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From pagan mythology to literature, the moon has become a symbol of constant change, unreliability, even madness.   Conversely, during the past year, as scrolling news reports tried to unravel the impact of the fast-changing pandemic, broadcasters seemed to be more than usually attentive to the lunar calendar as a reassuring constant, drawing attention to unusual full moon manifestations: September’s Harvest Moon, January’s Wolf Moon, April’s Pink Moon, and May’s Supermoon.   Looking back on my 2020-21 year of teaching, perhaps the most ‘lunatic’ year to return to classroom teaching, we had to steel ourselves against inconstancy and ride some rough storms.  There were the lower level but necessary pragmatics of desk cleaning, seating plans and hand sanitising; the logistics of zoned year groups that gave birth to a new breed of masked avenger teacher, scurrying between zones, heroically pulling their trolleys of books and papers; then there was the swift-footed response to burst bubbles, managing in-class and remote learning in tandem.     We came to expect the waxing and waning rhythms of pandemic life, the full glow and the shadows.  But what we now know that the pagans didn’t, is that the rock of the moon is always reassuringly there.  The full moon is always in orbit – its full glory is just not always visible. As I returned to the classroom, luckily to a school that has embraced Let’s Think in English, the principles of Cognitive Acceleration (CA) became my rock.  Those principles were always constant but I felt their enactment in practice wax and wane through the challenges of COVID era education. Although many reading this blog will be familiar with CA in some form, it does not hurt for me to be clear and transparent about the principles we aimed to enact through Let’s Think in English and why:

1. High and equitable involvement: it was likely that what our most vulnerable learners had most missed out on through a period of remote learning was the efficacy that comes from being a valued contributor in a safe community.  You matter, you all matter, and it matters what you think and say.
2. The social construction of meaning.  Reading is not an extraction of meaning from the page but an active, constructive, personal and social process.  We needed to test out whether readers were alert, attentive, monitoring and questioning the meaning they were constructing.  Could we help them to become more aware of their own process of meaning making by making it shared and social?
3. The centrality of challenge.  Without challenge, learners are metaphorically treading water.  This may build stamina, but it does not take you into new ways of thinking: extending cognitive capacity.  Could we help students to move from personal and instinctive responses to texts towards reasoned and critical responses by noticing resonance and dissonance with the thoughts of others?
4. The nurturing of metacognition.  Becoming more aware of and being able to productively steer one’s thoughts is not a given in our academic or personal lives.  Could students over time become more aware of how they were building understanding, whether that understanding was reasoned and tested and become more able to transfer and apply this to new texts and contexts?

Lofty aims.  So how much of this did we achieve? So follows my reflections on the past year’s phases of the moon: teaching Let’s Think in a pandemic. September’s Full Harvest Moon In the full glow of the ripe promise of September, my very first lesson with my Year 7 group was a KS2 lesson using Smriti Prasadam Hall’s symbolic picture book ‘Rain Before Rainbows’ which you can access here.  It is a story that moves from a place of trauma and loss through struggle, to hope.  The message of the text did not present the usual degree of challenge for a Year 7 group but it was deeply pertinent and we took our journey in deliberate stages to establish the routines and rituals of collaborative making meaning:

• Can you repeat that so the whole group can hear?
• Could you share what your group thought?
• Did you have a similar or different idea to this group?

With subtle metacognitive nudges:

• What was it in the text that led you to think that?
• As we continue to read, what will it be helpful to look for?
• Do you know other symbols of hope?

I was clear with the group that they faced an additional challenge to listen and respond to each other’s ideas whilst being seated in rows facing the front.  They described what they would need to do to show that they were listening other than through eye contact and body language, based around being able to repeat, respond to and question the contributions of others. We then moved to the usual Let’s Think induction lessons based on a fable, The Bridge, (lesson available here) which provoke conflict in ethical perspective taking and build on awareness of narrative structures.  We began to gain some traction with the power of conflict, working with difference to deepen thinking.  As teacher mediator, I felt the power and responsibility to calibrate our climate.  Yes, I could request elaboration from a student to explain their group’s response – but I could also create the air-time for students to explain what or who had led them to change their mind as the lesson progressed.  I saw that if I made space for and was fascinated by this– the students became so and quite quickly became unafraid, willing even, to share changes in their thinking.   It was heartening to see the cross-fertilisation of ideas and increased confidence was still happening even without the powerful, physical signifier that is students seated in table groups.   Waning  Moon...November to December As the second wave of the pandemic loomed, it became harder to build on our promising start.  I was part of a well-run department: a tight ship.  As bubbles burst and the usual scheme of work was at times disrupted with students having to self-isolate, I felt the very real tension between programming in Let’s Think lessons and making progress through the scheme of work with its valid common assessment tasks and moderation cycles.  A great reminder of the pragmatics of applying research principles in practice.   January New Moon It is odd that the very absence of a visible moon is heralded as a new moon.  The ultimate ‘glass half-full’ philosophy, perhaps.  Be patient...it will return. That’s exactly the position we found ourselves in just a few days into January with the dark days of an extended lock down and a return to remote teaching.  Our school policy was to keep to the usual school timetable, teaching alternate synchronous and asynchronous remote lessons.   Could we maintain the CA principles we had set and begun to enact through this phase?  The attendance of my Year 7 students at live lessons was remarkably good, but only a third or so of students had working microphones to contribute orally, not all initially had access to lap-tops and not all had good broadband connectivity.   To maintain our principles the pace through lesson content slowed down and innovation kicked in:

• To maintain high levels of contribution, I would share a recorded reading of a text and pose a question or questions and capture responses asynchronously on Padlets or Google Jamboards.  The beauty of Padlet particularly is that there is the facility for students – and teachers – to respond to each other’s posts, creating chains of thought.
• To encourage elaboration and the shift from thinking to reasoning, I could select student posts to use as springboards in live lessons – inviting students to elaborate on an idea and explore dissonances between student responses.
• To maintain the centrality of challenge for progress, whether teaching Let’s Think lessons or the core scheme of work, we worked towards and through binary choices to slow down thinking and provoke reasoning.  Is this Romantic painting/poem frightening or beautiful?  Having read these poems, which poet has the greater respect for nature: Wordsworth or Clare?

Waxing towards a full Supermoon We returned to school in March 2021.  Every first lesson I taught with every group was a Let’s Think lesson.  Why?   We had not let go of the importance of equitable conversational turns to build self-efficacy, meaning and cognition during lockdown – but it had been more difficult, more stilted and too reliant on each student’s access to hardware and broadband connectivity and their confidence to share ideas in a chat box or on the live microphone.  We needed the return to class to be a return to valuing, responding to and enjoying each other.  We were unmuted and unlocked – but not unmasked.  Masks made smaller, quieter voices hard to hear.  Ensuring that all pupils were contributing to and accessing the ensuing discourse of the lesson was even harder.  Asking students to discuss and arrive at a small group response, then jot down a phrase or a few bullet points to indicate that response on a white board unlocked the next ‘waxing’ phase of teaching.  If I could see each group’s board, I could reflect back to them the common chords and discords from across the group.  In this way they could still ‘hear’ and respond to each other, and I could more easily distil themes or productive binary conflicts to inform the next phase of the lesson:

• So I can see many of you think...
• The most common response seems to be...
• However, we also have some groups who think...
• The room seems to be split between those who think...and those who think...

This really was now a phase of waxing growth: I was able to teach lessons with rhythm and regularity across the remaining school term.  There were two major developments that became possible in this phase which I feel are central to embedding Let’s Think as an intervention that works in synergy with the broader curriculum.

1. The lessons were sequenced and positioned to enable students to bridge concepts from one text to another.  Some might call this interleaving.  When constructing an English curriculum, we are often used to creating tapestries of texts for study by theme or by genre.  So, for example, why would I place the study of a short 1950’s sci-fi story at the end of a unit on Romantic poetry and nature?  By the end of the sci-fi lesson, students consider whether a text that contains some outdated notions can still be resonant and relevant in the present.  When we bridged to the relevance of Romantic visions of nature in 2021, the students argued passionately that we are just as much in danger of losing touch with the natural world.  In the face of the climate crisis, we need humility and respect for the power of nature. And how would we have coped in lockdown without those walks?
2. I made the group increasingly accountable to set their own direction and goals for development.  We had used dialogic talk reflection tools in the autumn term, but the disruptions to in-class teaching had knocked us off course.  We used the tool below, developed through the Assessment Companion for Thinking Skills (ACTS) project (link to this and other tools here) to assess the strengths and areas for development in the group’s dialogic talk behaviours: moving from foundational behaviours of inclusion, politeness and clarity in exchanges, to ones that are fuelled by a desire to question, share differences and reach for the most reasoned, evidenced ideas.

  Developing dialogic norms reflection tool

			To improve our group needs..
1	Everyone contributes	Expect to contribute Take turns Be polite Show you are listening
2	Seek understanding	Make yourself clear Elaborate your answer Track the ideas of others Ask questions of others
3	Explore differences and reasons	Be open to different ideas Share agreement and disagreement Ask ‘Why do you think that?’ Ask for evidence & reasons
4	Pursue the best ideas	Be open to changing your mind or adapting your ideas Work towards well reasoned ideas together

  Let’s Think pandemic teaching has confirmed my belief in the full Supermoon principles mentioned at the start of this blog.  It has forced innovation in improved use of white boards, Padlets and binary options as effective dialogic mechanisms.  In the final term, it gave me the opportunity to enact the rich possibilities of embedding Let’s Think lessons in wider curriculum sequencing and design.  In collaboration with department leaders, we drafted the legacy for a more generative Let’s Think pathway through their rich curriculum.  Finally, it has crystallised the importance of inviting students to become co-pilots on their shared educational journeys.  To the moon and beyond... [post_title] => Reflections on a Mad and Moonly year of Teaching English [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => reflections-on-a-mad-and-moonly-year-of-teaching-english [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-10-04 09:44:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-10-04 08:44:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1426 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1421 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-09-01 09:26:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-09-01 08:26:07 [post_content] => How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene (ISBN: 9780141989303) I was first introduced to the work of this neuroscientist by Mundher Adhami many years ago. Michael Shayer and Mundher drew upon his work during the development of the Let’s Think Maths lessons for Key Stage 1 and at the time I found his book, The Number Sense to be a revelation. Back then it was helpful to read a book that actually gave real insights into how the growing understanding of the brain could help teachers in the classroom. The impact then was a careful rethinking of my understanding of the development of mathematical thinking during early childhood. The early part of this century saw the educational press awash with books about the brain, many of which made some rather grand claims about the application of neuroscience to the learning process and the actions of the teacher in the classroom. Philip Adey refers to several of these issues in his last publication, Bad Education, which I would strongly recommend you reading for a deeper reflection on the place of Let’s Think within education. To say I enjoyed How we learn would be an understatement. I found it stimulating, challenging and accessible which is actually quite something given the number of chapters on brain imaging and the multiple references to obscure areas of the brain I think I should know. How We Learn has given me even more to think about for it has made me question my own understanding of the brain and how it impacts the learning taking place in my classroom. For a week after putting down the book I weighed up my classroom practice against the advice in this book which is also titled The New Science of Education and the Brain. Until recently any author claiming to give direct teaching advice based upon brain science was given very little space in my thinking. This is in part due to the spurious science that is often involved when someone claims to tell you how the brain learns and the movement pushing learning styles and other such oversimplifications of science as quick educational fixes. This book however is among an emerging breed of practical application texts concerning brain science. It seeks to use scientists’ growing understanding of brain development and function to provide clear and simple advice that can transform our classrooms. Dehaene is a very well respected neuroscientist who is both measured and thoughtful in the advice he gives and also one who is mindful of the claims he is making. What is helpful, is how his understanding of how the brain works can be applied to learning and specifically learning that takes place in school. There is a lovely episode on page 189 where there is an appeal to allow mirth and laughter to have a place in the learning process. This is timely advice for I finished this book on the 8th of March the day when children in England returned to school after lockdown2. I wonder how much laughter was heard after all those months of silence? Part Three of this book gave me the most food for thought for here he outlines the pedagogical features that need to be present for efficient learning to take place: attention, active engagement, error feedback and consolidation.  As a Let’s Think Tutor three of these resonated very strongly with me. His reference to the idea of error feedback contained a really interesting take on cognitive conflict (a key feature of all Let’s Think teaching). The subheading for one section in this chapter was ‘surprise is the driving force of learning’ and to qualify what he means he quotes research that states that: ‘organisms only learn when events violate their expectations’ which helped me to look afresh at this aspect of my teaching and planning. I also found his focus upon attention quite interesting as this referred to what pupils attend to and my own understanding of how to engage pupils. I have now come to see that Let’s Think lessons contain triggers that engage children and to support their talking. Triggers can be part of the lesson or ideas that focus pupils such as in one lesson recently where I used the idea of the r-number to focus pupils on the nature of exponential growth. Active engagement connects with the idea of social construction in Let’s Think and the fact we are supporting pupils to working collaboratively on a shared challenge. Dehaene states that the brain learns efficiently only if it is attentive, focused, and active in generating mental models and in Let’s Think this is best done with other adolescents for the words of a 12 year old are more accessible to another peer of the same age than mine. Consolidation concerns time and the importance of sleep in the learning process.  Let’s Think works because it takes time i.e. two years as we seek to enrich and balance our students diet of experiences within the classroom. Each of the sections above are practical and helpful and serve to lead the reader towards the main aim of the book which is to provide a neuroscience-informed approach to education. The highlight of this section are the thirteen easy applicable action points of which I will relate numbers 6, 7 and 13.

• Keep children active, curious, engaged and autonomous,
• Make every school day enjoyable,
• Let students sleep!

There is much here to support the pupils we are so passionate about and I aim to distil more of the gems contained within How We Learn for the rest of this year and beyond. [post_title] => How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => how-we-learn-by-stanislas-dehaene [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-09-07 15:25:18 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-09-07 14:25:18 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1421 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1414 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-06-24 10:45:45 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-24 09:45:45 [post_content] =>   Alex Black a fellow member of the Let's Think Forum, re-introduced me to Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Barbel Inhelder's 1974 paper with the charming title, 'If you want to get ahead, get a theory'.  I had first read it a long time ago as a paper about how young children develop an understanding of balance, seeing how small blocks can be balanced across a steel rod. A second reading gave me much more, and something that has real power for teachers developing their practice.  Please read the paper because I wouldn't want you to miss out on the way the authors create an elegant activity for young children to try:  the oddly weighted blocks, the sequence of task demands are all very typical of the Genevan School at the time.  And do read the paper because it's aiming to share a much bigger idea about what happens to our theories of the world when we attempt actions in the world based on them.   It's the bigger idea that has captured us and will inform a seminar we are planning about the theories behind cognitive acceleration.  It is a paper about how we deal with the clash between our internal world of ideas and the world itself.  For example: A person has a theory about the world, their theory leads them to act in a certain way.  Their actions lead to unintended consequences.... what might they do next, what might they be thinking?

A: Keep their theory and act the same way again

'The world is full of chance events; things don't always happen the same way. My theory is a decent one but this time, by chance it didn't work out, I'll give it another go.'

B: Keep their theory but act differently

'I know the world well but the fault was in the way I acted, if I try something different in line with my theory then this time it will be OK'

C: Begin to reject their original theory and act the same way again

'Well, that was a surprise, I must have things wrong about the world. I am going to try it again as before but just look closely at the consequences to see what I need to do to change my ideas.

D: Begin to reject their original theory, but act differently

'Well, that was a surprise, I must have things wrong about the world. A better theory would be this, I'll try something new based on my new theory.

The ideal state for a person is to have their theories about the world 'in equilibrium' with the way the world is so that there are no unintended consequences brought about by their planned actions.  That way they can plan ahead, making 'abstract' choices about their path through the 'concrete' world, all the time being aware of the consequences, making the right choices, and not getting any nasty surprises. 'Equilibrium' is however a very hard thing to achieve especially where the world you are acting in is complex and where you have had little time and few learning opportunities in which to build your theories about it.  Therefore, we often end up somewhere between A-D in our choices.  

I find myself at A, a lot! I'll check my pockets for my keys perhaps 10 times before I can finally agree they are not there! 

Sometimes I find I am operating in the realm of C, knowing that I'm wrong but trying to build a new theory by looking closely at the consequences of my actions. I can't get onto Netflix, I thought it was the internet that was down on my Smart TV but the lights are on the router and my phone works, maybe it's the battery in the remote control?' 

When Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder watched children building and balancing blocks on the steel rod they were interested in this, 'the interplay between action sequences and children’s ‘theories-in-action’.  They noted that when the child's theories in action were inadequate in the face of action sequences that 'failed' then the child began to focus more closely on the means by which the world was failing their theory.  They also noticed that children in this mode were pausing before acting with their attention shifting from just trying to balance a block successfully to understanding how blocks balance; building their theories as they did so.  They saw that children, ‘must first form a unifying rule based on regular patterns he has observed' before the shift in thinking could take place. As teachers we have theories for how thinking may best develop in a child.  We set up our classrooms and act on our theories daily.  Importantly those theories may not necessarily be explicit, even to ourselves even though we are acting in accordance with them.  But do our theories work in the real world and if they don't how do we face the disequilibrium we feel when our attempts to promote thinking fall short of our expectations? If things don't go as we expect as teachers do we pause, look closely at what is happening and use the new evidence of the world to reflect on our theories?  Do we make our theories explicit to ourselves, aiming to unify them to make for a more robust theory based on the observations we have made?  These are the hallmarks of reflective practitioners.  These are the hallmarks of evidence-based practice. It's really hard to shift one’s ideas about the world based on what is happening in the world because it can be easier to explain away an unexpected outcome as chance or an aberration than it is to make explicit our theories, undo our mindset, adopt a new theory and as a result new actions.  There is risk in this and as a result we can avoid it very, very persistently.  Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder saw children attempt again and again to balance blocks using their current theory of ‘balance it in the middle’ despite the block falling off because the real world rule was ‘find the centre of gravity, by feeling the weight distribution, and balance it there’. Alex and I are going to look at some of our current theories for the positive effect of cognitive acceleration and some of the action sequences that follow from that. We are going to look at how that differs from some of the practices we see.  We’ll consider Piaget and Vygotsky, Dweck, Kahnemann, the relevance of neurological theories, the power of group efficacy after the ideas of Wooley, the learner as apprentice thinker after Rogoff and much more.  All great theories but do they explain the impact of cognitive acceleration, are they put into practice by Let’s Think teachers and what do we do if our theories don’t hold up in the real world? Of course, A-D are only some of the many ways that people deal with the theories in their head not playing out too well in the real world. The way we have evolved has also given us another option, based on our desire for community and the security of the crowd.

E: Keep our original theory and recruit others to the same theory ignoring the consequences of our actions in favour of group think.

'I feel better about my ideas when others share them, this feeling is more powerful than the evidence of my actions which in any case can be accounted for by chance or the recruiting of other ideas and explanations. Let’s conspire to ignore what the real world is really like'

Position E is one of the most challenging aspects for us all because it is a position that actively ignores the real world and as a result real world evidence has little power to bring about change. It is also self-sustaining because the group members aim to support each other in both affirming the theory and rejecting the real-world evidence. All are equally invested in the internal logic of the theory rather than the unfortunate evidence of its falsehood.  I remember a time in the 1990’s when theories of ‘Teaching and Learning Styles’ swept through schools and teachers were exhorted to match the curriculum to their children’s preferred styles, and in some cases to test children to ascertain that.  Group think to marvel at began to emerge in schools despite the evidence that this popular raising attainment approach had no effect at all on attainment.  I see the same evidence avoiding group think today in the anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers and in those convinced that private companies will act for the public good. We in Let’s Think aim to keep alive the debate about what our theory is and the evidence for it, to be explicit about the current theories and to pause and reflect when they don’t play out in the real world as we had expected.  It’s a way of making progress perhaps? Stuart Twiss   [post_title] => 'If you want to get ahead, get a theory' [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => if-you-want-to-get-ahead-get-a-theory [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-06-24 11:55:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-06-24 10:55:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1414 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1403 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-05-04 18:29:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-05-04 17:29:46 [post_content] => Stories have special powers. While most of humanity learnt to read and write in recent history – only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820 – narratives have been central to human life for thousands of years. Cave paintings from 30,000 years ago appear to depict scenes that were probably accompanied by oral storytelling. Story dominance in human interaction has rewired the human brain to be predisposed from birth to think in, make sense in and create meaning from stories. Stories predominance is a survival skill; forms of narrative, allowed early humans to learn more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully [1]. Story was so crucial to survival that the brain evolved specifically to respond to it. If you’re reading this your brain is designed by evolution to develop story representations from sensory input. Don’t believe me? Then watch this video and explain what is happening: https://youtu.be/VTNmLt7QX8E The animation experiment by Heider and Simmel (1944) revealed that humans have a strong tendency to impose narrative even on displays showing interactions between simple geometric shapes. When watching this animation with three simple shapes, most observers tended to interpret them the shapes as having intentions, desires and beliefs. You might enjoy watching how comedians reacted to watching the animation: https://youtu.be/ZAnt9II-5Co As Bruner [2] (1990) explained: “Children produce and comprehend stories long before they are capable of handling the most fundamental Piagetian logical proposition that can be put into linguistic form.’. In the present educational landscape when Ofsted claim learning is “an alteration in long-term memory” and recall and retrieval are valued so highly it strikes me the power of story in supporting the formation of memory is undervalued and frequently overlooked. As Egan [3] (1997) states: “oral cultures discovered long ago that ideas and values put into rhythmic story form were more easily remembered and more accurately acted upon”. The power of stories to support learning is quite remarkable with research showing it has impact on comprehension, motivation to learn, language mastery, writing and memory [4]. Let’s Think lessons draw upon the power of story. In Let’s Think in English (LTE) we are fortunate as the focus of the lessons tends to be narratives. It’s a pleasure and privilege to observe pupils following the texts, eager to meet the next page and see if their predictions ring true before engaging in cycles of discussion sharing their views and collectively developing understanding. In Let’s Think we are familiar with the Vygotskian concept of mediation; the act of guiding and supporting pupils to develop higher mental functions as a more knowledgeable other. However, in LTE lessons I see narrative texts as mediators too providing a springboard for thoughts linking to Vygotsky’s role of cultural mediation and supporting internalization. Let’s Think maths’ and science’ programmes draw upon the power of stories too. As Alan Edmiston, Let’s Think in maths tutor explains: “All of the maths lessons follow a sequential series of episodes, the first of which is concerned with engagement within a context. From that context comes an exploration of mathematical relationships moving upwards towards the more abstract aspects of the concept that runs throughout each lesson. An example is a Year 5 lesson: Sports League. The lesson is focused upon how many games a team will play within a league which can be expressed algebraically in an expression as n x (n-1). To begin with however we start with a story of how both my daughters love netball, yet I do not like team sports because of my father who used to embarrass me in team games when I was in Year 5. I mention to the class that they asked if I could organise some games with two other schools but this time the parents and teachers play, and the students watch. The only problem is I have to make sure I can take part in all the games and fit them into my diary so I need to know how many games we will play altogether if everyone plays everyone else and everyone plays at home. Hooked – you bet they are! I find such an approach and the narrative that flows from it acts as a stepping stone towards higher level mathematical thinking.” While Dr Martina Lecky, executive headteacher of the Vanguard Learning Trust, outlines the influence of stories in Let’s Think science and CASE: “As an experienced practitioner, I have often found that the use of a narrative can increase students’ engagement in CASE lessons. One of my favourite lessons is activity 20, which focuses on the reasoning pattern of correlation. I set the scene with the class: we live in a village called Brocklehurst and we are all carrot farmers. The problem is our supermarket buyer, Sainsbury’s, is about to cancel its order because our carrots are not as big as those of other growers. One of the villagers has, however, found a company selling a chemical called ‘grocaro’ which could solve our problem. As the carrot growers of Brocklehurst we need to decide, based on the evidence, whether the treatment, grocaro, has the effect of growing larger carrots compared with a control group. I give the students different roles – farmers, town mayor, representatives from Sainsbury’s and the company selling grocaro – and the excitement throughout the lesson is palpable. I believe the narrative provides the context for them to have a heightened response as they consider the issue from the perspective of their role. At the end of the lesson, I know that the experience leaves an indelible mark on students as they have not only been challenged cognitively in terms of the lesson’s reasoning pattern, but also they have been on a conscious journey facilitated by the unfolding narrative.” The narrative framing evident in the LT math and science lessons and rich texts of LTE provide familiar steppingstones to formal thinking and abstract concepts. Once we recognise the power of stories we have to as Egan says: “…reconceive the curriculum as the set of great stories we have to tell our children and recognise… school teachers as the storytellers of our culture.” In my next blog post I’ll look at another story influence: how a lesson’s sequence can mirror narrative structure. Footnotes

1. Boyd, B. The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, Volume 9, Issue 1. 2017
2. Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
3. Egan, K. The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
4. Miller S & Pennycuff L. The Power of Story: Using Storytelling to Improve Literacy Learning. Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 2008) 36 – 43

  [post_title] => The Power of Stories [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-power-of-stories [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-05-04 18:38:33 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-05-04 17:38:33 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1403 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1387 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-03-28 15:29:01 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-03-28 14:29:01 [post_content] => Professor David C. Johnson was a pioneer in many aspects of mathematics education and computer education, first in the United States and later in the United Kingdom. He combined rigorous educational research with equally rigorous development of the curriculum, of high quality teaching resources and of teacher professional development, aiming to provide all students with an engaging and relevant education. He worked by forming collaborations with others, including researchers, policymakers and teachers, and acted as a wise research supervisor and adviser to a whole generation of leading researchers in both mathematics and computer education. David was one of twin brothers born in Minnesota, USA, to Carlton, a retail manager and shop owner, and Dora, a shop worker. He gained a BA from Colgate College (now Colgate University) in  Rochester, New York State, and then a PhD from the University of Minnesota, where he taught for 17 years (1961-78), progressing to become Professor of Mathematics Education. This included a 5-year period as the Head of the Mathematics Department in the Laboratory School attached to the university. David was an active member of the research committee in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and was chosen as the founding editor of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, first published in 1970. This quickly became, and remains, the leading international mathematics education research journal, reflecting the high standard he set at its inception. In another ground-breaking publication from the NCTM, a 1980 reference book Research in Mathematics Education, David contributed two key chapters The research process and Types of research, and also edited and provided the commentary for an important section of case studies. Parallel to his leading role as an educational researcher, David was becoming an early enthusiast for the use of computers in the mathematics classroom, not to practise skills but to both support the development of important mathematical concepts and to refocus the curriculum for a computer age by introducing a greater emphasis on the ideas which underpin computer use, especially algorithms and iteration. He led a team in the production of a school textbook series Computer Aware Mathematics Project (CAMP) which pointed the way for developments in other countries. One prescient result identified by an independent research study was that this teaching of simple programming (now known as coding) improved attainment in algebra. He also established a much copied innovative graduate programme. While in Minnesota, David married his first wife, who gave birth to their daughter Pamela. They later divorced and while on sabbatical in Cambridge, working with Robert Harding on the use of computers to teach university mathematics, he re-connected with his future second wife Katie. This led to a move to the UK in 1978, when he was appointed to the Shell Chair in Mathematics Education at Chelsea College, part of London University. This was already becoming a leading centre for mathematics education research, under his predecessor Geoffrey Matthews, and for computer education, with Bob Lewis. David became Deputy Director of the Centre for Science and Mathematics Education at Chelsea under Professor Paul Black, and later after the merger into King’s College London, Deputy Head of the School of Education under Professor Arthur Lucas.  He was later also appointed on a part-time basis from 1991-93 to the Research Professorship of Mathematics Education at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, to lead the development of a Centre for Mathematical and Scientific Literacy. At Chelsea/King’s, David directed a series of major projects in the teaching, learning and assessment of mathematics at primary and secondary level. These included Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science (CSMS), Strategies and Errors in School Mathematics, Children’s Mathematical Frameworks, and Graded Assessment in Mathematics (GAIM), Nuffield A-level Mathematic, Evaluation of the Implementation of National Curriculum Mathematics, Cognitive Acceleration in Mathematics Education (CAME), Effective Teachers of Numeracy and the Leverhulme Numeracy Research Programme (LNRP). These projects were variously funded by major charities, government and research councils, with the intention of improving classroom learning in mathematics. They included a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, rigorously employed, and entailed working, with differing emphases, with children, teachers, and professional advisers, sometimes with very large numbers of students involved. The outputs included the identification of conceptual progressions in mathematics learning; comparisons of the effectiveness of innovative teaching methods, themselves informed by earlier research; the devising and implementation across more than 150 schools of an 11-16 and GCSE assessment scheme, and the production and evaluation of a new A-level mathematics curriculum and accompanying set of A-level mathematics textbooks for the computer age. They informed a series of policy initiatives, including The Cockcroft Report, the development of GCSE, the first and subsequent versions of the National Curriculum and its models of assessment, the National Numeracy Strategy and subsequent developments. Yet even so, due to a series of conservative ministers from both parties who valued tradition over the attempt to implement teaching methods, assessment and curricula which were research-based and appropriate to the 21^st century, this vast programme of research has had much less impact than it deserved. Alongside these projects David maintained his initial enthusiasm for the use of computers in mathematics classrooms, and broadened his interest to include computer education more generally. He became an active member of the Education Committees of the British Computer Society, and of the International Federation for Information Processing, which established his international reputation. Most importantly he gained funding for and co-directed a major project Computers in the Curriculum which was the most generously funded government computer education project; it unusually gained repeated funding and lasted for 19 years, from 1972-91. Here again the aim was to use computers to improve the teaching of important concepts in existing school subjects, and the development process involved groups of teachers and researchers in each subject discipline working to develop and test activities for pupils. As with David’s mathematics education projects, this work at the time put the UK up among the international leaders in the use of computers in schools. Following on from this, he also co-directed an influential large-scale government-funded project Impact of IT on children’s achievements (ImpacT) evaluating the effectiveness in terms of results of computer use in schools. David’s role in these projects was strategic: setting aims, writing and securing the funding bids, overseeing the management, staffing, research methods, ongoing evaluations and final reports. He was careful to ensure that each project kept on track, finished on time and within budget, with final reports and academic papers written. But in some projects his role was also very hands-on; he enjoyed working with teachers and researchers in professional development sessions and in classrooms.  Throughout his career he continued to keep up to date with research and practice, reviewing many journal articles for editors, and to publish frequently, often collaboratively, in journals, books and reports. He communicated clearly to audiences of different types, writing logically and fluently. Across the 25 year period of this research, David mentored and inspired, and in most cases supervised the doctorates of, a progression of mathematics education and computer education researchers, including ten future professors, many of whom in turn became leaders in these fields: Kath Hart, Margaret Brown, Steve Lerman, Mike Askew, Dylan Wiliam, Jeremy Hodgen, Richard Noss, Margaret Cox, Deryn Watson, David Squires.  Many others who worked on the projects also went onto further research or took leading roles in curriculum development and/or policymaking: Alice Onion, Gill Close, Mundher Adhami, Sue Johnson-Wilder, Julia  Anghileri. He also successfully supervised many overseas doctoral students (altogether he supervised more than 35 successful doctorates) who went on to make contributions in their own countries. He was an excellent supervisor, always setting ambitious but achievable objectives for students, and a shrewd judge of what type and degree of guidance each student needed. David was hugely respected as a scholar, researcher, teacher and administrator who was never self-seeking, always acting decisively and with integrity. But above all he was much loved by those to whom he was a generous mentor, friend and collaborator. He was always good company and could converse entertainingly with people of all backgrounds. David retired from King’s in 2004 to spend more time with his second wife Katie, and with his daughters Ashlie (a barrister) and Sophie (a hospital doctor), and their families.  At times in his life David, although apparently very fit, suffered from medical emergencies: he had polio as a child, later a serious heart attack and then a major stroke. From all of these he made amazingly good recoveries, with his family’s (and especially Katie’s) strong support, but on March 17^th 2020, aged 83 he died peacefully of heart failure after a long illness. [post_title] => A tribute to Professor David Johnson (26th March, 1936 – 17th March, 2020) [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-tribute-to-professor-david-johnson-26th-march-1936-17th-march-2020 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-03-28 15:29:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-03-28 14:29:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1387 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1374 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-03-15 22:06:42 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-03-15 22:06:42 [post_content] => This blog explores our experiences of providing Let’s Think professional development to a group of primary and secondary teachers in South Wales. This project originally arose in the light of significant developments within the education system in Wales. In 2022 a new curriculum will be launched. Overarching this curriculum is a vision that has four core purposes for learners: There is clear alignment between these purposes and the philosophy and principles of Let’s Think. For Richard Lashley, (Education Support Adviser for Carmarthenshire Local Authority) there has never been a greater need for the Let’s Think programme to become embedded in practice. There is a legacy of using Let’s Think within the region, but for many teachers having time to reconnect with the materials, or to meet them for the first time has not been a priority. Seeing the potential value in re-launching Let’s Think across the region, Richard wanted to work to address this. Together with the education department at Swansea University and Let’s Think, Richard and his team developed a project to explore the impact of a programme of professional learning in Let’s Think, with a focus on mathematics, across the region. However, as the saying goes, the best laid plans do not always go as expected, and shortly after the initial meeting with teachers to outline the project, the pandemic hit. Schools across the region rapidly moved to a range of models of blended learning. Engaging in professional learning opportunities during such a global pandemic has not always been simple. Moving from the more usual face-to-face delivery of sessions to approaches based in an online environment has taken some adjustment. Nonetheless, a group of teachers in Wales are benefitting from exploring the Let’s Think materials in this way, devising creative ways in which to become familiar with them in a rapidly changing and online world. This blog outlines some of their experiences. Richard explains: ‘Planning for this project started in late September 2019 in response to the overwhelming need to develop aspects of thinking relating to numerical reasoning in schools across Carmarthenshire. After some discussion about avenues of professional learning, the team’s experience of the Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) and the maths equivalent CAME to light (pardon the pun). A survey of our schools revealed that a number of teachers had previous experience in the Let’s Think and CAME programmes yet many were no longer using the materials. It was time for action! We identified eight schools (including three federations). The schools represented both English and Welsh medium contexts and included primary and secondary teachers. The objectives identified at the start of the planning process were to:

• Improve questioning, thinking and numeracy for pupils and staff through the Let’s Think programme.
• Improve the action research skills of staff using a lesson study approach.
• Develop high impact approaches for teaching, learning and networking in line with the ‘Schools as Learning Organisations’ (SLO)

Although the project was designed pre-Covid19, most of the objectives were kept in place.  However, given the additional pressures on the teachers and the need to remain socially distant, the action research element has been relaxed for now. Nonetheless, the aim remains to create expertise in Let’s Think amongst the group of teachers working within ‘hub’ schools, who in time will be used to support a roll-out into numerous ‘spoke’ schools throughout Carmarthenshire. The input from Sarah Seleznyov from Let’s Think started in January 2021 . One of the immediate challenges related to the range of familiarity and experience with the materials. Some teachers had undertaken CAME training in the past and were familiar with many of the lessons, whilst some came with no experience at all. The learning approach takes the form of a flipped approach whereby the team complete some reading related to key principles of the programme prior to sessions, for example, around metacognition and social construction. In addition, the teachers access high quality recordings of tutor simulations of model lessons to help explore key themes, and to get ready to plan and implement the episodes with groups of their own learners. The direct input, using video calling, largely emulates the approach used in Let’s Think lessons – introducing key terms (concrete construction), challenging the team to think and discuss ideas (social construction) and unpacking the thought processes and thinking (metacognition). Session one was challenging due to the context we were working in: online professional learning feels very different to the norm, and for many the materials were completely new. We were worried that this was too much for the teachers, who were already working under considerable challenge, and after the first session some did say that: ‘As newbies to the programme, we know lots of other people on the group are familiar with CAME but we have no experience in either and felt quite overwhelmed and because of this we felt we didn't engage as much as we should have (lack of knowledge).’ However, drawing on large reserves of grit and resilience, and with individual, tailored support from the project team, most of the teachers went on to successfully deliver a Let’s Think lesson after the first session. This involved some creative thinking, with lesson taking place in a wide range of contexts – at home with their own children, on screen to a small group or face-to-face in the on-site provision at school with colleagues joining in on video or as a socially distant observer. After each completed the teaching, they sent a transcript of part of the lesson to Sarah for evaluation.  These excerpts are used to help reflect on key aspects of pedagogy as individuals and also within the group as a basis for professional dialogue. Once the initial session and subsequent lesson was complete the process repeated. Session two was transformative, with teachers reflecting on the benefits: ‘The lesson simulations, in my opinion are invaluable. The front sheets and resources supplied make preparation and delivery very easy. Also, having the opportunity to discuss ideas and perspectives with the other practitioners really helps my confidence and sparks lot of enthusiasm for me!’ ‘Enjoy discussion with colleagues about lessons learned.’ At the time of writing, we await the opportunity to discuss the second Let’s Think maths lessons that the teachers have now taught, and are eagerly anticipating the chance to build on the enthusiasm ignited in session two and nurture the connections being made with the ‘Bounce Back’ curriculum and other Cognitive Acceleration programmes.’ [post_title] => Professional learning during the pandemic: lessons from Wales [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => professional-learning-during-the-pandemic-lessons-from-wales [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-03-16 12:32:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-03-16 12:32:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1374 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => 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 ) [7] => 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 ) [8] => 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 ) [9] => 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 ) ) [post_count] => 10 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1426 [post_author] => 2223 [post_date] => 2021-10-01 10:40:35 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-10-01 09:40:35 [post_content] => Leah Crawford is a Let’s Think in English Tutor.  From Sept 2020 to July 2021 she was contracted to devise and teach post lockdown English interventions at Amery Hill School, a 11-16 secondary school in Alton, Hampshire.  Part of the strategy was to teach Let’s Think lessons and embed the principles in small and whole group teaching.  In this blog, she reflects specifically on teaching Let’s Think in English to a Year 7 mixed ability class of 30, as well as their core English curriculum. From pagan mythology to literature, the moon has become a symbol of constant change, unreliability, even madness.   Conversely, during the past year, as scrolling news reports tried to unravel the impact of the fast-changing pandemic, broadcasters seemed to be more than usually attentive to the lunar calendar as a reassuring constant, drawing attention to unusual full moon manifestations: September’s Harvest Moon, January’s Wolf Moon, April’s Pink Moon, and May’s Supermoon.   Looking back on my 2020-21 year of teaching, perhaps the most ‘lunatic’ year to return to classroom teaching, we had to steel ourselves against inconstancy and ride some rough storms.  There were the lower level but necessary pragmatics of desk cleaning, seating plans and hand sanitising; the logistics of zoned year groups that gave birth to a new breed of masked avenger teacher, scurrying between zones, heroically pulling their trolleys of books and papers; then there was the swift-footed response to burst bubbles, managing in-class and remote learning in tandem.     We came to expect the waxing and waning rhythms of pandemic life, the full glow and the shadows.  But what we now know that the pagans didn’t, is that the rock of the moon is always reassuringly there.  The full moon is always in orbit – its full glory is just not always visible. As I returned to the classroom, luckily to a school that has embraced Let’s Think in English, the principles of Cognitive Acceleration (CA) became my rock.  Those principles were always constant but I felt their enactment in practice wax and wane through the challenges of COVID era education. Although many reading this blog will be familiar with CA in some form, it does not hurt for me to be clear and transparent about the principles we aimed to enact through Let’s Think in English and why:

1. High and equitable involvement: it was likely that what our most vulnerable learners had most missed out on through a period of remote learning was the efficacy that comes from being a valued contributor in a safe community.  You matter, you all matter, and it matters what you think and say.
2. The social construction of meaning.  Reading is not an extraction of meaning from the page but an active, constructive, personal and social process.  We needed to test out whether readers were alert, attentive, monitoring and questioning the meaning they were constructing.  Could we help them to become more aware of their own process of meaning making by making it shared and social?
3. The centrality of challenge.  Without challenge, learners are metaphorically treading water.  This may build stamina, but it does not take you into new ways of thinking: extending cognitive capacity.  Could we help students to move from personal and instinctive responses to texts towards reasoned and critical responses by noticing resonance and dissonance with the thoughts of others?
4. The nurturing of metacognition.  Becoming more aware of and being able to productively steer one’s thoughts is not a given in our academic or personal lives.  Could students over time become more aware of how they were building understanding, whether that understanding was reasoned and tested and become more able to transfer and apply this to new texts and contexts?

Lofty aims.  So how much of this did we achieve? So follows my reflections on the past year’s phases of the moon: teaching Let’s Think in a pandemic. September’s Full Harvest Moon In the full glow of the ripe promise of September, my very first lesson with my Year 7 group was a KS2 lesson using Smriti Prasadam Hall’s symbolic picture book ‘Rain Before Rainbows’ which you can access here.  It is a story that moves from a place of trauma and loss through struggle, to hope.  The message of the text did not present the usual degree of challenge for a Year 7 group but it was deeply pertinent and we took our journey in deliberate stages to establish the routines and rituals of collaborative making meaning:

• Can you repeat that so the whole group can hear?
• Could you share what your group thought?
• Did you have a similar or different idea to this group?

With subtle metacognitive nudges:

• What was it in the text that led you to think that?
• As we continue to read, what will it be helpful to look for?
• Do you know other symbols of hope?

I was clear with the group that they faced an additional challenge to listen and respond to each other’s ideas whilst being seated in rows facing the front.  They described what they would need to do to show that they were listening other than through eye contact and body language, based around being able to repeat, respond to and question the contributions of others. We then moved to the usual Let’s Think induction lessons based on a fable, The Bridge, (lesson available here) which provoke conflict in ethical perspective taking and build on awareness of narrative structures.  We began to gain some traction with the power of conflict, working with difference to deepen thinking.  As teacher mediator, I felt the power and responsibility to calibrate our climate.  Yes, I could request elaboration from a student to explain their group’s response – but I could also create the air-time for students to explain what or who had led them to change their mind as the lesson progressed.  I saw that if I made space for and was fascinated by this– the students became so and quite quickly became unafraid, willing even, to share changes in their thinking.   It was heartening to see the cross-fertilisation of ideas and increased confidence was still happening even without the powerful, physical signifier that is students seated in table groups.   Waning  Moon...November to December As the second wave of the pandemic loomed, it became harder to build on our promising start.  I was part of a well-run department: a tight ship.  As bubbles burst and the usual scheme of work was at times disrupted with students having to self-isolate, I felt the very real tension between programming in Let’s Think lessons and making progress through the scheme of work with its valid common assessment tasks and moderation cycles.  A great reminder of the pragmatics of applying research principles in practice.   January New Moon It is odd that the very absence of a visible moon is heralded as a new moon.  The ultimate ‘glass half-full’ philosophy, perhaps.  Be patient...it will return. That’s exactly the position we found ourselves in just a few days into January with the dark days of an extended lock down and a return to remote teaching.  Our school policy was to keep to the usual school timetable, teaching alternate synchronous and asynchronous remote lessons.   Could we maintain the CA principles we had set and begun to enact through this phase?  The attendance of my Year 7 students at live lessons was remarkably good, but only a third or so of students had working microphones to contribute orally, not all initially had access to lap-tops and not all had good broadband connectivity.   To maintain our principles the pace through lesson content slowed down and innovation kicked in:

• To maintain high levels of contribution, I would share a recorded reading of a text and pose a question or questions and capture responses asynchronously on Padlets or Google Jamboards.  The beauty of Padlet particularly is that there is the facility for students – and teachers – to respond to each other’s posts, creating chains of thought.
• To encourage elaboration and the shift from thinking to reasoning, I could select student posts to use as springboards in live lessons – inviting students to elaborate on an idea and explore dissonances between student responses.
• To maintain the centrality of challenge for progress, whether teaching Let’s Think lessons or the core scheme of work, we worked towards and through binary choices to slow down thinking and provoke reasoning.  Is this Romantic painting/poem frightening or beautiful?  Having read these poems, which poet has the greater respect for nature: Wordsworth or Clare?

Waxing towards a full Supermoon We returned to school in March 2021.  Every first lesson I taught with every group was a Let’s Think lesson.  Why?   We had not let go of the importance of equitable conversational turns to build self-efficacy, meaning and cognition during lockdown – but it had been more difficult, more stilted and too reliant on each student’s access to hardware and broadband connectivity and their confidence to share ideas in a chat box or on the live microphone.  We needed the return to class to be a return to valuing, responding to and enjoying each other.  We were unmuted and unlocked – but not unmasked.  Masks made smaller, quieter voices hard to hear.  Ensuring that all pupils were contributing to and accessing the ensuing discourse of the lesson was even harder.  Asking students to discuss and arrive at a small group response, then jot down a phrase or a few bullet points to indicate that response on a white board unlocked the next ‘waxing’ phase of teaching.  If I could see each group’s board, I could reflect back to them the common chords and discords from across the group.  In this way they could still ‘hear’ and respond to each other, and I could more easily distil themes or productive binary conflicts to inform the next phase of the lesson:

• So I can see many of you think...
• The most common response seems to be...
• However, we also have some groups who think...
• The room seems to be split between those who think...and those who think...

This really was now a phase of waxing growth: I was able to teach lessons with rhythm and regularity across the remaining school term.  There were two major developments that became possible in this phase which I feel are central to embedding Let’s Think as an intervention that works in synergy with the broader curriculum.

1. The lessons were sequenced and positioned to enable students to bridge concepts from one text to another.  Some might call this interleaving.  When constructing an English curriculum, we are often used to creating tapestries of texts for study by theme or by genre.  So, for example, why would I place the study of a short 1950’s sci-fi story at the end of a unit on Romantic poetry and nature?  By the end of the sci-fi lesson, students consider whether a text that contains some outdated notions can still be resonant and relevant in the present.  When we bridged to the relevance of Romantic visions of nature in 2021, the students argued passionately that we are just as much in danger of losing touch with the natural world.  In the face of the climate crisis, we need humility and respect for the power of nature. And how would we have coped in lockdown without those walks?
2. I made the group increasingly accountable to set their own direction and goals for development.  We had used dialogic talk reflection tools in the autumn term, but the disruptions to in-class teaching had knocked us off course.  We used the tool below, developed through the Assessment Companion for Thinking Skills (ACTS) project (link to this and other tools here) to assess the strengths and areas for development in the group’s dialogic talk behaviours: moving from foundational behaviours of inclusion, politeness and clarity in exchanges, to ones that are fuelled by a desire to question, share differences and reach for the most reasoned, evidenced ideas.

  Developing dialogic norms reflection tool

			To improve our group needs..
1	Everyone contributes	Expect to contribute Take turns Be polite Show you are listening
2	Seek understanding	Make yourself clear Elaborate your answer Track the ideas of others Ask questions of others
3	Explore differences and reasons	Be open to different ideas Share agreement and disagreement Ask ‘Why do you think that?’ Ask for evidence & reasons
4	Pursue the best ideas	Be open to changing your mind or adapting your ideas Work towards well reasoned ideas together

  Let’s Think pandemic teaching has confirmed my belief in the full Supermoon principles mentioned at the start of this blog.  It has forced innovation in improved use of white boards, Padlets and binary options as effective dialogic mechanisms.  In the final term, it gave me the opportunity to enact the rich possibilities of embedding Let’s Think lessons in wider curriculum sequencing and design.  In collaboration with department leaders, we drafted the legacy for a more generative Let’s Think pathway through their rich curriculum.  Finally, it has crystallised the importance of inviting students to become co-pilots on their shared educational journeys.  To the moon and beyond... [post_title] => Reflections on a Mad and Moonly year of Teaching English [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => reflections-on-a-mad-and-moonly-year-of-teaching-english [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-10-04 09:44:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-10-04 08:44:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://www.letsthink.org.uk/?p=1426 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 53 [max_num_pages] => 6 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => 1 [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => [is_robots] => [is_posts_page] => 1 [is_post_type_archive] => [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => ef0f2f8d04452b7f051c9fd6dc322a94 [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => [thumbnails_cached] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ) )