Just nicked this great photo of the fantastic Teachers who underwent the TROPIC training with us in Brisbane this June. (Martha, thank you for publishing it on your blog!) It certainly was enjoyable and challenging and stimulating to be with such a group of enthusiastic people who now have even more power to change things in their own settings. I look forward to hearing about their experiences with Teachers Reflecting on Practice in Classrooms.

Writing for the web

Just found this great link to some common sense ideas for writing on the web - I got it from Stephen Downe's OLDaily newsletter (people can subscribe to that by going to http://www.downes.ca/news/index.htm). This article has ten tips for catching and maintaining people's interest on the web and is written by Mark Bernstein. You can find out more about him by going to his article titles 'A List Apart' at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/writeliving/

Idle Blogging Comment

Blogging seems a pretty lonely business at times. I wonder if students who use them feel the same? I guess if you are blogging for a course, then others are going to read and post comments. A blog in the wild has to take its chances :-)

TROPIC training

It was great to run a training session for 16 Teachers interested in learning about classroom profiling. Their interest and enthusiasm was so encouraging. We get so few chances for professional conversations about how we teach. It's a treat to get such a chance with such a great group of people.

Blogging

I have been reading posts on e-learning topics from EdNa, and have been thinking about blogs and their uses. I can see how they are useful educationally for posting assessments, reflections, and for having discussions based around topics of interest. In general though it seems most bloggers post alone - they get little feedback on their reflections. Blogs really do seem to serve a reflective purpose, but don't generate much actual discussion or exchange between minds. Forums seem to be better at doing that, especially when you can have new comments posted to you by e-mail. I am much more likely to read forum postings that are e-mailed to me, rather than check everybody's blogs every day. I guess you can have blogs that send new comments to you via e-mail too. It is kind of nice to have a reflective journal online however.

Easter Monday

A rainy day with no where to go - no shops open that I know of, and no tourist sights to see due to the cyclone damage. Another cyclone is beginning to build to the north of us, and we have received the first warning. Do we have enough butane/candles/gas/batteries? Reminder to self: Must find time to do an emergency shop tomorrow.

It must be a day for planning semester 2!! So I have done some. It does give me a sense of satisfaction to have done the programming and a few other administrative tasks. Have been thinking about the logical order to deliver subjects in. I have been delivering subjects each week of the semester to date, but it is looking more and more like having blocks of delivery would be a good idea. I wonder if the students could cope? TNQ TAFE has always had to ocnsider the distance learner, the isolated pockets of learners and the working learner, so delivery has tended to be spaced out to allow people to work around their work and home schedules as well as cope with travelling. Maybe a student survey canvassing their preferences would be a good idea. I will develop something simple to hand out next week. I know from an adult learner's perspective, it is good to allow people time to process information, which is an argument for keeping delivery as it is.

Marking will come next. Students deserve to have feedback asap, and I have a bundle of assignments to go through.

Debriefing

Today I held my first 'normal' class since the cyclone hit. It was a small class as I had received apologies from some and not heard at all from others, who are probably still without power and/or phones. The ones who came needed to debrief and tell their stories about what had happened to them and to their friends. They are incredible people - nearly everyone told how they had quickly chipped in and helped other people they considered to be in greater need than themselves by volunteering or just being there for people. There is a lot of gratitude in this community about the miracle of there being no deaths and few serious injuries (though one of my students had received a head injury and had been hospitalised for a time because of that). The stress of the event was discussed - effects being noticed in themselves and in others were brought out. One student told how a neighbour had been stressed to the point of having a mental health episode and noticing with dismay the unkind reaction of those around him.

They are also learning on 'fast forward' how the community works which fits in exactly with their studies.

We eventually could talk about their studies and even got through the lesson, amid cups of tea, biscuits and more stories. They are learning and they are living their learnings. It is an amazing thing to watch, for me.

TROPIC-el training and Innisfail reflections

Well, we have new dates to go to Brisbane and do the profiler training, and seven people who want to be trained. That's really encouraging. We'll go in May, Lord willing. Teacher profiling is just such a wonderful way to have something useful and positive and professional happening in your teaching life.

I got in touch with a couple more of my Innisfail students today and was that a blessing. One wants to be in touch with two others to form a study group as a distraction to the devastation caused by the cyclone. It's great to be able to give them something more positive to think about, and for the request to do this to come from them. Some who have lost so much want to have a way of volunteering to help others who are worse off than they are. There are some community agencies who will welcome their offer to do that, and it was great to be able to refer them. One student knew what had happened to another student who I had been able to contact as her phone is disconnected (by the cyclone, I imagine). She is safe.

Innisfail

Today I felt ill. I had to travel down to Innisfail to teach (110kms/68.5 miles) and the devastation from the Cyclone there is terrible. There are so many houses without roofs, so much vegetation that has been forced into everywhere it should not be, so much damage to property. The people are in good spirits though. The army is there, the emergency crews too, and there is a huge contingent of cheerful volunteer tradesmen.

Even one of my students turned up! I am not sure if the other students are safe yet and I could not get hold of a phone and computer to find out their phone numbers and call them. The student who did come in wanted a distraction from the 9 people living in her house who don't normally live there. Talk about an incentive for learning....I obliged by giving her reading materials and showing her how to use the Janison website to supplement her leanring.

I did visit my 94yo friend and her 67yo daughter. Their house had most of the windows on one side blown out and they had been flooded inside the house. A ceilng fan from a detached roof two doors down had flown through their water powered (hydraulic?) elevator/lift (my 94yo friend cannot walk and the lift is needed so she can leave the house which is one story up) and mangled it so it is unusable. My friend is trapped in the house till someone comes to carry her downstairs. I am thankful that people know of her plight and are helping as much as they can. While I was there, a crew was chopping up fallen trees, removing trees from the roof and giving opinions on how to fix the lift. No one is really familiar with the things though so no one would actually touch it! They were afraid they would make it worse, I guess.

The sheer size of the devastation is still hard to grasp. It is pretty bad up here where I live but it seems to have trashed the countryside for hundreds of kilometres.

I hope we don't get another Cyclone like that again.

A picture of the tree that went through the fence in our back yard, compliments of Cyclone Larry. 

Cyclone Larry-ed

Well, the plan did not go off without a hitch - a category 4 hitch. We were all set to go to Brisbane for the profiling training when boom - Cyclone Larry decided to interfere with that plan. Innisfail got hit when Larry was still a huge category 5 and their terrible devastation is in all the news casts now. I felt unable to travel all last week due to the disruption casued by Larry on the Tablelands. Roads were cut, power and phones were out, some towns lost their water supply, and everywhere there is trashed vegetation and disorder. Our own house was affected by the loss of a large tree in our back yard, a medium sized one in the front yard, a broken wooden fence, lots of broken and uprooted plants, a flooded garage and therefore flooded boxes of stored goods, the loss of the microwave oven, the loss of all our refrigerated and frozen food, and just a general sense that life had been turned upside down. Power was out for 4 1/2 days. Phones worked for a day or so then started to be unreliable. News of neighbours miraculous escape or loss poured in. The size of this natural disaster is hard to grasp. A short drive between Tableland towns soon reveals that life will not be set to rights again for months, maybe years. Priorities have shifted and been reassessed in personal and public domains. I am so impressed by the persistence and energy being expended by those who have come to help us. They are the heroes of this hour.

A sense of humour is still thankfully vident in many places - for instance, a friend saw a sign on the back of a car that said "Just Larry-ed".

I am very glad that the Brisbane people who asked us to come and train them understood, and we are reschedueling the training for the end of May, all being well.

Teacher Profiling in Brisbane!

Well, Martha and I are about to take the plunge and teach some other Teachers how to be classroom profilers. The North is going South - we are travelling from Cairns to Brisbane to deliver this teaching! It's exciting to think that there will be more of us. I have definitely enjoyed the contact with Teachers from Ed Qld, but there have been only a handful of TAFE Teachers that have been interested in classroom profiling up until now. Somehow, teaching in the TAFE system is very different from high schools and primary schools, especially when we are delivering classes flexibly and with blended delivery strategies. Martha and I are interested in making the discussion about TROPIC-el (Teachers Reflecting on Practice in Classrooms and in E-learning) wider than behaviour management. Behaviour management strategies are improtant, and we like teaching the microskills to help Teachers with this, but..we also want to have more professional discussions about what good teaching actually is. How do our learners learn? How do they learn in the e-learning environment? What is best practice?

Will be travelling for all of next week. I may not get back to this Blog for a week or so.

Profiling, quality teaching practices, research possibilities...

Thanks for the day, Martha. We looked at lots of things, didn't we. I appreciate having time away from phones, interruptions, distractions (except from the meanderings and mind maps we created ourselves!) to talk about profiling, teaching and learning strategies. Why are times to do these sorts of things so rare? I think the value of these types of meetings often goes unrecognised.

Where to from here? I am keen to hold some training sessions with the teams. I want to be part of more profiling sessions. I want to widen out the professional discussion to talk about positive teaching practices, how we encourage students ot learn, and what we are doing RIGHT!

A new plan for teaching students in remote areas

Another teacher and I have been developing a new plan for teaching high school students in remote areas to connect them up somehow into one vast learning experience that would have value and meaning for everyone. The mix will go something like this:

1. One hour of video conference per week where interactive, short bursts of lessons are interspersed with group activities at each site (if the groups are big enough) or splitting off sites where there are small numbers so that they can complete activities 'together' and then report back to the entire VC.

2. One hour of web conferencing per week using a Centra platform. There are options for sharing a whiteboard with other students (and the Teacher of course), shared web browsing, shared project pages, games like hangman, crosswords, chances to complete instant polls and surveys, voice capability and, of course, chat sessions and boards.

3. One hour of face-to-face tutoring per week where students enrolled at each site have a real person all to themselves to ask questions, clarify meanings, work on assignments and generally smooth out any 'bugs'. Includes literacy support especially for those having trouble with the web component of the course.

4. An understanding that students will spend a minimum of 3 more hours of their own time on subject material eaxh week.

How does that sound? I think it will work.

It's November already

Wow - it has been over a month since I last posted. It's a busy time of the year after all, but something happened today that I wanted to reflect upon.

A student took the time to phone me to say how much she had enjoyed the class she had just completed with me and another Teacher. The things she liked about the class were the informality, the fun, the involved style of learning that allows students to contribute and learn from each other. She likes the fact that we as Teachers are not intimidating, are friendly and seem to enjoy the classes too.

What is good for that student is also good for us as Teachers. Teaching is about relationships to me. Unless a learner feels safe enough in the learning environment to try new behaviours, new patterns of thinking, how is s/he to learn? Respect in the classroom is a foundation. There is definitely room for humour that does not denigrate or humiliate too.

And I wonder how long I would continue to be a Teacher if it was not enjoyable? It is rewarding to me to see the changes in people's thinking, in their expanding horizons.

They expand my horizons too.

Post-Profiler Training Reflections

It's the week after I comlpeted my profiler training. What a difference that week made. I really was doubting that I would be able to synthesise the data from the first week and make sense of everything. The second week really consolidated the learning for me and I now feel comfortable being a profiler. I just hope I get plenty of practice from people asking me into their classrooms. It is invigorating to have a space to talk about teaching in a professional manner....

More later - am in the middle of downloading an update on Mozilla Firefox!

Good intentions are not enough

It is 10 days since I completed a profile on a Teacher and I have not yet been able to sit down with her and give her any feedback. She does have the score sheets, thank goodness, but she will not know what they mean.

Work is so stuffed full of things that have to be done - how is it that I am going to be able to fit proper profiling sessions into my workload? The Teachers deserve to have feedback and in fact there will be no cultural shift to best practice this way without it. How do I make profiling more of a priority in the midst of the overdriven teaching workload? Already I am wondering about how I will catch up with the marking and planning and so on that I will miss out on next week when I am on the second week-long training session with Mark and Denise.

Is it just because it is so late in the day and I am still buzzing around trying to be 'productive'? That's part of it, but I am concerned about this matter when I am not tired, too....

Profiling tomorrow

It is the eve of my profiling assessment. I am not sure I am ready for this - how will I remember all the different behaviours I am supposed to be recording? More importantly, will I be able to give some meaningful and useful feedback to the Teachers I profile? Let's see if I can get some thoughts about all this down on 'paper'.

It is important that the Teachers do find the process of use - a way of reflecting on teaching practice and a doorway to discussing pedagogy. We have so few opportunities to do this sort of thing as a profession. I want it to work. I hope it will be a way to help people become better Teachers, and to confirm what they are doing right. I hope it will also make it easier to ask for ideas when a Teacher has a new challenge that seems insurmountable. In particular, I would like Teachers to be able to discuss strategies for behaviour management whenever necessary. I don't know any TAFE Teachers who have huge problems with behaviour management except when they have classes largely made up of high school students. Maybe I will discover that this impression is not quite correct.

It's going to be interesting, either way it turns out.

Random thoughts about Teacher Profiling as a learning experience

I am part way down the journey to becoming a Teacher Profiler. Part of the reason people seem willing to be profiled seems to be that they want to improve their profesional teaching skills. This is voluntary learning in action - no course needed, no book, just a trained observer willing to spend 40 minutes in your classroom and tell you what they have seen afterwards.

It is an interesting experience to be in different teacher's classrooms. We have never really had a system that allowed such observation before. What does go on in classrooms? They are a public place for students enrolled in them, and usually not for anyone else. This is a form of practical privacy really. The potential for the abuse of power is incredible for the Teacher. The student is not without influence but in most classrooms, the teacher sets the standards for learning, treatment of the truth, attitudes and behaviour.

Blogging about this topic with other Teachers should reveal some interesting ideas and comments. Blogs can be sort of like classrooms too - only interested people read what you have written and participate in the discussion - they sort of 'enroll' themselves....it's another form of learning.

Motivating adult learners

'First day back fog' lifted pretty early in the day today - it was a productive day and I was pretty content to be back, once I got there!

So to get back to the topic of motivating adult learners, some things happened today that motivated me to learn - a colleague and I discussed how we could learn more about teaching practice and how we could develop a community of interest around skills that enhance teaching and learning among teachers who are deliberately studying these things. We decided that while we would need some f2f meetings, we would also develop a web site so we could

• post interesting information for each other,
  
• have discussions,
• keep track of useful stuff we find, etc.
  

The motivator for me was that we were driving this - no one was making us do it, no one else would gain as much as we would from it, no one would join the group without a genuine interest in the subject matter, and it was fun to think about how we could be collecting information in a unique way - no idea is really new after all - we develop our ideas in an environment of input from so many other sources it amazes me when people take entire credit for thinking up 'new' stuff...yet if we don't do it we miss out on noticing a lot that we could be using. I guess that's what I see as a major purpose behind developing reflective practice habits
.
So we'll see where this leads.