Category: Teaching & Learning

Categories
Teaching & Learning

Developing a progression model for IBDP biology

Originally posted on November 24, 2018 @ 4:00 pm

I recently completed Daisy Christodolou’s “Making good progress?”. You can see my notes here. In the final chapters, after presenting an argument building up to this, she outlines the key aspects of what she terms a “progression model”. In this post I want to line up some ideas about what this may look like in delivering the IB DP Biology course.

In her book Christodoulou suggests, and I agree, that to effectively help students make progress we have to break down the skills required to be successful in the final assessments into sub-skills and practice these. This is a bit analogous to a football team practicing dribbling, striking or defending in order to make progress in the main game.

In the book she also stresses the difference between formative and summative assessments, what they can and can’t be used for respectively and why one assessment can’t necessarily be used for both.

A progression model for biology

A progression model would clearly map out how to get from the start to the finish of any given course, and make progress in mastering the skills and concepts associated with that domain. In order to do this we need to think carefully about:

  1. What are the key skills being assessed in the final summative tasks (don’t forget that language or maths skills might be a large component of this)?
  2. What sub-components make up these skills?
  3. What tasks can be designed to appropriately formatively assess the development of these sub-skills or, in other words, What does deliberate practice look like in biology?
  4. What would be our formative item bank?
  5. What could be our standardised assessment bank?
  6. What are appropriate summative assessment tasks throughout that would allow us to measure progress throughout the course?
  7. What could be our summative item bank?
  8. How often should progress to the final summative task be measured i.e. how often should we set summative assessments in an academic year that track progress?

Key skills in biology

This is quite a tricky concept to pin down in biology specifically and in the sciences in general. What skills exactly are kids being assessed on in those final summative IGCSE or IBDP/A Level exams. I haven’t done a thorough literature review here so currently I am not sure what previous work has been in this area.

However,  I would contend that most final written summative exams are assessing students conceptual understanding of the domain. If this is the case then the skill is really, thinking and understanding about and with the material of the domain. Students who have a deeper understanding of the links between concepts are likely to do better.

In addition, those courses with a practical component, like the IBDP group 4 internal assessment are assessing a students understanding of the scientific process. While it may seem like these components are assessing practical skills per se, they only do this indirectly, as it is the actual written report that is assessed and moderated. To do well the student is actually demonstrating an understanding of the process, regardless of where their practical skills are in terms of development.

Indeed if we look at the assessment objectives of IBDP biology we see that this is very much the case. Students are assessed on their ability to: demonstrate knowledge and understanding and apply that understanding of facts, concepts and terminology; methodologies and communication in science etc.

Sub-skills

How can we move students to a place where they can competently demonstrate knowledge and understanding, apply that understanding as well as formulate, analyse and evaluate aspects of the scientific method and communication.

The literature on the psychology of learning would suggest breaking down these skills into their subcomponents. This means we need to look at methods that develop knowledge and understanding from knowledge. Organising our units in ways that help students see the bigger concepts and connections between concepts within the domain will also help. For more on this see my previous post here. I think that understanding develops from knowledge.

I recently read that Thomas Khun claimed that expertise in science was achieved by the studying of exemplars. Scientific experts are experts because they have learned to draw the general concepts of the specific examples.

Useful sub-skills would be:

  • Fluency with the terminology of the domain
  • Ability to read graphs and data
  • Explicit knowledge of very specific examples
  • Explicit knowledge of abstract concepts illustrated by the specific examples
  • Ability to generate hypothesis and construct controlled experiments

Deliberate practice in biology

Thinking about these sub-skills, then, we can see what may constitute deliberate practice in biology and thus what would make useful formative assessments within the subject.

Fluency with the terminology can be gained through the studying of terminology decks like those available on quizlet. In addition, the work of Isabel Beck. Suggests that learning words isolated from text is not that helpful to gaining an understanding of those terms. To gain this, students need to be exposed to these words in context. Therefore there is a lot to be said for tasks and formative assessments that get students reading. Formative assessments could then consist of vocab tests and reading comprehension exercises of selected texts.

Reading and interpreting data can be improved through practice of these skills. This is an area where inquiry alone won’t help students make progress. Students need to be shown how to interpret data and read tables and graphs before making judgements. Ideally, in my opinion they should do this once they have learned the relevant factual knowledge of a related topic. Formative assessments focussing on data interpretation should therefore come a little later once students have covered a bulk of the content.

To build up conceptual understanding, students need to be exposed to specific examples related to those topics as I outlined in this post. Tests (MCQs) that assess how well students know the specific details of an example could be useful here to guide learners to which parts they know and those they don’t.

Following this we can begin to link examples together to build knowledge of a more abstract concept. Concepts can then be knitted together to develop the domain specific thinking skills: thinking like a biologist.

Formative assessments

Formative assessments could take the form of MCQs but as outlined above, vocab tests, reading comprehension activities, and other tasks may well have their place here.

Summative assessments for measuring progress

I am now thinking that to truly assess student progress against the domain, individual unit tests just won’t cut it. As Christodolou argues, summative tests exists to create shared meaning and do that need to be valid and reliable. Does scoring a 7 in a unit test on one topic of an 11 topic syllabus mean that the student is on track to score a 7? Not necessarily. Not only is the unit test not comparable to the IB 7 because it is only sampling a tiny portion of the full domain, but the construction and administration of the test may not be as rigorous as that of the actual IB papers.

Clearly it isn’t ideal to use the formative assessments described above as these are nothing like the final summative assessment of the course, plus their purpose is to guide teaching and learning, not to measure progress.

I would argue that summative assessments over the two-year course should use entire past papers. These past papers sample the entire domain of the course and performance against them is the best method of progress in the domain. A past paper could be administered right at the start of the course to establish a base line. Subsequent, infrequent, summative tests, also composed of past papers could then measure progress against this baseline.

Why should summative assessments use past papers? What not use unit tests? Unit tests, aggregated, is not the same thing as performance on a single assessment sampling the whole domain. They cannot produce the same shared meaning as an assessment that samples the entire domain. In addition the use of many single unit, high stakes tests will cause teaching to the test as well as much more student anxiety. Instead lots of formative testing and practice of recall should help to build students confidence in themselves.

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
Teaching & Learning

Notes on making good progress?: Chapter 1

Originally posted on October 28, 2018 @ 7:59 am

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.

Why didn’t Assessment for Learning transform our schools?

Formative assessment is when teachers use evidence of student learning to adapt instruction to meet student need. It’s focus is on what students need to do to improve, on their weaknesses. Feedback then, needs to be tailored thoughtfully to direct the student in how to improve and allow students to act on that feedback.

Formative assessment should be used to diagnose weakness and feedback should tell students how to improve explicitly. AfL is not just about teachers diagnosing weakness and being responsive it is about students responding to information about their progress. Could be a good model for appraisal too.

There is a tension then, between summative and formative assessment. One is about measuring student progress against the aims of education while formative assessment is about the students finding out what they need to do to improve.

If we can agree on the aims of assessment, there is still a discussion about methods. We either favour the generic-skill method which states that to get better at a particular performance you just need to practice that performance. So if you need to practice critical thinking you just practice it or if you want to get better at writing an essay, you just write lots of them. Or we favour the deliberate practice method. This method breaks the final skill down into its constituent parts and practices those. So footballers practice dribbling, passing, defending and shooting not just playing whole games all the time.

Summative assessment is about assessing progress against the aims of education. Formative assessment is about the methods you choose to meet those aims: generic or deliberate. Depending on which one of these you subscribe too will affect your formative assessment, and thus whether assessment tasks can be used formatively and summatively.

If you believe that skill acquisition is generic then formative assessment tasks will match the final summative task. You will write lots of essays, feedback can be given and a grade awarded. If you believe that the method of deliberate practice is better then you may need to design formative tasks that don’t look like the final task. These tasks cannot be used summatively because they don’t match the final task.

Interestingly, belief in generic skills leads down the road of test prep and narrow focus on exam tasks because this model suggests that to get better at the exams you do need you need to practice taking them.

In my mind the key questions for a school, curriculum level or department that wants to adopt the deliberate practice model should be:

  • What are the key skills being assessed in the final summative tasks (don’t forget that language or maths skills might be a large component of this?
  • What sub-components make up these skills?
  • What tasks can be designed to appropriately formatively assess the development of these sub-skills?
  • What does deliberate practice look like in my subject?
  • How often should progress to the final summative task be measured i.e. how often should we set summative assessments in an academic year that track progress?
Categories
EdTech Teaching & Learning

eLearning on a hairpin

Some great advice for managing online learning

Our campus closed on February 3rd 2020, although effectively it was the 24th January when all the students and teachers went on holiday for the Lunar New Year.

In this post I want to outline how I have approached eLearning, the tools I have used and how I have used them, along with my perception of how students have recieved them.

My thoughts cover the period from the 3rd February until the end of March 2020 and are based on needing to get to grips with a new approach, with little to no training, amidst some personal challenges that I will outline in a later post.

Our school closed with almost no warning and we were provided with voluntary training (which I attended during the holiday) on ClassIn which we didn’t use (but looks very good), followed by one day of prep on Monday 3rd February before diving into delivering the full program.

My classes have already become fairly routine driven. I have a method and I stick to it. This is partly because I juggle a lot of different responsibilities and having a repetitive plan takes some of the strain away, which is good for my students because they don’t benefit if I am constantly stressed out.

I found the initial switch quite easy as my routines could transfer quite easily into an online environment and for the first two weeks we were not required to hold live classes.

Quizlet

I have been using Quizlet a lot over the last few years and have completed construction of key terms decks for the entire 2016 IBDP biology course and the current CAIE IGCSE biology course. Links below:

Links to my IGCSE Quizlet decks
Links to my IBDP Quizlet decks

I use Quizlet in a variety of ways. Any activity can be used in class or at home but I focus on the learn activity for students to pre-learn vocabulary before starting new concepts. In my classes, students who complete this task quicker can work through the other learning activities to overlearn the words.

The live activity makes a great team starter to review prior learning and can easily be combined with share screen on Zoom. The gravity and match activities also make good starters that have a competitive edge for individuals. Mostly I use Quizlet to pre-learn vocab and access prior learning. This formative assessment is great for review as well.

All in all Quizlet is hugely versatile and can be used in any sequence. For a vocab heavy subject like biology, I would argue it is essential.

Kognity

One of the best moves I think that we made last year was to move to digital books. There was a variety of reasons for this. Procurement of books in some countries is not always easy for a variety of reasons.

Kognity acts in the same way as a normal textbook and I have always been keen for my IGCSE and IB biology students to develop independent note taking and writing skills. They need to be prepared to be independent adult learners and need the skills to be able to self study. I use the connect-extend-challenge routine regularly in class and so have made sure to give students time during their eLearning to continue with this exercise when encountering new concepts and topics.

But Kognity has two features that make it exceptionally better than a physical textbook: 1) the practice section for students 2) the assignments and statistics sections for teachers.

The inbuilt practice functions of Kognity lend themselves to formative assessment really well. Not only do students have to take questions to mark a section of the textbook as having been read, but they can self assess through strength tests and strength battles. In the strength tests students can pick any section of the textbook and take 5 multiple choice questions on that topic. In the strength battles they can compete against a friend or the “bot” to see who can answer the questions first. Combined with Zoom breakout rooms the strength battle tool is a great way to get kids interacting in small groups. I have found that they are more comfortable talking and socialising in smaller groups than in front of the whole digital class.

I use these as starters to access prior learning and may spend a fair bit of time getting students to review this material together or in groups. Using breakout rooms in Zoom allows students to be grouped into pairs to do strength battles.

Teachers can set assignments in the form of sections of the textbook to be read, multiple choice questions or extended response exam style questions. These assignments can be scheduled, allowing you to plan for weeks at a time.

The statistics pages are very useful in allowing you to see how many questions students have taken for a topic and how many they have got right in total, easily allowing you to spot trends of topics that may need further teaching. In the statistics pages you can also easily see what assignments students have or have not completed and can also even see when students last logged into the textbook.

Zoom

Zoom was the biggest learning challenge for me during this period (and remember my wife and I are both teachers with a 3yo and 4yo at the time and not working from home but from random hotels – so there wasn’t a lot of time for personal CPD). I had used it a couple of times for meetings but now teaching one live lesson a week per class with it felt like quite a lot to learn.

Zoom allows you to share your screen so that you can take kids through a PowerPoint or explain instructions for using Kognity or Quizlet etc. You can also pause the screen share if you need to bring something else up, like emails, that you don’t want your whole class seeing. During screen share you can also add annotations, text and drawings, that you can save.

Combined with sketch pad this becomes a very powerful tool for “chalk and talk” where necessary.

Another feature of Zoom that I really like are the breakout rooms. Here you can assign students to “rooms” within the call so that they can work on individual of group tasks. You are able to enter and exit the rooms as much as you like, as well as broadcast messages to all rooms. Using breakout rooms I have students go head to head in strength battles, design Kahoot quizes for their peers or take the time to meet with students one to one or in small groups.

One of the things that I learned in my first few weeks was that Zoom lessons are not like normal lessons. Students may well have been sitting in quaratine or home isolation for weeks, not leaving the house and certainly not seeing friends. I think it is important to create as many opportunities for our students to chat to one another and play games. I find that breaking them up into smaller groups in Zoom rooms helps them get over some shyness and actually connect with each other.

Seneca

I discovered Seneca while on this learning adventure and has been a fab resource for my IGCSE class, adding something different into the mix.

From the teacher side it allows tracking and setting of assignments like Kognity and is free.

From the student side it encourages recall through self testing and therefore thought to improve retention. I introduced it to students during the eLearning period and they said they prefer Kognity.

Kahoot

Combined with Zoom this is a fun tool. Give students the opportunity to make their own Kahoot quizzes to test each other. These can be made in breakout rooms, by pairs or small groups of students. Or teachers can deliver their own quizzes, like running a Quizlet live session.

Screencasting & Sketchpad

I have one live session a week where I run some of the activities outlined above. I also use the live lesson for checking in with students to find out how they have been getting on with the other asynchronous tasks that I have set.

I find that screencasting is quite difficult to get right without a silent room, good microphone, or space to annotate and draw effectively – my mac track pad with sketchpad is not ideal. Sketchpad is a great tool though when you can get it to work!

A final word of advice

Go easy. Even if you were lucky enough to prep, you and the kids need time to adjust to a new scenario.

Be mindful that the students situations may be very different. Some kids may be looking after siblings. Some kids may have to share a laptop with other siblings. Don’t set so much work and don’t expect it all to get done. Be compassionate and try to understand the issues your students are facing.

This piece of research, although aimed at managers, is useful for teachers, particularly the first point. It is important to understand the students individual situations. I wish I had appreciated this more at the start.

Finally, your students may be isolated away from friends with limited opportunities to socialise. Give them the chance in your live lessons to talk and play. Zoom breakout rooms are great for breaking the class up into smaller groups. Give them a collaborative task to get on with and let them catch up with their friends. This is a scary and stressful situation for all of us.

Categories
Coordination Personal Teaching & Learning

I survived 18-19

This is my last post for the school year 2018-19. I will be back in August/September with some new material.

What have I done this year?

I certainly don’t do things by halves. In the space of one year I have moved house, country, and continent with my family, engaging with a whole new culture, paradigm and language.  This involved huge adjustments in life (just going to the supermarket was one!) and parenting routines as well as overcoming significant cultural adjustments. It’s been a hard year to be a parent and husband.

At the same time I have changed schools and jobs, taking on a new senior role involving acting as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program Coordinator, HS Diploma Coordinator and the University Guidance Officer. My new school had recently moved from A Levels to the IBDP and this year was to be the final year for the first cohort. It was exciting to be a first time DPC, working with a new program: lots of potential for positive change and influence where necessary.

I have also moved back to teaching IGCSE biology for the first time in six years and picked up a year 13 class which resulted in me having to adapt my normal teaching SOW to fit their needs. It has been quite a challenge; having taught the IB Middle Years Program for four years where I had to adapt the biology curriculum on an ongoing basis, I had to start over in planning and prepping the IGCSE biology course.

I wrote my reflections on my first term in this role up in this post, and throughout this year, as I wrote about previously, I have led training on academic integrity, leading to a new policy, coordinated the IB Extended Essay (which was a unexpected surprise) and implemented a development plan to embed TOK in the whole secondary Yr7-13 curriculum.

On top of all of this I have continued to work as a university guidance officer and managed kids applications to universities in Hong Kong, China and South Korea for the first time, alongside apps to Canada and the US. Korean University applications are far from simple!

Finally, I have undertaken significant professional development, through the UK’s National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership via UCL’s Leadership Colab’s cluster group at Harrow International in Beijing attending five Saturday sessions. I am now looking to write up my 5000 word project based on my role as IB DPC and implementing change in the Key Stage 5 curriculum. Added to this I have attended the CIS-EARCOS institute on higher education  in Bangkok and the IBO’s global conference in Hong Kong as well as fitted in university visits to four universities in Hong Kong.

Reflections on classroom practice

The teaching has been enjoyable but frustrating when I haven’t been able to deliver a much loved course in the way that I would like, particularly after I have spent so much time reading, thinking and writing about my ideas regarding life science instruction over the last few years. I am looking forward to beginning a new course with year 12 in August, and further developing my ideas surrounding using stimuli material to help link the course to other subject areas and generate big inquiry questions, linked to real world issues. I have enjoyed the IGCSE teaching, mainly because this has been an opportunity to take a course from the start and really think about how my ideas for the IB biology curriculum translate over to the IGCSE curriculum. I am looking forward to continuing the course with a fantastic group of year 10s soon to be year 11s.

The major problem I have been consumed with recently, both for my own classroom practice and from a whole curriculum perspective, is how to make the learning authentic and meaningful for students. By this I mean is how can we help to students to see how what they are learning links to the real world, and real world, current issues – to help them understand the global narrative that they are their curriculum is part of. I also mean how can we inject more meaning into the their performances and the artefacts that they are producing. I summarised my ideas in this post.

Reflections on leadership

As I wrote previously, this was my first year in senior leadership and this year has been a steep learning curve in that regard. Leadership is a proper marathon. You can’t afford to slacken off – there are always relationships to be built, and the wrong smile or word can undo weeks of hard labour on this front. This has come home a lot for me as we wind into the last three weeks of a very long year. Teachers are tired, I am tired, the leadership team is tired…..what is  the learning from this?

One thing I have noticed is that my sleeping thoughts, those just as I am going to sleep and when I wake up are much more preoccuppied with work. Aside from the occasionally sunday night worries, or worries the night before a new term start, this has never happened to me on this scale that I can remember. This year it has been a constant feature of life. Several nights a week, for most weeks of the year I have found myself thinking about things that I am responsible for and have no direct control over. I wish my waking thoughts were preoccupied with my own kids but no mostly these are do with the administration of the Extended Essay or something to do with Academic Honesty.

Since Christmas a huge amount of my time has been taken up with thinking about exams! First it was the mock exams and then the May exams. The amount of behind the scenes work that goes into running an exam session is truly extraordinary. There is the exam secure storage to sort out, so that it meets new and ever changing standards. There is the exam timetable to put together so IB and IGCSE exams are in one calendar, there is the invigilation schedule to plan and organise, and find creative ways to make this easily understood by teachers. In our case there was a re-rooming schedule to organise. Added to this there is making sure that all the correct exam stationary is present and accounted for, that we have received the correct exams, that the examination rooms are set up correctly and in line with regulations, that the invigilators are briefed and know what they can and can’t do, that the students and parents are briefed. This aspect of the job is highly administrative but still requires learning of new procedure and reflection on how to improve the processes that we put in place last year.

The approach to exams this year reminded me of prior learning. Some of the conversations I have had this year with colleagues have surrounded accountability and quality assurance. I refused to make personalised exam timetables for my students in year 12 and 13 this year. Not only is this a MASSIVE opportunity cost for me, but it means that potentially kids miss out on a massive formative opportunity for development. The argument that we should was basically to ensure that they didn’t miss any exams, but so what if they miss a mock exam? Surely that is going to teach that student something valuable. I know it did when it happened to me at university. Secondary leaders and teachers have got to remember that we are in the business of raising adults, we shouldn’t be taking away opportunities for kids to learn, no matter the cost, because better learn it now, the stakes are only going to get higher.

Aside from exams, I have had to guide the teaching team through their first set of IBDP eCoursework procedures. Making sure that teachers knew which items they were uploading and which of these were meant to graded and annotated and which weren’t. We also had to think, as a team, about good marking and moderation procedures and practices as well as what were consistent annotations on student work. Again I think that there is still room for improvement here.

Because the IBDP has such a large volume of coursework that is both externally assessed and internally assessed, externally moderated, student and teacher understandings of academic integrity issues is paramount. Next year, there is still work to be done in this area, particularly in terms of improving our students understandings, but we have made steps in the right direction this year in developing a shared understanding of the policy and procedures surrounding this.

Another aspect of the IBDP curriculum we have been beginning to look at this year is the narrative and coherence of the curriculum both horizontally, within year 12 and 13 and vertically with the rest of the secondary school. The first step in this was to look at how TOK brings the curriculum areas together. This involves developing subject specialists understanding of TOK and what it brings to their subjects and exploring links between the TOK and subject areas. We have begun this process this year with some training on TOK and P4C and will continue with training in this area next year. I have been much inspired by Mary Myatt and Martin Robinson in this area.

I have continued to be mindful of building positive relationships and a positive atmosphere, as I identified this as an area of development for me coming into the role. Teacher issues and resolving them, has been the real stumbling block here. How do you build trusting, respectful and positive relationships but still hold colleagues to account for the actions or lack thereof. Managing challenging personalities remains an area for development for me, as well as maintaining my own positivity and proactive outlook when stress, tiredness, and difficult attitudes can make it even harder to be empathetic and understanding of others at times. How do you be an inspiring leader and get people on board with your vision when, at times, you have to call others out? How do you do this without allowing others to take advantage of your attempts to be understanding and to empathise?

Even if I don’t pass the assessment, the NPQSL course has been really quite valuable to me. I wanted to take this course because I recognised that I had a lack of leadership training, if you will. I wanted some exposure to the theory behind leadership for learning.  I have taken away something from each of the five face to face session and blogged about four of those sessions; here, here, here and here.

Finally, At the start of this year I expressed some frustration to my boss about my lack of line managing anyone. I was new to SLT in my school and with the new leadership position I had expected to be formally part of the appraisal process for staff. I felt that I had a lot to offer in terms of coaching colleagues etc. I have come to learn over this year that leadership isn’t about being anyones boss. Instead it is about relationships. I am pleased to reflect on the fact that several HoDs have sought me out on regular occasions for advice and support. I am pleased to give it to them and pleased that after 8 months in a school I am at a position where despite the lack of official “line management” in the org chart, colleagues have felt that they could approach me with questions and that I am able to support them. Leadership and management is far more than box ticking appraisal and I now reflect that I am happy being an unofficial coach and mentor than having direct reports.

No wonder I have not always felt the best on an emotional and psychological level this year, it has been a ride. Time for a much needed holiday . Looking forward to celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary in Otterburn, Northumberland with all my siblings and their families. Oh, and I better get writing that NPQSL project up….