Teaching is to Emancipate

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My Advanced Higher Bad Boys very helpfully pointed me at this strategy for dealing with the frustrations of being a teacher.

Woo-saaaaaaahhhh….

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.

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.

My school is lucky enough to have pupils from Poland join us: to help them, a colleague has put together a vocabulary sheet for some of the basic terms in science. You can download it for MS Word or as a pdf.

The annual Scottish conference of the Mathematical Association at Stirling University was held on Saturday. As before, the event was eclectic and informative and a good opportunity to spend a short time networking with those interested in the mathematical development of young people in Scotland.

Keynote: Adam McBride

The keynote address was given by Professor Adam McBride of Strathclyde University under the heading “Mathematical Challenges”. His talk was directed at three key issues:

• Arousing and maintaining interest
• Perseverance in hard problems
• Realising the potential of gifted students

These were eloquently and passionately discussed with some practical pointers for the assembled audience of mostly mathematics educators. He made reference to the fact that the gifted have special educational needs: not in the sense that many of us are used to but clearly no less deserving of the appropriate support and challenge in order to bring them to their fullest potential. Professor McBride directed our attention to the NRICH project and the work of the UK Mathematics Trust as a source of appropriate resources and support, for students as well as teachers. Able pupils are often bored at school, spending much of their mathematics lessons waiting for the rest to catch up. Schools are tempted to push them through the system: I know of one student who suffered as a result of such an initiative and concurs with Professor McBride’s clear guidance that such pupils should be offered enrichment, not acceleration. Finally, exhorting us to not be afraid but rather celebrate when we realise one or more of our students are intellectually more able than we are, he encouraged us to set high targets: for all of our students as well as for ourselves.

A Curriculum for Excellence

I went to two workshop sessions around the topic of the new curriculum to try and get my head round the perspectives: one given by Fiona Roberston from HMIe, the other by John Tees of Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Numeracy Group. Fiona began her presentation with a run down (in reverse order, but I’ve put number one first) of her Curriculum for Excellence “Top Ten”:

1. There is no one “Curriculum for Excellence” – everyone’s will be different
2. The 2002 National Debate which set it all off
3. A coherent 3 – 18 programme: we have to be working with the primaries
4. The 4 aspects of the curriculum
5. Should be building on the best of 5 – 14
6. The 6 entitlements must be considered in implementing the curriculum
7. The 7 design principles must also be considered
8. There are eight curriculum areas: we need to know all of these
9. 2009: the experiences and outcomes
10. 2010: the S1 cohort arrives in our schools to experience the new curriculum!

Her thorough and detailed talk went on to provide a great deal of information and tips around what the HMIe are looking for in schools. Some of these are (with paraphrasing and the odd error no doubt introduced by me, for which I apologise, but this is what I got from it):

• There’s a new document being published in November by HMIe in the “Opening up Learning” series.
• Enjoyment of mathematics fails in Primary and flows into Secondary
• Effective challenge
  • increasing complexity or abstraction
  • Teaching is often too textbook driven
  • Reinforce and build on prior knowledge
  • It is not an acceptable excuse that you can’t rely on the information from the Primary schools
  • Promote Positive attitudes (DON’T say, e.g. “it’s fractions – I know you don’t like these”)
  • being active in your learning does not mean running about the classroom
• Breadth and Depth
  • Pace is not the same as speed through the curriculum
  • Electives may be offered in S2 but not at the cost of core timetable
  • timetable for S2 electives can be made available by removing ICT as a discrete subject: place it within all other subjects
  • low ability electives in S2 can have a positive impact on attitudes to core mathematics
  • the IWB is a tool – it’s not about the technology
• Progression
  • Identify curricular pathways
  • the outcomes in numeracy have been unpacked now
  • track back from higher
  • coherence: across primaries and secondaries
• Relevance
  • sharing purpose in the lesson is important…
  • DO NOT copy a learning intention from the board into a jotter or diary
  • google sketchup has been used very well
  • some have been using Bebo, twitter, and so on, and have had “significant impact on relevance”

Fiona directed us to a number of documents to help us, especially in the area of assessment:

• Changing Assessment Practice, a follow up to the Black Box publications
• Assessment in Schools: fit for purpose? (pdf) from the Institute for Education

Her talk concluded with some questions from the audience but not before she outlined some important pointers to what an inspection is looking for:

• Teachers are
  • reflective
  • ready for professional discussion
  • engaged in a process of continuous improvement
• Department development plans
  • what are your strengths?
  • how do you know?
  • what improvements are you working on now?
  • why?
  • how are you going about it?

There are further helpful bits of information in her presentation slides: her final slide was titled, “Curriculum for Excellence: what HMIe expects in 2009 / 10″

• look below the headings of the 4 capacities
• think hard about the entitlements and design principles
• engaging with the outcomes and experiences
• reflect on your approaches to learning and teaching
• Building the Curriculum 3: what does it mean for you?

The rest of the day

After the first session, I attended a rambling and slightly incoherent presentation by LTS and had a nice lunch. The afternoon was spent on more practical matters, such as the specifics of the Standard Grade exam performance this year. At this workshop, given by Brian Logan, acting PA for the Foundation exam at the SQA, it was stated that the exam writers in mathematics do not have any dialogue with the other subjects – this explained the incorrect physics in this year’s credit paper (giving the weight of an atom of gold in grams). This seems to be a long way from the cross-curricular spirit of Curriculum for Excellence.

My apologies for the distorted report – I’ve run out of time but I think the presentation by Fiona Robertson deserved the fullest of coverage. As a parting gift, accept this link to the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, which is a fantastic resource (and from where you can get a nice box of goodies for your school – free!)

A careers fair in town trashed a double Advanced Higher, so I got the two students present to help me dig stuff out of foostie old cupboards. Here are some pictures of what we found. No prizes, but can you identify all of this kit?

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!

I was asked by a young graduate whether he should consider teaching as a career. Here’s my reply.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. It sounds as if you are quite young: this is not a disadvantage or bar to teaching but I am firmly of the view that teaching should not be a first career choice. Children are more likely to respond to the experienced voice: they have little enough respect for that, and despite what you might be told, they do not “identify with” younger teachers.

Having said that, I know of many good teachers who have never left the education system: if you’re interested in primary teaching, there’s a special advantage for you there (being a male).

You’re right about the magic of “that” question. I’ve been teaching just over five years and I’ve had three or four of those – about as many times as I have been physically assaulted. Do they make it all worth the effort (I work about 75 hours a week)? I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t imagine sustaining teaching as a career more than about 10 years. On that benchmark, I’m half way through my teaching career – I may go longer, yet again, I may decide that this year is my last.

On balance, teaching is extremely rewarding emotionally: it’s like a love affair with a slightly psychotic and very needy woman. If you think you can cope with that, go for it.

Good luck.

Did I advise him well?

It’s been a busy October holiday. I’ve…

• been on a shopping trip to the Arndale and Trafford Centres in Manchester
• submitted a proposal to include mathematical modelling in the new Higher Physics course
• launched a number of new or relocated websites
• written new e-commerce code for a boat builder
• had a lot – a lot – of conversations with a number of people on some of the issues that concern me relating to assessment of Physics in Scotland
• launched the TeachingPhysics wiki for organising meetings
• started to put together the Teachmeet:Physics unconference in March
• done all of my ironing!
• caught up with a number of old friends
• watched several movies with popcorn and beverages
• moved this blog

I feel ready to return to work now: more informed, more prepared and more able.

This week sees the launch of a new website where physics teachers can share and arrange meetings. The idea came from one such meeting, over curry in Kirkcaldy, at which many good ideas had been shared as is always the case when teachers get together.

In March next year, we are planning to have the first physics teachmeet – along the lines of the series of teachmeets held to acclaim around the UK.

See you there!