BESA CORNER
In our regular feature highlighting the work of members of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, Education Today this month hears from CERI HEATHCOTE, Community Manager at Collaboroo; and SARAH HAYTHORNTHWAITE, Director at GL Assessment, on engaging budding talents at a much younger age.
Towards more collaboration
through digital communities CERI HEATHCOTE, Community Manager at Collaboroo™ offers advice on how teachers can use online communities to connect and collaborate with other teaching professionals around the country and beyond.
It is well recognised that teachers face significant challenges in the classroom caused by the ever-
changing education landscape, socioeconomic conditions, high workload and budget cuts. But there is a growing movement of teachers using online forums and engaging in digital communities to proactively find solutions to some of these issues and gain inspiration and support from other professionals to actively improve their own teaching practice. The internet is awash with free educational content for teachers but poor navigation and variable quality can often make it time consuming or difficult for teachers to get exactly what they need.
Why are online communities so useful?
Online communities can help teachers decide which content is useful by validating content and advice based on their own professional experience. Features like trending feeds, curation tools, commenting, voting, rating and clever algorithms are all key to helping individuals to benefit from the experience of a large number of teaching professionals – helping them to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff! They also allow teachers to access a wide support network way beyond their own school, cluster group or local authority. They are conveniently available 24/7 making it easy to fit in participation around the school day.
What is Collaboroo?
Back in 2015, I was involved in launching an online content hub for The Consortium filled with ideas to help with lesson planning and engaging children in the classroom. Whilst the content proved useful and popular, feedback told us that teachers really wanted to share their own ideas and collaborate with other teaching professionals. Ultimately everyone involved in education wants the same thing, to make education accessible, enjoyable and achievable for every child. After some discussion at The Consortium we were really excited by the opportunity for us to help by bringing together everyone who shares our passion, using digital connectivity. It took us over a year, working with teaching professionals and technical experts to finalise the details. Finally, in early 2017 we launched Collaboroo with the ethos ‘Teach Happy’.
So far we have attracted over 6,000 new members including primary teachers and early years practitioners and we have had over 1,000 contributions and interactions.
How are teachers and early years practitioners using Collaboroo? “This website is amazing, I really like it. It is very easy to use and some fantastic ideas are posted. I am addicted to Pinterest so this makes my life so much easier to find educational ideas from the source at the touch of a button,” said Kelly, an Early Years Practitioner. Angela, a Primary Teacher, sums it up: “I love the fact that the essence of this site is a coming together of like-minded professionals who want to share best practice and help colleagues around the globe. I also love the fact that there is something new appearing every day. And I really, really like that I can ask a question about just about anything, from class rewards to assessments and pupil tracking and get realistic, practical and usable ideas really quickly.”
Join us at Collaboroo to connect, create and teach happy. To find out more visit
collaboroo.com
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www.education-today.co.uk
Engaging budding talents at a much younger age
SARAH HAYTHORNTHWAITE was a lecturer in engineering at the University of the West of England and worked at British Aerospace. She is now Director at GL Assessment.
‘By neglecting spatial thinkers, how many Elon Musks have we missed?’ This great question was posed by Dr Jonathan Wai, a research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Dr Wai’s specialist subject is spatial thinkers; those who think first in images and have a
capacity for mentally generating and transforming visual images. There is a lot of evidence that people with strong spatial abilities tend to gravitate towards and excel in fields such as physical sciences, engineering, maths and computer science, as well as art and design. Indeed, spatial learners have many strengths. They make connections easily, they are creative, innovative, reflective, and they are good at understanding concepts. Elon Musk, the inventor and tech entrepreneur behind Tesla motors, is a great example. He can apparently see images with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. However, our education system is heavily biased towards verbal skills. Curriculum and testing regimes place a premium on the ability to grasp word and number sequences, on oracy and literacy. It is not very good at identifying and developing spatial learners, and our analysis of GCSE scores in the UK suggests that those who have high spatial reasoning but poor verbal reasoning scores markedly underperform*. What is striking is that the gap in exam performance is not confined to English or the humanities. There is also a significant, if less pronounced, divergence in maths and science. In last year’s maths GCSE, for instance, 89% of children with good spatial and verbal abilities achieved an A*-B. Conversely, only 52% of those with high spatial intelligence but poor verbal reasoning skills achieved the same, a 37 percentage-point difference. In physics, chemistry and biology the gaps in performance are similar.
This represents a huge waste of potential. Almost 4% of students in the UK can be classified as having high spatial but poor verbal reasoning abilities – approximately 400,000 children in all. There is no intrinsic reason why these children shouldn’t perform well if their spatial ability is accurately identified and their verbal challenges addressed. There are assessments of cognitive abilities that will help and there are strategies schools can employ.
Developing spatial skills can start from a young age. You can teach spatial words, such as ‘out’, ‘inside’ and ‘corner’, use maps and models of the world, and ask children to imagine where things will go in simple experiments. It also helps to start with the concept first before going into detail, use models and diagrams, and talk through real-life scenarios and practical examples.
The annual shortfall of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills in the UK workforce is, according to the Campaign for Science and Engineering, 40,000. If we could unlock spatial learners’ scientific potential at an earlier age and engage their incredible talent, perhaps we would have more success persuading both boys and girls to stick with science beyond 16. And if we could do that, imagine how much smaller that figure could be.
*GL Assessment’s ‘Hidden talents: the overlooked children whose poor verbal skills mask potential’ is available to download at
www.gl-assessment.co.uk/hiddentalents
July/August 2017
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