Team Pereyma would like to extend warm thanks to our Drammen friends for the warmth and hospitality they extended to us during our August visit! We also extend genuine thanks to Roar Grottvik for his kindness and support during our visit. We sincerely thank Principal Marianne Dahl Haagensen for permitting us to proceed with our planned visit to her school during a time that was filled with much change. During our time together, we feel that we developed a great sense of direction regarding our work for the coming year. The time we spent working together with our teaching colleagues, face to face, was highly effective in both building our learning community and working through challenges encountered in the past.
When we shared our learning goals for the upcoming year, we learned that the NORCAN Drammen team will be focused on lesson study. We have come to realize that this is much the same as what we call our Collaborative Inquiry for Learning Mathematics (CILM). Early in our discussions, we discussed the importance of mindset on student learning - both teacher mindset and student mindset. We also agreed that teacher learning could be taken as a predictor of student learning, and so we would endeavour to be mindful of this as we created our measurement plan. Even though we work with different students a continent apart, we both identified fixed mindsets of students (including lack of resilience and cognitive risk-taking) as a limiting factor in Mathematics achievement. So we wondered… what specific classroom strategies can we employ that will nurture a growth mindset in our students?
Ian (this is his Canadian name, apparently!) shared a video called “My Favourite No”, https://youtu.be/uuDjke-p4Co which showed a teaching strategy that an educator used to highlight the power of mistakes and to begin to change student thinking about mistakes in Math. “Wrong is Right” became the theme of our inquiry. After watching this video, we discussed how powerful it is to watch another teacher using a new strategy in their classroom. We believe that we too could create videos like this that we could share with one another. And so a plan was born! When our individual groups work together in a lesson study (CILM), we will be mindful to incorporate a teaching strategy that we believe will foster a change in student thinking regarding the idea that mistakes are powerful teachers. We will video record these sessions and share with one another, and then provide feedback to our peers.
We recognize the importance of measuring any impact that we may effect through our change in teaching practice. As such, we plan to survey students for growth mindset at the beginning and at the end of the term/semester. We also plan to video record student thinking about mistakes at the very beginning of the semester, as well as at the end of the term when they have experienced learning experiences directed at changing student thinking regarding mistakes.
At the beginning and end of the term, we will ask select students these questions and record their response (anecdotal data):
- Describe your feelings about Math.
- When you get stuck doing a Math question, what do you do?
- How do you feel when you make a mistake in Math class?
Every student will also be asked to complete the following survey, at both the beginning and end of the term:
We are still unsure about how we will measure Teacher Learning, and are presently working on ways to do this effectively. We will keep you posted on any developments and will post our ideas here for your feedback.
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