In Pursuit of Great Mathematics Teaching

Coaching Questions based on FISH! A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results by Stephen C Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen

This is a little business parable book. (I have read several books from this genre recently and been pleasantly surprised with them after I get over the silliness or contrived nature of the story. Another one is Who Moved My Cheese? which I wrote about recently.)

I found FISH! contained useful, applicable points for leading my team. The four practices advocated in the book are: choose your attitude at work, incorporate play, make other people’s days, and be there (fully present) at work.

Thinking as a coach, the book gave me inspiration to write a list of coaching questions. (Questions marked with a *star are taken directly from the book, not written by me.)

What would you like the energy of your team to be? When you visualise this, what do you see, feel, hear, and experience?
If you were working at your best, how would your colleagues/boss know? What would they see, feel, hear, and experience? What would you like them to see, feel, hear, and experience?
What choices do you have regarding your energy/mood/attitude at work? What attitude would you like to bring to your work?
What assumptions are you making about your energy/mood/attitude at work? If you knew you could choose your own energy/mood/attitude at work, what would you choose?
*When you are doing what you are doing at work, who are you being? Are you being impatient and bored, or are you being world famous? Who do you/we want to be while you/we do our work?
How playful are you at work? How playful would you like to feel? What would be the impact of being playful at work? What opportunities are there to be playful at work?
*How could you/we have more fun and create more energy?
*How could you/we engage [our customers] in a way that will make their day? How could we make each other’s days?
How present do you feel during your work? How present would you like to feel? What would be the impact of being present at work? What opportunities are there to be present at work? With which people could you be fully present?

I have phrased these questions for a work context, but they could be used for families and relationships of all types.

Book Review: The Invitation by Tony Stoltzfus – and coaching

The Invitation, a book about Christian coaching, has made the biggest impact on me this year. I am a practicing Christian and wanted to learn about how I can use coaching with Christian coachees. Stoltzfus runs an ICF-accredited coaching school and another one of his books, Leadership Coaching, is about coaching more generally. However, The Invitation is a book specifically about a Christian model of personal change. My biggest takeaway was how to incorporate prayer into coaching.

Stoltzfus lists sixteen psychological desires: see them in the image below (image source).

When my coachee is talking about something that I suspect is related to a deep desire, I explore to find the desire that is beneath the surface, and then choose a prayer question that asks Jesus how he has already been filling that desire.

For example, I was working with a woman whose family circumstances have changed and she found herself anxious about the future. I asked some questions to explore further what she is really seeking; a sense of peace, rest, acceptance, and purpose. After further delving, she decided that acceptance was what she was most keenly desiring. I suggested we pause and she ask a question in prayer: “Jesus, what do you like about me?” I asked her to ask the question and then sit quietly for 30 to 60 seconds and see what she heard, sensed, felt, or thought.

Book Review: The Life and Work of David Grove by Carol Wilson – and coaching

I was struck by the idea of Clean Language after reading the chapter in Wilson’s book Performance Coaching. Wilson’s book, The Life and Work of David Grove expanded on that idea and also added a lot more about Emergent Knowledge and other areas. Some parts of the book were not as valuable to me as a coach. However, I found very helpful the idea to use the coachee’s words back to them so as not to pollute their thinking. This was a hard lesson for me to learn – I think that I thought I was adding “value” in some way by interpreting what the coachee said. Now I think that this just muddies the water for the coachee. So unless I ask permission to share an idea of my own, I now try to re-use the coachee’s own words rather than rephrasing them.

Another useful idea for me was to ask for metaphors to explore the topic, especially when the coaching topic is a difficult one for the coachee. Grove used these techniques to explore trauma and I have faced only a small number of coachees who wanted to talk about traumatic events. However, it has been useful to ask for metaphors in many of my coaching conversations. For example, my coachee was talking about a feeling of grounded expansiveness. I requested a visual image for this and she replied that it was like a majestic mountain. We explored this a little more and I now regularly ask her about whether certain behaviours come from or could come from the majestic mountain.

Book Review: The Inner Game of Tennis, W Timothy Gallwey – and coaching

The Inner Game of Tennis is actually written for tennis teachers and explains how to help students experience what good shots feel like so they can become better players. The ideas have a lot of crossover to coaching and impacted early coaching ideas a great deal since its publication in 1974.

Gallwey devised the idea of two selves. Self 1 is the judgmental person, evaluating progress, giving instructions, and making the player try hard. Self 2 is the person’s “doer”, where the person experiences flow, confidence, and can see the goal of a shot. This is helpful to me as a coach – if I can help the person see their goals and approach them with relaxed concentration, rather than judging their progress, they will more naturally make progress.

Coaching Questions about Change, based on Who Moved My Cheese?

I recently read the business classic, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. It’s a short book (fewer than one hundred pages with nice big type!) that is a parable sandwiched by discussions of a group of friends about its meaning and use. In the parable, two mice (named Sniff and Scurry) and two littlepeople (named Hem and Haw) search through a maze for cheese. In the story, cheese is a metaphor for whatever it is that they really want in life. All four characters find some lovely cheese, but after a while, the cheese disappears. The mice immediately start looking for new cheese. The littlepeople, by contrast, waste a lot of time complaining that the cheese is gone and hoping it will return.

After some time, one of the littlepeople comes to his senses and starts off to search for new cheese. As he goes, he writes on the wall the things he learns in the hopes his partner will see it.

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott: Reading Notes

Our lives, or businesses, or relationships succeed or fail gradually and then suddenly, one conversation at a time. And the conversation is the relationship. All conversations are with myself, and sometimes they involve others.

[Personal notes are in square brackets to indicate they are my own thoughts, not from the book.]

Seven “fierce principles”:

Master the courage to interrogate reality
Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real
Be here, prepared to be nowhere else
Tackle your toughest challenge today
Obey your instincts
Take responsibility for your emotional wake
Let silence do the heavy lifting

The purposes of fierce conversations:
To interrogate reality
To provoke learning
To tackle tough challenges
To enrich relationships

Master the courage to interrogate reality. Have conversations where we share our truths, since we all see and experience our work or relationship uniquely. (“Beach ball conversation”: each of us is on a different coloured striped of the ball and hence we have our truths to share.)

Most people want to hear the truth even if it’s hard. People want (at least) one person who will be honest with them and to be honest with one person.

What issues are we avoiding? What are we pretending not to know? Bravely call a meeting about the real issue or a high stakes decision.

Use an issue preparation form to clarify for yourself and share it with the people with whom you want to talk.

Don’t say “but” – replace it with “and”. “I know you want more time to work on this project and the deadline is looming.”

Instead of saying, “I need to talk to you about….”, say “I want to talk with you about….”

“What is the most important thing we should be talking about today?” This is a question to use in meetings, in one-to-ones, and with family and friends. [I also want to ask this to God in prayer.]

Cultivating Positive Team Culture: Workshop at TeachUp, May 2019

Ice breaker questions such as these ones help build vulnerability between people. This helps create a positive team culture.

I really enjoyed presenting at the Singapore International Schools TeachUp. Thanks to the participants who came along to my session about positive team culture. I have been encouraged recently by learning that team culture can be impacted by even one person delivering a steady stream of cues in three areas:

Belonging
Vulnerability
Story

In the workshop I shared that these three areas were named for me in the book The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. Some of the ideas are obvious but it’s valuable to have a structure within which to think about them.

In the workshop, we spent some time sharing ideas about creating culture by visiting stations around the room and talking with each other. A lot of good ideas were shared. The scanned sheets from the stations have been uploaded below.

Slides available here.

(Cookie recipe here.)

Blank table materials available here. Scanned table materials with participant’s contributions available here.

How would you create a positive culture in your team (or school)? Maybe you think the ideas are obvious, but naming them helps us remember to do them. Share here in the comments or tweet me @mathsfeedback.

Ms Aldous’ Favourite Books

The school library made this amazing poster for me! Here is a list of my favourite books.

The Senior School library is making these brilliant posters for teachers. I’m so grateful!

I compiled the list with the idea that students might find them interesting. A true list of my favourite books would include some maths education and Christian titles.

Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Quiet by Susan Cain
Insight by Tasha Eurich
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
This is Not a Maths Bookby Anna Weltman
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
The Shack by William Paul Young
Relativity: A Novel by Antonia Hayes
The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

What are your most recommended books? Let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter (@mathsfeedback).

Managing overwhelm: How do you curate and consume your educational reading list?

This blog post describes how I curate and consume my education reading list. It’s a response to Michaela Epstein’s post (@mic_epstein) with the same questions (and title!).

I hope that others in the Edu-Twitter/blogging community will also write posts that respond to the same six questions. The greater the diversity of responses, the more likely it’ll be that a reader will find an approach that works for them. Write as little or as much as you like. You might also like to read posts by Ollie Lovell (@ollie_lovell), Amie Albrecht (@nomad_penguin), and Jeremy Hughes (@JeremyinSTEM).

Feel free to write less than me, I got a bit carried away after I got started. What a reading nerd I am.

1. What does your average reading/watching/listening day look like?

I schedule a reflection time each working day in my Outlook calendar for the last half hour of my time at work (6:00 – 6:30 pm). I use it for Twitter, online or offline reading, and some reflection activities. It might be more accurately called Generative Time, because I feel like it refreshes me each day to finish with something that helps me learn (and it gets me away from emails). To be fair, I don’t always stop with my busy work when the reminder pops up, but usually I enjoy at least some of the half hour for taking in an inspiring idea or three.

Half an hour of beautiful reflection time every work day.

I used to use an RSS reader to read teaching blogs but I fell out of the habit and also the program was discontinued. Now I usually see the blogs I want to read via Twitter anyway.

New Maths Marking and Feedback Policy

We have recently updated our marking policy in the maths department. It felt like quite a bold update to our policy: it’s much less prescriptive than before and acknowledges the many ways in which feedback can be given to students.

As a school, we are in transition with our digital tools. We work in a one-to-one school in which students have iPads with a stylus or a laptop/tablet; we are encouraging them all to get a stylus. The main teaching software is now OneNote on an interactive whiteboard.

A lot of our students’ maths work still goes into their exercise books, but a lot is now being done on their personal areas of OneNote.

We discussed our marking and feedback ideas over several department meetings and devised the following new policy. I’m looking forward to the learning walk that will focus on feedback later in the school year.

Maths Department
Marking and Feedback Policy

The purpose of feedback is primarily to help students know and articulate their strengths and areas for improvement in the current topics of study. Teachers should share with students an idea of where their learning is heading. This can be done using learning objectives.

We recognise that good feedback happens in many ways which are chosen by the teacher in relation to the needs of the students and the teacher’s preferences. We agree that teachers can make their own choices and this policy does not require that teachers all give feedback in a certain way.

The maths department will have an annual learning walk focused on feedback in which teachers can share their methods of feedback and student reflection. This will allow leaders to verify good feedback is being given and promote sharing of feedback strategies.

We agree that a minimum frequency for recorded, specific, personal feedback is every three weeks.

Homework and classwork tasks should be marked, whether by teachers or students. Students should reflect on their work and record this in some way.

There are many ways teachers can share feedback with students. These include:
• Student self-marking of work as directed by teachers
• Student peer-marking of work as directed by teachers
• Marking by teachers in exercise books or digitally, can be done in or out of class time
• Verbal feedback, which does not need to be recorded
• Written feedback in OneNote
• Student reflections, written with guidance from teachers; can be in exercise books or digitally
• Small quizzes, online tasks, and exit tickets
• Strength and target sheets used after tests