Adventures in Education and Abroad

Election and TES news

2010-05-11T23:30:00.005+01:00

Hello from London once more!

After last weekend’s TES, and the many things that happened since my last blogpost, I wanted to write much sooner (as always), but alas, life happens :-) Once of my favourite things to take place over the last weekend was a theatre visit to the National Theatre and the great play Women beware Women. The NT has a fantastic scheme at the moment that they are selling £30 tickets in the best area of the theatre for £10 to students and if you are clever enough to bring a copy of your passport and the signature of someone who knows you, you can even sign up to their under 25 scheme and get the first performance for free (with further ones only £5!). This is amazing! I have really only discovered the theatre recently after watching Le Misanthrope with Keira Knightley, and then The History Boys two weeks later and with the NT giving away such cheap tickets, its sure that I am going to go down to London more often now to indulge. I especially liked the end of Women beware Women because it climaxed in a 5 minute scene where all of the central characters came together in the montage of a party where everybody was seduced by sin and many of them actually die. It’s incredibly dramatic and with a turning stage and pitch perfect music, really sent shivers down my spine!

If anybody is reading from outside the UK: Our general elections happened last week and basically resulted in a big mess where the winning party (the conservatives for the first time in 13 years) did not get enough votes to ‘dominate’ the parliament and provide us with a prime minister. The other party (Labour), which had been in power since the dawn of time, did only get a few less votes and now where is talk about them teaming up with the third party, the liberal democrats. All three parties have quite different views on how to run the UK and it is most entertaining to watch them try to sort themselves out. Most likely there is going to be another election, but for now, every day there are more news which tip the scale in different directions. Today, the old labour prime minister resigned (possibly to sacrifice himself in order to enable better conversations with the liberal democrats) and today the new prime minister, the leader of the conservatives, basically set an ultimate for the lib-dems.

One thing that really annoys me is that although the conservatives promised more state funded free schools, or new academies as they call them (see earlier blogpost), in a conversation with the TES Mr Gove, the possible next secretary of education, basically said that they would need to adapt to the exact same tests ‘with rigorous accountability’. Now, he might not have understood that the whole concept of free schools is to be except from state tests (with the possible exception of maths, one foreign and the native language in the Scandinavian model). Although I agree that the ‘teaching to the test’ would be slightly more creative in his 'new academy idea, it remains that the state dictates what children will need to know at a certain point in their lives and it disregards it whether they are ready for it or not and/or how quickly they will acquire the knowledge.

I also read an article about homeschooling in Germany and how it can result in the parents going to prison because it is illegal. At the beginning of this year a German family was even granted asylum in the US in order to be able to educate their children at home. As much as I am a supporter of homeschooling and greater freedom of education, I have to say that the article was quite radical even for me. Yes, of course it is wrong to punish people severely for wanting to educate their children at home, however to say that ‘parents are dissatisfied with conditions in regional state schools where classrooms are overcrowded and bullying and drug problems are not uncommon’ is, in my opinion and experience, quite an overstatement. Although I have to say that I went to a very good (state) school, I never heard about problems to this extend from other schools. I bet that they do exist, but not more than in the UK (teenage pregnancy rate, anybody?) and other countries in Europe.

Two and a half weeks until the end of my placement… Very mixed feelings.

Con-Lib?

2010-05-07T22:46:00.004+01:00

My Year 7's had to take a French test this week (Reading and Listening) and this is the illustration I got on one of the backs of the papers. It summs up very neatly what I have been thinking about tests all along. To make it more bearable for everybody I try to be as positive as possible, but somehow it did not seem to have worked on this pupil. Bless...

On a more positive note, I passed my QTS Literacy skills test today. After only four hours of sleep because of the election chaos last night (eg Should I feel guilty for having mixed feelings about the Tories coming to power- or not), that was quite surprising. It feels like we are living in really exciting times and I so much wish that I could have voted- unfortunately my citizenship papers are still on the way...

Live, love, laugh

2010-05-04T20:15:00.006+01:00

Hello everybody and I hope that you had a good bank holiday weekend!

Now it is only 18 more teaching days and 27 lessons. Time has flown by so quickly that it is crazy to look back to Christmas and the dreading of the long spring months. Although I have found it relatively easy in the last weeks, I know that many of my friends were quite unlucky with their schools, tutors and classes and my biggest respect go out to those who have maintained their high spirits. The tile of this blogpost is a tattoo that my friend Lucy got as an antidote to the PGCE a few weeks ago!

With the end of the course, Cam*Era is also coming closer and closer and you can find more information about the festival on our newly improved homepage www.cam-era.org. Tom Hollander and Samuel Barnett, one of the History Boys, have agreed to come along for q&a's and the program is looking more exciting by the day!

But onto some education things. I attended a department meeting today and for various reasons it was the first one at my second placement school. Although mfl discussions are fairly boring if also necessary (eg speaking exams, how to help individual students, etc...), there was one topic today which got me quite upset and exceptionally engaged (yes, you are not necessarily too enthusiastic when the meetings are about stuff you are not going to experience at the end of the year): Picking teaching and exam topics for Year 10s and 11s.

The argument was that a lot of the languages students struggle with the range of topics in year 10 and that the new GCSE, introduced this year, has just made matters more complicated. Theoretically students have to complete writing and speaking tests in different subject areas over the course of the year but now another school has come up with the clever strategy to introduce a topic and then structure both writing and speaking assessments around it, The two tests have a different focus (eg different questions) but still the same range of vocab and sentence structures.

This might sound like a very good idea- double as much teaching for the same topic, greater understanding on part of the students and as a result better exam results. However, it would also limit the topic syllabus to three a year and hugely limit the range of vocab that the students learn. They would only be able to discuss the few topics they have been taught rather than double as many as before plus subjects would become huge 'chunks' of many weeks and if you did not feel connected to what are are being taught there is no change for more than two months!

As I have only discovered today that there are a few people out there who are actually reading my blog, I would be very interested in hearing your opinion on this topic. Is less really more in the case of language teaching and education in general?

Edinburgh and the volcano

2010-04-25T09:20:00.008+01:00

Good morning from Oxford!

(As it seems I am spending most of my weekends here now and I love the town very much (mostly for the people who live in it but nevertheless), I am not allowed to comment too much on the boat race and the University Challenge victory three weeks ago. Hihi...)

Travelling in my holidays was very eventful. Going back to Germany turned out to be much more relaxing than I thought and even with lots of Cam*Era work and my dissertation (An analysis of an email exchange with a native speaker class) to write, I still had a few days to spend time with my family and friends. It's funny how much you can get done in a place where it is 1) quiet and 2) clean and 3) you don't wish you were somewhere else all of the time. I think I might go back in August for a few weeks to get the ISFA going properly. It's going to be launched at Cam*Era but will require at least a month of getting in touch with people and hopefully finding some sponsors!

I only came back to Cambridge for one day, just to head off to the Democratic Schooling seminar at the University of Edinburgh early the next morning. Edinburgh and the weather were beautiful and thanks to my amazing friend Holly, with whom I had also been to the AERO conference last year, it was a fantastic three days. The seminar itself on Friday morning was really interesting, but long not radical enough for me. I had the feeling that neither of the speakers were actually advocating democracy in schools but that it was rather about education in a democratic society without the input of people under 18- what a crazy but common idea. Although the topic of 'student voice' came up once or twice, it almost seemed to scare them to think about giving students real power. Commenting on it, I turned out to be the most 'radical' person in the room and people came up to me later, congratulating me on my revolutionary ideas. Very entertaining :-)

Unfortunately we were in Scotland just as the volcano erupted, so Holly and I were both forced to travel back to England by coach- but at least in comparison to a lot of my friends I did not need to get a range of public transport and a few days to get back home! I got to Southampton just in time to film the Student Robotics Competition my friends put on every year and was actually quite excited to get back into the editing room this week. Editing is ultimate organisation and I really like that you can immediately see progress as soon as you spend a little bit of time with your film. Although some of my friends were stuck abroad, it was still lovely to see a lot of the competition people from last year again and the event itself went really well.

Back in Cambridge, it turned out that seven teachers from our school were not able to get back and I had to cover a couple of lessons as well as a parents evening. While the former was quite annoying (and I was still lucky to cover my favourite German classes), the parents evening was great. Of course I had been to a couple before, but actually being the only one sitting behind the table turned out to be hugely satisfying. In the UK parents come to the evening together with their kids and its really nice to be able to praise children who deserve it in front of people who are pleased by it as well. The annoying kids normally don't come, so I approach it more or less as two hours of making people happy. Of course I also have to criticise sometimes, but it's long not as bad as you would think. And it shows- the students are always nicer the next days :-)

Now it's only 24 more teaching days until the end of my PGCE and 54 days until Cam*Era!

Let the sunshine in

2010-04-24T12:58:00.004+01:00

Hello to a very long overdue blogpost!

Once more I am on the train to London, not quite feeling productive enough to get on with some Cam*Era work and definitely not depressed enough to get on with some lesson planning, so here we go: An update on the travelling and education that is happening in my life at the moment. :-)

But first for some film! As you might remember from January, the National Student Film Association now has a new committee and my journey this morning will lead me to the National Theatre and our first (and possibly only) committee meeting for this year. New committee members are coming from as far as Scotland to discuss what we can do for film students in the UK and I really hope to make their journey worth as much as possible. Of course the past has shown that even with lots of talking, very little can get done, but I keep my fingers crossed! Screentest was, after all, a great success and there is definitely great potential to make the NSFA something outstanding. I have the feeling that one of the most discussed points today is going to be money and the question where we are going to get it from, what it will pay for if we get it and if the NSFA should ever be considered as an organization which pays its committee. Not that I am desperate to get money for what I love doing anyway, but again experience has shown that money definitely increases people’s commitment. Discuss.

Cam*Era preparation are also going fairly well. Although we have so far only received a disappointing number of films, the weekend itself is shaping up to be amazing with great speakers, Corpus Christi and the Picture House cinema as venues and alumni returning to the uni as judges for our awards. Lots of website changes are just under way and we are launching a major advertising campaign this week to get more people to submit. So, if you are reading this and have not yet joined our facebook group, waste another minute of your precious sunny Saturday by going on facebook and inviting all your friends. Please. Done? Thank you!

But on to something less fun but maybe just as exciting. Elections. What, I hear you shout? Exciting? Rather annoying. Yes and no. This is the first year that I am actually aware of the all the general election circus that is going on in the UK and of course my major points of concern are Education: Primary, Secondary, FE and HE. The former is the only one I am not involved in directly at the moment but as the Sats boycotts are on the brick of being on the way (or not?!), it still feeds into the everyday discussion in the staff room and beyond (be thankful if I have not tried to engage you into an outraged dialogue yet!). For anybody who does not live in the UK: SATs are generalized standard tests and all UK children have to take in Year 6, the end of their primary school time. If you have read my blog in the last year you will know that I dont like tests but that, of course, the matter is not as simple as that. The interesting bit at the moment is that of course every party has different policies on it (The Tories want to move it to Year 7, The LibDems want to get rid of it and Labour is not sure).

The thing that really gets me annoyed is that it is actually only the Democrats who are proposing a free school, or rather as it is called in the UK a 'Academy system': more independence for school leaders, teachers and communities and financial support from the government. Although the TES has recently taken to condemning it (and who could blame them, being the Labour paper that they are), which got me quite upset last week, I am still very much in favour of communities being able to administer their own schools and not having to 'teach to the test'. Have a look at the online discussion and I will give you my 2 cent when I have carefully consider whether I would actually dare to think about voting for the conservatives. Shudder.

Kings Cross! More news on the meeting for Democratic schooling in Edinburgh and teaching in Volcano Ash times in a bit :-)

Drink for thought?

2010-03-14T22:29:00.005Z

'Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.'

~Charles Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," Paris Spleen, 1869

Good old Charles! But where to start? Spending most of the weekend in bed, working on Cam*Era and spending a Saturday night 22nd birthday party half asleep has made me realise how much I am actually wasting my youth. These are maybe my last months as a student and somehow I have to find a way to celebrate that a little bit more! The PGCE is rubbish for extensive shenanigans because I have to be at school at 7.45 every day, but after all that's what weekends should be there for. Staying in bed and playing Mario Kart half of the day is not really the ideal image I have of myself (bless Schopenhauer).

General boredom and the wish to escape life once more in the following weeks led me to ponder my two favourite questions: 'Who/what do you love?' and 'What makes you happy?' It turns out that after some months of inner calm and business, the answers are not as easy anymore. All I know is that my festival work is one of the answers to both questions and that teaching has fallen off the radar a little bit which was unexpected. But that also means that I now have to find a way to hang on to the event organisation stuff as much as I can.

Before I give up on education however (and I doubt that will ever seriously happen), two exciting events are still waiting for me. In four weeks time I am going up to Edinburgh to attend a seminar on democratic schooling, as mentioned in the last days. I think part of the reason why I am not so enthusiastic or rather idealistic about education anymore is because I am working in an environment where everybody is counting the days to the next holidays and dreading tests. Meeting some people again who love the concept of education and actually want to make things better for everybody might just be the spark I need. And then of course there is the AERO conference this summer- can't wait!

Finally there are going to be some adventures abroad again!

Homeschooling?

2010-03-12T07:46:00.004Z

I started this article this morning at 6.30 when I was just having breakfast, listening to last.fm, and thought I would share two quick, education related things that happened yesterday.

The first one was a professional studies session on 'homeschooling'. As part of the PGCE, we have professional development for an hour a week and generally somebody from the school comes in to tell us about how to get a teaching job, consider special needs or approach A-Level teaching. So all in all very mainstream stuff. But behold, yesterday, the schedule came up with the interesting idea of 'homeschooling'. As you can imagine if you have followed this blog for a while, I approached the session with a keen interest to hear about the school's provision for children who can not/ do not want to come to school and who are online affiliated to and supported by it. Of course I was wrong. Homeschooling in fact related to the idea of liaising between home and school, so talking to the parents/ guardians whenever their child had done something great/very bad. While this was interesting as well, it was really not the glimmer of hope I was after and I felt clearly mislead by the term homeschooling. Although the homeschooling I had imagined is not illegal in England, it is still fairly uncommon. Currently, there are around 50,000 children who are educated at home.

The Easter holidays are now approaching faster and faster and I have decided to go up to Scotland for a seminar on European Democratic education. My flights are booked and hopefully I will be able to learn a lot which I will also be able to use able to use for my AERO workshop in June. I can't wait to see all of the lovely people at the conference again and wish I could stay more flexible with my plans for next year so that I had the option to just stay in the States. Unfortunately that is not possible due to general life admin (including the need to book flights in advance) and the dream might have to wait for another year.

The second education related thing that got me thinking yesterday was my first parents evening. A friend of mine who is doing the same course described it recently as 'speed-dating'. Everybody wants to hear something truthful but on the other side you really want to try to get along. In Germany, parents evening is only for adults while in the UK, students go together with their parents. I have to say that I approve of the UK version and it's nice to be able to talk to the kids one on one as well. Meeting the parents was fascinating and in a lot of cases explained a lot! A little, stroppy boy from my Year 8 class for example was clearly not even half as bad as his aggressive and defensive mother! I was there with the lady who normally takes the class as unfortunately I had only taught this group of kids three or four times and listening to her talk with extreme care and political correctness was really interesting.

I am not a parent and so can not imagine what it must be like for somebody else to criticise your own child. It was however very nice to see how a lot of parents clearly wanted to help their children. Funnily enough there were two sets of German/ Austrian parents and they were especially interested in how they could support the learning of their kids. Both groups mentioned that the amount of vocab learning is much smaller and that the expectations are much lower than in German speaking schools. This is really fascinating as I have not been in contact with German schools in a while and sometimes forget how much work we actually had to do for our language lessons- and I had English, French and Spanish in my last two years. At my school, the kids are barely given any homework in comparison and although I don't believe in homework being the answer and hope to inspire intrinsic motivation, maybe the parents were right and the standards are quite worryingly low- and nobody realises.

On a quick, film-related note I met this amazing young director last week at Screentest and I just asked him to come along to Cam*Era to talk about his work. It is very inspiring to actually find a really good young film maker amongst hundreds of good, but not remarkable ones! The quality of his film 'Who's afraid of the Water Sprite' is outstanding and I can really recommend to have a look at the trailer of his new film 'Bovine' here.

Only 8 1/2 teaching weeks left!

2010-03-09T12:29:00.005Z

So Christmas and New Year whizzed by and as you can see we are already two and a half months into the new year. Madness.

I thought I'd update you on what is going on with my PGCE. Before the PGCE students went into the second block placement (6+6+5 weeks intersected by half term and Easter break), we were told that February was going to be a dark month. No sleep, continuous preparation, classroom management issues, missing support and lots of marking. Oh, plus our biggest assignment yet: 1C, with 8000 words to write on a study that we have to design ourselves. Now, I would love to be melodramatic and go: Boy, were they right! But the truth is that I am doing fine.

Yes, I have been very lucky with my school (which is only a few minutes away from my house), my mentor (who is awesome and tries to adapt the program to what I want to get out of it) and my classes (which the exception of one which I swear is made of monsters in training). I would not go as far as saying that I enjoy it all the time, which I don't, or that I don't feel challenged at times (see the monsters), but overall I am ok, sane and fairly healthy. This however is quite a stark contrast to a lot of the other PGCE students many of whom have not been as lucky as I am in either of the three respects above and sometimes don't get home until 6pm and then have to get onto marking books.

Through a miracle I am only teaching 9 classes a week and have time to be chair of the NSFA, run the Cambridge Student Film Festival and visit my friends in Oxford and London over the weekend. I have to say that the latter three contribute hugely to my emotional balance and that in a way, they make me enjoy my time at school much more because of the diversity of the things that I am doing. This afternoon for example I am going to meet up with people from the university to discuss collaboration opportunities for Cam*Era, the film festival. Sometimes it feels like the film projects are my real work- they demand more attention but also give me much greater high points once something works out. Last week for example, I paid in a cheque of £3000 sponsorship money for Cam*Era.

The one thing that is really exhausting about the PGCE is the continuous assessment. Being a teacher on a training course is a little bit like being an actor who has three auditions a day- you have to be good all the time. Professional teachers observe your lessons almost every single time and write comments on very scary blue sheets of paper with one copy going to the faculty of the university and one going to your personal mentor at the school. It is sometimes quite funny to see how a really positive lesson can turn into a nightmare on paper or vice verca!

I am still glad that I am doing it and it will ultimately also be very beneficial for my CV. As the majority of the PGCE students I have also had my doubts, but now there are only 8 and a half weeks left and I am sure that I will be able to complete those as well! What comes after will be another matter completely and I doubt very much that it is going to involve secondary school language teaching but that my future will rather lead in back into the direction of film or event management... We will see :-)

Three weeks worth of TES

2009-12-22T12:05:00.003Z

Hello from snowy Germany!

After a week of internet absence and a lot of wonderful skiing in the

French alps I have reemerged to share some thoughts on what is going on in the world of education. I finally had the time to read the last three TESs on the plane to Germany the day before yesterday and, as always, it looks like education is doomed! Apart from the general primary school inspections, SATS pressure and abolishment, Ofsted devastation, inclusion and SEN, GCSE standards and the private school reform, the lasts week’s news are surprisingly relevant to what I am doing and will indeed closely concern a whole generation of newly qualified teachers.

Chancellor Alistair Darling announced that teachers will have their pay rise capped to 1 percent from September 2011 on. This is below the national inflation rate of 1.9 and I am sure will drive many teachers out of their profession. Ironically, just a few pages later, the TES also announced that 250.000 people who are trained as teachers do not actually work in the classroom. After working in schools for a while now, I know that teachers feel overworked, underappreciated and underpaid anyway- why make it even more difficult for them to stay in their profession? In another counterproductive move, after the TTA has met its recruitment target this year, it was decided a few weeks ago to cut the teacher training bursaries down in September 2010- in my case that would mean £3000 less a year. Now, you may ask: Why do teachers get paid to train if nobody else does? It is precisely because they won’t earn as much as other people and because there are not enough people who want to do it!

This applies especially to my area of teaching- languages. Language graduates are statistically one of the highest earning groups of people, after law and medicine but even before engineering. Every year, fewer and fewer linguists go into teaching and apply for jobs in the economy and industry which pay them three to four times as much as teaching! I have seen teachers get to school at 7am and leave at 5pm with a pile of 30 books to mark and five lessons to plan at home that evening for what I consider to be very little money in comparison. A lot of the PGCE trainees on my course (and mind you it is supposed to be the best in the country as we were told so proudly on our first day) have dropped out a few weeks into their first placement due to the workload. Students in subjects such as arts and music do not get any financial support and after the disaster with this year’s student loans I can frankly understand their option.

Personally, I am much divided between my career choices. Firstly it is very surreal that theoretically I would be able to go back to Germany next summer! By then I will have lived in the UK for six years, going from Boston to Southampton to Cambridge because of driven but ultimately random decisions. I am not sure if the PGCE would really qualify me to teach full time immediately, but there is definitely the chance to work in other positions. However, I do love England and most of my friends are here so it looks like my options are down to getting my NQT year out of the way and trying to get a teaching position which I like (eg teaching German and Film at A-Level), a PHD or maybe some event management work which will correspond to my film festival experience. The PhD applications are sent off now and I won’t have to apply for teaching jobs until spring so at the moment I am waiting for another ideal opportunity to come along.

Another idea which has also emerged recently is having a year abroad and doing some short time teaching work in homeschooling centres or private schools, especially in the states. At the AERO conference last summer I met a lot of people who were very interested in hiring a ‘European Ambassador’ who can teach languages and I might be able to get a working visa through aero if I tried. That would give me a year of flexible teaching and travelling which sounds very tempting. However, at the beginning of the year I decided that my first priority would be my friends so I am trying to convince my friend Holly to come with me and be freeee for a while :-) At the moment it looks like we are going to go to NY together again in June for my conference workshop and then travel down to Mexico city for a month or so.

But even with summer thoughts in my head (and a houseboat trip, Ireland holiday and much more to come in 2010), the reality at the moment is very much ‘home, family and snow’. On Saturday we are off to Switzerland to do some more skiing and that means I will have been in four countries within one week- talk about Carbon footprint! Unfortunately I have the feeling that the experience will pale in comparison the total happiness last week...

Bon Noel!

End of placement one and the launch of the NSFA

2009-12-04T14:46:00.009Z

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

2009-11-18T00:31:00.001Z

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

2009-11-07T21:00:00.000Z

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 Catholic conspirators, 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

2009-11-04T17:29:00.000Z

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

2009-10-31T07:35:00.000Z

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! :-)

2009-10-27T08:07:00.001Z

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

2009-10-19T20:34:00.000+01:00

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! :-)

Another exciting review and my first lessons

2009-10-17T10:44:00.000+01:00

After talking about the Nuffield Review at the beginning of the week, there was another paper published yesterday which makes me think that the UK education system is changing in major ways. After six years of research, Cambridge published a big Primary School Review which is really rather exciting and, as the BBC news say, 'could change British Primary Schools forever'. The report focuses on life, work and learning in primary school and makes 75 recommendations to the state, some of them more radical than others.

Interestingly, its main avocation is the abolishment of simplified rules and prejudices that govern primar school life everywhere in the UK, eg testing vs non-testing, schools starting age four vs age six, curriculum imposition vs total freedom. The review argues that a balance has to be found for each individual child. If a child wants to learn how to read at 4 it should be encouraged but not forced to. It supports a school starting age of 6 but also encourages the observation of the maturity of the individual child. Learning should be assessed but not in exams but ongoing teacher observation of progress. According to the recommendations of the report, league table should be scrapped, SATs abolished and the status of primary schools and its teachers raised as they provide the ground work for the society we live in. You can find the findings here .

All in all, it looks amazing. I only went to school with 7 (!) and really think that my parents made the right decision at the time and I truly enjoyed being able to play with my friends at the Kindergarten a year longer! Getting rid of exams is always a good idea, especially for students the age of 10, and as a teacher of course I support the idea that schools and education should be more valued- almost every teacher is going to tell you that he/she is overworked and underpaid, even the good ones. Now the question is, as with the Nuffield review, which of these ideas are actually going to be implemented and how Primary Schools, parents, teachers and especially students are going to react to it. The intentions might be great but many people are strongly opposed to change and find the idea of not being able to assess children's knowledge on paper very frightening!

As an example, on Thursday, we had a school briefing on the introduction of diplomas, which offer Year 10 students the chance to learn about a special subject are in an applied way, and offered teachers the chance to completely rewrite their assessment standards. Theoretically, they would have been able to assess students enthusiasm, commitment, skills and progress and not the knowledge that they had gathered over the time of a few weeks. However, none of the teachers were able to see this new policy as a possibility, for them it is just more paperwork which nobody was happy about. Of course I understand that after teacher for years and years, having to deal with new policies every year or so and not being able to have true freedom because of government regulations can tire you out but that does not mean that you should lose the will or broad sight to want to change things- in my book at least! These teachers and administrators are so stuck in their way of seeing eduction that they are not even willing to consider more holistic alternatives- which ironically the national curriculum is implementing more and more of!

On Wednesday and Thursday I also taught my first proper lessons, very exciting. Almost as expected, the second one went better than the first and I even got a round of applause from my students- after teaching the time in German of all things :-) I would say that both of the lessons were way too teacher focused and that I am also praising too much, but at least I know what to concentrate on in the next lessons. Now that I am actually in the classroom almost every day, I am looking forward to trying out all of my exciting ideas. However, I have also learned that you have take one step after the other and that just the fact of taking the register in the middle of the lesson rather than at the end can already confuse my students immensely!!

My first lesson, the Nuffield Review and lots of love :-)

2009-10-13T21:58:00.001+01:00

I have been quite lazy with my blogging in the last weeks and really need to make myself sit down and write an update on what is going on! When I started this, I promised myself I would not become like the other bloggers who write posts every few weeks or months- there is too much interesting stuff going on in my life to not share it :-P Unfortunately, talking about the excitement, that of course also means that a lot of my time is spend actually doing stuff rather than reporting on it and when I get home (late on most days) I am happy just to have a hot chocolate in bed rather than get my evaluation hat on and make an effort :-)

So, by now I am into PGCE week 5- unbelievable! There is just another week and a half until half term and soon it's going to be Christmas (or so the shops want us to believe :-). Tomorrow, I am finally teaching my first proper session at my school and it is quite exciting, if also tedious, to plan 60 minutes in detail. I am not really used to this kind of lesson planning and really need to discipline myself to go beyond a few notes on a piece of paper! Tomorrow will also be extra strange, because I have not taught at all at the school yet and will be thrown into the deep end; my mentor is at a conference and basically left me with her Year 10 German class. I am really looking forward to the challenge, and explicitly asked for it, and hope I can live up to the expectations!

Otherwise, the PGCE is going well. We had to hand in our first assignment on Friday which consisted of a 1000 word essay on the use of target language in the classroom. Our second one, 2000 words on inductive grammar teaching , is due in the week after half term and today we already had a preparation lecture for the third one which is the same all across the different PGCE disciplines. I find the work load very doable, but then should probably make more of an effort to file things correctly and plan a little bit better.

The most interesting thing this week was the reading of the Nuffield Review which recommends a more holistic education for the 14 to 19 year olds all across the British comprehensive schools. You can find the paper here. It is always great to see how alternative education ideas are implemented into the National Curriculum or Scheme of Work, however, I am very aware that it is not just the paper work that needs to change but the way learning is accessed. As long as schools work towards exams, the best ideas will not be implemented and democratic education is impossible!

In two weeks time I am off to Oslo and will hopefully also have the chance to drop in at the democratic school. I have never seen one and it would be great to have a look around and experience democratic education in action. The only problem is really going to be the language barrier as I don't know any Norwegian. Let's hope that Oslo lives up to its great language reputation! :-)

On a finishing note, my friend Steve and I were visited this weekend by our Student Robotics friends from Southampton and we went punting on the Cam, to the cinema and a nice Italian restaurant in Cambridge, called 'Clowns'. Overall, I also cooked for 12 different people over the course of the weekend and had a fantastic time. The two and a half days really showed me again how happy it make me to have friends around and I am now tempted more than ever to chose my place of work for next year in a place where my friends are living. All you need is love :-D

Comprehensive schools, GCSEs and plum crumble

2009-09-30T21:07:00.000+01:00

Today was my 7^th day at the Sawston Community College and as so much stuff has happened again in the last days, I thought I would update you on what is going on :-) At the moment, I am sitting in the staffroom, waiting for my lovely communting companion Catherine to give me a lift home. Days at Sawston are long: Staff starts at 8.15 and does not finish until half 3 and I am normally here another half an hour plus on each side. After that, I have to get stuck into lesson planning and uni assignments. Thank goodness, I have Tuesdays off, so my time is not yet quite as limited as it could be.

In my first week here at Sawston, I saw some very good and some questionable practice. One brilliant teacher engaged his students with short documentary clips and role play while another one just talked at them for an hour. I was also guided around the school by Year 8 pupils and had the chance to ask Year 7 students about their experience with the change from the primary school. All in all, I have learned a lot and many things became clearer to me. ‘Unfortunately’ I also realised that the whole school and teaching idea is not as easy as I thought. Having focused on alternative education and its benefits in the last years, I am having a hard time rejecting a lot of the ideas behind the comprehensive school system. One school that provides equal opportunities for all, no matter which ethnicity, class or ability, sounds great in practice but is, of course, impossible to sustain. Children from richer parents will generally go to schools higher up in the league tables that those from working class families.

When it comes to the practice I have seen in schools, it quite surprised me that the British National Curriculum and many new ideas encourage the individual, holistic development of the child and that many more options are available than I for example had in Germany. On the other hand, these ideas are not implemented and many schools and teachers only teach ‘for the exams’ rather than for actual skills the students will use later in life. They are much more interested in getting their kids through their GCSEs than to foster Claxton’s eight favourite skills: curiosity, courage, exploration and investigation, experimentation, imagination, reasoning, sociability and reflection. A teacher actually laughed at me when I started discussing these targets and said I would never get a job if I don’t ‘produce’ achieving students as a teacher.

And many students I talked to were just as caught up in their desire to ‘achieve’. I talked to a little girl about her Religious Education lessons and asked he why she had chosen them as one of her options. The answer was ‘because I am good at RE.’ Come on guys, religion should not be something you are ‘good’ at!! You might be interested in the concept of religion and/or might want to develop your faith but to chose a subject like that just to get higher GCSE grades is very sad.

The funny thing is that I only realised last week that only school makes people do/’learn’ something they might not like or be good at. Later in life, people (hopefully have the opportunity to) chose the job they want according to their own taste. Yes, I am all up for encouraging a well-rounded education, but many people go eventually into the area of work which they have enjoyed all the way long. So if you play computer games all day you are actually likely to become a games designer. If students are able to chose what they want to learn, they will be more engaged in the tasks and more active learning will take place. Further, they might also chose projects which will be able to make an active difference to the community around them, for example teenagers who like to garden will grow veg for their families and will feel a real sense of achievement.

On that note, I really miss looking after people so in case you fancy a piece of cake, just come to visit me :-) Tonight, there is home made plum crumble on the menu. Hmmmm...

Cambridge Matriculation dinner

2009-09-25T00:06:00.000+01:00

OK, here we go. This blog entry is not going to be the brightest one because I have had quite a lot of wine but I am trying my best. :-) Just had my matriculation dinner at Homerton College in Cambridge and it was really good; the food and company was awesome and there was lots of free wine as well; good times! Homerton has ca 300 PGCE students and around 240 were there tonight. I met a few people from my course and from my placement but there were also a lot of new faces. At the moment, I am sitting at the train station in Cambridge and the next and last train to Royston is going to leave in 20 minutes so I thought it might be time to write some stuff for my blog again :-)

So, my first week of proper ‘teaching and learning’ observation is over and I have seen many positive as well as negative things. Plus there was always my book ‘What’s the point of school’ which challenged me all the way through and encouraged me to think critically about all of the things at hand- very much like a good teacher. I am not saying that all what the book says is right (as my friend Steve pointed out) but it is certainly interesting to consider different points of view and keep an open mind.

Today for example all of the 10 (female) PGCE students at my community college at Sawston were required to present what they had discovered in this week of observation and the focus was on ‘teaching and learning’. Now, all of the presentations were very good and I enjoyed them as well, the problem was just that none of the other people actually concentrated on the ‘learning’ criteria. As a teacher, I think you can get very tangled up in what you have to do; however how the students learn and what they think they are achieving is so much more important! Of course, you, as a teacher, should facilitated that learning, but all too often it is just the way you are responsible for the classroom or how many students are achieving your target grades that dominates your ‘learning facilitating’. ‘Learning is not about the teacher; it should all be about the students.

Tonight at my matriculation dinner, I talked to a few other teachers, expressing the view point that students should learn what they want to learn; that they should be able to learn at their own pace and that they should be able to have an influence on how their ‘learning communities’ are run; the basic principles of democratic education. Other students started to argue with me (which is great as it makes me question my own point of view and keep an open mind!) and I am truly enjoying finally being at a university where people are not afraid to voice their opinion. It is really amazing that I feel that I have finally arrived at a (geographical) place where discussion and interest are good things! Long live the geeks! :-)

Talking about which, I am going back to Southampton tomorrow night. I really think that I should stay here in Cambridge in the next weekends to make some more friends (and get to know the people on my course better) but I really miss my friends down in the South and can’t wait for tomorrow’s working day to finish. Although the journey down takes a very long time (3 hours) and is very expensive (£37 in advance) it will be all worth it- hopefully!

But back to Cambridge: Homerton College is really nice! After tonight’s dinner I can confirm that their food is truly awesome and that the people are really nice. :-) There was a candle light reception in the great hall for all of the new PGCE students (incl a drinks reception beforehand) and afterwards the principal of the college gave a really nice speech. Half of the people on my course and from my school are affiliated to Homerton and that seems to be the general statistics. The college is right next to the department so I guess that is one of the reasons why a lot of people chose it.

I would go back into my book and all of the stuff that I have discovered in the last weeks, but I am way too tired plus I don’t want to miss my stop which means that you will have to wait until tomorrow when I am on my train back to Southampton. Good night and I hope that you had an awesome week full of positivity!! :-)

'What's the point of school?' and Student Robotics

2009-09-20T23:21:00.000+01:00

This week, my Post Graduate Certificate of Education started at the University of Cambridge. It is a one year long teacher training course of which 2/3 are based at placement schools. After this year, I will finally be qualified to teacher modern foreign languages (German, French and Spanish) in Primary and Secondary schools all around the world; extremely exciting! It will also allow me to top the course up with an MEd in 'Management and Leadership' to full time teaching a year later, which sounds very promising and will be all about initiative and innovation. The week has been extremely exhausting and rewarding and on Friday I already had my first day at the Sawston Community College, my first placement school and the first community college in the history of UK education. I am sure that there will be lots to report in the next weeks!

Thanks to all of my commuting time, I have also had the chance to start yet another book before the madness of the course will kick in properly next week and with it the required reading. The book in question is Guy Claxton’s ‘What’s the point of school?’. The best thing about this book is that it is actually English as in from the UK. I have read some wonderful education books from America, but to read something about A-Levels and GCSEs in the context of improving education is kind of magical! So, Claxton starts off with talking about why school is rubbish and then goes on to discuss what has already been done to change that (and how that has failed) and what really needs to be done to improve the situation. He calls for students to develop qualities of mind: curiosity, courage, investigation, experimentation, reasoning, sociability and reflection. Basically, skills that will equip them for the future. As a teacher, I absolutely agree, however I am still too inexperienced enought to be able to think of many activities that promote them. Something to work on in the next weeks! :-)

Now, one could argue that one of the ‘life skills’ is also reading. Although there has been a slight increase in students ability to read (although still many thousand students leave school without being able to read properly!), fewer and fewer actually enjoy reading. This is especially dramatic, as research has shown that ‘reading for pleasure outweighed every social advantage’ including the parent’s income. On average, students educated in ‘alternative’ schools or those who are un- or homeschooled, read much better and are more interested, absorbed and relaxed. In the end, it all comes down to the question 'What do children really need to learn'? A few weeks ago I would have said that children only need to learn what they are interested in, however, after observing what kind of skills are necessary to function within a society and be able to develop other skills, reading is one of the few things that I can not imagine somebody to live without.

I also started thinking about why students have so many exams and test. Of course they give teachers and parents the illusion that they are able to assess a learner's subject knowledge. What most of them don;t understand is that there are a million reasons why people can not do well in tests and that these don't necessarily reflect 'knowledge' at all. What is especially bad about the whole test system is the fact that the tests dictate what the students 'learn'. The modern foreign languages curriculum in the UK (which is enforced through tests and homework) tells students what kind of language they should be able to use at a certain point in their learning process. It does not encourage them to learn 'outside of the box' or use structures or vocab that have not been taught yet.

In my opinion, students should be able to chose what they want to learn (and say!!) and the main aim of education (in school or not) should not be to pass exams, but to develop students into healthy, happy human beings (‘Exams can be retaken for example while self-harm or drug addiction can require years of recovery’). Students in the UK are among the unhappiest and unhealthiest in the world! More than half (63%) of the students feel that school does not prepare them for life in the real world.

I could (and, probably in the near future, will) discuss some of other very interesting things Claxton touches on, however it is getting a little bit late and I just quickly wanted to tell you about the amazing weekend I had helping my friends from Student Robotics, based at the University off Southampton, prepare the 'Kickstart' of this year's robotics project with local 6th form students. Science in Action! :-) I Basically spent the time betwen Fri night 9pm and Sat morning 7am building and glueing together pieces of kit for the robots and then the rest of Satuday at the event itself. I had a fantastic time and it was so nice to see everybody!! The 6th form students now have 7 months to build robots and will return to the university in April for a big competition.

Two weeks ago, I submitted an article about the conference to the AERO magazine, which will be printed this week. Writing the piece took ages because I wanted to make sure that I described everything correctly and did not get too carried away by my enthusiasm :-D I hope that the readers will like it and of course it is quite an exiting prospect to be a published author very soon!

Democratic education in state schools

2009-09-11T14:42:00.000+01:00

Three quick links to great articles about teachers and students developing a more democratic school life:

- 50 ways in which adults can support student voice by Adam Fletcher

- Issues by young people for social change by the FreeChild Project

- Boston Teachers' Union opens its own school, article in the Boston Globe

(Sorry this is a bit short, I am on my way to London! :-)

Primary experience, day 3 + Julie and Julia

2009-09-09T22:53:00.000+01:00

So, I just wanted to write a very quick, very egoistic blog entry about how great my day was! Two fantastic things happened today (plus lots of little stuff) and both of them made me feel so good that I want to share that. Pkus there is a little bit of education stuff at the end. Just for those of you who just wanted to stop reading :-)

Firstly, I had another reall good morning in Barrington at the Primary School. I am spending every day in the same class and by now, I know some of the kids' names and they also know me. They also ask me for help and today I taught a Year 5 girl to round to the next whole number and decibel. In the end, she was able to do it on her own and even thanked me on her way out. Another girl showed me a fossil she had found on the beach and I also learned about story telling. Good times indeed. Maybe I should become a primary school teacher instead.

The second great thing that happened today was that I went to Cambridge to watch the premier of 'Julie and Julia' which I liked immensly. Although it is a little bit too long, I laughed a lot and the two stories and very well connected- it reminded me a little bit of The Hours, just much lighter. And the food!! My goodness, I got hungry just watching the fantastic dishes being prepared! :-) What I liked best however, was that both of the protagonists had men to cook for. I am a housewife at heart (although it really does not matter who I cook for!) and it is just not as much fun if you just do it for yourself.

Incidentally, with my new (own!) kitchen at my disposal, I started cooking my way through Gordon Ramsay's 'Cooking for friends' a few days ago and even started making strategic shopping lists instead of just buying what I felt like and then cooking what i had ingredients for. This is a kitchen revolution in my case! I am sorry if this diverges a little bit from the original theme of the blog but I thought maybe you should know that I am not just a teacher, student and education revolutionist but that I also love being in the kitchen. And that I am a dancer. And film lover and maker. And photographer. But enough complexity for today :-D

On a last educational note, I found Stop National Standarts today through Twitter and have started reading my way into the site. Powerful stuff although I am still not sure if some kind of standarts are not encouraging a more harmonious society. I am not saying that everybody should have to learn neverything and take tests to 'assess' knowledge, but I so think that every child should be learn basic maths, reading, writing and be introduced to science, history, sociology, politics and one foreign language. If they want to develop these basics once they are a little bit older: great! If not, they have at least been exposed to them so now can make the informed decision not to take them as subjects.

Democracy in universities and big bullies

2009-09-08T16:10:00.000+01:00

(Peter Monkman, winner of this year's BP Portrait Award)

Commuting back and forth between Royston and Barrington allows me to find the time to get loads of cool reading done each day and of course if I am travelling all the way down to Southampton to see my friends, there is even more! So, reading the TES, the THE and my new book 'Why we teach' by Sonia Nieto this week(end), I came accross some interesting reading which I wanted to share with you.

In the Times Higher Education supplement, the topic this week was a comparison between UK and US Higher Education. Apparantly in the US, students have a lot more power when it comes to evaluating and as a result also firing staff. Of course uni is much more expensive, (in the UK the fee cap is at the moment on £3100 a year), and as a result they are comsumers and if they reject the 'product', their professors, they can easily be made redundant as a result. Although I am against the concept of individuals paying for their education (another whole topic of its own), of course I welcome to the idea of students having power over who teaches them! If a teacher is bad, he should improve or go; it's that easy! This level of power does not exist in the UK and on secondary school level, it can really only be observed in democratic schools. Apparantly in Bologna there was a university which was completely led by students- very exciting!

On the topic of uni fees, Nicholas Barr, professor of public economics at the London School of Economics has recently argued that universities should be able to charge higher and differents amounts of fees which I find absolutely horrendous. Yes, the quality of the education offered at different institutions may be different and may also impact on the graduates eventual earnings, but theoretically every student has the same chance to get into the 'better' unis which are already much wealthier than for example local colleges anyway. Poorer students will be priced out of prestigious courses because they can't afford them at the time and almost every student will need to repay a greater student dept- surely this is not the way forward!

It is already worse enough that subjects like Media and Film, the creative arts and sociology are treated as 'soft' options for college and uni students, but now New Zealand is thinking about rewarding uni students for taking up 'harder' subjects such as maths and science. This is a very difficult topic for me because as a film student, I would clearly argue that my media/film/engl lit/photography A-Levels were just as hard as the ones of my best friend who did Maths/ Further maths/ Physics. We both got 4 A's. However, I have to say that he had to work much harder for his uni course than I had to. Secondly, I am currently profiting from quite a big grant which the UK goverment is giving to all new language teachers so it would be hypocritical to write that 'rewards' for students taking up subjects the government classes as 'hard' are bad.

I also read about guns being allowed in US uni classrooms- as protection against students who want to shoot others. What the hell?? Is it not bad enough that hundered thousand of US secondary pupils are not going to school because they are afraid of bullies, do uni students now also have to stay at homes because they have to be afraid of guns???

My Primary School work experience- Day 1 and 2

2009-09-08T15:35:00.000+01:00

In preparation for my PGCE, I am doing a week's worth of work experience in two different Primary Schools. Ones is a small village school a short train ride away with only four classes and the second one is the local town school in which there are eight. While the first one is Church of England 'owned' which means that the church only owns the building, the second one is (confusingly enough) 'aided' by the catholic church, which means that the church pays for both the staff and the building. I was actually only suppsed to work in the first one, but as it turned out that there are very few language lessons on offer, I decided to search for a second primary school to have a comparison and experience more mfl teaching.

So far, so good. Since this year, it is compulsary for primary schools in the UK (catering for Year 1 to 6) to introduce one modern foreign language from Year 3 onwards. This has both advantages and disadvantages. While it is great that children are exposed to mfl from a young age on, the school can choose which language they would like to teach and as such this might result in students arriving at their secondary school with different stages of knowledge of different languages. Secondly, almost none of the current primary school teachers are trained to teach a foreign language and many are scared to learn and teach something they have no experience in. With only 25% of GCSE students this year taking one mfl, this trend will only worsen in the next years.

Due to this reason, many teachers completely rely on pre-made books and resources. In a French lesson I watched in the local school today, the teacher proudly showed me how there was no further need to prepare lessons at all: you open the teacher guide book, start the smartboard and download a video from the internet. Very scary. But even worse than this was the horrible disciple in the school. Children were constantly shouted at ('Do what you are told, not what you want!'), bombarded with useless questions ('Why did you drop that pensil? Why? Why? Answer me!') and their spirits were constantly diminished by the teacher ('Don't stick up for your friend, it is not worth it!' and 'I don't want you in my class and I bet the teacher next door does not like you either'). One girl who had started crying because somebody else had hidden her shoes on the corridor was screamed at to pull herself together. Nobody listened to the children and frankly I was more than posivily surprised that they even participated in the lessons at all.

My original school however, Barrington Primary School, is a lot better and in my opinion that has very little to do with the fact that the school and the classes are smaller, but primarily with the staff. Every teacher addresses all of the kids with their names and they are always treated with love and respect. Even when they do something wrong, they are not made to feel that they are unwelcome but they are gently corrected and no big drama is made of the small mistakes. The whole learning environment is just completely different. The rooms are colourful and children are given time to complete their tasks at their own pace. There are still some questionable reward/punishment ideas going on (writing lines and gold stars) but i would much rather send my children there than to the other school!

Are schools prisons?

2009-09-03T08:07:00.000+01:00

Through Twitter, I found this great, if also very controversial article this morning: Why schools are what they are by Peter Gray. He names the following reasons for the fact that our school system is so embedded in culture and society:

- school is what everybody else does; it's normal

- schools give parents they 'reassurance' that their child is being looked after in a 'useful' way

- you can 'predict' what children are being taught in schools

- schooling prepares children for 'high class jobs' which will give them a lot of money

- it offers an easy way to see who are the 'good' and 'bad' children

- schools give jobs (in the US there are 6.8 Million teachers alone)

- private and higher education makes a lot of money

Of course none of these reasons are really valid if you think about how unhappy some children are, having to go to school. However, I am emphasising some and with it disagree quite profoundly with Gray, who calls schools prison in his newest article Why students don't like to go to school. I know many people who were very happy in the school system. They enjoyed the social aspect of it (getting to know many new people you would normally never meet and of course seeing yor friends every day) and a lot of them also enjoyed the academic side and the fact that they were introduced to a wide range of subjects.

Grey would probably say now that they have been mind washed to accept the restrictions in the system and maybe that's true (, I am not going to argue with a psychologist about psychology here :-), but I have to say that although I did not really care much about my German school time (apart from finding many subjects a waste of time which resulted in me staying in the UK for my further education), I loved taking my A-Levels. I was able to research things I was very interested in, had adults who inspired me and whose knowledge was at my finger tips, had the resources available to me which I wanted and actually enjoyed the routine of the daily schedule.

However, it must be said that there is probably a big difference between US high schools and UK FE colleges! When I was in the US, I just found high school plain boring. The building was horrible, the teachers unfriendly and after a week, I was the best in all of my classes without making an effort (you see, I am very good in adapting to the system and maybe that's why I have trouble rejecting it as a whole- egoistic, I know). But again it did not feel like prison. Students were able to choose (in a limited way their time table and of course after school activities) and they were encouraged to take singing lessons, band, languages and music. And this is only again one specific example. I do not know what a 'real' high school in the US looks like. Maybe I should find out some time, considering how many children are actually 'trapped' in that system, to use Gray's expression.

Back in the UK

2009-09-02T21:44:00.000+01:00

Crazy to think that I am already back in the UK since 5 days! My new flaat is great and on Thursday my furniture will be finally be delivered so I can move in properly. My primary school placement will start on Monday (after an NSFA meeting on Saturday in London) and uni will already begin a week later- where has the summer gone? :-)

To get back in the writing habit, I had another go at one of my old screenplays today and also wrote an article for the AERO magazine about the conference. Ron (Miller) is going to have a look at it tomorrow and I am looking forward to his comments and (constructive) criticism. Although I wrote around 40.000 words last year for my course, it took me a while to get back into the writing routine and I am already dreading the tons of assignments that are waiting for me on the PGCE!

Now that my four weeks in Paris have also come to an end, I wanted to drop down some quick thoughts on things you should not miss out on if you are in Paris:

- Walking up the butte de Montmartre in the evening, eating great ice cream and seeing Paris from the Sacre Coer

- Talking up a sport, in French, and meeting great people

- Going up the Tour Montparnasse at night, seeing the whole of Paris and the setting sun behind

the Eiffel tower

- Having a walk and lunch in the beautiful park of

the Musee Rodin

- Seeing Monet's Water Lillies in the Musee l'Orangerie

- Watching a documentary about Notre Dame in the cathedral at 9.30pm

- getting of at the Odeon Metro stop and wandering around St German de Pres

- visiting the Marais on Friday or Saturday night

- sitting on a bench in the Parc Luxembourg

- having lunch next to the crazy well of the Centre Pompidou

- experiencing free open air cinema at the Parc de la

Villette

- having lunch in the cute cafe on the first floor of the Louvre with a view of the Pyramides

- lying on the sun in the Paris Plage

- taking part in an awesome cycling tour of Paris

- having great, great pastries in the best patisserie in Paris, Laduree

- sitting on the Champs de Mars with a picnic

After all, I was very sad to leave Paris, but of course I am also extremely excited about the great things that lie ahead of me! Just the experience of working in a primary school is already something I am really looking forward to. May the new year begin!

Children teach themselves and each other

2009-08-25T22:11:00.000+01:00

I was once more at the Montparnasse tower tonight to show it to my new friend Matt. We got talking about education and how he wants to start a website with his girlfriend to inform Czech students about opportunities to study abroad. Our views on education are very similar and I am looking forward to following the progress of the project! We agree that people need to know much more about all the opportunities that are out there!

He also talked about a film he saw about a school where children teach themselves and each other. I started googling the subject a bit and found a great talk by Sugata Mitra on children discovering how a computer works and teaching each other (link) and on youtube, Tom Munneke also answers some questions on peer teaching (link). Matt suggested that children can easily make other children enthusiastic about stuff and I have to agree! As a child you are very likely to check stuff out that is reccomended to you by a friend while you might not do it anymore as an adult because you think you know your exact taste and as a child you are more open minded.

Matt and I also went to a graffiti exhibition in a modern art centre which was quite cool. Tonight, on the way home I saw some amazing pictures on the metro wall- I wish I could draw like that! :-)

Dan Pink on motivation

2009-08-24T19:45:00.000+01:00

Through Twitter, I just found this amazing TED video where Dan Pink talks about motivation: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html He for example says that a system of reward does only improve 'performance' if the task has a basic solution which is known to the worker. Once the task requires the right side of the brain, including creativity and innovation, the idea of a reward actually worsens the performance! He also backs it up with some research and talks about it in the context of IT and economics. The whole talk reminds me very much of Maria Montessori, who also argued against rewarding children because it made them stop what they were doing (well).

Now, for my own teaching, I have to get used to that thought. In my EFL classroom, rewards have always worked very well but then again it might be possible that this is because my tasks were very straight forward and the solution was fairly obvious. And yet this is not how you should teach- apologies to some of my earlier students, I am on my way of being a better teacher, I promise! Dan Pink suggests that the solution to motivation is autonomy, masters and purpose; excatly the factors that should go hand in hand with great teaching and learning! He brings up this example that 20 percent of the time at google workers are allowed to work on whatever they would like. At the end of the year, half of the products released by google were born out of project ideas which came out of this '20 percent time'. Amazing!

On that note, here is also another, older talk by Mae Jemison who passionately argues for the connection between art and science. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html 'The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity'. This is still as relevant today as it was in 2002! Science and art are equally important and thanks to the holistic ideas of Ron Miller, I can know appreaciate a little bit more how they all belong together! Listening to Mae Jemison talk about all the things she loves (space, dance, chemistry, ...) also helps me to be more at ease with all the different things I feel passionate about (ballet, educations, cooking, films, languages, ...). They can all influence and inspire each other and I certainly hope that as a teacher, I will have the opportunity to use all of them to inspire my students to learn.

A weekend in Paris

2009-08-24T18:48:00.000+01:00

Guess what? After three weeks at my parisien language school something increadible happened today: It was fun to learn and speak French. What is the world coming to? As you might know by now, I am stuck in Paris because my French lessons are part of the conditions I need to fulfil in order to attend the PGCE at the University of Cambridge in a few weeks time. Because the whole affair is unfortunately fairly expensive, I had to chose the cheapest course available and until now, have been bored ot death partly because of bad teachers, being out in the wrong language level, slow lessons, the heat and the fact that I have not really met one nice person to speak French with. Until today!

Finally, I am in a class where everybody is better than me (which is great because it challenges), we are talking about relevant things and I also met someone who wanted to speak French with me after class. Well, lets say rather that he started speaking French (very well) and refused to stop :-D So that gave me a bit of a boost and I am determined to use my last five days (where has the time gone?!) to actually learn something. Which just shows again how important it is to be inspired to learn in the first place. Plus I am actually using my French now.

Last weekend, my friend Steve from England also visited me and apart me from doing ballet three days in a row, we spent loads of time sightseeing and discovering. It's so much more fun to do that together! On Friday, we had dinner at the Marais and then went to the Lido (which looked very much like a show on a cruise ship!). On Satuday, we took part in an amazing bike tour with the fat tire bike company, had tea at the cite universitaire and dinner at the centre pompidou and afterwards went up the montparnasse tower which was amazing at night!

Most of Sunday, we spent at the Louvre (where you can also have amazing lunch) and then later at Montmartre. So basically, Steve got a great tour of Paris and we spent so much time outside that I now have a sunburn on my shoulders.On Saturday, I am finally going home and although I love Paris now much more than I did in the first weeks, I can't wait to get my flat together, see my friends again and finally start teaching! Hopefully, I will also find some time to travel down to Sands in the next weeks and have a look at the school!

From Turning Points' to 'The Self-Organizing Revolution'

2009-08-20T20:27:00.000+01:00

I am almost finished with reading 'Turning Points' and started another book on my way to the Paris city centre today: Ron Miller's 'The Self-Organizing' Revolution. In it, he outlines alternative educational movement and argues that, however different they might be, they also have a lot of things in commong and that the best way forward is to adopt a holistic world view which embraces all of the proposed education forms and see what is best for every individual child. I could not agree more.

Although I understand that there are long not enough schools to offer a proper 'choice' to parents and students, in my opinion the main problem is the publicising of education alternatives. There are way too few people who actually know that the possibility that their child does not need to go to a state school. Only by showing people what is available to them will they be able to make an educated choice- for the best of their child as Ron argues above!

The most amazing thing for me about the AERO conference was the fact that all of these different groups, Montessori, Waldorf, homeschooling, etc..., attended and were not inetersted in promoting their own way of educating, but rather came together in order to create a better education future for society with everybody's contribution! Something like this does not yet exist in Europe but I cannot wait to learn more and maybe one day get involved in building an organisation that brings the whole of the european alternative education together- a kind of AERO Europe project.

I also asked myself for the first time what exactly I would like to to teach. It's funny that it has taken me this long to think outside of the box! I would love to teach cooking and baking for example. And organising. And dancing. And reading out loud. And I bet this is just the tip of the iceberg and I am just too ignorant at the moment to think of more. Teaching languages is also something I like doing, but rather as a means of communicating that remembering vocab! I have always asked people what they enjoy in life, what they want to do, but I never imagined that it would be possible for me to teach things outside of the state corriculum!

So, this brings me to my first ideas for my own school. I am going to start a little section on the left where I am going to collect bits and bobs for my ideal school.

Some time in the last days, I read about the importance of the teacher in the development of the learner and it struck me that I actually really remember my teachers from my school time and not the 'facts' they taught me. Teachers should teach what they are passionate about- and if it is cake making in my case :-) Every human being has so much he/she is passionate about and inspiring someone else to love the same thing is something truly amazing!

When I talked to my (very conservative) dad about education the other day, he argud that it will never bee possible to have all of these different way for children to learn different things and still 'compete' for the same jobs and universitty places. There is already a huge problem (ever within Europe or one country!) to transfer from one school or one university to another. German universities would not consider me for a BA Film course because I had taken media, film and photography in my final year and not maths, science and another foreign language (!). So how is it possible for everybody to learn what they want to and still get on in the 'system'? What if you want to be a lawyer but can't attend uni in Europe because you went to a Montessori school?

There were also some other questions I want to think about:

What do children need to learn? (Truth, goodness, wisdom, love and others come from withine the person!)

Do they need guidance in 'developing' the above abilities?

How do we identiify ourselves? What do we need to learn in order to 'be' ourselves?

Do I want to change the (national or international) educational state system OR do I want to advocate educational alternatives as a way to escape the system?

In the talk with my parents, it also became clear that they see my 'career choice' as a possibility to work in private education and, eventually, earn a lot of money. I am still very confused about where I stand on this. Yes, I grew up in quite a consumerist household and society (my dad is a banker) and I like clothes and shiny things, but I also feel that everybody should have the same right to free education and that I am responsible for fighting for that believe. Opening a private alternative education school for 'rich' kids and support the poorer ones with scholarships will benefit the school (better materials) but might also drive a lot of students away. I will have to think more about this.

Lastly, Ron also placed the alternative education uprising as part of the civil rights movement. And then came the question: Do children have human rights? Oh, that made me think. Of course they do. But they also can't do everything, adults can do and many decisions are made for them. is that good or bad? Should parents choose the way of 'schooling' for their child? According to the United Nation's article 26: yes. But what if the child would like to chose him/herself? And what if the state interferes? (On that note: I can''t believe that homeschooling is still illegal in Germany!)

He also used a great word- philanthropy (love for humanity). I do agree that children need to be educated to build a better world as part of a community. My friend Michael, who I met at the conference, told me about his vision to open a small community village in which every member of the group educates the children together and in a democratic, free way. Believing in the good in human kind is so important and I really hope that Ron is right when he is predicting that this is the way humanity is developing.

Democratic school documentary

2009-08-19T21:33:00.001+01:00

EUDEC posted a cool link to a report about the Sudbury Valley school online, which explains the daily life in a democratic school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOpOxcsNlK0 Very intriguing, can't wait to get in touch with people from Sands and hopefully attend the IDEC in Isreal next April! I am now also in contact with Michael who is the EUDEC chair and it will be very exciting to learn and travel more!

I also continued reading 'Turning points' in the metro today and realised that 'Home schooling' is actually a wrong name. It neither has to take place at home (a lot of the home schoolers I read about spend a lot of their time travelling), nor does it resemble what we associate with a school- adults teaching children. It's funny to think that not all parents would actually want to have the responsibility of being with their children all day and providing 'education' of some sort. I can imagine school is a great place for them to send their children to to go to work/ have time for themselves. But why have children if you don't want to spend time with them?

I came across Susan Ohanian today and she wrote a couple of things that made a lot of sense to me. Firstly, she says that it is not important which facts children learn in primary school, but that the only important thing for them to remember is that learning is fun and that 'books can offer information and pleasure'. She also laments that testing and grades do not take into consideration social responsibility, compassion, caring, creativity, curiosity, initiative, self reliance and a lot of other good qualities. I absolutely agree with both of the points. When I teach Englishh in summer schools, it's never really about making kids better at the language but rather about inspiring them that English can be fun so that they might persue it at home- because they WANT to rather than have to.

Three more links for me to explore in the next weeks/months:

Education Otherwise: http://www.education-otherwise.org/

School of Living: http://www.schoolofliving.org/

'Natural Life' magazine: http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/

It's funny to think that by the end of my time here in Paris, my French will have improved only very little, but my knowledge of alternative education (and my ballet skilss :-) will have grown quite a lot! I think I would like to return to France to work in a Primary School where the language is a bit easier and then try to swap teaching the kids German for the kids teaching me some more French! I like to speak it, but the lessons are just so dull!

What makes a good teacher?

2009-08-17T22:00:00.000+01:00

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-pay/ Subject knowledge, enthusiasm, experience or teaching skills?

Reading about the adventures at Sands School, I am extremely interested in working in a school where students are able to chose the subjects they want to persue (and need to commit to them for at least a week) and where teachers are able to discover new subjects together with the students. As an example, I am going to start teaching French in September, although my subject knowledge is only intermediate. Same with my Spanish. Even though I hope that I will know more than my students, I am aware that this may cause some difficulty in the higher classes. Working at a school where students and teachers are able to work together and the teacher is able to teach skills rather than facts sounds amazing!

In my experience as a young EFL teacher (and sometimes I was barely a year or two older than teh kids I was teaching) it's all about the enthusiasm and commitment to the subject. Yes, you may know everything about yoour subject area, but if you can't deliver it, you are not a teacher but a lecturer! Creative, convincing lessons will engage learners in the subject and enccourage them to follow their interests at home and in the school. They will want to learn and as a result they are more likely to remember and apply knowledge. It is my firm believe that teacher should be rewaded for the enthusiasm the spark in the children they are teaching. Test scores may not necessarily reflect this love for the subject at all but one should actually talk to the learners!

After all, the goal of a lesson should be that the learner has increased his/her knowledge about the subject, shouldn't it? As a teacher, I want to take a masters degree to find new ways of getting students ineterested in my lessons and if the masters degree is in the subject I am teaching rather than in pedagogy, the widening of the subject knowledge should again only be there to find new niches which the children could be interested in.

Taking a masters is a good thing, but only if it happens for the right reasons and/or if the right things are taken away from it. If the teaching has not improved after a masters degree, was it worth it? As a result, I return to my other point that teachers should rather be rewarded for their ability to engage students rather than for possessing a higher degree as the latter should follow from the former.

Applied democartic education

2009-08-17T17:03:00.000+01:00

Actually, I am quite angry that Cambridge forced me to come to Paris. It was one of the conditions for my place on the PGCE course (a condition that cost me around £2000) for fourweeks, and until now the lessons have only improved my French very little and am I not looking forward to going to the language school. Today it was especially bad. After having read tons of stuff on demoncratic education in the last days, I was stuck in a hot, small classroom with 14 other people who were bored and the teacher talked at us and told us about grammar rules. Ialmost fell asleep and, after hypocratically signing the register, left the class half way through to educate myself somewhere else in Paris.

With the metro, I travelled to the cinemtiere du pere lachaise- the biggest graveyard of Paris and wandered around, looking at the huge tombs and gravestones. If you now think a graveyard is

a bit of a strange tourist attraction: wrong! This is one of coolest placed in Paris and does not really resemble a graveyard, but more a huge park with memorial stones and cobble stone streets. I also stumbled upon the tombs of Georges Melies, one of my favourite cinema pioneers. The stone reads 'Createur du spectacle cinematographique, 1861-1938'. Cinematique spectacle is a great discribtion for what he did I think!

The second famous grave I saw was that of Oscar Wilde. Although I am not sure why there was a pompous sculpture, after all, Wilde was all about the subtleties, it was realy funny to see how many women had decorated the stone with lipstick kisses. Wit is sexy! :-) Walking along the paths, some leafs came down from a tree and I realised that it is almost autumn already- the summer went so quickly!

Caring Education & Meaningful Democracy

2009-08-16T22:20:00.001+01:00

As an afterthought to the list of questions, Ron Miller, who I also met at the AERO conference, is posing one above all other: What is education for? I also believe that this is the one everybody should think about. Ron also writes about educating people in a society that is all about testing and performance in this article: http://www.educationrevolution.org/caring.html

A few years ago, Ron also published this essay on the different kinds of alterntive eduction that are out there: http://www.educationrevolution.org/altedmap.html A very interesting read and one more important than ever with all the new strands of education being founded in the last years.

'Turning Points'- food for thought on the way

2009-08-16T21:39:00.000+01:00

After spending two weeks in Paris, going home for a week and retourning, I had a lot of time to finally make a start on reading 'Turning Points', a book I picked up at the AERO conference in NY in June. In it, 27 education revolutionists tell their story and describe why and how they have changed education and the educational system we live in.

Apart from being very inspiring, it has also given me a few names and projects I would love to get in contact with:

- Northern Lights Media

- Kirsten Olson, who helps schools to integrate alternative education into their curriculum

- the online journal of unschooling and alternative learning (JUAL)

- www.HumaneEducation.org

- the 'Greenhouse for education and social innitiative' course at the HaKibbutzim College in Israel

- the Westmoreland House Institute of Mentoring

There are also lots of questions that emerged from reading:

- What do you think about punishment and rewards in education?

- How can you offer free or cheap education but still make a good living?

- In learning, what is more important, the self or the community?

- Can you start a school without knowing the master theories?

- How is it possible to educate everybody differently and let them study and work all over the world with different or no qualifications?

- How can you inspire children to choose to learn about many different things?

This is just a brief collectiong, but hopefully I will be able to think about my own ppoints of view a little bit more in the future. What I would love to do at this point is travel around, visit lots of schools and homeschooling families and emerge myself into this very exciting community of people who believe in educational alternatives. I would also like to find out how 'alternative' they really are and if there is not a way to convince people in Europe that there are other and better ways than the state school system.

However, I think it is not the worst path to deepen my studies a little bit in Cambridge and also get some teaching esperience in state schools before I embark on my big adventure. Two or three years are not a very long time and the only danger is that I get too comfortable in my life to leave everything behind for a big discovery when the time comes. Let's hope for the best!

Paris, je ne sais pas si je t'aime

2009-08-05T20:19:00.000+01:00

At the moment I am in Paris which is quite exciting. I have already seen a lot of the city and and until now, my favourite bits were Montmartre, from which you have an amazing view over Paris and can eat fantastic ice cream in little, green streets and the Rodin museum which is absolutely fanastic!

Other parts which I really liked were the quartre Marais

including the centre Pompidou and the hotel de Ville, in

front of which you can have lunch together with lots of tourists and even more pigeons, and the place de la Bastille.

The best thing about Paris so far however, is the Metro! It's unbelievable how many stations thereare (every 100m you can find one!) and even though you might have to change a few times, you should be at your destination within a few minutes.

The city is making every effort to get rid of the cars in the centre and if you don't like the metro there are bike rental stations everywhere. You just unlock one with your credit card and then it's one euro for every half an hour which is really not bad- plus you get a tan in the georgious weather we have!

The Parisiens themselves are quite friendly, but get

impatient very easily as soon as I start using my French. So far, I have tried ballet and Bikram Yoga and, together with a friend from my language school, also went to free open air cinema the park de la Villette.

Unfortunately, very few things are free here and I was shocked to see how expensive food is. For an ice cream you pay 3 euros and sandwiches and water are even worse. The best thing is really to stock up on food at a

supermarket and then carry it around for the day. The good news is that the Parisian tap water is very drinkable!

The only othern thing I am really not taken by is my room at the cite universitaire which looks like a prison cell and most of the other students at the language school- especially the German ones. In a week, I will return for another fortnight of lessons and hopefully by then, people are a little friendlier!