Desks and Pips

The result of our voting about what we'd like to see Tallis lose for a day is a tie between Desks and Pips. I think we should present these suggestions (and the general concept of a "No Something Day") to the Leadership Team to consider. What do you think?

Exploratree

Futurelab, who are promoting an alternative to the national curriculum at key stage 3 entitled Enquiring Minds, have produced an online thinking tool cleverly entitled Exploratree (exploratory, get it?!) Having registered, the user is able to create thinking guides (a bit like animated mind maps) which can be saved, printed, sent or shared with others. The site offers ready made structures for thinking that reflect the methodology of Enquiring Minds. Alternatively, users may wish to create their own guides from scratch. The real value of the site is the ability to work collaboratively on any given project and to set up groups. This means that a teacher or student could create a group, begin a thinking process and encourage others to collaborate on completing the process. In order to test whether or not this is an interesting and/or useful exercise, I have begun a reverse thinking investigation, using one of the pre-designed guides, and invited the members of this blog to have a go at helping me complete it. You should all have received an email asking you to get involved. Perhaps you could leave a message on this post to ley me know if it's working (or not) and how you're getting on following the instructions and adding to the project. The idea is to work backwards from an "ideal" future in order to work out what steps need to be put in place in order to achieve it. This kind of structured thinking exercise might be a very useful feature of the new KS3 curriculum and sites like this, given appropriate access to ICT, could provide learners with opportunities to strengthen their thinking muscles.

The Future is Now

 

Dr Richard Barbrook challenges new generations to take the power of the Internet into their own hands, to resist status quo politics and to use the world’s most powerful political tool to shape their own, better, destiny. His message: if we don’t want the future to be what it used to be, we must invent our own, improved and truly revolutionary future.

True Tube

TrueTube is a relatively new website that enables young people to debate ethical, cultural and political issues using video. The site has been nominated for a BETT award and is aimed at secondary school students. It presents controversial topics from a variety of viewpoints and builds on young people's understanding and use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It will also soon have a younger brother/sister called Truetube Junior for primary school aged children. The designers of the site make it clear that not all content might be useful or appropriate in a classroom context, but this kind of resource might be an engaging way of debating all manner of issues related to Personal and Economic Well-Being and beyond. The site encourages users to create their own content and provides them with an online video editing toolbox. There are some very useful "How to" videos on the site covering topics like "Shooting DV" and how to get on in the music industry.

Bird's Eye View Drawings

There are lots of examples of artists and advertisers using a bird's eye view chalk drawing to defy the laws of physics. The artist Robin Rhode is a good example. Sometimes he animates the various still photographs to create short films but often he exhibits the individual shots on a gallery wall so that they appear like a disassembled flip book. Jan Van Holleben's photo series like Dreams of Flying is another good example of this kind of approach. This music video is inspired by Holleben's images. I found the above advert by Nike which I like very much, partly because it's very simple and fluid in its mixing of different viewpoints. I think Mr Hawes' idea of doing an animation/film using the concourse to describe a mathematical process would work really well, especially if students were shown other really good examples of this kind of work by a whole range of artists as inspiration.

Creativity - A Call To Arms

Miss Dooley and myself are in the early stages of planning a project to do with her Year 10 Maths Group and I thought it would be great to invite members of the group, and followers of the blog, to contribute their ideas. The unit of work focuses on reflecting, rotating, enlarging and transforming shapes. There is a certain amount of jargon involved - scale enlargement, projection lines, vectors etc. but it seems that the concepts have lots of visual and artistic applications. My first instinct is to use animation to illustrate the concepts (animation is great for showing movement and transformation), or to use the students themselves to illustrate and explore the concepts physically and film it (maybe from the link and using the concourse for a grid)

Animation can be quite hard to do with thirty students at the same time, but does produce lovely films that can then be layered with music, voice over and text.

One thing I forgot to mention was that Ms. Dooley's group will be asked to make a product that they can use to help Mr Ormston's group understand the topic. What do you think would be the most effective way for the students to achieve this?

Finally, I made a short film using an online teaching resource which I captured from the desktop using IshowU - maybe this could be a starting point?

Soren Hawes

creativity?

Disrupting Tallis

I've really enjoyed what everyone has been saying on this blog over the last few weeks and I've been especially drawn to the idea of disrupting Tallis (Jon, Amber). Before Christmas  the Year 7 cross curricular project happened and culminated in an evening event showcasing the work. My favorite part of the event was the disruption that had happened in one of the music rooms just off the Tallis Room. All the furniture had been removed and the room had been transformed into a magical interactive experience. I obviously knew that the event was on, and I knew a bit about the work that was going into it, but I hadn't expected the room to feel like that when i walked in. I felt like I had discovered something exciting and new even though it was in a room I normally ignore and walk past all the time. I think school should be full of experiences like this, where little things surprise us and what we are expecting to happen is shaken up. 

Like Jon, who has written about the Cildo Meireles exhibition at the tate modern, I'd like to tell everyone about my favourite theatre company. They are called Punchdrunk and they specialise in creating theatrical environments in unusual transformed locations. During their performances the audience are free to choose what they watch and where they go. Punchdrunk’s desire is for the audience to rediscover the childlike excitement and anticipation of exploring the unknown and experience a real sense of adventure. I think it would be amazing if learning could be more like that. Punchdrunk say that they try to focus as much attention on the audience and the space as they do to the text and the performers. They took over the Battersea Arts Centre (the whole of it, offices, toilets, everywhere) and reused the space to how they felt it would work better. I think sometimes in school we are so stuck in our own habbits of how things are, that we can't see the potential of what could be. 

The Josh Beasley Award for Creativity

What makes learning more effective?

In a recent study by Professor John Hattie, of Auckland University, the most effective strategy for improving education appears to be raising the quality of student-teacher interaction. The study was based on 50,000 other studies covering all aspects of schooling across the world. Professor Hattie has produced a ranking system of most to least effective strategies. At the top comes:
1. Students assessing themselves
2. Students working at a level just beyond their current level (appropriate challenge)
3. Formative evaluation
4. Teachers reflecting on their own practice

Less effective interventions, those appearing lower down the list, include:
133. Student centered "open" classrooms
132. Giving students control over learning
131. Multi-age classes

The report seems to suggest that students, when given regular opportunities to reflect on their progress, develop a good understanding of what they need to do next and do not need excessive testing. Other strategies which seem to work well include teachers being clear about their expectations and "reciprocal" teaching - students taking turns to teach the class.

Issues like gender, television, class size and setting by ability appear to be less important in their effect. In an interview with the TES, Professor Hattie remarks "A teacher's job is not to make work easy. It is to make it difficult. If you are not challenged, you do not make mistakes. If you do not make mistakes, feedback is useless." This raises some interesting issues about the nature of challenge for individual students, the significance of mistakes in the learning process and the importance of personalised formative assessment.

Cildo Meireles

I went back to the Cildo Meireles exhibition at Tate Modern today for my second visit. It's easily my favourite show of 2008. Meireles is Brazil's best known conceptual artist. He's now 60 years old and began his career during the miltary dictatorship in Brazil in the 1960s. Consequently, much of his work is political in nature but not in any narrow, hectoring way. His artistic interventions are subtle and very beautiful. Many of his pieces involve meshes of different kinds. Sometimes they are soft like fishing nets or webs of material, sometimes not. My favourite work is called "Through" and consists of a number of see-through barriers which create a labyrinth leading to a ball of brightly lit cellophane at the centre. In order to reach the centre point you are required to walk on glass. Consequently, you feel slightly disembodied, as if you are floating through the space and, simultaneously, you are reminded of your physicality. Other highlights of the show include a tower of old radios entitled "Babel" and a room of rulers and clocks, all of which have had their numbers rearranged. In this film, the artist reminds us that, whilst the eyes are important in art, we have other senses which we must use in order to obtain a better comprehension of art (and life).

The reason I've chosen to write about this on the Creative Tallis blog is because I think we should investigate some of the strategies used by Meireles in his art to inform our thinking about the "Food for Thought" project this summer. The exhibition ends soon, but I would encourage you to try to get along and see it. You won't be disappointed.

Creative Day

As well of having the summer evening event I think we should dedicate a day to promote creativity for the whole school and get every one thinking creatively. When I say thinking creatively I mean not just thinking that art, music and drama are the creative subjects but learning how to be more creative in areas such as maths, English and every day life as well. The day could include an array of activities that might be new to people and not usually taught within the normal school curriculum.

Any ideas about what events could be done and whether you think this a good idea?