Every so often an Education Secretary announces a ban on mobile phones in. school (which always turns out to be guidance, not mandatory). It's a sort. of non-policy, a statement for the purpose, in my opinion, of wanting to. say something, anything.
Every so often an Education Secretary announces a ban on mobile phones in school (which always turns out to be guidance, not mandatory). It's a sort of non-policy, a statement for the purpose, in my opinion, of wanting to say something, anything.
The latest "crack-down" gives teachers perission to search pupils' bags, but as far as I recall they have had that right for a long time. So I think this is another non-policy announcement. Anyway, click that link to read the pdf.
My understanding is that most schools already have a mobile phone policy and a way of dealing with the issue.
I think there are huge benefits of allowing, or even encouraging, pupils to use phones in lessons, in a controlled way.
I know there are studies purporting to show that phones reduce academic progress, but I think you have to look beneath the headlines to find out what's actually going on.
A good example of this occurred a few years ago. The headlines rang out: ban phones for best results. But when you looked at the actual research, it was a more nuanced picture. In some groups of students, phones held them back, while in others the use of phones enhanced their learning.
This sort of thing happens a lot, and not just in the realm of using phones in classrooms. In due course it will happen with AI: some research will show that some students use AI well while others use it badly, with the result that the former students will fall behind. Look out for the headlines that only report that, followed by the usual poliutican panic, soundbite and crackdown.
I sometimes wonder if I am just too cynical.
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This is one of those rituals that the DfE goes through every so often in one form or another. If you don't believe me, my book Make Time With IT (see photos above), a simple guide to how teachers could make light of some of their admin tasks though the judicious use of technology, was published in 1996. That's right: over nearly years ago! I was contacted by someone in the DfE, or whatever it happened to be called back then, and the upshot was that some of the book ended up on my website with links to it from the DfE.
I say all this not as some sort of brag but simply to illustrate the fact that this has all been going for some time. When Damien Hinds was Education Secretary I said to him in a meeting that perhaps one of the criteria Ofsted (the schools ihnspection body in England and Wales) should look at, and take seriously, is the amount of admin teachers are obliged to do in their school. He didn't like the idea, which is probably just as well: I can imagine some headteachers asking teachers to fill out a form at the end of every school day to say how much time they'd saved by not being asked to do admin.
Anyway, things like this are well-meaning, but without changes to make admin reduction a reality (more money would be a good start), I think some schools would find it hard to do very much.
In any case, some of these tasks are oines that I, as a teacher, found and find valuable, as I'll elucidate.
The principles of the document are sound. In particular I think this is to be welcomed, generally speaking:
The key tests for any task must be:
a. Does it need to be done at all?
b. Is the task of an administrative or clerical nature?
c. Does it call for the exercise of a teacher’s professional skills or judgment?
If the answers to a) and b) are yes but the answer to c) is no, then the task should not be carried out by a teacher.
There's a long and non-exhaustive list of examples in the annex, but I've chosen the following sample to look at in particular, numbered for ease of reference:
Production of photographic evidence of practical lessons e.g. for assessment purposes or to ‘evidence’ learning. Unless you have a classroom assistant, which I almost never did, I don't see how you would get this evidence if you wanted it, unless you did it yourself. I suppose you could ask the students to take photos and upload them somewhere, but somebody would need to organise the evidence at that point anyway.
Collating pupil reports e.g. reports of pupil examination results. Not only is this not an arduous task if you use a spreadsheet (say), but carrying this out can be very useful in helping you identify trends or potential issues.
Responsibility for producing, copying, uploading and distributing bulk communications to parents and pupils, including standard letters, school policies, posts on electronic platforms. No argument with most of this, but without the services of a technician or admin person, and given that subject curricula have to be available on the school's website, the reality is that it's going to end up having to be done by a teacher. As it happens, I worked with a school once that wanted each department to be responsible for its own area on the school's website, and the variety of colours, organisation and other aspects really reflected the character of each subject area. It was so much more vibrant than what might have been the case otherwise.
Organisation, decoration and assembly of the physical classroom space e.g. moving classrooms, moving classroom furniture, putting up and taking down classroom displays. Again, I agree with most of this, but I always had to do my own classroom displays -- except for the occasion when another teacher in my department very kindly did it for me (and made a much more artistic job of it too).
Ordering, setting up and maintaining ICT equipment, software, and virtual learning environments (VLEs), including adding pupils to VLEs and online subscription platforms. I agree with all this too, but when I worked with schools with no technical support, I had to do it myself.
Ordering supplies and equipment. See #5
Cataloguing, preparing, issuing, stocktaking, and maintaining materials and equipment, or logging the absence of such. See #5. Actually, in one school when I did a stock check fivemminutes after joining as Head of Computing, I discovered that one computer system that was on the books was not actually in the school.
Co-ordinating and submitting bids (for funding, school status and the like). As head of department, it was in my interests to co-ordinate and submit bids for extra money.
Taking, copying, distributing or typing up notes (e.g. verbatim notes) or producing formal minutes. Fair enough, but how many schools would be able to provide secretarial assistance for subject staff meetings?
Bulk photocopying. I've worked in a lot of schools, and only two of them had a dedicated reprographics department.
Have I been unlucky? In many schools I had no technical support, no classroom assistance and no admin support. So it's great that the DfE is thinking about this, but as I said earlier it can't happen without other changes to support it.
This article first appeared in the freeDigital Education newsletter.
From a quick perusal (it came only recently), and as the title suggests, this book deals with the dangers of artificial intelligence insofar as fooling us is concerned. For example, it demonstrates how a script could be written to make a bot seem so lifelike that it could get people to hand over their social security details.
In this context, the Turing Test comes to mind. I’m not convinced to any extent at all that not being able to tell the difference between a computer and a person means that the computer is intelligent. However, the original formulation of Turing’s ‘imitation game’ was whether a machine could be perceived as being intelligent.
Apparently, people have been using ChatGPT to interact with potential romantic partners. A college used it to generate a letter addressing the grief and trauma caused by a recent mass shooting. The college authorities might have saved themselves from a backlash had they not insterted the words ‘paraphrased from a response by ChatGPT’.
That was bound to be noticed, and noticed it was, which brings us on to our own responsiblity to be perceptive. For example, i a ‘deepfaked’image, part of the text was distorted, potentially giving the game away. A few weeks ago I myself used an AI image generator to create a cover for the book The Girl At The Tram Stop. It’s not a photo and therefore not the same as a deepfake, but someone pointed out to me that one of the people in it has no feet. I hadn’t noticed! In a different experiment, I used an AI image generator to create a photorealistic image. The result was very lifelike, but if you looked closely you would notice that one of the subject’s hands was distorted.
‘Deception’ is very readable with some great examples.
Every so often there comes along a new daft idea (or a newly-packaged old idea that has been mangled out of recognition (and thereby rendered useless) so that its “inventor” can be designated as a guru. (Me? Cynical? Never!) One of the more unfortunate manifestations of this phenomenon was the three part lesson. It sounds good and logical, but then the thing that usually happens happened: Ofsted started insisting on it, and headteachers demanded to witness it in every lesson. Woe betide the brilliant but hapless teacher whose lesson plans failed to include the three parts.
This doesn’t just happen with things like lesson plans — it happens with everything. When I was an IT advisor the deputy headteacher of one school insisted on having students use a version of one of the systems called integrated learning for a whole lesson — despite my informing him that all the research suggested the optimum time was 15 minutes.
It happened when I was a senior manager in a local authority, when someone from Ofsted gave a talk in which he said technology should be used in every lesson — and that if the teacher couldn’t use it he or she should make sure to mention that technology could have been used.
It happened when I was involved in technology training for headteachers, in which role I heard of headteachers who insisted on interactive whiteboards or computers being on in every classroom in every lesson — not used necessarily, just on.
It happened when the Department for Education introduced levels, which were intended to give an idea of where students were at the end of a key stage in the National Curriculum. Some headteachers decided it would be far more useful to give a level to every lesson and every piece of work.
I daresay there are schools in which teachers are expected to divide all their lessons into manageable chunks in accordance with Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). The fact that CLT is light on the specifics and is a load of rubbish is seemingly no deterrent.
All of which is to say that although I’ve focussed on the three-part lesson in this article, I am really using it as a proxy for all the hare-brained policies I’ve come across that are founded on the myth that there is a magic bullet in education.
Anyway, I was trawling through the Freedman archives when I came across this article written in 2004. Although it originally referred to “ICT”, it could just as easily refer to “Computing”, so I’ve made a few changes accordingly. The insistence on the three part lesson has since been thrown into the dustbin of education history, thank goodness -- though I daresay there are still some headteachers who swear by it.
Having a structure to your lesson is definitely good – but having a prescriptive approach like saying all lessons must have X number of parts, where X is any number you like, appears to have no firm basis at all. In fact, for a thorough debunking of the rigid application of the three part lesson structure, I recommend Tom Bennett's book, Teacher Proof, which I reviewed here. (I haven’t linked to it because its price on Amazon — the paperback version — is £73, which I regard as a tad expensive.)
Anyway, here’s the article. Enjoy.
The 3,000 Part Lesson
The idea of the 3-part lesson is not exactly new. Long-in-the-tooth educationalists will recall the original description of the 3-part lesson:
“First I tells ‘em what I’m going to ell ‘em, then I tells ‘em, then I tells ‘em what I told ‘em”.
To be fair, and also boringly pedantic and modern (which is probably a tautological statement in itself), the first part of that is a declaration of lesson objectives rather than of intended learning outcomes. Even so, you can see the similarities between this “old-fashioned” approach and the current “conventional” wisdom.
I wouldn’t mind – in fact, I think the formalisation of the concept of the 3-part lesson is very useful. But there is no consistency. The 3-part lesson has developed into the 4-part lesson, and I’ve recently come across a project that promotes the idea of the 6-part lesson, and a school which bases all its lesson planning on the model of a 7-part lesson.
None of these goes far enough.
I propose the 3000-part lesson. Based on the “ideal” lesson time for discrete Computing lessons of 50 minutes, the 3000-part lesson would itemise exactly what was to happen in each second of the lesson. Nothing would be left to chance.
I do have some philosophical questions though. For example, part 1 of my ideal lesson is “Preparing to change the mind set of the pupils entering the classroom”. Should this be counted as part 1 of the lesson or, because it actually starts before the lesson, is it more legitimate to regard it as part 3001 of the previous lesson?”
Please send your answers on a self-addressed postcard.
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A title perhaps more at home in your school library than a specific department. That’s because The Book at War is a fascinating study of how books and other reading matter have variously influenced politics, propaganda and history over time, making it a useful starting point for discussion around issues such as free speech.
Among its intriguing, lesser-known facts is the detail that picture postcards with military themes, rather than beaches, have been used in other countries as tools of persuasion. Closer to home, there’s some thoughtful exploration of the historically symbiotic relationship between British newspapers and the country’s publishing industry, and interesting analysis of how the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen came to prominence after WWI, contrasted with the popularity of gung-ho wartime texts for younger readers, such as The Boy’s Own Paper.
Highly recommended.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.