Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Of all the subjects that our students engage in, mathematics is the one most requiring an injection of learner agency. What is it about mathematics that engenders it to modes of teaching that are so heavily teacher-directed? How might this change if we seek to understand the place that learner agency plays in producing learners who will emerge from our classrooms with a love of mathematics and a deep understanding of its beauty?

Could some or all of this work online to build engagement? 1) close reading 2) engage with objects 3) attention through assessments

Numerous creative examples to how educators promoted learning on line and worked to build engagement.

With our goal of deep-learning in mind where do we begin and what learning opportunities might result in this? Having clarified our key terms of understanding, learning and deep, we can turn to a set of questions which might be of use as we plan the learning our students will engage in along their way.

There is an understandable interest in deep-learning, after all, who wants their students to have a superficial understanding of the content. Read the marketing of almost any school and you are likely to find some statement about the deep-learning that is achieved as a result of their excellent teaching and learning platform. Likewise, ask any teach about their philosophy of teaching and you will hear how they engage their students with learning that promotes a deep-understanding.

You're reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays. This week: I point to some key findings in the newest annual National Survey of Student Engagement. I share readers' feedback on how they have reformed their gateway courses. I ask whether your college or department has developed alternatives to teaching evaluations.

One of the thinking moves that we hope our students will confidently engage with is centred around the disposition of uncovering complexity. As we endeavour to shift our students towards a deeper understanding, the capacity to uncover complexity is a vital step. However, the ability to uncover complexity is itself complex and an excellent example of a skill that is best achieved when considered as a disposition. 

Our beliefs about mathematics play a significant role in how we approach learning within the discipline. These beliefs are established by the nature of our early engagement with mathematics and are difficult to change once established. For many people mathematics is viewed as a subject that is not for them. Indeed the situation is so bad that many people will say that they are not a maths person and approach mathematics with fear and anxiety. 

Powerful learning begins with the perfect provocation. Creating, refining and skilfully presenting the perfect provocation is an essential capability for teachers hoping to engage their class in rich dialogue. Claims that the percentage of students engaged by their learning declines from 75 percent in fifth grade to 32 percent by eleventh grade suggests a need for a more provocative environment. 

"Number Talks" is an approach to the teaching and learning of Number Sense. Rather than relying on the rote-memorisation of isolated number facts achieved through drills of "table-facts", Number Talks aim to build confident, number fluency, where learners recognise patterns within and between numbers and understand the properties of numbers and operations. Number Talks are a "mind on" learning task that engages students in an active learning process as they search for patterns, decompose and recompose numbers and develop a flexible understanding.

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

Traditional methods of teaching maths have more in common with how we programme a computer that what we might do if we wanted to engage our students in mathematical thinking. We shouldn't be overly surprised then when our students consider mathematics to be all about learning a set of rules that they need to apply in the right order so as to output the correct response. But is there a better way?

In the contemporary classroom, there is much greater consideration of what the learner does in partnership with their teacher so that they develop the capacity to learn. Classroom routines and structures are designed to engage the learner in a rich process of dialogical learning. 

If you consider the day to day life of many of our students today, you see that they have very little time that is free from some form of programmed activity. Indeed, it is increasingly the norm for families to fill their children's time with the maximum number of learning, sporting and co-curricular activities. Schools naturally are happy to facilitate this and many see the breadth of programmes that they offer as a measure of success. But is there a consequence to all this activity and constant state of engagement?

As we make plans for how we will engage our students in their learning the decisions we make become fundamental to how they will grow to understand the purposes of learning. How our learners approach the curriculum and the disciplines is fundamental to the outcomes we may achieve for them. One path will set them up to view learning as the acquisition of information the other to see it as a process of asking and exploring questions of significance through the many unique lenses.

This is not a story about the evolution of the world-wide-web. It is not about an evolutionary process of learning or a desire to engage in life-long learning. It is instead about the importance of purpose and engagement as factors in our learning.

"Over the last few years, I have spent time trying to work out ways to engage our teachers. We, at Schools' Library Service, have introduced an information literacy framework, created lesson ideas and spent hours talking to teachers about how school librarians can support teaching and learning. I even wrote a blog about 'How to make an information literacy framework work for you", but still some teachers are just too busy to listen."

"As a PGCE Student going through two school placements in North Wales back in 2005, I found it hard to keep up with daily admin. Just planning lessons and trying to deliver stimulating content and keeping the students engaged throughout, was challenging enough. Marking: I dreaded it, and found it almost impossible to fit it into my weekly regimen of teaching, planning and completing assignments for university."