A $1 Million 'Nobel Prize' for Teaching

Applications open for world’s first One Million Dollar Teacher prize

Sunny Varkey, Founder of the Varkey GEMS Foundation and Chairman of GEMS Education, announced the formal opening of the application and nomination process for the Varkey GEMS Foundation Global Teacher Prize on the final day of the Global Education and Skills Forum.

This one million dollar award, under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, and Ruler of Dubai, will be given to an exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession.

The award, which aims to have the weight and importance of the ‘Nobel Prize’, underlines the importance of the teaching profession and symbolises the fact that teachers throughout the world deserve to be recognised and celebrated.

Sunny Varkey, founder of the Varkey GEMS Foundation, said:

"The prize is open to currently working educators who teach children enrolled in compulsory schooling, or are below the age of eighteen. Head-teachers with teaching responsibilities are also eligible to apply.  The prize is open to teachers in every kind of school and, subject to local laws, in every country in the world.  The closing date for applications will be August 31^st 2014, and the winner will be announced at the Global Education and Skills Forum 2015 in Dubai next spring.

Applications will be judged by a prize committee, who will meet this October to choose a shortlist of ten candidates. The prize committee will include Sunny Varkey, Founder, Varkey GEMS Foundation; Vikas Pota, Chairman of the Varkey GEMS Foundation; Sir Michael Tomlinson, former Chief Inspector of Schools (England); Ann Mroz, Editor, Times Education Supplement; and Karen Giles, Headteacher, Barham Primary School, London.

A winner will be chosen from these ten finalists in November 2014 by the Global Teacher Prize Academy made up of head-teachers, educational experts, commentators, journalists, public officials, tech entrepreneurs, company directors and scientists from the UK, the US, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Austria, Pakistan, Philippines, Netherlands, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Japan, Nigeria, Uganda, Singapore, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India and Turkey.

The academy includes prominent names such as Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey; Baroness Martha Lane Fox, founder of Lastminute.com; the Grammy winning jazz musician and singer Esperanza Spalding; US social activist and educator Geoffrey Canada; Nigerian businessman Jubril Adewale Tinubu, Group CEO, Oando; Strive Masiyiwa, Founder & Executive Chairman, Econet Wireless, South Africa; British philosopher David Rodin; Hadeel Ibrahim, the Executive Director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and Jiang Xueqin, Vice-Principal, Tsinghua International School, China.

The public can nominate a teacher, or teachers can apply themselves, by filling an application form at http://globalteacherprize.com . If teachers are being nominated, the person nominating them will write a brief description online explaining why.  The teacher being nominated will then be sent an email letting them know they’ve been nominated and inviting them to apply for the prize.   Applicants can apply in English, and from May onwards, in Mandarin, Arabic, French, Spanish and Portuguese.  To join the conversation online follow #TeacherPrize on: www.twitter.com/TeacherPrize and www.facebook.com/TeacherPrize

Teachers who are applying will have to provide references from their current supervisor and up to two additional references.  These can include video testimonials about their work in the classroom and beyond, and can come from pupils, colleagues, head-teachers as well as members of the wider community.

The winner will be paid the prize money in equal instalments over ten years, and the Varkey GEMS Foundation will provide the winner with financial counselling. Without compromising their work in the classroom, the winner will be asked to serve as a global ambassador for the Varkey GEMS Foundation, attending public events and speaking in public forums about improving the prestige of the teaching profession. A condition of winning the prize is that the winner remains as a classroom teacher for at least five years.

-From GEMS Inbox

Bringing experts and primary sources into the classroom = transformational

Below is a story from GEMS Royal Dubai School, which I would like to share.  As per previous posts, I was skeptical of using Skype, Hangouts and so on for whole class interactions, mainly because I was concerned that it doesn't put individual children in control and it has a bit of an 'Inactive Whiteboard' feel to it.  I was wrong (again).

I've seen a few of these now and the thing that has changed for me is the use of primary sources and experts who would otherwise have been unable to share their knowledge and, more to the point, passion and feelings with the children.  In each example I have seen, the teacher has reacted in exactly the same way at the end of the session:  "As their teacher, I could never have given my children what you have just given them - thank you so much!"  I suggest that's transformation...

Do watch to the end of the video for Mrs. Stone's reading of 'The King's Letter' and we can add inspirational as well...

My thanks to Mark Stone and Anne-Marie Murray and of course Mark's amazing parents.

Year 6 Topic: ‘World War II - Skype to New Zealand’

Teacher:  Anne-Marie Murray

The day that I introduced the topic World War II to my Year 5 class in Royal Dubai School I quickly realised that all of the planning I had prepared for the next 3 weeks would be completely useless. Having taught World War II for 3 consecutive years in England I was pretty confident that the activities and lessons I had planned would provide the children with all the skills and knowledge that they needed to understand the war and its impact on children in the UK. I was wrong!

It quickly became apparent in my first lesson that I was dealing with a number of different nationalities, each bringing different perspectives, experiences and stories of WWII. The classroom became a hive of discussion about how each of their countries had been involved in and affected by the war. It was fascinating to watch but I quickly realised that these children would need something much more personal and real to help them understand the perspective of the war from a child in Britain. Books and photographs were useful to an extent but to make their learning memorable and real I had to think outside the box.

That’s when I approached our Digital Learning Coach, Mark Stone. I was fortunate enough to have a weekly coaching session with Mark and in that time we had set up Skype links with a school in Sweden, introduced Edmodo, had the children using Dropbox to collaborate in their learning and had incorporated the SAMR model in my classroom, making the children familiar with using the terms of the model to describe their learning.

I would regularly chat to Mark about my classroom practice and the challenges that I faced as a teacher in an international setting. Mark quickly came to know about my ton of useless planning for the WWII project and as I banged my head against a brick wall he told me about his parents’ story. Mark’s parents had been children in England during WWII. They now lived in New Zealand and had always shared stories of the war with Mark as he was growing up. Mark realised that there was no point in him telling me the story when in fact his mum could tell me the story herself; moreover, through the medium of Skype, his mum could tell the whole class her story.

I raced back to my classroom to tell the children about our idea. The excitement in the classroom was amazing. Children naturally began to collaborate together to create lists of questions to ask and within an hour we had come up with fascinating questions for Mark’s mother and father to answer. We emailed the questions to them to have a look at and set up a date for our Skype. In the meantime I used the children’s questions to plan my lessons. These lessons were based on their genuine interest in the war and the planning became personalised for my class rather than a general plan to work from. The learning was transformational and the children’s motivation was off the scale. They were well and truly gripped and it was brilliant to be driving their learning forward.

On the day of the Skype the children were so excited. They had their questions lined up and, as Mark’s Mother and Father appeared on the screen, the whole room fell silent. The children listened attentively to their responses and the level of their questioning indicated that they were captivated by the stories being shared.

Following the Skype session the children wrote letters to Mark’s parents. The letters demonstrated that the experience had had a massive impact on the children. They were deeply touched and inspired by the stories they heard and they invited Mark’s parents to be VIP guests (via Skype) at our VE day celebrations the following week to signal the end of the topic.

On VE day the children sang WWII songs to our New Zealand guests of honour and shared some of their learning throughout the project with them. The Skype with New Zealand became an integral part of the celebration day.

At the end of the project I was keen to see what the children thought of the process. We used De Bono’s thinking hats to evaluate our learning and to think about how we could use Skype in the future to help us engage in our learning. Their responses were honest and inspiring. Skype had given them the medium to engage with WWII survivors who had lived in England at the time. The children still had their own stories of the war but they now had a real understanding of what life was like for children in England during WWII.

Skype to NZ Video  http://youtu.be/glOgoPEv52U 

Transformation vs. Improvement - and one proposed example

This is a great post by Derek Wenmoth on the gaping chasm between improvement and transformation:

http://blog.core-ed.org/derek/2013/03/two-agendas.html

Once again, we see that visionary leadership is critical to transforming learning and providing our young people with the skills and attributes they really need to thrive and survive.  It's just not enough to have a handful of hero innovators in each school battling against the odds to change the world.  All they manage to do really is create pockets of excellence.  Only the people at the top can scale this excellence to make it 'normal,' to transform the culture and to say, "this is what we do here."  If they've done a good job then I suspect we wouldn't recognize the place as a school, such is the level of transformation needed.

Here is one example of something we may not recognize in our schools at present, not really tech-related, but I suggest transformational, innovative and with the potential to provide enormous benefits for learners.

This idea came out of a recent project I was working on with my colleague, Mark Stone, who is the Digital Learning Coach at a school in Dubai.  We spent some time in the evenings visiting children in their homes, interviewing them and their parents about digital learning and seeing how learning was organized in the home environment. It started out about digital learning and we were really looking at how the use of digital tools differed in and out school.  What we learned, however, went so much further and was quite unexpected (you could say we were uncovering the curriculum, not covering it - cliche alert).

We found out about extended families, the culture and history of each and every one, what and when the children ate and who the best person in the home was to support each child's learning in different situations.  We were even at one point offered some home made Romanian vodka crafted by Granddad on the shores of the Black Sea.  The warmth of the hospitality was quite overwhelming.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, spending just 1 to 2 hours in each of these homes gave us an insight into the lives and learning preferences of these children that was previously hidden and which was, quite simply, a revelation.  Perhaps the greatest piece of learning for us was that, at home, we saw the children as true individuals, not part of a class that had to be managed.  When we talk about personalised learning, what do we really mean?  Well, we saw it in the homes - children deciding when and where to work - and on what, when to have a snack to keep their energy levels up, when to take a break, which parent or grandparent to ask for help, which device to use and so on... you name it, they were in control of it, always under the careful guidance and with the support of adults passionate about supporting their learning.  In short, it took very little time and effort on our part to gain a much deeper understanding of each of these young people as individuals.
This is important because, when I worked at the school a few years ago and was running a parental engagement workshop, we asked the parents the question: "What makes a great teacher?" The answer was pretty much unanimous in the room: "Your best teachers are the ones who really know and love the children, who see them as so much more than names on the register or numbers on a spreadsheet.  They engage with us and make a huge effort to be a part of our family."  Moreover, they proceeded to name the school's "best teachers" - again, with pretty much unanimous agreement - and on exactly this basis.  No one mentioned test scores.

So what's the innovation to come out of this?  How can we transform learning based on this experience? Well, this is one small suggestion to get going - not aimed at this school in particular, but to try in any school.
This is what I would do:

1. For the first half term every year, I would start school an hour or so late, with teachers having that extra hour to spend as they like - have a lie in, a swim, go to the gym or relax in Starbucks. If there are logistical issues for parents with this, provision could be made with a skeleton staff, a bit like a breakfast club, but a late one!  The Principal could run it.

2. There would be no after school commitments for teachers in the first half term.

3. Instead, teachers would spend an hour or so every weekday after school visiting their children and parents in their homes, getting to know the families and their circumstances.

Of course there would be logistical issues - working parents, etc..  But guess what, if the parents aren't there when the kids get home, who is?  Teachers would benefit greatly from experiencing whatever the children experience when they get home.  The objection will arise: aren't the children losing an hour of schooling? I suggest this would be more than made up over the year by the teacher's enhanced understanding of each child as a learner. 

Would all the parents welcome the teachers into their homes?  Probably not. Would those who do see their children benefit significantly?  In our experience, we suspect so.

This may sound crazy.  That might just mean it's a good idea.  I'd suggest it's more transformation than improvement and that makes me feel confident that it's along the right lines.  And we'll never know if we don't try.

Digital Metacognition

       “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change.  And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” (Peter Drucker)

 I have been thinking for a while now about how students learn with digital tools and in digital environments - and, of course, what we are doing to help them.

         In GEMS schools, we aim to normalize the safe, appropriate and effective use of digital technologies to enhance learning in all areas of the curriculum and beyond.  We are teaching our students how to learn with these tools and to think deeply about how they can build their own digital ‘learnflows’ to become lifelong, independent, digital learners and successful digital citizens.  This is a constantly developing programme of digital metacognition or ‘learning to learn digitally.’

         Defining and Refining 'Learnflow'

         “A learnflow is when the individual steps of a workflow are not viewed as individual steps, but are rendered unconsciously, smoothly and effortlessly.The learnflow is part of the fluency the iPad user has attained in order to not see using individual apps as a goal, but their use has become merely a tool in the pedagogical aim of learning.”  (Sylvia Tolisano, 2013)

         http://langwitches.org/blog/2013/10/12/workflow-and-learnflow/

         Tolisano’s groundbreaking work is currently limited to learnflow with the iPad, but we need to refine and build on this to accommodate the ever-expanding range of tools available.

         Moreover, effective learnflows need to be perpetually and consciously constructed.

         In short, our students need to ‘learn how to learn digitally’ and, as educators, we need to actively facilitate this process.  

         Metacognition and Digital Metacognition

        “Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them…” (Flavell, 1976, p. 232).

        “Metacognition also thinks about one's own thinking process such as study skills, memory capabilities, and the ability to monitor learning. This concept needs to be explicitly taught along with content instruction. Metacognitive knowledge is about our own cognitive processes and our understanding of how to regulate those processes to maximize learning… strategic knowledge (conditional knowledge)… is one's own capability for using strategies to learn information.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition

         Accordingly, it is proposed that ‘Digital  Metacognition’ may be defined as:

         ‘The conscious process of thinking about how one learns with digital tools and in digital environments, including  the impact of procedural choices on cognitive processes, with the aim of constructing the most effective learnflow in any given situation.

        This needs to be explicitly  taught to students  to help them develop their digital study skills and understanding of how procedural decisions affect cognition, ensuring they are independently capable of perpetually and consciously constructing, and employing, effective strategies in leveraging digital  tools  and environments to maximise learning outcomes .'  

I hope to learn more about this concept in the coming weeks and months, as I work with teachers and students across our network of schools.  There's a lot to think about.

Flipped Classroom Impact - Research

This is an interesting article and I look forward to seeing the full report.  

I can't help but wonder if the results could be improved further by improving the quality of the out-of-school part, moving beyond the 'lecture.'  What if the prep was collaborative (F2F or online) and involved some element of problem-based learning or at least something higher up on Bloom's than just consuming information with a postponement of active learning until the student is back in school... can we make the flip more active at all stages?

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/18/the-flipped-classroom-boosts-grades-5-why-thats-as-big-as-we-can-expect/

Some thinking on the GEMS approach to digital learning and parental engagement

We have a responsibility to fully prepare our students for the realities of the university and professional worlds into which they will move after K-12 education. Technological fluency is as essential as literacy and numeracy, and will enhance creativity and inquiry-based learning, which are cornerstones of our educational philosophy.

As parents, administrators and teachers, we recognize the importance of technology, now and in the future. Indeed, the future is here, as forward-thinking schools around the world have embraced the inclusion of technology as a best- practice in teaching and learning.

Beyond the simple reality that technology has, and will continue to, change and drive the way all things get done, significant research demonstrates that meaningful use of technology in the learning process has the following beneficial results for students:

·         Development of 21st century learning skills, including experience in effective collaboration, as well as consuming, filtering and creating multimodal content - skills which will be essential for success in university study and workplaces of the future

·         Increased student engagement

·         Flexibility for teachers in addressing different learning styles, including interventions for students with special educational needs and Additional Language Learners, as well as extensions for those who benefit from greater challenge

·         Adaptive learning systems allowing students to build their own learning pathways

·         Provision of a greater range and variety of assessment strategies for teachers

·         Promotion of inquiry and critical thinking skills.

GEMS is committed to providing its students with the skills and attributes they will need to flourish in an ever-changing, technology-driven, global society.  Research shows that student ownership of devices and content, enabling learners to access tools and materials wherever and whenever needed, has a significant impact on outcomes.  Similarly, effective engagement of parents in the learning process is key and we have a well-established parental engagement programme aimed at ensuring that our students are fully supported in their learning by parents as true partners.  The opportunity for students to learn in a safe and secure Bring Your Own Technology environment, at school, home and elsewhere, is a natural and essential element of the GEMS commitment to all our students and their families.

Our aim is to normalize the safe, appropriate and effective use of digital technologies to enhance learning in all areas of the curriculum and beyond.  We are teaching our students how to learn with these tools and to think deeply about how they can build their own digital ‘learnflows’ to become lifelong, independent, digital learners and successful digital citizens.  This is a constantly developing programme of digital meta-cognition or ‘learning to learn digitally.’

As part of this digital normalization, we have found that there are many great subject-specific and skill-building mobile apps, such as Hairy Letters (KG phonics and letter formation for 3-5 years) and Daisy the Dinosaur (for budding computer programmers 3-8 years).  Also, Angry Birds (Original, Space and Star Wars) may be a surprising inclusion, but such games can help students to meet objectives in the new UK computing curriculum, for example, as well as learning about gravity, angles and forces! It is suitable for all ages. 

In line with our stated aim of developing advanced levels of digital meta-cognition in our students, however, it is essential that we also consider the growing suite of non-subject specific mobile applications, which facilitate the learning process and provide the creative, organizational and collaborative tools which learners need to meet challenging curriculum objectives.  Below is a list of iOS apps which can help to establish an effective learnflow and help learners to create rather than simply consume.

Recommended  Apps to Facilitate Learning and build Learnflow:

iMovie

Garageband

iBooks

Explain Everything

Educreations

Book Creator

Touchcast

Comic Touch 2

Toontastic

Popplet

Skype

Blogger

Voicethread

Aurasma

Minecraft

Dropbox

Google Drive

Google Maps

Google Earth

Google Hangouts

Puffin Academy

Edmodo

QR Reader

Facebook

Twitter

Google+

Google Capture

YouTube

Quizlet

Dragon Dictation

Mad Libs

Away from tablets such as the ubiquitous iPad, the ever-expanding suite of Google Apps provides an additional rich resource, empowering students with the creative and collaborative tools to advance their learning and reach previously unattainable levels.

Underpinning all of this modern learning is a commitment to developing successful digital citizens, ensuring that our students are safe online and able to use technology effectively and appropriately, making good choices in digital environments and with their use of devices.  Websites such as http://www.commonsensemedia.org/, http://www.fosi.org/  and http://thinkyouknow.co.uk/ provide excellent resources for parents, students and teachers and are providing the basis for high quality digital citizenship programmes in GEMS schools. 

Research shows that effective parental engagement in the learning process has a significant, positive impact on outcomes for students.  Accordingly, GEMS has a well-established parental engagement programme and our schools run regular workshops to help parents support their children more effectively, including through the use of technology.  Schools also provide a range of online support, such as the excellent GEMS Royal Dubai School English Language Learning Blog: http://www.rdsell.blogspot.ae/ where parents can find information about the apps they need to work effectively with their children at home.  The children bring their own devices to school and have ownership of the content as well as the hardware, which has also been shown to improve outcomes.

Gamification of learning can be very powerful, when used intelligently as part of a personalised, child-centred learning programme.  It is, of course, also very important that we teach our children to achieve a healthy balance in their lives, not just in terms of technology use, but also in engagement with other key activities such as music, art, physical exercise and real life personal interaction.  Studies suggest that a maximum of two to three hours’ screen time per day is a sensible guideline and, within a well-balanced curriculum, and with effective parental engagement, this sort of level can be achieved quite naturally as part of students’ daily routines and overall approach to life.  Results of research into the impact of technology on children’s learning, development and well-being are mixed and, given the nature of rapid technological innovation, attempts at longitudinal studies have proven difficult to construct.  GEMS teachers continue to conduct their own research into the impact of technology on children, such as this study of iPads in the early years, which was carried out in a GEMS school: http://www.merga.net.au/documents/Spencer_MERGA36-2013.pdf.  Given that there are so many unknowns, it would appear sensible to recognize that, “Digital media are here to stay and are going to be widely used by young children.  The important issue is how to maximize the positive consequences of these new media so that they enrich rather than hinder children’s play experiences.”  (Johnson & Christie, 2010).

(Full reference: Johnson, J. & Christie, J. (2010) Play and Digital Media. Computers in the Schools, 23, 134-147)

As well as reviewing all apps and other software to ensure that the content and structure are in line with established theories of learning, the GEMS strategy is to ensure a balanced approach to technology use, providing children with the independent learning skills to make good choices and establish a balanced, healthy lifestyle, filled with rich and varied learning experiences.

Parents, again, can play a significant role in helping to achieve this balance, by modelling good behaviour in the home.  It is all too easy for busy, working parents to spend too much time at home checking work emails, as well as catching up on social media and consuming digital content on mobile devices as part of their daily relaxation routines.  We should, however, think carefully about how such behaviour impacts the attitudes and actions of our children, who see their parents ‘tied’ to their devices almost 24/7.  For example, it is important that children see their parents reading books for pleasure and talking about what they are reading.  Two important things tend to happen when children see their parents reading: first, they want to know what the book is about and, second, they are very likely to want to share their own books. This doesn’t only apply to younger students, but also teenagers who are required to grapple with advanced literature such as Dickens, Twain, Vonnegut and Shakespeare.  Reading the same the books that our children are studying, or even books by the same authors or in the same genres, can lead to a natural engagement with the material at home, which is likely to greatly enhance students’ interest, understanding and achievement.  It must be incredibly difficult for a teenage student to commit to hours of study of a complex text when they see their parents sitting on Facebook!  For parents who are not native language speakers in relation to their child’s curriculum, translations are almost always available and modelling reading as an enjoyable pursuit is vital, whatever the language. 

As part of the GEMS ‘Talk, Share, Encourage’ programme, we recommend that parents engage with their children’s digital learning, but also ensure that they spend time talking to their children, reading with them, sharing ideas, questions and new learning, whilst encouraging and praising success and sustained effort.  It is also, of course, essential that parents encourage risk-taking, constantly reinforcing the idea that perceived failures are actually valuable learning opportunities and helping them to find new strategies to succeed.  This leads to improved levels of resilience and independent learning skills, both crucial attributes in today’s world.

Learnflow and the Digitally Normal School

I think Langwitches sums up the current situation and challenge quite nicely in the blogpost linked below.

I was talking to a colleague yesterday about the optimal suite of tools needed to create a digitally normal school. The conversation turned to how a 'digital inspector' would know he or she was actually in a digitally normal school. What would such an inspector look for?

We decided that the judgment would come down to an assessment of the authentic learnflow:

In every class and every home and everywhere else the students learn, are all the teachers, students and parents empowered and engaged in the necessary, natural and sub-conscious business of learnflow?

I suspect and hope that someone, somewhere has begun writing the inspection framework for this...

The GEMS Education Digital Standards are being launched in all the network's schools this year and I think they represent a good start down this road.


http://langwitches.org/blog/2013/10/12/workflow-and-learnflow/

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