development Archives -

5th February 2021

In a world full of need, how can we ensure we help people in the best possible ways?

Mrs Efua Aremo, a Design & Technology Teacher at WHS, explores whether a ‘human-centred design’ approach can help us deliver solutions which are effective in meeting local and global needs.

A World full of Need

It is impossible to adequately describe the profound losses experienced over the past 12 months. There are the more measurable losses such as employment, finance and health but then there are also the relational losses caused by isolation and tragic bereavements. It has been a brutal year for many, and the impact of the pandemic has been acutely felt by the most vulnerable.

When we are confronted with such needs both locally and internationally, we desire to help in any way we can, as Mr Keith Cawsey observed in his December article. However, it doesn’t take long to discover that people have many different types of needs and there are many different types of help we might provide.

What do we need?

“I need blue skies, I need them old times, I need something good…”

Those words from singer-songwriter, Maverick Sabre, powerfully captures the sense of longing many of us feel for simple things like sunshine and for more intangible things we struggle to name.

One of the most popular ways of categorising human needs was introduced by Abraham Maslow in 1943, it is known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ © Verywell / Joshua Seong. Used with Permission.

Maslow’s hierarchy describes five different levels of need:

Physiological: basic needs such as water, food and sleep.
Safety: security and freedom from danger.
Love/Belonging: the desire for relationships of love, affection and belonging.
Esteem: a stable, positive self-evaluation and respect from others.
Self-actualisation: the desire to realise one’s full potential.

How can we help?

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The old proverb quoted above helps us as we think about the types of help we might provide to people in need.

Through observing the charitable work of religious and humanitarian organisations, we can identify at least four levels of assistance:

Emergency Relief: giving direct help to meet immediate needs – “give a man a fish.”
Longer-Term Development: giving assistance which results in a person or community being able to meet their own needs – “teach a man to fish.”
Social Reform: overcoming the adverse social conditions or systems which lead to injustice or oppression.
Advocacy/Campaigns: providing information about needs to people who are able to help.

This article focusses on the first two categories.

When Helping isn’t Helpful

Sometimes, efforts to provide help do not achieve the intended result. For example, in 2010, a US aid agency installed 600 hand pumps to supply clean water for rural households in northern Mozambique. The aim was to help the women and girls who travelled long distances to collect contaminated water from wells and rivers. The aid agency imagined that the pumps would save time, improve health conditions and empower the women to start small businesses. However, these water pumps were not used by most of the people in the community. What went wrong?

Helping those who are different to ourselves

Though the desire to help others is always to be commended, it can often be accompanied by wrong assumptions which hinder our ability to help effectively. This is especially true when we are seeking to help people from a different economic status, ethnicity or culture to our own.

It is tempting to assume we know what people need, especially if they have basic physiological needs which are not being met. However, even in his original paper, Maslow acknowledged that human beings are more complex than the tidy logic of his hierarchy suggests. He recognised that the lower-order needs do not need to be completely satisfied before the higher-order needs become important. Therefore, when helping the neediest people in society, we need to get to know them beyond their basic needs.

Recognising this fact is key to understanding what went wrong with the water pumps in Mozambique. The aid agency seems to have stereotyped the rural women as passive, needy people and so failed to ask their opinion about where best to locate the new pumps. They focussed their attention on providing access to clean water but did not account for the fact that the original water sites were “important social spaces where women exchanged information, shared work, socialized their children, and had freedom outside the home.” The new sites lacked the privacy, shade and areas for laundry and bathing which the women valued, and so the new water pumps were rejected.

Thankfully, we can learn from experiences like this to devise better ways of helping people in need.

Human-Centred Design: A Better Way?

“In order to get to new solutions, you have to get to know different people, different scenarios, different places.”

Human-centred design (also known as ‘design thinking’) is an approach to problem-solving which involves partnering with those in need of help to deliver the solutions which most benefit them. It involves “building deep empathy with the people you’re designing for… as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs.”

But this does not mean that those who are being helped are only consulted at the start of the process. Human-centred design is a non-linear collaborative process which involves back-and-forth communication between those helping and those needing help. Together they produce many design iterations until they find a solution which best suits those who need it. It is obvious how this approach might have led to better results in Mozambique.

Human-centred design involves looking beyond their needs and acknowledging the full humanity of the people who we wish to help: appreciating their culture, discovering what they value, and how they might contribute to meeting their own needs.

Sternin in Vietnam © positivedeviance.org

Taking a more human-centred approach enabled Jerry Sternin from Save the Children to successfully deal with the problem of severe malnutrition amongst children in rural Vietnam in the 1990s. Previous attempts had relied on aid workers providing resources from outside the affected communities – these methods proved unsustainable and ineffective.

Sternin discovered that despite their poverty, some mothers were managing to keep their children healthy. So he sought to learn from them and discovered what they were doing differently from their neighbours: they were feeding their children smaller meals multiple times a day rather than the conventional twice daily. They were also adding to these meals freely available shellfish and sweet potato greens even though other villagers did not deem these appropriate for children.

By empowering the mothers to train other families in these practices, Sternin was able to help the community help itself. Malnutrition in northern Vietnam was greatly reduced through implementing this effective, empowering and sustainable local solution.

The Wonderbag

Wonderbag by Conasi.eu, CC BY-NC 3.0[iii]

Another sustainable design solution is the Wonderbag, which is a non-electric slow-cooker. Once a pot of food has been brought to the boil and placed in the foam-insulated Wonderbag, it will continue to cook (without the need for additional heat) for up to 12 hours. This product was developed in South Africa to address the problems caused by cooking indoors on open fires. It has vastly improved the lives of the women who use them because cooking with the Wonderbag uses less fuel and water, improves indoor air-quality, and frees up time which many girls and women have used to invest in their education, employment, or to start their own businesses. Local women use their sewing skills to customise the Wonderbags with their own cultural designs.

Human-Centred Design at WHS

In Year 9, design students at WHS are tasked with designing assistive devices for clients with disabilities. One of the first things they need to do is get to know their users; seeing beyond their disabilities and discovering who they are, what they love, and what they hate.

One pupil found that her client who suffers from benign tremors loves to paint but hates having to use massive assistive devices because they draw too much attention to her. This pupil is currently developing a discrete product which will help their client paint again, meeting her needs for esteem and self-actualisation.

Helping Others in this Time of Need

In the midst of a global pandemic and in its aftermath, we will encounter people in need of both emergency relief and longer-term development assistance. Perhaps by adopting a human-centred design approach, we will be able to help others in ways which are effective, sustainable, and which recognise the beautifully complex humanity of those in need.

REFERENCES

Rawpixel.com, Shutterstock Image ID: 212764069, n.d.

Keith Cawsey, “What Has COVID Taught Us about Our Relationships with Others?,” WimTeach, 10 December 2020, http://whs-blogs.co.uk/teaching/covid-taught-us-relationships-others/.
Maverick Sabre, I Need (Official Video), 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZNtticFI60.
Abraham H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm.
Joshua Seong, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-4136760.
Timothy Keller, Generous Justice (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010); Oxfam GB, “How We Spend Your Money,” n.d., https://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/how-we-spend-your-money/.
Africacollection, Shutterstock Image ID: 714414436, n.d.
Emily Van Houweling, Misunderstanding Women’s Empowerment (Posner Center, 2020), https://posnercenter.org/catalyst_entry/misunderstanding-womens-empowerment/.
Emily Van Houweling, Misunderstanding Women’s Empowerment.
Emi Kolawole, Stanford University d.school cited in IDEO.org, The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design: Design Kit, 2015, 22.
IDEO.org, “What Is Human-Centred Design?,” Design Kit, n.d., https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design.
Monique Sternin, “The Vietnam Story: 25 Years Later,” Positive Deviance Collaborative, n.d., https://positivedeviance.org/case-studies-all/2018/4/16/the-vietnam-story-25-years-later.
Jerry Sternin and Robert Choo, “The Power of Positive Deviancy,” Harvard Business Review, 1 January 2000, https://hbr.org/2000/01/the-power-of-positive-deviancy.
Conasi.eu, Wonderbag CC BY-NC 3.0, n.d., https://www.conasi.eu/cocina-lenta/3088-wonderbag-mediana-batik-rosa.html.

25th November 202025th November 2020

Thinking about our Bread and Butter

Suzy Pett, Director of Studies, explores best practice for assessment and feedback.

Whilst cognitive scientists are increasingly enhancing our understanding of how students learn, to all intents and purposes, learning is still invisible. Sometimes we glimpse signs of learning: those eureka moments when a piece of knowledge suddenly clicks into place. But, to see the learning itself is a chimera.

Because of this, assessment and feedback is our bread and butter as teachers. We assess continually in a variety of ways to work out what has and hasn’t been learnt. It allows us to explore a student’s schema (network of knowledge), to put right misconceptions, to encourage individuals and to adapt our own teaching accordingly. In this way, we can make a myriad of adjustments to the way we teach to enhance student progress. Plus, with the help of cognitive science, we’re getting better at knowing what does and does not work in terms of assessment and feedback.

But, the idea of ‘assessment’ can strike fear into students. And, do students fully take on board our feedback, anyway? During our staff study day at the end of last half term, a group of us discussed our ethos surrounding assessment and feedback. It was important to refine our collective understanding of both these fundamental areas of pedagogy. With linear A Levels and GCSEs, we need to shine a light on our assessment methods, making the most of spaced and interleaved practice. But, we spoke, too, of students’ misunderstanding of the purpose of assessment and feedback.

We boiled down our ideas to a powerful message, drawing from our own experiences and in light of reading articles by David Didau, Tom Sherrington, Hattie, Clarke and the Education Endowment Foundation.

We want students to realise that:

Assessment doesn’t just measure learning, it helps learning and it happens all the time in the classroom.
Feedback is not a judgement on their ability but a spring-board towards further personal and academic development. Everything students do is part of a wider personal and academic endeavor.
Feedback is an opportunity for reflection on, and ownership of, their learning.

Let’s dig a little deeper into these three ideas.

Assessment doesn’t just measure learning, it helps learning and it happens all the time in the classroom:

Assessment and testing turbo boost learning: They don’t just measure it, they propel it! The process of recalling knowledge strengthens long term memory; the process of collating ideas and organising them on the page helps consolidate schema. We want students to know this!

Lightness of touch, good humour and warmth: Frequent low stakes testing or quizzing (especially if spaced and/or interleaved) is fundamental in encoding ideas in the long term memory. And, it is an opportunity to quickly put right any misperceptions forming in the student’s mind. Regular testing, should, therefore not feel like a burden, but should be an opportunity to learn. As teachers, we need to help set the tone for this. With a lightness of touch, good humour and warmth, these low stakes tests can propel more rapid learning and can build student confidence. Our attitude must reflect this spirit.

Toggle between knowledge: We need to be aware, too, of the illusion of understanding. Pupils can perform well in a low stakes quiz, especially if the quiz reflects a unit of blocked learning. However, students might not necessarily be able to transfer the learning to another context, or be able to recall it in an exam which requires them to toggle between different sorts of knowledge (such as in the linear GCSE and A Levels). A longer, more formal, interleaved assessment or test is still important to gauge how students can pull together ideas from across their different schema. However, a refrain we often hear from students is “Is this an assessed piece of work?”, with rising levels of panic creeping into the voice. So, again, teachers need to position this sort of testing accordingly – as a chance for students to learn, rather than the teacher to judge.

Assessment happens continually, anyway: students need to realise this. As teachers, we’re not judging a one-off performance. Assessment is an ongoing process to help individuals make progress:

It’s the checking of prior knowledge at the start of the lesson (helping students orientate new understanding within their existing schema)
It’s the Q&A during lessons
It’s the one-to-one discussions whilst the teacher is circulating when the class are working
It’s the quick quiz during class time
It’s the careful observation of student talk/work during activities
It’s the mini plenary to judge how well new ideas have been assimilated
It’s the exit card for teachers to work out how each individual has grasped the learning.
NB: the verbal feedback in lessons and the one-to-one discussions are arguably the most powerful forms of feedback, more so than the written feedback on written work. Students should not underestimate this sort of feedback.

Feedback is not a judgement on student ability but a spring-board towards further personal and academic development. Everything they do is part of a wider personal/academic endeavor.

Low threat to self-esteem: One of the most striking discussions we had during staff study day was around the profound impact of feedback to bolster or demoralise students. An entire page of feedback on an essay may be well intentioned, but it can in fact deflate a student. Feedback is received best when there is a low rather than high threat to self-esteem, and we should be mindful of this. Instead, choosing to focus feedback on one particular skill, or on one particular element of the essay/test can be more impactful for the student, who can use it as a springboard for development.

Get off the hamster wheel! Learning is more that digesting ‘testable chunks’: Fortunately, WHS already has grit and resilience at the heart of the learning experience: growth mind set is firmly established amongst staff and students. However, we still need to beware to avoid assessment and feedback making students feel like they are on a hamster wheel. Instead of narrowing horizons to the next test or the next piece of feedback, it’s important for students to realise why this learning is important, beyond the looming GCSE and A Level. In giving feedback and when quizzing/assessing, we need to be sure that we keep our eyes on the whole and share this with students. Giving reminders of the wider canvas of the learning are key i.e. why is this knowledge/skill/technique important to our subject. Let’s even think beyond our subject divides and tap into our school’s STEAM ethos. We must keep at the forefront that what we are doing is unlocking the expansive, fascinating potential of our subject, not simply breaking it down into testable chunks. Feedback should remind students of this; it’s a chance to nurture their love of the subject.

Ditch the satnav: In contrast, David Didau has coined the term ‘satnav marking’, to indicate the sort of reductive mark that simply tells students the next steps. Whilst arguably useful in the immediate term, it makes a subject operate in a ‘paint by numbers’ capacity. We should avoid this sort of marking, instead encouraging students to think in nuanced ways about their work and their subject and their passions.

Feedback is an opportunity for reflection on, and ownership of, student learning.

If feedback is seen and not heard, it is pointless: Fundamental to feedback is students’ reflection on it. During out staff study day, we spoke about our sense that pupils often felt like they were doing the assessment/homework/test for us as teachers, rather than for themselves. By placing metacognition at the heart of the feedback process, we can shift this student misperception so that students take ownership of assessment and feedback as a personal learning process. Teachers need to carve out time and prioritise students taking on board the comments. Strategies were discussed, such as ‘DIRT’ time; students rewriting sections of their work; students responding to questions posed in the marking; students pre-reflecting on their work to allow teachers to respond to this in feedback; student tracking their marks/feedback using OneNote.

Give feedback on ‘best’ work: An idea that struck a chord was that students need to take ownership of their learning by the effort they invest in their work. There is little point in giving feedback on work students know isn’t their best…the feedback will just confirm what they already know. We need to give feedback on students’ ‘best’ work: i.e. work which is a result of high effort, in which students are invested and which shows ‘liminal learning’ (work which is pushing at the bounds of their capabilities). If this is the criterion for marking work, then students will want to see the feedback.

Self/peer assessment is not because we’re lazy! We also discussed the use of peer and self-assessment in allowing students to take ownership of their work. Whilst students often do not like this method of assessment, preferring the safety net of the teacher marking their work, we know that it develops metacognition. This is not a technique for lazy teachers not wanting to mark (as we suspect some students think!) but it is a vital tool for student self-reflection.

It’s about a whole school culture. Most important of all is for this mind set of ownership and self-reflection to be reinforced regularly across the school: it’s about a culture which comes from teachers, tutors, form times, PSHE peer counsellors, subject leaders.

20th May 20207th June 2022

The Power of Listening

Suzanne East, Head of Year 12 at WHS, looks at how listening can empower us as teachers and learners.

I am a talker, and I suspect that is true of many teachers. We get a buzz from sharing our passions for our subject, from explaining and answering questions and from solving problems. But increasingly my attention has been drawn to the importance of listening as a vital way to genuinely shift our focus away from ourselves, our opinions and assumptions; forcing us to notice what is really happening for our students, what they are learning and the journey they are making as they engage with the information we are presenting.

During this time of lock down this has been brought into sharper focus as we realise what we miss by not being able to see and hear our pupils in person. I think many of us have experienced that unsettling feeling of talking into the void, calling out for any pupil to respond! This has added to my intention to ensure that I bring good quality listening to my school life once we return.

Concerns about the quality of listening may be a reaction to the Twitter generation which seems to demand that we constantly project our thoughts and ideas out into the world – this demand to be seen and heard where perhaps nobody is doing the listening. But we have long been aware that it is easier to notice and respond to the louder and more obvious messages that can be presented by students. Susan Cain’s “Quiet: The power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” reminded us of what we may miss if we don’t stop to make sure that all voices are heard, and of our obligation as teachers to ensure that no one is overlooked.

Attending mindfulness sessions with MiSP and again in courses with the Positive Group, I started to realise the difference between my usual listening style and what really thoughtful and attentive listening can be. The requirement to stop and to observe your surroundings is closely linked to the need to listen as well. To stop sending messages out and to take time to notice what is actually being said. Practising this stillness and trying to observe the moment was both a relief and a revelation. Accepting that I don’t have to respond to everything straight away, fighting the urge to jump in when listening even to a simple story, and noticing my instinct to mould what I hear to fit my own experience and expectation was a real eye opener.

One listening activity many of you may have tried is that of working in pairs to sit silently for between 1 to 3 minutes whilst the partner describes a situation, perhaps a simple event like a holiday or a more emotional experience such as a recent frustration or disappointment. In either case it is revealing to notice the desire as a listener to interrupt, join in and comment, rather than allowing the story to be and remain that of the storyteller. Feeling that listening to each other is a skill our girls will also need to develop, and we have tried this with Y12.

We asked them to sit back to back in pairs to listen for one minute to their partner and then to repeat back what they had heard. Giving time to listen to the end of the story and then telling the account back allows a sense of mutual understanding to grow and holds a mirror to the mistakes we often make in our everyday interactions. By actually doing this exercise the girls were able to start to experience this for themselves and to acknowledge their own behaviours. We know that many friendship issues arise from not listening honestly to each other and the damage done by quick reactions to a message on social media which can then take months of unpicking to repair the hurt caused.

Encouraging girls to listen fully to the whole story, to think before they act, and to go back and check with each other to see if they have understood correctly, are all useful tools in diffusing potentially viral misunderstandings. Despite all our efforts to be more inclusive and to accept diversity, we also live in a social media age which encourages swift reactions with a quick “like” or “dislike”. It is our responsibility as educators to highlight the potentially damaging impact of this and to explore the advantage of allowing space to consider the nuanced motivations that contribute to individual actions and decisions. We explored this further with our Sixth Form using the three chairs activity, in which the same situation was described from the perspective of the protagonist, victim and a fly on the wall. In my group the fairly trivial example of Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter led to a surprisingly rich discussion on the different motivations for bullying.

We want our students to be able to open up to us and we want to help them to live happier and more fulfilled lives. From our greater age, we can look back at the challenges of teenage life and see where we could have done it better, but that is not what any student wants to hear; we have to be careful to make sure the conversation remains focussed on the student and not on us or our ability to problem solve quickly.

Neuroscientist Sarah Jayne-Blackmore has spoken and written many times on the nature of the adolescent brain and reasons why it leads to greater risk-taking behaviour, and how this behaviour is significantly influenced by peer group approval. We want to influence our students and encourage them to make what we consider the best decisions, but the evidence suggests that they are not going to hear us unless we really take time to listen and understand what is important to them. We allocate time to one to one conversations with form tutors in the sixth form, but successfully managing these is not easy and tutors need to be skilful in creating a situation of trust in which a student can really open up. Mark Wilmore, one of our tutors with many years of experience as a Samaritan, training as a Counsellor and also as a sixth form tutor, shared his top tips for these conversations:

Check in & boundaries
Non-verbal communication
Listen ‘actively’
Have an agenda
Try to avoid closed questions
Use challenge where appropriate
Feedback
Set targets
Keep a written record
Follow up

Making it obvious to the student that these conversations are important – that they deserve proper time and attention and that we are genuinely listening to their experience and their story – are vital in building a successful relationship. Body language and preparation will tell the student far more than words, so making sure you have time to genuinely be there for them is vital, as they will be quick to assume that we are not really interested and then any words of wisdom we have will fall on stony ground.

It is also an important part of a student’s development to struggle and to find their own solutions to problems. We need to empower them with the confidence to know that they can make the change for themselves and that they have the skills that they will need. Rachel Simmonds says in Enough As She Is that “suffering is key to our children’s learning” and “that the price of some of our most important life lessons-the ones that make us wiser, tougher, and more capable-is pain, even heart-break” (Simmonds p200). This isn’t to leave them on their own, but to be with them and give them space to sound out their own solutions so that next time they know they will manage better.

In PSHE earlier this year we invited the Samaritans in to talk with Y12. Hearing the accounts of these masters of listening without judgement, the ones that those who are feeling most isolated and rejected turn to were truly inspiring. But they emphasised that the skills of listening were something that we should all practise in our relationships to help avoid people becoming isolated in the first place. Their campaign Shush “wants to encourage people to listen to the really important things their friends, family and colleagues need to tell them, and to devote some time and attention to being better listeners” (Samaritans). This was a powerful session, which left us all awed by the potential impact each one of us can make by just taking the time to stop and listen and allowing others to be heard.

Bibliography

Blackmore, Sarah-Jayne https://www.edge.org/conversation/sarah_jayne_blakemore-sarah-jayne-blakemore-the-teenagers-sense-of-social-self

Cain, Susan (2012) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that Can’t Stop Talking, Crown Publishing Group/Random House, Inc.

Mindfulness for schools https://mindfulnessinschools.org/mindfulness-in-education/

Positive group https://www.positivegroup.org/positive-for-schools/

Samaritans https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/support-and-information/worried-about-someone-else/difficult-conversations/

Simmons, Rachel (2018) “We Can’t Give Our Children What We Don’t Have” in Enough As She Is Harper Collins, New York.