Paperclip Newsletter -
Last updated 30th June 2010
WORKSHOPS PROGRAMME
SUMMER TERM 2010
1st July Oldham - Talk to Writing as part of a North West Community Professional Learning Event - details here!
AUTUMN TERM AND BEYOND
We are planning for more talk to writing workshops in the Durham/Newcastle and Bristol/Swindon areas. We are going to follow up our successful Foundation/KS1 workshop in the Midlands with another in Derby/Nottingham. We hope to have dates before the end of term. We would be happy to run a workshop in your area. We do the admin, carry the risk of nobody turning up (this has only happened once so far!), and offer free places for you. You find us a cheap or free venue and help with local publicity. So please get in touch if you are interested.
A NEW EAL BILINGUAL FORUM
You are probably aware of the EAL-Bilingual Forum - this provides online support for colleagues working with bilingual learners. You may be a member or you may have browsed the archive: easily accessible via any search engine. It was set up in 2002 by concerned colleagues and was hosted by BECTA. This hosting will cease and the archive is likely to disappear now that the current government has cut BECTA. All is not lost, however, and we have set up a new forum as a Google group. If you want to join (and in order to see the archive for this group you have to join) you will need to send your email and details to Frank Monaghan at Open University: f.monaghan@open.ac.uk
LATE, NALDIC and NATE events
London Association/National Association for Teaching English
LATE www.late.org.uk are running a conference in central London on 3rd July including a workshop on spoken language at GCSE. Still places available.
NALDIC www.naldic.org.uk and Marylebone School are running a joint conference on 9th July: Ensuring that advanced bilingual learners achieve their potential
NATE www.nate.org.uk national conference takes place in Hinckley between the 9th and 11th July - a brilliant programme not to be missed.
ASE : Association for Science Education
There is a write up of the work we are currently doing with Science and EAL colleagues in Medway LA to develop collaborative resources for KS3 and 4 in the latest Education in Science magazine. We presented at the last ASE national conference and hope to be at the next in Reading.
If you don't already belong, now is the time to rejoin your professional association:
NALDIC NATE LATE ASE ATM Geography Association History Association Humanities Association
DORMANT ACTIVITY NOW REVIVED AND ONLINE!
PLEASE CHECKOUT NEW CONTENT ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES:
FOUNDATION STAGE: But Martin...
HISTORY, MAKING OF THE UK: Tudor Entertainment
WW2 HISTORY: Air Raid Connect Four
ENGLISH FICTION: Bill's New Frock, Frankenstein and an Interactive Bookmark
LANGUAGE/LITERACY: Feelings Synonyms
MATHS: Trionimoes
SCIENCE, CHEMISTRY: Compounds Bingo
SCIENCE, PHYSICS: The Bulbs (work on series and parallel circuits)
CAMBRIDGE REVIEW VERY POSITIVE ABOUT COLLABORATIVE GROUP WORK
Summary of research on classroom organisation. Pages 289-90
Teachers should encourage exploratory talk, argumentation and participative discussion. Effective learning is developed in relationships between staff, children and peers rather than the individual child.
Groups in classrooms are often formed without a strategic view of their purpose, and there is little support for pupil-pupil interactions within groups. Pupils often struggle to work together in groups.
Recent pressures relating to the curriculum and the classroom context have resulted in an increasing heavy emphasis on whole class teaching with little room for group work. Pupils are likely to be seated in an arrangement that does not facilitate their learning. Pupils usually sit in groups but do not interact and work as groups.
Effective group work has a positive effect on pupils’ academic progress, higher conceptual learning, behaviour and relations with others, provided that teachers take time to train pupils in the skills of group working.
Schools need to look more deeply at their current practices regarding differentiation (especially setting and inflexible within-class grouping) and identify best practice on actual effects on pupil learning rather than rhetoric.
Varying pupil within class grouping for different activities offers more flexibility, facilitates movement between groups structured by ability and avoids limiting the opportunities for some children.
However, the evidence suggests that there are no consistent effects of structured ability grouping, such as setting, on attainment, although there can be detrimental affects on social and personal outcomes for some children. Teaching quality seems to be the most important factor in determining outcomes, although pupils in the top groups can have an enhanced educational experience.
When we first started work on collaborative group work in the 1980s, there was little research to support what seem in our experience the most effective way to encourage learning in multilingual, challenging classrooms. Now there is much more research to support our intuitions. All we need now are more courageous head teachers and less political interference. Lots of thanks to Mike Kent in TES 4872 for giving Ofsted a sound thrashing. Why not write to your new fresh MP to let them know how you feel about government interference. After all they don't tell surgeons how to operate even though they do give them lots of forms to fill in.
In the light of the now very faint chance (slightly more if Rose gets to the statute book and much more with Alexander's recommendations) for more extended groupwork in primary, and to celebrate our first after twelve years History and Geography workshop in Southwark on 20th November, we are revising and updating some of the board games which we developed in the early nineties. The first to go online is the Aztecs Tributes Game. You can find a summary of this and a link on the American History page.
AND ANOTHER QUOTE FROM ROBIN ALEXANDER!
These are the final paragraphs from a chapter by Alexander "Culture, Dialogue and Learning: notes on an emerging pedagogy" in Neil Mercer and Steve Hodgkinson's new book "Exploring Talk in School"
There is a final challenge, and it underscores our earlier discussion of the need to relate the analysis of classroom talk to its contexts of pedagogy, policy and culture. Notwithstanding the appropriation of dialogic teaching by the QCA and the national strategies, some of our teachers feel that dialogic teaching's collective classroom ethic, and its emphasis on reciprocity and mutuality in learning, are being increasingly compromised by current government policy. In a culture of high stakes testing, which the UK government insists is here to stay, competition replaces collaboration, while coaching for recall against the clock subverts speculation, debate and divergence. Meanwhile, the emphasis on personalisation and choice may make the recent British espousal of the idea of classrooms as learning communities somewhat short lived.
Perhaps, therefore, the bowdlerisation of dialogic teaching by official agencies reflects not so much a failure to understand what it is about as a conscious attempt to force it to fit a framework; and a view of education, for which it is not really compatible. For it is hard to see how learning as dialogue can sit other than uncomfortably with teaching as compliance.
I hope this extract will want you to read more. The project has copies of this book for sale at 30% discount (£16) plus postage. I will bring copies to workshops if requested and it will be on sale at the next LATE conference.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ON TEACHERS' TV
In the broadcast "Teaching Talking 2" which can be downloaded or just watched on: http://www.teachers.tv/video/1493 a newly qualified teacher designs an inclusive collaborative lesson with Year 8 pupils on the novel "Holes" by Louis Sachar. She then discusses it with her John Yandell, her tutor, from the London Institute of Education. You can find a collaborative activity on "Holes" on the site here.
PARTNERSHIP TEACHING
Thank you everyone who responded to my request for information about what is happening at the moment with partnership teaching. It is good to hear that there is a steady and maybe slightly growing interest in partnership work. It turns out to still be maybe the most powerful way at raising awareness and building capacity for the best provision for children new to English. The biggest problem at the moment is that it is not a quick fix, but requires reliability and patience on the part of EMA consultants. If, however, every EMA consultant spent half a day a week on partnership work, we would be ten times more effective than all the other initiatives that we have encountered since the strategy embraced EAL issues. There is increasing evidence that partnership teaching delivers, and even Ofsted acknowledges its power in producing confident teachers of bilingual learners. It also produces more collaborative resources that produce confident children.
Collaborative Learning Project.
17, Barford Street, London N1 0QB UK
PHONE 0044 20 7226 8885
EMAIL: stuart.scott@collaborativelearning.org
The COLLABORATIVE LEARNING PROJECT was established in Inner London in 1983. It is now an independent and non-profit making educational trust: a support for a network of teachers across all phases and across the curriculum, throughout the UK and increasingly beyond. The enthusiasm and hard work of teachers has kept us in existence. We have always aimed to develop, disseminate and celebrate effective group work cooperatively, by sharing classroom activities which can be used as they are, or the strategies contained in them can be adapted to other subject matter or different age groups. Every activity has been tried out in many classrooms, and by using them, we hope you then will be inspired to develop other materials along similar lines, and send them back to the project. In this way we can keep abreast of curriculum changes.
Why collaborative learning? What exactly do we mean by it ? Are you interested in looking at some of the ideas that underpin our work? Here is a list of frequently asked questions and some answers, with a request for your own ideas. For those interested in students learning English or those working with students learning another language of instruction, the paper below discusses the value of collaborative learning for students in multilingual classrooms An introduction to Collaborative Learning: extending thinking and creating contexts for developing academic language in multilingual classrooms.