Notable quotes and Quotable Notes from Edutech 2013

I was privy to a smorgasbord of simulating delicacies at Edutech Brisbane 2013. The following are quotes and ideas that resonated, disrupted and tantislised.

Now to action…!

Dan Pink
Have fewer conversations about how and more about why things are done.

Can I do one thing tomorrow that is better than today?

Ewan Macintosh

Be curious
Listen to yourself
Humble is cool
Good energy is infectious
Find a way

Problem Finders – curiosity is finding a problem and knowing when it is solved

Why are you doing this?

Googleable and Ungoogleable

Where have I been? Feedback
Where am I now? Assessment
Where and I going?… With my learning

FAIL – First Attempt In Learning

Replace the words “doing” and “work” with learning

Sean Tierney
Cognitive amputation – devolving tasks to technology

Change management is about changing culture.
Change the environment and force teachers to act differently.

Growing staff
Empowering students
Growing parents
Collaboration always
Questioning everything

Invent the future don’t prevent the future.

Mark Harris
If it doesn’t make the world better don’t do it.
Modern student: Connecting, collaborating, interacting, creating, publishing, entrepreneur online out of school.
Where are the modern teachers?

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

Gary Stager

Making things is better than being passive – making good things is even better.

A good prompt is worth 1000 words (curiosity)
A good prompt is a challenge, problem or motivation
Requirements: Materials, Sufficient time, Supportive culture (including expertise)

Building a better Prompt
Brevity
Ambiguity
Immunity to assessment

Look askew – you never know what you’ll learn!

Staying with an idea long enough that they get good at it.

You can’t teach 21st Century learning if you haven’t learnt this century.

Do the impossible.

Less us, more them!

Those who know better need to do better!

Alan November
I hope that this talk is good enough to criticise.

The best learners are desperate.

The more of an expert you become in any field the more difficult it is to understand the struggles of the first time learner.

Simple Flip model
Students prepare outside class
Every student asks questions
Teachers study students’ questions
Students work in class on problems
Students debrief one another
Instruction moves towards personalisation.

More students ask questions online than face to face.

Questions of students must be the starting point and most important information for teachers preparation for the next lesson.
Conversation, debate, defend ideas most powerful way of learning – Socrates

Collaborative assessment promoting learning: After test, the students immediately retake the test but second time the group votes on the answer after debate. Half point if correct the second time. Score is combination of both. No marking for teacher.

Who owns the learning?

Kids learn better from kids.

If you have to teach something, then you have to learn.

How we learn is not how our students learn.

Stephen Heppel
For every British soldier killed in Afghanistan 10 schools could have been open. Guns or learning the better choice?

Sir Ken Robinson
HG Wells – Civilisation is a race between education and oblivion.

What matters is not what happens to us but what we make of it.

Reflection of Dan Pink’s Edutech 2013 Keynote

Dan Pink on the Science of Motivation

Dan Pink gave the opening keynote at the 2013 Edutech Conference in Brisbane.

What truly motivates? Studies have shown that the higher the pay the greater the performance but only in mechanical skills. When any rudimentary cognitive skill was required, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

If-then reward are great for simple and short term work but not good for complex and long term tasks.

Artist give the world something that they did not know they were missing. ie iPad
A study conducted on artists asked to produce commissioned and non commissioned art works showed that non commissioned were more creative even though both were of equal technical quality.

Most work we do at school is commissioned and has too many constraints.

Money matters as a motivator due to fairness. Pay teachers to show they are valued but rewarding high performing teachers financially is counter-productive. The politicians need to get this message.

Management is a technology to get compliance. Humans don’t engage by being managed and controlled. Management won’t achieve engagement.
Autonomy for self direction is the technology to achieve engagement. High standards and autonomy is the best that leadership can provide.

Examples of autonomy include Google’s 20% time to “Do what you like but share it at the end of the week with everyone else”.
Could “Non Commissioned” days which Pink called “FedEx Days” work for teachers and students? Take one day a fortnight to work on anything that they were educationally passionate about and share it with everyone at the end of the day.
Staff meeting time could be better utilised by following this model with a focus on innovation and excluding things like marking, planning etc. It requires trust all round. Trust is only developed by trusting.

Making progress in meaningful work requires constructive feedback. Pink spoke about DIY Performance Reviews. We already have teachers setting their own goals through Performance Development processes and Step 9 Performance Development Plans. I would be be very interested in exploring teachers providing collegiate feedback and support for Performance Development. Teachers and leaders should be accountable to each other. DIY Report Cards where teachers and students set own goals and grade themselves and each other is something to seriously consider.

Purpose is an essential motivator. Everyone needs to know why something is being done. This reference by Pink echoed Joan Dulton and Dave Anderson’s Parrot of Purpose sitting on one’s should and constantly squawking, “What’s the purpose?”

Have fewer conversations about “how” and more about “why” things are done.

Can I do one thing tomorrow that is better than I did today?

Thank you @danielpink for a motivating and thought provoking keynote to start Edutech 2013.

One Thing My Mother Taught Me Before She Died

My dear mother died of cancer 35 years ago. It was a tragic story of misdiagnosis by doctors to the point where she was told by her family doctor that she was a hypochondriac. After a year of feeling pain that was “only in her head”, with her thinking she was going mad, Dad made her seek other opinions and cancer was discovered in her bladder.

Mum told me that before her first operation she thought she might die. After surviving she said to me that many people say that one should live each day as if it’s your last. However, she said that one should live each day as if it’s your first. After “returning from the grave” She saw the world as if for the first time, in wonder, as someone blind seeing for the first time; every colour vivid, every flower a marvel, life a gift to be treasured and never taken for granted.

Mum showed me a sketch that she made of a brushfire blackened landscape with a tiny red flower at the base of a burnt out tree. Underneath she had written “Courage”.

Mum’s courage battled through more operations and radio therapy. The doctors blamed the cancer on her father chain smoking when she was a child. Mum blamed the stress brought on by the death of my sister at the age of 11. Either way, she remained positive, courageous and resilient.

My mother desperately wanted to live. The cause of her illness was out of her control. I do get very angry when I see people deliberately poisoning themselves and their children by smoking.

When I catch myself staring at the pavement, feeling sorry for myself, I think of the red flower, I think of refocusing on what I have rather on what I haven’t and I try to look at things through the eyes of one seeing for the first time.

Corporate Fundraising for Schools

Where do I stand on Corporate Fundraising for Schools? I am a firm believer that education, like health should be free, inclusive and universal so that all students have equal opportunity to reach their potential. As Principal of a school in a disadvantaged southern suburb of Adelaide, I can attest that this is not the case. While many schools charge parents hundreds of dollars in voluntary contributions, my school can only impose the minimum fees on parents and still many can’t pay. An extra $100 from 250 families would give the school an extra $25 000 to spend on learning programs. Our parent fund raising committee has a target of raising $6000. This would probably be less than the amount wealthier schools spend on raffle ticket books! The problem is that parents raise money in their own community. If the community is wealthy, the gains are great. A disadvantaged community has limited resources.

It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. It is imperative that education is supported by the community. The promotional schemes aimed at schools run by supermarkets at least puts money back into the school community in which the parents shop. It is a win win situation. Schools benefit from supermarket patronage. Obviously the wealthier the community, the more resources go to the school; the less to the less advantaged.

Until Gonski becomes a reality and school funding is put on a equitable, fair and just basis then any support from the community will be welcome. The gap between rich and poor never lessens though.

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Learning from Mistakes

I was listening to a TED Radio Hour podcast while travelling the 930km distance to my favourite place on Earth, the photo of which is the background image of this blog. The topic was about mistakes made by physicians. The mistake made by the speaker resulted in the death of a patient. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes. A physician would certainly want to learn quickly.

The TED speaker believed that it was important to speak publicly about mistakes, both from personal cathartic reason like that of a confessional and also so that others can learn from their mistakes.

I thought back over my thirty plus years of teaching and the many mistakes I have made. I do wonder what impact my mistakes have made on children’s lives. Thank God there have been no fatalities but maybe that is more luck than planning.

Darren was new to my class in about 1983. He didn’t talk a lot and didn’t have many friends but he was tough and took on any physical challenge with gusto. The obstacle course I designed was certainly challenging and included climbing through the shelter shed window and traverse hand over hand across the rafter and slide down the support pole. What I overlooked was the concrete floor. Darren was swinging across until he missed a hand hold and fell 3 metres landing flat on his side. He was so badly winded that I feared he had broken ribs. Had he hit his head he could have done serious injury.

I learnt to assess risk carefully.

I planned an exchange to Kangaroo Island and sought sponsorship from local businesses. Parents gave consent for students to go to neighbouring businesses with a letter of introduction from me and a prepared speech which had been rehearsed by the children.

All students were sent out in pairs and returned during the next hour with varying degrees of success – torches, cups, even cash donations. All students, apart from two returned in the allotted time. Nearly 2 hours later, and just before I called the Principal and then the police, the two boys returned very pleased with themselves carrying boxes of bounty. They had walked to businesses well over 4 kilometres away! To say I was relieved was an understatement.

This taught me duty of care. Any of the children could have been injured, knocked down by a car or even kidnapped. It was a lesson I was lucky to learn without mishap.

Another teacher and I were rehearsing for a musical production with 90 children after school. The students were predictably excited but as the time progressed a few children’s inappropriate behaviour became so disruptive that it began to derail the rehearsal for the other 60 children present. My response was one that I will never forget. Amongst all the noise, I told David, one of the boys mucking up, to “Play along with me”, pinned him up against the wall and yelled at him to stop. There was sudden silence and the kids fell into line. It achieved its aim… but at a cost. A group of children came to me to say how inappropriate my behaviour had been. I explained to them that it was a setup and that I was not being aggressive. What I did not know was that David never understood what I had said to him and therefore was very upset with the way I had treated him.

I learnt of the importance of always modelling appropriate behaviour. Regardless of whether it was a dramatic ruse, the perception is the reality. I inadvertently modelled that threat and violence was a solution to a problem. I did not model respect. I did not model an adult in control solving problems calmly.

Looking back, I can see how these mistakes helped me learn about myself and my responsibilities as a teacher and a role model. I would rather have learnt these lessons in a way that did not potentially put children at risk.

Perhaps others can learn from my mistakes rather than having to make their own. What can I learn from others’? Nothing if we don’t share.

Only make new mistakes!

Easter Eggheads

A Miracle! – Bunny lays chocolate eggs and then paints them!

It always bothers me around Easter and Christmas time how crazy our society and education system has become. As I walk around the school, my school and any government school, I see teachers and children doing activities about  Easter bunnies, Easter bilbies, Easter eggs and chocolate . At Christmas time is is Santa Claus in his Coca Cola colour coded clothing, songs and stories of airborne reindeer, flying sleighs, snow in summer and corny carols. What is happening to education when there is a total lack of focus on the reason for the season?

Would Anzac Day ever be seriously taught in schools by only focusing on the Essendon v Collingwood AFL Football clash? Would Australia Day be celebrated with no mention of Australia? Would the Queens Birthday ever be celebrated with no mention of Her Majesty or Queens Birthday Honours? Yet because Easter and Christmas are religious holidays, holidays that everyone is happy to take off, educators are happy to discount the historical, religious and sociological significance and the reason that these holidays exist. This is similar to teaching Australian History with no acknowledgement of the 40 000+ years of Aboriginal History, or teaching English Literature with a total focus on comics.

I am not implying that the religious/historical/cultural events behind Easter and Christmas should be taught as fact. But surely they need to be taught. If teachers believe that these events are fantasy rather than history, why do they choose to teach the commercial fantasy of Santa and Easter Bunny over the “fantasies” that have had a major impact at shaping the past two millennia? It could be argued that these two events that most teachers shy away from or just ignore are the the most significant in shaping western history, culture, law, science and the Arts. I would be more than happy if the previous statement was debated in schools rather than children spending all their seasonal energy colouring in stencilled sheets of a cartoonlike rabbit capable of illegally breaking into everyone’s house carrying container loads of chocolate  and foil wrapping.

Education should be about inclusivity, examining all sides of an argument, encouraging questioning and investigating fantasy and fact. We should not sacrifice our moral purpose on the alter of chocolate and tinsel (sold at a store near you!).

 

Age Appropriate Behaviour?

We tend to judge behaviour in terms of age appropriateness. I recall my first child hitting the “terrible twos” and could not believe that my beautiful daughter had metamorphosed into a disobedient, argumentative little tantrum thrower. The Toddler Training bible, Dr Google and every other reference said that this was normal development caused by hormonal changes. When the tantrums occurred, parents were recommended to stay calm and patient, speak quietly and model to children the way that strong emotions can be dealt with. Eventually they will learn to control their feelings and modify their behaviours. The Terrible Twos pass… and then the Horrendous Threes. We are now in the Awful Eights. (Why did no-one warn us of all these?!) Each stage in the child’s life is a time of challenge and learning, for both parents and child. The child gradually learns appropriate social behaviours. I was ready for similar stages in my other two children and a little wiser in dealing with them. I still have adolescence to look forward to!

The tantrums seen in a two year old are age appropriate. The same behaviours in a five year old at school are inappropriate. Tantrums in older children are definitely inappropriate and will require intervention so that that pattern of behaviour does not become “hard wired”.

Play Is The Way has had a dramatically positive affect on our school culture which has resulted in children learning socially appropriate behaviours by reflecting on and taking responsibility for their behaviours. The Play is The Way language provides a way of opening up conversations for learning from inappropriate behaviours. At all times the adult must model calm considered “adult” behaviours. Asking questions immediately requires the child’s brain to move away from the Limbic (emotional) part of the brain to the cerebral cortex (thinking) parts. An emotional responses to an emotional outburst will trigger defensiveness and escalate the problem. The Play Is The Way language is built around 6 reflective questions:

“Is that the Right thing or wrong thing to do?”
“Are you havinga Strong moment or weak moment?”
“Are your Feelings or thinking in charge?”
“Am I trying to hurt you or help you?”
“Are you running away from the problem or dealing with it?”
“Being your own boss or asking me to be the boss?”

These questions can be modified to any opposites such as “Is that a Nice or Nasty thing to say? These questions open up a conversation between the child and the adult where the adult crafts the questions to guide the conversation for the child to do the thinking and reflecting on his or her behaviour rather than passively listening to an adult give a lecture. The latter generally makes the adult feel better but results in no learning for the child.

Community Circles are a powerful tool for children to help each other reflect on behaviour and support their colleagues in developing strategies to become more virtuous. Inappropriate behaviours are named and dealt with in a trusting and supportive manner. Children learn the language to confidently and respectfully deal with issues and seek or give advice on how to improve. It is all about learning.

We live and work in a school community. When someone does the right thing, it affects the whole community positively. When someone does the wrong thing, it has a negative effect on the community. We firmly believe in “Our School. Our Children”. Children, regardless of their age or year level can be invited into a Community Circle to be accountable to and supported by the community.

Children’s learning and wellbeing is our business. Helping children develop appropriate social skills to enable them to moderate their own behaviours has become an increasingly large part of the teacher’s role. The real challenge for a leader is how to deal with teachers who display behaviours that are socially age inappropriate. The community of teachers has as yet developed to a stage where teacher behaviour is addressed in the same way that children are being taught. We too often operate a “polite society” rather than a community of learners. When a staff member’s behaviour, attitude or speech is negative, inappropriate or contrary to our School Agreements or Values, staff will rarely speak with the person concerned. More often than not the person will be spoken about or the behaviour will be reported to leadership.

It might sound simplistic or provocative, but most of these misbehaviours are age inappropriate – a teacher refusing to speaking to colleagues for extended periods, a teacher yelling at children, continually late for duty,

late back from the staffroom after a break, etc. Behaviours that would be expected from a junior primary student but not be accepted from a primary student, let alone an adult.

The Play Is The Way questions are a perfect vehicle for addressing the above. How many staff would respond positively? Would they feel that they were being “treated like a child”? If a teacher’s behaviour was named at a “staff meeting community circle” where they were respectfully told of the impact their behaviour was having on the community and then support offered, would the teacher see this as an act of caring and a valuable learning experience or would they cry victimisation and complain to the union?

Age inappropriate behaviour requires an age appropriate response… or should that be a “behavioural age” appropriate response?

Cocooning Children

Once a boy  found a caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it. The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.

 One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy’s mother explained that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon and was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.

The boy watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.

At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!

The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He got a pair of scissors, and snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!

As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He thought that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.

But neither happened!

The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings.

It never was able to fly…

The boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong and learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle. In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.

Struggling is an important part of any growth experience. Muscles don’t grow without be stretched. Our school values include resilience and persistence. TfEL (Teaching for Effective Learning) 2.4 is about Challenge and (appropriate) support. How difficult this becomes when (some/many) parents continually “rescue” their children. As the boy in the story, the parents might be well meaning but the result is children who cannot “fly”.

As part of the school’s Virtues program, we work with parents to enable children to develop resilience and persistence through struggling and embracing challenge. The following message to parents that I observed at Tapping Primary School WA (A Play Is The Way Lighthouse School) will soon be on posters around our school:

No False Rescues

Falsely rescuing children from emotional discomfort and difficulty weakens their resiliency and lessens their ability to persevere.

 We rescue when a someone is struggling to breathe, not when one is struggling to swim in a swimming lesson.Cocooning children will never allow them to fly.

The Mouldy Mug

I am not writing this post to take the opportunity of having a cheap shot at Port Adelaide Football Club supports despite the caption on the mug clearly showing Port Adelaide Football Club which strongly implies that the mug was owned by Magpies or Power supporter. I say “owned” because after taking the photo I disposed the mug in the bin. What is not as obvious is that the coffee residue in this mug had dried thickly and a caffeine addicted spider had created a web above the foul, pungent stain. This mug had been sitting on a bench for months partly hidden from view by other jetsam which someone had discarded.

This mouldy mug illustrates a deeper issue that is the elephant in this case, our staffroom. What does it say when a mug is left for months in a public place and no-one deals with it? What does it say when after any break there are teaspoons or mugs left in the sink? What does it say when coffee rings are left on a table or bench, burnt cheese on the sandwich toaster or food and crumbs left on the staffroom table on a Friday evening? I could go on about papers left on staffroom tables, benches and floors, dirty trays in the oven and the stove top filthy… but I won’t.

In an institution which has a role in teaching values to children, why do we have such difficulty in modelling basic values such as respect and care to our colleagues? Dropping a spoon into the sink is actually saying that I expect someone else to do this for me. I do not respect my colleagues enough to wash, dry and put away a spoon. I am happy for you to clean up my mess left in the sandwich maker because my time is more important than yours. I will ignore the mess on the staffroom table and bench because I know that someone else will do it. Those wonderful staffroom fairies will magically make everything right.

My dear mum would always say to me, “Honest in a little, Honest in a lot.” Any value here can be substituted here.

I did not set out to Crow about the since departed Port Adelaide Mug. I simply want to state that for a school culture to be truly values driven, collaborative and supportive we need to get the little things right to enable the big things to happen.

Reflections on Maths with Ann Baker

Ann Baker presented a full day’s thought provoking training at Hackham East Primary.

The following things resonated:

There should be three parts to a Maths Block.

  1. Mental Routines
  2. Problematise Situation
  3. Reflection

Mental Routines – 10 minutes daily

The traditional mental routines have an adverse effect on student self esteem, learning and attitude to maths.

Ann demonstrated many activities using the 100 grid for mental. Children share multiple strategies for solving problems.

Present the same mental routine for a fortnight. Kids need to be speaking the maths language and meta language. Teach the vocabulary or terminology (factors, multiples…) explicitly for those routines. Display on the board.

Terminology requires 200 repetitions to embed.

Ask Guy Claxton type open ended questions:

What if…?

What might…?

What could…?

Reflective learners need time to process therefore think that they’re dumb if they don’t get it as quickly as others.

Similarities with Dylan Wiliam – Wait Time or Processing time is essential for thinking – ask and wait. Let kids think. Then flip the asking of the questions over to the kids. Ask reflective thinkers if they’ll ask the first question. Cue them in at the beginning of the lesson. Tell the more able students to wait until after the 4th question before they can ask.

Problematised Situation (Problem Solving)

ACARA Mathematics Proficiency Strands: Understanding, Fluency, Reasoning, Problem Solving

Higher order thinking and reasoning should be built into everything to develop adaptive reasoning.

As over 60% of all children are Visual Learners, provide visual support. (Just as oral comprehension precedes written comprehension.)

Echoes of TfEL 2.4 Challenge and Support. Let kids struggle. With best of intentions we too often over praise, over provide and over protect.

All problems should have Easy Peasy, Middly Puddly and Sting in the Tail.

Encourage collaboration and discussion. What you do with the help of a friend you’ll do tomorrow by yourself.

Do not rehearse inappropriate strategies. Practice makes permanent.

The Secret Code

Subitize from subito meaning to “suddenly know”. The importance of being able to subitize cannot be over stated. All success in mathematics is built upon this.

Subitize and Count on. (Take the largest number and count on) If Receptions cannot count on they will never catch up with others.

Tell children that we are all born with a Lazy Brain – it tries to chunk things together.

Subitizing games:

  • Magic Cloak – throw a large die, and immediately cover it with the Magic Cloak (tee- towel). Children draw what they saw.
  • Children throw 2 dice repeatedly. Teacher calls doubles, one less then, one more than etc. Children put their hands up when this combination is thrown. Teacher acknowledges as the hands go up.

Explicitly teach children the Secret Code:

Count on (co)

Double (d)

Rainbow facts (rf)

Near double (nd)

Friendly number (fn) (is any number that ends in 0)

Bridge through 10

Round and adjust (year 4+)

Landmark numbers – 25, 50, 75, 100 (base 10) 15, 30, 45 (base 60)

If kids come up with their own strategies, the strategy is named after that child ie SS Sally’s Strategy.

Encourage children to play with the numbers, pull them apart, experiment and discover patterns, relationships etc.

Problem Solving Strategy

All problems must have a real purpose or context. The children must be able to see or image the problem. It has to be real to the child. Puppets can be used to assist this.

Let kids work out what is happening. Productive failure – learning from reflecting on mistakes.

Always teach kids to work from what they know.

Give 1 problem (eg M&Ms on Muffins) and get the group to find as many ways of solving the problem. Group then decides which strategy is best and why.

If you can’t do something in 6 ways you can’t do it.

Respond to children who have asked good questions or come up with good strategies (the “right answer” is secondary to the thinking): “Thank you for the learning opportunity …”

Formative Assessment Strategy

Interview a child

Gather 2 pieces of documentary evidence per child per term (on work on students’ work if given permission or on a Post It note stuck to the work and placed in a plastic sleeve):

  • child said…,
  • child did…
  • With suggestion/prompting child said…
  • Which strategy did you like?
  • Which is more reliable?
  • Are any similar?
  • How?

Do not rescue. If a child cannot get started, ask them to walk around the room to look at other children’s work and see if there is a strategy that they like.

 

If you do not do a reflection, you did nothing.

Multiplication: Begin with Tally of 5 to learn 5 x tables. 6 x is tally of 5 count on 1 etc.

 

How and where to create and find problems:

  1. Use existing problems from Ann’s books
  2. Copy: Use Ann’s problems but change numbers and context
  3. Devise own, but consider that the numbers used provide the best opportunity to get the desired learning.
  4. Share problematised situations with staff.

 

Structure of a typical week

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Mental Routines Mental Routines Mental Routines Mental Routines Mental Routines
Problem

  • · Gaps
  • · Misconceptions
  • · Error patterns
  • · Strengths
Strategy lesson Problem Strategy lesson Problem
Reflection Reflection Reflection Reflection Reflection

 

Ann recommended the following apps.

Guessem

Clock Master

Natural Maths

Finger Tips

Blog

Natural Maths Strategies

Thoughts on follow up:

  • Teachers video their mental routines – capture their questioning, the students’ language and reflections etc to share with others in their PC.
  • Share Commitment to Action in PLCs
  • Get Ann Baker back to do demonstration lessons in classes and release teachers to observe
  • Maths Committee to reflect and develop plan to support implementation of the Maths block across the school.