How important is measurement?

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Last August I started incorporating regular visits to the local gym in my routine. Aware that I am not getting any younger and that my work has included substantial periods of time sitting at a screen I really needed to include more physical activity in my life. All was going great, then came lockdown. Fortunately I have an exercise bike and thanks to the lovely weather I have been able to set up a little home gym to keep things moving but I am aware that the balance has tipped somewhat as all my teaching, interaction with colleagues and social life is now screen based. My husband has started leaving the scales out in the bathroom to draw my attention to the need to review the effects of lockdown lasagne and increased home baking..I studiously avoid the hint as I know what is going on and don't need another cause of stress in my life right now. 

Last night's #LTHEchat  gave rise to a tangential conversation (as it often does) about the National Student Survey (NSS) and measuring student engagement/enjoyment of learning. Of course metrics have been the focus of much in education over recent years with many calling on empirical evidence as a basis for change. A suggestion that the NSS results could include emotional engagement information brought strong reactions;

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! #LTHEChat

— Chris Jobling (@cpjobling) May 13, 2020

and a call to discuss such surveys in a future chat. This prompted me to reflect a little on measurement in general. There is a tendency to assume that opposition to measurement comes from a desire to hide away from investigation. I do not believe this to be at all justified in education. Most practitioners want to understand how people find their teaching, we have in interest in knowing what works and what doesn't. There is little satisfaction in working away blindly without feedback. However let's not be naive, we need to know the purpose of such measurements. We need to understand the basis of the judgements and how they will be interpreted. For those working in education measurements and metrics have been used not to inform but to be interpreted selectively in order to advance certain agendas. Used to reduce the costs of teaching by removing experienced practitioners in favour of cheaper labour without a thought for how new practitioners will be supported. Used to pit head teachers and colleagues against each other through league tables. These are not in the interests of learners, they do not support the necessary interpersonal dynamics that create a great learning ethos, they do not help improve your teachers, they create a culture of fear and prevent true collaboration. 

Another area of measurement - summative assessments - which have been hugely changed due to the #pivotonline agenda have increased stress and anxiety to our learners this year. We really need to stand up for what is helpful to learning and look critically at what we're measuring and for whom. If we really to wish to serve the learning needs of our students and indeed ourselves we need to question the purpose of measurement - the intended audience, the nature of the interrogation and the awareness of how subsequent judgements impact on the stakeholders. If measurement matters, how and what we measure matter more. If the stakes are too high, I don't want to play. So the scales can go away for now!

Grades are the bureaucratic ouroboros of education. https://t.co/5Wp9DxptdA #ungrading

— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 6, 2020

Where is the silliness in education?

This headline grabbed my attention recently. Politicians have decided it is time to stamp out low level disruption in classrooms and they plan to do so by appointing a behaviour management consultant Tom Bennett @tombennet71 -a former nighclub owner now reinvented as a teaching consultant, now fêted in the press as the latest "behavious tsar". I share Ken Robinson's exasperation at the outpourings of those in government office who wade in with "initiatives" to justify their existence. 

I spent 15 years in the secondary teaching system and I have seen my share of chair rocking, paper passing and giggling. Now having spent a further 15 years in H.E., teaching staff are more likely to complain about a lack of animation from their students, a passivity or disconnect that troubles them. Behaviour and body language are physical manifestations of our psychological state, I would not wish to suggest that they should be ignored. They can be vital clues for those charged with classroom management and should always be taken seriously - but branding such behaviour as "silliness" is to misunderstand the psychology of the developing young person in front of you and -far worse - to undermine the challenges faced every day by every teacher in the western world. Classrooms can be boring places,humdrum droning about targets, levels and exam requirements are often the dominant narrative, they can be anxiety incubators, pressure cookers which have faulty valves due to the enforced passivity for hours on end. Austerity means we won't be seeing government initiatives to increase access to open spaces (if they haven't been sold off already), participation in field trips or working in better buildings - just more young people crammed into unsuitable spaces with little opportunity for personalisation of their learning. 

At least during my secondary teaching days we had the flexibility to excite our learners, to recognise their need for activity through multi-sensory approaches, drama, music, cookery, creativity- many were the ways in which I could engage students with language learning. The opportunity to balance the activity over the course of a lesson, a term and a year making time for lively interaction and fun as well as time for quiet reflection and even a vocabulary test or tricky problem solving session. I don't dispute that there are challenging individuals in any classroom nor that it is helpful to provide strategies to support teachers in re-engaging them. However there is so little that can be fundamentally changed by an individual practitioner about a sytem which has lost sight of its purpose thanks to being used as a political football. This is where the real silliness is in education. The obsession with the superficial over the substance of learning. Teachers need the breathing space to reflect upon their classroom encounters, the energy to address them and the supportive professional community of fellow practitioners to implement innovation. The insights explained here make a good deal of sense to me:

Speaking up!

The point at which I fell in love with the French language is a difficult one to pin down. Undoubtedly I was influenced by the trips my parents encouraged and the role of interpreter which they bestowed on me at just 12 years old. I was terrified of my French teacher but recently took my family to see her home town of Aix-les-Bains because I surely recognise her impact on my life. I went to Oxford Poly to study for a French degree, determined not to "do" literature but within a year I had negotiated more literary study and still have a passion for the works of Mauriac, Camus, Baudelaire, Voltaire and Prévert. (read, discussed and analysed in both my languages). I created a drama project during my PGCE around the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco. Working as an assistante during the 2nd year of my first degree was no doubt a turning point though - I began to understand that language learning is not just intellectually challenging, it is fundamentally transformative - it changes the way you understand others and yourself through interaction. I continue my language learning journey through interaction largely but not exclusively online using #cmc computer-mediated communication.

My community (language teachers/experts in a variety of guises and contexts) are struggling with the realisation that young people are increasingly not choosing to continue language study for single honours degrees, numbers on such courses have been in freefall. It is very upsetting for all of us to see that the qualification we so treasure is not featuring on more wish lists and this has been the subject of countless reports, discussions and soul searching. However, the very opposite trend has been seen in university-wide language study provision so clearly young people do still enjoy the thrill of interaction across cultures. Many of them have done so all their lives but have had little or no state recognition of their linguistic heritage. At a recent school event at my university I asked a group of 14 year olds why they thought languages were useful (expecting the usual list that pointed to employability). This insight came back immediately from a young Sikh - "you can tell someone something without the others knowing what you said". Out of the mouth of babes! Language encodes, linguists decode. That is a human skill, still unmatched by google translate, requiring sophistication, knowledge and skills way beyond those which can begin to be awakened at A level, that is just the beginning. In the UK we have to send a clear message from our community that the journey may be long but it is worthwhile. In schools we need to have the freedom to inspire, in H.E. we must be relevant and move with the times.  Most importantly our community must pull together, for the losses we will sustain otherwise are too terrifying to contemplate. Valuing language skills is valuing human diversity in all its richness, and respect for life gives hope in an era of instability and war.
This post was written to relate to UCML's support for A level Content Advisory Board's recommendations. 

Implementing e-portfolio assessment.

I have written extensively about the e-portfolio project for language learning which I introduced 3 year's ago so please forgive me for the use of the most wonderful of affordances we have in digital reality - hyperlinks - in order to offer greater detail to those who may be interested to look into them. 

This blog post is very deliberately big picture, and I think the reason for that will soon become obvious. Language learning is a long term undertaking if you wish to get to a reasonable level of mastery. The outcomes of a course are likely to be simply way stages on a longer journey, summative assessments are just snapshots of your proficiency at a point in time. Their predictive validity of these will depend on many factors (course design, assessment design, appropriacy of language study to the context of usage to name but a few). Even those of us who have studied languages for many years generally consider ourselves language learners rather than experts, the beauty and challenge of getting to grips with a second (or additional) language is that you have to apply your skills to keep up with a constantly changing body of usage. Language constantly evolves, it is a complex expression of the human mind and has to reflect the realities of the human context. As fast as course books and teaching resources are published, the language and culture moves on. The language teacher has a responsibility to acculturate the learner to the reality of this domain, making them aware of effective learning strategies and coping mechanisms. After all, you can hardly stop a native speaker and tell them to only use the language covered up to p35 of your course book when they interact with you, even if the content of your final exam may be more predictable! 
Given that this engagement with the learning process, which can be a transformative one, is a vital part of the skill set acquired during good teaching, it needs to be recognised, embedded, recognised and rewarded alongside the summative achievement of your final "level" at the end of a course. The e-portfolio project was based on literature available through JISC's e-portfolio project  and a narrative creation informed by Helen Barrett's insights into the value of e-portfolios for deep learning.  Documentation sharing the detail is available here, short summaries of the technologies and process used were recently published by ALT and Mahara. 

We use the e-portfolio to force learners to reflect on their learning approaches, make their processes explicit, analyse and reflect upon them. Ultimately the learner has to take ownership of their part of the learning process. This is sometimes uncomfortable, we would all prefer to blame someone/something else for a lack of progress. Initial reactions can be quite negative, tutors and learners have to be shown the value of this approach. We emphasise the importance of connecting to peers whether you are a student or a tutor, supporting each other. The final artefact is an individual narrative of your learning journey and it provides really useful insights from students to their tutors, useful feed forward for our learning design. Ironically, embedding reward for reflection on the minutiae of the individual's learning has helped our learners discover more about themselves and see the bigger picture. It has also helped to equip them for the reality of using and extending their learning in the future, beyond the immediate goal of the final summative course exam. Should the language they have acquired turn out to be not that which they need in subsequent employment, they have the tools to embark on learning another language. They will also be equipped as effective, self regulating learners who can adapt to a new challenge. 

e-portfolio research

Now starting to find my way through the blogs, twitter feeds, studies and research to establish a suitable framework for evaluating our e-portfolios. Our implementation is due to start in October with a small pilot group. Lots of useful information from JISC and Becta. We will be emphasising the employability skills enhancement that we can deliver by encouraging the mastery of the available technologies and engagement with the language learning process. It is very important to me that we facilitate deep learning through a reflective, story telling approach. I found this presentation very significant:
http://www.vimeo.com/23513397