 Hello, this is Ross, also known as Teacher Toolkit. This is a short presentation about three important pieces of research that I am currently involved in. Now, some of you may care, hopefully you do. I would imagine the vast majority don't, but there you go. These are the three pieces of research. On the left, verbal feedback action research, where I'm hoping to share some work across seven English schools, where when teachers talk to people, they have same or better outcomes, particularly with disadvantaged students. I'll go into that in more detail shortly. The image in the middle, I'm picking my doctoral journey, looking at social media, particularly Twitter and how it influences education policy. On the right, of all the schools that I've visited over 100 plus in the last 12 months or so, I've identified 10 very different schools across the UK, and I'm sharing some of the insights. This short presentation looks at all three. The first one, tweet me your thoughts, use our Teacher Toolkit and hashtag verbal feedback project. The first original proposal, I shared this on Twitter in 2016, and very quickly I gathered 110 schools in six countries without really understanding the difficulty that that would cause for myself to collect the data. But the original proposal was to challenge that written feedback is the most valuable type of feedback in a classroom, and particularly how in terms of high accountability for teachers working in state schools, that it always was then required to be evidenced to show progress and that people's were acting on what teachers had said. Of course that needs to happen, but you can get lots of silly ideas as a byproduct of that desire. So I gathered all these schools very quickly after three or four months of trying, and I got way out of my depth. So then I, by chance on a visit to UCL down in London, presented the proposal and they backed me and funded me. So we're currently conducting the verbal feedback research and development project. So this alongside the UCL, the widening participation project with a couple of academics there supporting me. So we've got seven schools, but let me just go back as to why this started. So my passion with Teacher Workload first started about 2013 when Nikki Morgan, the English Education Secretary of State at the time, produced this workload challenge report. And you can see the particular top two, recording input in data, and excessive depth of mark in detail and frequency. And on my travels, I've polled about 15,000 teachers on that workload question. And marking comes up time and time again in any type of setting, primary, secondary, independent or international school. So it's confirmed my belief that we need to drastically reduce teacher workload in terms of marketing feedback. And although some schools that I've visited have the best policies in the world, I think what examination bodies require teachers to do will trump all of our best intentions. So I think we probably need to look at reform at a higher level beyond just the school organization. Other reasons, so this research from colleagues at Cambridge, comparing state schools and independent schools, both teachers in different settings will work typically 55 hours per week to keep up with their workload. But the key difference between state schools and independent teachers, sorry, state teachers and independent teachers is that state school teachers are often asked to complete meaningless tasks. And you can see there the monitoring of marking exercise books was the top result. I'm always surprised how few people understand or even are aware of the Department for Education workforce census in England. So some quick statistics, there are 451,000 teachers in state schools today. There are about 350,000 qualified teachers including myself who are not working in schools and that data goes back 10 years. But this data here on the screen goes back 25 years. If you look on this right column here, you'll see typically 20-ish thousand teachers enter the profession every year. Now last year was the first time ever in this data collection that more teachers left teaching than entered. It was only by a few hundred, but it's the first time it's happened. And my worry is that looking at perceptions on social media that I suspect we may have more teachers leaving the profession this academic year. So this will be July 2019 than those entering. And then you can see the data that goes over the each year. So me, I'm off the scale there 25 years. I was about a 38% chance of staying in teaching. I've signed posted Malcolm Gladwell's book there Outliers. You may have heard the comment 10,000 hour rule bastardized and misinterpreted. But if we just take that as a ballpark figure for a full-time classroom teacher who works 750 hours per academic year, you're looking at about 13 years of teaching to reach what Gladwell would call mastery or really master being secure in the classroom. But we know we often hear that teachers leave within the first five years. Well, that sounds bad when we hear that on on the news and social media. But actually, when you dig into the details, the greatest attrition is in the first two or three years. Obviously, we don't want to promote that to the world. So these are the reasons why teacher workloads are serious issue. So my objective. So with the UCL support, what I would like to do is challenge perceptions, particularly of verbal feedback or written feedback to do that to reduce teacher workload, to develop a group of teachers and schools to gain expertise, not just in critical research and to be more engaged with research, but in verbal feedback approaches. And the teachers involved come from a vast range of subjects. And the particular criterion here with UCL is looking at disadvantaged schools and pupils that are underrepresented in higher education. So how are we going to achieve this? Well, we first of all started by constructing a reflect, ask, investigate, innovate model for research and development. We wanted to start with what do we know about effective professional development? During this process, the asking investigation stage, we looked at an impact framework such as this one, we fixed the baseline, we collected data, we decided on a research question, which I'll show you shortly. And then we wanted to consider what would we want to know about at the end, as we start through the research. So with things like types of evidence, the pitfalls, the risks, the ethical risks, those types of issues. And then we when we meet back in May, so I'll show the time frame shortly, May 2019, we'd start to make a tentative claim about the resources that I've shared with the schools and then consider how we would transfer this knowledge to a wider audience. So these are our seven schools, we did start with 10, but we've lost three along the way. So I'm confident these seven will significantly, when this research comes out, make a huge impact on the profession. So we've got schools all over the place, wide demographics, number of pupils on role, but here's a map for you so you can see where they're located. So we've got a couple in London, Surrey, Berkshire, Milton Keynes, Warwickshire and one up in Batley and Leeds. So when I wasn't there with Mark Quinn, the academic who's been working with our teachers, they developed this research question. Now I've circled here engagement, which is potentially a poor proxy, but we would have since defined this, since I circled this image on the right, but this is the research question, to what extent does available feedback implemented for two terms improve student engagement amongst disadvantaged pupils? So we're looking at years seven, eight and 10, so it's 11, 12 and 14, 15 year old students. Of course engagement we can define as outcomes, attendance, behaviour, participation in class and examination outcomes, but we can get into that detail as we go through the project. Here's just some images of when we first met, talking about workload and ideas and then in these two or three images here, I was working on particular techniques and forming the research question and ethics to then take back to our schools. These are the dates where we're at, so we've already been together three times, so the next time we meet we'll be in May and then we hope to report findings, look at data in July and then disseminate it with the rest of the profession in the start of the next academic year, so I'm very excited about that. So that's the first piece of research. Number two, so if you want to tag to your thoughts, so use at teacher toolkit and reply with a hashtag ed, so eddoc edchat. So this is my current focus, I've written about this on my blog. I'm very fascinated not just how Twitter has enhanced my professional development, but I think I've surpassed that level where I've started to observe not just myself, but others start to influence education policy. Now my original intention was to look at 35 OECD education jurisdictions and obviously that's a lifetime's work for many people, never mind just myself, so I've tried to narrow, narrow, the focus and look at just England. My supervisor, so Professor Stephen Watson and Mark Carrigan, Dr. Mark Carrigan, we are, my current focus is looking at these four things and this stems from Professor Stephen Watson first writing about me and his observations of my influence on my social media journey in a book called Flip the System UK and I first wrote about my own journey in a book called Education Forward and Stephen tackles this dialogue in these four approaches that we have social media providers with freedom of speech, so democracy, it also provides us with a platform to learn from one another, so a source of scholarship, but then you can see as people grow with influence or particular themes, how it can steer activism and bring people together in terms of solidarity, so you could argue that this is potentially shaping teacher dialogue, the purpose of having a teaching union and so on and so forth, so this is where I'm currently at, this is the research and practitioner development framework first designed by the Open University and at the top here I'm pretty much kind of about here still and I need to start to narrow my focus, that's where I currently am, so I'm looking to tackle my methodology over the coming three or four months, so why do I want to do this? Well I want to demonstrate that teacher voice, teacher professionalism is shaping the narrative, I'd still have a ballpark figure about 10% of teachers using social media, so I gauge this from my own social media research as well as on the ground in skills, you'll always get a mixture of lots of teachers using Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, but Twitter's generally in the minority still, many more teachers are on Instagram and Facebook and obviously they have different social tools or purposes which then generate different types of usage, but I'm looking at Twitter because it's a conversational thread and I've got my own evidence as well as observing others and you can see almost on a daily basis on Twitter in all aspects of life, never mind just in education, how grassroots or individual people as journalists or reporters are influencing policy or policymakers and there's a term called microcelebrity, so it was first coined in 2001, if I take you back to when Big Brother first started on the telly or we look at various teachers that might be viewed as edgy Twitter celebrities, this is the actual academic definition of microcelebrity, so someone being well known in their field even no matter how niche it is, so I'll talk about that in a bit more detail, for me in my own journey this is my 10 years of my background in design, so this is me branding myself, so you can kind of see my banner from my website, how my ID logo has evolved from my photograph or using keep cam carry on and then evolving this into the red branding and then how my websites on the top right have evolved throughout the last seven or eight years to what it is currently today, teachertalkit.co.uk, my audience, so I always wrote for myself but you can see I started with one follower, one reader, my purpose was just to write for myself as therapy but as you can see over the time it's grown up to 208,000 readers in last month, so typically six to seven thousand daily readers, so you can kind of see that this is a habit now seven or eight years later where it's gone to there's just another way of looking at the data, so over nine million views, 12,001 days, so it's nothing huge compared to big organizations but for a mere humble blogger and individual it's pretty good data, this is my analytics, so this is just the snapshot of last month, so nine million people saw my tweets which is frightening, it's a huge responsibility as well as a real privilege to be able to be followed or listened to by many people but it's now not just me, I've grown a team of bloggers and freelancers who help make the website work for a good eight years of my blogging life, I was a full-time school leader, deputy head teacher and trying to do all this on top of being a deputy was unsustainable, I used to go part-time, went through all the ups and downs of workload and trolls and all sorts of things but you can see here how this has evolved into people that kind of make the site grow and through conflicts of interest companies wanting me to share their work led to conflicts of interest but also I guess accidental income and obviously if I return out from work five or six o'clock at night and then have to blog about a company or tweet them out that was extra work and I was sitting sometimes at my desk till midnight and obviously it was a choice but when I started to realize having lost my job before I started all this it was a great way to make an additional income and pay the bills and so here's just a kind of indication of income it's about a year old this slide shot but it has significantly grown since then so when I made a decision to step out of my full-time job and do this I knew that I didn't have to I guess quite privileged to rely on an additional income from the website so it allows me to have a wider impact and start to have an influence at other levels so I'm kind of unpicking this for my doctorate throughout the whole process I've been involved with lots of copyright issues for myself of others I've been sued a couple of times so it's very interesting countless troll attacks or critique so here's one from a colleague who's criticising me for having premature ejaculation not knowing that I had a premature child and lost another baby and so you can kind of see sometimes people's feedback hurts so I've learned to deal with troll attacks and what I've found is when you're well connected people often expose anonymous ID so that it has a purpose and yes we should be challenging of one another but when it starts to get personal when well particularly in education when we have to kind of call those things out and other things I've learned throughout the way so G. Harley John is an student of my school so when you have an international story reach your school gates how you deal with the social media impact of that is quite a challenge so that was a very very interesting period in my teaching career as a school leader and that's influenced a lot of my work so what I'm hoping to do is look at how over the last 10 years what are the key moments been in my Twitter journey so I've been blogging since 1999 when one web page took 30 seconds to load but when Twitter first evolved I created a personal account then at this point I created a professional account I separated the both so we've got at Ross McGill at Teacher Toolkit and then what I hope to do and articulate it partly a monologue to begin with with my doctorate is look at how I've perceived influence or how I think I've influenced or how others have influenced education policy and by the time I finish my doctorate you know if it's six years long so that's where there'll be the ending point hopefully sooner than that and but I've also looked at Rutgers University me and former so something called the Kardashian effect a Kim Kardashian millions and millions of followers she is clearly an influencer but now because of her influence she's now not viewed as an expert on climate change but she still has to comment on that or even if she doesn't she'll put out a personal comment and then obviously it would cause people who are the experts somewhat disdain if misinformation is being shared but millions of her followers would believe that that is the correct information so Rutgers University tackles me and former where people are self-focused retweet me please more followers selfie selfies versus an informer which I would probably first attribute my first journey as creating resources sharing ideas building that content talking about other people's work as well as my own retweeting others I think that probably largely attributes to why I've got quarter of a million followers I've done lots of reading academic reading as well as just general books this is probably one of my favorites that I would sign post to people Twitter power by Joel Conn and Dave Taylor and they talk about these four principles and I always put the analogy if your post man or woman knocked your door you obviously get to know them and like them over time you start to trust them so if they suddenly put out a book of stamps in front of you and ask for a dollar or a pound to buy them you probably would because you've got those hallmarks in place so when it comes to online relationships we need to ask ourselves well I like that tweet I know teacher toolkit I it's a source of information that I trust and maybe the every five or ten tweets when Ross shares his book I might buy that book so I work on those principles and over time that's evolved into a social media plan so to speak we're trying to follow a certain methodology without overbearing my social channels with too much of one thing I've started to play around with uh netolithic and many others again I'm probably going to stop this because I haven't quite narrowed my research of where I want to go but this is just a social map of the term knowledge rich which is currently a popular term used for curriculum dialogue in English schools state schools so this kind of looks at key organizations and all these little arrows and dots are connected to other people um let me just delete these two images here so you can kind of see a group of people and how they're connected and then I can start to track how often they tweet about it and who is controlling that dialogue so it's very early days but whether I look at my own journey or key pieces of information such as grading lessons grading schools off-steads framework knowledge rich curriculum remains to be seen okay my last piece of research um so again tag me at teacher toolkit and use the hashtag just great teaching this is about my new book now I wanted to put to good use my experience of visiting many many schools over the last 18 months what are the top 10 key issues that all schools face across Great Britain now if we take funding away because every school has to deal with funding then what are those issues so I'll share those shortly but this is what I want to do to shake perceptions of British education yes it's important to look at Finland and Shanghai and other places but there's so much that we already do within that's great nothing particularly politicians need to celebrate that more so I want to highlight the challenges to showcase how schools deal with those challenges to provoke politicians and bias but also shape my own narrative if you're familiar with my own journey my last experience was quite brutal um has put me off quite somewhat about returning to school leadership and I want to not deny that narrative because it's common for many teachers I'm conscious that my influence on might be shaping everyone else to view that British education's in a bad place in some cases it is in other cases it isn't so I also want to kind of start to move my own narrative away from what I would probably call a toxic situation over the last two or three years so how am I going to do that well obviously this will be my fourth book so I've learned to develop a framework of topics headings word counts so that I can try I can't scroll this live screen here but um this document here um but I've written 60 000 words I now need to edit it throughout March 2019 ready for publication in September these are the books the books the schools um so 10 schools a prune independent school in Scotland an independent school in England boys school girls schools the oldest school in the country prime schools a school in the middle of nowhere in trogarian in west wales um some great schools here selective and non-selective areas sorry non-selective school in Kent in a selective area and so on and so forth so these schools all here um thank you to all the head teachers and school leaders involved a real mix of independent boys and girls number of pupils on role and these are the schools and where they've identified what they think they do really well and these then inform the topics for the books so the framework for the book is here's an issue that all schools face why it's an issue here's five ideas from me and here's the school talking about why they do this one thing really well and this is what the head teacher says and in each chapter will be summarized by various people so I've pulled out some data so I've got 10 head teacher responses and I've got 300 teachers with a bit of data so this is the challenges and strengths so the current strengths that the head teachers highlight is dealing with pupil mental health curriculum teaching and learning special education needs and disabilities and lesson planning you'll see here in terms of purple pupil mental health current debate social media exclusions knife crime is what head teachers would consider to be the greatest strength where they have the most confidence there's no strong orange line here apart from teaching and learning cpd so I've looked at the red line pupil mental health and special education needs where they lack confidence with the blue bars so planning s en and research led practice which seems to be a pattern in other places so the challenges so it's dealing with pupil mental health then research led practice I'm looking at the orange here in fact doing this I think I might have got that typed up wrong so I will edit that so I'm not going to reshoot the video so I'll reshoot that and post the live slides on the blog teacher strengths so the dark purple pupil mental health is the strongest then we've got a mixtures s en and behavior and then teaching and learning as you'd expect the group large tallest green bar where teachers identify the weaknesses the dark blue you're looking at research led practice and teacher well being managing their own well being and so I find that quite interesting two more teacher confidence where our teachers most confident well it's teaching and learning and lesson planning as you would expect the dark blue where they lack confidence is research led practice teacher well being pupil mental health and special education needs and what are their challenges so what they find the most challenging is would be their own well being and as well as pupil mental health but where they can cope or don't find it challenging is is what you would expect lesson planning and teaching which matches the previous question I'm currently looking through the book covers and coming up with design so it's a nice part of the design process which I really enjoy and so it's 10 chapters 50 ideas 10 school voices and it's out in September and I hope to share it all around the country in lots of conferences so I'm going to finish there I'm Ross thank you for listening that's my verbal feedback project my doctorate social media journey and my insights from visiting schools all across Great Britain you can get in touch with me at support at teachertoolkit.co.uk and read more on teacher toolkit.co.uk thank you for listening and yes send me your feedback thank you