Overcoming Obstacles in Inquiry Learning

Today in our staff meeting we discussed ideas in relation to our new Inquiry topic of geography based on the Rugby World Cup. We came up with ideas such as an Amazing Race activity where students would complete challenges in teams based on fact finding around famous world landmarks. We had some enthusiastic discussions around what tangents we could go on, floor-to-ceiling world maps to decorate the classroom, digital literacy links and potential trips, but the conversation turned towards potential barriers for those ideas, as often the great ideas we have and the enthusiasm peters out as the inquiry progresses.

The main factors for tis included time, resources and individual knowledge. Teachers often do not have time to create the posters, booklets or physical accoutrements to accompany the inquiry, and these hurdles seem to be what drive the waning of enthusiasm on the return to the classroom. At our school this was then compounded with the lack of access to printing and laminating and availability of adequate paper, art supplies and other classroom consumables. Add to this many teachers’ unfamiliarity or perceived lack of understanding of digital technology or gaps in subject matter and the problem intensifies.

We brainstormed solutions to this problem, the main bridges to overcome these failings appeared to be working collaboratively with other teachers and at other class levels to share the load, and maintaining high expectations of our learners, both of which are referred to in the Kahikatea and Tapasa resources.

DMIC: Developing Mathematical Inquiry in a Learning Community

Today in our second callback day we had a PD session from CeRME and Massey University on developing maths inquiry. Our session started with a talk about the traditional accessibility of maths and mathematical development. We need to promote a love of maths as lifelong learners, often children have not had the opportunity to access certain educational opportunities.

Discussion on the Numeracy Project- ability groups were detrimental to learning as it kept them down a stage because they were not able to solve a problem in a certain way. Too many different strategies were learnt and children got confused. Numeracy project focused on number to the detriment of strand, the fun part.

Measurement learning should always start with non-standard units. Gave example of new-entrants class using non-standard ‘shoes’ units to measure a mat. Using a sheet of paper to teach right angles, fold to teach 45 degrees etc.

The 7 Mathematical Practices that were discussed were: Making a claim, Developing mathematical explanations, Justifying thinking, Constructing viable arguments, Generalising a Mathematical Idea, Representing Maths ideas using numbers, pictures and materials (gave an example of building with uni-fix blocks to learn volume), Using Maths language. Mistakes are powerful learning opportunities, being numerate involves having a good concept of estimation, knowing that the reversibilty of addition and multiplication does not translate to subtraction- something that I have already identified in my classroom this year.

Much of what he said were things I had already heard in University, a decade ago. I think it is interesting that the same conversations are happening after 10 years, for instance don’t tell kids the answer, don’t dumb things down, introduce algebra as addition problems with a missing digit.

Introducing Problems: Present problem, read it, ask someone to explain what is happening in the problem and get someone else to re-voice it. Part of the planning has to involve all the ways the children could get it wrong- plan for misconceptions. When sharing answers, don’t forget to re-state the problem, e.g. 29 x 15 is 29 leis x 15 people. Insteead of the close-ended “any questions?” try “what questions could we ask here?” to elicit more conversations.

Knowing when to park problems- for instance “add a zero” instead of times by ten- and when to address it is a balancing act, you want to harness the teachable moment but not get derailed by going off on a tangent. When introducing a new solution, e.g. the grid multiplication method, you should allow a tangent of giving at least another 2 problems to consolidate. Visual representation cannot be underestimated, e.g drawing the problem to clarify the final step when solving a problem like 29 x 15 using rounding and compensation (take away 1 or take away 15).

There are strong similarities with the White Rose Project in the UK. Higher ability students need to explain it to the rest of their group and try to find another way to solve the SAME problem, before moving on to solve a different. Limit the time in senior classes to about 15 minutes of problem solving in groups before moving on. Make explicit the links to Mathematical Practices when you see them in action in the class, highlighting the behaviours when you see them so that students see the value in the solving of the problem.

Setting Up the Class: Seniors, split class into halves and see each half on alternate days. Strength based social grouping, groups of 4, one challenging task and allocate roles. !0 minutes warm up, 5-10 minutes for launch 15 mins group activity, 15 mins large group discussion, 10 mins making connections to big ideas. Juniors split class into halves but groupings are in twos or perhaps threes if there is a non-verbal (or non-counter) student. Other class doing task rotations, e.g. make 10 with counters, make 6 etc. Warm ups can be a problem or ain introduction to a new activity to be used by the non-taught half of the class. Teacher role- anticipate, monitor, select, sequence, connect.

Older children do one problem a day, younger ones do three or so versions of the same problem. Older children have a more complex problem. Ask the children who you saw solve the problem using the correct strategy to share, and only them, not the ones who have not got to that stage. After they have shared, get all the children to repeat the strategy to make sure they have followed it. When moving to next iteration of the problem, make clear that you would like to see this strategy used to solve it. Then move to an open ended task or problematic task.

Independent work should be purposeful. Make the practice related to previous problems, e.g use problems from previous day, week or last term, refer students to solved problems from the wall. Can use mathletics, games usually end up being about winning than about maths learning, and it usually gets noisy. Have some open-eended quesitons e.g what things in the class have 4 sides? How many ways can you make 15? Sorting shapes, finding objects larger/smaller than 1 metre etc, weighs more than 1kg. There were 24 legs in the park, what animals were there?

Talk Moves: Restate, Repeat, Reasoning, Add On, Waiting. Restate is Teacher verifying what a student has said and clarifying anything. This gives a bit of think space for all students and makes the idea accessible. Repeat-teacher asks another student to repeat what the last student said. Reasoning- teacher asking other students whether they agree or disagree with another’s answer, can be asked to prove it. Add on extends the explanation, would someone like to add on to that? Wait Time- total silence, teacher counts to 10 in head, communicates expectation that everyone has something important to contribute.

Using questions to justify their answers instead of accepting correct answers or stating that an answer is incorrect. Begin the term by asking: What makes a good mathematician? Compare answers like “Knowing your timestables” with “Taking risks, justifying answers” which should replace the former after some time spent seeing maths in this way.

During the launch, make sure the problem is visible to all students. During small group discussion, provide individual think time before sharing answers. Make sure the topic is relevant to the learner’s own experience- don’t assume children will be able to relate to the situation, e.g. filling up a car with petrol.

Trevor also introduced us the the concept of a Quick Image, an image that is flashed quickly across the screen and students have to say how many dots there are on a screen. The focus is not on how many dots there are, but how you worked out how many there were, for instance 7 dots flashed up as 2 dots, 2 dots and 3 dots scattered across the screen.

Moving Smart

Tonight I attended a professional development seminar led by Wendy Perera entitled Pathways to School. In her introduction she alluded to the connections between the body and the brain and the importance of movement and spatial awareness in the formative years of pre-school education.

Wendy believes that there is a degree of sensory deprivation in the younger generation. I agree that these days the change in lifestyles and living arrangements for children and the lack of access to outdoor spaces for many learners does result in a lack of opportunities for sensory exploration in an outdoor setting. I think that these problems are wider than just children choosing to spend more time on screens indoors, it is part of a wider social problem involving time-poor or disinterested parents, a lack of natural outdoor space due to the intensification of housing in inner city suburbs and a lack of access to public or private transport due to rises in the costs of living. Wendy believes that children should be encouraged to go barefoot- however followed this up with a statement about how we lose 90% of our body heat through our head- something that is often quoted but is actually a misunderstanding of the fact that by wearing a hat you can stop heat loss through your head, which unfortunately made me question the veracity of the next 2 hours of her session. I had to fight against my own cynicism that if someone cannot calculate the improbability of losing 90% of a body’s heat through less than 10% of the body’s mass, it casts doubt on the accuracy of their quoted statistics.

Wendy introduced the situation of the chair-tipper, a child rocking on her chair. This indicated that they are craving vestibular stimulation, a system involving the inner ear canal and the sense of balance. “The most advanced form of balance is to sit still”, how do we get someone to sit still- by asking them to roll, move, turn and twist. She suggests having a towel by the door of the classroom and encouraging children to roll up in it before coming in. This, she states, will satiate some of their desire to flex and roll while sitting on the mat.

Children who slam doors accidentally or squeeze their friends too tightly do not have an understanding of their proproception, their spatial relation skills. If this skill is not developed, it can affect later brain development in the limbic and cortex regions. These later regions are what makes reading, writing and maths possible. Used the metaphor of the washing basket having holes plugged when skills are acquired in order to keep the water (knowledge) in.

One thing that I did agree with was her belief in the research that suggests that for a child less than 2 years old they should have zero screen time, and after 2 only a very carefully selected learning programme for no longer than 1-2 hours a day.

How do we know that a new skill has become automated? I can take it to a new learning place and do it, or I can answer an unrelated question while performing a skill, therefore the cortex has been accessed. An example of this is singing a song while using scissors, younger children will struggle to open the scissors for each new cut, when the motion has been rehearsed and is automated, children could cut while singing a song. When a child’s tongue moves to one side of their mouth and sticks out it is ‘midline’ related. As the tongue being the only movable organ in the middle of the body, when doing something tricky with one hand, the tongue will stick out of the opposite side of the mouth.

The human brain can only do one thinking task at a time- you cannot put a thinking task on top of another thinking task, but you can put a thinking task on top of an automated task, e.g. driving a car. The actions we need to complete to write need to be automated so that you can then move onto the thinking required to construct written language. Cortical grip, thumb underneath fist. This is a grip which is honed on the monkey bars on the playground, girls typically spend more time on the monkey bars than boys, this translates to better pencil grip.

Children process their learning from right brain to left, from the real to the symbolic. However, often the teaching is from symbolic to the real, the “a is for apple” paradigm of teaching the alphabet rather than experiencing the world and then acquiring the word, learning about apples, eating different types, then saying “apples start with the letter a”, and going from there.

The evolution of movement poster shows the crawling milestone before the sitting milestone. Reading recovery teachers often get their pupils to do some crawling. To be ready for school a child needs to be able to hang on the monkey bars and support their own body weight for 10 seconds. To be ready for school a child needs to be able to play with and manipulate balls or bean bags. A new statistic coming out of China shows that (almost) 90% of children have myopia, Wendy believes that this is due to screen time and indoor activity taking precedence over outdoor activities. She suggests using a balloon ball (like a beach ball), bubbles or a laser light pointer to improve eye tracking.

We were introduced to the concept of midlines, the points along the body where the top meets bottom, right meets left and front meets back. When offering a toy to a child, offer it to the midline rather than encouraging or forcing a dominant hand to take it. Homolaterality: An activity where one side of the body is moving and one is still, e.g. scootering or handwriting. Many children have issues with balance and movement due to their cross-lateral skills not having been properly developed.

A child who is ready for school needs to be able to follow simple directions, remember simple rhymes, retell simple stories that have been told or read, repeat verbal instructions in order that they have been given and have three spaces in his/her short term memory. The number of instructions a child can remember is their age minus two. 3 spaces for phonics, 4 spaces for computational maths, 6 spaces for reading.

This session was interesting and as a senior teacher made me more aware of the practicalities of running a junior class and the experiences children should be aiming to get during their ECE years.

Growing Positive Team Culture

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending a course run by a colleague of mine entitled “Growing Positive Culture” which focused on the psychology of professional relationships. In this workshop we were introduced to several different schemas for analysing interpersonal dynamics, and through the various theories we were reminded that the behaviours we observe in others are only the visible tip of the iceberg, experiences, attitudes and emotions making up the submerged bulk which we cannot see.

The first part of the session was devoted to getting to know oneself, a collection of images were provided with our task being to identify which emotion and reactions they generated for us individually. We then were asked to “Spend $1”, with a list of values and attributes that we chose from, stating how much of the dollar we were prepared to spend on each one. I chose to spend half of my total amount on health, followed by intelligence, happiness, confidence and achievement.

We then looked into the work of Alison Mooney, circling words that resonated with us before folding the page into quarters and totting up the number of words circled in each quarter to give us a personality type: Peaceful, Powerful, Playful or Precise. I have done similar activities in previous courses I have attended, and although I see a lot of the same traits every time I have taken a test, I find the results differ somewhat each time depending on my mood/energy level/social situation. For instance, last year when taking a similar assessment on a leadership course in Hackney I came out split between a creative type and a ‘Type A’, or ‘Driver’ personality. This time I came out evenly split between the ‘Peaceful’ and ‘Precise’ personality types, almost a polar opposite to 15 months ago!

The discussion after this centered around how you can work alongside these various types, and the ways in which you can “Fill their tank”, or build trust between you. For instance, giving a Playful personality type scope to be creative and energetic in their work, and working to the deadlines a Powerful type would ask for.

The second part of the workshop was about knowing your team. We looked in greater depth at building trust, using The Five Trust Buckets and the metaphor of one’s bucket being filled when someone else does trustworthy things and emptied when promises are broken. One person may enter a new relationship with a full trust bucket already, while another may come with an empty vessel which needs to be filled before any relationship can be established.

Megan Tschannen-Moran’s Trust Buckets are Benevolence, Honesty, Competence, Reliability and Openness, which we discussed as a group and ranked in terms of our own priorities. We then moved into how to package feedback, and how this can be different when packaged in an honest way versus a benevolent way. A team culture needs to be robust enough that honest feedback can be given and received, but also respectful, so try to create a team culture that takes out repercussions after feedback. An example of using a benevolent slant could be “please take two minutes to reflect” instead of “you have two minutes to reflect”.

We also looked at the 5 States of Mind, or 5 Energy Sources, Consciousness (Being Aware of Yourself), Craftmanship (Being Aware of your Pedagogical Content Knowledge), Efficacy (Being Aware of your Capabilities), Flexibility (Being Aware of your Situation and Perspective) and Interdependence (Being Aware of your Need for Others).

The next part of the workshop was around coaching, believing that as a coach your job is to uplift the other and help them through the challenges. A good point I picked up was the need to ask questions regarding what is going on for both people in the challenging situation. Come back to the question: What is the one benefit you hope to get out of this?

We also learnt about the 7 Norms of Collaboration: Pausing, Paraphrasing, Posing Questions, Providing Data, Putting Ideas on the Table, Paying Attention to Yourself and Others, and Presuming Positive Intent.

Lastly, we focussed on knowing our culture, changing the style of the feedback, not the content to reflect the person you are giving it to, and being open to taking feedback as a gift. If you feel as though someone is feeling threatened and attacking you, ask them “what do you see that I could do differently?” as this may help diffuse the situation as they see it as an opportunity to take back control and contribute to the conversation, giving them buy-in to the situation. The 4 Ways of Adult Knowing were discussed, with the stages of this based on being rule-based, other-focussed, reflective and interconnecting.

This has been a very long post even though I have cut a lot out from my notes and reflections made while in the workshop. I hope to include some links to the theories and paradigms I have learnt about at a later date so that I can use this in the future.

Play Based Learning

Today I attended a PD session on Play Based Learning held at Ormiston Primary School in Flat Bush. We discussed the theory and research behind Play Based Learning. Here are my notes from the session:

In Play Based Learning there are 3 main educators: the Children, The Learning Environment and finally the teacher.

What is the role of the child during PBL? Independently selecting resources- this can be a very hard task for some as many rely on the adults in their life to do this for them. Talking and sharing with their peers allows for rich learning to take place amongst students. The teacher can also take the place as a student in these interactions, allowing the pupil to become the authority in games and play based investigations.

The role of the Learning Environment: How could I use this area to stretch thinking and learning? Use of open ended resources and following the interests of your learners to help dictate your resources. An open-ended resource is a thing that does not have a fixed-purpose design, e.g. a toy dinosaur can only be seen as a dinosaur, however a stone or a shell could be a phone, a car etc. Use of outdoor learning environments, water play, and use of incidental items such as large cardboard boxes from school deliveries provide different opportunities for learning.

The role of the Teacher in PBL: Facilitate, observe children’s play, listen to questions and share stories, record, reflect, respond, play alongside, gather an idea of their interests. At Ormiston, three teachers meet together and plan their sessions, what questions are going to be asked, how to set up etc. During the lessons they take notes and photographs to document the student’s learning and as a record of assessment. They begin each session with 5-10 min discussion about learners’ ideas, use photos or video of the students’ own work, and add depth to their learning by setting up a new provocation each day.

Teachers in PBL gather for a reflection everyday after the sessions. They ask what learning did we see, how were resources used, do we need to enhance those resources? How can we stretch them into the Zone of Proximal Development?

The Journey Begins

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or so the saying goes. I have long resisted the idea of a blog, preferring instead the romantic notion of inscriptions in perfect cursive on the tangible pages of a journal, however my handwriting has never been awarded any praise, and the excuse of never-having-time has made it easy to avoid picking up the pen by staying in front of the screen, so here we are.

Like many education professionals, I have been guilty of spouting the party line of ‘being a lifelong learner’ without following through with the necessary actions. I definitely do not claim to be in any way technologically savvy, so hopefully this foray into the world of digital diaries will be the impetus I need to develop my knowledge and skills in this area, and remind me of what it means to be a learner.