Three Little Pigs Resources

Scieszka, J.  (1989)  The true story of the three little pigs.  New York: Viking.

HSIE S2: Community

A simple series of lessons on the role of the local council...

English (ESL tutor): using modal verbs. Students ranked the verbs as strong, medium or weak. Teacher pinned a string on the back wall and grouped the words together on a string. Class co-constructed some sentences using pictures on the board and a IWB dice showing different modal verbs - eg. picture of recycling, dice shows 'could.' Students had to make their own sentences using the modal verbs, then cut them up for a friend. Friend had to identify the modal verb as strong, medium or weak and glue them together in their book

Game using verbs. Teacher put up a previously studied passage and drew up a table on the whiteboard: action verbs, thinking verbs, modal verbs, 'to be' verbs.

Google map put up of the local area. Local landmarks noted and sentences written about what people can do there.

Library lesson: Find a picture of Town Hall and local councillors - draw pictures of each and label them.

A poster of what the council does. Powerpoint slides of local council services. small (3x4cm) colour pictures of a range of local council services eg. local swimming pool, parks, road signs, rubbish collection and recycling, preschool, Town Hall. Students begin by choosing three, stick them on their poster and write a caption for each, explaining what it is and who uses it. Heading is Our local council can...

Book Detectives

This was a reciprocal teaching technique for guided reading. Students were assigned to three groups.  

Materials: 

Multiple copies of the same book: enough for one per student in each group. In this class two groups had a Paul Jennings book and one group had Flat Stanley. 

Summariser: Outlines key parts of the story

Question master: Formulates questions, as though they were formulating a quiz about the book. 

Word finder: Finds at least two interesting or unknown words. Is responsible for looking up words that other group members refer. 

Illustrator: Provides a picture of the passage.

?Story Mapper:  Maps the story so far. 

Students are assigned one role per lesson. Teacher tells them how many pages to read before undertaking their role. 

At this link are some bookmarks which each student can use to remind them of their role: Book Detectives 

Multiplication: Grid Method

Just while I remember...

Long multiplication

    27
 x 43
    81
     2   
1080
  2      
1161
   1

Grid method

	40	3
20	800	60
7	280	21

  800

  280

   60

+ 21

1161

Maths S2 Number: Dice games

Game #1

Materials:
1 die per student
One set of 15 cards, numbered 3 to 18, per group of 2-3 students. Keep together with a paper clip.

Students divide into groups of 2 or 3. Each group gets 3 dice and a set of cards.
Students take it in turns to roll the dice. They add up the faces of the dice and take the card with that number. Play passes to the left. If the total that the student rolls  has been taken, they don't get a card for that round. The winner is the student with the most cards when all cards have been taken.

Good Points:
Other students in the group tend to add the numbers up too, to check whether the right card has been drawn.
Can be changed to 2 dice for multiplication. Dice with more faces can be used for multiplication beyond 6.
Good to have a set of 3 large dice for demonstration of the game, but not essential.

Game #2
Whole class sits in a circle. Teacher holds two large dice, and passes one to the right of her and one to the left. On the count of three, the students roll the dice and add up the total. The first to call out the total holds on to their die, while the other students passes their die along away from the teacher.

Good points:
A good game for the end of the lesson as it can go as long as necessary.
Can be changed to multiplication.
Other students in the class also add the numbers in their heads to see if the students were right. But not all will do this.
Bad points:
Students who are good at adding tend to hog the die whereas students who need more practice tend to get less time with it. Students who are less strong may be less confident in calling out the answer and get 'rewarded' for not trying with not having to try further.

Maths S2 Number: Practicing Adding and subtracting using different strategies

A simple lesson on number, following on from a powerpoint on number (several slides, emphasis on different ways to count on):

1. One group doing algorithms from the board. STRATEGY: using written algorithms
2. One group working with the teacher doing base 10 blocks: showing the teacher the answer to sums he gives them eg 213 + 38. STRATEGY: 
3. One group on the computers (2 per computer) playing 

• CMIT games: Darts Game, Addition Wheel http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/countmein/children.html
• Ambleside games: Addition machine, Subtraction machine http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/mentalmaths/additiontest.html

The most popular board game was CMIT Darts Game. The algorithms on the board needed to be complemented by some harder ones for the early finishers. 

Maths S2: Graphing

Saw an interesting lesson on graphing.
First students completed a game together on the IWB: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/maths/organising_data/play/
This was a good introduction to graphs, a subject which the students had not previously encountered.
Then the teacher used the regular whiteboard to conduct a survey of hair colour. (Interesting how many students asserted that the Eurasian kids had brown hair, when several had black hair.) Then they drew this graph in their books. There was a lot for them to learn in this lesson - they picked up on the word 'axis' from their work on the globe, but some had difficulty copying the graph in their books.

Maths S2: Number Patterns

Just saw a maths lesson on number patterns. After using an IWB activity where students made number patterns on a 100 chart, they were split into three prearranged groups.

One group was making patterns with shapes with the teacher,

One group was colouring patterns on a 100 chart,

One group (with whom I was working) was playing a computer game: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/maths/number/number_patterns/play.shtml
This was by far the most popular rotation. However, it includes negative numbers (which most of the students said they were not familiar with). Also, many students figured out that they could solve both rounds more quickly by trial and error than by working out the correct number pattern.

The older BBC game has naff graphics, but has some advantages over the current game:
It only occasionally uses negative numbers;
it isn't against the clock, so they have more time to figure it out; and
there are more choices which makes trial and error less enticing:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/ks2_activities/maths/number_patterns.shtml

How Teachers Learn: Helen Timperley

After writing my last post, I remembered something Helen Timperley said earlier this year about the teacher as 'adaptive expert'. Timperley is a lecturer at the University of Auckland, and (among her other distinctions) is a big fish in the relatively small pond of the study of teacher professional learning. She looks at all the different kinds of professional learning that teachers engage in, to figure out the features of professional learning that is successful enough to actually get all the way through to the classroom. Her publication on Teacher Professional Learning and Development is here.

She based her discussion on How People Learn, in her words 'one of the most profound pieces of work in education.' Teachers are people too: so how teachers learn is the same way as how students (and everybody else) learns:

1. Learning must engage the learner's preconceptions
2. It needs to lay a deep foundation of factual knowledge organized in a conceptual framework - again this is the same for students and for teachers, and for people in general.  Learning plans for students need to be developed so that they are linked to a conceptual framework. The key job for school leaders leading professional learning in schools is to help teachers develop conceptual frameworks that are consistent. so students see the coherence
3. It must encourage and presuppose a self regulatory approach – so teachers can take control of their own learning.  The teacher is an adaptive expert, and this way of working is critical in the age we live in now. Teachers don’t do ‘this’ or ‘that’: they have to be adaptive. Teachers need to be able to identify when routines work and stick with them, and when they need to be changed and change them. 

The difference between teacher learning and learning at large is that teacher learning needs a specific feedback loop within the classroom, as teacher learning needs to be put into practice, and the success of this is measured by the success of student learning. As adaptive experts, teachers need to respond to feedback from students on how their learning is going, and adapt the teaching accordingly. Taking this responsibility, to identify what they need to learn, learn it, apply it in the classroom, monitor the effectiveness according to student outcomes, and then

Revolution in the Classroom: What's not to love?

Four Corners ran a fascinating documentary this week, Revolution in the Classroom. It followed a state government pilot to give 47 schools more autonomy over staffing and budget. The schools spent their money on strategies to provide teachers with guidance and feedback on their work in the classroom. Toronto High, for example, funded a Teacher Development position, to work with teachers in the classroom and focus on their teaching. The schools’ HSC and NAPLAN results spoke for themselves. It seemed to be a perfect ratification of the importance of improving teacher quality by giving feedback.

The central point that I will be taking away from Revolution in the Classroom, though, is the confirmation that feedback is key: both to teachers to tell them how they are going, and back to students to let them know how their learning is going. That doesn’t necessarily mean relying on another teacher in the room, or even on student focus groups about how they think their learning is going, though these are hugely valuable wherever they are possible. The feedback that is continuously available to teachers is the student’s learning, and it is crucial to make this learning as visible as possible as it happens.

As John Hattie says,

“The critical element is the way in which teachers use assessment to find out how they’re having an impact and with whom. The critical element is teachers getting feedback from the kids about whether those kids are making growth, where they’re making a difference. The critical element is schools that work with teachers to know that kind of difference. (10 mins)

I couldn’t help wondering why the Teachers’ Federation would be opposed to something that seemed so successful (11.55). Having dug into it a little, I understand a bit more. The Boston Review makes clear that the State Government sees devolution of power as a cost-cutting possibility: quite simply, principals do the work that would previously have been done at head office. Extra funding provided for the pilot scheme would not be budgeted for a wider rollout.

The answer seems quite clear to me… The State Government knows that to improve student outcomes it needs to improve teacher quality. Even if it didn’t know that from the pilot, there is plenty of research pointing that way. Having seen the strategies that work in the pilot, why can’t it provide schools with the resources to implement similar schemes? If having a Teacher Development officer works to provide teachers with feedback on their lessons, why not give schools at least the choice of having one – not by rearranging their own budgets to take resources away from somewhere else where they are necessary.  Maybe it’s expensive – but it seems a small price to pay. 

Fighting Bullying With Babies NYT 2010/11/08

Hello, back again, this time with an interesting article from the NY Times about a strategy for addressing bullying in schools - by taking babies into classrooms. It began as a parenting education program, but it turned out that by playing with a baby once a week, watching it grow and develop, the children's negative aggression decreased and their kindness and acceptance of others increased. I was reminded of the 'shoes off' schools that Stephen Heppell talks about... it just seems to work.

Kohn, A. (2005) Getting Hit on the Head

Kohn, A. (2005) Getting Hit on the Head Lessons: Justifying Bad Educational Practices as Preparation for More of the Same. Education Week, September 7, 2005.

Don't justify pedagogy (eg standardised tests, setting homework) by saying it's something the kids just need to get used to because they'll be doing it when they are older. Fair enough. 

Freund, Margaret, How Primary Teachers Feel About What They Do

http://tiny.cc/k8qj7

Freund acknowledges that students are social agents too, but seems to both overemphasise and underemphasise the students' conscious ability and will to perform the emotional work of contributing to the classroom environment. In the first case, Freund argues that,

children learn that they should not be too assertive or aggressive, like Susan, a child in Mrs. D's class they will be described as a ‘little madam’, for once a child has been typified as disliked, it is almost impossible to change the typification (King 1984).

However true it may unfortunately be, the fact that labels tend to stick is an unlikely reason for Susan to avoid aggression.  On the other hand, Freund notes an instance in which she argues that students are 'social actors who have a part to play in the way that the social order of the classroom is constructed', and suggests 'being cute' is one of these 'strategies':

Being ‘cute’, is a guaranteed way of getting a response from a teacher and a special response when children use a stereotype of innocence and ‘babyish’ behaviour by acting in ways that appear submissive. Aaron was younger than the rest of his kindergarten class, physically smaller with pudgy, soft baby features, and when he was trying to avoid trouble he would sit passively with his head on the side like a puppy, a picture of innocence and soft baby features .

Aaron's physical appearance here is something he has no control over, and sitting quietly to avoid trouble is more a tautology than a deliberate attempt to get a response from a teacher.

Teaching the Facebook Generation, SMH 27/02/11

An article in the Herald about "Teaching the Facebook Generation" suggests schools are wary about allowing social media to be used during class time. So how are kids supposed to learn about it - and learn with it? Tim Hawkes is still on the Herald's speed dial, and seems to be taking a sensible approach - ''Ineffective policy is to ban use; prohibition has never worked... We want to ensure that each student's electronic footprint is one they are proud of."

Roschelle, J., Pea, R., Hoadley, C., Gordin, D., & Means, B. (2000). Changing how and what children learn in schools with computer-based technologies. Children and computer technology, 10(2), 76-101.

So - the first article I have to read about IT in education is eleven years old. (Perhaps a gentle introduction to the kind of IT I will actually find in education…). It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The study is well aware of its limitations, and is grounded in pedagogical ideals that seem pretty solid in terms of supporting children’s learning, viz
(1) active engagement,
(2) participation in groups,
(3) frequent interaction and feedback, and
(4) connections to real-world contexts
The study then gives examples of how Y2K technology can be used to put these principles into practice. Marco Torres it ain’t. The strength of the article is in identifying the main areas in which IT can be used to support learning, but, with so little idea of what connected technologies will make possible, its suggestions of how to do this are predictably limited.

1. Learning Through Active Engagement
“Students learn best by actively "constructing" knowledge from a combination of experience, interpretation, and structured interactions with peers and teachers”
– for this the study refers to Bransford. Using the “Microcomputer-Based Laboratory,” students can immediately plot graphs from their data. their mate’s graph on the bus the next morning, which jogs a vague memory of that thing they did in Bio the day before. All well and good – in fact, a bit of a jolt to remember a time before Excel – and it increases their learning gain around using graphs by 81%.

2. Learning Through Participation in Groups
Some good justification for this, too -
Social contexts give students the opportunity to successfully carry out more complex skills than they could execute alone. Performing a task with others provides an opportunity not only to imitate what others are doing, but also to discuss the task and make thinking visible. Much learning is about the meaning and correct use of ideas, symbols, and representations. Through informal social conversation and gestures, students and teachers can provide explicit advice, resolve misunderstandings, and ensure mistakes are corrected. In addition, social needs often drive a child's reason for learning. Because a child's social identity is enhanced by participating in a community or by becoming a member of a group, involving students in a social intellectual activity can be a powerful motivator and can lead to better learning than relying on individual desk work.
This seems exactly the kind of thing that web-based learning groups were made for. The study gives the example of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environment, which apparently encourages metacognition, too. It supports ‘structured collaborative knowledge building by having students communicate their ideas and criticisms--in the form of questions, statements, and diagrams-to a shared database classified by different types of thinking. By classifying the discussion in this way, students become more aware of how to organize their growing knowledge.’

3. Learning Through Frequent Interaction and Feedback
Yup, this sounds familiar too – and predates Visible Learning by almost a decade. The graphs example above comes in again here – timely, specific feedback about what students are learning. The article suggests that boilerplate feedback responses sent via email constitute a good example, too. Pass me a bucket.

4. Learning Through Connections to Real-World Contexts
Bransford, again, on transfer. I think the main difficulty here is going to be how to identify projects that primary school children could hook up with – hopefully we’ll get some pointers there.

Marc Prensky and Stephen Heppell: Storytelling

A series of chats between Stephen Heppell and Marc Prensky (the 'digital native' guy) has been posted on YouTube recently. People tend to ask Stephen some difficult questions about the use of digital technologies in the classroom, and his responses are always thoughtful. In each of these videos the two respond to a question - asked via Twitter or Facebook - things like 'What is the role of the teacher in 21st century learning?' or 'How do we encourage children to be brave, to be wrong and to ask questions?'.  Stephen's and Marc's responses offer much insight, and much that is challenging.

The one I was first drawn to was Marc Prensky - How can we encourage quality storytelling in our children?



There is a lot that is interesting here, and some that I don't agree with.

Private parts

My more perceptive readers will have noticed that there is no picture to the right, and may even have guessed that Alice is not the name I go by In Real Life. Yup, Google has more data about me than any real person, including anyone interested enough to be reading this. Seems I'm not really following Marco Torres' good advice around building up a digital portfolio. But the reasons I haven't are fairly simple. I don't want to identify where I work, simply because I don't want to have to concentrate on being 'on message' all the time.


Lucky I have options...


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village


...but hopeful I won't need them

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_reuse.png

What is Teaching? Hirst, 1974

I was flicking though a book at the weekend by a professor of education at the University of Cambridge, when I came to a chapter called "What is Teaching?". Towards the end of this essay, Professor Hirst observes,

I am not even sure that successful learning is a criterion for good teaching (p.114).

What a prat I must be - I always thought that learning was the whole point of teaching. So what does Hirst think teaching is - let alone good teaching?  How does he come to the conclusion that it doesn't necessarily involve learning? And is his theory still relevant?

Hirst distinguishes between two understandings of "teaching", as follows -

The most common [meaning of "teaching"] relates to the case in which a person may teach in the fullest sense of that word and yet, in spite of the intention and the appropriateness of the activities involved, the pupils may learn absolutely nothing. ... [The second] involves the implication that not only has there been the intention to bring about learning, but that the pupil has in fact learnt what was intended. (p.106)

I suppose in medicine the equivalent would be the difference between treating the patient and curing the patient - treating is the process, but curing implies success. The second sense is the 'taught' in "Mr Miyagi taught me karate" - which assumes that I now know karate, and Mr Miyagi did whatever it took to instill this in me. Sounds good, but Hirst explicitly discounts the second definition, and concentrates  on the first, which he asserts is the most common meaning. He seems to be concerned about situations where the teacher is ticking all the right boxes - things I suppose like showing rather than telling, allowing opportunities for the learner to discover for themselves - and yet the learning aim of the lesson doesn't seem to stick. Surely the process that the teacher is engaged in is 'teaching', he thinks - what else would it be?

There is an obvious flaw here. If you have taught the student, and the student hasn't learnt, then you haven't actually taught them. There is no difference according to this definition between 'teach' and 'intend to teach' or 'try to teach'. If I go to 'teach' my kindergarten class about Wittgenstein, and they end up asleep or wandering off, an observer might state that I tried to teach philosophy, but I didn't teach. In this case, I didn't take into account the context of the learners - i.e. that they are five years old and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Hirst would ascribe my failure to an exception to his definition: the fact that teaching implies that the learning is possible, and in this case it wasn't. But, in every case in which the teacher 'teaches' and the learner doesn't learn, there must be some reason why. As a teacher I would want to be able to identify this, as the first step towards enabling the student to learn. And the thing is that we know so much more about learning now than we did even in Hirst's heyday. What may have appeared to Hirst as a failure on the part of the student to learn, might now be explained by the fact that that is not how that student can learn.  How People Learn tells us that students' preconceptions need to be discovered, engaged, and if necessary, challenged. They need to develop a deep foundation of factual knowledge that they can organise in a framework for easy retrieval. And a metacognitive approach will help them to take control of their own learning. All of these aspects would need to be taken into account.

I think that Hirst may be reflecting a malaise about teaching and learning current in the 1970s, when classroom walls were being torn down in favour of open learning spaces. The problem was that no-one knew what to do in these spaces, and this led to a search for concrete answers to questions such as Hirst's. But simply going through the motions of teaching is not teaching. Students can all learn, and teaching is doing whatever it takes to make that happen.

Paul H Hirst, "What is Teaching?" in Knowledge and the Curriculum: A Collection of Philosophical Papers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) pp 101 - 115.

Beating the Odds (ABC, September 2010)

Continuing yesterday's news round up - there is a great piece here from the ABC, showing how education can give opportunities to kids in at risk areas - again out here in the west.

They were different classes, now they're one community (SMH, 6/9/10) and Bad mark on school funding (SMH, 9/9/10)

An article in Monday's Herald about how connected learning communities are leading to student centred learning in Western Sydney public schools. Says the principal, ''It's shocked some of the teachers just how enthused some of the students have become".
And an article in today's Herald, with the big news of how little Australia spends on public education, and how much on private, in comparison with other countries.