Scottish Numeracy Energiser NIACE for Learning Connections, Communities Scotland

Scottish Numeracy Energiser NIACE for Learning Connections, Communities Scotland

Session Evaluation by Trainers

Date: Session:

1Which activities worked well and why?

2Which activities did not work so well and why?

3Was there anything missing from the session?

4Overall how successful was this session?

5How could this session be improved?

6Anything to be resolved for the next session?

7Anything in the participant evaluation that you need to take account of?

8Other comments? (including constructive feedback to fellow trainer)

Whole Training Evaluation by Trainers

Course dates: Course venue:

Course Content – please list details of which activities were used, or attach a course programme.

1Who was the audience for this training?

2Which sessions were most successful?

Why?

3Which sessions were least successful?

Why?

4Was the training too challenging/too easy/about right for the

participants?

Comments:

5Was the pace of the sessions too fast/too slow/just right?

Comments:

6Did the participants find the training interesting, useful, relevant, enjoyable? (please circle)

Comments:

7Did the training meet its objectives? yes/no/partially

Comments:

8Overall how did the participants rate the training in their evaluations?

9Any particular comments from participants that you will take account of?

10 What changes would you make to the course content?

11What changes would you make to the way it was delivered?

12Do you have any comments on the parts of the Energiser Training you didn’t use?

13Please estimate the time required for:

Preparation_____

Delivery_____

Evaluation_____

Other_____

Comments

14This is the first training pack from Learning Connections that has been produced on CD-ROM only, without a paper version.

Please comment on how suitable you find this format.

15How suitable was the accommodation?

16How suitable was the location?

17Any other comments?

We would be very grateful if you would send us a copy of this evaluation, either by email or post, so that we can take account of your views.

Thank you

Please email to:

Or send to:

Learning Connections

Highlander House

58 Waterloo Street

Glasgow G2 7DA

Numeracy Energiser for Teachers of Adults

11th – 13th November, 2005

Westerwood Hotel, Cumbernauld

EVALUATION REPORT

Janet Swinney

Introduction:

This report has been prepared by NIACE’s designated project co-ordinator for its series of Numeracy Energsier training events. The assessment of the success of the Scottish Numeracy event is based on reflective feedback provided by the trainers, and the contents of the evaluation forms completed by 30 of the 36 course participants at the end of the week-end. It is also informed by insights gained through running similar events in England. The suggestions are intended to help Scottish colleagues build on the achievements of this event in ways that are appropriate in the Scottish context.

The Aims of the Numeracy Energiser for Teachers of Adults:

The event was targeted specifically at tutors who –

• feel that their own maths is wobbly;
• haven’t got a degree or a Higher in maths;
• are anxious about their teaching in this area;
• would really rather be teaching something else;
• feel they need updating.

It was intended to provide them with opportunities to:-

• develop some confidence in their own mathematical thinking and numerical skills;
• acquire some methods for helping learners with varied backgrounds, perspectives and experiences of Numeracy/Maths;
• have some fun while doing the above.

The Course Content:

The week-end was organised in a similar manner to earlier Numeracy Energisers:

• an introduction to current issues in Adult Numeracy teaching (presentation);
• ice-breaker activities;
• what we need to know about learners and how to find some of it out (presentation followed by group and whole group activities);
• teaching and learning - planning a programme of work to enable learners at a variety of levels to carry out a social investigation using maths/numeracy (group activity followed by group assignment)
• teaching and learning – ways of teaching operational skills (workshops).

Adjustments were made to nearly all materials and activities to take account of the Scottish educational, social and cultural context: Scottish colleagues’ were particularly interested in helping learners develop their critical thinking skills hand-in-hand with their numeracy skills.

The Participants:

The week-end attracted its intended audience: most participants worked in Community Learning services across Scotland; a significant proportion worked in isolation from their colleagues; many taught one-to-one and nearly everyone felt vulnerable when it came to teaching numeracy. Most participants’ highest maths/numeracy qualification was at Standard or ‘O’ grade. Some participants had no maths/numeracy qualifications at all. Participants described themselves in the following terms:-

‘I have a maths Higher (39 years ago!).’

‘Very low [level of qualifications]! Barely scraped through Higher maths! Remember nothing now.’

Despite working in isolation, tutors had a degree of social and political awareness that distinguished them from many of their English counterparts on previous Energisers and this influenced the way they responded to some of the activities. See below.

Two factors seem to have been significant in attracting this particular ‘client group’.

The publicity material – the informal tone and the content, which acknowledged that a lot of tutors do feel inadequate about teaching maths/numeracy. This allowed people to ‘come out’ and to take the first step towards tackling the problem (experience of previous events confirms this);

Learning Connections’ use of its networks across Scotland - this meant that all literacies partnerships were offered places on the training programme for members of their partner organisations.

Suggestion 1. Use a combination of informal, non-threatening publicity material distributed via Learning Connections’ networks to promote any further, related staff development opportunities.

The Training Team:

Two Scottish trainers were recruited to join three English colleagues who had had experience of delivering previous Numeracy Energisers, i.e. the project co-ordinator and two trainers. The aim was to achieve continuity while helping Learning Connections to build its own trainer ‘asset base’.

The two new trainers were adaptable and keen and worked well as part of the team.

In the event, one of the ‘English’ trainers withdrew when proceedings were quite well advanced, and the challenge was then to find a replacement with the same forte, i.e. mathematical thinking. Ultimately, a fifth colleague with a background in Higher Education and curriculum development in the schools sector joined the team.

On the whole, team working was effective, with much planning and preparation being done electronically. One planning meeting, involving all team members was held in Edinburgh. A Learning Connections development officer managed the process for recruiting and selecting the Scottish trainers, and attended and contributed to the meetings in Edinburgh.

The importance of having someone on a training team like this who has some understanding of Pure Mathematics and who is able to generate mathematical curiosity on the part of course participants without them feeling exposed, diminished or in other ways threatened cannot be overestimated. This way lies Profound Mathematical Understanding! Having a first glimmer of PMU is a liberating experience for participants: they can then move on and leave behind the dread that many of them experienced in their own early education and the obsession with teaching operational skills to the exclusion of all else, and start working with learners in a more open-ended and exploratory fashion.

Unfortunately, people with PMU themselves who can turn the mathematical experience from a downer into an upper are not often found working in Community or Further Education. Colleagues in Higher Education, on the other hand, are usually under pressure to keep their publications rate up and don’t have much time to spend supporting staff in other sectors. Nevertheless it is absolutely vital to the situation both north and south of the border that we enlist the help of these colleagues.

Suggestion 2 – Learning Connections needs to seek out from the Scottish Higher Education sector, one or more pure mathematicians or maths educators who can work in a non-threatening way with adult tutors, and who are willing to become part of future staff development ventures.

Overview:

The event was very successful overall.

Asked to comment on how far the event had fulfilled its aims, the participants who responded commented as follows:-

Mathematical thinking – 27% said they had gained a fair bit of confidence in their mathematical thinking, 47% said they had gained lots of confidence and 10% said they had taken a major step forward.

Methods and approaches that can be used with learners – 24% said they had gained a fair bit in this respect, 52% said they had gained lots and 21% said they had gained huge amounts.

Fun and enjoyment while learning – 13% said they had a fair bit of fun, 47% said they had lots of fun and 33% said they had had a whale of a time.

One of the main triumphs was managing to create an environment in which no-one was lost to the cause because they were overwhelmed by panic. We came close to this once or twice, but participants found the confidence to tell us that this was happening and re-engaged when the moment was over.

Participant comments: ‘Felt comfortable and at ease’. ‘Relaxed, humorous, engaging and informative’.

Participants felt most at risk in sessions that were intended to promote PMU. One participant commented:

‘The pure maths bit instilled fear and wasn’t delivered in a manner most adult educators are comfortable with.’

Session 1 – Introduction, Ice breakers and What Makes a Good Numeracy Tutor

Of the participants who returned their evaluation forms, 14% found this session quite helpful/interesting, 50% found it very helpful/interesting and 33% found it extremely helpful/interesting.

The ‘Who’s All Here?’ ice-breaker worked well and could be used again in other settings.

The ‘Numbers on the Back’ activity built on this and was a good way of getting everyone, whether confident or not, to begin to engage with numbers and to think about how they ask questions about numbers. The training team are divided as to how to run this exercise. One view is that it would work better if each participant were given only a ‘bald’ number or a mathematical symbol. The opposing view is that including numbers with a social or historical significance and units of measurement is also important, as people who are not mathematically confident relate more readily to numbers with connotations: they have a straw to clutch at. On Numeracy Energisers to date this exercise has always been run in this way. The only way to test the first option is to try it.

If running the session again within the same time constraints, I would suggest dropping the ‘What Makes a Good Numeracy Tutor’. While this produced a useful self-assessment tool for learners, it led to relatively little learning. The time could have been better spent pursuing the teaching and learning implications of the ‘Numbers on the Back’ exercise.

Session 2 – Assessment, Learning and Problem-solving

This was one of our least successful sessions. Of the participants who responded, 57% found the session fairly helpful/interesting, 23% found it very helpful/interesting and 13% found it extremely interesting. One respondent wrote -

‘[Spend] less time on session 2 - found it irrelevant and very confusing – may have been the delivery style.’

Another, ‘the billiards example wasn’t a very useful example,’ and another

‘[The] golden zero balls….Didn’t get much out of it. Sorry’.

I have some sympathy with these comments. Our democratic planning process led us to have over-complex ambitions for this session. On previous Numeracy Energisers, the focus has simply been on what it means to be mathematically mature or ‘numerate’ and how, through the process of initial assessment, you can get learners to reveal where they are in relation to aspects of this ideal. Participants examine their own mental processes and then think about the implications of this for working with learners. Both visualisation exercises and the Golden Zeros have been used very powerfully in the past to reveal the importance of understanding:-

what learners see in their mind’s eye (i.e. what’s on their mental screen);

the range of valid strategies learners have for approaching mathematical problems.

Having acknowledged the short-comings this time round, it would be a pity to lose sight of this agenda, as these points are absolutely crucial ones when it comes to adult learning.

One possibility for further staff development events might be to focus solely on initial and formative assessment, using the notion of ‘getting learners to reveal themselves’ and applying it to all aspects of the ‘mathematical maturity’ model (or to Diana Coben’s definition of what it means to be numerate) rather than just one or two.

Suggestion 3 – Continue to search for intriguing and adult-friendly ways to help tutors explore their own mathematical thinking, so that by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their own approaches, they gain greater insight into what learners bring to the numeracy classroom and can help them more effectively.

Session 3 – Error Analysis

In this session, we worked in four separate groups, with every trainer working to the same remit. For many participants this was a first opportunity to learn about the variety of ways that numerical operations are taught/have been learned at different periods in the education system and in different parts of the world. Good supporting handouts on mathematical conventions in different cultures were available.

Forty-seven per cent of respondents found this session very helpful/interesting, while 33% found it extremely helpful or interesting.

Session 4 and 5 – ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’

These were the two sessions which involved participants in planning a social investigation for their learners.

We used an activity drawn from an American mathematical source to get the ball rolling. We worked in three groups to the same remit. The idea was get participants exploring aspects of the global economy by examining the labels on their own clothing for country of origin and then organising this data in a meaningful way. Two groups took to this activity like ducks to water. The third group immediately pointed out shortcomings that we might have foreseen in relation to:-

the validity of the database;

the gender and cultural issues raised by examining one’s own and each other’s clothing in a mixed group.

However, asked to redesign this activity in ways that would suit their own learners, the group responded to the challenge and came up with many good suggestions, for example

organising a group excursion to examine clothes in a department store (this way all the clothes in the sample would be new);

organising a group excursion to examine clothes in a charity shop to avoid any sensibilities about having to examine one’s own clothing in public, and to include an investigation of cost;

relating the exercise to the local economy in various parts of Scotland and the impact of outsourcing.

This group also raised the important question about what power the individual does have within the context of global predatory capitalism, and this was debated with heavyweight input from one or two supporters of the Fair Trade movement. This is a fundamental issue which those of us who regard ourselves as development educators or radical educators could do with considering more fully.

Although about two-thirds of participants saw no problems with this exercise, I would be loathe to run it again without taking on board the concerns raised by the third group. Ultimately, this might mean designing a different exercise.

Back in the large group, we shared our approaches and insights. Bloom’s Taxonomy was visited briefly to illustrate how to ask questions that elicit different types of response. Some participants found this extremely useful. This is the closest we have come on any Numeracy Energiser to being able to illustrate the mechanics of critical thinking and how to coach learners in it. However, anyone who spends 40 minutes working through the Taxonomy can see that it is flawed. Adult/Community Education as a whole needs a better understanding of what critical thinking involves, what its characteristics are, how to teach the mechanics of it and how to express the curriculum in terms of problems, questions or issues rather than topics or subjects. Perhaps the English schools sector with its ‘Critical Thinking’ ‘A’ level can offer some help?

After the group de-briefing, we then went on to tackle the main exercise.

Participants one item and/or statistic selected from a range and worked in groups of varying size to design a plan of work for learners that would –