Short term pain – Long term gain?

This week has been a difficult one in many ways for teaching unGooglable questions, but there are also plenty of indications of success to keep me thinking positive towards the end of term. Trying something new is a risk, it takes your teaching time, and eats into your curriculum, and often the end result is not ensured. In the end this week, it was one question on a post it note that tells me we’re getting somewhere.

Firstly, lets look at the difficulties:

Number one: I’m asking kids to work in an entirely new way, which is more difficult, has a less apparent purpose and is taking up a whole lot more time than usual. By now, most of the students want to do a diorama or a papier-mache sphinx with labels on it and get it over with. These kids are nearly teenagers, by the way, so they know how to express these doubts in just the right way…

Number two: I’m doing so much more ‘support’ teaching and more detailed pre-planing that I even catch myself looking wistfully back at the last project, so full of self directed time, well understood expectations and support for only the true strugglers in the room. Because what I’ve essentially done this week is to make almost everyone into a struggler, even myself, and the attendant increase on my attentions is creating not only frustration for the class, but actual queues. And all of this is fine, because in my head I know where I’m going with this and I’m pretty sure the end result will be better, but I’m also having to do a fair bit of PR to keep the students on board. I’m also out of my own comfort zone which is good, but also time consuming.

Number three: I’m learning as I go. I’ve already started to create a fairly long list of modifications to the way I might teach this process in the future. I’m relearning that the level of general knowledge needed to create great high order questions needs to be instilled first, and having to play catch up on this has not made things easier.

Overall, I’m really happy with the questions that have resulted, but some of them are the kind of questions where you just know that you’ll be working on them for a long time to come.

Now let’s look at the positives.

Here are some examples of the kinds of questions my students came up with about Egypt this week:

  • How do we know the artefacts are real and not fakes?
  • How did the burial rituals shape the everyday life of Egyptians?
  • What would you change about the way slaves lived?
  • Would modern day Egypt be famous today (for tourists) without the Pyramids?
  • Compare the purpose and construction of the Pyramids and the World Trade Centre?
  • What would have happened to Egypt without trade?
  • Compare the difference between the historical evidence for Ancient Egypt and Aboriginal Australia.

These are just the questions that stick in my mind tonight, but there were many more, just as complex and with just as many layers needed to get to the bottom of them.

This of course leads to the most uncomfortable question of all for this particular educator. How do I go about teaching kids to answer them?

I spent a lot of time this week playing catch up on content. A few discovery channel videos, some texts, and even a trip to the Museum worked as solid background information. Throughout this I kept my pockets full of pencils and post-it notes and encouraged kids to scribble questions down at every opportunity. We would return at the end of lessons and try to place the questions on the question wall, using Blooms to rank the ‘Googlability’ of each. We quickly built up a huge repository of difficult, high order questions.

And because there were some students who delivered many questions and some who delivered a few, and in service to the idea that it was the process rather than the question which mattered, I decided to pull the questions out of a hat.  There was some ‘debate’ about this, as you can imagine. Some students asked to do one of their own questions on grounds of personal interest, and others didn’t care what question they got.  I allowed some students to pick their own, and the rest of the class took pot luck.

I also spent the week introducing a range of mind maps, noting scaffolds, and alternative ways for students to break their complex question down into more manageable, or directed secondary questions. There were two reasons for introducing a wide range of materials. Firstly, not every student works the same, so a range of options helps them choose their most effective method, and secondly, I was unsure myself which of these methods was best. (see ‘learning as you go.’) The idea was that students would use the time to break their question down until they had an appropriate list of Googlable questions that would inform their decisions about how they would answer their main question.

This took, and continues to take, some explaining…

But one of the most important things to combat this week was the student’s feeling that they should be ‘getting on’ with it. So many of them still feel that this section of the Egypt project is unimportant or time wasting. It’s one of the hardest perceptions to combat so far, and probably one of the most important.

One of the ways I’ve done this is to restrict this week and next into ‘research and planning weeks’, time spent purely nutting out the best secondary questions to ask, and deciding where the answers fit in the bigger question. Students are not allowed to begin actually research until the coming week, and they cannot start to draft until after the holidays. I’m really aware that if students slip through this next phase with weak plans or bad questions, they’ll really struggle. At the same time, spending the extra time should create better results and better information reports. That’s the idea anyway.

I’ve also found that the process involves a lot of back and forward, and kids (as well as teachers) will need to adapt to that. The point of generating a really hard question by making it ungooglable, followed by a process of breaking it down into lots of little questions that are googleable, followed by a process of incorporating all those answers back into a coherent response to the original question is one that students will doubtless be frustrated by. I’m sure hoping that the end result of a truly investigative report, as well as the idea that the process they just used can be transferred to any topic, will be enough of a reward for them.

And, hopefully, enough of a reward for me as well, seeing as I’m gambling so much learning time on it.

The Highlight of the week, however, comes from the question posed by one of my students at the museum, the kind of question that had me scrambling for post it note and pen. It was the kind of question that set me off on designing a whole new side project, designed purely because someone asked this question of me.

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For me this question was my reward for the week. This student was no longer thinking about how you mummify someone or how many cats you were allowed to take into a tomb with you, someone was applying knowledge of ancient Egypt to the modern world.

She was nowhere near as impressed with the news that her excellent question was the basis of a whole new task we will start next term. Neither were her classmates, as it happened, but it sure was the signal I needed to see that some students were starting to get it, and to keep me moving forward.

UnGoogleable Questions in the classroom. A first step.

One of the major challenges I’m facing at the moment with my Middle years class is the fact that they’re still learning how to research properly. After attending a recent conference presentation by Ewan Macintosh, I decided to make UnGoogle-able questions a focus in my class, as a way of accessing not only Higher Order Thinking, but as a way of extending the complexity of my student’s projects, honing their questioning skills and attacking the problem of answering more complex questions in detail at the same time.

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At present, many of my students see projects as simple fact finding missions. Hit google, find some facts and arrange them into useful headings, follow this up by a quick rearrangement of sentences and ideas to avoid the dreaded plagiarism, and hand me a selection of facts I could have found for myself on Google. These are essentially lower order projects, and as highlighted by Ian Jukes recently, these skills aren’t going to cut it in the real world of their future.

I’m aware that this is not their fault. I’ve not taught these skills explicitly enough, and it’s something I’ve struggled with year in and year out for a while now. How do you move these projects to the next level?

The ideas Ewan talked about fit nicely with this challenge, and that of my parallel focus of teaching students employable life skills, teaching processes for success and using content as the delivery system. The idea I’m shooting for is that these higher order skills become transferrable to any topic and they become the basis from which students tackle any problems or tasks they face in high school and beyond.

So for most of last week, the discussion in my classroom has gone something like this…

ME: What is it we’re learning about this week?
EVERYONE: EGYPT!!
ME: Wrong. We’re learning about how to make and answer better questions, remember? We’re just using Egypt as an example when we do it.
EVERYONE: *Nervous shufflings.* Can’t we just do a project like last term?

I wanted to start up slowly, and so I’ve focussed more on the questioning than the topic so far, but even this toe-in-the-water start has made some students decidedly uncomfortable. I was asked today, mid-discussion on what it is that makes a question ungooglable, “Can we start now?” ( “I’ll leave you to imagine the tone in which this was delivered.)

I’d made a powerpoint to lead the discussion, one that outlined how quickly Google gets stumped by questions as they move up the Higher Order Thinking Skills ladder. I demonstrated to the class that once the questions got hard, Google just started throwing words searches together in the hope of swinging an answer that I would find acceptable. The best example of the day was the question “Was the Sphinx a waste of money?”, Google smartly searched ‘Pyramids‘ and ‘Money‘, and helpfully delivered a wide range of tourism packages to a bemused student group. It was the first inkling they had that Google might be fallible, I think…

Talking about why that happened switched on a few lightbulbs as well.

What we also discovered today was that most of our projects this year have hardly ever strayed past, understanding and summary. There were four more levels for us to explore. For those kids at the leading edge of the learning curve, this was great news. For those working hard to keep up, it was a bit deflating. I’m going to need a lot of scaffolding and support for these students, but in my opinion, this will force me to be detailed about how I teach the questioning skills. Not to mention the next step. Answering them.

The initial challenge is to create ungoogleable questions for our classmates to research in a few weeks time. The quality of the questions is the focus. “What kind of question will help someone demonstrate how much they’ve learned, rather than how many facts they’ve collected?” I asked them.

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We broke up the Blooms questioning matrix and looked at the format of the questions in each. Then we had a go at making an Egypt-based question of our own that fit the format. So far we have only worked through FACTS, ANALYSIS and APPLICATION. The questions they have come up with were put on the wall to be used for the next part of the task.

There were a range of good questions that came out of this process. More than I thought, if I’m honest. Many of them will get us past the ‘Summary’ and ‘Understanding’ roadblock we’re having, and once we finish the other three Question types, we will have more than enough high order questions for students to choose from. This is encouraging, but it also brought home to me how much scaffolding and support it will need for these students to keep thinking  about Higher-order questions.

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I’ll need to be doing a lot of work to make sure that I’m ahead of them in this, because quite a lot of these pre-teen kids are skeptical of anything new as it is. If I’m not ready with solutions to the inevitable difficulties they face in actually answering these questions, then there goes the ball game.

I’ve already had some discussions about the direction this next phase should take. Ideas on how I might scaffold kids in the process of picking apart and answering higher order questions. PBL is a possibility, and I’m interested in the way the research project teaches skills over content. Both of these need some consideration, but I’m also keen on finding out what ideas other teachers are using  as well. I’d be interested in hearing how others are scaffolding the research skills needed to answer broader, Higher Order thinking questions in their classrooms.

As a first step, I’m encouraged by what we came up with, but I’m now more aware than ever that there is a lot of structure needed if this idea is to take off in my class.  I’m keen to discover what there is out there that might help me move this forward.

Put up your Jukes. How Ian challenged my smugness at Edutech

I’m a pretty standard early career teacher, I think. As Edutech2014 loomed a few weeks ago, I, like many other educators, set myself a few goals and challenges for while I was in Brisbane. I wanted to restart my rather stalled twitter connections and professional reading; I wanted to investigate further ways to use the technology in my classroom to better differentiate my teaching. I wanted to continue my thinking about feedback mechanisms for teachers to students. I wanted to use the conference as a way of furthering the directions I’d already identified in my site and my class, to reinforce the positive things I was doing and take them further.

All very admirable.

And for the first day and a half, everything went to plan. My self-satisfaction rating soared as I retweeted the sage statements of a range of speakers who were at the cutting edge of technology, education, pedagogy and creativity back to the school blog. I made connections with teachers on twitter and in the trade hall. I even managed to get onto the wifi. The reinforcement I got from Sugata  Mitra, Sir Ken  Robinson and Dan Haesler in particular made me feel good, as I could nod along and agree wholeheartedly and say to myself that I as an educator and more broadly, we as a site, were already discussing, sometimes even implementing the positions these edu-rockstars were advocating. The smugness I was feeling was pretty warming. Self-affirmation was at an all time high.

Then I went and listened to Ian Jukes…

And to be honest, at first I had trouble with this guy shouting and raving and generally acting like there was a hurricane on the way.  It was real duck & cover stuff.

If you’ve got the time (and if not you should make it) the basic ideas of this version of his presentation are almost exactly the same as the talk I sat through in Brisbane.

Jukes suggested to us that as educators we were not necessarily as in touch with the real world as we might first assume. The nerve of the guy. The idea that career teachers were not in touch with the latest trends of commerce was one that made sense, but made me sit up a bit nonetheless. The next suggestion that teachers we were in danger of becoming obsolete in a rapidly changing world was one that severely challenged my smugness bubble.

But it took me a few days to sink in, if I’m honest. I went home and had a lot of good conversations with colleagues about the inspirational speakers and the latest ideas, and for a few days I kind of placed Ian’s talk in a box labelled “alarmism” and left it there. It was only a few days later that I started to really appreciate the scope of what I’d heard.

Jukes argues that the Education system as it currently stands no longer serves the needs of students. The current ways of working were originally designed to feed an industrial society with workers doing low level cognitive work with low creativity. Those jobs are being outsourced at an alarming rate, and the result is that educators are now generating learners who “have never been more prepared for the industrial revolution.” (I’m paraphrasing, because Ian talks real fast…)

Disruptive innovation is a huge part of the modern world, and I’ll admit that the idea that adaptation is needed in education was one that wasn’t too big a stretch. However the idea that global changes are disrupting our traditional teaching role and making it more likely to be obsolete was a bigger idea to swallow, and it took time. Our student retention results are dropping across the western world according to Jukes, and students are walking away from education at a rate that if represented in the corporate world would “indicate a defective product.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Jukes argues that if we don’t change our product, we face an uphill battle to equip our students with usable skills when they move into the market.

All of this is confronting, powerful stuff, and it suggests a tension that needs resolving in my job, Namely, CONTENT, vs. SKILLS. I’m going to look at how I resolve the tensions that are arising between the requirement to teach content through national curriculum, and the need to create learners who are capable of being flexible, collaborative, team-oriented members of society who can find the research they need, consume content quickly, and solve complex problems together. In short, I need to teach creativity and problem solving whilst still teaching content in an already crowded middle years curriculum.

That needs a real shift in focus.

At the moment, I tend to look at how I can get my kids out of Primary school and make sure they enter high school in the best possible shape. However, that kind of focus misses the longer-term picture. As an educator I need to focus on the end result of my students’ education just as much as a year 12 teacher does.

The kids I teach need to be ready to get a job. This is not the only focus, but it is a very important part of education. Getting a job is about five to six years away for my year six and seven students. Jukes has already demonstrated how fast things can change in even that time. There’s no way I can know what that job might be for any of my students. It probably won’t require them to know the date of William Janz’s discovery of Australia off by heart though.  (Google it if you don’t know.)

What I need to teach them instead is how to find what information they need, be critical of it and to use it creatively and collaboratively to solve problems in a timely way. I have a responsibility to look at doing those things better, not for the end of year result, but for the start of career result.

What this means for me in my classroom

At the moment, I feel like my classroom teaches CONTENT with only a side order of life skills. Where perhaps what we need to do is to focus on SKILLS with a side of content instead. How can I maximise the environment, the learning and the scaffolding of life-skills in students to create learners with flexible, transferrable skillsets that they can use as the ‘lenses’ through which they interpret different content?

Content should be the servant of the skills, in  my opinion, because once the skills are learned, the content is interchangeable. This is where I want to move my learners. I’ve already started with a few ideas to add simple challenges to my class, and the result has been modest but encouraging. It makes me want to investigate this idea in a lot more detail.

The First step
Example: My students have been doing a project that is essentially a traditional maths-based design task. Students with a limited budget design and build a structure capable of holding a specific weight for a specific time. The project is designed to make that outcome possible, with just enough materials and budget to give success to the teams who manage the maths and their time properly. It traditionally assesses 3D shapes, measurement, design and budgeting skills.

After Edutech, I decided to try something out. On Thursday, I went to every table group and removed ten of their popsticks. I told them they would still need to meet the requirements without them.

This instantly added a team problem solving layer to the task, and the next half an hour of learning convinced me that not only are these skills vital to my students, but that I wasn’t currently teaching those skills anywhere near well enough. They were almost completely flummoxed by the change.

The next step.
I’m now looking to engage in professional discussions about the scaffolds and explicit teaching needed for teaching collaboration, questioning, problem solving, creativity and flexibility. I’ve got a few leads and a lot of reading to do. I’m going to share what I find out in this new blog (Which I had no intention of starting before I went to edutech). I hope others will share their learning and links in this area too. Please feel free to add comments, links and suggestions below.