What characteristics enable our students to thrive during remote learning?
What characteristics enable our students to thrive during remote learning?
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Remote learning seems like a distant memory…..
Erin and I have been keen to delve deeper into the student responses and make sense of the survey data in order to address our first question: How can we empower our students to be problem solvers?
Like every teacher who survived remote learning and has entered back to a ‘normal’ teaching life, we have been flat out! The weeks have been full, busy and our lists of things to do keep growing… While it is sometimes easy to forget that remote learning occurred, we think it best to take the time to reflect on what happened and how we can learn from the successes and challenges we encountered during this time.
This Maths Mindset survey was developed after we identified that staff and students across three grades were having difficulty with engagement in maths during remote learning, students who would normally thrive in the classroom were struggling to use effective problem solving strategies and there was a general lack of motivation. We were frustrated! We seemed to be doing more work online than ever before and getting less engagement and motivation from students as well as generally feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with the program we were delivering as well as our engagement with the students. Of course we acknowledge the challenges of a global pandemic, but you can’t help feeling personally and professionally responsible for the wellbeing and academic progress of your students.
We wondered – “What’s going on?” “What can we change?” “Why does a well-researched and effective maths program work so well at school and feels so difficult remotely?” “What are we missing?” We hoped to get a better picture of what was happening with our students and try to find common themes or ways we could then build some changes into our regular program.
For more information see our previous blog post “How can we empower our students to be problem solvers?”
Our approach to analysing the survey was to find similarities and differences between the students who thrived and struggled. We pulled out interesting snapshots, developed hunches and wonderings, and drew together an overall summary from each question.
Background information: we used the program Microsoft Teams as the tool for distributing work, accessing group conferences via video calls, collaborating spaces for students to ask questions. Acknowledging the work program was always evolving, most lessons had guidance or access to teachers to clarify questions or links to videos with explanations. Each morning teachers would ‘check in’ with their class and go over the day’s activities. We would run small conferences a couple of times daily and be available via the group text function to clarify tasks.
Summary
The majority of students have indicated middle to low responses towards the first question in this mindset survey ‘Learning maths at home for me is…’.
An overall trend was that the response to the first question tended to indicate the responses to the rest of the survey. For example, many students who recorded that they were struggling with learning maths in a remote context also struggled to deal positively with challenging problems or even utilising problem-solving strategies that we focus on often during class time. No surprises really, if they weren’t having a good time learning at home they wouldn’t see the value of challenging tasks and explaining their thinking. In hindsight, the first question was a good gauge to see the overall attitude our students currently had towards maths learning and the following questions attempted to delve deeper.
The students responded that ‘needing a teacher’ or others was the reason for learning maths at home being ‘really hard to do’ rather than a great experience.
Some other interesting responses included:
“I can do it but I don’t have other people to [discuss] it with”
“I don’t have a teacher to explain what the task is”
“I don’t have anything to motivate me when I’m stuck or annoyed and so I just give up but when I’m at school I seem to be able to understand the maths better”
“It is hard to motivate me to actually do it and if I need help my parents were taught maths in a different way so most of the time they can’t help me”
“‘I find it verry hard and takes half the fun out of maths by just not being able to work it out with other’s”
Successful students, however, used self help and problem solving strategies such as; asking a parent or sibling or watching an explanation video of the strategy or task. For example, “when I’m at home I can always ask my brother for help or I can watch a video explaining how to do something I don’t know how to do”.
Overall – it seems that our students on average place a high value on collaboration and communication when solving maths problems. Erin and I discussed that this may be a product of our approach that students have the opportunity to explore, model and share ideas during a math lesson. We have emphasised the importance of reasoning and sharing thinking during class time. An example of this is inviting students to share their answers to the class with a culture of their peers adding on, respectfully challenging thinking or asking for clarification. The teacher is able to orchestrate discussions and support students with the process of sharing or asking questions.
Wondering: If our aim is to empower students does there need to be a balance between collaboration and independent learning during classroom learning?
How much reading are kids willing to do during a task? So many kids have missed parts or only do certain parts of a task, could this be contributing to the lack of understanding or motivation?
Summary
This question was interesting as it delved deeper into the maths mindset focus we were trying to understand with our students.
An overall snapshot from the grades seemed to be middle to low responses in answer to this question.
Many students couldn’t explain the strategies they used to move from the “zone of confusion” to finding an answer to a challenging problem.
Our school has been working hard to foster some really important math mindset norms (based on Jo Boaler’s YouCubed norms) around challenging problems and mathematics. Mistakes are valuable, questions are important, depth over speed and maths is about creativity and making sense. In the classroom we emphasise and encourage those norms, but with the feeling of isolation and calling of the sunshine outside, we found these obstacles prevented students from engaging with maths and their perception of themselves as competent maths learners was diminished.
Many responses that were positive included summaries of having a go and also reaching out and asking for help. For example, “I’ll have a long think then I’ll either watch a video or ask for help” and “I normally give it a go and ask for help from mum and dad and they help me understand it without giving me the answer which is sometimes frustrating”. Whereas the students that responded negatively mentioned issues such as “I don’t have a teacher to help me, it’s much harder to figure out the answer” or “normally I get really stuck and just leave it but other days I call up a friend and we work it out together and that makes me feel more motivated to do my work”.
Based on this information we implemented collaborative maths drop-in sessions, and instigated more positive maths mindset/problem solving discussions during class and small group meetings. Frustratingly, many students who mentioned that they needed a teacher to explain a task or assist with a problem did not attend these meetings, even if specifically encouraged. This, of course, could also be in response to the ‘lockdown fatigue’ that many of us experienced which resulted in lack of motivation and engagement.
This also led us to wonder the effect that home learning environment has on the positive approach to problem solving that the students held. If students were able to ask a sibling or parent, they often seemed to respond in a more positive manner than students that felt isolated or unable to ask for help. Parents’ responses to challenging maths problems and their previous experiences learning mathematics themselves had a huge effect on how students felt in continuing learning maths at home in the way that we were trying (by not just giving them worksheets!).
A more obvious (or expected) correlation was that between low responses to the first question – students struggling with maths during remote learning – and an inability to overcome challenges or challenging questions without support from a teacher or discussions with friends. Students who were already having a negative experience with remote learning did not have the strategies or intrinsic motivation to begin or keep working on challenging questions.
Summary
Overall, many students wrote that they needed help from other people or benefitted from a collaborative environment when feeling stuck, “When I get stuck I find it hard to get started without help [from] other people”. Successful students mentioned taking a break and coming back to the problem or setting “small goals that are achievable so I’m not bogged down by the whole question”.
We were interested in trying to figure out the strategies that students used when feeling stuck.
How many asked parents? Found a video online? Spoke to a friend? Asked their teacher?
With this survey, and class discussions that were held afterwards, many students did not actively try to find ways to move themselves from feeling stuck to feeling success. Many commented that they just moved on to another question or gave up on the maths for the day altogether. Some responses included “I want to give up” and “I probably can’t work it out”. Students seemed to have forgotten all of the positive maths dispositions that we had been working to embed over the past few years.
From this feedback, we tried expanding and modelling what was required for the thinking to solve challenging problems but also to move out of ‘feeling stuck’ to feeling like they know where to start or solve the problem. We revisited mindset videos during our class conferences and prompted them with questions such as “What do you do when you are stuck on a maths problem?” “What strategies can you use?” “What do you have available at home and online to help you?” If students found the task challenging they couldn’t engage in the problem so getting started with their thinking stalled.
Wonderings
Where is the sweet spot of a challenging differentiated task in a remote setting? If it’s too easy students have indicated it’s not worth explaining their thinking because for them it was easy. ’Nothing, I didn’t get stuck’ was an example of this response. It was interesting to note that the students who said they ‘weren’t challenged’ avoided the questions that required them to share or explain their thinking.
If we were to do this again, instead of assuming that they had the mindsets skills, possibly embedding these skills explicitly in our maths program. Maths anxiety and a negative mindset is so deeply entrenched (perhaps generational) that perhaps an emphasis on these messages during this unprecedented pandemic would have been more valuable than additional challenging problems? In the two weeks after the survey and the remainder of the term, we went back to the basics of these messages and saw a positive impact in the students who were still actively engaging in the work program.
Summary
“When it’s done, it’s done!”
Overall, student responses to this question showed that while many students said that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing their thinking, it did help them further develop their ideas and thinking about a maths problem or potentially highlight any mistakes that they made. Some students said they knew how to solve the problem but then had difficulty putting it into words.
Students that responded positively enjoyed sharing their thinking because:
“…it will help me more if I get it wrong then I can figure out which strategy works. I also like doing it because it means that I actually know what I am doing instead of just knowing the answer but actually knowing how I got it!”
“…explaining my thinking is not particularly my favourite part of math but sometimes when I do it, it can help me to figure out the problem and better understand the question”
“I get a little bit frustrated when I have to explain my thinking several times or in several ways because it takes me a while to write or draw etc. but again I get to expand my thinking, help develop a deeper understanding and learn more which is good.”
Some negative responses to this question included:
“I don’t like having to explain my thinking because I get nervous and my brain just stops for a moment”
“I get really stuck a lot of the time”
“If I have to show my thinking for a really complicated equation it is hard”
Our teaching team had discussions during remote learning about better ways to create a ‘feedback loop’. We were finding our time was being used to give feedback and look through students’ work but students weren’t necessarily viewing our feedback. This caused frustration for teachers (what’s the point?) but also frustration for the students because it seemed like we were asking them to share their thinking but nobody was listening. We changed our practic,e and we began using the assignment function in Teams to create activities that were to be submitted, marked against the success criteria and returned to the students. Our success criteria used a rubric that indicated that we wanted to see examples of student thinking in any format they chose – pictures, recordings, equations etc. This had the intended emphasis on empowering students and creating a feedback loop that valued their time and effort. Unfortunately we didn’t see a great deal of difference in student’s reading and viewing the feedback.
Wonderings
During class we often get students to share their methods of solving problems, either through writing or in a “fishbowl” with the student sharing their thinking verbally with the class. This is a large focus of our mathematics program, we are working from the basis that students learn better when they are valued contributors to finding a solution to a challenging problem. Being exposed to multiple strategies, methods and ideas modelled by their peers.
We often facilitate their thinking with prompting questions. This year we have been trialling Matt Sexton’s “Talk Moves”; a way of orchestrating questions to promote deeper thinking and discussion about maths problems. Question stems focus on revoicing, reasoning, restating, clarifying, giving wait time, agree/disagree, and adding on to what the student is saying.
Why are they so capable and successful at doing this in class yet so lost in an online context? The interest behind this question is that our students went from one thing in our classroom to the opposite. Regardless of academic level, it seemed, overall, it was the students with the greatest maths mindset strategies that succeeded in conjunction with a supportive home environment.
How can we continue to build that positive maths mindset within all of our students, irrespective of home environment, remote or on site learning?
Last words and future work
Moving forward, back at school ‘Yay!’
We are planning to build on the things that worked remotely and strengthen aspects that proved to be challenging for students. How can we build a stronger sense of independence in our math learners? Building in a desire to set goals, utilise strategies that can be applied to any problem and understand the value of sharing their thinking beyond the classroom.
This experience has also emphasised the importance of shared views about mathematics learning with our parent community. This will be a priority moving into 2021 and beyond.
It would be really valuable to hear from other teachers who have experienced this unprecedented time in education and have similar experiences and wonderings.
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