Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

A New Year

Happy New Year! 2011 seems such a futuristic date and yet why have I still not put into action my longtime ambition of moving to Melbourne, Australia? Let's do the checklist for my language teaching wife, my 5 year old son and moi - 

• Great weather - check
• Great lifestyle - check
• Sporting opportunities - check
• Great wine (not for the 5 year old obviously...) - check
• Forward thinking education system focussed on learning - check

So what the hell am I waiting for? Well it is much easier to dream than it is to act; at 32 I am doing well in my career as Assistant Head Teacher in one of the country's most innovative schools, I am able to speak at conferences, I organise TeachmeetNE, I have worked on the National Strategies for languages at KS3 and co-authored the KS4 languages strategy swan song before the government closed the National Strategies (a ridiculous decision). That, combined with a wonderful family make for a pretty good life here in Newcastle, so why move?

The tipping point was finding this . The Victorian Languages Strategy for the 21st Century is exactly the direction teaching and learning languages should be going. I can see a strategic plan which is driven by effective pedagogy not a whimsical reflection of a bygone era which seems to be the current British Government's policy on languages. I can see myself working in this context in order to further develop this strategy into a world class beacon for language learning. So, that long term goal in sight now I just have to find a job, get a visa, sell my house and transplant my entire life thousands of miles away... best get started.

From organisation to personalisation

As part of our continued professional development programme at school, we are undertaking professional enquiries from a choice of 12. These enquiries will be made up of groups of teachers enquiring into aspects of education, teaching and learning and hopefully engendering some positive change.

I was asked to facilitate the PEG (professional enquiry group) looking at personalisation, so as part of our 3 day staff conference staff could opt to go to a taster session for 4 of the PEGs before choosing the enuiry group we wanted to work with after half-term for the rest of the year. In my taster session, I started off by having a rolling powerpoint of groups linked to a painting by a famous artist. Two of the groups had their first or nicknames and a picture of themselves on the powerpoint, 1 group had their Mr/Ms name and a photo, 1 group had initials and no photo, and one group just had surnames. I was delightful to my first two groups during the connect the learning activity (draw what affects how you work on a daily basis), giving them sweets and praising them whilst I shouted at and and ignored the other groups. In the first review, straight after the connect, we discussed how that classroom set up made them feel. One colleague said that I "treated us differently, you gave different things to different groups of people." So I asked him, was that differentiation? We then discussed how one enquiry might be the difference between differentiation and personalisation. How can we ensure that school is personal to every child, not just to groups of learners? How do we ensure that we treat Amy as Amy and not just as CAT=108, MQT =B UQT=A? We then looked at this video which makes some interesting points about schooling and personalisation.

 

This led to some very interesting discussion about how we shift from organisation to personalisation and what kind of shifts we might need to make in our school in order to achieve a personalised school which has 2,300 students in it! Not an easy task!

We then watched some excerpts of another video which is an animation based on an RSA talk given by Sir Ken Robinson last year. I watched the talk last year and thought it was great, but the new animation just takes it to another level! A fascinating, question raising talk!

 

After some more discussion, we finally used the thinking dice to generate some possible lines of enquiry we may follow over the next 9 months. (If you have not seen the thinking dice, they are great, check them out here.) We generated some interesting questions using the stems and the question I think I am going to enquire into personally is "How do we get from organisation to personalisation?"

This, Dear Reader, is where I need your help! Any thoughts, questions, links, arguments, reading materials, examples of great practice in this area would be most warmly welcomed. I am hoping to use crowd sourcing as a way to do some really deep research into this area and share back any findings with you. I am considering how best to do this (part of my enquiry cycle!) and at the moment am going to ask for any comments to be made on this blog post (although I am thinking about a wiki) and I am also going to use the twitter tag #org2pers when gathering information from the wonderful professional learning network I am part of on Twitter.

Any thoughts?

Teachmeet Sunderland 2010

It feels like a while since the last teachmeet in the North East but there is a big one tomorrow at the Stadium of light! Teachmeet Sunderland will use the twitter tag #tmsunderland and there will hopefully be a live video feed as well as the cover it live below! WIll let you know the video feed information as soon as I get it! Hope you can virtually join us...

Cogito ergo sum?

Had a great morning meeting up with some lovely teachers from the Manchester area looking at designing cross curricular schemes of learning with MFL. I presented on developing thinking skills, learner attitudes and using the SOLO taxonomy to assess understanding. It was fascinating to work with English, History, Geography, Art, PSHE, Science and ICT teachers as well as delightful linguists! Anyhoo, here is the presentation as promised!

Cogito ergo sum? on Prezi

Also, the link to Hooked on Thinking, and the De Bono's template (Download Blank De Bono).

Can't wait to see the finished results!

Going SOLO - assessing undertanding of language concepts

Ever since my friend Darren Mead got me into SOLO taxonomy I have been cogitating and playing with different ways to use it in the learning of another language. That got me into thinking about what learning another language actually means. I know that it has nothing to do with national curriculum levels as they just vaguely describe some stuff that you can do (but obviously not that you would do in the real world!). I know it is definitely not GCSE controlled assessments which I believe they are going to make into a game show soon... ("So ladies and gentlemen you have to memorise 5 paragraphs and an exclamation mark in 6 hours otherwise you will fall into a pool of cold custard and exam markers! On your marks...") So I finally came to the conclusion that learning a language is about understanding and applying the rules that make up a language. Being a real linguist is about making connections which are then demonstrated in the language we produce and are able to understand. Of course there are loads of way to take in language and reproduce it (from flashcards to thinking skills) but it is not until we make concrete connections that we can really understand how language works and therefore become a linguist. 

So how can SOLO help? Well, SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes [Biggs and Collis 1982])is a taxonomy which measures a learner's understanding of a concept by dividing understanding into five levels. 

The first level of understanding is called pre-structural. This is when a learner has no idea about a concept. So next time you are observed by OFSTED and the kids don't learn anything tell the Inspector that it was not unsatisfactory, simply pre-structural...

 
The next level is known as unistructural. This means that a learner has grasped one element of a concept. When Darren described this to me, he said that it was like having one brick but not really knowing how to make that brick into a house. In language learning terms, this can mean undestanding one aspect of a grammatical concept like gender and adjectival agreement- i.e. "I know what a noun is" or "I know that a noun is either masculine or feminine in French."

 

The next level is the multistructural level. We now have a pile of bricks, but we have not yet seen how they fit together to build a house. "I can identify the gender of nouns from the word that comes before it. I have more knowledge but I have not yet linked it all together."

 

This level is known as relational. "Finally, I can see that by fitting these bricks together, I can start to build a house. I know that nouns have a gender, I can identify the gender, I know that adjectives change depending on gender and I can now understand how all of this fits together, I can see the links between the gender of a noun and the way an adjective behaves. I have my house."

            
The final level is extended abstract. This means that learners can predict, using their          relational understanding, beyond the oricginal concept. They, for example, can guess that nouns and adjectives change when plural. They can start with the notion of gender as a unistructural part of a bigger understanding of the language they are learning. This is like seeing your house for the first time as part of a street or town.

So imagine applying this to the perfect tense. "I understand that tense is when we talk about different times. (unistructural). I know the verbs avoir and être. I know how to make a past participle. (multi structural) I know how to put together an auxiliary verb and a past participle. I understand that we need to apply my understanding of gender to verbs which take être. (relational) I wonder if I change the tense of the auxiliary verb that I could create the future, conditional or pluperfect...." (extended abstract - well it would be nice if they could get there!!!)

I am not entirely there with SOLO yet but I feel that I am at least multistructural so I will leave you with two parting gifts; firstly a link to a Gender & Solo document I have made with SOLO rubrics and ideas for activities and also a video from the brilliant www.hooked-on-thiniking.com with some gorgeous little Kiwi learners explaining their understanding of how the SOLO taxonomy has helped them!

 

(Mind) Controlled assessments at GCSE

Oh my Lord in heaven, why have you forsaken me? I am spiralling into a pit of despair when it comes to language examinations in this country. I have just calendared all of the Y10 and 11 French and Spanish controlled assessments between now and July and figure that I have about three hours teaching time available this year in each language. Great. Now not only do I have to train my children to memorise (bottom of Bloom's taxonomy...) a ridiculous amount of material, but I have no time to teach them anything interesting or even vaguely linguistic. That bodes well for getting them prepared for A-level...

So a little prayer my dear language loving friends...

Dear God, 

Grant me the serentity to accept the things I cannot change (the exams and ridiculous assessment regime)

the courage to change the things I can (teaching the kids to be linguists rather than empty vases to be filled - light a fire don't fill a vase...)

and the wisdom to know the difference (this is my fatal flaw, I think I can change the world!)

Pedagogy later = Apocalypse now

 It has been lovely, thanks for asking. The break I mean; I have reined back on twitter, have put my blog on the back burner and have been focussing my time on family, friends and writing. So what has cause me to rupture my silence, to burst the bubble of summer fun? Mainly anger and disbelief. I am devastated by the decline in languages in England. I was embarrassed by the front page of the Independent which loomed up from the newspaper stands in my local supermarket yesterday  - languages in schools in crisis. Children are not opting to take languages because they are perceived to be hard. This is bollocks. The real reason children are not opting to take languages is because, despite the best (?) efforts of the new secondary curriculum, Links into languages and the exam boards, the current trend in language learning is that of trying to disguise the same old, disengaging (I hesitate to use the word) pedagogy that is boring, transactional, rooted in contexts which the students will never use, vocabulary-list-tastic by making it whizz bang and fun (at least our perception of fun...). Well, for want of a less vulgar expression, you can't polish a turd.

Do not misunderstand me, there are shining examples of innovative and excellent practice out there which put pedagogy at the heart of everything they do, but this is not reflected in the national picture. My proof? Look at the decline in numbers - French has dropped out of the top 10 subjects at GCSE for the first time since 1066. German is faring worse and Spanish has gone up 1%, but 1% of a paltry figure is not a lot. Only 1 in 4 teenagers in this country are taking a language post 14. This is a disgrace.

The not-so-new secondary curriculum is brilliant, in that there is nothing in it, we are not to be dictated to in terms of content which has led to a growth of CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) which is being heralded as the Messiah of languages. I think CLIL is a positive move, but I have observed a number of CLIL lessons where History is taught entirely in French or Fair trade is taught in Spanish, however, the history lesson and the citizenship lesson in themselves lacked really effective pedagogy. We are on the right road with CLIL, but we need to rebrand it as CLPIL (Content, Language, Pedagogy Integrated Learning - not so easy to say...)

Do not get me started on exam boards. Ridiculous. I lost all respect for publishers and exam boards when they started getting into bed with each other and branding textbooks as "the only AQA/EDEXCEL endorsed book". In other industries I am sure this would contravene competition laws. The message from this is "buy this book, learn it off by heart and your exam results will go up" which head of department in a struggling school would not do this? The exam needs to be rethought to test skills not content and let them have a bloody dictionary for at least part of the exam where they are dealing with unknown language - reading and listening. We should be examining how learners cope with language, not how much of the vocabulary they have learned.

So let us turn to the sources of language teacher professional development in this country and see what is happening to carve a consistently better pedagogical approach. Well, I was on a nationally rolled out CPD course a little while ago which consisted of drawing stick people in powerpoint and adding voice overs. Some people did not know how to do that so in one sense it was useful to them but I kept asking myself, what is the pedagogical purpose? (I actually felt sorry for the presenter because he was obliged to stick to a script written by someone else). At no point was the reasoning behind doing this activity discussed, assessment rubrics were not mentioned, scaffolding activities were not explored, feedback and feedforward did not come into it. It may as well have been a session on how to make finger puppets without ever mentioning the why. The focus was on (not very) shiny output and little on the input. I might be able to get my students to make vokis, podcasts, talking powerpoints, films and animations but if they are all about asking where the post office is (get a map) or saying what is in my pencil case (get a life) then it is a waste of time. Our children are prolific consumers and,today, creators of media, they can create things we cannot and I am guessing they would never use powerpoint to do it. In all cases, the shiny output is only one part of the puzzle, how best do we input language, link it together, set up assessment rubrics (when will there be a national languages CPD on SOLO Taxonomy?), practice, demonstrate and review learning? En gros, when are we going to get back to the basics of what good language teaching/learning pedagogy looks like?

I hesitate to criticise because I love languages and language teachers. Ne'er a finer bunch of people will you meet, but rather than putting time into crystalising and sharing a new and effective pedagogy and investing in training teachers in situ, we expect languages teachers to PAY to go to evening or residential events, where we roll out rushed off, outcome focussed CPD. It is a disgrace. 

I am sorry if this upsets anyone, this is not a personal attack but rather a rally to say we are at rock bottom and we as a language learning community need to really take stock of what we are doing because if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got; in this case a crisis.

Derek Wise CBE

It is with great sadness and pride that I write this post. I work in a remarkable school - we do not get everything right, but we give an educational offer to our children that is a model for where education should be. We focus on developing skills, attributes, competencies and knowledge while giving our children the widest range of experiences we can. We have invested into learning spaces and technology which is pedagogically smart. We work incredibly hard in a normal, comprehensive, working class area to provide every opportunity we can afford to our children. In short, Cramlington Learning Village is a truly outstanding school. You need proof? The last three whole school OFSTEDs have been outstanding, our thematic Science inspection in OCtober was outstanding. We have 200+ delegates coming to a conference next week which is run by staff at the school to model what is actually going on in our classrooms.

This did not happen by accident. There is a plan and the man with the plan was Derek Wise our Head teacher. Derek tragically passed away yesterday but I know he is in a better place. He was an educational visionary who worked tirelessly to create a school which he believed would make the life chances of the children in his care better. He disseminated that vision and inspired many to follow his lead. He was not always easy to work for as his meticulous attention to detail and his incredible work ethic demand a huge commitment of time and energy by every person who works in the school but because we believe in his vision, we do it. He may no longer be with us in body, but his spirit will live on through the school he has created and we will ensure to continue to develop his vision for education. On a personal level I feel like I have lost a mentor but at the same time I can realise that I have learned more over the four short years I have known him than I would have learned from someone else having worked with them for twenty. I only hope that when it is my time to join him in heaven that I will leave a legacy which is a hundredth the importance of that which Derek leaves us.

Rest in peace.

Hard to teach MFL - really?

Some people think learning a language is hard and that teaching one is just as difficult. Let's be honest, it is. However, as I have said on many occasions in the past, linguists are resourceful and powerful learners and teachers, using everything at their disposal to engage, challenge and further language learning. It was a pleasure to be involved in a Teacher's TV programme about using ICT to make language learning "easier" along with Fiona Hilton and the amazing José Picardo (he of www.boxoftricks .net fame).José has written a great post about his contribution to the programme on his own blog www.josepicardo.com, definitely worth a read.

As for me, I used easispeak mics, combined with audacity to create presentations on Haiti. For me, however, the crucial thing I was trying to demonstrate was not the final product, but the process of assessment for learning the students were going through, and what helped me to structure that? RealSmart. If you don't know what RealSmart is, it is a package from a company called SmartAsses which describes RealSmart as "a suite of tools that help you learn. Realsmart builds collaborative learning portfolios which support the process of learning through peer, mentor and self-assessment." Have a look at the site to get a really good idea of how powerful this suite of tools really is. Anyhoo, here is the video if you would like to have a look!

Hard to teach from José Picardo on Vimeo.

You can't do that in language teaching...

 My dear friend @joedale sent me a link to a TES discussion board about how to use Bloom's/Anderson's revised Taxonomy in the languages classroom. I was amazed by the negative nature of some of the responses that were posted claiming that our language learners could only ever get up to applying on the taxonomy as their language level is not good enough -rubbish say I!!!!

Anyway, I then spent a little time reflecting and wrote this post on the thread in reply...

"Hello! I think there is a little bit of confusion here about what Bloom's/Anderson's taxonomy is for. As Graham rightly points out, it is a generalised framework of higher order thinking skills. It is a way to look at the complexity of thinking a learner is using - however, it has nothing to do with linguistic outcomes and trying to artificially superimpose this taxonomy onto "what they need for GCSE French/Spanish/German etc" is wrong. This approach will lead to the disastrous situation where teachers think that learners can only function at the first three levels in a languages classroom because they do not have a sufficient level of language to write an evaluative essay on veil wearing. Put simply, we are teachers of languages but we should also be teachers of learning.  I bet that every teacher here has talked to students about the best way to learn new vocabulary; lists, mind maps, word hooks, look cover spell check etc. By talking to the students about different ways to learn a language and giving them the chance to evaluate which works best for them, we are allowing learners to use higher order thinking skills. At the end of a series of lessons about the perfect tense in French, getting students to create a flow diagram to help others to form the tense correctly is an example of synthesising/creating. Analysing is about comparing constituent parts and deconstructing ideas/language - i.e. the best form of deductive grammar learning (rather than explicit grammar teaching). Evaluation is also about hypothesising - think about pre listening exercises before you attempt a gap fill - "what kind of word might fit in this space?" "a noun because there is a la before it"... Basically I think that we need to differentiate between learning language (memorising words and structures and using them - gets us up to "applying" on the taxonomy) and learning to be a better linguist (analysing constituent parts, hypothesising, bringing together different grammatical concepts to create a piece of writing or speaking which takes us right to the top!) We are doing a huge disservice to our children if we do not get them to think in language learning (something the exam boards do not do) as we are trying to create better language learners, not better exam passers! The entire Bloom/Anderson's taxonomy is applicable to language learning and we should be explicit with the learners talking to them about the different levels of thinking they are using.

As for De Bono's hats - I have an entire Y9 scheme of learning in French based on them! We take the topic of the environment and each lesson is based around one of the hats - Lesson 1; white hat thinking - we learn to use facts and figures about the environment. Lesson 2; black hat thinking - what are the problems to do with the environment? Lesson 3; yellow hat thinking; what are the positive things you do now? Lesson 4; red hat thinking - what are your opinions and feelings about the environment? Lesson 5 green hat thinking; use the future tense to say what you are going to do to be more environmentally friendly. Assessment? A letter to the European Commission - on the writing frame we have  a different coloured hats next to each few lines to encourage the students to write a paragraph about each hat, therefore giving different points of view. So where is the blue hat? When I mark the work and give them feedback I am wearing my blue hat to suggest what else they could do to improve their work. 

We should not be shying away from things that are accepted as being effective pedagogy and ways of thinking by saying that "you can't do that in languages". We can do anything in languages because, as we all know, linguists do it best."

Any comments or thoughts would be greatly welcomed!