One of the most famous TED Talks amongst educators would have to be Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk on how schools kill creativity. If you’ve never gotten around to seeing this video, I highly recommend it – I even set it as a ‘reading’ in the opening weeks of my curriculum studies unit. With almost 10.5 million views to date, the talk was such a hit that Sir Ken was invited to follow it up in 2010 with a second talk, Bring on the learning revolution!

But what’s there in TED for an English teacher, besides Sir Ken?

This topic came up a few weeks ago on the #ozengchat Tuesday night stream and I had a few suggestions ready to go. One of my favourite talks of all time is one of the first I saw – by David Griffin onhow photography connects us.I love to show it to classes that are about to start a unit on digital storytelling, or picture books

I have quite a few favourite TED Talks, and looking at the collection of downloaded talks on my iPad, I thought it would be good to post my collection (so far) up here on the blog. I’d love to hear about which ones you’ve seen and liked, or which ones you would recommend. Here’s my list:

TED talks ipad screenshot

LINKS TO MY TOP 12 TED TALKS:

Sherry Turkle (2012): Connected, but alone?

Seth Priebatsch (2010): The game layer on top of the world

Sarah Kay (2011): If I should have a daughter

Rives (2007): Rives on 4am

Rives (2006): Rives controls the internet

Jonathan Harris (2007): Jonathan Harris collects stories

Joe Sabia (2011): The technology of storytelling

Geoff Mulgan (2011): A short intro to the studio school

Erin McKean (2007): Erin McKean redefines the dictionary

Emily Pilloton (2010): Teaching design for change

David Griffin (2008): On how photography connects us

Chip Kidd (2012): Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.

Truth told, I had already come across the QWC last year, when I was learning about IF:Book Australia (http://www.futureofthebook.org.au/). Finding out more about the QWC was something I had been meaning to do for awhile!

So it was serendipitous that  I came across a notice about the ‘Letter Writing Club’ that is being run throughout 2012 by the Queensland Writers Centre. On the first Monday of most months, members of the public can participate in the club for free. Paper, quills, old typewriters and other devices are made available for people to write letters … this is the whole point of the club.

Isn’t that great?

Here is the information from their website – I hope to get along to at least one of these!

Since starting this position in 2010 I have been attempting to infuse the unit I coordinate with greater amounts of project-based learning. However, in a context where students have little time or incentive to engage with classwork that isn’t formally assessed, it has been hard to reward things like student project work.

After three semesters of teaching English Curriculum Studies 1 I decided that a radically new assignment was in order. 

Background:

Students used to do:

• Assignment 1 – Personal teaching philosophy statement and resource analysis
• Assignment 2 – Report on video lessons and learner needs observed
• Assignment 3 – Junior secondary English lesson plans

All of these assessment pieces were completed individually – no collaboration was required and no public audience was utilised.

From this semester onward, students now do:

• Assignment 1 – Personal teaching philosophy statement and resource analysis (same as before)
• Assignment 2 – Junior secondary English lesson plans (now completed in small groups of 2 or 3)
• Assignment 3 – A range of CHALLENGE TASKS published in a portfolio <– SCHMICK NEW TASK!

The New Task:

Many of the key ideas about inquiry-based and cooperative learning that I am working with can be found in a book extract provided by Edutopia: Teaching for Meaningful Learning by Brigid Barron & Linda Darling-Hammond.

Here is a brief extract – some words about project-based learning:

“Project-based learning involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event, or presentation to an audience. Thomas (2000) identifies five key components of effective project-based learning. It is: central to the curriculum, organized around driving questions that lead students to encounter central concepts or principles, focused on a constructive investigation that involves inquiry and knowledge building, student-driven (students are responsible for designing and managing their work), and authentic, focusing on problems that occur in the real world and that people care about.” (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 3; my emphasis)

What I’ve done in my new task is to create a poetry ‘project’ as one of 10 ‘challenges’ that students need to complete.

After trialling a poetry project last semester, I know that students see value in, and engage with this kind of learning.  But, at the end of the day, students felt let down because the work they put into their projects didn’t ‘count’ towards their final grade.

Once I started messing around with a new assignment that gave them credit for their project work, it was too hard not to design a whole suite of ‘challenges’ that they could choose to take up! So, that’s what I’ve done – students decide what grade they want to get, and complete the number of challenges needed to obtain it.

‘Challenge-based learning‘ as a term has not gained as much traction as ‘project-based learning’, but I think there is something to be said for the difference in terminology. In my teaching context, students are completing a ‘project’, but there is a minimum standard they have to reach to be able to ‘pass’ the assessment. Also, there is less focus on a ‘driving question’ than a PBL task would have – more of an emphasis on the products needing to be made. Hence my use of the term ‘challenge’ in the overall task.

The Challenges:

OK, the easiest way to show you the assignment is to share copies of my assignment sheets:

CLB018-CLP408 challenge portfolio task

A matrix of challenge tasks is provided for students to choose from in assignment 3. 

Students will receive a grade for Assignment 3 based on the number of challenges completed: 

•  4 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = PASS
•  6 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = CREDIT 
•  8 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = DISTINCTION 
•  10 CHALLENGES COMPLETED = HIGH DISTINCTION! 

CHALLENGE TASK peer assessment sheet

Note the peer assessment component of this task. This is something I am especially proud of, for a number of reasons! Not only am I hoping that this will result in a more sustainable marking practice for me (I will be checking/validating the peer marking, but no re-doing it), but it is also a strategy for getting the students to learn how to share their work and act as ‘critical friends’. I also think that having anopther preservice teacher assess your work in this context can be seen as providing an ‘authentic audience’ for student work.

Reflecting:

The student portfolios for this task are due next Friday, so I’ve yet to see how this new assessment plays out in real life.

One idea I have bubbling away about the teaching methods chosen is that ‘project-based’ learning can perhaps be broken down further as being either ‘inquiry-driven’ or ‘challenge-driven’ (and maybe even a third category, ‘play-driven’). But that’s a hierarchy that I’m still thinking through…

There is a lot going on here, I realise. But I’d seriously LOVE to hear feedback from my critical friends, including any students that end up reading this post

If you have any questions to ask, shoot them at me too! Obviously I’m quite proud of what I’ve constructed here, but in a few weeks it will be time to reflect again on how to improve for semester 2, so as they say…bring it!

Before coming to the 2012 AERA conference I had the absolute pleasure of attending the Inaugural International Youth Studies Congress at the University of Calgary.

As well as hearing from distinguishes scholars, teachers and students on issues relating to youth studies, the major highlight for me (and tbh, the carrot that helped me decide to attend in the first place), was the keynote address by Henry Giroux.

#whatgirouxlookslike

If you consider yourself a ‘radical’ educator and have not yet read Giroux’s work, I highly recommend it! He is doubly awesome in my book, given his commitment to getting his scholarly thoughts out into the wider-read public domain. I thought it very fitting, therefore, that I should tweet the ideas from his talk that stood out most for me.

You can read the gist of his talk in this op-ed article: The ‘Suicidal State’ and the War on Youth.

(NB: I accidentally tweeted the term ‘suicide state’ instead of ‘suicidal state’. Oops…)

I used the hashtag #girouxsays to mark the tweets…given the fickle, temporal life cycle of hashtag searches, I’ve collected them all here for y/our convenience and later reference:

A big shout out to Shirley Steinberg, the Werklund Foundation Chair in Youth Leadership Education, for hosting this inaugural event. She’s kind of a big deal in the fields of #radical_education #freire_project #critical_pedagogy – loved hearing more about this work! (my radical itch was in need of a scratch…)

‘Constructing a community of practice in English Curriculum Studies 1 – online and offline’

Action research cycle:

• Planning and fact-finding: 2010, semester 2
• Phase 1 action: 2011, semester 1
• Phase 2 action: 2011, semester 2
• Phase 3 action: 2012, semester 1
• Report findings: 2012, semester 2

The buzz term for how to ‘do’ curriculum planning here at uni is constructive alignment. Anyone else having to use this term?

Basically, constructive alignment is what you do when you make sure your assessment tasks match your learning objectives, and that your lesson materials feed into this productively. (OK, so I slipped the word ‘productively’ in just there…can you tell I’m living in Queensland? Productive pedagogies, anyone?)

So, the first two phases of my action research have been all about getting the assessments to work for me and my unit, English Curriculum Studies 1. I inherited a bunch of learning objectives when I took on coordination of this unit, but in the end I found that the assessment tasks weren’t engaging students in the ways I knew could happen. In the ways I was sure could happen, anyway. All of the assessment pieces have now been modified or replaced (not allowed to change the learning objectives) and things are aligning much more constructively…

The last piece in the puzzle that I was really hoping to nut out in this third cycle is the establishment of threshold concepts for this unit.

A ‘threshold concept’ is the kind of concept that, once learned, cannot be unlearned.  Once we grasp a piece of threshold knowledge, we pass over a barrier into new territory, where everything is seen anew with different eyes.

In the (bazillion) Powerpoint presentations I sat through last year as a new academic, I picked up the importance of using a few well-chosen threshold concepts to drive a unit of work.  For teachers like me that prefer to use project-based and inquiry-based learning approaches, having a set of threshold concepts in mind that you want students to ‘get’ by the end of the experience looks to be an excellent anchor for lesson planning.  Although these concepts are related to the official learning objectives of the unit, they do serve a different kind of function…and I really want to settle on what mine are!

Until this week I was still struggling to come up with suitable concepts.

But now, I struggle NO MORE!

I have been working on a summary video for students to watch at the half-way point in semester, while I am away at a conference.  In the video I want to recap the main points learned from weeks 1-5 of the unit.  The process of trying to identify what the ‘big ideas’ were amongst all of the super important stuff we learned wasn’t easy.  But the process of having to present the ideas to my students (not just to my academic review panel at the end of this year…!) has really helped.

Which I guess just goes to show that even teachers need an authentic audience for their work.

Trying to keep the video short (under 5 minutes) also forced my hand – left to my own devices, I’m sure I could find plenty of threshold concepts, but you only need a few. The wording of what I’ve chosen isn’t quite right yet, but these are the six big points I have chosen:

1. Your personal teacher identity is unique and reflects your personal experience, but will inevitably draw on many established philosophies and practices.
2. In ‘English’ we study: semiotics, text and context.
3. Language codes and conventions are socially constructed.
4. Verbal/linguistic language is just one semiotic ‘code’; we also learn/teach audio, visual, spatial and gestural language.
5. Literacy involves more than code breaking – we also make meaning, use texts functionally, and critique texts.
6. Multiliteracies pedagogies are currently favoured in English curriculum theory.

I suspect this is still too many for 6 weeks, but there you go.  We’ll see.  Once I’ve finished the video I’ll post it up here on the blog. I still have to add the narration, but most of the images are in. I’m using Movie Maker and Audacity as my tools of the trade…I hope the students have time to watch the bloody thing! But even if they don’t, I’m glad I went through this process and am happy that I’ve found some threshold concepts to settle on, for now. And, with any luck, a shiny new resource at the end I can be proud of. Fingers crossed!

However, I suspect it might be true.

I think it was my PhD thesis that killed it for me…I think…I don’t like writing.

I tried to rejoin my Daily Writing Group but this time it didn’t help.  I did co-write an Editorial for a journal = big success story!  (Editing other people’s writing was much easier than writing my own work.)

*le sigh

Luckily it is teaching time now, less expectation to write.  Brief, brief reprieve.

Definitely time to make good friends with my blog again.  I like it here best.  And people tell me they read it! (I hope people will be glad to know that they are not the only ones who don’t like writing.)

Other things I have been doing instead of writing:

• reading fiction
• organising multiple conference papers
• answering emails
• playing MW3

All worthy occupations!

Maybe I’m just in thesis ‘recovery’.  I mean, surely.

Just have to find the right motivation…

I really enjoyed meeting new people and hearing them share their work yesterday at the first TeachMeet in Brisbane.

Steve Box (@wholeboxndice) hosted the TeachMeet at Moreton Bay Boys College (thanks Steve!):

TeachMeet Brisbane

I presented a 7 minute pecha kucha on how to construct ‘fair’ assessment when using project-based learning (PBL).

My presentation included shout-outs to @BiancaH80 @malynmawby @Vormamim and @benpaddlesjones who are some of the wonderful people that have tweeted around ideas with me on my PBL journey.  It was the first time I presented a pecha kucha and adhered strictly to all the rules!  Making cards to help me stick to the topic helped a lot (something I haven’t done since school tbh):

Actual palm cards - old school!

If you’d like to check them out I’ve put the slides up on slideshare.  I hope that showing these resources helps future TeachMeeters plan their Pecha Kuchas – I loved the mode of presenting and highly recommend it!

Congratulations to TeachMeet Sydney on their WORLD RECORD ATTEMPT tonight!  I hope the next #TMBrisbane event at the State Library of Queensland will be able to be video streamed online like #TMSydney was tonight, I had a ball watching along and tweeting with everyone from home

The events were great successes, described by participants as welcoming, supporting and positive.  This is not surprising, when you consider that the ethos behind the event is that it is strictly free professional development run ‘for teachers, by teachers’.  What I thought was most attractive about the TeachMeet structure was the short presentations – either a 2 minute ‘nano-presentation or a 7 minute micro-presentation (or Pecha Kucha).  It sounds like an ideal way to hear a little bit from a lot of people.

You can therefore imagine how stoked I was to hear that someone was organising the first ever TeachMeet in BRISBANE!

#TMBrisbane

TEACHMEET BRISBANE will be held from 4-6pm at Moreton Bay Boys’ College on Thursday 1st March 2012.

If you would like to register or get more information, you can visit and join the TMBrisbane wiki: http://tmbrisbane.wikispaces.com/

Of course, I was so excited to see the event come to Brissie that I had to volunteer to present.  It will also be a great chance for me to refine my pecha kucha style!

(I also look forward to the #TMBrisbane hastag drawing together more of the Brisbane edu-community)

Pass it on

If you would like to be involved in TeachMeet Brisbane, or to support the event, take a look at the flyer available for download on the wiki.

In the Twittershpere you can participate in the backchannel from anywhere (not just Brisbane!) on March 1st by adding #TMBrisbane to your tweets.

Finally, this video about TeachMeets made for Sydney West is a great one to pass around to folk who are new to the TeachMeet concept…enjoy!

By nigelhowe (CC BY 2.0)

OK, just a couple of weeks late for a post like this, but what can I say?

I feel the urge to make some plans.

1. Go to less conferences: I loves me a good conference   But when you fill up every break you have with a work trip, you never actually have a break.  Sounds reasonable enough, however I am already slated to attend the AERA annual meeting in April, the AATE conference in October, and the AARE-APERA conference in December.  At least that’s one less than last year I suppose…
2. Learn more names: 9 weeks to learn 80 names – by golly! Putting students into reading groups helped me to learn more names last semester.  Next semester I think more students will be joining Twitter for their assessment task, so that will help a little more.  But my big idea this semester is to use OneNote better for this kind of thing, giving each class its own folder and importing student photos where possible.
3. Finish three academic papers: This is my year to publish, I’m sure.  Thesis writing burnt me out for a long time in terms of wanting to write, but this year my resolve is firmly in this direction.  I need to remember how to write and be happy.

It’s got to be dangerous to make more than three new years resolutions, so I’ll stop there!

I still have a month before university teaching starts again.  Plenty of time to work on some writing.  But also plenty of time to work on my blog, and on my unit outline, and a raft of other things.

At least this post is out of the way.

First posts of the year; they make me kinda nervous…

Still, my moby is playing nice enough to let me post these – my three best favourite blogs, and a free tool that should be getting more Edu-love, imo:

Best School Administrator blog
Darcy Moore’s Blog

http://darcymoore.net/

Darcy continually puts forward ideas and resources that are either immediately of interest to me, or make their way into my orbit months (or years) later. Progressive, responsive and visionary Darcy – I’m sure i won’t be the only blogger to nominate him

Best teacher blog
Bianca Hewes

http://biancahewes.wordpress.com/

For her edupunk ethos, and her uber reflective practice, Bianca always gets my vote. Now she’s started an MEd. in edu research, making this a hot blog to watch for all things Project-based.
PBL ftw!

Best individual blog
Dean Groom

http://deangroom.wordpress.com/

Dean is doing some really sexy Games-based learning work. He shares on his blog, among other things, his powerful use of Minecraft to connect kids AND their parentals to meaningful and fun learning online. His posts always give me something to think about – sometimes to disagree with – and his generosity with knowledge and resources is an important factor in the growth of interst in GBL in Sydney and beyond.

Best free web tool
Polyvore

http://www.polyvore.com/#

At first glance this looks like a fashion website. But dig past the front page and you’ll discover a collage making tool with a vibrant community of users and a rich collection of ‘sets’ covering a wide range of highly creative art, literature and even interior design sets. Easy to use, highly addictive, 100% recommendable (as long as you can forgive the fashionista links to retail items…which any good critical user should be able to manage )

Now, off to submit my post link. I hope I made it in time!

Thank-you to every blogger i have read this year. While i was finishing my thesis I did fall a little out of the loop; i hope to be a better reader, and commenter, in 2012.

Good luck to my peeps, and may the odds be ever in your favour!