Are you a Weetbix kid?

For many months there has been an ongoing conversation in our classroom about the fact that despite what Sanitarium wants us to believe, not all Aussie kids are Weetbix kids. One kiddo in particular finds this idea (like Weetbix) hard to swallow. He regularly tells us that this is wrong, just plain wrong.

Can you see where this was going?

Well, I'll get there in a minute because the learning that lead to that was pretty exciting too.  Many of the kiddos and I have been avid watchers of Masterchef this season. It's coming to a close and, naturally, we've all got our favourites.  I talked this up a little and in Masterchef style I gave each person a token to vote for their one of two likely candidates for the finalists. Somehow we ended up with 28 votes, from 24 people. I couldn't have asked for a better way to raise the issue of tainted data!

Our next foray into data collection was a Google form.  (You can check out the form I used here.) As I mentioned last time, we've recently started learning about Asia. The Google form asked a couple of questions with different types of answers. We looked at how easy it would be to analyse the data from each question. (As a side note,  it acted as a quick and dirty form of formative assessment about Asia and the data analysis was pretty simple: we've got a long way to go!) Again we had more answers than people. This was mostly because I set up the form that way.  Once the kiddos realised that was my design choice"e they flew quickly into questioning data collection methods across the board.

"Is that how advertising companies come up with their funny statistics?"

"You could come up with any statistics you want to come up with this way. How is that ethical?"

"What other ways can you arrange the data to say what you want?"

"How did the Weetbix people get their data?"

Bam! There was the link.  Everyone fell silent and turned to me. I shrugged... To be honest I don't know so I turned it back on them. "How do you think they get it?"  No one was sure so we tabled the question for a moment while I got everyone up on their feet in groups of ten.  The makers of Weetbix claim that 9 out of 10 Aussie kids are raised on Weetbix so I figured that we'd work with two sample groups of ten to make comparisons.  I posed a couple of questions asking kiddos to move to different sides of the room:

1. Who eats Weetbix regularly? In both groups only 3 out of 10 kiddos eat it regularly. Hardly the 9 out 10 kids Sanitarium claims.
2. Who has ever eaten Weetbix? 10 out of 10 kiddos in one group and 8 out of 10 in the other to make an average of 9/10. Much more like Sanitarium's claim.

Or are they?

And the conversation was off. The realisation that data only answers the specific question asked was a very powerful one. The link to advertising and politics was instant, while the links to science were a little slower.   We never really found a definitive answer to the question of how Sanitarium got their data but we made a few hypotheses. 

We spent the rest of our lesson building data displays of the data I'd sneakily collected earlier that day.  For home learning the previous evening they had been asked to spend 20 minutes practising mindfulness, and on arriving at school they had to share what they had done (on a sticky note). We discussed this a a form of data collection and the challenged associated with collecting and analysing qualitative data. The challenge of grouping responses was evident as we created a tally and frequency chart. I had sneakily turned the responses into a word cloud while the kiddos were at PE earlier in the day so I presented this as one form of data display and asked if it was effective or easy to read. 

Resoundingly no!  So I challenged them to do better.  

We've posted them on one of our internal windows and asked the other students in our building which  data display is the most effective.  Which one do you think works best?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

I say data, you say dAta...

We're working on statistics and data at the moment.  I threw the kiddos in the deep end by providing a  pile of data displays and letting them investigate.  Here's what we discovered:

Our next step was a snap shot of our current thinking about the definition of data, which we did on answergarden.ch:

Some interesting ideas here that we delved into:

• History you can check - this raised the notion of qualitative versus quantitative data
• Sorted information - this raised some question about the difference between data and information. I didn't give the the answer to this quandary yet, I'm still hopeful that they'll come to it themselves.
• Collection of information - not yet having distinguished between data and information this was the most exciting point for me because it came up time and again which told me that there was a basic understanding.

We ran through a whole gamut of possibilities of what constitutes data to try to whittle down our understanding even further; and then compared which type of data might be easier to represent or analyse.

After much to-ing and fro-ing we took another snapshot of our understanding.

Information still features highly (as does funky?!?!) but there's a broader range of ideas now.

At this point, once again I've thrown them in the deep end. I directed them to the CIA World Factbook to collect data to build a data display comparing Australia with 9 other countries in Asia.  That was my whole instruction. A couple of looks of disbelief later (not sure if that was from the ridiculously ambiguous task instruction or mention of using CIA data) they all scurried away to get into it.

Asia, and Australia's place in it, is a topic we've just started this week. It's tied loosely to a big unit on Ancient India we'll be doing with our whole team later in the term but we're starting more contemporarily and broadly.  

General knowledge of which countries are actually in Asia was pretty scant. I will admit to being surprised, but gave everyone the benefit of the doubt because we've only just started learning about it.  Call me mean, but I let them all struggle with finding the relevant countries. A few had a look at the map on the wall, some others pulled out old-school atlases, a couple searched for 'lists of Asian countries' on Google. The rest turned to me. And I smiled and asked them to have another think.  Ha!

As a group they were pretty tech savvy so the act of making a data display wasn't a particularly big challenge. Choosing the right data display for the data they'd collected is a slightly different matter, and prompted some rich discussions.

How do you teach data and statistics?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

What's for dinner? Hang around and my class will tell you.

The last couple of weeks have been an absolute roller coaster for me. I've started my new contract and LOVE my class. I think I've mentioned how excited I am to be working with my 'co-teacher', but I'm going to do it again: she's amazing! So much drive and energy! And just a never ending pit of knowledge. I'm like a pig at a trough sucking it all up. (Yep, there's an image you won't get rid of for a while. Sorry!)

We also have a pre-service teacher (student teacher) in the room for the first four weeks of term.  We're all comfortable in acknowledging that it hasn't all been smooth sailing so far but it has been a time of huge growth for us all and  we've definitely hit calmer waters now. It's been fascinating for me to reflect on how much my teaching practice has grown in the past year. 

One things I'm particularly enjoying is the fact that this classroom - in fact this whole school, - follows Ann Baker's maths pedagogy. (In fact today instead of a staff meeting we had a 90 minute professional development session linking her pedagogy to the new national curriculum. Gotta love a school that prioritises ongoing professional development!)

Our numeracy blocks typically follow her pattern of:

• a mental routine
• the main part of the lesson (such as strategy teaching or a problematised situation)
• reflection.

Possibly the most powerful part of this, for me, is tackling problematised situations. In a nutshell we offer problems that have their basis in real life, in ways that the students can relate to, and are engaged by.  The students then use their own (or shared) strategies to find possible solutions. It's a fascinating process that allows the students to apply their understandings and offer reasoned options. 

We're currently working on a rather large situation that involves my class  working toward making recommendations about what I should feed my (six) children. I presented the problem:

I just recently got married, and there are now six children in my family. Yep. Six. They all like different foods. Dinnertime is an absolute nightmare. I don't know how to manage this situation. I wonder if you could help me figure it out?

And  threw it open to them. We're working on data at the moment so they very quickly established that I needed to ask 'a bunch of questions'.  They then provided me with 176 questions to take home to ask the boys. (Oh yes, all six kids are boys.)  There were many repeats and so I ended up with ten questions and related answers.






On presenting this data to the class I commented:

That's lovely but it's not overly helpful. It's a whole bunch of words and numbers on a page. I still need your help.

So now they're all analysing the data to make recommendations.  Each at their own level of understanding.


I've seen tallies, tables, graphs and a few things I can't quite name.

Some students are using information from one question to help shape their recommendations based on other questions. It's AMAZING.

 Now my challenge will be to keep coming up with awesome problematised situations. I realise they don't all have to be this grand,  in fact I'd prefer they weren't, but the challenge is on.  I'd be happy to hear your suggestions.

If you haven't read about, or heard of Ann Baker head over to her website and check her out. I've bought a few of her books and am finding them to be a wonderful resource.


And here's the new bit to my blog. I'm going to try to link my posts to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Feel free to ignore this part if you wish.

Standard 3.1 Establish challenging learning goals; 
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programs; 
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies; 
Standard 4.1 Support student participation; 
Standard 6.2 Engage in professional learning and improve practice; 
Standard 6.4 Apply professional learning and improve student learning.