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I am indebted to one of my students for the discovery that there is a simple English version of Wikipedia, designed specifically to have simple English words and grammar for people learning English and for children. Thank you Zahraa!
This is a good place for teachers to contribute kid-friendly info for projects – and if you do become a contributor, well, you’ll know straight away if the work’s been plagiarised, eh?
I blog the books I read over at ANZ LitLovers but some of the things I want to say about Goodbye Mr Chipsseem more properly to belong here…
It’s a slender book, only 128 pages long and written a long time ago in 1934. It made James Hilton’s name as an author, was reprinted countless times and has been adapted for screen and stage, most notably in the 1939 British classic but also more recently as a TV series in 2002.
The book and the film made Mr Chips a by-word for a good teacher. Mr Chipping (to give him his correct name) teaches in a minor public school called Brookfield in England, and is much loved – the complete antithesis of brutal disciplinarians such as Charles Dickens’ Gradgrind in Hard Times who maintained discipline through fear. He conquers his initial shyness, learns to lighten up under the infuence of a lovely young wife who he met on a hiking holiday, and handles his grief at her death with stoicism and courage. He shelves unrealistic ambitions when he realises that his indifferent degree precludes the headship and over time comes to represent the school itself:
…a good school of the second rank. Several notable families supported it; it supplied fair samples of the history-making men of the age – judges, Members of Parliament, colonial administrators, a few peers and bishops. Mostly, however, it turned out merchants, manufacturers and professional men, with a good sprinkling of country squires and parsons. It was the sort of school which, when mentioned, would sometimes make snobbish people confess that they rather though they had heard of it.
But if it had not been that sort of school it would probably not have taken Chips. For Chips, in any social or academic sense, was just as respectable, but no more brilliant, than Brookfield itself. (p19)
Mr Chips teaches one of my favourite subjects at school - the Classics – but amongst other aspects of this book which made me revise my opinion of Mr Chips as a model teacher (an opinion based on vague memories of the 1939 film) was his indifference to the efforts of a new headmaster to move with the times. Mr Chips begins his career in 1870, retires aged 65 in 1913, and is recalled as the casualties mount during WW1 – and in all that time changes nothing at all about his teaching. Mr Ralston, the innovator, is presented as an amoral brash young headmaster who ‘wants to run Brookfield like a factory – a factory for turning out snob-culture based on money and machines’ (p76) and his ambitions to improve the school run counter to its traditions:
‘I aim to make Brookfield a thoroughly up-to-date school. I’m a science man myself, but for all that, I have no objection to the classics -provided they are taught efficiently. Because they are dead languages is no reason why they should be taught with a dead educational technique. I understand, Mr Chipping, that your lessons are exactly the same as they were when I began here ten years ago?’
Chips answered, slowly and with pride: ‘For that matter – umph – they are the same as when your predecessor – Mr Meldrum – came here, and that -umph – was thirty-eight years ago’…..
…’Very interesting, Mr Chipping, but once again it proves my point – you live too much in the past, and not enough in the present and the future. Times are changing, whether you realise it or not. Modern parents are beginning to demand more for their three years’ school fees than a few scraps of languages that nobody speaks. Besides, your boys don’t learn even what they’re supposed to learn. None of them last year got through the Lower Certificate. (p75)
And what does this ‘noble’ character do, when confronted by a headmaster asking him to improve his performance? He refuses to discuss it, refuses to resign, and uses his influence with one of the Old Boys to ignore Ralston!
It’s not just that Mr Chips’s teaching is moribund, clinging to the idea that Brookfield should be teaching ‘a sense of proportion’ to balance the vulgarities of the new century (p77) – as if that should somehow preclude modernising his teaching methods so that his students might actually learn something. It’s also that the much-lauded ‘jokes’ that Mr Chips makes are at the expense of his hapless students. This is what this paragon of teaching says to one of his third generation students, seen in the film clip above [1] taking tea with Mr Chips:
‘Colley, you are – umph – a splendid example of -umph – inherited traditions. I remember your grandfather – umph – he could never grasp the Ablative Absolute. A stupid fellow, your grandfather. And your father, too – umph – I remember him – he used to sit in that far desk by the wall - he wasn’t much better, either. But I do believe – my dear Colley - that you are – umph – the biggest fool of the lot!’ (p15)
The class roars with laughter at this, something I hope would not happen today. Any teacher who tried to get his laughs by mocking a student and his family like that would be reprimanded by his principal these days, and we teach children not to tolerate this kind of bullying no matter where it comes from.
Mr Chips, far from being a model of good teaching, is a failure. He’s a bully, and a bore, and no amount of jolly scones and tea can make up for the fact that he was hopelessly old-fashioned and wouldn’t make any effort to move with the times. He represents the kind of arrogance still occasionally met in the profession, when individuals think that they alone know how to teach and reject research-based evidence that there’s a better way.
Goodbye Mr Chips may in its day have represented a more humane kind of teaching than its Victorian predecessors, but today it is an interesting museum piece, and that’s all.
Wikipedia is in constant use around the world today, and nearly all of us use it as a frontline source of information now. Somewhere, I have read that while there can be inaccuracies, research showed that there were actually fewer errors in Wikipedia than in the Britannica, especially for more recent information. Well, maybe that depends on the entry. Wikipedia’s team of scrutineers monitor contentious topics (e.g. Israel/Palestine) and sometimes ‘lock’ them so that changes have to pass scrutiny; sometimes there is just a warning to be wary, as there was when I used the entry on Muhammed Ali as a source for one of my students who had chosen him as a subject for our current Biography unit of work. Overall, I find it remarkably helpful, especially when seeking information about countries that don’t feature so much in US/UK encyclopaedias – not least Australia! Some of the entries are excellent, and have been written with clarity and expertise, as I found when I wanted to know more about Modernism, (see my post about it at ANZLitLovers).
But there can be pitfalls, and I am indebted to my good friend Sue Terry, from Whispering Gums, for the following advice about using Wikipedia wisely. All students should be made aware of these tips for sorting out the good from the bad:
check the footnotes/references: good Wikipedia articles cite their sources, not just as references at the end of the article, but in-line at the point statements are made.
make sure the sources are valid: look at the domain names (such as dot gov and dot edu) and the authority of the person or organisation behind that source. Blogs, for example, are great to read but they are not necessarily a reliable source for an encyclopedia article.
look for multiple sources: these can provide a double-check on statements made, particularly the more controversial ones
check that the sources themselves don’t cite each other: circular referencing can be common in the on-line information world.
look under the “Discussion” tab: this is where articles are assessed (though these are not always up to date) and where discussion about the article occurs – contentious issues, exclusion versus inclusion of information, definition of terms, etc, can be discussed here.
look under the “History” tab: while many Wikipedia editors are anonymous or semi-anonymous, you can get a sense of who has been involved and the level of their activity and involvement.
note any tags on the articles: editors tag articles that have problems, such as poor or no citation of sources, incomplete or minimal content, and so on. Some of this may be obvious but sometimes these tags can clue you in to how useful the article may be, where its weaknesses are.
Today I stumbled on a really interesting article about the place of encouragement, praise and rewards in the classroom on the UK TES site. The article is called Good for You and it explores some research that says praising students for a job well done may be counter-productive in the long run….
Punishment, we all know, rarely solves anything and most of us spend our teaching day encouraging, praising and rewarding students in order to try and help them achieve their goals…
But what if we are creating a culture that precludes children from developing a sense of pride or satisfaction from a job well done? What if ‘rewards inflation’ means that children are no longer content with a sticker or a smile?
Read the article, it’s food for thought.
(Had to laugh about the schools that were offering iPods and mountain bikes and spending £30,000 on rewards! Imagine having a school budget that meant you could afford to do that!)
On a day when I had all kinds of grief with the library server, a Prep tantrum and a flood of spam from an Educational DVD supplier, I also had one of those magic teaching moments when it’s all worthwhile.
Years 3 & 4 are doing projects on Australian Farming and although the plan was that they would research agricultural products such as cheese and honey, two groups chose to learn about chocolate and chewing-gum. Well, why not, if that’s what they’re interested in, I thought. We had a couple of books about these topics: Chewing Gum, and Chocolate, both by Natalie Jane Prior (published by Hodder Children’s Books) so I thought it would be okay.
Alas, while these are great books, the text is a bit difficult for primary students of this age group. I thought the solution would be to set up a Rollyo search to help these students find appropriate information online, but couldn’t find anything that was easy enough….
So I decided to write a wiki page myself on my new LisaHillSchoolStuff Wiki. It took over an hour, because I didn’t know much myself about how chewing gum and chocolate were made, but it was worth every minute to see the kids’ reactions. They had been struggling with the books and perhaps were regretting their choice, and then suddenly the task became easy. They were rapt! I had the Chocolate group using the circulation desk computer, with a laptop beside them so that they could write their newfound facts straight into the Inspiration template I’d made, while the Chewing Gum group did the same in the adjacent ICT lab and the rest of the groups were in the library classroom. (We have large windows everywhere, and there were other teachers in the lab so there was plenty of supervision even without me racing around from one group to another. )
Quote of the day was, ‘It’s like information that’s written for grownups but it’s easy enough to read’.
BTW #1 I can’t upload the Inspiration template I designed for this task to EduBlogs, but if anyone wants a copy, leave a comment with a return email address and I will email it to you. It will only work if you have Inspiration 7 or above.
BTW #2 Just in case you’re wondering why the children needed a laptop and a computer and used them in a different workspace, it was because the network was down and the WiFi was misbehaving. (There had been some sort of problem beyond our control in the city yesterday and it’s not fully resolved). The children couldn’t access the work they’d done the previous week which was stored on the library drive, and while the internet was working on some but not all of the computers in the lab, it wouldn’t work in the library at all. So I’d had to race around at recess with a USB and install the template into My Documents on each of my five laptops, so that the children could start again and save their new work in the laptop’s My Docs, so that come what may, at least next week they’ll be able to get at their work. This is a reality that teachers have to deal with all the time – no matter how creative and innovative and keen we are, we need reliable IT to make it all happen.
I’m hoping that if other staff join me in writing kid-friendly information pages, this Wiki will become a really useful resource.
Here’s a clever way for parents at home to interest children in character development in the books they read. Using Post-It Notes, children note aspects of character as they read, so that discussion can focus on this aspect of the story. For full instructions, see Brendan’s Blog at the Family-School & Community Partnerships Bureau Thanks to Sally Cripps from ANZ LitLovers for the tip!
Ian Lillico is an educator with a special interest in boys’ learning. On his web page Boys Forward he lists a number of strategies of relevance to the library program for our all-boy classes.
Since boys have a strong need for ‘territory’ my practice in assigning boys to sit at a particular group table for the year is a good one. However, my rule has been that students can sit at any seat, as long as it’s at the assigned table, and most students like this flexibility. Next year however, I might try assigning a specific seat for boys in all boy classes to see how that impacts on their sense of shared ownership of the library…
Boys need to communicate before writing, (and writing tends to be a problem area for many boys) so I shall try increasing the opportunities for discussion using modelling and shared planning activities for project work. I already use his strategy of allowing ‘think time’ and in all my classes and often have students talk to the person next to them to answer my questions. I usually ask them to tell me what their partner has said so that both the person speaking and the person whose ideas are being relayed feel that they have had a turn. However I think I do need to encourage students to expand on their ideas more - maybe podcasting some responses would be motivating? An action research project would confirm for me whether this increases their writing output or not.
Lillico also says that all writing activities for boys should include the use of teacher prepared templates or scaffolds, and that boys need to be told how many lines or pages to write. I need to make sure that all the rubrics we develop for project assessment includes this information in future.
The recommendation that there should be ’more interactive class teaching through the use of audio-visual instruction, CD-ROMs and the whole range of current multi-media tools’ is a key element of our new strategic plan. We’ll be blogging too, next year, (when I figure out how to build it into my classroom practice as a routine activity!)
Some other ideas worth investigating include increasing time on task in short, intensive activities (though this occurs by default in the library since the lesson is structured to begin with a story to capture students’ interest, then borrowing (a physical activity involving walking about) and then a task at tables, which is usually about half an hour. Perhaps I could try splitting this into two 15 minute bursts?
I don’t use quizzes much in my library program, because my preference is for open-ended learning, but Lillico says that boys like them – especially if there is a small prize – so it could be worth a try in some contexts.
I also like Lillico’s suggestion that ‘all classes … should devote a proportion of each lesson (at least 15%) to reading’. This could include reading in pairs and shared note taking under given topic headings. (We do a lot of note-taking using templates in our non-fiction library units). Structuring tasks so that they begin with shorter, more closed tasks, which lead on to ’more challenging, open-ended tasks’ within the same project would bring opportunities for success at the beginning.
I don’t agree with Lillico’s recommendation that teachers abandon topics if after ’explicitly explaining the relevance and attempting to integrate new concepts into existing ones, no relevance can be found’. Sometimes students need to be introduced to new topics before they see the relevance, and this is especially true of literature. I doubt if many of my boys thought that the ancient stories of Beowulf or Gawain were relevant beforehand, but they loved these stories, and could see the relevance of the moral issues once they had heard them. The trick is to lure them in right from the beginning…
Last week I went to the first of two Pearson FreeWeb PD sessions with Paul Mears. I learned some new tricks with FlickrStorm beginning with loading up my own set of Images of England. At home I had a further play and created a set of coral reef pictures that I can use next time I do this unit of work with the Juniors.
The workshop was especially useful because Flickr doesn’t seem to have a link to FlickrStorm so you’d never find it if not told about it, and also FlickrStorm isn’t very intuitive. It has a minimalist interface and rather unobtrusive icons!
After that, we played with Picasa. I already have a Picasa album (see the blogroll at right) but Picasa 3 has new features, and I learned how to upload from images to album direct. However, what I really liked was learning how to manage those pesky folders, because previously Picasa would scan everything – including every little picture in every little program I had – which was very annoying. To select which folders you want it to browse, go to the Tools Menu, and then select Folder Manager. I explored further at home and discovered that it will even automatically add the photos to Blogger, which will be nice next time I have travel photos for my Travels with Tim and Lisa blog. Alas it doesn’t work for uploading photos to WordPress which is what I use for my professional blog, nor for Global Teacher or Edublogs… Paul also showed us to make a Gift CD which is really nice for Prep teachers and at home I tried out making a collage, of my dogs, naturally.
We had a very quick look at Rubistar – which is a beaut site for rubric making. Last time I looked at it (which is a while ago) it was rather primitive, with lots of awful rubrics for American projects that seemed fearfully dull and rather fuddy-duddy compared to the tasks we set using DATT tools and other graphic organisers. But now it is much more flexible and even has a drop down menu. Having just finished doing term 4 projects with about 360 kids from Year 1 to year 6 I’m just a little bit tired of them LOL, so I shall leave exploring more of Rubistar till next year.
Our final task was to create a PhotoStory. This is another free program you can download. By coincidence I had just learned how to do one of these at the weekend, but as always with ICT there was more to learn. The first trick is to use Picasa to get your photos. You can insert up to 200 photos; if you want more, make two photostories, then combine them using Moviemaker (another program I am just learning to use). The next trick is to ignore that ‘test your microphone icon’ which was what mucked up the narration I tried to do at the weekend. The other crucial distinction I learned was that you must always save the project so that it can be opened and edited; save the finished movie as a file name (use the prompt in the middle of the menu i.e. as a wav file) because it can’t be edited. So before finalising the movie, always save it as a project. Make sure that students understand the distinction and use proper file saving skills especially naming.
Then we did some fancy editing. Zooming in happens by default, but you can set the opening and closing position using Customise. To make a title slide, make some simple colour image files, which you can then import, and then add the title, and use jazzy fonts etc. (You can also use Effects in the program. )
You can even write a shared digital story by getting students to create the text & narrations for 1-2 slides and then put it together using MovieMaker. Paul showed us one that he had done, and it did look impressive, especially if you burn it onto a CD and let the kids take it home.
It was a fabulous workshop, even if I did have to drive through a hailstorm to get there. We were given a CD with further resources including a most intriguing program called Scratch, the purpose of which I don’t really understand yet. I shall have a play with that in due course….
Sometimes students need to be introduced to new topics before they see the relevance, and this is especially true of literature. I doubt if many of my boys thought that the ancient stories of Beowulf or Gawain were relevant beforehand, but they loved these stories, and could see the relevance of the moral issues once they had heard them. The trick is to lure them in right from the beginning…
