Expecting the most – where we should be aiming with Foundation students.
Generally, in life and in teaching, I reckon you’re better off with having high expectations in
most situations. You can always adjust downwards but starting off with low expectations
and then trying to raise them later is a lot harder.
When it comes to expectations of prep/foundation students perhaps this anecdote
illustrates a significant part of where I’m coming from.
I was doing a modelled lesson in a prep classroom. I always ask what topic the teacher
would like me to model. I’m not sure whether the teacher was actually asked or not but the
Numeracy Coordinator let me know that I was to model a lesson on fractions – a half. No
probs, I duly prepared a lesson with a warm-up, student activity and a share/reflection.
I’ve turned up to the prep classroom the next morning – a school in the western suburbs –
and introduced myself to the teacher and then the kids. You gotta love preps – they just
looked pretty keen and had a ‘bring it on’ vibe about them. The classroom teacher went to
the back of the room while I told the kids who I was and that they could call me Mr V or
Rob. My warm-up was a favourite of mine called Tell Me 10 Things About. It’s a great warm-
up and I use it from Foundation to Year 10 and for everything from individual numbers to 2D
shapes to time to capacity….
So today I wrote the numbers one to ten as a list on the whiteboard and then told the preps they
were going to try to tell me 10 things that they know about half.
Half
1.
2.
3.
4. etc.
As usual, I told the students that nobody in the room was allowed to tell me more than one thing. As
I explained to them, this would stop you ‘bludging off’ some kid/s in the room that you think are
smart and letting them do all the work.
It was about now that the classroom teacher started waving her hands – not waving but drowning
style – to catch my attention. I couldn’t exactly miss it so I asked the girls and boys to hold on and
checked if everything was okay. ‘’No’’, she said. ‘’It’s not! We haven’t even done half yet.’’
Okay. Now this wasn’t the first nor will it be the last time that a teacher will presume that their
students won’t know something based solely on the basis that they haven’t taught it yet. You can’t
know about subtraction because I haven’t taught it yet – you may not have ‘taught’ it but almost
every toddler knows full well the concept of subtraction – give a 3 or even a 2 year old some of their
favourite treats and then take some away – the reaction will let you know – loud and clear – that
they knew they had some stuff, someone took some of their stuff and now they have less stuff than
they started with – not happy! Subtraction.
Hardly any concept we teach is new. Terminology may be new but most concepts are well
established – we just need to find out what the students already bring to the table – hence my warm-
up of Tell Me 10 Things About. It’s really saying, what do you already know about this topic. Bring it
on – and I’m going to record here on the whiteboard what you know.
So, back to the preps and their teacher. I stayed calm and suggested that even though it hadn’t been
taught yet we give it a go anyway.
One of them actually recognised the word HALF. Good effort. Alright kids, who wants to start?
Well let’s just say 10 individual kids contributed quite terrific statements/drawings/comments about
half and there were still hands up after I had recorded 10 things.
The ‘things’ put forward by the kids included:
– half as part of a whole (complete with illustration drawn by the student)
– half as part of a collection (complete with illustration drawn by the student)
– half as it related to age
– half as it related to an AFL game
– half as it related to time
– half as it related to capacity
I glanced fleetingly at their teacher at the end of the warm-up and her look said it all – ‘’I didn’t know
they knew all that.” As teachers we won’t know unless we ask. Kids are smart. Preps are
exceptionally smart – they’re regularly immature, lack structure, lack social graces, lack resilience
and persistence but they’re smart (and they do make you laugh!). They’re small in stature but not
relative intelligence!
Many come to school with a wealth and depth of knowledge that is quite remarkable and too often
we give them inane tasks and lame worksheets. Colouring in frogs on lilypads is dribble. Busy work.
We should be challenging foundation students. We should have high expectations of them. How will
we know what they can do if we continually give them tasks that they can do. I start challenging
preps with open-ended tasks and problems as soon as they’re ready. I’ll try them in week 3 or 4 (or
earlier if they’re a switched on cohort) and if the lesson bombs I don’t catastrophise – I put it off for
a week or two and then try again.
Our Australian and Victorian curriculums don’t help or promote the discussion around high
expectations for Foundation students. I can’t help wishing that the Foundation curriculum for
mathematics was more aspirational.
I can hear the counter points. “But I have kids who can’t count or recognise numbers’’. Get those
numbers happening in meaningful contexts and those same kids come along in leaps and bounds.
Write out the letters of their name. Natalie. N A T A L I E
Now get them to place finger on each letter of their own name and watch that same child count.
Foundation kids are all about me – make the maths all about them! And expect them to achieve.
Support, scaffold, encourage where necessary but don’t tell!! Wait. Don’t tell.
Try this:
It was mid-November this year (2020) and I was actually working in a classroom with real humans –
yay! It was a prep class in a school in a suburb of Bendigo (low socio-economic area) and I was asked
to model a lesson for the Foundation staff. My warm-up was to hand out the cards 0 to 10 randomly
and not in any order to 11 of the kids and then asked them to stand out the front of the room.
I checked that they all knew the number that was on their card [Each card had the numeral the
corresponding number of dots and the number name].
5
*****
Five
No problems.
I just waited – with a very calm expression on my face. They looked back at me. I waited. They
looked back – smiling, some giggling. I waited (calm, neutral expression). Then a girl, let’s call her
Ava (because that was her name) asked, ‘’Do you want us to get into order?” My waiting for this
from one of the kids was all of about 30 seconds. I simply said, ‘Great idea Ava. Off you go kids.”
Now I reckon it took well less than a minute but in very quick time the preps – with no assistance
from me – had lined themselves up from 0 to 10. They were then given my well earned and sincere
praise with special praise for Ava on her initiative. Later I asked them to find a partner so that the
total of the numbers/dots was 10 exactly. I gave no help – just waited. No problems. It was
November, they have a very good teacher and they’re smart. I expected them to complete the line-
up and find their compatible number to 10. They did.
If, as a collective of Foundation teachers, we all had higher expectations of children in their first year
of primary school what a remarkable and significant difference that would make. I have long
believed that Foundation students set the academic standard in a school – not Year 6. Get our 5 and
6 year olds off to a great start and all of a sudden the grade 1s need to take notice and lift
expectations accordingly and on it flows through the school…
If you’re any teacher – but particularly if you’re a Foundation teacher in 2021 – have high
expectations of your students. Find out what they already bring to the table. Don’t tell unless you
absolutely have to. Challenge them. Their response is so often just wonderful. If you focus on having
high expectations of your Foundation students, you will be going a long way to ensuring that they
are getting the best possible start to their primary school experience. A really effective Foundation
teacher is one of the most valuable assets any school will ever have.
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