Slow Learning

Steve Jobs: calligraphy and connecting the dots

2011-10-15T14:30:00.001+11:00

Listening to a replay of Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford University I was struck by the importance he placed on following your passion. He never graduated from university but dropped out and then dropped in to courses that interested him. One of these was calligraphy.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; yet this is what education bureaucrats, politicians and media commentators expect teachers to do. Any teacher knows that we can use evidence to inform out teaching practice, plan detailed lessons, teach effectively only to have the lesson derailed by a kid who is out to lunch with his or her behaviour. I'm going to use this quote - "...you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Debriefing questions for lesson professional development

2011-09-26T14:12:00.000+10:00

Last week I worked with three teachers to explore a professional learning model using a truncated version of lesson study. The model is called a triad, even though it's a quartet if you include me as facilitator.

The teachers planned a lesson on using metaphors and took turns to teach, observe, reflect and revise as a group

Each time we revised the lesson it got tighter and each teacher had ownership of it, which was referred to as "our lesson".

Below is a list of our debriefing questions

1. Howwas the lesson planned?

2. Whatworked well with the planning?

3. Whatchanges would you make for the next planning session?

4. Wasthe lesson goal clear? Were the Learning Intentions and Success Criteria displayed? Did the sequences of learning contribute effectively toachieving the goal?

5. Wasthe flow of lesson coherent?

6. Werethe materials helpful in achieving the goal of the lesson?

7. Wasthe lesson chunked into digestible bits or episodes?

8. Wasthe lesson appropriate for students’ level of understanding?

9. Didthe classroom discussions help promote student understanding?

10. Was the lesson differentiated? If not,how could it be differentiated?

Literacy Coordinator's role at a P-12school

2011-05-28T18:39:00.000+10:00

This afternoon I wrote some notes on my work as Literacy Coordinator at a regional P-12 school and thought there seems to be a lot of things the job requires me to do. In the interests of sharing the information I've listed the role below.
Literacy Coordinator P-12

Key Role: to lead, coordinate and monitor teachers, students and programs in Literacy Education P-12 in accordance with MEC Strategic Plan. The purpose is to ensure that literacy improvement is a continual focus, so all students can achieve and all teachers can teach to high standards.

Responsible to: Principal

Role:

Coordinate literacy across the school as a key leadership position
Research best practice; use evidence based teaching to identify priorities for development
Develop, review, revise and implement with school staff, a 2-4 year Literacy Plan
Review and manage multiple sources of data. Use data to direct teaching and learning resources.
Give feedback to show positive, static and negative change
Promote and model best teaching and learning literacy practice across the school
Assist domain areas to develop effective strategies and resources for improving literacy
Facilitate classroom observation
Coach teachers to use evidence based teaching practices in literacy
Contribute to Regional and Network Literacy Coordinator workshops
Present the Regional Modules to staff
Provide Professional Learning to enhance quality literacy practices across all domains
Liaise with other Literacy Coordinators in the Network and across Networks
Use the Network Literacy Improvement Officer (NLIO) as a resource to assist with all aspects of Literacy Improvement in the school
Be the point of contact for the NLIO to distribute information and resources to staff
Oversee classroom literacy programs
Promote literacy in the school and school community
Work with year level teachers to plan, monitor and resource literacy programs

Chalk is much more interactive than an interactive whiteboard

2010-10-31T19:24:00.004+11:00

I've just read about a high tech classroom complete with interactive whiteboards which has been upstaged by good old fashioned chalk. The classroom was designed for an education conference in Bahrain and was designed to show the best in cutting edge technology. As can happen with situations like this, the technology failed.

According to TES the star of the show was Ewan McIntosh, an expert in digital media from Edinburgh, who covered a wall with chalk notes and doodles.

Ewan McIntosh said, "I think we fetishise technology at the expense of thinking about physical space. Chalk is much more interactive than an interactive whiteboard."

It's not all as it seems.

Teenage Brains Research

2010-06-26T14:46:00.003+10:00

Amelia Hill writes in The Guardian about new research into teenage brains which has found that they're less developed than was previously thought. Teenagers may look like adults but their brain structure is similar to that of much younger children, and brains continue developing well into adulthood.

Dr Iroise Dumontheil of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience puts it like this:"'It's not the fault of teenagers that they can't concentrate and are easily distracted. It's to do with the structure of their brains. Adolescents simply don't have the same mental capacities as an adult."

Teenagers have 'chaotic thought patterns', caused by an excess of grey matter (the cell bodies and connections that carry messages within the brain). Adults have less grey matter, and their brains work more effectively. Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who led the research, explains: "What our research has shown is that there is simply too much going on in the brains of adolescents ... The result is that their brain energy and resources are wasted and their decision-making process negatively affected."

Why teenagers can't concentrate: too much grey matter

Pat Conroy has enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers

2009-11-15T22:30:00.000+11:00

About eight years ago I read a book about teaching which I haven't forgotton. It's called THE WATER IS WIDE and is Pat Conroy's memoir of a year teaching poor black kids on Yamacraw Island about a world they didn't know existed.

The first thing I learned when I got there was that fourteen of the seventeen kids in grades five through eight read below the first grade level. Five of the kids did not know the alphabet; five of the kids also did not know how to add one and one, two and two, things I thought rather basic in the education of most people.

It was a year that changed Conroy's life. Read it if you can get a copy.

I remembered the book when I read this letter about book censorship which is a beautifully eloquent homage to English teachers:

A Letter to the Editor of the Charleston Gazette

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteenstory building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye fortyeight years ago.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because bookbanners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works– but writers and English teachers do.

I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against–you’ve riled a Hatfield.

Sincerely,
pat conroy

Results of testing won't be used for league tables?

2009-11-13T18:40:00.002+11:00

We seem to becoming more obsessed with tests and and easy comparisons. Julia Gillard, Australia's Education Minister, says there will be no league tables.

We've heard it all before.

Recently a meeting of principals in Canberra warned a new website that provides information on schools around the country could lead to the creation of league tables even though the website has been designed to stop that happening.

Are exams bad for children? The Telegraph, UK, quotes Greg Watson, head of OCR, one of three main exam boards, as saying that the system of league tables and Ofsted inspections piled pressure on teachers to get results at all costs.

In a speech, he suggested that “exam factories” were being created, potentially damaging children’s education.

The article is written by By Graeme Paton, Education Editor of The Telegraph. He says that the comments are a latest in a series of attacks on the way the UK Government uses exam results to hold schools - and pupils - to account.

Two of England’s main teaching unions – the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers claim the exams, which are taken in the final year of primary education, skew the curriculum and force schools to “teach to the test”.

Exams are not in themselves bad for children - what is bad is an exam the results of which "indicate the school's performance", making the school teach to the exam to improve their rating - together with financial incentives.

I remain sceptical when our politicians say the they are being transparent and that league tables won't happen.

At the Canberra principals meeting Ms Gillard insisted after the launch ''there is no part of this website that can be sorted into a league table by using sort functions on the computer. That is simply not possible''. clever - It's not us that will create the league tables.

League tables won't be created? Yeah, and pigs might fly.

Learning slowly according to Manfred Spitzer

2009-11-12T22:05:00.004+11:00

Gary Woodwill reviewed a book about learning, thinking and acting. The title grabbed my attention "The Importance of Learning Slowly". The book is by Manfred Spitzer, The Mind within the Net: models of learning, thinking, and acting.One of the comments Woodwill makes about the book is that:

While a single event can have an impact, it usually takes many events to have a relatively permanent change in the brain (aka “learning”) and to extract general features and generate rules from experience ... and according to Spitzer "It must learn quickly for obvious reasons, but it must learn slowly in order to generalize in a way that will produce the optimal solution without oscillating around it or forgetting it because of some other stimulus.”

(p. 53)

Woodwill continues

We often find our models of understanding the world in the latest technologies available to us. Piaget developed his multi-stage theories of learning from observing his own children, and then applying the dominant mechanical metaphors of his day. In the 19th century, Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, coined the term “the average man” based on the pendulum (Piaget’s “equilibrium”), while Herbert Spencer wrote a psychology of adaptation using the newly created thermostat as his model (Piaget’s “adaptation and assimilation” within set limits).

In the second half of the twentieth century, two models of computing competed for dominance. One model was artificial intelligence, based on a model of inputs, storage, processing, and outputs - in other words, a factory metaphor. The other model was that of neural networks, modeled on what was then known about the functioning of brains in humans and other animals. In the 1950s, AI became the darling of computer science, leaving neural network development far behind in terms of funding and attention.

Manfred Spitzer’s The Mind within the Net is one of the best non-technical narratives on how minds work using the neural network model. Some of these explanations are startling, while others reinforce positions of strong advocates of individual freedom and the power of informal learning, such as Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Jay Cross.

Spitzer also believes that children can and need to learn more quickly than adults. Children need a rough and ready view of the world while adults want to increase their depth of understanding. Spitzer relates this to the pace of change in today’s society. “The old master violin building makes better violins than the young student of the trade. If, however, all of a sudden the customers want music synthesizers, student will adapt to change more readily.”

The importance of feedback is apparent in both brains and neural networks. Neural networks have a technique called backpropagation of errors that simulates feedback loops in the brain that slowly change the hidden layers between input and output. This means that learning is much more to do with practice and observation than being told what to do. “Children learn from examples,” says Spitzer. The brain stores its learning in “self organizing feature maps.”

Spitzer is a psychiatrist in Germany, so it is not surprising that he has a chapter entitled “The Disordered Mind” in which he discusses autism and oppression. Most of his conclusions are on the best way to raise children, making this book less applicable to the adult learning. However, there are so many insights going through it that I highly recommend it to everyone in education and training.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

On line courses at Yale

2009-10-31T12:05:00.002+11:00

Occassionally I remember to check out on line courses which I think are great. Yale courses can be linked at On line courses at Yale. For example the history department

... is home to one of the most popular majors on the Yale campus and encompasses the histories of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Courses range in focus from the earliest recorded historical periods up through the modern day. Students are required to study history from a variety of geographical, chronological, and methodological perspectives, utilizing source materials wherever possible. The department also houses the History of Medicine and Science major. Learn more at http://www.yale.edu/history

Check it out from your kitchen table.

Building reading stamina

2009-08-13T07:00:00.000+10:00

"This year reading is really boring. Everytime we finish a chapter the teacher gives us a sheet with questions that we have to answer. Last year reading was fun, we made up our own questions and talked in groups about the text."

I was reminded of this conversation I had with a group of year 7 boys when I read Carol Jago's column 'Readers Just Want to Have Fun' in Voices From the Middle. The boys talking I had worked with in grade 6 as a rural primary school. We were using Reading Circles and the students really came to enjoy reading and to see that it could be fun. Yet here they were one year later and turned off reading because it was now a comprehension worksheet exercise.

If we want students to read we first need to get them enjoying reading and wanting to read.

Recently I've been working with teachers to get them to change from silent reading to independent reading. Independent reading where students choose their 'just right' book, read with a purpose, write in their reading journal with the teacher working by conducting reading conferences.

Sometimes the teacher might run a guided reading group during this time.

But the first thing is to get kids to build up their reading stamina. This means being able to concentrate on reading for 30 plus minutes. To really get into the story, which is something struggling readers rarely experience.

In a couple of classes where teachers have insisted on students reading for 30 minutes students have begun to enjoy reading. And they do not read outside of the classroom.

So, first things first, get them reading for a sustained time.

The beauty of mathematical language

2009-08-12T15:15:00.004+10:00

They say a whole page of ideas
Can be captured in a symbol
And a large chunk of life
Can be explained in an equation

With powerful and elegant notations
People can picture in their minds
Through a few simple strokes or curves,
Whole chapters of imagination
And days and nights, countless explorations of intrigue,
Sustained

A little Pi, is not so simple,
For books have been written, and still more will write
A small lemniscus, is not so naïve
For it never ends and never starts
A tiny epsilon-delta, is not so petite
For it takes tremendous insight and intuition
To see it beyond the small printed space

In a little Greek or Latin
The language of the dead and bygones
A process, and
A concept
Are in love, deep and profound
Tall’s mathematical duality
Like the wave-particle

The beauty of mathematical language
To those who see, they saw beyond,
Far beyond
To those who do not, the little Greek or Latin are
Discretely lifeless and collectively soulless
Like a wonderful poem left idle on paper.

16 December 2004

Victor Tiong

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

Beautiful writing according to Kate Jennings

2009-07-07T12:05:00.000+10:00

Kate Jennings in her Australian Quarterly essay incoporates an extract of 'beautiful writing' from a piece for The New Review of Books by Mark Danner Obama and Sweet Potato Pie:

Everything else they would never see. It existed only for the several thousand cheering people in Vernon Park on that bright morning in Germantown. They would never see, for instance, Obama's riff on sweet potato pie. It came as he told a story about his campaigning "the other day in a little town in Ohio, with the governor there," about how he and the governor suddenly felt hungry and "decided we'd stop right there and get some pie." Now here began a little gem of a story, which had at its center the diner employees who wanted to take a picture with Obama, not least because, as they told him, their boss was a die-hard Republican and "they wanted to tweak him a little with that picture." All this was heading toward a carefully choreographed finale, where the owner appeared personally with the pie for candidate and governor and Obama looked at the pie and looked at the pie-carrying die-hard Republican owner and "then I said to him"—perfectly elongated pause—"How's business?"

This brought on great gales of laughter from the crowd. For the joke turned on a point already precisely made: How can even the most die-hard of die-hard Republicans, if he is thinking of his self-interest, how can he vote Republican this year? "If you beat your head against the wall," Obama demanded of that faraway Republican with his pie, to a blizzard of "oh yeahs!" and "you got that right!" from the crowd, "and it hurts and hurts, how can you keep doing it?" But it was those two words, "How's business?"—that casual greeting thrown at the Republican diner owner that showed that there simply could be no other choice this year—that showed the case proved, wrapped up, unassailable.

And yet what struck me in this little model of political art was a tiny riff the candidate effortlessly worked into it from his banter with the crowd. When Obama launched into his story with "Because I love pie," a woman out in that sea of cheering, laughing people shouted back, " I'll make you pie, baby!" and to the general hooting laughter the candidate returned, "Oh yeah, you gonna make me pie?" Then, after a beat, amid even more raucous laughter, and several other female voices shouting out invitations, "You gonna make me sweet potato pie? " More shouts and laughter. " All you gonna make me pie?"

"Well you know I love sweet potato pie. And I think what we're going to have to do here"—and the laughter and the shouting rose and as it did his voice rose above it—"what we're going to have to do here is have a sweet potato pie contest.... That's right. And in this contest, I'm gonna be the judge." The laughter rose and you could hear not only the women but the deep laughter of the men taking delight in the double entendre that was not only about the women and their laughing, teasing offers and about their pie that that lanky confident smiling young man knew how to eat and enjoy and judge, but even more now, amazingly, as people came one by one to recognize, about something else. To those people gathered in Vernon Park that bright sun-drenched morning, it was an even more titillating and more pleasurable double entendre, for it was most clearly about something they'd never had but hoped and dreamed of having and now had begun to believe they were within the shortest of short distances of finally tasting. "Because you all know," their candidate told them, "that I know sweet potato pie."

Re-reading Marzano's books

2009-05-20T22:01:00.003+10:00

I've been thinking a bout classroom management and organising for effective teaching and began re-reading some of Robert Marzano's books, especially on Classroom Instruction that Works. Another book is the Art and Science of Teaching from which these questions came:

What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress and celebrate success?

What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?

What will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge?

What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?

What will I do to engage students?

What will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures?

What will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures?

What will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students?

What will I do to communicate high expectations to all students?

What will I do to develop effective lessons organized into cohesive units?

Reading to reach the dangerous moment

2009-04-26T18:26:00.004+10:00

Last Friday while I was conducting some reading assessments with year 8 students one student became teary as she read a passage aloud to me. She and I talked about whether to continue with her reading or not. She decided to continue and was able to successfully read two of the three passages . After reading she answered the follow-up literal questions by just guessing the answer; in one case the question was 'What droned over the water?' . The text reads ' a fly droned over the water' but the student said "a green bird". She said that this was the answer because the story is about a green bird. I thought where do we start with assisting her to read with understanding.

She is an efficient decoder which to use Frank Smith's words, is "barking at print". It's the understanding of what they are reading that is not developed. Graham Greene called this his dangerous moment:

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives ... I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read - not just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled together like railway carriages, but a real book. It was paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the water rising above his waist - and adventure of Dixon Brett, detective. All long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half conscientiously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment.

How can we get students the dangerous moment?

I've been reading Maryanne Wolf's book 'Proust and the Squid' which besides having a great title is rich in ideas and an astonishing account of the development of the reading brain. She says the fluency in reading is not a matter of speed but is a matter of being able to utilise all "special knowledge a child has about a word - its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings - fast enough to have time to think and to comprehend... the point of becoming fluent,k therefore, is to read - really read and understand."

The first thing is to get kids to enjoy reading, to want to read so as to get to the 'dangerous moment'. Too often reading for many students is a chore, boring and an activity which involves completion of comprehension worksheets. So we need to assess kids accurately, to get them reading texts at their 'just right' level, to explicitely teach how good readers read, to teach the strategies that good readers use and to creat a sense of joy and wonder and enthusiasm for reading.

Teaching is not brain surgery. It's Harder.

2009-04-20T20:59:00.004+10:00

After watching Four Corners televison program tonight on unemployment I read this piece "Top Ten Necessities for Education Reform" that Will Richardson twittered . The piece is from a Psychology Today blog by Dr. Judy Willis a neurologist and middle school teacher:

For the first time since the institution of public education in the U.S., students currently in high school are less likely to graduate than their parents. the U.S. is the only industrialized country where that is true. Here are my recommendations to change the appalling dropout rate and prepare students for the 21st century.

1. Collaborate
2. Evaluate Information Accuracy
3. Teach Tolerance
4. Assessing Student Knowledge
5. Beyond Differentiation to Individualization.
6. Inspiration and engagement open the brain's information filters (reticular activating system and amygdala) to accept sensory input.
7. Lower Stress. React or Reflect?
8. Using Learning Beyond the Classroom.
9. Teach students (and educators) the Brain Owner's Manual.
10. Teaching is not brain surgery. It's Harder. When teachers receive the recognition, status, and more of the autonomy I receive as a neurologist, we will attract the best and brightest to teaching and keep professional educators longer than the current five year average.

Students like working

2009-03-12T21:16:00.002+11:00

This morning I was in Terry Hillier's year 9 maths class at Maryborough, sitting at a table with a group of students discussing their learning. I asked " How are you going?" and one student replied, "good, I've learnt more this year (two months) than all of last year."

"OH, why is that?"

"Well last year we had heaps of teachers, and this year we've just had Mr Hillier."

"What does Mr Hillier do that helps you learn mathematics?"

"He explains things well."

"And we work."

It was obvious that the teacher has a strong positive relationship with his students. We know that explaining things clearly is important, but the comment that grabbed my attention was 'we work'. Students actually like to work.

A few years ago I remember some of my ex students saying that they liked a certain teacher but that he shouldn't be teaching. The reason was that they didn't work and students didn't respect him as a result.

Work doesn't mean busy work but meaningful, organised and challenging work. And you know, the very kids who struggle with reading and writing usually do very little reading and writing. We wound them by being undemanding.

Teaching the Passive Voice

2009-02-24T19:04:00.003+11:00

This afternoon at Maryborough Education Centre, where I'm working as a teaching and learning coach, a group of teachers discussed the need to explicitly teach grammar, and we talked about using grammar in the context of students' writing. Yesterday I worked with Debbie Long, a science teacher, using shared writing strategy for students to write a scientific report. One aspect we covered was that this genre of writing should be in the passive voice. So here's a piece from ReadWriteThink.org

Vignette: Teaching the Passive Voice
To help students understand sentence structure, some teachers get physical.

Here are two ways to dramatize the passive voice. I stand at one side of the room and throw my keys on the floor, telling the class to make me a sentence about what I just did and to begin the sentence with my name. I always get “Ms. Van Goor threw her keys on the floor.” I smile and write the sentence on the board.

VG: And the subject of the sentence is?
Class: Ms. Van Goor.
VG: Right! And the verb?
Class: Threw.
VG: Right again.

Now I pick up my keys and do the same thing again, but this time I tell them they must begin the sentence with The keys. It takes only a few minutes longer for them to get “The keys were thrown on the floor by Ms. Van Goor.” I write that sentence on the board also.

VG: And the subject is?
Class: The keys.
VG: Right! And the verb?
Class: (This takes longer, several tries, but eventually someone says it) Were thrown.
VG: Right. Now, in the first sentence, was the subject (I underline the subject once) doing what the verb (I underline the verb twice) described?
Class: Yes.
VG: Was the subject active, doing something?
Class: Yes.
VG: OK, how about the second sentence? Did the subject (I underline it once) do what the verb (I underline it twice) described?
Class: (much more slowly!) No-o-
VG: Was the subject active, doing something?
Class: No-o-.
VG: Or was the subject passive, just sitting there letting something else do something to it?
Class: (very tentatively) Passive?
VG: Yeah. The subject didn't do anything, but somebody or something did something to the subject. I don't know why we call the verb “passive”; it's actually the subject that's sitting there passively letting something happen to it, but that's the way it goes. We say was thrown is a passive verb.

Another day, I use body diagramming. I call three students up to the front of the room and give them three slips of paper. Written on one is The new outfielder; on another, hit; and on another, the ball. Then I tell these three students to arrange themselves so that they make a sentence and that they must somehow interact with one another in so doing. They do fairly obvious things, the subject usually hitting the verb with enough force to bump the verb into the direct object.

Then I call three more students up, keeping the first three in place. These three get The ball and was hit and by the new outfielder. I give them the same instructions. It takes the students a few minutes but they usually end up with the subject and verb students out front and the prepositional phrase student a step or two behind them, with a hand holding on to the verb. Then, with both groups of three “acting,” I ask the class to tell me the real difference in what’s going on up there. Someone will eventually get it: that the action goes to the right in one group and to the left in the other. If I then ask them to look only at the verbs in the two sentences and find a difference, someone will eventually notice that the passive verb has two words. And if that class has by then memorized all the do, be, and have verbs, I'll ask what family the helping verb belongs to and wait until someone recognizes the be family.

If time allows, I get other sets of students up front and ask them to make up their own short sentences with active and passive verbs and rearrange themselves as necessary. We get lots of laughs—and students find out not only how to shift from one voice to the other but also how such shifts affect the meaning and flow of the sentence and how indispensable the be verb and the past participle are.

—Wanda Van GoorFrom Haussamen, Brock et al. Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers (NCTE, 2003), pp. 29-32.

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work from McKinsey

2009-02-22T16:53:00.005+11:00

I've read about this article on web 2.0 from the McKinsey Quarterly in Stephen Downes' OL Daily blog , and then followed his reference to Derek Wenmouth from where I took a look at Jane Hart's blog.

Over past two years, McKinsey has studied more than 50 early adopters of Web 2.0 who are using technologies such as blogs, wikis, information tagging, prediction markets, and social networks. From this they have drawn six insights on how companies can best use these technologies.

1 The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2 The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3 What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4 Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5 The right solution comes from the right participants.
6 Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

For more detail, read the full article: Six ways to make Web 2.0 Work, McKinsey Quarterly, FEBRUARY 2009 • Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts

Derek provides a paraphrase of the six points.

Blogs and wikis, where did the time go?

2009-02-04T11:18:00.003+11:00

This morning my email inbox contained the latest Educational Leadership online and I decided to read one article by Bill Ferriter, 'Learning with Blogs and Wikis.' This will take me a few minutes I thought. Well, it's now three hours later and I'm thinking I've got to stop. As a result of reading his article I've read various blogs, added blogs to my bookmarks, read posts on Bill Ferriter's bog 'The Tempered Radical', checked out Bill Ferriter's pageflakes , gone to Pageflakes and set up a page of the feed reader, listened to the four day conversation on Kelly Gallagher's new book Readicide, checked out Kelly Gallagher's website and begun adding blogs to Pageflakes.

Ferriter writes that as a result of using digital tools:

"Thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice. In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. And this collective knowledge is readily available for free."

So I suppose this morning's effort is an example of this.

And I feel good because I've actually written my first post in ages.

Working with adults

2008-07-21T12:04:00.000+10:00

Working with adults is challenging. I was thinking about this recently when someone asked me about my thoughts on coaching teachers and I remembered a list of statements, about working with adults, produced by Robin Fogarty and Brian Pete.

Here they are. See if you agree or disagree:

1 Adults seek learning experiences to cope with life-changing events.
2 For adults, learning is its own reward.
3 Adults prefer survey courses to single concept classes.
4 Adults want to use new materials.
5 Adults are quick to re-evaluate old material.
6 Adults prefer to learn alone.
7 Adults prefer to sit and be taught.
8 Adults prefer 'how to' trainings.
9 An eclectic approach works best with adults.
10 Non-human learning (books, TV,) is popular in adult learning.
11 Adults don't like problem-centred learning.
12 Adults carry reservoirs of personal experiences.
13 'Real world' exercises are preferred.
14 Adults let their schoolwork take second place to jobs and family.
15 Adults transfer ideas and skills easily into their work setting.
16 Adults are self directed learners.
17 Facilitation of groups works better than lecture formats with adults.
18 Adults expect their class time to be well-spent.
19 Adult learners are voluntary, self-directed learners.
20 Adults are pragmatic learners.

Sources: (Knowles 1973, Zemke, 1995)

Point 10 might be different these days as the internet is not included. Malcolm Knowles focused his attention on the learner is his seminal peiece The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species. his contention is that adult learners are an entity unto themselves.

What are your thoughts?

Writing a six word story

2008-07-15T21:42:00.005+10:00

During our end of term 2 holidays I heard an interview with Amy Hempel on Radio National she talked about short stories and quoted Gertrude Stein who once wrote a 4 word short story titled Longer: "She stayed away longer." Jill Wilson referred to the interview on her blog Chopping block. As a result of this I remembered the six word short story that Ernest Hemingway wrote: ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. Is the story apocryphal? In Author! Screenwriter!: How to Succeed as a Writer in New York and Hollywood by Peter Miller on page 166:

More than thirty years ago at the beginning of my career, I had lunch with a well-established newspaper syndicator who told me the following story: Ernest Hemingway was lunching at the Algonquin, sitting at the famous “round table” with several writers, claiming he could write a six-word-long short story. The other writers balked. Hemingway told them to ante up ten dollars each. If he was wrong, he would match it; if he was right, he would keep the pot. He quickly wrote six words on a napkin and passed it around. The words were: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.” Papa won the bet: His short story was complete. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end!

Wired magazine asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves. You can see the full list here: Wired six word short stories.

Here are some of my favourites:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.- Margaret Atwood

The baby's blood type? Human, mostly. - Orson Scott Card

Bush told the truth. Hell froze.- William Gibson

Don't marry her. Buy a house. - Stephen R. Donaldson

Easy. Just touch the match to - Ursula K. Le Guin

Teacher Magazine decided to run a competition of their own after getting the idea from Smith magazine:

The six-word memoirs published by Smith include one from TV chef Mario Batali ("Brought it to a boil, often"); another from an anonymous student ("Deferred all math homework to Dad"), and this from a long-suffering English teacher: "Grading AP essays, I crave Tolstoy."

Here’s the specific question Teacher magazine used:

If you were writing a mini-memoir of your teaching life, what would your six words be? Your memoir might be funny, inspirational, profound, mundane, deeply true. Want to play? Mull it over, doodle with pen and napkin or your favorite digital tool, and post your memoir for all of us to read.

A few results:

They asked. I listened. We learned. (Majorie)

Life on the bell curve's edge. (Amy B)

Every day is a new adventure. (Amy E)

Reading creates new worlds—let's go! (David)

Exercised the muscle of the mind. (Nancy D)

Please, don't ask me for more! (Kim after a hard year)

No growth, no life. Struggling, soaring. (George)

This sure gets away from edubabble we often have to read and listen to as part of our working lives.

Is google making us learn differently?

2008-07-04T16:00:00.001+10:00

Last week at a conference keynote presenter Tom March talked about the iPhone and showed clips of the things google can do. One idea I took from this was that he thinks that we need to change our thinking about how we organise schools and teaching.

Serendipitously on the way home I picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly and there emblazoned on the cover was 'Is google making us stupid?' This is an interesting article about the effects of the Internet on the brain; the contention is that the Internet has changed our thinking. The author Nicolas Carr says:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

On the other hand this seems like another world from the world many kids, that I see in schools, experience. On the one hand we have the amazing technology but on the other hand there are lots of kids struggling with basic reading and writing. I find that I'm often skimming and scanning through articles but I still take time to read BOOKS. As Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain says, deep reading is deep thinking.

Negotiating the curriculum nothing's really new

2008-07-03T15:16:00.002+10:00

"Nothing's really new Sam." This was a statement made to me when I mentioned that I remember attempting to negotiate the curriculum in the 1980's after Garth Boomer's book 'Negotiating the Curriculum' was published.

Boomer's approach was essentially inquiry learning - issue or problem, question, hypothesis, test, and conclusion. Negotiating the curriculum adopted four questions:

1 What do we know already?

2 What do we want and need to find out

3 How will we go about finding out?

4 How will we know, and show, that we've found out when we have finished?

Pretty straight forward really and it stands the test of time.

Achieving outstanding numeracy outcomes

2008-06-18T23:01:00.003+10:00

Searching for effective teaching practices to improve numeracy outcomes is a key factor in our current work in Victoria as Teaching and Learning Coaches. The report What’s ‘making the difference’?: achieving outstanding numeracy outcomes in NSW primary schools aimed to establish what educational practices make the difference in enabling primary school students to achieve outstanding numeracy learning outcomes and to explore to what extent and how such educational practices could be successfully transferred to other schools.

Abstract
This project, undertaken between January 2001 and February 2004, set out to investigate which numeracy practices in NSW schools were achieving outstanding numeracy results. Effective numeracy practices were identified at 45 case study schools. Those practices were then trialled in other schools that wished to improve their numeracy outcomes. The trialling was supported by extensive professional development for teachers. Successful numeracy practices included:

The use of hand-on materials to support the understanding and development of numeracy concepts

Small group work to encourage discussion and exploration of ideas

Use of open-ended questions by both teachers and learners to establish, consolidate, extend, reinforce and reflect on concepts, skills and applications

Discussion during lessons to enable students to engage with and understand new and established mathematical concepts

Catering for individual needs of students through consistent and varied assessment, differentiated teaching and learning, and opportunities for interaction with the teacher or peers

Collaboration in planning between teachers which provided opportunities for innovative teaching and

Whole-school commitment to numeracy with all teachers implementing policies and programs consistently in all classrooms.

Schools trialling the successful numeracy practices found that a Key Group, usually supported by the school principal, was crucial in driving the project and in supporting continuing change at the school level. Continuity of teaching styles appeared to sustain and improve numeracy achievement. Schools which demonstrated greater than expected growth in numeracy achievement over the life of the project focused on either the language of mathematics or the use of practical resources to support concept development in numeracy. An important outcome of the project was the finding that quality professional development of teachers that improves their specific knowledge of numeracy teaching and their ability to direct and embrace change leads to measurable improvements in the numeracy outcomes of students.

The Best Slow Dancer

2008-06-01T20:25:00.006+10:00

One of the great sites that you can subscribe to is Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. The title of this cought my attention as writer of Slow Learning Blog

The Best Slow Dancer
by David Wagoner

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn't there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never
Where you could be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren't the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else's partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

"The Best Slow Dancer" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light.© University of Illinois Press.

Is multitasking a myth?

2008-05-22T18:22:00.011+10:00

I recently read an article in The Australian by Ruth Ostrow about the need to slow down, that we are leading busier lives and need to "flick the off button."

She quotes research by Hewlett-Packard that shows that IQ falls by 10 points when people multitask or get distracted by electronic communications, which is the "equivalent to smoking a joint or not sleeping for 35 hours."

Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Sharar, who was in Australia for a Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney believes most people suffer from what he calls TBD (Too Busy Disorder). Rostrow's article goes on to say that Ben-Sharar described a controlled experiment that showed the majority of participants felt "overwhelmed" by the things they needed to do, half of them to the point of feeling depressed.

"People today are chronically busy and then they front up to therapists, asking: 'why am I not happy? I have a wonderful family, great work, friends? they are suffering TBD."

In another reference Ostrow refers to Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz's book The Power of Full Engagement, which discusses being completely present as the way towards productivity. They suggest 'working in focused spurts ... as opposed to doing marathons that exhaust us. ... we take pride in our ability to multitask and wear our ability to put in long hours as a badge of honour. As a result, we never have full attention or peak energy.'

Is multitasking is a myth

As often happens when you begin thinking about a topic such as multitasking a serendipitous connection occurs. In my case it was coming across a blog about multitasking by John Medina.

Here's what he says in his opening paragraph:

Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking.

Students often claim that they can do more than one thing at a time but the evidence that the brain focuses sequentially one concept at a time should give us reason to think about the overstimulation that kids experience.

But more of this later, after I've had time to let the ideas wash around my brain and then, to paraphrase E.M Forster, write another blog post to find out what I think.

Thinking of the big idea

2008-05-15T18:34:00.006+10:00

Photo by Millicent Bystander

There is a fascinating article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell about big ideas and the importance of someone looking at a familiar fact with a fresh perspective. It's about thinking. The following extract from the article is about Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, LLC--the idea that cancer can be detected long before a tumor is formed. Myhrvold, one of Microsoft's pioneers, brings intellectuals from different disciplines together to brainstorm new ideas--in this case physicist Lowell Wood meets with a group of doctors:

Last March, Myhrvold decided to do an invention session with Eric Leuthardt and several other physicians in St. Louis. Rod Hyde came, along with a scientist from M.I.T. named Ed Boyden. Wood was there as well.

“Lowell came in looking like the Cheshire Cat,” Myhrvold recalled. “He said, ‘I have a question for everyone. You have a tumor, and the tumor becomes metastatic, and it sheds metastatic cancer cells. How long do those circulate in the bloodstream before they land?’ And we all said, ‘We don’t know. Ten times?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘As many as a million times.’ Isn’t that amazing? If you had no time, you’d be screwed. But it turns out that these cells are in your blood for as long as a year before they land somewhere. What that says is that you’ve got a chance to intercept them.”

How did Wood come to this conclusion? He had run across a stray fact in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. “It was an article that talked about, at one point, the number of cancer cells per millilitre of blood,” he said. “And I looked at that figure and said, ‘Something’s wrong here. That can’t possibly be true.’ The number was incredibly high. Too high. It has to be one cell in a hundred litres, not what they were saying—one cell in a millilitre. Yet they spoke of it so confidently. I clicked through to the references. It was a commonplace. There really were that many cancer cells.”

Wood did some arithmetic. He knew that human beings have only about five litres of blood. He knew that the heart pumps close to a hundred millilitres of blood per beat, which means that all of our blood circulates through our bloodstream in a matter of minutes. The New England Journal article was about metastatic breast cancer, and it seemed to Wood that when women die of metastatic breast cancer they don’t die with thousands of tumors. The vast majority of circulating cancer cells don’t do anything. “It turns out that some small per cent of tumor cells are actually the deadly ones,” he went on. “Tumor stem cells are what really initiate metastases. And isn’t it astonishing that they have to turn over at least ten thousand times before they can find a happy home? You naïvely think it’s once or twice or three times. Maybe five times at most. It isn’t. In other words, metastatic cancer—the brand of cancer that kills us—is an amazingly hard thing to initiate. Which strongly suggests that if you tip things just a little bit you essentially turn off the process.”
That was the idea that Wood presented to the room in St. Louis. From there, the discussion raced ahead. Myhrvold and his inventors had already done a lot of thinking about using tiny optical filters capable of identifying and zapping microscopic particles. They also knew that finding cancer cells in blood is not hard. They’re often the wrong size or the wrong shape. So what if you slid a tiny filter into a blood vessel of a cancer patient? “You don’t have to intercept very much of the blood for it to work,” Wood went on. “Maybe one ten-thousandth of it. The filter could be put in a little tiny vein in the back of the hand, because that’s all you need. Or maybe I intercept all of the blood, but then it doesn’t have to be a particularly efficient filter.”
Wood was a physicist, not a doctor, but that wasn’t necessarily a liability, at this stage. “People in biology and medicine don’t do arithmetic,” he said. He wasn’t being
critical of biologists and physicians: this was, after all, a man who read medical journals for fun. He meant that the traditions of medicine encouraged qualitative observation and interpretation. But what physicists do—out of sheer force of habit and training—is measure things and compare measurements, and do the math to put measurements in context. At that moment, while reading The New England Journal, Wood had the advantages of someone looking at a familiar fact with a fresh perspective.

And not a Thinkers Key or Green Hat in sight.

Malcolm Gladwell, "In the Air," The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, pp. 58-59.

Training in real life systems

2008-05-14T20:32:00.004+10:00

All right, allright, I get the message, I need to write some blog entries. so here's the first one for 2008. What a slackarse I've been!

I've begun a new job called a Teaching and Learning Coach - raa, raa go get 'em. The job is to work with teachers in schools to develop their teaching skills in order to improve students learning, which is why we teach, although some of us seem to forget this. The system has at last recognised that the most effective professional learning takes place in the workplace, the classroom. Here's a couple os snippets from McKinsey research 2006/7 'How the world's best-performing school systems comeout on top':

...despite substantial increases in spending and many well-intentioned reform efforts, performance in a large number of school systems has barely improved in decades... you could define the entire task of (a school) system in this way: its role is to ensure that when a teacher enters the classroom he or she has the materials available, along with the knowledge, the capability and the ambition to take one more child up to the standard today than she did yesterday. And again tomorrow.

...despite the evidence, and the fact that almost every other profession conducts most of its training in real-life settings (doctors and nurses in , clergy in churches, lawyers in courtrooms, consultants with clients) very little teacher training takes place in the teacher's own classrooms, the place in which it would be precise and relevant enough to be the most effective.

There you go. Makes sense doesn't it.

The Importance of Learning Slowly

2007-12-04T13:01:00.000+11:00

Earlier this year I came across a review by Gary Woodwill of a book about learning, thinking and acting. It was the title that grabbed my attention "The Importance of Learning Slowly". The book is by Manfred Spitzer, The Mind within the Net: models of learning, thinking, and acting.One of the comments Woodwill makes about the book is that:

While a single event can have an impact, it usually takes many events to have a relatively permanent change in the brain (aka “learning”) and to extract general features and generate rules from experience ... and according to Spitzer "It must learn quickly for obvious reasons, but it must learn slowly in order to generalize in a way that will produce the optimal solution without oscillating around it or forgetting it because of some other stimulus.” (p. 53)

We often find our models of understanding the world in the latest technologies available to us. Piaget developed his multi-stage theories of learning from observing his own children, and then applying the dominant mechanical metaphors of his day. In the 19th century, Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, coined the term “the average man” based on the pendulum (Piaget’s “equilibrium”), while Herbert Spencer wrote a psychology of adaptation using the newly created thermostat as his model (Piaget’s “adaptation and assimilation” within set limits).

As Foucault taught us in Discipline and Punish, much of the psychology of the twentieth century is based on disciplinary practices derived from factories and prisons, giving us such learning technologies as classrooms, regular rows of seats, raising of hands, incremental rewards, recess, time periods, and the power of the teacher’s gaze.

In the second half of the twentieth century, two models of computing competed for dominance. One model was artificial intelligence, based on a model of inputs, storage, processing, and outputs - in other words, a factory metaphor. The other model was that of neural networks, modeled on what was then known about the functioning of brains in humans and other animals. In the 1950s, AI became the darling of computer science, leaving neural network development far behind in terms of funding and attention.

After more than 50 years of development, the hopes of those developing traditional artificial intelligence have hit a brick wall. While powerful computers using brute force in the number of computations they can carry out have beaten grand masters at chess, the same computers cannot recognize anything for which they have not been specifically programmed. In other words, they can memorize a seemingly endless set of facts, but have no flexibility to be creative with what they “know”. On the other hand, new developments in brain research has stimulated renewed efforts in using neural networks to produce flexible learning processes in computers, and to help researchers understand learning in living organisms.

Manfred Spitzer’s The Mind within the Net is one of the best non-technical narratives on how minds work using the neural network model. Some of these explanations are startling, while others reinforce positions of strong advocates of individual freedom and the power of informal learning, such as Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Jay Cross.

Like neural networks, the brain is based on vector algebra, rather than numerical computations. Vectors have strength and direction, and many vectors, representing multiple inputs, unite to form a result. The result in the brain is strengthening or weakening of a set of neural connections, a relatively slow process. While a single event can have an impact, it usually takes many events to have a relatively permanent change in the brain (aka “learning”) and to extract general features and generate rules from experience. Spitzer says that “… there exists a tension, a problem, for every learning organism. It must learn quickly for obvious reasons, but it must learn slowly in order to generalize in a way that will produce the optimal solution without oscillating around it or forgetting it because of some other stimulus.” (p. 53) This conclusion challenges those who advocate extreme learning and other forms of speeding up the learning process. In fact, according to Spitzer, trying to learn to quickly can actually be detrimental:

“… the interactions of an organism with its environment can be generally conceived of as a sampling of data in order to predict the true (i.e., adaptively valid) values of parameters. As stated above, this task can only be accomplished if every single experience (every single input pattern) has only a very small impact on the changes in the network. If the changes are too large, estimates may oscillate around the true values rather than approximating them. Again: the system only works with learning happens slowly.” (p. 54)

Spitzer also believes that children can and need to learn more quickly than adults. Children need a rough and ready view of the world while adults want to increase their depth of understanding. Spitzer relates this to the pace of change in today’s society. “The old master violin building makes better violins than the young student of the trade. If, however, all of a sudden the customers want music synthesizers, student will adapt to change more readily.”

The importance of feedback is apparent in both brains and neural networks. Neural networks have a technique called backpropagation of errors that simulates feedback loops in the brain that slowly change the hidden layers between input and output. This means that learning is much more to do with practice and observation than being told what to do. “Children learn from examples,” says Spitzer. The brain stores its learning in “self organizing feature maps.”

Spitzer is a psychiatrist in Germany, so it is not surprising that he has a chapter entitled “The Disordered Mind” in which he discusses autism and oppression. Most of his conclusions are on the best way to raise children, making this book less applicable to the adult learning. However, there are so many insights going through it that I highly recommend it to everyone in education and training. Spitzer’s newest book is on learning and will be translated into English by the end of the year. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Chess Tournament in Castlemaine's Old Gaol

2007-10-17T10:13:00.000+10:00

Yesterday one hundred and sixty kids from Castlemaine area primary schools walked and travelled by bus to Castlemaine's Old Gaol for the 2nd Chess Tournament. This is the culmination of two terms of chess learning and playing in primary schools as one of the numeracy lessons.

What struck visitors was the enthusiasm of the students. We had kids from grade 2 to grade 6 competing.

Each student played 7 games beginning at 9:30am and finishing at 2:pm.

Watching the kids play a game and then run outside, jump around and talk excitedly, Randall, the manager of the gaol said, I don't know how you teachers can do it."

The enthusiasm of the kids was tiring.

The winning team was grade 4 boys from Castlemaine Primary School.

Wind Turbine at Cults Primary School

2007-09-19T10:27:00.000+10:00

The reason I visited Cults Primary School in Aberdeen was to check out their wind turbine, which I heard about in Australia. Susan Clark who I mentined in the previous post took me on a guided tour of the school and gave me some details about the turbine.

Cults Primary School in Aberdeen is the first school in Scotland to harness the wind to generate its own power. The wind turbine at Cults school will provide energy for the school and awareness of renewable energy among pupils, other schools and the wider community.

The 5-kilowatt Iskra turbine is powerful enough to provide enough energy to run most of the school’s catering operation. The cost has been covered by the Scottish Energy Saving Trust (£13,326), Aberdeen City Council (£9,500), the school’s Parent-Teacher Association (£1,000) and Cults Community Council (£1,000).

The turbine should deliver an approximate saving of £650 per annum at current electricity prices and will contribute to reducing the school’s reliance on fossil fuels. The school expects to cut its CO2 emissions by 5,633kg per year--and by 112,660kg over the lifetime of the turbine.

A 32-inch LCD screen has been installed indoors, allowing pupils and staff to monitor wind speed and direction, power output, and the tonnage of carbon dioxide which would otherwise have been pumped into the environment if the school were using conventional power sources. The school has installed the equipment to let the pupils make a real contribution to renewable energy generation and learn about enterprise, citizenship and working with others. While I talked with Susan in the school's corridor, students stopped in front of the monitor to read the information.

The principal Ian Smithers (the one with hair), said the monitor keeps the students interested in what energy the turbine is creating and saving. It has to work at a certain speed to be generate enough energy to save electricity and money.

I wonder what schools in Mount Alexander Cluster can do? Challenge 2 Change is moving in this direction.

Cults Primary School is an Eco-School

2007-09-07T06:09:00.000+10:00

Today I visited Cults Primary School to find out more about their wind turbine and eco-school status. TheHead of School, Ian Smithers introduced me to Susan Clark ,the key person behind the project, who is team leader for the Pupil Support Assistants and the school's Information Technology among other things. I was impressed by the involvement of students in the decision process in the designated areas a school needs to cover to be awarded a green flag.

The school has been awarded two green flags which doesn't mean much to an Australian but is very significant in Scotland.

Susan showed me the documentation that has to be kept to demonstrate the involvement of children and she added that when the committee came to evaluate the school, they spoke at length to students. Obviously if the pupils weren't really involved it would be very obvious.

We walked around the school past the sensory garden which was designed by pupils in collaboration with parents, including a garden designer. The garden is for special needs kids and involves touch, smell, visual and other senses.

You can see the raised beds for kids in wheelchairs, the water fountain is powered by solar power. It does switch off in Scotland. I said our problem in Australia is not the solar power but the water as we are experiencing drought conditions.

There were numerous other areas of great interest which I'll report in another blog.

But it's wonderful to see the results of commitment by a school in giving the kids real responsibility.

Is there a chess connection with Glenfiddich?

2007-09-04T21:34:00.000+10:00

Well it's a shame that after the Chess Conference we had to do a bit of touring. As you can see here Steve Tobias, Steve Carroll and myself took a break from our demanding cognitive work, to relfect on our experience. The sign had nothing to do with visiting Glenfiddich and nothing to do with having a wee dram. Steve Carroll was thinking hard, as you can see by his frown, about the chess and mathematics connections with visiting a whisky distillery.

Today we dropped Chess-squared initiator Steve Carroll at the airport with his 5 suitcases of presents for his wife Megan, kids Darcy, Jack and Gracie and numerous others he felt needed something from Scotland. By the time we loaded the suitcases into the boot of the car and Steve into the back seat the front wheels were airborne. We had to move Steve to the front seat so I could get the wheels on the road to enhance our steering capabilities.

However while we sat in a lounge with a cappuccino - don't get me started on the appalling coffee here - we began working out the future directions of our chess initiative in schools. One area to follow up is more focused interviews with students about what is going on in their heads when playing chess. What makes chess interesting for them and what makes mathematics interesting and boring?

Lots of ideas to follow up.

Steve Tobias has contact with one of the professors from Turin University who is keen to cooperate with the research the team is doing and to publish a joint paper in italian and English.

This afternoon we are visiting two researchers in Education at Aberdeen University to explore possible networking with schools in Mount Alexander Cluster and Aberdeen on energy conservation.

And I'm going to write to Tourism Scotland advising they need to train barristas. Maybe Edmund from Coffee Basics in Castlemaine, could be flown over.

Susan Polgar supports Chess-Squared

2007-09-01T20:00:00.000+10:00

Susan Polgar, the world's first woman chess grandmaster is shown here supporting our cluster schools by writing a message on an autographed photo, for all schools in our cluster. Steve Carroll organised the photos and signing. This is an entry from her blog.

These are our friends from Castlemaine program in Australia. They are here at the International Chess Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland. Talk about commitment to chess and education to fly half way around the globe to attend! A numeracy initiative of the Mt. Alexander cluster of schools funded by Innovations and Excellence. A partnership supported by Castlemaine Chess Club, Castlemaine Community House, School Focused Youth Service, and James Cook University- School of Education- Queensland

Here is their blog: http://mtalexandercluster.blogspot.com/

Mount Alexander Cluster of Schools Chess paper

2007-09-01T19:23:00.000+10:00

Yesterday the team - Steve Carroll, Steve Tobias and myself delivered our paper to the conference and we ran out of time. But we got our message across about the good things happening in our schools with our Chess-Squared initiative.

Steve Carroll outlined the background to the project and explained how the idea hatched from his fertile brain and that the key person for us in getting the tutoring going so successfully is Harry Poulton who as I said, "Is the only one of our group who can really play chess."

I spoke about the key partnerships with principals and teachers and that their commitment is real.

Steve Tobias talked about the research background and the notion of performance versus mastery learning. Our work is based in mastery learning that intelligence is not fixed at birth.

Feedback to our presentation was really positive. People liked the team presentation which demonstrated that we worked as a team and there is interest from Aberdeen and Turin Universities in doing some follow-up work with us.

Aberdeen chess conference begins

2007-08-31T01:35:00.000+10:00

Well we finally made it to Aberdeen for the Chess in Schools and Community Conference. Steve Carroll, Steve Tobias and myself are presenting a paper tomorrow and are enjoying the conference presentations so far. they are focused on getting chess into schools for the benefit of the whole child, to use a cliche, but it's an important distinction to just focusing on finding champions. According to Susan Polgar "Chess should be fun." Our preparations have been finalised so I hope it all goes well tomorrow. This is the first academic conference like this I've presented.

Tonight we attend a civic reception hosted by Aberdeen City Council.

You need to listen to learn

2007-08-13T22:19:00.000+10:00

During a meeting last week I began a conversation with a colleague, asked questions, listened and began explaining my thoughts when I realised that his attention was focused on what another person was saying. I was annoyed but realised that not listening carefully is something I do all too frequently. Improving my listening skills has been a goal for a long time. Then on the weekend I read this:

To learn from people, you have to listen to them with respect. [It is] not as easy as you might imagine. ... The trouble with listening for many of us is that while we're supposedly doing it, we're actually busy composing what we're going to say next. ... [During] your next personal encounter, try to employ the tactics we've outlined here:
* Listen.
* Don't interrupt.
* Don't finish the other person's sentences.
* Don't say 'I knew that.'
* Don't even agree with the other person (even if he praises you, just say, 'Thank you')
* Don't use the words 'no,' 'but,' and 'however.'
* Don't be distracted. Don't let your eyes or attention wander elsewhere while the other person is talking.
* Maintain your end of the dialogue by asking questions that (a) show you are paying attention, (b) move the dialogue forward, or (c) require the other person to talk(while you listen).
* Eliminate any striving to impress the other person with how smart or funny you are. ... [You will learn, and as an ancillary benefit] you'll uncover a glaring paradox: The more you subsume your desire to shine [and truly listen], the more you will shine in the other person's eyes."

Ingmar Bergman writer

2007-08-07T22:45:00.000+10:00

Ingmar Bergman is dead. I remember the first Bergman film I saw "Wild Strawberries' when I was about 18. I was a country boy who grew up on Tarzan 'King of the Apes' and Disneyland and had just moved to the big city and Wild Strawberries grabbed me although I really didn't know what to make of it. I think I somehow knew it was arty and I was trying to be arty. But Bergman was also a great writer. Icame across this post in a blog on writing that I read regularly Poynter Online by Roy Peter Clark. This is great to read as you can visualise the scene so well.

It's the opening to "The Seventh Seal," a story about a medieval knight in the days of the Black Plague:

The night had brought little relief from the heat, and at dawn a hot gust of wind blows across the colorless sea.

The knight, Antonius Block, lies prostrate on some spruce branches spread over the fine sand. His eyes are wide-open and bloodshot from lack of sleep. Nearby his squire Jons is snoring loudly. He has fallen asleep where he collapsed, at the edge of the forest among the wind-gnarled fir trees. His open mouth gapes toward the dawn, and unearthly sounds come from his throat.

At the sudden gust of wind the horses stir, stretching their parched muzzles toward the sea. They are thin and worn as their masters.

The knight has risen and waded into the shallow water, where he rinses his sunburned face and blistered lips.

Jons rolls over to face the forest and the darkness. He moans in his sleep and vigorously scratches the stubbled hair on his head. A scar stretches diagonally across his scalp, as white as lightning against the grime.

The knight returns to the beach and falls on his knees. With his eyes closed and brow furrowed, he says his morning prayers. His hands are clenched together and his lips form the words silently. His face is sad and bitter. He opens his eyes and stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is gray and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute and dark over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a sea gull floats on motionless
wings. Its cry is weird and restless.

The knight's large gray horse lifts its head and whinnies. Antonius Block turns around. Behind him stands a man in black. His face is very pale and he keeps his hands hidden in the wide folds of his cloak.

The man, of course, is Death, but we'll meet him in a minute. Notice how, through his words, Bergman offers us a wide shot, where we can see sky, the gulls, and the horizon; and the close-up, where we can see the parched lips of the knight and the scar on the squire's forehead.Because there will be sound in the movie, Bergman writes with sound: the snores of the squire, the whinny of the horses, the cry of the seabirds. And, of course, we overhear the dialogue:

Knight: Who are you?

Death: I am Death.

Knight: Have you come for me?

Death: I have been walking by your side for a long time.

Knight: That I know.Death: Are you prepared?

Knight: My body is frightened, but I am not.

Death: Well, there is no shame in that.

Footballers who moved to Freemantle

2007-08-06T23:24:00.001+10:00

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to the footy broadcast of West Cast Eagles vs Freemantle and the commentators were discussing two players who transferred to Freemantle at the end of last year - Chris Tarrant and Dean Solomon - when one commentator said:

"I was a bit cynical when Solomon came to Freemantle with Tarrant. I thought they got the two shoes without the suit."

Don't you love it when you hear someone say something like this you haven't heard before!

Writing a paper on our chess initiative

2007-08-06T16:58:00.000+10:00

"The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better." Stephen King

Steve Carroll, Steve Tobias and I are co-presenting a paper at an international conference on chess and the community in Scotland later this month. As part of this paper, I am writing a section dealing with the introduction of the chess-squared project in our cluster of schools, which includes a brief story of the initiative, comments on the key role of the principals, the teachers and the tutors, a description of our distributed leadership and a number of vignettes from classrooms.

Earlier today I was discussing with a teacher the difficulty of kids not getting their work completed on time and how difficult it is to develop this responsibility in kids. I mentioned that I always told my students that I'm a deadline person unlike my wife, Pat, who when given a task just gets it done. I begin the task and for some reason that I can't figure out, I leave it unfinished until pressure mounts as the deadline approaches, and then I go flat out and complete the task. I'm wondering were many teachers conscientious students who got their work done early and always on time?

Well, today I felt good because I sat down and wrote about 900 words for the paper.

I began this post with a quote about writing from Stephen King and I thought I'd end with one from Hemingway that sums up my feelings about the first draft:

"The first draft of anything is shit." Ernest Hemingway

Lesson Study at Castlemaine Secondary College

2007-08-01T21:14:00.000+10:00

This term I have begun working with a group of teachers at Castlemaine Secondary College using Lesson Study as a professional learning strategy. We have two groups of three teachers involved in a cycle

one hour planning,
one hour teaching and observing
one hour debriefing and evaluating.

Each cycle will take 3 weeks for each round making 9 weeks in total for three teachers. A big commitment, which we might have to adjust.

Research demonstrates that the teacher makes the big difference to students and the most effective professional learning comes when a teacher works with his or her students in her classroom.

A couple of quotes sums this up:

Professional development should be “grounded in inquiry and reflection, participant driven and collaborative, involving a sharing of knowledge among teachers within communities of practice, sustained, ongoing, and intensive and connected to and derived from teachers ongoing work with their students.”
The International Reading Association (2006)

The problem is that there is almost no opportunity for teachers to engage in continuous and sustained learning about their practice in the setting in which they actually work, observing and being observed by their colleagues in their own classrooms and classrooms of other teachers in schools confronting similar problems of practice. (Richard Elmore, (2004). School reform from the inside out: Policy, practice, and performance p.127)

So far we’ve had 4 sessions for each sub-school providing background to Lesson Study as a form of professional learning, working through the schedule, supporting teachers filling out the PoLT (Principles of learning & Teaching) component mapping, conducting PoLT student surveys, presenting the Release of Responsibility model, deciding on what teachers will say to their class when explaining why three other teachers are sitting in, analysing lesson plans, deciding on a lesson format and collaboratively planning a lesson which one of the group will teach while the others observe.

Next week we begin our first teaching and observing lesson.

Jargon usage is a problem we need to be across

2007-07-29T23:02:00.000+10:00

One of the things that bugs me is the education/corporate speak. I include corporate here because it seems to me terms and buzz words used in the corporate world drift into education.

One of the most popular terms at the moment is "going forward" (as opposed to going backwards"), others include "on the same page", "paradigm shift", ""ballpark", "toolboxes", "tool kit","touch base", "empower", "capacity building," "brainstorming", "shared goals", and so on.

The principal of a local primary school said the phrase that currently annoyed her is "across". You can no longer be aware of a situation you must be "across" it. You are no longer up to date with your workload or comprehend a situation ... you are "across" them.

Jargon is everywhere and in education circles I suppose we call is "eduspeak". Jargon can be humorous but also dangerous. Jargon is often used to show the difference between insiders and outsiders, those in the know of the current jargon and those who don't. George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language, said the aim of jargon was to mislead.

He wrote, "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

The other problem, he said, was that jargon stopped people thinking. "Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one's brain," Orwell said.

Thinking and walking

2007-07-29T22:48:00.000+10:00

I'm a reasonably sociable person who also likes solitude so this quote in Presentation Zen appealed:

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
--Rollo May

Walking and thinking for me somehow gets things flowing in my mind and I'm able to work out ideas. Often when I'm trying to figure out how a difficult situation or problem should be handled I'll go for a walk and talk to myself.

One of the areas I'm working on with a group of teachers at the moment is an adaption of the professional learning strategy Lesson Study. This involves a group of teachers planning a lesson, observing while one teaches the lesson and the evaluating how it went and planning for the next lesson and so on. This is taking up a chunk of my current solitude looking for ways to make this successful for the teachers involved.

Hardworking, deeply committed teachers

2007-06-21T22:24:00.000+10:00

It's about time that public school teachers were defended. This morning I was discussing the continual negativity towards teachers by politicians and took great pleasure in the comments by Diane Ravitch in The New York Sun .

Recently, I attended yet another one of those conferences where leaders of American industry, commerce, and government get together to decide what to do about our schools.
The meeting proceeded through the now-familiar litany of bad news: American students perform poorly on international tests as compared to their peers in Europe and Asia.
American graduate programs in science and engineering have relatively few American-born students and lots of foreign students. India and China are grabbing more and more of the world's technical jobs because their students are better educated and, I might add, lower paid.
We are losing the brain race to our economic competitors.
We have heard all of this before, for at least the past 25 years.When the time comes to talk about solutions, the conversation and the remedies always seem to focus on teachers. The line goes like this: Our students are not learning because our teachers are not smart enough, are lazy, don't care, get paid regardless of their effectiveness, and so on.

So, once again, out come the usual solutions to our nation's education problems: Incentivize teaching. End tenure. Adopt schemes for merit pay, performance pay, bonus pay. Pay teachers according to the test scores of their students. If student test scores go up, their teachers get more money. If student test scores don't go up, their teachers get extra professional development, and if need be, are fired.

After sitting through another day of discussion in which the teacher was identified as the chief cause of our nation's education woes, I felt that something was amiss. It's not as if there is a failure to weed out ineffective teachers — about 40% who enter the profession will leave within their first five years, frustrated by their students' lack of effort, their administrators' heavy hand, unpleasant physical conditions in their workplace, or their own inability to cope with the demands of the classroom.

I have not met all three million of our nation's teachers, but every one that I have met is hardworking, earnest, and deeply committed to their students. All of them talk about parental lack of support for children, about a popular culture that ridicules education and educators, and about the frustrations of trying to awaken a love of learning in children who care more about popular culture, their clothing, and their social life than mastering the wonders of science, history, and mathematics.
This is a tangled skein of causation, to be sure, but I have a radical idea. Next time there is a conference about the state of American education — or the problems found in each and every school district — why don't we take a hard look at why so many of our students are slackers? Why don't we look at the popular culture and its effects on students' readiness to apply themselves to learning? Why don't we investigate the influence of the role models of "success" that surround our children in the press?Why don't we ask how often our children see models of success who are doctors, nurses, educators, scientists, engineers, and others who enable our society to function and who contribute to our common good?
It's time to stop beating up on teachers and ask why so many of our children arrive in school with poor attitudes toward learning. If the students aren't willing to work hard, if they aren't hungry to succeed, then even the best teachers in the world — laden with merit pay, bonuses, and other perks — are not going to make them learn.
Every article and book about successful education systems in other nations say that their students are "hungry" for education, "hungry" for the learning that will propel them and their families to a better life. Our children — with too few exceptions — don't have that hunger. It's not the fault of their teachers.
We will continue to misdiagnose our educational needs until we focus on the role of students and their families. If they don't give a hoot about education, if the students are unwilling to pay attention in class and do their homework after school, if they arrive in school with a closed and empty mind, don't blame their teachers.

Diane Ravitch is a research professor of Education at New York University. She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Storytelling and narrative medicine

2007-06-20T14:51:00.001+10:00

Last weekend I was staying in Smythesdale with friends Anne and Jeff Langdon. Anne is an artist and teacher and head of Ballarat High School's Art Department. Anne and I were discussing the state of world affairs, our kids, and teaching, when she asked me if I had anything useful on creativity, as she and her Art Faculty colleagues are preparing a paper on the importance of art and creativity in the curriculum.

As it happened I had just been reading chapter 3 in Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind and mentioned that Yale Medical students were studying art and Columbia University Medical School are being trained in narrative medicine. The relevant extract can be found on page 52:

Today the curriculum at American medical schools is undergoing its greatest change in a generation. Students at Columbia University Medical School and elsewhere are being trained in "narrative medicine," because research has revealed that despite the power of computer diagnostics, an important part of a diagnosis is contained in a patient's story. At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient's condition... UCLA Medical School has established a Hospital Overnight Program, in which second-year students are admitted to the hospital overnight with fictitious ailments. The purpose of this playacting? "To develop medical students' empathy for patients," says the school.

Further on in the chapter Pink quotes Bob Lutz the head of General Motors:

Bob Lutz is not exactly a touchy-feely, artsy-fartsy kind of guy. He's a craggy, white haired white man in his seventies....when Lutz took over his post at GM, and the New York Times asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here's how he responded: "It's more right brain.... I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation." ... General Motors says it's in the art business.

The other thing I'd like to pick up on here is the "narrative medicine" training that medical students at Columbia Medical School are undergoing. Last week in The Age Business section there was an article on storytelling by Gabrielle Dolan which referred research by Human Synergistics International that highlighted:

... organisational storytelling as an effective tool in the success of these critical factors. Organisational storytelling is storytelling with a business purpose. Business leaders such as Jack Welch have always understood the power of story. When asked what his greatest attribute was, Welch replied: "That I am Irish and I know how to tell stories." ...

Stories allow people to personalise the organisation's mission and translate it into human terms.

... story becomes a critical tool. While logic and data can engage people's minds, stories engage their hearts. ...Essentially, change management is replacing existing stories in people's heads with new stories about the future. Narrative and story imagery are powerful ways to paint this vision of the future.

That's something I'll pass on to Anne. If any of you have other connections to creativity I'd be delighted to read about them and pass them onto Anne.

Practice Makes Perfect

2007-06-15T15:31:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I was discussing literacy with a couple of primary teachers and asked about their impressions of secondary school English classrooms. We got around to talking about the ubiquitous practice of reading a class novel aloud for a whole period. First of all the students are bored; secondly there is often very little explicit teaching including giving the reason for reading the novel; third, the learning intentions for that period aren't stated; fourth, students are expected to be passive receivers of information with the occasional response to a question about the text. Engaged the students aren't.

Today I came across a blog post by Maish R Nichani of http://www.elearningpost.com/ which referred to a survey about adult learning. The first preference was learning by doing and I wonder how much of this is the situation in our classrooms. If students are to write how much writing do they actually do as compared with listening to their teacher talk about writing.

According to a survey from the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), UK workers have an overwhelming preference for less formal ways of learning to improve job performance.

For the survey (Practice Makes Perfect), a sample of 2,076 workers in the UK were asked which of ten ways of learning were helpful in learning to do the job better.

Learning by doing the job on a regular basis was the favourite method - overall, 82% found this quite or very helpful. This was followed by being shown how to do things by others (62%), and watching and listening to others (56%). Just 54% felt that taking a course paid for by the employer or the worker was helpful, followed closely by reflecting on your own performance (53%). Reading books and manuals (39%), using trial and error (38%) and using the internet (29%) were the least favourite methods.

I wonder what our students would rate as their preferred way to learn?

Cowshed line

2007-06-12T09:13:00.000+10:00

I drove to Zack and Tracy's (our son and daughter in law) house last Sunday and on the way took a few photographs focusing on line. I'm fascinated by line in natural and made objects and above is an interesting mix of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines with a derelict cow shed.

The faces of painted women

2007-06-10T17:49:00.000+10:00

The wonders of YouTube. This one I came across in Bruce Schauble's blog Throughlines which I read regularly.

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Is school reform impossible?

2007-06-06T19:00:00.000+10:00

My head starts to spin with all of the information you can come across in the blogosphere. I keep telling myself that slow learning is savouring learning not rushing from blog to blog. Recently I came across mention of the pedagogy of slowness in a blog titled Artichoke.

I am loving listening to The Knowledge Tree E Journal issue featuring Geetha Narayanan’s take on just this idea and its real time and space result - Project Vision

So what is the dangerous idea I have been exploring and why do many people across the world consider it powerful? The dangerous idea is that school reform, in India in particular, but across the world too, is impossible.

Changing education, at the systemic level or at the institutional or school level, or educating teachers and school leaders in change can be classified as largely first order change - that of school improvement, which involves doing more of the same but doing it better (where the focus is on efficiency) and that of school re-structuring, which involves re-organising components and responsibilities (where the focus is on effectiveness).

The power behind the dangerous idea is the realisation that if one cannot reform education by improving the system or by re-structuring the schools, then the way forward must be through design. The need seemed to be to re-envision and to design a new system - one that supports both personal and social transformation creating 21st century learning.

Geetha’s thought experiment in challenging hidden assumptions about how we do school resulted in something very practical and grounded - Project Vision – a slow pedagogy created from shop front type learning experiences for marginalised children in the “rapidly growing slums” of Bangladore, India.

Project vision is not about creating small sized schools – it is about fragmenting theone place one space school into “four distinct, distributed, interactive and inter-related components that work in coordination with one another.”

I'm still grappling with the ideas Geetha Narayanan articulated in her blog, including this paragraph on slowness:

The concept of Slow emerged from the Slow Food and Slow Design movement in Europe and the United States and builds and develops on ideas of sustainable living as a desirable future. Slowness as a pedagogy allows students to learn not at the metronome of the school day or the school bell, but at the metronome of nature, giving them time to absorb, to introspect and contemplate, to argue and rebut and to enjoy.

Increase creativity - raise the roof

2007-06-06T18:28:00.000+10:00

Are you an abstract, creative thinker or a more detail concrete, detail-oriented thinker? Currently there is a lot of thought given to school planning, especially open plan classrooms but one thing I haven't heard discussed is ceiling heights. Artist Robert Genn in his blog The Painters Keys writes about research into ceiling heights.

Raise the roof! May 8, 2007 Dear Artist, Now it seems that researchers at the Universities of British Columbia and Minnesota have found a relationship between creativity and the height of ceilings. Rui Zhu and Joan Meyers-Levy tested various volunteer groups in rooms of eight- and ten-foot ceilings. "When a person is in a high-ceiling environment, they are going to process information in a more abstract, creative fashion," said Zhu. "Those in a room with relatively lower ceilings will process in a much more concrete, detail-oriented fashion." These researchers feel people under high ceilings are "primed" to think broadly because of the sense of freedom associated withManchester Cathedral, UKThe soaring architecture of Gothic Cathedrals may have contributed to the lofty thoughts of the Renaissance" src="http://clicks.robertgenn.com/images/artists/robert_genn/051107_cathedral_sm.jpg"> Manchester
Cathedral, UKThe soaring architecture of Gothic Cathedrals may have contributed to the lofty thoughts of the Renaissance the space, while the containment of a lower ceiling encourages people to think small and focused. There may be something in this. Artists have traditionally demanded high ceilings, not only so they can run up their easels and facilitate high light but also to give themselves creative headroom. My studio, for example, is divided into two areas, one with a 9-foot ceiling, the other with a pitch that goes up to 14 feet. I've noticed I feel different in the two areas, and bringing work-in-progress from one area to the other demands different moves. On the other hand, working outside under an infinite ceiling can evoke a kind of conservative stagnation. In my case, this perverse reaction may be due to the intimidation that the great outdoors has always given me and may not be typical of all plein air enthusiasts. On the other hand, the studio in general is a sanctuary where I may safely vacillate between exploratory creativity and my personal bag of tricks. Apart from the feng-shui of high ceilings and their invitation to power and expansive thinking, other benefitsBig Mark Rothko in the Metropolitan Museum, NY include the dissipation of toxins and more oxygen. And when you think about it, the availability of empty warehouses and lofts on Manhattan has contributed greatly to the New York "paint big" school. Paris has always had some big places too. "Give me the venue and I will fill it up," said Picasso. While larger, higher studios may invite larger, higher work, they might also invite larger, higher ideals. Incidentally, these researchers ought to try to find out if shorter persons are more creative than taller ones because they have more space above their heads. Best regards, Robert PS: "Higher ceilings prime the feeling of freedom that in turn facilitates the relational processing of multiple data." (Rui Zhu) Esoterica: Contrarily, I'd like to draw your attention to the possible value of confinement. Tight little areas such as bird blinds, cars and motorhomes work well for many. It has something to do with the absence
of clutter and the opportunity to focus. Curiously, I've pulled off more than a few reasonable paintings in the economy seat of a crowded aircraft. I feel there's something smugly brilliant about keeping my elbows to myself. In any case, when building the studio of your dreams, you need to think about bumping your head.

That is the sort of nonsense up with I will not put

2007-06-06T16:50:00.000+10:00

A blog I came across recently is delancyplace.com. the blog contains excerpts or quotes that the editors think interesting.

I've signed on to receive daily emails and the first one I received is pasted below - an extract about prepositions. As teachers in the local schools begin report writing and grappling with making sure their reports are grammatical correct, the excerpt seems apposite. Worth a look.

"[O]ne of the all-time great grammatical shibboleths [is] that when writing a sentence or a clause, you must not ... make a preposition the last word you put in. This notion apparently originated with the poet John Dryden, who in a 1672 work quoted Ben Jonson's line 'The bodies that these souls were frighted from' and commented 'The Preposition at the end of a sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observ'd in my own writings.' Probably, Dryden based his stand on two foundations. First, prepositions in Latin never appear at the end of a sentence, not surprising since praepositio is Latin for something that 'comes before.' Second, a principle of composition that's as valid in the twenty-first century as it was in the seventeenth holds that, whenever possible, sentences should end strongly--and prepositions, as necessary as they undeniably are, are usually more of a whimper than a bang."
Whatever its origin, the ban found favor with prescriptivists through the centuries, including Edward Gibbon; John Ruskin, who in an entire book (Seven Lamps) concluded a sentence with a preposition precisely one time; Lily Tomlin's officious Ernestine the telephone operator, who asked, 'Is this the party to whom I am speaking?'; and my mother-in-law, Marge Simeone, who is prone to saying things like 'In which car are we going?'... [B]ut [this rule] was always a bit suspect. It was blown out of the water by [Henry] Fowler, who wrote in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 'Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are 'inelegant' are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards.' Fowler then gave twenty-four examples of the 'rule' being broken by such writers as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pepys, Swift, Defoe, Burke, Kipling, and the authors of the King James Bible. ... When the preposition occurs in a phrasal verb, the transposition task can be close to impossible. To 'fix' a phrasal-verb-concluding sentence like 'I'm turning in,' you'd have to come up with something like 'Turning in I am,' which not even Yoda from Star Wars could say with a straight face. "To anyone still unconvinced, I offer two small anecdotes, in reverse order of familiarity."
1. Winston Churchill, when corrected for violating this rule, supposedly replied, 'That is the sort of nonsense up with I will not put.'"
2. A guy from South Philadelphia, on vacation in London, asks a bowler-hatted gent, 'Where's the subway at?' The Londoner replies, 'Don't you Yanks realize that it's poor English to end a sentence with a preposition?' To which the South Philly guy says, 'Okay, where's the subway at, asshole?' "

Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway Books, 2007, pp. 163-165.

Helvetica is fifty and everywhere

2007-06-05T09:29:00.000+10:00

Typography and graphic design grabs my attention. My wife, Pat, tells me that she notices that when I'm feeling a bit stressed I often spend hours redisigning some unit of work I am to present. I lose myself in the small details and problem solving. I came across a piece with a slide show by Mia Fineman "The Helvetica Hegemony: How an unassuming font took over the world" in Slate magazine. To take a grab from the first slide:

This year is the 50th anniversary of Helvetica, the ubiquitous sans-serif font that some have called the official typeface of the 20th century. Even if you don't know its name, you'll probably recognize its face. Helvetica is everywhere. It's been used in countless corporate logos, including those of American Airlines, Sears, Target, Toyota, BMW, Tupperware, Nestlé, ConEd, Verizon, North Face, Staples, Panasonic, Evian, Crate and Barrel, and the Gap. You can spot it on billboards, album covers, and directional signs, including all the signage in the New York City subway system. Even the IRS uses Helvetica for its income tax forms. ...

Now, the typeface is the subject of a small exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art centering around an original set of Helvetica lead type donated to the museum by Lars Müller, designer and publisher of the 2005 book Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface.

Worthwhile reading the text with the slides. Have a look.

The mathematics of executive salaries

2007-05-21T20:15:00.000+10:00

Last Saturday's Business Age contained an interesting article by Leon Gettler on executive salaries. The gist of the piece was about the disparity between the obscene amounts of money some chief executives earn and what ordinary wage earners earn.

Gettler used statistics to draw comparisons and this got me to thinking that teachers could get kids to investigate the figures and work out their own comparisons. For example, this paragraph about Macquarie Bank's chief executive Allan Moss:

On $33.5 million, Allan Moss is on a nice little earner, up 58 per cent on the previous year. As The Sydney Morning Herald pointed out, he's worth 446 construction workers, 669 graduate teachers, 335 GPs, or 747 times the average Australian worker.

So there you go, I wonder how many teachers you could get for Allan Moss's salary?

Chess-squared is a brilliant project

2007-05-06T14:03:00.000+10:00

Steve Tobias is a Senior Lecturer at James Cook University in Queensland. He has taught at all levels of schooling. For the past two decades he worked in pre-service teacher education in the field of mathematics education. His recent research is in self regulation and building resilience and persistence in open ended and problem solving situations. He recently flew down to Castlemaine to meet the Chess-squared group.

I conducted an email interview with Steve about the chess initiative, CHESS-SQUARED, that began in a cluster of schools in Mount Alexander Shire, Central Victoria in 2006. The project is coordinated by Steve Carroll, Harry Poulton and Sam Grumont.

The chess -squared group have been invited to be keynote speakers at the Chess in the Schools and Communities International Conference At Aberdeen University. The main aims of the conference will be to explore the particular contribution of chess play within the school and home environment to the development of thinking skills, health and well being and the creative imagination of children and young people.

Sam What is your involvement in the project?

Steve I guess my main role is to support Steve, Harry and Sam with collecting research information about the students', teachers' and community's responses to the Chess program. It is a unique program and we would like to collect broad evidence that it has some positive effect on teaching and learning, particularly in mathematics. I am interested in students’ ability to self-regulate their learning, their ability to persist when the going is tough and their resilience when they lose a game. In a similar way I would like students to see that in learning mathematics - failure is actually okay and a starting place for developing a richer understanding of the task.

Sam What are your thoughts about how it's gone so far?

Steve This is a brilliant project. There are some facets that should be acknowledged. The main organisers are very passionate and committed to the project. It seems to more about bringing the community together through the schools. Playing games is important for developing logic, reasoning and strategizing skills. However, it also encourages 'play' with others including friends, mates, people you didn't know, parents, siblings, grand parents. I think the importance of the project is in the how the students build confidence through play and how this effects the relationship (learning opportunity) between students and teachers.

Sam Tell me about the Scotland Chess & Community Conference

Steve It is being held in Aberdeen. The organisers of this conference invited the Castlemaine project as guest keynote speakers for their international conference. This is an honour and a tribute to the schools and organisers and huge indication that what is happening in the Castlemaine area is unique and very important for not only building skills but also community.

Sam Do you think the teaching and learning that is happening with Chess-squared is worthwhile?

Steve Absolutely. Without question their is a direct link between playing chess and teaching and learning. In this case students and teachers whether they be a chess tutor or fellow student - the teaching and learning will be intertwined. We would like to collect evidence about the richness of this interaction and the effects on student motivation. Hopefully the process will 'enable' students to learn for enjoyment and teach them something about persistence, resilience and the power of thinking through different strategies.

The Importance of Learning Slowly

2007-04-30T18:01:00.004+10:00

Currently I'm working as a Teaching and Learning Coach and I know it takes me time to think things through if I am to get a deeper understanding, which is why I titled my blog 'Slow learning'. I'm always on the lookout for material about thinking and recently I came across a blog post by Gary Woodill titled The Importance of Learning Slowly , which is a review of Manfred Spitzer's book The Mind within the Net: models of learning, thinking, and acting. From Gary Woodill's review:

Manfred Spitzer’s The Mind within the Net is one of the best non-technical narratives on how minds work using the neural network model. Some of these explanations are startling, while others reinforce positions of strong advocates of individual freedom and the power of informal learning, such as Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Jay Cross.

Like neural networks, the brain is based on vector algebra, rather than numerical computations. Vectors have strength and direction, and many vectors, representing multiple inputs, unite to form a result. The result in the brain is strengthening or weakening of a set of neural connections, a relatively slow process. While a single event can have an impact, it usually takes many events to have a relatively permanent change in the brain (aka “learning”) and to extract general features and generate rules from experience.

So there you go.

Learners shall inherit the earth

2007-04-05T17:07:00.000+10:00

In times of change, learners inherits the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.'

--the late writer Eric Hoffer

Asking the good question is key

2007-04-04T18:11:00.000+10:00

Teachers in Victorian schools are coming to grips with formative and summative assessment which are now called:

assessment of learning (summative)
assessment for learning (formative)
assessment as learning (formative)

I recently read an ASCD brief blog by Marge Scherer on Dylan Wiliam co-author of Inside the Black Box , about a session he ran at a conference. It's all about formative assessment:

Some kinds of assessment raise achievement, and some merely measure it, Dylan Wiliam told the educators at his session, titled "Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute and Day by Day."
The assessments that researchers have found most effective at raising achievement are those that teachers make minute by minute and day by day in the classroom and then use almost immediately to adjust their lessons. For example, teachers who walk the aisles to check on what the class needs to work on next are gathering more helpful data than they would if they used the same time to help two or three individuals with specific problems, he said.

Asking diagnostic questions is another way to find out what students do and don't know. A simple technique like an exit question (a question every student answers before leaving class) can help the teacher know how many students have grasped a basic concept or skill and whether to reteach the concept the next day.

Asking every student to choose one of several answers is another way to make sure students are engaged throughout the lesson. Teachers should not allow students to choose not to participate. Research shows that the more students think and talk in class, the more they learn. But questioning should not be scary, Wiliam reminded the group. If the student answers "I don't know," a good reply might be, "I know, but if you did know, what would you think?" The point is that no student should be able to "choose not to think."

To demonstrate some of his strategies with the audience, Wiliam had the group predict which of several answers were correct and then explain why they chose the answers they did. Such reflection and analysis are part of learning, he said.

Wiliam's final message: Classroom instruction matters most in boosting achievement, and improving questioning and feedback techniques will improve the effectiveness of teachers.

Mindset a growth mentality

2007-03-22T22:45:00.000+11:00

Tonight I came across comments on Bruce Hammond's Leading and Learning blog about recent research by Stanford Professor Carol Dweck and her colleagues , published in her book ,'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success', which recommends that students need to become aware of how their brains work. According to Bruce, Dweck suggests:

"That we teach our students to think of their brains as a muscle that strengthens with use forming new connections every time they learn.This certainly fits in with those who hold a constructivist view of learning.
That we teach students appropriate study skills and convey to them that by using these methods it will help their brains learn better.
That we should discourage using labels ( and streaming) that convey to students that their intelligence is fixed.
That we should encourage students to appreciate that there is wide range of ways of being intelligent - schools that are aware of Howard Gardner's research on multiple intelligences will be aware of this. Schools that focus on narrow literacy and numeracy targets will be giving students the wrong message.
Teachers ought to focus more on student's effort, strategies and progress rather than praising their talent or intelligence . Students need to see mistakes as positive rather that negative events - something to learn from and not to fear making
Most of all teachers need to give students relevant challenging work that students see as fun."

The blurb from Random House notes that Carol Dweck says that our mindset is not a minor personality quirk: it creates our whole mental world. It explains how we become optimistic or pessimistic. It shapes our goals, our attitude toward work and relationships, and how we raise our kids, ultimately predicting whether or not we will fulfill our potential. Dweck has found that everyone has one of two basic mindsets.If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone–either you have them or you don’t. You must prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs. This is the path of stagnation. If you have a growth mindset, however, you know that talents can be developed and that great abilities are built over time. This is the path of opportunity–and success.Dweck demonstrates that mindset unfolds in childhood and adulthood and drives every aspect of our lives, from work to sports, from relationships to parenting. She reveals how creative geniuses in all fields–music, literature, science, sports, business–apply the growth mindset to achieve results. Perhaps even more important, she shows us how we can change our mindset at any stage of life to achieve true success and fulfillment. She looks across a broad range of applications and helps parents, teachers, coaches, and executives see how they can promote the growth mindset.

So, we need to work on developing the growth mindset of our students. Way to go!

Too much talking by teachers

2007-03-20T21:39:00.000+11:00

The last two days I've been at a professional development project called "Building Learning Capacity of Professional Learning Leaders". This is a 10 day program running over the next few months.

The building leaning capacity is from Guy Claxton and one of the readings we had was his keynote address for the British Educational Research Association last year. One of the key ideas Claxton discussed in his book 'Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less' is slow learning. We started the first session with a handout of 5 pages to be shared between two people and were expected to read and discuss it in ten minutes. I turned to my partner and asked, "What was your reaction to the task?"

She replied, "I like to have my own copy to read and write notes on."

Precisely my thoughts. I kept thinking that this was the opposite of slow learning, of slowing down, savouring the ideas, tossing them around before talking about them. But this seems to be the case of education everywhere - speed up, data, analyse, react, get it down quickly. At the end of the two days when we were asked to reflect a comment made at my table was that we talked too much. And this was coming from teachers. We all agreed we'd like more time to think; quiet time.

Interactive whiteboards may not improve learning

2007-02-13T22:03:00.000+11:00

Technology is a great thing but we always need to ask has it made difference in learning? A number of schools in my cluster, have purchased interactive whiteboards with the goal of enhancing teaching and learning.

From some of the whiteboard sessions I've seen, students are engaged, kids can move things around the boards easily and the visuals are stimulating. However some teachers are concerned that the interactive capability of the boards are used fully and that they don't become glorified, expensive data projectors.

A recent UK study commissioned by the English Department of Education found that computerised whiteboards failed to boost student achievement.

I came across a report of the report in a BBC News item, "Doubts over hi-tech whiteboards".

The study group visited schools only a year after a government project introduced the boards. "Interactive whiteboards can even slow the pace of learning," and result in "relatively mundane activities being overvalued", the Institute of Educatiion study suggested.

Another finding was that "although the newness of the technology was initially welcomed by the pupils, any boost in motivation seemed short lived".

A crucial statement is that "when the use of the technological tools took precedence over a clear understanding of their purpose for teaching, IWBs were not used in way that could enhance learning," it said.

Does this apply to the use of weblogs in the classroom?

Critics of teachers turn people away

2007-01-30T14:14:00.000+11:00

Well it's been a while between posts and I must say a very enjoyable holiday at the beach in Airey's Inlet. I rarely thought of teaching at all but mid-January one article caught my attention.

During the past couple of years I noticed that there seems to be a prolonged systematic attack on the teaching profession by politicians and columnists, particularly in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper 'The Australian'. Every problem in society seems to be the fault of teachers and in the case of the Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, it's left-wing ideologues who have hijacked the curriculum with some themes "straight from Chairman Mao". We've heard it all before: a drug problem - introduce drug education; road accidents - introduce driver education; racism - get rid of multi-culturalism; rude behaviour - introduce values; and literacy and numeracy levels - get back to phonics. However for teachers one academic made a statement.

Professor Sue Willis, Dean of Education at Monash University and president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, rode to the rescue in an article in The Sunday Age which was reported in a related article 'Criticism endangers teaching.

"The capacity to attract our brightest and best young people into teaching, and to keep them in teaching is directly related to the way (the profession) is constructed both in the media and by politicians," Professor Willis said.

"It's absolutely clear that we have downturns in applicaton rates for university courses), and an increased loss of teachers from the professon, when they are constantly being slammed.

"Why would people want to go into a profession where they're treated like shit? Where they're treated as though no matter what they do, everything is their fault. If there's high unemployment, if kids are rioting at the beaches, schools are the problem.

"if we really want to attract the brightest and best into state schools, we've got to start talking them up - and the constant talking them down is actually causing the problem it's supposed to be pointing to."

As I remember some teaching colleagues saying out loud in New York, "go girl!"

Principals' Collegiality at Daylesford

2006-12-04T19:18:00.000+11:00

Last week principals of the Mount Alexander Cluster of Schools met at Daylesford for an end of year reflection and setting some plans for 2007. I was involved as educator for the cluster's Innovations and Excellence Initiative and ran a session on evidence-based teaching and learning. The principals group has been meeting as a collegiate for fifteen years and over time a sense of trust has resulted in an openness in sharing school data.

The focus on evidence-based teaching and learning is the result of wanting to improve our students' literacy and numeracy skills. You can ask a teacher if she can identify students in her classes who are learning at a higher level as a result of the teacher's work and if the answer is "yes", the next question is "How do you know?" We can only know if we have evidence and i don't mean anecdotal evidence. I first used this strategy with student readers after reading Aidan Chambers book Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk. If you haven't read it, you should.

At the conference I used the THINK-PAIR-SHARE strategy with cluster principals after they read a paper "An evidence-based approach to teaching and learning" presented by Michele Bruniges at an ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) conference in Melbourne last year.

Teachers are moving along the path of using evidence but in my experience most of the energy so far is in looking at results and comparing them with past years' results or state-wide results. The important development I think is what do you do with the data? It should lead to identifying weaknesses in the students responses, agreeing on strategies for improvement, having a go at teaching the strategies and then seeing if there is an improvement.

Mike Schmoker argues that there is a way for this to happen by focused structured teacher collaboration:

This simple, powerful structure starts with a group of teachers who meetregularly as a team to identify essential and valued student learning, developcommon formative assessments, analyze current levels of achievement, setachievement goals and then share and create lessons to improve upon thoselevels.

Picture these teams of teachers implementing these new lessons,continuously assessing their results and then adjusting their lessons in lightof those results. Importantly, there must be an expectation this collaborativeeffort will produce ongoing improvement - and gains in achievement.

If there is anything that the research community agrees on, it is this: theright kind of continuous, structured teacher collaboration improves the qualityof teaching and pays big, often immediate, dividends in student learning andprofessional morale in virtually any setting. Our experience with schools acrossthe nation bears this out unequivocally.... Mere collegiality won't cut it. Even discussions about curricularissues or popular strategies can feel good but go nowhere. the right image toembrace is of a group of teachers who meet regularly to share, refine andasssess the impact of lessons and strategies to help increasing numbers ofstudents learn at higher levels.

This is the direction we are going. Early next February the collegiate is meeting to develop a plan for improving our approach in improving teaching and learning through the effective use of data.

Anne Tyler and writing

2006-12-01T15:00:00.002+11:00

The blogosphere has lots of posts about writing and in Failbetter.com fiction editor Margo Rabb grabbed the chance to ask Anne Tyler about her work, her approach to her craft, and, in particular, her latest novel, Digging to America. The last sentence in this extract will resonate with many of you:

You have said that you go through a "refilling" stage after finishing a novel - how long does this stage generally last? Once you return to work, how do you start -- by outlining, drawing up character histories, or jumping right into writing?How many hours do you write each day?

I spend about a year between novels. My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations. I'll say, "It's time I stopped lolling about. I'd better think something up." Then for a month or so I'll jot down desperate possibilities. "Maybe I could write about who does such-and -such. Or wait: I think I already did that. Well, then maybe about about that woman I saw in the grocery the other day. What was she up to, exactly? what might her story have been?"

Eventually, one of these possibilities will start flowering in my mind, and I'll manufacture what's initially a very trumped-up,artificial plot. I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages. At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less. The ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning. If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

You can check out the full interview at Failbetter.com.

Use a fountain pen to improve your thinking

2006-11-14T23:29:00.000+11:00

I have always enjoyed writing with a fountain pen. When most, well virtually all, of my friends and colleagues use biros, roller balls, and felt tip pens I stick to my fountain pen. When I was a secondary school student I loved pulling pens apart and checking the bits and then putting it together, hoping it would work. Didn't always work.

The Lamy Safari, with a fine nib shown above, is my favourite. I've got Watermans and Parkers in my collectin but it's the Lamy Safari I return to use always.

Not everyone likes handwriting and I've been told at times that writing notes in a notebook and then typing them is double work. But I like the feel of handwriting, I can doodle, draw arrows, make connections, and quickly jot notes in the margin. In fact I think differently when I handwrite. Jack Vinson in a blog about thinking while notetaking. He talks about typing being more linear and careful but

Writing, on the other hand, allows me to make more jumps and smash thoughts
together even when they are not discussed in the same sentence. You might talk about X-Y-Z-A-B-C-Y, and I can lump the Y's together by simply smashing some text into the margin. Or I can draw lines and arrows and conceptually group things with circles and squares. I can also doodle. I can't draw at the computer without finding a different application that breaks my chain of thought.

I came across this in a post of Angela Booth's titled: Writing is thinking: switch to pen and paper and use both sides of your brain.

Success for low achieving kids with chess

2006-11-14T22:05:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I met with Dr Steve Tobias, Senior lecturer in maths education at James Cook University, Townsville, to review the chess numeracy initiative in our cluster of schools. Steve is keen to explore the data we have been collecting on the connection between playing chess and maths thinking.

All thirteen schools in our cluster took part in the project. We mainstreamed chess in grades 5 & 6 as part of the initiative, paid for tutors to take the students through strategies and playing games, all the while making connections to maths. The knowledge and passion of the tutors coupled with enthusiastic classroom teachers made for a heady and successful mix.

One of the successes, which we are keen to explore, is that in a number of schools, students with low academic achievement found success playing chess. A number of boys in different schools told us that this was the first time in their school life they had been successful at something mentally challenging. We're not sure exactly what's going on here but plan to conduct surveys gathering some quantifiable information and follow it up with quantitative data by interviewing students.

It is possible that the spatial relationships is an area these kids are good at. I came across a piece by David Cohen on chess education which i have yet to read but I intend passing it on to my chess experts. You see the irony of the situation is that I'm coordinating the initiative but I don't play chess. One of the sections in his paper deals with maths and visualisation:

Children develop math skills with chess because of a common requirement of chess and math: visualization. This usually occurs in
Grade 2 (at age 7). Chess develops visualization abilities as follows:
Chess board - The chess board is laid out in a checkered pattern of a large square comprised of 64 smaller squares arranged 8x8. Children can be taught their way around the board through its various patterns(ranks, files, diagonals, colouring of squares).
Moves of the chess pieces - The child first learns the movements of the chess pieces which travel in straight lines: pawn, rook, bishop, and queen. But then the child is introduced to a movement that is quite different from the others: the L-shaped jump of the knight. The movement is not only different from the child’s previous chess experience, but is also likely an entirely new experience for the child. The child must learn to visualize the movement.
Moving chess pieces around on the chess board - Moving a chess piece from a starting square to an ending square forces the child to visualize the patterns and movements.

I found this information through a google alert which led me to the Waterfront Juniour Intermediate Chess Club. I'm beginning to see what the web 2.0 - read, write web, is all about.

Is it learning or work we are after?

2006-10-27T12:40:00.000+10:00

Last Wednesday I attended a afternoon and evening conference with Guy Claxton, on the topic 'Building Learning Power'. He talked about 4 generations of professional change:
1 Scratch generation- what the culture is about, examinations and behaviour.
2 Hints and tips - this is where teachers attend workshops and get little things we can add on to our repertoire of teaching skills and strategies, such as mind maps, thinking tools etc. It's about how to organise and retrieve information in a better way.
3 Generation of thinking and learning skills - very cognitively focused on thinking and often involving stand alone strategies. According to Claxton, these tend not to last, to spread or to deepen. "The long term evidence is not good." He talked about how to move from a language of skills to a language of dispositions.
4 Infused Learning - this is the move to more powerful habits of minds/ dispostions.

One research anecdote he used is based on the experience that every school's mission statement, vision, and teacher talk features the word 'learning'. A researcher sat in the back of classrooms noting the times that the words 'learning' and 'work' were used by teachers. You guessed it; learning was used 2% of the time. Everything else uttered by teachers was "get on with your work", "get back to work", show me your work", "are you having trouble with your worlk", you need to work harder".

His question: "Why don't we use the word learning if we think it's important."

I'm thinking it's the incongruence students often experience between what their teachers say and what they do.

When teachers learn more about learning the effectiveness of a school improves and learning follows.

Theme Time Radio with Bob Dylan

2006-10-19T23:30:00.000+10:00

The rhythms of the English language sound great when Bob Dylan introduces his theme and songs on Theme Time Radio. The show is broadcast on XM Radio in the U.S.A. and I first heard it on a podcast a friend, Jeff Langdon, gave me. I remember thinking at the time Dylan's cool patter would be great to use with students. Maybe as a Quickwrite piece to spark writing from.

If you haven't chanced apon the broadcasts here's a little sample to whet you interest:

First let's get in the mood with the husky voice of the woman announcer who sounds like she's had one whisky and cigarette too many, or then again maybe she's had just enough. "It's night time in the big city. A truck driver runs a red light. A strange, quiet man practices Tai Chi in the park. It's Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan."

JAIL
"Tonight we're going to visit the big house. The clink, the brig, the coop, the grey-bar hotel, the hoosegow, the joint, the jug, the slammer, the stir. A real hush-hush subject where everyone is hurting for someone or something. We're going to learn about cons, jailbirds, stoolies, lifers, new fish and politicians. Prison, the house of many doors."

"Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair" BESSIE SMITH
"Bessie Smith doesn't want to be in prison. She caught him with a trifling Jane. She cut him with her barlow knife. She kicked him in the side. She stood there laughing as he wallowed around and died. She admits it. She's nutso, crazy, unbalanced, unsound, loony, witless and wrong. She has a grave disorder of the mind that impairs her capacity to function normally in society."

FATHERS
"We got an email from Johnny Depp in Paris, France. He wants to know: 'Who was the founder of modern communism? Well Johnny, Karl Marx was the founder of modern communism. He also fathered seven children. Four of them survived to adulthood. His only son, Frederick Demuth, was illegimate. I wonder if he calls his daddy on Father's Day?"

Primary school students seem happy

2006-10-19T23:11:00.000+10:00

Wouldn't it be good if school and learning for our students was a joyful experience?

Today I visited a number of primary schools in the Castlemaine district with Matt Theobald, an art teacher from Castlemaine Secondary College. Driving between schools he said, "The kids seem really happy. I even saw one boy skipping on the way to class."

Why do some kids often seem to lose the joy of learning when they are in secondary school? Is it timetables? Is it the disciplines? Is it the teaching and learning?

But it shouldn't be forgotten that many students do experience secondary school as enjoyable.

Adolescence is one factor in the changing attitudes of students at secondary college. I often taught the same students in year 7 and maybe year 9 or 10 and then year 12 and experienced the ups and downs of their teenage life. A fast forward button would be useful I often thought.

If we could have more teachers moving between primary and secondary schools I'm sure we'd have greater awareness of the plusses and minuses of teaching at each level.

Here we go again

2006-10-10T22:29:00.000+10:00

Here we go again. This time it's the federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop who says it is "unacceptable" for students in English classes to be studying Jerry Springer or learning how to send text messages. A report in Today's The Age reported the ministers remarks.

"It is unacceptable for students in English classes to be learning SMS, which is a travesty of English, studying television chat shows such as Jerry Springer, and other topics that are a distraction from their need to learn communications skills that will support them in a job and in further education and training," she said.

This is interesting as in a previous post I referred to an article in the Guardian which says that researchers at Coventry University found that contrary to popular belief, the use of text message abbreviations is linked positively with literacy achievements.

I sometimes wonder if politicians have any real idea of what happens in a real classroom om a day by day, week by week.

I often wish teaching students to be influence to adopt some idea was as easy as politicians seem to imagine.

245 kids in prison

2006-10-10T21:40:00.000+10:00

Yes, yesterday 245 primary schools students marched, strolled and bussed their way into the Old Castlemaine Gaol to compete in the Mount Alexander Schools Chess Competition.

Once inside students sat at tables lined along the spokes of the prison which made it a unique experience for the them. Chess Kids ran the competition, supplying all of the equipment, boards, pieces, clocks and computer program.

Each student played 7 games competing with others at their level. The winning team of 4 students get to play the state final next week.

The enthusiasm of the kids for chess has surprised all of our teachers and principals. The Mount Alexander Cluster chess/numeracy initiative mainstreamed chess as part of each school's numeracy work; tutors worked with the kids and their teachers passing on their passion for chess. One of the principals, Kevin Brown, said to me that he had attempted to get chess going with a little success but the tutors brought another level of knowledge and enthusaism to the classes.

In all of the schools I have worked in as a consultant one thing that kids constantly say a good teacher has is 'they really like their subject' or 'really like teaching'. Passion, you can't beat it.

Content knowledge in your discipline is important. It's obvious to kids that you really know what you are teaching and that you can assist them in moving to a higher level because of your knowledge. Both process and content are important. I'm emphasizing this because I seem to be reading a lot of teaching material which virtually dismissed content knowledge as unimportant. But in chess like other areas knowledge of your subject can inspire kids.

The chess competition was the finale of our initiative for this year. We aimed to finish on a high note.

Now we need to evaluate our pre and post test data, anecdotal information and conduct some student assessments to see if there has been some effect on the numeracy skills of our students. Some initial information looks positive.

If you have any stories about using games successfully in class let me know.

Chess kids in prison

2006-10-04T16:27:00.000+10:00

Like many good ideas this just began with 'let's have a go'. I was approached by two teachers Steve Carroll and Harry Poulton who had an idea to extend the idea of chess clubs into the mainstream classes in thirteen Castlemaine district schools (central Victoria).

Steve and Harry wanted to get kids enthused by playing chess and seeing if there is an improvement in numeracy skills. They gained academic support from Dr Stephen Tobias of James Cook University, who is just as enthusiastic to see if there is an improvement in numeracy thinking and strategising skills of middle years students.

The cluster principals decided to use funds from our Innovations and Excellence initiative to fund tutors and to purchase chess kits for each school.

Once a week for a maths session tutors would take the kids through chess strategies and play chess games. The initiative took off at an astounding rate with kids who never expressed an interest in chess getting hooked. The key ideas of mainstreaming the chess as a normal class and supplying outside tutors proved the key.

A chess blog is running and has received favourable feedback from US chess guru Susan Polger.

I've been involved as the Educator for the cluster and we have a big tournament this coming Monday, also funded by our Innovations and Excellence Initiative.Chess Kids is running the tournament at the Old Castlemaine Prison, a rather unique environment for our students.

We estimate over two hundred of our primary students will compete. It seems virtually all of the grade 5 and 6 students want to compete, that's how enthusiastic they are.

Texting helps spelling

2006-09-25T12:00:00.000+10:00

Texting will ruin spelling. Or will it?

An article in the Guardian says that researchers at Coventry University found that contrary to popular belief, the use of text message abbreviations is linked positively with literacy achievements.

One of the researchers Beverly Plester said: "So far, our research has suggested that there is no evidence to link a poor ability in standard English to those children who send text messages. In fact, the children who were the best at using 'textisms' were also found to be the better spellers and writers." The trial group was small but more research in this area is needed.

Spelling is one subject the public gets easily worked up a over because everyone figures that there is a right answer. Therefore teachers can easily teach kids to spell. In my blog wanderings I read this piece on spelling in Jo McLeay's blog. She also talks about the need to use spelling strategies and mentions David Hornsby who recently ran a one day workshop at Campbells Creek PS in central Victoria on spelling.

Teaching kids strategies is important as we need to be mindful that if students write without attempting to spell correctly, they are practising to spell incorrectly. Just think that after 6 years of practising spelling incorrectly how difficult it is to change or unlearn.

Reading circles group meets at Romsey

2006-09-19T11:17:00.000+10:00

Last week I spent a few hours after school with a group of teachers who are using Reading Circles as part of their reading work in schools. You couldn't meet a more enthusiastic bunch of teachers; well this isn't exactly true, as I work with enthusiastic teachers in all schools, which is surprising given that politicians and the media love to constantly criticise public school teachers.

The group is using an adapted form of Harvey Daniel's Literature Circles. We use the roles and basic cooperative learning approach but adapted it to using short text such as short stories, non-fiction articles, extracts from texts including Maniac Magee and King Lear with great success. A couple of teachers said that their kids also use reading circles when discussing television and film.

It seems students enjoy the support the reading circles structure provides for them to discuss and explore texts in depth. They become enthusiastic readers and talkers in their circles. I remember one grade 5 student Nick saying, "It's amazing you know, we do all the work; we read the text, think of the questions, run the discussions and then work out what went well and what we need to do to improve."

Also I remembered a grade 7 boy saying that he hated reading because his teacher made the class write a book report for every chapter they read. Enough to turn kids off reading but reading circles is turning them on. It certainly isn't about the Gradgrind model from Charles Dickens of filling the empty vessel with facts.

Leisurely reflection

2006-09-16T16:05:00.000+10:00

Do you notice that when you take an interest in something which might be a certain model car or a new style of fountain pen you suddenly seem to see them everywhere. Well in today's Melbourne Age philosopher Tony Coady served up this morsel on slow knowing:

" I love universities, I think they are terrific institutions. But there is no longer time for the important activity of leisurely reflection. There's a constant driving necessity to be in committees, to write reports on what you've done or are about to do or might do some time, retreats, endless bureaucratic matters, the pressure to publish, do extensive amounts of teaching and raise outside sume of money. Most of this is down to government policy."

Slow ways of knowing

2006-09-15T10:16:00.000+10:00

Guy Claxton in his book 'Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind' talks about "the slow ways of knowing ... the mind needs to be given time" and that we need the disposition to take one's time. I've just been to a slow food weekend in Melbourne which is about "living an unhurried life, beginning at the table." This sounds like a good idea that should apply to education where everything is speeded up with standards, assessments, progression points, high level thinking, authentic learning.

To add to the food metaphor, Claxton also says that the "know-how regions of our minds are organised less like the Library of Congress than a well used kitchen". We need both the organised, logical, deliberative thinking, as well as the meandering, serendipitious, playful, dreamy thinking.

Let's slow down and enjoy our learning and teaching.