MYSA Conference

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I’m heading off to the Middle Years of School Association (MYSA) conference at the end of this week and I am so looking forward to it. For the first time in many years we have more than one teacher (me) attending such a conference, thanks to some funding we recently received. To have four minds processing information, four hearts being re-impassioned toward Middle Years education and four bodies to spread around the excellent speakers will exciting.

What I’m also excited about is the fact that the four of us will be traveling together in one car each morning and afternoon. We’ve decided not to stay at the conference location but travel about 2 hours each way from here in Toowoomba to the Gold Coast. While that is a big commitment, our families are important. What I’m hoping will happen is that, during these drive times, we will engage in some lively discussion about the topics and information we engage with at the conference. I’m hoping that we will start dovetailing our learning directly into our school setting.

I want the couple of days of the conference to be a catalyst for further discussions and decision-making in the Middle Years of this school.

Hopefully, you will see a few posts on this blog that will share what we have learnt too.

 

 

Discovering padlet

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I’ve just discovered padlet – a simple little website that could potentially have some interesting classroom / learning benefits.  In many ways it is like an electronic pin board where people (you and your students) can post text, images, links, etc.

I’ve just started using it with my kids, posing a topic question and asking them to respond, each posting a statement.  These statements can be seen by all students and commented on by each other.  I love this possibility for peer reflection and analysis.

padlet can be locked down using passwords so that only your students can access the wall.  This level of security is so important when working with collaborative web sites. There is also the ability to establish a specific URL which can make the students’ access to my padlet wall that much easier.

Have a go by adding your thoughts to this padlet…

 

It is early days for me – we’ll see how effective this becomes.

Have you used padlet or something like it?  How do you use it?  How effective has it been as a teaching tool?

 

Social Constructivism and the Flipped Classroom (family-guest post)

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I’ve been blogging for almost a year now and always appreciate the feedback and/or comments people leave on my blog (just as I like leaving comments on others’ blog posts).

So it was with a mix of interest and pride that I read a post on Social Constructivism (including comments on the flipped classroom) by Hayden Wilcox.  Yep, my son, who is in his first semester of an education degree.

I think this theory can have some fantastic benefits when implemented within a classroom. Learning becomes engaging, motivating and fun. Students are able to work together, discuss issues, and learn from the ideas they each have. Student knowledge is constructed from outside their own understanding – allowing for a wider and deeper understanding of concepts, and fresh and new perspectives from other students.

 

I reckon he’s done a good job but the real test for him will be to receive some real, honest feedback from real, honest educators.

Would you be good enough to visit the blog and leave a comment?

 

A testing time…

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It is NAPLAN* week here in Australia where every student in year 3, 5, 7 and 9 sit national tests.  To say these are disliked by the students would be a gross understatement.  To say the tests are seen as irrelevant by teachers would be close to the truth (why else would they be lampooned as NAPALM tests?!).  And I know the media will be preparing for their annual feeding frenzy reporting on results and statistics that tend to enflame emotions.

For my Middle Years students, this time of testing (this ‘testing time’) is nothing new.  They have sat them before.  They have been preparing with their teachers for some time now – often to the point of being well and truy sick and tired of the process and the content.

We’ve made it clear to our students that these tests are just one test on one day and not the be-all-and-end-all of their learning.  By all means, we want them to do well but not at the expense of their emotional health.

This video, “I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate.”, puts our feelings about NAPLAN into sharp focus.

So, what can we do to maintain a proper focus during the next three days?  One thing I’m excited about is the fact that our Hospitality students will be blessing our Middle Years kids with a special morning tea today – some muffins (cupcakes) baked especially for them.  I’m trusting that the kids will feel that they are being thought of by the other students in our school.

I think it is important to realise that, for these early adolescents, the amount of mental energy needed to sit these exams is enormous.  I’m encouraging teachers at my school to provide plenty of physical, brain-less-ish activities for the kids each afternoon; to play some music, allow them to chat, to provide some hands-on activities.  All of this can still be related to the subject and unit of study but remain sensitive to the emotional and energy needs of the students.  It is about finding a balance between understanding our students and providing appropriate forms of continuing education.

What are you doing in your school to support students (and teachers) through this time of testing?

 

*National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy

 

Challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant curriculum – AMLE characteristic 3

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The Association for Middle Level Education is considered by many to be a peak body for Middle Level education in the world. For me, their This We Believe statement, encompassing the 16 characteristics of successful schools, is something of a seminal work and I plan to explore each of these characteristics over the next few months

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

Curriculum is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant.
(Challenging Curriculum)

A long time ago, when I started teaching, the curriculum pressure was so much less than it is today.  One of the oft-used content elements was the TWA – the time-wasting activity.  Now, sometimes they were simply that, an activity to waste or fill time during the day, often at the end of the day waiting for the bell to ring.  Sometimes they were activities that built relationships, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

But what I remember most fondly is that we had time.  I understood the value of the hidden curriculum and the incidental curriculum and I would often be happy to run off on tangents.  And so were the kids.  They thought we had lost the plot and were simply exploring something more interesting that what they thought they needed to learn.  I knew that we were exploring stuff that was important to life and living.

Today seems so different.  There is an overstuffed curriculum that needs to be covered in a ten-week term that only seems to be 6 weeks long.  Assessment seems to pile up for the students and their stress levels grow almost daily toward the end of the term.  And so do mine.

So what do we do?  Well, the reality is that we don’t really have time for the TWAs of the past and we do have a lot to cover.  So we need to work smarter.  This is where the element of challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant learning comes in.  What is needed is for the teacher to connect the curriculum, no matter the subject, to the students in real, authentic ways and, as much as possible, ‘decompartmentalise’ the curriculum.  This involves taking every opportunity to make genuine cross-curricular links and to show students that learning, like life, is not one-dimensional but integrated and connected and all smooshed together.  Tangents are still vital but they need to be well planned and linked to various elements of the total curriculum.  And this means that teachers must make sure they are not one-dimensional in their subject knowledge.  Some of the best teachers I know are those who, despite their subject preference, have developed a healthy understanding of, and respect for, other subjects.  This allows them to make the curricula links naturally and with relative ease.

Obviously, teaming is a valued element of active exploratory and integrative learning, but that is not always possible, especially in a smaller Middle Years context.  Maybe there is the chance to teach a few subjects and make the link that way.  Maybe it will have to be as basic as exposing oneself to other curriculum areas to make the links in whatever way you can in your own class.

Young adolescents love to explore; to follow tangents of their own design.  I know I am guilty of stymieing that desire often.  I find it hard to break away from the routines of an ordered curriculum delivery.  But I know it is important.  What I do do, is to ensure that my lessons are delivered passionately and with enthusiasm; that I link the content to the lives of the young people I teach.  And sometimes I am pleasantly surprised that I have taken them down a path of exploration that I didn’t necessarily intend.  Those are the times what I’m reminded of the foundations of adolescent education all over again.

How about you?  How do you bring this characteristic to your classroom?

 

Destroying a novel

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As you may be aware, am teaching English this year. We have just finished studying a new novel, Fog a Dox and I’m seriously wondering what damage I have done to the good work of the author.

It is a great little novel filled with descriptive language, indigenous perspectives, bush culture and a sensitive exploration of people and their life and death. We have looked at the author’s voice in the text; we’ve pulled apart the language structures and explored the descriptive text; we have tried to understand the characters of the book and how their personalities add to the telling of the story; and we have explored how we might anticipate the author’s voice by writing an additional chapter to the book.

These are all valuable learning experiences but at what cost? 
  I wonder how many of my students would go back and read this book just for the pleasure of it. I wonder whether our exploration of the text in an way adds to their ability to explore any text or might my students’ analysis of any book detract from the sheer pleasure of reading.

Do we run the risk of exploring books to death?


What is your opinion?

 

Post Script:  I wrote this a few weeks back and didn’t get around to posting.  I have now asked my students to give me feedback on the book.  It was a mixed bad of responses but there were many who felt the book failed to connect with them.  I now need to ponder whether the connection would have been there if they had ‘just read it’…

 

Prac teacher in the room…

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I don’t tend to have too many prac teachers visit my class now that I do not have a full teaching load but I have started this term with a second year Secondary English student teacher and it is challenging me.

I am being reminded of just how much of quality teaching is not teachable. Dont get me wrong, there are many elements that must be learnt at university but the are also many aspects of teaching that just come naturally (or perhaps birthed in true educators. The desire to teach cannot be learnt. The passion for a subject must be natural. Even the ability to deliver content is, to a degree, intuitive.

I’m being reminded that teaching is an incredibly complex process and there is so much to be remembered. I have a level of frustration with my prac teacher because the Uni has tagged this as a prac in which behaviour management is to be focused upon. She is doing that well but struggling to keep up with the content depth and diversity. Teaching sure is complex!

There are a plethora of elements for me and the students teacher to focus upon and to form into her ‘natural’ character as a teacher: voice quality and variance, enthusiasm, the sharing of ones self, teaching to lesson, unit and developmental goals, timing and pacing, lesson transitions, etc. in each of these elements, I have been forced to explain their value and necessity. In doing so, I have evaluated myself and reflected on my own teaching.

There have been a couple of times when I have encouraged the student teacher to deliver content in a ‘better’ way but at the same time realising that I would do the same process at times. I need to get a bit more honest with myself as I prepare to teach.

Finally, I like the opportunity to see different teaching processes from fresh minds. I can get caught in my own, usual, favourite content delivery methods (wonderful as they probably are) but it’s always good to see something new.

What do you get out of having preservice teachers visit your classroom?

“Do you remember me?”

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I have written before about the wonderful opportunities we have, as teachers, to enter into the lives of our students.  Today I want to share just one experience that happened during the recent holidays.

I was attending a large music event in our city over Easter and was stopped by a young man.  He gave the typical comment, “Hi Mr Wilcox.  Do you remember me?”  And I gave my typical response, “You’ll have to give me your name.  You look much older than when I taught you in Year Eight…”

He gave me his name and I vaguely remembered him, but it was what he said next that had me glowing inside: “Can I tell you about my life?”  Here was a young man, now 21 years old, who, it seems, had connected with me many years ago and who wanted – perhaps even needed – to tell me that he had turned out OK.

We chatted for a while but, before we headed in different directions, I organised to catch up with him for a coffee, where he told more of his story.

He’d left our school after a couple of years and attended a school that exposed him to a lot of ‘life’ he had not seen before and he jumped in boots and all.  He got into the drug scene, left the family home and moved away to another city.  He hooked up with various people who each had their own baggage that they dumped on him until he had hit rock bottom, living in a shed at the back of the house of some family friends.  Thankfully, these people reconnected him with his grandparents who took him in and cared for him.  He has now straightened himself out, reconciled with his parents and is holding down a part time job.

While he felt he wanted me to know all of this, I made sure he was aware how much it meant to me that I was given a glimpse into his life, both then and now.

We will rarely meet our past students… we may not ever really know the impact we had in their life.  But when they do seek us out it is something incredibly precious.

I trust you will join me in making sure we look for every opportunity given to us to speak into the lives of our young adolescents.  They are at such a vulnerable time of their lives.  Our voices can be powerful.

Active & Purposeful Learning – AMLE characteristic 2

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The Association for Middle Level Education is considered by many to be a peak body for Middle Level education in the world. For me, their This We Believe statement, encompassing the 16 characteristics of successful schools, is something of a seminal work and I plan to explore each of these characteristics over the next few months

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

Students and teachers are engaged in active, purposeful learning.
(Active Learning)

There is so much to be considered and explored in this characteristic.  Let’s explore just a few elements in brief…

  • Active learning must be strongly linked to learning styles.  As a whole, I don’t think educators do that great a job of catering for the kinaesthetic learners in the room, for example (and there probably more than we realise).  Nor do we always cater for the visual learners, though this is improving due to the use of technology.  How much do you move your students during a lesson, for example?
  • Active learning is also, obviously, about having the student involved in their learning.  How often do your students have the opportunity to select their learning pathway individually?  For me, this has not been a strong element of my teaching but it is something that I need to integrate more into my learning.  How do you do it in your classroom?  Feel free to teach me!
  • Active learning must be linked to maturation – concrete thinkers still exist in the Middle Years classroom yet our curriculum, infused with higher order thinking skills (which I highly value), can tend to leave these students behind.
  • Young adolescents, especially boys, need to have opportunities to manipulate with their hands.  My Head of English did a great activity with the staff, giving us some plasticine and asking us to create something which we subsequently used, in small groups, to create a story.  It was a great tactile activity that linked to a creative thinking task.
  • I believe there is a subtle difference between learning that is designed as purposeful and that which is purposeful.  The distinction is in who determines the purposefulness of an activity.  While I do believe that teachers have the wisdom to make natural and purposeful links to real-life experiences of young adolescents, I also believe that it must not stop there.  We need to allow students to manipulate tasks and learning to find personal and individual purpose and meaning.  Again, I’m not sure I do this particularly well but maybe you do.  Please leave a comment that can help us all.
  • The most important thing about purposeful learning is, however, the simple desire of the teacher to connect learning to life.  In the autobiographical writing my Year Eight English students do, I make a very strong point of them considering their unique ‘voice’.  They have lived experiences that others have not.  These experiences have helped to shape them as individuals.  The experiences have also given them an understanding or perspective that others will not necessarily have.  And all of this gives them the right to exercise their voice to instruct or encourage or challenge others.  I want my students to see that they are a person of purpose and that there is purpose in them writing about themselves.
  • Ultimately, purposeful learning is about adolescents taking  a role and understanding their responsibility for their learning.  While teachers still scaffold their learning we must ensure that we never place the responsibility for learning on us more than on them.  Students at this age can own their learning – indeed, must own their learning.  It is a process, I know, and we must manage their ability to be responsible carefully.  Sometimes that will look like planned failure for the sake of driving home a point.  At other times it will be planned success to provide an esteem boost.  I believe both are valuable (but not mutually exclusive).  How do you shift the responsibility for learning onto the shoulders of the students?

 

Are there other things that you do to bring this characteristic to your classroom?

 

Easter

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I trust you are having a well deserved break over this Easter.

 

As teachers, we give and invest much of ourself into our teaching – Middle Years teachers do this , perhaps, more than most.  We understand the nature of sacrifice.

I trust you will take a few moments to consider true sacrifice this Easter.

 

To show how much He loved us, Christ stretched out his arms and said, ‘This much’.