A classic combination of questions in action research. I’m going to use them to try to help me reflect on this blog. I got very bogged down in the 31 day Blog Commenting Challenge. It made me really think about what I’m doing with this blog and, well, why I write it at all. I’m going to use a reflection technique to help me sort it out. It’s one that I used a lot when I was at uni and which might just be helpful now.

What?

State the problem -

I’m only a very part time educator these days. When I do work in education it is with adults and it is very limited. Most blogs that I read or comment on are primary school teachers. After 18 months out of school I’ve lost my common ground with them. I thought I’d find adult education bloggers to be my peers and provide a new community. I haven’t. They are either not there or I can’t find them. It’s not like I can just use university bloggers either - their issues are as different to mine as the primary school teachers.

Mostly now what I do is write: blogs; articles; wiki pages. Some about education, some not. I like to write. I enjoy it.I love the whole gamut of writing from simple factual things about dates and times to long, in depth, opinion pieces. Mostly it’s the sort of writing that combines words and images. Heh - I wasn’t going to get less visual was I?

Put simply then, the problem is that what I read (blogs and twitter) and what I write about (and reflect on) here does not improve my practice. My practice has changed.

So What?

Why is this important? Well, it’s important because I still want to take actions and improve. It’s just that what I do has changed. I still want to use a blog to help me do that. I know it’s a useful tool and I want to use it.

Now What?

Now I get to re-invent my RSS reader and this blog. If you come with me on this journey you are very welcome. If this is where we part company, thanks for being around and goodbye.

I’m going to use these insight to plan radical changes to the blog over the next couple of weeks. It might get a bit bumpy along the way. My focus is going to shift to writing and reading in all it’s forms.

So here’s a few questions for anyone who’s still here after this announcement.

Who writes really well?

Who should I be reading?

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I’m a little behind with the 31 day challenge so this is my day 7 reflection.

Progress to date:

1. Audited my own commenting behaviour,
2. Commented on a new blog,
3. Installed a blog comment tracking service,
4. Asked a question in a comment,
5. Commented on a post I didn’t agree with
6. Responded to another commenter on a blog post.

Task 7 is to identify 3 things I’ve learned in the challenge so far. I’m to think about what I’ve learned about myself as a commenter, what I’ve learned about the act of commenting, and how I think my recent commenting activities have impacted me as commenter and a blogger. The idea is to quickly identify the significant learning. Familiar and not all together comfortable territory from Ultraversity days First the:

Reflection

I learned that I am a reluctant to post comments part because I worry about what people will think of me. I think I sometimes misjudge the tone of what I write and there can be cultural differences that make global blog commenting more difficult. Yet I have no problem commenting on lots of flickr photos, engaging in conversations about the images and their meanings, implications etc. I am more confident in that environment. I also discovered I’m quite likely to respond to a blog post from a contact on twitter rather than on their blog.

Recurring themes? Feeling safe, comfortable and ownership

About commenting in general I’ve learned that it’s harder than I thought. It’s given me an insight into why people might be reluctant to comment on my blogs. I read so many things and am interested and enjoy them but I still only respond to a small minority. It’s made me more aware of the need to get a response from the blogger, to be made welcome and comfortable even if I’m disagreeing with them. Hard! See the point above. I might just face the fact that avoiding conflict is a deep seated personality trait and stay in my comfort zone.

Recurring themes - difficulties, balance, conflict avoidance

Now for some quantitative data:

There seems to be a 10% responding to 90% reading balance now compared to 2% - 98% before the challenge.

Ok - that’s pleasing This is partly because I culled my feeds and removed a lot of stuff I skimmed and wasn’t relevant to my current needs and interests. Even so I think it’s progress. None of these comments were just “me too” posts and I tried to add something and engage with the poster and other commenters in all of them.

However - I still commented on 3 times as many flickr photos as blogs! These comments were almost never of the ‘lovely photo’ variety

Themes - progress, engagement, visual stimuli

Significant Learning

I avoid even minor conflict - even on blogs,
Visual stimulus is important to me
I can change my commenting habits with a small amount of effort

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Music seems to be a bit of a theme on the blog at the moment. An old friend from Ultraversity days, Sarah Hackett, got in touch recently to tell me about her new venture. Sarah did some fine research (First Class in fact!) for her final year project on using Moodle and video coaching to work with groups learning folk fiddle. If you are going to TeachMeet08 North East London edition you might be lucky enough to hear her talk about it.

Her new venture takes that work and extends it out to a wider audience:

Folk Fiddle lessons online

Learn OnLine 4 life and Laugh Out Loud 4 Life
Learn Folk Fiddle tunes by ear and and improve your aural skills, memory, musicianship, awareness of harmony, violin technique, appreciation of musical form and structure, and enjoy practical application making sense of music theory in a logical way. Most importantly though - have a great deal of fun and get involved in a really sociable activity!

Sarah’s work is always innovative and interesting. She provides a flavour of what people can expect:

A free course of online lessons

I have posted videos for the tune Trip To Matlock that you can access without charge so that you will be able to get an idea of what to expect.

Please would you give a donation to one of the charities suggested in the Trip to Matlock News Forum for the use of these videos. There is no need to sign in - just click on the blue i button to find out how to access.

The site is great for individuals or could be used by schools groups. Sarah’s charges are very reasonable and you’d certainly be getting expert coaching.

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I love global collaboration projects. They are such powerful stimuli for children’s learning. I’ve been keen on them ever since I first found Flat Stanley and I even initiated a small scale one as part of my degree.

You don’t have to be the class teacher to initiate this sort of thing. If a TA or a Learning Mentor is prepared to see it though the teacher is often delighted to let them. It would make a lovely action research project. Note the exchange is of “stories, photographs or podcasts” so not too tricky, even better if your class is doing something like “The Travels of Barnaby Bear”.
There’s a flyer to download and print on Sylia’s blog and more details on the Teddy Bears Around the World Blog

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POP Quiz-Text Version
POP Quiz 1
Do you know the true art of questioning? (If Students Wrote the Quiz)

Can you answer “NO” to all 5 questions?

* Do you put our names at the BEGINNING of directed questions? If you put names at the beginning of a question, the rest of us will tend to ignore your question, since you have already chosen who will do the answering for you! Wouldn’t you, too?

I can mostly answer No to this one, but it’s good to be reminded

* Do you ask “whole group” questions like, “Does everyone understand the difference between…?” Hope not, because it is simply an invitation for a chorus of “yes” responses and the 2 or 3 of us who do not understand probably would not let you know because, “everyone must have understood it but us!” Instead, ask, “Who would like for me to repeat those directions?”

Oh - yeah, I knew that but I’ve still caught myself doing it a couple of times

* Do you repeat student answers? If you do, then you’re teaching us not to listen to each other, because we know the answer will be repeated by you! Instead, try other responses such as “Tell us more,” or “Someone else?”

Ouch! Guilty as charged Need to watch this one!

* Are you always the “answer-giver” in class? If you turn our questions back to us, you will encourage us to do our own thinking and learn to answer our own questions. For example ask, “That is a good question. What do you think?” After giving us a chance to state an opinion, the question can then be directed to the class for discussion. At that point you can add your comments to ours.

Ok I get an A+ for this one, I’m smiling again:-)

* Do you practice less “wait time” for the slower students than you do for the smarter ones? Researchers have clearly demonstrated that teachers typically wait less than one second after asking a question before calling on a student, answer the question themselves, or make an additional comment! Increasing wait time results in dramatic improvements in the overall quality of class discussions.

I’ve been working on this one, counting up to twenty elephants in my head. Adults need thinking time too especially when English is their second language.

There’s lots more good stuff on this site.

What aids do you use to reflect on your teaching?

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I am about to embark on a new venture. I will be teaching NCFE level 2 with a group of teaching assistants for a few hours a week. It’s exciting and daunting at the same time. It’s an opportunity to put into practice all my constructivist ideals and my commitment to web 2.0 but it’s going to be a challenge. I’m putting all my teaching materials online in the Teaching Assistants area of usefulwiki and I hope to attract other UK based TA trainers and students to get involved.

Like the web head I am the first thing I did was ask round in the TA forums for people’s impressions and experiences of the course. I got lots of helpful advice and encouragement and a great book list! However one of the main thing that they agreed on was that sometimes the tutors ‘waffle on’ about things that don’t seem very relevant to the evidence based assessment criteria. This instantly rang bells for me. I could be wrong but this may be a case of surface versus deep learning. The TAs want their ‘bit of paper’ and as stressed, busy people, they want to achieve it by doing ‘just enough’ work to get them through. The tutors though have other objectives, they want to produce rounded, competent TAs who are reflective about their work, apply theory to their practice etc. Is this starting to sound familiar to any one? Especially people at Ultraversity?

I have no idea how to resolve this at the moment but I think the key is in carefully structured assessment assignments that encourage a reflective attitude without overburdening the students. Oh, and finding a variety of ways of providing evidence for meeting the assessment criteria. Time to put the money where the mouth is! Watch out for a batch of blogging TAs!

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This podcast is a great introduction to Action Research in the school setting. (It made me quite nostalgic about my old learning community!).
Rachel has a great podcast on her blog all about her ICT cluster’s collaborative action research project:

Our ICT Cluster, Nelson City Schools, consists of nine city and rural schools; eight of which are primary and one which is an intermediate. We are in the first year of a three year professional development contract with the Ministry of Education.

Last week I interviewed our Cluster’s Director (and also my school Principal), Paul Potaka, and made a podcast on the action research process, reflection and development our ICT cluster has/is undergoing.

Paul’s contribution to the Time4Reflection Seminar is embedded below in podcast form… Sorry but I cannot locate the process diagrams that he references but it is still a very interesting interview in which you can see the journey our cluster has been on
…. oh, and you can also hear me struggling to produce my best “teacher voice” even though I have a cold!!!

Click here to get your own player.

I like the tools they’ve chosen to use to judge their success. Now I’d quite like them to start looking at children’s voice as well as student achievement. That feels like the riskiest thing to do but it’s also often the most powerful.

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Booruch
Education Podcast Reflections #44bThis week, I am in conversation with Linda Hartley, a former Teaching Assistant, who runs the Classroom Displays Flickr Group and is introducing a variety of other Web 2.0 tools for sharing and collaboration between Teaching Assistants and the wider education community.

It hardly hurt at all

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I’ve decided to expand my creativity over the summer with the help of Edward De Bono’s new book “How to Have Creative Ideas”. I’m a big fan of De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and I’ve seen the method used in schools to good effect. So I’m going to spend 10 minutes a day or so working through the excercises in the book and chart some of my experiences on the blog. Like a good action researcher I intend to extract my significant learning! What I will blog about are my reactions, thoughts and reflections on the process rather than the experiments themselves. If you want the actual experiments you’ll need to buy the book Day One
Context
I read through the introduction, recognised some familiar stories and some stuff about lateral thinking. The book looks interesting and I’m feeling quite positive about the games. I spend a short time reminding myself that De Bono is talking about creative ideas not artistic creativity.
(Sudden flash of negative memory - a nasty, destructive, but witty teacher once wrote on my report when I was about 14 that I had “an artistic temperament with none of the talent to justify it” Ouch!)
Ok so I decide to try the the first in the book and set a 10 minute deadline. It seems simple enough……
What?
It was quite hard to get going and fight off the feeling that I wasn’t doing it right.
Once I’d got my first idea I carried on and by the end of the ten minutes I had one quite good solution to the task that fulfilled the criteria and one (the first) that slightly missed the point.
So what?
Ok extract my learning from this:

Now What?
What do I take forward to the next game?

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Reinventing Project-Based Learning is a great new blog from Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss..
The Classroom Displays group and blog feature in Jane and Suzie’s new book which is being show-cased at the NECC in Atlanta on June 25th. Sadly I am unable to join them physically, though I might just manage a virtual presence

Project-Based Learning Meets Web 2.0
Students take learning to new levels when they use technology tools for authentic projects.
Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age
(to be published by ISTE in late 2007).
This new book showcases teachers on the leading edge of project design. Like their students, they use emerging and older technologies to communicate, connect, and collaborate. If you’re already teaching with 21st-century projects, or are ready to begin, join the global conversation.

Jane really understands what I’ve been trying to achieve with Classroom Displays.

Look at displays contributed by 113 group members and ask yourself: What do class displays tell us about what goes on in school, and about what we value in student work? Visit Classroom Displays Group on Flickr and read host and Edublogger Award Finalist Linda Hartley’s blog. Linda describes her purpose and what she’s learning on her research site Acting to Improve.

Jane’s also started a Flickr group to support the project as well. Now I wonder where she got that idea?

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