Michael Stephenson: the first OTIR Blog

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Online Teacher In Residence blog, and thanks for stopping by. This is our first post and, at the (public) start of the project, I thought I’d scribble down a few thoughts about the year ahead...

As you’ll maybe know from the project’s website, I’m a classroom English teacher at Inveralmond Community High School in Livingston. Over the next three school terms, Lucy Young and I will be sharing our plans, resources and experiences  through this blog, as well as through twitter (@SBT_Teacher) and the project’s main web spaces on the SBT site and glow.

The plan is that each term will have a particular focus for each of us, which we hope will help us explore ideas around creative approaches to literacy and literature in the classroom. We’ll be thinking about our work in light of the new Curriculum for Excellence, looking to develop resources, ideas and discussion about what this might mean for our work with a wide variety of texts.  Lucy’s first blog post will be next week, and I’ll leave it to her to introduce all the great things she’s going to be working on. At the moment, I’m looking to focus personally on the following:

Spring Term – Adaptation

I’ve been getting quite into graphic novels and games-based learning recently. I’m no expert in either area – more of a moderate geek! – but I am really interested in exploring some of the possibilities they offer. Specifically, it’s the process of adaptation that I want to get stuck into. There seems to be huge potential to combine critical literacy skills – understanding a text’s essential themes, structure, characterisation etc – with a creative, collaborative and even cross-curricular response.  We’ll be working with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde initially, using extracts from Stevenson’s original and the brilliant Grant/Kennedy graphic novel. From there, it’s on to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline which has been adapted into more forms than just about any text I know!  Our real focus with Coraline will be on the adaptation into video game format, which is definitely new territory for me. I’ll let you know how we go!

Summer Term –  Creative Partners

There’s every chance the adaptation unit will stretch uncontrollably beyond the Easter Hols, but we’ll then be moving on to a Creative Writing focus. SBT’s fantastic Online Writer-in-Residence resources will definitely come into play here! I hope we’ll also be able to develop links and share our writing with Inveralmond’s ‘Dreams and Teams’ partner, Ozisweni Special School, in South Africa. All eyes are on South Africa this summer, of course, and there’s every chance football will feature in our work at some point!

The ideas, experiences and resources which Lucy and I post on our projects are just one  part of the overall OTIR programme, though.  The ‘teacher to teacher’ section of the glow group will provide a space for sharing resources and ideas, and this will be the real beating heart of OTIR. We want the group to be really useful and meaningful for teachers across Scotland and there will be regular online discussions to get involved in, as well as some high quality CPD on offer. The first of these CPD sessions, will be with graphic novel legends metaphrog (www.metaphrog.com) on Wednesday the 10^th March at Inveralmond Community High School! If you would like to see Metaphrog in action, they are doing a Glow meet for pupils on Wednesday 3^rd March.  You can join the group at:

https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/Graphic%20Novels/default.aspx

I’m really looking forward to this one and we all hope to see as many folk as possible getting involved. The session will be aimed at p5-S3, so there’ll be something there for just about everyone!  Please chip in to the follow-up discussions through glow, too. We’re all huge fans of the national English and Literacy glow groups, and we hope something of their spirit of innovation and collaboration can carry over into our project.

Also all very excited about the online teachers’ book group which will be running over the year – look out for this, too!

Anyway, enough for now. Lucy and I will be posting full project updates on alternate weeks, but I’m sure there will be tons of more informal ramblings in between times. Please check back – and please get involved! If anything in the blog, glow group or OTIR website interests you; if you’d like to contribute, or if you can help us overcome the challenges ahead, we’d certainly all love to hear from you!

All the best,

Michael

Oh, a wee post-script on our online launch with Eric Booth… We had a really good time (when the nerves died down!) and it was a privilege to hear Eric’s thoughts and discuss the project with him. He’s an inspirational guy, and I’d strongly recommend this recent TESS article on his perception of Scottish education to anyone involved in our schools – a brilliant post that we hope will set the tone for our year ahead!

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6031869