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At the end of our round at Burwood PS a lot of us were still puzzling over rigour: Is it a product or a process? How is it distinguished from high expectations? How easy is it for us, as teachers and leaders, to achieve rigour in our classrooms. And if it is quite easy to achieve, why aren't we seeing it? I do like the Barbara Blackburn books because they contain big ideas written with practical examples that makes you believe that rigour can be quite easily achieved. In "Rigour is Not a Four-Letter Word", Blackburn defines rigour as: Rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he and she can learn at high level, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels. That definition seems to me to say that rigour it is both process and product. The video below has a couple of gems. One is her thought about questioning, "It is not enough simple to ask higher order questions. If a teacher asks a higher order question and accepts a lower order answer, that's not rigorous". This really resonated with me. How often in rounds do we try to capture the teacher's level of questioning, without capturing the associated responses? Have we been looking at questioning through too narrow a sense? Is the student answers we should be focusing on more in our observations? Another puzzle that we discussed during the round is the idea of teachers holding high expectations. Contrary to the Tell Them From Me data, we frequently observe teachers who are demonstrating low expectations. In fact genuinely high expectations are only observed in a minority of classrooms. Why is that? Do we need to change teachers' practices or their fundamental beliefs? Are there simple changes to practice we could encourage teachers to take? Have you tried any of these changes yourself since the round? Looking forward to seeing your thoughts and ideas as you respond to my starter, and then to each other. And I'm hoping for rigorous thinking ...... but how will I know when I see it? Barbara I'm sometimes puzzled during school visits about what I observe in classrooms. I've talked with the school leaders about priorities and what we might hope to see, but during the observations a different type of teaching altogether emerges.
On other occasions, I know that a school has been engaged in a significant initiative and great changes to teaching and learning have occurred. But just prior to the observations a new initiative has begun, and the previously observed practices seem to be occurring far less frequently or even drop off altogether. Sometimes a new political agenda emerges, despite the best arguments of educators at the highest levels. Currently imposed targets with the threats of consequences for those who don't meet them is an example of a change that might disrupt the clarity you have. So my big questions are: how do we ensure clarity and coherence in the eyes of the leaders? and most importantly, how do we ensure that this is shared clarity and coherence between leaders and teachers? Do your readings shed any light on these questions? Our next round is at Granville East and we hope to deepen our understanding about how to teach and lead so that our students can think like mathematicians.
Our blog is started by Nicki from GEPS. She writes: According to Di Siemon, Number is routinely identified by teachers as the most difficult aspect of school mathematics to teach and learn....and differences in performance are almost entirely due to difficulties with larger whole numbers and related concepts such as multiplicative thinking. Do you agree? What makes you say that?  In a recent report, “The Problem with Finding the Main Idea” by the John Hopkins Institute for Educational Policy the authors argue that in recent years curriculum has been overlooked as a pillar for school improvement. And I tend to agree. We have been caught up in reforms to make learning and thinking visible, to embed formative assessment, to ensure effective feedback and enable student self-regulation among others. Our priority has been “how” we’re teaching (the critically important pedagogy). We have neglected the “what” of learning and teaching (the curriculum). And maybe this is because because the “what”, the curriculum in our schools, has become so all-encompassing, with strings of outcomes so long it would take a lifetime to master them, that leadership and change in the curriculum in our schools has become too hard. In the hard-hitting video, as the first of Global Ed Talks, Dylan Wiliam makes statements that challenge our thinking about what’s important for our students and our curriculum. A major point (made in the first half of the video) is that to enable our students to be successful we must pay greater attention to recognising the role of knowledge in the curriculum. He says,
Mehta and Fine in the “What, Where and How of Deeper Learning In American Secondary Schools” suggests that deeper learning comes from the intersection of mastery, identity and creativity. In planning for deeper learning then, we need to consider both the cognitive and affective, the short-term and the long-term, and the individual and the social. Be that as it may, Wiliam’s concern with an emphasis on generic skills mirrors the concern of Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel. He speaks of a confusion about what we mean by 21st century education, “I say students should be work capable – and people hear ‘we need more generic skills like collaboration, instead of content knowledge like chemistry’”. He argues we need to teach students concepts, fact and principles – and that content needs to genuinely challenge students. Finkel refers to the IBM concept of a “T-shaped worker” where the vertical line of the T stands for deep expertise in a discipline – this is what you need to acquire first. Once you have that you can branch out along the horizontal bar and use that expertise flexibly, creatively and collaboratively. A recent study showed that this knowledge is critically important ( “The Problem with Finding the Main Idea”) It found that finding the main idea is not a skill that can be taught in isolation. Good readers can only find the main idea when they know how to decode and have the content knowledge to understand the text they’re reading. How important is it then, in developing proficient readers, to ensure that all students are exposed to quality texts, and all students are exposed to knowledge across the learning areas in the Arts, in Science, History & Geography? In the article, “Knowledge & Practice: The Real Keys to Critical Thinking”, Daniel Willingham reinforces Dylan Wiliam’s points. His three main ideas:
Our students need to learn to think like mathematicians, scientists and historians. Amongst other skills, in mathematics our students need to reason, in history they need to examine historical events from different perspectives, in science they need to observe carefully and collect data. How frequently does “disciplinary thinking” occur in your classrooms? And if the answer is “not often”, how do we change this? But disciplinary thinking is not enough, students need to develop the key ideas and understandings of the discipline. What knowledge and what understandings? We can’t cover everything! Wynne Harlem tells us we need to identify the nature of progressions from small to big ideas as an essential guide to what students should be learning. For example, in maths we need to focus on the big ideas to develop conceptual understanding. Dianne Siemon is showing us how to do this for the Number strand in the early years. As leaders, how do we ensure our school’s curriculum enacted in our classrooms covers a broad range of content for all students? Ensures that students develop discipinary thinking? And focuses on big ideas and not on trivia? Obviously, professional learning of our teachers is critical. My equally important answer is in our assessment. We need to put in place structures that ensure when we assess students all these three aspects are at the heart. “What gets measured, gets done”. To sum up, here’s a twitter post from Tom Hills. “I think there are 3 debates all doing a merry dance.
Which of these is your greatest dilemma in leading curriculum in your school? And how have you, or could you, start to address your dilemma?
2016 mathematics became whole school focus because results showed a gap between English and maths achievement. The first IR rounds supported this decision. Data indicated that there is a mismatch between the confidence of our students and their mathematical skill. Our kids love maths and think they are good at it, but NAPLAN results indicate a majority of our students in years 3 and 5 are not ‘Proficient’ in numeracy (they are not in the top 2 NAPLAN bands).
In 2017, TEN training K-2 was implemented to improve teacher understanding of the continuum of learning in mathematics and highlight the importance of establishing strong foundational skills in numeracy. Positive feedback from the teachers has seen a modified form TEN training being implemented with 3-6 teachers in 2018. As a result of 2017 IR findings and recommendation the whole staff created a vision for mathematics at OGPS. We held a twilight session and asked our staff where to next? This process indicated that many of our teachers had the strong belief that students need the "basic skills" before they are able to/or given the opportunity to attempt working mathematical tasks. Therefore we changed the focus of our PL to collaboratively in stage teams design and implement tasks where students had to use mathematical reasoning. Teams shared their tasks and what they'd learnt from them at a whole school staff meeting. The purpose behind this was to show that our students ‘can do it’ if given the opportunity. As a result each stage now has a working mathematically focus. In 2018 OGPS has been working with Anita Chin to strengthen staff understanding of the mathematics syllabus and the language of maths K-6. We want to understand how students progress from K to Year 6 -not just within a stage. This will lead to the development of a refined whole school scope and sequence. Some questions that we are still considering are: How do we get a balance between teaching the skills and providing opportunities for students to apply their skills in open ended problem solving situations? How do we successfully incorporate working mathematically into the TEN framework? |
