Rachel Yates – ‘Thinking it through’

VIGNETTE 2 Rachel Yates – ‘Thinking it through’

For her first SDI, Rachel, an English teacher, worked with a mixed- ability class of 13–14-year-olds on the language of film. It was not as successful as she had hoped. Later she reflected on this stage in the research:

Rachel With the first project I spent, yeah, a long time writing

the scheme of work and trying to do it and it was a bit demoralising when things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.

The support within her community meant that Rachel was not defeated by this. In her micro-community she was able to stand back and, with her university-based partners, look at the evidence from the video, from the diagnostic tests and from the student interviews. Together they identified a tension between Rachel’s need to control the learning and the students’ need to have ownership of the activity. Rachel acknowledged a sense of the pressure within her school to speed up delivery and cover content when she commented: ‘I think it’s my habit to try and pack everything into a scheme of work and try and do too much . . . and by trying to do a lot of things perhaps I was missing a focus for the learning’. She also described her feeling of vulnerability and loss of control when teaching with computers in the library or computer room. Rachel took account of this analysis when planning a repeat of the lesson with another year group. She

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started with activity-based work on digital images in her classroom using a data projector. This was followed by a move to the school’s computer room where the students worked collaboratively on their own story sequences using digital cameras and PowerPoint.

Rachel With the first project I had the idea . . . and they followed that story. [This time] I gave them the option of thinking up their own story . . . and they had, I guess, more ownership over the task, which I think was a very positive thing.

Rachel was more satisfied with this second sequence of lessons and the evidence indicated that her students had developed further their abilities in critical and visual literacy. However, Rachel’s learning went beyond the single SDI; she had begun to develop confidence and ideas about teaching and learning. She declared:

Rachel Thinking through it from a learner-centred perspective rather than a teacher-based perspective – I think is something that the SDI has helped me with quite a lot.

Interestingly, the change in her approach, attitude and aspirations brought her closer to her espoused views about teaching and learning articulated at the start of the project. In her initial interview Rachel said she thought that learning was best achieved by students ‘having ownership, being collaborative, not being lectured at . . .’ However, her sense of what was expected in the school, combined with her unease around learners with technology, meant that she was not carrying this through in practice. The evidence of the first design initiative and the supported analysis enabled her to see this. Through participation in the community, Rachel also learned to feel comfortable with new learning contexts and situations produced by ICT. She continued:

Rachel I think it’s partly a case of being comfortable with using the ICT personally and feeling that you can handle the equipment or you feel that you know what to do with

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the class. But I think it’s maybe relaxing into what you’re doing too, that you have a sense that this is purposeful and it’s getting somewhere and the children are enjoy- ing it.

For Rachel the initial activities and discussions in the meso- community were interesting and started her thinking, but it was her experiences in the micro-community which were central to her professional development. Time away from school for collaborative analysis of the data, which the project made possible, combined with the opportunity for iteration and reflection, were key in enabling her to confront issues and engage with ideas which had been suppressed in the pressure of day-to-day practice. As the project progressed she was able to place her experiences in the wider context of the shared understandings developing in the meso-community of the SDT. Among Rachel’s departmental colleagues in school there was little interest in incorporating technology in teaching and learning. In this context Rachel’s experiences on the InterActive project made her neither evangelical nor overtly revolutionary. But she did return to school a more thoughtful and confident teacher, an enabled practitioner with a sound foundation for continuing professional development.

In order to exemplify the ways in which the ‘layers of community’