Source: ‘Lucky Roll’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaehbom/2246451899/

It’s been a while since I wrote anything ‘moodling’ but after this morning’s class I can’t help but quickly share this little gem.

In my Year 9 and 10 classes (both deemed ‘lower end’, damned labels…), I am trying to teach research skills, critical thinking skills and a bit of critical pedagogy to boot this term. It’s my last term at this school so I thought I’d go out with a bang

Last night, I created a monopoly board in a Moodle wiki. Nothing fancy, just a simple table in wiki’s HTML editor (no HTML knowledge required, just a bit of tinkering with 13 x 13 table in the enlarged editor). I entered the correct colour fields, nominal values of fields, utilities and stations. I then created a wiki page for each student by enclosing their names with hard brackets on the main wiki page (eg. [Matthew] ) and  copied the table with instructions into each personal page. This way, students simply click their name of the main wiki page, click ‘Edit’ and go for it. If you are not so handy with Moodle wikis, here is a “2 Minute Moodle” on it.

At the most basic level of the task, students have to find median house prices in Perth suburbs and enter them accordingly on the board, as well as find names of train stations and utilities. Basic internet search demonstrated – easily, but not for all.

They have to create 10 of their own Chance and Community Chest cards that need to reflect the realities of life in our city – more digging around and seeing what kids know, value (and not).

If they choose to do so (commensurate with higher achievement too), kids can come up with their own monopoly topic/theme – eg. Swan River (main river in Perth) and write their own ‘values’, cards and rules. But they need to ‘keep it real’ and back what they write with info they find.

Because this whole thing is in a wiki, kids can share and help each other out at any time. All boards are easily printable, exportable and of course – ultimately playable.

We had our first run this morning and I sent out a tweet: I wish I could bottle this engagement & open it on a bad day.

While the kids are beavering on their own game, I’m creating my own version – but with a twist. The idea came from a passing comment by a student, while brainstorming for open ended questions about Monopoly a few days ago:

“What if Monopoly was like real life. You sort of get your chance card when you are born, don’t you?” (who says kids aren’t great philosophers)

We have done a little bit of work of chances and choices in life and the difference between them. In light of that, my Chance card will have a theme “chances” in life, Community Chest will be “choices” in life. The cards will have statements with NO assigned further action (eg. none of the ‘Get $100). A Community Chest card may be “You fail to graduate from high school”. I will design a few sample cards, the rest will be decided by class before we settle and design our ‘Monopolife’.

The statements will (I hope!) lead to an open ended discussion and negotiation between players how far should the player go forward, backward, penalties, advances etc. And it is this discussion I am most interested in, to see how kids reason, argue, feel, value on their own terms.

I am hoping for a discussion with questions like: What can we do with choices in life? What about chances? Should we simply give up? Why are choices and chances (not) the same? What if you were really rich/poor and had different chances? etc.

Those are in no textbook I have seen but they are life. A life where chances of those with the most are often presented as universal choices, breeding resentment, stress and, so often misery. And vice versa. And all in between in all its messiness, through lack (and oversupply) of understanding and care.

We may not ’succeed’ in everything planned with this game, but if we enjoy next week or two in class, develop some valuable life skills, and see each other as fellow, struggling, hoping human beings – our work will be done.

Pass’n'Go !

This week, I showed the series of classic clips ‘A Class Divided‘ in my Philosophy & Ethics class. At certain points I paused the clips and asked questions like: Does this sound familiar? Is this you? Anyone you know? And pennies dropped…

I wanted to show that fighting any form of discrimination (in this case racism) is not just a matter of throwing more information and exposing the fallacy of harmful, deeply prejudiced and logically flawed ways of seeing things. It is a matter of bravely ‘touching the soul’ too.

Watch the little kids turn nasty, watch them lose faith in their abilities while others flourish when seemingly better, then ask yourself: Is this what we (are asked to) do, overtly and covertly, in our educational system? Broader society?

Take a few minutes to watch the first two parts of  Jane Elliot’s classic ‘Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes” exercise in its original version with her 3rd grade class and share what I’ve shared with my class today. Jane, thank you!

Sorry dear American friends, I couldn’t resist the calamitous pun.

Source: http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/

There is a frivolous and a serious side to this title.

A few days ago, I came across the story titled “Teachers banned from contacting students on social networking sites“. It was an unnerving read about a knee-jerk reaction by Education Queensland over several incidents involving contacts between teachers and students by way of online social networking (SN). Unnerving because I have been successfully using social networking tools to connect with a number of current and former students over the past year.

My first reaction was – this stinks! The reaction of several of my (ex)students on Twitter and in class was – this stinks! The fury of fellow ed-tech folk was palpable on Twitter and in the blogosphere, the phrase “21^st century” got mentioned a lot. The comments on the story’s website were an expectedly polarised mixture of “about bloody time” (mostly from people who don’t REALLY understand the methods, let alone the principles of social networking online) and “outrage” by people who have actually used social networking with students and benefited from it.

I didn’t leave a comment on the story but chose to sit on it for a few days, thinking.

Firstly, while the ban and particularly the lunacy of keeping teachers websites “private and appropriate” is unenlightened at best, I am sure that Education Queensland had the best interest of kids in mind, no matter how misguided the edu-crats may be. There clearly had been some breaches of trust and some inappropriate behaviour (I don’t condone it but then the number is relatively low considering probably tens of thousands of such ‘communications’).

As I reflect on this debate, I think this matter goes beyond the domain of education and a “few bad apples” causing others who use SN responsibly to suffer. It is a matter of divorcing education from the culture and society in which it is embedded into a kind of narrow technical pursuit by ‘experts who know’ (more on that in our ‘Why is everyone an expert on education?’ series, next installment close to publishing).

For better or worse, we are swimming in social media (see the stats above), it is a growing part of our cultural, social, political, economic and with it (why not?) educational life. Unless we make some enlightened and wise choices, decisions on such awesome tools of (ab)use will continue to be made by educators who have increasingly little power in the broader culture but fear losing their modest power in the educational establishment. To put it simply with a question: Ban it? Until when exactly?

How about leave it to the teachers and students? By all means, provide guidelines and warnings on content with sexualised nature, innuendo and stupidities like that. Social networking tools do make abuse easier to commit and distribute in time and space by people bent on abusing children or plain idiots. They can also be a wonderful way to connect, extend, humanise our teaching and learning in ways consistent with the century we live in. On the abuse prevention flipside, because these networks ARE social, they can quickly spot, even track and police (potential) offences. After all, friends are still one of the best weapons against bullying and abuse, aren’t they? Let’s talk with the kids (not AT them) and become wise TOGETHER about online behaviour, what is appropriate and why so. The idea that you control the mouse but don’t control the signal still needs to be bedded down in minds of kids, parents and educators (and politicians, obviously).

So is student-teacher social networking all good then? Not so fast, not just yet …

Online predators and abusers are a real problem. But let’s not make a leap that every teacher online is a predator or at least has stupid, if at least unsavoury intentions. If anything, it is the students that are probably more likely to be predatory and abusive. Don’t believe it? Just wait till a disgruntled teenager unleashes an MSN fury about you being a ‘crap teacher’ because she failed that test by 2%, and which you marked with utmost professional integrity.

Another issue is one of time. For all its benefits, social networking can become quite taxing on teachers’ time. Teaching is a caring profession, one where  relationships do and should matter. Caring for too many students online, usually as a supplement to face-to-face contact, could spread one’s teaching resources thinly. It could even breed misguided resentment “he doesn’t ever reply to our posts, he doesn’t care” or “he doesn’t want to be friends on Facebook, he is not friendly” etc. There is also a danger that because of the ‘always on call’ attitude, students will come and ask questions and seek help for problems they could be better off solving and struggling with themselves. And they will do that at often inappropriate, inconvenient times. Being a node, to use connectivist lingo, is OK but being a hub with the approval switch for all traffic would probably often work against the independent learning of students, something social networking tools have such a wonderful potential to support and sustain when used wisely.

And let’s not forget that old nut… While privacy is a button to click and filter to turn on in this hyper-connected world, it should not be dismissed lightly either. Invoking the platinum rule (”Treat others the way they want to be treated”) could be increasingly important or the SN tools may deliver disappointment and, at worst, abuse.

Final thoughts

This reflection began with the question “should teachers be allowed to connect with students over SN?” This is an edu-technical issue – ban or not ban. At a much deeper level, SN is about the potential to rock the boat of the restrictive, binary teacher – student divide we are so comfortable with and used to. For now, we (can) run projects and tinker on the edges with SN occasionally bridging that divide. However, it can be very taxing and quite possibly (un)helpful in many ways to be a (traditional) teacher, connector, assessor, judge, evaluator, crying shoulder, confidante, ‘buddy’ and many other things to cohorts of students 24/7 online and face-to-face. Context rules – let’s have a mature conversation about it.

But if we genuinely open up spaces where these roles are re-defined, re-imagined, in some cases even completely reversed, social networking could be an incredibly useful, perhaps essential tool in fundamentally re-shaping education towards a (post-industrial) model of cross-generational mentorship. I am passionate about working towards it but I’d continue to wisen up on social networks and by all means use them with students and colleagues … judiciously.

‘Judiciously’ not because I don’t use, like or trust my social networks (I love them!) but because the ‘bleeding edge’ we are at sometimes requires its pint of blood I’d rather donate than have it drawn without my approval.

And the punsy title?

What else is education other than a social network, seemingly supressed, blocked and banned in its 21st century incarnation. Not work? You be the judge…

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niclindh/1389750548/

I have grown a pretty thick skin over the past few years dealing with questions like “What difference can digital technology REALLY make in schools?” For the record, I loathe ‘electronic worksheets’ and my mantra has long been “if you can do it better, simpler, faster in pen and paper then…use pen and paper.” But try to come close to this without digital technology:

Earlier this term our school Moodle site got a nice new design. But things did not just look nicer. The aim was to make Moodle more ‘owned’ and used by students. To my delight, the biggest change has proved to be participation in the student ‘Have Your Say’ forum, now made prominent by a big clickable picture right on the top of front page.

From the very first day, students have jumped on it. Within two months, our forum is sporting over 60 conversations (another dozen already deleted as they lost currency or were clearly spam). They range from the inane, “lolz-full” to very serious, thoughtful stuff in many of the forum’s conversation threads, some with 40 posts or more.

A number of staff have actively joined in some of the conversations questioning, explaining, supporting or sometimes challenging the kids as equals. I have heard a number of comments along the lines “I love checking the kids forum when I get a spare minute, it’s addictive.”

Through the forum, the school community has had a chance to safely bring out in the open and many times incredibly thoughtfully discuss the issues that were considered ‘off the table’. Our forum is in an environment that is open (in mind and method) and very egalitarian. Yes, there are some ranty posts, immature responses and all, but to actually see the kids write and speak out in public, then be prepared to have their views scrutinised, confirmed or challenged is something that is not cultivated in many (formal) classes or so often gets the ‘educational’ label that suffocates the real and raw. This is huge for a school that is (still) suffering from the mentality of fear of standing out, amplified of course by teenagehood itself.

There is no other physical or virtual space like it at our school to bring together students of all ages and year cohorts to speak to each other. There is no other space like this where kids have time, space and (to many) a very familiar method to respond. There is no other space to bring students and staff together to share their ideas safely, and with the reasonable choice of (non)participation that breeds real maturity and responsibility. There is no hiding behind fake names – everyone stands behind their words, for good or bad. There is no shouting, interjecting, excluding, bullying … we are equal.

Technically, the forum is just your stock-standard garden variety of a Moodle Standard Forum, set up in a couple of minutes. The forum rules consist of one line: Keep spam and swearing to yourself. Now, let me remind you that we (our school) are not exactly stereotyped as ‘well behaved’ but rather the other way around. So one would think there’d be lots of trouble?

I moderate the forum with the help of four students (two junior, two senior) and so far, we have only had to intervene twice (spamming) as moderators. At all other times, it has been the students themselves who reminded each other about what the forum is for and what is (not)appropriate. Guess what sticks more – being told by a teacher or told by a bunch of your peers?

The forum has given our administration, teachers, Student Council and all the students indeed enough material to think about for months! And more …

One could ask “What has all that got to do with education?” My response: “Everything!”

It is touching what we, teachers are there for and we should be listening to every day – student voice. It is a crazy, young, hormonal, loyal, moody, clever, honest voice of people we are trusted to spend so much time and achieve so much with. Slowly, things like this are changing the kids from mere cooperators to true collaborators (Cooperate= work together to achieve the requested/ordered. Collaborate= work together to achieve shared goals & agreed methods of achieving them). It moves them from compliance to consideration, from being told to telling, from sharing what they think to shared thinking.

I know that some of my colleagues would knee-jerk at this point: “So you want the kids to be always right and run the show?” If/when it ever comes to that I’d just post the statement in the Have Your Say student forum for the kids themselves to answer probably with far greater maturity, passion and eloquence than expected.

And if by any chance think I am making this up, here’s one of the posts from the forum:

“Keep your opinion to yourself” is a phrase I see constantly repeated in this forum. Have your say is here for the purpose of having one’s say in matters.

Yes, one may say something others may find offensive but I’m sure a lot of which is just poorly worded. It happens, especially when so many people abbreviate and don’t proofread their writings. Anyway, telling someone to keep their opinions to themselves defeats the purpose of this very liberating setup, I could go so far as to say it undermines our democratic state and rights of “free speech” – it’s somewhat over exaggerating, but it’s the truth in a sense.

With people keeping their opinions to themselves mankind would not have gotten anywhere, if Charles Darwin had not observed animal variation and voiced his opinions we would not know of evolution now. If Karl Benz didn’t share his idea of getting from point A to B faster and more efficiently we would not have the ever-popular automobile. If Mr. Lasic had not been so in-touch with our generation and modern learning we would not have moodle and intern this forum to voice our opinions.

Some opinions are somewhat ridiculous (look at mein kampf!), but I am sure we are all mature enough to dismiss such frivolous propositions without the need of jumping on the “keep your opinions to yourself” bandwagon.

Feel free to elaborate on this.

Thank you.

And they did! 20 posts later, the thread is still going. I have used it in my Philosophy & Ethics class too (excuse the gratuitous flattery of my name there )

What has that got do with education? Can digital technology REALLY make a difference in schools?

Just ask the kids. And listen. Carefully.

I came across this incredible story today. (Still) think teaching is some mechanical, box-ticking, grade-chasing endeavour?

Kick back and take 45 (in full) to see Mr Kanamori with his bunch of 10 year olds. You will remember it for a long time!

(The 5 clips are sequentially lined up using Embedr.)

Now THAT is education. Evaluate that !

This time a guest post by a colleague, Veronica Emery.

When Tomaz asked me to write this blog entry I thought what I always think when he suggests that I, ‘get online’. Who cares what I think? Why would anyone want to know what I have to say? I thought it when he showed me Facebook, I thought it when he showed me Moodle and I was still thinking it, when he introduced me to Twitter. For a middle aged, computer illiterate teacher, these things seemed like a lot of time and effort with a presumption that total strangers are interested in my life or my ideas. I referred to it as vanity on the net.  But as this is the world which my students inhabit, I was determined to have some form of active participation in it.

So with the encouragement of my good friend, I began to check out my options. Facebook required way too much; uploading of photos, status updates and tracking of so called friends for my skills. Moodle would expose my computer skills to way too much critique from work colleagues and students alike. A blog of my own design, I don’t think so! Twitter?! Now here was something; no uploading, no pressure from live chat, no need for groovy photos and linking to others, only having to think in blocks of 140 characters and a choice as to whom I wish to ‘follow’.  This, I could have a go at.

Once I realised that the only people ‘following’ me, also had a choice, it helped calm my nerves about who would be reading what I had to say and who wouldn’t. So Tomaz helped me to sign up and showed me the basics. This was great. I could read other peoples ‘tweets’ without needing to reply, just think about what they were doing and how they were doing it. Too easy! No pressure and no requirement to put my own doings out there.

After three weeks of voyeuristic cyber life, I got brave enough to take my own groovy photo (just the one), and send out a few tentative ‘tweets’. After six weeks I had found; Barrack Obama, Kevin Rudd and the NASA Mars probe. Hey! Maybe there were some teachers on line as well. Sure enough, some great practitioners doing some really cool things in their classrooms, sharing their ideas and projects with the world. ‘How great is this?!’ I thought. After nine weeks, I read a tweet from Paige who runs a world-wide pen pals program for classrooms. I was curious enough to send my first direct tweet to the person I feared most on the net. A total stranger!!  Before I knew it, we had exchanged lots of information about her pen pal program and the way it operates and I was beginning to get very excited about the possibilities for my own students. Could this be a way to connect my classroom with another classroom on the other side of the world? The potential seemed endless.

Now, some four months after signing onto Twitter, my class and the classes of five colleagues have joined this program and are in touch with classrooms of same aged students in Romania, Hawaii and Canada. For students who have not, on the whole, had the opportunity to travel outside of their own suburb, this contact has provided a chance to connect with real people in real time about the issues, ideas, fears, changes and worries which are universal to all teenagers. I nearly cried when one of my least interested students began asking me for spelling and grammar tips because she didn’t want her new pen friend to think she was a ‘moron’. “Plus we’re probably the first Australians that they’ve met aren’t we Miss?” she said. I agreed that this was probably the case. When she replied “So we best make a good impression huh?!” I think I may have actually shed a tear or two.

So, I’m still no expert but the kids laugh with me rather than at me now, when I ask them questions about computers and the net. The best thing for me at the moment is that I am ‘out there’ and I don’t care what anybody thinks. How cool is that.

Veronica Emery (Teacher, Mother, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer)

Thank you Veronica, great story! If you would like to follow @mrsemery on Twitter – http://twitter.com/mrsemery or drop a comment for her below.

Another Evaluate that! moment…

Tomorrow marks a year since publishing My f*#!%ing goosebump story – the post I still consider my “best ever” (drumroll…ta-daaa!). It has reality, expletives and a message of hope – that one always dies last. As if to mark the occasion, I was involved in a similar incident yesterday. Less violent, more accidental but I did end up on the floor through an action by a Year 9 student in my ‘at-risk’ class (ah, the euphemisms).  Not bad for 198cm [6ft6in] and 100+ kg teacher hey? The student stormed out of class afterwards, staff were sent to look for him, I got checked by admin etc etc. But that is not what is remarkable about this story…

This morning, the student and his classmate partly responsible for the incident, came to our office 10 minutes before the first bell to see me. They looked me in the eye and simply apologised for their actions. Very sincerely and in hushed tones. Nobody sent them to apologise – they came completely on their own steam. For a 14 year old ADHD-diagnosed boy that is huge. The matter ended right there, no further procedures, charges etc. but the feeling of trust between us leapt up a couple of storeys – right there.

The media, politicians and pundits will have you thinking that education is all about ‘improved performance’. One we can declare ‘important’ and measurable. But how do you measure things I have just described above? Things that truly matter to me as a teacher and the student as a growing young man. Will he remember the (failed) test or birth/growth of respect by and for adults in his life?

I sent out a tweet this morning about this little teaching vignette and the response was wonderful. My dear transoceanic colleague Ira Socol (my [co]nspirator in promoting the phrase Evaluate that! – see why) and I simultaneously had an idea – let’s start collecting REAL, insightful moments of teaching and learning NOT measured (even measurable) by school. I started the Twitter tag #evaluatethat , sent out an invitation and provided a few starting examples.

Within just a few minutes, we had half a dozen insightful snaps of reality that make teaching such a human and unbelievably important task! And they keep coming…

And here it is to you, dear reader, and those who you know:

Whether you are a teacher, student, parent, administrator… tell us, in a brief sentence or two, YOUR moments of teaching or learning (yours or someone else’s) that was never formally measured but made an impression on you. These ‘bites’ of reality do not have to be all gloriously positive, the only criteria – true, real and not measured (no hypotheticals please).

We are collecting these via Twitter by using #evaluatethat hashtag in each relevant tweet. This will ensure all of these are kept in one place and can be easily seen by all.

What if I don’t have or want a Twitter account?

That’s fine. If you want one, here is a well-received Twitter Handbook for Teachers that has all you need to get started. If you don’t want to bother with Twitter, just leave a comment below.

Passing this on will make the collection richer for things that matter the most, but you know that already…

To watch a child grow – privilege of a parent. To watch a class grow – privilege of a teacher.

The tipping point for this post comes from tonight’s episode of Insight (SBS Television) titled “Worst and Best Schools”. I provide the link and let you decide on the value of punditry (and some valuable insights, to be fair) on display.

The inspiration for the list below is (ret) Judge Dennis Chaleen’s 8-point reflection on the effects of imprisonment (some uncanny similarities there with schooling). In a few brief points, he sums up society’s addiction to prison and reasons for lack of change in our views and practices. I’ll try to follow his ascerbic style.

I am no retired judge, only a classroom teacher of nearly a decade in mainstream schooling … but here is my list of the baffling inconsistencies:

* We want STUDENTS to have self-worth, so we care most about the winners.

* We want them to be responsible, so we make tests the most important things in their life.

* We want them to take control of their lives and own their problems, so we spoonfeed them with correct answers.

* We want them to be prepared for the future, so we teach like 200 years ago.

* We want them to be non-violent, so we blame.

* We want them to learn new things, so we discard educational research.

* We want them to listen, so we don’t give them a real voice.

* We want them to be trustworthy, so we trace their every move.

* We want them to be independent, critical, imaginative thinkers, so we measure (mostly ) recall.

* We want them to stop hanging around ‘losers’, so we ’stream’ all the ‘losers’ in one place.

* We want them to be kind and loving people, so we promote zero-sum competition.

* We want them to be a part of community, so we block and control them becoming a community.

* We want to educate the whole person, so we test academic skills.

* We want them to learn, so we equate it with the “necessary pain of work ‘in the real world’ “.

* We want to prepare them for the ‘real world’, so we ban some the most common means of communication in it.

What about the teachers? A couple of quick ones…

* We want teachers to lead, so we tell them to follow.

* We want teachers to teach deep and with passion, so we give them a strict syllabus  and a deadline to follow.

Is this what we REALLY want?

I have experienced it many times yet I am still amazed by the willingness of students to share information online they would not divulge in person. Through a private chatroom, messaging or a similar (private) medium, I have found out things I simply would not be privy to otherwise.

The main reason for it is pretty obvious: students feel safe and comfortable there. The power relationship is leveled, there are no raised or hushed voices, everything is recordable (no “teacher’s word against student’s”), trust is open, implicit and mutual, students are comfortable with the medium, they have time to consider, change, delete what they say… in short a differently powerful way of communicating that can be very effective and empowering for students and teachers alike. Oh yes, we ‘dislike’ or ‘ban’ that sort of stuff at schools around the country…

During a brief private chat with one of my students today, an old idea sprang forth. The idea isn’t exactly about technology but the priorities we (learn to) assign and value.

Since the 1950’s Bloom’s taxonomy has been widely quoted in edu-circles. The pyramidical, cognitive domain (do you know the other two Bloom wrote about?) has been a particularly prominent marker in deciding what goes on in classrooms. Lately, the original cognitive canon of “remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create” has even been revised to its ‘21 century’ digital incarnation and increasingly used by a range of people from parents, teachers, administrators to computer sellers.

But here is another one of those pyramids that came out about a decade before Bloom. Created by Abraham Maslow, the pyramid shows the hierarchy of human needs . Basic needs like food, shelter, water etc on the bottom, creativity, problem-solving and other, ‘higher order’ needs much touted by the digital peddlers like me at the top. If you haven’t come across it here is the classic diagram.

Now, this isn’t rocket science. If a kid is hungry, feels threatened, unsafe, not well, insecure or lacking to satisfy any of those needs towards the bottom, he or she might but is not very likely going to scale the heights of Bloom, no matter what you do or what shining resources you throw at them.

But unless we ask and/or observe carefully we might actually miss those signs. We push ‘Bloom’ and so often forget or take ‘Maslow’ for granted. Maslow ain’t digital either but digital tools can help, a lot.

I sent out a tweet last night with a link and a question about this. One reply (thanks Colin, @cytochromec ) was particularly poignant:

I had a prof who discusses pyramid on the first day. Only teacher who openly inquired if we were safe/healthy/fed/housed

“Only teacher”! Will you be that teacher or will you just go ahead and try to educate their head (often in vain)?

Yes sure, Maslow had his fair share of critics too but (just like Bloom) his ideas are still useful as a rough guide. It is not a gospel but can be a good daily reminder about what comes first.

Have a good day at school tomorrow.

This morning, I got organised to do the last session of compulsory MSE (state) testing with my Year 9 class. Booklets out, pencils ready to shade those truth-telling bubbles, DVD ready, all good until we had a minor calamity next door. When fixed, our DVD froze repeatedly, rendering the whole exercise pretty much invalid. Plan B – we jumped on the net to show an antidote to testing – Dr Stuart Brown’s  TED talk about the importance of play. The otherwise very reliable wireless network goes down. Plan C – start showing Ken Robinson’s seminal TED talk (Schools killing creativity) I had saved on my laptop. It was a long shot, still in the creativity alley but I feared the kids would get a tad bored. And they did…about 4 minutes into it. The first paper plane flew around… Plan D – I held up the rubbish basket at one end of the class and said: “This is an airport. You all get one piece of paper to land in it from behind this line.” What happened next will stay with me for a long time.

The kids from two classes (my “bottom” achievers class were joined by the “top” (Academic Extension) class thanks to another calamity) busily started designing the most elaborate paper planes and test-flying them around the place. Ever seen and heard about 15 paper planes in the air at the same time in a small class, with music going and 40 kids chatting away? Creative mess! After the 5 minute deadline it was time to ‘land’. Many planes, no landings inside the ‘airport’ box.

Then ‘Peter’ (not his real name), scrunches up a piece of paper and lands it in the box. Another student copies and does the same. Nobody really notices it, all busy missing with their planes. We finish and clean up. I do the spiel about how ‘Peter’ was the only person in this class who thought laterally and creatively. The problem was to ‘land a piece of paper in the box’, not ‘land a paper aeroplane in a box airport’. He got it!

OK, no big deal you may think. Let me tell you a little about Peter. As a result of an accident as a young child, Peter has had learning and social difficulties all of his years at school. He fights, metaphorically and with his fists. He is in my “bottom” class (as kids would so aptly know). He is not in class very often. He does not ‘like to read or write because he sucks at it’ (his words). He swears. He has a very short fuse. During the first round if MSE testing yesterday, he said to my colleague “I am not doing this, I don’t need another test to tell me how stupid I am.” I can go on but I think you get the picture, one of those ‘unteachables’ some would say.

Today, he has shown to himself and others that he is not ‘dumb’ by default like he has been told (and measured so!) for many, many years. Yes, small example, ‘trivial, feel good stuff while he is missing on real education’ some would say. Yes, ‘landing bits of paper won’t get him a job’. Yes, he should be … you’ve probably heard the list.

But I tell you what. Telling Peter that he is the cleverest (for once) and a creative thinker straightened his spine. This wasn’t some phoney, ‘feel good’ pep-talk (kids smell those coming from a mile!). I wrote him a little “Choose Respect” slip we use at school to acknowledge a positive with just a few quiet words of encouragement in person. I got a ‘thanks Sir” and a fist-bump – huge!

To the class (my beloved “bottom achievers”), I simply said “People do and will tell you that you are dumb. The tests we will still have to do next time will probably show that you are dumb. Are you going to believe that? Or are you going to show, like Peter today, that you can be clever and creative. Imagine Peter was an employee of a large company, they needed to solve a problem and he came up with a simple, original solution that saves them millions of dollars. Ability to have a go and think creatively will be worth more than any tests you pass from now on. You just need to work out how to pass enough tests to get where you want to go.”

Peter will probably not change overnight to some ‘model student’. I still expect him to get in trouble. But if for once he shows himself he is not a verifiable idiot the tests (will) show, he may just change a few things in his life. Peter, you made my day!