The drift of the Government’s White Paper - Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: Building a 21st Century Schools System ( reported today on BBC Education News) - sounds, at first, like reading a franchise agreement for those that succeed by one criteria to spread their word : viral-like: It will call for high-performing schools and education providers to take over their less successful neighbours, creating chains of schools with a shared “brand” identity.
The demise of the ’strategies’ or ‘frameworks’ (still not sure about this) is in there; … another element of the White Paper will see the end of one of the cornerstones of Labour’s original standards-raising drive, with the dismantling of the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools.
But this could be a simple cost-cutting measure rather than a terrific education change and could, potentially, leave a large hole which will need to be filled - just when teachers had begun to get to grips with the ‘new’ frameworks ! I will be interested to follow where this leaves the present ideas on ‘assessment focus’ and APP.
BBC Education News announce today what might prove to be one of the greatest educational ‘turn rounds’ - the end of the ‘strategies‘ :
The government is set to abandon one of its most significant education policies in primary schools in England. From 2011 schools will no longer have to implement national strategies in literacy and numeracy.
As an aside - do they mean ’strategies’ or ‘frameworks’ or are these interchangeable?
And there is this wonderful sentence at the bottom of the report:
And ministers have agreed to the findings of a group of educationists and head teachers who said formal Sats tests for 10 and 11-year-olds might eventually be replaced by teacher assessments of their pupils.
For some this will be a breath of fresh air and a chance to localise their teaching to suit their setting, for others, alongside the Rose Review, this could come as a massive ‘pulling away of the carpet’.
‘Another change’, I can hear the teachers crying … but this one should free things up and allow primary teachers to focus on the learning that is relevant to their children and should allow them once again to be professionals making professional decisions.
Publishers who have developed support materials tied to the frameworks will now have the chance to rethink and to think more creatively about the materials that could be used to support teaching and learning in these areas.
Of course, there is the minor problem that before the implementation of this change in policy there will be a general election. I wait expectantly to see what the other major political parties will have to say in this ‘ping-pong’ game of education.
The Japanese get it first but I suspect that it won’t be long before it gets over here. Read the blog post above to find out more or go to the links and translate the Japanese !
Listening to a friend this morning I was alerted to the fact that the Tories, on the way towards the next general election, are going to remove SATs from the primary schools … and give them to Y7 instead!
This from the Telegraph today: Exams taken in the final year of primary school will be replaced with tests at the start of secondary education, the Tories said.
Mr Grove, the Tory shadow schools secretary also added : “We would free the final year for teaching in the broadest sense in order to ensure that children had access to the broadest curriculum possible. When they arrive at secondary school we find out genuinely how well they have been taught, how effectively they can read, how gifted they are at maths.”
So you can imagine where the priorities will lie … reading and ‘rithmetic … I wonder where ‘riting will come in. Not wanting to think creatively about the issue of exams the solution appears to be that you just move them out of one place and into another.
Last week at the Bradford ICT Conference I did a ‘keynote’ on creativity in which I pointed out, possibly to the converted, that it was not so much what the tool (hard and/or software) was but it was what you did with it that made its use creative.
This morning I noticed that Mike Baker, in a BBC article,announced the tenth anniversary of Sir Ken Robinson’s ‘All Our Futures’. So in ten years how far have we come. Ken Robinson argued that ‘creativity could be taught’… I am not sure that he is/was right about this but feel that he was certainly ahead of his time in a system that was pushing forward a ‘back to basics regime’ and one where numeracy and literacy were the only things that appeared to matter. I am certain that we should leave enough ‘white spaces’ in children’s education so that creativity can grow and develop. My concept of ‘white space’ is the room needed to allow ideas to mature … it allows for things to go wrong and be re-thought, it allows for experimentation. It does not depend on short term success of simple pre-determined targets.
Innovation comes from creativity and innovation is in the mind’s eye of the creator. It is excellent to read Sir Ken’s books ‘Out of Our Minds’ and ‘The Element’ and to listen again to his TED presentation ‘Schools kill creatvity’ to know that the struggle to embed creativity is still open. ‘All Our Futures’ called for a reduction in the burden of assessment and said the national curriculum should be reduced to take up no more than 80% of the timetable. … white space !
It is worth having a read of ‘Excellence and Enjoyment’, published in 2003, and noting the change of tone. No sign of my sort ‘enjoyment’ here just a focus on standards and the two strategies. the mentions of innovation and creativity come as management tools: Ofsted reports show that the best primary schools combine high standards with a broad and rich curriculum.We want all schools to have this aspiration and to be creative and innovative in how they teach and run the school.
It could all come down to a general election and the issues over implementation of the Rose Review.
Attribution: Original image: ‘Spring Shoots‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59987629@N00/123284271
by: Wulf Forrester-Barker
Travelling round the country over the last couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to ask teachers, SMTs, advisors and ‘others’ what they think will influence education int he short, medium and long term. The responses were many and varied as you would expect. From teachers there was a concern about APP and how, even though they were being told that the evidence that they collected normally was what was needed, they saw it as extra paper ’stuff’. Some SMTs were worried about the Rose Review and whether, if a General Election comes early all their thoughts and plans to implement would/could/might be wasted. Advisers were concerned to get their messages right (or as right as possible) not wanting to move one way or the other at present because children’s future (and their credibility) might be at stake. Its a guessing game.
My worry is that for the sake of politics all of the work by and on Rose and Cambridge could be brushed aside for something that gets votes … whatever that might be.
Radio 4 is a strange beast … I find myself istening to it often as I drive down the various motorways of the country. Tonight at 18.30 I listened to Rupert Sheldrake talking about ‘Morphic Resonance’ and it came to me that this is the way that we ought to be able to pass ICT capability from teacher to teacher.
Morphic resonance is a term coined by Rupert Sheldrake in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. He uses the expression to refer to what he thinks is “the basis of memory in nature….the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.”
Image: Tree bending over backwards - Lindisfarne - April 2009
I read too much in the media about what is going (is it?) to happen to primary education in the brave new world that faces us PR (Post Rose) and was dragged in to the idea that talking to technology and listening to in was the answer to all of my questions. Or perhaps I just read the wrong papers or listened to the wrong news.
So I asked some teachers … there was an interesting amount of professional apathy on show … ‘Not another report/review’, ‘I wonder what we will have to change this time?’, ‘I will get my spider diagrams out and dust them down I think’ were just some of the reactions I got from a profession that has witnessed change after change after change. I tried not to mention to them the report on assessment !
What struck me most was that the reactions were sort of acceptance of changes yet to come … no idea that this might be what was waited for. I asked if they were going to comment … nobody thought that they would … it is a process for others perhaps rather than teachers … or am I listening to a biased sample?
It appears to be ‘wait and see’ time … but already the publishers are gearing up to help out as are the people who will be thinking about support and training for the practitioners. A silver lining perhaps.
The BBC report this morning that primary school science Sats are to go next year. As Jim Rose sets up a core of literacy, mathematics, ICT and personal skills ( I have read my way through the report now and still haven’t a clear idea of what these are) science appears to be the fall guy. And it really is no surprise.
I think that this removal of science is just twiddling at the edges … the tests should go completely and teachers should get back to concentrating on personal progression in learning that is fit for a digital future.
Ministers, it is said, have backed recommendations from an expert group report on assessment being published on Thursday … So today we are to get a report on assessment … just how many more reports can primary education (and primary teachers)cope with? Who can keep up? And does it matter?
If I was a cynical writer I would suggest that this removal of science could be a political attempt to defuse the proposed ‘Sats ban’ scheduled by the Unions. But it is a start … I still need to see how Sats fit in with the broad brush strokes of the Rose Review … I feel, as is the usual case, it will take time to filter through to the classroom floor and don’t recognise any reason to rush forward. Working in Scotland and talking to teachers here allows me to appreciate that the Scottish approach through the new Curriculum for Excellence gives professionals the opportunity to regain their professionalism. I just hope that the educational strictures of the last decade have not denuded the profession of its creativity and enthusiasm for the education of young people.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things …” and to have your say about them, it is not all ‘done and dusted’ yet. But let’s hear it for ICT as it enters the ‘core’ (where did science go?) And if you wish to get a sense of déjà vuthen read here … and you could, while you are considering all of these things, ask where Sats fit into this plan.
Curriculum reform consultationThe Secretary of State is launching a public consultation on proposals for a revised primary curriculum and changes to Personal, Social, Health and Economic education. Alongside these proposals, the Secretary of State is also consulting on changes to national curriculum subject level descriptions and updated guidance for the teaching of religious education. The consultation takes place from 30 April to 24 July 2009. The questionnaire, an interactive tool to explain the new curriculum, detailed programmes of learning, revised level descriptions, the updated guidance document, and other information on all aspects of the consultation can be found here.
This is really important stuff and the chance for everyone invloved with teaching and learning to say what they feel should be happening and perhaps why they feel so strongly about it. I wonder if it will, as usual be the LA advisors and those with more vested interests who will spend the time to respond or whether teachers and TAs will take the necessary time. It would make a super staff meeting!
Today (as reported by the BBC) the Tories announced that they had observed an opening in the defence and were about to take a free kick in the political football match that is education.
A Tory government would give primary schools in England more control over the way they are run - in a similar way to city academies, the party has said. The NASUWT, said the policy was “a blueprint for the dismantling of state education”.
Now I am the one who is usually shouting reform (being a de-schooler - come back Ivan - all is forgiven - see the postscript to this post)… but is this reform or ‘tinkering’? Is it a case that the problem is so difficult to deal with it you can shelve responsibility for it by handing it to others. In this case heads and governors and ‘private’ institutes?
Just can’t see how Mr Grove’s … the academies system needed to be extended to primary schools to help disadvantaged students …hangs together in the context of primary education. I can’t see how changing who makes the decisions is going to help. If it does happen I suspect that schools will quickly get themselves into small self-supporting groups who may, in the end, amalgamate spontaneously. (Isn’t this an LA without controls?)
This is the bit that worries me (or excites me) and yet I am not exactly sure why … Mr Gove also announced his party would allow community groups, charities, philanthropists and education federations to set up new primary schools … I feel sure that some groups who would open out education and allow children to get their childhood back would or could be very suited to such enterprises.
I can see a bit of good coming from it …Beverley Hughes said it was “highly dangerous” to talk about primary schools being able to abandon the national curriculum … now there’s a thought that really interests me.
PS
I have had an interesting week of educational banter that has caused me to go back, in the end, to my educational roots. I have never, and I believe, will never be an institutionalist and so have never believed that schools were good places for education.
Their strength used to be that they were populated by dedicated, inspirational people who were urgent to make a difference to and for the young people who crossed their paths on a year by year basis. If only I felt that was the case today. It is not to say that I don’t believe in the dedication of the people it is just that the pathway has changed and somehow the route has got lost amongst the trees.
So I went back and reread, just to revitalise, the works of my mentor Ivan Illich and I am pleased to say that my ideals are still alive and well. Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.
They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)
In the coming age of Web 2.0 technology this escalated to nature of the ownership of education and the vexed question of ‘push’ or ‘pull’ with regard to real learning. I think that teaching is potentially overrated and it stupefies creativity in sport, work and life ……….. the truly greats are and were individuals defining their own truths in their own way and our education systems appear to do nothing at all but institutionalise and take of all of the exciting peaks and troughs in peoples’ learning pathways and make them into plateaus. It is not just about being good …….. it is about developing the ‘goodness’ ………… teaching can play a part but education is different.
We should not be taking so much of the lead as educators we should be opening doors and drawing maps ….. the ownership and control needs to shift to the learners and it is up to us to ensure that as it does they, each and everyone, is in a state to take on the power that this ownership endows. I see this approach as one towards personalisation.
Not the institutional idea of personalisation : Personalisation in education, though, means pupils get what they need; not what they want.
It is not the pupil’s decision, but someone else’s. You can read about the institutional inconsistencies here but …..
To see where all this might be going in the modern idiom read Ewan McIntosh’s blog post about the MET Schools.
PPS
Just to mention that Jim Rose’s Review will be appearing over the horizon any day now … wonder what difference that will make?
A wonderful morning at the new Guardian Education Centre near to St Pancras Station where teachers and advisers turned out for a conference called ‘Raising Achievement Through Podcasting’ from the Guardian in association with Lightbox Education.
The Guardian is at the forefront of podcasting, serving over 30 million online users worldwide. The Guardian podcast team will share its vision about podcasting as well as give practical ideas. Key speakers will also include Doug Dickinson, an independent ICT consultant, and Emily Drabble, Guardian learnnewsdesk senior editor. There will also be sessions from practising primary and secondary teachers who regularly use podcasting and a chance to see and find out about the Guardian News and Media Education Centre (formerly the Newsroom) at its new home in the newspaper offices.
The sessions kicked off with my service manager of learn.co.uk, Lisa Spillar ,setting the path for the experience and she was followed closely by my friend Dr Baldev Singh who got peoples’ brains into the groove with challenges about the changing faces of technology and globalisation.
Next up was me … I talked of the educational implications behind the use of podcasts and suggested that children should be allowed every opportunity to record and publish digital sounds in very many contexts. Podium was my tool and the audience quickly appreciated the reasons it was given a BETT Award in 2009.
The idea of the morning was to give conference attendees opportunities to gather their thinking about podcasting and to relate that to their personal setting and also to gain information about how the Guardian supports and champions such work. Their ‘front end’ at learn.co.uk is well worth a visit as is learnnewsdesk.
I felt that this was achieved in a very graspable way for the diverse group present.
The education centre at the Guardian have many sessions on offer to teachers … well worth checking
Image: ‘As far as the eye can see … and the heart can reach’ - D Dickinson - 2009
Its good to have a break from thinking … over the past week I have tried to stop thinking about the things that I normally think about and to focus my energies somewhere else.
This refocus took me to the coast of Northumberland and 3 days of fantastic orienteering and one phenomenal day walking on Lindisfarne. The weather throughout was just wonderful and my mind an body concentrated on the sheer pleasure of pitting myself against the planner of my courses and the unforgiving vegetation. My brain had little time to ponder education as it coped with route choice on a truly complex scale from the city centre of Newcastle to the depths ( and I do mean depths) of Kyloe.
Just for the record I did win my class (M60S - the S standing for ’short’ - usually under the hour). Results - for those who wish to read them can be found here and you could, again if you wished, actually follow my courses here. I ran course 20 on Day 2 and 3.
Monday was spent on Lindisfarne in glorious sunshine and, once away from the crowds, crystal clear skies with only the skylarks for company across the dunes of the nature reserve.
However, the news was never far away, and I read of teacher unions declaring that they would boycott Sats next year … and my mind asked me ‘ Why not this year?’ and on coming home and getting my mind re-focused I noticed that Don Ledingham asks in his blog - Perhaps the time is right to explore alternative delivery models for education where we shift our thinking from people being users or consumers, to being participants? and I know I agree.
For too long education and learning has been ‘done to’ people. It is quite clear that we cannot go on this way. Ownership is everything - it is the thing that makes the difference. Teachers are inspirers and must be given the opportunities necessary to inspire. We are going further and further away from what is needed and, as Don says, our current system - as it has evolved - has been dominated by the tenets of centralised control . We have created dependency on it. Is it because education is a politically driven institution or is it that we simply haven’t allowed it to evolve enough?
The steps forward are not simple … but they do need taking … and the answers will not fit easily into the present climate. I just wonder if the current economic downturn will have taught us anything about what is important.
I learned new words today ‘heuristic play’ … I had never read the definition before. I took for granted that this is how children play/discover/develop … I feel better for the knowing of it.
It seems to fit in with one of my current themes ‘ Too much teaching, not enough learning’.
A Government Cross-Party (?) Committee has come to the conclusion that we need to make it simpler. The BBC reports today that : … schools should only have to follow the curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT and that this should be less than half of teaching time .
So now we have yet another report saying what should happen to go with all of the other recent ones ( see previous post on this)
BUT … Committee chairman Barry Shearman says, sensibly, Ministerial meddling must stop … at last, common sense.
The NAHT and NUT say the tests damage children’s education, because teachers are forced to “teach to the test”, narrowing the curriculum. This together with the good bits, and there will be good bits, of the Rose Review perhaps means that we are getting on track for an education sysytem fit for the 21C.
The article seems like a leak of the ‘meat’ of the Rose Review … but I can’t find the leak anywhere. I just wonder if this is a real rush forward of the Review so that it gets out there quickly and gets accepted into schools before the election jugganaut begins to roll into town.
I just love this bit from the article: Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.
In my wildest dreams or nightmares I can’t imagine that Jim Rose actually said any such things … again another example of the media jumping on a band wagon that they don’t understand.
… and, of course, we get the BBC quoting the Guardian … the juggernaut moves on …
Meanwhile the Yorkshire Evening Post has a cautious Twitter may join primary curriculum and The Independent adds in the idea that children should study Twitter (as if it were to be a curriculum subject) … thanks to Gareth Davies for pointing me towards the later two ’spots’.
Talk about a blend on the ‘new’ with the ‘old’ .
My good friend Terry Freedman comments: Still, it’s all good: think of how many things you could cram into the curriculum if each lesson had to be no more than 140 characters long!
The training implications of this one simple piece of leaked mis-information are enormous … and just as an aside - I was with a group of teachers last week who knew of Twitter (because of Stephen Fry) ; they had heard of blogs but only one person had read one and no-one had thought of writing one; they liked the idea of podcasting but they confused podcasts with simple MP3 files on a web site; and they told me that Wikipedia wasn’t a ‘real’ encyclopedia because ‘anyone can write any rubbish that they want in it … can’t they?’
It could be an interesting uphill climb towards a 21C education fit for purpose. We will need to get teachers to live it before they teach it.
PS 21.14 on Wednesday 25th March … There are now 182 comments on the original Guardian article
PPS 06.35 Thursday 26th March 2009 … You might want to read what the ‘tech world’ thinks … Techcrunch
Over the last month I have had the pleasure of opening a number of conferences up and down the country and have taken the opportunities that have arisen to talk to teachers and advisors about the vexed issues surrounding copyright in a digital age.
I note from Ewan’s blog that it has also raised its head in his world and that it is great to know that Lord Puttnam is prepared to comment that copyright in a digital age is worth less than ever before. But where does this take us?
My concern, on talking with the groups that I had contact with, is that they were aware of the ‘problem’ but had scant knowledge of the issues. Few had heard of ‘creative commons’ and few understood the implications of the things that they were doing as a matter of course and the things that technically they were condoning that their children/students did.
A process of education at all levels needs to be initiated for the present but for the future things need to change. Publishers and creators need a different attitude to their works.
So .. what happens now … and what do we tell the children?
Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, says so in an article in the Times Online today highlighting, yet again, the dismal failure of our educational system to support creativity. His panacea is the IB which, if you look at Rose and Cambridge closely you will find smatterings of ( more-so I think in Cambridge than Rose)
Seldon says: The lifeblood of British schools has become choked by a regime that frogmarches children through exam after exam, leaving them bereft of the skills they need to get on in the world beyond the school gates. No other country in the world is as obsessed with the external exam as Britain.
So we have got rid of KS3 Sats … surely now (much, much too late) is the time to remove the others. The forum on TeacherNet offers many good reasons, not the least just plain common sense … it is worth watching the Teacher TV programme KS1/2 Maths - Goodbye Sats Hello Assessment 2 at this point.
It would be well, in this context, to listen to Stephen Heppell’s ‘Enpowering Young Learners’ contribution on the Mobile Learning Institute site. Just watch and listen and reflect on the ‘being done to’ nature of the education system that we have foisted on our young people. We will regret it. History will show just how wrong we were to dumb down the vast creativity that could be on offer. Perhaps listen again to Sir Ken Robinson’s TED presentation.
“In times of change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” - Eric Hoffer
My new iPhone is becoming a feature in my life as I connect more regularly with the people I want to listen too and collaborate with. This week Angela Maiers and I shared a short set of exchanges about the social nature of learning. Angela was in the ASCD conference listening to Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey making a case for collaboration as the key to true learning. My Tweets back to Angela were questioning the ‘necessity’ of interactions with others as a part of the learning process and I wondered if the idea of personal learning styles was not, again, raising its head from its recent position. The support4learning site makes these comments: Individuals learn best in many different ways, sometimes using a variety of learning styles, but teachers and trainers may not always present information & learning experiences in the ways that best suit you. Forms of learning through workshops, practical activities or through informal methods may suit some people more than others. Sometimes, people feel they are not good at learning when it may be just that they don’t know their own learning styles.
Perhaps, if this is so, and the ‘learning styles’ lobby is not to be disregarded, it is a matter of - each to his/her own - but I do wonder if my ’style’ today is the same as it was yesterday and that I learn some things in one way and some things in another … or have I just got a ‘mash-up’ that may or may not be appropriate and might be holding me back?
Angela quotes wonderfully from Fisher and Frey : Learning innately a social endeavor. It is during collaboration with others that we consolidate content. We would never get from good to great if we are not forced to make meaning with other people.
I am just not sure whether really big steps would be made if this were the case. I am not sure that learning is about convincing others.
No blog posts for a while … sorry about that but is appears that this blog has been infiltrated by a Russian hack … I think it is solved now ( thanks to my son) but if you do get to the site and you receive any warning messages etc please do let me know ….
Okay so six months can be a long time in politics but … six months to train a teacher?
Problem is if you take a typical PGCE course it is not actually a year … it actually has about 38 weeks in it … now by my maths that is sort of, about, nearly 9 months ish … so if the six months is really six months then it is about 2/3 of a PGCE course not half. ( phew … glad I have done the hard maths)
The Government’s proposal (reported by the BBC) is aimed at attracting more outstanding people into teaching … ‘Please Sir, Please Sir, can I be more outstanding?’
Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne told the BBC the plans to intensify training for “good people” with “life experience behind them” builds on work over the last couple of years. “We know there are a lot of fantastic mathematicians, for example, who would have once perhaps gone into the City but now actually might be more interested in a career in teaching,” he said. “What we have to do is make sure the very best people are able to get into a classroom as quickly as possible.”
It does occur to me that these people that the Government sees only want to be in teaching now because they are ‘insecure’ where they are and teaching looks like a secure option. Not a firm foundation to build a career in teaching.
Interestingly there does not seem to be a need at the moment to attract people into the profession. There are few shortages (other than those ‘talked up’ by the media etc). So why the move? Why the rush? What is this bright idea about? And we all know that the brightest often don’t make the best teachers.
Watch out for next weeks master plan to keep your mind off the fact that your pension and your savings are slowly being eaten away.
PS Over the last day, since the anouncement, there have been many comments on forums, most saying that this is no way forward. You can read some of them here from the BBC Education News site.
Last week was a bit like entering a major orienteering competition, turning up at the start, picking up a map and being presented with a variety of interpretations of the terrain showing a variety of courses. Then, on starting the course realising that the map was aligned E>W or was it S>N and observing that your compass was going round and round in circles. There were wonderful parts of the course where I ran through fabulous forests with a clear idea of the route and goal ( many, many thanks to Mike Waters for his clarity, humanity and common sense) and there were times in the deep fight of the tangled forest, when up to my neck in a linear marsh I was ‘power pointed’ to death and lost all sense of direction (and sense too).
Okay, so maybe the alalogy doesn’t quite work but my 3 days of CPD last week seemed like that.
They began on Tuesday in Manchester at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel where I and about 170 teachers, heads and advisers were gathered to contribute to QCA’s consultation on the Rose Review. I just have to admit (and in no way grudgingly) that Mike Waters was superb. He was engaging, honest, provoking, humorous and personal. He outlines where the Review was, what its intention was, when it would be published (April 2009) and when ( if ratified??) it would be implemented (September 2011). He said that thecurriculum need to be bent around the children and the bends would all be different because the children were’. And that this meant that …it would be essential to reduce prescription and increase flexibility to get the personalistion needed … wonderful stuff! He questioned if … the world came in subjects … and worried about children walking round with ‘RUaLevel3?’ labels. He said … schools should become brokers for learning and that should be in context and the context was individual and didn’t have a ‘best before’ date. (He didn’t actually string all that together … that was just me but the idea of it is there.)
It/he was good and I was refreshed by the words and the approach. Chapeau Mike !!
John Crookes then got down to the nitty-gritty of how they expected it all to work and I could see the route and could see the goals … I just became worried about what would happen if there was a general election … and there were no answers to that one. The tables I sat at were populated by people who had come to gather information and in the contributions part (on some remarkable ancient technology) stuck firmly to the straight line.
This meeting was the seventh of nine set around the country to gather the views of the nation. I felt that the teachers there were just waiting to find out what was going to be ‘done to them’ in this next initiative. There was little or no mention of the Cambridge Review.
You can read for yourself and put your own spin on what was said here. Check out Mike’s slide below so that you keep your sights on the goal.
… Then I went to Blackpool (following MIke) to the Naace Annual Strategic Conference held at the Hilton Hotel. … and this is where, at times, I lost direction. Some bits were excellent … the craic, the overall organisation and the weather. Unfortunately I missed Angela McFarlane’s presentation on ‘5 year olds could never programme the video’ (but was told that it was excellent) and also was too late to catch Mike Waters continuing his Manchester theme.
My CPD ( if you don’t count the food and party on Tuesday evening) began on Wednesday with a presentation by Microsft’s Martin G Bean, done in typical MS style. His co-presenter Andy Sithers came up with a couple of apps that had me really excited. Firstly ‘Photosynth’ … this is what they say about it: First there was the snapshot, and then came video. Now there is Photosynth, a new service available at photosynth.comthat will change the way you experience and share photos. You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark. With nothing more than a digital camera and some inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos. Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.
… and then there was ‘Deep Zoom’ … this just totally knocked me out … who said that innovation was dead !!
The session also reminded me of the Innovative Schools Online site and its case studies … well worth a visit.
Then I went to listen to Tricia Neal talking about ‘Building on strong foundations: EL in a digital age’. A really great start to the day setting the scene for institutional education and asking questions about children’s involvement with technology prior to school. And a really clever use of a ‘mindmap’ as a presentation tool. I felt that Tricia was let down by the technology of the moment: streaming rich media proved to be a problem as the pull on the network of the ‘Twitterers’ at the Conference killed the connection speed. Something that conference organisers have really to take into account in this connected world. It was good to see in the session that some people, aware that this would be a problem, were using their own connectivity options and not draining the shared resource.
Next came Ollie Bray talking about ‘Computer Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools’ . Its all here … enjoy! Refreshing and alive with the ‘give it a go’ message loud and clear.
John Davitt was …. well … John Davitt. Provoking in the gentle way he has and reminding people of where they were and the road that they had come down.
Things began to go wrong when I chose to go to a BECTA presentation on ‘ Managing Information to Parents’. I was ‘power-pointed’ without a sense of what I might have been bringing to the party from my experience and it didn’t work for me. There were so many things that I felt were missing from the ideas. A triangular model had double-headed arrows but I felt that the explanations only pointed outwards and not inwards. There was no sense of ownership of the the dat being passed and it was all centred on institutions telling parents not people communicating information to those who should be/mightbe/ought to be interested. And there was little or no role here for the learners/students themselves. Perhaps I was expecting too much. I needed to know what happened to the data when the students left school; what happens to reporting post 16 ( in the NHS GPs cannot report without permissions); if the triangle is to work how does the feedbck loop happen. I worried about how this fits in with my concept of e-portfolios and was left, at the end of it all, with an idea of something that was not ‘holistic’ enough.
Thursday dawned well and the sun shone again and snow could be seen on the mountains of the Lake District. Breakfast was good … and then I lost it. A morning of BECTA and Ofsted (I had to leave early) infuriated me. You can read the Ofsted report here if you wish … the Twitter back channel was really interesting!
It just gets me to reaffirm that Ofsted is outdated and outmoded. The recommendations at the end of the exec summary really don’t take us anywhere new … perhaps they were not intended to … the first one confusing me as it seems to be a contadiction.
You can watch some of the presentation videos of the Conference here.
I talk with senior management teams, teachers, students, advisors, software producers and publishers passionately about the use of ICT to enhance teaching and learning. I demonstrate, build, exhort, joke, anecdote and cajole but in the end insist that children have the right to the best and that technology can and should make a significant difference to how they live and how they learn. Today for them is not a rehearsal it is an entire entity in its own right and we as educators have the power to make it special.
