EdFest 15 now ready for viewing!

For those of you who missed it live, the Edfest 15 video is now ready for viewing!

Watch EdFest 15 on YouTube.

If you have a Scootle account you can watch it here where course slides etc are also available:

EdFest 15 on The Scootle Lounge.

Happy viewing!

Regards,

Mel.

Welcome to 2015 with the Wodonga CRT Support Network!

Many of you are aware that one of the projects I worked on in 2014 was bringing the MoneySmart Teaching PD program from the Victorian Curriculum Assesssment Authority to CRTs on the same free basis that it is supplied to schools.  That's not all I've been working on and there's a couple of exciting things in the near future!

Regards,

Mel.

Scootle Edfest 15 is now on!

Folow the link and click play to watch the live stream.

http://blog.scootle.edu.au/edfest15/

Recorded versions will be available later this week for those of you who can't watch today.

Regards,

Mel.

Evolving our practice.

Well, another school year is almost upon us and we are about to head back into classrooms across the state.  Schools are choosing from a pool of CRTs and they naturally want the most effective ones they can get into their classrooms making ours a performance driven job market.  How do we meet this challenge head-on and sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to our classroom practice?

Many of us are aware of John Hattie's research in the context of how the government has used it against Australian schools to lower funding;  "Teachers are the most important factor in education and all the money we have thrown at it hasn't increased outcomes".  The good news is that this isn't how John Hattie intended his research to be used and it's got some good information in it for us as teachers too.

It's worth a look and keeping those highly effective factors in mind as we evolve our teaching practice.

Here's a couple of links to follow if this grabbed you and you want to find out a little more.

"What's good for the goose..." (DEECD research article - PDF):

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/about/research/ravisiblelearning.pdf

Hattie Ranking (Visible-learning.org):

http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

Regards,

Mel.

Differentiation doesn't work?

In a couple of Facebook groups I have seen the following article and discussion about it:

"Differentiation doesn't work"

I have to say that I have a huge problem with what this article is saying and there were other teachers commenting along the same lines so I thought I'd give a different view.

A theme that cropped up in more than one of the discussions was about how it worked in classes with high needs or gifted and talented students where differentiation was expressed as an appropriate tool to ensure that all students were able to learn.  This is basically confusing differentiation with individual learning plans.  Individual learning plans are made for students with different capabilities and learning goals that address their specific learning needs.  They are each working on different academic content.

Differentiation is where students work on the same academic content.

"Simply stated, differentiation is modified instruction that helps students with diverse academic needs and learning styles master the same challenging academic content."

From "A Teacher's Guide to Differentiating Instruction".

Differentiation is about making sure each child gets what they need but it's not all about different academic levels as some were thinking during the Facebook discussions. It is about different learning styles and is achieved by not assuming each student will benefit equally from the same learning activities.

As an example I was in a spec dev class and we were learning about rain in weather cycles; it rains, the water goes into creeks and into rivers and back into the ocean, evaporating along it's journey to form new clouds to bring the rain again. One student stared off into space for a little bit and then asked out of the blue if the water from rain that goes down the drain in the street, the water from the bath and the water from the toilet all went into the same drain.

What this allows us to learn as a teacher is to understand how our students are thinking. We can see how they each approach the same learning and the different strategies they employ to understand the lesson being delivered. This student was understanding the world from how one thing was connected to another. Another was learning by copying the pictures of rain and where it went to create a visual reference in their mind. Another was repeating each step verbally and learning through auditory means.

In classrooms with high learning needs students frequently have individual learning plans and so on but that doesn't mean that there aren't things they can all work on together and in this case differentiation is a vital tool.  The students as a whole are unable to grasp the content through a specific learning style because of their ranging cognitive abilities as well as other issues. You can't just give the same activity to each student, you have to target their individual learning abilities.

Once you understand that student A needs to make connections, student B needs visual activities and student C needs aural then differentiating for these students becomes relatively easy, it can just be labour intensive on occasion as you seek out appropriate activities and support the students through these activities. Once you've got the activities, however, you've got them and in a digital age they can all be filed away on something as small as a flash drive instead of needing file cabinet after file cabnet like was necessary in the past.

When applied properly differentiation does not hamper learning, it enables it by providing each student with appropriate avenues for them to understand the same content in a personally understandable and meaningful way.

You still need to have some activities that can be differentiated for the whole class so it can feel like a class instead of an individual collection of students.  For inclusion purposes you're all doing the same thing just at different academic or physical ability levels. Everyone is doing spelling differentiated with level appropriate words for example. Some are using pencils and paper and working on letter formation and so on while others are using counters. fridge magnets or dictating to ES staff because they have motor skill issues that prevent them from being able to write. Some are using a combination because they need the process broken down for them in order for it to be achievable (they'll work out the spelling with counters then use one to one copying from the counters to paper so they can focus on writing alone for example).

Differentiation is an incredibly powerful learning and social tool and articles like the one that got me thinking about all of this simply doesn't do it justice.

So when it comes to statements like these

"In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction"

we can understand one of the reasons why special development classrooms have quite small class sizes and an appropriate number of ES staff. Differentiation can be a very time consuming to achieve on occasion but it gets easier and faster over time as you fill up your flash drive with the stuff you need to make it happen.

What I learnt in Spec Dev has allowed me to differentiate far more easily in mainstream classrooms. It's led me to a far deeper understanding of what differentiation is actually supposed to be doing in our classrooms and how to achieve it with the minimal possible effort.


So while differentiation may be "a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions" as practiced by those observed in the article, it doesn't mean that's how it needs to be and the couple of intervening years really makes a difference. It's considered "somewhat" or "very" difficult to implement by 83 percent of teachers.

The question I'd like you all to ask yourselves is this one:  "Well... What are the other 17% doing?" because they are the ones finding it easy.  What do they know and do differently?  That is the information for us to learn from which is much more productive than than letting ourselves be convinced that it doesn't work or is too much work.

My piece of advice is that we live in a day and age where instructional activities are easy to access and we don't need to create everything ourselves. The internet offers an avenue to digital tools, hands on activities and pen and paper exercises at an unprecedented level of accessibility.  We just don't need to reinvent the wheel anymore and it gets easier and easier to deploy quality differentiation into our classrooms with each passing year.

It's a lot easier now than it was even 5 years ago (the latest date in the first article is 2011 for studies with the earliest being fron 2008). You can get online and buy rubrics very cheaply that have pre-generated differentiation built in and all the resources right there simply to deploy into classrooms. Not just for high needs students but also extended activities for gifted and talented learners as well.

Differentiation is just not the huge effort it has been in the past for the average classroom teacher. With the explosion of the online sharing of resources through Teachers Pay Teachers and similar sites a market has been generated for standalone lessons where in the past it used to be primarily learning systems that we were able to buy. Australian Governments and education systems are even coming on board with websites of their own, such as Scootle, offering pre-generated content with differentiated activities included.


So a bit of a warning. The info the original article is based on is from an "educational consultant" and you can often put those in the same class the article puts uni lecturers into (not all uni lecturers are in that boat either). They are often a couple years behind the times and also rely on studies that in turn rely on "what the majority do".

If the majority struggle with it and find it hard then that's how it must be.  Suddenly "it's bad". They don't ask "why do the 17% find it easy".  As teachers that sort of stuff isn't what we need. What we need is the educationalists seeking best practice examples and putting that out there instead. Look for those, read them intently so we can decide for ourselves whether it's something we should or can implement in our classrooms.

I recently ran across this video too;

"Systems are not the solution, people are".  We are Teachers, the people who educate the students. They are our classrooms. They are our students. No-one knows our capabilities and theirs better than we do.  Don't discount differentiation because others struggle with it.  Don't discount your own ability as a Teacher to use it effectively.  Invest in it.  Get enthusiastic about it.  Learn about it.  Get creative, use your lateral thinking skills and find the most efficient ways to implement it.

Once you achieve a state where you want differentiation in your classrooms, or any other strategy you can name, and are genuinely invested in it you'll learn about it because you want to and it becomes  a joy, not a worry.  It becomes easy, not a struggle.

Your faith in your own abilities is one of the most important learning tools you will ever have on the road to becoming a great teacher.  Just don't listen to people telling you that you just aren't good enough by telling you what's too hard for you, pay attention to the 17% who caan tell you how to do it instead and learn what they have to offer.

Regards,

Mel.

Visual Literacy with Cookie Monster.

Just a quick one today!  I'm working on a project for hands-on/visual literacy and I just thought I'd drop this in...

Watch Cookie Monster on YouTube!

As a child I was totally captivated by Cookie Monster spelling a single word.... 

Word groups highlighted in a different colour, the motion of letters coming together into a word and all overlayed by phonics and comedy. Of course it's done by apps all the time these days but it's great to look back at the "olden days" on occasion.

It's great being a teacher sometimes, I can sit on the couch and watch old sesame street re-runs or DVDs and nobody looks at me funny!

Mel.