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!

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.