New year - new classrooms

This picture by Ben+Sam is from the wonderful pool of Great quotes about learning and Change on Flickr. It is a good reminder of the need to move forward from the old teacher-centred classroom into new learning environments that put the learners in the centre.

During the last couple of weeks of school before our Christmas break, I was part of a team of colleagues who were given the task of redesigning some of our classrooms, thanks to some surplus in the budget. Rather a challenge to be tackled in such a short time, but luckily we had preliminary plans from last spring that we could now put to use.

During the summer, the old language lab had been torn down (read the reasons in an earlier blog post) and turned into a new music class, which left the old music class empty. We had planned to turn that room into a small-group working space with some new technological solutions, too, but the funding had been missing until now.

We had three guiding principles for our plans:

1. pedagogical principles - our choices should support student-centred learning

2. downsizing - to make space for anything new in already too cramped classrooms, a lot of the old stuff would have to go

3. flexibility - the desks and chairs should be easy to move around and regroup into different formations

This is what the room looks like now. A typical desks-in-rows arrangement with the teacher, blackboard, screen etc. in front. There was also a huge TV and VCR contraption in the right-hand corner, but as you can see, the TV has already been dismantled and is on the floor waiting to be taken away, along with its metal shelving and the screen railings plus the OHP, (first part of the downsizing).

All the furniture will also be replaced by something like this:

There will be triangular desks that can be arranged either individually, in round groups of five as here, or in other formations depending on the needs of the lesson. The teacher's desk has been moved to the other end, even though the old blackboard will still stay in place. An IWB will be installed on one of the other walls, and the teacher will also have a spot table with a high bar chair- ideal to move around and use the new Airliner wireless slate on. Student laptops with some clever wiring from the ceiling will have to wait till a later date.

A small, 12-seat classroom will also get a make-over. Especially the teacher's end of the room has been a real nightmare to work in, although students haven't had much more room to move around either.

The whole room will be emptied and turned into a negotiation style space, ideal for small staff meetings, but also teaching small groups in a more adult setting, which suits our 16-19-year-old students quite well. Hopefully this will even help the students behave in a more mature way. The long oval table is put together of separate units that can also be arranged separately in a more traditional way.

We have definitely come to a point where 'a generation change' will have to take place as far as classroom technology is concerned. When computers and IWBs come in, last century equipment will become obsolete and will have to go. Or so you would think! We have already heard the first bouts of strong opposition from colleagues whose comfort zones have been shattered by these plans. I need to add that, in our school, hardly any teacher has the luxury of a classroom of their own, but we all go round the school teaching in different rooms, so classrooms will have to serve multiple purposes. Apparently, the upset colleagues' subjects are impossible to teach if students don't sit in rows of desks. In addition, they object to giving up their OHP transparencies, since learning to use a laptop and data projector or an IWB will take too much time and be too difficult. And lastly, how will they ever be able to teach that one course a year where they always show the same ONE clip on the VCR? Where their logic fails, is that it's all about TEACHERS and TEACHING!

Of course, ultimately it's not about classroom design or technology, but it is to be hoped that the new environment might open up some new perspectives. It's good for teachers to be forced to stop, think and rethink some old routines every now and then. If only we had had more time, we would have involved our students in the planning, but unfortunately school budgeting works in mysterious ways... I will post some more photos once the rooms have been completed. Let's see how many colleagues will be fighting for the chance to work in these rooms!

Ning and school - once again

After closing a very promising experiment with an online project Ning and  having started a new similar one, it's a good time to touch base and do a bit of reflection. All last year, my aim was to provide a lively, but to a certain degree secured (e.g. monitored membership), learning community to students in many countries. Looking back now, that's what we managed to build in a year although it wasn't by any means perfect. One of the problems was that initially, most of the students only joined because their teachers told them to, and consequently, the bulk of their community presence was in the form of teacher-led assignments. Very typically, students just went through the motions of uploading their blog posts or taking part in discussions to get their course credits from their teacher, but as soon as the assignments ended, the rest of the community members never heard about them again. On a more positive note, at the very least, they got a little bit of information about a new way of sharing information - with pictures and hyperlinks as opposed to the old static and linear pen to paper approach. Also, one of the main goals last year, apart from the obvious intercultural communication and authentic language use, was to introduce students to the idea of writing more serious blog posts in addition to the conversational chatting they are more familiar with. What I'm not so sure about now is whether this brief introduction will serve them for anything in the future, when they are more mature, and possibly have more to share and contribute.

Some time ago, I came across Dean Groom's blog post Communities just don't happen. Reading the next quote made me question the success of our learning community.

A strong community is desirable over a collection of people using a portal, because members are less likely to want to break the bonds made between them. Portals have users, who have no bonds.

Did we get anywhere beyond sharing a well-functioning portal for a loosely connected group? To my surprise, Google analytics revealed that last year's Ning still has almost as much activity as this year's one, even after officially stopping to manage it and guiding students to join the new one for this year. Clearly, some students managed to make lasting friendships and wanted to continue the dialogue even after the project as such was closed. What is quite evident, though, is that without teacher guidance and given assignments, the students simply use the old Ning as a place to leave short chatty messages on each other's walls, and possibly still carry on some of the discussions in the forum. No photos are added, or blog posts written any more.

I can't help wondering whether it would have been a better idea to keep the old Ning running and just accept new members to it. The reason why we opted for starting a totally new Ning for the second year, was that otherwise we would have ended up having too many dormant members after students graduated and left school, or their teachers decided not to continue with the project. With Ning, members have to delete their accounts themselves, the network creator can't do it. In addition, I was afraid that the this year's new members would find it difficult to navigate on the site, if all last year's posts, photos, videos etc. were already there. To avoid this, more guidance into following RSS feeds, for example, would be needed, to keep students on track of the latest additions on the site. Not a bad idea anyway! I think it's the old control-syndrome of many teachers that makes me want to keep organizing the Ning instead of just letting it shape a life of its own. On second thoughts now, I can see that there should be some sustainability to the whole concept of our Ning. We had better rethink the big picture of creating ongoing dialogue between students across continents and focus on the process and creating a sustainable community rather than a one-year project with a one-off end product.

The underlying problem is the 'old school' setting of such a project. In particular, if project work is made part of the curriculum, where students get credit for it, it easily turns into just another assignment for assignment's sake. To some extent, you can 'force' these assignments on students, but I totally agree with Dean Groom that "Participation in groups at the higher levels is entirely voluntary" - you cannot force commitment. As the structure of traditional school systems rather works against this, I have some budding ideas to develop next year, but more about them later.

Motivational quotes for passive students

Just before the Christmas break, we started our 3rd grading period of this school year. It is the last period for our graduating students, who will finish regular school in February and then start preparing for their national final exams at home. The Finnish senior high school system is quite particular (as I have tried to explain many times before). For example, I teach English, for which students study 8 courses during 2.5 years, with each course graded individually. The final English grade will be the grade point average of these 8 courses. A typical scenario is that the first 3 courses, which are considerably easier and basically only revision of earlier English studies, will give most students much better grades than the later, more demanding ones. By the time students start their 8th and last course, many know that the grade for this last course won't make any difference whatsoever to their final grade, so they just slack through the last weeks. I get quite frustrated with them, since they should really be learning more than ever now that the final exams are looming so close. But for the carefree youngsters there is always tomorrow, and "when school ends I will really start studying". Total self-deception and procrastination.

This year I decided to start 'brainwashing' them into making the most of the last lessons and taking advantage of any help and guidance I could give them before the all important exams. I looked for inspirational and motivational quotes for them, then browsed through Flickr to find illustrations for them and decided to start each class with one of these quotes. Apart from motivating the slackers, I also use them to introduce some more vocabulary, and also to start discussion in English about their relevance to the students reality.

So far they have worked quite well, and students are actually already expecting the new quote at the beginning of each lesson. The following one has produced the most discussion so far:

It was rather endearing how keen and open my students were to reveal all their secret strategies of avoidance (most of which I could guess anyway!). I don't know if these quotes will actually change their studying habit in any way, but at least the discussions we've had have been worthwhile. In their hearts, they know all of this, of course, and I know I should be looking in the mirror to find out why they have become so tired and passive, but for their last few school weeks, at least we are having constructive discussions about learning and teaching, and all in English.

For the quotes and illustrations, I have been inspired by others, who have kindly uploaded their work online:

the Great quotes about Learning and Change - a pool by several great educators

Education & Technology Quotes - 19 slides by Tony Vincent on Slideshare

Quotes - beautifully visualized by Silvia Tolisano

(and I'm sure there are many others, but these came to mind straight away)

Taking stock of 2009

It seems like ages since I've last posted anything here in my blog. In fact, I haven't been much online at all for weeks. I could resort to the accepted excuse of 'being busy', but the truth is that, of late, I have chosen to give priority to offline life. When family, including a teenage daughter, started commenting about mum being at her laptop too much, I reckoned it was time to break some routines. And so I did.

However, I have missed my online contacts and pontificating about education in my blog posts. I want to make this a more regular habit in the new year, provided that I really have important issues to write about. Often I do question the value of my thoughts being online. Personally, blogging has taught me to stop and reflect, which has been crucial to my professional development. But surely I could just as well save these posts on my harddrive for my eyes only. Then again, I have met some wonderful educators through the

comments that they have left here, and I won't want to lose that great opportunity.

Other insights this year: learned a lot about using Ning for international school collaboration, and finally got to use Twitter and tried a couple of online conferences, both of which have truly been more educational than any conventional conferences I have attended in the last couple of years. I have also started taking small steps to get some shifts going on at my school. It is very slow, though.

2009 will end peacefully amidst lots of snow and enjoying candlelight during the darkest time of the year. New year, new tricks soon!

Inspirational learning environments

During the 8th AEC-NET conference in Denmark, I had the chance to visit Alssundgymnasiet in Sonderborg. It's a senior secondary school like ours, with about the same number of students (400). But what a difference in the design!

I won't go into the details of the wonderful building, since it would just make me and many others green with envy. Suffice to say that entering the building was close to getting into paradise, complete with its own snake, too!

Something else about the school impressed me even more than the creative achitecture. The school was a totally wireless campus, and everywhere we could see students working on laptops - their own that they bring to school every day, I was told when I asked them.

How can they afford this? Surely this can't be a requirement for all students! I learned that students don't have to buy their own course books, but can get them from the school library instead. Books are a major cost for high school students in Finland, whose families have to fork out hundreds of euros every 6-7 weeks. In a year, that money would easily be enough for a laptop or two, not to mention the positive effect of recycling books on the environment! Publishers in Finland would no doubt go up in arms if this was proposed. I also doubt whether our local authorities could afford to supply schools with the books. The Danish students also said that for students who don't own a laptop of their own, the school has got some to lend out. However, no student is forced to use a laptop, and some students still prefer the old pencil and notebook learning.

I wish I could see something like this in the hallways of my school. No wonder there is concern that Finland is falling behind in the application of ICT at schools. In my school, for example, the accepted wisdom is that wireless Internet would be impractical and too complicated to install and maintain. How does it work in Denmark then?

We were taken to observe a class where students presented their research on their ecological footprints in English and with the help of computer graphs and illustrations. Excellent!

We don't need a new school building to adopt similar 21st-century classroom practices. What we do need, though, is the wireless internet and the laptops. I wonder how long we will have to wait for them in today's economic atmosphere! To make the rest of us feel better, the Danish colleagues explained that their school was well ahead many others in their country, and that by no means all schools were as well equipped and advanced in the use of technology.

Even so, I dream on.

Redesigning traditional classrooms

Most people have a fixed idea about what classrooms should look like - desks in neat rows facing the blackboard on one wall, in front of which the teacher is supposed to teach. The industrial model, deeply entrenched in people's consciousness, around the world. Difficult to change, too, with tight budgets and old school buildings, with the traditional square and boxy classroom design. Nevertheless, I have noticed that primary and middle school teachers even in Finland have been slightly more adventurous in rearranging their classrooms, but the higher up you get on the educational ladder the more set are the rows of desks.

Inspired by a colleague, who arranged the desks into groups of four, I wanted to experiment with the same arrangement last year, with quite encouraging results. After some negotiation with the principal and the school development group, we managed to get the green light at a staff meeting to make this a permanent arrangement in two classrooms. The reason why we need to consult all the teachers, is that we are not lucky enough to have our own classrooms, but instead each teacher changes rooms all through the day and week, and consequently several teachers share the same rooms.

Since then I have had all my groups study in this format - 3-4 students together in a small group.

I must say, this suits foreign language learning very well, since we do spoken work and practise communication in the foreign language in every class. Having more than one partner to exchange ideas with leads to more active participation by all the students and wider perspectives on the topics discussed. What's more, this is a simple little change to make me throw the learning ball to the students more often in my lesson plans.

SETTING UP THE GROUPS
How to arrange students into the groups then? I have tried different ways. I had read earlier that the teacher should set up the groups, making sure that there are both boys and girls and students with varying abilities in each group. Doing this is rather time-consuming, and I don't always know the students enough in advance to be able to gauge their ability. In addition, I am often unaware of personal chemistry problems between students, which may lead to unnecessary conflicts and unconstructive collaboration. Our high school system, as I have explained in a previous post, is unique in that it is more like a university system. Students choose the courses they want to study in each of the 5 grading periods, and so the compotisition of each group changes five times a year, so in every group I teach I usually have some students that I meet for the very first time.

After a couple of failed attempts, I decided to let the students choose their own groups. Quite expectedly, this led to some disruptive groups of good friends and a few shy and quiet students helplessly standing by the door, too afraid to join anyone voluntarily. This didn't work all that well either.

My latest system has worked quite well. In the first lesson of a course, I let the students sit in pairs that they choose themselves. After that I will join up the pairs and individual students in mixed groups of 3 or 4. In this way the students are given a little of bit of choice, which they like, but I can interfere, too, with hardly any opposition from the students. Lonely students don't stick out like sore thumbs, and the noisy ones are kept apart.

CRITICISM
I don't think anyone has come up with one, universally working solution for organising classrooms and learning in a school setting. If that solution had been found, I'm sure we'd all know about it by now!

Naturally, not everybody likes the new classroom set up. Students protest because more active participation is expected of them. Sitting in rows allows them to spend more time quietly in their own thoughts, or withdraw totally from any participation in class. Not so in the groups, where they have to at least recognize the existence of their group mates in one way or another. Shy students find it difficult to sit facing others. Some also complain that when they do have to face the front of the class, with the board and the screen, it's awkward to keep moving their chairs to be able to see properly. Other complaints have been about the difficulty of moving between the groups in a crowded room.

Colleagues who share the same classroom complain that it is impossible for them teach their subject with this desk arrangement. This is especially true about maths teachers. Last spring we had rather a big conflict, where one maths teacher couldn't find anyone to change rooms and so started demanding me to put the desks back into rows for her to be able teach in the room. I didn't comply, since I had the staff meeting decision to back me up. On the other hand, some other colleagues who have been intially forced to teach in this room, have actually found it good, and have changed some of their classroom routines accordingly.

The latest criticism, just this week came from a cleaning lady. She was waiting for me outside the classroom, ready to come in after my last lesson in the afternoon. She asked me why I had the desks in groups and suggested I go back to the old arrangement, so it would be easier and quicker for her to wipe the floor. I was rather astounded by this sudden comment from an unexpected source. I considered it wiser not to start throwing pedagogical jargon about collaborative learning to her and gave a simple explanation of group work. She then went on to enlighten me that I was actually preventing students from learning properly, since most of them weren't facing the blackboard! Oh well, maybe next week I should offer her some good tips about cleaning in return...

8th AEC-NET conference in Sonderborg, Denmark

Greetings from Denmark! I have more or less been 'off the radar' for over two weeks. At first there was the presentation to prepare as we were lucky to be shortlisted for the AEC-NET award again. I wanted to introduce the audience to something new, and practised with Prezi, the new presentation tool developed in Hungary. I had some trouble downloading the finished presentation and was rather panicky at one point, since the presentation date was getting closer and closer, but with the friendly and speedy help from the Prezi team, plus totally unexpected assistance through Twitter, I managed in the end. Pheww! Thank you so much everybody!

On the whole, though, It was a lot of fun learning a totally different concept of putting a presentation together. PowerPoint is so linear and predictable, whereas Prezi forces you to start from the big picture and then add surprising details and fun parts to it. I must say Prezi did live up to its novelty value, especially since all the other presenters relied on good old PowerPoint. I got a lot of interested questions. Here is the beginning 'canvas' of the presentation, where I used pictures of lego characters as part of the illustration, since we were in Denmark.

I don't think it was only thanks to Prezi, though, that we were lucky to win another AEC-NET award for our WHAZZUP? project. We did have a very lively online community last year, where students learned a lot

about the 10 different participating schools and their respective cultures. Students were also guided to more academic blog writing in addition to the popular forum discussion and chat, where more colloquial language could be used. Many of them also produced multimedia presentations on various topics that they were learning at school. Creating a positive digital footprint, and responsible net behaviour were also among our goals, and to a large extent we did manage to get the message across.

Here we are, the winning WHAZZUP? team - I and my colleague Merja plus our student Henna, who presented with us, holding the certificate, and two of our partner teachers, Geeta Rajan, from New Delhi India, and on the right Adrienne Webb from Dublin Ireland. Adrienne, our partner for many years in various projects, has just published a very nice account of her AEC experience on the webpage of the Computer Education Society of Ireland.

As good, efficient and easy as virtual communication and collaboration is these days, I still think face-to-face meetings retain an important place in building trust and motivation for lasting partnerships. All my long-term colleagues around the world are ones that I have had the chance to meet and get to know personally outside the virtual world. I feel energized and inspired after sharing ideas with so many wonderful teachers from so many countries. The new WHAZZUP? 2009-2010 is on its way - a hopefully improved version from last year. Working on intercultural projects is an ongoing learning process that I really enjoy!