Tag Archives: teaching

Listening AND doing⤴

from


Image from Wikimedia
Recently I’ve been over-exposed to the picture above. I’ve been to a slew of talks and presentations where well-meaning people have used this picture on  slide and told me that lectures are outdated and all the best teachers nowadays engage their students in active learning. But, of course, it’s not as clear cut as that. In a paper that, in my opinion, is one of the most important pieces of writing about teaching and learning, Anna Sfard highlights the importance of not rejecting acquisition as a useful form of learning: On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One. Recently there has been a tendency for educators to opt for participatory models of learning – often called ‘active learning’ . However, as Sfard says, it’s not the only way that people can learn and we should be careful of black and white dichotomies. A couple of months ago I participated in an #LTHEChat on Bluesky on the topic of Team Based Learning, and wrote a blog post as a result of a conversation I had during that chat – basically arguing against the idea that being a ‘guide on the side’ was better than being a ‘sage on the stage’.  You can read the whole blog post for yourself and admire the artwork that goes along with it 🙂

Listening AND doing⤴

from

Recently I’ve been over-exposed to the picture above. I’ve been to a slew of talks and presentations where well-meaning people have used this picture on  slide and told me that lectures are outdated and all the best teachers nowadays engage their students in active learning. But, of course, it’s not as clear cut as that. In a paper that, in my opinion, is one of the most important pieces of writing about teaching and learning, Anna Sfard highlights the importance of not rejecting acquisition as a useful form of learning. However, as she also says, it’s not the only way that people can learn.

Image from Wikimedia

How I use Glow Blogs in my classroom⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

As I approach my retirement from class teaching, I thought it might be worth making some notes about how I use Glow Blogs1 in that role2. I’ve been using blogs in class since 2024. A lot of what follows is obvious stuff but there may be a nugget or two.

Class Blog

My current class site is the Banton Biggies – The Tallest Class in Banton Primary

This is principally a way of keeping a record of some of the more interesting things we have been doing. Informing parents and any one else interested.

When I started running a class blog, back in 2004, I had pupils doing most of the posting. A rota of pupils who posted about the previous day’s learning. I now focus on my pupils posting to their e-portfolios and some project work. I do all of the posting, I do give some ‘pupil voice’ lift quotes from the classes e-portfolios and exit tickets.

Surprisingly I now find it harder to organise rotas and give individuals time for posting than I did before CfE.

I post a lot more video now than I used to. Most via YouTube. These are often just concatenated photos that I take or short videos the pupils have created or a combination of both. I don’t spend much time editing these, using Snapthread or iMovie, Magic Movie.

I use the WordPress block editor for most things. I try to use featured images, limited number of photos in galleries with some single images. I use the quote block quite often to add text from the pupils.

I use the Embed Plus for YouTube plugin to post YouTube videos. This allows me to avoid suggested videos at the end of play. I needed to get a YouTube API key, which was a bit of a faff, but only had to be done once. The videos are unlisted in YouTube as recommended by North Lanarkshire council.

I seldom use any other blocks. I use slash, /, and start typing the name of the block to insert blocks quickly.

I find the class blog very useful for gathering information about some activity or concept that class have been involved in. I can use separate pages to gather posts on a particular topic or project. for example, I’ve posted a lot about our MakerSpace so have a page for that. There I used the Query Loop Block to gather the relevant posts and the Embed Plus to show a YouTube playlist.

Tags and categories allow me to quickly pull together evidence if asked for. Search lets me aid my failing memory to repeat lessons from a few years back or remember ideas to share.

I know that blogs are a bit more difficult to post to that X/Twitter. Twitter became the go to way to share classroom activity (maybe not so much now). I’ve found time & again that blogs are more powerful and useful. I can’t imagine teaching without one.

Homework

I post homework grids to my class blog as well as providing them physically.

e-Portfolios

My class make use of individual e-Portfolios for keeping a record of some of their learning. At one point the council encouraged schools to use them with all upper primary pupils to produce profiles. I use them to track targets and record learning in a slightly less formal way. Since I teach multi-composites some of my primary sevens have had quite impressive sites.

Hopefully some experience of using the most popular app to create website, WordPress will do some good too.

Project sites

Banton Beasties

This lists and classifies the creatures we have seen in the playground or our outdoor learning trips to the woods. It has been running for just over a year and I just made it public. The site is organised around the classification of animals. So we are learning about that, lifecycles and some WordPress skills.

This site is being made by the children in the Banton Biggies class of Banton Primary. They are using it to practise their research and writing skills. The information is gleaned from the internet and we try to acknowledge sources appropriately. We may make mistakes and will try and correct them over time. Always a work in progress.

Podcast

My class occasionally creates an episode for the BBP, this has turned out to be about two episodes a year. In my previous school we tried for a podcast once a month, but that was a lunchtime club. Currently my whole class is involved. We use it as an opportunity to explore, writing, collaboration and talking (more).

I’ve posted a lot about podcasting here, for example: More Classroom Podcasting & More Podcasting in the Classroom thoughts

Learning resources

I keep a site as a resource site for my class: Banton Buzz – Challenges, Links and Tasks for the Banton biggies. At first I tried to organise it. Now I mostly give the class links to posts and projects on the site. This means a lot of the content is not easily discoverable. I use H5P a lot (hundreds) on the site to create quizzes and activities. The vast majority of the content here goes along with the NLC spelling program for second level. But I’ve experimented with a lot of other H5P content types, e-portfolio starters, video embeds and experiments.

Exit Tickets

I’ve got blog of this name where I post short exit ticket style questions and pupils post comments. I use this as an occasional alternative to post-its and other plenary tools. I am not sure that I recommend it for anyone else, but as I am pretty familiar with the system I can quickly post a question on the fly and pop up a QR code onto our Apple TV or airdrop a link.

Scratching the Surface

It was over 20 years ago when I started using Blogs in my primary classes. I feel I’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible. It is one thing I would certainly recommend to my fellow teachers as being worth the extra workload.

  1. Glow Blogs are WordPress blogs provided to Scottish Educators by the government via Glow. Glow is Scotland’s national digital learning platform provided by Scottish Government and managed by Education Scotland. ↩︎
  2. Slight caveat, I work part-time as Product Owner for Glow blogs, so have a bias. I did start blogging in class before Glow and before Glow adopted WordPress Blogs. ↩︎

Cleaning Cupboards⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Usually at this time of year I am busy ‘tidying’ things into cupboards. The summer holidays are approaching. This year I am having to clean the out – nine years of accumulated stuff.

There are worksheets galore, laminated instructions and guides, old Tate gallery calendars. Books, tapes, things I’ve made to help with a task, things I thought might be useful, kids work I couldn’t throw out, old bits of technology, a tower of dvd disks I was keeping for bird scarers.

The electric trunking round my room has a collection of interesting wee things the kids have found, spider skeletons, squirrel and mouse gnawed nuts, broken egg shells feather and the like.

As someone who doesn’t have a great memory, this brings back lots. It has also makes me think of a few slightly connected things.

Reinventing the wheel

Primary teachers create a lot of resources. Or buy them from twinkl or similar. I thought that the flowering of edutech might have delivered shared resources in a more distributed, open way than it has. I do resent the money spent, as I think with some leadership we could have had something great.

I am organising, as best I can, anything I think might be useful and leaving them for the next person to occupy my classroom. But I also found resources left by the previous incumbent that I’ve never touched.

memories

Some of the memories I’ve got are stored in our class blog. As they get older I doubt there of much interest or anyone other than me. I will be a wee bit sad as they are lost or replace in the future.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2025-04-02 20:44:09⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

As my full time teaching moves towards the end. I wonder what other job allows you to: organise an art exhibit; video conference with someone from NASA; go for walks in the woods; write poems; learn about AI; play with paint, numbers, cardboard & a whole lot more. Half full I’d say.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2024-11-02 18:21:13⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Last year: I am now more than one term into what looks like being my final year as a full time teacher. I got OAP status earlier this year, but aim to wait till I am a year older, before I take my pensions. I’ve had an idea that I’d write something about this. But strangely nothing coalesces.

Use more cats!⤴

from

Bribery

“Bribery” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Today in the Active Learning Network CPD session Isobel asks us to reflect on the sessions. The activity that I enjoyed the most was the session by Mark Wilsher called The Purr-fect Grade: How grading cats teaches us about student assessment.

What one thing will you take from the sessions?

  • Use more cats in my work
  • Use cats more in my work

What obstacles might you face?

  • Only having two cats
  • My cats not behaving when/as I want them to

How might you overcome these obstacles?

  • Get more cats!
  • Bribe/train my cats

What might you gain from this activity?

  • It would give me joy!

What might you miss if you didn’t do it?

  • The joy of talking about/stroking my cats when I should be working!

The story of a loser⤴

from

I was contacted this week by a professor in my old Philosophy department (where I spent many happy years as a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant), wanting to know how I made the move from philosophy into learning and teaching. That’s something I am always happy to talk about – I’m genuinely interested in how people can take experience and expertise in one area and use it in another.

In my case it happened something like this. I was teaching a lot of tutorials in level 1 philosophy and trying my best to find ways of getting more students to do more than sit passively while the few confident students dominated the conversation, or tutorials turned into mini lectures. A friend (now my husband) suggested that I start to look at learning and teaching events as a way of finding inspiration – and told me that the UofG learning and teaching conference would give me a nice, free lunch if nothing else. I attended the conference, saw a talk by a lecturer (Steve Draper) about Jigsaw Classrooms, and realised I’d found a model that I could use. So I contacted Steve and met with him, applied for and received a small grant from the HEA (as it was then), and spent the next year developing my model of Jigsaw Tutorials. I immersed myself in educational research, wrote papers, presented at conferences, and developed materials that others could adopt or adapt for their own teaching. In short, I became an expert in Jigsaw and realised that I wanted to work in learning and teaching. So when a part-time, short-term post was advertised in the Learning and Teaching Centre I was excited to apply, and over the moon when I got the job. A full-time post came up as a learning technologist and I was again successful, the Uni approved a fee waiver for me to begin a PhD in Education and the rest, as they say, is history. I was not sure how useful my experience would be to others wanting to make a similar move – but I was more than happy to share my success story.

Over a short phone call, however, it became obvious that she was not interested in my story, because she thought of what I’d done not as a positive move from a subject that I’d grown tired of into an area of research that interested me a lot more – and which I felt was important as it made a practical difference – but as a downwards move by a failed researcher. It’s always lovely to get an insight into how others see you. She told me of a colleague who she was meeting later that day who, in her words, had ‘come to the end of the line’ in philosophy after a series of short-term contracts, and who she was going to suggest move into learning and teaching – hence her enquiry to me.

I gave some advice. I said that if a colleague was genuinely interested in making the transition from disciplinary research into the scholarship of teaching and learning then there were communities that I could introduce them to, and colleagues who had also made the move who could help them to make the move. I said that it was not easy, that it was a career path with at least as much importance as disciplinary research, and that SoTL was as rigorous as any other subject. But she was not really listening. In her mind I was a loser, I had failed at Philosophy so I’d gone off to work in a dead-end service job with a lot of other losers, and she wanted to know how her loser colleague might scrape a meaningless existence with us.

I know, on one level, that research is more highly thought of than teaching, I know that I work at a research-intensive university, so maybe this should not have been a surprise. But it was.

Why ’good behaviour’ can lead to inequity⤴

from @ EduBlether

The debate around behaviour in schools is perennial, and just as we said in the podcast episode on behaviour, we will not have time to fully discuss all of the various elements of the debate in this post. What I have to say about behaviour in schools could make up a whole book on its on, so I will continue to post on the subject in the coming weeks. I feel that returning to the discussion to revise and review viewpoints will be worthwhile. My views on this change regularly depending on my experiences in school and the new challenges I am faced with in my leadership role in a school.

For the purpose of clarity, I want to say up front that I am an advocate of restorative practice and a collection of approaches towards ‘behaviour’ that allow children’s dignity to remain intact and that has relationships front and centre. I openly criticise overly punitive, zero-tolerance measures to ‘manage’ behaviour that prioritise an inflexible tariff of consequences. This is down to what I see as the purpose of education (which I recently wrote about here). I believe that Education is a democratising and liberating force that can help children to change themselves and the world rather than conform and reproduce status quo. This is important in this discussion and I urge you to reflect on your answer to the purpose question as it will impact on your views on behaviour.

From my experience, discussion with colleagues, reading current literature and analysis of policy, I would say that in Scotland there is a tangible shift towards nurturing, child-centred, rights-respecting approaches towards behaviour that align closely with my own view. Inclusive policies give me license to pursue the restorative approach I discuss above. The work of popular edu-authors and speakers like Paul Dix (When the adults change everything changes) and the awareness of trauma informed practice and adverse childhood experiences in Scotland has changed the narrative. Most schools no longer remove golden time from children or place their name on the grey cloud to ridicule and embarrass them into behaving better. Behaviourist approaches now seem like out-dated practice that is almost universally lambasted, certainly it is in my immediate professional circles.

The principles of nurture are also well understood in schools across Scotland, the main principle brought into this discussion is often “all behaviour is communication”. Educators seek to understand rather than be understood when it comes to behaviour (or at least there is an awareness of the importance of this). I have first-hand experience of some exceptional practice in this area. Robust packages of support, and huge levels of effort, determination and collaboration have gone into changing the lives of children who would, in a more traditional approach to behaviour, have been excluded and/or done serious harm to themselves and others. With an approach centred on forgiveness, understanding and an educative approach to behaviour – I know that a long term impact can be made. I have seen this work, and the implications are literally life changing.

The ‘problem’ with this approach is that it is hard. VERY hard. It takes a large degree of understanding and professionalism. This is not an approach that is ‘efficient’. There is no linear route to more regulated, consistently calm behaviour. It is a mix of complex, nuanced and fluid approaches that change daily and vary in terms of success. There will be a lot that does not work and certainty of any kind (in terms of children’s behaviour) is almost non-existent. This is not a post of my top 10 approaches to managing behaviour or the silver bullet that will cure all behaviour issues. From my experience there is no list or single strategy that works. This uncertainty and unpredictability inevitably has an impact on other school priorities. It is therefore paramount to view this as values-led practice, as mentioned when questioning your purpose. It is necessary, when approaching behaviour this way, to interrogate what your values are as a school. What do you value above all else? Do you value things like; acceptance, forgiveness, understanding of differences and inclusion? If so then it is important to be upfront and explicit about this. Celebrate your intent. Shout it from the rooftops. I find having a clear rationale for why you are adopting a certain approach, makes it easier when times get tough. Use it as a mantra to repeat to yourself when you find yourself wanting to resort to the path of least resistance. Shouting at a child, or forcing them to apologise may make you feel better in the moment, it may even feel like the ‘right’ thing to do, but does it really meet the longer-term values that you hold dear? Values are what keep me motivated, and keep me coming back every day to continue to try to make a difference. I believe that schools should be judged by how they treat the most vulnerable learners in the community. How those who are facing adversity, in any shape or form, are supported to overcome this. Universal and unquestioned compliance and conformity is not something I aim for in education. These statements express my values to a degree and are hugely significant when interrogating my approach towards behaviour.

Another reason this approach is hard though is because it appears to favour or prioritise the children who are facing barriers at the expense of those who are not. There are children who ‘behave’ as expected every day, without prompt or correction. “It’s not fair on everyone else” is a completely natural reaction, and one that I have wrestled with myself. To a certain extent I agree. Children who are disrupting the learning of many through their behaviour are illustrating a situation that is unfair. But, when I reflect on this, my sense of injustice comes from the inequality inherent in the system, not from the behaviour of individual children. I find it helpful to adopt a social model of analysis here rather than a medical model. The social model focuses on the environment and all contributing factors to a child’s behaviour, looking for alternative approaches that involve many variable factors. The medical model looks to problematise the individual, isolating the concerns to the child – removing them from external influences. For me nothing in education exists in isolation.

If we accept a system that is engineered towards comparing children, heavily focussed on qualification and progress in learning, where efficiency is valued highly while at the same time focussing on the actions of individuals, then disruptions to this will be seen as unfair. But how ‘fair’ is the system to begin with? Quite often, what we value as ‘good behaviour’ are the behaviours of well-off, middle-class, neurotypical children who have not experienced trauma or adversity. By this I mean, sitting quietly, listening, taking turns, resolving conflict with words, being polite etc. In this sense, schools operate to reinforce these societal norms as preferred behaviours. But whose cultural norms are they? Who sets the tone for these being ‘good behaviours’? In our current school system, If you behave this way, you will succeed at school, if not then you are in need of correction, and statistically are more likely to fail – by almost every proxy of success in our current system. These behaviours are preferable because they are beneficial for a very particular type of education. What happens when the environment and expected behaviours change? For example, how many people have witnessed a child’s behaviour completely change (in a positive way) when on a residential experience for example?

My issue here is that our education system as a whole perpetuates a system of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. If tolerance, acceptance and flexibility are not built into the system, and we have a narrow view of what ‘good behaviour’ looks like, then there are always going to be children who fail. My point in this post is that instead of trying to achieve conformity through force, which we know is simply out of reach for some children, that we should try to redesign the system to better suit the needs of those children finding it hard. Ian Gilbert, in the fantastic book ‘Working Class’, reflects on Paulo Freire’s work, in a way that is quite significant in this discussion.

“Your time is better spent not fighting me to change me but fighting to change the conditions in which a ‘you’ and a ‘me’ arose and which continue to perpetuate such a division”.

This is why I am proud of the work I have been a part of in my career which prioritises system change within a school in favour of children who can’t, for various reasons, succeed in the more traditional approach towards behaviour. By changing a system to be more inclusive and which respects every child’s rights and access to education I feel that we are challenging the inequality we see throughout society, and that we are contributing to a more socially just culture and community.

If all behaviour is communication, then that applies to the adults in the system too. What are you communicating through your behaviour as an adult when you are helping children learn how to behave? What are you communicating about your values and your approach to tackling inequality? What do your actions communicate about your beliefs and what you hold dear?

This debate is highly contentious and emotional. Your personal beliefs around this will be impacted on by so many elements of your life (your politics, your own experiences, your beliefs on the purpose of education and many more) meaning that there is going to be disagreement with what I have discussed here. I encourage this. I hope that this provokes discussion and debate. Ultimately though, I believe that as an education system we need to openly discuss this from a values based perspective because it has a profound impact on the lives of the children and young people we serve.