your learning, your future
your learning, your future Hello and welcome to our 33 ’d edition of the Shirebrook Academy newsletter. This week is jam packed newsletter full of Mathematical goodies. Praising Pupils Praising pupils for outstanding work is incredibly important to create a great classroom culture. There is a strand of thought though that many teachers are using praise too much rendering “Well Done”s meaningless. Doug Lemov from “Teach Like A Champion” has written here about when to use acknowledgement (just describing what pupils are doing) and when to use full on praise. It’s definitely worth a read. Maths Gem Resources Another Maths Gem post here. It contains some lovely euro2016 resources (I’m going to be putting more stuff together using a combination of these things for year 7 in the coming weeks.) Another thing to note in particular are the resources from Colin Foster. I attended a talk by him last year and he has some very good ideas about improving mathematical reasoning in pupils. His website contains some excellent resources and ideas (even if it looks like it’s been designed by a year 8 pupil). Numeracy Ninjas I think most teachers here at Shirebrook have enjoyed using the Numeracy Ninja programme. Interestingly Wyvern College (where the programme began) has conducted an incredibly detailed impact study into using the programme. The methodology in this study seems very strong as they’ve used a representative control group and have a sample of over 470 pupils. The key finding is summed up here: “We found Ninjas boosted the average students’ fluency with mental strategies and the key skills by at least 70% more than the gains of a control cohort.” You can read more about the study here. Keep up the good work Numeracy Ninjas.
Limits of the Growth Mindset As a school we are embracing the excellent research of Dweck about Growth Mindset. It is important to remember though that this is no magic bullet, in fact what is at the heart of the Growth Mindset is the idea that hard work is what is needed to succeed. The worry is that pupils (and teachers) are duped into thinking it is simply a case of changing your mindset and working hard and then you’ll be successful. There is a huge body of research about what is known as “deliberate practice” which seems to be the single biggest factor for success. David Didau has written an excellent blog on just this. In particular the key quote is: Hard work and a growth mindset is not enough. In fact, it seems likely that practising more without getting results will probably erode beliefs about self-efficacy. No wonder children learn that they “can’t do maths” or that “French is impossible” if they’re practising in the wrong way. If we believe that the difference between successful and unsuccessful students is their mindset we could be adding to a potentially toxic cocktail. It’s much more likely that a growth mindset follows from experiencing success. Why are we changing the GCSE and is it working? When you’re struggling with teaching that foundation year 9 class trigonometry this might be a question you’ve asked yourself. Having looked at older GCSE and O-level papers it is clear that papers have got easier and academic rigour is of course important for the value of any exam paper. Jo Morgan has written a nice blog looking at whether the New GCSE is working. Have a read of it here. Challenge Find the shaded area.
Limits of the Growth Mindset As a school we are embracing the excellent research of Dweck about Growth Mindset. It is important to remember though that this is no magic bullet, in fact what is at the heart of the Growth Mindset is the idea that hard work is what is needed to succeed. The worry is that pupils (and teachers) are duped into thinking it is simply a case of changing your mindset and working hard and then you’ll be successful. There is a huge body of research about what is known as “deliberate practice” which seems to be the single biggest factor for success. David Didau has written an excellent blog on just this. In particular the key quote is: Hard work and a growth mindset is not enough. In fact, it seems likely that practising more without getting results will probably erode beliefs about self-efficacy. No wonder children learn that they “can’t do maths” or that “French is impossible” if they’re practising in the wrong way. If we believe that the difference between successful and unsuccessful students is their mindset we could be adding to a potentially toxic cocktail. It’s much more likely that a growth mindset follows from experiencing success. Why are we changing the GCSE and is it working? When you’re struggling with teaching that foundation year 9 class trigonometry this might be a question you’ve asked yourself. Having looked at older GCSE and O-level papers it is clear that papers have got easier and academic rigour is of course important for the value of any exam paper. Jo Morgan has written a nice blog looking at whether the New GCSE is working. Have a read of it here. Challenge Find the shaded area.
