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!