Author: wrpvincent

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Coordination Personal

Reflections: first term in senior leadership

In August 2018 I started a new position as the IBDP Coordinator at a school that had recently adopted the IBDP to replace its A Level program. This was my first time in a senior leadership position and I want to take sometime to reflect on that first term.

Prior to this role I had worked as part of the founding team of a secondary school. During that time we took the school through IB MYP and DP authorization, CIS accreditation, where I planned resourcing of the science department, as well as planned and developed the university and careers program. It was a busy time, and I learned a lot about things that I would not have got exposure to if I had stayed at my previous school. Through observation, I spent a lot of time watching and reflecting on the actions of various senior leaders.

So, naturally, entering into senior leadership for the first time, I felt that I had some ideas of do’s and dont’s of leadership, to help guide me in my initial steps. I also felt that I knew some of my natural weaknesses that I needed to work on. Looking back I think the biggest lesson I learned at my previous work was an echo of a prior lesson that I learned in my first year of teaching: It is ok to not have all the answers. It is ok to admit to knowledge gaps.

Starting in a new school always brings new challenges, and this term was no exception. It was odd, being new, being in leadership, and feeling like I was expected to have answers in the first week about processes and systems that I was still just getting my own head around. In addition to picking up new classes (I am still in the classroom 10 hours a week) one of which was a Y13 biology class, and having to learn the ropes of IT systems I hadn’t used before as well as the expectations of policy and procedure, I was implicitly and explicitly asked by staff about various points of procedure which I just didn’t know how the school did it. I had my own ideas of how things should be done, but I certainly did not want to impose those from the start.

In my first week, I was, figuratively, thrown under the bus being required to present to the whole primary and secondary school about priorities for KS5 and the rest of the secondary school. I also was front and center, leading multiple sessions during the staff inset. During all of these sessions I was careful to thank those who had put the work in before my arrival and show humility in the way I talked about the DP and my ideas. I was also happy to admit that this was my first DP Coordinator post. I think that this went some way to helping me build relationships with staff members.

On top of planning and marking (It was the first time I was teaching IGCSE biology in 4 years) during that first term my time was consumed mostly by:

  • Managing teachers
  • Developing policy
  • Developing exams processes and procedures
  • Developing the DP options process

Before becoming a senior leader I thought that most of my time would be taken up with managing student behaviour across the board but this term I was surprised to find just how much time is taken up by teachers! 🙂 Not all of this is good or bad, much of it is healthy relationship building, and I had already clocked in my last job that this was an area I needed to work on: relationship building.

I like to work on my own, not surrounded by other colleagues to talk to or distract me. I find planning and prioritisation hard when my time is broken up, and I like long chunks of uninterrupted time to focus on my work. In my last job I had already told myself that I needed to get into the staff room more but this term this has been an imperative. Why send an email if I can have a conversation? I have come to understand that this is so important for a senior leader and as I write I am reminded of an old Head who always used to admonish me to come and see her and not send emails. However, I currently believe that this is a responsibility of senior leadership not teachers. At the time I was teaching four classes of biology, two classes of TOK, running the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and setting up the careers program. I didn’t have time to try and find people (in fact a lot of that year I spent in tears). This Head should have been coming to find me, instead of showing a profound lack of understanding about what I was doing with my time.

As DP Coordinator I need to be aware of the pressures my teachers are under and get out there to support them. However, when issues between staff arise, this can take up a huge amount of temporal and emotional space as I learned this year. I have also seen how destructive certain habits can be for individuals.

Developing policy has been a key focus for the term. As the DP program is quite young, there are a lot of policies and procedures that need attention. Initially we have been focussed on developing academic honesty policy and I wrote about that here and here.

Since October, my time has mostly been absorbed by planning the administration of the mock exams to be held in January (getting the dates in place is another story) and developing a process for the DP options/subject choices procedure for year 11.

I also had the importance underscored, more than ever, of working in a team and holding the party line. When decisions are made as a leadership team that might be unpopular and that you are either personally neutral to or don’t really agree with, it is really important to support the party line. Not doing so, can serve to undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of that team. While it may be tempting to admit privately that you disagree with a decision or that the decision wasn’t yours, the result of doing so will not be positive.

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Books Education

Notes on Trivium 21c

Martin Robinson’s Trivium 21c was an absolute delight to read. Thought provoking and enlightening it presents an eloquently articulated history of the educational ideas and, through this radical history, a persuasive argument for the great synthesis of traditional and progressive teaching methods, united via the ancient arts of the trivium.

The trivium in teaching

The trivium of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, originally used as the basis of the school curriculum in the middle ages are explored from a variety of different paradigms and meanings for Robinson to final expound his view of how this mantra could be utilised in modern schooling.

Grammar, Robinson argues, is not only the teaching of the rules of the language arts but is equivalent to the transmission of all of the basic facts and building blocks of knowledge that make up a particular discipline or subject. Grammar is also the transmission of the structure and rules of culture, which, of course, encompasses all the academic disciplines as well as other elements. To Robinson, modern grammarians are those of us on the traditionalist side of the great education debate on methods. Grammarians value knowledge and the methods best shown to help students gain this knowledge.

Dialectic, to Robinson, is the art of critiscm, skeptiscim and questioning of grammar. It is an art that needs to be taught in order to enable future adults to be able to think clearly about and with knowledge, in order to not simply be absorbers of knowledge but users and producers of it. Dialectic is important as it allows students to manipulate and use the knowledge acquired through grammar, by questioning it, reflecting on it and potentially rejecting or changing it. If grammar represents tradition, then dialectic represents progression; the dialecticians are those of us in education who aspire to the more progressive methods in the great educational debate.

The third art of the trivium, rhetoric, is the art of communication. Not only should learners be taught to acquire knowledge through grammar, taught to question it through dialectics but they should also be taught to communicate their thoughts through the arts of rhetoric.

Should the purpose of education serve the common good or enable someone to live a good life?

As someone who has moved from being deeply religious to being so no longer, I found myself agreeing with Robinson’s sentiments that curiosity is not best served by prejudice and that teachers must not model the closed mind of someone who thinks there is only one path that leads to meaning or, I guess, truth. In this vein he asks us to attempt to live, as teachers, with the uncertain position of holding the traditional and the progressive together, investigating ideas from across the range of opinion.

Robinson asks if all teachers in any given school understand the narrative of a the curriculum? He argues that only by seeing how their part fits into the wider curriculum can teachers deliver an education to students that allows them to be knowledgable, critical and reflective. He claims that students must learn the unifying concepts, the concepts that come up again and again, of each discipline again and again. This put me in mind of Thomas Khun who claimed that expertise as a scientist only arrives through exposure to many examples. Scientists are experts because they have been able to generalise from the many specific examples and they apply this knowledge in new scenarios.

Robinson also claims that teachers must move away from omniscience, which reminded me of an early career conversation a chemistry teacher who claimed that not knowing in a teacher is a sign of weakness, and that students don’t like it. I agree with Robinson that all teachers need to honest about what society doesn’t know, they need to embrace the uncertainty in their discipline.

A good teacher has mastered the core knowledge and more of their discipline as well as holding an appreciation of what society doesn’t yet know in their field.

We need to understand that teachers should have the authority to teach but recognise that all knowledge is probable and uncertain.

Teachers should use language in such a way that ensures uncertainty has its place.

Robinson’s book draws on many sources and aside from his main argument is highly informative of the history of educational ideas. His arguments are compelling and interesting but the book is worth reading not only for this but also for your education in the history of educational ideas that it draws upon. This book has helped me begin to see the synthesis of the progressive and traditional narratives and has got me wondering about how I can go about making argumentation an important part of my biology classroom in the second stage of the trivium. How can I use debate to really challenge kids to think and learn all sides of an argument? How can I introduce students to the, Dissoi Logoi in science, the art of seeing both sides of an argument as true within their contexts. Instead of dialectic argument as being right vs wrong we can make both as right. Dual thinking explores the possibility that both sides can be right.

Categories
Education Personal Resources Teaching & Learning

PGCE Research: Teacher Understandings of Educational Neuroscience

Below is the pdf of my research project that I completed as part of my PGCE top-up course. It followed from a fuller literature review that can be read here.

Completed in 2015, I only just realised that I didn’t have a link to it.

Download (PDF, 387KB)


Categories
Books

Notes on making good progress?: Chapter 9

In this series of posts I record my notes from Daisy Christodolou’s book “Making good progress? The future of Assessment for Learning” It is quite excellent. You can buy a copy here.

An integrated assessment system

An accurate and useful progression model is the foundation of any assessment system because it explains how pupils make progress. SoWs and lesson plans and the curriculum can all be based on this progression model. Textbooks would be the most efficient way to bring all of these items together.

The first item in a progression model is a collection of formative questions which match up to the curriculum. The bank should be online so that pupils can access it at home or at school. Pupils should have formatives at the end of lessons or chapters and these would contain questions on new material and also on material previously taught. It could be linked up to question level analysis and if it was automated could point pupils straight back to a relevant video or worksheet on what the students had just got wrong.

Next we should have summative item banks. For difficulty model assessments this could be whole past papers or if online a computer adaptive system that makes testing shorter and more accurate. For quality based model we could use a comparative judgement system.

Finally a standardised test bank would contain be non-curriculum linked questions like the CEM tests. These are useful for setting targets.

Such a system would be beneficial because it would be coherent: a clear structure of progressing to novice to expert. It has the ability to give pupils ownership of the curriculum. It could also be self improving.

Categories
Books

Notes on making good progress?: Chapter 8

In this series of posts I record my notes from Daisy Christodolou’s book “Making good progress? The future of Assessment for Learning” It is quite excellent. You can buy a copy here.

Improving summative assessments

The aim of summative assessments is for them to provide an accurate and shared meaning without becoming the model for every classroom activity. Rubrics of prose assessment statements are not particularly good at delivering reliability, and they can end up compromising the creative and original aspects of the task. Prose descriptors can be interpreted in many different ways. Judging in absolute terms is extremely difficult. Markers will overgrade and undergrade depending on the sample. We are much better at making comparative judgements than absolute ones.

very prescriptive rubrics end up stereotyping pupil’s responses to the task removing the justification for having them (grading creative and original work). Responses that are coached to meet the rubric pass and truly original work that doesn’t fails. Rubrics encourage coaching.

Comparative judgement offers the possibility of dropping rubrics by defining quality through exemplars not prose and by not relying on absolute judgement. It simply asks markers to make a series of paired judgements about responses. It relies on tacit knowledge of the subject expert – knowledge that is not easy to express in words.

Comparative judgement is criticised for offering little in the way of formative feedback. This is precisely the point. It decouples the grading process from the formative process. It allows classroom practice to be refocussed away from the rubric and towards helpful analyses of quality. One extremely useful resource that could be produced would be a set of annotated exemplar scripts.

Decisions about the difficulty and content of national summative exams are made by national exam boards. What if a school wants to summatively assess more frequently? To what extent can they be linked to the curriculum that the pupils are following? One solution is to outsource summative assessments, but there is still a gap between the remote standardised assessments like CEM and the formative assessments of classroom practice. It is not easy to create or interpret the results of school made curriculum-linked assessments. It can be difficult to tell if the test is difficult enough, or if it has the right spread of difficulty. Tests taken by small numbers of pupils don’t produce reliable grades. We can compare the results of teacher made tests to national assessments. The content studied over one term is simply not broad enough domain to sample from. Assessments have to sample from what pupils have learnt in that subject, not just in previous terms but in previous years.

A summative assessment can be linked to the curriculum and the most recent unit of study. However if a grade is awarded it will not be based solely on that unit and cannot be seen as reflecting performance on solely that unit. A student can make great strides with a unit but not be reflected on the summative unit as the assessment is not sensitive enough.

Summative assessments need to be far enough apart that pupils have the chance to improve on them meaningfully. However pupils will make relatively slow progress on the large domains that summative assessments are sampling. There are risks with using summative assessments too frequently.

Using scaled scores can overcome this to some extent. A scaled score converts raw marks which are not comparable (from different assessments) into ones that are. They show the continuum of achievement. Grades suggest that pupil performance falls into discrete categories when in fact it is continuous.