I want the students coming to my department to be aware of themselves as learners, and to be active participants in their own learning processes.  Of course every student is actively involved in their own learning – no learning would take place otherwise – but I want them all to be able to take a step back from themselves and reflect upon their own progress.  Making this reflection regular, manageable and meaningful is a challenge!  We don’t have 1-1 computing devices in class, so if we are going to use ICT we are largely going to have to use the students’ devices in the students’ time (until enough of them have smart phones!).

Moodle

Moodle offers a plethora of tools that might help here:  Class wikis, glossaries, journals, forums… the list goes on.

Glow

Wikis and blogs are in Glow now aren’t they?  Or they will be soon.

Google Apps

Google Apps include forms and shared documents.  I guess they could be used somehow.

Edubuzz blogs

I’ve used scribe post blogs in the past. They can be very effective, but are really reflections upon the group experience rather than personal self assessment.  Blogs can be made private, so we could have individual scribe post blogs.  Unmanageable perhaps?

The desktop

Students could write up learning logs as word processing documents, stored on the server.  Not appealing!  We don’t have 1-1 in class, so impractical.  They could do the same at home.  How would they share these reflections with me?

Ad-hoc tools

Wallwisher could be very effective for group reflections. Can anyone suggest other tools that would work?

Non-ICT solutions

One solution would be to have 5 minutes at the end of each lesson for students to write up learning logs by hand.  This is simple, manageable and accessible for all students.  But the activity could quickly become perfunctory.

I don’t really seem to have resolved anything here.  Moodle and pencil-and-paper seem to be the front runners.  I’d be most grateful if you could help to clarify my ponderings!

1. help students  to reflect upon their own learning
2. help them  to discuss their learning with each other and with me at any time
3. help them  to gather evidence of their own learning
4. help them to learn collaboratively
5. help them to self-assess their progress, and peer assess each other’s
6. provide them with alternative resources to “close the gap” if they have not mastered learning objectives
7. provide parents/carers with information about their children’s learning
8. provide me with tools to manage assessment data
9. save money!

Along with this list of potential benefits, I have a list of possible tools to deliver the benefits:

• Moodle
• Glow
• Google Apps
• Edubuzz blogs
• desktop applications and the school server
• ad-hoc use of Web 2.0 tools (Wallwisher, Posterous, Twitter etc.)
• Non-ICT approaches

I’m going to work my way through the first list in subsequent blog posts, considering the best solution for each (whilst at the same time thinking about the whole package). Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any important potential benefits, or important tools. Also please let me know if you have been through a similar thought process and have any conclusions to share.

This may take a while – don’t expect a new post in this series every day – and I may give up on the series if I feel that I’ve reached a decision already.

Imagine that it is a year from now. You are leaving the classroom, and as you go, I have a tear in my eye and say “you were the best class ever”. What kind of things do you think you would have to do, individually and as a group, in order to make that happen? And as you leave, you say to me “thank you Mr Jones – you were the best teacher ever.” What kind of things would I have to do to make that happen?

A year ago, as usual, this led to the class coming up with an excellent set of class rules, and a clear list of their expectations of me as a teacher.  The pupils all signed their list, and I signed mine (once I had negotiated away items like “no homework”!)

Now things don’t always pan out the way I would hope, but today, as the class left the room for the last time, I must confess that there was a lump in my throat, and I was able to tell them honestly that they were the best class ever.  They have been a superb learning community.  They have supported each other, never slagged each other off, developed a clear sense of themselves as learners, taken on responsibility for their own learning and been brilliant fun. It was this class did the Counting Cogs investigation, and chose their own method of assessment.  It was Harriet from this class that spoke with me to a journalist (Douglas Blane) from TESS.

I was discussing them with a colleague at the end of the day.  I said that I felt very pleased with the job I had done with them, despite the fact that I knew that most of the success of the class had been down to the youngsters themselves, and that they would have been a great class for anyone.  ”That may be true to some extent” said my colleague, “but at least you know that you did not squander that opportunity.”  I do, and feel good about that.  But I’m going to miss them.

I plan to use this task as an introduction to multiples, factors and primes in our new  CfE course, so I was really using my S2 class as guinea pigs!

The task was genuinely rich: the pupils came up with many conjectures which I had not predicted. Here are some snippets of the artifacts they produced:

I was particularly pleased to be able to discuss the “failed attempt” and convince the students that it wasn’t really a failure at all. It was really a great bit of evidence of the scientific method in practice. They could have improved their recording by showing how they found out that it wasn’t true (by making a prediction based on the conjecture, then finding that it didn’t work).

The pupils were using words like multiple, factor and prime without any prompting from me to do so. I think this task would work very well as an introduction to these concepts.

I put the class into groups of two and threes, handed them out the envelopes and said “this is an assessment activity – show me what you have learned in this topic”.

The pupils struggled initially with the open nature of the task.  Several asked “what are we supposed to do?” to which I replied “show me what you have learned about straight lines.”  “This is weird” said one of the pupils!

I did not say that they had to make a poster, but the resources to do so were available unobtrusively at the front of the room.  Once one group asked if they could make a poster, and I said that they could if they wanted, the idea took off across the room and they all ended up doing so.

Despite my assertions to the contrary, most of the class seemed to believe initially that there was a “right answer” towards which they were heading, and one group of boys said “we’ve finished” once they had gathered the resources into groups and stuck them onto a poster.  I asked if they felt that they had had the opportunity to demonstrate everything that they had learned about straight lines, and they said yes [slightly worrying since we spent some time working on mathematical modelling with straight lines!].

For me the most valuable element of this activity is the discussions that take place between pupils, and between me and the pupils.  Pupils have the time to talk to each other about their learning, and these conversations can clear up lots of wee misunderstandings.  I am also able to ask interesting questions, and pupils have the time to think about them.  I asked one pair of girls, who were busy gathering bits of card into groups: “why does this graph belong with the equation y=6-x?”  They answered in terms of gradients and y-intercepts, but were also, when pushed, able to explain that the line represents all the places on the diagram where the equation is true.”  I asked if this was the only place they could put (3,3) then left to talk to another group.  This is the poster they produced:

At the end of the lesson we discussed the activity.  The pupils were all very positive about it.  One of the boys who had declared “we’re finished” said that he would have liked to have had more blank graphs to fill out.  I finished by saying “I know this was an assessment activity, but does anyone feel that they have learned some more about straight lines during this lesson?”  80% of the class put their hands up.

Two of my department came in during the lesson to join in with the task of questioning the pupils.  At the end of the day we had a chat with two more members of the department about how we might improve the activity.   We thought we would try to make the resources reusable (laminated perhaps so pupils can write on them with dry-wipe pens), or maybe make it into an electronic activity by having the resources as objects on a drawing.  We would also change the cards to make the task more open-ended.  At the moment they fit together too neatly, so it does seem as though there is one right answer.

How do we square that with a system that has all S4-S6 pupils abandoning any pretence of learning from Easter until the beginning of June in order to prepare for and sit the SQA exams?

I don’t see anything in the documentation about the senior phase that suggests that anyone is planning to deviate from this age-old model of qualification by exam.

Nor do I have any alternatives to offer!

That is all.

Having watched this Teachers’ TV video at the weekend, I felt inspired to try an assessment activity that might better reflect the principals of assessment in CfE.  It wasn’t a big deal, but the outcome was interesting enough to prompt this rare blog post!

Today was the last lesson for my S2 class on a money topic which included wages, VAT and exchange rates.  I told the class that the aim of the lesson was for them to produce evidence of what they had learned during the topic, then asked them how they thought they might do that.  The first response was  “a test” (loud boos from classmates!).  Someone else suggested making posters, and another pupil suggested making up questions for the Activote pods, which they would then answer.

We settled on making posters.  I have done this many times before as a way of allowing a class to reflect upon their learning and pull together a topic.  The difference this time was that I had been very clear with them about the fact that this was an assessment activity.  We were doing this activity to gather evidence of their learning.

I put them into groups of 3/4 (at random) and gave them 3 minutes to decide on their roles within the groups.  I stopped the clock after 1 minute, because they were assigning roles like “write the banner” and “”draw the pictures”.  I said “remember – the purpose of this lesson is to gather evidence of your learning”, then started the clock again.  This time they immediately began talking about the content of the topic, and chose roles like “write about VAT”.

I told them that each team shared responsibility for everything on their poster, then let them get on with it. None of them seemed to have any problem with being assessed through a group activity.

As I walked around and discussed their posters with them, several pupils asked me “is this okay?” or “can I do …?”. I replied by asking them whether or not they felt that it provided good evidence of everything that they had learned. This seemed to be a very powerful question – they always responded by going back to their posters and adding more or amending what they already had.

Some pupils asked me (or other members of their teams) to explain parts of the topic that they had not fully understood. They seemed quite comfortable with the fact that these conversations would form part of the assessment process. And the whole class understood that what they said counted for something. In fact one boy, when I asked what evidence we were getting from his intricately written title, replied “but I told you about how to work out VAT when we were talking to X”. The challenge for me is to figure out a way to capture the evidence that I heard in class today.

To cut a long story short, I was reminded today of the benefits of giving youngsters a say in how they are assessed, and of the benefits of sharing the purpose of an activity with them. It hardly seems worth mentioning when I put it like that

I can’t really put into words what a great privilege it was to be there.  My son was performing, and I have taught most of the pupils who were on stage.  I also sail with quite a few of the youngsters.  It was like being a proud parent thirty times over.  It was also special for me because it was the first school musical that I have been able to see, having been a performer in the last two shows.

“Happiness doesn’t come from having things – it comes from being part of things” as the saying goes, and I felt a huge pride last night at being part of the community that produced such a fine performance.

Lesley Hood devotes a huge amount of time every year to putting on the musical.  I don’t know where she finds the energy, but I’m very glad that she does.  She thoroughly deserved the rapturous thanks that she received from performers and audience last night.

Here are a few things that stood out for me after a first reading:

To get a 4 you need to get a 4 in every assessable component. If you get one 3 then you get a 3 overall.

Information Handling is going to be internally assessed.  Goodness knows what form that assessment will take!

The portfolio used to assess the other elements will “be drawn from across the curriculum or from more than one context” (emphasis added).  It could therefore consist entirely of work produced in the maths department.

What are your views about amount of time to spend whole class teaching in maths vs. individual/group work etc.?

I told Julie I’d get back to her, but my response needs more than 140 characters – hence this short blog post.

The short answer is that there is no answer!  All three modes are useful, and an effective teacher will use all three, but it is not useful to attempt to prescribe an ideal mix.  At the risk of setting up a straw man, I think it’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect lesson, and that a lesson which suits one learner very well may fail completely to meet the needs of another member of the class.

Having said that, the reality is that learners still spend the majority of their time in secondary maths classrooms either being taught from the front or doing individual work.  This is especially true for the more academically successful learners in S3-S6.  One could argue, therefore, that there is room for more group work!  I think the work on cooperative learning in maths is very interesting, as is the critical skills model of group working.  But we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bath water – those of us old enough to have used the SMP individualised maths program remember students who could pass a test on ratio, but pronounced it “rat-ee-o” because they had never heard anyone say the word!

I suppose the bottom line is that teachers and departments need to find their own answers to this question – guided by discussion with colleagues and learners, and by honest reflection on their own practice.