At Panmure Bridge School our shared aim for 2021 is to carry out visible and rich teacher inquiries to help us meet one of our school’s strategic goals of 1 ½ times accelerated shift in Maths.
Currently our inquiries fit under the wider umbrella of Achievement Challenge 6, to lift the achievement in maths for all students years 1-13, in our case years 1-8. Throughout 2020 our school wide professional development focus was Maths. This year we began the year with a teacher only day on maths that allowed us to top up our own knowledge ketes and strengthen our own connections to this curriculum area. Consolidation is the key to success here as it allows us to take the learning from 2020 and give it a place of value in 2021.
One area we can all implement as we embark on our 2021 learning journey with our students, regardless of level, is the strategy of Talk Moves. Talk Moves is a strategy that promotes classroom conversations centred on maths that helps to improve students' understanding of mathematical concepts. Talk Moves is a framework to prompt the discussion. Frameworks was the one thing most of us identified as being the most powerful tool towards helping increase student achievement. These frameworks or prompts were not generic, they were class specific, created by the teacher to help meet the learning needs of the students in front of them. The idea of frameworks or prompts was the most common tool teachers at PBS wanted to carry forward in 2021. I’m excited to see how each teacher adapts the Talk Moves framework for their class. As a teacher of Year 7 and 8 students I know that I can definitely learn from the work done by the teachers in the class levels below mine, as they can learn from me. Often a word that makes no sense to one person can be the word that unlocks the learning for another.
Last year we all encouraged our learners to use and apply their learning, and the language and vocabulary linked to that learning, by leaving purposeful comments on each other's blogs to promote authentic dialogic interactions. The differentiation came in the form of individual peer to peer comments in the senior school, and class to class comments in the junior school. Doing this allowed us all to peek into the learning going on in each room.
At the end of the 2020 school year I had a check in chat with each teacher. Once again we were all on the same page with our reflections identifying that changes in practice not only gave us opportunities to develop a strong cybersmart program, but also encouraged us to think critically about the learning and language behind each lesson. In the senior school we realised that if we were expecting the comments to be specific, the learning behind the blog post content needed to be equally as specific. Rather than moving on and leaving this rich learning behind, as a school we have decided to focus our teacher inquiries around how the language and learning need to actively participate in Talk Moves can be harnessed and replicated in blog comments.
One size definitely does not fit all in this case. What I am excited about as the in-school COL teacher for Panmure Bridge School is finding out how each teacher approaches this challenge. We all agree that we want to use Talk Moves in Maths to help us meet our school’s strategic goal of 1 ½ times accelerated shift in that curriculum area. The changes we identify that we now need to make to our practice is where the learning will come from. It takes a village and each member of our PBS village who willingly shares their practice, ideas and inquiry journeys allow us to strengthen our own teaching and learning skills.
For us, it is the opportunity to consolidate our learning from 2020 that we hope will be the key to our success.
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