Reflection of my practice: an example of reflection in practice

An aspect of training to be a teacher is becoming a reflective teacher  (Pollard 2014), and as I’ve just started my first round of subject tutor visits its something that is becoming apparent that students are findings difficult. I think there are two primary reasons for them not doing it:

• Firstly getting in the classroom is the most pressured issue for them: tomorrow morning at 8.50 that year 9 group will be there ready for teaching regardless of whether you’ve done your reflection!
• Secondly, reflecting on your practice is hard, and if they’re like me, students will avoid it because it is so hard and at this stage seeing why it would help them is difficult (taking me back to the first point) – so lets not bother!

So yesterday I began to think about what I could do differently to help them engage with reflecting on their practice - I can’t change them, I can only change my approach. The approach I’m trying today is to reflect on my practice using the format and frameworks we give them to use, and then to share it here on my blog.

This reflection comes with health warnings:

• its my reflection about my practice to help me understand and improve my practice
• I am not a student teacher, I am lecturer who has been teaching for over twenty years

Put simply: the reflection content below can’t be copied or used to directly inform a student’s reflection, but the structure might help them write their own.

I’ve used Reflective Writing: a basic introduction by Martin Hampton to structure my reflection.

Description: What happened?

A trainee teacher had written ‘class discussion’ in their lesson plan but the observed practice was teacher-led Q&A. My feedback was about how hard it was to hold a class discussion, and maybe they needed to think about how they could structure the discussion differently, or use questions differently. What followed was a useful conversation (I hope) but I came away remembering similar conversations with trainees in previous years and I was left asking myself ‘Why do I keep having this conversation?’, ‘Does it make sense to the student?’, ‘What are they gaining from it?’.

Interpretation: What is the most interesting idea from this event? How can it be explained with theory? 

For me, the most meaningful aspect of the event was considering the difference and purpose of class discussion and questioning. These have been two aspects of pedagogy that I have struggled with in my own practice (see Hardy 2004), which might be a factor in its significance for me. Alternatively this might be due to my frustration with trainees’ lesson planning, their understanding of classroom talk and the different types. Mortimer and Scott   (in Pollard 2014) identify four types of communicate approaches:

1. Interactive/dialogic

2. Non-interactive/dialogic

3. Interactive/ authoritative

4. Non-interactive/ authoritative

(Mortimer and Scott 2007 in Pollard 2014, p.314)

What I think I usually see in trainee teacher’s lessons is interactive/authoritative talk, where they are asking questions to guide the pupils to a specific point of view, but when planning the trainee calls sees it as interactive/dialogic talk (class discussion).

Outcome: What have I learned from this?

Having read more about these four approaches and used them to analyse my feedback and the students’ lessons it’s helped me recognise that I rely on an interactive/authoritative talk during the post-lesson feedback. I know that a more productive method of helping them understand how they are communicating is by having an exploratory conversation (interactive/dialogic). For example by exploring with the trainee who has written ‘classroom discussion’ but actually asked closed questions we both might come to a new perspective and understanding of what was happening and how this could be different in the future. I think this could be an important process for me to continue practicing because it will help me adapt my approach and also help my trainees see the value in 'engaging in a process of systematic and informed enquiry’  (Philpott 2013, p.20).

References

Hardy, A., 2004. Questioning styles: observations of differences in practice at key stage 2 and key stage 3.  In: Sheffield, 2004. 2004: DATA. Available at: http://bit.ly/11GPpzz [Accessed 20 November 2014]
Philpott, C., 2013. Who has all the answers in education (and why should you believe them)?  In: C. Mercier, C. Philpott and H. Scott, eds.,  Professional issues in secondary teaching [electronic resource]. London: SAGE, 2013, pp. 7-22.
Pollard, A., 2014.  Reflective teaching in schools [electronic resource]. 4th edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Looking for more?

I came across an activity from the companion website for Reflective Teaching in Schools that I think would help student teachers understand how their lessons actually happen:

·       To consider the qualities of interaction in a lesson

Food security: a topic for design and technology

At the beginning of the term my colleague, Beverley Lawe,  led a seminar for year 2 about ‘Food Security’, part of the module Design and Technology in Education and Society; today I followed this up by exploring with the students this topic's potential use in D&T. In this post I’m sharing some of our discussion, beginning with a summary of the topic and then presenting three possible activities in which food security could be used as a starting point. These activities use the NTU D&T curriculum model as a framework.

World diet

As the world population’s diet changes to reflect the perceived affluent diet of western countries, which includes meat as a staple element, there is a greater demand on arable land to produce food for the animals rather than for people to eat. The land needed to feed an animal which will be slaughtered is greater than the land needed to feed a person from vegetation (fruit, veg, wheat etc). Therefore we need to make some changes.

These changes could include:

• people eating less meat (Meat free Mondays campaign is an example of this)
• cultured meat (not meat but a simulation created in a test tube)

Power of the supermarkets

We had some debate as to whether it was the supermarkets driving this, or the consumer but this is the basic premise of our argument:

We focussed on the decreasing variety of different food products available (Aldi and Lidl are masters of this), for example: do you need a ‘finest’, ‘essentials’, and the branded versions of cream crackers? By restricting the choice they make the shopping experience simpler (no more dithering in the aisle) but there are consequences:

1. We come to expect the same ‘type’ of pasta/apple/cracker throughout the year, which forces the supermarkets to source some of these from overseas. This particularly affects fresh fruit and veg being imported and means we tend not to buy seasonal or local.
2. We become accustomed to a particular taste and always buy the same ones; the apple is an example of this. Golden Delicious apples have dominated the market for a while, they are easy to produce with a consistent smell, taste and appearance; consequently there is now an impoverished choice of apples on the supermarket shelves. Work by Hogg (see Kierl 2014, p.80) in 1875 recorded 475 varieties of apples.

I’m not claiming to have all of my facts correct here but I think I’ve captured the essence of what the students have remembered from Beverley’s seminar.

My question to year 2 was: How can this topic be relevant for D&T? We discussed this today and I proposed the following ideas using the NTU D&T curriculum model as a framework.

Mainly designing

A conceptual approach could be taken with the world diet; ask pupils in groups to use data about the increasing world population, its wealth and change in diet (I’m sure geography teachers could help out here). Ask some pertinent ‘What if..?’ questions to try and think about the future.  

From here pupils could identify some positive and negative consequences about the increased demand for meat. You could begin to explore these situations with them:

• How could we increase the amount of land for growing vegetation to feed people (or animals)?
• Why do people want to eat meat? What’s the alternative?
• How could we encourage people on a large scale to change their eating habits? I’ve deliberately suggested large scale as the idea isn’t in this activity to design and make a food product, instead maybe a campaign or programme.

Mainly making

This activity could start with familiarising pupils with the alternatives to meat, some already available (e.g. tofu and quorn), some in development (e.g. cultured meat) or just no-meat food products. To start with pupils could blind taste test food products that do not include any meat product, in groups with focussed questions.

The next stage could be to give groups a non-meat alternative to test and experiment with, e.g. boiling, frying, roasting, raw etc. This is an investigative part of making that is very successful with food.

Finally pupils could be asked to modify an existing recipe that contains meat, removing the meat component and replacing it with a alternative but not compromising on taste or appearance.

In this activity the design decisions pupils make are technical, constructional and aesthetic, they are not being asked to consider the market or the concept; this in my opinion is what makes it a ‘mainly making’ activity.

Designing and making

Starting with the power of the supermarkets as a concept and the ‘impoverished choice’ of different varieties of fruit and veg on the supermarket shelves (e.g. carrots or apples), pupils could design a marketing campaign for a local food supplier that specialises in a particular fruit or veg or a local speciality. This is obviously a seasonal brief, with different food produce being used dependent on locality.

All of these have a central component of Design and Technology in Society, the fourth component of NTU's curriculum model, allowing pupils to explore the consequences and possible solutions to this local, national and international food dilemma.

To many D&T teachers these activities are nothing new, but to some of our undergraduate trainee teachers they are, and a main aim of the module is to challenge them to think about how topics, such as food security, can be used in D&T lessons.

If you want to know more about food security Beverley asked year 2 to listen to a podcast from the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme.

If you want to know more about the NTU D&T curriculum model read the paper I presented with David Barlex in New Zealand last year, pages 214-218.

Reference
Kierl, S., 2014. Ethical Technological Literacy. In: J.R.Dakers, ed. Defining Technological Literacy. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

What's in a name? or where's the 'and' in design technology?

Earlier in the week I took to Twitter to ask the provocative question: What is our subject called? This followed an innocent comment on a blog where design and technology was called ‘Design Technology’ and a journalist in the Guardian talking about their experiences in design technology. Both irritated me and by Monday afternoon I couldn’t keep my irritation to myself; but why should it irritate me? I want to cover two points in this post to help answer that question: firstly an explanation of the subject title, and secondly why getting it right is important.

At the inception of the National Curriculum, prior to 1990 (Wakefield and Owen-Jackson 2013), a working party defined the subject (DES1988) and called it design and technololgy.  So there it is: design AND technology. I could end there but its useful to consider why the ‘and’, why ‘design’ not just ‘technology’ and vice versa.

The ‘and’ exists for a purpose. As Tristram Shepard pointed out in a tweet  ‘design technology’ as a noun does not exist, but there is ‘design’ and there is ‘technology’; The ‘and’ brings together two existing nouns, ‘design’ and ‘technology’, as a compound noun and therefore a ‘unitary concept’ (DES1988, p.2). The explanation in the working in the report is so clear I will repeat it here:

‘…most, but not all, design activities will generally include technology and most technology activities will include design… our use of design and technology a unitary concept, to be spoken in one breath as it were, does not therefore embody redundancy. It is intended to emphasis the intimate connection between the two activities as well as to imply a concept, which is broader than either design or technology individual, and the whole of which we believe is educationally important. (Accordingly we use design and technology a compound noun taking the singular form of verbs…) (p.2)

It is not two parts ‘design’ and ‘technology’ as was suggested in the first, and atrocious, rewrite of the new National Curriculum (Department of Education 2013). For the sake of repetition to highlight the importance: it is a unitary concept represented as a compound noun ‘to be spoken in one breath’ (1988, p.2).

This name does have implications for the curriculum delivery, content and epistemology, which lead to my second point: the importance of getting the name right.

Wakefield and Owen-Jackson (2013) remind us that for a brief period design and technology was a subsidiary of a subject called technology; this included business studies and IT. The consequence here was a combination of mismatched subjects, with different types of knowledge and purposes. As a comparison in other countries the subject is called technology or a subsidiary of faculty of subjects (see Dugger Jr 2009, and Ginestié 2009). These scenarios come from or result in different approaches and purposes to (design and) technology* education (de Vries 2012). I think Ginestie (2009) thinks this arises from the ‘lack of clarity of a defined epistemology for (design and) technology*, which is the argument the Expert Panel (Design and Technology Association 2011) for removing D&T as a foundation subject. I am not going to explore the epistemology of our subject here that is for another blog post (once I have delved into work by Kurt Seeman).

I’ve touched on the name change but now I want to question the impact of the changing name. What was design and technology called when you were at school? My history in D&T is this:

·      Primary school: nothing

·      Secondary school:

o   First year (1981): woodwork, metalwork, domestic science, sewing, drawing, painting and pottery;

o   Second and third year (1982-84): all of the above, except woodwork and metalwork;

o   Fourth and fifth years (1984-86): O level Graphical Communication

o   A level (1986-88): Design, Craft and Technology (DCT)

D&T’s history is important; Martin (2013) proposes five design and technology eras. My ideas about these five eras, name/s related to the subject and the approximate years they took place in:

• Era of making: Students in this period studied subjects such as craft, technical drawing and sewing between 1970 and 1986.
• Era of personalizing: this was between 1985 & 1990; a very short period and I relate it to my own experiences when I did DCT (the Welsh version of CDT);
•  Era of designing; during the first iteration of the National Curriculum between 1990 & 1996 with the focus from the four attainment targets ((Wakefield and Owen-Jackson 2013).
• Era of manufacturing; 1995 to 2005 linked to the instigation and implementation of Tomlinson’s report (2004) resulting in Diplomas and GCSEs including Engineering and Manufacturing.
• Era of valuing; 2000 to 2007 saw a greater focus in the whole National Curriculum on values, ethics and citizenship. No changes to the subject name were made but there was a shift in emphasis, which I think led to the ‘Importance Statements’ (2007).

My history in being a student of D&T straddles the eras of making and personalizing, and this probably had an effect on my naming and teaching of the subject. Consequently I probably projected an incorrect image of design and technology to my peers and stakeholders of the subject.

To summarise the name is the subject’s identity, calling it by any other name implies a different subject. The purpose and focus of design and technology is all in its name; call it by another name and it becomes a different subject with a different purpose.

I would welcome your thoughts on the name, how a name defines a subject and any other thoughts you have regarding the comments I have made here.

References

De Vries, M., 2012. Philosophy of Technology.  In: P.J. Williams, ed.,   Technology Education for Teachers. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012, pp. 15-33.
Department of Education, 2013.  The National Curriculum in England Framework document (February 2013). London: Department of Education.
Design and Technology Association, 2011.  Report by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum review (DfE, December 2011) [online]. Design and Technology Association. Available at: http://bit.ly/14GHAZv [Accessed July 24 2013].
Dugger Jr, W.E., 2009. Developments in technology education in the United States of America. International Handbook of Research and Development in Technology Education, , 65-84.
Ginestié, J., 2009. Thinking about technology education in France. International Handbook of Research and Development in Technology Education, , 31-40.
Great Britain. Department for Education and Science and the Welsh Office, 1988.  
National Curriculum Design and Technology Working Group Interim Report. London: DES.
Great Britain. Department for Education and Skills, 2004.  Final Report of the Working Group on 14-19 Reform. Nottingham: DfES.
Martin, M., 2013. Five Eras of Making and Designing.  In: PATT27 Technology Education for the Future: A Play on Sustainability, Chirstchurch, New Zealand, 2-6 December 2013. pp. 318-324.
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007.  The National Curriculum : statutory requirements for key stages 3 and 4. London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
Wakefield, D., and Owen-Jackson, G., 2013. Government policies and design and technology education. Debates in Design and Technology Education, , 7.

*I would prefer to write design and technology here but the authors refer to technology education in their writing.

With thanks to David Barlex for pointing me in the direction of the Parkes report, and Tristram Shepard, Jo Hayes and Matt McLain for their views on the name, which helped clarify my thinking.

DfE discussion about CPD

I've just picked up this hashtag (#dfecpd) on Twitter today and I'm wondering what D&T teachers CPD needs are:

• Did you need more support in your NQT year about subject pedagogy?
• Are their problems with location and access to CPD?
• Is technology the answer to accessing CPD?
• How can local ITT, Teaching Schools and universities, providers help?
• What impact are TeachMeets having on your subject pedagogy?

I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Tweets about "#DfECPD"

To find out about CPD at NTU's Centre for Design and Technology visit our blog.

Top 10 hints for part time PhD students

Another new role - Graduate School student rep for the School of Education at NTU. This means I now have a voice at the university as a student as well as a member of staff (I just like to talk!). As part of this I've met a new part time education PhD student at NTU (Welcome Jim!) to share some of the highs and lows of being part time. Whilst talking I realised that I was listing a top ten of hints for part time study so thought I'd share them here in two shorter lists:

Technology:

1. Use evernote: I find it hard to justify spending money on apps and subscriptions but this one is worth every penny. The best bits: As I type a new note into Evernote it finds related notes - a godsend for me as I only have a bit of time on the bus to write and I can't carry all those notebooks with me. 
2. Get a twitter acount: its fun, its a distraction and then there's hastags..... Particulalry #phdchat and #ptphd (I think there is only me using this one)
3. Read PhD blogs: and not just by current PhD students but also those written by supervisors.
4. Use an online referencing site. At NTU Refworks is available and I'm quite happy with it. Why: anything I find via Google Scholar in my five minutes of time I put straight into Refworks ready for me to go back to, to cite and to use - a time saver.
5. Join an online group which helps you and you can give back to. I started the DTE google group after PATT27 in Christchurch. There were 12 or so phd students at the conference whose thesis focusses on technology education with no online meeting place - so I set one up, which links to point 3 below.

Practicalities/social:

1. Read the university regulations and plan for key dates: I took a while to realise that this is part of my PhD study; understanding the regulations and expectations are important.
2. Writing: 1. Do some everyday (or so): there's lots out there about writing everyday (Elbow, Goodson etc) but you do need to find out what fits you. Talking to Helen Sword last December I realised I was becoming a slave to the 'everyday' expectation (I have enough hair shirts in my wardrobe without adding another). 2. Read about writing: this is my thing at the moment. I've got to be careful it doesn't distract me from actually writing but I know I need to improve the style of my writing. Poor writing detracts from content - if I'm spending all this time doing good quality, well thought through research, which I hope is ground breaking, I want it to be readable.
3. Meet up with other PT PhD students: whether online or face to face. This has helped me enormously, I don't feel so alone.
4. Don't despair: you're part time, it's a marathon not a sprint. There will be periods when you don't get much done, which leads me onto my next point....
5. Thinking about your literature, muling over your data collection, jotting notes, spending 10 minutes here and there - these all count as your PhD time.