Author: wrpvincent

Categories
Coordination

Developing a school wide Academic Honesty Policy I

Originally posted on November 20, 2018 @ 10:14 am

One of my focuses this year as Diploma Programme Coordinator will be to work with the schools educators to devise a secondary wide academic honesty policy. This is the first time I have had to lead a collaborative project across the secondary and I am spending a lot of time thinking about how best to implement this.

The easiest thing, and the first thing that I considered, would have been to simply lift policies from previous schools (with permission of course – oh the irony!) and adopt it in the new context. On reflection I decided not to go down this path because doing so would have meant we lost a good opportunity for collaboration amongst the team and would have probably also ensured that we didn’t get the buy in and subsequent up-skilling, that we need if the policy is going to be successful.

Teaching academic honesty is one of those things that I think it is easy to expect everyone on the teaching team to be able to do and assume that they know how to do it when in fact there may well be understandable knowledge gaps within the team. Different people also respond to their own knowledge gaps differently. Not admitting to knowledge gaps is an behaviour that can develop insidiously in educators due to perceived peer, parent and student expectations. The culture of a school may well be one where, admitting ignorance is something that is frowned upon. I am also aware that simply admitting ignorance isn’t enough. People need to be motivated to fill the gaps once identified and this process takes effort. We all avoid the effortful path at times.

For this project, I decided to go down the long road and start afresh. I want buy-in from the team and I want to identify skill needs amongst the team so that we can begin to help teachers develop their own skills in this area, as well as develop a deeper understanding of the IB requirements for academic honesty.

One of the things that I learned as a workshop leader with the IB is that all training sessions with staff should aim to help colleagues develop their teaching skills and share pedagogical techniques as a secondary objective to the primary aims of the session. Thus, when I utilised one staff inset session in October, I planned to use visible thinking routine “chalk talk” as a route to triage where the team was in their thinking and understanding about academic honesty.

I started this session by introducing chalk talk with a practice question. On a prior inset session led by another team member we had looked at Hattie’s research and so to transition from that I chose the question: “Is homework necessary?” to get the team used to the format of the chalk talk.

For the main event, I took questions from the IBO’s documentation on academic honesty and grouped them into categories. I prepared the session in advance by writing questions onto the back of the paper I was going to use. In this chalk-talk, instead of answering one question and rotating through each table, each table had a different set of questions that each group responded too as they rotated through them.

The results can be seen here:

Following from the chalk talk, I asked each group to summarise the discussion and responses prompted by the questions they started with. I gave them 15minutes to prepare a presentation for the rest of the team, and asked them to reflect on that instruction: how do they effectively get their students to collaborate on tasks like this? How do we teach students to work collaboratively or do we expect that they will be able to do it? We ended the session by sharing the general findings from each of the groups.

Following on from this session I have written and disseminated a survey based around some of the concepts surrounding academic honesty and citations, in order to give staff a chance to have some continual input into the formation of our academic honesty policy. In January I hope to be able to review the data collected from this chalk talk and survey to begin working on developing our policy but I am unsure of where to take this next to ensure collaboration and buy-in amongst the team. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them!

Categories
Education

Undervalued & under-taught: concepts missing in teacher education

Originally posted on November 19, 2018 @ 8:00 am

Friere, Piaget and Vygotsky are the usual suspects in the theory that underpins many initial teacher training courses, at least in my experience; I am happy to be corrected. The theories of these men, while useful and, in parts, necessary are often presented as the ground truths of teaching and learning or as outright fact.

Over the past few years I have picked up a little bit of knowledge about certain concepts that, if not completely debunking many of these operational fact-theories, certainly voice a challenge to them and I think it would do a lot to develop educators own critical thinking faculties if these concepts were taught alongside the main teacher training dogma.

Many of these ideas I have been exposed to through my own semi-self directed reading about education. I write semi-self directed because although I am choosing which books to read and when, I rely on the recommendations of colleagues and the educators that I follow on twitter.

While each of these, on their own may not be threshold concepts as such (if such a thing exists) learning about them has had a developmental effect on my thinking as an educator.

In my thirties, I can now begin to trace back my own intellectual interests and growth of knowledge. Originally, I was only interested in biology and things directly related to that field. Working as a teacher, my interest in this subject prompted me to develop my knowledge of neuroscience, among others. From here I developed an interest in the teenage brain and then neuromyths.

During my PGCE top-up, it was clear that subjective research processes were held to be just as valid as objective research methods. I challenged some of the ideas fed to us about subjective & experienced based research, arguing that evidence needs to be as objective as possible. My ideas were met with some scepticism, but I went ahead and tried to summarise some of the work on educational neuroscience and to do some sort of quantifiable research on teachers understanding of neuromyths.

Despite the lack of rigour and balanced curriculum, topping up my GTP to a PGCE was worth it. I wanted to do the PGCE because I felt my GTP had not had any academic focus and I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t know much about the theory behind what I was being told to do in the classroom. My PGCE served to get me academically engaged with the educational theory and it is only since I completed it that I have continued to maintain that engagement.

My interest in this area hasn’t abated but as I learn more it has become more nuanced. I agree that we need to be careful interpreting the results of much cognitive research but I do think that it offers that power to help guide us to what may better versus worse pedagogical techniques. They may well help us hone our pedagogical content knowledge.

Currently, these are the ideas that I believe that all teachers should have some training on (in no particular order):

Where can you go to get more valuable knowledge on these concepts? Here are some of the resources that I would recommend:

The Education Endowment Foundation

Daniel Willingham’s blog

The Education Development Trust

Core Knowledge Curriculum

The Learning Scientists

The Learning Spy

Categories
Education

Burn, heretic, burn!

Originally posted on November 10, 2018 @ 9:55 am

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Once upon a time in the West, if you believed in the transubstantiation of bread and wine during Holy Communion and you lived in one part of Europe you got burned at the stake. If you denied this small fact and lived in a different part of Europe you also got burned at the stake. It didn’t matter if you agreed on 99% of the other details of your religion, you still killed those with slightly different views. Humans do that darnedest things to each other based on the most trivial of differences.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Thankful we are all humanists now to a greater or lesser extent (whether you accept it or not) and therefore it isn’t acceptable to burn each other. In his books Noah Yuval Harari charts the course of the three great humanist traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries: liberalism, communism and facism. All of these traditions placed mankind and the human experience at the centre of their creeds, as opposed to an almighty, thats what makes them humanist.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>We now live in the area when liberalism has triumphed against the others, according to Harari. Even as a conservative you are a liberal, in the sense that you believe in the rights of the individual, freedom of the individual, and the equality of individuals. Democracy is the flowering of liberalism in politics. Everyone’s vote is equally valid.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Like all religions, humanism and, specifically for this thought trail, liberalism has its schisms. We humans love to be tribal and to argue. In someways it is what makes us human. Identifying who isn’t in our tribe helps us identify who is. We depend on our social interactions within our tribe.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Indeed Harari, likens the intellectual differences and squabbles between  humanist tribes to be not too dissimilar to the tribalism that erupted in Europe within Christianity, best exemplified by the Spanish Inquisition, which murdered hundreds of people over differences in the interpretations of the bible.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>If you have spent any time on Twitter as a teacher you can’t possibly have avoided the prog/trad squabbles, rows and playground name calling, highlighted this week by closure of Debra Kidds account.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>It’s a shame that the greatest CPD tool for teachers also highlights so much of our  worst social natures.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Despite the protestations of some, the debate between progressive education and traditional education (the prog/trad debate) doesn’t just exist on Twitter. It’s obfuscated because teacher training courses don’t teach education history (to my knowledge) and generally they aren’t balanced in discussing pedagogical approaches (again in my experience).

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Any honest reading of the history of the ideas in education can trace the debate back to at least the early 1800s. Hirsch provides a decent overview in the appendix. In the wake of the American war of independence and the French revolution new ideas about the progression of humanity began to take hold. Nothing happens in a vaccum. As the ideas of the intellectual founding fathers of liberalism, communism and fascism spread, they were also to influence ideas about education.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>I don’t intend to recount that history here, as much better has been written about it but with the, sometime vehement, differences in opinion between proponents on both sides of the debate, it is easy to forget that, ultimately, according to Harari, wether you identify as trad, prog, trad/prog, atradprog, we are all children of the great intellectual revolution of liberalism.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>We all believe in the rights of the individual. We all believe in equality. We all believe in the individual freedoms of adult members of a civilised society. We just disagree on methodology and approaches of indoctrinating and raising adults into this society.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Those advocating a traditional approaches do not do so because they are sadists. They do so because they believe these are the best methods of reducing inequality, and helping all individual children fulfil their potential.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Those advocating progressive approaches do not do so because they have a hidden agenda to keep an elitist society propped up. They do so because they believe that these are the best methods for ensuring individual freedom and individual expression, as well as helping all individual children fulfil their potential.

And to be honest, I think most people would probably describe themselves as mods.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>In a sense this debate is simply a practical outworking of the inherent tensions within liberalism: those of ensuring individual freedom and of ensuring equality. It’s hard, in any society, to have both.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>So next time you feel like throwing a stone, just remember, you’ve got more in common that you think. It also might be worth remembering that without tone or body language the written word can be so easily misunderstood.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>At least no teacher in the Twittersphere has literally burned another teacher at the stake for professing different views….yet.

Categories
Education Teaching & Learning

Remembering stuff

Originally posted on November 9, 2018 @ 9:00 am

Someone once said that the educational debate in the UK is lightyears ahead of the debate internationally. It is a shame really because you would hope that the minds engaging with educational debate from every country would add to making the debate more urgent.

The modern education system is sometimes characterised as being one where kids are mindlessly forced to rote learn and that we have to fight against this industrial factory like education. It’s anecdotal I know but I have worked in five schools and visited a few more and never seen anything like this. Where are all these schools that are battery farming their kids? Most schools are definitely more progressive in their outlook than traditional, in this sense. Although I would contend that good schools and teachers in them know when to adopt different techniques as necessary.

If you engage in debates about the aims and methods of education it is common to read thinking like this, a popular view exposed by many educators, and widely influenced by romanticism:

“The point I am making is that DI is very successful in a certain thing that we are measuring. Remembering stuff. For an education system that measures how well you can remember stuff sat at a table for two hours (of which the DP is really no different from any other offering) then I’m sure DI is highly effective…. but really why do we care? We all pretty much know that that such a metric is a) a terrible way for Unis and businesses to know that they have recruited an effective colleague b) it just isn’t they way to make it in the world past examinations. Once our smartphones can answer any knowledge based examinations (not far off from now) then DI will just about be a waste of everybody’s time. What I’m interested in is what type of instruction leads to creative, communicative, empathetic, collaborative, entrepreneurs and explorers? If DI does that then I’m interested. But first we have to develop a way of measuring these things to see if a certain practice achieves it. Any other research is basically past its sell-by-date, as I suspect are exam based remembering courses.”

Remembering stuff. It’s the practical equivalent of the old, male and stale ad-hominem stereotype trotted out in arguments in post-modernist education discussions at times. It’s uncool. It’s useless and why would anyone who cared about kids and their futures insist on paying attention to it in their classroom or school? It’s outdated. We don’t need to remember because we have google now. We don’t need knowledge because AI will take over our jobs and if we make sure kids know and remember stuff then they are doomed to be job-less, on future the scrap heap, in a world where 65% of the jobs haven’t yet been invented yet.

Why do we care about remembering stuff? 

First, let us not conflate remembering and knowing. They are not the same thing. Technically, remembering is simply the process of retrieving information from your long term memory that you know. Knowing something is having it stored there in the first place. It is possible to know something and not remember it.

This argument above mentions remembering initially but then refers to knowledge based exams and questioning the value of knowing stuff when our smartphones can do that for us later, effectively conflating the two. Both knowing stuff and being able to remember stuff are important. It’s no good knowing stuff and not being able to remember it and you can’t remember what you don’t know. So, in my view education has to help students do both of these things. Why is knowing stuff and then remembering it important and why should we care?

Well, actually, knowing stuff is still pretty important. Believe it or not. Some educator’s use Bloom’s Taxonomy to assert that remembering stuff is at the bottom of the pile, a low order skill useless on its own. However, despite the fact that this taxonomy is not informed by the cognitive psychology of how people learn and it is often presented uncritically, this interpretation is also not what Bloom intended. He put knowledge at the bottom as it is the foundation on which all else is built.

You can’t do much if you don’t know anything. And in fact the more you know, the more you can do, including learn more. The Matthew Effect is a well documented psychological phenomenon by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The more you know, the easier it becomes to learn more and therefore become a life-long learner. That is one reason why we should care, especially if we want to make life-long learners.

These days it is fashionable for international educators to discount knowing  stuff because the international consensus is that 21st century skills are more important than knowledge per se. These 21st century skills are generally recognised to be the four C’s of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. The line of reasoning is, generally, that we need to teach these skills instead of knowledge.

There are a few problems with this line of thinking. Firstly these skills are not actually 21st Century in and of themselves, and there is no reason to think that they are more important this century than they were in the time of Julius Cesar. Indeed, calls for skills based curriculums go back at least a century already.

Secondly, we can’t have people skilled in these areas who aren’t also knowledgable. Most psychological research to date suggests that creativity requires knowledge and it is only possible to think critically about what you already know about. If you really think about it – to be a great communicator you actually need to know about what you are communicating about. Could you imagine the BBC Earth documentaries not only without a knowledgable David Attenborough but the teams of knowledgeable researchers who write the scripts?

Thirdly, the idea of teaching generic skills is also flawed. The generic skills method of teaching postulates that authentic tasks are ones that mimic real life i.e. science teaching that gets kids to act like scientists. Authors like Daniel Willingham and Daisy Christodoulou point out that the most effective way of teaching skills is through the deliberate practice method. Just as a football team doesn’t practice by playing games, but by breaking the skills needed to win (dribbling, passing) down to their component tasks and practicing those.

In short, knowing stuff (and remembering it) is the foundation of the skills we want to instil in our kids, it is also the foundation of understanding and the foundation of life-long learning.

We all pretty much know that that such a metric is a) a terrible way for Unis and businesses to know that they have recruited an effective colleague b) it just isn’t they way to make it in the world past examinations.

Do we? How exactly do we know this? It seems hard to make that claim as it is pretty much unmeasurable. Even if you could survey every employer and university there are too many conflating variables. We are all products of this system. This claim is made without any proof and the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim.

Once our smartphones can answer any knowledge based examinations (not far off from now) then DI will just about be a waste of everybody’s time.

Oh no. Seriously? We still honestly think this? It is right up there with the “we can google it” claim that knowledge isn’t worth having. In addition to what I have written above I should highlight here the distinction between working and long term memory.

Working memory is what you can hold in your awareness and it is limited. The environment and long term memory are accessible from working memory and long term memory is unlimited in its store.

If we rely on google and not our long term memory we will find it very hard to make sense of the world around us as our working memories will constantly be overwhelmed. We wont be able to chunk information.

Knowledge isn’t just what we think about it is what we think with. If you rely on google on your smartphone you won’t be able to think well, you certainly won’t be able to think creatively nor critically nor communicate well.

Also, google is blocked in China. Do we really want to give governments that much power over knowledge and what we know and can know?

What I’m interested in is what type of instruction leads to creative, communicative, empathetic, collaborative, entrepreneurs and explorers? If DI does that then I’m interested. But first we have to develop a way of measuring these things to see if a certain practice achieves it.

Yes, it can do. DI has been shown to effectively increase what people know and remember. If knowing and remembering is the foundation of being able to think well, collaborate well,  and create well then we shouldn’t just throw these out.

One of the problems with international education in my view is that it over emphasises inquiry learning, making ideologues get hot under the collar when DI and other guided instruction is mentioned. We are trained to think schools are battery farming kids, when to be honest, they really aren’t.  I think we need to try to find out what works in what context and focus on that. I think that there is a place for guided instruction.

Anyway, DI does not always equate with rote learning. Why make it out to be?

I am also now reminded me of this article and this tweet. They are based on similar assumptions and outlooks, and I had wanted to write something in response to these claims.

I agree with Noah Harari when he writes that we often conflate intelligence and consciousness.  I am not convinced that AI can actually know anything. I think it is intelligent and can process a lot of information quickly, but I would contend that to know anything and remember anything you need to be conscious.

If this is true what is the real risk presented by AI? Probably automation of tasks that rely on data processing in some form. Doctoring for example, requires the ability to process symptoms and match them to known illnesses. But not every job is at risk of automation because not every job relies purely on data processing. As Harari contends in his books, the highly prized human jobs of the future will be the ones that rely on human ability to relate to other humans. Therefore Doctors are at much more risk of being automated than Nurses. However, Nurses still need to know an awful lot of stuff as well as be at good at relating to other people to be able to do their jobs.

Humans need knowledge to be able to think well and to specialise in areas. If we don’t ensure that people know things they definitely will not be better placed to work with or instead of AI. The people that are replaced by AI will be the ones who don’t know much.

Additionally, the fact is knowledge rich curriculums demonstrably reduce inequality and with the way social divides are opening up in our modern society perhaps the way for international education to contribute to a peaceful world is to close those gaps? Seeing as DI has been demonstrably shown to reduce social inequality (See Why Knowledge matters by E.D. Hirsch) and as international curriculum’s like the IB is placed in many public schools in poorer areas, I find it’s focus on inquiry teaching quite worrying.

I wonder if international educators can afford to ignore this stuff because generally our kids come from educated and affluent homes?

Categories
Coordination

The Extended Essay: The central support for teaching ATL skills?

Originally posted on November 3, 2018 @ 12:00 pm

I have reservations about the IB ATLs. I have written about this previously, mainly focussing on the approaches to teaching and I don’t really want to go over these issues again, suffice to say that it still causes me concern that the IB, as the only truly global non-national/international curriculum has such strong ideology that underpins what it requires teachers do. In fact the more I think about it, the more concerned I am by the fact that, on reflection, most teacher training curriculums that I am aware are not balanced and do not give good education to teachers on evidence, history, philosophy. Instead they simply uncritically present one ideology as fact.

My previous post focussed on the approaches to teaching. In this post I want to focus on the IB’s approaches to learning which I will refer to in this post simply as ATls. Hopefully this post will be a bit more positive!

There are certainly areas of the of the ATLs that I have come to appreciate. Before I get there I just want to state that from what I have read, I think that the evidence from cognitive science is pretty clear cut: there are no such things as general learning/thinking skills. More over, I don’t think that the often quoted 21st Century learning skills or 4Cs of: Communication, Collaboration, Critical-thinking, Creativity are anymore important in the 21st Century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries (they were referred to then; they are nothing new now) and I think the whole enterprise of trying to teach them outside of domains is an exercise that will only make our education system weaker, not stronger.

To make the ATLs work within the school context they need to be linked to and embedded in domain specific content. Some of them maybe more generalisable than others and in that sense may be more malleable for being taught independently, but most will need to be embedded within the teaching of specific content of a domain.

For example, elements of the self-management tranche of the identified ATLs may well be more stand alone, or at least can be taught independently of subject matter. However, teaching students about time-management still needs material to work on, in this case the students own general workload at school.

Mindfulness is another self-management skill that can be taught independently and, in my opinion, to great value for the learner. However for this to be affective it needs staff buy-in and training. While mindfulness is the new trendy idea, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what it actually is.

Thinking skills, communication skills and research skills, as identified by the IB’s ATL guide all require teaching and embedding within content. In terms of the Communication and research skills, one of the central pillars to teaching these is the Extended Essay.

In most schools the Extended Essay process is placed to the middle to end of the DP, with students perhaps beginning the process in term two of the first year and ending sometime around Christmas of the second year. This year we have gone to the extreme of bringing it to the front of the process as we feel it underpins and provides so many opportunities to explicitly teach the ATLs but still linking them to specific subject knowledge.

We have introduced our students to the process this September and have planned in specific interventions that look at research skills and communication skills, while we also begin to map out how these skills are taught vertically from year 7.

Our current year 12 students are supported through the process with clear scaffolding. First they are asked to think about general topics and clearly led through ways to identify and think about ideas. Subsequently, we introduce them to the library and its resources in a series of sessions which first look at the library and its resources in general before looking at the databases we have access to and how researchers utilise these resources appropriately using boolean operators..

Students are then asked to draft a proposal for their Extended Essay which would include the research question, an outline of the subquestions and a list of potential sources that can be used. This proposal needs to be agreed to and signed off by their supervisor before Christmas of the first year. The proposal becomes the basis for the first formal reflection.

In the second term, we show students how to critically appraise sources and continue to give them support in writing their outline for their essay. This takes place un until April where they submit their outline to the supervisors and follow up with a second meeting.

Following on from this meeting students will recieve feedback and after their exams, during their core week, they are given time to work on writing their Extended Essay in the morning with the aim that they would have a first draft completed by the end of the third term and submitted to their supervisor, this would form the basis of their interim reflection and their third meeting.

Student can then finalise their work over the summer, submitting it and completing their viva voce at the start of their second year. In this way this major piece of work is completed before the bulk of internal assessments and university applications begin.

By front loading the extended essay process in this way, I believe that the team has a greater chance of explicitly teaching, the research and communication skills needed to succeed in the extended essay. This reduces the chances of these skills being left to chance and also allows students to be able to apply these skills in their internal assessments for their other subject.

Finally by also, bringing some of the other internal assessments into the later half of the first year, we can begin to help students develop strategies for their own time management and organisational skills, by explictly showing them how they balance the commitments of the extended essay, internal assessments and other work. This can be done early in the course, allowing them to apply these skills later in the course.