Not a great incentive for enjoying computing lessons! Photo by Terry Freedman
I don’t think rules, as commonly formulated, are very useful in the context of Computing lessons. Rules are usually framed in the negative. For example, in a computer lab I went into a few years ago on one of my school visits, there was a poster on the door listing all the things that people shouldn’t do:
Do not leave the computers on.
Do not leave printing next to the computers.
Do not just switch the computers off.
and so on.
Don’t bother! Notice, by Terry Freedman
There are two main problems with this sort of thing.
First, it doesn’t tell you what you are supposed to do instead. For example, if I am not allowed to turn the computer off, am I supposed to just leave it on? If I am supposed to log off and shut down properly, it would be better to say exactly that – and tell me how to do so.
Second, it creates such a horrible, negative atmosphere that, in my case at least, made me not want to be there at all. There were so many “Don’ts” that I thought it was probably safer to not do anything, to avoid contravening any rules I didn’t even know about!
In my opinion it is far better to create and establish a set of expectations for Computing lessons. People – even kids! – tend to rise or fall to the level of others’ expectations of them. Here is the set of expectations I established for my own lessons.
Treat everyone in the lesson with respect
That means, no shouting across them, calling someone an idiot or talking while they are talking.
Treat the facilities with respect
One way I was able to achieve this was to always make sure they were in the sort of condition that indicated that someone cared about them. Unfortunately, that sometimes meant clearing up computer rooms in my break after other teachers had allowed their classes to leave them looking like a battlefield. You get through to people in the end what sort of standards you expect, but it can take a long time.
Be challenging
Not in the behaviour sense, but in terms of challenging statements or assumptions. For example, had I started a computing lesson with a statement like “A good example of an algorithm is a recipe”, I’d have been disappointed had my pupils not questioned that. I’d have had to have qualified the statement to some extent.
Be alert
I expected my pupils to keep up with current affairs as they affected, or could affect, my subject. That was pretty easy when I was teaching economics, but I also expected it when I was teaching Computer Programming and ICT. I thought (and think) it important for pupils to have an awareness of how the stuff they are leaning might be applied in a real world context, and to be aware of instances when things go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, you don’t have to look far for examples (just pick any Government-run IT project if you’re stuck for ideas).
When I was teaching, social media wasn’t available, but had it been I would not have allowed my pupils to acquire all their “knowledge” of the world from social media, any more than I’d have been content for them to read only some ranting tabloid newspaper. I built up a library of magazines, and had a subscription to the Economist. Had I been teaching primary school children then I’d have subscribed to First News. You may not have that newspaper where you live, but the point I’m making is that it’s all about expectations. I would not expect someone to tell me they know something because a friend told them about it on Facebook. At the very least I’d expect them to check the information out in a different sort of media outlet altogether.
Be prepared
This is related to the preceeding point. I always expected my students to come to the lesson prepared, or at least primed. Having told them in the previous lesson what we’d be looking at in this lesson, I expected them to have done some thinking about the topic rather than arrive in a state of tabula rasa. Sometimes — often, in fact — I would say to them something along the lines of “On Sunday, on Radio 4 at 11:00, there’s a program about X. Please listen to it so that we can discuss it in our next lesson.”
This was, of course, an example of flipped learning before the term had been invented.
These days you don’t have to hope there’ll be a relevant radio programme just when you need it. There are podcasts galore, and YouTube for a start.
Be inquisitive
As a result of such prior reading, listening and watching, I should expect students to arrive with questions. Not ones they could easily look up, like “When did the GDPR regulations come into effect?”, but challenging ones, ones that could lead to a great discussion.
In my first year of teaching, I said to one of my ‘A’ Level Economics classes that they could ask me any question they liked, as we were going to make the lesson a Q & A session. I thought of this because this particular group were, for whatever reason, compl;etely disengaged. I had a parallel group of students who were vibrant, interested and polite. This group comprised mostly students who were argumentative, uninterested and generally unpleasant. This Q & A idea was one born out of desperation on my part.
Student 1: What’s the current Bank of England interest rate?
Me: Dunno. You’ll have to look it up.
Student 2: What’s the rate of unemployment at the moment?
Me: Dunno. You’ll have to look it up.
Student 3: What’s the current rate of inflation?
Me: Dunno. You’ll have to look it up.
Student 4: This is ridiculous. You don’t know anything.
Me: What do you thiink I am, a walking almanac? You can look all these things up for yourself. Ask me something interesting.
Student 5: How can we solve the problem of high inflation at the same time as high unemployment?
Me: Do you honestly think that if I knew the answer to that I’d be standing here trying to teach you lot?
We all laughed — and then we had a fantastic and brilliant discussion. After that, the students were just as engaged and switched on as the ones in the parallel group.
Be innovative
I didn’t care whether my pupils used a database, spreadsheet or computer program to achieve a particular goal, as long as they could convince me that their choice was the correct one. And the more outlandish their idea, aka the less likely it was that I’d have thought of doing it that way myself, the more I liked it.
Be adult
By this I don’t mean not to act like children – why shouldn’t they, given that they are? I mean that when they were working on a long term (6 week) project, I expected them to organise their own time and tasks, be cognisant of when they needed a bit of a break (the lessons were two hours long), and know when it was time to get back to work.
Be responsible
Finally, it’s better to give pupils responsibility rather than a list of rules and regulations, which is why I favour Responsible Use Policies over Acceptable Use Policies. As a general rule, I always found that giving responsibility to pupils worked well, whether it was organising themselves for an IT project, organising a Briefing Evening for parents or preparing a Year assembly.
Conclusion
I do think a key thing though is to remain the teacher. All this nonsense about being a guide on the side or “facilitating” is all very well, but someone in the room has to be the adult and as you’re the teacher it might as well be you. Giving kids responsibility and freedom only works if they know that you are doing so from a position of strength, not because you are unable to impose discipline if needs be, or because you have some half-baked idea about getting down and dirty with the kids.
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It's really easy these days to get hold of books and magazines, or to grab pencil and notepaper to make a list, but it’s sobering to reflect that it has not always been the case. Writing itself was invented ‘only’ a few thousand years ago -as a means of keeping accounts. When it started to be used more generally. It was viewed with suspicion by some people. Socrates, for example, thought that once written down, words could be taken out of context and their meaning changed as a result. The art of making paper was kept secret for hundreds of years. And were you aware that our portable devices ultimately derived from the moon landings? This fascinating book, set out chronologically, reads like a novel, and takes in everything from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter, including post-colonial literature. If you love reading and writing, this book is for you.
This book was first reviewed in Teach Secondary magazine.
This book is not specifically related to ed tech, but so many ed tech people have referred to it in articles that I thought I'd take a look. Bounce seeks to answer the question: What does it take to become an expert?
It turns out that genetics and social class are not determining factors, according to Matthew Syed, the author. So what does matter, and why is any of this relevant to teaching Computing?
Something that Syed puts great store by -- he has written about it in his newspaper columns -- is serendipity. He was once the England table tennis champion. He likes to relate how if he had lived just a few doors along the road when he was a youngster, he would have gone to a different school, not met the superb table tennis coach and not had access to a facility where he could practice any time of day.
Obviously, there is nothing one can do about where one is born, but I often think of the quotation, attributed to various sources:
"The harder I work, the luckier I get"
So I do think there is something about putting your back into it, raising expectations, and having high expectations. I'll consider those things in a moment, but as far as serendipity is concerned, it strikes me that as a Computing or technology teacher you are in a prime position to create opportunities, or at the least the potential for opportunities, in a number of ways. For example you could:
Arrange trips to exciting places where technology is crucial, to show the kids what's out there.
Work with companies who can come into school and provide exciting experiences for the youngsters, to fire up their imagination.
Work with local organisations, inviting them to come in and run activities in school.
Arrange work experience (for older students) in local tech-oriented businesses.
Record and show interesting TV programmes that illustrate what's happening behind the scenes. For example, I recently watched a programme called City in the Sky, which showed all the amazing technology hidden from view when you take a flight somewhere.
Expectations are key, something that is well acknowledged by Syed. For the Computing teacher, this means thinking twice before offering students a dumbed-down, low status qualification because you don't think they would be able to cope with anything harder. When I took over as Head of ICT & Computing in a secondary school some years ago, one of the first things I did was get rid of the "Mickey Mouse" (their term) course for dumbos (ditto) that was running in the school, and replaced it with the much harder GCSE. I still put students in for the original skills course by way of a safety net, but it was hardly needed. In short, most of the students were able to rise to the level of my expectations.
Syed also discusses the work of Carol Dwek. She writes about the importance of a growth mindset as contrasted with a fixed mindset. The former acknowledges that people can become better at what they do -- though it does not fall into the trap of stating that anyone can achieve anything, contrary to what many people have assumed.
Syed also discusses the placebo effect, in which a belief in the efficacy of something (an object, a procedure) can lead to a great outcome even though there is no obvious link between that something and the result. I wonder if some of the fantastic results we hear about sometimes as a result of some ed tech innovation can be at least partly attributed to this placebo effect?
Last but not least, practice is all-important. Syed cites the 10,000 hours figure popularised by Malcolm Gladwell (whom he quotes extensively). The implications for the Computing teacher are obvious: provide lots of opportunities for pupils to practise problem-solving through programming.
I found a couple of things rather niggling. One is the repetition. I am pretty sure that about two thirds of the pages could have been saved had Syed not given numerous examples for each point. But then I suppose it would have been a pretty boring reading experience.
Another thing was the tendency to describe the people he talks about, though not as extensively as Gladwell does. One somewhat odd aspect of this is the occasional focus on women's hair. In one instance he talks about a girl with a pony tail, called Kirsty. Despite the presence of the comma, I couldn't help thinking, "That's a nice name for a pony tail". In another case he mentions a girl with long hair flowing down her back. That reminded me of a Tommy Cooper joke:
"My girlfriend's got lovely long hair, all down her back. None on her head, just down her back."
Despite these caveats, the book is interesting, uplifting and contains much useful information -- the result of a great deal of research. You should definitely purchase this for your classroom library.
Click to buy Bounce. Please note that that is an Amazon affiliate link.
This review was originally published on 7th July 2016.
I mentioned recently that in his book The Craft of the Classroom) , Michael Marland provided very useful advice on very practical issues in the classroom, and good routines to ensure a smooth lesson. Routines are good, because pupils know what to expect. They are able to predict what is going to happen, and when. Some pupils, whose home lives are chaotic and unpredictable, may even feel safe because of routines. Here are some routines that I think are useful for Computing lessons.
Discuss the tasks they were asked to do at home
Who has found out what? What difficulties did they encounter? What questions arise from the activity? How does it have a bearing on the current stuff we are working on?
Give feedback on classwork and homework
I have always favoured a five minute class feedback (“A lot of you did X, but some did Y. On the whole I was very pleased/disappointed/ecstatic”) followed by individual feedback throughout the lesson. I always wrote comments on the work, and then made it my business to speak individually to at least 6 pupils every lesson.
What’s the latest?
What’s come up in the news that is worth discussing? This doesn’t have to be related to current work. Yu may be doing algorithms, but if there is big story about Facebook accidentally leaking the personal details of all its users, that is too good an opportunity to miss.
5 minute quick-fire quiz
I liked to spend 5 minutes asking questions of pupils at random. I regarded this as a kind of mental warm-up to get them fired up and ready to go for the lesson proper.
Puzzle corner
I can’t think of anything else to call this, but what I liked to do with my pupils was show them a section of a computer program, or a spreadsheet formula, or even a snippet from a newspaper story, and ask questions like: what does this code or formula do? What is the mistake in this code, and would you fix it? What’s wrong with what that person in the newspaper is quoted as saying? What does that person mean by what she is quoted as saying? And so on.
What next?
I used to do a lot of project work in my classes, so I always gave them ten minutes at the end of the lesson to make some notes on what they intended to do next time, and what they needed to do in the meantime in order to be prepared for that.
Conclusion
You can mix these up a bit or omit one or two as you see fit. For instance, you might want to do the 5 minute quiz at the end of the lesson rather than the beginning. Also, it may not be appropriate to do all of them in every lesson. Case in point: if you see the class twice a week, it’s unlikely that you will have set them homework on each occasion. Perhaps you will include the first two tasks every Monday, say, but leave them out of Thursday’s lesson. Similarly with Puzzle Corner. You may wish to leave that out of lessons in which you give feedback – otherwise there won’t be much time left for anything else!
The key thing is that having a few routines gives your lessons and your week some structure, and the activities I’ve suggested are designed to keep kids on their toes.
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Rubrics are deceptive. They seem like a good way to let all the teachers in your team know how to mark students' work. Unfortunately, although they appear to be objective, they usually leave much open to interpretation.
That means that the team will still have to meet and discuss what the criteria apply to actual work, and generate a shared understanding of what the boxes mean. They will also need to generate examples of work that meet the various criteria, for themselves, future colleagues and, of course, the students themselves.
The purpose of this post, however, is simply to raise a smile. I came across the rubric below around 30 years ago. Unfortunately, there is no name on it, so I can't attribute it. If you know who created it, please let me know.
Not to be taken too seriously! Author: unknown.
This artticle was originally published on 7th July 2017.
