Success?!

What is success?? It is the question I am asking myself as I reflect and dissect a trial I have just completed with my Year 10 classes. This trail was of a new teach approach that I was inspired to take on thanks to the wonderful and inspiring Claire Amos of HPSS and others.  I divided each of the classes into 4 groups of 4 and gave each of them a physics subtopic explore and answer the learning outcomes. There next challenge was to then use that acquired knowledge to teach the rest of the class about their assigned subtopic.
Today was presentation day and as I had being reinforcing too both classes all week that this will not be a failure, it will be placed on the sliding scale of success. Everybody will learn something and whether it is physics or not it doesn't matter. I placed real emphasise on the journey and not the outcome, because that is what is really important. Yes they need to know the material for the topic test and exams, but in the wider scheme of things, knowing the order of the EMS is not going to impact their day to day lives and for most of them their future jobs or careers.

10A - This was the first class to become the teacher. Most of the groups took it really seriously and worked really hard during the week and respected what we were trying to achieve as a good. Their presentations and ppt clearly showed this. Other groups didn't take the challenge as seriously and again it was easy to see in the presentation and the way there were able to convey the information and answer the questions there classmates had.
At the end of the lesson each student filled in a self and peer review sheet (thanks Ros MacEachern, it is awesome!). I stressed the importance to them of being honest about there performance when filling in the self review. Looking through them the students have done a very good job at this, they clear took on board what I said and the results were really powerful insight to how the student thought they achieved. They are pretty much spot on to the grades I have given them.

The last 10 minutes of the lesson we spent as a class reviewing what worked and what didn't. I divided the board in half - good and bad. The response from the students were exactly what I had expected. They were very self aware of what worked and more importantly what didn't work and why it didn't work. The good aspects were things like participation, team work, being responsible, having fun, research skills.
The class was unanimous about one thing, they do not want to try this approach again. I respect them for this and have taken this on board and on reflection neither do I in its current format. I need to make some changes to it, maybe take a couple of steps back and use it group setting and not have so much knowledge riding on the activity. This in hindsight really did scare the students, I did put them in a sink or swim situation, most of them swam well, others just treaded water.

10B - this was the second class to be teacher. The difference between the two classes was very interesting. The presentations from these groups were excellent, included a good array of demonstrations, experiments and videos. As this was P 6 and 7 compared to P 1 and 2 the attention spans was greatly reduced but we managed to get most of them teaching done in P 6. Again the students were very honest in there peer and self assessment which was great.

Again we spent the last 10 minutes reviewing the week and each student told me the things they did and didn't like this modified jigsaw approach. The responses from this class were very different from the other class. They came from a completely different angle and really dissect the method as a whole. this was really pleasing to see. They did not right this approach off completely which was interesting. There criticism and feed back were fantastic and very useful for me as the teacher. I will be taking them on board as a couple were things I hadn't really considered to be issues, but I now know that they are. WIN!!

We are going to have a review lesson on Monday to address in areas students missed understanding of today. I think that this is very important as it reassures the students and rewards their participation and willingness to give this a go.

Tuesday will be the introduction of co-constructive unit planning. It has worked really well with my Yr 8's, so I am going to give it ago with the Yr 10s. It should be fun, and as I told them I write the test and exams so we can cover what they want to cover within reason and investigate ideas that interest them.

This week has been a success!! Each student has learnt something, it wasn't we just won the world cup success, but it was a success! The student may not believe me, but it was. Everybody tried hard and gave great presentation. They gave great feedback and criticism. We will move forward as one unit. The biggest success is the students to surprised themselves and gave this a good try. That is all I asked of them. That fact makes me very happy and keen to keep this way of teaching up. The more we do it, the more the students will hopefully get on board and demand it.