DTPF!

This is fast becoming something of a mantra for project based learning pedagogy at our school:


Do The Project First!


You may have read in earlier posts that in my school I am responsible for Create, which is a trans-disciplinary course in KS3 combining music, media and drama. It has long been the shared view in our team that the ultimate synergy of the three disciplines is film and we have now had two bites at the cherry with some success but many failings.


There are logistical issues which are a thorn in our side, mainly resultant from the capacity and scale for which we are required to plan and execute. At any one moment there are 180 students in Create shared between specialist teachers for each of the disciplines.


Two years ago, each half of year 8 (180 students) teamed up to become a film production company and we made our own version of Twilight. The process was fantastic, students were booking into our green screen studio to record scenes that they had rehearsed, to be met by their peers who had set up the studio for green screen video recording. The scenes were filmed and shared with a group of editors in the classroom who worked with the raw footage, taking out the green background using chromakey and editing in multi layered backgrounds which they had prepared in photoshop. At the same time composers were working with the themes from the twilight soundtrack to create music suitable to underscore the scenes.


There was a real buzz about the department and then when we came to show the complete film back in the hub (our performance space) it fell a little flat.  Even our students are still focussed on content and despite the amazing journey they had gone on, they could not get past the fact that the final film did not look great. Our knowledge of chromakey was in its infancy, so many of the backgrounds looked too artificial, camera wobbles meant that actors bobbed up and down against their background and due to time constraints and the aforementioned capacity issues we did not have time to redraft scenes. We had 6 actors in the role of Edward Cullen and Bella, which resulted in serious continuity issues. All of which combined to leave us feeling a little underwhelmed and determined to get it right the next year.

So last year we changed tack and in an effort to negate the final product having a polished look, we used 'Be Kind Rewind' as our stimulus. If you haven't seen the movie, the basic premise is that Jack Black accidentally wipes all of the VHS tapes in his friend's store and they remake the film on a shoestring budget, this is called sweding movies (taken from custom Swedish furniture). Our students seemed switched on by the stimulus and we had them working in groups rather than as a whole year group. We were much tighter in the pre-production stage with check-lists for each stage of their planing, each tick resulting in their wacky racer moving a little further along the road at the front of the class.

This engaged the students for a while but it became death by planning sheets and time that would have been more useful spent filming, making mistakes and correcting them, was spent doodling costume designs instead.  What we thought might turn out as well considered melodrama, actually led to the drama aspects of the project becoming somewhat of a joke, and acting skills were not really being enhanced to any measurable degree. Another factor that was not ideal was that we asked the groups to rotate around the roles of actors, editors and composers and so less time was spent in each. So rather than deep learning in specialist areas we skimmed the surface of the content in many cases, more lessons learned! The final products were highly mixed and often funny, but lacking the kind of quality that we were striving for and so this year it has been back to the drawing board.


It is said that hell is paved with good intentions, and last year we intended to make a "sweded" movie as part of our CPD time to use as a model but many reasons, none of them really good enough, we did not get round to doing it.


This year we have committed (thanks team!) a significant amount of our CPD time to "Doing the project first", the mantra taken from an inspirational visit to High Tech High in San Diego. 


The idea being that if you go through the steps that the students are going to go through you can see the choke points, work out logistically what are the problems and solutions, check that the intended learning is being delivered and at the end have an exemplar to use alongside real world models.


The running gag in our department is "Can we do the same next year?" as we are constantly looking at, revising and tweaking our enquiries and projects and this year it is no different. The film making project is in a new guise with a new driving question of "How do you tell a story using film?"


We have some excellent short scripts for stage adaptations of some Grimm Fairy tales written by Carol Ann Duffy and have chosen 'Hansel & Gretel' as a piece that more easily accessible and "Ashputtel" as a piece that presents a greater challenge. Students will be challenged to take the stage script and adapt it for the medium of film, thinking about what changes that will necessitate and how the audiences are different for each. This time students will specialise in media as script writers, storyboarders, directors and film editors. In drama they will become actors (and dancers if they choose to), and the musicians will be film composers underscoring the film. This specialism should hopefully deal with the issues of capacity and time to redraft, rather than last year's carousel.


The completed films will be shown at a community event in the Hub at Easter (with popcorn of course!). I would love to have our excellent local film house the Tyneside Cinema involved and we do have contacts, but at the moment I am hedging my bets and waiting to see what our "DTPF!" model turns out like. As I write this I think that maybe I am being a coward here, and if they were on board from the start that would add a layer of authenticity to the project. Hmmm, more thought needed here! Anyway DTPF!


We met as a team for the first time today to begin the project ourselves. We read the script for 'Hansel & Gretel' and decided to try and make our film as true to the atmosphere of the script as possible, the genre being a fantastical thriller, set in an alternate fairy tale 19th century. We are taking inspiration from the recent Grimm brothers movie (particularly musically), and Red Riding Hood visually.


We have the facility and increasing know how to use Adobe CS to edit the film, create backgrounds for green screen scenes and add after effects, and intend to use these facilities to transform environments in and around our school into those of the world in which the piece is set.


I have to say that I am extremely excited by the prospect of collaborating in such an authentic and creative way and I know that this is shared by the team. This afternoon as we began to read through the script my colleague Rob stated quite beautifully that "I know we have to be here anyway, but I couldn't imagine anything else I would rather be doing than this", and our student teacher Natalie beamed at the idea of storyboarding ideas with the comment "This is great, it's just like being back at university".

"I couldn't imagine anything else I'd rather be doing"

Having discussed the big picture for our movie we split into our specialist groups and began to think about our roles for pre-production, developing the storyboard and script, beginning characterisation and composing the leitmotif themes that would be the building blocks for the score. Here are some of my compositional sketches in their infancy from this afternoon.


It is true, and in this we are very lucky, that we are given directed time for CPD on Wednesday afternoons, but this to me is CPD as it should be. There is a palpable enthusiasm centred around a shared goal which we hope will reap dividends in the execution of the project. I feel that for the first time in a while I am really putting my skills as a musician as well as a teacher to use, and bringing a little bit more passion to what I do.


We intend to capture our journey in making our model film with videos, blogs and reflection, and hopefully some of that enthusiasm will translate from our final product to our students as they begin creating their films after Christmas (it is all about them after all!)

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Cracking Nuts

I am using this post to collate responses to a training session I ran with our TDU (trans-disciplinary units) teachers, which modelled using a personal artifact as a starting point for enquiry.

We started off by examining our emotional responses to the object (yellow), then described it (orange) and asked questions of it (blue).

Teachers have now began some exploratory initial research to answer some of these questions and uncover narratives and facts associated with the object or objects like it.

This is a very similar process to one that I underwent (using a mincer) on a recent masters unit at the University of Bristol ran by Ruth Deakin-Crick and Martin Sandbrook.  It is also a process that we intend to roll out with students in Year 8 after Easter using their own artifacts.

I will continue to update the space below with staff responses, and then model the next steps in the process. Though I am reticent to use the word steps as the process can and possibly should be very organic and emergent so sequential chronology is not neccessarily concrete, especially for more able users.

Nutcracker poem

Bernt's nutcracker

Cracked Nuts - Orange Pants

The Nutcracker Ballet

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Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! Thou art translated

Just as 'A Midsummer's  Night's Dream' experimented with fractal storytelling with the famous play within a play, today saw the beginning of our school PEGs (Professional Enquiry Groups), my own being "How do we make Enquiry work?" Hence the tenuous link, an enquiry about enquiry!

This throws up all sorts of exciting possibilities for me as a facilitator and after the first session today I hope that the journey that colleagues and I have undertaken is a fruitful and rewarding one.

What is really interesting for me are the possible commonalities between disciplines. Hopefully we may arrive at some generic skills, cognitive approaches and ways of knowing that are transferable across subject, age and enquiries, and ones onto which tools can be mapped to further students metacognitive development. These words popped up time and again in today's session alongside phrases such structure content/process dichotomy, authenticity and engagement.

The above presentation maps out the first steps of our enquiry and it is my intention that the pathways for each member of staff through the enquiry should reflect their priorities in terms of their own practice.  That said I hope we can do some pretty interesting and valuable things collaboratively. For instance one approach that is used in Japan is to attempt to plan the perfect lesson, and this opportunity to meet and collaborate in a fairly risk free environment could well prove to be a very powerful experience!

So today we moved through the first couple of steps in our school enquiry model, that is to identify the problem or question, then to generate and think about pathways forward in terms of research and action. Of course part of the point of doing these PEG is to affect some kind of change (thou art translated!), whether that be in the practice of the teachers involved, the learning of the students or even to develop a community of enquiry as a stance within the school.

With that in mind we did have liberty to skip to the end as it were, and treat our enquiry as a project (likened to me as an enquiry on steroids!) with authentic outcomes as described above. For instance how could we best share our findings with the rest of the school, what impact might it have in our classroom? For some of us there are academic outcomes with findings needing to be translated into essays for masters courses. For others this was welcomed as time and opportunity to look at and develop enquiry and enquiries through lenses which stems from their own priorities such as assurance of quality, level of structure or breadth of content.  For me it was great to see such richness in the diversity of interest and possible avenues that may be opened up hereafter.

Once again I am heavily indebted to a Mr Darren Mead who helped me with the structure of this session.

I attach below some of the sketched ideas of members of our PEG from today's session:

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A (hopefully) more than simply vocal student voice.

Last night I met my focus group for the first time. This has been something I have not done particularly well in the past, though hopefully that will change. We plan to some quite ambitious things this year in Create, our trans-disciplinary, enquiry-based curriculum (Music, Media & Drama) for years 7 and 8. Perhaps it is better to give you a brief history of time, or at least the last three years.


Create has been running now since the inception of our Junior Learning Village, when years 7 and 8 joined us for the first time in 2008. We were lucky to be given time out of school to plan these modules at what has now become known as “Muffin Mansion” aka Longhirst Hall in Northumberland just north of our school. Faced with a carte blanche, we as a team were incredibly excited about the potential of breaking down disciplinary boundaries, moving to a new building and having the chance to work with and develop youngsters from an earlier age. Ultimately though there were a number of factors that led to the first year in Create being somewhat of a headache. Many of our staff had not worked with years 7 and 8 and so a lot of our planning was naive in respect of our expectations of such children’s capabilities. In the excitement of moving to an enquiry based curriculum, we possibly spent too much time planning content and not enough time planning pedagogy, i.e. how to teach students to enquire, what are the key stages, what web 2.0 tools would be useful. Finally another major factor was that due to staff departures, in effect the curriculum was planned by one team and delivered by another.


As a result the first year in Create, whilst peppered with vignettes of pockets of success, was on the whole a disappointment. Students were given too much freedom, too early, in enquiries that were too abstract and lacked real world authenticity. Our first unit, “What would music look like?” was a prime example. Using the work of Oskar Fischinger as inspiration, we imagined students making animations set to student composed music with contemporary dance moved choreographed in our state of the art ‘hub’ performance space. Faced with the same blank piece of paper we had experienced a year earlier in planning, many of our students emotionally opted out at the scale and complexity of that with which they were faced.


Fast forward one year and the vista of Create was a markedly different place. Our Year 8 students last year went on an incredible and at times frustrating journey in remaking the movie Twilight. The process was quite remarkable with students quickly overtaking teachers in their skilled editing of video, using chroma key to manipulate backgrounds using our green screen studio and applying after affects. Logistically there were many problems which required navigation and many mistakes from which to learn, but when you walk into a room to find a student inserting a television screen onto the background of a scene, and on the screen is playing the original Twilight movie, you know something special is afoot. The one thing that kept coming back to bite us (sorry, terrible pun) though was the quality of the final product. Logistically, it was a massive achievement to film an entire movie, with jobs and roles for 200+ students, but when you sit students down in the hub for a premiere to watch their film, and they find it hard to follow the movie as their as six different actors playing Edward Cullen, scenes missing as they have been lost in the system and every time the camera wobbles it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief as the moon jumps around the sky in the background, you can’t help but sense the collective disappointment. Of course we continually heaped praise on our students for actually accomplishing such a feat, but in a target driven society, even in our school where process is held in such regard, or kids can’t help but focus on the final product and allow that the dominate their judgement of success.


We are about to run the same unit again this year in Create after Christmas, this time with a twist. To negate the unavoidable issue that we are simply not, nor have the facilities of Pinewood studios we have taken inspiration from the movie Be Kind Rewind. If you are not familiar with the movie, the basic premise is that whilst looking after the local video store, the two protagonists inadvertently erase of the all the cassettes in the store, requiring them to remake all of the movies on a shoe string budget.


Our students will do the same, and thus the aesthetic quality (or lack of) in the final product should not take the shine off their evaluation of the experience, in fact the hammier the better in terms of spoofing the movies. We are still faced with the same logistical headaches as last year though, made more difficult by students making a number of films across the 200 students rather than one combined effort.


So we come back to last night, and my meeting with the focus group. The idea seems quite simple and I don’t know why we haven’t done it before. I have taken a group of 22 keen, but genuinely mixed ability students, (I have graphs, graphs can prove anything, I have a graph to prove that last statement as well), and they are to do the enquiry a half-term in advance of the rest of the year. Between now and Christmas we are going to spend one night a week making these movies, doing the enquiry, working out which tools work best, whether students should sign up to become specialists or have a chance to do everything i.e. cameraperson, actor and composer. Of course there was much bribery in the form of sweets and juice, but I get the sense that these students are genuinely excited by the unit and are proud to be involved not just as guinea pigs but as authentic cogs in the decision making process on how the enquiry will run. An added benefit besides being able to try things out and garner feedback is that when the unit rolls out to the whole year group, I have two students in every classroom who have experienced the process and become extra teachers, coaches and mentors in the classroom. As we draw closer to the end of the process I hope to start training the students in how to coach others, but I am very hopeful that this approach to student voice will be successful. I intend to something similar with a Year 7 focus group cohort in advance of their storytelling enquiry which begins after Easter.


Last night’s meetings was one of those moments when you walk out of school delighted to be a teacher, which is always there at the back of your mind, but often hidden by pressures of the daily grind. Enthusiasm is contagious though, and long may it continue.

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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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