That’s right, folks. It’s a typography joke.

There has been an understandably frenzied response to the initial findings of the National Curriculum Review expert panel report that was released earlier this month, particularly from ICT teachers who are facing the prospect of their subject being marginalised, or others who think it will be removed altogether.

While the implications are less immediate for me here on St Helena, a British overseas territory where the NC is non-compulsory (in the same company as academies and free schools…), there is still a part of me that worries whether my subject will exist when I eventually return to the UK. That same part of me is eyeing the history shelves on my bookcases and considering a spot of investment.

Though the effects of any National Curriculum changes will affect me just as much as colleagues in the UK, my position here in the middle of the Atlantic has given me a slightly different perspective which I’d like to share through a series of questions.

ICT’s ‘coherence’ is questioned. Are we surprised?

Despite their importance in balanced educational provision, we are not entirely persuaded of claims that design and technology, information and communication technology and citizenship have sufficient disciplinary coherence to be stated as discrete and separate National Curriculum ‘subjects’. We recommend that:  [...]

Information and communication technology is reclassified as part of the Basic Curriculum and requirements should be established so that it permeates all National Curriculum subjects. We have also noted the arguments, made by some respondents to the Call for Evidence,58 that there should be more widespread teaching of computer science in secondary schools. We recommend that this proposition is properly considered.

                Expert Panel Report, p24

One of the things I’ve been trying to work on as part of my role in teacher training here is the idea of firm foundations. When considering any kind of educational plan, from a lesson plan to a scheme of work to an entire programme of study, what do we consider to be bedrock? What is the unassailable, irrefutable foundation which we all agree upon, understand and feel confident that we can build everything else?

In the case of St Helena that lies in assessment, with wild disparities between levelling across the three primary schools and the high school from Key Stages 1 to 3 – a familiar problem for most teachers in the UK, though I’ve never seen such differences before. One of my year 8 students’ attainment record showed him to be a level 4a by the end of year 6, then seemingly as the result of one term’s teaching at high school he plummeted to a level 3c by Christmas of year 7.

This is part of the problem in the UK, but the wider issue here is the issue of what is ICT? I can’t argue with the lack of “disciplinary coherence” described in the report. In some schools ICT encompasses a large amount of graphic design, video editing or other multimedia work that might otherwise fall under Art & Design or be omitted from the curriculum entirely, while in others ICT lessons entail a great deal more in the way of computational thinking with a focus on data handling & programming, while many more consider ICT to involve understanding how to use computers in an office environment.

ICT is not ICT everywhere. It’s an issue at interview, as one candidate’s definition of the subject may be completely at odds with the interviewer’s understanding of the subject. The very best ICT departments cover all the bases, offering as rich and varied a curriculum as they can, but this relies partly on investment in software/hardware & in staff expertise.

The end result of this disparity in defining the subject is a huge variation in teaching content, and teaching quality. There are pockets of excellence, with individual schools, or sometimes individual teachers, enjoying enormous successes, but among many qualified to comment there is a grumbling, begrudging agreement with the findings – the value of the subject isn’t questioned, but its coherence is. That’s an important difference, in my mind.

The role of the expert panel members is to devise a curriculum that covers as many key areas as possible, while not imposing requirements on schools like “you’ll need £12,000 for the Adobe Creative Suite,” or “you’ll need a computer scientist and graphic designer in the department”. These things cannot be legislated as they would be setting most schools up to fail, but there remains nothing to preclude them from happening.

ICT teaching is poor. Can we fix it by removing ICT as a subject?

I have a few issues with this. The first lies in the uncharacteristically poor way the BBC announced a recent Ofsted review. The headline read “ICT ‘poor in secondary schools’, Ofsted says”. The subhead included the qualifier “in a fifth of secondary schools”. Add to that the pathetically small number of schools in the sample group mentioned (74, visited between 2008 and 2011) and the article crumbles into a poor lambasting of the subject with little actual substance… which is kind of irritating for those of us who don’t disagree with the main point. There is a lot of ICT teaching that is, in the words of Schools Minister Nick Gibb, “far too patchy”.

I do try not to get even the slightest bit worked up by the swathes of vitriol and drama that have become staples of the TES ICT forum over recent years, but this well-meaning post from a prospective PGCE trainee really annoyed me:

I have been offered an interview for the ICT PGCE I am not so much worried about the interview rather I am concerned that if get a place I will struggle due to weak subject knowledge.  I am quite a confident teacher in other subjects but did not have the relevant degree to get on the PGCE in those areas. I have been advised to get my foot through the door and then explore other possibilities. I also feel it is not fair on students if the teacher is not confident in their subject.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

Some replies included:

Not your fault that even the Universities see ICT as a subject that you can shoe-horn anyone into but you can easily get confident in the subject – just start background reading.

I’m surprised that Universities still offer the ICT option. The University I did mine at abandoned it, describing it as “worthless.” That description has permeated the Education system and I’ve heard it repeated quite a few times.

To which the original poster replied:

 I would have liked to teach primary but I was told that with a 2:2 and only a small amount of experice to go for ICT as it would be easier to get a place rather than apply for primary and potentially end up with nothing. [...] Many of my friends who teach IT say the same thing, be an expert in MS Office.

I hope it wasn’t just me digging my toes into the carpet while reading that. The first reply came from a subject leader I know & respect, and it certainly doesn’t reflect his own expertise, nor would the potential trainee be likely to land a job in his department upon qualifying unless he’d worked hard at becoming far more than “an expert in MS Office”, but such are the prevalent attitudes towards the subject at the moment.

The situation isn’t helped, of course, by jackassery from the likes of Toby Young, publishing three pathetically easy multiple choice questions from an exam paper in the Telegraph, and claiming that constitutes a representative view of the subject. A perfectly reasonable opinion piece on those questions, and others like it that exist in every subject’s exam papers now, would be in feeling the need to give throwaway marks early in GCSE exam papers, but no – it’s almost become fashionable to knock the subject.

To Toby Young, I’d invite him to join my A level students in their January exam to see whether his representation of the subject they have been working hard to master is representative. As for the rest…

Surely there’s no smoke without fire?

I don’t claim for a moment there aren’t problems in ICT teaching. When looked at country-wide, there are issues. Issues that stem from the widespread notion of “anyone can teach it”, that lead to claims of “but this is shocking… apparently it isn’t rigorous!”

However, there are problems too with the solutions being considered by policy-makers. Try two on for size:

Stop teaching ICT as a discrete subject

There is poor-quality teaching going on in ICT lessons. Remove ICT as a subject, and what do those teachers do? Go home? Some might, but others will be forced to find jobs in other subject areas that they are equally uncomfortable with.

Replace it with Computer Science!

This stemmed from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s speech in which he criticised the UK for ‘ignoring our programming heritage’. I’m not a computer scientist, but I firmly believe that some of the fundamentals would be hugely valuable to youngsters – I’ve settled on embedding computational thinking in our new curriculum down here.

As I said, however, I’m not a programmer. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking on an A level Computing class – but I’m open to learning. Give me the time to study on my own using the vast number of resources available online, or train me up, and I’m there… but if this is rolled out nationwide, who’ll foot the bill? There are precious few comp sci grads in teaching due to the disparity of pay between education & industry. Where will all the teachers come from? If they’re the existing ICT teachers, surely in a decade’s time we’ll be having the same discussion, substituting ICT for CS…

Computer Science would be an excellent addition to the curriculum, but I don’t see it as a replacement for ICT.

So what can we do?

The tone of this post so far has largely reflected the sources quoted, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Fundamentally, the pockets of excellence that existed across the UK prior to the recent media outpour will be no less excellent.

Rebranding

There is a stigma with our subject, but I don’t believe that can be changed by rebranding what is already a solid subject – there has been talk among several of my #ictcurric colleagues on Twitter about rebranding ICT to Digital Studies, but I just don’t see the virtue in it… I know for a fact the people considering the rebrand are committed to delivering a rigorous, challenging curriculum –shouldn’t that be enough? Will rebranding make it any more rigorous or challenging?

Focus on what’s important

We should do what we’ve always done – focus on what’s important. Establishing firm foundations for a subject on decidedly shaky ground is a challenge, for sure, but I don’t believe it’s impossible. There is some undeniably good stuff going on in ICT classrooms around the country & around the world – the first response to the NC review from the teachers in those classrooms should not be to change how they teach.

ICT is an application subject, and I’ve maintained for years that if we teach it isolated from other subjects, we aren’t doing it right. Marrying up discrete & cross-curricular ICT can be very difficult, but without it we’re teaching kids to make presentations about presentations, and spreadsheets about spreadsheets.

For my part here on St Helena, a significant part of the new ICT curriculum will involve thinking skills, independent working, communication & creating content. On January the 12^th I will be leading a working party that spans the three primary schools and the high school along with senior members of the Education Department to agree three things:

• What ICT on St Helena should be
• What we need to cover in order to achieve that
• How we intend to assess progress

Curriculum strategy 101 – start at the ground & build up. It may be easier here in isolation, with primary & secondary schools that work together, but I’d recommend at least asking these questions of your department/school to see whether you’re all on the same page, even if you know what you’re doing is working.

ICT, and those of us that teach it and believe in its value, is having a hard time at the moment. There may well be more cause to jump ship in the near future, but all is not lost – the review report sets out nothing that I’m truly worried about, my worry is in school leaders’ interpretations of it, and the implementation in the 2014 NC.

I’m not saying we won’t have cause to worry, but I don’t believe we do at the moment, so focus on the good stuff.

One reader echoed the feelings of Louise Handley, an intellectual property lawyer who gave an excellent presentation to students in my last school, that a career in law shouldn’t necessarily start with an A level in it:

Education used to be about mastery of content and the language(s) in which to express it. Instead of comparative law with Public and Private International Law heavily featured to broaden understanding of the context within which English law operates, today’s students go through a narrow training course designed to make them more employable. The results are the difference between a lawyer and a technician.

A generalisation I’m not sure I’d be happy with if I were a young barrister, but the point is a good one. A successful education is one that not only produces employable students, but ones that have that mastery of content, and language skills needed to express it.

I’m coming to the realisation in my time here that St Helena is a microcosmic representation of Britain. Learners here are extremely passive (more so than in the UK), rarely question received wisdom, and as a result don’t truly understand it. There are the same claims made in the staff room here as they are in every staff room I’ve ever known, that students need “spoon feeding” – not a helpful observation, in my opinion. There is no shortage of intelligence among the students here, but independence is a different skill, and one that stems from the culture of learning students experience from an early age.

I am teaching Enterprise here, with the tacit understanding that entrepreneurial spirit is a key focus of the school. Due to the islands geographical isolation, youngsters are being encouraged to set up their own businesses with funding from the St Helena Development Agency. This is an incredible opportunity for young entrepreneurs – one few get in the UK – but at the moment students do not have the independence to be at the top of the tree, running their own business. It almost feels like the aim of many is to be middle management.

As a result of this, one of the fundamental questions I find myself asking in my curriculum review is ‘how do we get the kids to think?’ – students will rarely question received wisdom. They instead accept it and want to move on to what’s next. There is a real lack of critical thinking across the curriculum.

Progress of a kind

On Friday of this week I had the best lesson thus far in terms of behaviour with my year ten IGCSE set. It was a theory lesson introducing network topologies, and my computer room had been double-booked by English. I took the class down to the English room and proceeded to conduct the lesson in the traditional chalk & talk fashion. Up until this point in theory lessons I had introduced the topic with the class together, then encouraging them to find out the rest, with the result being low-level disruption throughout combined with rampant copying & pasting from websites. Suffice it to say results in my theory tests rarely got higher than 80%, as the final 20% came from questions requiring a judgment based on their understanding of the topic. The ones who had done the work could recite facts, figures and some definitions back to me, but few could explain their value, think laterally or suggest alternatives.

None of this is particularly surprising – I hadn’t gauged the activity properly, so not everyone was progressing in line with their ability, which had a knock-on effect on behaviour. In last Friday’s lesson, behaviour was universally excellent. The class was attentive, hung on my every word, and wrote a comprehensive series of notes on networking. It felt like a win.

 Image from an interesting post on rating teaching by UPD Consulting: For whom the bell curves

The issue is that I have another test scheduled for next Friday, and I don’t expect the top results to be any better than those from previous weeks, if I use the same model of 80% lower order, recall-based questions & 20% higher order, judgement-based questions. I feel confident that the bell curve of results will be skewed to the right and be a little thinner as the lowest results will be a few notches higher, but students who should be working towards an A* will still plateau at a B due to the lack of being able to think critically. Gifted & talented students are not benefiting from the more traditional teaching method I employed last week.

So what do I do?

It strikes me that there is no quick fix. Teasing out intellectual curiosity & critical thinking takes significant amounts of time & effort. I’m not going to see any massive change in that bell curve by Christmas, but I’m determined to see some by the time my year 10 students sit their exams next year.

What I want to get across to these students is that without being critical of something’s value, you cannot truly understand its value.

I stumbled upon this wonderful animation of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which he posits the idea of prisoners being chained in a cave facing a wall. Behind them is a fire, and between that fire and the prisoners is a walkway which people & animals cross every day, casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The shadows & echoing noises of the people shuffling across the walkway are as close as the prisoners can get to viewing reality. A prisoner released from the cave would not recognise the things that had cast the shadows, and may believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he now sees. After time, however, the prisoner would acclimate to the light beyond the cave, and eventually see more and more things. He would come to understand that his understanding of reality in the cave was limited, and, eager to share this revelation with his friends he would return to the cave & shout this new-found truth from the walkway, but his friends having only ever seen & heard him up close would not recognise his shadow or the strange echo cast by his voice from the walkway, and they would remain unaware of the reality their friend had experienced.

While I don’t necessarily believe every young person needs to read The Republic, they should be critical of what they are told. As one of the commenters from the Guardian article earlier said of people who say subjects like Classics & Philosophy are useless:

I reply that such people are rather like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave: they reject something not because they have weighed it up and found it to have no value, but because they don’t have the conceptual resources to understand what its value is to begin with.

It will come as a surprise to no-one that I believe strongly in the value of subjects like Classics, and that it belongs at the core of any curriculum designed to encourage curiosity, but if as some argue it is outdated, and unpopular for a reason, is the void left in thinking skills filled by other subjects, or even outside the classroom? Perhaps it is in your school, but in mine it isn’t.

ICT to the rescue?

I had quite a few funny looks from assembled subject leaders at an SSAT conference last year when I put forth the idea of ICT going some way to filling this role by blurring the lines between it and other subjects. There was considerable scepticism, and rightly so – suggesting ICT is the new Classics isn’t quite what I’m getting at… but there are opportunities open to us in the ICT room that we ought to capitalise upon. I discussed this idea almost a year ago to the day, that at least a part of the role of ICT in the curriculum should be as the setting for other subjects to be brought together; the resulting work is likelier to be of a higher standard than if it had been completed in isolated chunks in separate lessons.

I don’t believe creativity, independence & criticality can be crowbarred in. You cannot be taught how to tap your creativity, you have to discover it for yourself – but you can be helped along the way to making that discovery. A couple of thoughts I’ve had in order to encourage these things are:

• Buying half a dozen Minecraft licenses, have a server set up on the school network, provide the kids with two or three introductory videos, then leave them alone to play in order to figure out the rest, then sharing their understanding of the way the game works with others.
• Setting up blogs for the three primary schools, establishing quadblog links with other schools around the world to widen students’ views of the world, and provide them with a wider audience to appreciate the quality of their work.
• No modern languages are taught here, which isn’t hugely surprising when you consider the isolation of the island, but as Goethe said, “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” With the impending influx of South African contractors to work on the airport, Afrikaans would be a possible (tough!) option.
• My teacher training programme is going to focus on non-traditional teaching methods, with very few lectures & more reflective activities to consider how to improve their practice.

I’ve spent a good deal of my time teaching ICT asking myself why I picked it as a specialism, and whether or not it’s valuable. Only by considering the answers to these questions can I consider myself suitably informed to give a decent answer. “It’s important because it’s everywhere” doesn’t cut it… that’s merely acceptance of a norm. You need to dig a little deeper in order to get to the real crux.

Steve Wheeler said in an excellent blog post on Thursday that he thinks the teacher’s worst enemy is bad theory:

Bad theory, when accepted without challenge, can lead to bad practice. It’s insidious, because bad theory that is accepted as fact without a full understanding of its implications, results in bad teaching, and ultimately, learners will suffer.

If I could lay out my plan for what I want to leave behind me whenever I leave this spectacular place, it would be for imparted wisdom in all its forms to be questioned, scrutinised and challenged by students and staff.

That would be a far longer-lasting legacy than a revamped scheme of work.

• Teaching ICT & Enterprise across key stages 3 to 5
• Leading the ICT department
• One day’s outreach per week in the primary schools to advise on ICT curriculum
• Training & mentoring for trainee teachers
• Teaching & learning coaching for colleagues

Anyone who knows me will understand when reading that list just how much of a ball I’m having here, but this is just context for the crux of this blog post. ICT on St Helena is focused entirely on computer skills, with little focus beyond that on application, evaluation (or any other higher-order thinking skills) until students reach A level. The primary school curriculum is outdated, isolates ICT rather than encouraging cross-curricular links, and doesn’t make assessing progress easy. There are no ICT specialists in the primary schools, but those teaching ICT are keen to improve the subject.

At Key Stage 3, we follow the traditional model of a unit on spreadsheets, followed by one on databases, followed by another on Scratch, yet APP has been introduced as a method of assessment. This is a nigh on impossible fit when entire terms can be spent in one Assessment Focus, and has led to some peculiar blips on tracking spreadsheets, where in term 1 a student achieved a level 4b, then in term 2 the student achieved a level 3a – he happened to be very comfortable with the desktop publishing unit in term 1, but struggled with the database unit in term 2. As a result, I’m going to be leading a curriculum review from Key Stage 1 right the way through to introducing new qualifications at GCSE & A level, where currently the only options are IGCSE ICT and AQA A level ICT – both tough options for students with low literacy, as many have. So at the moment I have a blank sheet of paper and a mountain of background reading, including the fine work of people like Brian Sharland & Chris Leach.

Having sat down with the department we decided we like APP, and will likely use that format as our rubric for assessment, but I like others in the #ictcurric movement feel the three existing strands don’t encourage creation of content, rather than mere consumption. Fundamentals of any curriculum are likely to be literacy and critical thinking, and these are desperately needed here on St Helena, as the students though exceptionally quick-witted struggle to work through a problem independently, or apply their own knowledge beyond the confines of that lesson in order to progress.

I recently enjoyed reading Computing At School’s computing curriculum, and fully intend to apply some of the concepts in the primary schools, eventually working up through to KS3. Anything we develop here hasto be a curriculum that fits for St Helena – dropping in the National Curriculum and expecting it to work has been tried before, and I feel confident in saying part of the failure was a complete lack of ownership on the part of the teachers then asked to deliver it. I hope through a series of INSET sessions with the high school and primary staff to develop our own assessment rubric – tentatively with the four strands being:

1. Finding
2. Using
3. Presenting
4. Creating

Heavy emphasis will be placed on critical thinking throughout, not just from level 4 up (being wary of bias in strand 1, considering target audience in strand 3, etc). Projects will be designed around a central theme with enough breadth to cover 3 strands on average, with each project having a selection of level descriptors included in the teaching materials to allow for easy assessment & negating the need for baseline testing in year 7 as we will feel far more confident in levels given at primary school.

Transition should not be an exercise that straddles years 6 & 7, but should start in year 1 with sights set firmly on year 11.

Stay tuned for more updates!

I tend not to leave required reading to take in one of my posts, but this LA Times article by teacher Ellie Herman had me nodding my head and scratching it in equal measure. While the settings of our respective classrooms are very different, there are many things in Ellie’s classroom that we will all have experienced – the keen student with additional needs so significant that they preclude him understanding the notes he so dutifully takes down, the students suffering as a result of poverty, the angry ADD-fuelled (or Ritalin-addled) kid… they’re in my classroom too.

The general feeling in my former staff room was that the incredible melting pots that are modern classrooms are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the huge amount of variety in our students that was either not present, or not identified, in decades past. Teaching is becoming harder, and there seem to be no signs of it stopping.

A couple of months ago, we had an excellent bit of INSET training on the topic of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome – well worth reading up on for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, but here are the Cliffs Notes:

• When a woman drinks during pregnancy it can cause significant problems in the development of the baby.
• The amount of alcohol does not matter, nor does the point during the term of pregnancy.
• As a result, some women are unaware they are pregnant and continue drinking.
• The main effect of FAS is damage to the central nervous system – especially the brain.

This isn’t a particularly new condition, but only in the last ten years have significant numbers of children with the condition survived early infancy. As a result these children are now filtering through into our high schools, adding to the already simmering pot mentioned above. The issues caused by FAS can manifest as lack of impulse control, retention of memory, and inability to focus, and like autism, FAS is a spectrum disorder that can range from mild to serious.

We live in complex times, with few simple problems, and yet we as the professional at the front of the classroom are expected to be the ones with the answers. Armed only with a data sheet that may (though may not) have more detail than the occasional scant word or acronym – SA, SA+, STAT, EAL, BEH – isn’t hugely helpful.Also, FAS and other developmental syndromes including autism, Asperger’s and others do sometimes go undiagnosed, so we are also to be on the look out for students with problems that haven’t yet been identified.

Okay, so I realise I started out with reference to an article entitled “the myth of the extraordinary teacher”, and now I’m talking about special educational needs, but my point is twofold:

1. Teaching is hard. Anyone who claims anything different either doesn’t know enough to form that kind of opinion, or aren’t particularly good at it. It’s a constant balancing act, rarely with fewer than 25 variables sat before you, plus pressure from different sides when it comes to measuring outcomes of whatever stripe.
2. In answer to the original article, I don’t believe these settings do preclude excellence. We perhaps have to alter our definition of the word – academic excellence is not the only kind, after all.

Measuring time, by aussiegall on Flickr

Quantifying success

In order to gauge the relative success or failure of anything – a movie, a car, or a school – the first step is to select an appropriate yardstick. None of these three examples can be definitively compared with other movies, cars or schools using one criteria alone. Using box office takings alone would place Avatar comfortably at the top of the list, while The Shawshank Redemption & The Godfather share the top spot on IMDb’s Top 250 chart (Avatar rolls in a little later at #184). Low fuel consumption may be a perfectly reasonable criteria in the desirability of a family car, but is unlikely to be at the top of the list of priorities for a Formula 1 team. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the idea that quantifying & measuring the relative success or failure of a school, or a teacher, is any simpler than either of these examples.

I used to teach a truly exceptional boy with Asperger’s syndrome whose fixation was politics, but for him at that time the sum total of politics was contained in the history of the Labour party from the 1960s onwards. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert when it comes to politics, but I knew enough to have some incredibly entertaining arguments with this young man who put every bit of his highly-specialised knowledge to good use. After a few conversations I wanted to see how well he could write, so I asked him once to write me an op ed piece on anything he liked. Approximately 500 words, on any topic provided he cared enough about it to form a compelling argument.

He came back to me a couple of days later with a short essay on the unfair system of education in the UK entitled “An argument in favour of abolishing British grammar schools”. As the benefactor of a grammar school education myself, I was delighted with the topic. I went off to read it, scrawling notes in the margins ready to lock horns with him when we next met. In this extremely well-written but entirely one-sided diatribe, he explained that wealth was no basis of selection for an education, and that rather than having a selection of centres for academic excellence scattered around the country, the focus of the government should be on encouraging the same standard throughout.

We talked at some length about how his argument had some flaws, not least of which was the fact he himself went to a highly successful academically-focused high school (a former grammar school itself) based largely on his postcode, which just happened to be located well within the leafy suburb of the catchment area – a postcode his parents secured through buying a house well beyond the means of many others, while I secured a spot in a grammar school not based on the personal wealth of my parents but my performance in an entrance exam, but the point is this: the government, both national and local, is measuring the success of schools in the same terms as a then-15-year-old boy talking only from his personal experience of education.

When I compare him to our current Secretary of State for Education, I at least feel confident that the boy has expanded upon his ideas since leaving school. With Michael Gove, I’m not so sure…

A good friend of mine works in a Pupil Referral Unit, the success of which is measured using exactly the same measure as my former school – the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE. To provide some context, the students at this PRU have been permanently excluded from at least two high schools. The traditional educational system hasn’t worked for them – twice. So why then is the last resort being expected to operate in the same way as these schools? Last year, of the 11 final year leavers, every single one of them is now either attending college or in employment.

That is a huge achievement, and a testament to the hard work going on there – they take persistent non-attenders, students with alcohol and drug problems, and often histories of violence, and educate them. Not merely walk them through qualifications and present them with a handful of certificates at the end, but teach them how to function in a world they haven’t yet managed to be a part of.

Success like this rarely happens in education. Ramparts should be added to the school building purely to allow the staff and students to trumpet their extraordinary success from them. However, the staff of this unit, and many like it around the country, have been repeatedly told that under the new Ofsted criteria they cannot be graded as anything other than satisfactory. Adequate. Passable.

Talk about a vote of confidence.

How can we be great when we don’t know what great is?

I was recently asked to be host to two enthusiastic trainee teachers who were in school for a taste of what teaching is all about, and by the end of the day I feel fairly confident that they had had as comprehensive an experience as could be expected – they were whisked from lesson to lesson with barely chance to catch their breath, they had an undue burden placed upon them by an assistant head (to corral year 7 students at the sports day in the afternoon,) had just enough time over coffee in the staffroom to complain that that wasn’t what they were here for, and were saved from it by a colleague who due to his new job no longer cared about annoying SLT. Cough.

At the end of the day, we sat for a couple of hours discussing what it was to be a good teacher. I was surprised to hear that while mine wasn’t their first placement school, they hadn’t yet seen an enthusiastic teacher – the teaching they had seen thus far had been largely “Right, carry on with coursework,” with very little further input. That wasn’t quite the experience they had with me, though I don’t usually end my lessons with a Lady Gaga song. Honest.

I remember Googling to find answers to the question “what are the qualities of a great teacher?” when I was training for part of an assignment. There are so many bullet-point lists, PowerPoint presentations and webpages on the topic, but none of them can sufficiently answer the question because of that difficult quantifier – Great. Extraordinary. Exceptional. Outstanding.

Okay, maybe not the last one, but the others are incredibly difficult to quantify, describe or explain by using anything other than excessive hand actions and descriptive terms like je ne sais quoi. For any new teachers looking for advice, I can’t help you beyond this:

A great teacher is first a good teacher, and a good teacher is first an adequate teacher. Look at the standards for an exhaustive list of the kinds of things you should be aiming for, but I’d boil it down to knowledge, communication, relationships, versatility & resilience.

Everyone has to have the first two under their belt, but the standards only go so far as to describe subject knowledge. You absolutely need to know your subject, but don’t be confined by it. The best experiences I’ve had in the classroom and out of hours in teaching students have been about all manner of far-flung things, not just ICT – my Classics Club has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career, but you’re never going to see “Is able to teach Ancient Greek” on the specification for an ICT teaching post. If you want to be a great teacher, know as much as you can about as many different things as you can. If you don’t love to learn, how can you expect to get others to?

Communication is a big deal. Not just being able to, but being able to tweak whatever needs changing when talking to different audiences. Differentiation is all about communication – if your favoured method of imparting information isn’t working, what else do you have in your arsenal to fall back on? Discount nothing – glove puppetry, mime or interpretive dance are just as welcome in my classroom as chalk & talk.

For me, the final three are where the real differences lie for me between okay, good and great.

Relationships are the cornerstone. The first thing to realise is you’re teaching kids, and you’re going to get some fooling around from time to time. A solid teacher-student relationship based on mutual respect is a sure-fire way to sort them out easily, but forging that relationship isn’t easy – it takes time, consistency, and interest on your part. You can’t fake it, so don’t try – I had plenty of teachers who taught me very well indeed but could scarcely remember my face once I’d left. It’s not a problem.

Versatility is also a big deal. Delivering an assembly is very different to delivering a lesson, and it never fails to get me hot under the collar… having my colleagues lining the sides of the hall, spectating, has always put me off kilter, but it gets better with practice. I’m also no gifted athlete, but that doesn’t stop the PE cover lessons coming in… roll with the punches or they’ll knock you on your arse.

Resilience is needed to get yourself back up when you inevitably do get knocked down. Whether it’s because of a truly awful lesson where the kids just didn’t get it (we all have them), a bollocking from one of the higher-ups, or just the mounting pressure, you need to bounce back from it. Teaching kicks the shit out of you sometimes, and in my three short years I’ve come to understand why so many burn out. If you truly care about being a great teacher, the last thing you’ll let it effect is your teaching, but letting the pressure take its toll on everything else – social life, friends, family – isn’t a long-term solution.

To conclude…

One final caveat I’d add to all of the advice above is that it works for me. Not all of it will work for you, but some if it will. I’d also add I’m neither the voice of sage experience nor do I consider myself a great teacher, but some of my students do, and compliments like that don’t come along often in teaching, so take them when you can.

To sum up what has been one of the most rambling posts I’ve ever written (I’d apologise, but I enjoyed writing it too much), assessing the quality of a teacher requires the same kinds of differentiation we assess in lesson observations – by outcome, by task & by input. This is unlikely to happen while the people at the very top are so feeble-minded that they can’t look beyond their own experiences as a universal, one-size-fits-all education, but 2015 isn’t all that far away… Surely they can’t do too much damage if we ignore as much as possible in the meantime?

The idea that extraordinary teachers are a myth is bullshit. Yes, we have a lot to manage in the classroom, and nobody can do it all, all of the time. But the truth is that even the best of us have bad lessons, bad days, bad years…

When you have the respect of your students & your colleagues, you’re doing a good job. The best teachers I’ve come across don’t need to keep looking up for any further affirmation than that.

I’m currently presenting at an SSAT seminar entitled ‘How to make ICT the most popular subject in your school’, having been very kindly invited by Nick Jackson. I’m hoping to expand on this post tonight after the event, but wanted to post my presentation for anyone following on Twitter, or anyone with an interest in pushing the envelope when it comes to content in ICT lessons.

My presentation is entitled “The History of War… in ICT”, and looks to discuss how technological discoveries have often been fuelled by military research & development.

Watch the presentation online, or download it as a .zip file – needs Adobe Flash Player in order to play.

Updated: click here for details

Good lord it’s been a long time since I made a post. The reality is that I’ve been working on this for about four months, in and around everything else that’s been going on. It’s now just about ready for release, so here it is.

What is it?

Some Rights Reserved is a resource to be used to complete the OCR Nationals in ICT unit 1 course. The website contains resources to be used to create the required documents, presentations, databases & spreadsheets – all with an intellectual property/Creative Commons twist. The teacher’s handbook provides information on assessment, guidelines for how to complete the assessment objectives & exemplar work.

The project is based around the idea of sharing ideas – the written word, music, video – for free. As such, I’m releasing it for free.

So feel free to visit the website, and the teacher’s area for the handbook.

A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. In the New York Times analysis of the report, Steve Lohr said:

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The study combined data from 99 studies with quantitative comparisons of online and classroom learning. The difference in grades was modest but meaningful enough to draw the conclusion, so many drew the conclusion that online > classroom learning.

I’d caution against this. As I said in a previous post, computer-based learning isn’t intrinsically more motivating, more engaging, or better than any other kind of learning, but that’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t be doing all they can to make online content accessible, engaging & useful.

Last month, I was asked by the Naace to review some online Moodle courses described as ICT Continual Professional Development resources. I realised once I started looking into them that they were essentially compendiums of links to other websites answering questions to general questions like “What is assessment?”

The entire page was set out like this, with 10 sections laid out with a header, a handful of separate pages giving nuggets of information about the topic, then some links to other websites. The overall effect was completely over facing. Yes, these courses were designed for adults, but the principles of good web design revolve around the central mantra of “keep it simple”, regardless of audience.

The standard setup in Moodle is a course broken down by weeks or topics. All resources need structure, but most students using a textbook wouldn’t start flicking through from page one in order to find the subject they’re looking for – they would flip to the index. If you’ve put together a webpage that’s double the height of a standard monitor (~2048 pixels), start your course with an overview, including learning objectives & outcomes – just as you would at the start of a lesson.

Wherever possible, embed information on the page, don’t link to it. Whether this is a paragraph of text, an image or a Youtube video, students might miss it if you hide it away in a link.

This leads me on to my favourite discovery of last year; Adobe Presenter. Every Moodle course I set up now starts with a simple presentation that introduces the subject. Because it’s more attractive than standard text, and comes with an element of interactivity in the forward & back buttons, students are more likely to take the information in.

Embed these presentations by publishing them online and inserting an iframe to a label on your course.

“A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them.”

Pär Almqvist

Softening the edges of a Moodle course takes time. Softening the edges of an entire Moodle installation takes even longer, but the benefits are potentially far greater. My school is in the process of switching from the almost impenetrable course list to departmental landing pages as the main way for students to access information.

5 rules for designing a good elearning course

1. Make it active & thought-provoking

Don’t just use your VLE to present information to students. Put activities on it to encourage them to engage with the content. Hot Potatoes quizzes, Flash-based activities, crosswords, etc.

2. Encourage collaboration

Include activities that require students to collaborate with others. “In 60 seconds, write down all the words you know related to e-safety. When you have done, swap your list with a neighbour and see if there are any words you don’t know. Together write a short definition of each word from both of your lists, using formatting & images to help.”

3. Guide your students with structure

Break Moodle courses into suitable chunks – lessons, topics – using headings, subheadings & indentation to show flow of information.

4. Embed, don’t link

Wherever possible, embed information in the body of your course rather than linking to it. If you have the equivalent of a page of text, link to it, but include anything shorter to improve readability. Having to have a dozen tabs open to read all of the information on a course is not usability in action.

5. Edit your copy

Textbooks rarely contain spelling mistakes. Not so for websites. With the increasing push to electronic media replacing textbooks, it is essential to retain quality & reliability. Read through the text on your courses, check the links, and if possible have someone else do it too.

Further reading

The field of user experience is fascinating, and well-documented. Try these links if you would like to read more:

• Jakob Nielsen: Twitter postings: iterative design – “text is a UI”
• Kyle Sollenberger: 10 User Interface Design fundamentals
• Leona Tomlinson: Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website
• Michael Agger: Lazy Eyes – How we read online
• Sigma Infotech: Website design for your customers – it’s not what you want
• Adobe: Engaging with the new eLearning

From Now On

I really have to start the first roundup of useful links with the first site that got me really thinking about the role of technology in education. Jamie McKenzie takes a cautionary role, looking for the good in applying technology rather than evangelising. He provides excellent food for thought, and was quoted several times in my dissertation.

Key posts

• Avoiding Second Hand Thinking
• The Slam Dunk Digital Lesson
• The Medium is Not the Literacy
• Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students

Ending the War on Sharing: Richard Stallman

I described Richard Stallman in my famous faces in tech poster series as an “open source evangelist”. Here, he makes an excellent argument against the war on piracy & file sharing.

Stephen Fry on the history of copyright

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, and talks candidly about his own attitudes to file sharing. An excellent talk on the subject from someone who makes money by virtue of his intellectual property. Downloadable m4a podcast.

News roundup

• New Scientist: Worldwide battle rages for control of the Internet
• The Guardian: Teenage girl is first to be jailed for bullying on Facebook
• Plagiarism: Textiles graduate student caught out
• Wired magazine: BBC launches open-source Digital Revolution
• Social media statistics

From firm foundations…

When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled “vocab”. At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan – the kids know the vocab, right?

Early this year, my department ran a survey for all key stage 3 students (11-13 year olds) to find out attitudes and opinions on ICT. I would say I picked the first answer at random, but as the student’s first and second names both began with A I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Regardless, here’s what we saw:

Question one: is ICT important?

Yes. ICT is everywhere so it’s very important to understand it.

Question two: what do the letters ICT stand for?

I’m not sure.

So she knew that ICT was important, yet didn’t know what it was? This student was in year 9, so had been receiving two lessons a week for over two years at my school – not to mention the years she spent studying it at primary school – without covering a simple definition of terms.

Saying that she didn’t know what it was is a little harsh, granted, but after realising this good student didn’t know what the fundamental acronym stood for, in a subject littered with abbreviations, acronyms and a raft of otherwise alien words, that vocab section I derided as a trainee started to make an awful lot of sense.

According to this blog’s stats, the most popular resource on this site (by a considerable way) is the Bloom’s taxonomy document. I have to say that I’m glad about that… posters have their place, sure, but they’ll never have the kind of impact that really thinking about how you teach your subject will.

I was responsible for the year 7 scheme of work this year, which I put together largely over the summer, but after reading this girl’s insight into the role vocab has to play in truly understanding ICT concepts I opened it back up to add a vocab section to every unit. Key words were flagged up with definitions, and time built into the scheme for what some might think was a step backwards: vocab tests.

I went to a grammar school which taught very much as tradition dictated, and out of my three French lessons per week, the first ten minutes of the first lesson was dedicated to a simple, ten question vocab test – completed in the back of our vocab books, mere tantalising pages away from the answers which we’d written in the front. Under the keen eye of either of the stern Mr Wilby or the frankly terrifying Mr Ryder, we would learn our vocab in preparation for the test, do it, swap books with a neighbour, mark them together and by show of hands the teacher would determine… something.

What I didn’t know at the time was what exactly they were determining. Check your taxonomy – they’d just assessed our knowledge. What was next? Comprehension of this vocab (applying different cases & genders) & application (forming into gramatically correct sentences).

I realise I’m way over-egging this particular pudding, but in thinking back to my experience in my formulaic but effective French lessons, I saw what I’d been doing wrong as a trainee. Expecting students to understand the difference between a database and a spreadsheet is more than a little unreasonable when you haven’t provided them with a definition of either. I see this all the time with new students in year 7. “What’s a spreadsheet?” “Microsoft Excel.” “Okay, that’s an example of spreadsheet software, but can you tell me what one is? What does it do?”

I’m not sure whether this is something only I have had to deal with, but sometimes we feel like we’re regressing too far. “These kids have had ICT lessons virtually from the womb… why do they need to start from scratch when they arrive in my room?” was an interesting question from a high school ICT teacher I met at a conference. Just as interesting was the question “Do you have to complete the database task in Access, or can you do it in Excel?” from a qualified ICT teacher.

Students with a firm foundation in vocab and definitions go on to form confident opinions, and apply their understanding. By starting lesson one of spreadsheets with =A1+B1, there’s a hell of a lot that you (I) just missed.

Encouraging higher level thought

Equally important is what comes next. At the end of year 7, all students completed a project in small groups where they came up with a vision of some form of information technology they would expect to see in ten years’ time. Here’s how we broke it down:

What can computers do?

Pick a current example of some kind of ICT – mobile phone, games console, PDA – and list what it does. Everything that it does.

What could computers do ten years ago?

Sticking with the same genre of technology, pick an example from ten years ago. If you chose the PS3, pick the original Playstation. Write down what that could do, and note any differences you see.

So what can you expect in ten years time?

Think about the context you’ve just discovered – think about what’s next. Think about input & output devices. How will you control your invention? How will it relay information back to you?

In three manageable chunks we covered past, present & ideas for future technology, with the likelihood being that they’d only really experienced the present examples. Understanding.

Short assessment tasks were prepared – students had five minute interviews with me as an industry expert (eyes rolled) in which they describe their product and I give feedback. Often the ideas were along the lines of “It’s like an iPhone, but with more memory.” Or “It’s a PS3 that can play Xbox & Wii games.”

With that last example, we got into an interesting discussion about why Playstation, Microsoft & Nintendo would allow their games to be played on one console. We also discussed what the controller would look like – they presented me with a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a games controller – chunks of all three console controllers Photoshopped together, but with a little discussion they agreed it wouldn’t work so moved on to another idea.

While giving current examples, I used the Nintendo Wii (again) as a key example of the kind of change we’ve seen in recent years. I started my lesson with the key question:

Why might it be surprising that Nintendo is having one of its best years on record? And why do you think that is?

As expected, nobody volunteered an answer – those are two difficult questions, and take some thought. So I left it on the board with the promise of a praise slip for anyone who came up with an answer before the end of the lesson. I did this with three separate year 7 classes, and in each one the answer came at around the 30 minute mark.

It’s surprising because we’re in a recession, and they’re making so much money for two reasons. Firstly, the Wii is a lot cheaper than the Xbox or Playstation 3, and secondly it’s a very different interface. You have to be more active to use it, and a lot of the games involve more than one person so parents are buying them to play with their kids.

A question like that digs a little deeper than a vocab test, drawing on awareness of current events as well as understanding the appeal of different consoles to parents – the ones who hold the purse strings. A games console no longer means hours of solitude locked away in a darkened bedroom.

After some thought, these students got that – but it only came after setting those firm foundations in vocabulary & encouraging them to build upon these themselves.

I feel awfully preachy having read this post through, but please don’t imagine me standing atop my soapbox trying to preach to a choir of grandmothers about the virtues of sucking eggs – this is more a description of the issues I had with building competence in my students.

It’s all too easy to fake understanding in ICT lessons: doing doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. By introducing key questions teachers can assess what’s actually being learnt. My resolution for next year is to do more digging in order to assess genuine understanding.

I was interviewed by a freelance journalist for a TES article recently, and was told that our LA ICT advisor was unhappy with the comment I gave on the Rose reforms. “Good ICT is very difficult to teach, and rarely gets beyond skills building, or ‘trivial pursuits’ in primary schools,” I said, annoying primary ICT coordinators everywhere with my sweeping generalisation. “Teaching students to become technology aware – knowing how and when to use it in completing a task, as well as understanding what should be trusted, what should be regarded critically and what should be avoided – are vital skills.”

I do wish I hadn’t been quite so sweeping in saying that ICT teaching in primaries “rarely” gets beyond trivial pursuits, but in my defence I’ve rarely seen it happen in the primary schools I’ve been in.

Saying that we must teach the very young how to use the technologies in existence today would have been like saying ‘adults must teach children how to program a VCR’ in the 1980s. Children are already using computers to the extent that early years teaching would take them to through nothing more than intuition & play.

I don’t want it to seem as if I don’t value ICT as a subject. I wouldn’t have chosen to teach it if I didn’t think it had merit, but elevating it to the level of literacy, and reallocating teaching time from subjects like English & maths seems wrong-minded, to me. Some of my current year sevens arrived with a better understanding of how to use a computer than how to form a sentence. How will embedding ICT in the curriculum earlier stop this from happening? How useful is ICT as a tool if you lack the linguistic skills to express yourself?

I don’t mean to sensationalise, either, but I keep seeing this “ICT is everywhere, therefore it’s an important educational subject” mentality. In presentations the members of my PGCE course gave while we were training, many said exactly this; technology is a part of the fabric of children’s lives, therefore we must teach them how to use it. This is a reactionary view, and one that doesn’t account for the fact that adults are learning to use the same technologies at the same time as children. Can we focus their use? Can we direct them into using a piece of presentation software as a framing device for a verbal presentation on a particular subject? Absolutely. Is this what we’re talking about with the Rose reforms? No.

I’m running a project with some of my key stage three classes at the moment where they have to come up with an idea for an innovation they would expect to see in the next ten years or so, and I’m being consistently impressed by the grasp of how technology works these students have. They haven’t got it from me – the scheme of work has been focused on applications rather than “bigger picture” thus far – but they are coming up with ideas like disposable digital paper (one made the argument that “because of Moore’s law, microchips powerful enough to run one of these will cost pennies in 2019, so we can sell these as disposable computers”), holographic interfaces that will register users’ movements using sensors, personal projectors that will beam whatever display is needed onto whatever surface is available (“But what if you’re standing in a field on a sunny day? You can’t beam it onto the grass can you?” “No, but you can hold out the palm of your hand.”)

These children are so acutely tuned in to current technologies, and how they work, that they’re coming up with ideas the best and brightest are working on as we speak – without looking at the myriad crib sheets Google has to offer. Our brainstorming activity took place in a standard classroom… no computers to be found.

The lessons I had to sit through as a GCSE IT student where the idea of input and output devices was laboured to excess seem a world away. They understand the idea of an interface, even if they can’t explain it well.

So shouldn’t we be focusing on giving students the tools they need to explain their ideas, rather than hammering home concepts they already understand?