Bitesize Research: How writing about classroom content impacts achievement

This week, I wanted to share with you a meta-analysis published by the Review of Educational Research in March 2020 by Graham, Kiuhara and MacKay.

Objectives of study: This review looked at how writing about classroom content impacted achievement in Maths, Science and Social Studies. Whether this varied from subject to subject, and whether age, assessment or writing activity type were influencing factors were also examined in this study. It used data from 56 studies, and around 6,000 pupils in years 2-12.

Headline findings: Writing about classroom content has a significantly positive impact on achievement in Maths, Science and Social Studies.

Summary of study: 

• The ages of pupils did not impact the correlation between writing and achievement; it was strongly positive in all age groups.

• The type of writing task (e.g. summarising a text, creating a narrative) did not impact the correlation between writing about classroom content and achievement.

• The type of assessment in each subject also did not impact the correlation. 

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How am I currently using writing tasks in my lessons? How impactful are they on student learning?

• In what ways can I create written tasks that enable students to better learn classroom content?

• How can I seek best practice with creating written tasks from subject areas such as English or Humanities?

If anyone would like to discuss this further with me - please start the discussion below!

IB Hub Day T&L Reflections 2020

WA has successfully held 4 inaugural subject specialist IB Hub Days this year. This has been a fantastic opportunity for our staff body to showcase their IB Approaches to Teaching and Learning, and also to create links with other IB schools and educational consultants and guru's in their subject areas. The agenda for the days have been of high quality, thought provoking and inspiring for those involved. A big thank you to all those who have been involved in organising the days - you are stars!

Below are the reflections from the English, Geography, History and Maths Hub Days and how the CPD from them have influenced these teachers' teaching and learning going forward.

English by Julian Gyll-Murray

T&L strategies learnt on the hub day: 

The most fascinating part of the day was the sessions delivered by two guest speakers- Susan Neilson and Gary Snapper. 

Susan spoke about how to develop student autonomy, and how crucial it is to guide students to approach texts in a self-sufficient manner. She emphasised the role of discussion and creative writing, the impact of modelling reading together as a class community, and the use of using student-led agendas in order to cover the themes of a text.

Gary delivered an inspiring session on approaches to teaching poetry in the IB. He recommended starting discussions on poems about the entire text before breaking them down, in order to develop a practice of forming a holistic understanding of the poem. He also showed creative ways of analysing the structure of poetry through exercises such as altering the order of stanzas, which gives the students a new perspective on the poet’s authorial choices.

How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:

As IB teachers, we adopted a number of Neilson’s strategies, such as letting students create an ‘agenda’ of what they would like to focus on in particular texts. Some of us have used the likes of Padlet to do this in lockdown to good effect. In the literature course, we have adopted much of Gary’s advice in order to approach the Unseen Poetry component of their Paper 1 exam. Here, good questioning was key, ensuring that students communicated their reaction to the text as a whole before thinking how the author elicited that reaction.

The impact so far:

Unfortunately, due to the lack of exams this year it has been difficult to measure the impact of these practices in concrete terms. However, it has definitely made IB English a more engaged and student-led experience for our cohorts, and has garnered a more enthusiastic and self-sufficient approach for many in the DP student community.

Geography by Grey Day

T&L strategies learnt on the hub day: 

I found the talk on ‘Thinking like a Geographer’ particularly interesting. As with most subject curriculars, the tendency is to stick with the required content and teach what is needed for the exams, however Karen Corfield introduced us to a number of resources that may not have been necessary for the IB curriculum, but would further broaden and strengthen our students’ knowledge of the wider world, allowing them to think more critically which would have a positive impact on their IB learning.

How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:

This could be implemented by creating reading/documentary lists for students to follow. Students could then complete reflections on what they had read/watched and link it with what they are currently learning at the time. Students could also complete mini research topics on current geographical events and affairs which may not necessarily be within the IB curriculum but would broaden their knowledge of the wider world and allow them to make links to what they are currently learning while also improving their critical thinking and research skills. 

History by Jodie Coller, Corinna Matlis & Charlotte Nicholas

T&L strategies learnt on the hub day: 

Our goal is to give students the kind of complex knowledge and arguments they need to succeed in IB history, and, following the IB Hub Day, it was clear to us that incorporating more historiography and more depth studies into our schemes of work will help us achieve this goal.  

How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:

Historiography: We incorporated historiography largely through two mechanisms. The first came back to IA technique. Through our discussions with other schools, it became clear that many history departments focus their students on a historiographical debate for their IAs. This is an excellent technique because it allows students to frame their own arguments through a comparison of historians’ arguments, and it forces students to evaluate carefully two different perspectives on an issue.  

We have also embraced historiography in our teaching of IB both through incorporating short snippets of historians’ work into most lessons, thereby showing our students that the topics we are studying are also debated by historians and that we want our students to join in the debate. 

Furthermore, we’ve begun to incorporate longer pieces of historiography into lessons by assigning academic articles as part of the required reading for students. We feel this is important as these articles not only introduce students to different perspectives on our topics but also act as models for students in how historians write and build arguments.  We have even started working this kind of task into activities for younger students from KS3 through activities like guided reading and using scholarship to answer enquiry questions.

Maths by Maria Prodromou

T&L strategies learnt on the hub day: 

On the agenda was a talk from Professor Karen Page on Voronoi Diagrams, a geometric construction new to the specification change this year. We saw a plethora of applications of a mathematical tool/construction to other subjects such as Biology (in nature and disease) and Geography (toxic waste dump problem). This gave us an opportunity to learn more about a piece of maths knowledge we have never taught nor ever applied! 

The problem solving session provided strategies to develop students’ inquiry skills. The wording of the questions were “unusual” in terms of standard Mathematics questioning - showing us how to create problems by purposely missing information that the students would need - can they realise what information is important to answering a problem? Some questions didn’t have a question and teachers were encouraged to write the hardest question they could think of, given the information - a task harder than it sounds!

 

The session on implementing the Toolkit gave an insight into how to use technology to enhance learning and create depth of understanding as the new syllabus has a strong focus on use of technology. Tom Holmes gave a phenomenal presentation on how to use geogebra to model real life contexts - a powerful tool to show the dynamism of maths, and limitations of a model.

How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:

It’s been great to take some of the examples Prof Karen Page spoke of and plan them into lessons on the Voronoi diagram and show students the cross-subject use of them - they love seeing maths in different contexts! It’ll be interesting to see if any student has been inspired by these wonderful constructions to ask a question to explore using them in their IAs. 

As Key Stage 5 Coordinator for maths the inquiry based questioning is something that we have been working on implementing in our new lesson planning for the new specification to create curious, problem solvers! It has also been great to plan lessons entirely dedicated to the toolkit with Geogebra, which the students have responded really well to as it’s something different to doing maths on paper.

Bitesize Research: The Relationship Between Students' Belief In Their Abilities And Their Achievement in Verbal And Mathematical Subjects

This week, I wanted to share with you a meta-analysis published by the Review of Educational Research in April 2020 by Moller et al. from the University of Kiel. 

Objectives of study: This review looked to synthesise 505 data sets on the relationship between students’ beliefs about their abilities (called ‘academic self-concept’) and their achievement in verbal and mathematical subjects. The review looks at three strands of academic self-concept; social (e.g. how good am I compared to others?), dimensional (e.g. how good am I at Maths compared to English?) and temporal (e.g. how good am I compared to how good I was?)

Headline findings: In terms of dimensional academic self-concept, as students develop positive self-concepts at one end of the verbal-mathematical continuum, they may develop negative self-concepts at the other end. 

Summary of study: 

• Strengthening self-concept in Maths or Science leads to a weakening self-concept in reading and writing, and vice versa; students become ‘Maths’ or ‘English’ people. 

• This does not align with the evidence of student achievement in those subjects; ability in verbal and mathematical subjects are not mutually exclusive and ability in both was positively correlated.

• Dimensionally, talented students may develop only an average self-concept in their worst subject, even though their performance in this subject is above the average.

• Particularly strong correlations were found between achievement and self-concepts with older students and where grades were given rather than standardised test scores.

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• In what ways can we avoid binary self-concepts in students and avoid them thinking they are either ‘Maths’ or ‘English’ people?

• How does this research link and strengthen the case we can make to students around taking and flourishing under the IB?

• How can we ensure that our students maintain a high level of academic self-concept? 

If anyone would like to discuss this further start the discussion below! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.

Thoughts from a Trainee

By Sophia Evans, Teach First Trainee in Maths

When I first joined the Teach First programme, I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not teaching would be a profession for me long-term. I had not had any prior experience in teaching and applied to Teach First on a whim, after a friend who was already on the programme suggested it to me. I had in my mind that I would just complete the two-year programme and most likely move out of teaching after that. I was incredibly nervous about starting at WA with only one week of experience in a school during summer institute; I think the best word to describe how I was feeling is clueless.

One of the strengths of WA is the high standard of teaching and I have seen some fantastic teachers demonstrate their craft on many occasions. However, I do feel that this can sometimes be a pitfall. I’m sure my fellow trainees will agree that being surrounded by such high quality teachers is incredible for development, but can also cause issues with confidence and self-esteem. Throughout the first few terms, and I am sure I am not alone with this, I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I could be doing more. This can be quite a burden to carry during your first few months in a profession with minimal experience.

Once I had begun to overcome my growing “imposter syndrome” and realised that I should be just focusing on my own teaching and learning, instead of comparing myself to others, I began to develop my teaching skills further. The team planned lessons that we use in maths already contain good pedagogical strategies but I think that for a while I was just teaching the slides, rather than really thinking about what I was doing, how it links to other areas of maths, and even how the slides could be improved for support and challenge. Taking the leap into editing and sometimes questioning things in the team planned lessons was quite difficult, initially I felt like I didn’t have enough experience to go off-piste. I also started observing colleagues more and would steal and adapt their fantastic ideas. I used a task from one of Ruhina’s Y10 lessons, where students had to construct a house using angle and line bisectors, as one of my observations from my UCL tutor. The lesson went extremely well and I think that it sparked this interest inside of me to try new things in my lessons!

Y10 Construction Task

I have thoroughly enjoyed discussions I have had with various people in the maths department about how and why we teach things the way we do. In particular, my mentor meetings with Tom would often end up with us discussing potential new ways of teaching a particular topic, or the questions we would ask and why it is good to ask them. Training in an environment where you are surrounded by knowledgeable people who enjoy discussing their subject and enjoy conversations about pedagogy has been one of the key factors in my development as a teacher. I feel fortunate to have this opportunity, especially as I have friends teaching in other schools who have certainly had different experiences with their departments. These discussions have helped me develop confidence in my own curriculum knowledge (as someone who didn’t study maths at university this is a big deal) and have also, I think, helped me teach better lessons where I have actually thought about what, how, and why the students are learning.

Having used Google Classroom since September, I felt almost an “expert” compared to my friends in other schools, which also meant that the completely daunting shift to WA Online was not as much of an obstacle as I thought it would be. I actually wrote a “google classroom guide” which was shared with some members of my Teach First maths cohort this year, which I NEVER thought I would be doing. I think that this confidence with utilising technologies has allowed me to become more creative with teaching strategies online, as I didn’t have to worry about the basics, and even led to me giving an INSET training session with Emma and Jojo. 

The switch to teaching online has highlighted to me how much I actually miss the classroom and the students. I believe that the situation of “all being in the same boat” has made some of the students more engaged in my lessons and has given me the opportunity to build stronger relationships with some of them. As part of my module 3 assignment I looked into effective teaching strategies for teaching online and attempted to implement metacognitive strategies into my lessons. If I was not as confident with teaching online, and built relationships with students in that they would be confident to be themselves in online lessons (answering questions and contributing to class discussions), I don’t think I would have been able to really focus on the intervention implementation as I would have been too busy stressing about the IT-side of the online lessons, instead of the content. I thoroughly enjoyed implementing metacognitive strategies, getting students to think about what they know and how they can implement it, and am excited to continue with this in my lessons in September.

I feel incredibly lucky to have spent my training year with you all, and massive shout outs go to the entire maths department (love you all), Divisha for being a great co-tutor to learn from, Ruhina for being the best DOL I could ask for and for Tom, my mentor who, I believe, is one of the main factors for sparking this passion of mine and making me change my mind about teaching long term. I cannot thank you guys enough. 

Here’s to being an NQT next year wahoooooo! Good luck to all the new trainees joining, you guys are very lucky to have WA at your side for your training!