Education in Australia?

Is the NSW government the only sensible player in education reform?

Now that the election has been run and won by Tony Abbott, attention is now turning back to three word slogans about boats and the economy. Fortunately, some people are also asking questions about the future of education in Australia too. While debate still rages about the long term impact and effectiveness of Labor’s reforms, commentators are starting to ask what an Abbott Coalition will do with schooling in Australia.

Peter Job has a decidedly broad view about what needs to be done and a clear idea of went wrong for Labor (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-23/job-labors-failed-education-revolution/4975262). Entitled “Labor’s failed education revolution”, he derides Labor’s Gonski/Better Schools Plan as failing because it focused too much on funding. He also accuses the Labor created NAPLAN, MySchool and performance pay policies as leading to poorer quality education. Ironically, he argues for more funding for public schools (can’t see Abbott doing that) and:

• recognising their unique role in addressing the needs of all - the gifted and the disabled, the advantaged and the disadvantaged
•  the adoption of the practices of countries which achieve above us in international measures rather than those which achieve below
• valuing teacher professionalism
• allowing teachers to use their professional knowledge as they judge best to address the diverse needs of their students.

While these are nice statements to address what he sees as the growing inequalities in the system, this doesn’t really address any of the practical aspects of achieving them. Sure the final Gonski package did miss some key aspects but it was better than doing nothing, which was the policy of the Coalition until just before the election when they agreed with Labor. However, his criticisms of NAPLAN and MySchool are genuine and have negative impacts on schools. I have experienced many a concerned parent quoting NAPLAN figures at me during interviews because their child may not have been above standard in all areas. They often fail to see that this is one measure at one point in time and that students improve over the course of the year, often doing better in the second half of the year when the tests are NOT held. Similarly, I have been at schools that have altered curriculum to prepare students for NAPLAN, although we officially do not do that, and thus upset a well thought out program. Finally, the pressure school administrators place on teachers to improve NAPLAN results or ensure certain children are absent on testing days has also been well documented.

Kevin Donnelly is clearly enraptured with the Abbott victory, so much so that he seems to be delusional. In the opening to his piece “Policy challenge: Abbott’s education plans” (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-19/donnelly-abbott-government-education/4967216) he states that: “The Abbott Government has clearly signalled school education as an important policy issue…” Clearly he saw something most of the voting public missed because despite following the election very closely I didn’t see any major announcements by the Coalition on school education. In fact, wasn’t it Chris Pyne that one day said he was dead set against Gonski but the next day agreed it was the best way to go forward then proceeded to not mention the issue again throughout the course of the campaign. That’s ok though, Kevin is often a little confused when it comes to what is best for school children. Having read a few of his books, he would like schooling to be about phonics and the three Rs – that’s it! So it is not surprising that he is in favour of decentralising education control from Canberra and reviewing both NAPLAN and the National Curriculum. It did surprise me though that he was a fan of letting non-qualified teachers into classrooms when he is so focused on improving Australia’s standing in international testing. Maybe he thinks the current lot do such a bad job that amateurs couldn’t do much worse. Apart from that he likes having reviews of everything so he doesn’t need to specify how he would transport education back to the 1950s.

Thus, these two pieces provide a contrast in political stand points but the same lack of clear direction for Australia’s education future. Peter Job may have some nice broad sweeping statements about how it should be but derides the one side of politics that could actually implement his schemes. Kevin Donnelly remains an outlying, conservative educational commentator that will probably have greater sway with Abbott so be ready for your phonics everyone. However, neither spoke of the reduced funding to the university sector, where reform and improvements to teaching can actually occur, or clear plans for improved teacher professionalism and development. Maybe we should start the conversation around the NSW government’s Great Teaching, Inspired Learning policy (http://theconversation.com/nsw-government-makes-a-positive-start-on-reforming-teaching-quality-8549) that actually brings all the aspects together and starts by respecting teacher professionalism.

Regardless of who is in power in Canberra or the states, education is not only about NAPLAN or international testing or funding. A real debate about the role of public funding and curriculum that respects the professionalism of teachers to make the best decisions (we wouldn’t question a doctor’s prognosis with quite the same vehemence we do that of teachers) is needed to address the perceived slide in standards in Australia. This has to begin now as we have already fallen behind and the new century will not wait for us to catch up.

"Because it's there"

Mallory on Everest, did he make it?

Two Sundays ago I had the pleasure of watching the inspiring documentary The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest on ABC2’s Sunday Best. The documentary examined the life of famous climber George Mallory and claims that he was in fact the first person to successfully climb Mt Everest. While the evidence might contradict history’s claim that this was done by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, George Mallory’s determination to conquer the impossible provides an important parallel to the work of teachers in classrooms: curricula and assessment.

To explain, George Mallory was once asked "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?"

His response, "Because it's there".

While this has become arguably the most famous quote in mountaineering, importantly, it showed his determination to conquer the impossible. However, it might also be a response many teachers have to the question by students: “Why are we studying this topic?” or “Why do we have to do this task?” That is, we are often forced into covering material or grading students on tasks simply because they are written into curriculum documents or told to us by various heads of department. This can often be at the expense of material that genuinely engages the students and thus destroys a love of learning. Moreover, this view can be expressed in meetings or informal talks between subject teachers yet nothing gets changed at a departmental level because they lack the agency to make it happen.

I find myself struggling with this too when I teach history. The national curriculum has very clear guidelines in terms of content and topics to be covered. Unfortunately, this does not reflect the actual amount of time teachers have to teach the course or whether students want to relearn the same material in a slightly different way for the 10^th time. For instance, I recently taught the section on Movement of People and found that the topic that got the most complaints was Australian experiences of settlement. While I see the importance of looking at convicts, settlers and First Australians, this material is done to death in lower grades and thus students feel like they are being punished. Moreover, the lack of time I had to teach the material meant it was covered in a brief manner that did not do the topic justice.

However, in some senses I was happy to take this criticism. I spent most of the unit looking at the slave trade and William Wilberforce, topics that really engaged the students. We were able to explore the issue of modern slavery, Kony 2012 and the role of politics in creating change. From a curriculum stand point this was barely a quarter of the unit but based on the student’s reaction to and engagement with the topic, I judged it prudent to lose time on these other topics. Furthermore, I had a supportive head of department that was willing to allow me to do this as long as I covered certain topics in enough detail.

So coming back to Mallory: how often do we teach something “because it’s there”? Is this good enough? Should we all just throw out the curriculum and all go our own way? Is following the curriculum exactly the wildest dream after all?

In reality, curriculum is written to provide an outline for teachers with assessment as a way to mark student progress for report cards. Each school is different with some being stricter than others. For instance, at a middle school in Canberra they literally map out a lesson by lesson plan which they expect to be followed. In other cases, curriculum is just a guide with heads of department willing to negotiate certain aspects while ensuring assessment standards are maintained. Thus most teachers follow the curriculum for the most part, try to finish it if they can and if not they don’t get too stressed.

However, if Mallory could have the wildest dream of conquering Mt Everest, why can’t teachers have the wildest dream of freedom of curriculum? Clearly various forms of national or state curricula and testing lead to targeted lessons to help students do best in the final exam (and this is of course a natural outcome of this model) but is there an alternative?

If our focus of schooling is to ensure students can pass a written exam on a given day on a given amount of content then we are on the right track but this does not reflect the real world. No worthwhile job in the real world nowadays relies on a set amount of content with a written exam at the end. Most jobs require students to be flexible and creative thinkers: problem solvers who can adapt to a range of situations. The school model with its mandated curricula and assessment in no way reflects this reality.

Wouldn't it be better to give students a topic area and ask them to come up with a task to hand in? Of course guidelines would be required and students may not love every topic area but at least they could explore the topic area in a way that engaged them. Rather than saying we will study and do a test on First Australians, settler men, settler women and convicts, imagine if I had said to my class: choose an area on the settlement of Australia from 1788 to 1901 and decide on an assessment task to give me. I can now imagine a class full of students bursting with ideas about what to research and how to present it. Imagine: all the students with relatives who were convicts, students who had visited Indigenous communities and learnt some of their customs, students interested in the politics of early Sydney and the various other possibilities. Now imagine all the various ways they might like to show their knowledge: iPad apps, websites, computer games, museum displays, videos etc.

In summary, like Mallory, this post may meet its end in the death zone: starved of oxygen, not at the pinnacle and forgotten about until dug up 75 years later (see picture). However, just as Mallory had the wildest dream of conquering the impossible, there is nothing wrong with the wildest dream of education: genuinely engaging classes with all students buying into the process. This may not be achieved under current curricula and assessment practices but we need to start making attempts at the summit. Who knows, we one day might make it.

An Outbreak of Learning!

Today I nearly destroyed the planet. After initially failing to infect the entire planet with my deadly virus, I eventually worked out how to best spread the virus before beginning its destructive path to total annihilation. Fortunately, a few of my students did manage to destroy the planet so all in all it was a successful day.

The experience I described above came about due to my interest in the notion of gamification. Gamification is the process of using computer games, such as apps or fully fledged X-box games, to teach students. While this may sound like an excuse to play computer games in class, the upside to a proper implementation of gamification can be enormous.

I decided to try gamification with my Year 8 History class. We are studying Medieval Europe and I thought that the Plague might be a fun way to experiment with computer games. I had heard of this app called "Infect the World" and had seen some students play it in their spare time. After researching the app, and to my delight discovering it was free for a lite version, I decided that it fitted the criteria for good gamification:

1) Good content

2) Game joined seamlessly to content

3) Good game

Firstly, the Plague is the gory kind of topic that boys love because if they aren't infecting the room with their own odors, they often complain about the ones their friends make. Plus a quick inspection of any locker room towards the end of the year will reveal a plethora of never before seen bacteria and viruses fermenting in left over lunches and snacks.

Secondly, the game itself involved choosing the traits and environmental conditions to help spread your virus around the world. From sores to coughs, vomiting and diarrhea, these were all the classic symptoms of the Black Death and Great Plague that formed the historical content of the lesson. Moreover, the environmental conditions they could create in the game using heat and cold allowed them to mimic the conditions that caused these major outbreaks in history.

Finally, the game itself is reasonably fun to play. Once you get your head around the way to manipulate your virus and the frustration of quarantines and cures, it can be quite addictive. In fact, I originally only intended to play the game with the class for 30 minutes but extended this to 50 minutes because on my second turn I was actually winning and beating the game. This is even more surprising considering the relatively simple display but a dose of healthy competition in the class definitely helped.

The biggest reward however came in the wrap up to the lesson. After playing the game for almost an hour, I dreaded finishing up to do some basic research on the Black Death and Great Plague so that they could complete some scaffold summaries. However, the experience of playing the game made the students more willing to do this grunt work and when I showed them the connection between the viruses they had created and the actual plagues they were genuinely excited. As one student said to me at the end of the lesson, "Before I didn't get how the plague could spread but now I can see the ways that it did in real life." Moreover, the use of some Venn diagrams and bespoke scaffolds allowed me to effectively link the game with the historical content.

Thus, in summary, I would suggest everyone give gamification a go. Finding the right game for the content can be tricky, right now I am toying with the idea of a combat game to teach the Crusades, but when it fits nicely the results are spectacular. It is especially nice to see the kids that are usually so bored get into the game and furthermore see their eyes shine when they start to make the connections to the class content. But most importantly, I need to stop writing this blog so I can go back to infecting the world - my learning journey never ends.

Starry Night

Starry Night by Van Gogh

This week I continued my exploration of inquiry based teaching in my Year 7 English classes. We are currently working on a poetry unit and I thought that this provided a great opportunity to put into practice what I had learnt from MoMA. As it turned out, there was much more to it than just a beautiful piece of art.

I started the week with the simple inquiry question: “What is poetry?” They were mostly silent to begin with but once people started mentioning types of poems, the names of poems and poets started flowing. It was also interesting to see the technical language they used such as rhyme because it gave me a good insight into how much work will be required to teach them analysis skills. This tied in well with the course I have been doing on differentiation and it was pleasing to see the two ideas intersect.

I then followed this mind mapping activity up with a hands-on poetry experience. One of my fears when I teach poetry is that students think poetry is either incomprehensible garbage or just a laundry list of technical terms applied to words, lines and stanzas. I remember at school how much fun I had discovering poetry through the work of William Carlos Williams and I wanted them to know that poetry is accessible and fun. So, with a pen in hand, we headed out to the school oval with a 5 senses scaffold (created from a 5 sense picture of Google images). My idea was simple: experience the oval and write a poem about it. After a few brief instructions, with most students ignoring my pleading to “please do this activity by yourself”, I had them touching and eating grass, sniffing the breeze, examining the various items left on the oval and gazing upwards at the sky. We then headed over to some tables and wrote. Unsurprisingly, many of them chose to write acrostic poems but I told myself that next time I would push them to write something more ‘proper’ because I didn’t want to be too restrictive this early on.

The next day, having already successfully written one poem, I decided to try the activity again but using Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. I got the idea from the MoMA education page using their theme based categories. Not only was the painting visually appealing, particularly the way the stars are portrayed, but it captured a wonder I hoped would inspire the kids. Moreover, I decided to team teach the lesson with my colleague as we both had reduced classes due to a school activity.

Using the same 5 sense scaffold, together we elicited responses to the painting. Using that great question of “what else do you see?” we were able to generate an extensive list of items and feelings. I was really impressed by the way the students could see different interpretations in the painting, such as the hills being a tsunami or wave, and the interactions the painting generated as students were keen to share their ideas. In fact, they were so keen to share that we had to remind them to share with the class rather than just blurt out answers to their friends. Next we got them to write a 7 to 10 line poem about Starry Night.

I was amazed!

The quality of the work they produced was out of this world – and only 1 or 2 acrostic poems in sight. From poems about drowning to trips down some filled alleys, the students were able to use the 5 senses to create moving poems as diverse as the class itself. Moreover, everyone was able to complete the task and I didn’t hear a single complaint about poetry being boring or too difficult. I especially loved being able to share some of the poems with the class as both of us teachers discussed how our childhood memories effected our own poems. The highlight though for me was the work of a Chinese student who is just learning English and the wonderfully natural way he crafts his poems. He often asks for help because he sees himself as weak in English but every poem of his I read amazes me with its grace.

Thus, inquiry based learning once again came up with the unexpected and rewarding. The painting and activities is definitely something I will reuse plus this way of getting the students to write poetry is really effective. Rather than complaints about poems being too boring or difficult, artwork allows them to express what they see in the work and how they interpret the world. The results so far have been wonderful and I have the pleasure of putting their poems together in a book for the class. Just like the glistening, golden stars in the painting, my students really showed me how they shined.

It's all in the journey

Mickey Arthur at a Cricket Australia press conference

Successful teachers and coaches have a lot in common: the skills required to get a team or individual to be the best in their sporting field is not that dissimilar to getting a student to ace an exam or write a great assignment. So it was with some interest that I saw a tweet about an interview with former Australian cricket coach Mickey Arthur (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-22/interview-mickey-arthur/4905796?section=sport).

For those who don't know, Mickey Arthur was the South African born coach of the Australian cricket team up until just before the Ashes started a month or so ago. A controversial selection in the first place, his tenure as coach was littered with rumblings about his style and ability to deal with the various egos that dominated the team. The most notorious of these incidents became known as "homework-gate" in which a number of players were sent home during a tour of India for not abiding by team rules and failing to hand in a reflection task on how they could contribute to the team's future success. Predictably at the time there was a chorus of criticism: how dare this non-Australian blow in tell our cricketers what to do (but of course we aren't racist in Australia, we just don't let the foreigners near the cricket team unless they are good spin bowlers) and why is he treating them like children and making them do homework?

At the time I felt a fair bit of sympathy for Mickey Arthur and I secretly suspected all cricket following teachers might have too - even if they didn't like a South African coaching Australia. The frustration of students not completing homework can become a huge millstone around your neck as you are required to cajole then threaten and finally carry through on detentions and phone calls home to get that one paragraph summary that would only take 5 minutes to write if they just bloody did it! The alternative is to make threats and not follow through but that then makes the situation worse as you need to reinforce any punishments that much more to ensure they don't take advantage of you. So I could understand his annoyance at paid professionals, with honestly not that much to do apart from attend training and play cricket, being too lazy to write a few sentences suggesting ways they could contribute in the next game. Apart from the trivialisation of homework (NB: I'm sure every cricket following student in Australia saw it as tacit encouragement to not do their homework), it seemed to me much more about respect and attitude. The act of not handing in something the coach asked is just disrespectful and says that you don't care about the team or anyone apart from yourself. Moreover, the players sent home did seem to have the biggest egos in the squad so maybe this assertion was not far off the mark.

Fast forward to the Ashes and Mickey Arthur is sacked as Australian coach. Cricket Australia cite poor performances and a lack of team discipline as the reasons - the irony being that this came from the same people who refused to properly sanction the "homework-gate" offenders and allowed them to retain their senior positions in the team. They then appoint an Australian - thank God the masses cry as they vehemently deny that it was performance and not Arthur's South Africaness they disliked - to coach the team as ex-players galore claim that this is the boost the team needs to win the series. Moreover, the ill-disciplined boof-head (sorry David but it is true) that sparked Arthur's sacking even admits he is to blame for destroying someone else's career while he gets second chance after second chance and making heaps of money for his troubles. Unsurprisingly to anyone who could stop being a one-eyed supporter for half a minute, the Australian team has not performed any better under new management and all hope now rests on home ground advantage. So it was great at this time for Mickey Arthur to give an interview on ABC Radio.

If I had been in Mickey Arthur's shoes I would have been pretty bitter and angry. Here was a guy trying to coach a team in a period of rebuilding, following unprecedented and sustained success, and rather than support he gets the boot. Also, the irony that the same players who were ill-disciplined are rewarded with spots in the team and full forgiveness by the new coach would have made my blood boil. So as I eagerly await his first hand grenade about the Australian team all I get is... happiness. What is this? Isn't he angry or upset? Where does this happiness come from? He must be nuts.

As I listened more carefully, particularly as he described his coaching philosophy, I realised that he was a much better person than I am because he was above all that. His main concern at the time, and to this day as he watches the Ashes from his living room, was the individual development of players as people not cricketers. For him, it was much more important to develop an environment and culture with the right values that fostered individual development rather than just teach them the right way to bat or bowl. Moreover, even though he no longer coaches them, he recounted with passion his frustration at watching them make the same mistakes over and over, wishing he could just step in and give them a quiet word about hitting the ball straighter so that they don't get out again. Finally, he was still so in love with a game that had treated him badly of late. Rather than throw in the towel, he was working at a school and starting his own cricket academy: giving back to a game that has given him so much, as he put it.

This got me thinking about the parallels between what he does as a cricket coach and my job as a teacher. Every time my students attempt to analyse a film or research a history topic they are like a Shane Watson striding out to the middle to face an over from Jimmy Anderson. I can give them all the advice, encouragement and wisdom of my many years of teaching as I like but ultimately they have to score the runs of learning themselves without me. Moreover, we all try to create that particular learning environment that fosters creativity, exploration and learning within each class for every lesson and we can run into a Warner or Watson who just won't play ball. However, they just don't do their homework but go out on the field and deliberately sabotage the game for everyone else into the bargain. So do we write them off? Fortunately, teachers tend to take the Mickey Arthur approach of giving them another chance and helping them along their journey rather than cheer on their failures.

The biggest thing for me though was how Mickey Arthur talked about developing the cricket side as a journey. His greatest disappointment was not getting the chance to turn good players into great ones: the lost chance at tapping into the undeveloped potential that the team contained. This reminds me of a student I mentored for 2 years and who is a mad Liverpool fan. I was surprised when he asked me to act as his mentor, he didn't seem that keen on me as a teacher, but I wanted a chance to work with someone one on one through to year 12. After a slowish start, we were both a bit tentative and unsure of how to be a mentor/mentee we eventually found a nice balance of study advice, proof reading and just talking football. For me the joy was in watching him go from lacking confidence in his studies to becoming a more confident and diligent student. It didn't matter what marks he got at the end of the day because I had seen him grow as a student and that made the whole process worthwhile. I can think of similar cases with some of my unofficial students and they all have the same core principle: it was the journey that mattered, often ending with a good result too.

The other big thing for me was the reasons Mickey Arthur went into coaching. Recognising his own limitations as a cricketer, good but not great, he used his love of cricket along with his communication skills to become a successful international coach with the South African team. It was his desire to communicate with people and build relationships that brought him this success. More importantly, even though he was sacked, he could still be satisfied with the effort he put in. As he stated, he gave everything for the job while he did it and thus even the events surrounding his sacking could not diminish the pride he had in his effort. This too is a lot like being a teacher: sometimes we can work really hard with a particular student, from one on one help to special scaffolds and differentiating tasks, but still experience that same disappointment when they either give up or maybe fail in the big test or assessment. However, if we know that we did all we could to help that student then we can take the satisfaction of the effort we put in and hope that next time it pays off.

So that's my longer than expected rant/reflection/potted history of Mickey Arthur and his relevance to teaching. I recommend that everyone listen to the interview (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-22/interview-mickey-arthur/4905796?section=sport), even if you aren't a teacher but then why are you reading this blog(?), just so you can be inspired by his passion, dedication and sheer positivity in the face of hard times. While coaching the Australian cricket team and teaching in a classroom may seem poles apart, his journey and the journey he wanted to take the team on can inspire us all to give everything we have to every day of class. We might see our kids get out leg before again and again but hopefully we can help them far enough along their journeys to eventually reach that century.

Time to Meet Your Maker... Model

There is one good reason why every high school in Australia should have an iPad or laptop program for every student: differentiation.  Not only does this technology provide opportunities to support every learner in the classroom but they make implementing a differentiated curriculum that much easier.

For those educators who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, differentiation is

“the recognition of and commitment to plan for student differences. A differentiated classroom provides different avenues to acquire content, to process or make sense of information and ideas and to develop products. The goal of a differentiated classroom is to maximise student growth and to promote individual student success.” (Tomlinson 1999)

In essence, differentiation is ensuring that you modify:

•  what you teach
• how you teach it, and
• how the students show you they understand

for every student. While this may seem daunting, it is something teachers naturally do every day in the classroom. From a slightly more complex question to a small extension task, these are great examples of modifying the curriculum to suit a particular student’s needs and abilities.

Recently I started an online PD about differentiation in order to get more skills in this area. One of the models of differentiation they used was the Maker Model and I used it this week to teach my Year 7 English class film analysis skills. Essentially, the Maker Model focuses on:

• Content – varying the level of abstraction and complexity of concepts covered
• Process – giving students alternative methods to complete tasks as well as different types of graphics organisers
• Product – allow students to demonstrate mastery through a variety of forms
• Learning environment – student-centred and flexible areas that encourage independent learning

Using this as a template, I tried to design a lesson where my best kids could push themselves to deeply analyse the ideas and techniques behind the film we were studying while also providing my lower ability kids with the chance to successfully write an analytical paragraph. In terms of content, the Maker Model helped me focus on the bigger concepts behind the film as well as the task. So rather than just add more clips for my better kids to analyse as I might have done, I tried to choose clips with different themes that showed different aspects of the message of the film. While each student had to write an analytical paragraph, I used the process and product elements to really differentiate what I was doing. Hence, I had students completing everything from 1 properly structured paragraph through to mini-essays. Thus, rather than have my better students finish early and become bored, I was able to keep them on task and occupied for the whole lesson. Importantly too, it pushed them to make connections between the themes and film techniques and hence engage their higher order thinking skills in a meaningful way. Finally, I was able to utilise the student laptops to allow them to work individually or in pairs to view the clips and type their responses.

In terms of the actual lesson, it turned out to be a success. My introduction and explanation of the task definitely needed work, especially in distributing the tasks (which I could have used the laptops to do), but once the class got started they were quiet and on task for the whole lesson. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work more one-on-one with the lower ability students as well as seeing the higher ability kids embrace the challenge I set them. In particular, two students who usually get all their work done but I don’t really extend all that much, were a little surprised when I gave them the mini-essay task but were animatedly talking and writing for the whole lesson. Moreover, they asked more questions than usual and I was able to teach them some new technical terms that I wouldn't cover with the rest of the class. On the other end, all my lower ability students produced an edited, structured, analytical paragraph and were beaming with pride because they had completed all the class work. So all up, every student was engaged and on task for the whole lesson as they developed their film analysis skills.

The important thing for me from this experience was that using a structure like the Maker Model made my differentiated class more focused and effective. Sure, I have been differentiating my lessons for years, but the Maker Model helped me see my lesson content and procedures in a new light and thus be able to better tailor my differentiation for my own purposes. It is a model I will use to plan differentiated lessons in the future and I think it is definitely worth a try.

The Little Monsters! (App-tastic! #1 Class Dojo)

It would be remiss of me to have a technology and education blog without reference to some of my favourite educational technologies, so today I will tell you about my one of my current favourite apps for the classroom …

Class Dojo

I discovered this app through a colleague at a previous job. One day he started talking about this program that allowed you to award points to students for their good behaviour and take points away for their bad behaviour. At first I was sceptical; this seemed a bit too much like a primary school app rather than something to be used in a secondary classroom. Still I downloaded the app (it was free after all) and after spotting some funny shaped creatures decided it was not an app for me.

Fast forward and I can now admit that I was a little short sighted. Has the app changed? Not all that much: still funny shaped creatures, still awarding points. However, I have come to the realisation that while the appearance may be targeted at a younger audience, the uses for the app (affordances) are for all classrooms. Not only does this app allow you to keep real time track of student behaviour but it can actually improve your class’s behaviour.

I first tried this app with my Year 9 History class for a bit of fun. This is probably my best behaved class and I felt they would see the spirit of fun the app aimed at and not be offended that I was treating them like primary students. So I put it up on the overhead projector as they were working on an inquiry based task (see my previous blog for inquiry based learning) and just started awarding points for on task behaviour, helping others and hard work. The effect was almost immediate, some turned around and tried psychoanalysing their funny shaped creature as my representation of them (by the way: the creatures are randomly assigned) while others took a few seconds notice and got on with their work. However, once they got over the initial excitement of the creatures their behaviour started to change: they started behaving for points! As I said, this is my best behaved class but even the most off task of students started knuckling down to their research in an effort to be recognised and earn another point. This worked particularly well during the class discussion as everyone wanted to contribute so they got a participation point. At no point did I offer a reward for the person with the most points or signal that the points meant anything: they simply wanted more points and that was enough.

A word of warning though, the points system does not work for all students. In the same class discussed above, I had one of my best and one of my worst students both react negatively towards the point system. Both deliberately tried to get negative points as a protest against the system and thus needed more traditional classroom management techniques to get them back on task. So the lesson I learnt from this is that while it is fun to make the points public, it is better to keep them private and maybe just show the student their totals at the end of class or even not at all.

With this important lesson learnt, I spent this week using it in my Year 7 English class. I did not make the points public this time but instead just used it to keep track of their behaviour. This private use of the system made it easier for me as I didn’t feel pressured to award points and it helped me to be available to every student in the class. In particular, the random student selector option prompts you to award positive or negative points to a randomly selected student. This has been really useful as it helps me to get to all the students and see what they are up to rather than then handful of students who regularly monopolise my time. This has the added benefits of ensuring that I am moving around the classroom and making everyone feel more included. Moreover, the reports that can be generated from the app make long term classroom management planning easier. For instance, after each class I print off the scoring for each student – where it shows how many positive and negative points they got that lesson and the behaviours displayed – and quickly review them looking for multiple negative behaviours. By doing this, I have been able to identify some organisational issues that effect a well-intentioned and generally hard working student that I might have not noticed otherwise. So rather than miss an opportunity to help him improve his learning across all classes, consequently I have also noticed he is often the last to leave his locker and head to class, Class Dojo has alerted me to a problem through mere data.

In summary, Class Dojo is a great app for keeping track of behaviour in the classroom. While it can be used in a public sense to get students to monitor their own behaviour, I prefer to use it privately to help me keep track of all the students in my class. Not only can you record and monitor their positive and negative behaviour but the system allows you to add your own behaviours and thus customize the system. This has been particularly useful as I try to get my students to focus on organisation and practice Good Learning Behaviours (GLBs) and thus I can reward them for these specific behaviours. Moreover, the random student function provides a friendly reminder to get around to all students in every class and the summary data helps in long term planning. The best bit is that it is free and the recent update has made it much more user friendly. So try it today… you’ll never see your little monsters the same way again!