Master's Degree of Education - Week 2

English

Biggest takeaway: I’m unfortunately going to have to look this up on my own. This professor is hopping all over the place. We started with oral language, which is the developing understanding of language from parental engagement with children before prep. Talking, playing, engaging, socialising, asking questions, etc all build oral language. Without it, a child will already be quite far behind other children. For example, they will not be able to focus on learning how to read, because they don’t have the foundations to speak. The big 5! Or 4. Or six, depending on who’s asking. Some clarity there would have been nice.

• Phonemic awareness: hearing, identifying, and manipulating sounds in words.
• Phonics: the connection between letters and sounds.
• Vocabulary: understanding, defining, and using new words.
• Fluency: reading accurately, with expression and intonation, and at an appropriate rate.
• Comprehension: understanding and analysing what you listen to, and what you read.
• Oral language: the process of being introduced to the language concepts relevant to both producing and understanding spoken and written language.

It’s important to keep in mind that spoken and written language should be treated as two separate languages, whose knowledge feed into each other.

In ESL students, it’s notable that large chunks, like phrases, will be learned and used until the student is able to break the meaning down into its individual components later. It’s also worth noting that without a strong grasp of the language being used in class, it’s not really possible to learn maths well, since symbols don’t get used initially.

The alphabetic principle allows students to create a connection between a symbol and its corresponding sound. this is not something students are able to figure out on their own, generally speaking. They need to be able to break up spoken words into syllables, identify the initial phoneme and have the corresponding symbol be identified. After that, they can generally make some educated guesses.

Each aspect is tied tightly with the other. One cannot prosper without another, and need to be developed together. General knowledge is an important aspect of this as well. (Bit difficult to read about animals without a rudimentary understanding of a handful of animals, yes?)

As students become familiar with words and reading, their focus can move from alphabetic decoding to analysing the text. It’s too difficult to do both. Just like adults needing to learn a lot of vocabulary and old english before they can start to analyse Shakespeare plays, right?

Classroom Management

• Wait three to five seconds after asking a child a question. Give them time to answer, especially for more complex questions.
• Confusion and disobedience can result from students being unfamiliar with the language structure used by teachers in classrooms.
• Use simple, direct language that emphasise important words. Place verbs at the beginning of a sentence when issuing instructions.
• Nouns and verbs are easier to understand. Prepositions and negatives are more difficult. (Ex: "Don“t cut out before you colour in” is likely to be heard as “blah blah cut out blah blah colour in”
• Teach active listening. Give them exercises and games where they need to listen to key words and instructions. For older students, teach note-taking from oral input.
• When doing roll-call, ask children to answer a simple question so they have an opportunity to develop oral language.
• Make time for social interaction. Start an activity like modeling clay and pair students with stronger oral language skills with those that have weaker skills.
• Sharing story books and asking open-ended questions about them provide many benefits, such as how to use a book, where the information is, language recognition, creativity, and cognitive development.
• Children often think out loud before transforming that into internal thought. (ex: “choosing yellow, oh that's broken, I’ll choose orange”). As a teacher, think out loud as well in order to model this process.
• When making corrections to a student, model the correct way without explicitly pointing out the error.

Because the most effective pathway to fluent reading is print experience, it's important to get children interested in reading. How to do it?

• Extrinsic rewards are counterproductive, as they do not show intrinsic value in reading itself
• Make the choice to read easy
• They’ll be more likely to read if the text is interesting, their friends are also reading it, or if it has some kind of utility
• Whether a child will make the choice to read involves whether they want to go read more than they want to engage in another activity
• Make the choice available by also making it visible (ex: bookshelves in living spaces)
• They’re more likely to engage with it once they feel like they’re “good at it”

Maths

This week we’re focused on the foundations of learning how children learn basic numbers and counting.

We started off by discussing Subject Matter Knowledge (SMK) and Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and the differences between them. While I don’t quite understand all the details, SMK seems to be mostly concerned with the knowledge and understanding of the subject itself (ex: maths), while PCK is concerned about knowledge regarding your students and the curriculum.

The university apparently asks professors to provide three types of assignments in order to ensure that students show a full understanding of the course. Given that their working conditions are currently dogshit, it makes more sense now why there are only really three assignments in any of my current courses. Nevertheless, the thought behind it is interesting:

• Assessment of learning (evidence of achievement, ex: tests)
• Assessment for learning (the student learns something from the exercise)
• Assessment as learning (self-assessment for students to monitor their own learning)

A lot of this early learning is extremely preoccupied with executive functions and optimising learning to regularly free up working memory space for more complex tasks. These are the relevant functions mentioned:

• Attention: Filtering to focus on relevant stimuli, coordinating available memory resources, and assigning them to the task at hand.
• Cognitive Flexibility: Ability to adapt to subsequent questioning or problems presented in a novel way. (I think...)
• Inhibition: Suppressing the urge to do something else or drop the task, as well as preventing distractors from derailing the point of the original question.

Maths Anxiety and Growth Mindset

Prep to year 2 are critical years for developing confidence in subjects. Foster a classroom culture of presenting maths as a language, a way of discussing problems and discovering solutions. It’s collaborative! If we focus merely on getting the answer right, we risk rote memorisation and end up failing to understand the actual concept. Emphasise that these are skills that are practiced in order to improve. By asking students to discuss with each other how they arrived at a particular answer, the student is now learning multiple times. It’s very easy for students to get frustrated, nervous, and discouraged. Be encouraging! DO NOT say bizarre things like "well, there are other subjects to be good at", WOW. Understanding is maths is not a choice these days. Make it fun! By making activities games, students become focused on finding a solution that makes sense to them, instead of figuring out what the teacher wants to hear.

Understanding what a number is

It’s more involved than I thought! For the first year of schooling, this is the flow:

• Introduce numbers 1 - 4. DO NOT include symbols ("3"), as that is a separate effort. We want to focus on the linguistic representation ("three") and the physical representation (3 cubes), since also including symbols is too many things at once.
• Present the concept of nothing, the zero.
• Continue numbers 5 - 9, with structured patterns such as subitising.
• Focus on the sequence of all these numbers, from 0 to 9
• Simple comparisons, such as 1 more, 1 less

Four and five year olds may struggle to count to six, and that is okay. It’s actually quite involved to understand what "3" is. This comes from the "part-part-whole" concept, which is the concept of recognising a number as parts of a whole. For example, "3" is:

• 2 + 1
• One more than 2
• 0 + 3
• One less than 4
• etc.

This is why in order to indicate complete undertanding of what a number is, a child needs to fulfill the following:

• When counting, there needs to be a one-to-one correspondence with the items being counted. Watch a student and notice that when prompted to count, they just start rattling off numbers while their finger is just hopping around objects at a different pace. Watching for this is important, because they still may arrive at the correct answer. They may also count the same item more than once.
• The order of counting does not matter. Ask a student to start counting in the middle of a line of items and that will trigger further thinking, since they can’t simply count from left to right. Ensure, however, that the sequence of the counted numbers stays stable.
• An understanding of the cardinality principle. All this means is that the last number counted is the answer to the question “how many”.
• Conservation of number. Shuffling the items after a count and checking the count again is another way of checking whether they realise order does not matter.

One thing that was pointed out today that I really should have realised sooner was the importance of introducing ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.) as a prerequisite for double digit numbers. "38" is pronounced "thirty eight", not "threety eight", as a new language learner would expect. (I mean, after all, we do pronounce "98" as "ninety eight".

Unexpected point being made in the reading: due to inflation and cost of living pressures, we need to introduce concepts of higher numbers sooner to children than we have historically. It’s worth noting that as living in society has become more complex, the demands on people’s literacy and numeracy increases significantly. This, in turn, places a great deal more pressure on parents to be early teachers without almost any of the knowledge and tools to ensure it’s success. Sometimes it feels like we’re asking far too much of parents without giving them the support necessary in order to accomplish what’s expected of them.

Assignments and Readings

Alright, here’s what I’ve done:

English

• Week 1 reading
• Scratch my head at the assignment requirements
• Attempted to find meaningful rules in English. I was able to conclude that English is consistent within groups and chunks of the language that derive from similar histories. When trying to answer the question “why”, the most useful path for enlightenment is to figure out which language was this borrowed from (including Old English). Also, apparently there are a dozen phonological(?) rules that English follows which constrains the library of sounds that can be used to form a valid word. (ex: you simply cannot start a word with "mb" and make it work)

Maths

• Week 1 reading
• Attempted week 2 reading. Got way too distracted with the author(s) failing to ask the very important question "did I ask a bad question?" when only 1% of your students got the completely correct answer. There is so much training on how to write a good survey, and what invalidates a survey. These rules apply! Please follow them.
• Did the assessments! I did about as well as I expected to and showed the weaknesses I knew I had. Nice to see I’m still sharp enough. Disappointed to find out how grossly inconsistent the assessment criteria was applied across the SMNY test. "Oh Australian students are doing so poorly, oh noooo they’re dumb compared to the rest of the world" you should really double-check to see that you’re not just worse at asking questions! I’m trying the self-evaluation part and the expectations all just don’t line up that well and I hope I get it right urgghhhh

What I really need to get done:

English

• Week 2 reading
• Week 3 reading
• Make a dent in reading the massive national report thing
• Write a summary of what I’ve learned so far.
• Try not to panic, there’s nothing to panic about.
• Remember to check the before-class activities

Maths

• Finish week 2 reading
• Start week 3 reading
• Finish the self-assessment
• Remember to check the before-class activities

PE/Health

• Go over the relevant reading before class
• Remember to check the before-class activities