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Post by Judy on Mar 1, 2021 9:49:06 GMT
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Post by Kerry Kearney on Mar 2, 2021 13:17:38 GMT
Very interesting and points well made in this article in the Guardian - but none of them new. Children learn best by experiencing the world around them as the Scientist showed in her positive attitude to hands on learning for her younger children. The fault is in the prescriptive curriculum that takes the joy out of learning maths and English - I share the same views as the parents. It is so interesting that at University, the lecturer in Maths says that students have to unlearn what they have been drilled for so many years - and that negative numbers and fractions should be taught earlier in the curriculum. But was resonates most is the teaching of English - subordinate clauses, adverbial phrases, determiner, auxiliary verbs - really this destroys a love of language and probably the same for maths.
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Post by Jeannette Smith on Mar 5, 2021 8:35:36 GMT
The reaction of Kit Yates doesn't surprise me at all for two reasons:
Firstly from my experience of a few Maths teachers in my sixth form college, I have found that the higher the level of Maths that they teach the less they understand students who are working at a lower level (and why). This was confirmed to me one day when I was supporting a GCSE retake class where a supply teacher (who usually taught A Level Maths) was covering for the lesson. I was moving around the students helping them with some quite basic maths tasks. The teacher came up to me at the end of the lesson to thank me for my help and told me that I had "the patience of a saint". I was not impressed, patience should be a standard expected of all teachers. I also remember a different Maths teacher claiming that all A Level students should be working at the same level, the idea of differentiation was unusual to their way of thinking. Scary. No offence to all Maths teachers by the way...My Dad taught Maths and I would have failed my O Level without his guidance!
Secondly, I can actually understand why Kit Yates struggled with the bar model method of teaching. I ran some training on Dyscalculia at college for the additional learning support team and after looking at what it means to be dyscalculiac, I introduced bar models. I must admit I had to keep it simple for me as once they get complicated I get lost in my explanation (though I do love the idea of bar models). Some of the staff did not react well to this part of the training. "What's the point?" "I just worked out the answer as I usually do" completely missing my point that students may find the method useful and it was an alternative to present, so that they could 'see' the maths. The older the member of staff the more they dismissed the idea. It was quite depressing really. I'm hoping that by the end of this course I will be more confident in the method myself so I can try again! More training with parents may help on these new methods?
I also agree with the comments about English. As an English graduate I always loved reading, but I didn't like being made to criticise and pull apart a novel or a poem..."Can I not enjoy if for what it is?" was my complaint! I think it's even worse now with all the complicated vocabulary and this totally spoils the enjoyment of reading and writing. When I was at school we used to have a separate book where we simply wrote stories for an hour a week...I still have the book today! We were encouraged to use our creative skills and today I think that this creativity gets lost under all the structuring and terminology needed. Such a shame.
It was great to hear positive comments about Science. Science at primary level is always enjoyable and exciting. It's when it gets serious at high school that the natural curiosity wavers which is a great shame. The same could also be said about Maths come to think of it!
The answer...Get more creative and start to enjoy learning!
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Post by christie on Mar 7, 2021 21:17:35 GMT
I agree that the Mathematics Lecturer is very unlikely to have come across students that struggle with Maths and therefore not see the value in the more visual, hands-on methods. I also think if he was really dissatisfied, he should open dialogue with the class team, and I am sure that in this situation they would advise his daughter to use methods that she is confident with if it is making her feel low. This would have been far more proactive than talking to a newspaper. I recently had this issue homeschooling my son, where he was secure in subtraction, but was then asked to complete similar problems using part-part-whole knowledge. He found this challenging and it made him doubt his ability. However, we worked at this - modelled it with cubes and drew diagrams and now he has another method in his arsenal to use, plus he feels good for overcoming the challenge.
I actually feel that the article is a bit loaded and it reads as biased against teaching methods and the curriculum with a token positive opinion at the end. If the Guardian really wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of how the curriculum has been applied to homeschooling, perhaps they should have contacted parents who are also actually teachers/professionals working with young people with pedagogical knowledge and training? Whilst also acknowledging that the work sent home will of course be different to what is normally delivered in class, given the circumstances.
I also think that schools are between a rock and a hard place - they need to differentiate for every student in the class to ensure progress, but at the same time meet ridiculous, seemingly contradictory, OFSTED/DFE guidance. For example, I was recently told by a class teacher that a student could not have a levelled reading book beyond that phonics level that had been taught in class. The difference between this and their actual phonics knowledge was 6 book bands. The class teacher did support the student, however, that they had to do this outside of the guidance and feel worried about doing so, is a bit worrying! Surely such prescriptive teaching/methods do not allow for a strengths model to be employed?
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Post by Katherine Bishop on Mar 14, 2021 23:18:54 GMT
I find this an interesting one as well. It is good for students to see things from different perspectives. The maths lecturer describes a situation that is common in the classroom. Students will have preferred strategies - does that mean we don't persist with trying the others? If it confuses them, do we keep going? Could we introduce different strategies as options and a bit of an experiment even. Get all students to learn about all of them and then survey them to find out which they preferred and why, which was most challenging for them and why. Maybe it could help them learn about their learning styles and develop metacognition.
I do agree that doing this at home now adds a whole other dimension. Challenging times.
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