Falling before the finish line

Teaching is a lot like a marathon. It takes training, planning and preparation. I have been pretty good at this over the years. I have developed some excellent strategies. I have tried to train my mind (meditation) and my body (diet and exercise). I have been meticulous in my planning to avoid leaving everything until the last minute. I have prepared units of work well in advance to lessen the load. I have put in place restrictions so that my work life did not take too much of a toll on my personal life and I have found myself some excellent coaches to help me along the way. Even with all this in place, I was always completely spent at the end of the year having given the marathon my all but I always finished the race and made it with a good time.

This year I returned to school after 2 years in an admin position. I started my marathon without too much thought. I just fell into the groove of previous years. I did not recognise that I had forgotten the micro-skills I had developed from running consecutive marathons. I had forgotten my routines, processes and practices. The syllabus had changed while I was away so my programs didn’t quite fit. I was teaching a senior subject I hadn’t taught for a very long time. This put my planning and preparation off. I had forgotten the importance of my exercise, diet and meditation training and these were the first things to go when the time pressures hit.

I then took on a relieving role and said yes to whole lot of extra things. The stuff that I really enjoy, the stuff that feeds my inner edunerd  and I continued to teach. In essence, I added a another half marathon to my marathon and agreed to wear a weight belt and army pack. So I worked harder for longer and let all the important training, planning and preparation stuff fall away.

I was struggling, but I was up and I was running and I looked like I had it all under control. I could see the finish line and although tiring I thought I could still make it. But while race security’s back was turned some unstable members of the crowd jumped the fence and blindsided me on the track.

Injured just short of the end of term, I did not make the finish line.\

Why do teachers do this? I know it’s not just me. I have seen others take on more and more. I have seen our systems place more and more on us. I have seen society create more and more work for us. We keep making our marathon longer and adding to the load we must carry as we run it.

If I can’t shorten my race, this is how I will be lessening my load:

• My number 1 priority will be family and friends.
• I have written a list of goals I wish to achieve. I will refer to these often to remind myself of what I have chosen to focus on.
• When asked to do extra stuff I will refer to my list and make a decision about whether it fits into my goals.
• When taking on something extra, I will ask what I should stop doing or negotiate time to do the extra stuff in.
• I will set reasonable limits on my time for doing school work at home. If it doesn’t get done, it is not because I can’t, it is because it is not humanly possible.
• I have designated time in the holidays that will be for school preparation and I will only work during this time and relax and not think about it when it is not.
• In my holiday work time I will prepare for as much of term 1 as I can.
• I will meditate, exercise and eat well as a priority.
• I will have fun teaching to remind myself why I love my job.

I hope your marathon year was not as turbulent as mine. Please take time to rest and recuperate these holidays. I plan on it being a PB race in 2017 and if you stumble, I hope there is someone there to help you over the finish line.

 

I’ve had a crap week

This week has been a hard slog at work. The type of week that makes you question your career choices and your ability to do or cope with the job. 

There are a number of professions that get to see people at their best and worse – police, nurses, teachers – to name a few. Those who work in the triage areas of these fields often cop the brunt of the bad & not so much of the good. We see people pushed to their limits physically and mentally who are so overwhelmed by their situation that they have little regard for those trying to help them.

When constantly faced with this it is very easy to become focused on the bad and allow it to overwhelm you. So I want to say a huge thank you to the people at work (students & colleagues) and at marking who reminded me of the good – in me, in what I do and in others.

#OzEduBookChat: Making Every Lesson Count

Before we start our first #OzEduBookChat, I wanted to give a little background.  This idea had been swirling around in my brain for some time.  I like to read an education based book each school holidays.  I have the time and greater brain space to devote to it.  If anything piques my interest I have time to plan how I might implement it in my classroom. I also think by talking. I’m not good at letting ideas float around in my brain – there’s not much room up there. I need to write or speak about them to fully integrate ideas or form articulate higher order concepts.

I put it out there on Twitter and Karen Graham (@CSPS) Alice Leung (@aliceleung) and Rebecca Hepworth (@bechep2) encouraged my delusion idea and #OzEduBookChat. So our first holiday book chat is Making Every Lesson Count: Six Principles to Support Great Teaching and Learning by Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby.

Disclosure: none of us have any association with the authors or the publishers and chose and paid for our copy of the book because we want to read it.

The questions are as follows:

Here is the Storify link for the chat.

 

Trying to embed some simple formative assessment into my practice

I have been employing some formative assessment strategies this year after reading Embedding Formative Assessment by Dylan William and watching The School Experiment. More specifically, the no hands-up classroom and individual whiteboards. I chose these because they were simple, practical ideas that I could trial then suggest to the faculty as an introduction to formative assessment.

The no hands-up has been an overwhelming success. I have written names on paddle-pop sticks (I’m Australian, we don’t call them ice lolly or craft sticks) and have a cup for each class. Questions are asked of students as their names are randomly drawn from the cup. If students don’t know the answer they are given thinking time and asked to give their best guess, even if they don’t know the answer. I then circle back to them after we have heard a few answers to check what their answer would be after listening to others.  I am using them with a Year 8, 9, 10 and 11 class and it works equally as well with all of these age ranges.

This has had a moderate impact on the engagement of my students. Most (still working on the 1%) are now actively listening so they can at least give some part of an answer and all are now comfortable with the idea of being not quite correct (there is no wrong answer) and resigned to the fact that they will be called on and may as well stop, pause and think.  This is still accompanied by the occasional mumbled answers and reddened faces but I now do not hear, “I don’t know.” If I forget the sticks, they remind me. Those students who always put their hands up, didn’t like it at first. They like answering questions and being correct.  I now say things like, “I acknowledge you know the answer but its someone else’s turn.”  This has satisfied them somewhat.

I had also bought some small individual whiteboards. I used them early in Term 1 with some success but at the time, they weren’t as useful as the sticks. I don’t have my own classroom and so carrying them from room to room was problematic. My osteopath suggested that unless I wanted to fund her next overseas holiday, I should stop.  So they have not been as extensively used as the sticks.  Until this week. Its reporting time, and time for some summative assessment. The whiteboards came out in an attempt to mix things up and make revision a little bit more interesting.  And it worked like a dream.

The first class I used them with were my Year 10’s, a mixed ability group of students with varying degrees of classroom engagement.  Due to time constraints I was just going to give them a past paper to complete. Boring. But then I remembered the whiteboards. I asked students to write their answer to the exam questions on the whiteboards and then hold up their answer.  This allowed me to give instant feedback and allowed students to adjust their answer immediately.  I then used the sticks to ask students how they derived their answers. To my delight, the whole class engaged in this activity. I think because it was a bit of fun and non-threatening. I corrected some misconceptions, did a little bit of whole class redirection and reminders and saw my students have a few light bulb moments along the way. I had a pre-service teacher observing my lesson and he was so impressed by its success that by the time the lesson had finished, he’d sourced his own set of whiteboards on Ebay and was ready to order a set.

Today, I used the same principle with my Year 8’s with a greater degree of success. While I won’t be using the whiteboards every lesson, I will be using them more.  The opportunity for instant feedback in a non-threatening way over-rides the pain of schlepping them around the school.  I now need to work on being better organised so that my questions allow me to monitor misconceptions and misunderstandings so I can adjust or revisit during my teaching.  Maybe I do need to finish that Assessment for Learning in STEM Teaching online course from Future Learn.

There is no going back, there is only now and forward from here

This week has been a difficult one. I am back at the school I have been at since 2008 but I have been relieving for 2 years in a non-school based position. Everyone warned me that going back would be hard. I was prepared but this week things caught up with me.

Everything is so familiar but nothing is the same. The familiar lulled me into a false sense of security. A small, burning ember of impotency has been glowing, hidden below the surface since I returned to school. A small gust of inefficacy and the embers were well alight.

I am a head teacher and have a wonderful faculty to lead they are the familiar and they are family. Accepting and supportive of each other in that dysfunctional camaraderie borne from shared battles, extreme stress and human suffering (teaching). However, the school has changed and I have come to the realisation that I do not know where I fit in it anymore. I know the fine detail of my classroom and faculty but I no longer understand the big picture of the school.

I had prepared myself to feel this way. I had been warned. I believed I would not let it phase me. But this week has been hard work personally. There was a funeral for a woman my age whose anxieties and demons were so overwhelming that she could see no way out other than ending her own life. There is the worsening of my husband’s degenerative illness. Add a bit of insomnia and a lot of pain from a twisted shoulder and sore neck with one or two setbacks at work and in my classroom and I was questioning my decision to not take the non-school based position for three more years.

Then it was time for Friday last period. The last opportunity for learning in the week and my year 8 science class seeing it as anything else. A sense of dread had descended over me.

I have introduced mindfulness meditation with all my classes to begin and end the week. Year 8 came in after lunch.  It was hot, they were bothered and I was sad and deflated.

“It’s Friday, time for a meditation.”

They cheered and I could have cried.

In that moment I knew that I have to let go of the past, stop worrying about the future and just be in the present. I acknowledged my thoughts and fears and watched them float by like clouds in the sky.  Thank you Smiling Minds. Thank you Year 8.

There is no going back, there is only now and forward from here.

 

Teacher Quality and ATARs

One of the best teachers I have had the good fortune to observe is my husband. I have had the good fortune to have observed his work as a stage 1 and stage 3 primary teacher and as a high school TAS teacher. 

He is no academic & without my help, would not have made it through Uni. But put him in front of students and he was an expert. 

I would ask why he did a particular activity, chose an approach or broke down a concept; his reply would be, “that’s just the common sense way to do it.” He was a natural and it is just common sense to him, but not to all. His data backed this up.

My husband got the 2nd lowest result of his HSC cohort. As an aside, his best friend, who got the lowest mark is now a very successful expat living in Dubai.

Band 5s and ATARs are not a measure of your success as a teacher (or anything else). Some can be taught how to teach and others are naturals in spite of their HSC results. I am unsure how to get the best of both ends of this spectrum, other than the fact that the current method may be excluding the naturals.

Responding using ALARM is where the real learning happens

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BROAD GENERALISATIONS ABOUT PRE-SERVICE AND EARLY CAREER TEACHERS. THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS, I HAVE MET THEM, TAUGHT THEM AND TAUGHT BESIDE THEM. I AM TALKING IN GENERAL TERMS.

I have been teaching the pre-service teachers I lecture about ALARM this week. This morning I was reflecting on my lecture and tutorial and I had another one of those light bulb moments.  My general constructive criticism of my pre-service teachers was on the teacher-centred nature of their lesson plans and practical lesson demonstrations.  “What are the students going to do?” is somehting I have written and said too many times over the last couple of years.

I give these teachers the 5 minute lesson plan by Te@cher Toolkit because it is a clear visual reminder of what students would be doing. I have changed the way in which we have presented information, given feedback and assessed the course in an effort to address this. Unfortunately, “Copy notes from the board” or “answer the questions from the text book” are all too often seen as a student-centred activity focused on the what, how and why.  Forgetting the how well, so what or why is this important.

I have found that these early career and pre-service teachers are focused on the presentation of content and make this their priority to the detriment of how students will manipulate, assimilate, practice and present this knowledge.

So as I introduced ALARM and I talked about the higher order thinking and the responding side of the matrix, I realised that this is the perfect vehicle for reminding teachers that responding to content is equally as important as learning it. In fact, I would contend that it is more important, because this is where the real learning happens.

ALARM and the importance of analyse and critically analyse

I have been to a number of subject specific ALARM training days over the past 2 months and several teachers from different schools have admitted that at their school they have combined the analyse and critically analyse components of the ALARM matrix.  This had me quite concerned, and I have tried to come up with a nice way to say this but I can’t.  So here goes.

If you can’t separate analyse and critically analyse then you don’t get it and therefore can’t teach it properly.

These 2 components of the matrix, in my humble opinion, are the key to ALARM, they are the key to teaching critical thinking.  Yes they are difficult to understand, but that is the whole point.  If it was easy, we wouldn’t have to teach it.

I struggled with this when I first started with ALARM and looking at my early matrices, I did combine them.  But then it dawned on me that this was the key point of content to concept.  This was the stumbling block between what you know and what you think. They need to be separated and if you can’t do that for the content you teach then maybe you don’t understand it well enough.  Sorry. This was very confronting for me when I realised it about myself.  I thought I was a good teacher and I thought I understood most of the concepts I taught (my physics knowledge is still pretty weak but I only teach it in years 7 to 10). It was confronting to realise I had gaps, and if I had gaps, how could I explicitly teach the concept to my students.

[*edit* spoke with Max today and he made me consider that there may be another possibility for this misunderstanding – experts have chunked information and in doing so, find it difficult to then break it down. So let’s all consider ourselves chunking experts]

It wasn’t until Max Woods commented on a matrix I posted on Edmodo that it clicked.  I was actually merging explain and analyse, not analyse and critically analyse but to make it work I dropped analyse.  I could do the positives and negatives or the advantages and disadvantages and I saw this as analysing. But in ALARM, explain is function or purpose, analyse is the relationship and critical analyse is a comparison.

So let’s look at some Science (sorry, playing to my strengths)

Consider this Stage 4 outcome:  describe some examples of technological developments that have contributed to finding solutions to reduce the impact of forces in everyday life eg car safety equipment and footwear design

As mentioned in a previous post, this outcome has a glitch.  The verb is ‘describe’ but the phrase ‘the impact of forces in everyday life’ takes it all the way to the appreciate area of the ALARM matrix.  The link to life is about how advances in science have impacted on all our lives, in this case advances in force minimisation.

Name and Define:  What is a force?

Describe: What technological developments have contributed to decreasing forces in cars?

Explain:  How does each technological developments reduce force?

Analyse: Why is each technological development important to car safety?

Critically Analyse: What are the advantages and disadvantages of each development?

Evaluate:  How successful has each method been?

Critically Evaluate: What is the impact of all force reduction methods on car safety

Appreciate:  What impact has this had on society?

In this case, analyse is about the relationship between each technological development and car safety.  It is this question that sets the groundwork for critical thinking and provides the link to the impact on society.  The matrix would still make sense without it. However the vital step of explicitly making the link between content and concept would not be made as well as it could.  Before ALARM, I would have assumed this step to be an intuitive one. It should be an explicit step.

Confront your own understanding of your subject and persevere. It is worth it. This process makes more sense, the more you apply it. If you are struggling, please feel free to send me your matrix. I may be able to help, and if I can’t I will send it to Max.

Responding using ALARM – the easy bit, you’ve done all the hard work already

This is the sixth post in my series on ALARM.  The previous posts include: What is ALARM and why should you use it?, ALARM Logical Interpretive Matrix, ALARM Connotative Interpretive Matrix, Doing what you’ve always done better using ALARM, and Analysing the question, ALARM and the glitch.

In this post we finally get to responding. How do you use the ALARM matrix to respond to a question you have just analysed?  This is the easiest bit and will be the shortest post.  Pay attention, if you blink you’ll miss it.

Step 1: Take the deepest level from the matrix and put that first.

Step 2: Address each of the features and parts one cell at a time moving left to right across the matrix.

Step 3: Restate the deepest level as it relates to the question.

You have done all the hard work learning the content, analysing the question and putting it all into a matrix.  The matrix now provides the structure for the response.  Each row of the matrix can represent a sentence or a paragraph depending on the amount of content being covered. Some subject areas or lower order questions may not require step 1 or step 3. This is often the case in Science and I tell my student not to worry about step 1 unless they get into critically evaluate, conceptualise or appreciate and step 3 only in questions above 5 marks.

Next post I will look at giving feedback, explicitly teaching the use of metalanguage and encouraging more sophisticated language in student responses. I apologise in advance to the English teachers who will read this post.  I am a Science teacher doing my best to teach literacy. All constructive feedback and advice will be gratefully accepted.

Face to face teaching can never be undervalued in an online school

Last week was residential week at Aurora College. Students and teachers converged on Sydney from all over NSW for 4 days of face-to-face classes and some cool excursions. I have finally recovered enough to think.

What this week has confirmed for me is that face-to-face experiences are important for good teaching and learning. Getting to know my students and colleagues ‘in the flesh’ so to speak will help me teach better in an online environment. It has helped establish relationships that are vital for knowing my students and how they learn.

This may have developed eventually in the online environment. Eventually. Probably. But it would take longer and require greater effort. My students are now living breathing beings, not just an avatar. As I am to them. Body language and facial expressions are powerful cues to teaching and learning. Now that I know them a little better, I can adjust to their individual needs and idiosyncrasies.

To meet with the staff was vital. I am not physically in a school and I have missed teacher talk. The virtual classroom is not quite the same. It does not have the smell of coffee and maniacal laughter of the if you don’t laugh you go mad type. It was amazing to share notes, ideas and experiences. You can never discount the value of impromptu PL, coffee & shared chocolate.

I am looking forward to our next residential in term 4.