This special project update was first published in Issue #163 of the Dialogic Learning Weekly Newsletter.
Welcome along to another weekly newsletter. This week a full update about a project I just completed in Papua New Guinea.
On Wednesday I landed back on Australian soil after spending four days in Papua New Guinea working with 50 teachers from 12 provinces.
Chris Harte invited me to co-design and facilitate a 2-day workshop on learner-centred pedagogies. It was lovely to work alongside him again.
The workshop was part of PNGAusPartnership Secondary Schools. A new initiative partnering 12 PNG and 12 Australian high schools to strengthen education, leadership and people-to-people links.
Here are some of the insights I take from an amazing trip.
Sharpening Our Tools
Our 2-day course focused on learner-centred pedagogies. We spent time together exploring a range of teaching and learning strategies.
Building the toolset was a deliberate aspect of our time. One of the teachers explained that she had used some of the ideas before, but our work had helped to sharpen our tools. 🛠
Another explained there was a lack of language to accurately describe some of the strategies. It made me reflect on the importance of a shared language and names for these strategies, and how this mediates collaboration.
Papua New Guinea has 832 living languages (languages, not dialects), making it the most linguistically diverse place on Earth. With that in mind you can understand that sharing practice, ideas and strategies is challenging.
Exploring some new project ideas.
Commitment to the Teaching Craft
Within hours I began to reflect on the teacher’s purposeful attitude. They were there to improve their craft. 🖐
There was a clarity about what was valued in the session. The strategies and techniques that shift the emphasis away from too much teacher talk. Our participants were soaking everything up.
Even the methods Chris and I used to co-facilitate were noticed and explored. We modelled, then developed the skillset through collaboration and dialogue.
One of the teachers explained that in many of the rural communities teaching students was significantly challenging, but “thankfully and hopefully it might not be anymore”, due to the skills she had learned.
When we have choices in our pedagogical toolset and a broad skill base to enact them, we might feel a little less worried about the challenge.
Workshop is a-buzz with project hives, learning design and pitch preparation. Working with @tombarrett is always a joy and a privilege. pic.twitter.com/V15m9i95SX
There was no question about the mindset of the teachers in the room. They were ready to learn and open to improve their teaching. 🧠👐
Although they may have been teaching in a teacher-directed and centred way, they were not obstinate about this approach. It was dominant amongst the secondary teachers we worked with, but they were ready to improve and change.
For many of the teachers, this was a new approach to professional learning. We modelled pedagogies and offered an abundance of strategies. Some participants felt it revealed what sort of teacher they were.
Here is some feedback from one teacher.
I used to think that I should dominate the lesson on how students should learn. But, now I think that I should be more flexible and design lessons in a way that provoke more curiosity, discover their capabilities and what they can contribute in the real world.
It was exciting and refreshing to help teachers who were so humble and open in their efforts to get better.
Smiling after the final presentations
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Perhaps the most important insight for me was that despite 832 living languages and all of the challenges these teachers experience, many of which I am only beginning to understand – we gathered together as one group and connected around the language of learning. A universal human truth.
Thanks for taking the time to read the update this week. See you next time.
~ Tom Barrett
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I have been facilitating lots of different sessions recently with teachers, school leaders and architects. Here are a few tips and ideas to help improve your next workshop.
1) Don’t be afraid of providing independent reflection and thinking time.
All too often, we run workshops in the whole group mode or table group mode. We have to keep the individual mode active to improve the flow of thinking and dialogue.
Typically I use the individual thinking time as I would when running idea generation activities. Most of us are more receptive to other people when we have had time to think on our own. All you have to do is provide time for workshop participants to collect and capture their thoughts before launching into other modes. Compare the workshop scenarios below and reflect on which you think would be most effective:
(A) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” [no thinking time] What do you think? [to the whole group]
(B) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” [no thinking time] Talk to the people on your table about what you think.
(C) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” Spend a few minutes reflecting on your own about this. You might like to draw and make some notes. Gather your thoughts and be ready to share in a small group. [Lots of thinking time, pressure off]
(C+) Now you have had some time to think about the provocation. Talk to the people on your table about your ideas. Make sure you think carefully about stepping up and stepping back so everyone can share.
(C++) It sounded like you have had some time to explore that idea – I overheard a few points I would like to focus on, but who will share something that resonated with them [whole group dialogue, with a few points at the ready to provoke further and draw people in]
Your Next Step: Design your workshop to balance individual small group and whole group dialogue and thinking modes.
2) Create the right conditions for high-quality dialogue
The most common piece of feedback I get from my workshops and sessions is about time. People wish for more time and hope they can recreate the experience in the future.
More specifically, they express gratitude and appreciation for the time and space to engage in authentic and meaningful dialogue with their peers.
It might sound almost too obvious, but stepping out of the “work” structure and engaging in dialogue about the work, is rare. My workshops put dialogue at heart.
Participants in my sessions enjoy the opportunity to share, discuss and explore with colleagues. It would help if you thought about ways to create these experiences too.
Your Next Step: Plan a little less, allow more time for dialogue, design simple ways to capture thinking, allow more time for dialogue.
3) Respond to the people in front of you
“Football isn’t played on paper” as the saying goes, we might have a great plan but making it happen can often be the biggest challenge. Let’s keep running with the idea of “planning less” a little further.
I would say that in close to 75% of the time, I have more than I need for a workshop. My ideas flow, but the experience might not allow for deeper thinking and a better experience of meaningful dialogue.
Although I might have spent time refining a workshop plan and shared this with the client beforehand – I never shy away from going off-script. Respond to the people in front of you – use ongoing feedback to check in and gauge the progress they are making. “Everything ok? Do you need some more time?”
If you set up a chunky provocation and create the right conditions for deeper thinking and dialogue – you have to allow participants the opportunity to ensconce themselves. There is nothing more dissatisfying than being pulled abruptly out of this type of activity.
You want people to express appreciation for the time you designed for them, not lamenting the workshop as a missed opportunity.
Your Next Step: Design the workshop with rich provocations, allow time to get ensconced, respond to the needs of those in front of you.
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Are you designing workshops or staff meetings and want some inspiration? What are your biggest challenges when it comes to facilitating professional learning sessions?
That question: “Can architecture have moral value?”
Farrelly goes on to suggest four ways architecture can “acquire moral heft; four opportunities for virtue. These are wellbeing, environmentalism, public-mindedness and beauty. “
In this post, I share some of my thoughts about how these four ideas relate to educational architecture.
My immediate reaction is that school and education architecture surely can assume an inherent morality due to the nature of the work. What do you think? Is that too easy an answer? Is it that simple?
But perhaps my first reaction is an extension of the disposition of being an educator. A purposeful, often vocational, approach teachers have towards their career. A designer of learning environments may not associate with such a deep-seated moral purpose to make a difference. Or at least their drivers come from an alternate place.
It would seem crucial (and logical) that for successful design outcomes in education architecture there needs to be a moral parity. At the very least moral sensitivity. Assimilation?
Are all stakeholders approaching the collaboration with the same moral code? What happens when this code is in a different language? What benefits or hurdles do we create by an ethical code established on different terms?
Let’s have a look at each of the four avenues that Elizabeth Farrelly suggests – starting in each section with some of her elaborations.
Wellbeing is the least of them, being most self-focused. The ancients, naturally, were steeped in such wisdom but one of the earliest modern thinkers to document the link between health and architecture was Florence Nightingale. Noticing that Crimean War casualties healed faster near natural light and air, she produced designs for the lovely old St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where every bed had a massive window opening over garden and river.
EF
Despite what Farrelly says about the self-centred nature of our contemporary use of the term wellbeing, this is at the heart of why schools exist.
I taught in primary schools in some of the lowest socio-economic wards in England. For many students I encountered, school, the school building, the concept of school and the people involved, contributed massively to their wellbeing.
Every day I could see the impact of the ordered nature of the classrooms and the calming care of the educators on these students. That was nothing exceptional, that was simply our job.
So far from being the least of these moral imperatives, wellbeing is at the core of what we do in education. Whenever I am exploring what school communities value the most, wellbeing is often referred to as overarching, central or at the heart.
I often say you can’t just wake up one morning and change your mindset, and the same is true of wellbeing.
Despite commonly being held up as a central endeavour, it still is often poorly defined. I think that education architecture has a moral imperative to create environments where physical, emotional, academic and mental wellbeing can be positively affected.
It is not magically done by putting in a running track around the playground or by including calming sensory rooms. It is achieved in close partnership with the occupiers and eventual inhabitants.
I often say you can’t just wake up one morning and change your mindset, and the same is true of wellbeing. It is the aggregate of the choices we make. Buildings can guide us to drink more water, to be less isolated, to be more focused, to use the stairs, to get outside more, but we have to choose.
Yes wellbeing is self-focused but schools are buildings filled with people all committed to the fulfillment of every individual’s potential. It would be impossible not to.
Then there’s eco-mindedness which, since it goes to species survival, is our pluralist era’s closest approach to a cohesive morality. Certainly Glenn Murcutt has always treated touch-the-earth-lightly architecture as a moral vocation. But is a 10-Green Star building properly described as morally good? Or is that more of a technical attribute?
EF
This is an interesting one for schools. Let’s explore an extreme but fairly likely reality for many schools and education facilities around the world. Imagine a school building that is not environmentally friendly. Imagine out of date processes and functions that are not eco-minded. How can we reconcile this against the education we are trying to provide within those walls?
On one hand, we might be teaching the value of “Respect for our planet” in a lesson that is taking place in a building that doesn’t adhere to the same moral code.
It is an interesting dilemma for the custodians of the space and the learners.
As Farrelly explains eco-mindedness is an example of a “cohesive morality” but what happens when that code is not valid of the buildings you occupy?
It is easy to refer to new schools holding up the different Green star ratings, but the existing building stock is more likely to defy any moral imperative.
I wonder about the inter-generational moral approach to education architecture. The way an old building impacts the behaviour of a future generation of students.
Can you retro-fit a moral code alongside new building codes?
By public-mindedness I mean that rare quality some buildings have of making you feel more significant, more dignified and more included, simply for passing by. This is almost a lost art, since no one will pay for it any more, and few architects have the skill.
EF
I wonder if I have ever experienced inclusiveness, dignity and significance because of a building? I think I have in lots of different ways. But it somehow depends on the situation. When I am in a wonderful environment, experiencing that place as a user, an operator, a human that the design was aimed at – I certainly do.
I often feel this way when I am in a theatre or sports venue. Perhaps it is the purpose of that space but the experience encompasses those three ideas. I remember feeling this way as a passenger at St Pancras Station in London.
As an outsider looking in I wonder if you feel insignificant, excluded and a little less worthy of that place?
I recently visited St Paul’s Cathedral and I remember feeling over-awed by the scale of the place. I wasn’t there to worship, just to look, a tourist. If I was there on more reverent undertakings I would no doubt feel something different.
Schools aim to lift every individual and improve their condition. This includes the community the building sits within. This is often done through the provision of community facilities and the ability for the wider neighbourhood to use the spaces on offer.
This might be a multi-use hall space that is booked by a martial arts club every Tuesday and Thursday evening. Or a parents group that uses the cafe and meeting facilities. Or perhaps a local 5-a-side football league that makes good use of the gym.
Opening our education facilities up in this way is a critical path to ensure we are included as a local community member. So much of our school facilities are not used to their full potential and remain under-occupied.
Maximising the potential impact is a critical disposition to take, so that as many people as possible, not just students and teachers, feel a lift.
Finally, beauty. Beauty is architecture’s highest virtue because beauty alone lifts you from your ego. I’m not talking object-beauty. The Taj Mahal is merely a nice thing. I’m talking beauty of the spatial experience, be it Westminster Abbey, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or our own convict-hewn Argyle Cut. Beauty of this kind we love for its own sake, regardless of use or profit, and this transcendence is profoundly good for our souls.
EF
Much of the talk in school architecture is how we create high functioning buildings and learning spaces. We want them to operate in a way that adds real value to the experience of teaching and learning. What affordance do we have for beauty? Is the aesthetic quality of learning spaces being crowded out by pedagogical function?
Farrelly explains it to be about the spatial experience, not just the object-beauty. When teachers and students experience their buildings, they are not merely looking in, and they are not on a sightseeing tour. They are the key stakeholder, the core user. Identifying a teaching and learning space as beautiful without experiencing it fully, is a judgement from behind a sight-seeing veil and will only ever be on a surface level. It is like just judging a car on its looks, without taking it for a test drive.
Teachers and students are the users and operators of that space, so perhaps beauty depends on the function.
For example, if a teacher experiences seamless collaborative learning using whiteboards and small breakout spaces, or a productive dialogue with 30 students in the round without any acoustic problems, or the flow of team teaching across multiple areas, is that beauty?
The users are pushing that space to perform and function at a high level – their experience heightened by being surrounded by that environment. I think that is beauty.
To finish a thought from a different place, Rowan Moore explains that he opposes, “a culture that invests little in the dignity and beauty of everyday places – streets, schools – but finds billions in its back pocket for corporate spectacle.”
His remarks caused me to reflect on the worthiness of what we do in education. The phrase “Is it worthy of our students time?” is a great provocation for learning design. (Taken from the Teaching Effectiveness Framework) A similar set of questions could guide us.
Is this learning space worthy of its inhabitants? Will this place create a beautiful experience?
I had the opportunity to work with a primary school leadership team in Sydney today. The team at St Christopher’s in Panania are a partner school of mine and I support in a critical friend type role.
We spent some time today exploring the concepts associated with “proxies for learning” using my recent blog post about it as a starting point.
In short the concept of a proxy is that we focus on a representation of learning – we are not looking at learning itself.
Again the discussion centred on the idea of creating better proxies and what the limits are. We had a range of questions that helped to explore this topic:
How might we design better proxies for learning?
Can we describe the proxies we have been using in our own practice?
If we were observing learning taking place what would we actually be looking at?
How might we design a proxy that is closest to the location of learning?
What is the evidence of learning?
Is this evidence of performance or learning?
How might we recognise when learning is taking place?
An interesting challenge to me from the team was that an example I used to explain a proxy was in fact a proxy. I have heard myself say something like “We might only look at learning if we could scan the brain or have a mobile MRI or CT scanner.”
But of course the results of such scans are just proxies for the real thing. Peeling back the skull and directly observing the neuro-chemical process is the truth. Everything else is a proxy.
So when we consider that everything we do is a proxy for learning at a neuro-chemical level, we must shift our energy to the quality of the proxy.
You might also describe it in terms of the fidelity of the proxy – the quality , authenticity and standard of the representation of learning.
My friend Chris also suggested that self reflection and a learner’s self proclamation is the highest standard:
The proxy which is closest to source must be the reflective learner’s self proclamation “I’ve learned!” Maybe we should enable that voice more and listen to it. #proxy
But I am not sure if greater proximity to a synapse is best? There seems to be lots of bias associated with the self-assessment of learning.
David Didau offers a reminder about the complexity of learning and a list of ideas for better proxies:
Obviously, we don’t really know how, when or why learning happens, but we do have some guides about what might make it more or less likely.
So, here I tentatively offer a list of other possible ‘good proxies’ for learning which may help teachers plan and look for opportunities to increase students’ mastery of curriculum content.
Learning may happen when students:
concentrate on relevant examples and non-examples
retrieve what they have been taught in previous lessons
apply concepts to new examples
engage in practice drills (which may involve repetition or formulas and procedures)
answer questions without cues or prompts
What do you think about this list? What do you consider a high quality, high fidelity or just a good proxy?
This exploration has also led me to wonder more and more about retrieval over time. Sometimes learning might not occur in the timeframe we expect it to and only after a shift in time. More to ponder.
This is an exploration of a few emerging ideas from my work today. During a coaching session I was exploring the idea of the “proxy”.
The word proxy means “agency of one who acts instead of another; letter of power of attorney”. In fact a contraction of procuracie (c. 1300) a word meaning administration or management.
A model I have been using with leadership groups over the last year (blog post on the way) is the idea of alignment. One part of this is the alignment between the Actual Learning Experience and Learning.
This might also be called the alignment (or difference) between Performance and Learning. David Didau refers to some work by Nicholas C. Soderstrom and Robert A. Bjork,
We can onlyinferlearning from performance
Performance during instruction is a poor indicator of learning
Many different sources refer to some other work by Professor Robert and the slide below from his presentation What Makes Great Teaching?
The “Curriculum is covered” is one that resonates as I hear that language a great deal. A poor proxy for learning.
There is a lot more to explore and for me to learn about some of these ideas but I enjoyed this insightful take on proxies from Seth Godin in his post Avoiding the False Proxy Trap:
Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.
This helped me get a clear sense of how we might create poor representations or flawed proxies for learning. It also made me think more about assessment and the design of assessment in schools.
Godin concludes by saying:
You’ve already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.
Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.
A good provocation to think through if he, for example, is referring to learning. It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
