Reflections on our Learning Communities

By Alistair Bissell, 23/3/12.

In recent work, the teachers at my school have been thinking about the underachievement of boys, and the work of Carol Dweck (2006) on growth mindset vs. fixed mindset.

In a recent Ofsted inspection, and in many internal lesson observations, it has been noted that often the teachers are working harder than the students! As teachers, we work hard to provide varied, engaging lessons, but the students sometimes choose not to engage in the way we would like. In recent meetings we have discussed our reporting methods and, in particular, whether ‘engagement’ is the best attribute to report on. Would reporting on ‘effort’ be better?

Our thoughts are that perhaps ‘effort’ implies that it is the students that need to be doing the work, whereas ‘engagement’ implies that it is the teachers’ role to do the work required to engage the students.

Dweck’s (2006) ‘growth mindset’ is the view that for one to achieve their full potential, the effort and hard work that they put in is more important than their innate ability, whereas ‘fixed mindset’ is the view that if you are clever then you will be successful; how clever you are is fixed, and more important than effort. As an aside, Ma (1997), has carried out research into the links between students’ perceptions of mathematics and their attainment in mathematics and her findings show that students’ enjoyment has more impact on their attainment than their perceived difficulty or perceived importance of mathematics. Perhaps this is because if students enjoy mathematics then they are more likely to put more effort into their study.

As a staff, we have been considering what ‘effort’ actually is, and it’s relationship with progress:

Initially, we thought that students’ progress would increase uniformly with the amount of effort that they put in. There was a suggestion that the middle graph might be a better model for the relationship, as the dip in progress takes into account that as students try harder, and work on more challenging tasks, they are more likely to encounter difficulties and problems where they get stuck.

One teacher discussed a desire to give students more freedom in their art lessons, as they often feel that by stopping students to discuss what they’ve learned, vary the task or break the lesson up into shorter chunks (for example, starter, main and plenary), they are interfering, or getting in the way of what the students are doing. Why not just let students paint, and give them the chance to make mistakes, and to be creative? It strikes me that if we don’t give students the chance to make mistakes then they are going to find it hard to get beyond this dip in progress as they put more effort in. The description of students having the chance to be creative without teacher interference feels to me like it corresponds with the part of the graph where students are beyond the dip in progress, and their effort is now paying off. I feel that for students to get beyond the dip in progress, they need to learn to overcome mistakes and difficulties without intervention from the teacher, and be able to function independently. An appropriate name for this dip in progress could be the ‘independence barrier’.

In reflecting further on the relationship between effort and progress, I believe that in classrooms which are teacher-led, increased student effort will lead to more progress, but there is a limit to this. As students begin to ask their own questions and interact with their own learning, they will initially hit difficulties, which may slow their progress; they hit the independence barrier. If students can overcome this, and learn to function independently, then they will be able to interact with their own learning, ask and answer their own questions, be creative, and their progress will not be limited.

In order to allow students to work beyond the independence barrier, we need to be planning lessons which give students the opportunity to be independent and ask their own questions. We need to allow our students the opportunity to make mistakes, and think about how to address them.

In reflecting on my own teaching of mathematics, I feel that I’ve always thought that it was important for students to have the opportunity to ask and answer their own questions, be creative, interact with their own learning and work independently, yet I don’t feel that many of my students work independently. I think that I am good at planning activities with scope for students really thinking about their mathematics and taking problems where their ideas and questions lead, but it is quite rare that students take this opportunity. Previously my explanation for this has been that they haven’t been motivated enough, or that they have chosen not to engage, and my hope has been that by continuing to provide opportunities to work on their own questions, they will eventually have a positive experience from this and increase their intrinsic motivation for working on mathematics. It now occurs to me that my students may have had a negative experience of putting more effort into their learning, as perhaps they have hit difficulties and been unsuccessful in sorting them out. A natural thing for students to learn from this would be that they make more progress if they don’t ask their own questions or challenge themselves.

So my challenge is to get more students beyond the independence barrier and into the space where they experience success and enjoyment from working independently. It is clear to me that the answer is not as simple as me helping students more when they get stuck, as this will lead to students becoming more dependent on me. I feel that part of the solution is to develop the expectation that all students work hard in my classroom and always put in 100% effort. I’m left questioning the idea that to contribute to the mathematics in my classroom is an offer that the students can choose to decline. While there are minimum requirements for participation, students can currently choose not to engage in developing their independence, asking their own questions, or committing to ideas. While my hope has always been that students will experience enjoyment from participating in working mathematically, and I can’t force students to have an idea, or their own question, I need to find a way of making hard work compulsory.

References

Dweck, C. S. (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House

Ma, X. (1997) Reciprocal relationships between attitude toward mathematics and achievement in mathematics, Journal of Educational Research, 90, pp. 221-229.