unpopular

Prospectus

Prospectus, originally uploaded by unpop.

This is what most of my time has been spent on these past three or four weeks. It has generated not a little amount of stress within myself and the rest of the school management team... It finally arrived from the printer this afternoon. Hurrah!

If you want to take a look at the finished product as a PDF, you can download it here.

Nine questions for teachers

I have become very tired of a great many edublogs over the last year or so, but Doug Belshaw’s is still one I always enjoy. He posted nine questions the other day that I thought were interesting. Here’s my reponses. Apologies to anyone looking for Indiepop. There will be a post about that very soon, no doubt.

1. Why do we have a system that trumpets ‘personalised learning’, ‘Every Child Matters‘ and the diversity of society, and then insists that each cohort must do better than the last in public examinations?

Until you have 100% ‘success’ rate (by whatever criteria, or range of multiple criteria, you choose) you should be always striving to make improvements. If you are not, ask yourself why not? Why would 60% or any other arbitrary figure be ‘good enough’? Personalizing learning goes hand in hand with that, surely. It’s about maximizing the potential of each individual, and that’s about striving for that 100%. Also, it’s not really about hitting the 100% mark anyway – it’s about the striving.

2. Can you think of another profession where day-to-day web tools such as Flickr (that have been used unproblematically and without complaint) are suddenly made unavailable by persons unknown (and unaccountable)?

As teachers we are tasked with being responsible for young people in our care. It would be irresponsible to give them carte-blanche access, just as it would be if parents were to do so. I’m not in favour of blocking web resources simply because they MIGHT be abused, but there must be some monitoring and control. We have instigated a huge sea change in my school with regards this – so now our students know that they have much more freedom with web access than many other schools. I have been using FLICKR  with my Art students for years now (since it was still Beta!) and love it. But still, students do need to be constantly reminded about responsibility and privilege etc.  Also, the buck will stop ultimately with the Head Teacher of any school, not a network manager, individual teacher or other SLT member who has a whole school responsibility for such things.

3. If we know that children learn ‘academic’ subjects best in the morning and do better in artistic, athletic and creative activities in the afternoon, why don’t we arrange our lessons accordingly?

Time and space, as already noted. Also, as an Arts teacher and practitioner, I’d be somewhat put out by anyone suggesting I could only teach my subject in the afternoon… Many of my most successful Art lessons have been in the mornings. So I’m not sure how much store I would put in the research… Not that I’ve read any of course :) Also, how do you define a ‘creative’ activity? Is History creative? Is Geography? English? Art? Maths? I’d argue that you can be creative in any area. See my now ancient study for the British Film Institute. I still stand by most of that, incidentally.

4. Why must every intervention and way of teaching lead to ‘better results’ (measured, of course, by examination)?

It’s measurable, as much as anything else. And the data can be analyzed. I’m being partly cynical in that response. But only partly.

5. Given that headteachers, colleagues, parents and pupils all know who the very poor teachers are in a school, why is it so difficult to remove them from their extremely important position of responsibility?

It is a very long and arduous journey to encourage a member of staff that perhaps teaching is not the best career for them, but that’s okay. Everyone has to be given every opportunity to make improvements etc. Personally I think some of the problem lies with teacher training courses passing student teachers who are clearly very weak and unsuited. Not that there are not older, more experienced staff who are weak, but heh.

6. Why are politicians in control of the majority of what goes on in education?

Everything is political. A great many things are Political. All educators are political and a great many of them are Political. And how would you fund public resources like education if not from Central Government, and still make it as fair for everyone as possible? I agree that a Parliamentary Democracy has its downsides, but the fracturing of responsibility, of giving increased levels of autonomy at ‘local’ levels is not something I agree with. Where does it end? Chesterton’s ‘The Napoleon Of Notting Hill’ is a marvelous fictional satire on this.

7. What makes a ‘good’ teacher? Should decent results in public retrospectively justify or condemn the methods employed by teachers?

Good teachers are surely those who care about what they do and continually reflect on their practice and strive for improvement. It seems to me that by doing this, ‘decent results’ will inevitably come. If ‘results’ are not good, it seems to me that the stakeholders (line managers, parents, governors, students) are entirely justified in asking why. I should stress however that none of this should be about blame and must always be solution focused. ‘What can I do to improve?’ should always be the primary question.

8. Most private schools do better than state schools. Research shows that this is largely down to smaller class sizes. Why, in a wealthy western world, do we not do something about this?

I have little or no experience or knowledge of Private schools. However on the occasions I have been in some for training courses or conferences I always feel like I have gone back in time twenty or thirty years. Or more…

9. Do students always know what’s best for them? Shouldn’t professionals guide their option choices and advise them based on experience? Has ‘learner voice’ gone too far?

If educators abdicate all responsibility for using their own experience and knowledge and act solely on what students say they want, then they are failing themselves, the student, and the profession. As someone else said, it’s all about balance. Having said that, I remember being sixteen/seventeen and thinking that my parents didn’t know what they were talking about; that I would not ever think the same as them. Oddly enough, as the years go by, I realize that in many, many things they WERE right. But being sixteen/seventeen is all about knowing better than adults and it would be a terribly dull world were it not.

Not from where I'm standing

This Situationist type version of the UK government teacher recruitment campaign made me laugh. And this blog post where I found the image (via Doug Belshaw's excellent blog) made me vaguely cross. I can understand those people who throw their arms in the air and say that 'teaching's not for me'! I really can. There have been times when I've felt the same, but they are very few and far between. Because really, in my experience, it is on the whole a terrific profession. And no, I am not just saying that because I am on holiday.

I’ve had one thing dominating my mind these past few days: OFSTED. We have the inspection team descending on the school tomorrow, so it’s been all systems go since last Thursday when we got the call… Fingers crossed all goes according to plan.

edublogging

I don’t hold with resolutions or any of that malarkey. However, in a bid to dig myself out of my January Blues and general school-induced ennui, I have endeavored to start blogging properly again about my educational experiences. I figure that whilst battling against what so often feels like a tide of apathy and disinterest in the workplace I might as well keep reminding myself of what is going well, and what I am doing that makes me and perhaps a few others smile.

So I’ve started writing again on my blog over on edublogs. If you want to have a look, you are more than welcome. That’s the other me. Or maybe this is. Or maybe neither is me at all and all these words are just figments of someone’s warped imagination.

And yes, I am tired and a bit hazy round the edges. But listening to Bob Dylan helps. And The Kinks. Oh yes. Martijn admitted that he has never quite seen the appeal of The Kinks outside of ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘Lola’ either. I scratch my head and smile knowingly. Which is quite strange because really I don’t know a damn thing...

If Time Was All

If Time Was All, originally uploaded by unpop.

Today's drawing was made whilst listening to james Roberts.

It’s been one of those weeks for sure. One of those where you barely catch your breath, but whenever you do it is charged with a thrill of delight. It’s the pleasure of feeling you made a difference, that all the things you seemed to spend forever working on and planning go off without a hitch and are appreciated by those involved.

Like the Travels In Time website launch on Tuesday evening in our new school Library. We did the project itself way back in the summer term, but as is the way with such things we have only just managed to publish the results. I think they look quite cool, and certainly all those gathered for the launch seemed to agree it was worth the wait. What was most special about the event, however, was seeing multiple generations in the school sharing experiences. From twelve year olds to ladies and gents in their nineties, everyone was clicking away on our iMacs and enjoying the website we put together. Plus there was cake. What more could anyone want? I think it is crucial that we get more adults from the community into schools to experience what a (mostly!) exciting and positive atmosphere it is. Destroy the myths of the media about hoodies, virtual bullies and a youth gone to waste. And openness, in all its forms, is the only way to do it.

Or what about the student press gang workshop on Tuesday morning? I put my ‘real life’ hat on and talked about writing and publishing and running a record label and all of that… And then proceeded to run around like a loon, working with the multiple small groups to achieve their targets. Sure, there were problems and things rapidly skewed from the original timetable and plan, but that’s part of the fun, part of the learning experience for all of us. Still, we had video interviews with staff going on, reviews being written of other enrichment activities, calendar planning, illustrations and goodness knows what all else. It was ace.

And then on Wednesday I had my Exeter Goes Pop! hat on for a year 11 Leisure and Tourism class, talking them through the design process for the posters as a way of modelling the design process. I really do think it is invaluable to be able to show students that you have a life outside of the school day, and how that life can enhance their learning (and your teaching) experience. And did I mention the animation work I was doing with a Year 8 Modern Foreign Languages class? It’s really exciting to be able to move outside the comfort zone of teaching Art, or at least to bring something of the creative process to other curriculum areas. One day all learning will be like that… Perhaps.

On Wednesday too we had Michael Brennan Wood in, working with a group of Year 5 and 6 students from local Primary schools. It’s great to have such established artists working in schools, and even if I was too busy to really engage much with the day, it was still ace to be involved even a little.

Oh and then of course there has been all my regular lessons. Year 10 making their digital collage robots based on the Douglas Pledger’s digital illustrations (always a hit), Year 11 doing photos inspired by Cindy Sherman’s ‘Film Stills’ series. The robots are looking superb, with a lot of young people getting into details of burning and dodging sections to add highlights and shadows, spending ages arranging tiny screw heads. The devil is in the detail, and all that. The Sherman inspired photos meanwhile are awesome. Fabulous stuff, and all of it done with digital cameras they have at home, or cameras on phones. It’s great to watch them Bluetooth their work to and from their phones, sharing their work with each other in the same way. Of course if the Tories get in all that will go down the pan, as they plan to ban mobile phones in school. What a bunch of kneejerk reactionary rubbish.

Anyway, now it’s Thursday morning and I am rattling along in a train from Waterloo to Southampton (off to the Apple RTC Managers’ Meeting), high on way too much caffeine and the pleasures of the past few days. The pleasure of last night too, for even given the fact that the blare of a TV playing a soccer match and the roar of a small but vocal (and ultimately dejected) audience made talk rather tricky for much of the evening, I still had a most pleasant time in the Royal George with J and Y.

I’m looking forward to the weekend even more though, when C comes over to meet me in London and we get to visit the newly reopened London Transport Museum. I also really would love to see the portrait photography show at the National Portrait Gallery, and the new shows at Tate Britain and Modern. So much to fit in…

Waiting at the Tate

waiting at the Tate, originally uploaded by unpop.

We went down to St Ives with the Year 10 and 11 students yesterday. As always, it was a really enjoyable day, despite getting soaked on the walk up the hill to the coach park at the end of the day! I managed to get a lot of drawing done myself, making rough sketches for about a month’s worth of daily drawings, in between talking to the students about their work and discussing the exhibits. Or maybe it was the other way round… Whatever, it was a great day. We got a photo permit for the gallery too, so for the first time in ages I was able to keep a record of the day. My favourite shot, though, was taken outside. On my Flickr page I called it my attempt at a Tony Ray-Jones shot. He’s one of my favourite photographers, and I love the way he captured the people around him. I’m not a great people photographer as a rule, though I sometimes wonder if that’s just because I don’t have many opportunities. Not that I think I could ever be great, but you know, maybe just okay would be cool.

Anyway, I do really love that photo of the students waiting outside the Tate. I cropped the original very slightly, but there is still, I think, a lovely (albeit largely accidental) composition and many intriguing little relationships and interactions going on between the characters.

Also, there’s a shot on my Flickr page of two girls drawing, and for some reason it really reminds me of that old Belle & Sebastian promo shot of Stuart David (was it Stuart?) leaning over that sculpture of the prone nun. Do you know that photo? I have a folder full of those old promo photos in the Geek Lair somewhere. It is quite terrifying to realise how old they are now. And erk, having just mentioned them, I suddenly feel the need to listen to them. Nothing like a bit of nostalgia, is there?

Junk Culture

So yes, I have returned to our home in the country with a cold as a parting gift from London. I just fired up my e-mail software and logged-in after just four days without being able to check most of my accounts. I have nine addresses that I use regularly, one of them pretty much a legacy from many years ago that I can’t fully jettison because I’m still subbed to mailing lists with it and frankly I am too lazy to un-sub and re-sub with a new address. So how many junk mail messages did I return to? Over 500. Yep. Over 100 a day. And you think that’s crazy? Well let me tell you, for the legacy email addresses (that is, ones I no longer use or ones that I intentionally only use when doing on-line transactions – deleting email addresses doesn’t just bounce the mail back to sender; they fire through to the core admin account) the total is nearer 2500. So call it 3000 pieces of junk mail for four days. Do the math.

No surprise then that I recall the comments made at BETT about e-mail being the biggest drain on productivity in business.

So with younger generations of users increasingly favouring IM /SMS technologies to communicate (not to mention conducting conversations via comment spaces on blogs and social networking sites), are we approaching a situation where e-mail is becoming a legacy technology? Will e-mail go the way of Usenet, for example? Has it already? Answers on anything but an email please…

Learning does not equal Training

By contrast with the morning, the few hours spent at BETT in the afternoon are a come down of sorts. Actually that’s not strictly fair, for one of the seminars is truly inspirational and the kind of thing you wish was being trumpeted from the rooftops. Or was at least given prominence as a Keynote for the whole damn shindig. Actually the two afternoon seminars show two sides of the approaches to ICT these days. In one, ‘What does good ICT look like?’, there are the usual rumblings about the importance of teaching young people about file management and the teaching of ‘skills’ with specific software packages (death by Powerpoint, Word and Excel). There is talk of needing ‘specialist ICT teachers’ to deliver ICT teaching, which seems at odds with the views of some (our own LEA ICT advisor amongst them) who suggest that the best ICT teaching is currently being delivered by non-ICT specialists. There is insistence on discrete ICT teaching and there being allocated time for that in the timetable. All very grey. All very safe and dull.

On the other side of the coin, there is the inspirational presentation by someone from Headworks, who passionately argues the case for students learning best through doing and making rather than consuming; for choice and immediacy; for collaboration and social networking as a learning environment rather than behemoth ‘learning platforms’. It’s a seductive argument, and I suppose I feel strongly about it because I hear him talking about things I’ve been pushing to implement in school for some time. Things like using Flickr and blogs; opening up network access and teaching responsible behaviour rather than trying to ban services or block sites. “Connections not content” was one of his mantras, and it’s a good one. It’s not about the content of the teaching activities on a whiteboard, it’s about the learning connections students make with each other and the wider world. It’s about what they DO and about what they MAKE. I like how this ties neatly into the idea of making connections between things which we have for so long pushed in our Art curriculum. “Powerpoint is not a learning tool” is another mantra, and that’s one I particularly like. The key to successful use of ICT in teaching and learning is not in how we use it to present ‘facts’ to our students, but is rather in how those young people use their technologies to make sense of what they are learning.

Oh, and apologies for anyone looking for pontifications about Pop music. Normal service (whatever the hell that is) will be resumed soon. Ish. Maybe.