Recently the senior leadership team at Rosendale have been debating our vision for the school. We have been particularly exercised by whether we support failures or prefer to think of mistakes.
Seth Godin has posted this very helpful reflection on the debate…
A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.
A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.
We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don’t kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won’t work, while opening the door to things that might.
School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.
Our federation senior leadership team heard an excellent talk Assessment for Learning 2011 – Dylan Wiliam @ Schools Network Conference today from Professor Dylan Wiliam on what the state of play is for formative assessment. We were significantly encouraged to hear that much our of our practice is at the cutting edge of Dylan’s message. Not least because the Kagan Co-operative Learning Structures facilitate a huge amount of learner to learner assessment for learning. He stated that the focus on assessment was a misunderstanding, but that we should understand assessment as a fundamental element of teaching. Within this feedback is crucial and feedback should:
Cause thinking
Provide guidance on how to improve
Use comment only marking
Have focused marking
Everybody gets the same amount of work from feedback
Make use of explicit reference to mark schemes
Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor
e.g. ’5 of these are wrong, you find them’
Response should be required to feedback
Re-timing assessment – decision driven data collection
How do I wrap up this topic? Find out what learning is secure and tailor the last few lessons to address the gaps
This summer’s recent events of civil unrest across the UK have been disturbing for many in London. The political rhetoric surrounding ‘broken Britain’ has left us with as many questions as answers. But what exactly is the nature of brokenness, what nuances are there to this word that we should understand, lest in our rush to fix the broken society we accidentally ‘fix’ the wrong thing?
In thispresentation, Broken Britain? Sept 2011, I suggest that in fact, rather than denying our brokenness, we should be embracing the purposeful re-shaping, re-making and re-setting of our schools’ philosophies and pedagogies as we seek to refine our model for the very best education.
As we start a new academic year here in the UK, we are faced with the most trying of circumstances: financial; social; and pedagogical. What is required above all else is an intelligent navigation through what will undoubtedly be choppy waters.
Intelligent Leadership is a presentation of my thoughts on the matter, delivered at an Alan November SSAT Primary Network conference held in Birmingham, UK in the summer of 2011.
It has been a very interesting year in our federation this year. The two schools serve very different settings with very different local needs. Being together in a federation therefore raises an interesting question: what is it that is keeps us together, or alternatively, how can federated schools keep their individuality?
Following the Secretary of State’s recent announcement on the latest drive to convert struggling schools in to Academies, I was asked in a recent interview for BBC News 24 to comment upon the dynamics required for successful school improvement. Our two schools have achieved their best ever SATS results this year and we have received glowing reports from the Local Authority school improvement partner for our innovative re-design of pedagogy to engage children better in their learning. Further still we received an outstanding judgement from OfSTED for our use of ICT and New Technologies. Yet it became clear as the year progressed that these successes, and of course the considerable work that still needs to be done to keep the schools restless in their pursuit of excellence, were due to the symbiotic nature of our federation.
It is absolutely clear to me that federations, and perhaps especially those that are borne of school improvement, need to be aware of their particular areas of expertise and to be empowered to share these across the federation. This raises morale and recognises that all parties in a network have valuable learning experiences to contribute to the whole. Somewhere in this lies their sense of individuality and its implicit contribution to the federal goals. There is much more to be reflected upon in understanding ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ as it relates to federated school models, but I am sure that a foundation of equal partnership is vital to each member’s optimal performance.
The 2011 K-12 Horizon Report has been published recently, surveying the terrain for new technologies in education over the next few years. I spoke recently about this report at the ICT register conference at the University of Loughborough ICT Strategy the next 4 years. We might be forgiven for believing that New Technologies had disappeared off the governmental radar in recent months with its absence from the headline big four of English, Maths, Science and Sport. However, Secretary of State Michael Gove reminded us of the importance of new technologies in no uncertain terms in his recent speech to the Royal Society. This high level recognition of the changing learning landscape around us is very welcome, as is the launch of a new SLICT-style CPD programme by Connected Learning and IET Associates, check it out. However, for those of us involved in delivering learning experiences in school, we recognise that our vision could and should extend even further. We look forward to what the new academic term here in England may bring.
Why work in networks? In these times of fast paced educational change, many of us are facing the added pressures of strained budgets, curricula uncertainty and local authority transformation. I am not sure how we can navigate these waters without the continued support of a network of schools and professionals from whom to draw upon.
In the technological world this is called a Personal Learning Network and it is often made up of a plethora of web2.0 sites and contacts. However, personally, I like the human touch too. So I find myself drawing upon a group of close contacts to inspire and re-invigorate my thinking. Who are these people? Michael Shepherd (on twitter as Smichael920) from Haweside Primary School in Blackpool has a really innovative mind and leads an excellent school brilliantly. Equally Dave Watson at Chorlton Park Primary School in South Manchester is an outstanding National Leader of Education and genuinely humble innovator in leading schools and supporting clusters of schools. Tom Barrett (@tombarrett) is Deputy Headteacher at John Davies Primary School in Nottingham and a global leader in embedding new technologies in to the primary curriculum. He is also a real expert at empowering networks of thinkers, take a look at his Edublog Awards nominated Interesting Ways series for a great example of his PLN in action. There is also Dave Broadfield (@davebroadfield), another guru of New Technologies and learning spaces, who has been at the forefront of innovation in primary education for 20 years. I also draw upon the considerable expertise of Steve Hall, senior lecturer at Staffordshire University, who is an expert in international collaborations between primary schools. Beyond education, I have worked very closely for many years with Malcolm Hurrell at New Mindsets, to help me develop my thinking around leadership, management and coaching, whilst another two National Leaders of Education, Peter Rubery, Principal at the Fallibroome Academy and Darran Lee, Executive Principal of the Learning Federation in Oldham, both continue to challenge me in my journey from best practice to next practice.
These people have helped to make me who I am and they continue to help me become the leader I would like to be. I met most of them through the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, a great network for educational transformation.
Primary schools are used to change. A brief reflection on the last few years of initiatives reads like a litany of pedagogical change: national strategies; synthetic phonics; MFL; 5 hours of sport; embedded ICT; Healthy Food; Every Child Matters; the creative curriculum… and so on. As a result, we can do change: we have become masters of change management.
Many colleagues that I have spoken to over the past few months have been elated/devastated (delete as appropriate) by the pace and scope of change that we are experiencing in all education sectors at the moment. The extremes in responses are not, I suspect, just due to political allegiance but rather are a consequence of uncertainty. Up to this point in time one of primary school leaders’ key strategies to managing change successfully has been to anticipate it, yet at the moment reliable anticipation is in short supply. In the absence of such strategies, we are faced with the situation that Professor Seymour Papert summed up portentously: there is only one 21st century skill and that is the ability to act intelligently when you are faced with something you have never seen before.
This may offer little comfort to some. It is all well and good urging intelligent leadership in the face of unprecedented experience. What if that experience is trying to reconcile a staffing profile constructed in times of plenty when now we face a time of unprecedented cuts in school budgets? Or aggressive union representatives agitating for workers’ rights? Or colleagues meandering aimlessly through their curriculum now that QCA and the Rose Review have been shunned? (The Cambridge Primary Review received a much better hearing from the new Government than it initially received from the previous administration and so will have increasing influence on the direction learning in the primary sector may take. I will post on this development in the near future). Or parents worrying about the pros and cons of academy status? Or child protection cases mounting in the context of city councils’ repeated inadequate social service reviews? Or…, well, you get the idea. Facing things that we have never seen before, at a pace that we have never endured before, with an accountability that we have never answered to before mitigates against our ability to think at all, never mind clearly or intelligently. For many of us, survival from one day to another is achievement enough.
However, clearly that isn’t enough. Our children deserve better and goodness knows, given the messes we have created economically and socially during our tenure as guardians of the globe, we really should give everything that we have to enable our children to make a better job of facing unknown 21st century challenges than we have. But how?
You will be disappointed to read that I don’t know. But I know a woman that does, and probably a man too. Never has there been such an important time for a primary network as ours. Whether you are in a rural Kent village school, an inner city Birmingham academy or a Blackpool Children’s Centre, I need you. I need you because you hold at least part of the answer to the problems that I face. Nor should I feel belittled by such reliance, because I, in turn, hold some of the answers to the problems faced in Exeter, Sheffield, Pluckley or Tiverton. Indeed, wherever my partners in this network find themselves. Seymour Papert was right, we are going to face situations that we have never encountered before. But we don’t have to come up with our intelligent responses alone and in fact if we want to deliver the best possible life chances for all our children rather than just a select few, we mustn’t come up with our best responses alone. For me, there are two key 21st century skills when faced with the unprecedented: to act intelligently AND collaboratively.
I look forward to receiving your thoughts on the way forward, because I believe they will help to bring me clarity. Please feel free to respond via my blog at neilhopkin.wordpress.com
Dr Neil Hopkin
Chair of the SSAT National Headteacher Steering Group for the Family of Schools Primary Network
The final piece in the jigsaw for this series of 3 posts on negotiated learning is, in some ways, the most important: that of staff development. No innovation is going to succeed without careful support and for us the notion of coaching and modelling was key to the successful introduction of a new way of enabling learning (read my thoughts about a coaching paradigm here). In our case, an important and ongoing part of the process is that of international collaboration. Facilitated by iNET and the SSAT we initiated a programme of staff development with Wooranna Park School and then Princes Hill Primary School, both in Melbourne, Australia. Principals Ray Trotter and Esme Capp have proved inspirational in furthering our own reflections on how to enable children to co-construct their learning journeys. Once we had started those conversations we were on our way and the rest, as they say, was history… the future!
My colleague, Kate Atkins has written eloquently about the philosophy underpinning our rationale for Negotiated Learning at Rosendale and Christ Church schools. Kate grounds her approach in observation, specifically the observable behaviours of learning. She notes that, “If you spend any time working with babies and toddlers, it becomes clear that they do not need to be taught nor persuaded to learn. They have an innate curiosity and desire to explore and make sense of their environment and the people who inhabit it. Young children learn an enormous amount in their early years, they learn how to talk, to build and develop relationships, how to get their own way, how to walk, run, climb stairs and manipulate objects to create a desired effect, how to go to the toilet, how to feed themselves. The list is endless. And all this learning is driven by their own motivation and supported by the environment in which they exist and the interactions they have with other people in their environment.
Educational institutions that provide for young children, capitalise on this and provide a range of learning resources; sand and water trays, bricks to build with, natural objects to explore, opportunities to paint and sculpt. They also provide role models in the form of the adults who work with children and also the other children who are present. These institutions recognise that children learn from each other, from observing and working alongside adults and children who teach them the skills that they need in order to complete the tasks they are interested in.
This type of learning is extremely personalised. It takes as its starting point the events and objects that children are fascinated by and capitalises on their interest in order to extend their thinking. Some of this happens through necessity. It is almost impossible to persuade a 2 year old to do something that they do not want to do but, given the right environment, they will be purposefully occupied at all times (even if that occupation is taking toys away from other children and seeing what happens!).
This type of learning also understands that there is a need to teach the skills and understanding necessary to read, write and be numerate. However, it does this by exposing children to literacy and numeracy through reading stories, writing cards and shopping lists, counting how many children there are, going to the shops and then teaching skills as and when the children are interested to learn.
It is unclear why this approach to learning stops when children go to school. The children themselves do not change but the education system around them certainly does. Unlike most of the rest of Europe, in England we have a belief in a much more ‘institutional’ approach. We set a very strict timetable and teach children skills in very large groups (usually 30). We then set them tasks in order to practise these new skills. Sometimes these tasks can be very relevant to the children but often they are without any obvious purpose. At this point many children stop being motivated to learn, they struggle to understand concepts that are without context or meaning for them or that they are simply not ready to learn.
This education system treats children like industrial components on a factory production line. It has a philosophy of ‘one size fits all’ and takes no account of the personal interests of each child. We seem to forget all that the children have already learnt and there seems to be an unspoken understanding that if we give children any independence they will choose to misbehave and ‘waste their time’ with meaningless activities.
Some educational establishments have made the commitment to extend the model of early years’ education. They recognise that a system that works does not need to be abandoned but that it does need to be adapted and progressed as the children themselves develop.
At Rosendale Primary School we have decided to take this approach. We believe that there are 3 teachers in our classrooms, the adults, the children and the classroom environment. As a result of this we train teachers and teaching assistants to have a deep understanding of child development, how children learn and the progression of skills in each subject area. We use a variety of strategies (including Kagan cooperative learning groups) to develop relationships between our children and allow the sharing of knowledge and expertise. And our classrooms are organised to encourage independent learning and allow free access to resources.
In our Key Stage 1 classrooms we allow children free access to various areas of learning, including creative learning and problem solving. Children are able to follow their own interests and adults interact to extend and develop their thinking, help them solve problems and model ways of and approaches to learning. Within this, there are several ‘Provocation Points’, which are strategies that have been planned to develop the children’s interests or expose them to new experiences or ways of thinking. These provocations could be teacher initiated, environment initiated or child initiated. Each adult holds 1 literacy and 1 numeracy workshop each day, working with a small group of children (usually 6). This group may be made up of children of the same ability, children with the same interests, friendship groups or Kagan groups. The content of the workshop will depend on the needs of the children and will be planned as a result of careful observation and assessment so that children are being extended appropriately. At the end of the workshop, the children and the teacher will negotiate a ‘follow up’ task. The aim of this task is to give the children the opportunity to practise their newly learnt skill whilst demonstrating to the teacher their understanding and emerging competence.
For many teachers this change in pedagogy represents a major shift in thinking and approach. Where previously, we would know exactly what each child would be doing throughout the week, i.e. the task that he or she is working on, teachers will now have to discover and address what each child is learning as the week progresses and respond to that learning journey either through intervention or planning. This process will be challenging. It will demand hard work and patience. It will cause us to reflect, but it will allow us to cater better for the needs of all our children. It will help support the most to the least able and challenge all children in a manner appropriate to their abilities. It will preserve the desire to learn that children have and it will recognise and celebrate their individual achievements and successes.”
