Graham Wegner – Open Educator

I’m feeling very proud of my colleagues this evening. Between my principal and I, we cooked up a sharing process based on a poster sharing session she was part of during a Teaching Australia principal’s PD program. The focus was on sharing contemporary classroom practice with a technology flavour. We designed the poster template, had copies printed up on A2 paper and distributed them out to all staff members. I talked about the goals behind the process and followed up with this email:

Dear colleagues,

School Closure Day requirements:
Just to clarify from last night, you will receive your A2 sheet and marker  in your pigeonhole this afternoon. Your task is to reflect on and write in dot points about an aspect of your classroom practice that reflects
contemporary learning. Use the ISTE Standards to help hone your thoughts:
-
1.         Creativity and Innovation
2.         Communication and Collaboration
3.         Research and Information Fluency
4.         Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5.         Digital Citizenship
6.         Technology Operations and Concepts
Think of something you have worked on that would fit into these categories, write it up on the A2 sheet with the view that you will present it to a group of colleagues speaking for no more than 5 minutes.
You will present it once more to more colleagues from other groups as well.
I know that this can be nerve-wracking for many of us but consider the following: Research shows that some of the most powerful learning occurs when colleagues share what they do (hence the emphasis on Professional Learning Communities). We also have a duty to our students and colleagues to de-privatise our practice – as we all build on each other’s work as students move through the school.
This is not an exercise in big-noting or critiquing.

Well, the resulting sessions were excellent. Ann had shuffled the staff into groups of 5 with a 5 minute allocation for each person to speak to their poster. Once that had happened, each group broke apart to re-present their poster, this time for 10 minutes to interested staff members from the other groups. So, in the space of an hour, I personally heard how a Year 3 teacher was using interactive material on netbooks with her class, how a Year 5/6 teacher was fostering a learning community within her classroom, a Year 5 teacher who used a key YouTube video to cement a key inquiry concept, an inspiring story of a Year 3 teacher new to our school this year who had gone in his words from “Lost In Space” to “Star Trek” in his evolving use of the same netbooks, a junior primary teacher who was seeking to improve her IWB skills, our Assistant Principal who was using a literacy website with her Reception students as well as presenting my own on the use of delicious tagged bundles of sites for our Inquiry unit as well as the use of YouTube videos to show varying viewpoints on the topic of the Murray River / Lower Lakes. I’ve blogged about this before – but as is often the case, most of my colleagues don’t read this blog so this was the first they knew about my strategies.

It was an awesome array of contemporary practice at our school and showed that although the progress is all at differing stages and speeds, everyone is moving forward and committed to ensuring that our practice provides the best learning for our students. My next job is inform the parents booked in for my ICT Focus evening tomorrow night.

Toni Glasson – Assessment for Learning – My Notes From Our Session at our Pupil Free Day

Start planning with what skills, knowledge and understanding do you want your students to have, not what will we “do” in the classroom. 21st century learning is about personalisation, students are the focus, need to be able to see progress over time. assessment for learning – inquiry learning, quality  teaching

Terminology:
Summative = assessment of learning
Formative = assessment for learning (can be broken into for = teacher via learning intentions, and as= student, self assessment) Toni sees this as an artificial division, as teachers and students are a symbiotic relationship.

“Assessment for learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.”
(Assessment Reform Group 2002)

Why AfL?
Use of AfL strategies leads to:

• improved student achievement
• greater engagement and motivation and responsibility for their own learning on the part of students

http://assessmentforlearning.edu.au

Learning intentions are an obvious sharing with the students of what they will be learning. This is followed by the success criteria which tells the students whether they have learned.

What happens to your learning if you don’t know what you’re expected to learn OR whether you’ve learnt it?

Sharing learning intentions with your students:

• expressed in terms of skills, knowledge and understanding
• learn, not do
• separate the learning from the context
• linked to the “big picture”

In practice, when do you share your learning intentions?

Sharing success criteria:

• makes student assessment explicit
• different forms, including rubrics
• students become aware of work quality and the quality to which they aspire

The learning intention is separate from the task, but defines the purpose of the task. It is important not to have too many success criteria. Hattie points out that feedback is one of the most important aspect for student improvement – so use the success criteria to target that feedback. (Research says that oral feedback is more powerful and immediate than written.) Articulate everything and the reasons why you are doing things – the students are the conduit to their parents and informing them of why they are doing the work they are doing.

Keep collecting samples of work – at various levels – so that you have examples to draw on to outline your expectations. What makes this a good narrative? What needs to be improved for this to become a good narrative?
This becomes designing the success criteria with your students.
Don’t design rubrics on your own – the best ones are always designed collaboratively.

• clearly expressed and relevant skills, knowledge and understanding
• an appropriate number of criteria for your year level
• mainly qualitative differences are identified in the descriptors (rather than quantitative)
• clear descriptions of all levels for student self assessment – accessible for all, needs to be unpacked in class (without this accessibility, it loses its ability to be a formative tool)
• for summative assessment, weighting of criteria needs to be included to reflect importance
• where possible, rubric is accompanied by models and work samples
• when used for formative, not used for “grades” and “levels”

Effective Teacher Feedback
Key ideas are that it must relate directly to the success criteria, identifies what has been done and and where improvement can be made, offers advice on how to improve that achievement, and can occur both during and after an assessment, can be oral or written  and allows time for students to act on the feedback.
How do you differentiate the success criteria to cater for personalisation of learning, even though the learning intention stays the same?

Plenty of food for thought here – Toni’s work helps educators to inform their practice and ensure that effective assessment is informing student learning.

I quite enjoyed the first day of training for the Intel Thinking With Technology course today. A small group of ten educators who are being trained to take this course back to their sites made for an engaging time as we whipped through the first two modules, led by our expert Senior Trainer Steve Nicholson. I plan to reflect in more detail as the next four days unfold but I just wanted to document this realisation before it fades.

We had time this afternoon to start using the planning template the program offers for designing a unit of work. It has a number of similarities to the Understanding by Design influenced unit planner my schools currently uses, so it was very user friendly to work with. Steve had time set aside for us to work on designing of a unit of work for future use in our classrooms, and with the gift of time, I looked at the school’s Inquiry Scope & Sequence to determine which of the inquiry units that my colleagues needed planned before the year’s end. I started on the last one currently titled “Does Music Make The World Go Round?” , cutting and pasting SACSA outcomes into the template before I had a major attack of the doubts and emailed my colleagues at school (Kim, my tandem teaching partner and Maria, our next door co-planning buddy) for counsel in where I should start, especially as our next actual unit of inquiry centres on Health outcomes in the dreaded “growth and development” area. Kim answered during her lunch break, correctly calling me out for being cowardly and avoiding this unit and so in the afternoon when we had some more time, I started again.

So, as I pored through the outcomes and SACSA examples to get my head around what the unit should be about, I realised that this was not how I plan for learning in the classroom any more. I needed my colleagues’ input, the conversation that hones in on the essential understandings, and the shared understanding of where we want the students to go during an inquiry unit. We do all of this together in our co-planning time, in the evenings on the wiki chatroom and through email exchange. Occasionally, we break the planning up into segments for individuals to work on alone but these are always pieces to the bigger puzzle.

It’s been called the deprivatisation of practice where teachers open up the closed door to their classrooms and create better learning through conversation and planning. But it is truly how I work best now. It is how this whole online networking thing works best – learning from each other and creating better learning experiences for our students.

We can’t do it alone.

I’ve hanging around a few Nings of late and even kick started one to give some of my staff a first hand experience of social networking walled garden style. One that I’ve just joined recently is part of an online conference run by my education system and focussing on Learning Spaces. What I find interesting about this is the chance to contrast the thinking and experiences of educators within my system with other points of view out on the open web. For instance, Vicki Davis recently pointed to this video from Bob Sprankle’s presentation at the recent BLC conference in North America.

Now, the concepts and ideas that Bob raises are worthwhile, don’t get me wrong. Many teachers can articulate what their ideal classroom could look like if someone was actually funded to build it. But there’s the rub. Even with the Federal Government getting stuck into the biggest building initiative in decades via the BER initiative, I don’t think much of that is going into future proofed classrooms and buildings. Schools are being handed templates of current buildings with minimal opportunity to rethink the way a school or even a classroom could be designed and function.

So when an idea like Qantas Club model classrooms was floated in the second Ning that I’ve been frequenting, I can feel a collective sigh from all of the teachers who just know that their classroom space is not changing any time soon. They quite pragmatically see that fantasy talk around learning spaces that are tailor made for these 21st Century Skills is not their reality. After all, they still have to shoehorn 30 odd students into their allocated area, connect to less than reliable networks, juggle limited budgets and still meet the rising demand for data driven accountability.

Of course, if we can allow the connection to the web in our schools to be less restricted and of sufficient bandwidth to be useful, then these new online learning spaces for the everyday teacher have much more chance of being achieveable. Even here, we run the risk of stumbling into fantasy territory again. You know the dream, the one of kids using their own devices to connect to the school network so that connection to the rest of the world is right there on the kid’s desk. But then we’d need top notch technicians to ensure a robust and flexible network – and I know in this state, there isn’t enough funding to keep the sort of talent in this area that we need for that dream to come true.

I have this gut feeling that even primary school education is going to dramatically change – some how, some time – before my time in this system is up. But I’m realistic enough to know that the physical facilities that people describe as pushing towards a more ideal learner centered classroom don’t come cheap and it will take a better government (State or Federal) than what we’ve got right now to make that investment.

Don’t get me wrong – we are seeing welcome investment in education that is a long time coming. I have to keep my cynicism in check and my network helps to keep me from assuming negative outcomes.

e.g.

Darcy1968: Windows 7 is RTM so we may be advantaged by getting our laptops later rather than sooner #DERNSW7:09 PM Jul 27th from twhirl

grahamwegner: @Darcy1968 I’ll bet there’s a few teachers quaking in their boots re: DER laptops – or planning to ignore so business as usual.7:18 PM Jul 27th from Twitterrific in reply to Darcy1968

Darcy1968:@grahamwegner It is terribly exciting for most though and at our school there’s no where to hide but plenty of collegial support and help.7:21 PM Jul 27th from twhirl in reply to grahamwegner

grahamwegner: @Darcy1968 That’s good to hear – it would be easy to be cynical (like me).7:34 PM Jul 27th from Twitterrific in reply to Darcy1968

Darcy1968: @grahamwegner we have all just been empowered to make a genuine difference and I buy into the once in a lifetime opportunity notion.7:36 PM Jul 27th from twhirl in reply to grahamwegner

We can make genuine change in classrooms exactly as they are right now. Waiting for the ideal learning space may never happen but as Tom Woodward’s great photo illustrates, schools will be eventually forced into change whether they want to or not.

I’ve been lurking around some excellent blog posts and catching some mind challenging tweets of late. This little beauty from Will Richardson is a typical thoughtful piece of writing but it is the quality of the comments that had me enjoying the to and fro of the topic. The conversation is clear, concise and insightful – and often sums up my own inner turmoil in better words than I could summon up myself in the same venue. Where everything is heading in regards to the future of education, heck, the future of learning is hotly debated by better informed minds than mine but only by reading and eventually engaging in the conversation can I expect to get a better grasp of my own role within that future.

There is always talk about preserving the essentials, the traditional knowledge, skills and concepts that will always be needed. Politicians like to call them the “basics” but I don’t think that educators and our powers that be necessarily have the same things in mind. Our parents certainly may another mindset altogether, as Trevor Meister pointed out in Will’s comments:

The notion that things will remain status quo until parents Demand changes led to this comment-

“But the only way that parents are going to DEMAND access is if they see that not simply as a way for kids to get a computer but to see connections online as a way to a better future, a way to help their kids become more educated, better learners than by books and paper alone.”

Other comments suggest that this is not likely to happen because either parents are ignorant of technology or are caught between a rock and a hard place worrying about getting their kids into college, which is best served by status quo.

A third reason this might not happen is probably not much of a factor now, but will be. What about the Parent that sees all to well “connections online as a way to a better future, a way to help their kids become more educated, better learners.” For them the use of emerging tech, web2.0/3.0 and what ever comes next is just a part of life. They are also starting to see major cracks in the old -you have to go to college to get a “good job”, what ever that is because “Employers” require you to have a “degree”. Most of the people they interact with on a day to day basis may be freelancers, independent subcontractors, or entrepreneurs running their own show. To them the idea of saying, “Wow that is amazing work and is exactly what we need, …but I’m sorry, you didn’t graduate from college.” would be ridiculous.

This parent is also not likely to DEMAND greater access and use of technology for better learning. For one, because of their connectedness, they have witnessed the back and forth battles over the same issues for years and can guess that their Demands will be in the minority and are likely to fall on deaf ears. (They may also have figured this out at the last parental advisory group meeting when everyone looked at them like they were from another planet after each and every comment or suggestion.) They have already declared the horse dead and as everyone knows, even if you drag a dead horse to water its not going to drink, no matter how hard you beat it. For another, the level of access and the knowledge of tools available may be higher at home. When the child comes home with a “Research Project” that includes the word- presentation along with the words- Power and Point instead of being thrilled, they send a note back to school – “I am sorry, my son/daughter can not complete said “Research Project” as I had previously vowed to strangle the next person I saw doing another lame power point presentation. Don’t worry, we will do the research, but will choose an alternate form of presentation.” This parent doesn’t feel the need to demand much of anything, they might even be the ones least likely to. They and their child have all the access they need, an awareness of what is available “out there” and the ability to tap into it when needed.

I do want to make it clear that I am not saying this parent is any “better”, this is just their reality. For now, their numbers are probably fairly small, but it is hard for me to imagine that this demographic would not continue to grow.

See what I mean about minds better than my own…

Trevor expands further on one possible future as we have more parents joining the ranks of the hyperconnected:

Take that now larger group of hyper-connected parents, mix with group of hyper-connected educators (especially those that found themselves left behind in the middle) armed with even more powerful technologies and networking know how, and stir. If these aren’t a nearly perfect set of conditions for spurring innovative solutions, I don’t know what is. How long would it be before someone said, enough, would it be possible to organize a series of unconferences or tweetups or #barcamp style gatherings? We could call them #schoolcamps or #learnups, and do follow up in between on-line. …. (many other possibilities exist of course, -perhaps the AI instruction/testing model will finally be perfected.

So, in true inquiry style where the question is the starting point for thinking, I posed this over at my new staff Ning (where the tumbleweed is still blowing through):

If School Is Changing To Match Our Students’ Future… then what essentials do you think we need to keep regardless of that future?

I hope my staff are keen to engage with this question and help me to figure some of the potential answers. I’m just hoping that they don’t mimic what one of the smartest people in my network observed at the recent ALEA Conference in Tasmania:

It is 8:15am and I am watching English teachers crowding wildly around the worksheets stand excitedly buying worksheets to bore kids *sigh*

What are the essentials? What is the difference between them and the 21st Century Skills that are touted as where educators need to be?

From the local (and only) daily newspaper here in Adelaide:

PARENTS hope new minimum teaching times for maths, English and science in South Australian primary schools will bring Australia in line with top-performing countries and lift student test scores.

Figures reported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show Australia lags behind countries such as the Netherlands, France, Mexico, the UK and the Czech Republic in teaching time committed to core subjects.

On average, students in the 30 countries in the OECD spend 50 per cent of class time on reading, writing, maths and science, compared with 24 per cent in Australia. In contrast, Australian teachers have the flexibility to dictate what is taught in 59 per cent of class time, compared with just 4 per cent of flexible time as the OECD average.

Now, I have a foot in both camps here – as a teacher in the public school system that is often under the critical gaze of the SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATION OF STATE SCHOOL ORGANISATIONS (SAAOSSO) and a parent who is represented by the same organisation. I do find it interesting that SAAOSSO’s method seems to be criticising the public school system equals improving it. Anyone can cherry pick OECD statistics to present a favourable argument – I’m wondering if all of those countries who spend that time exclusively on core subjects are all out performing Australia in their literacy and numeracy achievements. Actually an actual link to the statistics being quoted in the news article would have been useful rather than assuming that the reader should take the article at face value.

And as a teacher who sees the benefit of covering SACSA outcomes in “flexible” time in the guise of Inquiry Learning, I wonder why we’d even want to strive for the OECD average of 4 %. This perception that we don’t spend enough time on the “basics” is very interesting. I have heard that this call is usually because the government (or in this case, the parents’ representative body) don’t really have a clear vision of the future, so grasping for the past is the usual response. Just for the record, I have no problem with the State Government’s call for minimum times for English, Mathematics and Science. My own timetable for my class matches those requirements pretty well – but I sense that “flexible” equals “undesirable” in this new initiative. Improving our own education system needs to focus on what is relevant for our students, not as Greg Carroll puts it so eloquently, following the ball around.

Image adapted for review purposes from the OECD Document titled ENHANCING EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE IN AUSTRALIA.

June has been a very lean month for this blog but not without good reason. This month has seen the writing of mid year reports followed by this week’s full schedule of three way interviews  (parents/ student /teachers) which has sucked up most of my free planning and writing time.  I’ve also found myself chasing a whole bunch of Between Module Activities from a whole staff TESMC (Teaching ESL Students in Mainstream Classrooms)  course that I’ve been involved in. I have one more of these to do to meet minimum requirements for my certificate before the end of June, so it may well be July and the CEGSA Conference before I have the time and opportunity to write some more here.

But the interview process has been very interesting – by this time tomorrow, we will have held over thirty earnest conversations with parents and caregivers. There have been promises to strive for goals, observations shared, disappointments voiced and just occasionally that golden moment when a student shows that real sign of a self motivated, initiative seeking learner.  Thank, to Darren Draper, I re-discovered Christian Long’s “Future of Learning Manifesto” (wow, I wish he was still  blogging) with my favourite extract that describes my role with these students:

Keep in mind, I may be young so I may have a hard time with that “r-tickle-a-shun” thing. That’s your job. Give me the words. Give me the tools. Give me the examples. And then get out of my way.

But the second you see my passion start to go from curious lit match to smoke-jumper forest fire, stop giving me handouts and worksheets and become my Jerry McGuire.

I’ve got to remember to not be the wet blanket.

A bit later this year, my school will get its BER-funded library. And while we don’t get that much choice about the design of the actual building, Ann my principal keeps reminding the staff that we have a lot of choice about the interior looks like. She believes (and I agree) that this is a great chance to break the mould of how a primary school library is set up and run. Re-imagining how a dynamic learning space for our school could look is an exciting opportunity that should open up new possibilities.

I personally feel excited looking at Kim Cofino’s workplace, the Learning Hub at ISB, Thailand and see that is an attractive learning environment that holds what is currently good about school libraries (fiction books, magazines etc.) blended with new media areas and comfortable seating. Kim explains:

You have to give them something different. The Learning Hub (library) has to offer a physical environment that is different than other spaces teachers and students regularly use.

Not that their design doesn’t need a bit of tweaking from time to time:

In our efforts to make a 21st century learning environment, we had mistakenly recreated a standard, formal classroom space at the very front of the Learning Hub, assuming that teachers would want to use it as an expanded classroom:

I’m thinking that a few things need to go – a traditional computer lab isn’t really needed in a school that is trying to go wireless and get technology out into the classrooms and why do we need any reference books that are not digital? I suppose one of the greatest challenges about a blank slate (aka the empty shell of a building) is prioritising the possibilities and actually picturing how it all might fit together.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/3536973387/

My principal, Ann, and I will often throw challenging statements into the conversation mix in the staffroom every now and then and wait for a bite.

“I can see a future where handwriting is an irrelevant skill.” (This is guaranteed a rapid response with junior primary teachers who see that sentence as an attack on the skills of literacy and the development of fine motor skills.)

Ann also threw this gem out to our Assistant Principal and teacher-librarian: “Won’t things be great when we change over to our paper-less, digital library?” They both knew that she is only half-joking.

I’ve also contemplated out loud about the demise of tree-based newspapers or the day our school our school has 1:1 laptops. It’s not as if they don’t know that these things already exist but I certainly detect an unwillingness to acknowledge that their school and their established way of work could be affected and move in these directions.

I’ve been told as much by my colleagues that paper will always prevail in classrooms, that our system will always need face-to-face teaching and libraries stacked full of books. A few have learned to try and bait me back with references to Susan Greenfield or similar. I just wonder what many of them thought when they heard Mark Treadwell talk about us being in the initial stages of the Internet Based Paradigm.

Schools have been the way they are for quite a while. There are plenty of teachers who believe that the slow change we’ve been used to in the education sector is just the way things are, that we are somehow immune to the rapid changes in society and all kids need to make their way into the future are the same tried and true basics.

So I’d like to keep my colleagues on their toes, keep niggling away at their certainties and get them to consider the bigger picture beyond their own classroom and help shape the changes that will inevitably crop up a lot sooner than anticipated. But I’m running short of provocations – do you have any to help me out? Or am I the one who needs to be challenged?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2782069277/

I reckon a skillfully constructed cartoon can say more than any blog post ever could. So, as Australian schools gear up for the annual NAPLAN tests, I couldn’t resist posting this gem from Savage Chickens.

Good luck to all involved in this process. Let’s hope that standardised testing doesn’t mutate any further than its current configuration – what I read about other countries’ testing expectations does make me nervous about the future.