Don Ledingham’s Learning Log

We held a very successful “Corporate Parenting” Conference today at the Marine Hotel, North Berwick. .

Adam Ingram MSP , Minister for Children and Early Years gave a  well informed and committed keynote address and emphasised the need for us to collectively address the needs of Looked After and Accommodated Children and to focus upon the improving outcomes for such children, namely:

• Raising Attainment
• Improved Leaver Destinations
• Reducing offending
• Improved Health

In the follow up questions Adam was asked a question about the need to reconfigure services and his vision for the future.  He alluded to an extensive vision but focused upon Early Years support and intervention encouraging us to reprioritise around this point if we are to make a difference to chidren’s lives.

In recent discussions with colleagues from many different fields I’ve found a similar willingness to engage with this agenda - although it remains to be seen if we can begin to reprioritise budgets to this area. Having said that we had a very useful example last week when we were able to redirect some work towards early years.  In a meeting with Diane Littlejohn we were discussing our parenting strategy and Diane was telling us about the transition work she is doing in one of our clusters to help all parents make the transition from being the parents of a child to the parent of a teenager (which any of us who have been parents will tell you is quite an adjustment). Nevertheless, we were able to connect the conversation to a recent meeting we had about a desperate need to support parents of very vulnerable young children to help the child adjust from home to nursery and nursery to primary school.

The emerging proposal was that we would be better directing Diane’s expertise to this age group with a view to making a long term impact - as opposed to trying to intervene in a situation which might be beyond help.  Now I know the danger here is that we have a “lost generation” but if we are serious about making a difference we need to move from “trying to fix” to “trying to prevent”.  As I’m finding out the consequences of reprioritising funding from previous areas of emphasis to other areas can cause significant distress and concern amongst those who perceive themselves to be losing out in this adjustment.

I reckon the solution/challenge here is to engage with all interest groups to describe what want to do, why we are doing it and involve them in the solution - without this dialogue the system can begin to break down with single issue groups only focusing upon their own needs and challenging the wider agenda which is to advocate for the needs of all children.

It’s this agenda which I’m finding professionally challenging but the potential rewards for taking this approach seems to me to be too good to miss.

The power of our strategic groups came to the fore this week at our 3 -18 Strategic Learning and Teaching Group.

This group has 25 members who represent a wide cross-section of those of us involved in education in East Lothian.  I know its accepted logic that such a large group can’t operate successfully but it’s the very size of, and representation within the group that actually makes it effective.

We started the meeting reflecting upon the impact of our Learning and Teaching policy in the last year.  By splitting up into groups of 3 we were able to identify a wide range of observable changes in our practice throughout the authority that would evidence our emphasis on learning and teaching.

The second part of the meeting was given over to considering our Service Improvement Plan for the coming session. I showed the group a range of the possible outcomes which we have been exploring.  One of the draft outcomes read as follows:

“All children will achieve Level B in reading by the end of P4, level D by the end of P7, and Level E by the end of S2.”

We discussed the thinking behind this desired outcome and the reaction it might stimulate amongst teachers. The problem lay in the notion of “All” and the idea it just seems to reaffirm a focus on attainment - which many teachers just see as a means of keeping the Authority and HMIe happy - as opposed to helping individual children learn.

I’ve written so many plans for departments, schools and authorities now that I’ve become acutely aware of the dissonance between what the writer of the plan might intend and the perception of the plan by those who have to implement it.

The idea behind the outcome is that we would like every child to be able to read by the age of 9 - at least well enough that their reading ability does not limit their progress in any other area of the curriculum. As we wrestled with the problem of how we might come up with an outcome which was clear, kept our focus on reading, but didn’t antagonise teachers we struck upon a solution. That solution was to take the problem to the teachers - let them know what we wanted to achieve, why it was important, and  some guidance on the characteristics of an outcome - and let them come up with the answer.

The power of this idea is that has so many advantages:

1. It engages teachers with the rationale of the outcome approach;
2. It will enable us to generate an agreed outcome which has a wide range of stakeholder ownership;
3. It will enable us to have the impact we desire, i.e. make reading a central focus of our practice in schools.

It’s only through talking through a problem like this with such a wide ranging group that such solutions can be generated.

Ever since I started teaching I’ve been frustrated with the idea of “Christmas Leavers”.

The school leaving age regulations read as follows: 

Children may leave school once they reach their statutory school leaving date, this is dependent on date of birth. For children born between 1 March and 30 September it is 31 May of their 4th year of secondary school. For children born between 1 October and 28 February it is the last day of the December term of the school session in which they are 16.

It’s this latter group which cause such concern.  It never ceases to amaze me how many of the most challenging children are in this group. I can’t track down the link but I know there is a correlation between low attainment for boys and the age they started primary school education, i.e. the younger they were the lower their attainment in S4 (there is no such correlation for girls). Rather than trying to tackle this by ensuring that boys don’t start school too early we exacerbate the situation by demanding that these (often) disenchanted young people have to stay on at school for another four months.  Ridiculous!

It’s peculiar how sometimes things just seem to come together in an unexpected and unplanned manner but I had a meeting today where that very thing happened - and I would put it down in no small part to the discipline of keeping a Learning Log.

The various elements of this web of connections are as follows:

1. My observations of classes with a focus on learning intention and learning task;
2. The early years Active Learning approach which I have observed having such a positive effect upon children’s learning;
3. The developmental approach being used in Maths Recovery;
4. Our strategic decision to place Learning and Teaching at the heart of A Curriculum for Excellence;
5. The notion of universal and targeted intervention strategies.
6. The importance of children being functionally competent by the age of 8-9 to access the rest of the curriculum
7. Our emerging early years strategy which will link pre-school education; child care; nursery and early years at primary school; and focussed care for vulnerable children and families

There are probably many other possible connections but the above will suffice for the purposes of this post.

The meeting I had this afternoon was with Mike Jess and June Murray, from Edinburgh University and some colleagues from our Active Schools Team. The focus of the meeting was the Basic Moves programme which has been operating in East Lothian Schools promotes an innovative approach towards teaching physical education.

Simply, developing children’s basic movement competence as the foundation for a lifetime of physical activity cannot be left to chance and must become the focus of children’s programmes in the future (Jess and Collins, 2003)……

The programme is based on the need for adults and children to have a shared understanding of the Basic Movement Framework and for adults to consistently offer children developmentally appropriate, inclusive and integrated experiences that lead them to develop this critical foundation. Children’s basic movement competence has been left to chance for far too long and we must now take the opportunity to rectify this situation once and for all.”

The purpose of of our meeting this afternoon was to consider the next steps when the current programme in East Lothian comes to an end in 2009.

Emerging from the meeting was a fledgling strategy which begins to tie together some of the strands I mentioned at the begining of this post:

1.      Basic Moves needs to be embedded within our evolving developmental approach towards ensuring that every child reaches a level of competence in literacy, numeracy, movement, and social and emotional development to enable them to fully access the educational opportunities provided for them beyond the age of 8.

 

2.      The strategy needs to adopt a focus upon pedagogy and a shared understanding of a developmental approach which builds from where children are starting from.

 

3.      We need to develop and implement a range of proactive intervention strategies which target and support children whose rate of development might be compromised by socioeconomic reasons or other family circumstances.

 

 

 

I visited Dunbar Primary School this afternoon and observed a nursery class and two P3 classes. I was particularly interested in the planning process for nursery classes as I’d sat in on a session during yesterday’s In-Service at Preston Lodge where a group of nursery teachers had been discussing how they lan their work over the session, term, week and day.  I was fascinated to learn how they manage to weave the huge variety of experiences into a meaningful and coherent whole - mind maps played an important part. Contact Cockenzie Primary School for more info’.

When I followed this up this afternoon I saw co-creation of the curriculum in action when Rachel Muray showed me how they involve the children in the planning process - three year olds!!! - brilliant stuff.

I also heard how there might be need to extend the range of staff development opportunities for our early years staff. The range of courses on offer is relatively limited and once you have attended them there is nothing left in our brochure as these tend to repeat from year to year - perhaps a solution might be to ask teachers and nursery nurses to offer to lead a short session on an area they are developing . From what I’ve seen over the last few weeks we have a huge range of exciting things going on in our nursery classes which would be well worth sharing with colleagues - the problem is that many people don’t want to ‘”push” themselves forward as being anything special. If only we could overcome this “Scottish” trait!

I’m just getting round to completing some posts about recent visits to schools. Part of the delay was connected to the problem of uploading some photographs from my phone to the web.

The above photograph shows a P3 pupil using numbers to complete a mental paths challenge.  Each child has a set of numbers in front to them which they must use to answer mental maths questions from their teacher. The teacher would ask a question, such as - 6 less than 32. - they then held up a 2 and a 6 in one hand. The speed at which they worked and the degree of participation and lack of following others was remarkable - I couldn’t keep up!!

I then came across an interesting writing lesson with P1’s where they were writing letters - I’d never the seen the technique of some parts of letters being underground or in ther sky - the teacher had picked this up from Sparklebox.co.uk

Prestonpans Infant School is also doing some really exciting work in relation to Learning Stories where teachers are taking a lead role in reflecting upon their practice and encouraging children from a very young age to explore how they learn and to reflect upon their learning process.  What struck me most about my visit to the school was the sense that here is a place which is comfortable with examining their practice.  I look forward to coming back very soon.

I visited St Martin’s Primary school watched active learning in action when I observed a P1 class doing maths. I watched spellbound as the children showed incredible enthusiasm, confidence and focus towards the tasks set by their teacher Cath Nairn.

Cath explained how the pupils were probably three to four weeks ahead of where they would normally be for this time in P1 - so what’s the difference for the children? “Children don’t have to worry about writing it on a piece of paper” “It takes away the stumbling block of getting a mark on a piece of paper” “They’re not worried about making a mistake - it liberates them to engage and enjoy learning maths”

Shop

What’s the difference for the teacher? - “You get to see children making progress on a day-to-day basis, where you can set challenges to continually extend their learning”

The photographs show some of the activities that the pupils were engaged in during the lesson - which link to the plan on the last photograph.

Coin recognition

Cathy used the Interactive Whiteboard to great effect with small group of pupils where they dragged and dropped coins to make sums of different values.

Shopping lists with tally marks

When I spoke to the children they all used the same word - “FUN”

Cath stressed how important it was that she was able to build upon the work undertaken in the nursery. Cath doesn’t spend as much time marking jotters but she does spend more time planning what the children will be doing next - I would suggest that this time well spent.

Weekly plan

Daily plan

I was out in Humbie Primary school yesterday afternoon.

Humbie have embraced the active learning approach for early years which have seen the introduction of pre-school approaches into early years of primary.

The school are now exploring the use of the coaching in the learning and teaching process. Some of the teachers in the school were exposed to the GROW model and now want to extend the active involvement of learners into the upper primary school.

One of the lessons I observed was one of a series which had been planned by the teacher in conjunction with the pupils using the GROW approach.  The topic was the body.  Here’s an example of how the GROW model was being used in relation to the heart:

Goals: What do we want to find out? - How does your heart work?; is the heart soft or hard?

Reality: What do we know/have already? - We have a model of a heart; Sara knows an experiement; Our teacher knows an experiment.

Options: What might we do? Loook at a model of the heart; research; interview a doctor; use stethescopes.

Will do/Wrap up: What will we do? - We’ll do all of the things we identified under options.

The teacher had generated the entire topic through this form of dialogue with the pupils.  In this way they had co-created the curriculum and were actively engaged in, and responsible for, it’s success.

It is the quality of this dialogue that makes this approach so successful - with the teacher being a partner in the learning process - as opposed to the director.

This was experimentation in action and I gave out one of my “Permission to Learn” cards for the first time as the teacher was worried about taking risks.

If you are interested in trying out the approach in your own classrooms I suggest you contact the school.

I met Ian McGowan today who is one of the Directors of INPP in Scotland.

I was interested to find out more about this programme which I’d heard can have positive outcomes for children with Developmental, Specific Learning and Behavioural Difficulties.

I hope to invite Ian to Haddington to speak to him with some colleagues before we make any commitment to active involvement. However, I am convinced that motor difficulties can have a very negative impact upon a child’s development and that there is potential for using such programmes in an early assessment and intervention programme.

 I will back this up with a research literature review.

We made a decision last year to introduce Midyis baseline testing for all our secondary schools for a test which all S2 pupil sit. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been analysing the data and its has thrown up some very interesting results.

Such has been the success that we have now agreed to use the PIPs test for P5 and are now piloting a pre-school test.

All this data will allow us to identify any pupils who are obviously operating below their potential and enable us to actively track progress over their school career. Such information supplements the on-going assessments and judgements made by teachers.

We used Midyis at Dunbar Grammar School and it provided valuable supplementary information for parents and pupils when it came to course choice in terms if offering an accurate prediction of likely attainment at Standard Grade.

This example comes from New Zealand who have been using Midyis for many years: