Month: March 2011

Little and often

When I was training to become a teacher, I was encouraged to do tasks like marking, planning and self-reflection in short, manageable bursts. I found this advice to be easier said than done during the early stages of my career. However, I eventually reached a point where I found that I had fully subscribed to a ‘little and often’ philosophy. I have refined it over the last few years and thought that I would share ten of the most useful facets here.

  1. Keep a note book (or folder) of lesson ideas, activities and homework; keep it with you to jot down ideas on the fly.
  2. Mark and assess work in small batches avoiding the dreaded “marking pile”.
  3. Make feedback short and precise to make it meaningful and to keep it manageable for yourself.
  4. Take 15-20 minutes to reflect on your day: what went well, what didn’t, how can you do better tomorrow?
  5. Read blogs, articles and books every day – it’s important to keep learning. Save longer material to be read in short flurries once or twice a week.
  6. Collaborate with others but make meetings short and emails brief; instead get on with the doing, focussing on the outcomes instead, evaluating as you go.
  7. Share ideas, resources and useful links via email, Twitter or Facebook immediately; don’t wait, don’t stock pile.
  8. Once a week turn off email, Twitter and other distractions; focus on the work. (If you suffer from severe bouts of procrastination then once a week might not be enough)
  9. Don’t let things become untidy. Fix displays, put away resources, tidy your desk when you see that it needs doing.
  10. If you blog, write a bit every day. The previously mentioned note book comes in handy here for drafting posts and recording ideas.

Busting a hole in the wall (the purpose of education)

purposed-badgeWhen Sugata Mitra put a computer inside a hole in the wall of the NIIT building in New Delhi, he took the first step in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, that education was a universal connector craved by people the world over; and that the traditional notion of classroom education was by no means the only way to do it. Now, more than ten years on from the beginning of the HITW experiment, the lessons remain unheeded by many of the people involved in mainstream education. In fact, concepts such as ‘self-directed learning’ and ‘the student voice’ are still scoffed at as Dawn Hallybone was reminded this past week, attending a debate on the National Curriculum review.

Are there still that many people connected to education that truly believe, we, the adults know what’s best for the next generation and the one after that? Nick Dennis spoke of the need for us to focus on principles in this debate and at first I disagreed, as principles like ‘purposes’ are rarely universally shared. However, I now see where he was going, and while I appreciated Doug’s question about whose “better” was Nick referring to, I think Nick’s conviction was what was most important. He asked the big questions about what we want education to be and what we are doing for each other as a community, not as definable roles but as human beings.

It is make or break time for humanity and we have a responsibility to draw a line in the sand, admit our mistakes and create a system of education that can begin to undo the harm that we have done to the world. For all the talk over the last twenty years of the ‘global village’, it has not stopped us continuing to destroy our planet, to wage wars and to continue to ignore the inequalities in society. What is the purpose of education? Surely, it is to create unity by helping future generation to recognise the values that humanity share.

Fred Garnett grapsed this when he argued that new (social) media can foster “collaborative, discursive learning, the kind of learning that creates a healthy, open and participative society.” Is this the extension of Mitra’s experiment? Is social media the natural evolution bringing learners to the stream rather than the well? Some of us embrace change, recognising the merits of experimentation and creativity; others fear it, seeing new as dangerous. I’m not suggesting that we should plunge head first into wildly unstructured models of learning but if it were not for people who dared to be creative, who dared to experiment, we would not be able to stare into the vast ocean that is our solar system, or be able to listen to Mozart on a device, so small, it can fit into the palms of our hands.

When Mitra began his experiment he was giving education back to the people and his observations of the children showed happy, creative, collaborative learnings, the sort of learning Tom Barrett hopes his son will continue to experience. I’d intended to say that education is about more than opening doors; it’s about what you do once the door is open. Now I’m asking who needs doors? Why not work together and bust a hole in the wall instead?

#writewell – A Gifted and Talented Writing Project

On Tuesday afternoon when the majority of students were making their way home, 15 dedicated Year 11s remained behind to take part in a project that I am leading with five colleagues from the English department. The short term aim is to improve on these, already, talented writers skills, hopefully helping them to achieve A*s in English. The long term aim is to help them become better and more critical writers, oozing with confidence whenever they put pen to paper or finger to keys.

100 Words

The project is running for ten weeks and includes a variety of facets. One of which is teachers, parents, writers and others offering 100 words on why being able to #writewell is important.

Here’s a flavour of what has been shared so far:

“With a talent such as writing well, it allows the reader to feel your passion, feed off your enthusiasm or understand your reasoning which all help in your path to success.” (Corrie Fenner, Teacher of PE)

“From my perspective, if a candidate can’t write their CV and covering letter well, how can I trust that they will accurately “proof read” a press release, direct mail piece or html email?” (Liz Wilkins, Senior Marketing Manager for Education, Adobe Systems Europe, Ltd)

“My favourite meal consists of a glass of milk, crisps and egg sandwiches.

If it wasn’t for the comma you might think I had invented something called “milk crisps”, which could be the dried up flakey bits just around the rim of a plastic bottle of milk – but that would be disgusting!” (Julian Smith, Leader for Drama and Performing Arts)

140 Characters

I also asked my awesome PLN to get involved via Twitter and offer 140 characters on why being able to #writewell is important. I loved this one:

#writewell tweet

Student Blogging

The students involvement centres around a series of taught sessions, seminars and individual tutorials; input from professional writers, including: an author, editor and professional copy-writer; and most importantly it includes the student’s writing which will be produced on their own blogs – putting their words out in to the public sphere to be praised and scrutinised.

It is our hope that the public forum combined with a range of creative exercises and experiences will help these talented writers to fully realise their potential and also eradicate some lingering inaccuracies that find their way into the students work. It is our hope that we will help them to see that being able to #writewell is vital to their futures.

For ease, a lot of the material related to the project is being collated and managed via our schools VLE so I am unable to share all of it with you. However, the students’ blogs (the heart of the project) can be found in the sidebar on the right of the English department blog. If you are an educator, parent or fellow student, please take a moment or two to read some of the students’ posts and perhaps even leave a comment. Please offer praise where it is due but also offer some advice and guidance on how the student could further improve the quality of their writing. This I believe is integral to the success of the project.

Each week the students will be given a specific writing activity. The opening task asked them to write about an object that has significant meaning to them. Here are the first three posts that were submitted, I think they have gotten off to a great start:

As the project evolves the writing activities will be supplemented by reflection and evaluation activities. We also expect the students to comment on each others writing. And we hope for there to be the opportunity for some collaborative writing to occur as well.

If you are on Twitter you can follow the project via the hash tag: #writewell. And if you have a few minutes perhaps you could tweet about ‘why it is important to #writewell’?

We hope that you enjoy reading the students’ posts as well as watching the project grow as much as we expect to.

—

This was an edited version of the post I submitted to English @ CCC.