Stop teaching!

Did I get your attention?

Great.

I know this is nothing new to those of you who read my blog, but I just wanna say it anyway.

Teachers too often think about themselves.

Well I know I’m a grand-old hypocrite because after all this blog is named after me and is pretty much all about me. Feel free to add your thoughts about my ever-expanding ego as a comment below.

Right now, I’m concerned with the fact that teachers are doing all of the learning and leaving students to be passive receivers. We here all of this talk about passive and active learners. We are told that active learning = doubleplus good and passive learning = doubleplus ungood.

And then we see all of the beautiful resources teachers make for their students.

We see videos.

We see powerpoints.

We see websites.

We see blogs.

We see podcasts.

We see apps for iPhones and iPads.

We see games.

We see worksheets.

Teachers are talented, creative, knowledgeable … they show their students this all of the time.

Students are talented, creative, knowledgeable … we don’t let students show this to us all of the time.

When the new curriculum hits our shores teachers will run to create new programs and resources or they will run to access new programs and resources created by other educators.

Why don’t we just let the students be the creators?

Student as teacher.

Cool.

Reflection on collaborative work prompted by cleaning the toilet bowl …

Yup, I do my best thinking whilst I’m doing a mundane job – not that I want to in any way detract from people who take pride in their work as toilet cleaners, it does indeed take talent to master the perfect shine – and tonight is no exception. Hubby and I are doing a clean of the house before we head off to New Zealand with the boys for a couple of weeks. I’m assuming this is a pretty normal practice, cleaning the house you’re not going to live in for two weeks, or are we just batty? Either way, cleaning the toilet whilst Lee did the vacuuming prompted a reflection on team work.

Do you regularly incorporate team-work or collaborative learning into your teaching program? How often would students be expected to work cooperatively with one or more of their peers in your class? Do you actively encourage students to work with peers who are not considered ‘friends’ or with people who have a vastly different skill set?

The truth is that group work is often resisted by students when it is first introduced for a number of reasons. The main one would be the fear that their own success may be adversely impacted upon by members of their group. Students often don’t trust themselves to be able to stay on task when working with friends. They worry that not everyone will contribute equally to the project or task. Underlying these concerns is the awareness that success in school is a number. Success is measured by that number or percentage doled out by the teacher. Success is not marked by personal growth. It’s a shame that this is the case and that our students understand perfectly well how the ‘system’ of achievement in school works.

Working with my husband to clean the house tonight made me realise that working together to achieve a common goal forced us to unconsciously plan (he had to vacuum the spare room whilst I cleaned the ensuite, then he’d vacuum our bedroom and I’d move to the main bathroom), negotiate (vacuuming is less gross than toilets, but you have to do more rooms) and to chunk a large project (a clean house) into smaller, manageable tasks divided between the group members.

I hope my analogy hasn’t put you off your dinner – but I hope is HAS helped you to see how group work/collaborative learning enables our students to develop so many more real-world skills than independent work ever can.

So – how often do you include group work in your teaching program and is it there just for the sake of it, or do you include it in a meaningful way that ensures students are being assessed on their growth as young thinking citizens, and not just a finished product?

These guys worked together to create a human pyramid - awesome 😉

Edmodo keeps getting better!

It’s odd but I don’t think that I have ever blogged (solely) about edmodo. Edmodo is my most favourite web 2.0 tool. Why? Because it literally has become my virtual learning space. I guess I could say ‘classroom’ but I won’t because it connotes four walls and isolated teaching and learning. I guess I could say ‘environment’ because that is the buzz word (er, I mean ‘acronym’) ‘VLE’ but for me the word ‘space’ connotes freedom from the traditional restrictions placed on learning. I could use adjective ‘institutionalised’ in the preceding sentence but I refrained as I know you’ve heard it all before – being eduporn addicts and all!

So why blog about edmodo now? Afterall, I’ve been using this ‘micro-blog’/’social-networking for education’ for over 18 months now. I’ve been evangelising edmodo for the last 12 months. NOW is the time to blog about because it’s getting just so damn good! The people at edmodo have (honestly) listened to their community and moulded their (dare I say it?) ‘product’ to suit our needs and wants. It’s really cool that users can have such a genuine influence on education tools – what’s better is that it is free. It better stay that way. Can I have a chorus of ‘Ning’? 😉

I’m not going to blab on about edmodo like I do with everything else (afterall I have 6 hours to complete three piles of marking – two physical and one virtual – and three PBL projects to organise) I’m simply going to list my 5 fav things about edmodo at the moment.

1. Communities: This is a brand new feature just introduced to edmodo yesterday. (Aside: You know you’re an edu-geek when you notice a feature introduced 5 mins after it becomes available!) Edmodo communities are oriented by subjects (i.e. Social Science; Science; Mathematics; Language Arts) and are ‘suggested’ to teachers in the ‘suggestions’ tab. Once you join the community you can get direct access to the resources/ideas/experience/feedback of other teachers from around the world. Iknow many of you are on twitter – the best PLN there is. What edmodo communities allows you to do though is save any of your favourite resources/links directly to the built-in library (more about this at number 2). Also, the conversations are threaded and this means you can ‘write longer’ and keep track of a conversation more easily. Awesome.

2. Library feature: Edmodo recently added the library feature in order to assist teachers in keeping track of and organising the great resources they share  (and have shared with them) on edmodo. Simply put, every file and link added to an edmodo group is ‘magically’ placed into a large cache called the ‘library’. Teachers can then creat folders and select which resource should reside in which folder. I know this sounds simple but it gets even better. You can share these folders directly with your students! This means the teacher can select a variety of materials appropriate to a specific unit/topic and send these directly to the students, all organised into a folder! Awesome.

3. Assignments and gradebook: I am just beginning to use this feature regularly and I LOVE it! The edmodo assignments are so easy to set. All you have to do is click ‘assigment’, add the details of the task, upload files/attach links with a click, select the due date with another click and the send to your chosen group. (Go register for edmodo, play around with setting an assignment and I assure you it is this simple!) My fav part of this feature is the gradebook. Your students ‘turn-in’ an assignment with a click, and then you access them in your ‘spotlight’. Read through their work, give them some feedback and a mark – then literally with a click of a button the grades have been sent to your ‘gradebook’. Awesome.

4. RSS feeds: You can now RSS to your fav blog/site and it feed DIRECTLY into your chosen group. It’s so easy to do that even I worked it out in two minutes. I set up an RSS from the Board of Studies site to my Davidson DER group so the teachers at my school get the latest news from the BOS without any effort from me required.

5. Public pages: You can now select for certain posts/assignments/links/polls to be set as ‘public’. This is great because it allows your students to share their work/ideas with the ‘real world’ – especially their parents but the edmodo group as a whole maintains its ‘private’ status. Public pages are great to showcase student work and acts an incentive for students to put in their personal best with all tasks. See an example public page here.

So that’s my little edmodo evangelising. It really is great and my school has adopted it fully. My principal mentioned edmodo at assembly last week – allowing me to confidently proclaim on twitter that at Davo “we now have ‘momentum’ “. Blended learning is taking over my school slowly but surely – thanks edmodo!

Camp-fire Circle-Time and Orderly Disorder

A week of lessons has rushed past since I blogged about the reconfiguring of my classroom. I have deemed it a ’21st Century Learning Space’ as a bit of a joke at my own expense. (Some real ones can be found here.) It’s really just an ordinary classroom with desks in non-traditional arrangement and a rug on the floor!

My room is a little different to most I see daily because I have considered the impact that physical space has upon intellectual and emotional space. This is not to say I haven’t ever designed my classroom to maximise learning – I have been known to do this frequently and have been an advocate for groups/bunches that allow students to work together, especially with the introduction of 1-1 in our school. For me the current design is different because it drew on the mythic notions of the campfire, watering hole and cave (see earlier post here.) This philosophical underpinning gave me a metalanguage with which to speak to my students about ‘why’ the room is configured in this new way. This ‘language of myth’ actually works as a cue for my students. Yes, they think that it’s pretty lame to start with – but once you get them thinking about WHY these three types of learning are relevant to their world, they kinda get it. Plus, kids like it when you show enthusiasm for their learning – they love it when teachers throw caution (or is that fear?) to the wind and take a very visible risk. I guess I’m one to not worry too much about looking silly! I can now be heard saying to me students, ‘Alright – lets have a chat around the campfire and then you’ll spend some time in your caves.’

I currently teach four different English classes each week – Yr 7, 8, 10 and 12.  The reshaping of my room has pushed me into reshaping my pedagogy – a most desirable outcome. I am more conscious of the types of learning that are implicit in the activities I create and the outcomes I expect to meet. Circle-time has proved a hit with Year 10 – we’ve been sitting crossed-legged on the ‘camp-fire’ carpet sharing stories about our hopes and dreams post-HSC and confessing our true feelings about summative assessment and 21st century literacy skills. Year 8 have been reading in their caves twice per lesson (5 mins at beginning, 5 mins at the end) as well as playing spelling cames around the camp-fire.

Year 12 has been the most exciting! I have explained to them my refusal to spend 10 months prying open their mouths, shovelling content that has been made palatable by teacher and then asking them to say ‘ahh’ as regurgitated content is forced out and lands onto 3 page lined booklets. No, not me. (Yes, poor kids!) Instead, I’m designing each week of lessons around our mythic spaces. P1 = campfire stories (teacher-centred), P2 = cavetime (students independently work through a Blooms matrix), p3 = wateringhole chats (small group activities; outdoor activities; student presentations) and P4 = campfire (fishbowl; Socratic circles; circle-time). So far our discussions about the poetry of Dickinson and the thoughts of de Botton on ‘status anxiety’ have been lively and most of all, fun! 

Of course there are risks to be taken in this approach to classroom design. There can be a great deal of noise as the students move furniture (where necessary) and as they move themselves into the appropriate ‘space’. But the fear of noise in a classroom is simply a veiled fear of that which is natural and normal.

My goal for the coming week is to use a data projector to project the lesson plan on the board. This strategy I wasinspired by my prac student and will help orient students with the lesson’s expectations and prepare them for the transitions between cave/camp-fire/wateringhole. Not ALL spaces will be utilized in each lesson. Ultimately students, familiarised with the notion of ‘mythic spaces’ to enhance learning outcomes, will self-select the appropriate ‘space’ to meet a task. It is this which is my ultimate goal – to encourage self-direction and an appreciation of the influence that physical space can have on intellectual/emotional space.

So, how is your classroom arranged and why have you selected this design?