Class Room Management: The first thing you do

I realised this week, due to a number of factors and variables in the school I am in, that my classroom management ability had somewhat atrophied. That’s not to say my classrooms are chaotic (at least any more than I encourage to happen), but that my approach to keeping order had shifted to a “force of personality” approach.

I am currently heavily involved in a boarding house, and have invested quite heavily into to developing relationships with boarders, their friends and the people around them. It made some things easier, in that a significant look can solve minor issues, but when situations unravel it makes things more challenging. The professional disconnect is no longer there, which means that my own composure is compromised and things develop into shouting matches rather quickly.

Put simply; I’m not applying the same level of technique that I used to, relying on the rapport with the student to do the work.

That needs to be fixed, if I hope to not dull my classroom management ability.

So, I watched a quick YouTube video as a refresher course:

The First Thing: Border Control

The best way to avoid shenanigans is to avoid inviting shenanigans in through the door.

The means not letting students drift in through the door, bringing the baggage of the day with them. Dealing with a constant trickle of disruption coming through the door is wearing on a teacher, and essentially means you need to calm a classroom every few seconds.

As a routine, keep your class line up outside the classroom, and start managing behaviour there.

The video above suggests engaging with the students on a personal level before addressing them as a whole group. It’s good advice, and I recommend following it to the letter, particularly for new teachers.

So… how would this work for me:

My classroom

The issue with my classroom is that my corridor is quite thin, and it is also one I share with another 3 teachers. If all of us have lessons, the corridor becomes fairly crowded fairly quickly.

I don’t think there is any practical solution around this, apart from just allowing students to drift into my classroom. It may end up being one member of staff (me) dictating the ready state of the corridor. Which would be quite fun, and certainly something to aspire to.

Morning/evening roll call

A bit of context for our day pupil teaching brethren, otherwise known as the majority of teachers. Roll call in boarding schools is typically handled in house, a practical arrangement since the boarding students are there already. Trying to run a register there is a challenge for two reasons: the list is just longer, requiring a longer time where boisterous boys and giggly girls need to be quiet; and also you reach critical mass of bodies where inappropriate behaviour has a higher chance of happening.

In the past I was more mobile in roll calls, and could just position myself where knots of misbehaviour could occur. In an effort to track and prevent lateness to roll call I started using an Excel spreadsheet to log when boarders were late. This meant being tied to a certain spot with a laptop, and as a result, behaviour in roll calls has become a bit more unruly.

Going forward, I’m going to go back to guard duty on the door, keeping people out of roll call until uniform is ready, or just keeping them quiet as they walk in. I’ll just need to track the lates to roll call on a different spreadsheet.

That’s all for now.

Happy teaching!

 

Are Learning Objectives SMART goals?

One of the thousands of questions that pops out of my head. This morning in the shower I was contemplating SMART goals:

• S – specific
• M -measurable
• A – actionable
• R – that you are responsible for
• T – time bounded

There are many variations, but this is the one I like the most, referenced from CCP Gray’s video on 7 Ways to Make Yourself Miserable.

To be honest I can’t find any mention in the literature of the R value standing for “being Responsible for”. I think that is a crucial factor into making the goal motivating rather than a stick to beat down hopes and dreams.

For example; you are only responsible with the preparation for the test, not the result of the test itself. You don’t set yourself the goal of getting an A in the test, as the final result is taking out of your hands at the marking stage. The marker assigns a result, not the person taking the test.

Rather it is better to set yourself the goal of completing x number of practice questions in the week before the test, perhaps even setting a time if you are conscientious enough. Then you can succeed in preparing for a test as opposed to failing to get an A, which you could never force to happen anyway.

With this in mind, are our learning objectives actually SMART?

Learning objectives often cite “Understand a concept” as one of the middling goals. Regardless of your interpretation of the difficulty of that, neither student nor teacher is responsible for that outcome. The teacher cannot for neurological change in the student’s head, nor can the student control their own brains to force the outcome.

Would the following be better: setting actions in classroom setting to be completed. The teacher would still need to know how the activities and actions lead to Understanding, but all the student needs to do is ensure they complete the action. You can, and should, tell them how this leads to understanding, but their goal for that lesson is to follow the action script laid out by the teacher.

Tangential learning, and creativity can certainly fall out of that process, depending on the skill and confidence of the teacher.

If you want to try putting this into practice, this website provides a list of action verbs for target setting:

https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/opia/job-search-toolkit/action-verbs/?redir=1

Reproduced here in case the website goes down:

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constructed contacted continued contracted convened conveyed coordinated corresponded counseled created critiqued decided defined delegated delivered demonstrated derived designed detected determined developed devised directed distributed drafted edited educated effected elicited encouraged established evaluated examined executed exhibited expanded expedited experienced experimented

explained explored facilitated figured financed focused forecasted formed formulated fostered founded functioned generated governed grouped guided helped identified illustrated immunized implemented improved increased informed initiated instituted instructed interpreted interviewed introduced invented investigated judged led listened maintained managed marketed mastered

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There is guidance all over the internet about writing SMART goals, but this is the best one I could find:

https://uncw.edu/career/documents/WritingSMARTLearningObjectives.pdf

With the following examples below:

Further reading:

Bastable, S.B., & Doody, J.A. (2011). Behavioral objectives. In S.B. Bastable, P. Gramet, K. Jacobs, & D.L. Sopczyk, D. (Eds.) Health professional as educator: Principles of teaching and learning (pp. 377-418). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Cranton, P. (2012). Planning instruction for adult learners (3rd ed.). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Wall & Emerson, Inc.

As taken from this website:

http://www.culawschool.org/it/?p=311

With an appraisal coming up, I will make some goals for myself and post them up here.

Happy teaching!

Reading: Making Thinking Visible part 2

Following on from the previous reading…

Quite a bit about thinking routines. I would like to see some.

They mention their website: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/vt . I wonder if it’s still there?

Blah. I lost focus on the words. At the moment, they’re just rattling off a history of the development of ideas. The process is probably important, but I will need to come back to this page again, since it’s not grabbing my interest. A same since they probably spent a good long time recording this. (Page xix).

Some rhetoric: engage learners, support thinking, develop understanding and encourage independence. Is that what I am doing in the classroom?

Do I have an overall philosophy in teaching? I live by a maxim of doing the best I can, and doing the most amount of good in a place or situation that I can. I have taken on some very unsavoury roles and jobs, ones that people tend to avoid. Partly to make a difference, but also partly because of naked ambition: take the roles no one wants and you will jump up the ranks faster.

To what end though? Money is always a factor, but I think I might be doing this even without the draw of a fat pay check.

I think maybe I just want to leave things in a better state than when I found it. I think that applies to students too. I just want to put them in abetter position than they were yesterday.

So what do I man by a better position?

I think perhaps…

It’s a complicated thing.

I want students to be independent. Strong enough to stand on their own two feet when something occurs. I also want them to be integrated into whatever environment they fin themselves in. I want them to be in a position to make the world a better place themselves.

I think I want them to be like me, and go forth into the world and leave things better than how they found them. I’m rambling now. Read more.

Ah, no.

I want students to be able to deal with that which is undiscovered. To be able to prepare for that which cannot be known. To be able to stand their ground against overwhelming chaos.

That’ll do.

Next step is how to measure my actions against that goal.

Finally.

Part 1: Some thinking about thinking

Damn, we’re starting with “according to the dictionary”. I hope this is an inside joke about how high school essays start…

Is it clear that learning is a product of thinking? I know of many passively gained skills I have, up to and including typing on a keyboard. Hmm.

Good point: What is meant by thinking? The question of what kind of thinking do you want to see in the classroom is a very good one, and leads me to think about what categorise of thought there are.

We have “bad thoughts”, “sweet thoughts”, “kind thoughts”, but is the mechanism for all these the same.

Off the top of my head, there are:

• active thoughts, which we try to force our brains to do.
• passive thoughts, where ideas seem to pop out of nowhere.
• empty thoughts, which flit through the brain but vanish fairly quickly leaving no impression

Hah, I’ve literally just written a blog post on what this author is discussing with Bloom’s being over taught. Funny, but shows I’m on the right track.

I’m always sceptical of people that use the phrase “problematic”.

The point raised about Bloom’s taxonomy being hierarchical is actually not a very good criticism. I think you need a standard hierarchy to work from, to gauge levels of mastery. Where I think Bloom’s falls down is that the descriptors and levels are actually wrong. Or at least not as high utility.

For example, being creative is not adequately described. As the book notes, Bloom’s work was based from… actually it doesn’t state it. In fact the book says it’s just a theory, which raises my sceptical eye brow further. I think the writer means hypothesis, so I will now be on my guard when the author refers to research and scientific process.

Question: Surely there should now be a weight of actual practice evidence on the success of Bloom’s model? It’s been enacted in education for over 50 years… there has to be some study on its efficacy.

Got a bit of reading list from this book. Remember to check those sources (which hopefully will not be behind a pay wall).

I feel like a language game is being played here. The author is using various different meanings of Bloom’s stages to muddy the clarity of those positions. For example, where understanding is concerned; Bloom’s taxonomy refers to demonstration of understanding, as in the fact/idea can be categorised or interpreted.

I think that perhaps Bloom’s show us levels of mastery of use of an idea: you can understand a concept without knowing the fine details of it.

As Piaget points out with children (sorry no citation yet!), a game can be understood long before an explanation of the rules is given.

So… your criticism of Bloom’s is incorrect in this case.

No, I don’t like it. The idea of removing the hierarchy just means your compass is broken. You can argue the directions are wrong, but without a map you’re just lost.

Up to page 8 now. I need to go do something, but I will look back on my thoughts here after I am done.

Summary

While I agree Bloom’s Taxonomy has its flaws, the criticisms of the author are not valid, and at this stage I assume to be subjective. To be sure that what the author is saying is correct I will need to read and research the following:

• Bloom’s original Taxonomy paper.
• The citations listed in the book.
• Papers on the efficacy of Bloom’s taxonomy in the classroom/teacher training.

I also have to be honest about a concern I have. I know that deconstructing hierarchies is a left-leaning philosophy. I do not insinuate political agenda here, or anything as corrupt as Lysenko-ism. I just think I’ll need to divine out assumptions made.

I don’t see moving up and down the hierarchy as evidence that the hierarchy is wrong. Simply that you can move up and down the hierarchy, and that learning is not some ratchet system, where one level is attained ad locked into place.

Domains of thought

I think that we’ve stretched Bloom’s Taxonomy about as far as it will go.

When Bloom wrote his Taxonomy of Educational objectives, which I have to admit I have not read yet, the domain which came to dominate much of education was his work on the cognitive domain. This was seen as the “knowledge” domain, and since the purpose of education is to instil knowledge in the next generation, this was a neat bench mark from which to measure the success of education.

Most trainee teachers worth their chalk will study Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, and most curricula and national level schemes will level year group learning goals on it. There are in fact two other domains to be considered: the affective domain and the psychomotor domain.

Affective is a bit of a vague word, but it deals with how learners react emotionally to new information. That is not to say it is like the popular stages of grief, but it deals with how students put value and meaning onto objective facts. It is the emotional domain.

It might seem like a very fluffy and useless sphere to study in terms of academics, but really it is one of the magic bullets you can use to gauge student engagement. You will often hear people talking about relevance of the topic to the student, and what relevance means is the subjective value the student places on that topic.

It, in fact, may be one of the most important domains to investigate in the information era. As mastery of facts becomes less important with rapid access databases and Google being so readily available, the ability to discern relevance and place a value hierarchy on information becomes more important. You can’t sift through the mud unless you know what gold looks like.

What is interesting to me (at least for right now), is the psychomotor domain.

This deals with actions taken in the world, and can be seen as how you use your body to investigate or make changes in the environment around you.

I get the feeling this has been largely sidelined due to academic disdain for the physical subjects. There is generally a feeling that Design Technology or Food Science are lesser disciplines compared to Physics and History, presumably because actually moving around is what workers do, not managers.

I argue that this is both a huge disservice to those subjects, and also a tremendous oversight on the part of academics. I readily accept the criticism that I have no evidence for this bias against the more active subjects, and I am only projecting my own observations on a straw man of stuffy academic types that don’t get outside enough, but I think they’re not uncommon observations.

Either way, an investigation of the psychomotor domain shows us some very cool ideas on how to grade skills. Speaking as a science teacher, I know that using a graph or conducting yourself in an experiment safely are skills which need to be taught. In the past it would be a simple tick box: can they use a Bunsen burner without setting their hair on fire? Yes. Good, education achieved.

But even a small amount of focus on that thinking reveals massive amounts of criticism. How do you know they can use it? You have one point of data. Did they do it right because they know what they’re doing, or were they just lucky? Are they going to do it again in the future? What does it mean that they can even use a Bunsen burner? Turning it on? Using it in an experiment? Knowing that they can use it to solve a problem?

Looking at the psychomotor domain shows us that such practical skills can be graded in terms of mastery.

And I would go as far to say as it can be used on mental or cognitive skills too.

We may have stretched Bloom’s taxonomy to its limit. I think we need to branch out and categorise the other domains of thought and education.

 

Cochrane’s Cognitive Skills Taxonomy

Here are two pictures outlaying my taxonomy of cognitive skills.

Almost every part of this needs explanation and description of how and why I have chosen the categories here. Here is the most recent (27-Feb-2019) version of what I have been working on for discussion. It should be immediately implementable in any curriculum or scheme of work, as either a simple box tick to say what level of mastery a student has, or as a foundation idea from which to build from.

 

Reading: Making Thinking Visible part 1

by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, Karin Morrison and foreword by David Perkins.

Reading for pleasure is something I’ve done in the context of fantasy books. I can’t say I’ve been into Sci-fi books despite my geek credentials, as I find the tone of those books stuffy and usually pompous.

So, now I’m reading some academic articles. Here I will record my thoughts as I go. They may well be unintelligible ramblings, but I need them to sort my thoughts. Even as I write this I’m interrupted and I will need a written record to keep my thread of thinking.

Anyway, let’s start.

Some irrelevant thing about a stranger being angry on the phone. What’s the point?

Ah, a mention about trying to work out the thinking inside someone else’s head. I wonder if this person has looked into different models of thinking, and I wonder if the models I’ve looked at will come up.

Good point about not knowing how we think ourselves, but I think the analogy of a coach on the sidelines is a bit weak. It’s more like a driver knowing how to operate the controls of a car, but not knowing the particulars of how the engine works and how the drive shaft is connected to the wheels.

Often that’s not even needed to go from point A-B, you just need to know what lever to pull and when to steer around the odd dog. Perhaps this helps the coach analogy? Requiring someone on the outside of the sports activity looking in to help out? Don’t think so… but you certainly need an engineer to know how to fix the car when it breaks down.

Ah, perhaps psychology as an underpinning for education is a bit of a dead end then. You only need someone who is good at driving to tell you how to drive. Is that what a teacher is? Someone who just knows the operations of learning well enough to guide others through it?

Potentially.

Read more.

So we should be externalising the process of thought? Perhaps not. No doubt there is value in learning how learning happens, but is it of functional utility to the student who needs to navigate around the road of education? Does that not simply shift the burden of teaching actual content, and discipline of subject to some other teacher?

Should then this be a separate subject in itself?

Honestly I don’t think so. I think underpinning every subject there is a core method or skill set for interpreting or interacting with the world. I don’t think there is a universal tool for understanding all truths yet, but I would suppose the scientific method comes close. That is why it appears to be mirrored in many subjects, where objective truths need to be discussed (like History and Geography etc.).

The stumbling block would be meanings of these truths, and the placing of values…. quantifying the emotional and cultural relevance of these effects, which I would put squarely in the domain of the humanities.

Can these two describe each other? Interesting notion, but I’ve forgotten the authors point.

Externalising the process of thought is a good tool for an educator. I don’t think it’s one for the educatee. Some of these skills and methods are best brought out as a result of combinations of workings and trials and errors, rather than active reprogramming by the person thinking.

Actually put bluntly, I don’t think you can teach someone how to think without breaking the thinking device. Again, thinking about driving, you don’t want to have to re-weld he axle to turn a corner… you much rather just turn the wheel and let the engineering do the rest. Simple awareness of knowing what the brain is doing is probably only going to interfere with normal operation, and the learning process itself.

The last few paragraphs seem to be justifications for Concept Based Learning (take a shot).

The idea of thinking with another set of ideas to explain a new phenomena is not useless by any means. i myself in this reading have gone to town on car analogies to explain the trickier ideas of a learning process. But that’s tremendously surface level. The mechanics of a car are different to the biology of learning, and psychology different to learning the highway code.

Is that what concept based learning (take a shot) is? Learning to think with analogy? That would be greatly comforting when encountering a new situation, and sits right in the Star Trekkian explanations of hard Science in the past. Ghostbusters Twinkie comes to mind as well.

But.

It is not the reality of the situation, and can lead to a false arrogance and assumed knowledge. Interesting.

I think about this in terms of Physics. I can explain a phenomena with analogy and metaphor, and students will understand the lower resolution concept of what I’m talking about. But when it comes down to the hard crunch, they flounder. They might not even realise the detail is there to be looked for.

Hm. I don’t think I understand Concept based teaching enough yet.

Okay, I’ll leave it there. In case you’re wondering we’ve just finished p the Foreword by David Perkins. This was a whole 2 pages.

We could be here a while.

I’m going to read through my thoughts now and see if there’s anything useful I can pop out.

I really have an aversion to Concept Based Learning (take a shot). I think I see it as the opposite pole to developing skill sets instead. I wonder if that makes me old fashioned, or just plain wrong. I enjoyed reading the book though.

I wish I could post the content of the book up here for discussion. I wonder if that might be allowed? Maybe an idea for later. Please let me know any thoughts or comments on my mad ramblings.

Happy teaching!