Tag: Teacher education

Social World of Childhood?

Yes I know this is a module title from the Ed Studies programme here, but I wanted to give some account of my being on the school bus, the 4a from Headington up to the top of the Raleigh Park estate in Oxford, with an increasing pile of kids from Matthew Arnold School.  They were legion and noisy at the start of the day, and sort of objecting to my curmudgeonly refusing to move so they could sit together. What was most interesting was their concerns: “Would I be allowed to have my ‘phone in behaviour support?”  “Did you know that [A] isn’t speaking to [B] since [B] said she didn’t like [C]???””Miss [to the luckless TA also on the bus], I have an exam tomorrow does that mean I miss behaviour support?” The conversations were all about behaviour and relationships, a descant to the tap of mobile ‘phones, multifaceted conversations.

Why I am surprised?

I’m not, well, not really – but what I want to underline is how little any of this seemed to chime with the grand high project of education I was going to lecture on.  On the bus I felt surrounded by an alien world, a world of children and young people: concerns around rules and rule-breaking; alliances and gossip; what can be got away with and what will have to be endured.

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…

Starting the PGCE

Well, the sun is shining, and I ended the teaching day sat under the trees in our Arboretum with the people who are going to be my personal tutees. It was easy to be upbeat, while remembering that this experience, the workload and learning challenges of the PGCE never make for an easy year. So much to learn, for some a lot to unlearn, and this year above all some key messages the Government want us to deliver.

This isn’t going to be a moan. I read, for example, the latest drafts, tweets and releases on redefining SEN and am determined to think  “here is another challenge” and then worry how the trainees and the trainers – and most importantly the schools – will deal with this, but today of all days we need to look at all this with some hope. Here is a large and competent bunch of students all looking at us, keen to get going, nervous of the step they’re taking and I feel I need to say

“We are professionals with you. As I’ve said before, we have beliefs we profess – and we want to share our vision with you.“

So what are we asking the Early Years PGCE students to learn? What does an Early Years teacher need to know?

I could list phonics, transition, pedagogies, child development, curriculum documentation, leading the team, dealing with parents, answering critics – the list is very long. Maybe I want them to know one thing: how children learn best. All being well, the rest may fall into place when they have grasped the beginnings of that.

Nutbrown Review of Qualifications

Not a rant this time, just the links to the pdf of the report, and to the DoE webpage on the review which also has other useful links.

Here are the nineteen recommendations:

Recommendation 1
The Government should continue to specify the qualifications that are suitable for staff operating within the EYFS, and the Teaching Agency should develop a more robust set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria to ensure qualifications promote the right content and pedagogical processes. These criteria should be based on the proposals set out in this report.
Recommendation 2
All qualifications commenced from 1 September 2013 must demonstrate that they meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria when being considered against the requirements of the EYFS.
Recommendation 3
The previously articulated plan to move to a single early years qualification should be abandoned.
Recommendation 4
The Government should consider the best way to badge qualifications that meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria so that people can recognise under what set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria a qualification has been gained.
Recommendation 5
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, by September 2022, all staff counting in the staff:child ratios must be qualified at level 3.
Recommendation 6
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2013, a minimum of 50 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 7
The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2015, a minimum of 70 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios.
Recommendation 8
Level 2 English and mathematics should be entry requirements to level 3 early education and childcare courses.
Recommendation 9
Tutors should be qualified to a higher level than the course they are teaching.
Recommendation 10
All tutors should have regular continuing professional development and contact with early years settings. Colleges and training providers should allow sufficient time for this.
Recommendation 11
Only settings that are rated ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted should be able to host students on placement.
Recommendation 12
Colleges and training providers should look specifically at the setting’s ability to offer students high quality placements.
Recommendation 13
The Department for Education should conduct research on the number of BME staff at different qualification levels, and engage with the sector to address any issues identified.
Recommendation 14
Newly qualified practitioners starting in their first employment should have mentoring for at least the first six months. If the setting is rated below ‘Good’, this mentoring should come from outside.
Recommendation 15
A suite of online induction and training modules should be brought together by the Government, that can be accessed by everyone working in early education and childcare.
Recommendation 16
A new early years specialist route to QTS, specialising in the years from birth to seven, should be introduced, starting from September 2013.
Recommendation 17
Any individual holding Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) should be able to access routes to obtain QTS as a priority.
Recommendation 18
I recommend that Government considers the best way to maintain and increase graduate pedagogical leadership in all early years settings.
Recommendation 19
I am not recommending that the Government impose a licensing system on the early years sector. However, the Government should consider supporting a sector-led approach, if an affordable and sustainable one emerges with widespread sector support.

Learning poems

I will leave it to two voices more eloquent than mine to explore in two very different ways the notion of children “as young as five” (why always that cliche?) learning to recite poems. They express in different voices a counterpoint of the disquiet we have all, I think, felt at pronouncements on the the content of the new National Curriculum, esp in its looking at English in the first years of Primary.

Michael Rosen, whose poems really do inspire young children – and by that I mean everything from getting them to make rhymes themselves (In one nursery I worked in we had “Don’t put Teresa in the freezer/Don’t put Nick in the sick” as a response to Michael’s Mustard in the Custard poem, on Youtube here) to falling about on the floor laughing – is as eloquent and wrathful as ever, an Amos Starkadder kind of rage aimed at the current decisions, when he critiques the new curriculum proposals. Here, in story form, he mocks everything he can lay his hands on about the idea of reciting poetry in the Gove model.

If Michael Rosen is Amos Starkadder, perhaps Mary Beard is Flora Poste: determined to bring a sense of order to the seeming chaos (I note, however, that she and I have different views on Cold Comfort Farm).  Mary is, however, no fan of the Gove model either. Here, in her Times Blog (linked in my Blogroll, as you’ll see) she too expresses her doubts.

So why don’t I like what Gove is suggesting? Because it’s bound to be one size fits all kind of learning and so completely uninspiring.

I fear she is right, that this could be the beginning of a canon of a great works way of looking at literature that will be dull and unresponsive to children’s interests and needs. And this will be the challenge: making this work, cutting through the political rhetoric on any side to see that at the heart of it is not the creation of children and schools from Ladybird Reading Scheme books of years gone by, nor yet dismissing this because Michael Gove has come to be disliked and mistrusted, but saying calmly and passionately to parents, trainee teachers, Governors, Inspectors, “This is what we have always done, and done well. The children in this school delight in spoken and written English, from Early Years (where they learn to recite and love and parody and store up for later those rhymes we call, well, nursery rhymes) to the riches of Heaney, Clare, Causley, Marvell – yes, and Rosen too, and, in time, Vergil.  This is what we do, this (if you’ll let us explain) is how we do it. We are not disempowered idiots, or people jumping on and off bandwagons when we are urged to do so: we are a profession; we have beliefs we profess.”

And I was going to leave it to Michael and Mary. Maybe I should have.

Who asks the most questions in your classroom?

An interesting question in itself. I wonder, hearing Julie Fisher talk about interactions in the classroom, whether we have really moved on, in ITE, from talking about “effective questioning” to a module that genuinely is interested in what children have to tell us. That killer phrase from one practitioner in the REPEY report “I need to tell you…” seems to me at the heart of this: the teacher confusing her/his clear professional duty to educate with a desire to control that process to such an extent that no real learning is allowed (or, if we’re honest, even looked for ) that isn’t in the teacher’s grasp. I’ve asked before “Is there a clear link between Sustained Shared Thinking and effective pedagogy?” and I wonder how this might continue to play out as we expect more and higher quality interactions from our newest professionals. God forbid that we should teach Sustained Shared Thinking as a technique when what is (might be) needed is time for teachers to listen and to follow up interests…

And then there’s this: the fiery Michael Rosen suggesting on his blog the kind of things the teaching profession should be saying out loud: “Children are full of feelings and thoughts,” “We ask children to think about difficult ideas…to think beyond themselves…” “We want children to ask questions…” Reading intelligently isn’t taught just by decoding, and thinking deeply is only partly encouraged by debate (Rosen has ideas about this, too); the critical thinking we ask for in trainee teachers comes from the genuine interest of others in your ideas, and starts from teachers and other adults with young children having a real delight in their thoughts.

Gambia 2012

This year’s trip starts, in some ways, with last year’s video. Click here for the link – we went for a week of working with Gambia College students/graduates, and EY students from Brookes would be doing the same again this year (others may have a different programme). Watching it instantly makes me (as always happens!) eager to go again. This is a long link, and you may need QuickTime to watch it – but it’s worth a look!

Cost?£800.00, organised via Gambia Extra and Alan and Tony from GE are coming on 20th Feb to talk to anyone interested – details on the posters round Harcourt Hill.