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.

A Question of 3 Apples

Ian McKenzie has been helping his students at Viscount School in Auckland develop their questioning skills using a really interesting experiment. He gave them 3 apples to consider: one fresh, one plastic and one... not there. The students were asked to try to explain how and when they know for sure that something is real.

As Ian explains, "These 12/13yr olds have been working with me for about two terms now and have been learning to use a range of questioning techniques in order to facilitate deeper thinking skills. They know to use questions to gain clarification and to garner reasons / evidence from each other. They then ask each other to consider their own assumptions, before hopefully testing out some alternative ideas."

This group were also given some images to consider and to use their questioning techniques to think about whether what they were seeing was 'real' or 'not real'. It's a question which intrugued them because they all considered themselves to be deeper thinkers, but found it very difficult to question their own religious beliefs in the same manner (The Polynesian community being committed Christians). However, some brave souls found a way to make alternative suggestions and this lead to a deeper level conversation about some beliefs not having the same reasons and evidence behind them.

What I find particularly fascinating about this experiment is that the 3 apples idea is something I've often used with nursery/reception children to begin to explore whether something has to be seen to be real. And yet here is Ian using ostensibly the same task to push for a far greater depth of reasoning, questioning and understanding. Which just goes to show that Bananarama were right - it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it (and that's what get results).

Thinking Schools Network

A new Partner Finding Site for Thinking School People has been launched (Thinking Schools Network) Available in English and "Scandinavish", the site is beginning to fill with the details of interesting schools, thinkers, innovations and speakers. The site has been set up by Bengt Lennartsson and Bitte Sundin, following their hosting of the 13th International Conference on Thinking in their home town, Norrköping (Sweden) in 2007 and the subsequent Nordic Re-Thinking conference the following year.

The aim of the site is to offer a free facility for people interested in thinking in all it's forms to share resources, ideas and contact information with each other. Members of the site can find schools interested in becoming partner schools, making student-to-student contacts and finding out about future conferences and seminars. Already there are members in many of the Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. JN

How Much Challenge is Enough Challenge?

Getting children to play pairs (matching one card to another) is a great way of improving their memory skills and strategic thinking. But how many cards should you start with when playing the game with nursery children? Most foundation stage teachers tell me 8 cards (4 pairs) or thereabouts.

So, what about starting with 20 cards and playing the game with 3-year-olds? Way too many, I hear you say and last week I would've agreed with you. But not now: during half-term, my 2
½ year old daughter and I downloaded Animatch, a game of pairs for the iPhone that comes with 20 cards as standard. Thinking this is too many for Ava to deal with, we simply listened to the sounds that each animal makes and names the creatures as we went along.

However, within 10 minutes of playing around with the programme, Ava had worked out the object of the game and was merrily matching the cards to their pairs. Her initial strategy was to pick one animal and then keep going until she'd found it's pair before moving onto another animal. She soon realised that this is an inefficient strategy and so moved on to working out what was under each card and matching as she went along. It now takes her 90 seconds to complete the game without the need of any guidance or encouragement.

I wonder where I can find a game with 40 cards to match...?! JN

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

2 Circles for P4C

Facilitating Philosophy for Children (P4C) can be a challenge with average class sizes in the UK of 30 but a possible solution is to have 2 circles of children - an inner and an outer circle.

Whilst half the children sit in the inner circle engaging in the community of inquiry, the other half sit in an outer circle mind-mapping or in some way recording what is being investigated by the other children. Every 10 minutes or so, the groups swap over. Children partner up, one from each group, so that they can compare notes and respond to each other's thoughts.

This idea was developed in Berwick by Mary-Rose Blythe, deputy head at Holy Trinity First School, and myself as a way to ensure that the deaf children at the school didn't miss out on the wonderful experience of P4C. However, we also found that ALL children enjoyed the opportunity for thinking/recording time whilst in the outer circle and the increased opportunity to talk whilst in the inner circle. Furthermore, research by the Universities of Newcastle and Sunderland noted that this combination of P4C and cognitive mapping helped children make more progress in their learning when compared with taking part in just one of these approaches. Try it out and let us know how it goes! JN