Class Dojo - a behaviour management tool for the digital child and teacher.

In term three last year I blogged about behaviour management and how I was coming to terms with learning how to speak the language of the virtues.  The Year 4 class I had come into in term three had had a far bit of upheaval in the second term despite the best efforts of my predecessors and senior management to maintain stability, and as a result the class was not the cohesive unit you'd expect half way through the year and behaviour was erratic.

While I made progress using the virtues and building relationships, the behaviour management rewards side was not capturing the whole class.  I had been giving out "Caught Being Good" cards (we called them Tuis - after the NZ Music Awards - to fit in with the class theme), but some kids had lost interest, and others were stealing them from their classmates.  It became a massive effort to collect in the cards and issue the points and add them up.

Before the end of term three I was very despondent with how things were going and I was not enjoying the class, a personal disappointment to me as a professional teacher.

Something had to change.

I had heard of Class Dojo.  I'd seen it talked about at Educamps and Eduignites and ULearn14.  I had been involved in Twitter Chats and Facebook discussions on its merits.

I went to the Eduignite at Hautapu in term three and caught up with @ariaporo22, aka Alex, a high school teacher from Rotorua who is the Class Dojo Community Leader for New Zealand.  We sat down and discussed the merits.  Alex uses it for most of her classes.  She uses it to reinforce the positives and rarely, if ever, used the negative side of Class Dojo.

I also talked to Maria, the teacher in the class next door, who was also using Class Dojo, to get her perspective on it.  And then there were discussions with senior management on the way forward and how we could change the culture of the class and emphasise positive behaviour.

Three weeks before the end of term three I decided to revamp the behaviour management programme for term four and bring Class Dojo in to the mix to up the ante.

At ULearn15 Alex talked me through the set up and how it works over the cocktail event on the first night as we tried some MLE furniture out of size.  We set up an account and a "practise class" on my phone and practised giving and taking points and making new rewards to give out.  We also practised changing the monsters for each student.



The practise run - this was part of Alex's mini tutorial at ULearn15 with me.

Later on, I set up the real account for my class and it was very easy to do so after Alex's mini tutorial.

On the first day of school I sat the kids down and I really wanted to show them the new programme on the ActivBoard.... but in the holidays the school server died and my laptop and the new server were not talking.  So using my phone I showed them the Class Dojo video for the class and talked them through it.

I think the monsters hooked the kids.  They liked the bright colours, the multiple eyes and the horns.

  

I also focused on the virtues that we needed to use in the class to develop the virtue of Unity - friendliness, patience, responsibility, respect, self-discipline, consideration.  Many of these virtues the children could tell you what they looked like but many students were struggling to demonstrate them in how they behaved.

An example of some of the positive behaviours you can edit.

As Alex suggested I tried to keep the positive side of the tool the focus.  I loaded up the rewards with references to the virtues we really needed to use in the class.  And then I went made on the clicking.

I'm not going to tell you that it solved all my classroom management issues with this class, but the term was a lot better than the previous term.  Those kids who really wanted to learn and were shining examples of how to behave in the class were recognised for their efforts in a very visual way.  They soon led the points tally.  My students who were not shining lights trialled behind. 

That's when I brought in an incentive.  A sticker chart. 

I needed something that was visible when the Class Dojo was not shining on the ActivBoard.  So every time a child got another 50 points, they got a sticker.  After every 150 points they got 15 minutes golden time.  They could use the golden time to use the i-Pads, the computer, play with the class Lego or other equipment, read, or even go outside and kick a ball around.

When the class got to 1000 points (we did this most weeks), we negotiated a game to play outside.

This got my students who were not shining lights moving.  They wanted the golden time.  They wanted the outside game.  You have to love bribery.

The kids often wanted to change their monsters.  I had to limit this to once a week per child and after school, because it could be time consuming. 

Class Dojo has provision for you to link in the families so they can see from home how it is going.  It can also be used to communicate with parents  But as this was my first time and the school had no precedence in doing this, I decided against it.  If I had been in a school with established relationships with parents I may have considered this.  However, some parents had heard about it from their children and came in after school to check progress as their child changed their monster.  When we had Student Led Conferences, some parents commented that their child had made their own accounts at home and ran their own Class Dojo system!

I also kept giving out the Virtues Cards.  Class Dojo sometimes helped me with this because I could go back and check points I had given for a certain behaviour.  I probably gave out more Virtue Cards than before.

These are some of the highlights of using Class Dojo and some things I learned from a term using it:

• You can change the value of the points awarded.  I kept it at 1 point for everything, but if there is a behaviour you really want to push, you can change the value to a higher point reward and that may be a way to get that behaviour occurring more.
• I could use it at my computer or from my phone.  That meant I could be taking a reading group on the mat, and when I see Bob at the back of the room working hard, rather than ticking his name on the board or going to my laptop to click a Dojo point, I could do it from my phone on the floor.  It also meant that at assemblies or whole school singing or Kapa Haka, I could give out points for participation or respect or whatever from my phone.
• When relievers came in (who were usually inhouse relievers at this school), I could open Class Dojo on their laptops and they could dish out the points to the kids too, ensuring the class behaviour management was consistent.  It also meant I could see that some kids were behaving at least every time my laptop or phone dinged!
• I would use the Random button at the end of the day to let kids go and give them a point for a behaviour.  This was a great time for me to be able to end the day by saying something positive to each child.
• During the time we were doing Athletic sports rotations and I didn't have my class, I used the Random button to make the students accountable for their behaviour with other teachers.  If a student's name came up, I would asked their peers if they deserved a point and what behaviour they should get it for.  Some students would be honest and declare they did not deserved a point as a result.  If they did this, I would thank that student for their honesty.
• I also used Random to give out special prizes.  When we had the Tuis I would do a Tui Draw and the students pulled out of the kete would be able to choose from the choosing box (pencils, highlighters, erasers, mini notebooks, rulers, colouring pencils...).  I was able to still do this by clicking on Random.
• You can use Class Dojo to remind you who is not there!  When we did the roll each morning, we would also do the roll on Class Dojo and the students not there would fade grey so you didn't reward them points.  If a child arrives late, you go into attendance and click their name and they come back bold again.  Each child also gets a point for being at school on time.  You can also label students late if they come in as you are doing the roll.
• You can award a group of selected kids or individuals or the whole class at once.
• You can create groups.  I made groups for my reading and maths groups.  If I felt a session went well it meant I could click on the Short Tailed Bats maths group or the Takahe reading group and the children in that group received points.  Any absent child would not receive points.
• There are a whole pile of resources, like certificates and more, that you can access to enhance the experience.  I have yet to use these.
  
• You can check out the statistics for behaviour as a whole class, group or individual.
  
• If you have instigated the facility for parent participation, you can post notices, photos and videos for parents to view.  It's called Class Story.
• There is now a goal feature - that was developed after I made my sticker chart.  Ironic.
• Class Dojo sends you messages to tell you about developments through the app.

These are some of the things I would like to see Class Dojo do to enhance the tool for teachers and students, if possible:

• Make it so the students can create their own monster - colour, number of eyes, visible teeth, horns....  I suspect it is already available - but the kids have to have their own log ins to do it.
• When you click on a child or a selection of children, make it so you can click more than one behaviour or the same behaviour multiple times to reward a child.
• Allow the teacher to choose different sounds to go with a behaviour so the children can identify the reward by the sound as well.
• Have a greater variety of icons for the behaviours.  I had icons doubling up, which was tricky visibly.

On the whole, I found this tool helped my class become a calmer group during term four that had better behaviour to enable more learning.  I was able to reward those students who often slip under the radar because you can become too focused on the children with undesirable behaviour.  It forced me (gladly) to look for the positives in a group that I was losing hope in.  Class Dojo enabled us as a class to focus on what was good in our class.

It is easy to set up (plenty of YouTube tutorials if you need them), the app can be used across a variety of platforms and the administrators are regularly coming up with new features.  The use of it in the classroom can be as easy or laborious as you want.

ULearn14 Breakout 4: Leading Change Successfully - Mark Osborne

One of the Breakouts I went to at ULearn14 was with Mark Osborne from Core Education.  This was a very interesting Breakout to attend for me for the following reasons:

• firstly because I did not agree with everything Mark said,
• secondly because he made some very sound points,
• and thirdly because some of what he had to say rang very close to recent experiences for me as a teacher who had been in a climate of poorly planned change.

The following is what I took from Mark and my response to it.... and there were a lot of questions asked.

When you change the spaces into modern learning environments, how do you make sure you change the pedagogy as well?  How do we bring in collaboration, problem solving, resilience...?

You can not change people, you can only influence them.  Especially adults.  Kids are easier to change.

And the above were valuable questions and statements.  Because currently New Zealand is in the midst of the modern learning environment revolution, but that in itself brings issues.  We can make a classroom look shiny and new and have all the high tech gadgets, but those things in themselves will not improve the quality of teaching and learning.

People have to be able to use those spaces effectively, use the tools effectively.  Modern learning environments often mean shared learning spaces for two or more classes rather than the traditional single cell classroom, therefore you will need teaching staff who can work together, with a similar philosophy of teaching and who compliment each other.  To put together two or more staff members who don't share the same philosophy is courting failure.  Sharing students and spaces takes a lot of adjustment.  This blog by @ChCh_based, Ruffling a Few Feathers: Wow, this has taken a while to write, is a wonderful description and reflection on the adjustment to shared teaching and spaces.

This quote from the blog speaks volumes to me:

To me it is like a messy desk, moving things around and making piles isn’t really the same as creating a tidy desk. And I feel this is what we are doing. We have moved students around given them different teachers for different subject but have we actually really changed the way we are teaching?
The truth is no.

I have been questioning these MLE where they think giving students different teachers all the time is MLP. But is it? We are meeting the needs of your children by grouping them and they may not have their usual teacher. Isn’t this the same as streaming, groups, setting (or any other words you want to use)? Is this really MLP? What are we doing differently?

When I read this blog, I could see why this teacher took so long in writing it.  It's taken me a long time to write this post.  There are a lot of personal deep thoughts that @ChCh_based has put into this blog, thoughts that some may consider inappropriate.  But if you are struggling with change, you need to get those thoughts out.  You need to get the feed back and you need to learn from the struggle.  This is part of the journey @ChCh_based is on in order to be successful - because success does not come easy, and there should always be hiccups, stumbles and mistakes or else you are not really making change.

And that is why this post is also taking so long to write.  I will be discussing two school in which I experienced change.  The change was two different contexts, as were the schools.  But one was a positive experience and the other experience was a very difficult learning experience, one I wished I had never had to endure for many reasons, but one that will probably make me a better leader in the long run because now I know the kind of leader I do want to be V the kind of leader I do not want to be.

Adaptive organisations - when you are forced to change that can be disruptive.  So how do we make sure that our organisations are always open to change, moving, adapting so it is not so disruptive?

Resilience is the reaction to the disruptiveness of change, the ability to adapt.  That is not necessarily being resistant to change or fully embracing it.  Resilience would be to keep yourself aware of what the change is and why it is needed and how it is being done so you can adapt to it and make it work.

So what do all these birds have in common? 

The huia, moa, South Island kokako and haast eagle are all extinct.  Why?

Adaption is the reason -  these birds were unable to adapt to the introduction of a deadly predator - mainly humans  -  to their environment.

Think of the Woolly mammoth (Ice Age).  Its woolly coat was a great idea, but has the ice age drew to a close, it didn't evolve.  Mark talked about DNA evolving, changing, dumping.  He compared an organisation, like a school; changing the concept of DNA to the behaviour of the people in the organisation.  An organisation has to change its behaviour to change successfully.  That organisation is not just systems, policies and procedures, but also people and how they behave.

In my thinking and reading and reflecting on this ULearn14 Breakout, I recently came across this case study, Personal Cost of Change, on the MOE's Educational Leaders page.  This is the opening of the case study:

An experienced principal at a new school tries to bring about changes that will lead to a more supportive and inclusive professional culture for the improvement of teaching and learning. The staff are resistant to the changes and wish to continue with the status quo. The four-year change process was more complex, longer than expected, and resulted in much stress and heartache. It caused the principal to question her values, beliefs, and leadership style.

As I read through it struck a chord with me because I've been on the other side of this equation in my school, and it was no picnic.  For me it was not easy because the person making the change didn't have a clear plan, was a poor leader of people, could not articulate a vision and did not take the staff "on the journey".  I can only imagine the impact that had on that principal, because they never "shared" themselves with the team.

The principal in this case study has articulated how the change effected her and they changes that happened to the make up of the staff.  The principal had to adapt to the situation she found herself in, and part of that adaption of was be somewhat authoritarian for a long period of time to achieve the change she and the BOT wanted.  Once the change was bedding in, the principal was able to revert to her preferred consensus style of leadership.  Some staff adapted to the change, and some did not:

Staff changed. Some decided that the new direction was something they did not like, so they retired or went to other jobs. One was offered a support and guidance programme, but decided teaching was no longer for her.

We all know of schools who have a change of principal and then there is a major turn over of staff.  That turn over can happen for a number of reasons (the changes are too dramatic, this change at the top inspires an individual to reach for the next challenge in their career, it's time to leave teaching...) and the turn over can help the change as a result.

I've had this experience myself.  I began at school A in the first term of a new school year.  The principal went to a seconded position and the deputy principal was appointed as acting principal (as a first time principal but eventually to become the appointed principal).  At the same time, three new staff, including myself, came into the school.  The school had had a negative culture due to parental/community opinion and attitude towards the principal (resulting in a roll drop), the behaviour of certain senior students, and the approach of the staff. 

During the second term the whole staff (including the support staff and caretaker) did an Eliminating Violence two day workshop with GSE in an effort to change the climate of the school.  Subsequently I lead a team of teachers to brainstorm ideas of how to continue the climate change we had started and how to put it into action.

We brought in simple actions like "Caught Being Good" cards in the playground and positive reinforcement actions within the classroom; made our morning tea longer but shortened the lunch time as the biggest issues happened in the last ten minutes of lunch time; developed a shared vision and set of beliefs for students and teachers and displayed it in the classes; tightened up our disciplinary procedures using the Bill Roger's model of assertive discipline and our consequential communication with parents; we addressed the fact that some staff were in "deficit mode" and needed to move into the "credit mode"; we made more effort to include parents and the community in the school starting with simple things like activities in the classrooms and assembly; we brought in student led conferencing for reporting back to parents; we recognised the diversity in our school and ensured that all students and staff were addressed using their actual names.... there was so much more we worked on too.

We did this because all staff were taken on the journey.  To have everyone from the principal down to the caretaker involved was essential, because how often do the most difficult kids in your school gravitate towards the caretaker as they do their work about the school?  We worked in teams for specific areas we wanted to target, and we set time frames to report back to the whole staff for further discussion and input.

We still faced challenges and difficulties on the way (such as when a student stole a teacher's laptop, which was soon returned for several reasons), but we did not give up.  The school's climate did change and the community has seen that change and consequently the roll of the school has increased.

For me, personally, as a new staff member to the school, I probably was not as challenged by all this change as much as some of the longer term staff, particularly one teacher who had been there for 25 years at that stage.  However, we pulled together and made a difference, and at the end of that first year only one teacher left (it was a fixed term position and he was travelling an hour there and then back again).

So this photo below, from Mark's presentation, probably sums up the experience I explained above.

 

What is the difference between leadership and management?  This was an interesting question to address.  And leadership in a change situation is crucial, so knowing what is a leadership role and what is a management role is also essential.

 

 

Where do the things in this list fit onto this continuum below?  At this point we had a bit of a brainstorm at the tables to put these things into place.

 

Management  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Leadership

 

This was how I arranged them at the time:

 

 

 

Some of the concepts above appeared straight forward, others were confusing to me.  Storytelling has happened in all cultures all through the years and Mark says it is very much a leadership quality.  I struggle to understand what aligning means in relation to management, and I am open to finding that out if you can be of some assistance.

 

 

 

I really liked this analogy that Mark used: 

Management is ensuring the bus is booked, paid for, everyone has a seat, a map and the driver has a licence. 

Leadership is convincing everyone to take the journey.

 

 

Very few people are strong at both management and leadership.  There are plenty of well organised, rostered people who have no idea of the big picture.  And then there are plenty of people who have a great big picture but couldn't organise their way out of a paper bag.

 

If you want to make sure you are not like the huia, you need to make sure you are closer to the leadership end and have a vision.  But as a leader, it can't just be MY vision, it needs to be OUR vision.

 

What is leadership for a slow-moving world?  In the 1920s a beginning teachers could have taught the same for the next 20-30 years.  But a BT today will find that within four years they are making changes.  And the reality is that all teachers are leaders.  And as leaders of learning, teachers have to be adaptive to the group of children they are teaching and the advances in education.

 

Have you ever met a Lone Ranger boss?  They are the bosses who stayed in their office, thought, read and occasionally toured the school, went back to their office and issued a decree.  They tend to be sequential and orderly; consult, consider, make decisions alone.

 

But what are the skills for leadership for a fast-moving world? 

• Connected, empowered teams. 
• Going out and solving problems for themselves. 
• Networked, complex. 
• Pooling of the information then making decisions together.

 

The experience of change

What is change?  There are two kinds of change in this model: first order change and second order change.  In the photo below it talks about first order change.

Examples of first order change include changing from paper portfolios to e-portfolios for reporting; thematic studies; adapting skills from one way to another.

Second order change can be so disruptive, the organisation and staff and processes may even go backwards.  Some example of second order change are throwing out age level teaching and going to vertical levels; co-teaching; get rid of the curriculum and going to project based learning.

If I am in a BYOD school and we change from I-pads to chrome books it is a first order change.

Someone who is struggling with change maybe thinking, "I don't know about you, but I am more comfortable with being unconsciously incompetent!"  If I struggle with the change, I might be seen to be not the teacher the parents thought I was.  I might have a lot to lose.  I might struggle with change.  I might resist the change.

Someone who is struggling with change maybe saying, "Why should I waste my time learning Google Docs?"  They can change this mind set and reframe loss to gain: "I create and share in collaborative planning and get some back." 

The people in tears are those facing second order change.  But we often react with first order change solutions that don't solve second order change challenges.  Second order change requires more support, more understanding, more reassurance and input, more time.

One way to get second order change happening is to get the "untechy wise about the curriculum teacher" paired up with the "techy still learning about the curriculum teacher" for coffee chats and to share their expertise with each other.

Leaders need to build change readiness - if someone is really struggling with getting on board the change bus: are they not ready for change?  Have I not supported them enough to cope with change?

And this part of the Breakout had really challenged my thinking at the time.  I had not long left a great position at a school with students I adored and had made good progress with and had great plans for.  But what made me leave was a principal who micro-managed, did not consult but rather dictated, and who had no trust in their team or their experience.

I had begun at School B in the first term of the new school year.  During that term, the principal who hired me won a new position and left at the end of the term.  There had not been enough time to make a new appointment, so NZSTA supplied a principal for the second term and the new principal (a first time principal) was appointed during that time to start at the beginning of term three.

This principal came into the school determining to make change without knowing the community, students or staff.  At no time were the staff consulted on the directed the principal had determined would be taken, and that principal was ill-equipped to get the staff "on the bus" because the staff had no map and felt uncomfortable on that bus with that principals whose licence appeared somewhat dodgy.

While discussing first and second order change, I recognised a lot of behaviours and reactions that I had while working with that principal.  I recognised that my reactions and consequential behaviours were not particularly flattering towards myself, but I also recognised the errors that principal had made.  Consequently, even though my reaction to the change was poor, I have learned a lot about how change can and should be made.  And I was so glad I had chosen this Breakout to attend because it really did help me process the experience of working with that principal and my reaction to the change.

The reflection on the situation I had experienced was enhanced further by the next section of the Breakout.

Leading change successfully - there is a whole bunch of research on how to do it well: the non-negotiable, the optional.

Those who are resistant to change, who want to keep the status quo, are not necessarily wrong.  But have you listened to their reasoning as the leader?

Resistance to change can either be:

• overt:  ridicule, boycott, sabotage, well-poisoning.
• covert: token engagement, reducing output, withholding information.

These are logical responses to change.

And I have to say I was guilty of both with my recent experience.  Some of that reaction, the covert, was preservation of myself as a person.  I was running on empty because the whole experience of working with this micro-managing principal had rung almost every ounce of joy out of my position.  The overt part of my reaction was because I was at the point of knowing that my relationship with this principal was unsalvageable despite my best efforts.  The principal had blocked every positive move I had made to be constructive and was actively curtailing my ability to do my job.  And so my reactions became negative.

If we won Lotto we wouldn't hand back the ticket, because there is some change we like.  We just don't like to lose what we already have. 

Teachers hold on because they fear that the outcomes for the kids will not be as good. 

And I held on to that job despite the negative relationship with the principal for as long as I could because of the students.  I focused on the students, worked hard for them and to helped them along their learning journey.  When I left, I actively feared for the future development of those students.

Change readiness is built upon four components (Holt, et al, 2007):

• personal valence (the change will be personally beneficial)
• self-efficacy (I/we have the skills and competencies to successfully implement the change)
• Appropriateness
• Managerial support

Sometimes change fails because management does not see that they themselves need to change or collaborate.  And I think this was one of the key derailments in the experience I had with this particular principal.  They did not look at themselves during the whole experience and examine their part in the whole saga.

Leaders need to weigh up the cost/loss balance of staying with the status quo or pushing on with the change.

Leaders need to establish a sense of urgency for change. (John P Kotter, Leading Change):

Sources of complacency include:

• Absence of a crisis
• Happy talk from management
• Human nature (denial)
• Low-candor; low confrontation culture
• Lack of feedback
• Wrong measurement tools
• Narrow goals
• Low performance standards

Controlling the "temperature" around the change is essential.  The worst thing is if there is no conflict because, as a leader, you want differing opinions so you can have robust conversations and debate and make sound change. 

The worst thing you can do is get the list of problems, take them away and fix the problems yourself.  They are then your solutions and not the group's solutions.  You need to work with the group so everyone has ownership.

A leader needs to "cook" the conflict so it does not over boil, but also doesn't go cold.  Set a date to solve the problem, where people will meet and put ideas forward to go forward with.

In School B there was no consultation, no robust conversations or debate.  I found this confusing as at other schools these conversations and debates were encouraged.  If I tried to have those conversations with the principal at School B I was accused of yelling at them and my concerns were summarily dismissed.

At my position prior to School B, I was at School C, which had two temporary principals in terms one and two of my first year until an appointment was made and the new principal started in term three.  This was this principal's second position as a principal.

The thing I appreciated most about this principal was that they did not come in an make change straight away.  This principal established relationships with the staff, students and community first.  They observed how the teachers worked and interacted with the students, community and each other.  They stopped and watched what was working and what wasn't working.  They talked to the different groups about issues that stood out to them.

Slowly, the following year, the principal began to make changes.  And towards the end of that year that principal had to make their biggest changes in preparation for the following year - and some of those were painful changes which could have been communicated and consulted on better, and some of those changes were in full consultation and had the staff on board because they understood how they and the students would benefit.

The culture of your organisation will determine how well change will succeed and move forward.  But the culture of your organisation is all about people - about people's relationships, attitudes and mind sets.  If you have not established the relationships, not gained their trust, then how can you expect them to have a positive attitude or an open mind set?  How can you then expect to make change.

Mark says that when it comes to change you have to be able to do the following:

Be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I'm in my 20th year of teaching.  My career and possibly my generation of teachers has constantly been about change.  We started training as the New Zealand Curriculum documents were developed in the 1990s.  Our first five years of teaching (at least) included the draft, consultation, introduction and implementation of a new curriculum area document annually.  Then we went through the revision of the curriculum again in the mid 2000s as well as the Numeracy Project, the Literacy Project and ICTPD clusters, only to have National Standards foistered on to us before we were given the opportunity to implement and bed in the new New Zealand Curriculum document.

So I think I am pretty comfortable with change.

I am really pleased that I choose to attend this Breakout.  It was challenging for me, but it did allow me to reflect on a recent negative experience, understand what was going on and to learn from it.

As a result of that Breakout and my reflection on it as I wrote this post, it allowed me to be brutal about aspects of my experiences with leaders and change, and it clarified my views on what a leader is, what I want from a leader and how I want to be as a leader in addition to the management skills discussed earlier in this post.  This is what I think a leader should exemplify:

• relationship building and maintenance skills
• empathy
• listening skills
• the ability to consult
• the ability to debate with opposing viewpoints
• the ability to make a decision with the best information available, but the ability to seek advice when required
• the ability to reflect
• the ability to say when they got it wrong and work on fixing it constructively
• the ability to take feedback and use it to move forward constructively

I hope I can live up to my own expectations, but I would certainly share this with those who I am in a leadership position to in the hopes that they would assist me in being honest and true to my own beliefs.

And I value your feedback as a reader too, after all, you have read to the very end.....

ULearn14 Breakout 3: Windows in the Classroom - Arnika Brown, Cyclone Computers

I'm catching up on my reflections from ULearn14.  Better late than never.

One of the Breakouts I went to at ULearn14 was held by the team at Cyclone, who market for Microsoft.  I found out a lot of things that this breakout that I didn't know before. 

For example, we can get a whole lot of Microsoft support and set up in our school for free under the deal with the MOE.  I went to this MOE site where lots of questions can be answered and probably not many teachers or principals know much about what is on offer.  Essentially Microsoft are offering pretty much everything Google offers schools, including a teacher dashboard to collate what is happening in your class easier.  Here are some screen shots from February 2015:

And did you know this about the BYODs your students may bring to school?

Here are the bare bones of the breakout:

Arnika Brown opened with these remarks and questions:

• 21st Century learning design is about ensuring students have the skills to enter the workplace, to engage in further learning.
• Do we have 21st century classrooms? 
• Has teaching and learning evolved? 
• It is more than changing the furniture in the room. 
• It is about how we teach.  The PLD we get and how we use it. 
• How do you share information with students so they can get it efficiently?
• How do we see what our kids are doing?

Arnika then went on to discuss:  What is in Windows 365?

OneNote available to all teachers through the MOE Microsoft contract and is part of Office on your computer.  This is how teachers can access the students' work. 

SharePoint  is a web application framework and platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint integrates intranet, content management, and document management.  SharePoint is mostly used by midsize businesses and large departments.

Windows 365 is the brand name used by Microsoft for a group of software plus services subscriptions that provides productivity software and related services to its subscribers. For consumers, the service allows the use of Microsoft Office apps on Windows and OS X, provides storage space on Microsoft's cloud storage service OneDrive, and grants 60 Skype minutes per month. For business and enterprise users, Office 365 offers plans including e-mail and social networking services through hosted versions of Exchange Server, Lync, SharePoint and Office Web Apps, integration with Yammer, as well as access to the Office software.

OneDrive has 1 terabyte of saving capacity, so Arnika was recommending moving all the data schools and teachers save into OneDrive.  She did warn not to cut of TeacherWrite completely, but to give teachers time to change over, e.g. 6 months.

Skype Classroom is a great teaching tool.  This link will take you to a video where there are kids talking about how they learn using Skype and where you can join up.  Last year I did my first Skype with a class.  I blogged about it in the post My first Skype session with my class.

Arnika told us about how we can do a Microsoft Educators course and earn badges.  The aim is to help teachers be technologically able and to be able to use technology in the class to enhance learning and teaching, as well as expand the skills of the children.

The 21CLD resource was spoken about by Arnika.  Students around the world need advanced skills to succeed in the globalized, knowledge based world of today. 21st Century Learning Design, or 21CLD, professional development helps teachers redesign their existing lessons and learning activities to build students’ 21st century skills. It can be linked to your national or local curriculum standards. The program is based on rubrics developed and tested internationally for the Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research project.

Arnika stressed that importance and the need to have the right devices, the tools, the training, the empowerment for teachers to ensure their students have great meaningful learning experiences.

We also got to check out the first Chrome Book Computer (HP) coming into the country in the following few months.  It was to be set at the same price point as the Chrome Book but would not be limited to Microsoft products, as the Google Chrome Books have been limited to Google only products.  These ones would allow the user to choose the most appropriate program to achieve what they wanted.

I personally really liked the colour, size and weight of the device.  As a teacher I think it is best to give the students a choice as to the program they want to use to best present their learning, and I do not want to be limited to either Microsoft or Google products, I want to access both so I can do my best work.

Essentially this breakout was an advertisement for Microsoft and the products, support and training which Cyclone can provide teachers and schools.  I thought when I signed up for it that it would be a bit more practical, but I found the discussion around how some schools are currently using the products to enhance teaching and to be in contact with students and their learning to be very interesting.

Dr Adam Lefstein - Keynote 2 - ULearn14 - Teacher professional discourse and learning: what we talk about when we talk about our practice

The second key of ULearn14 note was presented by Dr Adam Lefstein from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.  This is his bio from the ULearn site:

Adam Lefstein is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where he conducts research and teaches about pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning and educational change. He’s particularly interested in the intersection between research and professional practice, and how to conduct research that is meaningful, rigorous and helpful for educators.

His recently published book, Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning through Dialogue (with Julia Snell, published by Routledge), investigates the possibilities, challenges and dilemmas of dialogic teaching and learning, and offers practical tools for using discussion of video-recordings of classroom practice to hone teacher professional judgment.
Previously, Lefstein worked as a teacher and facilitator of teacher learning at the Branco Weiss Institute in Jerusalem, where he also directed the Community of Thinking programme.

You can find out more about Dr Lefstein's book at http://dialogicpedagogy.com/ and follow him on Twitter at @ALefstein as of today.  Click here for the collaborative document from the Keynote.

Below is the Storify of the tweets I and others tweeted during Dr Lefstein's Keynote presentation. 

Sadly Storify has deleted itself from the Social Media landscape and none of my Storifies exist anymore.  😭😭😭😭

A day later (and then several weeks later) I have had a chance to reflect on what we heard from Dr Lefstein yesterday.  Teachers tend to talk a lot.  We talk all day to students, we talk to the parents who we encounter in our day and we talk to our colleagues in meetings, in passing, at lunchtime.  But how often are our conversations with our colleagues of a quality that the participants come away with something they know will improve their practice?

In 2006 I was lucky enough to do the Middle Leadership Course at the Leadership Centre at the University of Waikato.  Murray Fletcher was the facilitator of the course and one of the centre points was active listening.  This keynote gave me pause to go back and reflect on what I learnt in this course and to synthesise what I know already with what I heard yesterday.

I was particularly taken by the comparison of teacher professional discourse being compared with a doctor's medical round.  When doctors do their rounds they have each other to discuss the patient's condition with.  They may consult with the nurses who have a more direct care of the patient.  They toss ideas around and come up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. 

Teachers do do this as well, but not usually as they teach.  It usually happens in the staff room at lunch time or in a meeting to create and IEP.  Because the nature of teaching is generally one teacher in a single cell room with many children, there generally is no other adult for the teacher to confer and work with to solve those problems or take a different tack with teaching the moment that it happens.  Our conversations tend to be reactionary, after the fact, rather than in the moment.

In regards to Rule 1: Don't talk about pedagogical problems, I agree that teachers as a rule are not used to people watching them regularly, to have people come into their classrooms and talk the practice of teaching as the teacher is teaching.  However, I believe that most teachers are pretty good at talking pedagogy, particularly if something is not right - however this doesn't seem to happen in the class... it's always and after thing and mostly focused on solving an issue rather than analysing and celebrating what works and then exploring the possibility of changing that up.  Often our pedagogical conversations are based on putting out a fire rather than preventing the fire.

Teaching is an aspirational vocation.  We all have great plans at being the best teacher we can be, having the most amazing programmes, engaging children in meaningful and inspiring learning.  But we soon realise that we can't juggle all the balls at the same time, if one thing is going well it may be to the expense of another, and there is always a bit more that we can do as teachers.

Which brings me to Rule 2: Don't mind the gap between teaching aspirations and classroom realities.  There will always be the gap between what we what to provide and achieve with our learners compared to what really happens, but even though we may never consistently achieve to meet the standards we (or others) set ourselves as teachers, we should never give up or lessen our expectations.  We need to continue to challenge ourselves and exceed our previous best to keep the passion alive and extend ourselves.  We need to be clear what our leaders expect of us and our leaders need to know what we expect of ourselves as well, which means discussing and planning your aspirations with your team or senior management.

Rule 3: Dichotomize is about the opposing forces in our classroom, in our teaching, in our own perceptions and realities which are facing off each day as we teach.  This has always happened, and always will.  But good discussion with a trusted colleague will help you to identify those which are really hurting your teaching and holding back students from achieving and will enable you to come away with a bag of tricks to try to change the situation.

Rule 4: Trust your own unique experience - this is important that our experiences shape us as teachers, but we also need to be open to other experiences by our colleagues, because they may spark and idea or a system we can make our own for the betterment of our own teaching and the learning of the students.

Rule 5: No precise professional language is where Dr Lefstein and I have a fundamental difference of opinion.  I find that teaching is littered with teaching language and phrases that people who are not teachers do not understand.  I often find myself translating acronyms like RTLB, explaining what synthesising in reading is, or a number of other things as parents and friends look at me with glazed eyes.  We have plenty of technical teacher talk.

Rule 6: Hyper-criticise Dr Lefstein showed part of a video of Sir Tony Robinson on a show called The Teaching Challenge and this is the blurb for the video:
Sir Tony Robinson, presenter of Time Team and Blackadder, hated school, but has returned to take on a history class at Shireland Language College in Smethwick, Birmingham.
His challenge is to teach a lesson on the worst jobs in history relating to the evolution of public health and hygiene since 1300. He faces not only the pupils, but also the school's formidable head of history, Colin Vigar, who offers a robust critique of Tony's performance. (2005)
And Tony was rigorously critiqued by Colin.  But is a rigorous critique helpful to a teacher receiving feedback?  Personally I don't think so, and neither did the room, nor Dr Lefstein's research.  Feedback needs to be structured, specific and constructive.

Rule 7  - seems to have disappeared during the keynote so we moved on to the next rule.

Rule 8: Focus on what's missing is when the discussion focuses on what did not happen rather than on what did happen.  That can be very down heartening to the teacher who is being observed when they are only told what they haven't done and should have done instead rather than building on what was achieved.

So what did I come away with from this keynote?

• Professionally discussing our teaching practice is important to helping me be a better teacher.
• The conversation needs to focus on what actually is happening.
• We shouldn't ignore our own experiences, but should be open to the experiences of others too.
• Feedback needs to be structures, specific and constructive - the aim is to build up the teacher to go forward, not tear the teacher down.
• It would be beneficial to have discussions with another professional as event occur, although in teaching this tends to be hard as we are a single teacher in a single room with a class most of the time.
• We should talk about the challenges we face and not be staunch.