It was wonderful working with my fellow Authors Sarah Seleznyov, Stuart Twiss, Jeremy Hodgen and Mundher Adhami on this piece of research.
Cognitive Acceleration in Mathematics Education: further evidence of impact
If you are really serious about raising the standards of thinking and achievement in your school please get in touch.
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Climate change, Covid pandemic, Racial reckonings, Economic, Legal and other crises have brought discussions about Justice to the forefront of our public discourse.
Do you want to be one of three contestants to get involved and appear in one of the monthly episodes? Each episode will involve discussing the principles for some aspect of Justice. Each contestant will have brought 2 of their most important principles and 1 principle they strongly disagree with. The Game of Justice will be an hour or so via zoom and with permission of all involved published on youtube.
If you are interested and want to know more message or mail me.
Also for Theory of Knowledge teachers the unit lessons for Socially Constructing a concept of Justice help yourself to https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1axCuiqpQRnAfdLwpP6shxaOKpl9Z21KcRBgwqGhYNeg/edit?usp=sharing
University College London – Birkbeck University of London – UCL Institute of Education
If you want to join on Twitter then use #ASEChat Every Monday at 8 pm UK time
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ase_chat_27.04.mp4
If you want to join today on Zoom then Direct Message me @alexbclearning or Linda Needham @NeedhamL56
OR mail me alexblack@mle.abceducation.ch
OR Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-black-10361a33/
During the last four years of the now ending decade, Jaeann Tschiffely has added guest blogs. Many of them are about how her experiences of Let’s Think English and Maths training and application have enriched her teaching life. Thanks Jaeann you have inspried and challenged my thinking in many ways. Also, thanks to Michael Walsh @mikefnw75 and Sarah Seleznyov @sarahseleznyov who she still says are inspirations in her development.
Sarah blogs at https://www.londonsouthtsa.org.uk/blog/
Michael blogs at https://www.letsthinkinenglish.org/blogs/
The Thinking Teacher Teaches Thinking
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/2016/11/23/the-thinking-teacher-teaching-thinking/
Every Lesson is a Vocabulary Lesson
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/2016/11/07/every-lesson-is-a-vocabulary-lesson/
Beyond the Engaging Conversation; Getting Kids to Think
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/2016/12/09/beyond-the-engaging-conversation-getting-kids-to-think/
PYP Exhibition and Symbolic Reasoning
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/2017/03/15/pyp-exhibition-and-symbolic-reasoning/
“Can I draw?” Read Aloud and Dual Coding to Build Comprehension
https://www.abceducation.ch/blog/2019/04/18/can-i-draw/
Concept maps are a very useful tool for retrieval practice, metacognition and developing deeper connections and elaborate understanding in a subject domain.
A great set of tools can be found at https://cmap.ihmc.us/cmaptools/
The software is free, works on many different systems, and can be stored in the cloud so they can be edited and embedded in web pages and exported in many different formats. Concept maps can be linked together to give many levels of detail.
My experience has taught me that reading aloud to students can be a very valuable tool to build comprehension skills in students. We know how important reading aloud is for younger students, so why is it that as they get older this practice seems to diminish and fade away? We may feel time pressure to follow required curricula or it may seem like students aren’t listening when they ask to draw while you read. I have put this to use.
First I chose a book they can’t read for themselves. Recently it has been an Alex Rider book earlier a Harry Potter book. For 4th graders with very low reading scores and very limited vocabulary so this may seem very ambitious, but just because it is above their reading ability does not mean it is above their interest level.
Next I structured their drawing. To start with I had them fold a paper in half lengthwise then fold it in fours leaving 8 squares. Room for a “sketch” box on the left and a “jot” box on the right. For each chapter they were to draw one thing in the “sketch” box and then write three key words or phrases in the “jot” box.
We continued this for a few days. I then asked them to fold their paper in six sections, three across. Now they did their sketch and jot, then found a classmate to share with. Any jots the classmate had that they did not were then added into the third “share” box. I also had them add a caption or labels to the “sketch”.
What I was able to point out to the students is that the “sketch” box contained the main idea of the chapter and the jots were the supporting details.
I also provided copies of the book for the students and they were able to go back and reread to find the detail they didn’t quite remember or may argue about with their friends. These students all read well below grade level and are unable to pass a written or multiple choice comprehension test, but they are now able to find the main idea and important details in literature and defend their choice.
In our school we are required to do daily fluency practice and have our students chart their progress. Some make progress in the number of words they can read in a minute but but many do not and comprehension has stayed low. What I have noticed is that when they are able to understand what they are reading they are better able to predict the coming text and their fluency increases. This is not immediate as at first they slow down in an attempt to get meaning from their reading, something that was not measured in their graph and therefore not valued. After a brief period of decreased fluency, it often increases dramatically. As their comprehension increases, they are better able to predict what is coming. So while it is often argued that a student must have fluency for comprehension, I argue that they must have comprehension for any meaningful fluency.
To put a slightly different spin on the ideas Robert Coe talks about in Classroom Observation: It’s Harder Than You Think, we end up valuing what we can measure rather than finding a way to measure what we value. Reading aloud to students of all ages has value that is difficult to measure whereas number of words per minute can be easily measured but is only a proxy for learning.
Last September, in Riga,
The group from Rauma talked about their 3 key goals:
Making student thinking
and thus increasing student self-efficacy.
When they are talking about students they actually mean the student teachers they are training and also the school students they teach.
After several discussions, they invited me to come and run some lectures and workshops.
So in preparing for a visit, two experiences really nudged my thinking back to an idea that had been bubbling away under my conscious thinking.
One was a
Then a tweet by @sarahseleznyov “Anyone
by Nalan Akkuzu (2014). This applied the theories of Albert Bandura and Locke in the context of teacher education in very interesting ways.
Digging this out suddenly the idea of how Bandura on self-efficacy and the Vygotskian elements of the Let’s Think methodology are just what we need to explore.
I saw that Let’s Think lessons and teacher training sessions already used some of these variables.
The experience our group had in Zürich doing our LTE training of developing our own lesson “Feathers”, based on a short film stimulus, seemed to exemplify all of these experiences and certainly increased all of our self-efficacy. It allowed teachers an opportunity to vicariously experience others modify the way the lesson was delivered in a masterful way. Allowed a large number of conversations which persuaded us all of the importance of managing the cognitive conflicts and their resolutions in ways appropriate to the particular class and time the lesson was being used with.
Akkuzu quoting (Kukanauza de Mazeika, 2001; Wang & Wu, 2008) “Studies have shown that student teachers who receive verbal feedback at a high cognitive level exhibit professional growth through exploring the strengths and weaknesses of their own performance and developing deeper conceptual understanding of their classroom behaviors .”
This use of verbal/social persuasion is a key element of the social construction episodes of Let’s Think lessons where the teacher mediates using their understanding of the Vygotsky concept of Zone of Proximal Development. Here ZPD is understood as a set of characteristics about the
This is where a shared understanding of the theoretical principles of the pedagogy makes it visible in practice and leads to the successful use of experiences as feedback opportunities. A lesson built together by a group of teachers is both a product and a process amenable to the continued uses of the Bandura experiences that will further build efficacy.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Kukanauza de Mazeika, J. M. (2001). Effect of different types of feedback during microteaching sessions on preservice teachers. Doctoral Dissertation, New York University, New York.
Wang, S. & Wu, P. (2008). The role offeedback and self-efficacy on web-based learning: The social cognitive perspective. Computers and Education, 51, 1589-1598. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2008.03.004