Thursday, 31 July 2014

Creating a research-engaged school

Creating a research-engaged school - a guide for senior leaders
1 July 2014
Research published today by the National Foundation for Educational Research and the United Learning group of schools gives an insight into how teachers use research evidence in the classroom and what they feel are the most effective approaches to engaging with research and using it to inform their practice.
It is accompanied by a practical guide for senior leaders called Creating a Research-Engaged School – that helps them explore with their teams the approaches that can be adopted to make greater use of research evidence in their schools. The easy-to-read guide provides a menu of building blocks for developing a research-engaged school culture together with help to assess a school’s current situation and how to take research-engagement forward.
The research contributes to the growing debate around evidence-informed teaching practice by providing a clearer picture of what current evidence-informed practice looks like, the benefits of engagement and how to develop a culture of evidence-informed practice.
Key findings from the study are:
  • Overall, engaging in research evidence was perceived to encourage practitioner reflection and open-mindedness. Teachers’ openness to engaging with research and adopting different pedagogical approaches were considered to make lessons more engaging for learners.
  • Interviewees believed that teachers benefit from evidence through its use to inform professional development and through the confidence acquired from implementing new approaches.
  • Senior leadership team (SLT) members explained the benefits of using research evidence to drive school improvement initiatives; to substantiate the reasons behind change; and to underpin staff professional development. Additionally, creating the right environment to nurture a culture of EIP was considered critical.
  • Creating the time and space to engage in evidence, and making it easy for teachers to engage with evidence (by, for example, having support from external experts) were also viewed as important.
Carole Willis, Chief Executive of NFER, commented: “For our schools, and the young people they serve, to gain maximum advantage from the best available evidence, research organisations and schools have to work together. That is why I’m delighted with this partnership between United Learning and NFER, investigating how teachers can use research to inform and improve their practice. I hope the findings will be of practical benefit to schools, particularly those seeking out new ways to integrate evidence-use into their practice.”
Jon Coles, Chief Executive of United Learning, said: “The importance of an evidence-based approach to learning is clear but it can be hard to see the wood for the trees and identify what approaches deliver the best outcomes in the classroom. This report helps to identify some starting points to engender a research-based culture both within a school and within a subject. It provides a helpful guide for senior leaders on how to explore their schools’ current situation and suggests strategies to encourage and support the growth of their own research-engaged culture.”
The research report: Teachers’ Use of Research Evidence can be accessed at:www.nfer.ac.uk/IMUL01
Creating a Research-Engaged School – A Guide for Senior Leaders can be accessed at:www.nfer.ac.uk/IMUL02
Ends
Notes to Editors:
The small-scale exploratory study was carried out in United Learning schools and involved telephone interviews with United Learning senior leaders and face-to-face interviews with a range of interviewees in seven case-study schools.
About NFER
NFER has a worldwide reputation for providing independent and rigorous research in education. As a charity, any surplus generated by the Foundation is reinvested in research projects.www.nfer.ac.uk/schools.
Contact NFER:Jane Parrack, Marketing and Communications Manager: j.parrack@nfer.ac.uk, 01753 637245.
Sarah Fleming, Media and Communications Executive: s.fleming@nfer.ac.uk, 01753637155.
About United Learning
United Learning is a national group of schools which aims to provide excellent education to children and young people across the country. Uniquely, it includes significant numbers of schools in both the public and the private sectors, working together for mutual benefit and linked by the aim of bringing out the best in everyone. www.unitedlearning.org.uk
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Wednesday, 16 July 2014

OER tools for educators

By Laura Devaney, Managing Editor, @eSN_Laura


1. OER Commons
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. For some of these resources, that means you can download the resource and share it with colleagues and students. For others, it may be that you can download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work. OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.
2. Open Tapestry
This site features higher education courses, but advanced high school students may find the information engaging and useful. Open Tapestry is all about discovering, adapting, and sharing learning resources, whether you’re a teacher, an instructor, a professor, a corporate trainer, a learner, or just a curious mind! We help you organize your content into categories–or Tapestries–that you create. Open Tapestry’s toolset allows instructors to develop course materials in a fraction of the time, while invigorating and enhancing learners’ experience. We give you the tools to mold and shape content already on the web to exactly how you want it.
3. Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creative Commons  is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make specific uses of it.
4. EDSITEment
EDSITEment is a partnership among the National Endowment for the Humanities, Verizon Foundation, and the National Trust for the Humanities. EDSITEment offers a treasure trove for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality material on the Internet in the subject areas of literature and language arts, foreign languages, art and culture, and history and social studies. All websites linked to EDSITEment have been reviewed for content, design, and educational impact in the classroom. They cover a wide range of humanities subjects, from American history to literature, world history and culture, language, art, and archaeology, and have been judged by humanities specialists to be of high intellectual quality.
5. OpenEd
OpenEd is a K-12 educational resource catalog, with over a million Language Arts and Math games, video lessons, assessments, and courses. While it integrates with all popular Learning Management Systems it offers its own simple “flipped classroom” LMS oriented to using resources.
6. Utah Education Network
UEN connects all Utah school districts, schools, and higher education institutions to a robust network and quality educational resources. UEN is one of the nation’s premier education networks.
7. Washington Department of Public Instruction OER
In April 2012, the Washington State Legislature passed bill HB2337 (RCW 28A.300.803), directing the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to create a collection of openly licensed courseware aligned to the common-core standards and an associated awareness campaign to inform school districts about these resources.
8. WatchKnowLearn.org
WatchKnowLearn has indexed approximately 50,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 5,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom, as well as parents and students at home 24/7. Users can dive into our innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. Our web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. WatchKnowLearn does not itself host videos—we serve as a library for links to excellent educational videos that have been selected by educators.
9. Net Texts
The Net Texts system is a free, web-based solution that provides teachers access to a vast library of innovative, curated collections of high quality content, which they can then manage and combine with their own resources to create, publish and deliver lessons directly to students’ iPads, Android tablets, or computers. More than just a content management system, Net Texts is a powerful teaching and learning tool that helps schools maximize their investments in tablets and 1:1 computing initiatives, while improving instruction and learning outcomes with up-to-date educational resources. Courses contain teacher-created material as well as Creative Commons-licensed and other open education resources from the web.
10. Achieve OER Evaluation Tool
To help states, districts, teachers and other users determine the degree of alignment of OER to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OER, Achieve developed rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community. ISKME subsequently developed an online OER Evaluation Tool, based on the Achieve OER Rubrics. The rubrics evaluate OER: Degree of Alignment to Standards, Quality of Explanation of Content, Utility of Materials as Tools to Teach Others, Quality of Assessment, Degree of Interactivity, Quality of Practice Exercises, and Opportunities for Deeper Learning.
11. Gooru
Gooru is a free search engine for learning, has organized OER into easy-to-locate categories and collections to help teachers and students make the most of what’s offered online. Users can search for resources, collections, or quizzes; study individual resources or entire collections; practice with an adaptive assessment system; interact with peers or teachers; and save and customize their favorite learning materials.
12. SchoolForge.net
SchoolForge’s mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open educational resources. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education.
13. OpenClass
An expansion of Pearson’s online learning environment OpenClass, Exchange allows educators to search for and access thousands of resources, including videos from TED-Ed, Kahn Academy, and YouTube EDU, as well as courses from the Open Course Library. The resource is available to all users free of charge.
14. Curriculum Foundry
Curriculum Foundry from Learning.com provides a searchable content repository that includes vetted OER tools, as well as a district’s existing digital content. Through this solution’s comprehensive set of tools, districts can build and share their own curriculum. Curriculum Foundry also features single sign-on enabling students and teachers to easily use digital content.
15. Guide to the Use of Open Educational Resources in K-12 and Postsecondary Education from SIIA
This guide provides a framework for understanding open educational resources (OER), and it examines development and implementation costs, current business models, government and philanthropy’s role, and other considerations around the use of OER.


1. AMSER
What: The Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER) is a portal of OER built specifically for those in community and technology colleges, but is free for anyone to use.
About: The National Science Digital Library (NSDL)—the parent of AMSER—is an online library which directs users to high-quality STEM resources. NSDL was created by the National Science Foundation in 2000 to provide organized access to resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of STEM education. NSDL aggregates content from a variety of digital libraries and projects, including Internet Scout and AMSER. NSDL also provides access to services and tools that enhance the use of online resources in a variety of contexts.
What: An OER for building your own online curriculum. Download one of its sample courses and you get a set of web templates you can load onto your own server and use as the basis for an online course.
About: From the University of Central Florida (UCF), the Toolkit is a free, open repository of information, resources, models, and research related to blended learning. Funded by a Next Generation Learning Challenge Wave 1 grant, the Toolkit is a collaboration between UCF and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
3. COERLL
What: The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin focuses on foreign language learning, and provides materials for the study of Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese and Hindi, as well as videos for the study of Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English conversations.
About: Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, COERLL’s mission is to produce and disseminate OERs for the internet public (e.g., online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.). COERLL aims to reframe foreign language education in terms of bilingualism and/or multilingualism. As such, all COERLL resources strive to represent more accurately language development and performance along dialectal and proficiency continua.
4. MERLOT
What: Begun by a consortium of state higher education systems, this massive OER repository offers learning objects, full course curricula, open access journals, assessment tools, open textbooks, discipline-specific pedagogical resources, and more.
About: Material is peer reviewed, and reviewer and user comments are accessible to all. Academic discipline is represented by communities, each with their own editorial board of faculty from disparate institutions. Browsing through users’ “personal collections” can provide insight into how others use the materials.
What: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
About: Pioneering the OER movement, MIT OCW offers thousands of full courses that can include lecture notes, online textbook material, assignments and exams with answers, and multimedia. The course content is downloadable through iTunes and YouTube. Like any open educational resource, these materials are freely available for educators to re-use with attribution.

What: Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes; interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics; adaptations of existing open work; and electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
About: ISKME created OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007, to support and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the site offers engagement with resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
OER Commons has forged alliances with over 500 major content partners and users can search across over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER. Since these resources are ‘open,’ they are available for educational use, and many hold Creative Commons licenses that allow them to be repurposed, modified and adapted for a diverse array of local contexts.
What: A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs for easy access and downloading.
About: OCL is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. Some OER are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or less), but many of the courses can be taught at no cost. Unless otherwise noted, all materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license. OCL courses and materials have also undergone testing for accessibility and have been designed using the industry-standard Quality Matters (QM) rubric for assessing the quality of online courses.
What: View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.
About: Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and courses, Dr. Richard Baraniuk founded OpenStax (then Connexions) in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, OpenStax CNX is a non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month. There are thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime. Everything is available for free thanks to support from Rice University and philanthropic organizations.
What: Free online courses and multimedia available to both students and faculty.
About: In 2008, Saylor Academy began exploring OER to develop its catalog of over 300 free, self-paced, online courses. In late 2012, it added the first college credit pathway courses. The Academy hired credentialed educators to design courses and to locate, vet, and organize OER and other materials into a structured and intuitive format. Many courses have additionally undergone a peer review process by panels of consultants. While the Academy does not confer degrees, it offers verifiable certificates and continues to make strides in connecting our courses to college credit.
What: Not just a repository of courseware, the Consortium offers its members the tools and resources to develop their own content.
About: The Open Education Consortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education globally. The Open Education Consortium realizes change by leveraging its sources of expert opinion, its global network and its position as the principal voice of open education.
Additional resources: The resources, though not specifically repositories, can help you navigate how to access OER, understand the value of OER, connect you to OER communities, present the latest OER news and much more:

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Wednesday, 9 July 2014

What exactly makes for good teaching?

Are we measuring the worth of our teachers in the right way? Professor Mick Waters argues that while good lessons are vital, good teaching involves so much more than the classroom.

General-Teacher16.gif
I spend a lot of time in schools and, over the last few weeks, I have been closely observing how some teachers do their jobs, and thinking about the impact they have. I have been looking directly at the teachers rather than poring over spreadsheets and screens full of data.
I watched a teacher, crawling around on hands and knees in driving rain, helping two youngsters to erect a tent while on their camping visit to the Peak District. The sense of satisfaction and relief all round when the job was complete was palpable; the quiet togetherness through the steam of the celebratory coffee. 
At a schools’ music concert in Huddersfield Town Hall my eyes seemed to fix on one of the teachers sitting among the several hundred pupils on the stage as he lived every moment of the performance along with his pupils. The energy, enjoyment and effort almost literally “sang out”.
At a pupil referral unit, I watched from a distance as a teacher commiserated with a teenager with a syndrome and a statement and a difficult school history over the death of one of the animals on their “farm”. For the child to display emotion was a rare occurrence; it mattered because it was a point of learning rather than landmark to record.
At the end of a race at a regional athletics event, I saw a crestfallen competitor consoled by a teacher. She had stumbled and finished a lonely last having started as favourite to win. Quietly urging the loser to congratulate the victor was part of the essence of competitive sport, as young people learn to win with dignity and lose with grace.
At a buffet lunch where teenagers had done the catering, local employers met with suitably dressed and prepared year 10 students to “network” as part of a careers convention. A teacher moved around prompting introductions as necessary and standing back when possible as she pulled every opportunity out of the occasion. That evening she would be writing the letters of thanks.
These teachers are like most of their colleagues across the country. Decent, caring, committed adults who have chosen to spend their working lives alongside young people helping to make their prospects as good as they can be. These teachers know that their subject disciplines matter and that examination success is important. 
They also know that aspiration is more subtle than striving for higher levels, qualifications and career prospects. They know that aspiration is more than emphasising optimism. Unleashing aspiration means recognising contribution, developing belonging, and building spirit within the youngster.
When they turn up at school in August to be there as exam results are opened and join in the celebrations, the good teachers know that the exam success is a piece in the jigsaw of preparation for life and the blend of experiences beyond lessons will make also a difference.
There are messages in this about the way teachers are expected to go about their work and how we measure their worth. The first is to acknowledge that the lesson is not the only unit of teaching and learning. While good lessons are vital, good teaching in its truest sense takes place in a whole range of settings and is often less of a performance and more of a genuine human interaction, taking advantage of the circumstances conducive to the young person’s growth and development.
The second message follows on from this – if teaching is subtle and complex, let’s stop reducing judgements about its quality to the inspection observation of a few minutes of performance in a lesson and a quick flick through some exercise books. 
It sounds scientific to use terms like “triangulate” but some real observation of teachers going about their important annual work might give a better indication of the degree of teaching effectiveness.
Being close to adults who are hard-working, kind and funny, people who inform, explain, listen, think aloud, wonder and moan and at the same time structure some steps into understanding concepts or building knowledge is what young people appreciate as being with a good teacher. 
Good teachers talk about what is right or wrong and why. They help pupils to recognise propaganda, appreciate a poem, and mend relationships. Good teachers display knowledge, skill, charity, humility, care, sadness, concern and joy. 
I am not sure whether these are British values but they are decent, human values and in good schools we know that decent human values help to raise decent human beings.
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Monday, 7 July 2014

POSTCARDS FROM NEW YORK (STATE): HOW CAN I TEACH LIKE A CHAMPION?

· by  · in Classroom, CPD, Education Around the World. ·
With our British colleagues, we usually practise substituting ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ for the Pledge of Allegiance.”
Doug Lemov
This unexpected line broaches many questions I considered while attending a Teach Like a Champion ‘Behaviour and Culture’ workshop in Albany in late-May.  What do ‘champion teachers’ do?  How can professional development help everyone do the same?  And how do can this be translated to a British context?
The work of Doug Lemov and Uncommon Schools has gradually reshaped my understanding of effective teaching and training.  I’m an unashamed fan of their first book, Teach Like a Champion, which I believe is the best available collection of effective teaching techniques.  The research was inductive, growing from Lemov’s attempts to collect best practice: he identified teachers who succeeded dramatically with students from the most deprived backgrounds, then sought to break down and codify their actions.  Lemov, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi went on to explain how they use practice to help teachers adopt Teach Like a Championmethods in Practice Perfect..  Meanwhile, in Leverage Leadership, their colleague Paul Bambrick-Santoyo has reshaped my understanding of the speed and effectiveness with which leaders can develop their staff; his next book, The Rookie Teacher Project, will, I suspect, do the same for initial teacher training.  I’d been impressed by Uncommon Schools’ classrooms and leadership and culture; underpinning this, it seemed, was Uncommon’s teacher development.  This post examines their work through the prism of the two day workshop I attended, from the perspective of a teacher and a professional development leader.
The workshop was a masterclass of teaching techniques: my first realisation was how much work I have to do to bring my classroom up to scratch.  I realised I could get closer to my aim of 100% on-task behaviour through clearer instructions (using ‘economy of language’), while leaving students happier about it by concluding with a ‘bright face’ (a warm smile or nod of acknowledgement).  I could employ the ‘Art of the Consequence’ to give detentions more effectively by ‘not engaging’ in discussion over the sanction and ensuring I invariably ended it with the ‘bounce back:’ the uplifting statement that nudges students back into learning positively.  Likewise, while I already scan the classroom, finding ‘Pastore’s Perch’ – the place in the room offering a full view within the narrowest angle – would make this a lot easier!  Fellow teachers often assert that the way they give instructions/detentions/whatever is perfectly good enough for them.  I would challenge anyone to fail to find inspiration to improve what they do based on this workshop.  My to do list (this paragraph just scratches the surface) may seem depressing – I have perhaps a dozen important changes to make.  Paradoxically however, I was left wildly optimistic: I know I have much to amend, but I know exactly how to make these changes.
CIMG7094
Doug Lemov models coaxing Practice Perfect co-author Erica Woolway into sitting up and doing some work.
If my keenness and alleged self-efficacy sound exaggerated (too much Kool Aid and not enough sleep?), describing the training’s combination of video, analysis and practice may help explain it.  We watched dozens of videos: analysing the work of real teachers in real classrooms demonstrated exactly what success looks like and why it works.  After two years dancing tango, I can break down a dance I watch into constituent parts; likewise, repeated examination of videos made clear the way teachers’ head movements or word choice combined into highly effective sequences.  Doug and the team then modelled practice activities which would help us use these methods ourselves.  Tasks grew in complexity, from practising using hand gestures and an acknowledging nod while continuing to teach through to varied routines in which students delayed their compliance and teachers honed their approaches based on feedback.  Participants embraced role play, probably because they anticipated it, perhaps also because it is hugely satisfying and great fun.  We sought to lock in changes by writing reflections and ‘to do’ lists as teachers and leaders and conferring with our colleagues (or other sole attendees) on what we would do back at our schools.
Rule 16
Call Your Shots”
            Practice Perfect
Calling a shot is to describe one’s intention before acting, it helps watchers appreciate what has been done and why.  In writing Practice Perfect and describing what they believe professional development should look like, Doug and Erica have called their shots in the clearest possible way.  Watching them enact what they had written about, I was able to collect any number of tips for running CPD.  Erica ‘supermodelled,’ for example: without mentioning the fact, she retreated from the centre of the room to the corner while discussing the excellent view available from ‘Pastore’s Perch,’ showing exactly what it looked like.  Every minute was made to matter: instructions were impeccably clear; the total time allocated to mention of logistics (like timings and breaks) was less than sixty seconds across two days.  The complexity of practice stepped up through the workshop, beginning with simple group practice and moving on to increasingly individual tasks using feedback as participants gained comfort and expertise.  More was going on behind the scenes: the team examined and acted upon feedback from day one assiduously; they also refined the workshop as it went on, removing or altering activities based on participants’ progress, while basing what they did on models scripted in advance.  The effectiveness of modelling these traits was made clear to me on the second day, when, entirely unbidden, fellow participant Anna ‘called her shots,’ as an apparently automatic action.
To me, Teach Like a Champion shows that great teaching is neither magic nor craft mystery, it is a learnable set of skills and behaviours.  Many teachers see it as mechanistic or impersonal – it’s not.  We took Lemov’s models and adapted them to our contexts and personalities.  Using the principle of ‘economy of language,’ we wrote our own scripts of what we could say; in using an expression to acknowledge students’ actions, we chose one which fitted our faces (our partners offered feedback on whether it worked!)  If leaders want to help teachers change their practice, I believe this is the most powerful tool available.  British teachers may be reticent about role play and chary of ‘standardisation;’ using ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is just a first step to breaking down this reluctance. The workshop left me a better teacher and teacher-trainer; I hope more can be done to use these strategies in Britain.
I’m hugely grateful to Doug, Erica, Colleen, Jen, Dan, Tracey and Rob, who were most welcoming and generous with their time and thoughts.
Full disclosure: Uncommon kindly charged a reduced fee for my attendance.
Further Reading
From others:The Teach Like a Champion ‘Field Notes’ blog
Laura McInerney has written a fascinating post on seeing Teach Like a Champion training in action and overcoming her British reservations about it.
Joe Kirby has reviewed how Teach Like a Champion, Practice Perfect, and Leverage Leadership.
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