End of placement one and the launch of the NSFA

Today, my first school placement has finished. I have now been at Sawston for four full and five half weeks and can honesty say that I have learned a lot! This is what I wrote for my end-of-placement report:

"During my time at Sawston Village College I had the chance to develop a range of different skills and increase my subject knowledge. Although I still feel a little bit insecure about my Spanish, I have grown much more confident in teaching German and French. Visiting and leading a great variety of classes has given me the opportunity to get to know the Scheme of Work and topics from Year 7 to Year 11.

I found it especially enjoyable to see how the relationships with my Year 9 German and Year 8 French/German class improved over time. It was fantastic to be able to teach whole lessons in target language and engage the students through my references to German culture and the life of the pupils in Germany. I have started to plan for different levels within one class and now pay more attention to the learning of the individual student. In my next placement, I am looking forward to being attached to classes for a longer time, getting to know the pupils and their language levels and monitoring their learning closely.

One of my biggest strengths is my positive attitude in the classroom together with firm management, however, I need to make sure that all of the pupils respect me and listen to me when I want them to. I also have to focus on adapting my lesson plans according to how much progress has been made and targeting individual ability groups with differentiation. Overall, I found my time at Sawston Village College very valuable and look forward to experiencing more teaching and learning practice in my new placement. "

Sound very academic, doesn't it? :-) Overall, I had a really good time and did not find it quite as exhausting as I had feared. Thankfully, I had at least one or two lessons off a day in which I focused on my lesson planning and essay writing. Next Friday, the last one before Christmas has to be handed in. I am also very excited to work in Cambridge next term and be part of the MFL department of the Netherhall School. I have also asked to be able to teach a bit of Film and Media (yay!) and doing some A-Level work should be fantastic.

With regards to Alternative Education, I applied for a PhD in Democratic Education at Oxford last week. The decision about the place will not be made until mid January and in case I am successful the process could take a few months more in order to secure the funding, but I am very happy to get the paperwork on the way.

I also have some news regarding my film projects: This weekend is the launch of the National Student Film Association in Bristol, which should be extermely exciting! It will be so nice to see everybody again and I see the NSFA as an amazing platform for all student film makers in the UK. As an extension, a friend and I have started the International Student Film Association, the ISFA, which will do the same great things, just for students world wide! Although I am very busy with my studies, I have already set up the website and I am also in contact with students from all over the world so hopefully I will be able to delegate a little bit in the next months! :-)

Classroom management

Good evening everybody!

Long time, no see! In the last days I so super busy with the Cambridge Film Festival and the foundation of the International Student Film Association that I had barely time to eat or sleep! Thankfully, life is slowing down to its normal (hectic) pace again and I thought I would give you an update on how the PGCE is going!

I am now in week two of my block placement and teach every day.Overall, I have taken over two German and one French class and so far, it has been very enjoyable. I am not half-dead because of the workload and find the whole planning process fairly easy. Of course this might be because I have worked as an EFL teacher before but I have to say that it was quite new to me to plan so much in such detail- in most efl lessons all you get is a board pen and 10 min preparation time if you are lucky :-D

Now, the only class that is causing me a little bit of trouble is a 28-kids strong Year 8 group. I teaching them in both German and French and although they are a lovely bunch they are incredibly chatty and find it really difficult to listen to each other and to me. I am not used to such big groups and they get each other so excited that they just won’t calm down! As you might have realised I am trying to be an inclusive teacher and educator and don’t like the thought of having to send students out of the classroom or ‘punishing’ them for something such as chatting. I also think that making them write lines can be a tedious and annoying task for them.

From an ‘alternative’ point of view, I would love to try to focus their attention on something that they find relevant and that will foster skills which they can apply at any time later in life even if the foreign language is forgotten. I am not a bad teacher and I always try to make my lessons as engaging and useful as possible. However, if you have 28 students and some of them want to listen to what I have to say and others don’t a predicament arises: how to win over the reluctant students if (1) they don’t want to listen and (b) everybody has to prepare for exams? Even group work is not successful, because their thought just go completely off topic as soon as you don’t check up on them constantly.

So far, have tried to gain class attention by clapping, counting down, picking out the trouble makers, using a bell, lowering my voice, raising my voice, standing on a chair, raising a hand, standing in the middle of the classroom and actually sending people out. I have tried to reason with them and repeated the rules that they have agreed to when they came to the college. I wish I could have written them down together with them but tough luck. They are all nice kids and they will also give your their attention once you ask them to- for about a minute that is. Through the constant classroom management debacle, little learning is going on and the students who are paying attention get really annoyed.

I am working in a state school where children know exactly what is expected of them. It is not an overly strict environment and I guess in comparison to other schools of the same size, Sawston is a really very friendly and positive. Yes, we could blame the exams and the class size and the fact that students are forced to engage with subjects they are not interested in, but if you look beyond that: What can you do? How can you make students listen?? I am looking forward to observing some more lessons in the next weeks and will feed back as soon as I have some new ideas.

On another note, I have more or less finished my MPhil proposal which needs to go out this Friday and will post a link as soon as it is properly done. In my research, I would like to draw a map of the democratic schools in Europe and see how and if democratic education practices can be in cooperated in the British state school sector. Let’s see what Oxford and Cambridge think about that and if I can find some funding...

Fireworks and Summerhill

Happy Guy Fawkes week everybody! :-)

I hope you had the pleasure of experiencing some amazing fireworks in the last days! I was in Cambridge on the Midsummer common on Thursday, together with around 20.000 other people, and the display was great! Tonight, on my way back from London, I was also so lucky to come back into Royston just as they started the fireworks here and with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words in my ear, the experience was even better! I think, fireworks should always be watched with music! :-) (For all non- UK readers: Guy Fawkes Night is an annual celebration on the evening of 5 November. It marks the downfall of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, in which a number of Catholicconspirators, including Guy Fawkes, attempted to destroy the Houses of Parliament, inLondon, United Kingdom.)

So, in London I met up with the rest of the NSFA council and we talked about our launch party, which is going to happen on the 5th/6th December in Bristol- awesome! :-) To quote from my text from the website: 'If you are a student in the UK who is searching for connections to the film industry, needs help with the foundation of a film society or a film festival or just would like to get in contact with other film- enthusiastic students all across the country, the NSFA is for you!' The NSFA has now taken over Screentest, the national student film festival, and although there is a lot to be done in the next months, I can't wait to develop the potential and meet lots of other amazing film students. As you might have read below, I am also on the verge of founding the first International Student Film Festival in Cambridge together with some friends and film provides me with a great balance to education :-)

After only four days of reading, I finished my Summerhill book today. It was super interesting to read about life at the school and really fascinating to think about self regulation and freedom in a community which is almost completely governed by children. I have the feeling that I probably would have gone to lessons as a child there and I am also not sure if being a teaching/ houseparent would be the job for me, but I would definitely like to visit the school to experience the spirit of the community that is living there. As the school has existed since 1921 and won a major battle against Ofsted in 2000, it must have a very powerful and convincing atmosphere! I feel that if I really decide to apply for the Phd and make my topic 'democratic education in Europe', Summerhill is a very good place to start some serious research. I have indulged in a little shopping spree in the AERO book store and am now expecting a bunch of books on democratic education from the States any day :-)

Phd thoughts

After returning from Oslo a few days ago, the cold winter weather has now taken over this part of the UK. Of course we don't have -4 degrees but when I left the house this morning the temperature had come down to 5 degrees. Finally it feels a little bit more like winter in this part of Europe as well :-) It's only 7 more weeks until Christmas!

I almost finished 'How to grow a school' while I was away and I am looking forward to talking about some more great ideas about school foundation in one of the next posts. Yesterday, I also started which Matthew Appleton's account of Summerhill, 'A free Range Childhood', which is now my new travel companion. After doing so much reading and writing about democratic schools in the last weeks I have decided to apply for a MPhil/Phd at the university! The only problem is the funding, but I am so lucky to have a good freind who is doing a phd in education at the moment and hopefully she is going to help me through the process a little bit. Phd sounds very posh indeed, but I am not really interested in the title at all- all I want to do at this point is learn more about democratic education :-)

On Monday at uni we were talking about gender equality and how boys statistically never do as well at school as girls. Since the national Curriculum was introduced in 1988 and GCSE results were analysed for the first time in 1992, there has been a constant concern about raising boys achievement. On average, 8% more girls than boys achieve 5 A* to C grades at GCSE and this has almost caused a moral panic! In my eyes, theorists are approaching this problem from the complete wrong point of view. Yes, it is very important that both of the genders are doing equally well at school, but should we not change the initial 'assessment' of children into something that is a lot fairer, rather than saying that it is the boys who can not perform well enough in the tests? Why pressure boys to do more work in order to do 'as well' as girls? Everybody learns at their own speed and, to voice a stroppy idea, maybe it is rather positive that boys are not quite as likely to please the system?

On the subject of testing, can you remember how we were discussing the abolishment of the Sat's tests in the last weeks thanks to the Alexander Primary Report?The National Union of Teachers are just preparing their next phase in the campaign against the exams and many other parents have voiced their concern about pressuring students much ttoo early into testing. This Saturday, the UK prime minister Gordon Brown said in the Times Educational Supplement that he finds Sats important to hold the schools accountable for their actions. What a reason to test children who are 10 years old!! So basically, the government is supporting exams to be able to see how not only children, but also schools are performing. Maybe they should rather send out a questionnaire to see how happy children are in the school? In my eyes the ultimate measure whether a school is successful or not is if children would also go even if it was not compulsory. Whenever I voice this opinion to other people, they look at me like I am crazy. What is so wrong with the idea of wanting to go to school? I am sorry, but is that an unrealistic expectation in today's society? (Sorry British Sarcasm there :-)

PS: Thank you for anybody out there who is reading! :-) Feel free to send me a mail or comment if you agree or disagree with any of the strong opinions I am voicing here all of the time!!

Oslo Free School

A very cold ‘hej’ from Oslo!


After an extremely weird dinner of mashed potatoes and soup preceded by a healthy day of doughnuts, tonnes of tea and chocolate, I thought I’d sit down to tell you about my Norwegian experience. The hostel is really nice, although quite far away from the city centre, and it is literally freezing. It has not snowed (yet) but yesterday everything was frozen when I left the hostel in the morning. Although I have ‘already’ been here more than 48 hours, is seems like the time has flown by. Unfortunately I have to say that that was not just because Oslo is so amazing but also because I had to spend at least half of that time asleep in bed. I already felt quite ill when I left Cambridge on Wednesday but told myself not be a wuss- and here I am now will a full blown flue. At least I had a whole day at the democratic school yesterday and the experience was amazing!

Overall, the Oslo democratic school, or Nyskolen, caters for students age 7 to 16 and has around100 students, divided in two buildings. The lower School has 60 students, split up in three groups: yellow (year 1 and 2), orange (3 and 4) and red (5 to 7). The two younger groups have around 10 kids each while the red group has around 40, however it has three teachers who are all responsible for the group at the same time, so basically the teacher-student ratio is the same. The upper school has 40 students, split up between year 8 to 10. After year 10, Norwegian children go to the ‘Gymnasium’ were they are able to specialise a little bit.

School begins at 8.30am and finishes at 3pm. The days are divided in the morning meeting, four lessons and three breaks including a one hour lunch break. Children are encouraged to go into the nearby park and play but everybody can just do what they like. Lunch is served in the individual classrooms and again children can where, when and how much they want to eat. Food is prepared in the kitchen by a teacher with the help of three students who swap every day. Teachers come from all walks of life: All class teachers are trained either as Waldorf, Montessori or state school teachers, but teaching assistants don’t need qualifications.

A lot of the children have transferred from other schools becausethey were victims of bullying or were unable to deal with the way the schools and/or the system tried to fit them in certain boxes. The school also has special classes for new students to explain to them which opportunities are open to them and how they can influence the everyday life of the school. Many of the students commute up to an hour every day and a lot of them also stay up to two hours after school to spend time with their friends or the teachers who clean up and plan their lessons. Mona explained to me how one important part of the school is the social time the kids can spend together- school here is about community.

Weeks in the upper school are split up in projects including work experience, outdoor weeks and even two times four weeks a year which are called the ‘boring period’ and mirror the strict curriculum of a ‘normal’ school. This enables students to try a variety of ways and this system has proved very successful in the last five years. The lower school also has project works which includes music and art. At the moment, the topic is Edvard Munch, a famous Norwegian painter (You might know ‘The Scream’). In both the upper and lower school, Maths, Norwegian and English are basically taught every day. There are no ‘private’ schools in Norway, every school has to be connected to the state system. As a result, the school is 85% state funded, with parents paying around 90 pounds a month for which the children are also provided with a hot lunch, and has to follow the national curriculum. After growing up with the stereotype of how amazing Scandinavian schooling is, it was a little bit of a shock to my system to hear how tightly everything is controlled by the state and that a socialist society also means that every school should be the same and offer the same structures. Homeschooling is forbidden and every school has to be approved by the state. Initiatives like in the UK, with parents founding their own schools and private companies paying for charter schools, are not allowed- for better or for worse.

While there are around 100 Waldorf Schools, ca 40 Montessori schools and many Jenaplan schools, the democratic school is the only one of its kind in Norway and remains a spot of bother to the state system. The only way it has managed to survive in the last years is to keep to state legislation, follow the national curriculum (in one way or another) and assign tests twice a year. However, there is no homework and at the heart of the school philosophy is love and respect for each other.

I might sound a little bit like the prospectus here, but I immediately felt the difference when I arrived in the morning. I had been given a lovely guide, Mona, who took me to the school meeting and had lots of time to chat. Everybody was very friendly and a lot of the kids were really happy to talk to me- in English! All of them said how much they enjoyed their time at the school and that they would never go back to the state system. What some of them especially liked was the fact that the students often helped each other in the lessons and that the age difference did not really matter. I was also free to have a look at the different classes and year groups, hang out in the kitchen, talk to lots of teachers and just spend time with the children. The student-staff relationship could not have been more different from a normal school: The teachers knew all of the kids’ names and treated them very much like they were all a big family. Coming from a British school, I was astonished to see teachers touching students- scandalous! :-) Imagine, I also took pictures without being threatened to be taken to court.

Although I would not say that the school is democratic in the strict sense of the Summerhill model as children have to attend fixed lessons, it is still very much child centred and children have the opportunity to change the way the school is run. Every morning the two parts of the school meet up to discuss the plan for the day. Any child and adult are free to report any personal news and everybody has to wait for their turn to speak. Once a week, the whole school meets up to discuss any issues that have come up over the last days and children have the chance to request projects and feedback on lessons. It was really interesting to see how the school adapts to the state system in order to stay open and yet finds ways to give power to students.

I had planned to go back to the school today and have a look at two English lessons at the Upper School, but unfortunately my flue made is pretty much impossible. I felt so bad today that I was barely able to leave the bed, not even talking about enjoying Oslo, but I am still glad I came. It comes to show that there is nothing that can replace the real life experience of such an amazing place. Thanks to Ryanair’s super cheap flights I really hope to come back for a few days some time in the next months and experience some more everyday life in this lovely community! Hopefully this is just the first of many free and democratic schools which I will visit in the next months and years.

More thoughts on the school and its structure and pictures tomorrow when I am back home!

PS: Digressing from the topic a little bit: last Saturday before the film festival meeting, I went to the concert of the University of Cambridge Chamber Orchestra. They were playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concertos in E minor and I have been listening to the concertos these past four days. I have to say that they go very well with Oslo and the cold. Just like the Kings of Leon clearly recorded their last album to be listening to on the Parisian Metro at night :-)

Finally some adventures abroad again! :-)

I have really missed the Paris/travelling bits that I was posting over the summer, so here is one blog entry about all of the amazing things that are happening away from Cambridge and the UK.

So, lets start off fairly close to 'home', in Southampton! It is half term and I am down for the weekend since my film friends invited me to come and stay with them. It is so nice to have meals with friends, talk about films and drink some wine together- how I had missed that! Hampshire is beautiful in autumn and I walked down to the old Southampton walls with my friend Sam yesterday. In a way, it is also quite nice to get a break from education. I still have an essay to write until the end of the week and of course will get back to my studies in the next days, but it is so refreshing to talk about films and other stuff. It's a little bit like I opened the window to my brain and let lots of fresh air in :-)

Around midday, I will be travelling back up and tomorrow I am off to Oslo! I had booked the flights back in September when Ryanair had an offer and got them for £15 return which is amazing! Of course I will need to pay for the hostel, food and the transport from and to the airports, but that is just about doable. The trip will give me the opportunity to visit the Democratic school there. This is the first time that I am actually able to see one after doing the tonnes of reading in the last months and I am pretty excited as you can imagine. What awaits me? Chaos? Community? Structure in any way? I am a little bit worried about not being able to speak Norwegian but lets hope that somebody will be able to explain stuff to me in German, English or French. Will keep you updated :-) The google weather forecast promises snow!!

There are at least two more exciting journey for me in the next months which are education related: The International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in April in Tel-Aviv, for which I should really book tickets now, and then of course the AERO conference in Albany in June. Now that I am officially a presenter (click here to see that I am right :-P) I have a proper reason to interview people about their education experience and hopefully will also be able to visit a few more alternative schools in the next months. I just wish I had more money!

My youngest sister is 15 and she just took part in an exchange program with a school near Chicago which I also did at her age. A group of German students visits for almost four weeks in autumn and the Americans come to Germany the following summer. Although I did not get on brilliantly with my host-sister at the time, I really enjoyed the experience and I think in one way or another it definitely influenced me to come to the UK just half a year later. Just being able to speak English in a real, valid context was pretty amazing. In a way, learning a language is one of the few things you can truly apply once you leave school- and yet very few people actually value it. Anyway, to add a little bit sensation to the blog: My sister got swine flue and I was really worried that she might not be able to take the flight home with everybody else. However, everything is ok now! :-) Also on the topic of exchanges, Alex Blagona, a very actively blogging MFL teacher up in Suffolk, gives his opinion about heallth and safety issues in UK school exchanges here. His blog is really well worth reading so have a look if you have a spare second.

So, I better get up now and meet a few more friends before I have to go back up to 'the North'.

Happy 'half term' everybody! :-)

PS: After the foundation of the National Student Film Association (NSFA) in June, I am now involved in the starting up of a big Student Film Festival in Cambridge. I have fantastic ideas for it and with all of the resources and the reputation the uni has to offer, this could be the first international festival of the UK. Super exciting stuff! Hopefully, I am going to start a new blog as soon as things get going properly to update you and use it as a documentatio for other students who want to start their own festivals. I wrote a 5 page abstract yesterday on what you have to think about and what we did with SoFi, the University of Southampton Film Festival, and I am eager to get as many students inspired to take the initiative as possible. It is a little bit like schools starting, just on the side of film :-)

Responses to the Primary Review and a defining moment in my teacher training

Oh man, so much is happening at the moment, I don't know where to begin. The only problem of my course being so rich is that, unless I post something every day, you will end up with super long blog posts- I promise I will try to be concise today :-)

So, first a quick update about my PGCE and what is going on in my life. Today, we were handed back our first assignment (a report on the use of Target Language in the MFL classroom) and I received super positive feedback which makes me really happy. It's funny that something which was considered a weakness in my first degree, having and expressing your own personal opinion and relating data to your work, is now suddenly a strength a lot of other people from the course have trouble with. Further, today was also a good day, because I heard that my workshop proposal for the AERO conference 2010 in Albany, New York got accepted!! My article on the last conference was just published a few days ago in the AERO magazine and I am extremely excited to be chosen to hold a workshop- only have of the proposals that were submitted got accepted! I am going to talk about the alternative education network in Europe and there is hopefully going to be a discussion on how we can bring the different branches and the states closer together.

I had a pretty interesting weekend with lots of time with my friends, a bit of Pilates, going out and enjoying the gorgeous autumn weather here in Cambridge. Somehow, I ended up at the market place Sunday evening and hear people singing in a beautiful church nearby. I am not a Christian but sang in a church choir in Germany many many years and could not resist having a peak inside. As it is the habit in churches I was ushered inside and sat down before I could say no and although I was not too excited about being stuck in the middle of a church service I must say that it was a pretty powerful experience to sing again with hundreds of people and be part of a community, even if I knew nobody there and in a way was only pretending to be part of the group. I should really get involved in one of the uni choirs- it was such a peaceful end of the week! :-)

Oh dear, but I digress! Let's get down to the dirty business. A couple of newspapers have posted comments on the Primary Review and they range from agreement to outrage. Minette Marrin from the Sunday times blames the 'low attainment' of British students on bad teachers and argues that it does not make a difference at which age children go to school. As a teacher, I am of course quite angry about a comment like that- the situation is much to complex to blame one party involved!- but on the other hand have to agree partially: yes, education can be made or break with the teacher. Ironically, Ed Balls, the UK schools' secretary, announced plans today to encourage parents to send their children to school with four years of age!! This is, and I quote, so that children can 'hit the ground running' and to 'close the gap on their peers'. What the hell!? How can you send children to school with the attitude that they are already behind? The two brain sides of human beings are not even properly connected until the age of six!

In one way, today's university seminar on assessment had quite a drastic impact on how I see the UK's education system and this day will go into the books as the moment when I decided not to work in the English state system. This is because firstly, teachers are only encouraged to teach students how to pass exams. Everything depends on how 'students' perform and if they don't do well, eg don't meet the exam criteria, they are seen as a failure and so is the teacher. Secondly, students are only graded on how much of the subject knowledge they are able to cram in their heads. Whereas 50% of the overall grade in any subject at German schools is 'oral', ie the teacher continuously the students' effort during the lessons, nothing like this exists in the UK. Nobody cares if you work hard: It is only the mark at the exam that counts. This is extremely sad and although I am still enjoying my course and the teaching, this is not a system I want to support in the future! The PGCE will give a great range of fantastic skills and will be fantastic for opening up opportunities in the future but I can't wait to get involved with alternative education! :-)

Another thing that was discussed widely in this weekend's newspapers is the idea off the British government supporting small schools which are being founded by parents who can not afford to send their children to private schools and are outraged about the standard of the state schools near them. These new schools might be able to get funding from the state and will be tied to the following of the National Curriculum. Somehow this whole movement has been connected to the Montessori schools but I have honestly no clue how the two groups are linked- there are already many Montessori schools in the UK and surely no untrained parents can just open a school like that? More investigation to follow! In general I think it is a great scheme that should give parents a great deal of autonomy in the education of their children within the local community.

In the Sunday Times I also read an article about Fleur Britten, a 21 year old student at Oxford who was home educated. It's amazing to hear how she just learned about what she wanted and now has a skill a lot of other students of our generation are missing: Knowing what you like! The organisation that connects many homeschooling families in the UK is Education Otherwise and I am excited to get in touch with them in the next months in preparation for my AERO workshop.

I am sorry if the blog reads a little bit like a newspaper reviews- it is rare that I find the time to read stuff properly and I thought you might be interested in a few quick updates about what is going on in the world of education in Britain! :-) On a last thought, yesterday a few friends and I were talking about schools reflecting the local society and culture we live in. It is a micro-cosmos in itself but surely every school should prepare children for the world that is waiting for them once they leave the school. This is quite an exciting thought for me because it is yet another reason for the idea that exams in schools is wrong: When do you ever take an exam outside of an educational context?

I hope you had a good start into the week! :-)