Five Little Words

In the summer of 2014, the staff, children and governors of Rosendale Primary School worked together to find 5 words that they thought described Rosendale.  These 5 words have become the foundations of our school values.  Why is it important to have shared values in school?  Well, as humans, we base a lot of our decisions and actions on our values, they tell us what is important in our lives.  Successful communities across the globe have shared values, a common vocabulary, mutual trust and established rituals.

WELCOME was chosen because the children wanted to show that Rosendale is known for making sure that everyone in its community feels included.  We WELCOME everyone with a smile every morning.

Other words we considered were JOY, POSITIVITY and VALUED.

“Welcome” is a mark making project created entirely by the children in Reception. We laid out large pieces of paper outside, and the children brushed, dotted, combed, printed, dripped and generally had fun with the paint. The photos of people holding up “hello” signs represent some of the 58 languages spoken at Rosendale.

 

 

COOPERATE was chosen to represent Rosendale’s commitment to mixed ability cooperative learning.  The staff also felt that it was important to recognise that much of Rosendale’s success comes from working together as a team, supporting and learning from each other.

Other words we considered were TEAM, COLLABORATE, VALUED

“Cooperate” was made by the Gymnastics Club, forming the word by linking their bodies, and bending into letter shapes. The photos around the word represent how pupils work together in couples and as teams, leaning to negotiate, compromise and encourage each other.

CHALLENGE was chosen to show that at Rosendale we expect everyone – children, staff and parents to strive to be the best they can be.  The governors also wanted to represent the huge number of opportunities that we provide for children to explore the wider curriculum, try something new and learn about themselves.

Other words we considered were COURAGEOUS, BUSY, CURIOUS and PRODUCTIVE

“Challenge” has been made from recycled polystyrene, sculpted into icebergs using a hot wire. The letters are being negotiated by Rosendale children, crafted by 6AF from wire and wool. See if you can spot Miss Atkins!

 

UNDERSTAND was chosen because children, staff and governors wanted to show how important Rosendale’s community is to the identity and ethos of the school.  We wanted to appreciate the diverse local community in which the school sits, as well as recognising what it is like to be part of a thriving, busy capital city and to make sure that we give the children all the skills they will need to be part of a developing global community.

Other words we considered were RESPECT, VARIETY, DIVERSE and ORIGINAL

“Understand” is a paper making project made by year 5.  We dipped a frame into paper pulp, drained and dried the sheets while embedding objects and images into the pulp, that represent some of the key subjects studied at Rosendale.

 

EXCITE was chosen because the children wanted to show how great it was to be a pupil at Rosendale.  The staff too wanted to recognise how much they enjoy working here.  Rosendale is a school that wants to give everyone opportunities.

Other words we considered were VIBRANT, ENERGETIC, CREATIVE, and EXPLORE

“Excite” is made from laser cut acrylic letters, with a background of spin paintings made by various pupils across all ages in the school. Many thanks to Michael Ruh Studios for the loan of their hand made spinning machine.

 

 

There’s No Such Thing as a Stupid Question

I was lucky enough to see Professor John Hattie speak last week.  If you don’t know who John Hattie is, the Visible Learning website says he is “a researcher in education. His research interests include performance indicators, models of measurement and evaluation of teaching and learning. John Hattie became known to a wider public with his two books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for teachers. Visible Learning is a synthesis of more than 800 meta-studies covering more than 80 million students.  According to John Hattie Visible Learning is the result of 15 years of research about what works best for learning in schools. TES once called him “possibly the world’s most influential education academic”.  He is a great speaker, takes no prisoners and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.  He is uncompromising about what works in education and what doesn’t.

I have seen John Hattie speak several times before but what hit me on this occasion was what he said about children asking questions.  He said that his research shows that in a lesson children ask an average of 2 questions.  Most of the time they are the passive recipients of learning – teachers talk for 89% of the time in lessons.  This is a problem.  Especially when we find out that the things that do make a difference to children’s learning are often connected to independence in learning, metacognition, study skills, self-verbalisation and self-questioning.  These things require the space in lessons for children to ask questions.

I remember that as I set off for my first day at secondary school, my Mum told me something that I have never forgotten, she said “Don’t ever be afraid to put your hand up and ask a question.  If you have that question, you can bet that at least 5 other children in the class have the same question but they are too scared to put their hands up.  Never be too scared to ask a question.  You have to be brave enough to ask not just for yourself but for the other children too”.

I teach a class of Year 4 children one afternoon a week.  I teach ‘reciprocal reading’ which is a very carefully planned methodology that explicitly teaches vocabulary alongside reading for understanding and comprehension skills such as inference.  One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how small the vocabulary of some of our children is.  One of the reasons for teaching reading in this way is so that we can make sure that children know and understand the words they are reading.  The plans highlight some of the words that we think the children will have trouble with but there are always some other words that we presume the children will know only to discover that they don’t.

I told the children in Year 4 about the words of wisdom my Mum gave me and said that they had to raise their hand if there were any words that they didn’t know.  As a result, we have hands popping up all the time and the children are happy to share when they don’t know something.  I want the classroom to be a safe place where we are all secure enough to ask questions, admit when we don’t know the answer and share the thrill of learning something new.

This week when I had taught a lesson on the human digestive system that involved children recreating the digestive system, ending up with ‘poo’, I made sure that I allowed enough time at the end for the children to ask questions and I welcomed all of the questions, making sure that the children knew that there was no such thing as a stupid or silly question.  It was a great 15 minutes with getting on for 50 questions, some of which I could answer there and then and some of which I sent the children away to find out the answers.  As a result, I now know why poo is brown.  There really is no such thing as a stupid question.

 

Teaching isn’t rocket science – it’s much more complicated than that.

School holidays are the perfect opportunity to catch up on some reading – a little bit of ‘trash’ (usually a crime thriller), some children’s fiction (Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpugo, which made me cry so hard at the end that my family came to find out what on earth was the matter) and something that, although it might not have anything to do with education, might teach me something about leadership, the working of effective teams and life in general.  This holiday I read ‘An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth’ by Chris Hadfield, as recommended to me by Marc Rowland.  So, for what it’s worth, here is what I learnt.

Teachers are quite a lot like astronauts.  

Chris Hadfield is an amazing man, the book is inspirational and I really recommend it.  However, it did not make me want to go into space or feel any less anxious when getting on a plane.  It did make me reflect on the similarities between the task of an astronaut and that of a teacher.

Astronauts have a really difficult job and so do teachers.

Early on in the book Chris says that astronauts are public servants, tasked with doing something difficult on behalf of the people of their country.  It seems to me that this applies equally well to teachers and all those who work in education as it does to astronauts.  Our job is to give all children the best possible chances in life and to make the education system better for those who come after us.   We too are public servants tasked with doing something difficult.  Just how difficult was evidenced by the recent report from CentreForum stating that “4 out of 5 disadvantaged pupils are failing to achieve a world-class standard at secondary school”.

Just like astronauts, teachers don’t give up when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem.  They will ‘work the problem’ with experts and colleagues.  The recent focus on evidence based practice is a great help.  As is the work of organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation which support schools to find and share that practice.  Schools need to insist on evidence based practice in their classrooms and they need to be as willing to acknowledge the importance of finding out what doesn’t work as finding out what does.  School leaders should encourage innovation and risk taking as a way to improve practice and this will involve making mistakes along the way.  They need support to do this from an accountability system that is based on dialogue and trust not just data and suspicion.  It would also help if the goal posts didn’t keep moving.  It is easy for an astronaut and the general public to tell if a mission has been successful.  Did we get to the moon and did we all come back alive?  However when assessment and grade boundaries change as often as the weather and the means of reporting good progress suddenly looks completely different it is hard for anyone to really know if your mission has been successful or not.  It is also hard not to feel a certain frustration when schools are told that they are only successful because the exams are a lot easier.  It’s like being told that you only got to the moon because it is a lot closer now (when in fact we all know that the moon is moving away from us).

Preparation is as important when you enter a classroom as it is when you enter a rocket.

Chris talks about the need to “love the preparation as much as the actual thing” and we all know that the better you prepare for a lesson the better it is likely to be.   I don’t just mean how important it is to protect teachers’ PPA time which guarantees them a proper amount of time to plan with colleagues so that they are properly prepared for the week.  I also mean the other things that teachers do to better prepare themselves and that school leaders should facilitate, such as observing other teachers, having time to talk to children out of lessons, looking at children’s work to see where they need support or extension, planning with other adults who work with their children.  In fact, anything that informs and improves teaching and learning is important preparation.

For an astronaut simulations are a bit like lesson study is for a teacher.

One of the best ways that astronauts practice for difficult jobs is through the use of simulations, perhaps via a computer or in a swimming pool.  They also use this technique when something goes wrong in space and they have to improvise a solution.  Astronauts back on earth practice things and iron out the problems so that their colleagues in space don’t make the same mistakes.  Mistakes in space tend to be fatal!  Lesson study works in a very similar way.  A group of colleagues get together to prepare a ‘research lesson’ which is trying to show how to improve learning, especially overcoming barriers to learning for identified children who find learning difficult.  These lessons are watched by a group of teachers who are going to be focussing on the learning of the identified children and assessing how well or otherwise the lesson supports them.  Before the ‘research lesson’ other teachers, who have planned the lesson, teach it to another group of children so that they can find out what the problems are before the lesson ‘goes public’ and those problems can be ironed out.  Often the problem is around the lesson being far too long, there being too much teacher talk and not enough time for children to work independently.  These problems can be caught early and  eliminated but other problems will occur in the lesson that couldn’t necessarily have been foreseen.  This is where the post lesson discussion comes in.  Just as the astronauts have a lengthy debrief after every simulation, so teachers have a discussion after every lesson study and in both cases observers and participants talk about what they observed and what went well and what went wrong.  But here comes the big difference between the two and it is a difference that I hope to reflect on with colleagues over the coming weeks.

After any space simulation, the astronauts and the whole of the flight team, spare no punches in the debrief.  They identify and analyse every single mistake as well as all the things that went right.  Chris Hadfield says that they learn every single lesson possible and then ‘fold them back’ into what they call Flight Rules so that everyone benefits from those lessons and the same mistakes can’t be made again.  I don’t think we do that particularly well in the post lesson discussion because we are very aware of the negative effect of too much criticism on our colleagues and I genuinely understand this.  I hate being criticised, so my response (aside from preparing as much as possible) is to be the first to critique my own performance.  I work with several teachers who are exactly the same and at the end of a lesson observation will come with a list of things that they think went wrong with the lesson.  I think that there is something very powerful about this kind of critical debrief and I especially like the idea of ‘publishing’ some kind of ‘lesson rules’ so that the learning is shared and we come closer to codifying good practice in the classroom.

This holiday’s reading has given me lots to think about and lots to share and discuss with my colleagues.  I did not think that I would learn so much from Chris Hadfield and you might not be convinced that astronauts and teachers are alike.  Obviously, there are far more differences than similarities but one thing I’m certain of, to paraphrase Bill Shankley – teaching isn’t a matter of life or death.  It’s much more important than that.

Manners Maketh Man

From my research, I have discovered that this motto was probably first used by William Horman in the late 1300s.  William was, amongst many things, Bishop of Winchester and Headmaster of Eaton.  William came from humble beginnings and the adoption of this motto seems to indicate that he believed that a person’s characteristics and behaviour were a more important indicator of their value than the circumstances of their birth.

At Rosendale we try to teach the value of manners or morals (which is a more accurate translation of the old english word).  We talk about how great it makes you feel when someone says ‘thank you’ and we make sure we model this ourselves to the children.

I was surprised at how these social skills did not come naturally to many of the children and needed to be explicitly taught.  One of the many benefits of using Kagan Cooperative Learning is that these social skills are taught within the use of structures.  When a child has been listening to their partner you build in time for the listener to thank their partner for sharing with them.  Although at first, this might seem a bit stilted and often causes some giggling, there is no disputing how valued it makes the speaker feel.  The next step is to promote ‘active listening’ by encouraging the listener to paraphrase (“Thank you for sharing with me, you were telling me that……”) or to select a part that they enjoyed (“Thank you for sharing, I liked the part where you…..”)

Similarly, when children are participating in structures that involve mixing around the classroom and getting in pairs, those structures make sure that the children start by saying “hello” and end with “goodbye”.  We also talk to children about pairing up with the person closest to them rather than their friend who is across the other side of the classroom, leaving the person closest to them ‘hanging’.  We call these ‘drive bys’ and having demonstrated to the children how horrible it feels to have that happen to you, we then remind them on a regular basis not to do that.

Children with lovely manners are a delight to work with (as are adults with lovely manners) and we overlook the importance of teaching these social skills at our peril.

Confucius

At Rosendale we have been teaching Mandarin to our children for the past 4 years and in 2013 were awarded Confucius Classroom status from the Institute of Education Confucius Institute.

Yesterday, I had the honour of receiving the Confucius Classroom of the Year Award at the 10th International Confucius Conference in Shanghai.  Of course, this is not my award.  It has been earned by Kou You and is a fitting recognition of all the extraordinary work she has done at the school.

The conference lasted for two days and featured many discussion groups and speakers.  It really helped to focus my mind on the role that learning a language can play in helping our children to develop a sense of themselves as citizens in a global village.

Today, Roger Ames, Professor of Philosophy at University of Hawaii and an expert on comparing Eastern and Western philosophies spoke very eloquently about the common misreading of Chinese philosophy.  A misreading that is caused by Chinese philosophy being translated according to a Western vocabulary that comes from a culture very unlike the culture in China.

Ames told us that people are who they are due to their relationships not just with other beings but also with the world around them “We see because we have the sun”.  He told us that we collaborate with our environment and we don’t live inside our skin.  He went on to discuss that in the past, individualism was once liberating (feminism for example).  However, today our issues (climate change, terrorism) are not ones that individuals can solve.  We either solve them together or we don’t solve them at all.  He discussed the function of the family in Chinese philosophy and that when philosophers talk about ritual it is not empty symbolism but the family traditions that are handed down and protected by each member.  A relevant thought at this time of year when we will all be carrying out family traditions at Christmas.  I enjoy finding out about the traditions that other families share and to see which rituals my brother and sister have kept from our shared childhood. I was fascinated to hear him talk about the West’s obsession with originality.  To repaint the Mona Lisa would be an insult.  Whilst in the East, they are interested in the advancement of the creative project.  Many artists will revisit an artwork from a past master to use as inspiration and to explore the development of technique.

Through language, such an extraordinary way to express our culture, we can begin to understand and learn from each other.  We can begin to work together to solve our global problems.  And this must begin in our schools.  I return to London tomorrow, determined to prove us worthy of the title Confucius Classroom of the year 2015.

 

 

Things I have learnt about lesson study this week

This week saw Day 1 of the continuation of our Lesson Study project using funding from the LSEF.  The day was led by Sarah Seleznyov from UCL IoE who recently travelled to Japan to see lesson study in action.  Here are some of my notes from the day

• Lesson study allows time for research.  This element is built into the cycle and is called ‘kyozai kenku’.  Without this, you are always only referring to “your own circle of reference”
• In Japan it takes 10 years to become an ‘expert teacher’.  A level 1 teacher can give students information and could be replaced by a video! A level 2 teacher can describe content and give an explanation of meaning.  A level 3 teacher can give a context so the students can understand concepts.
• Lesson study builds teachers’ capacity to anticipate student thinking.  If you can anticipate misconceptions you make a better teacher.
• The collaborative writing of an ‘impact framework’ before the process starts is vital in focussing thinking on what behaviours struggling learners display and what behaviours we want to see.  Knowing this allows you to plan a much more informed lesson.
• Lesson study moves away from judgemental lesson observations to sharing lessons with others in order to develop your practice
• Lesson study supports teachers to closely observe pupils’ learning and the behaviours that go with it.  It focuses on evidence – what has been seen and heard rather than what teachers ‘imagine’ is happening.
• Lesson study puts professionalism back into teaching.  It is empowering and encourages problem solving.
• There is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ lesson

The Power of the Team

This week at Rosendale, the children in every class in the school were put into new Kagan teams.  The Kagan methodology of Cooperative Learning places children in mixed ability teams of 4 and changes those teams every half term.

In order to get these new teams working effectively together teachers spend time at the beginning of each half term on teambuilding activities.  Teambuilding creates enthusiasm, trust and mutual support which ensure more effective peer to peer learning and greater academic gains.

Peer to peer learning has been found to have a significant positive effect on children’s learning and is rated highly on both the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit and in John Hattie’s book ‘Visible Learning’.  As with all things, though, the effectiveness is dependent on how peer to peer learning is introduced and the rigour with which it is carried out.

Given that, we always make time to ensure that the new teams get to know each other, feel that they are supported by each other and so can develop a synergy.

I spent Monday afternoon teaching a Year 3 class and spent a significant amount of time on a teambuilding activity.  I gave each team an envelope containing many different words and asked the teams to work together to make and record as many sentences as they could using only those words.  An activity that I had expected to last for about 10 minutes ran and ran.  The children worked together for about 25 minutes all contributing to their team’s collection of sentences.  The differences in approach were fascinating.  One team worked through very simple sentences changing one word at a time, for example ‘the boy ran, the girl ran, the man ran, the cat ran’. Another team appointed a writer who was provided with sentences made by the other team members that they then recorded on the paper. Another team chose a key word that they used to build sentences around. And yet another team all worked together to make the sentences, this approach was slower than the others but came up with more complicated sentences.

Throughout the activity the children were focussed on the task in hand, all leaning over the table, talking to each other, smiling, asking questions.  There was a palpable energy in the room.

Spending the time to develop new teams means that these teams will function properly.  Children feel safe, accepted and supported.  They know that they can rely on their teammates to accept their ideas, listen to their opinions and help them out with their learning without judgement.

How do your teams function? Do you feel safe, accepted and supported? If not, try a teambuilder!