Lessons from Teapots

On Monday morning two of our teaching staff were discussing the media beat up of the phenomena known as ‘planking’. The two psychology teachers were musing that planking in itself wasn’t a problem, rather the unsafe behaviour of the unfortunate young man who tragically died while performing the stunt on his balcony, was. They decided in fact that planking itself was no more or less dangerous or interesting than ‘teapotting’, the act of standing with one hand on your hip and one extended as a spout.

During the luncheon after our special Education Week assembly that morning, they mentioned the teapotting idea to our student leadership team and for a bit of a laugh, took a photo of the group ‘teapotting’ and created a facebook group.

So begin a very interesting ‘living’ social experiment conducted by the teachers with their students on a social network. How many people would be happy to ‘like’ and repost teapotting? The goal was 100 in a night. By midnight the tally had reached 200. The next day it topped the 1000 mark. One of the national TV networks heard about it, lifted some of the photos from the site and claimed the idea as their own. Likewise the Herald Sun newspaper. Suddenly there were over 2000 followers on facebook and the thread had picked up it’s own hash tag on Twitter.

For awhile, the thread looked like it might be sabotaged by a few naysayers who used the urban dictionary to portray a nasty side to teapotting or who encouraged or predicted gloomily that teapotters would become planking risk takers. But the group was undeterred. The teachers monitored the site continuously and reminded visitors to the page that it was a digitally ‘safe’ space where profanity and disagreeability would be swiftly removed. Teapotting, by it’s definition on their page, is only authentic if conducted in a safe and sensible manner.

Today the media coverage intensified and then an awesome iteration occurred. Someone on Twitter suggested the connection between teapotting and the Cancer Council’s Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea fundraising event on May 26th. Now the idea had wings and a cause. An idea born in jest and then nurtured in educational philosophy had suddenly become a random act of kindness!


Next Thursday our school will host Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea and the media are coming to cover it. We will have our 15 minutes of fame and more importantly, the Cancer Council will get a boost for their research.


Since my current Master’s research is based on the positive influence of adults on social networks this incident is like a data gift for my project. As a school leader however, my glee is tinged with terror that someone will railroad the group and turn it into a negative for our kids and the ‘social media in education’ cause.


Most of all though I am excited by Liv & Alison's 'big think' and overwhelmed by the rich learning opportunities offered by such a simple idea. Thanks to everyone who has come on board to support the concept and helped point out the teaching points along the way.
So what have we and might we learn from teapotting?

• Social networking is a powerful medium for spreading information. If you post a photograph online it can end up on national TV without your permission in less than 24 hrs. The need to examine privacy settings and check our digital footprints is suddenly very real.


• Teachers & students can have fun learning together through social media


• The world is a closely connected place. From our tiny town, teapotters around the world have appeared and to some extent we can trace and draw their connections to the source. Great for studying the transmission of epidemics!



• Social Identity theory is alive and well. It’s important to be part of a group. It feels good to have a common purpose. People who don’t feel part of the community will try to devalue it.

• Generally, people are good and they respond appropriately. They like to make connections with people they don’t know, in a positive way.


• Role modelling on facebook works. Generally speaking, kids don’t like swearing on social networks. Everytime one of the teachers removes a post or reminds posters of the need to be digitally responsible, they get lots of ‘likes’.


• We do care about copyright and we don’t like it when other people fail to acknowledge our ideas. Our classrooms will be much more careful with creative commons and source acknowledgement now that we feel something of ours has been ‘stolen’.


• However, we’ve also learnt that it doesn’t really matter whose idea it was in the first place if it achieves something worthwhile and for the common good. Social networking groups can collaborate to modify and expand small ideas into giant ones.

Education Week

I knew I'd be a hopelessly intermittent blogger :-(  
The only time I actually manage to get words on the page is when I should be writing something else (in this case a 6000 word literature review). It seems Blogging has become my preferred method of procrastination!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Education Week. We'll be celebrating the occasion by opening our new BER building. The building isn't what we wanted. We have an excellent performing arts program that desperately needs a home and the 2 million dollars allocated for our building would have created a beautiful space for that. No longer would we have had to traipse our cast of 70 plus up the road to our local hall where we pay exorbitant fees to rent the space for our non profit making performances. No longer would we have had to squeeze our huge cast onto a tiny stage or let them freeze backstage in the unheated and unlined bluestone side room. If we were an independent or catholic school we would have been handed the 2 million to spend as we saw fit. Unfortunately, we are but a humble government organisation, not to be trusted with such autonomous suggestions!

However, that is a political argument that's now in the past and not worth revisiting. We have a beautiful building and it's going to very useful for many things. It's clean, it's shiny and it's full of state of the art gadgets including an awesome sound system that even I can manage.

It's a multi purpose building and when I was having one of my 'thinks' this morning, (as I do now that we are in the Seussical swing), it occurred to me that that's a perfect analogy for our school. We are, in many respects, a multi purpose school. We take all comers, we offer all subjects. We allow and encourage our kids to be the best they can be in a huge variety of areas.We teach about the real world in a school of 'real' people.All cross sections of society are represented in our school. Just as in life after school, our students learn to deal with difficult people and to monitor their own behaviour and develop sound relationships with people who come from different backgrounds to themselves. At our school, kids can be athletes, performers, academics, musicians, equestrians, leaders and world travelers. They can do all of these things at the same time and they don't have to leave their home town to do them (with the exception of the traveling part!). They're taught by people who know them well and who have a vested community interest in seeing them succeed. We teach our kids within their own community, for their community. In doing so, we build efficacy in the community itself.

This weekend I read the local regional paper and noticed a lot of very large, expensive advertisements from other district schools, public and private, all vying for the educational rights to the children of the area and beyond. Some of them were making some big claims and the colourful pictures painted a very rosy picture.We've been suffering lately from a spate of private school transfers and looking at those ads I can see how parents might be persuaded to believe that the grass is greener where the pastures look more lush.

We haven't put any ads in the paper or on TV. Quite frankly, I think there are hundreds of better uses in our school for the sort of money those advertisements must cost. In fact, if I were a fee paying parent at one of the schools who pay for the ads I'd be asking questions about how my money was being spent.I think the calibre of the students who graduate from our school is all the testament we need. I just wish more people would draw the logical conclusion that such success doesn't happen by chance. Amongst all the strengths we encourage at our school, maybe we should ease up on the modesty thing!

I think there's a blog post waiting to happen about local vs regional or private schooling, but this government school teacher has way too much on her plate at the moment to write it.
Suffice to say, I'm very proud of my school and all who learn in it. I couldn't wish for a better place for me to teach or my children to learn.

Happy Education Week everyone.

Please don't tell me my friends aren't real.

Blogging was not on my list of things to do today but, as noted in my previous post, I'm easily distracted and I have difficulty sticking to my 'get it done' priorities.

Today's distraction is due the large number of references I've come across in my Twitter feed and Google Reader this week referring to'real life' as opposed to 'online' with the assertion being that the people you meet and communicate with online are somehow different, or the relationships with them are less valid or less important than the relationships you have with people in your pysical space. I'm used to that sort of misunderstanding and assumption from folks who aren't internet connected but it comes as a bit of a shock to me when I read it in my social media pages.

I firmly believe that this discrimination between on and offline worlds is one of the greatest barriers we face in promoting global unity and providing 21st century communication in schools.

Frankly, I'm tired of being told I should spend less time on the computer and more time talking to 'real' people. I'm over making excuses for providing my students with the opportunity to broaden their outlook by communicating with kids in other parts of the world. Here's the thing. Online is real. The people you meet there are real. The friendships you make there are real. The learning that takes place there is real.

I have friends I made in high school. I have friends at work, friends I met at parties, at mother's groups, while playing sport or because we've worked on committees together.I also have friends I've made online.The only difference between each group is their context. The commonality is that they are all my friends.

I love the fact that I live in a time when I can connect with people all over the world at anytime of the day. Given the relative isolation of my small country town, if I were to confine myself to only meeting and befriending the people I can see face to face, then my choices would be pretty limited and so would the opportunities of my students.

I've only been part of the Twittersphere for a short time but I've been collaborating with other teachers via the internet for almost fifteen years. I started my collaborative journey at TeachersNet where I met an amazing group of people with whom I became firm friends. Subsequently, I met some of them in a physical space, many I have spoken to on the phone and some have remained 'text' based. They are all real. The conversations we have are real. The support and advice we offer each other is real.

At Christmas, one of my old Tnet friends sent me two tins of canned pumpkin so I can make that wonderful American delicacy with  ingredients that aren't available here. That pie (despite my poor culinary skills), will taste every bit as good as if it were hand delivered in a checkered tea towel because the sentiment behind the sending of it is just the same as the jar of home made cookies from my neighbour next door.They are both symbols of friendship.

I know there are cases where people have masqueraded as someone they are not on the internet. They are frauds but it's not the internet who makes them so. I've had physical meetings with quite a few frauds in my lifetime and while it was easier to discern their age and gender because I could 'see' them, their motives were just as well hidden as an online fraudster.We need to teach our kids how to identify genuine friendships and genuine people, in ALL their spaces.

It's time we stopped referring to online friendships as something different , strange or less important than the friendships we form in physical space.The world needs to be more connected; we need to feel more like the citizens of the world that we are, rather than barricading and segregating ourselves into minority (or majority) groups based on race or location or social strata or age. Online friendships promote empathy and cultural understanding. They provide opportunities for collaboration and consultation with other like minded individuals and they overcome the isolation of geography or circumstance.Online communities are just like any other community. They provide friendship and support and a sense of belonging.

I guess the most compelling proof of the reality of my online friends is that I married one of them. Back in the day when my online presence was just a nickname with no photo or profile, we formed a friendship based on humour and shared interests and common beliefs about teaching and the world in general. Given that we came from different decades and different countries, it's doubtful our paths would have crossed in any other space. And yet, here we are, twelve years on, still sharing common beliefs about teaching and the world and bringing up our 7 yr old who is absolute living proof that our 'virtual' relationship is pretty damned real!

Are online friendships part of your real world?

Think Big

I've struggled to add to my blog over the holidays. I think my brain has enforced an imposed vacation to give itself time to recover from 2010.

I have been working on a few things for the new year though, and one of them is this year's production of 'Seussical'. The production isn't actually part of my assigned workload and so I guess I should be prioritising it below the staff rosters, the timetable and organising the start of year PD days but as I've mentioned previously, it's one of my favourite things to do and so I'm indulging myself by listening to the score over and over until it's inculcated and I've become a part time resident of Solla Sollew.

Each time we do a new play I try to connect to the story and characters in some way, to immerse myself in the story so that the kid's will 'feel' and believe the storyline when I help tell it to them.This time I've found an immediate affinity with two of the characters because I discovered that Horton and Jojo are thinkers! And so am I. Indeed the amount of thinks I have is astounding and like Jojo, they often get me into trouble.

Recently I did this quiz and it told me I was a visionary 'crazy maker' and that my inability to manage so many different projects may be adding to the workload of those around me.I think it was suggesting that I should shed some activities, lose some thinks in order to see more of them through without creating chaos for those I work with. I also read this post by Will Richardson about rethinking our online time and that created more thinking and more worrying. I agree with so much of what he's saying but I can't quite reconcile that with the burning desire to read everything, to follow every link, to try every new program. We live in a wonderful age, it's an exciting time to be an educator and I want to soak up and share every bit of it! It's a conundrum, but it's a problem I've decided to ignore for the time being.

Instead, one of my new year resolutions is to encourage more thinks. I am going to stand up for my right to think.I am going to stand up for my right to encourage kids to think. I will not sacrifice thinks for test scores (although I promise I will pay due attention to teaching persuasive text and I'll do my best to improve their spelling, provided great word choice remains their priority!). I will not be bound by or bow down to the staus quo or the 'historical' routines or a limiting curriculum that focuses on content rather than context. I will encourage and support staff at my school to try new ideas and dip their toes in the amazing networking possibilities of social media. I will no longer accept the 'I'm no good with technology' statement from teachers and I will be resilient in the face of criticism from luddites and digital dinosaurs.

'People are people, no matter how small' and our students deserve to be given access to the sort of

technology and the ways of thinking they'll need in their adult lives.If they are going to save the world instead of destroying it, then they need to collaborate with their peers all over the world. They need to develop skills to solve problems rather than create them. So, as Jojo says, 'I will think and think until I drop', and if that makes hard work for myself and others, so be it, because in the immortal words of Dr Seuss,
 "Anything is Possible'.
If anyone out there has some ideas on how to manage my thinks, I'd love to hear from you.

The best classroom in the world.

The best classrooms aren't necessarily the ones with four walls.

Year 9 is an interesting time for kids. At our school it's a limbo space, a twilight time between the children that they were and the adults they will become. The desire to work to please parents or teachers has long passed. The need to work in VCE seems still far distant. For some, it's a time to opt out and when that happens it's often really hard to opt back in.

That was certainly my own personal experience. A bright and engaged student until year 8, I became a stereo type of angst ridden adolescence. I hated the conformity of the classroom, I despised the boring text book, one size fits all approach of many of my teachers, I found it difficult to find relevance to my world in the tasks I was asked to complete at school. I did opt back in eventually, but only because I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers who took the time to see the value in me despite my arrogance and refusal to toe the traditional line.

That was 30 years ago but nothing much has changed. We still expect kids to keep plugging away , doing things our way even though we know it is essential for them to find their own way.We serve up a regurgitated diet of text book content seasoned with a sprinkling of 'active', but not necessarily relevant learning. We expect them to conform to school uniform and school rules, even though we know they'll learn best by making their own mistakes. And a lot of kids respond just the way I did. They switch off from school and more critically, the type of teacher student relationship that is so vital to engaged learning becomes very hard to maintain.

This year we decided to try something a bit different with our year 9s at the end of the school year. Like many of the programs that run in private schools (where funding makes it possible to be alternative), and the government run Alpine School program (where places are limited), we wanted to give them some real life, rich tasks to finish off their middle years schooling. We called it the 'Survivor' program and based the final 5 weeks of term around a range of life skill's and outdoors activities. I think the whole program was pretty successful but this blog describes the two activities that I was involved in.

One of the 'Survivor' challenges was to bike ride 100kms from Colac to Apollo Bay along the Beech Forest Rail Trail over 3 days. I was lucky enough to be the support car driver ( my glutes are no longer designed for a bike seat!). The first day was 45 kms of mostly uphill riding on bush tracks. It was hard physical work and even the super fit front runners were struggling by the time we reached the run down into Beech Forest. We lost a couple of bikes but with some reshuffling everyone managed at least 40km of the ride. Sara took a tumble during the bush leg and arrived at the lunch time pitstop covered in blood from where her braces had punctured her bottom lip but a couple of kms in the bus was enough time to staunch the bleeding and she was back in the saddle for the rest of the day.

When we arrived at our campsite (a local cricket ground with toilets but no showers or power), in drizzling rain, I wondered about my own ability to survive the next two days. But the kids had their tents up in no time and their trangia stoves were soon cooking a gourmet array of beans, tinned spaghetti and noodles. A game of cricket in the gloom of dusk ended the day.

On Thursday we rode another 30 km through the beautiful Otway Ranges, up and then down into Skenes Creek.With hair pin bends at every turn and sheer drop offs from our side of the road, I was a nervous wreck and spent so much time watching and counting heads in the rear view mirror that I missed the majesty of the rain forest. The kids tell me however that it was an exciting and exhilirating experience to hurtle themselves down the side of the mountain without touching the brakes!

Our camp site in Skenes Creek was right on the beach which afforded tired legs with a welcome sea bath. It also had a shower block which was a relief to everyone's senses. Suprisingly, almost everyone was keen to ride the 6km and back into Apollo Bay along the Great Ocean Road that evening. Not surprisingly, everyone was also happy to take up the offer of fish and chips before bed.

On the last day we rode into Apollo Bay again and then drove to Forrest where everyone rode enough of the bike trails there to make up their 100km. Remarkably, in 3 days together, I didn't hear a single complaint and I didn't have to 'speak' to a single student in anyway but the positive.

So clearly everyone ( including the staff) had a great time. But what did they learn? As a YCDI school, the keys to success jump quickly to mind. Persistence; staying on that bike after the first 10km took bucket loads of it. Resilience; likewise. Confidence; you bet. Some of these kids have never ridden down the street let alone 100km. Success like that breeds confidence.Organisation; their bikes had to be in top shape and if they hadn't organised their food, they went hungry. And finally, Getting Along; speaks for itself if you can manage to spend 3 days with 22 unshowered classmates and teachers!

I can tell you there was a fair quota of numeracy involved in calculating mileage, speed, velocity and the percentage chances of rain. As for literacy, I heard a lot of really good stories and conversations during the two days :-) I also heard laughter and encouragement and cooperation. Not the things 15 yr olds are usually well known for at school.

The second activity I was involved in was 'The Christmas Elves'. During the week after the bike ride, the year 9s spent sometime in the kitchen whipping up batches of Christmas rum balls. These were wrapped in cellophane and the Years 5-7 students added a card of Christmas greetings. Then on Wednesday, everyone dressed in elfish finery and each year 9 led a group of 5-7s on a journey through town delivering the gifts to each household. The gifts were accompanied by some spirited carolling.

We thought this would be a fun way to provide some leadership opportunities and share some multi age comraderie while teaching the kids a little bit about altruism. I think the activity succeeded on both those counts but I don't think anyone anticipated how successful the activity would be from the recipients point of view.

We were inundated with thank yous from the townsfolk and even from some passing travellers.

One lady cried, another provided a song in return and yet another told the kids it was the first time she had felt the Christmas spirit in many years. Some insisted on giving the kids money (which they donated to a Breast Cancer fundraiser run by one of our Yr 8s the following day).

And so what, if any learning occurred here while the children were gone from their classrooms for the morning? One of the Year 6 boys summed it up. " I never realised you could have so much fun giving people stuff. I feel great!"

You know what they learnt? They learnt about Goodwill. The best Christmas lesson of all.

I'd love to hear about programs other schools are running to engage their students outside the traditional classroom.

What happens with the Year 9s at your school?

Alphonso's Dog

I really should be working on my reports but I read this blog post today Of Monkeys and Bananas and it reminded me of the story of Alphonso's dog. We refer to Alphonso's dog so frequently at home and at school, that it has become an embedded phrase for anything that continues to happen just because it's become accepted practice, regardless of whether or not it's good practice.

Alphonso's dog comes from a story someone once told me about a monastery where dogs had been strictly forbidden for hundreds of years. One day the Abbot (called Alphonso), took pity on a stray that he found outside the monastery and he began to feed it. The dog, of course, kept coming back and because Alphonso was cool with it, the monks began to believe that having a dog in the monastery was OK and that the dog must, in fact, be a creature of spiritual significance. When Alphonso died, the monks revered the dog in his memory. In this way, in time, all dogs became important to the monks and were treated as something special rather than something forbidden. Pretty soon no one knew why having a dog at the monastery was important, it just was.

We use this phrase to describe many things, just one of them being the acceptance of teenage drinking in our community. When did it become accepted practice for 14 and 15yr olds to get slaughtered every weekend? Why is it that football clubs and parents condone the behaviour and in some cases even supply the grog? Because it's an Alphonso's dog, that's why. Everyone else does it, therefore it must be ok.

When I was a kid, it was smoking. Everyone else did it, therefore it must be a good thing to do. Thank goodness someone euthanised that dog before it euthanised me.

There's an awful lot of teaching practice that's become an Alphonso's dog too. Grouping kids by age is one of them. Judging intelligence based on good spelling and neat handwriting is another!

I'm concerned that attitudes to social media are also becoming Alphonso's dogs. If you ask most of the people who have never used social media but are opposed to the use of it in the classroom why they don't approve of it , the reasons they give aren't based on their own experience but rather because 'someone' says so and 'everyone' knows. Thanks to shock jock media beat ups and just plain ignorance, the idea that the internet is a bad and dangerous place is becoming one of Alphonso's dogs.
One of the reasons I love teaching so much is the ever changing nature of the job. No two kids are the same, no two days are the same, every year is like starting a new job but with the bonus of lessons learnt from the previous year.

So how come some teachers keep regurgitating the same lessons year after year? When so many rich and varied tools are at the disposal of 21st century teachers, why do they continue to deal in 19th century teaching practices? I know it's boring for the kids but it must also be boring for the teachers. If I wanted to know what I'd be doing in week 4 of term one I think I'd be better off working in garbage collection. When the doors to classrooms all over the world are open and inviting us to Skype or Tweet or Elluminate ourselves in, why are some of us still working behind closed doors and closed minds ?

It's that damned dog of Alphonso's that's why and if anyone has ideas on how to get rid of him, I'd appreciate it if you shared them.

The Class of 2010

Today was the last school day for our Year 12 students. Tonight they party, tomorrow they start Swatvac, next week they start exams and soon they will step off into the big, wide world of university, training or employment. So this reflection is a tribute to the graduating (said with supreme confidence in their ability to pass the upcoming exams!), class of 2010.

There's a lovely sense of privilege and pride, especially in a P-12 school, that comes from watching tiny, timid five yr olds transform into confident young adults. This is the third group of kids that I've been lucky enough to be associated with from Prep to yr 12 and with this group in particular, I've always felt a very strong affinity. They were the babies of our first middle years group, guinea pigs in a bold and very successful experiment to break the barrier of transition from primary to secondary school.They were also the first of our 'super' school productions, with everyone from years 5-7 involved in the chorus.They were founding members of our Kapahaka group and part of our school's performance tour of Knox during the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. Many of them joined our first ever school tour of NZ in 2005 and some even returned for a second trip two years later.

Outside of school I coached quite a few of them in netball or junior tennis and when I think about it, I can't  remember any really negative behaviour from any of them. Most classes go through a bit of a 'too cool for school' phase when they get to yr 9 and 10 but not this lot. They're just a very special, lovely group of kids and it will seem rather strange not to have them at school anymore.

One of the outstanding features of this group is the amount of altrusists among them. Josh , Josh and Emily have been Moyne Shire Youth Councillors for the past four years and have given great service to the youth of the Western District. As one final initiative, Josh and Emily, along with Shelby and Lucy will be part of an 'Alternatives to Schoolies' trip to the Phillipines after their exams. Instead of partying at one of the country's  beach haunts, they'll spend three weeks in the Phillipines, living with a local family and helping in the school there. Before they go they are working flat out to raise money to buy vegetables to plant in the village farms and school supplies to distribute to the children. If you'd like to donate to this fine cause, please contact us at school.

When they were in the 5-7 unit, these kids helped to establish 'Rainbow Reward' days, where everyone dressed up and took a day off class to celebrate the preceeding weeks of hard work. They approached these days with great fervour and their dressup skills were impressive. The legacy of this is that dress up days are now cool right across the school and everyone enjoys the chance to play for a day.

In a similarly flamboyant fashion they are almost all performers and nearly everyone of them has been involved in the Performing Arts during their time at school. They have created a aura of excellence around our school productions and 'mainstreamed' performing for boys. Of course this year also marks Geoff and my first foray into VCE drama and we are grateful to Sonia, Andrew and Paul for once again becoming guinea pigs and positive role models for a De Manser initiative.

To the 14 who completed the whole journey with us, we wish you well and hope that your life is full of wonderful events. To those who left to work or complete their schooling elsewhere, especially Johan and Grace and Aisha, we miss you and wish you all the best of luck with your exams too.
Can't wait to catch up with you guys when you're all rich and famous :-)

The Class of 2010 on PhotoPeach