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Why being bad at Maths just doesn’t add up

By Helena Rees, Head of Maths.

Many still see people who are good at maths as slightly weird, geeky, uncool. Why is this? Why should we study maths?

A couple of years ago Professor Brian Cox hosted ‘A Night with the Stars’ on the BBC. From the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, he undertook to explain among other things how diamonds are made up of nothingness and how things can be in an infinite number of places at once. He took the audience, made up of famous faces, celebrities and scientists, through some of the most challenging concepts in physics, using maths and science experiments as he went along. It was a truly fascinating programme and if nothing else demonstrated the power of numbers and the speed with which they can make a grown man cry. Jonathan Ross (43 mins approx) was invited to assist Brian Cox in a maths calculation using standard form. The look of sheer panic on Ross’s face, followed by him saying, “This is the worst thing that’s happened to me as an adult” and “I’m sweating”, just about sums up many people’s attitude towards maths.

Mrs Duncan spoke to the whole school this week and used this example. Imagine going out for dinner with six friends and the bill comes. When the time comes to split the bill between seven, the bill is shuffled to the maths teacher or accountant with a slightly shame-faced look saying, “I am rubbish at maths” or “I couldn’t do maths at school”. Imagine, however, that same group of people sitting down to order and someone asking for the menu to be read out because they can’t read it. Few will admit that they can’t read as the stigma of this would be hugely embarrassing. Yet no such reservations exist for maths with individuals almost boasting about their lack of maths ability. Why is this?

Many still see people who are good at maths as slightly weird, geeky, uncool. A PhD in Maths or Physics at the end of a name tends to conjure up images of social awkwardness — people more to be pitied. On the whole surveys of attitudes over the past 50 years have shown that the cultural stereotype surrounding ‘scientist and mathematician’ has been largely consistent — and negative. However, things are changing, in November 2012, President Obama held a news conference to announce a new national science fair. “Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House, we’re going to lead by example,” he said. “We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.” The idea that scientists, mathematicians and engineers could attain iconic status is exciting.

The popularity of television shows such as ‘Think of a Number, ‘Countdown’ and more recently the use of numbers in ‘Numb3rs’, and ‘How Do They Do That?’ have boosted the public’s perception of Maths. CSI has done more for boosting number of students of forensic science than any careers fair. The Telegraph recently reported that students who had a Maths A Level earned on average £10,000 more than a student without. Perhaps statistics like these would encourage more students to take the subject seriously. A report by think-tank Reform estimates that the cost to the UK economy between 1990 and 2008 of not producing enough home-grown mathematicians was £9 billion, such is the value of maths expertise to business.

Marcus du Sautoy, second holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford says he can’t understand the pride there is in being bad at Maths. “It’s bizarre why people are prepared to admit that because it’s an admission that you can’t think logically. Maths is more than just arithmetic. I would rather do business with someone who admits they’re good at Maths. You don’t get that in the Far East. In Korea or China they’re really proud of being good at Maths because they know the future of their economies depend on it, their finances depend on it. Mobile phones, the internet, Playstations and Google all depend on Maths,” he says. “If people realised that, then they wouldn’t poke fun at it so easily. In today’s information age, Mathematics is needed more than it ever was before – we need Maths. Problem solving skills are highly prized by employers today. There is an increasing need for Maths and the first step needed is a change in our attitudes and beliefs about Maths.”

It is true that many of us will not do another quadratic equation or use trigonometry in our daily lives. However, Mathematics is more than just the sum of subject knowledge. The training to become a scientist or an engineer comes with a long list of transferable skills that are of enormous value in the ‘outside world’. Communication skills, analytical skills, independence, problem-solving skills, learning ability — these are all valuable and at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy. But scientists, mathematicians and engineers tend to discount these assets because they are basic requirements of their profession. They tend to think of themselves as subject-matter experts rather than as adaptable problem solvers.

We have all heard of Pythagoras and his famous theorem. The theorem states that the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right angle triangle sum to the square on the hypotenuse, more commonly shortened to a2 + b2 = c2. In 1637 Pierre de Fermat postulated that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. For example to a3 + b3 = c3 After his death, his Fermat’s son found a note in a book that claimed Fermat had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin. It was among the most notable theorems in the history of mathematics and prior to its proof, it was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most difficult mathematical problem”.
(https://plus.maths.org/content/fermats-last-theorem-and-andrew-wiles ) However, in 1994 Andrew Wiles, published a proof after 358 years of effort by Mathematicians. The proof was described as a ‘stunning advance’ in the citation for his Abel Prize award in 2016. You can watch an interview with Andrew Wiles by Hannah Fry where he was interviewed this week in the London Public Lecture Series organised by Oxford University.

In a recent article Wiles commented “What you have to handle when you start doing Mathematics as an older child or as an adult is accepting the state of being stuck. People don’t get used to that. They find it very stressful.” He used another word, too: “afraid”. Even people who are very good at Mathematics sometimes find this hard to get used to. They feel they’re failing. “But being stuck, isn’t failure. It’s part of the process. It’s not something to be frightened of. Then you have to stop. Let your mind relax a bit…. Your subconscious is making connections. And you start again—the next afternoon, the next day, the next week.”

Patience, perseverance, acceptance—this is what defines a Mathematician.

Hilary Mantel, novelist and writer of Wolf Hall writes “If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient” Perhaps Mathematicians and novelists are so different after all?

When it comes to Mathematics people tend to believe that this is something you’re born with, and either you have it or you don’t and this is the common refrain at parents evenings. But that’s not really the experience of Mathematicians. We all find it difficult. It’s not that we’re any different from someone who struggles with Mathematics problems in junior school…. We’re just prepared to handle that struggle on a much larger scale. We’ve built up resistance to those setbacks. A common comment on parents evening is to delegate the Maths homework to dad as that is ‘his thing’. What message does this give our girls of today? That this is a subject that boys are good at.

Luckily for us here at Wimbledon High School we have a strong culture of doing well in Maths. We have excellent results at iGCSE and there are over 50 girls this year in year 12 alone studying some form of post 16 Mathematics qualification with a view to a STEM career. The new Steam room is an exciting initiative to be part of. A recent article in the National Centre for the Excellence in Teaching of Mathematics journal, asked how can we get more girls to study A Level Maths. The answer at WHS? Keep doing what we are doing well and continue to be excited and positive about the beauty and the magic of numbers.

 

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A trip to הארץ (the land)

By Keith Cawsey, Head of RS.

Having been at Wimbledon High School for a whopping twelve years (how did that happen?), I was due a sabbatical. My first stop was Israel. 

I first visited Jerusalem in the January of 2000 and was keen to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. I was also interested in visiting a few places and museums that I have taught about since qualifying as a teacher, but never actually visited.

My first stop was to the Western Wall. Often called the ‘Wailing Wall’, it is best known by the Jewish community as ‘the Kotel’ (literally, The Wall). This is the only part of the original temple that was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Indeed, it is part of a supporting wall of that temple and is the most sacred place visited by the Jewish community today. To the left of the wall itself, is an arch – Wilson’s Arch – where the faithful were praying and a discussion on the Talmud was taking place.

At school, I lead the annual trip for students in Year 10 – Year 13 to Poland, where we visit Auschwitz concentration camp and Oskar Schindler’s factory. When he died, Oskar Schindler asked to be buried in Jerusalem, facing the Mount of Olives and his grave is visited by millions each year. On my second day, I searched for his grave. In a way, it was closing a circle. I had visited his factory in Poland, listened to many Schindler survivor testimonies and, of course, watched the film. Here was my opportunity to pay tribute to that awe-inspiring man, who saved so many. His grave had stones placed on top of it, a Jewish tradition to honour the dead. Later in the week, I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Shoah (Holocaust) and saw his tree planted in the ‘Avenue of the Righteous’ – a row of trees placed in memory of all the non–Jews who helped save the lives of Jewish people during the Shoah.

Starting in the Muslim quarter on the third day, I walked down the ‘Via Dolorosa’ – a road that traditionally Jesus walked down on his way from being sentenced by Pontius Pilate, to his crucifixion. Each of the fourteen stations is marked by a number and many have churches or chapels where you can pause and reflect on the Passion of Christ. The last four stations are to be found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – a church traditionally built on Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. You can also see the place where Jesus was laid out after his crucifixion and the tomb where, according to tradition, Jesus was placed after his death and subsequently rose from the dead. Rudolf Otto used the word ‘numinous’ to explain that feeling of holiness and of the almighty and in this church. It was all around me.

Later that week, I queued very early in the morning to climb up to the area of the Temple Mount (Har Habayit in Hebrew). This is the place where the Jewish Temple once stood and is traditionally is the site where Abraham demonstrated his devotion to God by almost sacrificing his son Isaac. Today, the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands on the site as the rock that the mosque is built around is traditionally the place of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven during his night journey in the 7th Century CE. The view of Jerusalem and the vastness of the site itself was remarkable. The site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, some say, was once the ‘Holy of Holies’ of the Jewish temple and, as a result, praying by Jews on this site today is not allowed as they may be treading on sacred ground; only Muslims are allowed into the mosque itself to protect the sanctity of the building.

In Jerusalem, my final visit was to Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Shoah. The building itself cuts dramatically through the countryside as visitors are led past the Avenue of the Righteous through to the main museum. Here, there is a chronological display of how the Shoah unfolded between 1933 – 1945 as well as focussing on what happened to the Jewish community afterwards. The Hall of Remembrance has an eternal light and a list of all the concentration camps written into the floor – a fitting memorial to the six million Jews murdered in Nazi Germany. A time to reflect on the past, but also a time to pray that we all have a responsibility to ensure that such an event must never happen again.

The last couple of days of my trip were in Jaffa – a port just outside Tel Aviv. It is connected to a great character of the Old Testament – Jonah – sent by God to deliver bad news to the people of Nineveh. He tried to hide from God, but God had other ideas and taught him, and us, a valuable lesson.

I leave you with a Jewish toast – ‘L’Chaim’, which is Hebrew for ‘To life’.

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STEAM

By Alex Farrer, Scientist in Residence.

Since the launch of our STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) space in September, STEAM lessons, activities, clubs and assemblies have been delivered by the new Scientist in Residence team. This has created a buzz of curiosity around the school and enabled “STEAM” to be injected into the curriculum, but what is exactly going on, and why?

It is frequently reported in the press that thousands of additional science and engineering graduates are needed each year and many national initiatives aim to encourage more girls to aspire to such careers. However it is still the case that most pupils decide by the age of 10 that science is “not for them”. They enjoy science, they are good at science, but they think that other people become scientists and engineers. The STEAM initiative aims to encourage more girls to aspire to study science, technology, art and mathematics subjects post 16, but also to develop STEAM skills in all pupils. Not every pupil will aspire to a career in science and engineering, but every pupil will benefit from added exposure to STEAM. Employers and universities are increasingly looking for candidates who have problem solving skills, consider the impact of their decisions, use their imagination, communicate well, work well in teams and cope with frustrations, problems and difficulties. Cross curricular STEAM activities not only help to develop these skills for every pupil, but also show how relevant the subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics are to all subjects.

More information is available here about the ASPIRES and ASPIRES 2 studies which track the development of young people’s science and career aspirations and also here about the benefits of keeping options open for possible engineering careers.

This new initiative at Wimbledon High aims to promote STEAM cross curricular activity for all year groups from Reception to Year 13. The Scientist in Residence team consists of experts in computer science, medicine and STEAM teaching and learning, who are able to plan activities that are practical, challenging, engaging and linked to real life situations. Visiting engineers and scientists enrich the projects and links are made to STEAM careers. In the lessons things might go wrong, groups may have to start all over again, team members might disagree and tasks may be really difficult to succeed in. Coping with the epic fails that can occur when imaginatively attempting to solve a STEAM challenge is all part of the benefit though, and there is also a lot of laughter and fun. The lessons can certainly be classed as “serious play”!

These are just a few examples showing how STEAM is beginning to form…

• Year 3 launching projectiles ‘Into the Woods” 
• KS3 being creative with Minecraft Education Edition
• Year 7 using their physics knowledge to capture amazing light and colour photographs at the beginning of their art topic
• Year 6 learning about sensors and coding with micro:bits
• Year 1 becoming rocketeers
• Year 7 creating pigments for Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat in R.S.
• KS3 gaining medical insights into the Black Death in History
• KS3 pupils designing and building a City of Tomorrow
• Year 5 designing ocean grabbers inspired by the R.S.S. Sir David Attenborough
• Year 4 controlling machines built with LEGO WeDo

Year 12 are also beginning a joint project with local schools and scientists from UCL and Imperial College as part of the ORBYTS initiative – Original Research By Young Twinkle Students – an exciting project using mass spectrometry to look at exoplanet atmospheres which includes the opportunity for students to be co-authors on an academic paper. There may even be a robot orchestra in the making, so there is certainly a variety of STEAM forming!

What all of these activities have in common is that they aim to promote STEAM dialogue around the school. The year 6 academic committee have been putting intriguing photographs with an attached question around the school to promote just this sort of discussion, whether it might be year 8 on their way into lunch or parents chatting while waiting to pick up year 2.

 

 

 

What happened here?

 

 

 

We want to show students and adults in our community that STEAM is something done by us all. As an adult yourself you may have felt in the “not for me” category – you might have given up science early, or not felt that it was your best subject. As role models we all need to show that we are interested in talking and getting involved in STEAM, so that no one in our community is in the “not for me” category. Helping with a competition entry, discussing Blue Planet 2, using STEAM news articles or photos as hooks for lessons, all help to inject STEAM into the school community.

Follow us on Twitter @STEAM_WHS to see more of what is going on and look out for future blogs on the importance of building science capital and using STEAM photos to inspire and engage. The following web links are examples of the many cross curricular ideas available for all age groups that could be used in lessons and at home. Create some STEAM!

https://www.stem.org.uk/cross-curricular-topics-resources

https://www.stem.org.uk/welcome-polar-explorer-programme

https://practicalaction.org/challengesinschools

http://www.rigb.org/families/experimental

http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry/resources/art/topics

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The long and winding road: how factual recall tests can effectively support linear examination courses

Wimbledon High History

By Emily Anderson, Head of History.

Think back, if you can, to your own History studies at school, whether these were months, years or perhaps decades ago. For most, the content covered becomes, over time, increasingly hard to recall. My current grasp of the French Revolution, for example, which I studied at AS Level, is embarrassingly basic now, almost 15 years later, as it is something I have rarely had need to revisit. At Parents’ Evening, parents smile wryly at vague memories of the Corn Laws or the Spinning Jenny (not meaning to undermine their importance, but their ubiquity in the collective memory of British adults is truly extraordinary) and voice envy at the breadth of opportunities available in the current History curriculum.

Instead, it is the broad conceptual understanding of, say, the nature of power, as well as the skills that remain, and these which lie at the heart of the purpose of History education for our department here at WHS. Empowering our students to participate in the academic discourse of History is our core aim, to enable them to engage critically with the world around them in their future lives. It is, however, impossible to participate in this discourse without what has been termed ‘fingertip knowledge’ as well as more conceptual ‘residual knowledge’: to secure meaningful progress in History, both need to be developed (Counsell, 2000). As argued recently in Teaching History where dialogue around cognitive psychology is increasingly evident, ‘fluent access to a range of types of knowledge is what enables historians to participate in some of the more sophisticated forms of historical discourse’ (Fordham, 2017).

Recent changes to A Levels (AL) have brought how we secure this fingertip knowledge into focus. The nature of the new linear exams mean there is more demand for a greater volume of content to be retained over a longer period of time. The importance of detail is evident both from reviewing past papers and from our experience in examining at AL last summer.

To approach this, we reflected on our experience of nurturing fingertip as well as residual knowledge at GCSE, where the linear model is, of course, long established, as is our practice of setting factual recall tests at the end of each topic. Our evaluation of the latter is below:

Advantages Disadvantages

It is classic retrieval practice, which results in stronger storage and retrieval strength (Fordham, 2017).

It encourages an extra stage of revision early in the course before more high stakes testing kicks in for mocks and terminal exams, reducing the pressure on Year 11.

It helps lead to great results (above 75% A* in the past three years).

Our tests were much too challenging – becoming notorious amongst our students and sapping morale.

They were no longer fit for purpose – pupils would never need to recall such specific detail, especially after the reform of the CIE IGCSE Paper 4 in 2015 which removed such questions.

 

Therefore, we have changed the structure of our tests to open ended questions. At IGCSE these are in the style of 4 mark recall questions. At AL I am experimenting with questions taking the form ‘cite two pieces of evidence which could be used to support an argument that…’, or similar. To try to tackle the issue of relevant but vague answers, I have awarded bonus marks at AL for detail to encourage both a conscious choice in selecting evidence (as pointed out by Foster & Gadd (2013)) and in-depth revision. All are now out of a uniform mark – 20 – to encourage comparison across topics and at different stages of the two years.

Furthermore, we have used the new AL structure to rethink when we test, in order to support maximum recall over the two years. Here, we currently have two approaches: retaining end of topic testing at GCSE in order to keep the advantages identified above, but utilising spaced tests at AL (the benefits of which are argued by, amongst others, Laffin (2016) and Fordham (2017)) by revising and testing existing knowledge on a topic before the next stage of it is covered. This lends itself particularly well to the unit on the British Empire from c1857-1967: in the past few weeks, my Year 13 class have sat tests on the increasing independence of the Dominions and on India, both in the period from c1867-1918, before studying inter-war developments. Students then complete their own corrections, consolidating the learning and identifying areas for development. During the revision period at AL, they can also undertake the same test several times citing different evidence. My 2017 cohort had, at their own suggestion, a star chart to record how many times they had undertaken a test for each area of the course, broadening their evidence base each time.

Whilst I hope that this gives a snapshot of the department’s current and very fledgling thinking, I would be mortified if it was taken to show that we are overly focussed on factual recall testing in the department. We are not. Tests of course never can and never will be the ‘be all and end all’ in terms of assessing student progress, but approaching them critically can only be a good thing.

References and further reading

Counsell, C. (2000). Historical knowledge and skills: a distracting dichotomy . In James Arthur and Robert Phillips, Issues in history teaching (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge.

Fordham, M. (2017). Thinking makes it so: cognitive psychology and history teaching. Teaching History, 166, 37-43.

Foster, R., & Gadd, S. (2013). Let’s play Supermarket ‘Evidential’ Sweep: developing students’ awareness of the need to select evidence. Teaching History, 152, 24-29.

Laffin, D. (2016). Learning to like linear? Some ideas for successful introduction of the new A Levels. Historical Association Conference workshop.

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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

By Suzy Pett, Head of English.

With imaginative writing now a significant part of the Edexcel English Language IGCSE exam, Head of English, Suzy Pett, takes a look at how to teach creativity.

Creative writing for many young people can seem scary. Whilst it was enjoyed at primary school, it can be hard to squeeze it in amidst mounting homework and social media. In a world of 9-1 exams, assessment objectives and mark schemes, Somerset Maugham’s witticism (above) might strike fear into today’s young person. How to do well at something in which methodology and success seem so elusive?

However, Maugham is not suggesting that imaginative writing is a quagmire of subjectivity. Nor am I suggesting that creative success can be measured by exam mark schemes. But, we can certainly differentiate between good writing and that riddled with hackneyed phrases, lazy grammar and bland vocabulary. We can certainly smell a mile away desperate formulae – the gratuitous simile, forced adjective or unnecessary alliteration. And, we can certainly enthuse, excite, inspire, prod, cajole and galvanise pupils into gaining the tools to become discerning creative writers.

So, while Maugham declares the illusory nature of three rules for novel writing, here are three things we do to nurture imaginative writing here at WHS.

1. Play with voice/style

Adapting writing for purpose, audience and form (PAF) is the cornerstone of how we teach creative writing. Being alert to the nuances of tone is essential. You don’t want to bore the pants off your readers with prudish sincerity. Nor do you want to offend with flippancy in the wrong context. But how to get pupils to enjoy the playfulness of this code switching?

• Bring in the clowns (well, sort of)! In March, comedian Dave Smith – regular guest on Radio 4’s Home Truths and various TV shows – will help our Year 10s cultivate a wry, humorous and satirical voice in their writing.
• Bring in the performance poets! Deanna Rodger and Cecelia Knapp are coming to WHS to perform and lead workshops with our pupils. Hearing their raw, immediate, confessional first person voice combined with the performative quality of their language allows pupils to be alert to the negotiation of style, content and audience.

Activities to try yourself/with your daughter:
• Regularly read columnists with strong sense of voice: Caitlin Moran, Hadley Freeman, Marina Hyde…
• Try rewriting a section from a novel from a different character’s voice. How would language, tone and perspective change?

2. Be alert to grammar

On first look, grammar might seem anathema to imagination. However, rather than being starchy and puritanical, grammar in fact unlocks creativity. It allows pupils to write with craft and intent.

A few weeks ago, the WHS English Department had training with Ian Cushing, a teaching Fellow in English Linguistic at UCL (and co-author of the AQA English Literature and Language Student book among many other publications). We unpicked the way grammar was a meaning-making device in texts, having fun playing around with similar grammatical techniques in our own creative writing and assessing the effects. It was an absolute blast and we genuinely had great fun with verbs!

Activities to try yourself/with your daughter:
• Take an extract from a novel/magazine/newspaper. Look carefully at how it is put together. Are there lots of verbs (-ing verbs? Past tense verbs)? Are there lots of abstract nouns? Or concrete nouns? Or prepositions? Ask yourself what effect they have. Then, try to create your own piece of creative writing using the same grammatical devices to create similar effects.

3. Read (novels, newspapers, articles, blogs)

Reading is a given for any creative writer. It develops our worldview, empathy, vocabulary and awareness of narrative structure. We start every KS3 lesson with reading. Over the summer, we asked pupils to become word magpies and collect all the new vocabulary they came across in their reading, allowing them to build a store of unusual vocabulary to replace weary idioms.

Activities to try yourself/with your daughter:
• Take a writer you love and try to mimic the language, sentence structure, figurative/literal images in your own work. Create a pastiche!
• Have a vocabulary jar in your kitchen. Pick out new words every so often and make sentences out of them over breakfast or dinner: create characters and settings. The more wacky, original and imaginative, the better.

So, there you have it. Three ways we can nurture creativity.

• Want your daughter to develop her creative writing outside the classroom?
• KS3: come to Scribblers club!
• KS3: Read Scoop magazine (in the library)
• KS3/4: come on the annual Arvon residential creative writing trip to spend a week workshopping with published writers
• KS4/5: come to ‘It’s Critical!’ to be immersed in a wider ranges of writers beyond the curriculum
• Enter the many competitions we advertise
• Write for Unconquered Peaks (get in touch with Year 13 Editor-in-Chief, Olya)
• Write a storybook for Ghanaian children with Akenkan

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Classic Chemistry Clips – The Beauty of the Practical

By Anthony Kane, Teacher of Chemistry.

Chemistry is, fundamentally, a very exciting and dynamic subject.

Part of the reason for this is the practical work we undertake – this takes two main forms, the class practical and the teacher demonstration.

When thinking about chemistry demonstrations, most students (past and present) will think of bangs, explosions and fire – all good things, but all over rather quickly. Some of you might remember, as I do, the disappointment when a teacher got you excited for a demonstration, only to watch it fizzle, sputter, and their subsequent and despondent “it wasn’t supposed to do that…

Imagine if we could replay, in slow motion, our favourite demos, to watch the magic of reality unfold frame by frame. Imagine always being able to see the demonstration clearly, regardless of where you were in the class. Imagine if we had a backup in case a demonstration, for whatever reason, went awry. Imagine if we were teaching a different topic entirely, and felt that now would be a wonderful time to illustrate our point with a display, but there was no time to throw it together. (Imagine if you wanted to show all your friends really cool science videos…)

These were the ideas that I had in mind when I started recording demonstrations during lessons at Wimbledon High School. Since then I have put together a catalogue of over twenty videos of common classroom demonstrations, and played them countless times. Using our Windows Surface Laptops, and connecting wirelessly to our SmartBoards, I am able to project what I am recording while it is being recorded.

The advantages are huge. Twenty students cannot all see one small beaker on a desk, but project it to the room and they can all get a perfect view. Sometimes the eye is not quick enough, or we blink, but with a video, we can go back and watch it again. We can slow it down, we can analyse frame by frame, and our learning is richer for it.

“Boom” goes the thermite.

Another aspect of the videos that I think particularly embodies the spirit of learning here at Wimbledon High is the sheer joy that students find in watching these demonstrations. “Ooh”s and “Ah”s are just as gratifying on recording as they are the first time you listen to them live in a lesson. One of our stated aims here at Wimbledon High is to nurture curiosity and a sense of wonder, and listening to some of the clips below, I hope you would agree that we are doing just that.

“Woah!”

“WOAAAAH!”

 

 

Where does this leave the future of chemical education? I think that the next logical step would be to record the method of class practicals – so that these videos can be distributed to students in advance of lessons and set as required viewing for the lesson. This would empower students to feel more confident with their equipment, have more time in the lesson to gather data, and to have more belief in their own abilities as scientists, encouraging their independence as learners. This would also prepare them well for scientific disciplines at university, which often require you to familiarise yourself with pre-lab exercises before entering a laboratory.

This is also a promising avenue for developing school partnerships. These videos are broadly applicable to many chemistry curricula, and we are fortunate at Wimbledon High to have excellent facilities and lab technicians. Sharing the fruits of our chemical labour is quick, easy, and importantly very beneficial to the education of others. I have already begun sharing my collection with another school and look forward to increasing their reach as time goes on.

Science is a practical discipline, and chemistry is a particularly visual subject. By offering students more opportunities to experience its beauty we open them up to a world of possibilities; an exciting pathway to deeper understanding of the universe, a subject both big and small, with deep history and philosophy, heroes and villains, and instil in them a lifelong appreciation for nature.

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Developing WIMlevels and a new model of assessment

By Paul Murphy, Deputy Head Academic.

Perhaps Plato’s desire to ensure an expert mariner sails the ship in which you travel is a more striking illustration for the need to appoint and trust experts to do their business than pointing out that when it comes to how children learn, it is the teacher who is best placed to deliver students from the metaphorical storms they must weather. Although applying a gentle rhetorical massage to a critique of the character of democracy in the Peloponnese during the fourth century BCE is probably poor soil from which to begin an explanation of how Wimbledon High School has re-visited its own model of education, assessment and academic support, it captures the essence of our basic approach; in lieu of an accessible, clear and viable set of examination criteria and grade-boundaries (which in any case differentiate, rather than provide a guide for how to educate), we as a common room turned to each other, to pedagogical expertise and to our (extensive) experience to decide how to best support our girls throughout their time on Mansel Road.

Cherie Blair, a champion (albeit self-proclaimed) of the under-educated, noted in a speech on the subject that “someone with 4 A grades at A-Level from [a famous Public School] may look good on paper…but push a bit harder and often you get the impression they have learned to pass exams rather than think for themselves”. Although I risk (and indeed am being) highly reductive, it is my firm belief that learning to pass examinations, although a valuable skill (the most valuable in terms of future earnings, beside inheritance), really only teaches you do to precisely that, pass examinations. To consider the Junior perspective, SATS do not help GCSEs, which in turn offer little skill-based progression to A-Level alone. Data shows us that students who do well at GCSE tend to take well to A-Level. This does not mean GCSE is a good preparation to take the higher discipline; both are differentiating measures, and so it is likely doing well at one measure of capacity and intellect will see you do well at another. The same is true of the jump from A Level to Degree, at least in terms of skills (I should note that some studies do link outstanding A Level performance to 1st class degrees and that I, of course, write generally and for emphasis). Examinations do prove that learning has occurred, and are a basic requirement of universities and employers, so we had them keenly in our focus as we developed our model, but they were certainly not the focal-point. Outstanding examination results are intended to be the happy by-product of focussed, considered and subject-specific and synoptic education (not the oxymoron it might at first appear).

My (internal) starting point when opening discussions with Heads of Department and Staff was the work of Piaget (now a rather unfashionable educational philosopher, despite his respected grounding in child psychology). Piaget found, in 1920, that children’s power of reasoning was not flawed after all. In areas where children lacked life experience as a point of reference, they logically used their imagination to compensate. He additionally concluded that factual knowledge should not be equated with intelligence and “good” decision-making.

Over the course of his six-decade career in child psychology, Piaget also identified four stages of mental development. “Formal operations,” the fourth and final stage, involves 12-to-15-year-olds forming the ability to think abstractly with more complex understandings of logic and cause and effect. This is when he considered (and later theorists have not successfully, in my view, challenged this developmental stage) the brain at its most plastic in terms of learning beyond mere knowledge (though, of course, as I noted above, he felt knowledge was still essential for positive outcomes). I was keen therefore that our system of assessment, our schemes of work, our developmental model, should be more consciously building undergraduate skills, concepts and modes of working from Year 7. There were, of course, many of these elements in existing assessment models and schemes of work, but we needed greater clarity and accuracy (and indeed conviction) about what such skills were, and how they could be developed, taught and assessed over a seven-year period, in each subject discipline (until our education system’s conception of subjects as disparate areas of studies subsides, subject-specific skills will be the way of thinks in the United Kingdom).

So, the first step was to communally identify our goals, which was relatively straightforward. In a meeting with a key team of HoDs and SMT members, we thrashed out the key aims we would like to use to frame our assessment policy. Of course like all good discussions, concordat was neither complete nor decisive (and like all chairs of such discussions, I am conscious my own starting point will have coloured the outcome), as our thoughts will be subject to change and amendment as greater understanding comes forward. We settled on two themes; that our key idea would be the pursuit of scholarship, with an “end-goal” of providing every student will the tools and skills to thrive at a top university, conservatoire or other tertiary institution (our context precludes the immediate focus of work at 18 for most), and that each department would draft their own set of progressive criteria, describing in detail the “threshold-concepts” that demonstrate the distinctive steps in understand each subject more fully and completely, and using their extensive experience to explain to parents, girls and themselves, what these moments were, which skills a girl was currently able to use, and which they were working to next on the ladder to becoming a capable undergraduate. As such, the skills required in Year 7 had to be mindful of ensuring the skills required at University were developing in the right way, and our highest “progress levels” are beyond the requirements of GCSE and A-Level respectively.

A good “threshold-concept” example (elaborated for all HoDs in a session we held with Ian Warwick, an educational-consultant who focusses on the academic development of highly able pupils) is the moment at which a student of English Literature first recognises that the characters are fabrications, and that the author deliberately writes to create and develop them. Without this step, analysing literature is at best comprehending the narrative of a story, with it, a world of opportunity opens. We tasked all HoDs to work with their departments, to find all such steps and progressions which students undergo during their secondary and further education, and to stage these progressions in a table which demonstrated them. An example is below (English Literature), at Appendix A. A note must be made here to the elasticity and dedication of the staff involved in the development process; to hold this close a micro-scope to your methods of assessment is difficult and challenging in the current political climate, where examination pressure can so easily trump educational goals.

A two-year process was devised for the development of these threshold concept progress tables, with a view to the new model being adopted in Years 7-10 from September 2017, and the whole school from September 2018. The first part of the model has been drafted and implemented, with our first (internal) reporting assessment scheduled in October. The model has broken progress down into these threshold concepts further and skills progressions, with separate descriptors for “skills” and “concepts and ideas”, so that girls, parents and teachers can all clearly identify and track the progress of a student with accuracy and confidence, whilst also showing students what they need to do next in order to progress. The rationale for a dual-descriptor approach (see again Appendix A) was based in both practical evidence (a similar model is already in use, and has proven very successful, at the flagship Westminster Harris Sixth Form) and educative and psychological theory, where the ability to understand and the ability to do remain distinct concepts (see Naglieri, Goldstein or notably Brooks (in Psychology Today)) that require acknowledgement, assessment and explanation in their own right. Each threshold has been standardised using internal moderation, cross-reference with standards in the reformed GCSEs being undertaken in various subjects (our A Level draft is pending) and also, by heavily relying on the pedagogical knowledge and experience of the Wimbledon High staff. Departmental meetings remain the epicentre of good teaching and learning, and it is from them, in combination with educational theory, that this system was devised.

The system has also sought to allow departments the freedom to devise schemes of work in a way which encourages subject-specific skills to subsist at the core of our academic offering. The model moves away from collective assessment weeks and towards a fluid style of assessment, where teachers’ overall opinions of a pupils’ progress are combined with punctuated and careful written assessment that allow pupils to display and develop skills beyond those expected for their age-range, without sacrificing the need for clear, identifiable points of progress. MidYIS (despite its inaccuracies it remains the best available base-line data from a test scenario) forms the basis of our initial projections for pupil progress on our scale, but it is by no means the main driver over time, as yearly pupil targets will be clear, fluid, subject specific and, most importantly, highly individual.  Progress up our various “WimLevels” will be tracked half-termly, without the need for cumbersome reporting systems, and we hope that it will focus our girls on the simplest goal in self-improvement: which step must I take next to get better? Our Assistant Head, Performance, devised a specific flight path for each girl’s projected progress both intra-year and year-on-year, which can be amended based on achievement should the demon MidYIS be proven a too miserly tool.

The finished product means that all girls, parents and staff will receive a clear, robust message about the skills they have developed and concepts they have learned, every half-term, and in every subject. It will inform scheme of work planning, assessment, intervention, tracking and teaching, setting our goals as classroom practitioners based on mastery and excellent of the subjects we are teaching, with fantastic examinations results little more than a by-product which proves that we are ensuring our girls are always learning and developing academically in the best possible way.

Mr Paul Murphy

Deputy Head (Academic)

19th October 2017

www.wimbledonhigh.gdst.net/