I find writing education textbooks hard - but I do enjoy the challenge.
Today, I finally got my hands on a hard copy of my latest book Exploring People and Place (Level 4). It is the follow up to the Level 3 book that we published this time last year. Both books have been designed and written to support the learners understand the experiences and outcomes of Scotland new curriculum.
The main sections are:
Coasts
Tsunamis
Water (including a good section on the bottled water industry)
Food and Agriculture (A nice picture of some cooked guinea pigs on page 32)
More about Scotland (follow up from Level 3 book)
Weather
Globalization (including mobile phone in Ghana, Film Crews in Dominica and laptops in Portugal)
There is no doubt about it Steve Jobs was a genius. He was a person who could think about things differently and encouraged others around him to do the same.
He was an amazing presenter and has a gift (along with teams of people that he built up around him) of seemingly creating the impossible but in a really simple and easy to understand way.
Over the last week I have been writing up my thoughts on Taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
This is the summary post to aggregate all of the information together.
The original slides that I used to illustrate the presentation are embed below:
This is the last in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
For a long time I have maintained that you can’t innovate alone. All of our most revolutionary ideas from the last decade have been developed though collaboration rather than in isolation.
Collaboration also gives us the support for risk taking activities. It allows us to share ideas and digital tools allow us to collaborate more widely than ever before. It seems to me that these days virtual staff rooms increasingly provide more support than physical ones. Some of the most innovative risk taking schools that I have seen - don’t have staff rooms. They have spaces where children and staff sit together.
Of course some independent schools still have bars in their staff room! Bars and pubs are also often the home of developing innovation and ideas. Why? Well, innovation is incubated over conversation.
As well as innovating risk taking educators learn a huge amount from copying each other and adapting or ‘hacking’ other people’s ideas for their own local need.
In fact we learn most things in life by copying - just think about how you learnt to talk, walk and drive. This is one of the reasons why it is funny that only in education do we call copying (our most powerful aid to learning) ‘cheating!’
Lets stick with the theme of copying for the moment and consider it in relation to another common characteristic of risk taking leaders and teachers. The characteristic is the ability to think about the future and also the future needs of the children in their care.
Have you ever heard of a 3D printer? It is a printer that prints things out in 3D. There are places that you can go to and have feet scanned in (using a 3D Scanner) and the 3D printer will print out a pair of shoes(or football boots) for you. It is interesting technology and has started to make its way into a number of schools it has also found its way into the confectionary industry. At the risk of sounding completely bonkers I suspect that most homes will have a 3D printer by 2020.
Why is this important? Well, technology like 3D printing is starting to challenge our laws and interpretation of intellectual property. If the UK is serious about the ‘knowledge economy’ or a ‘digital future’ (two terms that I don’t actually agree with) we need to understand in education the importance of intellectual property and how modern technologies can be used to develop future economic prosperity.
We also need to make sure that young people are equipped with appropriate skills. Our skills agenda must be more than just vocational skills (I am not saying that these are not important) but our skills agenda must have digital literacy at its core. Again this is fundamentally important if we are serious about a future digital economy. If we are not serious about this then we need to stop talking about it and find something else to invest in.
At the heart of the skills agenda in education has to be good cluster working (nursery, primary and secondary schools all working together). Often we loose the education importance of such a relationship as we become focused on the difference between establishments (eg: Primary VS Secondary) rather than the importance of collaboration and working together. This is one of the reasons I am a huge fan of all-through schools - we need more of these even if they are spread over a split campus. There is nothing wrong with this - shared vison can narrow distance.
One of the reasons that all-though schools are important is that they allow a headteacher to invest in the education process where it matters. It matters the most in the early years and I am saying that as a secondary practitioner. In Scotland, research tells us that for every £1 invested in the early years we will save the taxpayer £9 in the future. All though schools allow staff to have a greater shared understanding of what it is we are actually trying to do in education. Ultimately we are trying to improve the life chances of children.
Moving forward we need more education risk takers. We need to recruit school leaders in an imaginative way. We need to use technology to share ideas and to support each other. We need to make sure that people can voice opinion in a constructive and kind way. We need to make sure these people are listened to. We need to flatten education and system hierarchy.
Most importantly we need to think simply and use a lot more common sense.
This is the fourth in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
He illustrated it with this story that I have re-told hundreds of times over the last few years. The story goes like this...
Two countries are at war but they have not engaged in conflict for many years.
The two countries are separated by a range of mountains.
The reason that there has been no conflict for years is because a radar dish is placed on top of one of the mountains. It allows both sides to monitor each other.
But there is a problem. The mountains are high and in the winter time the snow falls on the radar disk making it heavier. When the snow becomes really heavy the pole snaps.
When the pole snaps communication goes down, neither country feel safe which leads to anxiety and war has the potential to break out.
So, how do you solve the problem?
There are obviously lots of answers and over time people have suggested a variety of solutions, such as:
1) Heat the satellite dish -the problem is this isn’t very sustainable.
2) Adjust the angle of the dish - the problem is this isn’t very adaptable.
3) Clear the snow -the problem is this is a quick fit not a solution to the problem.
4) Declare peace -a solution but one that will take time (a bit like a curriculum reform!).
The interesting thing of course that many of the most common solutions offered are actually quite complicated. They involve things like a new power supply, logistics, lots of people, diplomacy and international politics.
The key is to remember “the solution is in the problem”:
"The satellite pole snaps because of the weight of the snow. The snow is caused by the change of temperature. The problem is the drop in temperature".
If "the solution is in the problem," how can the decrease in temperature be part of the solution?
The solution - fill the satellite pole with water.
As the temperature drops the water freezes and the pole gets stronger. As the temperature increases the snow melts (removing the problem) and the water un-freezes.
I have no idea is this is a true story but I like the simplicity of the idea and have always belived that we can learn a lot from stories.
Now, although I agree with “The solution is in the problem” statement. I think the biggest challenge that we face in education is that we often don’t actually realize what the real problem is and therefore it is very difficult to find the solution.
Curriculum reform is quite a good example of this. People assume the problem is the actual ‘curriculum reform’ or ‘resourcing’ or ‘professional development’ or ‘the children they teach’.
But actually it is not. Most curriculum reforms fail not because of the policy, the funding, the CPD or the children. They fail because of the inability of adults to get on with one another, work together andbecause many education leaders try to control rather than empower their school community.
So, if the problem is people then the solution also has to be people - perhaps people need to change or at least realize that things are only going to get more challenging in UK education and society.
I think we really need to start working better together and fast!
In the next post in this serise I'll pick up on some further consideration for risk taking in education.
This is the third in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
If ever you needed an example of a wicked problem then education would be a perfect example.
A "Wicked problem" is a phrase originally used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. (source)
One key thing that risk taking leaders and teachers have in common is that they have realized a long time ago that it is OK to re-invent the wheel. The reason that this is OK is because other things have changed (eg: technology advances, changes in staffing, young people’s expectations etc…).
Industry provides us with another interesting example of this. Amazon started out selling books. Selling books was not a new business idea in fact I am sure that some people probably laughed at it. The main idea behind Borders (UK) Bookstore was to sell books. Borders Books was around long before Amazon had even been dreamed up. Amazon re-invented the wheel but they re-invented it in a different way. In a way that took into account changes within society and embraced the digital age.
Amazon continues to thrive. Borders Books UK went bankrupt in 1999 (the US part of the chain in 2011). They key difference was that one company realised that there was a difference between, ‘we have done that before,’ and ‘doing things differently’.Schools need to keep this in mind every time they develop strategies to fully include children, personalize learning, adopt a Local Authority directive or deliver on a piece of policy.
As well as being a wicked problem (in particular developing the curriculum) education is also a complex problem. Unfortunately we often deal with complex problems in education in complicated way. In ways that are not sustainable or adaptable. The result tends to be a quick fix rather than actually tackling the core of the problem.
I think it helps to look at some really complicated problems and then how they have been tackled in really simple ways.
Problem One - Fresh Water in sub-Saharan Africa
No one can deny this is not a problem. In a number of locations over the word there is a shortage of fresh surface water and the water table has dropped so much the water needs to be pumped to the surface.
Electric pumps are not sustainable and when they break they are not adaptable. They are a quick fix and don’t solve the problem.
Hand pumps work and are sustainable (eg: they don’t rely on electricity). But pumping is hard work and adults need to do other things so don’t always have time to spend hours a day pumping water. Children find the traditional hand pump mechanism hard to use and although many see the point of pumping water it is very boring! Hand pumps are not very adaptable.
The Solution -play pumps. A children’s merry-go-round attached to the hand pump. As the children play (it only spins one way) water gets pumped into a storage tank. The sides of the storage pump are used for advertising to help generate an income to maintain the pump.
More information on Play Pumps here - it is a fascinating story.
Problem Two - Obesity
Is technology making us over weight? How do we encourage people to walk up stairs rather than taking the escalator? If we did this how much more healthy would people be and how much money would this save the national health service in the long run?
Is this a possible solution? - (You Tube Clip below)
Both of the above examples are useful to examine when trying to work out how to tackle education and curriculum problems.
The solutions given for each problem are both very different but they are also both very simple. Both solutions have been adapted for local need. Both solutions are playful and exciting. Both problemsare solved by encouraging people to have a challenging (it is hard work to walk up steps and push a merry-go-round), positive and happy experience.
What can we learn from this? Well perhaps our first steps to tackling our challenges in education are to make sure that children have a positive and happy experience of schooland learning. Perhaps we can do this by providing authentic challenge and excitement within a playful environment. Individual children will need different approaches to help them get the most out of their learning. Everything that is done needs to be simple, adaptable and sustainable but within a local context.
Finally, let us return to industry for one last example. In the USA the bottled water industry is a $8 billion business. But 42% of US tap water is better quality than bottled water. Why do people drink bottled water? It is because they have bought into the experience.
We need to get out children and young people to buy into the experience. The experience is learning.
In the next post in this serise I'll talk about how the solution is often in the problem.
This is the second in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
In the first article in this series I have already mentioned Monkseaton High School in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle. It is a school that has embraced controlled risk taking and does things differently.
But there are of course lots of other examples of education delivery around the world where doing things differently and risk taking approaches are encouraged.
"Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.
Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized."
Gever Tulley (founder of Tinkering School) talks more about the project in his 2009 TED Talk (embeded below):
One of the key aspects of Tinkering School is its playful approach to learning and teaching. I’m a huge advocate of play and games in education. I think that if you think about any good game they tend to offer challenge, progressing and reward. Computer games are now so sophisticated as well as challenge, progression and reward they also offer personalization and real-time feedback.
Hmmmm… not a bad five words to describe what we continuously try to create in our classrooms and learning spaces. I’ve written a lot about games based learning before and this recent talk that I did for Microsoft sum up most of my current thinking.
Some schools have taken the notion of games and computer games to an extreme. Which brings me nicely onto my second example of different global practice.
"Quest to Learn [in New York] is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.
Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn, but also to the belief that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We believe that supporting students, their parents and communities in a quest to become motivated, resourceful, life-long learners is a true aim of education."
Of course some people are skeptical about on-line teaching and I strongly believe that children should have a blended approach to learning. But part of this blend has to be exposure and use of digital technology.
It is however interesting that increasingly some learning delivery models are entirely available on-line.
Which brings me nicely onto my third example of different global practice.
"The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.
All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.
Here is an interesting thing to consider. The Khan Academy gets over a million unique views a week (and rising). What percentage of these come from the UK to do think? I would bet not very many. I’ve got no real data to back this up but I expect statistically many of the views come from Eastern Asia and India. Of course there is nothing wrong with this - in fact a free on-line education is in theory great for everyone. But we do need to consider why globally some people are motivated to learn and others are not.
I have said time and time again that in the UK we do not lack resources (I know we could always have more) but we do lack motivation and this seems to be a very hard thing to crack at a system wide level.
Now I am not suggesting for a moment that we replace our schools with The Kahn Academy or even smaller UK versions of it. But in the back of a taxi on the way to Reading Train Station Professor Sugata Mitra once told me, “If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, they should be.” I think he was quoting Arther Clarke.
Of course he didn’t mean that we should replace teachers with computers.But he is right and I have come across a few (luckily, very few) teachers in my career who’s only role seems to be to press the spacebar to advance the PowerPoint presentation while rows of children copy the projected side into their jotters.
This is not an engaging activity, it is very poor pedagogy (if done all the time) and is certainly not a great return on investment for a teachers time.
The work of Sugata Mitra brings me onto my forth example of different global practice.
Professor Mitra’s work is fascinating and if you have never seen his TED Talks (one and two) you need to spend some time watching his projects on the use of technology to educate children in places where no one wants to teach.
"When I last visited India, I asked the children what they would most like to use Skype [the internet telephone service] for. Surprisingly, they said they wanted British grandmothers to read them fairytales – they'd even worked out that between them they could afford to pay £1 a week out of their own money," Mitra said.
He had already recruited one woman to spend a few hours a week reading fairy tales to the children, with her life-size webcam image projected on to a wall in India. He appealed to Education Guardian readers to volunteer. And some 200 people stepped forward.
"Many are retired teachers, who are now regularly on Skype teaching children in the slums," says Mitra. "The children are forming relationships with them, and the teachers, many of whom were upset at the thought of having finished their careers, have realised they're more important than ever."
More information on the Granny Cloud in this short YouTube Video:
Again, I am not saying that this is the answer to our literacy issues within the UK Education System. But I am constantly surprised with how few schools have grasped the concept that it is now very possible to beam and expert into your classroom for real-time engagement with children and young people.
We simply must make more of these opportunities to turn our schools and classrooms into child centred exciting places for young people to learn, question and imagine.
It is also important to remember that you could never lift one of these models and retro-fit it into a new community. Some of the learning plazas in Wales have tried this and it just doesn’t work.
What risk taking schools and leaders do is take the best bits from a global recipe and create a model to serve their local circumstance and need. As long as the model they work towards is flexible and agile it doesn’t matter if some parts or ideas do not work - the important thing is that it is kept as child centered as possible and the philosophy of trying new things is built into the very foundations of any new school.
In the next post in this serise I'll talk about solving problems with empowerment and experiences.
This is the first in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
Risk is a difficult thing to talk about because everybody has a different perception of risk. The image below sums it up for me perfectly, I don’t know many people who would argue that the picture does not show a risky activity (imagine filling in the Local Authority forms to get approval for this activity!).
The interesting thing is that the children in the picture make this journey and take this risk every day. This is because they are walking to school.
The challenge these children and their teachers face is no different in principle to the challenge we face when deciding to take pedegogical risks in the classroom or the leadership risks needed to rapidly imporve a school. We have to weight up the balance between risk and reward. The children and adults in the picture from Gulucan village, West China take the daily risk to get to school because they believe that the reward of education(which statistically leads to the long term reward of better social and economic security) is worth it.
In UK schools we need to develop a culture where we encourage teachers to take pedagogical risks to better prepare young people for the long term reward of being responsible, productive citizens in the third millennium. It needs to be made clear at a government and LA level that it is OK to challenge the norm if schools are acting in the best internets of the children and communities that their serve. Like all risk taking, risks should be risk assessed and good risk assessments are based on evidence.
I loved the evidence-based risk taking approach that I saw at Monkseaton High School near Newcastle when I went to visit near the start of the year. By challenging the norm when it comes to school design, school timetable and pedagogical approach they have not only created an inspiring building to learn in but empowered children to attend and want to learn.
For example, If you attend Monkseaton High School you might notice the following risk taking approaches that challenges to the norm:
The school day starts at 10am. Why? Well, teenagers need a lay in and that’s been scientifically proven by the University of Oxford.
The building is kept at a constant temperature of 18.5 degrees Celsius. Why? Well, teenagers are naturally hotter that adults (it’s because they are growing during puberty) and according to research 18.5 degrees Celsius is the best learning temperature for teenagers.
The sports hall is in the middle of the school building. Why? Well, not only does it send the strong message that sport and exercise are central to the school (exercise is very important for the brain as well!). But also the open plan computing areas become facilities for spectators. Audience and showcase are important for all sports performers and athletes.
If your studying or revising for your GCSEs you might find that the lessons are as short as eight minutes in length, then you have a break, then another eight minute lesson, then a break, then another eight minute lesson. Why? Well, ‘Spaced Learning’ has been developed by the school with Terry Whatson from The Open University University and if you look at this years GCSE results it seems to be working. You might also like to have a look at the ‘Spaced Learning’ Toolkit which the school have developed with the help of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Innovation Unit.
Now, I’m not saying that any of the above aspects of the learning at Monkseaton could easily be replicated in another school. But it is the responsibility of schools and school leaders to vacuum up the best ideas and develop their own local recipe that suits the local need.
Think about Tesco as an example. Most Tesco stores have key aspects that are the same because of what people need. In the same way that all UK schools should have some aspects that are the same because that is what all children need (eg: being safe, qualified staff, high connectivity etc…). The interesting thing about Tesco is that if you go to the one in my home town of Weymouth it sells buckets and spades because it is by the sea. But, if you go to the one in Haddington near where I live now, it doesn’t. Why? because although the core aspects of both stores are exactly the same they have adapted for local need and acknowledged that some people need different things.
In short, in the same way that industry has evolved schools need to evolve as well. If we continue to structure our schools with extended and complicated hierarchy they are likely not to succeed in the third millennium and education will reach a crisis point.
The same crisis point that has already been reached by our banks (some of the worlds most hierarchal organizations). Governments can’t continue to bail out banks in the same way that they can’t continue to bail out education. The solution and quick fix is to devolve more power and responsibility to individual schools - but with this comes added accountability and there are still unanswered questions if this typ eof model would be sustainable in the long run.
Of course it is not just the banks and Tesco that we can learn from in education. Many schools rely on the fact that people have to go to them (by law) and that they are trusted institutes. People went to Woolworths. It was a trusted brand and household name but it didn’t evolve. It didn’t digitize, it didn’t change with the times, it went bankrupt and closed down as people voted with their feet and realized they could get an equivalent (or sometime better) service elsewhere.
We can’t let this happen to our education system - it has to remain world class and schools must remain safe, exciting and worthwhile places to go.
For this to happen schools must evolve.
In the next post in this serise I'll talk about doing things differently.
Over the past 6 months I have been working with Local Authorities and the EIS Learning Representatives to deliver a number of EIS/LA CPD Sessions for educators.
The great thing about these CPD sessions is that they either take place on a Saturday morning or during a twilight session which means there is not a problem with school cover. I am constantly surprised with the number of people and professionalism of the teachers that turn up to attend these events.
A few Saturdays ago I was invited to speak to over 80 practitioners (Early Years, Primary, Secondary and local authority staff from Clackmannanshire Local Authority. I was asked by the learning reprehensive to speak about Taking Risks with Leadership, Management, Learning and Teaching
I promised I would share the slides from my presentation and I have embedded them below:
I’m going to write about the main points that I covered during the presentation and my current thinking in this area over the course of the next week.
My key message is that unless we start taking more risks, develop a culture where it is OK to try new things and realize that we can achieve outcomes in a variety of different ways then our education system is in danger of stagnation.
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