15 minute read
by Anna Dickson 40
Overall, I feel that this model has significantly improved the way in which I assess and subsequently offer feedback to my students in exam classes at Key Stages 4 and 5. The picture I have built up of individual students’ progress is much more detailed than I have achieved in previous years, a snapshot of which is shown below in a segment of my mark book listing the data gathered after covering just one iGCSE topic:
Despite this being a small-case study, I do feel several successful outcomes have emerged from this research that I would recommend to colleagues.
I would advocate a mixed constitution when it comes to assessment and feedback. By creating a three-tiered assessment and feedback model, different feedback loops were established for different types of assessment for each student. When used in conjunction, this information could be interpreted by students on a regular basis to support them in making continuous progress towards the desired outcome.
I would highly recommend the ‘outsourcing’ of assessment and feedback to technology where possible. In my model, this was applicable to tiers one and two. It is also worth stating that the time invested in creating Quizlet flashcard banks and Microsoft Forms self-marking quizzes will be lessened in subsequent years as these resources can be easily updated where necessary and then recycled.
The strategy that I have judged to be most successful is that of only releasing grades to students after they have engaged in a feedback activity of some form, requiring them to be active in their reflections of their responses to exam-style questions. By making use of the functionality of Microsoft Teams, I was able to attach marks to students’ assessments without revealing them immediately. My rationale for this was that it placed much more emphasis on the process of the assessment, rather than the result, removing the likelihood of students disengaging with feedback and instead simply focusing on the raw mark.
As a result of experimenting with the different strategies that make up this model, I’ve felt time spent assessing and feeding back on different elements of students’ work is more proportional to outcomes than in previous years, and that I am also more accurate and informed in my tracking of student progress over time.
BIO Anna Dickson is Subject Leader of Politics and Learning Pathways. She always been interested in assessment for learning and has enjoyed exploring the role technology can play in our classrooms since the digital device provision was rolled out at Berkhamsted School. These two areas combined are the focus of her 2020-2021 Action Research Project.
Teaching Without Organs: Reflections From a Covid Classroom Using Deleuze & Guattari
The Covid pandemic brought change and difference to the forefront of educators’ minds. It required school leaders to reconsider what education might look like in these unprecedented times and practitioners to rethink their day-to-day teaching methods. Prior to the pandemic I had been teaching Economics for five years in the independent sector and had developed a toolkit of pedagogical approaches I typically used in most lessons. However, the introduction of alphabetical seating plans, restricted pupil and teacher mobility in the classroom, as well as pupils dialling remotely into lessons meant that a number of these techniques in my teacher toolkit were no longer suitable. This brought with it challenges but also opportunities.
This article outlines the research I conducted as part of my Master’s Degree in Teaching and Learning at Oxford University. Using the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine how my teaching practice has changed since joining Berkhamsted School (at the height of the pandemic). Whilst the research outlined describes teaching in a Sixth Form Economics classroom, the pedagogical approaches could be used in any subject-setting.
The discussion will reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Using the philosophical lens of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) through which to examine change, it will consider whether it is ever really possible to 'Teach Without Organs'.
Research Methods and Ethics
I started writing my Master’s Degree in Teaching and Learning at the height of the Covid pandemic when completing research in the classroom added an extra complexity to what was already a challenging time. The Master’s Degree in T&L at Oxford University is designed specifically for teachers which means that all assessments are due during the school holidays and the lectures mostly at weekends, making the course accessible for full-time academic teaching staff.
As with all practitioner-led research there are ethical considerations that need to be met: research at Master’s level must be approved by a formal application to BERA, the British Education Research Association. Teaching in the pandemic had already added huge additional burdens onto schools, academic departments, and pupils, so considering how to ethically conduct research at this time was at the forefront of decision-making for any research. Ethical approval must be granted before any research can take place, and so it was particularly important that the methods chosen could be lockdown resilient as relying on lesson observations was unwise. Practitioner researchers were also advised to reduce burdens that research can place on pupils during this time: Sixth Form pupils had enough stresses at this moment and adding interviews or focus groups to their commitments was not deemed fair.
These considerations influenced my choice of research method. Over the academic year I kept an auto-ethnographic research diary (a personal reflections diary) which I added to a few times a week. I kept screenshots of pupil work completed during the lessons on OneNote which was anonymised. Permission to record the lessons was already granted, as was standard procedure during the pandemic. I watched back some recorded lessons to listen to my teacher voice in the classroom, to map the student/teacher interactions and used this data to help track my physical movement around the classroom, also aided by use of a notebook in lessons. For mapping the classroom interactions, I took inspiration from a method termed ‘Mondrian Transcription’ used by Shapiro & Hall (2017) to map visitor engagement in a museum which bears similarity to the work of de Freitas (2012).
The French Philosopher Deleuze is well known for his conceptualisation of change and difference. Given the changes to education in the pandemic it felt fitting to use his philosophy as the lens through which to examine change in my own classroom.
Deleuze, critical of traditional philosophy, writes how everything we observe in the world is in a constant state of ‘becoming’. Only through thinking about this process of ‘becoming’ can we start to comprehend ‘being’ in the present. He expands on this conceptualisation with his metaphor of the Rhizome which has no start and end point [see Figure 1]. I found the notions of ‘becoming’ and the Rhizome to be an interesting way to think about my changing teacher identity and pedagogical practice in the classroom.
Borrowing the phrase 'A Body Without Organs' from French writer Artaud (1947), Deleuze (writing with co-author Guattari in 1987) asks the question: 'How do you make a body without organs?'. First discussed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and later built on by the two authors in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) encourage us to consider what a BwO might mean for our own lives. By a BwO they mean considering what a body could do if it was freed, without any boundaries or limitations.
Fascinated by the concept of the BwO I started contemplating what a BwO might look like in the context of teaching and education: what teaching might look like without boundaries or limits. This was particularly interesting in the current context during the pandemic when the environment of the classroom had changed and many of the pedagogical approaches, I had relied upon were taken away. I came to think about what a ‘Teaching Without Organs’ (TwO) approach might look like which led me to formulate the following research questions:
• What could a teacher do if we could overcome any limits or boundaries on us in the classroom in terms of mobility, group-work, and feedback? • In the context of Covid, what might this look like? How could we overcome these boundaries or limits placed on us? • How effective might overcoming these barriers be?
Figure 1 Photograph by C.W. Mims
As an initial reflective task, I began by writing down any aspects of my teaching practice in the auto-ethnographic diary that I felt would be non-negotiable, unchanging aspects of my practice. To borrow the term from Deleuze, any aspects that I felt were essential to my ‘being’ as a practitioner. I did this at the start of the academic year when joining Berkhamsted School. Some of the entries listed in the table were very prescriptive: 'I always mark pupil work with a red pen by hand'; 'I draw my diagrams on the whiteboard'; 'Pupils have access to a physical textbook'. These elements which I defined as key characteristics of my practice formed the ‘organs’ which Deleuze and Guattari describe, limiting and placing boundaries on my practice.
Over the academic year I used the autoethnographic diary, lesson plans and screenshots from pupil OneNote pages to trace how my teaching practice changed. At a time when Covid was placing more limits and boundaries on classrooms and education, I wanted to see how it might also create new possibilities and enable me to think beyond these confines I had placed on my practice.
Auto-ethnographic diary entry 1
Collaborative Creative Having many activities Contextualised with real-world examples
Figure 2
What else is important to my teaching: That I mark pupils' work by hand using a red pen That pupils use greem pen to peer mark or self-mark Pupils have access to textbooks
What is important to my classroom space: Teacher-desk Desktop Computer Having a whiteboard in my classroom and access to whiteboard pens Large folders where I have collected resources Access to a photocopier Taking home pupil exercise books to mark My red pen My post-it notes
In writing Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze was fascinated by what Spinoza said about bodies: 'no one knows what a body can do'. The body, confined by its organs, has limited potential. Teaching in a classroom could be seen imposing limiting factors: the space is organised with usual classroom infrastructure and layout; typically, a whiteboard, a teacher desk, and a desktop computer.
I found that teaching in the pandemic meant increasing the restrictions placed on teacher mobility and the classroom space, in some ways moving further from TwO. At one stage due to necessities with contact tracing teachers remained within a 2x2 metre space at the front of the classroom. Given that so much of teaching is an embodied practice Spinoza’s question seemed particularly relevant to teachers at this time.
Interest in mobility and interactions in the classroom has been of particular interest to education researchers like de Freitas (2012). Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, de Freitas (2012) has used rhizomatic diagrams to plot interactions in the classroom.
Figure 3 Figure 4
Taking inspiration from this, over the course of a week I produced similar diagrams plotting my movement around the classroom in a 20-minute period [see Figure 3] and a map of the verbal interactions which took place [see Figure 4]. In Figure 4, the thicker the lines the more frequent the interactions.
Because of the advice to socially distance in the pandemic Figure 3 shows that teacher mobility in the classroom was mostly restricted to the space surrounding the desk. Similarly, most of the interactions in Figure 4 were between pairs and there were few interactions outside of this. It was clear that the seating arrangement was placing boundaries and limits on the interactions in class and particularly noticeable was how most of the teacher interactions were focused on the first three rows of desks, and particularly on the right-hand side of the classroom.
Mapping these diagrams made me consider how it might be possible to overcome this so that the teacher interactions could be more like the rhizome diagram in Figure 1, which is a much more detailed web of interactions, rather than a few interactions concentrated to the pupils in the front few rows.
This would mean implementing tasks and activities that enable pupils to interact with each other to overcome these restrictions placed on mobility, so that my classroom could become closer to a TwO.
One way that this was achieved was through use of the collaboration space in OneNote which allows any number of pupils to be working on a single document at once.
A key exam skill in Economics is the quality of analysis or the chain of reasoning. An example of this might be: 'Economic growth leads to a rise in incomes. This is because the economy is expanding, so businesses demand more labour to work'. Pre-covid I would ask pupils to write a chain of reasoning on paper and swap with the person next to them. This worked particularly well when the paper was large A3 size so multiple pupils could sit round a desk and discuss the work together. The teacher could then circulate the room and give feedback.
As shown in the mobility diagram in Figure 3 the boundary placed on teacher movement meant that opportunities for teacher-to-pupil feedback in the classroom (about written classwork) also was more restricted.
On the one hand, this could be regarded as a movement away from TwO: greater restrictions placed on feedback.
However, over the course of the year, with the help of the department and the training received in technology at Berkhamsted, I implemented alternatives to overcome these boundaries or limits.
With the use of the Surface Pro devices, pupils could now write their chain of analysis directly into the Collaboration Space in OneNote. Instead of walking around the classroom to give verbal feedback I began to use the collaborative ‘sharing’ function on OneNote. An advantage of this is that the teacher can see what the pupils are writing in real-time and 'live-mark' the work. It was a much quicker and easier way for teachers to give immediate feedback in class: the teacher could write a few comments and the pupils could continue with the work and instantly make changes [see Figure 5].
This can also be done as a more targeted approach with individual pupils who are working directly into their own personal OneNote page.
An alternative to this is the “Share Message” function on SENSO where teachers can directly send a message to pupils’ devices.
Figure 5 A key advantage of this method is the ability for the teacher to see the pupils’ initials which automatically is added to the side of their entries. The new Collaboration Space method also allows for any number of pupils to be working on a document at once. Linking back to de Freitas’ (2012) rhizomatic diagrams, the Collaboration Space allows for much greater student interactions in the classroom beyond just the person they sit next to.
We can see how with the use of the Collaboration Space, the possibility for interactions within the classroom, by working on a shared document, is much greater. This overcomes the limit of the seating plan. However, it is necessary for greater teacher monitoring to take place to ensure that pupils are using this functionality wisely (not writing across each others’ documents, for example).
A further advantage is that it allows for pupil work to be saved automatically. With the original whiteboard method, pupils would take a photograph of the work they had produced. The Collaboration Space functionality is better in enabling pupils to return to the work and make revisions.
Prior to the pandemic, a pedagogical technique I frequently used was ‘the whiteboard method’: pupils in my classroom would often be given a small whiteboard to complete work in groups (for example, to prepare a spiderchart on a topic). This was the method I had used in my interview lesson when joining Berkhamsted School. This method I deemed effective at increasing pupil work-rate, reducing work avoidance, and increasing pupil accountability. I found that giving pupils a different marker pen colour and insisting that the page was had a 50/50 red/blue pen ratio ensured that there was more even participation between pupils in group work. This also enabled for more effective teacher communication: teacher phrases such as 'Tom, why aren’t you contributing' could be replaced with more neutral phrases such as 'Group 1, I’d like to see more red pen on that page'.
With the original whiteboard method there also seemed to be something psychological about the ability to erase the marker pen and start over if a mistake had been made, which seemed to reduce a fear about failing. I noticed through observation that this seemed to particularly be the case amongst female pupils. When I have used the whiteboard method in class there also seemed to be less work avoidance strategies such as bathroom breaks or wanting to refill water bottles. There seemed to be a motivational impact when pupils completed visible work with a whiteboard pen on whiteboards.
Through self-observation of my own lessons over the course of a term, I noticed that the Surface Pen did not reduce work avoidance and hesitation about starting to the quite same extent as a traditional whiteboard method. I suspect that this is because the Surface Pen takes longer to erase than a normal marker pen and additionally, where pupils are completing work directly on their Surface Devices, they deem this to be ‘neat work’ if it is completed within OneNote. Pupil work rate increased most notably when pupils were completing work on the Whiteboard App, as it was deemed to be ‘rough work’ and not saved, or assessed by the teacher, unless they chose to screenshot it and insert themselves.
However, using the Surface Pen to complete work was deemed more optimal for increasing pupil work rate compared with typing. Apart from the strongest pupils in the class, pupils who typed appeared to have a noticeably higher rate of work avoidance compared with those who wrote directly with the Surface Pen. This might be because typing takes longer to delete and it is more obvious amongst peers when work is deleted, due to the sound the backspace makes in class.
Figure 6
