teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

First up, a couple of (minor) changes to the Weekly Roundup from now on. Because on a Sunday I have a lot of non-education things to do, organize, and reflect upon I am going to start rounding up on a Saturday instead. The other change is that from now on my weekly roundups will have a theme, highlighted in bold in this introductory spiel. It’s already pretty much got that, but I might as well make it more obvious. This week I seem to have unconsciously focusing on teacher professional development and the future of the teaching ‘profession’…

The things that have caught my eye this week are:

• Chris Sessums - Getting IT Right Socially: Reflections from ALT-C 2006
• EdWonk - Is Teaching A “Profession” Or Is It “Something Else?”
• Jenny D. - Professions, Process, Outcomes
• Wes Fryer - Wiki, Blog or Moodle?
• Tom Barrett - Classroomblogging wiki and ICT in my Classroom blog
• Terry Freedman - Blog Literacy, or How I Cope With The Deluge
• Educational Technology That Works wiki

Find of the week happened just now, actually, when I came across Tom Barrett’s blog - ICT in my Classroom. The great thing is that Tom’s a Year 6 teacher in a primary school - wait for it… in England! Sutton-in-Ashfield, which is not too far away from me, if I’ve read between the lines in his class blog correctly. And here was I thinking the edublogosphere was dominated by Americans and the odd Scot. Tom’s blog gives great examples of how even fairly straightforward ICT ideas can be used to good effect. Take his Flickr picture annotation post, for example. Other teachers can easily discover what this pioneer in ICT in primary education is doing. Fantabulous.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there, some of which Tom and other pioneers are harnessing. However, sometimes one can feel a bit lost at sea when faced with a plethora of ICT tools which could benefit learning. What’s needed are concrete examples that teachers can learn from and then implement in their own classrooms. This is what Tom is trying to do with his Classroomblogging wiki. A lot of it is understandably primary-school focused, but there’s still some great ideas there. Here are some of my favourites:

A photo blog - upload favourite images linked to a theme eg. harvest, freezing, new life. Ask students to comment on reason why it’s a favourite.

Podcasting in a foreign language

Ask teachers within the school from other classes to comment on work - a weekly headteacher blog would be a nice way to comment on work across the school…

Establish some safe guidelines then simply let the kids write about their world and ideas and thoughts.

He’s also got a Google Earth Classroom wiki, but this isn’t the AGM of the Tom Barrett appreciation society, so I’ll move on… Another, more formalized way of spreading good practice comes through the Educational Technology That Works wiki. This wiki looks at what it calls ‘Classroom Instruction That Works’ (CITW):

CITW is a collection of effective strategies culled from a meta-analysis of decades of research on what works in classrooms to improve student learning and increase student achievement. This meta-analysis was conducted by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. They combined these effective strategies into nine broad categories:

* Identifying similarities and differences
* Summarizing and note-taking
* Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
* Homework and practice
* Nonlinguistic representations
* Cooperative learning
* Setting objectives and providing feedback
* Generating and testing hypotheses
* Questions, cues, and advance organizers

Under the section Marzano & Web 2.0/Setting Objectives & Providing Feedback there’s a fairly good list of Web 2.0 tools that can be used in the classroom. It may be worth exploring the wiki and contributing to it if you can! (Wes Fryer’s also got a good article about various tools over at Techlearning in Wiki, Blog or Moodle?)

There’s no doubt that teachers across the world are, on the whole, a dedicated, hard-working bunch, committed to ensuring the best learning experiences possible for those in their charge. Unfortunately, however, I no longer think that teaching can be called a ‘profession’. In an interesting post entitled Professions, Process, Outcomes, Jenny D. reflects on the musings of herself and others on what would make teaching more like a profession. I agree with the conclusion she and her first-year doctoral students came up with: that professionals are not measured by outcomes, but by processes:

For example, physicians worry about process first. The correct process leads to the best outcome, so process is first. Physicians share a common language for discussing process and procedure.

Doctors who work with the sickest patients are often the most skilled doctors, and their outcomes are probably not as good as doctors who work with less sick patients. So measuring a doctor’s skill might not be best done using outcomes.

Another example, physicians dissect their failures in Morbidity and Mortality meetings. They go over their failures not so much to point blame, but to examine the procedures and processes, and look for ways to improve and learn. Clearly, a physician who makes an error or doesn’t follow the best procedure is not going to look good in an M&M meeting. But that doesn’t change the focus of the meeting away from examining process.

EdWonk (I’m pretty sure that’s not his real name) picks up on this in Is Teaching A “Profession” Or Is It “Something Else?”. He puts it in more straightforward, hard-hitting language:

I could not imagine a physician who would need to save 100% of his or her patients from death in order to avoid being labeled an “underperforming” physician.

I could not imagine an attorney who would need to obtain an acquittal for 100% of his or her clients in order to avoid being labeled an “underperforming” lawyer.

I could not imagine a dentist who would need to painlessly save 100% of the teeth of 100% of his or her patients in order to avoid being labeled an “underperforming” dentist.

It’s unbelievably foolish and naive to expect that 100% of children can reach a given target without taking into account their individual differences. I’m a firm believer in ‘aiming for the stars to hit the treetops’, but not when hitting the treetops is labelled as ‘underperforming’.

In real professions, 100% effectiveness isn’t required in order to avoid being termed “underperforming.”

Finally, a couple of posts from two of my favourite edubloggers - Chris Sessums and Terry Freedman. I’ve only just come across Terry’s post from June entitled Blog Literacy, or How I Cope With The Deluge in which he gives great advice to those new to this Web 2.0 business and is feeling a little… well, overwhelmed. He discusses reading effectively and how to deal with blogs to which you subscribe. Definitely worth a read! Chris, on the other hand, in Getting IT Right Socially: Reflections from ALT-C 2006 discusses everything from the ‘locus of control’ for teachers, to Marshall McLuhan, to making ICT in education ‘cool’. I think I would do him a disservice trying to summarize his post at the tail end of this weekly roundup. Just go and read it! Here’s a rather amusing picture he posted alongside his text as way of enticement:

Until next time… thanks for reading!

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