Poor white schools

Years ago, when I was a teacher in the UK,  the "problem" areas where there seemed to be huge issues in achievement were the inner-city schools, where these issues were blamed on high levels of ESL students who underperformed on the tests.  I did my teaching practice at an inner city school in Leeds and it was a bit of a shock to the system, even growing up as I did in East London.  However recent reports that I've been reading have shown that inner-city schools are doing much better in the UK now, and it's the schools in "poor white areas" that are facing problems.  This is not an issue with language:  in fact children from poor Indian, Pakistani, African and Caribbean families do much better than white British children in similar areas of disadvantage.  I was interested to find out that in central London, fewer than 1 in 5 primary school children is now categorised as "white British", and of those I'm guessing the working class is an even smaller number.  The "problem areas" have therefore shifted.

During the week I was reading a BBC report about league tables and how these are unfair to schools in white working-class areas.   It states that white working-class boys have the lowest rates of university entry of any group in the UK.  Some time ago I was reading in the Guardian about Jaywick, a coastal town in Essex, being the most deprived English neighbourhood, and incidentally the first place in the UK to elect a UKIP MP (I'm sure there's a connection).  The deprived areas of the UK are no longer inner-cities - they are the rural and coastal areas.

As students move from primary to secondary, the impact of deprivation grows.  Less well-educated parents are less able to help with homework, and many are not supportive of schools, having had a negative experience with schools themselves.  Gaps in vocabulary are also more obvious at a secondary level, and families are less interested in looking into options for university.  The situation may get worse when Ofsted intervenes, school leaders lose their jobs and it becomes even harder to recruit teachers to these schools.

Now clearly, living in India, there is no comparison at all between levels of poverty in our inner-city slums and white working-class areas of the UK.  But talking to some of our NGOs who work in these slum schools, perhaps there is something that can be learned.  For example, there is no inevitable link between poverty and low achievement in school.  It's much more to do with low aspirations and negative attitudes towards education.   Perhaps in India there are actually more aspirations - there are a huge number of service jobs here and Indians themselves are very industrious, with people setting up small businesses on every pavement that serve their local community (shoe repair, sewing, tea making, snacks etc).  Perhaps that's the secret - the community.  As mentioned in a previous post I lived and worked in a mining community in Yorkshire for 6 years - and it really was a community in my first years there.  There was a Working Men's Club where people could go to socialise, evening classes at the local school, a church that arranged social events, and so on.  The local pit, where most of the men worked, was a community in its own right.  In many parts of the "industrial heartland" of the UK this can no longer be said.  Today many working-class families are living on low wages and with uncertain employment.  They are suffering from debt and insecurity.  Families are under pressure and the children have little hope of a better life.  Even at the height of the miners' strike, you could feel the sense of community and purpose.  My hunch is that sense is no longer there in these areas.

Obviously there is no quick fix - but there does need to be a solution if these areas are not to become even further deprived.  The inner-cities have done it.  What would it take to turn the rural and coastal areas around now?  All I can think of is that education, and in particular giving students the skills they will need for their future, are vital if we are to move forward and give all children the ability to pursue their dreams.

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Is no news good news?

Last night I was speaking to my son.  I say "night" because it was 11.30 pm and I was in bed.  As Joal is currently walking the Pacific Crest Trail, the times when I can speak to him are determined by our different time zones, but more importantly by when he is able to get an internet connection, as most of the time he is in wild regions without a signal.  As a mum, I've been nervous about this trip for a while, as there are certainly dangers.  Last year I believe 11 people died on this trail, mostly through a lack of water or, conversely, by too much water, being swept away in river crossings.  When I go for multiple days without hearing anything, then of course it's a bit of a worry.  Well last night Joal was talking to me about the fact that on the trail people are now nervous because of a mountain lion attack which killed someone on the Appalachian Trail.  That seemed a long way away from where he is, however after finishing our call I couldn't get to sleep.  So in the middle of the night, I got up and Googled "mountain lion kill in US" and what did I come up with but an article in The Independent entitled "Cyclist mauled to death by mountain lion on forest trail near Seattle."  Hmmm - not the Appalacians then, but a place where my son and his girlfriend will actually be trekking though sometime soon.  And this death happened 4 days ago!  Needless to say, this story wouldn't have got onto my radar, had I not Googled it.  I wasn't on the BBC news for the regions I follow, for example.  After a sleepless night I'm asking myself, is no news good news?

I've been thinking about news recently as a couple of days ago I was asked to develop a workshop on information literacy.  There is so much "fake news" at the moment that I've been asking myself what it's important to teach students so that they become more critical about what they read.  I've also been listening to the podcast Note to Self, which did a recent episode about bots, in particular on Twitter, which are insidious, being aimed to promote fake news and sow chaos.

I also read a great article this morning by Dr Alec Couros and Katia Hilderbrandt from the University of Regina about the critical literacies we should be developing in our students at a time when the boundaries between real and fake news seem blurred and uncertain.  They point out that fake news is often generated using social media in order to increase web traffic and ad revenue, and also to discredit a public figure.  For example there have been numerous stories about the role of the Russians in the recent US elections as well as the Brexit campaign.  In fact today anyone can publish anything, real or fake, very easily, especially as we now have the ability to change people's facial images and voices on video to spread fake messages and trick people.  How do we teach students to validate information in this new digital age?

A couple of days ago I was talking to our iCommons Coordinator at school about checklists for evaluating information.  She talked about how she teaches students to use CRAPP (which she refers to as CAARP), but how useful are such tools when we are dealing with an avalanche of information, when fake news is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, where authorship  and origin can be falsified, and where world leaders themselves are spreading the falsehoods online?

Dr Couros and Katia Hilderbrandt have 3 strategies for dealing with the deluge of fake news which I'm summarising below and thinking about how we can teach these to elementary school students:

1. Develop and employ investigative techniques.  They suggest knowing about and using sites such as Snopes that will help identify accuracy.  I love their suggestion, which I've also used with students, about using Google reverse image search to check whether images have been altered.  We do ask students to look critically at websites, but studies show that people are still hugely influenced by false elements of websites such as logos and domain names.  In fact the best way to check is to look outside the site itself to see what other sites are linking to it.  Finally it's important for students to understand what bias is.  We are currently teaching this to our Grade 4 students, however for older students the site Checkology is great for helping students to identify what is news, opinion, entertainment, advertising, publicity and propaganda.
2. Use rich examples.  For many years we have taught our upper elementary students how fake websites can look real.  We've used Dog Island and the Tree Octopus among others.  Couros and Hilderbrandt write that it's also important we use fresh and authentic examples in class, for example things that students might encounter in the news.
3. Nurture a critical disposition.  Often students (and adults) believe everything they see, hear and read, so in schools we need more focus on approaches to learning such as critical thinking and questioning.

The article, which I really recommend you read, contains an interesting graphic about where popular media fits in a scale of fact to fabricated information.  Even with reliable sources that do report facts and news, such as the BBC, New York Times, Time magazine, The Economist and so on, there are still biases, with some skewing more liberal and others more conservative.  I was interested to see that CNN is seen as media that moves between a fair and an unfair interpretation of the news, being full of opinion, giving selective or incomplete stories and at times unfair persuasion.  Other media such as the Daily Mail and Fox News and not simply skewed, but also often give unfair representations of the news and contain propaganda and misleading information (Fox also includes inaccurate and fabricated information).

So back to my dilemma.  In searching for information about the progress of my son on the PCT I've come across many blog and vlog posts, as well as other stories about hikers who have gone missing from the trail.  I've been trying to put all of these into perspective.  For example, yes, someone was mauled to death by a mountain lion on a forest trail a few days ago, however it has only been the second fatal attack by a mountain lion in Washington state in the past 94 years.  Really, cycling to work in London every day, was more risky for Joal.

If you want to know more about Joal and Jenny's walk on the PCT, you can follow their blog JWalking.

Photo credit:  Personal photo of their first 100 miles of the hike.

Can technology bridge the gap? part 2

In my last post I was exploring whether introducing technology into some of the NGO schools in India can help close the achievement gaps with our most disadvantaged students.  I was interested to read another study today based in Los Angeles where in 2013 students were given tablet computers equipped with digital curriculum.  This area also had a high number of disadvantaged students, with 76% of the receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

Although it seemed that this initiative was likely to bring about a huge leap into the digital age, the reality was not so positive.  Looking back, it's clear to see that what went wrong was that teachers were not well trained on how to use the tablets:  in fact the school district had simply purchased a lot of expensive new technology without any clear plan for how to use it.  I've written about this a lot before on this blog.  Training teachers and giving them time to use the tools themselves is vital for success - the focus of the roll out has to be preparing teachers to use the new technology and supporting them through implementation.

There's a happy end to this story however.  Two years ago, the district adopted the new ISTE Standards for Students where the focus has been on competencies for students to be successful in a digital world.  ISTE's CEO Richard Culatta writes, "The standards provide a pathway to create global citizens who will live in a world where all their work, much of their civic engagement and a huge part of their personal experiences are going to happen in digital spaces."

So the secret to student success is teacher success!  If teachers are not using technology successfully, how will they help students to be prepared for today's digital world?  It's also worth considering the advice given in the infographic below.  Successful teachers start with the WHY rather than just jumping onboard with the "latest and greatest" new tools, they embrace change and they share their learning with others.  There are a huge amount of educators who will be happy to help and give advice if you reach out.  Supporting teachers to be comfortable with using technology themselves is one effective way to help bridge the attainment gap.

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Can technology bridge the gap?

Last Friday some teachers came in for a meeting from 2 of the NGOs we support:  Apni Shala and Khoj Community School.  These organisations had been given a donation of iPads and they were keen to learn about what apps could be used with their students.  Let me first tell you a little about these organisations:

Khoj Community School is a school launched in June last year in a slum area of Mumbai.  The vision of the school is to create experiential educational opportunities for these students to explore and pursue their dreams, and to develop skills and attitudes to help them engage with and thrive in a multicultural and diverse world.  The school started with 26 students in Kindergarten and the number will grow each year as a new grade is added annually.  The parents pay 250 rupees a month to send their children here (around USD 3.50/GBP 2.50).

Apni Shala is an organisation that also uses experiential learning methods such as art, drama, games and community projects to help children develop social and emotional skills.  This is a larger organisation dealing with around 6,000 children across 40 schools.  Apni Shala focuses on life skills programmes to help students develop their personality so that they are able to make positive changes in their lives.  Life skills that are intentionally developed are communication, confidence, teamwork, taking initiative and empathy.

Now I've often said that the work I've done with local educational NGOs is the best part of my 6 years in India - if you are to say there's a reason for everything I would say that the reason I was meant to come back to India was to work with the teachers who have given their lives to the most disadvantaged of children.  As a technology teacher I'm always asking myself whether technology can bridge the gap for these students, allowing them access to learning that they wouldn't otherwise have.  For example in many of these schools there is no money to pay for textbooks - instead the teachers can show students how to tap into the wealth of knowledge found for free on the internet.  It also allows them access to learning opportunities they would not find in the schools themselves.  Free videoconferencing tools can bring experts into their classroom, helping them to learn from people they would never usually meet.  Another way I think that technology can help is through personalising learning.  We were keen to show the teachers apps that students could work on at their own pace, developing skills that they need.  Students who need help mastering a particular concept are no longer left behind just because other students are not struggling with the same concept at the same time.  I truly believe that technology can help students to overcome geographical and socio-economic barriers as well as racial and cultural injustices:  it provides powerful tools that can help to increase access to learning to help bridge the gaps.

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Artificial intelligence -v- intelligence augmentation

A couple of days ago a video was released on the AFP news agency channel about how some Swedish people are having microchips implanted into their hands which allows them to do things (so far only things like access a gym, get into their apartments, and purchase train tickets).  Looking at this video it struck me that we have already moved from using technology, to wearing technology, to implanting it.  The claims are that implantables makes life more convenient.  Of course the other side of this is that there could be more privacy and security issues.  We have seen that connecting devices has already led to large scale DDOS attacks and data hijacking.  Next we will be facing implant hijacking.  I watched an interview with Ben Libberton from the Karolinska Institute who claims:

It's relatively uncertain how they will be used or what kind of information will be transferred from these chips and where it will be going, so I think that it's important to consider these implications to make sure every step along the way of this technology development that the security and ethical implications are considered fully.

These videos reminded me of another video from last year where futurist and technology expert Scott Klososky talks about augmented intelligence and claims it won't be long before implantables are very normal and where schools may have to have classes for augmented kids (with a brain computer interface and retinal projection) and non-augmented kids.  Scott claims we will be the last generation to be un-augmented.  He talked about this when he came to ASB Un-Plugged earlier this year as well - personally I find this very scary, especially when you consider what will happen when students leave school and go for jobs.  Clearly if some people are augmented, then those people will get the best jobs and the highest salaries - increasing inequalities.  If you start to think about the consequences it's really frightening!

I've been thinking about data and student achievement recently.  I was reading about soft data in Daniel Sobel's book Narrowing the Attainment Gap: A Handbook for Schools where Daniel argues that the attainment gap is mostly to do with soft data (motivations and barriers for students).   At the same time I'm seeing more and more schools focusing on big data.  A couple of weeks ago I was talking to Consilience's data scientist, Sujoy, who claims that in fact the power is in "small data" looking at individuals and what helps each child to progress.  And as Tricia Wang says, "Relying on big data alone increases the chance we'll miss something, while giving us the illusion we know everything." (She recently did a TEDtalk about the human insights missing from big data that is worth watching.)

Let's pull these thoughts together.  Currently many details of our lives are captured and traded by data-mining companies.  You only have to pause a little over someone's Facebook post, and related ads seem to flow into your email and messages.  For example a couple of days ago I paused over an ad for microblading (I didn't have a clue what it was) and suddenly I'm getting ads all the time about beautiful eyebrows!  Data is collected from the websites we browse, what we buy, social media posts, loyalty cards, the music we listen to, the movies we watch online and so on.  I've stopped giving out my real phone number when asked while making purchases as I'm flooded with spam messages afterwards, with companies targeting me in marketing their products and services.

But can "big data" really be useful in education?  Does it allow schools to better understand how students learn and how best to support them?  Around 6 months ago the IB published an article about data entitled Big Data, Big Problems?  The question this article addresses is this:  do the numbers tell the whole story?  I was interested to read a comment by Allison Littlejohn, Professor of Learning Technology at the Open University in the UK who claims "We can look at trends ... and connect that with employment within countries.  Depending on what the future job opportunities might be, schools can then adapt the curriculum."  Really?  Good lord, I'd have thought it would take a little longer than this to adapt, write and implement a new curriculum!  However I do agree with something else she writes, "We need to be sure that students are properly prepared so that when they do leave school, they're able to aim for jobs that still exist, and later change careers, which they're very likely to do throughout their lives."  I think it is true that schools may be able to target support that students' need when everything is more transparent, but perhaps the question then is what is being measured (is it just what is easy to measure in schools?  What about the environmental factors outside of school that motivate students?)  Littlejohn argues further that the success of collecting the data depends on how well coders, teachers and people who understand learning can work together.  She states, "It's very difficult to actually gather the data that you need to come to the conclusions that you want to reach ... a lot of what we measure and analyse is an approximation of what people's actually ability is."

At school I work closely with our iCommons teacher/librarian and recently we've been having a big push with our Grade 4s about bias.  In fact we came across a great online resource called Checkology, though a bit old for our Grade 4s, but I'm sharing it here because it provoked interesting discussions about bias in media.  At the same time we are aware (and letting students know) that Google's autocomplete feature can produce a biased result while searching, perpetuating gender and racial biases which reinforce rather than eliminate discrimination, and which ultimately can negatively affect development.  I'm thinking about this now in terms of smart speakers as well, such as Echo and Google Home who are "always listening" to us, and which pretty soon are going to start talking to each other.  What information are they giving us - knowing what we want to hear?  And here is a question that Scott left us with in one of his Un-Plugged presentations:  When machines can learn faster than humans, what will be the most valuable areas of learning for humans?  Something to think about as teachers right?

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Say no!

Lots of you reading this blog know that I've gone through a hard time this year, with having to leave India and with the decline in my mother with her dementia.  There have been many days when I have felt truly awful, for example the day when I heard my mother was rejected from a dementia care home, and yet when I meet people and they ask how I'm doing I still find it incredibly hard to say what I'm feeling.  In fact many of us smile and say polite things, even when we don't feel like it.  And in the long run, this causes a problem.  We tell "white lies" and agree with people who we actually don't agree with.  We stay silent when we hear something that we really should challenge.  We pretend to be friends with people that we dislike.  And because of this, because we know other people are also doing this, it can lead to a lack of trust, where you're unsure if someone is really saying what they mean, or just what they think you want to hear.  This goes along with social media likes:  some people feel so much pressure to be liked that they reconfigure their entire personality to get other people's approval.  In fact it's almost as if we have been indoctrinated with the belief that we need to be as accepting and affirmative as possible.  But, Mark Manson writes in his book The Subtle Art ..., we need to reject something, otherwise we stand for nothing and therefore live our lives without purpose.  He writes:

We are defined by what we choose to reject.  And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all.

So perhaps I have to start saying no a little more.  Am I doing OK - well often the answer is no:  I'm packing up, I'm sorting out, I'm throwing out.  It's tough.  I hang onto the thought that something good will come of this, but getting through these last few weeks is hard.  I've said no to meetings and social events recently and I feel better for it.  Thankfully I have amazing colleagues who are kind, caring and who show me every day that what I've done over my 6 years here has been impactful and influential - on them and on our students.  This is just the end of one chapter - it's not the end of the book.  There's another chapter waiting to be written, and pretty soon I'm going to be doing just that.

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Do something!

Earlier this year I think I used the term "paralysed by indecision" as I considered all the options for moving to the UK.  At the time I think I was like a deer in the headlights as I worried about the myriad of decisions that needed to be made, but as a result of a coaching conversation I came to realise that what I needed to do was simply to make the first decision and that others would fall into place naturally after that - a bit like a series of dominoes that needed the first one to fall and give the rest of them a push.  And truly, having started the push, I do feel a lot better - more in control.

In The Subtle Art Mark Manson writes "Action isn't just the effect of motivation; it's also the cause of it."  It's true that most of us only act if we feel motivated to do so, however the reverse is also true:  action can lead us to become inspired, which in itself can lead to us being motivated, which can then lead to more action.  Sometimes you just have to do something, even if you initially lack the motivation to make such an important change, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way of motivating yourself.

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Growth is an endlessly iterative process

We learn a lot in life from being wrong.  One example of this is that last year when given the choice of summer reads, I immediately rejected one of the books after reading the title and a bit of the first chapter.  It's only recently, when I found a used copy of the book lying around at school, that I picked it up and thought I'd give it a try.  While I don't agree with everything the author writes, it does give me a new perspective.  Today on the way to work I read the chapter about being wrong.

Sometimes we think it is bad to be wrong (or conversely that it is better to be right).  However what Mark Manson writes about being wrong is that we need to see it as an opportunity for growth.  He writes "Growth is an endlessly iteratively process.  When we learn something new we don't go from wrong to right, but from wrong to slightly less wrong ...  we chip away at the ways we're wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow."

The other thing that I've thought about while reading this is that there is not often an absolute right - what we can hope for is finding what is right for us, and that may actually be wrong for someone else.  All of us have our own ideas of what our lives mean and how we should live them.

At school today I was talking to a colleague about the short video Why incompetent people think they're amazing.   It's a case of "you don't know what you don't know".  And yet people who don't know, are certain that they are right.  Manson writes that certainty is the enemy of growth.  What we need to do is to doubt the future, and that will push us to get out and create it for ourselves.  I'm thinking this is true for me.  My upcoming move back to the UK is full of uncertainties - I need to be proactive about getting what I want into that new life.  As he points out, it's all too easy for us to assume we know how the story will end - actually none of us do.  As John Lennon said, "It will all be OK in the end - if it's not OK that means it's not yet the end".  That means we shouldn't settle - when it's not OK it should push us out to do more.  The possibility of change is actually an opportunity for growth.

And here's the interesting thing:  we often don't know at the time what a positive or negative experience is.  We may find something incredibly stressful to live through, yet that something may end up taking is in new directions, forming us in different ways, motivating us to do new things.  Let's hope so.  As I wind down my time in India my life is full of not-OK days, but perhaps in the future I will be able to look at these more positively.  Already I find these not-OK times have been opportunities for people to reach out in kindness to me, and that in itself is very precious.

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Staying connected

Yesterday I met Edna Sackson.  She is someone I've "known" online for around 8 years.  We first "met" as part of the blogging alliance set up by Kelly Tenkely in the 2009-10 school year.  We became part of a network of teachers who exchanged our ideas and shared our practice.  Edna was in Mumbai this week running a PYP workshop about getting connected.  It was truly amazing to meet her in person after all this time.  And it got me thinking about ways I get connected in my personal as well as my professional life.

Over 30 years ago, when I was 23, I went to India.  The only real way of staying connected with my parents was to write letters.  But it wasn't really a connection - it wasn't two-way communication.  I would write a letter and they would not be able to write back as I was on the move a lot.  Only once, in the whole time I was there, did I managed to make a phonecall to them, and that took a lot of organising and booking a specific time for a "person to person" call.   Even so that was better than the situation faced by a friend of mine who went to work with the Antarctic Survey team, who was told he could send 60 words a month to his parents!

My son is currently walking the Pacific Crest Trail.  Although he is out in wilderness areas, in mountains and deserts, he's managed to stay in regular contact for the weeks he has been away.  We use Whatsapp to talk to each other, but we communicate in lots of other ways as well.  For example he drops photos into a shared iCloud folder for me to see.  He has left me voice notes which I have turned into blog posts, which then get sent out via email and Facebook.  He has an Instagram account where he posts photos and video.  Although he is a long way away without much of a connection for a lot of this time, I still feel pretty connected, and when we actually speak it's as clear as if he is standing in the next room.

I know in this I'm blessed.  On days when I don't hear from him I've taken to reading posts about the sections he is walking from other hikers who did the trail last year.  Some of them have posted videos so I can see the terrain he is walking through.  My own parents didn't have a clue where I was or what I was doing when I was overseas in my 20s, in the case of my son I have a pretty good idea what he is doing almost every day.

How do you stay connected?

By the way, if you want to follow his progress along the PCT, here is a link to his blog (he's currently done about 10% of the walk).

Happy Mother's Day everyone!

Photo Credit:  personal photo - completing 10% of the PCT

Voice, choice and ownership

This is going to be a personal post, not about technology.  If you're not interested in personal stuff you might like to skip this one.  I'll be writing a post about getting and keeping connected using technology after this, so you might want to fast-forward to that.

Voice, choice and ownership have been in my mind for around a year now.  I started thinking about them as part of a design challenge to re-envision technology at ASB last year, and of course agency, covering all 3 of these, is at the heart of the workshops I've been designing for the IB.  Yet at the same time over the past year I've felt powerless in my own personal life.   Circumstances outside of my own control are driving me out of India.  I've been wracked with guilt about my inability to provide adequate care for my mother who has dementia.  In less than a month now I'll be leaving India and starting the journey home.

Reading on in The Subtle Art ... I came across this:

If you're miserable in your current situation, chances are it's because you feel like some part of it is outside your control - that there's a a problem you have no ability to solve, a problem that was somehow thrust upon you without your choosing.  

When we feel that we're choosing our problems, we feel empowered.  When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.

What this post is about is choice.  We often don't have any control over what happens, but we do have control over how we respond - in fact even not responding is a choice we make.  Basically it's like this:  we are responsible for our experiences - we are always choosing - we have ownership.

I had a bad day on Friday.  In the afternoon one of my colleagues said to me "You have to take back control" and it's true.  In The Subtle Art the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility" gets turned around.   Now it's "with great responsibility comes great power".   The more we accept responsibility, the more ownership we have, and the more power we have over our lives.  Accepting responsibility and ownership is the first step to solving a problem.

So here's another thing that I've been thinking about:  there is a difference between fault and responsibility.  Fault is something that is in the past - those choices have already been made.  Responsibility is the present - it's to do with the choices you are currently making.  It doesn't do any good to blame someone else for your situation - they might have caused the situation (fault) but they are not now responsible for it.  You get to choose.  You get to see things and react to them the way you want.

Life is like a game of cards.  We all get dealt different ones, and some get better cards than others.  But the game is played by the choices you make about using the cards you have in your hand, the risks and opportunities you choose to take, and the consequences you choose to live with.

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Fire bullets before cannonballs

On Sundays I meet up with a group of teachers from a number of different institutions for Cognitive Coaching.  Yesterday we were talking about why some school initiatives don't stick.  For example when I first came to India huge numbers of people were being trained in the Data Wise approach.  I even blogged about this back in September 2012, and I was excited by this approach.  However I didn't use it much myself and though there seems to be a revised interest in data this year (we are currently doing data inquiry cycles) compared to the huge amount invested in training, there's not much current impact (most of the teachers trained have already left).  The following year it was Critical Friends.  Again I was part of a group, lots of people were trained, but now there are no critical friends groups left at school, and again this initiative has died a death.  Following on from that we've had Responsive Classroom, Adaptive Schools and Cognitive Coaching.  As one of our group said yesterday, "seems like every time another bandwagon comes along, we jump off the old one and onto the new one".  And what a waste - of human talent, of PD money, of the potential for making a true difference by integrating one of these deeply into the culture of the school.

So then one of us asked a question:  why do we do this?  What's the purpose of all this new innovation?  Of new initiatives that are invested in heavily but which are not implemented long enough to have teachers reflect, iterate and really make a difference.  All of these initiatives are very worthy - all have the potential to make a huge difference to student learning - so why aren't they sustained?  We talked about the fact that some people just want to make their mark by bringing in something new (good for adding on a CV as well).  We talked about the fact that this could be a marketing policy (see how many things we are involved in), or a way of attracting new teachers.  Certainly our PD is second to none.

And then one of us talked about Jim Collin's advice to fire bullets before cannonballs.  This concept comes from Collin's book Great by Choice.  He writes that first you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk) to figure out what will work - basically you take small shots.  Then once you know you have hit your target fire a few more - just to make sure this is not a coincidence - and then finally bring in the cannonballs: concentrate your resources into one big bet to get huge results.  The ability to turn small proven ideas (bullets) into huge hits (cannonballs) counts more than the sheer amount of pure innovation.

So then I started to think about this business idea in terms of schools.  The fire bullets before cannonballs concept can also be applied to looking at innovation in schools.  Collins writes that innovation is not what distinguishes companies that thrive in tough times from companies that fail.  In fact he noticed that companies that survived tough times were often less innovative than their competitors that failed.  Basically, you shouldn't embark on a large, risky project until you have proven you can hit the target with smaller, less risky projects, that let you figure out what works and what doesn't.

This was the beauty of having an R&D department.  Should we have the students bring in any mobile device for BYOD?  We did a study in 2 classes to determine which was the best device for student learning (it was the laptop).  Should we have students use a second mobile device?  We did a year-long study on that as well in just 3 classes.  What we learned from R&D was this:  we need to try something out and then evaluate it when it's over.  We need to ask the tough questions:

• What worked?
• What didn't work?
• What was too expensive, even if it worked?

But even more important in a school we need to ask what is the impact on student learning?

This post has been some time in the making.  I've been thinking this idea through constantly since last month when a former R&D member shared this quote from Carl Glickman with me (and which I'm sharing again now because all of my thinking around this issue was stimulated by this one quote):

It is irresponsible for a school to mobilize, initiate, and act without any conscious way of determining whether such expenditures of time and energy are having a desirable effect. This sounds obvious, but most schools move from innovation to innovation, expending great amounts of time developing new curricula, learning new practices, and acquiring new material and equipment. Then, after initial enthusiasm has passed, they have no sense of whether these efforts helped students. 

I think we have to be brave and ask the tough questions about what we are doing in schools.  Are we firing bullets or cannonballs?  Because if we are firing cannonballs and they are not hitting their target then we will run out of gunpowder quickly, and then we will die.  Our students don't get a second chance when we make the wrong decisions or jump on the wrong bandwagon.  It's their future we are talking about, and their future is precious.

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Minding the gap: family matters

During my 30 year teaching career I've worked with some of the most challenging communities as well as some that are very wealthy, and one thing I've come to appreciate is that things are not always what they seem.  In my last post I wrote a little about my impressions of working in a mining community during the miners' strike of the 1980s, and about the challenges faced by the students in my class.  As I read further in Narrowing the Attainment Gap, many of these students spring vividly to mind, as the factors of home life, community, low self-esteem, lack of aspiration and special educational needs were particularly strong in contributing to their educational experience.

Daniel Sobel writes that students spend only 15% of their time in school, and while teachers can make a significant impact in this time, you also have to consider the impact of parents, home life and economic context on attainment.   In fact learning starts from birth, and one interesting thing I read is that studies in the USA show that by the age of 4, even before they start school, children from professional backgrounds encounter over 30 million more words than children whose parents are on welfare.  Also there is the question of which language.  Now for almost 30 years I've worked outside of the UK with children from over 60 different countries and I'm very familiar with students who speak a different language at home from in school.  The issue seems to be compounded by low income.  I reflected on this in the light of my own children, who grew up in the Netherlands where the home language was Dutch.  When they went to an international school, where the language was English, I think initially it was a struggle. In fact all the way through primary school my daughter struggled with spelling in English as she had the "interference" from Dutch, but this did sort itself out in secondary school (but possibly because at this time we were living in Thailand and she didn't hear so much Dutch outside of school, so switched to doing everything in English).

Another issue I was reading about today was that of hunger.  This is something that I did encounter in students during the year-long miners' strike of 1984-5.  Almost every child I taught was the son or daughter of a miner, and these men were out of work for an entire year.  The families did get fed by the NUM if the miners went out and stood on picket lines, which I remember also being a challenge as I had to drive through these flying picket lines every day to get to the school in the mining town where I worked.  The impact of this uncertainty and lack of food, clothing and so on, on the education of these young people, cannot be overestimated.  I never thought I'd see such deprivation in the UK - it was a real eye-opener for me!

Now here's another thing that I relate to:  high mobility.  I feel I've been highly mobile myself and it's good to think about what impact this has had on my own children (a good one I would say - and they would agree).  However when people are forced to move, when it's not their choice, then clearly this can impact education.  I think this is especially true in my international school context.  Students come from so many different educational systems around the world, and we can never be sure just what they have already learned.  That's why we start every unit with a pre-assessment to that we can tap into prior knowledge.  Even so, I've still seen students that have had a sort of Swiss cheese kind of education, with gaps everywhere, as their parents have moved every 2 years because of being posted to different countries.  Alongside this I've seen students who have a smattering of a number of different languages, but this constant shifting has led to semi-lingualism rather than multilingualism, with some students having no real first language.

Constantly shifting can also lead to students experiencing a chaotic home life.  I've taught children who have lived in hotels for months, with little privacy or space to do homework.  I've also taught children whose mothers (mostly) have had to give up work as the main breadwinner has been relocated, and who have been resentful of the move and determined to find nothing right with the new location, which in turn impact the children's experience.  In my time on the Yorkshire coalfield, I worked with many families from Scotland and Durham who had been relocated after their pits closed.  Now they were facing a loss of jobs for a second time.  This anxiety was very prevalent in the community, especially among the teenage boys I taught who had spent their whole life thinking they would be going down the pit themselves.  Now they were facing long-term unemployment:  at the start of the strike there were around 170 working pits, but around 10 years later there were only 6.  The mine in the community where I worked was the last one in the UK to close; in 2015 deep coal mining finished in the UK.

Now obviously there was not much to do in a mining town, especially during the strike.  The town consisted of a huge council estate with extremely poor housing as it had been thrown up quickly when coal had been discovered locally, with another slightly better estate at the local power station which used the coal.  There were no cinemas, there was only one supermarket, and nothing of any cultural interest at all.  Some of the students joined the local scout troop, and there was also a boxing club (one of my students became a UK champion for his weight) and a swimming pool.  At school we ran the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme, which helped some of the students to widen their horizons as well, as many students did not even travel as far as the local market town.  When I told them I'd come from London they had big eyes - it seemed like an exotic place - yet it was only 3 hours away by train.  I remember meeting one student from my first year of teaching about 3 years later.  He told me he was working in a night club collecting and washing dirty glasses.  He was extremely proud of this job:  he told me he loved working in such a "posh" place!

So here we have it - a lack of vision and a lack of ambition.  We did take the students on trips - for example I remember taking a group to York to the Viking museum which was a real treat.  However for most of my students life was going to be down the pit, and for the girls, teenage pregnancy and continuing the cycle of impoverishment, with Friday and Saturday nights and the local Working Men's Club.

How to solve such a problem?  Well clearly there are things the school can do, but the biggest impact is going to be from employing top-quality teachers.  I decided to look into this a little more.  When I left university, teaching was quite a popular profession to go into.  How does it fare over 30 years later?  I looked at my own two children, now in their 20s and discovered that each of them has one friend who went into teaching straight from university.  In the case of my son, his friend became a science teacher with Teach First.  He was placed in a challenging school in an inner city area after just 5 weeks of training.  He lasted 2 years, and is now training to be a doctor.  One of my daughter's friends is also a teacher - she's working in Scotland teaching in a Gaelic school and apparently she loves it (though this does seem a bit of a niche market and possibly parents who choose to send their children to the school are involved and motivated in this type of education).  Looking at the colleagues I started teaching with there are still a couple of them working as teachers, though many left because of the stress, paperwork,  and challenging students combined with lack of support from school leaders.   We must do more to support good teachers to stay!  As Daniel Sobel points out, poor teaching (and I would add here combined with a lack of support - personally I think it's crazy to think you can learn to be a good teacher in just 5 weeks!)  leads to poor student behaviour which then leads to less motivated teachers.

So a fascinating trip down memory lane for me today - and looking forward to reading more about the attainment gap tomorrow.

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Minding the gap: correlation or causal factor?

I grew up in East London.  In my school of around 80 students who took the 11+ in 1970, 8 of them passed and 72 of them failed.  I was one of the 8.  That meant I left primary school and went to a "direct grant" grammar school, which also happened to be a single-sex school.  Now a direct grant school at that time was one that was funded directly from the central government for a certain percentage of the school fees, the remainder of the funding was through private fees.  I therefore went to that school for free, whereas other girls went there because their parents paid for them to go, and while I don't approve of wealthy parents being able to buy a "better" education for their children, I have to admit that going to that school probably changed my life forever.  My father was an Irish immigrant to London and my mother had left school at the age of 13 in 1942 as her London school was bombed during World War II and never rebuilt.  My fate, had I gone to the local secondary school, would probably have been very different.  Likely I would not have gone to university, likely I would not have become a teacher, likely I would not have left the UK for the world of international teaching, where I've been for the past 30 years.  So reading Daniel Sobel's book about the attainment gap I'm really interested in what he refers to as "soft data".  I was one of those kids who almost certainly would have fallen through the gap, but I was also one of the lucky ones who didn't.

Last Friday at our PD day in Mumbai we were talking about reading - in particular the Fountas and Pinnell method of levelling books for guided reading.  I believe that the policy at my school is that students can choose to read books at one level above and one level below their actual assessed reading level.  I remember thinking back to my childhood, where the only children's book in our house was The Wind in the Willows, which our parents read to us one chapter a night.  Somehow, without any direct instruction, I learned to read before I went to school.  As an 8 or 9 year old, I vividly remember reading the "adult" books my parents had in the house - one of which was Hard Times by Charles Dickens and a book called Enquire Within.   Nobody suggested that these were at an inappropriate level for a child to be reading, and sure, I probably didn't understand all the words, but I can also say that these books helped me to build vocabulary and that reading "real" books was probably much more beneficial to me in becoming a reader than the Janet and John books being read in my primary school.  I still read every day, averaging around 50 books a year.  One of my biggest fears is that I won't live long enough to read all the books on my "Want To Read" list!

So in the light of all of this, I was more than curious to know what is more important in educational success:  natural ability or the socio-economic situation of the family and the quality of schools that students attend (my hunch was that it would be the latter).  Research shows that the family environment is seen to have a very strong impact on educational achievement, whereas it has a very small impact on cognitive capacity - which I guess is what causes the gap, as students from poorer families are not achieving to their capacity.  Studies show that other factors are important in educational success, including personality, being open to new experiences, good teachers and good peers.  I thought about this in the light of my own experience and can agree that being with other girls who were both academic and motivated was definitely a plus point in my own schooling, and I can therefore relate to the statement that many children from poor families thrive in education and in the world beyond the classroom.  However it's also clear that there are fewer of these children who reach "the top".  Thinking about the other 3 girls from my primary school who went on to a grammar school, 2 of them were from "good" homes and they also ended up at my school, the other one came from a family where her parents were divorced.  She was rejected by my direct grant school (it was Catholic and selective so unfortunately because of being brought up by a single father she did not really fit the profile of students who were admitted) and ended up instead going to the local co-ed grammar school where she eventually became demotivated and did not achieve her potential.

The girls from my primary school who went on to grammar schools were not well off.  In fact, in the case of Paula who was not admitted to my school, her family income was probably no less than mine.  She lived with a father who worked, I lived with both parents but only my father worked.  In addition I had two younger siblings, so the money was spread out further in my family, to five people rather than two.  The attainment gap is not caused by differences in family income, but instead by other background differences which have been labelled as "mysterious third factors", such as schools.

In my first year of teaching I worked in a small town on the Yorkshire coalfield (it was during the miner's strike - so it was a challenging time to be trying to motivate children).  For a third of my day I was assigned a class known by the non-politically correct term of 4Y (Y being the last letter in the name of the school, this was the bottom stream - only several years later later did this change to a more acceptable way of naming classes, then my class became known as 4MM which was based on my initials, not the ability level of the students).  4Y was the "remedial" class.  Now let's put this into perspective.  I was a first year teacher.  I had no experience at all of working with challenging children from challenging homes.  Some of these children did not have "homes" in the regular sense:  they lived in caravans in a field about 2 miles away from the school.  All of the pupils except two in my class of 24 "special needs" children were from broken homes, and one of the others was still being brought up in a single parent home because her mother had died.  At lunchtime this girl had to walk 2 miles home, light a fire, and prepare food for her dad and older brother who were working in the mine.  She was always late back to school in the afternoon as it was not possible to do all this in the one hour lunch break that we had.  Looking back now I find it almost incredible that I survived this first year, and I truly question whether anything I did made a difference in the lives of these 14 year old students.  They loved listening to me read aloud, which I did every day, and maybe this had some benefit.  My question is why?  Why was this class of challenging, very needy students given to someone with absolutely no experience at all of teaching?  And also, why were this group of students together in every subject for the entire day?  As Daniel Sobel points out, "disadvantaged pupils have a tendency to drift into the bottom sets and stay there".

I don't remember giving any standardised tests at all for most of my time teaching in the UK.  My students sat Mode 3 CSEs and we wrote the test papers ourselves, moderating them with other local teachers.  Since leaving the UK, however, I know a whole battery of tests have been introduced, mostly to measure success or otherwise in the National Curriculum (I should point out that my current school also tests students:  we do the MAP and WRAP tests which are probably equally horrendous).  One thing I didn't consider before is that classroom environments are not ideal testing conditions and that the rate of children being put into the "wrong" group is quite high.  In fact I have noticed that some of our very bright children do seem to take an incredibly long time on these tests, and that the scores are sometimes a surprise, in that they don't really reflect what I see daily in the classrooms.

One thing I do relate to though is that schools are often very isolated (siloed) places - once a teacher closes the classroom door there may be little or no connections with his or her colleagues and the best practices of some teachers in helping individual students may not be shared.  To some extent in a school like mine where teachers are involved in collaborative planning, and where there are actually no doors or even walls, this is not necessarily true, but I do relate to the statement that "good teachers are not sufficient to help close the attainment gap if other important classroom-level factors are missing.  Schools need not just to hire the right teachers but to work across the board."

Schools are blamed for a lot, and clearly looking at the raw data it seems as if there is a correlation between what schools are doing and the fact that the attainment gap grows over time.  I've heard Sir Ken Robinson and others talk about how schools are killing creativity, which likely has an impact on motivation and student achievement.  Daniel Sobel, however, points out that the pre-existing factors that hold students back may be seen less during primary schools because the material being taught is something that every student can learn and because in many primary schools the behaviour policies are well enforced, and it's only later when the content starts to become harder that these environmental factors become more important and students struggle to cope.  He writes, however, that while schools do contribute to the achievement gap, if schools did not exist the gap would be much larger.

Working overseas for most of my teaching career I was especially interested in the findings about gender and ethnic gaps in the UK.  My own limited experience of working in Yorkshire was that the few Indian children I taught did seem to be motivated and do extremely well.  When I was working in Amsterdam it was the Japanese and Koreans.  The UK data seems to confirm this as well.   Many immigrant parents have a strong work ethic, which is transmitted to their children.  However it's interesting that data from different sources ends up with different conclusions.  In the PISA tests white, English students do better than their black and Asian schoolmates, however GCSE results show that Asian pupils do better on average, whereas white, working-class students tend to do worse.  Add gender into the mix and the waters get even muddier.  Boys seem to underperform girls at most educational levels despite there being no difference in average intelligence between genders.  In GCSE science girls tend to outperform boys, in PISA tests the opposite is true.  Strange, right?  I'd like to dig into the reasons for this a bit more, and maybe I will in upcoming posts.  One thing is certain:  I know we can do better in helping students to flourish, and I want to be part of that in whatever way I can be.

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Minding the gap

Last night I had a Skype call with Jill, a consultant at Inclusion Expert, and at the end of our conversation she recommended that I read a book by Daniel Sobel entitled Narrowing the Attainment Gap: A Handbook for Schools.  As this book was only published a couple of months ago, I was interested to see if I could get a Kindle download from the Amazon India store - and yes, I could.  So I downloaded it and read the first chapter yesterday.  My plan is to blog about my thoughts on this issue over the next week or so.

Daniel Sobel is an expert in the field of inclusion and his book is aimed at supporting schools leaders to understand the attainment gap in their own school context, and then give practical advice on meeting the needs of children who struggle in school, thus reducing the gap.

Here are some of the key take-aways from the introduction to the book:

• The key barriers to inclusion are time, money and attitudes
• Inclusion and the attainment gap are mostly to do with soft data (motivations and barriers for individual students and school contexts)
• The two main challenges that underlie inclusion are classroom teaching and whole-school systems.  Addressing these two things together can transform schools.

Clearly as an educator who writes a blog called Tech Transformation, I'm interested in anything that can transform the educational experience for students.  I'm very much looking forward to learning more about this important issue and hopefully getting involved in the transformation once I'm back in the UK in the summer.

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The what and the why

Over the years I've led a lot of PYP workshops and one model that we used to help teachers understand why our focus is on concepts and not facts is the avocado model.  In this model knowledge is divided into 3:  things that are worth knowing, things that it's important to know and finally the enduring understandings.  I thought about this model again as I was reading about the self-awareness onion.  In this model there are also multiple layers, and as the saying goes, the more you peel them back, the more likely it is you are going to start crying!

The first layer of the self-awareness onion is the what - it's your emotions - what you are feeling right now.  Most of us can identify these, though we do have our blind spots, as growing up we were told that some emotions were inappropriate.  The second layer of the onion is the why - it's our ability to ask why we feel the things we do.  These why questions are often linked with what we regard as success or failure and asking the why questions helps us to understand the cause of the emotion - and only once we understand the root cause then we can do something to change it.  Right in the middle of the onion are our personal values and standards - this is the way we view and judge ourselves and others.  Mark Manson in The Subtle Art ... says that this layer is the most important, because our values determine the nature of our problems, and in turn this determines the quality of our lives.

Reading this through I was also reminded of Dilts' model about our identity, which I learned about in my Cognitive Coaching training.  This goes deeper still than beliefs and values.  Basically the premise of this model, which underpins coaching, is that what we think influences how we behave and that influences the results we get.  Hence the focus of cognitive coaching is on thinking.  I love it when I can make connections between the different things that I'm reading!  In coaching we always recognise the outer layer of the onion - the emotions - when we start to paraphrase.  This lets the coachee know that we are trying to understand and helps to build trust and rapport.  Our paraphrases and questioning may start to illuminate the why.

In Dilts' model, change has to happen at more than one level.  For example if you change the environment or behaviour this may simply be a form of compliance - for sustainable change to be made you have to tap into more than one level.   If you want to change behaviour, you need to focus on capabilities.  If you want capabilities to change, then you need to first focus on beliefs and values.

Back to Mark Manson again.  He writes, "If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value, and/or how you measure failure and success."  He goes on to write about how you need to give up the false gods of pleasure, material success, always being right and always being positive - in fact what we need to do is to confront your problems, rather than avoid them.

The next chapter is about choice.  I've been exploring choice this year with a new focus on agency in the enhanced PYP.  I'm looking forward to reading and sharing this chapter soon.