The muzzle effect

Let me start by saying, I am not being muzzled but I recognise some of this and wanted to share my thoughts. I blogged about #JoyFE and the power of communities of practice. Then I was presented with my cringe question..."yeah...and so what?" I cringe because it is so powerful. If you don't have an answer that you 100% believe whenever you answer "yeah...and so what?" it quickly becomes clear that there are flaws in your thinking and you cringe! But I do 100% believe in #JoyFE and communities of practice so this should be easy to answer for me, and it was. But for another member of the group they talked about feeling muzzled. Instantly it cut right to the core. I know that feeling, I have experienced that muzzle before in education. 

Have you ever been on a training day, teach meet or an event and felt a buzz from it? The enormity of the power you now have with the new skill or idea you have just learned pulsing through your veins. You can't wait to get back to work and get started! Then someone pops your balloon. Perhaps now isn't the time for your department to try this. Perhaps someone tried it before and it failed. The muzzle is that someone has stopped your buzzing pulsing idea because they don't have the appetite or they are treating you with mistakes from the past that they expect you to make. They have judged your idea and it is going nowhere. 

In this scenario I ask one question. Who's responsibility is it to drive the change that you want to make? The person applying the muzzle or yours? If it is your idea and you 100% believe in it then try it. Obviously never go against rules/procedures or do anything that will get you into trouble. Try to negotiate the time and space to try your idea, short term, one group, one lesson, one starter activity. Whatever the size you can negotiate that is the win and the starting point. From there you can learn and build.

Imagine you try an idea and it gets stuck. It dies. No one joins in. You make a mistake. The muzzle is then applied by others to you or from you to yourself. Again, who is responsible for this idea? If you believe in it 100% drive the change, be the change. Now this is easy to say from here but one thing I can think of that may help you at all stages of trialling ideas is a community, a collective or a support network. Take your school or college blinkers off and look external for these people as they will bring fresh ideas to your thinking as to how best to remove the muzzle. If they are from the same team as you they may also have a muzzle and then you have a whole bunch of muzzles to remove! 

You may naturally have this network through participants from the event that gave you the original idea. I was never a fan of swapping phone numbers at meetings or events but I always do now. I collect a network of people who may want to try the idea that I have in their place of work and together we can muddle through. You may find this network to support you via Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. You may see someone posting and like their trail of thought. Connect, don't just like and scroll through, retweet, follow, send a DM, be personal! You may find this network through a community of practice that meets in certain spaces. Don't be afraid of asking for an invitation to groups you see and think I would love to know more. Generally people are welcoming and supportive and, if I am honest a group or collective that is a clique and doesn't welcome new people in isn't somewhere I would want to be and I doubt you are missing much from such a closed set.

Now if you do find yourself in a community of practice you may find yourself with more ideas and things to try more regularly and your community is called upon more often to help you remove the muzzle. There is no shame in this but it would be nice if those applying the muzzle gave you a little more room. I never understand the idea behind applying the muzzle. If someone wants to try something new, one of 2 things will happen. 1 the new idea will be brilliant and everyone will be happy. Or 2 the new idea fails but everyone learnt from the experience. To me this is a win win, hence why I don't understand why you would ever apply the muzzle. SJ

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

Digifear

 I wonder if we had completed a national teaching survey in January 2020 asking teachers to estimate how consistently they would use digital tools or remote learning activities, what the results would have been? As we know lockdown has had a massive impact on the ways learning is delivered and accessed, and 2020 will go down in memory as a catalyst change with lasting effects or one to forget (or maybe both!). 

Talking with teachers the past few weeks, many have found the experience of delivering online exhausting and challenging. In the movie The Matrix, Neo sits opposite Morhpeus and is offered a choice of two pills. “You take the blue pill, the story ends… you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland.” If you offered teachers the choice, what percentage of them would take the blue pill? I think many would, and the return to normality would be welcome not just in our professional lives but also in our personal lives. 

As far as i know, we are not in the matrix but we can continue down the rabbit hole to see how far it goes. Even if a small mindset shift occurs as a result of lockdown this will have been positive. Many have witnessed the possibilities of technology, even if they may not be a fan of online delivery. 

Now the situation is even somewhat more confusing, what do we do in September? What do we do to support summer catch ups? For those institutions with digital strategies I believe the impact will be manageable, but for those who have not taken digital seriously, this will cause some serious stress and anxiety. 

It's very important to keep a positive mindset in challenging times that's for sure and this can only help in creating a solution. There are many unknowns at present which does not support future planning, but we know not all plans always go how we want them to. I’d class myself as an optimist, but I believe education leaders need to plan for the worst and hope for the best. 

Tim Ferris the best selling author and podcast presenter has highlighted the benefits of fear setting. You can access the blog post and TED talk on this link https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/. If we can work backwards from our fears we can look at the solutions we need to put into place to ensure the train stays on the tracks. Solution focused mindset is key here.

Innovation is messy, time consuming and rarely inexpensive both in time and fiscal terms. This shouldn’t deter school leaders and all levels of the teaching pyramid trying something new, risking failure being vulnerable and learning from the experience. I have no data to go on but i wonder how many teachers have tried something new and failed in this lockdown period? I believe this to be a good thing, even better so if trying new things is encouraged and reflected on by senior managers. 

Small elements of fear can be good when it is self imposed. Teachers need to feel encouraged that attempts at innovating practice will not lead to negative ramifications. Culture is so important in setting the platform for performance. In the right kind of culture people feel safe and feeling vulnerable is showing courage and being brave in attempting new things. 

For more on vulnerability check out this TED talk from Breene Brown: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?language=en

Visualisation Part 2

 Nearly three years ago I relocated to West Yorkshire from the South East to move into my first home with my fiance. I left a Head of Department job at a college in Kent to make the move, but had no employment in place for my arrival. I was feeling pretty positive about this (even though i am risk averse) and thought i'd be able to pick up a job pretty quickly in the north. We moved into our new house in June, i was still finishing my notice period in Kent and did not move until the following month. After a painstaking drive up the M1 on a Friday night I arrived in Leeds. The next day I flew to Malta, not because Leeds is so bad, it was just my summer holiday. I touched down in Luqa ready to begin the holiday, good food, plenty of wine / beer / spirits to prepare my plan to conquer the north (or so I thought). 

Upon returning to Leeds, the job front was pretty slow. Nothing was really exciting for me to apply for, or just didn't meet the criteria I was looking for. I eventually started a new job in October after three months of searching. The job turned out to be wonderful but the three months of being unemployed for the first time in 10 years made me very uneasy. I think all in all I attended 15 interviews and in total received two offers. Many of these interviews were for positions that I didn't want. I had received great feedback from many, and comments such as “we think you're over qualified for the position”, i find that one so annoying. You can see the qualifications I have before you make me travel across Yorkshire for a conversation. For one interview, I received feedback via email that wasn't from my interview…..I’m sure many of you reading might be able to relate to these frustrations. 

To keep my mind busy I had plenty of decorating to get on with at the new house, after two weeks of that I knew I needed to get a job pretty quickly before I went mad. By this time I was feeling pretty low and began to doubt my skills and attributes. I’ve enjoyed reading in recent years and a friend recommended I read The Success Principles, by Jack Canfield. After reading many self-help books telling me to take cold showers and get up at 4:30am, I was sceptical. This book i place as my saving grace. It allowed me to re-frame my situation and allowed me to practice strategies to help support my goals. The two key things i took from the book which i still use to this day were visualisation and meditation. 

Visualisation and meditation were not new to me, I knew what they both were. I thought meditation was performed by Buddhist monks and not unemployed teachers, by this point I was willing to try anything. Coming from a sporting background, visualisation was something I used often when playing football. Reading the guidance in the book and trying the techniques, it dawned on me I had been using visualisation techniques before every interview, completing a rehearsal of my performance, but what i wasn't rehearsing was the job offer coming through. Positive thinking, thinking i was going to get the position just wasn't happening, i was in a negative spell with a lack of offers coming my way. The meditation helped me develop a new sense of calm and control, as well as clarity in my thinking. Before the interview for the job I was offered, I actually wrote a whole page of A4 paper that read you will get the job, you are great over and over again. The interview process was by far the hardest i have had to go through but i felt very positive that this time i was getting an offer….. And I did. Since this time I have built a new routine of visualisation and meditation into my day to day life. 

In his book The Morning Miracle, Hal Elrod speaks of the SAVERS approach to mornings. 

Silence

Affirmations

Visualisation

Exercise

Reading

Scribing

I try to do this as much as possible every morning, in particular visualisation, meditation and reading. I find this sets me up well for the day ahead. This structure has been very beneficial to me in my own life. When I worked with students this year we spoke about their morning routines. Many didn't have a routine, many it was get up get dressed get to college. No time for breakfast or mental preparation, which resulted in many landing in my classroom at 10am on a Friday asking me what time Greggs opened. Developing personal strategies of getting the best from yourself is very important in life but seems to be something that is overlooked when we work with students.

Mental rehearsal involves imagined, mental practice of performing a task as opposed to actual practice and research is showing our minds can't actually tell the difference between our own simulations and the actual event. Take for example, a learner retaking GCSE maths at college. I worked with a learner called Lola a few years back who was on to her fourth retake. The poor girl was feeling so negative about retaking it was a stressful experience for her. She eventually passed thanks to what I can only put down to visualisation and affirmations. Lola had moved from a negative mental rehearsal to a positive one, much like myself in searching for a job. She went from i can't do this, to I’m going to pass and she did. Tools such as visualisation, mental rehearsal, affirmations and meditation could really help learners focus and relieve anxiety and stress so why are we not using them more?

To try to answer the question above is difficult. I think there are many reasons why these techniques might not be used readily, for example they are personal to the individual. People might perform meditation in different ways. I’m not saying we should all make students do a quick meditation every lesson, but giving them the awareness of what techniques are out there and how they can help could be very beneficial. 

A particular issue I think with younger people now is, there is rarely a time where they let their minds wander. They are usually on smartphones or some sort of technology in this ever connected world. I spoke with one of my teaching groups earlier this year about their daily screen time. The results were in all honesty quite shocking. One learner was averaging around 8 hours a day screen time. Being the teacher I am, I asked the student to work this out on a yearly basis. Those of you good at mental arithmetic will have worked out, its around 2920 hours or around 122 days. Shocking!

If we could harness some of this screen time into me time, I feel students would benefit greatly from it. Visualisation, meditation does not have to be long, it can be 5 minutes long. I'm sure this student could have spared the 5 minutes away from Snapchat to complete this. 

The pressure on young people now is intense. Are we failing them by not teaching them about coping strategies? More importantly, these are life skills that need to be developed to support each individual as they go through life. There will be interviews, times of stress, times of unrest, times of happiness but a learner who understands how to prepare is a learner who has a better chance at accomplishing the goals they set for themselves.

English and Maths students taking retakes in college are amongst some of the most under motivated and anxious due to previous failures. If we can re frame their situation (re-framing is often used in therapy and sometimes referred to as cognitive re-framing) and support them in feeling more positive about their studies this can only be a positive thing. There is only one thing worse I can think of that's worse than an academic test and that's a driving test. God i hated learning to drive. My instructor was a keen historian - but the focus of his work was American serial killers. One lesson he brought a book to show me a killer from somewhere in the deep south of America and showed me a picture of this guy. “Don't you think he looks just like you?” The only thing that kept me going was i knew one day i'd be out on the open road on my own. I had visualised it. I passed first time and I would recommend Kevin, my instructor to anyone in Kent.

To conclude, we visualise all the time, but its not always purposeful. In many instances in fact its negative thoughts or images we see. Many aspects such as self belief and confidence come into play when visualising successfully. Let us work with learners to show them the doors of opportunity and make them feel positive about themselves. We can only do this by trying these techniques and letting those in our charge experiment with them. 

Thanks for reading

Read and Write by Texthelp

I am yet to teach a student who is overjoyed to be singled out for their differences and openly welcome interventions in front of the whole class. It maybe because I teach FE. My learners want to join in with their peers first and they worry about the additional support they may need second. The skill of the teacher is to provide timely and meaningful support to the student with additional needs in a quiet purposeful manner. I'm not saying I run covert operations in class and there are secret side conversations happening. That would be an awful environment for the rest of the class! No, what I do is provide the extra resource or support to the learner and say, "that's for you to look at when we do... " that additional resource could be a Chrome book because the learner needs formula prediction on Equatio mathspace. It could be a dictionary of English to their home language. It could be a blank comic strip template to help them visualise and structure their answers. It could be a completed comic book template of the lesson sequencing my planned activities so they know what to expect and when. It could be a set of headphones so they can listen to white noise to help them focus. It can and should always be what the learner needs to help them achieve in my lesson. If it doesn't help then deal with the barrier they are facing it isn't relevant.

Most learners in my classroom have only recently had a diagnosis of additional learning needs. I teach FE, which includes adults who have returned to study post 40 who suddenly discover they have an attention disorder or dyslexia or a variety of needs. It is such a common occurrence that exam access arrangements expressions of need begin in September and have a deadline of January to allow for thorough assessment before the March deadline. Last year in a class of 14, 8 adult learners required exam access arrangements. This later in adult life diagnosis means my learners are even less inclined to be seen as different or needing something extra to help them but if the support is relevant to their need, in my experience, they are willing to give it a go.

I was overjoyed when we got Read and Write from Texthelp (this is not a paid for post nor is it an ad) we had a customisable solution to give everyone a fighting chance to overcome their barriers to learning with one click. I am aware other products exist but none in my opinion have the wide range of features I will tall about. Imagine a lady in her 60s. Proud grandma whose grandson is starting high school. She returns to study GCSE maths so that she can help him with his studies and achieve a qualification she never passed. Imagine through discussion with me that we discover she struggles to read and stay focused when using a screen. We hop on a chrome book and use the screen masking feature on the Read and Write toolbar. But that's not the end. Later she discloses she's stopped using it, when I ask why, she is overwhelmed by the buttons on the bar. I am crushed. Quickly I hop onto data desk and personalise her bar with her input. We end up with just 5 buttons all relevant and personal to her. She is back on track.

Just because we find an amazing tool doesn't mean it does the job for us. We wouldn't buy the same textbook for every class and not direct students to certain chapters or pages. We can't leave Read and Write to do it all. It does a lot of the heavy lifting, but we need to help. We need to personalise the experience for our learners to make the additional support relevant, which is where the data desk feature come in. The beauty of Read and Write is that it is there whenever a learner needs it. They don't need to ask. We are providing a meaningful and timely support that helps overcome barriers to learning. SJ