Math Inquiry - Learner Agency?

One major question I've been asking myself is how do I build our learner's agentic practices while still covering all the content we need to and engaging our learners?

I've tried a number of approaches lately and feel like I need to nail it down to one or two.  Today's experience left me feeling excited about the progress the kids have been making already.  I took an old favourite - maintenance questions (!!!) and revamped this to be a problem challenge with a group focus.

Taking our name cards and placing students in groups (success - they form these mixed groups without complaint or excluding others) the kids worked their way through the questions posed here, to earn points.  They were hugely motivated to improve and talked through their processes and answers with their collaborators.  Ninety percent of the students were participating in the group effectively and this was evident in the learning demonstrated when the kids shared back at the end.  Most of the groups got to the last question and many completed all the questions successfully.  What was great about the questions was that the progression built on knowledge throughout - so in order to answer question two, question one had to be complete and correct.  These were a great way of building on the kids IKAN gaps as well as exposing those who were working on place value and not fractions, to begin to move into fractions.

When sharing back, we talked about who was challenged by the questions, what they felt they'd learned and the feeling of success.  Many of our more hesitant math learners were contributing in positive ways and demonstrating enthusiasm for math!  Lightbulbs!

Math and Learner Agency

Daily at the moment I am having these amazing math sessions with our learners.

Why is it amazing?
The kids are engaged, stretching themselves, seeking help and expressing their enthusiasm through their voices and faces.  As they are enthusiastic and stretching themselves, we're able to see how they're learning, how they're challenging themselves and to have important learning conversations around how that's happening and the impact it's having on the whole class.



Why are they doing this?
I can only offer an opinion on this one but I feel like they're doing it because many of them have already come with a great foundation.  On top of this though - we're providing explicit opportunities to learn, we've built on this learning from their assessments (IKAN) and are showing the application to real life and thus, demonstrating its relevance.

In fact, two of our boys stated that when they could see the question (context), they could see WHY they were learning about (for example, how to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages; or how to divide by ten by moving the decimal place).  One of them threw up his hands in horror at the idea of working with fractions or percentages, but when applied to a context he knew (buying and selling Speedway Stock cars) he intuitively knew an answer.

Following explicit opportunities to learn, and links to relevant real life contexts, we are also talking a lot about the process.  We have discussed what's important in math.  We've talked about how sometimes we feel nervous, decide we can't do it before we start, read a problem and read it wrong and so misinterpret it or make an error and decide that that x instead of tick means we can stop the learning there, instead of returning to the problem and reworking it.  So we are developing a culture of accountability, expectation, challenge (I know to learn I need to be in the PIT and it will feel horrible but that is where I learn  - so I'm going to choose a hard problem to challenge myself and if that's too easy then when I'm finished I'm going to choose another one!

Why is this working?
Again, I can only offer an opinion, but I'd like to put this back to the kids to answer sometime in the future.  Perhaps it is because our feeling successful is not just dependent on our right or wrong answer, but is in fact partly determined by our willingness to build our learning habits and as such, our agentic practices.  Also, we are building our knowledge slowly through games, activities, problem solving etc, so we are having many opportunities to practice our learning habits and our new knowledge.

It's exciting seeing our nervous learners making progress and being willing to share their challenges and their progress.  Smiles and lightbulbs all round!

Inquiry Reflection Update

As part of my learning around Learner Agency I've been looking at ways to help the kids to develop their ability to know where they're at, self-assess and how to move forward from here. On reflection, one thing I was confronted with quite strongly was that I was not providing enough formative assessment opportunities for our learners, so they were quite negative about assessment processes.  They often walked away from a test feeling anxious and that they had not been prepared well, even when I felt I had prepared them.

I've been working on finding short, sharp modes of assessment that enable the kids to have checkpoints in their learning.  One example of this is that following a couple of days of learning around a topic, I've begun the lesson with a little formative assessment where the learners pick the level they feel they can stretch to and complete the task, assessing as they go.

In working through the answers, I used our student name cards (a set that is laminated and put in a container by my front computer for ease of use) to select students for answers so most people had a turn even if it wasn't at their stage.

After a while I just went around the room asking kids in turn and the positive mood improved.  When Jasmyn nutted out a problem beyond the stage she was working and I congratulated her on "the stretch" she was visibly excited by her ability to move forward.

Following this, I worked with those kids who have set Fractions as their goal based on their IKAN assessment results

and we made links between fractions, decimals and percentages, celebrated how using intuition helped the boys to solve problems, discussed how our attitude to a challenging subject helps / hinders our learning and demonstrated how applying a context (fractions) to a real-life subject (% off the price of a Stock Car) helped Seth to grasp the relevance of fractions and be willing to have a go...... and was successful instantly.

A $50,000 stock car is 75% off - how much will you pay?

This was an awesome math session with Malakai, Seth, Daniel, Josiah and Tapa - lightbulb moments were going off everywhere! Loads of the boys were saying "I get it now!"
My heart is happy.