Sharing Pedagogical Purposes

Get Inspired. Getting ideas for project based learning.

2012-01-19T20:31:00.001Z

In " Yes Minister" speak this is a brave post, maybe that is why I've found it so difficult to find advice an guidance on getting initial ideas for projects. So, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of strategies and sources of inspiration, it may all be egg sucking, but, as I have just began a Professional Enquiry Group on "project based learning" I thought it might be time well spent. These will not appear in order of importance.

A very useful start point may be this article "Where do projects come from?" by Angela Guerrero in High Tech Highs fabulous unboxed.

1. Time. Probably a no brainer, but sometimes ideas are hard to come by, be aware of this and start thinking about projects early and informally. Serendipty, can be a wonderful thing so plant a seed, revisit it and wait.

2. Be a hoarder of ideas. Some ideas seem great straight away and when you start to work through their implications they become unfeasible, or, not what you want. Don't discard them but shelve them. Around four years ago I had an idea for a small task to summarise and revise a module. It involved taking key ideas and then turning them into a Dr Seuss style image and ditty, inspired by the hours I had spent reading with my son. I tried a few and felt that that the points the students would take from this task would not suffiiciently focus on the content. Recently, searching for an idea, I remembered these and found the scan I had taken and I am now about to start drafting examples for a year 7 Space science module. I think the fact that they will be describing processes as opposed to recalling facts might help.

3. Mimic and modify. Plagiarism is an ugly word, but emulation is a different ball game all together. If you see a great set of student work or some highly engaging project then use it. There's no shame in that, after all there will still be a lot of work to be done to the project to modify for your context. the content will change, the students, the timescale etc.This is why the work of High Tech High , Expeditionary Learning, Calgary Science School and the Buck institute are so important for us mortals.

4. Consider the content to be taught. Remember, that not everything you want your students to learn will appear in the project. Some of parts of a module, even a Project led one, will have a structured teacher taught part. Focus in on what what would benefit from being taught through a project.

5. Consider the audience the product is for. This again is something that you will want to revisit at a later stage of development, but, considering what may appeal to your audience may help narrow down what the product could be.

6. Critical skills product list. I was fortunate enough to be trained in the Critical Skills approach many moons ago, and one of the most regularly used tools is a list of around 100 products. Some of which I still don't understand what they are but the list is a frequent start point. Start a list of potential ways students can show learning.

7. Use your interests and passions. I have touched on this in a previous post but if you're enthused and excited by what is coming up then your students are more likely to be too. Your hobbies and interest may give you another angle to approach your subject from. The line "That's why we want you to teach here because this is what you ..." sums it up nicely. I wish I could capture that more often in my classroom.

8. DTPF. (Defined)I know this should happen later, but an initial play around will help a basic idea develop into a more substantial idea. Just setting a side an hour to have ago at roughing out the project and attempting a small part will help clarify your thinking, help you make connections and reflect on what you really want the project to be like.

9. Think of themes. If you want to do a book project, or a podcast or a movie, your thoughts might be refined by tagging on a "in the style of ...." may give your idea wings.

10. Consider the skills you wish to develop. This could be part of your subjects content, but it could easily be a literacy focus, a particular way of thinking, collaborating or communicating.

11. Visit galleries and museums. Doing this will help with two aspects of coming up with ideas. Firstly, the content of what's on show may be grist to the mill, but on a more generic level HOW the information is communicated might give you the required inspiration. The wonderful museum box demonstrates this nicely.

12. Consider which external partners your students would benefit from working with. An informal visit and chat might be the trigger for some wonderful student work, and add an authenticity to the project.

13. Consider what parts of the real world you want to expose your students to. A David thing this. Partly, David Perkins notion of finding a junior version of a real "game" and partly a David Price "work should be like learning, and learning should be more like the world of work" thing. Thinking about this and your subject discipline may lead you to an authentic project for your students. What parts of your subject is being applied in the workplace? Take inspiration from Jay Vavra at High Tech High, and his Bush meat project.

14. Revisit old projects or tasks and rebuild them. You may have a great project under your nose that just requires a little care and development.

15. Take a systematic approach. Using a structure like SOLO taxonomy may help breakdown or indeed build up the elements of a project. This Youtube clip of Naomi Hart outlines her early attempts at doing this. Inspiring.

16. Ask how you can engage art or design and construction element. I have quoted this before from High Tech High's Jeff Robin " Art and artist communicate." So, looking for some artistic angle for the project work may at the very least bring part of the critique, drafting high qualityculture that art does by tradition. Indeed, High Tech Highs philosophy of head and hands leads to one of the most engaging curriculums around.

17. Realise that projects can come from anywhere. Obviously, having planted a few thoughts to mull over helps but a simple anecdote may illustrate a wider point. The project I am currently developing on Space Science for our Year 7's almost became a mug decorating project, with diagrams of celestial movements to help explain seasons etc. The reason for this was my son asking for a drinking and picking out his favourite "Pedriodic table" mug when the idea came. I even got as far as Googling ceramic pens and thinking about creating mugs for the staff room (an authentic audience if there ever was one for a mug) before my requirement for some literacy work in this project rendered it "shelved". I may well return.

18. Multiple steps may be necessary to get an idea you're happy with and "do the project first" with.

19. Use the team. An invaluable resource, to share your initial thoughts, the conversations do not have to be commital such as " I'm doing ..." but will benefit from a speculative approach " I'm thinking about...." Seems a little thing but a lot safer for both parties. I would also seek colleagues outside your department, they help see things from a students perspective (or at least one with a less subject specific lens). Colleagues from within your discipline are probably best deployed when your planning in detail.

So, they you have it, sorry I couldn't make it twenty but that would just have been arbitrary and we have plenty of that in education. Obviously, if anyone has hints and tips on getting ideas fro projects I'll be glad to add them. Even ones that apparently suggest how to suck eggs.

Students talking about the benefits of Critiques and Drafting

2011-12-14T14:17:00.000Z

As part of creating a learning an agenda in my classroom I like to keep the pedagogical purposes of the strategies used clear and open. So it is easy to imagine how pleased I was when a student turned up today with two drafts of their work! These year 7 students are redrafting a Scientific write up. They have experienced one full critique before this one. It's nice to see how accepting of challenge and hard work they are. The quality of their work matters to them and they feel as though they are learning by doing this.

The most interesting thing for me in this how they see the benefit of the Feedback Norms as lead to to something helpful, and not just being told to do it again. Again this is indicative of the need for a classroom culture that allows and nutures high quality student work. Another small step towards this I think......
Students discuss why they like Critiques (mp3)

SOLO taxonomy, planning and progress..

2011-12-13T14:31:00.001Z

Today, a group of year students have been completing an extended writing task based around the wonderful PEEL strategy "fact in fiction". Since we had not seen each other for a week I structured a few tasks to remind them of the content ( and resources) and to facilitate the connection of concepts.

First, was a group task that had them as a list key ideas about the Immune system, a chance familiarise themselves with the content once again. A pure multistructural task.

Next they were to define and distinguish between some key vocabulary. Words I knew they had struggled with in the previous lesson. The distinguish element to this was to ensure a relational understanding.

Another relational task followed, but this time choice was given either comparing two ideas using a comparison alley or using an analogy map to create mental models for how these two ideas work. I was pleased to introduce choice as some of the analogies were very revealing. I particularly enjoyed the students likening lymphocytes to a bottle of bleach as they release a chemical against pathogens.

All of these tasks were designed to be about five minutes in length and very much focused on the content. The next one was more complex but I'm hoping will lead to a detailed sequence. Again a relational task but required several pieces of complex information being used. The keywords here are the conceptual parts of this content.

The final task was to complete the fact in fiction task. This involves writing a fictional story inserting relevant facts along the way, but the clever bit is the insistence that the facts are underlined along the way. This encourages the use of key vocabulary and regular reflection. It is obvious when work is lacking in the content, this visual nature makes it easy for the students to see omissions and flaws in their work. There are opportunities for students to work in an extended abstractt way here and at the very least it encourages relational thinking. (See below for an example)

SOLO taxonomy has helped the planning by making it easier to see the increase in the demand of each task and focus on the key connections important for understanding this topic. It is in this way that knowledge and understanding can be built, and teachable moments found and then focus upon what matters, in understanding and for the students at that time. Simple everyday tasks are easily sequenced to plan for (more) complex responses in student work.

An example of Fact in Fiction task

A weary travellers tale.

(A fact in fiction writing task)

Bob and Billy are twins. Identical twins the same in every way. They have just returned from holiday in China. Bob is jet lagged but is generally just dandy! Billy is not. He is feeling unwell. He has a fever, diarrhoea, and a rose coloured rash.Five weeks before they went, they had an appointment to be vaccinated for Typhoid and Malaria. Unfortunately, Billy had double booked with a hair appointment. His hair look superb on the plane, even the air hostess said so!

Your task is to complete the story of Bob and Billy outlining how Billy gets better with the help of his immune system. You must use as many scientific facts as possible. Underline them as you go. Make sure you include the following

How the white blood cells in Bobs body are working to protect him.
Name the two types of white blood cell
How they immune system will fight the disease
What its means to be immune
What a vaccination is and how it works.
Which disease Billy has, why you think this and what type of microbe is causing it

Good luck.

Student work using fact in fiction

A video example of a critique

2011-12-08T17:04:00.001Z

This is not a perfect example of a critique session, but many of the features of one are present.

Critique of E- Safety Games

Firstly the use of the Feedback norms, about being kind, specific and helpful are present. The session starts with a look at strengths of each piece of work. Although difficult, every example has a positive. I intentionally went through every piece of work for this reason, giving value to their work so far.

The whole class ethos of this is emphasised with the question " what will you steal? what idea will you to take to use in your own work?" This is a key point to critiques, its not about getting feedback to one student but away of all students understanding what high quality is like. If I wanted to give one student feedback I'd do that one to one myself. What I want here was to emphasise that we are all in this together.

The specific nature of the questioning, always seeking clarification and specificity, whilst reserving judgement. This allows a frank discussion of what is needs to be done.

Possibly the weakest area of this critique is the focus on the content, although the issues around the topic do surface, as they always do. Critiques are great way to teach content.

Establishing Pedagogical purposes

2011-11-23T14:10:00.001Z

Pedagogy should at its best be about what teachers do that not only helps students to learn but actively strengthens their capacity to learn David Hargreaves, Learning for life, 2004.

This in a sentence is what pedagogical purposes are all about. The benefits are clear, greater teacher clarity, improved student teacher relationships and improved metacognitive thinking by students. These feature prominently on Hattie's table of effect sizes in positions eighth, eleventh and thirteenth respectively. The following quote from Ruth Deakin Crick bears this out and eloquently highlights the benefit with having a clear learning agenda and the sharing of pedagogical purposes.

there is evidence that the key themes which form the necessary conditions for building learning power in classrooms include the quality of the relationships between teaches and learners, the quality of dialogue in which listening to the ‘other’ is central to questioning and debate, the development of a locally owned language for naming these processes, student choice and voice, and resequencing the content of the curriculum, which involves problematizing’ and ‘contextualizing’ the content so as to create challenge and meaningfulness Deakin- Crick et al 2002.

For me there are three ways of quickly establishing a culture of sharing pedagogical purposes in our classrooms. I think the enquiry based and Project based learning may be a more comprehensive way of doing this. However, the three strategies can be categorised as,

Using specific tasks to stimulate a discussion around the act of learning.
Stating and debriefing the pedagogical purpose of each "task"
Increasing the number of metacognitive strategies used.

A splendid example of a task being used to stimulate discussion is the PEEL projects "Dirty trick" strategy (a full description of the strategy can be found on their website). Whereby students are asked to copy a set of notes, which are filled with errors and general nonsense.I like to distract them form this by titling them "Everything you need to know about..." and the like. Here's an example with living rocks that they never notice!

An example of Dirty Trick

Responses can be quite emotive- so use sparingly

I only use this sparingly as students could feel cheated, I love this example as it shows this student cares about what they learn. . If like me you spend a long time building up trusting relationships you wouldn't want to use it inappropriately, so a brief task of no more than 5 minutes is best. However, it does open up discussion about active and passive learning and responsibility. The students tend check and question information before they make notes and some even start to challenge the information I present. I always throw in a few silly ideas into the following lesson to check that they are questioning the information.

Increasingly, my lesson plans that I write that others use highlight the strategy being used and how to debrief it. This helps turn a complete this task/ worksheet style of approach to developing student knowledge of possible strategies they could choose to use when working on a project or in a more independent way. The debrief of each of these tasks is vital. I normally ask the following questions.

How did you go about using this tool?
What was difficult about using it?
What does it allow you to do? or Why would you use it again?
Where would you use it again?

Question 3 and 4 are obviously there to facilitate transfer of the tool or way of thinking.

This AudioBoo highlights how readily students take to this, I love how they try to persuade doubters to the value, and is a chance for them to show how much they enjoy and care for learning. These students had just used a Whole Part Map for the first time. I think it also shows how it is necessary for the teaching of learning strategies to have a content/ real learning basis.

Students talking about whole part maps (mp3)

I always find this table useful in analysing the tools I use during my teaching.

Developed by Jill Flack.(PEEL)

The final way of establishing pedagogical purpose with students is to increase metacognition. This can be inextricably linked to the debrief above. Although, I find that specific tasks as render positive results too. A favourite are the metacognitive wrapper tasks asked at the start of a session to prime the kind of thinking wanted (including content) and at the end to see how that metacognition had changed or improved their thinking. Again spending a small quantity of time discussing these often brings out generic strategies that some students use, allowing others to mimic their style of working.

A lot of these strategies can be framed through the use of SOLO taxonomy. It has a clear pedagogical purpose, to highlight what high quality learning woudl look like and providing structure and guidance to get there. The shared language mentioned in the quaote from Ruth Deakin Crick, is clear and unambiguous and readily picked up by students. And, through the clever linking of specific tools to the levels will add another dimension to the student debrief on the tool by asking "Where on SOLO taxonomy does this tool help you think at?".

So why should we share pedagogical purposes with students? This is succinctly summarised in the closing quotation.

‘Effective teaching … should aim to help individuals and groups to develop the
intellectual, personal and social resources that will enable them to … flourish … in a
diverse and changing world.’ ESRC TLRP Evidence-informed principles for teaching
and learning: No 1, March 2006

Critiquing culture takes off!

2011-11-21T18:06:00.001Z

I sat down recently to mark some Year 8 practical write ups, which had been critiqued by students in pairs, during a teacher led session. So I expected to see some peer feedback and a second draft. At first it didn't register that this student had done something different. I did notice that she had done three drafts but the significance didn't register. I was just impressed, by the work ethic and by how the drafting culture had quickly been accepted as the norm by the majority of this class. I did notice that one draft had been highlighted with different colours and thought "Great they have been thorough". But something didn't sit right. I looked again at the student work and saw draft one, followed by a critique followed by draft two which had also been critiqued and finally draft three. It then dawned. They have done an extra critique, but when did they do this? I then realised that the second draft had been critiqued independently of me! These students had not previously critiqued work, but have instantly seen the value and invested in it. The culture of critique and draft had taken off! I love the quote from this student after draft one.

I am well aware that this is only two students who have completely taken to this, but I now have exemplar critiquing and drafted work to inspire and cajole others. Let the archiving commence. I must confess that I was slightly taken a back by the quality of the critiquing by the students on the second draft. It was so much better than what they had done when I had led the session. It was kind, helpful and specific, and contain real learning conversations and lots of subject content references. I am becoming increasingly convinced that critiques are the best opportunity for teaching that we have, with ready made context and personal investment. What bothered me was how much better they were without me! In reality they had used the same success criteria we had established and had applied the feedback norms that were shared. But, the important thing is that they have made these there own, they can do it at anytime and with any topic or task and with great skill. I have annotated the slides below showing the student work, but it really isn't necessary when you look at the work and comments. Drafting example

View more presentations from DKMead.

Obviously intrigued by the motivation to go to such lengths, I asked the two students involved. They had critiqued each others work and both had made huge improvements. I will photograph the other piece of work and add it to this blog post. The thing that strikes me about this AudioBoo is how matter of fact, they are about critiquing, drafting and hard work! They see it as part of learning, they see it as worthwhile, they see it as normal. Thank you Josie and Emily.

Year 8 talking about Critique (mp3)

Hidden Lives of Learners - A must Read Book

2011-11-02T22:33:00.002Z

Grahams Nuthalls posthumously published book “The SecretLives of Learners” is the culmination of a lifetimes work as an educationalresearcher. Nuthall is rarity an academic who has passion, clarity and his fingeron the pulse of learning. This book although based on his research is very muchfrom the hip and as a result you get a challenge, passion and candour in equal measure.The title alludes to the three co-existing (although not necessarilyinteracting) worlds a learner experiences within a classroom. Firstly theteachers classroom we are all know, secondly the world of the peer, whereteachers/ adults seldom gain access and finally their own world that exists inall our individual heads. In here lies the richness of Nuthalls’ writing, as aneducator he is imploring you to look closely and widely at your student’sinteraction, actions and thinking. Illustrating that metacognitive thinking isa vital part of learning. This book requires several readings to winkle out theimplications to classroom practice.

The difficulty for a teacher to see learning is anotherexplicit challenge, with Nuthall making clear those teachers (and I wouldsuggest the wider education community) misconstrue good behaviour as goodlearning behaviour. How might technology allow teachers to see learning that istaking place rather than just “on taskness”?

An insight into this can be gleamed from the methods Nuthallused assessed prior learning, wired each student and teacher for sound, usedclassroom observers to note interactions and available resources, assessedagain, interviewed learners about their learning experiences and finallycorrelated learning with this data. Eventhe methodology employed has a useful message for teachers, we must listen andlook out for the learning that is taking place, and this could be the roletechnology will play in a modern classroom, through blogs, message boards andwiki’s and the like the process and the interactions necessary for learning to takeplace are they for all to see and reflect upon.

The book is filled with extracts of the dialogue from theclassroom and the interviews between researchers and students. These actexegetically of the main findings of his work rather than mere anecdotes. Thebiggest of these being that for something to be learned a learner must interactwith the information in three or four different ways during a learning episode.The implication being that teaching alone does not suffice, and that teachersand students need to be able to work and think in different ways. Therefore theneed for pedagogical structures such as a basic accelerated learning cycle isimperative

Few statistical devices appear in the book one that does isagain based around individuals rather than Educational Technology could howeverrevolutionise the next finding.. Nuthall demonstrates that students arrive witha lot of prior knowledge- around 40% of the items to be learned were alreadyknown. This is shown to be dependent on ability with the more able or should Isay the students who perform better in test, having greater prior knowledge. Itis shocking to note that there is no difference in the quantity learned betweenthese students, although how it’s learned and how much teacher support doesvary, with the more able requiring less teacher support.

The quantity of previously known information isone of the big “hiddens” within the classroom. This is why assessment forlearning works, especially the use of pre-assessments to determine a more personalisedroute through a scheme of learning. But, this requires training of studentsthat the assessment is helpful and will inform them of their next steps, andnot a judgement and it also requires a lot of effort on the part of theteacher. This is a big opportunity for genuine Educational technology, makingthis rich information readily available to students and teachers. Althoughmarrying this with another finding of the astonishing individuality of learningwith up to 80% of the items learned done so by one or a single other student.This is the challenge. The uniqueness of learning needs to be looked for byteachers and curriculum designers.

I have just remembered that this exists of this old presentation form a Teachmeet.

Drafting work and Portfolio books- An Update post.

2011-10-30T22:05:00.000Z

As a prelude to this post it will be worth reading NickDennis succinct blog post An Ethic of Excellence- in opposition to “quickfixes”, which coincidentally is kind of the point here. This post is a reflection to my learning goals set at the start of this academic year.#

I must confess to sense growing well being when considering theimpact of Portfolio books. The majority of students now understand theirpurpose which is a vast improvement from our first attempts at using them. This has presented two major obstacles to overcome.

Firstly, the hard wired nature of completing “schooling”tasks. That is to say that once complete students believe they are finished.This is unsurprising as most of what they do at school is precisely this. Taskdone, teacher ticks and on we move – the relentless factory model of educationat its most pernicious. Thankfully this cycle is easy to break, although whetherit remains broken is a different question.

Secondly, and this is entirely based on the studentexperience of the above, is that students genuinely do not understand whattheir best is, since they have rarely had an opportunity to demonstrate it. Surelythat’s a teachers job, but the delivery model again occludes.

So, what I have learned so far is the importance of culture.All of my year 7 and 8’s have so far written up one practical piece of work,identified and stressed as “work to be proud” of. Obviously, some students graspthis straight away others remain ignorant, bu,t the culture remains expectant ofexcellence through hard work and the drafting of work. Each write up has beganin lesson time ensuring a shared structure and success criteria for these pieceof work and then have been completed as a home learning task. This has then beenfollowed up through a whole class critique of one or two students work torefine and exemplify what excellence could look like. The students have thenagain been given (a little) class time and a home learning task to improvetheir work. Again care has been taken to mention that their portfolio work, with that multipledrafts of improving work, is another way to demonstrate successful learning andanother way to value their hard work.

A problem encountered.

If you know a redraft is coming howdo you put all your effort in when you know you’re going to do it again. I haveno answer to this yet, but I hope the portfolio book will help at least placesome expectation upon these tasks. This renders task selection ( and design)essential. I am sure some of my students have encountered this sentiment andhave expressed it verbally as well as in sub-par work. They have said thingslike “will we have to re-do this?” which I have taken care and time tochallenge in a positive way. My response has always been to distinguish betweenredoing and drafting. Redoing implies copying out neater like cutting the lawn,while drafting infers improving and learning. It is a fine distinction,particularly for students, but what is at the heart is the establishment of a critiquingand drafting culture.

So far all students have improved their work in at least twofeatures of their work. Some have made huge leaps in their work. It may be easyto detract from these improvements and claim its due to teacher influence orhelp from peers and therefore not reproducible by students in their everydaywork. But, this is not a quick fix, teaching for its better part is not a setof tricks, tools or gimmicks. It’s about trustful relationships where challengeand expectation can over time develop not only good scientists (in this case)but also a vibrant work ethic and aspiration. At the very least these studentsnow have a model of, if not excellent work, at least good (or for someimproving ) work in their books. Its ownership and it’s a starting point.

The recurring power o critiques.

Through all my experience of running critiques with studentsone thing has continued to surprise me, and that is how much these discussion remain aboutlearning science ( content knowledge). This in itself is a massive sellingpoint for the selection certain tasks at regular intervals throughout the year tocritique and redraft. It allows you to revisit and develop understanding of thecontent that your subject values. It forces students to question what theyunderstand and what they don’t and give opportunity for them to communicatethis in several ways. It’s teaching.

The next steps will be more evident after the next student task.Year 7 have began writing up a long term experiment on plant growth, sodifferent content knowledge but the scientific thinking utilised in design,carrying out and analysing experiments remains constant. After the initialdiscussion of the success criteria, I can already see the improvement, and I’msuitably expectant of work approaching their best. Year 8, is a little moreproblematic as their next task is an extended writing one, so the similaritiesare less specific and therefore the transfer I am hoping for is more cultural. Wewill see if this happens.

SOLO and connectives lesson reflection

2011-10-23T17:02:00.000+01:00

My year 8 students are currently studying a module called " Do we still need fossil fuels?" which culminates in an extended writing piece in response to this question. They will peer critique (review) in small groups producing a journal collecting 5 different articles.This is part of our school wide focus on developing literacy.

As part of the preparation for this writing, I wanted to share with them useful connectives that would not only develop their literacy but also their thinking within the article. An opportunity presented itself with our use of the Electrocity SIM game. The Electrocity game was to be part of their on going research. before they started gaming each group had to name their town and come up with its priorities/ principles/mission statement. This serves two purposes, it establishes a narrative at the start of this enquiry of things they are interested in and secondly tells them that they can use the game as a way of researching what "will happen if...." scenarios.
I came up with the idea of listening into student conversations,recording on post it notes the the connectives used.I planned to debrief the students frequently, around every 7 minutes or so, ranking the connectives against SOLO taxonomy,thereby creating a just in time need to be taught about using connectives to develop our thinking.This was primarily achieved by understanding that their initial game playing session would involve a combination of "how do i play" and ""Hey we are playing games distraction. I knew that much if the conversation would be Prestructural at this point, with comments along the lines of "Cool you can build a stadium" or " Get a wind farm" So the second part of the debrief would be about compiling the connectives that they knew and I (surreptitiously) offered and again ranking them against SOLO. We were providing the next step.

Note how SOLO has been added as students started using returning to the SOLO feedback unexpectedly .

Another vital part of this session was the non judgemental feedback provided against observed use of resources. The helpful resources that we had made in previous lessons such as the "info scrolls", their notes, the information on the EON and Electrocity websites. All were highlighted at the beginning of the session, with a clear expectation the they should be used to inform decisions. Of course they were not, but this would change simply by counting usage and feeding it back. As can be seen in th ephotograph above.

The procedure was repeated once the students had settled back into game play. Notes were made on a different coloured set of post it notes to allow us to see progress made.It was pleasing to see that nearly all groups were now dipping into the resources albeit tentatively. The conversations began to change and they began to at least give reasons for the choices they wanted to make (i.e. the prevelance of "because" became noticeable). Many students returned to the principles they set up at the beginning with statements along the "we wanted to be as green as possible so we must use the wind turbines", demonstrating the power of establishing a narrative in enquiry work.
Again the students were gathered and their comments assessed against SOLO taxonomy. It was obvious with the different coloured post it notes that progress was being notes. NB; I am fully aware that the students were able to play the "Connectives" game and say the things they thought I wanted to hear. However I am unconcerned by this "imitation" work as they are actually practising the use of connectives. Exactly the point I was making.

I was very fortunate to have @JamiePortman and @Gwynap visiting and acting as observers with me. So the of connectives was practiced consistently by all throughout the lesson. Although, the progress the students made over the whole lesson suggests that they had began to use these as their own. They had learned to use them through practice.

The following picture can be read as follows . The left had side is what the students had said i.e they current position. The post its on the right their next steps. SOLO taxonomy made this very easy to do for both my students and me. Orange Post Its were used in the first attempt mainly Pre and Unistructural. Blue the second attempt which is mainly Relational but with some Prestructural and Unistructural showing that some students required more practice at using this (well I never! Graham Nuthall correct AGAIN) and the final attempt in Green which interestingly had nothing below Relational!
I think what this shows is that SOLO taxonomy is a great way of giving and structuring feedback, and how by sharing the progress they are making can lead to more progress due to greater engagement.

Solo taxonomy and Connectives.

2011-10-13T21:47:00.001+01:00

My comrade in SOLO @clarky099 a little while back started to compile connectives that would encourage students to think at the next level. I have two lessons coming up, one of which is perfect for training the use of them, soon to be followed by an extended writing task. It is obvious that not only the literacy will be enhanced, but also in the thought behind the writing by use of these connectives. Building on the Damien's work, I have added and classified some connective against (and for use with ) SOLO taxonomy. Im hoping to gather more and especially collate some subject specific ones.

I'm using these tomorrow by (hopefully) listening in to student conversations and making notes on Post it notes to capture the connectives being used. At regular intervals I will use these notes to debrief the student conversation and hopefully modify it, so that they at the very least begin to use these connectives as part of their conversations.

There is a Google doc if anyone cares to contribute. SOLO CONNECTIVES

Extended Abstract	In conclusion … In summary … To sum up … Overall … On the whole … To conclude … So, to round up.. That will lead to.. If ...then.. Its just like ....because...
Relational	More importantly … This can be proven by … so … As a result of … … because … This means that … Equally … As with … … are .... As for … … whereas … … while … similar in that Mainly … Mostly … Usually … Unfortunately … Most often	Due to the fact that … … due to … … therefore … … caused … This caused Compared with … Similarly … In the same way … Likewise … However … On the other hand … … although … Despite this … On the contrary … Instead … But... When...
Multistructural	Firstly, secondly, Finally … To being with … On top of this … In addition to this … Additionally …	… and … … also … … as well … Futhermore … Another … Not only … but also
Unistructural	For example … For instance … Such as …

Project Card = A summary of Wild About Cramlington

2011-10-11T20:40:00.000+01:00

Example of assessment and Feed forward using SOLO Taxonomy.

2011-10-08T09:36:00.002+01:00

One of the reasons I find SOLO such a useful framework is that it allows me to provide content related feedback to students, as well as "feedforward" (thanks @CHarte) to students. This helps develop student thinking and the quality of student work. I hope these examples illustrate how obvious the next steps in subsequent pieces of work are for these students. I find it a happy blend of specific and generic that makes it accessible to students.

A couple of points about Blooms Taxonomy.

2011-09-02T21:06:00.000+01:00

If you take Analysis as an example and firstly consider the artwork, of Piss Christ by Serrano Andes.You may Identify the materials it is made from , describe what it looks like, classify what style of art it is, make inference to its meaning, anticipate what others may think of it and appraise its value to a wider debate to society.

Problem Number 1- Is it a Hierarchy ?- To do one level of Blooms, you have actually used all levels of the Taxonomy.

Problem Number 2-Clarity - If you can easily cover all the levels from one other, how useful is it to your students? How clear is it how to analyse Is it usable? Would they use independently? Or is it one of those "secret teacher business" things? If so, how are we supposed to communicate with our students about this?

If you now Analyse the performance of FC Dinamo Bender last year. Then you may enumerate the statistics, compare home form against away, calculate the difference between home and away form, compare (yes again!) number of goals scored versus conceded, generalise the home form and away from form both these comparisons and decide how well they performed.Again, every level covered.

Problem Number 3- Ignoring of the content being learned.- The skills utilised in the analysis of art work and football statistics, is very different. One is more likely to be interpretive of opinion, while the other could be a number crunching exercise. I know I have been selective here, but I have tried to avoid using jarring juxtaposition. It is clear that the content helps determine what is involved in the analysis, Blooms taxonomy separates these. I want my students to learn something as well as think in complex ways about their world, this is why I am actively promoting the abstinence from Blooms and the championing of SOLO taxonomy.

More on SOLO taxonomy here - http://hooked-on-thinking.com/ and http://pedagogicalpurposes.blogspot.com/2010/08/video-introduction-to-solo-taxonomy.html

Blooms levels from http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm
Images from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
and data from www.vitibet.com

This Years Learning targets- an authentic year ahead?

2011-09-02T17:17:00.001+01:00

Each year I like to set myself targets to develop my practice, often with a less is more approach so normally two or three ideas or areas maximum. This year I hope is going to be dominated by Project Based Learning.

My priority must be creating more authentic projects in my subject area, Science. I think the easiest way to do this is firstly to involve parents more as an audience, not only for their child but as a member of the local community. This I hope wil not just be for the big projects we undertake but very much part of the journey. I am already planning a parents session on using www.electrocity.co.nz as bit of research/ homelearning . Through this I am hoping to find some useful contacts for expert collaborators, obviously this will not be the only avenue I hope to develop, but could be the most important one, as this more present more motivated participants who have a vested interest.

A large part of authenticity be having genuine outcomes, working with experts in the field we are studying and/ or projects that have a real impact beyond our classroom. These real world connections I hope will help provide the motivation to produce quality.

I am expecting this to put quite a bit of pressure on myself, my co-teachers and our students, but, this will be welcome if the quality of the student work and the pride of achievement are high!

So measures that will be reinforced this year to help ensure this desired quality are.
1. Project Tuning- which will also have the benefit of sharing good practice too both within school and beyond. I'm hoping that some of the collaborators can have an input at the early stage.
2. Continued development of a "drafting" culture through critique.
3. Establish a work book and portfolio book for "best drafts", so students can readily identify their best work. I hope this will add importance to all work beyond the "big" projects. I have already identified this work in my first module and will share this with my students.
4. More regular exhibition of student work. My thinking here is that twice a year could be feasible to host an open evening to display, share and explain student work. Importantly these need to be established early in the year so that deadlines are well known and respected.
5. Do the project first has become a bit of a mantra for me, so I will endeavour to do this for each project this year. My experience in doing this has told me it works, helping me judge value, feasibility and work out differentiation.
6. Finally, I will archive high quality student work to use as exemplars. I have some from last year, and although the projects will evolve, may set a standard for others to emulate.

So that's it in a nutshell, i know there will be more like SOLO taxonomy (and the destruction of Blooms :-)), evidence based strategies, whole school project weeks and much more besides.

I have just read through a very useful (draft) guide to Project Based Learning from Learning Futures , so if you are interested in developing PBL too, keep an eye on this site for its release. Highly recommended.

Student Perspectives on the "Wild about Cramlington" Project.

2011-07-07T09:57:00.004+01:00

"Wild About Cramlington"Book project process Review

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These are the views of my Year 9 Students who had just completed their first Project Based Learning experience. It is great to see that they are begining to care about what they are learning about and their local community. There are also nice signs that students are beginning to trust one another and value the feedback they recieve from one another, not bad considering there only came together as a group only for this week. It's made me realise (again) of how important it is to establish a learning community in our classrooms.

Obviously the most pleasing outcome of this is not just the fact that they have learned something but that their learning goes beyond the classroom, beyond just trying to please (or appease) sir. There are signs in these statements that it matters, to others what they have learned. I think this came about from two corner stones of the design of this week. Firstly, the product was a useable, real thing that was going to be published, and secondly the presence of experts during their learning, as Learning Futures would describe them Extended Adult World Connection.

Hinge Questions. A Clarification.

2011-06-28T13:31:00.011+01:00

I have just Google searched the term "hinge questions" and to my horror one of my previous posts is the second on the list and the first to mention "Hinge Questions", and to be honest it's a bit naff. I feel I need to do this important strategy justice.

A Definition

I read a great quote on twitter from David Wees which went something like this.

" Grades are not precise measures of learning. Repeat: Not Precise!. Act accordingly" .

This encapsulates why hinge questions are so important . They are simply a tool to help the teacher and learner what the learner needs to do next, by helping them identify what alternative conceptions they hold on a particular ideas/concept/ item of learning. They are often multiple choice questions ( or at least these are easier to design) but can be more open ended in nature. But, either way the purpose of the question is to illicit what the learner understanding is in a clear and unambiguous way, and not confusing it with a level or a grade. It is the student understanding that matters, not where that understands on some arbitrary ( yet, important) measure, and this decides whether you can move forward "hinges" upon student thinking.

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)

PCK can be simply be defined as the way in which content knowledge is used in teaching situations. For example improvising, making connections, drawing analogies, defining, redefining, and the ability to teach the same thing in different ways. A huge part of this is the ability to identify what is important in a topic and focusing the learner attention and focus upon this. PCK is also laden with the "mistakes" that are going to be made by learners. From this it's importance in hinge questions becomes apparent, just how do you start reconstructing student preconceptions?

The clearest explanation can be found here by its pioneer Lee Shulman.

Culture

I believe the first step is placing a value on identifying them for the student. This is a cultural manoeuvre, placing what were once perceived as a mistake or a wrong answer into a new category of "that's where I've been going wrong, what do I need to do about it!". To do this I vindicate the use of a making clear the pedagogical purpose of such questions every time I use them. I appeal for honesty (even down to a request not to guess).

This relies on a lot of trust not only of the teacher but also of themselves and their peers. So a long term consistent strategy is best, for example the use of a no hands up policy at appropriate time ( of course sharing the purpose of doing this) or celebrating mistakes and using them as a teachable moments. (Great blog post here from my esteemed colleague @saidthemac). The beauty of PCK is that you can (almost) plan for these moments.

Timing

It seems obvious but hinge questions should allow learners time to refocus on the important aspects. This brings about two main notions. Firstly, focusing on critical learning concepts as opposed to ideas that are not essential for further progression, this can be a difficult decision and relies on a sound PCK. A Key Stage 3 Science example could look something like this. When teaching about Photosynthesis the students prior learning would involve the identification of plant cell organelles. Important as these are, especially the chloroplasts (which are the site of photosynthesis), but at this level students understanding is not enhanced with more information than this. So any subsequent hinge questions would be better served on the process of photosynthesis, for example distinguishing between raw materials and products, or the affects of higher or colder temperature.

Secondly, there should be ample time to respond to the information at hand. This could be at the start of the lesson, with specific tasks to follow different hinges. Or toward the middle of the lesson to modify or clarify an emerging understanding or even at the end of a lesson, but only if you are planning the next lesson around these.

Some deconstructed example hinge questions.
1. Name the following –
Na
Cl
H2O
Fe
NaCl
CuSO4
CaO

Common mistakes are just naming the elements, and describing what they are made from. The first two are straight forward test that the symbols have a meaning, a scientific way of communicating as does water ( which is a compound). NaCl tests if they can follow a convention of placing the metal first and non metal second and changing the –ine ending to –ide CaO confirms this. The CuSO4 is more complex but can be completed by memory, hence the lower emphasis.

2. Choose the best answer
An element is made of
1. all types of atoms
2. one type of atom
3. one type of atom joined together in a pair
A compound is
1. at least 3 types of atom joined by a chemical bond
2. more than one element near another.
3. Two or more elements bonded together

Students often confuse atoms, elements molecules and compounds. This question makes this apparent. 1 is a misnomer 2 is the correct answer and 3 is a molecule which could be an element.

These are a little more complex, and students are instructed to pick the best answer. For example the Lungs responses are The site of respiration a "alternative conception" easily picked up when studying the respiratory system ! For breathing with is another easily acquired alternative conception. Breathing is a physical process and therefore involves the diaphragm and intercostal muscles and the ribcage, which affect the lung volume. The site of gas exchange is the correct and abstract answer.

So, there you go, I hope this is a slightly more comprehensive and therefore useful discussion of hinge questions. It would be great if you could post comments with deconstructed examples from your subject areas.

Wild About Cramlington

2011-06-21T20:01:00.003+01:00

So here it is, after a full week of bird watching and project development a (almost) complete guide to the Wild Life of Cramlington.

Wild About Cramlington guide.

I am meeting with the students tomorrow to run a final check and add the final map to the area.

This project would not have been possible without our wonderful volunteers who gave their time and expertise so generously. They both have great blogs on our local wildlife and birdlife in particular. Perhaps their biggest offering however was they helped the students that their learning matters to a wider community, which can explain the energy and care the students have put into producing this.

Please check out there blogs here: They both have posted about their experiences too!

http://crammybirding.blogspot.com/

http://holywellbirding.blogspot.com/

The benefits of "teacher as designer" concept mapped

2011-06-19T17:04:00.002+01:00

The role of the reacher at High Tech High is defined by the role "teacher as designer" so they design the curriculum and the procesese and experiences the students go through. This concept map shows some of the benefits and a few of the operational conditions required for this to flourish as it does at High Tech High.t

Why do the Students at High Tech High produce such high quality work?

2011-06-19T16:03:00.002+01:00

The student work at High Tech High is inspiring. They do not do this by accident or simply because they are talented. A belief in hard work, real outcomes with real responsibility and well designed projects allow them to succeed.

Why are students at High Tech High So Responsible?

2011-06-19T15:25:00.004+01:00

Many interacting reasons combine to influence the students. Many of these are cultural and have been designed and are regularly maintained in the school. An example of this is the aspirational student work, which is displayed every where, as th efabric of the school.

Do the Project First- Olympics Style.

2011-05-27T19:42:00.010+01:00

This video is not intended for you to watch, you can if you want, but it serves merely as evidence that I have indeed followed the advice of Jeff Robin at High Tech High and I have done the project first.

My year 8 students have just began a Science Project on the Science of the Olympics, where they had to choose an Olympic sport, research the Forces that are employed in the sport along with the antagonistic muscles that create them. So just simple Physics and naming of a few muscles are expected as the content. But in the one lesson that I have had with these classes I have already noticed a benefit to this paired down content. That the students have began to unlock the content that belongs to them and is allowing for genuine co-construction to take place. So amongst some of the notable queries and discussions we have had are:-

1. "Sir, it says that people who go on a Skeleton for the first time have a 50% of dying! I wonder how they worked out the probability?" which left me ruing that this is not a maths and science project.

2. "Sir, what do you call the shape of the pattern that an Arrow flies in...you know that curve thing?" "A parabola. " So how does that work then ?". This conversation has taken place in three out of the four lessons, and not always with the top end of the KS3 levelling hierarchy that we use to determine intelligence and success in this country. One of the students had just scraped a level 5 in the last topic test. (Irony).

3. "Sir is it OK if I video myself Ice Skating, Swimming, Running, Playing Basketball....I have not done it for ages!"

4. Two girls jumping up and down flailing their arms about who said " Sorry sir we were just trying to work out if your arms help pull you up when jumping!"

5. "Sir, can we make the music, the scenery, do stop gap animation as homework?"

6. Three boys who had chosen Table tennis and then regretted it as it had became boring. Responded to my request of "can you finding a way of making it interesting for you?" Found out that it was banned in Russia for 53 years, if memory serves as they thought it could make you blind!" They were skeptical (great scientific thinking I'd say) but are now in love with Table Tennis again.

But perhaps my favourite so far has been one from a student who I have struggled to engage. Who asked today " So Forces and Energy are different aren't they?" I felt like Mark Moorhouse (@MarkMoorhouseMM) !

The point I'm trying to make is by allowing students to find and define some of their own learning can take students to deeper and more interesting learning, by developing a true engagement as opposed to a learning compliance. I know I am going to have my work cut out but will endeavour to teach to the requests.

None of this would have happened if I had said "research and Olympic sport and make a video". I imagine that I would get a load of pilfered images, pixelated , inappropriate and compiled in an uncreative way. Do the project first!

The video above is not perfect but took me 9 hours to make. So imagine my joy when one class even gave a spontaneous round of applause. All the others sat perfectly through it, often glancing and smiling at me when I appeared on screen. I think my applause was for the error ridden guitar playing, which is my first public performance! I think they saw that I had taken a risk and was a learner too. I tweeted this and received a great response from Mr Moorhouse that simply said " Great Learning commons!" I love this notion that students and teachers are in this together! Read more in the latest Learning futures pamphlet here.

As I have said and not just as a disclaimer, the video is far from perfect. However it serves an important role in this project, and that is to set the minimum standard, I expect my students can and will produce better. I think I could have made a better one but did it on my own and with no critique, not an excuse but stating the power in the critiquing process. I will use this as model so that the students and I can define together and success criteria.

Another reason to do the project first.

I also manage to model a few techniques and strategies. that my students could use to avoid the pilfering of low quality images. It also has work of varying quality from me in that shows that I have learned too. My presentation with a box on my head is very self conscious but by the end hearing my voice in some of the voice overs I am more confident and clear. (Well if you are fluent in my native tongue!). I have learn to edit moving pictures in Movie maker and to edit sound files using Audacity. These skills are transferable and teachable now.

Another good reason to do the project first.

It also allowed me to figure out what I thought the minimum content should be, and what was difficult in the content and the process too. I'm now more prepared for differentiation, to support my students and design groups that will work. I have also been able to assess how long my students need to do this and plan a schedule that is appropriate.Deadlines were shared at the beginning of the project to allow my students can plan ahead. Or at least have the opportunity too. This is what used to happen when I worked outside of education, it is one way of "Making Learning Whole" as David Perkins fine book encourages, it helps make this a real experience.

So I will finally state in true Jeff Robin fashion that none of this would have been learned and applied if I had not DONE THE PROJECT FIRST.

The Process of a Project at High Tech High- a display of student work.

2011-05-11T20:30:00.000+01:00

Love the clarity.

Love the steps.

Love the how one task informs the next.

Love the role critique plays.

Love the sharing of the process.

Love to see drafted work.

Amazed by the quality of the final work.

Love how it's cross curricular.

Love the public debrief.

Love the focus on changes made.

Love the idea of identifying difficulties.

Love the the links between hard work and success.

Befuddled by my low quality photography.

Project process hth

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An example of a critique.

2011-05-07T16:01:00.021+01:00

My students in year 7 are currently working on a project where they have to analyse a basket of food items through the eyes of different characters for example a vegan, an althlete or a mum on a budget. They researched food items in a pre selected "basket" and found the nutrients, food miles and chemicals used in their production or manufacture, as well as creating character profiles for each of the "analysts".
After this research they were requested to make some art work based on this research and we then critiqued it around these questions. This was their first exposure to this technique and the feedback norms, which are find are encouraging a rigorous dialogue in the classroom.

1.Hard on content, soft on people.
2.Step up, step back.
3.Feedback must be kind, helpful and specific.

Next we began writing scripts for these characters, and these audio clips are from their second attempt at critqiuing each others work.
I requested them to make brief presentations with around 25 minutes to prepare. To guide them I modelled the kind of thinking required on an exerpt of work and set guiding questions. My students are increasingly aware of SOLO taxonomy and are beginning to refer to it, again I modelled this before they began.

Essential questions were set to encourage high quality feedback. Which are given below.

It is most pleasing to hear the students use them and make specific reference to them in their presentations, which helps them focus on the content and provide specific feedback. I feel the structure of a presentation also encourages all students to contribute too and also assist in getting the balance between student and teacher feedback. One of the great strengths of critqiues is that they help build a community of learners, where every student is aware of what the others are learning and are able to provide help to one another. This is true student voice in action,and it's all about learning.

http://audioboo.fm/boos/350706-an-example-of-student-critique-presntation

A teacher running a session must be confident in using wait time before and after students have spoken, resisting the temptation to jump in with an answer. I personally find note making helps keep my mouth shut and helps me go beyond the feedback that student have themselves given.

Here is an example of the students written feedback followed by an audio boo of them discussing the work. I conclude the presentation asking if the feedback was useful, and giving feedback on the feedback itself. Students need training in doing this, although for only their second attempt this is really rather good feedback.

The next audio boo is from a student who has just received some peer feedback which was very positive. She feels as though the feedback was not helpful enough, which allows me to reinforce the norms and prompt for some of the things that I thought she could do. This students is extremely talented, I think it was great for her peers to see her request guidance, it sends a clear message that success is not something that you have its something that you work towards. http://audioboo.fm/boos/350762-was-that-useful-feedback

The final AudioBoo is the students who have just given this feedback responding to the question "what have you learned by giving this feedback?". It is essential that critqiues are seen as being beneficial to everyone. This is often missed in peer feedback, the people who benefit most are the ones who give the feedback. Again listen for teacher wait time, which has students adding to what they have previously said and others actually joining in. It is a most effective technique.
http://audioboo.fm/boos/350767-what-have-you-learned-by-giving-feedback

Critiques- feedback and learning at High tech High.

2011-04-26T12:47:00.018+01:00

As identified in the previous post I consider Critiques an essential element to the success the students experience at High Tech High. Critiques are basically a formalised peer and teacher assessment session, but through their regularity, intensity and genuine sense of a learning community these turn into something all the more powerful. A real learning forum, as David Perkins would put it "an opportunity to learn form the team".

The foundation of these critiques are three simple norms, which are now proudly on display and referred to in my classroom. ( I like the term norm as it makes it very easy for me to say that these things are normal in successful classroom). These are:

1. Hard on content, soft on people- I always exemplify for my students, for example " When Sean explained about how the light refracts in the eye he did not use any scientific words. Would become the explanation of the how the eye refracts light did not use any scientific language". So far, my students have liked this, giving them confidence to give critical advice to classmates and friends alike. Self correcting has been evident with students rephrasing sentences to give feedback. I feel it has really helped them talk about the content more rather than the presentation.

2. Step up, Step back - Focus on the age old problem that some students will not offer suggestions and others will dominate. Dylan William's advice on no hands up rule applies double here! I like the terminology here makes it a much more student friendly than a rule. This was expertly done at HTH with students being invited to give their advice ,opinions and feedback.

3. Feedback should be kind, specific and helpful- requires no further explanation, although I was amused that the first time I held a critique in this style not one bit of positive feedback was given. I let my students go and did not correct this, as they were clearly trying to be helpful and were battling well trying to be specific. I told them at the end and they thought it was hilarious, in an embarrassed sort of way. The second time around they made sure that they had a bit of praise too. I only give this anecdote as a way of emphasising the need to give feedback on the process of critiquing as well as the content on show.

At High Tech High the Projects run for a long period of time, which naturally allows for the undertaking of what can be quite lengthy feedback sessions. The expert teachers I observed doing critiques were aware that it is hard work for students and can be monotonous, so they managed this situation with aplomb with great sensitivity to how students were responding and giving appropriate breaks and if necessary rescheduling of some group presentations to enable students to get the best feedback possible. It really mattered to everyone.

The teachers also had planned for the feedback that they wanted to be discussed. This tended to be around the content of what was being learned during the project, as well as the quality of the understanding, making this a real chance to explore misconceptions. The basic format was that each group of student in turn would present where their project was at the time, and then the class would discuss the work being guided by the questions the teacher had established. These were on display and guided the conversation as opposed to directed it, so there was plenty of scope for more explorative discussion. Every group also asked for specific advice about their own project which ranged from looking for tips and tricks on how to improve the presentation, yes/ no feedback on whether something was clear and to much more complex request about the content and context. These led to sophisticated dialogue between students, but, the art of the teacher was to interject and clarify, prompt and extend at opportune moments. The teachers role in subject content ( pedagogical content knowledge mostly) was vital, so that they did not revert to the "elementisis"(elements first) approach to teaching and learning. Instead it allows teachers to teach within the context of what the students need to know within the bounds of their projects. See David Perkins wonderful book "Making Learning Whole" for more about elementisis.

The ownership of this feedback by the students, facilitated (and sometimes) given by the teacher was one of the reasons that the quality of the student projects was so high. Due to the creative nature of (all?) the projects at HTH, I am reminded of Geoff Petty's Six phase model of the creative process:-Inspiration, Clarification, Distillation, Incubation, Perspiration and Evalutaion. With these it is easy to see that you could indeed have critiques around most of these as they would match the different stages of any project. The least obvious is possibly Incubation, where you are "to leave your ideas alone", but what better way to do this than spend some time reflecting on the learning of others, which could lead to a new insight for your own learning. The notion of incubation challenges the need for "pace" within a lesson, our brains need time process and organise information. Project Based Learning does this.

Back at school in the UK, without the luxury of large projects, I have taken the chance during "create a presentation" tasks to utilise Critiques. I would normally rely on my circulation to provide feedback during these sessions, thereby taking the responsibility away from my students. I have therefore built in a mini presentation into these tasks, timed just before the half way point. These are timed, short (around 2 minutes) and focused not on the content but where they are in the development of the presentations. They also allow for discussions on improvement (or learning as you will) in subsequent presentations. I have also requested that each group has questions that they would like to ask, although this is something that they have found difficult so far.

I have supported these by ensuring I have clear learning outcomes, so that they can assess coverage, and then questions about the content so that they can begin to assess understanding. Although this lengthens these activity substantially, I have so far been impressed by the depth of the knowledge that this time(incubation?) has allowed my students to acquire.

A great thing that High Tech High did that I am yet to emulate is having students work on similar yet distinct projects ( although one is in the pipeline!) This allows them to approach the content from different perspective and contexts. So during the Critique the students will "hit" the same information four or five times in different contexts. This would be music to Graham Nuthalls ears. Then factor in again that over a prolonged period of time you would have several critiques it is no wonder that the students at HTH learn so deeply.

Undoubtedly the high stakes nature of the projects at HTH is a huge motivational factor in offering and being willing to receive critical feedback with their peers. Although I was surprised that this did not dominate these discussions, as the content and learning of the content was central to the conversations I bore witness too. This excellent article on the Unboxed journal written by staff and students at HTH explains in more detail.

The Benefits of Teachers as Designers- Thoughts on High Tech High

2011-04-14T19:52:00.026+01:00

This is the first post attempting to summarise the observations and thoughts from my trip to High Tech High in San Diego. I must admit to retaining very clear memories of this trip, and still have some unresolved thoughts. Obviously a powerful and motivating experience! I must take this opportunity to publicly thank the staff at HTH, but in particular, Jay Vavra, Jeff Robin, Laura McBain, Rob Riordan and Larry Rosenstock whose passion and knowledge I have found inspiring.

One of the first things to be made clear was the role of the teacher at HTH, that of designer, a notion which on the surface seems fairly familiar. But consider that the management structure is fairly non hierarchical, and therefore the trust and responsibility for a high quality experience lies at the feet of the teacher. This is a positive thing, empowering them to teach to and with their passions. Passion is word used purposefully in these parts, driving the cross curricular and real world connections of the projects that the students do. Bringing a bit of yourself is actively encouraged.

The projects are genuine Project Based not Project Orientated, as the mercurial Jeff Robin points out. So the students don't learn some stuff and then make a project, they make a project and learn deeply as they go. A key feature of the projects is how connected there are to the real world either through the audience or by the recipients of the projects. For example students who designed and built toys in an engineering project had local toy manufacturers visit their exhibition and the toys were built after interviewing students in the elementary school who were also the recipients of the toys. A biotechnology project outcome was a group of students travelling to Mozambique to train game wardens how to DNA profile bush meat samples, thereby having an impact on the conservation of endangered anaimals. A cross species learning outcome- amazing!

It wasn't just the audience that made for an authentic learning experience, it was the collaboration on the project. There was lots of outside experts involved, for example the aforementioned toy manufacturers, but it was the internal collaboration between the students that gave the learning a real world feel and context. In four days I didn't meet a single student who did not know what every other student in the class was doing and how they were doing it. This level of collaboration was awe inspiring, and I believe it has come from two sources. For me this summarises what Learning Futures mean by School as Base Camp, a wonderful notion.

Firstly, through the "Critiques" that happen through each project, where the students refine their projects through feedback from the teacher and the class. I will write a separate post on these as they are a key way that I observed where learning took place, not just about the project but the "content" too. The second was the sense of community that was made manifest in quote from a teacher, "The students understand that when they exhibit their work, that one amazing project will look poorer if displayed with many mediocre ones". I think this sums up the collaborative learning experience they receive at High Tech High, that is both within the class but greatly influenced by what is beyond it.

My favourite anecdote from my trip defines this responsibility. A student on an exhibition night was there without a finished project, amongst a whole class of projects . This void, really stood out, I asked her where her project was and was confidently told that she had been let down by her partner, but that she had everything in hand to meet the deadline later in the week to hand over the project to the recipient. As we spoke a colleague came by and interjected, " I'm sorry" he said "but where's your project" , this was followed by another colleague three minutes later asking the exact same thing. So in about 10 minutes three strangers had asked this student why she had not finished her project, this is real assessment, with real feedback, leading to real responsibility. Which prompts the question why can't our exam system embrace such approaches where the examination is actually part of the learning process. Two things struck me about this student was how confident she was in failure and how much she had learned about the content and process of completing this project, in reality she had been really rather successful.

As a side note her partner was conspicuous by his absence! One of the few restraints placed on the teachers in designing the learning experience was that they do group the students by ability and insist on mixed ability groupings. We were told that ability groups in a class "would be frowned upon". It is this conviction that allows this community to flourish and that students enjoy a rich and realistic learning experience.

These Exhibitions happen regularly throughout the year, for each of the courses that the students take. This regularity and repeat immersion in this assessment is demanding and is used to assess the students learning, determining grades and whether they graduate or not.

Ultimately it is these reasons that the students at HTH demonstrated tremendous responsibility, not only for the project but for their wider education and school community. It is completely apparent that this is why they have such a high University qualification rate ( 100%) and why their students have such positive experiences when at University. For example there students are renowned for being able to communicate confidently with adults. such as college professors.

So how do the teachers go about designing this kind of learning experience. Jeff Robin makes it clear in these two videos that teachers need to do the project first. This makes the project viable as it is assessed for feasibility, whether it is a reasonable demand and identifies the pitfalls be to aid differentiation and support of the students during the project. It turns the teacher into what seems the novel role of project manager and "sets a minimum standard for the students to better, unlike a rubric which set the ceiling, a project sets the floor!"

The teachers do not plan in isolation and are in cross curricular teams, allowing them to operate outside their comfort zones, again I consider this significant in adding to the breadth of the students learning experience, they are not just taught how their teachers were taught, it allows for teachers to take risks as they have the support of a colleague. Furthermore each project goes through a Project Tuning Protocol so that many hearts and minds get to influence the project. This is very much part of the ethos of High Tech High. It is such an important one that a post will follow dedicated to this most valuable process. As a result the quality of student projects improves greatly from middle school through to high school, where it can only be described as stunning. Examples can be found here

One of the key and most consistent cross curricular approaches which is evident throughout the school is the infusion of art. The idea that "Art communicates" is every where and is used to great effect by students to show what they have learned, another factor factor in building student responsibility. I have found it difficult to reconcile the mantra of the UK education system of "pace" with this, it is almost contest between depth and breadth of knowledge. it seems much more realistic to deal with a few concepts in great depth (as preferred at HTH) than to learn lots of surface items as we must to deal with the relentless cycle of learn and regurgitate in preparation for an one hour odd exam.

So, where is the rigour? Is it in the UK exam system or is it in learning experiences designed by educators with the real world, not in mind, but in situ?

Coveritlive- Visit to High Tech High San Diego

2011-03-15T16:33:00.000Z

LF@HTH

A New Adventure- Professional Enquiry Groups.

2011-01-18T20:45:00.003Z

Thinking for Learning PEG on Prezi

Metacognitive wrappers based around Marzano's 8 C's of engament.

2010-12-30T10:38:00.011Z

This is an attempt at personalising the start point of a learning experience. I have planned a choice of four different metacognitive wrappers. These have been designed around the four classification of Robert Marzanos learning styles ( from On excellence in teaching"").
The students will arrive and "best fit " themselves to a category. I have intentionally dropped the labels, although this may be a mistake, to keep the start of the lesson as simple as possible for the students.
I have tried to simplify Marzanos language for year 7 students and phrased them as questions to invite self reflection. I will record their preferred style for future reference and use.

Once selected the students will have Metacognitive wrapper for their prefered style. These have been designed to meet the assigned C's of engagement. The basic format of these wrappers are to get the students to think about the content of the lesson and also about a strategy that will facilitate their learning. I have attempted to match these thoughts with their particluar C. I don't think these are perfect yet. Any suggestions to improve them are welcome.

1. Mastery learners who are driven by success and are engaged predominately by Competition and Challenge

2. Interpersonal learners who are driven by relationships and are engaged by Cooperation and Connections.

3. Understanding learners are driven by the need to make sense of things and are engaged by Curiosity and Controversy.

4. Self Expressive learners who are driven by origionality and are engaged by Choice and Creativity.

I will update this post after I have used them with some student reponses, and when I have overcame the Nuthallian problem of what success will look like in this lesson.

Behaviour Management by numbers

2010-12-16T21:33:00.007Z

There is a big difference between behaviour management and behaviour "response" and I think this little vignette illustrates it.
Today we differentiated our three science classes by giving our students the choice of five different enquiries to pursue. I was working with a our weaker students on two different investigations. I was always going to be busy, but, today I got to the point of being too busy. I felt as though I was having no impact at all, keeping some on task, supporting others and extend others too. I was getting a bit frustrated and a few bits of poor behaviour were evident.
Thankfully I managed to curb my frustration and gathered the students together. I asked them what they were finding difficult? And compiled a list that ranged from access issues, attitude to learning or motivation and on taskness. All the things I had noticed. I then asked them what help they needed to overcome these problems. Too my surprise they generated solution to the problems that involved themselves or their peers, I was not included! It was great to see them (finally) acknowledge the need for responsibility in their learning.
So I asked them to give themselves a score out of ten for the responsibility shown in the first twenty minutes. They average out at around five. I then asked them if they used their strategies where they would be? This produced a score of about nine and a half. I allowed them to aspire to better.
So it was great to see over the next 45 minutes the transformation in the classroom. This would not have happened if I had of let my frustration rule the situation.We regularly went back to our arbitary responsibility score as it ebbed and flowed, and it never went below 7.5. Although abitary this strategy has allowed students to self monitior a learner attribute and to manage the situation (almost) by themselves.I got the productive classroom my efforts deserved and less fustrated!

This lesson has reminded me that students are absolutely aware of the expectations we have for them and they do respond to having responsibility. We just have to have a little trust in them.

Sent from my iPhone

A change to the definition of learning.

2010-12-10T16:46:00.007Z

I've just used the define function of Google for the word "learning". I really wish I had not. So imagine my disappointment when I searched "learn".

To be fair my search for a working definition has been as long one. I'm not after an academic, convoluted all encompassing one, just something I can use to spot it taking place in the students in my classroom. Graham Nuthall has wonderfully documented how difficult teachers find this.
I think I have come to clarity recently with a one word definition. That word is change.
If someone has learned something it will manifest itself in one of three places.
Most obviously is the acquisition of new knowledge, students will know a new fact previously unlearned, or added to an existing idea which deepens or broadens a concept.
This may also culminate in the second area, which is a change in an opinion. For this to happen it may or may not involve new knowledge but could be down to recognising the significance of a piece of knowledge.

The final are is probably the most complex. This is the student confidence in their knowledge. Students could move from "I think the answer is..." to " I am certain that it is..". The reason for this is the students are linking a piece of knowledge to evidence of its validity or truth. So it is possible that learning results in the student becoming less confident. In a world where it is necessary to unlearn and relearn it is vital that the student thinks about why they know something and verify that they have sufficient evidence to believe it. This is rather counter intuitive. I thinks it's probably worth spending a moment to think about how you could help students manage this loss of confidence and see it as a part of the learning process.

This route however allows students to unlearn your misconceptions or eventually be more confident in it, if/when they find the reason something is true.

So to summarise my working model of learning is a change in knowledge, opinion and/or confidence.
Incidentally, the Internet is saved as I searched for "definition of learning Graham Nuthall" and I stumbled upon Artichokes blog, and there too the word change appears in the definition. In such company I feel vindicated! Huzaah!

To clarify the use of italics for the phrase piece of knowledge as I am unsure of the piecemeal nature of knowledge. I'm sure Nuthall phrases it as "item" for completeness.

Sharing the pedagogical purpose- student discussions

2010-11-26T10:32:00.017Z

These excerpts are from a lesson where the students were introduced to a couple of new learning tools. I make a point of introducing each tool we use with a brief overview of what the tool is and then how to use it, modelling how to do it and thinking out loud about the decisions i make while using it.

http://audioboo.fm/boos/225372-students-talking-about-whole-part-maps

http://audioboo.fm/boos/225531-students-describe-using-a-moving-on-map

Just like any content learning, some students struggle with learning the tools and think associated with them,. This is why discussions like these are so important. My voice is fairly sparse throughout as I tend use lots of wait time after a student has stopped talking, which prompts further discussion from them or their colleagues. It is evident in these Audioboos, that other students jump in at these points and share their knowledge of the tool. so, the resulting discussions are full of the difficulties and benefits of using these tools. The main thing though is that these tools become their tools as opposed to tasks the teacher has asked them to do. This is a key way in which we can increase the independence of students. It is essential that teachers hear these discussion's as it will frame, future differentiation and support for these students.

The tools themselves are the thinking tool- the whole part or brace map, for connecting important information and the PEEL strategy of a moving on map. The moving on map is entirely constructed by the ideas of the students, who are incidentally eleven years old. A colleague happened to be passing through my classroom as we constructed this and remarked on the sophistication of the student ideas. The other thing that struck my colleague was the usefulness of "boxing" in each step which added to the clarity of what the students had to do.

Metacognitive Wrappers

2010-11-21T19:57:00.012Z

Metacognitive wrappers on Prezi

All a metacognitive wrapper is a task that is completed at the beginning and at the end of an activity or lesson, that is designed to help students plan or at the very least consider their thinking over a lesson. The positioning of these tasks is importan, firstly the integration of teaching thinking skills in real content is well documented in John Hattie's Visible Learning. He also highlights a couple of studies that back up the wrapper nature. Lavery states that strategies aimed at forethought and that encourage evaluation have the biggest impacts on learning. While Huang when studying the metacognitive behaviour of self questioning measured the biggest effect before the lesson, and slightly lower after the lesson. It was much lower during the lesson. Common sense would suggest that trying to be self questioning during a lesson could be distracting to all but the most able learners.

I always field a few responses and record them on the board, and thereby make their thinking visisble. There is no need to sanction any responses as right or wrong at this point. I stumbled across these a while back, and instantly saw their use in engagement and in the development of true metacognition. It is essential that student metacognition goes beyond just thinking about their thinking and actually facilitates them being able to control their thinking.

So what prompts or questions are useful, through trial and error I arrived at the kinds of things to ask, and have recently began to discover the research that explains why this strategy works. I always make a point of making it absolutely clear what they are about to learn. This gives the gives the scope to ask something about what they might already know? I purposefully leave it as might as this makes all ideas to be valid, at least at the beginning of a session. I think it is important not to close any thinking avenues in the first five minutes of a lesson! It also gives students the chance to come back to their original ideas at the end and see if it has changed, have they added new knowledge, modified an existing idea or become more confident about what they knew. (Although becoming less confident in their knowledge is just as valid a response, as they could either be unlearning a misconception, which is a difficult process or be questioning why they believe something rather just accepting something is right.)

The phrasing of the questions is vital, it must embody the kind of thinking you require of them and phrased in such away that its sounds mutable or learnable. So adding phrases like at this point in time or today, are useful signals.

The next element is a target setting one that could be the visualisation of a success criteria, the setting of a self reward for success (could this be a way of tapping into the intrinsic learner motivation? Findlay and Cooper demonstrated that those students who are internally motivated perform better than those who delegate this responsibility). This element could equally be determined by the usefulness of what is being is learned.

Strategic thinking is an essential part, helping students structure not only their thinking but their work too. So getting students to plan out a step by step method on how to solve a problem or planning out an assignment are two of the top four in Hattie's list of most effective metacognitive strategies. In fact a properly planned wrapper will hit all four.

The final element to a wrapper is to focus on a learner attribute such as motivation or being resourceful in their learning is probably the quickest win for the students and for the teacher . Even if at the begin if they say "I'm not motivated today " they have already engaged in the type of thinking you require. I have been surprised by the consistency of improvement at the end of each session when returning to this question. By indicating these attributes within a specific learning activity adds importance to them and makes them visible. It makes them metacognitive.

So to conclude, learners must return to the task, I change the tense to things like Was the knowledge you had useful, or did your plan help you structure your work etc and I again discuss their responses, looking for and praising them controlling their thinking or changing their mind. As change is learning.

LIE to apply - a strategy for demonstrating learning

2010-11-17T20:18:00.007Z

This is a simple strategy that I came up with ages ago and don't think I have fully explored it's potential. It's a task design to get students to demonstrate their learning. I must emphasise that this is not regurgitation of the knowledge i'm looking for here but an opportunity to apply their knowledge in a new scenario.
L.I.E stands for Label, Identify and Explain. I think this is flexible enough to be applicable to a range of contents. My original outing involved students studying some diagrammatic pictures of diseased lungs. They then had to label the part of the lung infected, Identify which disease they thought it was and Explain they thinking behind this decision.
Today with my year 7's we were looking at puberty. The students drew a "stenciloid" person assigning it male or female. Then Label the parts where the change would take place. Identify what the changes would be and finally Explain why the change would happen. It was obvious who had struggled with the abstract concepts today such as hormones. The feedback from my students about this lesson was they had added to the previous knowledge by now being able to say why the changes during puberty happened. I don't necessarily think that was due to this activity, but , this activity certainly made that learning visible to them.
After the success today I think I'm going to try this one with my Year 13 when we look at antibiotic action on bacteria. I think this could be a useful strategy As it could allow me to assess unistructural ,multistructural and relational thinking a la SOLO. I'll post on that one when I get something concrete.

Hinge Questions

2010-11-04T17:25:00.006Z

For a better description of hinge questions please read this post

I love the simplicity of Hinge questions. My students can have a go of these in the first ten minutes of next lesson. But, behind this simplicity there is a little thought, each question is testing a key learning intention from the past two lessons. I have intentionally sought to mislead or place red herrings in their way. I want their mistakes manifest.

This will give me a chance to respond, either through some differentiate activities or a targeted teacher input for the next part of the lesson. I have also differentiated these by SAT level so that certain questions will hint at student progress.

To get these right, I have rewrote them and deleted others. I've probably spent too long on writing what is essentially four questions, but my next lesson depends upon them

The Pedagogical Purposes of the Relay Review.

2010-10-12T19:01:00.014+01:00

Teachmeetpedpurposerelay

View more presentations from DKMead.

This was my presentation Teachmeet Sunderland .I've assigned Solo taxonomy categories to the pedagogic level of its use. A most revealing strategy.

The relay review is one of those "simple on the surface" classroom activity, that has a certain pedagogic richness when used with a little bit of thought. Nominally, to use this you split your class into two teams, assign a colour and a piece of flip chart paper to each and ask them to run up one at a time and write down something that they have learned that lesson. The first team up to say twenty facts wins. That's it, a simple and quick review task.

It is at this point here that I can restate why I believe having pedagogical purposes are essential for teachers. Without them this article ends here, a tool to use in the classroom. Tools and Tool kits are not enough.

I have not hidden my passion for SOLO taxonomy, and it has been revealing to reflect upon to what extent the pedagogical purpose of this activity matches the different levels of it. It gave me different lenses to consider my classroom practice through.

The other tool I find useful in assessing the purpose of an activity is an invention of Jill Flack, an outstanding, inspiring educator who is a corner stone of both PEEL and TEEP practices. It is the table that features in the slides, identify the purpose of each activity, what the students are learning by doing this, and what the implications of this learning has for teachers.

If you use the Relay Review in your class one of the first things you'll notice is that your students will enjoy doing it. I must admit that I was being slightly pejorative in labelling the FUN aspect of this tool as Prestructural . This stems from my lack of ability to define fun properly in an educational setting. On a personal level I learn more when I'm challenged, find things difficult, when I'm intrigued or curious, when I can see the benefits to me . I also enjoy a satisfying, stimulating, thought provoking and safe learning experience, none of which I would describe as fun but things I certainly enjoy. I'm sure there is a great debate on the Pedagogy of Fun to be had as the arguments for it to be engaging , motivating and to entice risk taking by learners are compelling. A quick google search reveals the diversity of opinion. But this one really caught my eye.

Most of the "tool" uses of the relay review I have classified as Unistructural due to the limited amount of student learning associated with this task, after all no new learning is taking place here. It is a simple remember what we have been doing task. So engagement through competition and increasing blood flow to flagging students brains are all valid uses of this tool, but they bring nothing new to the students learning.

With a little adaptation this activity renders some whole class formative assessment information. To do this I provided a littel more structure to the flip chart, so that student responses become more targeted. A simple grid with the key topics quickly displayed not only what the students had learned but also what they had not i.e. a multistuctural use. Instantly the learning in the classroom becomes visible and the students next step is obvious to me and to them. The photograph included here was taken approximately 3 minutes into a activity, it was so obvious what they were avoiding! Being aware of the order of responses is actually giving me useful information to use in my teaching. This kind of thinking takes the use of this task from a multistructural to a relational use. This can be augmented, by debriefing what a quality answer/ response would be. Over a sequence of reviews you would hope to improve this over time.

A limitation of this tool is that you are only assessing the whole class, so using this as a hinge activity for individuals is problematic. It is possible to stand betwixt the two flip charts, and scrutinise the contribution of individuals. in fact this is a potential way of differentiation being more challenging to more able students. Simple feedback can be given at this point too. If you are feeling particularly astute you could stand with your markbook and note who writes what down, although this is blurred by the confluence of student learning. Hence my focus on the process and sequence of this task rather than its finished product.

If you observe you students when they do this, you notice that as they wait there turn students break out of the line and form small huddles, where the vibrant exchange of facts,ideas and clarifications. Taking photographs will aid the debriefing the quality of the teamwork, the pictures providing non judgemental feedback. A well structured discussion can lead to ways forward and the building of a safe community of learners. It makes it clear that skills like teamwork are learnable.

Further discussion can take the implicit and make it explicit, getting students involved and aware of that "secret teacher business" Namely that learning is social ( is this where the fun's at?) asking who helped you learn that? How did they explain it so that you understood? Likewise that learning involves repetition. What did you do when you released that someone had written down what you were going to? How often did you have to keep checking what was on the list already? Was it helpful to recheck ? How often do you recheck your work normally? Will try to do it more often? This makes it clear that metacognition and learner behaviours are learnable.

Perhaps the strongest message is that it is fine not to know everything, simply by having a conversation around what is our next step is and then changing the lesson plan/ route as a result of this makes this clear. This is difficult for teachers but this activity gives opportunity to engender a culture of students seeing feedback not as criticism but as an essential part learning. The research by Black and William highlights the academic impact in having formative assessment in place.

The udders are omnipresent to represent a state of mind, that of having clear, predetermined, and planning pedagogical purpose to our classroom activities. Only if we do this will we ever be able to milk every task for all its worth.

Metacognition of an Enquiry

2010-08-04T19:42:00.004+01:00

Following on from my experience at Bristol. I have compiled all the recorded metacognitive thinking I did during this experience. In the hope of finding patterns in the thinking that one needs to do to be a successful enquirer, in order that I can provide tools and structures for my students. This is a work in progress. Any comments, analysis, ponderings are all gratefully recieved.
https://docs0.google.com/document/edit?id=1GIE1NPtznOTnNKs8_8yUDea2kBEftfOMlljjRJNzxBQ&hl=en&authkey=COm4r74L#

A video introduction to SOLO Taxonomy

2010-08-04T09:19:00.007+01:00

This is a presentation that I did to the TEEP network via Adobe connect.

Thanks to Simon Brown for retrieving and editing.

Narrative- a learning connector

2010-07-27T21:18:00.002+01:00

These are more thoughts stemming from the social experiment at the Graduate school of Education at Bristol University.

A central, recurring tenet of the enquiry I took part in was that of narrative. To start the enquiry we were tasked to find an "object" in Brandon Hill nature reserve to enquire about. We were firstly asked to describe it , then think of a story why we connected with it, before thinking divergently creating a multitude of questions.
My initial thoughts were slightly dismissive, doubting the likelihood of discovering something that delighted my curiosity and that I had a personal connection with. After all why should I find something 300 miles from home in a place I had never been before. And I'm a butch , scientific, aesthete of a Geordie to boot.
So my initial findings were what you'd expect. A tree, a fence, an object. I saw and thought nothing above the ordinary. Yet on asking myself why I connected with them quickly turned choosing one thing to enquire about into being spoilt for choice. The tree was suddenly a Lime tree also known as a linden tree, so memories of drinking cold Lindeboom beer in a student bar many moons ago came flooding back. The fence around Cabot tower reminded me of the now restored Saltwell towers in my local (resplendent) park which lay derelict for most of my life, which I also used to eat my lunch beneath of a seldom seen friend.
A warning sign that read "Water Hazard" reminded me of playing Wii with my son , and his ability to read. The family trip which took through a golf course which saw him demand "so which bit is out of bounds?!?!"
This process amazed me, the amount of emotion that it stimulated was astonishing, in fact was too much at times and steered me away from certain choices. But, the positive influence this had impacted over the following two days not only in engagement with the process but also with sustained motivation.
On hearing my colleagues choices and their reasoning my experience was obviously far from unique, in fact it was the norm. All had personal, emotive reasons for their choice, all had chosen to reveal ( or not) something of themselves by doing so. Our narratives began to entwine here, helping to form that all important community of learners.
The very nature of enquiry based learning, with its valuing of the process taken, is enhanced by this narrative as it tessellates the original connection with the subsequent connections made whilst learning. The experience is all the more rich for that as everything resonates with personal value, and it all stems from a simple task, choose what you want to do just think about what it means to you.
The questions this raises over how learning happens? How learners become engaged ? What implications this kind of learning experience has on structuring a curriculum? Are difficult and worth persevering with.

Just as I was about to press publish I realised that I have not even states what my choice was. Nor the narrative that led to it's choice or how this narrative developed. I'm not even sure of the importance in doing so, therefore I won't , as the my learning here is all processed based and not restricted to enquiry based learning. Making or more importantly allowing students to make that personal connection with what is being learned is not an educational luxury it's a necessity.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Social Experiment- An Enquiry Based Experience.

2010-07-22T13:33:00.005+01:00

I have just spent two days in the University of Bristol Graduate School of Education taking part in a social experiment based around a model of enquiry. My role was very much that of a learner. I have a huge amount to think about analysing the processes involved, connecting this experience to that of my students and how to share this learning with colleagues. I have been hugely disciplined and recorded a large quantity of my metacognitive thinking.
The first thing I've learned is by being metacognitive I have been able to work on two levels, that of a learner being strategic in what I'm doing and secondly as a way of transferring my ideas in to my classroom and that of others. I am rather hoping that after analysis the key skills that I used will become clear, categorised and therefore "teachable". I'm also hoping that the reflection of my co- enquirers will broaden this knowledge base.
This brings me neatly on to my second point. How learning is a social construct, and that (although some knew each other) a disparate group of learners so readily shared, supported and critiqued the learning of others. The process led us to work individually with small forums for discussions a learning community struck up. This contrasts with the intense work I do with my classes to build a community. Maybe it was the shared vision, small group size or the intellectual sophistication of the group, but this happened without effort! Everyone was enquiring on a variety of different themes in a highly personalised way, but during the times we shared our thinking several commonalities arose, one of which was the social nature of learning. I need to critically reflect on the frequency and the quality of these occasions in my classroom.
I started my enquiry looking at trying to identify a Dragonfly that I'd seen, I will blog about the process in more detail. Everyone had a different theme but the consistency of the level and diversity of the creative thinking was astonishing. Especially considering no request to be so was made. Time, intellectual space, safety, and a prerequisite to think divergently facilitated this. I even wrote a poem, perhaps a first which I read out (certainly a first).

Dragonfly,dragonfly
You don't breathe fire
You don't even put me down with your ire
Fecundity is the name of your game
In your blue, green golden haze

Poor as this is, it does demonstrate the difficulty in teaching creativity, but the relative ease of facilitating creativity in an education setting. Another feather in the cap if enquiry based learning.

The final learning that leaps out from my experience, which is the power of narrative. This helped me make a personal connection to what I was learning and intertwined the process and content I was learning throughout the two days. It was a powerful connectivity tool.

So these are my initial thoughts, with many more to come, which will be more focused around the translation of this into classroom practice.

Simple Enquiry Based learning structures

2010-07-06T15:07:00.022+01:00

Firstly, I will point out that I don't think this lesson is a true enquiry, but a stepping stone towards enabling students and me to reach that goal. This blog post is all about the processes involved. In the previous lesson the students had experienced a similar structure whereby they moved around our open learning space, with simple experiments, experiences or demonstration for them to observe/ do / reflect upon. The received non judgemental feedback on their "on taskness/ learning".

The lesson began with a simple circle time, with the students asked if they needed to add or change their what good learners do poster. They were then given the challenge to produce a brief lesson to teach Conduction, Convection and Radiation and the structure of the room and resources was explained to them. They were also given the big picture of the process too.

We then came up with the success criteria for their lesson plans. Asking the students what they thought success would be like, gives clarity to the task and ownership of the task to the students. This example, is basically a recounting what they know goes into a lesson, a recap (and subsequent application) of our learning to learn course.

They then picked numbers from a pot to find a partner, the novelty of this technique threw up a couple of interesting exchanges. Firstly, two students who I would never place together came up. They looked at me and said is it OK for them to work together, I lied and said " Of course I trust you to be productive". To their credit the issues I had managed throughout the year did not manifest themselves and the students responded with a high level of responsibility. The second came from a quiet student, who offered in the debrief that he had "enjoyed working with people he had not done with this year... it helped me think in different ways". I was spell bound, I will use this randomisation again.

The classroom was arranged in the following way.

The sofas had been pulled up in front of a whiteboard and the PC had three videos on the this topic for them to watch through our school version of Youtube. On an a joining whiteboard a sign in system asked the student to record what they watched, if they recorded notes and if they had subsequently went onto use the information.

Four laptops were set up on one desk as a research station. Students had to again sign in and state the question that they we going to search an answer for. They had a time limit of 10 minutes per person, although this was used flexibly as a way of providing non judgemental feedback on time management. This was designed to remove the random googling that my students do and for them to consider how much time they spend on tasks. Students too often passively research, and glance at web pages gleaning non related facts, this strategy forced them to identify the thing they wanted to learn about before addressing a resource. I hope the limiting of IT access does not seem too controlling especially in this age of IT ubiquitousness. The aim of this session is the development of the student skills to use these effectively. The structures were chosen to facilitate this. I also find it useful to consider a sliding scale from teacher to student to control where the responsibility lies for each decision. This session is this light a slight nudge towards the students in this regard, but one that I hope will allow them to take up the reigns themselves.

A further book based resource island with six general school text books was set up in one corner of the room. The limiting of this resource was to encourage sharing of resources and hopefully discussion of the information.

One final area was set aside with pens and paper where the students gathered to plan and create their lessons.These were circular tables to encourage good communication rituals.

The students set about this task, I took a back seat and circulated with a sheet of flip chart paper noting down what they were saying and doing. I noted the time at which these observations were made. After about 15 minutes or so I pinned these to the wall and invited the students to gather around. As they did they bean to read what I heard, after a few initial chortles the students settled down and looked a bit brow beaten. I remained impassive doing my best man waiting for bus impression, I did not want to show any sign that I had made a judgement. You can clearly see that the behaviour was not as on task as it could be. I asked for an opinion and the consensus was that they needed to be more focused.

Lesson feedback

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As the lesson proceeded these sheets clearly demonstrate the students becoming more on task. Again the same impassive strategy was used to pass this praise on. This is so important as it allows them to build their own intrinsic motivation rather than be reliant upon mine.

The students worked to a deadline to create their lessons and then were again randomly paired with another group to teach each other. The students were very focused and confident in their conversations here, asking questions and challenging one another. I must say it was a pleasure to see this happen.

The end of lesson debrief started with the question "What has helped you be successful?" Implying that they have been successful and probes to find out why. This metacognition is vital in this style of learning experience to highlight the process and the transferable skills used, as things like content and we worked on computers tend to dominate the student experience. The students were very aware of the reasons they were successful. They came up with
1. Learner attributes- "we were on task", "we helped each other when we got stuck"
2. Learner skills " I found the success criteria told me exactly what to do ?"

3. Collaborative learning , with one student in particular being astute " Working with someone new, was really helpful, He helped me look at the problem in a different way, I would have described what was going on, but we actually talked about why it was useful, I wouldn't have done that on my own".

4. Content Knowledge- Several students referred to "last lesson" , "what we did last lesson" and "my notes from last lesson"

The pride from the students was palpable, not only in their successful learning, but in the way they had achieved it. To celebrate this I asked them to identify the one thing that they were most proud of, to think about what it feels like and how they might get that feeling again. I specified that they would not be asked to share this, it was just for them. I gave them a minute or so of silence to reflect on this.

I then asked them to identify one person who had impressed them and share how they had done this. I gave them a minute to think about this and then started with a volunteer, as I felt confidence would be important in building momentum, we then progressed in a clockwise fashion around our circle. they did this very well, giving specific praise, identifying resilience, creative, detailed explanations, thoughtful questions, patience and pleasingly every student was named at least once. Some were praised more than others, but none the less everyone had impressed someone. The reason for this was to reinforce the good learning behaviours, make it clear that it's not only me who sees what is happening in our learning space and vitally consolidate our learning community.

Folk theory update- Does displaying success against target motivate students?

2010-05-10T16:32:00.007+01:00

With the next set of topic tests complete, I can now start to measure my theory that displaying students who beat(or match) their targets increases the numbers of students meeting their target! This being due to increased motivation and the in built fairness of the system.
What i mean by fair is not just celebrating the learning of students who get the highest scores, but seeing learning happen in all.

The first measure showed that one class had 8 students meeting the targets, and the second 4. As I said to these students "Every time I use this strategy the lists get longer and longer, more students meet their targets!"

So I am relieved to say that 10 (6 first timers) students in the first class and 7 (6first timers) in the other have met their targets.

This is not evidence (yet), but certainly encouraging.Anecdotally too the signs are good with more students asking the question "What do I need to do to improve?". As starting points go I'm happy with this.

Debriefing tools for Enquiry Based Learning

2010-05-04T13:14:00.006+01:00

I have compiled a list of ideas to help teachers get the most from the debrief of enquiry based/ experiential/ open ended learning activities. If you have any more I would love to here from you to add to this resource.

A brief guide to debriefing

The major responsibility for conducting successful enquiry based learning rests with the debriefing phase of the exercise. The debriefing is an important process designed to synergize, strengthen, and transfer learning from the experiential exercise. The most successful way of doing this is through non judgemental feedback

Developing the willingness to be debriefed

At the very start of the learning experience it is vital that an overview of what the session will look like is important for learner. This must be done and valued regularly. It must include and highlight both a reflection and debrief session: reflection should be a quiet individual time and debriefs will tend to be whole classes or at least large groups.
The agreement of success criteria at this point is invaluable, whether it is a skill or an attribute. This will encourage students to buy into the process, value the feedback and change their practices (ie learn)
The quality of debriefs is dependent on trust, so the better you know your students the better their response will be. Therefore plan to increase the intensity of them over an academic year.
Debriefs do not always occur at the end of session and short punchy “refocus” style one shouldbe planned in. It may also be beneficial to host responsive ones to change the direction ( whether it be a behavioural or content problem) , although it may be better in the long run to allow a mistake and its consequences manifest itself before intervening. A longer term view should therefore occasionally override a short term management issue.

Health warning

When debriefing ,especially when sharing data or feedback on performance the emotional state of the students and the emotional impact of this feedback should be considered. Emotion is an important feature of any learning experience, so this is not something to be avoided but use in a positive manner. Remember and highlight that you can probably learn more from mistakes is a way of addressing this educatively.

Questioning

Planning for debriefing cannot be reduced to a set of simple instructions. Trial and error and perseverance are necessary. It is important to think about the questions that you ask, encouraging pupils to give longer answers. Teachers need to plan the analogies, stories and contexts to be used to encourage transfer.
Teachers should also encourage students to ask the questions, so that overtime the proportion of teacher questions reduces. This may not become equivocal, as the teacher will always have the overview and purpose of the enquiry in mind.

Below I aim to exemplify useful questions that can be used to debrief an activity. These are not sequential and you may decide to focus on only one area of questioning? You students or at least their actions will inform of this. Each and every question could be proceeded by asking why? Or How? Although a simple “Go on” will add to the open ended nature of debrief, and allow students to think about their own learning and experience rather than answer a teacher question.

Content questions

The table includes a few (overlapping) questions to draw out the learning that has taken place. The teachers role is to a) check and challenge accuracy b) clarify and highlight key learning points c) connecting ideas together d) compile the learning for the class. “Flipcharting” the ideas can help make this learning visible to all. It may also provide a start point for the next session .for example highlighting misconceptions

What have you found out?
What fact has led you to learn more facts?
What’s been the most useful thing learned in developing your understanding?
What have you learned that you did not know before?
What facts can you now link together?
What’s the most important fact learned?
What have you learned that has changed how you think about this problem/ idea/ concept?
Did anyone find a similar thing?
Did anyone find something different?
Do you still think that’s right?
What questions do you still want to ask about the concept?
What have you seen? what does it tell you?

Process /Learner skill question

What tools have been useful? How?
What was your most useful questions?
How did you go about reading the information?
Did you think of the questions first or did you allow the information to “guide” you? Do you think that was the most helpful?
How did you interact with the information?
What conversations helped you learn today?
What was the moment when you realised that you had learned something/ corrected your previous ideas?
Did anyone double check their work, see something missing and go back to correct it?How often did you reflect?
How did you attempt to join ideas together?
How (often) did you use the success criteria?
What strategies have been helpful? Eg drafting

But these can be more specific about a particular skill.

How did you set about...
How did thinking like that help you....
What made you decide that this skill was going to be helpful?
How would you get better at..

Or even Science specific.

How do you know your test was fair?
Why do you trust the data you have produced?
How do you know your data answers your question?
Was your data precise enough to be helpful?
Does the evidence support each
What assumptions have we made?

Learner attribute questions

How did you get unstuck?
How did you avoid/manage distractions?
How did you plan your work?
How did your motivation change over the session?
How did you respond to problems?
How did you get yourself interested in this work?
How did you manage your time?
How did your behaviour affect your own/ others performance?

Metacognition

Although a lot of the strategies and question here are metacognitive in nature, specific strategies will only enhance your students experience.
Specific questions that run along side a particular procedure or task, can facilitate this. For example while taking measurements asking How accurate are you being? How many decimal places have you recorded? Have you recorded the data accurately? Will train the students to do this greater confidence and accuracy?

Wrapper activities, ie those that you start and end the session with can be used for a wider range of tasks. So asking What knowledge might be useful?
• How motivated are you today?
• How might you work out things for yourself?
• How will you mentally link what you see and what you are learning throughout the lesson?

Will help set the students of in the right direction, rephrasing these at the end will help students visulaise the strategies used.

Teacher observation and record keeping

Teacher time should be split between supporting students and observing students. Observation should be intense and detailed notes should be kept for debrief purposes. These should include quotes, who was interacting with who and how. What resources where being used and how? What questions were being asked and who were they asked of. Collecting numerical data, also provides a reflective mirror for students to consider the learning taking place. So number of students on task, number of procedural questions asked, number of smiles/points/ nods of heads can reveal something useful to the students. The timing of the activity should also be recorded, as this will help contextualise the feedback. An occasional snapshop picture of what each individual is doing will also bring a different perspective. Likewise the use of video and photograph to capture behaviours and interactions are invaluable . Before and after feedback scenarios can be used to demonstrate the progress being made by the class.
This allows spontaneity and responsiveness to the situation unfolding around you, but also had grist to your mill when debriefing students. It also ensures that you feedback is non judgemental, an important emotional.
Classroom structures and procedures
It important that students are debriefed together, so arranging the furniture to facilitate the conversation will help. So a circle of chairs is the obvious answer. Ensure that all students are included is important, do not start the debriefing until they are quiet and included.
Ideally these will become self managing in some respects but teachers need a purpose to each debrief, although allow space for other ideas to come to the fore. Praise piggy backing on ideas, and encourage the use of protocols to manage this situation. For reticent students (or groups) you may occasionally want to take turns around the circle, allowing a 30 second think time after ask a question will reduce the stress of having to respond. Although I would not advertise it, accept a pass from students, expect them to contribute to the classroom community. Teachers therefore need to establish a No Put down Zone so that they are free to express their opinions.
The simple procedure of asking a question before nominating a student to respond, encourages all students to think and reflect and prepare to respond. All the usual good practice of wait time after a question has been asked and a student response should be utilise by the teacher and trained into the students.
Intervening without interrupting
Post it notes with either prompts or observations can be placed in front of students. These can reinforce or challenge behaviour ( in its widest sense).
Alternatively, hosting small meeting with groups of students will allow you to pass information on which is then disseminated by these students. This can be content or procedural.
Simply writing down quotes and displaying them in the class can provide ongoing feedback to the learners. Although you may want to discuss ways forward from this.
Ticking, crossing or smiley facing pre agreed success criteria can also provide ongoing feedback. By placing this in a prominent position students can quickly be sensitized to its use and the feedback being provided.
Reflective practices.
Teachers may want to set a selection of questions for students to respond to in writing on their own, before a debrief takes place. Students will therefore be better prepared to respond, and less likely to adhere to a response a peer has given.
Alternatively giving students a choice and encouraging extended writing can also be very productive.
1. Describe your experience of....
Now respond to at least 2 of these questions:
2. What thinking processes did you use?
3. Were you successful? Why?
4. What problems did you overcome? How did you do this?
5. Did you think creatively? How did you do this?
6. What skills have you developed over this challenge?
7. If you were to do this again what would you do differently?

Target setting questions

The final part of a debrief should look to move the students forward.
What’s the next step in this project?
What will you do differently next time?
What do you need to make this task easier?
How could you solve these problems?
What areas are you still finding difficult?
Do you need to redo any sections?
Do we need another point of view?

The Hidden Lives Of Learners

2010-04-30T11:42:00.009+01:00

These are the slides I used during my TeachMeet NorthEast Presentation on Graham Nuthalls work.
On the surface Nuthalls work is very simple. He assessed prior learning, wired each student and teacher for sound, used classroom observers to note interactions and resources, assessed again, interviewed learners about their learning experiences and finally correlated learning with this data. But what you get is so much more. An inspiring synthesis of the hidden lives of learners!. Even the methodology employed has a useful message for teachers, we must listen and look out for the learning that is taking place.

Hidden lives of learners

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The concept of the three worlds that a learner exists in is instantly a useful planning and reflective tool for teachers. Another neat way of thing about it is Pam Hook's question "What is happening at the ampersand?" This book gets to the heart of the confluence between teaching and learning.

The question posed is illustrative (but not definitive) of how messy the business of learning is. The first posing is difficult unless you know the answer. The second is easier by virtue of your prior learning. This allowed you to deduce what the answer is, but not that you have learned anything!
Students learn what they do.

Consider the amount of learning forgotten by students, especially that crammed for an exam. Nuthall makes clear that students do not become content experts but experts in classroom procedures that is imprinted upon them lesson after lesson, day after day.

So when it comes to seeing learning teacher and students can find it difficult. In fact Nuthall makes it clear that when asked what learning looks like teachers describe good behaviour, not even learner behaviours as opposed to seeing the process of learning. The next few slides prove that I too have failed to see the dichotomy. I have blogged about this previously. Fortunately my PEEL Good learner behaviours display rescues me intermittently.

Three exposures

The seemingly random picture of the Queen, an anagram and a choice of number. Is used to demonstrate a key finding of Nuthalls work. Students need 3 or 4 different exposures to a fact in order to commit it to their working memory. This is the second exposure to the content to be learned from the questions asked earlier.

Evidence

The first of the graphs (slide 26) see the students increase in ability from left to right. It is unsurprising to see the more able students be more successful in a module of work than the weaker ones. This is typical. What is a little surprising is the influence of prior learning. The more able arrive already knowing more, and this is the sole difference in their success. The amount of learning by all students is equivocal, independent of ability. This probably explains why Finland's schools are considered so successful. This is the reason I celebrate performance against target, rather than "grade" with my students. Again I have blogged on this.

The graph on slide 28, is a source of comfort for teachers, and again typical. It highlights that the majority of the learning in the class has come either directly or indirectly form the teacher. The weaker students are more reliant upon the teacher than the more able, and are more reliant upon direct teacher input. A clear call to arms for effective differentiation if there ever was one! It is also important to note that the learning from the choice of teacher designed activities, will also be influenced by the peer culture and social status systems our students construct in and out side of school. On top of this,there is still a significant amount of learning that is self or peer derived. hence the warning from Hattie! Students require training and structures in giving effective feedback.

The one that I do not know

Is a quote from one one of my students, directed at his peers, who persistently ignored him.I intervened and was lucky in my timing in two ways. One that I overheard his plea, but also in that my lesson plan, the ensuing conversation that we had was the third exposure to the information he was struggling with. Now, he knows the what he doesn't know, and when asked the content and the action of learning are linked. So, when I ask whats the one that you don't know he replies "condensation!", the right answer.

The table shows the frighteningly uniqueness of learning. The numbers in the final column, ranging from 44- 89% are the amount of learning that is exclusive to one or one and a single other student. This too is independent of ability. I have not yet assimilated this into my pedagogy, as fully as I expect we can, but I do engage level ladders with a range of suggestive ability indicators. I annotate these with code, for every students, sampling them frequently. So BM is book marking. MMT a mid module test, TQ a teacher question etc. i revisit them when I am unconvinced that a student has not learned them. This way I can (crudely) track the learning taking place.

Finally the ISBN, and the forth and final exposure to the previous answer. The Hidden Lives of Learners. Read it, Think about, Reflect upon your practice, but most of all enjoy it.

Why can't even Ofsted identify learning?

2010-04-22T18:00:00.001+01:00

I have been rather proud of my use of a simple Building Learning Power strategy.I even blogged about it ( http://pedagogicalpurposes.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-have-posted-this-brief-clip-to.html )Whereby at the start of the year, with every class, I ask the students to come up with a helpful list of " What good learners do?" and also "what good learners do when they get stuck". This has been a useful classroom management tool and has led me to believe that my classroom is focused on learning. I'm not so sure now.

It definately a classroom management tool, a good one at that, but how much of it is genuinely about learning. This according to Professor Graham Nuthall is a common problem, teachers confuse good pupil behaviour for good learner behaviour. His research clearly shows that these are distinct. For example all of my classes state good learners "follow instructions" and "stay on task", and many of them include "avoid distractions". Yes, these could lead to a situation could take place but do not actually describe what students do when they are learning. Maybe the hardwired teacher default position of "behaviour first, learning second" explains but does not excuses my use of this tool. Maybe it is just easier to see behaviour than learning.So why is learning so difficult to see or quantify? Could it be that teachers are over focussed on behaviour and learning is lost within this? Could it be a teachers reluctance to surrender control of the learning?
Today's report from Ofsted about how well students behave in school, is exactly what I'm talking about on an infuriating scale. Surely schools are about learning and not behaviour factories. Of course young people are well behaved, just like all other age groups. Is this what Ofsted is for? (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8637064.stm )

Thankfully I always have a copy of PEEL's learner behaviours on the wall adjacent to the class displays. I refer to this with my students as where we are heading, but not as often as I should. This is focused on learning, and therefore that teachers can see the learning behaviours in their students.

These include: Plans a general strategy before starting and Challenges the text or an answer the teacher sanctions as correct. I love this the locus of control is crashing away from the teacher.

The full list can be found here( http://peelweb.org/index.cfm?resource=good%20behaviours ) I recommended displaying these in your classroom and sharing them with your students at the very least. You never know an Ofsted inspector might see them......

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The Pedagogical Anatomy of a lesson.

2010-03-25T14:23:00.050Z

I've recently done a demonstration lesson in a school that I support, the purpose of which was to show strategies to engage and stretch the most able. as this was in a different school , with students I've met briefly I needed a strong lesson structure both in terms of practical organisation ( which love it or hate it PowerPoint facilitates this, it also allowed me to reflect on each part of the lesson planning) but also in terms of pedagogy. The lesson is planned using the TEEP learning cycle. This piece aims to explore the structures and the reasoning behind each strategy. The reasons have been italicised.

The opening slide was a starter activity, students here practice something they had done in a previous lesson and connect to a concrete fact that the lesson was aiming to explain. This helps prepare the student to learn and (using Hatties words) "build commitment and engagement. Challenge is added here by getting the students to establish the FACT, and by using technical words like correlate c.f. whats the pattern?

Next the studenst completed a ranking activity as to the likelihood of these statements being correct, this is primarily an teaching input, but trying to get the students to speculate whats really going on justifying their position. This is a higher order thinking skill and thereby increasing challenge. The questions quickly establish alternative conceptions of the ideas about to be learned. This student to teacher feedback information can then be acted upon. These also provide a focus for the incipient teacher input.
Since the students have been processing on their own so far, it is important to review not only the content but also the meta cognitive processes. Again this is structured so that they workout the facts for themselves. Question 3 is a "seed" question? I sell it as the question you can use to demonstrate mastery? It is given as soon as possible, to allow time for the students to think about it.

The learning intentions are planned using SOLO taxonomy, meaning that from the top the learning intentions are simple recalling of factsand this progresses to extended abstract demanding the students to make inferences based upon abstract ideas and prediction about hitherto unknown substances. The unistructural intentions are in fact essential learnings that the rest of the learning is built upon. This is not done by accident but through careful thinking about the pedagogical content knowledge of this topic, allowng specific intentions to be defined. John Hattie describes the use of SOLO as being "most valuable both in developing models of teaching and learning and also in our understanding of assessment". I have to humbly agree.

This then leads into a brief teacher input. The input has been delayed until this point to allow the teacher access to information available on student thinking on this subject. This allows accurate decisions to be made about pace and pitch, again this allows differentiation to take place. The input is carefully plotted to give a step by step method to perform the task and to emphasise the key and new language. This is brief around 6-7 minutes to allow maximum time for students to create meaning for themselves, thereby taking into account the age old saying - "it doesn't mean I said that they have learned it." It also allows the teacher to model the kinds of thinking and the connections that are necessary to fully understand the topic. This teacher input can be justified by the following quote from John Hattie " sometimes the deeper concepts need more specific and direct teaching". Infact the structure of the lesson is built around the notion of effective direct teaching employing the TEEP learning cycle

At this point a quick review is used to clarify the thinking, after the input. These questions were considered difficult ten minutes ago, but now the answers are obvious to the students. I was using a random name generator to select students ensuring that all are paying attention and that I don't focus the questioning on the 25% of students with their hands up! Since I did not know these students, I colour coded their names by their target grades, so that I could phrase the question in appropriate manner (differentiation): An "A" grade student would get something like so what's your opinion on these statements now?- While a "C" grade would get the more structured " So why do you now think that statement 2 is hogwash?". Research shows that a ration of 10 minutes teaching should have 2 minutes worth of review.

The students are then given a choice of which level they want to tackle. The colour coding seen above was not revealed in to the students, and is added for the benefit of showing planning progression and a confidence building trick. During the lesson the students are given the choice of easy, hard and"uber"-difficult. In reality this is not the case, as can be seen above with the order of difficulty going from yellow, orange, red, blue then purple. This was designed into the lesson in full knowledge that the purpose of this exercise was to allow the students to assimilate and practice the previous teaching, and allow the teacher to gain useful information on the alternative conceptions, sticking points and confidence levels within the classroom.Hattie describes this part of the lesson as "independent practice" but i would go further as this is THE opportunity for the teacher to personalise the experience for each student by providing support and challenge as appropriate.

It was hoped that the students would gain confidence by completing an easy one and the take the bait of a (unreal) difficult one. This gets the students to think that they can do this task. I like to make full use of the saying "whether you think you can or whether you think you can't = you're probably right!"

Since the demonstration nature of this lesson was stretching the most able, the above task was designed to give the same information in different ways, and introduce new language to the students. For example the inclusion of Sodium oxide is there to challenge the idea that covalent compounds are solely made from non metals, some have names and not formulae and vice versa. The most difficult one actually requires modification of the model provided during this lesson. Anyway enough Science.

Again since 15 minutes has past by the students are encouraged to review their learning. This activity actually serves two purposes with the second being to demonstrate their new learning. The task has been phrased to encourage generalisation of the key learning points. This is to help the students reach the highest levels of SOLO taxonomy as per the learning intentions. Reviewing should refer back to these to demonstrate progress, and this will allow student to self report this.

This is the point in the lesson that could involve a change of direction, I call this the " What if? " point, as in if what do I do if thye do not get i! This activity remained unused as the information in the classroom suggested that the students had progressed. This activity was designed to go back over the basics from a slightly different angle/ starting position, with a little more structure. It was then planned for the students to re attempt the previous activity.

This task is tantamount to another teacher input albeit a connecting one. The task is an activity called " X" marks the vowel, a task I invented to encourage students to interact with text. For a detailed write up of this teaching strategy please visit the wonderful ww.peelweb.org. The challenge in this activity is three fold. Firstly, the students are not being told the content being learned but are encouraged (and structured) to work it out for themselves. Secondly, the text needs to interpreted from having X's in place of the vowels, whxch xs stxll xxsy tx rxxd xf yxx cxncxntrxtx! And finally the questions the have to answer move from comprehension to comparasion and finally to inference. The final question is the third time the students have come across the notion of the boiling point of waterand relating it to its structure. Graham Nuthall's inspiring research tells us that students learn when they have three or four exposures to an idea in different ways. This is also a reason for the design of the What if activity.
By answering these questions the students also begin to demonstrate new learning. As a teacher I am less interested in the comprehension question and more interested in the questions where they have to apply new knowledge.

A major "content" plenary is then planned using a rather natty animation from the BBC. A task of listing seven key points, based on the brain based research that we find it easier to remember 5, 7, 9 items rather than say 10. This summary also enable the students to come across the information needed in another (different) way. This also allows for the uniqueness of student learning to be seen by the teacher. Graham Nuthall's research shows that student learner is fairly unique with up to 80% of the items learned being learned by only one or two students. This information is vital for a teacher to see, as this will give a crude measure of what has worked and not in the lesson and for future planning and differentiation.

Penultimately, and importantly the students are asked to speculate, which is a high order thinking skill, as part of a preview of next lesson. This activity allows students to meet one of the learning intentions and also provides a learning bridge to the next set of related content.

The final act brings closure to the lesson.The students then mark their progress against the SOLO learning intentions this is essential not only for motivation and the creation of a sense of pride but also in consolidating the important points within the lesson. John Hattie makes clear the effectiveness of self reporting grade as it helps build up an accurate picture that will inform their "prior" achievement.

Graham Nuthall's research can be found in his book "The Hidden Lives of Learners"

John Hatties meta analysis of achievement outcomes can be found in his book "Visible Learning"

Students DO make progress with SOLO Taxonomy.

2010-01-25T14:43:00.014Z

It is a fine feeling when your gut feeling has a concrete and real basis. This is a reflection of my first terms use of SOLO taxonomy.

The graph above shows a year 7 mixed ability Science class working over four SOLO and assessed tasks. It clearly demonstrates that my students are making progress up the SOLO Taxonomy scale in a measurable fashion. I think this graph also shows my progress in using SOLO in providing quality feedback. I am aiming to reflect on some of the processes and discussion that occurred in between these points. (I will dedicate the final paragraph to explaining how this data has been compiled.) Although, I must point out that the scores discussed here are solely for analysis and reflective purposes and the students have not and will not have it reduced down to a number. SOLO taxonomy provides a framework for discussion of work during lessons, for comment only feedback and for self assessment for the students.

Although the first two points clearly show progress form a score of around 0.5 to 1.0, I believe this is only establishing a useful baseline assessment of my students as they enter their new school. I think it also shows the lack of my skill in using this tool, as 0.5 indicates that half the class are operating on average at a prestructural level. and that the progress made suggests that on average everyone is working at the unistructural level. In reality two students had progressed to the Relational level while not one single student recorded a multistructural level score on the first task. So, I am not overwhelmed by its immediate impact, but it's certainly seemed to move the students in the right direction. I must also confess that my strategy to introduce a generic SOLO was very much by stealth. It was visible in the class ,but, only gradually dropped into the conversation when opportunity presented. The first two pieces of work were self assessed by the students using a content specific criteria using the SOLO structure. No attempt was made to introduce the language straight off. I don't know if this was the right thing to do, but, I felt that the students had a lot to cope with managing the transition to a new school.

The third activity here was a group presentation, so I feel that this has skewed the data a little, as some of the weaker kids scored their highest scores in this activity. This makes me want to underplay the progress here, as this suggests that on average the class is now at Multistructural and the raw data shows no one has remained prestructural, pleasing as this is it is not assessing individual performance.

However the value of this activity is significant, as it is this stage that I and my students began to fully come to terms with using it. The students made a presentation that required using several pieces of information/data to draw a conclusion. I listened to them and made notes and then together we used the evidence gathered to assign their group a level. This generated great dialogue which I believe has had a lasting impact. Some students were even saying things along the lines of " If we had of said this ......would we have get the next level".

Following this activity I made a presentation at the Teachmeet Northeast, about SOLO taxonomy where I came up with an analogy of its use. I decided to use it with my students and formally introduce SOLO taxonomy . It went down a storm with some students even recognising and identifying the levels before I had explained them, maybe stealth works as a teaching strategy. The students were also provided with a large copy of the taxonomy for their desks as they worked as a reference. The students went onto complete the fourth activity in this review. Half way through I took several statements from student work and asked them to assess where they thought it was, and how to improve it. I felt at the time this discuss was useful so I photographed the examples. Whilst marking the students scripts I was especially pleased by the amount of crossing out, arrows to add new details in and squashed sentences into gaps that really were not there. Pretty no, but indicative of reflection and demonstration of their understanding of not only the content of the lesson but of SOLO taxonomy too

So, overall this activity yielded a score of around 2.5 on this scale indicating that the majority of the students where working at the relational level albeit within small bits of content. This has been the thrust of my feedback about broadening out teheir knowledge base so that more and a wider range of connections could be made. All in all this set of data demonstrates the students making progress through the use and structure of the SOLO taxonomy, in a relatively small period of time.

How the data was produced.

Each SOLO level was assigned a score from 0- 6. (I have meddled with the structure slightly.)
The number of students at each level were tallied for each activity and multiplied by that score.

The score was then divided by the number of students in the class to give an average score per student.

The score has then been plotted against the order of these SOLO assessed tasks.

10 benefits for empowering your lessons with pedagogical purposes.

2010-01-23T08:14:00.000Z

The term pedagogical purpose designates an learning activity an extra benefit rather than just delivering a bit of learned content. Meaning that by definition it is shared by the teacher with the learners. The idea came from PEEL in Australia. Check out its website ( www.peelweb.org) for excellent classroom based examples. So why include them in your lesson plan?

1. It encourages metacognition,and therefore will develop learner skills or build learning power as Guy Claxton would say. For example if a strategy is good for making comparisons such as venn diagrams, then by signaling this purpose the teacher creates awareness in their learners. This leads to the next benefit of...

2. Increased independence of students. Having a pedagogical purpose in every day lessons will assist students in enquiry based or problem based learning lessons. They will have a wider range of "tools" to get unstuck and learn by themselves.

3. On task behaviour and the quality of work improves as students take each task seriously, after all each task has a purpose.

4. Teachers plan better lessons as they stop planning "busy" task and start including focussed learning activities, which are easier and more productive in creating feedback loops to exploit.

5. It increases teacher reflection on their classroom. Asking why strategies work will lead to asking how can I adapt this strategy which will eventually lead to creating your own.

6. The next natural step in this process is Action research which is well documented as a very effective form of professional development. So rather than sharing anecdotes with your PLN, you can share and discuss objective data based analysis of the new things you are trying on your classroom.

7. Teachers will dismiss the notion of having a teachers toolkit that they can dip into. Pedagogical purposes are an engineering factory allowing teachers to become more autonomous.

8. It's flexible so can be used with pre and post diluvian strategies. Infact it may be more beneficial when using web 2.0 tools to prevent them becoming the new PowerPoint, I.e. The educational equivalent of colouring in.

9. Pedagogical purposes broaden the feedback a teacher can give. The research by Black and Williams indicates that good feedback should indicate where the students are, where they should be heading and how to get there. It is this final steps that pedagogical purposes fit best.

10. They help develop a teachers pedagogical content knowledge, so teachers can develop multiple strategies to teach the same topic, understand and identify the misconceptions students are likely to have. Ultimately teachers are better equipped to teach, unteach and reteach.

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Giving Feedback on the process of learning.

2010-01-18T13:25:00.016Z

Once in a while it is so nice to talk with students about something other than what they could be examined on, even when what you talk about is actually more important than the exam. The learning process is one of those things. This technique is applicable across these skills, and can transform what your classroom environment is like.

The first step to having this conversation, was the designing of an activity that would bring the key issues to the surface. In this instance the focus was how students collaborate. A simple of trick of asking the whole class (25 students) to do a task that would be easily completed by a smaller group, say 5 students. The pressures of working in a large group are much more acute, it's almost like setting them to struggle ,as the pressure ( and previous experiences) will see them focus on the content rather than the process. The students in this lesson where asked to construct a food web out of 25 organisms.

The lesson began with the students and I compiling a list of what they think good learners do when they collaborate. This list is theirs and I always ask permission to provide feedback on it using a thumb up for agreement, a level thumb for something they can live with and a thumb down if they want to amend the list before I use it for feedback. The list has now turned itself into success criteria.

The students then "do" the activity, and I write down observations snippets of conversations, counts of number of points, the number of people who are talking at the same time etc. I use one Post it note per statement, and in this lesson I did it for 15 minutes. A tight time scale is another way inducing students to forget about the process and make the mistakes that may not always be an issue in smaller groups.

At the end of the challenge, I give feedback and ask questions about the content of the activity and gather the students around their previously agreed success criteria. At this point I ask for permission to add a "disappointments" column, adjacent their success criteria. I then read out my observations one by one stressing that I am not making any judgements, just giving them factual feedback. I ask them to direct me in placing each statement on either the success criteria it matches, (for example " Great idea Tom!" May be placed on we encourage each other) or in the disappointments column.

The students really pay attention to this, I think they feel a little empowered. They also feel a little chastised as they are a lot more critical of themselves than a teacher ever could be. This is why a safe and trusting classroom environment is needed. For example some quiet students will not force into this kind of activity preferring to keep silent. Some members of the class will feel it i their fault, but others will see the groups responsibility to invite everyone to participate. This is kind of dialogue that find this strategy engenders and that changes students view and participation in the activities.

It is not just collaboration that this works on you could have questioning, decision making, reasoning, risk taking, the list goes on, but the strategy works.

For a more detailed read about this technique in my classroom please search it out on http://www.peelweb.org/. typing in author search MEAD.

A Simple task with big Impact.

2010-01-16T13:39:00.020Z

The activities I would like to highlight here all take place within the first 10 minutes of a lesson commencing. Two of them have long been hard wired into my practice and I some what take them for granted. So the one I want to highlight is something that I picked up in Geoff Pettys inspiring "Evidence based teaching." It's not something new, in fact it is standard practice on any TEEP course I run, but, it has not made it into my classroom on a regular basis until this year. The beauty of Geoff Pettys book is that it gives activities a pedagogical purpose and backs up if effectiveness with evidence from either Hattie or Marzano.

The strategy is very simple, the simplest of the three by some way. All that is required is a visual representation of the learning that is about to happen.My interpretation of this can be seen in the examples I have used in the last two days. Anecdotaly the impact of this is profound. during one course a teacher complained that (since she had been late and missed the overview of the day) she could not see the overview as it had been obscured by another display and that she felts disorientated, as she not know what was going on. I have noticed my students increasingly asking me "are we now onto X ?", and I regularly see their eyes glancing up and down it.I feel it is well used, no less by me who uses it to clarify lesson plans in the morning, so that I have a very clear purpose and direction to the task chosen and in planning for managing transitions during the lesson. The effect size of this strategy is 1.27 . Needless to say this is a positive result. If you need more information on effect sizes you need to buy either Geoff Pettys book or John Hatties "Visible learning". In fact I would say every teacher needs these inspiring books.

The other two strategies are on the surface just as simple but in reality some of the most difficult tasks a teacher must do. Firstly is setting goals, or learning intentions or learning objectives. This is so hard, research shows tht teachers tend to write these as tasks rather than what will be learned. The effect size for this is 0.51. Again a worthwhile pursuit at the beginning of a lesson.

Finally a task issued at the start at the beginning of recalls prior learning. Petty recommends using questions here but any cognitive task will help, for example rank in order the most important facts from last lesson, as opposed to a word search of keywords. It is the connection and the search for meaning that is important not the simple recall. The effect size for this is 0.91.

When I read Petty the word "Wow!" stumbled from list as he points out the doing all three has a total effect size of 2.66. All in the first five minutes! Since reading this at least 90% of my (non enquiry) lessons begin in this way.

I believe it is the combination of these help students throughout the lesson: Where have they been, where are they going to and how are they going to get there. It's the foundation of comment only marking on a whole class basis. If I now ask my students what are they learning about then most of them will look to the graphical representation of the lesson first and then look at the outcomes displayed. It's very presence is giving them a pedagogical (albeit content based) purpose to each activity. Again consider an anecdote, if you want the students to do a presentation or a test, they know from the beginning and it' not just sprang upon them, they know from the start and in the context of their learning. It's all there for them in Technicolor!

Finding Success in low achieving students . Challenging my own folk theories.

2010-01-12T14:57:00.037Z

Probably inspired by reading Carl Bereiter, I have just spent several days pulling apart an apparent simple decision, asking myself why I would use a strategy with my students.The strategy in question is a tried and tested one, or so I thought. I used to do this and my recollections are all positive, and I believe it had an impact on not only student motivation but also their success.
All it involves is displaying the most successful students in the class after and test. Not, by their raw score but by how much they beat their targets by. Obviously a percentage target is useful. My expereinces of this with many classes, always in the first instance had one or two students meeting or exceeding their targets, with the number growing over subsequent tests and over the year ending up with one or two not on the list. I have always found that students are especially excited to find their results in this fashion and that students not minding this score displayed even if they missed their target. This was always done after a negotiation, and therefore I could rank the scores. I stopped using it when we ditched percentage targets in favour of a sub division of SAT levels.

So where does this dilema lie? It was a great strategy as my gut feeling tells me that it often found success for the weaker students in my class. I felt as though it leveled the playing field in terms of ability. It's more democratic right!? Everyone has a target based on the same data; CAT scores or KS2 aggregated scores in this case, it must be fair!? Therefore everyone can be succesful. But as I began to compile the class scores I began to notice (or at least imagined) a pattern. This may be a result of reading a lot by Carl Bereiter debunking the notions of Folk theories in education, that things work because they, on the surface can be made to appear that they work, but in reality they do not stand upto scrutiny. This has resulted in me questioning my pedagogical purpose of using this strategy.

The problem I have is two fold. Firstly, I am concerned that this strategy is more difficult for higher ability students to better their targets,as they have less room for manouvre, or so my folk theory tells me. I have reminded myself that this strategy is not primarily for them, and that they enjoy success in its purest form. The best marks and grades, as this graph of two of my classes bares out.More able students get better scores. Which prompts two thoughts why bother testing them if CAT scores are this reliable, and that the test I used is valid across the ability range.

The next thing I queried was why some well motivated students had not met or exceeded their targets. Part of our school review requires us to rate students responsibility for the learning; taking into account motivation, amount of on task behaviour and their ability to get unstuck. All learner qualities you may assume would impact on this kind of study. But not in my post-Bereiter world, the evidence suggest not with the two classes below showing a very slight regression in this respect.
So my less motivated and "lazier" students appear to be beating their targets more. Although it should be pointed out that their is a slight correlation between their responsibility for learning and overall success, but it's not as strong as I imagined. What on earth am I doing wrong with them? I'm not if I am not very good at teaching high ability, as my less motivated ones are progressing well? Do I need an alternative stategy to also motivate and challenge the more motivated? I am hoping that this strategy will motivate all.

Obviously this is what has stumped me. It may be that motivation has little impact on actual learning, it could be that these students are learning with what they are doing? It may be that the more able students are slightly penalised by this strategy? My gut folk theory is that it does. Indeed the next graph suggests an element of truth in these sentiments.

It could be something and nothing, after all it's not a strong correlation. But, what I have decided is that if this strategy works, I should see the recumbent motivated learner rise over the next few tests to create a positive correlation, and more importantly that I have more students celebrating as they have beaten their target. This situation pleases me now as I have a
testable hypothesis with an attached success criteria. I can begin to move away from my folk theory and find out something about how my students work.

Twelve tips for starting Enquiry Based Learning.

2009-12-31T08:59:00.001Z

Over the past year I have been developing a model of Enquiry based learning, although the journey is infact much longer. The elements I have used come from multiple sources such as Problem Based Learning, The Critical Skills Programme, TEEP's ideas on collaborative problem solving, Learning Skills In Science (which I piloted with the Wiezmann Institute), Learning to Learn, PEEL's ideas on learning processes, a generic Enquiry cycle, a science specific hierarchy of different kinds of structures (search for Carl Wenning at Illinois State University), and Science in the classroom from the How Students Learn series by the national academies press in the US. This list of inspirations are indicative of the difficulties in defining enquiry, but highlights why having a pedagogical purpose in our teaching.

So what I'm intending to do is list some teacher thinking required to construct enquiry experiences within the classroom. These are not in any particular order.
1. Teachers need to see enquiry as intergrated to everything that they do, it's not an add on. So that normal everyday lessons will share strategies, tools or develop attributes that will allow students to be independent enquirers. This is what I mean by pedagogical purposes.
2. A note on tech, this is not a substitute for pedagogical purpose. Infact, Tech requires extra planning, so that's purposeful, and develops what you want to develop. It does not mean that if students are using say Etherpad that they actually collaborating, in enquiries the process of collaborating is important and will require feedback.
3. Be aware that students (and tempting for teachers too) will be product focused, very much at the expense of the process. Teachers should let them make this mistake, and use a combination of non judgemental feedback and rigorous debriefing to tackle this. Students will progress on this teachers or more accurately facilitators need a geological view on this.
4. Students require multiple metacognitive activities during this as well as time to make their own mistakes and do their own learning. Teachers need to be observant. Post it notes with praise, prompts or interjections are a non invasive way of influencing the route the lesson is taking.
5. Teachers will find it beneficial to make detailed notes on who said and did what. Tallying how many people are engaged in discussion, the number of points,nods, smiles all help provide a full picture of the process the students have and / or are undertaking.
6. Long term planning is essential not only how the locus of control can be assumed by the students,but also how the afore mentioned tools and strategies can support the students with this.
7. Students will require a structure to research. My students have found Read----> thinking tool----> notes. As a way of genuinely learning from their researching.
8. Students will need training on how to ask questions that can be persued. The right stimulus that may have been tested to asses it's fruitfulness,is essential.
9. Teachers are facilitators and should constrain their influence. They must provide high quality, frequent feedback. The classroom environment they provide should be safe to allow risk taking and failure with confidence. This does not happen overnight.
10. Teachers should not lose the focus of why enquiries are a useful experience and become product focused. This focus allows them to create the time needed for students to reflect on successes and experiences this should be augmented by a thorough debriefing process. Therefore a shared language is needed to do this.
11. Beware of the word fun, everyone has a different perception about what this means. Learning experiences can be satisfying if the students are appropriately challenged, stimulated into thinking for themselves and feel as though they are making progress. The design of the enquiry should consider these parameters first.
12. There are many enquiry models available some generic and some subject specific. Choose a flexible one that you can adapt to you and you're students needs. These structures are essential early in the students enquiring training and plans should be made on how you can withdraw them over a year or more if you need.

A good start point for Further Reading is at Futurelabs Enquiring minds project as well as the sources of inspiration mentioned above.
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A model of (Science) Enquiry

2009-12-10T19:32:00.002Z

Model Science Enquiry

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Teachmeet North East - SOLO Taxonomy presentation.and the pedagogical purpose of the slides.

2009-12-04T11:08:00.007Z

Waaoo And The Little Pigs

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This is not a script, but, the pedagogical purposes behind the decision I made in creating my Teachmeet micro.

Click the link to watch the presentation.

The first two slides have the purpose of providing an emotional hook into the presentation and pose the conundrum about how we see and measure learning in the classroom. They are about how my son, and how he has developed his language skills from the omnipotent Waaoo to being able to read the word Mango without ever been taught to do so. This journey is visible and unmissable to every parent, but do we see this in our classrooms.?

I think SOLO Taxonomy is a way that we could do this for every student.

The slides tell the story of the increasingly knowledgeable pigs who are using increasingly sophisticated thinking to escape the clutches of an evil wolf. The bricks to house simile is on its own a powerful (not mine) way to visualise SOLO's taxonomy.The choice of a story makes it more memorable , engaging and more familiar, we learn by making connections to what we already know.We have all known the story of the three little pigs from childhood. The slides highlight how bricks of knowledge can be linked and built into more complex forms of demonstrating learning. The uses of different types of buidling materials for example roofing tiles, just adds to this image. To be secure the pig needs to use different materials in a coherent and coordinated way. SOLO taxonomy does exactly this.

In the background I use a range of what appears to be abstract images, a dot, a line a series of lines etc. These are a subconscious link to the real structure of SOLO Taxonomy. My students recognised this when I did this presentation with them. It is designed to give that familiar aahhh feeling during the video that appears later. As I have just said the brain likes to make connections with things it already recognises.

About half way through the story I indicate that something may or not be true. The pedagogical purpose of this is to pass the decision over to the audience. I have manipulated the SOLO taxonomy, but do not know if it is a valid change. I'm learning too. So all I am saying is I'm not sure here please think about it. Its that same as responding "maybe" to a student who asks if an answer is correct, they really go away thinking about it, which would not happen if you said "yes" or "No".

So when I show the video of the frankly outstanding primary students talking in detail about the SOLO structure and their learning with not only confidence but in an extended abstract fashion ( do you notice the consolidatory use of the SOLO taxonomy language there!) the symbols that are used are familiar.

I set the video up by hinting that the video may be from Biggs, the creator of the Taxonomy, by using the word expert. This was done for three reasons, firstly the students give a concrete version of the Taxonomy that I did not, secondly a little bit of humour makes a useful hook and that these students are truly inspiring. If i had of chosen another form of presenting the overall structure it may of appeared that it was useful for bright older students, but by using these young geniuses it clearly demonstrates that it is useful to all students. They really do provide a wow moment, as they show their genuine understanding of and appreciation of the Taxonomy. This was palpable during the presentation inducing a spontaneous round of applause. They did everything I could not do, making teachers want to get their students to be like them.

The next few slides just show classroom examples, for the simple reason that when you see a hierarchy or taxonomy it is not always evident how you can apply it in the classroom, so these just show a couple of real examples of its application and its impact on progress, despite only being introduced by stealth. I am only just beginning to fully develop these ideas with classes.

The final slide was not used, but was put in to potentially start a learning conversation at the Teachmeet, so some are a little facetious (well, most), others argumentative and other down right silly. The plan for using this slide was to display it as I walked of, leaving behind a list (too long to read ) of unanswered questions. Too many, to contrast with the lack of words in the presentation: a list as different people will start reading at different points, and the fact that it was impossible to read them all, in the hope that it would make it easy for someone to approach me to ask "what was that on the last slide.....". I wish I used it now, when is the next Teachmeet......So I guess its of to Hookedonthinking.com for more inspiration. Please check it out.

Random name generators- A democratic method.

2009-12-03T15:20:00.015Z

Following Fergus Hegarty's demonstration of a randon name generator at last nights TeachMeet North East (Flashmeeting here ). I decided to debrief my students about why they like it and how it helps them to learn.They had just had a lesson where I asked a question an d then nomintaed a student using a name selector after a few secons. ( These few seconds ensures all students get to think about the problem posed.) This is their response.

An interesting and revealing read, showing how democracy and fairness in the classroom is very much valued by our students, and that they all deep down want to be involved in discussions. This appears to be the opposite of what you might expect, you may think students may not want to be involved and shy away from the challenge, this simply is not the case.

There seems to be no doubt that a random name generator raises their intrinsic motivation for this, so I am now eager for our next lesson to find out if this is maintained without its use. I think novelty is a big part,so, too frequent use will erode its appeal. It will be back to me selecting students, which has its own use, especially differentiating questions and targetting specific students. It is interesting to note that they don't see me as being inclusive as being totally random. Is this the classroom equvalent of the i-pod shuffle phenomena?

I am particularly pleased by their pedagogical knowledge of this stategy, namely that it makes everyone think even if they are not asked a question which is nicely summarised by Luke who identifies that sometimes students "do not answer questions at all".

The use of wait time is essential for this strategy to work,so asking the question with a small wait before the student is selected ansures that all students have to think of an answer.More difficult questions may induce a small discussion before the student is selected.

A basic selector can be made in PowerPoint by putting one name per slide,setting the transition to zero seconds, and setting the slides to loop unti "Esc".

Supporting the limitations of a web 2.0 tool- A Wrapper activity

2009-11-18T13:40:00.012Z

Etherpad is probably the best web 2.0 tool for the classroom, with the addition of the Time slider function. This allows a skillful teacher to debrief the process taking place afore their very eyes. Most Web 2.0 tools do not have this essential focus on the process, and are merely presentation tools for content. Infact it may be argued that they make new content to distract from the process of learning.

For years teachers have sent students off to work as groups, "work together to make a poster" and provided that the students got the job done have assumed that collaboration has taken place. In fact the product has been such a focus that it has over riden the collaboration. In the real world the fact that some students can produce a poster is not useful or remotely interesting, but if they can genuinely support each other in a learning community, then they can head off and be successful anywhere.

So how can a teacher go beyond just debriefing the process and hand over some control of this metcognition to students? . Metacognition is vitally important, unfortunately overlooked component of learning, too often masked by content or the medium. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning.This is an example of a "wrapper" activity that is issued at the start of the activity and returned to at the end.

I had put the key questions of the lessons onto an etherpad document, and set up a wallwisher to run concurrently with it. The Wallwisher was focussed purely on the process, while the etherpad was solely content.

The focus of the Wallwisher was collaboration, which I broke down into the following categories to help the students define how they collaborated. The students were challenged to provide examples of how they helped others learn, using these categories.

1. Where they corrected someones work.

2.Where they questioned someones ideas.

3.Where they contributed an idea.

4. Where they have built upon or expanded upon someone thinking.

5. Where they have supported someone elses idea.

After the completion of the task the students returned to the wallwisher and added their examples and classified them under the correct catogory. They found this difficult and spent most time trying to figure out who they had supported during the lesson, so at the very least they did relflect on the process and not just the content. By doing this before using the Time lIne function the students were able to respond to this with things like " What I was trying to say here was" and "yeah, I couldn't think of the right word, until you typed it in!"

Next time I think I'll make a conscious effort to ensure that the Wallwisher is genuinely concurrent, so that the process is more to the fore.

Self Assessment- What value does it have in Enquiry based learning?

2009-11-17T14:41:00.033Z

I'll start by saying I am not a fan of the Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) chart, I feel it gives tasks to do rather than describe the thinking behind how to do the task. Presented here is a Science example although, I think this will be true in all subject areas. I am sure the interesting and useful learning points contained within the APP are not the completion of these task but the thinking necessary to be able to do these independently. So for my subject how to think like a scientist is more important than being able to draw a line graph.
So, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to plot the thinking behind key scientific skills. Although these examples are subject specific I would hazard a guess that all subjects will be able to plot out the developmental thinking that a student needs to take to make progress within these skills. I have broken these down into 24 seperate thinking skills. Some of these are sub divisions of different kinds of thinking. For example Logical thinking has three parts:- Using data to support theories, deriving ideas from other ideas and linking cause and effect. Each one has been placed into a level ladder so that students have some form of pathway to follow.This has been a time consuming task, I have read a ridiculous amount of academic texts trying to find developmental hierachies. I am not saying what I done is accurate, but, they have given a clear focus to my teaching and have also broken down the skills into steps, so that clear targets can be given. I have also correlated these across the APP so that they have a concrete link to the levels ladders.

This example show with * where the criteria matches the APP, with strand 5.

Students have recently completed a Scientific enquiry, designed around some of these( 8 of the
24 skills). This was an open ended Science Enquiry, requiring students to do a lot of thinking for themselves or at least make some decisions after being guidded through the thinking.At the end of this task they self assessed with a teacher discussion and guidance to grade their work/thinking during the enquiry. Many were able to justify the levels they awarded themselves.

This is what they tell me about

1. How accurate are they at levelling their own work?

2. Is there any difference between ability groups in this?

The following based upon a random sample of 38 students work, producing 200 self assessed levels over 8 of the APP style criteria.

How the data works. Each SAT level is divided into 3 parts ( for example 5c, 5b 5a leading to 6c,6b,6a). So a score of 3 is one complete SAT level. All levels are compared against end of year reported teacher derived SAT levels.

Despite students only awarding themselves the correct SAT level ( level 5, 6 etc) 26% of the time the students were overall fairly close to their reported SAT levels. From the 200 levels derived by this method 37% were the same as the teacher levels. They underestimated them by a factor of 2.02, meaning that they were around 2 division of a SAT level, for example they said a 5c and the reported level was 5a.(this would be a scoreof 2, as would a 5a and a 6b).The spread of the student self assessed levels is 2.5 so that all students are on average within one level of their reported level, backing up the previous measure. So, it is okay to trust the data produced by students.

This underestimation is not a concern and I am tempted to consider it of value, suggesting that the students have thought about where they have rated themselves. Pleasingly it also suggests the levels within the ladders are of some accuracy ,contain real challenge for the students and in some way are a rigorous form of assessment. Consider a set of data that completely matched their teacher assessed levels, would you firstly trust it? I wouldn't. It would also be impossible to identify areas to work upon to improve.

Inevitably some of the Skills identified will be more difficult to do than others, especially when the students have never previously been asked to think like them. So, I think the data asks a lot of useful questions about how to go about developing these skills and their genuine importance in the learning of Science. I am hopeful that these level ladders will help, as students have identified themselves across the board, on each of the 8 skills in this sample.

A few interesting pointers have also come to light when looking at how the consistency of the students across the ability range. Although the same size is slight homogenous, and therefore prone to skewing effects, there is some genuine food for thought.

Firstly that the level 5 students correctly identify their SAT level 40% of the time and the levels 3 and 4 students 33%. Compared to only 21% of the level 6 students. ( No difference was seen with the top end level 6 compared to the low end). Why is this? Could it be due to the more able students being more reflective about their learning? Could it be down to these students understanding the criteria better? The data suggest yes, the students who most undersestimate their grade is the level 6 students, by a factor of 2.65, gladly still within one level. The level 5 students underestimate by a around half a level (1.8) while the level 3 and 4 overestimate their ability by a small amount (0.33) or for example from 3a to 4c. Another possible explanation is that this form of assessment may actually be testing genuine student ability. Its test what a student can do not what they can remember or have the ability to write down. I hope so. Oh dear I'm beginning to defend the APP!

The big thing I'll take from this is that the first draft of my version of the Science APP is just that a draft. Some of it will need rewriting to make it more accessible for lower ability students and clearer in making it explicit between the levels. But, it does seem to be close and the evidence suggests its a useful thing to have in the classroom.

I have fourteen of them written and in need of refining, four crudely done and six that have not been started! If anyone is interested in giving me a hand let me know!

Stepping stone activity- a consequence of student to teacher feedback

2009-10-15T18:23:00.010+01:00

This strategy, which I will call stepping stones, is a transferable technique that may help turn an abstract idea into a more concrete one. it may also be a fun way of sequencing a lot of similar (but purposefully different content). I'm sure this idea is described in Paul Ginnis - Teachers toolkit.

The reason I'm recording this strategy is actually more to do with how my class arrived here. They have had a lesson on this topic and the evidence I collected lead me to reflect that they had not understood several of the ideas I was trying to help them learn. To find out exactly what they did I designed a quick, mid-module test that pin pointed the precise concepts they could not do. I quickly asked them at the end of this test to raise your hand up if you found question 1one the most difficult, and so on. They overwhelmingly identified this concept, that this stepping stone activity is based around. On marking the test, I agreed with them! I must trust them more on making decisions about what they do and do not.

With a designed test and a clear reflection activity, they give me all the information I needed to plan the next step in their learning. I have made the reason for doing this activity clear to my students by referring to their input. I really want to reinforce the idea that they influence what I plan for them to, education is done with them and not to them.

My current year 8 have struggled conceptually with word equations. They need to know the following

1. what reactants and products are
2. metals and air
3. metals and water
4. metals and acid

I'm only describing this to highlight that many ideas can be developed at once . The students need to be distinguishing between the ideas at times and combining ideas at others.

The session runs something like this:

Students are given an overview sheet with all the words available.

They are asked to plot as many reactions as possible through this grid, trying to explain as they go. Allowing access to books and each other. This planning time gives time for micro teaching and will allow students to participate in the actual event, they simply couldn't without this time.

Then gather them around an open space with the words arranged in the same order as they were on sheet on the floor. One by one get them to step across verbalising what they are doing. eg" I'm starting on sodium its a metal, then I'm moving to....." This makes it a great kinesthetic activity and this helps turns the abstract notion of a word equation into something tangible.

Train the audience to give subtle feedback for example as "gasp" when the "stepping stoner" is wrong, and a quiet "chapeau" when correct. A little bit of peer assessment, which just happens to be very revealing to the teacher. Who is confident enough to say "you're wrong" or "you're right". By making them subtle signals it makes it more fun and requires less conviction, increasing speculative assessments, which grow with reinforcement.

Anyone who is struggling or needs pushing simply ask for another more complex equation. To up the ante for everyone try it twice with the first attempt with the sheet and then again without.

The students seemed more confident about this, although everything is fresh in their mind, I suppose they will only reveal their true understanding in the end of topic test. Am i really looking forward to marking exam papers?

Classroom display to support a learning agenda

2009-10-06T18:35:00.009+01:00

I have posted this brief clip to attempt to illustrate how I am setting about supporting my learning agenda in my classroom.

The first thing shown is a few of the thinking words that circle my room. I use these when debriefing activities and to assist students in meta cognition. It gives the class a shared language for learning. It is also hugely motivating for students when they describe themselves juxtaposing!

Next is my biggest ever display, I think this shows the importance I have in Biggs SOLO taxonomy. I have it displayed so that the steps to improve their work are visible and easily referred to. My intention of training the students to use this is a major theme in my learning agenda. You will note the space next to it, this will be where exemplar work will be displayed..

Next are the tools that have been used in my lessons, that are labelled with their function. Again I want these to be visible to encourage students making decisions about how they learn. These include student examples of how to use them.

The most frequent used part of the display at this time of year is the "What good learners do" and "What good learners do when they get stuck". These are tantamount to class rules. But since the students have offered them, and then agreed to their use ,each class owns them. This makes them immensely powerful for giving feedback about behaviour, effort and attitude, all those management issues that can sometimes clog up good learning. Having the title what good learners do, makes their use a positive and assertive thing to do. I believe this is why my students respond well to praise when I catch them doing one of them and even better when they catch themselves ( often through my feedback) not doing one or two. students are a lot harsher on themselves than I am! I find it changes the negative behaviour quickly.

Likewise the phrase what good learners do when they are stuck is a positive motivational tool. I am often surprised how quickly the "I'm stuck therefore i won't try" attitude changes into "Great, I'm about to learn something new". Students take this with them, as I have seen other teachers who use this strategy with students I have taught previously , with phrases like "Enjoy getting stuck under the "what good learners do"! Ah transfer! most satisfying.

Next is the list of PEEL good learner behaviours, which is where I want my students to be. One day .....one day.

The stripy thing, was an attempt to get the students to choose a no hands up policy and discuss the merits of different teaching strategies. This has not gone to my thinking. I think I have already decided that I will ask who who I choose during lessons and train the students with things like, giving each other wait time etc. I wanted them to have as much ownership of our classroom, I have not used this consistently, with too many things taking precedent. I will return but I'm not now convinced of its merit.

And finally the board titled "Our Learning Journey" is an attempt to provide a visual overview of what is going to happen and when specific learning outcomes will be learned. The students have responded well and research backs up this strategy, along with a starter activity and clear shared learning outcomes having a big influence on student attainment. Thanks again Geoff Petty! (Although I do confess colleagues are beginning to take the Michael as I wheel this board between lessons. Teachers are great.)

Comparing a (more) Tradional approach to marking to SOLO taxonomy

2009-09-25T09:09:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last post, I have just marked the same class set of books. This time how ever was much more content focused, I'm trying to find out what if anything my students have learned. So my feedback this time is purely around Science content.

I am pleased to report that I only spent the same length of time as my previous marking effort, and I have managed using my level ladders gathered a small quantity of information about my students. Namely can they distinuguish between an Element, Mixture and Compound. I also feel more able to attach a SAT level to their knowledge. So not that useful really. I feel I have learned nothing about them as students (except two) and my feedback is limited.

A note on my codes. BM is Book marked, OBS is observed during lesson and DQ is when I have directly questioned a student around this concept.

I know patience is the key with this kind of marking and that over the course of a module a level ladder will allow me to collect a lot of valid information about where academically my students are. It's just going to take hours and hours. I will point out that I'm not intending on collecting all the evidence by marking books and have planned activities that will allow me to observe this learning. I also have planned questions to ask during lessons that will reveal who understands and who doesn't. All will be recorded , valued. and reflected upon.
The two students who are a bit different are a difficult boy who I now know understands alot more than he will let me know and a girl who knows abit but has no eye for detail so that despite understanding the lesson her work misses the point. For the boy, It has allowed me to praise genuinely for once.
I do feel better about this marking than I would normally as i have been marking against learning intentions. A proven effective strategy. I was also able to set each student individual tasks to clarify, consolidate and extend their ideas. Set at the begining of my lesson, they students responded well, question themselves and each other about what they learned last lesson. It's this connection that is the real value of my effort marking books. It is also useful to compile these findings for the whole class to provide real evidence to base "moving on" decisions.

But, I must confess that in terms of real ( not fact or content based) learning, the feedback focused on one thing, and is not transferable, nor progressive, whereas the feedback I gave them using SOLO taxonomy is. I have already planned their next assessment task and it is based around SOLO. I'm looking forward to putting this "transferability" and of course my students to the test.

Marking made easy,useful and enjoyable?!

2009-09-19T18:07:00.076+01:00

For the first time in my career I genuinely enjoyed and found useful the process of sitting down and marking a set of books! And I think I know why......

The piece of work I was interested in was a normal practical write up in Science. I had planned the assessment around a pre-existing task, using Biggs SOLO taxonomy to establish levels of success and the strategies they used in learning. Each level had specific content and process criteria. During the lesson the students were given a chance to self assess their work against these criteria. The Purpose of doing this was two fold: Firstly, to introduce them to Biggs SOLO taxonomy and secondly two highlight the idea that education is an interactive process and not something that is done to them. The fifteen minutes of lesson time dedicated to this activity allowed me to talk and help mark five students work, leaving them all with at least one "Next Step". I enjoyed these converstations as the dialogue with Year 7's was purely about learning,with one student stating " I can see what you mean when you say join your ideas together". This echo's what a Year 12 Biologist said earlier in the week " I can see how your answer is better than mine". This is the beauty of the SOLO Taxonomy, identified by an eleven and sixteen year old within minutes of using it ( as a 23 year old, it took me alot longer), it makes the quality of their work VISIBLE.

This visibility is (even) apparent to the teacher marking a book. A obdurate task at the best of time, having this clarity made marking efficacious, so much so I marked 18 books in 45 minutes, all being identified at a SOLO level, next steps suggested and scietific vocabulary problems attended to. I also felt I had time to use another of my favoured assessment strategies.

For every module I select all the important (or illuminative/indicative) learning outcomes and then classify them into different (grade) levels. This means I can easily during lessons or book marking gather evidence on student learning. Although this does tend to be rather content based, how the students use the information inevitably correlates with the level. ( normally through Blooms taxonomy). Every lesson I highlight on the whole class copy of the sheet what I'm looking for. I am begining to realise that to make marking (and more broadly speaking assessment) clear and useful to me as a teacher, the planning and clarity I create is essential to me gaining the information about student learning and progress I need to make informed decisions about next steps and guidance. So in the "free time" I gained, I was able to look for one learning outcome too, leaving me with evidence of SAT levels for these students.

I obviously recorded all my observations for both content and the quality of work on my new Teacher Mark Book sheet. Not bad for forty five minutes and two ~~interuptions~~ (both of whom asked for a copy of SOLO) converts!

My Learning Agenda

2009-09-06T12:48:00.000+01:00

With the new term beckoning, and a summer of pondering, I have finalised what my learning agenda for my classroom will contain. This will be the purpose of all the pedagogical decisions I make. this year. I have based it upon two things. Firstly, where I want my students to be at the end of the year in terms of them as learners, not as what they have learned but how they learn. Secondly, I have considered where my students currently are, I am fortunate enough to already know over half my classes for the next year.

I am Au courant that the agenda I set must be manageable and actually improve my teaching/ creation of learning opportunities and develop my students as learners. I am confident that I am not creating extra work for myself bur in fact making my job easier.

So here are my priorities, which may change over the discourse of the academic year. ( and so they should if need be!)

Develop independence of students during enquiry based learning tasks.
Develop quality work, through quality feedback using the SOLO taxonomy.
Plan all new lessons and Enquiries based around Blooms Four learning dimensions.
Increase reflection in Sixth from students.

So what strategies am I planning to use to achieve each one.

Developing independence

What I really mean by this is ownership. Ownership of the learning and ownership of the learning strategies employed in doing so. To do this I will make clear every time the class is using a strategy, giving it a name to aid the development of a shared learning vocabulary. Each strategy will be displayed, labelled, annotated and classified as part of the reflective and meta cognitive process.

So when we get to work in a more independent environment (such as during enquiries)the students will find it second nature to choose to use a tool or a strategy to help them, rather than being passive learners they will seek and organise knowledge. If this happens currently, its lineage invariably involves me. I want to be increasingly out of these decisions.

Isaac Newton provides suitable inspiration for this one. When asked who made his telescope and where he got his tools he responded by saying " If I had (..) other people to make my tools for me, I had never made anything of it." This is exactly what I want my students to appreciate.

Developing quality work

The SOLO Taxonomy is based upon how students use knowledge and encourages students to apply and link concepts. Consequently, students operating at the upper reaches of the taxonomy are producing high quality work that not only has breadth but depth too.

My day to day assessment and feedback will not only focus on the content but look to assess the use of their knowledge. I have constructed a large wall display to place these qualities at the heart of my classroom and assist in making the language of the taxonomy part of everyday dialogues. I have planned an introductory activity and a self assessment opportunity in the first week that utilises the taxonomy. I have also planned large assessment tasks for the second week back that is based on the SOLO taxonomy which has specific content attached to each level, so that the taxonomy will also be seen with a subject specific context. I am aiming to do this regularly, as I can see the quality of my feedback improving too.

Research into the impact of the SOLO taxonomy demonstrates that it not only affects academic success but also the meta cognitive too. Students are more aware of their learning and how to improve. I want this for my students.

Planning using Blooms Learning Dimensions

Nothing fancy here, just a statement of principle. The balance that the four learning dimensions of factual, conceptual, procedural and meta cognitive knowledge will give to the curriculum of my classroom is just irresistible. It just make sense. Hattie ranks meta cognitive strategies as the 13th most effective "strategy" relating to achievement. This is clearly something I can do something about by planning to teach how and when to do it and not just giving students meta cognitive tasks. This will not just happen, I need to plan the development of these skills.

Increasing Reflection

As far as I am concerned Sixth form students do not regularly sit back and reflect upon what they are doing and why. Our school also dedicates a lot of the Sixth form curriculum time to independent study, although difficult to set up, manage and to make effective it does have a hugely positive impact on student success. (Hattie quotes its at around d= +0.75.) So the pedagogical purpose of prioritising reflection is to indirectly improve the students ability to learn independently.

Now, as a self confessed and very proud and cognisant Luddite, I am embarrassed (a little) to admit that I am intending to use Blogging to encourage this reflection. Although lets make this clear, with all the Web 2.0 shenanigans going on in education at the moment, that Blogging is not in fact the tool being used here. It is merely a way of making the student thinking visible, it is presentational. It allows me, an educator, to make a decision on what support, guidance or task my students do next. So, with this in mind I have planned strategies such as PEELS reading log to actually develop and engage my students in meaningful reflection. It is essential that students do not blog in superficial way or just write what they think I want. They need to learn how to do this. This is why teacher knowledge of pedagogy and teachers having a purpose to their teaching is much more important that teachers knowledge of Web 2.0 applications.

Getting to grips with Solo taxonomy.

2009-08-24T12:37:00.000+01:00

I have just created my first specific assessment tool based around the Solo Taxonomy, and I'm rather pleased.

I have spent quite a lot of time getting my head around this , adapting for my own use, making a wall display (see earlier post) and deciding that the best way to use this would be through targeted activities with specific assessment sheets. Here it is, the topic is the rock cycle. Please not that this is not a traditional SOLO taxonomy as I have attempted to subdivide some of the categories.

So in planning for the first week back, I have seen a before, before after after ( See PEELWEB.ORG) activity that will elucidate the understanding of the students from the lesson. I have planned to do this as a group assessment. This will allow the students to discuss the SOLO taxonomy too, as it is there first exposure to it. I am intending to make the use of the SOLO taxonomy as key item of my learning agenda this year.

What has pleasantly surprised me was the speed at which I was able to write quality success criteria with built in progression. I hope it is as "clarifying" to my students thinking as it has been to mine. The criteria for the SOLO taxonomy really make it easy to do this. I have saved so much time it is easy for me to share it and write one for next weeks lesson!

This Years Teacher Record Sheet

2009-08-19T16:28:00.000+01:00

Last year I was determined to make the most of the informal observations that I would make as a matter of course during teaching. I thought long and hard about what I would see in my class, part of this was to catch the students doing something right. So last year I redrafted this four times to get it right.

So, it is therefore obvious that I have started a fresh this year. Although I have definitely learned something. I am hopeful that this years model, is more focused on the learning my students are doing and will inform the next teaching/ learning step easily. This will be shared with my students at the very start of the year. Every student will have one that I will fill in during lessons and when I look at their work.

The first section is all about improving on task behaviour, students work better if they think you are watching them, hence my insistence in not solely recording if homework is completed, but class written work, learning tasks such as a card sort and their involvement in discussions. The final one is so important to record as all students should be involved in this, for many reasons some students will struggle to complete all written tasks. I also want to add value on task discussions.

The second section is all about the quality of their learning, and, again this will completed during and after lessons. It is based around my own interpretation of Biggs Solo Taxonomy. It is one of my key focuses of my learning agenda this year, so it should be helpful to centralise this. I must stress that this is not just for written work and sitting in and listening to conversations will be just as valid.

The next section is a relic from last year, which is the ANECDOTES section, a hugely powerful classroom management tool. Poor learning behaviours being recorded and then recited back to students changes behaviour. Take for example " This is the third time this half term that you have not had a pen, you did not have one on the 12th and 19th of June!" Students very quickly get embarrassed into doing something different. More importantly the recording of good learning behaviours turns out to be a reward in itself, all with the added benefit of basically writing your reports as you go along. The anecdotes will include significant events and notes taken form random classroom scans.

I have added my schools Five R'S of good learning characteristics. These being Reasoning, Reflectiveness, Responsible, Resourceful, and Resilience. To reflect upon afterwards, possibly through discussion with the students. I intend to classify them positive or negative for each characteristic. The motivation for this is that this makes up a big part of our student monitoring and reporting system. So I want at least some evidence to reflect upon rather than just a gut feeling.

Then finally comes the assessment section, the things I would normally record in my record book, exam scores and grades for individual tasks but also a grade based upon topic specific observations made per topic. (More on this too follow.) The other novelty included is a record of science specific thinking skills which I am currently developing in place of the new APP's.

So there you have it draft one of this years record keeping, hopefully learning focused, dialogue fueling, and evidenced based decision guiding. Any comments on improvements are gratefully accepted. I'm sure draft two is just around the corner.

Solo Taxonomy Assessing the Quality of Learning

2009-07-23T10:38:00.000+01:00

I have been getting increasingly excited and frustrated with the whole idea of Solo's taxonomy of learning. Like all tools before I use it with my students I need to get my head around it. This process has been difficult as despite never hearing about it! There are lots of really amazing teachers using this with students of all ages, but mainly in New Zealand. So, I have spent an ages reading and thinking about how to use this.

Details of the Grid is available here http://tinyurl.com/l2hhxc

the following sources have been the most inspiring

http://hooked-on-thinking.com/ follow on twitter http://twitter.com/hooked_on_think

http://www.youtube.com/user/Chokearti#play/uploads/6/N63TXAHDgkE. The young students are amazing at describing its use

http://www.slideshare.net/jocelynam/solo-taxonomy

But the most useful thing I've done is trialled it in my lessons, firstly as a self assessment tool and then as a structure to base conversations about the quality of the student work. Both times I have shared what I was doing and asked for feedback. My students have responded in spades, some obviously finding even my crudest attempts useful.

This piece of student work was marked together discussing where on the taxonomy she thought she was. It uses the original language which I have changed, but will probably change back! You can see I am still going back and forth on this one. I have added a couple of extra levels to act as stepping stones. I will find out if they are need.

So my plan is to use the wall display to help permeate as many aspects of my teaching as I can, I will design assessment scheme for specific pieces of work based around this, use it as a self assessment tool, try to correlate it with the National Curriculum levels, refer to it in my feedback to students both verbally and written and I will also with students display exemplar pieces of work at each level. I think this tool with a purpose has legs. Now, I just have to go and use it!

Some Teacher Benefits.

2009-07-19T13:16:00.000+01:00

The Purpose of a "purpose" is that it will lead you some where, something must change, something must improve. So, if you don't set an agenda, how do you and more importantly, your students know what they trying to get better at. This is also true for teachers to develop their own skills and knowledge. So, part of the reason I want to establish pedagogical purposes in my lessons is entirely selfish. Geoff Petty in Evidence Based Learning summarises these teacher benefits succinctly as..

A. If you understand why a teaching strategy works well.

B. We can then adapt the strategy if we know why it works

C. If we understand the general principles we can use these to evaluate our own teaching methods and to design new ones.

My priorities for my students in the last three weeks of term have been:-

1. Appropraite use of IT in lessons, tail and dog stories
2. Increase independance and decision making
3. Increase the amount of higher order thinking.

4. Developing a specific Science thinking skills.

These are based pretty much on gut feeling and several formal reflections about my teaching, my students learning and the curriculum that I am teaching too. (Which can be seen above in an enquiry cycle.) Some of these ideas I have already blogged about. So what benefits will I get by challenging my students to these targets? I will scrutinise the first two to highlight how and why I am attempting to do this.

1. Appropriate use of IT.
This big irritant to me, I too often find that students will spend hours being totally distracted by the use of IT in my lessons. I am not talking misuse of the IT, like gaming, as this is less irritating, as it is a behaviour issue and I will deal with it as I would any behaviour issue. The two biggest worries I have are firstly, that most stuudents think that being on Google is actually researching, and that it is a thinking tool to help them research and learn. What a ridiculous proposition. Consider this all too real dialogue.

Mead: What are you doing?

Student: I'm researching about fair trade food.

Mead: and what thinking tool are you using?

Student: I'm googling, sir!

Mead: (In head. B*#lls another one!) Would you mind me having a look at your search criteria.

The student clicks back to reveal a not unreasonable input.

Mead; I agree with what you've typed in, but how does 69.5 million hits help you?

Students: ( Silence)

Mead: ( Good use of wait time, so, even more silence)

Student: So shall I use the webpages you have recommended?

Mead: What will that allow you to do?

Student: Find out what I want to know?

Mead: (raises eyebrows) Why were you on Google then?

Student: Errrrr.. I just was.

This is not what I imagined when I planned this lesson. Where are the conversations like this..

Mead: what are you upto?

Student: I'm researching about fair trade food.

Mead: how are you doing that?

Student: I'm using a PMI at the moment, I'm reading about a Ugandan Coffee farmer and what his daily life is like?

Mead: Learned anything new?

Students: I've decided that Fair trade is definately worth a few extra pence, and what Organic food is.

Mead: What helped you decide?......

The second problem is more insiduous, despite the instruction that "we are researching2 and a clear overview of the lesson plotted out on the board. Inevitably,I find half my class are on PowerPoint , while another quarter are choosing fonts for their wordart titles. Modern day colouring in. I'm not having this.

Strategies to help.

I have a few ideas that may help me out. Firstly, it is the relationship I have built with my students, so that I can give them honest feedback. I know that some students will actually follow my instructions, so I make a point of stopping the class to see "good practice". I also know that large numbers will head of into Google land and Font world, so I am planning a ten minute blitz at the beginning of the lesson. Again stopping everyone with yells of "Wow! everyone gather around to see what Giles has done!" Before then actually being more helpful but encouraging the class to give constructive feedback. After this ten minute spell I will return to the analogy of the tail wagging the dog. Other strategies include making clear the process of research with a over view of

Read/watch -------> Thinking Tool--------> Research.

and having explicit success criteria of "use a Thinking Tool of your choosing".

Finally and probably most important is to build in this problem and solution into the reflection. I will blog about this when I have compiled their responses.

So what are the benefits to me in overcoming these IT barriers to learning?

Well, I have spent an inordinate amount of time planning this lesson/ experience. I want to know if it works, have I structured it in a useful way? are the resources good enough? what tools do I need to reinforce in class? am I teaching the students the way I want them to do enquiries? is the content coming across? In a way I'm in the process of doing what Geoff Petty describes at the start of this blog.
Secondly, I much prefer to be useful during lessons, guiding prompting, questioning and providing mirrors for students to reflect about all of the above. I don't want to be solely responsible for keeping the students on task and not just busy. Ambitious I know but its a journey worth taking and its a lot more fun than being solely responsible for 25-30 peoples learning.

Which leads directly into the second item on my learning agenda.

2.Increase the students independence and decision making

I hope it is obvious that these things are connected and in fact entwined. So part of the problems I have been dealing with IT, are actually part of this. I can now ask the questions what decisions have you made today that has helped you learned, and seriously expect to get a considered answer. And decisively I can give praise for doing so. If a student has acted independently and avoided a distraction they will feel like the success is theirs, and that I have just caught them doing it. I feel they will be more likely to continue this positive learning behaviour than if I had of DEMANDED they do it my way. I also feel that these methods speed up and strengthen the trust between student and teacher. A worthwhile pursuit.

Although this is not my biggest tool in achieving the above, which is to teach my students how to enquire. I know this is not a quick thing, and have plotted two years worth of stepping stones to help them do so. But, the small things will add up over this time.Here's hoping!

A moving on map.

2009-07-14T17:41:00.003+01:00

I have been covering a lesson on a fortnightly basis for around two months, to be honest I don't know the students that well. They have been working on a enquiry, based around the question "Are you what you eat?" The purpose of this is to teach the students the enquiry cycle we would like them to use in subsequent enquiries, and obviously develop the skills needed to learn independently. Since I don't know these students I have been finding it difficult to "pitch" the lesson correctly.

Today's task was to write a script for a range of characters who are giving their opinions on a basket of food. First, I explained the task and process to be done and set them away. The first five minutes were consumed by a string of students following me around the room saying "I'm stuck" "I don't know what to do!". The antithesis of where we want them to be. I didn't jump in with answers and spent alot of energy praising those who were stuck. A good first step, create a positive attitude to learning.

Next, since I was now getting odd looks and a general feeling of "He's not helping us!"( tudents need this feeling, which can only be created by stepping back for a short while, to truly feel independent and become motivated to do something about being stuck).it was then that I gathered them around a desk and started scribbling on a piece of flip chart paper. I love that stuff, it's so organic and encourages interactions. I started at the bottom with the word STUCK" and moved straight to the top and asked what is the end product of this activity. A student quickly responded with record a MP3 for your speeches. This is at the top.

So, I now asked what their choices were now that they were stuck, the students said get unstuck and suggested some generic ways of getting unstuck such as C3B4ME. "Or?" I asked and got "you could just sit there and get distracted" and a yelp of "STAY STUCK", I think this is when they could see I was now going to help them.

I asked what they would need to do to get unstuck and complete the job. Strangely (or perhaps not) they came up with write a script and practice it before they came up with the next step. These task go just before the completion of the task. This strategy is a more specific example of a moving on map developed by the teachers involved in the PEEL project. After a small re-explanation of the situation they found themselves in, they then thought reviewing what they already knew. So they did listen at the start! This then led to a planning strategy and student said " how do we generate ideas?"

I then gifted them the idea of thinking tools. After a painful couple of minutes I reminded them that they had used PMI, in a previous enquiry, which received recognising nods. So, then gave them an alternative of a Frame of Reference organiser, modelling how to use it. I must admit that I have never had such an enthusiastic take up of a thinking tool, may be because the generation of the characters opinions was the actual task they were finding difficulty, but I actually think it was because the tool had a context and a pedagogical purpose.

After a final discussion that enabled us to complete the stepping stones between where they were and where they wanted to be, I set them off. The atmosphere in the class was tangible, with the LSA I was working with recognising how much more they were on task.

Around ten minutes later, I asked the students to "place a dot on the map to tell me where you are, when you get a chance!" which they did. Three students where still stuck . So this was actually great feedback for me to start to target a few students with a bit more guidance and questioning.

I requested a cross on the map around fifteen minutes later, which was great as it clearly demonstrated that they were making progress and provided an opportunity to praise genuine improvement. Many of the students were up to generating the ideas to include in their speeches. One student was particularly methodical about this, so I gathered the students around so he could share what he was doing, I asked the class once he'd finished, are they doing this? two replied yes, then I asked who is going to do this? with a chorus of "great idea" the student raised his arms skywardin celebration !

One final check about fifteen minutes before the end, this time with squares, made it very easy for the students to plan what they need to do next lesson. The conversations I was now having had changed from, "I'm stuck what should I do" to "I'm going to draft the script at least twice because I'll add more detail".

I'm chuffed, and the reason, I did very little, the students took over as they were allowed to, as they had a structure that they had helped devise, they felt safe to take risks and the plan had obvious improvement chances and the activities had a clear and shared pedagogical purpose.

Abbie is never interested.

2009-07-10T19:08:00.000+01:00

Having returned home after (what appeared to be) a great lesson with 8S2a on a Friday afternoon, I have decided to see exactly how successful I have been, if indeed I have. My gut feeling about this is that the students had done well, engaging in quite technically and cognitively difficult conversations; planning and setting up a scientific experiment.

They have been testing the 5 second rule, that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat if picked up within 5 seconds. The students have been challenged to think like scientists as I decided this was the day to try out the scientific thinking skills I have been developing over the course of this year. the specific one for today were: Clarity, Significance, Fairness and Relevance.

After an hour discussing, planning redrafting the students were tired but really getting into this kind of thinking. On return from a welcome lunch break the students set of to make decisions about the exact method they would use, and then set it up. The thing that struck me was the quality of they were having between themselves and with me were fantastically detailed and show remarkable reflection from the students.

At the end of the session I directed them to a wallwisher site, to answer the question "how have you thought like a scientist?" I was hoping to extract the kind of language I had introduced them to earlier, and from this be able to reflect upon their successes and then decide the next steps. They had around about 5 minutes to do this. A simple quick model of efficient assessment for learning if I do say so myself! Let see if it works and does it back up my gut feeling. I am getting quite into evidence based teaching at the moment. I am writing as I analyse so this could turn out to be a damp squid of a post. The important thing for me is that the process is making me thinking about what my students said or did.

So the outcomes for this and the next lesson are:-

And here are their end of lesson reflections

So here goes....

The first thing I notice is that the word bacteria is used frequently, which indicates that outcome A is sorting it self out. I was very conscious in planning this lesson that the content part, as small and would receive no directed teaching activities, as students should begin to pick these up through the activity. It seems that the research is right. I can safely assume that I will not need to do anything extra about this outcome. The reflective question asked is intentionally not content based, but still this learning comes to the surface.

Outcome B is also represent in this brief review, with "Wolfy" referring directly to their growth, and Liam describing bacteria multiplying. I'm loving this so far. Even the conceptual knowledge, albeit a simple one,is being learned with a targeted activity.

The numerous mention of the five second rule is suggesting that the link between bacteria and risk to health is being made. Kaylie and Brandon also start developing this a little talking about even clean surfaces have bacteria on them. Despite this, I think this will be a valid place to start next lesson with a question like " Does the Five section rule keep you safe?" just to make the link explicit to all and it will lead to a discussion about evidence, which is where I want the lesson to head next.

One thing is beginning to emerge, and that is the confidence and the enjoyment the students have had from their learning. This is not an outcome but does suggest that learning has taken place. Despite me phrasing the review question as "How have you thought like a scientist?" a large number of students have started their comment with I have learned. Abbie even goes as far as "I was very interested". Abbie is never interested. Emily is proud and "Baxter" is obviously pleased with the praise I gave "so na na na na :)" She even knows what she was praised for.

I am also able to identify the students who have just focused on the content and not mentioned the process. So, when the class begins the end of activity debrief I will focus on these students. I will also have a chat with max to get him to explain his comment, I'm not sure what he means and I'm not sure he does either.

The area that I'm not sure these brief comments will give me is the procedural knowledge and the meta cognitive outcomes. Are they using the scientific thinking language introduced today. Tom's comment about how to test for bacteria, although not clear hints that the idea of a scientific test has come through. A few students comment upon their thinking one even describes it as deep (and I would agree with her, a marvelous student) and one other describes creating a fair test. I think there is a some awareness of their thinking.

"Baxter" has genuinely surprised me with her comments, normally a distracted and distracting student she shows a great understanding of the concepts in the lesson. Impressively she identifies the need to collect evidence to the question being ask.This means that she is at least aware of the need for clear questions and relevant data. She has picked up on two of the big themes in the lesson. This being outcomes F and G. This is pleasing, now does anyone else. Lewis talks about fare (sic) test and Clare talks about "developing" question. We did draft the questions and then I model my thinking on deciding which was a good one. The process is apparent. "JoRDAn" seems to be suggesting to be looking for proof, so this may indicate he is aware of the need to produce evidence again outcome G.

This is obviously a tricky decision, I think some students have grasped these concepts where others have missed the boat. This is a little at odds with some of the conversationa with the students. This is the great thing about formally reflecting upon lessons, I'm trawling my brain to look for evidence that my students were successful. "JoRDAn" was very perceptive about fair tests and identifying problems this does not come across in his comment. Putting it all in perspective, the fact that this is the students first introduction to the new thinking language and the reflection only took 5 minutes today. The signs are positive some students clearly understand. So my next step will be to recap the language and to keep modelling it, the final task in this enquiry is for the students to self assess themselves. I will introduce this material earlier in the lesson than I originally planned.

So, I've learned a lot about my students again not by marking books but by considering in detail the evidence the students presented. I have students to target for help, to praise. I have a lesson starter that is needed by the students, and have been able to amend my next lesson plan to support my students. A worthwhile hour spent not marking books.

Metacognitive Musings

2009-07-08T20:41:00.000+01:00

While my class worked away on a research task today, as part of an enquiry style project. I pondered on how they were setting about the task, having been, if not clear fairly insistent that they read and then use a thinking tool to record their research notes. I have spent an inordinate amount of time asking the same inane questions "Why are you using PowerPoint?" and "When did I ask you to Present your findings"

Here lies my problem with ICT, it is a huge distraction to the thinking students need to do to learn. The metaphor "the tails wagging the dog again" is a regular battle cry in my room, and is the the reason for me insisting on the students using a thinking tool to process the information found.

So despite my class looking very busy i was curious.

Having read a very interesting article by Paul Pintrich, in Theory Into Practice.http://tinyurl.com/lxfl7y , which subdivides the strategies used to learn into three parts, Rehearsing, Elaborating and Organising together with metacognitive strategies (about the strategies used) and strategic problem solving. I simplified these and hope their do not loose to much of their meaning in the translation.

I drafted up a table to help them reflect on the processes they were using and armed them with a post it note. Asked them to write what strategies they had used so far and classify them against this grid. In other words what did they think the strategy helped them do with the information?

So here are the responses summarised. I have categorised them as either a strategy or not using smileys. I then discussed the original responses with the class, and hopefully the influence of this meta cognition can be clearly seen.

So, what do I think it tells me.

Firstly by the end of the session the students are commenting on more process at the expense of content with five less responses. Indicating at least some understanding that the process is important.

Secondly that the idea of research can be a noun, they can produce it by using a variety of processes. Although I don't think they are yet sophisticated enough to be specific in describing how, they have identified research as an actual strategy to research with less! Hoorah!

Thirdly, despite only getting one more strategy in the second half of the lesson, I was particularly pleased by the improvement in quality. For example students realising that they had to plan research, that they should consider what they and they peers already know. These are mainly meta cognitive strategies which did not appear at all in the first reflection. This is exciting.

So not bad for an hour. I think this simple strategy has raised the issue of meta cognition and pedagogical purposes for these students, a first step maybe but one that had to be taken.