The wiki that has been built for this years HSC PDHPE class has just started getting a real workout from not only students from Magdalene, but also other schools around the state. (I monitor the site using a tool called ‘sitemeter‘ that tells me who is visiting and the town/city they are from. This provides some good feedback on how worthwhile the project has been and whether it is useful and worth pursuing). 

One of the more contentious aspects I have recently added to the wiki is the summary notes for each of the Cores and Options that we do. 

I read about a teacher a while back who was getting exceptional results with his HSC chemistry class year after year and one of the strategies that he outlined as important was giving the students his summary notes for the course and having students improve them. This to me is effective as it provides the crucial information in a simple and structured manner and allows students a base of quality information to work from.

Some may argue that this is almost cheating and you are doing all the work for the students. I would argue that as a teacher our job is to provide high quality information to our students for them to have the best chance of doing well. Especially in the HSC which is a high pressure, high stakes exam I see it as our responsibility to provide simple, structured, quality information to our students. Just as a text books provides information so do the summary notes. 

The other part Iike about the summary notes is that it encourages students to critique the information presented as it has not been verified as the textbooks have and I make it very clear to students to expect mistakes in the summary notes and to try and improve them and add accuracy to the information. This teaches students to be critical of the information they receive and to validate it from other reliable sources.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” albert einstein.

This is one of my favourite quotes and it underpins the way I present information as a teacher.

As a teacher I see our job as being to help our students understand and grasp complex ideas in simple ways that make sense to them. This does not mean that we attempt to take the complexity out of the ideas but that we are to present the ideas in a way that they can get their head around to be able to explore the concept on a deeper level. I am guilty at times of trying to present ideas in a complex form to students which often leaves some a little lost and the concept can go straight over their heads with having a chance to engage with the concept or issue. 

To balance that quote out I like the following quote also. They almost contradict one another but I think it comes down to explaining things in ways that are relevant and meaningful to students so that they can comprehend them and work with them. 

Teaching is a fine art – hope I can master it someday!!

The HSC Online forums have been running recently and I see them as being a really valuable resource for students. Students can ask questions and get answers from experts in the field. Even if students do not have questions, reading through others questions and the answers posted is a great way to reinforce their knowledge and understanding. Students can also attempt to answer the question themselves which is a great way to apply their knowledge.

My only fault with the service is that the time it runs for is very limited and the posts are withdrawn almost immediately after the closing of the forum. I think there is benefit in leaving the forum available to be read right up to the HSC, even if students can no longer post. Obviously the forums cannot run indefinitely as the time required to moderate is unfeasable for the teachers and educators who do so.

The www.boredofstudies.org website fills a gap in some ways here as they provide a forum and study notes/resources that students share. The forum is maintained by students so there are some risks here in the accuracy of the information but for the best part I have found the students to be close to the mark. The study notes are also a great resource for students and while I can see a lot of teachers and educators might disagree, I think they are great for students to use, critique and add to their own notes as a way of preparing for the HSC.

Just playing around with a new presentation tool called sliderocket. Basically a web based powerpoint so not sure how it will add anything but still played around with it!! Would be good for schools or people moving away from microsoft office applications I suppose as a way to present information. Does have an offline player also so can play without the internet of required. It is quite flashy but does seem to take a long time to load. Think I will keep playing around with this one.

PLC has been in the news recently about an assessment task it set where students were able to use the internet and mobile phones to access information to assist them in completing the task.

This post from Chris Betcher who teaches at the school is a great response to some misconceptions about the task. It has raised some important issues to the mainstream and hopefully these will be explored some more into the future.

I think it is great they have put this out there and have been willing to open their assessment methods up to the world. Ahead of their time perhaps, or just trying to get to where we should be???

I came across this handy little application which is essentially a nutritional analysis tool. It has over 7000 foods that are loaded into it and you simply enter what you eat on a given day and it gives you a nutritional analysis, including for vitamins and minerals and the ratio of carbohydrates, fat and protein.
You can do this each day to develop a food diary and this could be a great little tool to use with our students when looking at nutrition to see how nutritionally sound their diets are. While it is American based this should not be too hard to use and make relevant for us here in Australia.

download it here

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Stumbled across a great blog by Dan Meyer where he shares his classroom experiences as a beginning maths teacher. He is a very clever film maker and poses lots of good questions in his blog and videos. 

Just came across this interesting poem at http://tasteach.edublogs.org/

The Things We Steal From Children

By Dr John Edwards

If I am always the one to think of where to go next.
If where we go is always the decision of the curriculum or my curiosity and not theirs,
If motivation is mine,
If I always decide on the topic to be studied, the title of the story, the problem to be worked on,
If I am always the one who has reviewed their work and decided what they need,
How will they ever know how to begin?

If I am the one who is always monitoring progress.
If I set the pace of all working discussions,
If I always look ahead, foresee problems and endeavour to eliminate them,
If I swoop in and save them from cognitive conflict,
If I never allow them to feel and use the energy from confusion and frustration,
If things are always broken into short working periods,
If myself and others are allowed to break into their concentration,
If bells and I are always in control of the pace and flow of work,
How will they learn to continue their own work?

If all the marking and editing is done by me,
If the selection of which work is to be published or evaluated is made by me,
If what is valued and valuable is always decided by external sources or by me,
If there is no forum to discuss what delights them in their task, what is working,
what is not working, what they plan to do about it,
If they have not learned a language of self-assessment,
If ways of communicating their work are always controlled by me,
If our assessments are mainly summative rather then formative,
If they do not plan their way forward to further action,
How will they find ownership, direction and delight in what they do?

If I speak of individuals but present learning as if they are all the same,
If I am never seen to reflect and reflection time is never provided,
If we never speak together about reflection and thinking and never develop a vocabulary for such discussion,
If we do not take opportunities to think about our thinking,
If I constantly set them exercises that do not intellectually challenge them,
If I set up learning environments that interfere with them learning from their own actions,
If I give them recipes to follow,
If I only expect the one right conclusion,
If I signify that there are always right and wrong answers,
If I never let them persevere with something
really difficult which they cannot master,
If I make all work serious work and discourage playfulness,
If there is no time to explore,
If I lock them into adult time constraints too early,
How will they get to know themselves as a thinker?

If they never get to help anyone else,
If we force them to always work and play with children of the same age,
If I do not teach them the skills of working co-operatively,
If collaboration can be seen as cheating,
If all classroom activities are based on competitiveness,
If everything is seen to be for marks,
How will they learn to work with others?

For if they…
have never experienced being challenged in a safe environment,
have had all of their creative thoughts explained away,
are unaware what catches their interest and how then to have confidence in that interest,
have never followed something they are passionate about to a satisfying conclusion,
have not clarified the way they sabotage their own learning,
are afraid to seek help and do not know who or how to ask,
have not experienced overcoming their own inertia,
are paralysed by the need to know everything before writing or acting,
have never got bogged down,
have never failed,
have always played it safe,
how will they ever know who they are?

The faculty room is a great blog which is is a collaborative effort of a number of prominent bloggers who regularly contribute to questions put forward to them. You get to see a range of opinions on issues affecting education such as ’should homework be banned’ as linked to above.

I would love to see a similar forum in operation at our school level where teachers could debate key issues that are relevant to us. I think this would provide a great opportunity for teachers to learn more abut each others view points and could be a great professional learning tool for both experienced teachers and beginning teachers.

I would also like to see it on a broader scale for PDHPE. Again, a panel of experienced PDHPE educators including policy makers debating key issues affecting the subject area and the opportunity for all PDHPE teachers to get in and contribute to the debate. A great learning opportunity for all involved.

I always thought that as the years went by, teaching would become easier and easier with the demands on my time lessening as I established myself and set up all my programs and plans etc. How wrong could I be.  It seems that the demands on our time are always increasing and I am yet to meet a teacher who thinks that  teaching is becoming easier. It is really an endless job and to do every expected task to its full borders on impossible and always ends up with the need to prioritise which tasks are most critical and do our best with the things that are lower down the order.
Unfortunately I think one of the things that is commonly pushed to the bottom of the list is professional learning and ’sharpening the saw’ so to speak. I can see this is a false economy where in the long run we are going to be a lot worse off and the students in our classrooms will be effected also.

This is somewhere I think technology can be our friend, even though it is an area where a lot of people see it as being another distraction and thing that we do not have time for. I only learnt about tools like RSS and Blogs and the benefits that online networking can provide last year but already feel that the learning I get from these far exceeds anything I received in the 6 years beforehand.

Why? Because I choose what is relevant to me and what I need. Because I can get it to come to me (RSS etc) and I can do it in my own time when I am ready for it. I have access to leading presenters/thinkers all over the world who 10 years ago I would never have had the opportunity to see or hear about. I have just watched a few presentations from the NECC conference which were awesome, and that in the past I would have had to fly half way around the world to hear (which I never could have done). I can watch these in my lounge chair as I please which I find pretty amazing.

I figure that the ‘time’ issue in teaching is only going to become worse and that if we are serious about professional learning and improving our practices than harnessing available technology is critical. As our Principal always says ‘it is about working smarter, not harder’ and technologies available to us now offer this, we just need to know how to utilise these tools.

Feedback is essential for learning and as teachers, in my experience, we generally get very little feedback in regards to our teaching practices. The last time I was formally observed in a lesson was on my last year of Practice teaching some 9 years ago. I have had prac teachers observe my teaching but not from a critical perspective and I think I could benefit from someone coming into my room and critiquing what I do.

While we acknowledge that our students need regular feedback on their work to help guide their learning we don’t back this up for ourselves as learners and it can occur that we may go years without any critical appraisal of our lessons and our teaching styles. We get anecdotal feedback through the way our classes respond to us and our impression of what we think they think but obviously this is fairly limited and it is hard to know exactly what the students think and feel about us as teachers and our lessons.

Our school is currently completing a school review and improvement process and our group is working on a number of tasks including an open classrooms project. The idea is to try and get teachers into each others classrooms to see what they do and learn from one another. As PE teachers we often get to see each other teach outdoors which is great but the dynamics and pedagogy of teaching a theory lesson is quite different to practical and I think there is a lot to be gained from going inside each others classrooms.

It will be interesting to see how the initiative goes as, while I think most agree with the idea in principle, it may be quite uncomfortable at first to have others watching and critiquing what we do. Also time is always a critical issue with teachers and whether we can make the time for this remains to be seen.

After watching Chris Lehmann speak at the NECC conference about his schools (Science Leadership Academy) approach to teaching and learning, I have realised I need to ask better questions of my students more regularly.  He talks in his session about asking questions that we don’t know the answer to and allowing students to find their own answers. While I am aware of the importance of asking fertile questions I think I have fallen into the habit of not asking anywhere near enough of them.

I think the ‘googleable’ questions are much easier to ask and allow us to remain in control because we know what the answer should be and can lead our students to them. To ask questions that students are forced to interpret and think about can get ‘messy’ but opens the door for authentic learning and is something I think I need to refocus on.

A recurring theme I have read in just about every article on improving student achievement is that the teacher makes the biggest difference of all variables. “Research has consistently shown that of all the things that schools can control, it is the quality of pedagogy that most directly and most powerfully affects the quality of learning outcomes that students demonstrate”. (Quality teaching in NSW public schools.)

One of the more interesting articles I have read is “what-makes-a-good-teacher.pdf” which is based on research carried out in NSW.  The article talks about the key findings of research carried out in classrooms around the state that had consistently performed well in the HSC. They talked about a range of common factors including the importance of mastering content knowledge, the importance of the classroom climate and the use of a few key teaching strategies and how they were generally implemented. All fairly straight forward things really and nothing that I was not necessarily expecting but it was interesting to see what teachers that are getting great results are doing.

The only limitation I see in it is that the HSC is examination based and so the research is obviously aligned around how the teachers get students to perform well in exams. I think that quality teaching is more than just getting students to perform well in exams. Can you get students to perform well but still teach poorly? I don’t know – I would assume that teachers that get good results are generally great practitioners all round? Need to think about this one.

This article is definitely worth a read.

I also came across this post by Chris Lehmann that I particularly like. A personal expression of what he see’s as being important to be a great teacher. Lots of great points that I also agree with.

http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/8-What-makes-a-great-teacher.html

I am currently in the very early stages of having a few of my classes creating their own blogs. Some early lessons and initial reactions are as follows. Check out the Sport Coaching blog as an example.

1. It is worth spending a lesson or two purely on the technical side of things to get the students skilled up in how to set up and manage their own blog. Initially it seemed quite cumbersome to get students to use their blogs and they found them difficult to use. In a very short space of time, and after some brief technical guidance they have picked them up and enjoy using them a lot more now. We did a little technical work to get them set up but I would spend a little more time next time around to ensure they had the basics covered.

2. Articulate the purpose of using the blog – often we have reasons for wanting to use certain techniques or tools and if students are aware of those reasons it can become more meaningful to them. Explaining to the students why we are using this method (to share our ideas and work with each other and to archive our learning and create a useful learning resource) made sense to them and seemed to help them focus and put energy into it. 

3. It gets much easier after the initial set up period – It was quite frustrating initially for myself as I had expected students to pick it up much easier, and frustrating for the students because I clearly had not given them enough guidance. Even so we managed to work through it and it has become much easier now that they have learnt how to use their blogs more effectively.

4. Digital natives?? – while this generation is regularly referred to as digital natives who operate seemlessly in this environment, I have found this to be a gross generalisation. A lot of students have very few skills and with technology and very limited experience and while they are generally eager and open to learn don’t assume that they are all just going to pick it up quickly and are naturals with technology. Clear, explicit instructions and guidance is required.

5. Train up/utilise student helpers – Trying to teach and answer every students questions is ineffective and will waste a lot of time. Once students had completed each part of the set up they were recruited as helpers and went around to help other students that had questions or were having difficulty. Gave me a lot more time to keep on top of everything and keep everyone involved. 

Image from http://prblog.typepad.com

While I can see the huge potential for learning using web 2.0 with students I am thinking at the moment that the benefits are even greater for teachers. The ability to develop professional learning networks in a really simple, time efficient manner has so many benefits which include the sharing of ideas and resources and tapping into the wisdom of the many experienced teachers out there.

From my experience teaching is a fairly ‘closed’ profession in that we don’t regularly share ideas between faculties and schools and a lot of great ideas are confined to a very small group of people within a school or faculty. If we could open up this information to a wider audience and get more people sharing their ideas then the benefits of this could be huge. The one’s to benefit most could be new teachers who get to see the ideas and thoughs of experienced teachers and who would have the potential to reach out to others outside their school environment for advice or information.

I would particularly like to see more experienced teachers, lectures and policy developers in the area of PDHPE share their knowledge and philosophies on teaching. While there is not a lot out there at the moment in our area I think this may change a lot over the next 5-10 years.