By Shalamar on 1 Jun 2010 in Featured, SSAT National Conference 2010 | 0 comments - add a comment
SSAT’s 18th National Conference will build on last year’s theme of 21st century schooling and focus on how schools can provide the best education for all students. We want to promote dialogue and discussion around three key questions:
What do you think? Share your thoughts with us here, or at the event.
By Shalamar on 3 Sep 2010 in SSAT National Conference 2010 | 0 comments - add a comment
Professor Erica McWilliam is a leading academic from Queensland University of Technology.
In her post she focuses on two of our questions: What should students learn? How should students learn?
Research is now uncovering something that many effective teachers have suspected for some time: that valorising self-esteem when it is unconnected to any particular achievement or effort is not only unhelpful but might actually be counter-productive. More and more prominent psychologists are now concurring with Baumeister and his colleagues’ that
“there is little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today’s children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise.”
Here are a few disturbing trends that are not the fault of our children but rather an effect of the idea that anything or challenging is to be avoided in the interests of raising young people’s self-esteem.
Trend Number 1: The sale of oranges is in decline, apparently because few of us can be bothered to peel them anymore. Our children complain that orange-peeling is too difficult and makes their fingers all sticky. (Note: it remains to be seen if the easy peel orange can come to the rescue.)
Trend Number 2: School guidance officers are noting that they now spend less time seeing the bottom quartile of ‘special needs’ students and more time counselling ‘A’ students who have just been awarded their first ‘B’. Parents are particularly upset when they have done more work on the ‘B’ assignment than their child did.
Trend Number 3: Secondary school students in Western countries have been opting out of Advanced Science and Mathematics in favour of ‘easier’ options like life-skills electives. (There is no similar trend in Asian countries). See the Wikipedia page Girls Just Want to Have Sums for a humorous Simpsons take on how we have come to substitute touchy-feely exercises for conceptual rigour.
Trend Number 4: For many of our young people, task completion has been about finding instant solutions and being rewarded with easy success. Carol Dweck’s research draws attention to this trend as a problematic effect of too much focus on performance goals (external judgment, looking good) and too little on learning (strategies for mastering new skills and knowledge). The trophy generation, she found, was in danger of over-emphasising performance at the expense of learning.
Michael Foley’s recent book, The Age of Absurdity (2010), likewise draws attention to the widespread retreat from challenge as a disturbing meta-trend of our times. In his chapter, “The Rejection of Difficulty and Understanding”, he sums up the widespread preference for ‘low challenge’ living:
Difficulty has become repugnant because it denies entitlement, disenchants potential, limits mobility and flexibility, delays gratification, distracts from distraction and demands responsibility, commitment, attention and thought.
Foley sees the retreat from difficulty as an effect, at least in part, of our willingness to elevate self-esteem to a social good worthy for its own sake, regardless of personal or professional achievement. He understands self-esteem as “ha[ving]” no values or principles”, and as requiring no effort beyond insisting on positive self-reflection from others. In short, in line with the finding of the psychologists whose quotation introduces this paper, Foley understands investment in raising children’s self-esteem as a means by which we can and do let young people off the hook of intellectual challenge.
Meanwhile, 21st century living learning and earning is replete with complexity and becoming more so. Earning a living in a highly competitive global marketplace demands engagement with more technology-enhanced processes, more complex design problems, more speedy and multiple transactions, more scrutiny of individual, team and organisational performance, less certainty of tenure and less career linearity, particularly in high-tech industries and those most exposed to frequent market fluctuations. The new global marketplace does not provide rich rewards for the capacity to perform low-challenge tasks, routine thinking or simple transactions.
High levels of literacy – both traditional and digital – are needed to live, learn and earn in the 21st century.. It does not matter so much that young people are deserting the more difficult disciplines – what matters is whether they are relying on ‘easy success’ to get them the future they want. Trying to avoid or step around complexity and challenge is not the answer. We need to ensure that our schools are providing the sort of “low threat, high challenge’’ environment that will allow young people to fly high in complex and turbulent times. Less failsafe – more safefail. Our challenge as teachers is to provide all our young people with a deep and lasting experience of the pleasure and rigour of complex thinking. To do less is to be patronising. If we make easy success an easy option, we are helping those who are most in need to be more exposed and more vulnerable.
It is my strongly held belief that what students learn and how they learn needs to be much more focused on actual achievement – on doing challenging and valuable things well – than on raising self-esteem. It’s time to move beyond the therapeutic era of ‘low threat, low challenge’ education that is exemplified in the scenario above, to an era that can significantly raise the bar on risk and challenge.
Erica will be speaking at this year’s conference. She will draw on her wide ranging research to outline the key elements of a 21st century pedagogy and the leadership required to deliver this in a wide range of settings.
By Catherine Dean on 3 Sep 2010 in SSAT National Conference 2010 | 0 comments - add a comment
Student performances are one of the real highlights of National Conference. Every year delegates tell us how inspiring it is to see such talented students singing, dancing and performing on a national platform. We had such excellent performances in 2009 and thought we’d be hard pushed to equal them this year.
By the time applications closed, we had been inundated with over 100 applications from all over the country. Our first job was to go through all the video materials which had been submitted and try to get down to a shortlist of schools to visit. It took us days to get down to 27 lucky shortlisted schools and the decisions were extremely hard to make. We are very grateful to all the schools who applied and I can only say that the standard was outstanding and we wished we could have visited everyone!
During the summer term I and four colleagues set off around the country visiting the shortlisted schools. We saw everything from Taiko Japanese drumming at Banovallum School in Norfolk to breakdancing at All Saints RC School in York and an African choir at Formby High School in Merseyside. I was lucky enough to see a wonderful energetic dance piece at the Colne Community School and College in Essex, and an infectiously enthusiastic steel pan band at Charles Edward Brooke School in London.
At the end of our visits, when we all sat down to tell each other about what we had seen, the common theme was the dedication and enjoyment we had all seen among the students we had met. Personally I really enjoyed having the chance to speak to students about the pieces they performed and hearing in many cases that they had been actively involved in choreography and arrangement.
From the shortlisted schools we have now made the very tough decisions about which groups will perform at the conference itself, and we hope you will enjoy watching and listening to them as much as we did. Have a look on the National Conference website to see the full list of performers.
Two which I’m really looking forward to are Ivybridge Community College in Devon who are devising a new acrobatic dance piece especially for the conference, and Parkwood Hall Special School from Kent who are bringing their renowned steel pan band. We have chosen a wide range of performances with the aim of showcasing the absolute best of what is out there in our schools – the variety and scope of talent is truly outstanding and we’re sure you will go back to your schools inspired and invigorated by what your students can achieve.
Catherine Dean works at the Specialist School and Academies Trust and is the Project Manager of this year’s National Conference.
By Andrew Macdonald-Brown on 13 Jul 2010 in Innovation Fellows | 2 comments - add a comment
I’ve been running a programme with the SSAT called the ‘Innovation Fellows’. This is a diverse group of 19 practitioners and school leaders seconded to the SSAT one day a week (Fridays), engaging in collaborative action research – what’s this got to do with cpd? I will get to that….
The Fellows have been focusing their group action research in 5 areas of System Redesign:
Information about the programme can be found at: https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/innovation/fellows/Pages/default.aspx
They have come together, and focused their classroom practice, exploring the impact of this on learning and engagement. The outcomes of this will be shared. What was a little unexpected was the extent to which colleagues in the Fellow’s schools voluntarily engaged in adopting similar practice. Inherent in this was the need for ad hoc cpd, and the realisation that the innovative approaches being taken to conduct action research across schools amongst the Fellows was being modelled in their own school, across teams.
So, after some reflection we get to the point at which we asked ourselves, ‘What does good cpd look like?’. For the Fellows, the response has been that the Innovation Fellows programme has represented a high quality cpd opportunity. This is a list of the characteristics they came up with. Effective cpd should:
This is not a definitive list, but it is drawn from the experience of practitioners. Perhaps a challenge is to consider how cpd can be reshaped to offer real development. A headteacher recently talked about cpd in the context of ‘performance management’. He noted “teachers don’t want to be ‘mangaged’, they want to be developed”. Not a bad mantra to lead by.
By Karen Gillingham on 17 Jun 2010 in SSAT National Conference 2010 | 3 comments - add a comment
I am passionate about using creativity to bring learning alive for young people. I have worked as an opera director with young people and repeatedly seen how a creative approach can transform engagement and enthusiasm.
I remember once being asked to cover for a teacher and lead a social studies lesson on refugees. The lesson plan detailed the plight of a family fleeing Iraq and embarking on the long journey to England, travelling in a box within a fruit lorry only to be sent back when they eventually reached their final destination. The plan for the lesson was to get the students to read this story and then answer various questions on it.
I really wanted them to understand the feelings of the family rather than just read about them in what could have been interpreted as a fictional way.
So I decided to set up the classroom as the cargo area of a boat. The students were allowed to bring one thing with them from home. I become the person who decided if they could keep the things they wanted to bring – that photo of their family, or their playstation. All of this was done with mimed objects, but they had to explain in detail to me what they were and why they had chosen them. Often I took the items from them.
After the decision had been made on whether they could bring the thing they wanted, they were sent to a rectangular area that I had marked with tape on the floor. This became very cramped as more and more class members joined the area.
I asked them to imagine it was dark and got them to tell me how they felt not having any daylight or food. I was amazed at the way that the students engaged in the exercise and began ‘being’ in that situation.
I stayed in role for 35 minutes. We then all came out of character and talked about the exercise we had just been part of. The class had a new found empathy for the family and the way that they answered the set questions in the lesson plan reflected this.
The original lesson plan had intended that the students be sat behind desks for the duration.
I use this story as an example of one of the many instances in my career when taking a creative approach has unlocked another level of empathy and engagement in young people. I believe we should be creative in all subject areas and use the creativity that surrounds us to inspire in all subject areas. I will be holding a workshop session at the National Conference. Through lesson modelling I will seek to support delegates in exploring how creativity can bring their teaching to life. I do hope you’ll join me.
Karen Gillingham is an opera director and animateur. She has worked alongside Gareth Malone on SSAT’s last two national conferences and will be speaking at this year’s event.
