thesisthoughts

I haven’t been around here (or my studies) for ages…

Work is extremely intensive and having three Professional Learning courses still going is keeping me more than busy. When I am exhausted after a full day at school and have to take the long drive to one of the Teacher PD centres, I try to tell myself that I am collecting experiences for my PhD.

I can say that the courses are going really well, and the comments and feedback I receive from the participants are excellent. When I finished the sessions in Z, most of the teachers told the staff of the centre that they are interested in an additional course next year. As I enjoyed the group I am happy about that and by then I should (must) have my ethics clearance so that the course will be included in my research – interviews, questionnaires and all).

I decided not to attend the sessions with Amanda Berry as I am taking two days off in two weeks time to attend the Israeli Qualitative Research Conference at Ben Gurion Uni in the south. The conference looks interesting and I am especially looking forward to hearing Prof Carolyn Ellis and Prof Arthur Bochner.

I’m sure the conference will give me a boost of energy and as I have both the Purim and the Passover holidays coming up, that is what I need. I am planning to lock myself away somewhere in the holidays (school maybe?) so that I can think, plan, read and write.

In addition, I am happy to announce that my proposal for Israel’s first International Conference on Academic Writing has been accepted! My paper “Teacher writing for Professional Learning” will appear on the program. The conference is in the Israeli summer, at the end of July.

Another new experience for me will be my first meeting with the group of 3 doctoral students that invited me to join their informal sessions. This group is based around academic writing and meets once every two months, each time in a different home. At each meeting, one member presents written texts for discussion and feedback. After my first meeting on Tuesday I will try to blog the experience. 

Finally, I am looking forward to a series of workshops being run by Monash for HDR students from all campuses. I have signed up as an online participant and once a month, on Fridays, I will have some live input and academic content and communications. Here it will be 2am Thursday night but… who cares?

Something to look at…

Yesterday we finished the 30 hour course at Z . Although I haven’t finished reading the participants’ responses yet, I know that many of the teachers and their principals have asked to organize a new course, an additional 30 hours. It is good to know that most of the participants completed the program and were left with  a desire to continue, to learn more. Many commented that they were in the midst of an exciting process with their pupils and feel the need to hear more. There was total agreement that the course should be 60 hours long and not 30.

The atmosphere was positive although it certainly was a bit noisier than usual. I related some of the noise to the pressure teachers are under at the moment – all have parent teacher evenings at this time and reports are due to be handed in in the next few weeks.

Yesterday’s session was about children with difficulties learning to write but only a brief introduction – last year, in the 60 hr course, I devoted at least two sessions to this important topic.

When I described the assignment there was agreement that the task is fair and nobody started panicking as they did last year. They were assured by the assessment rubric I presented together with the task and one of the participants commented that I really do practice what I preach.

This interesting group was extremely appreciative and convinced me with their comments and thanks that this learning experience (as short as it may be), really made a difference to the way they teach writing, see themselves as teachers of literacy and most important, changed the way they look at their pupils. Even if only some of this is retained, it was well worth my time and effort.

There is no such beautiful walkway anywhere around here, or at least I haven’t found it, but I have been invited to wander down a new and promising path.

When I went to the lecture by Dr Clandinin in Jerusalem, I was asked for a lift  by a doctoral student who lives an hour or so from me. On the long drive home we had a great chat about her work and mine, about taking first steps in academia and of course about the seminar we had just attended. On the way, she told me that she was a participant in a small group of doctoral students and researchers which meets every two months or so to read work in progress, to discuss it and to give and receive feedback.

This week I received an email inviting me to join this group and of course I happily accepted.  Although I really don’t have time to take on more obligations, this is an opportunity too good to miss. I need to talk about my work and research in general with people, face to face. I also need to begin to understand how the academic world ticks over here. Again, I am feeling the loneliness of off campus research and if I am serious about pulling this through and successfully doing the work I am dreaming of doing, I need to develop additional support frameworks.

This morning I sent the four group members a letter of introduction and I will attend my first meeting in early February. I’m looking forward to it!

royalty free photo: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=244692

It seems that more and more of the Monash Education faculty members are venturing over to this part of the world. I was thrilled to discover, a moment ago, that Dr Amanda Berry will be here at the end of january and will be giving a series of workshops.

How will I get out of work for those?

Last Wednesday I took part in a workshop with Professor Jean Clandinin. As I sat waiting for the session to begin I drafted a blog post – here it is…

I’m sitting in the auditorium of the Henrietta Szold Institute in Jerusalem. I got out of bed at 4:30, made sandwiches for the kids, got ready and left the house at 5:30 am.

I took a day off work to come here and I have left all my work overload and other business behind to be here. I’m excited, waiting for the lecture and workshop to begin. I have just heard that Clandinin has been in Israel before, at least twice.

Again, I feel somewhere stuck in the middle…

“Where are you from?” they asked me at the registration desk. They weren’t referring to where I live, they were asking about my professional affiliation. I stuttered… What should I say, they don’t have time for long explanations. It sounds ridiculous to say: “Oh, Monash University, Melbourne Australia.” What would that mean to them? To say, “Oh, I’m from the Ofakim Primary school” doesn’t sound better. “Then what are you doing here?”  they would ask me. To explain that I am a leader of professional development in the north etc would also have been too long winded. This was a workshop for teacher educators and research students in formal (local) frameworks. In the end I said “I live on Kibbutz Yizreel”.

The auditorium is almost empty – in one sense it is strange – Professor Clandinin is such a worldwide academic name but then, how many Israelis are interested in Narrative Inquiry? I certainly have no idea as this is the first Israeli research function I have attended. For me this was an opportunity I wasn’t prepared to miss.

Professor Clandinin is here, smiling and getting organized. My excitement has calmed down a fraction during the long wait. She is now trying to decipher the Hebrew print on the screen, doing  a great job too.

In the break I wrote:

… The material isn’t new to me at all but I am HEARING it instead of reading it and that is very different. I have used a lot of Clandinin’s articles and book chapters in my research and it was reassuring to go over the material in a different mode.

We were asked to choose an item in our bag or an item we have on us and write a story about it. Then we sat in groups of three and shared our stories. I found it interesting to be on the other side of an exercise like this. Usually I am the one asking educators to write. I was aware that three or four years ago this kind of activity would have been very nerve wracking and difficult for me. I was aware, yet again, that writing no longer is a threatening activity for me.

I will write more about the content of the workshop another day. I will just conclude saying that it was well worth the day off and the four hours driving.

The question I asked was: “I often feel as though I have to apologize for doing Narrative Inquiry. Would you say that Narrative Inquiry is now seen, internationally, as a more legitimate research method?”. Professor Clandinin’s answer was indeed reasssuring.

The course at Z is going extremely well. I feel as though the 26 teachers participating are involved and eager to try to change things in their writing instruction and that many are thinking about their own learning and really taking ideas and thoughts back to their classrooms.

Last week we had a virtual session and the task I gave was to write a professional narrative connected to the teaching of writing and/or writing with students. Beforehand we discussed the rational of the task and I even brought an example from last year’s group. Many of the participants in this group are not too computer confident and I was worried that they wouldn’t manage finding the virtual campus, posting their stories and responding to others. All in all my worries were unwarranted and most of the teachers wrote and posted narratives. At the moment they are reading and responding to other stories.

The night before this week’s session, I was busy collecting the stories (for future use…) and responding. I respond to each and every narrative and try to be involved in the responses too. Many of my responses at this stage are questions which will help in the revision process to come.

One story made my heart race and brought tears to my eyes. I read it again and again before I wrote a detailed response. Immediately I wrote an email to the teacher author and asked her permission to bring her narrative to the group session. She readily agreed.

O wrote that at our last session she wasn’t able to concentrate – not in my lecture, not on the PowerPoint presentation that went with it and not on the workshop we did together. She said that concentrating on the writing process wasn’t possible for her. O told that that morning she had been on a hike with her class and that at one stage an eight year old boy fell off a cliff. He was extremely lucky that he wasn’t killed and that he was only injured fairly lightly. She told of her experience, of the phone call from the principal telling her that the incident was already reported on the Internet, of the terror, the helplessness and the frustration of not being able to protect her student.

O went home after our session and didn’t sleep all night. She was terrified of walking into the classroom the next morning and facing this reality. The injured child was in hospital and she had a whole classroom of traumatized children to deal with. After hours of deliberation, O remembered what we had been talking about in the course session and decided, at 4 am when she finally got out of bed, to devote the day to writing with her pupils. She decided to spend the day writing with her students to different audiences with different goals.

Lacking confidence, O entered the classroom and after a brief discussion, explained to the pupils what they could do. Some wrote to their injured friend in hospital, some wrote to the people responsible for the hiking trail, some wrote thank you letters to the parents who helped on the hike and helped deal with the complex situation and some wrote rules for behavior on trips outside school. During the writing time, O was free to move between the pupils and talk privately to each and every one of them. She could hear how they were coping and how they were feeling.

The pupils wrote and wrote. O was surprised that even her weakest students, those that usually refrain from writing, were creating important texts. She wrote that she sensed that the act of writing was helping these children process the experience and regain confidence and control. She admitted that the classroom interactions, the writing and the activity helped her regain her self confidence as a teacher. The pupils were so involved in this process that they asked to continue the next day, they had discovered that they enjoyed writing for real purposes and for real audiences. They had experienced writing as a means of sincere self expression.

A few days later O decided to tell this story as her narrative about writing. She told her story bravely and as a result received a lot of positive and supportive feedback from the other teachers. This event has changed the way O sees writing instruction and has changed the way many of her pupils view writing tasks.

One of the questions I asked O was whether she had told her principal about the way she decided to cope in the classroom. She replied that she hadn’t . I suggested she show the principal (if not all the other staff) her narrative – they can all learn from it as we did in the group.

Since reading  O’s story she is with me all the time. I am thinking about her terrifying experience, about her coming to my course after such a traumatic event and not telling anyone and about how she used writing to help her students recover.

Apart from receiving a lot of satisfaction that the materials we discuss in the course are making a real difference in the professional lives of teachers and their pupils, I was excited to see the process of writing itself encouraging the creation of new texts. O described how the writing done by her pupils encouraged her and stimulated her to write and I told her that her narrative had stimulated me to write a narrative of my own. I have no doubt that the writing of many teachers in the course will be enriched by the sharing of O’s story.

In a reflective discussion in her classroom, O told her pupils that she too had written a story after the traumatic event. Her pupils were very curious to hear that their teacher enjoyed the benefits of  writing too.

I still have a lot of thinking to do about the links between O’s story and the learning in our course and about professional narratives being links in a chain, a chain which strengthens and supports both writers and readers.

I am waiting to read the responses on the online forum, to see O’s text revised and to see the influence of O’s story on other narratives being created by teachers in the group.

The location of the hike.

Picture: http://tiyulim.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post_19.html

Yesterday on the way to Z I had time to stop at a coffee shop for a break. I knew I would have time to do some work so I brought a book on teaching writing and my notebook for free writing. When my sandwich and coffee arrived I had to decide what I would do. I decided to free write on a topic worrying me at the moment and as a result made a decision which turned out to be an important one.

I wrote:

“I have been thinking a lot about cutting the course down from 60 hours to 30 hours. I can see myself making a lot of mistakes. At the moment it is irrelevant that I don’t agree with the cut in hours or that I am frustrated that I had no say in the matter. What is relevant now is how I choose to use those 30 hours available to me and I how I make them significant enough for the teachers to come back for more.

I must be wary of trying to pack too much into too little time. What I can see happening is me racing through the “material” and not letting the teachers talk, collaborate on and process what is being learned. Slow down should be my message to myself. Giving the teachers time to discuss what they have been doing in the classroom since the last session is not a waste of time – it is reflection, it is socially processing the new knowledge.

If each teacher presents her peers with a short oral narrative on something she is doing in her classroom or reflects aloud on questions she is dealing with, these must be seen as real learning activities.

I believe that in this way, the teacher participants will be more active in their learning, they will be taking responsibility for putting new knowledge into practice. They will possibly be made more aware of their learning.

last year at K there were a few teachers who complained that the course was too theoretical. They weren’t actively involved and didn’t understand that the activities and strategies presented could and should be explored in the classroom. If I had given 10 minutes at the beginning of each session for discussion in small groups, they would have heard what their peers were experiencing.”

When I finished my free writing (and my snack), I made a decision to change the timetable for the session.  I really had planned too much. After the session I was convinced that I had made the right decision. The discussions and the writing exercises really were essential.

This decision will mean that that there will be topics I don’t touch this year but tht is realistic when I remember that I only have 30 hours…

 Image: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=240700

Yesterday I opened course number 2 for the present school year, close to home, at A. I heard, ahead of time, that they had closed the enrollment (at 30) because there were too many teachers but in fact there were only 26 in the group. I was so worried that there would be a large group that I planned the session a bit differently.

My main problem in planning the opening session was that I knew that a few of the teachers had been present when I did a session for DK last year in her course at the same centre. When I stood in for her and did some introductory activities and a lecture on writing, I knew I would have a problem if the same teachers enrolled in my course. On the one hand I knew the taste of the course would encourage them to enrol but on the other hand, I wouldn’t be able to return to the introductory activities.

The group is very different to that in Z in that many of these teachers have been in contact with me in the past. At least 3 have studied in my courses on inclusion and four are from my school. At least 10 others teach at schools in which my professional learning colleagues work.

I haven’t had time to read their questionnaires yet but it will be interesting. I particularly want to read why they chose this course.

When I arrived at the centre I saw something that worried me greatly. There were teachers standing in a line and the receptionist was handing them a big folder (binder) of pages advertising courses and the teachers were choosing according to categories like “Oh, for this one I don’t need to use a computer” or “Great, this one finishes by…”. Is that how educators should be choosing their professional learning? Is that what happens when teachers are coerced into taking two 30 hr courses in a year? I want to hope that nobody chose my course for those kinds of reasons.

When we got to the stage when I asked the teachers to try out “looping” there was all over agreement and cooperation. Maybe the timer I brought did the trick? I asked them to free write on the topic of “Difficulties in Teaching Writing”, a topic they can all relate to. I put the clock on for three minutes and asked them to write quietly without stopping. Then I asked them to stop, to circle the 5 most important words they had written. I then gave them another three minutes on the clock to continue writing, this time concentrating on those five central terms. Apart from the teacher who corrected maths exams throughout the whole session (3 hours!), they were all quiet and did quite a bit of writing.

This wider participation may have been due to several reasons:

• The teachers were trying out a strategy to be used in the classroom
• I wrote on the program for the course that teachers would be expected to write
• It is that kind of group…

I told them that the discussion on how they felt during the writing and how they reacted to the task would be in the virtual campus so I better set up the discussion group quickly. There is no doubt that I will find the 30 hour time limit frustrating. I need to be careful that it isn’t always the collaborative work and the discussions that I skip.

This week I have my second session at Z – I had a few email responses which were very positive.

Yesterday afternoon I set off for my long drive to Z. I was very excited to meet my new group, and hoped that we would get off to a good start. There were supposed to be 28 in the group but only 22 turned up for the first session.

The staff at the centre were waiting for me and the room and the technology were all fine. As soon as I had my computer set up, teachers started arriving.

This group is different from others I have worked with in that 90% of the teachers are from a very religious backgrounds and they teach in very religious schools. It will be interesting to see how they bring their school experiences to the sessions and to learn from them about their environment. I must ask them about their Internet access – often these families have limited Internet experience and facilities.

The room was set up with tables and chairs all facing the front in a horseshoe and I didn’t move them yesterday. I will definitely set them up differently next time, in order to promote small group discussion. As a result, the first meeting was more lecture style than I would have liked.

One of the conclusions I reached after last year was that I have to be more direct in explaining to the teachers what hey can take to the classroom and what my expectations are of them between sessions. Last year I encouraged them to take as much of their learning as possible to the classroom, but not all of the teachers understood the links. Those that did understand and tried the big and the little strategies and tools in the classroom, got a lot more from the learning experience. Yesterday I was very specific: “This is an important question to ask your students”, “Did you notice that I gave you all very small pieces of paper? This is so… In the classroom…”, “In the next two weeks, until we meet again, fill in this table which will help you examine what is happening in your classroom…”.

I am extremely frustrated that the Department of Education decided to cut all courses down from the compulsory 60 hours from last year to 30 hours this year. Instead of all teachers learning one 60 hour course, they are required to choose two different 30 hour courses. What can you do and learn in 30 hours? It isn’t enough to form any kind of learning community, especially when there are 25-30 teachers in the group. In my mind I have made a decision: rather than complain about it all the time, I will see this course as part A in a series. If it’s good they’ll come back for more.

It is frustrating that the desicion makers ”up above” don’t listen to the teachers’ feedback (which said that the 60 hours facilitates deeper, more relevant learning) or current research on professional learning (sustained, ongoing…)

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, I believe that in the US, 16 hours is considered a long course.

Next week I will do the same program with another new group, they are located at K.