Mass Observation Results

Okay, I know that scientifically this is utterly meaningless and a very limited snapshot of students’ lives on a certain day with an infinitesimally small sample. However, in supporting the Mass Observation Project on 13th May, I did ask my classes to record a diary of what they did on that day.

The results – presented as a word cloud – look like this:

Not a terribly surprising set of words: the lexical field of education was predictably prominent with words like school, lesson, bell and subjects specific words such as Science and Maths. Time is an interestingly prominent word here as is talking and the prominence of mum over dad. On a small point, the prevalence of sat is also telling: students’ sedentary experience of education…

 

GCSE Exams and Blog Views

Hmmmm…

I wonder whether the fact that GCSE Prose From Other Cultures exam is on tomorrow accounts for the following spike in views of the blog in which I present my thoughts on Tsotsi…

Looking at the search terms linking the Internet to my blog, I think quite possibly that is the case!

Bless them!

And if anyone else wants to view it, the blog is here and the Tsotsi posts are here.

I wonder if any of those were my own students….

Good luck to you all tomorrow morning, but for now, for the sake of all that is sacred, get some sleep!

iGCSE First Language English 2013

This is it.

By now some of my Year 11s will have secured their first English GCSE grade.

It really is all out of my hands now.

And rarely if ever have I seen so many happy faces leave the exam room. Now I wonder whether “happy” is quite the right word. Content? Satisfied? Some were downright smug! The phrase

“I enjoyed that one!”

was heard. So yes, maybe, “happy” is the right word.

We’re talking of the iGCSE First Language English course, of course. Half our cohort were taking it alongside OCR GCSE. Our entry into the iGCSE route – or our leap for the iGCSE bandwagon, depending on how healthily high your cynicism levels are – has had a troubled gestation. Senior Leadership were looking to use it to maximise C grades; I was perhaps more interested in maximising A-A* grades and moving progress on from three to four levels; we have a high English to Language and Literature ratio which further complicates matters; our Speaking and Listening needed “juggling” to ensure compatibility with both OCR and CIE.

But we did it.

And I prepared them for it as best I could.

In fact the most gratifying response I heard from several students was that the revision classes I ran were really helpful and they knew exactly how to approach every question. I also took the opportunity of the captive audience to soliloquise about my approach to exams in general: they’re an opportunity to have fun, show off, and enjoy yourselves with language. And as they are dual entered, they could take the risks on the iGCSE that they may not want to take on the OCR course.

One student may have taken my advice at that point to heart. He sought me out yesterday to tell me how he had answered the question asking him to describe a place that was both old and powerful.

Which he took as an invitation to describe his own imagination.

Okay.

The right examiner in the right mood on the right day could really enjoy reading that!

Of course, Paper 3 on Friday did have two potentially problematic circumstances:

• one, we had our Leavers’ Service on that morning which reduced half the cohort to blubbing emotional wrecks, consuming tissues and snivelling onto their ties. And the girls cried a bit too!

• two, it clashed with Spanish so as the end-of-school bell went for everyone else, about 35 of our lovelies faced a second two-hour exam!

We did what we could to make it as little irksome as possible: I and our exams officer – who has my huge thanks – spent Thursday night baking lemon cupcakes, chocolate butterfly cakes and fairy cakes to keep their energy levels up in the break between exams and to make them feel cared for. Considering the circumstances the following phrase may be the most memorable:

“Best exam ever!“

Mass Observation

Just a thought, but if anyone was looking for a socially aware, cross curricular, literacy focused lesson, 12th May is Mass Observation Day, repeating the Mass Observation Day on 12th May 1937, the day of George VI’s coronation.

A nice lesson may start with an explanation of Mass Observation, an opportunity to write diaries for the day and perhaps an imaginative piece of writing exploring how life may have changed between 1937 and 2013?

To formally submit them to the project is possible – the link is here which also gives more explanation of the project http://www.massobs.org.uk/12may – but if you were to collate any diaries and / or stories written, you could do a nice colourful word cloud to display….

Class Allocation

As the year looms or lumbers towards its end, our thoughts turn to next year.

Who will teach which set?

Who has the C/D borderline Intervention students?

Who has that one Year Group who never seem to have settled down?

Who will be looked at to obtain our A and A* grades?

I like this time of year. As a Head of Department, I have the power to allocate class to teacher!

Whilst I am a lovely and kind person and I have asked whether anyone has any preferences, I am also aware of the following:

• As a manager, I want to allocate staff in a way which utilises and exploits their skills and strengths, whether that be in classroom management, inspiring the least able, challenging the most able, teaching boys, teaching AEN, teaching lower school or upper school;

• As a manager, I personally like the idea of giving everyone one year group with whom they have no contact: a parents’ evening off, one cycle of reports that you don’t have to do, a fresh start with that year group if you pick them up in the following year;

• As a leader, I want to place staff with sets that will complement their responsibilities:

• there seems little point giving a teacher with responsibility for Key Stage 3 no Key Stage 3 teaching; it seems absurd not to put a teacher with responsibility for transition into Year 7; it would be perverse to not put a Head of Year teaching her year group;

• And as a leader, I feel a responsibility to support the development of my staff.

• Shall I put this teacher who has joined us from a middle school in Key Stage 4 so that her CV can reflect success at that level? Should I put that teacher who has never taught Literature under the new specifications into a Literature class? Have the classes given provided enough range to allow that NQT to develop his skills?

It is a little bit like playing a game of tetris: certain staff have large amounts of time allocated elsewhere for SLT, Year Head, other curriculum areas; some of the concerns and focuses I have are conflicting; and sometimes the numbers simply don’t fit!

The tool I use to perform this task is this:

 

There is a list of classes on the left with various boxes to reflect the restrictions of banding, populations etc within the school; and beside each class are spaces to fill in the initials of the teacher. The number of spaces reflects the number of lessons available per fortnight or per week. There is a list of teachers and their available lessons on the right.

As you fill teachers’ initials into the classes on the right, it automatically starts to count down the remaining available lessons; and simultaneously adds up the number of classes for which each teacher has responsibility.

I find it useful here hereby put it out into the aether to see if anyone else could use or adapt or improve it to the requirements of their own school!

The document itself (with the relevant formulae) is here:

(Anonymised) Proposed Setting Arrangements

 

The Final Data

We have less than a week with Year 11 left in our school!

For some, that is a cause for celebration; others of emotional goodbyes; for yet others, it is a moment of terror asking themselves “Have we completed the course yet?!”

And with the OCR deadline for CAT marks looming on Wednesday, this is the weekend when finally and completely it is possible to say to all our students:

This is where you stand. These marks are safe and banked (subject to external moderation).

And it is – broadly – possible to take the next step and say (with all the caveats and warnings about Ofqual, Michael Gove and grade boundaries after the GCSE fiasco last year)

These are the marks you need to get this grade overall.

I am basing the maths here on the June 2012 OCR Grade Boundaries for raw scores which can be found here. I ummed and ahhed about perhaps adding a couple of marks to the boundaries to insulate us against the vagaries of Ofqual… but I decided that there was little to be gained from trying to second guess what appears to be a particularly volatile set of politics so left it as it was.

With the additional tweak (a particularly geeky and SLT-friendly tweak!) of colour coding on a scale of 0-80 in English and Language and 0-40 in Literature, we have a nice visual record of who is more and less likely to obtain the A and C grades. Thanks to Excel, the deeper the shade of green, the closer the student is to the boundary; the deeper the shade of red, the further away they are.

We also put our students doing Literature in to take the Prose from Other Cultures examination in January. so the final two columns simply compare the scores required to get a C or an A with what they obtained in January. Again, it is colour coded: green shows that they need less than they obtained in January; red shows that they need to raise their game. The deeper the shades of colour reflect how far from their January achievement they are: a nice deep green suggests that they need actually far less than they obtained in January to reach that threshold; a deep red suggests they need to up-their-game a lot!

If this would be useful to anyone out there, the (appropriately anonymised) document is linked here with the OCR grade boundaries.

(Anonymised) Marks required in exams to obtain a C

Students at this point respond very well to conversations that go along the lines of:

“Look, you only need 38 marks for a C”

“You need less to get C than you got in your last exam”

“You only need 27 for a C. But you could get higher!”

Those conversations seem more positive than “Well, I suppose it is mathematically possible”!

Departmental Database

KS4 template

It’s that time of the year again… when I revisit the Departmental Database and wonder how it could be developed and improved.

And this year, in addition, how to include the iGCSE into the growing range of qualification that we are offering.

So, last year, I was using a fairly basic =IF formula to compare the scores given by teachers into indicative grades. It was a little clunky and a little ‘Heath Robinson’ but it did the job.

This year, I am intending to use =VLOOKUP formulae to look the score given up in the table of grade boundaries on a separate sheet. It has taken a bit of time just inputting the grade boundaries (each possible score in each element of each qualification needs a grade allocated to it.

 

Once done, however, the hope is that it will be straightforward enough to simply fiddle with and amend the grades accordingly. Obviously, the =VLOOKUP will amend itself according to the data entered on the lookup sheet. And alterations in grade boundaries can be applied and grades amended according to the changes in data that we have.

In terms of staff inputting, all I need will be the score for each Controlled Assessment or mock exam. With judicious use of protected cells and suspicious passwords, that should in fact be all that the staff can do.

Their “dashboard”, if you like, will look like this:

 

Obviously there will be a range of data to be inputted for each child to track vulnerable groups, pupil premiums, intervention groups, withdrawal groups and accelerated groups – we have a tendency to generate five or six overlapping lists of students which no-one has any real overview of! – which can be done in anticipation of the start of term.

The database should also add up and / or average out scores for individual tasks to create the final figure to be entered into the OMR at the end of Year 11.

It should also be able to identify students whose Controlled Assessments pull down their raw ability; students who underperform in exams; students who might benefit most from specific forms of intervention.

One other item from the PiXL Club main conference that I liked was what I have dubbed micro-tracking.

This database is a broad-brush, specification wide tracking system. I intend to supplement it with a range of micro-tracking databases that track students’ success in individual exam questions to track their ability to perform certain skills rather than overall. A revision session on summarising skills for a select group of individuals persistently falling down on that skill will be more effective than a revision session on the OCR Information and Ideas Examination or the iGCSE Paper 1 or 2 which only touches on summarising. The same goes for directed writing skill, analysis skills, language skills, presentational devices responses or imaginative writing.

Additional sheets can be added at any time which could record mock exams on a question-by-question basis and a formula can easily add those up and record them in the main database.

Obviously, getting antiquated and somewhat Luddite staff to actually complete the database is another matter!

The Final Countdown

Also know as… how to freak Year 11 out!

And then a healthy dollop of cheese!

The Final Countdown!

Revision

This is written from the point of view of a parent who has just leant at Parents’ Evening that his son has an end of Key Stage test covering everything that he has covered since 2010.

On Tuesday.

In 72 hours.

He has been sent off to his biological father with instructions to buy a revision book – the chances of his being able to find his current exercise book is slim; exercise books from Year 7? Non-existent! – and his teacher has pointed him to past SATS papers online but I envisage this picture this afternoon: boy, surrounded by stuff, not sure what to do, head in hands.

And he says he has been told to revise but has never been taught how.

So, this is my advice to him – shamefacedly lifting terminology from the PiXL dictionary – not at all experimenting to see how students respond to the same language!

1) Diagnose

Use the past papers to assess which skill or knowledge you lack.

In question 1 for example, he did not know what an independent variable was.

2) Treat

Use revision book to refresh the techniques or to find the missing knowledge.

Use mind maps, flash cards, narrative, visualisation or whatever memory technique you prefer to practise or memorise.

Spend no more than ten to fifteen minutes doing this and then take a break of five minutes.

3) Test

Answer the question and use the mark scheme to assess the quality of your answer.

Then repeat.

And repeat.

And repeat.

It’s a joy-filled long weekend we’ve got to look forward to!

PiXL Conference

Yesterday was the PiXL Main Conference.

PiXL – for those who don’t know which included me until recently – stands for Performance in Excellence and is variable described as a club or a family by those who are fully engaged! Broadly, in its own words

The PiXL Club is a collaboration of school leaders, headed by Sir John Rowling, this is a club that some have said to be “the best thing they have seen in education”.

The PiXL Club is about sharing new ideas with school leaders; it is a partnership of focused, determined and dedicated professional practitioners. It is a not for profit organisation that focuses on supporting and developing the GCSE results of thousands of students in many schools across London, the South East, West and the North.

Their own website is here and no doubt describes them better than me.

Up until yesterday, my only real knowledge of PiXL was that the plan to dual enter Year 11 into UK GCSE and iGCSE had derived from them. A plan that I actually disagreed with vigorously for the majority of my students: the iGCSE is only valid with a Literature grade, and, for historic reasons, we have a large cohort of C/D students not taking Literature.

So I was a bit of a cynic.

For a national club starting a conference in London at 0930 “prompt” also militated against them: I had to get up at 5am to get there! And still couldn’t physically be on time.

The conference location was spectacular: disembarking at Waterloo, I ambled past The London Eye, wove between tourists over Westminster Bridge, jogged past the Houses of Parliament and veered right by Westminster Abbey to reach Westminster Hall. The sun was shining, birds tweeting, Big Ben chiming, traffic grumbling (mainly at me as I’d abandoned the pavements to tourists and was scuttling along in the road itself).
.

Being a tad late, the conference had begun and I was bereft of the customary small talk with strangers (not a huge loss) and coffee (a keenly felt loss!). And the hall atmosphere was… Odd. The closest analogy was to a Billy Graham rally I went to as an impressionable youngster… a rapt audience applauding loudly, a passionate speaker with a clear zeal, a very definite message about the right way to do things.

Inspirational for many I’m sure; over-zealous, pushing towards evangelical for me.

And being a mite perverse, I balked a little. The temptation was to sit there, arms folded, cynical sneer on the face…

However, there was a good deal of sense being delivered – yes, delivered, not discussed – there was no time for discussion points or questions: it was very preachy.

But some excellent practical advice in there: it’s still not too late to do additional Speaking and Listening; manage the exam day sensitively and carefully; provide spare equipment, water and cereal bars rather than relying on teenagers to bring their own; continue to focus on intervention.

There really was a strong ‘can do‘ attitude.

Although the ‘you can do staying at school until 8 in the evening‘ attitude did not chime well with me!

Lots of acronyms were thrown around DTT and D3 and L5 which I think I got a handle on eventually – good example for the effect of jargon in a future language lesson? – and there really was a sense of a homogenised and perhaps formulaic PiXL way of doing things. And an implicit suggestion that you were missing something if you did it differently. There are only so many times you can listen to “why reinvent the wheel” before you start hearing “thou shalt”.

However, overall, despite some concerns over philosophy and language, there was much said that was sound and despite my natural cynicism and the 5 am start it was somewhat energising.

I’m now also able to access the cloud-based resource sharing on a platform named Huddle too – again somewhat put off by the name that brings to mind repressed memories of rugby games and sweaty male bodies…

I do have one gripe though. And I know it will come across as extraordinarily petty and small minded…. but then I never pretended to be otherwise. Food. Beef cobbler. Hot food. On a plate. With nowhere to sit, perch or lean on. I ended up with a plate in one hand and a glass in the other – because I didn’t trust the flimsy wobbly glass holder clipped to the side of the plate! – and nowhere to eat it! And the beef was really gristly!