Todd, who teaches at Waitara High School, has been using my maths material. It has changed his thinking and transformed his teaching. Concrete Concepts make it easy for his students to learn maths and they love the challenge that Thinking Person and Everyday Genius Questions provide.
During a phone conversation in August, I told Todd, who teaches at Waitara High School, about the Crow Effect. He had a junior class of crows and rats, so he decided to try that, too, and it decimated his rat population.
In my last year of teaching I had a year 9 class of boys. The recommended procedure we teachers were supposed to follow was to acquaint our new class with the school rules and actively encourage our students to follow them.
I told my class a story about the invasion of Australia by poisonous cane toads instead. Animals died when they chewed cane toads. Only the crows were smart enough to kill them. They turned cane toads on their backs, ripped open their bellies and ate them inside out.
Crows were the heroes. My students identified with the crows because they wanted to be heroes too. Then I told them that in my class they had a choice, they could be crows or rats and used a RAT pneumonic phrase to explain what a rat was.
A rat is a Really Awful Twit.
Here is the crow pneumonic.
COOPERATIVE
RESPONSIBLE
ORGANISED
WORK
They understood what being cooperative and responsible meant, but I had to explain about being organised:
ORGANISED
Get to class on time.
Be ready to work when the teacher arrives.
Make sure you have all your equipment; books, pens, rulers.
Work meant getting the work done, which included homework. This didn’t take long and was much more effective than talking about all the school rules. Then the class drew a picture of a crow on the first page of their maths book and added the crow pneumonic.
They were a delightful class to teach because they loved the idea of being crows and I had a lot of positive feedback from parents. At the beginning of each lesson I greeted my class positively and always asked them how my crows were. Classroom problem were always minor and easily corrected. I only had to say to a student that he was acting like a rat to get him back on track. Anyone who wasn’t cooperative, responsible, organised or working was acting like a rat. Luckily, they were all motivated to be crows!