Redefining School Part 3

Still at Northern Beaches.

So - how does the school organise professional learning for staff with the large classes, technology to enable and pedagogy to support?

Each Monday afternoon all staff attend PL. Staff request sessions via word of mouth or an electronic request system. These requests are prioritised by the senior teacher i/c of PL and each Monday anywhere between 5 - 12 sessions are offered. Teachers opt in and their attendance is recorded in a reporting system that delivers a report to the HoF each term showing what has been attended by whom. This then provides a degree of review for future PL planning and helps identify for HoF, teacher and PL organiser any issues at the respective levels.

Expectation is that all staff attend. Reality is that at least 80% do. And because there is a record of who attended it is easy to identify and follow up those who don't.

Sessions might be on Moodle (for the first 2 years they were pretty much all Moodle); pedagogy, teaching methods, innovations, spirituality.

This information then also feeds into the appraisal system.

Once each term all staff spend 3 hours on a Wednesday (3:30 - 6:30) on a PL intensive which gives them enough time to do something substantive.

Redefining School Part 2

Northern Beaches Christian School featured in my last post. This post looks at their middle school "Learning Matrix". The students talk about the "matrix" in almost as reverent a term as we do about the movie. That's where the similarity stops though!

Basically the matrix is a combo of Bloom and Gardner with a range of activities in the matrix that are either compulsory or voluntary. Students must do the compulsory and can choose a range of the voluntary. This is a basic graphic representation of the matrix for Year 7 for term 2.

Students work on their "matrix projects" for around 6 x 70 minute sessions every two weeks, though as a year 7 syndicate teachers also share some of their maths, english, science and history work in the matrix too. This term the verbal tasks were all from the history curriculum and students were building websites or creating travel brochures in the "creating" and "evaluating" sections of the matrix. 

Students work to achieve a certain "points total" for the term.

Each task (cell) is mapped to a range of outcomes from the NSW curriculum and teachers and students use a range of organisers to track their progress against these. These organisers range from printed sheets to Excel spreadsheets, but not many are done via Moodle - though I wonder if they will be able to use the Moodle rubric from 2.2 to make this more integrated than it is now.

Collaboration amongst staff is crucial here. The team/syndicate agree on the tasks and where they sit - after all, they all have to work with all of the students.

As a planning and curriculum coverage tool, this type of grid is useful in itself. Coupled with specific activities aimed at the various intelligences and taxonomies, it is even more useful. Linked to the LMS (Moodle) is yet a further strengthening of the entire process.

There is an element of gamification in the curriculum too. So while the tasks themselves are somewhat authentic, they also form part of the overall theme for the term which is usually related to some notion of puzzle/competition/investigative process. The students certainly seem to enjoy it. And that's important. In fact - the school believes that their behavioural problems have decreased by some 75% in the past 2 years as a direct result of the gamification of the curriculum where possible.

Redefining School Part 1

I'm lucky enough to be in Sydney this week touring a range of schools with a group of teachers from Christchurch and Southland. The purpose of the week is to learn about and from some of the schools and the remarkable teachers in them about technology initiatives that are working.

This post is the first of a few. Initially I thought I'd do each school as a separate post, but after today's session at Northern Beaches Christian School that idea went out the window. So much to talk about. So - humour me while I try and make a few points about some of the stuff I saw today.

Northern Beaches Christian College was the venue for today. We were hosted by an interesting character. Steve Collis has the neat title of Director of Innovation at the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL). Now, the SCIL was basically invented by the school, so that was the first learning byte - if you want something, invent it. (Sound like Alan Kay anyone? "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"-  I love that quote from 1971).


Well, Steve is a bit of showman. But - what I found by following him around the school was that this was one of the few schools I have been to where the talk was matched by the walk. Certainly in the Year 7 - 9 classes I saw anyway.


So ... what were the takeaways worth remembering ...

• they've merged the physical space with the virtual space
• so - they have large teaching spaces - they've knocked down walls over about 10 years and now have large teaching spaces where learning happens. Up to 180 students and 6 teachers in the same space at the same time doing ... kind of the same thing, but with as many options as they have been able to agree to do as a team.
• they have learned the need to minimise noise by using special roofing tiles and walls that really do reduce noise - we were in a technology space where 75 students were working with various bits of equipment and talking - and we could see them from the other end of the room, but we couldn't hear them!
• What follows are a couple of images of some of the spaces. Comments as appropriate.

• what was interesting in this space was that the students (Year 7) were just at the end of a whole class intro session on whatever the content was ... so typical team teaching lecture style - nothing different, right? It was what happened when the leader/teacher said "get to work" that something was different. There were around 120 students in this group. They all got to work immediately - there was not a sound - so I presume it was an individual task - but not a sound. So - not sure that this was anything more than team teaching, but the students were clearly used to it and knew what was expected of them.
• Next space was a year 9 "Matrix" exercise - (more on the matrix in another post - its worth its own post). In this class I spoke with a couple of Year 9 students and one of the teachers. 

• poor photography aside - you can see that the space is huge (this shows about half the space). Teachers simply worked with individuals or groups as required. Students knew what they had to do for the entire term and they were all working on their various tasks. Obviously the make-up of the task is important to this, that's the "Matrix" I'll refer to next post. The three students I spoke to could tell me exactly what they were doing and why and could easily navigate their online portal where all resources were. The portal is just Moodle (and 1.9 at that!) - but they have configured a landing page with the appropriate links to the pages/resources that students needed.
• the furniture is not standard either - there are a range of table types and sizes, and chair sizes and styles - and students are free to arrange the room how they want.
• they talk of 3 types of space 
• the cave - a student wants to work alone
• the campfire - a small group want to learn from a master story teller
• the watering hole - everyone goes there at some stage and informal learning about anything can happen there
• each room or learning space can be configured to any or all of these at the same time
• the teacher I spoke with showed me how the Year 7 teachers had decided on the activities for the Matrix and how they monitored student progress and achievement. Despite all the work on Moodle, they used an Excel spreadsheet that linked the scores students gained from completing matrix work through to a map of the curriculum outcomes they were working with - so there is no doubt that there is a lot of teacher effort going in here.
• This next image is one from a newish building - taken using Photosynth on my iPhone (one of the more useful Microsoft tools). What this doesn't show is that there were 150 students in this Year 7 group - all working on a social studies project.

• The large screens here were simultaneously playing a series of video and still images designed to evoke some feelings amongst the students. The teacher I spoke to didn't know if the theory behind this playing of "subliminal images" worked or not - but felt there was some theory there.

And I guess that's the first takeaway. The school has clearly decided that they needed to back their changes with some theoretical base as well as a degree of "Alan Kay" - and invent their own future. So, the learning spaces are big and for a fair chunk of the school week students work in very large groups doing any number of tasks that are moderated by a team of teachers - who, while they have some nominal "class" teacher role, spend their time working with any of the students.

The kids I spoke with loved the freedom to "do what they want to" even though they were basically just picking from a set of given projects - but the range was pretty impressive.

Steve talked to us about a "love of learning" - in fact, the school holds this more important than outstanding academic results (though they will be related of course). They have taken time (10 years so far) to build the physical and virtual environments that overlap to provide the overall learning environment. The student numbers have increased from 200 in 2002 to 1200 in 2012. All students from Year 5 - Year 12 bring their own device - so students have Mac Books, iPads, Acer, HP, Dell, .... They use whatever applications they want. Staff cope. 

The environment supports students ("free range chickens" Steve called them) and their ability to self navigate the curriculum. They trial it in small bits (bunny hops they call them) and modify - but always seeking to make the students central and use the environment and technology to facilitate.

It seems to work. In the next post I'll talk about the "matrix" and how they bring teachers along via their professional learning program. 

Hans Rosling on the World Population

Those of you who read these pages will know that I am a fan of Hans Rosling and GapMinder. His graphical analysis tools are cool.

So - here's his recent TED talk on the impact of Religion on Babies born ... watch for the simple explanation at the very end which uses some very simple technology to explain his view that the world population will peak at a certain level.

Enjoy - it's 13 minutes of enjoyment of maths, social science and thinking.



And by the way - the graphing engine that Rosling uses is either the same or similar as the graphing option in Google Apps spreadsheet - so if you haven't tried it yourself yet on some of your own data, then head to the Motion Chart option in Google's spreadsheet.