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tombarrett
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Posts by tombarrett
Everyone Round the Camp Fire – Learning Comes First in New School Design
54 months ago
Over the last couple of years I have begun to take a deeper interest in the spaces that we call school and those we don’t but which are still considered spaces for learning.
Much of this focus has to do with our ongoing work at NoTosh with architectural firms and in support of schools seeking support and advice in making the most of new and old physical designs.
So I was drawn to this piece about a new school just outside Stockholm – partly due to the blog title – “Learning environments based on learning.” Here is a short extract in which Ante Runnquist explains some of the spaces or learning environments they have designed for the Vittra Telefonplan.
- Campfire situations are characterised by communication flowing from one to many, requiring a space that can accommodate a certain number of people in a group situation, where everybody can focus on the person talking or presenting.
- The watering hole is a place where people come and go, and a learning environment where you can gather in groups of different sizes. A watering hole is a place of exchanging communication, flowing back and forth. The watering hole areas are typically placed where you naturally would go, and where you maybe bump into somebody or something.
- Show-off situations are situations where one person communicates towards the rest of the world, showing what he or she can do or has done, thus requiring a physical space for display and exhibition.
- In the cave, communication flows within oneself, requiring a physical frame that furthers seclusion and contemplation.
- Lastly, the laboratories are places where the students can acquire hands-on experiences, working physically and practically with projects in a societal and experimental context. The laboratories inspire students and teachers alike, enlarging the learning experience and inspiring teachers to use different tactile approaches.
In practical terms the learning that is going to take place dictates what space would be best. And Ante Runnquist, a Vittra researcher and the author of the post, supports what we believe at NoTosh about how the pedagogy surely is the forerunner for any school design.
Even though pedagogy has changed greatly over the last 100 years or so, the physical blueprint for schools, dating back to medieval monasteries remain: it is one based on time-space-topic. Behind this lies a basic assumption that the students need to be regulated , if a school doesn’t verify that the students are in the right place at the right time and doing the right things, they simply wouldn’t do it.
During our trip to Sydney in November of 2011 Ewan and I found an old book of school designs from decades ago and were amazed to see how traditional the furniture was in the diagrams. Despite the interesting spaces being crafted and planned, you could still see the regimented learning that would take place from the rows of desks. Some things never change.
In our experience new school design does not automatically mean a school is thinking about learning in new ways – much of our design thinking work helps school do just that and if we are fortunate this precedes any physical planning. In fact it should inform the design.
It is exciting to see that the plans at Vittra Telefonplan have this as a simliar focus.
First, I think we have to rethink pedagogy: what are the dynamics of an education with focus on on 21st century skills? Second, as a consequence: we need to rethink the learning environment. When we do this, things start to happen.
Picture: Detritus of “meaningless language” to describe learning cast aside by students at MLC (Sydney, Australia) by Ewan McIntosh
A Sticking Plaster Mentality to Open Web Access in Schools
74 months ago
Just before Christmas Google announced the YouTube for Schools platform, which runs through a schools Google Apps for Edu account, allowing students to access selected content. In a week where the focus is on the changes of ICT curriculum I am concerned that the wider debate around open web access in schools will be once again lost.
This post is in part an effort to scrutinise Google’s YouTube for Schools more closely and to maintain and continue the important discussion on school web access, by bringing together some thoughts from around the web.
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Optophobia by Hani Amir
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Many schools will sign up to this flavour of YouTube because it quickly plasters over the crack of an unfiltered open web and means they don’t have to think about that.
An open YouTube allows teachers to use their own professional judgement about the type of content that a class will focus on and the ability to have the discussion about appropriate content, online behaviours and freely use whatever resources are appropriate to that class.
This “new” service, although it may well be more easily digested by school admins, means Google has become a further conduit of knowledge. A version of the web chosen for us – or in fact a team from YouTube Edu. This is literally a Filter Bubble in plain view! Eli Pariser explains in his book and TED Talk that due to an algorithmic filtering of the web we are seeing a version of the internet that is built from our preferences and previous interactions – the one the internet “thinks” you should see.
Schools using this will present a set of educational content on this platform decided by someone else and in my opinion are sidestepping the bigger issues we need to tackle. But this is a flawed model anyway, because at 3.30pm children will have access on the way home to an open web! We are sticking a plaster over the major issue of open content and how we must educate children and trust the professional teaching community on this issue. Summed up well by Liz Christensen a teacher from Nevada in the US who responded:
@tombarrett I think that since I am a professional, I should be treated as such. Let me make the judgements on youtube.
@grouchyteacher
Liz Christensen
Theo Kuchel, an expert in the use of video in teaching and learning, wrote the first piece I read in response to the YouTube announcement
Teachers should be encouraged to address the issues raised by comments and how related videos algorithms work and evaluate their effectiveness. This is all part of developing digital and media literacies. Offering a solution based on ‘removing’ comments and related videos is pedagogically unsound.
Dan Stucke an Assistant Headteacher from Manchester in the UK reacted to Theo’s post:
I’ve often found it useful as a spontaneous relationship builder too, many times a conversation in class leads to a story from my childhood or similar, and many times Youtube brings some video context to the story.
David Rogers the Curriculum Leader for Geography at Priory School in Portsmouth further underlines the importance of this, video material that doesn’t neatly fall into the “educational” category but requires a context to be built around it to make it meaningful, inspiring and useful at the point of learning. In many case the context is a very personal, subjective thing – if teachers the world over decided only to use media, resources and learning materials labelled “educational” just imagine the opportunities that would have been missed. Eli Pariser explains that:
…the search for perfect relevance and the kind of serendipity that promotes creativity push in opposite directions…By definition ingenuity comes from the juxtaposition of ideas that are far apart…
David goes on to explain:
While I admire Google for trying, the only real people that should be making decisions on what is useful educational content is teachers. Teachers who understand their own educational context, the learning styles of young people and their classroom. I think that it’s the wrong argument to have, but admit that it is a start.
I agree with everything David has said in his post, right up to the last 7 words in the quote above. I can’t bring myself to think that this can be a start – because many schools will see this as the only way, it is not a good starting point for schools because they are, all too easily, sidestepping the broader discussion about filtered and open web access.
I would like to think that using this version of YouTube in schools will make teaching colleagues question why it is in place and broaden their understanding and appreciation for the filters we put in place, but I worry it will simply be swallowed as is. In my opinion Google have given them an easy way out. (In addition both Theo and David ably deal with the roundabout language Google use in their announcement too about the “new” service.) Alastair Creelman from Linnaeus University in Sweden closes his blog postabout it with a telling statement:
…somewhere along the line we still need to discuss issues like attention, distraction, source criticism and information retrieval so that they (stuents) can find the good resources for themselves despite the distractions. We need to be careful of the line between benevolent protection and censorship.
Not enough discussion or debate has taken place, both online and within schools, Ryan Bretag has recognised this too:
And I have to wonder, are these Marlin-like administrators at all concerned about their choice between YouTube, YouTube for Schools, or <gasp> neither? Are they engaging their leadership teams, their faculty, and their students in a broader dialogue about this?
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Back in 2009 Ewan posted findings by research consultant Kim Farris-Berg from a US, South American and Australia study:
In 2007, [filtering] was high school students’ number one obstacle to using technology at their schools (53 percent). For middle school students, two obstacles tied for the greatest barrier (39 percent each): “there are rules against using technology at school” and “teachers limit technology use”. It’s likely that when students face obstacles to using technology at school, they also face obstacles to inquiry-based learning opportunities which can include online research, visualizations, and games.
If we compare that with the information from the 2010 Speak Up campaign in the US it is sobering to realise that students frustrations with filtering in schools not only remain the top problem in their mind but also that it is growing even more acute. As Audrey Watters points out:
When a similar survey was undertaken five years ago, students’ number one complaint was the speed of Internet access at school. Now, they point instead to school filters and firewalls. 71% of high school students and 62% of middle school students say that the most important thing their school could do to make it easier for them to use technology would be to allow them greater access to the websites they need.
An increase from 53 percent to 71 percent of frustrated high schools students does not indicate we are making progress with open access in schools. We certainly don’t seem to be listening to the students themselves.
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I wanted to hear from teachers on this subject as although the posts above prove a useful starting point there simply is not enough debate about the open web and open access to resources like YouTube. There were some really interesting replies on Twitter that back up many of the points made above, so I thought I would share a selection of them below:
@tombarrett open sensible access. Safest swimmers are those that can swim. Safest road users those who have passed. Safest Internet users..
@1jh1
john
@tombarrett some of our schools (over 80 I worked with in school district) never had YouTube blocked! Should be acknowledged.
@heyjudeonline
Judy O’Connell
@tombarrett We’re more adult based but our Institute has open FB, YouTube & Vimeo. It’s all about rights & responsibilities.
@gsyoung
Geoff Young
@tombarrett asked many schools this year “why is YouTube blocked?” And got the same answer “because we always have”
@PPotter
Pete Potter
@tombarrett We don’t use the LEA servers as they block sites such as youtube. The ethos of the school is of education rather than prevention
@andyhudson77
Andy Hudson
@tombarrett We’d have YouTube open to students in school during the day were it not for the bandwidth issues that arise each time we do so
@digitalmaverick
Digital Maverick
@tombarrett yes, our school does. We teach the kids discernment and how to check for approp content. Better that way than banning!
@krivett1
Kimberley Rivett
@tombarrett The “story” is simple: we teach digital citizenship. And we rely on student responsibility as well.
@surreallyno
Cristina Milos
@tombarrett Work at a K12 school in Norway, we have 100% open Internet, incl FB, Youtube etc. Zombies roaming the hallways, of course.
@bjornhg
Bjørn Helge Græsli
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What encourages me most about the tweets I have shared above is the number of schools and teachers working with open access to the web in their schools. Primary, secondary and higher ed institutes just getting on with things, helping their students tread thoughtfully and carefully through their experiences online.
What is missing though is the fanfare and celebration of what these schools, teachers, parents and pupils have accomplished together – we conveniently do not hear enough of their stories, we don’t share enough of their expertise. I hope that can change.
The teachers at these schools are doing their job and it is an opporunity we should all have.
I was writing about this topic 2 years ago and much like the statistics above, sadly not much has changed:
At the end of school children will go home and use the website, open to the inappropriate content we block in school. Not only is YouTube exempt from my teaching, I am exempt from helping children better understand, process and find value amidst a mass of video content. I am exempt from demonstrating and educating the children in my class to appreciate the power of such an information source. Apparently that is a good thing.
In my opinion it comes down to some hard decisions. The longer, more protracted path of educating young primary school children in dealing with open content on the web (including YouTube) is too hard a path for some to consider. The easy route is to block it.
Or in fact use an impoverished, diluted version.
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The ICT Curriculum is set to change in England and I just hope that we don’t lose sight of the role a more open approach to web access can have on learning in our schools. After all the students are telling us straight:
We are taught how to save documents and search for simple information, but we are on the internet at home and do most of our homework on the computer so we know how to do that. So IT lessons are kind of boring and we all really want to say to the teachers that we already know what we’re being taught. I wish we could learn how to do graphics, how to make a game or how to use Facebook safely – then we’d feel like we were actually learning something useful. I want to be a dancer or an actress when I’m older, so I’d like to learn how to look up videos to help me with my acting.
Ellie Magee, 12, Rivington and Blackrod high school, Bolton, Lancashire
The Done Manifesto
15 months ago
Bre Pattis from MakerBot and Kio Stark gave themselves 20 minutes to capture everything they knew about bringing a creative vision to life – the result is The Done Manifesto – 13 Rules for Realising Your Creative Vision (Beautifully illustrated by James Provost)
“These maxims are really a super concise and clear way of restating one of the founding tenets of so-called design thinking: The idea of creating prototypes as soon as you can, and failing as fast as possible so you can evolve your way to something great. ”
My favourite of the statements has to be this one:
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
This type of outlook on the creative process is pretty commonplace for start-ups and other such industries, but failure is rarely fully embraced in a school or education environment. In my opinion if we were to consider the curriculum design as a start-up industry – not the whole school – just the creative process of designing engaging, enriching, meaningful experiences for children – then it has to rank as one of the most creative industries of them all.
I always enjoyed seeing roughly where we were heading and immersing myself in better understanding the topic, research and the options for learning that was available. Creating implementations of a standard curriculum is a hugely creative process. All too often the workshop classroom is all about getting it right, rather than getting it wrong.
I think this is misguided and developing an ethos of mistake leadership in our classes is key to creating meaningful experiences for children in school.
“So do mistakes.”
#ukedchat Assessment Special
17 months ago
I am delighted to finally have the opportunity to take the moderator’s hotseat for this week’s #ukedchat – in which we will be running a special discussion all about assessment.
UKedchat is a Twitter based discussion group that meet every Thursday evening between 8-9pm GMT. It is a fantastic example of narrowing the use of Twitter to allow educators to discuss a specific topic, and I am excited to be moderating this week’s session.
If you have never taken part in a discussion, no fear! Just take a look at this handy information about how to get involved. Everyone is welcome. Explore some of the previous discussion sessions on the summary blog.
Assessment is such a broad issue that I grappled and struggled to come to terms with as a teacher, in this week’s conversation I hope that you will join me in exploring this rich topic.
We will be looking at the wider pressures of an ageing assessment agenda; how summative assessment may blinker our understanding of success; why failing is good and also tips and ideas for implementing formative assessment in the classroom.
So join me @tombarrett on Twitter for the #ukedchat Assessment Special on Thursday 20th October 2011, 8-9pm GMT.
BBC Dimensions: exploring the human scale of events and places in history
57 months ago
Dimensions is an experimental project from the BBC that allows you to compare the scale of different types of events with something that we can all recognise. There are two parts of the project “How many really?” and “How big really?“
“How many really?” is all about the numbers of people that were involved in a whole range of different events throughout history. The tool allows you to either add in your own numbers, for example 30, the number of children in your class, connect with Facebook or Twitter and compare your networks or even the number of people who can board a double decker bus or a Boeing 747.
You are then shown a visual comparison with the number of people involved in the event that you have chosen. The events fall into the following categories:
- Battles
- Civilisations
- Current Affairs
- Disasters
- Diseases
- Entertainment
- Modern Society
- Religion
- Slavery
- War
“How big really?” is all about getting a better understanding for the scale of different historical events and locations compared to our own map location.
We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?
Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain “Dimensions” can be transformed into short walks, so you can get a physical appreciation of the distances involved.
The tool provides a range of example categories to explore including:
- The War on Terror
- Space
- Depths
- Ancient Worlds
- Environmental Disasters
- Festivals and Spectacles
- WW2 – Battle of Britain
- The Industrial Age
- Cities in History
From the Ancient Worlds category you can place all sorts of significant monuments, like the Colosseum, on top of your own location. It gives you a true understanding of the scale of these structures. This would be great for classes to begin to really appreciate these huge monuments. What would be even better would be seeing a 3D model – as in Google Earth or Maps - on your location and then being able to pan and zoom around it.
The Dimensions tools would be interesting to use within a history class but also within maths to help children and classes get a better appreciation of different sizes. It will eventually be integrated into the online history resources at the BBC depending on user feedback.
Why I turned my back on teaching
357 months ago
It has now been 6 months since I left the classroom as a Year 5/6 teacher and turned away from my role as Deputy Headteacher which I had only started a year before.
I have never really spent time writing about my decision on this blog and so thought it was about time, after all many of you helped in a small way to me actually getting the Deputy post in the first place and have been there to provide encouragement and support.
The last 6 months have flown by and I have enjoyed every minute!
I decided to leave teaching because of a variety of things, but the elephant in the room which was nagging me for months, was my desire to work with teachers and student beyond one school. Thankfully I rubbed my eyes and embraced the elephant, so to speak!
I chose to apply for a Deputy Head post not out of any deep desire to run my own school or be a headteacher, it was simply that I needed to change my circumstance and needed to feel I was contributing more to the running of a school.
I don’t regret my decision, but I think the specific challenges of the position and school went a long way to dampen my enthusiasm and zeal for school leadership. Sadly it led to some of the lowest times I have ever had in my teaching career.
It all seemed to come down to compromise. Due to my time being unnecessarily stretched compared to other Deputies I knew, I was making compromises with the quality of my teaching, the quality of my admin and the quality of my preparation. I had never really had to deal with such forced compromise in the past, on reflection that unsettled me deeply and is certainly something I never want to see again.
In my first week as a Deputy I wrote that, “No other 5 day stretch has ever examined and pressurised my professional facets as those just gone.” Well those 5 days continued on and the remainder of the year proved even more challenging than that tumultuous first week.
So what has changed?
The most notable things are a better quality of time with my family, variety through project work and being able to work with more schools and teachers.
I never really got to a stage that I was comfortably balancing work and life during my year as a deputy and so the quality of time with my family was hugely affected. There was always something nagging in my mind that hadn’t quite been completed or needed doing. I was never 100% focused on the here and now, and time was lost with the family.
This contributed to an unhealthy cumulative pressure I hadn’t experienced, both physically and emotionally – needless to say I am now glad to see the back of it.
The variety of work we have at NoTosh has been such a brilliant foil to the trudging monotony of the last few years. No week is the same – we will be wading in the deepest of intense research one week and design thinking with teachers the next. We are are also working with lots of schools and supporting teachers so I am never far from the classroom.
I have also enjoyed the ebb and flow of project work which allows you to see things to a natural completion in the relatively short term. At school the long term completion of a poject would feel most satisfying at the end of terms or the end of a year.
This “shipping” as Seth Godin would put it generates motivation and your energy levels rise as you move on to the next project. I am enjoying this way of working and although I have really felt I have had to adjust over the last few months, success and completeness is always in sight, something markedly lacking from my experience as a deputy headteacher.
One thing I realised, from those closest to me, was that things are not set in stone ad infinitum, even a job as all consuming as a deputy headteacher, and when things don’t work out you have to plan and actively choose to get yourself out of it. Linchpin by Seth Godin proved to be an important read for me in those difficult times and which underlined the importance of action.
All of that said I know that perhaps given a different set of circumstances I would have had a completely different experience as a new deputy and I have not discounted that maybe one day I will give it another go. But not right now 
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I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Neil Hopkin, his kindness and generosity helped me steady the ship and find the elephant again in the darkened room. And also thanks to my good friend Ewan McIntosh for giving me hope and believing in me, even when I didn’t!
Thank you for your support over the last year and half, things took a wrong turn for a while back there but I am now doing a job I love (again), the future is bright.
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Pic the winds of skagit. by heanster
A History of Teaching and Learning from 500 Billion Words
27 months ago
By analysing over 500 billion words the Google Books Ngram Viewer allows you to compare the history of terminology and language from approximately 5 million digitised books.
The graph above shows my search for the terms “teaching” and “learning” in publications between the years 1500 and 2010.
What fascinates me is how the popularity or usage of the different terms climbed and fell throughout this period. The term “Teaching” has been used more frequently since the turn of the 18th century, somewhat settling into a plateau in the last 60 years. In comparison the term “learning” seems to have more of a rollercoaster frequency in the last 500 years.
References to “learning” from 1800 fell notably in the following 100 years, to a point where “teaching” was referenced more. And then began a 75 year period where “teaching” was clearly more frequently used or referred to in published literature. Why would there have been such a decline or change in frequencies?
If you look at the references to “learning’ there seems to be some peak and trough pattern amidst an upward trend. I wonder why this was the case? Similarly why did references to “learning” fall away at the turn of the 19th century only to climb steadily again in the last 100 years? What perceptions of “learning” or cultural differences were there between the 1700s (“learning” references increase) and the 1800s (“learning” references decrease.)?
I am no historian and I am sure many of you reading this will be able to explain the information better than me – needless to say it would be interesting to explore any broad reasons or background that might effect such results.
