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Received a copy of John Hattie’s recent book – Visible Learning - last week.
Quoting from Chapter 3: The Argument – What Teachers do Matters:
…what some teachers do matters – especially those who teach in a most and visible manner. When these professionals see learning occurring or not occurring, they intervene in calculated and meaningful ways to alter the direction of learning to attain various shared, specific and challenging goals. In particular, they provide students with multiple opportunities ..for developing learning strategies based on teh surface and deep levels of learning …leading to students building conceptual understanding of this learning which the students and teachers then use in future learning. The act of teaching requires deliberate interventions to ensure that there is cognitive change in the student: thus the key ingredients are awareness of the learning intentions, knowing when a student is successful in attaining those intentions, having sufficient understanding of the student’s understadning..and knowing enough about the content to provide meaningful and challenging experiences in some sort of progressive development. It involves an experienced teacher who knows a range of learning strategies to provide the student when they seem to not understand, to provide direction and re-direction..and thus maximise the power of feedback.
..in the right caring and idea-rich environment, the learner can experiment (be right and wrong) with the content and the thinking about the content, amd make connections across ideas. A safe environment for the learner is an environment where error is welcomed and fostered-because we learn so much from errors and from the feedback that then accrues from going in the wrong direction or not going sufficiently fluently in the right direction. In the same way, teachers themselves need to be in a safe environment to learn about the success or otherwise of their teaching from others.
To facilitate such an environment, to command a range of learning strategies, and to be cognitively aware of the pedagogical means to enable the student to learn requires dedicated, passionate people. ..teachers need to be aware of which of their teaching strategies are working or not, be prepared to understand and adapt to the learner(s) and their situation(s), contexts and prior learning, and need to share the experience of learning in this manner in an open, forthright, and enjoyable way with their students and their colleagues.
We rarely talk about passion in education, as if doing so makes the work of teachers seem less serious, more emotional than cognitive, somewhat biased or of lesser import. Passion reflects the thrills as well as the frustrations of learning- it can be infectious, it can be taught, it can be modelled, and it can be learnt.
Learning is not always pleasurable and easy; it requires over-learning at certain points, spiralling up and down the knowledge continuum and building a working relationship with others in grappling with challenging tasks. This is the power of deliberate practice. The greater the challenge, the higher the probability that one seeks and needs feedback. ..
..the message is not merely to innovate- but to learn from what makes the difference when teachers innovate. When we innovate we are more aware of what is working and what is not, we are looking for contrary evidence, we are keen to discover any intended and unintended consequences, and we have a heightened awareness of the effects of the innovations on outcomes.
Lots of good stuff here. I look forward to dipping into other chapters and reflecting on my own practice.
Highly recommended. You can read more about the book at Bruce Hammonds’ blog, Leading and Learning
Discovered this post through Twitter: From the Huffington Post website:
The other story about people sucking at math that’s a bit more surprising has to do with the Iran election. First came the report from British think tank, Chatham House, which showed that Ahmadinejad received 13 million more votes than he and other conservatives got in 2005, an unlikely occurrence considering his waning popularity. They also found that in two provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, turnout was more than 100 percent.
Then Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, two Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia, performed their own mathematical experiment, publishing their results in a Washington Post op/ed. Beber and Scacco looked at “digit frequencies” in the vote counts–when numbers recur at certain rates it suggests human tampering–to come up with a statistical probability that the election was fair.
And, according to their findings, the probability that the election was fair came out to .005 percent.
What does all this mean? The Iranian election riggers–Ahmadinejad & Co.–really really really suck at math.
Barbie has a lot to answer for.
I never had a Barbie – she was too expensive. I had a Cindy instead. At least Cindy never spoke the words “Math is hard” and gave rise to what I fear has been a generation of mathematics-avoiding females.
Imagine what could’ve been if she’d said “Math is fun”….
Regular (or even semi-regular..or even the occasional) readers will know that professional learning is one of my soap-box issues.
It was therefore very interesting to read the just-published New Zealand’s Education REview Office report on Professional Learning and Development from Derek Wenmoth’s blog. Well worth a look. Well worth considering in the Australian context. Well worth the reflection. Well worth the thinking. Worth it for teachers’ learning and for better learning outcomes for our students.
Well…I’ve done the lesson on simultaneous equations as I outlined in the previous post and it all went very well.
We started with two simple equations as part of their daily quiz – to solve for a and b in a + b = 3 and b = a + 1 (ie something they could do relatively easily by trial and error). I then challenged them with 2a – 3b = -1 and a = b + 1. We briefly talked about needing a strategy for more complicated ones.
I then handed out the grids and blocks. The little activity itself generated interest, engagement and a challenge. In a class of 22, I had three students who found one solution in 10 minutes and I asked them to try and find another whilst walking around the room and checking on what the rest of the class was doing. I probably wouldn’t keep it going for any longer than 10 minutes. We then all went to the desk of a student who hadn’t found a solution as yet and I asked her to fill in the rows with an even number of blocks and not worry about the columns as yet. She was a trifle daunted by the prospect of doing this in front of everyone but, although I don’t think she enjoyed the ‘exposure’, I think it pushed her thinking and learning behaviours in positive ways. She needed some assistance to then finish the problem but the majority of students ‘got it’ and they went back to their own problems to get at least one solution happening.
I then asked about a possible connection between the activity they just did and the two equations. Quite a few of the students realised the connection and got excited. We talked about how we could obtain the value of one variable then find the other. I showed them the substitution method. I kept repeating the main idea – that to solve two equations with two unknowns by hand, we had to keep using the strategy of finding one variable first then thinking about calculating the value of the other.
In subsequent lessons, we talked about pairs of equations that didn’t have a ‘letter on its own’ and what we could do but I made sure to always come back to the strategy – how can we solve for one pronumeral first? I was very pleased with the way the activity added to their understanding that the two algebraic methods of solution were just different forms of the same strategy and the way in which it engaged and made all feel as if they were in control of what they were learning – not just copying down a procedure that someone else had thought about.
Marty Ross wrote an opinion piece in yesterday’s Education Age : How Maths Became the Sum of Many Failings.
In this article, he rails against:
- Text books
- The training of teachers of mathematics
- The mathematics curriculum
- Calculators
I would like to respond to a number of points made in this article.
I have stated elsewhere that textbooks should not define the mathematics curriculum of a school. They are just one resource available to teachers and students. If the text IS the syllabus then this is, indeed, a problem in my opinion. Too many mathematics syllabi are still comprised of a list of content and the exercise(s) from the text that address this content. It is my belief that teachers determine what concepts, ideas and knowledge are important for students to learn (albeit within the constraints of either statewide or, to come, national standards) then formulate the assessment that will determine if students have learnt these things, then determine a set of learning activities that specifically and deliberately targets these understandings. A text is a good source of questions that can be used to assess students’ formative understandings…but only if the questions chosen are those that address the desired understandings. This is the job of the teacher; a teacher who knows what they want their students to learn and understand, who knows what misunderstandings were evident in the classroom and who wishes to address those misconceptions in order to improve learning.
Of course, in order for a teacher of mathematics to do the above, they need to know their subject well and the associated pedagogy of teaching mathematics. This is where teacher training comes in – or ongoing professional learning that addresses pedagogical issues. Too many student teachers will repeat the behaviours of their own teachers and these behaviours may be less than the ideal. It is difficult. It is becoming increasingly harder to find school placements for student teachers. Student teachers rely on their supervising teachers to assess them so are unwilling to go against any advice offered. Consequently, student teachers may replicate their supervising teachers’ methodologies rather than try out something else associated with what they might have learnt in college/uni. If these methodologies are ones that aren’t conducive to a greater understanding of mathematics, the cycle goes on.
Mathematics is all about reason. It’s about ideas. I have blogged previously about what follows but it’s worth re-stating it here, I think.
There is a poem by Peter Hooper which is partly given below:
Poetry isn’t in my words
It’s in the direction I’m pointing
If you can’t understand that
And if you’re appalled at the journey
Stick to the guided tours
Perhaps teaching and learning are much like this – the journey is the real education; the content merely the vehicle by which we explore the landscape. In what direction do we point our students with the what, the why and the how of teaching? From W.S. Anglin: ”Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness where the explorers often get lost”
Do we sometimes forget about the journey in our desire to get to the destination?
The teaching of ideas should be the journey in the teaching of mathematics. These ideas are taught through the vehicle of content topics that develop mathematical thinking and behaviours (acting like a mathematician) as well as a set of mathematical skills.
Mathematical thinking is about looking for patterns, testing these for the circumstances under which they prevail (proof) and abstracting them in order to generalise and predict. In order to inculcate such thinking in our students, teachers should strive to build on connections, coherence, creation, collaboration and conversations. Understanding mathematics is the destination. Assessment then addresses these understandings deliberately.
Teaching for understanding involves thinking – deep, sustained thinking that leads to students being able to construct an abstraction in their minds that actually makes sense of many distinct pieces of knowledge.
Instead of asking the question “What topics do we need to cover?”,we need to aim to develop processes and approaches which result from asking “What are the powerful ideas and processes that we believe are important for young people to learn in mathematics ?”
Our goal is then to develop syllabi around desired understandings – the big ideas – then ask “What information and what experiences do we engage the students in, in order for them to develop these understandings?”
The focus of assessment is in terms of the further question “If students understand this idea, how can they demonstrate it?”
The task of the teacher is not to put knowledge where it does not exist, but rather lead the mind’s eye so that it might see for itself. Our goal should be to provide learning opportunities within the curriculum that develop the students’ capacity to construct their own understandings and deliberately plan lessons that offer, support and develop rich and authentic thinking.
Research has shown that students who solve difficult problems on their own — without the help of other students or teachers — often gain a better understanding of mathematics concepts.
The learning comes with the struggle.
Let’s endeavour to give students opportunities to struggle through a problem, and refrain from directly telling them how to solve it. We can support and encourage risk-taking and the making of mistakes as a natural part of learning. We can emphasise understanding as the goal rather than just looking at results. We can encourage students to reflect on their learning and consider how they learn best in order to improve future learning. We can encourage students to be creative and open-minded in their thinking and consider multiple perspectives and develop alternative pathways to solution.
It’s a question of being more mindful about our purpose in the teaching of school mathematics.
This idea of purpose is an important one that should guide all teaching. Proof need not be the dry and largely esoteric horror people may recall from their own schooling. The capacity for absolute proof is unique to mathematics. It is important. But it can be as simple as asking “how do you know?”. In the same vein, the use of the calculator, including the CAS models, can assist mathematical understanding and free up teachers and students to focus on big ideas and deep thinking, instead of spending large amounts of time doing calculations. It all comes back to purpose. What is the purpose of the learning activity? If it is to do arithmetic and develop quick thinking in numeracy, then a calculator isn’t the appropriate tool. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to investigate continuity and differentiability of functions, then a calculator can enable these concepts to be ’seen’ and understood a lot better without the ‘distraction’ of numerous calculations that have the effect of providing intellectual ’white noise’ and distract the learner from the concepts.
I certainly agree with Marty’s final paragraph: if mathematics curricula are not written in the right ’spirit’ that reflect the heart and soul of the learning enterprise we call mathematics, then students will not enjoy mathematics nor will they understand it.
I’ve been clearing out my offices at home and at school recently. I came across this gem. It’s Professor Julius Sumner Miller’s response to the question posed in this post’s title, as quoted in the AMT (Australian Mathematics Teacher) Volume 4 2006.
Mathematics, when properly viewed, properly taught, properly learned, arouses the spirit, cultivates imagination, stirs curiosity, invites further learning. It is indeed one of the noblest creations of the human mind. It is, moreover, the product of the greatest minds of all time. It interprets nature, it unveils the harmonies of the universe. It is the priestess of clarity.
From the structure of mathematics emerges a sense of truth. It has no room for opinion or conjecture. It gives to our understanding what music is to the ear, what beauty gives to the eye. It is to the head what poetry is to the heart.
Mathematics lays bare the order and the beauty of the great scheme of things – the tides of the seas, the colours of the rainbow, the motion of the planets, the music in the pine trees, the gurgle of the brook, a worm in the good Earth, a bird on the wing. It tells us why raindrops are round; it can give us the geometry of a leaf; it describes the mechanism of light on the eye whereby we see, and sound on the ear whereby we hear.
Mathematics adds vigour to the mind, frees it from prejudice. Borrowing from Francis Bacon: mathematics makes men wise, witty, deep, subtle, able to contend.
In the Weekend Australian’s Review section today is an article about a play with this post’s title. A theatre company called Complicite is putting on the play and its artistic director is Simon McBurney who says:
“…maths requires an imaginative leap similar to that required to make a work of art. Hardy’s premise (from GH Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology ) that mathematics is a creative art was new to me. A mathematician, like an artist or poet, is a maker of patterns, but his patterns last longer because ideas wear less with time. So I started thinking about permanence, then about mortality. And their relationship, strangely enough, with mathematics”
Later he says:
“The problem is that we’ve been brought up to see maths and science as completely separate from the arts…when it’s become clearer to me that it’s really not a different subject at all”
The play ‘celebrates such beauty, linking continents, histories and viewpoints while asking questions about who we are, how we connect and whether – existentially speaking – we stay or go’.
Don’t you just love it? The mathematician’s patterns “last longer because ideas wear less with time”
Are we teaching those ideas that will last? Does what we teach explicitly relate to such ideas?
Let’s hope that it’s not the number of ideas that are disappearing under the weight of too many processes.
You can tell Melbourne has a ‘day off’ can’t you? May those who like a flutter on the horses in this ‘race that stops a nation’ reap enjoyment. As an aside, I quite liked the spot of history – and Mark Twain – in today’s Age’s editorial related to the Melbourne Cup: One Day, One Race
What I was really saddened by, however, was one of the letters to the editor in the same paper:
Doesn’t add up
If we decide to make maths compulsory, some students would be doing a subject they find useless.
English is used in day-to-day life. Analysing texts, grammar and spelling are essential for someone to get through this modern world.
However, all the maths an average person needs in their life stops, at the very latest, at the end of year 10.
When was the last time the people proposing these changes opened a year 10 maths textbook? Quadratic equations are not needed to do your tax return or calculate interest.
The National Curriculum Board must take into consideration that VCE maths is not essential, and they must trust us to make an informed choice about our future.
This was submitted by a 16 year old; probably a student.
What have we done? Why are some of our students so disconnected from the subject?
As I have stated in a previous post, if we continue to justify the existence of mathematics in the curriculum by its usefulness, we are not only undercutting its inherent cognitive framework of ideas, we are also promoting the fallacy that mathematics is merely a skills-based handmaiden to other disciplines. The National Curriculum is our chance to address this fallacy, which has been around since science and the rational creed took ascendancy in the academic world. Mathematics was originally a philosophy subject and taught as a system of ideas. When science took the world by storm, it began to be subjugated as a ’servant of science’. Can we retain the best of the subject in schools’ curricula and yet teach it as it should be (in my opinion!!) – as a system of interconnecting ideas? As a disciplined imagining?
The other aspect of this letter that causes me some inner conflict is the notion of a compulsory mathematics done at senior levels of secondary schooling. I have a colleague who passionately believes that giving students choice increases their level of engagement and thus their capacity for learning, enjoyment in said learning and consequent success. I’m not so sure.
To mandate mathematics at senior levels has inherent problems but it might also have inherent benefits. Too many students don’t choose subjects that challenge them intellectually. What consequence will this have for a culture in the long term? Are students cutting themselves off from knowledge pathways too soon?
What do others think?
I have just completed 3 days at the annual Australian Council of Educational Leaders conference.
My notes from various sessions attended are below. If you get the chance to attend next year (September 26 to 28) in Darwin, Australia, it’s well worth the trip.
- need for understanding of the future
- need for a new mindset
- need for a broader perspective
- need for new skills such as problem solving
*Keynote from Jean-Francois Rischard, formerly of the World Bank, spoke about the 20 important global issues confronting the world at the moment and how they need a global approach in order to solve them. He spoke of ‘bureaucratic years’ (like ‘dog years’) when something that should take one year to enact, takes seven instead. Main reason for this? Nation States mindset: territorial, short-term electoral cycles. There needs to be a new approach to solving these problems as the existing global methodology (G8, treaties, UN and some 45 international organisations) won’t be able to address them quickly enough (which needs to be in the next 20 years, 10 in the case of global warming). He suggests Global Issue Networks (GINs ) formed for each problem (fish depletion, global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, poverty, global financial stability, biotechnology research etc) from a pool of experts in each field (NOT representational – people chosen for their expertise, not from which nation they come). These then influence governments, parliamentarians, people (who would then, in turn, pressurise governments to get a critical mass of countries to discuss the vital questions of methodologies to address these issues ) and would include ‘league tables’ to name and shame countries who don’t follow the rules. Education can feed into this by educating future citizens to be aware of the big issues, responsible, open-minded problem solvers who appreciate excellence and truth. There is a need to think globally first, then nationally, then locally – not the other way round.
Curriculum changes?
*Mary Prendergast and Rohan Keert from Warrnambool College on moving a school system from management to leadership:
Move from a ‘heroic leader’ paradigm to one where leadership is the responsibility of all. Need for leaders to look backwards, look forwards and look sideways at who is travelling with you. Directions for leadership:
*Management as an antecedent to leadership
*Focus on a leadership team and ’seeding’ people who can act as thrusters to turn a systemic ship around
*First enlightenment (the vision) then the laundry (fill in the details)
That it is important to
-immerse people in change and enact a vision quickly and fill in the detail as you go
-prepare for change to be enabled over a long period of time – it takes time to ‘skill’ leaders
-accept that not everything will work and that not everyone will come on board. Some will be angry, upset and feel disenfranchised. So be it.
-involve staff in action-driven research projects with specific foci related to school improvement plan (ie deliberate, targeted professional learning)
Intriguing definitions of good management (perpetuates stability, gets things done) and good leadership (promotes change and pursues possibilities)
This website was mentioned
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/proflearning/schoolleadership/Developmental_Learning_Framework.htm
*Barbara Vann from the UK – Leading for Learning
We all have to be prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.
There are negative architects in every system.
Shift Happens video: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Shared leadership needs shared ‘followership’ too – the ability to step back and let others lead meetings, sessions etc.
Her school has pairs of students visit classrooms as ‘learning detectives’ then report back to a group of about 12 (inc a teacher) about the learning they witnessed in these classes. DVD of Y8 students talking about learning – very impressive. Students have some ‘training’ in learning styles etc beforehand.
*Patrick Duignan from ACEL on Leadership with Presence and Influence
Liked the philosophy of knowing one’s self before being able to know others..and the flow-on notion of not being able to influence others without influencing self through a deep knowledge of who we are. The importance of taking the time to know ourselves (what I call ‘headspace’ – that time to get away from the noise and clutter of emotional turmoil and the everyday concerns), being authentic in our dealings with others and being ‘present’ in our relationships with ourselves and with others. Inner dignity being reflected in our outer dignity…to inhabit one’s own dignity. Leaders being calm and centred. To get at the essence of who we are instead of the content of our lives.
Leaders have the capacity to influence…self, others and each other.
Great leaders tend to elevate the human spirit…are people who make a difference.
ACEL Day Two
*Douglas Reeves (ASCD) from US as keynote: WOW. He spoke of three main factors when considering the dynamics of change:
-Is change possible?
-Leadership matters
-Leadership practices can be taught and learned
Research coming out of the US says that students involved in extracurricular activities that mean they have to contribute to a ‘team’ – such as a sports team, or the school drama, for examples – actually increase students’ academic achievement. (Me – why? Connects to other research I’ve read about connectedness of students to school, engagement with a group, ‘flow’ in their school environment)
He made the point that facts about results and fear (Thou shalt improve these results or else) will not drive educational change.
Mention was made of a “jury standard”, that it was important not just to consider one source ie.
(1) look at multiple sources of evidence and multiple methods of doing something
(2) must be sustainable over a long period of time
(3) realisation that there is never one cause, one effect
(4) never look for absolute certainty – it ain’t there (hence, again, the need to act rather than wait for the ‘proof’ that something will definitely ‘work’)
He referred to the new religion – ‘documentarianism’. Nice looking documentation doesn’t necessarily reflect a good enacted curriculum. Any documentation produced needs to be user friendly to teachers, reflect the everyday teaching needs and be able to be modified easily, otherwise useless.
To mandate or not? The test: if mandated, successful compliance with the mandate should lead to better achievement.
Teachers who blame the raw material or the culture from which their students come need to change their mindset to seeing students in terms of what they could become rather what they have been before coming into their classes. (ie look to the future with hope rather than continually look back and sigh)
It is becoming increasingly apparent that monitoring and feedback are very important to inform future practice. This includes monitoring of the teachers as well as the students.
Feedback needs to be specific and frequent.
Teachers and teacher leaders need to perform ‘treasure hunts’ instead of ‘witch hunts’ ie. Consider the use to which assessment data is collected – to name, blame and shame and promote fear or provide evidence from which to adjust learning and encourage best practice? The task of a leader is to catch staff doing something good and encouraging and promoting and reflecting on this.
He spoke at some length on choice.
-some schools have deliberately offered fewer curriculum choices to students in order that they have a greater chance of being successful at a few that would then give them more choices when they leave school (due to the better results they attain).
-it’s important schools monitor the choices made by students to give them the best chance of success
-time and big blocks of time so students can form big pictures and make connections in subjects is important
Leadership is about influencing the professional practice of other teachers, not management.
What is the single most effective way of influencing practice? Advice from colleagues.
To have a better chance to sustain change, best to ‘use’ someone who is a ‘network hub’ in the school (someone who is well-known and well-connected and respected) who can push out the message. This is better than one-off PD sessions and offsets initiative fatigue. BUT need to beware of the other networker in schools – the toxic hub who is just as well-known and connected but has lines of repulsion and turns people off, rather than on, to the initiative.
*Conversation between Hedley Beare, Jerry Starratt and Patrick Duignan
What is my metaphor for education?
We have had the sporting metaphor (players in a team), the engineering metaphor (cogs within a system) and we’re currently in the market economy metaphor where competition is the paradigm – we have productivity, user pays, customer choice but not control, market edge and a market niche.
A better metaphor might be that of an ecosystem.
It’s important (but takes a huge amount of effort) to keep in mind the aim of education and realise that the prevailing metaphor is just an imaginary construct. This is especially difficult when other structures (the social imaginary, the cultural imaginary etc) are also based on the same market metaphor. Insist that the form follows the function (ie learning!!). This can be fraught when parents ring up and complain that they’re not getting value for their money. Stick to your guns – it’s important. Eg “We are not going to define ourselves by results alone. We need to take the long view of what’s important to your child’s education overall, not just this last test, not just this year” (I’ve said this myself on a few occasions!!)
The point was made that curriculum and course both come from the same Latin root- currere (to run)
So students follow a “track”, as it were….is this the metaphor we want when we think of how to organise learning for students? If they don’t finish in the top 3, they don’t get a medal? The faster, the better?
I liked that education shouldn’t be about following a script and regurgitating that script in assessments…that it should be transformative.
*Douglas Reeves and Level 5 Networks: Making Significant Change in Complex Organisations
Started with “We hear a lot about change needing time….5 year plans…RUBBISH. If it’s important enough, just do it!!”
He mentioned 90, 90, 90 schools (90% minority students, 90% poor and 90% barely meeting minimal state standards) and what they did to turn them around – the most effective aspect was to increase the amount of nonfiction writing in all subjects…ie. describe, persuade, compare and contrast, summarise, justify, explain etc. (Me: this would also increase the level of THINKING being done).
That the consequence of failure is to get valuable feedback on how to improve performance.
Teacher leadership has been too often a case of giving people more to do with no pay for it. Teachers modelling for other teachers is one of the most important things we can do (Sharing Classrooms)
If you want to change something and it’s important, a smaller number of degrees of separation between you and the decider is necessary. Change is difficult if you have to go through too many layers of hierarchical authority .
There are stages of reaction to change very similar to the stages of grief:
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
Leadership as architecture and leaders as architects. What are we constructing???
Level 1 networks: Contrived
Level 2 networks: Spontaneous (like after a conference, but they are ephemeral)
Level 3 networks: Co-opted Networks
Level 4 networks: Nurtured Networks
Level 5 networks: Value-driven networks
ACEL Day 3:
*Prof. Martin Westwell from Flinders University (who also spoke at the Mathematics Teachers’ Summer School)
We can’t ‘future-proof’ Australia but we can educate for the future by deliberately targeting the types of thinking that will be needed.
The way our brains are ‘wired up’ depends on the number and type of connections made. These connections are determined by the experiences we have. These lines of communication between brain cells consequently determine the learning formed. It is the interconnectivity of ideas between cells that transforms information into learning. Repetition of these experiences re-inforces the connections made. (Me: important, therefore, to ensure the connections made are those that produce quality thinking rather than regurgitating a learnt script). It isn’t important as to how the information gets into the brain but what the brain does with it when it receives it.
Anxiety (especially long term), just like how we are educated, changes the way we think…there is an emotional component. Anxiety can physiologically prevent us from achieving our potential, it inhibits learning. (Me: So intervening to improve learning means intervening when affective learning behaviours are not going to produce optimal learning as well as intervening when cognitive behaviours aren’t conducive)
An experiment done with a group of young black boys in the US produced the following. These boys were all given an IQ test. Half of them were just given the questions. The other half were first asked to tick a box to describe their ethnicity. Even though the groups’ ability make-up were very similar, the second group produced significantly less IQ points as the other. (Hattie’s “the best predictors of a child’s achievement are the child’s predictions”…if the child believes that they are going to perform badly then they will.) Students who think of their intelligence as fixed usually have achievements that decrease over the course of their schooling. Those who believe intelligence is malleable are more resilient, can come back from failure, don’t give up as easily and show a positive trajectory in terms of their achievements.
The executive functions of the brain that we should be encouraging and promoting in the way we teach are:
- Concentration
- Resisting temptation
- Delayed gratification
- Self-directed/interdependent learning (note to self: use these terms instead of independent/group work)
- Problem solving
- Creativity/Innovation
The environment we create in classes and schools can affect how students develop their intelligence.
Take, for example, the experiment done with mice who were deliberately injected with Huntington’s Disease…a disease that withers the brain. Huntington’s is a genetically inherited disease. If you have the gene, you develop it…or do you?
Only 20% of the infected mice who were placed in a rich environment full of wheels, crawl tunnels etc actually developed the disease. 100% of the infected mice, who were placed in an environment in which no stimuli were provided, developed the disease.
So..what is an enriched environment for schools? One that is multi-sensory, relevant, that has emotional content, interpersonal interactions, exercise, good nutrition and hydration and one that has sufficient blue light (eg sunlight)
Another automatic reaction of the brain (leftover from animalistic days when we needed to protect ourselves from harm) is its reaction to risk. This has huge implications for both teaching/learning and change agents of systems, such as education. We have impulsive preferences for certainty. This limits the potential for innovation. Our brains want us to ‘go back to what we know’…don’t risk the uncertainty. We see this whenever anything new is suggested or introduced. For example: technology. In the UK, when the internet meant that students were plagiarising their coursework component, the system reacted by making more assessment external and assessed by examination. As with anything new, however, the challenge is not to dismiss its existence in our reaction, but to be judicious and deliberate in our use of it to support, promote and encourage what is the essence of education: learning. The other mistake is to go overboard in its use. Not everything new is ‘good’ for learning – a lot of the educational technology games may lead to greater short term engagement but not to long term learning. Keep in mind the purpose. It’s not the technology per se that changes what and the way students think, it’s about you and what you do with it.
*Kate Griffin – Head Teacher of Greenwood High in London: From Learners to Leaders
Kate has increased leadership opportunities for staff and increased student voice in her school.
Students form the JLT – Junior Leadership Team and have reps on curriculum and faculty boards throughout the school. Any major curriculum decisions are discussed with these students. Students interview potential teachers for the school. They observe lessons of volunteering teachers then discuss the learning observed with these teachers to inform future practice. They attend leadership retreats.
Kate had brought with her 6 student leaders and 2 staff leaders from her school. One of the students said that the school was now more about ‘teaching as a support for learning’. I was a little disturbed by this – teachers should have more authority in the way learning is delivered. Teachers have the knowledge to determine the essential understandings to be learnt and can deliberately target these in their teaching. They do more than ‘support’ learning – they should be initiating, guiding, eliciting and improving learning!!
*Sheree Marris
A leader ‘makes stuff happen’, they see a need and they act on it.
(Me: this has been a recurring theme at this conference – a leader being someone who performs Nike thinking – Just Does It)
Don’t fail by default.
Experiences can be positive or negative. It’s how we react to them that determines the extent of the learning engendered.
A mindset that always has to succeed limits learning potential.
Thomas Edison had 1000 failures before he got the lightbulb to work. He described these as 1000 steps to its invention.
