Not quite #moocmooc

This week I am mostly vicariously participating in Hybrid Pedagogies #MOOCMOOC on Critical pedagogies (http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/mooc-mooc-critical-pedagogy/) by following the posts of some friends (Maha Bali, Simon Ensor and Keith Hamon). There has been much discussion on Freire and bell hooks – and just how tricky it can be to implement critical pedagogy in real life classrooms – they asked:

• Is the primary effort of education bent toward the humanization of its participants (learners and educators alike)? If it is not, should it be? What does humanization look like as curricula, as syllabi, as lesson plan?

• If it is not our task to “make deposits” into students’ minds, to reinforce learner passivity, but rather to spark inquiry, where is the best place to start?

• How are we teaching, really, and how are we relating to the world, really? Do we walk the walk we want to walk, the walk we say we walk?

• If, as Freire points out, the “teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking” (58), what process might we follow to foster authentic thinking — in the classroom as much as in professional spaces?

Movements in space and time

Recently our University moved from 15-week to 30-week courses: in moving from modules to courses, some of us found that this small change in space and time arrangements allowed us the space and time to at least attempt to implement something that is at least informed by Freire and hooks and Illich (and Holt) and Dewey – but also by Carl Rogers… and for us in particular this meant that our module ‘Becoming an Educationalist: reading, writing and enquiry’ – could not just enter into dialogue with students about what an educationalist could be in the world – and how – and why… It also allowed us to shape something that fosters belonging and human connections between the students – it allows the space and time to foster creativity and fun and play – as well as criticality and dialogue… and we hope that the processes involved also allows the module to act as a tool or lens for participants to use to critique their previous educational experiences – in ways that critically inform their own future practice. We blog about the course each week: https://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/  - and we encourage the students to blog their learning to develop their own playful, powerful academic voices.

We are the ‘other’

Our University is a Widening Participation university – and attracts those students who do typically get called broken or lazy or ‘less able’ – but who are really just less inducted into the traditional academic forms, processes and procedures… The goal of a module like ‘Becoming’ on paper could be that we re-territorialise (D&G) these perhaps ‘un-inducted’ students – that we tame them – fix them – and get them all set up for their education deposits; what we hope is that the passion and the play of the module and their blogs and the spaces created - enables the students to narrate themselves as they become ‘academic’ on their own terms.

Share the love?

We would be happy to share our Module Handbook with others implementing Critical Pedagogy in their classrooms – and to have you share yours with us: for beautiful lessons emerge from such practical ideas of CP in action.  

#ccourse Daily Create – 30th Oct: blog about it

I had just finished drafting a blog post for our first year #becomingeducational students when I saw this challenge – and I thought I would share ‘the blog wot I wrote’ – below – and a few thoughts about staff blogging for students.

Last year when we first started our course blog (rather than just uploading PPT slides to our VLE) we were a bit clunky in our own writing… we often started with a recap of the what, why and how of the lesson … Funny really because we wanted our students to blog to develop their academic voice and power in a way that was ‘theirs’ that was them – all of them as they were – but also the them they were becoming… We theorised this as quasi-academic writing that allowed them to playfully and wholly perform themselves as they became the academic they wanted to be (not necessarily the neutered academic that more formal writing might process them into being).

And – yes – we felt this process ‘worked’: students blogged – they had something to say – and in the end even the most truculent of them wanted to have their say about the course – about the assignments – and about themselves. Not a plagiarised word in sight!

But we changed too. We started to find our voices and ourselves – we started to become the academics we wanted to be. (Cool.)

So this year – we began blogging with a more freeform ‘voice’ trying to connect with and better engage with our student readers… and suddenly writing promotes *our* learning – and we begin to say some of the tacit taken for granted things that need to be said.

Anyway – this week we asked our students to explore the University as a site and sites of learning – ready for a Poster Presentation in a couple of weeks time – and – oh yes – because we wanted them to SEE – to see differently – to see the taken for granted stuff about education – about *their* education… and to start to think about what they might want to do about ‘that’. So here’s what the process of blogging helped us to write:

#becomingeducational W5: look – see

This week, W5, Study Week, we asked you to explore the University as a representation of learning, teaching and assessment – and as a site or sites of learning. 

We wanted you to develop your ability to observe – to really look and see what might be happening somewhere – and perhaps see it as if for the first time. Real ‘seeing’ allows us to bring fresh eyes to things that we may have previously taken for granted. Our new sight can give us fresh insight. This is a great tool for a researcher and perhaps is especially essential for the education researcher: after all, we’ve all been through school; we all ‘know’ what education, teaching and learning are all about – don’t we?

Well – perhaps we don’t.

After all we enter schooling very young – and the schooling we get shapes our experience and our understanding of what schooling is – can – and should - be. However, as we become educationalists – perhaps we need to see what education actually *is* - socially, politically and, yes, economically. Perhaps we need to really see what it is and what effect it is having – and keep asking, who and what is education for? Whose interests are served when education takes place like this? Could it be different? Could it be better? What would ‘better’ look like?

Participant Observation

We asked you to really look – to see – to observe – and to start to analyse. You were acting like anthropologists studying a new culture – and we are looking forward to your findings. We mentioned ‘participant observation’ – this is where somebody who is participating in an experience also tries to observe it. So as University students looking at University learning and teaching spaces – you were participant observers. On the other hand, you were not participating in the group discussions or the corridor or canteen discussions that you were observing. In preparation for your research project you might like to adopt the stance of a participant observer in your lectures and seminars, in your own study groups, in your peer mentoring encounters. As you do this you might start to see what works well in promoting student learning – and perhaps what works not so well. This might inspire you and help you to choose a research focus in which you are really interested. Below is an account of how a study support teacher prepared for her job by becoming a participant observer in her school.

Those Research Projects – again

For your research project we will ask you to investigate an aspect of University teaching and learning in more detail. After experiencing being a student for some time, you might find that you might want to explore particular practices like reading and notemaking or group work or attitudes to assessment or writing. You might come up with a completely different idea. We will be preparing for this together in class – and the proposal is not due till W19 – but keep your eyes open now – and use your Passion.

What brings you joy? What breaks your heart? How can you use this to design your projects? Check out this video on Passion Based Learning in the school sector: http://youtu.be/6kgdHp5amUM - and think how you can use your passions here and now.

Teachers Shadowing Students:

What I Learned By Doing What I Ask Students To Do

Re-blogged from: http://www.teachthought.com/teaching/teachers-shadowing-students/

by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education

The following account comes from a veteran HS teacher who just became a Coach in her building. Because her experience is so vivid and sobering I have kept her identity anonymous. But nothing she describes is any different than my own experience in sitting in HS classes for long periods of time. And this report of course accords fully with the results of our student surveys. 

She wrote:

I have made a terrible mistake.

I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!

This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and admins. to improve student learning outcomes.

As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10^th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12^th grade student on another day. My task was to do everything the student was supposed to do: if there was lecture or notes on the board, I copied them as fast I could into my notebook. If there was a Chemistry lab, I did it with my host student. If there was a test, I took it (I passed the Spanish one, but I am certain I failed the business one).

Teachers Shadowing Students: My Class Schedules For The Day
(Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day):

The schedule that day for the 10^th grade student:

7:45 – 9:15: Geometry

9:30 – 10:55: Spanish II

10:55 – 11:40: Lunch

11:45 – 1:10: World History

1:25 – 2:45: Integrated Science

The schedule that day for the 12^th grade student:

7:45 – 9:15: Math

9:30 – 10:55: Chemistry

10:55 – 11:40: Lunch

11:45 – 1:10: English

1:25 – 2:45: Business

Shadowing My Students: Key Takeaway #1

Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

I could not believe how tired I was after the first day. I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot.

But students move almost never. And never is exhausting. In every class for four long blocks, the expectation was for us to come in, take our seats, and sit down for the duration of the time. By the end of the day, I could not stop yawning and I was desperate to move or stretch. I couldn’t believe how alert my host student was, because it took a lot of conscious effort for me not to get up and start doing jumping jacks in the middle of Science just to keep my mind and body from slipping into oblivion after so many hours of sitting passively.

I was drained, and not in a good, long, productive-day kind of way. No, it was that icky, lethargic tired feeling. I had planned to go back to my office and jot down some initial notes on the day, but I was so drained I couldn’t do anything that involved mental effort (so instead I watched TV) and I was in bed by 8:30.

If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately change the following three things:

§         mandatory stretch halfway through the class

§         put a Nerf basketball hoop on the back of my door and encourage kids to play in the first and final minutes of class

§         build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine. I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective.

Shadowing My Students: Key Takeaway #2

High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.

Obviously I was only shadowing for two days, but in follow-up interviews with both of my host students, they assured me that the classes I experienced were fairly typical.

In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke. Sometimes it was because the teacher was lecturing; sometimes it was because another student was presenting; sometimes it was because another student was called to the board to solve a difficult equation; and sometimes it was because the period was spent taking a test. So, I don’t mean to imply critically that only the teachers droned on while students just sat and took notes. But still, hand in hand with takeaway #1 is this idea that most of the students’ day was spent passively absorbing information.

It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.

I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.

I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard. If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

§         Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following directly on their heels (e.g. a ten-minute lecture on Whitman’s life and poetry, followed by small-group work in which teams scour new poems of his for the very themes and notions expressed in the lecture, and then share out or perform some of them to the whole group while everyone takes notes on the findings.)

§         Set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.

§         Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed. This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way. I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with fifteen or twenty minutes of this.

Shadowing My Students: Key takeaway #3

You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. It’s really hard to do, and not something we ask adults to do day in and out.

Think back to a multi-day conference or long PD day you had and remember that feeling by the end of the day – that need to just disconnect, break free, go for a run, chat with a friend, or surf the web and catch up on emails. That is how students often feel in our classes, not because we are boring per se but because they have been sitting and listening most of the day already. They have had enough.

In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication. I would become near apoplectic last year whenever a very challenging class of mine would take a test, and without fail, several students in a row would ask the same question about the test. Each time I would stop the class and address it so everyone could hear it.

Nevertheless, a few minutes later a student who had clearly been working his way through the test and not attentive to my announcement would ask the same question again. A few students would laugh along as I made a big show of rolling my eyes and drily stating, “OK, once again, let me explain…”

Of course it feels ridiculous to have to explain the same thing five times, but suddenly, when I was the one taking the tests, I was stressed. I was anxious. I had questions. And if the person teaching answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again. I feel a great deal more empathy for students after shadowing, and I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a way of creating a barrier between me and them. They do not help learning.

If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

§         Dig deep into my personal experience as a parent where I found wells of patience and love I never knew I have, and call upon them more often when dealing with students who have questions. Questions are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student. We can open the door wider or shut if forever, and we may not even realize we have shut it.

§         I would make my personal goal of “no sarcasm” public and ask the students to hold me accountable for it. I could drop money into a jar for each slip and use it to treat the kids to pizza at the end of the year. In this way, I have both helped create a closer bond with them and shared a very real and personal example of goal-setting for them to use a model in their own thinking about goals.

§         I would structure every test or formal activity like the IB exams do – a five-minute reading period in which students can ask all their questions but no one can write until the reading period is finished. This is a simple solution I probably should have tried years ago that would head off a lot (thought, admittedly, not all) of the frustration I felt with constant, repetitive questions.

Conclusion

I have a lot more respect and empathy for students after just one day of being one again.

Teachers work hard, but I now think that conscientious students work harder. I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations. This could lead to better “backwards design” from the student experience so that we have more engaged, alert, and balanced students sitting (or standing) in our classes.

Those interested in learning more about shadowing and/or using our surveys for free, contact me; This article first appeared on Grant’s personal blog; Grant can be found on twitter here; adapted image attribution flickr user flickreringbrad; Teachers Shadowing Students: What I Learned By Doing What I Ask Students To Do

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Tinkering to Learn #ccourses14

Boom! Another academic year – another load of too much to do and too little time – Soooooo... started another course – #ccourses14! (I have the feeling that *course* is an oxymoron in this context – but that is a good thing!) and for the next few weeks the focus of this blog will be co-learning and the co-creation of knowledge in a connected world.

‘Dear Reader’ alert!

Dear Reader,

If you are completely new to online courses and blogging to learn – don’t be put off by not knowing anyone else on the course yet. It is very easy to make friends in these spaces. The trick is to *like*, *Comment*, *re-tweet* and *favourite* the messages that people start to post on and about the course. This is the way that we touch base with each other and build connections, trust and dialogue. The knowledge emerges and develops through these very connections.

I am lucky because many people that I’ve seen on other happy courses (you know who you are #edcmooc and #rhizo14!!) are here – as are people that I have spotted on the almost mythical #ds106. I am looking forward to co-learning with these peeps.

The course proper starts next week, Monday 15^th September. If you are still in the process of joining – here’s the link to the one-hour video on the blogging part of this connected courses thing: http://connectedcourses.net/thecourse/pre-course/

To RSS Feed

My big first task is to try to connect this blog to the course list – with the appropriate RSS feed. I have never managed that before! I listened to the instructions on adding the RSS feed – and decided immediately to do the simple link this first time, that is, I will *only* cover #ccourses14 in this blog cos if you cover the course in a multi-topic blog the instructions were WAY too complicated for me!

#becomingeducational: The end of the beginning

So, it’s June 2014, all you #becomingeducationalists have hopefully more or less survived this first year – and are perhaps waiting slightly nervously for those all too important end of year results.

We want to say a big THANK YOU to you all! You were great. It was an excellent year. Being with you lot formed the highlight of our week. Seriously!

On that note – here’s a link to a great article on the importance of play: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/give-childhood-back-to-children-if-we-want-our-offspring-to-have-happy-productive-and-moral-lives-we-must-allow-more-time-for-play-not-less-are-you-listening-gove-9054433.html

We hope that Becoming, whilst intensive, thought-provoking and, hopefully, challenging - was also playful; that we created space for us to ‘play to learn’. As Winnicott (1971) says – play is vital to counter the implicit threat of those tricky transitional spaces. And – I bet you all know about Winnicott now – eh?

We hope that you are pleased with your results!!

Nil desperandum

Any students who had issues preventing them from getting the work in on time – do not despair. There is the opportunity for re-submission – and there will be some re-sit and re-submission support in the Learning Centre, Holloway Road; in the Moorgate Hub and at Calcutta House – from w/b 14^th July. Check out the Study Hub calendar for specific times: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/studyhub/

Read all about it: Blogging to Learn

Towards the end of the year we presented our ‘Blogging to Learn’ paper in class before presenting at the ALDinHE 2014 Conference at the University of Huddersfield.

Well, we developed elements of that presentation into an article that has been accepted for publication in Investigations in University Teaching and Learning. When it is actually published, we’ll post links here.

Good luck folks – and keep in touch!