Last year I completed my Unified ICT Rubric for KS3, and even before it was finished I hated it. It was too big, too complex and too restrictive. I have spent the last year slowly thinking of a better way, looking around at what others are doing, and trying to roll disparate ideas into something simple, cohesive and, gasp, even fun. The result is the document and process you see below. It is a system of student self assessment, where the teacher is there to verifying and adjudicate student’s own assessments of themselves. But, it is more than simply an assessment guide, it is also a way for students to understand a whole course, and to map their progress.

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The Teaching & Assessment Process

This document can be used in numerous ways to support teaching and learning. The description below is the way I am currently planning to use it:

• The first step has been to reduce the number of units in each year, to free up 5 lessons for students to work on self assessment. You can see my draft KS3 ICT & Media Plan, to look at what exactly is covered.
• Students will be introduced to the guide during the first lesson of the year, and we will work through the instructions (top right of the guide) together.
• For each unit of study, students will reflect on roughly 5 strand+keyword pairs (e.g. Intellectual Property+Creative Commons). At first, I will select these for them, after some practice they should be able to select them themselves.
• Students will study as per usual, creating an artifact which they will submit for assessment.
• Students will then write their reflection, showing clearly how they have achieved each level, going as high as they can. They will assign themselves a grade using the average of their layers. This reflection, plus grade, will be submitted as well.
• Using both the submitted work, as well as the reflection, I will vet their self assessment, and determine whether it is accurate. Any adjustments (up or down), will be made before the final grade is recorded.
• Finally, students will highlight the keywords they have reflected on, using the header colour from the highest level they have achieved. As students progress through the course, they should end up with an ongoing map of their achievement:

I would love to get some input on this idea. How does it compare with your own assessments? Do you think it will work? Is it suitable to subjects other than ICT & Media?

Acknowledgements: this work has not been created in isolation, but rather has been influenced by many other teachers and their approaches to assessment and education in general. I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Goldthorpe’s work on self assessment, Mark Roper & Kevin Lester’s IEA work on a clear lexis for assessment and Chris Leach for tipping me over the edge.

The following 12 ideas are lessons I think we really should be teaching students to help them become healthy, sane adults. But for whatever reason, they are hard to teach and even harder to learn. How can we get these messages across to students without sounding preachy or just plain weird? Of course, some of these items will be controversial. Colleagues, administrators, parents and students may at various times disagree with the content, or even with the idea of departing from the normal curriculum. However, despite the risks, I think that students really do need to be aware of these ideas, and who else is going to broach them? The question is how…any ideas?

Credits: Rainbow and Stop Sign image by sandy.redding on Flickr shared under CC BY-NC-SA.

The two visualisations below are part of an ongoing attempt to define my views on education, and make these accessible to my students, fellow teachers, parents and leaders. I would be interested to hear if and how you find them useful, and what you think could be improved.

1. Teaching & Learning: Style Comparison

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2. Teaching & Learning: Essential Mindsets

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Teach A Teacher is part unit of study, part conference. Hosted at HLYIS this year, the event featured students from ICHK, and teachers from JIS, HLYIS, ICHK and ESF Kindergardens.

The aim is for students to work in groups to prepare and deliver professional development sessions for teachers. Students develop their abilities in presentation, communication and collaboration. Teachers get to learn new skills, and see education from the other side of the desk:

“I could sense that the students loved the topics they taught and it showed in their enthusiasm. Made me think of how my students see me when I teach.” – Participating teacher

And students start to understand what life is like for their teachers.

“This activity helped the students to know a teacher’s role and what it is like for their teachers. The interaction between teachers and students was great.” - Participating teacher

During ICT classes, students spent time devising, naming, imagining and planning their sessions. They presented to each other, to themselves, and to a few teachers too. Their work was filmed and reviewed by themselves and their peers. Over 9 lessons of 70 minutes each, groups polished, improved, refined and rehearsed. They strove to be imaginative, creative, clear and professional. On the day, all were nervous, but at the same time they managed to channel their energy into doing a great job. At times, they modeled current best-practice in the classroom:

“I think this group of boys were exceptional in their preparation and communication. I loved how hands on it was and they let us learn by doing.”

Relieved to be finished, students commented on how happy they were, and how much they enjoyed their experience. But, as is the way with technology, not everything went to plan:

“I really enjoyed the Teach A Teacher event. I have experienced that being a teacher is not that easy, you need to plan out the lesson really carefully. I noticed that I should always plan about what would you need to do when you’re having technical difficulties.” – Charlie Yau, Year 7 Student

Asked how they found the experience of being taught by students, teachers reported the following:

“It was a very good learning experience both for students and teachers. I enjoyed it a lot.”

“Loved the fun aspect of the presenter that used the sword in place of a pointer!”

“Great! I learnt a lot and felt very comfortable with the students teaching me. The best thing about this is that I can ask silly questions and not be laughed at!”

This is an event which will definitely be repeated, and hopefully expanded, in 2014. Please feel free to email me if you wish to receive information about next year’s event, either to come as a learner, or to enter student teams from your school.

Backchanneling is an idea that has been around for a while, and is something that I have encountered at various education conferences. Despite the technical-sounding name, a backchannel is simply a real-time conversation, happening online in parallel with some kind of face-to-face communication. For example, a keynote speaker might advertise a Twitter hashtag for their session: as they are talking, participants conduct a conversation using tweets, which are grouped together using the hashtag.

So, what’s the point? Is it just more needless technology, or is there something to be gained? What a backchannel provides is a way for your audience to make extra meaning based on what you are saying. For example, they may require clarification or extension on a particular point, or they may wish to contend an assertion or add a meaningful anecdote. This added dialogue is available to everyone with access to the backchannel, and can be responded to in order to help out or further the discussion. A savvy presenter will keep an eye on the backchannel, and deviate from their plan according to what the audience is saying.

Of course, a backchannel can be a distraction, or might even be used to subvert a presentation (a good presenter should welcome this, I guess). One danger in the classroom is that inexperienced or immature students might get carried away with excessive off-topic chat, with all the LOLs and OMGs that that entails.

On Friday my school is hosting the Global Issues Competition 2013, an event for students in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. Our aim is to encourage a backchannel with the aim of helping the students learn and make new connections. Originally we were going to use Twitter, but have now settled on a less public platform called TodaysMeet. Another good option is Backchannel Chat, which is specfically designed for education, and has some cool features, such as liking posts.

Credits: Image by Miss Barabanov on Flickr, shared under CC BY-NC-ND.

The following tweet landed on my feed this morning, and it really got me thinking. I so often try to tackle printing as an environmental issue, that I forget the fact that it is, in many ways, simply an inferior way to work.

Don’t tell me a policy is a “living document” that is being constantly reviewed if you then go and print it on paper. Sigh.

— Chris Betcher (@betchaboy) January 28, 2013

This led me to compose the following email to my colleagues, as an opening salvo in a new offensive against the poor practice of printing:

Colleagues, you all know that I am opposed to printing. But there is more to it than just environmentalism.

If you want to think of your work as “living” (eg actively used, collaborative, flexible, responsive, meaningful) then why consign it to static paper? Why not share your work online, build an audience and set your work free. Put it in a blog, or an online document, invite commentary, make everyone an owner.

This is the future of knowledge for our students. Lead by example. Paper is a dead end. Isn’t it time to upgrade?

Fortunately Chris Betcher put his thoughts down in a shared, digital environment, and so we are all able to make use of them. Imagine if he just printing them out, and filed them away.

Another school day comes to a close, and yet again I discover that the earth has shifted beneath my feet. Maybe this is the best thing about teaching, the thing that keeps us coming back every day. You just never know what is going to happen. And be it great, terrible or mind-blowing, it will surely get your attention. Today, the girls who just didn’t care turned out to have spent hours on your assessment piece, simply because it sparked their imagination. And their work was amazing. Today, the kid you really like, one of the good ones, did something so rash and bizarre that it made your head spin. Today, the teacher who resists change asked you to make a change on their behalf.

Sometimes I think I have a handle on this thing called education. This is generally right before it mysteriously slips through my fingers and spins into the distance. But lo, the next day it is back beside me, wagging its tail and begging to play. Sometimes I feel like I can change my students for the better. And then, all of a sudden, I realise they have changed me.

I guess its inevitable. Take a few hundred people of different ages, backgrounds and agendas, mix them together, take a step back and see what happens. In spite of all of the planning, the reflection and the striving, the real action seems to happen in the margins, annotations and footnotes. In the places where we don’t expect them, at the times least anticipated. And wham, there it goes again.

I guess the lesson for me here is to let go of my dreams of perfection and homogeneity, consistency and control. Instead, I will lay down my best plan, hit the play button and hang on for dear life. I will flail, kick, scream and smile. And then I will come back and do it again tomorrow.

*Note: Electric Explosion image by *georgiaheartslosers on DeviantArt, under CC BY-NC-ND

I’ve got creativity on the brain at the moment, and the more I think about it, the more interesting it is, the more nuances I find. This morning I had 15 minutes with some Year 8 students I know well. I told them that I had been thinking about this topic a lot, but wanted some different perspectives and ideas. I wrote the word on the board, and asked them to tell me any thoughts they had on the topic. A slow start led to most students getting involved, and the emergence of some themes:

• Originality – there was some consensus amongst students that something was creative if it had not been done before, or if the creator was not aware that it had been done. I agree with this to an extent, but an act of creation, such as painting a landscape, can be creative to for an artist, even though it might have been by thousands of others before her.
• Risk – some students thought that creativity comes from taking risks. I really like this idea, and it ties in well to the IB Learner Profile. I think it is probably impossible to be creative without some element of risk taking.
• Difficulty – some suggested that something has to be difficult to be creative. To counter this we discussed the fact that a creative act can be easy (such as taking a photo), but the thought or inspiration behind it (composition) might be difficult. I mentioned this photo to students as something technically relatively easy, but difficult in other regards. There is a school of thought that believes that modern creativity is somehow less valuable, because technology makes it too easy and accessible, which to me is counter-intuitive (for more on this, watch the excellent documentary Press Pause Play).
• Process – I tried to share with the students the idea that we often think of creativity in terms of the outcome, but that in a lot of ways it is the process that defines it. For example, Einstein’s famous E=mc² does not seem creative, but once you are familiar with the nature of scientific progress and revolution, and the struggle against the status quo, you can appreciate it as a deeply creative act.
• Struggle – I really believe that true creativity must involve some kind of internal struggle, as we attempt to force ourselves from who we are now, to what we need to become in order to do and think in new and different ways.  I related to students my own experiences learning web design, and the fact that every major advancement I made was preceded by a period of self-doubt, self-loathing and a desire to pack it all in. This was simply my brain rebelling against the chaos of the unknown: this phase hopefully then leads to insight and change, followed by a period of flow and productivity. In the past, whilst teaching students to programme (an inherently creative act) I have used the following diagram to illustrate this point, and support struggling students:

• Passion – Ken Robinson describes passion as being one of the most important parts of creativity, and it makes a lot of sense. After all, if you are not passionate, you are unlikely to put yourself through the struggle of the creative process.

By the end of the discussion I felt we had covered a lot of ground and shared some good ideas. I was really impressed with the students’ willingness to think, share and consider other perspectives. Yet I get the feeling that in some ways creativity remains an illusive, mysterious enigma which will occupy many an hour of my mind’s time.

Teach A Teacher is a brand new student-led conference for teachers. The aim is to help teachers improve their ICT skills, whilst exposing students to a new classroom perspective. All schools are welcome, but places are limited. To register, email rparker@ichk.edu.hk. Click on the image below to see a larger version.

Session Details

The table below gives details of the material on offer at the Teach A Teacher conference:

Session 1 – 14:45-15:30

Session 2 – 15:35-16:20

Peer-assessment seems to be a persistent buzz word in education, and it is something I have used in the past with my students. However, until recently, I have never found it to be as useful as others suggest it might be.  Recently, though, I supplemented verbal peer feedback with with a Google Docs form, containing a number of questions on a numeric scale as well as a field for comments. We video recorded each student performing their assessment piece (a rapid presentation on human-computer interaction, 60 seconds at most), and then reviewed the videos as a class. Whilst students did not necessarily enjoy the process of watching themselves on screen, it certainly made them think about how they present themselves. For each video reviewed, every student in the class (including the presenter) and the teacher, submitted feedback via the Google form. In addition, students were asked to comment on each others’ work verbally, which they were at times reluctant to do. This was supplemented by verbal feedback from the teacher for each student.

The result was immediate feedback, backed by a giant spreadsheet containing around 400 rows for each group of 20 students. This spreadsheet contained self, peer and teacher generated data, each of which was weighted equally (no teacher bias here). The spreadsheet was sorted by the name of the presenting student, and then averages were calculated for each of the questions asked. These were then averaged into an overall grade for the student. Comments were aggregated into a single field. This anonymised data was then delivered back to students using our school platform, Gibbon.

Interestingly, whilst the students were a little more generous than I had been, the overall distribution of grades was pretty much in line with previous, teacher-generated grades, with most students retaining their normal position within the class in terms of academic performance.

In total the assessment took two 70-minute classes (one to present and record, one to watch and grade), and all data processing and entry was completed within 90 minutes. This represents a significant decrease in my marking time, but more importantly, the whole exercise gave students ownership of their grades, and demoted the teacher from the position of god-like arbiter of success.

I am calling this approach mass assessment, and am very interested to hear of other teachers doing similar things, or willing to give this a go.