Eddie Woo General

Teaching outside the classroom

Hey Eddie, I got offered a full time job next year. Pretty excited but I want to be an active member within the school, rather than just doing the teaching component. So for example I want to participate in extra curricular activities within the school. But i was wondering if that is something a first year out teacher should do, considering the workload? What are your thoughts on that?

What a fantastic question. It comes from a really good heart that wants to get involved but also wants to be realistic about its own limits (and believe me, in your first year of teaching you will definitely confront your limits!). This is something I personally feel very strongly about, and I’m glad you’re thinking about very consciously rather than just falling into the path of least resistance.

Full disclosure: every year that I’ve been a teacher (including my first), I’ve been deeply involved in activities outside the classroom. That probably gives you an indication of the kind of advice I’m about to give. But now what’s important is that I justify it!

To answer your question, I need to pose a question back to you first. And that question is: what is a teacher’s role? What is a teacher actually supposed to do? You’ll note that I did not ask, “What is a teacher’s job?” or “What is a teacher paid to do?” I don’t want to know what the minimum expectations are; I want to know what it actually means to be a teacher, what it should mean, what it ought to mean. As a teacher, who are you? Why do teachers exist?

Your answer to my question will define the answer to your own question. I’ll show you how I answer each one in turn.

As a teacher, who am I? Why do I exist? I am a role model, an instructor, a mediator, a mentor, and a coach. I exist to do everything I can to bring people through the journey from being a child to being an adult. That includes standing in front of a classroom and explaining things – a lot of it – but it includes so much more. It includes teaching children how to relate to their peers – and those who aren’t their peers. It includes being an example of character and integrity. It includes forcing students to challenge their own limits even when they don’t want to – and proving to them that they are capable of more than they believe they can do. It includes showing them why they shouldn’t always do things even when they are capable of doing them. It includes helping them understand right and wrong in the nitty gritty of everyday life where things aren’t black and white. It includes helping them see their true role within their family, within their group of friends, and within broader society. It includes training them to work effectively with others.

So what am I supposed to do? Does my role end when my students and I walk out the door of the classroom? Not a chance. In some ways, that is just the beginning. I can think of two primary reasons – among hundreds – why teachers must participate in school activities with their students.

  1. In those other activities, you are still teaching. A lot. You are still explaining and training and helping students to learn. In fact, you are helping them to learn a whole host of skills and knowledge that cannot be taught in a classroom setting. I think back to my days as a touch football coach, and the many mornings I spent out on the oval teaching my team how to be a team. I’m confident that the lessons I taught out on the field will be some of the most enduring memories of school for the boys and girls I had on my squad. So if you’re a teacher, you should be out there doing that. Why would you pass up that golden opportunity?
  2. In those other activities, you see students in an entirely different light that will help you to understand them better and be a better teacher to them when you are back inside the classroom. Conversely, your students will see you in an entirely different light and that will help them learn more effectively too. Whether it’s sport or photography or army cadets or prefects, each activity you’re involved in helps you see a different side tip your students. Often a student who seems to do badly in your class has meant wonderful skills in other areas, and discovering those will help you appreciate them and give you opportunities to reach out to them (rather than them constantly disliking you because you are merely the teacher of the class they hate the most). Just like air is the medium for sound, I believe that relationship is the medium for learning. And every avenue along which you can form a better relationship with your students will help you to teach them more effectively.

So you can see I have a pretty firm stance on this one. I think it’s a no-brainer to get involved with school activities wherever you can. In fact, hopefully my two reasons above help you to see why I don’t think it’s actually accurate to call them “extra-curricular” activities (since “extra” literally means “outside of” and “separate to”). I think the name “co-curricular” activities is far more appropriate (because it helps us to see that the learning taking place in such activities runs in parallel to the learning taking place in classrooms).

That brings us to the question, then, of time. You wisely ask if these activities are “something a first year out teacher should do, considering the workload”. To be sure, any and all activities you engage in will take a significant investment of time (if you do them well, that is – and you should). There are only so many hours in the day and that means the time you spend on activities will inevitably take away from your time spent on other tasks related to classroom teaching.

But this fact remains true throughout your teaching career; it’s not like you hit some magical point in your fifth or tenth or twentieth year where you say, “Great, I’ve perfectly mastered my classroom teaching now, so with I’m going to devote some of my wonderful newfound spare time to some activities!” That day never comes. Teaching by its very nature is all-consuming. It’s a bottomless pit that will swallow up however much time you throw at it. You can always plan a more innovative lesson. There is always a new tool or technique or technology to try out. You can always spend more time helping out students after class. And there will always be new opportunities to broaden and deepen your understanding of your subject area.

None of these are bad things – they are the reasons why we as teachers never need to get bored! But they do mean, in my opinion, that you shouldn’t wait indefinitely to get involved in school activities. I would wait an absolute maximum of twelve months, because admittedly the very first year is not just your entry into teaching but into full-time work itself, and that can be pretty traumatic. But after a year, it’s time to take the plunge. Yes, it will take some time out of your 24 hours. It’s so worth it, though, that I don’t think you’ll look back.

Eddie Woo General

Awards aren’t evil

A few days ago, @corisel posted this thoughtful reflection on awards in teaching. It’s well written and touches on a really important point: that teaching is a team sport. A single child is raised by a community of educators, not by any one teacher in isolation. So, individualistic awards can be a dangerous thing; they can wrongly emphasise the recognition of one person over the whole group that is really responsible for any positive thing that has been achieved.

The whole discussion reminded me of someone else who was very opposed to the whole system of awards that seems to exist in every field under the sun. That person was the renowned physicist Richard Feynman.

Feynman

Feynman was an incredible scientist, but he was also an amazing personality. If you’ve got 10 minutes and want to marvel at his life, watch this very entertaining video about him by Scishow. The relevant fact about him, though, was that he hated the idea of awards. As in education, science is always a group endeavour. Every discovery stands on the progress and work of others. So, Feynman argued, it was wrong to recognise individuals with awards. In one TV interview he said:

I don’t like honours… I don’t need anything else. I don’t see that it makes any point that someone… should decide this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I’ve already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use. Those are the real things; the honours are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honours. It bothers me. Honours bother me!

His words seem to capture the essence of what many people have been saying so far in the discussion. But there’s more to the story. Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 – and given his whole stance on things, you would expect him to have refused the prize (he wouldn’t have been the first). However, he didn’t; he accepted the prize. This wasn’t just because he wanted his name up in lights all of a sudden. He actually went through a philosophical reversal about prizes when he saw the response of his friends and the common populace when he was awarded the prize. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he said:

And so, you Swedish people, with your honours, and your trumpets, and your king – forgive me. For I understand at last – such things [awards] provide entrance to the heart. Used by a wise and peaceful people they can generate good feeling, even love, among men, even in lands far beyond your own. For that lesson, I thank you.

His point is that awards have a power to draw attention to things that are good, and make people aware and curious about good things that they otherwise would not have done. Yes, they can be abused – they can be pursued for selfish reasons or given out as mere political gestures – but the awards themselves are not bad. In fact, they can be wonderful.

All this is just to think through the other side of things. I have no personal stake in the issue as I’ve never done anything to deserve such awards anyhow! But I thought it interesting and thought it would be nice to hear another point of view (namely Feynman’s – not mine).

Eddie Woo General

#ozftchat

It’s taken me a long time to dip my toes into the ocean of Twitter, but I’ve found it to be a really enriching place to go. I’ve had the opportunity to strike up lots of relationships and be exposed to lots of ideas that I wouldn’t have heard about if I stayed in my own little educational neighbourhood.

One of the greatest social structures that have emerged from Twitter are the scheduled chats. These are often run weekly (others run once a month), and see people gather to chat about a theme that’s related to their field. Naturally, I gravitate towards the teacher chats. Twitter isn’t the ideal medium for lengthy discussion of complex and nuanced issues, but that’s not what these are about. They are more like a teachmeet than a lecture: they cover a broad range of topics and connect a variety of people together, which then opens the door for further conversation later on.

I was very privileged to be the guest on #ozftchat a couple of weeks ago. Australian Family-Teacher Chat is hosted by the wonderful Jeannette James, and is exactly what it sounds like: a time for teachers and families to interact on questions and issues that affect them both (and there are lots of those). It’s a brilliant idea and a great way to open lines of communication that are more frequent and flexible than the annual parent-teacher interview.

As you might be able to imagine, I was brought in because the theme of this particular chat was mathematics. You can read a Storify of the chat here to see how it unfolded.

In preparation for the chat, I threw together a few quotes that communicated some of the key ideas I wanted to get across. Here they are:

2_think_deeply

3_asking_questions

6_climb_together

If you’re into education at all, whether from the parent or teacher side (or both!), the @ozftchat account is definitely worth following!

Eddie Woo General

Troubled Acronyms

Random thought of the day…

Why have there been so many ways to describe people whose main language isn’t English? I count the following acronyms:

  1. ESL: English as a Second Language. Okay, so maybe English is your third or fourth language – I get the problem.
  2. LBOTE: Language Backgrounds Other Than English. So it has BOTE in the acronym, which is a homonym for BOAT, which might be the way that some refugees arrived in the country and has negative connotations with some? Okay, I guess that could be construed as an issue.
  3. NESB: Non-English Speaking Background. So what’s wrong with this one? I thought it rolled off the tongue quite nicely, actually.
  4. EAL/D: English as an Additional Language/Dialect. This one wins points for using an extra symbol to squeeze in more meaning. Yowzer, it sounds so awkward to say out loud: “Eee Ay Ell Slash Dee”.

I guess I shouldn’t stress about it… in a year or two we’ll probably have a new one.

Eddie Woo General

Don’t smile till Christmas

I started publishing videos for students. But one of the things I least expected about doing this is how many teachers who have reached out and gotten in contact with me. I wanted to share one of the questions that was sent in, and my response.

Hey Eddie,

I am at university and about to begin my teaching internship. I am often asking educators about classroom management and behavior strategies since its the one thing I am most worried about in terms of becoming a teacher. The most common response I get is the need to set up routine, but also to literally be in terminator mode in terms of strictness and firmness for a term (I have also been told about the “don’t smile till Christmas” idea). Whilst I understand the need to be firm/strict, I came into teaching because I knew it could be challenging but extremely fun at the same time and it just isn’t in me to be that teacher that is constantly nagging and picking on minor things in order to set a standard for the class. I think me and you are similar in the sense that we like to, or even NEED to, engage with the students on a level that makes it enjoyable for the both of us. However its clear that you have accomplished this to a much higher level than I have even come close to in the past on pracs and you have found that balance between engaging with students and knowing when to assert your position.

So my question for you is, how do YOU set your standards, routines and behavior expectations with a class in your first couple of weeks with them and how do you go about easing those expectations over time to create that relaxed classroom nature.

As you might be able to tell from how I interact with my students, I have never felt entirely comfortable with the Terminator mode idea. I received similar advice while at uni and gave it a real go, but found it didn’t gel effectively with my personality. I felt like I wasn’t being myself whenever I took that approach to interacting with students, and it didn’t seem to help me or them at establishing a positive learning environment. I did, however, recognise that I needed to act and speak in ways that didn’t come naturally to me at first. I couldn’t be a Terminator all the time, but I had to master the ability to be a Terminator some of the time – when it was really necessary to draw the line in terms of expected behaviour inside and outside the classroom. It wasn’t in my personality to be dead serious about everything, but if I wasn’t able to be dead serious some things, then I would just come across as flippant and dismissive. That’s not doing a service to the kids any more than being angry all the time would be.

I guess my primary tip for classroom management is this. The key is not any technique or program in particular – even though I’ve learnt tons and they’re all useful. The key is relationship. When we walk into that classroom, we are not just there to transmit information. We are there to form a relationship with the kids, and that relationship becomes the conduit through which information and understanding flows. Have you heard this phrase before? “Students don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” It sounds a bit cutesy, but I’ve found it to ring very true with my experience. That means you care about them and ask how they’re doing as human beings. But it also means you care about their standard of conduct and will discipline them where necessary. If students see you don’t care in either of those ways, you will quickly see that no management strategies in the world can establish a really effective environment for learning – at least not for long.

So to answer your question directly: what do I do in those first couple of weeks? I don’t think I can give you any blanket advice here. I’ve taken a slightly different approach with every single student I’ve ever met, and that’s because (for all their similarities) every single student is unique. This is something that is best gained with experience: you need to learn how to read students and their particular needs, and respond accordingly. Some of them need you to be really serious, sure. But they also need to see that you can laugh. That you are genuinely concerned when they are going through hard times. That you can call them by name, look them dead in the eye with burning anger and tell them to leave the room immediately when they act in a way that harms or endangers another student. And to do all this in a way that’s consistent with your own character and personality. They need to experience your full range of emotion, in the right place at the right time, for you to earn their respect. And in that context, learning can really thrive.
Eddie Woo Mathematics

Practical tips for maths teachers: the growth mindset (TER Podcast follow-up #2)

Last time I wrote some thoughts I had after completing my interview for the TER Podcast about maths education. You can go back and read that if you’re interested in thinking through some of the big-picture issues surrounding the problematic state of maths education in Australia. Following on from that post, I want to share some more practical pointers that I’ve observed to be helpful in a variety of different classes and contexts. Each one is its own idea, so I’m going to devote a few posts to unpacking them in a bit of detail.

What are some of the effective approaches you’ve seen people use? Answer number one: adopting a growth mindset.

First things first. It’s vital that teachers regard their students with a real growth mindset. This is a phrase familiar to anyone who has read the work of psychology professor Carol Dweck, who gives the best summary of what the idea is about:

In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

You can see why this is such a big deal to maths education. Maths, perhaps more than any other subject in school, is dominated by a fixed mindset. There are people who are good at maths and then there are the rest of us. In fact, the phrase, “I’m no good at maths” has entered into our cultural vernacular and sadly become an acceptable response to anything encountered in everyday life that involves numbers or numerical thought.

The problem here is that this kind of thinking becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. When we think of ourselves as unable to do mathematics, we don’t bother trying – and hence deprive ourselves of the very experience that will allow us to develop mathematical skill (namely, struggling to grasp numerical concepts and master the tools necessary to solve problems that require their application).

It doesn’t take too much imagination to realise that our self-concept when it comes to our mathematical ability isn’t just self-generated. It is formed, in large part, by those we trust to nurture and develop us as mathematicians – our maths teachers. What kind of an effect do we as maths teachers expect to have if we consistently communicate that “This is too hard for you, and you will never be able to succeed at it no matter how hard you try”?

And sadly, whether it’s through the bevy of tests that end in failure, or the advice to children to take the mathematics course that will maximise their ATAR rather than challenge and enrich them, or even just the little interactions with students every lesson that erode their self-confidence – this is the message that students often pick up from us, their maths teachers. Some students survive this process, but many don’t. They aren’t just disempowered – they’re paralysed. No wonder “maths anxiety” is a thing (who ever heard of any other subject that has its own psychological malady associated with it?). What a tragedy.

It’s obvious that people can take the growth mindset too far. One of the most enduring characteristics of truth in all spheres is that it will always be abused by someone with the wrong idea about how it should be interpreted, and this is no exception. If you’re curious about this and want to know how to avoid that particular trap, you can watch a vlog I recorded about it a few months ago.

But that isn’t most of us. For most of us, the growth mindset is a breath of fresh air. Yes, anyone can master maths! Sure, it takes some more time than others – but who is surprised by that given that every human being is unique and brings a new perspective and set of skills to the table? Rather than view those differences as a cage locking us into a certain level of achievement, let’s embrace them and see how they can be brought to bear on the pursuit of mathematical understanding that we should all be a part of.

Eddie Woo Mathematics

TER Podcast follow-up: the big issues

2014 has been a year full of firsts for me. First year teaching in a comprehensive school (student teacher placements notwithstanding). First year as a head teacher (which has produced a whole lot of firsts of its own). First time recognised in public because of the videos I make. And as I type this, I’m at my first MANSW Annual Conference (arguably the biggest gathering of maths teachers in the state all year), my head spinning from considering new ideas and meeting new people (or in some cases, seeing people face-to-face who I’ve been interacting with online for a long time now).

Another first happened last month, when I participated in a phone interview with Corinne Campbell (@corisel) for the TER Podcast. The topic was Is Maths Education Broken?, and I was there to provide a sort of foil to an interview that Corinne had with the luminary Conrad Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha fame). You can listen to the entire episode (and if you’re in education and haven’t subscribed to the podcast, you really ought to). It was an interesting experience, not least because it was so unusual to actually interact with a voice that I was so used to just listening to passively through a podcast.

I’m the kind of person who thinks of the perfect witty comeback or joke ten minutes after the conversation is over. So even though I had prepared my own thoughts and notes before the interview and tried my best to cover everything that would be important, I found myself in the shower that evening thinking, “Oh, _this_ would have been the perfect answer to that question!” and “How on earth did I forget to say _that_?” So here are a few of the things that I should have said, but forgot to. In this post I’m going to talk about the large-scale issues that are related to the “STEM crisis” Australia is experiencing, and in a follow-up post I’ll talk about some of the smaller practical strategies that can be employed in the classroom to help our students from day to day.

How do we improve STEM skills in Australian schools?
There’s no simple solution to this one – so you can know with a fair degree of certainty that if someone tells you they have a straightforward way to fix this problem, they’re probably just oversimplifying the situation. The so-called STEM crisis is a perfect storm of different factors and so there won’t be a single actionable item to fix things.

But there are definitely many identifiable aspects of the challenge. For instance, the syllabus is by-and-large divorced from real mathematical practice (both in everyday life and in vocational contexts). Here’s a great little quote from Optimising the Future with Mathematics (via The Conversation):

Current mathematics education, in schools and universities, is satisfied with programming students to carry out certain mathematical processes, and assessment rewards students who can calculate everything even if they understand nothing.

So what can we work on at the ground level? Firstly, it’s vital to recognise the enormous continuity of learning in maths. All key learning areas exhibit a degree of intra-dependence within their skills and knowledge, but it seems to be especially noticeable in maths where a single “weak link” in the chain can be disastrous! Once student confidence is lost, it is hard (not impossible, but significantly challenging) to rebuild it.

Secondly, top-down (syllabus level) change is required, but we can’t wait for that to happen. Policy is always hard and slow to change (it must be in a democratic and bureaucratic environment), but we can push the envelope of our daily practices right now and see what works. We can undertake action research projects into what is effective and helpful. Another insightful quote:

We need mathematics “to be taught more like it is done” by those engaged in it, in both the innovations economy and research. This is a cultural change that involves the discipline itself, one that must be mainstreamed into school and university systems.

These cultural changes almost never come as mandates from above – they are typically born out of grassroots movements from below that are then recognised and ratified by authorities.

Eddie Woo General

The pizza slice that changed everything

Sometimes it’s the little things that really make a difference.

It’s been a year of big changes for me. Many of those changes have been deeply and personally challenging, and I’ve lost count of the number of days when I’ve laid my head down on my pillow at night  in an exhausted state and wondered what on earth I was thinking when I took up this new role!

At that point in time, I call a variety of things to mind to rationalise for myself and make me feel a little better after a long and trying day. This week, one of the things I called to mind was a slice of pizza.

pizza2

Context will help. One of the most novel experiences for me this year is being genuinely disliked. I have a feeling this is going to come across the wrong way, but most of the people I’ve interacted with in the past like me (or are very good at fooling me into thinking that they like me). For better or worse, I’m used to being fairly well regarded by those around me – and I’ve tried my best to give people good reasons to do that.

So this year it was a bit like jumping into a pool of ice water to have people – lots of them – really, honestly, openly, not like me. At first, like ice water, it was a raw shock to the system – was it going to get any better? But as time passed, I realised that there was no quick fix. I’d just have to get comfortable in the cold. Even though I didn’t like it, I understood very well why I was being treated this way – I was alien and unfamiliar to the school, not to mention inexperienced and making mistakes that had a flow-on effect to lots of other people. Well, fair enough then. Don’t expect to be liked – it’s not part of the role description.

But enter a group of year 12 boys who had their lunchtime hang-out spot in front of my classroom. One or two of them were in my class, but most of them I just got to interact with when I bumped into them in between classes. And frankly, whether intentionally or not, these boys just welcomed me. No matter what was happening, they would always greet me with a smile and chat with me as if they’d known me for years.

Friday was their last day of school before the HSC trial exams begin, and I had just wished my own year 12 class good luck for their assessments. The lunch bell rang and as everyone filed out of the room, I set about packing up all my things (whiteboard markers, worksheets, tripod, microphone)… only to be surprised by one of the aforementioned year 12 boys entering the room. “Sir, do you want some pizza?”

Some of them had gone and ordered pizza as a kind of pre-emptive celebration, I guess. The reasons for the food aren’t all that important to me, really. I was just touched that they invited me – a teacher, and a teacher who has just turned up at their school this year – to share some food with them. It was completely unrequested kindness – the very best kind.

Have you ever received a “slice of pizza” (or other unexpected gift) from a student?

Eddie Woo Mathematics

What is “Exploring Mathematics”?

Exploring Mathematics is an elective semester course offered to Stage 5 (Year 9-10) students at Cherrybrook Technology High School.

To understand what this course is, you must first understand what it is not:

  • This course is not about acceleration (learning content from years 11-12 in advance so that you will be more familiar with it when you encounter it in the future). In fact, topics in the Stage 6 mathematics subjects have been intentionally avoided so that they can be given their proper introduction in the Preliminary and HSC courses.
  • This course is not like your regular mathematics class in its classroom activities or its assessments. In fact, there is a very conscious emphasis on branches of mathematics that are not understood through repetitive exercises, nor assessed in traditional examination formats.

By contrast, the goals of this course are:

Continue reading “What is “Exploring Mathematics”?” →

Eddie Woo General

Semester 2 returns with a bang!

After a pretty intense Term 2, I’ve hit the ground running in Term 3. Highlights include: preparing a new Year 8 program aligned to the NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum; motivating my year 12s to make the most of their final term in school with a stirring story from the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and having a cracker of an introductory lesson to the Stage 5 elective maths course that I’ve started teaching this semester!

A brief note about that last point: the elective course (open to year 9-10 students) is called Exploring Mathematics, and it’s an incredibly exciting opportunity for me. It provides the chance to dig into all kinds of maths that have to be passed over in the BOS mathematics courses (due to lack of time, difficulty of assessment, and a variety of other factors). I intend for it to feature fairly prominently on this site; Í’ll write more details about this in the future as everything is still is in a state of flux for now.

What’s on the cards for your Term 3?