Stoking Students Fire of Imagination

“The Ethiopian Mermaid.”

By Anthony Ororho ©2019

In 1929, a little girl named Masareth went to the River in a small village near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to fetch water for her mother. She carried an earthenware pot on her shoulder, to convey the water back home.

On getting to the river bank, she started singing a folk song, in praise of the goddess of fertility. As she sang, she noticed an unusual quiet; not even the chirping of the birds could be heard.

All of a sudden, the river seemed to be boiling upstream. The waves moved toward her. She tried to run, but, her legs would not move. Out of the “boiling water” appeared a very beautiful woman. Masareth was too stunned to speak because, she had never seen a woman so beautiful. The woman moved toward her and said: “Masareth take this.”

Masareth obeyed and the next thing she knew, she was in a beautiful world, filled with the most beautiful flowers; roses, lilies, even the hibiscus had petals like angels wings. The lighting came from all shapes colors and sizes of exotic treasures-gold, diamonds, topaz, torquise and lots more.

Most of all, she was sitting on a gold throne, with a diamond crown on her head. When she looked at her feet, Alas! They had become fish tail.

The above story is a piece of fiction, that we can use during the Read Aloud activity in class.

Did you notice that it was short and interesting? Yes, because the attention span of Early Years scholars is short, teachers should choose short and interesting stories for scholars at this stage.

Did you notice too, that the story ended at a climax which gave no room for an anti-climax? What was the writers reason for ending the story abruptly?

The writer ended the story this way, so that the teacher can ask the children to say what they think would happen next. And the teacher must use the opportunity to stoke the scholars fire of imagination.

Amb. Anthony Ororho (September 2019)

Teaching in contemporary learning spaces

By Julia Atkin

Academic and consultant Julia Atkin discusses how a teacher’s perception of their own role can influence their design approach when it comes to creating learning environments. This article is an abbreviated version of a keynote address to The University of Melbourne’s ILETC symposia Challenging Transitions in Melbourne and Copenhagen 2018.

The re-design of school facilities in the first two decades of this century is considerably more sophisticated than the open-space design of the 1970s.

Emerging school facility designs reflect far greater intentionality. The best contemporary designs are focused on creating learning spaces that empower students to be effective lifelong learners who engage in deep learning with persistence and resilience. Teaching is now understood to be about embracing the challenge of developing learners who are equipped to work collaboratively, creatively, and critically on complex, non-routine, unfamiliar problems.

This shift in the design of school facilities from teaching-centred classrooms to the design of integrated, purposeful learning spaces that support learning in multiple modes, creates challenges for many teachers, while others take it in their stride. Why is this paradigm shift easier for some than others?

Factors that mediate a successful transition

Human behavioural change is tricky at the best of times. We are creatures of habit and much of what we do and how we do things is deeply ingrained in us having been learned from the models of teaching and the architecture of the school facilities we experienced ourselves.

Making a successful transition from a homogeneous space, designed for ‘one to many’ teaching, to settings and spaces designed to support a range of learning and teaching activities will depend on many factors such as professional support, encouragement to take risks and a collaborative culture. Central to teachers’ success in navigating the transition, however, will be whether they have a wide repertoire of pedagogical strategies to operate in a multi-dimensional environment. This in turn has been shown to depend on how they perceive their role as teachers.

Between 2000 and 2013 the South Australian Department for Education drew together the research and voices of teachers and world experts to generate a pedagogical framework, the South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning (TfEL) Framework (Figure 1). In developing this pedagogical framework, the key focus was on unlocking what it is that teachers do to both enhance academic achievement and to empower students to become lifelong learners. The SA TfEL Framework is a learner and learning-centred framework.

Figure 1. South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning pedagogy framework. (South Australian Government, 2010).

At the time, research was also undertaken to determine which factors influenced the extent of a teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. It was shown that a teacher’s pedagogical repertoire was not dependent on age, gender or years of experience. The research showed that teachers’ beliefs and assumptions about their role shape their practice and strongly influence the range of pedagogical strategies they employ (as shown in Figure 2).

The research revealed three identifiable trends in the teachers’ perceptions of their role:

• Content coverage and control – the teacher’s role is to ‘cover’ the curriculum; to teach the curriculum. They generally do not explicitly perceive that it is their role to ensure that learners learn what is intended in the curriculum.
• High relationship – low challenge – the teacher’s role is to primarily care for the learners. These teachers erred on the side of not challenging learners as they perceive learners have enough to deal with as it is.
• Responsive – the teacher’s role is to ensure learners learn meaningfully and thus the pedagogical approach was learning and learner-centred. Teachers with a wide repertoire of strategies fell into this category.

Figure 2. The impact of teachers’ beliefs and assumptions about their role and the effect on practice. (South Australian Government, 2013)

A very small percentage of teachers (those classified above as ‘Responsive’) demonstrated that they employed a wide range of strategies that enact the 12 principles of the three domains of pedagogical practice (displayed in Figure 1): Create safe conditions for rigorous learning, develop expert learners, and personalise and connect learning.

The impact of teacher perceptions of their role

It is widely acknowledged that ‘learning about’ skills and capabilities does not develop capabilities and skills.  Capabilities and skills are not developed by transmission of information – they are learned through experience and coaching.  Collaborative ways of working and independence, for example, are developed through participatory and experiential processes where students learn to be collaborative, self-directed and self-managing through setting goals and obtaining constructive feedback from peers and those with greater expertise. Developing global citizens involves more than projects to raise money for giving aid to developing communities.  Global awareness and global education means being connected seamlessly to other young people around the globe and engaging together in youth dialogue and projects that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries.

It is stating the obvious to say that teachers who see their role as ‘coverage and control’ will find a shift to both physical and social environments designed to promote student self-management and self-direction in learning extremely challenging. Yet our responsibility to today’s learners is to do just that.  The development of 21^stCentury capabilities is enhanced in learning settings that inspire creativity, active investigation and self-expression in settings that invite self-direction and require self-management, in settings that connect students globally. Such learner and learning-centred settings are in stark contrast to the standard industrial era classroom and teaching driven by a felt obligation to ‘cover’ the curriculum and   control the learning process.

How can an understanding that teachers’ perceptions of their role have an impact on their pedagogical range, assist teachers make the transition to teaching in contemporary learning spaces?

Further investigation of teachers’ epistemic awareness and the impact of this on their pedagogical approach showed that teachers who were classed above as ‘Responsive’, and had a design approach to teaching and learning, reflected on their practice and their own assumptions, questioned their beliefs and viewed learning as meaning-making.

On the other hand, teachers who were classed above as ‘Content coverage and control’ had a script approach to teaching and learning, reflected on their practice but not their assumptions, did not question their own beliefs and viewed learning as the acquisition of information with a lower emphasis on learning as meaning-making  (as seen in Figure 3).

Figure 3. The impact of teachers’ epistemic awareness on their pedagogical approach. (South Australian Government, 2013).  

While providing obvious insight as to why some teachers will navigate the transition from a traditional   learning environment to an innovative learning environment more readily than others, it also points to processes that will aid the transition.

Stimulating dialogue about the nature of learning, accessing teachers’ personal story knowledge of their own powerful, deep learning experiences, eliciting teachers’ values and beliefs about learning (increasing epistemic awareness) and involving teachers in intentional design of settings and spaces to support different types of learning activities are all strategies that support teachers make the transition from a traditional, teaching-centric learning environments to learning-centric environments.

PS: Julia Atkin says there are three identifiable trends in a teacher’s perception of his/her role: content coverage and control, high relationship – low challenge, and responsive.

As a teacher, have you considered which role you might identify with most? How could this impact your approach to teaching?

 

Making the Effort-Learning is not Competition

Richard Campbell of Effort Tracking looks at how tracking a student’s effort and application using a new formative – based assessment system is having an effect on student motivation and learning.

The Singapore experience:

Singapore, the country which came top of the OECD PISA rankings for Maths, Science and Reading[1], has just abolished examination rankings in a bid to turn its back on procedural rote learning and high-stakes summative assessment, proclaiming: “learning is not a competition”[2].

Singapore understands only too well the hidden costs of high-pressured, exam-driven classrooms, and is attempting to mitigate against escalating rates of student depression, anxiety, suicide and other mental health issues[3] by increasing the focus on developing ‘human-focused’ or ‘soft’ skills.

The same issues face all countries disposed to standardised testing of students and an educational emphasis on academic results [4]. Schools’ systems, parental expectation and cultural capital are all focused on academic grades as the main success-indicator of student achievement. This is to the detriment of valuing development and growth as driving objectives of holistic education.

Growth-mindset and Grit:

Recent research has radically changed the way we perceive learning. Carol Dweck’s influential research into mindsets [5] shows that those with a ‘growth-mindset’ believe ability is not a fixed attribute but can be improved by application and targeted effort. Angela Duckworth’s research into grit [6] illustrates how this development can lead to accomplishment, concluding that ‘grit’ is the most influential indicator of ‘success’; persistence and effort in the long-term beating raw talent alone. These ideas, although relatively new as research findings, have long been in the common psyche, embodied by the belief that “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”.

Measuring students with a common yardstick:

We all know that students are at widely differing academic levels and yet we compare them all against each other using a common benchmark rather than measuring the effort they put into their studies. This has a detrimental effect on lower-achieving students’ intrinsic motivation for learning and reinforces fixed-mindset beliefs in all students that ‘those who are smart don’t have to try’ and ‘those who are not smart will not succeed’. More concerningly, this causation is often reversed in student’s minds to: ‘those who don’t try are smart’ and ‘those who have to try are not smart’, leading to disillusionment and even self-sabotage in test-taking strategies [7]. This, of course is the antithesis of what education, growth and development are all about.

So how can we make the required paradigm shift in our systemic success-focus?

How do you measure student effort?

Over the past decade, Robin Nagy has developed a system to measure and track student effort [8] which has shown to have great effect in mitigating against the negative effects of high-stakes summative assessment.

By systemically measuring and valuing effort, students can focus on the processes rather than the outcomes of learning and develop those soft-skills and character strengths such as persistence, diligence, focus and self-control.

Components:

Effort Tracking is a methodology which has been progressively refined, breaking-up student effort into three components:

Diligence

Engagement

Behaviour

Each is described by its own rubric and grading levels, which accommodate both teacher and student perspectives. Results look forwards, not backwards, and are described using formative rather than traditional summative language. By aggregating the individual grades across all subjects, a higher-order Effort Score is established for each student, showing to what extent a student is ‘doing their best’ or ‘pushing down on the gas pedal’ at any particular time.

(Robin Nagy)

Nagy seems to be winning users over. Michael Parker, former Head of Oxley College, Bowral and the current Headmaster of Newington College, Sydney considers that Effort Tracking “goes straight to the heart of focusing on kids’ effort and growth at the same time. It’s made a real difference to our students.”

Perhaps more importantly, a Year 10 boy thinks the system “has given me the ability to reflect on my efforts during the school year. I think that the results make you think about changing your attitude to learning”

Conversations and goals:

Effort Scores are used by students to frame forward-looking, student-led, goal-setting conversations with teachers at the beginning of each new school Term, creating the impetus to improve in areas of potential growth. These coaching conversations allow students to reflect on differences in student and teacher perceptions of effort and help to align shared expectations of observable classroom behaviours. They allow for a meaningful goal-setting activity, based on measurable targets, highlighting explicit strategies for improving effort in specific areas or more broadly across subjects.

According to a Year 9 girl, “It gives me confidence and reassurance . . . . to make sure I understand how to improve and be on the same page as my teachers”

(Richard Campbell)

Richard currently teaches Law, Politics and International Studies at Taylors College, Australia, on a foundation course for Sydney University and is a Director of Effort Tracking Pty Ltd.

*Source: ITM