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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