Personal Blogs

Uncertainty has me clutching at something I can control - I work from home more often than not, whatever happens. Whatever happens this might mean some union support to apply to work from home in order to make what has become common place over these last nine months. 

My reading has got out of hand; I blame Amazon. I engage with one publication and a entire set of other tasty offerings are put before me. Once was a time that 'getting lost down a rabbit hole' took hours, even days, as you read an article, chased up a reference and waited for the book to be retrieved from the stacks ... or took a trip across town to find the journal burried in another library.

David Attenborough's 'A Life on our planet' is been my Christmas reading. And for others I bougth it for. I want it in the hands of hundreds. I wonder how we might post a copy through every door in Lewes. Would the coucil go for that? Not a Green council, not all those trees however sustainable the source. Yet the message is a relevant for a town of 17,000 as it is for the nation and the globe: we must change our behaviours. 

Then there is the incredible biography by Ely Green, 'Too Black, Too White' which after two close readings with notes I am about to review. I stumbled upon this during my research into the African American soldier's experience in the First World War.

And much more besides.

Today Amazon are offering discounts of 20% or more on Kindle publications. How can I not be caught in this snare? 

We Return Fighting edited by Kinshasha Holman Conwill

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchnes

The Words of Thomas Paine 

And

100 Great Black Britons

When in doubt, start another blog, add something else to the 'to do' list, find a different App to organise your life, then feel too scrambled and take a walk.

A two week break should be that - not an opportunity to make up lost time. A large stack of books begs me to read them, but some long abandoned DIY tasks clammer. Putting up pictures intstead of ticking off another chapter read feels like an achievement.

Yet I make time to run the first in seven online sessions on using social media. And take delivery of a Green Screen.

I must master WordPress, not just toy with it.

I've not put much up to YouTube in a decade and have never done a podcast; these things await my attention. 

Use it or lose it. I try to practice my French three or four times a week. Using Lingvist I can sustain an 80% score. However if I drop to learning once a week (or less) my come back is at first poor. One day a lot of self-paced learning will be like Lingvist. Could I do this through a smart speaker too? 

Here today, elswhere tomorrow. 

Yet again a PhD is in my sights for 2022. I have contacts at the University of Sussex (indeed it has been recommended), but what about The Open University? It would have to be 'at a distance' - Milton Keynes and I do not get on from my efforts 2010/2011.

To my horror, curioisty had be click on Order History in Amazon (actually it  was simply to locate a book that got sent to the wrong address). To my surprise I found that Amazon has a total archive of everything ever purchased. This takes me back to 1999. I thought I'd first gone onto Amazone 2000 when I bought books for everyone. 

Web-Based Training had me thinking of moving out of 'video based training' which I had done very successfully for the best part of 13 years. I'd already produced a few interactive DVDs: something for independent financial advisers paid for by Standard Life bank in Edinburgh comes to mind.

The following March (2000) I moved to Brighton to work for Worth Media as their 'Digital Editor'. The year after, February 2001 I started the MA in Open & Distance Learning with The Open University. If only I had completed that module, if only I had overcome the challenges of Worth Media having to line up a lot of staff to make redundant and got myself out of the firing line ... if only.

Never mind. I've learnt many life lessons and as a friend says, "it isn't over yet" and as my wife says "you've still got plenty of time". 

I'm not going to direct that drama series or win an Olympic medal, but I might produce or associate produce some drama, could sail single-handed across the Channel ... even pursue an PhD in education at the University of Sussex.

I would have returned to school having taken my A'levels and changed to Sciences in order to go on and study medecine. Curiosly I rediscovered my O'Level results recently as much to my frustration they were required by the University of Brighton in order to enrol on their PGCE. I have an As in Biology, as well as an As in each of Maths, English Literature and Geography. I gained Bs in English Language, Additional Maths and Physics. I didn't 'get' French or Chemistry but managed a C for each all the same. 

Years later, had I listen to my Mum, this would be 20 years ago after a hiatus with the bursting of the Web Bubble in late 2001, I would have taken a PGCE (but not in my first degree), or taken a portfolio in to show a contact (a fellow student from the 1950s University of Durham Art School then a senior lecturer) at Brighton or Sussex to take an MA in Fine Art. I did get so far as discsuing MA options. 

Had I listened to my Mum ... 

I did listen to my Father. I had wanted to change to study Law at univeristy. He told me I wouldn't enjoy it. He'd risen to be the Senior Partner of a Regional Firm, yet apparently had never wanted to be a lawyer - if he hadn't liked it how could I? 

Life can be a mess - the advice you take, the advice you don't. I wonder if you know how you are going to behave regardless of what people tell you when you ask them. 

A reivew of sorts written in several parts over 12 hours between 8:00am and 8:00pm this wet, dull, claustrophic, semi-lockdown Sunday on the Western edges of Lewes ... 

I'm 60 pages in and when I open the book I still get a waft of fresh paper. I need a book like this as a reality check and reminder of who matters in all of this education malarkey - the student ! 

I'll grow to feel in control, learn quickly ways to support their learning.

I like this:

'It's a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper, or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights which leave you either crippled or change'. p.1

How can teaching online via webcam be a bodily experience? An 'out body' experience perhaps? Not helped where none of the students are present - all have their webcams turned off. 

Kate Clanchy supports my idea regarding motivation, she makes this optimistic remark about her students (she teaches in school) 'all children will behave perfectly ... if they want to know something very much, about sex or anything else, and an adult sincerely sets out to tell them.' p.15

The issue of course if neither the students not the teacher want to impart knowledge: take 'Black Lives Matter'. Not my view, but I have had others ask why it is being taught to a group of all white students - or harder, how to teach it to a class where one student is black. Should it be awkward? Would it be like teaching menstruation to a class of predominantly boys with one girl present? What if the class was entirely black but for one white kid? I think the teachers missed the point, the institution failed in selling the purpose of teaching the class and in fact should it not be the case that only those who know what they are talking about get up to teach?

A further insight into the students comes where the author sums up her experience of working (her choice) with students who had been isolated in the 'inclusion' portacabin on the other side of the playing field. These children had misbehaved so badly or so often that they were separated from the rest of the school. Kate Clanchy is a saint; she has a lot to teach us. She tells a story of how she encouraged them to write her notes and put them anonymously in a box. Those that were scrumpled up and dropped in the bin proved more revealing as it told stories of physical and mental abuse and neglect. We know that how children are raised has a profound impact on their behaviour and response to the wider world. 

'No one is bad, though many are sad, and a few are mad' she writes on page 56.

I'm reading a lot at the moment. 

In between reviewing 1 hour 42 minutes of Dylan Wiliam on 'Formative Assessment' and the need for actions in schools to be based on evidence and checking through Dave White on 'Visitors and Residents' in the digital world, I riggle my way through the rest of Kate Clanchy. 

There are no surprises that she uncovers systemic racism in poetry competitions she enters her pupils for, no surprises at how awkwardly church schools fit into secular, or rather multiracial Britain, nor how middle-class parents tend to point their kids towards middle-class and aspiration schools leaving the general population lacking in a proper understanding of the communities around them.

Very Quiet Foreign Girls is worth Googling for their poems. Like 'Dead Poets Society' this is a group of underprivileged girls, rather than privileged boys, who met to read and compose poetry. The multiracial and international mix of students is extraordianry: Khurds, Iranians, Somalians, Poles and Hungarians, Moroccan, Afghan, Indian and Pakistani with a suitable mix fo relgions across branches of Islam, as well as Hindu, Cathollic and no religion at all.

Deprivation can be a shocker: the way the children live, their poverty, how treated at home, the uniform a release from having to find anything special or different to wear, shoes in all weathers a pair of flip flops, travel to London from Essex, let alone 'abroad' a signal of something 'beyond' and out of their reach to the point of feeling like impostors to be with anyone so privileged. 

'Poverty is stronger than plumbing' Kate Clanchy writes (p.160), 'stronger than medicine, stronger than art'. 

The first taste I got of it was on benefits in London in April 1985; not an expected path for an Oxford graduate who'd been spoilt for choices at the end of the Milk Round the Year Before. Then doing odd jobs, in a flat in Willesden and joining the Tricycle Youth Theatre and being around as many black faces as white. 

I'd not lived; I'd not travelled in my own country. I've been rubbing off the public school ever since and have taken a long time to reclaim Oxford rather than simply stating that I went to 'college'. Elitism comes in many forms and I am guilty of belonging to a few of them in the past (not always by choice).

Education is national, it is the community, it ought to be a melting pot, it ought to be a leveller. It should not be the fragmented, privileged, excluding, isolating experience that it is in Britain where too many children's experience is amongst 'their own kind' geographically, and by race, religion, class and wealth. 

Kate Clanchy has been what has made this a weekend, not a workday; my working week extended with the Dylan Wiliam to digest (it will take three passes through my gut like a cow chewing the cud). What surprises me is when out of the blue she drops her pen and smacks into Black and Wiliam and the entire idea of Formative Assessment (WALT) with the enthusiasm of a vengeant pugilist. I like her for it. My first notes on Wiliam are to question the keynote I have just sat through as a self-serving literature review which makes a lot of poor research conducted in the States simply so that he can destroy it. More of Wiliam elsewhere - I applaud 'evidence based' responses to any problem (though not, Kate Clanchy would say) at the expense of creativity and poetry in particular. is Wiliam and his brand of formative assessment most suited to math and engineering rather than the arts? Would fine art, pottery or make up benefit from or be destroyed by formative assessment. At what point does formative assessment in the training of a competitive sailor have to give way to intuition, for the musician to play the piece their way? Is formative assessment the scales and these alone will make for a dull clone?

We get into the apostrophe in English as a defining standard for how well it is taught, or not, and taken up by Grammar Schools but not the Comprehensive - or not. It is a detail too far for me. I take her point that the simplest advice to those in doubt over the use of the apostrophe is to never use it.

From p.207 to p.217 the PostIts cover most of each page. Her attack on formative assessment is heartfelt. I need, in the parlance, to ‘unpack it’. Kate Clanchy ‘began teaching thirty years ago’ (1990s). Since when there has been ‘the inexorable rise of the thing called ‘formative assessment’, and its lumpen classroom equivalent, the WALT’. '(p.207) 

WALT stands for ‘We Are Learning To …’

They should head a trainee teacher’s lesson plan and guide any observation.

The theory goes, Kate Clanchy explains, is that they ‘interact seamlessly with the curriculum and let everyone know where they are at’. 

‘They break up the lesson into simple learning objectives that the children themselves understand’. (p.207) 

‘This is formative assessment because it forms and changes he student as well as marking them’. (p.208).

[I can only think in terms of old school essay writing for homework. Formative assessment at its most successful, for feedback and differentiation - surely? And then the five hundred year old Oxbridge tutorial were students armed with essays debating one with their tutor and mentally marking their own effort as excellent, average, mediocre or non-existent, while forming a view of their own months, even years before any summative assessment into a formal written exam]. 

‘Formative assessment does not allow for ineffable processes,’ she writes (p.210) as she expands on a case study of a student who grew into himself and developed self awareness and confidence as a result of his creative writing, something she is sure would have been stymied by WALT and overly prescriptive formative assessment. 

She has a dig at something called the ‘Black Box’ which is an idea that Black and Wiliam also developed around WALT and formative assessment; I am currently ignorant of it. She argues that often there is less need for this kind of formative assessment and a greater need for summative assessment in the form of a concluding ‘well done’. (p.210).

Then she bemoans how an English test has been reduced to using a Wikipedia entry on Titanic to compose a nonfiction essay. A task that she considers thin and limited because it starts from not much and has little opportunity to flower the way the simple experience of listening to a poem and then writing one of your own can have. (p.211).

‘In my dress,’ she writes on p.212, we never need to write another WALT. In my dreams my colleagues are trusted to choose great, rich texts to teach, and we all trust the texts to teach the children. We assess both creative and critical responses to them as their final exams’. 

Some decades later Kate Clanchy spotted this her most promising student from those days of poetry and creative english. She got up the courage to contact him by LinkedIn.

‘When we read books with you,’ he wrote, ‘the world opened up. Your lessons were I learnt who I was,’ he continued, ‘became conscious of myself, grew up. That time was important to me, a free space’. (p.217)

40 years ago, on the 11th and 12th of December 1980, I attended interviews at Balliol College, Oxford to study modern history. The photographs above are the ones I took and later stuck into a scrapbook. 

My mother drove me down from Newcastle to Chipping Camden to stay with her long term boyfriend; my parents had separated and then divorced ten years eariler. According to my diary my material grandparents were with us too. The cottage in the Cotswalds was tiny.

The next day my Mum drove me into Oxford and dropped me at the entrance to Balliol. I had a rucksack, an acoustic guiitar and a pair of skis. I felt like a traveller who had got lost.

I must have gone to the porter's lodge, must have been given a key to a room. I can't recall where it was - staircase 11 to 15, one they set aside for the conference season.

I had two interiews and may also have met my 'pastoral tutor'. The first interview was on the subject I was hoping to study. We discussed Henry VII and then the Reformation. We'd not talked much at the RGS during class - it had been more a case of take notes, write the essay, learn stuff and make sure its in your head by the time of the written exam.

I had plenty of time between interviews; I do not recall coming across any other students at all.

I wandered over to the Sheldonian and Bodliean and took photographs with my Minolta. I must have eaten in hall. The next morning I want to the Ashmolean Museum opposite. Then I had a second interview. Once again there were two tutors. This was a general interview. I spoke about acting at schools and the People's Theatre: the Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Dracula Spectacula! 

I took myself down to the Station for the train into London. I made my way out to Brentford Docks where my father had his London flat then. This may have been my third time ever to London and the first time travelling alone. I stayed with Dad. Did we eat out in town? Did he introduce me to his girlfriend of that moment? His view of my song writing efforts were that there were 'too many words'. I take it he didn't like my singing, my voice, my playing ... that's Dad for you.

The next afternoon I took the train from Victoria to Folkestone and got the ferry across to Calais. I made friends with a girl my age and a young couple. The crossing was rough and this girl, Paula and I loved every moment of it, even when a vending machine broke loose and slid across the deck. I had her name, but no number. We were just young people pasing through.

Across Paris with my clobber by bus; skis and guitar. And the night train from Gar du Nord. Onwards to Bourg St Maurice, to Val d'Isere, the Hotel Sofitel and a job immersed amongst French 'seasoniere' where, in a Marks &  Spencer grey suit I was the 'day porter, English speaking, snow shovelling, breakfast delivering errand boy'. 

University life at Balliol eventually began in October 1981. A close friend from those days died a month ago. Life's short - embrace it. 

Whenever I can I am talking the students through this. I find I am more likely to get questions when I am using a mini-whiteboard to take them through it myself. And it helps to have them asking the questions via mic rather than in text. Text in chat can be a one letter or one word reply. 

Visitors & Residents > https://youtu.be/sPOG3iThmRI

I'm a sucker for praise and recognition; aren't we all? Maybe being this cheesy is a step too far in tacky commercialism though? Or not? I can't tell and don't know but the trap has been laid I I took the bate. As I've been giving workshops to staff, and now to students on using Screencastify I have clocked up many a screencast. 

I will knock one out as quickly as a sneeze - almost.

Needing to show someone how to get video from their phone to their Google Drive I used Screencastify to record 'webcam' only, practiced getting the image visible by holding my phone at the right angle and close enough to the webcam and then talked her through the process. Later that day I learnt, with delight, that both she and a student had now started to get their video content where it needed to be in order to share to the class via Goolge Classrom. Job done.

I also demo Screencastify live in the remote classes I am running this week; this makes for at least one further screencast a day - more when I get it wrong and record Webcam or Browser when I mean Desktop.

Onwards. The days is new. It's 5:00am and I feel rested and ready for the world. 

Can this be done online? Do I even understand all the terms? Does it all have to happen in the same class?

Constructive : a workshop like activity, or 'group think' in Google Breakout.

Collaborative : they work together in small groups to come to an answer.

Conversational : in the Chat and with each other.

Reflective : with more time at the end, or part way through, they reflect on what they are doing and if they are getting anywhere.

Contextualized : as in the online learning environment and/or the individual context for each person?

Complex : or challenging? Online learning is a fail for some, for reasons of their own making, or not. For technical, persona circumstances and other reasons. Some people don't like bringing the class into the home. It is a cultural shift.

Intentional : (I'm going to have to look this up).

Active/Manipulative : sounds like 'constructive' ?

By Izhaki - In OmniGraffle, CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40793898 

I am three formal 90 minute online classes in with two more to go. It is the same topic, but a different group of students each time. I made a slight overhaul in the hour before today's session.

I am yet to watch back any of the Meet recordings.  

The following passed through the entire cycle: 

I had a clip of Oxford Uni academic taking us through hsi ideas of 'Visitors and Residents' online. Rather than him, I ran through it myself to the webcam with a whiteboard. Old school, but I hoped would give me a chance of explaining it in my words. Is it relevant that students are this self-aware?

A haircut is due and there is reason why older people wear shirts with a collar or a roll top

Ditto 'Netiquette' as an icebreaker, something they should all have been drilled on and understand, yet the feedback in the Chat from 22 students was low - four at most caring to give me a sentence. Many more would respond to a closed question with 'Y' or 'N'. I tried Q&A the other day and had no questions at all. I rather thinking typing is an issue - noit least if they are on a phone, but because they are certainly not able to touchtype - only touch thumb.

I guess therefore I am going through this process. I know what can be fixed swiftly and do so. Indeed, while a video was playing, by way of demonstration I made some of the slides 'accessible' simply by increasing the font size, putting in a pastel shade background and right justifying the text.

The element where we looked for words to describe enhancements or augmentation to reinvention was dropped. I had begun with a Business School diagram introducing SMAR (which I have not used at all). I then struggled to find the words myself so certinaly couldn't provide a simple, clear activity for them to do for three minutes. Instead I quickly created the following and then moved on to the 'Lessons for today'.

I also dropped flicking through some pages from DK online showing the historic development of the gun from flintlock to plastic submachine gun. Interesting in its own right, but not the right comparison for the above stages. 

The Gun > https://pubhtml5.com/cqlx/ftcx 

I brought in a TED lecture from from David Epstein on how athletes have improved over the last 85 years. Interesting in its own right, but was to show the interplay between a presenter and their slides > https://bit.ly/3m2iNc1

Activity Three I want to replace with my own video so from the outset the message is for students rather than me saying that they should hear 'student' every time the presenter says 'Teacher'. Also to diminish the negativity on some slide presentation types than might be overly reliant on the slides and the handouts rather than students taking notes. Taking notes is a totally foreign concept, not even students who may benefit from recording audio or video so they have something to play back. I nabbed this LINK > https://youtu.be/GuA8fPCHu9c from Open Learn's Take Your Teaching Online'. 

I should test my theory of 'learning at the speed of desire' > motivation is all. If they are motivated they could Google my intentions and get their own top tips on presenting, using slides, video and screencast technology.

Last session like today having gone through all the buttons on the Screencastify minidashboard dropdown I once again inadvertently hit the Webcame record.

Let's hope I don't do this for the next two sessions. I'll put a note to self in the slides.

My feelings? Good. The first session felt like a dress rehearsal, the second like a technical rehearsal. It can only improve. Getting engagement and evidence of learning from the students is another matter entirely.

Soon after viewing the above I headed into town for a haircut.