Richard Wilson

Part of my passion is to get pupils, especially boys, engaged in writing. The best way is to offer them some form of positive engagement. To this end I have tried really hard to provide the pupils with opportunities outwith their norm. Major successes have been in interviewing Franz Ferdinand frontman, Alex Kapranos and Scotland frontman Jack McConnell. Both interviews can be downloaded from the school web-site for your pleasure. The value of this for scripting, discussing, talking and listening cannot be underestimated. I have secured another coup for East Linton by getting Ann Widdicombe to agree to a question and answer session with my P5 pupils. The pupil questions will be posted on my collaborative writing project where you or your class can suggest questions we may ask Ann on your behalf. The complete podcast will be available on the school web-site. This will take place after the Christmas/New Year holidays. As a learning opportunity it is absolutely fabulous. Contact us at East Linton if you want to collaborate on this exciting opportunity. We’re waiting………….. the Dalek or David Tennant is next on our hit list.

We all know the effect of good teaching versus bad teaching, or , at least we think we do. I found a piece of research that explores these issues in some depth. It is called ‘Good Teaching Matters’ and is well worth a read.

Click on the graphs to see the measured, cumulative effect three consecutive good/bad teachers on a group of low attainers generally, maths students and reading attainment. The numbers are expressed as percentile points. The evidence is quite dramatic and stark and bears out what we all instinctively know. Bad teachers can damage the learning process. The effects of bad teaching are pernicious and have a long lasting effect. Bad teaching has effects on life choices.

Counter it with the effect of good teaching and the results are there for all to see. Although the research was carried out in America, I’m sure that similar work carried out here would bear similar results.

New statement of quality for a teacher…I would be happy to place my son in your class for a year. Too contentious for discussion?

How can we change behaviour into a skill?
Practise, practise, practise and perspiration.
An ex-premier league manager once had a motivational poster on the exit door to the pitch, it said, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”. It is probably appropriate to have it plastered all over each school and workplace. It emphasises one of the seven big lessons about education that was never made apparent to me when I was a pupil, that, “effort is as important as ability”. I was never really engaged as a learner when I attended school. The learning process and how to improve it was never part of any discussion at the school I attended and the role models on offer were at best, poor. I left school before my sixteeenth birthday a disengaged and disenchanted learner for whom school had lost all credibility and relevance. Times have happily changed thanks to positive influences and informed choices since then. Second big lesson learned: intelligence is not fixed.
Learning about learning is an important skill. Learning itself goes through four stages. The first one is when you start off. At this stage it is not part of your behaviour yet, your skill level is at best low or even non-existent. You probably aren’t even aware that you are unware. This stage is called unconscious incompetence.
When you embark on the learning process it moves to another state called concious incompetence. You know that you aren’t very good and it takes up a lot of your time and concious attention. This stage is uncomfortable because it happens to be the part when you are learning most. It is also the most fragile state and prone to fracture if the physical, emotional, social and environmental conditions aren’t right. There are many factors which can derail the process right here and prevent further learning. Poor teaching, peer pressure, family factors, physical factors such as diet and sleep patterns may be the cause or contribute to lack of engagement. I personally feel that it is this stage that boys have most difficulty with. If their concentration is diverted they are prone to give up easily and write off their chances. I have only anecdotal evidence for this and am unsure on how to do any action research to prove this, but will persevere anyway.
The next level of learning is concious competence, still quite difficult because although you have reached a level of competence, it still takes up a lot of time and effort.
Lastly, if you stick at it, you reach the stage of unconcious competence when you do it without thinking. It has become streamlined and habitual, achieved easily without thinking. You have processed it to such a level that it is taken over by the unconcious part of your mind. An analogy might be driving to work, it is so engrained that you can sometimes barely remember doing it.
Some learners can make short cuts and go throught the middle two stages very quickly. This is not always predicatable, but we can shape or influence factors to make this process more likely. This is referred to as accelerated learning. I will explore more about this in a later post.

This is son number 4, Harris in a typical pose.

This is an example of a great wee programme called Comic Life which allows pupils to make their own comics from digital images or art work. I found it useful to motivate reluctant writers. It’s dead easy to use, my own boy, Lewis, made this example of our camping and fishing holiday to Glencoe after about ten minutes of instruction. He is currently in Primary 2. It was a fabulous holiday and for once Glencoe behaved itself, no midges, no rain! Fantastic! All fish were capture and release. The only downside to Comic Life is that it is only for Macs at the moment. The other downside was all of those lovely mountains to climb and having a long wait for Lewis to be old enough to carry my spent frame to the tops.

How do we bullet-proof our schools so that the default for pupils is to succeed? Is it possible? It is certainly desirable and should be an outcome that we at least strive for. We have all sorts of measures in place in terms of How Good is Our School and other quality measures which measure success in their terms. The problem is that success does not have a constant value either across cultures or time. What was strived for in the past and valued as learning experiences now have no credibility, phrenology is a good example of what was once a science and is now viewed as a quaint and somewhat cranky idea. What are we teaching now that will be seen as irrelevant in the future? I’ll leave you to ponder. Certainly learners in the future will need more than a set of paper qualifications. Guy Claxton is a very influencial force in building learning power. He states that to thrive you will have to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self-disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive. His book Building Learning Power is worth a read, in fact, buy a copy for your staff.
This leads us to the 5r’s that should be the vehicle for today’s learners
responsible
resilient
resourceful
capable of reasoning
reflective
and we should be using a pedagogy that uses an understanding of how learners learn to inform a responsive teaching process which effects inclusive and personalised learning. Learners learn through motivation, relevance, social process, memory and recall, learning styles, confidence, self-worth and positive attitudes. I believe that we should be actively teaching and promoting these to our youngsters today. When I reflect on my own educational experience as a child, motivation, relevance, confidence self-worth and positive attitudes were sadly lacking in the teaching style of the time.
The leader of any establishment sets the tone and ethos of the organisation. The culture of that organisation is the difference between nurturing and thwarting the educational process. The leader should foster a learning culture that develops the physical, social and emotional elements of development. I think it is clear that huge progress has been made in Scottish education over the past few years but we still have a way to go. If we continue to improve our ability to use reflective practice and self evaluation to measure the impact of:
leadership
learning and teaching initiatives
new initiatives and developments
improved and more relevant CPD
continuous learning
managing change
then we will place ourselves in a strong position to make our schools more pre-disposed to success.

Personal Learning Plans
Help! Has anyone used Wordpress as a template for a PLP? Please direct me to a source I can use as a guide.