ICT Summit - Day 2
Don Ledingham
Tuesday 15 November 2005
Really interesting chat last night with a number of folk - must mention Jim McAlpine, Sally Fulton, Glen Taylor, Anne MacKintosh and Mike McCabe. At the bar - as you do -we explored the notion of status and the importance of status for headteachers and directorate. As I've explored elsewhere in this weblog the concept of conscious awareness of status can provide a real barrier to proper communication, if those in positions of power perceive themselves as their position or role and not as part of a group. It's also a problem in terms of - bottom up ( I hate that phrase) communication , where people feel they cannot approach people "above" them because of perceived differences in status/role. Such traditional relationships only reinforces the opppositional "them" and "us". Glen raised a really interesting point when he suggested that it is acceptable to enjoy your status if it is linked to being held in a positive regard by those with whom you come into contact. I could subscribe to this when I think of my father. He was a doctor to whom status meant nothing - he treated everyone equally - regardless of rank. However, I think he enjoyed being held in high regard by the community he served - perhaps that's why he found it so difficult to retire- in fact he died visiting a patient at the age of 69. Perhaps if we spent more time trying to emphasise the regard which have for our colleagues then a much more positive ethos could be created?
Today has been interesting. I'll try to summarise some of the points which struck me during the sessions:
1. BBC Digital Curriculum - must be part of any long-term strategy for using ICT
2. How do we unlock the resources in our schools to facilitate new approaches towards leraning and teaching?
Try this out: Take two schools one a primary and another a secondary. Let's say for ease of comparison that they both have 1000 pupils. Even taking the most conservative estimates the difference in staffing costs is at the very least one million pounds - the extra staffing in secondary schools being necessary to facilitate the current curriculum.
I mused whether a secondary school could do without 10 teachers (360,00 pounds with on costs), i.e. 55 teachers as opposed to 65. What could you do with this money? Well how about five of those teachers teachers supporting on-line learning for students at a time outwith school i.e. flexi-working. These teachers could also be supporting students from other schools following their courses. As this builds up a very different picture of the upper school curriculum starts to take shape.
I played around with an S1/2 curriculum which adopted a much more thematic approach, children's timetables would be made up of themes and not subjects - building upon the primary experience. These themes would adopt a problem solving approach where learning is characterised by creativity and teamwork. Glen Taylor told me about middle schools in Michigan where groups of 60 pupils were taught by only four teachers - has this any potential?
The S3/4 curriculum would appear relatively traditional but with a new focus on promoting supported independent study towards certification. This change would provide a foundation/bedrock for future in-depth study using national qualifications.
The S5/6 curriculum would be an open access curriculum. Where a course of study is chosen there may only be up to 20% of face-to-face contact time. The rest of a course could be accessed on-line using video conferencing, pod lessons (downloaded when the student was ready to study), discussion boards, weblogs, collaborative web-based projects, on-line assessments - both formative and summative. Are we ready for something like this? Absolutely not!! We don't have robust enough technology; children haven't been prepared to work this way; traditional ideas of what constitutes teaching and learning haven't moved on; working practices are still too traditional.
And yet how far are we away from this? Would some teachers like a contract which enabled them to work from home? Would teachers like to do their 35 hours without ever visiting the school?
Through such an approach we can also start to blur the edges between school, college and even university.
Picking up a theme I explored yesterday - the school starts to have a very different core, where social contact, teamwork, healthy living and citizenship take the lead.
What would a transition process look like towards such a curriculum? Well - not that many changes in primary schools - from what I saw yesterday kids are going to be bored stiff if they come into secondary schools with the enthusiasm for learning and sophisticated ICT skills - and early certification is not the answer. The key to this is linking the opportunities provided by curriculum for excellence, our ICT infrastructure, SSDN, SQA computer assisted assessment and the influx of newly qualified teachers into the profession over the next ten years.
I think schools could make this shift towards something like this vision over a number of years.
I'm looking forward to our ICT day planned for the 20th December where we are going to look at how we translate our ICT policy into an action plan and link it to our teaching and learning policy and emerging ideas about A Curriculum for Excellence. I'm delighted that Martin Ware from SQA and John Connell, Director of SSDN will be joining us on that day.