Next Year I'm Gonna...

It's that time of year again.

I've hardly used Moodle this year and I've been using Google Classroom.  It's quite Zen.  Next year I though I'd maintain a Google Classroom for each module of each class (that'll stop it being Zen!) and keep my behemoth Google Site going as a static brochure of what we do, how to study and links to resources.

I like the way GC sets up a folder on your GDrive.  I could put my planning templates (in XL) there so that kids could learn 24/7.  This would take GCal out of the cycle (and my Plan Book!).

I want to not do extra but make my planning transparent enough for remotely accessing kids able to follow what they missed.

I would like to practise the Flipped Classroom with one module with 12 Px.

Good article on using Google Classroom

You get that

One should expect that from time to time, in any enterprise, that stuff happens.

I had a CASE lesson planned that looked pretty good to me.  It was about looking for patterns in diverse data about humans.  For instance a scattergram of head circumference against height.

The students had a number of different graphs to look for a correlation in.  As it was a Tuesday*  I included a wee task about the vocab of correlation.  It was last period and they never engaged. They were more interested in the vocab sheet than the thinking task.

What did I learn?

1.  Keep trying. You never know when they will engage (or not)
2. Accept that last period is better for cutting out, colouring in, joining dots than it is for thinking

*Tuesday is my literacy day.  I know it's pathetic but if I don't stick to it, it won't get done.

Demmings 14 rules

Demming was regarded by many as the best teacher they ever had apparently.  He helped Japaneses companies develop philosophies about continuous management.  I got this from a site here.

It is very applicable to teaching in all but one or two places.

The 14 Points 

1. Create a constant purpose toward improvement.
   • Plan for quality in the long term.
   • Resist reacting with short-term solutions.
   • Don't just do the same things better – find better things to do.
   • Predict and prepare for future challenges, and always have the goal of getting better.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
   • Embrace quality throughout the organization.
   • Put your customers' needs first, rather than react to competitive pressure – and design products and services to meet those needs.
   • Be prepared for a major change in the way business is done. It's about leading, not simply managing.
   • Create your quality vision, and implement it.
3. Stop depending on inspections.
   • Inspections are costly and unreliable – and they don't improve quality, they merely find a lack of quality.
   • Build quality into the process from start to finish.
   • Don't just find what you did wrong – eliminate the "wrongs" altogether.
   • Use statistical control methods – not physical inspections alone – to prove that the process is working.
4. Use a single supplier for any one item.
   • Quality relies on consistency – the less variation you have in the input, the less variation you'll have in the output.
   • Look at suppliers as your partners in quality. Encourage them to spend time improving their own quality – they shouldn't compete for your business based on price alone.
   • Analyze the total cost to you, not just the initial cost of the product.
   • Use quality statistics to ensure that suppliers meet your quality standards.
5. Improve constantly and forever.
   • Continuously improve your systems and processes. Deming promoted thePlan-Do-Check-Act   approach to process analysis and improvement.
   • Emphasize training and education so everyone can do their jobs better.
   • Use kaizen   as a model to reduce waste and to improve productivity, effectiveness, and safety.
6. Use training on the job.
   • Train for consistency to help reduce variation.
   • Build a foundation of common knowledge.
   • Allow workers to understand their roles in the "big picture."
   • Encourage staff to learn from one another, and provide a culture and environment for effective teamwork.
7. Implement leadership.
   • Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the processes they use.
   • Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member can do his or her best. Be a coach instead of a policeman.
   • Figure out what each person actually needs to do his or her best.
   • Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational leadership.
   • Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and quotas.
8. Eliminate fear.
   • Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to express ideas or concerns.
   • Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more things right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when mistakes happen.
   • Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do things.
   • Ensure that your leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in the company's best interests.
   • Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
   • Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department or function serves other departments that use their output.
   • Build a shared vision.
   • Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce adversarial relationships.
   • Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.
10. Get rid of unclear slogans.
    • Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess."Excellence in service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean?How is it achieved? The message is clearer in a slogan like "You can do better if you try."
    • Don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective leadership.Outline your expectations, and then praise people face-to-face for doing good work.
11. Eliminate management by objectives.
    • Look at how the process is carried out, not just numerical targets. Deming said that production targets encourage high output and low quality.
    • Provide support and resources so that production levels and quality are high and achievable.
    • Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.

Self regulated learners is what I want!

I ran into a reference to POSBGIL at Lance King's TaoLearning web site.

 It got me wondering about how to teach next year. In order to use Guided Inquiry Learning (that's the GIL bit of POSBGIL) I would have to promote self regulated learners.  Three things from this article interested me.

Firstly that self regulated skills need teaching and the way to do that was to teach the key competencies of the NZ Curriculum. But how do you do that?

Secondly, students vary in their ability to self-regulate their leaning so you need to scaffold learning more for some.  This leads on the the last point.

Thirdly, readiness for self regulated learning was testable. I found a LASSI index to test a student's relaxation. It cost $US3.50 a copy. Thought I'd make my own and this brought me back to HoM (Habits of Mind).

Art Costa who invented Habits of Mind said they were what people did when they didn't know what to do. That seemd to me they were self regulating using HoM.  I looked in our students' planners and there's a self assessment of HoM there, but it's a little complicated.  Interesting idea though; I will pursue this.

Also looked for the scholarly articles referred to in TaoLearning link; they have also whetted my appetite for further investigation.

How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day

Listened to an interview with Tony Benn on TV today. It was a very entertaining and kind of uplifting interview.  n it referred to a book called "How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day" by Arnold Bennett.  It has a Wikipedia entry and can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

I liked the way it talks about reclaiming 90 minutes a day to improve oneself. Whilst he meant his message for salaried workers working a 40h week it still makes me long for time to do things like wrote this blog or read a book.  Worth a go? Certainly worth a think.

Systems Thinking

Space as a context for systems thinking.

Habits of Mind

Would Art  Costa's ideas be a good way of teacing thinking next year.  There's more to them than our MALL (meta-cognition, analyses, lateral and logical thinking) and they would intersect at times.  There are 16 HoMs we could focus on one per week and that way we'd get through them all twice in a year,

• Persisting
• Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
• Managing impulsivity
• Gathering data through all senses
• Listening with understanding and empathy
• Creating, imagining, innovating
• Thinking flexibly
• Responding with wonderment and awe
• Thinking about thinking (metacognition)
• Taking responsible risks
• Striving for accuracy
• Finding humour
• Questioning and posing problems
• Thinking interdependently
• Applying past knowledge to new situations
• Remaining open to continuous learning

They actually don't look like ways of thinking.  Habits is a good word.

Maybe not.  They will arise so opportunistically that it's possibly better to have them as 16 posters to refer to and remind of.  Sometimes you could engineer them in.