Archive for reflection

Writing critically

20/03/2011 Featured, MEd, reflection One comment

As always on my MEd, we’re being encouraged to both think, and also write, critically. We spent a lot of time on this on our previous module and I feel that I’m making progress with this, but I’m nowhere near being confident as yet – as demonstrated by yesterday afternoon…

There are two primary aspects to the work I am doing towards completing my MEd. One is surrounding evaluating the impact of involving pupils in planning learning in terms of their engagement in lessons. On this side I feel I have made significant progress in my ability to write. My ideas are getting to the point where they are informed by research and I even manage to do so critically occasionally.

Yesterday we were focusing on the other side of the work, which addresses working collaboratively. When writing about working with others I find that I am still some way short of where I’d like to be. To try to simplify the steps I need to take to make my writing more sophisticated I’ve devised a three part scale:

  1. Appending references: This is what a lot of my writing on collaboration is like at present. This involves writing what you’ve done or are planning to do, and then dropping in a reference which is vaguely related at the end.
  2. Literature informed: I have managed to do this occassionally. This is where I start with the reference and use this to plan and explain what it is I’m doing rather than tagging it on afterwards.
  3. Critically informed: I’ve not made it here yet. I imagine this is where you start as above but you don’t simply then follow on to explaining the positive link between the literature and your actions. You include a critique of the literature, outlining the limitations and explain why you’re still using this to inform your work – perhaps bringing in further literature to support your point.

I’m not sure if this is correct or not, but I think if I can move my writing up this scale then I’m likely to be more successful. It then dawned on me however, that this is not actually about the writing. It’s about the doing. The real point is to actually do the reading critically before planning what to do with others and then evaluate the outcomes against this reading. If I can embody this approach, then the writing will naturally fall into place. This is what I’ve begun to do with the other side of the work, and I need to bring this into the more intuitive aspect of the enquiry also – collaborating with others…

What is knowledge?

22/02/2011 change, Featured, reflection, science One comment

Academics often have a real knack for hurting your head. They can take a word that you use every day and turn it inside out, upside down and really challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions. I had one of these very experiences this week at the first of the University of Stirling‘s ESRC Seminar Series entitled ‘Curriculum for the 21st Century’. The focus for seminar one was ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum‘ and the word which had some serious analysis was knowledge. It’s a word we use a lot in our profession, but what do we mean by it? How we view this word can have a massive influence on our approach to curriculum.

Although Michael Young couldn’t make the seminar due to illness, we were treated to presentations from Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Laura Colucci-Gray on this topic followed by opportunities to question each of them in small groups. All of the presentations and discussions were very stimulating, but it was Professor Biesta who really got my brain working, as demonstrated by the following tweet:

Gert’s presentation was heavily influenced by the work of Dewey and I am clearly going to fail to summarise what he was saying here. So I’m not really going to try to do that. I’m instead trying to summarise what I took from his presentation. During his presentation I had four inter-related recent thoughts swimming through my mind…

  1. Mark concluded his presentation by pointing out that although school subjects were derived from the disciplines, they were not in themselves disciplines as such…
  2. This then got me thinking about a post I wrote once on teaching science…
  3. This in turn reminded me of another post I wrote on teaching doubt…
  4. This then linked to something which occurred on Sunday at an SQA CfE QDT [acronym triple point score!] meeting when a teacher suggested that we needed to include the definition of species into the National 5 Biology content to general approval in the room – except from one member. He represents a University and asked to be informed exactly what the definition of a species is once we’d worked this out [if you're not a biologist, have a look at this].

Gert was using pragmatism to resolve the objectivism vs relativism debate – which focuses on the existence of knowledge as either fixed truth, or subjective to each individual. This notion of objectivism stems from a philosophical position that the mind is immaterial so cannot therefore ever contain the material world – there will always be a gap between the two. Apparently Dewey stated that this is the wrong starting point for the discussion. The mind and world are not separate. We interact with the world and change it. At its most fundamental, this could be exemplified by breathing – but extends to knowledge also.

From this starting point, Gert led us to a point whereby that it was ok for all knowledge to be socially constructed and subjective and any gap between knowledge and truth is temporal – between current actions and future consequences. The only problem arises is when we have to work with others and we all have our own subjective knowledge. In order to get round this, we develop an inter-subjective, shared, coordinated world.

So what does all this mean for education? Gert stated that as a result of these ideas, the key process for learning is experiences, or transactions. It’s only by doing and undergoing can we develop our understanding of the world. I think that it’s also clear here that even though we can view knowledge as inter-subjective, this does not decrease its value. Curriculum can still include knowledge, and in fact must, if future generations are going to be part of this shared understanding of the world.

It does however mean that we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not imparting truths, but sharing our subjective understanding of the world. We need therefore to provide learners with the opportunity to learn the limitations of our models and encourage them to question – which relates back to my teaching doubt post.

This then caused me to reflect on my own understandings of knowledge. Whilst I was at school I accepted knowledge as truths and did my best to regurgitate these on the lines and in the boxes provided to me in large silent halls. By the time I finished my degree however I realised that there was no such thing as proof and that we were all just slowly collaboratively constructing best fit models to explain the world, some of which we all agreed upon and others less so.

Somehow however after eight years of teaching I’ve somehow reached the point where it seems acceptable to state that students need to know what the definition of a species is – even though ten years ago I would’ve strongly questioned this. This in turn leads me back to the difference between school subjects and the disciplines.

It feels as though I should now be reaching for some sort of conclusion to this blog post, but I’m not sure what the conclusion is quite at this point. I think I know what this means for my own practice as a teacher, but what impact this should or might have on the curriculum is another question…?

ACTS Winter Conference 2011

16/02/2011 acts, cfe, change, MEd, reflection One comment

The timing of this year’s ACTS Winter Conference was very interesting. Given the recent publication of the Donaldson Report, the ongoing negotiations of the SNCT and the launch of the McCormac review there is a lot for Chartered Teachers, and aspiring Chartered Teachers such as myself, to talk about. The ACTS committee had done very well indeed to arrange for Graham Donaldson himself to keynote the conference as well as the ever inspiring (real) David Cameron. I also attended Frank Crawford’s excellent workshop on managing change.

Whilst most of the messages from the day were inspiring and encouraging for someone like myself who is working hard on the route to Chartered Teacher Status, it was frustrating that despite all of these positive messages there is an ever looming gloomy backdrop to the future of the programme. It is clear from the conference that there is a consensus that the attributes outlined in the standard for Chartered Teacher are the right ones for the future of Scotland’s (and indeed the world’s) teaching profession. There was also a common theme of these attributes needing to be espoused by the entire profession, not just a minority who are financially rewarded for doing so. I understand and share this point of view. The big question however for me is, how do we get there?

Could we get there by growing on the successes of the Chartered Teacher programme and developing it for the future? Could McCormac work with the GTCS, Universities and ACTS to develop a long-term programme for transition to this ideal? Could we capture the enhanced capacity of those teachers and lecturers who have undertaken and led the programmes and use them to help spread this enhanced professionalism until it is no longer seen as enhanced?

Or shall we stop those who want to become enhanced practitioners from getting involved? Shall we prevent those who have already invested significant portions of their own time and money from completing what they’ve started? Shall we remove the goodwill and enthusiasm from those who were willing to be pioneers in this laudable movement? Shall we strip out the growing capacity in the schools and the Universities to support the development of a 21st Century teaching profession for Scotland? Shall we limit the professional development of today’s teachers to the detriment of today’s, as well as tomorrow’s, learners?

Unfortunately it would appear that we’ve opted for the latter…

Some thoughts on formative assessment

30/01/2011 active learning, assessment, cfe, change, Featured, learning communities, reflection 2 comments

Are your traffic lights doing anything? What happens after your two stars and a wish? Do your pupils listen to their peers?

For some time now I’ve been concerned by the frequent utterance of the phrase “AifL is embedded”. There is often a perception that schools and teachers did all that work sharing formative assessment techniques as part of the AifL programme, and now we’re onto CfE so all is fine. I’ve often struggled to articulate my concerns with this point of view…but I’m clear that I have not fully embedded all aspects of the AifL triangle into my practice and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I’ve also demonstrated in the past that BtC5 raises the bar in terms of expectations of pupil involvement in assessment.

A couple of things recently have really helped clarify my thoughts on this. Firstly, I’m very lucky to be working with Myra Young to develop some Assessment & Moderation Circles with Secondary Teachers in East Lothian. She has a great way of describing the difference between formative assessment and formative assessment techniques. For example, if your pupils peer assess each others work with traffic lights then while this has the potential to be formative it only becomes formative if the recipient of the feedback does something with it. They need to make a change and learn from it. Otherwise you have a multicoloured piece of peer summative assessment. Likewise, if you give the pupils a prelim examination and then provide an opportunity to reflect on this and improve as a result – then this is formative assessment.

I think perhaps we have too often allowed the techniques to become synonymous with ‘formative assessment’ and we’ve forgotten that doing the techniques isn’t enough – the pupils need to learn from them.

This weekend, I’ve also discovered a fantastic Research Briefing from the TLRP programme which addresses this issue also. In it they state:

Assessment for Learning helps teachers promote learning how to learn in ways which are in line with their own values, and reduces excessive performance orientation. But it is difficult to shift from reliance on specific techniques to practices based on deep principles.

Advice on Assessment for Learning techniques is useful to teachers in the short term. But progressive professional development requires teachers to re-evaluate their beliefs about learning, the way they structure tasks, and the nature of their classroom roles and relationships.

From TLRP RB17: Learning how to learn – in classrooms, schools and networks

That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. AifL provided many of us with the techniques, but CfE is asking us to take the next step to deeper principles. How do we do this? The Research Briefing suggests:

Classroom-focused inquiry by teachers is a key condition for promoting learner autonomy.

Sound familiar?

On Reading

09/01/2011 cfe, change, Reading, reflection One comment

One of the greatest impacts my Chartered Teacher/MEd journey has had on me so far has been my approach to reading. Before starting on this process I rarely read anything to do with my professional life. If I did, it was much more likely to be biological than to do with teaching and learning. However, the MEd has opened my mind to the vast array of texts available which can really challenge thinking and inform practice. I surprised myself by continuing to read during the year I had out from the MEd programme – this to me demonstrated a sustained impact.

However, I have recently had to reconsider just how embedded my new approach to reading really is in my practice. I was lucky enough to get a meeting with Mark Priestley just before the holidays and we naturally got to talking about the Secondary curricular models which are developing as a result of Curriculum for Excellence. I have spent quite some time on this issue in my current role and so felt I was able to contribute to just such a discussion reasonably well. Mark stopped me short though with a very simple question…he asked my if I’d read much on this.

I hadn’t. And even worse, I hadn’t even considered it. It would appear that while I have got into the habit of reading around learning and teaching, this hasn’t yet extended much beyond this. He made a couple of suggestions so I went straight to the library to get hold of what I could. One of his suggestions which I was able to borrow was “The Curriculum” by A.V. Kelly. I’ve made little progress through this over the holidays, but what I have read so far makes a lot of sense in the context of Curriculum for Excellence.

One quote in particular which leapt out at me was:

the teachers have a ‘make or break’ role in any curriculum innovation. Teachers have been known to sabotage attempts at change; certainly it is clear that such attempts can succeed only when the teachers concerned are committed to them and, especially, when they understand, as well as accept, their underlying principles.

To what extent has this been achieved with Curriculum for Excellence so far?

What’s in a name?

14/12/2010 cfe, change, MEd, reflection One comment

I’ve finally submitted my most recent MEd assignment, which means I can try to get back up to speed with my blog. Just in case you missed it, the assignment was a proposal for a collaborative professional enquiry which I’ll undertake with some colleagues in my school early next session. I’ve chosen to try to further develop the idea of involving pupils in planning learning in order improve learner engagement, and ultimately their learning.

Obviously, as part of the proposal I had to provide a rationale for the enquiry including a literature review. In my searching I discovered lots of books and journals supporting this approach – much more so than the last time I tried to do this for this area. This is clearly a hot topic just now. I’ve already mentioned the excellent book by Chris Watkins which I came across in the library which is a must read if you’re at all interested in this pedagogy.

However, what has shocked me is that since searching so extensively I’ve come across two amazing blogs in this field which didn’t come up in my searches. The first was Shelley Wright’s blog sharing the fantastic work she has been doing with her biology classes. And then I stumbled upon Darren Mead’s inspiring Sharing Pedagogical Purposes blog. Both of these appeared at random on twitter.

What I’ve been thinking since is that part of the problem for those of us who are interested in these approaches is that we don’t yet have a common language to describe what it is we’re trying to achieve. Is this an extension of AifL, or are we creating “Classrooms as Learning Communities”, or maybe we are “Sharing Pedagogical Purposes”. Some of the other terms floating around here include “involving”, “engaging”, “metacognition”, “learn to learn”, “inquiry”, “personalisation”…

For the purposes of what we’re trying to do in our classrooms it doesn’t really matter what we call it, but now that we’re trying to share our experiences I’m finding the lack of a common language is hindering our ability to network as effectively as we might.

Having said all that though, this is a new, messy and complex business – which is exciting – and I’m sure we’ll get there…

ePLC

26/09/2010 cfe, change, learning communities, reflection, TeachMeet 6 comments

I’ve had this idea growing since TeachMeet the other night when I facilitated one of the World Cafe discussions around the following question.

How do we genuinely involve pupils in their learning and assessment?

You can see the outcomes of the discussion here.

The reason I asked this question is that I think that developing this aspect of our practice as teachers, particularly in the Secondary context, is a major challenge and the key to successfully implementing Curriculum for Excellence. I was very struck by the animated and rich discussion which occurred at TeachMeet…it would appear that I am not alone in pondering this question. In fact, I know of many others from twitter & blogs who have been not only considering this – but trying out ways to address this issue.

As well as giving some thought to this, I’m also currently doing a lot of reading around the notion of Collaborative Professional Enquiry / Collaborative Professional Learning / Professional Learning Communities / Group Action Research. This is primarily to aid me in my work towards my CTeach MEd which I’ve recently returned to after a year out.

So the idea that has arisen from these thought processes is –

Can we create an ePLC [electronic Professional Learning Community] to work together to develop our knowledge of this key issue?

I’m sure many would argue that many informal professional learning communities of sorts already exist through twitter and the blogosphere. But what I’m talking about here is setting up a much more formal group of 5/6 teachers to carry out a piece of collaborative professional enquiry. This could be around something like the following question?

What impact does involving pupils in planning their learning and assessment have?

I have a bit of a problem at the minute in that I don’t have a class just now, but I would be happy to facilitate the community – i.e. arrange meetings, share readings, administer file sharing, contribute to discussions etc.

What do you think? This may well be happening already elsewhere, but if so I haven’t encountered it. It could take our electronic professional interactions to a new level…? Can you imagine a more exciting form of CPD?

Are you Educationally Literate?

11/09/2010 change, Reading, reflection No comments

This is my first attempt at blogging from my phone, so please bear with me.

To what extent are you educationally literate? What does that mean I hear you ask…this is something that we’ve spent some time discussing this morning on my return to my CTeach MEd.

The discussion follows on from some reading we are asked to do from Reading Educational Research and Policy by David Scott. Scott argues that teachers today are educationally illiterate which means that we take texts on face value and don’t criticise their intentions and messages. Whilst his choice of language is often unfortunate, I do know where he is coming from. I am slowly developing the tools to critically analyse both research and policy texts. Looking back at my earlier career I would say I was a lot more accepting of what I read and questioned far less. Scott argues that by becoming more educationally literate teachers can become more empowered to enact change.

Despite this developing ability to be critical, I think I still feel that I would like to continue work on the assumption that the authors of the vast majority of educational texts are writing in good faith and with good intentions. I really wish to avoid a paranoid approach to research and policy, whereby I could slip into negativity for the sake of it.

Reflection

02/07/2010 reflection No comments

Although I’m not yet at the end of my Secondment (it’s recently been extended to the end of March 2011) I thought I should do myself a favour and try to reflect on this session before the summer holidays. I think this will hopefully help me to reflect more fully come next April, much like the ever inspiring Margaret Vass.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this job has been the incredible variety it has involved so far. Many of the day to day conversations, meetings and seminars become a little lost in the relentless march of time – so I’ve tried to pick out five of the major pieces of work from the year to focus on…

Communication

One of my first jobs on arrival in the office was to sort out a way of communicating information, practice and documents with colleagues in schools. Given my previous experience with blogs (such as this one) I decided that this would be the way to go so set up the CfE in East Lothian blog.

I’m quite pleased with the blog, although if I had the time I would’ve liked to done some work to find out just how useful it is and how it could be made more useful. I’m really pleased to see that this blog has recently been expanded with lots of resources by my colleagues – it’s so much better when a blog like this is added to by more than one/two people.

Subject Learning Communities

One of the major challenges facing me this year was to launch a model for collaborative working between East Lothian’s secondary subject teachers. There’s a bit of history here with funding having been removed from the previous system, so anything new had to take note of this.

I’ve written before about the approach we decided to take, and you can check up on our progress here.

This process has been an amazing challenge for me. I remember talking about the idea of professional learning communities in my interview, but was quite shocked to find myself actually working to implement them. Meeting with the teachers at the 11 subject seminars was fascinating. Working so closely with Don was very interesting. And developing & delivering the training to facilitators was both daunting and exhilarating.

Assessment

I’ve been involved with assessment in a number of ways this year, but the example that jumps out to me is the work to produce exemplars for the National Assessment Resource. This didn’t actually involve much work on my part, the teachers did all the work. My role was to coordinate the East Lothian schools and support them as appropriate. I learnt a lot from this role, both in terms of coordinating this sort of activity, but also in terms of my own understanding of assessment. I feel that this involvement was a fantastic opportunity for me to come to grips with what Building the Curriculum 5 means and how it should be implemented.

CPD

I’ve worked to provide a variety of CPD this year, but it was always a bit “on the hoof” as these sorts of things are sorted out in the previous session before I was appointed. The sorts of CPD which I have offered have included the TeachMeet, twilight sessions for NQTs, CfE updates for various groups of colleagues and two Sciences LTS Engagement events.

More recently I’ve been trying to change the focus of the CPD to make it more sustainable and less time consuming for schools. This has involved going into the secondary schools for two days and offering “CfE drop in” sessions which seemed to prove useful for many staff. I’ve also been working to put together resources on BtC4 & BtC5 which leaders in schools could use to deliver in-service.

Planning

The final theme I’ve chosen to focus on briefly is Local Authority CfE planning for next session. I’ve been heavily involved in planning for CfE implementation in East Lothian broadley, and also developing a system for moderation in Literacy & English and Numeracy & Mathematics more specifically.

This process has been quite demanding. For me, being able to contribute substantially to these sorts of discussions demonstrated to myself the progress I’ve made this session. I feel I now have a much deeper understanding of CfE, but also a more developed awareness of the strategic issues involved in its implementation.

As I say, this is a very brief and quite superficial attempt at a reflection – but hopefully it will prove useful when I try to do something more substantial in April.

Photo from tk-link

Quoted

27/04/2009 Reading, reflection 3 comments

Pedagogy and the Scottish Education System

I’m quite chuffed with this. I’ve been quoted in something! If you click on the image above you’ll find a very useful overview of Scottish education entitled “Pedagogy and the Scottish Education System: an overview“, and in it you’ll find “Kelly (2008)”. That’s me!

It’s a reference to my module 1 essay on aCfE which Peter very kindly describes:

Although this is an essay submitted for a module on a Chartered Teacher programme, it gives a very incisive view of the current debates in teacher professionalism.

It’s not much really, but to me it’s quite exciting.

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