Learning Conversations

Teachmeet: A meeting of teachers to share ideas, be inspired and develop personal learning networks

I've just come away from a pilot Teachmeet Fishbowl in Oxford.

It was different from the "normal" Teachmeet, where individuals are selected at random to briefly present what they have learnt (See BrainPop's Intro to Teachmeets video below). Instead the Fishbowl dialogue technique was used (extremely effectively!) to kick start the discussions.

I was invited along as an observer, and to highlight some of the key points that arose.

The Primary National Curriculum has changed

If you're not directly involved with teaching this may come as news to you. The 20 year old, highly proscriptive National Curriculum has recently been replaced with something much more flexible and suitable for 21st Century learners:

The event was designed to look at how schools can develop a more creative curriculum planning process, which focussed on the Key Skills and allowed teachers to meet the real, individual and local needs of their pupils.

Creative planning

Since the introduction of the National Strategies in the 1990's, teachers have been encouraged to follow highly structured planning processes:

• Long term plans - which identify the subjects and the objectives (sourced from both National Curriculum and National Strategies) to be covered for each term
• Medium term plans - which identify the timetable for each week and when particular objectives will be covered
• Short term plans - which identify the activities for each lesson, the resources required, assessment activities, how activities will be differentiated etc

As time went on, these planning templates have become extremely complex. So much so that when I saw Julie Wedgewood's impressive storyboarding templates at Learning Technologies 2010 I immediately thought: "These look like lesson plans".

The problem with this process has been threefold:

1. They lock you into a series of activities - with very little room for flexibility
2. They often become box-ticking exercises, used by senior management teams as part of their monitoring function, but with no real engagement by management in the quality of the lessons
3. They are extremely onerous to complete (See my earlier post on reducing teacher workload). Every night primary school teachers up and down the land are copying & pasting statements from various curriculum documents into their plans and frantically trying to document activities, resources and assessments - purely to meet the top-down monitoring requirements.

The approach being looked at in Oxford took a much more creative and flexible view of things. It was led (via a Skype video call) by Tom Barrett, an inspiring primary teacher from Nottinghamshire.

Rather than the focus being subject knowledge, instead the focus became the Key Skills (within each of the 6 areas of learning) that were desired as outcomes. This, then, allows the teacher to use their own creativity and passions to develop these Key Skills in their children.

Adaptive planning

Rather than setting plans in stone at the beginning of the week, instead we discussed how "skeleton plans" could be used. These would then flex throughout the week, allowing them them to adapt based on how the children react and discover. The plans become working documents, to be annotated during the week with extra ideas, resources and evidence of attainment.

The advantage of continually working with the plans means that you will continually reflect on them. Unlike the old style plans which became out-of-date immediately they were submitted at the beginning of the week, and were rarely evaluated. (At least in my experience!)

Teachers who already use this approach were saying that monitoring by senior management had become much more of a conversation, rather than a process to be undergone. Far healthier, and far more conducive to rebuilding teacher professionalism, I would say...

My only worries are these:

1. The open, creative planning process means we run the risk of our children "doing the Romans" (or whatever is the current fun thing to do) year after year. So, some long term planning will still be needed.
2. The structure provided by the old system meant that it was possible to share and reuse plans quite easily. We may find that teachers are now continually reinventing the wheel.

The answer to both those worries is a much more open, shared approach to planning:

1. Every teacher should be encouraged to have a blog/twitter account/RSS reader - a means of joining in to the existing networks.
2. As I commented on Tom Barrett's blog post about teacher networks I do think there's room for some sort of social lesson-planning tool. We need something to help make the planning & documentation process less onerous and time-consuming. It should allow
   individual schools do the top-down allocation of National Curriculum skills and objectives to teachers/year groups. It should allow schools to get an overview of what's going on (to avoid duplication). And it should enable teachers to share resources and activities. Such a tool would complement the reflection taking place in the networks and should focus primarily on the planning process. Although there's still the ongoing issue of how and where to annotate plans and provide evidence. Perhaps it needs linking to some sort of online assessment management tool? But that would be a whole other ball game, with huge privacy and child protection issues.

Anyway, that's the end of my reflections. Thanks to James Bird and Eylan Ezekiel for organising the Teachmeet, and to BrainPop for the food! Now it's over to Moby: