Curios of the week #112

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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It was back to the old routine—well sort of. We returned to work with a shortened week bookended by Easter Monday and Anzac Day on Friday. This made the three days in between a little manic. Worse, the day began on Tuesday with a member of staff informing me that both the coffee machine in the staffroom and the coffee machine in the cafe had broken down. This is a teacher’s worst nightmare.

On Thursday, we were visited by a special delegation from independent schools in Tasmania. As ever, such visits give us the chance to reflect on what we do and try to articulate our plan. We never suggest others copy us because each school has a different context and no doubt there are plenty of things we are doing wrong, but we are happy to explain our thinking and show visitors around.

This week’s Curios include a good union, some privileged snowflakes, a bad move in Sacramento and much more.

Uninformed opinion of the week

Peter Sullivan is a long-standing guru of mathematics education in my state of Victoria and in Australia more widely. He is beloved of bureaucrats and the academics who train teachers and his oeuvre is the usual constructivist stuff about giving students rich mathematical tasks to engage with.

Recently, Sullivan appears to have discovered cognitive load theory and this may be connected to Victoria, under the leadership of Ben Carroll, the education minister, looking to embed explicit teaching across the curriculum. Cognitive load theory is part of the justification for such an initiative and although not being known for his association with the theory, Sullivan has started delivering training on it. Or has he? In March, I wrote about an advert for such a training session but when I now click on the events link embedded in that post, cognitive load theory is not mentioned. Perhaps the session has expired.

In a new blog post for the Teachers to Leaders (T2L) website that hosts the link to that list of training events, Sullivan chooses to take aim at ‘scripted resources’ and ‘scripted slide shows’ that he claims are now being given to mathematics teachers. He is not specific about what these are, but he could be referring to resources produced by Ochre or maybe the education department. I haven’t reviewed either in detail and I am sure they will have their strengths and weaknesses.

We use PowerPoint slides to plan our mathematics lessons at Clarendon. Some people get very animated about this because they have an extreme dislike for PowerPoint. To me, it is just a medium. Getting angry at PowerPoint because you don’t like a lesson is a bit like getting angry at Australia Post because you don’t like a book they delivered. It is just a way of displaying things for a class to see. Alternatives include using a visualiser to display pages from a book, booklet or your handwritten notes, or spending time copying notes out onto a traditional whiteboard. I apologise but I really cannot summon any interest in debating the relative merits of such things.

Our slides are not ‘scripted’ and I very much doubt that the ones Sullivan is referring to are. They just consist of a sequenced set of notes, questions, solutions and so on. The only programs I know that have a literal script are ‘Big DI’ programs such as those developed by Zig Engelmann and colleagues or by MultiLit in Australia.

Curiously, Sullivan appears not to know about the vast body of research into the effectiveness of spaced practice. He appears surprised that the review section at the start of the lesson does not directly relate to the lesson content:

“A particular concern is that none of the questions in this scripted review phase anticipate or connect to the lesson to come. Not only does this increase the cognitive load during the subsequent learning, but there also seems no chance for teachers to remediate misconceptions exposed during the review phase, even if the majority of students’ responses are incorrect or confused.”

The mention of cognitive load and subsequent learning is bizarre and has nothing to do with cognitive load theory. Contrary to a common myth, cognitive load theory is not about always reducing load, it is about optimising it. As we move from novice to expert in a given area, that involves increasing load. One of the ways spaced practice works is by intentionally increasing load—this is a form of Bjork’s ‘desirable difficulties’. But I digress.

Sullivan also thinks that by preparing resources in advance, teachers cannot respond to student answers in class. To be fair, there is always a risk when giving a teacher a resource of this kind that they will plough through it regardless of what students write on their mini whiteboards, but that’s something that needs to be addressed by induction, observation and training.

Finally, while again demonstrating his lack of knowledge of spaced practice, Sullivan demonstrates he has no concern for teacher workload:

“The best way for teachers to respond would be to create their own daily reviews connected to the upcoming lesson content and to plan and sequence their own lessons based on the various resources to which they have access.”

That’s the dogma we have all worked under for so long but it is unusual to see it spelled out so explicitly.

Judgement of the week

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court recently ruled that biological males with a Gender Recognition Certificate, who have legally changed their sex, are not classed as women under the 2010 Equality Act. They still have protection from discrimination on the basis of their transgender status but, nevertheless, this decision will have far-reaching consequences in the UK and beyond.