#the official programmes are. changing slowly. but they are still so very weak

[leonardburton]

[image description: tags reading "i was taught in school that all the archives were made public, should find the source" / end ID]

Just got an ask from someone who wants to stay anonymous asking me why Algeria doesn’t sue and ask for reparation.

It’s simply because France made it impossible. Basically whenever there was a massacre France would burn or hide the proof especially the registers of births and deaths. When they left they also took a lot of archives and they refuse to give us access to those archives. The law actually says that archives must be made fully public after 50 years. Well guess what? The majority of the archives related to Algeria are still not public and its been 61 years. At first they promised to make them public. Then they said they had to check each page before making it public in case there some stuff that should stay classified. Then they decided that if in a box there’s just one single page that says “classified” then no page from said box can be made public. All of that for one simple reason. France voted a law giving a full amnesty for the colonial crimes committed by the French in Algeria. That law means that nobody can be judged for anything they did to Algerians during the war (let alone before the war). The only way for that law to be considered illegal is if the colonial crimes committed by France in Algeria are officially labeled as a crime against humanity. Because amnesty is not valid for a crime against humanity. That’s why they hide the archives because they prove that there was indeed a crime against humanity and that would force France to pay back for what they did.

Basically imagine there’s a murderer and everyone knows he did it he says that he did it but you still need the evidence for the trial… except the murderer has the evidence everyone knows he has them he says he has them but he can choose which one he keeps and which one he shows… France is the murderer in this scenario.

P.S: I talk about Algeria because I’m Algerian and because the situation was very specific but France should pay for ALL its colonial crimes (settler colonialism is very different because it’s a form of colonialism that doesn’t see indigenous people as merchandise or cheap labor they are seen as a threat something to be eradicated)

[ms-znodgrass]

Crossing the Yellow Line

Part 2 to Sweeter than Cake - you can read Part 1 here: https://ms-znodgrass.tumblr.com/post/182357384907/sweeter-than-cake

Thank you to the amazing replies I received from this, they were honestly so lovely and so I decided to bang this out.  

Again, requests are open. Enjoy! (Gif cred not mine)

Following yours and Otis’ escapade on the night of his 17th birthday, you solemnly swore not to talk of it. Otis returned from his bedroom to see you attempting to clear up the living room area, you didn’t want Jean to return the following morning to a mess, and you felt as if you owed it to Otis. That, and the fact that there were was a giant elephant in the room and you were doing everything to keep yourself busy.

“Hi,” Otis mumbled softly behind you, “you don’t have to clean up.” He leaned against the doorframe, scratching at the back of his neck. You swallowed.

“It’s fine really, the table’s sticky,” you chuckled.

“Let me get a wet towel or something,” he said, shuffling out of the room before you could say anything. You breathed in, and out, and in again. The room had gotten a little more humid, something unexpected in mid-January.

You were so lost in your thoughts that you didn’t see Otis appear at your side, wiping down the table. You began picking up some cups left at the opposite end of the table. Maeve and Eric were still sleeping peacefully, much to your dismay.

“Y/N, I-“

“It’s nothing, you know, what happened. Don’t worry about me thinking any different I’m very much on the same page as you, completely, one hundred percent,” you sighed, seemingly oblivious to the cup behind your foot. You’d stepped into it, and sent it flying behind you. “Shit!”

“I was just gonna say be careful of the glass,” he mumbled, “don’t worry about it.”

“No, your carpet!” You squealed, face turning hotter and hotter without your approval. His eyes widened as he spotted the brown liquid seep further and further into the cream carpet. You scrunched up your face in horror.

“Throw me the flannel, quick!” You begged. He threw it as far as he could, which was still a few feet from you. You looked between him and the flannel, raising your eyebrows.

“I have weak arms,” he shrugged, stepping towards you as you grabbed the wet flannel and dabbed slowly at the stain.

“You’re meant to scrub,” he said.

“No you’re meant to dab,” you argued, seeing a slight improvement – but nothing special. You stood up and turned to him, once again noticing the close proximity between you. Simultaneously you both stepped back.

“I’m so sorry about your carpet,” you sighed, wishing more than anything that the stained carpet would swallow you up. He smiled reassuringly, his soft lips curling up at the corners. Remnants of your lipstick tinted them a little.

“It’s fine, we’ll just… put something over it,” he murmured, placing his hands on his cheeks and squeezing them. “Give me a hand with the sofa.”

He took one side of the couch, whilst you took the other, and lifted. It was a hard job, trying to move the sofa over the stain. Not only were you both relatively weak, and tired, but Eric was draped across the entirety of the sofa.

“There, that’s fine,” Otis laughed nervously, examining the crime scene. Again you apologised, hiding your face behind your hands.

“Y/N?” Otis asked, his words laced with curiosity and amusement. You were worried that he was going to bring up your previous outburst.

You swallowed, “what?”

“Did you draw a dick on Eric’s face?” He chuckled, and you turned to see a poorly drawn penis on Eric’s cheek. Your finest work. You laughed with him, breaking the tension between you both.

“You should see the masterpiece on Maeve’s forehead.”

 It was mid-May, the sun was warming the skin on the back of your neck, sending a tingling sensation down your spine. You were sat on a picnic table, talking with Maeve, Eric and Otis. It was a Friday lunchtime, and everyone was raving about the bonfire party occurring in the field of some rich kid’s farm that evening. Luckily, you four had received an invite.

“I can’t show up looking like an orange again, that’s for sure,” Eric sighs, pulling the crusts from his sandwich.

“You were a pretty sexy orange,” you wink.

“Oh I know,” he smirks back at you.

“She’s just being nice, people thought you shat yourself Eric,” Maeve interjects with a devilish smirk. Eric throws a piece of crust at her in quick retaliation, which hits her square in the forehead. You could practically feel the anger radiating from her body, and apparently so could Eric.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, please don’t kill me,” he squeals, clinging onto Otis’s arm, almost as if to use him as a shield.

“That’d be too easy, especially with Otis as your protector” she grimaces. You let out a chuckle, Otis catching your eye with amusement lurking in his.

“Speaking of the party, I was going to invite Ola,” Otis smiles, looking at his water bottle.

“Oh good, maybe you’ll get a bit of action,” Maeve jokes, wiggling her eyebrows. You and Eric laugh in unison.

“Thanks Maeve,” Otis replies sarcastically.

“Oh we’re just playing, maybe a public kiss this time, you know, go official,” Eric nudges him. Your head snaps towards Otis. This was new information.

“You’ve kissed Ola?” You ask inquisitively, “you didn’t tell me.”

“I forgot to mention it, it’s nothing,” Otis shrugs, pulled at the shoulder straps on his rucksack.

“Well when was this?” You ask.

“Two months ago?” He guesses after a quick thought. You look between Maeve and Eric, who are both avoiding eye contact.

“Wait, everyone knew except me? Really?”

“I thought you knew,” Maeve admits, looking over to Otis, “you didn’t tell her?”

“It’s really not that much of a big deal,” he tells you.

“I asked after you both so many times, I just assumed it would’ve been mentioned,” you tell him. He shrugs again. Ouch, that hurt.

“It’s only happened a couple of times,” Otis adds. Oh great, so this happened on more than one occasion? You couldn’t put a finger on why you were so angry about it, was it the fact that you were last to know? That you felt deceived? You couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason.

“You trained him well Y/N,” Eric winks. Wait, what?

“What?” You and Maeve sing. You look at Otis, who is burning holes into the side of Eric’s head. . Eric notices the sudden change in atmosphere, and shakes his head.

“Nothing! Nothing,” Eric shouts.

Maeve looks between you and Otis. “You’ve kissed? Oh my god, when?” She’s half chuckling, probably in disbelief.

“At Otis’ 17th!” Eric blurts out, covering his mouth with a hand.

Otis shoves him and looks towards Maeve. “It was nothing, it was nothing!” He repeats. The words roll over in your head, circulating through your mind.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” Maeve laughs, elbowing your side.

“It was meant to be a secret… I was drunk and it just happened,” you told her, trying to act as if you weren’t furious.

“It was nothing,” Otis says again.

“Yeah! I think you’ve got that through to them Otis!” You say, standing up and throwing your bag over your shoulder. He looks up at you, his blue eyes wide and nervous. You sigh, shaking your head. “I’m going to class, I’ll see you all later,” you sigh.

Eric looks at you, confused. “But we’ve still got half of lunchtime left-“

“I’m going to class!” You yell, walking away before you explode with anger. How could Otis deceive you like that? And embarrass you in front of your closest friends with such ease?

You hadn’t noticed your cheeks were wet until you reached the toilets, and finally allowed the anger to seep from your eyes.

 “I just don’t understand it, you offered to kiss him so he could get his first kiss out of the way?” Maeve asks. You nod, collecting your things. You were meant to meet the others at the party in fifteen minutes, but realistically, you weren’t going to be there for a least half an hour. You grabbed as much as you could, giving yourself a once over in the mirror before stuffing your keys and phone into your pockets.

“Yes, in short,” you sigh, your head all over the place. You barely had time to process your feelings, and felt as if your brain wasn’t yet caught up with your heart. Maeve sits, perched on the edge of your bed with one knee tucked into her chest.

“Do you like him?” She asks, chin on her knee, she watches you intensely and you can feel yourself breaking under her stare.

“No!” You exclaim, throwing your hands in the air. You cross your arms, pacing the floor, “at least I don’t think so… I don’t know!”

“Oh this is getting good,” she says, lying back on your bed. “You could write a Netflix programme about this shit,” she adds, stretching her arms out. She peers up at you, “you didn’t fuck did you?”

“No! No! Just a kiss,” you sigh.

If it’s just a kiss, why do you feel so torn? You swallow, and look at her. “We need to go, we told the others we’d be there on time,” you sigh, clapping your hands and shooing her out of the room. She rolls her eyes.

“Stop tapping your foot,” she tells you.

You hadn’t noticed you were.

“I’m not!” You say, drilling your foot into the ground. Maeve inspects you.

“Look Y/N I need to tell you-“

“Maeve if it’s Otis related I don’t want to know. Please,” you plead, eyes becoming a little wet. She shuts her mouth and looks to the side.

“Maybe you need a drink,” Maeve proposes, “I mean you don’t have to, but one or two might make you feel better?”

You had rarely heard this soft tone from Maeve, and though her face showed no sign of emotion, you knew she cared. You smiled at her, thinking.

“Alright. Let’s have a drink before we go, but just one!”

Or two, or three, or four. You’d lost count after shot number six, and could feel your body begin to feel a little limp, a little more relaxed, a little more… fuzzy?

Maeve was laughing at you as you both attempted to walk along the yellow line on the side of the empty road. You weren’t doing too well, a few stumbles here and there, and the line seemed to be moving a little. “It’s not even straight!” You protested, squinting.

“I think I’m doing pretty well here,” Maeve called out in front. But as soon as those words left her mouth, her body met the floor. You almost peed yourself, you were in hysterics. Nothing else mattered apart from you, Maeve and the yellow line. That was until you arrived at Lawrence Fry’s farm.

“Fuck we’re here,” you muttered, looking across at Maeve.

“After you m’lady,” she chuckled, signalling for you to walk ahead. You took her hand and stumbled through the tall grass, both falling over unseen dips and molehills, each small blunder resulting in loud laughter. You could just make out a figure walking towards you: tall, blurry and wearing purple. Eric.

“Hey!” You yelled, walking towards him and greeting him with a hug.

“You’re swaying,” he says to you, “she’s swaying!”

“Nah, I think it’s the wind,” Maeve laughs. You turn and wink at her.

She retaliates with another wink, her eyes flickering between you and something behind you. She coughs, and widens her eyes. You turn, and step forward into a chest. Otis’ chest.

“Well hi there,” he chuckles, attempting to steady you by placing his hands on your arms. It doesn’t help much, the contact just causes your pulse to quicken. You look up at those blue eyes. His dark hair is pushed back into a quiff, held in place with the assistance of hair gel, and lots of it. He flashes a kind, white smile, the white t-shirt he’s wearing only making him look more… angelic.

That was when your head caught up with your heart.

“Hi,” you smiled, all anger dissipating from your being. It was almost as if he was the only person with you in a slight unpleasant smelling field of grass.

And… maybe not. A recognisable figure appeared next to him, “hi Y/N!”

“Hi Ola,” you smile, stepping back from Otis and seeing her smiling beside him. “You look pretty,” you say, and it was true. She did look stunning. You swallow the lump forming in your throat as you watch Otis place an arm around her waist.

“Thank you! So do you, as always,” she smiles. You step back again, deducing that the wind caught you off guard once again.

Maeve appears beside you, and pushes you back upright. “She’s a little drunk,” she announces.

“I’m a little drunk,” you echo, giggling. You catch Otis inspecting you, and can’t seem to read his mind.

Eric smiles at you and wraps an arm around your shoulder.

“Well, let’s get Eric on that level,” he smiles, walking you towards the crowd. You mouth a ‘thank you’ to him, to which he replies with a soft forehead kiss. He looks over at Maeve, “I can’t believe you both got pissed without me.”

Though Eric felt excluded previously, it didn’t take him long to reach your level. And before long, you three had all reached a pretty terrifying alcohol state. Thankfully, most of the other party-goers had too. You sat with Eric and Maeve around a giant bonfire situated in the middle of the field. The flames were hypnotic, and you couldn’t stop staring at them.

“Y/N I’m sorry if I embarrassed you earlier,” Eric slurs, tapping your leg lightly. “I just can’t help my mouth,” he laughs, leaning further and further back. You and Maeve have to pull him forward to stop him from falling off of the log. You shake your head profusely.

“It’s nothing! I’m glad I know you know,” you say, enunciating your words with equally poor diction. He smiles at you, and looks over at Maeve.

“At least I didn’t tell her they’ve done other stuff,” he tells Maeve. Her head turns towards you, an unreadable emotion lurking in her eyes. You blink.

“What?” You ask, nose tingling, eyes burning.

“That they’ve further explored their sexual healing, feeling, healing, whatever,” he murmurs, holding your hand. “He told you that right?” His eyes are half-closed, and he leans towards you to inspect your facial expression. Upon seeing your blatant shock, he gulps.

You clench your jaw, hurt from these constant lies, constant whispers.

“No, Eric. He didn’t even tell me about their kiss, of course he wouldn’t mention any other crap they’ve gotten up to!” You yell, tears brimming at the corners of your eyes. Maeve hits Eric’s arm, flipping him the finger.

Noticing the exchange, you stand up and look at her, “you knew?”

“Yes… I knew. But I didn’t know you didn’t know until today, he told me in confidence and begged me not to discuss it with anyone. I thought he did the same to you. But then today I realised you weren’t in the loop,” she sighs, standing up too.

“You could’ve told me today!”

“I tried! But you didn’t want to talk about it,” she tells you. A couple of people around the bonfire look at you both, you hadn’t noticed how loud you’d gotten. Or that Otis had appeared behind Maeve. You look at him, a stray tear dripping down your cheek.

Perhaps you should walk away, perhaps you should scream in Otis’ face, or tell him how strong your stupid feelings are for him. Perhaps you should sober up before any further damage is done. You should. But you don’t.

Instead you walk up to Lawrence Fry and lay a big, fat kiss on his unsuspecting lips.

[careergrowthblog]

Six principled practices for intelligent schools:

On my travels I’ve encountered schools that are doing brilliant things without resorting to short-cuts,  without saying that they’ve sacrificed their principles to satisfy external pressures and without making life miserable for their staff with ugly brute-force whip-cracking performance cultures.

Some schools are lovely to work in because leaders increasingly recognise the power of building a deep professional learning culture over time,  a high trust working environment and they’ve started to embrace some of the thinking that puts workload-heavy macro summative assessment and tracking machinery in its place.   A longer road to travel is for school leaders to find the balance with internal quality assurance – to make sure everyone is doing what they should be doing whilst also giving them the level of professional respect and autonomy they deserve.

I think it should be possible to run a school that is both principled and intelligent in what it does.  Here are six aspects of that in practice:

Curriculum design is driven by sound principles. 

There are lots of permutations for the curriculum and some competing demands from the accountability regime.  Progress 8 drives schools down one path, Ebacc down another and, Ofsted – with its recent and well-reasoned demand for curriculum breadth – down another.  The question is this:  If all the various algorithmic rules and policy expectations where changed, what would you do differently?  Are you running courses you feel slightly guilty about offering but do it purely for Bucket Three points?

The solution is to have a curriculum you believe in, rather than one you feel obliged to deliver – to the greatest extent possible.  What, for example, are the educational principles underpinning a two-year KS3?  Or your KS4 offer?

As John Tomsett’s tweet below demonstrates, it is now officially possible to gain Ofsted kudos for prioritising integrity over short-term league table gains.  

In this post, I have outlined the thinking process that leads to a particular set of choices for a KS3/4 curriculum – there’s a lot to consider. But Huntington shows us there is no need or justification for running a curriculum you don’t believe in or wouldn’t run if the accountability rules changed.

Assessment data is created and used intelligently. 

I think this is a major area for review and reform in many schools.  Too many data systems have too much data; data that is never ever acted on; that is too remote from the information that actually drives learning gains and that is largely geared to create illusions of linear progress to satisfy accountability processes.  However, slowly but surely, the Emperor’s clothes are being seen for what they are – and we are beginning to see the assessment paradigm shift I talk about here. 

If you have a principled, intelligent system, you will have a lean set of centralised data, you won’t be using ‘can do’ statements or creating giant banks of learning checklists that are impossible to track; you won’t be setting target grades or progress targets or even using data targets for teaching groups. None of this stands up to rigorous scrutiny; it is all deeply deeply flawed and massively time-consuming relative to the in-class micro day-to-day business of responsive teaching.

Workload reduction is a priority

I recently set out a list of 10 things schools should stop doing or should do less of.  If we are serious about teacher retention and about making teaching a doable job in reasonable conditions, it’s worth examining your practice and trying to implement all the things you haven’t already addressed.  If you simply ignore this issue, it’s neither principled or intelligent; it’s counterproductive in the long term.

Professional culture drives quality assurance

It still staggers me that so many schools still grade lessons, set data targets for teaching groups and run top-down quality assurance processes that grade book scrutinies and involve very rigid performance-related pay criteria.  These command and control practices are common and are often falsely given status as the driver of school outcomes.    There’s no evidence to support that.  In fact there are plenty of schools with great outcomes that do not need to use power-driven quality assurance; to my mind, it’s a sign of significant weakness if they have to. For years we’ve seen Ofsted reports banging on about teachers ‘being held robustly to account’ and in my view it’s this big kahunas ‘tough talk’ that is killing our system.  The price we’re paying is evident in the decline in teacher recruitment and falling retention rates.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Principled, intelligent schools do it differently.

This article for Sec-Ed by Maria Cunningham http://ift.tt/2AjPuL3 outlines a lot of these issues with several very constructive suggestions.  None of them are soft.  Underperformance can be tackled without reducing everyone to the level of a factory drone following orders, dancing to the tune of  the ‘everyone must be above average’ data delusion.

High frequency CPD is built-in. 

The research is clear on this and some schools are doing a great job of putting built-in CPD into place.  However other schools are miles behind with a just few INSET days and bits of meeting time scraped together across a year.  It takes time, patience and a bit of relentless focus to really shift teachers’ practice in a particular area.  That requires a pattern of CPD that has a rhythm and frequency to it, given the status is deserves – even if it means reducing the length of a teaching day once a fortnight.   I wrote recently about how much CPD time is wasted, but the main barrier is usually simply that not enough time is given in the first place.   Intelligent, principled schools will not pay lip service to CPD. They will put in place a proper programme sustained over time that delivers real professional learning for everyone.

Behaviour systems eliminate class disruption

This is another complex area.  I wrote a piece about this recently suggesting 12 considerations when discussing behaviour and exclusions – a debate that gets polarised all too quickly regardless of context with people judging the practices of schools they’ve never been to.  However, the driving principle that all schools should aspire to adhere to is that class disruption can and should be eliminated.  I know all too well how hard this is  but it must be the goal.  As adults, we have no excuses.

In a wide range of contexts, including the most challenging, I have seen that it is possible to eradicate low-level disruption in all classrooms.  This is achieved by following through on two fronts:

developing teacher confidence, building a team of assertive teachers who can build relationships with teenagers and can use in-class strategies and wider systems to insist on standards of behaviour being met;

implementing systems that make sure students understand the boundaries, providing support for teachers when they need it and delivering alternative provision to manage students in the short and long term when they find they cannot manage the expectations.

I’ve never seen excellent behaviour in a school where one of these elements was weak or absent.  It’s the sign of an intelligent and principled school where both strands are a focus of development, recognising that this may not be a quick fix.

Moving Forward 

You may be lucky to be working in or running a school that does all of this already.  If you are not, then pick your battles over a sensible timeframe whilst keeping all six issues in mind.  The hardest thing might be to change your own mindset – the way you hold staff to account, the way you talk about teacher performance, the way you project the possibility of change in student behaviour or teacher confidence or the need for assessment data coming out of your ears.  What could you do differently that is more principled and more rooted in evidence – more intelligent?

Six principled practices for intelligent schools: published first on http://ift.tt/2uVElOo

[zedecksiew]

“We want the same things” - Gina Yap Lai Yoong on getting writers organised

(In 2017, I plan to read, look at, and talk to more Malaysian creators.)

~ 

Formally established in September 2016, the Malaysian Writers Society aims to:

“encourage, promote, support, defend, and advocate for the interests of Malaysian writers, literary translators, editors, and creators of creative writing content;”

A kind of union, in other words.

At its first meeting, the novelist and performer Gina Yap Lai Yoong was elected President.

This wasn’t surprising. Gina – with fellow fiction-writer Tina Isaacs – is one of the primary admins of the MYWriters Facebook group, a 5000-strong community out of which the Society has now sprung.

In this post – part three of a three-part interview – I get Gina to speak about the importance and challenges of getting organised.

(Full disclosure: I am a committee member.)

~

(Feature in the New Straits Times on the Malaysian Writers Society, Oct 1, 2016)

Along with fellow writer Tina Isaacs – you are one of the founding members of the Malaysian Writers Society. How did that come about?

Tina founded the MYWriters online Facebook group. I was introduced to the group when I was making a call for my Writing Pact programme.

She noticed that a lot of the things I was doing within my personal capacity for the writing community were beneficial for other writers - I was going around to meet local writers whenever I travel; conducting write-ins and writing retreats for my Writing Pact; providing mentorship and workshop programmes; etc.

So we met up one day and chatted about our aspiration for the Malaysian writing community. Despite our clashing personalities, we clicked like magnets through our shared aspiration.

What’s lacking in the local writers’ community, to you?

The writing community – and the publishing industry, even more so – has been more vibrant and active the past five years, compared to those days when I first started out as a writer.

But there's still lack of support for the writers themselves. Personally, I am interested to enrich and support the writers' journey to ensure they continue to produce good writings, to be read by Malaysians and international readers.

I always believe that if we have more writers writing, we will have more works to be read, and when readers are presented with more options, this will inspire and cultivate a reading habit in our country. People say it's a chicken-and-egg situation.

I say: "Who cares. We've gotta start somewhere. So let's start with something within our control: writing and writing more."

(Malaysian Writers Society booth at Art For Grabs. Vice-chair Lokman Hakim and Secretary Tina Isaacs are on the left)

So the solution is to get organised?

There's only so much one person can do. Through the society and my partnership with Tina, I am able to cast the vision further, and gather a group of like-minded writers to do more together.

At the end of the day, we writers experience the same challenges: how to get published; where to get ideas; writer's moral support; writer's training; etc. And we want the same things: fair pay rates; better royalties; copyright protection; etc.

So let's work together to be a louder voice, to bring positive change into the industry, and to make things happen.

Is it challenging, getting a creative community - full of people working on their own stuff - organised?

Oh, it's very challenging indeed. It's like getting a bunch of extreme introverts to gather and work together. They don't even like to talk with each other; they prefer writing lengthy emails / comments as a way of communication, and they hate verbal / face-to-face confrontation.

I find myself playing the mediator role most of the time. It can be energy-consuming. On a bright side, as a fiction writer, I just treat it as character-development exercise, where I get inspiration for my characters.

(Oh wait, did I just admit to that? Haha!)

(A recent MYWriters write-in - ie: writers-meet-up-and-write thing) 

What sort of solutions have you found for working with this community?

Creative people all have ideas of their own, and are very strong “ownership” people – which is both a strength and weakness when it comes to working together as a community.

So what I do is I intentionally build a personal relationship with each one of them, by trying to know them first as a friend. Understand their likes and dislikes; their aspirations and inspirations; their interests and motivations; etc.

The better I know them as a person, the easier it is for me to weave them together to work towards our shared vision.

So it’s about getting the right people onto the right tasks?

Say if I know AAA loves spending time online, then AAA might be interested to contribute to anything that is online-related, such as online posting.

If someone else, say BBB, likes to meet people, then BBB might be interested to talk with sponsors to get funds for the community.

And they can do it their own way, as long as their role is fulfilled. When people see and believe in the bigger vision, and realise that within their capabilities and comfort zone they are able to contribute to the bigger vision, for everyone's good including theirs, they are empowered to be willing to contribute to the community.

This should be the backbone of any proposed solution in getting a creative community organised for a bigger vision.

(Gina at a MYWriters Fest 2016 event)

How do you think the Malaysian Writers Society is doing, so far?

Since its establishment, the committee has spent a lot of time setting the foundation right. Getting to know each other better; strengths and weaknesses; and trying to work as a team took up the first few months.

Since everyone is on a voluntary basis, committee members can decide what activity / programme they would like to anchor and take charge in, to make things happen.

The stuff we have already been organising - regular monthly write-ins; an annual writers’ retreat; an annual writers’ fest; book-sales booths at third-party events; weekly online postings / prompts – those will be carried out as usual.

Meanwhile, as a proper entity now, we are also invited for meetings with government agencies, where we are able to be a voice and participate in policy-making in the literature and publishing industry. I believe we are bringing in change slowly but surely, now that our voice is so-called “official”.

What’s next?

Tina and I have presented our five-year plan for discussion and more contribution.

In our pipeline for the next five years, we are looking at:

Publishing anthologies; Representing Malaysian writers in international book fairs; Setting up a writers’ clubhouse and residence; Establishing an industry rate guide; Setting up a database of writers, for reference; and Getting ourselves represented in areas where at current writers don't have a voice. 

~

Ambitious! Thanks Gina! Membership registration to the Malaysian Writers Society is currently open.

[careergrowthblog]

Six principled practices for intelligent schools:

On my travels I’ve encountered schools that are doing brilliant things without resorting to short-cuts,  without saying that they’ve sacrificed their principles to satisfy external pressures and without making life miserable for their staff with ugly brute-force whip-cracking performance cultures.

Some schools are lovely to work in because leaders increasingly recognise the power of building a deep professional learning culture over time,  a high trust working environment and they’ve started to embrace some of the thinking that puts workload-heavy macro summative assessment and tracking machinery in its place.   A longer road to travel is for school leaders to find the balance with internal quality assurance – to make sure everyone is doing what they should be doing whilst also giving them the level of professional respect and autonomy they deserve.

I think it should be possible to run a school that is both principled and intelligent in what it does.  Here are six aspects of that in practice:

Curriculum design is driven by sound principles. 

There are lots of permutations for the curriculum and some competing demands from the accountability regime.  Progress 8 drives schools down one path, Ebacc down another and, Ofsted – with its recent and well-reasoned demand for curriculum breadth – down another.  The question is this:  If all the various algorithmic rules and policy expectations where changed, what would you do differently?  Are you running courses you feel slightly guilty about offering but do it purely for Bucket Three points?

The solution is to have a curriculum you believe in, rather than one you feel obliged to deliver – to the greatest extent possible.  What, for example, are the educational principles underpinning a two-year KS3?  Or your KS4 offer?

As John Tomsett’s tweet below demonstrates, it is now officially possible to gain Ofsted kudos for prioritising integrity over short-term league table gains.  

In this post, I have outlined the thinking process that leads to a particular set of choices for a KS3/4 curriculum – there’s a lot to consider. But Huntington shows us there is no need or justification for running a curriculum you don’t believe in or wouldn’t run if the accountability rules changed.

Assessment data is created and used intelligently. 

I think this is a major area for review and reform in many schools.  Too many data systems have too much data; data that is never ever acted on; that is too remote from the information that actually drives learning gains and that is largely geared to create illusions of linear progress to satisfy accountability processes.  However, slowly but surely, the Emperor’s clothes are being seen for what they are – and we are beginning to see the assessment paradigm shift I talk about here. 

If you have a principled, intelligent system, you will have a lean set of centralised data, you won’t be using ‘can do’ statements or creating giant banks of learning checklists that are impossible to track; you won’t be setting target grades or progress targets or even using data targets for teaching groups. None of this stands up to rigorous scrutiny; it is all deeply deeply flawed and massively time-consuming relative to the in-class micro day-to-day business of responsive teaching.

Workload reduction is a priority

I recently set out a list of 10 things schools should stop doing or should do less of.  If we are serious about teacher retention and about making teaching a doable job in reasonable conditions, it’s worth examining your practice and trying to implement all the things you haven’t already addressed.  If you simply ignore this issue, it’s neither principled or intelligent; it’s counterproductive in the long term.

Professional culture drives quality assurance

It still staggers me that so many schools still grade lessons, set data targets for teaching groups and run top-down quality assurance processes that grade book scrutinies and involve very rigid performance-related pay criteria.  These command and control practices are common and are often falsely given status as the driver of school outcomes.    There’s no evidence to support that.  In fact there are plenty of schools with great outcomes that do not need to use power-driven quality assurance; to my mind, it’s a sign of significant weakness if they have to. For years we’ve seen Ofsted reports banging on about teachers ‘being held robustly to account’ and in my view it’s this big kahunas ‘tough talk’ that is killing our system.  The price we’re paying is evident in the decline in teacher recruitment and falling retention rates.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Principled, intelligent schools do it differently.

This article for Sec-Ed by Maria Cunningham http://ift.tt/2AjPuL3 outlines a lot of these issues with several very constructive suggestions.  None of them are soft.  Underperformance can be tackled without reducing everyone to the level of a factory drone following orders, dancing to the tune of  the ‘everyone must be above average’ data delusion.

High frequency CPD is built-in. 

The research is clear on this and some schools are doing a great job of putting built-in CPD into place.  However other schools are miles behind with a just few INSET days and bits of meeting time scraped together across a year.  It takes time, patience and a bit of relentless focus to really shift teachers’ practice in a particular area.  That requires a pattern of CPD that has a rhythm and frequency to it, given the status is deserves – even if it means reducing the length of a teaching day once a fortnight.   I wrote recently about how much CPD time is wasted, but the main barrier is usually simply that not enough time is given in the first place.   Intelligent, principled schools will not pay lip service to CPD. They will put in place a proper programme sustained over time that delivers real professional learning for everyone.

Behaviour systems eliminate class disruption

This is another complex area.  I wrote a piece about this recently suggesting 12 considerations when discussing behaviour and exclusions – a debate that gets polarised all too quickly regardless of context with people judging the practices of schools they’ve never been to.  However, the driving principle that all schools should aspire to adhere to is that class disruption can and should be eliminated.  I know all too well how hard this is  but it must be the goal.  As adults, we have no excuses.

In a wide range of contexts, including the most challenging, I have seen that it is possible to eradicate low-level disruption in all classrooms.  This is achieved by following through on two fronts:

developing teacher confidence, building a team of assertive teachers who can build relationships with teenagers and can use in-class strategies and wider systems to insist on standards of behaviour being met;

implementing systems that make sure students understand the boundaries, providing support for teachers when they need it and delivering alternative provision to manage students in the short and long term when they find they cannot manage the expectations.

I’ve never seen excellent behaviour in a school where one of these elements was weak or absent.  It’s the sign of an intelligent and principled school where both strands are a focus of development, recognising that this may not be a quick fix.

Moving Forward 

You may be lucky to be working in or running a school that does all of this already.  If you are not, then pick your battles over a sensible timeframe whilst keeping all six issues in mind.  The hardest thing might be to change your own mindset – the way you hold staff to account, the way you talk about teacher performance, the way you project the possibility of change in student behaviour or teacher confidence or the need for assessment data coming out of your ears.  What could you do differently that is more principled and more rooted in evidence – more intelligent?

Six principled practices for intelligent schools: published first on http://ift.tt/2uVElOo