Here is my initial plan of a structure of implemented change.
Hannah's Teaching Blog
Kia ora, my name is Hannah Burton. I am the Creative Space and Extension teacher at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand. I began teaching at Pt England School in 2016 and am now in my 8th year here. During this time, I have been in the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy, been a Manaiakalani-Google Class OnAir teacher, a Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher and a within-school Kahui ako (CoL) teacher. In 2023, I continue as a within-school CoL teacher and return to Manaiakalani Class OnAir.
Friday, 5 May 2023
Structure of Implemented Change
Formulating a Hypothesis
Friday, 28 April 2023
Initial Planning for Maths Group
Thursday, 6 April 2023
Tools/ Measures/ Approaches - Part 1
Our challenge:
Student Challenge: How do we accelerate achievement in maths when students have a range of maths abilities with various gaps in maths knowledge?
Teacher Challenge: How do we accelerate achievement in maths when teachers are tasked with teaching a classroom of students with a range of maths abilities and with various gaps in maths knowledge?
Personal justification of running an extension maths programme (see previous blog post):
A typical classroom includes a range of mathematics levels. How do we as teachers realistically support the children who find maths really challenging while also extending those who find the logic of maths more natural? It is challenging, that's for sure! We have a really unique opportunity here where we can run an extension programme for those children who we identify as gifted in Maths, allowing the classroom teachers to spend that session focussing on building the knowledge for the rest of the class. The extension group can then return to their classroom and use their new knowledge and skills to work alongside their other classmates to build their maths knowledge.
What does the Manaiakalani research say to provide evidence and justification for this inquiry?
In any inquiry, it is important to have tools, measures and approaches which are planned for use so we can get a more detailed and accurate profile of students' learning in relation to a challenge. If we aren't doing this, then any implementation of something new is really just a guess!
To start this off, I went to the research. Over the course of this inquiry, I want to make sure I look at multiple view points to see how to best teach extension level maths students.
Text: Linchevski, L & Kutscher, B. (1998). Tell Me With Whom You’re Learning, and I’ll Tell You How Much You’ve Learned: Mixed-Ability Versus Same-Ability Grouping in Mathematics, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 29, No. 5, P533-554.
Key Points:
- Ability Grouping (subject-by-subject, also known as tracking vs. all subjects at once, also known as streaming).
- Ability grouping can be used to change content, pace or teaching methods.
- Some research has shown that by ability grouping, the gap between abilities increases.
- Quality of oral language used (within communication) differs greatly between lower ability groups and higher ability groups. With this comes differences in expectations (Gamoran, 1993).
- Preteaching (described in study on page 536). Mix of homogenous and heterogenous groups. Students have preteaching in homogenous groups. "Whenever a teacher felt that a large, specific homogeneous group of students would benefit from the teacher’s direct intervention, that setting was used—for example, to better prepare weaker students to be integrated into a planned heterogeneous group activity." Page 536.
- Homogenous (children of same ability) vs. Heterogenous (children of different ability) grouping
- Study 1: After 1 year, in 10/12 schools, Mixed ability grouping did not impact the gap between achievement between children of various abilities. In 2/12 schools, it widened the gap however there were signs of this gap reducing after two years.
- Study 2: Mixed ability grouping was hugely benficial to average to lower ability students. Higher ability students did not lose any achievement by being in mixed ability grouping.
- Goroman (1992) - workshop type pedagogy - look more into this.
- Overall, this Journal Article and studies are in favour of Heterogenous grouping/ Mixed Ability Grouping for teaching mathematics.
Thursday, 9 March 2023
Collaborative Inquiry Group Meeting
Today we had time in our staff meeting to meet and talk about our inquiries. Clarelle, Danni and I discussed what the challenge of learning was that we wanted to focus on. We realised that there were more than one challenge and we wondered whether dividing and conquering would be the best approach to tackle more than one of these challenges.
The challenges to student learning:
-Inability to apply knowledge
-Not choosing the most efficient ways of solving problems
-Knowledge of gaps and next steps. (children being aware of these)
-Self efficacy, learning from each other.
Friday, 3 March 2023
Creating surveys to start painting a picture of the challenge school-wide
While Clarelle and Danni have been gathering data from the students in their classrooms, I started creating some surveys to be sent out to Senior management, Teachers and Students from across our school. The three of us then sat down to add some more questions, make a few tweaks, simplify the surveys and then send them off. Our focus was to find out what our colleagues own views are around challenges in maths for their own students as well as their own teaching.
Here are the surveys that we created.
Student Survey:
Monday, 27 February 2023
Inquiry as a collaborative process
This year, Clarelle Carruthers, Danni Stone and myself have decided to undertake a collaborative inquiry with a focus on raising achievement in Maths.
We met on Friday to discuss our inquiry:
Inquiry Focus: How do we accelerate achievement in maths when students have a range of maths abilities with various gaps in maths knowledge?
Possible strategies/ hunches (What might work? What can I try? Ideas to investigate):
-Understanding the subtraction addition relationship, multiplication, division.
-Fractions of a set, order fraction, fraction to decimals.
- Maths as a real world skill.
-Discuss in maths.
-Maths as a collaborative skill. Multiple parts to a problem, individuals working in parallel.
Assessments:
- Gloss
- PAT
- IKAN
- Knowledge check lists.
- Asttle- Read to the kids