If you’re coming to BETT (Olmpia, London, Jan 12th-15th) do drop by the Chalkface stand (PZ60, on the balcony, in the Publishers’ Village) and say ‘hi’. Site stats show that up to 20,000 people read this blog(!) so please don’t all turn up at once.
Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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I find this very thorough piece of research (pdf) from the Institute of Education very disturbing. After observing almost 20,000 students in over 800 separate classes, the authors concluded that, at KS2 at least, class size doesn’t make any difference.
To put the research in context, it’s the latest contribution to a long debate about class size. I’ll resist the temptation to cite you a list of sources (you can use Google as well as I can) but I will summarise what I got from my overview this morning:
- Most of the research is in Primary and may or may not pertain to Secondary. Adolescence must be a factor in managing large classes, surely?
- All the research I’ve seen has restricted itself to a class-size range of 15-40, which is a shame. What about class sizes of 2 or 200?
- Overall results are mixed, but nobody’s been able to show a really big benefit to small classes. The biggest claimed benefit I could find was a 6% economic benefit to the nation in the long term, for example.
- Teachers, parents and politicians generally believe in the benefits of small classes to an extent way beyond what is supported in any research.
Reading through the research, I find my prejudice in favour of small classes challenged beyond the point of recovery. This is particularly embarrassing for me as I’ve been promoting elearning services such as Yacapaca through the idea that by reducing teachers’ admin workload we can give each teacher more time in the classroom, thus enabling reduced class sizes.
Now I’m asking myself how attainment levels are maintained in large classes. Students definitely get less teacher attention in large classes, so what’s compensating for that? Drawing on memories of my own schooldays, I suspect that they will spontaneously support each other unless the teachers’ presence disrupts the dynamic.
If I’m right, then we need a radical rethink that puts peer support, not teacher leadership, at the centre of classroom practice. The teacher’s role becomes to set the frame and then stay out of the way, intervening only when the peer support process has visibly broken down.
This won’t come as a surprise to champions of collaborative learning, but to the rest of us, it’s a bit of a shock.
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I wrote this post a couple of days ago, but didn’t put it up for fear it would seem too far-fetched. Then I read this article and realised that I was indeed on the right track.
The question you may be asking yourself isn’t ‘what can I do to help?’, because that’s obvious, but ‘what can I do as a teacher?‘
One thing this present tragedy has shown is that whilst natural disasters do generally happen in far away lands, we can no longer take for granted that we, or our children, won’t be there at the time. Cheap air travel has changed all that.
As I watched the horrific news footage of the wave coming ashore in Sri Lanka, I asked myself why no-one had known that when the sea suddenly recedes for no apparent reason (as it did), this is actually the trough that precedes a tsunami, and from that point you have 5-10 minutes to seek protection on high ground or in a tall building. And the answer, of course, is that no-one had taught them. That’s fixable for next time.
And there will be a next time. I propose that we should ensure every child gets a basic education in how to respond to the threat from a natural disaster. It should be similar to the way we now teach children how to act if caught outside in a thunderstorm, and would conform to four criteria:
- covers a broad range of potential disasters
- brief enough to be memorable
- taught as a life skill, not as abstract knowledge
- empowering; focuses on what to do for yourself and others, not the consequences of failure.
I’d love for Chalkface to produce some useful resources on this, but realistically we couldn’t produce them in time to catch the public interest. Instead, I’ll point you to the New Zealand Ministry of Civil Defence. New Zealand is at risk from just about every kind of natural disaster going, and they take disaster education seriously. They have good, basic resources on
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This is slightly more Avante Garde than my normal posts, be warned. Liz Lawley reports on a presentation by Bill Griswold about using the backchannel in the classroom. He’s talking about university-level teaching, but do the same principles apply in schools?
The Backwhat?
The backchannel is the hi-tech equivalent of kids whispering to each other behind their hands during class. In networked environments, classically a wifi-equipped classroom where students are using laptops, students will set up ad-hoc group chat sessions using IM or IRC. They may use this constructively or destructively, according to how engaged they are with the material and how savvy the teacher is in using this new medium.
Enter Bill Griswold. Rather than seeing it as a threat to discipline, he sees it as an opportunity to draw out the less-forthcoming. Liz reports
During his presentation, Bill Griswold was talking about how hes using chat environments in the classroom. He observed that using the backchannel to allow questions from students materialized the question, not the questioner. More than anything else I heard during the panel, that one line made me really stop and think about implications of the backchannel, and why it is that I find it to be so attractive a medium.
Do read the whole post; it leads to some fascinating conjectures, but I, certainly, am a long way from drawing any conclusions.
If you want to dig deeper, here are Liz’s observations of her own use of the backchannel, and how it changed her participation in an event.
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Two weeks away and only 295 emails in my in-box; last year I know it would have been twice that. Clearly email has passed its peak as a communication medium. Still’n’all, it’ll take me a few days to clear them.
Lots of interesting stuff waiting in my newsfeeds, though; more posts soon.
Yacapaca 