This was the question posed at our Maths meeting on Thursday. Jeremy's blog post acted as a stimulus for our Harkness discussion around what the purpose behind Maths is and if we can agree on that how should we be planning out lessons.
My initial thoughts were that if we started with the purpose of school education then it would be easy to place the purpose of school maths within that context - easier said than done. Somebody pointed out the current set up our education system is geared towards further study. So we learn key mathematical content at KS3 and KS4 only to enable students to go on and study it at KS5. This seems outdated and unrealistic for the many students who do not go on to study Maths post-16. I think the purpose of education is to try and even the playing field between the high levels inequality which young people from poorer socio-economic areas experience throughout their life. A state-sponsored free education is supposed to solve some of the issues around social mobility. Does it? No. But that is not to say it shouldn't try. Education in state schools in England has a moral duty to provide students with the best possible chances of success in life. Does success in the 21st century mean people who can remember Pythagorean triples off the top of their head? Not necessarily. What defined success for people 100 years ago before computers and before the wide-spread use of phones with calculators is not what success will look like for our pupils. Instead, we need citizens who are creative, resilient, hard working, collaborative, optimistic and have a strong sense of self when faced with challenges in their personal and professional lives. School maths education needs to re-position itself in the curriculum as a key player in developing the full person and not just the subject which students are forced to do in order to pass a set of exams. Speaking of which I was totally in agreement with @solvemymaths' post (https://solvemymaths.com/2016/10/15/a-response-to-secret-teacher/) when they stated that Maths in a school context has become the compulsory course which swamps the curriculum all because it matters so much in the results of a school. It is no wonder that children start to despise a subject when it is sold to them as a compulsory, exam-hoop jumping exercise in nothing. If we can't change the curriculum (which maybe we should try to do at a later date) what we can do is think deeply about how we deliver it. Instead of planning from tasks we should be thinking about the character traits it helps to develop. Thinking about what they take away from school maths it is unlikely to be the content (majority of adults remember very little of their school maths curriculum) so what we should be making sure they take away are transferable skills which will make them good colleagues in a professional setting but also help them in the ability to build strong relationships and apply themselves to new and unfamiliar things. What this means for me - stop worrying so much about the knowledge (it is already decided for you and they will just forget it post GCSE anyway) and start thinking more about the experiences young people have in your classroom and how they are developing as people. If we can measure their development as people and help build their resilience, curiosity and grit then they will learn the content anyway.
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I was really pleased to be invited as a contributor to the UCL Teacher Takeaway event to share what I had been working on around Growth Mindset. As many people know the term 'growth and fixed mindset' was coined by Carol Dweck when talking about how people react to failures. Over the past 30 years there has been loads of research into the behaviour of children when faced with setbacks. Students with a so-called fixed mindset believe that their intelligence if fixed and that the goal is therefore to make yourself look smarter at all costs - leading to pupils avoiding taking risks, covering up mistakes and generally not seeing the point in trying because they won't get any better. On the other hand, students with growth mindsets relish a challenge because they see it as an opportunity to grow and learn - if only all of our pupils were like that! It comes as no surprise then, that when Carol Dweck published some research in the late 1990s along with Claudia Mueller claiming that growth mindset could be taught, educators leapt at the research and schools and universities have spent millions of pounds on creating programmes to teach growth mindset to their students. Dweck published a book in 2006 called Mindsets which has sold more than 1 million copies. In recent years, however, Dweck's research has come under increasing scrutiny. A great Buzzfeed article outlines much of the criticism - namely that the statistics don't add up and that the research has yet to be replicated. Dweck's response was that of course the results couldn't be replicated as they were created under such carefully curated conditions and teachers couldn't possibly recreate those conditions in their busy classrooms. Which leads me to the question: why should we all not just go home now? Well, as I spoke to the teachers about at the event, the reason we shouldn't go home is that we have to believe that is will be possible to help students develop a growth mindset in our classrooms. As Dweck says, it is about your context and the delivery. So much of what we do in our classrooms happens by accident or because we were told during teacher training that it was a good way to do it. We need to dig a little deeper into the 'silent arguments' we make with how we deliver our curriculums and how we run our classrooms so that we unpick whether the silent messages we are passing to pupils actually support a growth mindset or reinforce a fixed mindset. For me this is about classroom culture which I think is summed up by these 8 areas: I used the example of my mixed ability Year 8 class whose behaviour I find quite challenging as they are often disengaged and not focused on the work. The first diagram is an example of what I might traditionally have done in my classroom to manage their behaviour. Many of these are things you may have seen or done in your own classroom and seem innocuous enough but when I thought a little harder about the silent arguments here are some of them I think I am making to the pupils: Classroom norms: you need to be settled before we can start the work - your behaviour is challenging to me. I know better who you should sit with. Curriculum design: the knowledge stays with me. I know the order in which you must learn the material. Learning is a linear process. The final product matters. Language tone: You need me to guide you to success. Deficit model - you are incomplete at the moment and below where you should be. Feedback: I value your written work as evidence of your thinking and process. The final product is what matters. You are part of the learning process as directed by me. Praise: I am sad because you aren’t doing as I asked. You can be praised for appearing to do the right thing. Interactions: You need help. You should know how to interact and conduct yourself socially but you let me down a lot so I will avoid it. Tasks: You have short concentration levels. You need me to build up your confidence. You can’t handle the hard stuff. Behaviour: I value compliance. I have the authority to take away things you like. I then revealed a new plan below and asked the teachers to identify how the silent arguments had changed. I'll leave it here for you to consider but I do think the language is one of the easiest and most powerful changes to make. The word 'choice' has a lot of meaning for me: you choose your actions and your words therefore you are responsible for everything you do. This forms the basis of all of my restorative conversations and I find that when it clicks with a student that they have a choice in what they do it gives them a lot more empowerment over their future. After participants spent some time reflecting on their own classroom culture I just made one last point about the inevitability of failure. All of the blue sky thinking about our classrooms and what we want to achieve within them can seem impossible when faced with the reality of a classroom full of teenagers the last lesson of a day when it is raining outside. Matthew Syed writes in his book Black Box Thinking about how we must be analytical about our failures to ensure that we avoid making mistakes again just as airline carriers were about safety on board in order to reduce human errors inflight. He suggests doing a 'pre mortem' where you identify all of the things which are likely to go wrong and then try to plan for how you will avoid them. This is worth doing before putting any new plan into action as it will reduce the likely hood of failure - it also shows a growth mindset because it acknowledges that we are not perfect and we are always learning from our mistakes! I have attached a list of additional reading below but I hope this gets you thinking about the silent arguments you are making in your classroom and whether you are truly promoting a growth mindset classroom where pupils are encouraged to take ownership of their learning and mistakes are learning points.
Phil Lewis from Corporate Punk certainly gave a few pause for thought moments with his talk on culture and being a deliberately developmental organisation at our Inset Day this morning. The question about culture and how to foster the type of culture which allows creativity to blossom is one he has been thinking about for the past 20 years and so it was a great opportunity to hear some of his findings.
Two of the ones which really struck a chord were "Grey Matter" and "Yes the problem is you...". To explain, grey matter is the messy space between passive acceptance of what is happening in an organisation and nuclear explosion in opposition to what is happening. This is the space where real change can happen and the space wherein we need to be working. I worry that I, as with many others, too often find ourselves in the passive acceptance state where we don't want (or feel we can) challenge things. Reasons for this are sure to be varied but for me it comes back to a conversation I had with a colleague earlier in the week about not wanting to upset or hurt people and so always taking the role of mediator or facilitator. If real creativity is to be unleashed and real change to follow then I do think that I and others need to step out of the comfort zone of acceptance and find our voices to challenge the way and the why of things. This leads to the "yes the problem is you...". I totally understood what Phil was saying about the narrative we tell ourselves about our days and all the experiences we have. The tidying up of inconvenient parts of the story so that they fit within our own narrative and our own version of events is something I know I do but I see time and again either with students or colleagues or friends when we try to rationalise what happened. We re-write the story to suit our already preconceived version of what was really going on. Phil spoke about a time when he used to go home from work and in the process of rewriting that day's narrative he would ask "Is it me or has the world gone mad?". The answer he says is that "yes the problem is you". It is quite liberating to actually have that answer because now that the problem is me then it is within my power to change it. To do which I must step into the grey zone... |
AuthorRosie Smyth is a teacher in School 21, East London. ArchivesCategories |