Waimea College (TLIF 5-022) - Can we increase student engagement in STEM subjects by using coding, robotics and building a local curriculum with authentic tasks? Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Waimea College (TLIF 5-022) - Teachers of STEM (science, technology, and mathematics) at Waimea College were concerned that student engagement was lower in these subjects than in others and that students did not appreciate the pathways they offer to learning and work. The teachers wanted to explore the design of tasks that would increase student engagement, focusing initially on coding and robotics and on connecting with local experts.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) led by Damian Campbell
Date Published: February 2019
Overview
Early in the project, the team encountered a book by Russell Bishop that draws upon his years of research to foster the concept of “teaching to the North-East”, a place characterised by high-quality relationships for learning and high-quality teaching practices. The insight galvanised the team to create a new observation tool based upon the one used in Te Kotahitanga but adapted to their purpose. Use of the tool included discreet audio recordings of lesson segments that could be coded and analysed to understand what was happening in classrooms from the perspective of students. Teachers followed this up with critical joint reflection on what was happening and what could be done to move teacher-student interactions towards the North-East.
There is no ‘magic task’ that instantly improves and sustains engagement for students in STEM subjects. Maximum engagement occurs when students and teachers have a well-established positive learning relationship, when teachers are delivering high quality teaching, and when tasks are designed to be engaging.
Project team, final report
The team found that their new tool was an effective way of identifying specific shifts in practice they could make to improve student engagement. The experience of engaging in authentic tasks with experts in the community was also successful. However, it was not necessary that those tasks incorporate the use of digital technology. Other tasks, including practical tasks, can be just as engaging.
The inquiry story
This project involved three teachers of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, along with their students. Several colleagues were keen to become part of a second phase but the impact of the pandemic lockdowns made this too difficult.
What was the focus?
Waimea College has a fairly traditional curriculum and pedagogical approach. There are no co-taught classes and, while there is considerable collaboration within departments, there is little of this between departments.
The college is part of the Waimea Kāhui Ako, which has as its vision, “Working together to provide a successful pathway for our learners.” The three teachers involved in this project believe that STEM has a critical role to play in offering successful futures, both to individual students and the nation. However, they had data to demonstrate that at Waimea College, as in many other schools, student enjoyment of mathematics and science (a measure of engagement) is significantly lower than their enjoyment of other subjects. They were keen to explore the possibilities of collaborating to design a curriculum that would improve engagement in STEM subjects so that students could see their value beyond school. Their hunch was that an engaging STEM curriculum would incorporate innovative tasks that required twenty-first century skills and would utilise expertise within the community. They identified coding and robotics as being likely to appeal to students.
The team developed the following innovation statement:
We would like to know whether designing a local curriculum based on authentic tasks that incorporates coding and robotics will have an impact on student engagement in STEM subjects for all students at Waimea College.
What did the teachers try?
The initial focus was on the design of innovative learning tasks, but the three teachers were inspired by their reading of a new book by Russell Bishop (2019), Teaching to the North-East: Relationship-based learning in practice. The ‘North-East’ here refers to the quartile of a graph on which the vertical axis measures teachers’ ability to establish high-quality and explicitly positive relationships with learners and the horizontal axis measures the ability to deliver quality teaching that promotes high-level questioning and thinking. While the design of engaging tasks was not forgotten, the team was taken by the evidence Bishop presents of the close correlation between whanaungatanga (discursive, family-like relationships) and student engagement.
Inspired by what they read, the team began constructing an observation tool for monitoring both teaching skill and the quality of relationships between teacher and student. They also sought feedback from students on their perceptions of a range of learning tasks.
The new observation tool innovated on Te Kotahitanga observation tool, with the teachers stripping it back to the factors they thought were most pertinent to them. The recordings were done on smartphones kept in their pockets to reduce student awareness and keep interactions natural. Teachers recorded twenty-minute lesson segments, which were then analysed by the whole team. That process happened through transcribing the first twenty seconds of every minute. The data was entered into an Excel spreadsheet and then coded. The following information was collated in this way:
- Whether interactions were whole class, individual, or group. This enabled the teachers to check the balance of these interactions. Along with the transcriptions, it also enabled them to check whether time spent with individuals was being used for high-quality teaching and learning or more prosaic interactions (such as repeating instructions that the whole class may have needed clarified).
- Who the interactions were with. This enabled them to check whether time was being equitably distributed among different students.
- The types of interactions. The codes used were DI – direct instruction, TR – teacher response, TLQ – teacher low-level question, THQ – teacher high-level question, SR – student response, SLQ – student low-level question, and SHQ – student high-level question. These were the basis for ‘scoring’ the level of teaching skill involved in each interaction.
The observations enabled the teachers to create a score that could be used to identify where they sat on the graph and whether they were heading to the ‘North-East’. Getting the highest score for teaching required evidence that the teacher was promoting high-level thinking. Getting the highest score for relationships required not only evidence of positive interactions but being “explicitly positive” about the learning and fostering a growth mindset.
Following joint analysis of the data, the teachers identified how interactions could have been improved, for example, through being explicitly positive in offering feedback, using student-student interactions to help answer low-level questions, and scaffolding questions to enable students to answer simple questions while also prompting them to do high-level thinking.
Following joint reflection, a new addition was to record a quick PMI around tasks, engagement, talk moves, and possible solutions and strategies. The purpose of this was to keep a record of discussion that would enable continuity from one observation to the next.
The focus on designing engaging tasks through investigating coding and robotics was not lost. In one mathematics class, related tasks included using Scratch programming language to explore geometry and trigonometry concepts, using Sphero robots for measurement, building catapults, having professional engineers visit the class and run an activity simulating building a rockfall safety net, and building a non-prism that held exactly one litre of sand.
To support the design and implementation of rich tasks, the team purchased or developed new resources, practices, and learning experiences. These included:
- purchasing Vernier dynamics carts and developing lesson plans for their use based upon the Interactive Lecture Demonstration (IALD) model
- developing laminated questions cards designed to increase student cognitive engagement
- investigating the use of recorded student-teacher conversations for evidencing student understanding, including when capturing evidence for NCEA technology assessments
- providing Year 12 students with the opportunity to work closely with an engineer (or another stakeholder) on an authentic task that had been proposed via IPENZ. Examples included designing and building a model of a turbine to generate electricity in the Māpua Inlet and a GPS device for monitoring slope stability in the Tāhunanui hills.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
At the start of the project, the team had thought task design would be very important to student engagement but in talking to students, it became obvious that positive relationships and the quality of teaching were far more important. For example, after the sequence of lessons described above, the class was asked about the activities they had most enjoyed in mathematics. Their responses revealed the following information:
- No student answered that they most enjoyed using the Sphero robots or Scratch programming, even though at the time, these had seemed to be rich and engaging tasks.
- Some students really enjoy traditional learning tasks, such as algebra. “Algebra” was chosen as often as other tasks the teachers thought would be more engaging.
- Students obviously enjoy “making” things and doing “practical” tasks, such as building catapults. Many of the tasks that they most enjoyed did not involve modern technology, instead utilising simple products, such as paper, cardboard, rubber bands, and popsicle sticks.
- Students really valued having the engineers visit to show them the sort of work they do and to run a linked practical task. This reinforced the value of building authentic tasks and community connections.
When students were asked about their enjoyment of mathematics and science and willingness to ask questions, there were measurable improvements. Students in all three classes agreed that the aspect of their STEM experience that really made it enjoyable was the teacher.
The teachers found that the observation tool worked well to enable high-trust conversations supported by robust evidence. The ability to graph their data meant they could pinpoint differences in practice that would lead to improvement. For example, they noticed that group tasks enabled much more high-level questioning and conversation than individual tasks. Together, the tool and conversations enabled ‘easy fixes’, such as the recognition that a concept or skill needed to be re-taught. They also catalysed more complex shifts in practice, such as working towards becoming more ‘explicitly positive’ in the kinds of feedback they gave.
The tool enabled the teachers to hear their interactions with students and think about how the interactions were perceived by them. The raw data from the audio recording meant teachers couldn’t “trick themselves” into thinking lessons or interactions were more successful than they actually were. This meant that the tool’s use was sometimes confronting. However, when the teachers looked back on their graphed data, they could see that overall, they really were on a track to the North-East.
The team had plans to scale the project out to others, but these were disrupted by the pandemic that made it difficult for teachers to feel confidence in trying a new tool that put the spotlight so closely on their relationships with students. Being a secondary school, they felt they needed to spend 2020 catching up on missed in-school learning time. However, the interest is there, and the team’s plan was to continue to develop their tool and share it with their colleagues.
What did they learn?
The team learned that there are three components to improving student engagement: building positive relationships with learners, quality teaching practices, and engaging tasks. Engaging tasks need not involve using devices or software. For some, abstract tasks involving algebra can be very engaging and for others, there is great enjoyment in practical tasks, such as building catapults. Students also greatly value collaborating with community experts on authentic tasks and receiving feedback from those experts.
Bishop’s (2019) concept of “teaching to the North-East” enables teacher to set the direction for improvement. Allied to a tool that captured snapshots of real-life data and processes for joint reflection, it enables significant improvements in teaching practice that can be achieved in a small amount of time.
Inquiry team
This inquiry was led by Damian Campbell. The team also included Llywelyn Adlam, Will Taylor, and Drew McGlashen.
The project had support from two critical friends:
- Isaac Taylor Across School Teacher in Te Kāhui Ako o Omaio ki Tahunanui); and
- Dayle Anderson (Victoria University of Wellington).
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader, Damian Campbell, at damian.campbell@waimea.school.nz
Reference list
Accelerating Learning in Mathematics: Resource 5: Helping students to participate in learning conversations: https://nzmaths.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/ALiM_Resource05.pdf
Ambitious Science Teaching: Eliciting students’ ideas and adapting instruction: https://tedd.org/eliciting-students-ideas-and-adapting-instruction-2/
Bishop, R. (2019). Teaching to the North-East: Relationship-based learning in practice. Wellington: NZCER Press.
Finn, J. D., & Zimmer, K. S. (2012). Student engagement: What is it? Why does it matter? In Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 97–131). Springer, Boston, MA.
Hattie, J. (2015). The applicability of Visible Learning to higher education. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(1), 79-91.
Introducing five science capabilities: https://scienceonline.tki.org.nz/Science-capabilities-for-citizenship/Introducing-five-science-capabilities
Šlekienė, V., Ragulienė, L. (2010). The learning physics impact of interactive lecture demonstration, Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 24, pp. 120–129.
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