Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Learning

"My results..." Care less about what everyone says

In England and Wales today, and in Scotland last week, youngsters have been receiving their examination results. All those months of hard work, well, work in any case, pay off in about the 10 seconds it takes to open an envelope and take a glance over the final scores. Some people even choose to do it in front of the TV cameras - you'd have never found me wanting to do that!

At that point in time, the effort, the learning that went on, and the lessons to carry on into later life all disappear into distant memory. It might as well not have happened.

But a tweet this morning from London's friendliest entrepreneur Oli Barrett sent me seeking out the pre-envelope-opening tweets, all those people talking about "my results" on Twitter. The search string has been fascinating, particularly in the early morning.

 

Here's a representative sample of tweets from one small run through the search:

It feels in my very unscientific way of measuring things that about 80% want to throw themselves under various modes of public transport, most fear mediocrity, most fear what other people will say.

It's the last one that I wish we could teach young people about - care less about what other people say, more about what YOU do.

 

SOLO Taxonomy: giving students a sense of progress in learning

Without a sense of progress you cannot be creative, so what language can we offer students that enables them to take control of understanding where they are in their learning?

One key notion about creativity is that the ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process: knowing when something feels 'done'. Knowing when you're stuck, when you're done, when you're at the end of that chunk of learning is essential. It gives that indication that you need to go back out and get some more insights from someone or something.

Knowing where you are in your learning requires a language, a rubric of some sort, and one which fits the bill really well is John Biggs' SOLO Taxonomy (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes). This is a thinking tool which I came across from Chris Harte in his Cramlington Learning Village days. Often, the language used to frame learning in the SOLO Taxonomy is used by the teacher to assess learners' progress, but far more powerful is when the learner him- or herself is encouraged to use the language as a self-assessment tool. Giving the rubric to the learner by making it clearly visible in every classroom increases their capacity to take ownership of their future direction of travel.

The SOLO Taxonomy is like a stepping stone progression through the perceived understanding of a given area. We use it in the ideation phase of our design thinking work to test how rich an idea might be, or whether more immersion in the topic needs done to add depth to it:

 

The model provides five levels of understanding of a given topic or area of learning:

• Pre-structural - The task is not attacked appropriately; the student hasn’t really understood the point and uses too simple a way of going about it. In languages, this feels like knowing odds and sods of language, but never being able to pull together a sentence for oneself. 
• Uni-structural - The student's response only focuses on one relevant aspect. In a languages classroom this might be where a student can answer a specific question with a very specific answer, but can't go "off piste" linguistically.
• Multi-structural - The student's response focuses on several relevant aspects but they are treated independently and additively. Assessment of this level is primarily quantitative. In a languages classroom you might see a student able to link together some obvious connections of language, but still unable to pull the conversation around to other related areas.
• Relational - The different aspects have become integrated into a coherent whole. This level is what is normally meant by an adequate understanding of some topic. In a foreign language this might be the capacity to speak the language well enough to understand and be understood, but perhaps some of the cultural impact or context is still lost.
• Extended abstract - The previous integrated whole may be conceptualised at a higher level of abstraction and generalised to a new topic or area. Here, in a foreign language, we can imagine both a linguistic competence but also the capacity to develop an understanding of how that language has impacted on its culture, on other cultures, on literature and so on.

Tait Coles describes how he put it into action with phenomenal results in his classroom, and David Didau builds on Tait's thinking and provides some resources to get you started:

 

Introduction to SOLO taxonomy from David Didau

Additional links (14/08/12):

Pam Hook, a New Zealand educator who has taken Biggs' thinking and created many of the graphical rubrics and other resources you'll see peppered around the web, provides a rich bank of practical advice and printables to get you started on her site. If you're starting a school year, her downloadable slideshares will help you help colleagues make sense of how this can change practice.

Have you been using the SOLO Taxonomy? Want to start this new school year? Let me know in the comments how it impacts the capacity of your students to take control of their own learning.

Using spam to learn about persuasive language

A genius lesson or two from Scottish colleagues who immerse students in real world spams in order to see what kinds of reply they might write:

I gave a class of twelve year olds a selection of genuine spam emails and asked them to write down what their replies to these would be. It mostly purported to be from a distressed Nigerian monarch living in exile looking for a friendly Briton to share a fortune with. Some of the kids quickly twigged and wrote sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek responses. But a few of them seemed genuinely intrigued and happy to enter into correspondence; others tried to negotiate the terms to make more money. It was this naivety and innocence that I wanted to address in the pupils. They had to become aware of dastardly tricks.

As an English teacher, it was important to zoom in on the persuasive language techniques used in spam emails. By the end of the unit pupils could tell you that spam emails use terms of endearment to hook in the recipient, include hyperlinks to news articles to make their stories more plausible, describe accidents or impending threats to generate sympathy, and specify tight deadlines to make the deal seem juicier.

Read more and get some resources for this on the Scottish Book Trust site. Hat tip on this one to my old colleague Bill Boyd.

Photo: Holley St Germain

Are you a dawdler or a doer?

First Five Days: Day 3 from Alas Media on Vimeo.

I've spent the week back at Building Learning Communities in Boston, working alongside my colleague Tom Barrett and hanging out with great friends old and new. AlasMedia, my LA pals with whom I spend far too much time into the wee small hours talking about film, education, music and life, produced this clip to sum up the urgency with which we need to take what we learn from intensive weeks like this and put it into action in our classrooms.

What are you going to do on the First Five Days of school to make that dent in the status quo? Tell us using the Twitter hashtag #1st5days

Five Things I've Learned

Yesterday the Pearson Foundation launched its new site, Five Things I've Learned, and I was honoured to be amongst the first educators to contribute five key things I've learned in my career so far about learning, teaching, life and the universe.

I've still got plenty of dues to pay in my career, so it is incredibly flattering to be amongst such august company, from Jeb Bush to Stephen Heppell - it's quite a mix! More Five Things are due to appear in the weeks and months to come.

You can read my five things on the site, in full:

1. The people making the decisions are no smarter than you are.
2. The harder I work the luckier I get.
3. Vision is a process, not an away-day, a statement, or a project.
4. The world moves faster through projects.
5. Teaching needs learning, not the other way around.

Googleable or Not Googleable?

When we're working with schools on our Design Thinking School programme, one of the easiest ways to explain what we're looking for in the way a project is set, is whether the statement or questions being asked can be Googled easily: is this a Googleable or Not Googleable topic?

Every topic, every bit of learning has content that can be Googled, and we don't want teachers wasting precious enquiry time lecturing that content. We want students, instead, to be using class time to collaborate and debate around the questions that are Not Googleable, the rich higher order thinking to which neither the textbook nor the teacher know the answers.

One of our schools in Brisbane, Star of the Sea Cleveland, took my "Googleable" / "Not Googleable" to a very literal end, when they pinned up two headings and got students to post-it each and every question in the class, categorising those which could be searched quickly (the lower order questions) and those which they should dwell on in class time.

This is the kind of meaty discussion that we want in class, and making it explicit in this way means that we cut to the higher order thinking so much quicker.

Read more from our Brisbane school, and how the rest of this particular lesson worked out, on our shared blog.

#NeverSeconds: Students can change the world - when we get out of the way

When I was at school, I wrote an article in the student newspaper (the Pupils' View) about how fresh, healthy food was disproportionately overpriced compared to the "yellow food" on offer in the school canteen. The result was that the Catering Director for the Local Authority actually left her job. And I got into a fair bit of trouble.

This all happened in Dunoon Grammar School, part of the Local Authority Argyll and Bute who, with similar sense of grievance and bullying last week attempted to silence one nine-year-old Martha Payne with a brutal, long-winded press release and ban of Martha's online activities.

Since the end of the Easter holidays, Martha has been writing a daily food blog about her school lunches, with the support of her dad, as a self-initiated writing project. It also set out in the noble aim to fund the building of kitchens for less fortunate children in Malawi, through the Mary's Meals charity.

Her first posts revealed the tiny portions (hence the name of her blog: NeverSeconds) and, yes, the rather yellow fried nature of her food. But things improved within barely weeks, and most meals were absolutely fine (a summary average of the scores she gave to each meal results in something over 7.5 - not bad for mass-produced school meals, but with room for improvement, a point which was very much Martha's).

Where Martha forgot her camera, she took to drawing her meal. She scored not just out of ten, but also on a health rating, how many mouthfuls it took to get through and, disturbingly, how many pieces of hair were found in it (I've yet to spot the post where there is some hair; again, a good sign).

Within weeks, her notoriety was such that school kids from elsewhere around the world were sharing their meals for Martha to publish on her blog on their behalf. 

TV chefs Jamie Oliver and Nick Nairn championed her and invited Martha over to learn how to cook herself.

Vitally, her food portions became bigger, so that a "growing girl" like her had half a chance.

So far, so good, so much a passionate kid with a passion for food, and a good way with words. And a nine-year-old changing her school's approach to food. 

Until last week:

This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today. 

I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too. I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals either. 

Argyll and Bute, the school district rather than the otherwise very supportive school itself, issued a damning edict, preventing Martha from taking any more photos, writing any more blog posts about her lunches. Dinner ladies were, said the illiterate press release (we serve "deserts" to our children, really?), "afraid for their jobs". It was, according to one legal journalist, "one of the most piss-poor justifications of a ban of anything from any public authority".

Celeb chef Jamie Oliver, known globally for his crusade against poor school food, waded in to get people to lend their support with a simple retweet of his "Stay strong, Martha".

Mary's Meals, for whom Martha's blog had raised £2000 by Thursday night, the day of the ban, issued a statement outlining the consequences of the ban on her efforts to build kitchens in schools in Malawi, a country with whom Scotland has a long-standing official partnership.

Martha's "Goodbye" post earned over 2000 comments and Twitter's #neverseconds tag went into meltdown. #NeverSeconds, the girl Martha Payne and, excruciatingly, Argyll and Bute council all hit the top trending terms in the UK. Her blog, having reached 2m hits in just over a month already, now saw its blog counter unable to keep up as she broke through 3m in one day.

And I was livid for her. How dare councils, and this council in particular, once more attempt to bully those in its learning community. I sent a quick tweet to the Education Minister, who is also the member of the Scottish Parliament for the area, requesting he do something in what had already been established a ridiculous and illegal abuse of power. He tweet back that he agreed, having requested the Head of the Council to lift the ban immediately.

Within 20 minutes the Head of the Council was on the radio, announcing a change of tack.

Argyll and Bute finally managed a new statement, the politicians showing more sense than their feckless faceless bureaucrats and lifting the ban.

As a result of the debacle, Argyll and Bute has gained a global reputation for awful PR, a tortoise-like reaction time on Twitter and, potentially, an interesting place to go on holiday. Was it all a tourism ploy? Given the repeated mess they get themselves into, they're almost certainly not not that clever.

But, on a positive note, Martha's long-term goal of raising £7000 for a new kitchen in a Malawi school was rather superseded: she was at nearly £50,000 ($100,000) at the weekend just past, now at £100,000 ($200,000) with more rushing in every day. 

She has also created the beginnings of, hopefully, lasting change: she will head up a council summit on school meals and work with them longer term on improving the quality of food for every child in the district. Happily, she's back to blogging it all once more with the support of her school and, reluctantly or not, her Local Authority. She has now had her first kitchen in Malawi named in her honour.

Martha shows every facet of great learning: real world change, making the environment around her better, sharing her thinking with the world, having a conscious for the world beyond her immediate horizons, and robustness in the face of incredible media and social media pressure. She is another 'Caine', with a supportive parent and facilitating adults around her. She'll go far.

Donate to Martha's campaign through her blog: http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

will.i.am: Music as Medicine

The computer is my instrument. I play it. will.i.am

On one of my bored 38,000 feet periods I discovered a documentary about Creative Visionaries, and will.i.am was on. The guy's a superstar, a creative superstar for me for lots of reasons. I love this song that isn't released yet: Mona Lisa Smile. I like his way of thinking about music, about fashion, about life. I like his hero's journey (go and find out about it). As a drummer, I love the way he talks about rythmn and he does so here in his one piece of music thus far not to have drums.

"My instrument is the computer. I'm looking at this glowing screen. I'm looking at light. Think about it. I stay in the studio 12 hours a day, staring at the light, designing it, shaping it... I affect the lives of millions of people. That's crazy".

Crazy, but not uncommon. Glowing rectangles have so much to answer for. Getting to the point where you see the glowing rectangle as your instrument, and then combining it with real, 'analogue' instruments in an orchestra that "symbolises... human collaboration", this is the balance that we should always seek with technology. Treating it as an artform amongst many artforms interests me.

"I'm not taking ritalin. I'm taking music."

Teaching is demanding: Fatigued and Dissatisfied or Fatigued But Satisfied?

While sitting in on a seminar on Mental Toughness as a teachable, as well as genetic, attribute, I came across the work of Dutch researcher Nico Van Yperen. Being mentally tough means that we take control of our futures, we enjoy challenges as opportunities rather than threats, and we have deep involvement in meeting our own, personal goals. But if you're a leader, your actions can also be responsible for helping or hindering others' capacity to have mental toughness:

Van Yperen believes it is possible to influence achievement orientation. Generally, one's environment will shape these choices. For example, work settings with a compensation system that identifies and rewards individual performance will encourage a performance orientation.

One that rewards groups of people equitably encourages a mastery orientation.

Managers' comments drawing attention to the task encourage mastery. Comments comparing individuals encourage a performance orientation.

Managers who display their own pleasure when performing the same tasks as their people, encourage mastery. Those who don't, encourage a performance orientation.

Hard working, effective employees are a valuable asset we'd like to preserve. Helping them be satisfied in their work by encouraging a mastery achievement orientation is one way to do it.

 Pic from DVids

Design Thinking: not just for Design and Technology class

Design Thinking father Tim Brown blogged a while ago this great pleading from some of Britain's best designers and design educators for Government and schools to heighten the importance of design, technology, design thinking and prototyping skills through the vehicle of engineering subjects such as design and technology. It's a great clip, with many great reasonings as to why making learning concrete makes so much sense.

However, as impatient as I ever am, it's not enough.

 Design thinking - learning how to scope out and solve problems within seemingly vast areas of knowledge and experience - is something I believe belongs as a framework across the curriculum. It's as core a skill as literacy and numeracy, but a lot less well understood by teachers outside the design technology world. It needs the time, attention and thinking power of educators to be understood as a framework that contains so many of what we already know are powerful learning and teaching strategies for student improvement.

With NoTosh, I've been fortunate to foster and see the beginnings of this whole-school approach to design thinking in schools around the world, with our partners in the UK, US, Australia and the Far East. The Design Thinking School is taking hold in many areas, and challenging the status quo in some painful ways in others.

But challenging the status quo, that content cannot be covered unless a teacher or day-by-day curriculum is 'delivering' it, is what we're all about. And, school by school, that sea change - design thinking throughout the school, not just in the design technology class - is happening.