Before I go on, let me tell you about Friday evening. I met an old colleague (we went “out, out” to watch Alan Davies BTW) and I told her about my day and mentioned how in my naivety as a newbie teacher I used to say that I was never going to turn into the “negferret” teachers I’d met along the way. You know the ones: those who I had interpreted as being negative about teaching – the ones that I used to think “if it’s that bad get out!” Every week I meet newbies who are full of enthusiasm, saying things like “I want to get better in my teaching, I want to learn” They’re saying all the right things. Don’t get me wrong – I want to learn too – I don’t want to pull these people down but through writing this shiz down in my blog I want to ensure that people are getting all the information. I don’t intend on being negative – that’s not me (it really isn’t!) – What I want people to do is stop just accepting things they are told and do the research themselves. Looking back I now feel bad about thinking these negferret teachers were whingeing – at least they weren’t just “rolling over” to changes, which would have been worse – they were fighting for the “right thing”. Oh how wonderful is hindsight?
This conversation stemmed from the fact that on Friday I went to see one of the Shanghai teachers as part of the Maths Hubs exchange programme after receiving an invite from Robert Wilne (probably following one of my ranting posts!). I am now writing this having had 2 days to think about what I saw and how I feel about it. I am going to separate the lesson with peripheral thoughts but before I go on let me say I have an open mind about the whole thing. No, I really do … but I am cynical about the motives.
I am not saying that the intentions are wrong – in fact I believe in the principles of the hubs – I genuinely believe that people at the coal face are doing what they think is best for maths education. I have doubts about the motives further up the food chain – I’m not talking about the teachers on the ground, or those involved in the Maths Hubs or NCETM – I’m talking about the government. “Blowing the wind up the proverbial” of China is part of a bigger political picture – as a country we are strengthening our political and economic links with China and I take umbrage at education being used as a political pawn.
I digress. The whole organisation of the day/morning was brilliant. I arrived at Kings Norton Girls School and along with about 14 other people were taken to a room where the context of what we were about to observe was explained. I initially introduced myself as Mel from Alcester Academy but felt that I had to be honest and say that I was also JustMaths – I actually said “I’m going to admit I’m cynical as I believe that we have similar expertise in this country and probably in fact in this very room (and I don’t mean me!!)”.
The structure of the morning was such that prior to the observation a briefing was held and then the group reviewed what they had seen after the lesson and discussed the implications to their teaching.
During the briefing we were told where this lesson sat in the sequence of lessons and an outline of how each of these algebra lessons focused on taking tiny steps and not trying to ram too much into what the “learning objective” was in each lesson. Today’s lesson was solving linear equations with brackets – focussing specifically on the brackets (as they’d solved equations before) – I’m going to post a blog about the lesson later too otherwise this post will be endless!
After the lesson the Shanghai teacher – her name was pronounced “Echo” (probably spelt differently but I’ll go with that) came into the room and spoke to us. She gave some background from her perspective as to the approach to the lesson and took (lots of!) questions. The idea of the group observation is something I felt she was very brave doing but if it was something that we were used to from the outset of our teaching I can imagine it being very meaningful. At no point did I feel I was there to judge her ability to teach – I’m sure I’m not the person to do this to any other teacher anyway – I was focussing on the strategies she was using at key points in the lesson. However, during the feedback it was evident how toxic our system of feedback has become when she was asked about the lesson “faltering” … Personally I didn’t see that it did if you were focussing on the pedagogy and it is so difficult to judge a single lesson in isolation least of all someone teaching a group for a short period of time. End of. Why do we have this need to “judge” lessons? Who decides what the key measures are? Why those measures anyway?
I do wonder how big an impact a similar programme of observing some of the best teachers we have in the UK would make to the observed and those that observe them. I suppose to some extent those involved in the exchange programme are having a bit of this idolatry and to them it will make a massive difference to their lifespan in teaching – maybe this is the start of widening that net. It is still early days for the Maths Hubs and I still think the same as I did when they were launched – the scale of the project isn’t big enough.
I stand by what I say – we have the expertise on this very land – the issue is maths education is having a personality crisis. There are so many schools of thought out there as to “what we should be teaching and how we should be teaching it”. Lots is being done in researching good practice and there are loads of case studies but the fact is people can’t agree on the best way to teach something and just because it works in one context doesn’t mean it will work in another. Maths teaching is part of a bigger education system that has gone from being “knowledge based” to “skills based” and now is moving back to more of a “knowledge based” focus – there is a whole generation of teachers that know nothing else other than a three-part lesson! (To those of you that advocated this – I hope you’re hanging your head in shame!) To some extent this needs “unteaching” and a shift of focus back to good ol’ pedagogy needs to take place …. Can this be done whilst we work with the current measures of accountability within a school; a subject specialist will see the subtleties in a maths lesson but not all observers will and this is the crux for many teachers looking for career progression? (Or dare I say it … any teacher looking to “pass” performance management?)
There are so many issues in maths education – shortage of maths specialists in primary schools, recruitment, subject knowledge, performance management, assessment and accountability (to name just a few!) that I know it is difficult to know where to start. It is also hard (impossible?) to unravel maths from the wider edu-landscape and I fear that we are treating the symptoms and not the cause. Many of our ills stem from the increased accountability that schools are subject to and the lack of education awareness from some government officials – forced academisation and even jobs are at risk – Schools and teachers do need to be held to account but I’m not convinced that what is happening today with Ofsted as the overseer is working. I’m not sure there is a solution to accountability but it needs to be said!
I’m also not convinced that much of what I saw in the lesson was new – not to me anyway – there are elements of the lesson that most good teachers would do at some point dependent upon the topic. Through the conversations afterwards and through speaking to primary teachers every week I can see that many of the teaching concepts would be new in a primary setting but not so much in secondary. At least not in my experience … maybe I’m wrong (it has been known you know!)… and not because the pedagogy isn’t sound because it is and that is the reason – many good secondary teachers do this stuff anyway and it just hasn’t been held up there as sound practice.
The extent to which elements of the Shanghai Approach can be superimposed onto the UK secondary landscape remains to be seen but I don’t see it being the panacea to our ills but I suppose doing “something” is better than nothing. I’ll be back later with details about the lesson – let’s just say I came away with some things to reflect on, which I suppose is a good thing.
I’m also going to finish the post the way I started … do the research for yourself. Contact your local Maths hub and get in and see one of the Shanghai teachers for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
A great report! I also heard a caveat from my local Hub about what we were about to see and to suspend our normal criteria about what we look for in a lesson observation. I get that! And with a language barrier and unfamiliar set up, ICT problems, strange environment, not knowing kids names, this would not be a lesson experience I could evaluate against what I had seen before in my own department. So what was my own constructive feedback/opinion about the 1 hour demo lesson I saw? I hoped to see pace, challenge, variety, enthusiasm, confidence, wow factor, awe and wonder, and pupils learning, excelling and growing in deep understanding. I hoped for too much I guess. It was lacking seriously in all these respects. Too compartmentalized. I was sat at the back with a HoD from another school and we wanted to see cross topic-connections made and highlighted to solidify understanding, enriching problems, interactivity. In a nutshell if I were one of the pupils in that class experiencing lesson after lesson like this, maths would go from being my best favorite subject to the one I begin to dislike and underperform in. Did anyone else see in their lesson observation “…plenty of rich and sophisticated problems, called “Dong Nao Qing” questions…?”. I asked the teacher after the lesson what aspect of the lesson was focused on this idealism and her reply was that when she asked the pupils to multiply 5 and 7 she instead that they do it in their heads and not on their fingers. Perhaps my question was lost in translation? We UK maths teachers do a great job within a school system/culture totally different to Shanghai. I believe mastery is a good move but hope that we develop through grass roots activity our own version of mastery. I have my own ideas of what this is and looks like and specifically the resources and lesson content which supports and delivers this impact and aspiration. But the energy and focus that is put on to Shanghai by the NCETM … we can probably eclipse through our own collaborative practice and action research and curriculum development. It is happening and every time I see people like Bruno Reddy in action, read Jo Morgan’s blog or look at a new document from the NCETM or attend an OCR/AQA/EDEXCEL new GCSE session I see incremental positive changes been made already which impact on my own research and practice. Je suis UK. Yes we can. The Force is With Us. Respect!@MathsDunbar
Be warned a fairly long one…
I have had the “Shanghai experience” this past week which continues into next. My Shanghai colleague has taken my Set 2 Y7 class and I have observed each lesson this week as well as sat in on planning sessions with the teacher. Sara (her English name equivalent) is lovely, dedicated to mathematics teaching and proud of her job. She sees this experience as an opportunity to develop her own teaching and ideas. She is with another colleague and they fed back to us at a meeting on Thursday saying that they have enjoyed seeing some of our lessons and the activities we incorporate such as Tarsia and “Standards unit” style tasks, they said that their students would enjoy these ideas and it would help some of the less (I can’t remember the exact wording she used) inspired students in their classes to become involved.
In the lessons I observed I have come to some initial conclusions;
1) The precise vocabulary continually used seems to be more sophisticated than the general teaching I see from myself and colleagues – such things as using the term composite number when teaching about primes (I am sure there will be many who see this as something they normally do, however I and my colleagues all admitted to never having used / taught this definition). When talking about factors they ‘drummed’ in the words “dividend”, “divisor”, “quotient”, again this is something I would not use due to worrying about the language putting off some students and the actual mathematics being lost in syntax translation.
2) The formal methods of communicating mathematically (again perhaps something I am not so hot on). The students were told how in Shanghai all students would write the same sentence in their work so it was obvious to anyone looking at their solution what they had done. She did not like that several students had different methods for laying out the factors of a number and that the actual final sentence of “Therefore the factors of x are …” was not written. Again this highlighted that perhaps my students are used to ‘getting away’ with not writing a full mathematical solution – feeling that they have done the hard work and isn’t it obvious what my answer is! This is something I will make sure I get them to realise, having said this I have always stated to students that I don’t usually care about that final answer but rather care about the mathematical communication they are giving me. When I told the teacher that the students had come from approx 10 different primary schools who all taught in slightly different ways she couldn’t believe it and didn’t like the fact that they didn’t all work from the same text book. This raised questions for me about the ‘creativity’ of maths in Shanghai with all students expected to produce similar methods – maybe this is not true but is how it came across.
3) The teacher always went to students with hands up, I noticed many passive students and believe that this would quickly have a negative affect on many of our students. I tend to operate a no-hands type policy in that all members of the class know that I will ask anyone who I wish in the class, I’ll help them construct an idea / answer if uncertain, but I will not allow passengers. This is the main aspect I am against from what I have seen.
I am sure there are plenty of other thoughts I will have through more reflection but that will do for now! I am glad for this experience and the ideas it has given me, however I am always glad for the experience of observing other teachers who I can learn off and always take away some reflection.
I am looking forward to our Govt allowing us the same amount of time to plan lessons as our Shanghai colleagues, I believe I could produce incredible lessons constantly should I only teach 1 or 2 lessons a day and have the rest of the working week to reflect, review, refine and intervene with students. I am not convinced though that this was the main aim for this initiative in govt eyes!
Thanks for your thoughts – it sounds like your initial feelings are much like mine about what I have seen. I’ll get part 2 up at some point this week. Mel