It's that old thing of teachers feeling they need to cover the material (in our case it's called the 'scope and sequence') and not knowing that inquiry will go much deeper and in fact cover more.
Teachers do of course ask students to discuss things before moving on, activating prior knowledge, sharing vocabulary, and bringing learnt-but-a-little-forgotten concepts back to the front of the mind.
But this time of discussion can also be one of the best places to find the starting points for student-initiated inquiry.
I was visiting a Grade 3 class (Year 4 in terms of the English system) a few weeks ago. The teacher was getting the students to talk about what they remembered from their investigations into 2D and 3D shapes so far. They had made 2D nets for 3D shapes.
One student, L, asked, 'What about 1D shapes... and 4D shapes?'
The teacher is very attentive and responsive and saw an opportunity here. 'We should write down that question.'
It's a question I love, and I suggested I come back the next morning and address it a little. The teacher welcomed that and so I did.
I started by writing L's question, and complementing her for taking something the class were learning about and going on another step with it. Then I asked what the students had to say about this. S said that a line was 1D. He also wondered what 1.5D might be (funnily enough, this is not a crazy question, as I learnt watching this 3Blue1Brown video a while back).
A said that a circle was 1D, and I agreed that the line part of the circle was. L said she thought that a point was either 0D or 1D, and the consensus was that 0D was correct. N said that he'd heard that 4D was a 3D thing that interacts with you.
I then did a bit of talking and showing. I said we could look at the cube and at how the number of points goes up as we go up dimensions, the ones we know about, going from a point to a line to a square to a cube as in the diagram below. I'd brought the straws and connectors along, and I used those to show this. Some of the students could see it was doubling, so we might expect a four dimensional version of the cube to have 16 points or vertices on it.
I said we only have 3 dimensions in our space, and went through what they were in that room.
I asked if they wanted to see a 2D or 3D picture of one. There was a definite desire to do that, and we looked at some representations of the tesseract (the 4D cube).
images from the Wikipedia Tesseract page
It is a kind of wow thing, I think you'll agree.
We talked about a few other things: touched very lightly on Einstein and spacetime. And then I had to go back to Moon Class. I left the straws and connectors and they tried to make their own versions of the tesseract. The teacher sent me some pictures later:
It wasn't an ideal lesson - there was too much talking from me.
But there were some very good aspects to it:
The teacher was creating space for conversation where students thinking and questions could emerge. A lot of us are doing this. Some also get students using whiteboards so that the thinking isn't only verbal but diagrammatic and written too.
The teacher documented some individual thinking that wasn't in the direction of the planned lesson, but 90° to it. Fewer of us are doing this. We tend to have a plan in mind that we're getting on with and moreover that time of sharing takes quite a lot of attention to orchestrate. There isn't a lot of headspace for things counter, original, spare, strange.
The teacher thought some follow-up on the question was worth giving time to. Admittedly, things 4D isn't everyone's expertise, but that is one of the powers of documentation, of writing questions down in this case - it buys time - to talk to colleagues, to think, to google.
My best moves in the event were asking the students for their answers to L's question, and bringing the straws along. Those were two things that put the ball in the court of the students themselves.
If there is one thing I think we need to move forward on as a team, it's probably number 2 in the list. We need to be documenting more, to be preserving more of what the students say and do for future discussion and exploration.
Back in 2015, Estelle and I ran a workshop on talk in the classroom. I was in Grade 3 (Year 4), Estelle was in Grade 1 (Year 2), and we were sharing ways we encourage students to talk more in our classrooms. To prepare for it we visited each other's classes, watched some established ways, and tried some new ideas too.
Estelle, as well as being a wonderful friend, is a fellow edu-geek. We read, we discuss, we even go to see the odd French education film like Le Maître est l'Enfant and Être plutôt qu’avoir?
Some things were working against student conversation in class back then. We teachers have some tradition behind us, and a lot of curriculum to get through. We end up listening for rather than listening to.
This distinction, listening for rather than listening to is one Helen Williams uses lots, but it seems to have had multiple origins. Max Ray-Riek was one of them, and if you have five minutes to think about this a bit more, this is a now classic talk of his:
I'm not sure how much we were thinking about listening to at that point. We were thinking about 'What do you notice? What do you wonder?' to hear what the students actually have to say, but we were very much orchestrating what lessons were all about and the kinds of things that might be talked about in them. I had discovered people in the mathematical Twitter world who were guiding me towards close listening to students. Estelle was and is a brilliant listener. But we were still listening mainly for the matter in hand, the curriculum content.
In June 2016, Estelle and I knew we were moving down into Early Years, Estelle as the coordiantor. We went off to Prague for a great few days on play. Estelle would be leading the Early Years through a lot of change, but I'm not sure if she knew how much change there would be.
Loose parts play in Prague
That September, and for the next few years, I taught in K (5 and 6 yos). We still had specific mathematics lessons, for 45 minutes each morning. At the time, I blogged about the some maths aspects of this:
'There was a lot of space for the students own creations and explorations. I was keen to keep a sense of agency, and tried to respond to any initiative. This was as important, I feel, as the exact direction we went in. That sense of 'this is an inquiry we're following because B started us off with this; let's see where it goes' is something I really want to nurture again, and even more so, next year.'
Last year, Estelle and Rachel were in K and I was popping in, especially for maths lessons, in my role as STEAM coach. From September, they changed the mathematics so that there was a lot more choice in the range of activities available. Then in November, Rachel went off to Ljubljana for a play-based learning course, and when she came back she said they were recommending moving away from specific subjects at specific times of day and onto a continuous provision where children could choose what they engaged in for long periods of time. Estelle listened and was really responsive to the idea and Rachel's enthusiasm for it. In January, the K classes became more truly play-based, with children having a lot more choice.
As STEAM coach, I wanted to keep some record of the changes, so at the end of the month I asked Estelle about the changes. Here's a few minutes taken from that conversation:
It was not easy for me, this change. I had really enjoyed having a time with the K students each day where we would be exploring maths together. But of course, there had been a cost in terms of student autonomy and agency. Now children would choose more how to spend their time, and it would be our job to make sure the mathematics offer was atractive and just right!
The PYP (Primary Years Program of the International Baccalaureate) was changing too. In 2018, the PYP document The Learner described a major shift towards play for young children. Here's part of a table that describes the changes:
Move away from
Move towards
Predetermined time structures and routines
Flexible timeframes and routines that are responsive to the needs of the students
Pedagogy that centres around instructional processes for students and is teacher-led
Play that is co-constructed between students and teachers
Repeated large-group experiences as the basis for all learning
Whole-group experiences at pertinent learning moments
Actually, we were already well on the way to the right hand side, but there was more travelling to be done.
We've been thinking a lot about our pedagogy. During lockdown, we zoomed about Kath Murdock's Power of Inquiry. And when it was over, we met in peron after reading Anna Ephgrave's Planning in the Moment.
This year, we've been doing Saturday morning sessions with Anna Van Dam, debriefing afterwards to apply all the things we'er learning to our classes:
We've also discovered, and are loving, Vivian Gussin Paley's books.
And Rachel, Estelle and I are together in PK, with 3-5 year olds - in Sun, Star and Moon class! It's a kind of homecoming in some ways - finally the choice and playfulness that I tried hard to allow space for in lessons is the actual stuff of our time!
We're becoming more and more interested in listening to children. And finding out that our questioning is often not helping. Julie Fisher's Interacting or Interfering: Improving Interactions in the Early Years crystalised for us how some of the tools we might use in adult conversations, such as questioning, are often actually a hindrance with young children.
"The secret of effective questioning is to be genuinely interested not only in what learners are thinking, but in how they are thinking, in what connections they are making and not making. Genuine interest in the learners produces a positive effect on learners, for in addition to feeling that they are receiving genuine attention, you can escape the use of questions to control and disturb negatively. Instead of asking for answers, which in most cases you probably already know, you can genuinely enquire into their methods, their images, their ways of thinking. In the process, you demonstrate to learners what genuine enquiry is like, placing them in an atmosphere of enquiry which is, after all, one view of what schooling is really intended to be about."
Especially as most of our young students don't have English as a first language, we're finding that watching can be an important part of listening. Seeing what our students do, trying to guess their lines of thiking.
Slowing the pace down, giving students our attention for longer periods of time.
Here's Estelle in the forest the other week. I managed to video part of a much longer conversation.
Young students like this don't usually respond well to the direct approach, to questioning. It's more about creating the conditions for relaxed conversation. Here Estelle establishes a slow pace, peeling open acorns, seeing that some of them have turned to powder inside, seeing that there are holes in those ones, talking about worms. It's a comfortable situation, and sure enough, a student begins sharing his knowledge about worms.
After this, Estelle starting delving for acorns that were beginning to grow.
(We took some back to the classes, and there are some seedlings now!)
There's a quality to the listening which we sometimes get. There's a giving attention to whatever the student wants to say, in their own time.
Estelle, Rachel and I have been documenting 'Moments in the Day' - times when we watch a student at play, document it, try to see what learning is happening, and bring it to the EY group for discussion.
An example:
Estelle writes:
"G is sitting in the sun and holding up a jelly digit. What catches my eye is his quietness and his gaze on the object. I go over and ask what he’s noticed. I try to go carefully and softly with my interactions wanting to avoid taking over.
G says these things at different points in the play and conversation.
“I just cut it in half and it did that.
What is this? (holding up the digit zero)
Every time I do this it does that (points to two bubbles as they move in opposite directions when he presses his finger down.
I made four now (bubbles).”
Observations, sharing, trial and error, comparing across objects that are similar but not exactly the same. Counting the number of bubbles. Thinking about letters and numbers. It was G on the number hunt who was asking about the zero and saying it was an o.
A joins us:
“It’s broken into more!” Bashing it and making loads of tiny bubbles.
...There is a quality of being in the moment, attention and pause which was noticeable."Documenting together (and thanks to Anne Van Dam for encouraging us in this) is making us more keen to listen. Reflecting together on what we've documented is making us realise how much there is in what we hear.
We're all still learners in this art. We have to tell ourselves to leave space, to not do all the work.
It's kind of odd that it's hard for us. Estelle, for one, has listening as a superpower. I know how good she is at listening to me and other friends, and to colleagues at school. But, the challenge is harder now. Making space for students who, at 3, 4 and 5 years old, and are still building up the confidence to speak in English. Making our interactions carry little weight, to not swamp their tentative beginnings at expressing themselves.
Now at least, and at last, our antenae are twitching, waiting to hear what our students want to say, trying to read in their play the theories they are building. (Thanks again to Anne Van Dam for that emphasis. See the previous post for more on this.)
"In listening to others, accepting them in their irreducible difference, we help them listen to themselves, to heed the speech of their own body of experience, and to become, each one, the human being he or she most deeply wants to be." from D M Levin, The Listening Self, quoted in this piece by Brent Davis.
It's been a great experience working with Estelle on creating our Practical Pedagogies session. We wanted to look at ways that we encourage children to talk that enhance their learning. And, not only that, we wanted to look around and see how other people were doing it.
I'm lucky to have a bunch of colleagues who, despite all the time-pressures and full-on work of just being a teacher, make time to think about how to do it better, and how to share the growth with others.
So from time to time through the year Estelle and I tried things out, visited each other's classrooms, working out what it is that can be shared in a short time that will make the difference. Back in January we sketched a few ideas while we had lunch at BETT:
Some ideas we abandoned (dictation software!); others we focused on in the classroom, making talk routines, and reflecting on talk, a bigger part of our teaching. The journey has been as much, more, than the short session we ran yesterday, and I think, hope, we'll continue to develop it. Certainly, staff are seeing the benefits of visiting and learning from each other!
Here's Rachel's summary of her Objective, Strategy, Tactics after the two days were up:
#pracped15 O - collaborate with and observe more teachers. S - contact other teachers, take part in more conferences. T - trial and error.
We're having a two-day conference at my school, the International School of Toulouse, in October. If you can, come. It will be good.
Click on the image to go to the conference website. You can click through to see the programme. It's really varied - a whole range of approaches to teaching across Primary and Secondary that teachers want to share!
We had a coference like this back in 2012, "Practical Learning Technologies in the Classroom", focused on technology in particular. I ran a session with Estelle on blogging in primary and got my first taste of this kind of thing. The whole event was great!
The conference owes something to the "teachmeet" model - which is where teachers meet and have short 7 minute presentations on something that works well for them and that they want to share.
For instance, at the teachmeet at BETT this year I did a 7-minute micropresentation on getting the students contributing voluntarily to the class blog.
This year I've put down to jointly run three workshops. I'm so pleased to do this jointly, partly because it's with three brilliant colleagues, partly because it means more sharing of and reflecting on good ideas in the run-up to the conference. And because there's ten months to go, there's space for more experimentation, reading, thinking for us before we run the sessions.
Valuing talk in the
classroom
I'm doing this one with E. We began to talk about our session and what we're going to explore when we were at BETT, and we still need to talk more about this, but there are some directions I'm wanting to explore.
One is dialogic teaching. Have a look at Ilana Horn's summary of the book Beyond Best Practice to get some idea of this: responsiveness to what children say.
The next is the Thinking Together project. I want to start with their way of getting groups to define the rules for how they work together and move on from there: Are these useful rules for discussion? (pdf)
And then there's Pie Corbett's Talk for writing - giving children spoken models that they can imitate and improvise from.
[Edit: here I must add in a photo from my friend Mick and his EAL group discussing friendship:
]
So, a lot to be exploring!
Big questions &
philosophy with
children
This one I'm doing with R. Last year I did regular "Big Question" times with my class. But I need to see what other people are doing in this area - and the main approach is Philosophy for Children (P4C). This will give you an idea of some of the key principles of P4C. But central is a kind of pattern: a stimulus (perhaps a story), children posing questions, knowing how to select the ones that are big, ie not just specific to the stimulus, and debatable, not just a question of finding information. The children then select a question to discuss, get in a circle and begin. Hold the egg when it's your turn to speak, pass it to someone cupping their hands when you've finished.
For me, I want to make it a bit wider than what is these days considered philosophy, to include psychology, cultural studies, anthropology and the like - matters which in the past were within the ambit of philosophy.
Next week we're going to try reading/telling The Hare and the Tortoise to our classes and see what questions come up from this.
Students’ creativity in
maths in Primary and
Secondary
With J - great to have a session spanning Primary and Secondary. "Designing tasks that have a divergent component. Everyone can do something different,
at some point. Everyone can interpret the task in some way that’s their own. Creating
space so that students can show their own approaches to whatever maths is being
studied. This can be just the way different strategies are acknowledged for a piece of
arithmetic." We'll kick off with a practical activity which allows participants to go off in their own direction - then share our experience. Really want to look at the importance of talk in this too!
