Jonesieblog

Are you a Teacher, Principal Teacher or Senior Manager in a school?  Are you putting time into developing assessments in line with Curriculum for Excellence – “say write make do”?  If so, allow me to ask a provocative question: are these basic techniques of AfL being used every day in your classrooms?

• wait time
• no hands up
• random selection of pupils for responses (lollipop sticks or the like)
• think pair share
• comment only marking
• self and peer assessment

If not, then I think you are focussing your energies in the wrong direction.

Stumble it!

Curriculum for Excellence clearly  demands a richer, deeper assessment of learning than can be delivered by giving a percentage mark on a written test.

I have been exploring the implications of this fact over the last few years, as we all have in Scottish education.  This post isn’t really about the issue of assessment under Curriculum for Excellence, though.  It is about the way that being a Connected Teacher has facilitated my exploration.

Last week, I came across a review “Evidence Based Teaching” by Geoff Petty in my Google Plus stream.  I follow hundreds of maths teachers on Google Plus (very few of them from the UK yet) and they provide me with a rich stream of new ideas about maths education.

I bought Geoff Petty’s book, and was very interested in the potential of Biggs’s SOLO Taxonomy as a framework to assess learning in mathematics more meaningfully.

I searched on Google, but couldn’t find anything specifically relating to the use of the SOLO taxonomy for learning in maths.  Having hit a dead end, I filed away SOLO in my head under “one of these days I’ll have a look at this”.

Yesterday, I was looking through the #pedagoofriday tweets and saw this:

#PedagooFriday used #solotaxonomy for first time with Y13 text transformations. Got them thinking about meta narrative & literary theory.

A quick look at the #solotaxonomy hashtag led me to this tweet:

@dockers_hoops My pleasure David – there is some great thinking going on in New Zealand maths classrooms using #SOLOtaxonomy as a model

— Pam Hook (@arti_choke) February 23, 2012

I got in touch with @docker_hoops (David Doherty) and he sent me a stack of resources that he’d been given by Pam Hook – all specifically relating to the use of SOLO in the assessment of learning in maths. These resources were developed in New Zealand.

Magic!

Stumble it!

I recently posted on Google Plus about a lesson using a new resource to help pupils to improve their understanding of the decimal system.  Read it here.

Stumble it!

I have seen a number of articles/videos over the last wee while that have really helped to clarify my thinking about the difference between how learners feel about their learning experiences and how effectively they are actually learning.

Interleaved Practice

Research seems to suggest that if you ask learners to do a mixture of problems after a teaching episode rather than doing lots of practice of the type of problem they have been taught about, they feel more confused and perform worse on the day, but when they are given a test a week later they drastically outperform those who stuck to the one type of problem during the original lesson (The Effects of Interleaved Practice, Taylor and Rohrer 2009).

Facing Misconceptions

Derek Miller showed learners a video about gravity and motion.  Learners judged the video to be clear and easy to understand, but the video completely failed to correct their misconceptions, and their performance in a post-video test was virtually the same as in the pre-video test..  Another group of learners were shown a video which went on to state common misconceptions, and explain why they were false.  The learners described this video as confusing, but they went on to improve by 100% their performance in the test on the topic. You can watch his description of the experiment here on YouTube.

Effective Presentations

I can’t find a link to the last bit of research, alas, so I am paraphrasing from memory.  An American who spent decades researching effective use of Powerpoint performed the following experiment.  He presented the same set of information to 2 groups using Powerpoint.  One group saw a bland, bare presentation, whilst the second group saw a flashy presentation with lots of animation and colour.  The second group enjoyed their presentation much more than the first, and felt more confident about the topic than the first.  But when tested the first group outperformed the second group significantly.

And so…

How often do you take the phrase “I’m confused” in your classroom as a negative sign?  And how often do you use learner satisfaction or ability to perform on the day as barometers of the effectiveness of your lessons?  It appears that you shouldn’t be doing either without some deeper assessment of the quality of the learning that is going on.

Stumble it!

[disclaimer]This is a ramble, full of internal inconsistencies, born of a weary mind.  I post it into the ether like fresh meat thrown to a pack of wolves – go ahead and tear it to shreds![/disclaimer]

I guess you all know about Khan Academy.  If not: it’s one man’s collection of 2100 video lectures on maths, science, finance and more – all freely available.  In maths, it purports to provide a full progression from the basics of counting and place value up to some areas of university maths.

Bill Gates has endorsed it, whilst many educators are throwing their hands up in horror.

A heretical thought that popped into my head today.    What if young people decide one day that they want to spend all of the limited amount of time they devote to maths actually learning how to do maths instead of learning how to collaborate effectively, design bridges, play Mario Kart, be good time-keepers, produce presentations or whatever latest thing might be? And what if they then start using Khan Academy in large numbers to fulfil their needs? And what if they find that Khan Academy is actually much more useful to them than their school maths lessons in providing them with the exam passes that will open the doors to employment and/or further education?

How relevant will school maths look then?

As I look back over my 20 years of teaching, I can’t think of that many youngsters who have been motivated enough to spend time at home on maths beyond homework assignments, so it’s probably just a crazy, passing thought.

The broader purposes that we pursue as educators these days (under the banner of “A Curriculum for Excellence” in Scotland) are very noble – more than that, they address the real needs of young people growing up into a world of accelerating change.  But how good are we are getting buy-in to these broader purposes from parents, employers and the learners themselves?  Without that buy-in the project runs the risk of becoming irrelevant despite it’s worthiness – because our customers can now get what they think they need elsewhere.

Stumble it!