Good Teacher Magazine 2019, Term 2

Term Two 2019

“The best teachers don’t give you the answers...

They just point the way ... and let you make your own choices.”

2 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Your Soapbox

Student Voice: Essay Reducing Stigma and Smaller Classes Teachers should be the centre of the learning A Handful Of Discussion Strategies For The New Term The Global Search for Education: Learning That’s Virtually Real Violent video games are not associated...

MOTAT’s Science STEM Fair Three decades...

This Artist Turns Old Pocket Watches Into Miniature Worlds New book helps families improve child sleep woes How to engage in difficult but respectful dialogue NZSD Choreographic Season: An Encounter of Colliding Worlds PEACE Pack takes on cyberbullies and trolls A new educational initiative – Roots – makes music a priority University of Oxford students and Seychellois volunteers ...

Alina Kaufmann Alina Kaufmann Jane Gilmour John Hellner Elaine Le Sueur (MNZM) CM Rubin Oxfor University MOTAT Education Gregory Grozos Flinders University Donna Birch Trahan NZSD Flinders University University of Cambridge Aldabra Cleanup

4 5 7 9 10 12 16 20 22 26 34 36 38 42 44 46

#SpeakUp for road safety as part of Road Safety Week 2019

Brake

48

Behavioral disorders in kids with autism linked ...

Kendall Teare Levels of autism in China similar to the West, ...

University of Cambridge Girls and Autism Book Review For Kids With Anxiety, Parents Learn ......

Angus Chen Report examines origins and nature of ‘maths anxiety’ University of Cambridge Growing up digital Lori Brandt The Global Search for Education: Feel, Imagine, Do, Share!

CM Rubin New wetland classroom brings science to life Flinders University Stanford experiment finds humans beat algorithms ...

Taylor Kubota Things I Learned While Writing My First Book Stephanie Jankowski I Paint The ‘Missing Parts’ For Objects And Things That I Find .. Loïs Low Education creates opportunity for students in Uganda Universty of Sydney Urgent need for guidelines to communicate with children University of Oxford Quote Turning Food into Cartoons ​Laleh Mohmedi Hypocritic Oafs Roger Front Cover: Back Cover:

49 50 52 54 58 60 62 66 70 72 74 82 86 87 88 96

‘Ah the sights I have seen!’ Photograph: barisa designs® Adelaide Zoo... Meditating meercat Photograph: barisa designs®

Good Teacher Magazine would like to acknowledge the unknown designers and craftspeople internationally for the some of the images and art in the magazine, every care has been taken to identify and acknowledge writers/artists/photographers... however this is not always successful... most were collated from a wide range of internet sources.

ed-media publications

is produced in the first week of each school term and uploaded to http://www.goodteacher.co.nz The magazine is internationally freely available online NOTE: The opinions expressed in Teacher Magazine are not necessarily those of ed-media or the editorial team.

Goo

d

publications

Independent publishers of quality education media.

Advertising enquiries and bookings: info@goodteacher.co.nz Submitting material for publication: barb@goodteacher.co.nz Enquiries: 021 244 3244 info@goodteacher.co.nz mail: ed-media publications

PO Box 5531

Mt Maunganui 3150 ISSN: 1175-5911 Layout and Design: barisa designs® Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 3

Your Soapbox!

“

”

If you want to have YOUR SAY please email your offering to: info@goodteacher.co.nz

4 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

Student Voice: Alina Kaufmann Alina Kaufmann is a student in MYP 5 (grade

10) at Strothoff International School in Dreieich, Germany. She recently finished her Personal Project about the topic of prejudice and discrimination, for which she created a magazine article and a website.

WEBSITE LINK: https://akaufman21.wixsite. com/5-paragraph-essays

PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND REFLECTION The personal project is a project that is done by MYP 5 (grade 10) students in the Middle Years Programme from the IB (International Baccalaureate). The project stretches over a period of approximately 6 months, from the start of the school year until the beginning of March (even though this can vary slightly). It is a very independent project, where students are allowed to choose the topic and outcome they want to produce by themselves.

The personal project is supposed to be a preparation for the Diploma Programme of the IB and it is necessary to pass the project in order to do the Diploma Programme. The project is split up into four different criterion. These are Criterion A: Researching, Criterion B: Planning, and Criterion C: Creating a product or outcome and Criterion D: Reflecting. After the creating stage of the product, there is also an exhibition, where everyone presents their product or outcome to the school. The project, should help to prepare students by improving their ability to work independently on something for a large time period.

I started my project with research about the topic in order to get enough knowledge on the topic so that I would be able to create a good product about my research. Apart from a lot of secondary research from looking at websites about prejudice and discrimination on the internet, I also did some primary research. The primary research that I did to help me with the project was an interview with a homosexual person to find out about their experience with homophobia, and a social experiment to try and find out whether minority groups are less likely to be discriminatory than others.

>Back to index

After researching, I started to plan what exactly and how exactly I was going to create my product. For this, I created criteria and planned when I was going to finish everything so that I would be done on time. Then I started to create my product. I decided to create a magazine article as well as a website. The magazine article is about the causes of prejudice and discrimination, and the website is about prejudice and discrimination in a more indirect way. The website is about how to write a five paragraph essay. I brought the topic of prejudice and discrimination into this, by having example paragraphs that discuss which negative effects discrimination can have. The reason why I decided to disguise my website in this way is to reach a wider target audience and have a larger impact.

For the magazine article, someone would only click on the article if they are already interested in the topic of prejudice and discrimination. If someone is already interested in the topic, it is also generally less likely that they are prejudiced or discriminatory themselves. In opposition to this, someone who wants to know how to write a five-paragraph essay, can or cannot be interested in the topic of prejudice and Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 5

discrimination. This is why it is generally more likely for the audience of the website to be discriminatory than the audience of the magazine article, which is why I think that disguising my website allowed me to reach a larger target audience. After creating the product, I then reflected on the whole project and wrote the final report, where I concluded everything that I did throughout the project.

There are several reasons for why I chose the topic of prejudice and discrimination for my personal project. What first got me started to think about prejudice and discrimination as the topic for my project was a unit that we did last year in I&S. It was a unit about prejudice and discrimination and I found it very interesting in general. There was a simple exercise that we did at the start of the unit which I found really fascinating. We drew different people (for example a doctor, an old man or a teenage girl) and then compared our pictures with each other.

It turned out that they were all quite similar, for example that everyone drew the doctor as a man even though the doctor could easily have been a woman as well. This exercise made me think about how deeply ingrained prejudice is in basically everyone of us, even though we might not even be aware of it, and how basically everyone judges others in the second they first see them, although it might be completely unintentional. I found this realization kind of shocking but also really fascinating and wanted to find out more about it.

Apart from this, I find topics that have to do with psychology and learning about human behaviour very interesting. I am also strongly convinced that we as humans in general would benefit from all being a bit less judging and prejudiced and a bit more tolerant and accepting towards each other. I felt that if I would be able to create a product that would somehow convince at least a few people to be less prejudiced and more open towards each other, that my personal project would have been meaningful and worth spending so much time on.

had to choose as long as there was a product or outcome that we could make. I really liked this, because choosing my totally own topic meant that I was interested in my topic throughout the whole project. I think this also improved the quality of my project, because I often kept on researching when it would not have been necessary simply because I was interested in the topic. Through this I was able to gain more knowledge on my topic which helped me later on, and I would probably not have put in this much extra effort if I would have had to do the project on a topic which I did not like as much. I also liked the fact that the project took so long (about 6 months) because this meant that I could really create a product which I am proud of, as I did not have any time constraints, which is usually not the case with school projects.

Apart from all of these aspects that I liked about the project, there was also something which I did not think was beneficial, which was that we had deadlines for the separate criteria. I am not sure if every school has these deadlines, but for our school they were basically deadlines for when we had to turn in drafts of each of the separate criterion. I did not like this because it was basically impossible to already have all of the research done after criterion A, because there is always something more that you need to research. This is why I didn’t like having to write these drafts of the different criterion when I knew I was not really done with the criterion yet.

Furthermore, having to write parts of the report already way before the end of the project discouraged me to view the concept with the four criterion as a design cycle where you constantly go back and forth between the different parts, but it made me feel like I had to finish specific parts of the project at specific times. Despite this, overall I still enjoyed the amount of freedom we had with the project.

Overall, I would say that I had a really good experience with the personal project. What I really liked about the project was the amount of freedom that we had in deciding what and how we were going to do everything. We did not have any guidelines about which topic we 6 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>

Back to index

Essay Have you ever been prejudiced against someone?

Definitely.

Even though we often don’t want to admit it to ourselves, even the most moral people have been prejudiced at some point in their lives.

It is such a basic part of a person’s thought process that all human societies have prejudice in some form and to some degree.

Prejudice is not just an emotion, feeling or personality trait, it is more of an attitude that has been influenced by many things.

People are not born prejudiced, but they become so.

Once formed, prejudices can become locked in a person’s thought process so much that it can be difficult or impossible to change or eliminate these attitudes, but it’s nonetheless important to try, for the sake of the victims of discrimination. But in order to change these discriminatory attitudes, we have to know why people are prejudiced in the first place.

Even though it can be difficult to determine the causes of prejudice, as there is such a large variety of possible causes, psychologists have found a few general reasons that cause people to be prejudiced.

>Back to index

One of the main reasons why people form prejudiced opinions is because it is part of our basic human nature to try and order everything into categories. Our brain has difficulties with accepting a wide variety of differences and we instinctively tend to categorise people into groups in order to cope with situations more easily. Simply categorising people into groups wouldn’t even be a problem, but the problem occurs when we not only categorise people into different groups, such as LGBT+ people, but also attach characteristics to all of the people in that particular group, such as saying that all gay men are very feminine. However, this is difficult for our brain not to automatically do. This tendency of our brain to overgeneralize the world around us is one of the reasons for why people are prejudiced.

Next, prejudice is also taught and promoted through the process of socialisation. Socialisation refers to the influences a child experiences while growing up. When children notice that LGBT+ people (or any other group of people for that matter), are being treated differently than everyone else by their parents, they adapt this behaviour. This blind imitation of past behaviour is one of the ways of how prejudice becomes passed on from generation to generation.

Conformity, connected very closely to socialization, is another reason for why people are prejudiced. Starting at very early ages, people conform to what is going on around them. As proven by the Asch Conformity Experiment (1951) and similar ones, people are extremely likely to conform to what everyone around them believes, even though it might be totally incorrect. People are likely to conform to the opinions of others when trying to seek acceptance in a society. Studies have shown that people are more likely to show prejudice when they move into areas where prejudice is the norm, with the opposite also being true. Since conformity is so prevalent in our society, many psychologists believe that it could even be the most common cause for prejudice.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 7

One of the reasons for prejudice that is relevant for prejudices such as homophobia, is when discrimination is shown as part of a defensive function. When someone perceives some analogy between homosexuality and their own unconscious conflicts for example, they may become homophobic. An example for this could be when someone might subconsciously have homosexual urges, but represses them by rejecting homosexuals. In this way, the defensive function permits that person to externalise their internal conflicts, without making themselves conscious of them.

Another reason for why people are prejudiced is because it allows them to use scapegoating. The act of scapegoating means that someone is blamed for something that they have no control over. Usually, anger coupled with insecurity can spark the aggression towards less powerful groups of people which results in scapegoating.

In order to feel more self-respect the person feels the need to project his fears onto an inferior group. One example for this is when someone makes claims such as “immigrants are stealing our jobs”. A person who can not get a job might say this in order to have someone

8 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

other than themselves to blame for their situation, even though this allegation is not supported by empirical evidence.

Despite all of the many things that cause us humans to be prejudiced, most of which we can’t even control, we should not view it as a normal thing to be prejudiced. Even though it is human nature to try and order everything into categorise, we should always remind ourselves that people are one of the things which we should not categorise. We should also always make sure that we do not teach our children to be prejudiced through how we act around them.

Apart from this, we should not conform to the prejudiced believes other people might have, when we know that they’re wrong, and speak up to educate them. When we notice that someone is trying to make a scapegoat of someone else, we should point out the mistakes in their thinking. Admittedly, all of this will not be able to totally eliminate all injustice that is being caused by prejudice and discrimination, but understanding the causes for prejudice and speaking up when we notice it, can help us to do our part in making the world a slightly better place for everyone.

>Back to index

Reducing Stigma and Smaller Classes Key To Addressing NZ’s Alarming Adult Literacy Rates - Expert More needs to be done to de-stigmatise low adult literacy, and schools need greater resources in the early years, if we are to help educate the more than one million Kiwis who have literacy issues, according to an industry expert.

Research shows that around a quarter of Kiwis do not have the reading, writing and maths skills to equip them for everyday life*.

Jane Gilmour, of Literacy Waitakere, a registered charity which provides tutoring for adults with few or no school qualifications, says many of us take for granted our basic ability to read and write.

“We see people every day who, usually through no fault of their own, haven’t had enough schooling as children, so aren’t able to do the basics required to succeed in life,” she says.

Literacy Waitakere tutors reading, writing, spelling, numeracy and computer skills to adults of all ages, who all have different reasons for their lack of literacy.

“Often those who come to us for help have been failed by the school system: perhaps they were made to feel bad at school because they had poor handwriting, or they didn’t get to attend school regularly because of family disruptions,” she says.

Gilmour says schools need more funding during the early years and smaller class sizes so all children can have the opportunity to learn at their own pace.

She says many of the adults who eventually seek help are embarrassed about their lack of ability and we need to do more to destigmatise their inability to read, write and complete basic maths problems.

“Many of our students have little or no computer skills and may not attend WINZ appointments because they can’t read or understand the information required. Most also lack the confidence to ask for help.

“It’s a huge step for someone to walk through our doors they often think they are the only ones with

>Back to index

literacy issues until they get here and realise a lot of people struggle.”

Such was the case with Paul, who admits the task of learning numeracy and literacy in adulthood seemed ‘overwhelming’ before he came to Literacy Waitakere. “Every job I chose in the past was based on the belief I couldn’t do any better, and government department forms like tax would be stressful – I’d misinterpret what I was seeing” he says. “It’s really difficult to cope in a literate society. You’ve got to break through the negative feelings like anger and resentment, and feeling dumb.”

Paul says since taking part in the literacy programme his job options and confidence have improved. “Without literacy, people like me can end up not living the life they want or dream of.

When your options expand, life has more hope.”

Gilmour says a $13,500 donation from The Trusts Million Dollar Mission will now be used to pay for running costs, including paying specialist adult literacy tutors.

“The adult literacy “toolbox” contains many strategies to help adults acquire the various skills they need. Adults learn differently from children and begin with goal setting, taking responsibility for their own learning. One strategy is known as “scaffolding”’ – we start an individual person’s learning where their knowledge foundation sits.

Everybody is different – perhaps someone has some basic vocabulary or spelling, so we’ll give them a text they can read comfortably, and once they have the confidence to read that, we’ll go on to the next step.”

“All our income is from grants and donations, and all our services are free,” says Gilmour. “We don’t charge learners– literacy is a basic human right.”

Jane Gilmour Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 9

Teachers should be the centre o Good teachers always have been, remain, and always will be the centre of the learning for secondary students.

That’s because a good teacher, even an average one, can do everything that all the innovations in history have ever aimed to do.

Innovation In no particular order or chronology, we have tried many pedagogical and technological innovations in the last fifty years to improve student engagement and improve educational success: cooperative learning, discovery learning, student orientated inquiry learning, visualization, modelling, constructivism, multimedia presentations and projects, tape recording, overhead projectors, video, computers and mobile phones.

We have discovered and invested in programmes and practices to improve the non-cognitive “soft skills” of communication, grit, resilience, selfesteem, relationship building, growth mindset – seeking academic achievement by way of personality interventions.

And more configurations and strategies: standards-based assessment, open classrooms, numerous curriculum knowledge changes, experiential/authentic learning, reflective practice, communities of learning, action research, modern learning environments, thematic instruction, integrated studies, research projects, collaborative problem solving, peer 10 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

instruction, and lastly, sharing popcorn with students in bean bag chairs.

All of these have nudged the profession forward, but if a simple, widely effective intervention for educational attainment exists, educational researchers and theorist have yet to find it.

Our success with innovation has only been as good as the classroom practitioners who preside over the innovation. Without a capable teacher, the intended effect of an innovation is undermined. With a capable teacher, all innovations will help a student to maximize their potential.

Good teachers All of these innovations bring benefits to the learning environment, but let’s not forget the best from the “bad old days” of the teacher at the centre of the leaning.

Back then, secondary teachers tried new strategies and used new materials, resources, technologies and content. It kept them excited and invigorated to create a new learning episode and to see it work. They brought passion and enthusiasm to their teaching. They stored a wealth of deep subject knowledge and skills, combined with insights and broad overviews of their material, enabling them to identify correlations, themes, turning points, and essential facts. They knew what students needed to know for deeper understanding.

Good teachers carefully designed and delivered structured learning sessions offering choice and variety of learning activities, sometimes focused on student orientated learning, but never just a single style of teaching day after day. Always targeted to the people they taught.

They introduced lessons clearly, with precise instructions and told their students the value of the work they did. They moved around the room to maintain the learning, managed behaviour and provided skilled feedback, closing the lesson with a telling point about the learning or an ennobling thought. Brisk, business like, yet always supportive.

> Back to index

of the learning

John Hellner

Those teachers developed “soft skills” as a matter of course, as part and parcel of what their work, before the skills were formalized by researchers, recognising and planning situations enabling students to discover and build up their confidence, develop resilience, practice respect, and communicate in many forms and forums.

They took risk, told stories and modelled positive character traits, attitudes and values. They used humour, judgement, deference, empathy and good teaching skills to build good relationships.

They reviewed, revised and retried their practice before reflective practice and action research were “discovered”.

lead in working with students to maximize their talents.

The teacher at the centre of the learning aimed to increase student engagement, motivation, empowerment and enthusiasm, to put students more in control of their learning, adapt old knowledge to new situations, develop skill sets for the future, train students to organise and manage time and keep careful records, learn to work and communicate with others, solve problems, achieve success and a love of learning.

No matter how good the teacher or how well researched the innovation, many other and multifaceted forces push and pull us away or towards achieving our potential. And I am truly sorry to say it, but the circumstances of our upbringing make a huge difference.

We need teachers at the centre of learning now It might be time to re-assess the role of the teacher as being in charge of the learning, rather than a facilitator of the learning – although in practice, no contradiction exists.

Perhaps it is time we recognize, develop and maintain the role of the teacher at the centre of the learning by more concentration, money, training on delivering well-qualified teachers who know his or her subject well and will inspire effective student learning. With a good teacher in charge every innovation will gain some traction; without a good teacher no innovation will deliver the goods. Let’s not minimize the role of the teacher in the classroom.

This is not a call for a return to the Neanderthal Age and the curriculum of the sabre-toothed tiger. We need innovation to evolve and progress.

Just give teachers time, guidance, and money to do what they do naturally and let them take the

>Back to index

On the surface, the task seems direct: more and better initial selection and training, higher wages and better conditions, particularly training and time, more time and better quality, targeted professional development addressing the implementation of innovation.

But don’t get fooled into overemphasizing the hasty and easy solution of more qualified teachers over the more complex issue around improving student success and engagement.

More than just good teachers are needed

I read about a recent American study that makes a chilling point. It found that kids from lower-income families who scored in the top quartile on math tests in the eighth grade were less likely to graduate from college than students who scored in the bottom quartile in math but happened to be born into homes in which their parents were in the top third of income distribution.

This is a disturbing indicator, saying quite a lot about why and how young people succeed in American education and by extrapolation, much of the Western World. Educated, wellheeled, well connected parents have the most successful kids - and it isn’t because the kids inherit the smarts, or are taught in a teacher centred classroom, or benefit from the most recent evidence-based innovation, (which in New Zealand at the moment is the Modern Learning Environment). It’s because they got lucky when they were born.

But for now, and probably for the foreseeable future, we travel the pathway of educational modifications, rather than undertaking the more daunting journey of social transformation.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 11

A Handful Of Discussion St Can you spare a moment to think about the world that today’s students face as the use of technology increases and the need for face-to-face interaction decreases?

The art of informal conversation and the sharing ideas freely is in danger of being misinterpreted through digital means.

We can’t deny the importance and impact that digital platforms have had on communication but miscommunication is one of the major sources of conflict and the problem is increased because of the ease in which the communication is impersonal.

Communication is much more than just words.

When a person shares personal views with another in a face to face situation then there are other ‘clues’ that can be detected, including body language, facial expressions, feelings, tone of voice and reactions. It is through these means that the participants can gain a deeper understanding with less chance of the misunderstanding engendered by electronic media… email, text messages and social media. It is my contention that discussion plays an increasingly important part in education if we are to give students the tools to create trust between people in dealing with life beyond the classroom, and offer a handful of discussion strategies to that end.

1.Facilitated discussion: Facilitator starts the discussion by sharing his/ her view. (can be the teacher, but not necessarily). No interrupting. Facilitator chooses the next speaker who can speak and then choose the next speaker or pass and choose who is going to speak in their place. Silence is permitted as a response but everyone is given the chance to speak. Once this has happened then move into open discussion.

At a predetermined time the facilitator stops the discussion and students work individually to respond in writing to one of the following cards…

I think the most important point in the discussion is …

I am puzzled about…

A question that I still have about the topic is …

I agree with the statement that …

I disagree with the statement that … because..

Something I have learned is ….

Shuffle the cards and call on different students to read them aloud to the group before continuing with the discussion or concluding. Cards can be used to guage understanding of the topic or provide a starting point for further discussion.

12 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

trategies For The New Term Elaine Le Sueur (MNZM)

Complete the circle before moving on.

2. Circle of Voices.

START

Start with an individual reflection on the topic of discussion.

Allow 2-3 minutes for participants to marshall their thoughts. Then‌

Move around the circle in order.

No interruptions are allowed

Once everyone has had the chance to speak, move into free discussion with the proviso that every comment has to refer back to something that was said in the first round circle of voices.

Each person has up to 1 minute to give his/her viewpoint.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 13

3. Doughnut Discussion

4. Snowball discussion

This is a useful way to allow everyone to have a chance to have their say and be heard, allowing for cross pollination of ideas so everyone is not listening to the same speaker. At the same time.

Allow time for individual reflection on the topic to begin with

Divide your total into two even groups.( If the number is uneven in the class then the teacher makes up the numbers to that both groups are equal in number.)

Form into pairs and share reflections Pairs into quartets And so on

First group makes a circle.

This is a useful way for everyone to ensure their views have be heard as they move from small to large group or class discussion.

One student from the second group stands behind each person in the centre ring.

For discussion topic starters try a conversation cube.

TURN to face each other and TALK..

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/ Conversation-Cubes-Bundle-43946

After a set time, stop.

Either the INSIDE ring or the OUTSIDE ring then moves clockwise for three places and faces a new person and the discussion starts over.

Moving on for three places reduces the likelihood that the points made by the speaker have already been overheard by a neighbour.

5. Statement – Question - Analysis Older students can be encouraged to refect on the kind of questions that are asked to provoke discussion. They can design their own categorising system if they wish (eg. Fat/ skinny questions) or use Blooms taxonomy and aim for questions that encourage higher oder thinking.

Work in groups of 3 and allow time afterwards for students to discuss questions that provoked thought.

ROUND 1

ROUND 2

ROUND 3

Student 1

Student 2

Student 3

Think about the topic and make a statement about it.

Ask a question about the statement just made.

Respond to the question or make a comment about the type of question asked

Student 2

Student 3

Student 1

Make another statement about the topic

Ask another question relating to the statement just made.

Respond to the question or make a comment about the type of question

Student 3

Student 1

Student 2

Make another statement about the topic

Ask another question relating to the statement just made.

Respond to the question or make a comment about the type of question

14 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

Statement – question- analysis can lead to further socratic questioning that involves capitalising on student knowledge to probe further. The table outlines examples of Socratic questioning suggestions to help keep the discussion on track : Clarification

Evidence

What do you mean by …?

Why do you say that...?

Could you be more specific about…?

How do you know that…?

Could you give me some more details about…?

How could we prove …?

Could you give me another example of …?

Can you explain what/ why…?

Assumption challenging Is that always the way?

What are we taking for granted here?

What is this idea based on?

Does everyone believe…?

What is your reason for thinking that…?

Implications What might happen if…?

What are your reasons for saying…?

Who is a person you could ask to find out more about…?

What other information do we need to …?

Alternatives

Question questions

Is there another perspective that we could consider?

Is this question hard/easy to answer? Why?

What would someone who disagrees say?

Does that make sense?

What might… think about that?

Which question has been the most useful here?

To assess how well your students interact with each other you could try this fun activity… https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/ Product/ Escape-Room-A-social-scienceexperiment-4280553

These days I sell original resources online through https://teacherspayteachers.com/Store/ Thinking-Challenges I would love you to visit and follow my store to be updated as new resources are added.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 15

The Global Search for Education: Le

“We believe the training and collaboration with teachers around the world will be absolute key to increasing the adoption more rapidly, and could easily lead to millions of students using VR globally to learn science more effectively.” – Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Will all students one day have the opportunity to explore the world from within their classroom walls? Worldwide shipments for augmented reality and virtual reality headsets will grow to 68.9 million units in 2022, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 52.5%, according to the latest forecast from the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. Ever seen the level of engagement achieved when kids and adults play video games? Just imagine if we could entice learners by allowing them to participate in content that delivers a completely immersive and as well as fun experience.

16 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Michael Bodekaer Jensen has a passion for bridging the gap between education and technology by providing access to unique education opportunities to students. His company, Labster, involves virtual lab simulations for educators to empower their Biology, Chemistry, and Physics students. Labster is working closely with Google as a partner in advancing the adoption of VR in the classroom and working closely with teachers and institutions to gather valuable feedback on how we can advance the adoption further. Michael joins us in The Global Search for Education to share his perspectives on the future of virtual simulations and virtual reality in learning environments.

>Back to index

earning That’s Virtually Real C. M. Rubin “The students will get to experience science in a whole new way, fully immersed in the incredible world of biology, by for instance solving real-world global challenges they get to experience close-up or by traveling to the inner depth of cells and see and experience how DNA, molecules and enzymes br ings cells to life.”

– Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Michael, what VR endeavors are you currently focused on, and when can we expect to experience them?

We are focused on Biology, Chemistry and Physics. These fields also overlap with Medicine and Nursing, and help cover some parts of these degrees as well. Our Digital Biology Degree will launch this August, with the world’s first fully online VR-enabled biology college degree, together with our close partner institutions. In addition to this, we are working on a Builder tool, enabling anyone to build high quality and immersive VR and browser-based 3D learning simulations without any development skills required. This means that teachers and students will in the near future be able to build their own simulations. This will be launched later this year in closed beta with our partner institutions.

How many institutions and students do you estimate are currently using VR technology in learning environments and how do you believe this market will grow in the next 5 years?

This is a very good question. VR adoption is rapidly increasing, especially thanks to programs like Google Expeditions and Tour Creator, enabling teachers to build their own VR tours.

>Back to index

We are proud to be working closely with Google as a partner in advancing the adoption of VR in the classroom and working closely with teachers and institutions to gather valuable feedback on how we can advance the adoption further. We believe the training and collaboration with teachers around the world will be absolute key to increasing the adoption more rapidly, and could easily lead to millions of students using VR globally to learn science more effectively.

In terms of how many teachers in general use VR globally and in 5 years, I recommend you rely on research organizations that provide estimates on this. I can only speak for our own partner institutions and the adoption we see there, which is very positive.

Are these generally proprietary systems or do they use existing commercial technology, such as Oculus Rift or other existing tools?

Have you contemplated creating software applications for the existing VR systems of Facebook, Sony, or HTC? Generally, existing commercially available headsets are used, as these often are available at the lowest price-point. We are especially excited at Labster for the high-quality, 6-degrees of freedom, low-cost mobile VR headsets at ~350400 USD, such as Lenovo Mirage, as these Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 17

“I believe we will see teachers being empowered through far greater insights into their individual students’ skills levels, which allow them to provide better individualized coaching and mentoring to each student, and through this, ensure each student receives the best possible education given their individual progression and learning style.”

– Michael Bodekaer Jensen provide schools and students with a high-end VR experience at a very low price-point. Since price is key for adoption in most institutions, we only focus on low-cost commercially available mobile VR headsets, such as the Daydream-Ready phones and the Lenovo Mirage.

real-world global challenges they get to experience close-up or by traveling to the inner depth of cells and see and experience how DNA, molecules and enzymes brings cells to life.

Students will also get unlimited access to different otherwise expensive cutting-edge laboratory equipment, such as Electron and Confocal Microscopes. They will be able to perform and learn from animal tests without harming any animals in the process. All our simulations are fully vegan!

Your vision is to replace the role of textbooks for science education with a more interactive learning experience enabled by virtual simulations of lab equipment and experiments. How will you enable us to Are you mainly focused on Science? What’s “literally step inside the virtual world”? the potential to improve and enhance To clarify, we aim to supplement existing science classroom learning experiences in other education such as textbooks and classroom subject areas with VR and what are the teachers, by building learning simulations that challenges to make this technology both empower the students through interactive accessible for all students? immersive learning, and the teachers with the data and student-insights they need to provide the best possible teaching, coaching and mentoring for their students.

The students will get to experience science in a whole new way, fully immersed in the incredible world of biology, by for instance solving

18 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Yes. We focus on science. There is great potential for VR in any subject area, where teaching today is either expensive, dangerous, impossible or time-consuming to handle in a classroom. The primary challenge up until 2018 has been to create VR hardware that doesn’t cause motion

>Back to index

sickness for students, at a low enough pricepoint where students and institutions can afford the hardware. With the Lenovo Mirage 6-degrees of freedom, mobile VR headset, at a 350-400 USD price point, we see that 2018 is the year where this important hardware barrier has been overcome.The next important barrier is to ensure teachers are provided with good training and learning opportunities on how to best leverage VR as part of their classroom teaching, and how to merge it into their existing lectures. We work closely with our partners to ensure the teachers receive this important coaching and training where needed.

Imagine a virtual reality classroom 5 years from now. Will it be a location based classroom or an anytime/anywhere experience for individuals? What will the students be doing? What role will the teachers have? What will the group involvement and team collaboration look like?

This is a very interesting question, and the answer greatly depends on the feedback we receive from teachers and students over the coming years on how we can best improve the VR experience to support their lectures and teaching. I believe we will see teachers being empowered through far greater insights into their individual students’ skills levels, which allow them to provide better individualized coaching and mentoring to each student, and through this, ensure each student receives the best possible education given their individual progression and learning style. Teachers and groups will also be able to collaborate actively within the VR worlds in sessions, where e.g. the teacher or teacher assistants can be available on-call whenever any student requests assistance during their VR

>Back to index

training sessions, and letting the teachers teleport in and observe how each individual student or group is progressing with their learning.

This also means that VR sessions could be done as anytime anywhere homework sessions, and allow the teachers to leverage the limited classroom time for collaborative in-person group work sessions.

Current headsets suffer from various issues, such as bulkiness, need to be connected with computers or videogame hardware, as well as physical discomfort of users, such as nausea. How do you see technology evolving to facilitate a more seamless learning experience?

I believe Lenovo Mirage is the first VR headset to solve this challenge at an affordable price-point.

We will see many more such headsets in the coming years, and within a few years the price will eventually go below $100.

C. M. Rubin and Michael Bodekaer Jensen

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 19

Violent video games are not associat • Study finds no relationship between violent video games and aggressive behaviour in teenagers • A nationally representative sample of British teenage gamers were assessed for gaming and aggressive behaviour in the previous month, as evaluated by their carers • Data on violence in the video games was collected objectively, using the official EU and US games rating systems • First study on violent video games and aggression to use the Royal Society’s Registered Reports approach, ensuring an unbiased and effective analysis of results Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, have found no relationship between aggressive behaviour in teenagers and the amount of time spent playing violent video games.

The study used nationally representative data from British teens and their parents alongside official E.U. and US ratings of game violence.

20 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

The findings were published in Royal Society Open Science.

“The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn’t tested very well over time,” says lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Despite interest in the topic by parents and policy-makers, the research has not demonstrated that there is cause for concern.”

The study is one of the most definitive to date, using a combination of subjective and objective data to measure teen aggression and violence in games. Unlike previous research on the topic, which relied heavily on self-reported data from teenagers, the study used information from parents and carers to judge the level of aggressive behaviour in their children.

Additionally, the content of the video games was classified using the official Pan European Game Information (EU) and Entertainment Software Rating Board (US) rating system, rather than only player’s perceptions of the amount of violence in the game.

“Our findings suggest that researcher biases

>

Back to index

ted with adolescent aggression Oxford University might have influenced previous studies on this topic, and have distorted our understanding of the effects of video games,” says co-author Dr Netta Weinstein from Cardiff University.

An important step taken in this study was preregistration, where the researchers publically registered their hypothesis, methods and analysis technique prior to beginning the research.

“Part of the problem in technology research is that there are many ways to analyse the same data, which will produce different results. A cherry-picked result can add undue weight to the moral panic surrounding video games. The registered study approach is a safe-guard against this,” says Przybylski.

While no correlation was found between playing video games and aggressive behaviour in teenagers, the researchers emphasize that this does not mean that some mechanics and situations in gaming do not provoke angry feelings or reactions in players. “Anecdotally, you do see things such as trash-talking, competitiveness and trolling in gaming communities that could qualify as antisocial behaviour,” says Przybylski. “This would be an interesting avenue for further research.”

“Researchers should use the registered study approach to investigate other media effects phenomena. There are a lot of ideas out there like ‘social media drives depression’ and ‘technology addiction that lowers quality of life’ that simply have no supporting evidence.

These topics and others that drive technological anxieties should be studied more rigorously –

>Back to index

society needs solid evidence in order to make appropriate policy decisions.”

Method: The data was drawn from a nationally representative sample of British 14- and 15year olds, and the same number of their carers (totalling 2,008 subjects). Teenagers completed questions on their personality and gaming behaviour over the past month, while carers completed questions on their child’s recent aggressive behaviours using the widely-used Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The violent content in the games played were coded based on their rating in the official Pan European Game Information (PEGI; EU) and Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB; US) rating system, as well as player’s subjective rating. The findings of the study were derived from a study following the Registered Reports Protocol; the study’s sampling plan and statistical approach were evaluated before the data were collected.

Multiple linear regression modelling tested whether the relations between regular violent video game play (coded by researchers) and adolescents’ aggressive and helping behaviours (judged by parents) were positive, negative, linear, or parabolic.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 21

MOTAT’s Science STEM Fair – thre

When it comes to successfully connecting young people with real-life real-time innovation MOTAT’s annual Science STEM Fair leads the way.

Since the annual event was first launched in 1988 MOTAT has adapted and grown this science showcase into a fairground festival encompassing all things Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

22 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Apart from giving children the opportunity to get hands-on with all things STEM related in an exciting environment, the consistent intent behind the fair is to introduce visitors to industry leaders who are translating STEM related learning into present day innovation and commercial applications.

The 2019 event on Sunday 7 April was another perfect example of this ethos in action with more than 2000 visitors flocking to MOTAT’s Great North Road site to immerse themselves in the interactive STEM experiences on offer.

Highlights from this year’s fair included presentations by nano-science rockstar Michelle Dickinson and her Nanogirl Labs crew and engineering phenomenon Epro8, who reinforced

>

Back to index

ee decades on and still going strong! their status as crowd favourites once again.

Cutting edge industry developers Curiat Ltd were new participants on the day and their efforts exemplified the commitment many high-tech commercial enterprises have when it comes to sharing their work with the next generation.

“Our team loves getting involved with community events like this” explained Curiat director Rob Hanks.

“Getting hands-on is the best way to demystify what this new technology is all about for parents, teachers and youngsters. Companies like us realise we can play a role in bridging the gap between what our schools and families are able to teach children in this tech space,

>Back to index

especially given how quickly technology is evolving.

It’s smart business- if NZ wants great developers and innovative thinkers for the future, then it makes sense that we should play a part in inspiring them now.”

Themes of sustainability, climate change and society’s impact on our environment also featured prominently in this year’s Science STEM Fair line up.

The Tread Lightly Charitable Trust generated considerable buzz with their two interactive mobile classrooms that have been designed to show how we can reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 23

Their Drain Game truck demonstrated how stormwater systems work, what pollution is and how to avoid it. Their Tread Lightly Caravan provided endless learning and interactive fun for all the family, with activities that showed visitors how their everyday life choices can make a huge difference to the wellbeing of our natural environment.

It is clear to see the significant work that goes into creating a weekend event like this, but the MOTAT team and their industry partners appear to have struck on a formula that delivers that

24 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

perfect combination of learning, doing, fun and inspiration.

“This event represents exactly what MOTAT does so well as a museum” says Michael Frawley, MOTAT’s Chief Executive.

“MOTAT’s STEM Science Fair makes Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths fun, accessible, and inspirational and it’s a pleasure to share this event with such high-powered industry partners.”

>Back to index

Schools can benefit from MOTAT’s STEM resources and expertise throughout the year.

An on-site visit gives students a rich ‘incontext’ learning experience in a stimulating environment including hands-on tinkering, tram rides, exploration time and international exhibitions.

> Back to index

Or book a STEAM Cell visit to your school and MOTAT will bring the experience to your place saving you travel costs and setting you up with a highly customised, spot-ontopic learning experience with MOTAT’s unique pool of resources and expertise Contact the MOTAT Education Team on education@motat.org.nz or email bookings@motat.org.nz for more information on how MOTAT can help work with your school.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 25

Greek artist Gregory Grozos is on a quest to prove that watches can do much more than just tick.

They can fit entire worlds inside them.

“I call my creations ‘miniature worlds’ because that is what I exactly aim them to be,” Gregory writes. “I try to make each work as detailed and complete as a tiny world would need to be in order to be called a world.”

“All the themes and ideas are my own and many of my works can be broadly categorized as steampunk, fantasy and whimsical in style. I pay a lot of attention to fine detail, trying to bring to a harmonious combination many tiny bits and materials that come from a variety of unlikely sources.”

26 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Gregory sells his artworks on ETSY where the artist already has 71 reviews. Every single one of them is 5 stars. «I believe that art is a field of human culture which has tremendous power in affecting people,» he adds. «I thus try to bring out what is positive, bright and wholesome in my art, making it into something which can have the capacity of benefiting, inspiring and helping others. Seeing things in this way has opened up a completely new field of ideas, creativity and an enthusiasm to improve my skills, techniques, and knowledge.»

His pieces cost from $39 all the way up to a thousand, but each of them offers something different. And that’s what’s wonderful about Gregory’s work. They always find new ways of surprising you. Despite the lack of space within the watches, Gregory still manages to tell a story that feels whole. They are full of little details that keep your eyes wandering in countless rows of bottles, jars, and screws.

>Back to index

Image credits: microjewellery

This Artist Turns Old Pocket Watc The Result Is Fascinating

ches Into Miniature Worlds, And

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 27

28 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 29

30 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 31

32 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 33

Are Webook Prepped for families Superintelligence New helps improv Escalating family anxiety over childhood sleep problems affect everyone in a family unit – parents, siblings and the child enduring sleep issues – but a new book that teaches parents step-by-step treatments puts research-supported techniques into the home environment.

Book authors Dr Rachel Hiller (left) and Professor Michael Gradisar

34 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Flinders University pediatric sleep expert Professor Michael Gradisar says the issue of sleep difficulty among school-aged children is rarely explored in book or online advice, so this new book aims to offer clarity for parents wrestling with the concerns of what is abnormal in sleep patterns, or what should be ignored.

e? child sleep woes ve Half of all children experience sleep problems at some point, so the book provides step-by-step instructions to help children aged 5-12 years.

It identifies a range of sleep problems that the authors have most commonly seen in clinical work – led by children who find it difficult to sleep without a parent present, or who are very anxious at night time.

Professor Gradisar says sleep problems are rarely caused by a single issue, which is why the book - Helping Your Child with Sleep Problems: A self-help guide for parents, by Rachel Hiller and Michael Gradisar (published by Little Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK company) – presents a range of possible solutions for specific issues.

Professor Gradisar says parents are often fixated on sleep difficulties with babies, yet they are often less timely seeking help with older children’s sleep issues, or are confused about where to seek appropriate advice.

He speaks about this issue with significant authority, being part of a global panel of experts for World Baby Sleep Day, a US Initiative run for the past three years by the Pediatric Sleep Council. Professor Gradisar will again join a team of international pediatric sleep experts on March 1, 2019, to participate in a World Baby Sleep Day question and answer event on Facebook.com/ pedsleep.

In contrast, the new book is devoted to techniques for helping older children with sleep difficulties that have been tested via research studies, and it aims to provide practical advice that parents and children can understand and adopt.

The release of this book builds on Professor Gradisar’s 16 years’ expertise in this area. In 2005, Professor Gradisar opened the Child and Adolescent Sleep Clinic at Flinders University, where he pioneered the development of cognitive and behavioural treatments for childhood sleep disorders. Book co-author Rachel Hiller joined the clinic in 2011, and specialised in cognitive and behavioural treatments, before relocating the UK to continue her research and clinical work in the area of clinical child psychology.

Part 1 of the book identifys and defines sleep problems, addressing such questions as how do sleep problems develop, and why do they stick around?

Part 2 explains step-by-step techniques to help resolve sleep problems related to anxiety.

This includes new pediatric techniques called bedtime restriction and sleep restriction therapy, that help a child to fall asleep faster, and to stay asleep during the night. It also explains techniques that help children to face their fears, and deal with night terrors, sleep-walking and bed-wetting (that are collectively part of a group identified as parasomnias).

Part 3 explains tips and techniques to help a child maintain good sleep, especially as they become a teenager.

“Although it’s been great to see families 1-on-1 in our Child & Adolescent Sleep Clinic at Flinders, it’s even better to now have an impact on families around the world with this new book,” says Professor Gradisar.

“Ultimately, our hope is that this book helps parents to feel more confident and empowered to help their child’s sleep problem, so the whole family can get a better night’s sleep,” says Professor Gradisar.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 35

How to engage in difficult but

3 Practices co-creators Jim Henderson (far right) and Jim Hancock (not pictured) conducted a two-day workshop to expose campus and community members to a structured and thoughtful way of talking about differences of opinion.

Getting people to talk about polarizing topics while remaining respectful was the goal behind the “3 Practices for Crossing the Difference Divide,” a two-day workshop series designed to expose campus and community members to a structured and thoughtful way of talking about differences of opinion.

Nearly 200 people registered in advance to attend one or more of the three workshops.The event, hosted by the Office of the Chancellor, showcased how the 3 Practices technique works.

“We’re here to understand people with whom we disagree,” said Jim Hancock, one of the creators of 3 Practices and a co-facilitator during the event.

“The Practices promote understanding not by giving up what we believe, but by carefully listening to what another person believes as part of a path forward.”

3 Practices illustrates that those who adopt the following tenets can successfully talk with 36 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

someone who holds an opposing viewpoint: 1. I’ll be unusually interested in others.

2. I’ll stay in the room with difference.

3. I’ll stop comparing my best with your worst.

Provocative topics generate discussion Each workshop addressed a topic that tends to elicit strong opinions: • “Are We on the Brink of Disaster or Halfway Across the Bridge to a Better America” • “Build the Wall or Open the Borders: Will E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) Form Our Future as Much as It’s Shaped Our Past” • “Judge Kavanaugh vs. Dr. Ford, Who Did You Believe?”

Hancock and co-facilitator Jim Henderson deliberately chose eye-popping, provocative titles for the workshops to solicit a variety of opinions.

But Henderson, who served as “referee” during each workshop, assured everyone at the start of each session that the process would be “fair, equitable and accomplish something without damaging any human beings.”

Those present got to observe the 3 Practices process at work: • A speaker in the circle got 2 minutes to

>Back to index

Credit: UC Merced

UC Merced staff members, students and alumni participated in an experiment to help people gain a better understanding of others’ opinions without abandoning their own viewpoint or values.

t respectful dialogue • •

• •

state their opinion on the workshop topic.

The other circle participants (and audience members) listened without interrupting.

When the speaker finished talking, anyone in the circle could ask a clarifying question that started with the phrase, “I would be curious to know.”

The questioner had 20 seconds to ask their clarifying question.

The speaker had 1 minute to respond.

The process repeated until each person who wanted to ask a clarifying question did so, and then started over with another circle participant getting 2 minutes to express their view.

“It slows you down enough to actually focus on listening to somebody else. You’re not just sharing your own viewpoint. You’re asking a question, so you can give the person the gift to further clarify their position.”

–Luanna Putney, associate chancellor 3 Practices encourages people to develop understanding of each other, according to Associate Chancellor Luanna Putney.

“It slows you down enough to actually focus on listening to somebody else,” she said. “You’re not just sharing your own viewpoint. You’re asking a question, so you can give the person the gift to further clarify their position.”

Initially, finding people willing join the circles and share their true, honest viewpoints was difficult, Putney said.

“People were skeptical because they didn’t understand what this was,” Putney said. “We currently have no forums that allow all of us — students, staff and faculty — to get together in an open, welcome environment to talk about difficult subjects in a respectful way.”

Putney added that it takes courage for people to share opinions that might be uncommon or

Donna Birch Trahan

controversial in a certain setting. But when people understand the 3 Practices rules, it’s easier to engage in dialogue and dive deeper into issues.

“As we deal with crises and national events that affect our campus, we are going to need this kind of practice,” she said.

The 3 Practices method was born from The No Joke Project, a feature-length documentary; the book “No Joke: A Rabbi, an Imam and a Preacher Do the Unthinkable and Become Friends for Life,” co-written by Henderson and Cara Highsmith; and a series of live shows about the friendship between three clergymen in Peoria, Ill. Putney said several people who attended thanked Chancellor Dorothy Leland for offering a program that allows different viewpoints to be heard.

Attendees were asked to provide feedback about the series, which will help campus leadership determine whether bring the 3 Practices method Veena Jones reading to her son, Bodhi, courtesy back UC Merced to teach it to campus community of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. members who could then serve as facilitators across a range of difficult topics.

Jose Lopez, a second-year environmental engineering student from Echo Park, attended the first workshop as an observer. After watching the process during the first day, he returned the next day and volunteered to participate inside the circle during the remaining sessions.

“Other (methods) are more like a debate where people just want to get in their one-liners,” Lopez said. “They don’t even try to empathize with each other. With 3 Practices, I was surprised at how effective they were and how people are able to learn.”

Second-year environmental engineering undergraduate student Jose Lopez (center) shares his viewpoint during a 3 Practices workshop.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 37

New Zealand School of Dance Choreographic As New Zealand School of Dance (NZSD) third-year students prepare for professional careers, choreographing their own work is a core aspect of the course and an essential skill for a career in contemporary dance.

ORBICULUS – NZSD Choreographic Season is the culmination of three years of exploration and enquiry in the art of choreography.

This is a must-see performance season that weaves together a series of moments that connects people, movement, and space.

In an environment where there is safety to explore challenging themes, express feelings, and celebrate diversity and identity.

Third Year student, Alec Katsourakis reflects on his time at NZSD and his choreographic experience for the upcoming season of ORBICULUS, Te Whaea: National Dance & Drama Centre from the 22nd-28th of May. New Zealand School of Dance third year contemporary dance student & choreographer in ORBICULUS – Alec Katsourakis Since beginning my training at the New Zealand School of Dance, I have been overwhelmed with the kindness and generosity of the students and staff.

I have been training in dance since the age of 4, and since then I have been in and out of institutions that either make or break someone’s personal identity. It can be an arduous, cruel and unforgiving learning environment to be in. For something as fun as dance, you wouldn’t think this would be the case.

Two years ago I made the move from Australia to NZSD and I am happy to find myself in a school that nurtures students’ love for their craft, as well as their personal identity. I am proud to be in an environment that acknowledges the issues within the industry it is training people for, and actively tries to change that by ushering in a generation of committed, skilled, professional, kind, considerate and generous dancers.

38 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

This philosophy of the School is reflected in the guest teachers that come in and facilitate workshops and classes for the students. One of these guests was a choreographer from Ireland called Michael Keegan-Dolan. He facilitated a workshop for my class in which we were given the permission to simply dance, improvise and have fun for an hour. It was a very surreal experience to be playing games and having fun with a professional choreographer. This was an eye opening experience for my class, as we began to realise the true power of dance, and the real reason why we want to depart on a career in this industry.

This experience has helped myself and my peers to think about how we want to conduct the space for our 2019 choreographic season Orbiculus.

Each year, third year contemporary dance majors get the opportunity to create a short work as a way to test their artistic voice in a safe learning environment. The eye opening experience with Michael allowed us to gain some perspective, and made us all want to bring that playful, fun and open environment into the creation of our works.

Choreographic Season is an incredibly valuable opportunity. The lessons we are learning are something that we will carry with us for the rest of our careers.

This experience is teaching us that dance brings people together, it unites us, it creates new bonds while simultaneously strengthening old bonds. And above all else, it just makes people feel good. This essence is what we are trying to capture in our choreographic season Orbiculus.

Tickets are on sale now and the performances will be held at Te Whaea: National Dance & Drama Centre from the 22nd-28th of May. To book tickets: www.nzschoolofdance.ac.nz

>Back to index

c Season, Is an Encounter of Colliding Worlds

New Zealand School of Dance 3rd Yr Student - Rachel Trent.

Photo by Stephen A’Court

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 39

Upcoming Events: The New Zealand School of Dance is entering a busy season of events, please see all event details here:

The Choreographic Season | Orbiculus

Winter School

22 – 28 May 2019 at Te Whaea: National Dance & Drama Centre.

8 - 12 July 2019

A wonderful opportunity to see 3rd Year contemporary dance students on the cusp of their professional careers. The season challenges the audience to view the student’s works both physically and emotionally. Encountering themes of colliding worlds in new contemporary dance works choreographed by 13 of NZSD’s graduating students. The performance season explores a series of moments that connect movement, space and people together. www.nzschoolofdance.ac.nz

Contemporary Intensive Programme 25 & 26 May (Wellington), 20 & 21 July (Christchurch), 7 & 8 September (Auckland) 9am - 4.30pm For dancers aged 16 - 18 years, with a sound knowledge of contemporary dance and interest in dance as a career.

Establish a solid technical foundation, understand the industry, and discover the requirements for full-time training.

Each day begins with a technique class taught by a member of the New Zealand School of Dance faculty. Sessions in improvisation, contact and partnering, and composition - learning key aspects of the contemporary discipline.Learn from tertiary tutors and gain an insight into the New Zealand School of Dance’s unique contemporary dance training.

New Zealand School of Dance Winter School is an annual five day course offering intensive tuition in a range of dance styles.

Held in the first week of the winter school holidays, it is a fantastic opportunity for young dance students to learn from the faculty of the New Zealand School of Dance alongside some of the best national and international teachers available.

Winter School is suitable for students working at the equivalent of RAD Grade 5 up to Solo Seal. It offers diverse new challenges, with classes in classical, contemporary and allied dance styles.

The Royal Academy of Dance syllabus is offered as an optional extra - for that extra boost before exam time.

View the Course Description: www.nzschoolofdance.ac.nz “My daughter just had an amazing week at winter school and was so worth the trip from Gisborne, she is still buzzing!”

“Our girls thoroughly enjoyed themselves, gained a lot of new knowledge and came away feeling more inspired than ever. Thank you for providing such an extensive learning opportunity for aspiring dancers and teachers!”

Applications open Tuesday 9 April 2019 during business hours.

Cost: $200 per participant for one workshop or $299 per participant for two workshops, or $399 per participant for three workshops Only 25 spaces total http://nzschoolofdance.ac.nz/events/ contemporary-intensive-programme 40 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

New Zealand School of Dance 3rd Yr Students - OrbiculusPhoto by Stephen A’Court

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 41

PEACE Pack takes on cyberbullies

The PEACE Pack developed by experts at Flinders University is being used in hundreds of schools in Australia and now overseas.

Stock photo posed by models Photo: iStock.

A new manual focusing on cyberbullying and social networking hazards has been added to Flinders University’s internationally acclaimed PEACE Pack.

The comprehensive new 40-page booklet with accompanying video resources is based on years of research and includes an eightlesson plan to empower students and provide teachers with evidence-based information from a leading Australian university.

Developed by the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work researchers, it provides information, supporting theory, and practical lessons aimed at both primary and secondary students.

42 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Since 2001, the program has been used by more than 60 schools in South Australia and more than 350 schools in Greece, Italy, Malta and Japan.

The PEACE Pack is founded on the principles of Preparation (P), Education (E), Action (A), Coping (C) and Evaluation (E) and provides schools with a framework to address school bullying and violence.

The cyberbullying manual builds on the single lesson included in the initial PEACE Pack and includes information on the law, associated issues such as sexting and social media use, and tips for parents.

It was developed in response to teacher’s requests for a classroom resource they could deliver to support teaching in relation to digital citizenship.

“An expanded resource on cyberbullying was always part of the plan for the PEACE Pack but

>Back to index

s and trolls we needed to ensure it comprehensively incorporated all relevant research, and was informed by teachers’ classroom experience with this issue,” says Flinders University’s Professor Phillip Slee, who co-designed the PEACE Pack and is also a trained teacher and registered psychologist.

“The short term effects of childhood bullying are well-known and studies are increasingly improving our understanding of long-term damage as adults, including anxiety, depression and in extreme cases, suicidal ideation.

“The latest neuro-science research indicates that the impact of bullying is equivalent to exposure to domestic violence and physical abuse,” Professor Slee says.

The cyberbullying manual is the culmination of almost a decade of Flinders research into child safety in cyberspace.

Unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying has no physical boundaries, can be anonymous, constant, and can spread through a peer group and beyond in seconds, says co-lead author Dr Rahamathulla.

“This makes it particularly damaging to children who are targeted and particularly easy for perpetrators,” he says.

The cyberbullying lessons cover abusive texting, social media impersonation, exclusion, sexting and sexual bullying, stalking, derogatory comments and content, and more.

Despite these efforts to address schoolyard bullying, current figures indicate that almost one in five students are experiencing ‘serious bullying’ once a week or more.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 43

A new educational initiative – Root Amidst the current environment of low funding for education, many local schools in Cambridgeshire struggle to make basic provision for music Cambridgeshire secondary school pupils had the chance to put into practice their new singing talents – from music from the Middle Ages through to the present day – at a public concert in Trinity College Chapel on March 19.

For the past 5 months, the students from North Cambridge Academy and Sir Harry Smith Community College have been training alongside

44 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

professional musicians thanks to an innovative music programme that seeks to close a gap in school education.

The three-year project focuses on helping students develop both vocal and instrumental skills through regular workshops with professional musicians from Cambridge University’s Associate Ensemble VOCES8 and The Brook Street Band. Using the ‘VOCES8 method’, teachers and students are encouraged to learn through participation, using vocal and rhythmic exercises that develop their music skills and confidence.

“Amidst the current environment of low funding for education, many local schools in Cambridgeshire struggle to make basic provision for music,” explains Dr Sam Barrett, one of

>Back to index

Images: Ianthi Tsimpli

Cambridge researchers and musicians are helping to support schools in Cambridgeshire to deliver high quality and sustainable music provision over the next three years.

ts – makes music a priority the organisers of the programme, called Roots.

“Music can help children develop skills and confidence that can underpin many other aspects of their educational journey. Roots aims to redress the balance by providing a new model for future music education within primary and secondary schools in the region.”

One teacher remarked: “One of the Year 8 [aged 12-13] boys struggles with dyslexia and his academic work. He is not confident – due no doubt to this learning difficulty - and finds it hard to make friends. This project is making a real difference for him. Not only has he stood up with his group to lead, he has introduced his group and as the day went on, began to comfortably lead some warm-ups.” A Year 8 boy added: “I feel more confident after the choir leadership

project, I would now put myself out there for more and more things.”

Roots involves the regional music education hub, Cambridgeshire Music; two charities, Cambridge Early Music and the VCM Foundation; and is supported by both Anglia Ruskin University and Cambridge University. Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music, for instance, have been working with teachers to help develop lesson plans informed by their latest insights.

A parallel instrumental strand is being developed

by Anglia Ruskin University to establish a tangible legacy by founding a period instrument ensemble specifically for under 18s. Specialist coaching will be provided through workshops, access to historic instruments and the Brook Street Band’s innovative online resource Handel Digital, culminating in performance opportunities.

The concert at Trinity College represents the completion of the first phase of the project.

Responses from the schools involved have been overwhelmingly positive both from teachers and pupils alike. As one teacher said: “Another pupil in year 8 has behavioural difficulties – often out of lessons and unable to manage in a regular classroom. She loves music. This project has given her an incentive to better manage her behaviour so that she can participate. She has been able to attend the training sessions and now, having helped lead warm-ups for the children she has something to feel very proud of.”

Funding for the first year of the ROOTS project has been provided by the Helen Hamlyn Trust and the SoundMe project sponsored

by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). Individuals or societies interested in supporting years 2 and 3 of the project are invited to contact Dr Sam Barrett for further information.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 45

University of Oxford students an for an epic beach-clean mission A group of Oxford graduate students is setting off to spend five weeks taking part in the Aldabra Clean-Up Project – an ambitious collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF).

The five-strong team supported by The Queen’s College, Oxford, and spanning the Departments of Plant Sciences, Zoology, and Materials Science will be united with seven Seychellois volunteers to achieve an ambitious goal – the cleaning up of Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean, which is badly affected by plastic pollution.

Large amounts of rubbish have been accumulating along the coastline, including everyday items, such as toothbrushes and flipflops. This obstructs endangered marine turtle nesting sites and pollutes coastal grasslands where giant tortoises graze.

Seychelles team member Ivan Capricieuse said: ‘People in the Seychelles have always seen Aldabra as unspoilt and they are shocked when I show them pictures and videos of what is on Aldabra’s beaches.’

The project will clean up Aldabra in the only way possible; by hand, with hard work and determination. The teams will deploy to remote field camps and move along the coastline, compiling the plastic at designated sites, to be collected by chartered barge. They will also make systematic surveys of the rubbish and attempt to discover its origins, aided by ocean current modelling. The terrain is extremely difficult, and conditions will be tough, but the team is well prepared and have spent the last year fundraising, conducting outreach activities and developing specific research aims that will inform the management of this threat to Aldabra

Aldabra Atoll is one of the largest atolls in the world and is home to unique species, including 150,000 Aldabra giant tortoises.

But, despite its isolation and protection, this UNESCO World Heritage Site has not escaped the threat of marine plastic debris.

46 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

nd Seychellois volunteers team up University of Oxford

and other remote islands.

April Burt, project co-lead, who is studying for a DPhil at The Queen’s College said: ‘Aldabra is proof that with enough willpower we can save Earth’s special places.

But the ongoing plastic threat shows us that we must act as a truly global community.’

Associate Professor, Lindsay Turnbull, a trustee of SIF and a Fellow of The Queen’s College, who co-founded the project, said: ‘The project offers an incredible opportunity for Oxford graduate students, who are deeply concerned about the state of the environment, to work in partnership with brilliant young people in Seychelles, who are equally committed. I hope this partnership inspires young people everywhere to realise that they can do something to make a real difference.

The challenges facing the natural world are enormous, but we can’t be put off by the scale of the problem.’

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 47

Educators urged to #SpeakUp for road safety as part of Road Safety Week 2019 Road Safety Week 2019 takes place 6-12 May, and teachers and child-carers are being encouraged to plan activities and take advantage of free resources.

The week, which is coordinated by road safety charity Brake and supported by QBE Insurance and the NZ Transport Agency, will coincide with the UN Global Road Safety Week and will focus on leadership, with the theme Save Lives #SpeakUp. Brake is calling on educators to help save young lives and raise awareness of key road safety messages by taking part and encouraging children and young people themselves to #SpeakUp for road safety too.

Road Safety Week is a great opportunity for teachers, youth workers, and early learning educators to engage children and young people in life-saving lessons and encourage safer, more responsible road use throughout the community.

It’s an engaging topic with plenty of scope for creative and interactive learning, while also meeting curriculum goals.

The #SpeakUp theme encourages everyone to raise awareness of road safety issues that affect them, and the solutions that are needed in order to reduce road deaths and injuries, and make our streets safer, healthier and more liveable places to be. Educators can choose to run their initiative on this theme or any other road safety topic, according to their priorities.

Educators can access free electronic resources and guidance to help them get involved. Go to www.roadsafetyweek.org.nz/action-pack to register to get a free e-action pack. This will include downloadable posters to display during the week, activity ideas and resources, advice on taking part, and case studies of what other educators have done in previous years.

This year Brake is encouraging early years educators to hold a Beep Beep! Day, a fun road

48 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

safety day that teaches key, basic road safety messages to children aged 2-7, and also engages their parents and community. The next national Beep Beep! Day takes place during Road Safety Week, on Wednesday 8 May, with childcare centres around the country taking part.

Primary and secondary educators can find lots of suggestions for activities linked to lessons on the Road Safety Week web pages, from challenging students to devise their own road safety campaign, to learning about road safety as part of science, drama or other lessons.

Brake is also encouraging fundraising as part of Road Safety Week, through Bright Days or other fundraising activities. A Bright Day involves everyone coming in dressed in their brightest clothes in return for a donation to Brake, whilst helping to remind drivers to look out for people on foot or bike. More fundraising ideas can be found at www.brake.org.nz/fundraise.

Caroline Perry, Brake’s NZ Director said: “Road safety is a crucial issue for children and parents, and educators can play a key role in helping to reduce the risks children, young people and families face – by teaching road safety and raising awareness of local issues.

“Children and young people all have ideas to contribute on the dangers of roads and solutions for making them safer. They, along with the educators supporting them, have a great opportunity through Road Safety Week to speak up about the road safety issues that affect them.

Through road safetycampaigns, which they can devise, they have the opportunity to explore and improve their own safety, while also meeting important curriculum goals. I urge all schools and childcare centres to register today and get your free action pack.”

Brake is a national road safety charity that promotes road safety and campaigns against the carnage on New Zealand roads. It does this by running a number of initiatives including a service for fleet and road safety professionals. Brake coordinates national Road Safety Week each May. It is also fundraising to improve support for families bereaved and injured in road crashes.

>Back to index

Behavioral disorders in kids with autism linked to reduced brain connectivity

By Kendall Teare

For the first time, Yale researchers have identified a possible biological cause: a key mechanism that regulates emotion functions differently in the brains of the children who exhibit disruptive behavior.

The study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

“Disruptive behaviors such as aggression, irritability, and noncompliance are common in children with autism, and are among the main reasons for psychiatric treatment and even hospitalization,” said Denis Sukhodolsky, senior author and associate professor in the Yale Child Study Center. “Yet, little is known about the biological underpinnings of behavioral problems in children with autism.”

Averaged across all study participants with autism and disruptive behavior, these are the regions of the brain with reduced connectivity to the amygdala, displayed here on a standardized template.

The first of its kind, the Yale study used fMRI scans conducted during an emotion perception task to compare the brain activity of autistic children who do and do not exhibit disruptive behavior. While in the scanner, the children were asked to view pictures of human faces that displayed calm or fearful expressions.

During the task, the researchers found reduced connectivity between the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex — a pathway critical to the regulation of emotion — in the brains of children who exhibit disruptive behavior as compared to the brains of children who do not. “Reduced amygdala-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex functional connectivity was uniquely associated with disruptive behavior but not with severity of social deficits or anxiety, suggesting a distinct brain network that could be separate from core autism symptoms,” explained Karim Ibrahim, first author and postdoctoral fellow in the Sukhodolsky lab.

“This finding points to a brain mechanism of emotion dysregulation in children with autism and offers a potential biomarker for developing targeted treatments for irritability and aggression in autism,” said Sukhodolsky.

Other authors on this study include Jeffrey A. Eilbott, Pamela Ventola, George He, Kevin A. Pelphrey, and Gregory McCarthy.

Funding was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

>Back to index

Yale University Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 49

(Image credit: Karim Ibrahim/Sukhodolsky Lab)

More than a quarter of children with autism spectrum disorder are also diagnosed with disruptive behavior disorders.

Levels of autism in China simi joint Chinese-UK study shows The first large-scale study of autism in China has revealed that around one in a hundred people in China has an autism spectrum condition – the same figure as found in the West.

The research was carried out by an international team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, and the China Disabled Persons’ Federation and Chinese University of Hong Kong.

It is the result of an international partnership launched in 2013.

Autism spectrum conditions – which include autism and Asperger’s syndrome – are characterised by impairments in social interaction and communication, alongside the presence of unusually repetitive behaviour and narrow interests, difficulties adjusting to unexpected change, and sensory hyper-sensitivity.

Autism was first described in Western cultures, and only later recognised in Asian countries.

Around one in 100 school age children in the UK is autistic, but autism prevalence in China has been reported to be lower than in the West.

The reasons for this difference are that most studies in China have only included the special school population, overlooking the mainstream school population; and that most studies in China have not used validated and reliable screening and diagnostic methods.

“Understanding the prevalence of autism is important because of its relevance to planning services to support those living with the condition, as well as their families,” said Professor Carol Brayne from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge (ARC) added: “We need to study autism outside Western populations, since most of the

Contrary to previous studies, we have shown that the prevalence of autism spectrum conditions in China is in line with that found in the West Dr Sophia Xiang Sun 50 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

ilar to the West, s research to date has only been carried out in the West. This collaboration with colleagues in China is so valuable to help us understand what is universal and what is culture-specific in autism research.”

To address the gap in understanding autism in China, the researchers tested the total autism prevalence in mainstream and special schools in Jilin City, and mainstream school autism prevalence in Jiamusi and Shenzhen cities. They screened children aged 6 to 10 years old in the three cities using the Childhood Autism Screening Test (or CAST), a 37-item questionnaire, completed by parents, and developed and validated by the Cambridge team. The questionnaire gives a score of 0 to 31, and children scoring 15 or above were then given a clinical assessment. The results are published in the journal Molecular Autism.

In Jilin City, from a total population of 7,258, the team identified 77 cases of autism, equating to a prevalence of 108 per 10,000, very similar to that found in the West.

In Shenzhen and Jiamusi cities, only data for children in mainstream education was available; in Shenzhen City, 42 out of every 10,000 children in mainstream education had autism, and in Jiamusi City this figure was 19 per 10,000. In all three cities, the researchers identified new cases of autism in mainstream schools, confirming that there is underdiagnosis of autism in China.

“Contrary to previous studies, we have shown that the prevalence of autism spectrum conditions in China is in line with that found in the West,” said Dr Sophia Xiang Sun, who conducted this study as part of her PhD at Cambridge University and who is now based in the Star Kay Bridge Research Centre for Children with Autism in Xiamen, China.

>Back to index

Professor Patrick Leung, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “Previous research into the autism spectrum in China has mainly focused on the most severe subtype, childhood autism. We have been able to use a standardised screening methodology, allowing us to compare the results with Western countries to show that autism occurs broadly at the same rate, irrespective of culture.”

Dr Carrie Allison, from the Cambridge Autism Research Centre, commented: “Completing this study with colleagues in China has been nothing short of remarkable. It has involved translating Western autism screening instruments into Chinese, training Chinese clinicians in autism diagnosis, and working with national Chinese agencies, screening in three Chinese cities.”

Professor Fiona Matthews, the statistician on the Cambridge team and now based in Newcastle University, noted: “A strength of this study is the near universal response rate that is possible in China, which we rarely achieve in the West, making the epidemiology far more representative.”

The research was funded by the Autism Research Trust, the NIHR CLAHRC for East of England, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and the Medical Research Council UK. Reference Xiang Sun et al. Autism prevalence in China is comparable to Western prevalence. Molecular Autism; 28 Feb 2019; DOI: 10.1186/ s13229-018-0246-0

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 51

Girls and Autism Educational, Family and Personal Perspectives Edited by Barry Carpenter, Frances Happé and Jo Egerton Published: Routledge Often thought of as a predominantly ‘male’ disorder, autism has long gone unidentified, unnoticed and unsupported in girls – sometimes with devastating consequences for their social and mental well-being.

As current research reveals a much more balanced male-to-female ratio in autism, this book provides crucial insight into autistic girls’ experiences, helping professionals to recognize, understand, support and teach them effectively.

Drawing on the latest research findings, chapters consider why girls have historically been overlooked by traditional diagnostic approaches, identifying behaviours that may be particular to girls, and exploring the ‘camouflaging’ that can make the diagnosis of autistic girls more difficult.

Chapters emphasize both the challenges and advantages of autism and take a multidisciplinary approach to encompass contributions from autistic girls and women, their family members, teachers, psychologists and other professionals.

52 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

The result is an invaluable source of first-hand insights, knowledge and strategies, which will enable those living or working with girls on the autism spectrum to provide more informed and effective support.

Giving voice to the experiences, concerns, needs and hopes of girls on the autism spectrum, this much-needed text will provide parents, teachers and other professionals with essential information to help them support and teach autistic girls more effectively.

>Back to index

Boo k Review This book provides an excellent combination of personal experience and current research to highlight the importance of understanding girls and women on the autism spectrum. Throughout the chapters the issues of importance that are presented over and over again are about the need to value strengths and individuality; develop relevant strategies; be flexible; and build supportive networks, including ‘true’ friends; to ensure autistic girls grow into strong and selfreliant young women who can be whatever they want to be. I would recommend this book to anyone teaching, working with, or supporting young autistic women, who wants to contribute to their future success.

What stands out most from this new, highly informative and skilfully edited collection are the lived experiences of the contributors; presented as honest and open accounts by girls, young and adult women describing the way autism affects their relationships with the world around them…

For any social worker with an interest in the life course development of girls to adolescents to young adults this book will provide a heartfelt and highly informative insight into the lives of vulnerable and often marginalised females.

Mark Goodman, British Journal of Social Work

Dr Debra Costley, Associate Professor of Education, University of Nottingham, UK. A very well-timed book for the field, it deals a topic that is extremely underrepresented, girls with autism. It offers a thorough exploration of the topic that has a strong foundation in research. It is a very comprehensive analysis, which is particularly powerful when you read the lived experience section. Congratulations to the authors on producing a coherent, engaging and important book.

Phyllis Jones PhD, Professor in the department of Teaching & Learning, University of South Florida, USA. This book is essentially very positive despite the unflinching descriptions of the complexities of life and school and the barriers that exist for girls with autism. It maintains a focus on what is possible and what is achievable even with the current reality for the majority of poorly coordinated support and insufficient services. It is a highly recommended read both for parents and for professionals working in or with schools, colleges, career services, as well as the health and social care sectors.

An excellent book whether you are a researcher, educator or indeed if you have contact with girls who may be on the spectrum, diagnosed or not.

The variety of personal comments and writings are insightful and the refereed papers add significant depth to the subject.

This is a good resource if you have an interest in Autism and helps the reader see and understand how girls on the spectrum can hide their symptoms and adapt to try to fit within their society.

The difference between girls and boys on the spectrum is notable, it is welcome to see it being so holistically highlighted in a specific publication.

Dr Rob Ashdown, Editor, PMLD Link

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 53

For Kids With Anxiety, Parents Lea

The first time Jessica Calise can remember her 9-year-old son Joseph’s anxiety spiking was about a year ago, when he had to perform at a school concert.

He said his stomach hurt and he might throw up. “We spent the whole performance in the bathroom,” she recalls.

After that, Joseph struggled whenever he had to do something alone, like showering or sleeping in his bedroom. He would beg his parents to sit outside the bathroom door or let him sleep in their bed. “It’s heartbreaking to see your child so upset and feel like he’s going to throw up because he’s nervous about something that, in my mind, is no big deal,” Jessica says.

Jessica decided to enroll in an experimental program, one that was very different from other therapy for childhood anxiety that she knew about. It wasn’t Joseph who would be seeing a therapist every week — it would be her.

The program was part of a Yale University study that treated children’s anxiety by teaching their parents new ways of responding to it.

“The parent’s own responses are a core and integral part of childhood anxiety,” says Eli Lebowitz, a psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine who developed the training.

For instance, when Joseph would get scared about sleeping alone, Jessica and her husband, Chris Calise, did what he asked and comforted him. “In my mind, I was doing the right thing,” she says. “I would say, ‘I’m right outside the door’ or ‘Come sleep in my bed.’ I’d do whatever I could to make him feel not anxious or worried.”

Jessica and Chris Calise sit in their living room with their son, Joseph Calise.

54 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

But this comforting — something psychologists call accommodation — can actually be counterproductive for children with anxiety disorders, Lebowitz says.“These accommodations lead to worse anxiety in their child, rather than less anxiety,” he says.

That’s because the child is always relying on the parents, he explains, so kids never learn to deal with stressful situations on their own and never learn they have the ability to cope with these moments.

>Back to index

arn To Let Them Face Their Fears Angus Chen “When you provide a lot of accommodation, the unspoken message is, ‘You can’t do this, so I’m going to help you,’ “ he says.

Lebowitz wondered if it would help to train parents to change that message and to encourage their children to face anxieties rather than flee from them.

Currently the established treatment for childhood anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy delivered directly to the child.

When researchers have tried to involve parents in their child’s therapy in the past, the outcomes from studies suggested that training parents in cognitive behavioral therapy didn’t make much of a difference for the child’s recovery. Lebowitz says that this might be because cognitive behavioral therapy asks the child to change their behavior. “When you ask the parents to change their child’s behavior, you are setting them up for a very difficult interaction,” he says.

Instead, Lebowitz’s research explores whether

training only the parents without including direct child therapy can help. He is running experiments to compare cognitive behavioral therapy for the child with parent-only training. A study of the approach appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry last month.

Jessica Calise received 12 weeks of Lebowitz’s parent training as part of a follow-up study, the results of which are not yet published.

Once a week, she drove from Norwalk, Conn., to Yale University for an hourlong session with a therapist. Like all the parents who went through Lebowitz’s training program, Jessica began forming a plan with the therapist on how she and her husband would stop swooping in when Joseph became anxious.

The key to doing that, Lebowitz says, is to make children feel heard and loved, while using supportive statements to build their confidence.

Parents need to “show their child that they

Joseph Calise, 9, plays on his iPad in his bedroom.

Joseph used to get anxious whenever he was alone, even when taking a shower or at bedtime, so his parents, Jessica and Chris Calise, learned new parenting skills from the Yale Child Study Center.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 55

The next step is to tell children that “they can tolerate that anxiety and they don’t need to be rescued from it.” This helps give them the strength to face their fears, Lebowitz says.

This approach was hard at first, says Joseph’s father, Chris Calise. He’s a construction equipment operator, roughly 6 feet tall, with a frame as solid as brick. “The hardest hump for me was the way I was brought up,” he says, rapping his fingers against the kitchen table. “I always thought the way you do things [is to say], ‘Get over it. You’re fine. Suck it up.’ But it was obvious what we were doing wasn’t working.”

So, the parents committed themselves to a plan to get Joseph to feel comfortable sleeping and showering alone.

“It was baby steps first. I’d say, ‘I’m not going to stay [outside the bathroom], but I’ll come back and check on you in five minutes,’ “ Jessica says.

“Then I would say, ‘I know it’s scary for you, but I know that you can do it. You’re going to do great.’ Just acknowledging the anxiety and providing the reinforcing statement.”

It was slow at first, Jessica says. But each time, as she’d been trained, Jessica would praise Joseph when he managed to pass the time on his own. “[We’d] say like, ‘Wow, you’re a rock star! You were nervous and scared, but you did it, and you

can do it,’ “ she says.

And, slowly, Joseph started to spend longer amounts of time by himself, eventually sleeping on his own all night. “It was about halfway through when you really started noticing big differences,” Chris recalls. “He was becoming more confident. He just did things on his own without us having to ask or tell him.”

Many parents in Lebowitz’s recently published study had a similar experience. Nearly 70 percent of the 64 children who were assigned to the parent-training arm of the experiment had no anxiety by the end of the study.

“It is amazing. It is really exciting. These children had never met a therapist and were as likely to be cured of their anxiety disorder as the children who had 12 sessions of the best therapy available,” Lebowitz says of the results of his recently published study.

The parent training seems to work because it lets children confront their anxieties while parents provide love and support from afar, says Anne Marie Albano, a psychologist at Columbia University who did not work on the study.

“You coach the child a bit but don’t take over. It’s helping the child stumble into their own way of coping and ride whatever wave of anxiety they’re having,” she says. “That ultimately builds their confidence.”

That suggests this parent training has a lot of potential to advance childhood anxiety treatment, Albano says. “It is preliminary, but

All photos: Christopher Capozziello for NPR

understand how terrible it is to feel anxious,” he says. They need to accept that their child is “genuinely anxious and not just being attention seeking,” he adds.

Joseph brushes his teeth before bedtime.

56 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

Jessica Calise checks on Joseph as he gets ready for bed. Joseph used to be afraid to sleep alone, but he has learned to be OK with it since his mother learned new parenting approaches.

this paper is very exciting to me as someone who worked for 30 years in this field,” she says. “This treatment brings in the parents, finally, and focuses on the ways parents need [to stop] taking over, to break the cycle of anxiety in kids.”

Lebowitz’s parent training is theoretically similar to traditional therapy, says Muniya Khanna, a psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and director of the OCD & Anxiety Institute in Philadelphia, who was not involved with the work. “But, this gets at it from a different angle,” she says. “It targets lifestyle change and says, yes, if you change lifestyle and family life, it can have almost the same effect as changing the child’s theoretical understanding about [anxiety].”

Khanna thinks that combining this parent program with traditional therapy might yield even better results, particularly for children who haven’t responded to behavioral therapy alone.

“It’s encouraging for families where kids may not be developmentally or emotionally ready to take on cognitive behavioral therapy,” she says.

The study leaves many unanswered questions, Albano adds. “This is only a short-term outcome.

We need to follow up [with] the kids at six months, 12 months, even several years,” she

>Back to index

says. Not only does it remain to be seen if the benefits from the parent training persist as the child gets older, but more research will also need to be done to see if the same techniques will continue to work as children age into teenagers.

Jessica and Chris Calise say that they even use the techniques they learned through the parenttraining program with Joseph’s twin sister and older brother, Isabella and Nicholas. “It’s important to validate your kids’ feelings and show them that we care,” Jessica says. “I think this taught us to communicate better. I think it made us better parents, quite honestly.”

Joseph says he no longer feels anxiety about being alone. He doesn’t enjoy it, “but I’m OK with it,” he says. He has learned to banish the frightening thoughts that would come when he was by himself and that kept him up at night. “If I get a nightmare, I just change the subject to something happy,” he says. “Then I’m fine.”

New fears come up from time to time — like a recently discovered fear of heights. But with his parents’ support, Joseph says, he’s learning to face these too. “I think I’ll be OK,” he says. “I’ll just try to do it.”

Angus Chen is a reporter based in New York City.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 57

Report examines origins and nature of ‘maths anxiety’ A report out today examines the factors that influence ‘maths anxiety’ among primary and secondary school students, showing that teachers and parents may inadvertently play a role in a child’s development of the condition, and that girls tend to be more affected than boys.

The report was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, with additional support from the James S McDonnell Foundation.

The UK is facing a maths crisis: according to a 2014 report from National Numeracy, four out of five adults have low functional mathematics skills compared to fewer than half of UK adults having low functional literacy levels.

While mathematics is often considered a hard subject, not all difficulties with the subject result from cognitive difficulties. Many children and adults experience feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a maths problem.

A report published today by the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge explores the nature and resolution of so-called ‘mathematics anxiety’.

Origins of maths anxiety In a sample of 1,000 Italian students, the researchers found that girls in both primary and secondary school had higher levels of both maths anxiety and general anxiety.

More detailed investigation in 1,700 UK schoolchildren found that a general feeling that maths was more difficult than other subjects often contributed to maths anxiety, leading to a lack or loss of confidence. Students pointed to poor marks or test results, or negative comparisons to peers or siblings as reasons for feeling anxious.

“While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students that we interviewed,” says Dr Denes Szucs from the Department of Psychology, the study’s lead author.

58 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Students often discussed the role that their teachers and parents played in their development of maths anxiety. Primary-aged children referred to instances where they had been confused by different teaching methods, while secondary students commented on poor interpersonal relations.

Secondary students indicated that the transition from primary to secondary school had been a cause of maths anxiety, as the work seemed harder and they couldn’t cope. There was also greater pressure from tests – in particular, SATS – and an increased homework load.

Relationship between maths anxiety and performance In a study published in 2018, the researchers showed that it is not only children with low maths ability who experience maths anxiety – more than three-quarters (77%) of children with high maths anxiety are normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests.

“Because these children perform well at tests, their maths anxiety is at high risk of going unnoticed by their teachers and parents, who may only look at performance but not at emotional factors,” says Dr Amy Devine, the 2018 study’s first author, who now works for Cambridge Assessment English. “But their anxiety may keep these students away from STEM fields for life when in fact they would be perfectly able to perform well in these fields.”

However, it is almost certainly the case that in the long term, people with greater maths anxiety perform worse than their true maths ability.

Today’s report includes a review of existing research literature that shows that this can lead to a vicious circle: maths anxiety leading to poorer performance and poorer performance increasing maths anxiety.

Recommendations The researchers set out a number of recommendations in the report. These include the need for teachers to be conscious that an individual’s maths anxiety likely affects their

>Back to index

While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students.

Denes Szucs mathematics performance. Teachers and parents also need to be aware that their own maths anxiety might influence their students’ or child’s maths anxiety and that gendered stereotypes about mathematics suitability and ability might contribute to the gender gap in maths performance.

“Teachers, parents, brothers and sisters and classmates can all play a role in shaping a child’s maths anxiety,” adds co-author Dr Ros McLellan from the Faculty of Education. “Parents and teachers should also be mindful of how they may unwittingly contribute to a child’s maths anxiety.

Tackling their own anxieties and belief systems in maths might be the first step to helping their children or students.”

The researchers say that as maths anxiety is present from a young age but may develop as the child grows, further research should be focused on how maths anxiety can be best remediated before any strong link with performance begins to emerge.

“Our findings should be of real concern for educators. We should be tackling the problem of maths anxiety now to enable these young people to stop feeling anxious about learning mathematics and give them the opportunity to flourish,” says Dr Szucs. “If we can improve a student’s experience within their maths lessons, we can help lessen their maths anxiety, and in turn this may increase their overall maths performance.”

Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “Mathematical achievement is valuable in its own right, as a foundation for many

>Back to index

other subjects and as an important predictor of future academic outcomes, employment opportunities and even health. Maths anxiety can severely disrupt students’ performance in the subject in both primary and secondary school. But importantly - and surprisingly - this new research suggests that the majority of students experiencing maths anxiety have normal to high maths ability.

We hope that the report’s recommendations will inform the design of school and home-based interventions and approaches to prevent maths anxiety developing in the first place.”

Background Researchers worked with more than 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy to examine both maths anxiety and general anxiety, and gain a measure of mathematics performance.

They then worked one-to-one with the children to gain a deeper understanding of their cognitive abilities and feelings towards mathematics.

This is the first interview-based study of its kind to compare the mathematics learning experiences of a relatively large sample of students identified as mathematics anxious with similar children that are not mathematics anxious. Although further indepth studies are needed to substantiate and expand upon this work, the findings indicate that the mathematics classroom is a very different world for children that are mathematics anxious compared to those that are not.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 59

Credit: Steve Zylius/UC Irvine

Getty Images/UC Irvine

Growin

The interdisciplinary researchers at the Connected Learning Lab seek to better understand how adolescents are using digital technology and then leverage that information to improve educational approaches.

Today’s U.S. teens are more connected — to the internet, information and each other — than any previous generation, with 95 percent having access to a smartphone and 45 percent saying that they’re online “almost constantly,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Our research shows that young people learn best when actively engaged, creating and solving problems they care about, and when they are supported by peers who appreciate and recognize their accomplishments, says Connected Learning Lab director Mimi Ito. Scientists, educators and parents may well wonder about the effects the digital age is having on the nation’s youth. And with technology changing so rapidly, can the research keep up?

That’s the aim of the Connected Learning Lab in the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology at UC Irvine, where interdisciplinary researchers are putting their heads together to better understand how young people are using digital technology and then leverage Mimi Ito that information to improve 60 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

educational approaches. Twelve faculty — across informatics, education, anthropology, psychology and the humanities — bring their own research, specialized knowledge and students to the task.

Cultural anthropologist and informatics professorin-residence Mimi Ito directs the lab. She studies technology use by youth, examining their changing relationships to media and communications. With multimillion-dollar funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ito has spent the past 10 years constructing a framework around the idea of connected learning, and she has helped recruit other researchers with interests in this area to UC Irvine, building a critical mass of expertise for the new lab.

“With these new hires, UC Irvine has positioned itself in the forefront of national efforts to improve youth outcomes with technologically enhanced educational opportunities,” says Richard Arum, dean of the School of Education, CLL faculty member and an authority on the legal and institutional environments of schools, social stratification and digital education. “I am grateful for the opportunity to be engaged with this exceptional group of scholars.”

Arum was part of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network, a broader coalition of experts across the country chaired by Ito. Their work has found that the sweet spot for learning is where a person’s interests, relationships and opportunities intersect, often with the support of digital media.

>Back to index

ng up digital “Our research shows that young people learn best when actively engaged, creating and solving problems they care about, and when they are supported by peers who appreciate and recognize their accomplishments,” Ito says.

She and a team of others are helping define the way kids use media, parsing what it means to hang out, mess around and geek out online.

Ito says that researchers from the lab will explore everything from social, emotional and cultural factors to the technology and such concerns as educational inequality. “We do a lot of work in the education sciences, technology studies, humancomputer interaction and so on to understand learning dynamics,” she says, “but we also bring in a lot of social science to look at issues of equity, inclusion and barriers.”

Another CLL faculty member, Candice Odgers, explains that researchers want to determine how to leverage new technologies and build supportive environments in a manner that will decrease inequality instead of amplifying it.

“We have the largest world population ever of adolescents: 1.8 billion. And this group is very digitally connected,” notes Odgers, a UC Irvine professor of psychological science who studies adolescents’ mental health and development.

She points out that although one in three users of the internet is younger than 18, cyberspace isn’t geared toward them. “We really need to think about not only how youth are shaped by their experiences in the online world, but how the online world can be designed in ways that could be more supportive or that could reduce these inequalities that we are seeing,” she says.

Decreasing digital inequity Ito and Odgers, along with collaborators from UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto, recently received $65,000 in funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research to lead a series of workshops focused on decreasing digital inequity and enhancing inclusion via smart design and developmental science.

According to Odgers, who started tracking kids with cellphones 10 years ago, many adolescents are actually thriving in the digital age. “We see high

>Back to index

By Lori Brandt

rates of high school graduation and declining rates of things like teen pregnancy, alcohol consumption and violence,” she says. “So most kids are doing well. Even in cases where young people seem to be struggling a bit more, like with mental health, we don’t find evidence that smartphones are to blame.

People really want to blame the devices, so it’s important to understand what the real effects are.”

She says there’s better data today on digital technology and kids — and it’s becoming more nuanced. For instance, all youth, but especially those from low-income families, are increasingly connecting to the online world and their social networks via smartphones and mobile devices.

They spend, on average, three more hours a day on a device than children from high-income families, and that time is spent a bit differently. Kids in high-income environments devote a larger portion of their time to searching for information or doing things considered educational as opposed to entertaining.

Another interesting finding, from Ito, is that young people today have grown up consuming the media of their choice — self-selecting their news — unlike previous generations who grew up watching the evening news on live television. This influences how people form political opinions or decide what is factual and who is an authority.

“This trend has been going on for some time, and it means that interpersonal and social relationships drive belief systems in a much more profound way than an environment where you still had this bullpen of common media culture,” Ito says.

“Often, these broader implications are things that are difficult to anticipate until you’ve seen the ripple effects play out.”

Odgers characterizes the phenomenon this way: “The genie is out of the bottle.” The digital revolution, the information age and the ultraconnected, socially networked teen are all part of today’s world. She hopes that with the CLL at Calit2, “we can forge new collaborations; advance research faster than we would be able to in our own school environments; and serve as a real resource for this campus, the UC system and the world on a topic that’s just exploding and ()with which) science is struggling to keep pace.”

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 61

The Global Search for Education: Fe

“Our Riverside school uses a curriculum that we call ‘Humane’, and the 5 E’s that shape our curriculum are Empathy, Ethics, Excellence, Elevation and Evolution” – Kiran Bir Sethi

Children are the future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.

Since 2009, Design for Change, based in India, has focused on creating learning environments that balance academic programs with character development.

Their program focuses on problem-solving and critical thinking skills combined with teaching strategies that promote empathy.

Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of Design for Change, believes an “I can” mindset will always empower students to do their best work.

62 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

Her 4-step ‘Feel, Imagine, Do, Share’ framework (FIDS) is designed to foster imagination and innovation. The FIDS toolkit was first launched in 10 Indian languages and sent to 30,000 schools across India. Its unique value proposition, according to Kiran, positioned children as “our today,” i.e. they have “all the ingredients to make the world a better place.” What happened next?

The Global Search for Education is pleased to welcome Kiran Bir Sethi to discuss just that.

A hands-on course at the GSE had Stanford undergraduates designing and field-testing new concussion education tools for high school students.

>Back to index

eel, Imagine, Do, Share!

By C. M. Rubin

How “big” is your program currently – how many schools, communities, and leaders are involved, and where are they based?

Design for Change currently is in over 65 countries. We have reached around 60,000 schools in those 65 countries. Our group is primarily children between the ages of 8 and 13 because we believe that’s where you can plant the seeds of empathy and action. They are cut across all kinds of school profiles, rural, urban, semi-urban, as well as special needs, so you find that Design For Change and FIDS framework are versatile and can fit into any context.

What excites you most about your curriculum?

What feedback do you get from schools?

What excites me when I see how Design for Change is being implemented across the world is that when children are listened to and given that respect, we see them take ownership for the change and in that we see them design with communities rather than for. Our Riverside school uses a curriculum that we call ‘Humane’, and the 5 E’s that shape our curriculum are Empathy, Ethics, Excellence, Elevation and Evolution. This curriculum is actioned through the ‘Feel, Imagine, Do, Share’ framework. At Riverside, it is immersive and is co-created with children in a regular, iterative process. Design for Change uses just the framework to plant the seed.

“Any child can unleash the ‘I CAN’ superpower.” – Kiran Bir Sethi

The Design Factory team that took part in the Rat Relay recently.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 63

“The world needs more empathetic citizens.” – Kiran Bir Sethi Please tell us a story of HOW the program unleashes the “I CAN superpower”.

Here are some case studies from DFC: Students stand-up for Equality in Rajasthan Satya Bharti School, Labana, Rajasthan Not content to allow injustice to persist just because it has persisted for ages, the young change-makers of Satya Bharti School in Labana, Rajasthan, helped to fight a problem that has loomed large in Indian society since time immemorial. Convinced of the importance of equality even at their tender age, these students were staunchly opposed to the practice of untouchability in their village.

With help from their teacher, they planned to meet the children of Harijan (untouchable) families and spend time with them, playing and eating together, to spread their message of equality and dignity. Many of their elders disapproved strongly of allowing the untouchable families to participate in village events and permitting their children to attend

64 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

regular schools. In response, the children undertook tasks like sweeping roads, cleaning, and other menial tasks that were primarily performed by Harijan children. The children asked their parents to mistreat them just as they mistreat the Harijan children and did not allow their parents to touch them.

To make a larger appeal, the children marched through the village chanting Gandhian principles of equality and mutual respect. The children sat through a one-day-long, silent, hunger strike and went back home only after the village authorities softened and agreed to discuss equal treatment of Harijan families.

The children made their elders hug the Harijan families, an action that marks an amazing beginning to this story of change in this village.

I Want to Feel your Face You are not only a voice to me anymore

>Back to index

Design for Change, Taiwan Advisors: Jia-Yan Feng, Ya-Feng Liu Zhang Tuo Ye from National Taipei University of Education Experimental Elementary School and Xie Zhng Zhe, Deng Cheng Ping, and Chen Si Hao from Taipei Municipal Jen Ai Junior High School discovered that their visually impaired friend, Jack, wanted to “see” his friends’ appearance by touching their faces but he was too shy to express his wishes. Some of Jack’s friends were willing to let Jack touch their faces to “see” their appearance, too. Hence, Tuo Ye and his friends started to help Jack to realize his dream. Tuo Ye guided Jack to express his thoughts by sending handmade cards to the classmates, and he received a lot of positive feedback in return. Two classmates were also willing to be interviewed by Tuo Ye about their feelings. After the interviews, Tuo Ye made more cards for Jack to send out.

People who even didn’t receive Jack’s invitations came to him and told Jack that they wanted him to touch their faces!

What do you see as your major accomplishments to date and what are your goals for Design for Change in the next five years?

The framework has allowed so many schools and teachers to get excited that they can. While this has been great for children, which is a nobrainer, what has been fantastic and most gratifying to see is that around the world, it has gone to every kind of country, every context, which means that this works in all contexts. So, we feel excited any child can unleash the ‘I CAN’ superpower. That is what the world needs; the world needs more empathetic citizens.

In 2019, we are plan to take 4000 of these superheroes who’ve made the world a better place and their solutions to be hosted in Rome by the Vatican. As for our goals, we’re only in 65 countries right now, and in the next five years, we’d like to get to 108!

From this activity, the students also found out that, surprisingly, Jack had never touched his mother’s face before, and they arranged the event for him. It brought Jack and his mother much closer.

The participants believe that the Taiwanese nation is shy, and yet they made over two hundred cards to send to the Cultural and Educational Foundation for the Blind with a hope that they could help more blind people to shorten their distance with others.

>Back to index

C M Rubin and Kiran Bir Sethi

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 65

New wetland classroom brings s

66 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

science to life Flinders University PhD student Peter Reeve tests the water at Oaklands Wetland.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 67

A new classroom at Oaklands Wetland is bringing science to life for high school and university students with hands-on experience of stormwater testing and monitoring.

The Oaklands Education Centre is the first university-led laboratory in South Australia for schools, government agencies and environmental groups to conduct practical water experiments while learning how wetlands work.

The $200,000 partnership between the City of Marion and Flinders University will also see testing methods developed to monitor the quality of stormwater due to be fed to the nearby Tonsley Innovation District to irrigate plants, run air conditioning, and flush toilets.

The centre contains a classroom for up to 25 students, a field station with direct access to the wetland, and kitchen.

Marion Mayor Mr Kris Hanna said the centre was a welcome addition to the site.

“Marion is the new home for education, research and studies into wetlands,” Mayor Hanna said.

“Students, environmental groups and researchers now have access to a new facility that will improve understanding of how to make the best use of our most precious resource.

The Oaklands Education Centre is the first university-led laboratory in South Australia for 68 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

schools, government agencies and environmental groups to conduct practical water experiments while learning how wetlands work.

“The Oaklands Education Centre combines with the adjacent skate park, rotunda, trike track and wetland to be a drawcard for the region. The site is bringing people of all ages close to nature to learn, relax and have fun.”

Flinders University water expert Professor Howard Fallowfield, an aquatic microbial ecologist who lectures in environmental health at the College of Science and Engineering, says the new centre provides an opportunity for schools, community groups and researchers to get a better understanding of how wetlands can reduce water pollution and offer benefits for nearby communities.

“These facilities are free to use and give our researchers

> Back to index

practical opportunities to conduct research which ensures wetland water is safe for its intended use in the City of Marion,” says Professor Fallowfield.

a free community event also featuring the ‘unveiling’ of the new $640,000 rotunda and precinct funded by the Marion Council and the State Government.

“In an SA first, the new centre also offers the unique opportunity for high school classes to be led by our PhD students using modules designed for the SACE curriculum. They will have the ability to tailor packages to the educational needs of students in years 9 -12.

Completed in 2013, Oaklands Wetland is fully operational facility and treats up to 400 million litres of stormwater each year.

“Hopefully this positive first-hand experience in the field inspires more students to consider future tertiary education and career pathways in STEM sciences.”

Stormwater treated at the wetland is used to irrigate more than 30 council reserves.

Completed in 2013, Oaklands Wetland is fully operational facility and treats up to 400 million litres of stormwater each year.

The Oaklands Education Centre, located at 237265 Oaklands Road at Oaklands Park, next to the Warradale Army Barracks, officially opened with

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 69

Stanford experiment finds humans be Three high schoolers and a Stanford lab found that, when file size is restricted, humans are better at representing images than traditional algorithms.

Your friend texts you a photo of the dog she’s about to adopt but all you see is a tan, vaguely animalshaped haze of pixels. To get you a bigger picture, she sends the link to the dog’s adoption profile because she’s worried about her data limit. One click and your screen fills with much more satisfying descriptions and images of her best-friend-to-be.

Given the image on the left, two study participants made the reconstruction on the right. People preferred their reconstruction to the image at the center, a highly compressed version of the original with a file size equal to the amount of data the participants used to make their reconstruction. (Image credit: Ashutosh Bhown, Soham Mukherjee and Sean Yang) Sending a link instead of uploading a massive image is just one trick humans use to convey information without burning through data. In fact, these tricks might inspire an entirely new class of image compression algorithms, according to research by a team of Stanford University engineers and high school students.

The researchers asked people to compare images produced by a traditional compression algorithm

70 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

that shrink huge images into pixilated blurs to those created by humans in data-restricted conditions – text-only communication, which could include links to public images. In many cases, the products of human-powered image sharing proved more satisfactory than the algorithm’s work. The researchers will present their work March 28 at the 2019 Data Compression Conference.

“Almost every image compressor we have today is evaluated using metrics that don’t necessarily represent what humans value in an image,” said Irena Fischer-Hwang, a graduate student in electrical engineering and co-author of the paper.

“It turns out our algorithms have a long way to go and can learn a lot from the way humans share information.”

The project resulted from a collaboration between researchers led by Tsachy Weissman, professor of electrical engineering, and three high school students who interned in his lab.

“Honestly, we came into this collaboration aiming to give the students something that wouldn’t distract too much from ongoing research,” said Weissman. “But they wanted to do more, and that chutzpah led to a paper and a whole new research thrust for the group. This could very well become among the most exciting projects I’ve ever been involved in.”

>Back to index

eat algorithms at image compression

By Taylor Kubota

A less lossy image Converting images into a compressed format, such as a JPEG, makes them significantly smaller, but loses some detail – this form of conversion is often called “lossy” for that reason. The resulting image is lower quality because the algorithm has to sacrifice details about color and luminance in order to consume less data. Although the algorithms retain enough detail for most cases, Weissman’s interns thought they could do better.

In their experiments, two students worked together remotely to recreate images using free photo editing software and public images from the internet. One person in the pair had the reference image and guided the second person in reconstructing the photo. Both people could see the reconstruction in progress but the describer could only communicate over text while listening to their partner speaking.

The eventual file size of the reconstructed image was the compressed size of the text messages sent by the describer because that’s what would be required to recreate that image. (The group didn’t include audio information.)

The students then pitted the human reconstructions against machine-compressed images with file sizes that equaled those of reconstruction text files. So, if a human team created an image with only 2 kilobytes of text, they compressed the original file to the same size. With access to the original images, 100 people outside the experiments rated the human reconstruction better than the machine-based compression on 10 out of 13 images.

Blurry faces OK When the original images closely matched public images on the internet, such as a street intersection, the human-made reconstructions performed particularly well. Even the reconstructions that combined various images often did well, except in cases that featured human faces. The researchers didn’t ask their judges to explain their ranking but they have some ideas about the disparities they found.

the image wasn’t blurry, which means traditional compression ranked lower,” said Shubham Chandak, a graduate student in Weissman’s group and co-author of the paper. “But for human faces, people would rather have the same face even if it’s blurry.”

This apparent weakness in the human-based image sharing would improve as more people upload images of themselves to the internet. The researchers are also teaming up with a police sketch artist to see how his expertise might make a difference. Even though this work shows the value of human input, the researchers would eventually try to automate the process.

“Machine learning is working on bits and parts of this, and hopefully we can get them working together soon,” said Kedar Tatwawadi, a graduate student in Weissman’s group and co-author of the paper. “It seems like a practical compressor that works with this kind of ideology is not very far away.”

Calling all students Weissman stressed the value of the high school students’ contribution, even beyond this paper.

“Tens if not hundreds of thousands of human engineering hours went into designing an algorithm that three high schoolers came and kicked its butt,” said Weissman. “It’s humbling to consider how far we are in our engineering.”

Due to the success of this collaboration, Weissman has created a formal summer internship program in his lab for high schoolers. Imagining how an artist or students interested in psychology or neuroscience could contribute to this work, he is particularly keen to bring on students with varied interests and backgrounds.

Lead authors of this paper are Ashutosh Bhown of Palo Alto High School, Soham Mukherjee of Monta Vista High School and Sean Yang of Saint Francis High School.

Weissman is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Stanford Compression Forum and Google.

“In some scenarios, like nature scenes, people A Kiribati at their local medical clinic. didn’t mindfamily if the trees were a little different or the giraffe was a different giraffe. They cared more that

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 71

Things I Learned While Writing My First Since last September, I’ve been all Morning, noon, and night, I poured over my book, determined to meet the February manuscript deadline. As of February 28 at 3:00, I met that deadline–nay, I SLAYED that deadline!

–and I learned a few things whilst slaying. Allow me to share my findings:

Writing makes me fat. I’ve gained at least seven pounds and it would’ve been more had we not adopted a puppy who enjoys her daily walks. My virtual teaching gig is sedentary to begin with, then I added a whole bunch of writing on top of it and YIKES. My jeans are very unhappy with me right now Also? I’m kinda ewww. Working from home means I don’t have to look nice. I don’t have to put on make-up (read: wash my face) or put on real clothes (read: change out of my pajamas) or take the time to get public-ready (read: brush my teeth before noon). At this point in time I would like to issue a heartfelt apology to those with whom I came in close contact at preschool drop-off and pick-up. Especially during that stretch in December where I wore the same PJ pants for a week straight.

Though gross, it was was actually convenient because then I didn’t have to change for bed. Speaking of…

Writing a book is hella exhausting.

Though my body was not taxed in the least, my brain was so beat by the end of every day, I collapsed into bed by 9pm every night, dead to the world until morning. Now that I think about it, writing a book actually helped me sleep better. WAIT. Someone tell the doctors I just cured insomnia!!!

Before the book, I had been working out every morning. Since the book, NOT SO MUCH. As a result, my body aches and I feel weak. Oh, and I’ve 72 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

mentioned the fat. I’m back at it starting tomorrow (lies: Monday) because I think that whole “use it or lose it” saying is true and I’m skeered. #HusbandWTF offered to set up one of those treadmill desks in our office, but I think he just said it so I would stop crying.

In addition to muscle mass, I lost oh so many brain cells. I literally ached over a single sentence for 48-hours.

Between word choice and syntax, punctuation and rhythm, I just couldn’t get that SOB exactly how I wanted it. I would forget simple words and end up Googling, “What’s a synonym for difficult?” and subsequently feel like a moron. This mostly happened when I started what I now refer to as the “departure.”

I was originally tapped for this book because my “personality in writing” caught the right person’s eye. It’s a huge compliment, one I don’t take lightly, but it ended up cursing me.

There were times I’d get a whole essay down and then re-read it the next day like, “Who the eff wrote this? It sounds like a research paper and NO.” The departure from what landed me a book deal in the first place really started messing with me. I secondguessed all the things: a phrase, a comma, WHAT’S A SYNONYM FOR DIFFICULT. I lost my voice a few times, believing I had to be more scholarly or whatever since the book is about education. Even though the topic is serious, my tone and stories are not necessarily…professional? So throughout the entire writing process, I had to keep reminding myself to be ME: honest, irreverent, and pull no punches when it comes to the hard stuff. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s

>Back to index

t Book okay.

I wasn’t surprised to realize this next thing because I always feel like this about something I write, and most other writers (authors–SQUEE!) agree: it’s never done. We always find something we want to change or update, always working to improve.

What I was pleasantly surprised to learn is I LOVE the revision process! I would like to teach a class dedicated solely to The Revision. It’s heavenly.

Whenever Jenna, my editor, would send her edits, it was like Christmas morning! I’d open up the document, read through her comments, and strangely never feel insulted. I’m protective of my word babies, but I know Jenna is on my team and together, we nurtured those babies.

About those words: I’m a wee bit scared to share them. Publishing a book makes me feel naked. It’s a one-stop shop peek into my head, which will definitely offend and shock some who are more pinkies-up than middlefingers up. The book is my first impression and, in some cases, only impression. People will judge my writing (and let’s be honest: ME) by a single piece of work. Makes me vulnerable. Makes me sweaty. At the same time, though…

That’s some exciting stuff right there!

Also exciting (and humbling and wonderful and amazing and OMG you guys!) is the way my people rallied around me. #HusbandWTF was so patient and supportive, though he would interrupt my flow at the worst times and I kinda wanted to murder him in his sleep: Me: *furiously typing, in the zone, feeling the flow*

>Back to index

Stephanie Jankowski

Husband: *sits down beside me to watch a YouTube video on youth basketball drills at volume one million*

Generally speaking, my kids were all meh. If I got excited, they would humor me and jump up and down clapping their hands (except my almost 10-year-old son; he’d shrug his shoulders and gift me a “that’s cool.”

BUT I’LL TAKE IT).

My parents and brother helped with the kids when I needed it and my mom especially let me call her and read the passages I was struggling with.

I must’ve read her the same sentence written five different ways and she never once said, “you’re psychotic,” and I appreciate that about her.

My sweet friends cheered me on the whole time. They checked in, asked about the book, offered to help so many times. And the day I submitted my manuscript, I was showered with congratulations and love. I mean, I’ll write a book every month with this kind of treatment!

Looking ahead, I’ll enter into that heavenly space of revisions one a last time, and then some line-by-line editing will take place. We’ll finalize the book cover (I have a book cover!) and then I’ll begin badgering everyone I know in real life and online to preorder and spread the word!

That’s a good word, badger. People don’t use it nearly enough.

Hey there, I’m Steph! English teacher by trade, smack-talker by nature, and mother of three who lives by the mantra: Life is too short, laugh! I hope you’ll stick around and check out my stuff. And by stuff I mean my writing.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 73

I Paint The ‘Missing Parts’ For Objects An I’m an artist, drawer and painter based in Lille, France.

A few years ago, I started drawing on paper, using different tools such as pencils or Rotring pens.

At first, it was cool but I wanted to go further. I decided to go out of my usual workplace and find something new.

I played with lines and shapes, drew different things surrounding me and focused on giving reality a new sense.

boredpanda.com 74 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

nd Things That I Find In My Environment By ​Loïs Low Honestly, it was a revelation! I must admit that there was much work to do but I really enjoyed it.

Sometimes I visit places and different things or objects give me the idea of the drawing, sometimes I draw something and then

>Back to index

decide to combine with a particular place or object.

I hope you will enjoy my art and my ‘mises en situations’! Thank you Bored Panda for the excellent opportunity to share my artwork!

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 75

76 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 77

78 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 79

80 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 81

Education creates opportunity for s Teaching in a school with a mission When Eddie Woo and Annabelle Chauncy sat next to each other, their connection was instant. But it wasn’t chemistry, it was mathematics that linked them, and a plan to educate some of the most disadvantaged children in Uganda.

You don’t hear the word kismet used a lot these days. But when Annabelle Chauncy (BA ’07, LLB ’10) and Eddie Woo (BEd(Second)(Math) ’08) sat next to each other at the 2017 Alumni Awards, kismet was definitely involved.

They were both there as award winners: Chauncy, for building and operating community schools in Uganda; Woo, for his achievements as one of Australia’s most influential and effective mathematics teachers.

Chauncy remembers them bonding almost instantly over their passion for education. “By the end of the awards night I think I already had him booked on a plane to come over to Uganda,” she says.

It’s a long way from the leafy Sydney suburb of Cherrybrook, where Woo teaches at Cherrybrook Technology High School, to the Ugandan capital of Kampala. Not unexpectedly, the always engaging and animated Woo, is across the numbers.

“It’s a country of 44 million people in an area the size of Victoria,” he says. “Talk about an energetic place. Everyone hustling, everyone trying to get by.”

Driving just 20 minutes out of Kampala, things quickly become very different. There are few actual towns but the verdant country is dotted with small properties where subsistence farmers grow food for their families, with hopefully some

Eddie Woo and Annabelle Chauncy, a powerhouse team in the classroom

82 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

students in Uganda

The speculative drawings that Chauncy used to raise the early funds are now fully realised educational facilities.

left to sell. The mud huts where most of them live have no running water, no electricity. Most travel is done by foot.

It was in a rural area even further out that Chauncy chose to build her first school. How that happened is a story she now finds hard to believe, herself.

While studying law, Chauncy decided to take a break by volunteering to teach English in Kenya.

Her timing wasn’t great. While she was there, an election was called and the country descended into chaos. She remembers holding a phone out of a window so her mother, at the family home in the peaceful Southern Highlands of NSW, could hear the machine gun fire.

Chauncy was evacuated to Uganda but rather than head back to Australia, she decided to see what she could do in this new country. She quickly felt a connection with the place and the people.

“I had a very immersive experience, living in villages with local people who would quite literally give you the shirts off their backs,” she says. “They also had this real desire to improve themselves.”

>Back to index

It struck Chauncy early on how transformative an education could be for the children in these poor areas. For example, English is the national and business language of Uganda. If you don’t speak it, and many rural people don’t, you are unemployable. You survive rather than flourish.

With her travel partner, David Everett, Chauncy decided to raise money back in Australia to build a school. It was a standing start. They had nothing more to shop around than a written proposal and a drawing of what a school might look like.

“We were 21, all passion and naivety, and next to no experience in life,” she remembers. “But I say to everyone that my law degree set me up to know how to operate in the world.”

Just over 10 years later, after navigating steep learning curves, government-level meetings, an arduous building process and tireless fundraising, there are now two primary schools and a high school. Altogether, about 680 students attend what is now called the School for Life, for free.

“Lots of them have never held a pen or pencil before. It’s a big deal for their parents to let them be educated, because it means one less family member working on the farm,” says Chauncy.

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 83

“We feed them. We give them a uniform, and we teach them everything they need to be successful.�

As Anabelle Chauncy was opening her first Ugandan school, Eddie Woo was in Australia going against family expectations to become a

mathematics teacher. He excelled from the start, but what really put him on the world map was, for Woo, a typically compassionate and practical gesture.

In 2012, when one of his students was missing school because of serious illness, Woo started

He was there to teach the teachers, but Woo was a hit with the students as well.

84 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

recording his maths lessons on his phone and uploading them to YouTube for his student to watch remotely.

The student wasn’t the only one who tuned in. In fact, so many others did the same that the WooTube channel was born. At the time of writing, the channel has had more than 28 million views, and 519,000 subscribers worldwide, who are learning from Woo that maths isn’t just graspable; it’s fun.

Woo himself is so thrilled that he’s chosen not to make WooTube a commercial venture. “If a 14-year-old wants to watch a video about maths, the last thing I want to do is give them time to change their mind by making them watch an ad,” he says.

As his profile increased to the extent that he was being recognised in the street, Woo seized the opportunity to promote not just maths but better ways of teaching it. His achievements have been widely awarded, including as a finalist in the prestigious Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize, essentially placing him among the top 10 teachers in the world.

Such a passionate believer in the power of education was always going to be shocked by the education sector in Uganda.

When Chauncy took Woo to see a Ugandan government school, she saw the effect it had on him. “Eddie was deeply, deeply moved by the situation the teachers are in,” she says quietly. “I really mean it when I say that you can see pain in their eyes. You can see they’re almost helpless.”

Woo adds: “The schools are simply not resourced; some don’t even have electricity. And the teachers don’t get paid. Most I spoke to hadn’t been paid for two or three months. So what Annabelle has been able to achieve with School for Life is just astonishing. In educational terms, it’s an oasis dropped into the middle of nowhere.”

Western teachers have been a rarity at the School for Life because Chauncy wants to empower the local people – her entire teaching staff is Ugandan. But Woo offered a singular opportunity for professional development and easily fitted into the school community.

“The teachers were just lapping up the time they spent with Eddie,” Chauncy says. “And the kids loved him – they were calling him Eddie Whoa!”

“My day was about one-fifth observing a teacher and four-fifths running classes with teachers watching me,” Woo says. “Then I’d run a professional development session with the teachers for about two and a half hours. The thing is, I spent four years at university studying learning theory. They’ve had nothing even close to that.”

Woo’s time at the School for Life was almost literally a flying visit. He worked at the school for just four days and was operating in jet lag mode the whole time. But he did make a connection with Joseph Kaabunga, the School for Life head teacher.

“Joseph satisfies all the criteria of being a highly accomplished teacher,” Woo says admiringly. “He asked me how I come up with my stuff. I’d brought lots of reading material with me, including an Adam Spencer (BA ’92) book about maths. It’s a book I turn to for inspiration. I gave it to Joseph, for him and the other teachers to use. It brought him to tears. It was a very profound moment.”

A first for Eddie Woo Often called “Australia’s most famous maths teacher”, Eddie Woo has just been made the first ever Education Ambassador for the University of Sydney, through the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The role will see him partner with the University in promoting the importance of education and inspiring Australia’s future teaching professionals.

Eddie Woo and the school creating opportunities The 17 hectare School for Life property (bought with the money raised in Australia by Chauncy and Everett) is about a 90-minute drive from Kampala (or nearly five hours, if you leave at the wrong time on a Friday). The school buildings are sturdy, spacious and built for purpose.

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 85

Urgent need for guidelines to communicate with children about life threatening conditions University of Oxford The global prevalence of life threatening conditions in children and parents makes it an urgent priority to develop child-focused communication guidelines for healthcare professionals to support families in their time of need The Lancet publishes two ground-breaking papers collating evidence and global expertise to derive core communication principles to assist healthcare professionals in communicating with children about their own life threatening condition, or that of a parent.

These papers, led by a team at the University of Oxford, highlight the importance of communicating with families about life threatening conditions in ways that can make a real difference to the traumatic circumstances in which families find themselves.

Professor Alan Stein, senior author and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, University of Oxford, said, “This important Lancet series offers principles to guide conversations between health professionals, children and their parents about life threatening illness. There are huge time pressures on healthcare professionals and concerns about how to get it right for families.”

One of the most daunting challenges that parents and healthcare professionals face is to tell a child that they or their parent has as a life threatening diagnosis. Parents would do almost anything to shield their child from distress, yet sometimes this can’t be avoided. Evidence shows that talking with children about illness helps with family relationships and wellbeing.

Professor Stein continues, “Having guidelines makes it possible for health care professionals with different experience and training in both high, and low and middle income countries, to initiate these critical conversations to provide effective communication with parents and children.”

Sensitive communication and language tailored to the child’s age and understanding matters enormously to children and their families regardless of their life circumstances. Parents are 86 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

understandably uncertain about how, when and what to tell their children about the condition and are fearful of the impact. Yet children are often aware that something is seriously wrong and want honest information. Clearly this will be different for a 6 year old or a 14 year old, so guidelines to enable these critical conversations and provide effective communication with parents and children is key.

The series highlights that: • The moment that the diagnosis is conveyed is often remembered vividly for many years and signals the beginning of a new trajectory for the family.

• When a child has a life threatening condition there are practical reasons why the child should know, for example, if they need to take medicine or cooperate with treatment.

• For the family, being able to talk openly about a life-threatening condition allows them to better support one another and find the help they need.

• When a parent has a life threatening condition children even at a young age notice changes at home and alterations in their parents’ behaviour.

• Children want to know what is going on and in the absence of information they often ‘fill in the blanks’ by themselves to try and make sense of what they are seeing. This can sometimes be worse than reality, especially if the child believes they are responsible in some way.

• These structured guidelines will enable healthcare professionals to successfully navigate this difficult and emotionally challenging task.

>Back to index

“Learning is an experience.

Everything else is just information.�

Albert Einstein

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 87

To Make My Son Eat Healthy Food, My name is Laleh and I am 35. I have a son Jacob (6) and a daughter Charlie (19 months old). In May 2015, I turned my son’s spelt pancakes into a lion for a bit of fun and he loved it!

Every few days he would ask if I could make him a character from a movie, book or toy that he had seen.

Jacob and I would get creative in the kitchen and discuss the ingredients that we were using and the benefits. For example, when he was 3, we would talk about how Kale was a superfood. He would ask why, and I would say ‘because superheroes love eating it’ - that was a winner for him!

I started posting our creations on my personal Facebook page and had such a positive response that I thought I would create an Instagram account to inspire other parents to get creative in the kitchen.

Within a month our page went viral and gained media attention from all over the world with media coverage from Time Magazine, Huffington Post, The Today Show USA, The Today Show Australia, Sunrise, ABC TV, Disney Channel Australia, and shout outs from celebrities, such as Martha Stewart and Ashton Kutcher to name a few.

Ellen DeGeneres has even shared an artwork that I made of her on her show!

Within the last two years, we have been lucky enough to work with some amazing companies including Disney, Nickelodeon, Universal Pictures, Barcelona FC, Jamie Oliver, 20th Century Fox to name a few.

We would never in a million years have thought that our little kitchen creations would turn into a full-time business but we love every minute of it!

We love to use fresh, healthy produce and no refined sugar or preservatives. All our creations are dyed using vegetables and natural powders such as activated charcoal.

88 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

I Turn It Into His Favorite Cartoons By ​Laleh Mohmedi

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 89

90 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 91

92 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 93

94 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

>Back to index

>Back to index

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 95

Hypocritic Oafs All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.

Kate Sheppard I am ashamed to admit it but I once voted for a certain political party. I won’t let its name pass my pen but it contains a certain hue which could conjure up images of sea-sickness, or the surface of a sludge pond behind the chook shed.

What made me tick the box for this party? Guess it was a world-weariness for the main parties or perhaps I had romantic visions (if they became government) of tofu-powered cars, or having gluten-free water delivered by goat straight from the Manawatu River. After all, they stood for a clean environment, didn’t they?

traditional feminists, like votes for women or birth control; where true warriors like Kate Sheppard took up the struggle. Instead we have calls for reclamation of one of the top three offensive swear words of all time; a word so high on the Richter Scale, that if I had uttered it when a child, my mouth would still be recovering from having to work through a case of Life Boy soap.

Classy eh?

Anyway, the scapegoat seems to be male Caucasians.

After the atrocity committed in Christchurch, the leader of Turkey, suggested that New Zealanders could become legitimate targets.

Imagine if one D J Trump had said that. Get out the pink hats, nah sorry, not today.

These days, the diversity party, you know the one with two males and six females, seem to have moved on to brighter pastures. It appears they have become SJWs. For the uninitiated, apparently this stands for social justice warriors, although there’s a teeny hint of an oxymoron poking its nose in there. They have moved on from trivial stuff like 1080 poisoning fantails and retreating glaciers and are mounting a crusa personal struggle against those who offend them du jour.

I imagine Kate is spinning so quickly in her grave, she could be used to bore a tunnel under the Waitemata.

Presently the root of all that is not good is the old white male, which has morphed into ‘far right racist’ which has, in turn, morphed into ‘White Supremacist’.

Another (not so young) suggested that the Christchurch killer not receive a fair trial. Forget about survivors and families giving victim impact reports, let’s patronise them and forget about due process. Ye gods, even the Nazis got a trial and they were W.S.

When asked about the horror of Brunei’s intention of stoning homosexuals to death, along with other ‘transgressors’, one of this party’s spokespersons diverted the question into the tried and true formula for changing the subject. They (now used instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ according to 3rd wave feminist doctrine) said that Western Europeans (code for National Socialist Germany) should be first considered for their treatment of gays before we complained about extremist minorities. If in trouble intellectually, blame the Nazis.

The party is focusing on life-critical causes a bit removed from trivial stuff which concerned 96 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019

I think I recall climate change being blamed on white men. Of course.

I have read other incredibly stupid things recently.

One young thing is advocating that old people should not vote on Brexit, as it’s the young people who will suffer the consequences.

I know those two egregious examples did not emanate from this political party but it seems to be in the same vein of present rhetoric.

Over the last few days I have heard them, as well as journalists pressing for hate speech laws. As journalists are also the acme of knowledge, common sense and impartiality and are overlords of public morality, I think it’s important that this request be examined.

Thinking for a good three minutes, I have come up with the following:

>Back to index

• What is hate speech? Who will define it? Will there be a lengthy process where anyone can submit suggestions and will any laws be passed democratically? Aren’t our present laws sufficient?

• Will hate speech law be applicable to all or will only certain people be subject to it?

• Will anyone be exempt-clerics, politicians?

• Will any religious text be exempt?

• If someone quotes a religious text invoking insult or harm to another, or criticises the text, is that hate speech?

• Will the law just be a revamp of old blasphemy laws?

• Are any groups legitimate targets of hate speech, for example, anyone defined as being far-right, or perhaps certain countries?

• If someone denies an episode/s of hate/ genocide/extreme prejudice, is that hate speech? For example, holocaust deniers, South-African farm murder deniers.

• If somebody displays symbols of hate, such as terrorist flags, is that hate speech?

• Where is the place for legitimate criticism or debate? What is the threshold?

• Will enforcers check the legitimacy of complaints, or will the accused be arrested as a matter of course?

• Is the taking of offense a sufficient and necessary condition for hate speech? If two people are offended by each other, are both to be prosecuted, or is it first-in-first-served?

• Will hate speech uttered in the heat of an argument be treated the same as a carefullyprepared statement?

• Will the accused be given a trial, or will sentence be passed automatically, like an instant fine for a traffic offence? There’s an idea- a spite camera.

• Will agencies be allowed to interrogate children about parental hate speech?

• Will any body be permitted to draft its own hate speech regulations? For instance, universities may wish to curtail criticism or questioning of ideologies or ethnic practices.

• Will existing police be solely involved or will there be specially-appointed hate speech police?

• Will citizens be spied upon – phone, mail, internet?

>Back to index

• Will legitimate complaints be considered to be hate speech, for example, parents complaining about the rape of their children?

Will victim impact statements be subject to hate speech law?

• What will the penalties for hate speech be?

Will they be benchmarked to penalties for violent assault, or home invasion, for example?

• Are there degrees of hate speech? Will hate speech against an ethnic group be considered worse than against an individual? Is racism worse than sexism? Is homophobia worse than ageism?

• Will media be prosecuted for reporting hate speech? Will the censor have overview?

• Will hate speech cover non-verbal communication, such as sneers or gestures of contempt?

• Will someone who reads material deemed to be hate speech be liable to prosecution?

• Will English be the only medium for hate speech, or will it cover all languages?

• Will irony be considered hate speech? Will hate speech police prosecute sarcasm, satire and ridicule?

• Will there be a statute of limitations? Will searching through years of speeches, blogs, writings, for evidence of hate speech be sanctioned? Will people be prosecuted for hate speech uttered before a law is gazetted?

• Will hate speech depicted in entertainment media be subjected to censorship?

• Will NZ reference other countries’ or international laws, or decide for themselves what constitutes hate speech and how to prosecute it?

• Will hate speech victims qualify for ACC payments?

• Can false accusations of hate speech be prosecuted?

There will be other considerations.

Guess it’s all simple. No problem formulating a law. Not a big can of slimy worms. Should be done and dusted in a month. Looks like a windfall for lawyers. Best consult certain politicians.

Roger

Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019 97

“The best teachers don’t give you the answers...

They just point the way ... and let you make your own choices.”

98 Good Teacher Magazine Term 2 2019