James Nottingham's Blog
Reflections from a World of EducationHow Much Challenge?
Getting children to play pairs (matching one card to another) is a great way of improving their memory skills and strategic thinking. But how many cards should you start with when playing the game with nursery children? Most foundation stage teachers tell me 8 cards (4 pairs) or thereabouts.
So, what about starting with 20 cards and playing the game with 3-year-olds? Way too many, I hear you say and last week I would’ve agreed with you. But not now: during half-term, my 2 ½ year old daughter and I downloaded Animatch, a game of pairs for the iPhone that comes with 20 cards as standard. Thinking this is too many for Ava to deal with, we simply listened to the sounds that each animal makes and named the creatures as we went along.
However, within 10 minutes of playing around with the programme, Ava had worked out the object of the game and was merrily matching the cards to their pairs. Her initial strategy was to pick one animal and then keep going until she’d found it’s pair before moving onto another animal. She soon realised that this is an inefficient strategy and so moved on to working out what was under each card and matching as she went along. It now takes her 90 seconds to complete the game without the need of any guidance or encouragement.
I wonder where I can find a game with 40 cards to match …?!
Three Apples
Ian McKenzie has been helping his students at Viscount School in Auckland develop their questioning skills using a really interesting experiment. He gave them 3 apples to consider: one fresh, one plastic and one … not there. The students were asked to try to explain how and when they know for sure that something is real.
As Ian explains, “These 12/13yr olds have been working with me for about two terms now and have been learning to use a range of questioning techniques in order to facilitate deeper thinking skills. They know to use questions to gain clarification and to garner reasons/evidence from each other. They then ask each other to consider their own assumptions, before hopefully testing out some alternative ideas.”
This group were also given some images to consider and to use their questioning techniques to think about whether what they were seeing was ‘real’ or ‘not real’. It’s a question which intrigued them because they all considered themselves to be deeper thinkers, but found it very difficult to question their own religious beliefs in the same manner (The Polynesian community being committed Christians). However, some brave souls found a way to make alternative suggestions and this lead to a deeper level conversation about some beliefs not having the same reasons and evidence behind them.
What I find particularly fascinating about this experiment is that the 3 apples idea is something I’ve often used with nursery/reception children to begin to explore whether something has to be seen to be real. And yet here is Ian using ostensibly the same task to push for a far greater depth of reasoning, questioning and understanding. Which just goes to show that Bananarama were right – it’s ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it (and that’s what gets results)
Clown!
I recently attended a Clown in the Classroom workshop led by Mark Labrow. Despite initial reservations, we all had an absolute blast. And not only that, it gave us some wonderful ideas for enhancing creativity and spontaneity in learning.
None of us were required to put on big feet or big baggy trousers; a simple red nose was enough to signal we were clowns. We learnt the key is to react to everything around you as if it is the first time you’ve ever seen such a thing; in a way, to become more child-like. So, picking up a mug as if it’s just a work of genius, or sitting on a chair as if it were the most wonderful, beautiful and imaginative thing you’ve ever come across is the way to go. And of course this attitude is infectious, causing the audience, particularly if they are children or child-like themselves, to be filled with a similar sense of awe and wonder. And to wet themselves! So go on, have a go!
Footnote: this posting is dedicated to Rebecca Bell, the tremendous clown in the picture and to Mally Milne, my old geography teacher whose favourite phrase was “Clown!” No matter whether you’d labelled your glaciated escarpment incorrectly or defaced a picture of the queen, the only punishment you’d get from old Mally was to hear the shout, “Clown!”
The Learning Pit
One of the frameworks I regularly share with teachers is that of the Learning Pit, a model that explains how and why challenge is necessary for learning. Having first heard Dr John Edwards in 2001 using a “pit” to explain how organisational growth more often than not involves getting worse before getting better, I thought that the metaphor was an ideal way to explain to my students why I was consistently making things more difficult for them. Since then I have developed the idea into the following four-stage lesson plan:
STAGE 1: IDENTIFY THE KEY CONCEPT
The learning pit always begins with an important concept, since it is through conceptual analysis that students gain an understanding of their world. Example concepts include: art, bullying, culture, democracy, existence, growth, indentity, justice, knowledge, language, music, number, originality, poetry, questions, reality tv, science, tourism, and so on.
STAGE 2: CHALLENGE
In July 2008, Professor John Hattie began an address on behalf of his Visible Learning Laboratory in Auckland with: “The major message from my work with 240m students, 800+ meta-analyses, 50,000+ studies is… Challenge Challenge Challenge Challenge Challenge”. Stage two of the learning pit is concerned with just that: challenging students to think more deeply, purposefully, critically and creatively.
STAGE 3: CONSTRUCT
This is the point at which students co-construct an undersanding of the key concepts through continued dialogue and study with each other. According to many notable educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget and John Dewey, there is no such thing as knowledge “out there” independent of the knower, but only knowledge we construct for ourselves as we learn. Stage three recognises this by creating the conditions necessary for meaningful dialogue.
STAGE 4: REFLECT
If you reflect on anything you have learned, you soon realise that it is the product of repeated exposure and thought. Thus, stage four is concerned with students revisiting and reflecting upon their learning journey.
Notes
- The Learning Pit will be published in my new book, Challenging Learning, this autumn. To reserve your copy, please click here
- For an article covering the background, lesson ideas and outcomes of the Learning Pit, click here
- The photo attached to this posting comes from Lacey McCarthy,whose Year 2 students at Douglas Park School in Masterton, New Zealand have been using the Learning Pit to deepen their learning
Billie: the Reading Dog
Another great aspect of Douglas Park School is their dog, Billie, a 5-year-old Golden Labrador. Owned by Annie, the school manager, Billie hangs out in the entrance hall welcoming all visitors and enhancing the family feel of the place.
Doing what dogs do best, Billie offers a sense of security for children, particularly those with emotional or social difficulties; she brings a sense of fun to heated debates (she is tactically deployed to defuse any tense situation involving an irate parent or a pompous inspector); and she is the favourite attraction for pre-schoolers who look forward to patting her whilst Mum or Dad drops off their older siblings (I bet this “sales pitch” is one of the many reasons why Douglas Park recruits more and more children every year).
Now though, Billie is training to be a Reading Dog. Basing herself in the new entrants room (for 5-year-olds), Billie sits attentively, listening to a child reading or watching whilst they show their latest piece of writing. Being a wholly appreciative listener, the children really enjoy having a captive audience all for themselves!
Norwegian Mental Models
Now that there are 15 schools and nurseries in Norway in the Community Designed Education network, with 6 more due to join this summer, I thought it about time I posted a Norwegian blog (for the English version, use the translator at the bottom of the page). And how fitting that the picture should come from Hogsnes oppvekstsenter, the first school in Norway, and indeed in Scandinavia, to join the CDE network.
Teaching the ASK Model
Two of the schools I’m working with, one in Doncaster (UK) and the other in Cambewarra (Australia), are trying a new approach to their curriculum that places an emphasis on Attitudes and Skills, as well as Knowledge (ASK). In a previous blog, (see Teaching Attitudes on 18 March 2009) I shared the Attitudes work of Sandringham Primary School. Now, here’s an insight into the Skills work that Cambewarra Primary School are doing.
Enigma Table
The “Enigma Table” is a really nice idea that Kate McIntyre uses with her class of 4 and 5 year olds at Newport School in Middlesbrough, UK. As Kate explains:
Variation on the Hot Air Balloon
Following on from the 3 Apples experiment, here’s another contribution from Ian McKenzie at Viscount School in Auckland. He’s been working with a class of 12-year-olds on values, using a variation of the hot air balloon scenario (a balloon’s going to crash unless a few people are ejected from the basket). As Ian explains:
An Early Years Target?
I’ve just begun working with Eikefjord Nursery in Florø on a 3 year project as part of the Community Designed Education network. And, as usual, I asked for some background information before designing the training to ensure everything was tailored to their context. What came back was a wonderful insight into their nursery, courtesy of the headteacher, Susette Esp. Here are some of the edited highlights, as I’m sure colleagues in nurseries and primary schools in other countries would be fascinated to read them:
Eikefjord Barnehage has three classes for children from the age of 0 – 5, and is surrounded by beautiful nature all around that we frequently use in the education of our children. We have a beach right in front of us and the woods just a step out of our gate. The rooms are divided by age:
Piglet is for 0-3 year olds, with 9 places and 3/4 adults
Winnie the Pooh is for 20 children age 3-4 and 3/4 adults
The Hundred Acre Wood is our outdoor group for 12 five-year-olds and 2 adults
We have different aims and goals for our children in the different rooms to ensure new challenges and progress. One of the unofficial goals is for children to be able to climb onto the roof of our toy-shed. As long as they can make it up there independently then they can sit on the top, but they are not allowed to use cases or anything else to help them get there. This gives us information about their physical skills and strength, with most of the children able to achieve this by their last year in kindergarten.
We follow the national curriculum and strive to make sure we meet all the standards. The outdoor group do most of their activities in and through nature, though they have the use of a candle-lit hut for some of their activities. The other groups meet the needs of the children through a learning environment that is age specific. Our targets over the next 3 years are to grow our leadership capacity, use P4C to help children grow their language, thinking and collaboration skills, and to ensure that we make the most of the digital equipment that we have.
Teaching Attitudes
During my time as Director of the award-winning RAIS project, I worked with a number of schools to investigate the impact of children’s attitudes on their ability to make progress. Not surprisingly, we were left in no doubt that students with the best attitude towards learning (focus, determination, effort and so on) were making significantly more progress than other students who were either complacent, uninterested or simply not engaged, even if the latter students had better grades initially. This led to the development of the ASK model, a framework that allowed for the teaching of Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge as part of the curriculum.
Core Values
At the heart of the Community Designed Education process is the identification of a set of Core Values. Though most schools have a set of “virtues posters” dotted around the place, this approach is different in that a) it identifies just 3 or 4 of the most important ones, b) focuses attention on these top values so that they are far more likely to be embedded, and c) ensures that the chosen values become part of the curriculum and the culture of the school, and not just a topic for assemblies now and again.