You are here: Home / Ideas

Improving Extended Writing: the TOWER Model

March 19, 2013 By nwatkin 3 Comments

Since September I have been looking at effective student behaviours with fresh eyes. This was triggered largely by my rereading of ‘Teaching for Effective Learning‘ – a collection of ideas from the Project for Enchancing Effective Learning (PEEL).

One behaviour that I was particularly interested in was getting students to reflect on the quality of their written responses and improve them so that they created pieces of work that reflected their true ability. Part of the problem was that students were seeing written work as an end product, rather than part of a wider process that is designed to improve their learning. I started to experiment with a number of techniques from the PEEL book and also drew on ideas from David Leat and Esther Arnott and openly shared what I was trying to do with the students. Reinforcing these ideas with students helped to cement the positive behaviours I was looking for.

The result was a five-part model for improving longer written responses that had built into it a number of strategies to enhance the quality of the work being produced. Here is an example of the model in practice:

TOWER Noor
TOWER record evaluation sheet

In outline, it looks like this:

T = Talk
Provide a piece of stimulus material and allow students time to ‘verbally rehearse’ (thank you to Dan Lyndon for that phrase) points that will be used in their work. I give this a focus by providing a clear question to go with the stimulus. At this stage I also like to use the Explorative Strategies that I adapted from Drama.

O = Organise visually
After talking students need to make their thinking visible. I will provide one graphic organiser for them (there are good examples of organisers here), but allow them to select another if they feel it better represents what they want to achieve.

W = Write/Produce
At this stage I ask students to create a draft of their work. They understand that it is important, but also that they will get a further opportunity to improve their work.

E = Edit/Critique
Once a piece of work has been produced we edit it in a number of ways. Firstly, there will be a critique where students can draw out the general principles needed to create work of quality. Next, their work will be marked by either me or their peers to drill down on more specific issues within their work. I personally prefer to use the Shirley Clarke approach of setting three criteria and then highlighting the best example of each within the text. I also set an improvement question that students need to answer (3 stars and 1 wish, essential).

R = Reflect
The last stage is to redraft the work so that it responds to the advice given in the edit stage. This redrafting builds up the learner behaviour that quality does not happen easily and that it needs to be worked at. Once the final draft is complete the work will be formally marked.

After discussions with people at the wonderful Berkhamsted Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference (on 16th March) and several on twitter (especially with @LA_McDermott, I made several changes to the style of the booklet and added the evaluation timeline (see above). The evaluation timeline is similar to the one I use for Project Based Learning – adapted from a process used at High Tech High.

One of the key reasons why the Noor Inayat Khan piece works is that it is a question worth answering. I could have used the question ‘Why is Noor Inayat Khan significant?’ However, getting them to grapple with the question ‘Did Noor deserve to be awarded the George Cross in 1949?’ adds a layer of intrique and engagement that makes students get involved with the topic.

I need to continue experimenting with the process and getting feedback, but I am already convinced that it is having an impact. In summary, I believe there are three main reasons for this:

1. It was based on planning for positive student behaviours and the impact they can have
2. Good questions engage students and therefore make them produce better work
3. The use of critique deepens understanding of the task and the process of writing as a whole

Filed Under: Creativity, Ideas

Letting Go: Student Designed Project Based Learning

September 25, 2012 By nwatkin Leave a Comment

Listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors is always inspirational, but today (Tuseday 25th September) was more enlightening than usual.

Along with colleague Rosie Sheldrake, I took a group of Year 9 students to an oral history event at Essex University, in memory of the late Dora Love. The original plan was to give students access to quality material for a Holocaust project that we would define later, however, as the day unfolded, we decided to hand over the whole process of project design to the students – something we have not done before.

Below is a quick explanation of how we went about it…

Firstly, we asked what elements of the talks had really struck students and why. Next we explored the title of the session, ‘Building Bridges,’ and began to form these vague words into ideas.

We then divided the students into four smaller groups and asked them to formulate an idea for a project. The only restriction was that it must comply with the first four of Steinberg’s ‘six A’s’ of project based learning: authentcity, academic rigour, applied learning and active exploration. We were confident that they would come up with some decent ideas, but I did not know whether they would be able to make it rigourous enough to stand up to school and real world assessment. These Year 9s were more than up to the task and came up with some fantastic ideas.

Before sharing we got students to SCAMPER their project ideas to firm them up and explore avenues that had not occurred to them in the initial planning. Essentially it took the place of a good project tuning. While not quite as as effective as a tuning, it did force groups to scrutinise their ideas and three of the groups made substantial changes. They then posted up their final ideas on a whiteboard for critique.

You can listen to the final presentation of ideas below:

HDV_0210
HDV_0211
HDV_0212
HDV_0213

Within two hours students had created a project idea that combined many of the elements outlined above. The main idea is to create a set of plinths in front of a mural. These plinths will contain a history of different types of discrimination. People who have experienced abuse will be invited to come and stand on the plinths, tell their story and record their hopes for the futures. All this will be captured on a rolling film. This is ambitious and exciting, but it makes our genuinely engaging learning. They will need assistance with the managing of adult relationships and assessment, but we are planning to give much of this responsibility to Year 12 student leaders.

What I like most about this project is that the learning will unfold as the project progresses; students can create the history plinths, but have no idea who will come and tell their stories. It will create a real bond with the community and foster attitudes of understanding. If she were still with us, Dora Love would be incredibly proud.

Filed Under: Creativity, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Dramatic Resources for Reading Texts in the Classroom

September 12, 2012 By nwatkin 2 Comments

In June I had the pleasure of spending some time with Avner Segall from Michigan State University. He talked about how teachers try very hard to add layers of pedagogy to lessons and often ignore the pedagogy implicit and hidden within the texts they use. He demonstrated how unpicking text, its motives and choices can give teachers all the material they need to create exciting learning. This made a great impact on me, but I was unable to fully translate it into classroom practice. Then, in July I completed an in-house coaching cycle and spent time working with a fantastic Drama teacher called Alex. In the lesson that I observed, she had eight ‘Explorative Strategies’ on display around the board. Students were given a scene from Oliver the Musical and asked to explore it using one or more of the strategies. The students were obviously familiar with the process, but the results were stunning. They were digging deep into the text and asking some very precise questions about its purpose and significance.

I immediately made a connection with Avner’s work and could see how these strategies could be adapted for use in classrooms. I have created a set of eight posters, place mats and cards each with an SOLO HOT Map or graphic organiser to assist thinking. These can be viewed and downloaded by following the link below:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/h5xqp5ajr1le7vd/r-Ke_FOJ6n

I am now using this with all classes. Like any new approach it will need some time to embed, but the early signs are that students can see how the strategies help them to find greater meaning in the texts. What also pleases me is that I was able to connect ideas from History and Drama to create a powerful resource.

I would love some feedback on this approach and, in particular, any suggested improvements. Hope you find them useful.

Filed Under: Ideas, Innovation, Motivation

Why Teachers Need Each Other: Setting Up Learner Communities

January 5, 2012 By nwatkin 2 Comments

As teachers, we think a lot about teaching and learning, spend hours developing resources and hone our classroom practice so that students can get the most out of the hours they spend with us. However, rarely do we give any thought or attention to our own development and learning. This, I am realising more and more, is a serious problem. Firstly, it means that for a good many staff there are limited opportunities for them to improve and grow. But the biggest issue is that a lack of self-development damages students: those who do not learn themselves are going to find it more difficult to effectively model the process of learning with their students.

So, how to we solve this problem and get teachers learning? At Copleston High School we have just embarked on a process that will turn all our classroom staff (teachers, CTAs and Cover Supervisors) into action researchers. We took the following approach:

STAGE 1. AND OUR SURVEY SAID…
Our first action was to start a dialogue with staff and take their ideas about teaching and learning seriously. Therefore, we set up an area on our FROG VLE where staff could suggest what the school should focus on and then vote on which were the best proposals.

STAGE2. REVAMP LEARNING & TEACHING GROUP
We have a termly Learning & Teaching Group Meeting to which each department sends a Rep. Up until 15 months ago, its role was to discuss items that appeared on an agenda, which was rarely populated by anyone else other than senior leaders. We took the decision in October 2010 to offer them an alternative: carry on as we had been, or use the time to form action research groups. The vast majority opted for the latter and so we took the top five priorities from the staff survey and turned them action research titles. Members of the Teaching & Learning Group then divided themselves up according to interest and started researching.

I wanted to create a buzz about action research, get people innovating so that others might follow (see Geoffrey Moore, 1991). I love the way Seth Godin talks about this in his TED talk:

STAGE 3. RE-BRAND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
We now had five action research groups with interesting findings that they could share. After an insightful trip to Cramlington Learning Village and talking to staff there we adapted their idea of holding an internal conference. We started organising conference packs, speakers, food, etc so that it had the feel of a real conference, but it would be for our staff about our development. We felt this step was important, because it would signal a new direction and new expectations from staff. We called our conference Copleston Sauce: Open, taste and Love Learning (a title created by 7LM – my Year 7 ICT group – they even designed the logo).

STAGE 4. SELL THE IDEA OF ACTION RESEARCH
On the first day of the conference (Tuesday 3rd January 2012) we split the whole teaching body into groups of five and asked them to sit together at round tables in the main hall. This was not a shock, we published lists and an explanation before the event and held two briefings in December. We started by talking about the reason why the school exists: to serve the community in which it sits. We then explored, how we can exemplify the idea of community in our practice. We talked about teachers forming communities in order to learn so that they could mirror and demonstrate amongst themselves what they expected of students in the classroom. We talked through the idea that the school community needs to have an andragogical and pedagogical strand in order to grow (see David Price’s blog on the Learning Futures Project). This, we explained, was why we wanted them to form small learner communities and conduct some action research.

STAGE 5. HERE’S ONE I MADE EARLIER
Next, we got each member of the new learner communities to go to one of five workshops based around the research topics conducted by the members of the Learning & Teaching Group. This enabled us to model the process with staff and plant some seeds in their minds.

STAGE 6. START PLANNING
With the help of a protocol we designed specifically for the occasion, we got the learner communities to start talking amongst themselves and deciding what would be the focus of their action research. It was a risk constructing the groups and not allowing total freedom of choice, but the principle of learning from others and mixing up staff with different roles and skills was an interesting experiment – it will be interesting to see the results of the evaluation when it comes back. At this stage we felt it was important to drive home the community angle and to make staff even more aware of the potential within the school.

The initial response was incredible. The questions being posed were fantastic and the level of engagement from staff was amazing – the conference ended at 4:00 pm on Wednesday 4th January 2012, and 20 minutes later there were still staff in the hall discussing their action research. The sharing has continued on twitter with people suggesting resources and links and it was happening across departments and between staff and CTAs. We feel that the freedom for each learner community to determine its own title was important in building ownership of the process. It has created a genuine enthusiasm for action research and a platform on which we can build a school community that truly has learning at its heart. What we have done is in no way unique and borrows heavily from work already carried out by Learning Futures Project, High Tech High in California, Cramlington and the work of Dylan Wiliam. However, it is a big step forward for us and we believe is moving us into a completely new space in terms of development

The challenges we now face are helping staff to realise their plans in the coming weeks and to establish a model for making action research a key component of the Professional Development programme year after year. We really want the conference to happen again next year and for the most part to be run by the Learner Communities. What the conference this year has shown us is that teachers really do need each other to develop and to enable them to thoroughly practice what they preach.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Ideas, Motivation, Work Flow and Swing Tagged With: ,

5 Steps to Creative Ideas

October 29, 2010 By Johannes 1 Comment

Beginning tomorrow morning every single one of us is going to sell Ideas! …What we are not clear about is just how to get ideas. So I said maybe you could tell us. – James Web Young (2003)

So, how do I get ideas?

In James Webb Young’s brilliant book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, he argues that coming up with an idea is actually a rather straight-forward process. In fact, the reason why ideas differ so enormously is because it is simply a new combination of old elements and the way we view relationships between them. So, in Young’s view, some will see each piece of fact as a separate bit of knowledge whilst others will see a link in a chain of knowledge with relationships and similarities. For the latter, facts are more like an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts. Therefore, for someone who is quick at spotting patterns and relationships several ideas will be produced. When relationships are seen they in turn lead to the extraction of a more general principle which, when understood, suggests the way to a new combination – the new idea. This process can of course be cultivated as Young states:

The production of ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool

5 Steps to Creative Ideas (influences from Young)

Step 1. Gather Material

As with all professions without understanding the key facts you have nothing. If you sit and wait for a revolutionary idea to strike you, think again! Johannes has worked as mentor and Associate Tutor for many years and have helped new teachers who sometimes would start planning their lessons without having done any research into the topic. His advice was always to ensure that subject knowledge was sound before planning begins. Teaching a lesson without understanding the subject content is impossible. Lack of understanding leads to poor teaching (see Musings on Creativity in Teaching Part 1: Knowing Your Knowledge). That said, outstanding teachers not only have specific knowledge of their topic but also a general understanding of their subject which enable them to understand the ‘bigger picture’. We also suggest a third element, namely to have a wider perspective in other subject areas. Outstanding teachers gather anecdotes, information and stories from a range of areas for example architecture, music, business, nature and film etc.  The latter is essential in the creation of ideas. It is the new combination of specific knowledge about a topic coupled with a general understanding and wider perspective about the subject and other areas that will make ideas occur. The task of gathering material is a life-long one , be it an interesting quote, enigmatic photo or recent news story, find ways of cataloguing/storing these snippets of data.

Step 2. Oblique Strategies

This part is less concrete  as it involves thinking more abstractly about the facts you have, looking at each one individually, bringing two facts together to see if they fit, as well as beginning to synthesize and spot relationships. For this process to work you should try not to think too directly at each element but do what Young refers to as ‘listening’ for their meaning without ‘looking’ for it (Young 2003, p30). What tends to happen here is that you will get initial, sometimes rather odd, ideas but don’t disregard these as they will help to shape your future ideas. Whilst engaged in this process you’ll also feel like you’ve ran into a wall, but don’t give up just yet. It’s the same feeling you have when you’re engaging in a long brainstorming-session with a team and it feels like you’re getting nowhere – but you are! It is crucial to continue just a little bit longer before stopping, not giving up, but stopping as you have exhausted you mind for the time being. Cue: Step 3.

Step 3. No Efforts – Stop Thinking

This is the time for your unconscious mind to do some work. Like you say to your students, remember not too cram everything the night before… Well, the reason you say that is also because the mind needs to rest to synthesize the information properly – to take it all in. However, sleeping will not be the only solution to your ideas. The best way of letting your mind rest whilst topping up the creative juices is to undertake another creative, yet relaxing, activity for example go for a nice run or long walk, watch a decent film, listen to music and so on. You are not only giving your mind time to reflect but also providing additional material which has nothing to do with the topic at hand but will serve to keep your mind working without you having to think about it.

Step 4. It Just Came to Me

Just like that, the idea popped into your head when you least expected it, in the middle of the night, early in the morning or sometimes annoyingly when you’re driving or in a situation where frantically writing down things may not be regarded as something positive. So, when you stop pushing for ideas and gone through a period of rest, they’ll show up.

Step 5. The Bleak Reality

When you take out your new idea to the harsh reality you might realise that it’s not as wonderful as you once thought. This is the hardest part; moulding your idea into the structures and conditions so it can work. It is during this period when most people give up and put their idea in the half-baked drawer together with hundreds of its counterparts. Solution: don’t protect your new idea, throw it to the Devil Advocates! You will then see that your idea carry self-generating qualities as it stimulate those who examine it and consequently will help develop into the final masterpiece.

If you find the topic about ideas interesting you might want to get your hands on a copy of these books, they have stimulated us to write some of the posts on Eat.Sleep.Teach.

Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley

Making Ideas Happen – Scott Belsky

The Back of the Napkin – Dan Roam

The Art Of Innovation – Tom Kelley

Related Posts:

Filed Under: Ideas Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts