We are unconscious leaders.

Reflections based on TED talk “Leading with Lollipops” by Drew Dudley

People do not generally consider themselves leaders, even if they are, because they are uncomfortable with the idea of something monumental and unattainable.

We celebrate when we do something “difficult” or “extraordinary” but we devaluate things that we do everyday, things, which might change people’s lives.

The biggest impact we might have had on someone is a moment we probably do not remember because we considered it “irrelevant”.

Drew Dudley in his TED talk, encourages us to think about these moments in which we change someone’s lives by doing something as simple as giving someone a lollipop.

Being a teacher I have experienced many "Lollipop moments" myself, many of them, as Drew Dudley points out belong to a pool of moments I do not remember, but I know they are there. 

One I do remember happened during my first full-time teaching position at the International Community School in London. It did not happened during my regular lessons, but during one of the many cultural trips I organised. It changed my life and the life of many of my students, some of them now married and with kids, but still in touch with me. 

I strongly encourage teachers to create situations such as cultural trips, outdoor classroom or just a completely different scenario to the regular one as "Lollypop moments" often happen then.

“It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us”. Drew Dudley.

Time To Teach Teachers Teaching

Reflections based on article “6 Powerful strategies for paradigm-shifting teacher PD” by Steven Harris.

 

PD meetings should be organized as if teachers were VIP students. There are several reasons for that:

A.    Meeting costs. Often companies do not consider the cost of a meeting, but the reality is that they are very expensive. A two-hour meeting with 100 meeting attendants costs 200 times the average hourly rate.

B.     Modeling. Teachers will use PD sessions as an example. Bad example leads to bad teaching. PD meetings should get teachers experience the methodology the school wants to get in the classroom.

C.     Motivating. Teachers often use personal time to prepare their lessons. If they feel that their school is wasting their time during meetings, they will not be encouraged to continue doing that.

The list of ingredients to make a successful PD meeting is not very different to the equivalent things needed to make a good lesson:

1-     A “Hands on” approach in which every staff member has to be an integral part of a team.

2-    Open Space workshops in which every attendant is contributing.

3-    Encouraging staff to develop courses or present at conferences or workshops. Any teacher participating can improve his/her CV as well as enhancing their motivation by presenting.

4-    Informal, informative, fast-paced meetings. A good example is the Pecha-Kucha type presentations in which 20 slides are presented by a 20 second talk. Total 6’40’’. More info on PechaKucha.org

5-    Take the team on an observational journey. Short PD sessions outside the regular settings.

6-    Create or join a “vision tour”. Long PD training periods a worth-wile investment from a school in a teacher who is committed to work in the school for a certain period of time.

As a mathematics teacher in an international school I would like to see more of these ingredients in our PD meetings. I feel that often none of the A, B or C reasons as listed above are taken into account when planning a PD meeting, and the only reason to meet seems to be "because we have to" or "because it is scheduled" or "because you get paid for that". I feel that some changes need to be done as this affects specially our IT PD meetings. For more information on this please read this multimedia article.

Teams in education.

Reflections based on article “Teams in different situations” by Richard Harris

The faster a company introduces a change the more likely it is to dominate the market. Teams have been recognized as a potentially effective strategy to generate innovation, but not all teams are as successful. There are three types of teams.

-       Work teams. We see them often in manufacturing process such as car factories, but now we see them appearing more and more in services.

-       Managing teams. Teams of directors, directing. Often not very efficient.

-       Project-based teams. They are created to solve a specific problem such as film production. In this type of teams we often choose team members. It is the most effective type of team from the point of view of innovation.

Applications of these types of teams in the educational world are numerous. Students learn from interaction with others, so any forum facilitating interaction will enhance long-term performance. Project-based teams are a model to follow: students can be given a specific task to solve and be given some choices of when, where, how and who they work with. That way they will internalize the consequences of their choices.

As a mathematics teacher, I have personally used these ideas. I designed a project in which my students could show and improve their mathematics skills in peer-reviewed video-recorded presentations. Students could view and comment any of their peers' presentations and by doing this, they interacted with each other, sharing ideas and this all enhanced their learning. A full report on this project can be downloaded here.

Do schools kill creativity?

Reflections from TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?” by Ken Robinson.

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The future is unpredictable. Therefore the best way can we train our children to be successful is by making sure they have a skill that is going to be useful: creativity.Some teachers focus too much on academic ability. They are too strict when correcting mistakes. Children and their parents and teachers should not be too worried about making mistakes. “If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original”, says Ken Robinson.He explains that this happens because most school systems were created to meet the needs of industrialism. Most of the subjects taught in schools are related to using our brain, and not our bodies and we use mainly the left side (rational one) and very little our right side (the emotional one).He relates the very interesting story of Gillian Lynne (famous choreographer (Cats and Phantom of the Opera), and how she was lucky to have a doctor who suggested her to go to a dance school when she could not stop moving instead of prescribing drugs to calm her down.
There are thousands of children with ADHD nowadays. Do we encourage them to take part in activities involving movement or do we encourage their parents to get drugs to calm them down?Should we do more group collaboration? Group students in different ways? Will technology be able to help us change from an "industrial revolution" educational model to a "technology revolution" one?The world of education has never been as challenged as now.... but we also have more opportunities.



Schools have now unlimited resources to promote creativity. Creativity can be promoted by the school administrators, its teachers or the students themselves.As a Mathematics Teacher I have myself promoted creativity in many occasions. To cite one example, I have designed, created and put in practice a set of activities in which my students showed and improved their mathematics skills with videos. 


Innovation can lead to improvements but it can also lead to the opposite. In order to make sure the former path is chosen we need to investigate the results. This is what   I did: A study researching differences in IB SL Mathematics students’ understanding of trigonometry depending on whether they used peer-reviewed video recorded tasks or not was conducted. The sample size was made up of 18 randomly selected students, divided into two groups. The intervention group integrated peer-reviewed video-recording activities in their lessons while the comparison did not.
The research design was experimental and I, the researcher, assumed the null hypothesis (no significant different outcome). Prior to the beginning of the implementation phase, a pre-test was undertaken, following a treatment phase where the innovative teaching practice was implemented. A post-test was carried out three weeks later. Data was statistically analyzed, including a T-test between the two columns of change percentages, which was applied in order to reject or confirm the null hypothesis. Qualitative results are also presented. I published the results of this investigation in several educational networks. It can be downloaded here.