My BBC email alert once again gave me food for thought this morning – also noticed by @acsutcliffe who tweeted about it.

What makes a good teacher? asks the article by Mike Baker. The conclusions of research carried out by a group of experts at the invitation of Cambridge Assessment agency make interesting reading. You can read the article for yourself, but I found it interesting to read some of the conclusions.

Professor Patricia Broadfoot argued that
“the highest quality teaching and learning comes when we have the greatest autonomy for the teacher and the learner”. The good teacher, she went on, was someone who was “left to get on with what they think their students need”.
She goes on to suggest that child centred learning is the key.

Another expert Professor Debra Myhill pointed to the ability of the teacher to reflect on and change his or her performance as key.

And another, Professor Mary James commented
“If learners are not involved in their learning, they do not learn”.

My favourite phrase of the article is the call for teachers to be ‘creatively subversive’ – explained as not passively accepting Government initiatives and directives, nor dismissing them and refusing to comply, but instead, creatively adapting them.

Well – I agree with @acsutcliffe – there is a lot of relevant stuff here that the Government needs to note, and the conclusions of these experts make perfect sense to me. Subject knowledge is all well and good but it’s what you do with it and how you share it that matters.

The article concludes with the writer questionning whether there are enough teachers capable of ‘creative subversion’ after years of being told exactly what to teach and how.

I know plenty of people who are ready, willing, able, and in fact, downright excited about a bit of ‘creative subversion’ .

What do you think? Are you up for it?

I find myself unexpectedly in Starbucks, enjoying a gingerbread latte and staring at the wall.

The time has come to admit something I’ve tried to ignore and hide for a while – I am addicted to blogging! I’ve just taken a test and, by asking me about my blog habits it concluded that …
81%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Now that’s worrying! What’s more worrying is that I’m sure it would be worse if the questionnaire had asked questions like

• how often do you casually drop your blog into conversation?
• how many times a day do you ‘pop by’ your blog to check how many visitors it’s had?
• how much time do you spend looking for bling for your blog?
• do you feel bereft if you can’t look at your blog on a regular basis (Birmingham LA hasn’t blocked blogs yet, but I did a course in Gloucester where they are blocked and was beside myself that I couldn’t see ¡Vámonos!)

Joking aside, I am loving my blog, and the time I spend on it is well spent as people are reading it – and I hope finding it interesting and informative. My visitor counter clocked 1000 on Monday and I nearly hit the roof. May not seem many when you think that Joe Dale’s blog is at 81,980, but I’m pleased as punch. In the words of Jaume Fuster De mica en mica s’omple la pica.

So keep stopping by and letting me know what you’ve found interesting and I’ll keep feeding my addiction – which actually is a quite healthy one!

Whilst at the Teachmeet at BETT this year I witnessed Doug Belshaw announcing the official launch of EdTechRoundup.

As Tom Barrett puts it on his blog, ‘ EdTechRoundup is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don’t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people’s throats’
‘Our aim is to deliver common sense advice and guidance that is practical to teachers – much of what we will talk about has been tried and tested with our classes. The shows will be hosted by two different people each week – to see who is involved please visit the contacts page on the wiki.’ that you listen in too.

The first edition of the podcast went live last week. It is hosted by David Noble (who I have met) and Sinclair McKenzie (who I have virtually met) and features a short interview with Joe Dale on reasons to use blogs in the classroom. I had a chance to tune in yesterday and would recommend that you do too.

I particularly liked the discussion of www.classtools.net , a site I had heard of and meant to use but never got around to it! I was reminded of it at Teachmeet where the fruit machine was used to pick the order of presenters. The site offers the opportunity to create free games, activities and diagrams using Flash and is well worth an explore. I’ve already input the names of all the classes I’m teaching at the moment into random name picker and hope the kids will enjoy seeing their names spinning – and it’ll also save me being accused of only picking the children in my house!

Anyway – listen to the podcast and find out about this, and much much more. You can listen to it via the blog or through an iTunes feed.

Episode 2, presented by Tom Barrett and John Johnston will be available soon so stay tuned to learn more!

I’ve mentioned before the Voices of the World project, initiated by
Sharon Tonner creating links around the world using our voices / sound rather than solely as a way of written word. It’s a genius project as it offers-

• a monthly task – short sharp bursts are great for keeping up interest , and also work well for me as the whole school want to be involved so I can rotate classes to lead
• a different tool each month – so far – Voki, Animoto, One True Media and Voicethread (not to mention using Audacity and Flickr to gather and create things!) so we’re introducing new ideas and techniques into the classroom – and they’re free!
• links with classes across the globe – Greece, Thailand, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Australia, USA… the list goes on.
• the opportunity for my pupils to ‘be’ Spanish. I teach them Spanish and, in the absence of a Spanish school, and because I have to be different, Whitehouse Common are doing their tasks in Spanish (the other schools are doing the tasks in their own language)

This month, the task is on Voicethread and is on the theme of customs. It’s a two part task – Sharon has selected some slides featuring fruit, clothes, musical instruments etc and each school is going to record the name of each fruit, instrument and so on in their own language. Then each school is going to create their own Voicethread based on their country – the food, costume, sport that most represents it.

I must admit, with January half gone, we haven’t started yet. There are many reasons but one is the issue of our icon.

We need to create an icon to represent our school on Voicethread, and Sharon asked that it be the flag of our country. Problem – we are in England, but our words will be in Spanish so which flag do we use? Sharon and I exchanged e-mails on the subject and concluded that it needed to be a hybrid! So, we were about to head off to Paint to redesign the flag when i discovered a very timely post from Langwitches, Silvia Tolisano, on a tool she had discovered on Twitter via Karen Bosch called We are multicolored.
This tool allows you to make a hybrid flag, based on three questions –
Where is your home?
What other country has affected you?
Where have you dreamed of going?

So, off I went and had a play and came up with these – not sure which I like best but it’s a start.Is this one a bit boring and predictable?

I like this one with the English bit of the Union flag at the front – but does the St George’s cross get a bit lost?

And this one is for our Euro08 project – we’ve drawn Sweden!

It’s a tool I wish I’d discovered yesterday when I was teaching Year6 RE about signs of belonging and identity – but we’ll be having a go next week for sure (they’ll be thrilled – tweeting on Twitter with Ewan McIntosh last week, designing flags next week – what will it be next?)

And I also think it’ll be a great new tool to add a new dimension to European Day of Languages next September – we’ve discovered the languages spoken by our school community – wouldn’t it be great to have a display of the 480+ hybrid flags of the pupils? And we thought last year was brilliant!

Need a rest before my brain overheats….

Sifting and reading through the bumph I picked up at BETT, I came across an article in this week’s TES (a bargain at 50p – although I admit I was more drawn by the potential of the bag in which it was packaged) with the above title.

In a speech this week at the Moving Young Minds conference in London, Lord Puttnam, who is chairman of Futurelab, said
“Technology savvy children are switching off and becoming ’emotional truants’ because schools are not relevant in a digital age”

He went on to add that “the education system seemed ‘out of sync’ with all that counted for young people……children were disengaging from formal education because it did not reflect their experience of digital interaction.”

The article concludes with some statistics about the use of technology by young people –

• nearly all children do some homework on the computer
• 77% use the Internet daily
• three out of five use social networking sites like Bebo, and even more played video games, used mobile phones or digital cameras

The final statement was particularly telling – ‘young people believed that understanding technology was almost as important in life as having a good teacher or a supportive family’.

Especially in the context of the comments by Jim Knight about Internet safety this week, it make sense to me that we use and embrace new technologies that children are already skilled in using and turn them to our purposes – for example, see this article about the use of Nintendo DS
If we allow children to use these tools in our lessons, we can guide them in using them responsibly and stop them from being taboo. And before we can use them in our teaching, we need to find out about them ourselves. That’s one reason I went to BETT and Teachmeet – to find out. But you don’t have to go to conferences. I bought a Nintendo DS after listening to Ewan McIntosh talk on this theme at Language World last year, and my 9 year old son has been having a marvellous time teaching me how to use it as have the pupils I teach at school. It’s led to several discussions about their favourite game sand several have gone away and had a go at Brain training in Spanish – there’s no greater incentive than beating the teacher’s score ;0)

I’m not saying anything new I know but if people keep saying it and doing it …..

After an exhausting day at BETT, I’m currently enjoying a glass of wine at Teachmeet and listening to lots of good ideas for using technology in the classroom. The rules are that you either have 7 minutes or 2 minutes to present your message. Powerpoint is mildly boo-ed and no sales pitches.

I’ll let you know what I learn as and when!

There are lots of different models for delivering MFL at KS2 , and the Pathfinder projects investigated a number of them. Coventry City Council was one of those Pathfinder LAs and developed an interesting project called Language Detectives, now Investigating Languages. I had heard a basic outline of what it involved and the theory behind it but never actually seen any of the materials or had the detail explained so, as I was starting to feel a bit of a fraud when I mentioned it as a model then failed to give any further detail, and also because I wanted to know, I jumped at the chance to attend Sian James’ presentation.

Sian has led the project for the last year, taking over from Nick Jones who began it. In a nutshell, it is a two year language awareness course with CD and activity book for each year which, as Sian put it, ‘aims to open up a world of language learning, of language awareness and language skills’. The USPs of Investigating Languages seem to be

• It’s ideal for the non-specialist as there is no call for knowledge of a specific language.
• It’s flexible – although intended for Years 3 and 4, and then followed by studying a specific language in Years 5 and 6, there are many different ways that it’s used: for Year 5 and 6; as a 4 year course with a discrete language taught alongside; as an intensive day once a term; as a bridging unit between Year 6 and 7.
• It clearly meets the LLS and Language awareness strands of the KS2 Framework.
• It enables pupils to become comfortable with risk taking.

It was originally conceived as a way for all Coventry schools, where the average number of languages spoken is 10 (one has 42), to have a combined approach to PLL. All schools in the LA have the materials and use them to suit their needs (as above) – I like this as it gives a common core whilst still allowing schools a say in the languages they teach, when and how.

Before explaining Investigating Languages, Sian actually highlighted a website I’d visited before, but hadn’t fully explored. Newbury Park School in Redbridge has a vast number of languages spoken by its school community and has developed a brilliant site featuring all the languages. For each one, a child from the school presents greetings and other short phrases in video clips with the word in the original script and also Roman script. There are also Q&A such as What’s your name?, a page that shows where the language is spoken not just as a first language but also as a second or third official language, and also a resource pack for each language to download. I love the site not just for the breadth of languages from which you can choose but also because it shows that this school values the experiences that its pupils bring in terms of their language skills and heritage.

Back to Investigating Languages (IL) – we began with a list of words. Sian asked us questions about what we thought we had to do, what we thought the words might be (greetings) and how we knew (we recognised some of them and made an assumption based on our experience). We then worked in pairs to work out the languages. Some we guessed, some we used deductions based on the way the words look, how they relate to other words we did know etc. which is a process that IL is seeking to nurture.

The next activity involved 16 strips, each with 6 words on, half with the language written at the top. We quickly worked out that the words were months of the year and the ones with the language labelled were January –June. Again we were asked for our thoughts and ideas, and encouraged to discuss our reasoning. Using clues such as script, use of capital letters, number of accents, we paired the cards. Then we had a go at pronouncing them, using one of the activities on the CD where four languages are featured at the top of four columns so direct comparison can be made. It was interesting to see how we were willing to hazard a guess when the script was familiar, but Russian or Greek was met with silence – how like kids us teachers can be! We found out interesting facts such as the months in Polish are named after activities that are done in those months and that the word for January in Dutch and Swahili is the same.

Sian showed us more activities from the CD and provided us with some examples from the book as well as the promise of a sample CD ( the previous group had taken all the ones she had with her!) Another favourite was an audio clip in French that she played with no preamble. We deduced that it was about someone visiting London, seeing Big Ben and David Beckham and saying hello to him. We put actions to the key words and then listened to the same clip in Swahili, using the same actions at the appropriate points. An amazingly simple activities but so much in it about use of cognates, word order, knowledge of linguistic conventions etc.

And another involved reordering words from listening to an audio clip. Whilst I don’t like English translations being displayed usually when new words are presented, in this case it demonstrated a point abut word order as the English word moved with the Spanish one.

Sian told us that after two years of this, when Year5 and 6 start studying a discrete language, the pupils are not content with single words; they want to know how to make sentences and paragraphs immediately because their confidence is such that they feel they can cope with it.

I’ll definitely be investigating further – even if we don’t purchase the materials (Sian is currently updating them so hang on until June was her advice!), the ideas and concepts are brilliant, aren’t they!

At the first run of the Preparation for Transition conference in Birmingham, everybody I spoke to seemed to be talking about the session delivered by Jacqui Tilt, aided by Helen Leigh, on Practical strategies to ease challenge of Transition in MFL, so I was eager to attend this time around when the opportunity arose.

Jacqui, a secondary MFL teacher and Primary MFL AST at Hanley Castle Language College in Worcestershire, works with a cluster of 8 feeder primaries and shared her experiences of transition and the approaches taken by her school to ease the potential nightmare under the headings COMMUNICATION, TRACKING and PROGRESS. s highlighted the importance of COMMUNICATION between all involved parties is vital. Ways in which this has been achieved at Hanley Castle include

• regular network meetings, sharing effective practice, giving information and offering support with both primary and secondary colleagues attending.
• Language College newsletter – primary colleagues are encouraged to share in this letter too so there is a ‘joined up’ approach to sharing. Where it was initially just sent to be put up on the noticeboard, primaries wanted to share this with their parents so it is now electronically sent for distribution.
• an Annual Language Festival to which primary pupils are invited – the week before open days (good timing!)
• The cluster (8 feeders and the secondary) were awarded the Leading Aspect Award which recognized their hard work – always nice!
• Jacqui offers model lessons –although as she says, she is becoming increasingly redundant as primary staff have taken over the lessons to such an extent that they can be an example.
• The Language College’s FLAs are also shared with the cluster of primaries, working on things like intercultural understanding and storytelling.
• And there has also been the opportunity to observe one another thanks to funding from an external agency.

Something I liked about this was that it really is all inclusive – not just the teachers ‘plotting’, but pupils and parents are kept informed and involved too.

Pupils from the feeder schools all come with different experiences – so the Language College has a rolling programme with two of three language studied each year – French and Spanish, then the next year, Spanish and German, and the following German and French – so even if the child doesn’t do the language they’ve studied at Primary in Year7, there is the opportunity to pick it up in Year8, or at a lunchtime club.

TRACKING or Assessment is something that can be worrying – primary children often say that they enjoy MFL as there’s no assessment – but it does need to be done so how? The ELP is a long document to pass on to secondary colleagues – Jacqui pointed out that wading through 150 of them was unmanageable– and where to put them? I think there is a value to the ELP and that they can be used, but would suggest as a ‘show and tell’ document during the first week or so – this way, whilst the pupils share their portfolios of work with one another, teachers get a look too, gaining an impression of what has been included. A more manageable way of recording for tracking is using I can sheets and, with Helen Leigh, KS2 MFL Consultant in Worcestershire, Jacqui worked on some I Can statements based on the ELP and the KS2 Framework, and also a very simple proforma on which all the information from these statements can be synthesized into one A5 sheet. (Helen has kindly given me an electronic copy which you can download from My Box of Goodies)

And how to ensure PROGRESS? In the above way, prior learning can be seen at a glance and acknowledged, and children ‘buddied up’ with pupils of differing experience – eg a child with no previous French supported by a child who has done French for a number of years. Another way of aiding transition suggested was the use of the first few weeks for a cross curricular topic with pupils based in one place for most of the time so there’s less moving classrooms, enabling pupils to get used to the place – Jacqui is excited by this prospect as it allows collaborative planning with other colleagues at school and allows creative links to made between disciplines.

‘Creative repetition’ is a phrase Jacqui uses to explain how the potential problem of repetition – revisiting things in different ways – can be addressed. She acknowledged that it isn’t easy, but with the focus on skills rather than content at KS2, the new ‘independent learners’ that will begin to arrive will be more able to take a lead in how they learn as they exercise their LLS.

That’s the way one cluster of schools has met the challenge – lots of good ideas there with the focus again on communication between Secondary and Primary. Parts of this model might be unworkable for a school with a vast number of feeders where a ‘cluster’ would be more like a ‘mob’, but I think the more ideas the better – no two schools are the same after all, so to a certain extent every school has to find its own way.

Coming up …. Language Investigators, and the Languages Bridge.