On the power of critique

This interview was conducted with Charlie a week after a whole class critique session on his composition for the Frozen Moments project. I bumped into Charlie on the corridor and grabbed the opportunity to get some sound bites from him, knowing that he had valued the experience. Charlie had not been prep'd (you can hear me prompt him sometimes) and is around the national average if you believe in CAT scores and seeing students as numbers. 


See if you can guess which year group he is in...





None of the qualities that surface from this conversation are the result of any amazing teaching on my behalf. More the protocol we used and the innate nature of Critique to lead to  a focus on high quality content.


What strikes me listening back to this is just how powerful his testimony is for a number of reasons:


"I could see..." This hints at a clarity of direction.

"Harsh on content" comes straight to the fore, it is clear that Charlie values having his work robustly challenged.


"So the person doesn't feel like them failing" So failure is important but it must be made safe.


"I'm improving and I haven't even started the work" NOW the aforementioned clarity is crystallised. This is about the best thing I have ever heard a student say. Incredibly perceptive and inspirational for me to hear.


"Then I get the most out of the class... all of the brain power" Wow, here is a statement that says community more perfectly than I ever could.


"We thought we'll probably get away with that" Quality, quality, quality.


Here is the feedback Charlie got from the class, the technical words in bold are the students'. I did rephrase some in terms of sentence structure though.

Feedback from the class:

Good use of silence at the end, try fading out the wind sample.

Try extending the magic sample as it cuts out quite early. Also this could be faded out and made louder.

We love the wind sample being in the piece throughout; the wind sample should also fade in gradually to help build tension.

Think about your choice of timbre on the ostinato, it sounds a little squelchy and should sound more mysterious.

The accelerando works well with that choice of notes in the ostinato and the staccato way that those notes are played. The crescendo should peak at forte earlier and start to fade back to piano to prepare for the silence.

We love the pedal and the way the timbre changes gradually over time. Try adding another A in a different octave later on to help it change more.

Get rid of the word "view" from  on the laugh

Oh, Year 7 by the way.

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Creative Curriculum Design - The problems

This year, alongside all of the usual trials and tribulations, I have been particularly pleased with the way that PBL (Project Based Learning) is beginning to be embedded in the department.


"Create" combines the disciplines of Music, Media and Drama and increasingly having been to High Tech High and having made a journey from tentative baby steps of pilots to robust tuning and refining we are beginning to realise the vision we had for Create when we sat at Muffin Mansion (read Longhirst Hall) almost five years ago.


Initially we were incredibly naive and expected to be able to allow the students to be almost entirely self determinate, big mistake! Over time we have learned that choice is OK, provided that it is framed thoughtfully and in a way that encourages independence through a gentle removal of scaffolding as students progress through the key stage.


Aside from ageing (in technological terms) PCs, the biggest barrier we have faced in the last couple of years has been in finding ways to implement PBL in a way that allows for professionally high quality outcomes.


The realisation has been that teachers need to spend more time with less students.


We have two 75 minute periods per week, with 6 classes of roughly 30 on session at once, split between 2 Media, 2 Music and 2 Drama teachers.

In it's original incarnation, Create was basically a carousel. Each class had a Create tutor who was their guide and would introduce enquiries (as they were then; rather than projects) and monitor home learning. Students rotated between the disciplines each lesson and each cycle was punctuated by a generic "Create tutor" lesson related to the enquiry and so learning was transient and often not of the quality we aim for.


A typical unit looked like this:

What would music look like?

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The enquiries were developed largely to ensure breath of content for the National Curriculum in Music, and other examples were:

What would Beethoven think of rock 'n' roll? Where students learned to perform music from both eras and made short dramatic pieces supposing that Beethoven had time travelled a la Bill & Ted (fine film!)

Can the camera tell the truth? Where students made comic books of still images to tell a story, with a soundtrack.

Looking back, our intentions were noble enough but in reality our enquiry questions were like lubing a steak and hoping to cram it down a National Curriculum shaped straw. We allowed ourselves to become hamstrung by notions of external pressure that were largely non-existent in reality.

The learning was also in two parts, lots of short enquiries or lessons, followed by some making of a product. (More like project orientated learning rather than project based learning)

Another issue was that at the time we felt the need to include all three disciplines in each enquiry which led to some square peg round hole shenanigans and usually one discipline became marginalised with a tacked on role.

Whilst there were some really great lessons, students did not really but in as the things we asked them to create were mostly abstracted from what creative artists produce in the real world. Students perceived little value in them and as a result the enquiries suffered.

The first changes I made the following year when I took over the department were to get rid of bespoke home learning for each enquiry which was unwieldy in terms of monitoring and workload in creating the tasks. Instead students were asked to keep a journal of their learning, reflecting upon what they had learned, how they had been Creative (ICEDIP, more on this below) and including examples of their learning. Students could choose how to keep their journal, for example as a scrap book, or in a song, the idea was to be creative in presenting your response.


I also brought in Geoff Petty's research on the ICEDIP model for creativity to help students understand that creativity is a not a rigid process and can be learned.


Finally, we moved from rotating every lesson to having blocks of four lessons with each teacher, which made much more sense. This has endured to some extent in the first two terms of Year 7, where students need some element of "tooling up" to prepare them for the enquiries ahead.


That was three years ago and Create has continued to evolve. In my next post I will discuss how we have moved to PBL rather than EBL, and how we are dealing with structuring the terms so that we see less students for longer.

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DTPF! Surfacing 'Tacit Knowledge'

There are varying and sometimes conflicting, or at least ambiguous definitions for 'tacit knowledge' so for the purpose of this entry I am going to use it to refer to not just to learning/knowledge which is difficult to to transmit, but rather learning which can be described as 'know-how' rather than 'know-what', 'know-why' or 'know-who'.

There is a an extra layer of subtly to this type of learning in that it goes beyond simple 'know-how' i.e. 'how to make beans on toast', 'Tacit knowledge' is non-formal in nature and it is learning that is more easily 'caught' rather than 'taught'.

For example riding a bike is something that is difficult to express and pass on to someone else. One would find it difficult to describe the sum of the learning and knowledge involved in successfully riding a bike.  Instead it is best learned by watching others, then experimenting through trial and error.

This is a type of learning I have become very familiar with through my involvement in Musical Futures, where music teachers will often play lots and explain little, giving students a practical musical experience upon which they can later hang terminology and formal knowledge.

So I return to the DTPF! mantra (Do the project first, see my earlier post). Our students have just been briefed on their film making challenge, and in preparation for this we have collaborated as a faculty and created a model for the students.

In doing so we went through the same process as the one upon which our students are now embarking. There were many reasons for doing this, firstly the students would have a model with which they could compare their work and use to critique. It also demonstrates a commitment from ourselves as a body and that the product is achievable. Also by follwing same process as the students, it gave us an opportunity to look at the mechanics and logistics of how that would work, especially important when 180 students will be working on the project at the same time. We have also as a staff body picked up some important technical knowledge on how to use some of the facilities at our schools and their implicit limitations (for example the size of our green room, or how to use our cameras most effectively).

We have been able to do document and share this process with the students so that they can see how we got from the stage script, to a screenplay and storyboard and then to a film. In doing so the most revelatory aspect has been surfacing some of the 'tacit learning' that we would hope our students catch, but perhaps had not anticipated or considered.

What I think we have done with this DTPF! is to foreground some of the 'tacit learning' that our students will pick up along the way and in doing so, we are now able to factor these into our planning and success criteria. In this instance the 'tacit learning' is the body of 'know-how' required to make a film, specifically fleshed out within our context and our facilities. Much of the process might seem disparate when taken as a discreet quantum or packet of knowledge but become crucial only when you consider the whole and the connections therein.

For example:

'Know-how' to take steps to avoid continuity issues.

This is something that must be planned and accounted for at almost every stage in the process of film-making and so it is difficult to describe other than by showing students how. We are now able to do this by using our model, i.e. storyboards which plan for continuity between shots (body position for example), filming of our filming which shows us discussing continuity and the positioning of bodies between filming shots, and editing clips together which maximise continuity by capturing the best in and out points for body positioning.

Or a more routine example:

'Know-how ' to catalogue your filming both orally on film and by filing.

When you mention it, it might seem obvious, but as I have mentioned in a previous post, we have tried filming in previous years with limited success. This 'know-how' had been foregrounded in the mistakes we made. Whilst this packet of knowledge alone may have implicit value in terms of being organised, it is only when you connect it to the later stage of editing footage back together it becomes crucial to the point of making your job nigh on impossible unless it is done. In the past students might and in fact did learn this through trial, error and much frustration. Whilst I am firm believer in allowing students to make mistakes and learn from them, in my experience when students perceive that their genuine and significant efforts have been rendered futile by mistakes that could have been avoided, this can be very demotivating, and understandably so. I guess my point in this instance is that the tacit learning here is not just in the 'know-how' of cataloguing your filming but in the holistic value of doing so when taken in the context of the project as a whole.

As a slightly related aside, one of the biggest issues I still have in teaching an enquiry based curriculum is the unintended learning outcomes that are a natural result of students partly or fully determining their own learning. How do you plan for, validate, measure and reward this unintended but equally important learning? Answers on a postcard please!

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The Tyne Project

From Monday 13th June students at Cramlington Learning Village in the North East of England are having a week where their normal timetable will be suspended. During this week they will be choosing from a wide range of arts based projects. During the course of the week they will visit The Tyne and create pieces of art stimulated by our local river.

The hope is that this project will do two things:

• Give students a rich experience and help them to develop their artistic and creative skills

• To help them connect to their cultural heritage, using the river as an access point to our regions rich history.

We will then publicly exhibit our art and learning in school on Saturday 25th June so that there is an authentic audience for our work.
We will we be using our blog and our twitter feed @tyneproject as another way to exhibit our learning and then there is the exciting use of QR codes to link to our students' work.


We are placing a number of QR codes along the length of the Tyne so that you can be 'in situ' on the banks of the Tyne and use a smartphone to view the art that our students have created.


Students will begin tweeting and blogging from Sunday 5th June, when a small group of students will cycle along the Tyne to gather stories, photographs and video. These will be used as a stimulus for the whole year 7 cohort in a launch assembly on Thursday 9th June, during which we also hope to have a Skype link to Nagarjuna Academy, our partner school in Nepal, where students from Kathmandu can tell our students about the human importance of their great river, The Bagmati.


'I think that it's a good way of getting children to learn about the history of Newcastle and the Tyne.  It's not just learning in a classroom, we're using Arts to help us explore stories.'


'The QR barcodes are different and eye catching, it great because you can show your work to more people.  I'm really looking forward to cycling down the Tyne as this will be a really active way to learn.'

(Two student perspectives on what we hope to achieve with the project)

This project has been influenced by our involvement with both Learning Futures and High Tech High. Below are the slides I used to present this project to a Project Tuning Panel at High Tech High in San Diego earlier this year. Thanks especially to Rob Riordan and Laura McBain.

Tyne Project - Project Tuning (High Tech High)

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"Shifting the locus of control in a PBL environment"

Here are the slides from my presentation at TMNE10:

Tmne10

A more in depth explanation will follow once coursework is out of the way.  The Nuts in May video is available on my earlier blog "If at first you don't succeed..."

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A simple rule yields results

A big part of the curriculum at our school is Learning to Learn, and I have been involved in teaching this now for a number of years.  This year our school launched it's TDU (trans-disciplinary units) course.  The course is project based, with students identifying and choosing questions to research.  They then gather analyse and evaluate information, the idea being that at times they are required to think like a scientist, musician, researcher at different times (hence the trans-disciplinary).  Students then present back their findings to help try and answer the big question framing that unit.

In the first term students had a practice project and one of the key things that I picked up upon was the way that they interacted (or didn't) with written materials as part of their research.  On the whole students would read sources carefully, but I was not always sure that they had constructed any meaning from what they had read.  The most common approach was to pick out the most important bits and copy them into their journal, thus comprehension was of mixed levels and very few students were able to synthesise their findings effectively.  With this being a practice project I allowed students to make mistakes, the idea being to be more proactive in the debrief to help students learn from these mistakes.

With this in mind I asked students to think of ways that they can interact with text, and many of them picked up on the use of thinking tools in the previous years' Learning to Learn course.  When I asked why they hadn't used thinking tools in TDU they said 'because it's not Learning to Learn.'

This answer not only gave me an insight into what is now a major target for our school, the movement from a discreet learning to learn course, to a learning to learn approach in all subjects, but also serendiptuously an opportunity to share with the class a session I had taken with GCSE students preparing revision programs.

As part of the session we introduced our GCSE cohort of students to Hyerle's thinking maps, and gave them opportunities to use them in fun situations such as 'bubble map a chav'.  As you can see from the picture below the use of thinking tools to revise collaboratively (which regrettably remains mostly interacting with text) was received very positively.

As a class we agreed to follow a rule that our Science department already use in their enquiries in years 7 & 8:

Reading -->  Thinking Tool --> Notes

This term my students have been looking at "How great is Great Britain?"  And to help them get to grips with using thinking tools to research, I suggested a line of enquiry "Are we America's lapdog?" and some resources that they might use such as George Michael's shoot the dog music video.

The resulting notes in student planners were consistently better that what had been recorded in the previous project, both in terms of the quality of the notes and the demonstration of understanding and meaning:

On reflection, some students had difficulties in choosing appropriate thinking tools and so as a result the next lesson I ran pretty much the same session I had taken with the GCSE cohort on Hyerle's thinking tools.  Looking back I should have done this first as for some of the weaker students having a smaller set of tools from which to draw upon has proved to be a much more effective approach, rather than asking them to remember tools that they had used in Learning to Learn over a year ago.

That said, my students are now into the "How Great is Great Britain?" project researching their own lines of enquiry and now use thinking tools as a force of habit.  We will see how it goes in terms of synthesising their findings to make a whole personal meaning later in the project.

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