November 2007
This month we are pleased to announce that Sir John Jones joins us as Associate Director. As promised in our last edition, Alistair Smith describes his best all time assemblies. We have a write up of the first Secrets of Happy Schools Conference, ‘Winning the H Factor’. We report on how recent research shows how 'junk sleep' is harming teenagers' health and their performance in school. In our regular Three Items on a Desk feature, French teacher Jessica Holmes remembers her initial experiences of learning the language and finally, we conclude by revealing some interesting links between linguistic skills and brain structure.
Sir John Jones
Alite is delighted to announce that Sir John Jones has joined us as Associate Director. Sir John was a Headteacher of three secondary schools over a period of 17 years. He received a Knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List, 2003, for services to education.
Sir John Jones and Alistair Smith have spent some time working on a new project around well-being and happiness in schools. They recently launched their public programme in the first Secrets of Happy Schools Conference, ‘Winning the H Factor’.
Alistair Smith's Best All Time Assemblies
Dogs, tin boxes, pipe bands, read more about assemblies with impact...
Many a conscientious child will have listened attentively to homilies about forgiveness and turning the other cheek only to be blasted from the stage and ordered to detention for having the temerity to sneeze during the assembly prayer. At this point let’s assume that not only are assemblies a well established feature of school life but also a force for good.
Assemblies tend to follow themes, often planned with little diligence some years before and repeated year on year without question. Thus many an opportunity can be lost. On November 9th 1989, a Thursday, the Berlin Wall came down. That morning, our whole school assembly focused on ‘life is like a pizza’ with Mrs Dropmore from domestic science doing the honours. The defining moment of the age passed us by to the smell of pepperoni.
Technology has now eased the path but can lead to a lack of spontaneity. Assemblies can be downloaded before you can say Diwali. Desperate deputies are on the same googled website frantically seeking inspiration. On Martin Luther King Day, every school in the land is doing brown eyes and blue eyes at about ten past nine.
Take care! The lure of live broadband YouTube assemblies can undo you when you get a pop-up message trying to sell you 100 Viagra tablets at the same time. Second Life or its equivalent, will in the future host large scale assemblies. Voting technology is already being used to canvass and instantly display the assembled school opinion on topical and controversial matters.
Celebrations are often the focus for powerful assemblies - but remember, some young people would rather sit in detention than stand on a stage. One school has made it fun by using an electronic random name selector which automatically draws from the register those with 99% or more attendance who are to enter for the termly prize. The names are projected in front of the whole school and stopped randomly when a student presses the button. It’s a bit like telephone voting on a reality television show except you don’t lose any money.
Some of the best assemblies I have experienced have been a coming together of the topical, the personal interest of the presenter and the appropriate format. So on Human Rights Day the young teacher has everyone stand in the hall. By asking designated chair numbers to sit down she can represent statistics such as the distribution of wealth, the number of children who will not eat that day, the number of people with no access to shelter or clean water, the number who will be in gaol without trial or possibility of release.
Often there can be nothing better than a role model who speaks from the heart. A young man who, working for a large high street retailer asked himself, ‘what difference was he making in the world?’ Unable to provide a satisfactory answer, he took himself off to work as a volunteer at an African school during his two-week holiday and having resigned by email, returned a year later to try and raise funds from his old school. When he talked about saving abandoned babies from rubbish dumps the room was silent.
Schools are full of talented teachers. Sometimes that talent is eccentric. An assembly about bullying involved a large tin box in the centre of the stage. The teacher hits the box with a hammer. She makes points about the impact of bullying and how to cope. Being hit with a hammer dents the box but does not destroy it; sometimes in life you will take a few hits and live with a few dents she says. Be ready for it. Remember to look after what’s within: at which point she opens the box and a child steps out!
On other occasions I’ve seen or heard of: performing sheepdogs; bmx live; singer songwriters performing songs about the staff; a huge model of the human brain with the interconnections represented by a ball of string passed around the hall; the ‘dog food’ which is really chocolate biscuit mix on the theme of can you trust what it says on labels; the teacher talking warmly about the greatest influence on his life and how important it is to show appreciation and when the curtains pull back behind him there’s his little old mother sitting with her handbag on a chair.
There’s an old joke about assemblies beginning with an ass and ending up in lies. Not the case! The recipe for success is to begin with someone or something which can arouse passion. Locate that passion in a message which is meaningful and contemporary for the students, convey it through a string of engaging metaphors and with an appropriate media. Sit back and enjoy!
WINNING THE H FACTOR – the secrets of happy schools
Alistair Smith and Sir John Jones run the first of this new series of courses at the Café Royal in London.
“Alistair Smith and John Jones are a dynamic,
highly inspirational and entertaining double act.”
Graham Logan, Peel Primary School, West Lothian
“I arrived happy and left even happier”, one delegate reported back after attending Alite’s first Winning the H Factor conference earlier this month. However, the investigation into the theme of happiness – what it is and how to get it – was about more than cheering people up. Sir John Jones and Alistair Smith successfully motivated the audience into thinking about the positive effects of a happier school community and into doing something about it in their own schools.
Alistair Smith unearthed a wealth of research on the subject of happiness. He voiced his concern that we weren’t becoming a happier nation and examined the impact of emotional state on children’s learning. Sir John actively showed us how easy it is to become caught up in the routine ‘treadmill’ of daily activities and lose sight of core purpose.
“A lot of it has struck home what John and Alistair have said. Now we are geared up to go and put in place some of the things. It has been good to look at the perception of happiness and what it means to make staff and children happier”, said one Headteacher, Linda McSweeney from St Michael’s Catholic Primary School in London.
One Assistant Headteacher from Canterbury, said that it was ‘nice as a teacher to be able to reflect on your own practice and as a manager, to reflect on whole school issues and how happiness can influence that. It is very nice to be looking at happiness rather than target setting! I am looking at well-being, building personal skills and personalities. It’s about celebrating the differences of the children and not moulding them. I will use all the resources when I go back to the classroom.”
Much of the material that Alistair and John used during the course of Winning the H Factor was put together on a DVD for delegates to take away and use. Alistair and John led a number of activities on the day that were aimed at measuring and assessing happiness. One idea was to share delegate’s existing good practice. Here’s a selection:
- Accept that your school can deliver on this one – whatever your issues are that come in from outside
- Parental evaluation of school events – let them tell you how good you are!
- Smile more!
- Remember your Head of Well-Being leader is for both children and adults
- Every half term send home every students’ positive commendations
- Understand that kids will learn nothing if they are not happy
- Don’t appoint unhappy people
- Organise joint celebratory events with all staff invited
- Cherish your staff
- Really unpick what happiness means to your students and how they define it
- Only fuss over things which matter
- Include explicit references to happiness throughout induction programmes for newly appointed staff
- Connect personal and professional beliefs and values when reflecting on core purpose of school
- When I appoint two new Deputy Headteachers for September 2008, I shall have one for learning and one for well-being
Alite’s Winning the H Factor conference broke new ground on the technology front – the presenters were able to gauge the reaction of delegates by an interactive voting system and also to form a profile of the audience they were addressing. By using information gained from this, Alistair and John will be able to build on their existing knowledge as they continue presenting this series of courses.
David Plummer, Head of Notre Dame Prep School in Surrey told us how straight after attending Winning the H Factor he held a staff meeting, gave out the questionnaires and showed the DVD that had been used during the previous day. His staff then decided to identify their own areas of individual and school development.
Carol Smith, an art teacher from Holmer Green Upper School in Bucks noted that the ‘quality of both presenters is brilliant and having the interaction between the two means it is never boring… I like all the mix of doing activities, watching the video clips, listening to the presenters and using the technology. It feels new and exciting.”
HOW HAPPY IS YOUR SCHOOL?
Let us know what makes your school a happy place to be and win a visit by Alistair Smith and our award winning video production team.
We are delighted by the entries that have come flooding in for our Happy School competition and because we like reading them so much, we are extending our competition until the end of this month. To inspire you to write to us, we are featuring the following entry from Judith Ellinger who believes Barnwell School in Stevenage has the H Factor:
I am a Core Learning Teacher at Barnwell School. Core Learning students are those that find the transition from KS2 to KS3 especially hard, usually because of issues such as their prior attainment in the core subjects and low self-esteem, who would find life more difficult in larger classes. In Core Learning, lessons are adapted from the schemes of work in order to make them accessible to students. They are engaging, creative and most importantly fun. Core Learning reflects the ethos of Barnwell School. Jackie Johnson, Learning Leader for post sixteen, carried out her masters research project on Learning Preferences and this has become a central part of Barnwell life. Students learn in an environment that is vibrant, engaging and has a wide variety of support for teachers and learners within its community. Whether it be through our system of ‘Buddies’, the many groups set up to support and develop teacher’s professional development or the learning lunches that invite everyone to contribute to life at the school. Barnwell is an inspirational place to be, it is inclusive, progressive and an extremely happy community of learners.
Details of the Alite competition are as follows:
As part of our work on happiness in schools and to coincide with the launch of our new series of courses Winning the H Factor: The Secrets of Happy Schools, we want to hear from schools who consider themselves to be good examples of happy places to be, learn and work. Drop us a line with a very short descriptor of who you are and why you think your school deserves a mention. For the top five entries, Alistair Smith will come and visit you personally with our award winning video production team. You will win a DVD showcasing your school and stills that can be used on your school website and in your school prospectus. Entries to be submitted to melanie@alite.co.uk and to be received by 30th November 2007.
LIKE TODDLER, LIKE TEENAGER
Ricky Gervais has a podcast. Boris Johnson has a blog. Prince William has a Facebook account and just about anyone who is anyone has their own website. But what unites these technologies and why do teachers need to know about them? Teacher and Managing Director of smartassess, Gwyn ap Harri, believes that these technologies are the way forward for learning and teaching, and that the fun side of the internet will no longer be relegated to after school...
If we are honest, teachers might admit that the way we teach in the classroom does not promote the most natural way of learning. People learn best from each other when they are having fun and this can be seen from the word go, when babies are learning to talk, walk and play. Seeing what their parents and older siblings do, young toddlers will begin to mimic them and learn from them. While teenagers, of course, cannot be directly compared to toddlers, it is important to consider how young people learn and to see if this can be used as a model when they are older.
Probably one of the most typical things for a teenager to do once the school day has finished is to go online: chatting to their friends using instant messaging, surfing the net and logging on to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace make up a typical way of passing the evening.
Classrooms have revolutionised in the past decade with online resources displayed on interactive whiteboards and every child in the class being able to participate with handheld voting systems. This is all heading in the right direction to engage pupils; technology is key for raising interest and motivation levels. However, until recently, we have not been trying to replicate how pupils learn at home in the classroom.
Blogs and podcasts are rather similar in their purpose; they are online personal spaces, using written or oral communication, initially designed to be online open diary spaces. However, moving away from its diary function, a blog is a valuable learning tool. Making the most of the interactive nature of blogs, teachers can set controversial or thought-provoking questions for homework to which all class members must respond. For in-depth study or for media-rich exploration of a topic, documents and images can be uploaded, in addition to simple messages, in response to questions in any subject. In history, a teacher could ask “What would the UK have looked like had Germany won World War Two?” and in science, “In what ways can we reduce the carbon footprint of our daily lives?” As a response, teachers might expect a sentence or two from the first students to reply but, the more involved the class gets, the deeper the subject will go and the more interesting thoughts are highlighted.
By posing questions such as these on a blog, students refer to their peers’ work before and after posting their own comments and attachments. It is collaborative learning and peer-assessment in an easy and enjoyable way. Lively debate and discussion can ensue, with students learning from each other and assessing their peers’ thoughts and comments.
A podcast can work in a similar fashion but in this way, a student can upload a podcast as part of their homework and then their peers can post their comments, perhaps expanding on interesting points, asking for clarification or indeed just posting an opinion on their theme.
These technologies lend themselves perfectly to project work, by individuals or groups. I have been using realsmart, a learning suite incorporating all of these technologies, with my pupils for assignments. By removing the need for exercise books, or even a word processing programme, we are effectively disguising learning behind a real-life façade.
When tackling a topic in-depth, instead of asking for an essay to be written, a website can be created over an extended period of time. In this way, a subject can be explored thoroughly and taken in different directions. For example, for a project on the Industrial Revolution, instead of writing an essay or creating a bound book of pages of text and photocopied images, suggest creating a website on the topic, with pages dedicated to different areas of interest such as: architecture of the time; how the landscape looked; the structure of society; fashion at the time and more. Each student can create their own site and, in this way, can direct their learning (with the teacher’s permission) and experiment with the look and feel of the website, making their learning personal.
Similarly, a blog or podcast can be used for shorter assignments where, having researched a topic, a student can post their work online for their class to share. Harnessing these technologies, which students use daily in their spare time, means that learning is far less removed from play, just as it should be. Real-life learning gets students motivated, overcoming the first hurdle to successful learning. If students want to study and enjoy doing the work whilst simultaneously being able to learn from each other, what they gain from learning will be far higher. Blogs and podcasts need not be merely for the young with time on their hands; teachers should seize the chance to replicate these technologies for learning inside school time.
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JUNK SLEEP
It’s not just junk food we should be worried about! Recent research shows how modern technology is keeping our teenagers awake at night.
An internet survey carried out by the Sleep Council has shown that teenagers are putting their health and academic performance at risk by having bedrooms full of gadgets such as televisions, computers, iPods and mobile phones.
The researchers have coined the term 'junk sleep' to refer to the type of sleep grabbed by young people who leave televisions or music on as they drop off. They say that junk sleep could soon rival junk food as a major lifestyle worry among parents.
"Youngsters need to be taught that a healthy lifestyle includes healthy sleep as well as healthy food. The message is simple: switch off the gadgets and get more sleep” recommends Dr Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre.
The poll included one thousand 12-16 year olds and found that nearly a quarter of them fall asleep whilst watching television, listening to music or with another gadget running. Possibly more worrying is the fact that a third of young people admit to only getting between four and seven hours sleep on school nights and even less at weekends. The recommended amount of sleep for this age group is between eight and nine hours. In separate research, Stanley Coren (a Canadian sleep expert) claims that people lose one IQ point the next day for every hour of sleep they lose the night before.
Many of those questioned admitted to feeling tired during the day with a large number of participants putting down their lack of sleep to worrying about the following day or being too hot or cold, not because of their gadgetry. Yet, in June, the Sunday Telegraph reported that using a mobile phone before going to bed can double the time it takes to fall asleep. (The Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University.)
The researchers find this worrying. Dr Idzikowski said, “I’m staggered that so few teenagers make the link between getting enough good quality sleep and how they feel during the day. Teenagers need to wake up to the fact that to feel well, perform well and look well, they need to do something about their sleep.”
Dr Chris Idzikowski went on to say: “This is an incredibly worrying trend. What we are seeing is the emergence of Junk Sleep – that is, sleep that is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs to perform properly at school.”
Researchers in America back up the findings. The American National Sleep Foundation has found that students obtaining lower grades went to bed later and had fewer hours sleep than their higher-achieving classmates.
This is born out by the experience of Head Teacher, Duncan Harper, from New Woodlands School in Lewisham, who told the BBC in June 2006; "We decided about three or four years ago that a lot of children were coming in very grumpy, very tired, irritable and getting involved in silly little disputes and not ready for learning. And, when we looked into, it a lot of the children had televisions, PlayStations, Xboxes even computers in their bedrooms."
His response was to obtain parental permission to confiscate computers and televisions from their children. He found that parents were quick to grant permission and that pupils' behaviour and concentration improved both in school and at home.
Teenage Sleep Facts
Below are suggestions from the Sleep Council for impressing upon young people the importance of good sleeping habits:
- You could get fat. You are more likely to feel hungry the day after you haven't had enough sleep. If you get less than six hours sleep per night you are 25% more likely to be overweight than people who sleep for eight hours. (Slimming Magazine, 2005). If you sleep for less than four hours per night, this rises to you becoming 75% more likely to be overweight (Columbia University research).
- You will look older. Lack of sleep advances the effects of ageing, because your body cannot control your hormones.
- You may get spottier. Again, if you don't sleep enough, your body won't be able to control your hormones and this could lead to you getting spots.
- You might not use your intelligence to full potential. If you don't get enough sleep, you will find it harder to concentrate in school. It will also stop you from having good, creative ideas and from remembering things.
- You might get worse at sport. Not sleeping properly may make you clumsy and less likely to perform well in sporting activities.
- You could get ill. Over a period of time, not getting enough sleep will suppress your immune system and you will become more vulnerable to catching all sorts of bugs and illnesses.
Three Items On My Desk
Jessica Holmes, who has been a French teacher for fifteen years, reflects on the three most important items on her desk and finally appreciates how her family gave her much needed support when she was initially introduced to the language at Secondary school
"Because I work part time, I work in three different classrooms so, in school at least, I don't really have a desk. However, I do have one or two bits and pieces that are important to me and I either carry them around in one of my many resource boxes, so that I can use them whenever I need to.
The first thing is a tatty, blue French vocabulary book. It's the very first vocab book I was given when I joined secondary school way back in 1980. I didn't even know it was still in existence until six years ago when my dad ceremoniously handed it over to me during his father-of-the-bride speech at my wedding. It was very sweet, not to mention a touch embarrassing. Dad launched into a story about how I came home from school one evening and burst into tears because I didn't know how to do my French homework. I had been given a list of fifteen French words to learn for a test the next day, but had no idea of how to go about it. Dad seemed to take great pleasure in telling all of my friends and family about how I had sat at the top of the stairs, red faced and sobbing, and had screamed that I was going to give up French as soon as I could because it was totally impossible, I hated it and it was so, like UNFAIR! It was all true; I remember it vividly. Yet, contrary to my threats, here I am today teaching French, with a French degree, a French husband and three French-speaking children.
The point Dad was actually trying to make was that he was so proud of my persistence. Despite the fact that I had no idea of how to learn the words, I managed to learn the words and do OK in the test (I think I got 8 out of 10). He saw it as a sign of my resilience that I was able to keep going at something I disliked so much until it became something that I actually enjoyed.
My response to him is that I did it because I had a supportive family who all pulled together to help me, test me and show me ways of memorising the new words. They gave me the support, encouragement and, equally importantly, the techniques I needed to overcome the problem. What I wonder today is how many people in my class went home with similar feelings about the subject? How many of them failed to overcome their fear and hatred of the subject and did give it up at the first opportunity? Did the teacher ever even know how we were feeling? Did he care?
Of course, teaching has come a long way since then. But I keep the vocab book for two reasons. Firstly to let my students know that I had to overcome challenges in school and, more importantly, to remind myself of how it felt to be out of my depth and of how easy it was to overcome this once I had been given the correct learning techniques. I always share tips on vocabulary and grammar learning with my students and, importantly, with their parents in the hopes that no potential teachers of French give the subject up before they have even really started!
My second item is a poster I gave made with a quote from one of my favourite reference books, 'How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk' by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Although the book is really aimed at parents, I think that it has useful advice for teachers too. The quote goes; 'By trying to protect children from disappointment, we protect them from hoping, striving dreaming, and sometimes from achieving their dreams.' I hope to instil in my pupils the confidence and belief that they can achieve anything they wish to if they really put their minds to it. This poster reminds me never to put down anyone's aspirations.
The other things I have with me at all times are three different coloured beanbag frogs called Frank, Kate and Ellie. I use them to get my pupils talking. Frank is fantastic at speaking French and, if I want someone to speak some French, I throw Francois to them and ask a question. It is then their turn to speak. This helps get all kids involved in my lessons, not just those that are confident enough to put up their hands. Obviously, I make sure that any questions are aimed at a suitable level for individuals catching Frank.
Kate is great at asking questions. I throw Kate when I want a pupil to ask me a question about what we are learning. Knowing how to ask questions and not being afraid of doing so is such an important part of learning. Sometimes I throw her to a pupil I think may not fully understand the work. Because I am telling them to ask the question, the fear of looking silly is removed. Other times I choose someone who I feel could extend their learning by thinking of a question.
Ellie is fantastic at explaining things. I throw her when I want to get someone to explain our learning objective in their own words, as if they were the teacher. That way, I get to see if they have understood, they get to consolidate their learning and the rest of the class gets to hear an explanation different to my own - very often they explain it better and more simply than I had done in the first place!
LINGUISTS’ BRAIN LINK
Brain structure and white matter affect our ability to learn languages.
Researchers from the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France and the University College of London have found that people with an aptitude for languages have asymmetrical parietal lobes. Furthermore, they have also found that the more talented linguists amongst us have more white matter in the part of the brain that processes sound (known as the left Heschl's gyrus). It is our white matter fibres that make connections in our brains, so it is suggested that having more or thicker fibres in this particular area of the brain aids the flow of information. It would, therefore, help people process sound and make it easier for them to learn languages (although the scientists state that they only looked at how people learn the sounds of a new language, not how they pick up foreign grammar). The team, led by Narly Golestani, trained 65 native French speakers to distinguish between some very similar sounds in Hindi (which none of them had previously studied). The subjects had a similar background of language learning - they had all studied two additional languages at school, but none had been regularly exposed to a language other than French before they were eleven.
Within the group, there were people who could differentiate between extremely similar sounds after only a minute or two of training, whilst others were only able to make guesses after twenty minutes of training. The team selected the eleven quickest and the ten slowest learners and used two different types of scanners to look at their brains. The scans showed that there was a distinct anatomical difference between the brains of the two groups and Golestani told the BBC that: "We are starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people's abilities or pathologies - why people are good at some things and not others is evident from these scans."
The team would like to investigate further whether the differences in brain structure are purely anatomical or are a result of upbringing and environment. As this research was carried out on adults, the scientists would like to make further studies into the brains of infants to see whether there are very early anatomical differences that might predict their abilities later in life.
The full report, 'Brain structure predicts the learning of foreign speech sounds', can be found in the journal Cerebral Cortex.