Hello everyone, Ross here at Teacher Toolkit, back with my weekly Monday night videos. I'm back after a 8,500 mile trip to lots of fantastic schools across the country. This week I'd like to talk about an evidence-informed school. Research culture show you a great example, so a bit more practical to begin with and then a little bit more educational research towards the end. I suppose inspired by my research from my book Guide to Memory and looking at all the data I've collected from teachers, particularly the phrase cognitive apprenticeship and what that actually means. So what I'd like to do, just let me just put the screen up here. So here is what I'd like to go through. How your school or are you working in a school that is research rich, I suppose. And before I get into details, you know, there's tons of research, but the research on research schools suggests that the strongest kind of evidence cultures are associated with dedicated time across staff groups, not just teaching staff or school leaders. Open learning cultures, high levels of research engagement across the school that's strong and prioritizes support structures. I recently found a great book called The Joys of Work by Bruce Paisley and inside there's 30 tips. And one thing I came across was there's a great story about the Korean airline industry in the late 80s and 90s where they suffered from most of the airline disasters across the globe. And essentially one reason for that was that traditional hierarchy or the structures in society and career don't allow people who are junior in junior positions to talk to seniors, particularly during a crisis. So if there's an accident and you're the pilot and I'm the sure death, there's a fear where I can't raise a concern. Compare this to where organizations with good cultures where people on the floor, I suppose can raise concerns with their leaders and leadership inspires and has channels open where people can create difficult conversations without fear or retribution. And it's a really interesting analogy. So if I just pop to a kind of key slide, let me just put myself over here for now. Here is this kind of traffic-like scale for you to look at in terms of where you view your current school. So the suggestion here is to look across each line. So this top line and ask yourself in your school, we have no time to dedicate anything to research at all. Or does your school currently give time to school leaders or people with particular positions? Or across the whole school, is there engaged embedded time allocated to improve our practice? So in this case, would you say your school is a red, amber, or green? And then when you look through this, I'm just gonna hide my face on the video for a moment. But when we get to the bottom, schools don't follow these models. So some of you might work in that particular context. And then thirdly, a research-practice relationship is not one way it highlights the importance of developing a relationship between knowledge, disseminating information, and presenting the conditions which all teachers can learn and collaborate with one another. On the next slide, this is my five minute research appraisal plan. Now you can find a video on my YouTube channel and a resource which explains all these boxes step by step. And I'm gonna show you one of the best examples I've found on my travels to schools all over the place. I guess thinking about seven key recommendations for all teachers, all school leaders who want to have a more highly engaged school where evidence is an integral part of school improvement. I think first of all, external research should be highly valued, it should be synthesized. Senior leaders are largely responsible for this, but also building awareness. Some schools have in the leadership or teaching and learning team a dedicated person that's responsible for reading the research, translating it into a bite-sized summary and then disseminating this with the staff. I guess a third point, I've got seven recommendations. Third one would be, engage in research evidence is collaborative, it's then thread into CPD. It should challenge our teacher beliefs and only lead into sustained change if there's time to have a good debate and where they can see impact in practice. That's critical for teaching staff. The fifth point, I suppose, would be that research recommendations underpin our decision-making. It's an ongoing iterative process and the CPD research aligns with how we shape our performance management, hence showing you this on the screen. If I just come out of this before I switch topics all together, I've got this resource here. So this is a 70-page document and it's probably the best thing I have seen on my travels of late. And this is from Staffordshire University Academy. I shared this before the summer. Essentially here, you've got a couple of pages on the screen. I'm just gonna double-check, you can see this, yes you can. And you can see here that if I just zoom in here, it's all been anonymized, but we've got a teacher here whose research appraisal question was to investigate scaffolding strategies to support SEMD students and prove a non-causing curriculum. Another example, non-teaching support. How can the business team improve how it works as a team? There's another one in the site staff about reducing graffiti and so on and so forth. It's a fabulous document. What I love about it the most is there's a one-page poster here of everything this individual has done to research, to share through CPD and then to report back their key findings. So there's one example read. You've got the topic, our influential read, takeaway tips, keyfinders and next steps. And they've been doing this a few years now and I was lucky enough to go and attend and see this being published. So if you want a copy, just give me a shout, I'll send you this anonymized copy, no problem whatsoever. Now, I'm gonna switch topics. I'm gonna switch over to cognitive apprenticeship. So let me just put this up on the screen here. Now this is a phrase some of you will be, might be unfamiliar with. I came across it from a piece of research by Collins et al. In 1991, not in 1991, I recently came across it but it was published in that time. What cognitive apprenticeship is is an instructional paradigm. So a concept for teachers to help identify the process of a task and make it visible to students. Help them situate abstract tasks in authentic concepts. So make abstract concepts concrete. So let me just pop out of this slide. Let me get the right one. I want you to see the traditional model first, I suppose. Traditionally, what we do as teachers is we do four things, I suppose. I've got the wrong slide up here, apologies. We do four things. The first way that we typically do in classrooms is we model the process. So traditional apprenticeship is defined as I model, I scaffold the resources, I fade away the resources as you develop expertise and I coach you along the process. So this is the traditional way that we do things in the classroom. Kind of four step process. I model the process, I make it visible. I then scaffold how you get there with chunking the information or giving you various resources and handouts along the way. I then as you develop a degree of metacognition or expertise, I fade my resources away to push your expertise on a step further and I coach you through a range of activities. What we've got here on the screen is another way of thinking about making a task easily observable. So number one, you know, bringing the thinking to the surface and making it visible. Secondly, the tasks as they come up and arise in the world with students naturally understanding the reasons for a finished product is to situate the abstract tasks of the school curriculum in context that makes sense to the students. So I guess with the photographs here I've got on the screen. You've got, you know, build a table, all sorts of things or make a chair in a design and technology classroom. But here's a real world example of a finished house or a finished chair. Let's have a look. Now that might be difficult to do that in some classrooms, which is why we need here's one I made earlier or we bring a video or whatever it might be from online into the classroom to let students see a real example. I guess the third part here, you know, in traditional apprenticeship, the skills that we learn are the task itself. And it's unlikely that students encounter situations where they can transfer the skills that are required in the real world. So much of our curriculum reform today, particularly here in England, now demands that students can transfer what they've learned. So in this case, this diversify slide suggests that we should consider, you know, the content, so the domain knowledge that we might have, the heuristic strategies, how we model the process, how we sequence the lesson structure of the curriculum between, you know, global issues, local issues, the complexity of the task, the diversity of skills that we could use. And then the sociological factors. So how do we immerse students with examples in the situation itself, so the relevance to the environment? How they can take a sense of ownership in the community? So, you know, when we have students involved in a local competition and they see a judge come in or an author or whoever it might be, they take a lot more pride and responsibility and there's a greater deal of excitement. We need to do more of those things in our skills. And then, I guess two finer points, intrinsic motivation. So how do we motivate students towards a coherent goal, whether it's a formal assessment or not, just the process of going through the learning loop, so to speak. And then, you know, exploiting corporations. So how do we get kids to work in teams, extend learning resources, bring in other things? So there's a resource on my site. So underneath these videos, which are live stream now, once they're published, I'll share the links to the evidence-informed traffic light that I showed at the start of this video, as well as the example from Staffordshire University School so you can see their public documents. And then I'll share this slide. We can get a lot more information. I'll send you a blog with the original research paper and these slides for you to take a little bit more of a look at. I guess to conclude, is in my research with Guide to Memory, many teachers are familiar with cognitive load. More of us are familiar with working memory, but mention the phrase cognitive apprenticeship and we're not so sure. Traditional apprenticeship, I model, Stafford, I fade the resources away and I coach and give you feedback along the way. That's what all teachers do. This is suggesting in terms of cognition is to identify, situate and diversify. So there's more slides there to explain it. I'm gonna leave the video there. That's long enough for everyone. I'll see you next Monday evening. I hope if you're back to school, you're fully in the rhythm and you're having good fun and meeting all your students otherwise from me. Happy Monday. I shall see you next week. Bye for now.


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Okay, good morning. I'm going to talk to you today about operators and about open source, and about open source orchestrator as opposed to closed source orchestrator. And I'm going to make a comparison. For those of you who are not expert in onboarding new services, I'm going to have a one-minute explanation of what does it really entail. When you want to have a new service, you need to onboard it. You take the VN as an operator, you consume the VNF from the VNF vendor, including all of the artifacts, TOSCA, automation script, all the code that comes with it from the VNF vendor. Then, once you approve it and certify it, you have it on the drawing board and you start putting up the service on the canvas. You add the automation script for the service, the policies, the workflow, and it's ready to be tested. Now you test it, usually those bugs, this issue, going back to the drawing board in an iterative manner until it's being ready, and then you package it and you move it to operation. After you distribute it, it's in operation and it's either going to work for some time, but if there's issues, you need to rebug it. This picture is very beautiful on one hand, but it derives a very, very complex and labor intensive process. What you see in the following slide, you don't need to understand every square, every tile here, but you need to understand that every tile here actually means labor, cost, OPEX, sweat and tears, months or a period of time in a cascade manner, in a waterfall manner, until the service is ready. In fact, every box here represents the embodiment of what's... I mean, we moved to NFV because we wanted to have a lower OPEX ability and those sets of boxes and that's just engineering and operation, this is actually working against the business case of NFV because it's a very, very long process. So I'm going to give you an example of troubleshooting an NFV issue and that's something that we had in live cases with our customers and I'm going to show you how we run this in two environments, one of them with an open source orchestrator or at least orchestrator that the community has access to and the other one with closed source orchestrator and you would see, I think by the comparison of one box, that which one is really easier. Let's say you have an NFV issue. We have three pillars here. At the center we have the CSP, the operator. At the right side we have the closed source proprietary orchestrator company organization and the left side we have the VNF vendor organization. What's happening is the following. You have a problem, it is error, it is discovered in operation. Clearly somebody make a phone call to engineering inside the operator still. We need to troubleshoot something. Engineering and operation sit together and understand what is the problem and they are calling 1-800-VNF vendor and they say there's a problem. Let's sit with tech support and try to understand what happened. Tech support starts to troubleshoot the problem and then they say we need to talk to product manager because it's a real problem. It requires some modification. Now the problem usually are some of the TOSCAP code is not really ready. Something is not working in the way that the VNF is orchestratable. Product management says wait, maybe actually wait a second. Maybe the TOSCAP script that we delivered without VNF are good. Maybe it's the orchestrator that is not orchestrating the good TOSCAP script that we have provided. So now you're adding the VNF, the orchestrator vendor, the closed source orchestrator vendor to the loop. Now you really have to triangulate because what you're actually doing, you're looking at several black boxes. The orchestrator which is the black box, there's the VNF which is the black box and you have to look at the behavior of this in a several time zone in a huge team to understand where the problem is. And then it goes to R&D and it goes to testing and usually in this point you can no longer do it with phone calls, you need to have face-to-face. So in the cases that I was involved in, it always end up with all the engineer going to some exotic place to have some sort of off-site and resolve it. Now, with the exception that people have in fun, what you see on this slide, this spaghetti, is the anti-material of OPEX reduction and agility. This is something that is impacting the value of NIV. And that's just one box out of the 15 boxes I show you. Okay, this is one component. Let's look at the safe thing in an open source environment. CSP in development finds that there is an error, right? Okay, it goes to engineering. Engineering says it's really an error, we are aligned. Let's go to the VNF vendor. They go to the VNF vendor. VNF vendor says, look, you know what? There's an open source... We are part of one app. There's an open source orchestrator. The problem is the orchestrator. It's not our artifact, it's the orchestrator. The CSP answer is the following. If there is a problem with the orchestrator, fix it. You have the capability to contribute to it. In fact, the VNF vendor has the entire orchestrator in his lab with the code of the orchestrator in his lab. It can run everything in his lab, right? So, and he's empowered to be a contributor or maybe even a committer to the open source distro. And so there's no offside in exotic place, but if you look at the amount of errors in the two options, you see that it's a substantial difference. Now, I think the takeaway I have for you today, and again, there's two things. First thing, if you download the presentation from today, there's 15 boxes of steps in the operator, like onboarding the new VNF, certifying it in our environment. Each one of them has the same left and right picture. Each one of them has the ramification for the operator on a massively deployed open source and the ramification for the operator which is using closed open source. But for me, I think when people... It's like, you know, you ask the people in the street, what is 5G for you? It's like 5 grand. When you ask people in the street, what does open source orchestrator for you means? They would say it's free. I guess the license is very cheap. I can have a fast, you know, I can switch vendor very fast, which supports very fast because I can have several flavors of the same thing. And all of that is true. But in my opinion, the fact that you're no longer using black boxes and the fact that you're on the left side of the slide, where you can actually interact and demand that each one of your supporter, including the VNF vendor, is in command. And if there is an error, there's no pointing fingers. I think it's a huge benefit and it shows you how agile this is. So with this, we still have time for a very short question. Question? Okay, thank you. I had a question. So after the VNF vendor fixes the problem in the open source orchestrator, what is the time that it takes to go through the open source acceptance process and make it back into the production version that the service board actually uses in their network? Great question. Firstly, it depends on what organization it is. There is a committer. The committer is... Thankfully, you can always do it just to test it. Since you have access to the code, you can always do the change incrementally without committing to the upstream. So you can just fix it for now, okay? So the short answer is you can do it immediately. If you want it to be part of the big distro of the open source, then it depends on the organization. Actually, in ONUP, there's a cadence of several... Every period is going to be a new version. I don't know what it is. But as I said, to solve the problem on a fork, small fork, until the new change is accepted, immediate. As long as the problem is discovered. Okay? Okay, thank you very much.