I’m now coming to the close of the Y10 unit on number, the first unit of the year in my first year of teaching. Some things have been good – I’ve established connections with the class and we worked on some interesting maths, however there is room for improvement with my organisation and planning, and I’ve put some of the lessons I’ve learned here.
Sticking to the Unit Plan
At large schools like Mount Roskill Grammar School [MRGS], many tasks are done by others, so that we streamline processes, take advantage of different people’s experience and to save people having extra workload. At MRGS the unit plans are already set up for us. In some cases this defines exactly what you should teach in a specific lesson, but more often it has a week blocked out for ‘fractions’ or two weeks for ‘percentages’.
I used a pre-test to check how students were going before I started the unit, and then I worked from there to deliver what I thought the skills the would need the most support with across the board. I did this in order to ‘fill in the blanks’. There are two issues I see with this approach which are outlined below.
One issue is that despite an honest attempt at teaching skills that students did poorly in during the formative assessment, I did not have enough time to cover all the content of that the unit plan suggested. Tauira were asking about this today in class, and I feel gutted to have spent perhaps too much time on some areas and not enough (or no time) on others.
The second reason for sticking to the unit plan is a practical and pragmatic. Because we have been in various states of lock-down due to the Omicron outbreak in New Zealand (and in particular in Auckland) we have had to rely on others to either teach our classes. While this has usually been relief within the department, it can be very short notice when someone is going to be isolating, and they may be quite unwell, so it is better for all teachers to be teaching the same skills at the same time.
Lesson 1: Stick to the unit plan.
Literacy Skills
Another issue with the Number Unit, that I faced was that I used the formative assessment to teach the skills required of students. While this in itself isn’t a bad way of teaching to work on achievement gaps their may be other areas that are also important. For example, some students may just need a reminder and then need to pushed into harder areas of the curriculum or to focus on problem solving skills rather than just being able to complete skills, such as being able to divide one fraction by another, or to multiply two integers.
This distinction between teaching narrowly to the formative assessment at the expense of other mathematical skills ended up costing my tauira. The summative assessment was made up almost solely of word questions, which would not only test my the numeracy skills of my tauria but the literacy skills as well.
Therefore, another valuable lesson I have learned is that I need to check the summative assessment. First to see what kind of mathematical skills it is testing. Then to establish how it is assessing students; Is it testing problem solving skills or numerical skills, word questions or questions using mathematical symbols? The post-test should (and in this case did) reflect the New Zealand Curriculum , both in terms of mathematical skills and problems in context. The formative assessment (in this case) captured only the mathematical skills that students remembered how to do.
Lesson 2: Check what is expected in the summative test.
Testing versus Learning
With my Year 10 class, I believe spent much too much time on fractions. What is too much time? Too much time is going too far beyond the confines of the unit plan. Maybe and extra day or two might be okay, but going beyond this means that another area of the unit suffers.
But why not keep on teaching fractions if the class are not understanding the concept yet? One reason, is that my teaching practice may not be up to scratch and that no matter how long I spend on a topic using poor pedagogical practices they will not learn the skills or concepts. This is something, that I am currently addressing, and will dedicate another post to Educational Research. The second reason came to me during a professional development session with my department. We were asked whether it would be better for students to deep knowledge in one area (say fractions) or shallower knowledge but in many areas. At the time I thought a deep knowledge in one area would be better, but many of my colleagues argued that a shallow knowledge in multiple areas is better.
And in order to get good ‘grades’ one must have a range of skills and abilities. The unit was supposed to teach and assess a range of number skills, so focusing on factions for so long, despite students not understanding
Lesson 3: Learn effective pedagogies to teach a bigger range of skills.
What do tauira, whānau and kaiako want from kura?
From my discussions with tauira, they want to do well in class. They place a lot of emphasis on formative on summative testing. The wider school, for its part, also reinforces these norms using its Junior Diploma, which is reported to students and whānau. For students this means getting at least an ‘achieved’ level at
Whānau have high expectations for their tauira. They want them to do well, to learn a lot while in school and have successful careers, to contribute to their whānau and community. This often means that whānau also want tauira to do well in common assessment tasks, and would be especially concerned about Junior Diploma Grades.
Finally what do I want as a Kaiako for my class? This is the hardest to reconcile. The first is because I do not want to place a lot of emphasis on summative tests. I think that students can learn and improve skills and still not do well on summative assessments. Second, because the summative assessment go towards the Junior Diploma and only a NZC Level 5 ‘achieved’ counts as an achieved grade for Junior Diploma students may not see success if they are working at a lower level of the curriculum.
I personally witnessed students upset, disappointed and despondent at receiving a Level 5 ‘not achieved’ grade. I think It is better for students to have small successes every day in mathematics classroom, in order that they develop the self motivation in mathematics . Students seem to see these summatives where they do not reach level 5 as a failure, and therefore will not help in building successful for students.
Lesson 4: Good grades are great, should not be the only important part of learning
