Author: wrpvincent

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Teaching & Learning

From Knowledge to Understandings

Originally posted on April 2, 2018 @ 9:00 am

Recently (when I first started this post at least) I blogged about the best way to begin the DP biology syllabus and I was frustrated by the limitations of the syllabus to be able to pick and choose different assessment statements.

The DP biology course has always been knowledge rich. Maybe not as full as the A Level syllabus to take account of the fact that students are taking six subjects plus a summatively assessed course in Theory of Knowledge, a summatively assessed research project: The Extended Essay, and their Creativity, Activity and Service Program.

Now, the IB changed the syllabus to allow more conceptual teaching, by removing the series of statements about students should be able to:… “explain x” and “state y” and grouping knowledge into brief statements under the heading of understandings, applications and skills. However, the structure of the syllabus with the essential idea for each topic tends to hamper the ability to lift assessment statements out and add them to new areas. i.e. mutations and oncogenes in topic 1.6 could be taught with topics 3.1 after 2.6. See the biology guide for the full IB syllabus.

This year, my Diploma Programme Coordinator, asked the subject departments to focus on developing their written curriculum.

It seemed timely to be asked to do this, when over the summer I had been musing about the best place to begin the course and the best ways to break up the different topics – many of the schools I have worked in simply teach the course topic by topic and the IB is keen to point out in the biology guide:

“The order in which the syllabus is arranged is not the order in which it should be taught, and it is up to individual teachers to decide on an arrangement that suits their circumstances. Sections of the option material may be taught within the core or the additional higher level (AHL) material if desired or the option material can be taught as a separate unit.”

Over the course of this academic year, I have thought a lot about how best to structure the course to allow the “best” progression of concepts. Actually, I think that this is a process that began when I first started teaching my current Y13s, and I am an exceptionally slow thinker! I do remember reflecting on how to best position evolution within the course and which topics would be best coming before or after it.

But it wasn’t until this year that I have had the time within my working week or the emotional time within my personal life to really dig down and get to grips with writing up my ideas into the formal IB course outline.

I have also been exposed to new ideas about teaching and learning over the last twelve months. Last summer I read Dan Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?” which I think I got put onto after reading Michela’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers”.

Idea’s from cognitive science have become more and more prevalent on my twitter feed as well as I have started to interact a little more with the #CogSciSci crowd.

All this to say that my thinking has evolved in the last twelve months.

I now know that, generally speaking, content knowledge, concepts and skills are domain specific and that learners have to become fluent with a subject’s facts before they are able to transfer that to abstract concepts and develop understanding let alone build connections with other subjects.

I am also beginning to understand the concepts of retrieval practice, spaced practice, dual coding and the distinctions between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge and how all this may apply to my subject teaching or pedagogical content knowledge as Lucy Crehan puts it in “Clever Lands”.

Translating this into biology teaching is still not well understood (or so it seems from my vantage point) but conversations like the ones below (propositional knowledge = declarative knowledge) and blogs like this one, are beginning to help me unpack this.

The finished product

The below is the finished course outline that details the units and sequence of the teaching of the course. It is an official document used in the authorization and evaluation process of IB World Schools.

The below is my SOW for the course. It has six tabs. The DP overview shows the number of teaching hours recommended by the IB for each subtopic along with my grouping of them per unit. The Year overview shows the spacing of the units through time for both Y12/Y13. The next two tabs are for the week to week (mid-term planning). The Bio and TOK tabs show the TOK links that I have chosen to focus on the topic and are to support collaborative planning with the TOK team. Finally, the PSOW tab shows the practicals that can be built into the course. The IB mandates a specific number of practical hours for both SL and HL courses.

Final Word

The other effect of this learning for me is that I am now worried about the direction that the IB is taking in its philosophy.

If research from cognitive science is telling us that learners need a solid factual knowledge base before they can build conceptual understanding then what does this say for a course whose syllabus is about “understandings” as opposed to knowledge?

I have not heard anything from the IB that shows that it is reviewing research from cognitive science. Is the IB becoming an ideologically run institution that ignores research that doesn’t fit in with its own paradigm?

Categories
Education University

UK student loans: just a graduate tax?

Originally posted on November 13, 2020 @ 11:08 am

In the UK, as in the US, higher education access is supported through government loans. In the UK, this system has been in place since 1998/99 when student fees of £1000 were introduced for undergraduate courses. By the time I went to university in 2002, this had risen to around £3000 and, at the time of writing fees for undergraduate courses in the UK stand at £9,250 per year of the course.

Much has been made over the introduction of tuition fees and the main vehicle used to pay for them – student loans. In this post I want to explore reasons behind the introduction of fees and loans in the UK and what some of the implications of these may be.

Colleagues I have discussed this with often maintain that loans are just a graduate tax, that graduates only begin to pay them off when earning above a certain level, and that if they are not paid off in 30 years they are erased. This may be true, but, I have felt uneasy, in my role as a university guidance counselor about just dismissing the implications for young people who decide, on our advice, to get themselves up to almost £30,000 in debt on fees alone, ignoring all other costs of being a student. This post is really an opportunity for me to explore this topic in a little more detail.

Why loans?

A little known theory in economics, known as Human Capital Theory (HCT), asserts that investments made in the development of skills and knowledge, through training and education, will improve the productivity of an individual and thus the economy as a whole. On the personal level, the rationale, from this view, for investing in education is for the real term pay off you will get from getting a better paid job. On a macro scale, the amount that a government invests in education then, so the thinking goes, the greater productivity of the economy and subsequent increase in GDP.

But there is a trade off for a government. Investment in Higher Education (HE) is expensive, and has a lower rate of return according to many studies. And so governments are less willing to invest tax payers money, especially for degrees that may have a low return on investment.

Enter, Milton Friedman and the free market, which suggests that the market for HE may be improved, and institutions made more competitive, if the state reduces its input, oversight and regulation. Friedman advocates for fees for HE be covered by the student in the form of loans from the government

So, naturally, based on two economic rationales, free markets and HCT, the case for HE investment through student loans is made. What is the problem?

Choice

One of my concerns around this issue which is linked to others is the impact it has on choice. When we begin to look at degrees in terms of return on investment, then some degrees seem to have a higher value – graduates from these degrees get paid more and therefore can pay off their debts more easily. There are two problems with this.

Imagine that degrees in computer science command the highest salaries for post graduates. This is because in the labour market there is a shortage of these skills. As more and more people switch to studying this degree because it pays better, the labour market becomes flooded with these skills and the price of labour goes down. Thus the return on the investment goes down as wages are driven down by competition. This isn’t the graduates fault who may now be saddled with debt that is harder to pay off.

Secondly, should the value of a degree be measured purely in these monetary terms? As I have got older I have appreciated more and more what can be learned in non science undergraduate courses (I did three science A Levels and a science first degree) like Arts which tend to command lower salaries. There are a whole variety of reasons why these degrees have more intrinsic and instrumental value than just monetary value for a graduate but they stand to die out and receive less funding if individuals stop applying for them, which they will do if they are thinking about returns on investment alone.

Related to this point and the point below about equity is the idea that those that do have to worry about debt, those students coming from less affluent backgrounds will feel more pressure to not take a degree that doesn’t have a good return of investment, so we have a class or wealth divide around who really has choice of degree path, with the more affluent students, having more rational choice. So the first charge to lay at the door of the idea of loans is that they actually reduce choice for poorer students.

Equity and Access

Costs of entry to HE can present very significant barriers to individuals. This is the problem of access. If a government wants to promote a genuine free market for the sake of the economy, then the assumptions that everyone can access that market has to be addressed. In other words the government needs to ensure that all those “deserving” of a place in the appropriate labour market are able to get access to the education and training they need to be able to compete in that labour market effectively. And here is the rub, the introduction of fees raises a barrier to individuals who despite a reduced socio-economic background may have the personal qualities to make the most of the labour market at the other side.

Fees and loans may not present much a problem to members of society who have the social and economic capital in order to cover the costs, but they will raise very real barriers to children, with just as much, if not more merit, for whom the prospect of becoming £30,000+ in debt is a very frightening prospect. So the second charge to lay at the door of fees and loans, is that they do nothing (at the very least) to provide equity in society. If we want a just, socially mobile society, where individuals are not constrained by the random act of birth, then we need to think hard about the implications of these loans.

There is another element to this. Many people understand the idea of genes and inheritance, and probably can understand the idea that certain biological traits are inherited from parents. But what often is missed is that children inherit their early environment too. Bourdieu writes about this in terms of cultural capital. Plomin also references this idea in his work. Children are born, at random, into a particular family environment, just in the same way they are born into a body made from a particular mix of genes. The family environment will transmit cultural capital in the form of knowledge, customs, understandings particular to that family. To use an extreme example, some children will grow up exposed to ballet, opera and fine art. Others will be exposed to cold, fend for yourself dinner, because mum and dad are both out having to work their third job.

Which group of children will be best placed to make the best decisions in terms of university courses? Which will be more likely to understand how to make the most out of university and capitalise on their experience?

This problem of equity and access leads to a third problem: social reproduction. Children who are born in the “right” place will be more able to go on to reproduce those conditions for their children, while the others will find it much harder to shift gears so to speak.

Debt

So let’s lay that aside. I have outlined above three misgivings about the system: Choice, Equity, Access. I don’t claim that the points briefly expressed above are enough on their own to call for a change in the system, but they should at least give serious pause for thought. They certainly did for me when I came across them.

A fourth problem with student fees and loans is debt. And there are two elements to this for me.

Firstly, there is a general issue linked to the ideas above which goes along these lines: Those students who are already disadvantaged are the ones who will be most disadvantaged, on average, by this system. As I alluded to earlier, some students will not be put off by fees. Their families might be able to pay them directly or at least pay off the loans quickly once the graduate leaves and gains employment. Or, some parents may be able to make interest free loans to their kids on the understanding that these are paid back. Fair enough.

But many kids won’t be in this fortunate position. This will be because they come from families that are not that fortunate (yes, unfortunate, not lazy). So these kids, the ones that actually need the levelling affects of education, are the ones that will end up picking up the bill of debt.

Accepting this means that you can’t argue that loan repayment is a graduate tax – not every graduate will need to pay it. It’s a poor-graduates tax. It hits those from the poorest backgrounds the hardest. The less money you have going into uni, the more money you will have to pay back, either because you have to borrow more, or because it will take you longer to pay back.

And this is doubly true if they haven’t had the advice growing up (Remember cultural capital?) about maximising their investment and decide to spend £30,000 on Beckham studies.

The second issue about debt for me is the specific issue of interest rates, that the UK government employs. I was staggered when I looked at the student loans available to me as a postgraduate student this year. The UK government was willing to lend me money at a whopping 5.2%.

5.2%!

The Bank of England has lowered interest rates to 0.1%, mortgages are at an all time low, and I can get a loan from Nationwide for £20,000 at 2.9%. Why is the UK government charging higher interests rates than a corporate entity like a bank? Has it been turned into a business?

The only reason that the student loans company has an interest rate this high is to make money. Plain and simple. These are not loans designed to enable access to university, to level the playing field to allow those most disadvantaged a leg up. Instead they are a way for poor graduates to become compound interest slaves to government and society.

I could just about accept it, if the rates were lower or in line with other interest rates for important investments paid off over a long time i.e. mortgages. But I just find a rate of 5.2% entirely cynical.

Milton Friedman as Obi Wan Kenobi meets the UK government as Darth Vader. The young Anakin (aka Margaret Thatcher’s government) has learned the dark side of Firedman’s ideas so well that they will apply it to conquer the universe.

Whats the problem with a rate this high? Well, at that rate, because of compound interest the loan will have doubled in 14 years. So, if a student graduates and is not earning enough to begin to pay off the debt, they are soon going to find the amount owing has grown to crushing amounts.

Jason Hikel in less is more, and writers like David Graeber have highlighted the problems with debt capitalism but it strikes me that these loans made to students are not too dissimilar to the loans made to global south countries that tie them into repayments over years that reduce the nation’s ability to fund its own education and other social systems. It is fundamentally exploitative. And disproportionately exploitative of the poor.

Add to this that free market economics will see that the cost of labour is pushed down, and we have an unholy alliance of high student debt with declining relative wages.

I can’t see that causing any problems for society down the line /s.

Growth

Think of all that debt accumulating, providing a steady income to the UK government from all of those graduates taking out loans and paying them off over the next thirty year. Supporters claim that the government has promised to forgive the debts if they remain unpaid after 30 years, but I think that is naive.

The government has made drastic changes to teachers pensions, military pensions, as well as to women born in the 1950s, all in the last 10 years, There is nothing in that behaviour that suggests to me that they will keep their word. I do not believe for a minute they will be willing to give up this income stream of debt repayments which is set to become a lucrative industry for the government, they will need it to support growth of the economy. Debt fuels growth.

What do you think?

Categories
Teaching & Learning

Routines

Originally posted on October 22, 2017 @ 9:00 am

I was planning on publishing this post in August, but term got away with me!

Next year, I want to really focus on developing solid classroom routines. I am amazed at how I have got to year 10 of my teaching career and it has only been in the last twelve months that I have begun to see the importance of these for running even older classrooms.

Perhaps it is the peculiarity of my current school, with a high turnover of students and my experiences of having dramatic changes in the makeup of each cohort year on year, alongside changes to curriculum time and with a wide range of student backgrounds, and language proficiencies.

Last year I focused on thinking routines and I think the adoption of some of these exercises has been very beneficial for my students, the trick is sticking to them! But reflecting on this process, talking to colleagues and reading Battle Hymn has really highlighted the necessity of routines for all aspects of classroom management.

My one concern is that reliance on routines will make the classroom boring but I also think that routines have the potential to create safe spaces, where all students understand easily what is required of them. Used well they can remove distractions from students and increase the efficiency of learning.

The idea is essentially utilitarian; serve the greater good. Create space for the majority to learn.

The trouble is, our school has been open for four years now and every year, management has changed how we do things, in terms of the number of lessons available per week per subject, or the length of lessons. Don’t get me wrong, change can be good and it is important to try and improve things. However, change that isn’t tested and thought through can have negative consequences, as can too much change.

Routines need to be simple and rewards and sanctions just as simple. An overcomplicated system just creates more work for everybody.

Thinking: This year I will continue to embed the visible thinking routines as defined by project zero into classroom activities. I use connect-extend-challenge all the time and may need to revisit how I implement it. In discussions with colleagues recently about best prepparing students to write personal statements, I have also been introduced to the point-evidence-explain for structuring writing. As a science teacher, who hasn’t had much training in writing, or as a science teacher who hardly ever has student’s writing essays, it is interesting observing internally how that type of routine can easily be adopted to embed thinking about an argument.

Behaviour management: This year, our school has implemented a “behaviour policy”. Although we don’t suffer from extremely poor behaviour, I have been frustrated by students regularly not turning up to class on time, not having the materials they need with them and generally not taking responsibility for their own development.

EAL: My simple model for lesson planning: 1) 10 mins of low-stakes quizzing in some form; 2) 30 mins of teaching/learning activities; 3) 10 mins of written plenary. I haven’t been brilliant at sticking to this plan throughout this half of last term but the idea of the last part was to give my EAL kids a chance to do some formal writing in English. Other rountines that I am trying to develop for my EAL kids is to write new terms on the side of the board. I collate these into quizlet and ask kids to keep their own glossary ot terms. I also am trying to narrate much more of what I do in the classroom so that my thinking is clearly visible to these students.

Categories
Teaching & Learning

Intensive EAL support and differentiation in Biology

Originally posted on August 13, 2017 @ 9:00 am

As an international teacher, I am familiar with EAL or Lang B students in my classes, and familiar with how to support them in my Biology classes which, more than even some of the other science subjects, has a lot of context-specific terminology that cannot be simplified. These terms can be almost impossible to simplify form non-native speakers but repeated INSET training has told me that I must. Some examples would include:

  • Heterozygosity
  • Anyone of the Animal or Plant Phyla students are required to know
  • Proteome
  • Clade
  • Oxidative Phosphorylation
  • Photolysis
  • Inhibitor
  • Eukaryote
  • Archaea
  • Transpiration
  • Cohesion

There are many more…

This past academic year I had a particularly difficult situation to deal with in my grade 10 biology class.

Grade 10 is the final year of the MYP and is equivalent to Year 11 in the U.K. My current school is very small, tiny in fact, by the nature that it has only been open four years.

As a new school in a competitive area we have a battle to recruit students. As an international school in an area where lots of families come with the parents work on short term contracts we have a high turn over of students.

Due to these factors, every year of teaching I have had to completely change my scheme of work for this grade and grade nine because of changes in the cohorts of students as well as yearly changes to science teaching hours across the week.

One year I only had brand new students taking grade 10 Biology all of whom had come from Francophone schools and so the MYP 5 course I had planned had to be changed to accommodate these students.

As an international school it can be normal to have turnover in students with many students leaving and new students entering at any grade. Things are also complicated because students may come from different national systems, and may have studied in different languages prior to joining us. It's very hard to comparatively assess the biological knowledge of different students coming from different languages of study and these different systems.

Whereas, last year, all the students in my grade 10 class were new to the school and I had to create a novel one year curriculum for them to ensure that none of the fundamentals from grade 9 were missing, this year I could revert to the original two year program I had planned previously.

This year I had some students who had progressed to grade 10 biology from grade 9 (these grades are planned as a two year consecutive course) internally and were on track to take the MYP eAssessment.

However I also had students placed in the class who came from different schools and were new to studying in English, let alone biology in English. Amongst these students there was variation. One student had absolutely no prior experience using or studying in the English language and others had never studied in the language, academically, but had spent some time of heir lives speaking and communicating with English.

At the start of the year, I was informed that all of these students would be taking the MYP eAssessment (the IB equivalent of GCSE)!

Despite my protestations that these students would not be ready for the eAssessment with only six months of going to an anglophone school, let alone studying biology in English and that they were better off being placed in an intensive EAL program, I was ignored.

The message to me was that I simply had to differentiate for these students! Differentiation is fine but when does differentiation steadily become "plan a whole new program?" What are the practical limitations for a teacher that determine when differentiation should stop and alternative arrangements need to be made.

A similar situation happened to a colleague of mine who teaches French. One year he was told that he would have French A (Literature – native speakers) students mixed in with French B (Aquisition – non-native speakers) and that the teacher would have to differentiate between these two groups.

I am all for differentiation and trying to meet individual students where they are at but I don't like it when it becomes a lazy shield for management to hide behind. Instead of the SLT taking charge and actually putting a proper intervention in place for these students, it is easier to pass the buck to the teacher and simply say "differentiate!" The problem with this is the anxiety, stress and associated mental health issues it will invariably create for staff.

What seemed to be lacking from members of the schools management is the difference between Jim Cummin's BICS and CALPS. Being able to speak in a second language with your friends is one thing, but being able to think about and explain complex, abstract concepts in a second language is quite another. Biology has a huge amount of subject or context-specific terminology that even native speakers can find daunting.

The year hasn't been a great success. Unfortunately some non-negotiables have to be negotiable as there is a limit to what a person can achieve in a day. What this meant for these students is that I simply wasn't able to plan for them as well as I would have liked, with all my additional responsibilities, particularly the running of the university guidance.

I focussed what time I could devote to this class on the students who would be taking the exam and focussed on developing the thinking routines within the class; connect-extend-challenge has become very popular!

However I have been able to learn something from this experience and found that the following techniques could be put in place very easily to support EAL students without too much interruption to the flow of the lesson:

  • Glossaries for every unit that focus on key words. I have started adding them to my DP workbooks as simply a space at the back for students to add their key words and definitions, but for the younger grades I will provide the words and the definitions.
  • Whole-class reading in every lesson. Making solid use of available texts and reading these out gives students a change to practice saying new words and gives me a chance to feedback to them and explain any new terminology.
  • When asking students to explain a concept to check for their understanding, allowing them to write out their ideas in the their mother tongue to support a speaking in the second language.
  • Asking students to write, in English, a short paragraph (3-4 lines) explaining what they learned either at the start of end of a lesson. As the teacher, I can rotate and check grammar, spelling and sentence construction. This is best done by hand as 1) the IB exams are currently written and 2) due to the Lindy effect, writing is likely to be around a lot longer than google docs.
  • Taking care to fully explain the roots of words e.g. "photo" & "synthesis" and giving students time to find the words in their mother-tongue if they have studies this concept before.
  • Allowing students to speak in their mother tongue to each other to aid explanations and comprehension.
  • During explanations given by me, slowing down and, where possible, using simpler language (not always possible in Biology – what is a simpler word for heterozygosity?).
  • Always check for understanding with open questions. "Please can you explain/write/draw this for me?" to show understanding.
  • Use of colours and images to describe tasks so that students become aware that when a symbol of a quill is used it means that they have to write.

Any more advice or ideas welcome in the comments!

Categories
Teaching & Learning

What is the best place to start teaching IB DP Biology?

Originally posted on August 20, 2017 @ 9:00 am

Every year I like to think about how I approach the delivery of the DP Biology course. I think about what are the best examples to use to illustrate concepts like the pentadactyl limb, or what is the best way to structure the teaching sequence into a coherent sequence.

This summer I have been thinking about how best to approach the start of the course. I think this is important in my context because I cannot be certain of the biological background of all of my students and I don’t want to make any assumptions about what they know.

I polled teachers on facebook and twitter about this and most teachers tend to start the course with 1.1 – introduction to cells, although other areas like to 2.1 – molecules to metabolism and 5.3 – classification of biodiversity are also popular if not nearly so as 1.1.

My issues with starting at 1.1 is that I think that while there are some essential ideas that are natural to start a Biology course; the functions of life and cell theory, there are others which are not so helpful like stem cells, gene control of differentiation, and evolution of multicellularity. Some of these concepts are tricky to get your head around and do not count as foundational knowledge, in my opinion.

What I want in the start of my DP course is to introduce students to the simplest biological concepts that will go on to serve as a foundation for future learning. I believe the functions of life and the classification of life (“what is life?” and “ok, we know how to crudely define living things, but what types of living things are there?”) are understandings that students should address before going on to look at how living things work.

What I am struggling with is this: the IB’s TSM states that topics don’t need to be taught in order, or that even subtopics don’t necessarily need to be taught in order. We should, as teachers, construct a course that draws different elements into coherent units. Personally, last year, I made a move away from going through topic by topic and tried to link subtopics into themed units. I love thinking about what topics flow well together.

But what if you want to split sub topics? Is this allowable? Obviously you could do this but, with the way the IB has structured the sub-topics each with their own “essential idea”, should you? The issues with the essential idea is that it aims to force all the understandings in that subtopic under a single umbrella. Because the essential idea is examinable, surely all the understandings, applications and skills should be kept together as they serve to illuminate the essential idea.

Personally, I think I may go ahead and chop up 1.1 so that I introduce these:

  • A2: Investigation of functions of life in Paramecium and one named photosynthetic unicellular organism.
  • U2: Organisms consisting of only one cell carry out all functions of life in that cell.

With this from 5.3:

  • U4: All organisms are classified into three domains.

Which will then act as a segway into topic 1.2 the ultrastructure of cells, before going on to consider cell theory and the then the rest of topic 5.3.

Its a little bit pick and mix, but do I run the risk of not covering the essential ideas. To solve that, what I may do is leave the essential ideas  (of these sections) for revision in grade 12. In-fact now I think about it, all the essential ideas would make great revision points.

I could get the students to memorise Allott and Mindorff’s paragraph’s that describe each essential idea and force them to regurgitate them at random points through G12…..