Why the learning revolution isn’t happening

Further to last nights rant, I’ve been pondering more on what’s going on with education at the moment.

As this article shows, almost everything we know about how to get the best out of young people is systematically ignored by the school system. We’ve known this for a while and yet we (as a country) seem to lack the political will to do anything about it.

I’ve finally come up with a theory.

You see in most organistaions everyone agrees what the point is. They might not agree on the best way to get their, but the overall objective is known, if not explictity stated. The problem with the UK education system is that we have two competing visions of what it’s for. And even worse, no one ever seems to want to discuss it.

On the one hand you’ve got what Ken Robinson describes as ‘a protracted process of university entrance’. In other words a system whse underliying purpose is to divide people into categories. The ‘intelligent’ ones who will go to university, the ‘practical’ ones who will join the trades, and the ‘others’ who will do whatever the others tell them. So far, so 1950s. Routed in the class system, the very thing that comprehensive education was supposed to get rid of. Except it didn’t. A throwaway remark by David Mitchell on a recent QI made it clear to the extent that that view still exists, perhaps more so on the right of politics.

On the other hand there’s the system that says actually, the point of education is to develop each individual. That tries to value the individual and make it relevant to them. A system that values learning above everything else – above exams (which are firmly part of the previous system by the way), above the way schools are currently structured, above all the vested interests in keeping the system the way it is. This is the system many of us have been talking about over the last few years, and yet we seem virtually no closer than we were 10 years ago.

And until we have this debate and work out exactly what the point of the education system is, everything about the old system, everything that values that old point of education will continue to shackle and restrain everything other that occasional and local reform.

So why don’t we have the debate? I suspect, in part, it’s because we’re afraid we might lose.
Postscript: Oh, and in case anyone’s asking, no academies are not the solution here. The idea that the market can in some way inspire the kind of innovation required here is founded in cloud cuckoo land. Yes, it might in one or two cases, but with the mass academyisation being proposed in England at the moment I predict that within 5 years most of England’s acadmies will be run by a handful of companies. And if you don’t like SIMS, imagine if those prinicples were applied to the school system!

Rant

It isn’t the technology. Please will you realise that?

If it is the technology, our education system is about to start hemorrhaging money and people in a world that it stands no chance of keeping up with.

It’s about the way we teach, and the system we create. It’s always been that, but now this new shiney techno-driven world 2.0 just makes it more obvious and pressing.

The technology is, and will always be, a tool that allows us to unshackle education from the industrial, fast food, “here’s another 100 things to remember for a test next week” system that we’ve inherited, and create something new, organic, useful and fit for purpose.

The reason we’re not isn’t the leaders don’t get technology, it’s that the vast majority of the leaders are the products of this broken system and are not willing to risk throwing themselves out with the bath water. They’ve got too much to lose.

CPD on demand – Can you help build it?

In a couple of weeks we’ve got our Teaching and Learning inset day. This is usually a great day, with lots of teaching staff sharing their ideas in a host of websites.

I want to continue to explore new ways of delivering inset on Moodle and other ICT use, so I’m going to be setting up one or two new Moodle courses, plus fishing out some older ones and run it as a drop in session – encouraging staff to come in and take responsibility for their own CDP, with hands on support as and when they need.

Using that as a starting point, I also thought that some staff might want to take another step towards the kind of CPD that we all get from Twitter and the blogs that we read. To that end, I’ve set up CPD on demand and I need your help.

I’ve started to create pages for subjects. The idea is that for each subject there will be a list of websites and people to follow on Twitter. Visitors can either explore individual blogs, or search through a Google Custom search. But for this to work I need to know the websites and Twitter accounts to add. And that’s where you come in.

Could you please spare two minutes to head over to the site and add a couple of links? Feel free to add extra subjects, or anything else you think would be useful to those teachers visiting the site.

Hopefully, once it’s set up it’s something that you can share with other colleagues at your school.

Image credit: Question Mark and Arrow by Laurakgibbs on Flickr

WCYDWT? #3 Castles

In some ways the first two ideas I’ve blogged about since I tried to hijack WCYDWT for my own nefarious history type purposes haven’t quite lived up to Dan’s Standard. They’re both good ways into lessons, and they both do a good job of creating interest in something that may not be (for many students) inherently interesting. However. they’re both limited in terms of the extent of the enquires that spring from them. ¹

You can probably infer, I’m quite proud of this next one, but that’s for tomorrow. In the meantime, what would you do with this?

What I did with this: The World Turned Upside Down

Ingredients:

• The World Turned Upside by Billy Bragg (for example the Youtube version above)
• Lyrics to the above song
• 1 guitar and a rudimentary knowledge thereof (the chords E, B and A if you want to play it in the same key)
• Willingness to face down a class full of disbelieving 12 & 13 year olds

So as they arrive the video is already playing. Some of them think it’s something lingering from last lesson, others that it’s connected to whatever I have planned for the next hour. Others think I’ve just lost it a bit.

Once they’re settled, I play them the video again, telling them that I’ll be asking questions afterwards.

After the second play we see what we heard, or thought we heard. They normally get 1649, St Georges Hill and something about ‘someone digging’ (sic) in addition to a range of other suggestions. I explain that the song is about one of the many groups of people who had ideas about how the UK should be run in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I and it will be our job to unpick the song and see if we can work out what they thought.

By this point most of them will have clocked the guitar, but there’s still something wonderful about the sense of disbelief that echos round the room as I pick it up. That, right there, that’s what I’m going to be trading off for the rest of this lesson.

I explain that the best way to understand the song is to sing it. Someone comes up to scroll through the words and we sing.

I say we sing. It’s a little trickier than that. The first attempt at the first verse is normally me and 2 others. At least until they realise it’s just the three of us and then they stop singing as well. So I chide, I demand, I laugh, I joke, we do some girls vs boys, this side vs that side and by the end most of them are singing along with gusto.

Then I ask them again what they though the Diggers stood for, what happened to them and why. Then the big question. Why is a bloke standing on a stage in 2007 singing about something that happened in 1649? (Clue’s in the last couple of verses. They all get it, even if they don’t want to say it out loud).

For the rest of the lesson, in groups, they get Nick Dennis’s information sheets about one of the other groups from the period and they have to write a verse that sums up the key points about they. Most choose to adapt a current song or nursery rhyme, and towards the end of the lesson they sing (or recite if they’d rather) their creation and everyone else has to report back on what they’ve learned and I fill in any missing blanks.

Notes and Variations

1. For those unable or unwilling to take the singing route, I was at the SHP conference a couple of years ago when Donald Cumming talked about getting students to act out the song with a series of movements.
2. I’ve tried the same approach with year 10 and Redemption Song. Died on it’s arse. Even with everyone standing up and the offer of chocolate it limped at best. There is definitely something 12 year olds have in terms of willingness to just just stuck in that 14 year olds have lost
3. Of course, some songs definitely should not be sung. I use ‘Strange Fruit’ during the introductory lesson to Civil Rights, and that one just has to be listened to.

Thoughts? Comments? What other songs could be used in this way? Let me know below.

WCYDWT: The World Turned Upside Down

(Lyrics here)

What would you do with this? Let me know in the comments. I’ll let you know how I used it tomorrow.

What I did with this: Losing your head

[Original post, plus some great follow up comments can be found here]

Meet my friend, the crop button. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be using Keynote, his cousin the mask button.

The picture is actually quite engaging in itself, but there’s still a good chance that a good percentage of students will tune about before we get to grips with what’s being shown here. So, when they come in to my class for this lesson they get this.

Which is followed, once everyone’s settled with this.

The question here is important. It’s not ‘what is going on here’, but what do you think is going on here’. And in those three little words we move from a right / wrong / “I’m not going to get involved in case I don’t get it right” situation to one in which every opinion is welcomed, valued and open to challenge. “Why do you think that?” “Does anyone else agree?” “What other evidence is there for that?” “What evidence is there that suggests this is wrong?”

The object of the exercise is not to work out what is going on in the picture (although every class I’ve used this with does), the point is to talk about what could be happening based on limited evidence.

Once the conversation has run it’s course, they get the full picture and the second key element to the lesson – a story.

History is full of stories, but they’re often overlooked for ‘facts’. A story needs to contain the little juicy bits that keep people hooked. Things like that on that cold January morning, Charles Stuart wore two shirts, so as not to be seen to shiver and be thought to be afraid. After the axe had fallen, it is said that those at the front of the crowd rushed forward to dip their hankies in the blood of the man many believed to have been divinely appointed. ¹ Speaking of the axe, the executioner struck the deal of anonymity with Parliament, so to this no one knows for sure who swung the axe. Slightly oddly, Cromwell agreed that the King’s head should be sewn back on after the execution, and he was quietly buried in Windsor Castle.

Hopefully the next stage is to garner questions, one of which will be ‘why did this happen’, and then we’re off, either into an exploration of the Civil Wars, or into the trial and execution itself.

Alternatives and Variations

This approach (of only revealing part of a picture) can also be adapted by given students half of an image and asking them to draw in what they think might be in the second half. I do that with the image below for example, as an introduction to Civil Rights in the US for year 10. (All the more shocking for it being a postcard)

It also works well with images like the one on this page for studying witchcraft.

So that’s what I’d do with it. There’s already been some great ideas over the comments to the original post, particularly looking at where you could take the enquiry after this initial activity. Now, let me know how you’d do it differently, or call me up on anything below.

Image credits:

The execution portrait was taken from a school textbook. I’ve been unable to work out who owns the copyright for the orginal image, but if anyone has a problem, please contact me and I’ll remove it.

The lynching image is public domain via wikimedia

WCYDWT: Losing your head

No idea what this is about? Read the intro post here.

What would you do with this picture?

Follow up post – What I did with this here

WCYDWT: The History Edition

I’ve been reading Dan Meyer’s blog for as long as I can remember. Any time my feed reader gets overloaded and I have to hit ‘mark all as read’ his is one of the few I make sure I actually read first. In particular I love both his willingness to share his resources, ideas, frustrations and development with the world, and as part of that, the development of ‘What can you do with this’?

If you’ve never come across Dan, or ‘What can you do with this’?, it might be worth either having a look at his recent TED talk, or reading through some of the examples he’s posted on his blog (alongside the excellent discussions that have followed many of them)

Dan’s big idea is that we need to be less helpful to students. Rather than structuring every bit of their thinking for them, we need to hook their curiosity and provide a framework whereby they are able to solve more visibly viable problems themselves.

For a long time now I’ve been looking at these and thinking ‘wow, I wish I could come up with this kind of stuff for history’. And then yesterday the other day I had a bit of an epiphany. While I may not be taking digital snaps and cutting up video, I’m starting to see that the WCYDWT approach is close to the heart of how many of us (in the UK at least) teach history. To put this idea to the test, over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting some examples of resources and materials I’ve been using (or plan to us) as ISMs*. I’ll stick to Dan’s practice of posting the resource first, and following it with my idea a little while after. I’d be interested to hear both from history teachers about how they would (or do) use this resource, and from teachers in other subjects on their views of the approach, how it might work for them, or how much I’ve misunderstood what Dan meant!

First one to follow shortly here

*ISM stands for Initial Stimulus Material, an idea developed by Rob Phillips and briefly explained here.

Content Generator Revision Games for WJEC History GCSE

One of the best investments we made as a school was to invest in a license for the Content Generator packages which allow teachers to quickly and easily create their own Flash based games.

For our revision CD-ROM I’ve created a whole series of games for the units that we teach at GCSE. These are Germany 1919-45, China 1949-76 and USA 1929-90. In case they’re of any use to anyone else I’ve uploaded them below. Feel free to use them in any way that you want. Each zip file contains a series of games based around the same set of questions. For anyone using the Content Generator packages themselves, I’ve also included the text file so you can edit and change the games to your hearts content.

USA

Germany

China