Google Teacher Academy UK 2012: My Reflections and the Future

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Earlier this week the Google Teacher Academy ran for a second UK outing at the new London offices on St Giles High Street. It was a privilege once again to have the opportunity to help plan, organise and be part of the 2 days.

50 educators from around the world came together for some rapid professional learning and discussion and the chance to work alongside Google employees to help make change happen in their communities. These are a handful of my reflections about the 2 days and what the future may hold for the event.

Google Engineers

One of the most unique features of the teacher academy is the access to and contribution by Google product managers and employees to the learning. During our 2 day event we had the chance to spend some time in the company of YouTube, Google Docs and Google+ product managers who joined us for hangouts. The Google Docs team were there in force and shared with us some incredible new features to this ever changing tool. Jeff Harris the product lead for Google Docs document, presentation, and drawing editors did some great demos and talked about the future developments of the tool. It is always exciting to have access to this type of group and have them share their expertise with us.

Google+ Potential

One thing that the GTA did for me was to put the potential of G+ back on the table, not because of any great demo or future road-map session, it was more to do with a group using it loads. There was lots of sharing to just the GTAUK group and so the circles came into their own, I think I will probably spend a bit more time figuring out how best to use it alongside Twitter.

Whoop!

I do enjoy a dose of “whooping” (I suspect you are pleased I didn’t add “cough” to that phrase) to raise the enthusiasm in the room. Don’t get me wrong I am not so keen on the use of the ‘whoop” in cinemas where it doesn’t have much place, but at the GTA the enthusiasm for the learning opportunities we can offer our classes was great. And when you unpick it, that is all it is, an enthusiastic public gesture of our delight for a potential future learning opportunity for our students. Jo Badge describes it as the GTA “philosophy” and in many ways it is important as it kept the energy up – you wonder what the event would be like without the wearing of our emotions on our sleeves. Huzzah!

Reflections from GTAUK participants

Reflections on google teacher academy UK 2012 #gtauk « DrBadgr by Jo Badge.

Learnbuzz reflections on the GTA from Steph Ladbrooke.

Google Teacher Academy: Reflection | Anseo.net from Simon Lewis.

Carry on Learning: GTAUK posts from Sheli Blackburn

The Future of the GTA in the UK

It has been about 5 or 6 years since I began to email Cristin Frodella from Google about bringing the GTA to the UK and it has been great to now see the second event conclude. However this leaves me somewhat pensive about the event over here, the model of organisation and how much more could be done. The bottom line is that I want more of this type of opportunity for UK teachers, not just a few places over the course of 2 years but more like 3 big, full blown academy events every year.

It doesn’t seem that much to ask for UK teachers, who are, in my opinion, one of the most innovative and inspiring communities of teachers in the world. This is what I am pushing for and will do what I can to help make it happen.

Goal Setting Research – ‘Can we fix it’ is the right question to ask

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An interesting article by Daniel Pink referring to research about changing the way we might set our goals from “I will…” to “Will I…?”

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In a nifty set of experiments, three social scientists explored the differences between what they call “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) and “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) But before the participants tackled the problem, the researchers asked one half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task – and the other half to tell themselves that they would complete the task.

The results?

The self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretence, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”

The outcome was the same. People “primed” with Will I solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In subsequent experiments, the basic pattern held. Those who approached a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.

“Setting goals and striving to achieve them assumes, by definition, that there is a discrepancy between where you are and want to be. When you doubt, you probably achieve the right mindset,” researcher Albarracin explained in an email to me.

“In addition, asking questions forces you to define if you really want something and probably think about what you want, even in the presence of obstacles.”

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Taken from ‘Can we fix it’ is the right question to ask – Telegraph http://tgr.ph/H6zSqt


Some good counterpoints to discussions about the importance of learning outcomes and setting goals. Could this be done in the way we verbalise or talk about our targets or what we are learning in the classroom? How do you think this idea would play out in the classroom?

The “Interesting Ways” Series: A Milestone in Sharing

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On Saturday I joined the TEDx community of presenters and gave a talk about knowledge sharing at TEDxNottingham, so it is fitting that the Interesting Ways has passed a milestone of sorts – a milestone in sharing.

Thanks to some great recent contributions the iPad resource passed 100 shared ideas!

To you this may mean very little, as we see a great many lists of this sort “100 Ways to Eat Fruit…”, “100 Different Keyboard Shortcuts…”, “100 Reasons Not to Use Compiled Lists”. But the key characteristic of these is that they have almost certainly been built quickly, sometimes by a few people, but more likely by an individual compiler.

You only have to look at a copy of Wired or other such magazine to see how much we are transfixed with the presentation of numbered sets of information or advice.

The Interesting Ways series is different. Firstly the list always starts at zero and although I have a hunch people will chip in and share, it is not guaranteed. Secondly they are built with classroom practice in mind, the ideas are shared by mostly practicing teachers. Thirdly the resources have many, many editors – you only have to scan through the Twitter names left as signatures on each slide to see that. And finally they are built over time – there is no rush to get a perfect multiple of 10 before they are published, they evolve at different speeds, sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly as the community learns.

I think the final point refers to the lovely imperfections of them – which is in direct contrast to the sterile multiple-of-10-perfection posts which drive traffic. These are evolving all of the time – the first resource for the IWB has been a publicly editable document for 5 years!

They’re a bit scrappy and some have had things moved around and deleted but that is to be expected for resources that are in the open and publicly editable for so long. I am always grateful to hear from so many of you who have noticed something is amiss, spotted any problems and either fixed it up or let me know – people care for these resources.

It would be interesting to know how you see it all, but I think there are a few reasons why they have proven popular/useful – (1) They are always changing (2) You can easily present them to staff and embed them in a webpage (3) One slide, one idea, one image seems to work (4) They are easy to contribute to, they have a low barrier to entry (5) they are owned by the community that have built them (6) We learn about our community through the ideas we share.

I always thought the idea might catch on, this milestone, of sorts, just reminds me of how far we have come and I am so pleased to help everyone build such great pots of ideas.

I genuinely think we can do more though and hope that we can all continue to share more of our ideas and expertise. 

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Image: ‘Sharing‘

The School Filter Bubble

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It is good to question what we see, as all too often we adhere to the life script that everyone else is happily playing out – for me Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble helped me to once again question what we take as the truth, in his case the internet that is presented to us.

But what if there is a school filter bubble?

I am going to look at this as a parent and as a teacher.

My son is my favourite subject and there isn’t really any known limit to the amount I want to know about his day and what he is up to. He has been in full time school for just over a year and I still would love to follow him around for a day. But the message from school and what we find out as parents is only such a tiny fraction of what is happening at school.

We digest the presented message of school, of our children’s learning and the finer intricacies of what is taking place. The PR machine of school is crafting a message about the business of learning. And what a tough task that is because (a) learning is one of the most complex processes in the universe because of the number of factors that effect it and (b) the message is aimed at a (more than) captive audience – as parents we always want to know more.

It may come across that I am bashing school-home communications a bit – well the key thing for me – being a professional in the education sector – is that I know only a sliver of what is happening in my son’s learning life at school. Really only a fraction, the fraction that is communicated, shared at parents evening or in the odd newsletter or word at the classroom door. I don’t think that is enough.

Why should I just accept the school filter bubble?

How is it possible with all of the technology tools that build knowledge sharing, participation, crowd-sourcing, communities and overcome physical and social barriers to make connections, tools that side-step language and time differences and allow us instantaneous communication – that we still don’t have the true capacity to experience what is happening at school instantly, more easily, more quickly and more intuitively.

Well we should and one day we can make it happen.

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Pic Cost savings in The Netherlands: Now you see it, now you don’t by opensourceway

Set Your Compass: Share Your Direction

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All too often we don’t co-construct our curriculum with the children in our class. What occurs is a complete lack of clarity about where, as a group of learners, we are heading. In fact the direction we are going in is all too often very much laid out for the learner – the route is set by the teacher and the outcomes are already known.

Curriculum planning in this vein doesn’t cater for the tangent or the divergent thinker- well it might entertain it briefly but will eventually settle back on the steady path to where we were always going.

Curricular of this ilk are not setup for serendipity. If I knew exactly the music that was going to be played on the radio all of the time, well in advance and had no control over it, I would miss out on those beautiful moments when you hear a wonderful track that hasn’t been played for ages and there you are in that completely unexpected moment savouring every note.

Much of this is to do with teacher control and the lack of willingness to let go of the reins and venture from the path a little. But it is also to do with a lack of ambition about what we plan, many models of curriculum, as well as units of work, are legacy systems:

A legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program that continues to be used, typically because it still functions for the users’ needs, even though newer technology or more efficient methods of performing a task are now available.

If the direction of a unit is already laid out, involving the learner in the direction is fruitless, for the learner at least, for no alteration can be made anyway.

In his book How Children Fail, John Holt reflected in 1958:

It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we impose on them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip.

He continues to explain that he recognises a disconnect with what we as teachers perceive as a learning journey and how children truly see this. How many schools do you think could still be described in these terms?

At one of our partner schools in South London the pupils of Rosendale Primary School negotiate their learning. They have a clear direction and input into the course that is going to be set – not only that they have the ability to define how they get there. The pupil’s prior knowledge, skills, interests and passions are the starting point for much of the project learning that takes place.

With a vested interest the pupils at Rosendale have a much clearer understanding of the learning as a journey – they know what needs to be done and have made choices that help to define this and make it real and meaningful to them. It is not simply a set of tasks imposed on them by a legacy system.

Most of the time with these more open models we have to set our course into the unknown a little, we have to be willing to take the path less trodden.

When the teachers and Year 3 and 4 pupils of Thorney Close Primary School took on the challenge of running their own TEDx we didn’t know if we would be successful, there were a great deal of unknowns. At one point we didn’t have a venue because Take That were playing at the Stadium of Light!

With uncertainty often comes failure and we felt that for real and so did the children, but would they learn from it – absolutely!

Here are some reflections on the process by one of the teachers involved:

I learnt to trust the children and to let them go in the direction they want, trust that they’re going to make the right decisions with a little bit of guidance but not as much structure as we normally would give. So to sit back more and to listen more, and just ask the odd few questions – without waiting for that answer that the teacher wants to hear.

One of my favourite ways to describe this sense of a general direction, unclear and yet thoughtfully open, is the idea of a “fuzzy goal”. Taken from the opening to the wonderful book Gamestorming by Sunni Brown, David Gray and James Macanufo – a fuzzy goal can both describe our philosophical approach to change as well as the direction of a student led unit.

Like Columbus, in order to move toward an uncertain future, you need to set a course. But how do you set a course when the destination is unknown? This is where it becomes necessary to imagine a world; a future world that is diferent from our own. Somehow we need to imagine a world that we can’t really fully conceive yet—a world that we can see only dimly, as if through a fog.

Pic navigation (cc) by marfis75