To grade or not to grade??

Over the past few months I have been involved in graded (and ungraded) lesson observations.  For 45 minutes to an hour, I sit in a classroom and watch the teaching and learning that is taking place.  I have a form to complete which prompts me to look at various things such as classroom management, evidence that learning is taking place, assessment tracking, lesson planning and so on.

What I've noticed though is how staff behave at the end of the observation, when the lecturer and I start the feedback session. I always start by asking the lecturer 'What do you think went well?' and 'What didn't go so well?'  More often than not, this is followed by a somewhat garbled response - understandable - the lecturer is relieved that the observation is over and is anxious to hear my views, not dissect the lesson themselves.

But what really happens is this:  if I grade the lesson as 'Excellent' (a grade 1), then the lecturer thinks 'Yippee - I did it, I am an excellent teacher, and you can now say anything you like because it doesn't matter because I'm already excellent';  if I grade the lesson as 'Adequate' (grade 3) - or worse, 'Unsatisfactory' (grade 4), the lecturer doesn't hear anything I say beyond that, what they have heard is 'despite your best efforts, and the sleepless nights you have had in the run up to this observation, you are still only adequate at this job, mediocre at best.  They are now thinking, 'what is the point, I've worked this hard to just be adequate'.  They do no hear my advice or suggestions for improvements, they do not listen to the good elements that I highlight, they hear instead a barrage of 'adequate', 'reasonable', 'satisfactory', words that are damning by their mediocrity.

I once discussed a grade with a lecturer who I felt had missed a number of opportunities to stretch and challenge the students.  The lesson was - dare I say it - 'adequate': learners were achieving at a level that was expected of them, but they weren't going the extra mile.  At the end of the observation I sat with the lecturer and told him I was not sure whether I was going to give him a 'good' or an 'adequate'.  He told me that he would hand in his notice the next day if I gave him the lower grade.  He asked me how he could face his colleagues with an 'adequate'.  We chatted for a long time that day, and I gave him his 'good' in the end, because I could not see any benefit to him or his students if he left, and because it was a borderline decision anyway.  I discussed with him the shortcomings of the session, and I highlighted his strengths too.  Did giving this lecturer a grade encourage him to do better?  Did it make him think deeply about the way he taught the lesson?  I very much doubt it.  Without the grade at all, he might just have listened to my observations and feedback and reviewed how he was engaging with those learners.

The same is true for students.  I've observed students scroll through a marked, annotated assignment right to the end to find their grade.  If they've done well, they turn to their friends with a whoop and then ask them what they got.  If the student did badly, they scowl and move on.  It is very rare that I see a student sit and digest all the comments and feedback I have given them on an assignment, and then use this information to improve their next piece of work.

I once tried an experiment.  Initially I gave the learners their written feedback as usual for an assignment.  When we started the next assignment some weeks later, I asked them to review the feedback they had from the first assignment and then told them to write a point or two about how they would respond to this feedback in their second assignment.  I got them to write this point as the first line of their next assignment.  It was met with some confusion ('why are we doing this?') and some suspicion ('what is she getting at?'), but it at least got some of the learners to consider how they might improve on their previous grades.  This is something I think is worth adopting as regular practice, and it would certainly be interesting to research the outcomes of such activities to see if it has a positive impact on grades.

One thing I can say is that I really enjoy giving lecturers feedback on their lessons.  I find that the experiences I have had throughout my teaching career give me a good insight into what is effective and which tools might enhance a lesson, and I am very enthusiastic about sharing these ideas with staff.  I really don't like giving lecturers a grade.  Some colleges are already moving away from graded observations and discussions I've had with these colleagues suggest that after an initial period of uncertainty from staff, the consensus is that these observations are more effective in that staff get more out of the process than just receiving a judgement.  Perhaps there might be room for both?

Useful Reading

There are some excellent insights into Feedback and Assessment (mainly from a student / teacher perspective rather than lesson observations) on the UKEdChat pages, and a very good research article by Ruth Butler (rather old now from 1988) called Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task Involving and Ego Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance.  Finally there is an excellent piece of research by John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) entitled 'The Power of Feedback' which is well worth a read.

Adobe Document Cloud

I've discovered Adobe Document Cloud and what it offers me in terms of PDF documents.

This week I have been away from my desk carrying out lesson observations. During the observations, I write notes on a standard form.  I give my feedback to the tutor concerned, take a photo of the 2-page form on my mobile and then leave the form with the tutor.

I then upload the photos to my Evernote account, and in the past, I have waited until I've been at my desk to download the files, convert the two pages into a single PDF using Acrobat, and then email them to our Quality department.

Recently though, Acrobat was removed from my desktop PC, so I was looking for a way to convert two separate JPEGs for each observation into a single PDF.  I discovered Adobe Document Cloud did exactly what I wanted.

I already have an Adobe Creative Cloud account.  By going into the Document Cloud, I can Create PDFs by dragging and dropping the JPEGs into the browser.  I can then combine the two PDFs into one by selecting them and giving them a new name.  I'm pleased at how easy it is.

I could probably send the JPEGs from my phone directly to Creative Cloud - so that's the next step to investigate.  I love it when things just work!!

New beginnings

Next week I will start a new (albeit temporary) role as a Teaching & Learning Mentor.  I'm exciting at the prospect, as well as being a little nervous.

Applying for - and subsequently getting - the job have made me think a lot about what the role of a Teaching & Learning Mentor should be.  As a lecturer, I look to my campus Mentor for support with lesson plans in the main.  I'm pretty competent when it comes to technology for learning, so this is not something I need a lot of support with.  But when it comes to lesson observations, I find it handy to be able to chat through my lesson plan with someone else who can give me suggestions or point out areas that I have not explicitly included.  I guess it is useful to hear an objective point of view on what I have put together.

Today, I read the Guardian's Secret Teacher post on inset days (Guardian, 2015).  I agree with the author that there is nothing worse than sitting in training which feels less than relevant, whilst thinking about all the prep and / or marking that is sitting on your desk, whilst trying to control the building sense of panic about when you are going to manage to fit it in.

Last term, I was involved in putting together an inset for a specific group of staff.  One of the things I was determined to do was to ensure that during the session, staff would complete something tangible which they could take away and use in a lesson.  We did this by including a brief introduction, and then four activities - short 15 minute group sessions which introduced a teaching tool or technique and then gave the staff an opportunity to begin planning their own take on the technique - something that would work for them and their learners, and that they could take away at the end of the session.  As an example, my session was on the use of online collaborative forums as a way of developing higher order thinking skills.  I explained the purpose of the forums and briefly some of the technicalities, and then I got the group to think of a forum topic that they could use within their own subject area.  Once they had done that, I asked them to think about how they could drive the online discussion forward to develop those critical thinking skills that we so desperately want our learners to have.

Feedback from the session was very good, and as a team I think we did a good job of making use of the time in a way that the staff felt was productive.  My post now will be to replicate that productivity every day, with every member of staff I interact with.

There is definitely a need to bring staff together to plan and to disseminate information, but how we do that is just as important.  We are telling teachers that they need to be less didactic and more interactive, but that's not always how inset sessions run.  Perhaps now I have an opportunity to lead by example.

So much to learn, so little time

I found this post from this time last year which I never got round to publishing.  The subjects may have changed, but the principle still remains!

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Sept 2014

I've re-connected with my piano.  Last week I had it tuned, and just before he left, the piano tuner played a short but beautiful piece of music on it.  I sat in the other room and listened and it reminded me how much I love playing the piano, and how much I miss playing it.  So I've started playing again.  I picked up a piece of Chopin that I've tried to learn once before, and practiced, and it's been a joy.

What I need now is lots of time to practice.  But wait, I don't have lots of time.  In addition to getting back to the piano, I'm also two weeks into an online Mobile App course, learning about the ins and outs of Android applications, Eclipse, SDK's, Java and XML.  I'm really enjoying the course, but it's very hard with so many system tweaks and downloads, and complex programming and packaging.

And then in a week's time, the Introduction to Guitar Playing starts on Coursera.  I've already delayed starting this course twice because of lack of time, but I think I'd love to be able to play the guitar, and apart from a couple of chords and one short piece, I've never really dedicated much time to it.

I'm also getting to grips with MIT App Inventor for one of my modules at college - that's great fun too, and I'm looking forward to getting the learners enthused about what they can do with it.  I'm writing lesson plans for my Website Production class - next week it's client and server side scripting - that'll take a while to put together.  Soon, I'll be joining a Preparing to Teach class, so I'll need to refresh my memory on learning styles and theories for that.

I'd also really like to get to grips with a bit of Visual Basic programming, so that I can tinker further with my home automation system, getting lights to turn off after a certain amount of inactivity in a room - but I've never done Visual Basic before so that's proving quite challenging.

And of course, I'm trying to allocate a bit of time to training my border collie for his agility classes - we're even planning to enter a competition next month.  Gardening, housework, taxi driver for three kids, and I'd like to have a go at making my own bread without cheating with the bread machine.

Life for me is about learning.  I love learning.  If I don't know something, I google it.  If I don't understand something, I read about it.  If I want to get better at something, I practice it.

Now if I could just stop time for a hour a day of dedicated learning, that would be perfect.  There is so much to learn, so little time.  Perhaps a course in astro physics is what I need...

Something Different

This year I have a Level 3 tutorial group.  Much of what we need to do in tutorials is admin based or building up personal skills - not something many IT students are particularly enthusiastic about.

As something completely different today, I decided to do a general knowledge quiz.  I thought it might be good on a number of levels:

• getting the learners thinking early (ish) on a Monday morning
• giving me a better understanding of their existing general knowledge
• encouraging them to start thinking beyond assignments and criteria based learning and into news (both technology and general news), common sense and life skills

Questions included one capital city, one cooking, one health, several news (politics and sport) and a few other IT based questions.  Learners were asked to work independently, and I tried to generate a bit of a sense of competition to encourage them to do better than their friends.  At the end of the quiz, learners swapped papers for marking, and scores were given by way of hands raised in score boundaries.

The learners all took part, and all engaged really well.  It was fun, but with some serious elements in - after all we should really all know at what temperature water boils, and how long to cook dried pasta. 

Personally, I also really enjoyed it as it seemed to bring about a good, friendly banter in the classroom, and I awarded a Merit badge to the learner with the best score at the end.  It felt like a good activity to bring the group together and to get everyone focussed, and it is something I will definitely do again.

The importance of preparation

A few weeks ago I had an interview for a new job. The interview consisted of a 15 minute presentation, topic given well in advance, a task and a meeting.

I worked very hard on the presentation.  Coming up with an idea in the middle of the night just after being told I'd got the interview, I rehearsed well, brought a prop and even practised delivering it to my very patient husband.  All good.

Before the interview, I read through the job spec and my application several times.  I took a little time to think about my own strengths and weaknesses as that tends to be a classic interview question.

But on the day, when I'd done the task, delivered my presentation and was asked the first question 'what can you bring to the post?' my mind turned to mush and I rambled about something not particularly relevant. I failed to mention all the things that I do day in day out, perhaps because I take them for granted.  I didn't talk about quality, or breadth of experience, I failed to tell them how I keep abreast of current thinking via social networking and other online resources.  I didn't comment on my wider reading and research done during my dissertation.

This theme continued throughout the next hour.  I got a few useful bits of information out, but afterwards I kicked myself for missing out the obvious things that they would have been looking for.

Interviews are not unlike teaching - an opportunity to share what I know with others, but because the topic was me, and I thought I'd just be able to answer those questions on the fly, I fell a bit flat. I floundered to find the right words.

The lesson I have learned here is that everthing needs prep.  Often it's just because being succinct is tricky, but it's essential for effective information giving. Despite how well you think you know something, saying it clearly and concisely can take practise and skill.

Needless to say I didn't get the job, but it was a valuable experience that served as a good reminder of some fundamental principles - not least the importance of preparation.

Raspberry Pi Projects

This year I was successful in obtaining a bid for a set of Raspberry Pi computers for our Foundation Degree students to make use of.  Today they delivered their end of year presentations about what they had done with their Pis.

We started the year with a bit of programming.  This included a few sessions to introduce them to Python, and then half a dozen sessions on using Scratch to create some simple games and interactive programs.

There was a clear divide within the class - those who felt comfortable dabbling with programming, and those who didn't.  The students were put into groups to work on the Pi - these were based on friendship rather than ability - possibly something I would avoid next time, as those who were comfortable with programming often took the lion's share of the work leaving the less confident students floundering and eventually backing off from the project.

Today each group delivered a short presentation on their project and what they had achieved.  Several of the groups had achieved some or all of their intended project, others had got stuck along the way and did not have a finished product.

Of the successful projects we had a covert surveillance system, by way of a Pi placed inside an air freshener container with an HD camera to stream video to a remote monitor if the motion or door sensors were triggered.  Another group created a server running Apache for a custom built website.  Other projects started but not completed included a morse code LED lamp, a remote controlled car controlled by a wii remote, a flashing LED cube and another video surveillance system.

Although not all the groups achieved their goals, it was very clear from the presentations that almost everyone had taken something away from their projects.  Here are some of the things that the students have learnt about - often without even realising it:

• A first introduction to Linux
• GPIO (General Purpose Input Outputs)
• Some basic electronics - capacitors, resistors, breadboards and other connecting devices
• Downloading and installing operating system distributions
• Basic connectivity - attaching monitors, keyboards and other peripherals
• Basic programming skills
• Shell programming
• Project planning skills

In addition, all the students learned that sometimes the smallest hitch in building a fully functioning programme can have a huge impact on progress, and I think we all learned that a step by step approach, tackling each tiny element one at a time is the only way to build up to a successful outcome.

I asked the students at the end if they would like to continue working on the Pis next year.  Some said no, but on the whole, the project seems to have piqued their interest in programming and I have absolutely no doubt that what they have done this year will stand them in good stead for the programming, scripting and IT security challenges that they will take on next year.