Brains on the tablet

I hope you’re not eating, with the question I’m about to ask. What do you think of when you hear “Brains on the table”? Probably something unappealing, I imagine. It was a peculiar thing for me to hear in my first week of a new job over three years ago...

When Ahmed (our director and a senior researcher at Newcastle University) gave me a research paper with this title, I’m 97% (no: 100%) sure that he wasn’t trying to put me off the office biscuits. He was actually introducing me to research that spanned back many years, all about the benefits of students externalising their thoughts.

The paper I’m talking about is this one, by David Leat, now a consultant to our company, and Adam Nichols. They explore how, with the use of a paper tool called Mysteries, they were able to see pupils’ “cognitive processes”. Hence their brains being on the table!

Other ways of saying it:

• making students’ thinking visible
• providing a window into students’ minds
• externalisation of thoughts

The key benefit is that by understanding how students think, many things can be identified; such as what they’re doing well and what they’re struggling with. Plus how and why.

Mysteries were first developed by David and the Thinking Through Geography group. Small groups would be given lots of snippets of text, and sometimes images, that usually had a narrative thread to them. One main, open question about the snippets would be asked. Students typically read through the snippets first, then organised them into different piles, before laying them out in a chain to build understanding and form an answer. As well as hearing groups’ discussions, teachers could then also view their final layouts, which were a vision of how students had arrived at their conclusion. David explains “it quickly became apparent that there was something very interesting going on as students manipulated the little snippets of paper”.

Brains on the tablet

During Ahmed’s PhD, he came to work with David, and saw the potential of Mysteries. He gave it a digital transformation and the idea blossomed into what you may now know as Digital Mysteries, the iPad apps that have had over 350,000 downloads across 60 countries. These were developed in coordination with many different teachers, firstly for the UK curriculum then worldwide, and because of their popularity, we wanted to give people the chance to create their own! This is where Thinking Kit www.thinking-kit.com comes in - tasks can now be tailored exactly to your students’ needs, or even created by the students themselves.

When activities are completed by students on iPads, we call it ‘brains on the tablet’, and it’s an excellent source for formative assessment. As David and Ahmed say in their article, published in the Creative Teaching & Learning journal (email natalie@reflectivethinking.com if you’d like a free copy of the piece), formative assessment “is grounded in talk about thinking and ideas - therefore, any serious discussion generated by the mystery or during the reflection phase, is formative, as it helps shape ideas and scaffold the sense making process”.

  Read more on Moseley et al.’s work here.

Things provided in the app:

• a structure for collaborative learning. It flips between individual and group work throughout, meaning regular discussion triggers and openly expressed thoughts, as well as concentration time.
• tools to emphasise cognitive skills, such as ‘named groups’ to visibly categorise information, ‘sticky tapes’ to show connections and ‘notes’ to express ideas/opinions.
• an interactive playback of the session to go over alone, as a group or even as a class.

As this screenshot shows, all students must tap their name to agree they’ve read the instructions.

As a result of all of the above, the teacher can then:

• see the current ‘state of play’ but also history (e.g. ‘deleted’ notes and groups).
• tweak the difficulty of future tasks by removing slips or altering the question.
• integrate the activity with other lesson planning so that those who finish early can move onto something else.
• easily transition between a chat with an individual, a group or the whole class.
• extend the outcome beyond a session (students can print off, email, and reflect upon, an automatically generated PDF report).

Thinking Kit also allows students to do the creating too. Activities could be based on something they’ve learned about in class, a topic they’re yet to be introduced to (so they have to carry out research - see students’ work on migration here), fieldwork or something they simply have passion for and want to help others learn about. In a previous blog post, we talked about how students of Broadwood Primary School created their own iPad activities on various topics; from Batman, to The Twits, to Minecraft! All the while, they developed key digital skills that some had never experienced before.

To see what types of activities we mean, explore our developer page on the App Store. We have many free pre-prepared activities and the Thinking Kit App is completely free. To create your own, or to get students to, have a 30 day free trial (no card details required) at www.thinking-kit.com.

A rounded and fair education for young people in the 21st-century

Researchers at Newcastle University are hosting a free event on building a ‘Community curriculum’. If you’re interested in a rounded and fair education for young people, then go along!

The event is on Friday 8th July from around 8.45am - 3.30pm, at The Herschel Learning Lab, Herschel Building, Newcastle University. Morning refreshments and lunch will be provided. The event is being hosted by the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences @secl.

To register to come along, click here.

David Leat @davidjkleat (Professor of Curriculum Innovation) will introduce the event and be sharing ideas on the completed guide to community curriculum making. There will also be a keynote from Professor Mark Priestley @markrpriestley of Stirling University on ‘Teacher agency: creating the conditions for meaningful curriculum development’

From mid-morning to lunch, there will be table seminars that attendees can choose from. Some topics include, ‘Teachers and partners planning together’, ‘Working with industry’, ‘Finding resources in your community’ and ‘Using technology to support enquiry/project based learning’. Our director, and senior academic researcher at the university, Dr. Ahmed Kharrufa @ankharrufa, will be hosting one of the seminars.

The new ‘Herschel Learning Lab’, which is now open for bookings, can be explored on the day. The room is set to be used for collaborative activities which involve small groups of students working on tasks like problem-solving, debate and presentation preparation.

If you’d like to go along, register here. Click here for a map of where to go (building 17)

For a brilliant insight into the concept of community curriculum making and some real life examples, read this blog post by Kim Cowie @COWIEKIM.

Can technology help encourage more young people to get involved in politics?

In our previous blog post, we shared with you that we created a dedicated task for 11-14 year olds to discuss the UK 2015 general election.

Over the past few weeks, it has been brilliant to hear of teachers using the app/task across the country.

On the morning of the election day itself, the team went to the largest school in Newcastle, Kenton, to work with year 8 students and see whether the task had made any difference. It was incredible to see the transformation from before to after - one student said they had 'no interest in politics', but afterwards was asking lots of great questions about the different parties. They wanted to find out more.

In a couple of minutes, this video explores the session and has an interview with some of the students who took part:

Some quotes from the students:

• "If I did have the opportunity to vote, I think I would have a better idea of who I would vote for."
• "I also think I've got a better idea, because when it's on the news, it's often just clustered together, what people said. It doesn't give you the full insight of what the different parties want to do."
• "You want to know which (parties) are good for you, so with your friends, you know you can have a conversation with them to know which one is better."
• "I think it (the Digital Mystery) gives you a better understanding of stuff and you can know what's good and what's bad and I think it would be good to introduce it at other elections."

One of our brilliant pieces of feedback from Twitter:

@Refthinking Yes, of course! Brilliant, inspiring and extremely useful.

— Dominic Newbould (@DominicNewbould) May 5, 2015

Thanks to everyone for supporting this task/iPad app, including everyone following our social media updates, those at BBC Radio, the Northern Echo, Bdaily, Schools North East and North Tyneside Learning Trust.

If you've got something to share about 'Digital Mysteries: UK Election 2015', let us know!

The history of Mysteries

For those of you who don't know, our collaborative learning program Digital Mysteries is based on a popular paper-based tool called Mysteries.

In this guest post, David Leat, who founded Mysteries and is now a Professor of Curriculum Innovation at Newcastle University, tells us the story behind them.

Professor David Leat

"When the Thinking Through Geography Group developed mysteries as a paper based activity, it quickly became apparent that there was something very interesting going on as students manipulated the little snippets of paper.  With friend and colleague Adam Nichols, we started taking pictures and videos of groups as they progressed through a mystery and we found recurring patterns in the arrangement of the paper.

Through playing back the video to the students and asking them about what was going on at crucial moments and linking this to our observations, we were able to describe some typical stages that many groups went through.  These are the basis of the stages in the current digital mysteries.  One of the interesting outcomes was the realisation that the stages represented increasing complexity and sophistication in thinking, moving from comprehension to classification (grouping) to more complex processes of hypothesising and evaluation.

If some groups got ‘stuck’, it suggested that they had reached a temporary plateau in their thinking.  So the intriguing question was – how could skilled teachers intervene and scaffold more sophisticated thinking and in effect move the students on?  This was diagnostic assessment but instead of being interpreted from written work after the event, when the underpinning thinking has long gone cold, it was in the moment when students’ thinking is still potentially plastic and malleable.

The problem then was that it was a minority of teachers who got it, and could interpret what they were seeing and hearing.  It is perhaps not surprising that many teachers found it hard to get away from the idea of a right answer.  In addition, one teacher is spread a bit thinly across 6 to 10 groups.

Digital Mysteries on laptops or tabletops go a long way towards playing the role of the skilful, scaffolding teacher who does just enough to move pupils on, to challenge their thinking or provide a hint.  However the computer and the software don’t replace the teacher; there is still tremendous scope for the teacher to listen and watch, and critique and nudge students’ thinking.  We called our early paper based research ‘Brains on the Table’ as mysteries provided a window on students’ thinking.

Digital mysteries provide enhanced opportunity for teachers to intervene in the development of thinking – but we still need to articulate and share this sophisticated practice knowledge."