We ask students to write all the time but rarely ask why. The Ken Robinson enthusiasts among you will claim there's an outdated Victorian model in place; other liberals will argue it's all about teacher accountability and not quality. System technocrats, especially in English and Maths, will claim it embeds and proves attainment of learning objectives for e.g. Assessing Pupil Progress, while traditionalists will argue that it's all about the (lost?) basics we need to go back to; with raised eyebrow a few cynics will tartly observe that it's to keep students quiet for a certain proportion of the lesson and force some individual thinking in a generation that talks well but lacks attention span.
All have some truth to them. But try this: it has two wildly different and conflicting purposes. What if we needed students to write for a limited, very traditional and strict purpose - because exams are written and so will very many decent jobs be - and separately, for a wider, more idealistic purpose: because it's the ultimate method of exchange of ideas in depth, of skilled argument and reflection, condensed to a tight form? If they were true, we'd do two different kinds of writing, and neither of them might look that much like the broken-down spoon-fed short written exercises now so common across all subjects: first, we'd much more commonly use formal test papers to acclimatise students to (and quite insistently use well-supervised peer marking to measure progress on) exams - slightly dull but precise and necessarily regular - perhaps even weekly. And beyond that, we'd let written tasks have pretty free rein, and encourage students to be as ambitious, free-thinking and wide-ranging as possible in writing. What that would mean is freeing up most classroom time outside of the revise / test / peer-mark cycle to be about group project work, self-directed learning (flip the classroom here if you like), talk and flexible deadlines; and we'd make the recording of this learning in written form a highly flexible range of outcome options - for students to write what, and when, they like, to show the world what they have learnt and now understand or can do. In other words, we'd do more exam work, and almost all writing beyond that would be on student blogs. Because a blog isn't telling your teacher or your parents you are ticking boxes in the subject: it's showing the world you get it, and want in on the global discussions about it. So I've spent the past few months with GCSE and A-level classes doing absolutely no writing at all beyond sample tests and student blogs.
What I've found is that the most powerful and compelling reason for asking students to write for an entirely public audience is this: they realise how high that bar is, and can be initially intimidated about the prospect. But that removes all apathy or sense that the writing is a humdrum task - that perennial cry of "What's the point?" disappears at a stroke. Asking all students to write their own blogs as their learning unfolds and interlinks empowers the teacher to be more supportive because they're less tied to the bureaucratic side of the process; it raises the challenge level; it enables IT-skilling though confirming the message that "content is king"; it enables good differentiation; students can easily personalise their work; it lets them see their own progress; it promotes limited and purposeful writing and means more productive and accelerating talk time in learning rather than rote writing tasks.
The breadth of results has impressed me. Students have collated and commented on topical news, explained practical implications and real-world examples of syllabus phenomena, made "Comment is free" type posts detailing their views on issues, written up experiments in thorough detail, published data they have either researched or sourced elsewhere and linked it to other topics, and commented skillfully on one another's work. And if, as the best have done, they write professionally in the public domain already as teenagers - which top university Admissions Director wouldn't offer them a place on a degree course of their choice?
There are a powerful range of practical advantages to student blogging over other written forms. Composing complex written arguments with IT is better than on paper - you can adjust planning as you go, cut-and-paste as your argument develops; add in the online capacity to link-reference other webpages (the teacher's or peers' blogs, news stories, resource pages) as you construct the argument and you have a really punchy way to create a detailed and well-argued viewpoint. The range of interfaces, appearances, skins etc associated with public tools like Blogger and Wordpress professionalises the appearance of students' work and they rise to that implicit reward with serious attempts to write in depth: seeing your work given impressive profile and knowing the world is only a click away from reading what you think is considerably more motivating than continuing to write longhand in that dog-eared exercise book.
Feedback, groupwork and a visible papertrail are all effortless gains in this model. Display student work for class discussion, comment in reply to students' posts to give feedback; set homework for them to make short comment critiques on one another's blogposts; give project tasks requiring them to read multiple peers' work and synthesise an overview post with linked references. No hassle passing exercise books around / taking other students' work home to peer-comment on (and losing it); all their blogs are linked to from my own as class teacher. They can review across classes and year groups. They can also find resources on my blog or by following a dedicated Twitter feed. Line managers wishing to check my classes' work can trace to the minute what tasks were set, what resources provided, what reminders given; to the minute they know the time students posted their work in reply, commented on or fed back to one another, and can see if and in what way I've provided further feedback; an email papertrail confirms further support where needed - all without leaving their desk. (By the way, I'm not intimidated by this intrusive rise in monitoring capability. I do my job well and want my students to feel that accountability isn't something to be scared of either. In return, I give students, and expect from my SLT, considerable flexibility in using this powerful system: don't be bureaucratically nit-picking about timescales or exact procedures; stick to the big picture of whether the student is engaging and developing.) This is all massively more powerful, and infinitely easier, than collecting exercise books for monitoring and restricting peer-feedback to within the classroom, and a source of far less hassle and conflict than fixed small-scale written homeworks with exact deadlines. Furthermore, parents can easily be directed both to any information they need to help and (should they complain) to the evidence of what their child has both received and achieved - and to comparative students' work from within the same class. This forcefully and positively shifts the onus back onto the student to self-manage and the parent to monitor - where it ought to be - so I can remain a lead learner on tap as a resource for the motivated, and an aid to the struggling, more than a policeman of small-scale paper-based tasks.
Of course, there are a number of "I wouldn't risk that" concerns with student blogging, but none justify avoiding it: my aim is not to tell you that it is problem-free, but that its problems are essentially no different to any conventional learning medium. Most terrifyingly for the luddites and senior leaders, the risk of defamatory or provocative remarks exists; but this is a behavioural issue, not a technological one. It's no different to the risk of a student in uniform mouthing off at the local shopkeeper, or a student on stage in the school play "going off on one" - we fear these things, but they rarely ever happen, and are behaviour issues to be addressed like any other, not technological issues. Don't deprive all of an exciting outlet because of fear of a remote possibility of misuse by a tiny few. (In fact, the very public exposure of allowing students to blog about classroom activity is a sign of trust to which students rise admirably. And I advise a common sense approach to online courtesy and standards, not another wordy policy with fixed rules. Like most issues of morality / community consensus, discussing them if problems arise is a good opportunity, not a delay, and enriches understanding. I've had no problem all year with this.) And anyone who's ever managed a Facebook-centred incident in school will know the useful incontrovertability of screenshots as proof. Policing this kind of misbehaviour, if it does occur, isn't so hard. And if you really want you can require them to give you editing rights on their blog (I don't want to, but it's easy if you insist.)
Others worry that some student work is too weak for this medium and will make the school look bad or the student feel demoralised. But we put all our students' work on display boards, don't we? And we claim to care about the progress each makes over time - where better than a blog to show that flow of development? Student bloggers are not meant to be the finished article as writers (I'm not sure most professional bloggers are...) and what we're looking for is for them to strive to emulate, and participate in, a global community of discussion, however fledgling their efforts. Support the weakest closely but don't hold back for that reason: all should be told they're worthy and able to attempt it, that they have a right to their views - and that they too must try to meet a standard of excellence if they're to draw readership.
Plagiarism is also a problem, but surprisingly less online than offline. I've had one incidence of this all year (that I know of!) - a direct lift from the textbook. A discreet, firmly-worded private email explaining copyright law to the student (copied to the parental email) and a brief non-naming public reiteration to the whole class of how this was both a legal problem, a disciplinary issue and (worst of all) just poor character, effort and engagement - the post swiftly disappeared and the problem never occurred again. In group work, groups can share and co-write sections and use them across multiple blogs - they're just asked to make clear when they do this.
Use of strong language (to make a point, rather than directed use designed purely to offend) is a moot point. I have a philosophical position that this should not be stonewalled in public discussion, and it is not the place of a school to ban it. I allowed A2 Sociology students this year to use it in political posts; tellingly, they did so freely in early posts, but then its use fell away - strong language sometimes has a place that cannot be replaced (often it is critical in satire, for example) - but its casual use disempowers it and makes the writing appear lazy and ill-thought-out. The students themselves ended up reflecting that they should choose words better and not so easily. "You don't hear Polly Toynbee saying 'What a dick' in her articles, even though she clearly thinks David Cameron is one," asserted one perceptive wit, to general agreement. This is not a conversation teacher training prepared me for, but I'm glad it happened; and I think those students are better writers now for learning, with freedom to choose, how to make words have their most powerful effect. Of course, language is a thorny issue, so I share this story without wanting to impose the advice.
The last major concern is Child Protection but this ought to be shrugged off. Certainly older students are far more risk-savvy online than the press moral panic would have us believe; they all use Facebook all the time so telling them blogging isn't safe is laughable to them; and a glance at educators' Twitter accounts would reveal numerous links to excellent webpages, class blogs, and Twitter accounts being run for / by / with students down to primary age. Teach e-safety once and well, and take firm action in the rare occasions there is a genuine problem - but don't lock your kids away from the world. My students were delightfully amazed and excited to discover postgrads in Germany, travel writers in South-East Asia and Occupy activists in the US liking, commenting on and following their blogs. There is a world of engagement out there - let's get in touch!
None of this is a unique experiment. It's part of a broader, slow, piecemeal colonisation of this new frontier of IT-led learning. I see strong similarities of aim and approach with excellent initiatives like inter-school Quad Blogging, class blogs with multiple student authors, forum debate pages, increasingly commonplace teacher-written content blogs (please get off VLEs, they're depressingly clumsy and archaic alongside a blogging / tweeting class system), and the habit of using class tweets to see if the world responds. These great initiatives all share the same aim - to get students facing out to the world of interaction - and I'm heartened but (as a secondary specialist) faintly embarrassed that so many are primary-led. The system I describe is one I use with year 10 through 13, and hopefully provides a complement to primary excellence of blogging use; adapt and use as you see fit. Or contact me to discuss it via Skype - how's that for useful CPD!
So where now? Our first year of use has been rewarding and engaging for students and myself, relatively problem-free, an example which other subjects in the school have now started to follow, and intriguing. I am genuinely confident it has enhanced students' enjoyment, their writing skill, and their university prospects. Our use has been a bit hit-and-miss - but that's what a trial is for, and I go into year two with a clearer idea of the advantages, limitations and required timely guidance in asking students to write for the public forum. Next year I'll provide even more exemplars, flowcharts of thinking-to-writing processes, more emphasis on image and use of video, perhaps some spoof too, instead of all serious (to satirise something you have first, by definition, to understand it); and I may use more written feedback on blogs, as well as oral formative comment and discussion in class. I've not come across other KS4/5 student blogging programmes but I'd welcome the chance to collaborate and I'd encourage others to try this. Remember what learning is for - to enrich and connect our understanding of things. Remember what writing is for - to share what we see, think and believe, and invite response. Remember what schools are for - preparation to enter a wide world of possibility. And as Durrenmatt said: "A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge." Who wouldn't want their exploratory classroom to look like that, and their students to live and learn that way? Get all your students blogging and you will see how exciting exploration can be.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Middling standards, being mean, and how every child matters
Right, let's rattle some cages. That headline probably makes you think, as we pass through exam season and await the grades that August brings, that this will be another blog / movement / initiative / mentoring scheme which is about pushing up "satisfactory" or "bog-standard" schools / teachers / students through forceful management and monitoring, so that your class / department / school / federation / pan-galactic empire achieves 100% A*-C. You will be disappointed with what follows as I intend to tell you I pay little attention to the C/D borderline and sometimes let students fail even though I know I could get them C. But hear me out - and first I need to go a little around the houses in some theory.
School value-added analyses continue to use the mean as their average when in fact they should use the median. How a mathematical distinction which should be obvious to a level 4 student slips by 400,000 teachers every year quite escapes me. Let me explain. Ten of 30 students in your class hit their data targets. Ten beat it - usually by one grade. Ten miss it - seven of them by one grade and three recalcitrant sorts refuse to do anything work-wise and each miss by three to six grades. Use the median and your value-added is zero - you're exactly performing to target (if indeed student grades can be used to measure teachers, but let's presume so for today.) Use the mean and the data is skewed heavily by those three refusers: you're at minus a third of a grade on average or so and hovering on statistical underperformance. Certainly you are going to have a difficult performance management meeting this year. But the same number of children beat target as fell short. But two of the three problem students are problems right across the school - and one barely attends. A mean average, as any year 8 maths student should know, is skewed by a small number of extreme data points. And whilst it is almost impossible for an individual student to get more than +2 grades above data, it is easy - if you resist, refuse to study, or absent yourself - to get far worse.
The appeal goes that "every child matters" - you can't let those students fail, even if they represent only 10% of your class, even if they are choosing to fight you. Somehow you have to get through - every child matters, and their future is in your hands even if their past is a problem. Fairness, goes the argument, is a society in which we give up on no child. This is idealistically true but practically limited, and here's why: ask yourself how much more time you spend on those students than on the diligent (and equally deserving in a different way) who embrace every task you set and who want help moving from B to A - or A*. You're not allowed to answer that you help them too - because you don't, if you're endlessly chasing the problems to drag them up to C. You're lying to yourself. And you might need to ignore the instruction to get everyone Cs and back a more natural justice approach - perhaps a somewhat Tory approach of telling people to sort themselves out before they're entitled to more help. Teachers' time is a finite resource and a decision to devote it to one cause is, ipso facto, a decision to reject another: to "save" one child is by that very choice to abandon another - and just because the abandoned don't complain as loudly doesn't make it any better a choice.
The C/D borderline is not the be-all and end-all and principled teachers, confident of their purpose, should ignore it. Focus on excellence and you will get results - and I mean this at all levels of the academic scale, and in all contexts. Focus on results and all you will get is narrow-purpose minimal-competence drilling - mediocrity by any other name. I had a conversation almost a decade back with a different Head of Department colleague who got 100% A*-C in their department - more than three-quarters of them C. I got about 90% as 3 students in my department missed C, and she held forth that she had "beaten" me. But my department's median grade was A and hers was C. My value-added median was +2 over data targets and hers was 0. In addition she had managed to massage a cohort into universal middling values which leave employers and universities completely unable to distinguish talent and commitment from spoon-fed apathy. She and her staff had devoted 80% of her time to 20% of her students and settled for moderate competence from the highly able. My department had 6 A*s and strong A-level take-up; hers had one and little, respectively. I'll take my 90% A*-C rate over her 100%, thank you. The point is this: by all means invest that reasonable amount of extra time, sympathy, support, and pushing in those struggling to find a way to love the subject and engage with it; but in the end, stop depriving others who deserve your attention too, at a different level, and distribute yourself more evenly to all. If fairness is a society in which we give up on no child, why are you ignoring the potential A* students on the other side of the room? (And the F/G who could reach E too.) Why are you investing more time in catch-up sessions than extension opportunities? If EVERY child matters - that means the able and well-behaved too. Sometimes those who continue to resist, refuse and who want to fail need to be allowed to do so. It's not giving up. It's giving your best, and more time than they're due, and then leaving them the consequences of their choices. Keep the lines of communication open (often the recognition that, although you're there and waiting to work with them, you will no longer continue to be at their beck and call endlessly, or that you have stopped prioritising them, is the very stimulus that wakes them up and kick-starts a late recovery) and hope that, even if they don't turn this round in time, they'll learn the lesson in time for a resit or the next stage of qualifications. Remember we are teaching children for life, about self-application. Every child matters: go spend some time with that potential A* over there instead. Don't be happy about his high grade B essay comparing Brutus and Antony's speeches in Act 3 of Julius Caesar; ask him why he isn't both cross-comparing them and also comparing them to the previous evidence of the two protagonists' private character and public image - and perhaps also to other great speeches of Shakespeare. Letting 2-3 students each year fail if their engagement level proves they intend to, and being conspicuous in not bending over backwards to do it all for them, can have powerful effects in motivating not just those of high potential but the middling too: if they know that both (a) people will be allowed to get their just deserts - high or low and that (b) you'll invest time in anyone and it's their responsibility to make what they can of that - suddenly a previously ignored majority can fly. Try to get through to the demotivated, and always provide every help to the weak, but give everyone the time they deserve; and make sure parents get the message if their child is under-applying - and that it is THEIR business (students AND parents), and not yours, to fix that.
And this is why I refuse to use the mean in data analyses. If twenty students in a class of thirty-one beat their target grade (as happened in my GCSE class last year), most by one grade, I'm not about to let two wilfully apathetic refusers on target-minus-four cancel that out. So I'm taking the median instead, which treats each child underperforming as the same as each child overperforming - what matters is how many under/over perform, not by how far. Because every child matters - so a mean value-added analysis which scores those two refusers as four times as important as each of the twenty who worked damned hard to overperform - is just downright offensive. Means and medians are averages - are ways of working out "the middle" - well, what I'm saying is that if you use the mean, your focus is on middling values - in the derogatory sense - on block-scoring mediocre, minimal-competence C grades. It's offensively preferential, it panders to resisters over the deserving, it sends the wrong message about quality in education, and it is useless to employers. I reject the mean, and the obsession with C/D, on principle - and don't be surprised that I therefore almost always beat, in practice, those who champion it solely.
At this point, depressingly, there are probably still some alarmed Senior Leaders out there reading this and thinking "He's dangerous, I'd fire him", or at least "I'd get him to see why he's wrong" (which means, "I'd make him change back to focusing on the C/D borderline and if not, then I'd fire him.") And it is these people, and not my approach, that is the problem. In terms of getting students A* grades last year, I was seventy-five times as effective as the average core subject teacher at my last school. SEVENTY-FIVE TIMES. And I am not walking on water; I am not especially brilliant; I simply reject a dogma of triage about getting everyone C both on principle and because in practice it always results in dumbing-down. And there are people who think the problem is my approach? Senior Leaders - I ask you: who wouldn't want a teacher who gets these results? (And for the record, I have never, ever, taught in a selective context, and the school I am referring to last year was only 3 years ago in Special Measures and on Ed Balls' famous hit list. The course was sat in 60% of the recommended course time. I invite you to challenge my credentials on social justice vs elitism and on quality vs context.)
So ask yourself whether you're dividing your time fairly. And next time you're asked for a value-added analysis, use the median and not the mean, and strongly challenge anyone who uses a mean instead. It's OK that some students fail. It's not OK that many students don't reach their fullest potential because we're obsessing about the far fewer who might fail. Because every child matters - not some more than others. Think what it really means.
School value-added analyses continue to use the mean as their average when in fact they should use the median. How a mathematical distinction which should be obvious to a level 4 student slips by 400,000 teachers every year quite escapes me. Let me explain. Ten of 30 students in your class hit their data targets. Ten beat it - usually by one grade. Ten miss it - seven of them by one grade and three recalcitrant sorts refuse to do anything work-wise and each miss by three to six grades. Use the median and your value-added is zero - you're exactly performing to target (if indeed student grades can be used to measure teachers, but let's presume so for today.) Use the mean and the data is skewed heavily by those three refusers: you're at minus a third of a grade on average or so and hovering on statistical underperformance. Certainly you are going to have a difficult performance management meeting this year. But the same number of children beat target as fell short. But two of the three problem students are problems right across the school - and one barely attends. A mean average, as any year 8 maths student should know, is skewed by a small number of extreme data points. And whilst it is almost impossible for an individual student to get more than +2 grades above data, it is easy - if you resist, refuse to study, or absent yourself - to get far worse.
The appeal goes that "every child matters" - you can't let those students fail, even if they represent only 10% of your class, even if they are choosing to fight you. Somehow you have to get through - every child matters, and their future is in your hands even if their past is a problem. Fairness, goes the argument, is a society in which we give up on no child. This is idealistically true but practically limited, and here's why: ask yourself how much more time you spend on those students than on the diligent (and equally deserving in a different way) who embrace every task you set and who want help moving from B to A - or A*. You're not allowed to answer that you help them too - because you don't, if you're endlessly chasing the problems to drag them up to C. You're lying to yourself. And you might need to ignore the instruction to get everyone Cs and back a more natural justice approach - perhaps a somewhat Tory approach of telling people to sort themselves out before they're entitled to more help. Teachers' time is a finite resource and a decision to devote it to one cause is, ipso facto, a decision to reject another: to "save" one child is by that very choice to abandon another - and just because the abandoned don't complain as loudly doesn't make it any better a choice.
The C/D borderline is not the be-all and end-all and principled teachers, confident of their purpose, should ignore it. Focus on excellence and you will get results - and I mean this at all levels of the academic scale, and in all contexts. Focus on results and all you will get is narrow-purpose minimal-competence drilling - mediocrity by any other name. I had a conversation almost a decade back with a different Head of Department colleague who got 100% A*-C in their department - more than three-quarters of them C. I got about 90% as 3 students in my department missed C, and she held forth that she had "beaten" me. But my department's median grade was A and hers was C. My value-added median was +2 over data targets and hers was 0. In addition she had managed to massage a cohort into universal middling values which leave employers and universities completely unable to distinguish talent and commitment from spoon-fed apathy. She and her staff had devoted 80% of her time to 20% of her students and settled for moderate competence from the highly able. My department had 6 A*s and strong A-level take-up; hers had one and little, respectively. I'll take my 90% A*-C rate over her 100%, thank you. The point is this: by all means invest that reasonable amount of extra time, sympathy, support, and pushing in those struggling to find a way to love the subject and engage with it; but in the end, stop depriving others who deserve your attention too, at a different level, and distribute yourself more evenly to all. If fairness is a society in which we give up on no child, why are you ignoring the potential A* students on the other side of the room? (And the F/G who could reach E too.) Why are you investing more time in catch-up sessions than extension opportunities? If EVERY child matters - that means the able and well-behaved too. Sometimes those who continue to resist, refuse and who want to fail need to be allowed to do so. It's not giving up. It's giving your best, and more time than they're due, and then leaving them the consequences of their choices. Keep the lines of communication open (often the recognition that, although you're there and waiting to work with them, you will no longer continue to be at their beck and call endlessly, or that you have stopped prioritising them, is the very stimulus that wakes them up and kick-starts a late recovery) and hope that, even if they don't turn this round in time, they'll learn the lesson in time for a resit or the next stage of qualifications. Remember we are teaching children for life, about self-application. Every child matters: go spend some time with that potential A* over there instead. Don't be happy about his high grade B essay comparing Brutus and Antony's speeches in Act 3 of Julius Caesar; ask him why he isn't both cross-comparing them and also comparing them to the previous evidence of the two protagonists' private character and public image - and perhaps also to other great speeches of Shakespeare. Letting 2-3 students each year fail if their engagement level proves they intend to, and being conspicuous in not bending over backwards to do it all for them, can have powerful effects in motivating not just those of high potential but the middling too: if they know that both (a) people will be allowed to get their just deserts - high or low and that (b) you'll invest time in anyone and it's their responsibility to make what they can of that - suddenly a previously ignored majority can fly. Try to get through to the demotivated, and always provide every help to the weak, but give everyone the time they deserve; and make sure parents get the message if their child is under-applying - and that it is THEIR business (students AND parents), and not yours, to fix that.
And this is why I refuse to use the mean in data analyses. If twenty students in a class of thirty-one beat their target grade (as happened in my GCSE class last year), most by one grade, I'm not about to let two wilfully apathetic refusers on target-minus-four cancel that out. So I'm taking the median instead, which treats each child underperforming as the same as each child overperforming - what matters is how many under/over perform, not by how far. Because every child matters - so a mean value-added analysis which scores those two refusers as four times as important as each of the twenty who worked damned hard to overperform - is just downright offensive. Means and medians are averages - are ways of working out "the middle" - well, what I'm saying is that if you use the mean, your focus is on middling values - in the derogatory sense - on block-scoring mediocre, minimal-competence C grades. It's offensively preferential, it panders to resisters over the deserving, it sends the wrong message about quality in education, and it is useless to employers. I reject the mean, and the obsession with C/D, on principle - and don't be surprised that I therefore almost always beat, in practice, those who champion it solely.
At this point, depressingly, there are probably still some alarmed Senior Leaders out there reading this and thinking "He's dangerous, I'd fire him", or at least "I'd get him to see why he's wrong" (which means, "I'd make him change back to focusing on the C/D borderline and if not, then I'd fire him.") And it is these people, and not my approach, that is the problem. In terms of getting students A* grades last year, I was seventy-five times as effective as the average core subject teacher at my last school. SEVENTY-FIVE TIMES. And I am not walking on water; I am not especially brilliant; I simply reject a dogma of triage about getting everyone C both on principle and because in practice it always results in dumbing-down. And there are people who think the problem is my approach? Senior Leaders - I ask you: who wouldn't want a teacher who gets these results? (And for the record, I have never, ever, taught in a selective context, and the school I am referring to last year was only 3 years ago in Special Measures and on Ed Balls' famous hit list. The course was sat in 60% of the recommended course time. I invite you to challenge my credentials on social justice vs elitism and on quality vs context.)
So ask yourself whether you're dividing your time fairly. And next time you're asked for a value-added analysis, use the median and not the mean, and strongly challenge anyone who uses a mean instead. It's OK that some students fail. It's not OK that many students don't reach their fullest potential because we're obsessing about the far fewer who might fail. Because every child matters - not some more than others. Think what it really means.
Monday, 14 May 2012
Wilshaw busts a gut - just not his own
Further to recent remarks by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Head of Ofsted ("Teachers don't know what stress is"), a leaked document from the National Audit Office has revealed that the government is forming a calculus for levels of teacher stress. MBD on Education can exclusively reveal the content of this calculation process and why the document has not been released to the public courtesy of an off-the-record leak by a junior statistician at the NAO. The results will shock teachers, but probably not surprise them. (Unless anyone is foolish enough to believe this spoof / sketch is genuine news, of course.)
Our source was unable to discover which firm had won the contract - "it was one of those massive firms that parasite onto public sectors contracts, like Serco or Capita, but neither of those two - I can't remember and they'd erased their logo from the paperwork by the time it reached me, once they realised the project was tanking. They'd moved on to a new DWP contract removing the long-term unemployed from the voting register by then."
The reason the formula has not been applied is obvious upon closer examination of the maths involved. Here is the formula, explained by our NAO statistician:
"It looks complex but let me break it down for you. The sideways M letters are sigmas - you add things up. c is the number of curriculum change initiatives - numbered as y ('why bother') - you add all them up from the first day of government to a maximum level of d (for 'derision') - gauged by how many of the population think, inexplicably given that they don't think this about doctors or nurses, that they could do your job better than you. To reduce this slightly, you divide this by h times t where h is the holiday length and t the relatively early time in the day teachers are said to finish, so the top-left sigma is about stress caused by managers and parents and what little respite teachers get from that. You could remember the 'ht' as standing for half-term if you like, except most teachers just spend them ill, recovering barely in time for the next Monday. The ht divider used to balance this proportion of the graph out but in the last decade, and particularly under this government, this part's become top-heavy: the EBacc is messing with the curriculum and the right-wing press has ramped up the we-hate-those-lazy-teachers rhetoric from the 1980s again, and then Gove is trying to abolish the summer holiday too. Plus anyone in the industry knows nobody goes home at half three anyway, so this is the first big stress block.
"The second sigma function is based on stress caused by children. It sums up i - people presumed at first that it stands for children's usual self-centredness, or the 'x' for the zero initiative they regularly show, but actually this function is a measure of how much they use their iPhones instead of doing what they're supposed to - from a value of zero to f, where f is how many times in the average lesson they try to check their Facebook page. This can be divided by w, or the number of bottles of wine teachers are provided with at the end of term. Obviously that divider makes this part of the score very favourable for staff in independent schools, whereas it is often as low as zero for state school teachers, meaning that the child-caused stress figure is divided by zero, producing a level of infinity for stress in this sigma function for teachers in schools of the ungrateful poor.
"Next you add together those two sets of data and multiply them by the large E divided by the small r. The E stands for the ego of your particular headteacher and acts as a multiplier for how much stress comes down to classroom teachers. The nearest thing we have to data from the 1980s suggested that headteachers protected their staff from stress and stupid central initiatives because they remembered what it was like in the classroom but now we have NPQH to develop a sense in headteachers that they're altogether different in kind from teachers, they're a master race who rise to the top inevitably and owe nothing to their erstwhile colleagues. The really important thing, they now realise, is for them to make to it to being Chief Exec of a profit-making academy chain earning a quarter of a million a year so they need never step in a classroom again. You divide this by r - for remuneration of normal teachers, which is obviously falling after years of consecutive pay freezes. Remuneration was slightly higher in some academies than unconverted schools, but this effect is massively outweighed by the Ego rating of heads of academies, who pretty much all think themselves Plato.
"A helpful mnemonic to remember this part of the teacher stress equation is that E/r is like 'Emergency Room', because by now the patient is all but dead on the table."
Next this total amount of stress, for causes from above and below and balanced with any possible benefits, made specific to your context, is divided by a multiplier called 'ao/b'. Our statistician explains: "This is three factors considered together: a is for attendance - we don't know why that's in there, but apparently it has to be included in all school data now, no matter how relevant or otherwise; o is 'opportunity index', a measure of how wealthy an area a school is in, sometimes also called the 'offensiveness index' because we measure it by how many minutes a teacher can go for without being verbally abused in a way most other professionals never have to suffer. In many independent schools this can be months at a time, whereas in inner-city schools it's usually a fraction of a minute. This produces a really low divider score, raising the overall stress level coming out of the equation. You multiply the attendance by how much respite teachers get and then divide it by b, which is 'bare-faced cheek.' This is ascertained by reading the Education Secretary's recent pronouncements, in which a millionaire educated at a thirty-thousand-pound-a-year school with a pupil / teacher ratio of 8:1 and which sends more students to Oxbridge than the whole UK Free School Meals population lectures the working classes on how it's their fault they've failed to penetrate the inbred network of privilege and favour that forms the closed upper echelons of UK society. In short - the more Gove opens his mouth, the higher teacher stress levels rise.
"You can probably remember these variables because by calling them 'aob' we've basically chucked everything else we can into the equation, just so it's really hard to calculate, is even more non-specific, and wastes another load of time you can't spare. Best of luck working it out. Apparently they were going to call this denominator the 'Gove Fantasy Index' but that got vetoed early on."
So far so complex. Many teachers will have been trying to calculate their own stress levels using the calculus so far; but if you're pleasantly surprised by how low it is, read on and brace yourself. The real problem with the data recently, has been the next step - you need to put the number arrived-at so far through the exponential 'bull' factor. The best way to explain this is to hand back to our statistician. "Oh, the bull - that's easy to explain. This stands for 'beating up on lead learners' and is a measure of how much abuse comes out of Wilshaws's mouth, directed at teachers. If you know anything about maths you realise how rapidly exponential rise can push the final number up - and this is where Wilshaw has made a real impact. He's had nothing nice to say about teachers either during his long public soundbite audition for the post, nor for the time he's been in post. He's actually not been in the role long, although for most teachers it will feel like he's been there an eternity. Apparently in the design of the equation consideration was given to multiplying the bull by an 'mp' factor - not for 'Member of Parliament' but for 'Michael Palin' effect for how amusingly ironic it is when Wilshaw bangs on about teachers not feeling stress then contradictorily uses his own experience as a teacher as a comparative reference. It reminds people of the 'When I was a lad, we were so poor we lived in a hole in the road' sketch of Monty Python fame, basically."
We asked one teacher in Walthamstow what the difference was between Wilshaw and his predecessor Christine Gilbert. "It's like swapping matron from the Carry On films for Voldemort," she said, turning pale. "She was just a mean and humourless old bitch - although it's funny looking at her hypocrisy now trying to defend the profession - but he's a force of unmitigated evil, aiming for universal domination and the destruction of all that is good and true. OFSTED Inspectors are basically the Dementors from Harry Potter, let's face it. I wouldn't mind half a chance to f***ing Expelliarmus him."
There is one final tiny positive tweak in the calculation. Teachers will be half-heartedly reassured that a (small) deduction can be made from the now-astronomical stress figure produced by the calculus so far. Over once again to our statistician:
"Notice the small-font 'ps' at the end. You take the value of a teacher's pension for p, and the sense of solidarity with colleagues whose integrity and ethics are also under constant assault by those meant to champion and represent them - and multiply them together to get 'ps', and take this away from the result so far. Whilst solidarity is at last rising again, that's being more than offset by the fall in the value of pensions.
"Of course, as deductions to stress go, by then it's like Palestinian children chucking stones at tanks, it's that futile and irrelevant an impact. So 'ps' in small font seems quite fitting because it's a trivial afterthought, let's face it."
It appears that the reason for burying the formula - assembled expensively in the private sector for a budget of around four million pounds (enough to run a medium-sized comprehensive school for a year) - is political: not only did data testing of the formula on teachers across multiple schools produce results in all cases likely to end in the DfE being sued for constructive dismissal, the highest results of all were in Gove's newly-formed academies.
"It was a nightmare" reports our source. "The stress levels coming out of the model were above all maximum health and safety limits set by EU law. Gove went mental. Somebody senior said the government wanted us to bury it until we can pull out of the EU Social Chapter - there was something about how, after that, we can screw teachers and the rest of the workforce all we like, but until then it might leave the government liable for large payouts. Worse yet, it turned out that neither the Education Secretary nor the Head of Ofsted scored anything like as highly for stress as the mean figure for year 5 teachers in urban schools. That would have looked really embarrassing, so I guess that's why they canned it."
The private sector contractor allegedly offered to look again at the model, but their eight million pound redraft fee was considered unreachable, with the D of E already having closed two county support centres for children with learning disabilities so that the private sector firm could put in the six hours' work needed to draft the original formula. "Plus," adds the civil servant, "it was difficult to reach them again after the problem arose. We could only get through to voicemail and a message saying they were on their way to the bank. There was quite a lot of laughter in the background."
This blog approached the teacher unions for comment in response. NASUWT sighed then put down the phone, the ATL representative just wept for twenty minutes, and the NUT phone line went quiet, followed by sounds of weaponry being armed faintly in the background. We'll keep you updated on further developments. At an hour-long INSET to explain the new calculus at one rural school in the North-West, one sparky NQT asked whether it could integrated with SIMS for export to a marksheet, while seven of twelve heads of department exhaustedly indicated they didn't understand the data anyway.
Our source was unable to discover which firm had won the contract - "it was one of those massive firms that parasite onto public sectors contracts, like Serco or Capita, but neither of those two - I can't remember and they'd erased their logo from the paperwork by the time it reached me, once they realised the project was tanking. They'd moved on to a new DWP contract removing the long-term unemployed from the voting register by then."
The reason the formula has not been applied is obvious upon closer examination of the maths involved. Here is the formula, explained by our NAO statistician:
"It looks complex but let me break it down for you. The sideways M letters are sigmas - you add things up. c is the number of curriculum change initiatives - numbered as y ('why bother') - you add all them up from the first day of government to a maximum level of d (for 'derision') - gauged by how many of the population think, inexplicably given that they don't think this about doctors or nurses, that they could do your job better than you. To reduce this slightly, you divide this by h times t where h is the holiday length and t the relatively early time in the day teachers are said to finish, so the top-left sigma is about stress caused by managers and parents and what little respite teachers get from that. You could remember the 'ht' as standing for half-term if you like, except most teachers just spend them ill, recovering barely in time for the next Monday. The ht divider used to balance this proportion of the graph out but in the last decade, and particularly under this government, this part's become top-heavy: the EBacc is messing with the curriculum and the right-wing press has ramped up the we-hate-those-lazy-teachers rhetoric from the 1980s again, and then Gove is trying to abolish the summer holiday too. Plus anyone in the industry knows nobody goes home at half three anyway, so this is the first big stress block.
"The second sigma function is based on stress caused by children. It sums up i - people presumed at first that it stands for children's usual self-centredness, or the 'x' for the zero initiative they regularly show, but actually this function is a measure of how much they use their iPhones instead of doing what they're supposed to - from a value of zero to f, where f is how many times in the average lesson they try to check their Facebook page. This can be divided by w, or the number of bottles of wine teachers are provided with at the end of term. Obviously that divider makes this part of the score very favourable for staff in independent schools, whereas it is often as low as zero for state school teachers, meaning that the child-caused stress figure is divided by zero, producing a level of infinity for stress in this sigma function for teachers in schools of the ungrateful poor.
"Next you add together those two sets of data and multiply them by the large E divided by the small r. The E stands for the ego of your particular headteacher and acts as a multiplier for how much stress comes down to classroom teachers. The nearest thing we have to data from the 1980s suggested that headteachers protected their staff from stress and stupid central initiatives because they remembered what it was like in the classroom but now we have NPQH to develop a sense in headteachers that they're altogether different in kind from teachers, they're a master race who rise to the top inevitably and owe nothing to their erstwhile colleagues. The really important thing, they now realise, is for them to make to it to being Chief Exec of a profit-making academy chain earning a quarter of a million a year so they need never step in a classroom again. You divide this by r - for remuneration of normal teachers, which is obviously falling after years of consecutive pay freezes. Remuneration was slightly higher in some academies than unconverted schools, but this effect is massively outweighed by the Ego rating of heads of academies, who pretty much all think themselves Plato.
"A helpful mnemonic to remember this part of the teacher stress equation is that E/r is like 'Emergency Room', because by now the patient is all but dead on the table."
Next this total amount of stress, for causes from above and below and balanced with any possible benefits, made specific to your context, is divided by a multiplier called 'ao/b'. Our statistician explains: "This is three factors considered together: a is for attendance - we don't know why that's in there, but apparently it has to be included in all school data now, no matter how relevant or otherwise; o is 'opportunity index', a measure of how wealthy an area a school is in, sometimes also called the 'offensiveness index' because we measure it by how many minutes a teacher can go for without being verbally abused in a way most other professionals never have to suffer. In many independent schools this can be months at a time, whereas in inner-city schools it's usually a fraction of a minute. This produces a really low divider score, raising the overall stress level coming out of the equation. You multiply the attendance by how much respite teachers get and then divide it by b, which is 'bare-faced cheek.' This is ascertained by reading the Education Secretary's recent pronouncements, in which a millionaire educated at a thirty-thousand-pound-a-year school with a pupil / teacher ratio of 8:1 and which sends more students to Oxbridge than the whole UK Free School Meals population lectures the working classes on how it's their fault they've failed to penetrate the inbred network of privilege and favour that forms the closed upper echelons of UK society. In short - the more Gove opens his mouth, the higher teacher stress levels rise.
"You can probably remember these variables because by calling them 'aob' we've basically chucked everything else we can into the equation, just so it's really hard to calculate, is even more non-specific, and wastes another load of time you can't spare. Best of luck working it out. Apparently they were going to call this denominator the 'Gove Fantasy Index' but that got vetoed early on."
So far so complex. Many teachers will have been trying to calculate their own stress levels using the calculus so far; but if you're pleasantly surprised by how low it is, read on and brace yourself. The real problem with the data recently, has been the next step - you need to put the number arrived-at so far through the exponential 'bull' factor. The best way to explain this is to hand back to our statistician. "Oh, the bull - that's easy to explain. This stands for 'beating up on lead learners' and is a measure of how much abuse comes out of Wilshaws's mouth, directed at teachers. If you know anything about maths you realise how rapidly exponential rise can push the final number up - and this is where Wilshaw has made a real impact. He's had nothing nice to say about teachers either during his long public soundbite audition for the post, nor for the time he's been in post. He's actually not been in the role long, although for most teachers it will feel like he's been there an eternity. Apparently in the design of the equation consideration was given to multiplying the bull by an 'mp' factor - not for 'Member of Parliament' but for 'Michael Palin' effect for how amusingly ironic it is when Wilshaw bangs on about teachers not feeling stress then contradictorily uses his own experience as a teacher as a comparative reference. It reminds people of the 'When I was a lad, we were so poor we lived in a hole in the road' sketch of Monty Python fame, basically."
We asked one teacher in Walthamstow what the difference was between Wilshaw and his predecessor Christine Gilbert. "It's like swapping matron from the Carry On films for Voldemort," she said, turning pale. "She was just a mean and humourless old bitch - although it's funny looking at her hypocrisy now trying to defend the profession - but he's a force of unmitigated evil, aiming for universal domination and the destruction of all that is good and true. OFSTED Inspectors are basically the Dementors from Harry Potter, let's face it. I wouldn't mind half a chance to f***ing Expelliarmus him."
There is one final tiny positive tweak in the calculation. Teachers will be half-heartedly reassured that a (small) deduction can be made from the now-astronomical stress figure produced by the calculus so far. Over once again to our statistician:
"Notice the small-font 'ps' at the end. You take the value of a teacher's pension for p, and the sense of solidarity with colleagues whose integrity and ethics are also under constant assault by those meant to champion and represent them - and multiply them together to get 'ps', and take this away from the result so far. Whilst solidarity is at last rising again, that's being more than offset by the fall in the value of pensions.
"Of course, as deductions to stress go, by then it's like Palestinian children chucking stones at tanks, it's that futile and irrelevant an impact. So 'ps' in small font seems quite fitting because it's a trivial afterthought, let's face it."
It appears that the reason for burying the formula - assembled expensively in the private sector for a budget of around four million pounds (enough to run a medium-sized comprehensive school for a year) - is political: not only did data testing of the formula on teachers across multiple schools produce results in all cases likely to end in the DfE being sued for constructive dismissal, the highest results of all were in Gove's newly-formed academies.
"It was a nightmare" reports our source. "The stress levels coming out of the model were above all maximum health and safety limits set by EU law. Gove went mental. Somebody senior said the government wanted us to bury it until we can pull out of the EU Social Chapter - there was something about how, after that, we can screw teachers and the rest of the workforce all we like, but until then it might leave the government liable for large payouts. Worse yet, it turned out that neither the Education Secretary nor the Head of Ofsted scored anything like as highly for stress as the mean figure for year 5 teachers in urban schools. That would have looked really embarrassing, so I guess that's why they canned it."
The private sector contractor allegedly offered to look again at the model, but their eight million pound redraft fee was considered unreachable, with the D of E already having closed two county support centres for children with learning disabilities so that the private sector firm could put in the six hours' work needed to draft the original formula. "Plus," adds the civil servant, "it was difficult to reach them again after the problem arose. We could only get through to voicemail and a message saying they were on their way to the bank. There was quite a lot of laughter in the background."
This blog approached the teacher unions for comment in response. NASUWT sighed then put down the phone, the ATL representative just wept for twenty minutes, and the NUT phone line went quiet, followed by sounds of weaponry being armed faintly in the background. We'll keep you updated on further developments. At an hour-long INSET to explain the new calculus at one rural school in the North-West, one sparky NQT asked whether it could integrated with SIMS for export to a marksheet, while seven of twelve heads of department exhaustedly indicated they didn't understand the data anyway.
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Schools issued with 743-point behaviour checklist
Under advice, I've removed this article temporarily from the blog. I hope to return it soon, either in full or as mildly amended as possible. Please check back soon :)
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Setting homework via Twitter
So, apologies for the two-month absence. Rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated etc... I've just moved to the Persian Gulf is all.
Predictably, a new job is a fount of chaos, and so it has proved as ever - you don't know any of the new place's systems, procedures, where to find resources, whom to ask for what etc - but actually it's a positive pressure: you want to do well, to make a good impression, and to succeed for your new students. I have a great love for the place I left but my day-to-day focus here now is pleasure and gratitude at the exciting opportunities the new role offers me. And new beginnings are as good a time as any to start something radical and see how it goes: when could experimentation possibly be safer than at first in a role, when you have the excuse of finding your feet if you cock up? Don't be cautious: gamble. Explore. And so my first post in a new school is to tell you all this: I'm setting homework only by Twitter now. And wow, but really - wow. I will never, ever set homework conventionally again.
You will have gathered where I am going with this: all of these problems disappear in their entirety when you simply tweet every homework. Take one lesson to make all students create an account (actually, two-thirds had them already) and require them to follow you, and you're off. You control the wording, the timing, the weblinks to resources, the due date. Parents or colleagues can access it at will without awkward conversations. Students can have it appear on their mobile, their facebook page - wherever. Display it when you set it for those who want to write it by hand anyway - but all excuses vanish instantly. Most delightful is the end of the ranting from those few parents who never checked their child's work but are furious with you that he (it's always he...) is not doing it. Now you get to delicately point out that they could have checked effortlessly, without conflict, any time they liked. Oh, blissful day - not that I've had that here anyway. Less exciting but more practical is my quiet admission that my own disorganisation has usually been the reason I've faltered away on homework as terms have gone on. Not any more. Twitter is my personal homework-monitoring Jeeves and when classes enter I'm armed with clarity and newfound high expectations.
Anyone whose VLE manages to clear all these hurdles - pop over, Willy Wonka and I have your Golden Ticket waiting.
Predictably, a new job is a fount of chaos, and so it has proved as ever - you don't know any of the new place's systems, procedures, where to find resources, whom to ask for what etc - but actually it's a positive pressure: you want to do well, to make a good impression, and to succeed for your new students. I have a great love for the place I left but my day-to-day focus here now is pleasure and gratitude at the exciting opportunities the new role offers me. And new beginnings are as good a time as any to start something radical and see how it goes: when could experimentation possibly be safer than at first in a role, when you have the excuse of finding your feet if you cock up? Don't be cautious: gamble. Explore. And so my first post in a new school is to tell you all this: I'm setting homework only by Twitter now. And wow, but really - wow. I will never, ever set homework conventionally again.
This all began about four months ago when I (much belatedly) took advantage of an unlooked-for lapse in workload to finally get round to learning about Twitter. To someone deeply unimpressed by the Facebook phenomenon (I refuse to even have a page. I looked. I hated it. It would drive me mental) Twitter surprisingly caught instant light. Facebook is navel-gazing (even though you look at friends' sites) - Twitter is discursive by nature. Facebook is about self, and Twitter about views. Facebook is asking people to like me. Twitter is looking for whom I like and being pleasantly surprised by people following me - I take it that maybe I've something interesting to say if they do choose to follow. Obviously these distinctions are a touch false, but you take my point: Twitter is just fundamentally more businesslike and meaningful. I confess to being quite a lightweight user - I just use it to engage in educational and political dialogue on topics of interest, not for anything personal. I suppose others use it more roundedly - but I swiftly recognised its potential as a reliable medium of short factual communication - and what else is homework? I resolved to try it in my new school.
I should step back a while and give some context. I've always been an IT enthusiast without being a true tecchie. I was on email before others, used to teach media with videos while the conventional line was still to analyse newspaper headlines, and got all excited about forum collaboration and conferencing before NCSL made it the centre of every course they do (mildly irritated about how much less the TDA funded me compared to NCSL, but there we go...) I've been using the net since school systems could deliver the bandwidth to make it viable, and in the last three years everything I've produced has been resourced to websites where both colleagues and students could find it. I already refuse to allow students to pretend they didn't get a photocopy, couldn't remember the task, didn't know what proforma to use or how to plan the essay: it's all there online at course-specific websites I've created. They're not exciting (they're mostly Office Live templates with some thoughtful effort in layout going into them) but they're in depth and they work. I've used Wordpress (forgive me, BlogLord, don't strike me down or filter this page!) for dedicated subject blogs for specific schools. Twitter was the next natural step. And so successful was it after week one that several other staff have followed suit as well and we're trialling it together.
Think if you will for a moment of all the problems you face with homework:
- the student lost what they'd written down
- the student didn't write it down properly
- the student couldn't remember it
- the student couldn't read their own writing
- the student abbreviated it stupidly so it makes no sense and they effectively do a different task to what you set
- the student didn't know when it was due
- the parent didn't know there was any
- ... and is probably upset enough when they finally find out how much has been skipped, and blames you for not letting them know
- the parent can't face the argument with the child when they ask to see the planner
- the student / parent / both doesn't know what resource the task relates to
- the tutor / TA / catch-up teacher can't find out what it is to help the student with
- the teacher - god forbid - forget to set it before the bell and instead shouts "sorry - I forgot homework - none this week"
- (the teacher forgot to write it down in haste and makes a fool of themselves next lesson not remembering?)
- (the line manager can't check if the teacher is setting homework?)
You will have gathered where I am going with this: all of these problems disappear in their entirety when you simply tweet every homework. Take one lesson to make all students create an account (actually, two-thirds had them already) and require them to follow you, and you're off. You control the wording, the timing, the weblinks to resources, the due date. Parents or colleagues can access it at will without awkward conversations. Students can have it appear on their mobile, their facebook page - wherever. Display it when you set it for those who want to write it by hand anyway - but all excuses vanish instantly. Most delightful is the end of the ranting from those few parents who never checked their child's work but are furious with you that he (it's always he...) is not doing it. Now you get to delicately point out that they could have checked effortlessly, without conflict, any time they liked. Oh, blissful day - not that I've had that here anyway. Less exciting but more practical is my quiet admission that my own disorganisation has usually been the reason I've faltered away on homework as terms have gone on. Not any more. Twitter is my personal homework-monitoring Jeeves and when classes enter I'm armed with clarity and newfound high expectations.
Retrospectively, I realise this is so immense and fantastic that millions more people must be doing it already. If they are, they're keeping schtum. Having got to typing "using twitter for ho-" in Google, the venerable G-mind suggested completing it with "home automation." Behind the curve I may be, but surely more people have an interest in homework than home automation? Can no-one have searched for this before? Or written about this before? Maybe, beyond the lazy first-ten-answers I searched, they have, but all I found were a few general tangents: a Twitter account called ClassHomework - which stopped being used in early 2009; better, an idea of posting homework on Facebook is buried in the depths of this really thoughtful and inspiring page - but rather low-down in a manner that buries it amidst interesting but less practical and powerful applications (plus Twitter is a bare infostream, much more suited to setting homework than Facebook); the delightfully-named Graham Trick's use of Twitter to be homework help for students - but this entails sitting at Twitter for 2 hours every night waiting for help requests - "really? won't email do that just fine?"; and at last this IT / education consultancy one which sounds something like the use I make - minimal effort for me, high papertrail quality, documents referenced for homework. Why isn't everyone doing it? It's made my life infinitely easier.
Alright, so there needs to be some information about how to use it - but use a blog and post PDF guides for students and parents there available for download. And one for staff, too - you need to standardise the practice a little, to not confuse: we don't use our real Twitter identities (work / life separation warning bell - another reason to use Twitter, not Facebook) but a common form: XYZ_ABC where XYZ is the school's name in 3 letters and ABC the recognised staff initials on timetables. Students can use the formula to search staff. Tweets have a standard form too: year group - subject code - info - due date. A2 Sociology, for example: "13SOC: first draft of Murdoch ownership essay (Tue)" - how clear is that? Optional homeworks have "**" instead of a date, and items / links of interest just start "nb_" and the subject code. Combine these written explanations with a video tutorial on the glorious Screencast-o-matic (upload to / embed in blog if you like, or put it on the main school website) showing people how to go to and use Twitter and you're laughing. How could it be easier?
The luddites who adore keeping it in-house are grumbling, I can hear. Was Twitter the obvious step? Can't all this be done on the VLE, all this providing files and notifying of homeworks? Please notice my snort of derision. I have been waiting for VLEs to be not-sh*t (or indeed, even in existence) for a decade in multiple schools now. I invite you all to consider the following list of problems: step forward to win a prize if your school VLE
- exists (and not just on the server or in the head of the IT guy)
- functions effectively and does not need constant IT support
- is actually used by enough staff for students to know and care about it
- does not require a "working group" (?!) to talk about it
- gives you enough access and functionality not to be irritating to use "because we can't give you full access, that might cause other problems"
- doesn't have a set of emerging policies surrounding how you have to lay things out and what length / design they must all have
- allows you to text homework tweets from your mobile mid-class
- ... let alone then have 24 phones in the class ping as the homework is near-instantly delivered
- doesn't, despite your being a secondary school, look like some cretinous over-bright chalkboard with infant-school icons designed by a six-year-old on a sugar high
- ... i.e. like a late-1990s AOL proprietary interface ("the whole universe is me... look nowhere else...")
Anyone whose VLE manages to clear all these hurdles - pop over, Willy Wonka and I have your Golden Ticket waiting.
No - I'd rather have and maintain my own websites and blogs through commercial programs, free and with excellent functionality, and without line-management interference. And Twitter is the perfect complement. Set Wordpress (or whatever you use) to embed the Twitter feed too and BOOM! - There it all is right there for them. Not an excuse in the world. No losing track or lack of papertrail. No fake parental dissatisfaction. Fibbers - students or parents - have nowhere to hide - and nothing's going to keep me more honest, either: because if I'm not setting it right, I've invited the world to watch. I'm happy with that - we're all bound in to success together. Try it. And while you're at it - if you see any of the folks from Twitter's marketing department - tweet them that they owe me a MINT for this posting.
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