Category: My class

Why I turned my back on teaching

Leadership, My classPublished onUpdated on35 Comments on Why I turned my back on teaching

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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

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Interesting ways to use Docs in the Classroom 3 of 3

Google, Google Docs, My classPublished on1 Comment on Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Interesting ways to use Docs in the Classroom 3 of 3
This is the third and final part in a short series I am reposting from the Official Google Docs blog which I wrote back in 2008. I introduce people to the concept of sharing ideas in the form of the Interesting Ways resources – both learning about the tool itself and sharing good practice about it!
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The mornings are becoming darker and the leaves are changing colour here in England, the Autumn school term is in full swing. We have been using Google Docs (as part of Apps Education Edition) with a new year group for 8 weeks and we are putting into action some of the many things we learned from last year’s implementation.

Whilst in the previous two posts I have explored many of the broader themes that must underpin the way sharing online docs should be approached in the classroom, I am now knee deep in the practicalities of using Google Docs with our classes. This post will hopefully give you some practical ways to use the tool in the classroom, some inspiration as to where to start and some usage tips that will help it all run smoothly.

Over the last year I have begun two presentations that share practical tips in the use of Google Earth and the Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom. I have set the presentations up so that anyone with a practical tip can become a collaborator by sharing editing rights with them. In this way the presentation expands with the advice and tips from real users and from a much wider audience of educators.

All you need to do is send me your email and I will be able to add you as a collaborator to the presentation, so you can add just 1 or even 10 tips for the use of Google Docs in the classroom. (See details at the end of the presentation)

The first five are my own tips, in no particular order, to get the presentation started. It is currently called “[Insert #] interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Docs in the Classroom” – but I hope that you can find time to add your own and share your advice with Google Docs users so that the name changes! Or perhaps you would prefer to just use the presentation as part of your staff training – it is all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0.

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The Interesting Ways resources have come a long way since 2008 – and this one is up to 34 ideas! I hope that you have enjoyed the short series of posts about using Google Docs and managed to take something that you can apply in the clasroom when you are working with collaborative online tools.

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: It’s about communication, not the tool! 2 of 3

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This is the second in a series of 3 posts I wrote for the Official Google Docs Blog – in this one I share some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.

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2668173081 b62efb9df5Communication is important, not the tool

The success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool — it’s about the group’s ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we were using technology that the outcome would be any different. In fact even though each child was engaged with a role within the group and a task to complete, the technology exacerbated the lack of communication. The groups were plodding on with their own tasks and when it buffeted with someone else’s they would get upset. They may be working in the same online space, but that does not automatically indicate they are collaborating well.

With this in mind we raised the profile of the sense of communication within the groups and discussed with the children their teething problems and how we can best resolve them. With every resolution I drew it back to the idea of better communication. The class had a fuller understanding from these discussions of what they were doing when working together in Google Docs and some of the ways that their own communication was causing problems. To reinforce this in future sessions I would regularly stop the class to talk about an excellent example I had overheard from an individual or a group. One such example was when the children in one group lowered their laptop screens so that they could discuss the progress of their work so far. I raised it with the wider group ,we briefly discussed why it was such a good move, and through this we then saw the majority of the groups adopting this strategy.

How student personalities and familiarity with technology affect group work

You know what it is like: you try and balance a team and consider the characters that you put together in a group, but within moments they are falling out! I suppose using Google Docs does not make the task any easier. Out of the 5 groups in my class, 2 worked very well together, 1 was OK and the other 2 had lots of problems and struggled. On reflection, the groups that worked least well together were made up of perhaps 2 or 3 strong personalities that would naturally like to take a lead and this caused conflicts and problems as it has in other activities. When the children have their own laptops and a clear contribution to make within a document, that is appropriately structured, in my experience it can help a group work together.

I had children in my class that were very capable at using technology and were motivated and enthused at its use in our lessons but who often struggled with their literacy or maths, they were more confident when collaborating with Google Docs because of their own personal comfort with technology in the classroom. They pushed themselves forward to take a lead and be more involved when in a more traditional paper-based activity they may not have done. Similarly, the flip side of this is children who are very confident and capable in literacy who perhaps have less confidence when using technology. Even though composing groups within your class to collaborate is similar for any activity, it is important to consider the type of characters who grows in confidence when embedding technology in their learning.

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Next: Interesting Ways to Use Docs in the Classroom

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Tips for introducing online collaboration to students 1 of 3

Google, Google Docs, My classPublished on12 Comments on Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Tips for introducing online collaboration to students 1 of 3

In 2008 I was invited to write a series of blog posts for the Official Google Docs blog. I have decided to repost them here to highlight some of the challenges I faced at the time and in an effort to help you, not only with the use of Google Docs but also other online collaborative tools.

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3068052025 ecfde2145fModelling expected behaviour and good practice first

As our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children were finding it difficult to work together. With hindsight it is easier to recognise that the children were not only being introduced to a new piece of technology (the Docs tool) but also their traditional way of working was to be challenged by the new concept of working collaboratively in an online document.

It was clear that the children were unsure about the way they should be working together. They were each working on their own laptop and it was not the technical side of things that they struggled with, it was the fact they were expected to interact with others in their group as well as use a screen. I found it very useful to model the process. Just as I would if I were showing the children a style of writing in Literacy or a type of stretch in PE. I worked with a colleague on an example document and gave the class a running commentary as to what we were doing. As we worked we talked to each other and I underlined some of the key features of what made that short demo collaboration successful for us.

I think that every class of children will respond differently to the challenge of working together in an online doc, but it proved incredibly valuable to our classes to model what is expected of them. In September, I’ll have a new class and I will be keeping in mind this idea from the outset. Another idea would be to encourage the students to demonstrate the concept to the class – this is much harder to show but valuable nonetheless. I will be planning in time to model the technical and communications side of working together and also reflective time with the groups throughout the project to discuss and review the process of collaborating.

Introducing group collaboration: entire class, working in pairs, and groups of four

With the 9 and 10 year-olds in my classes, I found it valuable to take small steps towards an open collaborative project with 4 or 5 group members. As I introduced Google Docs to the class, we began to work together on documents that everyone could contribute to, revealing the ways that it worked and how it updates. In many respects this could be labelled as modelling the process that the children will in turn use later on. It proved valuable to be able to prove the concept to the children in a simple “step in, step out” controlled type contribution, nothing protracted. We added ideas to a large grid within a spreadsheet, with the children being told to choose any cell to write in – you could also invite them to fill in some information about themselves next to their name in a class list document. This single contribution to a whole class document was our first step.

It was followed by children working together in pairs on one document – a laptop each, sitting next to each other and sharing the document between them both. Finally the children worked in a larger group of 4 in a more lengthy collaboration as part of a Geography project. I believe it is important to progressively build up to bigger group collaboration and for this coming academic year I will be taking the same approach in developing the children’s collaboration experience over the first 6 weeks of term.

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Next: It’s About the Communication Not The Tool

30+ Interesting Ways to Get to Know Your New Class

Interesting Ways, My classPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on 30+ Interesting Ways to Get to Know Your New Class

When the Australia winter is replaced with warmer days, it means in the Northern Hemisphere schools will soon be returning. 

The first few weeks should be about getting to know your class. The better we understand our students, the better we can design learning for them.

Over the last six years, I have gathered and curated some tips and activities for those early sessions we have with our students.

I hope that the ideas prove useful as we get to this time of year. If you have ideas for classroom activities or whole school transition days, please consider contributing them.