Whats a WORDLE? Click the image and find out.

Wordle is just one of those web 2.0 technolgies that seem to be born by the minute. Click the image and see a larger wordle created from the Chess-Squared blog.

NAB's SCHOOLS FIRST- Celebrating school-community partnerships.

Schools First is a fantastic new initiative that is about improving outcomes for young people.
At its heart, Schools First is about bringing together students, teachers, parents and community members, to support each other and help improve student outcomes.
The Chess Squared Program has been honoured to selected as a best-practice example being shown to 80 workshops around Australia.
With a prize pool of $5 million every year for three years, Schools First is the largest education corporate philanthropy in the history of Australia
The awards include up to 60 local awards of $50,000 each and up to eight state awards of $100,000 each. One outstanding national award recipient will receive between $500,000 - $1 million.
Schools First is brought to life by NAB in partnerships with Foundation for Young Australians and Australian Council for Educational Research.
A Chess-Squared story on The Age website can be found here.

SEL- Social & Emotional Learning

Daniel Goleman's interview was recorded on December 10, 2007, at the CASEL Forum, an event in New York City that brought together seventy-five global leaders in education and related fields to raise awareness about social and emotional learning (SEL) and introduce important scientific findings related to SEL.
Goleman talks from a historic perspective examining studies that aimed to deal with a range of social learnings. Some programs worked and others didn't, so the study searched for common themes in the programs that worked. What they found was the programs that taught self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, sound decision making had overwhelmingly higher success rates.
It seems to me that when chess is taught in a whole class/whole curriculum approach that we have a forum that supports many of these types of learnings.
The video takes a little while to download......so be patient!

"Originally published 2/27/08 © Edutopia.org; The George Lucas Educational Foundation."

3rd Mt. Alexander Cluster Chess Tournament.

Schools chess is 'big' in Castlemaine. And when they built the Old Castlemaine Gaol 150-odd years ago, nobody thought one day it would be full of schoolchildren playing the Royal Game.

A record number of 270 students from far and wide participated in the third annual Mt. Alexander Cluster Primary Schools Chess Tournament held at the old Castlemaine Gaol.

The event is officially the largest regional schools chess tournament held in Australia.

Castlemaine Primary School won the event for the second successive year, with new entry the Maryborough Education Centre (MEC) surpassing all expectations producing the overall individual winner.

For the second year running Ross Allengame's class from Castlemaine Primary won the A_Division and will be representing the cluster at the State Finals in October. MEC finished second and Castlemaine North finished third in the elite category.

St. Mary's won the B-Division, from Winters Flat and Castlemaine Primary while Maryborough Education Centre won C-Division from Castlemaine Primary and Castlemaine North.

Other participating schools included Winters Flat, Castlemaine North, Castlemaine Primary, Chewton, Campbells Creek, Newstead, Taradale, Elphinstone, Maldon, Guildfrod, St. Mary’s, and Harcourt Valley.

And a week earlier, 75 students from Daylesford, Kyneton, Maryborough and Castlemaine ventured to our CSC Junior Campus to do battle for bragging honours in the secondary school version.

Students from the Junior Campus, under the guidance of schoolteacher Mark Johansson, filled six of the first seven placings in that event.

The Chess-Squared Program sees community tutors deliver chess tuition in classtime. It started in the Castlemaine schools three years ago, has won a State Numeracy Award, last year delivered a Keynote Presentation at an International Conference in Scotland, and has a research component auspiced by James Cook University.

Castlemaine Primary has won eight places and MEC have secured 5 places in the State Finals. The Castlemaine Secondary College through strategic tournament play throughout the year has a maximum of 10 players representing the region at the State Finals in October

Report from CSC Jnr. Campus Tournament

They came from far and wide. About 100 Students from Daylesford, Kyneton, Maryborough and local primary schools came to do battle for bragging honours at the annual CSC (Castlemaine Secondary College) Chess Championship.

All of the students seemed to handle the rigors of the tournament day really well. They were highly motivated and played some really exciting games. It was no place for the faint hearted and a wholesome competitive spirit permeated the proceedings.

The tournament included three primary schools whose students often matched it with the secondary school students and never flinched when confronted by stronger more mature opponents. Their attitude was 'bring it on'!

CSC junior campus's team consisting of Joel Vearing, the outright tournament winner, Patrick Kelly second, Zac Gillet fourth, Jun Jun Robins fifth, Jesse Cameron and Matt Morgan sixth, and Max Nachman eigth, all of whom formed the nucleaus of last years all conqueroring CSC team that went on to become sixth in the Australian national titles, dominated the tournament.

All the students had good attitudes and were resilient in the face of defeat taking their losses in their strides.

Castlemaine Primary School won the primary school section and finished equal second over all. Matthew Hunter, Jordan Furlong, Oscar Black, Kaleb McBride, and Iona Moller all doing exceptionally well ,and showing that once again Castlemaine Primary School will be a formidable force in the upcoming Mt Alexander School Cluster Tournament to be held on the 15th of September.

The positive feed back we had for the day was awesome, and we all extend our hearty appreciation to Mark Johansson for his hard work and sacrifice in making it happen.

regards

Harry

TOURNAMENT TIME

When they were building the Old Castlemaine Gaol 150-odd years ago, nobody thought the place would one day be filled with young schoolchildren doing battle over chess boards.

Monday 15TH September sees the third annual Mt. Alexander Cluster Schools Chess Tournament at the iconic Castlemaine landmark.

It is expected 300 primary school students will converge on the venue, including first-timers from St.Mary’s Primary School (Castlemaine), and a group venturing over from the Maryborough Education Centre.

Other primary schools represented include Winters Flat , Campbells Creek, Yapeen, Guildford, Elphinstone, Taradale Chewton, Castlemaine Primary, Castlemaine North, Harcourt Valley, Maldon, and Newstead.

The event is the culmination of a program run by schools in the Mt. Alexander cluster that sees tutors from the local community venture into classrooms delivering the finer points of chess during term2 &3.

Program convenor, Harry Pouton says: “It’s a successful partnership between the tutors and the classroom teachers”.

Research conducted by James Cook University indicates students take their classroom skills into the home and that facilitates chess play within the family.

From an education perspective the program has a number of benefits. It fosters effective links that strengthen the partnership with home and school.

Among other things, the passion and expertise of the tutors has an enabling effect on student learning, and combining the program with a numeracy focus has seen under-achieving students find success at school.

The program was invited last year to deliver a Keynote Presentation at an International Conference at Aberdeen University Scotland, where it was considered a unique and outstanding example of schools building social capital within their local communities.

OVER THE BOARD WITH HARRY: The work of Fernando Moreno

VELs Thinking Domain says “Our world and the world of the future demand that all students are supported to become effective and skilful thinkers.” http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/essential/interdisciplinary/thinking/index.html )

The Chess Squared Program encapsulated the directives and spirit of the new VELS strands of Physical, Personal and Social Learning and Interdisciplinary Learning (Victorian Essential Learning Standards) when it attempted to help students develop self efficacy and become self regulated learners. We did this by encouraging student’s through the spirit of competition, and the fun of game playing, to take control of finding patterns and connections.

Tutors encouraged students to learn to plan, examine and evaluate the process of pattern finding they are engaged in. Students, in order to improve in chess and thinking skills, were encouraged to develop flexibility in their thinking and make decisions about what to do next. They were encouraged to take control of a problem solving situation. Steve and I are beginning to investigate the impact of this ‘thinking about thinking strategy’ used in the program and its importance to enhancing learning outcomes.

When at the CISCCON Conference in Aberdeen last year, the Chess-Squared organisors found the work of Fernando Moreno particularly interesting. Moreno, a trained counsellor, uses the game of chess in a therapeutic manner to scaffold student thinking about situations they are faced with in real life.

Fernando Moreno says, “While the skills learned in chess benefit everyone, chess has been known to be especially effective for students whose environments provide little or no resources for success in school or society (p.2, 2002)” Moreno (p.3, 2002) highlights the positive outcomes in the American ghettos where chess programs have been applied. Moreno (p.3, 2002) says that the pedagogical efficacy of chess as a tool for deepening students understanding of decision-making processes and strategies has been extensively documented. Moreno (p.3, 2002) goes onto say, “Perhaps not as documented is the change in perception teachers have when they find out their “problem students” are chess players”.

The Chess Squared program has already provided an abundance of evidence confirming Moreno’s statement through it rigorous tournament structure involving hundred of students. The results have seen large numbers of students, dominantly boys, who perform poorly in other areas of school life excelling at chess and finding motivation and success at school.

Moreno (p.5, 2002) cites Dr. Robert Ferguson who evaluated the outcomes of twenty years of chess research at the “Chess In Education: A Wise Move” conference in 1995 who has concluded chess is an effective tool for developing critical thinking skills and leads to improvements in mathematics and language skills.

It is widely claimed chess is a game that engenders and encourages positive cognitive and attitudinal traits, also known as the affective domain, in those who embrace it. The attitudinal traits it encourages are; impulse control, improved concentration, resilience, managing feelings and deferment of gratification.

The skills in the cognitive domain it develops, amongst others, are; self talk, problem solving, forward thinking, anticipating consequences, meta-cognition and reflectivity which are all essential VELS skills.

It has been suggested students aren’t encouraged to think ahead at school. When students play chess they are encouraged to set clearly defined goals for themselves and choose strategic methods to achieve the desired outcomes. They then evaluate and compare results with their objectives, and evaluate the outcomes in terms of the strategies they adopted.
Chess is a game of prediction, calculation and pattern recognition. Predicting consequences and pattern recognition are key elements of mathematics and chess. In chess games players have to visualise and predict consequences. This is an area schools seldom teach students how to improve in.

The prediction of consequences is an essential component of science, mathematics and visualization. It is the faculty to make a mental model imaging a likely sequence of events. The key question is ‘what if’. In chess and mathematics you need to compare the existing context with past situations and weigh up potential outcomes. In practical terms this might mean estimating jumping a fence or in chess when confronted by a problem recalling past geometric situations, and analysing and visualising outcomes. Modern mathematics pedagogy has shifted from algorithms to pattern recognition.
The chess squared program is proud to be associated with Fernando Moreno and shares his vision of chess as a well being, life skill building tool that has something very special to offer all students. Let us unite in this worldwide task to put chess on the global curriculum.

regards

Harry (Chess Tutor)



Fernando Moreno & Dr. Steve Tobias: CISCCON Aberdeen Scotland 2007.