Earth’s core get made?
  • What are the planets made from?
  • How big are all the planets?
  • How was the sun made?
  • What did space look like before the big bang?
  • Why is there no ozone layer in Australia?
  • Is there anything which could destroy Earth?
  • What if the hole in the ozone layer gets too big?

Wow! Remember, these students are in S1…which means they’re about 12 years old. Our curriculum will perhaps attempt to answer some of these over the next six years, but not all. How did we answer all these I hear you ask…well they each chose one to research at home and share back to the class as a homework project which they did brilliantly on Friday of last week. Not a perfect solution, but at least they had the chance of exploring at least one of these big questions and hearing from others about their questions too.

This whole process has really made me think…if that’s the questions they are arriving to us with, why is it so hard for us to make the space to answer them? Also, if we make no attempt to try and answer their own amazing questions is it little wonder that many of them eventually switch off to schooling? Imagine instead of being so obsessed with content in S1-3, we instead focused on those skills and attributes which we so wished our students possessed in S4 onwards? I’m not saying knowledge doesn’t matter, but I don’t think everything necessarily needs to be taught to everyone at the same time.

One of my favourite papers contains a much more complex version of the table below. Harris suggests that to get learners to see the purpose in, and even ‘own’, their own learning they need to be collaborators in the learning process:

Continuum of Learner Engagement (What) and how teachers can achieve these levels of engagement (How). Adapted from Harris (2010).

Continuum of Learner Engagement (What) and how teachers
can achieve these levels of engagement (How). Adapted from Harris (2010).

I love this idea and have been striving to find a way to make it a reality in my classroom for some time now. It really shouldn’t be that hard given that there is significant overlap between this idea and the capacities we are tasked with developing as part of the curriculum.

FourCapacitiesDiagram530_tcm4-715823

So, for me there seems to be a contradiction here. If we want our learners to own their own learning and develop the capacities we want them to have, we need to be able to allow them to be collaborators in the learning process. If they are to be collaborators in the learning process then we need to make the space to take their complex and challenging questions seriously as part of their curriculum.

Ultimately, if we want our kids to be switched on we have to somehow find a way of decluttering the curriculum and making the space for it to happen…

Planning with the Learning Cycle⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

image

I mentioned this on #PedagooFriday last week. My S1 Learning Skills class are about to plan and deliver lessons in groups using our six part learning cycle. I first asked them to brainstorm ideas for each stage in the cycle based on their experiences in lessons this year. I was blown away by their responses – especially for the ‘Discuss Leanring Outcomes’ stage where they mentioned discussing the learning outcomes in groups, setting targets and agreeing success criteria for the lesson. If they manage all that in their lessons perhaps I’ll even learn a thing or two!

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Continuous Improvement⤴

from @ Fearghal Kelly

I don’t know if you have, but I hadn’t heard much about the new Curriculum, Learning, Teaching and Assessment National Forums from Education Scotland. They’re not a secret, but I suppose that as they’re in the process of being set up just now there’s not much of a fanfare being made yet. You can read much more about them in Annex C of this CfE Management Board paper.

I’ve been invited to join the Core Group of the National Digital Learning Forum which met for the first time last month. Not knowing anything about it really in advance, I traveled through to Glasgow with low expectations. The word forum to me implies a lot of talking and not a lot of action. As Annex C in the document above suggests, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The plan for these new forums seems to be to develop a coherent approach to continuously improving our curriculum and therefore avoid the cycle of ‘big bang’ reforms. The principles of CfE are broad enough to potentially avoid a major reform in the foreseeable future as long as we continually improve the detail. These forums are an innovative attempt to bring together the people who are delivering the curriculum with those with the power to bring about any required changes. Clever, huh?

Not only was I impressed by the overall purpose of these forums, I was also pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming focus of the National Digital Learning Forum paperwork being on learning – which, as you’ll be able to tell from my recently revised about page, is pretty much what I’m all about. Technology matters, but learning comes first.

So, it’s still very early days, but I’m impressed so far…and if you get a tap on the shoulder to join one of the other forums, seriously consider it. I think they’re going to be better than they sound.

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