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first note of 2021

柚子•美酒•月光•杯 cheers to welcome 2021, wishing health to return to the world and happiness to resume/improve for the world too in the new year 🥂
and a qotd to start the year (thanks the Crew for inspiring it):

“All sailings are good sailings; all weather’s good weather 🥳”

（Tan, 2021)
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notes on DI from webinar by Prof. Hattie

last Friday, Prof John Hattie conducted a live webinar for Singaporean educators to share about effect size of the six areas of SF(Ed) based on his meta-analysis. i am most interested in the part on DI, and here’s my notes taken during the sharing:

  • While we often believe no two students learn the same way, he countered by saying “well, actually not completely true, a lot of students learn in the same way.”
  • as such, by taking the teacher perspective, differentiation is about how teachers allow “for (students’) different ways of learning.” 
  • if differentiation means grouping students and giving different activities to different students, it’s an “abject failure”, for the effect size is only .12.
  • instead of emphasising different activities for different students, look at differentiation in terms of mastery learning (effect size 0.61) and success criteria (effect size 0.88) instead.
  • “Differentiation means kids can have different ways and different times to get (to a common success criteria).“
  • Citing research carried out by Prof. Christine Rubie-Davies, who studied and compared teachers that set low expectations vs. those that set high expectations of students, the effect size of the latter are “very high“ (effect size .5 to 1.44; vs. -0.3 to .2).
  • A distinct difference between these two groups of teachers is how they viewed differentiation (low vs. high expectation):
    • “sees great differences between students in class” vs. “sees lower differences between students in class”
    • “argues that some are expected to improve” vs. “argues that all are expected to improve”
    • “has more differentiated activities in class” vs. “has less differentiated activities in class”
  • differentiation if taken to be “different for every kid like personalized learning, individualized instruction, has an effect size close to zero.”
  • to promote the “centrality of the child“, get students to work together across different ability groups, where teachers structure tasks so that students “can learn from each other.“
  • differentiation is “different ways in different times“, akin to GPS. for example, to travel from Sydney to Melbourne, 80% of the drivers will take the Hume Highway; but there are those would take the coast road, some would go inland, including those that would drive all over the place like tourists. this is “what the concept of differentiation looks like”.
  • the fact is that “a majority of students go through a similar progression but we need to differentiate for those that go down the coast road”. there’s no wrong routes per se, for a GPS will always route a driver to Melbourne (i.e. success criteria)

#TLDR differentiation is about how a teacher design learning so that students can pursue different ways albeit over different amount of time to achieve common success criteria. in the process, effect size is high when teachers set high expectations of students, design tasks for students in heterogeneous group for them to learn from each other. 
#TLDR differentiation is akin to GPS. students can take different ways to arrive at the same destination (i.e. achieve common learning objectives) at different times; there’s no ‘wrong’ route to a GPS.

hope i have gotten the ideas and quotes as close to what Prof. Hattie has intended, and u’ll find this little note useful. oh yes, all the emphasis were added by me (:

to cite:
Tan, Y. H. (2020, September 16). notes on DI from webinar by Prof. Hattie. EduBlog.Net. https://edublog.net/wp/2020/09/16/notes-on-di-from-webinar-by-prof-hattie/

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(more) effective questioning

it’s been a while since my last post. as we begin day 1 of term 4 tomorrow, (the act of) of questioning could be even more useful as we consolidate new (and old) concepts/ideas taught leading up to the end-of-year examinations. chanced upon this piece of gem – a chapter on More Effective Questioning – by Pearsall (2018).

questioning is an important part of our everyday practice therefore it’s nothing ‘new’ per se. a quick browsing through the chapter would remind us of the many effective techniques that we may have already been practicing all this while (e.g. Cold Calling, Question relay, Placeholder statements). but again, you may find some new ideas through a 5-min quick browse too (:

some questions that came to me while browsing (which i do not have answers at this point in time) include, “how would these techniques look like in a online synchronous learning environment (e.g. Zoom, Google Meet)?”; “what could work and what may not work so effectively?”; “how could i/we adapt these techniques so that they would be equally, if not more, effective for synchronous online learning?”.

finally, nothing beats the feeling of seeing a great piece of free reading/resource for sharing early in the morning (“Thank You, ASCD”). have a great term 4 ahead to one and all!

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