Author Archives: essdee

Why Do We Teach?

Posted on 03/09/2016 by essdee| Leave a comment

“Certainly he’s got go,” said Gudrun. “In fact I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?”

(From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence)

To coincide with the Olympic Games in Rio I watched again the film Chariots of Fire. One major theme of the film relates to why top athletes run.

The film tells the stories of two British runners who participated in the 1924 Olympic games in Paris. One, Eric Liddell, runs for God; the other, Harold M. Abrahams runs for acceptance.

“I believe God made me for a purpose. And when I run, I feel his pleasure” states Liddell. Elsewhere he asks “So where does the power come from to see the race to the end?” His answer, “From within.”

In contrast, Abrahams states “I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing.” When contemplating the hundred metres Olympics final he says “I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor: four feet wide with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. But will I?” Continue reading →

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Posted in Education Policy

Confirming or Challenging Children’s Expectations of Teaching?

Posted on 02/09/2016 by essdee| Leave a comment

In every setting and situation we have expectations about what is possible and what is not.

We expect a judge in a courtroom to be fair and impartial. We know that most clergy won’t tolerate people cursing in a church. We’re not surprised when a librarian asks us to be quiet in a library.

But sometimes we are surprised because our experience differs from what we expected.

A serious-looking London Bobby agrees to pose with us for a selfie. A flight attendant departs from the standard script for pointing out the safety features on a plane. A priest personalises and sings from the altar a song for a couple on their wedding day.

As children enter a new class, they have perceptions of their teacher and the teacher’s role in their learning. Their perceptions may be about teachers generally or they may be specific to the teacher they have this year. Continue reading →

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Posted in Teaching

A New School Year, a Fresh Start for Children

Posted on 01/09/2016 by essdee| Leave a comment

One year ago few people thought Leicester City Football Club would become Premier League Champions.

This time last year who thought that Donald Trump would become the Republican Candidate for this year’s U.S. Presidential election?

But someone believed they could do what seemed impossible and both Leicester and Trump defied most people’s expectations.

How we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived by others influence what we believe we can do.

As the new school year begins, children enter classrooms with perceptions of themselves and perceptions of their classmates. They may perceive themselves and their classmates to be serious or mischievous, friendly or cheeky, helpful or shy in school.

They may perceive themselves and others to be clever or average, weak or stupid, capable or smart in some or all school subjects. Continue reading →

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Posted in Practice of Teaching, Teaching

Why all the Fuss about Commemorating 1916 in Schools?

Posted on 06/04/2016 by essdee| Leave a comment

“Wasn’t there a lot of fuss about remembering 1916 in schools for the last couple of months?” a friend, who is not a teacher, observed. Many of us have noticed that all over Ireland children have been coming home from school talking about the Easter Rising; schools organised concerts and other commemorative activities to mark the centenary. “How can schools justify spending so much time on one topic this year just because it’s 100 years since the Easter Rising?” the friend asked.

For someone who doesn’t know how teaching works, that might seem like a reasonable question, along the lines of why children spend so much time rehearsing for a school concert, training for a football league final, or preparing for sacraments in religious schools. Continue reading →

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Posted in Teaching

Properties of 3-D Shapes

Posted on 03/02/2016 by essdee| 2 Comments

When your children work on 3-D shapes from a mathematics textbook, do you sometimes wonder about the properties of some of the shapes? Does a cone have a vertex? How many faces has a sphere? How many edges has a cylinder? If you ask a mathematician the answer to such questions, the mathematician may direct you to the definition of a vertex, a face or an edge. Or the mathematician may ask you the purpose for wanting to classify the shapes in this way.

In order to resolve this in a way that works in a primary school classroom, I have compiled a list of definitions and a grid on which to record information about a series of 3-D shapes. I want to share it with you in the hope that it will be of help in your classroom. Here are the definitions. Here is the empty grid; try completing this first. Here is the completed grid.

Please comment below if you have any other suggestions about resolving such questions in your mathematics lessons.

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Posted in Teaching Maths

If Schools Were More Like Coderdojos, How Would Teaching Change?

Posted on 10/03/2013 by essdee| 1 Comment

In a previous post I wrote about features of coderdojos that could be emulated in schools. Among the features I identified were:

1. Learning comes about through solving specific problems
2. Learners choose the problems and tasks that they work on
3. Mentors are experts in the content to be learned but not necessarily in pedagogy
4. Expertise is spread among mentors rather than concentrated in any one individual
5. Learners are organised by their interests and not by their age
6. Learners choose to work alone or in groups
7. Learners can actively teach others
8. The atmosphere is informal

If such features were applied in many schools, the work of teaching would change and particular aspects of teachers’ work would require more emphasis. I identify some of those aspects in this post. Continue reading →

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Posted in Practice of Teaching, Teacher Education

What Schools can Learn from Coderdojo

Posted on 25/02/2013 by essdee| 5 Comments

It amazes me to observe how quickly coderdojos have become established all around the world. I can think of no other not-for-profit educational initiative that has caught on so globally so quickly. Since July 2011, dojos have appeared in places like Tokyo, Kilkenny and Rotterdam. But for educators coderdojos illustrate how features of constructivism can work in practice. Let’s look at some of their key elements. Continue reading →

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Posted in Teaching

False Friends in Teaching and Learning Mathematics

Posted on 27/01/2013 by essdee| 3 Comments

Teachers realise that children whose first language is not English can find it difficult to understand new mathematical terms. However, mathematical terms in English can be tricky even for children who are native English speakers. Continue reading →

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Posted in Teaching Maths

Changing Teaching, Changing Culture

Posted on 10/09/2012 by essdee| Leave a comment

How do teachers learn to teach? You might say by attending college, going on teaching practice, and from teaching experience. But according to Stigler and Hiebert, who wrote the book The Teaching Gap, teaching is a cultural activity. It is an activity that is absorbed from the culture through family conversations over meals, through watching television and listening to radio, and of course from spending 13 years as a student in various classrooms observing teachers teach. Learning about teaching in this way seems to be stronger than teacher education or continuing professional development. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education Policy, Teacher Education, Teaching

Replacement Units and School Textbooks

Posted on 15/07/2012 by essdee| 2 Comments

Some educators consider it a virtue for teachers to not use textbooks. My view is that textbooks can play an important role in instruction. Teaching is complex enough in itself without expecting teachers to generate classroom materials for one or more curriculum subjects. Indeed, designing and making good materials is not something that teachers are necessarily prepared to do – especially when children today are used to and expect slick, professional materials and designs in websites, videogames, magazines and so on. Teacher-made materials can rarely compete with the attractiveness of commercial publications and materials. Continue reading →

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Posted in Textbooks