Let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot in the classroom (video article)
Richard Andrew
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According to Google, the saying ‘Shooting oneself in the foot’ means ‘To foolishly harm one’s own cause’.?
When I reflect on my early years of teaching, much of what I did when working with students was shooting myself in the foot. I was making my job as a teacher more difficult than it needed to be.?
I was trying my hardest to engage my students and bring them onto my page. And yet, my efforts to engage and have students understand tended to backfire. I had all the right intentions, but my approach wasn't misaligned.
I shot myself in the foot repeatedly.?
Was I aware that some of my actions were counter-productive? Heck no! How could I have been??
And here's the point I’m making. We don’t know what we don’t know. When we lack awareness of how and why some of our actions make teaching and learning more difficult than it needs to be, we are blind to the outworking of those actions.
In this 3-min video, I explore this foot-shooting process from a mathematics classroom perspective.
Your turn ...
Do you suspect you could be shooting yourself in the foot? If you are a leader, do you suspect some foot-shooting is happening amongst your teachers?
Do tell ...
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1 年It's always good to take time to self-reflect on your actions, strategies and behaviours. Feedback from other is a great way to get some reflection from others.
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1 年Thank you, Richard. This is an eye-opener. Kindness should be built into anything, specially when teaching mathematics to our students. This can can start with individual commitments to showing kindness in words and actions.
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2 年Well refining context is more important to bridge the concept with discussion, argument, assertion and reasoning. The years rolling the concept will be precised. Efficiency of teacher proving with simplicity in mathematics learning. Students first teacher next.
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2 年Paul Abbott just posted this: Speaking about algebra, how long ago was this written? “The logic of the subject, which, both educationally and scientifically speaking, is the most important part of it, is wholly neglected. The whole training consists in example grinding. What should have been merely the help to attain the end has become the end itself. The result is that algebra, as we teach it, is neither an art nor a science, but an ill-digested farrago of rules, whose object is the solution of examination problems.” One may think this quote—expressing concern over algebra losing its relevance due to mindless teaching and assessing methods—is quite recent: but it is actually George Chrystal’s Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1885!
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2 年A great question you ask, and you’re right - students tend to think that doing well in maths is to replicate board work well, and, unfortunately, that belief is reinforced by typical standardised assessment regimes that continue to be doled out by state systems. It’s a bit of a catch 22 for the teacher I think, and it takes some courage to travel along a path that promotes a more student centred approach to learning. But I also think it’s possible to do so. Such an approach will be slower (slow cooked as a colleague once put it). It will allow time for group discussion, reflection and peer collaboration. It will mean rethinking what you envisage ‘should’ happen in a classroom - changing the paradigm, perhaps by devising a lesson a week where students spend time on carefully constructed investigations that can cover the prescribed material but in a far more meaningful and relatable way. Assessment regimes could be tweaked to include some of that investigation material. I’ve tried it, along with different methods of assessment, such as group presentations and interviews etc. and it was a heck of lot more rewarding than trotting out the usual textbook examples.