28 Days of Writing Archives - Page 5 of 7

Learning Provocations (ideas, how they affect us and why we should use them)

Tom28 Days of Writing, Design Thinking, LearningFebruary 11, 2015October 11, 20158 Comments

During a design thinking inquiry process we use provocation as an engaging starting point or an opportunity to inject momentum in thinking and student engagement. They can come in many different forms:

Questions, Images (and text), Statements, Film, Data visualisations, Change a setting, Artefacts, Quotes, Maps, Proverbs, Role Play, Stories, Music and audio, Animation

I remember discovering this wonderful post from Cristina Milos a few years ago that captured so many wonderful ideas about how to plan for provocation. I highly recommend taking a look and digging deeper into the examples she shares.

For a long time now I have considered how learning provocations have an impact after all we have to plan for this reaction if we include provocation in our learning sessions. I think that provocation produces different reactions in us all, challenging is in different ways:

Emotionally (This is challenging how I feel or what I have previously felt)
Understanding (This is challenging what I think I know and my assumptions)
Perception (This is challenging my point of view)
Ethically (This is challenging our shared beliefs)
Morally (This is challenging my own principles)
Action (This is challenging me to take action, to change or make a difference)

We have to give adequate thought and preparation to the follow up activities – not just planning for provocation, but planning for the reaction to it as well. If we have carefully crafted a provocation we should expect a reaction, considering the impact it is having on those we are working with and how to structure the learning that flow from it.

I believe that used in the correct way, at the the correct moment, the right type of provocation creates momentum in our thinking or those around us. When we are looking at the impact on Understanding for example, provocation can often create a new boundary or edge of what is known. What follows is an attempt to plot a course into that new territory – our curiosity as our guide.

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How does the question in the image above challenge you? In which domains (outlined above) does it have the strongest impact on you? What learning structure would be most effective to follow it up?

Hold Your Ideas Lightly

Tom28 Days of Writing, Creativity, Design ThinkingFebruary 10, 2015October 1, 20156 Comments

This is a simple metaphor to understand. When you are exploring the validity of an idea, hold your idea lightly – do not clutch it tightly to your chest. We often explore if an idea is valid in the company of others and so we need to present our thinking with this mindset as lots of good things flow from it. It is an important mindset we adjust to in our design thinking workshops we run with teachers.

Instead of having to pry open our fingers to get to the idea to offer advice, when it is held lightly and openly in our open hands others can access it.

Offer an invitation to your ideas not a barrier to hurdle.

When we hold on to our ideas lightly we are being more careful in terms of what we have committed to that idea. There is no tension in our grasp of the idea because we have invested lots of time and energy into developing it. It is probably early on in terms of our thinking and we are open to what others say.

If our grasp is light it might be swept along by a strong breeze from others. Who knows if we are open to other people contributing and building on our idea it might be taken in a direction that we might not have seen.

It is all about communicating your idea as early as you can, but matching that action with a relatively low commitment in energy, time and resources.

In the workshops I have led over the last four years I have asked hundreds of people to communicate an idea they have only just created to someone else. The constraint comes from the time they have to communicate the idea or concept and the resource they have to do it with. A single Post it note. What else!

They are thrust into a situation where they are already non-committal about an idea and are encouraged to “Hold their ideas lightly”, pitching the idea to someone else quickly. All of these things create a scenario that is often alien within education – sharing something so early. I always like to follow this sort of task up by asking “What does it feel like to have to share an idea so early on in the process?”

Invariably there is a mixed reaction. From the “nerve wracking” and “scary”, to “liberating” and “exciting”. The anxious responses normally speak of a habitual culture of getting it “just so”, or working on something heavily before sharing widely. The more positive responses, which is the majority, recognise how this mindset, named up front, and the process that activates it, creates a refreshing sense of openness about our creative work.

Hold your ideas lightly – don’t clutch them tightly to your chest.

Teacher Education Should Not Be Compromised

Tom28 Days of Writing, LearningFebruary 9, 2015February 10, 20153 Comments

I can’t help but feel worried about teacher education. You know, university courses for learning our craft. Today I ran into some unfortunate stories of the experiences our aspiring teachers might come across. Who knows whether this is a universal, worldwide issue but I have long held concerns. They have niggled away in the back of my mind. After all this is such an important formative experience for people entering our profession.

How can you not have lesson intentions or success criteria for sessions about how we teach?
How can you not have technology rich experiences for our aspiring teachers?
How is “technology and me don’t mix” still a sentence people say?
How can you be so muddled about the student course and curriculum, you have no time to talk about learning?
How is a young teacher meant to learn when nothing of the contemporary classroom is modelled?
How come we are not thinking deeply about the student teacher experience?

So many questions and so much that needs to change. I know this may be in the minority here in Australia. Well I hope it is.

We are on the cusp of a project with an education team from a university here in Melbourne. I am excited about what we might create together in re-designing teacher education. It is one of a few pieces of our eco-system that is, well, broken. If over the next 5-10 years we can raise the quality of the aspiring teacher experience, it figures that everything might flow in a positive direction from there.

Pic Western Decay by sleepinyourhat

Keeping the main thing, the main thing – Posts about Feedback from #28daysofwriting

Tom28 Days of Writing, FeedbackFebruary 8, 2015February 8, 2015Leave a Comment

5727007519_7cf25af4d3_b — loopz by Rosa Menkman

I started 2015 in Perth. Well in actual fact I had trips to Brisbane and Sydney as aperitifs and then headed to Western Australia. I was helping with some professional learning days at a large independent girls school we have been working with since the beginning of 2014. Our mantra for the sessions was:

Keep the main thing, the main thing

And feedback with its long lost twin, feedforward, is pretty close to being one of the most important elements of learning and curriculum design. I will spend some time in future posts sharing how I see it all and how it aligns with a prototyping disposition. For now, here are some great blog highlights from educators sharing their thinking on feedback as part of #28daysofwriting.

Alex Gingell shares how he used an Experience Tour to help with the professional learning discussions on feedback in his school.

I wanted staff to ‘immerse’ themselves in feedback. To gain an understanding of how feedback works across the school and to give them a tool that would enable them to develop their own perspective of feedback in their practice. This tool is designed to be used over a slightly longer period of time and having started, I would now like to provide the opportunity for staff to continue their ‘tours’, moving from reflecting on feedback in books, to experiencing feedback in each other’s classrooms.

Experience Tour: Feedback by Alex Gingell

Great to see the DIY Toolkit being hacked to suit the needs of our school developments. An interesting post well worth a look.

In this post from the Four Seasons in One Kiwi blog, @StephT shares some of the discussion about feedback in terms of leading a school.

a good leader shows they are human, takes on board feedback, uses it to improve the way things are done but does not allow themselves to sink under the weight of it. We did not think that the leader that journeys up the Nile in a heavy armour plated frigate was that of a good modern leader. That, we felt, was a leader that ignores feedback and has armoured ears, which could, consequently turn into a disaster zone.

Day 7: Educational Piranhas #28daysofwriting by @StephT

Great to get some on the ground, fresh insight into the principal role within a school – read the rest of the post above.

This post from Dave Stacey outlined an interesting concept to explore when structuring the timing of feedback. Something I will be returning to in a future post of my own.

We need to get much better about the point at which we give our feedback and make sure students can act on it (DIRT time is an idea that’s been kicking around for a couple of years, and if you’re a teacher if you’re marking without it, you’re probably wasting a chunk of your time – try here and here to start, but there are loads of great blogs on it). We can restructure our assessments, we can make better use of cloud technology to provide feedback BEFORE the final deadline, or ensure that students get a second go at delivering that presentation.

I shouldn’t feel bad for saying ‘well done’ – #28daysofwriting day 5 by Dave Stacey

Nicola Richards shares her first steps into using the SOLO Taxonomy in helping students understand the specific parts of their journey. By the sounds of it the taxonomy helped the class also provide effective feedback to peers, which is often tricky if we don’t have a notion of what specifically to say.

So my first real “work” for my class this year was to write a paragraph with a video as a stimulus. Once they were finished we discussed the key concepts and then I asked them to peer assess the paragraphs using a simple SOLO rubric. Most found it easy to identify where their partners work was at and could also identify next steps. I can see me using this regularly for peer, self and teacher feedback. I am passionate about the use of SOLO taxonomy (thanks @arti_choke) and keep finding ways to incorporate it in my teaching and learning. This was a great example as it fulfills many of the key requirements of effective feedback too.

28 days of writing – day 5 by Nicola Roberts

Explore more of Nicola’s post on her blog nixpixmyideasonstuffeducational

I look forward to writing and learning more from the reflections of others about feedback and do my bit to keep the main thing the main thing.

Image loopz by Rosa Menkman

500 Not Out

Tom28 Days of Writing, BloggingFebruary 7, 2015February 7, 20156 Comments

This is my 500th blog post.

I am not one for milestones but this digital space has been close to my heart ever since I started. It has contributed in so many different ways to where I am today. So I am taking a minute to look back a little on where it all began.

I started writing a blog back in late July 2006 (wow, close to 9 years ago). It was called ICT in the Classroom and I set out to share about just that:

“So here I am – first blog about me and my ICT. It is something I am passionate about and hopefully this space will be somewhere for me to channel my thoughts a little and to explore my experiences of ICT in my classroom.”

In those days I had a blog with Edublogs. They did a sterling job of helping me get started. I am still grateful to James, Sue and everyone at Edublogs for helping me and thousands of others get started with blogging.

My first real post was about, surprise surprise, blogging! And it would seem the enduring nature of this tool remains strong today:

“This whole blogging thing has caught up with me. I have started one for my son to record his first few years with us – I hope it will be something that he enjoys looking back upon later in life. It is great fun to do.

My own blog will be a learning curve as well, I have begun to explore the ways that blogs can be used in education and specifically with my class next September. At my first teaching post I had to build and maintain a website, fitting this around work is hard. The beauty of blogging is how easy it is to create and publish work online.”

It is “fun” and even easier nowadays to publish content in beautiful ways.

I also began to understand the social aspect of blogging. As I have said before, for me it was the first social platform I experienced. I connected with other bloggers through the beauty of the pingback. If you were added to a blogroll it was a massive win!

Commenting was essential for establishing connections in those pre-Twitter days. This is where the rich discussions would unfold. Sometimes far outweighing the published words in the original post. Another blogging habit would be creating a post based on someone else’s writing. This reaction or commentary style post was common and helped snowball ideas. This was especially true when they were about classroom practice.

I had the privilege of reading many blogs to gain some idea of how to behave. I am grateful to Peter Ford, Ewan McIntosh, Doug Belshaw and many others who helped me figure it all out. Getting a blog comment from these legends was always exciting. (Amazing to think that now I can call Peter and Ewan my colleagues)

I hope that projects such as #28daysofwriting help you discover or get back into this glorious habit. And I am resolute that I will be around to talk about my 1000th blog post.

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