Category: Learning

Nonfiction in the middle

Mediating between curiosity and research, curriculum and pleasure By Nadine Bailey and Katie Day

In the summer of 2024 we asked International School Middle School librarians to tell us the story of nonfiction in their libraries. We wanted to know their ambitions, frustrations, organisation and display as well as their collection development and usage plans. All books recommended in this article can be found tagged in our LibraryThing Shelf (https://www.librarything.com/catalog/middleNF). 

Curriculum and Research

Educators and librarians who have been around for a while know and recognise the pendulum of ideas and practice that upend things first in one direction and then another. Nonfiction is one of those things where some of the momentum is now moving back to the practice of reading subject matter in physical form. Many librarians responded that in a post-covid learning environment both they and the teachers they work with were moving back to giving information in print form – mainly books where they were available, but also printing out articles from online sites such as Britannica and Newsela in order to encourage deep reading, avoid distractions and teach nonfiction reading skills that could be later transferred to online reading. 

Schools following the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organisation) programmes (PYP/MYP) had particular interest in “transdisciplinary” and cross curricula books that would offer broader perspectives on curriculum or unit themes. Many librarians were investing in books that would support inquiry into aspects of the United Nations SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). There was also a keen interest to ensure that sufficient “local” (country where the school is located) and “diverse” (countries of students’ origins) content was available in the library.

Many librarians have quite heavily weeded their nonfiction sections and are now looking to re-stock them based on this renewed interest in physical books. But it appears that publishers are not necessarily aware of what is happening on the ground and are not always updating and bringing out new editions of popular texts. 

On the other hand, most respondents remarked on how much progress had been made in the last few years on the design, layout and illustrations in recent nonfiction texts. There was also a shoutout for the increase in different formats including “Oversize books” (see the books of “Big Picture Press – Welcome to the Museum”); Graphic and Manga imprints (series such HowToons; Cells at Work; and authors such as Don Brown and Jim Ottaviani); infographics (Infographic guides; ) Subject Summaries (The Big Fat Notebook series), Picture books (see this 2024 SLJ list) and Subject Overviews or introductions (DK Eyewitness, and DK Big Ideas).

Where curriculum and research is concerned, students can now often choose their favourite medium of access through a variety of formats.

Foster the flame of curiosity

Somewhere on the way to middle school, students amend their passions to fit in with their peers and ensure a sense of belonging. So out go the dinosaurs and big trucks to be replaced with their favourite sports personalities, music stars, books about their sports (soccer and basketball seem to be hits). Puberty hits this group hard and fast and strategic placement of sensitive materials can put paid to rumours and myths. It is also a time of self-absorption and worry about their physical and mental health – books on health and well being, relaxation, anxiety, meditation as well as psychology, are popular and an area of growth in most libraries. 

Given the demographics of our schools, students of this age are already taking a keen interest in finance, aspects of wealth and investment as well as entrepreneurship. They’re also interested in personally exploring hobbies and activities they may see online such as cooking, sewing and knitting or other crafts. 

History – particularly the world wars and more recent conflicts continue to fascinate and appal in equal measure – often mediated by historical fiction texts students may encounter in their literature studies or English classrooms and what they see on the news or social media. 

Shelving, organisation and display

In order to make nonfiction appealing and accessible, quite a few of our respondents mentioned they either had or were in the process of rethinking the way that nonfiction was shelved, organised and displayed in their libraries. There is a continuum from pure DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) to a range of Book Shop or genrified models. Librarians were more interested in getting books seen and read than in a hypothetical need for their audience to be able to navigate a university library later. One of our respondents coined the lovely phrase of “emotional accessibility” in this respect. 

Of course most libraries have already taken the first step of putting “literature” or novels out of a straight Dewey 800 section into a fiction collection – genrified or or not. Other common “extractions” from the main Dewey structure include:

  • Taking Biographies, collective biographies and memoirs out of 910/920 and putting them in a separate section. Some libraries put collective biographies at the start of the section they pertain to (i.e. famous musicians go to 780).
  • Travel Books
  • Poetry
  • Drama and playscripts
  • Graphic Novels and Manga 
  • Narrative nonfiction
  • Myths, Legends and Fairytales
  • Parenting 
  • Well Being
  • Professional Development 
  • Sports 
  • Country specific collections
  • A specific nonfiction series that’s popular
Photo: American School of Dubai MSHS Sport Section

In the absence of permanently pulling out a section – many librarians make use of rotating “dynamic shelving” or temporary topical displays. The guideline here appears to be to follow the needs and interests of the community – teenagers want to be able to independently navigate the library without adult intervention that may be embarrassing. 

Photo courtesy of Ashley Simmons
Photo courtesy of Ashley Simmons

Related to that – signage and signposting was an area that nearly all librarians were investing in. Many mentioned significant weeding that had resulted in more space for forward facing displays and carving out sections of interest. 

Recommendations

To support the discovery of nonfiction titles for middle school, we’ve curated a shelf of 389 (and growing) books on Librarything that we consider to be worth investing in. It’s an ongoing labour of love, so not every book has been tagged at this point yet.

Examples of Some of the tagging we’ve employed are (not an exhaustive list):

  • Narrative nonfiction
  • Manga
  • Graphic
  • Topic_
    • WW2
    • Women
    • Science
    • Mathematics
    • Religion
    • History
    • Climate
    • SDGxx
    • Activism
    • Wellbeing
    • War
    • Technology
    • Sustainability
    • Sports
    • Space
    • Social Media
  • Geo_
    • Southeast Asia
    • China
    • USA
    • Europe
    • UK
    • Australia
  • Edition
    • Young Reader

Since such lists can quickly go out of date, we’d also like to generalise with some series, authors, titles and publishers that we recommend.

Great AUTHORS 

  • Marc Aronson
  • Don Brown
  • Marc Favreau
  • Candace Fleming
  • ​​Russell Freedman
  • Yuval Noah Harari
  • Deborah Hopkinson
  • Tanya Lloyd Kyi (Canadian)
  • Randall Munroe
  • Jim Ottaviani
  • Elizabeth Partridge
  • Gillian Richardson
  • Steve Sheinkin
  • Cory Silverberg (Puberty)
  • Dashka Slater
  • Tanya Lee Stone
  • Pamela S. Turner

Great PUBLISHERS

  • Annick Press (Canada)
  • DK (Eyewitness; Big Ideas; Children’s Timelines; How Things Work; How Stuff Works)
  • First Second (MacMillan)
  • National Geographic for Kids
  • Usborne (UK)
  • Crabtree Publishing Company
  • Flying Eye Books

Great SERIES

  • DK Eyewitness
  • DK Big Ideas
  • DK Children’s Timelines
  • DK How Things Work / How Stuff Works
  • From Playground to Pitch
  • HowToons
  • Hazardous Tales (Nathan Hale)
  • Little Histories 
  • World Citizen Comics
  • UN sustainable development goals

Great TITLES

There’s been a recent shift toward publishing a Young Adult version of popular nonfiction titles either simultaneously or shortly after the Adult version. These can be found by searching for “Young Readers” or “Young Reader’s edition” / “Young Reader’s Adaptation”.

Blogs and nonfiction websites

Nonfiction Book Awards

Pairing Nonfiction and Fiction

Last but not least, pairing a nonfiction book with a novel can enhance both texts.

I initially started putting a fiction book on this libguide followed by suggestions of nonfiction, https://asdubai.libguides.com/ms/reading/nonfiction. I’ve now moved away from that somewhat and have started curating “Read Around the Curriculum” posters where either a curriculum topic is highlighted with fiction and nonfiction, or an “If you like / want to know more” poster is made of one of our book club fiction books with suggestions for finding out more about the context with other fiction/nonfiction books on the topic.

Katie Day and I would love to hear your suggestions for more nonfiction books, and perhaps we can expand the list to High School. Many of the books suggested in our list are suitable for High School and upper elementary as well.

Comments and suggestions much appreciated.

NOTE: Since the publication of this post we have been approached by commercial entities about using the list. While we cannot prevent the list from being used commercially this is our wish:

This list was created in order to freely help librarians all around the world. It was a labour of love which took a lot of our personal vacation time to create. If you are part of a commercial organization and you will be using the list commercially we would request that you attribute us and make a suitable donation in our names to “Biblioteca di Lampedusa” which serves refugees from around the world in their Silent Book initiative, https://www.facebook.com/BiblioLampedusa/ or the “IBBY Children in Crisis Fund”: https://www.ibby.org/awards-activities/ibby-children-in-crisis-fund.
Thanks. Nadine & Katie

Learning but not yet

So I got fired up about learning Javascript and then I had to do some very practical stuff in HTML/CSS that took way longer than I thought it would with considerable troubleshooting. So that’s been parked.

Even as a teacher, when I do stuff I’m learning about learning. Like the fact that when I originally wrote that blog post about customisation of libguides at my previous school, I’d spent a lot of time in that summer getting acquainted with the ins and outs of bootstrap/HTML/CSS. And because I was using it a lot it seemed quite easy. And then with a hiatus of nearly 5 years, I’d forgotten so much I had to almost re-learn it all again. It’s a little bit like my journey with learning Chinese, and forgetting Chinese and relearning Chinese, and taking a break and having to start learning it all over again. The dilettante model of learning and doing is not necessarily super efficient – Adam Smith definitely had a point on comparative advantage.

And one of the big lessons? I spent quite a bit of time doing some fancy bootstrapping for the landing page and then looked back at the guides I’d made at my previous school and realised that there is no point if there is no one to maintain and sustain it (maintenance is a big thing in my thinking – see this post from last year which was one of the most read posts I’ve written). So I reverted to something more standardised – I also believe that constraints are an important thing in creativity.

So, I’ve relearnt some HTML/CSS and managed to make a good-enough header/nav bar and footer that functions, and I’ve re-discovered the nice geeky hideout that is the Springshare lounge with their very supportive community. And I know a lot more about what I don’t know … which is a lot.

And maybe when I need a career change I’ll do some more programming and stuff … I once thought I should become an editor because I have the uncanny ability to glance at pages of text and see the one spelling, punctuation or grammar error, and working through all of this I’m developing an eye for glancing through code … very infant stuff still, but maybe something worth developing.

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Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Don’t try this at home!

Week 12. The TV in our household has been quiet for most of the Covid-19 period. This isn’t unusual, since I grew up in South Africa, we only got TV when I was 9, and it was a little black and white thing to boot, so the habit never caught on. Since my son is doing film, we’ll occasionally watch something that he’s seeing for film together, or the odd Netflix series. I switched on the TV the other night and stood amazed as a home-schooling mum told a reporter about how she managed everything, the brilliant schedule*, her children diligently working at whatever was laid out, the chores everyone was merrily doing and sighed. And felt inadequate. And laughed a little hysterically. (And switched channels). And remembered that I’d never chosen homeschooling, ever, at any point of my parenting existence. In fact sending my kids to school was a sure way of ensuring that they survived past childhood.

I think a lot of us “educator/administrator / parents” are feeling the pressure that somehow we should have more a grip on online-learning – well spoiler alert – this one certainly doesn’t.

This past weekend I closed my laptop and only lightly touched my phone to connect with friends and family. Because my son needed my help. He had a film assignment to complete and I was the only warm body able to be camera-person. He needed synchronous conversation and meals with me, as we’ve been completely asynchronous all week with him waking up just as I’m at the end of my physical and emotional tether with all the work I’m doing online. We needed to have some meals together. Go for a walk. Get in the car and visit our local vegetable farmer to stock up and try a local farmer who had a meat self-service stall.

I still consider myself to be fortunate. One 16 yo in the house with me, one 18yo stuck in the UK with her guardians, trying to discuss university options and counselling not to feel despondent that the first choices were not achieved. Single and remote parenting isn’t something I’ve chosen but has been thrust on me with a husband still in China.

It was a tough week. Our landlord refused to extend our lease for even another year as she had $$ signs dancing in her eyes (good luck with that), and we needed to virtually find a new place (my husband can’t return to Beijing without 14 day quarantine, and he can’t be away from his job that long, as life is back to normal where he works). Thank heavens for kind colleagues who were leaving and prepared to have a long conversation about the place they were vacating. Now the ROTW (rest of the world) has joined the online party every single system is creaking and groaning and, more often than not, just lying down and dying. Professional stress plus personal stress are not a great combination. My son had a terrible week last week – 11 weeks of online learning for an extreme extrovert with ADHD is not a joke. Plus a physically absent father and an emotionally absent mother – or at least not present at the hours that he was present. He did a lot of sleeping. And cooking. And neighbour’s dog walking. And panicking. So did I, except for the sleeping bit.

As with most things these days, it seems like online-learning while parenting is a binary thing. On the one hand there are the perfect parents with their schedules and advice, and on the other there are those shouting out for help, discussing tantrums and refusals to cooperate. Or those like me occasionally whimpering that it’s not easy.

The other binary seems to be the “refuseniks” who are taking a stand against any online learning as an affront to their authority in the home, or who say it should take a back-seat to emotional / physical wellness vs the group who want it to all be “business as usual” and are reactive to any hint of a slackening of pace.

I suspect all and any responses are responses driven by culture, experience, financial means and dare I say anxiety. While on the one hand I do think this is the ideal opportunity to rethink so much in life, there is the constant sword of Damocles I feel hanging over my head. Single parts of a machine that change, run the risk of being flung out. Will a term out of school really matter? This article based on the Christchurch experience argues it won’t. NWEA – who is selling a tool, but does have the data that so many crave during uncertainty compare the Covid-19 slide to the summer slide. And some private schools are already preparing to mitigate against any slide. I know that working and learning in our household does create the semblance of a structure and the idea that there is some lurching forwards towards academic goals, or at least well-trodden pathways.

It is of course a privilege thing above everything else.

romanticising quarantine - .jpgThe people cited in the first article weren’t sitting around doing nothing while their children were un-supervised, left to their own devices and anxieties. The loudest voices in the “I’m going to do nothing” won’t really be doing nothing. They’ll be playing games, cooking, gardening, reading and a plethora of other stimulating activities in the (larger) indoor and outdoor spaces they have at their disposal. They’ll know what to do because their background and privilege will allow them to make choices that mean things will turn out OK. Structured schooling is unfortunately one of the few options for many other students to do the school and life learning that will make their futures more bearable.

Not just privilege but also assumptions – they’ve not really changed – the idea of homeschooling presupposes that there is someone at home to do the schooling. Now there may be somebodies at home – but those bodies may be working pretty darn hard to keep their own jobs, or in fact be the ones pushing out the online-learning while juggling the education of their own.

A few of the articles I’ve found interesting this week are “prepare for the ultimate gaslighting” That counts not only for consumption of goods, but also I think for the consumption of learning. What will happen when we go back? The universe hates a vacuum. Will it be swiftly filled by more of the same?

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*There are circles of hell for online/remote/home schooling schedules – and the ones closest to the fire are the ones that are colour-coded and for sale on TpP (Teachers pay Teachers – for the uninitiated) ! schedule.jpg

How long will it take to rethink online learning?

Tomorrow marks 74 days since we saw our students face-to-face. Since we had the luxury of physical indoor and outdoor spaces. A library. Fields to play in. Classrooms. We’re at the point of the year now where we’ve started talking about assessments and report cards and student led conferences. Where there are fewer days left until the end of the school year (67 days) than we’ve been doing online learning. And everyone I speak to is so very tired. Students, parents, teachers.

If this becomes our new normal, even in some kind of hybrid online/off-line model as articles such as this from the Atlantic Get Used to It: This Lockdown Won’t Be the Last  suggest that we may be moving between the two for a while to come, then we’re going to have to rethink online learning in a major way.

I listened to an interesting podcast with Sam Harris and Matt Mullenweg little over a week ago, on the New Future of Work wanted to blog on it but then had to do some more thinking and revisiting the points, but it was nearly a 2 hour podcast and I didn’t have the time to re-listen to it (even on my usual double speed), and there was no transcript – so the hack I employed was to open a word document and activate dictate, play the podcast in the background and use Microsoft’s pretty impressive assistive technologies help me.  I can read way faster than I can listen which is why video-based education always annoys the heck out of me. Podcasts are ok as I can do them while walking, cleaning, cooking etc.

Levels of Online Work:

Getting back to the point. Mullenweg identified five levels of online working. And I think this is probably true of online learning.  He also had a great little anecdote about the early days of radio drama in the 1920’s when people didn’t take advantage of the medium and tried to recreate plays including costume etc and then broadcast it. Online everything is a bit like that – we take the physical and try to recreate it but online, not fully adapting to the medium.

The levels are:

Level 1: Occasional at home work for example due to emergencies / illness using basic equipment like phones / internet

Level 2: Attempt to recreate the office environment at home without taking advantage of the medium – i.e. synchronous, mandated online hours, surveillance by company, little freedom and agency.

Level 3: Take more advantage of the medium – e.g. shared documents, real-time editing for example during meetings for clarification and shared understanding, better home equipment, companies investing in hiring people with really good written communication skills.

Level 4: Going asynchronous giving agency to people to design their day and productivity. Performance is judged on production / output not on how it’s produced. The baton is passed on over time zones. Decisions take longer but allow for longer and better contemplation, less power dynamics and give space for introverts and people for whom English is a second language.

Level 5: Nirvana with better work and more fun. Environment is designed around health including mental health and wellness. People operated at a higher level being “heroicly productive”. A sense of a world of “infinite abundance” and where there is a noticeable divergence between peers in terms of their deliverables/output. The biases of online environments such as dress / self-presentation / image disappear.

In their “The Remote Playbook from the largest All-Remote company in the world” Gitlab have their own levels:

  • No remote
  • Remote-allowed
  • Hybrid-remote
  • Remote, biased towards one time zone
  • All-remote, asynchronous across time zones

Document everything

I really like some of their suggestions – including the one about documenting everything and having a single source of truth. Honestly that was one of the most time-consuming things I did initially and it remains tough to keep it updated and relevant, but our Middle School online learning guide (7,745 views) and the more detailed Teachers guide (5,476 views) remain the best time-investment I’ve made so far.

Document Everything
From: The Remote Playbook by Gitlab – see more here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/handbook-usage/#why-handbook-first

Get off email

The most impressive statement Mullenweg made was:

“sometimes I .. get under 5 emails per month, well and some months it might just be one or two basically all I get with email is like private HR stuff things that need to be one to one private communication everything else happens on these internal” (discussion boards / forums)

One of the most stressful parts of online learning I think for everyone has been the continual flow of single-purpose single-person emails all asking / saying the same thing. From the EdTech / IT side of things we’ve taken a load off with Libguides. I don’t get the feeling that’s happening so much in the various subjects. We’re not at Nirvana yet – or even close because there is still some pride in saying how many emails you have / have sent / how many hours you’ve been working. I had a really bad day on Friday. I’d been up late giving online PD to some educators in North America, followed by finishing off some points that had arisen from the PD plus internal stresses as our permission to stay is becoming an issue as we can’t return to China and my son and I were creating home-made application photos and filling in forms (in French – thank you Google translate) into the next morning. Then up early to do the first grocery shop in 3 weeks at 7.30am before the shops got busy. And then I was dead. I checked the most important emails and dealt with them – often just pointing people to our knowledge base. I left a bunch. And by the end of the day got “don’t worry I managed to solve it” from a few. The more robust our knowledge base can be, the easier this is going to become. I also need to make a huge investment in getting everything to ASK.wab.edu and then pointing to individual pages / boxes.

That’s going to take a huge investment not just in putting it all in “ask”, but also in getting our whole community to check there first as a habit. 

Rethinking it all

But I diverge from the real point of this blog and that is the increasing realisation that perhaps we need to rethink teaching and learning. I attended a Zoom webinar with around 50 MYP educators last week, led by the indomitable Lenny Dutton and the consensus seemed to be converging around the fact that huge scaling down of the curriculum and content expectations was occurring – with 50% being the most common number suggested. (Side note, it also made me incredibly proud of the leadership, foresight and guidance of WAB as we’ve been asynchronous from the start).  Perhaps it’s my A-type personality, or perhaps it was the question from my son “will all this result in the IB changing its exams next year to take account that we’re missing so much this year” that made me wonder what the heck we’re doing? Yes I’m not uncaring and I know all about Maslow vs. Bloom etc. I also know that there is less room for anxiety, worry and endless media scrolling when there’s useful and engaging work to be done.

I have to keep wondering if there is a different way, besides the asynchronous and slower pace to do this. My colleagues know I have two phrases of our greatest enemy in education that I repeat all the time “continual partial attention” and “switching costs“. I think education does particularly badly in helping students to find their flow or in adhering to Daniel Pinks’ tenants of motivation “autonomy, mastery and purpose”

I’m a veteran of (adult) distance learning, having done two back-to-back masters’ degrees remotely over four plus years. It was hard. Really hard. And it took a while (at least 3 subjects, lots of tears and feedback) before I managed to work out the best way to organise myself and my work flow and to find the balance between (part-time) work, full-time motherhood with a spouse who was on the road a lot and being a student.

The sweet spot for me was only two subjects per semester, and only working on one subject at a time each day.

Granted these were masters level subjects with an enormous course load and tons of academic reading to do. But then again I’m a highly literate adult, with hopefully more defined study skills and work habits. So if we’re asking students to do 8 or more subjects and teachers to be teaching 5 block – sometimes of different grades/subjects (middle school) is it any wonder we may be over-reaching? (The poor completion record of MOOCs is also something at the back of my mind).

004-teamsAs you know, I’ve also been grappling with that beast called Teams, and I’m trying to think out of the box and learn from all the questions and webinars and videos out there. One completely out of the box idea I had was perhaps we’re thinking of it the wrong way around – this is in particular to my thoughts about student agency, self-directed learning, portfolios and evidence of learning/mastery.  What if instead of having class/subject teams, each STUDENT had a team they were owner of. They’d have channels for their various subjects, and they’d choose which two or three subjects they’d focus on at any time and when they’d do it. Subject groups would have department teams with all the teachers, the curriculum and curriculum content that then could be pushed down to students and mentors would help guide students in their choices. Instead of semesters, for this age group we’d probably have to look at shorter periods of time to ensure that the “forgetting” curve didn’t kick in – especially in continual practice type subjects (I’m in dire danger with my Chinese according to my memrise app, not to mention muscle loss on the fitness side of things).

combating-the-forgetting-curve

What are you thinking?

In a conversation with a fellow educator last week, he said “Well WAB is just so far ahead in thinking about these things, we’re probably at least two or three years behind even putting theses discussions out in the open” and perhaps that is so with our Flow21 initiatives. I’m also wondering how far away we are from becoming a global rather than location based entity – for example some of our students were at one point enrolled in local schools where they were based and have now returned to the fold – what’s stopping us from enrolling other poorly served students into our programmes?

I’m thinking the IBO is also going to need to be far more proactive to fit the new reality. Personally I was not impressed with the timeline of action (exam cancellation and alternatives proposed) only coming after it was apparent that this wasn’t just a China problem. Value based leadership is essential in these times and that includes checking bias.

FeedbackOnlineMYP.001

I do think the IBO focus on ATLs (Approaches to Learning), particularly communication would remain foremost – again from Mullenweg:

“and writing quality, clarity, and skill becomes more and more valuable I think in all organizations but the more distributed you are for sure. This is going to be a windfall for all the humanities degrees. Absolutely we screened for it very heavily in hiring process. Like I actually don’t care where you went to college or anything like that but we do a lot to screen for writing ability both in the how you apply how we interact will hire many many people without ever actually talking to them in real time or on voice we do it entirely through slack and tickets and other things because that’s how we work”

If we were to explode education what would it look like? Please comment.

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Feedback during Online Learning by Stephen Taylor
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
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Teamin’ up

IMG_6391

This blog post is brought to you in-between too much stuff to do with online learning but as an absolute PLEA to Microsoft Education with their wonderful but exasperating Teams product to do some more heavy lifting to get Teams for Education into a shape and form that will get us through the next few months of online learning.

Why Teams is great – especially during online learning

Ok, I’ll do a sandwich – Teams has been wonderful for just existing. For making meetings quick and easy. For their integrated class/teacher/student notebooks (albeit they crash way too often and can refuse to sync properly). For their great way of setting up assignments making it quick and easy to have an overview, to mark and give feedback, for the rubrics.  (Although you can’t see assignment dates on the calendar – please vote for this!) They’re doing a really really good job of a lot of what we need.

And now for the BUT.

The big but. And I understand how it happened. It happened like a lot of things to do with education happen, including a lot of LMS (Learning management systems). They do something for the big people, in corporations or in universities, and schools are crying out for a functioning and functional LMS that’s mobile and cloud based and so something gets adapted and pushed down to secondary school or even primary. Ditto the other way, things are made for primary school where you have one classroom with kids and a few specialist teachers / classes and someone tries to push it up to secondary.

So, we’ve been doing online learning for nearly 8 weeks now (I think, I’m losing track, and last week was a week “off”). And we’re really needing to change gear. We can no longer stay in first gear as if we’re climbing a steep mountain while on the flat-endless prairies. So it’s time to take stock and adapt practices for the longer term.

What is not working that in education we actually really really need to work? And pretty fast? (And all the mistakes I made along the way as bonus crash-viewing – hopefully this will help someone else just starting on this path) .

7 tips for video conferencing

Child protection needs to be a priority

Teams was really new this year and has been adding great features along the way. So for a long while, it was an experimental sandpit for us where we were letting our early adopter teachers play around in, create as many teams as they wanted with no real oversight. It was great, we learnt a bunch and all was fine, because we were still having physical classes and mainly using it for assignments. Then Covid-19 hit and we went full stream online. We went from a handful of teams/teachers with regular feedback to over 300 teams and all teachers overnight. Despite having naming conventions (to easily find / sort teams) and requesting that EdTech and senior leadership were co-owners of all teams, that didn’t necessarily happen. Humans in panic and all. We set up protocols for online meetings. We requested teachers to record and save meetings.

  • People forget to record (meetings can’t be set to automatically record).
  • People forgot to put meetings on the public calendar(s) (we have one per grade)
  • Students start meetings before the meeting time/teacher is present.
  • Teams only keeps a meeting recording for 20 days.
  • Meetings in private channels can’t be recorded

These are things that were “nice” to have automated / sorted out before we went online but now are really important if we want to safe-guard students and protect teachers from (potential) unjustified accusations.

Here are the links to Microsoft teams UserVoice to request these things are implemented – please add your voice and vote:

Schools have children in them – they do stupid things!

We have a number of teams for professional purposes, and even we have problems with basic organisation – such as putting things in the right channel, starting conversations in the right channel etc. We were so glad when Teams started the option of private channels, but then so disappointed when they didn’t have the full functionality of open channels. Open channels are fine. But not for 10-11 year olds. They need to be corralled into private channels so they don’t mess things up for themselves and others.

Teams has an endlessly flat non-hierarchical structure

Yes ideally and eventually we’re going to kill grade levels and age-based learning and all of that. But it hasn’t happened yet. And it’s not going to happen in the next few months of online learning. And yes fortunately and for the better of all we’re moving from thinking about students and classes as “my” student/class/subject.

The very basic question we all grapple with in creating teams is how to structure it. Because there isn’t really a structure in teams.

Here is something I posted to the Tech Community educator group early on in December 2019 about the sheer math of the matter and some responses:

Screen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.53.50 PMScreen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.54.25 PMScreen Shot 2020-03-24 at 6.55.41 PM

I still don’t really have the optimal answer to that, particularly given the restrictions of private channels (maximum of 30 per team, no meeting scheduling and no meeting recording).

The thing is it’s better to think this all out in advance and to have a plan rather than to start and then have to reconfigure things afterwards because

  • you can’t change a private channel into a public channel after creating it as private
  • you can’t change a team into a channel – private or public or vice-versa
  • you can’t move a channel into another team
  • you can’t rename a team or change a teams name (well you may “think” you can and do it,  but you have potential real problems in the back-end in Sharepoint)
  • you can’t sort teams or put them into folders or pin them – you can drag them around – easy enough if you have a couple of teams not so if you have 300 of them, you can filter them – but that only works if you’ve named them all properly and consistently.

There is no dashboard / entry point

When you enter teams it is a full on experience. There is no dashboard with your calendar / assignments / meetings about to happen. You can scroll and scroll and still miss things – sometimes I have a meeting to attend and I even know in which team and it’s started but I still can’t find it quickly!

The analytics are very rudimentary

I’m the first to admit I’m a little bit of a data nerd – ok a lot. I have seen a lot of responses in the twitter-sphere along the lines of “no one is going to tell my child what to do during school closure” or “I don’t care if they learn or not as long as they’re happy” – but that’s not my demographic. Our families are paying a lot of money for their children’s education and learning and they have high expectations of us and their children.

[Personally I’d also say an engaged, purposefully busy and cared for child (not just by the parents but by the educator too) is a happier child than one left to endless repeats of anxiety creating bad-news on social media or TV. ].

So we spend a lot of time and energy making sure we’re mentoring students, monitoring their engagement and that they’re not falling too far behind their peers. Moodle, our usual LMS (but the clunky old stead) has great analytics. I can see exactly who’s been online and when, for how long and what they’ve been engaged in – but for many reasons our students and teachers like the intuitive feel of Teams more.

Teams has basic analytics for the week and month BUT I can’t click on anything! I can see the number of active / inactive users but I can’t click further and see WHO is inactive – so here’s one class for example – 9 kids’ haven’t re-engaged in the first 3 days after spring break. Who are they? Without looking through comments and assignments in detail I don’t know. I look at 28 days and see it’s just 1 person – who is that?

But that’s just one teacher for one subject – say I’m a mentor for 11 students and I need to report weekly on all my students and see who’s falling behind and whether it’s just one subject or all of them. No can do.

Lack of portfolios

Using portfolios as evidence of learning is really important as we progress in our understanding of education as a process of learning rather than students needing to jump through some curriculum and examination hoops at certain points in time in their lives (really relevant now as IB, GCSE and A level exams were cancelled this year). The structure of teams is that the Team in Sharepoint “owns” the work students have done as assignments. There is no easy and quick way to gather all the evidence of learning from the assignments and “give” it back to students to add to their portfolios as they move through the system or from one school / teacher / grade to another.

This may seem minor but it’s a major philosophical shift that need to happen in education. Learning is not something that happens to students from teachers, but something that students own and are accountable for. Especially now. Especially in concept-based education like the MYP.

There are many ways of showing mastery and the current set-up still puts the teacher in the control panel.

I’m way over my time and word limit now, so to end my sandwich:

What else works really well

Add on apps and integration with things like Zoom. A fabulous user-base in China with the inimitable James Rong – check out his blog – we have a joke here that if we ask a question to Microsoft, they ask James and then come back to us with his answer. Our other “joke” is that he posts an answer on his blog to a question we didn’t even know we had until we see the answer!

If you’re rockin’ teams and have some suggestions on best practice, please don’t give them on twitter or facebook where they’ll disappear, but add them as a comment here so that as a community we can all learn together. 

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I don’t know who created the image on my blog header but it’s amazing – it was passed onto me in a chat as a meme, if it’s yours please let me know so I can credit you.

 

First the earthquake and then the tsunami

Six weeks done and we enter our virtual online Spring Break. And my social media both professional and personal is awash with questions from people about school closure and online learning from a teacher/librarian/tech/personal point of view. It’s the long tail, the tsunami hitting land after the earthquake at sea. And I know that’s just a pretty picture of a wave on my blog and nothing at all like a tsunami. We in China had the Earthquake and now as folk in the rest of the world start running from the Tsunami we’re inundated with questions.

I’m not sure we’re equipped to answer them.

As private international schools in Asia we are a bunch of extremely privileged people. Both educators and pupils. My “go to” people in the China EdTech /Education world are a relatively homogenous group in that we are all well resourced and can go back to our leadership and ask for the money we need for the things we need to support and sustain online learning.  We have strong and capable leadership in our school who have modeled best practice in their empathetic and compassionate attitude and behaviour to all constituents of our community. We haven’t had to deal with salary cuts, union rules, students in situations of extreme poverty, or unreasonable demands. My colleagues and peers are a sharing, giving bunch and the things we create or come up with are shared freely without cost to others as we build on what works. The companies we work with have been super helpful and responsive and generous.

But the Tsunami has hit shore, and the coastal dwellers include the most vulnerable and least equipped or prepared for this. Our solutions won’t and cannot be their solutions. We have to remain humble in our responses. Even as I realise this and write of my experience I realise this comes from a place of privilege. I have these resources I can rely on.

The personal and political

This blog is a little more personal as I sit in the early hours of the morning after a fitful sleep. The virus has come close to home. A child in my daughter’s boarding school in the UK was diagnosed with the virus yesterday. After he left the school to go back to Europe on Wednesday. We heard last night European time. My husband is still in Nanjing. My son is with me in Switzerland. She’s in the UK. Three jurisdictions. Three different social, ideological cultural and emotional responses to this event.  But what does that matter when you have to make decisions? Decisions that could put other people at risk – like her guardians in the UK. A country that won’t let her be tested privately or publicly before going to them. A place where a lot of air-traffic is still occurring due to bizarre travel decisions by the leader of yet another nation. Where schools won’t/can’t make autonomous decisions and need to look to their government, but where the government, unlike the Chinese government, has a more cavalier response to the situation. And it seems is putting economic and political expediency above people’s lives. I keep second guessing myself.

This much I know is true. She should not be in a boarding house/school with so many other people. She can self-isolate with our friends / her guardians. She should not be travelling internationally at this time – airports / planes = high risk. Virus statistics and reporting is a numbers game. Literally a game. You test, your infection stats go up your fatality rate goes down. You don’t test, you can pretend all is ok. But then people die.

These are my concerns. Is she infected? If so, she infects the people who are generous enough to take her in. They infect other people. She gets ill – she’s young and healthy – but what if she gets very ill? I’m relying on friends to take care of my child, my young adult?

Parenting online

Ok, so a bit more about parenting (or the lack thereof) during the virus.

I wrote this for parents on a libguide right at the start of school closure. It was recently included in an article by ISTE so I thought I’d better revisit it. Funnily enough I don’t think I’d change anything. I’ll just expand a little on what it looks like practically and in reality for people going into this.

I’ve been working crazy hours, so parenting has suffered. This is a good thing in some respects.  Above all I think it’s important to keep good relationships going in the home. A big part of that is me refraining from nagging my son. When I do try and take what he considers to be an unreasonable interest in what he’s doing / how / when / how much, it nearly always ends in a row. Unless he’s doing the asking for help – in which case I need to drop everything and attend to him. I just love this (old) NY Times article about being a potplant parent – that’s needed more than ever during online learning.

My son has ADHD. He was totally overwhelmed at first. So were his teachers, even though I don’t think any of them are similarly afflicted. The first inclination for everyone is to try and carry on as normal, just online. It took at least two weeks or more for everyone to “calm the f down” and settle into workable solutions and routines. A couple of strategies that helped for us at home:

  • Putting a desk in the guest room upstairs to stop him working in bed / on the sofa / at the dining table. I know if he’s on his laptop in any of the latter spaces he’s either doing “light” work or goofing off. So does he. When he’s got a serious assignment or a meeting with a teacher he’ll go upstairs to his desk to work. There’s a glass door to the space and my new standing desk (much needed based on the hours I’m spending online and the back and arm ache) on the landing is a few metres away so I’m there but not there.
  • At the end of the first week when he finally admitted that he was losing it and couldn’t cope, I bought a paper agenda and we agreed he’d just think about and focus on two subjects a day. Once he’d caught up he could go back to the regular schedule, we agreed on which subjects they’d be for a few days together and then he took charge again. The fact that our school has moved to an asynchronous learning model is very helpful here.
  • Letting teachers be the teachers. We’re extremely, extremely fortunate to be at WAB. I can’t emphasise this enough. I know that his teachers are supporting him and looking out for him. That means I don’t (and shouldn’t) micromanage his learning. He has regular face-to-face check-ins with his teachers and his class mentor. They have physical and emotional distance from him while still being on his side. I don’t have that. It helps. When he messes up or misses a deadline, or doesn’t respond I will hear about it, but not before. We needed to intervene once with a busy-work / communication style situation, but that’s hopefully been resolved.
  • Sharing the household burden. It’s taken nearly 17 years, but after a week of closure he spontaneously came to me and laid out what part of the household chores he’d take upon himself “without any prompting”. This includes cleaning the bathrooms and toilets, taking out the garbage, helping walk our elderly neighbour’s dog and helping with the cooking and cleaning the kitchen. He’s stuck to that for over a month now and I’m more proud of that (and walking into his room yesterday and seeing it tidy, with the bed made) than anything else during this period.
  • Giving each other space – we’ll each go off for walks on our own. Take time out to cool down if we have words or after a shout. Yes I shout. And swear. And so does he. We’re human and emotions can run high. But we’ve found a new type of equilibrium in our relationship, an understanding that that should be more important than all the other details. It’s been a long time coming.
  • And I think he’ll want me to add this, he’s not a gamer. That’s huge. I know families with big concerns about the vast amount of time online at the moment that’s spent gaming not learning. I am grateful to him that this is not the case, and he reminds me of it when he sees the impact on some of his friends and peers.

This gif shows how I felt by 7am yesterday morning after nearly 7 weeks non-stop working. We’re now in our Spring Break and I’m promising myself to get off the computer and do some reading. Of real physical books!

via GIPHY

 

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Photo by Joshua Dewey on Unsplash

Objects in the mirror

As we enter week 4 of online learning (and week 5 for me of the supporting and setup) a few musings on the process.

I chose today’s title because a lot of what we do is like trying to drive a car in reverse over a long distance for a long time with only a side-mirror as any view on reality. The other reason is that things are both distorted and exaggerated.

My mantra has always been that it’s not about tech, it’s about people. And that seems even truer if possible now. Students (and teachers) who were struggling in real life classrooms are struggling now. In some ways it’s just more obvious and exaggerated now. Those with a great rapport with students are re-creating that rapport albeit online. And the people who thought the usual rules and ways of doing things didn’t apply to them still think that – only it’s really messing up students ability to find what they need to do and to do it on time, so maybe, just maybe they’ll be sanctioned.

This week I wrote a blog for our parent EdTech blog forum about maintaining social relationships during online learning. What I didn’t say, because it wasn’t appropriate in that forum, was what my son said to me when I asked him what his advice would be. Besides saying he was just doing what he always did usually and that he had mates whose sleep/wake patterns were so messed up that he knew he could have contact with them no matter what the time was. He’s quite a perceptive kind of kid, and comes out with great one-liners, like this one: “the sad thing is that suddenly some kids are realising that they don’t have friends. They hang around in some amorphous group at school where they have the illusion they belong, but this just highlights they don’t have one real friend”.

It’s a time of learning so much about oneself. Like I’m usually a highly structured person with great habit-stacking and very regular when I wake up, exercise, work, read, learn Chinese, etc etc. This usually even includes holiday time when I always have great learning goals which I usually achieve (more or less, say 60-80%). But trying to be available for everyone all the time has truly messed me up big time. This weekend is the first one in five that I’m refusing to look at my emails or teams or WeChat (except for posts from friends). I’ve started refusing meetings starting at 3am-6am. And trying to force myself to bed on time (since last night). Because no proper rest means that I’ve become a bit of a brain-dead idiot myself. Even my reading has been suffering – I remarked on twitter to someone the other day that I was incapable of reading my school book club book (Down Girl) because I didn’t have the mental capacity for anything besides series of mediocre historical crime fiction and popular nonfiction (thanks Bill Bryson for “The Body” – yup that virus you predicted has come to reality, and I’m working my way to an early death right now).

So what works?

Having systems and structures and routines in place: When I originally read “When Adults Change” I thought it was a “nice idea” and something that would be “nice to have”. I’m beginning to think it really is a “need to have” at this point. Off line there is considerable room for ambiguity. Lots of opportunity to improvise and make things up on the spot or change direction 180 degrees. Online is less forgiving. Especially for people under stress. If you say that students can find their daily check-in and work for the day in place A, if it is not there about 80% of the students will assume there is no work for the day. About 10% will go hunting around using intuition and some kind of savvy and about 10% will bother to ask the teacher and/or EdTech person or their parents will do so. That means at any one time in any subject a lot of kids are missing the boat.  Having one daily entry point solves a lot of that. 

Simplifying instructions to the point of no-ambiguity: When things aren’t clear you can see on people’s faces that you need another way to explain things. That you need to rewind. That you need to do things one step at a time. Online, even in conference calls the nuances of facial and body expression are reduced to caricatures of themselves. Ideally you should only be delivering one message at a time. In clear simple language. With illustrations / marked up screenshots and screencasts. You need to say what you mean and mean what you say.

Eliminate and refine channels of communication: I tend to be quite private and don’t generally have colleagues on my personal social media, even if they’re my friends. In China WeChat has resulted in significant blurring of those personal/professional boundaries. Luckily in MS we’ve said the WeChat is not an acceptable channel for teacher/student communication. Unfortunately it is still so in HS, something I don’t support as a parent of a HS student – even if he thinks it’s ok. But I still regularly have people trying to contact me on school Tech matters on WeChat, while my order of assistance is email, teams and then finally about 4 or 5 hours later I may get to WeChat – because I still see that as my “personal space”. I’ve had to communicate that clearly to people at the risk of them feeling it’s unkind of me.

For students I’ve recommended that teachers eliminate one-on-one communication by email as much as possible for “communal” issues. If students post a problem in a communal forum, the chances are (a) more students have that issue / misunderstanding (b) some student has already resolved the issue and can help the others (c) everyone sees the issue and the solution. So anything from two to 60 one-on-one emails are eliminated. On the other hand it’s good to have one-on-one (with another adult in the room) mentoring sessions to make sure that students are no isolated and are feeling supported.

Knowledge management – Curate and publish FAQs & Issues: Thank heavens for Libguides * at this stage of the game. I’ve always been a fan, but now I can not only “can” responses but also point people to a central place where they can (hopefully); help themselves. I have a central one that points teachers, parents and students into more detailed pages. A couple of things I see happening are well documented in EdTech lore – the “waves” of adoption and understanding. We have the early adopters (along with the EdTech team) who already were tech savvy and quickly work out the tools and issues. So their questions become valuable in setting up the FAQs about your basic LMS, they then move onto experimenting with other tools, and gaining and sharing expertise and issues in these (like Teams). Besides this there are some amazing groups on WeChat China Tech who’ve been experimenting and documenting and helping each other (Thanks James Rong – the Teams Guru) Then the bulk of teachers start having the same experiences, and if you’ve had time to document things you can point them to this.

Then you have the very long tail of people who have not been keeping up with developments and out of the blue want to use tools that are either obscure or have already been tested and failed.  That’s what we are experiencing right now.

Keep things minimal and simple: managing EdTech has always been a balance of having a few “old” tried and tested tools and giving teachers and the Tech team the freedom to experiment and try things out with the hope that something amazing is around that corner that will be a game changer. Very few new tools are truly game-changing. Even Microsoft Teams for Education, which is pretty good but still has a LOT of work to do before it’s ready to take over the learning space (I’ll write more on that some other time).

Now is NOT the time to throw new tools and edtech at teachers and students/families. See my point above about one daily entry point. It’s also not the time to expect students to use seven different tech tools to complete one piece of work, with the risk of failure to connect at each point. It’s also not realistic to expect your IT support staff to have to up-skill to be able to support all the many and various issues that may arise. That’s why it’s important to be able to either say “no” or “only if it’s proven to work in China and you’re on your own if things go wrong”.

Don’t create busy-work – remember your educational goals. This is really important. In the first week of closure I noticed at home with my own son (first year IB), the difference between the teachers who were in tune with the idea of online learning as an asynchronous experience that would be used to continue teaching and learning and those who saw it as a delivery mechanism for work-sheets and busy-work. Online learning is hard – particularly if no-one (teachers or students) signed up for it in the first place. It requires extraordinary levels of self-motivation. It’s far more “active” and “harder work” in the sense that generally in a normal school situation students can gain a lot of their education by passively going to classes and absorbing what’s going on.

Some of our students are discovering previously un-tapped resources of self-discipline and self-motivation. Many of our teachers are being amazingly innovative. A lot of very positive things are coming out of this experience. Both the positive and negative are just very magnified right now.

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* As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of Libguides during this period they’ve become even more valuable than every before in information and knowledge curation. For their quite modest price they definitely punch above their weight in reliability and accessibility. And they’re not hard to learn – some of our teachers have jumped right on board and with a bit of training and help have created amazing guides – see this one for our G5 PYPx on Sustainable Development Goals made by @MrsBidder

Photo by Elly Filho on Unsplash

Preparing for closure – don’t make it about Tech

By now the nCOV potential pandemic is world news and international schools over China are in (full) preparation mode on how to continue teaching and learning via online modalities. As part of my preparation, I’m planning to blog daily. Because it’s not about the tech. It’s about mental and psychological preparation to sit this out, continue to learn and teach (what I put up for our community).

If I were to gift every student, teacher, administrator and parent one thing, it would be a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. The new graphic novel version is particularly good. And a blank lined notebook and a pen.

Funnily enough, it struck me that if it weren’t for my librarian/tech integration hybrid role, I wouldn’t even be involved in these discussions. I’m always astounded how far down the list of people thought about, librarians lie, and education twitter folk must be tired of me answering every question on collaboration and curation and resourcing with “have you asked your teacher librarian”.

Whatever. I’ll write this from the point of view of a librarian who happens to be techie and cynical about tech, but passionate about learning and maintaining learning.

What have we put in place so far for school closure

In the days before the spring break, we created a “closure” tab in our Moodle Learning Management system in middle and high school. [We’ve been looking for an alternative for years now, but between our innovations in student learning and agency and the “China” factor, haven’t managed to move forward in that.] Within the tab we have a learning forum where students and teachers can interact asynchronously with each other. The expectation is that teachers will post a lesson each day that a lesson would have taken place (i.e. 5 times per 9 day cycle) and students check in and respond and do the assigned work. Elementary school will continue to use blogs.

What else do we have?

Regulars to this blog will know I’m a huge libguide fan and I have an extensively curated set of resources for our middle school (students, teachers and parents) that can be accessed through our main library page.  Unfortunately our 16,000 book collection is inaccessible, however we do have Overdrive/Sora, and a range of Kindle/audible books for students who borrowed the devices before the break. There are also extensive collections of books on Epic, (available during school hours) so I’ll spend a little time curating some suitable titles for each grade level to share out to students and parents.

We recently purchased a (very expensive) subscription to Newsela, that should prove a boon to students wanting to improve their nonfiction text comprehension / vocabulary and general / specific content knowledge.

Our language department has been using Education Perfect for a while now with considerable success, and we recently started a trial with their Science modules.

For our budding writers, it would be a great opportunity for them to try out things like Wattpad and other interactive writing tools.

We’ve also been experimenting with Microsoft Teams for Education, and while it’s a very promising tool, it’s a business tool that’s being adapted for Education, and there are some substantial things that don’t (yet) make it suitable to take over as an LMS. It’s moving pretty rapidly and has some really nifty bits, and if they listen carefully to their educational users it has potential to wipe a lot of things out in its wake. James Rong from Guangzhou International School is the China expert on that and worth following. Here’s his guide to setting up Teams for learning. 

Personal

The first thing I had to do was tell myself that vacation or no vacation I have to start getting a rhythm going and some good habits. During term time I’m good at habit stacking, up at 5am, gym clothes ready to put on, work clothes & breakfast/lunch packed to go, 5.30 taxi – doing my Chinese Memrise flashcards on the way to work; 6-6.50 gym; at my desk by 7.15am. Now I have the issue that my husband is at work in Nanjing, my son is with his girlfriend. There’s nothing stopping me from doing nothing but watch Netflix or twitter/FB updates. The pollution outside is diabolical (unusually bad for a period when all the factories are closed) – so while I’d usually be up and going for a walk/run along the river, that’s not really an option.

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Once my online meeting is done I’ll set myself some personal goals as well.

So status update:

Currently: D5/10 of the Chinese New Year vacation
Schools closed until: 17 February 2020

Overview of government site

Beijing status 1 pm.

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Pretending to learn

One of the hidden advantages of learning Chinese is that I often catch myself pretending to learn and it gives me an acute insight and experience into the nature of real vs. faux learning. I’m doing a lot of “busy” work today on trying to get my document together for my ISTE certification (faux learning) so this will be brief.

Real learning literally makes your brain hurt. Sometimes I feel like my brain is creaking when I’m concentrating hard. It’s hard to keep up for very long and you tend to need physical breaks. Some of the things that I’d include in real learning is when you’re not just trying to remember characters but when you’re using them to make sentences – and incorporating previously learnt characters and sentence structure. That’s hard work. Memorising and reproducing a list of characters is easy. It’s also easy to use apps to go through lists of words and pick the right word / sound / character combination from 4 or 6 options. That’s my “pretend I’m learning Chinese in the taxi on the way to work” learning. Funnily enough if I do the same at home at my desk with a pen and paper, and look up the etymology of the words as I go along and write the sentence examples from my dictionary it’s coming closer to real learning. Similar actions but a twist that enhances.

Something similar happens when you’re practising music. Playing a piece through is great fun. But just focusing on one part that’s tricky and repeating that until it’s fluid, and even perhaps breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits – that’s real learning. Anton Nel in his DSS talk at WAB hinted at this. Others have also talked about it in the “10,000 hour debate” that morphs into the “deliberate practice” discussion.

Real learning takes place when you do the things that you like to avoid by doing other things – like fill in the blank sentences and worksheet versus reading an authentic text. I really do understand why so many students avoid reading a book. Because it’s hard work. Really really hard work. Especially in another language. You’re recognising characters, thinking about the meaning, flipping sentence around in mental gymnastics so it makes sense in your mother tongue grammatical structures. Looking words up. Looking pronunciation/pinyin up.

I’m reading “The List” with my group of early morning read-aloud students. It describes a dystopian world where one has only 500 words to use. When we started the book I joked with my crew that that was my Chinese language reality. I also recently finished “All Rights Reserved” where each spoken word and gesture is billed to you. Imagine how reality and potential is limited in these scenarios. Now have a look at this site – this is mind blowing and what a fabulous way of joining research, art, reality and literature by Dr Pip Thornton. Her piece NEWSPEAK shows the whole text of Orwell’s 1984 as a stock market ticker-tape, with the word prices fluctuating according to live data from Google Ads.

NEWSPEAK 2019 from Pip on Vimeo.

I’ve recently subscribed to “The Syllabus” of Evgeny Morozov – the best description of how this came about is in a Dutch podcast (with the worst cover art I’ve ever see outside a primary classroom). It is the epitome of going against the easy consumption of media and information through human and algorithmic curation of a weekly reading list within various fields. Which is how I stumbled on the whole art around the above discussion.

Keep those brains creaking everyone!

 

A little on learning Chinese

One of the fun things about the FOEN19 (Future of Education Now) was meeting up with two librarians who I greatly admire and in-between sessions geeking out with them. One of the great things (and possibly why I like them so much) is that they’re both keen students of Chinese, the three of us are all at various points of our Chinese journey.

There is of course the big “WHY” of learning a language – and besides a million other reasons it’s an excellent humbling experience that results in a lot of empathy for our EAL students.

The post below is almost literally taken from an email I’ve just composed on a few of the tools I’ve found useful in my journey.

1. Hacking chinese blog is definitely the best there is – they’ve got tons and tons in their archives and regularly do fun challenges. I’ve learnt so much from them about learning to learn etc.
2. Outlier Chinese – they’re newer on the scene. I did their Chinese Character Masterclass, It’s a tough one, I think it’s better to have a year or so of characters under your belt before you do it – or at least a couple of 100 characters, I think they say you should start with it. I found it hard to keep up with the course and then I’d binge on it and then lose momentum. In the end over the summer I put another thrust into finishing it. It’s good content but not very well presented and as a teacher (and design conscious person) I’d lay out things a lot differently.
Their supplement to the Pleco dictionary is definitely worth the extra $$ as it helps with the etymology and breaking down of components of complex characters.
3. Chinese Character books / Grammar books etc.
There are a variety of these, some I like more than others. Many have been supplanted by apps but they’re still good to use. As you can see from the photos, some are old and some are out of print, but if you’re working at a school are almost certainly still floating around the Chinese Department or text book store. I’m sure there are other new books, most of these are still around from when I first started learning 10 years ago. Happy to hear of better alternatives.
  • Easy way to learn Chinese Characters – possibly my favourite, but you’ll have to get it second hand as I don’t think it’s in print anymore.  It’s a workbook that builds things up very logically and possibly has been supplanted by other books since I used it – happy to hear about alternatives
  • Graded Chinese Reader – I’m on the 500 words one, I’m finding that that best way to read via the abridged short stories. I’ve tried other stuff including picture books, kids books, text books, but there’s nothing like authentic texts. There’s plenty of room for growth with 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 and 3000 words.
  • Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters an nice visual way of learning uses various memory techniques to remember the tone and the structure of the character – of course the outlier folks would argue you shouldn’t be relying on this type of memorisation and that etymology is a better way. Worth looking at in conjunction with Outlier, to see what best suits your style.
  • Chinese Characters – starts easy and gets very complicated. Similar build up to “Easy way to learn Chinese Characters”
  • Rapid Literacy – this one literally does what it says. Great for a kick start to reading. There’s a CD you can listen to, plus the work book and it has you reading the most common characters in context in I think 10 lessons. It’s also great for listening practice.
  • On Learning Chinese is a more academic tome. It’s for people like me who really wanted to understand Chinese from a top down 10,000 feet perspective as well as from the daily character grind.
  • Teaching and Learning Chinese as a foreign language  again for the nerds or the former language teachers. It’s really a worth while book because it gives you all the grammar you need plus all the stuff you need to know about interference of L1 (English in my case).
  • iMandarin is possibly my favourite Chinese language institute and this 900 Sentence book is an absolute gem. Just what it claims to be – the 900 most common sentences you need as a beginner. With a CD to keep listening and repeating. I think you need to be a student there to get the book.
  • Just for the LULZ – Chinese character fast finder – if you like dictionaries and browsing through books of words this is great. It’s a throwback to the days when you didn’t have electronic dictionaries and had to find words by counting strokes and knowing radicals; and Peng’s Chinese Radicals – available widely in Singapore – nice when you want to flip through and learn some stuff without trying too hard.
I spent 2 years full time study of chinese (2009-2010) and never got the tones. Then I found this recently and went through the drills and by the end I absolutely got it. Suddenly I could hear all the different tones…
Absolutely worth a couple of weeks work (it’s short and intensive but you need time between the paired drills)
Your school probably has a subscription to this via the Chinese Department – if not it’s pretty cheap and great for creating writing worksheets with stroke order, creating (manual) flashcards etc.
6. Apps
A lot of the books mentioned in (3) above have been supplanted by apps. But I still prefer books and writing by hand. But these are great for stolen moments in taxi’s or while waiting and because they’re smart and can do the spaced repetition thing for you.
  • Pleco – dictionary with lots of add ons – the flashcards and outlier dictionary are well worth it. The getting words into lists and importing and sharing lists can be a real pain, I have to go back to the instructions every time I change text books but once they’re set up you’re good to go for a while.
  • Memrise – good for spaced repetition. The Chinese 1 course is particularly good for colloquial Chinese but then it gets more grindy and by Chinese 3 it becomes long and boring (too many words before you go up a level). The first 500 character one also takes a LONG time. I wish creators of these apps would allow for smaller chunks and more levels – even adults like feeling like they’re accomplishing something. Some language institutes have made their own courses within Memrise – this can be a good and bad thing depending on the recordings and care they take (some are riddled with errors and loud / soft / irritating recordings).
  • Skritter – in two minds about this one. Works best on an iPad, it can be very picky about your writing and I actually prefer pen and paper so I’ve stopped using it as much as I used to. It’s also relatively expensive, and you sometimes need to do your lists on a laptop and then import them, but using a track pad on a laptop is clunky, so then and iPad is better, so I’m not getting what I need out of this app.

There are a gajillion apps out there and I’ve tried a lot of them but those are the three left on my phone now.

7. Podcasts
I’m a bit back and forwards on this one. I used to listen to some and then I got a bit tired of them, and stopped listening because I could only really get benefit if I was sitting and taking note, and not if it was just background stuff going on. Again I’d love some good recommendations. The only one that I found consistently good was Melnyks Chinese. It’s free to listen but you pay for the lesson pdfs.

8. Videos
When I was lazy and wanted to pretend that I was learning but was actually just passive, I used to watch a fun set of YouTube videos in a sitcom like setting called “Happy Chinese”

9. Role models
There are some people who are doing fantastic things. Jeremy Howard is an example of someone I’m in total awe of. Well worth reading about his approach.

Jeremy Howard – Language Acquisition Performance from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.