Curios of the week #76

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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The week began bathed in glorious sunshine. It is still the midst of winter but it felt like spring. It was a weekend for walks and I took a stroll around lake Wendouree, past its two fountains. It is a great time of year when the sun is shining. It is pleasant, rather than hot.

It was the week I said goodbye to teaching Year 6 science, at least for a while. I have enjoyed the journey. We have studied hearing and sound and then a series of special science week lessons on disease and environmental issues. They have been a fun group to teach, full of fascinating questions.

We also had a lot of visitors to Clarendon this week, on both Wednesday and Friday. I enjoy talking about what we do here and it is always interesting to meet other teachers and school leaders who are on a similar journey.

This week’s Curios include a bit of standardised testing, an old skool argument, reading comprehension strategies and much more.

Collective of the week

Sometimes, it is illuminating to pick up a few rocks and see what’s underneath.

This happened with a recent piece in The Conversation by Dr David Pomeroy and Dr Lisa Darragh. It is about proposed changes to the mathematics curriculum in New Zealand.

The article makes a good point about rushing change. If the New Zealand government, having proclaimed a maths education emergency, rushes out a substandard curriculum and resourcing for the start of 2025, this could be a problem. However, lying under the surface are a few other issues.

The New Zealand government have apparently labelled their new approach ‘structured maths.’:

“…it’s likely structured maths will include teachers directly explaining maths to children before they practise it, children repeating maths techniques until they have mastered them, and more rote memorisation of basic facts like times tables.”

That sounds like a thoroughly good thing. Who could possibly argue with directly explaining maths to children? How else are they going to understand it, right? And knowing times tables fluently prevents them having to constantly work out these basic facts. However, the world of education is not governed by such common sense:

“Unlike structured literacy, which has a broad research base, structured maths is not a recognised teaching method.”

Really? I recognise it. It is how we teach at Clarendon.

If you follow the link, it takes you to an article by Laura Waters on newsroom that argues that structured maths is not even a thing. According to Professor Jodie Hunter of Massey University, structured maths, ‘still does not exist.’ After describing the explicit teaching of maths, she claims there’s no evidence for it.

This is a new one on me — being told a method of teaching that my colleagues and I use daily does not exist.

There is plenty of evidence for the explicit teaching of mathematics. For example, there are the process-product studies of the 1960s onwards that focused on literacy but also on mathematics. In 2010, Reynolds and Muijs published The Effective Teaching of Mathematics: A review of the research. This draws on process-product research to emphasise the effectiveness of what the authors call ‘active teaching’ that is highly similar to the ‘structured maths’ model. Anyone familiar with Rosenshine’s Principles will recognise it because they share a similar evidence base.

So, what is going on? Well, Pomeroy and Darragh mention a group I had not encountered before, the Aotearoa Educators Collective. According to their website:

“Aotearoa Educators Collective is an umbrella collective created to support education thought leaders who share a common interest in promoting progressive ideals in education.”

One of the ideas it promotes is:

“The primary responsibility for schooling is to create critical creative citizens invested in participatory democracy with capacity to combat social injustice”

I don’t think I agree with this. It seems like early 20th Century Educational Progressivism, drawing on figures such as John Dewey, and given a modern spin.

Professor Jodie Hunter who thinks structured maths does not exist is a member of this Collective. It seems the main objection is less about rushed implementation and more about deeper ideological opposition to ‘structured maths.’

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

New robot overlords of the week

Image via AI, obvs

One of the worst phenomena in teaching is the one where teachers stay up late into the night, searching for — or even purchasing — lesson resources. As a profession, we have a weird notion of autonomy that suggests all teachers should plan all lessons from scratch. Apparently, this will mean these lessons will suit the individual students in each class rather than some generic student. The basis for making such decisions on what suits each individual student is never explained but, like the Emperor’s New Clothes, we are all supposed to see it. It is a major driver of workload.

Most places fudge this. Strong departments share lots of resources. Weaker ones share fewer. However, there is still often an element of individual teachers building their own lessons around these resources and we are still likely to find out that a colleague has spent two lessons watching a Netflix documentary. This is also where activity-based planning comes in. This is where we select an activity because we think it is a good thing to do rather than because it will help students reach a specific goal.

At Clarendon, our aim is to jointly plan everything down to the detail of each lesson plan. The idea is that initially, a new teacher joined our team will not have do any planning. They still need to prepare, but this creates the space.

What are alternative solutions to the planning issue? What about artificial intelligence?

The Australian government has announced a trial where AI will take up some of the burden:

“The pilot will help reduce admin workloads for teachers by supporting things like drafting lesson plans and suggesting learning activities aligned to the national curriculum.”

If it reduces workload then that’s a good thing. However, I suspect that many of the suggested learning activities will not align to the science of learning. Instead, like other applications of AI, it will simply repackage its training materials in a variety of different forms. Plans and activities will be derivative of plans and activities written by real teachers, with no quality control and the potential for false hallucinations. It will replicate, in a tech-savvy way, activity-based planning at scale.

Retro argument of the week

This week also saw a return of an argument that took me straight back to the days before Brexit and Trump. In those days, academics were not as worried about populism or decolonisation as they are now. Instead, they took aim at a different abstract noun. Neoliberalism!