Johannes Ahrenfelt» Teaching and Learning

10 resources that changed my teaching practice:

admin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:02:54 +0000

5 Great websites:

5 Great Books

IPods in the Classroom

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:21:32 +0000

Alex: It works because you have to really think about the topic as a whole, not only goof-around, but actually plan and consider all your key points. Because we talked about how to structure the podcast and about, like, pitfalls, we knew that we had to make it ‘visual’ and tell a story so people remembered our show.

Harriet – When we had learnt the technical bits then it was great. I thought it was difficult to speak into a mic though, because I felt a bit silly. I was concerned about what other people would think. The best thing about recording was that we created the content and we had to think about our message as well as where out topic fitted in with the rest of the course. That was challenging.

- Sixth Form students discussing a podcast project in March 2009.

Gimmicky? Perhaps, but at the same time this is also an opportunity to encourage students to use their MP3 players for more than simply listening to music – they could be learning at the same time! Podcasting is useful and hopefully this example will show you how simple they are to set up with the help of online tools and how effective they can be to stimulate learning with exam classes.

You have probably gathered that podcasting is more than simply creating an MP3 file and uploading it online; that it enables you to set a channel using RSS[1] to share your creations to anyone that subscribes and that they will receive all the updates automatically when they connect. Gcast.com is a free service where you focus solely on creating the content e.g. a discussion, monologue, interviews, jokes, poems and music, then Gcast.com will finalise all the technical issues for you. Another great thing about this site is that it also has a music website Garageband.com which seamlessly integrates with Gcast.com which means that you can import fantastic music into your podcast at the click of a button. The music you store on ‘MyPlaylist’ can be accessed on both sites – simple!

In a nutshell:

register with Gcast.com
register with Garageband.com
upload your creative MP3 files or record content via phone (oh yes, you can do that, great for ‘Last Minute Ideas’ channel!)
select the order of tracks including music added from Garageband.com
click create podcast

Case Study: making overviews engaging in the History A-Level classroom

This example was used with an AS class (16-17 years old) of 18 students. It is a mixed ability ranging from target grades A-D. They are used to different approaches to teaching e.g. creating movies, presentations, teaching mini-lessons and using peculiar ‘games’ for improving communication skills[2]. They had just completed the first half of a History course and the intention behind creating a podcast, in fact a radio show, was to encourage students to consider what they had been taught over the past couple of months. They were divided into seven groups; the same number of key questions from the syllabus.

Lesson 1: Criteria and research

The initial lesson focused on the outcome of the podcast, namely that they were to create a radio show of max. 6 minutes long. They had to include music taken from Garageband.com as tracks can be transferred seamlessly to Gcast.com[3] and, this is the best bit, they are royalty free and can be downloaded. The class then had to consider what the challenges could be when presenting potentially ‘heavy’ material on the radio and a discussion ensued about the challenges of audio versus visual material and the need to provide listeners with a mental image of what is talked about somehow and that the message had to be clear.

We agreed on a number of criteria that they had to achieve to ensure a successful and purposeful podcast. Also, the students were a assigned to a ‘Mentor Group’ which would listen to the podcast and evaluate it based on the agreed criteria:

Criteria	1: Excellent	2: Good	3: Room for improvement	Comments
Historical accuracy
Historical relevance
‘Stickiness’ (will you remember the key points)
Clarity
Engagement/Entertainment

Whilst students commenced their initial research we created the podcast channel so that it would be quicker to finalise the work in later lessons. Gcast.com provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up a channel. Homework was also set in this lesson which was to actively listen to a range of different radio shows on various frequencies to gain a fuller understanding of some of the ‘features’ that presenters have on their shows like quizzes, call ins, interviews and so on.

Lesson 2: further research and planning the radio show

The class spend this hour finalising their research and structuring their radio shows. Students shared ideas for ‘features’ and it was agreed that three mini-featurettes were needed to create a good flow in the show.

Lesson 3: recording

The groups made use of a number of microphones/headsets and two voice recorders[4] to record their interviews, fake call-ins and other ‘featurettes’. After a bit of tweaking all groups were practising their lines whilst others were planning which part of a song they should use. It is important to give students a limit as to how long a piece of music can be so that the radio program does not become to long. We agreed that 45 seconds was just enough to capture the moment or set the scene.

Lesson 4: putting it together

There are different ways to piece together a podcast but most groups choose to either import all different components e.g. music, interviews, call-ins and main presenting, into Audacity[5] and save as a main MP3 file, but many simply uploaded their different sections into the Playlist on Gcast.com and organised the final podcast online. Either way is simple and does not require much technical understanding. Honest. It is very straight forward. After all the files had been uploaded we transferred them to the podcast channel which had been set up in lesson 1.

When everything had been completed and files uploaded we listened and evaluated the programs. The class found it very exciting and (embarrassing) rewarding. Some commented that it would be easier to remember different parts of the syllabus as they could relate much of the content to examples in the radio show. Once group who had focused on Nazi Racial Policy used the story of a fictional young girl to explain life in Nazi Germany between 1920 – 1942. We followed her traumatic experiences from early segregation to the Warsaw ghetto and finally to the concentration camp.

Ideas for future podcasts:

§ Case-studies in Geography: students create radio-shows about one case study each.

§ Last minute revision: the teacher uploads mini-ideas (2-3 minutes max) which emphasises a key point or idea

§ Revise [your topic]: Fact based radio documentary with interviews and debates, similar to an ordinary radio programme

§ Tomorrow’s World: the class creates an entire show together about how issues in e.g. History, Geography etc will impact on the future (terrorism, global warming, fair trade and globalisation)

§ The Movie Vault: students analyse the relationship between book and film

§ How to…write the perfect essay: students share their ideas and examples of e.g. introductions, argument etc.

§ How to…work independently: students explain what they do to work well in groups as well as how to use write realistic targets

§ How to…get an A*: groups provide concrete ideas for exam and revision techniques

[1] Visit our website for videos about RSS and podcasting : www.staffroomproject.com/?q=ipod-in-the-classroom.html

[2] many resources can be found on the main website www.staffroomproject.com/?q=resources.html but we have also included a range of tutorials and interactive resources on our ICT website: www.innovativeict.net .

[3] www.gcast.com and www.garageband.com work seamlessly together.

[4] Voice Recorders are great as they can be placed on a table and it will pick up students discussions and record in digital quality, unlike simple microphones which tend to record poor audio quality. They are not expensive either, visit www.innovativeict.net/voicerecorders for examples of voice recorders we like to use.

[5] Audacity is a free audio recording software which can compile and save audio into different formats. Go to your favourite search engine and download it today – it’s simple to use.

Make it ‘Sticky’: how to create memorable lessons

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:08:39 +0000

Sticky = understandable, memorable and effective in changing thought or behaviour.

Two big questions needs to be addressed by teachers each lesson:

What’s the point of the lesson?
Why should it matter – will it matter to the students?

It may seem obvious to many but it can be easy to forget when you have taught the same topic for several years. Why should they care that V. Frankl lost his manuscript on psychological well-being; that A bag of butter popcorn contains 37 grams of fat; that Einstein’s theory of relativity does not mean that everything is relative or that the skills of communication and synthesis are probably the most important skills they need in life? Those are fair questions. If we cannot provide a good enough explanation then what is the point?

Some lessons seem to ‘stick’ in students memories more than others, why? If we think about it, some information, facts, ‘knowledge’ is inherently interesting, whilst some will be inherently uninteresting. The million-dollar question is of course how we can ensure that all (or at least most – let’s be realistic!) lessons stick. For example, how do we get students to care about being healthy; relate to life in Warsaw ghetto in 1943; get them to really understand the notion of a mathematical function?

The brothers Chip and Dan Heath have explored the idea why some messages stick and why some disappear. They argue that the main reason why people, such as teachers, fail to create effective and memorable – ‘sticky’ – lessons is because what they call ‘The Curse of Knowledge’[1]. This refers to the notion that educators and presenters of information sometimes fail to see that abstractions, the wealth of knowledge which they have and which makes sense to them, may not make sense to the students. If you try playing the ‘tappers and listeners’ gameyou will quickly see how this problem could make it difficult to teach students:

Think of a tune, say Penny Lane, then tap the song using your hands on a table to another person – the ‘listener’. They now have to guess which tune you have in your head based on the rhythm being tapped.

If you tried this with another person you will see that they cannot guess what song you were tapping. Research at Stanford University, USA, discovered that tappers predicted that 50% of listener would be successful in guessing their tune. In fact, only 2.5% of listeners guessed correctly. Why did this happen? According to the Heath brothers ‘the problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to know what it is like to lack that knowledge’[2], so the isolated taps that are so clear to the tapper make little sense to the listener . As teachers we are particularly good at combating this problem and we do so everyday. However, there are still aspects of this challenge, areas of our subjects, which we may find difficult to deal with so that students can conceptualise, comprehend or be able to retain what we teach them. If we are to ensure that our lessons become memorable and therefore ‘sticky’, according to the authors, we need to consider six simple principles:

Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories

Some of these may seem fairly obvious to some (maybe you?). However, it is worth examining them in detail. Let us take a look at a few examples.

Simplicity:

What is the core that students need to understand, the golden nugget, and how can you ensure they understand it? If you think about the topic ‘Titanic’ issues such as inequalities, poverty and social despair might surface. However, if you start the first in a series of lessons investigating the socio-economic problems of late Victorian period, you might see the enthusiastic spark disappear in many of the students’ faces. The core is of course social inequalities, but how will you reach the students? Titanic sank two hours and forty minutes after setting sail and 1,517 people died most of them from the working class. Why? Simple.

Unexpectedness:

This one seems fairly obvious. Suppose you shock them with a terrifying story or image…that is unexpected, but that does not give them the key ingredient which they seek: insight. Instead, get the students’ interest by stimulating their curiosity through showing them there is a gap in their knowledge – how will it turn out? What is the answer? Using Thinking Skills mysteries in the classroom will achieve just that. There are lots of fantastic examples of how effective these can be, some of which are mentioned in this book (see p. xx-xx for an example of how they can be used in Modern Foreign Languages) and some which are published online.[3]

Concreteness:

Students’ experience of education can become abstract particularly during transition phases such as the beginning of their GCSE and A-Level, or when new units of work commence. Therefore, it is crucial that we make our messages, why it matters, clear to our students. In 1992, Art Silverman came across a situation where he had to make a seemingly abstract problem concrete which the general public would understand and remember. He worked for a charity which sought to educate the public about nutrition. He had been asked to inform people about the dangers of eating traditional cinema popcorn as a medium sized bag contained 37 grams of saturated fat. Such a statement would obviously change people’s cinema habits no doubt – ‘no more popcorn for me! The reality was of course much different. Eating this amount of fat is clearly very bad for you but the message was not concrete enough for anyone to really understand that it was dangerous. Silverman had a light-bulb moment. The charity called a press conference in which he explained:

A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighbourhood movie theatre contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon and eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings-combined![4]

Credibility:

Making sure that students believe what you tell them generally is not a problem. Some research has suggested, however, that students more readily trust online material before teachers.[5] Therefore, testing hypothesis is an important part of exam classes learning so they understand that ‘facts’ vary from source to source. If you asked students to decide which source of information is the most trust worthy which one would they choose Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia? Would they even trust information from Wikipedia? Research was carried out which compared the validity, the credibility, of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which costs to subscribe to) and Wikipedia (which is free). Interestingly, there was very little difference in the content both resources provided.[6] By giving them the challenge to test a problem, students are more ready to believe as they are in fact assessing its credibility and make an internal judgement about its trustworthiness.

Emotions:

If we had time we could customise every example we gave to ensure students relate to our messages e.g. adding their names and names of their friends to maths examples. This would of course be next to impossible. Instead we need to try to give them more general examples without losing the opportunity for them to care. As a history teacher in Britain we have to, and rightly should, teach about the Holocaust. This is one example of how one school started the unit:

Question 1. How many people were killed in Germany between 1939-1945?

a) 1 million

b) 4 million

c) 6 million

d) 19 million

How far do you think students were able to relate to this tragic period in history? Not far. In fact, how could they relate to the deaths of more than six million Jews at all? Here is another example:

Fill a page with dots (full stops size 20, bold) and you will have approx. 600 dots and photocopy it 10 ten times. Give students a small piece of paper (no more than 2×2 cm) and ask them to draw one small dot for every person they know. Explain that most people probably have between 15-30 people they know incl. classmates, neighbours, family and friends, and that as a class you have about 600 people you know. If you put together everyone from school you will probably have several 1000s. Now scatter the A4 sheets across the classroom, nonchalantly, and explain that these sheets contain 6000 dots (names of people) and that in order to get the full extent of the number of people murdered you need to multiply this by 1000. Penny tends to drop after that.

Stories:

“We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”[7]

Do you remember what Frankl lost, which was mentioned at the start of this section? Maybe, possibly not. If we had told you the following story then you probably would have remembered:

Victor Frankl and his wife were arrested together with hundreds of other Jews in 1942, Vienna, Austria. Unbeknown to many, Frankl had developed a new theory of psychological well-being. Both he and his wife had anticipated what would happen to them so they had sewn the manuscript of the book he was writing into the lining of his coat. Victor and his wife Tilly were later transported to Auschwitz and the manuscript was eventually found and destroyed. Frankl began re-writing his work from scratch on bits of paper and he had to endure the death of his entire family – his wife, brother, mother and father all died in the concentration camp. When the allies liberated his camp in 1946 he had completed what was to become one of the most influential books of all time according to the New York Times – A Man’s Search for Meaning.[8]

We know that planning all lessons based on a series of principles may not be possible all the time. However, by considering these ideas, coupled with lashings of our own creativity, we can produce powerful, purposeful lessons which contain enriching tasks that will ensure skills and learning progression for all classes.

[1] C. Heath & D. Heath (2008), Made to Stick, Arrow Books

[2] Ibid. p. 20

[3] Please visit this website for great Thinking Skills activities: http://www.innovativeict.net/examples

[4] C. Heath & D. Heath, Sticking to it, Association Now, February 2007

[5] Haydn, T * Counsell, C History and ICT (Routledge) p.

[6] See Chapter 2 p. xx – xx for a more detailed look at using online material and a further discussion on the comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia

[7] V. Frankl (2000) A Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press

[8] M. Scully, Viktor Frankl at Ninety: An Interview, www.FirstThings.com (April 1995).

Make it stick

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Make it ‘sticky’

Sticky = understandable, memorable and effective in changing thought or behaviour.

* Teacher talking to a class (5%)
* Student reading a book (10%)
* Student watching an audio visual presentation (20%)
* Student watching a teacher demonstration (30%)
* Students taking part in a discussion group (50%)
* Students involved in an activity that is related to what the teacher wants them to learn (75%)
* Students teaching others (90%).

Speaking or lecturing without dialogue continues to be the most common form of teaching mode in both secondary and higher education, in the face of overwhelming evidence that it produces the lowest degree of retention for most learners.

Some lessons seem to ‘stick’ in students memories more than others, why? If we think about it, some information, facts, ‘knowledge’ is inherently interesting, whilst some will be inherently uninteresting. The million-dollar question is of course how we can ensure that all (or at least most – let’s be realistic!) lessons stick. For example, how do we get students to care about being healthy; relate to life in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943; get them to really understand the notion of a mathematical function?

The brothers Chip and Dan Heath have explored the idea why some things stick and why some disappear[1]. In a nutshell, they argue that the main reason why people, such as teachers, fail to create effective, memorable – ‘sticky’ – messages or lessons is because what they call ‘The Curse of Knowledge’. This refers to the notion that educators and presenters of information sometimes fail to see that abstractions, the wealth of knowledge which they have and which makes sense to them, may not make sense to the students. In order to ensure that their their lesson become memorable and therefore ‘sticky’, according to the authors, we need to consider six simple principles which the Heath brothers call SUCCESs:
§ Simplicity
§ Unexpectedness
§ Concreteness
§ Credibility
§ Emotions
§ Stories

Some of these may seem fairly obvious to some (maybe you?). Let us take a look at a few examples.

Simple:

If you think about the topic ‘Titanic’ issues such as inequalities, poverty and social dispair might spring to mind. However, if you start the first in a series of lessons investigating these issues you will most certainly see the enthusiastic spark disappear in many of the students faces. What is the core that students will understand and how can you ensure they understand that? The core is of course social inequalities. How will you reach the students? Titanic sank two hours and forty minutes after setting sail and 1,517 people died most of them from the working class.

Another powerful point to consider are the simple questions What’s the point of the lesson? and Why does it matter – will it matter to the students? It may seem obvious to many but it can be easy to forget when you have taught the same topic for several years. Why should they care about the skills of evaluation or synthesis? That is a fair question. If we cannot provide a good enought explanation then what is the point?
By considering these ideas, coupled with lashings of our own creativity, we can produce powerful, purposeful lessons which contains enriching tasks that will ensure skills and learning progression for all classes.

Learn how to communicate better

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:21:32 +0000

Making students see the bigger picture is difficult but crucial. Using overview early in the course, say, when you introduce a new topic or Unit is an ideal way of getting them thinking about the ‘story’ of what you’re doing. Re-visiting these overviews are also important so students can see where they are heading, particularly if you are teaching a thematic or synoptic approach; how will students grasp why peasants across 1855-1956 link with Russian ‘empire’ or ‘nationalities’; or how policing in the 1750s connect with the thinking of the period.

We work hard at creating activities that makes overviews matter to students – getting them thinking about how the smaller picture ‘slots in’ with the bigger.

Here’s an example of encouraging them to consider just that. What do you think? How do you do it? How important are overviews and bigger pictures in your subject?

Pecha-Kucha, or ‘chatter’ is a method of presenting using visuals which was first introduced by two Australian architects in 2003 who sought to keep presentatiosn tight and focused.

20×20 6:40

The rules are simple:

create a PowerPoint presentation, or using Keynote, with 20 images lasting for 20 seconds, as you tell the story in sync with the pictures. Your presentation will only last for 6 minute and 40 seconds. Slides will play automatically (panic!) so when the last slide has been shown it’s all over… Nice and simple.

Give student a good topic ot theme which requires them to think about the bigger picture e.g. How did Stalin consolidate his power? They then have to use 20 images which demonstrate their understanding. The limitations imposed on them will enable them to focus on:

evaluating the theme
carefully select and rank which elements are the most significant to answering the question
demonstrate clear judgment on on broad questions

Pecha-Kucha is a fantastic way of making it difficult for students to ‘go deep’ in their presentations – they will have to do that during their research. Also, their audience will have to ‘dig deep’ in order for them to see the bigger picture. The whole class will therefore improve their skills.