ResearchED15: What I took home in my Party Bag of Thoughts

In Barcelona there are a number of five-year old children running round who have been dubbed ‘The Iniesta Generation‘. Nine months before they were all born, Barcelona were playing Chelsea in the UEFA Champions League Final and Andres Iniesta saved the day by scoring a last-minute goal. Celebrations from delighted Catalans across the country went beyond the usual jubilant hugging and as a result of this there was a 45% increase in the monthly birthrate for February 2010. Or so the theory goes.

I’d like to think that fantastic events like ResearchED do the same for teacher bloggers (yes, there was a point to the opening story) – speakers encouraging and inspiring nobodies like me to take fingers to keyboards and birth a new blog; furiously mashing out strings of words in the hope that it becomes something worth reading.

It was Becky Allen (@drbeckyallen) who encouraged me to take the plunge – her talk included 8 or so steps (I lost count after step 4, which doesn’t say much for my memory retainment) on how teachers could engage more with research. I’d managed to complete Step 1 already (Get a Twitter account) – hurrah!

https://twitter.com/mrrattle/status/640103285664448513

Step 2 asked me to blog… I fell short at this point. I left the conference vowing to have my blog up and running before the weekend was over. At 9pm on Sunday I still hadn’t done it and couldn’t find anything else to procrastinate over. Hi.

I’ve read a few other blogs that list the various talks people went to with their thoughts on each one; I don’t really want to write about that as I don’t think my thoughts are particularly interesting and I have my own notes so don’t need to regurgitate them for my own perusal later on. Actually, there was one talk that surprised me – I did not expect Tom Bennett (@tombennett71) to have a Scottish accent; for some reason I’d imagined him to sound more King’s Landing (and less North-Of-The-Wall). I was a little bit disappointed because I’ll now have to re-read all his TES blogs with a different internal voice.

While I’m not going to write about thoughts from each individual talk I attended, I firmed up a few ideas I’ve taken from the conference (only managed 3 but that’s quite a lot for me) and am going to log them here for my own reference:

I am going to follow through on ideas I think up in the school year
This is quite an important one for me. I often have phases where I try new concepts or ideas out on classes or in my own practice, but I rarely see them through in terms of reflecting on how successful they were or measuring the impact. I’m going to choose 2-3 at the beginning of term (so… tomorrow I suppose… bollocks) and revisit them every month or so to keep them fresh and try to see how successful they are (if at all).

I am going to try and support and consolidate my ridiculous iniatives with research
I often just think of ideas while walking home, or from a comment a student or teacher might make. I rarely go out of my way to find out if there is any research on them – not even a quick Google. I’m sure I could take time out of my Sim City app to bother doing this (even if my citizens lament the loss of their Mayor and riot…)

I’m going to do it properly
While I’m not going to pretend what I’m doing is proper research, I am going to do my best to document what I’ve done and measure the impact in some form.

I suppose I have a fourth; which is to update this blog at least monthly with what I’ve done/discovered. This is pretty much entirely for my own benefit – I know that if I don’t have something I feel obligated to do, then I’ll flake and not follow through on the little projects I’ve decided to commit myself to. By documenting and writing it up in this blog, I’ll feel that I need to continue with it and see them through. It makes sense to me, ok? Stop judging me.

I said stop it.

@mrrattle