Practice doesn't matter

Some time ago I was involved with an e-learning programme on coaching for the FA (Football, or soccer for US readers). I spoke to the guy a few years later who told me the programme had made a fortune for the FA, showing that branded, quality, niche, generic, e-learning content can make money.

Pathetic on practice
What was more interesting was his analysis of the ills in British football, exemplified by recent England performances. He explained that our heritage in sport was rooted in the public school system which valued 'games' but not 'practice'. To practice was seen as a form of 'cheating' old chap. So we like to play competitive sports, not practice to improve. This is so true. I've seen my kids get turned off football and rugby, despite being keen when younger, because it simply wasn't any fun playing on huge pitches with huge goals designed for six-foot goalkeepers. It was all about 'getting stuck in' with little real coaching. They gravitated towards Tae Kwon Do which is mostly practice, with occasional competitions, and flourished (for 4 years, four/five times a week, a clutch of medals, heading towards black belt next year).

Homework seen as cheating
A further reflection was around the issue of homework. Most parents I speak to with children in the state system are shocked at the lack of homework. Perhaps this has its roots in the same culture, that practice is wimpish, only for swats, and doesn't matter. The students who do lots of homework are the students who do well academically, it's as simple as that. They learn how to learn and develop intrinsic motication and discipline around learning. These students often hide the fact that they do stacks of work at home, for fear of being ridiculed. They learn to keep quiet about doing homework.

Homework creates autonomous learners. It teaches them to learn efficiently. It prepares students for the leaps from primary to secondary to tertiary education. It allows parents to contribute to their child's education and keep track of their progress. Looking back on my 50 years on this planet, most of what I learnt was in the quiet of my own room, not in classrooms. It's a shame that this valuable ethos is being abandoned.

Thinking in the box
There is, of course, another reason for the collapse of autonomous learning (homework) - the teaching profession's obsession with classroom-only learning. Like full-size pitches in football, they're too big, anonymous, impersonal. They strip the fun out of learning. Educational theorists and practitioners can only think in the box, that box being the Victorian classroom. This is why the main investment in technology was in whiteboards. A more cynical observer would say they simply can't be bothered marking.

Freerice.com

Freerice.com
Loved this site. Such a simple idea. Answer questions, improve your vocabulary and help feed the poor.

What's interesting about the idea is the fact that obne can link a simple learning game to a worthy charitable cause, killing two birds with one stone. Think what could be done of basic literacy and numeracy were tackled this way.

Grains donated so far?
1,712,371,750

Hirst's dead classroom

School: The Archaeology Of Lost Desires
Went to the Turner Retrospective at the Tate and had to laugh when I picked up The Guardian newspaper to see a full two-page colour picture of Damien Hirst’s latest megawork, ‘School: The Archaeology Of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity And The Search For Knowledge’.

It’s a mock classroom with three ranks of 29 students as dead, decapitated, skinned sheep in formaldehyde. A single shark lurks at the back of the class. At the front is a huge towering tank with 10,000 litres of formaldehyde. Inside a white dove flies within a metal cage. On either side lie two halves of a sliced cow, some sausages, an old leather armchair (also in formaldehyde), cabinets of pills and drugs and an open umbrella. All bought for $10 million.

So what of modern British art and school?
Art is usually reactionary and irrelevant when it comes to education. Books, with their Harry Potter, Enid Blyton, Just William imaginary boarding schools, a million miles away from the reality of school for the huge majority. (93% to be exact). Theatre is just as bad with the awful The History Boys, replaying that old public school tale of extraordinary master and his boys. Imagine if the pederasty in that play had been included in a play set in a comprehensive. The movies are not much better with Dead Poet’s Society. The notable exception is the wonderful Ferris Beuller.

Hirst’s is a working-class Leeds lad, with an ‘E’ in A-level art, rejected by every college he applied for he eventually got into Goldsmiths. His punky credentials are better than his education, a close friend of Joe Strummer and general bad boy himself, he really is a 21^st century artist.

Class war
I think he’s got this nailed. The loss of identity, uniformity, submergence and deadening of life the classroom. The sheer tedium of it all – an 11, soon to be 13, year minimum sentence. The religious imagery of the caged dove as the teacher caught in a pseudo-religious preaching role. The shark is the lurking bully and the ever-present air of frightening violence that is typical of the school experience. Like the students the teacher is merely a larger trapped, farmed animal. The classroom is the mortuary of lost desires. The search for knowledge only emerging after you recover from its leaden effect.

Only a Hirst, a young working-class guy, could get under the skin of school in this way. If you’re in New York go see it – illuminated 24 hours a day and visible from the street.

Helicopter parents

40% hover!
These are US for parents who hover constantly above their kids and intervene to help them solve problems. A survey of first year University students in the US showed that 40% of students had parents who directly intervened when there was a problem in their first year. About 13% of students said such intervention was frequent. Rather than being a break away from parental influence and control today’s kids seem to remain under their control for longer.

This also seems to be true of kids at school, where staff are finding and increased and often intense interest by many parents in their children’s day to day activity in school.

At first sight this may seem worrying, yet the survey exposes other findings:

Electronic communication fuels the interest

Well-educated parents aren't more likely to be helicopter parents

Helicopter parents are not just wealthier parents

Their children are more engaged in college life, happier and reporting getting more from the experience

However, those students do get lower grades!

On an entirely different note, students are spending the same amount of time studying as they reported in 2001, about 13-14 hours per week. That's about half the time faculty say they should be studying. What’s new!

Boomerang kids
An interesting corollary, and perhaps consequence of this interest, is ‘boomerang kids’, who keep returning home for accommodation and financial support.

Getting Things Done

I’ve never been one for self-help books, but this one kept on popping into my life. A personal recommendation, a review in a newspaper then a rave article in Wired Magazine. Forget the ‘things to do list’ (even with prioritised codes ABC), filofax, Outlook or time management courses – buy this book.

Too much stuff
Want to regain control of your life and the mess that is too much email, voicemail messages, piles of documents, endless work tasks and piles of bills to sort out. Or those movies you want to watch, books to read and personal projects whirling around in your mind. Allen calls all of this ‘stuff’, and he has a cure.

Sorting out stuff
Stuff is just stuff until you decide to act, so don’t manage stuff, manage actions. Clear the decks, get things off your mind. Lists and memory are both hopeless so Allen offers a neat one page algorithm, and amazingly specific advice. Think about what you have to do before you do it and don’t waste time on thinking about things you’re not going to do anything about for now. Capture and refine your decision making.

Collect in buckets
To capture you’ll need collection buckets – in trays, electronic and paper (he’s no technology only geek). Have as few of these as possible and empty the buckets regularly. Everything goes into a bucket but nothing gets put back into a bucket.

Deal with stuff
Is it actionable?

If NO a) trash it b) put it in a ‘someday’ folder c) archive as reference for retrieval when required.

If YES, “Will it take less than 2 minutes?” If YES – do it. If NO, delegate or defer to a) delegate b) defer to a calendar or next actions folder. Off the side are larger multi-step ‘projects’ where you’ll need plans and separate folders.

Organise your stuff
He gets practical on the need for folders, storage for physical files, a calendar and folders for actions.

Review regularly
Review weekly from 10,000 ft, especially your action lists, and clean them up. You’ve got to close those loops.

Do it detail
What I most like about the book was the simplicity of the basic model and the wealth of practical detail on specifics. Here’s a few choice tips (there’s dozens more):

Set aside a day to set up your system

Tackle with email in order from top to bottom

Do one at a time and don’t leave any in limbo

Have a cockpit of control – space in house (not shared)

Organise your ‘office space’ in transit

Buy basic tools – trays, folders, filing, elastic bands….

Get a filing system and labels

Don’t use colour-coded folders

Handle things once

Don’t have a ‘to file’ system

Don’t use ‘fat’ files as action files

Organise your desk and drawers

Clean out your files once a year

The real guts of the system is building your own ‘categories of action’ lists. My own happens to be; errands, home, computer, calls, travel, blogs, food/heath and leisure (films, books, websites, exhibitions and live events).

In the end it’s all about habits, the habits of dealing with stuff without thinking. All I can say is it worked for me. The trick for me was the use of a paper diary for my ‘collection buckets’ and ‘action lists’. Go do it – order on Amazon NOW, or at least add it to your action list.

Problem with maths - maths teachers

I suggested in my last post that algebra does more harm than good in teaching maths but there's another factor at work - maths teachers.

1. Maths needs to be enlivened by better than average teaching.

2. Maths teachers tend to be weak on social and communications skills.

3. Good mathematicians tend to do things other than teaching.

'Maths is boring' is the usual summation by kids at school. It's also the experience of most of us who went to school.

Maths graduates and specialists tend not to be great communicators, and if a subject that is admittedly as dry as maths is to be taught well should we consider using people who are high on communications skills and moderate on maths.

On top of this the subject can be enlivened by the use of good e-learning. Look at the success of Nintendo's Brain training - mostly simple arithmetic. people actually pay £100 for a console then £20 upwards for this simple piece of software that related maths to your life (brain age) - and its fun. The MyMaths site and Bitesize are also pretty good, better than much teaching I'm sure. Yet how much of this stuff is even known by teachers, never mind used.

Numeracy - counts for little

Is all this fuss around numeracy really warranted? I met a trainer in a government department who had to put his staff through a Level 2 numeracy test. He was surprised to find that many failed - as he regards them as good at their jobs.
The claim is that 13.5 million people are 'stressed out' by their poor numeracy. But when did you last hear anyone tell you that they're 'totally stressed about my algebra skills'. The second claim is that 15.1 million have poor numeracy skills (equivalent of G or below at GCSE). This made me think.
Is it right that the standard here is the Maths GCSE. I have known lots of happy, successful people who handle money and numbers and bets who have no GCSE in Maths.

Numbers
While I accept that much of the 'number' content in the national Curriculum is sound, even here, knowing about prime numbers, square and cube roots etc seems remotely useful.

Shape and space
OK, working out the area of a rectangle I get - we all have to buy carpets and paint etc. But trigonometry? The volume of a sphere? Vectors? Transformations? It's mostly useless, except for a small minority of people.

Handling data
Some of this is useful but not all. Have you ever seen a stem or leaf table? Simple probability is fine - but calculating mutually exclusive events? It's over-engineered.

Algebra
This is where it all goes wrong. Here's a quote from Roger Schank who looked into the dodgy history of why algebra became so embedded in curricula, "I'm a math major and a computer science professor, and algebra has never come up in my life, maybe it has in yours." I'd argue that little or nothing in algebra is useful for the vast majority of people in work. In fact it is so conceptually difficult and of such little practical use that most of us who master it forget it soon after we've passed the exam. When was the last time you used a simultaneous linear or quadratic equation?

Algebra is bad for our kids
Even worse, could algebra be damaging our kids approach t maths? I suspect that algebra is the single most damaging cause of poor numeracy. As soon as kids face this useless challenge they are turned off the subject. It kills any interest in maths stone dead. They instinctively kow that it's useless knowledge.

What counts can't always be counted
In truth we need a simple standard in the 'real world' application of maths that is free from the Maths GCSE. Simple mastery of arithemetic, calculating areas, percentages and reading graphs would do. We need to produce adults who love to learn, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school and algebra.

Talent management - rum business

I think we need an import ban on flaky HR ideas from the US. Talent Management is the latest HR bandwagons. Once the 'Leadership Training' bandwagon had run its course, its wheels stuck in the deep mud of fashionable indifference, HR had to find another rickety old vehicle to justify increasing scepticism about their usefulness.

Talent Management (really just Leadership in new clothes) is yet another reason for senior managers to spend oodles of cash on themselves . And don't think for one moment that this is an inclusive, company-wide scheme that involves ALL employees. It's really a filtering process for joining the Executive Club. Never trust those guys you see turn up to meetings, or at the airport, with their little Platinum, Gold or Silver 'Exec Club' tags hanging conspicuously on the outside of their combination-lock briefcases. They're in the same camp as those who wear mobiles on their belts or blazers with flat gold buttons on the cuffs.

If Talent Management really was meritocratic, then boards would advertise openly for members (they don't - in the UK it's mostly word-of mouth) and there would be transparency from top to bottom in recruitment, rewards and promotion. The city and UK senior management is full of old duffers, still wearing their broad diagonally striped school ties (I personally think this smacks of public school pederasty).

If Talent Management does have a role it would be to clear out people who are stuck in jobs they saw as temporary when they joined, and to move people on in terms of aspirations. All too often it's about keeping and not losing people. I like the LearnDirect idea of an independent Advice service advertised on TV that makes people think about their aspirations.

Complaince killing training

Attended an small but excellent think-tank meeting on the future of learning in Government. It was sobering to hear how training departments are now so swamped by compliance training that little else is being done. We're so busy obsessing about the potential of employees to sexually harass, racially abuse, be biased on gender, discriminate on disability and negative on age, that they've little time to learn anything else.

How did it come to this? The training is not evaluated, and when large academic studies are done, they show no, or counterproductive, effects (Dobbins, Harvard). Yet, HR departments are compliant in this conspiracy. They willingly deliver bucket-loads of this stuff. Why? because it's easy. The driver is NOT learning or people development, it's 'fear'. It's a crude attempt to reduce risk by delivering crude courses, measured only by bums on seats, that do nothing more than protect organisations against their employees.

It's boring, people don't like it and it doesn't work. How bad can it get before we stop this madness?

Blackpool

Gave two talks on skills/education at the Conservative Party Conference (not my natural habitat). Not surprised that all parties have finally dumped Blackpool as a venue - it's the armpit of Britain, all fast food, barn-sized drinking parlours and dilapidated B&Bs.

Two-brains Willetts
First talk was with David Willetts, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills, around Leitch. The bottom line is that business and education/training have been drifting apart for years. Business wants quick solutions that meet their needs and don't have much time for the vast array of qualifications and agencies in the market. They're desperate for a system that's quicker, simpler and with less entities. More is less. Education and training, on the other hand, is obsessed with qualifications and the creation of entities. They're like two sides shouting at each other with megaphones across a vast chasm.

Back to school with Michael Gove
I had a spat with Michael Gove mid-afternoon. His example of how children need more maths/science was, and I quote, "In order to understand how electrons orbit around the nucleus children need to understand the Copernican system of planets rotating around stars". I urged him to get another example, as "the quantum positioning of electrons has nothing to do with the Copernican gravitational model". He was none too pleased and did a lot of finger wagging. He's all discipline, standards and back to basics. By the way Michael check the spelling on your home page - it's awful

Final talk
The final session was excellent. There was a great talk on the 'myth' of science/engineering graduates. John Hayes, the Shadow Minister for Skills was sound on the need for a proper careers and advice service but it was John Morton, CEO of the ETB that astonished us with some raw stats. We produce 17000 engineers a year and the number has been stable for 15 years. 50% of these never go near engineering as the starting salary is pretty low (barely keeping up with inflation). The failure is in the FE sector, where we don't produce enough trained technicians. In the last 3 years these trainees have dropped by 26%. He saw the problems as lying elsewhere in our lack of innovation, entrepreneurship and our failure to celebrate success.

Online lectures big HIT on iTUNES

MIT’s Professor Lewin has proves a smash hit with his online physics lectures. “It sounds arrogant, I know, but it’s better to see a first class lecture on video than a mediocre one in the flesh”.

Use the FREE stuff because it’s better. This is a simple solution to a massive problem. Students are already voting with their fingers and dumping their third-rate, real, local lectures for first-rate, online, global lectures. The same can apply to most standard teaching and training lectures.

The traditional model is to have poor lectures which are never recorded. The very idea of not giving students a second bite of the cherry is absurd. If you were a journalist or novelist, you wouldn’t dream of standing up and only giving people one chance to hear your work. Publishing has been around since the 15^th century, it’s about time teaching and training caught up.

Professor pans 'learning style' teaching

Despite the complete lack of scientific evidence for learning styles it seems to have gathered force through recent efforts on 'personalised' learning. This is suicidal. The whole education and training world continues to present itself as half-baked and gullible on theory.

I presented the Coffield research on learning styles at a coaching conference recently and received an abusive email from Peter Honey (who was in the audience). After an exchange of emails on the scientific evidence on learning styles he went strangely silent. He did admit, however, that there was no scientific evidence to back up his theory - the famous Honey and Mumford model.

Here's another serious, qualified and sensible voice in the telegraph attacking their use in schools and training.

Wiimotes and training

It was bound to happen. The Wii controller, the Wiimote, is now being used in training simulations. There’s no doubt that this is a breakthrough technology where the input device fits the user, not the interface. Wired magazine has reported on projects in power plants, medical devices, pest-control and driving simulations. Some of these projects are placed in Second Life, others use Google Maps and Google Earth. In the driving simulation they use real accident blackspots to teach safe driving.

Simulations have been around for a long time. The difference now is that they are possible for a fraction of the price as games technology and games authoring software (Caspian learning) has plummeted. What the Wiimote gives you is hands-on manipulation and experience.