Teaching is to Emancipate

At last I have a GLOW login – ahead of the pack in Fife but not by far. Not all of the functionality is there yet but I am sure will be in place ready for the wider adoption anticipated by everyone.

I am hearing some wonderful things about what’s coming in GLOW, not least a move away from the closed-door proprietary nonsense towards open standards – Andrew Brown knows that “secure” doesn’t mean “inpenetrable”. Good luck to him in evolving GLOW to its fullest potential.

The 2009 Scottish Survey of Achievement in Reading and Writing is published this week and I am sure it will be picked apart and used as evidence that:

• Education is failing
• Teachers are liars
• Surveys ask the wrong questions
• Kids aren’t as clever as we were
• Computers are wrecking children’s literacy

or whatever else your particular vested interest or prejudices require. My particular view is that there is evidence (and this survey alone isn’t it) that societal changes are driving societal change and this is perceived as, inter alia, an increase in illiteracy. I am sure someone will be beaten with a metaphorical stick as a result of these numbers, and for sure some ill-informed politician will make party political capital out of it.

Within the report, to the credit of the people who prepared it, is data on the difference between what their survey found on the day and what the teachers who work with the children all year said about the pupils’ abilities. For example:

This, with the reported levels found by the survey, could be interpreted to show that teachers are misrepresenting their pupils’ abilities. Certainly, secondary teachers have long viewed primary teachers’ reports with a good deal of suspicion if not downright disbelief. Is it really the case? I wanted to research this as part of a putative doctorate but was advised to steer well clear.

What I fear is that too much credence is given to the interpretation made by education leaders about what this data means. Having, like many a Principal Teacher, been the unwilling participant in the annual ceremony of “flagellatis statistica” conducted by school leaders, I can vouch for the faith that is placed in such data. The current report cites the levels of confidence as at about 95%, but as anyone who has done real, robust, scientific statistical research will tell you, these are not gambling odds. We share, after all, 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Therefore, these statistics are not quite as true a reflection of the state of Scottish Education as you, dear reader, are a chimpanzee.

My view is simply this: that society is changing and we should expect it to. We reap what we sow. To mix metaphors, we are reaping a curate’s egg: parts of it are excellent. I am fortunate enough to teach such parts.

David Noble set up a great little experiment today using ipadio, an audio-over-IP application server, to host a virtual end of year education conference he dubbed TeachMeet Mobile. Using the mighty power of twitter, he drummed up some speakers for a one-hour reflective which is available to hear live here and after the event here.

My own contribution rides on the back of Drew Buddie’s review of how far the use of ICT in education has come in the last ten years and is meant to be a bit of a foil to any exuberance we might feel about being so far ahead of ourselves. My simple and short point is simply this: I am not convinced that the young minds we are preparing are best served by what I see as an endemic dumbing down of the curriculum. This isn’t a Scottish problem, it’s all over the place and has been brought about by an avalanche of change – in political thinking and correctness, in public funding of state provision, in weak social (read “non”) science research, in promotion of managers of expediency to positions where leadership are required, not least the head teachers of state schools, and the very curriculum itself, diluted to the point of homeopathic uselessness by feeble regression to an exponentially weakening mean level of ability.

The words of the new curriculum are laudable: I hear paraphrases in the modern idiom of the seven liberal arts and sciences and slogans such as “science at the heart of Curriculum for Excellence”, but until a fundamental return is made to decent standards of behaviour, literacy, parenting, leadership and public service provision, no progress will be had without those of us called mavericks being heard.

… and we’ll do the job. This was a phrase often quoted at me as a project manager in industry, usually in response to some request for an explanation as to why a project was falling behind schedule, or why tasks were not getting done. Once upon a time, I was the kind of guy who could happily ask such a question, knowing that the necessary resources – time, tea, toilet rolls or tools – had not been provided properly or at the right time and place. Everything could be correlated to a cost and I knew that cutting costs could be done using the “just-in-time” model of resource provision. I learned, the hard and expensive way, that the T-shirt slogan, “make God laugh – make a plan”, just wasn’t really funny. Especially if it was your plan.

Don Ledingham falls into the same old traps of the deluded project manager in his blog post on reducing bureaucracy in education when he cites the cost of a 30-minute meeting of SMT/PT’s as something approaching £18,000 – £20,000 per year. The cost is, of course, £0.00. The financial costs of the enterprise are the same, with or without the meetings. The posts are filled, the salary bill is fixed. Whatever you want those people to do, they will endeavour to do – whether it is on your time or theirs. No, the cost of spending time is what is not achieved with the remaining time. If you want a fully-integrated, cross-curricular, child-centred, four-capacity-compliant, literate, numerate, articulate, coherent curriculum, then the time to build it must be given to the builders.

The principles are simple but missing from education: from blindness to the effect of initiative layering to the extremes of narcissism, education is driven by expedient and personal self-interest far more than it is driven by the principles of providing good value for public money, future-proofing our economy and preparing people for social, economic and political environments which haven’t been dreamed of yet.

There were many great, stimulating, enthusing and positively challenging things about this year’s Scottish Learning Festival but for me, two are most memorable and, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a little connected. The first was Professor Carol Dweck’s keynote, “Developing Growth Mindsets: how praise can harm, and how to use it well”. In it, she described for us a dual categorisation of (i) the Fixed mindset and (ii) the Growth mindset. These categorisations are characterised by three rules:

Rule #1

• Fixed: look clever
• Growth: learn, learn, learn

Rule #2

• Fixed: It should come naturally – hard work makes me feel stupid
• Growth: Work hard – effort is key. The harder you work, the better you get. Geniuses are distinguished from their peers by hard work, working hard at their strengths and weaknesses

Rule #3

• Fixed: Hide mistakes – have no recovery recipe for failure
• Growth: capitalize on mistakes, confront deficiencies

Professor Dweck went on to identify that mindsets come from our language and importantly, praise can encourage the Fixed mindset. She carefully distinguishes between praise of intelligence (which encourages the fixed mindset: “what a clever girl!”) and praise of effort or process. Helpfully, we were given practical advice on what to praise:

• Effort, struggle, persistence despite setbacks
• Strategies, choices
• Choosing difficult tasks
• Learning, improving

Because of the plasticity of the brain, the mindset can be changed with the right work and the effect this has on motivation is significant: one place where this is exemplified is at www.brainology.us, where a mindset development programme for students offers a “manual for the brain” to help overcome problems in school. It’s not a free programme, but the (free) demo certainly seems engaging and promising.

Teachers have a duty (imho) to have expert knowledge on aspects of learning rooted in this kind of research and this brings me to the second memorable thing at the SLF09: I was lucky enough to have my name picked to speak for seven minutes at the Teachmeet event at the BBC. I’m not going to talk about the teachmeet phenomenon – there’s plenty on that, but taking that as read, I was very happy indeed to be able to offer a description of a critical thinking task I have been using with some of my Higher and Advanced Higher Physics students. This was something I came up with whilst on holiday this summer, reading some Feynman and Taleb’s “Black Swan”. I developed a problem for pupils which required them to initially fail – the problem is not solvable numerically – and then persevere, reflect, think out of the box, struggle and – this is what I hoped for – resolve with a new perspective on their own knowledge and how they came by it.

I admit to the obscurity of this task in the context of the daily mayhem of the average secondary school but excellence is not for all (despite what it says on school stationery): excellence is elusive and precious – and anything precious is hard won. The prize is nothing less than emancipation (look at the banner on this site) – setting minds free of the bonds in which they have been enslaved by social context and the dull linear education that most encounter. Let one pupil (one out of about thirty) leave you with an insight into what I was seeking:

I learned that to truly understand something (especially something like this that requires hard thinking) you have to not only work at it, but to sit back and think about it. Then, if you’ve got it, finish the task then at the end reflect over it. If you still get it – then you know you’ve done good at it. Then you get that good feeling.

“That good feeling” is addictive. It is the joy of winning the intellectual battle. This student has set her mind free. The task was posted here.

I am posting this from the Clyde auditorium at the SECC, where a packed house is enjoying Knightswood Academy’s beautiful and competent dance performed by a healthy gender mix of really very talented young people.

The keynote is being given by Fiona Hyslop, our esteemed Secretary of State for Education – more on that in the comments.

I’m off to a good start, having had a quick look at the exhibitor displays, met with some of the influential people in education today and had a very positive conversation with one of the senior managers in my own LA, Fife, about the positive things happening in the arena of new technology.

I’ll comment updates as the day and opportunity affords.

Love it or hate it, change to the Scottish curriculum is coming. One aspect of the change is the new pre-certificate level curriculum for pupils from Primary through to S3 – called “a Curriculum for Excellence”. It is defined, following some hard work by a small number of educators and some consultation, as a collection of outcomes and experiences. There’s a lot of information on the LTS Website and every teacher has been given their own personal copy of the outcomes – all of them – in a lovely green folder.

There are a number of issues with what is expected to happen as a result of this expensive distribution: there seems to be an expectation that a brand new curriculum will magically appear because we have all been given this resource. Extra days of CPD have been funded by the Government but the two this writer has had have vanished into the ordinary business of delivering the existing curriculum. The green folder in the picture has yet to be opened in the context of sitting down and developing the curriculum.

It, or rather the more convenient online version, has, however, been studied as it has evolved. The intentions of the new curriculum seem to be to provide a highly rich, unique and valuable learning experience, matched to the individual needs of each pupil. About time. Increasing time pressures on educators have been undermining the quality of what can be done in school and I am surprised I don’t hear more people repeating Churchill’s complaint that, “my education was interrupted only by my schooling”.

From the outcomes and the Introductory Statements, it is clear that teachers in Scotland are going to have to use every bit of the freedom we enjoy to use all of our skills, expertise and experience in the classroom. Not only that, but to provide these experiences in the flexible, challenging and engaging manner now demanded, we will need a level of subject knowledge significantly above the one we are teaching at. This is excellent: with all due respect to my colleagues, biologists can rarely teach resistance well, although they can often meet the outcomes. I know that as a physicist, my teaching of classification lacks the sparkle of the same outcome taught by a biology graduate who knows the importance of it in the later development of the subject.

I also know that in my classroom, the students benefit most when I am charged up myself about the topic we are discussing: especially where I am doing the learning too. This is most likely to occur in my case when I am considering some (off-topic) aspect of that which we are studying, such as the human story of triumph and disaster exemplified by John Logie Baird’s so-called invention of television (he didn’t) or the gut-wrenching injustice of the theft of the idea by RCA from Philo Farnsworth (he did) and his subsequent death from alcohol abuse, described in video by his sisters. When the students recall the outcome “describe picture build-up in a TV”, they do so by thinking of the 14-year old Farnsworth being struck with inspiration on his tractor, plowing the fields in Utah. This kind of learning and engagement is what I believe aCfE to be all about and can only come from the depth of knowledge and engagement in the subject that the graduate teacher of that subject has.

The new curriculum is strong on the development of “cross-curricular” links. In science, of course, this becomes awkward and difficult outside of one’s subject area because the cross-curricular links for biology (physical education, home economics, eco-schools, health and wellbeing, and so on) are substantially different to those for physics (technical studies, mathematics, geology, geography, music, and so on) and similarly for chemistry.

To meet the expectations that Curriculum for Excellence has to offer, the three discrete sciences must be taught by their respective specialists. If the difficulties of timetabling and staffing can be overcome, this will deepen and consolidate the knowledge and confidence of those lucky pupils exposed to this from the earliest stage, and the yield will be in their attainment at Higher and Advanced Higher, with the onward benefit to the prosperity of Scotland.

Science is dead. Long live the sciences!

This looks like it’s going to be fun… I was at the British Geological Survey launch today at Our Dynamic Earth in Holyrood, Edinburgh for the launch of the UK School Seismology Project which will deliver 40 funded seismometers to schools in Scotland. This is a wonderful opportunity and the three pilot schools were represented by pupils who were sharing their experiences with us.

After an introduction by Aoife (pronounced ee-fah) O’Mongain who has brought the project together, there were addresses by David Kerridge, the head of the BGS, Stuart Monro, co-chair of the Scottish Science Advisory Council, and the Minister for Schools and Skills, Keith Brown MSP. All referred to the fantastic rich cross-curricular opportunity the project offers schools, and the power being vested in Scottish teachers to bring about superbly engaging experiences for young people under the banner of A Curriculum for Excellence, the finalised outcomes of which are to be published today (2 April 2009) in Stirling by the Cabinet Secretary of State for Education and Lifeong Learning, Fiona Hyslop.

As many of us know, there has been much criticism of the draft outcomes but there remains amongst teachers I speak to a determination to continue to do the very best we can for the young people of Scotland, not least in those areas where we all stand to gain – in science and technology. Stuart Monro reminded us of the very great things that have been and continue to be done in these areas by Scots and by Scotland. Our success can only be enhanced by initiatives such as the BGS seismology project: this is real science and the data produced by the seismometers in schools will contribute to new knowledge about our planet at a time when we need to understand it most.

After the Minister spoke, there was a short video before getting down to the nuts and bolts: Gordon Irvine of Dunblane High School spoke of his experiences with the equipment as part of the pilot, then Aoife and Gregor Steele of the Scottish Schools Equipment Research Centre explained the interactive experiments and encouraged us to get a little closer to the exhibits set up for us, which we did, over much discussion and a not inconsiderably tasty lunch buffet. The pupils present were a credit to their schools as they mixed with the educators, scientists, media and politicians, sharing their experience and enthusiasm with us all.

I’ll certainly be trying to get my hands on one of these excellent kits. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a picture of one set up for us to look at and try…

… as well as Gregor’s wobbling jelly demonstration. More information on Seismology is available from the Science Enhancement Programme as well as directly from Aoife at the British Geological Survey, who will provide more information – and would love to hear from you if you can help extend the offer from 40 seismometers to more: costs are in excess of £300 per kit and funding partners would be greatly appreciated.

On 19th March at Dewars in Perth, the IoP are supporting a networking / CPD event with a
strong emphasis on informality. There are a number of interesting speakers lined up to share
some great ideas on teaching physics.

You can join us in Perth or on your computer at home. The idea is to get together and swap
ideas for good teaching, using new technology or not. Examples include:

“iPod my Physics” – Sinclair Mackenzie on podcasting
Ideas for cross-curricular working with Geography from Ollie Bray
Jaye Richards, teaching sound and light with the Nintendo Wii
Dave Spittal on things that can be achieved with a cheap webcam
Drew Burrett on GLOW
Bob Kibble on simultaneous equations with wooden beams

and others…

Why not consider coming along to share your great idea?

Check it out and sign up here.

or email me and I’ll add you. There’s food, wifi, and a good atmosphere. It all starts at 6 p.m.

See you there?