Debriefing questions for lesson professional development

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.    How was the lesson planned?

2.    What worked well with the planning?

3.    What changes would you make for the next planning session?

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

5.    Was the flow of lesson coherent?

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

7.    Was the lesson chunked into digestible bits or episodes?

8.    Was the lesson appropriate for students’ level of understanding?

9.    Did the classroom discussions help promote student understanding?

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

Chalk is much more interactive than an interactive whiteboard

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.

Learning slowly according to Manfred Spitzer

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.

Re-reading Marzano's books

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?

Students like working

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

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.

Negotiating the curriculum nothing's really new

"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.

Practice Makes Perfect

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?