Dr Bevan, Southend High School for Boys
Podcast
Time: 24:52 minutes
This is Southend High School for boys and we are a thousand pupils strong, mainly boys but some girls in the 6th form.  We are a school that is absolutely committed to developing the talents of individual pupils finding out what those talents are and bringing out of them the very best of their abilities and expertise whether it’s in sport, whether it’s in music, whether it’s creative or whether it’s academic.  We capture that in a lovely phrase that we use which is to talk about ‘enriched learning’.  The idea that you can take a routine and normal curriculum and enhance it through things that you do in lessons and outside lessons and that those principles run through everything that we try to do.  
We have a little test for the quality of the education that we provide here and our test is that what pupils choose to do when they’re not required to do anything and for us when you see pupils who are choosing to pursue their sport, pursue their music, pursue their drama, pursue their studies beyond what is normally required you know you are providing a good education.  
Technology is right at the heart of many of the approaches that we use to enrich lessons, to enhance pupils learning.  There are a number of features; some people use the word ‘affordances’ that technology has that you simply can’t get by using other approaches in the classroom.  Some of them are to do with the visual stimulation that comes with technology others are associated with the temporary nature of the work that pupils produce using technology.  It’s provisional, they don’t have to come up with a final answer, they can always improve, they can always go back.  That matters a huge amount to pupils, particularly to those who are less confident and perhaps to lower attainers as well.  
There are also a whole series of features within technology that allow pupils to collaborate far more productively than they might have done in the past.  I think it’s worth expanding on each of those three. So, let’s kick off with the visual.  When I’m talking with staff about this I show them a number of stills and I ask them to identify the film from the still. Usually they can do it pretty much automatically.  I then give them a paragraph from various famous books, very few of them ever know which book it comes from but I’ve actually given them the same portion of information in the two cases.  The visual memory is so powerful in comparison with text memory that anything we can do to draw pupils into more visual experiences of learning the better and technology helps that.  It’s not that the technology itself is fabulous it’s that it has a very strong visual component.  
The idea that work that students produce is provisional matters a huge amount to those who are unsure about the quality of what they do.  If pupils know that what they’re doing can always be improved that when it is marked the marking is not the end point, it’s not create something, teacher assesses it, gives you another four out of ten and then you do the next task.  With technology it is so easy to structure your lessons in a way that the advice that the teacher is giving or that comes from other pupils allows you to reform your work in someway which might mean going back, it might mean adding more, it might mean looking at other students work.  It might even be taking a whole series of responses from multiple students and each of them contributing a paragraph so that every student gets the chance to create a perfect essay out of the paragraphs that have been created by individuals within the class which links very nicely to this idea of collaboration.  
It’s very difficult when you put pupils into a small group and give them jobs to do together to ensure that everybody has a role but with technology you can so much more easily have students creating individual parts of a project or an assignment and then bringing them together and there is no doubt that that collaboration and forcing students to articulate what they’re doing and why they’re doing it becomes of value.  So we can see that the technology itself isn’t the central issue, it’s not the hardware and the equipment and in fact you can use technology in ways that are wholly unproductive.  They’re sometimes referred to as power pointless ways of doing things.  Where you take what used to be a really good activity and convert it onto a computer for no good reason at all.  Also very conscious of how students can be asked to express their ideas in ways that force them to practice, to think carefully about what they’re going to articulate and rather than writing it down get them to speak and obviously making video is a very effective way of doing that.  
We’ve got a teacher who has been working in History at the moment asking students to make short films that capture the key features associated with Hitler’s rise to power.  While they’ve been making their own videos she has been going around the class videoing the pupils asking them to give advice on how to make videos.  So, you’ve got two things going on at once and she has ended up in that project with the pupils producing their video extracts on the History content but also she has ended up with a video herself of advice for next years class, explaining to them what not to do and what to do when making  the videos.  So, a combination of technological solutions that have worked very well indeed.  
Mind mapping, concept mapping; both so easy to do with software and a lot of the software is available either freely or very cheaply as well.  Allowing people to make the kind of links on screen that show that they understand the relationship between ideas in Science, between concepts in RE, between elements of language in French or German. Teachers do have to be very careful to make sure they know why they’re creating the mind map, what purpose it’s serving and we’ve found very useful purposes. One is at the very beginning of a topic to ask students to create a mind map that shows something of what the pupil currently understands of the topic they’re about to study and the teacher can very quickly without having to read extended paragraphs, very quickly just see on each screen what pupils currently understand by that topic and then the teacher responds to that by teaching whatever new material is needed and then ending the topic with a detailed concept map that is very structured and that is why we would use the term concept map rather than mind map.  A very structured concept map which shows and captures and classifies the information that has been learnt during the proceeding weeks.  
We’ve also found that filming pupils performing certain skills has proved to be of real value.  The obvious examples are in PE but also pupils making short safety films in design and technology where they’re learning to use a new piece of equipment, filming how it should be done is as good as the student doing the classic things which always used to be write a list of instructions or produce a poster.  Now they’re actually articulating into camera what they’re supposed to be doing.  With the PE we’ve got students who do high jump or triple jump, throw a javelin and it’s very difficult to know what you look like as you’re doing that but a short video can be played back on the screen of the camera there and then or can be analysed more closely using various forms of software. One of our teachers here has collected a bank of both good and bad examples of shots in badminton and he’s collected these on a website the pupils can view and access and go back to.  
Another of the very specific advantages that you can gain from using technology in the classroom is the fact that much of what is produced can be stored permanently, stored for sharing and pupils can go back to it 2 years, 3 years later.  We have staff here who regularly store powerpoints that they have produced or students have produced onto websites and they use various forums for doing that.  In addition videos of students performing certain skills can be stored for review later. Pieces of work, sample mind maps can all be held and instead of relying on students to recall from memory, instead they can actually see again what it is that they did or they can go back to the mind map and recall what they did and it’s stored for them they don’t have to find the tatty book in the back from two years ago.  
Opportunities arise with technology to change the way we teach but it also changes the way teachers have to plan and changes the way teachers assess.  Traditionally, a teacher would spend a relatively short amount of time planning perhaps not in their first few years of teaching but once they become experienced planning tends to be quite a short period of time then the lesson is executed with a lot of involvement from the teacher and then there is a big chunk of marking or other form of assessment afterwards.  The more that technology is used in the classroom the more that pattern changes.  One of the first things that happens is that more time is spent at the planning phase, the teacher is becoming familiar with the resources that they want pupils to use, they decide that they want to teach this topic but which of these different approaches am I going to use for it? Then because the pupils tend to be more engaged and more motivated there is less teacher involvement in the lesson, the teacher has a slightly different role.  It’s a guidance role and it’s a steering role making sure that pupils understand the task and that they are fully immersed in doing the thinking. Technology puts the learning far more into the hands of the student, changes the role of the teacher and the feedback from the teacher can then be much more easily inserted.  
It’s much easier to differentiate as well in the tasks as they unfold, to increase the difficulty of a task if it’s in Mathematics according to the pupils need or to extend a task if a pupil seems to be finishing more quickly or to help them work with others to explain how they’ve done and what they’ve done.  Very often the products that come out of lessons that are based on technology have already been reviewed as part of the lesson, the marking load is reduced.  
When teachers become increasingly comfortable using technology in the classroom one of the things that happens is their status as expert changes.  Most teachers freely admit that there will be pupils in the classroom that know more about the technology they are using than they as a teacher.  It becomes not uncommon to expect a pupil to offer an answer to a question that the teacher doesn’t know.  As soon as that begins to happen the teacher changes from being just an expert and somebody whose status depends on their subject expertise, they change from that to being somebody who is an expert in learning and an expert in aiding learning and an expert in planning learning and yes they still need subject knowledge.  That is a change that isn’t always comfortable, but it is a change that many teachers find immensely satisfying when they eventually let go and allow it to happen.  When you realise that actually you as a teacher are most effective when you are working as a learner and that you are thinking about how best would I want to learn this? How best would others learn this?  What activities do we need? What is the current state of knowledge of the class that I’m working with? How can we progress?  That begins to be really effective.  It’s not just to do with the technology but once again the technology has aided that transition.  
Another part of that process is that you get a very much increased emphasis on dialogue in the classroom.  It sounds odd but the more screens that the pupils are working at you actually end up with more, not necessarily direct conversation, but more people more naturally talking about their work.  In a traditional classroom you would not normally have more than one pupil talking and usually they would only be talking to the teacher but when you embrace most of the approaches with technology that we’ve previously mentioned pupils begin to be routinely discussing their work, talking not just about the subject matter but about how can they improve what it is that they’ve done in that subject matter and you get routine conversations the whole dialogue of the classroom is routed in what have I learnt? How can I improve? What do I need to do next? And these were questions that previously were very much in the head of the teacher and were routed in the planning the teacher was making rather than in what it is the student was thinking about. 
The question that should govern every lesson is: What has each student learnt in that lesson and can they articulate what they have learnt in that lesson?  And I think the techniques that are available using technology greatly aid that transition in to the point where that’s the way the pupils are thinking and i think one of the biggest challenges for teachers working with teenage pupils is the issue of relevance and authenticity.  There’s no doubt that a lot of what we expect young people to learn they will not necessarily see the immediate relevance of and yet they live in world in which immediacy is a hallmark of the culture.  One way in which that can be addressed is by designing tasks that are more authentic, more relevant to the student’s own context and that may be basing it around an area of their own interest or homing in on some way of blending their interest with the subject matter that’s to be learnt. But it’s also possible to actually use the technology itself as the vehicle for that authenticity. 
Students of all ages spend a large amount of time using modern technologies which they see as a natural part of their experience. They are communicating in multiple ways routinely, they are meeting online every evening to discuss, they’re familiar with forums.  They’re familiar with posting material, sharing material, commenting on material that they have shared not all of it necessarily material that we would welcome in a school environment but nonetheless that’s what they’re used to doing by taking those environments whether it’s the weblog, whether it’s the wiki, whether it’s the forum, whether it’s the instant messaging all of these can be readily adapted for use in different subject areas.  
Students usually would not have expected to have any oral material to work with for modern languages.  It’s so easy to post a short podcast, video file, audio file for students to actually look at at home in the evening.  It’s very easy to ask students to provide comments in a web forum on a poem and to respond to each others comments as their homework task.  This is very natural to them and it actually doesn’t belittle their interest, it doesn’t side line their interest, it’s just says this is what you’re used to so let’s place the learning in a context that you are very comfortable with and which undoubtedly will unfold and be the way in which increasingly over time communication is done in the adult world as well.  
Many of the technological approaches that we’ve been discussing; forums, web communities, wikis allow pupils to contribute with a different level of confidence than they would have in the classroom. To raise your hand in front of 30 other people and the teacher, to then offer a view that you might only hold tentatively is really quite difficult and classrooms we all know are dominated by, typically, the quickest thinking most able students on the one hand and possibly the more disruptive on the other and there is in the middle a large group of typically quiet, typically well behaved, typically doing all right pupils who don’t necessarily have quite such a clear voice.  The various technologies that we’ve discussed allow many of those students to actually stand up in front of the class and give a presentation except they’re not really doing it they’re making a video of themselves and offering that for others to see or they’re offering a comment on a piece of work or expressing an opinion about a topic and rather than fearing the response that they will get they are contributing it as part of an continuing discussion.  
One of the big challenges for all schools at the moment and I’m sure this will continue for some time to come is to do with narrowing the gap, raising the expected outcomes of those who are either falling behind for motivational reasons or who enter school perhaps with a history of lower attainment.  Technology addresses some of that challenge.  At the heart of that challenge is good teaching. Technology can aid good teaching but there are some very specific features to do with that that the technology particularly strengthens.  We know that activities that happen in many classrooms simply leave these students marginalised, not intentionally and of course the great battle is between the teacher and these pupils to re-engage them and perhaps even in group work we find that the lower attainer will opt out a little bit, the less motivated will disrupt a little bit and we haven’t found a way in conventional classrooms of really routinely addressing those two groups.  What technology does is it can place a very specific requirement, give very specific roles to each individual.  It can also provide media formats that are more appealing to students.  There’s no doubt that even the least enthusiastic pupil responds to work with digital video but there’s also an issue about the fact that the outcomes that they create are provisional, that they have the option to improve and enhance them, that they are encouraged to take the better ideas from those around them and incorporate them into their own work.  
We know that the routine process of being a low attaining child, submitting your work, getting a bad mark, doing the next task, getting a bad mark, doing the next task is demoralising.  We know that is true and we need activities in our classrooms that motivate the low attainers.  We should have in our classrooms the greatest degree of enthusiasm for learning from those who need to learn the most.  You could say that as we introduce the approaches that we’ve discussed as we introduce more technology into the classroom that there is a risk that the highest attaining pupils will simply accelerate away and the lowest attaining pupils will experience an even greater gap of disadvantage.  That’s not been our experience and part of the reason for that is that one of the hallmarks of higher attaining pupils, so far, has been their ability to write; to write with clarity and to write with speed. Now although that’s a skill we want all pupils to have there has tended to be a limiting factor, it’s tended to be the case that even if you actually love History, understand History, have enthusiasm for History but can’t write you are viewed as a poor Historian and that doesn’t have to be true.  Clearly there comes a point, as I’ve said, where the pupil will have to write but actually if they can learn their History and I’d use that as one example, if they can learn their History using a variety of digital media they can produce outputs which contain the same intellectual content, that show the same understanding.  Then, actually, no longer is there that inbuilt advantage for the expert writer.  The same is true about the fact that typically the students who had the same advantage in the classroom were the most articulate and that is true also as part of the issue of social disadvantage.  
Children coming from homes where the parents are articulate are usually themselves more confident and articulate and will be able to give better answers in the standard classroom.  What we’re talking about are a number of processes that allow pupils who are less articulate in conversation to actually contribute meaningfully to the learning that’s going on, have valid contributions to make and some of those issues can begin to be balanced out.  That’s not to say there won’t still be students that are faster, better, quicker, whatever, of course there will be. But we can at least do our best to make sure the learning activities maximise the gains for the lowest attainers and the least motivated students we’ve got.  
Many commentators have argued a lot in recent years about the fact that we need a curriculum that is skills based.  That pupils will undoubtedly in 20 or 30 years time be doing jobs that we don’t even know exist at the moment.  They will be working with technologies we don’t understand and the challenge there is to have an education that allows pupils to develop skills that they can later transfer of which by far the most important is the ability to learn new skills and so the introduction of technology into the classroom in many different ways brings with it an emphasis on the skill and on the process above the content.  That doesn’t mean that we abandon the content but it does mean that the content can be approached in many different ways.  It can be adapted and adjusted and pupil’s contribution to the learning can come from many different perspectives as well and I think that’s something that the traditional classroom limited to a large extent.  It gives pupils a greater level of choice in the activities they’re doing.  It gives them a greater sense of authorship, ownership in the products that they end up with that too addresses some of the issues of motivation but as I’ve said previously what it does far more is it leaves the student more confident to take on new tasks whatever shape they might be without needing so much explicit direction.  They are more confident, more autonomous, more capable of that kind of independent style of thinking and learning that we so desire.