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Over a week ago I was invited by Toucan Computing to give a brief presentation on Felsted’s use of mobile technology at Apple’s European offices in London (just above the Apple Store on regent street). Other schools also discussed their experiences/programmes too and it was interesting to note the high proportion of primary schools seem to be leading the way in using the iPod Touch in the classroom. The one notable exception at the briefing was Essa Academy in Bolton (I will return to them later). A few Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) were also on hand to offer (sometimes very strong) opinions on how they saw mobile learning. Although I found what they said useful, I really wanted an ADE who still worked at a school to voice their opinion. What was clear from the mobile briefing is that a few schools are starting to move away from the ‘office’ dominated view of ICT to one that complements teaching and learning.

On the Friday, I visited Neal Watkin in Ipswich. Neal is an Advanced Skills Teacher in History and over the last year he has been looking at incorporating some of John Hattie’s effect size research into his lessons. What impressed me the most was the collaborative nature of the work; the county advisor (Dale Banham) had brought together a group of ASTs in English and History to come up with the general principles for the project and as a result, it had been tested in a variety of schools. Neal has managed to bring the latest research on teaching and learning into the classroom and and gained support from a variety of quarters. I look forward to the presentation of the results at next year’s Schools History Project Conference.

On the following Monday, I went to visit The Bishop Stortford High School, courtesy of the incoming Head of Sixth Form, Tom Capewell. Tom organised a great series of observations and I was most struck most by the English lesson I saw taught by Nick Patterson, the subject leader for English. He had the boys get to grips with the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth on London and used a great strategy to get them to compare the poems in a table using only one word to describe each poem, giving a clear structure of points to would later be used to write an essay. I thought this was inspired and will have to adopt this method in my use of source work next year. I also spent a a good amount of time talking to the Head of ICT about their use of the iPod Touch next year. They are asking every parent of the incoming Year 7 to buy one so they can use it as a personal organiser and web device for work. The school is in an affluent area and many of the students already have an iPod Touch so this seems sensible to me, especially when the students have access to the latest technology and schools are always playing catch-up.

I then made my way to Bolton with the Head of Classics to see the work of Essa Academy and Abdul Chohan. Achievement had previously lurking around the 20-30% pass rate for 5 GCSEs including Maths and English but projections show an incredible upsurge and they are looking forward to August. The work at Essa covers many areas but the one aspect they have gained attention for is by giving each student an iPod Touch. This has had a dramatic effect in terms of student organisation and curriculum delivery in particular as the school has subscribed to a company providing podcasts covering all GCSE subjects so learning can happen anywhere. After spending the morning there, it was very clear that this is a school going places. The innovative approach to teaching and learning at Essa is remarkable. One aspect was teaching Year 7 in ‘pods’ of 40 under the watchful gaze of a secondary specialist, a primary specialist and a teaching assistant as they go through different topics to enhance their basic skills. Another was the novel approach to giving students a broad education by giving them the ability to change subjects every 6 months (everyone would study the core of English, Maths and Science but the other subjects did not have to be a full GCSE in a particular topic although they could choose this).

After leaving Essa, we went to visit Heathfields, a local primary school. Dianne Spencer (the Head) and David Mitchell (the Deputy Head) kindly showed us around and some of the work of the students. I was very impressed with the extended writing one young lady; her use of connectives through the VCOP method made me rethink how I get students at secondary level to write essays. Continuing the primary theme, I visited Flitch Green Primary School on the following day to teach a lesson to Saturn Class on the Vikings with Chronology as the key conceptual focus. Flitch Green is also an Apple Regional Training Centre and the use of technology to support learning is something to behold. In preparation for the lesson, I visited the school a week before and I saw some wonderful animation work with strong narratives which sparked the use of Ian Dawson’s work on active learning in History. The pupils and I worked together to construct a narrative of the Vikings as part of the History they had studied.  This worked really well especially as the tabards they wore gave them a nice visual and physical reference of the overlaps between the Romans and the Saxons. I then got them to sequence a series of pictures by telling them a brief history of the Vikings which seemed to work well. What I did not expect was the lovely messages and feedback about the lesson from the pupils. I would like to thank Katie Coburn for allowing me to hijack her class for the morning!

Feedback from Saturn Class using Wallwisher on the Viking lesson

So, after all this wandering and wondering, what have I learned? There are a lot of people, both primary and secondary, who are also ‘travelling without maps’ in terms of curriculum design, lesson planning, pastoral care and the thinking about the environment students work in. What guides them in this creative uncertainty is the conviction that the children in their care deserve their best. I am very grateful that they have allowed me to share in their journey.

Front image: half alive@Flickr.com

World Map - 1689

‘We could roll up the map of the Cold War and travel without maps for a while’
E P Thompson on the possibility of social groups affecting the Cold War in 1982.

The academic year has finished and as you often do when things end, I started to think about my assumptions at the beginning of year. In some cases, I exceeded my expectations and in other areas I have been left with an uneasy gnawing feeling that only exists when things are left undone or have been completed poorly. Thinking about my role as Assistant Head in particular, I have come to realise that the plans I made were just guesses, contingent on a range of assumptions (succinctly and brutally put in Fried and Hansson’s ‘Rework’) that I was not really in control of despite my best efforts. Of course, there were variables I could control myself but my ‘map’ of how I thought the year was going to go did not lead me to plan for all the changes I was going to encounter. It is impossible to plan for everything but one thing I can do is to get better at preparing myself before I start. I have learned from experience that the best way to challenge and stimulate my own thinking is by seeing the excellence displayed by my peers. It was obvious that a journey around the country to see and experience excellence would help me create a more detailed ‘map’ for the coming academic year.

Source work at Diana Laffin's workshop

The first ‘stop’ on this journey is the Schools History Project conference in Leeds. This is a good place to start as it provides an amazing opportunity to see many History teachers and trainers at the top of their game in one place. One person I always try to see is Diana Laffin. Her work with her A Level History students always forces me to raise my expectations on what can be done with History in the 6th Form. This year was no exception and the source analysis activity she and Emma Kelley modelled using Enoch Powell’s speech was brilliant. They gave us the text of the speech but also said that an extra sentence/paragraph had been inserted and we needed to identify it. What this neat trick did was to force us to read the source a few times, getting a feel for the overall speech and looking for a specific phrase or wording which would betray the inserted text. This ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ reading worked brilliantly. They also asked us to annotate, in silence, the questions we would like to ask and any observations we wanted to make before we could discuss it as a group. Finally, we were instructed to make up a tabloid headline representing a particular point of view using a variety of sources, making the seemingly ‘dull’ topic of housing an engaging and ‘live’ topic. There are so many ways that their work could be deployed in my planning and I hope the students feel the benefit of Diana and Emma’s inspirational workshop.

Another stimulating experience was chairing the TeachMeet session with able assistance by John Heffernan, Sarah (Head of Classics at Felsted) and the brilliant ICT technicians at Trinity and All Saints. 39 people turned up to find out what other teachers were doing in their classroom and I was impressed and challenged by all the presentations. I would like to thank all the people who volunteered to present, Steve Bunce for booking the Flashmeeting and Doug Belshaw for keeping things running virtually. In addition, I also want to thank the sponsors: Beedocs, Vital, Heinemann and Toucan Computing. After the frenetic pace of the TeachMeet I had hoped for a rest but I readily volunteered to became a ‘common soldier’ in Parliament’s Army as part of Ian Dawson’s brilliant Saturday night extravaganza on the English Civil Wars in the North of England. Ian’s work is interesting as he has the knack of making the fiendishly complex easy to understand through active learning and this session was no different. The weekend was rounded off with a session delivered by Christine Counsell on Change and Continuity. What I loved about this session was Christine’s use of the Cambridge PGCE students’ work to illustrate her points and the understanding that her thinking on the issue was still developing. I was also struck by her use of Playdoh to get the delegates to represent key concepts in a visual way. This is a brilliant way to get the students to genuinely show their understanding of a concept even though it appears to be simply making shapes to represent a word.

Christine Counsell at the SHP conference.

Christine’s activity with the Playdoh resonated with most of what I had seen that weekend in terms of the role ‘play’ has in learning; being a journalist or a common soldier increased my enjoyment and understanding of the topic we were looking at. How could I thoughtfully use such activities to increase engagement but also develop ‘deep’ thinking to allow my students to see and touch the different textures of the stories within my lessons? A possible answer to this question was given by visiting Dawn Hallybone at Oakdale Junior School in East London. This was an unusual place for me as a secondary teacher but Dawn is well known in UK educational technology circles as an advocate and leading practitioner of Game Based Learning. Seeing her class ‘On Safari’ radically altered my perception on Game Based Learning and my own teaching. Using the Nintendo Wii game, ‘Wild Earth: African Safari’, Dawn’s class roamed around the virtual Serengeti national park taking ‘pictures’ and recording information meticulously about the animals they encountered. When they were given a task by the game to find an animal they did not know, Dawn directed a student to find out and they shared the information with the class (like the case of the Zorilla, which I had no idea about). Always mindful of the environmental impact of their exploration (due to the bar on the top of the interactive whiteboard), they continued to record information about the animals they encountered in their notebooks until the game clock had elapsed. From a secondary school point of view, the level of concentration displayed really impressed me and what happened next really made me rethink writing at secondary level. Without the use of a writing frame, the pupils in pairs (via Purplemash) began to produce fantastic descriptions of the animals they had seen, using the facts they had gleaned from being ‘On Safari’ in their notebooks. I realised in that moment that what I had just seen was a creative approach to knowledge acquisition augmented by the intrinsic motivation of the pupils within a context where saying ‘I don’t know’ was seen as a necessary and normal part of learning. Dawn did guide her class at times but they were merrily recording information and writing without much external pressure. For a secondary teacher, it was revelatory and I would like to thank Dawn and her class for sharing their learning with me.

Both the SHP conference and the visit to Dawn’s school made me challenge my ‘map’ of priorities for next year. I still have two more schools to visit this week but it has become clear that in order to renew my focus and deal with the rapid changes and demands, I need to roll up the map of my current way of thinking and travel without maps for a while.

Front and first image: Chuck ‘Caveman’ Coker @ Flickr.