A number of years ago, in another professional life, I was engaged by the Japanese Ministry of Education to review the delivery of their educational programmes, their teacher training, and their five year plan for moving forward. I spent a month touring schools; meeting with teachers, parents and students; consulting with university and Ministry personnel; and sitting in dozens of classes.
One experience during this time still stands out for me. I was in a classroom in a university laboratory school in Hiroshima. At the front of the class was a senior mathematics teacher – his back to the room – scribbling formulas on the whiteboard and muttering fairly incomprehensibly about what he was doing. At the back of the class were ten student teachers furiously copying down everything that he wrote so that they could someday use it in their own classrooms. In between were forty Grade 12 students who were paying no attention whatsoever. There were lots of conversations going on, some outstandingly artistic doodles being created, and a number of people catching up on an obvious lack of sleep – but no-one was actually learning mathematics. In my post-class focus groups, I discovered two things. To begin with, the teacher felt that it was his responsibility to teach, but not to ensure that anyone actually learned. Secondly, the students felt that it was their responsibility to learn, but that the venue for that was not school, it was at home or at an after school cram session where they would spend hours self-teaching and practicing problems. It was this disconnect that the government was trying to address. The challenge was, that the issue was more cultural than pedagogical.
Neil Postman once said that hearing a teacher say “I taught it, it’s just that they didn’t learn it” is akin to hearing a car salesperson say “I sold it, it’s just that they didn’t buy it”. We know that effective teaching and learning is an interactive process, and that to be meaningful, both partners have to actively engage in it.
Fast forward to last year, in his book The Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell looked at predictors for success in international, standardized mathematics examinations. It was his rather astounding discovery, that there was a direct correlation between how students filled out their demographic information with how they performed on the test. Those national groups of students who were disciplined enough to complete the pages of 120 identifying data questions (birth date, gender, level of education, etc.) did significantly better on the exam than those students who rushed through the “boring” demographics and jumped feet first into the problems. Gladwell concluded that the issue in math performance in this instance was not pedagogy or even natural ability but, rather self-discipline and, ultimately, culture.
This year at Somersfield under the leadership of Rosanna Luzarraga, our new Chair in Mathematics, we are working actively to rationalize our programming and to ramp up our pedagogy in mathematics from P5 to M5. Interestingly, this appears to be not simply a Somersfield concern, but a Bermudian one. In our conversations with other schools and with the Ministry of Education, we have been focusing less on content and more on attitude. How can we create a culture of success? How can we help students to see that hard work and application is not boring but actually interesting and rewarding? How can we get them to see homework not as something that keeps them from sailing or soccer but rather something that can help them to establish a work ethic and a set of skills to aid them in their future endeavours? How can we make our students understand that, just as they know that they have to spend hours practicing tennis or rugby or dance or the saxophone in order to be proficient, the same is true in mathematics, or reading, or modern languages? I said earlier that teaching and learning is a partnership. But it is not just between teacher and student. It is a three-way commitment, with parents playing a crucial role, to build a culture of learning that becomes a norm for all of our children.
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