Disengaged students

Being given a class of disengaged students is a difficult task.  It's not something that I can do year after year, although after a break of a few years; the challenge isn't as daunting as the thought of doing it for the third in a row.

I'm not particularly talented with this group of students - I certainly can't get them energised and self motivated, but I can get them working and start them on a path to regain their self esteem.  If I remember this as my goal I can see progress.  If I focus on grades, I put my head in my hands in despair.  Success comes (I love the kids that get to say - "this is my first B ever" knowing that it isn't a charity grade and that they have had to work for it), but it is hard, constant work with a lot of negative feedback from the students.

My top ten tips for working with disengaged students in year 11 and 12.

1. Do not allow students to do nothing.  If a student refuses work, accelerate through the strategies for teacher intervention and pass them on to admin to hit consequences that might be meaningful for them.  If they are in a re-engagement programme, teachers have already tried the 4001 strategies for re-engagement, outside intervention is probably required.

2. Be real.  Students will know if you are faking it.  Their life skills relate to outside the classroom, they have a bullsh*t meter that can detect it at 40 paces.  If you don't want to be there, they will understand, let them know that you have something in common and get on with step 3.

3. Be something they don't expect - be prepared with material suited to their level of work.  Reduce the amount of content on the board or page, increase the number of boards or pages over time. 

4. Have clear expectations of behaviour - no swearing, be on time, be respectful of others.  Make them aware of what they are doing and why they need to do it.  Tie it to graduation if possible, being changed out of their class into a work programme for repeated failures, use punitive responses as a last resort, but don't be afraid of using them (such as suspension from class) if necessary to ensure a minimum level of work.  Work closely with the social worker to assist students learn classroom behaviours and how to code switch.

5. Celebrate their achievements using intrinsic rewards.  Extrinsic rewards don't work with these kids, apathy is rife and you will too quickly accelerate through the extrinsic rewards required to bribe work.  With these students, extrinsic rewards are just not a good idea.  Everything about these kids is self esteem related.  Build that honestly, just a little, and it is success.

6. Find out their stories (where appropriate) and share yours, especially with indigenous students. Often by talking to students you will find out what does motivate them and all of a sudden you have a re-engaged student who is seeking your approval for those 5 minutes of talking about manga cartoons or about how to become a chef.

7. Do it quickly, be patient and forgiving.    They have 10-11 years of negative inertia to overcome, so if it takes a few times to change a behaviour it is ok (and forget as quickly as is appropriate if an honest effort to change the behaviour is being made).  They will run out of steam whatever you do, so get as much as you can early.  If they are working do a wad of assessment (by term three you will be pulling teeth to get assessment at a normal rate).

8. Ask teachers about the students.  Someone will know something positive about them and it will give you an in to start a lesson they may engage with.

9.  Acknowledge their existence in and out of the classroom.  You might be the only person to say their name in a week.  You may get a grunt or a finger in return behind your back, but over time they will realise that it is ok to say hi back.

10.  Make it clear that it is ok that they don't have to like you and vice versa.  In many cases they don't know how to like, they have been practicing the opposite for so long.  All of a sudden you become the one person that isn't giving them a hard time and you are the one getting the most amount of work.


Just be aware, if you get good at re-engaging kids, you run the risk of being the disengaged student expert and will get them year after year.  If this happens you need to be strong when you have had enough and insist on a break from it, or seek another school where you can get that break - timetabling will see you as a very valuable commodity whilst you are doing the role.  These students can break your confidence and deprive you of your will to teach - if you feel this is happening, seek assistance and return to normal classes.

Class centric schools

Last post I talked about making a class rather than a group of individuals and how that was important to how I tried to teach.  It reminded me of a large organisation that I did work for.  They changed the name of their administration centre to store service centre (or something like that) to change the thinking in the organisation from an administration 'ruling' the stores, to a service model where they were enablers that assisted stores to sell more product.

The admin vs teachers conflict is a common enough malady and sometimes I think I understand why.  Empire building is not uncommon and importance is placed upon being a gatekeeper for projects to become viable  - goodwill needs to be developed before a project is considered.  Multiple consultations are required before a project can get the go ahead and if someone steps outside of unwritten rules, the project leader is sent back to their classroom tails between their legs after doing considerable work to check that the project is both viable and has clear student support and benefit.  I have no problem with the gate, it's the pre-requisite of goodwill that is the problem.

This scenario is a recipe for reduced initiative and is quite clearly poor management.  An alternate method is to encourage the person seeking the initiative (if valuable) and then assisting in enabling the person make the event happen, to mutually decide it is unviable or send the idea to the third umpire.  Encouragement of initiative is a quality of a good manager.  Let's face it, rarely is a student event fun for teachers - but the kids get a lot out of well run events and it is something that they remember well after school (let's hope for the right reasons).

I like projects that can run with little assistance from admin as I tend to think there are things done best by teachers and other things done best by administration.  I think, a project that can be run without generating large amounts of cooperation from 9 members of a committee is more likely to succeed. I normally accompany committee involvement with a swear word - a small skilled selected team is nearly always a far more effective method than a voluntary committee.  Maths Academy, Summer school, board game clubs, the edmodo rollout, the IWBs rollout, 8-12 integrated maths programmes, creation of the maths lab, centralised marksbooks, programmes, newsletters, assessment and electronic resources are all initiatives that were able to be done with little if any admin assistance.  All of these Maths Dept initiatives had clear and purposeful gains for the school as evidenced by the development of a changed profile for year 11 and 12 MAT and MAS classes.

As a team there are things we cannot do, that admin can.  Streaming in year 9, pastoral care intervention, school direction, staffing profiles, funding and the like.  These things have large impacts on the classroom and to be honest we are better reacting to most of these than being involved in these decision making process.  We can have input but probably informal discussion is enough.  Long drawn out processes help no-one where a little leadership of both teams can make a decision happen.  In many cases even a sub optimal solution is better than developing a perfect one (after the need for it or benefit has passed).

In a class centric environment, if the teacher has evaluated that an event is in the best interests of students and a teacher is willing to assist making it happen (in addition to their normal roles as a classroom teacher) it is incredibly poor form to be anything other than encouraging and assisting to make things happen.  When we fail to do this, we need to ask, is it in the best interest of the school, the class and subsequently is it in the best interest of students.

Russ.

Teaching unruly students

I teach at a school with a few social problems(I'm a little prone to understatement).. I get knowing looks from people when they find out where I teach.  I can hear them thinking, "Who in their right mind would want to teach there?  Can't you do better than that!"

Truth be told, the students are ok and once you understand how they think (since I grew up around my school, I probably picked it up quicker than some), they gave me a job when I needed one five years ago and I have enjoyed it.  Not the most glamorous job, but it is challenging and rewarding.

Probably the hardest time is capturing the kids and positioning them for learning.  Each teacher does it a little differently, but I do have a few tricks.

The most effective strategy is creating a rapport with the kids by making them understand that teaching 30 individuals is near impossible, but everyone benefits by being part of a class.  My strategies for this are quite primitive, but they are effective, especially with the second tier of students - where my teaching interests lie.

Struggling students know that they find it hard to rival the top students and seek attention in other often negative ways.  To counter this I leverage a range of rewards and penalties that focus on team behaviour.  The class gets a high test average (greater 70% mean), I get the class some party food. The class is working hard, the entire class gets reward points. Groups of students working well also receive reward points.  The class gathers 100 reward points, we have a game session (to get 100 points we're ahead of the programme anyway). Students now have a real reason to help each other.  Contrariwise, if some students get disruptive, the whole class is penalised by being kept in after class (I did say primitive!).

Gasp! - penalise the whole class - that's not fair.  Surprisingly, it is fair, because the class as a whole has the responsibility to maintain order, not just the teacher.  I'll manage the class if I have to - but I'd rather teach than be constantly punitive.  Peer intervention is often more effective, can be less disruptive and the student-teacher relationship strain is reduced - attention seeking behaviour from peers quickly turns negative and the behaviour stops.  It doesn't work with the next tier of students (as groups of disengaged/struggling students need other strategies and higher levels of intervention). It's a strategy you have to be careful with and you need the goodwill of some students in the class to make it work.

If it is working, the good kids won't object because the more popular disruptive students are quickly getting less popular.

Individual achievement is celebrated but rarely extrinsically rewarded.  The exception is that I'm always on the lookout for  kids that have discovered what it takes to be a future focused 'student' and promote them into higher classes.  It's always a pleasure to say to a former challenging student, "Grab your bag and head down the hall.  Your work here is done."

Western Australian Secondary Mathematics Teachers Group

If you are a WA secondary mathematics teacher and would like to join a local online teachers forum (there's 25 or so of us so far), join Edmodo as a teacher (it's free and takes half a minute to join) and use groupcode tp39qk.  There's a discussion on national curriculum, IT usage and a growing list of upper school investigations.

After a week or so I'll change the group code to keep kids out, so join soon if this may be useful to you!

Russell.

Survey and stats results

I quickly graphed the survey that's been running this year.  It's interesting to note that the majority of readers are teachers and students (students form the majority of the other category).  The proportions have stayed roughly the same after a spike with a load of students at our school realising that I was posting calculator tips here.

From analytics, I can see that students are most interested in graphics calculator help, many hits from the simultaneous equations page, and for teachers many of the entries about IWBs and pay claims are read.

Parent spikes in usage come around NAPLAN time.

This sort of information gives me better guidance about what people want from the blog, what to write and when.

Similarly I can see that the readership is growing steadily, although growth has been impacted by my masters, as I've posted fewer articles.  Hopefully this will improve as I become better at managing my time.

I try and keep readership around 20% (<5 secs indicates that a reader has not found what they are looking for).  Generally, the 20% is what forms a readership.  Cold canvassing rates are <1%, so I consider 20% reasonable since people have actively searched for information to find the blog.

Nearly all searches are done through google.

Promethean IWBs, Equation editor, fxDraw and Classpad manager

This is a momentus day for those of us using Promethean boards..  Activboard now has equation editor - the one we know and love/hate from Word.

Yay!  Go forth and press that update button.

Oh, and those of you that wish to use classpad manager and fxdraw on a mac winOnX does the job for about 5 dollars (thank Hieu for that!) but lacks some functions for updates and the clipboard. 

Those of us that need a mac to run Excel in a windows environment (because Excel on mac corrupts our marksbook files), classpad manager and fxdraw can try VMware, but it requires an IT guy to fiddle with it (whereas winOnX is simple but has less functionality).

The last week

Looking back over the week, kids have been preparing for exams in year 8,9 and 10. There is a decided lack of urgency in their preparation which is something that needs correction. In designing the exams, I focused on the DET C grade descriptors which provides a broad brush of what a C student should be able to do. From classwork I'll select the A's and B's.

I'll admit to being frustrated with the exam process. Test the A candidates properly and the 2nd tier lose motivation, fail to test the A candidates adequately and they get lazy and overconfident. The middle ground where an exam works for both can be hard to find and I'm loathe to split the exam as this hasn't worked in the past either.

At least their final assessment for the term we identified those with independent learning capabilities. It was a quadratics investigation run over two periods followed by a test. 3A candidates were able to identify connections to prior learning and make connections between turning point form and transformations. C students missed the connection even after being taught the material explicitly.

The edmodo portal is filling the OTLS hole well. Past exam papers, course outlines, grades, homework and boardwork are all being exposed to students at point of need. It has been a few years coming but it finally fills the gap between the digital student and the classroom.

The next two years will be challenging, finding ways of delivering my yr 10's to university. Mixed 11 & 12 classes have a breadth of spread of ability and maturity. Although we have an above expectation pass rate and we now deal with late maturation a lot better than in the past, we still have a long way to go.

Higher education

As a wannabe researcher, I look forward to research cycles and finding things that I can bring back to the classroom. It's also good to know things that can refocus a discussion in a direction that can be more fruitful in terms of outcomes.

My thing for today is edmodo - a web2.0 technology bringing a limited facebook environment to the classroom. It may be what we all hoped OTLS was going to be. It's being used in some of the private schools around Perth and may be worth a look.

This has been a strange week as I decide whether to restart my research or seek L3CT as many have recently suggested. One process enhances my ability as a teacher and the latter recognises my achievements whilst providing a significant increase in salary. As someone seeking continuous improvement, I'm not sure I could sustain my interest long enough to complete the L3CT process for fundementally only monetary gain nor am I sure that I have the resources and support available to complete my postgrad whilst on full load.

At this time in a career it can be difficult, watching those around you seek and get promotion whilst trying to remain focussed on why you started teaching. The L3CT benefits are particularly suspect when considering the choice in this way.. No sane person starts teaching for the money - and that's the primary benefit of L3CT.