Billie: the Reading Dog

Another great aspect of Douglas Park School is their dog, Billie, a 5-year-old Golden Labrador. Owned by Annie, the school manager, Billie hangs out in the entrance hall welcoming all visitors and enhancing the family feel of the place.

Doing what dogs do best, Billie offers a sense of security for children, particularly those with emotional or social difficulties; she brings a sense of fun to heated debates (she is tactically deployed to defuse any tense situation involving an irate parent or a pompous inspector); and she is the favourite attraction for pre-schoolers who look forward to patting her whilst Mum or Dad drops off their older siblings (I bet this "sales pitch" is one of the many reasons why Douglas Park recruits more and more children every year).

Now though, Billie is training to be a Reading Dog. Basing herself in the new entrants room (for 5-year-olds), Billie sits attentively, listening to a child reading or watching whilst they show their latest piece of writing. Being a wholly appreciative listener, the children really enjoy having a captive audience all for themselves!

Assess: to Sit Beside

This is the first of two postings inspired by a couple of wonderful days I've had working with the staff and students at Douglas Park Primary School in Masterton, New Zealand.

Once per term, every child at Douglas Park is encouraged to invite their parents into school for a Learning Conference, during which he or she explains what they've been learning, how much progress they've made and where they intent to go next. (See Learning Conference guide).

Their rationale behind these conferences are twofold; the first is straight from John Hattie's book on Visible Learning:

"Parents should be educated in the language of schooling so that home and school can share in the expectations and the child does not have to live in two worlds - with little understanding between home and school. Some parents know how to speak the language of schooling and thus provide an advantage for their children during the school years, while others do not know this language, which can be a major barrier to the home contributing to achievement."

Second of all, as they explain: "Assess comes from Latin, to sit beside, so our learning conferences give parents the perfect opportunity to "sit beside" their child; to encourage our students to take personal responsibility for their learning; to develop their communication and organisational skills; to clarify for themselves and their parents their sense of progress and to further enhance the school-home communication and relationships.

For more information about this, take a look at the Learning Conference Guide on the Sustained Success website or email the school.

Norwegian Mental Models

Now that there are 15 schools and nurseries in Norway in the Community Designed Education network, with 6 more due to join this summer, I thought it about time I posted a Norwegian blog (for the English version, use the translator at the bottom of the page). And how fitting that the picture should come from Hogsnes oppvekstsenter, the first school in Norway, and indeed in Scandinavia, to join the CDE network.

Sentralt i CDE-prosessen står undervisning av de mentale modellene som er nødvendige for å virkeliggjøre skolens (eller barnehagens) visjon. Mentale modeller er de dypt forankrede antakelser, generaliseringer eller bilder vi har, som avgjør hvordan vi forstår verden, og hvilke valg vi gjør, hvilken praksis vi velger.

For eksempel, hvis en lærer mener at barn lærer best hvis de får motta informasjon som de siden skal huske, vil denne læreren legge opp sin undervisning ut fra det. En annen

lærer, som mener at barn lærer best når de får stille spørsmål, tenke gjennom sine begrunnelser og trekke sine egne konklusjoner, vil gjennomføre en helt annen type undervisning. Begge disse lærerne handler ut fra god tro, ut fra en tro på at deres praksis gir gode muligheter for læring, men de befinner seg i svært forskjellige virkeligheter. Dette er grunnen til at mentale modeller har så stor betydning, og grunnen til at de "riktige" mentale modeller må identifiseres og undervises i, hvis skolen (eller barnehagen) skal kunne realisere sin felles visjon.

Da personalet ved Hogsnes Oppvekstsenter skulle identifisere de mentale modellene som var nødvendige for at de skulle kunne realisere visjonen sin, gjennomførte de først en brainstorming. Deretter stemte de fram de viktigste, blant de mentale modellene de hadde identifisert ut fra visjonen sin. (Resultatet kan dere se på bildet.) Utfordringen deres ble deretter å modellere, snakke om å undervise i disse mentale modellene, hver dag, med alle medlemmene i læringsfellesskapet.

Det gleder meg å kunne si at de har gjort store fremskritt! Faktisk så store at Ragnhild Isachsen, rektor på Hogsnes, er invitert til å holde et foredrag (keynote speech!) på den 14.Internasjonale Tenkekonferansen i Kuala Lumpur neste måned!

Teaching the ASK model

Two of the schools I'm working with, one in Doncaster (UK) and the other in Cambewarra (Australia), are trying a new approach to their curriculum that places an emphasis on Attitudes and Skills, as well as Knowledge (ASK). In a previous blog, (see Teaching Attitudes on 18 March 2009) I shared the Attitudes work of Sandringham Primary School. Now, here's an insight into the Skills work that Cambewarra Primary School are doing.

Selecting five key thinking skills, Processing information, Reasoning, Inquiry, Creativity and Evaluation, Trent Burns and his colleagues are ensuring that at least one of these skills is at the heart of each lesson. For example, when studying the environmental impact of technologies, the children would be asked to "paraphrase" the contributions of another, and then to add a "reason" to that opinion or argument.

Of course, since the children would have to use their thinking skills in order to answer a question or complete a task, some might say the deliberate focus on a particular type of thinking is unnecessary. And yet to improve any skill, expert practice concerns itself with breaking the skill down into parts. For example, in addition to swimming from one side of the pool to the other, a swimmer wishing to improve his/her skills would be well advised to at times focus almost exclusively on head position, then perhaps on the timing of his/her arm strokes and maybe another time on the frequency of kicks. And so it is with thinking - breaking the whole skill down into parts so that the whole might be improved bit by bit.

Furthermore, Trent's students enjoy the added dimension that a focus on thinking skills brings to their lessons, referring frequently to the PRICE model either by identifying the skill they believe they are using to solve a task, or setting out to improve a particular skill by finding opportunities to practise it.

Look out for an update on their progress after my visit there in June.

Learning Detectives

Here's a really nice idea from Louise Brown, the deputy head and reception teacher at Amble First School in Northumberland.

At the start of each day Louise chooses two children to take the role of Learning Detectives. They then each put on some headwear (crown for the girls, a viking hat for the boys) to denote they are the Learning Detectives for that day. Their task is to record their classmates engaging in whatever the focus might be for that day/week.

At the beginning of the academic year, Louise tends to focus the children's attention on social language and social skills (for example, listening to each other, working together, agreeing and disagreeing). She then moves them on to thinking about the skills of learning (for example, asking questions, giving reasons, making links and decisions).

At the end of the lesson or day, Louise asks the 2 Learning Detectives to feed back to the other children when and where they witnessed the particular skill in action. This feedback comes in the form of written notes, digital pictures or diagrams that are drawn on the interactive whiteboard. All are used as part of the plenary session during which Louise encourages them to reflect on their thinking and learning throughout the day.

The idea has now spread across the school, with Learning Detectives appointed to spot good behaviour, friendly actions and sociable children (and adults!) in the playground and around the school.

Teaching Attitudes

During my time as Director of the award-winning RAIS project, I worked with a number of schools to investigate the impact of children's attitudes on their ability to make progress. Not surprisingly, we were left in no doubt that students with the best attitude towards learning (focus, determination, effort and so on) were making significantly more progress than other students who were either complacent, uninterested or simply not engaged, even if the latter students had better grades initially. This led to the development of the ASK model, a framework that allowed for the teaching of Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge as part of the curriculum.

Having shared the ASK model with staff at Sandringham Primary School in Doncaster during their work with the Community Designed Education network, I am delighted to hear that they have really gone to town with the teaching of attitudes.

As Emily Smithard, the deputy head explains: "Having been working on attitudes in school for a while now, we have been able to see just how much of an impact they have had. We are trying out a variety of systems in classes and feeding back every fortnight how things are progressing; sharing good practice and any hiccups we may have had along the way. We did a walk of the school last half term to see what was visible in the classrooms and at that point things were just emerging but last week I visited every classroom when everyone had gone home and now attitude displays are in every classroom, in both halls and along many of the corridors. Assemblies are also linked to the school attitudes. Our plans for the future include a kick-start for each of the attitudes, and an "Attitudes Day" when the children can brainstorm, act out and know what it feels like to carry out that attitude. It's all exciting stuff!"

What I really like about this approach is that Sandringham are not following, for example Habits of Mind or Building Learning Power, but are creating their own structures based on what their children think. Each class has brainstormed the attitudes they think are necessary for learning, then taken a vote to identify the top 4 or 5. From these they are designing ways to develop each attitude through a process of teaching, investigation and practice. Their sense of purpose and of ownership is inspiring. Congratulations to everyone concerned.

Core Values

At the heart of the Community Designed Education process is the identification of a set of Core Values. Though most schools have a set of "virtues posters" dotted around the place, this approach is different in that a) it identifies just 3 or 4 of the most important ones, b) focuses attention on these top values so that they are far more likely to be embedded, and c) ensures that the chosen values become part of the curriculum and the culture of the school, and not just a topic for assemblies now and again.

For one school in the CDE network, the effect of this was remarkable. All of the staff voted for the top 3 values, with "Everyone feels valued" coming out as the top one. At the time of the vote this was a primary school doing a good job in a challenging area; they had lots of posters around the school extolling various virtues and the staff were trying their best to teach a whole range of positive behaviours. But by their own admission, not everyone was feeling valued. So they challenged themselves over the coming weeks to ensure that everyone they came into contact with, children, colleagues, parents (even Mrs Smith who is making her 5th complaint of the week) would be valued. Within a few months, the school felt a different place: more positive, supportive and more caring than ever before.

If you're considering this approach, then remember that pretty posters are not enough! Core values need to be modelled, articulated and taught. As you can see in the photo of Cambewarra's display, they have not only identified their main values but described each one as well as listed behaviours one would expect to notice when these values are being practised/maintained. They also teach these values through form tutor time, in assemblies and throughout the curriculum.

For more information and ideas about core values, I recommend the CDE website and Bill Martin's Leadership Blog.

Primary Twitching

I heard a great suggestion from the owner of Alnmouth Grocers, Alan Tilmouth, recently: twitching for children (taking children out regularly to spot birds!) As he says, "Bird-watching should be compulsory in every primary syllabus. It is a great activity for kids; it improves listening, observation, memory, counting, colour recognition and gets them outdoors more."

Alan is of course biased. Not only is he a father of 3 young children, but he is the co-author of Birds in Northumbria and Editor of a regional weblog Bird North East. That said, he makes a good point! This, I'm guessing, would also be an activity of which, Reuven Feuerstein, recognised as one of the leading psychologists of his generation, would approve highly of.

Feuerstein's programme of intervention, Instrumental Enrichment, upon which so many of the world's curricula for children are based, theorises that the skills of thinking and learning are best developed by children when an adult encourages them to focus upon events, patterns, characteristics or notions that the child wouldn't otherwise notice. So when a young child is building a tower with Lego bricks, we might draw their attention to the colours of the blocks, or prompt them to create different patterns with the tower. Or when teaching a child to swim, we'd encourage them to notice their head position and not just to focus on their arm movements. This mediation is at the core of teaching and learning, and indeed helps to distinguish between outstanding and average practice. And so it would be with bird watching: focussing children's attention on birds' colours, size, flight patterns and so on.

So why not give it a try? The RSPB site gives a lot of ideas and resources. Or, if you're in Northumberland or the North East, I'm sure Alan would be only too happy to advise or support you. There's also a retired police officer turned twitcher, Per Eidsten in Tonsberg, Norway, who I know would be the perfect guide for a spot of twitching!

Creating Questions

The Question Quadrant is a powerful tool developed by Phil Cam to elicit and generate questions that can be used to conduct a philosophy lesson. The purpose is to initiate and model the types of questions that can be used to produce in-depth discussion with communities just starting P4C. The Quadrant can be used to distinguish closed and open questions that relate specifically to the text; or closed and open questions that stimulate intellectual curiosity.

The Question Quadrant can be used in small groups or as a whole class. Trent Burns at Cambewarra Primary School in New South Wales, Australia has been using the approach to role model the types of questions that P4C seeks, placing the Question Quadrant in the middle of an inquiry circle.

The questions show in the diagram were taken from the picture book More Spaghetti I Say by Rita Golden-Gelman.

As Trent says, "The discussion generated is valuable as students give reasons as to why they have chosed a specific part of the quadrant to place their question. Having students fill out a blank question quadrant after listening to a story is also a valuable teaching tool and requires students to develop their own questions for discussion. After all it is the questions that make the inquiry come alive within the classroom."

For more information about this approach, both Trent and I highly recommend Phil Cam's new book, Twenty Thinking Tools as well as his excellent introduction to P4C, Thinking Together.

Maps from Memory

Another favourite strategy from the Thinking Through team is Maps from Memory.

To start with, these were literally maps but the approach has been used very successfully to encourage students to recreate diagrams (eg, the structure of the ear), Mind Maps, processes (eg the Water Cycle), and pieces of music (either listening to music and then re-creating it, or reading sheet music and reproducing it in written or auditory form).

Nice applications for this approach can be found in Thinking Through Primary Teaching, More Thinking Through Geography and the soon-to-be-published, Thinking Through Music by Martin Renton.

Fortune Lines

In the mid-1990's I was part of the Thinking Through Humanities project - a group of teachers from Northumberland working alongside David Leat and colleagues at the University of Newcastle. Among the strategies that we explored and developed were Fortune Lines, so I was particularly pleased to come across this strategy being used with 5/6 year olds recently.

Fortune Lines aim to map the feelings of one or more of the main characters in a story along a timeline. So whilst reading the Gruffalo, for example, the teacher encourages her children to think about how the mouse is feeling at the beginning of the story when he is minding his own business, then how he might feel as he is threatened by the fox, the owl, the snake (and how he feels when each one of them heeds his warning about the Gruffalo and retreats) and then, at the end when the Gruffalo turns up and scares the living daylights out of the whole forest!

An important aspect of the approach, as with all the so-called Thinking Skills strategies, is to challenge children's first answers thus calusing them to think more. For example, "Would the mouse have been sad the moment he med the fox or only once the fox had threatened to eat him?" or "Are you always sad when you're scared?"

Of course, this approach doesn't apply to young children. Various books in the Thinking Through series give superb examples of using Fortune Lines with 13/14 year olds studying events leading up to an historical event, or mapping the changing fortunes of a community as it moves from a primary industry such as coal mining through factory-based work to tertiary industries such as call centres. For more information, take a look at Thinking Through ... Geography, History, Maths or other subjects.

Out-Smart!

A wonderful innovation that's well worth exploring is Out-Smart. Developed by Paul Dearlove during his time at the award-winning N-RAIS project (Northumberland's Raising Aspirations in Society project), the approach combines outdoor adventure with thinking skills strategies.

Though many people will say that problem-solving activities in the outdoors are nothing new, Paul's approach is different: Out-Smart focuses as much on the reflective process and on making thinking visible as it does on the "initiative games".

Key questions that Paul asks Out-Smart learners include: what is an appreciative team; what learning dispositions do we want to grow; how can our response to challenge in the outdoors be applied to learning in the classroom; and can reflection be as active as adventure?

To find out more about Out-Smart, visit Paul's website or read Radical Encouragement by Williams and Wegerif. JN

Innovation: the solution?

Following on from the previous posting, I came across the following quote when reviewing notes I’d written during a course led by Prof Michael Fullan a couple of years ago: “One of the most critical problems our schools face is not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many different innovations.”

For me, the answer to this issue lies in the work of the Community Designed Education network. Started in 2001 by Dr John Edwards in Australia and Bill Martin in the USA, I have been part of this growing community of schools, businesses, professional sports teams and industry since 2005. The underpinning belief of this network is that organisations grow best from a combination of the personal, practical knowledge of its people, together with a rich culture of evidence based, action learning.

Beginning with the identification of a shared vision, the CDE process encourages organisations to take a year to identify the best ways to achieve their goals (as opposed to diving straight in with any innovation that seems promising). This allows rich data to be collected and a number of cycles of action-learning to be completed so that decisions are ultimately about what works BEST rather than simply about what works.

For more information about the CDE network, take a look at www.community-designed-education.com/ or visit Bill Martin’s leadership blog

Innovation: the problems!

It might seem strange to have a warning about innovation overload on an "innovation in education" blog, but as a big fan of John Hattie's work I am particularly keen to cite his work.

In his new book, Visible Learning (pictured), Hattie warns that it is almost a trivial claim to say that a policy or innovation works because almost everything works! In fact, his research shows 95% of everything we do to improve education can be shown to have a positive impact on student achievement. So the challenge is not so much to find something that works, but to invest time, effort and money into innovations that make a SIGNIFICANT difference to student progress.

He goes on to say that teachers average an effect of between 0.20 and 0.40 per year on student achievement. So, schools should be seeking an effect size greater than 0.40 for their achievement gains to be considered above average and greater than 0.60 to be considered outstanding.

Teaching test-taking, homework, competitive learning, audio-visual innovations, ability grouping, initial teacher training and healthy schools are all included in the LESS than average (below 0.40) typical effect size. Whereas in the over 0.60 category (outstanding) can be found creative curricula, phonics instruction, cooperative learning strategies, Piagetian programmes (teaching students at one level above where they are at) and feedback.

For more information, I highly recommend Visible Learning published by Routledge.

Sing from the Rooftops

Bravo to Martyn Soulsby and everyone at North Lakes School in Penrith (UK) for being the first school in Cumbria to receive the Sing Up Platinum award! Singing happens at the school every day, within and beyond the music curriculum - just for fun. They also regulalry perform at regional and national events. The Singing Squad, consisting of Year 5 and 6 pupils, selects and learns its own songs and assist and encourage singing amongst the children in the playground. Pupils are encouraged to use the Sing UP website and Song Bank at home in their own time and the school is introducing a section on the school Moodle (Virtual Learning Environment) for the pupils to access at home. Parents are highly supportive of the singing that goes on at North Lakes. They attend the monthly Sing Up sessions with Ems Featherstone and many parents accompany the choir on their many events and trips. The school now act as ambassadors for Sing up and the national Music Manifesto.

With the school already reknowned for its outstanding work with P4C, it really must be a joy to work, learn and sing there every day. Bring on the "Choir of Inquiry" JN