A long time ago I downloaded the TED Talks app on my tablet but in all the years it's been on there, I've not actually used it. The other day I opened it up, which caused it to start giving me some suggestions. I've watched a few of them in the past few days and here's one I feel is worth sharing.
It's all about what Adam Grant terms Originals - that is creative thinkers. He tells a story of how he missed an investment opportunity that would have paid off immensely for him because he didn't recognize that the ones who offered it to him were going to be successful.
A big part of the talk is how (moderate) procrastination can lead on to more creative responses. he says (and it's backed by his research) that if you put of completing a task it gives you more time to think and more time to come up with more ingenious solutions or responses. I found this to be very empowering as I do tend to be a person who procrastinates (and in fact, this blog post is a semi-procrastination from working on one of my Coding Across the Curriculum videos), but I also tend to come up with creative solutions. It's nice to see the connection between the two. It's also nice to be able to support those children who (again, moderately) procrastinate with their work - to give them time to think and mull over ideas.
A second idea that he discusses is the idea that original people are full of doubt and fears. What is different however, is that the doubt is not self-doubt, but idea-doubt. That is, that original and creative people doubt that ideas will work, but don't give up on solving any problems. Many people doubt themselves so much that they don't even put ideas forward. This is not what originals do. He discussed the fact that you can (almost) predict the creativity of a person based on the internet browser they use (I'll let you watch the video to find out more on that though). The argument with that is not that your browser makes you creative, but the way you choose which browser you'll use reveals a lot about your mindset (so just changing browsers does nothing, I'm sorry to say to you Internet Explorer and Safari users - whoops, I just ruined the surprise).
The final point that he makes is that creative and original people produce a lot - and that a lot of it isn't their greatest. Most people who have done great and amazing things have got their because they tried many, many things. It is through those attempts that eventually they have discovered new and original ways of doing things. This ties into the whole idea that failure and mistakes help you grow (also doing an online course where this is being stressed - more on that when it's done).
Here's the talk below. It's definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. If you are one of the people he is describing then this can be very empowering. If you are not, then it can give you some insight into how you can be like that AND how you can recognize those people who are.
I'm pretty sure that I've previously mentioned some offshoots of my Google Innovator Project, but I haven't yet talked about one of ones I've spent more time on than the others: my Maths Strategy Videos. I essentially have had this idea for a few years now, but have kind of sat on it for a while because of time and not really having the confidence or motivation. That all changed with making videos for breakouts and coding.
I've used videos before in my mathematics teaching but often it was hard to find ones that aligned with what I was meant to teach. I've also been taking an online course through Stanford University and Jo Boaler that's been encouraging me to make maths more visual.
When planning my videos I wanted to be able to show learners a variety of ways that they could visualize a problem or strategy. But I also wanted to make the videos short and sweet. Admittedly I do feel like an amateur, both with the quality of the videos but also the content.
I've tried to get lots of feedback (and I've gotten a bit from my immediate colleagues at Ormiston) but I still doubt that I'm showing the strategies the best way I could. At the end of the day though, it's another resource for children to use in order to understand mathematical concepts.
So why do I think this is a good idea? I've noticed that many children do not feel very confident in maths class. Their brains seem to shut off the moment you say "It's time for maths." For many children these are difficult and abstract concepts to understand and they are likely taught way to quickly. I wanted to give them a chance to review the lessons at their own pace. I also wanted to make it possible for me to do the work of 10 educators at the same time. All learners have different needs and this helps me meet them.
Ideally, I'll be able to cover all the different strategies in the NZ curriculum and beyond. In my future, utopic maths classroom, my learners would learn at their own pace, watching the videos and completing the work as fast or as slow as they could. I would act as a guide and facilitator - making sure they got the help they needed and that they were moving forward as they understood new concepts. This would go alongside collaborative, mixed-achievment problem solving, with (hopefully) rich mathematical discussions.
I've also started thinking of other ways I can flip the classroom. Watch for some writing videos coming soon...
Here is the link where I'll be housing all of the videos as I make them. I'll likely also have some sort of progressions where the videos can be linked to the curriculum.
Since I returned from Sydney in August, my work on my Innovator project has been somewhat uneven. I initially did a lot of planning but had lots of work at school to do. During the school holidays I got a good amount done, but have since slowed down. Still, I've managed to make some pretty good progress and follow some pretty interesting tangents to my project so I thought I would share my journey up to this point.
The Good News
I've managed to make two videos. To be honest I didn't think that I would be this far along at this point, so that's pretty good. Both videos were shot and edited during one week, so if given the time, I know that I can produce these at a fairly good rate.
I've also received mostly positive feedback from the educators that have used the videos, and many are looking for more. So that's also exciting. One of the bits of feedback I got was from Tim Bell, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Canterbury who has been significantly involved in both CS Unplugged and the creation of the new Digital Technologies Curriculum here in New Zealand. I had also previously attended one of his workshops in Christchurch (CS4PS) that has been instrumental in my understanding of computational thinking. So that was a pretty big deal for me. His advice was extremely helpful and will hopefully be seen in some upcoming videos.
I've also had a chance to try out one of my videos with my own learners, which was part of the reason for picking that idea. The early responses were very positive. The children were able to complete the task, with very little extra input from me, which made it much easier for me to manage another group (see some comments below about that). The idea of teaching this way is probably something that is going to increase more and more in the future. It frees up educators to do what educators do best: guide children. It allows children to learn at their own pace. Some people may say that getting a robot to do an educators job will not be as good, but I say that they've made educators do robots' jobs for so long it's about time we did what we can do to be more impactful. I'm not saying videos should be used exclusively, but if a child can learn from a video of me doing something, that allows me to teach a lot more children and frees me up to support them in other ways rather than just content delivery.
Another thing that has come out of this is that I'm learning a lot more skills for producing videos. There has been a quick learning curve and I imagine that as time goes by I'll have to learn more out of necessity. Already I have been looking at ways to improve sound quality and I want to work on video quality as well (I'm not so sure filming with an iPad is the best way to go, so we'll see).
Overall I'm extremely please with the progress so far.
The Bad Stuff
One of my biggest frustrations at the moment is time. There is just not enough of it to do everything I want to do AND have a life outside of school. For various reasons, most of my out of school time has been focused on non-school activities - which is the way it should be, to be honest. That means though, that I have been much slower at putting the videos out that I thought I could be after making the first two. My plan was actually to have three done before school had started this term because I was teaching both ideas and it would have allowed me to see how two different videos would work in a classroom setting. That being said, it's probably best not to pressure myself too much, as I've also managed to create some other things on the side, due to the skills I've learned making these videos.
The Interesting Tangents
At least two other projects have come out of this journey so far, and I'm planning a few more as well. The first one (which I've actually written about already) was the digital breakouts I've been making. The second, which may actually have the potential to be more impactful on education than either of the others is that I've started making a series of videos to show a variety of math strategies. It was a convergence of a lot of things all at the right time that got me started on this and when I shared the first 8 videos (they're a lot quicker to make) the response was more positive than any of the other resources. But these resources will be shared in more depth in a further blog post.
Other things that have been happening as a result of this is that I'm getting contacted by more and more outside agencies and people (which reminds me I need to get back to them). This is certainly an area that I'm looking towards developing as my focus is shifting from my own classroom to a larger scale (potentially global at this point).
Where to Next
For my project, my future plans are to continue to make the videos. My next one (which I've got the script half finished) will be on making stories with Scratch, while the fourth will shift gears a bit and focus on debugging (which has come out of some discussions with others about the new curriculum). Beyond that we'll see. Hopefully that can be completed before the end of the school year (December) and I can use the holidays to make a few more. Ideally this will be alongside more breakouts and maths videos.
I also want to start looking at Phase Two of the project: starting meetups for educators who want some support or who want to share. In the coming weeks I will put some feelers out through Twitter and Facebook to see who is interested and will hopefully be able to plan something for late January or February next year. I'm getting a bit excited about this as bringing more people on board might make this project take off a bit more.
I've got to remember that things start slowly. If I only have two videos it's not as useful as if I have a whole collection. Once things are made it will be a bit easier to have an impact, but like I mentioned above, it's all about finding the time.
I'm going to leave you with the two videos I've produced so far. Feel free to share them and use them as much as you'd like. I always appreciate feedback on what I've done so that I can improve what I'm making. Subscribing to the MakerEdNZ YouTube Channel would also be greatly appreciated and make sure you got emailed about new videos.
For those of you who know me and my classroom, you'll know that I have a massive collection of Lego, including many, many minifigures. My learners this year have, with much collaboration, become very creative with the Lego, building houses, cafes and many other things with incredible detail. A couple of my learners have even gone so far as to make a number of stop motion videos, but in the last week they've taken things to an entirely new level.
When I first introduced Stop Motion to my class, we had been using Stop Motion Animator on chromebooks. I had some webcams that worked (though the majority of the ones I bought did not) and that was going fine. Then we had some issues with the saving, so it became very frustrating to see my learners put a lot of effort into their videos and then be unable to save things. So we tried Monkey Jam on the class desktops. There was an improvement in being able to save an export, but it was still a cumbersome process.
Then we tried the Stop Motion Animator App on the iPads. Brilliant. Great resolution, easy to use, easy to add audio and easy to upload to Youtube. Over the past few days, the big sets have been used to create some really elaborate and creative stories from two of my students. I especially enjoyed the way they used Lego bodies with no heads as clothes.
For anyone thinking about maker spaces, this is one way I have used my maker space to help develop literacy skills. Have a look at what they've done. My input was solely to provide the Lego and show briefly how to make a stop motion video. I'm really impressed with the direction they took with minimal direction. I think it goes to show that learners (of all ages) need an opportunity to explore. The first Lego creations and stop motion videos we did this year were not very exciting, creative or well done. But given time to try lots of things, they've been able to produce some amazing this. I only wish I could give this group of learners more time to develop these problem solving and collaborative skills.
Every term, each team at my school has an assembly where the learners come up and share something they've done. Each term, I've been the "lazy teacher" and had my learners come up with what to share, prepare everything and then present, with very little input from me. The first two times have been pretty good, especially considering they've likely not had any guidance in doing something like this before.
This term, after going to CS4PS, I went pretty hard out with teaching coding and computer science. I have some students who have really enjoyed doing coding (through code clubs and some of the lessons I've done in class) and they decided to share some stuff they've done on Scratch. The group chose itself, and was inclusive of all learners who wanted to participate. For few days of their preparation, I did absolutely nothing, except remind them they had a deadline. They worked together, having arguments and discussions. Tears were cried, but followed by talks to fix the tears (I may have nudged them to have those talks).
We had a practice on Friday morning and afterwards in class, we had a little critique to help them along. We first talked about all the great things they did (and there were a lot!) but then we discussed how we could improve. It was amazing to see how supportive and positive the rest of the class was in helping them along. They realized most of what we said anyways, so they were also being self critical (which, is yet another thing I want my learners to be).
Then this happened in the afternoon:
I'm so proud of them and I didn't even do anything, other than guide them along. This is all their doing. It's been a fun last couple of days in class with this and some other amazing things going on (hopefully I'll be blogging about another group that did another AMAZING thing this week, but we have to finalize some things on Monday).
Overview
Last year and this year, I've been experimented with no ability groups in both Writing and Mathematics. I've gone through ups and downs in this process. One thing that needs to be clear that having no ability groups does NOT mean that you don't differentiate. It just means that ALL tasks are accessible to ALL students and expectations are high for everyone. In my mind there is no acceptable target for meeting standards that is below 100%. In reality, you might not meet that, but that should absolutely be the goal. By teaching to levels, students don't always have the chance to make accelerated progress to catch up and the task can seem extremely daunting.
Earlier this year, I was involved in a Facebook conversation about mixed ability groups in Reading. I was getting a bit overwhelmed at the work I was putting in to try and make my reading program work, so I thought over the last holidays: Why not try something new? Can I mix ability groups in Reading and get better results? So I thought about what I had read and looked at some learning tools the school has in place currently and came up with a plan.
What it Looks Like Now
During week 1 of this term, I spent some time, developing a language of questions with my students. We talked about SOLO taxonomy as well as Bloom's Taxonomy (I am aware of the criticism against Bloom's but I still think it has some value). We worked through coming up with (or at least deciding on the level of) questions for our shared book.
At the end of the week, I picked 6 novels from the reading room and gave a brief introduction. Students choose their 1st, 2nd and 3rd preferences for the books and I put them into groups based solely on their choices.
During week 2, students first read the book with their group. They then filled out a chart with questions based on SOLO. With me, we discussed what happened, the questions (and answers) they came up with and we used a SOLO map to describe one of the characters, using evidence to support our claims. Students also spent some time filming their reading, as well as a cloze activity. One of the days, I asked the students to come up with a create question (Bloom's - this is my main use of it) and they had to make, write or do something. Observing this was interesting. The students were all 'in' the book. They were interacting with it in ways that I couldn't structure.
Reasons for Change:
I don't think I'm an unreasonable or reckless person. As I wrote previously, I think we need to be careful of not focusing on doing the wrong thing right, but rather doing the right thing, even if it's not perfect. I have reasons for making these changes and they are not simply because it's easier (it's not, for the record), I want to cause trouble (trouble is a byproduct of trying to change and do the right thing) or I'm defiant (only to people who are being oppressive). Here are some of the main thinking points I had to guide me:
Student Choice
Over the course of my career, I've noticed that many students are disengaged, not only with reading and writing, but with school in general. Most of what we have students read are not necessarily things they find interesting. Yes, many of the school readers attempt to be interesting, but you can't force a student to want to read something. I think back to my days in school. When I HAD to read books, it was much harder than when I had a choice. I would read tons in my summer. University was a killer. All the readings, and though useful, they were not a choice, so I was not very motivated to read them - and I'd describe myself as an avid reader. I wanted to give my students more control over what they read. Though this choice is limited by the books we have, at least they got to choose something.
Quality of Texts
Most of the books we read with students are not books anyone would take out of a library. They are either short stores that aren't particularly well written or they are short information texts. I know most libraries have these kinds of books, but I don't think I've ever seen a child near them (I guess this is also part of student choice). I wanted to read good books with the students that they would not only enjoy, but that had some sort of structure to them.
Depth of Understanding
I really wanted to incorporate SOLO into my reading program. I think it is a great tool to get students thinking about what they're reading. Could I have used this in the way I previously did Reading? Certainly, but this way of running a reading program allows for more continued discussion and helps manage the mixed ability groupings.
Sense of Accomplishment, Growth Mindset
I want to give students the opportunity to do something that lots of other teachers would say they can't do. My question to them would be: why not? I'm there to support those readers whose levels might not be as high as the others (and for the record, a number is just that, a number, it does not tell nearly the whole story). If a student wants to try a difficult book, I want them to try it and not be phased. If they struggle, then that opens up the desire to improve. We have been fostering a growth mindset in our class lately and this is an extension of that. You can do it, don't listen to the naysayers. Differentiated, but in a different way
Not differentiating learning wouldn't be good practice. No matter where you aimed your teaching, students would be getting bored because they either were being challenged too much or not enough. This way, students have different ways of challenging themselves with the same material. They support each other, but not in the way the "more able" students are tutoring the "less able" students. With fast readers developing questions (which helps their understanding and gives them responsibility) as well as creative tasks which they can do they get a challenge (Can you think like a teacher? Can you be creative in your questioning? Can you ask questions that you need to find out) while at the same time supporting the slower readers, who have a great set of student generated questions to help their understanding. With my guidance as well, students get a chance to answer those higher level questions and get answers that they may not have thought of. Plus, the oral language that can come out of these groups has proven in other subjects and areas to be quite rich.
Related Article and Videos
The following article from Mindshift, discusses some ideas of how to motivate students in reading and writing. It identifies some key ideas that should be addressed: Autonomy (choice), Relatedness (can they discuss this in a non high stakes way with peers and adults), Interest and Value (to goals, lives) and Competence. Competence is very important. If a student does not feel competent in something, it will be hard for them to enjoy it. How I am addressing that is with the SOLO maps as well as the questioning and differentiated support from me and their peers. The others seem to match up quite well with the other things I have explained above.
This video, while focused on Math, explains a lot of the reasons (backed up by research) for not ability grouping, which is relevant across all subjects. Note that this does not mean you do not differentiate, but you do so in a different way (by support, for example).
This second video, from John Hattie, goes on to explain that tracking has a 0 effect for teaching. He then explains an idea that I've had (and used as justification for not ability grouping): that students, particularly (but not limited to) in Mathematics, are not given the chance to change tracks (groups) because they are not given the content (or strategies) that 'higher' tracks receive. How could they possibly bridge the gap?
First Week Observations
I'm noticing students seem more excited (How do you quantify that? Being on task?) and are seen in tight-knit groups discussing the work. Several groups have jumped ahead (awesome!) to fill out the SOLO map without me and we were able to discuss this in more depth. One group I work with was very good at finding evidence within the book and some students who would have been classed as "low" were able to explain their answers coherently. Another student, when asked why he felt that one character was bossy was able to articulate that he just had a feeling. We discussed how we could find evidence for this, but I was impressed with how he articulated himself and wasn't worried that I would be upset with his answer. It was a good moment.
I also liked how I had shared the documents as a group rather than make a copy for each student. This took the emphasis off of individual responses (because, really, what's the point of all of them writing it down). The groups I worked with were very good at sharing these jobs.
The creative activities created what I would call chaos, but the good kind of chaos. Students were "in" the books, thinking about how the books related to their lives. They were being creative and making things. But most of all they were focused on what they were doing. Besides one student, every child knew what to do and was doing it.
Where to Next
Obviously I'm not perfect and neither is this reading program. As I've been getting things up and running, it has been hard to find time to focus on specific children (though I have managed to work with target students at times). I need to make sure that I am spending more time with target students to check their understanding. This could be as simple as them sitting beside me when we discuss the book, or just sitting down with them to listen to them read their pages. Time constraints, as always, are an issue. Perhaps dialling back the amount work to be done (e.g. cloze and filming) would be beneficial for students.
The noise is obviously an issue, which makes it hard for me to work with a group when it's too loud. Part of this could be solved by using our breakout room (sadly, not in existence until I move classrooms in a few weeks) for either my group sessions OR for the loud activities (our Makerspace/Lego).
I will need to read up a bit more on how to make this work, but at the moment, I think the most important criteria is being met: students are enjoying reading time and are actually reading during that time. From here on, it will be a series of tweaks (which, depending on time) may or may not be fully documented here.
