Liquid Gold By kevin dooley

Covering a session on the level 5 literacy and numeracy specialism this week I got to try out some of the ideas from the Lazy Teacher’s Handbook.

I started the session asking the new trainees to stand in alphabetical order by name, then by their original subject specialism. So far so normal – this was followed by numerical order by length of time teaching, then length of time since took cert ed/PGCE which showed a group of people at one end brand new to teaching, the other end a couple of people with 15 years experience and a mid range of 7-12 years.

The next task is the slightly adapted ‘Thinking Line up’  out of the Lazy Teachers Handbook. I split the class into two groups (a six and a seven) and asked them to rank order themselves in terms of how confident they are in defining CPD. There was one very strong reaction as someone headed for the door! (i.e., he felt very unconfident about this) There was a few rumblings from this, and the general feeling in the room was that people weren’t too sure about it.

Trainees were then paired (with people from opposing ends of each group, i.e. a more confident with a lesson confident) and asked to discuss CPD. There was an interesting variety to these discussions, some talked about things they did, others discussed the difference between organisational and personal CPD and one pair thought everything counted as CPD – and therefore if everything did then nothing did!

I interrupted this activity to introduce the post-it notes, a variation of an activity done before, both in class and at conference work shops. In pairs, they had to write a comment, question, examples about CPD and put it onto the wall. They then read and responded to others post-its (after swapping pairs)

After a brief discussion about how this activity was an analogy to Twitter (limited space, choose what you read and comment on) we did one final ‘thinking line up’ activity. I had thought hard about how the phrase this last question, and it was through a discussion with a colleague that I chose ‘line up in numerical order in terms of the last time you reflected on your practice’. This didn’t cause as much controversy as I thought it would and almost everyone said they had reflected that day after teaching.

Groups were then formed, given flip chart paper and asked to brainstorm all their ideas around reflection. During this activity I used another of the activities from the Lazy Teacher’s Handbook. I asked one person from each group to come to the front and I told then that I wanted them to join another group, share their discussions and then report back to their original group.

I also used the same three people when I wanted to ask the groups to move on from a general discussion to writing a definition of reflection. I quite like this idea of having these ‘envoys’ and it certainly meant I didn’t have to stop the flow of the group discussions. I think I could have set it up better and explained to the whole class what I wanted, rather than just to those three trainees.

There was an interesting discussion around formal and informal reflection, and some strong (negative) opinion expressed about the theoretical aspect of this. However, it was agreed by the group that having a structure to work from when writing formal, to be assessed self evaluations would be helpful and for some people it had been a long time since they did this, so we agreed that everyone would choose a reflection model, use it within the next two weeks when we will meet again to have a peer review session of these reflections.

Managing this final discussion was quite a challenge, there were some strong opinion expressed, especially from some that had just completed the cert ed, and what I was feeling as reluctance to engage with the structured models of reflection. However, the group as a whole were really great and very supportive of each other and I felt that everyone had an opportunity to express their opinion. While it wasn’t exactly what I had planned, I feel like I listened to everyone in the group and managed them to be able to come to a consensus on using the models.

I finished the lesson with a quick review of the activities and how they felt they could adapt them for their own teaching. I also asked them if they could guess which of the activities had been new to me, and on the second guess they got it – not sure what this says about the activity as I think I did botch it a bit, but they did say they could see some benefits to it.

Then finally, I asked them to complete the Brookfield Critical Incident Questionnaire I previously adapted for a DTELLS lesson. Generally the feedback was very positive and everyone had been engaged thoughout the session, points of interest were when one said they liked the first activity, despite being someone who usually really dislikes taking part in warmers! A couple talked about the lateness of the day (this was a 7-9pm session) and how either they were still engaged, or were almost apologetic when saying they had switched off during whole class discussion because it had been such a long day.

With my presentation coming up next week where I discuss the complexities of CPD and the difficulties many tutors have in recognising CPD, it has been interesting in this session when initially everyone was quite ‘uurrghh, CPD, not too sure about that’ but through the discussion activities actually were more confident in admitting what their ideas were about this. It confirms that I am correct to highlight the complex nature of CPD and to raise the question about what support tutors need to be able to take control of their own CPD.