Learning Creative Learning: Embracing Multiple Motivations

This is a post inspired by the Week 2 Lecture for Learning Creative Learning, the MIT Course I'm doing.

The emphasis of this course is clearly to promote creativity and play as an important motivation for learning. However, Mimi states in this video:

"So, its not that one is better than the other but I think that different people, different young people have different kinds of affective registers, different things that drive and motivate them."

 Making clear that this technique is not for everyone, and that it should not necessarily supplant some of the more traditional motivators (grades, etc.), but can be added in order to reach people for who are left disengaged by traditional motivators.

"I think the point of what we've been trying to pursue at least with our idea of connected learning and interest based learning is to really broaden the kinds of entry points, pathways, motivations and the ways we recognize learning so that it can accomodate more diversity of styles."

That inspired me to think about the different types of motivation I currently use and could use in my classroom to encourage learning. Hopefully this will help me to keep them in mind whilst lesson planning. I also found it interesting to categorise them in a way other than on the Extrinsic/Intrinsic scale discussed by Dan Pink and others. Then I made a pretty poster about it:

Let me know if I missed any.

I will also start a series of more in-depth posts about different ways to incorporate these motivators in lessons. Watch this space.

Back to Basics: Intervention

My head of department recently showed me a chart she's created to help with intervention for pupils who are working below their target grade. This is what they look like:

The idea is that you put each student who is below target in to a ring of the concentric circles. You also give them codes (from the second sheet) as to why you think they haven't made their targets yet. Now you have a list of suggested intervention strategies you can use!

Some people in the department felt that this was too basic and didn't really give them anything they didn't know.

For me though, I think its really good to have all these strategies written down somewhere as a reference or a checklist of things to try out. Maybe its because I've moved around so much from school to school, but I think that this is an area where I could definitely improve. In future I plan to use these sheets to review the interventions I have done at least once a term.

Are there any other strategies you would add? Is it a little too formulaic? I already changed some of the wording of the sheet to make it a little less algorithmic.

16% Time Revised: Scaling it back

Hi there. Been a while hasn't it? Well I'm back baby!

I'm now on my second term of the 16% time experiment, and I've made a few minor changes. There were two big problems with my first attempt; we didn't have time (only 3 or 4 hours per term) to really get in to some of the more impressive sounding projects I (or they) suggested and many pupils had no idea how to start answering some of the questions posed. This is a top-set group and yet I repeatedly had to suggest googling a maths word they didn't yet know!

I still think that these big projects are within their grasp, but I think we started too big and students who have not done anything like this before just got lost.

Scaling it back

• Project suggestions are now reasonably 'completable' in 1-2 hours.
• They come with minor prompts and questions, to scaffold the directions they could take.
• There is a difficulty rating on each project.
• If they want to do a different project, I have a form for them to work through that gets them to write their own criteria for success and scaffold the project themselves.

We've had one lesson in this style and it was a lot more purposeful an environment and more accessible to the lower end of the class. I'm not sure if this will be quite as inspiring as before though. I'll let you know how it goes.

Here are my new suggested projects so far:
Revision  Complex Numbers  Arithmetic Proofs  Euclid  Different bases  Estimation and Large Numbers  Magic

16.6666666666% Time

I have some very bright and very highly motivated pupils in my top-set year 10 class this year and I feel like my classes are a bit wasted on them. The topics we go through need to be practiced and there is always extension material for them, but they just breeze through it. Last week I completely failed at tried to create a 3D-Graph, following this excellent post by Ashli. Basically I botched the explanation and expected too much to get done in a single lesson. Anyway, it was motivating to some, but others just felt it was another standard maths lesson.

Inspired by Shawn Cornally's Inquiry style of teaching and the idea I first heard from Google of 20% Time for employees, I decided to try out our own version of 20% Time in class:

In a recent survey I did with the pupils, most were happy with the pace of our classes, about 6 felt it was too slow and a couple felt it was too fast. I didn't want to leave that majority out of this, which is why I give them the option to revise topics. I will provide materials for this and it should hopefully help those less confident students.
To start with, my guess is that pupils will not have any idea where to go with this, so I have a few suggested project ideas:

Though I'm dangling these in front of them in the hope that someone will bite, I made it clear that they can really choose any topic they want. There are only two constraints:

• It must be mathematical and include maths which is currently beyond their knowledge/ability.
• Success or failure in the project is not so important, but you must aim for the project to be awesome (no powerpoints based heavily on wikipedia, etc. I want outrageous 6ft models and flashing, dancing lights!)

When they have picked a project and started working on it, I will drop a few words like 'game theory' as hints to the directions they could go, and vet their projects for mathematical content and awesomeness. Apart from that though, I hope to sit back and let them explore.

What do you reckon? Do you have any other intriguing/inspiring project ideas I could offer up as bait?

Coping Strategies: Encouraging pupils to struggle well *UPDATED

Here are some posters I've made for my classroom this year:




The idea is for pupils to think about what strategies they can use to try to tackle a difficult problem and a lot of them are lifted off this Mathematical Habits of Mind post. In class, if a student is struggling, I will point to these posters and ask what strategies they've tried or which strategy they think might help. Hopefully this will encourage students to try things out before giving up and asking for the solution from me.

Have you got any ideas for other coping strategies I could use? Any ideas how I could better encourage the struggle?

*UPDATE: Now includes two new posters (and a slightly funkier text)!!