Why I write …

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

The above quote is from George Orwell – one of my favourite writers – and comes at the end of his short essay titled ‘Why I Write’. This blog post (accidentally typed ‘essay’ first, lol) is both a homage to Orwell and a required activity. Why? Well, I’m going to be talking about blogging on a panel at the upcoming AATE conference in Sydney. I’m pretty nervous cos my co-panelists are two people who I hold in high-esteem: Darcy Moore who is the catalyst for my use of social media and this blog, and Kelli McGraw who has supported me and inspired me to always set high expectations for myself. I’m actually really anxious about this presentation – more so than the other two I’ve found myself involved in – because I received a list of questions from the lovely Melissa Kennedy who will be chairing the panel. The questions scare me – don’t get me wrong, they are amazing, important, interesting questions – but the most scary is, ‘Why do you bother with this blogging thing?’

This question got me thinking about Orwell’s argument that there are ‘four great motives for writing’. I guess falling back on great writers as a means to cheat and steal and answer to a tricky question has always been my style. So why stop now? Do I agree with Orwell’s motives? Um … stupid question, he’s Orwell. My philosophy lecturers always complained that I lacked a critical stance and too keenly accepted the ideas of others – guess I haven’t matured since I was 19, cos I’m very happy to accept Orwell’s four motives as being my own motives for ‘why I write’.

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one … Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

This is such a great first motive. No one would write a public blog if they didn’t enjoy the attention (positive or negative) that it brings. Bloggers certainly aren’t interested in money, because you don’t get any (well, I don’t anyway so maybe someone who does can teach me how) and education bloggers are certainly not going to be getting any – in Australia at least. It’s true – I do like being talked about by other people – of course I’d prefer that it was my ideas and words, and not the clothes I wear. Education bloggers in Australia are few, and so it is pretty easy to get ‘known’ if you post regularly and the content of your posts are relevant to at least a small group of other people. Sometimes I’ll write a blog post just because I want someone to comment or tweet about it … if bloggers weren’t egotistical that we wouldn’t keep an eye on our stats.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement … Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

I have always loved to write and I have always dreamed of being a writer. Any type of writer would do. First I wanted to be a journalist, then it was a music journalist, a zine writer (I did this throughout my teen years before the Internet), a novelist, a confessional poet (but at 17 I didn’t have anything to confess), a philosopher (with no original thoughts this became too hard), a playwright (I even wrote a play and acted a small part in The Importance of Being Ernest) until finally I found blogging. It’s seems to have stuck. I find it easy to write here … intially I was scared shitless thinking thousands of people would read my words and laugh at me. Then I realised (thanks to the blog stats) that thousands won’t read my posts … 482 on one day is the most I’ve ever had.

Realising that my blog is my playground means I can write however I like. Mostly I write like this – honest, silly, personal. Sometimes I am angry and serious. sometimes emotional and irrational. I take great pleasure in constructing sentences, sometime carefully considering my purpose and sometimes typing in a great rush. I rarely, if ever mull over a post and very infrequently rewrite/edit a post. My writing is my thoughts. It is what it is. I post my travel adventures here too and if I ever felt like writing a story or a poem, I’d post them up too. Orwell is right … the impulse is a desire to share an experience, and that’s why this blog is a hodge-podge of posts … my life is a hodge-podge of experiences.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

This is a very important impulse for an education blogger. It’s important – I think – that the real experiences of classroom teachers are being shared. Too often in this world of political agendas relating to education, or even worse the constant suggestion that there is a ‘reform’ to education coming or happening, means that we teachers are forgotten. Remembered publicly as numbers and words, forgotten privately as human beings and as professionals. Those statements are a bit big really … honestly my agenda is not that big. And anyway, politics is the next motive. Really, I want this blog to record my successes and failures as a teacher. I always say you can never ‘be’ a teacher, ‘you’re always ‘becoming’ a teacher … so this is a documenting of my ‘becoming’. It’s a process diary – a work in progress. An historical document of my attempt to be a better teacher and a desire to share that attempt with others who are similarly attempting to become better teachers too.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Hmmm … I think I’m politically minded. Not very good with keeping track of polictical debates and can’t contribute intelligently to a political conversation … simply because numbers bore me. That doesn’t mean I’m not politically minded. Of course this blog has a political agenda insofar as I truly have a ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. My attitudes towards traditional schooling, my frustrations with limitations put on student expression and access, my disgust at the politicisation of education and my sincere interest in project-based learning and authentic learning experiences where young people are empowered by passionate teachers to change their shitty world. All of that is political. This blog always comes from the heart and with an intention to change or challenge current ineffective teaching practices … there’s a political motive in that, I reckon.

Crazy late night brainstorming and revision of ideas re: PBL

This is a series of tweets that I don’t want to lose. Maybe this crazy burst of ideas will formulate itself into a new understanding of project-learning and a tricky ‘flat-classroom’ and ‘real world’ mode of cross-curricula projects. Maybe. If you want it to make any sense, read it as a twitter-feed – that’s from bottom to top.

What do you do when a project fails before it begins?

This question was buzzing and thrashing through my mind all weekend thanks to the ‘honesty’ of my Year 8 class. They are a great bunch of kids but I have the most unfortunate timetable with them – I see them first period and last period on a Monday, then I don’t see them again until second last period on a Thursday and right before lunch on a Friday. Let’s face it, that’s a tough timetable to have a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds.

Last week I introduced them to our latest project. The ‘hook’ lesson was heaps of fun, involving the students getting outside to do some improv skits in our little makeshift amphitheatre. The students really enjoyed the activities and started thinking about what makes people happy in life – happiness being the focus of the project. On Thursday I handed out the project outline (see below) and there was much uproar about the requirement to make videos and put them on YouTube. They just weren’t keen on the idea and felt like I was asking them to do something they didn’t want to do … they didn’t want to be ‘put on the Internet for the world to see’.

I must admit, at this point I got a little grumpy inside. I felt like my hard work had been ignored and that my students weren’t thinking about learning beyond the walls of the classroom. One student also questioned why we were doing a ‘PD’ topic in English – the driving question of the project being ‘What is true happiness?’. I just couldn’t understand why my class were being so negative about the project – a project that I thought they would be super excited by. But they weren’t. Humph.

I wasn’t in class on Friday so I left them some vids to watch about Shakespeare and the Tudors. That gave me the weekend to try and work out how to salvage the project – after all, I had carefully planned it so as that a whole bunch of syllabus outcomes were covered. I knew that through their responding and composing they would master heaps of new skills and cover required content. But I also want to do PBL the right way … where students are excited and involved and engaged with their learning. Not feeling like it’s just another boring project …

So yesterday I went into class armed with 30 copies of the English 7-10 syllabus, got my class to sit on the floor in a circle and we chatted about subject English – what is it, why do we do it. Then I showed them the syllabus and had them read through and highlight the outcomes that I had decided needed to be met by them by the end of the term. Admittedly this took a while and involved quite a bit of paraphrasing and explaining terminology etc – a syllabus is no easy document to read. Then I asked them this question: What project do YOU want to do that will help you meet these outcomes?

My students were well confused by this. OK, maybe they were more freaked out, especially since I ripped up a copy of my project and told them we wouldn’t be doing it anymore because it was MY project and not theirs. I must confess, I was just wishing they would scream, ‘Don’t do it, miss! Your project is awesome and so are you!’ but really they were just entertained and very curious. I sent them off in their project teams to design their own projects. The only two requirements was that they needed to include engagement/mastery of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the project had to ensure the selected outcomes are met.

To cut a long story short, by the end of last period yesterday, my students were excited about THEIR project. Some had modified aspects of my original project outline – using the DQ but changing the product. Others came up with their own DQ (preferring to focus on humour rather than happiness) and focused on different products and audiences – one group is now doing a series of joke books answering the driving question, ‘What makes you laugh?’.

My way of dealing with a failed project may not have been perfect (honestly it was perfectly frightening and we have now ‘lost’ two periods of class) but it has taught my students that being involved in the learning process and true engagement is hard but important. They can have a voice and choice in how they learn – it’s not enough to just do as you’re told.

Let’s see how their projects turn out …

My research: PBL, assessment and subject English

OK. So on Monday I got a really serious email from my MEd supervisor (Dr Jon Callow, Sydney University … cool, huh?) … it was a timetable for my Masters and it was hectic. There is so much for me to do between now and next August when I graduate that it makes my head spin and my toes tingle. Not in a good way.

The first thing that is due is my research proposal … and I have to present that to a panel! Eek! I’ve already written a draft thesis proposal as part of a unit of study that I did last year (you can laugh at it here). Looking back over it now, I cringe – I have learnt so much since then, most importantly the value of ‘small’ ideas. It’s nice to dream big, but research is expensive (time and money) and I need to be realistic about what I can achieve. Over the last 8 months I have pared back the focus of my research to just assessment, project-learning and the English classroom. It is still too loose to be able to write, so I’m at that ‘read and immerse’ stage where I just have to drown myself in other people’s words and ideas and experiences. It’s so weird because – to be completely honest – I don’t particularly enjoy reading other people’s ideas and experiences. Oh, I don’t know if ‘enjoy’ is the right word – I enjoy it when I do it, I just rarely do it and I dunno why. Arrogance most likely. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at (in a slow, stuttering Hugh Grant is proposing to a daft blonde kind of way) is that I need help.

<ignore this paragraph it is garbage>

I am leaning heavily towards a case study consisting of one English class – focusing on the attitudes (but maybe not attitudes??) of the students and the teacher towards (the effectiveness of??) different forms of assessment. I’d do something like help a teacher plan and run a PBL-style project whereby three different forms of assessment are included (assessment of, for and as) in the three week project. Urgh. Writing it down makes it sound so stupid. Basically there seems to be ZERO research into PBL (my type of PBL, like the BIE model basically) in Australia and absolutely ZERO into PBL in the English classroom. So that means there is a ‘gap’ – a good thing for researchers. My job is to fill up the gap, haha. The final layer is assessment … well really feedback is truly what I’m interested in … or is it the ‘assessment cycle’ in the English classroom?

SORRY! Here is what I want to say about assessment … it’s from my draft thesis proposal:

A challenge faced by secondary English teachers in Australia is the nature of assessment. Often the primary assessment in English is summative despite evidence that formative or assessment for learning practices have ‘more impact on learning than any other general factor’ (Petty, 2006). The Rationale of the NSW English Stage 4/5 Syllabus (2003, p. 7) and Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 6) both advocate assessment for learning practices including peer and self-assessment.  In their seminal paper, Black and William (1998) conclude that the introduction of effective assessment for learning  “will require significant changes in classroom practice” (p. 141) because “instruction and formative assessment are indivisible” (p. 143). Importantly Black and William propose that “what is needed is a classroom culture of questioning and deep thinking, in which pupils learn from shared discussions with teachers and peers” (p. 146). These features are key elements of project-based pedagogies which have been shown to “have documented positive changes for teachers and students in motivation, attitude toward learning, and skills, including work habits, critical thinking skills and problem-solving” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, p. 4, 2008) Barron’s (1998) study of project and problem-based learning using a longitudinal case study of 5^th graders found that, given timely feedback as part of their PBL experience, students took “advantage of the opportunity to revise” (p. 304). Moreover, Barron concluded that an “emphasis on formative assessment and revision” (p. 305) is central to PBL.

And this is what I want to say about Project Based Learning … from same place as above paragraph.

Project-based learning is a pedagogy that engages students in relevant, real-world problems that require them to attain and strengthen skills essential for success in the 21st century – collaboration, communication, creativity, digital citizenship – as well as understanding positive ‘habits of mind’ (Costa, 2007). Founded in Constructivist theory, Project Based Learning “involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event or presentation to an audience” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2).   Research into project-based learning (PBL) “has found that students who engage in this approach benefit from gains in factual learning that are equivalent or superior to those of students who engage in traditional forms of instruction” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2).

What do I want from YOU?! Well … I’m doing this research thing new-skool. Yeah, I can read through the reference list of a hundred journal articles and I can trawl through the edu data bases of Sydney University … but I could also use my wonderful edu network and ask YOU what articles/research you have read relating to ANY aspects of my focus topic (PBL, assessment/feedback and the English classroom in NSW, Australia) that might help me better immerse myself in this topic and find some truly awesome gaps to fill, haha. If you just know the name of an academic or writer or teacher or article or blog or journal that you think I should track down or read … pretty please let me know by posting a comment below. I reckon edu research should be collaborative and should be shared immediately. I’ll be posting here everything I think, find and write … straight away, no waiting for a journal to tell me I’m good enough. Unless of course I get told off for doing so, haha – then I’ll tell you about me being told off 😉

Thanks a million in advance!

You’ve gotta walk the walk …

Yesterday was the first time that I have taught on a Monday in 6 months. That’s a big deal because I have four junior classes on a Monday and NO senior classes. I have Year 8 twice – period 1 and period 6. Yup, it’s like two completely different classes. It’s bizarre what five hours of being caged can do to a group of 30 14 year olds.

After struggling to invent some kind of engaging ‘hook’ lesson for our new literature circles project, and doing my best to keep the students ‘under control’ whilst they took part in the activities; I came out of the lesson shell-shocked. For real. I was all like, ‘What the heck am I doing this for?’ and, ‘I am so bad at teaching!’. I felt like a prac student after her first solo-lesson. Thank goodness there wasn’t a supervising teacher in the room or I would have been sent packing.

Next lesson was Year 10 (although I thought it was Year 9 so I amped myself up for discord only to be greeted by the smiling faces of 19 girls). The boys were out for their ‘Men of Honour’ day, so the girls and I got to spend the lesson sitting in a circle, chatting about the women in Macbeth and vaginas, lol. It was a lovely lesson.

Recess – yay, chocolate cake for my colleague’s birthday! Then the nightmare of a double period of Year 12 Trial marking and helping our teacher/librarian out with her first attempt at creating a PBL project. Lunch time? I forgot that I had play-ground duty so had to rush out and stand in the sun watching boys play handball. Not so bad except I had a towering pile of marking that wasn’t getting much smaller due to a bombardment of interruptions in the English staffroom.

Period 5 was Year 9. I haven’t seen these guys on a Monday for so long and they were super excited to have me back as their teacher – such a nice feeling! What was rather ‘trying’ was the eagerness of a small group of boys to participate in EVERY drama activity – even when they weren’t meant to … urgh. This is a ‘cute’ thing, right? Like they were SO engaged in the tasks that they couldn’t STOP participating. Or maybe there is something else at play, like the boys being dominant and not just playful? It didn’t bother the other students and therefore I took it as playful – kids at my school are usually over-friendly more than devious. It was an exhausting lesson though – those ‘fun’ lessons we all hear about from the presenter on our occasional PD days are impossible to sustain, given more often than not when we teach 5 or 6 lessons per day.

Period 6 was Year 8 again … we had some special guests in the classroom – students from Maebashi, Japan. It’s always hard to know what’s the best type of lesson when you have ESL students in a class of primarily English-speakers. It was even worse given that these three students had minimal to no English. What was I to do? I did the wrong thing. I just ignored their needs and powered ahead with a lesson I felt I ‘needed’ to get through (introducing the roles in Literature Circles because I will be away from class the next two lessons). OK, I didn’t ignore my guests, I said hello and smiled at them a lot, haha. Shocking, hey? Then I went off on my teacher-centred whole-class instruction mode and ‘taught’ what I needed to get through … what a horrible approach to a lesson! I even yelled a little because the kids were noisy coming into the class and made them sit in a seating plan. Who the hell am I? Half-way through I saw some kids staring out at the trees, I saw others drawing pictures in their books. I hated the lesson but felt confident the students would ‘learn’ the roles despite the boredom. The quiz at the end revealed that to be false. Most of them didn’t learn the responsibilities of each role. Wahhh.

After school I sat with my colleague and we compared our marks for the Belonging essays – all essays are double-marked and checked for discrepancies at my school. Then when I got home (at 5.30pm) I sat down and wrote detailed, personalised ‘medals’ and ‘missions’ comments on the back of every essay and in the middle of that managed to eat a hasty dinner. At 8.30pm I started marking English extension two major works and reflection statements. I got to bed at midnight.

You know what? This is the daily experience of the every-day teacher. Don’t come into our schools – or target us on social media or email – and try to tell us that we should do this and that to be better teachers. Don’t try to tell us we need to work harder. If you aren’t walking than walk, then don’t talk the talk. Word.

Three PBL Secrets …

1. Your first project will fail.
2. Start small – a one week project at most.
3. Talk openly with your students about the process and what/if they are learning.

Discuss.

#ISTE12 Day Two

Day One of #ISTE12 was, to be honest, a bit of a let down. It did end with a wonderful dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory with Roger and Lynette Pryor. It certainly was refreshing to spend time with Aussies who see through the bullshit of education conferences and look critically at what underlies them – schools, teachers, parents and most importantly students. We spent a few hours talking about our frustrations and our dreams and we all left with a couple of drinks under our belts and plans to meet up back in Oz and hatch some plans.

Day two of ISTE was much better than day one. Why? A couple of reasons. One, I found my Kiwi/Aussie mate Glenn which meant I could relax and have a laugh – even though I’m sure sometimes he got driven mad by me and longed to be ISTEing solo again. Second reason was because the sessions were just better. The best session of the day was the one by High Tech High CEO Larry Rosenstock. His presentation was inspiring – his school and his vision for education was admirable. I guess if you saw my tweets during this session you’ll know why … I’ve added some of them below for you. I’ve always been interested in High Tech High – well ever since I started experimenting with PBL – and hearing Larry speak reinforced this interest. I love that his vision for teachers as collaborative agitators (meeting every morning to share their latest ideas for critique) and the complete removal of all of (what I call) the ‘nationalist’ elements of schooling – things like homecoming, proms and football (esp the mascot). Kids participate in sport but not for competitive prestige. I always think about the ideal school Orwell would have designed … removing non-community sports would have been a must.

Other sessions I attended were the Collaborative writing session run by a panel of teachers (a really cool design for this type of conference) facilitated by Vicki Davis. I liked their positive approach to the National Curriculum and the Common Core. I tweeted some stuff about it, see below. I’m interested in using Student Writing Groups in my classes – I’ll be investigating how these can be enhanced by using edmodo too.

Lastly, I attended a session on Infographics and Data Visualisations by David Warlick. It started off being interesting – there’s something shocking and interesting about data presented via infographics – but after half an hour or more of looking at them, I got bored. I wanted more discussion of how these can be used to enhance students learning and engagement. It really didn’t move into that region very much beyond David’s suggestion that we use the data visualisations to provoke student questions. Hmmm … no duh. I was disappointed by this session and you can probably tell from my tweets.

Oh wait – there was one more session I attended that was brilliant and which I could not tweet from. If you ever get to attend ISTE, make sure you participate in a Birds of a Feather session. I joined the PBL session facilitated by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss (OMG – I know … THE writers on PBL research, just amazing to be in the room with them!). When I came into the room I knew I would love the session – the chairs were being moved around into circles, all messy and awesome. We then spent the next hour or so responding to prompt questions in small groups – rotating every question. It was so much fun and I learnt heaps. The people in the room were big PBL players (Shelley Wright, Theresa Shafer, Chris Lehmann and Mike Gwaltney to name a few) as well as complete beginners. I loved this session!

And to end this busy, busy day I attended the EdTech Karaoke party put on by a bunch of edtech businesses like Edutopia. It was a truly weird experience. I was lucky enough to catch up with David Ross and Dayna Laur from BIE right when I entered the party. They are such great people – genuine, passionate and warm. Meeting people like David and Dayna makes all the other silly twitter and edutech-hype stuff worth wading your way through. I then met up Glenn and some other Aussies and after a few more drinks ended up on stage make a git out of myself singing ‘Land Down Under’. Oh dear. If you ever come to ISTE and consider attending the EdTech Karaoke party, hire out a copy of Revenge of the Nerds to help you prepare, haha – it was fun in a geeky way, but I suggest leaving well before 11pm.

Why did I got to ISTE? The conversations with people who live on the other side of the world.

Another lesson failed by the filter …

Most schools have them, most teachers and students hate them. Internet filters.

This morning I spent two hours creating what I think is a pretty great mini-project for my Year 8 students. It’s based on the online game ‘Machinarium’ … using it as a stimulus for creative writing. Here is the outline of the project: steam-punk

I set the task as an edmodo assignment for my Year 8 class this morning. And guess what I saw when I logged-in to see how they went with it? A message telling me the game was BLOCKED by the filter. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is as an educator trying to use new media and digital/mulitmedia in her classroom. I’m not even in the classroom today and I’m still working hard to give the kids an engaging and effective project to complete … argghhh!! I know I should check these things before hand, I know there are processes to follow in order to have the site unblocked … but these things just add another layer of work for teachers. No wonder so many teachers just think ‘screw that, I’m sticking with my text book and worksheets‘.

OK, rant over. Of course the students can play the game at home and still complete the task on Monday, but that’s not the point. I know we’ve all got to live in a filtered world, I just had to share my frustration (and sympathies) with you all.

The Catcher in the Rye: can stories help young people develop resilience?

I have been working very hard over the last few days to think of a project that will engage and impress my Year 10 Extension class as much as our much-loved Hunger Games RPG (which was so loved one student wrote 14,000 words in 14 days).

I don’t think this project will result in my students staying awake and posting messages on facebook and twitter until midnight (like #HG2212 did), but I do hope it will make a lasting impression on them as human beings. This article kinda gets to the heart of this project’s relevance.

Below is our project outline. I’m about to send it to them on edmodo. Wish me luck.

A 5 week ‘Wuthering Heights’ project (saving my arse).

If you read my last post you’ll know that I’m teaching Wuthering Heights this term. I also have to teach the poetry of Keats to the same group of kids … and it’s my first time teaching both. I have found that using PBL (particularly the use of check-lists, drafts, plans and feedback) with this class has produced some high quality, original compositions from students who may ordinarily rely on ‘spoon-feeding’ and teacher ideas.

Instead of spending hours ‘up-skilling’ myself before my lesson tomorrow (cos let’s face it, when you’re teaching the very top students in your school you get a bit panicked about looking like the true holder of all knowledge), I’ve decided to create a mini-project for my students. Basically it’s just an outline of what they need to know by the end of our 5 week study of Wuthering Heights … and maybe the expectation that this knowledge is self-generated and presented on a webpage for the world to see. The project outline will hopefully give my students a vision of where we are heading … it becomes their learning goals for the duration of our novel study.

Anyway, if it freaks them out (which I know it will because what they need to know about this text looks fair epic!) I think that’s a good thing … better than them spending five weeks chatting about the novel, reading and viewing stuff about it and then at the end going, ‘What do I need to know for the Trials, Miss?’. But really – the project outline is for me. A glorified worksheet. Now I don’t need to teach anything at all. It’s all up to them.

Here is the project outline: