Teaching Generation Z

I really enjoyed reading Clay Burell’s most recent post. As happens so often in my online reading, it ties in with some of my thoughts as I’ve just completed writing Term Two reports for my class and for the first time in twenty plus years of teaching, I’ve had to assign grades to each learning area from A to E. This stems from a mandate from the outgoing Federal Government that despite union opposition is now compulsory across all schools in Australia. I blogged about this 18 months ago when it seemed imminent but it took until this year to become an unescapable reality. Clay really pulls apart the history of grading as a tool for assessment in schools and makes some very valid observations that question the structure of schools worldwide. This point about class size ties in with my day today involved in industrial action when my union is asking the government (as well as improved salaries) for reduced class sizes:

So complete is our acceptance of factory schooling, we consider classes of twenty “small” when, I would argue, even twenty students for an hour is a recipe for poor learning - come on, do the math: one teacher teaching twenty students for an hour equals three minutes of individual attention maximum.

Anyway, over the last three years I have moved from the 2006 report card system where I had to write descriptive comments on each learning area (8 in all) with larger paragraphs for mathematics and English and finish it all off with a 200 word summative comment at the end about attitude to learning, organisational and social skills. This was close to 1000 words of writing for each student and with a class of 30 in most primary classrooms, most teachers really felt the pressure during this part of the year. Parents loved the individualised comments about their children. Feedback indicated that they really appreciated the work put into the reports - but as one teacher said to me, “That just about killed me. My private time was totally consumed by report writing. I’m glad it’s over.”

With the Federal Government putting the pressure on schools late in 2006 and into 2007, we adapted our report cards to be ready if needed for the A to E grading system. We did not end up using them, substituting a continuum system that rated student achievement from Well Below Year Level Achievement (what would become an E) to Outstanding Achievement Above Year Level (A equivalent) and reduced the written component down to two sections for Literacy and Numeracy and the 200 word summative comment. Still a lot of work but the teachers were wilting like in 2006. Interviews were held straight after the report card went home to explain how the middle part of the continuum “Achieving At Year Level” was a good place for their kids to be. Parents still gravitated towards the personalised comments where they looked for context for the achievement system.

For this year, the A to E system was mandated in all South Australian schools. It had to happen.

Teachers met to share work samples and to moderate their expectations for each year level. There was constant referral to the SACSA “Lite” documents to check on the outcomes being assessed. This common understanding was essential to ensure that teacher judgement was consistent across the school as standardised testing does not dominate the Australian education scene (yet, he thinks cynically) to provide that sort of data. We don’t have grading books like a few American edubloggers I have chatted with are compelled to use. We interpret the curriculum and individual schools have to put structures in place to ensure consistency. The writing shrank back to the summative comment only. Grades were inserted for strands within Learning Areas and an overall grade calculated. We also have spent time talking with the kids to ensure that their first experience with grades was not a bad one. Many Aussie kids have formed their perception of grades from American TV shows, their parents’ high school experiences where if you got a C, then you obviously weren’t trying very hard. This is in conflict with the Aussie system where C is year level achievement - to get a higher grade means working above that year level and being on a par with students in the year level above. The romantic concept of “straight A’s” just by working hard and being a “good student” is not going to happen. Multiple A’s on a report might only be achieved by highly gifted students.

Now I don’t see myself as a “professional grader” as Clay indicated but I think he realises that the Australian (and NZ as well) system within primary schools at least is a different beast to the one he is leaving. But interestingly, that despite the fact that Australia ranks well in front of the US in any number of international comparisons, we still keep wanting to adopt the worst ideas from their systems. I think this grading idea is one of them. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes the next logical step for our politicians seeking to “improve” our education system.

My wife and my youngest son, Joshua, headed off today for a five year old birthday party leaving me at home with our eldest son and a pile of report writing to do. We decided to head out for some lunch as a bit of a break, driving off to a Subway near our house. Now these things have sprouted throughout suburban Adelaide like mushrooms over the past few years to the stage where we have three of these outlets within five minutes of our house, two of them located in petrol stations. We went to one of those on Tapleys Hill Road, went in, ordered our food and sat in the small tabled section set up as a mini-restaurant. While we ate, I looked around and thought how the petrol station had evolved from the place where you just filled up the fuel tank and bought a Coke or choccy bar.

Some things haven’t changed like the obligatory racks of cigarettes behind the counter (although it’s getting pretty expensive down under to continue this sort of habit) but everything else is nothing like the petrol station of yesteryear. As well as the restaurant area, there’s a pretty comprehensive mini-supermarket, an ATM and gourmet coffees complete with muffins and other cakes for a longer pitstop. Add in Top 40 music playing through a quality sound system and ambient lighting and it’s obvious that this modern hybrid doesn’t just want you to pay for your petrol and go.

I read a lot about how school is stuck in the industrial age and that teachers from the 50’s would be able to work and operate in today’s classroom because things haven’t changed that much. But I’m not sure I buy that line of thought entirely. Sure, school buildings have been around for a while but the way my classroom has changed is a little bit like the modern petrol station. The technology does make a difference - the interactive whiteboard, the laptops, the wireless connection. There are other differences over my teaching career as well - the shift to inquiry learning as a focus, student voice coming to the fore, the popularity of open space classrooms, team teaching, the decline of open space classrooms, a greater focus on students creating and sharing their own learning, a constructivist curriculum framework that’s lasted more than three years, co-planning units of work, the introduction of standardised testing and the re-introduction of A-E grades. So the classroom, like the modern petrol station, is being asked to do much more than in the past.

I think that having the right facilities does help pave the way towards improved outcomes. The petrol stations decided that the way to improve services was to form partnerships with other franchises, sell a wider variety of products, allow punters easy access to their money and generally create an environment where people willingly part with their money because that environment is right. The modern classroom is reacting to the changes that society is inflicting and imposing and effective teachers are modifying what they offer in order to create the right learning environment. But they operate within financial and facility-based restraints. That means many classrooms might appear at a glance to be throwbacks to an older era but the teacher has to be like the service station proprietor where many services have to be offered to keep the learning moving along.

Anyway, not sure if this metaphor will fly. Feel free to shoot it down or compare and contrast to the classroom you know or have to operate in.

Lest we forget….

Own photograph of War Memorial, High Street , Wirrabara, South Australia.

When I get the chance I go for a walk along the Torrens linear park - accessible down the end of our street. I took a couple of shots on my phone a few weeks back when the drought seemed to have hit the hardest on Adelaide’s distinctive waterway from the bridge on Henley Beach Road and then re-took the same pics three weeks and a few millimetres of rain later. Just goes to show that it doesn’t take much rain to fill the Torrens - but the drought isn’t over yet…

I’ve been playing around with YouTube tracking down old music videos and seeing if I can track some of my obscure favourites. A few days back, I read a Stephen Downes post that linked from a Rob Wall post starting a meme called Top 5 Of The Eighties. Although not officially invited to be part of the fun, I couldn’t resist. Being of the age where the music of the eighties provided the soundtrack to my teenage and early years of adulthood, I went scurrying to my cassette collection to see what jumped out at me as being memorable (or even listenable today.) Here’s my list in no particular order.

• The The - Infected
• Husker Du - Zen Arcade
• Midnight Oil - 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
• Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues
• Public Enemy - Fear Of A Black Planet

And to give non-Aussies a taste of the Oils in the middle there, here’s a live version of “Only The Strong” via YouTube. Not quite as good as the album version … but Midnight Oil were arguably the best live band down under in the eighties.

No tagging - feel free to jump in and even try a different decade.

I’ve been recently tagged by Doug, Patrick and then today, David. It’s been everywhere and dodged me until now. I thought I had the perfect photo if someone ever decided that this game of tag should come this way until I checked and found it was © copyright.

So, I’ve found a CC version that is pretty similar - more on that in a minute… here’s the rules.

Passion Quilt Meme Rules:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Collaboration And Linking With Others Makes You A Star! 

“Hand Star” by Chris.P. 

The thinking behind my photo was that it had to be about learners, be they students or educators or anybody. How do they/I learn best? By collaborating and linking up with others - you can learn by yourself but not in isolation from everything/ everyone. Everything you learn has a connection to someone else. Also, every time you learn/ create something, it becomes more powerful when shared/ linked with others.

Who am I tagging? Let’s go for some of the most passionate people I know on my network.

Alexander Hayes
Ken Rodoff
Leigh Blackall
Chris Harbeck
Konrad Glogowski

I just hope that Alex doesn’t throw up my Open Educator logo as his example - it could end up well utilised in the near future anyway.

I wandered around the oval today on recess time duty and noticed how two years of drought has ravaged the grass surface. There are only sporadic spots of green amongst a mass of dried yellow and as the games of soccer and cricket are played by the students dressed in navy, light blue or white, worn brown bare patches are peeking through.

It was the last day of the school year today. The year sevens were hyped up, spending their last day of primary school strutting around looking big and important, masking the nervousness about starting high school in the new year. Emu parades were conducted, classrooms were tidied, Christmas gifts given to the teachers and the hot westerly breeze brought a haze of smoke across the school yard as Kangaroo Island continued to burn.

The air conditioner in my room continued to struggle as my class quizzed each other on the year past, then bid crazy amounts of imaginary money in a classroom memorabilia auction before we headed off for the final assembly of the year. Everyone was edgy, kids leaving were teary, and then it all ends with a fizz. Kids stream out with their parents, some stay to say thanks for a great year Mr. Wegner and then the place is quiet. I sit there for a few minutes, checking the emails I never had a chance to look at for the whole day, then pick up stray papers and stack chairs until it’s time to head over to the staffroom for farewells and the obligatory Kris Kringle gift exchange. I need a Coke badly but have to settle for a Pepsi Max. It’s not quite the same.

In six weeks time, it will be time to gear up and take on board a new class with new possibilities and new opportunities. For now though, the working year is done. The rubber band is about to snap.

I've just poked my head from the haze of over two weeks worth of writing (typing) end-of-year student reports which here down under would have to be the most time-sucking, energy sapping, brain deadening thing to do in the whole school year. I swore (not the profanity kind) that I wouldn't post to my blog until I had finished.

And I have.

Sort of.

Well, my part anyway!

I share a classroom and so the report writing responsibilities have been split pretty fairly between myself and my tandem teaching partner. All of our student reports have three sections to fill with about 180 - 200 words of insightful text - I had to do two of these. Multiply by 30 students and the premise that each section will be uniquely composed and it’s no wonder the blog has been dormant meanwhile. Then liase with my offsider to make sure we’re not presenting contradictory views back to the parents…. well, you get the idea.

These busy times always seem to coincide with the more interesting online events in the “edublogosphere”. Last time I was flat out was during the K12 Online Conference and I still haven’t checked any more than the bewildering preconference keynote and half of Clarence Fisher’s keynote.  Now apparently the edublog awards are on and some extremely generous person (or peoples!) decided to nominate TGZ for Best Teacher Blog. You may have seen the outsized badge in the sidebar - I found five minutes to install that but not to resize it so it doesn’t look ridiculous. I’m hoping to beat the 5% I garnered last year (not looking good at the moment!), although with the voting fallout already wreaking havoc, I think I’ll be content that someone (someones!) felt that my occasional writing was worth pushing forward for consideration. Anyway, I let James know about my feelings over there on the blog so enough on that particular topic.

(Although I did post this -” There seems to be a lot of lobbying for edublog award votes going on - some methods could mean a very hollow victory.” - on twitter about 7 hours ago. I do like grapes that aren’t quite ripe anyway.)

So, here’s my point. Finally.

We finish school for the year in just over two weeks. My non-teaching friends always remark about how nice it is to be winding down for the year. Except every year it seems that we’re winding up for the year. The pace is going to get hectic from now on with staff dinners, Year 7 graduations, assemblies, class party days, reports being published, kids finding which classroom and teacher they’re getting for 2008, Kris Kringle (oh no, please, I’m being blackmailed into participating AGAIN), farewells for staff leaving, visits from staff joining us in the new year, jumping into new ICT program initiatives, blah, blah, blah, blah…..

No wonder I hate Christmas when all I want to do is go home, pad barefoot around the house for a few weeks, sleep in (until the kids bug me to get up), ring a mate to play golf, go for a walk along the Torrens or play Tiger Woods 2008 that I’ve only tried once since buying it two months ago.

Winding UP!

What usually happens is I’ll come home after the last day of term with a massive headache. Basically, the rubber band that is my brain will be wound up so tight, it’ll eventually snap.

I’ve heard more than one teacher say that schools would run perfectly if it wasn’t for the students. Leaving aside the obvious point that without the students, the school itself wouldn’t exist, it also shows another belief that many, many teachers have. That belief runs something along the lines of that if you are involved in schools and you don’t have students in front of you on a daily basis, then life is a lot easier. That means anyone in leadership or administration have got life easy - after all, they don’t have a class to teach!

Being in this role of Coordinator over the past five years has been a real eye opener for me. Although it is officially a first step role for official leadership in schools, it does open new perspective of the so called advantages of being a leader. I’ve been sitting on the fence, not in an indecisive way but in terms of that I still have a foot in both camps. I’m still a classroom chalkface practitioner for 3/4 days a week with my own bunch of 30 individuals to teach, assess, build relationships and manage in that time. But the rest of my role involves budgets, crystal ball gazing, planning and implementing, reacting to and juggling requests and crises, and doing a bit of leading out in keeping our school moving forward towards their “up-to-date- technology” vision (new vision coming soon!) whilst keeping everyone informed.

So I’m going to point a few things I’ve learned by being on both sides of the fence - some things that my colleagues who’ve chosen to stay in the classroom aren’t or don’t want to be aware of.

Classroom perspective: Leadership gets paid so much more than us, so they need to earn that money.
Leadership perspective: It’s not as much as you think. My leadership salary is 4% more than I was earning as a full time classroom teacher - I can tell you for a fact, I am working much more than 4% harder than when I started this gig.

Classroom perspective: Leadership doesn’t have to worry about dealing with the students.
Leadership perspective: Leadership do have to deal with students but quite often end up dealing with the time outs, the yard behaviour problems, the suspension re-entries and as a special bonus, the irate parents. Granted, the latter also accost classroom teachers as well but they seem to save their biggest heads of steam for the principal!

Let’s not forget the late or missed lunches, the covering for classes when relievers don’t turn up, having a huge pile of work to get through that gets bigger as the day goes on because one urgent issue after another pops up, the speaking in front of the staff when everyone wants to go home, the default “you’ll chair this meeting” mindset in committees, being the person who gets glared at when something on the network doesn’t work first up, and the “Have you just got a minute? My computer’s playing up.”

Not forgetting that the latter example often happens on the days I’m on the classroom teacher side of the fence…..

I really enjoyed catching up with Alan Levine and Michael Coghlan over some fabulous Malaysian food in Gouger Street last night. Despite his virally ravaged throat and low energy levels, Alan was great to trade ideas with and I would love to have been able to make it to tomorrow’s presentation that has him here on behalf of the Australian Flexible Learning Network. In between roti and peppercorn chicken and other great dishes, we traded Web 2.0 edutalk and the tool that kept popping up regularly was twitter. Alan made note of this in his post but I want to tie this to something I noticed earlier in the day.

I checked in on twitter mid afternoon and saw a tweet from a fellow Aussie teacher, Russel Montgomery. He’d just posted on his blog and was using his twitter network to ask for some feedback. Russel wrote:

What I want to write about it is the rate of change that I find myself caught up in. It is meteoric.  …. and for my life perhaps is becoming catastrophic. I am not sure.

Anyone who’s got on the online treadmill of late will notice that things seem to be getting faster and faster, new stuff, can it be applied to education, how do we get others on board, they’re getting further behind …. hell, I’m getting further behind! Russel’s post concluded with the following query:

Anyway I am curious as to how the rest of my education network is coping with all this. How do you maintain a healthy balance between the various elements of your life? How do you manage the passion for reform over against the necessities of living a semi-normal life?

I can really relate to this - in fact, this issue is probably the cause of my rant against hype. But I reckon I have a few pointers to give to Russel and even some of his commenters in terms of keeping things in balance - in fact, it’s only one real pointer. I remarked at one stage to Alan during the evening that twitter was only as good as the network you had assembled with it. To me, that’s the key to the balance of this whole unreal exponential trip that we self styled and self identified edubloggers have embarked. Build your network with care, adding names that can help you get to grips with any tool or issue so that you don’t have to rush around like a headless chook trying to try everything.

Here’s what I mean. I know hardly anything about Second Life - I made an avatar once and I think I need a software upgrade to get back in - but as Sean Fitzgerald is part of my network (whether he like it or not!) I don’t need to be. Mobile learning? Try Alex Hayes or Leonard Low. Classroom pedagogy - Konrad Glogowski, Chris Harbeck or Jo Mcleay. I have my design experts, open source sources, higher ed, international schools, all on my network so I don’t have to an expert in any of it. I just need to find them when I need them. That way, I can go to bed at 10.30 pm every night knowing that something I miss will be archived, that in my aggregator someone will review that new cool tool. And I can just focus on what I’m best at and be that node on someone else’s network.