From the BBC website: "Education theory and practice go head to head when Professor Dylan Wiliam takes over one Year 8 class to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of education."
In this program Wiliam introduced a few very simple, cost effective methods to increase academic achievement. He implemented exercise in the morning, a new grading system, and getting rid of hand raising and replacing it with names being drawn at random, using whiteboards to answer questions, or using color coded cups to indicate when they need help understanding. I really would have loved having colored cups in math class when I was that age.
On the damaging practice of hand raising:
What was really interesting in this show is not only did getting rid of hand raising (eventually) lead to the increased participation of the usually less active students, it also allowed teachers to identify the weaknesses in their usually active students because suddenly they were called on to answer questions that they didn't know and wouldn't have volunteered to answer.
On traditional grades:
Unfortunately I can't find any clips that show much of his solutions, but I found this:
Wiliam discusses changing the interaction between students and teachers as well as working class vs. middle class education but that part gets cut off.
Out of everything he implemented I found the no hands up rule and the use of color coded cups in math class to be the most effective. If a student can put a red cup on their desk signaling to the teacher to come to them before moving on, it makes it a lot easier than keeping your hand raised for all 20 or so minutes it takes to get to everyone, I figure that having a red cup on my desk would have made me felt less defeated in math courses where my arm felt like it was going to fall off.
No comments:
Post a Comment