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.

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.

[relatedPosts title=”Related Posts: ” num_to_display=”4″]

Ideas for Encouraging Collaboration and Creativity Part II: how to brainstorm properly

If you are looking to start an innovations group either in your school or across county and you want to focus on a particular issue then you probably need to thrash out some ideas before you decide. A good old-fashioned brain-storming session will be great starting point for your collaboration. We also mentioned a few ideas about brainstorming and collaborating online in this post: How to collaborate virtually. Here follows a set of ideas which we use to work and plan together on projects, books or workshops and we feel they work very well.

Alien Worlds

The key to a successful brainstorming session is what you and other people bring to the table. So, let’s see what you have! Take out a piece of paper, a comfortable pen and list or map out your thoughts about this question for 3-5 minutes (be as specific as possible – you may need to break down ‘my experience’ to smaller chunks for example) :

What will I bring that will benefit the brainstorming session/planning meeting?

Now think about this question:

What will other people bring?

The aim is of course to have a varied group of people with different experiences but that is not possible all the time so what do you do then?  If you want to ensure that there is a constant flow of creativity within the group try to:

  • Read different literature e.g. books that indirectly have little to do with your area of expertise (see the end of the post for suggestions that will encourage creativity and innovation).
  • Subscribe to an inspirational magazine e.g. WIRED UK
  • Investigate new music and art e.g. try iTunes Essentials, Live365 or Spotify for new music, visit Banksy’s website to get inspired with street art, learn something new at LifeHacks or discover how almost anything works at How Stuff Works.
  • Give each member of the group a new persona, or role to play based on Tom Kelley’s Ten Faces of Innovation to really push yourselves to become more innovative (read this post about using Ten Faces of innovation with students).

Building up a portfolio of ideas takes time and a lot of hard work so it is important get into a sort of routine of collecting and recording as you go along. List books you want to buy, rip out magazine articles, save online using tools like EverNote or Awesome Note, note down quotes and words of wisdow or interesting websites. These might be invaluable one day.

The Idea Board

The idea board is a place where you add not only your ‘light bulb’ moments but also what may seem like minor ideas at the time. One such way could be to keep stickies nearby, adding notes to a Moleskin sketch-book, use your mobile phone to save thoughts or keep a washable mini-whiteboard in your office. Most of our ideas have come from some of these fleeting thoughts, and this plays a crucial part in the creative process.

Dumping Ground?

There are different ways of brainstorming, some structure their chaos by adding, ‘dumping’, all their ideas and suggestions on a long list – the more words the better. ‘Dumpers’ then organise their additions on a mind-map and can therefore categorise and group ideas more easily (this method is explained in more detail in the book Thinking Skills and Eye-Q).

Another way is to assign a scribe and everyone throws suggestions at them to write down on a flip-chart or similar. The key thing here is that there is no order except from the fact that the scribe ensures that all voices are heard – quantity is important here, not quality (well at least not yet!). Don’t be put off if all your ideas seem impossible or even stupid, because they are not. Think of each suggestion as a stepping stone to the team’s final idea and without these initial thoughts none of you would have got anywhere, so keep thrashing out ideas but leave the devil’s advocate outside (at least for a while).

Distance and Fuel

If you prepared well by stimulating your mind and recorded your thoughts of inspiration on the Idea Board as well as filled your dumping ground, or not, with lots of interesting (and let’s face it, not so interesting ideas), now is the time to take a well deserved break. Distancing yourself from all the suggestions, ideas, solutions and problems as well as refueling on coffee, water, biscuits and food is crucial if you are to come up with a truly innovative idea. This may only involve going for a brief walk, ordering a decent espresso or ‘sleeping on it’, you know what works best for you. But don’t skip this bit, you might regret it.

North or South?

This is the time to decide which way to go or what idea to run with and it might take some time. We have found that running with one seemingly obvious idea sometimes leads to the actual idea, perhaps one that was mentioned at the start of the process. Yet, this is not wasting time as without this creative activity we wouldn’t have thought of the end product and it’s always different to what we thought – but very exciting!

Creative Books

Here follows a list of books we have read and used often when we meet up to work. Some are just for inspiration whilst others have become great guides for us both.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: Strategies for Heightening Creativity

Dan Pink: Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Harris, Caviglioli, Thompson: Thinking Skills and Eye Q: Visual Tools for Raising Intelligence

Banksy: Wall or Piece

Steve Jobs: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Alain de Botton: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

[relatedPosts title=”Related Posts: ” num_to_display=”4″]

Planning GCSE with a smile

GCSE is a bit like going to the dentist for a check-up: you know that it is good for you in the long-run, but it leaves such a horrible taste in your mouth. Every so often it is worth going back to basics and designing a course from scratch. In this way you can ensure that it is enjoyable and contains learning that has real worth. The TEEP cycle can offer assistance when trying to achieve this not just for lessons, but in planning a whole scheme. Outlined below are six easy steps for creating a scheme of work that challenges students and makes GCSE much more rigorous:

 

1.       Prepare for Learning

The Big Picture is essential – both for teachers and students. Without it, the learning becomes a series of virtually independent chunks that bare no relation to each other. Planning without the big picture tends to produce a scheme that is heavy on content and light on memorable learning. From the perspective of the students, there is little to hang on to.

Firstly, a big idea or question is needed that will guide students through the work and offer them a line to pin their new learning on. Questions work well, because they encourage an answer and this in turn leads to better engagement. A unit on Crime might be approached with the following question:

 

Is Britain more violent and crime ridden than it has ever been?

 

The first lessons in the scheme – your way of grabbing them and getting them to think as soon as they came through the door – might focus on creating a debate or dilemma. For example, cutting out reports from newspapers about crime and creating a class montage helps to establish how the topic is viewed by the Media. This can then be analysed for dominate themes, e.g. crime is violent, on the increase, involving more children, more sexual in nature, etc. Offering an alternative viewpoint to this forces students to think about the following content and filter it through the debate. They will need to ask questions of and engage with the materials you provide.

When students see Steven Pinker providing an argument that the world is less violent than it has ever been and saying he can prove it, the reaction is always one of shock (see the film at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html). This approach establishes a real problem that students will want to spend the unit investigating.

 The students will now be thinking about the topic and actually caring about its contents – for a moment they might actually forget it is a GCSE exam unit.

  

2.       Agree Learning Outcomes

The next step should be to establish how the question is going to be tackled. In lessons teachers discuss the content, process and benefits, and extending this to a whole scheme helps to increase understanding. The content is easy, you have a Big Question and the specifications state the boundaries. The process might take a little longer, but agreeing on a logical framework in order to answer the question is needed to assist understanding. Equally vital is identifying the skills needed and tools at hand. Now for the benefits. Exam preparation is a clear one, but then unpicking other benefits can lead to greater motivation among students. This is substantially easier if the big question is rooted in a real and genuine problem.

 

 3.       Present New Information

Before launching into the content proper, overview activities encourage students to make links and tease out the key words and ideas in the topic. This process allows students time to familiarise themselves with the topic before they begin. It is a chance to embed the main ideas of the unit. It could essentially be seen as an early revision opportunity.

 ‘Chunked up’ learning and creating mini-enquiries, each with a question and a relevance to the main enquiry will also help to aid understanding and maintain interest. Tackling the smaller parts makes it more manageable for students and allows for regular review of the Big Question. These reviews can be linked to exam question practice that will allow staff the track and monitor performance.

 

4.       Construct Understanding

Content should be delivered through a range of activities that engage students with problems to solve and hypotheses to test.

For example, mystery activities can not only deliver new information, but provide dilemmas that engage students in the process of analysis. This Billy the Kid Pardon Activity gets students working on a real life dilemma from 2007.

 

5.       Apply to Demonstrate

Each section of the course can be concluded with activities to extend thinking and help students piece together information to answer the Big Question. One strategy for this is model making. The models can physically represent the information in a way that was easy to remember. It could be as simple as making a hat for each part of the course, where the inside, outside and brim all represent something different. Another strategy is to use concept maps and get students to make links between the key facts within the section. Links help with memory and develop understanding.

 

6.       Review

Starting the year with a blank display board and gradually added work, evidence and models under the Big Question is a great way to keep track of learning and develop a clear approach. Reviews in each lesson should be easy to plan as teachers can refer back to the Big Question and discuss whether an answer is anywhere near being established. Answers can be unpicked to see how students have come to their conclusions. The strategies they used can be recorded for future use, creating a kind of GCSE toolkit for them to refer to and use.

A unit can seem like a long time, but sandwiched together it is only about twenty four hours (of teaching). However, leaving students with an activity that is creative and exciting will help with positive feelins aout the work. The tendency can be to assess at the end of the unit, but this does not always provide students with an opportunity to look at a unit in its entirety and make sense of it. Neither does it provide a natural high with which you would want them have. No actor would want to go through weeks of rehearsals only to find they were writing the programme notes. It doesn’t have to be grand, just fun and cover the whole unit. Making a song about the topic set to an appropriate tune would be simple and not very time consuming, but it would also be memorable. 

The process of learning at GCSE should engage students and focus them in a way we expect from Key Stage 3. They must feel part of the learning and care about the final outcome.

[relatedPosts title=”Related Posts: ” num_to_display=”4″]