TheFlippedScientist

I promised Priscila Heredia  a post reflecting on the idea of learning loss in the last year due to the COVID pandemic, as she has noticed as an educator herself, that her son has regressed in certain aspects of his education. So as I am in managed isolation back in New Zealand, I thought I would take the time to deep dive into the issue.  According to a recent OECD report on the economic impact of learning loss, the idea that students have undergone learning loss is a fait accompli.  "There is no doubt that the school closures in the first half of 2020 have resulted in significant learning losses to the affected cohort of students – and some of the re-opening strategies being implemented will only further exacerbate these already incurred learning losses" While remote learning surely affects students, we don't know yet exactly how or how much. Does learning loss provide a meaningful answer ? If we have a loss, what learning has exactly been  lost ? Do students forg...

Having spent 5 years teaching internationally, predominantly the English exam board courses, what shows that the student has learned is based primarily on his or her success in the end-of-year external examinations. The focus is on getting information   into  students’ heads (and then have them recall it during the exam). Now having also seen how students often revise, there is a prevalence of re-reading their notes, getting the highlighter out, and feverishly highlighting passages. These are all designed in some way to get the information to stick.  Now as I keep telling the students, these techniques, generally do not work. In fact, the  opposite is true : when information comes to mind easily when reading a textbook and feels like yeah I am learning something, that information is easy to forget. All too often my students revise topics they already know well! In other words, just because a student is learning something quickly and easily does   not  guara...

A recent education report from Tokona Te Raki has argued the streaming, also known as ability grouping needs to stop as it disproportionately affects the academic performance of Māori and Pāsifika students. Having now read the report, the paper does have a statistically significant conclusion that Māori does not have the same long-term outcomes as non-Māori, however, this is a correlation and not necessarily the cause of this underachievement. So yeah, I decided to go down the internet rabbit hole and see what the global situation was and if indeed streaming was a major cause of Māori educational underachievement. First things first let me define my terms so anyone reading knows what exactly what I am talking about.  ‘Streaming’ is used to describe a variety of approaches by which students with similar levels of current achievement (note I do not say ability) are consistently grouped together for lessons. ‘Streaming’ can involve grouping students into classes for all or most of t...

As the pandemic continues to force lockdowns in parts of Europe and the Americas, online learning continues to be in effect for many schools. As a science teacher, this has proved a challenge as science is a practical and hands-on subject. Not being able to allow students to experiment, test, and explore firsthand, however, has encouraged me to develop and build upon my teaching practice.  One lesson, I learned early, was when preparing to teach science online, I needed to be reflective and understand that I could not take my face-to-face classroom and simply replicate that online. I had to ask myself what had changed? This was then followed by, What did I need to do to adapt to that change? For me, this involved considering what the big ideas of the lesson are and what the students need to do to obtain those big ideas and show that they have learned and understood them before moving on. I utilized Catlin Tucker's 5E lesson design model to assist me in this adaption. One way I eval...

As part of preparing students for external examinations, I have been asking them about how they approach answering exam-style questions. It is something that we as educators sometimes take for granted that approaching the solving of these types of questions is actually a skill all in itself. From the student's feedback, it was clear they were lacking a clear strategy in tackling these types of questions.  One approach that I have been introducing the students to the use of computational thinking to develop a strategy to solve long answer style questions, especially those involving calculations.  Before a problem can be tackled, the problem itself and the ways in which it could be solved need to be understood.  Computational thinking allows us to do this.  Computational thinking allows us to take a complex problem, understand what the problem is and develop possible solutions.   There are four key techniques to computational thinking:  Decomposition - ...

In a recent article , online learning provider Crimson Global Academy's founder Jamie Beaton has argued that: "An online training academy could be established to upskill our education leaders, and perhaps the worst-performing remote physical schools, with substandard facilities or poor access to teachers, could be digitally replaced in part or whole" So from the data gleaned from the global pandemic which has lasted almost a year and that has meant online learning for some students over this period, just how effective would it be to digitally replace schools for those most struggling? If one is to make such claims then surely, they must be supported by the burden of proof?  In a perfect world, this logical obligation ensures that   anyone making a claim must bear the responsibility of proving that claim.    This is the difference between  established knowledge  over  alleged knowledge  and helps differentiate between expedient ideas that...

Recently, as part of the #edureading group on Twitter, there was a discussion on the choice of text used in classrooms in relation to the cultural relevance to the readers. One idea behind this latter strategy is in giving more 'relevant' texts, this will motivate students more, as they see themselves in the books. We all remember studying the works of Shakespeare —a staple of high school English classes—but remember many of our fellow students struggling to read and understand his works.  The same can be applied to the science classroom. By choosing more relevant contexts for learners like teaching momentum through skateboarding as an example, students will be more engaged in the process. The issue of a disconnect between young scientists and the science they’re learning isn’t new, though. Like previous generations, high school students have continued to spend science class learning about the fundamentals of science from the leaders of scientific thinking from the last 400 yea...