Why resiliency matters

Where Resiliency Matters

Professor Paula Barrett – Pathways Research Centre, ANU, University of Queensland

‘You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck’

Dr Barrett talked about the stigma of mental health and how severe anxiety and depression was much more common than thought; one in every five people will experience severe anxiety at some time during their life, particularly at transitional times in life.

She argued that, unless people had life skills, anxiety can lead to depression. However, she also argued that there were proven clinical interventions that can now help although very few people actually get help.

She also spoke of the problems some students, especially able ones, have with ‘perfectionism’ and that sometimes these anxious students are very able, thoughtful, aspirational, articulate with good family support.

Her argument was that we should aim for prevention, and equipping young people with the skills through curriculum development and gave examples about skin cancer and dental health program that worked. The same is true for mental health.

She talked about ‘human capital investment’ – that, ‘the best investment every government can make is the implementation of evidence-based social and emotional skills programs in the school curriculum’ (James Heckman – Professor of Economics, Nobel Prize winner, 2000)

She argued for the positive psychology approach about resilience – ‘the ability to bounce back in the face of adversity’ and of building on strengths, not just compensating for weaknesses.

Her approach is for schools to deliver social and emotional resilience skills in an engaging way.

She spoke of risk factors and protective factors.

I was a bit worried at the lack of interesting slides; she talked a lot, without helping the audience much, but the content was strong enough to sustain it, and she spoke without notes and with good detail about some of the key factors that she had obviously researched for years.

One interesting thing was the link between physiological evidence and anxiety. One in five babies are a lot more sensitive to things like noise and light, and get distressed quickly and stay distressed for longer. She seemed to be arguing that these were the same children who were prone to anxiety although there are protective factors that are at work here too.

She then moved to the protective factors and why they were important, and how easy they were to implement in schools. ‘Attachment is the most powerful protective factor in life’ (Barrett)

Another important protective factor was ‘attention style’ or what’s sometimes called ‘Mindfulness’. This did resonate with me (it’s a bit like meditation) and it’s an approach that some schools (like mine) have begun to take up, for every student, more purposefully.

The three most important health factors she talked about were: sleep, diet and staying active every day; move for an hour every day.

Finally, she spoke about the future resiliency model she saw that all schools would be offering in twenty years time, if not now.

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Monitoring (and celebrating) class behaviours with Class Dojo

A little while ago I was lamenting with my Literature class that it wasn’t always easy to document how that class went and establish what to do next, both of which are critical for effective planning, reflection, and formative assessment practice.

I take notes on student progress (formerly in OneNote, latterly in Evernote) but it takes discipline (and time) to do that after every lesson, let alone in that lesson itself. I might do that once a week, so I often don’t even have a record of who I’d had a good learning conversation with each lesson and, importantly, who I hadn’t spoken to 1-1 for a while in class.

It’s something that concerned me again recently when, at the end of term, I asked the students to complete a short online survey of how the course was going for them. Most of the results were positive; the students felt they could learn, were challenged to think and participate and enjoyed the range of activities, though one wag suggested that I could improve my tech skills

However, the lowest response came from the question: ‘Do you have a good sense of how you’re going in this class?’. It’s something that is difficult for Year 12 students sometimes, especially early in the year when they haven’t done much School Assessed Coursework (SACs) and it’s one place where a short 1-1 conversation can have much more impact than any general or group activity you set up.

But, who have I spoken to recently? Is the problem I began with.

So, I was very interested in the possibilities of the unlikely tool named Class Dojo which promises real-time behaviour monitoring. I saw the program from Roger Zuidema on Twitter and recorded that I was about to invent this!

I was surprised to get a pretty quick reply from the people who make Class Dojo too, proposing a Skype chat sometime about how it could be improved, which I’d like to do sometime.

How it works is you set up your class, who get zany colourful avatars, and you record good behaviour or bad in the class very easily via web page, iPad or iPhone. They get +/s or -/s against their name and the tally adds up. Over the lesson, or the week, or the term or whatever period you decide.

I’m lucky to work in a school where disruptive behaviour is rarely a problem but I was very interested in how this tool might be used to record learning behaviours. Our school’s reports, for example, include a set of ‘Positive learning behaviours’ from ‘Participates in class discussions’ to ‘Is organised and up to date with set work’ that teachers are asked to record in terms of how often they’ve seen their students exhibit those behaviours? Always, often, sometimes, rarely? But how do teachers record those behaviours and could Class Dojo help?

One of the first things I did was enter my students names and then showed them how the class looked via the data projector in class. They’re Year 12 students but they loved the quirky little pictures, immediately wanted to customise theirs (you can’t) or swap with someone else (you can’t).

We then looked at the behaviours section, which is at the heart of the program. We looked at the default behaviours (out of chair!) and talked about what + or – behaviours might look like in our Literature class, and then added them. One of the nice things is that you can set the positive and negative behaviours yourself and can even vary them from class to class. So, I can set up a series of learning behaviours that suit my senior Literature class, which are different to the ones I want to establish with my tutorial group in the wellbeing program. Here’s the behaviours we agreed on.

 

We agreed on these positive and negative behaviours and I was ticking off some of the things in Class Dojo through the class. This year I’ve started using a student as ‘class blogger’, who records the class discussions, rather than doing that myself all the time in OneNote, (they’re put up on the class wiki) and that’s helped free me up more to direct discussions or take records like this. So you click on the student names and assign ‘points’ as you go and it even pops up on the screen with a cool sound if you want.

At the end of the class, you get a report something like this

or you can get a report for each individual student, from any duration (whole year so far, this lesson etc) and you have the option to email that report card to a parent or student or email all the cards (it remembers the email addresses once you’ve put them in once)

 

 

I don’t think our school would approve of zany colourful non-letterheaded reports being emailed to parents, but I was happy to send them to students, always in a positive way to celebrate some ‘points’ they’d gained during the class. I wouldn’t want this to be a negative thing, and I wouldn’t be showing negative scores a lot, or giving them I hope. But, ‘not doing the homework’ is a pretty clear – in a Year 12 year.

Is it perfect? No. Is it a fun, simple and useful way to clearly document and share the good things that are going on in class? Yes. You need to have internet access and more importantly, your students on board; to involve them in the discussion about criteria and be clear and objective about how you’re using it: it’s not an assessment, it’s a tool for improving learning.

I plan to keep using it with my Literature class and wellbeing class this term and see how it goes.

 

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Should I be on “The Facebook”

In the normal classroom discussion the other day I was interested to find that everyone in the class (16 of them) have joined a Facebook group that one of them set up as a Literature study group. They’re all there, I asked and checked, and are discussing and asking questions and supporting each other (I hope) and pushing each other in the right directions (I hope)

I hope because I’m not sure. And I’m not sure because I’m not there. I’m not allowed to ‘friend’ students or be connected to them in social networks according to our school policy; a policy that I had a hand in developing. But, you’ve got to wonder. Here am I out here, trying to utilise our own online tools including a pretty decent wiki and blog setup, to get student collaboration and participation going and, here are they in there, doing it themselves, in their space, where they live, with the whole class.

I know you could argue that I shouldn’t be there, that it would change the dynamics if I was, and that they should have a space where they can test and re-test their ideas in their own way. True. And I don’t want to take over. But I could contribute, could support, could help shape that discussion and use that discussion to shape the classroom interactions and the things we do next. Could. Can’t.

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First look at Apple’s new take on textbooks

I’ve embedded the Apple announcement on text books below. I’ve already heard some negative reactions in the twittiverse arguing that this is another examples of Apple’s ‘walled garden’ approach, and that locking schools and districts into Apple systems entirely is not a good move. It seems there’s other questions too about whether these textbooks will be available on other platforms (unlikely) or available in other formats (very unlikely).

Nevertheless, I’m quite excited about it, particularly from a writer’s perspective. Could I write my textbook and have it on the Apple bookstore without the intermediary of the publisher? Like musicians do now?  Could we break down the systems and empower good teachers and good teacher/authors and share their expertise more widely? And I’m definitely going to download the publication software.

But I have reservations, and they are more around the idea of the textbook in the first place. Maybe the textbook thing is bigger in the United States than here, or maybe because I’m an English teacher there isn’t generally the reliance on a textbook beyond the set novels and plays.

The video says they are going to change ‘one of the cornerstones of education: the textbook’. But is the textbook really that critical? How does this change learning? Or teaching? And, will replacing the traditional textbook with a ‘bells and whistles’ version change the classroom experience? Where are the collaborative tools, the feedback, the personalisation, the differentiation, the user-created textbook that we’ve talked about for some time.

There’s no doubt it will look pretty, it will save a lot of printing and heavy schoolbags for kids with iPads (oh yeah, how many is that right now?), they can be updated easily and they will be more engaging.  But every time I hear ‘engagement’ as an argument for new software and hardware I cringe a little. There’s got to be better reasons than that. We shall see!

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The power of the voice

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I had one of those, ‘thank goodness that effort wasn’t  totally wasted’, moments a couple of weeks ago when doing some revision work with literature students to do with podcasting.
 
Teaching the poetry of Gwen Harwood earlier this year I was very keen to include as much audio as possible; after all poetry really lives when it’s spoken I feel.
 
So, I organized for each of the poems to have a definitive ‘reading’ by a student who knew the poem well. Hearing the poem is critical so I recorded each student reading in Audacity and saved them out as .mp3s which I put on the class wiki. I also recorded a series of mini-lectures on each poem, about five minutes each just talking through the poem like I would in class. So, each poem had a wiki page with a reading, a mini-lecture and the student contributions and notes.
 
 I didn’t think much about it, although to be truthful I was a bit disappointed that students didn’t see to see the value in the audio. So, in the very last lesson of the year I was pleased and surprised that a student from another class told me that she’d been listening to the audio and that it had been the most powerful thing for her own learning. That made it worthwhile somehow.
 

And justified me buying a new Yeti microphone in the recent Apple sale and putting it under the Christmas tree for a present to myself.
 

So, next year, more audio supplements to the teaching, more attempts to bring these works to life and maybe even a return to some of those rambling Ed-tech style podcasts I did a couple of years ago!
 

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Students and social media

Sitting here on a grey Sunday morning thinking about a parent forum we’re running at school tomorrow night for parents, on the issue of social networking, cyber-bullying and all that, I was struck by the radical difference in two pieces on the net this morning.

In the red corner, a New Jersey Principal has emailed his school community telling parents to close down their children’s social networking accounts, and that

There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!

Tough talk! And, I’ve reproduced the entire email below.

And, in the other corner (is it blue?) I was reading a blog post from The Innovative Educator arguing why social media curriculum is critical in schools including

Unfortunately, too many of the places where students go online to interact with one another have policy-imposed walls between teacher and student. Not only have many schools enacted policies restricting teacher/student interaction, because most schools have banned most sites students use to communicate they do their best to prevent students from using these tools to communicate in an educational setting. It is unfortunate that in the 21st century many schools have deemed adolescent socialization among each other or with their teachers as inappropriate.

Hard to imagine two more diametrically opposed views and I’ve some sympathy for a beleaguered sounding principal mopping up the fall-out from the messy kind of interactions that middle school students are likely to come up with, accidental and deliberate.

But, I’d have to say that it’s hard to argue that students ‘turn off’ the internet and I remember some of that talk around television and even rock and roll music in the early days. Block it, and ban it is not the solution.

I’ve been working with a couple of senior students who are going to talk to parents tomorrow night and for them Facebook is pretty much their internet. I don’t like Facebook, don’t have an account and don’t want one, but for them Facebook is their conduit with their friends and social world; their email, their Flickr, their events and invitations channel

We don’t block Facebook at my school, but we do block YouTube. If it was totally my choice, I’d probably have both open, though I don’t mind that Facebook is ‘throttled’ so it runs pretty slow. It will be interesting to see whether the block and ban approach will win over the educative approach that helps students understand and navigate the world they’re already living in.

From the Principal:

Dear BF Community,

In 2002 when I arrived in Ridgewood Facebook did not exist, Youtube did not exist, and MySpace was barely in existence. Formspring (one of the newest internet scourges, a site meant simply to post cruel things about people anonymously) wasn’t even in someone’s mind.

In 2010 social networking sites have now become commonplace, and technology use by students is beyond prevalent.

It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand!

There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!

Let me repeat that – there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None.

5 of the last 8 parents who we have informed that their child was posting inappropriate things on Facebook said their child did not have an account. Every single one of the students had an account.

3 Students yesterday told a guidance counselor that their parents told them to close their accounts when the parents learned they had an account. All three students told their parents it was closed. All three students still had an account after telling their parents it was closed.

Most students are part of more than one social networking site.

Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!

Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need.

Know that they can text others even if their phone doesn’t have texting capability, either through the computer or through their Ipod touch.

Have a central “docking station” preferably in your bedroom, where all electronics in the home get charged each night, especially anything with a cell or wifi capability (Remember when you were in high school and you would sneak the phone into your bedroom at midnight to talk to you girlfriend or boyfriend all night – now imagine what they can do with the technology in their rooms).

If your son or daughter is attacked through one of these sites or through texting – immediately go to the police! Insist that they investigate every situation. Also, contact the site and report the attack to the site – they have an obligation to suspend accounts or they are liable for what is written.

We as a school can offer guidance and try to build up any student who has been injured by the social networking scourge, but please insist the authorities get involved.

For online gaming, do not allow them to have the interactive communication devices. If they want to play Call of Duty online with someone from Seattle, fine, they don’t need to talk to the person.

The threat to your son or daughter from online adult predators is insignificant compared to the damage that children at this age constantly and repeatedly do to one another through social networking sites or through text and picture messaging.

It is not hyperbole for me to write that the pain caused by social networking sites is beyond significant – it is psychologically detrimental and we will find out it will have significant long term effects, as well as all the horrible social effects it already creates.

I will be more than happy to take the blame off you as a parent if it is too difficult to have the students close their accounts, but it is time they all get closed and the texts always get checked.

I want to be clear, this email is not anti-technology, and we will continue to teach responsible technology practices to students. They are simply not psychologically ready for the damage that one mean person online can cause, and I don’t want any of our students to go through the unnecessary pain that too many of them have already experienced.

Some people advocate that the parents and the school should teach responsible social networking to students because these sites are part of the world in which we live.

I disagree, it is not worth the risk to your child to allow them the independence at this age to manage these sites on their own, not because they are not good kids or responsible, but because you cannot control the poor actions of anonymous others.

Learn as a family about cybersafety together at wiredsafety.org for your own knowledge. It is a great site. But then do everything I asked in this email – because there really is no reason a child needs to have one of these accounts.

Please take action in your on home today.

Sincerely,
Anthony Orsini
Principal, BFMS

and from the Innovative Educator:

Schools that have taken the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the social media curriculum are neglectfully choosing to look the other way as students communicate, collaborate, and connect in worlds devoid of adults. The result can be that just as in the real world, without any adult supervision, students could be at risk and are existing without models for appropriate behavior. Additionally if educators refuse or are prevented from becoming a part of these online places they are not speaking the language or joining in the real-world environments of their 21st century students. That said, I don’t believe there should be an actual “social media curriculum” but rather social media must be integrated into the curriculum. Additionally, we need another name for these environments. Yes they can be social, but they are often more than primarily social environments. They are connecting, networking, and learning environments where students have conversations and explore passions, talents, and ideas. I’ve helped numerous teachers begin their own online learning communities with students and the results are dramatic. Work is published to a broader community. Students can easily see one another’s work, rate and comment on it. They feel like their teacher’s are finally interested in speaking there language. Teachers are amazed at the resulting conversations, ideas, and voices shared that would never have emerged had it not been for the integration of social media. With personal bio pages, students learn more about their classmates or schoolmates, or districtmates, or globemates…depending on the type of network set up. The students become the masters of their learning and conversations, and are able to do so in an environment that is safe and with the gentle guidance and facilitation of educators. Additionally the educator can set up roles for students who can be empowered to lead and monitor various groups and/or conversations. The lessons learned from the safe, online school environment can easily be transferred to what the students are doing online in their own spaces.

The other important piece to this equation is educating parents, guardians, families. They can also be invited to these online learning spaces. Additionally, caregivers must be taught how to engage in the online learning environments in which their children participate. It is unacceptable for caregivers to allow students to participate in these environments without supervision. Just as care givers would not let their children into real-world environments without a responsible adult present, they should not let their children exist in online worlds withouth them. But the adults need some support in how to do this and really what is and what is not acceptable behavior online. The best people to teach this…their kids and adults can help students organize at-school professional development for parents. It’s a win-win and learning experience for all parties involved. Together students, care givers and teachers can have meaningful conversations about what is appropriate, acceptable, questionable or embarrassing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

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Graduation Day

Well, it’s not really Graduation DAY, because she finished the course last year, but tonight is my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Monash University. Like lots of young people to day it’s been a fluid journey from double-degree to single-degree to shifts in emphasis and interest, discovering what she can do and what she loves (and doesn’t – take that marketing!) along the way.

Truth is, she doesn’t even want to go to the ceremony; ‘it’s only an Arts Degree…’ and ‘Do I really have to hire a gown?’ and all that. And, she’s already doing further study and doesn’t see this really as any end-point.

But, I’m glad we’re going to stop for a little while tonight and celebrate a moment in that journey. I couldn’t be more proud of her.

And, I couldn’t be more convinced, if ever I needed to be in these strange times, of the absolute centrality of learning in your life; the critical nature of the things we do in teaching and learning.

Above: First day at school; doesn’t seem that long ago!

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Dickhead Driving Campaign

I’ve blogged before about my belief that the ‘shock and awe’ trend in Victorian Transport Accident Commission (TAC) advertisements over recent years is not likely to lead to improved road safety.  You don’t teach people by trying to scare the hell out of them; it wouldn’t be all that ethical if you even tried it! Education is the key.

And the latest cool campaign coming out of some ad agency (your taxes at work) with the radical punchline: ‘Dont be A Dickhead..’  is hardly likely to be any more effective, even with some gratuitous references to Twitter and Facebook thrown in.

What  was more interesting to me was to see the campaign derided by opposition politicians in terms of the effect it might have on teachers trying to maintain respect and stability in the classroom.

One report in the media today said:

Opposition Transport spokesman Terry Mulder slammed the campaign for undermining the Brumby government’s much-hyped Respect campaign.

“It is appalling. Would John Brumby use that language when he is addressing a group of school children?” he said.

“It makes an absolute mockery of John Brumby’s Respect Agenda. It is shocking message one of the worst I have ever heard.”

and this from another politician:

Family First Senator Steve Fielding warned the ad campaign will make parents and teacher’s jobs much harder.

“Parents already face an up hill battle trying to stop their young kids from swearing and these ads make this job even tougher,” Senator Fielding said.

“I think the person who approved these ads has been watching too much of Gordon Ramsay.”

Mr Fielding says some common sense needs to be used in sending out road safety message.

I have some sympathy for that viewpoint. I remember once upon a time telling kids they shouldn’t say ‘bugger’ in class, until it featured as the punchline in a series of ads so memorable that I’ve forgotten what they were advertising. And I still caution students about language like ‘shit’ in classroom contexts. I wouldn’t be happy if a student in my class called another one (or me) a dickhead. And that is now more likely, no doubt. So, if it’s not going to help road safety (and it’s not) then it’s just an unhelpful waste of money.

Still, if politicians and media commentators really wanted to help out the struggling teacher at the chalkface by the good example they bring, there’s plenty more they could actively do to make that job easier, beginning with getting rid of the abuse, bullying and name-calling that constitutes debate in our Parliament.

Here’s one of the ads. There’s more on the VicRoads YouTube Channel.

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Back to school!

Love the cheezy catalogues that begin proliferating from Dec 31st on! Tomorrow, it’s true!

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The Millennial Muddle

Having just been in a discussion on the old Nicholas Carr article,  Is Google Making Us Stupid, which threatened to lurch irrevocably about how they couldn’t concentrate as well as we, and how it was up to us to do something about them or else they wouldn’t be able to think as deeply and powerfully as us, I was interested to read The Millennial Muddle by Eric Hoover which has as its byline:  ”How stereotyping students became a thriving industry and a bundle of contradictions”

I’ve never totally bought the new-gen, gen-y, digital native divide that demographers and social scientists often love. I like the divide less when it seeks to depict young people as shallow, narcissistic, attention-seeking and unable to think. The students I work with aren’t like that, and I’m more likely to go along with Negroponte and see these students as more worldly, more connected and more diversely literate than those before them. Negroponte can get all misty-eyed about this, but I’d rather his optimistic appraisal of where they are, than the ones who keep wanting to turn out students into us.

Hoover explores the divisions that exist in all the stereotyping in an interesting way. As a rule I say, beware of generalisations!

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