I'm a teacher, why blog!

A blog is a journal that is published online. But very few people keep a journal, and even fewer publish it. So what's the attraction of a blog? Well, it is not for everyone. However, teachers have one or more captive audiences with which they are in constant communication. Secondly, blogs are immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. Thirdly, they allow comments by readers. So, if teachers want to get information to their students in a form that is always available (at home) and which students can respond to, and maybe parent can have access to as well, then a blog might be useful. Add to that the fact that blogs gererally look good, can include images and video, are searchable, then maybe they are a useful communication tool.

What about students, I hear you say. Well, blogs can be restricted to a limited audience, and if students have a need to communicate with more than just their teacher, they can be very useful. They are simple to structure: are always linear, and are a long term record. They can be a major journal of learning and observations. They can be open to parents and family, so can provided an instant and appreciative audience. That is a key attribute of blogs for students. They can provide a forum and an audience for student writing and images.

Students and teachers can have multiple blogs that are written for different audiences as the need arises.

Real learning, programming with Stratch

This is an image of my first bit of programming using Scratch, and I am interested in using it as a tool to practice and learn down-to-earth curriculum skills. In this case, mid primary exploration of what the main plane figures consist of: like equilateral triangles. The glorious animated version can be seen here - 7 seconds of maths glory. Scratch is a delight to use. Very very simple and apparently powerful.

I am interested in how to use a powerful tool like this for students to learn some nice measurable curriculum skills and understandings close to the heart of any teacher. Having just heard presentations at the CEGSA conference on Scratch is strikes me (again) that we often go out of our way to suggest the most complex ways of using ICT and then are upset when teachers do not apply our wonderful ideas. Everyone seems to see programming only as a problem solving tool that students use to initiate an investigation, work on it for a long time, and hopefully come to a rewarding conclusion. While this kind of project can be very effective and beneficial, it is just about the hardest kind of learning to manage, requiring particular attitues, patience, teacher skills and student perservearance. Why not think of ways to apply powerful technologies to quite rudimentary learning, like, in this case, Year 5s learning the characteristics of standard shapes, and becoming familiar with their construction and manipulation?

What did they learn? Not a bad question for schools.

I have been working away for some months on researching a paper on professional learning, and some of my previous posts late last year reflect this. I have now published a fairly extensive report on what I discovered in this search and here it is: What did they learn? The title of the site suggest the main finding - that the focus of everything in a school should be directed to improving student's learning. This may seem to be a trite thing to say, but it has clearly not been the case. As a principal of a school for about 30 years I can say that we focused on lots of things in the '70s to '90s including school culture, democratic decision making, staff development and a hundred other things, and paid little attention to measuring student outcomes. We certainly cared about student learning, but we concentrated on achieving a good environment for learning and agonised about how to motivate, encourage, support and recognise good learning. But we didn't measure it in a systematic way and did not compare our measurements very much. We got into a huge battle for the last 20 years about external testing, and I was very active in this fight, and much of the criticism of testing is valid. This is reinforced by an excellent article by Ken Boston Our Early Start at Making Children Unfit for Work.

The trouble is, that in that fight we lost some perspective, and while condemning some testing we drifted into a culture in which no comparative assessment of student performance was acceptable. We developed a hundred reasons not to compare one teacher's results with another's. Teaching became secret teacher's business into which no one can intrude. The research into school improvement makes a good case for bringing these two extreme view closer together and achieving teacher professionalism and accountability for student performance.

It's about student outcomes, stupid!

The 'stupid' in question is me. The following 3 min video outlines some re-thinking I have done over the last 6 months. While I am changing my ideas about school professional learning and what we need to focus on - student outcomes, I can now see how we can resolve the contradictions that have be-deviled us for years - the tension between teacher freedom and external testing.




See also
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QnNSd6PIsc

The Digital Natives Myth

One of the pervasive myths of the digital literacy landscape is that young people are generally 'in' the digital world and older people are generally struggling to engage with it. The catchiest term for this is that young people are Digital Natives (being born into the digital age) and the rest of us are Digital Immigrants (coming to in in later life). While this is literally true, the conclusions about the gap in engagement with ICT are frequently exaggerated if not simply false.

I have been teaching a group of 30 or so university students in a multimedia course for the last four years and the Digital Native notion has each year been demonstrated to be false. These have been students who chose a computer learning course yet about a third have quite modest skills in using computers, another third were competent and about a third were behaving as Digital Natives are supposed to behave - using blogs, social networking and generally being creative users.

This issue has been well researched by a project involving several universities and a collection of their reports is at Educating the Net Generation (Uni Melb.) and their large scale study supports my simple observations. See 'The Net Generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies'. They also demonstrate in another story that the gap in skills between university students and staff is not as great as generally reported.

It is interesting to ask why such ideas as the Natives-Immigrants gap are accepted so readily in many forums. I think it is because it is an idea that Henny-Penny Optimists enjoy. The Henny-Penny Optimists are experts in ICT who promote a nicely contradictory point of view that, a) the world as we know it is ending, everything is changing, revolution is at hand, young people's brains are being re-wired by use of technology, and b) the future with ICT is liberating, collaborative and totally wonderful. Like the original Henny-Penny, these people create a lot of alarm and unnecessary panic. When the HPOs promote the Digital Natives idea, they alarm many teachers and administrators, particulalry those who have low ICT skills about the impossible and widening gap between themselves and their students.

The reality, as usual, is much more complex and not as exciting as simplistic generalisations like Digital Natives suggest.

The (relatively) simple formula for successful school systems

The OECD commissioned a report from McKinsey & Company on successful school systems and the report was published in 2007: How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top . The report concludes that there are three unremarkable things that high performing systems do consistently:

1. They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers).
2. They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction).
3. They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to ready the highests performance is to raise the standard of every student).

The top systems include England, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Boston, Japan. The report is very readable and basically hopeful because the answer is not just money or extraordinary leadership, but consistency and determination focused on some basiclly straightforward targets. Take teacher quality for example. The report says that all but one of the top systems filter teacher training applicants before University, and then again on entry to the profession. They achieve this in part by restricting the number of teacher training places, which raises the standard of those accepted. They set beginning salaries a little higher, and flatten later salary rises. Most low performing systems have relatively open admission to teacher training, consequent lowering of standards, then there are many graduates for each teaching position, leading to a generally low morale and status for teacher preparation. There is more to it than these measures, but a few smart policy measures have a large impact and, the report claims, prove that the calibre of graduate teachers can be significantly improved at little net increase in cost.

The top performing systems invest great effort in developing their human capital, creating a culture of permanent review and improvement, focused on student performance, for which teachers and schools are accountable. The major point here is that developing human capital is the goal and accountability measures are one of the means to achieve this. Not the other way around. The McKinsey report makes a key point regarding improvement under the heading:

"NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
Top-performing systems are relentless in their focus on improving the quality of instruction in their classrooms. Yet this focus on instruction, though a necessary condition, is in itself insufficient to bring about improvement. In order to improve instructing, school systems need to find ways to change fundamentally what happens in the classrooms. At the level of individual teachers, this implies getting three things to happen:

• Individual teachers need to become aware of specific weaknesses in their own practice. In most cases, this not only involves building an awareness of what they do but the mindset underlying it.
• Individual teachers need to gain understanding of specific best practices. In general, this can only be achieved through the demonstration of such practices in an authentic setting.
• Individual teachers need to be motivated to make the necessary improvements. In general, this requires a deeper change in motivation that cannot be achieved through changing material incentives. Such changes come about when teachers have high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and above all, a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference to the education of the children they serve."

It is difficult to imagine how these can be achieved without a 'learning community' approach to professional learning. This is an environment where teachers can safely consider 'weakensses is their own practice', test things in 'authentic settings' and find 'a shared sense of purpose'.

A dominant message from this report is that top systems are overwhelmingly consistent. Everything fits together aiming at the three ingredients: teacher quality, instructional focus, everyone learns.