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Teaching and learning Gem #20 – Popcorn Questions

This Friday Gem comes from Priscilla Abeelack who shared this idea with the Geography and Economics department.


  • The teacher starts by posing a question. At the end the teacher says “Popcorn + student name”
  • That student then responds fully and then asks another related/development question to take the discussion further. The student says “Popcorn + student name”
  • Or the student asks another question that is unrelated, for a good bit of interleaving!
  • And so on…until the whole class has been ‘popcorned’.
  • The teacher could start with something very ‘small’ and see how ‘wide’ the discussion goes, or vice versa; or the teacher could start on one topic, and see whether students can move to another topic through their questioning.
  • This would also be relevant for languages and other subjects to consolidate new vocabulary or terminologies. For example, ‘define …’, ‘what is the formula for …?’, ‘Explain one effect of …’, ‘Explain one cause of …’.

Popcorn questions is effective because:

  • It helps students create networks of ideas, proven to strengthen storage in long-term memory.
  • It could be useful in revisiting past material (interleaving!).
  • It requires students to really listen to each other and to respond appropriately.
  • It encourages a questioning mindset for students, identifying ways to develop and deepen discussion through asking questions.
  • It puts the responsibility on the students to shape the discussion – they are not reliant on the teachers.
  • It encourages students to take ownership of their learning and classroom experience.

 

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STEAM Farmvention competition

During half term you might like to have some family fun taking part in the national Farmvention competition.

Farmvention is all about coming up with innovative ideas to help farmers tackle the problems they encounter caused by climate change.

There are two challenges:

What is the best material for a polytunnel?

What is the best shape for a drone?

Girls can take part in both activities or just one of them if they would like to enter. The polytunnel activity is ideal for younger girls, and the drone activity is more suitable for older girls, but both have lots of scope for family fun!

Once pupils have carried out their investigation they can film a Flipgrid video (no more than 1 minute) and post it, or email in or bring in photographs, videos, drawings, booklets or labelled diagrams to Mrs Farrer or Mrs Bond.

Maybe you will test polytunnel materials and make a model?

Maybe you will film a slo mo video of your drone shape test and draw a labelled diagram of a drone of the future?

The choice is yours!

More information is available for pupils on Flipgrid. For the drones activity look here, and the polytunnel activity look here. Pupils and parents will also find lots of ideas and tips on the Science Firefly pages.

Have lots of family fun with Farmvention over half term! The closing date to get your entries into Mrs Farrer or Mrs Bond is 6th November. We will then be carrying out other Farmvention activities during the year and sending in all of our work to the national competition. 

 

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Celebrating Black Athletes- Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph was an American sprinter born in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee in June 1940. As a child, Wilma suffered from infantile paralysis, double pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio, with doctors event telling her she’d never walk again. Despite this very unfortunate predicament and bleak possibilities for the future, Wilma was a determined child and, with the help of her parents and 21(!) siblings,  who would often remove her leg brace and massage her injured leg, Wilma’s physical condition slowly began to improve. By age 6 she could hop on one leg, by 8 she could move around with a leg brace, and by 11 Rudolph’s mother discovered her playing basketball outside. Continuing on this positive and determined trajectory, at 16 years old she competed in the 1956 Olympic Games and won a bronze medal in the 4×100 relay. 4 years later, Wilma headed to the 1960 summer Olympics and won 3 gold medals, hailing her as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, as well as earning her the title of the ‘fastest woman in the world’. 

Throughout her life, Wilma had always been a strong advocate for the rights of black people. Growing up in a very segregated area of America, she wasn’t allowed into the top schools, but instead had to go to a school only for black children. Sick of this segregation, after she returned home an Olympic champion, Wilma refused to attend her homecoming parade if it wasn’t integrated, and so the town listened. After retiring from track and field, she went on to finish her degree at Tennessee State University and began working in education. She continued her involvement in sports, and after being inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame she started an organization to help amateur black track and field stars. 

Wilma Rudolph is truly an inspiration, and was and still is a great role model. She displays courage, passion, and emotion towards everything she does in life. 

By Malin

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SLT Aims for 2020 – Part 4

In this week’s edition of WimLearn, Jess, Vera and Lili discuss their aims for this year as our head girl team of the Student Leadership Team 2021.

Coming back in 2020 is already different to any other year. For us in the Head Girl Team, part of that entails the humble yet vital aim to keep our school full of safe and healthy students: taking measures against the spread of the pandemic, while also trying to support mental health by  reconnecting students as well as possible. We also wish for a continued push for environmental change, both in and outside of school as we don’t want to give COVID the chance to side-track us from this important issue. Part of doing this will involve encouraging out-of-the-box thinking both in extracurriculars and in academics (and we hope this will be facilitated by our wonderful new STEAM tower!). The world needs bold, creative, and brave thinkers to tackle the problems we face today. We believe that those thinkers are at WHS.

This year there is no shying away from our need to partake in conversations surrounding race. We aim to diversify the academic curriculum and the pastoral system at WHS. This encapsulates areas of PSHE, the peer counselling program, and extracurricular life. We want discussion groups and committees to create a dialogue surrounding racial inequality since awareness and discussion are key to making a change. We aim to foster the courage ready to stand up for what is right and decent when injustice is in the way. Some of these conversations may be uncomfortable or unpleasant, but the consequences of not having these discussions are far worse. We hope the student body is on board with our mission to bring ourselves together – even when we are apart – to build the foundations for a better post-COVID world.

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Friday Gem #18 – the problem with interrupting the pause

Autumn Focus: Questioning

Teaching and learning Gem #18 – Guest Edited by AFB – the problem with interrupting the pause

Following on from Isabelle’s gems about questioning, and the need to pause…

We have also been discussing what interrupting that pause might actually do.

Why do we interrupt a pause?

  1. We teach in a bubbly, vibrant school. We are not used to silence in the classroom. It’s a bit awkward.
  2. We move around our topics and texts fairly swiftly, and are not always comfortable with slowing down.
  3. We want to help. If we feel awkward, how awkward must THEY feel? I know, we’ll turn the question around! Changing the word order will not only help them understand the question better, but it will break the awkward feeling!!

INCORRECT!

Jumping in, to ‘help’ a student, or to break a silence might relieve someone, sometime. But it is also likely to:

  • confuse
  • or disorientate the thoughts about the first question
  • or embarrass by drawing attention to the pause
  • or even patronise by perceiving a problem where there isn’t one

 

Today’s top tip: embrace the pause

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Mrs Wei Fang reviews Kris Boulton’s blog post: ‘Should we use questions to teach?’

Mrs Wei Fang, teacher of Mandarin at WHS, reflects on her own experience of questioning in the classroom, before reviewing a blog post by Kris Boulton ‘Should we use questions to teach?’

 “…the question is not why questions are better, it is when.”

As a language teacher, I have been thinking a lot about questioning in the classroom, getting students to really think about the grammar and vocabulary they learnt, in order to improve their understanding and memorising. For example, ‘how’ questions are particularly useful in assisting students to remember Chinese characters, or hanzi: ‘How do you know the meaning of this character?’ Students would answer: It means juice 汁  because it has water radical 氵 (the components of characters that indicate meaning). I then would retrieve other learning from their long-term memory by asking an elaboration question: ‘Where else can you see this radical?’. Giving students the thinking time, asking them to connect their learning and expecting a better answer are very important strategies of questioning.

However, questions do not always go well. At times I asked a series of questions and felt like my questions were much longer than the students’ answer. They seemed to be confused about why I asked those questions. I then reflected on my lesson and realised that: why didn’t I just explain it?

So, it is time to think about why we ask questions. Kristopher Boulton argues that questions are not necessarily better than explanations, though sometimes he switches to questions when he feels the need to promote understanding. In his blog post ‘Should we use questions to teach? -1&2”, he addresses that the question is not why questions are better, it is when. He concluded that: ‘questions can be very effective tools of teaching, but they must be used with incredible care.’ A very structured grid of various question types concluded by him and another blogger can be found here:

Question Spectrum

The above matrix is made for Maths, but one can be also useful for other subjects. It brought to my attention the pointlessness of allowing students to guess without establishing their prior knowledge. In Mandarin, there is language content that is better to be explicitly taught first, especially the content that doesn’t exist in English, for example: tones, measure words, characters (not randomly drawing it but with certain orders), as well as unique culture conception such as Hukou (a system of household registration used in China), etc. In order to enhance understanding, I once asked year 7 students to analyse the tones, by asking them the differences between Chinese and English sounds. As a result of lacking enough input of Chinese, some students were struggling to tell the differences among the four tones. They told me that the rising and turning tones sound the same. In this case, further questions on this will confuse them. It made all the difference the next time when I made them practice tones for enough time, and then asked them to tell me which tones they have heard and why (verbalizing burgeoning understanding). A key quotation from Boulton that I keep in mind for my subject is ‘never ask pupils questions to which they have not already been told the answer, unless they know enough that answering the question requires them only inching forwards.’

References

Kristopher Boulton

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/should-we-use-questions-to-teach-part-1/

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/should-we-use-questions-to-teach-part-2/

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/never-ask-pupils-a-question-to-which-they-have-not-already-been-told-the-answer/

 

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Mrs Rebecca Brown reviews Craig Barton’s book: How I wish I’d taught Maths

Mrs Rebecca Brown, teacher of Maths at WHS, reviews Craig Barton’s book How I wish I’d taught Maths, focusing on Chapter 11 about formative assessment and diagnostic questions.

“without an effective formative assessment strategy we are in danger of teaching blindly, being completely unresponsive to the needs of our students.”

Craig begins this chapter by referencing the 2013 Dylan Wiliam tweet:

Example of a really big mistake: calling formative assessments ‘formative assessment’, rather than something like responsive teaching.

It’s only a too familiar scenario – you mention an assessment and a classroom (or staffroom!) erupts into a panic of more pressure and visions of tests, marking and grades. But how do we understand what our pupils know and where we need to begin or continue teaching them from? Even more crucial now, following a period of prolonged guided home learning. My key quotation from the chapter is when Craig explains that ‘without an effective formative assessment strategy we are in danger of teaching blindly, being completely unresponsive to the needs of our students’.

Formative assessment should be about ‘gathering as much accurate information about students’ understanding as possible in the most efficient way possible and making decisions based on that’. In short, it is about adapting our teaching to meet the needs of our students.

He describes elements of great teaching and cites one of Rosenshine’s (2012) ‘Principles of Instruction’ -to check for student understanding: ‘The more effective teachers frequently checked to see if students were learning the new material. These checks provided some of the processing needed to move new learning into long-term memory. These checks also let teachers know if students were developing misconceptions’.

Teaching is only successful if students have understood and learned something. Successful formative assessment can help us to identify problems and begin to fix things in the here and now much more effectively and efficiently. Asking ourselves, do I need to go over this point one more time or can I move on to the next thing?

Craig suggests the use of diagnostic questions to give quick accurate and useful information about students’ understanding. A good diagnostic question is a multiple choice, four-part question, with three incorrect answers that can help you to identify both mistakes and misconceptions. Each incorrect answer must reveal a specific mistake or misconception. If the question is designed well enough, then you should be able to gain reliable evidence about students’ understanding without having to have further discussions.

Diagnostic questions are designed to help identify, and crucially understand students’ mistakes and misconceptions in an efficient and accurate manner. They can be used at any time in a learning episode and are most effective when used throughout, using follow up questions to test the exact same skill as the first question.

Craig has developed a website of diagnostic questions that can be used in a variety of subjects. This year I will be trying to incorporate these into all of my lessons to ensure I have accurate, timely information on student understanding to enable me to effectively teach the girls that I have before me.