STEM with an A

Acting Headteacher Mrs Robson introducing the day.

Well, what a fantastic day yesterday was (19th July 2016). Broadwood Primary School had a STEAM Co. day and I was asked to host a Thinking Kit workshop. It was brilliant to see the creativity flowing through every corridor, classroom, hall and yard.

If you haven’t heard of STEAM Co. before, it is an organisation that promotes all of the qualities of STEM with a big extra A, for Art. This doesn’t restrict art to what we traditionally think of when we hear ‘art’, but more along the lines of what Seth Godin says, “Art is what we call it when what we do might connect people.” The ‘Co.’ also refers to a few different, but just as important, things - such as collaboration and community.

Nick explaining the inspiration behind STEAM Co.

On the hottest day in the UK so far this year, students, teachers, some parents, members of the local community, people from varied organisations and companies, as well as ‘Mr STEAM Co.’, Nick Corston (and his lovely, helpful son), arrived en masse to Broadwood, a school in Newcastle. I hosted one of 20 workshops, with lots of brilliant help from Jeannette Bowden (Broadwood) and Tracy Philipson (Bridgewater, another local school).

Children were free to visit whichever workshop they liked, whenever they liked. There were no restrictions to allow a free flow of creativity and excitement. The sweltering heat didn’t stop anyone - whether outside or in. I particularly liked the ‘passport’ idea as this encouraged children to visit a variety of activities to get their stamps and fill out the letters on their ‘spotters’ section to spell out a message.

Sugata's talk to conclude the day.

There was also a visit from Sugata Mitra, $1m TED Prize winner and builder of School in the Cloud, who gave an inspiring talk to the children to conclude the day. He talked about how if given the opportunity, children can be creative in their learning, they can teach each other and develop lots of skills in the meantime.

I’ll also write a post all about our workshop soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that! It was all about encouraging the children to create their own activities for iPads with Thinking Kit. Seeing the look on their faces when they transformed their ideas and research into an app-like activity for iPads was amazing! I’ll be sharing some of their activities with others.

Lewis creating a Thinking Kit task.

The day was all organised by Mel Horan, a teacher at Broadwood. Everyone was in awe of the variation and number of activities on offer to the students - you did a brilliant job!

For more details on STEAM Co, visit their website or follow them on Twitter.

Bzzzz: Curriculum making, creativity and teacher agency

Last week I was invited to Newcastle University’s event on Community Curriculum Making. It was a fantastic day and I met lots of interesting people, such as teachers, HLTAs (Higher Level Teaching Assistants), academics, business owners, consultants and in general, those interested in making a change.

Professor David Leat

The set-up was varied throughout the day to keep things interesting, and it most definitely did! After a lovely arrival with tea and coffee, then an introduction from the Professor of Curriculum Innovation, David Leat, it was time for ‘table seminars’. The event was set in the university’s new space, The Herschel Learning Lab, which has been fitted with large tables that encourage collaboration in small-medium groups. Each has a computer and screen attached, that can the group can read from/use together.

There was an excellent and varied line up of 11 ‘table seminar’ hosts, including headteachers, researchers, organisation representatives and education consultants. It was hard to choose, but I went for:

• Julie McGrane’s (education consultant) seminar on an ambitious and large project based learning venture with eight year olds, bees, parents, teachers and lots of members of the community!
  
  This was fantastic to hear about - what an achievement for everyone involved. Julie talked about how she was the ‘broker’ between the headteacher, year four teacher Mr Moore, and the Broomley Bee team led by Jilly Halliday. She talked about how she had worked with both parties to find the common ground to stem from, and how being a ‘broker’ is about being an agent for change and the bridge of communication between two parties. This brilliant project led to a class of eight year olds being united with over 56 different volunteers, over a period of eight months. As Julie presented the project, a real sense of camaraderie emanated from the pictures. It really showed what a relationship between a school and a community project can do for everyone involved.
  
  It was interesting to hear Julie’s perspective on the things that can make such a project happen. The broker is central. Whilst Julie is an education consultant, she is also an Ofsted inspector, which gave her a perceived kind of STATUS to the headteacher. She also was seen as having EXPERTISE as had done inset work with staff there before, and the school had TRUST in her, from her experience, around the pedagogy side too. These things combined meant that she was trusted to lead the way and get the main aims of the project underway.
  
  To find out more about the project from the main team members' perspectives, click here or follow @LLEducation.

• Emma Pace’s (Manager of House of Objects) seminar on the importance of creativity and distinguishing creativity from art.
  
  “Creativity isn’t a subject - it is a capacity that we are all born with as humans that we bring to all situations.”
  
  Emma runs an organisation/scrap store called House of Objects. Since it opened, 14,000 children have visited. They essentially take ‘away the meaning of items so they are open to interpretation’. Early visitors were asked to use the resources there to create something in relation to what they had been studying at school, something strongly linked to the point of the curriculum they were currently on. However, in recent times, children have been given complete freedom as to what they create! This apparently works very well, and not once have students been stuck for ideas.
  
  From Emma’s table seminar I took that creativity can help children develop:
  
  
  • RESILIENCE: If the children do get frustrated or stuck on part of their creation, children can be given examples of BIG companies that have usually had a lot of prototypes and failures before their successful product comes to fruition. It’s all about what they do next.
  • PROBLEM SOLVING: If something goes wrong, or a particular element of a creation/model didn’t work as planned, children think on the spot as to how they can move forward from there. They focus on their options and what they can do next.
  • BETTER MENTAL HEALTH: Creativity can be key to helping children cope with change. Being able to think creatively for solutions can mean children deal well with transitions and learning new things, therefore helping them in general life.
    
    

    

    A sketchnote by Sylvia Duckworth on creativity.

• Ahmed Kharrufa’s (Senior research associate of Newcastle University and of course, director of Reflective Thinking) seminar on his plans for exploring how technology can be used for school-community engagement.
  
  This is something that we'll do another blog post on to talk about in further detail, but in summary, Ahmed explored the idea of a digital platform that could unite schools with the community. Using this platform, a member of the community or an organisation in the community, will “commission” students to do something. This will be a project of some kind. As an example, a local shop owner might “commission” students in their local school to run a campaign to encourage more people to shop at local, small shops rather than big supermarket chains. This idea is something that was very popular at the event and lots of people put down their details to be kept up to date on it. Please do email ahmed.kharrufa@newcastle.ac.uk if you’d like to be added to the news list to keep up with this research (there will be no spam!)
  
  There was also a performance by 16 students of Belmont School, who in the space of one week, had learned to play a brass or percussion instrument. They then worked together to put a performance on for us - incredible that from all of their hard work and determination in a week, they did so well.

After open discussions and a lovely lunch, it was time for the keynote speaker, Mark Priestley (@markrpriestley), an education professor of Stirling University. Mark’s talk was on teacher agency, and how teachers are set to be ‘controlled’ more than ever. This is why it is very important to break through restrictive conditions and help create new ones for meaningful curriculum development.

It was very interesting to hear about the research that has been done in this specific field and how the tweaking of certain rules or regulations can open up new opportunities and ways of thinking/learning. Mark is strongly against phrases such as ‘delivery of content’ or ‘delivery of outcomes’. The discussion here was all around what action can be taken to enhance teacher agency. We will share Mark’s presentation slides when we receive them, but in the meantime, please do read this blog post if you’d like to know more, or explore Mark’s blog.

After this very thought-provoking keynote, David Leat then ignited an open discussion between all of us who attended. This helped to develop more understanding of community curriculum making and also take home some points of research to explore.

If you have any thoughts on any of these topics, leave a comment below or tweet us @refthinking.

For more details on the Herschel Learning Space, email Ulrike Thomas, Research Associate, The Research Centre for learning and Teaching at u.thomas@ncl.ac.uk.

Thanks, Natalie

Top 10 skills for the future

A while ago, I came across a 'top 10 skills for the future' image, formed by the World Economic Forum following their Future of Jobs report.

It really caught my attention and a lot of other people found it useful too. After recently experimenting with creating images for our Twitter page (@refthinking) and this blog, I loved the idea of mixing it up a little and adding some images.

Feel free to share it, but please let us know by mentioning us if it's a tweet, as it's great to see it being shared even more!

For a large version, please click here.

If you have iPads in school and want to increase development of some of these top skills, try our tool, Thinking Kit: www.thinking-kit.com.

Would your students love to see their own ideas made into an iPad app?

The fusion of our experience in collaborative learning research, developing iPad apps and an interest in Project Based Learning in the last couple of years, led to our creative competition, Our Mystery.

As a very quick summary, it offers UK years five, six, seven and eight the chance to come up with their own ‘Digital Mystery’. There can be as little or as much ICT as they like involved, as we provide a template form in PDF or Word and ask for hand-drawn or photographed images to accompany it.

We wanted to help slot the opportunity in with existing school plans rather than require extra time, so the mystery can be on a topic students have covered or are soon to cover.

For an entry pack for your students, just go to www.reflectivethinking.com/ourmystery. The deadline for entries is in a few weeks so giving the task to students after their half-term holiday slots in perfectly.