Communities of Practise

Reflecting on my frustrations at the quality of recent reading material. See my post on wider reading. I began seeking out opportunities for real. No longer do I want to read or see what a good one looks like, I want to read or see what happened, what we hope to happen and how we make changes in the classroom. Boring I know, actual real teaching. This led me to join JoyFE. JoyFE is a collective of FE practitioners looking for the everyday joy in what happens in FE. And let's be honest, the whole concept of FE is joyful. Further education (FE) in it's very nature is one of the most welcoming education experiences around. No matter what age and stage you are in life or education FE welcomes you in. Vocational, traditional academic subject or workplace upskill FE has an option for you. So by it's very nature, once you are openly welcomed you can't help but feel the joy.

Like many things though waters get muddy and there are times where FE has lost its way. Time pressures, OFSTED pressures, results pressures and everything in between mean that sometimes FE isn't as joyful as it should be. I remember the day I joined JoyFE. I messaged the wrangler of the joyful rabble, the unbelievably strong and brilliant Lou Mycroft. When I messaged Lou I said "I need to get back to thinking about why we do what we do". And I stand by it. At the time I was lost in a distance blended learning delivering planning storm. I was CAG ing students and the whole word was in lockdown, or so it felt. The joy of being in FE had disappeared for me.

Joining the joyful rabble collective I popped into the ideas room. If you are unaware of the thinking environment then Lou is your lady and she can give you a great insight. The ideas room gave me an energy like I hand't experienced in a long time. A virtual collective supportive hug from a group of strangers had made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Now I have been lucky in that my boss has twice weekly checked in as a team and on individuals since lock down. I have felt connected but the ideas room was different. It was different because there were no limits. This group were and are in a mission to make change. Not just for them but for everyone.

Colleges across the country have little gemstones of members of JoyFE. Practitioners who hold people, thoughts, feelings and joy at their heart. Joyful moments celebrated as a collective. Difficult decisions thought through and discussed as a collective. And that's how the joy starts. The collective nature of the joy spread through you and you can't help but feel energised. Then you feel empowered to make a change and change yours and others ways of looking at problems. Take my stress about CAG. CAG is CAG. We have never been asked to do it before. We are all trying our best. The joy is that we are trying to help students in the best way we can in the circumstances we have found ourselves in. Once I was able to accept that and recognise the joy the stress dissipated.

A community of practice enables me to hear the real, see the real and actually talk to the people living the real. A perfect example is the COVID impact on the beauty teaching staff members of my community of practice. I thought CAG was bad. Imagine having cohorts of learners legally blocked from completing their course. How do you keep those learners engaged waiting for the latest COVID update? Imagine going to work in full PPE just to help keep those learners engage and deliver part of your course. Through the community of practice I hear these stories. I see the photos. I learn how motivation can be created even in the darkest of times. I can then put it into my practice. Even though subjects are wildly different, there are elements I can learn and embed into my teaching. This is the joy of a community of practice and the joy of FE.

Blended and distance learning planning stress kept coming in waves. Staff were panicked. How would delivery work, what would delivery be, how much work was needed. Listening to others experiences in JoyFE, collaborating on working through scenarios. Evolving ideas and creating visions made all the stress fade away for me. The joy is that we will be back. We will be back educating. We will be back building relationships with students. The joy is that we can together share best practice and learn. The joy is that we can build opportunities to develop our own digital skills at a pace suitable for us. No one is expecting every lesson to be perfect. And if we hold onto the joy of that and reflect, no one ever did. SJ

Student Networks

 In recent months we have had to adapt how we interact and communicate in order to build professional and in some cases personal relationships. Many citizens across the world and here in the UK have sadly lost their jobs and worse livelihoods as a result of COVID-19. With the job market now very populated, what can job seekers use as an advantage in the hunt for work? One such advantage is the power of networks.

Back when I was 12 years old I missed selection to represent my district football team. I had been performing amazingly scoring over 40 goals in the season and was regularly being watched by football scouts. I was excited when the announcement was being made about the squad selection. Being 12 you can imagine this to me was like being selected for England at a World Cup. When the announcement had been made and my name wasn't called out you can imagine my feelings. My dad on the drive back home offered words of comfort as he usually did after a disappointment. He said “I spoke with the coach and he told me you just need to keep working hard. To be honest son you have scored 40 goals and you're being watched by scouts, you have done amazing things”. His follow up was something he hadn't said to me before “Sometimes it's not what you know, but who you know”. Looking back now he couldn't have been more right!

Connections provide us with opportunities to collaborate, develop and network. Having the key contacts can be beneficial in many walks of life but in particular when looking for work. This is an area perhaps we overlook when we work with students. Students naturally build networks within an organisational setting through friendships and clubs but, how can we develop this further and provide them with the means to access more people and opportunities?

Work placements and volunteering provide some great opportunities for learners to mix and network with professionals and like minded individuals. Not all learners always see the benefit of taking part in such activities. If lockdowns have proven anything to us it is that feeling connected is very important to our personal health and wellness. Thankfully being able to undertake meetings and networking opportunities online have been a godsend. I have no data to go on but I wonder how many active learners in further education took the opportunity to contact professionals online to network? My guess is that this figure is low.  

Moving forward due to COVID, there is a real possibility of reduced capacity to complete a work placement or volunteering in person due to the risk and organisations not having capacity to offer placements to non employee based personnel. If this is to be the case, groups of our young people could miss opportunities to gain connections and future employment opportunities for potentially years to come. How can we ensure this does not happen?

Many students will be starting college life this month and perhaps will need to complete a CV to share with their new tutor. If you are reading this and you have asked learners to create a CV, don't bother! Lets get students engaging in professional networks such as LinkedIn. The platform is awesome for learners to develop a presence online, gain new knowledge from contacts and potentially acquire work experience (in person or online) or longer term employment opportunities. The ability to build networks via LinkedIn is priceless, alongside some of the other features such as professional development which is available. This is where we need to move things moving forward. 

There seems to be barriers on occasion in implementing something like asking a learner to create a LinkedIn profile. Some staff may see this as a safeguarding risk or it makes students too accessible. In my own opinion, if we educate students on online safety and risks of the internet we should support and monitor them in spreading their wings on an online professional place. Perhaps letting them ride solo without guidance and monitoring is a greater risk. 

Even more so than support in using online tools, learners need development in stretching networking muscles. In previous blogs i have spoken about project based learning, there is no greater opportunity for learners to flex these muscles than PBL. Projects are what the world is built on. NASA put a man on the moon = project. Jurgen Klopp took Liverpool to the Premier League title, a project he said he would achieve within 5 years (and he did!!). Projects allow learners to grow, to find expertise, to take control of their learning. Please if you do anything this year with learners run a project and see what happens. 

COVID has been a setback for the world in general but as a result we have seen many innovations and brilliance. The future generations will need perseverance to overcome future problems, some current such as the environment and some unknown or uncertain (encounters of the third kind maybe). It is vital that we develop the ability to work with students to see the benefit in collaboration and group intelligence. As Spock says in Star Trek “The need of the many outweigh the need of the few, or the one”. Networks provide us with opportunities and the space for growth. Without that ability I fear for the global health of the planet as we move into the next 50 years. 

To conclude, please think about how as teachers and trainers we can develop those networking muscles in our learners. This could be as basic as a mock interview with an employer, attending a career event, video pal schemes, whatever it might be, let's get learners talking to new connections. The long term benefit to the learner is priceless. The short term pain and awkwardness of talking to someone new is far outweighed by the long term benefit of doing so. 

Thanks for Reading

Wider Reading1

Do you remember visiting the library or a bookshop as a child? The excitement as you browsed the shelves picking your favourites based on the look of the cover, the thickness of the pages? I love to read. I find reading enjoyable, informative and relaxing. That said I have very little time to read, maybe it is because of this rather than in spite of it that I enjoy reading so much, because my reading time is precious. I carve out an hour a week during my working day to read blogs, Twitter, websites, re-watch webinars etc. I am not talking about that here, what I am talking about here is sitting down and reading essentially a book. I like a paper book, ironic as most of my work is online. I am a HUGE fan of book snaps, I probably did book snaps before they were a thing at university. Back in the day I would photocopy pages of books with my finger pointing at the bit I wanted to remember or relate to. I am a really annoyingly fast reader, one of those fast readers that is really annoying when they finish before everyone else. I am quite sad in that if I am going to devote time to reading I want it to be something of interest. Something relevant, something new, something inspiring. At the start of lock down, we knew it was coming for a period of time so I cleared the book shelves at work. Rapidly, panic picking teaching and learning books.

Whilst working from home I have enjoyed carving out time to sit and read these books. Books on feedback, assessment, leadership, technology tools and everything in between. The time I have saved in commuting to work I have chosen to spend half of it reading and half of it relaxing. Many a time I have sat down excited to read a book, phone ready for booksnaps and things haven't gone to plan. There have been books that were quick reads because they had nothing new in. I mean literally nothing new. One was on leading sessions and the ground breaking information the 300 pages had to impart was that you need to be organised and plan your sessions including rest breaks. Another book was one that I couldn't read quickly, every time I tried to read it I struggled to connect. The flow wasn't right. The words didn't make sense. The content switched about all over the place, it was a hard read. Another problem arose when a book was too academic for what it was trying to be. It was written like a dissertation but was meant to be a classroom hand book. It was like when you took your library books home as a child and you realised they weren't as fun as the cover promised!

Is there a problem because there is nothing new to say? Have we seen it all in classrooms before? Education goes through cycles. Back in the day when I started it was all about learning intentions, then it moved to objectives and everyone asked students to 'understand'. Those of us who were older cringed as we were told that you couldn't evidence 'understanding' in the classroom but we all ploughed on as someone said it was a good idea. Then the sphere's shifted to differentiation and HATS, MATS and LATS. Then it became stretch and challenge. Then it went back to differentiation and individulisation. There may have been other variations in between but my point is there has always been a 'new' thing. Each 'new' thing has always had an author, a leader of the movement. Every leadership team, in every school, in every college, bought all the books and booked the external speakers and all staff left with beautiful handouts or signed copies of the books.

So why is there nothing new now? What has changed? I can see gamification is the next new thing. I can see esports coming but what is 'new'? We have long gamified lessons and gamification has been around for a while. We have been waiting for technology and appetite for it to increase in education, finally it is here. But again, it isn't new. The gamified elements of my paper based lessons back in the day were motivating for the learners and brought great results. Perhaps I should stop looking for new and look for something inspiring? Something exciting? The books I chose were disappointing. Kindly my boss offered to buy me some more during lock down, and he sent some he wanted me to read too. I sat excitedly down to read the first of these books today and instantly finished it. It had nothing new to offer nor anything inspiring, there were no classroom examples. The greatest takeaway from this book was that videos are difficult for students to follow so think about what you put in our video content. Sorry, but yawn!

I think in reflecting I have realised that I am not after new, I am after real. I am more experienced now and what I want to read now are real classroom stories. I want to read how what has been written played out in the classroom. I want to hear from new people, not new ideas. What I want to hear about are the who, the where and the why from varied institutions. I don't want any more academia amplified because it has a shiny cover, I want amplified voices from the classroom. SJ