Collaboration — so much more than parallel play!

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Collaboration has become a real buzzword in schools recently. Modern Learning Practice (MLP) is built upon a foundation of collaborative practice and places like the VLN are full of discussions around the value of working closely with colleagues. Thinkers like Fullan (eg 2011) and Timperley et al all claim that collaboration is central to their understandings around school development and teacher professional learning.

But what does Collaboration look like? Really ….? How do we know it when we see it … hear it. … experience it? This has had me wondering a fair bit recently. My concern is that we often identify what I would call connecting or cooperating as collaboration. All three of these things are in fact quite different, and developmental I believe. I have attempted to capture the differences in the diagramme below:

Collaboration model
Illustration: Greg Carroll 2015

Connecting:

This is where teachers come together for a specific purpose and agree to work together, share resources etc simply to serve an agreed outcome or purpose. This is generally short-term and intermittent. A lot of teachers are connecting on social media for example and this enables them to use a collective intelligence to find specific resources or ideas. The NZ Teachers (Primary) Facebook page and Twitter in some instances could be examples of this kind of connection.
Each person who is connecting with the others could still function quite adequately if the relationship didn’t exist (but is is better for everyone while it does).

This is where my metaphor of parallel play comes in. Developmentally children play alongside each other before they play together (connecting before cooperating).  They use the toys to play their own games in the sand pit before they share them and play together. The Venn diagrammes above show this.

Co-operating:

This is more in-depth more long term, and more closely linked. I have worked in many schools where teachers in syndicates co-operated a lot. This also happened across the staff for Units, sports days and so on. We shared students for literacy and numeracy between classes in order to cater for ranges of needs at both ends of programmes. We could have survived without the other people but our programmes and the outcomes for the students were certainly better because of the ways we worked together. We planned together for core curriculum areas, aligned Inquiry topics and shared resources and ideas for how we could make things as successful as possible for our students.

Many teachers also cooperate for their professional learning. Social media and forums like the VLN are hotbeds of people sharing ideas, practices and resources. People come together for their professional learning in PLGs or other forums at agreed time frames but often have little contact with each other in between times. They could operate without each other, but the collective brainpower of the minds working together certainly make it better.

Collaboration:

This is where people are so inextricably linked that they couldn’t function without the others. The effect is much bigger than the sum of the two parts. In MLP this is the thing that makes the difference. Teachers share and organise the programme in ways that mean you couldn’t split the ways of working back into its parts again. Again the Venn diagramme above shows this.

Learners of all kinds collaborate in many different ways and in many different forums. There are lots of good examples of teachers and classes collaborating for their learning (eg VLN Primary). Enabling eLearning is full of in-depth and ongoing examples too. Social media can also provide forums for people to engage with each other in these ways.

The key thing here is the complete reliance on each other to achieve the shared goals.  No one person could do it on their own.

Confusion?

In my experience we often see confusion between these three ‘levels’. People often refer to cooperation as collaboration in particular. True collaboration is actually still quite rare I believe.  I have also seen quite a few so called Modern Learning Environments where in fact the teachers are simply cooperating to use the space/s provided. They share the physical spaces and places, and sometimes some of the students, but also are largely ‘the rulers of their own kingdom’ in a series of classrooms without walls in a big open space. This is often what we saw in the days of ‘Open Plan’ in the 70s and 80s.

So I guess the questions that occur to me are around how we know true collaboration when we see it. How do we know what to notice? The defining questions I think we need to ask are:

  • Could this scenario continue to operate if one of the partners became disengaged or was not there for any length of time?
  • If you analysed the ways of working, which Venn diagrammes above would be the most necessary to record what is happening?

If collaboration is identified as being such a critical factor in MLP (and I absolutely believe that it is!), and therefore in MLEs, it is essential that we know it when we see it.  It is equally as critical that we know when we are not.

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The business of learning

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Stephen in thought

As a learning designer, I've still got a lot to learn. Not about learning, but about the business of learning. 

Changing times

Back in the day, when teachers wore gowns and boys had short haircuts, the teacher was a superior being who dictated what the lesson would be, and how the outcomes would be judged.
Learning was like school dinners: there it is, if you don't like it, go hungry. Or, in the tougher establishments like the ones I attended: there it is, eat every last bit of it, even if it is disgusting, it's good for you, and you can't leave the dining room until you've made a clean plate. Homework and detention were very much the same thing but went by a different name. But now the student and her parents are the customer and the learning spaces, methods, and materials are our product.

Now we've swung our thinking around and most people subscribe to the environments and principles of modern learning. The expectation in this new learning environment is for continuous pedagogical and technical innovation. Unchanged for hundreds of years, the rate of change of learning is now a power curve. Consequently, we find ourselves in need of some professional development in the area of innovation and business start-up. I say start-up because the change from old school to new school is so radical it's an entirely different world.

Learner focus

The learning designers on the Instructional Design team at CORE Education are totally committed to taking a learner focus, as opposed to a curriculum focus, or worse, a teacher focus. However, old habits die hard. As the oldest member of the team I sometimes need to be reminded to focus on the learner, their motivations, and their needs. That may be a narrow profile that we can target with pinpoint accuracy, more often the learners fit into a broad spectrum of people and then the task is harder. 

The principles of Universal Design for Learning and the tenets of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines act as our guide and underpin our work, but really it boils down to giving the learner ownership and offering them choice. Especially with adult learners, but with younger learners too, it's like asking: what do you want to be able to do; what do you need to learn to do that; how do you want to learn it; and how do you want to demonstrate that you can now do that thing you identified at the start? So, what we really design and build these days is not learning, but a framework for learning.

Fiscal challenge

CORE Education is not for profit, but we still need to make money just to survive. To this end, we have established an internal incubator, not unlike Google Labs, but on a more modest scale. Our learning designers are among those who have put forward project ideas. It's burned into our psyche to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations? But now we need to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations, and be productised, and be monetised?

Virtual challenge

Productise and monetise are not words that come easily to our lips. We don't like to dirty our hands with the filthy lucre. So it's a challenge, and show me a learning designer who does not rise to a challenge! One popular innovation process that we take to like ducks to water is Design Thinking. We workshop the learning problem. The workshop unfolds in stages: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. At its best Design Thinking is high-energy fun, iterative, productive, and ultimately points to one or more candidate solutions. While you can do it at four tables pushed together in your nearest cafe, ideally it takes place in a specially designed collaborative space with aids like portable whiteboards, projection screens, configurable furniture, and soundproof pods. Either way, that's face-to-face. So, here's the Challenge for our team, because we are a virtual team, and we rarely meet face-to-face. How do we innovate effectively in a virtual incubator?

Risk taking

I don't have the answer, but I'm looking for it. For years, I sat on a domain name, virtualincubator.co.nz, but recently I let it go. I keep having ideas for learning frameworks, most recently, an alternate reality games in education framework (ARGEF). But I continue to stare at the wall, racking my brains for how to productize and monetize it. Such is the life of the budding entrepreneur. What gives me hope are the experiences of most start-ups today: the business model is elusive; there is usually a long freeware phase; the freeware phase often morphs into a freemium model; and, the sun has set on the boxed product. Risk taking and failure are wholly acceptable in this brave new world. Success stories usually reference several preceding failed attempts. Perseverance seems to be the key.

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From Virtual to Reality

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An insight into the use of virtual field trips

Routeburn Track panaorama

When I tell people that I’m a virtual field trip teacher, I can get a variety of responses ranging from confusion and scepticism through to surprise and even envy. It can be challenging to explain what a virtual field trip is, and what it isn’t. Sometimes people struggle with the concept, thinking that real field trips are being replaced by online programmes. But in reality, virtual field trips can provide the inspiration for rich learning journeys and spark community involvement.

The Virtual Great Walker field trip

Last term I was involved in the ‘Virtual Great Walker’ field trip and I have to admit that initially I had some concerns. Firstly the plan was to only walk part of the track as a day walk. Secondly this trip had to inspire action, as the great walks cannot be fully appreciated virtually and they certainly can’t be done from the comfort of your own home. How could this trip inspire youngsters to take the virtual into reality and get walking?

The field trip needed to capture the essence of the world-famous Routeburn Track, but this posed some challenges. We knew that we would not be able to access the website if we walked all of the Routeburn Track, and we would have to carry all our filming equipment. I felt that we had to walk the whole track to do it justice, so a plan was developed. We would walk the Routeburn over the weekend so we could be ready to talk to students during audioconferences back in Queenstown during the week.

Behind the scene

Usually, our field trips involve daily audioconferences and activities, with experts who feature in videos and answer students’ questions in pre-booked audioconferences. These daily activities are followed by an evening of frantic effort back in an area with an Internet connection. Each night two people from the LEARNZ team edit videos, write diaries and ambassador updates, and upload images to the LEARNZ site so students can see what has happened the very next day. This material stays online for students to revisit or use retrospectively. For this field trip we would have to film everything over the weekend and then upload it to the site over the following three days.

Before starting the field trip, background pages were developed on the website to allow students to build their knowledge of New Zealand’s Great Walks, their biodiversity, and how to safely complete such a walk. These pages are designed to give just enough detail to inform students of key concepts so they can start more focused, meaningful inquiries of their own, and ask quality questions during the field trip audioconferences.

Experts to guide the way

The next challenge was how to organise transport to the beginning of the track near Te Anau and from the end of the track in Glenorchy. Susie Geh from the Department of Conservation (DOC) in Queenstown made this all possible and accompanied us on the walk. LEARNZ works hard to make connections between experts and students. It can be difficult to find people willing to take time out of their busy schedules to help on trips, and not everyone is able to communicate well with students. Fortunately, over the years, we have met some fantastic experts. I have worked with Ruud Kleinpaste (aka the Bugman) on a number of trips, and knew that, alongside Susie and other DOC staff, he would make the perfect addition to the team. After numerous phone calls and lots of organisation, I managed to meet Ruud, Susie, and videographer Pete Sommerville from LEARNZ, in Queenstown.

The adventure begins

From here, Susie drove us to Te Anau where we stayed the night ready to begin our walk the following day. After picking up hut tickets and checking the weather, we drove to The Divide where we met members of the Kids Restore the Kepler group. They wanted to go for a day walk and share some of the work that they have been doing on the Kepler Great Walk. These students were knowledgeable and passionate about Fiordland, and bringing birdsong back to the area. It was great to be able to share their work with students from all over the country.

Rain set in after lunch, making our portrayal of the western side of the Alps authentic. Moss-covered beech forest kept us all enthralled as we spotted different birds and invertebrates. Ruud could barely contain his enthusiasm as he leapt from one rotten log to another in search of bugs. A night at McKenzie Hut saw us refreshed, ready for the climb over Harris Saddle. The weather cleared and we were rewarded with stunning views over the Hollyford. The camera hardly spent any time in the pack as we tried to capture the essence of the area and our journey through it.

That evening Ruud took us bug hunting by torchlight, and it was intriguing to discover species I had never seen before. Our final day on the track led us downhill to the road end, where students from nearby Glenorchy School greeted us. They are an Enviroschool, and were keen to share some of the work they have been doing in pursuit of their Green Gold Award. An Enviroschool is a school whose entire curriculum is based around the main theme of sustainability and they can work with their community to achieve bronze, silver and green gold awards.

These students make money for the school through selling vegetables. They also source local native seeds to grow seedlings in their nursery. These seedlings will be planted nearby to help restore a wetland area.

Where to from here

DOC had arranged a pick up for us, so we all piled into the car and headed back to Queenstown ready for a long-awaited hot shower. Experiences such as these are impossible to fully capture through a virtual field trip, but they’re not supposed to. While talking to students in the audioconferences that followed, I could hear the enthusiasm of students from different parts of the country. Many spoke of the plans they had to get out and about on tracks in their own area, and some had formed groups to help restore parts of their local environment. Seeing students inspired by field trips such as this is what the use of digital technology should be about. We need to use technology to engage and inform students so they are inspired to form new ideas, collaborate, and take action. We need to make the virtual a reality!

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Is it time to ditch the pen and speak your writing?

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Speech recognition and writing

Speech recognition allows you to speak aloud to your device and have words typed as you speak. The software is not quite ‘Star Trek’ quality yet, but it has improved so significantly in the last few years that it is now a real option for text entry. Even better, it is included free in many operating systems.

Many versions of the software only work when they are online as your speech is literally sent across the internet, interpreted in the cloud and then returned to the device in text format.

With Bluetooth, wireless, and cloud technologies you can do cool things like talk into your phone and have the text come up in a document on any computer screen (in the same room or in a shared document across the other side of the world), all in real time.

The question is, should 21st-century learners labour to write with a pen or keyboard, or can they simply speak their writing? Is it cheating and how will it impact on their literacy and learning?

Is speaking cheating?

It depends on the learning intention.

If the learning intention is for students to express themselves or to show their understanding, then speaking to write is just as valid as writing with a pen or typing. It is simply the means of getting your word onto the page.

If the intention is to develop the ‘skill of writing with a pen or keyboard’ or spell words correctly then of course speaking is not appropriate. These intentions are often important for younger learners and less of a focus for older students.

Pros — why use speech recognition?

It is fast. The average adult writes at about 31 words per minute* while they speak at more like 150 words per minute. Speech recognition software uses context to recognise speech so most work best when you speak at your normal pace in whole sentences or paragraphs rather than individual words.

For those with writing difficulties or a strong preference for speech, it is critical because so much of the work produced and assessed in the education setting is still required in written format. Speech recognition gives these students the opportunity to show what they know rather than repeatedly defining them by their writing difficulties.

It offers options for those with who have writing difficulties. For those who have physical disabilities, poor fine motor skills, handwriting legibility, and other writing problems (e.g. very poor spelling), speech recognition offers another way to get their words onto the page.

It has huge (and largely untapped) potential for communication with students who are hearing impaired or Deaf. A speaker can use the technology to convert their voice to text, enabling immediate, real-time access for a student who cannot hear the spoken word. This option is not nearly as good as sign language or real-time captioning but is starting to be a reasonable third choice for students who are Deaf or hearing-impaired and can read well.

Cons — what are the down sides?

Speaking to write is a very different skill to speaking in conversation. The student must compose sentences in their head, speak (preferably the whole sentence) clearly and then review what has been written for accuracy. Speaking to write is a complex skill that will need to be learnt and practised. We should not expect that just because a student can speak, it will be easy for them.

The software is not yet capable of 100% accuracy so the student will always need to review the text and make corrections (using voice or keyboard).

There is currently no Māori speech recognition engine so te reo is not an option. Some of the products can recognise a few Māori words or can be trained to recognise new words.

The use of speech recognition in a classroom requires careful consideration. Many students are reluctant to speak their work aloud in front of their peers and although microphone technology is improving all the time, a quiet setting will give greater recognition accuracy. Because of this, students are sometimes sent to other rooms to do speech recognition. This, in turn, may lead to the student being isolated from their peers.

NCEA externals are still handwritten, so longhand is still necessary. This is very likely to change in the future and NZQA has already begun digitising assessments. Unfortunately having reliable speech recognition available for any student who wants it in our NCEA assessments is still a long way off. For more information see Innovation at NZQA.

Speech recognition requires power and in most cases, a good internet connection. We only need to think of the recent terrible crisis in Nepal, or even closer to home, the handwritten ‘HELP!’ signs hastily scribed by those trapped in high-rise buildings during the Christchurch earthquakes. Handwriting was crucial when all networks were out and power was lost to some of us for months on end.

Are crayons, pencils and pens out? What does the research say?

Recent neuroscientific research clearly shows us that students acquire early literacy skills most effectively by learning to write by hand (James & Attwood, 2009; Longcamp et al, 2008; James & Engelhardt, 2011). The tactile, physical act of writing by hand recruits the visual area of children’s brains used in letter processing, and the motor regions seen in letter production, in ways that don’t occur through tracing or using keyboards (Alonso, 2015).

So, perhaps surprisingly to some of us, using a range of ‘old digital’ (in the finger sense) media —- e.g. plasticine, sandpaper, paint, crayon, pencil, pen and glass (tablet finger writing and using a stylus rather than a keyboard) — remains important for now, especially in the early years of emergent writing.

For older students, there is also evidence that note taking by hand rather than keyboard may help comprehension. Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) showed that college students who take notes longhand take fewer notes overall, with less verbatim recording than those who use keyboards. But they perform better in both factual and conceptual learning.

Conclusion

So we shouldn’t be throwing away those pens and pencils just yet. Writing by hand is still an important skill that has a significant role to play in developing early literacy skills. It also appears that handwriting notes supports comprehension and retention of information.

Speech recognition though, is one of the many great tools that students can use to produce written content. It definitely has a place as an option for writing so let’s add it to our learners’ repertoire of skills – especially for older learners who already have handwriting in their toolbox.

What is sure, is that ever-widening opportunities are becoming available to our students. Those who learn to use these amazing writing tools – whether separately or in combination – will find truly inspiring, supportive, motivating and exciting prospects in our evolving classrooms and learning spaces.

For more information and reviews of a variety of speech recognition tools see:
Speech Recognition on the assistive technology VLN

 

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute

References

Alonso, MAP. Metacognition and sensorimotor components underlying the process of handwriting and keyboarding and their impact on learning. An analysis from the perspective of embodied psychology. Social and behavioural sciences (2015); 263-269. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.01.470

James, KH and Engelhardt, L. The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and education (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2012.08.001

Mueller, PA and Oppenheimer,DM. The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science (2014); 25(^) 1159-68.
doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581. Epub 2014 Apr 23.

The University of Stavanger. "Better learning through handwriting." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 January 2011. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119095458.htm

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Christchurch 2015 Polyfest — the Pasifika Education Plan in action

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Christchurch Polyfest 2015

This March, I attended the Christchurch POLYFEST 2015 held at the Westminster Park — the first time the event has been held outdoors. The Polyfest was an opportunity for the Pasifika community to celebrate the diverse cultures of the 19 Christchurch secondary schools in a lively and colourful event.

I also found it to be an excellent illustration of the Pasifika Education Plan (PEP) in action. The PEP encourages:

 “Working together ensures that activities that are required to lift achievement also responds to the identities, language and culture of the different Pasifika groups.”
(Pasifika Education Plan 2013-2017, p. 1, Ministry of Education).

Here’s what impressed me about this event.

What an exciting opportunity for the young men and women who will be the future leaders of our Pasifika community! They stood tall and showed off their unique Pasifika culture, their talents, and, above all, the enjoyment of being ‘Pasifika’. ‘Well done’ to them.

Polyfest dance collage

There were the usual magnificent displays of cultural dancing. But, this event was not all about the demonstration of ‘cultural dancing’. For example, there was the ‘Teta-Sopoaga’ Speech competition. This competition provides opportunities for Pasifika students from junior to senior levels in secondary schools to participate. Students are given the opportunity to deliver their speeches in either English or in their heritage language.

Importantly, even pre-schoolers were included when the early years children were brought up on stage to answer simple questions and were rewarded for their participation. This involvement shows the significance of early learning as a fundamental part of preparing our Pasifika learners for educational success.

Polyfest community support

The community was out in full force. Parents set up stalls and raised funds to assist their respective schools. School principals, teachers, board members, grandparents and families with their young children were there to support their older siblings, nephews, nieces and children.

Education partner organisations and agencies were there too. This involvement provided unique pathways for prominent groups such as Mana Rapuara Aotearoa (CareersNZ) to attend and outline their mechanisms for support of career aspirations for our Pasifika students. The Pacific Youth Leadership and Transformation (PYLAT) Council also participated in their role as a lead voice for Pacific Youth, having become a charitable trust and organised themselves around topical youth issues. 

Such events provide Pasifika children with the opportunities to see, hear, and recognise their own cultures, languages, and identities that reflect in the community. Working together like this goes a long way to lifting achievement among Pasifika children; it showcases what is essentially the Pasifika way.

If you are interested to investigate more about Pasifika Education and the Ministry of Education’s initiative in supporting Pasifika success check out the Pasifika Education Plan.

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