Presentation

Presentation for the ESU Edinburgh branch

It’s great when you learn to do something and it works.  However, the presentation takes a long time to download because there are so many photographs and I’m not sure that I would include the notes sections in a future presentation but here they are useful to explain some of the images.  I’ve looked at other blogs and sometimes the powerpoint is embedded in the text  so I will investigate how to do that.  Bill has said that the report needs to be copied and pasted into separate pages which will take ages but I’ll try and get it done over the weekend.  If nothing else it will teach me how to add articles and other pieces of writing.

Final report and presentation

It’s a long time since I added anything to my blog and once you get out of the habit it is definitely more difficult to get started again.  However, having finally finished my report and given my presentation I thought I’d better add these to the blog.  I gave my presentation last week at the Royal Overseas League in Edinburgh to the Edinburgh branch of the ESU.  I had taken a data projector and laptop along so that I could show them some of my photographs.  It was the first time since I returned home that I had a captive audience.  Typically when you get back from a long journey with lots to say, friends and relatives give you a certain amount of attention before they start telling you all about what you’ve misssed at home since you’ve been away.  My presentation didn’t have to go into too much depth either so it was a really enjoyable way of remembering some of the highlights of my journey and reliving some of the more interesting episodes.  There were lots of questions and discussions which could have gone for a lot longer had we had time.  It was also my opportunity to say thank you in person to the ESU for funding my travels.

I would like to post the report and the presentation on the blog but I’m having technical difficulties so I’ve asked my blogging mentor Bill to help me out.  Hopefully I will get it sorted in the not too distant future and get them up for general viewing.

Back home

So finally back home and as you can see a distinct lack of motivation over the past week.  I am now recovering and feel ready to get back to work and to finish off the story of my summer.

My final week in Singapore was really enjoyable.  I had meetings at NIE and was invited to be an unpaid research assistant for the day by one of the Professors which was great.  The research is quite comprehensive focussing on Citizenship Education in  Singapore with  a  survey to provide quantitative data and a follow up series of  interview questions for small samples.  The research team have targeted 19 schools of all different types and the sample of pupils are 15 year olds.  The survey is designed to gather information about citizenship-related perceptions and attitudes and the interviews are an opportunity to go into more depth around two topics, civic participation and engagement and civic knowledge, skills, perceptions and attitudes.

It was a really hot afternoon when I met the rest of the research team in the school office.  Most of them are students helping out and they all managed to get into the school without any of the usual security.  I had to leave my European Health Card with the security guard because yet again we had discussions about why I didn’t have an identity card.  The school was huge, 1700 girls and we were going to see 4 classes.  The numbers for the survey will give some really interesting results I think.  It was founders day at the school so there was already a lot of excitement.  The girls took a long time to settle down to the survey which is quite comprehensive with 20 pages of tick box questions.  They are not all the same format though so it takes some concentration and thought to answer them all.  After the survey a number of girls stayed behind to answer the interview questions.  For me it was fascinating.  There were questions about democracy and rights and responsibilities which my students answered quite clearly but started to get really confused on the comparative questions like whether or not other countries enjoyed similar rights and responsibilites to Singapore.  Examples given as suggestions were the UK and China for comparative questions and the answers were quite revealing.  There was also real confusion about the difference between the term meritocracy and democracy but they did think that the Singaporean government had done well and that it was over all doing a good job.  One of the students told me that other countries were not multicultural like Singapore so her estimation of the success of the government was that they didn’t suffer from conflict like other countries did.

I would like to follow up on the research and it would be great to do a similar evaluative exercise in Scottish schools.   That was my final task before hanging around for a delayed flight home and the inevitable  chaos that is unpacking and trying to get back to some kind of normality.  I still have photographs to finish downloading and books and papers to finish reading and ultimately a report to write and presentation to give so not quite over yet.  Pulling everything together is going to be much easier with the blog.  I’m really glad I kept up with it despite it being a challenge at times.  I will post my final presentation up when done which now means that I have to get on and do it.  I should also change the header to give it a more Scottish flavour.

The classroom of the future

I’m back in Singapore for my final week and today I’m visiting the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University.  My meetings have been with the Social Studies team and with the Curriculum Teaching and Learning Group but before I get into those I just thought I’d let you know about the classroom of the future here.  It’s very different from the one at Learning and Teaching Scotland as it’s used for trainee teachers and for visitors to try and get people to think about how new technologies can be used in schools in the future.  There are five pods with a different scenario in each but all using netbooks with added interactivity to download information from the noticeboards on a train or a bus for example, to collaborate with other students using translation tools, to play games on MUVEs etc.  There is only one classroom bit where all the walls can be used as interactive whiteboards and screens in the table tops allow groups to work on the same piece of work before projecting it on to the walls.  I know we probably have all the technology and that Glow will deliver quite a lot of that but being in the space it actually feels like a classroom of the future and not some random space with a label.  There is a building programme here to create some schools where all these technologies can be used in practice, could be good to visit when they’re up and running.

Some more thoughts

Perhaps the most interesting part of my time in Adelaide was having the opportunity to see L2L in action.  Spending a day in Bridgewater Primary School gave me time to talk to the inspirational principal, the pupils, teachers (called leaders of learning) and support staff.  One of the first things you notice is that everyone calls each other by their first name and the second thing is the apparent chaos and movement in the school.  As a visitor I was probably the only person who didn’t know what was going on and the only person seemingly without a purpose.  That was quickly rectified as I started talking to children in the green group about their personal learning. 

There are some really important things going on in Bridgewater that we could accommodate in Scotland and which would enable us to engage pupils in more of a learning conversation than we perhaps do at the moment.  All the young people I talked to were very clear about their learning, they talked about new learning and about why they had chosen particular strategies to tackle parts of their learning.  They were also engaged, noisy, enthusiastic, energetic and apparently happy.  I liked the brain food that arrived in each learning area at 10 o’clock in case anyone was hungry, big boxes of bread and fresh fruit which everyone helped themselves to.  I liked the movement cards which allowed children to move feely about the school to different areas when they needed to or wanted to.  The link books tied home and school together with reflective writing from the pupils and teachers.  These are augmented with a three way conversation as part of that relationship with parents who are encouraged to come in every morning to support their child in their reading and others if they have the time. 

Another innovative school that I managed to spend time in was the Australian Science and Mathematics School.  It is a purpose built school which makes sense of the interdisciplinary curriculum and is as much about radical learning as it is about a shift in practice for teachers.  Most learning is done in open areas and some blocks of teaching on areas like sustainable futures is done by specialist and non-specialist teachers so for example, I sat in on a lesson from a module called The Ethnosphere.  The students were about to start writing poetry in a scientific manner.  It works because everything is organised around the students investing in and taking responsibility for their learning.  The drawbacks are fitting in to the existing assessment structures which take no account of this particular schools approach to the previous two years of education so students in year 12 are shoe-horned back into having to learn in a more traditional manner for their final exams.

My experience in both these schools was enough to have made my whole journey worthwhile.  Having an opportunity to see ‘what it looks like’ if you give more responsibility to children and allow them to make decisions about their learning themselves is fantastic.  It looks really messy but the conversations with the pupils backs up the ideology about the value of student voice, of the possibility of deep learning and of motivated and enthusiastic young people engaged in developing and shaping their own learning experiences.

Some reflections

It is only now that I have some time to sit and think that I can reflect on my visits to schools in Adelaide and my meetings with various educators and academics.  I chose to travel to South Australia to see if the Learning to Learn (L2L) initiative had paid off ten years down the line.  I wanted to find out how the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) had managed to provide sustained and meaningful professional development opportunities for teachers and how they had built capacity over time.  I wanted to see if there were things we could do in Scotland to support teachers with the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence.

I managed to gain some more clarity on the reasons for the success of Learning to Learn (L2L) when I met two of the academics involved in facilitating the learning circles which were a key part of building the learning communities in schools that opted in.   Some of the things we discussed included the targeting of leaders in schools, the allocation of funding to the schools that joined up and the Core Learning Program which provided readings and presentations from educational theorists from Australia and overseas and was open to anyone.  What struck me most though was that noone expected any change within the first eighteen months so that in some ways the pressure was off.  There was space to take time to build an effective learning community and to decide on what the focus of the inquiry for your school might be.  Targeting principals (the principal’s participation was mandatory) and encouraging them to bring a small team to every meeting also meant that the program had credibility within the school when people started talking about pedagogy and the need for critical reflection.  A quote from one of the papers written about the initiative talks about not being able to expect any whole school reform without the leader being intimately involved in the learning.

The working relationship with the University of SA was also key.  Senior lecturers on the teacher training programs facilitated the learning circles responding to assumptions about learning, about teaching and about the structures where these take place.  They were also able to collect a lot of qualitative data and to write about the process which means that there is now a rich source of evidence tracking the last decade.  A DVD called, ‘The Thingy’ also has lots of video clips, readings, presentations and stories from sites which I am still enjoying dipping into.

Final post from Adelaide

Time to go already.  Had a great visit today to a really innovative and radical approach to education in the senior phase.  Talked to a lot of students generally about their learning which they initiated.  Very  interesting and truly interdisciplinary.  They work in a purpose built building though so there are as many implications for teachers as there are for the students.  It’s very open plan so all teaching is in view all the time and teachers are expected to work across disciplines a lot of the time, it was quite inspiring and I will have to reflect on the purposes behind it before writing something more coherent.  In the meantime check out the website at the Australian Science and Mathematics School.  I sat in on a Sustainble Futures lesson this morning called the Ethnosphere module where pupils were learning about writing poetry in a scientific manner.  Lots and lots to learn to inform interdisciplinary learning in Curriculum for Excellence.

School visits

This is just a quick post before I get overwhelmed with visits and meetings and to enthuse a lot about my school visit yesterday.  This podcast on ABC gives a really good flavour of Bridgewater Primary, a product of the Learning to Learn initiative but one which has taken the ideas behind it and made significant changes to the way learning is conceived in the school.  I loved it.  Rosslyn, the Headteacher was fantastically welcoming despite having hoards of visitors all the time.  She let me wander round, talk to kids, take part in focus groups and interact in the rainbow room.  I had a really good time which is what the majority of the pupils are doing every day.  I will write a more thoughtful piece about my visit but I have more visits coming up and don’t want to get behind too much.  Had a great meeting today at the University with two of the academics involved in Learning to Learn.  Great to talk to them to get information about their input.  Lots of interesting papers and reading available around this which I’ll flag up later.

Teaching for Effective Learning in South Australia

I had a meeting with the Department of Education and Children’s  Services (DECS) this morning to talk to curriculum managers about their latest phase of Learning to Learn which is now called Teaching for Effective Learning (TfEL).  It was a great meeting, very informative and I was really impressed by the team’s knowledge of current research.  They have given me lots of ideas to take back to Scotland including books to read, websites to look at and people to talk to.

It might be useful to include a brief history of the Learning to Learn initiative to contextualise current developments.  Learning to Learn began in 1999.  It was developed alongside the South Australian Curriculum Standards and Accountability Framework (SACSA) which is an outcomes based curriculum framework based on constructivist learning theories.  Learning to Learn provided leaders and teachers with extended opportunities to focus on generative learning, by learning how to learn.  Particpants are supported to reflect critically on their current practices by immersing themselves in the latest research on learning and curriculum by conducting locally based curriculum inquiry.  I think it is worth including the specific objectives here which are to :-

• reconnect teachers and leaders with their vocation, reigniting their passion as learners
• develop deeper understandings of learning, pedagogy and curriculum to transform engagement and classroom practice and
• build new concepts of learning communities through a culture of inquiry

The current phase of TfEL started in 2008 with the phase IV schools who were involved in Learning to Learn.  New government funding means that they are able to employ ten new coaches/mentors who will be based in a school, initially just primary schools supporting the implementation of TfEL.  Each coach or mentor will work with their curriculum advisers at regional level to support these schools.  The work is based on the South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning Compass (SA Compass) The SA Compass provides a guide for an ongoing discussion about Learning for teaching – Teaching for learning.   There are domains of action for LfET, and TfEL combined with pedagogical elements.

What I really like about this approach is that it gives everyone a common language, it focuses on the professional development of leadership teams and teachers together and is grounded in current educational research and thinking.  One of the members of the group said today when I was asking her about leaders creating learning opportunities with staff that they talk about the school being a principal’s classroom and that they should ‘lead as a learner’.

Tomorrow I have a primary school visit which I’m really looking forward to and hope to see some of the practice embedded in their approaches to learning and teaching.

Adelaide

I’ve been here in Adelaide for a few days now, orienting myself and setting up meetings.  So far I’ve been to Principals Australia, more of which later and tomorrow I have the first of my school visits.

The system is quite complicated as each state has its’ own curriculum and a variety of ages and stages so in South Australia for example pupils stay at primary until year 7 and go to secondary in year 8 when they are 13.  There are ongoing discussions about developing a national curriculum for the whole country projected to start in 2011 with the English and Maths curriculum.  There are three main sectors, the state sector, catholic sector and independent schools.  I think I am visiting mainly state sector schools but some special interest schools as well.

I’m here to look at the Learning to Learn initiative and how it relates to student voice.  So far even talking to teachers and principals on the phone it is clear that student voice is a priority and I’m really looking forward to seeing some innovative practice.

Internet access is patchy as I have to buy limited blocks of time so keeping up with the blog is going to be more complicated for the next week or so.   Distances are obviously greater as well so travelling to schools is going to be more time consuming.  Lots to fit in.