"No Such Thing As Bad Student, Only Bad Teacher. Teacher Say, Student Do."
To help students become fluent in maths, we need to teach them.
Mr Miyagi said it in Karate Kid, and the seminal Direct Instruction leader said it too:
“If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught—that’s not a slogan, it’s an operating principle (see Barbash, 2012).” - Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann (1931–2019)
As discussed in the previous post, when contextualising Maths Ninjas for our school, our teachers and middle leaders recognised that 1 minute of daily testing wasn’t quite enough. Students needed some form of instruction. Who better to name this after than that brilliant teacher to Daniel-san - Mr Miyagi? Our Miyagi (teaching block) is a 5 minute introduction to our fluency block that allows teachers to deliver explicit instruction in the strategies that help students to become fluent.
What does it look like?
Initially, we determined a sequence of teaching fact families to 18 (11-18), and drafted a sample Miyagi sequence for different year levels:
Then we implemented a whole school fluency benchmark assessment - and realised that for many students, we needed to start at facts to 10. This was okay, as the teaching sequence was the same, just different facts. Lower year levels spend 2 weeks on each fact set and then 1 week consolidating before moving on, higher years spend just one week.
Miyagi teaching is short, focussed on what the majority of the class needs, and is a chance for teachers to check for understanding and particularly accuracy before students practice more independently in the Dojo/Ninjutsu section of the fluency block.
How do we know what these strategies are? We defined them, for each Ninja level, in a sequence. The next post will discuss how this mapping happened, and what we’ve already learned and will change in future iterations.
Stay awesome Ninjas! Kat