Make a Difference from within Your Own Classroom

Go into your staffroom and yell Transform Now! Then go into your classroom and start Disruptive Collaboration. Read on …

Teaching & learning in the maths classrooms needs reform. Evolution. Transformation. YOU can make it happen this year.

Yes, just one teacher in one classroom is all it needs … let’s start with YOU.

Some background first: Australia’s maths results in 2015 indicate that the serious decline in performance is continuing. Sure there’s some hotspots but they should not obscure the fact that the transformation must happen.

Couple of facts you may not know … Australian maths students are three years behind those in Shanghai? Or that Australian 15-year olds have similar problem-solving abilities to 12-year old Korean students.

But read all the alarming facts and figures yourself in the Australian education research study published last year by three academics: http://theconversation.com/six-ways-australias-education-system-is-failing-our-kids-32958

While I too was shocked with the data and performance comparisons in the Study (as an ex-maths teacher), my view as to the steps we can take now differ from the report’s authors.

First, it’s curious that in seeking this transformation, we turn to the product of the system rather than the systems themselves. We criticise the egg instead of understanding the chicken. Of course, the bits and pieces of that chicken are complex to the point of obscurity (just like our education bureaucracies and the working of governments). 

This makes self-correction through iteration–the current model for education reform–a challenge.

The education departments in each state, with all their associated experts and consultants, plus the Pollies at both Federal and State levels, get behind the existing machine and PUSH.

We seek approval from the same power holders and institutions that nod their heads Yes or shake their heads No, forgetting it is their way of thinking that got us into this mess. We want transformational change not just from within, but from above.

Teaching is about the three Ps … Preparation, Presentation and Personality. The most important of these is Personality (yes, this is definitely lacking in many maths teachers but you can get around that). I wrote a Blog about this recently. And the quality and teacher-education is already there too.

So we have to stop battling the bureaucracy and start the transformation in your own classroom … right now. If you don’t then we slip further down the world’s comparative maths achievement ladder. If you don’t care about this then maybe you shouldn’t be teaching.

You need to be disruptive even if it’s simply for the sake of disrupting. Make noise. Draw attention. Walk into your staffroom and yell Transform Today because this whole thing isn’t getting anywhere very quickly.

Disruption in general is about unsettling, and is often thought of in terms of chaos. Disruptive collaboration is working together to force change. It’s the artful unsettling of that which has become inartistic. Reconfiguring systems that can no longer see themselves, or replacing them altogether. It’s about shifting the locus of control.

We could talk right now about helping our students collaborate disruptively – and we should – because they are being let-down big time. But most immediately, this is about teaching and learning. 

Now here’s the pitch … You should seek collaboration with your students that torpedoes those industrial-age ideas. Reject the ideas of the education bureaucracies that have shut off their innovation trying to please the Pollies above them.

You should want the product of your collaboration with colleagues and students to be disruptive, too. Existing systems have their own momentum and can’t be changed. They don’t need our hashtags or likes or affection. They’ve yielded the context that necessitates our collaboration to begin with.

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. So let’s build something that offers viable alternatives for everyone–especially those marginalized by the system that exists.

Let’s stop demanding rigor and accountability, and instead create something ourselves that is scalable beyond the walls of your school, or the reach of the concept of “academia” that continues to haunt learning everywhere. 

Something that thinks not in a pattern of school->curriculum–>content–>proficiency, but instead person–>learning–>knowledge–>lots of people–>lots of learning–>social capacity–>wisdom.

Let’s connect and build something that doesn’t serve you or the past or what’s already here but others plus the here and now and the future. Let’s build something we’ve never had –and do so by empowering everyone that’s a part of this.

Something that isn’t built to make your school or classroom spin faster. But rather is built for the real work of understanding something as beautiful as mathematics.