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WP_Query Object ( [query] => Array ( [paged] => 2 [pagename] => blog ) [query_vars] => Array ( [paged] => 2 [pagename] => blog [error] => [m] => [p] => 0 [post_parent] => [subpost] => [subpost_id] => [attachment] => [attachment_id] => 0 [name] => [page_id] => 0 [second] => [minute] => [hour] => [day] => 0 [monthnum] => 0 [year] => 0 [w] => 0 [category_name] => [tag] => [cat] => [tag_id] => [author] => [author_name] => [feed] => [tb] => [meta_key] => [meta_value] => [preview] => [s] => [sentence] => [title] => [fields] => [menu_order] => [embed] => [category__in] => Array ( ) [category__not_in] => Array ( ) [category__and] => Array ( ) [post__in] => Array ( ) [post__not_in] => Array ( ) [post_name__in] => Array ( ) [tag__in] => Array ( ) [tag__not_in] => Array ( ) [tag__and] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__in] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__and] => Array ( ) [post_parent__in] => Array ( ) [post_parent__not_in] => Array ( ) [author__in] => Array ( ) [author__not_in] => Array ( ) [ignore_sticky_posts] => [suppress_filters] => [cache_results] => 1 [update_post_term_cache] => 1 [lazy_load_term_meta] => 1 [update_post_meta_cache] => 1 [post_type] => [posts_per_page] => 10 [nopaging] => [comments_per_page] => 50 [no_found_rows] => [order] => DESC ) [tax_query] => WP_Tax_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => AND [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [queried_terms] => Array ( ) [primary_table] => ltss_posts [primary_id_column] => ID ) [meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => [meta_table] => [meta_id_column] => [primary_table] => [primary_id_column] => [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [clauses:protected] => Array ( ) [has_or_relation:protected] => ) [date_query] => [queried_object] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 40 [post_author] => 1 [post_date] => 2014-04-01 19:08:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2014-04-01 18:08:41 [post_content] => [post_title] => Blog [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => blog [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2018-02-19 14:50:34 [post_modified_gmt] => 2018-02-19 14:50:34 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://jamjarhosting.co.uk/clients/ltss/?page_id=40 [menu_order] => 5 [post_type] => page [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [queried_object_id] => 40 [request] => SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS ltss_posts.ID FROM ltss_posts WHERE 1=1 AND ltss_posts.post_type = 'post' AND (ltss_posts.post_status = 'publish') ORDER BY ltss_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 10, 10 [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1370 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-02-10 18:16:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-02-10 18:16:52 [post_content] => Let’s Think is a classroom intervention whose powerful ticking engine lies in the social construction of understanding.  The safe, meaning making community that we work so hard to develop over time, is built on carefully mediated dialogic exchanges.  Yet we know there are dimensions of communication beyond the words spoken: body language, eye-contact, tones of voice, the positioning and creation of groups, the sharing of resources. Even on the return to live teaching in school in September 2020 there were additional challenges to teaching Let’s Think with restrictions on the seating, grouping and movement of students and teacher. Michael Walsh, LTE lead tutor helpfully blogged about ways we might manage these restrictions here. Some schools have understandably felt that Let’s Think lessons will be on pause for the early Spring Term whilst we are teaching remotely.  So, when I read on the Twitter grapevine that Myfanwy Edwards, English Subject Leader at the new Richmond Upon Thames School in Twickenham, would be continuing to teach Let’s Think in English remotely, this small case study felt like something worth capturing for the whole LT community.  It’s a work in progress, but Myfanwy and I captured the story so far via a Zoom interview at the end of January. I taught LTE for 4 years at my previous school.  I felt lucky that there was a core of us who were really committed to the programme and to continued teacher development. We were in and out of each other’s classrooms, observing and reflecting and adapting practice.  I think this helped me to establish some key principles that I still believe in. So what were those principles? For me, they are the principles on which all good teaching of English is based and actually, we used them as principles for planning and teaching in the rest of our curriculum.  The importance of talk for collaborative meaning making is foremost: it didn’t take much persuasion for me to believe in this.  It’s strange now looking back, I started Let’s Think with a Year 7 group that first year and I took them all the way through to Year 10.  Although we did not use the KS4 lessons, they were so well versed in how to build meaning together, they understood that English is not individualistic or competitive and that they would benefit from building understanding together, that it was so easy by Year 10 to just set a group task or question and I knew they would make something from it. Now having done more training with my new department, the aspect that I did not fully grasp the first time around was the discipline of the Reasoning Patterns: having just one conceptual focus for each lesson.  For every rich text in English there are so many angles you could take, but a Let’s Think lesson takes a disciplined route through one concept, yet still gives room for students’ own route to understanding this.  I like the way that the Concrete Preparation section lays the ground-work for this direction in thinking, and offers you ways you can use in other lessons.  I think I’ve particularly learned how introducing the context or even the author does not have to be at the start or before reading a text, but can be woven in later to add a new dimension to thinking.  I like that sometimes context and author are not introduced at all and that lack of resolution keeps thinking open and bridgeable to the next context, like in ‘By the Sea.’  So I think overall, I like the disciplined, structured plan, but with enough flexibility for students to make their own meaning. Another school of thought is to ask students what is of interest to them, what they notice in a text and work with this.  I think if this is used in tandem with Let’s Think, the students learn how to use the freedom.  So just last term, my Year 7s having worked though The Bridge introductory lesson, were confident in working through who was to blame for a tragedy in their set text, because they had internalised the process.  That’s the metacognition principle.  It really works if you plan that disciplined training, then an opportunity to reapply. So my next question Myfanwy was around your decision to ask Michael Walsh to train the whole of your new department in September 2020, even though it could not be a face to face development day and had to be remote training on Zoom.  I can extrapolate from what you’ve said that it was about the importance of collaborative meaning making, the disciplined training of reasoning, the metacognition and bridging to reapply that thinking.  But why did you not wait until the training could be in person? It was linked to the lockdown. Kids had been sitting alone in a room, maybe talking to siblings or friends on social media, but nothing like the disciplined collaborative meaning making we manage in class, say around a poem.  We felt we needed to retrain the students and I wanted to give the staff in my new department the structures and development and confidence to manage this.  Michael is great, too, he helps you enter the programme on all sorts of levels: the pure cognitive growth angle, the democratic principle, the nature of literary making meaning.  I’m interested in what students have to say. So the way we have taught The Tempest with Year 7 remotely has shown that they know how to ask good questions of a text without the need for us as teachers to front load all sorts of colonial context.  In fact, the main contextualising I did was to imagine what it would be like to be in a shipwreck.  Then we read the opening scenes and they needed no prompting to ask why Prospero feels it is his right to be ruler of the island and that saving Ariel doesn’t necessarily give him that right.  It then felt like a natural development to move to questions of Colonialism and slavery. So it sounds like you were already seeing an impact on Year 7 from teaching Let’s Think in that 2020 autumn term? Absolutely.  The exchange of prior knowledge is so much more noticeable in pure mixed ability classes.  I’ve done some recordings where you can hear the ripple in the Vygotskian shared ZPD! But also how quick they have been to become more aware of how they are reading and can reapply a process. Did you hear teachers talk about their practice shifting? Yes, I have a teacher with 11 years experience, who asked if we could adapt the whole Year 10 poetry GCSE unit using the principles of Let’s Think, interleaving some of the GCSE lessons with anthology poems, like the George the Poet and Blake lesson on London.  I wondered if a more experienced teacher might be harder to convince but that wasn’t the case because she was so encouraged by the level of interest and understanding in the students’ responses.  Then there is my reading co-ordinator who is using Let’s Think as a lens through which to view her teaching of A Christmas Carol for her MA, again because of the quality and independence of responses. So there was enthusiasm, there was quite swift influence on the curriculum and teaching beyond Key Stage 3.  But teaching Let’s Think via remote live contexts presents a whole new challenge: what made you want to continue? I think if anything having to teach online has sharpened all of our principles.  What is really important to us and how can we ensure that that still happens online?  So, we have a focused teaching and learning department meeting every fortnight online. So far, we have discussed: How can we incorporate Assessment for Learning? How can we enable collaboration? and How can we include personal response?  There is no point in having principles if they go out of the window as soon as they are challenged.  So one of the most important things has been keeping the idea of the ‘third turn’ – avoiding the closed shop of teacher initiation, student response and teacher feedback, but instead folding student response back in to the thinking and further responses of the whole group. That’s hard in the chat box, I’ve found, particularly when some students don’t have a microphone or are in a context where they can’t unmute and say more about their answer. It is, but we have worked on us using the chat box comments to summarise where their thinking is, to make links between what students have said ‘So, Louis seems to be saying something similar to Ashton there.’ Then asking ‘Do you agree or disagree with that shared point’.  It’s not the same, but they are contributing and it gives the sense of a conversation and a communal effort.  You can also offer provocative statements related to the question to open up the level of contribution.  The London, Blake and George the Poet lesson worked particularly well with Year 10.  It was easier to do online with the video link, so that I could set this as an independent task – a breather – in between.  We said, go away then post in the chat what you think.  And that level of contribution feels even more important at the moment for student well-being. The idea of moving straight to an analytical paragraph, on your own with a grid to scaffold doesn’t feel right, when we could be asking: What do you think and feel about this? So let’s just pause here for people who might be reading this and thinking of trialling a Let’s Think lesson online.  You have mapped one lesson across two, to give thinking and reflection time? Yes, so the London lesson was across two lessons.  I will give them a screen break to reflect, then return and there is a shared Google doc with the text broken into sections and the student names in groups next to a section of the text, so they can add their thoughts on that section and begin to respond to each other.  And I can nominate one student in each group to get ready, come off mic and summarise the group’s thoughts from what has been typed into the shared document, just as we would in a classroom Let’s Think.  Another of my colleagues encouraged and gave the students time to text, phone, or Snapchat before entering group thoughts.  I think that’s the reason I would most encourage other teachers to try Let’s Think, is that you are encouraging, you are making the space in the school day, for students to talk to each other about something rich and share what they think. So the idea of walking away, or writing reflections between lessons might even be facilitated with shared software.  I have experimented with Google Jamboard (an electronic post-it board) and with Padlet – which is available to everyone – where students can respond to each other’s posts like a dialogue string. The important thing is we are locked down but not locked in.  Our teaching is based on asking questions that matter and listening with genuine interest to the responses and using those to frame the next question.  What’s interesting is that lockdown teaching has opened up another skill, if you like, of sharing and drafting more informal written responses in an exchange.  Some students are actually more willing to do this than they are to talk.  The interesting thing is going to be how confident they will be to talk with the same elaboration that they have in writing.  I imagine it will take us some time to find that confidence again. Yes, I think in post lockdown Autumn 2020, at least where I teach, we had more prevalence of extremes than we would normally. We had students who found it hard to ‘unmute’ and those who were overexcited by the communal context for learning again and offered too much too soon, without thinking.  Is there anything else we should be mindful of as a difference teaching Let’s Think online? Spoken interaction is multi-modal – not all responses are verbalised, we read body language and gestures.  And when students do unmute to the whole class online, we hear everything they say and so do other classmates, so that small group drafting of ideas in a safe, small forum has been lost.  We are simulating some sense of social construction, but it is different.  I’m actually hoping that some of the elaboration I’ve had in informal writing will translate to greater confidence in writing in class.  I think there may be some benefits. I even wonder if some will have thought harder about this poem I’ve put in front of them in a room at home with nothing else to think about than they would at school with all sorts of distractions. There could be some silver linings... And finally, what role will Let’s Think play post lockdown.. I don’t buy in to the scenario of lost learning and us having to start from scratch.  I actually hope we have students who have been quite reflective online, some even more reflective online and we can remind them of that and regrow that in talk in the classroom.  But we will work hard to return to that safe, collaborative, purposeful space we had begun to develop last term. Having talked now, further down the line, I can see that I’d like to sequence the lessons to bridge into the curriculum as I hear schools talk about that at the Let’s Think in English network meetings.  Being a brand new school, our curriculum is still under construction.  Once that has settled and we have all taught the LTE lessons twice, we’ll be ready to build that in. Thank you Myfanwy.  I feel your optimism will be a welcome antidote.  Myfanwy tweets at @Miff_  Leah tweets at @think_talk_org   [post_title] => Let’s Think online? A conversation with Myfanwy Edwards [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-online-a-conversation-with-myfanwy-edwards [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-02-10 18:18:57 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-02-10 18:18:57 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1370 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1356 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-01-25 10:38:05 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-01-25 10:38:05 [post_content] => One thing that has always intrigued me about the Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) is its uncanny ability to take even the most challenging, persistent non-engaged pupils and help them become deeply involved with science. The second thing that never ceases to amaze me is the transferability of the approach to other teachers, who can in turn engage their students deeply with real science. Our local success... There are many examples of successfully using CASE, but one really stood out. This was in a secondary school that drew from an area of Middlesbrough. The school had a large proportion of children where English was an additional language. At the time, pupil behaviour in the school was often challenging, even with pupils in Year 7. I was working as a Science Consultant with a Local Authority led Achievement Partnership to support this school and was in the school 1-2 days per week. Partly due to capacity and partly due to concerns that teaching CASE would mean sacrificing time for teaching content, we decided to do this as a trial with only half the year group. The second half of the year group would receive the lessons later. This left us with a mini-trial: Group 1 - 3 classes receiving 9 lessons of case in place of 9 normal science lessons Group 2 - 3 classes receiving normal science lessons We carried out a reasoning test (Science Reasoning Task II) before and after the intervention for both groups. Read about the trial in more detail. [caption id="attachment_1360" align="alignleft" width="311"] Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash[/caption] The headlines... The average science reasoning scores for the cohort (aged 11 years old) at the start were comparable to those of typical 6 or 7 year old child. The intervention group (group 1) had an average increase in cognitive scores equivalent to about 8 months (in a 4 month period), compared to the control group who improved 2 months (in the same 4 month period). There were no significant differences in science test scores between the two groups, despite the intervention group receiving 9 fewer science lessons. In short, it seemed to work really well. Beyond the headlines... As part of this, I was involved in teaching one of the groups and this is the story I really want to use to illustrate the idea of genuine and deep engagement. The group I was co-teaching had 27 pupils. I was sharing the group with an NQT, teaching about 50% of the CASE lessons each, but co-planning each one carefully. They were mixed ability and engagement was low, particularly as I initially had no relationship with the group. In the first lesson, there were three pupils that engaged well (and 23 who didn't). Undeterred, we worked with the four engaged pupils and managed the other 24, some of whom tried desperately to get out of their science lesson (as they did every lesson) by misbehaving. Those three pupils worked really well and enjoyed a meaningful practical activity, developed their thinking and discussed ideas around variables and values by looking at some laboratory glassware. After the second and third lessons, things weren't much better. A couple of extra children had started to engage having looked at the group who were and realising that things seemed quite interesting. Gradually though, over the next few lessons, more and more pupils were involving themselves so that by lesson six more than half the group were engaging throughout the lesson. [caption id="attachment_1361" align="alignleft" width="341"] Photo by Robert Thiemann on Unsplash[/caption] Eventually came lesson nine. When we got there, the NQT was due to deliver but was ill on the day so I agreed to step in. The lesson was about inverse proportionality, so in the spirit of practical work, we had a lab full of parts of trees that we were busy measuring. Although the first 15 minutes or so was focused on getting them started with the task, when that was underway, I was able to step back and watch the impact of the work we had been doing. The impact... Having watched for a few minutes, I realised a couple of things. 1) All 27 children were present 2) All 27 were fully engaged with the activity, discussion and remained so until the end. This included the children who had previously wanted to 'escape' their science lessons. Then came the discussion, eliciting the idea of the inverse relationship, a concept many students who were much older would really struggle with... At that point, in walked the head of Year 7, checking to see if everything was okay. Despite her best efforts to disguise her expression, she was clearly taken aback by what they saw. In the class were 27 students, all listening intently to their teacher asking questions about tree branches and mathematical relationships. Children who were often seen sat outside or inside her office contributing high quality answers to this discussion. Children were using a sketch graph that we had drawn on the board to both interpolate and extrapolate from the relationship to give plausible answers to questions about how thick the intermediate branches might be and what the tenth branch up might look like. Needless to say, this was the result of eight other lessons of challenge and determined effort, but it had paid off and the success was palpable. What happened next.... After that, this success was shared with all teachers as part of a sequence of professional development activities, both in science and beyond. The school has since extended its work to include the equivalent mathematics programme CAME. The school's performance is now average, when previously it had very low progress and attainment statistics. The school also went on to support other STEM related activities, including engagement with the STEM ambassador programme. Although this is all good, the human story is probably the most interesting part. I was able to follow up some of the pupils as part of a focus group a couple of years later. One girl from this teaching group stood out. In Year 7, I had asked her about her future aspirations and she really wasn't sure what she wanted to do, but didn't mind as long as it wasn't science. In the teaching group she started as one of the most disengaged pupils (and I gathered was at high risk of exclusion), although she was on board by lesson five. At the end, she stood out as clearly a very bright individual who found her previous experience with science just not that interesting. Her response in the Year 9 focus group was fascinating... "I want to be a paediatrician", and I thoroughly believed she would be exactly that! In summary... What is really interesting about this, is that in CASE, the science itself is the motivator. There aren't the whizzes and bangs that you associate with engagement, just really interesting things to look at and really deep questions to make you wonder why. This is a very human story, in which CASE played a small but significant part in changing the lives of children, reducing the risk of exclusion and improving their engagement with society in a positive way. [post_title] => What is it about CASE that engages pupils quite so well...? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => what-is-it-about-case-that-engages-pupils-quite-so-well [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-01-25 11:26:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-01-25 11:26:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1356 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1349 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-01-04 13:04:18 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-01-04 13:04:18 [post_content] => Recently whilst creating a bridging lesson about correlation and probability, I came across two knowledge claims which I believe have led to much confusion. The first claim was made on October 27th when Imperial College London produced a preprint of one aspect of their REACT study. “COVID-19: Public immunity “waning quite rapidly”  Some 365,104 adults took part in three rounds of testing for the study between late June and September to measure the prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in England. The study found that antibody levels fell by 26.5 per cent overall during the three-month period. Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/covid-19-public-immunity-waning-quite-rapidly-as-fewer-than-5-per-cent-have-antibodies/ Plus 300 other sources using this exact phrase. Then just a few days later came another headline announcement in the almost daily flow of optimistic vaccine announcements. ‘Absolutely remarkable’: No one who got Moderna’s vaccine in trial developed severe COVID-19 By Jon Cohen Nov. 30, 2020, 7:00 AM “That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago.” Indeed many commentators are now talking about the fact that we seem to be getting quite complex scientific and medical  knowledge claims by press release. The bridging lesson I am working on follows on from CASE lesson 20 Treatment and Effect, which is based on correlation reasoning patterns. The lesson also makes clear how important an understanding of probability is in everyday life, especially when trying to understand media claims. The first claim that “COVID-19: Public immunity “waning quite rapidly” was understood by many to cast some doubt on the hope that a vaccine for covid-19 could be possible. Several people I discussed this with made these kinds of inferences from this claim. “So if I lose 25% antibodies every three months by the end of the year I will have none and so will have to get a vaccine every year.” It needs to be pointed out that the study was done with home antibody testing kits that gave a binary answer Yes, you have antibodies against Covid 19 or No, you do not. Obviously the test kits are calibrated in such a way that a certain threshold levels of antibodies is needed to give a positive. These types of tests are often explained as similar to the well known home pregnancy test. Of course pregnancy is something that lends itself to a binary description whereas antibody levels do not easily fit. The study did not actually really measure anyone’s antibody level directly, as that would have been prohibitively expensive. A second CASE lesson 18 Tea tasting deals with some of the problems related to how such binary data is to be used and how the role of chance has to be ruled out. The REACT study, from which came the claim “COVID-19: Public immunity “waning quite rapidly”  is being done on a massive scale which has dictated some of its methodology and their limitations. Clearly the question that the study designers were directly asking was something like this: What is the probability that a representative sample (of some 365,104 adults) of those that get a positive Covid antibody test will be the same after 3 months as a similar representative sample (from these some 365,104 adults)?  Not a great news headline but it allows experts to give some useful information for policy makers. However the claim needs to be understood as a probability based assertion that applies to a large population sample. When interpreted in a personalised way the news broadcast shorthand could easily lead to inferences that lay unjustified doubt and a certain hopelessness. I would like to argue that the claims made in the media are usually an answer to some scientific or societal question which is the result of expert methodology. This methodology is usually statistical and any result must be by its nature a probable answer.  However these claims are often stated in a way that often elicits an over simplistic and over personalised interpretation. To explore these claims in a more productive way and achieve a greater deal of insight I propose these simple critical thinking questions.

1. What was the actual question the researchers were trying to answer?

2. How did they go about getting evidence to answer the question?

These are typical of moves to mediate student understanding that are part of the craft of being an effective Let's Think teacher. They will also allow for a thorough set of opportunities to create a common understanding of the complexities and different intentions of communication. The two media headline examples demand difficult and complex statistical thinking to decipher what the claims are. This is the type of formal operational thinking that is challenged during Let's Think lessons. In conclusion I feel another strong claim that can be made is if learners habitually pose the two key questions stated previously and have opportunities to socially construct an understanding of these complex matters, then they will be less susceptible to unjustified inferences and egocentric interpretations.   [post_title] => Knowledge claims, questions and how to avoid egocentric inferences  [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => knowledge-claims-questions-and-how-to-avoid-egocentric-inferences [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-01-12 14:55:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-01-12 14:55:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1349 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1322 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-12-08 11:50:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-12-08 11:50:46 [post_content] => Although Piaget did most of his testing on his own children, and indeed those of other Professors in Geneva, I do think his work has something to offer those in the mathematics classroom today. In this article I will give an example of how his ideas supported a colleague and I to make some important decisions concerning a low achieving Year 9 group just before lockdown. The material used was developed as part of my an Erasmus plus- funded project, called ACTS (Assessment Companion for Thinking Skills), a partnership project between University of Lincoln, Let’s Think Forum, Turku University in Finland TA Group in Latvia. As part of the project, I developed a hierarchy of thinking competency in the key maths strands of algebra, data manipulation and ratio.  To do this I used some of the ideas behind the CAME (Cognitive Acceleration through Math’s Education) project, developed by Michael Shayer, David Johnson and Mundher Adhami, and their analysis of the descriptors of thinking as supplied by Piaget. This article introduces the algebra assessment hierarchy, and explains how teachers can use it to The algebra tool attempts to show increasing maturity/sophistication in thinking based upon what students might say or do when working on a problem that requires the use of algebraic understanding. It is aimed at students from the age of nine upwards and breaks down the Piagetian descriptors of concrete and formal thinking into four stages or levels. At its highest level, formal operational thinking, it contains all of the features of good understanding that any successful student at post-16 would naturally exhibit. As an assessment tool it is concerned not with what students know, or can recall, but with the quality and sophistication of their reasoning. The algebra tool, shown below, seeks to provide as many descriptors of algebraic thinking as necessary to enable anyone observing a group of students to be able to assess the quality of their thinking. When I was trying out the tool many teachers used it to sit with a quiet child whose mathematical thinking they felt unsure of, and to listen to them working on a task. There is only so much we can find out from written assessments and so I think any resource that allows teachers to make detailed observations of students’ thinking can only be a good thing. As part of the refinement phase I asked a subject lead for mathematics if he could use the tool to assess a class while I taught them a CAME lesson.  We decided to do this with a low achieving Year 9 group. and the lesson I chose was lesson 21 which is called Expressions and Equations, and which focuses upon the difference between expression and equations. The advantage is that the start is very concrete and allows all students to participate whilst the latter phase is challenging enough to allow children who could achieve a grade 4 and 5 to be challenged. What quickly emerged, after about 15 minutes of starting the lesson, was that only four pupils out of the 18 in the group were able to progress beyond the first episode of the lesson. Once they began working on the first main task it became clear that the pupils struggled to work with expressions, and particularly this question: “What is the largest value that 3x + 15 could have?” The expected answer is that it can be infinite but the ideas of:

• 3x meaning 3 lots of x and,
• adding a fixed value to a variable,

really threw the majority of the class.  Luckily, three students in the class had some useful insights into the problem. The lesson provided an opportunity for these students to support the rest of the class and develop their understanding.  As they spoke, they grew in confidence so my role as teacher was to provide the opportunity for them to express and clarify their thinking. Following the lesson, the teacher and I discussed the fact only the four students described above had demonstrated any of the skills listed in the top half of the tool. The head of maths felt this was a consequence of a poor diet of learning experiences at the start of these students’ secondary maths career. This in turn highlighted the need for him and his department to provide opportunities in Years 7 and 8 for pupils to reason and to make their mathematical thinking open to discussion with their peers. The above episode provides an example of how the tool can be used to support teachers’ and students’ learning. You could use the tool to listen to a class working on a problem that requires them to use algebra. For example, sit in on a colleague’s lesson, identify what you hear and then discuss the implications for learning. Compare Year 7 with Year 10 in a task that requires the pupils to think and reason, and share findings with colleagues. Whatever you decide to do with the tool, please get in touch to share the outcomes and your thinking: [email protected] [post_title] => A Piagetian tool to support the development of teaching [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-piagetian-tool-to-support-the-development-of-teaching [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-12-10 11:45:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-12-10 11:45:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1322 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1265 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-11-17 15:03:42 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-11-17 15:03:42 [post_content] => The return of all children to school after lockdown was never going to be easy. As practitioners, we worried that our children would have fallen behind academically. However, how could we begin to ‘fill their learning gaps’ when they might not even feel safe in school anymore? The challenges we faced in September were not only that teaching had changed, from seating plans to the use of equipment, but also that our varying experiences of living through the pandemic had changed us too. With children having spent much less time talking face-to-face with peers, for some even talking to a partner post-lockdown was a challenge. In order to re-establish Let’s Think, I had to consider the more practical elements of tables and chairs as well as the children's emotional responses to group work. Despite this, Let’s Think has been pivotal in re-igniting communication skills and self-esteem. The children have begun supporting each other emotionally and academically again and talking has opened the door for more difficult conversations. For example, a discussion about the uniforms the soldiers wear in ‘The Conquerors’ led to a child revealing how strange he felt not wearing a mask in school. One child quickly reassured the others, explaining how we were 'a bubble' and that was 'like a family’. Following Let’s Think, I often use bridging to help the children to develop their ideas further. Bridging can make what they have thought about relevant by giving it a real application and it can activate and embed learning. Furthermore, effective and meaningful bridging can be approached through creative activities, such as drawing. Last year, I carried out research for my MA dissertation in which the children in my Year 4 class drew and wrote in response to the Aaron Becker Trilogy Let’s Think in English lessons. I wanted to explore whether you could increase confidence, motivation, engagement and enjoyment by turning the focus towards the creative and compositional elements of the writing process and whether an approach that sought to foster creativity, such as integrating drawing, may encourage ‘reluctant’ and underperforming writers. I concluded that it may be valuable for children to use both drawing and writing as a circular, interconnected process which can happen in either direction, insofar as the act of drawing may support writing but it can also create and refine ideas: Similar to Let’s Think, drawing is inclusive and using drawing in the writing process seemed to increase:

• Creativity and subsequently engagement 
• Enjoyment and motivation
• Confidence about themselves as writers.

    One possible reason for this may be that both Let’s Think and drawing encourage children to concentrate on the compositional aspects of writing. When we ask children to write, we require them to focus on ‘mechanics’, such as spelling and handwriting. If a child is pre-occupied with mechanics, especially if they find these elements difficult, a negative consequence may be that they perceive they are not a ‘good’ writer, as they do not value the capabilities they do possess, such as their ability to generate ideas. Therefore, using drawing as a tool feels particularly important at the moment, with some children returning to school with fragile self-esteem.   In the research, the drawings produced by the children seemed to fall into two categories: process drawing, whereby the steps taken to create the image are more important than the outcome, and product drawing, when the final picture is more significant than the practice of making it. Children use both process and product drawing for different reasons. Product drawing encourages a focus on details and could enhance self-esteem. Process drawings help the generation and organisation of ideas and allow these to be re-told and adapted.  Process drawing tends to be used by children more creatively, spontaneously and confidently than product drawing. It also supports more elements of the writing process.     To promote process drawing, it may help to understand the first four key factors outlined in this diagram (in pink): the use of a rubber, time taken, details added and effort involved. By decreasing these, the child would hopefully value the outcome less and adapt images more readily, thus shifting to using drawing as a process.     The diagram below summaries the main influences on writers’ self-perceptions that I observed and that the children identified. Central to the process are the child’s feelings of motivation, engagement, confidence and enjoyment, which could all affect reluctant writing behaviour and drawing self-esteem, or the child’s self-perceptions. As a writer, the child’s positive feelings may be enhanced when given choice and drawing could improve creativity, thus improving engagement. Autonomy can impact positively on the four key feelings. Furthermore, through working together, these feelings are also developed by peer approval and support. Now, more than ever, we need to look after our children’s mental health and encourage them to value the capabilities they possess. Let’s Think and drawing are both tools which both seek to enhance the feelings at the centre of this diagram. By using them in the classroom more often, we can hopefully provide our children with the positive learning experiences they need to support them as they negotiate our ‘new normal’. [post_title] => Using drawing to support bridging as part of Let’s Think [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => using-drawing-to-support-bridging-as-part-of-lets-think [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-11-21 12:10:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-11-21 12:10:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1265 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1260 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-10-13 13:25:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-10-13 12:25:41 [post_content] => I began working with Let’s Think Maths over 15 years ago.  It was a time when it was the norm to split children up by ability, through task differentiation five ways in primary schools and through setting in secondary school.  Procedural teaching was the main focus, with a weekly open-ended problem thrown in, often an unstructured one with no teaching of problem solving strategies.  Talk was not expected in maths lessons, instead it was ‘heads down’, each pupil concentrating on the worksheet they had been given, some moving on to the final challenge at the end of the lesson, usually an opportunity to apply the procedural practice they had been undertaking.  In many classrooms, success mattered and mistakes weren’t wanted. At that time, Let’s Think Maths was like a breath of fresh air, especially for those pupils who had been labelled as ‘low ability’ and resigned to a continual daily intake of lower order number skills practice.  And for the teachers, it was a radically new approach: it was exploratory, many solutions were valid, all pupils could engage and the lowest achievers could shine, by coming up with creative solutions to the problems the class was trying to tackle.   Teachers on Let’s Think professional development programmes found that not only were mistakes and misconceptions interesting to explore, they enabled more effective follow-on teaching.  And they found that teaching in mixed achieving groups really made a difference to the quality of learning, especially for the lowest achievers. So much has changed since that time, and in the majority of maths classrooms.  The radical approaches to teaching mathematics that Let’s Think proposed have become mainstream thanks to a combination of government initiatives and high impact research projects.  Much as we might criticise the DFE’s obsession with and simplistic understanding of international policy borrowing, their focus on mastery mathematics has changed hearts and minds in terms of the value of problem solving, exploring multiple methods, teaching in mixed achieving groups, and the potential for low threshold – high ceiling lessons like Let’s Think.  The DFE has also re-opened the debate about the need for maths to be taught though carefully planned curriculum sequences as exemplified in textbooks and in the Let’s Think Maths schemata.  The Best Practice In Grouping Students research project, led by Professor Becky Francis, has radically changed the way we think about grouping pupils: for the first time, we are seeing huge numbers of secondary schools moving away from early setting in Year 7 towards mixed achieving classes.  The University of Cambridge Dialogic Teaching project has demonstrated the importance of classroom talk across the curriculum, but particularly in mathematics. Let’s Think Maths now fits smoothly into the curriculum and pedagogies of many teachers of mathematics.  And we would like to think that as an organisation advocating changes to the teaching of mathematics over several decades, we played a part in achieving these changes to practice.  I often bump into senior government advisers or mathematics experts in senior roles in mathematics organisations, who remember their CAME training well, and say it continues to inspire them. As Let’s Think Maths now aligns much more easily with the curricula and pedagogies schools are already using, it makes integration a lot simpler for teachers and for pupils.  Lessons are frequently used by teachers to assess: What do they already know and so what should I teach? Have they really learnt what I think I have taught?  The lessons also support the reasoning concept building that a standard mastery curriculum requires.  And the professional development programme is now one that includes many of the recommended research proven approaches to teacher learning:  it has duration, includes opportunities to apply learning into the classroom, operates in iterative cycles of practice and reflection, and is collaborative. The future is brighter for pupils in mathematics lessons – and we hope it continues to move in the right direction with Let’s Think as a key partner. [post_title] => The future of maths is a lot brighter [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-future-of-maths-is-a-lot-brighter [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-10-13 13:29:49 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-10-13 12:29:49 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1260 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1246 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-09-28 12:12:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-09-28 11:12:31 [post_content] => Whilst our experiences during lockdown, including the current restrictions, will depend on our personal and professional circumstances, the one commonality we all share is how we have had to cope with uncertainty on both a daily and long-term basis. As a natural scientist, I recall learning about Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle at university. Based on quantum mechanics, the Principle is that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be determined with absolute precision; if we know the position, we cannot know precisely the momentum and vice versa. In layman’s terms, the lack of precision means that any determination would be an estimate and therefore conceptually the measurement would have a limit or an inherent uncertainty. The Principle helps us understand that our inability to determine something absolutely creates a boundary to our understanding, beyond which lies uncertainty. At the core of Let’s Think (LT) lessons, the teacher facilitates cognitive activities in order that students experience cognitive conflict; this is when students’ current level of reasoning cannot accommodate a ‘somewhat surprising’ stimulus, which is often presented through a series of problem-solving tasks. Students work together to construct their reasoning in order to resolve the conflict, termed social construction, and teachers, as part of the metacognition stage, ask questions to elicit students’ responses such as how they solved the task, what made it difficult, how their thinking has changed etc. The metaphor of a jigsaw was used by Michael Shayer and Philip Adey, the cofounders of Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE), as part of the training materials for teachers in the early 1990s. Cognitive conflict was represented by a jigsaw puzzle; social construction involved peers working together to discuss and agree the strategy to resolve the puzzle; and metacognition promoted students’ conscious explanations of the strategy so it could be applied to other jigsaws. During lockdown, I have reflected on LT lessons and the promotion of cognitive conflict which inherently creates uncertainty. The success of a lesson is not determined by the resolution of the conflict but rather that it has been experienced; therefore students’ cognitive development requires them to experience uncertainty. During my eight years as Headteacher of Ruislip High School, I have talked to the Year 7 students at the beginning of their secondary career about Let’s Think lessons, in particular the importance of welcoming the challenge in lessons and knowing that at the end of a LT lesson they may feel slightly confused. I believe LT lessons equip students with the firsthand experience that uncertainty is part of our lives; problems can be dealt with by working collaboratively; and our conscious reasoning helps us to make adaptations as and when necessary. Whilst this current multi-faceted jigsaw puzzle of the pandemic is unlikely to be resolved without a vaccine, our responsibility as educators is to prepare our students to deal with uncertainty as part of life and to know that the boundaries created by it are an opportunity for the next generation to explore beyond our current level of understanding for a new and brighter future. [post_title] => The value of uncertainty [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-value-of-uncertainty [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-09-28 13:49:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-09-28 12:49:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1246 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [7] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1238 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-09-07 16:38:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-09-07 15:38:37 [post_content] => Let’s Think in English Tutor, Leah Crawford taught LT sessions to her extended family via Zoom through the spring and summer of lockdown. Below is the final post republished for the Let’s Think community.  Uplifting and painful in equal measure, it feels like a fitting way of summarising what we have been through together.   Life was getting busier for everyone.  Lots of work and school distractions were putting a strain on family meeting times. Whereas before a session might have been the main event of the day, it was now something we all had to make the time for and commit to. So I started the session with some reflections.  Scope the collective past to bring us in to the collective moment.  I asked the family if they thought we had become better at thinking together.  There was a visible affirmation in eyes and nods and body language. Okay – so how are we better? Our answers are longer.  So at the start you would have to ask questions to tease out more detail, but now we just do it. There’s more discipline in waiting your turn (my Dad looks comically askance at my Mum...) We’re listening more actively How can you tell? Because we’re building on what others say I’ve noticed we’re all more confident to share but particularly our young folk.  It’s been lovely to see that. And confident to disagree. Thanks everyone.  That sounds like something you should be proud of. So in preparation, I had told everyone the lesson was called ‘Dream deferred’ and to check the meaning of deferred.  I also asked them to think about whether they had ever had a dream and what barriers there may be to accomplishing a dream. Quite sensitive stuff. And do teenagers want to share their dreams when their dreams may still be shimmering in the distance, fragile yet imaginable? Have you ever had a dream? The adults led the way. So this takes me back to my teenage self, growing up on a rural inland island on the west coast of Norway. These days, the thin strip of fjord surrounding the island has been bridged and the island is accessible and escapable 24/7, but when I was young the connection to the mainland, and to civilisation, relied on a small ferryboat that docked up at 10pm every night. It gave us a strong sense of security – it was a place where no one locked their doors, believing any rotten eggs would be stopped at the ferry. But it also added to the sense of stifling claustrophobia. The place felt very insular and cut-off in every sense. While biding my time, I travelled in my dreams, to other times and other places. English was my favourite subject and England the object of my girlish dreams. The flickering flames of my naive passions were fed and stoked by tomes of Regency romantic novels. Sometimes I would make random and pricey long-distance calls to shops in England only to be able to practise my favourite foreign tongue. I got in real trouble.  In between reading and dreaming, I vividly remember sitting at the end of a narrow, weather-beaten wooden pier, knowing that this was as far away and to the west I could physically get in the moment, but trusting that my time would come. Once I was old enough, I would cross the divide. I would become one of those who got away. Stillness. This from my sister in law who has married an Englishman, and lives in London.  What made the poignancy of her dream all the more arresting was that she was speaking with such passion from a small flat in lockdown, in the midst of the hot city, with no garden or balcony.  I thanked her for sharing such a moving and personal story. So the barrier to this dream being realised was mainly age but also opportunity. Would anyone else be happy to share a dream? I have an odd story. (my Dad) When I was in the Upper Sixth at Holt Grammar School, we had a heck of a first football team.  We got to the finals of the Merseyside Grammar Schools’ Cup and were supposed to play at Goodison Park (Everton’s home ground.)  It turned out that the ground was closed at the time and we only got to use the training ground.  We played the game – it was a close 2-2 draw and it was decided we would share the title.   We all walked away knowing that we had something really special as a team but wouldn’t get to play together again, as we were going off to jobs and university.  I often thought about those times and the closeness and skill of the team, but something happened to make me see it all differently. After started at Uni in Manchester, I went back to school, it must have been for a prize-giving or something, and bumped into the old lab technician, Charlie Parker.  A lovely man.  He asked how I was, but then asked what I thought of the time I had been spotted by the talent scout.  I had to tell him I had no idea what he was talking about.  So it turns out that a talent scout from Everton had seen me play and, as it was in those days, gone straight to may Headmaster to suggest that I was signed up for the youth team.  He had told the scout ‘Don’t touch that boy.  He’s going to university.  He’s going places.’ How do you feel about that Dad? Even at the time, I don’t think I would have said any different.  But it’s strange that for so many young footballers that would have been the ultimate dream and at the time, I wasn’t even told. Now my Dad is an LFC fanatic.  It’s like a religion.  This was pre Bill Shankly days.  Liverpool FC were still Second Division, but Everton a First Division side.  So football was and is a huge part of his life.  But it turns out his dream of a working class boy becoming a research scientist was bigger - and was realised. On the back of this story, we talked about how other people’s view of you can be a barrier.  This could easily have been painful memory.  A sliding doors moment. My brother summarised at this point that it seemed important to distinguish between the barriers to dreams that are painful or those that are just about plausibility.  There are dreams of being an astronaut and playing for your favourite football club, but for most of us these don’t cause any pain.  We know they won’t come true and we don’t really try to make them come true.  There are so many barriers to achieving these dreams that we don't really aim for them.  They’re just fun to imagine. So this could be really helpful for us moving forward – are the barriers to a dream causing pain or are they just a reality that we can accept? Let’s read the text and think

• How does the poet feel about the dream being deferred’

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?   Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.   Or does it explode?   Let’s Think veterans will know this is the early social construction phase of the lesson, a space to build shared meanings.  However I went through my own early cognitive conflict.  My reading of the poet’s feelings has always been exclusively negative: the explosion in the finale is an angry outburst.  The family, without much need of me now, took their thoughts in two considered directions.  The raisin and the syrupy sweet could be positive images that are interspersed with the festering sore and stinking meat.  And those strings of questions – the poet isn’t sure if being deferred will lead to sweetness or decay.  Equally, some read the explosion as an angry outburst, but some thought this was an moment of escape, a metaphor for freedom.  I asked if the final line could mean both destruction and freedom and the group agreed this could be the case. Like a revolution. When asked what title they would devise for the poem, most were happy to use Dream Deferred but more positive possibilities like Dream Realised and Freedom were also contemplated. Harlem The poem is called Harlem The title was revealed and background information about the district of Harlem, the Harlem Renaissance and the poet Langston Hughes was shared. It was beautiful to listen to how the adults supported our younger folk through this shift in frame of reference.  My Mum and Dad lived in California in the 60’s and talked about the Civil Rights riots that mirrored the Harlem riots in downtown LA, supported by the students in Berkeley.  They took us back to that final line in the poem.  It was a fearful time: there was anger and violence, but there was hope in the air that a country built on racism might begin to face up to its history and work for change.

• Does the title change your view of the poem? 

A teenage voice piped up We've been thinking about the poem as one person’s dream but now it's about a group of people. It feels like it matters much more now. Some adults mused that they had not thought before about how a poem’s meaning suddenly shifts when you know its social and political history.  A quietness and a slowness of pace came upon the group.  I did not ask for an explanation of this. Same text: different frame I then explained that we were going to experience the poem in a different context.  The video we were about to watch was a Nike branding advertisement, released just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.  We talked a little about the difference between a branding advert compared to sales: my sister who worked in marketing coming in to her own with this concise definition ‘a brand is a compelling promise consistently delivered.’  So we thought we would watch the advert and try to tease out the ‘compelling promise’.  I shared the star,  Sonya Richards’ personal story of injury and struggle: that she was on the brink of not qualifying for the Olympics, then crossed the line with one final, explosive qualifying race. You can watch the ad here

• Why might Nike have used Langston Hughes’ poem to promote their brand?
• Is it appropriate for Nike to use his poem to promote their brand?

True cognitive conflict ensued.  Some did not like the advert at all: neither its style, its use of the poem or the way the poem was read. Our ten year old female Londoner liked the way that the ‘brand’ included all generations of Black American women. A young girl can watch this and think ‘This could be me.  I could do that too.’” People began to re-read the poem. Sonya’s run is nothing like the festering sore running in the poem.  But we can see how her dream was drying up and sagging like a load. The athletic explosion at the end becomes something that can only be positive whereas we saw a tension in the ending. But if you notice those three generations of black women in the film, Nike might be trying to make the link between her struggle and their struggle. Did they do any more than release the advert? ...adds my 15 year old. It’s like those companies who buy their way into the London Pride March, but don't do anything to support LGBTQ rights.  Do they put their money where their mouth is? We did not reach a consensus and I didn’t push for one.  I think this is one of those questions that disturbs your thinking and opens you up and it’s best to stay in that disequilibrium.

• Does the poem still have resonance today?

The group did agree that the poem still had resonance – not just as a social and political text about a people and a movement, a dream still deferred in too many ways, but for anyone whose dreams have been restricted by the opportunities open to them or by how other see them. What happens to a dream deferred? Langston Hughes’ Harlem was a prism through which we explored each others’ dreams, moments from our past histories as well as the pride, pain and living struggle of Black history. One week later George Floyd was murdered. That Sunday we paused the lessons and spoke only of this.   End of an era This will be the final Let’s Think in Lockdown blog. We completed a total of 13 sessions together.  That’s 14 people and a small sausage dog making the time to improve and expand their thinking through texts and through each other.  Yes, we were in lockdown.  Yes, I know we had nowhere else to go.  But choosing to sit together in front of a screen for over an hour a week, focused intently on a text and each other’s thoughts brought us closer together in a way we never would have dreamed of. I’ll leave you with my Mum. Let’s Think family sessions have evoked distant memories and led me to explore the ideas rattling around in my head in lockdown. Let’s Think is a powerful process, I have been enticed into reading extracts of texts from so many various sources and enjoyed and been rewarded by the exploration process. The vivid imaginings of the youngsters, the measured approaches of the students, the learned embellishments of the wise and good and the opportunity for us ‘wrinklies’ to still feel valued and able to contribute. This has been such a rewarding exercise for all of us.  We are learning that we need to listen to each other to expand our thinking. A valuable lesson anywhere. [post_title] => Let's Think in Lockdown Blog 8: Still dreaming of change [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-in-lockdown-blog-8-still-dreaming-of-change [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-09-07 18:09:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-09-07 17:09:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1238 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [8] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1214 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-06-09 14:15:59 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-06-09 13:15:59 [post_content] => Imagine being in the thick of teaching a Let’s Think lesson.  Now imagine you could press pause and invite some world leading academics into your classroom to give their insights?   What if you had on hand Professors Neil Mercer, Patricia Alexander or Lauren Resnick to help you consider the development of thinking through talk.  What if you had Piaget available to point you to features of thinking indicative of the student’s development? Because you had paused those moments of teaching, each distinguished researcher would offer a different ‘lens’ through which you could reflect on the development of thinking.  What indicators might they point you to?  You could discuss with them why they, above other noticeable features, are worthy of note.   Might the new ‘lens' they offer have implications for the moves you go on to make as a teacher to promote the development of thinking? The Let’s Think Forum has been involved in a trans-national partnership to help teachers with insights into the development of thinking.  Where it has proven especially useful to UK teachers is the bridge the project has created between distinguished researchers, their sometimes obscure research literature and assessment tools that have use in the classroom.  We have been able to provide well-researched ‘lenses’ that have helped teachers see their classrooms anew, providing real time insights into the hidden events in their classroom. The project, ACTS: Assessment Companion for Thinking Skills will be published later next year. It has involved a two year development and trial of the ‘lenses’ or assessment tools as we call them within the project. What teachers have said about their use of the assessment tools and their engagement in the project suggests that the tools have value and even a wider use….. To see their classrooms through new lenses: “The tools help us to see differently, and in detail to help form observations based on deeper theories of education, thinking and learning “ACTS is a teacher’s journey through a different thinking process.” It is really interesting how many of us used the tools to help move on our students! Helping our understanding of what they think and how they think.” “The extra reading (about the research background) supported the understanding of the tool.” To go beyond the use of the tool with Let’s Think: “The tools are flexible so they can be widened or sharpened to suit the school need/context.” “It (the use of the assessment tool) developed from a Let’s Think lesson to be applied to other lessons.” To recognise that the project had impacted their general practice:  “ACTS is really a CPD package to help teachers gain an insight into thinking in a classroom.”  “I found the ACTS CPD a more worthwhile CPD as it really allowed review of own practice and the tools were easily adaptable.” The range of assessment tools the Let’s Think Forum team have created have been helping teachers discriminate between useful discourse and less helpful interactions.  They have shown teachers the value of creating the conditions for ‘productive failure’ in a way that helps develop pupil reasoning. They have provided the progress prompts that move students from relational thinking to relational reasoning and helped teachers see the significance of their actions in planning for these events.   They have also supported teachers understand development in terms of Piaget, an accomplished piece of wisdom for any teacher, and in relation to the complexity of reasoning in a task using SOLO taxonomy.

Closed: defensive or presentational	Learners...
	Present ideas as closed and final Defend a position to self-protect See discourse as competition	Agree with others in order to protect them Agree with others to avoid thinking or to avoid conflict
Open: exploratory	Learners...
	Offer ideas to the group for discussion Give reasons and evidence Consider alternatives	Rehearse and play with the ideas of others to make sense of them Build on the ideas of others

 Observing a lesson, watching a video or reading a transcript of a lesson, discuss:

• Do the teacher and learners have an open or closed orientation to each other?
• Does this shift according to phases in the lesson or according to who is speaking?
• What are some of the indicators that suggest the culture of talk in this classroom?

Working as part of a strategic trans-national partnership Thanks to Erasmus Plus EU funding, the project enabled the UK team to work alongside colleagues from Finland and Latvia, who brought different perspectives to the project coming from their own education traditions. We believe we have some refreshing and helpful assessment tools whose use will be illustrated by examples of classroom practice that we hope to be able to share at the beginning of next year when we have concluded the trials and the project.  If you would like to sample an assessment tool then please contact us. [email protected]   [post_title] => Developing pupils’ thinking skills [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => developing-pupils-thinking-skills [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-06-09 14:52:52 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-06-09 13:52:52 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1214 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [9] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1186 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2020-05-07 13:50:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-05-07 12:50:52 [post_content] => As I write, schools in the UK and across most of the globe are closed.  I have been continuing to support trainee teachers, school leaders and their teams and my own children at home.  It didn’t take long to realise that however creative we try to be, remote learning provision alone will always be a poor substitute to learning in the social ecosystem of the classroom or training venue. The ticking engine of every Let’s Think lesson is the minute to minute, live social construction of understanding.  If students are truly developing new understanding – not consolidating existing understanding – then adult mediation and collaboration with peers is essential.  Cognitive processes are shaped in and by our social context. I’m admitting to myself as I write this, that I’m sounding not only dry, but disconnected from the human and emotional dimensions of the impact of Covid 19 and the current lockdown.  So, it’s going to be much harder for many students to make cognitive progress without being in school.  Aren’t we actually more worried by their social and emotional well-being?  School aged children are in the process of becoming themselves, shaping their sense of who they are and their worth through interactions with others.

Well-being or intelligence?

We’ll cut back to my own situation for a moment.  Thinking about my extended family, nephews and nieces, my head was firmly in the well-being camp.  How could we stay connected in lockdown?  Sure, we were bound to try some video-calls, but these are notoriously hard with lots of participants.  What we’d need is some kind of engaging structure.  There are only so many quiz nights one can bear....  Then I thought about how silent and solitary our young people’s remote learning was going to be, however hard their schools were trying to keep the show on the road.  What did we have to lose? ‘So, I’ve been thinking.  I do this thing called Let’s Think.  I think it could work in family teams.  We do some thinking and puzzling about texts together.  It could feel like a fun challenge.  What do you think?” They were in.  As with every extended family in the current climate, this is a group not without its distractions and anxieties.  I did not bombard them with the theory behind the programme or its potential cognitive benefits.  What I did do, however, was take the connection and climate of the social group very seriously.  When you ask a group of people aged 10 -79 to think together, honestly, openly and aloud, particularly on a video call where all sorts of social signals can be lost, the social emotional stakes are high, however close we believe ourselves to be.  Families are constantly under construction. So, I sent out guidelines for engagement: “What could be tricky is that we are used to being playful together for playful’s sake – to make each other laugh, to connect.  There’s nothing wrong in that.  I’m hoping this will feel like fun, working through some questions and problems together, but the idea is not to say the funniest thing or to win an argument.  It may be helpful to talk through these guidelines together: When you work in your family group:

• Everyone should have the chance to contribute
• Explain your ideas, rather than just state them
• Listen to the ideas of others and share what you think about them
• Respect and consider differences – they are often useful
• Try to work towards a family group response that you will share with the whole group when we come back together

As I could rely on some adult mediation, for each session I sent out some guidelines on preparing for the session, the reading matter, and the first social construction question.  Each video call session could then open with a swift review of the concrete preparation and move to the negotiated family response: ‘We thought...’  ‘We talked about...’  which quite quickly became ‘Well, we just couldn’t agree because....’  I stuck to my principles and cued in our young folk to speak for their family group, even though I could see some worried eye-movements, hear their initial uncertainty, a certain lack of confidence and a lack of elaboration in their answers.  Cruel?  Yes – a bit of me felt so – particularly as their aunty, but the ‘tutor on autopilot’ knew this was no time to change the rules and rely on confident, elaborated adult responses to move through the sessions.  We would lose the kids in no time – mentally and physically.

So where are we?

If I had had to predict what would happen back then, I think I would have admitted that we would work through three, maybe four sessions, then return to the odd family quiz.  In fact we are nine sessions in.  The group initially wanted two sessions a week.  As the kids’ schools have found their feet and home learning has a more regular rhythm, we are back to weekend only sessions.  It is our young people who have pressed for more sessions, asked for the video calls to go through their devices and sat increasingly centre stage in their family group. I have my own thoughts about what may be happening here.  If you would like to follow my more detailed account of each session, I am blogging my reflections here. Have we been attending to well-being or intelligence? To close this blog, I’d prefer to include some reflections from family members:     I feel more than ever that the kind of disciplined inquiry that is Let’s Think could be key to managing the return to learning together in-school and being together in school.                         [post_title] => Let’s Think in Lockdown [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-in-lockdown [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-05-11 11:51:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-05-11 10:51:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1186 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 10 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1370 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-02-10 18:16:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-02-10 18:16:52 [post_content] => Let’s Think is a classroom intervention whose powerful ticking engine lies in the social construction of understanding.  The safe, meaning making community that we work so hard to develop over time, is built on carefully mediated dialogic exchanges.  Yet we know there are dimensions of communication beyond the words spoken: body language, eye-contact, tones of voice, the positioning and creation of groups, the sharing of resources. Even on the return to live teaching in school in September 2020 there were additional challenges to teaching Let’s Think with restrictions on the seating, grouping and movement of students and teacher. Michael Walsh, LTE lead tutor helpfully blogged about ways we might manage these restrictions here. Some schools have understandably felt that Let’s Think lessons will be on pause for the early Spring Term whilst we are teaching remotely.  So, when I read on the Twitter grapevine that Myfanwy Edwards, English Subject Leader at the new Richmond Upon Thames School in Twickenham, would be continuing to teach Let’s Think in English remotely, this small case study felt like something worth capturing for the whole LT community.  It’s a work in progress, but Myfanwy and I captured the story so far via a Zoom interview at the end of January. I taught LTE for 4 years at my previous school.  I felt lucky that there was a core of us who were really committed to the programme and to continued teacher development. We were in and out of each other’s classrooms, observing and reflecting and adapting practice.  I think this helped me to establish some key principles that I still believe in. So what were those principles? For me, they are the principles on which all good teaching of English is based and actually, we used them as principles for planning and teaching in the rest of our curriculum.  The importance of talk for collaborative meaning making is foremost: it didn’t take much persuasion for me to believe in this.  It’s strange now looking back, I started Let’s Think with a Year 7 group that first year and I took them all the way through to Year 10.  Although we did not use the KS4 lessons, they were so well versed in how to build meaning together, they understood that English is not individualistic or competitive and that they would benefit from building understanding together, that it was so easy by Year 10 to just set a group task or question and I knew they would make something from it. Now having done more training with my new department, the aspect that I did not fully grasp the first time around was the discipline of the Reasoning Patterns: having just one conceptual focus for each lesson.  For every rich text in English there are so many angles you could take, but a Let’s Think lesson takes a disciplined route through one concept, yet still gives room for students’ own route to understanding this.  I like the way that the Concrete Preparation section lays the ground-work for this direction in thinking, and offers you ways you can use in other lessons.  I think I’ve particularly learned how introducing the context or even the author does not have to be at the start or before reading a text, but can be woven in later to add a new dimension to thinking.  I like that sometimes context and author are not introduced at all and that lack of resolution keeps thinking open and bridgeable to the next context, like in ‘By the Sea.’  So I think overall, I like the disciplined, structured plan, but with enough flexibility for students to make their own meaning. Another school of thought is to ask students what is of interest to them, what they notice in a text and work with this.  I think if this is used in tandem with Let’s Think, the students learn how to use the freedom.  So just last term, my Year 7s having worked though The Bridge introductory lesson, were confident in working through who was to blame for a tragedy in their set text, because they had internalised the process.  That’s the metacognition principle.  It really works if you plan that disciplined training, then an opportunity to reapply. So my next question Myfanwy was around your decision to ask Michael Walsh to train the whole of your new department in September 2020, even though it could not be a face to face development day and had to be remote training on Zoom.  I can extrapolate from what you’ve said that it was about the importance of collaborative meaning making, the disciplined training of reasoning, the metacognition and bridging to reapply that thinking.  But why did you not wait until the training could be in person? It was linked to the lockdown. Kids had been sitting alone in a room, maybe talking to siblings or friends on social media, but nothing like the disciplined collaborative meaning making we manage in class, say around a poem.  We felt we needed to retrain the students and I wanted to give the staff in my new department the structures and development and confidence to manage this.  Michael is great, too, he helps you enter the programme on all sorts of levels: the pure cognitive growth angle, the democratic principle, the nature of literary making meaning.  I’m interested in what students have to say. So the way we have taught The Tempest with Year 7 remotely has shown that they know how to ask good questions of a text without the need for us as teachers to front load all sorts of colonial context.  In fact, the main contextualising I did was to imagine what it would be like to be in a shipwreck.  Then we read the opening scenes and they needed no prompting to ask why Prospero feels it is his right to be ruler of the island and that saving Ariel doesn’t necessarily give him that right.  It then felt like a natural development to move to questions of Colonialism and slavery. So it sounds like you were already seeing an impact on Year 7 from teaching Let’s Think in that 2020 autumn term? Absolutely.  The exchange of prior knowledge is so much more noticeable in pure mixed ability classes.  I’ve done some recordings where you can hear the ripple in the Vygotskian shared ZPD! But also how quick they have been to become more aware of how they are reading and can reapply a process. Did you hear teachers talk about their practice shifting? Yes, I have a teacher with 11 years experience, who asked if we could adapt the whole Year 10 poetry GCSE unit using the principles of Let’s Think, interleaving some of the GCSE lessons with anthology poems, like the George the Poet and Blake lesson on London.  I wondered if a more experienced teacher might be harder to convince but that wasn’t the case because she was so encouraged by the level of interest and understanding in the students’ responses.  Then there is my reading co-ordinator who is using Let’s Think as a lens through which to view her teaching of A Christmas Carol for her MA, again because of the quality and independence of responses. So there was enthusiasm, there was quite swift influence on the curriculum and teaching beyond Key Stage 3.  But teaching Let’s Think via remote live contexts presents a whole new challenge: what made you want to continue? I think if anything having to teach online has sharpened all of our principles.  What is really important to us and how can we ensure that that still happens online?  So, we have a focused teaching and learning department meeting every fortnight online. So far, we have discussed: How can we incorporate Assessment for Learning? How can we enable collaboration? and How can we include personal response?  There is no point in having principles if they go out of the window as soon as they are challenged.  So one of the most important things has been keeping the idea of the ‘third turn’ – avoiding the closed shop of teacher initiation, student response and teacher feedback, but instead folding student response back in to the thinking and further responses of the whole group. That’s hard in the chat box, I’ve found, particularly when some students don’t have a microphone or are in a context where they can’t unmute and say more about their answer. It is, but we have worked on us using the chat box comments to summarise where their thinking is, to make links between what students have said ‘So, Louis seems to be saying something similar to Ashton there.’ Then asking ‘Do you agree or disagree with that shared point’.  It’s not the same, but they are contributing and it gives the sense of a conversation and a communal effort.  You can also offer provocative statements related to the question to open up the level of contribution.  The London, Blake and George the Poet lesson worked particularly well with Year 10.  It was easier to do online with the video link, so that I could set this as an independent task – a breather – in between.  We said, go away then post in the chat what you think.  And that level of contribution feels even more important at the moment for student well-being. The idea of moving straight to an analytical paragraph, on your own with a grid to scaffold doesn’t feel right, when we could be asking: What do you think and feel about this? So let’s just pause here for people who might be reading this and thinking of trialling a Let’s Think lesson online.  You have mapped one lesson across two, to give thinking and reflection time? Yes, so the London lesson was across two lessons.  I will give them a screen break to reflect, then return and there is a shared Google doc with the text broken into sections and the student names in groups next to a section of the text, so they can add their thoughts on that section and begin to respond to each other.  And I can nominate one student in each group to get ready, come off mic and summarise the group’s thoughts from what has been typed into the shared document, just as we would in a classroom Let’s Think.  Another of my colleagues encouraged and gave the students time to text, phone, or Snapchat before entering group thoughts.  I think that’s the reason I would most encourage other teachers to try Let’s Think, is that you are encouraging, you are making the space in the school day, for students to talk to each other about something rich and share what they think. So the idea of walking away, or writing reflections between lessons might even be facilitated with shared software.  I have experimented with Google Jamboard (an electronic post-it board) and with Padlet – which is available to everyone – where students can respond to each other’s posts like a dialogue string. The important thing is we are locked down but not locked in.  Our teaching is based on asking questions that matter and listening with genuine interest to the responses and using those to frame the next question.  What’s interesting is that lockdown teaching has opened up another skill, if you like, of sharing and drafting more informal written responses in an exchange.  Some students are actually more willing to do this than they are to talk.  The interesting thing is going to be how confident they will be to talk with the same elaboration that they have in writing.  I imagine it will take us some time to find that confidence again. Yes, I think in post lockdown Autumn 2020, at least where I teach, we had more prevalence of extremes than we would normally. We had students who found it hard to ‘unmute’ and those who were overexcited by the communal context for learning again and offered too much too soon, without thinking.  Is there anything else we should be mindful of as a difference teaching Let’s Think online? Spoken interaction is multi-modal – not all responses are verbalised, we read body language and gestures.  And when students do unmute to the whole class online, we hear everything they say and so do other classmates, so that small group drafting of ideas in a safe, small forum has been lost.  We are simulating some sense of social construction, but it is different.  I’m actually hoping that some of the elaboration I’ve had in informal writing will translate to greater confidence in writing in class.  I think there may be some benefits. I even wonder if some will have thought harder about this poem I’ve put in front of them in a room at home with nothing else to think about than they would at school with all sorts of distractions. There could be some silver linings... And finally, what role will Let’s Think play post lockdown.. I don’t buy in to the scenario of lost learning and us having to start from scratch.  I actually hope we have students who have been quite reflective online, some even more reflective online and we can remind them of that and regrow that in talk in the classroom.  But we will work hard to return to that safe, collaborative, purposeful space we had begun to develop last term. Having talked now, further down the line, I can see that I’d like to sequence the lessons to bridge into the curriculum as I hear schools talk about that at the Let’s Think in English network meetings.  Being a brand new school, our curriculum is still under construction.  Once that has settled and we have all taught the LTE lessons twice, we’ll be ready to build that in. Thank you Myfanwy.  I feel your optimism will be a welcome antidote.  Myfanwy tweets at @Miff_  Leah tweets at @think_talk_org   [post_title] => Let’s Think online? 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