Posted: January 14th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Rebooting my teaching | No Comments »
As I start to ask around I start to think I might be more out on a limb with this project based thing that I had thought.
Here’s the thinking that got me out on that branch.
1. I can’t possibly teach them everything. History is too big!
2. Therefore it’s more important that they leave me enthusiatic and able to find out more for themsleves. Hopefully being slightly critical of everything they read and hear
3. I remember virtually nothing from my school lessons. This is also the case for almost everyone
4. My students recall very little in the way of ‘facts’ from year to year.
5. This presents me with two options.
a. cover far less, recap far more and test more often to ensure a smaller number of things stick. However, this is incompatible with #1 on this list. Which leaves me with -
b Let go of the obsession about whether every student can recall everything I tell them.
This leaves me in a place where I can launch students projects, sit back and help them learn, rather than worrying about if my teaching is sticking.
Posted: January 14th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Rebooting my teaching | Tags: immersion, immersion wall, reboot | 2 Comments »
One of the key things for me as I move towards a more project based approach is to try and get the student immersed in the period we’re studying a little more. So this week I tried an introductory lesson to Elizabeth I – had a massive pile of textbooks in the middle of the room, and after a few minutes talking a little bit about what we already knew, students set off to complete a fact file for display. They could choose what to focus on and how it was to be presented, but they had to get them completed by the end of the lesson. I wandered around discussing searching strategies with students and talking about what they had found, but at the end while I had some great pieces of work I didn’t think I’d got any sense of Elizabeth or the Elizabethian period. Thinking cap back on.
Cue tonight’s idea. Don’t know if it’ll work, but I’ll try it the next time I start a new topic.
The immersion wall consists of a long sheet of paper (probably wallpaper backing paper) with 50 (ish) questions on. It gets pinned up along the wall and the class need to find the answers to as many as they can. They add them to the wall with sticky notes? or sheets of A5? coloured paper. Initially with pins – later we can stick down the best answers (having discussed what they are)
Follow up homework – find me one picture that sums up what we’ve been studying. Bring in a picture for the wall, and write down why you chose it.
Advantages -
- Class effort will hopefully get more discussion and talking.
- Keeps the longer term visual element, but is more focussed.
- Maintains element of freedom but allows me to highlight key issues and ideas more directly
Help me out here – what have I missed. What could go wrong? How could this be even better?
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Resources | Tags: resources, sharing | No Comments »
My very first teaching website had a section of my resources on it and it’s been on the to do list for ages. I’m a great believer in sharing resources. Not because these are great, but because I can’t help thinking if we all shared a few of the things we create then all our lives would be a little easier.
So, I’ve finally got round to updating a section of this site. There’s a whole load of history stuff on there, some general resources and a few few classroom posters. I’ll try to keep it updated fairly regularly. Everything is Creative Commons licenced. Please help yourself, and if you improve anything (not too hard I’m sure), please think about sharing it back. I’ll be happy to host any files you adapt.
You can find the page easily by bookmarking mrstacey.org.uk/resources
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Blog | Tags: Lighting Candles, Resolutions | No Comments »
Happy (belated) New Year!
I don’t really do New Year Resolutions, but this year I’ve found a few ideas that I’m going to use to guide my thoughts and actions.
The first is one of my favourite quotes:
“It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”.
The second is Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s Wish:
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
Read the full thing
here.
And with all those things in mind, I’ll be announcing the first candle tomorrow when we’re back at school – I’ll be organising a weekly get together for teachers to come and chat, share problems and ideas and make new connections. Inspired in part by Teachmeets, and by Richard Kennett’s
idea of ‘Teacheats’ in school. Hopefully it’ll be the first of many!
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Ponderings | Tags: assessment, feedback, Hattie | No Comments »
Although I haven’t read his new book (yet), I’ve been thinking quite a lot about John Hattie’s idea about giving feedback being the most effective tool in a teachers armory.
That seems to be drawing a growing number of people into ever increasingly sophisticed rubrics – breaking down responses and drawing up ladders that show students where they are and what their next target is. And I can see the attraction in that. I’ve tried it myself over the years, and it seems to be one of the ideas that has resurfaced in the recent National Curriculum Review in England
But I can’t quite square that with my growing belief that learning should be student centred, and the fact that my lessons are increasingly open for students to go an explore and make discoveries. Maybe I’m just not a good enough teacher yet, but I don’t know how to make an achievement ladder for that, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t get in the way. After all, a student who has mastered getting information from a simple source now needs to apply those skills to a trickier source, but I’m not sure how to level that, or turn it into a grid.
It was with this in mind I came across this quote that I’d bookmarked a little while ago:
The mistake I was making was seeing feedback as something teachers provided to students—they typically did not, although they made claims that they did it all the time, and most of the feedback they did provide was social and behavioral. It was only when I discovered that feedback was most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher that I started to understand it better. When teachers seek, or at least are open to, feedback from students as to what students know, what they understand, where they make errors, when they have misconceptions, when they are not engaged—then teaching and learning can be synchronized and powerful. Feedback to teachers helps make learning visible.
This is one I’m going to need to come back to, perhaps when I’ve got my hands on a copy of the book, but I think it’s going to be on my mind for a while!
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Reflecting on practice | Tags: evaluation, review | No Comments »
A few notes, as much for myself as anything else, about the various units from the last term.
Year 7
The lessons introducing the ideas and concepts of History are pretty much sorted now, although I need to look again at the assessment task. I’d like to replace the one shot written test with some kind of assessment (maybe online) that gives students multiple goes until they get it right. And then maybe again a few months later to still if they’ve still got those building blocks.
The Battle of Hastings stuff seemed to go well. The walk through was good – my room is now big enough to do it in there which helps. The chronology exercise was hit and miss – I need to provide an extra source for students to remind them of the events (maybe this video), and I’d like to try and get some kind of self-marking drag and drop activity rather than one that they need to wait to be marked.
Year 8
The Tudor life project had some real highlights. One group’s questions were excellent and I was pleased with the way they came back the following lesson having discovered that either they couldn’t find the answers, or they couldn’t make sense of what they found. The museum exhibits were great and there were some good and thoughtful evaluations. Next year I’d like to try and get them out to a museum if I can, even if it’s only on a Saturday.
The Tudor religion unit held together pretty well. The idea of starting with the gunpowder plot worked quite well, but as a guiding question (should be ban the celebration of the death of Guy Fawkes) it was too distant from the main focus of the lessons.
Year 9
Jack the Ripper went pretty well. It’s still not very PBL, but I think the order and focus of lessons was better this year, with more problem based stuff as a focus. Some really good essays at the end.
Who Do You Think You Are produced some great stories. As a project it works better with a wider choice of questions for students to investigate. The resources for the immigration project are better than before, but it still doesn’t have as much punch as I’d like. Perhaps it needs a more controversial question?
A Level
The more project based stuff definitely seems to be working with Yr 13 – I was really pleased with the ‘In Our Time’ discussions and the presentations using Google Docs.
Final thoughts to take through to next term
Find ways of making feedback as instant and meaningful as possible.
Posted: January 9th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Rebooting my teaching, Reflecting on practice | Tags: evaluation, reboot, review | No Comments »
This year I’ve been trying to ‘reboot’ my teaching with a more project / inquiry based approach.
This is another of those posts I’ve been meaning to write since the Oct half term, and in fact several draft existed, but I rejected either for being overly naval gazing or too glib.
Now, with a little more distance, how do I think I’ve done?
WWW
The most ‘different’ units have gone down the best, and that’s pleasing. It was also interesting to see from the students evaluations that little of this is going on elsewhere in the curriculum (or at least, that they’re aware of). I think I was expecting to find more.
Log books are starting to work. They got largely ignored in the first half term, but I’m starting to find them a useful way of regularly recapping (and hopefully consolidating) students learning
Online – Blog and Edmodo have gone down well. Blog in particular for KS3 students. Put together a quick 3 minute video reminder of how to write a recent essay for Yr 7 and got a very positive response, so will try more of this if I can.
EBI
I wish I’d set myself some success criteria – how do I know how well I’ve been doing if I didn’t know exactly what I wanted? – Something to come back to perhaps.
Online – Blog needs a new theme to better show off student work. And I need to get better and putting it up there. I also need to make sure I don’t slip out of the habit of posting the homework during the lesson. Leaving it until afterwards is almost always a recipe for disaster!
Merits – I’ve never been a massive fan of an system that promotes extrinsic motivation, but one my year 7 classes did bang me to right on the last week of term for more awarding enough merits. One of my targets for this half term.
I’ve got a few good ideas for projects for next term, around the idea of infographics. I also want to explore the idea of the SOLO taxonomy, but that might be one thing too many at this point – maybe one to come back to in the third term.
Posted: January 5th, 2012 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Presentations | Tags: digital classrooms, digital content, SAMR, submission, task and finish, wag | 2 Comments »
In September last year, the Education Minister Leighton Andrews announced a Task and Finish group to look into digital classroom teaching in Wales. We discussed a number of the issued raised in two special #addcym chats, but I was determined to make a submission myself. With the deadline looming, I’ve finally written it. I’ve included a link to this post in my submission to the group, so more than ever I’d love your comments below!
To the Review of Digital Classroom Teaching Task and Finish Group
I’m pleased to be able to make a submission to the Task and Finish Group exploring these key issues.
I’m a full time teacher, primarily of history, but also ICT, Welsh Bacc and Sociology, at Olchfa Comprehensive School in Swansea. I am also part of the #addcym network of teachers mentioned by the Minister in his statement.
1) How should high quality, Welsh and English language accessible digital classroom content be developed?
One of the ideas we kicked around during the #addcym chat on the subject is one that I think has real potential and is based on the fact that across Wales there is a wealth of digital classroom material being developed. What we really need therefore is a way of harnessing and sharing that. Some kind of platform that allows teachers and schools to upload, tag, and share resources, coupled with a voting and feedback mechanism could encourage informal collaboration to develop between teachers, and would allow the ‘cream’ to rise to the top. These could then be taken and further developed and translated to provide the kind of resources currently being developed by NGfL Cymru. A version of this exists within the Scottish ‘Glow’ platform, and perhaps it would be useful to look at their experience before developing something for Wales. Certainly this wouldn’t need to be an expensive custom built piece of software – there are many free platforms that could be deployed. The key thing would be to provide an easy way for teachers to locate relevant resources. This is probably the biggest flaw with the current NGfL Cymru interface – there are some great resources, but it takes too many clicks to find them.
This approach would have several advantages. It would widen the awareness of teachers across Wales of the high quality resources currently available via NGfL Cymru as well as encouraging resources from an even wider range of practitioners. This in turn, would hopefully increase the range of materials useful to teachers at various stages of personal ICT development. It might also be able to harness the work being undertaken by Professional Learning Communities up and down the country, both within and between schools.
The main two sticking points would be that of copyright (which could be dealt with in part by greater awareness of Creative Commons licensed materials) and of getting teachers to take part. This cultural change towards sharing resources is a larger issue which will need to be addressed if the full potential of the digital classroom is ever to be realised. Certainly my experience of mentoring PGCE students is that many of them set up informal networks to share resources during their training. They may therefore form one natural group of change agents in this situation. Additional ‘carrots’ may need to be offered to teachers or schools initially. Perhaps designated inset time for sharing, searching, rating and developing resources?
2) How should teachers get the digital teaching skills to use ICT to transform schools?
I must confess myself a little confused by this question. I think perhaps we need to uncouple the ‘digital teaching skills’ from ‘use ICT to transform schools’. I’ll take the first one first.
If teachers are to develop ‘digital teaching skills’ (which for now I’ll take to mean the skills required by a teacher to use various pieces of technology in their teaching) then the following ingredients are key:
1. They need to be shown how it will have a positive impact on their teaching (rather than being told that they are going to have it)
2. They need time to play with it, and they need help on hand when they need it (not on one day, put aside for ‘inset’). This should either come from a teacher mentor or a student through a ‘digital leader’ scheme. (Such as that being developed at Ysgol Bryn Elian by Mr Allen Heard (twitter.com/mrAHeard / twitter.com/ybedl) )
3. They need to work in a culture where teachers are encouraged to be learners. Visibly be learning. Visible to colleagues and to students. And that includes the acceptance of, and willingness to make, mistakes. Of all of this, this is by far and away the biggest challenge, but also potentially the most wide reaching in terms of benefits.
These three are important for everything from Interactive Whiteboards to VLEs. However, if teachers simply use technology to teach the way they always have done, then we’re not using ICT to “transform schools”.
Dr. Ruben Puentedura has developed the ‘SAMR’ model of technology integration that has gained some traction online in recent years. (See http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/ or http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/perils-of-shiny-edtech/ or http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/models-of-learning-tmoxon-presentation/ ] for more details) I’ve seen it referenced in a number of blog posts, and it was also used at a seminar held by Apple 2 years ago looking at how their technology could be used to genuinely transform learning (I know the Minister is keen on the iTunes U model of content delivery for example). In brief it identifies four levels of impact that technology can have on education – the first two (Substitution and Augmentation) allow us to enhance our learning with technology, while the second two (Modification and Redefinition) allow us to be genuinely transformative in what we do.
If we’re going to use ICT to transform schools we need to re-imagine schools in light of what ICT makes possible. Knowledge is no longer scarce, so why is it still the basis of our public examinations system? If ICT allows world wide free and cheap communication, why is Skype blocked in so many schools? I appreciate that this goes beyond your remit, but I would suggest that that is exactly what needs to be pointed out to the Minister. Look at the work being done by people like NoTosh around the world with design thinking schools. Look at the possibilities offered by Opening Minds in schools that are using that as a basis for their curriculum.
While I’m going beyond what you asked, I’d make one more point!
While it was great to see the Minister recognise the importance of digital networks to teachers and learners (and indeed teachers as learners), I was disappointed that he didn’t extend that to the terms of reference for your group. For me, the real power in ICT has not been in the digital content is has given me, but in the network of other professionals I have been able to build up. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many brilliant resources (digital or otherwise) exist ‘out there’ on any platform, it’s the context that I really need in order to make them effective for the learners I’m working with. It’s that that we need to focus on, and quickly. To be blunt, another five years spent just developing more resources will be another five years wasted.
Similarly, any national VLE needs to provide students with opportunities to interact with each other, rather than simply ‘access resources’. I’ve recently been experimenting with Edmodo as a platform for my KS4 and 5 classes, and a WordPress blog for my KS3 classes. Both are free. The real power has been in the students having a platform for their work, as well as being to access materials and ask questions as and when they need to. This is the real power of the ‘digital classroom’, rather than providing any quantity of ‘high quality digital content’.
The very best of luck in your task, and I look forward to reading your report. If I can be of any further help, please do get in touch.
Kind regards,
Dave Stacey
mrstacey.org.uk
twitter.com/davestacey
Posted: December 18th, 2011 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Ponderings | Tags: CPD, GTCW, iNet, Leighton Andrews | 3 Comments »
7 years in to my teaching career I have come to the unfortunate realisation that I’m now too expensive to move schools unless I want to take on a management role. However, I would love to get some more experience of working in other schools. I know of people who have gone on international exchanges and come back re-engergised and invigorated, as well as having the benefit of extended their professional contacts and practice. In other words, the experience made them better teachers.
It seems to me to be a fairly simple thing to organise on a more local level – people could sign up for a 12 month exchange with another school.
Schools would benefit by bringing in fresh blood and fresh ideas as well as having staff returning with new ideas and new energy. Teachers would benefit by having an opportunity to go on this kind of exchange without having to go abroad for a year. Students would benefit by having enthusiastic, energised and better connected teachers. And ultimately the country would benefit by having another way of having teachers build networks and develop their experience.
I’m sure there’s lots of reasons that this wouldn’t work, but surely there are enough positives there to at least give it a try?
Posted: December 18th, 2011 | Author: Dave Stacey | Filed under: Lesson ideas | Tags: history, infographics | No Comments »
One of the ideas I scribbled down at the start of the year for a project was infographics.
Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. With an information graphic, computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians develop and communicate concepts using a single symbol to process information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_graphics
They’re everywhere these days, and I like the way they give an opportunity to potentially give quite a wide scope for coverage. They also play to the way many students like to collect ‘facts’ from history, and also bring an opportunity to bring in some numeracy – not something I find that easy to do. There’s loads out there, but you could start with coolinfographics.com if you want to get your head around the kind of thing I’m talking about. Have a look at this example of this history of the American Presidency.
The idea rose back up the list inspired by this post from Free Technology 4 teachers, which in turn linked to this video from Kathy Schrock.
So now I’m looking for some help putting some flesh on the bones.
I’m thinking I might try and run the project either at the same time for all three KS3 year groups, or one after the other to provide some motivation
I’m probably going to set up a Google Spreadsheet shared between the class in order to gather the data we need.
I’m thinking about getting each class to brainstorm the categories they want to investigate within a theme. The yr 9 theme will almost certainly be ‘20th Century’. Yr 7 & 8 themes I’m less sure about. There’s always kings and queens to fall back on, but I’d love some other ideas.
Once we’ve got the data I’m thinking maybe getting different groups to sketch out one part, but I’m not sure how we get in a uniform design. The thought did cross my mind about trying to hand it all over to one of the Graphics classes to see if they want to take it on (what do you think @nicfranc?) Alternatively I could offer a small group who wanted to to come and have a couple of lunchtime sessions to put them together, but that’s going to be a lot of lunches. Alternatively, we just go low fi and do a cut and paste job. Anyway, I’m rambling…
So, dear reader, it’s your turn. Suggestions? Comments? Ideas? I’d love to hear them below.
Nb – This has been crosses posted at the schoolhistory.co.uk teachers forum
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