Half Term Report

“Satisfactory Progress…”

I’ve been pleased with the impact that using OneNote has had on my teaching so far this year, but what is the next step?

Over the half term holiday, I’ve been reading about Metacognition.  Specifically, I’ve read Thinking about Thinking by Stephen Lockyer and Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning ed. Kaplan et al.

My sense is that my students will benefit from using some of the strategies put forward in these books and I’d like to spend some of our time together working on how we think about our physics.  I’d like my students to regularly ask themselves 3 questions:

1. What did you do?

(Did you re-read your notes? How did you set up the problem? How did you present your work? Did you check your answers?)

1. What difficulties did you have?

(Where did you lose marks?  Setting up the problem? Arithmetic errors? Missing units? Inappropriate significant figures? Explaining your answers?)

1. What would you do differently next time?

(What did other students do that you didn’t? What have you learnt about the process by doing this work?)

How am I going to do this?

My plan is to use the ‘Record Audio’ feature and enter into a dialogue with the students.  When I mark their work, I’ll be recording my comments as I go.  Very simply, I’ll just ask students to reflect on their marked work using the 3 questions above.  Hopefully they will also do this by recording themselves, but I’d be happy with whatever method they choose.

Interestingly, one of the things that has frustrated me this term has been the lack of response from students to feedback.  I have repeated myself many times regarding students adding units to answers and ensuring that they have put their answers to the correct number of significant figures, but mistakes continue to be made.  My aim is to see if encouraging metacognition from my students will reduce the occurrence of such errors.

Paperless in Crowthorne part two

Three weeks in…

Three weeks into term and I’ve had mixed success with my paperless classroom.  Proof of the old adage that you get out what you put in – the class that I prepared best for (my higher level IB set) seem to have embraced the technology with gusto.  My other set, a year 11 group, have been more reluctant and I’m facing a few battles with students who are not keen to toe the line.

I will reflect on the difficulties with my Year 11’s in a subsequent post, but first to the successes.  My Lower 6^th set are made up of a mix of students: some have been at the school for three years and mostly have Macbooks (from our BYOD days), and some are new L6th entries and mostly have MS Surfaces.  The latter group have generally embraced the ability to digitally ink, and the former mostly work on paper and then take photos to upload it onto the system.

The overall sense from this set is very positive indeed.  They like the fact that they get feedback on their work much quicker than normal, and that all their notes and resources are in one place. Our use of OneNote is now beginning to dissolve into the background of learning physics, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Lastly, I’d like to share the experience of one student who has been particularly impressive.  She has the uncanny ability to take my scrawl and turn it into a work of art.  Here’s what I tend to produce:

And she turns it into this:

Paperless in Crowthorne

First a bit of history.

I’ve been using OneNote to organise the notes that I give out during lessons for a few years now. The key trio of an inkable tablet, OneNote and wireless projection (e.g. using Miracast or Apple TV) means that the concept of a mobile whiteboard has arrived. At the same time we have ripped out all remaining Smartboards and have replaced them with wide pull down screens which reveal traditional whiteboards for when a good old fashioned pen is the best solution.

Having experimented with using this solution as a simple replacement for note-taking, it was an easy step to embrace the OneNote Classroom App that was released last year. This made an entirely paperless classroom something that is more than just a pipedream. The advantages from a pedagogical perspective have been extolled previously in this blog. Suffice to say that I enjoyed flexible marking (and the students benefitted from a faster turnaround of their work) and we had fun experimenting with a more collaborative approach in the classroom. The final result was a little messy, however, since I adopted it halfway through the course and never gave much thought to the outcome…I just played really.

The future.

This year I am determined to use what I have learnt to make an even more positive experience for the students. I have spent the summer preparing all my resources for my IB Higher Level Physics set. I’ve planned out all the homework tasks that I’ll be setting over the year and have prepared worked solutions (to share at a later date!)

I’ve pulled together resources from the Online Curriculum Centre to share with the students so that they have everything they could need available to them. My aim for this, more than anything else, was to get buy-in from the students. I’ve often found that they can be the most conservative about adopting new technology, so I hope this will allow them to see the advantage that it will bring them. I’ll be blogging about how it goes, but my aims are to focus on three areas:

1. Audio marking
2. Tagging of important formulae and definitions
3. Exploring the possibilities of collaboration

BYOD – the Wacky Races?

Bring Your Own Device. What a lovely idea. And with the tools needed for work increasingly going online, it certainly looks like the future. On the surface, this concept democratises technology. We all bring whatever we like to class and each get on with things in our own happy world where anything goes. And it’s cheap. Spend £40k per year on a Wi-Fi network and tell people to bring something to connect. Bob’s your uncle. No more expensive computer rooms to maintain, no more desktops to replace…what’s not to like?

Well, three things in my view.

Firstly, you are asking pupils to bring any device – and they do exactly this. Some bring the latest Macbook Air and swan around making everyone else jealous (the peer pressure of needing the latest device is another issue entirely). Others bring a tiny tablet that is virtually impossible to type on. Others bring a hand-me-down laptop with keys missing and more viruses than programmes. In short, the lack of standardisation leads to a vast differential in learning experiences.

Secondly, it means that the teachers in the classroom are confronted with as many different machines as there are pupils in the class. A lesson with an IT element becomes an exercise in technological Russian roulette…whose machine will be the first to have a problem? And when it does, the chances of that teacher being able to offer the first line of support, that they might in a more standardised world, is dramatically reduced. Many teachers are often quite reasonable with IT – especially when it is familiar to them. Take away this familiarity and they become helpless again. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for the IT Helpdesk itself.

Lastly, there is a clear issue with knowing who is on the system. Here you have a choice – a simple ‘pupils’ network, where people are essentially anonymous, or a more complicated authentication process, which is likely to be clunky for certain devices which are not optimised for your particular system.

So BYOD to me feels a bit like Bernie Ecclestone saying to the F1 teams: “Bring whatever car you like”. You’ll find that what happens is more like the Wacky Races than a finely tuned professional event. And, more than that, from the perspective of support, it would be like him saying: “Bring any car…but you must all get them serviced in the same garage”. Crazy.

And that’s why we’re moving from BYOD to CYOD. Choose Your Own Device. From a list that we feel is optimised for our system, and that staff will be familiar with (because we are issuing them with the same devices). Slightly less democratic, maybe, but much more efficient. Much like Formula One, really.

Ethics for Ed-Tech

Why do we do anything? Is it because we ought to, because we must, or because we want to? How do we decide between two or more options?

These are questions that have been discussed for much of history. Could asking analogous questions in relation to our use of technology in the classroom help us decide where, and in what, to invest time and money?

“The greatest good for the greatest number”. A bastardisation of what Bentham and JS Mill intended when they shaped utilitarianism, but this will serve a purpose as a definition.

My experience is that often those leading IT in schools will be ‘Technology utilitarians’:

“Act such as to have the maximum people using the most technology”. Smart boards in every classroom. An IPad for all. Class sets of laptops in big trolleys. We’ve all seen them…

The problem with this is that neither of the two possible outcomes from this are that appealing. Let’s say the school are successful in this. We’ll be full of gadgets, but there will be no focus on the learning that they enable. The teachers who understand the technology will teach lessons that are impressive on the surface, but the tech will mask the learning (or lack of it). Those who don’t or can’t access it will have lots of expensive kit gathering dust. Conversely if the school is unsuccessful, we’ll be ploughing more and more resources into the IT pot – often those shouting loud enough will get the toys, but the school will miss its strategic goals.

So is there an alternative?

How about being a “Learning Utilitarian”?

“Act such as to have the maximum learning by the most people”. If technology helps you to do this, then great. If it doesn’t…don’t bother. As long as everyone in the school is focused on this aim, then the technology that is introduced will be aligned to improving the school. Equipment won’t become dusty because it will have been bought with a specific learning goal in mind. I also suspect that fewer people will opt out. Even the most technophobic teacher will want to try something that has been proved to benefit learning.

And above all, we should remember to be Kantian about this. “Do unto others”. Never propose to introduce something that you wouldn’t be prepared to have in your own classroom.

Why it just might be different this time…

Another advance in EdTech? Another cynically arched eyebrow. I don’t blame you, really. There have been more ‘watershed’ moments in EdTech than England teams on the brink of winning the World Cup. Like a shiny new bauble on the Christmas tree, advances in technology seem to attract the rapt attention of the educational community. Months later they are mostly revealed as the white elephant that they are – expensive replacements of traditional methods that add nothing whilst always harbouring that possibility of technical failure. How many of us have turned away from a ‘smartboard’ in disgust at another alignment error, only to pick up the whiteboard pen to continue our lesson. The slight irritation of the failure to make the technology work is quickly replaced with a new found relaxation that you can get on with teaching.

Up until two months ago, using OneNote in the classroom fell firmly into the category of technology replacing traditional methods (perhaps with a little enhancement, but certainly not with any transformation). Using OneNote with a tablet and wireless projection means that you can essentially move around the classroom and anything you write goes on the screen. Enhancement isn’t bad though, and here are some ways that the ‘basic’ OneNote does just that:
• By freeing yourself from the front of the classroom, you can engage more easily with the students. As you write a note, you can really see if the students are understanding what you’re saying.
• By sharing the notebook with the class, they have access to the notes at any point – missed lessons etc. are less problematic.

But things changed a couple of months ago with the release of the OneNote Classroom Creator app. With the simple ability to assign permissions to different folders, this can now be used as an entire virtual classroom and using the online version of OneNote, students can access this on any device. They have their own folders to work within, and can collaborate together with a safe repository behind which to save their own personal work. How does this transform teaching?
• The Collaboration area means that students can either work together in real time, or post work for feedback from others. Here’s a short snippet from some collaborative work that students were doing on how a light bulb works

• They can also collaborate outside of the classroom without needing to meet up.
• Teaching can become paperless. With all students posting work online, all you need to mark a class set is your tablet. No more lost folders. An example here:

• This also transforms the speed at which feedback can be given. A student can be set homework, do it that evening, and then have the feedback within 24 hours.

In short there are two ways this this really transforms the classroom. Two words: feedback and collaboration. Effective feedback needs to be timely and collaboration needs to be safe and easy. Both of these are enabled with the classroom creator app.
And what would make it even more effective?
• As a physics teacher, you often want students to be able to write equations. This is difficult without the ability to ink on screens and most don’t have tablets with this capability. They can always work on paper and then upload to OneNote, but it isn’t as smooth as you’d like.

 

 

Visible Learning Conference 2014

Visible Learning Conference with John Hattie…Know Thy Impact

This conference drew delegates from around the world, for an analysis of what is rapidly becoming a global movement. With hundreds of people in the room, Hattie introduced his 3 themes: understanding learning, measuring learning and promoting learning. Throughout the day the reality was that there were other pervading ideas: the SOLO taxonomy was extolled as the holy grail (as a way of moving learning from ‘surface’ to ‘deep’), Dweck’s growth mindset received its’ fair share of positive press, and the benefits of making students struggle (in ‘the learning pit’) was mentioned time and again. Ideas like VAK were given a grilling (“If you hear the name ‘kinaesthetic’ you know someone is talking b******s”).
Keynote 1
In his keynote speech, Hattie made it clear that the job of the teacher is to facilitate the process of developing sufficient surface knowledge to then move to conceptual understanding. And this is teachable. The structure that this hangs off is the SOLO taxonomy: One idea, many ideas, relate ideas, extend ideas (the first two are surface knowledge, the latter two are deep). Another way of looking at this is that students should be able to recall and reproduce, apply basic skills and concepts, think strategically and then extend their thinking (by hypothesizing etc.)

So that’s surface and deep. Next Hattie described knowledge in terms of the ‘Near’ and the ‘Far’, i.e. closely related contexts or further afield relations – he proposed that our classrooms are almost always focused around near transfer. Hattie finished his keynote speech by briefly outlining 6 of the most effective learning strategies:
1. Backward design and success criteria. ES=0.54 (with ‘Outlining and Transforming’ the most striking at 0.85, although he didn’t really say what this actually meant). More straightforwardly, worked examples are at 0.57 – for me, as a physics teacher, this is critical. Finally, concept mapping entered the hit parade with an ES of 0.64. Hattie then went on to discuss flipped learning, which he seemed quite positive about, perhaps because the effect size of homework in primary schools is zero – which he spun to be a positive: “What an incredible opportunity to improve it”.
2. Investment and deliberate practice. ES=0.51. Top of the table here was ‘practice testing’ (even when there is limited feedback). Hattie thinks that the key to this is that students are investing in effort. “We need to get rid of the language of talent”, including setting etc. Dweck’s mindset work was repeatedly referenced during the day, including an interesting idea about the dangers of putting final work on the walls – perhaps we should decorate our rooms with works in progress? But how do we make the practice that they do ‘deliberate’. Another author repeatedly referenced was Graham Nuthall and his work on needing 3 opportunities to see a concept before we learn it. I thought that it was interesting that Nuthall was given such a glowing report when his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’ includes relatively little in the way of attempting to measure and quantify his conclusions. His conclusion to this section was the catchphrase: “How do we teach kids to know what to do when they don’t know what to do?”
3. Rehearsal and highlighting. ES=0.40. Some strategies here: rehearsal and memorization, summarization, underlining, re-reading, note-taking, mnemonics, matching style of learning (in order of effect size, with the latter at ES=0.17). The key here is to get kids to get sufficient surface knowledge so they can use their (limited) working memory to do the far learning. I thought it was interesting that matching learning styles gets such a bad press when it does, according to this, have at least a small positive impact.
4. Teaching self-regulation. ES=0.53. Reciprocal teaching – not just knowing, but checking that they know why.
5. Self-talk. ES=0.59. Self-verbalization and self-questioning.
6. Social Learning. ES=0.48. The top effect is via classroom discussion (at 0.82) (Hattie stressed that this should not be a Q&A, but an actual discussion).”When you are learning something and you’re still not sure, then reinforcement from classroom discussion is the biggest effect”…but if the discussion is of something wrong, then people are more likely to remember it. The most memorable quote here was that “80% of the feedback in the classroom is from peers…and 80% is wrong”.

Some Q&A
• What about Direct instruction? ES=0.6. The important thing is sitting down with colleagues and planning a series of teachers. And then jointly discussing how you are going to assess it. “If you go out and buy the script, you’ve missed the point”. Constructivist teaching only has an effect size of 0.17. Guide on the side leaves the kids without self-regulation behind. This resonated with the work of David Didau (the learning spy). Interestingly, ‘problem solving’ has negligible effect size, but ‘problem based teaching’ has a large ES.
• And what about IT? Technology is the revolution that’s been around for 50 years and has an ES=0.3. Teachers use technology for consumption purposes, e.g. using a phone instead of a dictionary. That’s why the ES is so low. If you use technology in pairs, then the ES goes up. Why? Because they communicate and problem solve; i.e. use it for knowledge production. Three linked concepts were mentioned: The power of two. Dialogue not monologue. The power of listening. Compare this to the quip: “Kids learn very quickly that they come to school to watch you work”.
• Feedback? The question of feedback is not about how much you give, but how much you receive. Most of the feedback is given, but not received. Students want to know “Where to next?”, so we should show another way, giving direction. This is incredibly powerful. “How do teachers listen to the student feedback voice, to understand what has been received?” This is at the van-guard of Hattie’s current research.
• Error management? Typically errors are seen as maladaptive…and teachers create that climate: solving the error, redirecting to another student, returning the correction to the student who made the mistake, ignore the error (although hardly ever). Hattie sees errors as the essence of learning. He mentioned the teaching resilience as an example of best practice.
Session 1. The Visible Learner with Deb Masters
In her work with John they have developed a model for measuring the effect of feedback and asked the question, how do you take the research and put it into a process in the schools? She called this ‘Visible learning plus’. We were asked to come up with our ideal pupil characteristics: questioning, resilient, reflective, risk takers. And the least ideal: not proactive, defeatist. No surprises there, then.
Deb defined visible learning as “when teachers SEE learning thought he eyes of the student and when students SEE themselves as their own teachers.” So the job is to collect feedback about how the students are learning.
We also need to develop assessment capable learners (ES=1.44). What does this mean? Students should know the answers to the questions…Where am I going? How am I doing? Where to next? Students should be able to tell you what they will get in up-coming assessments.
This workshop slightly lost its way towards the end as time ran out. We quickly looked at the use of rubrics to develop visible learners, and I was struck by the links with the MYP assessment structure.
She finished by looking at meta-rubrics and extolled Stonefields School as an exemplar of this in practice.
Session 2: SOLO Taxonomy with Craig Parkinson (lead consultant for Visible Learning in the UK)
This is based on the work of Biggs and Collis (1982) and was an interesting and practical session. Much of it was based on the ‘5 minute lesson plan’ (which I remain unconvinced about, despite liking the idea of focusing on a big question). The key is to design and plan for questions that will move students from surface to deep learning (one idea, several ideas, relate, expand). SOLO was the preferred model here, over the well-established Bloom taxonomy. I was sitting next to Peter DeWitt whose blog ‘Finding Common ground’ expands on this.
Session 3: Effective Feedback from Deb Masters
“If feedback is so important, how can we make sure that we get it right?” For feedback to be heard the contention was that you need “relational trust and clear learning intention”. I agreed with the former, but am less convinced by the latter. What do students say about effective feedback? “It tells me what to do next”. Nuthall was mentioned again – 80% is from other kids, and 80% is wrong. Why is there such a reliance on peer feedback? Students say that the best feedback is “Just in time and just for me”…and interaction with their peers is a good way of getting this.
Deb used the golf analogy to discuss the levels of feedback:
1. Self…praise (“cheerleading does not close the gap in performance”).
2. Task…holding the club etc. This is often where teacher talk features the most.
3. Process…what do you think you could do to hit the ball straighter?
4. Self-regulation…what do you need to focus on to improve your score?
The idea is to pick the right level at which to give the feedback…
Can we use the model to help the pupils to give each other and us feedback? I was particularly struck when one delegate from a large school in Bahrain suggested that they are experimenting with the use of Twitter to get instant feedback about the teaching in real time!
Keynote 2: James Nottingham: visible learning as a new paradigm for progress.
James started with a critique of the current labelling practices that occur in schools. For example, every single member of the Swedish parliament is a first born child, and 71% of September births get in top sets compared with only 25% of August births. “Labelling has gone bananas…if you label pupils then you affect their expectation of their ability to learn”.

Eccles (2000): Application = Value x Expectation

Again, progress should be valued rather than achievement. How do we go about getting this…what is the process involved?

The ‘learning pit’ was discussed (Challenging Learning, 2010). Often teachers try to make things easier and easier…the ‘curling’ teacher (push the stone in the right direction and then desperately clean the ice to make it easier for it to go further). I liked that analogy. James (rightly in my view) said that our job is to make things difficult for pupils, after all “Eureka” means “I’ve found it”. I’m sure his book will expand on this, but his basic structure was:

1. Concept
2. Conflict and cognitive dissonance
3. Construct
Some thoughts from the day

• The key message that came through from the whole conference was that everything has to hang off the learning objectives / the learning intentions. Is this just because their research requires a measurement of outcome? This is performance, but not necessarily learning. The question is whether the interventions that Hattie has found apply to effective classroom performance and learning…or just performance? I was struck by the contrast between this and what Didau talks about.
• Throughout the day there was an interesting use of instant feedback – point to one corner of the room if you know about x and the other corner is you don’t.
• Hattie recognizes that we are extremely good at the transfer of ‘near’ knowledge, but not good at the ‘far’…and that is ok: we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
• “It’s a sin to go into a class and watch them teach…because all you do is end up telling them how to teach like you”. You should go into the class to watch the impact that you have.
• What does impact look like at your school? Stop the debate about privileging teaching.
o Can we plot a graph of achievement against progress? This can allow you to make interventions with the drifters.
o How do we measure progress?
o Do we have enough nuancing of assessment levels?
o Hattie: “What does it mean to have a year’s growth / progress? We have to show what excellence looks like. Proficiency, sure, but the key is the link with progress.”

“Visible learning into action” will be out April – June next year to show how this might be put into practice in schools

Be More Dog…

You’ve all seen the adverts telling us to ‘Be more dog’. This got me thinking…is there anything we do in the classroom where we would actually benefit from being more like a dog? A silly idea, can we actually get something serious from it?

Be more dog?

Praise
I’ve recently taught my dog, Lucy, to walk to heel. I never really set out to do this and, if I’m honest, I didn’t really think she’d be able to do it (she’s a youngish cocker spaniel and gets distracted by everything). But one day there she was, trotting by my side and I started praising her, so she kept doing it and I kept praising her. We got to my classroom and I started teaching my 4th form. Whilst I’d like to think I’m quite a positive teacher, it was striking that I never reached anywhere near the levels of praise and enthusiasm for their physics (or their behaviour which we just sort of assume will be perfect at our place). I used to have a colleague who was famous for being really enthusiastic. I often wondered if giving too much praise was just as dangerous as giving too little…now I am wondering if I should try to be more like her. Too much might lead to the praise lacking impact and authenticity, too little can demotivate. How do we know how much is enough? Perhaps we should go with Losada’s theory that you should give 5.6 pieces of good feedback to every piece of negative feedback (or is the pupil – teacher relationship more like a marriage where the ideal ratio is 7-1?!)

Simple Pleasures
I love the version of the advert that has the dog hanging his head out of the window of a car. My own dog’s enjoyment comes from sprinting through the woods catching the trail of a deer or chasing a squirrel. When she’s like this, virtually nothing can distract her from her own sensory experience. In stark contrast, school is often a place where things like (variously) hard graft, concentration and punctuality are valued. Are there any situations where we see similar levels of unadulterated joy from our lessons as a dog can get from simply being allowed to run free? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of ‘flow’ immediately springs to mind: a state of being that sportsmen often discuss and is characterised by losing track of time and participating in a challenge that is pitched at the ‘goldilocks’ level – just at the pinnacle of achievability. Is there any way that I could achieve this with my students in the physics classroom? Perhaps rather than focusing on preparing what I will do in a lesson, I should entirely concentrate on setting tasks that will challenge pupils at just the right level. It seems obvious, but the difficulty comes with doing this for all the different students in the class without spending the entirety of the previous night writing personalised questions. Nevertheless, it is certainly something I would aspire to and is reason to reject the idea that we can all teach from the same ‘stock’ of lesson plans or just set the same questions from a textbook year on year.

Slavish devotion
People often remark that my relationship with Lucy is bordering on the unhealthy. Much as I love her, nothing can compare to the utter devotion and loyalty that she shows towards me. Now, I’m not suggesting that we would want this from our students. That would be a little weird. However, we’ve all had those bosses or teachers for whom we would go the extra mile for. What is it that inspires such feelings? I guess the first thing is that it is never a one-way situation (unlike, perhaps, some dogs and their masters) but one where the teacher has shown a deep level of commitment to the student’s development. Beyond that, there is the almost indecipherable combination of personal qualities that the best leaders show: warmth, integrity and selflessness being just three.

Just three ideas about how we can get inspiration to be better at teaching from the most unlikely sources. More to follow next time.

References
(n.d.). Retrieved from http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/03/the-ideal-praise-to-criticism/