Part 5: Sharpening Your Lens and Planned Opportunities

Part 5: Sharpening Your Lens and Planned Opportunities

Slide 13 remains on the screen

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Watch another video

Watch with your sharpened focus. Look for attention being paid to:

• Defining attributes of objects and shapes
• Positional and directional language
• Spatial relationships
• Visualisation and spatial reasoning
• Perseverance and problem-solving

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Audience Participant 1: I think the visualisation – this is a computer, this is a something – you have to bury that – that’s something you really have to think about. There’s nothing there so you’ve got to see it your head and work it out.

Caroline: Exactly right – thank you. So, in order to understand what ‘bury it under’ means we need to visualise what that’s going to look like in order to follow through and do it. That’s a great example … okay, let me not tell you. Let me ask if anyone else would like to suggest something.

Audience Participant 2: Use of positional language, which also tapped into spatial relationships, so putting something on top of, and referencing that in relation to other objects.

Caroline: Brilliant. Other ideas?

Audience Participant 3: Displaying perseverance by walking around the construction a few times.

Caroline: And did you notice – you’re exactly right – it actually fell out and he picked it up and put it back in so if we’re wanting a non-verbal demonstration, of the understanding of ‘between’, we actually saw it happening twice, so you know it wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t a coincidence; he deliberately set out to put it between. Great example. Thank you. Anybody else?

Audience Participant 4: It was a bit of speculation, but we were talking about perhaps problem solving happened in the creation of the structure.

Caroline: Okay – tell us your thoughts on that.

Audience Participant 4: It looked to be a castle or a fort or something, and I would imagine that perhaps that would have been set up as the beginning of that challenge.

Caroline: I’m so happy you made that particular point. A little bit of background: This project had been positioned within a ‘starting school’ project, which seems to be non-mathematical, but the children were all in the final term before they started primary school, and during their transition process – had been visiting the school. So what we had been looking to do was position those children as experts of that process. We’d been looking at photographs of their schools; they had taken a trip to school with their families and timed how long it took to get there. They had built 3D constructions of 2D maps that they had drawn of their schools, and that’s what the construction was. I’m not sure if anyone picked up on this, but I’ll give you a clue as time is a problem: the reason that we had presented this particular learning experience was actually deliberately designed to assess children’s understanding of concept of ‘between’. So this learning experience followed that map activity that we saw a brief example of in the first video, where we saw that some children understood the concept of ‘between’ but other children were acquiring that understanding. And this is a great example, in the short video, of how an educator can prepare to go in and assess particular concepts by joining in their play. So the educator had joined the children, and he was pretending to be a furniture delivery guy and giving them those little pictures of objects, and asking them to put them in particular places. As you can see, the learning experience didn’t go quite according to plan, because the children were having a lot more fun than perhaps we’d anticipated, and they’d taken it in directions we hadn’t really planned for. However, we still see evidence of the demonstration of the thinking that we’d set out to.

So it wasn’t just the children persevering, the educator was also persevering, but keeping the children on task. That enabled us then to assess what the children understood of particular directional and positional terms. I could talk about this all evening but we won’t!

We hope that ‘sharpening your lens’, by knowing what it was you were looking for, enabled you to actually observe more in what was happening in that interaction.

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Formative assessment

We need to know what we are looking out for

We follow children’s interests and observe demonstrations of thinking to assess what they understand

When we understand what the child already knows, we can plan to support learning

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As I said previously, the learning experience was designed deliberately to be playful but also to support assessment. This is a nice segue to our discussion about formative assessment, and how to we actually do this in a playful way. We follow children’s interests, and we observe their demonstrations of thinking, to assess what it is they actually understand, and that assessment is right there – to assess what it is that they actually understand. When we understand what it is the child already knows, then we know what it is we want to be consolidating for them, and we know what the next steps are going to be, to be extending that learning a little bit further. In order to do that, we need to know what it is we are looking for. You can’t see things emerging in children’s play or talk or actions unless you as the educator actually know what it is that you are looking for so that you recognise it when it happens. And so that cycle continues. We know what we’re looking for, we observe their demonstrations of thinking and understanding, we assess where they are at, then we plan – and so that cycle continues.

Start Slide 15

When? Spontaneous and planned opportunities

• Board games and card games –emphasise the counting principles. Count, count, count.
• Teach numbers explicitly – point them out in everyday life like tram numbers, numbers in pictures, shoe sizes, measuring cups, house numbers on the street

• Use mathematical language and demonstrate mathematical thinking during every day routines – count, measure length and height, weigh, compare, draw children’s attention to the passage of time. Count steps up; count steps down. Talk about who has the most, the least, the same as, which is the biggest, the closest, the furthest.
• Use positional and direction language – where are objects in relation to you, to the child, to each other?
• Comment on the attributes of shapes – arrange teddies by size, blocks by shape and talk about why – Which is the same? Which is different? How do you know?
• Persevere!

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So … when? This is part of our focus for this evening, to remind ourselves of: we need to have sufficient knowledge and discipline ourselves, we need to know what typical development looks like ourselves (going back to the Epstein definition again), and we need to know about appropriate pedagogical strategies, teaching strategies to support children; because if we have mastered those three, if we have those three tools in our toolbox, we are then able to engage in both spontaneous and planned learning experiences with children, because we recognise opportunities in the environment to talk about things that are long and things that are tall, and things that are fast, or things that are high, we can support children subitise. We can ask: How many balloons do we see in the air? How do you know? How does the child know that there are six? Are they counting each one? Or do they look up and immediately see, without counting them, that there are six balloons? It also means that we not just respond to spontaneous opportunities but we actually plan learning experiences as well that are going to set up opportunities in order to observe what children understand; so that might be board games and card games. We might be setting up opportunities to for children to demonstrate the counting principles. Count, count, count – we need that; it’s the basis for much later learning comes from children’s ability to count accurately. We need to be teaching numbers explicitly; we need to be pointing them out in everyday life – like the tram numbers, numbers in pictures, like numbers on gates on streets. We need to be looking at shoe sizes, measuring cups, there’s any range of opportunities for us to be supporting children’s number skills as a starting point in our ordinary everyday environment. What we need to be is intentional about that.

We need to be using mathematical language and demonstrating mathematical thinking during every-day routines: counting, measuring length, height, weighing things, comparing things, drawing children’s attention to the passage of time, counting steps up, counting steps down, talking about who’s got the most, who’s got the least, who’s got the same as, what looks alike, what looks different, what the reasons shy might be, what’s biggest, what’s furthest, what’s closest. All these types of terms that we know ourselves – all of us know these terms, we all know this language – but what we need to be thinking about is how we can intentionally support children using that language, and hearing that language from us.

Positional and directional language, which is the focus of the videos that we showed you today – Where are objects in o to you? Where are they in relation to each other? – and modelling the kind of language that goes with that. Commenting on the attributes of shapes – arranging teddies by size, blocks by shape, and talking about why – Why is it helpful to put the blocks away by grouping similar shapes together. Drawing children’s attention to the attributes of those shapes, even when tidying up, is going to be supporting their learning. And persevering – sometimes we feel as though we’ve got it wrong, and it didn’t work, but persevering as educators, keeping on trying, and refining our thinking, the more comfortable we become with what it is we are doing, the more smoothly things flow, and the more confident we feel in trying it again.

Start Slide 16

Conclusion

• STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) required for 75% of the fastest growing occupations.
• Despite EYLF, VEYLDF, NQS, the frequency of high quality interactions that support learning is low.
• Gender transition of maths anxiety – more likely to affect female children than male and a widening gender gap observed in Australian schools.
• Equity – children from economically disadvantaged families underperforming – long term implications.(Cohrssen & Page, 2016)

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So I’m going to conclude my part of the presentation with some key points that I’d like to just put out there for you to refer to before Mary shows us some examples of the work that we’re busy working on at the moment. STEM, as we learned earlier, is required for 75% of the fastest growing occupations. Now I think it can be risky to only teach what we know and what we think is important now because then inevitably we are teaching ancient history. What we need to be doing is supporting children’s ability to learn, and to think about what it is that they learn, and evaluate what it is, and to resource their own learning. Despite the framework and the National Quality Standards, we see form the E4Kids study that the interactions that actually support learning, as opposed to keeping children busy and following their interests, the interactions between educators and children that support learning are actually quite low – and that’s a concern. Maths anxiety is more likely to affect female children than male. We see a widening gender gap in how children are performing in STEM subjects at school. So we know that maths anxiety, from research, is likely to be transmitted from female educators to female children. if you think about how many educators in the field are women, and do the maths, you will see that this is actually something that we need to think about – and more than think about it, we actually need to do something about it. Because we can’t be thinking about supporting children’s maths skills and getting girls back into the STEM subjects in high school if we haven’t been actually getting the building blocks in place in the very early years. I feel quite strongly about that and if there was any take-away point from the presentation, I’d really encourage you to reflect on that and what the implications of that are, for our practice as educators.

It’s also an equity issue. We know that children from economically disadvantaged families tend to underperform. So, again, we need to be thinking about the ling-term implications of this. if children aren’t exposed to a lot of maths talk in their home environment, and they aren’t exposed to a lot of maths talk in the early childhood environment, because the educator doesn’t feel comfortable with it, or we prefer to focus on other things, or there just doesn’t seem to be time, it’s kind of a double whammy, because the child is then not being exposed at home, and they may not be exposed in their early childhood education and they then start school quite disadvantaged, compared with children who have been receiving it at home, and who have received high-quality maths in early childhood. We know that children are unlikely to bridge that gap, to catch up unless there’s a really targeted intervention, once the children start school. So this is a real equity issue, and I think it’s really important for us to be looking at STEM education from an equity perspective, as well as. We need to actually do something about this.

End of Part 5

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