Right thank you, good afternoon everyone my name is Beka I'm from Harlow college and I have a
colleague here Louise Brown from Buckinghamshire (Bucks) college group today we'll talk about the
projects we've done for over the past eight months we've enjoyed every minute of it
first things first before I introduce my colleague I'd like to say massive thanks to everyone
involved from all three colleges from Harlow from Capel Manor from Buckinghamshire group so thank
you, Louise over to you please - great thanks Beka so it's interesting to hear Lou talk about some of
the themes that are coming out because I think what struck me was that I think our intervention
was one of these small acts leading to change and I think that'll be another thread that you'll
see come out so yeah so as a three College groups three colleges working within one CfEM Network we
wanted to look at growth mindset and what kind of interventions we could put in place so we we all
developed a questionnaire together and we shared it with our students to to find out where are they
so for our College I was working with three teachers across our three different sites and they
they gave the questionnaire to their students and there were 138 students that completed it in total
in terms of the findings Beka if you could just put them all up thanks, oh, that's it I sort of
grouped them into kind of broadly sort of positive and negative findings these are all the sort of
positive things I think it showed to me that, that students had the potential or the starting point
of a growth mindset they knew that there was more than one way to or they thought that there was
more than one way to solve a problem they thought that if you put enough effort in you could succeed
they knew that they could improve in maths they knew it was important to know lots of methods
there was there was kind of a lot of positive there but equally there was negative so we had,
these were sort of broadly the results that we got so, students felt that they didn't like solving
complex problems they thought that maths wasn't their thing and the thing that really struck me
was that about them getting giving up when they got stuck and we know that we see that when when
we're marking papers you know they get to the back and they tell us you know I've just turned
over the page so I really wanted to try and trial something with our students that would help them
to just to get unstuck that was the phrasing that we kind of came up with is about getting unstuck
so we wanted to see more students attempting those sort of problem-solving four plus mark questions
that you get in the sort of last third of the paper and whether or not they got full marks
or not we just wanted them to not get zero marks we wanted them to feel like they could have a go
so our intervention.
We started with a lesson that was focused on getting unstuck so we sort of scrapped
the scheme of work we just thought okay well we're gonna look at this idea of getting unstuck we use
the growth zone model to get students starting points and we put up a really nasty question
and sort of just got students to say what their kind of gut reaction was where would they place
themselves on the growth zone model looking at that question and we sort of parked that and then
we asked students to talk about what happens when they get on when they get stuck, how do they feel
we did some work kind of finishing the sentence when I get stuck I - just so the teacher was
aware of how they felt and how they behaved and then we just thought okay in this lesson we're
going to get you to work on something but it's not linked to to the syllabus it's not linked to
preparing for our gcse we're just going to have a go at a problem you're going to work in pairs
um and it was a kind of it was a locked box problem so we had some of these sort of
combination cash boxes that had some sweets in it and we got them to work together to
solve the problem of opening the box and then we pulled um from that we we drew out what did they
how did they approach that problem what were the tools that they used to get unstuck and we
turned that into um a visual resource so this is an example of a poster that a pair of students
created thinking about all the things that they did to solve that problem and how they got unstuck
and then the sort of talking with their the other students in their class about what
they could do and the teacher inputting as well about ideas that they had for getting unstuck
and that works really well and what we did from that lesson is that we then, we
had this culture ongoing from then of talking about getting unstuck it's great to get stuck
it means that we're about to tackle a problem can you just go back Beka like we wanted to make the
language really normal it's fine to get unstuck but look we have these tools we've done it before
we're going to do it again so there was after this this single lesson there was a there was
a part of every lesson where they focused on getting unstuck they looked at a particular
a tough question they might have looked at maybe three in a lesson where they worked on
one together as a group then they might have worked on one in pairs and then they sort of
ultimately hopefully work on one on their own and it was just all the time going back to this
toolkit using this language and just normalizing the idea of of getting stuck and getting unstuck.
In terms of the impact actually I was going to say we did have a there was a bit of an impact
of covid in delivering this project we had a lot of staff sickness absence where teachers
were then having to cover and merge lessons so that did impact on them feeling like they
could deliver this kind of lesson with groups that they didn't know but still we did have an impact
so all of the three teachers involved kind of just anecdotally fed back that they felt that their
students were attempting more of the the complex questions and feeling more confident in class
and we Revisited the growth zone model at the end of the intervention and we put up the same
question again at the end and just got asked them to rate themselves on how they felt um so
in one as I've got here one one group 83 percent of students move closer towards the green which I
think was brilliant I've been analyzing the whole cohort data and I think about a third of students
felt some sort of positive change but if you consider all we did was change the language so to
have to have any kind of positive impact we felt was really good and the last thing that we did
is we use heat maps with our students they're just sort of question level analysis red amber green
but they're a really good picture of where the group is at the moment and we really wanted to
move this sort of whole suede of red that you get at the end of a paper into being more of a
patchwork of yellow and green and we asked we have seen that and we did a mock sort of around Easter
time and comparing the group from where they were at sort of Christmas New Year to where they were
in that March mock it's not all green but but it's not all red and I think that's the that's the
positive that we take from that so really small change on behalf of the teacher not very resource
heavy not a big thing to deliver but actually it did have a positive impact on students and we're
looking to implement this kind of getting unstuck lesson and within our induction this year year
so that we start the year with this language and that we we have the whole year to get to the point
where they're then doing the exams in the summer and they are attempting all of those questions.
Beka's going to feedback about the two other projects and is also going
to pull out some of the recommendations that we've sort of gathered as a team as a whole
thank you Louise, great, very quickly we've Harlow college and Capel Manor College
also taken they've taken the growth zone model sorry growth mindset messaging and we looked
at well how we can change our language how we can change that little subtle messages
that will hopefully help learners to change their mindsets and towards mathematics so before we've
done any of that we considered if learners largely functioning in the fixed mindset environment it's
going to be ineffective in a classrooms because if they come in and say well we can't do anything
anyway so they come in we've tried we gave up we sort of we tried we failed and we gave up
we also this is just blurb but the most important thing is is over emphasis on
teaching and mindset sometimes we get carried away with all right this is all about mindset
so let's just talk about mindset but in fact we leave out the highly, high quality instructions
and well thought out curriculum so they have to go hand in hand that's what we absolutely
wanted to make it clear from the very beginning. So what we did we had a pre-intervention mindset
question now which is quite similar to a very famous - Carol Dweck's questionnaires we wanted
to know what was the mindset of our learners and I would say all of you would probably guess what
the results would have been at that point lessons we planned based on that and we wanted to aim that
students to think how they feel about mathematics about their feelings well this is the problem and
how do they feel about it are they terrified are they do they resent it so we wanted them to
make to think because quite often we find they don't think they just as we were talking about
last week Friday about the mathematical problems they just do things with numbers they don't think
with embedded growth mindset language in every lesson it was it kind of infused the mindset
messages in every lesson and we talked about what mindset can change everything and why does what
does it mean to have a fixed and growth mindset we've talked about examples we talked about taxi
there's a great examples of the London cab drivers but the part of the brain grows there was a there
was a big scientific but there was experiment done when the part of the brain grows as they've
learned and they practiced driving in the center of London because they need to remember this
rates but then they once they once they retire they go back to the same level the same size
we introduce them to growth zone model, Louise talked about that and we encourage that logical
approach to teaching and learning and more importantly peer-to-peer feedback I think it was
really important to make the students understand they're not alone in this others sitting next to
them could also be in the same boat as them and then we've given them post interview questions
identical questioners at the end of the term. What did we find I was I've kind of alluded to this
before, we found about over 90 percent of students had fixed mindset with a bit of growth flavors to
it they were dipping in and out of those we had 40 percent of the students that believes that the
maths was never going to change no matter how hard they tried that's quite a big amount of students,
a large number of students, this measure has been reduced to 25 percent after the intervention
65 percent of the students thought that they knew they made sense so that was after the intervention
that was 38 percent of them was before intervention so I think getting them to think
about about the problems presented to them has helped them to understand if their mathematics
really made sense or not and this is published with the caveat that the hardest part was to
maintain the growth mindset we've achieved it to change it from fixed to growth in most cases
but the biggest part the hardest part was to maintain it because it was very easy to switch
between well I can't do this at the moment, with very small internal or external factors.
Okay, so, this was one of the examples Capel Manor college done they presented the quite
difficult question, really wordy, heavy on instructions and the conversation took the
turn of well they should explore why do they find it difficult because if they understand why they
find it difficult they can think strategize more and think about well how do I break this one down,
they've had lots of prompts from teachers, what does this topic cover identify the
parts and what do you need to know first and there's a very good crossover between
the growth minds and messaging subtle messages and the realistic math education were helping
the learners to make sense of a question, where do we start and where do we finish.
What else we can say what they have told us
these are the excerpts from the students interviews we've conducted an interviews
individually I think they speak volumes I will summarize a few words later on at the
end of this presentation but I'd like to just present some of the quotes from the interviews.
This was one of my learners she was absolutely negative towards mathematics altogether but with
a change of attitude she's seen her mock scores she now believes that she can do it
more importantly though the message is the changes that in attitude has helped her to
turn around in a way. This was another critical point where one moment they believed they could do
it but then they made the stupid mistake and then everything comes down crashing on them
very powerful quote teacher telling me they believe in me has given me boost I needed.
Nobody has taught us like this. They put 'we feel part of the learning process',
the conversations we've had with them that make an understanding that all students
struggle I think that was really really - that came out of the interviews we've had so,
very briefly what do we recommend look as Louise has mentioned before these are the small changes
changes infuse your language with the growth minds and messages, make the learners believe
that you believe in them and you can actually help them to achieve what they want to achieve
so the positive messages they can play a vital role if done properly.
I think keeping the mindset is the key they can easily switch from back to fourth we've seen this
with the mock results we've literally brought them up they believe they can do it they've done
the mocks and well not they're successful has completely switched them back into I can't do
this kind of attitude, the message needs to feel genuine whatever you telling them it needs to feel
genuine one of the students told me anyone can tell me anyone can tell me I can do this but do
you really believe I can do it do you really mean it? It has to come from you has to feel genuine,
don't worry about grades and results that are the side effects of what
you're trying to achieve celebrate every effort success or the failure,
celebrate the student mistakes and use them as learning tools we can all make mistakes,
show them it's okay to make mistakes we had the mistake of the day for instance,
and help them to build the resilience and the stamina that the learning should feel natural,
anxiety free, and you have to create a learning environment where every single learner really,
is free and feels nothing but happiness really, and that brings me to close my
presentation again massive thanks to Louise and her team from Bucks college
Ayaz and Abul and Lee from Capel Manor myself from Harlow College and my colleagues from there,
so thank you and I will leave it with that, if any questions I'll probably wait for it.