Providing a little spotlight for the creativity of some of Miss Miller's S2 students, who had spent some of the period learning about Tsunami formation, primarily through memory mapping. This was a little peer assessed plenary to see what groups had retained. Some are not quite finished, but a good effort nevertheless.

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Creative revision of the 2008 Brendan Foster film to make the fantasy more factual, if that makes sense. Well done, Aidan. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

We were introducing the structure of the earth and wanted to give students the opportunity to show their knowledge through a creative medium. Here is Aidan reading his alternative to the Brendan Foster fantasy script. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

...which had entry to each layer in the earth preceded by a question. A nice idea and lots of fact included in the fantasy Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

It seems incredible to someone who found it difficult to study even at University level that Study Skills are introduced in the lower secondary now. However, when discussing a lesson that my PLP (Personal Learning Planning) class were involved in today with a colleague, I think he is right in saying the earlier the better, because its not really about exams, its about taking responsibility for learning.
We had been discussing Study Skills and thought it would be interesting to take some familiar and less familiar techniques to revise the same block of text. It was a silly news story from the day about an accidental gunshot incident which resulted in some embarrasment for the person committing the crime. To indicate some of the variety of techniques, we had mindmaps, wordmats, mnemonics, audio memos, creating questions alongside reading notes and summary cards. The vital element here was that no one was working alone, which students had confirmed that they commonly do.
I left the exercise with the thought of coming back to it the following week. One thing led to another and, with Higher prelims interrupting my time with this class, I had to postpone. Two weeks and a half term later, I feared the worst for any retention. How wrong I was!
I was informed today that a 29 year old male, whose name escapes me, but not the class, had been practising with his girlfriends fathers gun for a forthcoming camping trip. This was in Loch Earn. Two men were on a nearby boat, Kyle Walker and Thomas Gilmour according to the class. A shot was fired by accident and hit the hull of the boat they were on. The perpetrator deeply regretted his actions but Sherrif Brown was not impressed and fined him £600! I couldn't believe how much had stuck and it was noticeable how confidence grew among the group as contributions were offered. I think the class were quite chuffed with themselves. I asked them if they thought they had been taught the content well. At first, a few nodded and then the realisation came that I had only facilitated their learning through my involvement in steering the groups. They had shown themselves to be successful learners despite no teacher led work and despite all taking different paths to recount a story. This led us into a discussion about whose responsibility it is to ensure achievement in academic pursuits. While teachers can clearly make a difference and have a huge responsibility to those that we teach, it was evident from the exercise that perhaps the person with most influence and, via this, the greatest responsibilities for learning are the students themselves. More than this, that responsibility is apparently best brokered when divided amongst the peer group.

A book I keep coming back to is The Teacher's Toolkit by Paul Ginnis. It's a great reference point for fresh approaches to lessons and encouraging thought and engagement. I tried 'Silent Sentences' with my class from this text today. I had asked a Higher class to look over a case study of industry in South Wales. I thought about doing group responses to a set exercise, but we had used that the period before as the class moved round stations. I then thought about an extended heads and tails, but in this class, there are definite leaders within some groups who other students allow to steer the group. Nothing wrong in that, but I wanted to keep everyone focused and involved. Silent Sentences is similar to heads and tails. The students have to make sense of a bunch of mixed up text where sentences have been truncated and there often seems more than one way to complete it. The notable exception is that there is no discussion. Students split up the text and then have to anticipate when theirs will be needed without consultation. After a set time, I gave the groups a single minute for a quick discussion and then distributed the correct order. Two things were evident. The first was that their case study knowledge, whether studied or not, was good. Many of the finished paragraphs were almost identical to the one I had supplied and there was clear evidence of logic, concentration throughout the activity and full involvement of all group members. Secondly, all of the groups had worked on an assumption of what they were being asked to do just from content recognition. No one had asked "but, what is the question?". This added the dimension of allowing students to put themselves in an exam setters position and write (pretty accurately) the exam question, fantastic for helping break down what a question requires for full marks. I'd certainly use this again as it provided such a purposeful period of work and a better use of content than a teacher centred activity.

When you teach rotations in the lower year groups, its sometimes hard to surprise students (their pals have told them what you cover and how they'll do it). It's even harder maintaining teacher motivation if, for example, you have 3 second year classes and are teaching the same lesson for the 6th time. This was a dilemma when we swapped rotations at Christmas and I found myself teaching fairtrade again in quick succession on Friday past. Instead of following a lesson looking at its impact on individuals through character case studies, I asked the class to create their own characters. We were able to start this via a rather excellent show and tell from a couple of the girls in the class which started to give us an idea of the location of fairtrade producers, the likely demographic, what they might be producing and how they benefit. We mapped some of this in the centre of the class and I then distributed mock Facebook profiles found on Tony Cassidy's ever useful http://www.radicalgeography.co.uk . I listed the criteria on the board (see the image above) and, in twenty minutes, the class created some really nice summaries of typical fairtrade producers and its positive impact. I've shared some examples, which I meant to include in #pedagoofriday but a Burns Supper and general fatigue at the weekend put paid to that. If I had ict access, it would have been nice to make these look more professional or use Russel Tarr's Fakebook as originally intended but, in the time we had, I thought this was a nice productive use of it.

I had a bit of space with one class to experiment a little today. I thought it was a good opportunity to share this http://www.glasgowcityvision.com/ . I had already summarised the main desires of this vision last night and thought it would be a great opportunity for some geography in the news. We started the period with a rolling Flickr slideshow of Glasgow images and discussed the likelihood that as the students became more independently mobile and their own needs and tastes changed that the nearest big city would become more important in their lives. Indeed, some would probably end up as residents. As this was their future and not mine, I asked them to imagine their ideal city of the future, specific to Glasgow. At this point, I showed an image of Coruscant from the Star Wars films. We tried to link as closely to the themes in the vision document as possible, for example, making more use of the River Clyde, promoting healthier lifestyles, creativity in the use of space and sustainable development. I employed a 'runner' to bring developed ideas on sticky notes to place on the board and told the class we would try to create our own survey return from these. The results were fantastic and the enthusiasm with which the students approached this, particularly as this was last period in the day, was outstanding. The pictures offer only a snapshot of a rich range of suggestions. A very simple lesson, introduced by the teacher but driven by the students.