Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

questions were the starting point.
    Imagine, now, these key words arranged in an octagon around a central theme. This theme can be anything you like –‘Love’, ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’, ‘Myself’, ‘Vodka’, you name it … . All you have to do, then, is to think of a question about whatever the central theme is but through each of the
8Way
‘angles’ in turn. So, for example, not long after coming up with this idea my daughter had to do a presentation on London as part of her literacy work at primary school. She was expected to go away and research ‘London’ and then prepare a four-minute presentation on what she had discovered. While the words ‘research’, ‘prepare’ and ‘presentation’ may seem little things to us, to a nine-year-old girl with undiagnosed dyslexia this was quite a daunting task for which she was not properly equipped. However, using the
8Way Thinking
model we put the word ‘London’ in the middle of the
8Way
octagon and I encouraged her to think of a question or two for each angle, questions we then wrote in the octagon, radiating out from the middle. She had questions like, ‘How many people live in London?’ for ‘Numbers’, ‘Where does the word “London” come from?’ for ‘Words’ and ‘What are the main sights in London?’ for, obviously, ‘Sights’. Radiating out from the questions she then started to add her answers until she had a page full of ‘research’ that she could read by spinning the paper around. For her presentation, she simply took in that piece of paper and chose three or four of the ‘angles’ and talked about the question she had posed and the answer she had come up with.
    And that, as they say, is all there is to it.
    To what extent do you use the Theory of Multiple Intelligences in your classroom to help give access to learning to all your learners? To what extent do you help those learners learn in a way that, at least some of the time, allows them to play to their strengths even though they may notbe your strengths? Remember, giving the dyslexic child a wordsearch 4 because they have trouble reading the text is one form of differentiation. Giving that child the opportunity to learn but using a learning map with fewer words anyway is another. To what extent do you participate in the ‘dumbing up’ of your class and the democratization of learning?

Chapter 27
Muchos pocos hacen un mucho
    Imagine if you could raise the test scores of young black people instantly and with barely any effort whatsoever. What if you could improve the performance of girls in a subject like maths where traditionally they have not done as well as boys? Well, research quoted in the
New Scientist
article ‘The Curse of Being Different’ 1 showed how to achieve just that. The researchers felt that something so simple as ticking a box to indicate your race or gender before an exam, as students were expected to do, could, at a subconscious level, serve to reinforce the negative views and stereotypes that society held about your race or gender, views such as ‘Black kids don’t do well at school’ or ‘Girls are no good at maths’. In one experiment, researchers staged a 15-minute session at the beginning of term with a group of African-American 12- and 13-year-olds, during which the students wrote about values that were important to them. This one simple activity reduced the achievement gap between the group and their white peers by an impressive 40 per cent. In another, one group of girls were asked to read a passage about the ‘fixed’ gender differences in numeracy ability just before they sat a maths test. A different group were given a passage to read that talked about how ability was modifiable, not fixed. This second group increased their achievement in the maths test by a staggering
50 per cent
.
    Little things can make a big difference.
    Sometimes I see schools that have been classed as ‘good’ in Ofsted-speak try to get to ‘outstanding’ by being, basically, ‘gooder’. They simply try and do more of whatever it was that Ofsted picked up on. Yet, outstanding isn’t about being ‘more good’. It often involves doing things that are totally different from those that were deemed ‘good’. But these things can be little things. What’s more, apart from bearing in mind that little things can have a huge impact as we have seen, it is important to remember this – you cannot fail. Your classroom is a laboratory, each lesson is