Teachmeet Clevedon - what I found out

I rarely feel "inspired" or have the inclination to describe something as "inspirational". The verb and adjective are both overused in education in my opinion. I often feel like replying to someone who says "such and such is/was inspirational" and asking how? and why?

However, parts of teachmeet Clevedon 5 did inspire me. (I won't say everything did for the reason given above).

The first teachmeet I went to was also at Clevedon and it was less formal than 20th October. The presenters were varied quality and the transitions were less slick. I enjoyed it though, the atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive and that makes a change from some schools and re-energises you.

"Learning Rocks" however, was a very slick evening, the transistions between presentations were improved by having a running order and someone off screen queuing the presentations so your PowerPoint was ready for you as you arrived at the podium to begin your talk. Time limits for presentations were kept to close as possible to 5 minutes so that the evening ran to time and stayed good natured.

The slightly different format of the evening included a seminar slot between the key note and the presentations. 

I missed the keynote presentation by Vic Goddard from Passmore's school, the one featured in Educating Essex. The opinion in the room was that he spoke very well and many were enthused by what he had to say.

I did arrive in time for my seminar slot. I went to hear John Wells the Head Teacher of Clevedon School speak about the journey the school had been through. It is clear from the talk that John has a clear vision for the improvement of the school and he doesn't lose sight of the things that have gone before. Being someone who likes diagrams I liked the way that the improvement of the school could be represented as concentric circles showing the layers of pedagogy that have been introduced in the school. I do always wonder with these things if everything is as well embedded as the senior management say it is, but I liked that idea that pedagogy (and not curriculum change) was at the heart of the school improvement.

Then we moved onto the presentations. I had volunteered to do one on the 5Es of lesson planning. You can find the presentation elsewhere on this blog as well as other posts about them. On entering the hall I discovered I was 16th out of 17. A lot of time to get nervous!

Gavin Smart spoke first @gavinsmart about the use of an expert (his Grandad) talking to the class. The project went well and the students and his Grandad enjoyed it. This has given me confidence, because while I cannot skype my Grandad from my year 7 science class, I would like to get real scientists more involved in what we do at school. It is something on the back-burners at the moment, but a real aim.

Dave Gale spoke about the ultimate maths faculty - a meeting of like minded maths teachers who use a hashtag to communicate via twitter. Again, I was pleased to hear that and feel that we have that supportive community already built up and using the #asechat hastag. I hope other science teachers joining twitter can feel confident about joining in too.

I was inspired by Dave Stacey's presentation. He talked about re-booting his teaching. I can really empathise with that. I have been a better teacher in the past and I know how to be a better teacher, I just need to find the focus to do it and maintain it. It was great to hear from Dave that it is possible to improve your practice and you aren't stuck as the teacher you are at the moment for the rest of your career.

I always enjoy Kat Crocker's presentations about what you can do during tutor time and I have already used the Guardian Eyewitness site with my tutor group.

Alessio's presentation about priezi was not only entertaining but also thought-provoking. How can we use presentations during lessons to support thinking and not just a quick way of giving information. This is something I will consider during the holidays.

A lot of the presentations were about on-line ICT, which we just can't use. But that is what I like about teachmeets, there is something for everyone.

Great evening, and well done to Mark Anderson and the Clevedon Team.

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Location:Church Rd,Bristol,United Kingdom

The 5 E lesson cycle

Here is me talking at teachmeet Clevedon.

And this is the presentation:

I will blog later about the rest of my TM Clevedon experience.

Teachmeet Clevedon Juicy Learning

Yet again another very successful teachmeet at Clevedon school.

The key note speaker was Jim Roberson, who is a discipline coach. He has a massive personality and I can see that he would be a big influence on disaffected teenagers. He said that "enthusiasm is caught not taught" and that discipline is "not what you do to yourself, but what you do for yourself". He went on to describe his approach as being RAP: R - respect (for yourself and others), A - accountability (for your actions and reactions), P - preparation (education will prepare you for the rest of your life). I really liked his opinion that your state of mind should NOT to be perfect, but to give it a try. He asked the teachers in the room "what is more important, having the right answer or everyone having an answer?" Jim summed up being saying that nothing is unrealistic and kids are not stuck at 14 years old.

During the evening there were two presentations by youngsters about how best they learn. Laura, Sophie and Agnes said they enjoy working independently, and on topics that are current. The boys who spoke also commented that they like lessons that have a context. Although I found some of what they had to say to feel like something SMT would say and not personal to the students I did latch onto the idea of topics being current and relevant, perhaps it is what I wanted to hear.

Noel Jenkins told the room about the fake planning notices that he has been using with his geography groups, getting the to think about how they would feel if a building had a dramatic change of use. He also showed how his groups have been making a landscape in a shoebox and writing about it to help show their understanding. He also praised the mission: explore website.

Alessio showed the audience how he had carried out a project using iBooks author to get a group of students to create a resource for other students to use. iBook author seems to be a powerful tool in encouraging students to share their ideas and practice writing to an audience.

Andy Hutt talked about using PowerPoint more powerfully. He championed using compfight.com to search for images you can use in presentations. He also gave the room a hand full of useful keyboard short cuts you can use during a presentation, such as being able to skip to the slide you want by typing in the number of the slide and pressing enter, or turning the screen black by pressing "B". He suggested using interactive textboxes if you wanted to leave a note for next lessons. His last suggestion was deceptively simple, but extremely useful: when using a lot of builds put a full stop only on the last one so you know where to stop in case o forgetfulness.

David Didau gave a quick burst through 25 ways to introduce learning objectives, from missing words out the students have to guess or making the keywords in to anagrams. He has given students ciphers to work out and jigsaws to do. Some colleague play hunt the objectives or use pictograms to get the students to work out what the objective is.

Gavin Smart showed us a app, "my study plan" that students can use to help organise a revision timetable. The app looked powerful, with students able to say which dates they would not be revising on and which exams were most important.

Dave Gale showed us a method for producing differentiated worksheets he calls "thoughts and crosses" where the students have to pick three tasks from the sheet from nine available, but they have to form a straight line. This stops students choosing only the easiest or shortest tasks to complete.

The evening ended with Jim Smith giving us ideas on how to deal with students who said "Sir/Miss I'm stuck". He commented that putting your hand up and waiting for help is not normal behaviour, you wouldn't do that if you found there were no tomatoes left in Teso. He suggested saying the following things to promote independence in response to a student saying "I'm stuck": 1. "OK, so do something different", 2. "What would you do if I gave you £1 million to be unstuck?" 3. "Imagine you were someone who is unstuck, what would you do?" 4. "Just do it wrong (then I have something to work with)" 5. "Choose someone else to help because I have clearly failed to teach you", 6. "What did you do the last time you were stuck?" 7. Play Billy Ocean "when the going gets tough" until they become unstuck. 8. Tell the students to come up with an answer and work backwards, 9. "OK, so what are you going to do?"

I really enjoyed teachmeet Clevedon, it is so nice to see as many teachers interested in their own cpd. My thanks to Mark Anderson for arranging it.

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Location:Clevedon, North Somerset

The Five E approach to lesson planning

Tomorrow evening I will be presenting at #tmclevedon, a Teachmeet at Clevedon school in North Somerset to the uninitiated.

I will be talking about using the 5 E model of lesson planning to help encourage a thinking classroom. I think that it has worked for me this year.
My presentation should be embedded below:



I have included an example of a lesson planned around the experiential learning cycle structure of planning lessons.

Personally, I find that the structure encourages me to do the plenary as the "story"/cycle isn't completed without it. The point of the lesson becomes the evaluation the students do and not the explanation that I give them. I hope this helps to build the thinking skills of my students.

Although I don't have the time or imagination to produce schemes to the quality of the segue scheme, I can still develop lessons and series of lessons that engage and motivate my pupils and help them to understand what they need to do to progress.

EDIT: the evening over ran and I didn't present in the end. It was an hour after it was supposed to finish when I was asked to go on. Next time!


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