The third workshop organized for the Hungarian partner schools of the Erasmus+ Student Voice – Bridge to Learning project came to pass on the 28th of June.artner schools of the Erasmus+ Student Voice – Bridge to Learning project came to pass on the 28th of June.
Following the review and the summary of the project workflow, members of the group distributed the task of elaboration of the different thematic blocs among themselves, which include the most important statements of the Student Voice project, but also personal teaching experiences. János Eőri, a mathematics teacher from the Hunfalvy János Secondary Vocational School gave then a very inspiring presentation about the so-called Happy Maths Test. As in some classes he did not succeed in motivating the students, he introduced a method based on Student Voice – principles. In this manner, students themselves made up different types of exercises according to the topic of the upcoming maths test and posted them in a dedicated Facebook-group. János Eőri assigned a score to each of them after which they got rated in the Facebook-group. Those exercise types, which had received the highest score from the students, were then involved in the actual test. As a result, the students’ performance got higher and their attitude towards Maths also started to improve. This method requires some extra energy from the teacher, especially that in the meantime other classes also reclaimed to get Happy Maths Test introduced by him. Nevertheless, it has become easier for him to correct the tests, while the atmosphere in the classroom has also developed a lot. Thus the teacher does not retain a control group any more: all of the classes applied that practice. On the other hand, according to his survey completed after the second maths test compiled jointly, students are all positive.
Hungarian project leader Lucia Kákonyi also presented self and peer evaluation samples she performed during her own classes. She also analysed the feedbacks given by the students. The second part of the workshop dealt with the topic of effective questioning. The participants discussed the ways and methods of questioning, talked about its role in motivation, or how teachers should react to students’ answers. They shared their own practices of questioning with each other and considered how they could progress in order to switch from checking student lexical knowledge to asking questions which are problem-solving and improve critical thinking.
