Number Agents

This post was triggered by a conversation I had with a parent coming in to enrol her children.  Lovely family, three beautiful children, full of potential, as all children are.  Towards the end of the conversation mum felt the need to tell me that her seven year old is not very good with his reading or writing.  His face turned down, he looked at the floor and you could just see any of that self-belief drain out of him.  It is obviously a message that in his short time at school so far he has received either directly or indirectly.  Mum felt this was something I needed to know, it was almost as if she was apologising for enrolling a child that was not reading or writing into our school.  In that one statement you could hear that this is the message that she has been given by our current system that this was what success looks like at school, that you can read and write in the first two years and if not, we then you are failing. Thanks to all the work...

It was at a mantle cluster meeting this week that I heard Viv Aitken talk about intrigue and the role it plays in preparing the brain to learn.  Obviously curiosity/intrigue plays a big role in the Mantle approach and it absolutely makes sense that it could be one of the dominant reasons for the great success teachers have when they feel confident enough to use Mantle of the Expert in their own class. We started our mantle journey as a result of an inquiry that had engagement and motivation at its heart.  We found Mantle to be incredibly engaging, in fact the engagement and motivation noticed in students resulted in us using the process school wide and implementing many strategies used in a Mantle throughout everyday teaching, including a lot of process drama and imaginative play. While we understood that the process was incredibly engaging and soon found that results were equally as pleasing, we never really pinpointed the essence of what was going on for our child...

If you have been following along with my specific posts related to Number Agents, you will already know I like to have some sort of big adventure each term.  These adventures usually involve all of the villains and some sort of kidnap scenario.  Lots of drama comes into play and we love it!  In fact the children constantly reflect on these scenarios and they form a strong emotional connection...good news for maths as it is the hero of the story! Not to forget as well that I love it...the teaching of maths is so exciting this way! With any normal Mantle there would be a wrapping up, it is important to have closure to the process.  I have been giving a lot of thought to this and how I can make it more exciting for the agents this year.  Last year I think the storyline was just that the villains had gone on holiday.  Many agents return to our class, so it is important that it isn’t so tightly closed that I cannot restart it again.   As I am al...

I see Innovation and the ability to innovate as the absolute key to improving our current education system, and as educators one of our key roles.  To use what we know about children (the learners in our classrooms now, not five or ten years ago) and to develop approaches that benefit them as learners and human beings. I believe one of the most soul destroying comments you can hear from an educator is "we have always done it this way, it works, why change it?" Or, "we bought the book, tried it and it doesnt work." It is my belief that this fixed mindset pervades our current system and one of the main reasons for it is the constraints created by the constant pressures and requirements placed on us by the powers above. Let's face it, educators are time poor and the last thing you want to do when under huge pressure is re-think how you do things...I mean re-thinking, reflecting, completely changing how we do things is a huge amount of work in itself. I ...

Our education system is at a real crisis point, but I have real faith and hope that with the growing volume of our voices we can create change. I have blogged a little around this and in particular I have expressed my concerns around the testing  culture that is narrowing our curriculum and undermining the real talents and passions of our learners. On a wider scale, I think the answer to most of our issues lies in bringing back the 3 R's. These three R's being 'Respect, Regard and Relationships.' Respect One of the main contributors to low morale in our system is lack of respect.  Teachers are working in one of the most important professions, yet they garner the least respect.  I steer clear from social media or comments on education related news articles.  The comments people make on these articles, despair and anger me.  It seems so absolutely heartbreaking to read these comments when we work so hard and give up so much of ourselves to our job. Edu...

This little verse really resonates with me.  I think that being average in our system is somewhat of a curse.  This has been something I have given a lot of my thinking time lately.  The comparative nature of our current system, leads many to use the core areas of Literacy and Numeracy to establish that children that are below, at or above.  Those children that are 'at' would be those children we may refer to as average.  They are usually your quiet, biddable learners.  They have learned how the classroom works quickly and avoid too much attention by just getting on and doing what needs to be done.  They get good reports and are generally doing everything 'just right.'  In fact they are so good at dancing within our system that we probably can go a whole day without noticing if they are present or not.  In fact on some days their name has only probably been uttered twice, once in the morning and once after lunch when we do the roll....

This sheet, sourced from here  https://indulgy.com/post/nBHpXdDhD2/life-skills  has given me a bit of inspiration and food for thought. I am unsure who created this, so can not tell you that, but it is not mine and was shared on twitter. This little sheet got me thinking though.  We have been a key competency based school since the creation of the wonderful 'new' curriculum.  We call ours local curriculum a 'thinking' curriculum.  We have used the Habits of Mind as our main driver for the key competencies.  Our curriculum is also framed around the pillars of learning (Learning to do, Learning to be, Learning to live together, Learning to learn.)  These pillars are great umbrellas for each of the Habits of Mind to fall under. Our wonderful national curriculum based on Key Competencies is fabulous and I believe it is an absolute travesty that it is being lost amongst the burden of comparative testing and reporting on National Standards. Just wh...

In my last blog post I shared with you my opinion on New Entrant testing.  If you have read my blog you will know I have some very specific opinions on testing, largely revolving around the idea that they create anxiety and give us information that we already knew.  T his blog post   talks a little about the effect I think that a testing culture has on our children's learning esteem and this one is informed by the system of Finland .  Scattered throughout most of my posts in fact are my opinion on testing and the disastrous effects a testing culture has on an education system. Obviously in our school we still use assessment, but have drastically reduced the amount of this and will continue to work on formative, non-threatening ways that we can continue to use to establish where children are at and ensure we are meeting their needs.  I am completely against timed testing in any shape or form and thank the work of Jo Boaler for informing my opinion around s...