3-Read Friday #013

Questions, sense, and cahtbots

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Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.

1. Same question, but different by Miss D Cox

For me, stage one of improving our checks for understanding is to ensure that all students have an opportunity and an incentive to think about the answer to a question. This is the participation ratio and in maths, at least, mini-whiteboards are a teacher’s best friend. Once the participation ratio is high, we can turn our attention to the think ratio - in other words, how hard are students actually thinking? This blog by Miss Cox is so useful in this regard, illustrating how the wording of a question can be tweaked to impact the think ratio and thus tell us something different about our students’ depth of understanding.

2. The SAR Method by Blake Harvard

It was Peps Mccrea who first got me thinking about the role that attention plays in terms of working memory - in short, if students are not paying attention to something, then they have zero chance of remembering it regardless of our efforts to optimise cognitive load. In this post, Blake adds something before attention, namely sense. Are students even aware of the things they need to pay attention to? I see this play out often when a child at the front of the class voices an answer, and a child at the back doesn't even have a sense that they have spoken.

3. Chatbots Have a Math Problem and a People Problem by Dan Meyer

At Eedi we think a lot about the role AI is likely to play in students’ learning. It is all too easy to get carried away, believing chatbots will be all our students need to get high-quality, personalised education in the non-too-distant future. Dan Meyer offers a sceptical, cautionary perspective, that is a useful counterpoint to prevailing views in the media.

If you found this edition of 3-Read Friday useful, feel free to share it with colleagues. Also, you can check out all the back issues of my Eedi newsletter and Tips for Teachers newsletter here. But, most importantly of all, have a great weekend.

Craig