I’ve started blogging again, but now at Squarespace rather than here on WordPress. There are a few reasons for the move, but principally it’s because that’s where my website is and it makes sense to me to keep them together.
Here’s an image from my first post over there.
This is a sketch done by Solomon Karmel-Shann, who is working on the cover for the book.
I’ve written a novel, set in a school, and readers who’ve read a pre-publication copy seem to have enjoyed it (see below for a selection of comments). It’s called The Worlds of Harriet Henderson.
If you’d like to hear more about it, and find a way to get a free copy, please send me an email steve.shann@canberra.edu.au
Here are some comments from readers:
“I can’t imagine having anything to read that would be more life-affirming or more in tune with the values that inform our work as educators.”
(Dr John Yandell, UCL Institute of Education, London, author & journal editor)“A novel that will appeal to English teachers because of the sophistication of the shifts in point of view and the beauty of the prose. A wonderful book.”
Emeritus Professor Brenton Doecke, Chair in Education, Deakin University“A beautifully written and sensitive novel that should be shared with every teacher, student, parent and principal you know.”
Bec Palethorpe (ACT teacher)“This is a marvellous book which I found hard to put down. The book is full of twists and turns as the young characters pursue the creative paths that give them life. A must read!”
Dr. Mary Macken-Horarik, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University“A story about a teacher, two students and a grandfather looking for the places where the openness can live, at least a little while, in an adult world of closures. A must for English teachers as they consider their commitments in these difficult teaching times.”
Dr Kim McCollum-Clark, Assoc Professor of English/English Education, Millersville University“It’s a story that has all sorts of stories inside it. It’s a book in which worlds overlap, collide and intersect, and where truth is complex. Yet the book is full of hope. A great read.”
Dr Margaret Byrne, author, film maker & principal of UGM Consulting
My latest book is now published. It’s a novel, and it’s called The Worlds of Harriet Henderson.
The story …
Fifteen-year-old Harriet Henderson has a new English teacher, Molly McInness, and all at once school seems full of possibilities. But, inspired by Molly and impelled by her own adolescent restlessness, Harriet makes an impulsive decision, a decision that takes her, her teacher and her new friend into complex and dangerous worlds.
Here are some readers’ comments:
“I can’t imagine having anything to read that would be more life-affirming or more in tune with the values that inform our work as educators.”
(Dr John Yandell, UCL Institute of Education, London, author & journal editor)“A novel that will appeal to English teachers because of the sophistication of the shifts in point of view and the beauty of the prose. A wonderful book.”
Emeritus Professor Brenton Doecke, Chair in Education, Deakin University“A beautifully written and sensitive novel that should be shared with every teacher, student, parent and principal you know.”
Bec Palethorpe (ACT teacher)“This is a marvellous book which I found hard to put down. The book is full of twists and turns as the young characters pursue the creative paths that give them life. A must read!”
Dr. Mary Macken-Horarik, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University“A story about a teacher, two students and a grandfather looking for the places where the openness can live, at least a little while, in an adult world of closures. A must for English teachers as they consider their commitments in these difficult teaching times.”
Dr Kim McCollum-Clark, Assoc Professor of English/English Education, Millersville University“It’s a story that has all sorts of stories inside it. It’s a book in which worlds overlap, collide and intersect, and where truth is complex. Yet the book is full of hope. A great read.”
Dr Margaret Byrne, author, film maker & principal of UGM Consulting
It’s available here if you’re in Australia. (Just the Kindle version. Paperback should be there soon.)
It’s available here outside Australia.
For more on my writing and work, see my website here.
In response to my last post, Lady Magpie wrote
I’d be curious about how the readings would work – how much choice there would be, how I’d be introduced to different reading options, how the readings would be “paced”, and what incentives would be in place to keep me reading (i.e. how the readings would be used in the course. I hate when readings are either completely ignored OR completely rehashed in the lectures, making me feel like reading them was a waste of time in either case).
I’ve been playing with this for the past hour or so. I want there to be some compulsory readings, to give us some common language and specific ideas to discuss, but also lots of choice so that the students are able to explore the Central Provocation and their thoughts about their chosen subject X in ways that make sense to them. I know how flat I feel as a student when someone tells me to explore an interesting idea but then tell me I must follow a pre-determined path. It doesn’t feel like an exploration at all; just a dutiful trudging down a known and over-used path.
Deciding on the compulsory readings is something of a challenge though. The students will be asked to buy a number of textbooks for their whole M.Teach course, and given that they will have forked out lots of dollars for these textbooks, I feel obliged to use them. This is a problem for a unit constructed along the lines I’ve outlined, because the tone in the both of the textbooks is of the research-informed expert telling us how things are. I know I’m in the minority here, but I’m not a big fan of this tone. The tone is meant to instil confidence in the reader (‘Wow, here is some evidenced-based scholarship that is giving me grounded advice on what works in teaching?’). It doesn’t have that effect on me. These textbooks (and one of them in particular) present the (often sound) ideas as unquestionable truths, shutting down inquiry rather than opening it up. For example, at the beginning of a chapter on the learning styles, the authors say that ‘there is not any recognised evidence suggesting that knowing or diagnosing learning styles will help you to teach your students any better’. They dismiss the idea rather than invite us to think about it critically.
Nevertheless, I’m obliged to use the textbooks in some way. So here’s what I’m thinking (and it’s a modification of what I wrote in Part 3).
I’ve abandoned, by the way, my original idea that I’d have specific readings for specific topics/learning outcomes. The mandated topics (classroom management, social/physical/intellectual development, literacy & numeracy, effective feedback etc) are all so interconnected that none of the readings looks at just one; each reading covers a number of them.
(each to be followed by an online quiz (rather than test) which requires students to demonstrate that they understand what they’ve read, that they’ve critically thought about it in relation to the Central Provocation and their project with chosen student X)
Week 2: Hattie & Yates Visible learning and the science of how we learn, chapters 1,3,&13 (about 30 pages altogether) – 4 marks
Week 3: Krause Ch 12 ‘Managing behaviour and classrooms’ in Educational psychology for learning and teaching. – 4 marks
Week 4 Chapter 2 Killen Effective Teaching Strategies – 4 marks
Week 5: Chapter 6 Tovani Do I really have to teach reading? – 4 marks
Week 6: Comber and Kamler ‘Getting out of deficit: pedagogies of reconnection’
(At least 5 need to be chosen and explicitly drawn on for the later assessments – which I want to rename – in 11 and 15)
My e-reserve folder on classroom management, with 30 or more articles on various aspects of what Krause calls the the interventionist, the inter-activist and the non-interventionist models of classroom management.
Other parts of the Tovani book, which I’ll encourage students to buy, borrow or download)
Killen Effective Teaching Strategies Chapters 6-14
Relevant resources that the students find themselves
****
So ends my preliminary planning. I have a meeting next week where I’ll find out how much of this I’ll be allowed to do. In the meantime, can I say again what a pleasure, and how useful, it has been to be getting so much feedback on Facebook.
So Step 2 was having a series of imagined scenes playing out in my mind of the students wrestling with the Central Provocation: There are some kids who are plain unteachable. (This imagining/visualising is similar, isn’t it, to the high jumper imagining, even befroe she sets offf on her approach to the bar, the spring in her step at take-off, the arching of her back, the upward thrust of her arms to gain more height, the smooth glide over the bar?)
Yesterday I wrote about how my students would be writing, chatting, moving around the room, speculating, reading, analysing, and so on. I realised, when I re-read this, that I’d left out at least two elements in my imagined scenes.
First of all, I implied but did not explicitly mention the sense of play. I want my students to feel that they’re able to explore as freely (and as pleasurably) as little children in a sandpit, trying things out, trying on personas, taking some risks, having some purposeful fun, sometimes on their own and sometimes with others.
Nor, paradoxically, did I didn’t mention the inevitable anxiety. There’d be moments, maybe even extended periods, when the students would find themselves asking uncomfortable questions. Why was there not a more defined and predictable syllabus that we were following? Was this unit giving them the knowledge, strategies and guidance they needed? Would they be properly prepared when it came their turn in front of a class? Student anxiety is uncomfortable for the teacher as well as the student. There’s a temptation to rush in, to make things prematurely safe and comfortable. But teacher education students need to become conscious of the gaps in their current ways of thinking about the lifeworlds of classrooms. The provocation is going to inevitably lead to an awareness of gaps. The trick will be how to allow room for this anxiety to manifest itself without it becoming overwhelming.
This leads to Step 3 in my designing of the unit: structuring the sessions and the assessments so that exploring the complex world opened up by the Central Provocation becomes manageable as well as unavoidable.
How would something like this work?
The Central Provocation: There are some kids who are just plain unteachable.
Session 1 (4 hours): Exploring the Central Provocation: collaborative sharing of stories and first thoughts, and exploration of way(s) we might usefully come to understand the underlying issues better. Action Research Project explained, students decide who their chosen subject will be. HBDI profiles explored and discussed.
Session 2 (4 hours): Is X (the subject of my Action Research Project) a challenge because of a physical, social or intellectual deficit? Lecture, group work, readings, activities.
School visits
Quiz 1a (10%). Combination of multi-choice & short answer questions, based on selected textbook chapters, and requiring making explicit speculative connections to chosen subject X.
Session 3 (4 hours): Is there a way of organising the classroom that would make a difference to my chosen subject X? This would be a session around Krause’s three models of classroom management.
Session 4 (4 hours): What do those at the chalkface have to say about our Central Provocation? Stories from practising teachers, and in panel and small groups.
Professional Learning Week (organised by others, on things like safe use of ICT, classroom management, including school visits)
Beginning of placements?
Placements.
Placements
Placements
Quiz 1b (10%). Combination of multi-choice & short answer questions, based on selected textbook chapters, and requiring the making explicit speculative connections to chosen subject X.
Session 5 (4 hours): Is my chosen subject X unteachable because he/she is illiterate/innumerate? Session around Tovani approaches & activities.
Session 6 (4 hours): Sharing of ideas about, and discussion of, the Take Home Test in Week 11 and the Professional Knowledge Bank in Week 15.
Placements
Take home test (30%): Written response to the following: In what specific ways has your reading (mandated and self-selected) contributed to your understanding of, and modified your thinking about, the Central Provocation?
Placements
Placements
Placements
Submit Professional Knowledge Bank (50%). A Mahara page organised around the following:
In this Unit you have explored the Central Provocation by learning about
a. Approaches to organising classroom activities
b. Literacy and numeracy strategies
c. Strategies for safely using ICTs to expand the curriculum
d. Approaches to managing challenging behaviour
e. Effective feedback
f. physical, social and intellectual development
Which of these six do you need to find out most about (either because it’s particularly interesting to you, or because it’s especially relevant to your chosen subject X? Research it. Prepare a Mahara page which reports on your research (readings, conversations, activities, UC sessions, observations). Discuss its relevance to the Central Provocation.
****
If you’ve got this far, thank you!
I’d love some feedback, particularly on the following:
If you were an M.Teach student and you saw this plan, what thoughts and/or feelings would you have? What would work for you, and what wouldn’t?
Also, let me know if you’re interested in being a part of Session 4.
The provocation ‘There are some students who are just plain unteachable’ seems to work, judging by the response when I posted a Facebook link to my last blog post. It was a lot of fun to be thinking along with a number of my past teacher education students, all of whom are now in schools and whose thoughts are therefore especially useful as I plan this new unit. In fact, as I gardened this morning (I’m still on leave, but like most teachers I mull), I thought it might be interesting to plan this unit ‘out loud’ on this blog.
Yesterday I wrote ‘provocation first, not outcomes or standards’. So, is Step 2 about weaving the mandated outcomes and Standards into the plan?
Nope. Not for me. Not yet, anyway.
I’ve got the outcomes at the back of my mind, of course. The seven learning outcomes for this unit are understanding the following:
So, as I said, these seven are at the back of my mind, but my next step isn’t to take each of these in turn and work out how I might structure the unit around each of them in turn. I find (is it just me?) that when I design a unit by breaking it down into its individual components that a number of things happen.
So my Step 2 is not to treat the outcomes separately, Nor do I yet ‘begin with the end’, as the Understanding by Design folk advocate. Perversely (given the widespread acceptance of the UbD wisdom), I don’t start by asking what I want my students to be able to do, or to understand. Often, I don’t know exactly what I want them to be able to do or understand. That’s why I like being in the classroom. It’s potentially unpredictable, chaotic, alive, generative. So I’m not yet ready to think too concretely about the assessments.
So what is my Step 2? (I’ve never thought like this before, by the way. I’ve never thought that I design a unit in steps.)
In Step 2, I play around with what I want my students to do. I try to imagine how I’d like them to be active. I form a picture in my mind of their faces, their expressions, their movements, their trajectories.
In this case, with these students, I know that I’ll be seeing them just six times, for four hours at a time. I know that they’ll be required to attend to this unit outside of those hours.
As I think about these sessions and about their time on their own, a picture begins to form in my mind. I imagine them thinking about the provocation, of course, but not just thinking. Actively exploring it, both on their own and with others. I imagine each of them choosing an actual secondary student – it could be a student they have worked with in the past, or someone they observe when they go into a school to observe, or even the self they remember being when they were in secondary school. This student would be someone who is (or was) difficult in class, a challenge to his/her teachers. My teacher education students write about the student. They speculate. They observe and discuss. They read. They come to tentative conclusions, which they refine after further observations, discussions, analyses and reading. They’re on the move, intellectually and physically.
So Step 2 in my unit design has been to imagine a project that will serve as a way for my teacher education students to know more about difficult students, and to explore the idea that some students are plain unteachable. In the process, I’m imagining, they’ll begin to see the connections to those seven learning outcomes.
Indeed, Step 3 of my unit design will be structuring the sessions and the assessments so that seeking out those connections becomes unavoidable. I’ll write about this tomorrow.
I’m designing a teacher education unit I’ll be teaching in the new academic year, and it’s not easy to locate (amidst the seven pre-determined learning outcome, the seven mandated Graduate Teacher Standards, and the three compulsory textbooks) its beating heart, the thing that will determine whether or not the unit will have enough spirit and spunk to provoke, in useful ways, the students who will be here in just over a month. Learning outcomes and Graduate Standards don’t provoke; they’re more like the sides of a cattle pen, making sure we go where those in charge want us to go. Textbooks rarely stimulate, telling us how things are rather than inviting us to think, explore and create.
The unit is called ‘Teaching strategies and learning theories’. Yuck. The title implies that becoming a teacher is all about being told how research by theoreticians has led us to strategies that work. That’s crap. Thoughtful and resilient practitioners, wrestling with actual problems and drawing intelligently on useful philosophies and theories, have led us to strategies that work sometimes with some kids. There’s always more to find out.
I will require my new students to be thoughtful and resilient practitioners. Few of them will have had any teaching experience, many of them will be feeling unsure, and a few of them will be angry when they discover either that there are no simple answers. To survive in teaching, they’ll need to observe, experiment, analyse, adapt and persist. That’s what I want them to experience in this unit.
So I want to start not with the Learning Outcomes, the Graduate Standards or the textbooks, but with a Provocation, one that requires them to explore the territory described by the outcomes, standards and textbooks. Provocation first, not outcomes or standards or some author setting out the territory before the pre-service teacher has been thrown in the deep end.
But what Provocation?
There are some kids who are just plain unteachable.
That might do it.
My book, Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities, is written and published.
There is a part of me that wants to leave that project behind and get involved something new. But the unpalatable reality is that I need to be involved in the publicity and marketing for the book. My colleague Anita Collins has designed a webpage for me, at steveshann.com, and I know I need to get out there and let people know about the book.
My website
But who? And how?
A couple of nights ago, some neighbours came to dinner. One of them told us how a gardening project she was involved in at a local primary school was helping to turn around some disaffected kids. I asked her if she’d ever thought of becoming a qualified teacher; she’d be very good.
‘I’m way too cynical about schools,’ she said. ‘There’s so much pressure to teach the syllabus, to conform, and there are so many demands and rules and procedures that have nothing to do with good learning.’
Afterwards, I realised that she, and the many teachers who struggle to reconcile their ideals and visions with the everyday realities of the classroom, are the people I’m writing for. It’s the struggle I’ve been involved in all my teaching life. If it’s true that we write the book that we wanted to read, I’ve written a book of non-cynical stories, of stories that suggest that no matter how oppressive or pervasive ‘the system’ seems to be, teachers can keep their vision alive, their ideals in tact. The classrooms of these teachers are vibrant places.
On the long drive back from Melbourne last week, I listened to an interview with Seth Godwin where he talked about marketing and finding an audience. He suggested that the first step in any successful marketing is finding your tribe, the people who are interested in the same problems as you are, and who want to know your solutions.
My tribe is made up of those teachers, many of them new to the profession, who are scared that the system will snuff out their ideals and their visions, and want to hear a more encouraging story.
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam)
This is the image we’re using for the cover of my book Imagined worlds and classroom realities, to be released later this year or early in 2015.
I saw this painting a couple of years ago, in the Met in New York, and the first thing that struck me was the deep thoughtfulness in the philosopher Aristotle’s eyes as he reaches out and rests his right hand on the bust of the storyteller Homer. He seems more than lost in thought. He’s also full of feeling, wondering perhaps about the place of poetry and mythology – with their evocations of beauty, love, courage, truth and the good – in his thinking about the world.
Then I remembered that Aristotle was a teacher. In fact we can just see the image of his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, on the medallion which hangs from the chain around his neck. Aristotle’s left hand is touching the chain, a gift from Alexander, representing (perhaps) Aristotle’s connection to the world of action, power and the everyday.
These two – the mythopoetic represented by Homer’s bust and the political represented by Alexander’s chain – are the teacher’s worlds. We necessarily pay attention to everyday necessities and realities – the bells, routines, timetables, expectations, demands, complexities, resistances, power dynamics and so on. We try to stay in touch with the values that brought us into teaching in the first place, and which animate our best moments in the classroom.
The stories in my book are attempts to represent this ‘living in two worlds’, this reaching out to stay in touch with what we care most deeply about amidst our classroom realities.
Here’s the latest version of the cover. Soon, I’ll write something about the image (it’s from a painting by Rembrandt), and why we chose it for the cover.
To see it properly, click on the image.
degrees of fiction 