Michaela School and behaviour - AIBU

[herculepoirot2]

AIBU to think that you might read this behaviour policy and think it is authoritarian and unnecessary, but to also think that, with results four times better than the national average, these people might have a point about the benefits to young people of being expected to work hard and behave well?

mcsbrent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Behaviour-Policy-11.02.19.pdf

Is it easier to remember the differences between mean, median, mode with some discussion of what mode and median mean? I certain try to apply this when teaching modal verbs and in medias res (or even the word media) but students do often look at me blankly when I ask them what 'media' actually means.

When did teaching become so much 'this is the right way to do it, and if you do it another way you are wrong.

Well, I think there probably are right and wrong ways. Some things will be, empirically, a total waste of time and others effective. I agree that you can be too prescriptive as well, but that doesn’t mean I as a reflective teacher shouldn’t be thinking about the best uses of time.

hercule you clearly don't like 'time wasting' whereas I am rather a fan of slowing things down!

One thing I am sure of is that there is no room for this kind of debate about how to best teach things at Michaela and its disciple schools.

I have actually seen people on Twitter tell the sainted, and very knowledgeable, Barbara Bleiman that she is 'wrong'.

@Piggy - or I’m guessing the Cathars in France? Just got reminded when you mentioned Catherine! Kinda cool to make connections and discuss them with the teacher. Probably hard to do within a Michaela lesson due to rules but I understand it would be time consuming for there to be 30 kids discussing each of their insights.

None of these questions mean that you need to do discovery learning

I knew I shouldn't have used the word 'discovery'...

It has been since I started teaching, Piggy

Back when I started the right way was group work and card sorts and getting the kids enthusiastic.

I spent a large part of my early career slowly realising that these lessons were way more ineffective than the ones where I explained stuff and got them to practise what they learned.

Surely we can agree that the best way for the kids to learn about Romeo and Juliet is to learn about Romeo and Juliet, not spend hours making a Romeo and Juliet diorama?

I guess in English figuring out the meaning of words you haven’t seen before might be considered as skill that they could employ in an comprehension exercise

The person on Who Wants to be a Millionaire could have figured out what "the holes that let CO2 and O2 escape in leaves are" using vocabulary.

Stomata - love the words that 'stoma' come from.

They could also have learnt the fact at school in biology.

I quite enjoy that bit (am always surprised that kids don't know what their names mean!) so don't view it as time wasting at all. I know I couldn't teach in a Michaela school. I am far too easily distracted and not biddable enough. I am sure lots if teachers would love it. But I would rather a school that allowed some flexibility in teaching style and approach. For example, I know of a school that makes all staff lay out desks to an approved pattern. I couldn't work there at all!

The teaching style of drilling and factual recall seems to be most popular with history teachers (although there is still some cynicism). I think most other subjects are shades of grey in terms of how they view it.

Is it easier to remember the differences between mean, median, mode with some discussion of what mode and median mean?

I don’t know, because I don’t know what they mean! (Assuming you mean the roots of the words).

Surely we can agree that the best way for the kids to learn about Romeo and Juliet is to learn about Romeo and Juliet

What are the learning objectives?

What are you hoping to get from the lesson?

DS knows the story of Romeo and Juliet. Does he understand how it relates to the characters in say West Side Story? Can he discuss the conflict in the main characters? Can he apply it to other examples of rivalry....I am not sure.

But he knows the story and can give you the facts.

Surely we can agree that the best way for the kids to learn about Romeo and Juliet is to learn about Romeo and Juliet, not spend hours making a Romeo and Juliet diorama?

Its fantastic they get good grades but is anyone also monitoring their mental health? The pressure these children are under to perform? I believe more in the carrot rather than the stick approach to education - IMO inspiring children is much better than managing them through fear.

I never mentioned making dioramas, noble. That's not the same thing at all. Some of my colleagues would do this. I hate cutting and sticking myself. But I have found, increasingly, students do just want to be 'told' things and reject working things out. This is definitely not helpful in inference subjects. It does also definitely help the brain to make connections between learning.

I could, however spend waste an entire lesson banging on about where the word diorama comes from!

I have made a zoetrope (whilst banging on about what the word means) and students ALWAYS remember that (very esoteric)word!

I think ti may be the school I work in (and it can be counter productive in some ways) but we are never told what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' teaching wise and those who wanted to do group work, or make dioramas did; those who didn't didn't.

I would say my very creative colleague who makes puppets and dioramas gets regularly the greatest number of top grades in the department.

you clearly don't like 'time wasting' whereas I am rather a fan of slowing things down!

Slowing down the pace of learning, great! Giving them the actually required amount of time to engage with and discuss the meanings of a novel by not trying to cram in a speedy reading of Wonder into a half-term, and rather, taking a whole term to read Pullman properly? I am all over it.

Surely we can agree that the best way for the kids to learn about Romeo and Juliet is to learn about Romeo and Juliet

I wonder if conscience alley, freeze frame and other drama techniques work in a school with such rigid behaviour where pupils are concerned about talking out, giggling and 'being free'.

I doubt Robin William's character would have been able to have pupils jumping from desks and 'seizing the day'.

Mode is interesting because it means to measure , so a modal verb 'measures' the likelihood of something happening. But the word has altered over time to mean 'lots of people do it ; it's the fashion the mode.

Media simply means the middle ; so the media put themselves in the middle of things : they 'mediate' meaning. I always understood median and mode better that way.

In medias res means 'in the middle of things'. Most Shakespeare plays start this way.

Here endeth the lesson.

Everyone who has GCSE maths or even is in primary school aged at 10 presumably knows the difference between median, mean, mode etc. Median is middle - from the latin word for that. Mean is the average. Mode I think we all tend to use less but is still taught in schools and I think means the most common - so 1 2 2 2 4 5 7 would get you 2 as mode.

My teacher mother certainly taught us the latin derivation of plenty of words. It is useful skill.

I think noble knows what they are in maths xenia

Anyhoo, back to Michaela and the question I asked a couple of pages back. Has anyone else seen its donate tab? I don't know if chloe is still about but did you have to donate money to visit?

I think noble knows what they are in maths xenia

A la mode....

I didn't know the derivation of 'meda' - but now I do, that's fascinating..

A media scrum, to mediate..I love derivations but I always forget if they are Greek or Latin.

No, I haven’t, Piggy. I believe you, though.

Piggy the diorama is an example of something that was likely to be lauded in the olden days as outstanding, when in fact it’s mostly ineffectual time-wasting.

You go on about the meanings of words, I go off on massive tangents about historical mathematicians or why infinity isn’t a number or why you can’t divide by zero. I don’t see a problem with it because I don’t think the syllabus is the sole extent of what pupils should learn. But the difference between that and the diorama is that while I’m waxing lyrical about Fermat’s Last Theorem, I’m not intending the kids to be learning something that’s on the syllabus and actually teaching it badly.

Back when I started the right way was group work and card sorts and getting the kids enthusiastic.

I spent a large part of my early career slowly realising that these lessons were way more ineffective than the ones where I explained stuff and got them to practise what they learned.

Sounds just like my experience.

Giving students the facts first and using them in problems is far more useful than spending 40 minutes guessing mean median and mode. The linking between topics comes afterwards, not at the start. Students aren't experts when they start a topic. They can't make the links because they don't have the knowledge. There's plenty of time for links/mastery/whatever you want to call it, once the skill/facts have been learnt.

This school has succeeded nectar if the way the exam system has gone it's an overall issue with the system which will make a school like this succeed. It's not that the school is great. The objectives, in my opinion, are wrong in the first place. I say this as a parent with 2 very different children. One will be an 8-9 student, the other will be lucky to get 5's with hard work. The one with the 5's is possibly more gifted, way more hard working and definetely more focused on what he wants. You'd think those are admirable qualities, but undoing the battered self esteem of the school system, particularly with it's over focus on short term memory, is difficult. Short term memory is a talent which doesn't serve much purpose other than to get through memory based examinations. It's really sad to reward that, and to see it crop into subjects such as English which should be giving children with other talents, a chance. It makes me sad and furious that children's broader talents are not recognised and therefore that they feel 'less'.

There's no way Michaela would have got so many 9s without some exploration and linking topics in Maths. The students would have had to think for themselves.