Tag: reading

3 things I do every (school) day that make me a better teacher

1. Read at least one article/blog post about teaching and learning.

As an English teacher it is probably a little predictable that I read a lot, however I believe that it is important to keep up with what is happening in education. I have also learned as many of us do that teaching is a busy and time consuming affair, therefore I don’t often find extended periods of time to read. Instead, I use a small number of apps and devices to bring reading material to me in a manageable way. This includes Google reader as an RSS aggregator and apps such as Reeder and Instapaper which I access on my MBP and HTC Wildfire respectively. I save and export longer articles/papers to read on my Sony Reader. Without going in to too much detail here, this combination of devices allows me to read at whatever point of the day I am free to or feel like doing so. Hotspots are: on the bus (7:30 – 7:45) heading to work and when school has just ended (3:40 – 4:00).

I am of the mind set that the best teachers are those who not only work hard on their day-to-day classroom teaching but also continue to keep up with pedagogical ideas, theories, new technologies and what other teachers are doing in their classrooms. When I talk to other teachers on Twitter or at conferences they tend to fit in with this description and in turn tend to be innovative in their practice, open to new ideas and are ready to discuss and share their opinion about education. Reading, for me, is an integral part of this dialogue. It is important to be informed.

2. Make sure one of my lessons is not teacher directed.

Two issues here. 1. Teaching from the front of the classroom (lecture style) is a sure fire way to kill creativity, learning and can lead very quickly to behavioural issues. 2. Teaching from the front of the classroom is a sure fire way to drain yourself of energy and enthusiasm for what you are teaching. At the beginning of each week I review what I have planned to teach and then set about planning into each of my days a lesson (with a different class each day) where, after sharing the learning intentions and explaining what is to be achieved, I shut up and spend the majority of the lesson sat with my students helping and supporting them with their learning.

I use these lessons in a variety of ways, here are a couple of examples:

  • Targeted support: I will group the class by ability and select a group to work with. During the lesson I will dedicate my time to that group – putting trust in the other students to get on and complete the work unaided. Some of the ways that I ensure the students are engaged in the work is by giving them a choice of what to do, in turn giving them ownership of their learning. I usually also set some sort of feedback exercise (not necessarily with me involved) where they are being relied upon to provide information. This allows me to then focus my time on the students I have decided to offer some more personal support to.
  • Assessment: I believe it is important to assess students work with them so that they can understand the process and what I am looking for. If certain students have been making the same errors repeatedly I will use these non-teacher led lessons to sit with them and will mark their work throughout the lesson with them, almost as a form of 1-2-1 (directed) learning. As they try to tackle the ideas or skills they have been struggling with I can address them and get them to work through, making corrections. This is time consuming and I don’t get around to all of the students in a single lesson but the level of learning and progress that takes place is very high. Over the course of the year every student who needed this level of support will have gotten it.

To some this may not seem completely fair and that some students may not get the same level of personal input from me. However, I do not have a problem with this and even tell my classes at the beginning of the year that some of them will get more out of me than others. What I also explain though is that I am not the fountain of all knowledge, that I will help them to understand where to look for answers so that they can solve problems for themselves. I also explain that for some of them I will simply be a facilitator, for others they will need my knowledge and expertise. They are all starting at different points and the better I know them, the better I can adapt the way that I support them as individuals.

3. Stop and take a break.

I make sure that I use either the 20 minute break time or the 50 minute lunch time each day to stop and switch off from what I have been doing and am going to be doing that day. Where possible I try to do this at lunch however, I teach during lunch time on a Friday. Why do I do this? Becuase, education is my career but it does not define me and I am certainly not going to let it kill me. Teaching is intense. Particularly when you are dedicated. Therefore, it is important to give yourself a mental break. I achieve this in a variety of ways. I may simply sit somewhere in silence; other times I may sit and read or surf the net; and on some occasions I will go sit with others and catch up on the gossip. Whatever, I do I try to make sure that it has nothing to do with school.

To those teachers who say “I simply have no time to take a break”, I say: “you are doing something wrong then!” The most important thing to learn as a teacher is how to do each of the many different tasks that make up your day in both the most effective but least time consuming manner. This could be:

  • using ‘assessment stickers’ that can be filled in with a few letters, numbers or ticks instead of writing out long paragraphs at the end of a student’s work.
  • keeping an electronic mark book instead of a paper one – easily copied for use with other classes.
  • setting extended homework projects that challenge your students but do not require that you are mark homework every couple of days.
  • using peer assessment more often to make your students more critical learners while lightening your marking load.
  • to collaborate with someone else on a scheme of work. You will not have to produce every single resource and your students will benefit from the ideas of two teachers, not just one.

There are many ways to cut down on your workload while ensuring that the learning in your classroom is engaging and effective. Putting just a few of these ideas in to practice would ensure that you have time to take that break. It is important to switch off. After all, you are only human contrary to popular belief! 🙂

Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog!

“Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog!” or to those of us who speak English: “It’s worth taking a look at this blog!” Thank you to Jan Webb for including me in her list of 10 blogs that are worth taking a look at.

If you are included below and wish to take part in the project; simply copy the image from above and the title of this post. Make a new post on your own blog; including them, and your list of the 10 blogs you think others should take a look at.

Okay. On with my list:

Doug Belshaw is an inspiration to many of us who marvel at his insane levels of productivity! His blog is always insightful, always useful and being someone who loves clean aesthetic design, his blog is beautiful to look at/read. Doug and his blog were one of the final catalysts that led to me writing my own blog and I have tried to borrow some of those design aesthetics in putting together my blog.

Richard Byrne seems to be a man on a mission to catalogue and provide his PLN with an entire library of educational tools, apps, software and websites; keeping them innovating in the classroom until the end of time. He is the most prolific blogger in my Google Reader. Simply awesome!

Tom Barrett quickly became one of my heroes when I joined Twitter. He will retweet you, recommend you and help you get your PLN off the ground. His posts centre around educational technology posting about great apps and tools. However, as a leader in the edtech community, the true worth in Tom’s blog comes from his ideas and thoughts about edtech itself and the pedagogy involved. To see what I mean check out this post called “Whispering Change”.

James Clay‘s blog is another great edtech read, particularly his series of posts titled “100 ways to use a VLE”. As an avid user of my schools VLE (Moodle) I find these posts exceptionally useful whether they introduce a new idea, reinforce something I have already been doing or remind of something I had forgotten about. This brings me nicely to the next two blogs which are also Moodle related.

Ian Usher is Buckinghamshire’s eLearning co-ordinator and helped set up our VLE. He is a “Moodle” afficinadao and his blog tends to centre around this – exploring the use of Moodle across a series of schools which he has worked. He also blogs on other edtech related ideas, pedagogy and tools. And as an added bonus, if you subscribe to his blog feed you will also get regular updates from his delicious links.

Kristian Still is someone I have gotten to know recently; he, being directly involved in this years Moodle Moot. (You can read his guest posts featured on Moodle Monthly about the #mootuk10 here: Day 1 and here: Day 2) Kristain posts regularly on a wide variety of education related areas including edtech, leadership and 21st Century Learning – a topic that is if great personal interest to me as it has been at the forefront of my thinking and classroom practice for the last few years. His writing style serves him well, creating clear and informative posts with a personal conversational tone.

David Mitchell‘s blog is really interesting as he is simply not afraid to try out new and innovative ideas inside and outside of the classroom. Search back through the posts to see how he is getting on with using mobile technology in the classroom, Cover It Live, Voicethread for peer assessment, Twitter and class blogging amongst other things. Reading about his methodology and his sheer willingness to give it a go serves as a constant reminder that you must not stay stagnant as an educator. You must keep looking for ways to improve the learning for your students.

Dai Barnes writes on edtech, pedagogy and innovation. His posts are always stimulating and, like several of the other educators I have included in this list, he is leading the way in thinking about 21st Century Education. His blog is well structured to allow you to find information on key areas of interest including Moodle, eLearning and mobile technology.

Chickensaltash is a great educator who waxes lyrical on day to day learning, edtech and the 21st Century Classroom. His posts regularly end up in my Instapaper account to read later as the guy can write and write and write! Therefore, I often need to save them till I have more time to read them and digest the ideas within.

I have included the Instapaper Blog in this list as Instapaper is my favourite web app of all time. It is integral to both my web work flow and personal productivity. It was the second web app that I used Fluid to turn into a desktop based app and the excellent, regularly updated iPhone app has become my most used app on my iPod touch. You can read my post about creating desktop apps with Fluid (including Instapaper) here. Their recent posts have included many updates on the development of their iPad app which looks stunning…check out the pics in this post. If you love design simplicity like I do you will love the way this app looks!

And that’s it; 10 blogs I think you should take a look at. Please leave comments if you wish and as always you can contact me on Twitter @jamesmichie.

#edread – Ideas & Values

edread wordle

While resources, websites and apps are helpful tools I am firmly of the belief that it is the attitude and values that you take into the classroom with you that will have the greatest impact on whether you can engage your students in reading.

Here is a compendium of ideas and values shared by the wonderful members of my Twitter PLN that you can use to help your students engage in reading:

  • “Set kids free to read”
  • “Recognise everything that they read” – e.g. Science text book, comics, the web
  • “Make sure kids are aware of all the things they read”
  • “Read in front of your students”
  • “Read to your students”
  • “Read the books you love”
  • “Use graphic novels”
  • “Use e-books”
  • “Take them to the library”
  • “Take them to the library regularly”
  • “Talk about books in class”
  • “Get students to review and recommend books”
  • “Drop everything and read”
  • “Make time to read”
  • “Let them read what they want”
  • “Let them sit on the floor and read”
  • “Keep spare books in your room – let the students read/borrow them”
  • “Encourage them to read about what they are interested in”
  • “Show them different ways of picking books”
  • “Say its okay if they don’t want to read today – let them research instead – its a type of reading too!”
  • “Create a culture of reading”
  • “Make sure they can access non-fiction texts”
  • “Encourage students to read aloud”
  • “Encourage them to read in groups”
  • “Don’t forget films!”
  • “Create book displays”
  • “Get authors in school”
  • “Get students to keep reading journals”
  • “For some reading needs to be challenging”
  • “Expose them to a wide variety of texts”
  • “Ask students to buy/download books – ownership helps them value it”
  • “Encourage them to explore reading”
  • “Be enthusiastic”
  • “Don’t be a reading snob”
  • “Any text will do! As long as they are reading”
  • “Read well – make books come to life”

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the #edread discussion.  I’m not going to post on this topic for a while but I will add resources to the main #edread page as they are shared on Twitter.

Remember you can see all of the tweets here and all of the resources that have been shared here.

Image created using Wordle.

#edread or “e-dread”?

edread

Maybe the key to getting a good discussion going on Twitter is picking the right hash tag? Perhaps others are misreading #edread as “e-dread” as Steve Gillott (@stevegillott) so comically put it.  #e-dread could be used as a hash tag to describe a student’s feelings about reading or even some teachers’ feelings about teaching! Whether the hash tag is clear or not, there has been more activity this week with some great ideas and resources shared.

Remember you can read all the tweets here and any and all resources, websites etc that have been shared have been compiled here.  Thanks to everyone that has contributed so far, please keep the tweets coming!

This weeks tweets:

#edread – An Update! (Spring Is In The Air)

blossom

The #edread discussion continues to blossom and has now (through some pro-activity) begun to bear fruit in school.  Not being one to wait for the discussion to have fully formed, I began sharing links and ideas that had been tweeted with my colleagues straight away.  I also shared a reading lesson that I had completed spontaneously the other week (read the blog post about it here).  Three other teacher followed my lead and did a similar lesson with their classes!

The outcome of the e-mails, sharing of links and ideas, and my constant chatter about reading resulted in a meeting between our Learning Research Centre manager (Andrea), a colleague (Jo) who has responsibility within English for Years 7 and 8 and I.  The purpose? To evaluate and improve the KS3 reading program and to look into ideas that can raise the profile of reading amongst KS4 students.

I came away from the meting truly inspired – both by the range of ideas that came out of it but also by the fact that a key component in this discussion had been the resources and ideas that had been shared by my Twitter PLN.  Crowdsourcing really is one of the most effective techniques to aid learning – Twitter simply makes it better by broadening the field.

From the meeting we have agreed to look in to / develop the following ideas:

For the last few years, at KS3, each class has had a weekly reading lesson. This year we introduced “shared reading” however I don’t feel that it was fully thought through.  The main problem being that the books we have to use have been around for some time and are not very appealing to our students.  Solution?  Andrea and Jo are going to research and compile a list of books that we could purchase (probably 6 copies of each) to use in reading lessons.  These are going to be new books, for different ability levels, by authors that are popular amongst 11-14 year olds; including graphic novels, comics, short stories, non-fiction texts and much more.  We agreed that “shared reading” was a good idea but that it would work better if we had more appealing texts and we could break the classes up into a wider range of groups.  I am sure that if we focus on variety and give the students more choice the shared reading experience will be far more effective.

This led on to a discussion about bringing the students into the LRC for their reading lessons.  As I mentioned earlier a few teachers have already followed my lead with this idea.  The English department used to do this regularly but it seems to have stopped happening.  Andrea the LRC manager wants it to become a more regular event (not just for English either).  We agreed that perhaps there should be a rota and that the students could be given a break from their “shared reading” lessons every 4/5 weeks by being brought into the LRC to explore the environment and to read whatever they want for pure pleasure.

As the meeting progressed I raised the idea of students “reviewing and recommending” books.  I suggested that recommendations or new-arrivals could be displayed on the computer screens when students log-in.  We also discussed setting up a LRC Blog so that Andrea could communicate with students and parents about what is happening in the LRC each term.  Students could review and recommend books on it and special events could be promoted.  This could be supported by more traditional methods like a notice board with reviews of books or recommendation slips stuck inside books by students when they return them after reading.

At KS4 Andrea suggested that we look at creating “reading lists” from curriculum areas.  This may work for KS4 students – if they have a passion for a subject they may choose to read more about it.  Wider reading is something that many of my KS5 students struggle with so introducing it at KS4 in an optional capacity may go someway to not only improving reading participation at KS4 but in turn help set expectations over reading at KS5.

We also discussed “Book Swap” which has already begun with Years 7 and 8 but I feel should be a school wide scheme.  I believe that if this is done right it can significantly raise the profile of reading around the school.  I am planning to do a “book-drive” to get teachers, parents and students to donate books to get the “Book Swap” off on the right foot.  I also wish for the “Book Swap” events to be organised by KS4/5 students – this will hopefully generate more interest if it is being promoted by students rather than just teachers.

The final idea that we discussed was “Drop everything and read” – the idea being that the whole school, at a designated time each week, literally drops whatever they are doing and read for 20 minutes.  Now, logistically this is the most challenging idea and the obvious answer (at my school) would be for this to happen during one an extended Tutor period.  However, I think it would have a much bigger profile and a more significant effect if it happened during lesson time.  The kids would be made to sit up and think about reading if in the middle of their Technology lesson they had to down their tools and pick up a book.  I will need to get my Principal on board with this one!  If anyone has any ideas about how I might convince her and the rest of the school to giving this a go please comment, e-mail me or tweet me @jamesmichie.  I think this has huge potential but will take some serious willpower to get it off the ground!

The meeting was really productive and affirmed my decision to put reading at the front of my blogging / Twitter agenda.  Maybe it’s the time of year – it did feel like spring this week and I really feel that the #edread discussion is beginning to take bloom.

Student involvement:

I have also now decided that I do want to get the students involved in the discussion.  I particularly want to hear from KS4 students – those who do read and those who don’t.  I want to understand what reading means and represents to them?  Why some have continued reading for pleasure?  And why other have not?  I am trying to decide between using an open forum on the VLE, using the “choice” module  again on the VLE or using Survey Monkey. I have decided against using Twitter as it would be difficult to get a representative response due to the fact that I have limited control over who is on Twitter and who is not.  I will therefore use a method that all students can access.

The latest #edread tweets:

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the discussion so far.  Remember you can see a full archive of the tweets here and there is a dedicated page here.Image by kittykatfish on Flickr.