On Monday I was sitting in the maths base at break time chatting to my colleagues when a sheepish face appeared at the door.  It was boy A (who appeared in a previous magic moment), a pupil of mine last session. When he arrived at high school two years ago there were serious questions about whether he would cope in mainstream secondary education, and he has struggled at times.

“Erm, I’m wanting to speak to Mr Jones” he mumbled, so I went out into the corridor to see him.  He asked me if I remembered showing Google Sketchup to him and his classmates last year (I did).  He told me that he had been playing with it, and wondered if I would like to see the models he had created. I said yes, of course, and he said he would bring them in.

At lunchtime today he turned up with a heavy bag over his shoulder.  He unloaded his old laptop and proceeded to show me his work.  He has made a brilliant model of an Xbox console  and some really intricate houses – and has uploaded his work to the 3D Warehouse.

He was so proud of what he had achieved and I was so proud of him – proud and honoured that he wanted to show his work to me.  I called in Craig, who teaches him this year – -  “You must see this stuff!” and we all had a play with the models in Sketchup.

A magic moment

Everyone has one of two basic mindsets.  If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone – either you have them or you don’t.  You must prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs.  This is the path of stagnation.  If you have a growth mindset, however, you know that talents can be developed at that great abilities are built over time.  This is the path of opportunity and success.

This makes a lot of sense to me.  I have inevitably been wondering about the mindsets of those around me, and about my own mindset.  It would be indiscreet to try to judge others here, so I’ll do a bit of navel gazing!

I most definitely grew up with the fixed mindset.  I caught it from my Mum (notice that those with the fixed mindset tend to look outside themselves for things to blame!).  She constantly told me how clever I was. Not how hard I was trying, but how clever I was. And she still does, bless her.

Fixed mindset people tend to shun hard work, because it exposes them to the risk of failing without the get-out clause of “well I didn’t really try very hard anyway.”  In their world-view, such a failure demonstrates an intrinsic weakness in themselves, rather than just a temporary setback.

I can see clearly how the fixed mindset let me down at various stages in my education.  I applied to Cambridge to study maths, but when they gave me an offer which I doubted I would be able to achieve, I turned down the offer rather than accepting the challenge.  And when I was told by a tutor at Edinburgh University that I was doing well but would have to work harder in final year in order to achieve a first class honours degree, I chose to relax and “settle” for a  2:1 (not that the 2:1 came easily, but I consciously chose not to do the work required to be in with a chance of a first).

I can also see how one’s mindset can change.

At school I was a very low achiever in PE – a report card comment said (and I quote verbatim) “Tries hard but achieves little success” (the fact that I remember that after 30 years says something about how it made me feel, by the way).  But I clearly remember the one time that I enjoyed PE .  We had an 8 week block of circuit training, in which we kept records of timings and monitored progress.  I saw myself improve, and was delighted.  For a brief moment I had a growth mindset towards PE.  But then we went back to high jump, and the usual raised eyebrows from the PE teacher as I failed to reach the lowest height setting of the bar.

I think teaching changed my mindset for good.  I came into teaching thinking that I could change education, and pretty soon discovered that I wasn’t even a very good teacher!  I was left with a stark choice – quit, or start working as hard as I could to master the craft of teaching.  For once, I rose to the challenge, and here I am 18 years later.  I don’t have to work as hard now as I did in those first few years, but I am acutely aware of the fact that my competence as a teacher has little to do with innate ability and a lot to do with hard work, perseverance and a willingness to learn from my mistakes (which continue to happen on a daily basis!).

I have not finished Mindset, and have not begun to reflect in any depth upon the extent to which my classroom practice fosters either the fixed or the growth mindsets.  But I shall endeavour to undertake that reflection in the growth mindset.

10 years ago I decided to move on from Newbattle High School, and began applying for other teaching jobs in what was a very competitive environment.  When I eventually secured a position at North Berwick High School it was the 13th job that I had applied for. I had a dozen unsuccessful interviews!  So I know a little bit about how it feels to get the phone call that isn’t good news – and how unsatisfying it is when you are told that it was a tough decision.  So it is with some hesitation that I say that it was, indeed, a tough decision.

I’d like to thank all those who applied.  The strength of the candidates, many of whom were NQTs, gives me great hope for the future of our profession.

Let’s not do that job hundreds of times over in isolation. Let’s do it together in a way that enables us to build on each other’s discoveries, and refine our judgements about which resources really help to deliver excellence.

Staff at Angus Council have done a power of work to list resources for each outcome in the maths and numeracy documents. But at present this list is only available within Glow, and is in a static format.

At North Berwick High School, we began transferring all our lists of hyperlinks to http://www.delicious.com some time ago, at http://www.delicious.com/tag/nbhsmaths and today I discovered a much more extensive collection at http://delicious.com/renfrewshiremaths, which tags every link with the code for a specific outcome.

From now on we will be using the same tags for maths links when I add them to delicious, and I would encourage any other maths teachers in Scotland to do the same. I’m not sure yet whether or not the RenfrewshireMaths collection includes the Angus Council lists. If not, I’ll start adding them this weekend.

Every young person coming into our department should be valued, respected and nurtured by us unconditionally.

The value I am seeking to describe here is crystal clear to me.  Whether or not the phrase in bold captures it clearly for others is another matter!

I am not trying to be innovative here.  I am sure that this value is held dear by almost every teacher, and has been written about at length by many others more eloquent than I (read Don Ledingham on “unconditional positive regard” for example).  I am simply trying to express as clearly as I can what it is that sits at the heart of my passion for teaching.

For me this is about how we behave towards the young people in our department, not just how we think or feel.  In fact it is sometimes necessary for us to behave in accordance with this value despite the way we are thinking or feeling.

Lest anyone think that there is anything weak or soft about this value, I should finish by emphasising that we fail to value, respect and nurture our students unless we demand the very highest standards of behaviour, mutual respect and personal effort from them.

The vacancy arose as a result of the approaching retirement of my current PT, Simon Smith.  It has been a great privilege to work under Simon’s leadership, and he has provided me with a wonderful working environment over the last 9 years.  I will be very proud of myself if I manage to offer the same levels of trust and support to my team over the coming years.

I have lots of plans, but I think I should share them with the department before I post them here.  Suffice it to say that some involve social web tools some do not

I must say a huge thank you to all the people who offered me advice, encouragement and support over the last few months.  I could not have done it without you all.

My Web delivers pretty much all the new stuff from all the sites that interest me to a single page set up to make it very easy for me to see at a glance what is new. I have complete control over what appears on this page and can add new sources with a couple of clicks of my mouse.

My Web connects me to a huge network of educators from whom I learn lots, with whom I discuss important stuff as well as silly stuff, and to whom I pass on cool new stuff I have picked up.

My Web provides me with free office tools that I can access on any connected device, as well as a calendar that I share with my family – my Web is the place where I store most of my documents and photos.

My Web lets me create my own rich web applications and host them free online for me and other people to use.

My Web is pretty awesome! Personalised, customisable, flexible and very comfortable to be in.

If I had to describe the Web of a large number of my colleagues I guess it would go something like this:

“There’s a button on the bottom of the screen that you click and it brings up the Internet [starting at either the school homepage or the Web site of their ISP if they are at home].  You click on a link [or a bookmark maybe] to go to your email.  You can search for Web sites by going to Google [bookmark or type 'Google' in the URL bar].  You get to a Web site you know by typing its name into Google.”

Nothing more.  For them the Web is place of endless information , but limited, specific functionality.  For you and me the Web is a place of endless functionality waiting to be discovered or invented.  If I want to do something online, it is my expectation that I’ll be able to find a site that offers that functionality.

My Web is better!  I wonder how long it will be before enough people realise this in education, and we begin to teach teachers how to construct their own effective Webs.  Such a program is as vital today as the NOF ICT training was 5-6 years ago.

This week I saw him doing something different on Coconut Run.  I asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he was making a catapult!  Another boy in the base had had the idea, and it had caught on amongst the others.

The creativity of young people amazes me.  You can see some more fantastic creations on Youtube.

This week we were doing the old “join the dots” investigation from Standard Grade which looks at how you can generate circular patterns from simple formulas using modular arithmetic. They completed the bits I had intended them to do in a period of one hour.

The next lesson, boy A asked “can we do some of those join the dot patterns really big today – like on a poster?” My lesson plan did not involve anything to do with the investigation, but I didn’t rule it out. I asked them to think individually in silence for 2 minutes about exactly how we would do what the boy had suggested, then gathered the thoughts of the class.

They identified that the two key  problems would be: drawing a really big circle on a poster and; marking 18 equidistant points on the circumference.

We had a fruitful discussion about ways of drawing a big circle, until boy B  said (obviously excited about his idea) “draw a big circle on the [interactive] whiteboard and we can hold our posters up to it and trace it.” Following this, girl C  said “and we could use the protractor on the whiteboard to mark out the points around the edge.”

Problem solved!  Now, this episode felt very different from usual class discussion, for at least these two reasons:

• the problem was authentic, in the sense that failure was a real possibility, and failure would mean that we would return to my original lesson plan;
• I did not have solutions to the problem up my sleeve.  I had no idea how we might proceed.

They were really fired up about making the big patterns, and a member of senior management happened to come in to the class about 20 minutes before the end of the lesson.  I made a point of telling her in earshot of the class how boy A had come up with the idea for the lesson, and how boy B and girl C had come up with the creative solutions that had allowed the activity to take place.

Boy B, who has serious emotional and behavioural problems, was obviously delighted with his achievement, and left the class with fists in the air saying “that was my best maths lesson EVER!”

A magic moment.

• developing an application on Google Appengine service
• running a school ski trip
• mandolin trivia
• researching my father’s experiences in WW2
• supporting (and learning from) student teachers and probationers
• pondering applying for a PT job
• trying to decide on a new mobile phone (G1?)
• refactoring FreeMIS to work with Rails 2.2

Maybe I’ll get round to writing some of these when I get back from the school ski trip, which departs on Saturday morning.