Tonight’s meeting was different from those held last term in that all schools in each regional cluster met together.  Rather than just year groups, each school as a whole, was asked to share one or two ideas that were working to improve writing.  As the meeting was only an hour it meant, in reality, one 5 min presentation per school.   With a little flexibility built into the timings we managed to cover a wide range of initiatives from practitioners from Foundation Stage through to Y6.

It would be naive to believe all the teachers from our cluster felt enthusiastic about tonight’s meeting.   Unlike teachmeets where people come along to listen and share of their own volition, many teachers tonight didn’t choose to attend, they were directed.   Some staff would no doubt have preferred their own staff meetings back at base.   Some of those presenting were certainly very nervous about sharing with an audience of over 150 rather than a smaller number of colleagues from their own schools, but the evening was a success nevertheless.   The presentations well received and supported, and definitely took some presenters out of their comfort zone!   We finished a few minutes early to give staff time to share emails and phone numbers, to bounce ideas off each other and plan further collaboration.   What may have seemed to some, an unnecessary gathering, finished as the start of a new way of networking locally.  In lots of instances tonight was about reaffirming the things we are all already doing in isolation, in some cases it was about sharing new ideas and initiatives that have proved successful but most importantly, tonight was about teachers sharing their practice with other teachers beyond their classrooms and schools.  Our meeting was one of four taking place simultaneously across the town. It will be interesting to share how the other three went and it will be interesting to see where the Primary Partnership takes us, for such a collaborative approach offers huge potential for the professional development of staff and their classroom practice.

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This year has seen a rise in the use of techology to support learning beyond school.   Some of the approaches we have been using for a while at Hawes Side really helped to bridge the home-school gap and the installation of a green screen further supported us in extending learning opportunities.   Here are some of this year’s biggest successes in the use of technology to take learning beyond the school gates.

Blogging – this has continued to rise and be utilised to support and share learning.   The introduction of staff surgeries and a coaching appoach to its development has obviously helped get everyone on board and it was no mean feat to get all 21 classes up and running!   The live blogging this year, from York and Robin Wood, were really powerful and got the parents engaged like never before.   They were able to follow their children’s exploits on the two residentials and comment back.   The pupils and staff blogged about everything, from the coach journey and what they had for breakfast to the Minster, the Jorvik Centre and much more.   Seeing what they were up to and being able to comment back on things as they were happening was a revelation for many.   It is now very much a part of how we intend to take blogging forward.

Green Screen – we were fortunate enough this year, to work closely with CMS, a Blackpool media company who fitted us a green screen sudio.   We have been meeting with the company regularly to develop the system and now have a great little set up that the children have confidently made excellent use of.   There are many examples of how this has helped extend the childen’s learning but my favourite story from the green screen was Emily’s advert.   One of our Y6 classes were filming adverts they’d written to support work on persuasive writing.   I watched some of them on the class blog and was impressed with Emily’s as she is such a quiet girl and her advert belied this fact!   I tweeted out the advert and received a message back from Mr Tobin aka @narthernlad to ask if he could use the advert as a stimulus for his  Y3 writing lesson!   Emily was delighted when Ian sent pictures back from his class showing them watching her advert and producing their own work based on it!  The green screen, and the use of twitter to share learning is certainly something we wil be expanding on in 2012.

Web 2.0 – like children in a toy shop we have continued to play with lot of web 2.0 tools and made use of some more than others. Among the favourites in school are wordle and tagxedo, wallwisher, voki, voicethread, photopeach, animoto and prezi.   Wallwisher has been used well to link with partner schools around Europe and Australia, to gauge parents views on things and collect their thoughts and ideas.   We have used it to ask questions of our partner schools and community and it is a simple and effective way of collating feedback.   Dropping our school development plan into wordle was also reassuring as the words learning and children came out the largest!

QR Codes – the children have really enjoyed using QR codes.   They stick them on displays to lead viewers to further information, they stick them in their books to link to online content and each class door displays a QR code that leads to ther class blog.   Next year we intend to create trails with facts and puzzles around school to make a tour of the site an interactive experience!

School Website – our website is always being developed and this year we have changed a lot of content and its look.   Thanks to the green screen we have added video introductions and tours with testimonials from staff and children.   We have moved away from a text heavy site that no one really wants to wade through and replaced it with a more fun, interactive and engaging experience.   We have woked with a company called Virtualsixty to build what we hope is a more appealing and exciting introduction to the school and more.  The use of programmes such as I am Learning ensure that the children and their families are able to extend learning by logging on via the website.

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Our previous ICT groups have operated under different names; The ICT Group, The ICT strategy Group, Web 2.0 Kids but essentially it is a group of 10 and 11 year olds who support the school in developing the use of technology in the classroom. From road testing hardware to presenting on Web 2.0 to staff the group have a key role in taking us forward.

Our first ICT Group was formed several years ago, when we asked a group of interested Y6 children to take away some netbooks to trial. We asked them to play with them for a week and let us know what they thought. Their findings surprised us- they said they were ok for connectivity but the keyboard was too small and children would want full size laptops-but most importantly we realised we had been missing an important voice in our development of technology in school, the user. One of them gave us a detailed written summary of the netbooks’ capabilities and potential for classroom use!

Since then our different groups of digital leaders have sported less confident staff in the development of class blogs (each year group is assigned Pupil ICT support) researched and presented on web 2.0 tools (identifying a key number to support learning) and presented nationally on their work at the ICT Register event. In the summer we held our first ever ‘kidsmeet’ which gave the children the chance to share what they had been doing with other schools who were using similar approaches. They regularly share their findings with staff and governors on different aspects of technology and in the new year, our New Digital Leaders will present to a larger number of schools on the ‘I am Learning‘ platform.

The children have an important voice in the development of technology across the school. Year after year they surprise us with their increasing knowledge, their mature approach to its use to support learning and their willingness to research, share and move our thinking forward.

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Most recently though, my second son has been having a more difficult time than usual and it has got to all of us a bit. It’s heartbreaking when your son or daughter tell you they have no friends, no one wants to talk to them and they spend most of their time alone. Niall recently said to me ‘I just don’t want to be lonely anymore’.

All through school we fought to be heard, to be understood, to find people who really, genuinely wanted to help and are sympathetic to the difficulties. Niall was statemented at 9 years old when he was in Y5. Up to that point he had been simply regarded as difficult, naughty, cheeky, you name it. I am sure there were those who still felt this to be the case after he got a statement. Our parenting was called into question and what he was generally felt to need was some firm discipline. He had huge problems dealing with instructions, a pragmatic, semantic difficulty means he interprets what he hears differently. He used to panic as a youngster when he mum said she was just going to dive in the bath! Because his problems aren’t extreme it’s easy to think they’re not real, he has never wanted to share them for fear of sticking out. He declined any support throughout high school as in his first term an SEN teacher came into his class and said, in front of everyone ‘Come on Niall, it’s time for your ‘Let’s sort it out’ session.” He tried hard to fit in, to understand the social mores and be accepted.

School was always difficult to get right, not so much academically (although he really doesn’t get maths!) but more socially and emotionally. He interprets things literally, speaks out of turn and inappropriately, but is devastated when such misdemeanours are pointed out. Forging good relationships with staff proved hard and with peers even harder. He has one good friend who he has known since he was five years old but beyond this, he struggles socially.

He was recently told by ‘friends’ at college that no one liked him, they found his behaviour odd and didn’t know how to deal with him. We’re currently working through this with him, telling him that as people get older difference are celebrated rather than ridiculed, that his unique outlook and creativity will serve him well as he enters adulthood. I hope the constant encouragement and support from home can balance the difficulty he faces daily beyond it.

The children had been creating photostories and presentations at home and we were finding it difficult to share their work on any scale in school.   We decided to install screens around the place and scheduled the children’s work to play at key times during the day.   The children are used to the screens now and look forward to seeing their work being broadcast around school but I can still remember the look on thier faces when they were first installed.

I often tell the story of a disenchanted pupil in Y3 who with the support of an enlightened teacher learned to use photostory.   He persuaded his mum to come along to one of our parents’ workshops and less than a week later he was producing photostories for his maths and other films to support different areas of learning.   He loved seeing his work around school and it had a profound impact on his attitude to his learning.   Not only that, his friends saw the potential and got in on the act!   Soon we had children bringing in their own projects for us to broadcast across the school.

As with anything new, when we fitted the screens we weren’t quite sure of where we might go with them.   We began to test and stretch their capabilities and eventually felt we needed something more.    We were fortunate to meet CMS, a local media company who agreed to fit a green screen studio for us in school.   This gave us the opportunity to put the sceens  to much better use.   To not only share the children’s work, but also to create their own in-house films, adverts, vodcasts and more.   Some of the early projects were great fun and the children immediately saw huge possibilities   With the aid of twitter, an early advert made as part of a Y6 literacy lesson was used by a school in Bradford as a stimulus for a Y3 writing lesson! The children quickly turned the green screen into a roller coaster, a newsroom, the beach, a playground, outer space, you name it!!

Current projects include ‘Hawes Siders’ our school soap, ‘A story from School’ our answer to Cbeebies’ Bedtime story and the teaching and learning group are making a film about how children feel about marking – this is for staff and will be used at our next professional development meeting after Christmas.   The children find the green screen easy to use and it supports their basic skills development giving them plenty of opportunity for speaking and listening, reading and writing (planning, scripting and autocue feature as much in any project as filming and presenting.)   The green screen studio has enabled us to explore further possiblities in the use of technology to support learning, the screens enable us to share  this learning.   We also use a scrolling RSS feed on the screens to advertise class blogs and relevant information.   Custom widgets also allow us to screen house point totals, birthdays, awards, sports news and much more.   Live broadcasting is our next step, beaming in-house offerings across the classrooms and screens around school.   The learning will be televised!

Our international partnerships have developed over a few years.   We’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in Comenius projects and have also developed our own partnerships with school in Australia and China, but how do such partnerships benefit school?   What difference does any of this make?

If staff attend a course or training session they will invariably come back to school citing the informal chat and the lunch as particularly valued times, it enables them to network and share ideas.   The course content is often lost very quickly once back in school, making little lasting impact on practice.   Through British Council funded Comenius projects we have been able  to take CPD to a different level witnessing a profound and lasting impact on those involved.   Staff have gained so much of lasting value by visiting partner schools in Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium and Finland.   Our current project will enable teachers and support staff to visit schools in Turkey, Estonia, Germany, Poland and France.   Once staff leave school the dialogue begins, once they arrive at partner schools the conversation develops, comparing, contrasting sharing similarities and exchanging ideas and apporoaches.

The impact of international work at a school and individual level easily outlasts the duration of the visit.  For those interested the opportunity to take part excites and motivates them, it puts a spring in their step and adds additional enthsiasm to their practice both prior to visits and after them.   The sense of purpose such projects can bring to the children’s work means they are also further motivated by an international peer audience.  The opportunity to develop an ongoing online dialogue has never been easier, the chance to share information never simpler or more immediate.

The work with our Australian partners has been documented here previously.   The opportunites to visit each others’ schools is obviously limited but the children have benefited from video conferencing and use of web 2.0 tools such as wallwisher.   We make good use of email and blogging too.   The new link with China is developing and again I have posted about this here already.   The children are fascinated by a culture so different to theirs.   They are thoroughy enjoying finding out all about school and life for children at our partner school in Beijing.   Along with our partner school, Robin Hood in Birmingham, we hope to be able to take pupils out to China by next summer.

For our pupils, finding out about other cultures and comparing them to their own is developing their cultural awareness and understanding in a way no PSHE lesson could hope to do.   The chance to work on international projects has given staff and pupils a global perspective and an opportunity to look beyond local practices and solutions.   It has given them an appetite for working across the world with peers who develop their knowledge and understanding and further their learning.

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The first thing that impresses you about working with Tim Rylands is he doesn’t just talk about it, he does it.   Before we agreed to our two days with him as part of our Kaizen staff training and development, Tim urged me to put him in front of children, so that staff could see his ideas and approaches in action.   It meant a lot.   It gave him credibility with staff because he got up and delivered.   To sixty children at a time! Y2, Y4 and Y6.   Three demo lessons that had the children reaching for language and stretching their imagination like never before.   Staff were invited to get involved and enjoyed the opportunity to watch the children but also to immerse themselves in the virtual worlds being created.   It was great to see some of our more reticent children rising to Tim’s challenges, growing in stature and having a ball.   Staff observed Tim using a range of strategies to draw the maximum out of pupils, to plant a seed, to nudge, provoke and promote thinking.

One of the devices Tim used with the children was to speak to them, listen to them for a while and then ask if he could come back to them later – which he always did.   This enabled the children to think about what they were going to say next – a sort of drip feed that encouraged, prompted and helped them push their ideas along.   Facial expression, tone of voice and use of props all played a part in the demo lessons.   Staff took a lot away from the sessions and reported that it helped the next day make all the more sense.

Tim’s reputation comes from his fantastic work with Myst but it would be doing him a disservice to suggest it rests solely on this.   His work with the staff in our network took us beyond technology and gaming.  He paused scenes in a number of games and encouraged staff to think about what they could see, sense, feel, smell.  He asked them to picture scenes, take on the role of characters and imagine journeys, lives and outcomes.   Just as he had with the children the day before.   The same approaches could be taken with pictures and artifacts, through role play and much more.   At its core Tim’s work is about the art and craft of teaching, a creative, questioning approach used to great effect to draw the very best out of the children, to make learning an exciting adventure.

The morning exercise is a great way to start the day in a city with little space for such activity.   The children arrive early to take advantage of the playing areas at the school, to play table tennis, basketball, to run around the running track and spend time with friends before registering and coming back onto the yard in classes. The impressive sight of thousands of children taking part in exercise routines is preceeded by announcements and messages from staff and pupils.   The children take an active role in all aspects of life at school.   They are chosen by classmates as class leaders in key areas, they are encouraged to share their thinking, their ideas and their learning.   They stand to speak and chose those to speak after them, encouraging full participation.  Each lesson is preceeded by a pupil presentation on an aspect of independent study.   Each presentation supported, encouraged and applauded.  The respect agenda is high, supported by Confucius philosophy that underpins the school’s values and beliefs.

Hawes Side, Robin Hood and Experimental School No.2 are embarking on a partnership which will see us all learning from each other, sharing our approaches, ideas and experiences. It will take a while to digest all the things we saw on this visit, but we are excited about the possiblities to learn from each other as our partnership progresses.

For such sessions to be successful a coaching culture of support and encouragement needs to be present.   Staff have to feel comfortable to come along and hold their hand up without fear of judgement, there has to be a shared understanding that not everyone will get it and if you don’t others will be there to help.   It sounds easy but our profession hasn’t exactly encouraged such an approach in the past.   For many. admitting a lack of understanding or ability would have been seen as failure rather than a cry for help.   Building an environment where people feel comfortable in asking for support from their peers (and the pupils in some cases) is helping us to target support, use our experts and develop professionally from within.

The staff surgery is proving helpful in developing the ICT capabilities of staff but it is a model the could be used in any given area.   As the landscape shifts and schools are being left to search out their own CPD more and more, it is important we make the most of our own internal strengths.   Some of these may be lying dormant as we speak!

The day began with a review of ground rules in order for everyone to feel comfortable, their opinions and ideas valued, their contibutions respected.   The following agreed words enabled us to set the right tone:

• Respect for all views
• Freedom to speak and confidence to disagree
• Confidentiality
• Support and encouragement
• Clear, effective communication
• Consider the bigger picture
• Generate outcomes/follow through actions

Last year we held a Leadership Day for all staff with the University of Cumbria and they introduced us to the work of Lencioni.   We took this opportunity to revisit Lencioni’s work on the dysfunctions of a team and spent some time discussing how these can create disharmony and what we need to do to ensure we always take the opposite approach.

Lencionis’ Five Dysfunctions

1. Absence of trust
2. Fear of conflict
3. Lack of commitment
4. Avoidance of accountability
5. Inattention to results

The opposite, positive approach would be:

1. Trusting one another
2. Engaging in unfiltered conflict around ideas
3. Commiting to decisions and plans of action
4. Holding one another accountable for delivering those plans
5. Focusing on achievement of collective results

Looking again at this work made us all aware of our own responsibilities as part of a team and as leaders of our own teams.   

We have previously used the dream/nightmare staffroom scenario to help us all see the kind of place we wanted school to be and the kind of place we should work hard to ensure it wasn’t.  This time we used the question ‘what makes Hawes Side, Hawes Side?’ It got us all thinking about the things that are special to our school and that give us a sense of pride in our work.  

We then reviewed what had gone well over the last 12 months and what our priorities were for the next academic year at a personal, team and school level.   This opportunity to reflect, review and think ahead gave us a clear indication of where to focus our attention when shaping this year’s development plan.   

The chance to spend such a day with staff is all too rare.   To be able to engage in professional dialogue, share ideas, philosophies, values and vision at length is something we’re not geared up for in school.   Time is always pressing and conversation usually brief, caught on the hop.  So much of our time in school is spent firefighting  that we rarely get our heads above the parapet to see the bigger picture, to reflect on our practice and share our ideas, our hopes and fears.  The Leadership Day gave us the time and space to do the things it is difficult to do once the cut and thrust of term begins.