Release the pressure | Guardian Unlimited Money
You are on your way to work but you really don’t want to go. Exhausted, you’d give anything to be able to crawl back into bed. It took hours to nod off last night: negative thoughts running through your mind on an endless loop. It’s been like that for a while now. You can’t remember the last time you actually slept well, even at the weekends.

Tired all the time and irritable too, but you’re not normally such a grump. The constant headaches really don’t help. You used to enjoy your job but not any more; just the thought of being at work pushes your pulse rate up and leaves you feeling agitated.

Workplace stress
If you work in a school this might be a familiar scenario. The article goes on to pin point feelings of lack of control over the job and feelings of injustice as major triggers of work related stress.

Since the introduction of the Workplace Agreement there has been a recognition in schools of the stress teachers face. Much has been done to try to take the pressure off them but very little thought seems to have gone into where that stress then lands.
Teaching assistants, technicians and school support staff have all taken over responsibilities that were once covered by teaching staff. In many cases this has happened with little or no financial reward. In some cases recent local authority led changes have even resulted in teaching assistants in particular actually facing reductions in their wages. Schools often trade on goodwill and sometimes even emotional blackmail, knowing that people don’t want to let colleagues or children down. Too much of this and work becomes a torment not a pleasure even in a much loved job.

In some schools a start has been made with the introduction of The Well-Being Programme. I was heavily involved in this during my time at my last school and we felt we achieved quite a lot in the first year of the programme. Some schools though seem to only be paying lip-service to the change process and not really grasping the whole staff collaborative action research aspects. Sadly perhaps not all LEAs provide the level of facilitator training that I was lucky enough to receive and not all facilitators are given dedicated time in school to perform their duties.

I’m going to try to pass on some of what I learned via usefulwiki.com
over the next few weeks. I’m also going to invite other Well Being facilitators to get involved. I hope we can gather together some useful tips for new facilitators.

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BBC NEWS | Education | No ‘hands-up’ call to help pupils

For many teachers and TAs this advice will come as no surprise. Anyone who has read the work of Sally Clarke (Buy it from usefulwiki bookstore) will be familiar with these ideas.
In fact the Better Reading Partners programme targets exactly these undemanding, under-performing children, often with remarkable results.

Comfort zone

“Invisible children”, the report finds, are quiet and undemanding and do not mind if they receive attention or not.

The research suggests helping these pupils by avoiding asking for children to put their hands up, instead choosing who should answer.

These pupils, the report adds, would also benefit from having 30 seconds to consider their answer.

“We need to make sure that no-one is left behind at any point”
Alan Johnson
Education Secretary

These are also the children that the Network Learning Community I worked for until quite recently were focussing on. We had pinpointed the transition from Key stage 1 to Key stage 2 as the moment when children like this start to fail. They seem to come to a sort of standstill and withdraw from engagement in the learning life of the classroom.

I’m going to write more about this and the approachs being taken to combat it in a series of blog post over the next couple of weeks.

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The Innovation Unit - It’s not 1996 - this century is a different place - The Innovation Unit Forums
It’s not 1996 - this century is a different place -

These people want to know what you think - now’s your chance

Stephen Heppell describes a world that is collaborative, peer-to-peer and mobile; where process is more important than practice. How would you measure success in this world - more joy, more smiling … ? What can you do to make it happen?

Interesting conversation? It should be but it hasn’t happened yet. The (ex-DFES) Innovation unit have made a public forum to try to start some discussions about the future of education in the UK but there’s not much going on there yet. One clue to the problem might be that you have to register to participate. If this is the case then it is a shame. It only took me a few minutes to register and it’s a nice, fairly user-friendly interface. You can quickly create a profile and upload an avatar. So come on why not join in the discussions?
(For the techie amongst you I think the web site is Joomla, and I think they’d be better with blogs and comments but hey what do I know?)

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Eide Neurolearning Blog: Finding the Right Ways to Praise Kids

From Carol Dweck and her team, here’s research that shows that providing generic or trait-related praise to kids (”You are a good drawer”) is more likely to induce feelings and behaviors of helplessness when negative criticism about drawing is later received. Children who received more situation praise (”You did a good job drawing”), had fewer strong emotional feelings and were more likely to persist with drawing activities.

Yikes! This may catch a lot of us. When trying to foster positive self-esteem, it’s possible we may be discouraging resiliency.

I agree - specific rather than general praise is the most powerful kind. It’s much better to say “I like the way you did x..” especially if you are pointing out something they’ve made progress with. Schemes like Better Reading Partners use this theory to re-enforce children’s positive self image of themselves as learners. It’s interesting to see a quantitative study backing up something I’ve seen and used extensively.
As an aside of particular interest to Action Researchers the bloggers children were shocked:

that the teachers criticized the preschoolers’ artwork just to see what the effects of different praise were. They wondered whether the parents really knew what the study was going to be like - and they thought it was unethical!

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DARnet
Andy’s writing about wiki participation and some connections from the DARwiki to a conversation on a couple of blogs. He’s found people talking about the best ways to encourage wiki facilitation, but doing it on their ‘home turf’ rather than participating in the making of the DARwiki page. The irony isn’t lost on Andy I know that he’s not fully explored his thoughts on all of this yet but it did sort of get me thinking too. There’s a couple of aspects of this that resonate for me.
People who write blog entries pointing to the Classroom Displays Blog often suggest their readers will enjoy it or find it useful. Not once (as far as I’m aware) has someone who has blogged the Classroom Displays Blog or the Flickr group actually joined the group or uploaded images to the wikispace.
I think edubloggers are alerting their audience, saying ‘there’s something over there you might be interested in’, rather than spotting something they themselves would want to get involved with. Often they point out the blog as an example of sharing best practice or using a blog for career development, as if they are saying ‘you too could find a niche and blog about that’ rather than actually encouraging engagement with the subject matter of the blog. They too, like Andy’s examples, are working at a meta level. In a way that’s good for the CD blog. More people are learning about it all the time. It’s being promoted as part of teacher training courses (amazing what you can tell from referer stats!). I suppose where I’m going with this is that the bloggers (in this case) aren’t really participating in a connectivist conversation about the subject matter of the blog but rather in one about the bloggers favourite subject - blogging! I wonder if the people blogging about facilitating wiki are doing a similar sort of thing.
Then there’s the issue of ownership. If a wiki is set up to serve a pre-existing community, like the cider wiki, it is a very different entity than one which may be the ‘property’ of one individual. I’ve noticed my own reluctance to edit ‘other people’s’ wikis, even sometimes DARnet! It can feel like invading someone’s territory if all the edits have been done by one or two people. It’s hard to get a balance. Its’ easy to say don’t do it all yourself but if there have been no edits for months it starts to feel like a dead wiki. Hmm, no idea where I’m going with all of this. I suppose it’s partly because I’m contemplating starting a new project, possibly based on a wiki and I’m wondering how I’m going to populate it. I’ve been thinking that I’d have to do some F2F workshops to build a seed community. I think I may need a crash course in community building & wiki facilitation, so it’s back to the DARwiki page for me then!
Meanwhile on the CD blog there are few comments these days, even though the number of visiters is far higher than it was this time last year. The best bit of interaction recently has been a poll about the point of displays which has attracted 42 replies so far, (and the current winning answer was added by a reader!).

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The Impact of the Research
I intend to start by exploring what impact might mean in the context of my research.
• Evidence of impact implies change not positive value, it is possible that my research could have had impact without that being an improvement or implying progress.
• Impact is not synonymous with effectiveness. My research could be effective in answering my research questions but fail to have significant impact if I or others saw no value in those answers.
• Impact may be time sensitive. It is possible that this examination of impact may fail to capture longer term impacts. It is also possible that initial enthusiasm may wane and impact may fade over time.
• It is difficult to ascribe simple causal relationships to actions in complex situations so it may be difficult to be sure of the impact
• Impact may occur at different levels. There could be deep impact on my own practice but there may also be shallower impact beyond this on the practice of others and this may be hard to capture.
• Impact may not only be due to my research actions and findings but due the the very act of conducting the research. This may be attributable to the Hawthorne effect(1) or to the influence of working in proximity to someone engaging in reflective practice (McNiff 2002(2)).
Impact studies are often undertaken by organisations to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing some organisational change. I have had experience of this wider sort of impact study in my job role as a research assistant to a network learning community.
However I am not an organisation and my research isn’t part of some change within an organisation. Although it might be said to have effects beyond those on me, these are essentially largely hidden. I have instead the shadows of possible effects. I have what people say they might do, (the survey results) little evidence of anything they’ve actually done.
There are things people have actually done and that I can be sure have been influenced by my actions. These might even be measurable effects. I am unconvinced that my qualitative data provides measurable effects in this distributed environment. I have to rely on ‘hits and contributions’ (Terrell, 2006, unpublished (3)) for measurable effects.
Quantitative data
I have a small amount of evidence of people creating links to the blog and being positive about it. Some of these people have quite high status as innovators or policy influencers (Steven Downes, the TES, NACE, - for example). Eve Thirkle suggested that I am too ‘tentative’ about claiming impact for these links. She was impressed by them as ‘experts’ but I see the impact of their linking to the blog as being fairly low.
More directly influential, in my opinion, are sites popular with teachers (Primary Resources, Teachingideas.co.uk, Sparklebox.co.uk, Discovery Educators Network,) linking to it.

I know that this has influenced the numbers of people consulting the site as about 40% of my visitors now come from these links rather than google searches.
Then there are the people using the site, 600-800 (April 2006) hits a day. They tend to view multiple entries, often using the categories to explore. They stay for as much as 10 minutes (this is a lot for a web site!). The most common exit point is for them then to go the the Classroom Displays Group on Flickr. Visitors come from all over the world:

(Note - I have now got much more detailed stats as I was recently able to install Google Analytics on the site)
Other quantitative data
I know that:
2 TAs joined the TA Forum because they saw it in my research.
1 NQT has asked me for permission to point to one of her displays on the blog in her CV.
So these are the measurable impact.
There is more impact that isn’t easily measured.
Impact on me

“It’s made me look beyond the role I have in school. It’s made feel, at times, that I can take control of things, that I can make good things happen.”

(from a posting to the learning set)
Looking at the impact the research has had on myself was quite challenging. My initial response was very negative. I wrote in the learning set about exhaustion and confusion.
I began to think that I needed to approach this from a different angle, that I needed to use a reflection technique to help me access the deeper impact.
I wrote The woman who made quilts as a reflective blog post and this forms part of my impact study.
Digging Deeper
The story made sense of my choice of topic for my final year action research in a way that took me by surprise. By rediscovering my voice, or at least one of them, I felt energised and able to once more make progress. The feelings of being exhausted and overwhelmed by the task of defending and validating my research began to fade.
I needed to dig deeper, to draw out some of the learning from the reflection. I needed to do this gently though, I had no desire to rip apart my carefully crafted story.

In my on-line research journal I started by exploring the story of the making of the reflection.
So there it is - the story of the woman who made quilts. My authentic voice. In it I hear the echoes of Angela Carter and LeGuin, my heroines of old. It’s not great Art. It’s like the quilts, simple and effective, it will keep me warm on cold nights and protect my dreams

(From Acting to Improve,)
Two things became clear to me from this:
• that the need to be creative is fundamental to me and making the Classroom Displays Blog goes some way towards satisfying that need.
• the actions of making and improving the Classroom Displays Blog move me in the direction of my values as suggested as a criteria for judging success by McNiff (2002(2)).
Impact on Others
Wider impact in school and other on colleagues
I’m widening this beyond the context of my school and defining my workplace as the on-line environment in which the resource I provide sits. My colleagues in this context are also those people I meet on-line and who attended my on-line exhibition. The data was collected from an on-line exit questionnaire, blog comments on the entry page to the exhibition and interviews with two colleagues.
Using the analysis technique of emergent coding and grounded theory on my impact data from the exhibition I identified 4 categories of impact. There were:
• The respondents said the research fulfilled a perceived need
(In 17 instances respondents mentioned a need for such a resource and/or research into this topic.)
• The respondents mentioned that the research offered opportunities for improved outcomes for staff or children.
(9 instances)
• The respondents said the research showed the importance of sharing expertise
(16 instances)
• The respondents suggested the research had educated them about web 2.0 services and/or promoted their use of such services.
(14 instances)

In a posting to the learning setI discussed my qualms about handling the data in this way. My worries were that it was mechanistic and too quantitative an approach. Discussing it further with my peer-review partner I concluded that it did have value although it did not tell the whole story.
Conclusions on impact
I believe that a small first person action research study such as mine can only make small claims of impact. The main impact has been on myself and on my own practice. This impact does not easily lend itself to measurement, these are subtle shifts in my attitudes and thinking. There is some potential impact on my professional development in that the research moves me nearer to needs identified in my mission statement in my personal development plan at the end of year 1.

I want to be able to be financially independant doing a job which allows me to use my creativity and have some control over my time. I want to be able to provide a service which encourages and enables people to express their own creativity. I want to move towards spending more of my time on creative activities. I want to use my display skills.I want to have the opportunity to work on the skills that I am improving at - in particular digital tools and computing. These skills are all transferable and may mean that I can move into environments other than schools.

(Personal Mission Statement - Hartley 2004)

I cannot easily assume cause and event and attribute impact much beyond this.
Some impact on others can be measured but it is mostly quantitative data that provides this. Again though even here these are small claims of impact, tiny shifts in people’s actions that can be observed by the mechanistic process of counting visitor numbers or links. The measuring of wider impact on others is harder to justify.
The data I collected after the exhibition shows some possible impact. Some of the people who viewed it may be more aware of web 2.0 because of the research. Some may be more willing to see the internet as a useful place for collaborative working as a result of the research. To measure these outcomes I would have to be able to see if this really did effect their actions and in the on-line context this is not possible. Even with those with whom I share a face to face context I cannot actually measure shifts in their on-line behaviour.
People who comment on the blog or join the group - these subtle shifts and nuances of behaviour, show the ‘evolution’ of relationships as a result of the changes in my practice.

“Remember that you are not trying to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between you and other people’s actions. You are not saying, ‘I brought about improvement’ or ‘I made that happen’. You are saying, ‘I can show that certain changes took place as I changed my practice, particularly in myself, and different relationships evolved.’”

(McNiff (2))

(1) Franke, R.H. & Kaul, J.D. “The Hawthorne experiments: First statistical interpretation.” American Sociological Review, 1978, 43, 623-643. cited in Clarke D, (1999),Performance,Learning, Leadership and Knowledge Url: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/history.html Available. Last accessed 20/4/06

(2)McNiff , J.( 2002), Action research for professional development, Concise advice for new action researchers. Available,
URL: http://jeanmcniff.com/booklet1.html Last accessed 24/4/06

(3) Terrell, I. (2006) Ultraversity Hotseat, unpublished

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FQS 4(2) Meek: The Place of the Unconscious in Qualitative Research

What is this wasting time about? If I may anthropomorphize, I think much of it has to do with our minds putting on the brakes, dragging its heels. We aren’t quite ready to do what it is that our work calls us to do. If we are writing, we aren’t ready to put things together in a coherent way. If we are coding, perhaps we aren’t ready to take things apart? I am suggesting this may not be simple avoidance or procrastination. I find it useful, when I am able to remember, that my mind may be conveying the message something further actually is needed. Sometimes—only sometimes—if I can consider the difficulty from this point of view, I can identify another approach. I may need to mull things over a little longer or work for a time in a very different direction from what I had thought might be the next step. I suggest we listen to our hesitations, to what seems like an inclination to waste time, and to try to locate a message from ourselves in them

Oh so that’s what I do, lol - tell that to the LFs when the deadline arrives!!

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Digging Deeper

A Modernist Aesthetic for Narratives of Research
In summary, the modernist aesthetic may be thought of as embodying a sort of cognitive modesty on the part of the writer, a recognition that the text is both incomplete and disunified, presenting a tentative set of possibilities, rather than an achieved and final understanding. My main argument, then, is that it is the modernist aesthetic (rather than the realistic aesthetic), which is helpful in making the link between reporting research and constructing a narrative, i.e. in addressing the political problem of the textual authority of researchers in relation to the supposedly ‘authentic’ voices of those whose lives they describe, and thus formulating research as an ‘emancipatory’ project.

Winter,R. Educational Action Research, Volume 10, Number 1, 2002, Truth or Fiction: problems of validity and authenticity in narratives of action research
Eve - ever the diligent researcher, found this for me. The whole paper is worth a read. The idea of the greater authenticity of modernist fiction in constructing narrative is one that makes total sense to me. It’s ages since I used fiction in my reflections and I was stunned yesterday by how powerful the insights it brought me were.
The story made sense of my choice of topic for my final year action research in a way that took me by surprise. By rediscovering my voice, or at least one of them :-), I felt energised and able to once more make progress. The feelings of being exhausted and overwhelmed by the task of defending and validating my research are clearing away.
Now I need to dig deeper, to draw out some of the learning from the reflection. I need to do this gently though, I’ve no desire to rip apart my carefully crafted story.
Maybe I’ll start with the story of the story…
The story
Four nights in the past week I dreamed the same dream. I was making an embroidery, beatiful coloured threads sewn on fine white linen. Each time I woke up feeling awful, there was something wrong with my embroidery. It just wasn’t right. My stitches were clumsy or I couldn’t find the right colour. When I woke it was with a sense of dismay and panic.
Yesterday morning when I woke my panic was replaced by a feeling of energy and a single thought. “The Classroom Displays Blog is a quilt” I got up quickly and as I’m on holiday sat straight down at my computer. I took some screenshots of the blog and dragged them into Omnigraffle. I made them into something sort of close to a tumbling blocks quilt. Strangely satisfying.
Then I dragged my old JellyQuilts out of my FirstClass home page folder and put them at the top of a blog post. Then I started to write, sure where the story was going but not how it would get there.
I worked on it all morning oblivious to time. Andy called me up in a chat at just the right moment in the story to provide the link to the JellyArt Movie. I watched it and remembered how creative all that stuff had been. But this time instead of being grumpy about where it all went part of me just thought “OK, let’s take some of that back! It was really only me that was stopping me.”
So there it is - the story of the woman who made quilts. My authentic voice. In it I hear the echoes of Angela Carter and LeGuin, my heroines of old. It’s not great Art. It’s like the quilts, simple and effective, it will keep me warm on cold nights and protect my dreams.

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Once long, long ago, there was a woman who made quilts. She took fabric that other people had designed and cut it up, using things that would have otherwise been thrown away. She chose the fabric because she liked the colours or the fabric was part of something that had some meaning for her. Sometimes she made fabric of her own, choosing dyes, making patterns, mixing those with other people’s fabric. She was sad sometimes because other people didn’t value her work, didn’t see the beauty she had seen.
People said -”Well it’s just bed cover. That’s not art, just something to sleep under.”
The woman shook her head sorrowfully. “As if something to put on your wall is more important than what you spread over your dreams!” she thought.

As time went on the woman got sick of people ignoring her quilts. She decided to stop making quilts and try to find another way to share her ideas with people. She went on a course to learn new things but the need to make quilts was still deep inside her. Soon she found herself making quilts from what she had around her once again. This time they were made from light and for a little while people enjoyed them. Other people used the light to make art but she always thought that hers were still quilts.


Eventually the woman’s course moved on and the stuff to make the quilts got lost along the way. She wrote thousands of words, made diagrams and videos but always felt she lost something when the quilting stopped.

The final year of the woman’s course arrived and she had to choose something to try to change, something that needed to be improved. She thought for a long time. There were so many things wrong or at least not quite right. Try as she might though she could think of nothing that working by herself she could do about any of them. What she needed was something that she could improve, something that involved the work of others but that was in her control. Her mind went back to her long abandoned quilts. To make them she’d taken stuff that other people had made that was only going to be thrown away and tried to show how it could be made beautiful and useful again. If only she could do something like that now she thought with a longing deep inside. That old ache to make things had never really gone away. She’d learned to ignore it but it still sat there deep in her heart.

And so the woman looked around her and on the walls of the rooms she worked in she saw the beauty in the images created with, for and by, the children she helped. “Such useful, beatiful things,” she thought “yet every few weeks they are torn down and thrown away! And not just here but all over the country, all over the world! I’m going to try to change that!”
The woman had her idea and she worked hard. She used everything she’d learned on her course, and from working with the children, and slowly she made a new thing from the old pictures.

People liked this new thing. They told each other, and the woman , how useful and beautiful it was and the woman smiled. She could see something that they couldn’t.

The new thing she’d made was a quilt.
Thanks to Andy Roberts and all the Jelly Artists

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My degree exhibition workshop was in school last week where staff could come and view the site whilst I supported, answered questions and gathered feedback. Scheduled to last about 30 minutes it went ran from 3pm through to 4.30 with people coming in and staying for between 20 and 40 minutes. People looked, talked, ate cake afterwards :-).

Click on the image to see a slideshow of the event.
It was very different to the pilot exhibition. I got lots of feedback, mostly positive but some critical too. I’m going to reflect on it using Gibbs Reflective Cycle.
There was feedback from what people said in person, from my observations, from the exit survey (which worked surprisingly well collecting lots of qualitative data) and from blog comments. There’s been feedback since too with learning journal observations of informal conversations and a couple of interviews.
Now I’m wondering about how best to measure impact in school after a very positive interview with my head teacher.

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