October 2002
This month’s newsletter takes the broad theme of training and development. Find out how one Primary School prepared staff for accelerated learning and how another transformed its environment. We also give details of the new Alite Coaching Programme, 12 Great Starts To Lessons, Guidance on How to Disrupt any Training Event and the Five Things an Audience Looks for In a Presenter.
Ready, (IN)SET, Go!
Lesley-Ann Bowering and Rachael Barehead of Heath View Community Primary, Eastmoor are on the Accelerated Learning starting line. They have planned training days that will help get all their colleagues in shape for the challenge ahead.
Their INSETs will follow the learning model that they plan to adopt in their classroom practice. This means that the first step on each training day is to create the right learning environment for the staff. Lesley-Ann and Rachael are aware of the value of laughter, so they decided that their first day should begin with what they call a ‘Rolf Harris Activity’, where two groups compete in a team tag drawing game. In a matter of seconds the teams must create a picture of an unusual subject (e.g. two rabbits getting married). This energiser connects well with the subject of this particular session, which is the use of brain breaks in the classroom. The school has already introduced water bottles and seen the benefits of the use and reference to motivational posters. In order that a further repertoire of good practice may be built up, staff will be provided with the theory and practice of various aspects of Accelerated Learning over the course of the year.
Lesley-Ann and Rachael’s big picture provides what will be covered in the session, the stated outcomes of which are how the ideas might be applied in the classroom. On this occasion one outcome will be a staff handbook of brain breaks for each year group. During the course of each presentation, Lesley-Ann and Rachael intend to make explicit what stage of the model they have reached. In this way they will be modelling the use of the learning cycle, inducting the staff into its use for the classroom, as well as introducing ideas in every session that can be applied in the different stages.
Drawing on what they have learnt from training days, books and the internet, Lesley-Ann and Rachael explain the rationale that lies behind brain breaks, how they can help:
- Provide reprieve from physical stress;
- Enhance fine and large motor skills;
- Improve co-ordination;
- Link to learning;
Sample timetables have also been produced to give staff an idea of when the breaks will be of most use in lessons.
Naturally, the activity stage involves staff participation. Different brain breaks are modelled for them, and they also get the chance during pair work to select and try out three for themselves. Understanding is demonstrated through them explaining when and how they might use the activities they choose. Additionally, they make clear how the chosen brain breaks might be useful in their own classroom.
Opportunities for review and recall will take two forms. Firstly, the staff are encouraged to use their chosen brain breaks before the next meeting, at which time they will report back on their success. These will go together into the handbook. It will also allow them the opportunity to reflect on the day’s learning. Secondly, a sheet is given out which addresses possible queries. ‘Some Questions Answered’ not only indicates the usefulness of the training day, but also helps form the basis of a discussion on any related matters. The surfacing of further questions reinforces the learning experience.
Lesley-Ann and Rachael have enthusiastically embraced the role of lead learners in their school. They are introducing the messages of Accelerated Learning both through the content they provide and through the processes that they espouse.
Presenter Presence
What makes a good presentation on a training experience or at a conference? What do audiences look for in a presenter? Here is our list (in order):
1. Control (will manage all aspects of the shared experience)
2. Confidence (conveys assurance and familiarity and is at ease)
3. Communication skills (understands and has mastery of the medium)
4. Consideration (values the group)
5. Content knowledge (knows the material)
Coaching – a powerful personal development tool
Stuck? Career in a rut? Life lost direction? Maybe you need a life coach and one may be only a phone call away.
Featured in the national media and the business press, coaching has been heralded as the latest breakthrough in personal development. With multiple applications to all age groups in education, commerce and personal life, it is fast becoming the training and development phenomenon of the new millennium.
What is coaching?
Coaching is a positive, helping relationship between two people: a trained coach and a client. It differs from other helping relationships such as counselling, mentoring, and guidance in that it does not offer advice nor does the coach suggest that he/she is an expert in a client’s field of work. Coaching seeks to empower a person to find their own solutions to their challenges, focussing on the present and the future and not dwelling on past events. Coaches are non-judgmental and non-critical, focussing on strengths and encouraging clients to build on these.
Why is coaching such a powerful agent for change?
Children are born without internal psychological hurdles and barriers. The adage “children don’t see danger” sums up the belief that anything is possible when we are young. Over time we acquire boundaries to our behaviour and capabilities. Some of these are helpful to our survival, others are extreme and hold us back. This continues into adulthood, and our past experiences from all aspects of our lives impinge on our ability to succeed.
Coaching draws on different disciplines to help clients overcome barriers which prevent them from achieving their goals. The skilled use of questioning, reflection, and some specialised coaching techniques can help people unlock the potential within them that is blocked by negative experiences from the past.
Coaching provides the client with a space for reflection and an opportunity to discuss and organise their thoughts without the interruptions of everyday life. This is provided by a coach whose main role is to question, listen and reflect back to the client. Coaches employ techniques that can enable people to consider problems from other angles and develop positive approaches to problem-solving.
How could it impact on teaching and learning?
Coaching could be used by teachers for their own personal and professional development. It could also be used with pupils. A teacher skilled in coaching can lead to a better understanding of themselves and a greater focus on goal-setting and achievement. The focus provided by a coach can really push them forward to achieve goals which they may be reticent to formulate and achieve alone.
Public Personnel Management in 1997 conducted a study into the use of coaching as a follow-up to face-to-face training in public sector organisations. It found that training alone could yield a 22.4% increase in productivity; when coaching followed training, this figure rose to 88%. Coaching, we suggest, has a key part to play in improving the effectiveness of conventional training.
In maximising the performance of an individual pupil, teacher or manager, coaching can help a person to address very personal issues that they may not work through in any other kind of school-based support. The benefits to the individual and the organisation in as few as 4 sessions could thus be enormous.
Coaching is carried out either face-to-face or more usually over the telephone. One-to-one coaching sessions usually last 45 mins. Using the phone means that the logistical blocks that sometimes prevent two people meeting are removed.
Coaching is:
- a non-critical and non-judgemental helping process
- a powerful way to overcome internal barriers to success
- adaptable to use with all age groups
- used across a group or one-to-one
- used to help pupils, teachers, managers and parents maximise their performance
- adding to the impact of conventional training
- easily carried out
- often done over the telephone, thus reducing logistical difficulties of two people meeting face-to-face
What next?
You may like to read more from these texts on coaching and personal development:
The Coaching at Work Toolkit: A complete Guide to Techniques and Practices
Perry Zeus and Suzanne Skiffington, McGraw Hill, 2002
The Solutions Focus
Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow, Nicolas Brealey, 2002
Beyond Winning
Gary M Walton, Human Kinetics 1992
Take Yourself to the Top
Laura Bermann-Fortgang, Harper Collins 1999
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Steven Covey, Simon & Schuster, 1999
Effective Coaching
Miles Downey, Texere, 2001
Be your Own Life-Coach
Fiona Harrold, Hodder Mobius, 2001
Watch the Alite website for details of our new Coaching programme.
How to Disrupt any Training Event, Presentation or Meeting
Each of the following actually occurred on staff development activities with one exception. Can you spot the intruder?
- Wear a hands free headset and whisper into it from time to time. Say something like ‘what do you mean the roof’s fallen in…’
- Sit on the back row with your mates and each of you read a broadsheet noisily
- Place a coffee percolator on the table next to your chair
- Sit with your arms folded…
- Put the new staff timetable in the staff-room pigeon holes that morning
- Wait till you are about to begin and then announce that the caretaker has passed away and there will be a collection at break.
- Draw a chalk circle around one of the chairs and avoid sitting in it. If anyone goes near it, shake your head and look worried for them.
- Have one chair too few
- Wear a large anorak and scarf
- With your other colleagues on the staff development committee - pretend you are asleep to test the presenter
- Complete the evaluation sheet as you start
- Play with a large knife and do so menacingly
- Bring in your holiday photographs
- Place a battery operated portable television between your feet
- Drop confusing comments from time to time
- Produce a small furry animal from one of your pockets and suggest throwing it to one another as an ice breaker and means of idea exchange
- Bring a large pile of marking and place it on the chair beside you
And the intruder is …. Draw a chalk circle around one of the chairs and avoid sitting in it. Try it on Monday…
Creating the Positive Learning Environment
Walking into West Heath Junior school in Birmingham is like walking into a TV make-over show. Every classroom seems to have its own theme or colour and the school is packed with state-of-the-art computers.
The school has been recognised by government inspectors as a place of innovation, a school of the future.
Take the literacy room: it has an oriental theme, the ceiling is draped with light-coloured material and there is a big carved seat made out of MDF, covered with animal-print cloth. There is another area, converted in dramatic style, from an old cupboard, where the older children can do independent learning. It is designed to look like a cyber cafe and the children love it.
The classrooms are painted in different bright colours, chosen by the staff and pupils, and the floors are either wood or aluminium. But the biggest surprise is the computer room. With a dark entrance guarded by a life-size cut-out of Darth Vader, it looks more like a high-tech control room or a film-maker's idea of a space-ship.
The PCs are underneath a glass desk-top, tilted up. In the centre of the black and metallic room there is a bubbling tank. Preet Sahota, who came to the school in January 1998, said he was dismayed when he first took over the school and saw how troubled it was. He brought in four consultants to look at it. Mr Sahota said: "She said, 'Let's create a school like no other, at the cutting edge of innovation'.
The pupils at West Heath obviously love the environment and take pride in it. Jordan, who is 10, said: "The most exciting thing is the Starship Mea (the computer room). "When I saw it, it was like 'Whoa'. I thought the room was just getting a lick of paint."
Many of you will be asking where West Heath gets the cash to make such dramatic renovations. Mr Sahota says it is all down to good financial management. "The local education authority sent in the auditors twice because they did not think we could be doing this on our budget," he said. "But everything came out of the main school budget, together with some help from business. ‘
Mr Sahota and his deputy, Hazel Fox, work to reduce the workload of teachers at the school. At West Heath, all teachers and teaching assistants have a laptop, leased with cash from the main budget, which they use to draw up lesson plans or access children's work. They also use software by which children's work is sent online for marking and is returned in an hour, with added graphs and information.
Deputy head Hazel Fox said: "We took away the mundane tasks from teachers and brought in part-time administrators to help. "Jobs such as cutting out cardboard, organising trips, putting up displays were handed over, giving teachers more time." The teachers also have a guaranteed amount of time when they are out of the classroom, so-called non-contact time.
A key plank of the school's policy is for teachers to go on training together, so that they will be more effective in implementing what they have learned. It is a team which seem proud to have a school which accepts all children and aims to give them high expectations. Last year they took in nine children last year who had been expelled. The school is in a poor suburb of Birmingham, where many families have been hit by the job losses at the Longbridge plant. About forty per cent of children have free school meals. "We find it easy to integrate excluded children, it's as if there is something in the air," said Mrs Fox. "We spend a lot of time with them, talking to them and encouraging them and rewarding them when they behave well."
The innovation at the school has brought awards for the school, and coincided with a year-on-year increase in national test results. Ofsted inspectors say there has been a big improvement in teaching quality and that the school gives very good value for money. "The innovation is not just about the visuals," Mr Sahota said. "It's about creating a calm, ordered environment so that people - children and staff - can be creative".
Source: BBC Education News
Twelve Great Lesson Beginnings
Adapt these for lessons or for training days. Humour and movement will help capture their interest.
1. Question/answer cards – they have to find the answer to their question, which is on the reverse of another’s question card
2. Dense Teacher – get the class to help you with an obvious problem you ‘can’t figure out’
3. Hunt for autographs – pre-prepared list of attributes/skills for them to match up with classmates and get their autograph
4. Jokes are written on cards and laminated. Pupils select a joke at random and then have to tell it to an audience.
5. Time limited Brainstorming – what they know about a new topic against the clock (individual/pair/group)
6. One pupil from each group takes exactly three minutes to summarise information for the others.
7. In groups, pupils present their information from the sound bite session in summary form. Questions from the floor follow. The event is run along the lines of a press conference.
8. Post It Parade. Each pair writes one fact or statement about the topic on a post it. Each post it is placed on the white board. The class then look at each and classify by re-positioning them on the board.
9. The class mill around and, on cue, introduce themselves to someone and describe one thing they have learned so far. On cue they swap roles. Each round consists of one minute per pair before a new round begins.
10. Up in the lift. Between the 1st and the 10th floor you have to find out what the other person has been learning that day.
11. Feely bag – there are five items in the bag which relate to today’s lesson. One person puts her hand in the bag and describes what they feel. The others discuss what it might be and how it relates to the topic
12. Artefact Challenge – use to prompt questions and discussions
Little Philosophers Think Big
Can children deal with philosophical issues? If so, how? Tuckswood First School knew that they could and proved it when they worked with 18 Year 2 and 3 children who had all displayed behavioural problems. Their modest success awoke the rest of the school to the possibilities of activities such as Philosophy for Children and Enquiry Drama, where ‘big questions’ are explored through stories and poetry. In these sessions children learn to think carefully about issues that relate to them and the world outside school. They learn to ask complex questions and to discuss the comments in a respectful environment. The benefits not only relate to the children’s thought processes, but also help to foster a responsible attitude towards others and their circumstances.
To read a full case study about the Tuckswood experience, and other examples of innovative practice from around the UK, visit the website at www.alite.co.uk and click on ‘case studies’.
Train the Trainer with Alistair Smith
This three-day package is unique to Alite. Participants are given the opportunity to develop their training and presentation skills whilst experiencing accelerated learning techniques. If you work for a Local Education Authority in a support or training role, if you are part of an Education Action Zone, if you are an Advanced Skills Teacher in a school with Beacon status then this programme is for you.
Delegates on the TTT programme will be able to take advantage of Alite’s new Coaching programme. Details will be provided at the course.
The October programme is sold out, but a few places remain on the course from 11 - 13 November in Buckinghamshire.
To view the programme content visit the website at www.alite.co.uk and click on Train the Trainer.
Alite for Numeracy
Ex-professional footballer and mathematics genius Chris Tomlinson has worked with Alite to create an Accelerated Learning-based numeracy course. Drawing on his extraordinary success using AL to teach maths, Chris shares a wealth of innovative and effective ways to develop and improve your numeracy strategy. He will be running a course in London on 7th October, and another in Leeds on 13th January 2003. The course may also be booked as an INSET. For more details, contact the Alite office on 01628 810700 or via email: office@alite.co.uk.
Networked Learning Communities
Alite has developed a programme specifically designed for NLCs. We offer a range of inputs within the 3 main strands – learning, leadership and networking – and will help you to put together a programme that suits the specific needs of your community.
For more details, visit the website at www.alite.co.uk and click on ‘Training’
Help Your Child to Succeed
Full colour, beautifully illustrated and on the shelves! It's Alistair's collaboration with ex-Campaign For Learning Director, Bill Lucas, on a book for parents. This book is aimed at the parent who doesn't normally buy parenting books. Through imaginative distribution, lots of give-aways and the fact that it’s cheap, both authors hope it will get beyond the chattering classes. Fingers crossed!
The book is now available via the website at www.alite.co.uk