Category: General

I started publishing videos for students. But one of the things I least expected about doing this is how many teachers who have reached out and gotten in contact with me. I wanted to share one of the questions that was sent in, and my response.

Hey Eddie,

I am at university and about to begin my teaching internship. I am often asking educators about classroom management and behavior strategies since its the one thing I am most worried about in terms of becoming a teacher. The most common response I get is the need to set up routine, but also to literally be in terminator mode in terms of strictness and firmness for a term (I have also been told about the “don’t smile till Christmas” idea). Whilst I understand the need to be firm/strict, I came into teaching because I knew it could be challenging but extremely fun at the same time and it just isn’t in me to be that teacher that is constantly nagging and picking on minor things in order to set a standard for the class. I think me and you are similar in the sense that we like to, or even NEED to, engage with the students on a level that makes it enjoyable for the both of us. However its clear that you have accomplished this to a much higher level than I have even come close to in the past on pracs and you have found that balance between engaging with students and knowing when to assert your position.

So my question for you is, how do YOU set your standards, routines and behavior expectations with a class in your first couple of weeks with them and how do you go about easing those expectations over time to create that relaxed classroom nature.

Sometimes it’s the little things that really make a difference.

It’s been a year of big changes for me. Many of those changes have been deeply and personally challenging, and I’ve lost count of the number of days when I’ve laid my head down on my pillow at night  in an exhausted state and wondered what on earth I was thinking when I took up this new role!

At that point in time, I call a variety of things to mind to rationalise for myself and make me feel a little better after a long and trying day. This week, one of the things I called to mind was a slice of pizza.

Context will help. One of the most novel experiences for me this year is being genuinely disliked. I have a feeling this is going to come across the wrong way, but most of the people I’ve interacted with in the past like me (or are very good at fooling me into thinking that they like me). For better or worse, I’m used to being fairly well regarded by those around me – and I’ve tried my best to give people good reasons to do that.

So this year it was a bit like jumping into a pool of ice water to have people – lots of them – really, honestly, openly, not like me. At first, like ice water, it was a raw shock to the system – was it going to get any better? But as time passed, I realised that there was no quick fix. I’d just have to get comfortable in the cold. Even though I didn’t like it, I understood very well why I was being treated this way – I was alien and unfamiliar to the school, not to mention inexperienced and making mistakes that had a flow-on effect to lots of other people. Well, fair enough then. Don’t expect to be liked – it’s not part of the role description.

But enter a group of year 12 boys who had their lunchtime hang-out spot in front of my classroom. One or two of them were in my class, but most of them I just got to interact with when I bumped into them in between classes. And frankly, whether intentionally or not, these boys just welcomed me. No matter what was happening, they would always greet me with a smile and chat with me as if they’d known me for years.

Friday was their last day of school before the HSC trial exams begin, and I had just wished my own year 12 class good luck for their assessments. The lunch bell rang and as everyone filed out of the room, I set about packing up all my things (whiteboard markers, worksheets, tripod, microphone)… only to be surprised by one of the aforementioned year 12 boys entering the room. “Sir, do you want some pizza?”

Some of them had gone and ordered pizza as a kind of pre-emptive celebration, I guess. The reasons for the food aren’t all that important to me, really. I was just touched that they invited me – a teacher, and a teacher who has just turned up at their school this year – to share some food with them. It was completely unrequested kindness – the very best kind.

Have you ever received a “slice of pizza” (or other unexpected gift) from a student?

After a pretty intense Term 2, I’ve hit the ground running in Term 3. Highlights include: preparing a new Year 8 program aligned to the NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum; motivating my year 12s to make the most of their final term in school with a stirring story from the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and having a cracker of an introductory lesson to the Stage 5 elective maths course that I’ve started teaching this semester!

A brief note about that last point: the elective course (open to year 9-10 students) is called Exploring Mathematics, and it’s an incredibly exciting opportunity for me. It provides the chance to dig into all kinds of maths that have to be passed over in the BOS mathematics courses (due to lack of time, difficulty of assessment, and a variety of other factors). I intend for it to feature fairly prominently on this site; Í’ll write more details about this in the future as everything is still is in a state of flux for now.

What’s on the cards for your Term 3?

What a week! It was a fantastic privilege to host EduTweetOz last week – I gained so much (in terms of conversations and connections), and can only hope that others got to benefit by coming along for the ride. Many thanks to the admins of the account – Corinne, Michelle, Donelle and Liz – for initiating such a fantastic community-building project and working tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure it’s valuable for everyone involved.

One of the things I loved most about my experience is that it confirmed something for me that I was hoping to be true but that I wasn’t sure of yet: namely, that there is a wonderful world of educators out there who I can connect touch with and form a mutually symbiotic relationship. There are many kinds of ecological relationships between species in the animal kingdom, the most common being predator/prey, competition and parasite/host. In each of these one group’s gain necessarily means the other’s loss. But in a mutually symbiotic relationship, everyone wins.

That’s what I was hoping to tap into when I first joined Twitter. My first tweet proves it. But it took me many months before I got in touch with anyone who could actually show me that this could become a reality. And seeing others get involved with Edutweetoz showed me it was possible – and outlined a path that I myself wanted to take and contribute to as well.

In the lead-up to my 7 days in the chair, I provided answers to some interview questions that each of the hosts gets given – and thought it would be nice if those were recorded here for posterity!

The content below was originally posted on the EduTweetOz blog.

Please tell us a little about your background in education. Why did you decide to become involved in education? What are some of the roles you’ve had and what does your current role involve?

During high school, I found that I loved to explain things to my friends – I got a real kick out of seeing the light bulbs come on inside someone’s mind, so the idea of being a teacher and doing that all day every day seemed attractive to me. In addition, I was deeply drawn to the profession due to the massive personal impact that teachers can have on students.

I trained to teach mathematics and computing studies. Immediately out of university I got a position at Fort Street High School teaching Software Design & Development (among other ICT courses), till I landed a job at James Ruse Agricultural High School where I was given the opportunity to use both of my teaching methods. One of my highlights at James Ruse was overseeing many of the school’s technological resources and migrating the entire staff to an information ecosystem built off of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). My work in that area contributed to paving the way for the DEC to adopt GAFE as one of their officially endorsed software tools, with the goal of moving toward a state-wide implementation. That’s an exciting project that’s still very much in motion.

This year I just took up the role of Head Teacher Mathematics at Cherrybrook Technology High School.

Who or what keeps you inspired and motivated in your work?

There are a whole host of things that inspire me every day – from the elegant simplicity and profound insights of the subject matter I teach, to the piercing insight and unwavering dedication of my fellow teachers – but I think the main thing that keeps me motivated is the thing that got me into the profession in the first place. I constantly encounter powerful reminders of the enormous positive influence that teachers can have on students – it’s an unmatched opportunity, and it’s endlessly novel for me to see it happen in diverse ways for each unique student.

What do you see as some of the biggest rewards and challenges for people working in education today?

Having just become an executive member of staff, I’ve been exposed afresh to the reality of just how much people working in education are expected to devote their time to things that are quite peripheral to actual teaching and learning. To be sure, the vast majority of administrative tasks and extra responsibilities do make their own valuable contribution to the school environment and hence to the educational experience as a whole, but I still feel myself and the staff I lead being tugged away from focusing on that most wonderful privilege: engaging students in the classroom. I think that regaining and maintaining that focus is one of the primary challenges for teachers today.

As for rewards, sorry to keep banging on the same drum, but I feel that the most precious reward is seeing students succeed in life. For some students, it means a university scholarship. For others, it means getting their ROSA and starting that apprenticeship they’ve been eyeing for ages. For some, it means finally understanding the connection between the volume of a sphere and the process of integration. For others still, it means being able to sit with a group of peers at lunchtime and being able to have a conversation that isn’t awkward. Whatever it might be, seeing students overcome their fears or self-doubt and achieving something they had never dreamed of reaching – being able to participate in that moment is priceless.

If you had the ability to make changes to the education system in Australia, what would you do?

I don’t know how I would practically achieve this – if I did, I would already be doing it – but I somehow would want to work toward an education system that placed value on things even when they cannot be directly assessed or quantified. For instance, I’m convinced that whole generations have a bad attitude toward mathematics because the mathematics taught in schools is heavily skewed toward mastering a set of processes that can be applied to a relatively repetitive set of problems to produce desired answers. The reality, though, is that actual mathematics involves play, abstraction, imagination, exploration and the formation of unanswered questions – but none of these are easy to assess, so they fall by the wayside in the syllabus documents.

I’m sure mathematics isn’t the only KLA that suffers from this problem. I wish I could change this situation but I don’t know how yet!

What role do you see EduTweetOz playing on the education scene in Australia and what are your hopes for the account this week?

EduTweetOz, like the internet in general, is a disruptive technology. It takes something that ordinarily takes place in the “real world” (namely, professional relationships and dialogue) and disrupts the ordinary supply chain by providing a way to get it without any of the extraneous elements (e.g. a physical location, food, pre-existing networks of relationships). It lets people dive in and connect with people they might never cross paths with otherwise, and provides them with avenues for learning that they might never have encountered even if they availed themselves of all the real world opportunities that were available to them (that’s certainly been my experience!).

So I view EduTweetOz as accelerating the formation of those kinds of wonderful symbiotic professional relationships that you might only make one or two of during a conference for your professional association of choice – without all the stress and fuss of actually physically attending such a conference!

My hopes are pretty simple: (1) that together we’ll raise some interesting and valuable conversation, (2) that we’ll all be exposed to people and ideas in the educational world that we wouldn’t normally see, and (3) that I won’t drown in tweets!! (I can see the headline now: “Sydney teacher dies in horrific self-inflicted Twitter accident.”)

Right now I’m in Canberra for the National Mathematics Summer School, which is a program run for talented mathematics students from all over the country. This year for the first time, they’re trialing a teacher component to the NMSS – two intensive days (rather than the two weeks that the students get) which give us a brief taste of what the school is like for the students, and also provide an opportunity for us to do some professional development too. (Getting my head back into undergraduate maths for three hours? Yep, my brain is pretty much melted right now.)

But that’s not what I wanted to write about today. (I’ll save my reflection for the bus ride back to Sydney.) I had the pleasure of meeting and sitting down to chat with the exuberant Betty Chau (who maintains the fantastic @PositiveSchool account, not to mention a fantastic blog) over a milkshake in a lovely outdoor cafe close to ANU (where I’m staying). I shouldn’t speak for her, but I had a fantastic time – evidenced by the fact that I remained completely oblivious to the passing time and became totally absorbed in our conversation way over the time when I was meant to be back on campus for dinner. (For the record Betty, I did in fact make it back inside just as they were about to pack up and finish serving – so thanks for driving that little extra distance at the end!)

Aside from raving about the superiority of the ACT secondary schooling system (something I’m totally willing to admit – sorry NSW, I love you but I hate you too), Betty shared with me her passion for positive psychology. (For the uninformed, to give you a brief and over-simplified summary, it’s an approach toward people’s mental wellbeing that focuses on their strengths rather than on what’s wrong with them.) I found it both intriguing and refreshing, for a few different reasons.

Firstly, though the idea of positive psychology seems to be gaining currency, the practice of positive psychology in the schools that I’m familiar with is lacking to say the least. When Betty told me a few things about how positive principles were a part of her classroom practice, the kinds of structures that some schools in Canberra have in place to implement it and the kind of helpful effect it was having on her students, I was just blown away. This is something that we definitely need to learn from.

Secondly, it dawned on me just how relevant it was for all teachers – but particularly mathematics teachers, since that’s what’s going through my head at NMSS – to be caring for the psychological needs of our students in a positive and nurturing way. Mathematics has a just reputation as possibly the most demoralising high school subject in existence, with a massive (usually damaging) psychological effect on thousands of students every year. I’m convinced that this is part of the reason why so many students are convinced that they are bad at maths: regardless of their actual mathematical ability, they have had a series of bad experiences with studying maths that have left them psychologically scarred and they have (understandably) just given up on ever understanding it. This is a great tragedy and something that drastically needs to be changed.

Thirdly, Betty’s smile and enthusiasm are pretty infectious. That’s not a very professional assessment of the facts but it’s true!

So as I continue to think about the new role I’m starting this year, I’m now faced with this question: amid all the organisational decisions, the results analysis, the academic rigour and everything else that a head teacher is supposed to be prioritising – how will I care for my students’ wellbeing? What principles will I bring to the way I interact with students and lead my faculty to ensure that we develop their strengths rather than become fixated on their weaknesses?

For that matter – how will you be caring for your students’ wellbeing? Now there’s a question worth considering as January 28 approaches!

Teaching myth #1: teachers are lazy because they get massive holidays (at least, compared to the 4 weeks of annual leave that most workers in Australia get). This myth is perpetuated because it’s half-true (yes, we do get a relatively large amount of leave – roughly 11 weeks of breaks between school terms), but it’s not true. Teachers who are idle during their school holidays are the exception, not the rule. Case in point: here I am in the middle of summer, setting up my new workspace during the holidays.

Okay, I’ll admit that (especially given the new step-up in responsibility involved in my new role) it would have been plain foolish to not come in during the holidays to bring in all my resources and arrange my desk before the school term begins officially. Here’s how it looks at the moment.

It’s pretty bare right now, but that’s because term hasn’t begun yet. Just wait… the chaos is coming.

The staffroom I’m working in is quite different to the one at my previous school. It’s a combined staffroom, housing 4 faculties (Science, Technology, Creative & Performing Arts, Mathematics) and 67 staff. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this kind of arrangement – Fort Street High School (where I did a practicum and subsequently had my first full-time job) also has combined staffrooms – but the scale of this one is still something to behold.

Click the photo above for a bigger version. This image is a pair of panoramas combined together, but the stitching in the middle isn’t perfect. It’s still good enough to get a sense of the working environment, though.

I have always loved to write. Since a young age, I have always owned little notebooks where I scrawled down thoughts and ideas. During high school, I always enjoyed creative writing and subjected myself to the vagueness of English Extension 1 (to me, anyway) so that I could enrol in English Extension 2 and create a major work. It was at uni that I discovered the joy of writing for its own sake – writing because I wanted to, not because I had to in connection with some external assessment or other requirement. Writing because it was a useful way to form, develop and retain thoughts. I started a blog, made methodical notes on anything I wanted to really learn, and engaged in all kinds of other writing to keep my brain going.

In the last 15 years, I’ve created and killed countless writing projects. It’s been a while since I started a new one – so, why a new blog in 2014? It’s a paradox, really. This year, I’ll be undergoing the biggest professional change since I started full-time work. I’ll be in a new role at a new school and the learning curve will be very steep, particularly in the first 12-18 months. That makes it both the best and worst time to start a writing project like this. It’s the worst time because I’ll have the least time to commit to it; it’s the best time because a time like this, when I am going to be going through a lot of new experiences and forming new working principles, is precisely when writing is most beneficial.

So here goes nothing. Let’s see how long it lasts. I hope to learn lots as I write here – and maybe even you will too.