The death of L6/Janice & the Giant MN Stereotype

[PiqueABoo]

"Moreover the creation of level 6 SATs papers, a harder test designed to stretch the most able, has led to a flurry of competition. The numbers entered have doubled in a few years, with parents begging schools to include their kids, even if this means extra lessons, pressure and after-school tutoring. They boast about their 'gifted and talented' offspring on Twitter and Mumsnet. All for a test which doesn't matter at all." - Janice Turner, Times today.

I've enjoyed some of Janice's articles and the overall direction was OK so I'll likely forgive her, but unlike her DC my DD wasn't headed to a private school and L6 was a blessing because it gave her something to enthusiastically engage with in those core subject lessons after a bit of a new-stuff drought.

At Y7 DD's comp the KS2 SATs results were then used to set for maths from day one and create flight paths i.e. predicted outcomes/targets. I see the latter as a kind of minimum guarantee for a high ability child in a state system that is increasingly difficult to trust because it's now so concerned with getting low ability children to floor-levels and closing dubious gaps as opposed to credible ones. Some of this even extends to disadvantaged children now with a quite weighty lobby lined up behind the idea of redistributing half of the pupil premium from the high ability disadvantaged and adding it to the amount given to the low ability disadvantaged.

There clearly was some of that ickiness, but that's not a reason to dismiss the whole and I think it's a pity L6 is now officially history. What happens with the pace being taken off the menu in favour of depth in primary will be interesting: I can't see much room for depth at that stage of education so suspect it will often be repetition unless you're lucky with school/teacher.

PS: "most able" has essentially been defined as the top 50% now so it's largely useless for anything else.

I agree - thank God for L6. If it had not been for L6, my family would have been relying on the teacher to decide whether or not to challenge DS2 this year, or just focus on the least able (again).

The flight path arguments do not apply in our case, but still..

Heaven forbid you let the trained, experienced, qualified teacher make a decision about educating your child. You must know better obviously...

So what is meant to stretch the most able pupils now?

Again, perhaps the teachers? Hlts etc

I haven't looked too hard because DD is now post-primary, but around here they seem to have jumped on some kind of "mastery" bandwagon so they talk about depth and breadth. The class moves through topics content domains in lock-step, but they stretch the more able with extension work higher level thinking in that topic content domain. No skipping ahead to a new topic.

It's education doing it's dichotomy thing yet again i.e. levels and anything like that are now unconditionally bad because they label children (there's a serious uncritical fad for Dweck and other Stanford-stuff right now), whereas new opaque stuff is unconditionally good.

Schools aren't that well known for their world class expertise in psychological interventions so this could be interesting. I expect lots of parents will hate it because they'll only be told working at, below or above expectations. But what do parents know anyway?

This is here: it could be something completely different elsewhere.

Pique this shows how little you understand mastery.

Mastery is exactly about stretching the middle to high ability students to think about what they are doing rather than following a set of rules.

For example I may ask a child to solve the equation 3x+2=4x-1, but a much more powerful question is 'how many equations can you write with an answer of x=2?'
Skipping ahead to a new topic doesn't benefit the child as much as a deep understanding of what they are doing does. This applies to lower level maths too, giving a child a column subtraction with the numbers missing to see whether they can 'carry' in reverse. Understanding leads to better learning. Skipping to the next topic doesn't.

Reading posts about 'stretching the most able' show how unaware non trained people are of the pedagogy of teaching.

It's spectacularly ignorant to suggest that breadth and higher level thinking don't stretch the most able.

It is far better to have a child that can apply what they have learnt upside down and inside out, than have a child who can solve simultaneous equations at 7 but has no idea what they are actually doing.

Grrr I'll have to leave before I post and regret.

So there will be no 'level 6' papers in next year's KS2? (or were there none this year?)

well ds has certainly had extensive experience of the approaches suggested by the 2 teachers on this thread.
The teachers who knew best what he needed always decided that what he needed was more repetition which by amazing coincedence just so happened to be the exact same thing others in the class were ploughing through for the first time.
Obviously though someone who may only have a gcse in maths would definitely know more of the subject than someone with a degree in it and 15 years applied industry experience.
Not everyone learns slowly and needs to do variations on the same theme 100s of times in order to fully get it and be able to make connections about how to apply it.

The jury is still out on mastery, especially when it comes to breadth and depth versus depth, breadth and pace for high attainers.

giftedphoenix.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/maths-mastery-evidence-versus-spin/#unique-identifier

"Pique this shows how little you understand mastery."

I freely admit I know little about it, but I don't think you really demonstrated that observation:

Me: "stretch ... high level thinking skills"
You: "stretching ... to think about what they are doing"

I stand by my dichotomy point.

Var123 mastery isn't about variations, it is about challenging thinking. If teachers are doing variations, they are doing mastery wrong.

Pace can still be there, it's just not what was recognised as levelled pace. I love the mastery ideas and we are only just implementing it at our school. In the long run it will undoubtedly prepare students better for the world of work.

Pique to you, stretch is getting a higher level in national curriculum levels.

High order thinking skills are stretch to me.

Using your approach, pupils working on solving equations would move from x+2=5 to 2x+4=12 etc. Using a mastery curriculum, they would write their own equations, look at a problem and use an equation to solve it, think about what they could change in the equation to give a different answer. Technically none of these skills are higher in the national curriculum levels but surely you can see the difference.

I think I've seen ds2 come home with this sort of homework (the description of mastery). its always in the last section and says something along the lines of make up your own questions and solve them. He always works backward. eg he decides that x=3 & y =7 and then he writes simultaneous eqns that satisfy the solution. 0/10 for mastery but 10/10 for making his life simple.

It sounds like educationalists may have commandeered the plain English word: mastery. From the description given though I do not think you've found the solution for engaging highly able children but maybe it will be useful for driving home info to middle attainers?

But var that is a different skill to solving them. A very different skill. It also helps when solving because he can see where the questions come from. That is exactly what he should be doing

Umm you do realise this is based on world class psychological and Educational research? Carol Dwerk and Jo Boaler, of course you could see Stanford as a little upstart educational place.
I would love it if my DCs school was doing this kind of thing, its the very thing I am thinking of working on this summer to help my bright DDs change their "mindset" to realise they can do more if they "try".

Educational research so often turns out to be bollocks that it's perfectly reasonable to be sceptical.

AtomicDog - no level 6 in 2016 (but there was a full set of them in 2015).

"High order thinking skills are stretch to me. "

What if they’ve already got them? If I had to pick just one phrase to describe DD it would likely be “innate puzzle solver”. There's also the correlation between mental acuity (CATs/IQ/whatever) and maths attainment.

Trial and improvement becomes painful to observe after a while and I couldn't wait for DD to get her mitts on L6, specifically because it had some algebra which is a pre-requisite for accessing lots of treasure. I’m not convinced there’s much scope for depth/breadth earlier on because primary maths is largely arithmetic (with a bit of geometry on the side) and we already have all that stuff around “number sense”.

Note the way I understand it, but perhaps some journalists and schools don't, is that the algebra in the new-improved curriculum is still supposed to be that "pre-algebra", "algebraic thinking" type, so possibly no respite there.

"you do realise this is based on world class psychological and Educational research?"

I prefer to call it world famous.

I think the first problem is that there's a significant gap between schools and the research i.e. it's largely received (headline) opinion via layers of intermediaries, some of whom have ideologies and agendas. The next problem is that even if the message from that research was perfectly clear and survived the journey intact, what makes schools reliable experts in terms of implementing this stuff and playing with children's heads?

Then there is cherry-picking because of those ideologies and agendas. For instance the most recent mindset intervention research by one of Dweck's friends said it worked a little bit for improving low ability children's attainment. Not high-ability children's attainment, b-b-b-b-but ermm... those children will be thinking completely differently now so there might be some be some positive effect later. Maybe.

I’m not dismissing all Dweck has done, but I’m rejecting what Dweck is being used to justify not least because I think this band-wagon will probably harm children like DD and worse, that some proponents know it i.e. they think it’s perfectly acceptable to rob Peter to pay Paul.

janice should be made to do tests she gets 100 percent in, in half the time available (then sit and twiddle thumbs) every day for six months and see how motivated she feels. ideally this could stretch across several lessons.
lesson one - test
lesson two - mark test - oh its all correct
lesson three - practise all the questions you got wrong. didnt get any wrong? practise them anyway

head - desk

"they think it’s perfectly acceptable to rob Peter to pay Paul." What does this mean?

I know what the phrase means, but I do not understand it in this context? Who is the beneficiary whose needs are immediate?

Carol Dweck seems to get quoted a lot, always approvingly on the G&T threads. Its as if if Carol Dweck says it, then it must be right. She's obviously very fashionable right now. Usually it is her recommendations regarding praising effort, never attainment that is being offered almost as a law. Is she that good? Is she like Darwin, who changed thinking forever, not just the author of a passing fashion?

sanfairyanne - that is almost an exact description of DS2's year 3 maths lessons for the whole year. Finally the teacher wrote in a report to me that he knew it inside and out.

Then unbelievably, the year 4 teacher decided that the best thing was that he do it all again with the rest of the class.
Then, the year 5 teacher did the same.

He's come out of it all still willing to do maths which is I think a testament to his rather scary, monumental stubborn streak.

Pique again what you describe isn't mastery.

The nrich website is full of problems, puzzles and ideas that are mastery, this is what your dd should be experiencing.

Chucking a few nrich puzzles at your bright kids isn't a real solution either.

Thank you, var123