The Education Continuum

Guest Podcast from Neil Selwyn, author of Education and Technology

I'm excited to be uploading our first podcast on the Education Continuum blog!

Click here to download Neil Selwyn's podcast On Education and Technology

You can find out more about the book, download supporting resources and a bonus chapter here on the book's companion website.

Alison Baker
Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)

Guest blog: What happens after the SEF?

One question that many senior leaders have been asking lately is what happens to the Self Evaluation Form (SEF) in the next academic year? Earlier this year the government announced that English schools would no longer have to complete the SEF from September 2011 but did not suggest what would need to be done instead.

The SEF has been one of those dreaded tasks; a bit like tidying some part of your house. You know it needs doing and at some point it would be obvious that you’ve not done it! There are many urban myths of Head’s getting the OFSTED call and the Inspector then suggesting the SEF does not look as though it has been updated for a while, queue a senior leadership lock-down day as they spend from 9am–3pm desperately trying to write a SEF.

One of the frustrations has been that you may have been busily evaluating the quality of your school. Observations, work scrutiny and pupil focus groups could be included within your calendared department review scheme. Annual parent and staff questionnaires may have been part of your Investors in People monitoring. An exhaustive data analysis could have been a key section of induction days for all staff. In some schools pupils have been trained to conduct lesson observations through student voice with the aim of developing the quality of teaching and learning. And yet the huge breadth of the SEF document has not given school’s the credit they should have received for the evaluation of – to use an industry phrase – the core business of teaching and learning.

This week the government has published its proposals for the future of OFSTED and way down in Paragraph 38 is mention of the SEF. Schools are expected to self-evaluate including an assessment of performance against the key inspection judgement, but no common form will be provided. Instead, the lead inspectors will spend more time prior to the inspection discussing the school.

The SEF may be gone but self-evaluation certainly hasn’t and still needs to be an item on your next school improvement plan.

 

Paul K. Ainsworth is the author of Developing a Self-Evaluating School: A Practical Guide.

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

What If ...?

 
On Wednesday, Rosie Pattinson and I were proud to attend the book launch for Peter Worley’s excellent ‘The If Machine: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom’ at the Institute of Education. There was quite a turnout of various ages and levels of fame, with comedian and broadcaster Robin Ince; Philosopher of Education, Michael Hand; Editor of Philosophy Now, Rick Lewis and Editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, Julian Baggini all in attendance – but it was the incredibly articulate children who had experienced Pete's philosophy sessions previously who stole the show.

Pete facilitated an enquiry from the book which left everyone scratching their heads and most of us using parts of our brains that felt underdeveloped, at best. But perhaps this is the point. Most children in the UK do not get to do any philosophy in their formal education – I certainly didn’t. A few lucky souls have the opportunity to study it at A level, or in the IB but it is a subject largely absent from lower secondary and primary education.

In the book, Pete explains with remarkable simplicity and clarity how children can be taught to identify necessary and sufficient conditions, to avoid circular definitions, to focus on falsifying rather than verifying general claims, and, above all, to ‘if’.

‘Iffing’ is Pete’s term for the technique of bracketing concerns about the truth of a claim in order to investigate its conceptual implications or entailments. And surely that is the greatest intellectual skill that any human being can learn in this age of information and opinion overload – to be discerning and to question the validity of everything they are told to take at face value. Learning to philosophise is precisely a matter of acquiring and practicing these techniques – something that few of us have ever done before.

Michael Hand referred to Pete’s first book as ‘The best book of its kind currently available … An invaluable resource for teachers wanting to try out some philosophy in their classrooms … A significant contribution to educational theory’. I would, of course, agree with these three endorsements, but would like to add one of my own. This is a book of inspirations – for teachers, children and anyone interested in the World and the power of the mind. It has certainly inspired me, and I hope that it will inspire many others in the months and years to come.

Peter Worley will be partaking in a roundtable on philosophy for children at the LSE on 23 June. Check back on the blog for further details later in the year.

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

Understanding Supervisor Training and Development Courses - Guest Post from Moira Peelo, author of Understanding Supervision and the PhD

Supervising PhD students is a complex job. It covers forms of mentoring, research knowledge, innovation and editing, alongside many other intellectual and interpersonal qualities.

What’s required varies according to subject area, design of PhD programme and institutional rules, as well as according to the styles of supervisors and students. For some people, being a supervisor is central to their academic identity – reflecting their research careers and standing in their academic communities.

So, in ten years of running courses for PhD supervisors, I have constantly questioned the usefulness of my courses. Long before quality assurance measures made course feedback a matter of institutional control, I was in conversation with course participants about what was useful, what was not useful for them.

In many ways, the data sets that underpin Understanding Supervision and the PhD can be seen as an extension of this conversation – trying to work out where such courses fit into people’s working lives and development as supervisors.

My challenge is how to make use of feedback.

People have become used to filling in feedback forms and know they need to find bits to like and bits to dislike. Given the range of supervisory styles, subjects and situations, feedback is invariably contradictory. What one person hates with loathing and contempt, another person finds exceptional and profoundly influential.

Occasionally, a participant can have issues around ‘development’ and seem fearful about attending courses. I have great sympathy with human fear, but am confused by intellectuals who resist development or change. Whatever the causes, it makes creative use of feedback harder if it is based on a defensive hitting out at course providers.

What I need to know is that what is covered in my courses can actually support supervision for as many participants as possible. This leads to a different set of questions to how much they liked or disliked any course, and often can only be answered at a much later point in time. My success does not lie only in changing people’s practices or introducing new ideas, but sometimes in confirming or enhancing existing ways of working – and best of all, adding to a sense of confidence and efficacy as a supervisor.

Mobile phones still exploding in classrooms everywhere

Guest blog by Tom Bennett

They’re not actually exploding, but the effect they have on a classroom is similar. I’ve been asked on to the Big Couch of BBC Breakfast this Saturday to talk about the impact phones have in schools, and to consider the proposed White paper legislation that makes it easier for schools to search students for contraband...which now means anything that a school defines it as. So if we choose, we can shake them down for anything on the school’s naughty list.

One of the problems phones present is that the technology that sired them has far outstripped our society’s ability to keep up with the cultural implications. A decade ago phones were still a luxury product; now it won’t be long before they’re considered to be one of the essential social indicators of existence below the poverty line. I mean, we still call them mobile phones, for God’s sake. You’d be harder pressed to find a phone that wasn’t mobile these days. It’s like calling a radio ‘wireless,’ or prefixing it with ‘transistor’.

Teachers need to realise that for many students, these aren’t optional artefacts- they’re an intrinsic piece of clothing, more akin to spectacles or underpants. To try to prohibit them from school premises is, unless the children are extremely biddable, doomed to failure. In order not to persistently fail, a school policy needs to be one of tolerant intolerance; we accept you have them, but if we see them, you lose it. They provide such an irresistible irritation, an itch to be tended and soothed, like a tiny plastic Tamagotchi, that many children could no more ignore its coos and gurgles than a crack addict could resist scratching a scab. So, away they go, out of sight and away from temptation.

In reality, these new search powers aren’t anything new- we’ve had powers of a sort like this already. Schools almost never use them, because we’re not comfortable running through someone’s bag for anything less exciting than a knife or narcotics. Anything less just isn’t worth the fireworks. And unless you work in Waterloo Road (and God help you if you do) then nobody really wants to frisk the kids. Lynx is toxic beyond a certain point of concentration.

I look forward to sharing this with Charlie and Suzanna on Saturday. I suspect I’m on the 6.10 slot, which is a joy unto itself. If you catch me, I imagine you’re a shift worker, an insomniac or a student. In which case, can I have my essay please?

Tom Bennett

Teacher, Raine’s Foundation school
Author, Not Quite a Teacher, preview below

The Dyscalculia Assessment - Winner of the Best Special Educational Needs Resource - Non ICT ERA Award

I thought you’d all be pleased to hear that Continuum’s winning streak is still very much in vogue.
 
Last Friday, The Dyscalculia Assessment won the prestigious ERA award for Best Special Educational Needs Resource - Non ICT.

Melanie Wilson, one of the authors of the book – Trish Babtie – and I were in attendance to accept the award and enjoy some dinner, dancing and roulette.  It was a lovely evening and a great opportunity to dust off our glad-rags.

Please join me in giving huge congratulations to Jane, Trish and Mel, and all those involved in producing the book, on this fantastic achievement.

Alison Baker
Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)

Guest post by Bethan Marshall, author of Testing English

Testing English is a book which looks at the way English has been assessed since the war. In particular it examines the way in which English teachers have constantly fought for a more authentic way of assessing pupils than sitting them down in an exam room and making them write for a couple of hours from anything as varied as a motorway at different times of day to Macbeth. At the heart of what English teachers were asking for was some kind of course based assessment so that pupils could write in a way that mattered to them. In so doing pupils would be able to redraft what they had written to convey their ideas ever more effectively.

This of course makes English teaching problematic. Wanting authenticity in what pupils write rather than simply testing what they can remember or produce in half an hour is controversial. It means too that teachers rather than looking backwards at what pupils have learned, as they would with exams, they look forward at what is to be learned; how pupils can get better at what they do; how they can progress.

The book looks at a number of research projects that explore this desire of English teachers to teach formatively and how, in doing so, how pupils can learn and develop. It looks, for example, at the King’s Medway Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project and sees the way in which teachers organize classroom talk so that they listen to what pupils say. It looks too at the King’s Oxfordshire Summative Assessment Project and sees the way in which, through course based assessment pupils can peer assess each other’s work and so improve what they have done.

Testing English was written before teachers actually started doing the new GCSE controlled conditions assignments but it does examine the way in which pupils can no longer draft and redraft their work or peer assess their colleagues’. It looks to at how controlled conditions assignments are multiple mini exams. In so doing the examiners, and by default the government, are yet again making hard for pupils to say what they want to say and refine it.

John Dewey, wrote in 1899, ‘There is all the difference in the world between having to say something and having something to say’. It has always been the desire of English to embrace the latter. And that is what Testing English is really about.

Continuum - Independent Publisher of the Year

I'm delighted to report that at last night's UK IPG Independent Pubilshing Awards Continuum were awarded Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year and then, from the winners of all of the categories, Independent Publisher of the Year!  You can read more about it in The Bookseller and on the IPG website.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us - this wouldn't have been possible without you.

Alison Baker
Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)

nasen Awards 2011

I’m delighted to be able to share the exciting news that three of our Education titles have been shortlisted for the nasen Awards 2011.

Teaching Children to Listen by Liz Spooner and Jacqui Woodcock has been shortlisted in the Primary Resource/Book to Support Teaching and Learning (non-ICT) category and in the Resource to Support Speech, Language and Communication Needs category.

 

 

 

 

Justice and Equality in Education: A Capability Perspective on Disability and Special Educational Needs by Lorella Terzi has been shortlisted in the Special Educational Needs Academic Book category.

 

 

 

 

Special Educational Needs: A New Look 2Ed by Mary Warnock and Brahm Norwich, edited by Lorella Terzi, has been shortlisted in the Special Educational Needs Academic Book category.

 

 

 

 

The winning product in each category will be announced at a ceremony which will be held on Tuesday 24 May 2011 at 7.00 pm in the Platinum Suite at the Reebok Stadium, Bolton, as part of nasen Live 2011.  Watch this space…

Alison Baker
Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)