IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING
Best thing since sliced bread!
John Barrow delights in a noisy classroom, he rarely uses the whiteboard and cannot remember the last time he taught a whole class lesson. This has been replaced with powerful individual and small group dialogue with students who spend much of their class time on collaborative tasks.
Ask me what a student is currently up to or working on in maths and the computer will tell us both within seconds. The computer has become my colleague. It keeps my records, sets the students individual work at their own level, and generally keeps us all on task. But it wasn't always this way.
In 1974, as a three-year trained graduate in my first year as a teacher, I remember well the principal handing me the school calculator, with brand new paper roll in place, ten digits, four large arithmetic operation keys and an even larger equals button, with the admonishment 'Don't bugger it up'!
I was supposed to average my test book results and grade the students twice yearly to assess their progress and report to the parents. Those were the days when we still programmed computers with cards and the square root function didn't have its own button! Reports came out twice a year and the exam was basically it. Failure was a reality faced by many students—illness, transient working families moving school, family breakdown, injury, etc could radically change a student's career prospects overnight.
Currently, I am a secondary Maths teacher posted to Yanchep District High School. Yanchep is a coastal cray fishing/tourist town 60 km north of Perth. I still find classes with diverse abilities, high transience and broken families, but these days I have Accelerated Maths to assist me.
With computer-managed individual programs of work, instant progress mapping, parent reporting, class progress profiles and teaching to point of need instead of the old 'shotgun method', I have found that students' satisfaction is at an all-time high. Also, parents have their individual homework load requirements met and we, the staff, feel that we are teaching rather than record keeping.
In six years I've moved from chalk and talk to no chalk. Gone are the structured lessons of lock stepped program. Here are individual and small group mini-lessons that roll with the day; students having animated conversations about mathematical concepts like I've never witnessed before, interspersed with gossip, latest movies and football scores.
A 'try before you buy' opportunity convinced me to consider a dramatic change in my practice. After a couple of weeks, the computer was consistently telling me one of the stronger students was getting fairly basic face and place value questions wrong. When I asked him what was going on, he confessed that he didn't understand the numbers—a turning point for him and me. He was smart enough to hide his lack of understanding and struggle on until the 'accmaths' system caught him out. I wouldn't have bet money on him having this hole in his knowledge. For me, the satisfaction of teaching to his point of need was huge and he quickly caught on once shown.
How it works
Class groups are still formed on age, but to aid the transition from year 7 to year 8 we have combined two age groups (12 and 13 year olds) and then ability grouped them to create workable class sizes. Currently, we have 57 year 7s and 50 year 8s combined and graded into five classes with ability ranging from Library Three to Library Eight—a six-year spread of ability, including two Special Needs students with educational assistants. In addition, we have a year 5/6 composite class with 28 students and a year 6 class with 30 students in the primary school, and two year 9 groups and two year 10 groups in the high school. All up 230 students are now managed by the 'accmaths' system.
A case study
The top ability group has 28 students working on Libraries 4-7. There are three double 40-minute periods of Maths each week—80 minutes on Monday, Thursday and Friday. As each class arrives for Maths, I greet them at the door and check their current work and dates. This allows me to identify struggling students or those without work, and lets each individual know I am aware of what they're up to.
The lesson progresses very differently to my traditional training. Students work collaboratively in fluid small groups. Tests are the only work students are required to complete in isolation. So, to facilitate this I wait until most students have a reasonable number of testable objectives before issuing tests.
Class time can be spent working on tests, exercises or practices or corrections for any of these. During the correction process, I require students to identify their problem and then to seek out what they need by using books, computer packages, wall charts, 3D models, games, videos, web resources, peers and experimentation. The last resort is to ask me. Obviously I do end up teaching many mini-lessons each period, but they are to the point of need and involve one to four students.
In 2004, our system became networked throughout the school. This means I no longer need to carry disks or memory sticks around the various classes to gather data and to back up the system. It also means class lists can be updated centrally and student reports can be generated at point of need. Now the challenge is to convince the powers that be that the curriculum assessment reporting is consistent with WA Levels and outcomes reporting.
What exactly do the students do?
During any given lesson my students work towards mastering objectives managed by the class computer. Questions are printed out in one of two forms—open or multiple choice. The multiple choice questions are usually adequate. Answers are entered onto cards that are then fed through a card reader that scans their responses into the computer. I can see a spreadsheet of the class at my desk, and, should a student be flagged as needing intervention, I take action. This often consists of discussing the corrections or suggesting texts useful for the particular objective. I also request an open-ended question set in the form of an exercise that allows the student and I to more thoroughly investigate their problem. An open-ended exercise requires me to enter the student responses as right or wrong, and takes a few minutes maximum, but isn't a major problem as most students don't get to the stage of requiring remedial help at this level. Before getting to this stage most students have sought out peers, texts and parents/guardians. When they come to me with their corrections, I usually have a mini-lesson or listen to them explain, often with a friend or two chiming in. They work collaboratively and eventually they manage to teach me how to do maths!
The hidden curriculum embraces an independent learning and collaborative problem solving ethos, and empowers students to use many and varied paths to knowledge.
Marking, recording and analysis time is reduced to nanoseconds and I now have time to teach students to their point of need. I no longer spend precious class time motivating interest in a topic some students are never going to be ready for, but rather, I do spend time listening to students explain what they would like to learn in order to correct their own work.
With the gradual introduction of teaching and learning software, the role of schools will change to a more nurturing/parenting place that facilitates education.
John Barrow is maths coordinator at Yanchep District High in Western Australia
| EQ Summer 2004 © Curriculum Corporation | top |
