Causal Chain TAI 2022

As identified during my Teacher profiling phase, I decided to focus on improving student achievement and engagement through teacher collaboration.

My own practice - continue to refine my practice (For example, in maths - daily number talk, the use of visualisation and materials, developing fluency and confidence in maths as opposed to memorisation, and practical application of their knowledge.

In my team, we reflected on our collaboration and mid-year results. Have you managed to lift our students' engagement and achievement due to the change we've implemented in our planning? The short answer is yes; however, we developed a shared understanding of our next steps: bring student agency on board and refine our programme. 

School-wide. Support my colleagues to improve their understanding of maths progressions and the effective use of various manipulatives in their classroom programmes by sharing some resources, reviewing school maths matrices, and actively participating and contributing during staff meetings.

Teacher Collaboration will lead to improving Teacher Practice - already visible from our T1-2 work

Collaborative planning - deepens Teachers' subject and pedagogical knowledge - students benefit from consistency/ balanced programme/ content, that in order leads to their increased motivation, engagement and better achievements.

We will employ Student Agency to help students take ownership of their learning: link content to their passions and interests.  When Students set personal goals, the learning becomes theirs. This sense of ownership leads to increased motivation and achievement. We will use the School Matrices with the learners.  ----- Team teachers move from being the deliverer of curriculum to being the co-constructors and experienced learners.

Collaborative teachers reflect on their own practice and are open to colleagues' feedback developing and improving their metacognition and key competencies. At the same time, they model and promote collaboration, metacognition, and personal agency to their learners. 

I believe that this chain will lead to increased teacher and student agency, collaboration, engagement, achievement and success for all syndicate members. 

Plan and conduct a detailed inquiry

Plan and conduct a detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature.  

Reality: The latest research is out. In math and reading, students are behind where they would be after a normal year, with the most vulnerable students showing the steepest drops, according to two new reports from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and the NWEA, a nonprofit organization that provides academic assessments. The students did not just stall early on; the setbacks accumulated over time — and continued even after many students had returned to the classroom this year. Perhaps even more troubling, the students who were most affected by the crisis were already behind their peers before the pandemic, and the added losses have pushed them further back.

What can we do to bring back and retain more students at school and develop (or sometimes ignite) their love of learning? Teachers have to collaborate to address all these needs and use our strengths to engage our tamariki along with accelerating their learning. Covid affected everyone! That's why I believe that teacher collaboration is an extremely powerful approach that can be used to not just benefit our students but support teachers' well-being too.

For teacher collaboration to be effective, we (teachers) should want to participate rather than feel like we must. Like any other skill, collaboration can be improved upon with practice. This is my and, hopefully, my team's experience and reflection on the past two terms of our collaborative work. I look forward to continuing to improve our team's practice to maximise our tamariki successes in all areas of school life and support them to become life-long motivated learners. He waka eke noa!

The focus and plan of my inquiry into teacher and student collaboration to improve learning outcomes and well-being.

• Continue to  develop and refine our shared vision and goals, team culture
• Continue to refine and reflect on our collaborative planning and creation of shared resources
• Create a habit of frequent and consistent team data analysis (formative and summative) to reflect on best practices and plan the next steps.
• Continue to develop trust and positive professional relationships. Like any relationship, collaborative teams take time to build and have the potential to increase in strength and productivity over time. 
• Collaboratively advance our professional knowledge, skills, and beliefs about student learning. 
• Model positive collaborative behaviour to our learners.

Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts By Jo Boaler

Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts by Jo Boaler (2015)

Found a few years ago during my ALiM work, I keep referring back to this article and  https://www.youcubed.org/ website. This work is about developing number sense instead of memorization of facts, it unpacks the idea of learning math facts along with a deep understanding of numbers and the ways they relate to each other.

In a critical research project, researchers studied students as they solved number problems (Gray & Tall, 1994). The researchers concluded that low achievers are often low achievers not because they know less but because they don’t use numbers flexibly – they have been set on the wrong path, often from an early age, of trying to memorize methods instead of interacting with numbers flexibly (Boaler, 2009). 

Based on my experience, some teachers want their students to drill in basic facts and times tables as this is 'a good old school that worked well in the past'. Saying that we don't really have any research data to support this statement. I remember a lot of my classmates who hated maths because they didn't understand it or had to sit timed tests. I was one of them and I didn't enjoy that 'good old school' approach. 

I believe that the current decline in student achievement in maths is caused by a lack of maintenance or an unbalanced or inconsistent maths programme. 

• Do we all have a solid maths block every day four or five times a week? 
• Do our students practise and apply the knowledge and concepts taught in class or just do some busy work during their independent activities? 
• How can they develop fluency without mileage and purposefully created and provided opportunities? 

According to the NZC,  'number' should be the focus of 60–80 percent of mathematics teaching time during the first four years at school and 50-70 percent afterwards. 

Here comes a common misunderstanding or misconception. The curriculum requires a lot of time teaching 'number', but modern research talks about reasoning. The answer is simple. The 'old school' is about memorizing facts while the modern school is about developing fluency through making sense and connections, and talking about reasons for the use of different methods. Students need to learn to calculate through number sense, as well as spend time on problem-solving and reasoning. 

One of the great methods for teaching number sense and math facts at the same time is a teaching strategy called ‘number talks’ that many of us have been implementing already. Research tells us that the best mathematics classrooms are those in which students learn number facts and number sense through engaging activities that focus on mathematical understanding rather than rote memorization. (Jo Boaler)

At the end of her article, Jo compiled some great and engaging activities that can be used in any classroom to support your tamariki number sense development.