Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

Those simple things...

I have tried to publish this post three times and Chrome keeps crashing (booo) so I am going to keep it short! I had a brilliant lo-tech lesson with my Y12 French last lesson on Friday where we played bingo/loto! We did not practise numbers or do it because it was Friday, rather, I wanted to assess not only individual speaking skills but also group speaking and listening skills.

I asked the students to prepare a 1 minute presentation on the sad and timely theme of "celebrity kills" and gave each one of them this card (now this has been in my teacher toolbox for years and I think I adapted it from something one of my own A-level teachers, the wonderful Shelagh Espinoza, used to do but its origins are hazy!)  Download Oral bingo

Very simply, each student had to give their uninterupted presentation and then the others had to jump in with any of the above so that we had a very varied conversation and students were really working hard in order to interact in lots of different ways whilst at the same time trying to get a column, then row and finally a full house. This was an incredibly rich source of feedback from students in the form of how agile their thinking in French was and also how rich their vocabulary is. No iPads, no tweeting, no Posterous, just good solid learning! We must not forget the simple things...

Personal Learning at John Monash Science School

So, my new job is "Leading Teacher -Personalised Learning". So what on earth does that mean? Well, apart from developing an holistic strategy to assessment, data, learning portfolios and pedagogy in terms of personalising the learning and school experience (takes a breath) I am building upon the excellent work already happening in a subject called "Personal learning". Personal learning is a kind of learn to learn/PSHE mash up which has the intention of boosting students' learning power (if I can borrow Guy Claxton's phrase) in their first year at JMSS. The course is built around developing the skills, attributes and knowledge of succesful learners. The attributes we are working from come from UNESCO's four pillars of Education and are summarised here.

To give a brief taste of the year view, we will be moving from quite tightly planned learning experiences helping the students to reflect on themselves as learners, give them some learning tools such as graphic organisers, SOLO taxonomy, de Bono's Thinking Hats etc, up to their own design thinking challenge for the last term. ( I was inspired, as ever, by NoTosh to take part in a brilliant design thinking process in England in October- read about it here).

Throughout this, the aim is to use realsmart as a portfolio which gathers evidence of the process of learning as well as the outcomes and is owned by the learners (that is the trick; developing reflective learners who are motivated to reflect independently for a reason!) Below is the skeleton for the learning portfolio I am going to use although students can design their own.

So we are starting off by deciding, together, what skills, knowledge and attributes we wish to have developed after 3 years at JMSS and then we are going to decide how we go about it. There is a year overview, there are a few lesson plans and a structure but their are still huge gaps in "my" planning for personal learning this year and I hope it is from those gaps that the best learning will come!

What I love about the John Monash Science School mission is that it is not about preparing students for the future they will inherit, but it also recognises that we need to make our students confident and capable enough to create their own world and have a positive impact on those around them. I hope that personal learning can help them realise this.

"The Mission of John Monash Science School is to develop in all our students the skills, attributes, knowledge and balanced perspectives which will best enable them to make a positive difference to the world they will both inherit and co-create."

 

An apology...

Dear blog,

I must apologise for neglecting you for the last FIVE months but we have been busy...

A year ago, I blogged that 2011 was gong to be the year that we started the wheels rolling in order to move our lives to Australia. Well, we did it and much more quickly than I would have ever thought! The New Year resolution (planned before hand) made just after the final chime of 2010 was brought to fruition when we touched down at Tullamarine airport in Melbourne on the 1st December 2011. In 11 months, I had found a fantastic job (miraculously in a school as innovative and exciting as Cramlington Learning Village) as Leading Teacher - Personalised Learning at John Monash Science School in Melbourne, applied for and received a working visa, found a primary school for my son, opened bank accounts and health care, packed up and (fingers crossed just waiting to exchange...) sold a house, shipped our worldly goods (still waiting for them to arrive BTW), left jobs, left a primary school, said good bye to family and friends and flown 10,000 miles to start our new life on the other side of the world, talk about life long learning...

This has been one of the steepest learning curves my wife, my six year old son and I have ever been on. We are learning, unlearning and relearning every day, using every ounce of our previous knowledge in a new context and loving every minute of it. Now this blog is about learning so I will leave my personal journey here (although it is inevitably entwined with every aspect of my own learning and how I try to support others in their learning) but I have a lot to blog about from my new school from setting up truly personal learning portfolios with realsmart, to planning the use of ipads in learning, the design thinking planning approach we have taken in emerging technologies (yes, that is a subject in my school, well not a subject, more a way of learning) and writing the ultimate personal learning course...

Many challenges lie ahead and I look forward to sharing them with you.

 

Language World 2011 - #lw2011

As promised, my presentation from Saturday's Language World talk or as I like to call it, my Jerry Maguire moment...

Languages:Reboot -full version on Prezi

What is real assessment?

I have come to the conclusion that the word assessment is not useful. Assessment for Learning, formative assessment, summative assessment are all just ways of moving learning forward. Anyway, I was inspired by this photo of Abi, a wonderful teacher in my department which I thought was a perfect image of real feedback so I set myself to try to think of a simile or metaphor to try and encapsulate different things which are all moving learning forward. This slide share is a first attempt. Comments welcome!

A simile for assessment

View more presentations from charte.

Happy Birthday Dear Teachmeet...

5 years after the inception of teachmeet, I was delighted to be part of the 5th TeachmeetNE. I love teachmeets; they are fun, raucous, social events all about learning. In deed in my presentation "Why hexagons are better than squares" I stated that learning for me was two things; social and about making connections. That is exactly what teachmeet is about. The event was brilliant because of the people who were there; people who were passionate about learning. We had Pam Baker, a teacher from High Tech High in San Diego, Grace Dunne who works in archives and education as well as wonderful teachers and educationalists from the region. It was a special pleasure to have one of the founders of teachmeet, the great Ewan McIntosh who presented his 5 year reflecting and lead a truly harmonious rendition of "Happy Birthday". His presentation is below.

 

 

I abused my position as host for the evening to massively run over the 7 minutes presentation and talk about SOLO and the use of hexagons to assess learning. So here is that talk (thanks to Steve Bunce for videoing these)

 

Finally, this may be the last teachmeetNE that I am involved in organising as my beautiful little family and I are off to pastures new in Melbourne, but it will certainly not be the last one I am involved in thanks to SKYPE and the ability to set my alarm clock to ridiculous o'clock to participate. (At this point I wish to say a simple thank you to the Board of Two Jumps Learning trust - I love you all, you know who you are).

Teachmeet is one of the ways to truly personalise CPD. If there is not one near you, organise one. Go on, I dare you.

#SOLO, I'm ridin' #SOLO

I am pretty sure that Jason Derulo was talking about the taxonomy when he said he was 'ridin solo' but I may be mistaken... Anyway after initial inspiration from Darren (@dkmead) Mead and contact with the wonderful Pam Hook and Julie Mills (www.hooked-on-thinking.com) I have been working on the SOLO taxonomy as a way to understand grammatical understanding in French. My experiments with y7 and concepts of gender have been quite successful (although I do need to review where to go next...) but I had a revelation last week when Damian Clark (@clarky099), Head of Humanities at Cramlington blogged about his use of hexagonal card sorts to promote higher levels of relational thinking. They have 6 sides you see, hexagons. 6 sides! 6 possible directions to connect! And what do you do if you have a pile of hexagons? You instinctively try to tesselate them - genius! Read his original post here.

So I took Damian's hexagonal cards and I filled them with parts of sentences in French which covered most of the "bits" of grammar from the As and A2 specification. I was confident that my Y13 class knew how and when to use the subjunctive and even agreement with preceding direct object pronouns but I was not sure if they were able to see the relationships between all of these bits of understanding (multistructural) and the grammar as a whole. So I gave them these cards cut up and let them go. At first they tended just to group things together (classic multistructural) but with some probing comments like "that's rubbish can't you do any better?"  they started to see that they could make links and, most powerfully, explain the links very clearly. With a little more metacognitive probing, they were deciding which of the possible links were the strongest. The amount of feedback I got just by listening to their conversations was immense and my favourite moment was whne one lad said "but you could link the preceding direct object agreement with the superlative triggering a subjenctive becasue they both have a feminine agreement" and his partner replied "but one is verbal agreement and the other is purely adjectival". My work here is done. - Here is an example of one groups work (spot the deliberate mistake...) 

#ililc

Steak et le chaton minuscule, Edmotho and Vader's March. These are the only things I have taken away from the Links into Languages ICT conference this weekend. Not really, I have met some amazing people and I have learned a lot and I mean a lot. 

Firstly I have learned that although Darth Govius and his Sith Lords are trying to turn education to the dark side, there are many, many rebels who are fighting the good fight and it is great to see a convergence of ideas and beliefs. I would like to summarise a couple of points for Mr Gibb and Mr Gove

1. Children require more than knowledge, they require transferable skills

2. Children are not memory machines, they are people who need an emotional and intellectual buy in to education in general and language learning specifically - terrible topics and contextless grammar is not a good diet

3. Excessive pedagogical dogma supported by old books out of a skip is shit - we need a blended pedagogy which is distinctive to learners on different parts of their language learning journey

4. TeAchnology is the future like it or not

5. Passionate teachers are worth their weight in bankers' bonuses -please treat them as professionals and with respect

6. In the words of Michael Jackson; "the children are the future"  so stop messing with their lives and leave it to professional educationalists, just because you went to school does not make you an expert in education.

I have learned many other things which I need to digest and I will blog about in the future but for now I just want to send a huge linguists love-in shout out to (in no particular order) @bellaale @reesiepie, @blagona @lwelsh @lisibo @wendadeniji @mariefrance @icpjones @suzibewell @joedale @zenahilton @amandasalt @froggyval and my dad and my bro @bootleian and @chrisfullerisms (and so many others!) Keep on rocking in the free world kids!

You can watch my presentation on Languages:Reboot here if you are interested!

 

 

Languages:Reboot

In my last post I ranted and talked about the state of the languages nation, so here I am going to share some of my thinking into how I think it could be done! Any of the good ideas I have are mainly stolen and at best blended with the ideas of such wonderful thinkers as Derek Wise, Michael Wardle, Darren Mead, John Connor, Ewan McIntosh et al and I must confess that anything that sounds rubbish is inevitably a 100% me, but here we go. The following is the introduction from an essay I am writing which form the basis for a presentation (see the handout at the top of this post) I am giving in Southampton on Sunday (which if you would like to watch it live streamed and probably see me trip over or faint you can tune in here at 9:45am GMT Sunday 13th February). If you think it is interesting, then tune into the broadcast or catch up with the blog post next week. 

Languages : Reboot

It is 2011 and we are in danger. By we, I mean those of us who may have an interest in the following ideas; learners and teachers of languages. Danger may seem a strong word, but I do not use it lightly. We are in danger of turning our children off languages. The current government has put in place the English Baccalaureate which will encourage “more rigourous, academic study of language” and like it or not this concept will inevitably lead to a rise on the numbers of language learners continuing to study languages up to the age of sixteen. The great caveat is that if we continue with the mundane, memory based, rote learning and nullifying contexts of the current GCSE, we will lose any sense of developing linguists and we will continue to keep only a very small proportion of those who study a language up to the age of 16 studying languages up to A-level and beyond once they have achieved their baccalaureate.  The current government’s plan with the Ebacc is not to develop a new generation of great linguists, it is to create a new generation of learners who see languages as an elite subject which marks the academically bright from the proletariat. This will, in the long run, lead to continuing decreases in the number of languages undergraduates and a languages deskilling of the general population, including those in the business and commerce sector.

Most believe that the cause of the general apathy towards learning a “foreign” language in the UK is the globlish phenomenon. Everyone speaks English so why should I bother learning anything else? To a certain extent this is true but you and I have rehearsed the arguments against this a thousand times in defence of our subject and we know them to be true; intercultural understanding, employability, improved communication skills, the prevalence of the BRIC economies etc. And the real  downer about the globlish situation? There is nothing we can do about it. In our ever shrinking world, with all of its inequalities, problems and vast opportunities, you probably can get by on English and we certainly can not halt the growth of English as a global language. 

So are we impotent in the face of this danger? I do not believe so. We can change the hearts and minds of our children towards language learning. We do it every day. We work incredibly hard to create engaging and powerful learning experiences in our classrooms despite all of the barriers we may face (reduced curriculum time, learner or school apathy, poor examination system, boring contexts and text books etc). Some of these barriers are not within our power to overcome, yet, I am going to argue and exemplify, we can definitely make moves to re-empower ourselves and our profession, we can make language learning such a rich and holistic learning experience that we are not only developing great language learners but as importantly great 21^st Century learners. We can show learners, school leaders and the rest of the educational world that learning another language is not only a fantastic way to develop effective learners but it is probably the best and most flexible tool to develop learners who can “learn, unlearn and relearn”. (Tofler, Alvin)

The models and ideas I am proposing are not revolutionary, they are simply evolutionary. We are now at a point where, although our system of language learning and teaching is not entirely broken (there are fantastic examples of truly effective practice happening every day) our disk drive is fragmented, we have a lot of old and now corrupt data which has dragged our approach to a grinding trudge. We do not need to reinvent the wheel or throw out the baby with the bath water, but we do need to do something to pull together powerful, purposeful pedagogy and ensure we remould language learning into a relevant and holistic learning experience. Ask any ICT technician what to do and he or she will give you the answer “turn it off and turn it back on again”. Well, they are right, it is time for a Languages : Reboot.

 

Goodbye Mr Gibb

I have been thinking long and hard about the current state of affairs in education in this country and more specifically in languages education. I have had the privilege to be invited to a Ministerial meeting along with some esteemed languages colleagues to talk to Nick Gibb about the state of languages in this country. I was disappointed. Let me put it this way, watch out Matt Smith, because Nick Gibb is chasing at your heels to be the next time travelling Doctor, although he only goes one way; back.

Nick Gibb wants rows of children who repeat verb paradigms of by heart (preferably Latin or Biblical Hebrew) and he really wants us to live education in black and white. His adage "it's not the skills you have, it's what you know." The scary thing is that I thought I lived in a democratic society but in fact I do not. After three hours of intense debate, some of the best thinkers in languages education (amongst whom I do not count myself, I was there by the default of "we'd best get a northern comprehensive type in") had thrashed out some fantastic ideas and in some ways started along the path of  developing a truly blended languages curriculum with a focus on grammar at times, creative use of the language, developing through partial immersion through to CLIL. A curriculum where languages education is , at times, done to students, most often done with students and gives learners opportunities for independence so their languages education is done by them. I was delighted to see the CLIL enthusiasts acknowledging the need for learning about language as well as learning through the language and some (smaller) concessions made by the one-word-at-a-time grammarians who, I think started to see some point in immersion in the target language. So was the democratic seed of a curriculum where different view points were synthesised from which a blended, purposeful pedagogy could be allowed to germinate? No. Nick Gibb closed the meeting with the same retro 1950s grammar school remarks he started it with. He had listened, but he had not heard. (As an aside, the best question Nick Gibb asked was "So when do you teach them the pluperfect?" I answered "When they are ready.")

So where does this leave us now? In despair? No. With no other choice but to accept the crushingly directive curriculum based on "how we were taught which did us terribly well" from this government? No. It occurred to me that democracy is not everyone having a say in the way they think languages education should be, it is, in fact, everyone doing what they believe is the right thing. I will continue to teach my children languages in the best way I know how, developing their language skills and their learning skills and giving them as much fun, excitement and intercultural understanding as I can. We are many, they are few and although it would be (slight) exaggeration to compare Mr Gibb and Mr Gove to despotic tyrants, look what happened in Egypt.