“The best teachers don’t give you the answers...

They just point the way ...

and let you make your own choices.”

Term Two 2016

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Index 3Your Soapbox 4

Innovative Learning Environments – a flashback to ‘open plan’ ... or a leap into the future? Jennifer Charteris & Dianne Smardon 5

Study finds school breakfasts contribute to healthy weight Michael Greenwood 9

More Empty-Nester Teachers Jetting Overseas Anne Keeling 10

What does MOTAT have to offer High Schools? Julie Baddiley 16

Youth into Industry Careers Day 2016 @ MOTAT 18

National Literacy Initiative for Kiwi Kids Warehouse Stationery 19

An unshakeable unease Laurie Loper 22

Tribute To Dr Seuss Elaine Le Sueur 26

A reading unit based on the work of Dr Seuss. Elaine Le Sueur 28

Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities? Larry Hardesty 30

This Is Why I Write Steph Jankowski 32

Stanford labor economist talks about uphill struggle as feminist scholarClifton B. Parker 33

Traveller T-Shirt With 40 Icons 34

Why Criticism Is So Tough To Swallow Caroline Webb 38

Andy Martin discusses the “magic potion” for writing a thriller Andy Martin 40

Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage... University of Cambridge 42

The Global Search for Education: What’s Really Worth Learning? C. M. Rubin and David Perkins 44

SAP launches Young ICT Explorers programme in New Zealand 47

Me, Too! Steph Jankowski 48

Edouard Martinet’s Masterfully Sculpted Animals and Insects Christopher Jobson 50

Secret Teacher 58

Online aunty helps young people solve problems Le Va 59

How to live a happy life Dr Bronwyn Tarr 60

Reaching Your Goals through Everyday Conscious Choices Michelle LaBrosse 64

So I Started Doing One Tiny Drawing A Day Brooke Rothshank 66

Poetry experts mark World Poetry Day Matt Pickles 74

Thirty years of maths support for local schools University of Cambridge 78

Creation University Roger 86

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Innovative Learning Environments – a flashback to ‘open plan’ ... or a leap into the future? Jennifer Charteris and

Dianne SmardonInnovative Learning Environments (ILEs) are a global phenomenon. ILEs are a culmination of architectural imagination, pedagogical development, technological advantage and intensification of student, teacher, and school leader productivity.

Over 50 countries are currently remodelling learning spaces and rethinking pedagogical approaches for 21st century learning (OECD, 2015).

In Aotearoa (New Zealand), we have heard horror stories of teachers arriving back at school after the holidays to find classroom walls knocked down and an unanticipated remodelling of their space.

As teacher educators, with a particular interest in teacher professional learning and development (PLD), we are concerned about the possible disjuncture between teacher preparation and the wholesale implementation of ILEs that is underway.The importance of the elements of space, design, lighting, heating/cooling and pedagogical resources like digital technologies, have long been considerations of classroom environments. Like the open plan era of the 1970s, ILEs are a move to reconsider spatial relationships in classrooms. What is different, however, is a profound reframing of schooling in keeping with the discourse of 21st century learning. Fullan and Langworthy (2014) note how new pedagogies associated with ILEs are premised on the ubiquitous use of digital technologies – that is, available anywhere and anytime. With the rapidity of change and the volume of information ‘out there’, teachers and students are charged with discovering and mastering content together and co-constructing pedagogical capacity (Fullan & Langworthy, 2014).

There is a shift from classrooms being cultural containers (Leander, Phillips, Taylor, Nespor & Lewis, 2010), where curricula are tightly bounded and students are located primarily inside four walls as knowledge recipients and reproducers. It is no wonder, with such significant change incurs strong sentiment. ILEs challenge teachers, students and

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parents/ whanau to think differently about classroom spaces. Classroom terrains are being dissolved and amalgamated with the widespread ‘unwalling’ (Deed & Lesko, 2015) that is taking place at present. Deed and Lesko (2015) write how the “imaginative re-forming of school learning environments” is expressed through “physical and social unwalling of authority and routine” that “disrupt teaching and learning conventions through distortion of form and creating uncertainty about function and meaning” (p. 220). This disruptive aspect of ILEs is evident in these changes that force us to rethink aspects of schooling.

In considering the implications of change, a range of questions come to mind.

• How is our relationship with learning content changing?

• What roles do learners and teachers take in spaces where learning is digitised and we do not always need to be physically present to connect?

• In spaces that are innovative, how do teachers connect with each other, their students, other professionals and the wider local and global community?

• What resources can we draw from to do new things, in new ways, with learners?

The diagram below frames how ILEs promote questions that enable us to rethink the pedagogical core of schooling.

FIGURE 1. The Pedagogic Core — Elements and Dynamics (Istance & Kools, 2013, p. 49)

With the signalling of this significant potential for educational transformation, we surveyed over 200 primary and secondary teachers and principals to learn more about their perceptions of ILEs. We also subsequently interviewed principals and teachers.1 There were a range of perspectives, ranging from unbridled enthusiasm about the potential of fresh new cutting-edge learning spaces, through to uncertainly and concern about teacher PLD.

The follows comments are a representative sampling from four teachers and two teaching principals who were asked about their take on the implications of ILEs in their work contexts. They raise the importance of pedagogical innovation, PLD provision and adequate funding for ILEs.

Form follows function- pedagogical innovationThe Ministry of Education (2015) draw from an American architect, Louis Sullivan’s, maxim, ‘form [ever] follows function’, to frame the importance of pedagogical innovation driving ILE design. This means that the architectural style of school buildings and the material objects within ILEs should reflect the purpose of student learning and meet the needs of the community.

Natalie is a teaching principal. She makes the point that ‘form follows function’ in that, rather than thinking about the commercialism associated with purchasing 1 Participants in the research have pseudonyms.

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equipment, pedagogy for innovative student learning is her priority.

I think it’s about doing things in different ways and having the flexibility to really put the focus back on the learner. So many people around me are at the moment turning ILEs into a commercial commodity where the starting point is focused only on the physical environment, devices and technology…For me, ILEs start with the pedagogy and what you are doing with your children… my brain’s going round and round with what the innovation is going to look like, it’s quite exciting. (Natalie)

Like Natalie, Kara is a teacher who focuses on the pedagogical approach, with what can be termed a student agency agenda, alongside the physicality of spatial changes.

When we first started discussing [ILEs] we all immediately began to think of the space and the environment and, through the discussion amongst ourselves, we’ve come to the conclusion that a big part of an ILE is around student agency where students own their learning and the teacher is a facilitator, a guide. (Kara)

Katya talks about the shift in her thinking about teaching and learning.

There is a shift in thinking and the way that you teach, so the children can be moving into different areas for learning and there are quiet spaces for learning. [My children] can take the laptop and sit outside if they want to do that. Or, because we’ve got the laptops, they can come into groups. For me the innovative learning environment should be more about the way that you are teaching….If you’re not going to differentiate and you’re still going to teach the way you’ve always taught, having a million dollar building that looks really nice is a waste of time. (Katya)

Gretel, a teaching principal, highlights an immense change that took place for her students and their whanau when their learning environment was reconfigured to create fluid spaces for learner agency.

We did buy the new kind of furniture because, when I arrived, we had the little lift up desks that I went to school with and some of them were as old as I was. So, I chucked them all out for furniture of different shapes… and that changed their [the students] world. They moved from being very possessive about their chair and their space and their desk… With their computers and laptops they became much more mobile and they could work in any other spaces… Parents arrived at my school and said ‘Where’s my child’s desk?’ and I said, ‘That little cubbyhole over there. It’s all there, they don’t need any more than that.’ (Gretel)

If change of this magnitude to the pedagogical core of schooling (Istance & Kools, 2013) is to take place smoothly, it is important for practitioners to be supported through the process with targeted PLD.

The need for professional learning and developmentTeachers recognise and emphasise the importance of PLD for working in ILEs. Tarran and Kara speak about the skills required for productive professional collaborations.

Teachers need to be able to work alongside somebody else quite closely. You’ve got to be able to take the strengths of both teachers in that same environment, to foster student achievement. (Tarran)

What actually happens between teachers, first and foremost, is not something that can be taken lightly. It’s not really a matter of just knocking down walls and putting in furniture. I think there’s a lot of skills that needs to be taught between teachers, especially collaboration… In fact, we’re going on a course tomorrow around effective feedback between colleagues… We are taking out the personal, so that people understand it’s a conversation about the practice not the person. (Kara)

Kara goes on to highlight the importance of PLD for teachers to remain abreast of change.

Change is coming whether you know it or not. It has started and it’s going to continue to change because our workforce and their needs are changing. (Kara)

Catherine, a technology teacher highlights the enormity of change to the culture of her school when ILEs were introduced.

We have moved into a beautiful new building…. The struggle with cultural change is absolutely huge… People are struggling and finding it different. [They are questioning] ‘What are we doing in this space? We are a school from year 0 to13, so establishing the culture all the way through is important. (Catherine)

Although there are examples of flagship ILEs profiled online that reflect new building projects, not all schools in Aotearoa have access to the same degree of funding.

Funding accessKatya notes the challenge of creating an ILE on a limited budget in an old school.

If you are looking at the actual innovative learn-ing environments building wise, we’re a very old school with very old classrooms... In the one that I am in at the moment, they want to drop the ceil-ings and lower the lights. That is about all they can do. (Katya)

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Despite not having money available to reconstruct the environment, Katya elaborates that innovation is a mindset and there is no barrier to her reconstructing the space for pedagogical purposes.

Pedagogically, an ILE is something quite, quite different. It not just about furniture and having a bright classroom. I mean, I’ve got old desks and we move those every day depending on what our needs are. You know, we don’t have to have fancy tables to do that. (Katya)

As illustrated by these teacher comments, there is an erosion of the notion that classrooms are cultural containers where knowledge is bounded and students are there as recipients of this knowledge. When we conceive that Education takes place in a globally connected world, we are open to embrace learning eco-systems (OECD, 2015, p. 11). This requires practitioners to ‘innovate the pedagogical core of schooling’ and think beyond the institutional architecture of classrooms and schools to further connect with communities in Aotearoa and across the globe. This focus requires specific targeted PLD to support teachers in possibilising the potential of change associated with ILEs.

Learning eco-systems are founded on a multiplicity of exchanges between people and their environment inside and beyond schools. In this mix, schools may become more entrepreneurial (Mueller & Toutain, 2015), outsourcing education to other providers. In this entrepreneurial context teacher professionalism and expertise is paramount, if outcomes associated with social equity are to be kept front and centre in Education.

Fiscal constraints are a reality in the majority of schools in Aotearoa and infrastructure is one of the factors that influence school competition and can undermine collaboration. Property funding is a significant consideration for schools and we consider that it is unrealistic to promote newly built flagship ILEs as the aspirational goal for all schools and the yardstick by which all are to be measured. The teachers we spoke with demonstrated a ‘can do’ attitude and a willingness to think creatively (and innovatively) with the resources available to them.

ILEs challenge us to consider a range of factors: schooling conceptual frameworks; potential collaborations with individuals and groups beyond the school; the cultural integrity and relevance of practices with local iwi; digitised pedagogy; and the influence of schooling spaces on teacher/ teacher, teacher/student, and student/student relationships. ILEs are more than open plan classrooms, they are the ‘perfect storm’ of a range of 21st century elements.

References

Deed, C. &Lesko, T. (2015). ‘Unwalling’ the classroom: Teacher reaction and adaptation. Learning Environment Research, 18, 217–231. DOI 10.1007/s10984-015-9181-6

Fullan, M., & Langworthy, M. (2014). A rich seam: How new pedagogies find deep learning. (New Pedagogies for Deep Learning White Paper). London: Pearson. Retrieved from www.michaelfullan.ca/wpcontent/uploads/.../3897.Rich_Seam_web.pdf

Istance, D., & Kools, K. (2013) OECD Work on Technology and Education: innovative learning environments as an integrating framework. European Journal of Education, 48(1), 43-57

Leander, K. M., Phillips, N. C., Taylor, K. H., Nespor, J., & Lewis, C. (2010). The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities. Review of Research in Education, 34, 329-394.

Ministry of Education. (2015). Innovative learning environments: Form follows function. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lOKS8Mv-8M

Mueller, S., & Toutain, O. (2015). The Outward Looking School and its Ecosystem. Entrepreneurship360 Thematic Paper, Paris, OECD. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/cfe/leed/Outward-Looking-School-and-Ecosystem.pdf

Organisation Economic Cooperation Development (OECD), (2015). Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems. Paris: Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing Retrieved from DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264245914-en

Dr Jennifer CharterisSenior Lecturer, Learning and Teaching

Course Coordinator, Master of Teaching (Secondary) Graduate Diploma in Education

School of EducationUniversity of New England

Armidale NSW Australiajcharte5@une.edu.au

Dianne SmardonIn-Country Pacific Island Lecturer

Nauru Teacher Education Project (NTEP)University of New England

Armidale NSW Australiaemail: dsmardon@une.edu.au

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Middle school students who eat breakfast at school - even if they have already had breakfast at home - are less likely to be overweight or obese than students who skip breakfast, says a new study by the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) at the Yale School of Public Health and the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut.The findings, published today in the journal Pediatric Obesity, bring new evidence to the ongoing debate over policy efforts to increase daily school breakfast consumption. Previous research has shown that eating breakfast is associated with improved academic performance, better health, and healthy body weight for students. But there have been concerns that a second breakfast at school following breakfast at home could increase the risk of unhealthy weight gain.“Our study does not support those concerns,” said Jeannette Ickovics, the paper’s senior author, director of CARE, and a professor at Yale School of Public Health. “Providing a healthy breakfast to students at school helps alleviate food insecurity and is associated with students maintaining a healthy weight.”The study involved 584 middle school students from 12 schools in an urban school district where breakfast and lunch are provided to all students at no cost. Researchers tracked the students’ breakfast-eating locations and patterns, and their weight over a two-year period from 5th grade in 2011-2012 to 7th grade in 2013-2014.

Specifically, the study found that:

• Students who skipped or ate breakfast inconsistently were more than twice as likely to be overweight or obese compared with students who ate double breakfasts.

• The weight changes from 5th to 7th grade for the students who ate double breakfasts was no different than the weight changes measured for all of the other students.

“When it comes to the relationship between school breakfast and body weight, our study suggests that two breakfasts are better than none,” said Marlene Schwartz, a study author and director of the Rudd Center.

The study holds implications for advocates and policy makers working to reverse the nation’s childhood obesity problem. Approximately one-third of American children between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight or obese, with higher rates among black and Hispanic children than white children. School breakfast promotion initiatives have begun, but evidence is needed to ensure these efforts do not lead to the consumption of excess calories among children at risk for obesity.

Study co-authors include Margaret Read of the UConn Rudd Center, Kathryn Henderson of Henderson Consulting, and Fatma Shebl and Sisi Wang of the Yale School of Public Health.

Study finds school breakfasts contribute to healthy weight

By Michael Greenwood

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Anne Keeling

Sunset at beach in Doha

More Empty-Nester Teachers Jetting Overseas for Work and Adventure

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More Empty-Nester Teachers Jetting Overseas for Work and Adventure

Teaching overseas isn’t just for youngsters. An increasing number of ‘empty-nesters’, both singles and couples are choosing to grab the opportunity – and they are eager to tell their stories, as primary teacher Janet Berg does here:Taking the plunge“I have always wanted to teach internationally since qualifying in the 1970’s,” says primary classroom teacher Janet Berg. “When my youngest daughter left for University it meant that I had the freedom to follow my personal ambitions, albeit later in life than I had anticipated!” Janet is now teaching at the Doha British School in Qatar.

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In Janet’s current class there are children from seventeen nationalities; both local children and expatriates. “All of the children speak English, so there’s no problem communicating,” she says. “In fact, because the children are so well-travelled, they bring an immense resource of personal experiences to the classroom.”

I’m living the dream!Ask Janet about life out of school and she waxes lyrical: “The weather in Qatar is amazing for people like me who appreciate constant sunshine and blue skies! The country offers so much in the way of sports and outdoor activities - I have been kayaking at midnight through the mangroves and partying aboard a wooden dhow in the bay! Doha also has some amazing architecture and the Islamic Art Museum is incredibly beautiful and atmospheric. In contrast, the Souq is a bustling hive of activity and gives you a glimpse of past traditions and cultures in Qatar. From Doha I’m able to take weekend trips to Dubai, which is only a forty minute flight away. Many other countries, such as Sri Lanka, are also within easy reach. The tax-free salary, free accommodation and travel allowances have meant I’m able to indulge in fabulous trips to these countries.”

Janet is thrilled with her home life too: “My living arrangements are fantastic. I have been given an allowance from school and have moved to a gorgeous apartment on the Pearl. It really is luxury living with a beautiful private pool area and gym. My balcony overlooks the Marina and then out to the Arabian Gulf. I’m living the dream and I feel extremely lucky!”

Making friends in DohaJanet has found making new friends easy. “One of the best aspects of teaching internationally has to be the people I’ve met,” she says. “Expats who live here have often left their own families behind and you become each other’s families, giving and receiving support and friendship. I now have many great friends from around the world and have learnt so much about other countries. Generally my friends are my colleagues, as my school is a close community with a real family feel. However, in Doha, there are many opportunities to mix with people from other areas through the numerous clubs and societies. I belong to the Doha Natural History Society and particularly enjoy the field trips out to the beaches and mangroves!”

Janet Berg from the UK - at DBS school Doha - Janet in the Pearl (where her apartment is)

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Janet riding a camel

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Keeping in touch with familyTo stay connected with her friends and family back home, Janet says that Skype is a blessing. “In fact, sometimes I feel that we have more communication through Skype than we would if I lived locally, as we now make time to chat,” she adds.

Doha is proving to be a popular holiday destination for them too! “Because of my salary and lifestyle, I have been able to bring my family over to Doha for holidays,” explains Janet. “The term times at school also allow for visits home at Christmas, and the flights in the summer are paid for with a longer break than schools back home - usually at least two months.”

Advice for othersJanet remains grounded in her advice to others: “Working abroad can be a risk and I have heard some stories about schools, even here in Doha, that do not treat their staff well and make false promises,” she warns. “My school is one of the better schools in Doha and I have TIC Recruitment (a specialist recruitment agency that offers free support to teachers) to thank for vetting the school and ensuring that my experience working abroad has been such a positive one.

During the process of employment, TIC staff always kept in touch, updating me on the progress of my application and answering any questions in a personal and caring way. It has definitely worked out well for me,” she says. Gemma McSweeney who is the Recruitment Manager at TIC Recruitment offers additional advice specifically for empty-nester teachers considering international options:

• Seek out schools that value your skills and experience. Most of the good international schools want experienced teachers and leaders.

• The staff in international schools usually range widely in both age and nationality; you won’t be the only teacher in your age group.

• International schools want staff willing to share best practice and lead professional development. Your extensive teaching experience will be valued.

• There is much less red-tape and fewer student behaviour issues in international schools than state schools. This gives you the chance to apply all your creative and engaging teaching skills.

• Even though your children may have left home, moving overseas is still a big decision for the whole family. It’s important to talk with your children and make them part of the decision process. This can put them at ease about you living in another country.

• Modern technology makes living abroad a lot easier for expatriates. Skype and Facetime mean your friends and family back home are only a click away.

• International schools usually have longer school holidays than state schools which means travelling home to visit family is possible while still leaving you time for other travel experiences.

• Many countries today have thriving expatriate communities which means it’s easy to make new friends, join clubs, and even try new hobbies and activities popular in your new location that you’d never have had chance to try back home.

To find out more about teaching internationally including popular destinations, visit TIC Recruitment at www.ticrecruitment.com

View from Janet’s apartment on the Pearl

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View from Janet’s apartment on the Pearl

Andrew Wigford and TIC collegues visiting Doha British School

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The days of rote learning and regurgitation of information on demand have past.

Instead we now live in a complex society with a high rate of change which demands specialised skills and an ever-growing wealth of knowledge.

Addressing this challenge requires educators to encourage students to explore topics they are truly passionate about in order to establish a deeper engagement.

This is an ongoing process and learning experiences outside the classroom shouldn’t be limited to primary age school groups.

With this in mind, MOTAT has designed a variety of programmes which are focused on secondary schools students.

As educators, the objective is to develop and nurture lifelong learners who are well equipped with skills for the future. MOTAT’s science and technology high school challenges are designed to foster these skills. They have a strong focus on complex problem solving, communication, team work, creativity and innovation.

• Construct It! is a challenge where students use electrical circuits to create an interactive toy or game. The magnetic circuit components are easily clipped together to form the base of the model which is then built upon using a variety of material resources. Learners get to plan and film an Infomercial to promote their creation once it’s completed.

MOTAT has a suite of machine-based construction programmes which can be aligned with the school’s learning intentions. These focus on concepts such as fair testing, simple machine theory or energy transformations. Here is an outline of what is currently on offer:

• Storming the Castle: in this programme students have a mission to construct a Rube Goldberg machine within specific design constraints. Working in small groups, they use their knowledge of simple machines and Newton’s Laws of Motion to build their machine.

Energy transformations, friction, and gravity all have to be considered in the overall design.

• ‘Marble Run’: here participants are challenged to create a mechanism that takes the longest possible time to deliver a marble into a cup across a table. They have a variety of resources, including K’Nex and matador, to use as construction materials. There is a strong focus on simple machines, forces and technology. The task also stimulates thinking around fair testing methods.

• Invent-A-Machine: this course involves learners building their own Rube Goldberg styled machine using a combination of levers, pulleys, gears, inclined planes, screws, wheels and axles made from everyday materials. This requires them to flex their design-thinking muscles and apply their knowledge of simple machines in a crazy, mechanical, contraption building challenge.

MOTAT appreciates the value that community members can add to the learning experience and understands that a collaborative approach is a key aspect of the Ministry of Education’s vision for ‘Lifelong Learners in a Connected World 20151’.

With this in mind the Museum has developed several secondary school education programmes which build strong community links and utilise the expertise of industry practitioners.

• GameMaker calls on students to flex their design-thinking muscles in the animated world of digital gaming. The process begins with learners critiquing arcade-styled games to develop design ideas for their own unique three-level game. Then there is the opportunity to publish their creation to the global arcade where it can be played by gamers from all over the world. MOTAT collaborates with members of Futureintech and the New Zealand Game Developers Association (NZGDA), who are based on site, to contribute their expertise during the education session.

This collaboration between industry practitioners, the Museum and high schools enables all those involved to offer a truly authentic and contextualised experience for secondary students.

1 New Zealand Education in 2015: Lifelong learners in a connected world, (Draft) MoEd, 2015

What does MOTAT have to offer High Schools?

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Julie Baddiley – Education Manager

What does MOTAT have to offer High Schools?

Other exciting MOTAT education programmes include:• The First of the Few is a community based

research project undertaken by MOTAT to commemorate the Walsh Brothers Flying School and its contribution to New Zealand and World War One. The aim is to tell the stories of those who established the country’s First Flying School and the pilots who trained there. The project is supported by an education programme which encourages historical inquiry and the ability to interpret primary sources. It gives students the opportunity to conduct research and add their own content in order to share these incredible stories and help keep history alive.

• Lights, Camera, Action is a brand new programme due to be launched in Term 2. Here

students will become the directors, producers, scriptwriters and actors for a video project set at MOTAT. The course incorporates storyboarding, scriptwriting, filming, producing, directing and editing. The final products will be showcased at MOTAT and used in their education programmes. The programme content has been designed to give real life context to the Media Studies and Digital Technologies curriculum. (e.g. Level 1 Digital Technologies Achievement Standard AS91073 and Level 1 Media Studies Achievement Standard 90993)

To find out more about the High School education programmes at MOTAT or make a booking, please call (09) 815 5808 or visit the website www.motat.org.nz

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Students will gain experience in civil contracting disciplines including health and safety compliance, workplace safety awareness, weights and measures and vehicle safety compliance.

They will get hands-on with a mini excavator and other industrial equipment including plate compactors.

Youth into Industry Careers Day 2016 @ MOTAT

Attention: High School Work Placement Coordinators!

Each activity will be supported by industry representatives as they share their expertise and help students get the most out of this career opportunity.YII Careers Day: Tuesday 31 MayTime: 8:20am – 2:30pmCost: $30 per student To register your students please contact:Julie Baddiley: julie.baddiley@motat.org.nz

MOTAT is looking for 32 (Year 11+) students from the greater Auckland area to take part in the third Youth into Industry Careers Day on 31 May, 2016.

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An initiative is underway to keep the art of letter writing alive by bringing it to a new generation through the gifting of thousands of free postcards and stamps to school aged children. Designed to help improve literacy and language skills through letter writing, Warehouse Stationery’s Get New Zealand Writing programme will give school children the opportunity to write a postcard and have it delivered for free, anywhere in the country.

It’s expected that more 70,000 postcards will be gifted to Kiwi children as part of the campaign, which is now in its second year.

Participating school children will be encouraged to write to a loved one using their best handwriting and then post their card free in store to anywhere in New Zealand.

Parents are also encouraged to get involved with 50,000 free postcards and postage available to them also.

Warehouse Stationery CEO Pejman Okhovat says international research has shown that when students practice writing by hand they learn how to read and write more quickly and more accurately.

“The Get New Zealand Writing initiative is a fun way to focus on the importance of writing in a child’s life. “In times when traditional letter writing is becoming a lost art, we think it’s important to continue to encourage Kiwi children to keep it alive. “We all know how special it is to receive a handwritten card from someone. We are proud to be able to provide kids with this opportunity while promoting writing as an essential part of their development and achievement,” Okhovat says.

He says the campaign is not just to inspire children to write but to encourage their parents to also rediscover the joy of the written word. Okhovat says the company will also launch its ‘My Favourite Words’ campaign.

New Zealand children and their families will have the opportunity to submit their favourite word and reason why, with the chance to have their handwritten sentence selected to appear in the final notebook.

Proceeds raised from the notebook will be donated to the Warehouse Stationery Scholarship Fund an initiative with the Salvation Army which helps young New Zealanders achieve their tertiary study goals.

For more information about Get New Zealand Writing and Favourite Word, visit www.warehousestationery.co.nz

National Literacy Initiative for Kiwi Kids

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An unshakeable unease

As my experience of education has grown, I have come to recognise how much schooling, as all students experience it, impacts on their learning lives. My own experience as a learner includes being taught through to tertiary levels, being in teaching roles and in several special education and teacher support roles. I also had social work experience, of both residential and generic kinds so came to understand how family and other circumstances impinge upon the learning lives of children and young people.Much of my social work experience was in a period when rural Maori moved into cities to find work. In adjusting to an unfamiliar environment and bereft of their community support base, large numbers of Maori children and young people ran foul of the law. No wonder Children’s Court days were hectic.For many of these Maori students, school become primarily a place for socialising with other Maori friends and family, maybe to eat a lunch bought at the school canteen, and maybe to even play some sport. It was not a place where learning and academic achievement was the priority.

Bumping up against business-as-usual methods of teaching covering stuff that didn’t connect well with the lived experience of Maori did nothing to raise hopes that many Maori students would become first class academic achievers. Soon many became unable to keep up with pakeha classmates and in short time, tacitly, they weren’t expected to by their teachers. Once that happened, the barrier to scholastic success became virtually insurmountable, worse it raised questions in the minds of teachers about the ability of such students to learn and whether they would be better placed somewhere else, say, in a Special Class.

Such experiences heightened the sense of the mismatch I witnessed in what was being provided in the name of education and what was needed to not only make the process more palatable but more efficacious as well. I now recognise that the origins of my sense of unease about the efficacy of education stems from the very beginnings of my working life. Once I had access to many classrooms that sense of unease quickly became unshakeable.

Social justice has been a constant theme and focus throughout my life, nurtured and absorbed from being a preschooler in Depression days of the 1930s. As a family we weathered the Depression fairly well in that my father obtained employment near the beginning of the Waitaki Hydro Electric Power scheme. But that didn’t mean as a child I wasn’t exposed to the effects of poverty that was experienced by almost the whole populace during those times. The dis-spiriting burden of the Depression was something one ate and breathed; there was no escaping its influence. I felt there must be more to life than that and that thought nurtured in me the desire to seek better.

Such experiences then served to sharpen the focus of the lens through which I viewed the world of education. Clearly visible was the inequality of outcome that was happening. What also struck me early on was the mismatch in the size of the underachievement problem and the methods that were employed to combat it. I could not understand why anybody would think that a case-by-case

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 23

An unshakeable unease

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Laurie Loper Psychologist

approach was ever going to be an adequate answer to systemic issues. Therefore my first response in every one of the many school support roles I subsequently took up was always to develop things that targeted systemic issues so as to benefit maximum numbers of students. In an era when casework was king, doing this was always difficult.

One of the very first things I noticed in classrooms was how slow many children were at doing written work. One day I watched some 6 and 7-year-old students working away at a worksheet task that involved filling in a blank in each of five sentences (words supplied). The reading and comprehension aspects of the task weren’t a problem, the physical task of writing was. In 25 minutes not one student had completed the task, most had only completed the first sentence. All students were on task the whole time yet failed to complete a task that should have taken ten minutes at the outside.

My answer was to invent a fast way of printing, one that would lead into cursive writing. This scheme had too many features to go into all of them here. I gave it a field trial that was successful despite some of the children being New Entrants, and not of an age I was wishing to target. One colleague wanted me to publish it but I was too busy at the time to take the suggestion seriously.

There were many other things produced. One sought to improve teacher use of praise. This scheme was researched. It showed sustained improvement of both quality and quantity of praise use after three years. There was a model for individualising staff development that could be applied to any professional group whatsoever. Versions of it were developed for teachers, educational psychologists and other special education staff; a similar scheme was developed for parents to help them support the learning of their children (more of this later). There was a success-monitoring scheme designed for students to give feedback to their teachers on how the difficulty level of tasks they were expected to do matched their current skills.

Reading was always a trigger for teacher anxiety hence this subject sparked many referrals to educational psychologists. Most such referrals happened because the referring teacher lacked an approach to deal with the situation. Knowing other students with similar issues existed in such classrooms, I set about developing whole class approaches to take care of the problem.

By far the most successful of these involved helping a teacher, teach her almost all-Maori class of 6 and 7 year olds how to use Pause Prompt Praise (PPP). Then I had her use a teina-taina arrangement, pairing a better reader with a less able reader. Sessions started off with the better reader hearing the reading of the less able one, using PPP. As a reward, the taina was read to by the teina, the taina choosing a story from those available in the box. The children loved these sessions. Coming in after morning play, they quickly found their previously prepared boxes of books and just got on with it, independently. They got so good at it using PPP, I took the teacher and 6 students she chose to a Teacher Only Day (TOD) at another school and had the children demonstrate. Attendees couldn’t get over how well children that young were at using the PPP skills. A followup survey found a pleasing number of classrooms benefited from that TOD, with one two-teacher school running it across all class levels in both classrooms.

Meanwhile I adopted another strategy. I started reading everything to do with learning that got published in the many educational research journals that passed through our local Psychological Service office. Anything and everything that had to do with learning, I read and had photocopied.

This tactic gave me my first breakthrough understanding of what was happening in the name of learning. It came in the form of a very well conducted study done in the early 1980s at Lancaster University; it was later was reported as a book titled Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences,joint authors were N Bennett, C Desforges, A Cockburn, B Wilkinson. It clearly showed that 16 ‘adjudged excellent’ teachers

24 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

of 6 and 7 year old students allocated tasks in Reading, Writing and Maths that weren’t a match of the children’s current skill status more then 50 percent of the time. As if this wasn’t bad enough, and here those involved with Bobbie Maths might want to prick up their ears, when teacher professional development based on this study was attempted with those 16 teachers, so set were they in their ways, changing them proved impossible, the researchers involved were simply forced to give up.

So I knew then I was on the right track with this efficacy focus, and I was apt to quote that study at the drop of a hat. It led me to do a bunch of other things as well.

That Lancaster University study prompted me to start working on a new model of learning, one based on scientific method with elements of the IEP process thrown in. This was the only student centred learning model I ever found. I went on to incorporate it into a number other schemes that were designed to be an alternative to the one-size-fits-all professional development schemes that were the only option for lots of professional groups back then.

I combined this learning model with a ratable checklist of skills idea that would allow people to pinpoint precisely their staff development needs. It offered them choices in regard to addressing their own needs and how they might go about addressing them, planning and evaluation wise. There was a version for primary teachers called Growing On. A version for secondary schools went uncompleted due to a reorganisation of duties.

There was a version for educational psychologists that I introduced during a professional development day. Those taking part endorsed the concept so wholeheartedly that one Senior Psychologist took the initiative and set up a working group that produced a scheme for national use. One of the working party, an in-charge person for a Special Education district, introduced a similar scheme as the Professional Development model for all of his Special Ed. staff.

One problem was to capture my attention for quite some time. It prompted me to adapt some of the ideas I had used before in other professional development schemes.

The idea was to produce a self-teaching programme that would enable all parents to learn the skills of promoting the learning of their own children. Hence the scheme was called Chance is a Fine Thing (CIFT).

Capable of being used in about a dozen different ways, it was based on ratable checklists of learning support skills, arranged in 16 categories. For those parents with limited spare time, it could be something they could sample at will, having learnt something of use in promoting the learning of their children. It had too many features to describe here. Trials of it were very encouraging and in one school that that trialed it for a year, only one home of the 420 involved asked not to be included.

Instead of supplying each home with a complete copy of the programme, each home was given an empty 30 pocket ClearFile into which the parent was to place copies of new sections brought home by the oldest child every two weeks throughout the school year. That meant the parent doing the archiving would handle the material multiple times so was continually being reminded of its presence in the home and of its purpose. Having been briefed beforehand on its purpose, students were encouraged to make sure their parents did the archiving.

Another use made of CIFT was as a discussion starter. A colleague and fellow RTLB ran it as such with a group of parent helpers and teacher aides for around 4 years. It proved well suited to their training needs, a bonus being it improved their management of their own children.

Members of the group involved often outdid the teachers they were working with in behaviour management. Some took the plunge and did a formal Teacher Aide qualification. One member was also an executive member of Tu Tangata, a Maori support group working in schools; she had that group adopt CIFT as its official training programme.

Another programme developed was a learning-to-learn programme for students. It was a student driven way of them determining their needs and being provided with ways of addressing them. A senior Year 4 and 5 teacher at a Hamilton school that had a highly diverse and highly transient student population used

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 25 Back to index>

it. He had a timetable spot once a week for his students to independently address their self determined learning needs.

There are another three things I’ll mention.

One was dubbed a Notional Diagram. It was a way of demonstrating how much waste of learning capacity is happening in ordinary business-as-usual classrooms.

The second was a way to understand a learning rule discovered by the late Graham Nuthall,.

The third, a questionnaire about beliefs about learning, was a way of convincing teachers and others about how much teaching practice is based on myths and mistaken beliefs.

More than anything else, it was the Notional Diagram that was to convince me that the unease I felt about what was going on in schools, efficacy wise, was both real and significant. The efficacy research of the late Graham Nuthall, aided by Adrienne Alton-Lee, and reported in 2001 at an NZARE conference in Christchurch put paid to any wonderment on my part as to what was causing this inefficacy. Plainly, the nature of the learning process was something neither teachers nor everyone else knew anything much about. What intrigued me about all this was how much waste of learning capacity this represented across all of the nation’s students.

The brief I gave myself was a way of demonstrating, visually, what this wastage looked like. Eventually I succeeded. I made use of a notional comparison of the achievement across the total student population under two learning conditions: one where inefficient learning was going on (like now) and the other where efficient learning was happening. Given that this was a notional exercise and there were assumptions being made that could be argued about, the result nevertheless showed clearly that only about half the total of the possible learning capacity of the entire student body was being developed under the present inefficient learning regime. Put another way, given the use of efficacious pedagogies, there was a huge potential for improvement.

One of the more surprising conclusions coming out of this exercise is that even our so-called ‘top’ students are capable of greater achievement than we imagined. The outcomes achieved by the very

efficient Bobbie Maths programme in the decile 7 Otumoetai Intermediate, in Tauranga seems to bear this out.

There were several other schemes that were developed. All were aimed at making classroom learning more efficacious. That they never took off or got to be used on the scal)e they arguably deserved is more a comment on how learning has become imprisoned by the ancient myths and mistaken beliefs that have sheathed teaching with an impregnable non change persona that remains intact to this day.

The education world has virtually ignored the importance of the evidence that says the way teaching is done is the major cause of education underserving the learning needs of all students. I count it a privilege to stand amongst those who have contributed to a different understanding of this situation and what must be done to significantly alter it.

For anyone seeking further information on Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities, otherwise known as Bobbie Maths, less commonly Pasifika Maths – the 15 video feature with the analysis of ‘evidence in action’ and supporting references provide great background.

http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/topics/BES/developing-mathematical-inquiry/introduction

26 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

It is 15 years since Dr Seuss died, but his books are as popular as ever. Imagine being so well recognised that you and your work feature on postage stamps. It is an honour that is sometimes given to those who have had a significant impact on society in some way and Theodore Giesel (or Dr Seuss as he called himself) singlehandedly changed the way that publishers viewed learning to read stories written for children. Incidentally, did you know that he pronounced his name to rhyme with voice and not juice when he first used the pen name? S-e-u-s-s was his mother’s maiden name and is pronounced Soice in Austria but he changed the pronounciation because Suice was how Americans said it. He also wrote under the pen name Theodore Le Sieg, which is Giesel spelled backwards. Would your name spelled backwards make a good pen name? Dr Seuss made many easy books fun to read by using the rhythm used by limerick writers known as anapaestic tetrameter. His books are not just fun for beginning readers however. They are still popular and his rhymes even sound good if you say them in hip hop style because rappers often use this pattern. Anapestic refers to the beat or the stress. Tetrameter comes from tetra meaning four and in this case indicates that there will be four beats in the line.

Try it with some excerpts from his books…From ‘Oh the places you’ll go’

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.andYou have Brains in your headYou have feet in your shoes

The pattern will become obvious. Dit dit dah. Dit dit dah.

Aboard a ship, crossing the Atlantic in 1936, Theodore Geisel kept himself entertained by putting words to the rhythms of the ship’s engines: “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.” was the result. When he arrived back home, he continued to work on the text and added illustrations. This was his first children’s

picture book. It was rejected by publishers many times before being accepted and published by a friend who had recently been appointed editor to a publishing company. It tells the story of a boy called Marco who uses his imagination to exaggerate and create, transforming an everyday walk down an ordinary street into something extraordinary. By placing the focus on Marco’s imagination the author is not only appealing to a child’s sense of fun, but also letting adults know that it is possible to encourage children to create as well as teaching them not to lie.

The anapaestic tetrameter poetry form has been around for a long time but wasn’t used in early to read books. Nor was there a focus on learning to read being fun. The basic readers used in schools at the time were the Dick and Jane stories in the USA and the Janet and John readers in New Zealand. Your grandparents might remember reading them in school. They might even have been lucky enough to meet Dr Seuss when he came to New Zealand on a book tour in 1976. I was one of those who lined up to have my book signed by the author himself and I remember it well but I don’t still have the book. I gave it to my little sister when she was old enough to want to read. The Janet and John early readers contained a list of commonly used words and pictures of two European children and their dog, Spot, engaged in everyday activities.

Here is a sample of the text from the first Janet and John reader for students.

Janet

John

Come, John, come

Look, John, look

Come, John. Come and look.

See the boats. Look, John. See the boats.

Janet, Janet. See the boats. Come and look. See the boats.

The American version of Dick and Jane were similar.

Dr Seuss wrote the Cat in the Hat because he thought that the stories in Dick and Jane readers were very boring. The cat in the hat used 225 words but the story and the pictures were fun and the book was an immediate success. His editor bet him that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. He took up the challenge and wrote ‘Green Eggs and Ham.

Dr Seuss didn’t have any children of his own but when he was asked why he didn’t write books for adults he said that adults were just out of date children. He did actually write just one book for grownups and called it ‘You’re only old once! A book for obsolete children.”

Tribute To Dr SeussElaine Le Sueur

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 27 Back to index>

He made reading fun for children, parents and teachers by using his own amazing imagination to create humorous rhymes and illustrations, but at the same time his stories can teach us lessons such as ...

• the importance of preserving the natural environment,

• the value of being reliable and keeping your word,

• the significance of treating everyone fairly,

• the influence you can have and the difference you can make if you believe in yourself.

Many of his books reflected his political views too. He was talking about Hitler when he wrote the book ‘Yertle the turtle.’ Yertle is the king of the pond but he wants more and insists that the other turtles make a stack so that he can sit on top of them and see the land. Yertle isn’t fair. He takes what he wants when he wants it and all the others are too scared to do anything about it. (Hitler wanted to change the world and suppress those who didn’t agree with his ideas). Mack, the downtrodden little turtle at the bottom pleads for him to take a break but Yertle is intent on reaching his influence further and further. (Other countries tried to intervene in the situation with Hitler). The climax is reached when Mack burps and causes the whole stack to topple down. (Hitler became blind to the oppression felt by ordinary people who were compelled to fight back and World War 2 began).

‘The Butter Battle Book, Horton hears a Who and the Sneetches and other stories all talk about what can happen when people from different populations don’t understand each other. Why do they assume that they must be a threat to each other? In the Butter battle book the competition to be bigger and better

results in both sides being disadvantaged by their inability to understand how societies do things differently from each other. Dr Seuss thought that the cold war between the United States and Russia might have been different if there had been a Horton on hand as an intermediary.

Everyone can make a difference, no matter how small.

As the Lorax (a.k.a. Dr Seuss) would say...

‘Unless someone like you cares an awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better... it’s not.

What are the things that you would like to change?

There is still time for entrepreneurial students to make a difference by sharing their experiences through contributing to our proposed publication. Can you help to spread the word? (See below)

INVITATIONWe are in the process of putting together a non-fiction biographical book to show our smart school age students that they can learn from each other as well as famous people in the community. If you are (or you know of/can recommend) a student attempting to make a positive difference to the lives of others through a project and would like to be involved, then we would love to hear from you. Someone else can help to write the story down but it needs to be a true story with how the student dealt with any issues that arose as they went along. If the story is included in the book then he/she will get a free copy when it is published. Any profits made from sales of the book once it is published will be given to the Kids First Children’s hospital.

All stories should be completed as soon as possible to be considered for publication.

Contact Elaine for help if required. Justelaine@xtra.co.nz (Stories and supporting material such as photos, newspaper articles etc will not be returned so please send copies).Students, please include this on the bottom of your story and ask your parent/ guardian to sign permission to include your story if it is selected:

I/We certify that this is work is by ............................................................................................................................................................. (name of student)I/We give approval for the above story to be published, should it be selected for inclusion. We understand that there is no payment other than a free copy of the publication if this story is included.

Signed ........................................................................................................................... Date .........................................................................................

Signed ...........................................................................................................................

E-mail your story a.s.a.p. (with supporting material attachments if desired) to Elaine Le Sueur, Gifted Education Consultant at justelaine@xtra.co.nz

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Squares are learning to research, generalise, observe, describe and make judgments.

Triangles are learning to adapt, elaborate, and compare.

Circles are designing, creating and predicting.

Some more ideas for Squares• What are the characteristics are shared by

…… and … in the book ‘----------‘ How many of these do you share as well?

• Make a list of questions that you can think of where the answer can ONLY be ….

Find a friend to work with and challenge your questions.

• Make a timeline or a visual outline of the sequence of events

• Dr Seuss wrote and published 60 books in his lifetime. Can you research and list them all? How many have you read?

In Dr Seuss’ s book ‘Horton hatches the egg’, Horton the elephant shows himself to be a reliable friend. Make a poster advertising yourself as a good friend. What are your greatest qualities?

Make sure your name is on the poster.

Use a graphic organiser such as a venn diagram to show how you and your friends are alike and how you are different.

‘The more that you read the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.’

Make a presentation about something you have learned from a book you are reading right now.

• What are some interesting facts that you have found out about Dr Seuss?

• If you were developing a TV Quiz show about the life of Dr Seuss, what are some questions that you could ask the contestants to test their knowledge?

• Make a model of one of the Dr Seuss worlds

• Friendship is one of the themes that Dr Seuss writes about. Make a list of criteria for being a good friend.

Give a

range of alternative

ideas that the character in the

book could use to solve the problem he/she/it faces. Find an

interesting way to show your answer.

Work with a friend to

turn a story you have read into a

play that tells how the main character met and solved a problem

Work with a

partner to tell about a

problem that you have faced

and solved like the one that the character

faced in your book

How is … (a book character)

like a …

(Ball of wool?)

What shape are you in?Are you a square, a triangle or a circle?

A reading unit based on the work of Dr Seuss.

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A reading unit based on the work of Dr Seuss.

Elaine Le Sueur is a writer who has worked in the gifted field as a teacher and gifted education consultant for more than thirty years. She is a regular article writer for Good Teacher and has published several books for teachers. Elaine believes in the value of having gifted students learning from each other as well as from biographies of adults who have made a difference to the lives of others, and that is her motivation.

More ideas for Triangles:• Compare the artwork in two of Dr Seuss’s books.

What are the similarities that help you to recognise his work?

• Yertle the Turtle is a story about the importance of freedom. If you were the Ruler, what changes would you make to the law? How would you ensure that the changes were fair?

• The Lorax is about preservation of the environment. Develop a graphic organiser to show the relationships between the problems faced by the onc-ler and the problems in our environment today. What do you think we need to do today so that our grandchildren have a clean place to live?

Write a story in the

style of Dr Seuss to tell about a problem we face today and

how it might be overcome

What are your thoughts about

one of the big issues that Dr Seuss

addressed in his books?

Ask a ‘What if…’ question

about something and then say how

things might change as a result

More ideas for circles• Find ways that we can help others to make

sense of the word and contribute to a better society.

• Create a multimedia presentation of ideas for random acts of kindness to improve your environment

• Create an original game to promote conservation/ recycling/ or your chosen issue.

http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/1488

• Click on the right answer in the middle of the page.

• If you get it right, you get a harder question. If you get it wrong, you get an easier question.

• For each answer you get right, the site donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

30 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University have been conducting a study to determine whether tablet computers loaded with literacy applications could improve the reading preparedness of young children living in economically disadvantaged communities.At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference this week, they presented the results of the first three deployments of their system. In all three cases, study participants’ performance on standardized tests of reading preparedness indicated that the tablet use was effective.

The trials examined a range of educational environments. One was set in a pair of rural Ethiopian villages with no schools and no written culture; one was set in a suburban South African school with a student-to-teacher ratio of 60 to 1; and one was set in a rural U.S. school with predominantly low-income students.

In the African deployments, students who used the tablets fared much better on the tests than those who didn’t, and in the U.S. deployment, the students’ scores improved dramatically after four months of using the tablets.

“The whole premise of our project is to harness the best science and innovation to bring education to the world’s most underresourced children,” says Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and first author on the new paper. “There’s a lot of innovation happening if you happen to be reasonably affluent — meaning you have regular access to an Internet-connected computer or mobile device, so you can get online and access Khan Academy. There’s a lot of innovation happening if you’re around eight years old and can type and move a mouse around. But there’s relatively little innovation happening with the early-childhood-learning age group, and there’s a ton of science saying that that’s where you get tremendous bang for your buck. You’ve got to intervene as early as possible.”

Breazeal is joined on the paper by Maryanne Wolf and Stephanie Gottwald, who are, respectively, the director and assistant director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts; Tinsley Galyean, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and executive director of Curious Learning, a nonprofit organization the researchers created to

Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities?Project to provide children with tablets loaded with literacy apps reports positive results in Africa

develop and deploy their system; and Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University.

Self-startingThe concentration on early literacy reflects Wolf’s theory, popularized in her book “Proust and the Squid,” that the capacity to read, unlike the capacity to process spoken language, is not hard-coded into our genes. Consequently, early training is essential to establishing the neurological machinery on which the very capacity for literacy depends.

The researchers’ system consists of an inexpensive tablet computer using Google’s Android operating system. Wolf and Gottwald combed through the literacy and early-childhood apps available for Android devices to identify several hundred that met their quality criteria and addressed a broad enough range of skills to lay a foundation for early reading education. The researchers also developed their own interface for the tablets, which grants users access only to approved educational apps. Across the three deployments, the tablets were issued to children ranging in age from 4 to 11.

“When we do these deployments, we purposely don’t tell the kids how to use the tablets or instruct them about any of the content,” Breazeal says. “Our argument is, if you’re going to be able to scale this to reach 100 million kids, you can’t bring people in to coach kids what to do. You just make the tablets available, and they need to figure everything out from then on out. And what we find is, the kids do it. When we first did Ethiopia, we had all these protocols and subprotocols. What if it’s a week and they haven’t turned them on? What if it’s three weeks and they haven’t turned them on? Within minutes, the kids turn them on. By the end of the day, they’ve literally explored every app on the tablet.”

ResultsThe Ethiopian trial, which the researchers conducted in collaboration with the ‘One Laptop per Child’ program, involved children aged 4 to 11 who had no prior exposure to spoken English or any written language. After a year using the tablets, children were tested on their understanding of roughly 20 spoken English words, taken at random from apps loaded on the tablets. More than half of the students knew at least half the words, and all the students knew at least four.

When presented with strings of Roman letters in a random order, 90 percent could identify at least 10 of them, and all the children could supply the sounds

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Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities?

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corresponding to at least two of them. Perhaps most important, 35 percent of the children could recognize at least one English word by sight. These figures roughly accord with those of children entering kindergarten in the U.S.

In the South African trial, rising second graders who had been issued tablets the year before were able to sound out four times as many words as those who hadn’t, and in the U.S. trial, which involved only 4-year-olds and lasted only four months, half-day preschool students were able to supply the sounds corresponding to nearly six times as many letters as they had been before the trial.

Since the trials reported in the new paper, Curious Learning has launched new trials in Uganda, Bangladesh, India, and the U.S. In all, 2,000 children have had the opportunity to use the tablets.

Currently, the team is concentrating on analyzing data collected from the trials. Which apps do the children spend most time with? Which apps’ use correlates best with literacy outcomes? Curious Learning is also looking for partners to help launch larger pilot programs, with 5,000 to 10,000 children.

“There’s a core scientific question, which is understanding what the nature of this child-driven, curiosity-driven learning looks like,” Breazeal says. “We need to understand how they learn, which is a fundamentally social process, where they explore the tablet together, they discover things through that exploration, and then they talk-talk-talk-talk, and they share those ideas. So it’s a profoundly social, peer-to-peer-based learning process. We have to have create a technology and an experience that supports that process.”.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/literacy-apps-poor-communities-0426

by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

One lap top per child

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This Is Why I WriteLike many of you, I spent a lot of time with family at Easter. Over drinks and completely out of nowhere, my aunt posed the question: why do you share so much of your personal life with perfect strangers?

Up until that point, I had never really looked at it that way, sharing with perfect strangers. I’ve always written for one person: me. It’s free therapy and I feel lighter after pressing publish. I mean, there’s a definite narcissistic streak in all writers; we live for those 5-star reviews and positive feedback, and when someone tells us how our words have changed them, well that’s just a little piece of heaven on earth.

And yes, feeding my inner narcissist is one of the reasons I write.

But I also do it because I don’t know any other way. Because writing has always been a part of me. My Mom used to write my brother and me notes, sometimes of the “have a good day” variety, other times, to expound upon one of our recent missteps or to broach a subject we just wanted to avoid. I wallpapered my bedroom in teenage angst poetry, and as problems evolved from mean girls and broken hearts to careers and sick children, putting pen to paper has never led me astray. Closure, emotional rescue, a creative outlet, a way to connect with people I care about. Writing has always been the answer.

But why publish it, blasting it to thousands of people, many of whom I don’t know? Why don’t I keep my private life…well, private? ...*clears throat for Mary Katherine Gallagher impression*...

My answer to that question can be best expressed in a monologue from the made for TV movie, On Fire. (And by ‘monologue’ I mean excerpt, and by ‘made for TV movie’, I mean John O’Leary’s book On Fire):

We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say ‘whatever I do in my private life is nobody else’s business.’ But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public…

The most hidden is the most public…Ain’t that the truth! When we’re having a bad day, the kids and I leave the house and go ANYWHERE so I can keep myself in check. Mama’s not gonna completely lose her cool at the park while others are watching, ya know? But it’s about being with people, too; empathizing and identifying with one another’s struggles connects us. There’s that universal thing. Not everyone agrees, but I would personally be way bored if I didn’t share the private puzzle pieces of my bigger picture.

…you aren’t afraid to know and own your story; otherwise you’ll never know the gift of your story. You won’t know the power of your experiences. You can’t embrace the beauty of your scars. You’ll never be a light to a world desperate for it.

On Fire, pages 53, 55

Listen, my colonoscopy didn’t cure cancer. My constant battle with sugar isn’t going to end racism. I’m not the first parent, nor will I be the last, to second-guess myself and feel the heavy weight of self-inflicted guilt. But those experiences help me come to terms with whatever’s going on in my life, and that’s reason enough to write about them. A few times, those experiences have helped others come to terms with what’s going on in their lives, too, and that’s reason enough to embrace my story, however ridiculous or vulnerable it makes me seem.

I believe in the power of prayer, the strength in numbers, and the importance of community, whatever size or shape that community takes. I own my mistakes and I share the private side of me, the side previously reserved for only close friends and family, because I want to. That’s why I write.

Hey there, I’m Steph! English teacher by trade, smack-talker by nature, and mother of three who lives by the mantra: Life is too short, laugh! I hope you’ll stick around and check out my stuff. And by stuff I mean my writing.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 33 Back to index>

Myra Strober’s new book is called “Sharing the work: What my career and family taught me about breaking through.”Myra Strober knows a thing or two about overcoming obstacles.Strober, a labor economist who studied gender issues, childcare and feminist economics, led a trailblazing career – both in and out of the classroom. The professor emerita of education and of business, was an activist, academic, wife and mother and mentor to many students and colleagues. Strober, who retired from Stanford in 2012, has plenty of advice for those entering the world of academia.

“The most important thing you can do for your career,” Strober said, “is to find a partner who will share the work at home and take your career as seriously as you do yourself. The second lesson I’ve learned is that being a woman generally sets your salary back to about 80 percent of what a man would earn for the same position.”

Those lessons and more are encapsulated in her new book of memoirs, Sharing the Work. The subtitle of the work is, What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others).

Stanford labor economist talks about uphill struggle as feminist scholar

By Clifton B. Parker

Strober was a co-founder of what is now Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and one of the first women on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business. At the Graduate School of Education, she also researched gender issues in the labor force.

Strober said that learning from her experiences is the “equivalent to getting a combined degree in women’s studies, business and economics. Plus, it will help prevent you from making the same mistakes I did.”

This article originally appeared in The Dish from Stanford Report. https://ed.stanford.edu/news

Myra Strober

34 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

I wish I had this shirt when I was in Afghanistan. In 2009, we were situated in a little Observation Post somewhere in Kandahar for a week or two at a time, with nothing but rations to fill our bellies. After many days and much elaborate drawing, I finally managed to communicate to a local Afghan National Army soldier that we were interested in real food. For the rest of our stay, and for just a few dollars per week, we were treated to hot meals twice per day. But had I had this IconSpeak shirt, weeks of eating cold rations could have been avoided.IconSpeak is a useful T-shirt printed with 40 universal icons, perfect for those occasions when you don’t speak the local language and have forgotten how to sign “I think there’s a problem with my carburettor.” The shirt was thought up by three Swiss “pen-pushers” over numerous drinks and after an adventure with a broken-down motorcycle, somewhere in Vietnam. Read a little bit of their story below:

“Many times we were confronted with a language barrier that was only to be over-come by drawing signs, symbols or icons on a piece of paper, map, or into the dirt,” explain George, Steven, and Florian. “We thought it would be great to have an es-sential set of icons with you, permanently, so that you could just point on whatever you need – and people would understand. Soon the notepad was pulled out again and we started listing more or less essen-tial icons that would have been of great help during not just ours, but basically anyone’s trip.”

More info: iconspeak.world

http://www.boredpanda.com/

Traveller T-Shirt With 40 Icons Lets You Communicate In Any Country Even If You Don’t Speak Its Language

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 35

Traveller T-Shirt With 40 Icons Lets You Communicate In Any Country Even If You Don’t Speak Its Language

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Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 37 Back to index>

38 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

A few years ago, I was working hard on a scrappy document that would eventually blossom into my first-ever book. It was still very early in the project, and I was hungry for guidance. So I was delighted that a colleague, who I’ll call Matt, had agreed to review my efforts and offer some constructive feedback. When he did, it went something like this:

Matt: “You’re doing great! Here’s what I think you should change . . . [followed by a thoughtful explanation of six suggestions for improvement] Other than that, it’s great!”

Me: “Um, okay, thanks.”

Matt was diligently following advice he’d once been given about the right way to give feedback. In his mind, he was making a tasty “praise sandwich”—saying one positive thing on either side of his criticism in order to make his comments feel less demotivating. He was trying to be considerate, yet I’d walked away feeling strangely discouraged. It was the opposite of what he’d intended.

That was hardly surprising, though, given a few things we know about the way our brains work.

Why Criticism Is So Tough To Swallow (And How To Make It Go Down Easier)

What your brain does when you’re criticizedPraise is a social reward that’s very appealing. But on balance, we are more sensitive to threats than to rewards.

At any given time, brains are subconsciously scanning the world around us for dangers to defend against—ready to launch a fight, flight, or freeze response that will protect us from predators or poisons. But the brain doesn’t just guard us against physical threats.

Research has found that it also goes on the defensive in response to things that threaten to undermine our social standing and safety, including interactions that make us feel even mildly rejected or incompetent. Since even being glanced at askance by a stranger can be enough to trigger our defenses, you can bet that receiving critical feedback is pretty likely to spark a fight, flight, or freeze response.

That matters because when our brains are in defensive mode, studies have shown that there’s reduced activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. That’s where our most sophisticated mental machinery

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We’re used to giving “praise sandwiches”...... a criticism wedged in between two generic compliments—that give our brains indigestion.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 39

Why Criticism Is So Tough To Swallow (And How To Make It Go Down Easier)

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generally lives: the neural systems responsible for self-control, reasoning, and forethought.

So it’s no wonder we don’t always respond graciously to feedback; it’s quite likely that our most thoughtful, attentive, flexible selves are somewhat offline. In fact, it’s possible that we’re not even properly listening. By the time Matt got to the third of his six suggestions, I was daydreaming about giving up the whole idea of writing a book (and considering what would happen if I perhaps punched him, gently).

And as for Matt’s praise? Surely his warm words should have offset the sense of threat in my mind, right? Not exactly. It’s true that our brains constantly seek out rewards as well as threats. That’s why we’re drawn toward things that make us feel good—and praise is a social reward that’s very appealing. But on balance, we are more sensitive to threats than to rewards. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s more important to be able to bolt from a burning house than to charge toward a cozy fireside sofa.

What’s more, it’s easier for our brains to process and remember specifics than to handle conceptual ideas. Research has found that we remember concrete words like “chair” better than abstract words like “comfort.” As a result, if we hear a generic positive statement (“It’s great! You’re great!”) followed by a list of specific things we should change, our brains will quickly discount that quick splash of praise and focus entirely on the negatives.

That’s what made it so hard for me to digest Matt’s praise sandwich. He meant well, but he might just as well have said, “Hey, here’s a bunch of things you need to do better,” since that’s pretty much all I heard.

The better way to give feedbackThankfully, this understanding of the brain reveals a little routine that we can all use to ensure that helpful feedback lands as it’s intended. It goes like this:1. Tell the other person: “What I like about this is . .

.” Give meaningful, specific examples of what you like, and explain why you like them. Aim for as many concrete positive points as you can. Don’t rush.

2. Then say: “What would make me like it even more is . . .”

The goal in the first of these two steps is to be at least as tangible and forthcoming in your praise as you are in your criticism—not just saying “it’s great,”

Caroline Webb

but what specifically is “great” about it. (Matt might’ve said, “I really liked the way you pulled in survey data to support your argument, for example in the section on page two. It tells a great story and sticks in the reader’s mind.”) These sorts of details matter; they make it far more likely that the person properly absorbs the fact that you value aspects of whatever they’ve said or done.Be at least as concrete and forthcoming in your praise as you are in your criticism.Then, when you introduce your suggestion for improvement with the phrase, “What would make me like it even more,” you’re framing your comment as an idea that—if explored—could take the other person from good to great, rather than something they were really dumb not to have done. You’re still making the point you need to make, but it feels much less threatening to your listener’s competence and self-respect than the usual, “How about doing this differently?”Taken together, these two sentences can greatly improve your chances of keeping the other person’s brain out of defensive mode as you give them feedback, making it far more likely that you’ll have a productive and good-natured conversation. This way, they can actually process your feedback intelligently and decide whether to act on it.For what it’s worth, this “What I like . . .” feedback model can help you as the feedback-giver, too, because being forced to find something you like—however hard it is to uncover it—often reveals something useful that you might’ve missed had you led with your criticisms.Finally, if you’re the one habitually receiving feedback rather than giving it, you can do what I eventually did with Matt, which is to simply ask him to give me brain-friendly feedback. I didn’t have to use any jargon, either. “First of all, can you tell me exactly what you liked and why?” I said. “It’s important for me to learn from that. I want to know what I should keep doing, or do more of. Then you can tell me what would make you like it even more!” The result? A fine, fistfight-free working relationship—and a finished book to boot.

Caroline Webb is the author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavior Sci-

ence to Transform Your Working Life (Crown Business, 2016) and is CEO of Sevenshift, a firm

specializing in science-based coaching.

www.fastcompany.com/3058834

40 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

So you want to write a novel? Of course you do. Everyone wants to write a novel at some stage in their lives. While you’re at it, why not make it a popular bestseller? Who wants to write an unpopular worstseller? Therefore, make it a thriller. It worked for Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth …Every now and then I come across excellent advice for the apprentice writer. There was a fine recent article, for example, in The Big Thrill (the house magazine of International Thriller Writers) on “how to lift the saggy middle” of a story. Like baking a cake. And then there is Eden Sharp’s The Thriller Formula, her step-by-step would-be writer’s self-help manual, drawing on both classic books and movies. I

felt after reading it that I really ought to be able to put theory into practice (as she does in The Breaks).

But then I thought: why not go straight to the source? Just ask a “New York Times No. 1 bestseller” writer how it’s done. So, as I have recounted here before, I knocked on Lee Child’s door in Manhattan. For the benefit of the lucky Child-virgins who have yet to read the first sentence of his first novel (“I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”), Child, born in Coventry, is the author of the globally huge Jack Reacher series, featuring an XXL ex-army MP drifter vigilante.

It is a golden rule among members of the Magic Circle that, when asked: “How did you do that?”, magicians must do no more than smile mysteriously. Child helpfully twitched aside the curtain and revealed all. Mainly because he wanted to know himself how he did it. He wasn’t quite sure. He only took up writing because he got sacked from Granada TV. Now he has completed 20 novels with another one on the way. And has a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Windows looking out over Central Park. Grammar school boy done well.

Cigarettes and coffeeHe swears by large amounts of coffee (up to 30 cups, black, per day) and cigarettes (one pack of Camels, maybe two). Supplemented by an occasional pipe (filled with marijuana). “Your main problem is going to be involuntary inhalation,” he said, as I settled down to watch him write, looking over his shoulder, perched on a psychoanalyst’s couch a couple of yards behind him.

Which was about one yard away from total insanity for both of us.

Especially given that I stuck around for about the next nine months as he wrote Make Me: from the first word (“Moving”) through to the last (“needle”), with occasional breathers. A bizarre experiment, I guess, a “howdunnit”, although Child did say he would like to do it all again, possibly on the 50th book.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving this away for free, but, beyond all the caffeine and nicotine, I think there actually is a magic formula. For a long while I thought it could be summed up in two words: sublime confidence. “This is not the first draft”, Child said, right at the outset, striking a Reacher-like note. “It’s the only draft!”

Don’t plan, don’t map it all out in advance, be spontaneous, instinctive. Enjoy the vast emptiness of the blank page. It will fill. Child compares starting a new book to falling off a cliff. You just have to have faith that there will be a soft landing. Child calls this methodology his patented “clueless” approach.

Andy Martin discusses the “magic potion” for writing a thriller

Lee Child and Andy Martin in NYC.

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Andy Martin discusses the “magic potion” for writing a thriller

Look Ma, I’m a writerTo be fair, not all successful writers work like this. Ian Rankin, for one (in his case I relied on conventional channels of communication rather than breaking into his house and staring at him intently for long periods) goes through three or four drafts before he is happy – and makes several pages of notes too.

And yet, with his Rebus series set in Edinburgh, Rankin has produced as many bestsellers as Child. Rebus also demonstrates that your hero does not necessarily have to be 6’5” with biceps the size of Popeye’s. And can be past retiring age too, as per the most recent Even Dogs in the Wild.

Child has a few key pointers for the would-be author: “Write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.” And: “Ask a question you can’t answer.” Rankin also advises: “No digressions, no lengthy and flowery descriptions.” He has a style, and recurrent “tropes”, but no “system”. And Child is similarly sceptical about

Elmore Leonard’s “10 rules of writing”.

“‘Never use an adverb’? Never is an adverb!” And what about Leonard’s scorn for starting with the weather? “What if it really is a dark and stormy night? What am I supposed to do, lie?”

All images via Facebook / Joel Rea

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Child never disses other writers. OK, almost never (there is one he wants to challenge to unarmed combat). But he is dismissive of a certain writerly attitude, a self-conscious mentality which he summarises as follows: “Hey, Ma, look – I’m writing!” And here we come close to the secret, the magic potion that if you could bottle it would be worth a fortune in book sales. Do the opposite. If you want to be a writer, the secret is: don’t be a writer. Try and forget you are writing (difficult, I know).

This is why both Child and Rankin speak with such reverence for the narrative “voice”. And why both privilege dialogue. The successful writer is a throwback to a vast, lost, oral tradition, pre-Homer. Another thing, fast-forwarding, they share in common: the default alter ego is rock star. It’s all about the vibe. Everything has to sound good when you read it aloud.

Art is theftBut if you seriously want to be a writer, think like a reader. Child explained this to me the other day in relation to his novel, Gone Tomorrow, set in New York, which is now often used to teach creative writing. “I introduce this beautiful mysterious woman. I started out thinking: I want my hero to go to bed with her. And then I thought: hold on, isn’t the reader going to be asking: ‘What if she is … bad?’” A small but crucial tweak: one letter – from bed to bad.

“So!“ you might well conclude, “isn’t this bloke like one of those con men who offer to show you how to make a fortune (for a modest outlay) and you think: ‘Well, why don’t you do it then?’” Fair comment. Which is why I am starting a novel right now about an upstart fan who tricks his way into a successful writer’s apartment and steals all his best ideas. I don’t know why, it just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that, in a word, is the core of all great art: theft.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of Cambridge. Andy Martin in conversation with Lee Child was

part of the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 14.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the

University of Cambridge.

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See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/opinion-how-to-write-a-best-selling-novel#sthash.Z2wLHLLl.dpuf

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The ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).

The new findings on bi-dialectalism are published in the journal Cognition, following a study undertaken by researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Cyprus, and the Cyprus University of Technology.

Although a topic of continuing academic and public scrutiny, a lot of research to date reports a positive cognitive net effect for multilingual children compared to children who speak only one language.

The effect is usually manifest in attention, cognitive flexibility and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, with some researchers arguing that the advantages of bilingualism are evident throughout the human lifespan. Until now, however, there has been very little research on children speaking two dialects which may only be separated by subtle linguistic differences.

Bi-dialectalism, the systematic use of two different dialects of the same language, is widespread in many parts of the world. In the USA millions of children grow up speaking African American English at home as well as Mainstream American English at school.

Similar situations arise in many parts of Europe, such as the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where school-children may only feel comfortable to talk about school subjects in High German, but switch to Swiss-German for everyday conversation.

British English, Gaelic and Welsh have well-established dialects as well as newly emerging ones

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Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages

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Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages

‘Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued.’

Napoleon Katsos

such as Multicultural London English, which has a rising number of speakers, especially among young, urban people.

To date, bi-dialectalism can be found in Lowland Scotland (in speakers of Scots and Standard Scottish English), in parts of Northern Ireland and elsewhere. However, the criteria for classifying two varieties as dialects rather than independent languages are not strictly objective and it could be debated whether these are cases of bilingualism instead.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou and Dr Napoleon Katsos from the University of Cambridge studied the cognitive performance of children who grew up speaking both Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek – two varieties of Greek which are closely related but differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar).

The study showed that multilingual and bi-dialectal children exhibited an advantage over monolingual children that was evident in composite cognitive processes including memory, attention and cognitive flexibility; suggesting that advantages previously reported for multilingual children could be shared by children speaking any two or more dialects.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “What is exciting and encouraging about our findings is that we were able to replicate the advantages of bilingualism in children who speak two varieties of the same language. They need not be as diverse as English and Mandarin Chinese.

“The distance between languages and dialects does not make much of a difference according to our tests and findings. Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance.

“Our findings could be significant for parents and children in the UK and countries across Europe and beyond where children speak a variety of different dialects. Germany, Italy and Spain all have significant numbers of dialectal speakers, as do parts of the US and China. With the rise and increased recognition of dialects in the UK, bi-dialectalism might become even more relevant in the UK in the near future.

“What our research suggests, contrary to some widely held beliefs, is that we don’t have to treat multilingual or bi-dialectal children as problematic. When it comes to language, plurality is an advantage.”

The study consisted of 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children and 25 monolingual children. Comparisons between the three groups were performed in two stages and the socio-economic status, language proficiency, and general intelligence of all children taking part was factored into the research methodology.

Dr Napoleon Katsos, one of the study authors, said: “Previous research has documented positive associations between childhood bilingualism and cognitive abilities.

“The novel and most important contribution of this study is that it showed similar positive effects extend to children speaking two closely related dialects of the same language. In qualitative terms, the effects of bi-dialectalism and multilingualism were, in general, quite similar. However, more research is needed on this topic.

“Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued. This kind of research can make people appreciate there is an advantage to bi-dialectalism and this may be important when we think about our identity, about how we educate children and the importance of language learning.”

Dr Antoniou and Dr Katsos are now retesting and extending their hypotheses on a larger scale in Belgium, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brussels. Belgium offers an ideal testing ground, with dialects of Dutch such as West-Flemish, being spoken alongside more standard versions of Dutch and French. The new study includes larger samples and new measures, to better understand the effects of bi-dialectalism on cognitive and linguistic development and their relation to bilingualism.

Reference:K.Antoniou et. al. ‘The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control’ Cognition 149 (2016)

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/

44 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

Our world is getting increasingly complex; so how do we know what is worth teaching and learning? I watched David Perkins’ presentation on this timely topic at the IB Heads World Conference this year and I am delighted to welcome him today to The Global Search for Education. David is interested in how we ought to adapt our curriculums in light of an ever-changing world. He asserts that what is conventionally taught in our schools is not necessarily meant to produce the kinds of community members we want and need. Perkins believes that only by reimagining what we teach our children can we lead students down the road to learning that results in a flourishing life.David Perkins is the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a founding member of the Harvard Project Zero, a research

project investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, Holland, Australia and the United States. David’s latest book, Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World, is a toolkit for helping educators and parents think through the all-important question: “What’s really worth learning?”What do you think students need to be taught in order to prepare them for life?This is perhaps the most important question in education for today’s complex world! Let me respond not by declaring a curriculum but exploring how we ought to think about it. From teachers to school leaders to makers of national policy, we should be asking, “What topics are truly likely to matter in the lives today’s students will live?”

For any candidate topic, I encourage people to tell an “opportunity story.” How might this topic come up later in students’ lives? With what frequency, what

“I encourage people to tell an ‘opportunity story.’ How might this topic

come up later in students’ lives?” — David Perkins

The Global Search for Education: What’s Really Worth Learning?

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 45 Back to index>

importance, offering what insights, empowering what actions in the world, informing the ethics of their decisions and the policies they support? Traditional curricula are stuffed with topics that resist a good opportunity story, topics just “there because they are there.”

What are examples of “big understandings,” as I call topics with a strong opportunity story? For instance, understanding democracy not just as an ideal but in its complexities and shortcomings around the world; or energy – its physics, economics, politics. Or basic statistics and probability… which come up frequently in medical decisions, insurance decisions, gambling, policies that impact the poor or international conflict. Also, many powerful works of art, literature, and music that resonate with the human condition.

What steps should schools take to ensure they are constructing a curriculum which prepares their students for the future?What’s needed here is a rich conversation within and across schools, including school boards, parents, and even students. Much of that conversation involves

sketching and critiquing opportunity stories. It’s hard to tell a sound opportunity story solo. One needs the rich critical conversation!

How should schools identify the key aspects of the curriculum they need to focus on in the classroom to ensure that students develop the key competencies they need in life?One place to look is the traditional disciplines – mathematics, history, etc. I grumbled earlier about the clutter of limited topics, but any discipline also contains abundant “big understandings.”

Another place to look is outside those disciplines. Based on comparative study of curriculum innovations, I can point out six “beyonds,” where educators are venturing beyond the traditional disciplines, in brief: beyond content, infusing 21st century skills, competences, etc.; beyond local, embracing global perspectives, problems, and studies; beyond topics, transforming topics into tools of broad understanding; beyond the traditional disciplines, renewing and extending those disciplines; beyond discrete disciplines, embracing interdisciplinary topics and problems; beyond academic engagement, fostering personal significance, commitment, and passion.

You stressed that many topics can be rich with learning opportunity – much depends on how teachers help students to develop in-sight about how some aspect of the world works, see potential for action, ponder ethical issues and generally see opportunities to build relevant links to their worlds. You state

The Global Search for Education: What’s Really Worth Learning?

“What’s needed here is a rich conversation within and across schools, including school boards, parents, and even students. Much of that conversation involves sketching and critiquing opportunity stories.” — David Perkins

“What to do with topics lacking a good opportunity story is a tough problem for educators. It’s always harder to take something out than put something in.” — David Perkins

46 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

that topics that don’t have this potential should be removed from the curriculum. Based on your research, what are the top 5 strategies you would recommend to teachers to help them with this?What to do with topics lacking a good opportunity story is a tough problem for educators. It’s always harder to take something out than put something in. Here are some suggestions for how to do it.

• Don’t take the topic out. Shrink it! Make it an object of “acquaintance knowledge” so that students have some orientation to it.

• Don’t take the topic out. Expand it! Many topics are thin only because they are thinly treated, but one can greatly increase their reach by looking for big generalizations and making connections to other areas. For instance, don’t just teach the French Revolution as about the French Revolution – teach it quite explicitly as a source of big themes that touch many other revolutions and various social innovations not only in the past but today. And pursue those connections as part of the instruction!

• Don’t start by planning what to remove but what big understandings to get in. With a positive agenda defined, it’s much easier to decide what to.

• Don’t start by redesigning your whole curriculum. Start with a manageable unit or two. Make the entire transformation a project of two or three years.

• With all that said, of course sometimes just take the weak topic out!

“Take a dispositional approach. Don’t just foster the skill’s development but also enthusiasm, commitment, sensitivity to occasions. Make such expectations part of the classroom culture.” — David Perkins

Based on your research, what top 5 strate-gies would you recommend to teachers to help them nurture the 4 C’s (creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration) in classrooms?First, let me note that there are many frameworks offering versions of 21st century skills. The 4 C’s is just one and not the only reasonable choice. However, I do think it’s quite a good one – broad enough to touch on important learner needs, compact enough to be manageable.

I’d encourage teachers to address the 4 C’s (or in fact almost any 21st century skills framework) as follows:

• Approach the C’s through “infusion,” weaving them into the teaching and learning of content.

• Be explicit about strategies. Research shows that students learn such skills better through making good practices explicit rather than just exercising them tacitly.

• Take a dispositional approach. Don’t just foster the skill’s development but also enthusiasm, commitment, sensitivity to occasions. Make such expectations part of the classroom culture.

• Teach for transfer. Declare an expectation for transfer, invite students to consider where else the C’s might apply within and beyond school, ask students to log stories of application.

• Coordinate across the subject matters. Use the same C approach in multiple subject matters yourself or by coordinating with teachers who teach the other subject matters. This reinforces the C and fosters transfer.

Thank you for your questions. I’m much more hopeful today than I was 20 years ago that we will see some fundamental changes in education. And I’m delighted to be part of the dialogue.

C. M. Rubin and David Perkins

C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair

award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three

bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland, is the publisher of CMRubinWorld, and

is a Disruptor Foundation Fellow. (All

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Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 47 Back to index>

SAP is bringing its youth innovation programme, Young ICT Explorers, to New Zealand, hosting an event in Auckland on 8 October in association with Manukau Institute of Technology. Designed to inspire and encourage school-aged children to use technology creatively, the programme invites them to apply what they learn about information and communications technologies (ICT) inside and outside their classrooms to develop innovative ICT projects. The Young ICT Explorers programme addresses two major objectives; improving ICT skills among youth and boosting innovation. It aims to achieve this by engaging young New Zealanders with technology early, often and meaningfully.“The correlation between high youth unemployment rates and the large and growing shortage of digital skills represents a startling paradox in the relationship between employment and education,” says Graeme Riley, Managing Director of SAP New Zealand.On the one hand the youth unemployment rate is still above pre-GFC levels; on the other hand demand for ICT skills continues to grow rapidly. According to Statistics New Zealand 10.9 percent of 15-24 year olds are not in employment, education or training. And enrolment in, and graduation from, tertiary ICT courses is still declining.” At the event, students will have an opportunity to present their project to a judging panel of academics, industry partners and ICT professionals. Each project will be assessed on its creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation.The programme currently operates in seven states and territories in Australia. Last year a record 874 students presented 371 projects.“With SAP’s Young ICT Explorers programme expanding to New Zealand for the first time this year, we are proud to be the first on board to support this critical initiative,” says Soltius CEO, Nick Mulcahy. “We

SAP launches Young ICT Explorers programme in New Zealand

Designed to grow the digital economy by encouraging innovation among school students

understand that if New Zealand businesses are going to be successful we need to instil confidence within future generations entering the workforce, inspiring an interest in the skills they need, and delivering the platforms to teach them.”“The skills shortage in the ICT industry is an ongoing challenge,” says Edwina Mistry, Industry and Community Engagement Manager at Manukau Institute of Technology. “The Faculty of Business and Information Technology at MIT recognises this challenge and works with industry to promote programmes in partnership with schools. The faculty sees the Young ICT Explorers programme as a great opportunity to partner with SAP to promote IT as a career.”Prizes will be awarded for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each school year category (division).A trophy will also be awarded to the winning team’s school in each division, and all qualifying entrants will receive a certificate of commendation for their participation.Registrations are now open and available online at www.youngictexplorers.org.nz for teachers and parents to register students from years 3 to 13 for venues across the country.For more information on the programme and to hear from students involved in the programme, please see:Young ICT Explorers: www.youngictexplorers.org.nz

About Young ICT Explorers Young ICT Explorers is a schools based competition set up by SAP in Queensland in 2010,

Launching in New South Wales in 2012, further expanding to Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and Townsville in 2014. 2015 saw the competition launching in West Australia

and Tasmania for the first time and 2016 will see it expand to South Australia and New Zealand. School students are asked

to enter ICT related projects in any field of study or topic of interest. The competition helps nurture, grow and encourage

young minds to take up the challenge of Information and Communication Technology.

48 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016

Me, Too!

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You feel not good enough.

Like all of your kids’ bad traits come from your side.

And you’re nowhere near as patient as you should be, showing more restraint with strangers than with your own family.

Me, too.When your harsh tone is repeated back to you, and you feel like the biggest failure to ever fail, but OHMYGOODNESS that child has been impossible lately. “He’s a good boy” and “it’s a phase” echo in your ears and though you believe those well-meaning words, all you really want to hear is “you’re doing a good job” and “you’re not alone” because you’re not convinced, and it would be so nice to have someone put their arm around you. No passive aggressive jabs, no finding the root of the cause. The root of the cause is age and you are doing a good job, I think.

When the one who loves you so big loves you even bigger in the moment that you least deserve it, that’s a beautiful thing. You wonder how much longer her brown eyes will see only good, and pray it is forever, promising to be better because she thrives on better. You are not perfect, but no one can come close to loving her the way you do, because she is of you and she is for you. That much is obvious when she reaches for you, only you.

Mostly, you do the best with what you’ve got and try not to compare yourself to the people who only serve grass-fed, all-natural organic foods to their children who attend private school while you’re all, “But we got the small fry” as you drive home from your public school that just

swept another professional scandal under the proverbial rug.

With a grateful heart, you bear witness to the beauty of your children succeeding and growing and learning and getting back up after they were knocked down. And as your baby’s heavy eyelids succumb to sweet slumber mid-suckle at your breast, you recognize how exquisite serenity is maniacally juxtaposed with back talk and eye rolling and tantrums, and you wonder who is the evil genius behind this shit?!

Me, too.In the middle of longing for a time when meals were peaceful, or hoping for the day socks find their way inside hampers, you realize you miss the swell of your pregnant belly more than you ever thought you would. The silent ache of emptiness takes you by surprise too often. You view your body as useless, failing to see the distinct irony of relying on it to carry a sleeping child from the car or put those friggin’ socks inside the hamper, you guys I’ve said it a million times!

Highs and lows, you’re in one of those temporary valleys, convinced it’s your attitude’s fault, snarling instead of smiling at the people who mean the most to you, the ones who are driving you effing crazy because they’re loving you despite obvious and countless shortcomings. Inconvenienced by simple things, enraged by stupid things, you’re left feeling stuck between two worlds: one that welcomes you, another that pretends you don’t exist and makes you want your Mom.

Me, too.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 49

Me, Too!

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Small worries have morphed into all-consuming fears, some trivial, some substantial:

• Matching Adele’s big notes

• Isis

• Gluten-free and free-range

• Tornadoes and global warming Spending too much money

• Not having enough time to write

• Racism

• Keeping the faith

• Syrian refugees and unwittingly repeating Holocaust

• Remembering my Kindergartner’s library book

• Violence and hate and murder–how long until human bodies litter the roadside?

• My kids eat too much junk food

• Cancer

• Are we having enough sex?

You’re about to do a thing you’ve done a million times, a thing that doesn’t require thought or attention–using your turn signal, turning on the coffee–but for a split second, you forget how to do that thing, and you pause. And the pause gives you pause because is this normal? Is this your new normal?

Me, too.Nobody really gets you, but they’re all very nice and have the best of intentions. Your shoulders are broad so you don’t complain about carrying the brunt of others’ burdens, so you allow for time to adjust to the extra weight. You juggle and balance, and as the weight begins to evenly distribute–to your heart, mind, and body–you realize there’s no room left for your own. Snide remarks about your bad mood or the unwillingness to give you space are what send you over the

edge, spilling the bag of secrets you had been holding for everyone else. You feel lighter, yet no better.

Missing getting tangled in the curly cords of telephones affixed to wallpapered kitchen walls, a time when your brother cared enough to take care of himself. Being angry but understanding because it’s so much easier. Spilled bags, lighter yet no better. The constant tug of war; what’s best for them isn’t what’s best for you, but you hoist the bag over your shoulder because that’s what they expect so that’s what you do.

Me, too.You’ve spent so much time and energy building something, yet rarely celebrate the successes. You can fixate on all the people who say no thank you, or you could revel in the glory that is being ahead of where you were yesterday. The latter is so hard, and you don’t know why. Is it human nature or is the grateful heart with which you claim to view life a figment of your imagination, a shield? You want more, you want less. You have bigger, you want smaller. You welcome the chaos, you cover your ears. You look for the best, you don’t appreciate the sincere effort. You are not alone.

Me, too.

50 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

French artist Edouard Martinet assembles faithful interpretations of birds, crustaceans, insects, and other creatures with countless objects from discarded bicycles, cars, and household objects. A bicycle pump forms the abdomen of a dragonfly, windshield wipers serve as the legs of a fly, or the metal logos of a bicycle manufacturer are layered to create the dense scales of a fish. All the more incredible considering Martinet never welds or solders his pieces, but instead uses only screws or fasteners, selecting only the perfect components that “fit” each assemblage like a puzzle. From Sladmore Contemporary:What sets Martinet’s work apart is the brilliant formal clarity of his sculptures, and their extraordinary elegance of articulation. His degree of virtuosity is unique: he does not solder or weld parts. His sculptures are screwed together. This gives his forms an extra level of visual richness – but not in a way that merely conveys the dry precision of, say, a watchmaker. There is an X-Factor here, a graceful wit, a re-imagining of the obvious in which a beautifully finished object glows not with perfection, but with character, with new life.Martinet will open a new exhibition of work at Sladmore Contemporary in London starting May 5th, 2016.

Edouard Martinet’s Masterfully Sculpted Animals and Insects Made from Bicycle, Car, and Motorcycle Parts

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 51

Edouard Martinet’s Masterfully Sculpted Animals and Insects Made from Bicycle, Car, and Motorcycle Parts

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by Christopher Jobson

Robin. Bronze, one of an edition of 12 copies, 22 x 32 x 18 cm. LEGS: springs , pieces of costume jewellery; BODY: children’s tricycle fender; FEATHERS: hood ornament of a Citroen; WINGS: petrol tank plates of a 50s motorcy-cle Monet-Goyon, bike chain guards; TAIL: car part, motorcycle decoration; EYES: marbles; HEAD: two seed scoops, ornaments for bike lights; BEAK: autoscope part, bike ornament.

52 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016

Gasana reading to children at the Kigali Reading Center in Rwanda.

(Photo courtesy of Parfait Gasana)

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Dragonfly, 115 x 54 x 80 cm.

ABDOMEN: bicycle pump;

THORAX: four bike rear lights, two small car lights, big upholstery tacks , gas cap, ball furniture casters;

HEAD: two old bike headlights, inside round sunglasses, shoe tree parts, parts of a daisy wheel for typewriter (hair from the mouth), under the head parts of acetylene bike lights;

LEGS: tubes, bike cable guide, wing nuts, cream chargers;

WINGS: umbrella ribs, fencing wire, aluminium metal mesh.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 53

Discovering lots of cool thinngs

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Fly, 47 x 40 x 27 cm.

LEGS : windshield wiper arms, bike brakes, bike chains, small typewriter parts;

HEAD: motor vehicle rear light;

PROBOSCIS: car hood hinge;

ANTENNAE: ski boot fasteners;

THORAX: motorbike headlight;

On the top :

50’s kitchen utensil.

WINGS: the glass is set in a windscreen brush holder, the wing ribs are made with soldering wire;

ABDOMEN: motorbike headlight, part of ceiling lamp.

54 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

Black Swift, 45 x 20 x 17 cm.

LEGS: springs, pieces of costume jewellery;

BODY: silver sauce jug;

WINGS and FEATHERS: petrol tank plates of a 50s Villier motorcycle, bike chain guards, scooter decoration;

TAIL: car decoration;

EYES: metal balls;

HEAD: one seed scoop, bike headlight;

BEAK: dental forceps.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 55 Back to index>

Praying Mantis, 104 x 50 x 74 cm.

ABDOMEN: bike fender, car ventilator and ski boots fasteners;

WINGS: rear lights of a Peugeot 404;

HEAD: two moped indicators;

TOP FORELEGS: car mirror handles, ham slicers, nutcracker handles, spaghetti tongs;

FOR ALL THE LEGS: the ends are parts from bike brakes plus a bit of bike chain;

THE OTHER LEGS: windshield wiper arms, aluminium tubes;

THORAX: car bumper, car mirror handles.

56 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

Three-spined stickleback. 34” x 5” x 13”H.

BODY: moped fenders and chain guards.

BONES: tablespoons.

GILLS: car door parts.

FINS: cake tins, fish slices, compasses.

TAIL: motorbike silencer, fish slices.

EYES: flashlights.

HEAD: Solex front fenders.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 57 Back to index>

Sardine, 25 x 70 x 11 cm.

BODY: Moped chain guard covered with multiple bicycle logo badges;

HEAD: Solex front fenders, car bumpers.

EYES: Flashlights;

GILLS: Car door parts, bicycle chain guards.

TAIL: Motorbike exhaust pipe;

FINS: Cake tins.

58 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016

Secret Teacher

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Hello There!Keeping details to a minimum as I do wish to remain anonymous and to keep my class secret for their own privacy.

I know there are downfalls to every job (ok, maybe not being Gerard Butlers masseuse. Or a chocolate taster. Or a wine taster for that mat-ter. Ok, I know there are downfalls to MOST jobs…), however I’m aiming to keep this blog positive and one to make you smile rather than have a whinge about workload, hours, head teachers, etc. that I know all us primary teachers carry on our shoulders.

It’s that time of year again; do I, don’t I, what if, is it the right time…?

This past couple of weeks I have found myself looking around for teaching jobs, not because of my school – I love it where I am now and will be sad to go, but I feel the time has come to move up in the world! So I’ve been search-ing for jobs offering some form of leadership or coordinator roles.

Looking back to when I was searching for my very first teaching job I remembered the daunting task of visiting schools, meeting head teachers – first impressions count right! Think-ing of questions to ask to make yourself stand out, only to get there and find you were walk-ing around with 6 other potential candidates, all eager to make the same impression and ask the same questions. I always found it quite ‘hunger games’ like, walking around with the competi-tion pretending to be nice to each other when really you just want them to ask a stupid ques-tion or say something totally irrelevant so they can be out of the running I remember trying to justify to myself why they shouldn’t get the job, trying to make myself feel more confident that I’m the one they’re looking for…

Anyway after quite a few years of teaching now under my belt, I was looking forward to do-ing the same process, meeting potential head teachers, now with that bit more knowledge and experience. Only to find…it’s exactly the same! The other candidates have also got that

bit more knowledge and experience, and why do they always seem to know what they’re talk-ing about more than I do?? I find myself think-ing ‘oh yeah why didn’t I ask that question?’ Or ‘I have no idea what that even means..’

Then finally comes the interview process (af-ter many tears and tantrums of ‘I’m just not good enough, no one will ever want me, there’s always someone with more experience…’ Etc etc!) Why do they feel the need to put us all in the same room whilst we await the other potential candidates and the head to come and introduce themselves. You sit there making small talk with each other, all the while think-ing ‘I hope you fall into the interview room and headbutt the chair of governors’.

Then there’s always the ‘perfect candidate’. The one you just KNOW is going to get it. Confi-dent, experienced, well dressed, seems to have that rappor with the head from the second they walked in there. The one everyone else in the room hates because they’re thinking exactly the same thing. You sit there waiting for them to come and collect you, wishing each other luck (with fingers crossed behind your back) as everyone is taken out of the room 1 by 1 and never seen again…

Has anyone else experienced this traumatic interview process? Surely im not the only one that feels this way!

Anyway, if you are looking for a new job this year…good luck

Secret Teacher xx

http://www.thesecretteacher.co.uk/

Facebook: Secret Teacher

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 59 Back to index>

A new website developed in New Zealand is helping young

Pasifika and Māori cope with stressful life experiences by providing them with a step-by-step structured approach to problem solving; something that is not necessarily learned in families where collective decision making is the cultural norm.

‘Aunty Dee’ (www.auntydee.co.nz) was developed by Le Va, a Pasifika non-government organisation that works across mental health and addictions, workforce development, suicide prevention, public health, disability, education and sport psychology.

Chief executive Dr Monique Faleafa said the website is called Aunty Dee because in many Pacific and Māori communities young people often go to their aunties (or aunty type figures) for advice and help. She believes it is the first web-based tool of its kind for young people in the New Zealand and Pacific region.

“We’re not born with problem solving skills, they are developed over the course of our lives,” Dr Faleafa said.

“But sometimes for young people, the development of these skills does not seem to match the complexity of the problems they are facing in everyday life. This can lead to feeling overwhelmed, distressed, angry, confused or even depressed.

“For Pasifika particularly, if we are taught from infancy that decisions are made in a more collective way, it’s quite possible that problem solving, and the related neural pathways in brain development, is also seen as more collective. Learning problem solving skills as an individual can empower and equip our young ones with tools to deal with what life throws them.”

The Aunty Dee web-tool went live in March and already more than 742 problems have been identified by people to problem-solve.

Rather than provide the answers to people’s problems, Aunty Dee guides people to identify real problems, generate solutions and then act. At the end of the process, people have a plan they can either download or email to themselves.

“Essentially Aunty Dee guides the person to think about and explore problems in an anonymous, engaging, non-stigmatising and structured way. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, Aunty Dee helps people work through it to find a solution,” Dr Faleafa said.

This proven approach is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a psychological treatment that is shown to be effective for reducing depressive symptoms for young people. Dr Faleafa added that

structured problem solving has also shown promising results for reducing the risk of suicide.

She said for vulnerable or underprivileged young people these sorts of interventions aren’t always accessible; which is why it will always be free to use Aunty Dee.

For Pasifika and Māori communities, the use of technology to deliver mental health solutions based on evidence is an important area of emerging research. Suicide death rates for Māori youth are two and a half times higher than those for non-Māori youth, and Pasifika peoples have higher rates of suicidal ideation, suicide plans and suicide attempts than all other ethnic groups in New Zealand.

Dr Faleafa said Aunty Dee reflects many of the recommendations recently published in research in the JMH mental health journal.

“The emerging evidence suggests online mental health support that uses smartphone technologies should, among other things, be based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, be designed for non-clinical populations, teach users about the psychological processes underlying distress and the resources available to manage it, and be designed for use in real time when it is needed – not based around weekly appointments or sessions.”

Being a web-based tool means Aunty Dee works on any smartphone, tablet or desktop computer.

“Aunty Dee requires only an internet connection to work. There’s no big files to download. We’ve designed it this way so that young people can use Aunty Dee as and when they need her – wherever there is a wifi connection.”

Aunty Dee is part of a broader, long-term strategy to improve the mental wellbeing of young Pasifika and Māori in New Zealand. Its development falls out of New Zealand’s first suicide prevention strategy for Pasifika called FLO: Pasifika for Life, which is led by Le Va.

Dr Faleafa said people who use Aunty Dee are also giving Le Va’s health researchers real-time anonymous and confidential insights into some of the issues that are going on for young people.

She hopes in future that this information will be used to inform and develop targeted wellbeing programmes which address relevant issues for young people today.

More about Le Va: Le Va is a non-government organisation that was formed in

2007 at the request of the Ministry of Health to build the capability and capacity of the Pasifika mental health

workforce.

Online aunty helps young people solve problems

60 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016

How to live a happy life

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Our life expectancy is closely linked to our sense of community and the quality of the relationships that make up our communities.

The reality is that even in the modern world, we can’t actually get by just on our own – we do rely on friendships to keep us happy and help us live a long and healthy life.

In this way, I don’t think we’re so far from our social ancestors as we think.

For them, music based activities were probably a potent ‘social glue.’

And still today, I think people would do well to dance and make music more!

Your research looks at how dance and music brings people together and fosters connection– could you expand on that?Around the world people dance and make music: it looks different and it’s used in various ways in different cultures but it exists everywhere. There’s something quite human about our ability and our tendency to express ourselves through music – like Oliver Sachs famously said: “We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one.” A lot of people might not really think of themselves as musical, especially today where a lot of us just plug into personal music devices and leave the creating to professional musicians and dancers. But even the least musical among us are susceptible to music in some way – it can affect us emotionally and physically. When a good tune comes on we can’t help but start tapping our foot in time to the beat, and music can make us feel intensely sad or elated. This appreciation for music, and our tendency to want to share and make music with other people – to hear music, to feel moved by it – this is something we’ve inherited from our musical ancestors.

The question then is: ‘Why?’ – where does this susceptibility come from? And why has it continued for so long as such an important part of human culture and ritual, probably for hundreds of thousands of years? The oldest instrument that we know of is about 40,000 years old – but probably we’ve been making music and dancing for much longer, and our first instruments would have been our voice and our body. Some people have said: ‘That’s all very well, but it has no evolutionary function.’ That may well be true but when we invest so much time and energy doing something like making music, it is an interesting empirical question as to whether there might be adaptive advantages to doing so.

One hypothesis is that it provides an opportunity for people to come together, making them move – dance – and in doing so we experience internal hormonal cascades which are made up of ‘feel good’ chemicals. These bursts of chemicals are part of our brain’s pain and pleasure and reward circuitry, and when they are triggered they provide an experience of elation and positive reward. When we get this kick in the presence of others, the result is that of collective joy – positive, shared experiences through which we establish and maintain important social connections with others.Now we feel like we belong to a unified, cohesive whole.

Being part of a cohesive social group would have been really important for our ancestors – collaborating with others to find shelter, hunt, rear young would have increased our chances of survival. Music and dance are by no means the only ways we can

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 61

Dr Bronwyn Tarr

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stimulate these positive social ‘highs’. But they’re really good ways of doing it because it’s an experience that we can share with lots of people at once. In order to understand why that would have given us such a great advantage we need to look at our species in the context of primates.

Humans are part of the Primate order, which includes a great range of different species which are typically social dwelling. Across these species, social groups consist of different categories of relationships between individuals: there are relatives (those who you are genetically related to) and romantic partners or mates (a ‘pair-bond’). Then there’s third type of relationship – a social bond – in humans we call it ‘friendships’. Much like pair-bonds or even the attachment between mothers and infants, these social bonds are strong and involve a lot of mutual time investment, shared care and energy. In chimpanzee social groups for example, animals which are bonded in this non-reproductive, non-kin way will ‘get each other’s backs’ if there is a squabble in the group and they will share food and sleeping space with one another. These social bonds are critical to the survival of primate individuals in the natural environment – conflict is inevitable so you need to have someone you can rely on to help you defend your food and space.

But we humans live in much larger social groups compared to our primate cousins. And this might have something to do with the size of our brains, or specifically our very large neocortexes. The neocortex is generally considered the seat of consciousness and reasoning, but it also plays a big role in social behaviours. In looking across mammal and specifically primate species, Professor Robin Dunbar noticed that there is a positive linear relationship between the size of the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain, and the typical size of the species’ social

groups. The bigger the neocortex compared to the rest of brain size, the larger the social group. If we take the known human neocortex size, and plug it into this equation, we arrive at our natural group size of 150 – the cognitive limit to the number of friends we can keep track of. Since dubbed ‘Dunbar’s number’, this is three times larger than our primate cousins, chimpanzees.

Other primates like chimpanzees rely on activities like grooming to establish social bonds and maintain cohesive social groups. Grooming is typically a mutual, one-on-one activity, but because of this it takes a huge amount of time to keep up with all your ‘friends’. If we humans have 150 as our social group size it’s going to take an estimated 40% of our waking hours to groom all 150 of those people. Which, while it sounds very pleasant, is clearly inefficient – we don’t have time to nurture that many relationships one-on-one. So what we’re looking for are activities that operate on a one-on-many basis. Dunbar has called this ‘grooming at a distance’ – mechanisms that help you get to the same end point of closeness, trust and connectedness but don’t require a one-on-one investment.

I think that music is a great hack for this. Music gives you a rhythmic scaffolding that a lot of people can attend to simultaneously. Music allows us to synchronise our movements in time, coordinate and dance together. You can see flashmobs of hundreds of people all joining into one cohesive unit. What we think is happening here is that those same chemical networks used by primates to establish their bonding are being activated for us too – networks that involve the pleasure–pain circuitry and allow us to enjoy a positive, natural high in the presence of other people, thereby reinforcing feelings of belonging with that group.

62 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 Back to index>

You drew on a lot of different disciplines: sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biol-ogy and neuroscience. What disciplines most interest you and how do you think about the interdisciplinarity of your work?I’m actually an undercover zoologist (maybe not that undercover!). Before I came to Oxford I studied animal behaviour and I was interested in the evolution of cooperative behaviours: what makes individuals come together and coordinate.

So I come at my DPhil research from an interest in sociality in general: what is behind the social connection that can form between individuals, why is it there and how is it maintained? Dance and music making are, from my personal experience, an incredible way of feeling a ‘one-ness’ with others. And I think this is unique because it doesn’t need to involve language – we can really use this shared, musical response to connect with others from all sorts of different cultures, without having to talk.

My personal experience has made me feel like there is something exceptional here, and there is something in that feeling of connectedness which I’m really curious about. I now work as a Psychologist/Anthropologist, looking at human social behaviour. Psychology offers different techniques to help get at the essence of that feeling of connectedness – techniques which range from asking people to rate how they feel on self-report measures and indices to getting them to play games which involve collaboration and coordination. These methods help us define and empirically test our experiences of collective joy. But ultimately I think it still remains a bit of an elusive mystery in social psychology research – pinning down what we really mean by that sense of ‘one-ness’ – that fused unity – is not by any means established in the literature. It’s still up for interpretation – which makes the research quite exciting.

Do you think that the things that in the past were much more important to our evolution-ary survival are things that now make us feel more comfortable – for example having friends and, as a mechanism for that, dance?In the past, when we were living in environments where finding food or shelter or defending areas would have been vastly more difficult on our own than in a group, any activity that helped form a sense of collective unity and gave us opportunities to hone collaborative skills would have been advantageous. Today we outsource a lot of our social cognition to technology, we no longer have to rely just on our neocortex to remember the 150 people who are important to us and why they are important to us and when their birthdays are and so on. We can get our daily meals from Sainsbury’s and arguably needn’t rely on strong social connections to get by day by day.

So this might contribute to the general belief that we’re a little bit beyond that heavy reliance on social bonds.

But I don’t think that we are. A really interesting study a few years ago did a meta-analysis contrasting the effects of social relationships – your number of friends and the quality of your relationships – and the influence these factors have on your health in comparison to smoking, to obesity, to how much exercise you do. It’s a given that smoking kills. But it turns out that social isolation does too. Your life expectancy is closely linked to the sense of community that you have and the quality of the relationships in that community. The point is that, even today, we can’t actually get by just on our own – we do rely on other people to keep us happy and help us live a long and healthy life.

Whilst the evolutionary pressures are by no means the same as they would have been when we were hunter gatherers in an arid sub-Saharan desert or impenetrable forest, we are still a social species, and we are also still a musical one. We still have this inherited need to belong and an immense aptitude and appreciation for music and for dance. I don’t think we’re as far from our ancestors as we think. I think people would do well to dance and make music more!

Did working with Robin Dunbar influence your work and help you apply your zoological background to social psychology?Robin has an incredibly diverse and inspiring background. He has worked on all sorts of projects on non-human social bonding, and he’s been instrumental in bringing together evidence for this theory of the social brain, which applies not just to humans but across primate species and mammals in general. It was completely serendipitous that we met and that this project was born in the way that it now exists. Robin had for a while been developing a theory that music-making and dance might, as he put it, have been a ‘pre-linguistic way of establishing and maintaining social bonds, social contracts and a sense of positive affirmation’. We met to discuss primatology, and it just happened that through the conversation that it came out that I was a dancer. And when he heard that, he said: ‘I have a project for you.’

He gave me the question: ‘Does dance bond us, and if so, how?’. That was the beginning of my DPhil. Of course it’s such a big question and you’re not answering the evolutionary side of it directly per se, but the backdrop of all of this is the idea that dance and music-making would have played some advantageous role in our evolutionary history. He also works on laughter and religion and literature and language, and the thread that ties it all together is this idea that humans are a very social species that would have relied on close-knit, well-coordinated social groups to survive. Music-making and dance are just one way we’ve managed to establish and maintain those social groups, and form one part of the bigger puzzle he’s working on.

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What practical insights about happiness have arisen from your research?What makes us happy? From a biological perspective, neurochemicals give us the sensation of joy, they trigger surges of positive emotion and waves of euphoria. Our pleasure circuitry in our brain is also part of the pain circuitry and linked to the networks that give us a sense of reward. When we find something pleasurable – whether it’s a mouth-watering piece of cheesecake or an amazing piece of music – it’s not just giving us a sense of enjoyment, it’s also triggering related cascades of chemicals that make us want to have the experience again.

Just like taking a drug can give you a high, doing certain things can give you natural, internal highs. The reason why the drug works is because it’s taking advantage of the internal chemistry that we already have which help us cope with pain or give us a sense of reward and joy. Going for a run activates this pain-pleasure circuitry and stimulates the release of endocannabinoids (which are your natural cannabinoids), and the release ofendorphins (which are your natural opiates) and as a result you get a ‘high’ and elevated pain thresholds. That high is addictive; a lot of people (I’m not among them!) love running so much that they may claim to be addicted to it. But really what they are getting addicted to is the cocktail of positive feel good chemicals that running triggers.

Listening to music can trigger that system as well. Certain songs will send shivers down your spine, raise the hairs on your arms and give you a real emotional response. In fact, listening to music can activate the release of endorphins, making us feel good and better able to cope with pain. Of course endorphins are also activated when we exert ourselves, so allowing yourself to just get up and dance when your favourite song starts playing is a sure way to trigger those happy chemicals! In some of our recent research, we found that dancing with high energy and in synchrony with others (so doing the same thing at the same time) has great effects. Compared to non-synchronous and low-energy dancing, people felt closer to one another and had higher pain thresholds (an indirect measure of endorphin release) after dancing energetically and in synchrony. So activities that involve lots of physical exertion and interpersonal coordination (specifically synchrony) are hitting the spot in more than one way, triggering our brains to release this deluge of happy chemicals. So join a flash mob, take a zumba class! But, don’t worry – if you are not physically able to dance all out, even just synchronising small hand gestures still provides a dose of this music-triggered happiness.

As I mentioned before, the social connections we nurture during a music jam session, dance class or when we go to a music concert are important for our general well-being and happiness because they give us a sense of belonging. A really interesting area of

research shows that there is actually an overlap between how your body deals with physical pain and social pain. So, for example, when out on a gruelling run, our body has to deal with all kinds of physical stress, which it copes with via those feel-good chemicals which help mitigate the painful physical effects of that activity. Similarly, if you are rejected or ostracised in some way, if you feel discriminated against, if you’re excluded from a group, it hurts. It hurts because it’s actually going through a similar neural circuitry as it would if someone was actually physically injuring us. An activity which makes you feel included in a bigger, stronger unit of coordinating individuals is reinforced by the feel-good chemicals triggered by that social activity. The neurological system is there to reward when something is going to be positive and to make you stay away from situations that aren’t. So in summary, from my research on dance and music, I would say that in the quest for happiness, joining with others in positive experiences of collective joy and shared coordination is a sure way get those feel-good juices flowing.

What’s been your own relationship with dance?I started dancing ballet when I was 12. Ballet is very structured, it’s a genre of perfection which demands total mastery of every corner of your body and psyche. When I was 18 I went to America and I danced at Interlochen Academy for some time in a cohort of about 25 other dancers. On arriving, we were put in a room and and told to improvise to music provided by a live, improvising musician. No talking was allowed. We were told to choose a set of movements that was ‘ours’, an individual signature move – and to focus on doing that. As the improvisation developed, we were told we could start integrating other people’s signatures into our sequence, but we didn’t have to. By the end of the hour, without any words being said between us, we had what looked like a choreographed piece of movement and music. What had happened, I think, is similar to what people describe happening in team rowing – where you suddenly feel a ‘click’, and a collection of individuals suddenly become a single unit, all on the same wavelength. That was one of the most fundamental experiences that I had dancing, and it featured in my application for this research project in Oxford – as a scientist I was interested to interrogate the nature of that feeling I’d experienced.

What would you like to do next? I would like to explore some of the other explanations for why we make music and why we dance and tie it together in a study of music and dance around the world. I’m currently pitching for a documentary series, which I think is a very exciting way to celebrate the colourful diversity of human music-making and dance.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-in-conversation/how-live-happy-life/dr-bronwyn-tarr

64 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016

Reaching Your Goals through Everyday Conscious Choices

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Each one of us starts with the best intentions: to eat well, exercise, do our best work at our jobs, and get along with our co-workers. Unfortunately, those good intentions don’t always translate into actually doing what we say we’ll do. Why is this? In this month’s Know How Network, we explore the answers to this question and how to align our actions with our intentions.Often, impediments to our success come in the form of what we here at Cheetah Learning call “triggers” - these are the

everyday disruptions that mentally or emotionally distract us from what we intend to accomplish. You’ve prepared for your project team meeting with a detailed agenda, and several team members show up late. You arrive at work with the intention of starting right away on your most important task, and you discover your email inbox flooded with “urgent” requests. You present a proposal for a new project, and unexpectedly come up against a lot of pushback from other stakeholders.

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Reaching Your Goals through Everyday Conscious ChoicesBy Michelle LaBrosse,CCPM, PMP®, PMI-ACP,

and Founder of Cheetah Learning

About the Author:

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP, is an entrepreneurial powerhouse with a penchant for making success easy, fun, and fast. She is the founder of Cheetah Learning, the author of the Cheetah Success Series, and a prolific blogger whose mission is to bring Project

Management to the masses.Cheetah Learning is a virtual company with 100 employees, contractors, and licensees worldwide. To date, more than 50,000 people have become “Cheetahs” using Cheetah Learning’s innovative Project Management and

accelerated learning techniques. Honored by the Project Management Institute (PMI®), Cheetah Learning was named Professional Development Provider of the Year at the 2008 PMI® Global Congress. A dynamic keynote speaker and industry thought leader, Michelle is recognized by PMI as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the world.Michelle also developed the Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) program based on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality profiling to help students master how to use their unique strengths for learn is recognized by PMI as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the world.

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What is your typical response to these kinds of “triggers?” For many of us, triggers push us into making choices that aren’t fully conscious or intentional; that is, we react rather than act with purpose. You may lash out at a co-worker, neglect other work you need to do, or find yourself stress-eating. After engaging in these behaviors, we often feel guilty and unfulfilled. “Letting off steam” rarely makes us feel better, and can instead have the opposite effect: of making us feel like we aren’t in control of our own actions or emotions.

Fortunately, reacting to triggering events isn’t our only option. With practice, we can develop the skill of making conscious choices about how to act when confronted with triggers. Here are some tips for making conscious choices in response to triggering events that Cheetah has developed over years of helping students prepare for the anxiety-inducing Project Management Professional (PMP®) Exam:

1. Identify what “triggers” you. We may often feel blindsided by triggering events, but if we step back from a minute, we can see that some of these triggers are fairly predictable and routine. There are likely one or more of your co-workers who you can always count on to be late, no matter how many reminder emails you send about the upcoming meeting. Acknowledging the probability that these co-workers will show up late again to your next meeting is the first step in preparing to react to this triggering event more intentionally.

2. Recognize and accept that you are being “triggered.” Now you’re in the meeting, and sure enough, your “usual suspects” come in 10 minutes late with their predictable apologies and excuses. And predictably, you feel annoyed. Recognize and accept that feeling.

3. Breathe. Deep, calm breaths help us reach a state of calm focus that prepares us to make

conscious choices about how to respond to triggers.

4. Identify others’ positive intentions. If the behavior of someone else is the triggering event (and this is often the case), take a minute to acknowledge the other person’s positive intention that led up to their actions. As the saying goes, we often judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. Judging others by their intentions opens up new possibilities for understanding and empathizing with others whose actions trigger us.

5. Find a productive way to move forward. We don’t have control over all the triggering events that happen in our lives. We do, however, have control over how we respond. After acknowledging that you are being triggered and recognizing that others, like you, start out with good intentions, you are in a great position to decide which actions will produce the outcomes you ultimately hope for. In the case of your team members showing up late to the meeting, rather than chewing them out in front of everyone during the meeting, you might pause to ask yourself: what can I do right now to make this the most productive meeting anyway? How might I most effectively communicate with the late team members to let them know their tardiness is unacceptable?

When we act consciously rather than simply react when we find ourselves in triggering situations, we influence ourselves to act according our best intentions. This positive self-influence brings us a feeling of deep personal satisfaction and pride that is far more rewarding than the reactive behaviors we justify as a way to “let off steam.” While these behaviors may feel good in the moment, they do not help us achieve the long-term, sustainable happiness that comes from making conscious choices.

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After Becoming A Mom, I Couldn’t Find Time To Paint, So I Started Doing One Tiny Drawing A DayEleven years ago I attended the Tom Bishop Miniature show in Chicago with my mother. She encouraged me to check it out on a professional level. I had already been painting with oils and acrylics, and many of my paintings were already small, but not miniature. After visiting the miniature show with my mother and trying my hand at some miniature painting, I was encouraged to apply for a scholarship to attend the International Guild of Miniature Artisans Guild School in Castine, Maine. I was able to take a class with Johannes Landman and was introduced to fine 1/12 scale painting. I have since become a member, fellow and teacher of IGMA.In 2014 I had a 7-year-old, a 2-year-old, and was having trouble finding time to complete my detailed miniature compositions. I decided to paint one small object a day for a year in effort to become more productive and less frustrated. Doing a daily painting pushed me to let go of making each piece too precious. I was able to paint a piece and if I didn’t like it, no problem! There would be another chance to try tomorrow.

Depending on the complexity these daily paintings would take between 45 minutes and 4 hours. Some of my 1/12 scale replica paintings can take several days to complete. Usually I would paint 2 daily paintings on Saturday, so I could take a break on Sunday. I generally chose subject matter for the daily work based on something that was currently happening in my life. They felt like little notes I could toss out to the world to be interpreted by those who found them.

I currently use Canson edition antique white paper. Any small natural bristle brush that comes to a fine point will work just fine. I have used: 5/0 Rosemary & Co. Pure Sable Series 92, 5/0 and 0 Da Vinci Pure Kolinsky Series 1505, and 6/0 Raphael series 8404. I generally draw the image with a .5 mm pentel P205 mechanical pencil and then paint with a Sennelier watercolor pan set. I use an Ott light and a desktop easel as my painting station. My iPhone is my camera to photograph each piece, and to find and source imagery to paint from. Generally, I don’t use any

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After Becoming A Mom, I Couldn’t Find Time To Paint, So I Started Doing One Tiny Drawing A Day

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by Brooke Rothshank

magnification. I am nearsighted so I usually just paint with my glasses off. I do have a magnifying headset which I have used sporadically in the past, but isn’t part of my regular practice.

I have enjoyed creating commissioned minis along the way. One of my most unusual requests was for a kidney! Unfortunately, I am not able to take commissions right now but hope to resume in 2017. My husband Justin (a ceramics artist) and I are working on a joint show to open this summer. I am also spending time with my most recent mini, our daughter! She was born a preemie at 4lbs 7 oz this past December.

For this amazing couples website: ‘rothshank artworks’

http://rothshank.com/

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http://www.boredpanda.com/author/blrothshank/

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On the 21st of March poetry fans around the world celebrated World Poetry Day.

To mark the day, we asked poetry experts from our English Faculty and Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages about their own research into poetry, and what poems they recommend we should read today.

Later in the article, Professor Simon Palfrey of the English Faculty explains his collaborative scholarly and artistic project Demons Land: A Poem Come True.

Before that, Philip Bullock (Professor of Russian Literature and Music) and Alexandra Lloyd (Lecturer in German at St Edmund Hall and Magdalen College, University of Oxford) who lead the Oxford Song Network at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), give their take on World Poetry Day:

Arts Blog: What is the purpose and remit of the network?PB: I think we say something on our website about the network – that it ‘explores the interaction of music and words in the nineteenth- and twentieth-

century European song tradition’. But that’s incredibly complicated, as you might

imagine. Trying to find a common language that brings together musicologists, linguists,

historians and performers is one of the major challenges, and we’ve brought together a wide

range of scholars from different fields in order to try to establish some common research questions and discuss how we each think about song (we’ve even pushed our period boundaries by talking to some classicists too).

We’ve also experimented with a number of different formats. We’ve had some more formal, conference-style events, often linked with the Oxford Lieder Festival, where people talk about their own research in depth. But we’ve also had smaller discussion groups in which we hear each other’s work in progress, and that’s a great opportunity to open things up for further discussion.

And this term, we’ve held a couple of workshops with current Oxford students and leading experts from outside the university – Helen Abbott from Sheffield, and Natasha Loges from the Royal College of Music – in order to explore the relationship, and sometimes even the tension, between poetry and music in song, to ask how we might translate song lyrics into English, and to explore what kind of knowledge and experience singers and pianists need to have in order to put across the meaning of a song to an audience that might not necessarily understand the language in which a song is sung.

A rather selfish reason for putting the network together was to get some feedback on a book I’m currently trying to write on Russian song, and I must say that I’ve always come away from every event buzzing with new ideas and angles to explore in my writing.

AB: What do you think of the way poetry is approached in schools and in the media? How would you change this? PB: I think poetry can sometimes seem terribly formidable, and people think that studying it often involves learning lots about the complex meanings of

Poetry experts mark World Poetry Day

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Poetry experts mark World Poetry DayMatt Pickles

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words and all the hidden references and technical tricks that poets use to work their magic. That’s all true, and it’s an important feature of how I teach poetry to my own students. But I sometimes think we forget the physical, embodied side of poetry – words that are spoken, or sung by a living, breathing human being.

We’ve rather lost the habit of memorising and reciting poetry (at least in the UK – Russians still do it with a passion), and with that, we’ve lost sight of poetry as a kind of performance, where sounds and sensations are as important in creating a relationship with the audience as the words on the page are. One of the exciting things about song is that it can bring poetry alive in the most intense way imaginable – we’re not just hearing a particular composer’s take on a poem, but a performer’s entire involvement with both the words and the music.

AL: I’d second what Philip writes about the embodied side of poetry. The expressiveness of sounds, and the feelings we encounter – emotional, but actually also physical – are part of the experience it’s easy to overlook sometimes. It’s always a wonderful moment when students, for example, discover enjambment (the continuation of a sentence beyond the end of the line) – the breathlessness experienced by the reader roots the poetry in something beyond the intellectual.

Poems are not, and should not be taught as, collections of printed words on the page, any more than music is. For instance, listening to different composers’ settings of one poem can reveal so much about the original text by drawing attention to its different parts.

AB: What would you like people to take away from World Poetry Day?PB: Thinking just about music for a moment, I’d like to suggest that song represents a wonderful form of imaginary travel. Listening to a Schubert setting of Goethe, a Glinka setting of Pushkin, or a Debussy setting of Baudelaire allows us to imagine not just very different historical periods, but totally new linguistic and cultural worlds.

As a linguist, I worry that not enough people study foreign languages, whether as part of the school and university curriculum, or simply for pleasure and enjoyment. But it’s not true that we live in a monolingual culture – we’re surrounded by other languages, some of them spoken by people who’ve

moved here and brought their culture with them, and others that have been imported in the form of subtitled films, surtitled operas or bilingual programmes for song recitals.

My first encounter with German was falling in love with Schumann Lieder as a melancholy teenager, and I first began to learn Russian by deciphering the texts of the poems that Shostakovich set to music – they were very much the passport to my later life as a linguist and every bit as important as the fat novels I also love reading.

AL: I’d like to emphasise the idea that poetry is ubiquitous, particularly in music. When David Bowie died in January I watched the video of his final single ‘Lazarus’, released just a few days earlier. I was struck immediately by echoes of Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin / Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke!’ (‘How slowly she creeps along, time, the loathsome snail’) from his cycle ‘Zum Lazarus’.

As with Bowie’s character in the video, Heine spent the last eight years of his life bedridden, suffering from paralysis and confined to what he called his ‘mattress grave’. These two verses about mortality - one from the mid-19th century, one from the early 21st - give us perhaps a sense of the connectedness of the human condition and the role of the arts and poetic expression in confronting that.

AB: Would you like to suggest a poem for our readers to read today?PB: I’ve recently discovered Japan, and although I can’t speak a word of the language, I’m really enjoying discovering its literature in translation. Basho’s frog haiku is terribly clever – and has been obsessively translated in an attempt to fathom its many secrets. It’s also about sound, so ideal for someone like me, who’s interested in poetry’s musicality.

AL: I’m also part of the team that runs the Oxford German Network. Our national competition last year was on the theme of poetry and our website has a feature with lots of suggestions for reading.

For today, I’d suggest reading Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ - it’s such a wonderful example of how ‘nonsense’ has meaning through sound and performance. There are also plenty of translations of it online - from the ‘Jammerwoch’ to ‘Siaberwoci’ to ‘El Dragobán’...

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Simon Palfrey, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, leads acollaborative scholarly and artistic project inspired by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which Professor Palfrey describes as ‘perhaps the single greatest poem of the English Renaissance’.

AB: Why is Fairie Queene significant?SP: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is perhaps the single greatest poem of the English Renaissance. I see it as a hallucinogenic masterpiece, erotic, ravishing, strange, and frequently very savage. Inspired by militant Protestant zeal, the poem was written in Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s, when Spenser served the English crown during the most violent years of the Elizabethan conquest. It presents an unbuilt world, and asks on what principles we might create a virtuous person and a reformed society.

Spenser’s mission in Ireland failed. His poem both reflects and tries to redeem this failure, offering a

model of the necessary future as much as a diagnosis of the present. Hence the imaginative premise of our project: that subsequent global history, a repeating mission of conquest, education, and colonization, can be understood as a tale of this poem coming differently, imperfectly to life. It has long been understood that the *Faerie Queene*, in its claim to change or to model lives, is an exemplary Christian humanist poem. In our project, FQ becomes the text of unfinished modernity.

AB: Tell us about Demons Land?Demons Land: A Poem Come True is a collaborative scholarly and artistic project telling the story of an island in which Spenser’s poem comes beautifully and terribly to life. This is the project of the Collector, a Romantic who around 1800 vowed to remake an island at the bottom of the world into a poetic utopia. Demons Land becomes a shadow history of Britain’s most notorious colony, the prison island called Van Diemens Land.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 77 Back to index>

Like Spenser’s mission in Ireland, the Collector’s dream failed: not because his world failed to be like the poem; but because both the poem and the land were other than he thought. They had indigenous energies, lives, untapped implications that his discipline hadn’t imagined.

The questions we ask are very basic. We are all familiar with the idea that a poem might reflect or record history. But what if it predicts history? What if history is itself structured like a poem? And we can extend these questions to life itself: what if lives happen as they do in poems, where they only have existence if they are seen, or only matter if they are sympathized with?

What if each individual life is not a self-sufficient experience, but an allegory of something other? What if metaphors are true, or life is organized in rhymes, stanzas, endlessly repeating rhythms? The question becomes: what does it mean (for society, or history, or a life) for a poem to come true?

Questions such as these cannot really be tested in conventional scholarly forms. They need a correspondent creative experiment. So the Demons Land project explores how different crafts and disciplines - poetry, painting, film, music, masks, puppetry, and creative literary criticism - can combine to embody a poetic vision. All of this will come together in an exhibition/installation telling the history of the experiment.

AB: How do their imagined worlds differ?Demons land is at once a repetition, an interpretation, a subversion, and a radical modernisation of Spenser’s poem. *The Faerie Queene* is notoriously unfinished. Demons Land continues the story, and purports to complete the poem, by means of a simple premise: that FQ is the prophetic text of western modernity, coming imperfectly, differentially true throughout the dominions conquered or settled by the English.

Demons Land is the epitome of this history, being the suppressed pre-history of Van Diemens Land, which itself echoes the earlier histories of Ireland and America. History is thus structured recursively, like a poem: Demons Land repeats itself to this day.

Hence the fictional postulate of our project: that a contemporary woman discovers a store of texts and paintings deriving from Demons Land, and undertakes to recover and publicize this unknown history. But then she repeats the story in less predicted ways as well - like the Collector, she begins to be possessed by it, and to identify in personal and even perverse ways with the figures in FQ/Demons land.

AB: What will the product of your research project be, and when/where can we see it?The main products will be the exhibition, its films and paintings, and a book I am writing telling the histroy of Demons land. As well as an online version of the exhibition, we will exhibit in locations whose own history speaks to our project, adapting our narrative to each host. The first showing will be in the gardens and temples of Stowe National Trust, designed in the early eighteenth century as an architecturalised Faerie Queene - like Demons Land, a place made in the image of the poem, as an act of political critique and fantastic idealism.

The second showings will be in Scotland, in the Gothic Mount Stuart house on Bute - another monument of beleagured idealism, and an island whose semi-disappeared history mirrors that of Demons Land - and in Glasgow, the great port of empire.

AB: What would you like people to take away from World Poetry Day?That poetry speaks directly to the possibilities - beautiful and terrifying - of life and history; that good poetry is always unfinished, awaiting and adapting to new readers.

Demons Land

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog

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In Afghanistan, many girls are forbidden to ride bicyclesThe Skateistan organization empowers girls through skateboarding

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The University’s STIMULUS project has helped thousands of student volunteers to become teaching assistants in local schools.

Today, England has a major shortage of maths teachers and applications to train to teach the subject are falling. But as early as 1987, Toni Beardon OBE, then a lecturer in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, recognised that there was a growing problem. At the same time, she saw that Cambridge students could make a major contribution to their local community while also enriching their university experience.

‘I’ve worked with STIMULUS for a long time and the children can’t wait to see the students.’

Daryl Corlito, Teacher of Year 4 at St Luke’s Primary School, Cambridge

Student Mentor Alexander Simpson at St Luke’s Primary School

Thirty years of maths support for local schools

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Now known as STIMULUS, and co-ordinated by the Millennium Mathematics Projectsince 1999, the programme has seen extraordinary growth. This academic year (2015-16), 190 Cambridge students have supported the teaching of STEM subjects in 19 primary schools, ten secondary schools, two sixth-form colleges, and one special school in the Cambridge area.

STIMULUS volunteers are recruited from a wide range of disciplines but the majority study Mathematics, Engineering, Natural Sciences, Medicine or Computer Science. Most are undergraduates but some are Masters and even PhD students.

Each STIMULUS placement involves a weekly commitment of usually one afternoon per week for one university term. Over the course of a year, the programme donates over 2,000 hours of volunteering to local schools.

The programme also aims to encourage volunteers to consider teaching as a career and gives them valuable classroom experience. Every year, several final year volunteers go on to study for a PGCE or are accepted on the Teach First scheme but for most, the

Thirty years of maths support for local schoolsUniversity of Cambridge

primary motivation is sharing their passion for their subject and helping others to succeed.

Emma Russell, a Final Year Mathematics student helps at Chesterton Community College once a week. Today, Emma is leading a drop-in maths clinic for Ruby and Catriona. Ruby, who is gearing up to sit her GCSE exams, wants some help with vectors, while Catriona, a Year-10 regular, just wants to stretch herself and build confidence.

Catriona says: “Normally I don’t put my hand up in class but I find it easier to talk in a small group like this.” Ruby agrees: “I’m less afraid to get things wrong.”

When asked whether they ever felt nervous about number crunching with a Cambridge maths whizz, Ruby and Catriona laugh. “I don’t think they find me very intimidating”, says Emma: “I started mentoring two years ago because I was considering a career in teaching. It’s also a great way to remove yourself from studying, which can be pretty intense. I’ve learnt how to look for different ways to explain things and to break problems down rather than just rush to the an-swer. It’s helped me a lot and I’ve just landed my first job teaching maths when I leave Cambridge.”

Student Mentor Emma Russell at Chester-ton Community College, Cambridge

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Code Club at St Luke’s Primary School, Cambridge

Neil Kelly, Head of IT and a Maths teacher at Chesterton Community College, has been working with STIMULUS volunteers for five years, and says:

“They’re particularly good at stretching our best students. The programme dispels myths on both sides. It shows our students that these maths geniuses are normal people who started out at school like them. And it helps the mentors get out of their university bubble. They don’t just talk about maths, they get a relationship going and they have a really positive influence.”

Neil adds: “I see it as part of my job to encourage the maths teachers of the future because we really need them and it’s a great thing to do with your life. The problem is that if you study maths at university, you can get a highly paid job in finance or computing. You won’t get paid the same in education but teaching is more than a career, it’s a privilege.”

2015 saw the expansion of the STIMULUS programme through a collaboration with the national Code Club network. Since October 2014, a team of volunteers have been running weekly sessions in several Cambridge primary schools to introduce these eager young students to programming.

Alexander Simpson, a Final Year Computer Scientist from Scotland, has been running the show at St Luke’s Primary School in Chesterton for nearly two years. He says:

“I started because I was determined to get young people excited about programming and help make it more diverse, especially by getting more girls involved. I start by showing the children something inspirational that they might be able to create with software one day, like a space craft. Then we go back to the basics but they learn really fast and it’s a lot of fun.”

Neil Kelly, Head of IT and a Maths teacher at Chesterton Community College

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Code Club at St Luke’s Primary School, Cambridge

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Daryl Corlito, Teacher of Year 4 at St Luke’s, says: “Alexander’s sessions involve lots of transferrable problem-solving skills and he’s really helped to build confidence, especially among the girls. I’ve worked with STIMULUS for a long time and the children can’t wait to see the students.”Several rungs up the educational ladder, some STIMULUS mentors help students with A-Level Maths and Science, Further Maths and university applications. At Long Road Sixth Form College, Balaji Krishna, a First Year Mathematician at Trinity College, has been offering general classroom support. He says: “I went to a state school near Cardiff and used to help GCSE students there so I wanted to carry that on. It’s relaxing to come here and it reminds me how much I’ve learnt.”

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Meanwhile, Filip Bar, a Fourth Year PhD mathematician has been working one-to-one with Sam on his preparations for STEP, an exam used to assess aptitude for university study in mathematical subjects.Filip says: “Teaching rather than just thinking about mathematical problems is refreshing. I know the solution but how can I communicate it? It gives you a fresh perspective.”Long Road’s Maths Team Leader, Stephen Warr, says: “We use STIMULUS mentors in quite specific ways to make the most of their expertise. They often arrive looking nervous but they soon settle in and benefit from seeing how we interact, explain and use resources. I think there’s a cultural attitude in the UK that it’s ok to be bad at maths and that puts people off teaching the subject but you can transform lives and that’s very satisfying.”Volunteers take a break from STIMULUS in the University’s Easter term to prepare for their exams but the project is already recruiting for Michaelmas Term.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/

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Creation UniversityThere’s nothing like an idea whose time has come. For years scientists, lay evolutionists and assorted atheists have been butting their collective heads against creationists, to little effect. Debate is great, it’s healthy to air one’s differences but what’s worrying is that creationists are often in positions of power. In the U.S. Bible Belt school boards were/are often controlled by adherents of Bishop Ussher; you know, the guy who stated the Earth was created at 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC (just in time to take a lotto ticket). In some school districts, Intelligent Design (creationism in sheep’s clothing) has been permitted to be taught in the science curriculum.

‘Tell me Miss Kansas, should evolution be taught in schools?’

‘Well Marvin, um, I think evolution should be taught in schools but um, students should have the opportunity to learn other theories, so they can make up their own minds…’

Theories???

At least this is a bit of a step forward from the days when teaching evolution was banned - a la Scopes Trial, Inherit the Wind etc. but most scientists were incensed that creationism could be considered to be a science.

Then along came the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the proverbial fan was well and truly knocked off its axis. Conceived as a protest religion to deter a Kansas school board from permitting Intelligent Design to be in the science curriculum, its founder, one Bobby Henderson, created Pastafarianism. Putting the onus of proof on people who make unfalsifiable claims (read religionists), Henderson and his disciples have created a fanciful and humorous background to what has become a global phenomenon, just like some religions. Poland, the Netherlands and New Zealand have recognised FSM as a legal religion and Godzone has witnessed the first

End of Semester Examinations

Science

1. Using an episode of The Flintstones as source material, write two or three para-graphs to prove that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

2. Draw a simple cartoon to prove that Charles Darwin was in league with the Devil.

3. If an atheist argues that Noah couldn’t have all species of animals on the Ark, what is the best response? a Were you there? b Were you there?

4. ‘I’m not interested in the ages of rocks, my concern is with the rock of ages’. Discuss, with particular reference to the Shroud of Turin and the Age of Aquarius.

Mathematics

1. How many days did God take to make the Earth? Divide that number by zero. (calcu-lators permitted)

2. As the Earth is 6000 years old, and fossils date back hundreds of millions of years, make up an answer to explain the discrep-ancy.

Evangelism

1. Develop a knowing, pitying and superior smile with which to confront believers in evolution.

2. Prepare a dismissive statement for all the false gods which may be referred to when you are proselytising. You must include the following words: truth, science, morality and tithing

3. Nietsche said that God is dead. Prove him wrong. N.B. God is not to be used as a reference.

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Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2016 87

Creation University

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Roger

wedding, with colander-wearing celebrants and pirates attending.

Should we be concerned about what is taught in American schools? Is Pastafarianism’s reason for existence relevant here? Well, Sputnik 1’s launch created shock waves in the USA and some of the resultant tsunami reached our shores. Wasn’t ‘New Maths’ one of those waves? Oh yes, Charter Schools are an invention from the States. What about league tables…? Could religious fundamentalism become a force in the antipodes?

Henderson has done much to bring the debate on to the global stage. His facetious demand to have Pastafarianism taught in science classes was, he said, as valid as the demand for teaching I.D. His ideas have been disseminated by social media and are challenging societies in a number of fields.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

an iconic image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Arne Niklas Jansson.

Will other countries follow us and legitimise FSM, or will they examine the way they define a religion and perhaps change how religions are treated? In so-called secular societies, some religions receive some pretty nice concessions. Will the simple colander be the nail in the coffin for all religious headgear? Will tax-havens disappear? Will the advent of Ministeroni be the nail in the coffin for priestly privilege? Or will Pastafarianism attract true believers and become what it mocks? Will our grandchildren be learning about beer volcanoes in heaven in R.I. on a Friday morning?

I am not about to become a Pastafarian soon but if I wear a colander, perhaps I can avoid paying taxes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

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“The best teachers don’t give you the answers...

They just point the way ...

and let you make your own choices.”