Feeling Dumb

Besides anything else this is a post about the power of poetry to motivate thought. Last week I read Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, it is a deeply moving book written in free verse and tells a tale of a girl’s journey from Vietnam to America. One poem in particular set off an interesting train of thought. Here it is:

This reminded me of myself part way through primary school. My mum was fighting a battle to get me support for my Dyspraxia, I knew that I couldn’t put my ideas on paper, my coordination let me down. This left me with a sense of failure and, as I couldn’t write what I wanted to say, I compromised more and decreased my standards for myself. I thought I was stupid. I denied any attempts to contradict this image of myself, people were just saying I was clever because they cared for me. In the end I got more support and was convinced but it remains a key part of my identity.

My situation is almost opposite that of Ha, the girl from the story.  She knows she is clever but this is undermined by the difference between what she can think and what she can do. I knew I was stupid and this was reinforced by the difference between what I could think and what I could do. Asides from the lack of mental equilibrium both situations have the same pitfall, a temptation to compromise and settle for a lower standard to resolve this painful imbalance between what you know how to do and what you can do.

Remembering this feeling put some of my NQT year into context, rich in theoretical knowledge but shallow in practical competence. The gap is most stark at the beginning of a career. I hope I am a little wiser than when I was 8. I don’t think this makes me stupid but the disconnect is still frustrating. I need valves to let off this frustration, for me this involves developing new ideas and discussing new projects. This is because this makes me feel capable, assured and competent.

I am working to bridge my personal gap between theory and practice and this is significant learning that requires me to push myself beyond my comfort zone. Realising the role projects that allow me to feel clever play has encouraged me to think about how I can balance providing challenge to move on learning and providing my class opportunities to feel clever. Crucially, reading Feeling Dumb again, these opportunities must be real, patronising and overdone praise will only enshrine a feeling of stupidity. Real opportunities must come out of conversation and knowing what makes the children in your class feel alive.

Measuring What We Value

This project evolved out of a desire to create a structure to drive us towards what we all want to do anyway, put children first. We have had a set of school values for some years without feeling they were fully embedded in school culture. It is widely recognised that assessment skews teaching priorities and we are hoping to mitigate against this by assessing the values we care about in the hope that this raises their profile.

Our values are the 5Cs: Caring, Curious, Confident, Creative and Celebrating. Children can articulate their understandings of these values to varying extents with many conflating celebrating with parties. We created a simple 5 point scale for each of these values and I modelled to my class how I would assess myself against these values. They then assessed themselves on a sliding scale, this meant their assessments didn’t appear to them as numbers, decreasing the likelihood that they would compare assessments with each other.  There was also space for them to put brief comments. These allowed children to add caveats, for instance that they were lacking in confidence except in sport. These were then plotted against assessments by their parents and by me as their teacher.
It is important to note two things this process is not meant for:

Measuring or tracking progress – Decreasing scores may indicate increased levels of reflection and high scores may suggest overconfidence.

Analysing how good a specific teacher is at fostering a particular culture – Same reasons as above.

Given the bias implicit in making subjective judgements the numbers are not very important. What we are interested in the conversations and the reflective process the numbers provoke. 
The first thing I found interesting was how hard it was to assess my class. For many children I would have been able to tell you whether they could use a fronted adverbial or an expanded noun phrase but not how caring they were. This made me think about how I could restructure my classroom to give greater prominence to the whole child. Once I saw how children had assessed themselves this helped me go further beyond the surface in my judgements of those children and what they might respond to.
Here is a sample of 4 radar graphs we used to compare assessments:

There are statistical differences, I suspect that most parents started with a score of 5 and adjusted from there whereas I started at 3 before adjusting up or down. What is particularly interesting however is the stories they tell, for examples the first graph shows the child and I agreeing they have a very low level of curiosity while their parents thought they were quite curious. This led to a valuable discussion of how they showed curiosity at home so I could attempt to encourage it at school. Differences in the other graphs also led to deep conversations at parents evenings, as an NQT I am unable to compare these discussions to typical parents’ evenings, it will be interesting to hear another teacher’s reflections.

Parents seemed receptive, although sometimes there was a lack of buy-in when another parent was the one who had assessed their child as this meant they had no connection to the numbers. This will hopefully decrease in  the future as parents become more aware it is something to expect. Another issue was lack of understanding of what they were being asked by some parents who do not have English as a first language, hopefully as the profile of the 5Cs is raised in the school this will decrease. I felt that a slightly longer parents’ evening might help give more space to these conversations although this could be my inexperience as an NQT.

My next step in this was to create a radar graph for myself. I rated myself, asked my year group partner to assess me (which they kindly did after numerous reassurances I would not be offended) and got a random sample of the children in my class to assess me. My class was very varied in their assessments which was interesting in itself, I am not sure if this represents their different interactions with me or differences in how they approach the system. This reminds me of a need to continually monitor my interactions to ensure I model all of the 5Cs to all children. This reminder will hopefully help me decrease the range in future iterations. The other priority arising from the graph is to model my curiosity more often as I see myself as more curious than my class do.

These are the kinds of reflections I have had with one iteration of this system. I hope with more conversations the children’s self awareness will develop and the conversations will become ever more valuable. Care needs to be taken in implementation to keep the focus on the conversations and the process as a tool for reflection rather than on the numbers but there is potential to invigorate conversations throughout the school about what we really value.

@MrEFinch has also written about this, see here: https://mrefinch.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/measuring-what-matters-5c-dashboard/

Do You Think of Yourself as a Mathematician?

Do You Think of Yourself as a Mathematician?

#52Books2017 #WeeklyBlogChallenge17 Twitter is full of conversations about teachers as readers and writers. I, among many others, have been swept into reading more than I have in quite some time and am loving it. I believe this enthusiasm comes from a simple shared goal, we want children to become readers and writers. This is easy to get excited about because we are excited about discovering or rediscovering these things in ourselves.

Most adults don’t think of themselves as mathematicians and I don’t think teachers are an exception. This means that the shared journey teachers and their classes experience exploring their natures as readers or writers often isn’t there for maths. There is lots of fantastic maths teaching: multiple representations, deep investigation, solving of open problems. These are the attributes of a mathematician but often they are used as interesting and effective ways of teaching content rather than shown the central point of mathematics. This comes back to the idea of a shared journey, maths is often seen as a linear progression, a path of steps to be followed. This leads to perceptions of teachers and children at different points on a journey and loses some of that connection that teaching a love of reading gives. I want to encourage teachers to step off the path and discover what gives them and their class a shared joy in maths.

Here are some ideas:

History of Maths – Sharing a discovery that Indian mathematicians used to do maths in verse or that Sophie Germain taught herself mathematics in secret while the French Revolution was in full flow outside her family’s house gives a feeling of mathematics as living, evolving and personal, a creative human art.

Get Lost in the Woods - Set the class a problem to solve that you don’t know an answer to. Explore it with them to gain that sense of shared journey.

Low Floor, High Ceiling – Set problems that allow you to stretch them in many different ways. This openness can again have the same feeling of shared discovery.

Communicate – One of the joys of reading is finding out what other people thought of a book you liked. Try to build enthusiasm for communicating mathematical ideas with others, allowing children and adults to put their personal imprint on a problem.

Wonderful Mathematical Books – The same way reading does it, beautiful books!

Do maths when children aren't there - Solve problems, prove your statements, spot patterns, draw your ideas, read about maths and talk about maths. 

These ideas are meant to be neither exhaustive nor authoritative, simply possible pathways to wider teacher enthusiasm for maths as opposed to maths teaching. If teachers are not readers can they encourage a joy of reading in children, if they do not write can they encourage a joy of writing and if they are not mathematicians can they encourage a joy of mathematics. 

Are you a mathematician?