Way of the SAMR eye

Steve talks to himself...

- So how did the lessons go, Steve?

- Which ones?

- You know what I mean. You’ve been procrastinating.

- I don’t call it procrastination when I’m busy with other things.

- I’ll just let that excuse hang in the air.

- OK. I’m still chasing the last five students, but all the 12 pieces of work I’ve received I’ve given feedback to and I’m very happy with them. There was the full range of grades on the IB scale, from 7 down to 1.

- I’m actually asking you to evaluate it.

- That’s what I’m doing. We finished the planned activities, and my fear that the ‘imaginative document’ I’d requested from the class would default to Google Slides in all cases proved unfounded. I got a Canva, Prezi, PDF, Pages, jpg and the rest were in Google. I gave them a mark out of 8 on the rubric I had shared at the start and commented briefly on strengths and weaknesses for each student. I haven’t shared it back to the students yet. I’m waiting for the lesson when I see them next.

- So that’s an evaluation then? Was it a good learning activity? Would you do it again? How would you improve it?

- I’m definitely keen to do it again - if only because I spent a lot of time preparing the materials; I’ve got things I would change, but I see what you’re getting at. If I’m going to evaluate it, I need to have values to compare against.

- Yes. Evaluation is more than just thinking about whether it went well or badly. You should have some sort of process.

- Well as luck would have it, I picked something up from Twitter which might help. My former colleague Matt shared an article last week while he was at Learning 2 in Vietnam.

@steveweatherell @svermeulin @irene_tanya @Txpated Another for you… (Steve, I know your love of ed tech models) https://t.co/EXRGsMs1k6

— Matt Broughton (@broughton_io) October 6, 2016

- Yes, I've heard you questioning SAMR, you heretic.

[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="331"] SAMR, TPACK, TIM, trudacot, PATER[/caption]

- My problem with SAMR is that it gives you wide abstract terms which categorise desirable outcomes, but no help with what it would look like nor how to get there. Redefinition becomes a goal in itself, when we even have difficulty defining what we already do! I tried to help my colleagues realise that every project may contain elements from S through to R. We even started a gallery of SAMR examples both from our own faculty and around the world. But it hasn't stuck as a helpful concept for teachers beginning to work with ed tech.

- And if I forced you to look at your lesson through a SAMR lens?

- Then I'd say I Augmented the task. Whichever culture in society they chose, the students had instant access to first hand accounts of the beliefs and practices. Also, they had an unlimited range of ways to express themselves imaginatively. And when we discuss the work in class and when I repeat the activity in the future, students will be able to easily consult many exemplars both in the classroom and at home. But looking at the rubric and task, I can't claim either Modification nor Redefinition since in essence it was just a written task for which students were encouraged to be creative.

- Right. So TPACK?

- To be honest, I've never used it before though it always comes up when models are discussed. As I understand it, my lesson did combine knowledge of Content (I wanted the students to consider cultures in society); Pedagogy (I considered how I would get their interest and how they would engage with the concepts); and Technology (I found the stimulus online; presented it using TED Ed; the students' work was created, shared, assessed and returned without using paper).

- But just because you are in the Sweet Spot of the Venn diagram, is that enough to say it was balanced or a good application of the three knowledges?

- No it doesn't. Now you're going to ask me about TIM, in which case I would say my learning environment was Active and my level of integration was between late Adaptation and early Infusion.

- You're being very brief with those models...

- Yes, I know, but I think they are built more as a framework for evaluation of a teacher or school's general practice. As Morpheus says, a model is not a recipe. You have to use it in the right way and although my lesson survives their scrutiny and I can think of ways in which it could score more highly, that would not necessarily make it better.

- So ditch the models...

- No, because there was another process described in the article. It's called PATER and it made a lot of sense to me.

- Aha, finally an acronym which spells a real word! So where are you on the PATER scale?

- I'm everywhere at once.

- ?????

- There is no scale, it's a cycle through Purpose, Activity Structures, Tools, Evaluation and Reflection. It recognises that we are not starting from scratch, but we are reviewing our teaching activities which already exist. Although our templates suggest that planning always starts with goals, that is an ideal which for many reasons, both practical and accidental, does not always happen. I love it when it does, but...

- That's a big topic you could perhaps cover in another blogpost. What about the 'Is it a Culture?' lesson we are discussing?

[caption id="attachment_65" align="alignright" width="300"] Those 7 elements in full[/caption]

- Right. Well by considering what my goals were for the lesson, in order to evaluate it, I realise that there was never a time when I wrote them down. There were seven ingredients which fed into the activity and each dictated a facet of the teaching and assessing, but none of them is an a priori goal. The outcome was dictated by the rubric which I adapted. The other elements all played their part too, but if we were to believe the theory, I should have stopped at number 1, identified all of my goals and then determined whether the other 6 elements were appropriate (and if they weren't, re-write the rubric, find another stimulus and so on...).

- So...

- So what PATER has helped me realise is that I didn't do it perfectly according to the template. I let the rubric dictate the teaching goals. But I don't have to feel bad about that and I shouldn't pretend that it happened otherwise. So long as I learn from it.

- Hurray!

"Finding out why we are doing what we already were doing is an exciting moment." Welcome to Night Vale by Fink and Cranor p99

[caption id="attachment_64" align="aligncenter" width="300"] SAMR + eye = samurai[/caption]