Collaboration | Eat.Sleep.Teach.

Teaching: The Unthinking Profession

I have been on the road again this week delivering training in a number of schools. I really enjoy the experience and always learn from the people I work with and it is tremendous fun. However, as a trainer I know that sessions packed full of practical strategies will go down really well and this is beginning to trouble me. I worry that theory and context are almost vilified in the profession and we can no longer see past the quick fix of a good practical tip.

Before going on I would like to say that I exclude the users of twitter from this description – they are keeping the art of theory alive (take a look at #edjournal for proof). They are, however, a minority and only in the most enlightened schools are they central to decision making.

This trend is worrying for three reasons:

1. Teachers, in general, are not interested in theory. The sessions where there is a substantial theory base will always get a weaker reception. Teachers want ‘stuff’ they can take away and use tomorrow. While I always show how the theory works in practice, it never seems to have the same impact as CPD with titles like ’10 engaging starters’ or ‘7 great discussion tools’. While there is a place for practical tips, but I know that this approach offers little impact. A good idea might be used once or twice, but understanding how it works and why it works will bring lasting and sustainable alterations to teaching methods. The ‘quick fix’ is just that and somewhere down the line a proper solution needs to be found. I see too many Senior Leaders promoting ‘Sharing Good Practice’ sessions as the way to improve teaching and learning in their schools. While it will allow for a dialogue to be a created about learning it needs to be followed up with a ‘Sharing Good Theory’ session where staff explain the philosophy behind the techniques that they use and why it leads to better learning.

2. If we can’t see the relevance of theory then how do we move forward? If only a small minority are reading about new approaches and trying them out, experimenting and refining, how can the profession raise itself up to better standards? Few people have heard of or seen Sir Ken Robinson, hardly anyone has read Geoff Petty or John Hattie, let alone slightly leftfield texts like those by Steven Johnson or Daniel Pink. I am concerned that standards will not improve in the majority of schools, because no one is looking into what is possible and exciting.

3. I think the attitude of the profession at large towards CPD and theory plays into the hands of our critics. Some politicians and large chunks of the population see teachers as lazy and stuck in their ways. They view teaching as being a simple set of skills, that as Michael Gove put it can be passed on from the master ‘to the apprentice’. I firmly believe that teaching is a highly creative discipline, providing tremendous scope and freedom to experiment. But it also consists of patterns and lines that can be follewed to create a more firm understanding of the students in front of you. Without theory to map a route we are either aimless or rigid, and neither is good enough in education. I find it hard to imagine a doctor being negative about new approaches in their specialism, or lawyers refusing to read the lasted case law. Why should teachers resent good CPD and theory?

I have talked to many teachers about this and most feel under pressure to perform well with exam groups and to meet expectations. They get observed occasionally, pull out a few tricks and set pieces, and then get back on the treadmill of reports, emails, marking and planning. They feel like they do not have the time to read theory and experiment, it intrudes on their daily business of survival. Also, the quality is not always there in CPD sessions and people get turned off. It is hard not to feel sympathy for this argument, but we need to break it down and move the agenda on. Leaders need to take bold decisions and teachers need to talk about theory, share it, just like we do on twitter, and help to breathe new life into our unthinking profession.

If you could change just one thing… you would be creative

Sometimes we think to much about being creative and come up with all manner of elaborate schemes to engage and excite students. Sometimes it might be better to take a step back, look at the basics and change just one thing…

In the last week of term we decided to do some lessons outside. In fact, we did a day outside, complete with lunch cooked by the students on fires that they constructed themselves.

There was a lot of smoke and, more importantly, a lot of laughter. The day was a great success and this was down to three things:
1. Change of scenery
2. New element or angle to the work
3. Different students coming forward to contribute

The change of scenery started out as a way to help students gel and mix with a wider group. However, it actually energised their thinking. The task was a mystery, but instead of clues on paper they were spread around an orienteering course. This meant that students had to locate the clues before starting to piece them together. The route they chose affected the clues they reached and therefore their answers. This made the debrief fascinating, especially since unexpected students were coming forward to voice their opinions. The ‘outdoors’ element completely threw some students who are usually good at this type of thing, whereas a few ‘quiet’ individuals were vocal about the way they had tackled the orienteering part. The whole exercise reinforced the notion of variety being vital in learning. The change of senery meant skills not normally seen in the classrooom were needed and the students loved the chance to demonstrate them. One young man is autistic and finds it hard to cope with the lively nature of life at school. He can be thrown by last minute changes to his day, but here (due to his scouting background) he was confident and a real leader.

We will definitely be doing this again and coming up with new scenarios to challenge students.

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Student Led Enquiries: The Summer School Diaries

For this year’s summer school at Copleston High School we investigated how Ipswich can be made appealing to the people of Bruges in Belgium. It is a real and significant problem (to us, at least), since the two towns have forged new links and have started to work more closely together in the last year. The Year 6 (soon to be Year 7) students attending the Summer School needed to decide what can be said about Ipswich and how it could be presented to their continental counterparts.

Below is a diary of the activities we used to build up the enquiry and student responses to them.

DAY ONE – Breaking the Ice
On arrival students were asked to play the ’11’ game. Everyone forms a circle and the first person starts counting, they can add 1, 2 or 3 numbers to the total. The person who has to say the number 11 is out and the counting starts again. This activity is a fun way to engage the brain and get people communicating in a small way.

Next, we carried out a litttle trust experiment, inspired by the work of Dan Ariely in The Upside of Irrationality. The group were split into two teams and each were given a bag of sweets (enough for one each). The first team had to decide whether to keep the sweets or hand them over to the other team for a chance of getting back many more than they started with. If they handed them over, the second team would receive four bags of sweets – making a total of five when added to the one they were already holding. The second team now had to decide whether to keep all five bags or split the bounty with the other team.

The results were fascinating. The first team debated for a while, but based on the fact that ‘we don’t know them and we don’t know that they will share’ they rejected the offer and kept the bag for themselves. The second group had decided to split the pot if they were given the option. Their rationale was that if the first team showed trust in them, they felt oblicated to reward them. The first team then felt bad and as we debriefed the activity the idea of trust came out really strongly as a key element in making any group enquiry work.

The final part of the morning session was used for getting to know people’s names (using ryhmes, e.g. ‘My name is Neal and I love a good meal,’ and a ball for random selection).

In the afternoon session we experienced archery. The activity was new to all students and a real challenge. The debrief centred arounnd a discussion of developing existing skills and learning new ones.

DAY TWO – What do you know already?
In the first session students were grouped to include a range of creative talents and then given the problem: How can you market Ipswich in Bruges? They had to think carefully about what they knew already and think about what questions they wanted to ask. We did this by doing a real brainstorm session and using David Leat’s 8Q approach (5Ws plus How, Could and Should). We also created a grafitti wall of our favourite questions where answers could be shared throughout the project. In the debrief students said that they now needed to find answers and suggested a visit to the town centre. Anticipating this, we made made a few bookings for Day 3.

The afternoon session was football coaching, where the students took a familiar skill and developed it in new ways.

DAY THREE – Summer Schooll On Tour
The whole day was spent out in Ipswich. We had pre-booked three guides: one at the docks, one at Ipswich Football Stadium and one at a local Mansion House. The idea was for students to get their questions answered, generate one ones and start to think about how to sell Ipswich. The whole day was fascinating and students were really starting to think about their knowledge because they were the ones in control of the questions. We also gave each group a digital camera and a journal so that they could record the day and take ‘publicity shots.’

The debrief took the form of a group Mind map and showed us that they had taken on board a lot throughout the and were now keen to get on with the project. So, we adapted our plans for Day Four and allowed the students freedom to create.

DAY FOUR – Any Ideas?
The fourth day was about students starting to develop their thoughts and coming up with the final product. They developed a range of responses, including live websites, powerpoints, models and branding – all through group interaction and problem solving techniques that they employed on their own. It was at this point that they ‘took over’ and started to call the shots about how to spend their time. Our role was to fascilitate and sort any logistical issues.

At the end of the day, the debreif centred around what skills they needed or wanted to develop. The students identified six key areas:
– How do we create good publicity?
– What language/words most persuade people to do something?
– How do we create good powerpoints and websites?
– What makes a good brand?
– How do you make a good speech?
– What does Ipswich stand for?

The staff then sat down and planned a session based around each of these questions for the next day…

DAY FIVE – Get Skilled
In the first session students had to allocate members of their group to attend the sessions listed above. There was a free choice as long as someone from each group attended each session. Three were run in the next hour and then another three after a break. The students then got together and swapped experiences and skills. The afternoon session was spent applying these new skills to their projects.

One of the issues that came up in the debrief was that they did not really know Bruges and so could not make a judgement about whether the points they had highlighted about Ipswich would appeal; as one girl put it, ‘We are saying that Ipswich has 12 medieval churches in use, but what if Bruges has 15… that won’t make them come here, it just makes them look better!’ It was a good point and we had anticipated this and organised a trip to Bruges.

DAY SIX – Are we ready to go?
The day was spent putting together a set of proposals and materials to test against the backdrop of Bruges. Students had two scenarios to work with ‘unique’ and ‘complimentary.’ The idea was to decide if they would sell Ipswich by stressing its unique features or whether more could be done with the links between the two places. Both theories would need testing against Bruges. They would need to test the strengths of any claim. By the end of the end students were filling their journals with points they wanted to clarify.

DAY SEVEN – The Big Road Trip
This was a long day, but worth the effort. Students were given a set of graphic organisers to fill in as well as collect information to support their approach to promoting Ipswich. The organisers were designed to capture a range of information and cover many skills – each member of the group had a different one to fill in and we left it up to the group to decide who did what. We had around five hours in Bruges, following set tours and recording information.

DAY EIGHT – More Information, More Problems

This day was spent making sense of the findings from Bruges and preparing media files shot on the previous day. Students decided how to spend their time and what to do. They submitted their plans in the morning and then started to work. It quickly became apparent to them that they now had information overload and almost all the groups started to edit and refine their work. This was interesting to watch as it is a skill we often teach and yet here were students independently recognising that it needed to happen.

DAY NINE – Statuesque
This day was devoted to throwing in one last challenge. Students were told that a sculpture had to be built to commemorate the link between the two places and they needed to submit a design. After the initial design was complete, students were asking about their presentations so we allowed students to manage their own time, as long as the whole project was completed, they could do whatever was necessary. So, they did.

DAY TEN – The Final Presentation
Parents and assorted visitors had been told to arrive at 1:30 pm and so students had four hours to complete their presentations about marketing Ipswich, create a stall to market their approach and show their sculpture and rehearse their speech. These last few hours were frantic, but the results were worth it. Each group did a unique presentation – some with ICT, others with mock-ups, and some just talking – and impressed the audience (who were full of questions).

At the end, staff revealed that they had kept a journal and noted down achievements by students. We called them up one-by-one and said what achievements we had seen them make in the two weeks and why that made us proud.

Epilogue
I have included here a copy of the original programme. I have done this to show just how much we changed as we went along, adapting to issues and the needs and requests of students. This ability to adapt is sometimes overlooked in normal classroom scenarios and yet it was what made the learning flow and be relevant to the students at that particular time.

The spirit of this group was so strong that we have decided to let them develop the programme for nest year. They will come up with the ideas, manage the budget, make the bookings and find the materials. Should be an interesting project to blog about…

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Not Invented Here: the Cloud as the Creative Playground for Educators

In Europe and Elsewhere, 1923, Mark Twain states that:

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all. (p. 175)

Twain was referring to the fact that nations find it difficult to use something that has already been invented and used the example of USA’s insistence on keeping their large and old-fashioned stoves although Germany had already invented one that was far more efficient and less clunky. Twain pointed to the fact that as Americans hadn’t invented the new stove it couldn’t be any good.

Teachers, and other professionals, may also be guilty of this. You may not be in this category but do read on as you might find out a thing or two about your colleagues. On a serious note, as a teacher have you ever created a classroom resource that had already been produced by someone else? Again, how many times have you heard or yourself said that “we must share more as a profession?” or that “we must find a process and system where we can share resources online”? The reason many of us are more willing to recreate a piece of work is what D. Ariely refers to as the NIH bias – or ‘Not Invented Here’ – which means that if it hasn’t been made by us it can’t be good.

In an experiment Ariely’s team wanted to check how far NIH bias was true. A control group was given a list of problems and suggested solutions. They could either choose to go with the suggested solution or think of one on their own. Ariely’s team wanted participants to come up with a solution on their own but, at the same time, reach the exact same solution that Ariely’s team had come up with before. Here are two examples of ‘problems’ that participants had to solve (the solutions are the one’s come up with by the scientists):

1. What innovative change could be made to an alarm clock to make it more efficient?

Solution: If you hit snooze your coworkers are notified via email that you overslept

2. How can communities reduce the amount of water they use without imposing tough restrictions?

Solution: Water lawns using recycled gray water recovered from household drains

In order to ensure that participants reached the same solution they were given a list of 50 words which had to be used to solve the problem. Each list contained the words or synonyms of words that made up the solutions reached by the scientists. It was hoped that this would give the control groups the feeling of ownership whilst ensuring the solutions were virtually identical. Moreover, at the top of the list there was also the words that made up Ariely’s solution but jumbled up so participants would see those words first. At the end of the experiment all participants decided not to choose the suggested solutions but their own, which were virtually identical. Ariely concluded that as human beings we attach a sense of meaning to something we have created, even if it resembles the original idea (something I discussed in more detail in this post).

As with the American and German stoves, in many respects, we sometimes over-value our own creations. In education there is sometimes a tendency to overvalue the usefulness and the significance of one’s ideas, even if they originally were produced or thought of by someone else. This is because we attach a strong sense of meaning to the resources we produce. I once had a Head of Department who always came prepared with answers to departmental discussions although they had asked the team to consider what they felt to be the most pressing issues. Whatever solutions my colleagues and I came up with the Head of Department would match them with those on their own PowerPoint presentation. Essentially this meant crowbarring our ideas into a pre-existing slideshow, leaving us feeling demoralised and that our ideas were insignificant. By hampering creativity in this manner the department did not progress in the same way if discussion had been open.

Instead of spending time re-creating existing ideas many schools are instead taking them onboard to save on resources and have therefore time to focus on developing new and exciting ideas. There are Departments that are very effective in sharing good practice with it’s staff and some schools have started ‘best-practice hubs’ where outstanding teaching is discussed and shared. These institutions often do well and have a tendency to produce teachers that later go onto become Advanced Skills Teachers and inspiring leaders. The key to this success lay in changing the culture of both sharing, which can be difficult, but also in taking risks to become more creative and innovative.

If the ‘Not Invented Here’ dilemma hampers continued development and/or the time allowed for teachers to innovate then there are solutions which can help. Cue: creativity in ‘the cloud’…

The Cloud as the Innovation Playground for Educators

Social creativity is not free-for-all; it is highly structured… Social creativity collapses without effective self-governance… [We-Think works] when we create something no individual could produce and where critical thinking is critical to developing ideas… We Think (p.86) – C. Leadbeater

Leadbeater is referring to a concept where businesses (and other institutions) focus on mass collaboration rather than mass production, where people work together to solve complex problems instead of working solely on their own. Education would also benefit from this way of thinking, a move away from NIH bias – the Cloud provides scope for this to happen.

The Cloud has become what Michael Schrage calls the ‘prototyping playground’. You can beta test everything. For educators working with Cloud based systems such as Google Docs, WEB 2.0, LimeSurvey and online storage, these provide the opportunity to trial ideas, share thoughts on pedagogy and classroom practice. We decided to beta test our third book in 2008 where we shared our thoughts on teaching exam classes and initially wrote most of the content online where we could quickly experiment with ideas and structures. We then received feedback as comments, emails and on social media like Twitter. Based on people’s suggestions we redrafted large sections of the book and after receiving permission also included several long passages which people had contributed as ‘case studies’. You can still find remnants of the book here. In this respect the Cloud represents the world’s biggest testing ground, a ‘sandbox’. This means that thinking creatively in teaching is increasingly something you can do in public online and in collaboration with hundreds of others. The outcome has the potential of becoming more powerful, as Leadbeater suggests, than if the same work was undertaken in the department or team meeting.

While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.

Seth Godin

It is worthwhile establishing a culture of collaboration online. It takes time as most people are more comfortable working around a table, in the office or classrooom. The power of online collaboration is that it takes the roof off your office or school building and leaves you, in a sense, vulnerable to others’ opinions but also provides you with thousands of colleagues instead of, say, just six. One example I find very interesting is crowd-sourcing information for a specific purpose. This when you open a problem or query to anyone or, what happens more often, to everyone in a core area like education. The power of crowds and collaborating is investigated carefully in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, who explains that under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. One successful example of this was done using the Twitter hashtag #movemeon to crowdsource ideas about good teaching and learning and later put these together in PDF format as well as online using On-Demand Publishing to sell the file as a book without having to incur the cost of publication. Hundreds of people participated in this project and many have since used this idea for other similar projects. If this had been done by say three-four people the results would never have been the same. As this project was limited to 140 characters the depth of conversation was not the focus but the brainstorming of ideas.

An even more powerful way of using the Cloud to work creatively to solve mutual problems was achieved by Ory Okolloh in 2008. During the post-election violence that erupted in Kenya and the ensuing media black-out, she posted updates and collated comments about the atrocities on her blog but found it difficult to keep up with the hundreds of comments and emails sent to her so she pleaded to the virtual world for a solution to automate the process. The solution came in a couple of programmers who in 72 hours set up an Open-Source software they named Ushahidi, or ‘testimony’ in Swahili. This piece of technology aggregated information from 1000s of emails and SMS messages and placed them on a map for people to see where violence was happening. Ushahidi is now used to report on for example:

post-earthquake crisis response and recovery efforts in Chile.
track near real-time stockouts of medical supplies at pharmacies (in a medical store or health facility) in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia.
monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections.
map xenophobic attacks perpetrated against non-South Africans.

The power of Ushahidi came when people started to collaborate and this way of crowdsourcing proved to be very successful. We are posting about ideas for using Ushahidi in education at a later date.

The Not Invented Here Bias may still run deep in many of us but there are tools available to help us overcome the issue. If Mark Twain was able to take a quick peek almost 90 years after his statement, perhaps he would grant us a smile at how some people are accessing tools online to not only use each others ideas but to collaborate on mass to increase their value and depth.

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Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part I: how to collaborate virtually

How to collaborate virtually

If you are working in different geographical areas and struggle to meet regularly then you need to find easy yet effective solutions to ensure that your collaboration does not suffer. Also, these ideas work well if you simply wish to kick-start the collaboration before meeting. Here follows a series if ideas that could help maintain a continuous creative working relationship:

Wallwisher: the creative wall

Wallwisher.com: great for sharing ideas – click to view example

Wallwisher.com is an online notice board where you create the content by adding interactive stickies to the board. This online tool is superb to use get the creative flare sparked up amongst colleagues. Sign up and start your own wall, then your co-workers can upload images, share ideas and links. Wallwisher is ideal to use a couple of days before the big planning meeting as it gets everyone thinking, then you start the meeting by going through the team’s examples.

The Creative Blog:

Blogs are commonplace nowadays and the list of blogging software is growing steadily and it’s fairly straightforward to set one up having little or no coding experience. The idea behind the creative blog is to keep a running discussion on a key issue, and change the issue regularly. For example, one school comes up with the topic for discussion and the teachers share ideas by adding comments. One particularly good way of keeping the creative flow going is to have regular times when staff or departments add their thoughts e.g. at Department Meetings. At the end of the set time frame, e.g. every half term, the post is printed to PDF or Issuu /ZinePal for easy sharing and to put the creative thoughts onto paper.

Simple Video-Conferencing:

You might have tried to do video-conferencing but you found it slow with poor audio and video quality? Although some methods are still annoyingly poor, some tools are in fact very good e.g. MikoGo.com . This service is not only free but also very straight forward and all you have to do is to register and download the MikoGo widget which you use to meet online.

Each time you want to start a session simply launch MikoGo and copy the session ID and then email/phone whoever you are meeting with and they enter the session ID – done! If you are doing vid-conf individually then inbuilt or basic webcams are fine. However, if you want to capture more than one person you’d benefit from a Point Tilt and Zoom video camera. They can be pricey but there are cheaper alternatives. The PTZs are great as they enable you to involve people around the room by ‘Pointing’ the camera and then zooming in on the person.

Collaborative Mapping:

This process is simple and only requires the people involved to sign up to a mind-mapping website that allows for sharing and collaborating on the same mind-map. There are many such tools available like for example:

CoMapping.com $25/year (approx £15): This is a superb tool as it gives users the possibility of collaborating on the same map at the same time.

Bubbl.us Free: Another solid application where people can work together on the same maps although not at the same time.

The strength of these types of online tools lay in the opportunity to sketch out rough ideas whilst at the same time build on each others’ thoughts. Many of such mind-mapping websites also give users to possibility of uploading images, adding links and even documents of various kinds. These more powerful features tend to involve a nominal charge, like with CoMapping (or MindMeister.com), but it is worth the money spent as you can lead, develop and collaborate on very large projects quickly and easily without much delay or complications. We have worked with both teachers and students on different projects and everyone agrees that it made collaborating more engaging and efficient – students benefited greatly during group work particularly when it involved a longer independent learning project spanning across a half-term as they could continue to work from home or simply just uploading documents, images and audio files to use when they returned to school.

If you haven’t tried any if these ideas yet then why not use one or two of the examples with a current collaboration, you will not regret it.

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