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Nativity Plays…

…are always poignant, partly because Christmas brings its own nostalgias, regrets, hopes and fears. Julian Grenier in Inside the Secret Garden has posted a really lovely incident of a child who overcomes a sadness with a sense of wonder: “He had held onto something that was fascinating him, despite his upset, and he had wanted to share it with [his key person] once he felt calm enough.” Maybe that ‘wanting to share it’ is why I’m posting what I’m ending this blog post with now.

To explain: this post fulfills a promise to separate people I meet on Twitter: Bosco Peters (@Liturgy) and Zoe and Andy from Saying Goodbye (@SayingGoodbyeUK). Bosco, a priest in NZ, maintains this website, and Saying Goodbye can be found here. Their interests (hardly the right word) coincided recently when Bosco posted on mourning the deaths of infants. They coincide with mine too.

What follows is the contribution I wrote eight years ago:

Lully Lulla: For Theo, Four and Three Quarters at Christmas

A Christmas might-have-been

Whose eyes like tunnels let down into dark

Let me go to this place or that perhaps

To snowy possibilities where that hand

Is slipped in mine, and off we go:

Me unbegrudging, happy of the chance

To revel in the play, in cheap mulled wine,

Sit on the cramped school chairs, be proud

As one small tea-towel stumbles on his line.

Did I see him there? Perhaps

Some small Christmas ghost

That Dickens overlooked sits with me still

(or always); then yes I saw him there.

If not, I saw his absence only;

He was not here except

As a dim shape ahead of me

In this great blizzard of regret that for a moment

Blinds my steps to Christmas.

They can also, of course, be funny, charming, fraught, competitive… Boscos’s blog has a link to something I think is an exemplary use of video – and a real baby!


Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Steve Wheeler, the author of this post argues that “often a mistake to try to represent complex ideas in the form of simplistic diagrams,” and goes on to suggest that Bloom, so much hailed as a model of thinking, requires serious revision in a “digital age.”

He goes on to state in Bloom Reheated (the significance of the title is in the blog post – ergo, read it) that “We need to find ways to nurture the agile, flexible, critical and creative learners we desperately need in our communities today.”

All agreed.  No problem – except that how do I work with students to give them effective models of learning that will stand them in good stead in a classroom? There might be holes in the Bloom taxonomy (not least, for me, its pyramid structure)  but it is still very current, (as in this guidance on University Learning Outcomes), and does allow students to think about how they teach, how their pupils learn; it is an effective tool for the reflective teacher who wants to move beyond “you do what works.”

Every child is an artist?

What are we to make of the powerful assertions here in the HATCH blog? Is every child really an artist – or are we over-using the idea of Art? How practical are the ethos-based key words here of trust, choice and environment?

While wanting to raise the issues as questions, because I think these are fundamentally more about personal philosophy than a quick fix for success, I would hurriedly add  that this is a very good way for trainee teachers to view their artistic/creative curriculum, especially in the light of latest thunderings (also here and here) about the death of the creative curriculum in  UK after the new curriculum proposals were published amid criticisms that the proposals were “flawed” and “prescriptive.”

What is andecdote about?

Maybe oral transmission of ideas requires some flesh. The parable. The chalkboard, or maybe these days a set of graphics – the sort of “lecture by powerpoint” in which technology aids but can also dominate. The Wordle at the top of this blog as I post is another case in point: a picture – even, like a Wordle, a picture composed of words – can be more powerful than a paragraph or two of prose. We need to embody our ideas (and this link takes you to something I’ve just started reading about).

But I was challenged yesterday in a conversation with Tom Tyler (check out also his cyberchimp site, and the resources, for example, attached to various Brookes modules such as this) about how one might use or could use or should use personal anecdote in a teaching situation. How does the word become flesh?

First of all, a warning from a marking perspective: it is very hard to fill up a lecture with personal insight (and it could be argued that that is the most useful thing about a lecture!) and then to discourage the unsubstantiated “I feel” comments that I’m ranting about in a previous post. I need to be very clear about how academic writing explains an academic position, and how that might be illuminated by a personal anecdote but that the anecdote is, in some ways, a marginalium, a side-line.

But then to three different examples, all of which I have used in classes this year or last, presented at this point (until I return to them) without much comment:

A child from one particular ethnic group has come to school with the clear message that getting dirty is inappropriate. Planting seeds in a Spring project presents difficulties, and his key worker – who belongs to the same ethnic and religious group – spends time modelling working with compost, then putting some on the child’s hand, and so on, until the child is confident enough to participate in a seed-planting activity with a group.

I am with Maisy, my granddaughter, who takes a wooden knight from the castle and picks up his sword saying “I snip you bed, Papa. A knight snip you bed with sword.”

I am with a group of children going on a Forest School trip. One of the children, then more of them, spot a deer over on one side of the wood. It is standing quite still, chewing at some leaves it has just pulled from a bush. When it sees it, it pauses, then jumps – not quite ‘prongs’ – off into the undergrowth. I say to the child that first spotted the deer (rather foolishly) “Did you see that?” and then “What do you think it was?” He replies, “A kangaroo.” Not a bad guess: this is a deer without the antlers he expects a deer to have.

So the questions are: can I present any of these as valid illustrations of pedagogical points? Is this “inaccurate research” really useful for my students – and if it is, how do they use it? And when it comes to NSS survey results what makes a tutor “interesting,” or “enthusiastic” and a course “intellectually stimulating”? What is fun – and what part does it play in learning in HE?

We tutors might have different views from our students, of course. It might be good to know…

Teachers should, must, will

An undergraduate at Oxford Brookes is aiming (or being aimed?? Now, there’s a whole other discussion! ) at becoming someone who understands “what it means to think and behave as a member of that disciplinary and/or professional community of practice.” Thus far the current statement on Graduate Attributes. For a student in Education Studies or Early Childhood Studies – undergraduates interested in education and care but not on a direct route to teaching – this may well mean exploring how schools work, how teachers teach, how learners learn.

The difficulty comes for some of them when we shift the expectation from a disciplinary discourse to that of a community of practice. Thus, when a student writes “The adult got the kids really wound up” it’s relatively easy to discuss how the language might be clearer if the incident is couched in less colloquial terms (although see below). A tutor might suggest that “get” as a phrasal verb is clumsy, that “kids” should be children, that “wound up” is too vague, or is too judgemental. There is something here about the range or tone that suggests that some distance expressed in language helps the disciplinary argument. Some of this is simply stylistic, and the Upgrade service at Brookes is very good at helping students with this.  Off at a tangent, I might spend ages arguing about class and colloquialisms, or US TV imperialism, or whatever, girlfriend. It is less easy when we come to the following:

  • Teachers should ensure that children have sufficient time outside every day.
  • Parents should read to their children, not just hear them read.
  • Children need to come to school ready to learn.

None of these three statements are necessarily untrue, and at the right place in an argument might be just what is needed – at the right place in the argument. However for the kind of distance an academic argument requires, writers may need to tourniquet their recommendations and personal opinions. This is because an academic argument cannot be based on recommendation, even if it has at its heart a set of beliefs. An essay aiming at the practical considerations of a particular project – phonics, outdoor learning, the care of looked-after children – might consider how a belief, or the conclusion of research is put into practice – but cannot be based on out-of-the-blue “teachers should” statements.
Consider, therefore, how the three statements above are transformed below:

  • Curriculum documentation [reference] recommends that teachers ensure that children have sufficient time outside every day.
  • The report [reference] concludes that parents should read to their children, not just hear them read.
  • Work by [author n – reference ] suggests that children need to come to school ready to learn.

In other words, the writer is openly entering into the “club” where these things are debated. It would also – might also – prevent the other bugbear of practically based essays: the way that personal opinion is allowed to trump any other argument. “I’m not really very fond of Piaget on this point,” as one student wrote recently. “My opinion is that children…” And while I wouldn’t want to raise Piaget to a godlike status, it did remind me of the story of the Bishop whose sermon included the words, “As Jesus said – and, mind you, I agree with him…” Assertion from personal insight, especially at undergraduate level, needs to be grounded not simply in the day-to-day experience of the writer, valuable though that may be, but also in the debate of the other members of the club. Do vobis potestatem…disputandi, as the charge for one of the ancient degrees at Oxford states: “I give you the authority to enter into a disputation.” “You now have the power to argue effectively.”
But at a time of rapid change there is a sting in the tale here, and the final question is this: How far should academics as teacher-trainers enter into academic debate, and how far are they trainers urging compliance with government directives?

It’s a slightly different case, perhaps, when we look at Initial Teacher Education. Here, the voice fr0m the community of practice the student is joining is stronger than it is for ordinary undergraduates. While I would still want to see a very healthy amount of reference to literature – curriculum documentation, research, evaluative reports by OfSTED, &c. – the voice of recommendation is (maybe) closer, and the possibility of dissent from commonly accepted notions of good practice is less. A good essay might therefore conclude with some explicit recommendation, and should include insights from the writer’s own professional refection, a simple exercise of editing out an undue number of “teachers should” statements would go some way to giving a better academic balance.

New toys

Thanks to Paul Wickens, I have been able to play with word clouds, using the Wordle software. Of course these kinds of  results need interpreting – but note the “must” in the Wordle cloud word frequency for the first chapter of EYFS – and am I right the wordle for chapter I have laboured so hard at looks rather woolly?

Or is this just the font?

The new header image, btw, is a Wordle of the introduction to EYFS.

Could you make this up?

Lenore Skenazy in the Free Range Kids blog alerts us to the idea of fake logs for children to play on. She – and many of the people replying – are justifiably bemused, angered or just plain gobsmacked by this, although not everyone is as super-critical as I might have imagined.   I am pondering my response – I may go and whittle a stick while I do.

Dear reader, what are your thoughts? Are plastic logs (the advert is linked here) a nifty gimmick to get children moving? Too sanitised to be of use? A depressing way of undermining natural education? Or what?