Author: wrpvincent

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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
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.

Categories
Books Personal

A reflection on climate strikes

climate people street weather
Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

Global Student Climate Strikes 2019

While reading Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal and her description of the global student climate protests I was reminded of the reaction on Twitter of some of the educators and people I follow, which was quite disapproving of the strikes, like the post below:

Naomi Klein articulates very well why students wanted to strike: climate change presents such a pressing and dangerous situation, one that is very likely to be world altering, and that presents the very real possibility that for school age children there may not be a world with jobs and the life we know it in the future. If you know your future is is f****d, what is the point in studying for it? Klein, quoting Thunberg writes:

“Why should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? … What is the point of learning facts….when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society?”

Klein (2020) On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal pg11

Teachers like Birbalsingh are focussed on their fight to create solid educational outcomes that they are sometimes not aware of the larger picture. Indeed, we could expect Toby Young, a climate change skeptic to take the view that students shouldn’t be protesting, after all from his position there is no justification for the strikes because climate change isn’t real. However, students striking to try to protect their futures, is just as important and urgent as studying at school to protect those futures. It is a shame that society has let them down to the point where they need to sacrifice their education in order to protest.

Greg Ashman writes along similar lines to Birbalsingh’s views in this post, although at greater length. And while what he writes echoes some of what Klein writes about in her book – the need for climate action to be driven by mass mobilization across societal groups for example – Ashman gets it wrong when he writes:

In this light, British school kids skipping school on a Friday to make vague demands that the government declare a ‘climate emergency’ does not really cut it. It is not like miners or nurses going on strike. It’s not really a ‘strike’ at all because nobody is inconvenienced and nobody loses any money. The only potential losers from a withdrawal of student labour are the students themselves, although this will depend greatly on the quality of the education that they have left behind.

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2019/02/17/skipping-school-to-save-the-world/ accessed 16/11/2020

Yes, the strike is not like a miners strike. Miners damaged their own income at the time of striking. They did this to try to protect their livelihoods. But I disagree with Ashman’s analysis. Students are trying to protect their future livelihoods, when none of the adults around them, who supposedly care about their futures seems to be doing anything about it. Ashman also misses the point that the climate strike is also a strike against free market capitalism (not capitalism itself – just the free market kind). If all students around the world went on strike they would be damaging that system as whole if they do not get educated because there would be a much more limited market to participate in in future. Remember that it is this free market system that is prime driver of climate change.

UK Remembrance Day Strike 2020

In the UK there is a yearly ritual of paying respects to those members of the Armed Forces that have perished in conflict most notably in WWI and WWII.

This year commentators were outraged by an extinction rebellion climate change protest at the Cenotaph. Despite the fact that one of the protestors was an ex-service man, media outlets claimed that this was an “insult” to the fallen.

Firstly, it strikes (no pun intended) me as ironic. While the day is a space for private reflection – members of the armed forces remember colleagues who have lost their lives in recent conflicts, the public uses this day, supposedly, to remember the fallen precisely because they fought for freedom and the rights it entails – like the right to protest.

Remembrance day serves as an opportunity to reflect on freedom, justice, and, so the story goes, by doing so we remember the importance of peace. My father would argue that remembrance day keeps us from fighting in Europe because we remember what a sheer waste of life it was.

Conviently it doesn’t stop us from bombing countries far away from here. We are happy to do that for oil.

Today we seem to have become obsessed with the ritual of remembrance day. But what are we actually remembering?

To me, staging a protest on the day of remembrance seems to actually be a way of actively honoring that sacrifice – you are actively exercising your right that was protected by the sacrifice of others. If you take issue with protests, are you really honoring what the dead died for?

When the protestors are claiming that “climate change means war” they are not making a metaphorical statement. They are highlighting the very real concerns that climate change will drive conflict.

You may argue that it wasn’t appropriate at the event, but what you are really saying is that what is important here is not the principle we are supposed to remember but instead the shallow, banal nationalism, that such events can be seen to support – the glorification of war and the feeding of the narrative that Britain is Great because she is more X, Y and Z than other nations.

As Naomi Klein writes:

“Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth”

Klein (2020) On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal pg255

Climate change will cause more war.

Climate change will cause more suffering.

We are already seeing it in Syria where drought caused the migration of farmers from the rural areas into the cities and sparked the unrest that led to the war and the migrations that have been so bothersome to many in the UK.

Climate change will affect geopolitics and could lead to more international tensions and conflicts.

I can think of no better way to honor the dead than trying to make society aware of its own hypocrisy. We are happy to remember the sacrifice that our heroes make but unwilling to face up to the problems our international actions cause both today and yesterday.

Categories
Coordination Personal Resources

NPQSL project: IBDP Curriculum Coherence

In January 2019, after starting a new job in China in September 2018, I began my NPQSL through UCL IOE’s Beijing Cluster. I guess I am a glutton for punishment. Not only had we uprooted the family and moved from Switzerland to China with our two daughters, to a new continent, city, house and jobs, I just had to undertake a large CPD project!

My job was a new role for me, and, while I felt very prepared for it, the challenges of adjusting professionally and personally to a whole new culture were significant. Reflecting now, going through my project and thinking about everything I achieved last academic year, despite such challenges, I am proud and that somewhat alleviates the shame I have been feeling this week over being made redundant.

Anyway, as I was scouting around for ideas for my NPQSL project, I could not find or connect with another IBDP Coordinator who had done the training, which is a UK qualification but open to (some) international schools too. Therefore I have decided to share a version of it on my TES shop for free (like all my resources that are slowly being populated to the site).

You can find my NPQSL project and appendices through the link below and you will also find my assessors feedback to go with it. I scored 20/28 which is the passing mark. Not the best score I have ever achieved, but I am pleased to have made it through despite all the other things going on in my work and personal life at the time.

I hope that it can help someone else when they are struggling with their own project.

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ibdp-npqsl-project-and-feedback-completed-feb-2020-12306245

Categories
Personal

A COVID-19 adventure

On February 3rd 2020, our school closed almost without warning. My family had left home on January 24th in order to take a weeks holiday by the coast in Vietnam with my parents in law who had been visiting us since just before my birthday.

On the last day before the holiday I had attended a meeting where we were told that there was an 80% chance that the campus would not open. By that time there were 5 cases of the virus in our city and the news of the outbreak in Wuhan had been on people’s minds all week.

The day we flew, all of us were already paranoid so that we didn’t leave the house for the day and wore masks all the way to the airport and on the flight to Vietnam.

As the holiday week progressed, we were told that the school would be closed for two weeks but staff needed to be back in school order to deliver online learning. This later evolved to an acceptance that no one would be allowed on campus – a rule brought in by the municipal government.

During the weeks holiday in the last week of January, the situation in China appeared to get worse and worse. We were glued to the BBC news app and watched as the UK FCO closed the local consulates and upgraded their travel advice all the way to do not travel unless it is essential.

Towards the end of that  holiday my wife and I were already worried about going back. With the change in the advice from the UK FCO, the clearly escalating situation, and the stories we were hearing from friends about food being cleared out of the supermarkets, we didn’t feel comfortable heading back but were worried about the stance our school was taking in initially insisting we come back.

Eventually the decision was taken out of our hands as our return flight to China was cancelled as the Vietnamese government took the decision to suspend all flights to and from China.

And so began our first 7 weeks of teaching and parenting away from home and away from school. During that initial 7 weeks we moved from Vietnam to Thailand because our Vietnamese visa was due to expire soon after our holiday and we knew we had 30 days visa free in Thailand as British nationals. Surely 30 days would be enough?

After 30 days we found we were still not going back and so we moved back to Vietnam after some issues surrounding visas which meant an aborted early morning trip to the airport in Chiang Mai.

I am sure that anyone reading this who lives in a house where both parents are working full time and have two children under 5 and has any experience of isolation/social distancing under the current COVID-19 pandemic will instantly understand the pressures that this situation presented. How do you both work full time from home and also look after small children that need constant supervision?

The added difficulty for our family in those first few weeks was that we didn’t know when we would be asked to come back for school reopening. It seems silly to write now, but at the time we thought we would be back to school in a few weeks at most. We didn’t want to be too far from our schools timezone so that we could stay in sync with the school timetable; if we went back to the UK we would conceivably have to teach at night and parent in the day. We also didn’t want to return to our school city because of the FCO advice and the stories we were hearing about the lockdown procedures being implemented in the city.

This left us planning week by week where we going to live as well as having to full time parent and work. Some weeks worked better than others, my wife and I finding a routine for ourselves and the children, even eating in the same local eateries for lunch and dinner. But that very much depended on the amenities that you found yourself with after making a decision to live somewhere based on booking.com info!

This continued until early March. All the while the disease appeared to be limited to China, we weren’t expecting a global pandemic based on what we were reading and our school began making plans to get teachers who were stranded outside of China back.

It is amazing how quickly the situation evolved in early March and it’s also incredible how different the picture looks with hindsight. In order to remind myself of the situation I was in I wrote much of this post on the plane back to the UK on March 25th.

In early March, we were informed that the school was planning to reopen and that staff who were not in their home country should aim to come back by the end of March. In order to see how the re-entry process went, the school Principal, who had also been out of China, was to return first and if that was successful the Site Based Leadership Team were to return followed by other “third country staff”.

After a successful return to China where the Principal picked up a direct flight to Chongqing from Bangkok with Lion Air my wife and I booked passage on the same route along with some other colleagues who were also stranded in “third countries”. At the time, in the middle of March, we were living in Hoi An in Vietnam and felt that we could easily get back to Bangkok from there to pick up this direct flight. Our Principal was also able to be picked up at the airport by school HR and taken straight to their apartment to begin their 14 day home quarantine.

Soon after however, it was clear that other staff were having some issues over their flights and it turned out their flights on the same route had been cancelled. Ours were still scheduled as initially Lion Air cancelled flights only to 31st March on that Monday (we had booked on the Sunday night) but by the Friday of that week (20th March) they had expanded that to 30th April.

So the Principal’s experience quickly became obsolete and the plan of having a guinea pig to see how re-entry procedures to China went became obsolete. The Principals return turned out to be the smoothest and easiest of all those who returned because the situation changed so rapidly in the last two weeks of March, when it became clear that the COVID-19 epidemic had expanded into a pandemic.

After our Lion Air flights were cancelled, the only options from Bangkok were via Chengdu or via Guangzhou. There were no flights to China from Vietnam since our original return flights from our holiday on 2nd Feb got cancelled.

When you are living it, a week can be a long time but when you think back on it it can seem very short. Memories become compressed and it’s easy to forget the feelings of anxiety that you live with in slow time when everyday you worry that the situation may change.

That week after we booked our China flights on the Sunday on the same route as the Principal, it seemed quite natural to be able to fly on 27th March so we could have our second week of quarantine in the Easter holiday.

My wife and I had already learned how difficult it was to plan and teach our own classes, deliver our eldest daughters online learning and parent both of the children well all at the same time, so when discussing our return home to China we knew that the only way we could manage a home 14 day quarantine without the distractions of any outside space was to plan the quarantine period in the holidays. We had expressed this desire as soon as we were asked to come back because we had already been having the conversations.

Now in light of our current actions I am sure that some will interpret our reluctance to fly earlier as us not wanting to go back at all. This is not the case but we felt at the time that we had to make the best decision for our two children.

It’s hard to get your feet in someone’s shoes. A colleague expressed concern by telling me why they thought our plan to quarantine at home during the Easter holidays was a bad idea because they felt we wouldn’t get a break. It was hard for them to understand why quarantining in the holidays was going to be the best break we could get! It meant that our children would benefit from not having two parents constantly torn by the demands of their needs the needs of the school. It meant that we would only have one week of work where we were trapped in the house with no outside space and no where to really separate work and play.

Being responsible continually for other people and placing their needs above your own, continually is a very hard thing to understand until you have had to do it.

Two days after booking our initial return flights from Bangkok to China we found the same airline had cancelled our colleagues flights on the same route. This was Tuesday 17th March, only a week after we were told the school plan to get everyone back and four days after the Principal had successfully made it back on the same route.

On Wednesday 18th March we were told by our landlady in Hoi An, that airlines were cancelling flights out of Vietnam. She was concerned about us being able to leave the country. Remember that there were no direct flights from Vietnam to China? Well now there seemed that there was going to be no flights anywhere else.

Faced with the looming realisation that we might get stuck in Vietnam we found our anxiety rising. Particularly as we already had an exit flight back to China from Bangkok. That evening that we got the news from our landlady, we booked an air Asia flight for the coming Saturday from Da Nang to Bangkok.

The next morning we woke up to find that flight cancelled. This was Thursday morning 19th March.

More airlines closing. More panic. We found tickets for a flight leaving to Bangkok a day earlier – leaving on Friday 20th March. It was more dear but we had passed counting coins at this stage. This was also the day that our Chinese nanny, after waiting for weeks for us to come back, resigned so she could find other work.

There’s a pandemic. You are separated from your home nation and from the nation you are resident in. Governments are making last minute announcements. Airlines are cancelling flights. It is hard to stay on top of the information. You live with anxiety constantly about the changes, about what is going to happen. This is on top of already emotionally, mentally and financially challenging “home-work” circumstances that we had lived with for 7 weeks already.

The next morning, Friday 20th March, we woke up to the news from the FCO that Thailand was bringing in new immigration requirements. Our flight was that day and we had no way of meeting the new requirements. We went to the airport with bated breath. Unsure if we would be able to check in. unsure if we would have the correct paperwork. Unsure if we could immigrate into Thailand.

Thankfully checking in went smoothly , although that entire check in procedure and exit from Vietnam was one of the tensest moments of my life. At the airport every flight, bar ours, was cancelled.

When we arrived in Thailand we received news that our Lion Air flight on 2nd April had also been cancelled. After panicing to get out of Vietnam back to Thailand to be able to get our flight back to China we no longer had a flight back to China.

We couldn’t wait around any longer hoping things would work out. We could see that the sand was shifting around us. The travel picture was changing. Immigration requirements were changing. Information you had on one day was obsolete the next.

If we booked a flight there was no guarantee that it would go. Plus because of the increasing expense of flights, we needed to trade off economical flights with leaving as soon as possible, before the situation changed further.

A delay of 24 hours would push prices up further. A delay of 24 hours would leave us more exposed to the risk of sudden changes in flight schedules and immigration policies.

We seriously felt at risk of being trapped in Thailand with our two small children during a global pandemic.

This was a real risk that we couldn’t afford after 8 weeks already of living out of bags while parenting and working.  We had initially packed for a one week holiday. We needed to get home and we needed support with the children so we could focus on work.

We also had no clarity on what the quarantine procedures would entail for us. Our Principal has been able to go straight home and quarantine at home, which would be manageable if we could do it in the Easter holidays but as we saw over that weekend, that rapidly changed. With no direct flights back to our city, there was an increasing chance that teachers would be held in quarantine in hotels in other cities that they flew into. it wasn’t clear who would be responsible for these costs.

We booked refundable flights back to the UK and waited. Over that weekend we began to see the challenges of no direct routes. Flights were available via Guangzhou, Nanning and Chengdu. These were clearly different and by the time recommendations came to not go via Chengdu people had already booked flights on them. Some colleagues ended up being quarantined in a hotel there. We also heard that families were to be separated for the two weeks with the children being quarantined with their mother. By Friday 27th March it was clear that home quarantine was not an option.

It was not the time to wait. We had to make decisions based on the best data we had available. In the future you may look back and think you did the “right” thing, or you may look back and think you didn’t. In the here and now there is just no way of knowing. Often when you look back your perception of the events is changed so it’s important to be clear with yourself in the present moment what your reasons are.

On the plane home on Wednesday 25th March I wrote:

Sitting on this plane I still feel anxious. I am relieved too. Relieved to be getting my kids back into the UK where their grandparents want to see them. Back to the UK where I have been amazed at the deep support network and its ability to collectively find a solution. But I am anxious. For me the anxiety has now changed. No longer anxious about getting trapped. I’m anxious about what my employer will say. I’m anxious that I’ll be jobless and that I’ll lose my bonus. I’m anxious that my actions will damage my career. I’m even anxious that I can’t now access the internet, so accustomed I have become to reading the BBC news hourly, sending and receiving messages like never before. Constantly connected in my hours of panic, I’m now unused to being disconnected.

The day after we returned the UK the Chinese government announced that it was closing its borders to all foreigners except diplomats, a sensible thing to do when individuals and companies were disregarding the governmental advice to limit travel to essential travel only.

On Thursday 26th March the Thai authorities brought in stronger lockdown procedures including road blocks and checkpoints. There was a possibility of further flight cancellations and stronger shut down measures. Those who waited may be forced into being stranded for a long time. If we hadn’t booked our flights back to the UK and rebooked to China we would have been stuck in Thailand and facing the national lockdown there. I am sure we would have managed but it wouldn’t have been great for our two little ones.

Unfortunately, I think that often teachers and school leaders become so focussed on learning, that losing learning time can be the worst thing in the world. Forward planning becomes narrow and very short term, long term planning almost obsolete, or very rare. Maybe it’s worry about accountability to parents. Maybe an inability to think, plan and articulate long term scenarios. Maybe it’s a lack of training.

In this scenario, I wonder if more would have been achieved long term if more time had been taken to adequately train staff in the short term and plan for the long term instead of assuming it would all be over in a few weeks.

Perhaps we should have had a short, medium and long term plan.

It’s easy to say that in hindsight though.