A Late November Day

I can still remember the excitement and noise behind me to this day. I was collecting my class of 32 Year 5 and 6 children from a morning break time during a rather charcoal-streaked-sky day in November. English Novembers are full of Autumnal colours and damp weather, this day was turning into just that, typical of that time of the year.

Perhaps the clamouring and excited voices were about the engaging lesson I had planned? Perhaps they were simply excited about learning with me? Maybe just pleased to see me? In all honesty I didn’t ask any of these questions, because I knew straight away what it was.

The morning had been great so far, I always decided to take each session as it comes but the day had started well. There was even some sunshine casting strained shadows across the car park as I arrived. The morning’s literacy session had been fun and we were enjoying the Shaun Tan work we had been exploring. Assembly, tick. Then break.

Those strained lengths of light that welcomed me to school had gone. Replaced with that charcoal sky. Something else I noticed was how wind had picked up, swirling in amongst the school buildings. The usual twisting leaf and crisp packet flurry buffeted against the Year 2 classrooms as the children went outside. I knew what was in store. I had seen this before and I knew my class.

A quick change of ends and resources prep for the next session, punctuated with a slurp of terrible coffee and I was ready to kick off again. Walking up the slope towards the waiting lines in the top playground I realised my predictions were happening as I suspected. The wind had changed everything and my class were completely different from when i had last seen them.

The calm start to the day had been replaced with exuberance and hyper-excited voices behind me as I led my class back towards the buildings. My mind began whirring as I knew that whatever I had planned needed changing, adapting. I always marvelled at how a change of weather could have such an effect on your class, something I learned the hard way back in my first year of teaching at university. Before everyone had a chance to wipe their feet I was set.

Adjust the sails and press on.

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

Your Advice Needed On Mixed Age Classes

In September I will be teaching a mixed age class of Year 5/6 children. This will be first time that I have had the unique challenge of working with a year group comprised of two different ages. Your advice and expertise about some of the questions I have would be most welcome.

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Much of my concern relates to the content of the curriculum and how best to plan to suit the needs of such a broad range of children. No doubt this is just the same as any classes we have, however a Y5/6 class has the added dimension of (possibly) doing SATs in 2011.

My class will be made up of children from 3 separate classes: a Year 4/5 class (who followed the Y5 curriculum), a straight Year 4 class and a straight Year 5 class. This mixture means that they have had a mixture of curriculum content too. Some have had the usual Year 5 curriculum whereas others have not.

We will be able to provide the older children with TA support to booster them nearer the time for SATs and also ensure that the coverage is in place for Literacy and Numeracy. Another challenge with such a class.

We’ll need to consider any impact on the Year 6 curriculum as there will be children moving into Year 6 next year.

It has been established that we will be using the Year 5 curriculum as a platform to build from and I will be working closely with the other Year 5 teacher (not the Year 6 teacher). Much of the content of the curriculum (especially topic based work) will have to be brand new, as there is the possibility of patchy repetition from the other classes.

Importantly we need to continue to engage and inspire this group of learners, no matter how old they are and I want to provide them a time that they will remember.

Faced with such an intricate challenge in terms of curriculum design I would greatly appreciate your help, advice and expertise.

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Pic: Sabotage #4: Mixing noodles with rice by Stéfan

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 2 – Contribute Your Ideas

The Curriculum Catalyst is about the online education community coming together to produce practical resources that we can all use to support curriculum development.

At the end of last weekend the Catalyst had over 280 topic ideas for the curriculum and over 70 people had voted more that 3000 times for a top topic. It turned out to be SEALIFE and since then I have created an open Google Document to collate our ideas for the topic. (Stage 2)

The document already has over 50 crowd-sourced sealife ideas (thanks for your help so far) for teaching and learning including:

  • Subject specific lesson activities
  • Books to support the Sealife topic
  • Web based resources
  • Details of the Ocean layer in Google Earth
  • Nintendo Wii games that can be used
  • Possibilities for places to visit in the UK
  • DVD titles

I hope that it proves useful in sparking some ideas for you and your staff. Please consider adding a short idea to the document to continue developing it. Don’t forget to just explore the 280+ topic ideas themselves (and vote), maybe there is something there you haven’t thought of.

After a week, so this Sunday, I will repeat the process for the next highest voted topic and create a new ideas document to work on. Currently “Imaginary Creatures” is in the lead. All of the weekly docs will be linked from my blog’s Curriculum Catalyst page.