One of the November 11 articles by Andrea Kuszewski had the following listing of  principles to follow if one wants to increase one’s cognitive potential. I think that this is also a pretty good list of principles to follow if you want to be a good educator and add value to your own professional learning, too! What a great way to model for our students what lifelong learning is really about…not merely the rhetoric of the marketing types in our schools. Best wishes for the New Year.

1. Seek Novelty

2. Challenge Yourself

3. Think Creatively

4. Do Things The Hard Way

5. Network

When you seek novelty, several things are going on. First of all, you are creating new synaptic connections with every new activity you engage in. These connections build on each other, increasing your neural activity, creating more connections to build on other connections—learning is taking place.

An area of interest in recent research [pdf] is neural plasticity as a factor in individual differences in intelligence.  Plasticity is referring to the number of connections made between neurons, how that affects subsequent connections, and how long-lasting those connections are. Basically, it means how much new information you are able to take in, and if you are able to retain it, making lasting changes to your brain. Constantly exposing yourself to new things helps puts your brain in a primed state for learning.

Novelty also triggers dopamine (I have mentioned this before in other posts), which not only kicks motivation into high gear, but it stimulates neurogenesis—the creation of new neurons—and prepares your brain for learning. All you need to do is feed the hunger.

Excellent learning condition = Novel Activity—>triggers dopamine—>creates a higher motivational state—>which fuels engagement and primes neurons—>neurogenesis can take place + increase in synaptic plasticity (increase in new neural connections, or learning).

As a follow-up of the Jaeggi study, researchers in Sweden [pdf] found that after 14 hours of training working memory over 5 weeks’ time, there was an increase of  dopamine D1 binding potential in the prefrontal and parietal areas of the brain. This particular dopamine receptor, the D1 type, is associated with neural growth and development, among other things. This increase in plasticity, allowing greater binding of this receptor, is a very good thing for maximizing cognitive functioning.

Take home point: Be an “Einstein”. Always look to new activities to engage your mind—expand your cognitive horizons. Learn an instrument. Take an art class. Go to a museum. Read about a new area of science. Be a knowledge junkie.

2. Challenge Yourself

There are absolutely oodles of terrible things written and promoted on how to “train your brain” to “get smarter”. When I speak of “brain training games”, I’m referring to the memorization and fluency-type games, intended to increase your speed of processing, etc, such as Sudoku, that they tell you to do in your “idle time” (complete oxymoron, regarding increasing cognition). I’m going to shatter some of that stuff you’ve previously heard about brain training games. Here goes: They don’t work. Individual brain training games don’t make you smarter—they make you more proficient at the brain training games.

Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty. Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game,you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Great! Now move along to the next type of challenging game. There is research that supports this logic.

A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks. They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects (I know—can you believe they exist?!). What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain. Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness—which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise—after this intense training. And they became experts at Tetris. Cool, right?

Here’s the thing: After that initial explosion of cognitive growth, they noticed a declinein both cortical thickness, as well as the amount of glucose used during that task. However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient. Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. It didn’t need to work as hard in order to play the game well, so the cognitive energy and the glucose went somewhere else instead.

Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak. We’ll come back to this point later on.

3. Think Creatively

When I say thinking creatively will help you achieve neural growth, I am not talking about painting a picture, or doing something artsy, like we discussed in the first principle, Seeking Novelty. When I speak of creative thinking, I am talking about creative cognition itself, and what that means as far as the process going on in your brain.

Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal “thinking with the right side of your brain”. It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. Creative cognition involves divergent thinking (a wide range of topics/subjects), making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking (cognitive flexibility), and generating original, novel ideas that are also appropriate to the activity you are doing. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other.

Several years ago, Dr Robert Sternberg, former Dean at Tufts University, opened thePACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise) Center, in Boston. Sternberg has been on a quest to not only understand the fundamental concept of intelligence, but also to find ways in which any one person can maximize his or her intelligence through training, and especially, through teaching in schools.

Here Sternberg describes the goals of the PACE Center, which was started at Yale:

“The basic idea of the center is that abilities are not fixed but rather flexible, that they’re modifiable, and that anyone can transform their abilities into competencies, and their competencies into expertise,” Sternberg explains. “We’re especially interested in how we can help people essentially modify their abilities so that they can be better able to face the tasks and situations they’re going to confront in life.”

As part of a research study, The Rainbow Project [pdf], he created not only innovative methods of creative teaching in the classroom, but generated assessment procedures that tested the students in ways that got them to think about the problems in creative and practical ways, as well as analytical, instead of just memorizing facts.

Sternberg explains,

“In the Rainbow Project we created assessments of creative and practical as well as analytical abilities. A creative test might be: ‘Here’s a cartoon. Caption it.’ A practical problem might be a movie of a student going into a party, looking around, not knowing anyone, and obviously feeling uncomfortable. What should the student do?”

He wanted to find out if by teaching students to think creatively (and practically) about a problem, as well as for memory, he could get them to (i) Learn more about the topic, (ii) Have more fun learning, and (iii) Transfer that knowledge gained to other areas of academic performance. He wanted to see if by varying the teaching and assessment methods, he could prevent “teaching to the test” and get the students to actually learn more in general. He collected data on this, and boy, did he get great results.

In a nutshell? On average, the students in the test group (the ones taught using creative methods) received higher final grades in the college course than the control group (taught with traditional methods and assessments). But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got (a multiple choice test), and they scored higher on that test as well. That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material. Sound familiar?

4. Do Things the Hard Way

I mentioned earlier that efficiency is not your friend if you are trying to increase your intelligence. Unfortunately, many things in life are centered on trying to make everything more efficient. This is so we can do more things, in a shorter amount of time, expending the least amount of physical and mental energy possible. However, this isn’t doing your brain any favors.

Take one object of modern convenience, GPS. GPS is an amazing invention. I am one of those people GPS was invented for. My sense of direction is terrible. I get lostall the time. So when GPS came along, I was thanking my lucky stars. But you know what? After using GPS for a short time, I found that my sense of direction was worse. If I failed to have it with me, I was even more lost than before. So when I moved to Boston—the city that horror movies and nightmares about getting lost are modeled after—I stopped using GPS.

I won’t lie—it was painful as hell. I had a new job which involved traveling all over the burbs of Boston, and I got lost every single day for at least 4 weeks. I got lost so much, I thought I was going to lose my job due to chronic lateness (I even got written up for it). But—in time, I started learning my way around, due to the sheer amount of practice I was getting at navigation using only my brain and a map. I began to actuallyget a sense of where things in Boston were, using logic and memory, not GPS. I can still remember how proud I was the day a friend was in town visiting, and I was able to effectively find his hotel downtown with only a name and a location description to go on—not even an address. It was like I had graduated from navigational awareness school.

Technology does a lot to make things in life easier, faster, more efficient, but sometimes our cognitive skills can suffer as a result of these shortcuts, and hurt us in the long run. Now, before everyone starts screaming and emailing my transhumanist friends to say that I’ve sinned by trashing tech—that’s not what I’m doing.

Look at it this way: Driving to work takes less physical energy, saves time, and it’s probably more convenient and pleasant than walking. Not a big deal. But if you drove everywhere you went, or spent your life on a Segway, even to go very short distances, you aren’t going to be expending any physical energy. Over time, your muscles will atrophy, your physical state will weaken, and you’ll probably gain weight. Your overall health will probably decline as a result.

Your brain needs exercise as well. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, your spatial skills, your logical skills, your cognitive skills—how do you expect your brain to stay in top shape—never mind improve? Think about modern conveniences that are helpful, but when relied on too much, can hurt your skill in that domain. Translation software: amazing, but my multilingual skills have declined since I started using it more. I’ve now forced myself to struggle through translations before I look up the correct format. Same goes for spell-check and autocorrect. In fact, I think autocorrect was one of the worst things ever invented for the advancement of cognition. You know the computer will catch your mistakes, so you plug along, not even thinking about how to spell any more. As a result of years of relying on autocorrect and spell-check, as a nation, are we worse spellers? (I would love someone to do a study on this.)

There are times when using technology is warranted and necessary. But there are times when it’s better to say no to shortcuts and use your brain, as long as you can afford the luxury of time and energy. Walking to work every so often or taking the stairs instead of the elevator a few times a week is recommended to stay in good physical shape. Don’t you want your brain to be fit as well? Lay off the GPS once in a while, and do your spatial and problem-solving skills a favor. Keep it handy, but try navigating naked first. Your brain will thank you.

5. Network

And that brings us to the last element to maximize your cognitive potential: Networking. What’s great about this last objective is that if you are doing the other four things, you are probably already doing this as well. If not, start. Immediately.

By networking with other people—either through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in face-to-face interactions—you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make objectives 1-4 much easier to achieve. By exposing yourself to new people, ideas, and environments, you are opening yourself up to new opportunities for cognitive growth. Being in the presence of other people who may be outside of your immediate field gives you opportunities to see problems from a new perspective, or offer insight in ways that you had never thought of before. Learning is all about exposing yourself to new things and taking in that information in ways that are meaningful and unique—networking with other people is a great way to make that happen. I’m not even going to get into the social benefits and emotional well-being that is derived from networking as a factor here, but that is just an added perk.

Steven Johnson, author who wrote the book “Where Good Ideas Come From”, discusses the importance of groups and networks for the advancement of ideas. If you are looking for ways to seek out novel situations, ideas, environments, and perspectives, then networking is the answer. It would be pretty tough to implement this “Get Smarter” regiment without making networking a primary component. Greatest thing about networking: Everyone involved benefits. Collective intelligence for the win!

Here are some edited highlights which resonated most strongly with me:

Interactive engagement (IE) is defined as methods “designed at least in part to promote conceptual understanding through interactive engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors.”

A video lecture is not interactive engagement.

Khan (along with most of the general public, in my opinion) has this naive notion that teaching is really just explaining. And that the way to be a better teacher is to improve your explanations. Not so! Teaching is really about creating experiences that allow students to construct meaning.

Here is the most damning piece of evidence, from Hake’s famous six thousand student study:

The six thousand students in Hake’s study were not in a single class. They were in 62 different courses, from high school to university, taught by a variety of instructors with different personalities and expertise. And yet ALL the IE courses made greater gains (the slope of the graph — between 0.34 and 069.) than the traditionally taught courses (average 0.23). It should also be noted that the green IE courses above were NOT identical and did not follow some magic teaching formula. They only had to conform to the Hake’s broad definition of IE given above.  METHOD trumps all those other variables.

But surely there is a place for lectures, right?

Yes, BUT students must be “primed” for the lecture. According to the PER User’s Guide FAQ:

It is possible for students to learn from a lecture if they are prepared to engage with it.  For example, Schwartz et al. found that if students work to solve a problem on their own before hearing a lecture with the correct explanation, they learn more from the lecture.  (For a short summary of this article aimed at physics instructors, see these posts – part 1 and part 2 – on the sciencegeekgirl blog.) Schwartz and Bransford argue that lectures can be effective “when students enter a learning situation with a wealth of background knowledge and a clear sense of the problems for which they seek solutions.”

I was the only practicing teacher there…and that was by good fortune rather than by design.

There were representatives from the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT), VCAA, AMSI, ESA, ACARA, NSW Board of Education, tertiary mathematics lecturers and various other acronyms. But no teachers. So no ‘teacher voice’. And to the group’s credit, it was recognised at the end of the day that this might have been a mistake.

Many present seemed to assume knowledge of what ‘the professional needs of teachers’ were. I made the point that teachers’ prior knowledge in this area, just like any authentic learning, needed to be determined and activated.

At the risk of never being invited (accidentally or otherwise) to one of these events ever again, I have to say that I was taken aback by a number of comments openly stated which were not caught, criticised and cauterised. The extent to which these comments were ‘accepted’ is of greater concern to me. How often have these been expressed in similar forums? We all know how certain expressed attitudes become impressed in people’s consciousness merely due to the number of times they get repeated. And a certain level of authority afforded to them as a result.

What were these comments?

(1) A child’s mind is like a clean slate and it is important that teachers don’t put the wrong stuff onto the slate. I don’t think any child, no matter how young, comes into the classroom without experiences and beliefs already in place. It is the teacher’s job to determine what these are, whether they are valid conceptions or misconceptions and how to intervene in meaningful ways to redirect understanding and improve learning. There is an element of underlying distrust here – can we trust the teachers to do ‘the right thing’?

(2) Teachers don’t want to do professional development unless it is tied to their professional accountability. Nothing to do with wanting to do a better job with learning for their students. Nothing to do with the fact that a large amount of PD is precisely what keeps teachers away from it – that it actually doesn’t address their needs, it addresses what other people believed their needs to be.

(3) We (the non-teachers) are the converted (to the right way of thinking) and the teachers are the non-converted. Having teachers at such meetings as today’s would not be productive because of this. The implication, of course, is that the non-teachers know better about what is required for teachers’ professional development.

An interesting day, but also a disturbing one.

Please, please…be aware of opportunities to have a say and express your views. Have a voice.

Some quotes:

In those classrooms where the focus is perceived to be on rewarding those who are successful at mathematics, it is easy for those who see themselves as unsuccessful to opt out. Likewise, those who see mathematics as difficult or confusing, or as a source of failure and criticism, are likely to lose interest.

Because of their experiences many of these students have built up negative behaviours and negative thoughts toward the learning of mathematics that are difficult to dislodge. Unless teachers work together and create a school and classroom culture that respects diversity, encourages effort and rewards improvement these students will slip further behind.

Stephens defines ‘engagement’ as “how mathematical ideas are explored, explained and elaborated—especially in a strong collective sense”. He goes on to assert:

Terms like ‘engaged’ and ‘engagement’ can be used rather loosely. Claims that students are—or appear to be—engaged need to be unpacked by asking: ‘What do you mean? Are students simply paying attention? Do they look busy? Are they merely doing what the teacher asks? Do they appear to understand what they are doing? Do they give evidence of liking or enjoying what they are doing?’ Some mathematics classes achieve an apparent engagement by having all students occupied in ‘busy work’. This can be done by
having students ‘engaged’ for large amounts of time completing worksheets or working through a textbook. Worksheets and textbooks have a place, but when they become tools for engagement—where students are expected to work quietly on their own, where the teacher’s role largely becomes one of providing individual assistance—these forms of engagement come at a cost.

Many classes can create a veneer of engagement in the same ways that the way we assess can create a “veneer of accomplishment’ (Lorna Earl). Our curriculum and our methodology need to be documented in such a way that good practice is embedded. This is too important to leave to chance and the variability of individual teachers. I believe that a certain methodology should be mandated. Every teacher needs to have, for example, a plan of how they will determine and activate prior knowledge, how they will ‘hook’ students into the mathematics to be explored(not merely an ‘engaging’ task – in terms of ‘fun’ or accessibility or busy work – but one that also sets the framework for the underlying mathematical concepts and/or skills), how they will explicitly teach the new material and how they will check for understanding along the way.

Another article that may be of interest, and along a related theme, is the CSE Occasional Paper No 121 (July 2011) by Vic Zbar titled Ensuring a More Personalised Approach: A strategy for differentiated teaching in schools. In this article, Table 1 shows a model of explicit instruction developed by Hume Secondary College (with John Hattie, I believe) which has become my new favourite thing. Differentiated teaching doesn’t mean having 25 different plans, it means having one good inclusive plan. I was so impressed with this table that I had it typed up separately to show to teachers (attached Explicit Instruction model).

More from Stephens:

…a little direct teaching is followed by setting tasks from worksheets or a textbook for all students. Students can appear to be engaged in such work. They know that they will rarely be asked to explain their thinking to the whole class, because the focus is on individual work. Students can sit next to friends and mix some quiet social conversation with the work in hand. If students are using a textbook, they can check if their answers are correct by checking at the back of the book. Occasionally they can ask the teacher a question, but usually the teacher is busy dealing with needier students or with those who are disruptive or off-task. By an unstated agreement the focus has come to be one of getting work done in an apparently quiet and well-managed class. We are not talking here about individual lessons, but about patterns of instruction that repeat themselves daily

How often do our students have to explain or make their thinking visible in our classrooms? What do we really value in our discipline? To support students becoming more creative, less dependent, greater risk-takers and more ‘engaged’, what do we actually do in our classrooms? What should they look like to better encourage the latter learning behaviours?

In the second half of the monograph, Stephens refers to three forms of scaffolding that teachers should be aware of in designing their lessons and better supporting student learning (my emphasis via bold type):

Three different kinds of scaffolding: Baxter and Williams (2010) refer to the first as analytic scaffolding. This is intended to help students understand mathematical ideas, with their related skills and procedures, so that mathematics makes sense to them—a proposition that is also supported by Meyer and Turner (2002).The second form of scaffolding is intended to create classroom communities where students can work together and to think more broadly and deeply than if everyone was left working on their own. Baxter and Williams refer to this as social scaffolding. The third kind of scaffolding focuses on helping each student to develop a sense of ownership of what they are learning. In particular, teachers need to encourage students to take charge of their learning and to be engaged because they want to learn mathematics. Scaffolding in this third sense implies giving enough support to enable students to grow in self-confidence but not too much as to inhibit risk taking and independence.

How well are we providing these three types of scaffolding in our classes? How does our assessment (formative and summative) contribute to these?

Lots of interesting thinking here. And timely. What can be put in place for 2012 in your classes? Your school?

The more I read, hear and think, the more I am coming to the conclusion that formative assessment is a necessary component of quality instruction. And by ‘instruction’, like Wiliam writes on p44, I mean ‘the combination of teaching and learning to any activity that is intended to create learning’.  Formative assessment is an imperative. Something that needs to be embedded in curriculum documentation so it doesn’t get lost or seem to be an optional ‘add-on’.

Wiliam makes the point in his Introduction that attempts at schooling reform that do not take into account the following three factors will have little effect:

1. The quality of teachers is the single most important factor in the education system
2. Teacher quality is highly variable
3. Teacher quality has a greater impact on some students than others

Dylan Wiliam references Doug Lemov – see the article Building a Better Teacher, and I also highly recommend his book: Teach Like a Champion - 

He has recently authored an Australian Education Review for ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) titled ‘Teaching Mathematics: Using research-informed strategies’.

This has formed a part of my holiday professional reading. I have some serious reservations about some of the assertions made, particularly as they relate to so-called  ’maths wars’ in the curriculum between an applied approach and a more rigorous, theoretical one…I think this is a fallacious construction built by those involved in education faculties in the tertiary sector. I do not think that there is such a distinctive dichotomous tug of war in schools. Nor should there be. I think to expend energy and effort on exploring a false dichotomy is to focus on the wrong things in mathematics education, the things that will not lead to an improvement in neither teacher nor student learning. I also do not think there is much value in debating the precise nature of what is meant by ‘numeracy’.

The sections of this review that really caught my interest and fired my imagination were Section 5 – Six Key Principles for Effective Teaching of Mathematics, Section 6 – The Role of Mathematical Tasks and Section 7 – Dealing with differences in Readiness.

The Six Principles mentioned are:

1. Articulating Goals
2. Making connections
3. Fostering Engagement
4. Differentiating Challenges
5. Structuring Lessons
6. Promoting fluency and transfer

Firstly, Twitter feed from ASCD sent me to an article at the Smithsonian.com website titled “Why are Finland’s schools so successful?” by LynNell Hancock.This was interesting because it wasn’t the usual rant which, in our media, invariably is used as a platform on which that particular media outlet could stand and lambast whichever government it had ‘issues’ with. And our media seem to end up simplistically blaming teachers for Australia’s students’ comparatively poor performance on a number of dubious measures of  achievement in one-off specialised and standardised tests. From the article, however: “There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.”
This article looked at Finland’s educational history and what their vision was for education and how they determinedly and authentically went about trying to achieve that vision, not distracted by other bright shiny educational ‘imperatives’. This was the part that particularly resonated with me:

Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or peruskoulu, for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

As we come to a time of the year in the Southern Hemisphere when many schools are assessing their teaching needs for the next academic year and teachers in independent and the Catholic sector are moving schools, my thoughts turn to what we should be asking for and looking for in the teachers we hire.

In Charlotte Danielson’s article A Framework for Learning To Teach, published in Educational Leadership in 2009, she writes:

Teacher recruitment and hiring is an often-overlooked opportunity to promote teacher learning. Indeed, it is usually regarded as a purely administrative function. However, when teachers participate in different parts of the process, the new hires enter an environment in which they have already earned the acceptance of their colleagues. In addition, to effectively question candidates about their skills and expertise, those colleagues will have had to think deeply about the qualities of teaching they most value.

She goes on to suggest that the questions prospective ‘hires’ (don’t really like that descriptor) are asked should be taken from her Framework for Teaching which includes the domains:

Domain 1: Planning and Preparation 

1a: Demonstrating knowledge of content and pedagogy 

1b: Demonstrating knowledge of students 

1c: Setting instructional outcomes 

1d: Demonstrating knowledge of resources 

1e: Designing coherent instruction 

1f: Designing student assessments 

Domain 2: Classroom Environment 

2a: Creating an environment of respect and rapport 

2b: Establishing a culture for learning 

2c: Managing classroom procedures 

2d: Managing student behavior 

2e: Organizing physical space 

Domain 3: Instruction 

3a: Communicating with students 

3b: Using questioning and discussion techniques 

3c: Engaging students in learning 

3d: Using assessment in instruction 

3e: Demonstrating flexibility and responsiveness 

Domain 4: Professional Responsibilities 

4a: Reflecting on teaching 

4b: Maintaining accurate records 

4c: Communicating with families 

4d: Participating in a professional community 

4e: Growing and developing professionally 

4f: Showing professionalism 

We could certainly create something similar using the proposed National Professional Standards for Teachers that have been produced by AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership). The domains that encompass these standards are Professional knowledge, Professional Practice and Professional Engagement. Within each standard are the levels of achievement: graduate, proficient, highly accomplished and lead.  Wouldn’t it be an excellent professional learning exercise to ask candidates to refer to these standards before coming to the interview and then talk about where they see themselves in each standard and provide evidence (not necessarily concrete, physical artefects of this…could be verbal descriptions of what they’ve done) of their capacity or practice in these?

And, of course, it is not only the candidates who have to think deeply about the qualities of teaching they most value, those who prepare the questions have to do so as well. On the website of the Scottish Education Authority, The Journey to Excellence, there are a number of terrific ‘School Improvement Guides’ that list characteristics of schools that are ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. One of these, Leading Learning, says that, in excellent schools:  ”Leaders ensure that the learning and teaching policy is a core school policy and is referred to in all relevant documentation”. I hope that ‘relevant school documentation’ would include the questions used to interview prospective new teachers. Is your school’s learning and teaching policy reflected in your interview questions?

The same document indicates that “Leaders ensure that learning and teaching are prioritised as the school’s core business. The school improvement plan focuses clearly on key priorities which will have a positive impact on learners’ experiences”. Is it obvious from your school’s interview questions that its key priorities are those that positively impact on students’ learning experiences?

Is there a consistency in your school between the teaching and learning policy, the methods used to evaluate teachers, the processes used to determine financial and other priorities and the hiring of new teachers?

David Perkins, in his 1993 article Creating a Culture of Thinking in Educational Leadership, says that:

›“….People acquire dispositions all the time, through enculturation…we work..in settings where certain values and practices are honoured. We learn, by osmosis as it were, to honour them too.

›We absorb a culture because we encounter exemplars”

Day 1

The first session attended was with Judy Willis. I have recently bought Judy’s book, Learning to Love Math, and I was interested to hear what she had to say given her background as a neurologist and teacher of mathematics. I find the brain research links to learning fascinating and they so often confirm my experiences in noticing how kids learn. She started by mentioning her three step plan for improved learning – R for reach students’ attention, A for attitude and the affective behaviors students entertain, and D for developing motivation and perseverance. The brain converts sensory information into learning. Only the person who THINKS, learns. It does this by firstly filtering inpsut through the RAS system of the brain that filters incoming information from the 2000 bits the brain receives every second. This filtering is mostly involuntary. With practice, we can select which bits of information we pay attention to. If teachers can gain attention, we are off to a good start. It’s not that students are not paying attention…..we all pay attention to 2000 things every second, it is more about noticing the information we want to focus on. Novelty and curiosity are the prime ways in which we can attain students’ focus. Something unexpected. She highly recommends the use of predictions in class to gain the brain’s attention. Ask a question and compel every student to make a prediction on the response. This means every student is engaged and will lead to sustained attention. The goal is to move from passive inattention to active participation. Mini whiteboards are a good way to gather these predictions quickly. She pleaded with us to use curiosity as a routine in every class. This will improve focus and resilience as students become used to new and different situations and academic risk-taking in the repeated prediction-making.

Secondly, the information has to get through the emotional filter, the amygdala. This is the emotional switching station and leads to affective behaviours. When the amygdala is stressed, it leads to the flight, fight or freeze responses. Things that can stress the amygdala are: the fear of being wrong, test-taking anxiety, frustration with difficult material and boredom from lack of stimulation. The flight response manifests in the classroom as withdrawal (or, as I have seen, students who try and regain their self-esteem by referring to some other activity in which they experienced success), the fight response as disruptive behaviour and the freeze response as zoning out. To try and address these responses, teachers need to take away any feelings of threat in an academic setting. Participation fear can be reduced by the use of the mini whiteboards or other forms of formative assessment. The goal is to move information from the lower reactive brain to the upper thinking brain. Teachers can provide achievable challenge and awareness of incremental progress. Activities that promote dopamine can also assist. Increasing dopamine leads to feelings of pleasure, curiosity and inspiration, motivation, persistence and perseverance and creative imagination.

Thirdly, to become a memory, consolidation is needed. The brain needs to recognise a pattern and it files information according to the perceived pattern. This means it is very important for teachers to determine prior knowledge in order for the brain to file it together and make connections.

The second session was Robert Marzano talking about formative assessment and standards-based grading.  He said that assessment is not just a labelling device. With NAPLAN testing just recently completed in Australia, it was interesting to hear him say that large standardised testing tells us virtually zero about individual student’s learning. It says a little about a class and a little more about a school. Tellingly, research indicates that there is about 87% reliability between these test results and a student’s ability overall but only 33% and 57% reliability between what score a student receives on the subscale test items and their actual ability level in those items. For example, if there are 4 questions on decimals, then the performance on these test items is only 33-57% reliable in indicating a student’s actual ability with decimals. So one wonders the point of the Myschool results display. Particularly the lovely new ‘gradient’ graph showing the growth of the same cohort of students in a school from Y7 to Y9 by a line joining two single data points representing the average performance in each year level. Every score has an error associated with it and what this score actually tells us. Averages should be indicated by a performance band that includes a 90-95% confidence interval…like the VCE scores. It would make more sense to show these bands in Y7 and Y9 to honestly reflect the error inherent in making conclusions about what this one-off test data can show us.

After this discussion, Marzano then focussed on how we should be grading work on a 4-point rubric scale that takes into account the types of questions used on assessments – low-level recall questions, standard applications and transfer of knowledge questions that test understanding. Interesting stuff that makes the type of learning more important in grading but I was unconvinced all the time and effort to develop and support such a grading system was worth it in terms of overall improvement in student learning. It is just another way of coming up with a number to summarise achievement. I think it would be better to focus our time and attention on ways of improving practice.

The final session for the day was with Dylan Wiliam. He made the point that schools need to ask themselves: what are we obsessive about? Then, what should be be obsessive about? We need to focus on what matters. Focus on the things that give us more ‘bang for our buck’. He talked about engineering effective learning environments. He said that teaching was a creative task. It’s not about creating learning in students, nor is it about being a ‘facilitator’ on the side. He spoke of the pedagogy of engagement and how important it was to involve all students in learning – no student should be able to hide in a class. This was a common theme..the ‘no opt out’ message. Wiliam was insistent that discipline knowledge was important – that there are ways of thinking in each discipline that deserve to be studied in their own rights and not muddied in integrated units. How important it was to develop disciplinary habits of mind.

He said that we need to determine:

• What we want people to know
• What it means to know
• What happens when people come to know
• How to get people to know

Ms A has discovered that reteaching something that was learned incorrectly the first time is more challenging than starting from questions. Each day when she assigns homework, she establishes 3 pathways: “I’m going to assign 10 problems tonight. If you are doing the homework and at the end of the problems, you are confident that you have mastered these, please come up with 3 questions I could use on a test on this stuff to check understanding. If you are doing the homework and you’re not certain that you’ve ‘got it’ then try 3-5 more problems and see if you can figure it out. If you are doing the homework and you are getting frustrated and confused, then stop answering the problems and write down a list of your questions regarding when and where you got stuck so I can help you next time”