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“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein Questioning is the very cornerstone of philosophy and education, ever since Socrates ( in our Western tradition) decided to annoy pretty much everyone by critiquing and harrying people with questions – it has

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I've observed a lot of lessons this year. Inside science, outside science, novice teachers, expert teachers. Lots and lots of other people's lessons. I've also been observed lots. As much as I've been in others' classrooms, others have been in mine. In general at TTA we take the philosophy that "feedback is a gift" and that if someone else has been gracious enough to let you into their room to learn from them, the very least you can do is provide them with some feedback that will help them be even better.

Within my department, the stakes are high in terms of the feedback I give. I don't want to give feedback that's so general and generic it can't be acted upon. But I also don't want to give feedback that's so specific it won't be actionable until this time next year when the lesson I observed is repeated. What I really want to do is find something that allows us to think in a general sense about what goes on in our lessons, but come away with specific techniques that can be used in those lessons.

In a lot of the lessons I have seen, and in my own lessons which have been seen, there has been an issue with ratio. This is a concept I first read about in Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 2.0, and below is the training which I led in my department on it. I hope you find it useful and, if you have any, please remember that feedback is a gift.

Ratio is an incredibly powerful concept that allows for sophisticated discussion of classroom practice and its eventual improvement through dedicated strategies. That's a mouthful of a sentence, but I can't think of a better way to put it. Before we look at what Ratio is, we need to start with the work of Professor Coe in his landmark work A Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In that paper, he famously argued that we have become distracted when discussing and judging learning. He decried the fact that we had become preoccupied with observable proxies for learning like busy or engaged students and had patted ourselves on the back when such proxies were achieved or observed in a lesson. But if all that is a distraction, then what should we become focussed on?

I think that line is crucial: learning happens when people have to think hard. Without hard thought, no learning. However many jazzy activities you do in the classroom: no hard thought, no learning.

It's at this point that ratio comes into the picture, as it is a way of describing and delimiting hard thought. There are two types of ratio:

So it is about both individual students and the collective, how much thought is happening both within and across the group. We could set up a neat little axes:

Obviously the golden zone is the top right, where all your students are thinking and they are thinking hard. Let's illustrate with some examples:

Before I give you "the answer" where do you think this sits, but just on the horizontal line (participation ratio)? I don't want to confuse things too much by using both axes at the moment, so just to start with, does asking a question like this get lots of students thinking, or not a lot of students thinking?

You guessed it: calling a student's name and then asking a question is a surefire way to lower your participation ratio, as the other students - whose names haven't been called - are almost guaranteed to not be thinking about the answer. This is why Lemov is so insistent about the use of Cold Call. Ask the question first, then call a student's name. Sounds easy peasy, sounds obvious; yet it's very easy to forget.

Ok so let's go for another scenario. In this case, the teacher uses Cold Call, and the third bulletpoint below is the transcript of what happened in the lesson:

Where do you think that should go? Think about it first...

I reckon it goes right here in green:

A bit better than our last one, but not a lot better. Why? Because the Wait Time wasn't long enough. They posed the question, then asked a student, who then had to pause and think for quite a while before answering. Let me ask you this: while that student was waiting and thinking, what were all the others doing? You betcha: confident that they wouldn't need to answer the question, they switched off and waited for the other student to answer the question. The whole point in doing the Cold Call flies out the window.

So in what ways can we increase participation ratio:

Some of those are obvious, but I'll elaborate on a couple that might not be/

Accountability measures are where you hold a student accountable for their engagement. For example, if I ask a student a question and they don't know the answer and they should, I'll "have a go" at them and tell them how annoyed and disappointed it makes me that they don't know the answer to this. I will warn them that I am going to ask somebody else the same question, and will then come back to them later on with the exact same question (I jot their name down and the question on my mini-whiteboard on my desk so that I can follow through on this later). This lights a bit of a fire under them to be extra attentive, and it builds a culture in your classroom of students paying attention to you and to one another.

The next three bulletpoints are very similar and were promoted at the recent Michaela Science conference, if a student answers a question, I'll jump to a different student and say "what did she say?" or do that with something I've just said. As above, this builds - over the long term - a culture of engagement and thought.

Check for mistakes is also a useful but under-used one. If a student is going to give a long answer, or is asking a long question, there's a danger that the rest of the class will stop listening. A script like "hand on a second Daniel this is really interesting I'd like everyone to listen carefully to what Daniel is saying and put their hand up immediately if they spot something that they think they can answer/say better/use a keyword. Ok, Daniel please start again."

Independent practice here is of course the only surefire way to guarantee that everyone is participating. Students need that nice long period of just sitting quietly and working individually in order to consolidate new information, and it's a great opportunity for you to get your participation ratio high.

Alright, let's start looking at the other axis: think ratio - how hard are your students thinking?

Now you should be able to think about where it goes both on the x axis (how many students are participating) and on the y axis (how hard are they thinking). Where do you reckon?

The mini-whiteboard routine is good, and it puts the participation ratio up. But - and I'm hoping this isn't lost on you if you're not a scientist - they aren't thinking very hard. They do the first one correctly, but all the subsequent ones are exactly the same, just with different numbers. There's nothing that makes them more challenging, so students aren't thinking all that hard.

Regular readers of this blog may recognise the above - it's my attempt to describe what makes some work challenging and other work not challenging. I'm not going to go into that too much now, but suffice to say there are loads of ways to increase the challenge of a task, and if they are getting every question right, you should probably change something to make sure the challenge is kept at a good level. In this particular case you could increase the challenge by any of:

Unit conversion

Rearrangement

Giving values in standard form

Using an eyepiece and objective magnification

Throwing in a question which uses another formula...

So there you have two case studies of times where the ratio isn't optimal, and some ideas as to how to fix that.

Below, I've got a little activity which has 7 further scenarios involving sub-optimal ratio. For each one you write if you think the participation and think ratios are high or low, and based on that what could be done to improve the ratio.

Coming to an agreement about the "right" thing to do in each scenario is an extremely powerful tool as it means you can walk into anyone's lesson and rapidly identify if the essential ingredients are there for a high ratio, and if they're not, have a shared language around what can be done about it. Which brings me right back to my definition at the start:
Ratio is an incredibly powerful concept that allows for sophisticated discussion of classroom practice and its eventual improvement through dedicated strategies.
Further scenarios for activity are below. If you want to know my thoughts on them, click here.

A teacher is questioning students and walking around the classroom, moving towards students who are answering questions. Their movement goes into the classroom as opposed to around the edges and their body and head are facing the student who is answering the question.

Students are working quietly but one of the questions in the practice set relates to material they covered a very long time ago and haven't revisited since. The teacher is moving around the classroom supporting students with that question. The support they are providing is very similar from student to student

Students are learning about organ systems in groups. Each group has been given a fact sheet about a particular organ system, told that they need to learn it and that any member of the group will be asked to explain what is on their sheet to the rest of the class

The teacher is going over an assessment going question by question. The students have their test papers out in front of them. At each question the teacher carefully describes how they would approach the question and models how they would answer it.

A student answers a question and the teacher uses a series of Stretch It follow-ups to test the reliability of that student's responses.

During whole class questioning, a student demonstrates poor behaviour. The teacher tells them to leave the classroom which results in a short conversation. Once the student has left, the questioning continues as before.

The teacher expertly models a difficult concept and does a check for understanding via questioning. Seeing that the students understand the concept, the teacher moves on to the next concept to be taught.

Ratio activity Update 12/7/20: it turns out a version of the graph I used above was displayed at the Michaela Science Conference in January '20 so it could be that the idea for the graph came from there. It's also plausible that we all plagiarised Lemov so hey.

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I've observed a lot of lessons this year. Inside science, outside science, novice teachers, expert teachers. Lots and lots of other people's lessons. I've also been observed lots. As much as I've been in others' classrooms, others have been in mine. In general at TTA we take the philosophy that "feedback is a gift" and...

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In mastery learning, learning outcomes are kept constant but the time needed for pupils to become proficient is varied.

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Done well, "Show Call" is a powerful tool for supercharging your students' work. Not only does it keep them on their toes because it could be their work that is shown, but it can also create a culture where all students are keen to help one another improve. In this piece, Darren Leslie explores how he uses Show Call in his lessons.
One of my favourite techniques from Teach Like a Champion 3.0 is Show Call. Show Call is where you visually share a student's work with the class using a visualiser or another tool that can project an image. Show Call affords us several opportunities in our teaching, we could live mark a piece of work, we could praise a student by sharing their best work and we could display work that is incomplete and study it with the class with the aim of improving the work. Over time I have come to prefer the latter. Taking a student's incomplete work and helping them to make improvements using their classmates' ideas is becoming a key feature of my classroom.

Lemov asks "what's the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it's to study the error itself". And it is this idea that forms the basis of how I use Show Call in my classroom. I use it to respond to student errors and instead of offering the student feedback in the moment I take their work, project it onto the board, and then proceed to ask their classmates for their ideas of how to improve the work, where they might have gone wrong and to check that we can all identify errors in one another's work.

"what's the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it's to study the error itself" (Lemov)

Building a classroom culture where this is part of the day-to-day workings of the room takes time and in the early days of teaching a class, I will project complete work that is correct and use it as an opportunity to live mark and provide praise for the student whose work is being projected. This helps to normalise the technique and build awareness that at any moment I may take your work and share it with the class. Getting this right is vital if we are to progress to using Show Call to its full potential.

Over time I will begin to take student work that is incomplete, missing a key step or with a few common errors so that we can study the error together, as a class. There are some key ingredients to getting this right and that begins with what Lemov calls 'the take'.
The Take
The goal is to make the take feel familiar to the student, like an everyday occurrence that is safe, and that nothing bad will happen. The first few times I project a student's work I will offer a quiet explanation: "your work is great. I would love to share it with the class" or "this is brilliant. I'd love to share it".

As it becomes routine, I transition to taking their work with them knowing it will be shared. First by letting them know, "this is great. I can't wait to share it" and slowly moving on to seamlessly taking their work with a nod of thanks and appreciation helping to communicate the normalcy of this in the classroom. Throughout, a smile and a thank you go a long way in helping to build a culture where the students are comfortable with sharing their work and the practice of studying errors.

After the students recognise that sharing their work is part and parcel of the classroom, I can then begin my circulation by declaring, "I am coming round to look for great work to Show Call", making it something for the students to strive for in the classroom.

Getting this part right is arguably the most important aspect of a Show Call. We would never want to humiliate a student or make them feel targeted so being super selective on whose work you Show Call, especially at the beginning will help to generate a culture where students' work is studied deeply.
The Reveal
The way that we 'reveal' work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead. Initially, I won't name the student whose work is being beamed onto the projector. I will state that "we are going to look at someone's work and talk about it for a little bit" setting the scene for the discussion to follow. It's important to note that the tone that you use needs to be as casual as possible, like this is the most normal thing in the world to happen.

"The way that we 'reveal' work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead."

As we begin to study errors more deeply naming the author of the work can come into play but often maintaining anonymity can be super powerful. We could move on, saying "let's check someone's work to see if they remembered to simplify their fraction" and if we wanted to use names we could say "Here's how Daisy solved this problem. What do you think?" or "Martin has made a simple common error. Take a minute to look at his work silently to see if you can spot it".

Now that the work has been displayed and the students are giving it their full attention what happens next should always focus on getting better and helping the students get better at the task in hand.
The Cognitive Work
As the work is being beamed onto the projector from under the visualiser an important part is considering how you want the students to interact with it. Perhaps they could read it silently for a minute and compare it with their own work or maybe they could discuss it with a shoulder partner. Whatever path you choose making sure that it is the students that are doing most of the cognitive work is key. You could say "take a minute to silently read Jamie's work" followed by "take thirty seconds to share with your partner how you would solve this problem".

With either option I would then cold call a student to have them share their thoughts "Gabriel, what do you think?" or "Keira, what should Jamie do to fix his error". As the students are offering their thoughts and building on one another's ideas I will chart the conversation on the board over the top of the image being projected, helping everyone to keep on track. By now the students will have concluded and it is time to wrap up the conversation.

Sometimes, I will provide a review to make sure everyone knows how to fix the error we have just studied and other times I will say "as Keira mentioned Jamie needed to do this, so take a minute now to tidy up your work". It is important that time is given for students to tidy their work and make any necessary changes before moving on.

Show Call is a regular feature in my classroom and with time it becomes a rigorous process for studying errors and what makes it powerful is that through questioning and probing it is the students themselves that improve the work of their peers. This builds a scholarly culture to the classroom that keeps the cognitive workout firmly on the side of the students.

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Using Show Call In The Classroom - HWRK Magazine

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Done well, "Show Call" is a powerful tool for supercharging your students' work. Not only does it keep them on their toes because it could be their work that is shown, but it can also create a culture where all students are keen to help one another improve.

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I really like using journeys and travelling as analogies about learning - I've written about them before when I wrote " Let's go for a walk". I love thinking of topics and ideas through the lens of schemas. I've read lots on schemas (and other bits too) and whilst writing about " the kernel of truth ", I realised that slowly an analogy has been developing in my head for schemas that encapsulates some other ideas from cognitive science.

Efrat Furst has some amazing diagrams of schemas, showing them as dots and lines. They clearly show the interconnected network of knowledge that we want to form in the minds of learners about our topics. The individual dots or nodes of network are often thought of as the individual ideas or objects, and the lines are the links between them. Over time we want to add new ideas (new nodes) to the network and increase the number of connections to old ideas too (the lines).

As an expert (in physics), I can pluck stuff out of "thin air" because my schema is very linked together and one idea leads to another. This means that I can quickly whiz around my network of knowledge and I don't get lost. My network is well travelled so the roads are wide and well maintained so I can travel from one idea to the next quickly and I can still get to even the oldest of ideas rapidly. The network is well signposted so I know exactly where I'm going and it's hard to get lost.

The width of the road gives me the ability to travel faster.

The signposting of my network means I know where I am within it.

An expert has a mental network akin to a complicated motorway system - wide roads, well-signposted. You can move from A to B to C very quickly and know where else you could have gone.

Novices are different. We are explicitly trying to build their schema (often from scratch). To begin with, they are much slower to travel around their own network and it's easy for them to lose their way as they travel. They need to spot the footpaths they've only travelled once or twice but there are no signposts (so it's easy to not get to where you intended). The roads are narrow and overgrown so it takes a long time to get around.

A novice has a mental network akin to some newly formed paths in the woods - narrow and not signposted. You take ages moving from A to B to C, possibly getting lost and not knowing alternative routes.

The only way to get from novice to expert is to continue to travel around the network and make more sense of it as you go. Not just creating new paths and new locations (expanding the network/your knowledge), but continually traversing the old paths, widening them and signposting them.

This is a blog for another day but one thing I'm looking into this year is Advanced Organisers - a simple depiction of the ways in which ideas are connected. They look a little like mind maps, but the links between topics are labelled (much in the way that we discussed schemas earlier). This is a work in progress but I've seen ideas from multiple places (Theory of Instruction by Engelmann and Carmine as well as Sarah Cottingham's book about Ausubel's work and Christian Moore Anderson's book on biology teaching) that, in a " kernel of truth " sense, make me think there's definitely something here to delve into.

I've looked at these before and my temptation is to get sucked in and make a HUGE one detailing all of the links and thoughts an expert might have. But on reading Engelmann and certain parts of Sarah's book on Ausubel, I think I see a huge utility in more focussed, smaller ones to begin with to help students explicitly see the links.

As I say, this is a blog for another day as I start to develop them.

The temptation I have is to sample students' schema randomly looking for specific nodes or specific links. And this might strengthen one link or help to ensure that students don't forget a specific link. But I'd like to develop my own practice significantly in this area:

This year, I'm going to be looking more at elaborative interrogation - I'm going to ask students to explain more widely what they have understand about an idea or topic. More open-ended questions that get them to more explicitly interrogate their own understanding and write it down. I think this will take some scaffolding to achieve which is where the advanced organisers will play an important role.

Anyway, back to the analogy...

If you're unsure of the distinction, the Learning Scientists have a great guest blog on the topic

My takeaway is that:

Retrieval strength is how quickly you can bring things to mind. When retrieval strength is high, you bring it to mind quickly. When retrieval strength is low, you bring it to mind still but it takes a while.

Storage strength is how well-embedded an idea is. When storage strength is high the information is stuck forever. When storage strength is low, it won't be remembered long into the future.

You can think of them as being on different axes so an idea being easy to retrieve doesn't mean that it's got high storage strength.

In my road based analogy each of the two ideas appear as:

Retrieval strength is the width of the road and how permanent the road has become (dirt track, gravel path, tarmac path, tarmac road, giant motorwar)- how quickly can I get to the idea?

Storage strength is how well signposted the turnings are - can I get back to the idea at all? If an gets to a point that it's signposted so clearly (high storage strength) that you don't need to travel there frequently, you know it's there and you can always get back to it (because it's clearly signposted). The roads might deteriorate slightly and it might take longer to get there (low retrieval strength), but you will always make it back.

You can imagine roads that are wide and empty but terribly signposted. These are ideas with high retrieval strength (I can feasibly get to them quickly) but low storage strength (it's hard to get to them again later on). This applies to new content that we've learned and is a state we often find our students in.

You can equally imagine the opposite, a well-signposted network but of roads that are not maintained well and have deteriorated with obstacles abounding (think of any major road network in some dystopian future where virus/zombies/war has broken out). Here, you can still get around the network (as it's well signposted) but it's no longer quick as the network is not well-travelled. These are the ideas that you hold onto for ages but may take a while to bring to mind. This is the state we'd actually like our students to be in when they leave us - some ideas or ways of thinking about the world that are stored so deeply that they're always accessible. Considering what these ideas are for each subject is a really interesting way to spend/waste an hour or twelve!

I'd like to explore this idea more over a few more posts. I'd love to hear any feedback! I'm @tchillimamp on Twitter/X or @drchillimamp on Threads.

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I really like using journeys and travelling as analogies about learning - I've written about them before when I wrote "Let's go for a walk". I love thinking of topics and ideas through the lens of...

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One of the most powerful ideas I've engaged with recently is using a diagram to visualise a shared model of the learning process; using it to get a feel for how learning works in general but also to identify reasons for why it can sometimes not happen. This is the diagram I have in my Rosenshine Principles book, courtesy of Oliver Caviglioli:

I've found it massively helpful as a focus during CPD as we've explored a range of interlocking, overlapping ideas:

Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought' and various ideas in the classic 'Why do students forget everything I say?' chapter.

Rosenshine's Principles: the value of practice, the use of daily review to activate prior learning; weekly and monthly review to enact retrieval practice; the need to break learning down into small steps.

Nuthall's observations from Hidden Lives of Learners: the importance of prior knowledge; his 'three times rule'

Shimamura's MARGE: A: Attend - the need to secure attention and the challenge of mind-wandering; R: teachers' opportunities to build relational models for areas of knowledge; G-E: the generate-evaluate cycle whereby learners bring ideas into working memory (learning is generative), evaluate for accuracy, add to or adjust their schema and then reconsolidate.

The near inevitability of forgetting, the role of retrieval, the need to connect new learning to prior knowledge and a whole host of other issues can be explored in some depth where we have a shared focus for framing the discussion:

( NB: The coloured labels here represent the discussion and thinking we might have around the diagram. They're not meant to complicate the simple diagram itself. I would hesitate to share the labels until I'd had the discussion first in any CPD scenario.)

It always frustrates me when people see a simplified model and jump to the assumption that the thinking is simplistic. Of course it's not. As I've explored before - schema-building is a rich and complex business; 'remembering' and 'learning' as labels encompass nearly anything we can be said to have learned. They're broad terms, not reductive and confining. I also find it frustrating - and fruitless - when people simply suggest that, 'it's a bit more complicated than that' - almost as a kind of free pass not to have to pose an alternative.

If someone suggests, rather pejoratively, that school has been reduced to 'memorising knowledge', I think there's a discussion to be had where, if we re-frame knowledge and memory as broad terms - actually, building schema (formed of knowledge, beliefs, memories, preferences.... of many kinds) in our memory (hence memorised?) is actually good enough as a concept to deal with quite a lot of the things we want to achieve in the field of education. If someone doesn't agree with that, then I'd want them to present a better model - not just tell me this one doesn't work. That way we have competing models to reference and debate, rather than the nebulousness of 'there's more to it than that'.

In a teacher CPD context, the most important reason for exploring a model is that, if the model is any good, it can help to explain things we observe and help suggest solutions to problems. In my experience the model above does exactly that - time and time again. For example, students don't learn what you're trying to teach for all kinds of reasons. It helps to understand why:

Attention deficits: they don't absorb ideas from lesson interactions because their attention is not given to the specific learning points in question; it might be elsewhere. You can't just learn stuff because of a discussion other people are having in the same room. Solution: strategies around securing attention, using narrative structures, inclusive questioning, attention-focusing stimuli.

Memory overload: working memory is finite; often students are dealing with too many ideas and pieces of information; they can't process it all and things don't make sense or stick . Solution: break concepts and tasks into smaller practisable steps and elements.

Lack of prior knowledge:the big hidden variable across the class: students will often not have a schema for the concepts being taught sufficiently well developed to make sense of or retain the new knowledge. Solution: develop a broad curriculum packed with knowledge and experiences across multiple interlocking domains that allow students to fill in knowledge gaps and broaden their schema. Check students' prior knowledge as a routine element of teaching rather than making assumptions.

Insufficient fluency of recall: very often a learning issue is simply a question of practice. Students haven't yet had or taken the opportunity to practise retrieving and applying their knowledge with enough frequency, intensity or variety to have developed the fluency and confidence expected or needed to move to the next stage. Solution: increase the range, intensity and frequency of practice tasks so that students gain confidence and fluency.

Task completion is poor proxy for learning: we can do all kinds of things immediately after being shown or simply by accessing information presented to us, without it forming part of long-term memory or leading to any fluency of recall for use at a later date. Solution: engage in more checking for understanding and more generative activity with supports removed; space practice so that long-term memory and recall are strengthened away from the illusion of knowing through recency.

That's just a sub-set of all kinds of issues that the model deals with. It makes sense of the problems that occur in very many lesson scenarios and provides solutions.

Of course there's a layer of this that is very much related to the everyday business of school subjects: maths, writing, history, creativity in art; understanding science .... There's another layer of how we think and how teaching affects us related to social and emotional development and, very possibly, a more elaborate model could show these things both as separate and then interacting to add further clarity to our understanding. Motivation and our complex responses to feedback would come into this as would other deeper existential elements of who we are: self-image and sense of purpose, for example. It would become a stretch to force everything into a deliberately simple learning and remembering, schema-building cycle.

But the point isn't to have a universal model for all things, burying itself under the weight of complexities it seeks to simplify. The point is to develop useful versatile models that give us insights and offer solutions - within whatever boundaries are needed to maintain their validity and usefulness.

On a very practical level, I can only say that, since introducing the schema-building model into my work, I've found it massively powerful and, given how many areas of teaching and learning it helps with and how much mileage for improvement there is within those areas, I'm not sure I'll need a different one any time soon.

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A model for the learning process. And why it helps to have one.

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One of the most powerful ideas I've engaged with recently is using a diagram to visualise a shared model of the learning process; using it to get a feel for how learning works in general but also to identify reasons for why it can sometimes not happen.

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Gemma Edgcombe Head of Curriculum Design, Teach First

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Science of learning – ‘10 things every teacher educator should know’ | Teach First

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When it comes to teacher education, we think a renewed focus on the science of learning has huge potential to get us to a fair education for all young people.

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This post gives the key points from my ResearchEd Surrey talk at Farnham Heath End School. Firstly, I explored the challenge for teachers in teaching a group of people all at once, with reference to Willingham's ideas about memory and understanding. When children don't understand - there are numerous possible reasons: lack of prior knowledge, insufficient fluency, problems with sustaining mental attention. Teachers need to be conscious of the potential for this to be happening across the class:

Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black has this great insight in their classic work Inside the Black Box. When teachers only select students who volunteer and are worried about getting through the material, they tend to ask less demanding questions in order to keep going forwards:

That's a significant challenge to teachers. Are you making the decision to move on whilst being 'out of touch with the understanding of most of the class?' It's so important to be responsive, ready to move back as well as forward if needed. Rosenshine has a useful set of guidance, comparing more and less effective teachers, stressing the dual purpose of checking students' learning.

He tells us how not to check for understanding - ie by simply asking 'have you understood?' This tells us almost nothing - as students rarely so no or could be wrong in saying yes. But, most importantly, there are always degrees of understanding. Instead of asking if, we should ask what student have understood. Rosenshine gives us a nice list of ways teachers can check for understanding.:

In the flow of instructional teaching, checking for understanding is supported by a range of questioning techniques, all underpinned by cold calling - so that every student engages in thinking and is ready to respond. It can be important to switch between cold calling, asking individuals - and pair-share, where everyone has a change to air their thoughts and rehearse their explanations. This gives the teacher a better sampling of the level of understanding across the class.

We covered many of the ideas in Cold Calling and Cold Call Variations, In our Walkthrus materials, we have a walkthru for Checking for Understanding:

Central to this is that each exchange is a short dialogue. Then by exploring the responses from multiple students we get a sense of the ideas students have grasped and the way they express their idea. It can be useful scaffold student responses, including question stems such as those included in Rosenshine's Principles:

The main decision-making for a teacher is how to respond in light of the information from these exchanges. Re-teaching requires being ready with additional examples and/or the nimble subject knowledge needed to generate new questions and explanations spontaneously. Deferring to another time can be a good decision - often students just need longer to make sense of things and you might choose to return to the ideas next lesson or next week.. to allow time for more ideas to weave together in students' minds.

Checking for understanding is exemplified by some ideas related to deliberate vocabulary development as described in this post. We need to connect need words to ideas and meaning students already have.

Thanks to everyone who came to my session.

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Check for Understanding... why it matters and how to do it. #rEDSurrey21

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Full Slides from researched-2021-surreyDownload This post gives the key points from my ResearchEd Surrey talk at Farnham Heath End School. Firstly, I explored the challenge for teachers in teaching a group of people all at once, with reference to Willingham's ideas about memory and understanding. When children don't understand - there are numerous possible reasons:...

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Memory not memories – teaching for long term learning

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It seems like a life time ago but this time last week I should have been at ResearchEd, listening to great speakers and getting butterflies about my session later that day. Except that I slipped on…

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Teaching for understanding: Schema-building and generative learning.

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I've had the privilege of observing a lot of lessons already this term - with huge thanks to the teachers concerned for their warm welcome. As I've been doing this, I realise I'm applying a continually evolving mental model of the learning process to what I'm seeing - and this is what influences the dialogues...

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this guidance report aims to help secondary schools improve literacy in all subject areas. it provides seven recommendations related to reading

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vocabulary development and supporting struggling students. throughout the report

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recommendations emphasise the importance of disciplinary literacy.  disciplinary literacy is an approach to improving literacy across the curriculum. it recognises that literacy skills are both general and subject specific

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emphasising the value of supporting teachers in every subject to teach students how to read

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write and communicate effectively in their subjects.  this guidance challenges the notion that literacy in secondary school is solely the preserve of english teachers

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or literacy coordinators. the emphasis on disciplinary literacy makes clear that every teacher communicates their subject through academic language

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speaking and listening are at the heart of knowing and doing science

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and every other subject in secondary school.

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Seven recommendations related to reading, writing, talk, vocabulary development and supporting struggling students

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Why curriculum matters: a response to Tim Oates, Dylan William and Daisy Christodoulou

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Why the views of our leading educationalists on the curriculum don’t add up

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The CfSA Directory – The Council for Subject Associations

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This FREE, quick reference, digital directory covers subjects taught in schools; it is focused on every subject you teach and introduces you to the subject associations whose purpose it is to help you in the classroom. There are links to SEND providers and other organisations that can provide support to you and your school.

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The importance and the underestimation of subject knowledge apply as much in the primary phase as they do in the secondary phase, where primary teachers need to know the foundational knowledge and what progression looks like over time in 13 subjects, of course albeit in less depth.

It is also true that teachers - and therefore also their teacher educators - need good knowledge of child development. Although this is neither subject knowledge nor pedagogical knowledge it does support teachers to make better choices about what they teach, when, and in what order, and what strategies and techniques they use to do so.

I would argue strongly that what we teach (the subject content) is too often overshadowed by how we teach (pedagogy). Good pedagogy isn't necessarily generic, as the nature of the content of a subject has much bearing on how that content is taught.
Take the Teachers' Standards, for example: only one out of the eight standards refer explicitly to subject knowledge. Teachers' Standard 3 ('demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge') is the Cinderella Standard, working hard in the background, underappreciated, to support trainees' practice in other standards:

TS2 (promote good progress and outcomes by pupils)

TS4 (plan and teach well-structured lessons)

TS5 (adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils)

TS6 (make accurate and productive use of assessment)

Put simply, without good knowledge of what you are teaching, it is impossible to meet these standards in a meaningful way. For example, one has to know what good progress looks like in a subject area and what is being assessed to promote good outcomes and make productive use of assessment.

As teachers of subjects (and I'm including primary teachers in this), trainees need to develop an understanding of vital subject content, how to sequence it over time, and what misconceptions pupils are likely to develop and how to overcome them. It makes sense that those who educate specifically in the teaching of a subject must also have well developed subject knowledge. This must be paired with pedagogical content knowledge - that is an understanding of what to teach in what order, how to communicate it, and what common misconceptions might arise. Only if this is the case can the teacher educator effectively model, guide and prompt what good practice in those standards above consists of.

To support this, I will use a case study from my recent work to show how I have drawn upon my own subject and curriculum knowledge to support trainees to develop effective practice in each of the four Teachers' Standards.
Case Study

Context:

In term two of his training year, a history trainee had made good progress in establishing high expectations and clear routines (secure in TS1). He had built excellent relationships with pupils in his key stage 4 class and behaviour was good (secure in TS7). He was regularly planning lessons, the activities of which appeared to clearly relate to the learning objectives he was setting (making progress in TS4).

However, he had a tendency to deliver activities one after another during lessons without effectively checking for understanding. What checking did take place after completion of activities mostly consisted of the trainee asking a small number of individual pupils to share their answers to set questions, or the information they had collated into a table or mind map diagram. As a result, it was difficult for him to show he was accurately assessing pupils' learning (TS6) and supporting them to achieve good progress (TS2).

Also, although some aspects of his lessons were well planned with clear links between activities and objectives, his planning was not building pupil understanding as it was not focused on the detail of the knowledge they needed to grasp (TS4). As a result, he was not able to effectively adapt his teaching to varying needs within the class as he was unclear about which pupils had secure knowledge and which needed further support (TS5).

Diagnosis:

Observations of lessons and conversations with the trainee revealed the cause of this difficulty was a lack of understanding of the precise knowledge pupils needed to gain within a particular topic. Lacking this granular detail, the trainee was delivering lessons with generalised learning objectives, such as (in a unit on the development of the West in 19th century USA) '[e]xplain why the cattle industry changed after the Civil War'.

When attempting to assess whether pupils had achieved this objective, he relied on asking pupils to feedback 'whole' answers to such questions. Without being clear about the building blocks of knowledge needed to answer such questions effectively, he rarely used this information to diagnose misconceptions, recap key points missed or challenge pupils to develop their understanding further. In addition, this checking was not comprehensive as he was sampling individual pupils, rather than assessing the understanding of the entire class before moving on.

Subject knowledge development:

Initially, my work was for him to focus on these building blocks of knowledge that would enable pupils to fully understand such key questions, as in the example above of the development of the cattle industry in 19th century USA:

1. Knowledge needed by pupils:

A sense of the geography of the industry. For example, they need to know where Texas (the starting point of the cattle trails) is and the places the cattle were driven to.

Methods used to develop this knowledge:

We began to use a range of maps to explicitly teach pupils the position of Texas, Chicago and mid-western 'cow towns', the states and territories such towns were in, and the location of the cattle trails in the wider North American continent.

We explored the relative locations of important places in the cattle industry by using compass directions (Cattle were driven NORTH from Texas; the railroads were expanding WESTWARDS).

2. Knowledge needed by pupils:

The chronology of the industry, including when the Civil War took place, secure in long-term memory.

Methods used to develop this knowledge:

This sense of chronology was developed through the construction of a comprehensive timeline, which was added to as the unit developed.

3. Knowledge needed by pupils:

The factors that influenced the growth of the industry, such as the location of newly built railroads, or the emergence of new markets for beef as populations spread west during the 1870s.

Methods used to develop this knowledge:

This knowledge was developed through focused whole-class reading tasks with:

Regular emphasis and summaries of key points by the trainee;

Carefully designed questioning to check understanding of key terminology during the reading;

The setting of questions to be answered by pupils following the reading, which focused on the key information needed to explain the industry's growth.

How this supported the trainees' progress in TS 2, 4, 5 and 6:

TS4 requires trainees to plan and teach well-structured lessons. Our work together dug deeper into the specific items of knowledge that pupils needed to answer a broad causation question about the development of the cattle industry. This enabled the trainee to build on an already effective aspect of his practice in which he thought carefully about matching lesson activities he designed to the learning objectives he set. Working at a more granular level of detail enabled him to sequence the content pupils were exposed to within these activities and ensure his planning considered what pupils would be thinking about at every stage of the lesson. Through this he built pupils' knowledge cumulatively, ensuring efficient and effective use of lesson time.

A clearer idea of the detailed content to be taught also meant he was a lot clearer about what he was assessing when checking for understanding, supporting his development in TS6. He could design questions to check specific items of knowledge as well as introducing regular low-stakes quizzes, for example on events included in the timeline. Allied to this, we designed, practised and delivered assessment routines based around the Teach Like a Champion technique 'Show Me'. This involves posing questions to all pupils at the same time and receiving their answers simultaneously (in this case using a programme on the pupils' school-provided tablet computers). Thus, the responses of all pupils could be checked and the data received can be considered reliable because all pupils answered independently at the same time. As a result of this precision of assessment, the trainee was better able to diagnose misconceptions pupils had or knowledge they had not retained.

This in turn meant the trainee was better able to adapt his teaching to the strengths and needs of all pupils, improving his practice in TS5. The low stakes quizzes demonstrated, for example, that specific pupils were taking longer to understand the geography of the cattle trade. This allowed the trainee to provide these pupils with maps during whole class reading exercises so that they could locate the place names mentioned in the text. This reduced the cognitive load of the reading exercise for these pupils, enabling them to better follow the text and integrate the information in it with the information in the maps. This assessment information also enabled the trainee to target his questioning during the reading exercises towards these pupils, asking for example: '[i]nto which state to the west Kansas did the railroads extend during the 1870s?

Finally, this all had the effect of improving pupils' progress in history. He began to specify the precise knowledge he wanted pupils to gain and designed activities to focus on this. He was able to more precisely assess the extent to which this was successful and take action to address misconceptions or difficulties for specific pupils or groups of pupils. Overall, he moved away from an approach akin to throwing as much paint at a wall as possible and seeing what sticks. Such an approach is satisfactory for higher prior attaining pupils with larger vocabularies and more knowledge in their long-term memories. However, it somewhat leaves to chance the progress of pupils with lower prior attainment, smaller vocabularies and less knowledge in their long-term memories. Instead he moved towards an approach more akin to that of an Old Master, clear about what the end product looked like and carefully and systematically, but with much skill, painting with subtle brushstrokes. Guided always by the history content pupils needed to learn, he sequenced it carefully and assessed it systematically, meeting pupils' needs along the way, to ensure his class were better able to give a credible account of the reasons for the growth of the cattle industry in the USA in the 1870s.

About the author

Lee is a teacher educator working for Teach First in the East Midlands. He's also a Teach First Ambassador, who joined our programme to train as a teacher in 2004. Find him on Twitter @LeeDonaghy

About this series

We train thousands of new teachers each year, but this is only around 5% of all new teachers. So we wanted to share some of the thinking behind our teacher education in this series of blogs. We hope these blogs will be helpful for the thousands of schools that support new trainee teachers each year, and act as a starting point for conversations with other teacher educators - so we can all keep learning and improving.

This is our current thinking but we're always reviewing and learning from research, other organisations and practice. We want your views and feedback: What do you agree with? Is there anything you disagree with? What have we missed? Let us know on twitter - you can chat to our teacher education leads @FayeCraster and @Reuben_Moore (and we're on @TeachFirst)

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Subject knowledge - '10 things every teacher educator should know'

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What we teach (the subject content) is as important as how we teach (pedagogy). That might seem like an obvious statement, but it's often underestimated. We e

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Ask the Experts - “How do you Encourage Trainees to Develop their Subject Knowledge?” - NASBTT

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We asked our Subject Specialist Associate Consultants one question. “How do you encourage Trainees to develop their subject knowledge?” Here is what they told us; Dr Kelly Richens – Secondary Biology Running through the heart of great teachers are two main themes: the desire to want to make a difference,…

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Classroom practice - Support for early career teachers - GOV.UK

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Secure subject knowledge helps teachers to motivate pupils and teach effectively.

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This animation aims to cut through the complexity that surrounds metacognition by providing a clear example of what it looks like in practice. It could be used to start colleague conversations, build staff knowledge when designing and delivering Effective Professional Development on metacognition.

https://youtu.be/sAik_RQY_Dg

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evidence suggests the use of ‘metacognitive strategies’ – which get pupils to think about their own learning - can be worth the equivalent of an additional +7 months’ progress when used well. however

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while the potential impact of these approaches is very high

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less is known about how to apply them effectively in the classroom.  this guidance report reviews the best available research to offer teachers and senior leaders practical advice on how to develop their pupils’ metacognitive skills and knowledge. the report has recommendations in seven areas and ‘myth busts’ common misconceptions teachers have about metacognition.  for example

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some teachers think they need to teach metacognitive approaches in ‘learning to learn’ or ‘thinking skills’ sessions. but the report warns that metacognitive strategies should be taught in conjunction with specific subject content as pupils find it hard to transfer these generic tips to specific tasks.

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Apply metacognitive strategies in the classroom.

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A look into the application of the I do, we do, you do strategy, sometimes referred to as the 'gradual release of responsibility' model, and how it can be applied across all lessons, not just in teaching maths or equations.

I first came across the I do, we do, you do learning cycle when reading Doug Lemov's excellent Teach Like A Champion (Volume 1, I think). In I do/We do/You do (otherwise known as Direct Instruction, Guided Practice, and Independent Practice) responsibility is gradually released from teacher to the student. The teacher must pay attention to both the sequence in which knowledge is provided to students but also to the rate at which cognitive work is required. There are links between this model and many different widely accepted teaching and learning techniques, including cognitive load theory and metacognition to name a couple.

Sadly, most teaching and learning models, including the two mentioned above, suffer from lethal mutations and become twisted by people's personal style or leadership decisions. I believe this unfortunate outcome is not a result of ignorance or deliberate engineering but in pursuit of the instance for accountability measures and 'quick gains'. Adam Robbins has very recently wrote a blog in this here. In my experience, there is also a psychological phenomenon involved called 'confirmation bias'. This is where people look to have their existing theories confirmed and dismiss or discount anything opposed to those existing view points. This often results in the partial application of concepts or the squeezing in of new ideas in to remaining protocols or structures. Like a square peg in a round hole being battered in by a hammer...

A square peg in a round hole, a metaphor for the forcing of a new idea in to an existing process

Now, the gradual release of responsibility model is not immune to this process of lethal mutations, but in my opinion it's harder to mutate. The simplicity of the approach coupled with the intuitive nature, make it a simple model for educators to adjust to. For example, if I wanted to learn how to change an oil filter in a car, the ideal method I would choose would be to:

1. Seek out an expert to tell me how to do it and, importantly, to show me how (Expert does)

2. Have a go at changing the oil filter with the expert close for support and guidance when I get stuck or confused (Expert and novice do together)

3. Once I have done this a few times with support, I would like to have a few goes on my own to make sure I can really do it (Novice does)

As you can see from my annotations in italics, this is the I do (expert does), We do (expert and novice together), You do (novice practices independently).

I strongly believe that just having knowledge of this teaching model will drastically improve most people's teaching by increasing the potential learning opportunities their students will have access to. The reason for this is that to successfully achieve this cycle in a lesson, you must apply some other equally successful strategies. I, we, you is not a standalone model to be put on a pedestal and followed blindly. It is a model that encompasses good practice and does what effective models do, it enables a common language and a thought experiment for people to discuss good teaching and learning. It is not over complicated or tied to specific subject areas and I have seen it effectively deployed in History, Science, Maths and English lessons.

For those who are not aware of the I do, we do, you do cycle, here are the main highlights:

I do - the teacher provides expert knowledge that the students currently do. This could be disseminated using modelling, worked examples and explanations making it a very powerful tool for teachers to begin the learning process. This essentially involves an expert sharing the knowledge. The power of a worked example is well known and is discussed expertly un Bob Pritchard's EEF Blog found here.

We do - after the teacher has 'taught' the initial information, the teacher's focus shifts to the students and what they have remembered or understood (call and response). This will most commonly take the form of questioning, mini-whiteboards, say it again better and the formative assessment of students to determine the initial success of the explanation or introduction of new knowledge. This could also be referred to as guided practice.

You do - once the teacher is satisfied their explanation has been received and students have a general competency in the new knowledge, the students must practice. This independent practice, for example via SLOP questions, is vital for students to 'think hard' for extended periods and therefore increase the chance of recalling the information later.

The I do, we do, you do model is most commonly associated with maths and the maths or equation style questions of physics and chemistry. This application is obvious and is one most people would be able to identify or apply easily. The teacher models a worked example (I do), then goes through an example with the class (we do) and then gives a worksheet with 50 progressively difficult questions and sets the class off for the rest of the lesson (see Tom Chillimamp's SLOP blog for more on this). Please see some screen grabs below of a recent lesson I taught my year 11 on specific heat capacity. This was followed by further independent SLOP and please ignore the scruffy hand writing, I am still getting used to the new tablet!

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A look into the application of the I do, we do, you do strategy, sometimes referred to as the 'gradual release of responsibility' model, and how it can be applied across all lessons, not just in...

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I've long thought that one of the weakest proxy indicators of effective learning is engagement, and yet it's a term persistently used by school leaders (and some researchers) as one of the most important measures of quality. In fact many of the things we've traditionally associated with effective teachers may not be indicative of students actually learning anything at all.

At the #ascl2015 conference last Friday, the always engaging Professor Rob Coe gave a talk entitled 'From Evidence to Great Teaching' and reiterated this claim. Take the following slide - How many 'outstanding' lessons have been awarded so based on this checklist?

Now these all seem like key elements of a successful classroom, so what's the problem? and more specifically, why is engagement is such a poor proxy indicator - surely the busier they are, the more they are learning?

This paradox is explored by Graham Nuthall in his book 'The Hidden Lives of Learners,' (2007) in which he writes:

"Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50% of what the teacher is teaching." p.24

Nuthall's work shows that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they're comfortable with and already know how to do as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks. A good example of this as Alex Quigley has pointed out is that engagement in the form of the seemingly visible activity of highlighting is often "little more than colouring in." Furthermore, teachers are more than happy to sanction that kind of stuff in the name of fulfilling that all important 'engagement' proxy indicator so prevalent in lesson observation forms.

The other difficulty is the now constant exhortation for students to be 'motivated' (often at the expense of subject knowledge and depth) but motivation in itself is not enough. Nuthall writes that:

"Learning requires motivation, but motivation does not necessarily lead to learning."p.35

Motivation and engagement are vital elements in learning but it seems to be what they are used in conjunction with that determines impact. It is right to be motivating students but motivated to do what? If they are being motivated to do the types of tasks they already know how to do or focus on the mere performing of superficial tasks at the expense of the assimilation of complex knowledge then the whole enterprise may be a waste of time.

Learning is in many cases invisible as outlined many times by David Didau and is certainly not linear but rather more nebulous in actuality. As Prof. Coe reminds us, 'learning happens when people have to think hard' but unfortunately there is no easy way of measuring this, so what does he suggest is effective in terms of evidencing quality?

Ultimately he argues that it comes down to a more nuanced set of practitioner/student skills, habits and conditions that are very difficult to observe, never mind measure. Things like and which are contingent on "selecting, integrating, orchestrating, adapting, monitoring, responding" " context, history, personalities, relationships" and which all work together to create impact and initiate effective learning. So while engagement and motivation are important elements in learning they should be seen as part of a far more complex conglomerate of factors that traditional lesson observations have little hope of finding in a 20 min drive-by.

This is where a more robust climate of research and reflective practice can inform judgements. It's true that more time for teachers to be critically reflective will improve judgements but we also need to be more explicit in precisely what it is we are looking for and accept that often the most apparent classroom element may also be the most misleading.

Slides: Prof. Rob Coe: From Evidence to Great Teaching ASCL 20 Mar 2015

Nuthall, Graham (2007). The Hidden Lives of Learners. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press

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Engagement: Just because they're busy, doesn't mean they're learning anything.

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I've long thought that one of the weakest proxy indicators of effective learning is engagement, and yet it's a term persistently used by school leaders (and some researchers) as one of the most important measures of quality. In fact many of the things we've traditionally associated with effective teachers may not be indicative of students...

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Teacher explanations are a vital part of education. As a profession we now have a greater appreciation for the role cognitive load can play in our students learning experience. Sometimes great explanations can be unravelled by poor management of our student's cognitive load.

Today I want to suggest some simple things we can do to ensure our explanations are cognisant to our students working memory capacities.
We all know that chunking is a great way of ensuring students have time to process the information we provide. We can sometimes get caught up in our own passion for our topic and forget to chunk our explanations.
The simplest way of ensuring the explanation is chunked is by starting with a blank canvas. Planning to live draw can feel daunting at first, but with practice and planning it is the perfect way of directing attention to the most relevant information and avoiding distractions. If you prefer PowerPoints to a visualiser then considering carefully what information appears on each slide is vital. The judicious use of relevant images and text spread over multiple slides is an effective tool. As is using animations to highlight or add relevant information in sequence.
Students can only learn new information by building on their existing knowledge, or schema. Before starting an explanation spend time assessing and activating the relevant prior knowledge of the class and adapt your explanation accordingly. A simple mini whiteboard quiz can get the job done in a few minutes and gives you vital clues about what areas might need a more detail.
The working memory model identifies the paths that visual and sound information follow to be different. By enhancing verbal explanations with relevant images, we can expand a students working memory capacity. This is the crux of effective dual coding. Dual coding often gets conflated with the use iconographic illustrations. While these can be used effectively as dual coding these are not the only way. Simple drawings, well chosen photos and diagrams can effectively dual code information. Dual coding is a concept that is often thought to be more complicated than it really is. Just follow this simple rule: Ensure each image adds to the explanation. If it is aesthetic, then get rid of it.
Daniel Willingham has written about the way the human mind appears to treat stories with a certain amount of privilege. Narrative structures that have characters conflict and consequence seem to be easier to remember than just abstract facts. Teachers should use narrative structures carefully though. Sometimes extra information can distract students from the main points of the story. These are known as seductive details and diminish the explanations effectiveness. When planning a narrative structure to an explanation try to only include extra information that helps to illustrate a difference or similarity between the characters involved and try to avoid just random trivia.
When explaining something we need students' attention. If they do not attend to the relevant information, then they have no chance of learning it. We need to ensure all students can give the teacher their attention by creating a calm and silent environment. As teachers we need to tell the students where to look to get the most relevant information and we need to do our best to ensure other students are not distracting them. We need to modulate our voice to emphasise key features and pause to ensure students are paying attention when needed.
Questions are used to check students understanding but also to ensure all students are paying attention. For example, Cold Call does a brilliant job of keeping all students engaged in the lesson. When giving explanations it is vital, we used sporadic questions to check students are paying attention. This is a double-edged sword as too many questions will disrupt the narrative flow, so it is best to just drop a single question in when there is a natural break in the explanation, but this is very context-specific so you might want to experiment.

Adam Robbins

Teaching secondary science: A complete guide by Adam Boxer has an excellent theoretical model for building explanations that is relevant to most subjects

Cognitive load theory: Research that teachers need to understand by NSW government is a great overall guide to the practical implications of cognitive load theory.

The evolution of a presentation is a blog I wrote during lockdown that illustrates simple ways of adjusting PowerPoints to direct attention

The privileged status of stories is an article by Daniel T Willingham about narrative structures and the mind

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Simple ways to reduce the cognitive load of teacher explanations

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details. Here's a round-up of 10 - each one of which warrants attention and focus in a CPD or coaching process as people build up and hone their repertoire of go-to techniques:

1. Signal, Pause, Insist

2. Sustaining Attention

3. Modelling

4. Explaining

5. Checking for Understanding

6. Cold Calling

7. Think Pair Share

8. Mini Whiteboards

9. Retrieval Practice

10. Feedback as actions

And finally - here's what it looks like put together:

Image Credit: https://emptechgroup.com/the-internet-of-things/ I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative...

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10 Things: The essentials of your pedagogical toolkit.

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details.

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details. Here's a round-up of 10 - each one of which warrants attention and focus in a CPD or coaching process as people build up and hone their repertoire of go-to techniques:

1. Signal, Pause, Insist

2. Sustaining Attention

3. Modelling

4. Explaining

5. Checking for Understanding

6. Cold Calling

7. Think Pair Share

8. Mini Whiteboards

9. Retrieval Practice

10. Feedback as actions

And finally - here's what it looks like put together:

Image Credit: https://emptechgroup.com/the-internet-of-things/ I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative...

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10 Things: The essentials of your pedagogical toolkit.

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details.

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Moving from ‘differentiation’ to ‘adaptive teaching’

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What does adaptive teaching mean for Education South West?

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while the number of teachers in mainstream schools in england has remained relatively steady over the last decade or so

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the number of full-time equivalent tas has more than trebled since 2000: from 79

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700. teaching assistants comprise over a quarter of the workforce in mainstream schools in england: 35% of the primary workforce

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and 14% of the secondary school workforce. the number of full-time equivalent tas has more than trebled since 2000: from 79

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there are currently more tas in english nursery and primary schools than teachers: 273

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900.1 about 7% of tas in state-funded schools have higher-level teaching assistant (hlta) status. a key reason for increasing the number of tas was to help deal with problems with teacher workloads. in 2003

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the government introduced the national agreement to help raise pupil standards and tackle excessive teacher workload

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in large part via new and expanded support roles and responsibilities for tas and other support staff. the growth in the numbers of tas has also been driven by the push for greater inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (send) into mainstream schools

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with tas often providing the key means by which inclusion is facilitated. given that sen pupils and low-attaining pupils are more likely to claim free school meals (fsm)1. tas also work more closely with pupils from low-income backgrounds. indeed

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expenditure on tas is one of the most common uses of the pupil premium in primary schools

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a government initiative that assigns funding to schools in proportion to the number of pupils on fsm. a combination of these factors means that schools now spend approximately £4.4 billion each year on tas

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corresponding to 13% of the education budget. this presents an excellent opportunity for improvements in practice

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with such a large and already committed resource in place. the recommendations in this guidance recognise the fact that schools are operating within already tight budgets; however

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noticeable improvements in pupil outcomes can be made through the thoughtful use of existing resources

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Guidance to help primary and secondary schools make the best use of TAs

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).
Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of 'evidence-informed' advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam's five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have 'done AfL to death' in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn't get a job unless you said 'AfL' about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam's ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of 'AfL' was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here's how I see it all connecting:
1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Wiliam says 'if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there'. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read 'learning intentions' as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge - in all its forms - they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means 'what does excellence look like?'. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in 'clarifying, understanding and sharing' - teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
In some ways, this 'strategy' is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. 'Discussions, tasks and activities' covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of 'responsive teaching'. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they've learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design - including good diagnostic multiple choice questions - and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Shimamura's 'Generate-Evaluate' model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall's ideas about 'hidden lives' and the idea that we can't be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check - now, and again later.
3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward. It's this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ' feedback as actions ' post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students' learning improves - and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It's got an interpersonal, motivational element that can't be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn't a purely technical, objective task - although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.

The goal is to change the students' capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin's Butterfly is wonderful - because it shows what effective feedback can achieve - but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to 'look like a scientist' or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine's ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we're still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we've succeeded (SatNav style), then we've still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.
4. Activating students as learning resources for one another
I think this is the feature of Wiliam's five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other's learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can't have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out 'where the learner is' and 'how to get to where the learner is going'. This is where disciplined ' think pair share ' becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains - but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners' answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy - because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students' responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie's 'reciprocal teaching', Shimamura's 'think it, say it, teach it', Slavin's collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning
In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of 'noble intent' rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. 'Owning your own learning' is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these 'goals' are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals - the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;

setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.

setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building - as per Shimamura's Relate in MARGE.

providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that 'AfL' or even 'formative assessment' has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it's when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That's the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It's powerful stuff, right there, where it's been for years.
Key References:
Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success and confidence. It can appear and feel very organic but if you deconstruct the range of things a teacher has to do in a successful learning sequence - it's quite an impressive array of specific definable elements. I think it can be helpful - as many others have done - to consider this is various phases. Obviously caveats abound - it depends on what you're teaching, the point in the overall learning journey and who the students are.

But.. for what it's worth, here's an idealised sequence of a what a teacher might do and the techniques they might use:

Phase 1: Clarifying Learning Intentions

Big picture orientation: Setting the scene for the learning to follow. What's the scope of the current topic and where are we in the big schema of ideas.. ? This orientation can really help students to make sense of what follows, giving them a wider sense of purpose and helping make sense of the longer term as ideas connect.

Set learning goals: Here, today, what we are aiming to learn? That is - by the end of this lesson or lesson series, you should know about X, be able to do Y and be able to explain Z. This is different to setting task goals. The key is for students to understand the learning goals - not to write them down. This requires some discussion, some checking for understanding and consolidation.

Phase 2: Activate and consolidate prior knowledge

The core aim is to ensure all students - every single one - has had a chance to consciously explore their existing knowledge related to the learning goals, focusing their attention on key elements. This could be done as follows, using all four elements in sequence as it's worth spending the time here:

Pair Discussion: what are the three main features of X? Or - simply - what is the answer to the question on the board? (A question entirely based on previously taught material.) Discussion helps students explore verbally in a safe pair bubble. They get warmed up.

White boards: Students share their key ideas or answers at once; teacher scans the responses addressing some key issues, giving corrective feedback

A sequence of three diagnostic MCQs on the board: Students have to answer individually, responding with whiteboards. Every student is made to think. The teacher picks up the trends and addresses key issues that arise.

A short round of cold calling to check for understanding, looking for good recap and consolidation of the material required as a starting point for today. The teacher re-teaches as needed - making a judgement to balance the need to consolidate with the need to move on.

Phase 3: Explain and Model

There's huge variation possible here depending on the material but it might include:

Reading -> summarising: A passage from a text is read aloud. The text contains the necessary visuals with some key terms also highlighted. Students then echo-read - taking turns with their talk partner to read back alternate paragraphs to each other. It's noisy as half the class is reading at once but there's lots of practice reading going on. Two students are invited - after cold calling - to summarise the text and explain the diagram. The teacher compares their summaries and consolidates the key points with few bullet points.

Demonstrate and Check for Understanding: Teacher demonstrates how to answer a particular question type based on the text. They do this via a live modelling process writing by hand under the visualiser, narrating their thinking as they go. Periodically, the teacher stops to select students to explain the latest step in the modelled example, checking their understanding. (The reading plus visualiser demonstration feels like a much better intro than clicking through a powerpoint.)

Multiple examples. More than one similar example is modelled. The first two examples are compared side by side so students can see how they are different but also how they follow similar patterns. The teacher models the self-evaluation process: Is it correct? Is it good? Could I do it better? They cold call students to invite critique, identifying key features of success.

Phase 4: Gradual hand-over

After the modelling input, students are ready to start doing things themselves - the hand-over begins:

Scaffolded, guided practice: The first task is exactly like the modelled examples with a couple of partially completed examples on the screen for students to complete. The answers are checked via whiteboards - everyone showing their completed examples.

Short-feedback loops: Students now practice examples of their own, set from the screen; each example is a short-answer form. For each one, students Show Call or respond with the Show Me whiteboard routine so the teacher can check for early success. Corrective feedback is offered; difficulties are discussed.

More extended practice. Now students engage in more extended guided practice, with a task containing repeat examples with gradual variation and difficulty incline. For a writing lesson, this is a more extended written section. During this period, the teacher circulates actively, looking to see that the new learning is being applied successfully around the room.

Students also engage in some self assessment, with responses sampled by the teacher. Which ones did you get wrong? The teacher evaluates students' responses to make the key decision: Are we ready to move to independent practice OR do I need to reteach and reconsolidate more elements of the material, with more guided practice first?

Phase 5: Independent Practice

When ready, students now apply their new learning to a phase of independent practice -working for 10 or more minutes on a series of questions or a writing task, on their own. Anticipating that students will now diverge according to their fluency and confidence, the task is designed with some key features:

Tiered scaffolds: students can access the task with more or less support as required

A gradient of increasing difficulty: there are opportunities to jump forward or to include more complex elements; there are additional practice questions available at various levels.

Sustained attention. The teacher is active in supervision to support students' sustained attention without interrupting the Golden Silence of independent study - providing time cues, prompts and scaffolds in a non-intrusive way with key students that need them.

Phase 6: Review and Consolidate.

The practice phase leads into a stock-taking consolidation phase. Here the teacher selects samples of student work and seeks to establish how well the key learning goals have been met - to support planning for the next lesson.

Show call. Students are invited to share their answers or their work completed during independent practice. This could via reading aloud, showcasing under the visualiser or a gather around routine. Peer Critique helps to engage students in applying the success criteria they're in the process of learning.

Paired Quizzing supports students with knowledge checks. One of each pair of students uses the study materials to ask interrogative questions of their partner -who has to respond unaided. They take turns, swapping roles.

Plan ahead. The teacher evaluates the review activities, revisits the Big Picture and Learning Goals to review the progress made and to set out the journey ahead. Next lesson we'll look at....

Phew! Exhausting isn't it! Of course there's infinite variations to all of these elements. The point here is to get beyond the whole 'teaching is all a bit of an art' thing... to explore the specific components that build up to create that impression. I find that where teachers are able to isolate specific aspects of their craft to review and refine and then seek to implement them with some real intentional fidelity to what they understand as an effective form of the techniques ..it works. The teaching is better; the learning is more secure. Of course the optimal sequence and blend of techniques is subtle, complex.. fluid. But it's not magic. A logical approach informed by an understanding of the learning model and group dynamics helps to craft lessons with a flow and responsiveness that allows schema-building to flourish.. not just for the lucky few, but for everyone.

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Responsive Teaching in action: An idealised sequence.

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success...

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.'

Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

We spent hours marking. We spent ages inputting data. And we didn't design assessments cumulatively.

First mistake: we spent exorbitant amounts of time in the first year marking, in particular marking English and History essays and paragraphs. We wrote comments, we set targets, we tried individualised icons, we corrected misspellings, we corrected grammatical errors, we judged and scored written accuracy, we wrote and shared rubrics with pupils. We spent hours every week on this. Over the year, we must have spent hundreds of hours on it.

The hidden pitfall of marking is opportunity cost. Every hour that a teacher spends marking is an hour they can't spend on renewable resourcing: resourcing that endures for years. Marking a book is useful for one pupil once only: creating a knowledge organiser is useful for every pupil (and every teacher) that ever uses it at again. Marking is a hornet. Hornets are high-effort, low-impact; butterflies are high-impact, low-effort. Knowledge organisers are a butterfly; marking is a hornet. We had been blind to just how badly the hornet's nest of marking was stinging us. So we cut marking altogether and now no longer mark at all.

Our second mistake: we spent far too much time in the first few years on data input. We typed in multiple scores for pupils that we didn't use. Preoccupied by progress, we thought we needed as many numbers as we could get our hands on. But the simplistic equation of 'more data, better progress' didn't hold up under scrutiny. Every teacher typed in multiple scores for each assessment, which were then collated so we could analyse the breakdowns. We were deluged in data, but thirsting for insight. There was far too much data to possibly act on. My muddled thinking left us mired in mediocrity, and we had invested 100s of hours for little long-term impact.

What we realised is this: data must serve teachers, rather than teachers serving data. Our axiom now is that we must only collect data that we use. There's no point in drowning in data, or killing ourselves to input data that we don't use.

Our third mistake was this: we had forgotten about forgetting. We designed end-of-unit assessments that tested what pupils had only just learned, and then congratulated ourselves when they did well whilst it was very fresh in the memory. We had pupils write essays just after they had finished the unit. We coached them to superb performances - but they were performances that they would not be able to repeat on that text in English or that period of History even a few weeks later. Certainly, months later, they wouldn't stand a chance. Just as if you asked me to retake for Physics GCSE tomorrow, I would flunk it badly, so just one year on, our pupils would flunk the exact assessment that they had aced one year earlier.

Looking back with hindsight, these three mistakes - on marking, data and design - helped us realise our two great blind spots in assessment: workload and memory. We didn't design our assessments with pupils' memory and teachers' workload in mind.

We were creating unnecessary and unhelpful workload for teachers that prevented them focusing on what matters most. Marking and data were meant to improve teaching and assessment, but assessment and teaching and had ended up being inhibited by them.

We were forgetting just how much our pupils were forgetting. Forgetting is a huge problem amongst pupils and a huge blind spot in teaching. If pupils have forgotten the Shakespeare play they were studying last year, can they really be said to have learned it properly? What if they can't remember the causes or course of the war they studied last year in history? Learning is for nothing if it's all forgotten.
The Battle of the Bridge
Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. There's always a teaching-learning gap. Just because we've taught it, it doesn't mean pupils have learned it. The best teachers close the teaching-learning gap so that their pupils learn - and remember rather than forget - what they are being taught. We've found the idea of assessment as a bridge to be a useful analogy for curriculum and exam design. Once you see assessment as a bridge, you can begin to ask new questions that generate new insights: what principles in teaching are equivalent to the laws of physics that underpin the engineering and construction of the bridge? How can we design and create a bridge that is built to endure? How can we create an assessment model that bridges the teaching-learning gap?

We've found two assessment solutions that have exciting potential. Here are the reasons I'm excited about them:
They have absolutely no cost. They are low-effort for staff to create. They have high impact on pupils' learning. They are not tech-dependent at all. They are based on decades of scientific research. They can be immediately implemented by any teacher on Monday morning. They have stood the test of time over the years. We'll still be using them in three, six and even ten years' time, and beyond.
In short: no cost, low effort, high impact, research-based, long-term solutions.

Two of the most effective assessment tools we've found for closing the teaching-learning gap are daily recaps and knowledge exams.

Over 100 years of scientific research evidence suggests that the testing effect has powerful impact on remembering and forgetting. If pupils are to remember and learn what we teach them in the subject curriculum, assessment must be and revisit curriculum content. The teaching-learning gap gets worse if pupils forget what they've learned. As cognitive science has shown, ' if nothing has been retained in long-term memory, nothing has been learned'. Assessment, by ensuring pupils revisit what they're learning, can help ensure they remember it.

Pupils forget very swiftly. We use daily recaps and knowledge tests to boost pupils' long-term memory retention and prevent forgetting.

Daily recaps are a butterfly: low-effort, high-impact. Departments create recap questions for every single lesson. Every single lesson starts with a recap. They are easy to resource. They consolidate pupils' learning so they don't forget. Every day they spend up to 20 minutes in each lesson applying what they've learned before. In English, for example, we spend those 20 minutes on grammar recaps, spelling recaps, vocabulary recaps, literature recaps (with questions on characters, themes, plots, devices and context). We do recaps on the unit they have been studying over the last few weeks. We do recaps on the previous unit and previous year's units. This daily habit builds very strong retention and motivation: pupils feel motivated because they see how much they are remembering and how much more they are learning than ever before. All recaps are open questions, and weaker forms might be given clues. The recaps are always written; they are no-stakes, without any data being collected; they give instant feedback, as they are swiftly marked, corrected and improved by pupils themselves. We've ask pupils after: 'hands up who got 4 out of 5? Hands up who got 5 out of 5, 100%?' Pupils achieving 100% feel successful and motivated to work hard to revise.

Knowledge tests are another butterfly - high impact, low effort. What I love about our knowledge tests is that they are cumulative, so that pupils revise and remember what they've learned. We set GCSE-style exams for depth, and we set knowledge exams to test a much fuller breadth of the knowledge pupils have learned. Knowledge exams are 35-question exams that take 60 minutes to complete. They are beautifully simple: they are organised onto 1 sheet of A4 paper, and they can be answered by pupils on one double-sided piece of A4. The breadth we can achieve with these exams is staggering. By Year 9, we have 3 knowledge tests per subject; they organise 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 7 and 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 8, centred on those years' knowledge organisers. Pupils are challenged to revise and remember what they've learned over all the years they spent in secondary school. I am willing to bet that many of our teachers could not beat even our Year 7 pupils on these exams across all subjects! Pages packed with answers for every pupil in the school. The humble knowledge test is a great catcher of knowledge.

As for marking them? We simply sort them into three piles: excellent, pass and fail. We don't even record the marks. Teachers just note the names of pupils who failed multiple knowledge tests so we know who's struggled.

Knowledge tests solve the breadth-depth tradeoff of exams. They give pupils maximum practice with minimum marking burden on teachers.

Simplicity must cut through assessment complexity. We should practise what we preach on cognitive overload for teachers as well as pupils. Assessment resources must be renewable, replicable, sustainable, scalable, enduring, long-term.

And the impact of recaps and knowledge tests? Well, it's very early days yet, but we've had some (very weak) Y8 or Y9 pupils miss an entire term though unavoidable long-term illness, only to return fully remembering what they've been taught the previous term and previous year. It's an early indicator that the assessment strategy is bridging the teaching-learning gap and overcoming the savage forgetting curve. The real test of its impact will be GCSE results in 2019, A-level results in 2021 and University access and graduation beyond.
Blind, still
The two blind spots we've discovered - memory and workload - provide us with ways of interrogating our teaching and assessment practice:

How much are pupils remembering?

Where are they forgetting?

Where are teachers overloaded?

And I still think that we can do more and find better ways of creating assessments with memory and workload in mind. I'm sure our pupils are not yet remembering as much as we'd like them to. I had a conversation with Jonny Porter, our Head of Humanities, just this week, about ramping up the previous-unit daily recaps we do. In this sense, even at Michaela we still feel blind on the blind spot of memory - pupils are still forgetting some of what we are teaching, and we want them to remember what they are learning for the very long-term. Our ambition is that they have learned what we've taught for years to come: for five, ten, twenty years.

Every day, teachers and pupils at Michaela see the words on the wall: ' success is never final; failure never fatal; it's the courage that counts.' It takes courage to radically simplify assessment - and courage to continually confront our workload and memory blind spots.

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.' Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

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all school leaders understand the importance of providing meaningful feedback. done well

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and thereby closing the gap between where a pupil is and where the teacher wants them to be.  however

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not all feedback has positive effects. done badly

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feedback can even harm progress. nor is feedback ‘free’. large amounts of time are spent providing pupils with feedback

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perhaps not always productively.  historically

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much consideration has been given to the methods by which feedback is delivered. specifically

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or should it be verbal? this guidance report aims to move beyond this and focus on what really matters: the principles of good feedback rather than the written or verbal methods of feedback delivery.  the guidance report is based on the best available international evidence

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in addition to a review of current practice

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and refined through consultation with teachers and other experts.

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Six recommendations for using teacher feedback to improve pupil learning

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For three years, now, my school (Reigate School in Surrey) has embraced the move away from traditional written marking and made the move towards more effective, time-efficient methods which largely involve verbal feedback.

In October 2021, I spoke at ResearchED Surrey about our school's move, along with mine and my colleague Michelle Marshall's involvement in UCL and Ross McGill's (@TeacherToolkit) Verbal Feedback Project. A link to the report can be found at the end of this post. I've spoken at a few conferences about verbal feedback, now, and I didn't want the 2021 presentation to simply be a re-hash of old presentations. The notion of cutting teacher workload whilst simultaneously improving outcomes for students is something I've been passionate about for a few years, now, but I'm conscious of not wanting to stand in front of colleagues at Saturday morning conferences and presenting verbal feedback as a brand new idea. It isn't anymore. And more to the point, neither are the principles underlying the methods my school now uses - a point I will pick up later on. However, as a quick look at educational accounts on Twitter and educational groups on Facebook will prove, there are still many teachers and schools who are relying on traditional written marking as their main form of feedback.

My presentation at ResearchED Surrey sought to not only give guidance to those attendees that were after advice about how to begin a conversation within their school about making the move towards verbal feedback, but also an account of where schools and the wider educational community currently are with the concept of verbal feedback. This blog post will outline some of my findings which I conveyed in my presentation.

One of the main barriers to schools making the move away from onerous written marking still seems to be the view that Ofsted need to see written marking, or at least a record of any feedback, including verbal, given to students. The following is a direct extract taken from their current (2019) framework:
'Ofsted does not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking and feedback; these are for the school to decide through its assessment policy. Marking and feedback should be consistent with that policy, which may cater for different subjects and different age groups of pupils in different ways, in order to be effective and efficient in promoting learning.' 'While inspectors will consider how written and oral feedback is used to promote learning, Ofsted does not expect to see any written record of oral feedback provided to pupils by teachers.'
The acknowledgement in the last sentence that feedback should be 'efficient' is more than a nod to the fact that no feedback methods should be burdensome on teachers' time. Our time is finite, and time spent on ineffective feedback methods is time which can't be spent on things which could have a greater impact on student learning. The reference within the same clause to feedback methods being 'effective' is non-specific, but again, directs teachers towards using methods which are going to have the greatest impact on outcomes.

2. EEF Feedback Guidance Report, June 2021.

Which leads me onto the Feedback Guidance Report published by the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) in June, 2021. The opening sentences to this report read as follows:
'New guidance on feedback encourages schools to prioritise key principles over methods.' 'Schools should focus on the principles which underpin good feedback rather than the way in which it is delivered...'
Within the report, Professor Becky Francis states that in the current, recovery-focussed climate, effective feedback methods have never been more important. The report is also careful to emphasise that effective feedback methods should focus on moving learning forward, and that time is planned in class for students to act on feedback. Many of us are familiar with Dylan Wiliam's statement that feedback is about improving the learner and not just the piece of work. A handy, printable A4 summary sheet is also provided within the report. If you are looking at beginning a conversation within your school or starting to think about CPD within this area, you could do worse than to print off a copy to go armed with when having the conversation, along with the UCL Verbal Feedback Report itself.

3. Early Career Framework, 2021.

A final area where we have recently seen greater reference to a move away from written feedback is within the new Early Career Framework of 2021. The framework is split into the familiar Teaching Standards, and divides these into sub-sections detailing that teachers should 'learn that...' and 'learn how to...'. The following points are taken directly from the details contained within the 'learn how to...' section of Standard 6 - Make Accurate and Productive Use of Assessment:
Make marking manageable and effective, by: * Recording data only when it is useful for improving pupil outcomes.
* Working with colleagues to identify efficient approaches to marking and alternative approaches to providing feedback (eg, using whole class feedback or well supported peer and self-assessment).

* Using verbal feedback during lessons in place of written feedback after lessons where possible.
* Understanding that written marking is only one form of feedback. * Reducing the opportunity cost of marking (e.g. by using abbreviations and codes in written feedback).
* Prioritising the highlighting of errors related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes when marking.

We can see here that the framework does not specify any one type of feedback or particular method. It does, however, steer teachers towards making choices of methods which move pupil outcomes further forward, addressing misconceptions through feedback and considering the opportunity cost in terms of time. It also states that, (point 3), verbal feedback DURING lessons rather than written marking AFTER lessons should be used where possible. Catching students in the moment, being able to address misconceptions so that they do not become embedded and harder to unpick later on, impeding further learning, is crucial if we are to move our students forward.

4. The underlying principles.

At the heart of the content of these reports and frameworks is an evidence base. An evidence base rooted within the world of cognitive science. Over the last few years within education, there has been a growing acceptance that what our students are made to think hard about and where their attention is, is where the greatest understanding and eventually, deep learning will take place (think Robert and Elizabeth Bjork's desirable difficulties and Daniel Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought'). This concept is at the heart of any form of feedback. Dylan Wiliam points out that 'feedback should be more work for the recipient than for the donor'. Therefore regardless of how feedback looks in your classroom, ask yourself 'is this method going to make my students think hard about how to not only improve upon this piece of work, but also similar pieces of work, so that what they are about to undertake sticks for future use?' 'Am I going to give adequate time for my students to act upon this feedback and to be put into the struggle zone whilst doing so?'

This whistle-stop description has aimed to sign post some of the ways in which the focus away from written marking has been embedded in frameworks and research. Links to each document referred to within the blog post can be found below. I was part of the initial move within my school away from written marking but each time I had a conversation with any middle or senior leader, it was with a document in hand and an idea about how we might implement something within it. Change doesn't happen overnight and staff buy-in is crucial, but with evidence and reference to evidence-informed principles within each of these reports and frameworks, it is clear that we now have a far greater basis for this change to happen. We've all seen fads come and go, but these were indicative of a time prior to the evidence-informed movement.

If we keep the principles and not just the methods at the forefront of everything that we do and any changes that we make, then we can be certain that we are pursuing what cognitive science tells are the current 'best bets' for our students.

Links:

Verbal Feedback Report (UCL and Ross McGill - @TeacherToolkit) - scroll down for the report itself and a 'Toolkit' guide of evidence-informed methods.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/widening-participation/teachers-and-education-professionals/teacher-research-projects/verbal-feedback-project
A link to the EEF's 2021 guidance report of feedback, along with a printable copy of a summary poster of the report, can be found here:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/feedback
A previous blog post of mine detailing how I use whole-class verbal feedback sheets and live marking.

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Verbal feedback - a focus on PRINCIPLES, not just the methods.

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For three years, now, my school (Reigate School in Surrey) has embraced the move away from traditional written marking and made the move towards more effective, time-efficient methods which largely involve verbal feedback. In October 2021, I spoke at ResearchED Surrey about our school's move, along with mine and my colleague Michelle Marshall's involvement in...

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).
Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of 'evidence-informed' advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam's five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have 'done AfL to death' in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn't get a job unless you said 'AfL' about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam's ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of 'AfL' was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here's how I see it all connecting:
1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Wiliam says 'if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there'. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read 'learning intentions' as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge - in all its forms - they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means 'what does excellence look like?'. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in 'clarifying, understanding and sharing' - teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
In some ways, this 'strategy' is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. 'Discussions, tasks and activities' covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of 'responsive teaching'. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they've learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design - including good diagnostic multiple choice questions - and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Shimamura's 'Generate-Evaluate' model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall's ideas about 'hidden lives' and the idea that we can't be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check - now, and again later.
3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward. It's this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ' feedback as actions ' post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students' learning improves - and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It's got an interpersonal, motivational element that can't be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn't a purely technical, objective task - although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.

The goal is to change the students' capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin's Butterfly is wonderful - because it shows what effective feedback can achieve - but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to 'look like a scientist' or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine's ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we're still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we've succeeded (SatNav style), then we've still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.
4. Activating students as learning resources for one another
I think this is the feature of Wiliam's five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other's learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can't have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out 'where the learner is' and 'how to get to where the learner is going'. This is where disciplined ' think pair share ' becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains - but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners' answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy - because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students' responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie's 'reciprocal teaching', Shimamura's 'think it, say it, teach it', Slavin's collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning
In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of 'noble intent' rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. 'Owning your own learning' is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these 'goals' are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals - the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;

setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.

setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building - as per Shimamura's Relate in MARGE.

providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that 'AfL' or even 'formative assessment' has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it's when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That's the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It's powerful stuff, right there, where it's been for years.
Key References:
Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

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If teachers are going to have a significant impact with the feedback they give, it needs to lead to improved outcomes for students. I am increasingly convinced that feedback needs to be constituted less in terms of a review of what has gone before and more in terms of very specific actions that students should take in order to move forward.

I think that too much effort is wasted in describing the work students produce or in giving generic wishful evaluative feedback - along the lines of 'you need to improve the structure of your paragraphs' or 'try to include more original ideas'. Some of the www/ebi feedback I have seen amounts to little more than telling students to 'get the answers right' or 'try to produce better work'. Instead of running the risk of giving nebulous unactionable feedback, teachers should focus much more on allocating tasks to students that address their learning needs. A student should be able to read or hear their teacher's feedback and then do something very specific and concrete that will improve their learning.

To keep this very simple - using only words beginning with R, because that's how it started to fall out - I think there are broadly five main types of actions that students should be asked to take after their work has been evaluated:
1. Redraft or Re-do
Redraft this piece of work / this paragraph/ this graph.... by doing X, by adding Y, by correcting Z...

Re-do this piece of work but this time make sure you include X, you measure Y, you state Z correctly....

Redrafting is very powerful provided that the actions are very specific and the scale of the task is manageable for both teacher and student.
2. Rehearse or Repeat
This could have been called practise and drill - if I wasn't using R words. As any musician will know, the feedback from most instrumental lessons is to practise something specific: some scales, sections of the piece, some finger exercises, a performance, each time paying attention to some very particular skill element for additional fluency. This could work for many subjects including Maths:

Practise your number bonds to 100 with these questions...

Practise factorising basic common expressions by doing these questions...

In French or English, you could practise writing certain type of sentence: Rehearse your use of future tense/dialogue markers/fronted adverbials/connectives - by re-writing these 20 statements adding the appropriate phrase, punctuation - or anything that can be done repeatedly.

Note, it is no good asking most students to simply 'practise doing X'. They need to be given specific questions so that they are doing X at right level of difficulty and at the right pace and scale. It is also no good giving them lots of one-off questions. Students need to do lots of the same type of questions to consolidate their understanding before being challenged with a wider variety.
3. Revisit and Respond
Very simply, this means 'do these questions'. It means, on the basis of what I'm seeing, you need more practice answering questions like this. It could mean going back over fundamentals or being given extension questions. Instead of a commentary on what students have done before, teachers simply issue new questions informed by their reading of student work or their test performances. This replaces a focus on retrospective marking with the proactive forward-looking approach of issuing questions or giving students work to do. Quite a big shift in emphasis but one that is likely to have much greater impact.
4. Re-learn and Re-test
This is very simply a case of specifying a set of knowledge and asking students to return to the routines of retrieval practice. They may need to re-visit previous learning too but mainly it is a case of self-quizzing repeatedly using a variety of memory techniques to ensure certain ideas, words, equations, facts, details, quotations - are learned. It's a very specific form of feedback: You still don't know all of these facts: go and learn them; prepare for a mini-test. That might be more productive as feedback for a history or geography essay than any number of comments on their paragraph structure.
5. Research and Record
Here, students may have some issues with the scope of their exposure to ideas and are showing the need to show deeper insight, wider references, more imagination. The solution to this could be more reading or more research of a different kind. However the instruction to 'do some more research' could be horribly unproductive or lead down too many blind alleys. Teachers could specify what reading should be done or where exactly students should research - but also require them to record their findings.

If you reconstitute all feedback so that any students can receive it and know precisely what they now need to do, in detail, then you've cracked it. This can replace any number of evaluative comments on previous work. Try it.
Teach First Marking

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#FiveWays of Giving Effective Feedback as Actions

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If teachers are going to have a significant impact with the feedback they give, it needs to lead to improved outcomes for students. I am increasingly convinced that feedback needs to be constituted less in terms of a review of what has gone before and more in terms of very specific actions that students should...

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I've written before about marking, but just to summarise: it has always been something I've loved doing. There was something in that Boxer-like satisfaction of ploughing through an unending pile of books, leaving lovingly crafted comments in an array of coloured pens and stickers that just looked like it would work so well. How could pupils fail to make progress when I'd spent so many hours on them?

So something I was nervous about when starting at Michaela was their approach to marking; that is, don't do it. I'd read Joe Kirby's blog and spoken to him at length, but remained steadfastly concerned that marking worked - if you ensured pupils

acted on feedback. I then moved to the idea that marking worked, but at what cost - a teacher with six or ten classes cannot be expected to give the detailed feedback the lightly-timetabled members of SLT seem to manage on a weekly basis.

In my second week at Michaela, we had a department meeting where Joe brought up the excellent question: it's great for workload that we don't mark, but how do we make sure we're giving feedback to make pupils' writing better?

One of the main reasons I think I find marking helpful is because it holds me accountable - I am actually reading if I am putting a pen to paper to say something about it. (I annotate the books I read in the same way - it helps me to remain focused.) But while this is an essential strategy when it is 7am on a Saturday, pre-intervention, and you want to clear the last 20 books to enjoy a semblance of a weekend when you return home that afternoon, or 9pm on a Wednesday when you just want to sleep, actually, I had underestimated my ability to focus.

To begin with at Michaela, I couldn't get out of the habit of marking. I would spend two hours with about 60 books, circling and underlining when I couldn't resist; writing limitless notes to share with the class, photocopying paragraphs to get pupils to annotate their peers' examples. Joe's comments on this kind of feedback were: 'would you want all teachers to be photocopying twice or three times a week? Is it worth the time getting the pupils to annotate a piece of paper they are then just throwing away? What else could you be doing with that time?' Moreover, I was reminded of why marking is not always the best method - if I'd put the merest hint of a mark on a child's book, their hands shot in the air: 'why is this circled?' 'I can't read your writing on this spelling correction.' 'Why is there a question mark here?' Marking breeds over-reliance on the teacher.

Now, I'm getting into the swing of the Michaela way. I read my pupils' books once or twice a week. I teach four classes, each with between 28 and 32 pupils, so it is about 120 books in all. I read 60 books in 30 minutes. As I read, I make notes: spellings lots are getting wrong, things they're all doing well at, and the main issues they need to improve. I note down anyone whose paragraph is amazing to reward with merits or show the class; I note down anyone whose work is messy to give a demerit to. It looks something like this:

In the following lesson, I teach the spellings from the front, and then test pupils. They will write their corrections out in green pen, interleaving the ones they got wrong, or the 'toughest three' if they managed, on this occasion, to score 100%. I'll test them again the following day. I'll share the positive things I found and celebrate the star paragraphs, and then explain carefully, perhaps modelling on the board (as Katie Ashford has described brilliantly here or occasionally putting a great paragraph from the class under the visualiser, how they can all improve their own paragraphs. And then they improve them, in green pen. It looks like this:

The second powerful tool is in-class feedback. With an excellent behaviour system, silent writing for 25 minutes means I can see every child's paragraph twice while circulating, giving them suggestions and tweaks while they write. On my colleague Lucy Newman's suggestion, I've also started using my visualiser more. This way, we can take a pupil's book, display it to the class, and show pupils how to edit their mistakes in that very lesson, just by giving oral feedback on the common errors they are making, or the aspects they really need to focus on improving.

The thing is, what makes the difference in their writing is the quality of the feedback and how timely it is. They don't need feedback on a paragraph they wrote two weeks ago. At Michaela, they can improve the paragraph they wrote yesterday, while it is fresh in their minds. I miss marking, I do. But I'm realising I did it for me, not for the pupils.

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I've written before about marking, but just to summarise: it has always been something I've loved doing. There was something in that Boxer-like satisfaction of ploughing through an unending pile of books, leaving lovingly crafted comments in an array of coloured pens and stickers that just looked like it would work so well.

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Written marking takes up huge amounts of teachers' time. If the average teacher marks for just over 5 hours a week, that's 200 hours of marking a year. In a secondary school of 100 teachers, that's 20,000 hours of marking.

Written marking is non-renewable: it's a one-off. Each written comment I put in a pupil's book only impacts once on that one pupil. What else could we do with that 20,000 hours, that would impact more positively on future pupils and other teachers? Marking has a very low ratio of impact-to-effort, and a very high opportunity cost.

There are much better ways to share feedback so pupils improve. There are much better ways to focus teachers' limited time. That's why in some schools, teachers no longer mark pupils' books - at all.
Feedback is a butterfly
Feedback is effective when it is timely (not too late after the task), frequent (not too scarce) and acted on (not ignored). Written marking often militates against this: teachers burn out and it becomes less timely, less frequent and less acted on by pupils and teachers.

There are many ways of giving feedback without written marking:

What if we continually worked on making our feedback have the highest-impact possible on learning?

Feedback should maximise the responsibility pupils take for self-checking, correcting, editing and redrafting their work. It should maximise preemptive teaching, preventing frequent errors and common misconceptions; it minimises laborious, slow, reactive written comments. Although teachers should still read pupil books, score exams, and circle misspellings to be corrected within lessons, written marking of pupil books outside lessons might be scrapped altogether. To monitor marking as evidence to hold teachers accountable for pupil progress is an illusion - comforting for managers, but unhelpful for teachers and pupils.

What I've seen is that this shift transforms staff culture. No teacher has to take home books in evenings, weekends and holidays; no manager is scrutinising pupil books for frequent teacher comments; no teacher is desperately marking books at the last minute before an impending book scrutiny. Instead, teachers are trusted. Teachers can focus on teaching well, ensuring every pupil is understanding and remembering, and helping their pupils love their subjects. Pupils are motivated, working harder than they ever have before, and improving their writing fast, as they take responsibility for checking and improving it.

When the school has 100 teachers, stopping teachers from marking even just 5 hours a week will save us 20,000 hours every year. Good school leaders stop people from doing good things, so they focus on better things. Next time, I'll blog about moving from unsustainable marking loads to renewable resourcing.

About Joe Kirby

School leader, education writer, Director of Education and co-founder, Athena Learning Trust, Deputy head and co-founder, Michaela Community School, English teacher

This entry was posted in Education. Bookmark the permalink.

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Written marking takes up huge amounts of teachers' time. If the average teacher marks for just over 5 hours a week, that's 200 hours of marking a year. In a secondary school of 100 teachers, that's 20,000 hours of marking. Written marking is non-renewable: it's a one-off.

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Authors: Authors: Victoria Elliott, Jo-Ann Baird, Therese N. Hopfenbeck, Jenni Ingram, Ian Thompson, Natalie Usher, Mae Zantout (University of Oxford, Department of Education); and James Richardson and Robbie Coleman (Education Endowment Foundation)

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Review of the evidence on written marking

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Feedback may have a positive impact through supporting pupils to focus future learning on areas of weakness, through identifying and explaining misconceptions, through supporting them in taking greater responsibility for their own improvement or through increasing pupils' motivation to improve.

Implementing feedback successfully will require:

communicate with pupils, teachers, and parents, about practices and expectations that relate to feedback policies,

assessing pupil understanding, so that you know what needs to be improved,

consider the ​'opportunity cost' associated with different feedback practices,

ensuring that feedback can be acted upon, for example through including specific information on what a pupil has done successfully or not, assisted with an explanation as to why,

carefully considering how feedback will be received, including impacts on self-confidence and motivation,

providing opportunities for pupils to act-upon the feedback after it has been given,
evaluating how effective the feedback has been.

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Feedback is information given to the learner about the learner's performance relative to learning goals or outcomes.

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AHT VAL: And once you've finished marking your students' books and they have responded IN DETAIL to your DETAILED comments, you must take them in again and mark them a second time using a different coloured pen!

AHT HARVEY: A page that's marked in only one colour is a useless page!

NQT BENJAMIN: Erm, if you say so. But why?

AHT VAL: It's basic Ofsted-readiness, Benjamin. Without a clearly colour-coded dialogue between teacher and student, how can we prove that the student has made progress as a result of teacher feedback?

NQT BENJAMIN: But I've only got this red biro...

AHT HARVEY GRINS UNPLEASANTLY AND OPENS A CABINET FULL OF PENS OF MANY COLOURS.

AHT HARVEY: In this school we wage a constant battle against teacher sloth and indifference!

(With apologies to The League Of Gentlemen)

I have been a teacher for more than 26 years and I tell you this: I have never marked as much or as often as I am now. We are in the throes of a Marking Apocalypse - a Markopalypse, if you will.

And why am I doing this? Have I had a Damascene-road conversion to the joy of rigorous triple marking?

No. I do it because I have to. I do it because of my school's marking policy. More to the point, I do it because my school expends a great deal of time and energy checking that their staff is following the policy. And my school is not unique in this.

Actually, to be fair, I think my current school has the most nearly-sensible policy of the three schools I have worked in most recently, but it is still an onerous burden even for an experienced teacher who can take a number of time-saving short cuts in terms of lesson planning and preparation.

Many schools now include so-called "deep marking" or "triple marking" in their lists of "non-negotiables", but there are at least two things that I think all teachers should know about these policies.
1. "We have to do deep/triple marking because of Ofsted"
No, actually you don't. In 2016, Sean Harford (Ofsted National Director, Education) wrote:

[I]nspectors should not report on marking practice, or make judgements on it, other than whether it follows the school's assessment policy. Inspectors will also not seek to attribute the degree of progress that pupils have made to marking that they might consider to be either effective or ineffective. Finally, inspectors will not make recommendations for improvement that involve marking, other than when the school's marking/assessment policy is not being followed by a substantial proportion of teachers; this will then be an issue for the leadership and management to resolve.

2. "Students benefit from regular feedback"
Why yes, of course they do. But "feedback" does not necessarily equate to marking.

Hattie and Timperley write:

[F]eedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding. A teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback thus is a "consequence" of performance.

So a textbook, mark scheme or model answer can provide feedback. It does not have to be a paragraph written by the teacher and individualised for each student.

Daisy Christodoulo makes what I think is a telling point about the "typical" feedback paragraphs encouraged by many school policies:

[T]eachers end up writing out whole paragraphs at the end of a pupils' piece of work: 'Well done: you've displayed an emerging knowledge of the past, but in order to improve, you need to develop your knowledge of the past.' These kind of comments are not very useful as feedback because whilst they may be accurate, they are not helpful. How is a pupil supposed to respond to such feedback? As Dylan Wiliam says, feedback like this is like telling an unsuccessful comedian that they need to be funnier.

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AHT VAL: And once you've finished marking your students' books and they have responded IN DETAIL to your DETAILED comments, you must take them in again and mark them a second time using a different coloured pen! AHT HARVEY: A page that's marked in only one colour is a useless page!

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New Video: The Art of 'Means of Participation' - Teach Like a Champion

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How you ask students to answer a question is often as important as the question you ask. If you don't get everyone to answer, if you don't cause everyone to think deeply about the answer, even the best question will only be so useful. So great teaching relies on clarity about Means of Participation-that's what...

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Teacher: ok year 8, well done today. In a minute we are going to pack up and stand behind our chairs, but I want you to make sure you have written down the homework from the board. Dave and Charlie please stay at the end and can you all remember to put all papers in the bin.

***

As a set of instructions, this looks pretty clean. The teacher praises the class, uses economy of language (as few words as possible), doesn't get bogged down in details and gives directives that are clear and easy to follow. And yet, as any teacher will know, it doesn't work. As soon as the teacher is a few words in noise starts to build as students pack away their books and pencil cases, start putting on coats, pushing their stools back and talking to each other about how quickly the lesson went (or Fortnite). Why? It's not a difficult class, they haven't been troublesome today, the teacher has good command of the group...so why does this always seem to happen?

***

I'm genuinely honoured and humbled that people have found some of the things I've written and said about behaviour helpful. I find behaviour management really hard. I don't have that thing where students just behave, I can't silence a room with a stare, I hate confrontation and I'm always worried that I'll use the wrong words and make things worse. For me it's easily the worst part of the job, and I really really don't enjoy having to deal with it.

I suppose it's because of all this that I've put a lot of effort into finding ways to stop poor behaviour happening: to get into habits of speech and action that allow me to create the conditions for good behaviour to flourish. In this I've found the Teach Like a Champion approach of finding set, high leverage actions and practising them deliberately to be extremely useful.

One of the most powerful techniques I use is Means of Participation (MOP), which I first read about in Lee Donaghy's blog (you should definitely read it). MOP is about how you communicate to students how they are supposed to participate in your lesson. Phrases like:
"...by putting your hand up..." "...just think about the answer for me please" "...without calling out..." "in a minute, you are going to turn to your partner and tell them..." "without talking to your neighbour..."
"Answer the question in your book in silence..." (note there are two MOPs here, in silence and in the book)

all establish the means by which your students will participate. It's a very powerful technique and has made a big difference to my practice. But the above alone isn't enough. Let's look at the instruction below:
"what is the word equation for photosynthesis? Please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me"
On the face of it, this is a good instruction. The question is clean and clear and the MOP is established in terms of how the students will write and present their answer. But - and this is my experience, both first-hand and observed - it doesn't work, and you still end up with students raising their boards before you have asked them. I think the reason for this is pretty simple: the second you ask them the question, they start writing down their answer (or at least thinking about it) and they are no longer listening to you. It's not that they are being defiant or messing around, they just didn't take in the instruction. And again, it's not because the instruction isn't clear, it's not a property of the instruction itself - it's a property of its placement; where it sits in the sentence. Try this:

"Ok in a second I'm going to ask a question, please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me. What is the word equation for photosynthesis?"

I'd wager ten quid that works better every time. It's not perfect, but it will almost definitely work better than the previous instruction set. It's even better paired with other techniques (see here if you haven't already) into a script more like:

"Ok, I'm going to ask a question and you are going to one [hold up a finger] write your answer on a mini whiteboard [hold up two fingers] two keep it face down and [hold up three fingers] three show me only when I say. Write down [one finger], face down [two fingers], show me [three fingers.] Ok who can say the instruction back to me....David?...Excellent. Write down, face down, show me [use the fingers again.] What is the word equation for photosynthesis? "

It's a bit longer and you only need to do it like this until your class is in a good routine, but moving the instruction to the front makes a big difference. Try these for size:
"Without talking, I'd like you to write down three things..." "By putting your hand up in the air, I'd like you to tell me..." "Without calling out, can anyone tell me..." "In silence, you are going to..." "Without turning to your neighbour, get your purple pen out..." "I don't want to hear anyone calling out their answer as we start marking..."
Again, not revolutionary, not going to solve all your problems overnight, but it will make a difference. And, like I said, when combined with other techniques you'll find things go a lot more smoothly.

I call this front-loading instructions: where you put your Means of Participation or whatever at the front of your instruction, where you anticipate the point at which a student might stop listening to you and thinking about something else (like the answer to the question) and get all the important information in before that point.

Going back to our poor beleaguered teacher of 8Sc2 at 3.02pm, let's review the script with fresh eyes:

Teacher: ok year 8, well done today. In a minute we are going to pack up and stand behind our chairs, but I want you to make sure you havewritten down the homework from the board. Dave and Charlie please stay at the end and can you all remember to put all papers in the bin.

We now know why this doesn't work. Even at the best of times it wouldn't work, but the end of the school day how much more so. Every fibre in every student's being is itching to leave - the cue "pack up!" is primed and ready to go. The second you mention packing up BOOM they're gone, and you'll end up with most students not writing down the homework and Dave and Charlie halfway home on the 204 bus before you even realise they've gone.

In such situations you have to take your front-loading to the max - dial it up to 11:

Teacher: ok nobody at all is going to pack away, pens down and eyes on me in 3, 2, - thank you for having eyes on me, David - and 2, - nobody is packing away - and 1 [pause and Be Seen Looking]. Excellent thank you. I remind you that nobody is packing up until I am done, and I will stop talking every time I see somebody packing up [pause and Be Seen Looking]. In silence, open your planners and write down the homework. [wait] In silence eyes up here please. Again, no packing up until I am finished. Dave and Charlie, don't ask me about it now, I remind you to stay at the end. None of us are leaving until all paper is in the bin and we are standing in silence behind our chairs. GO!

Try that one on for size. You might like it.

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Scene: it is 3.02pm and 8Sc2 have been working well throughout the double lesson. The bell goes at 3.05pm Teacher: ok year 8, well done today. In a minute we are going to pack up and stand behind our chairs, but I want you to make sure you have written down the homework from the...

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Teaching challenge - Support for early career teachers - GOV.UK

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Mr Price wants to have a classroom where pupils enter quietly and begin their learning promptly. However, only about half of his pupils are starting the lesson in this way. Some pupils are taking up to ten minutes to settle and are slow to start tasks during the early part of the lesson. What might Mr Price do to tackle this challenge?

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Cold Calling: The #1 strategy for inclusive classrooms – remote and in person.

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Based on my experience working with hundreds of teachers in numerous contexts, I’d suggest that one of the strategies with the biggest impact on the overall effectiveness of lessons is the ro…

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To make sure your students are ready to practise, use mini-whiteboards - Tips for teachers

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In this Tips for Teachers video, Adam Boxer shares the two reasons he uses mini-whiteboards every lesson.

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Mini whiteboards are a staple in classrooms across the country, from Key Stage 1 through to GCSE. In this article, we explain how to make the most of this invaluable classroom tool, including how to elevate your use of formative assessment to boost progress amongst your students.
Why use mini whiteboards in the classroom?

Mini whiteboards are more than just an opportunity for children to pick up whiteboard pens and jot down ideas. When used with purpose, they can become an effective tool for formative assessment.

By planning activities in advance, using carefully designed questions to assess learning and by reflecting on pupils' answers or feedback, it is possible to gain a better understanding of areas where teaching and learning has been successful and where pupils need further input.

Moreover, using drywipe boards can ensure that independent thinking time, partner talk and group discussions are utilised effectively by a higher ratio of pupils. By having a space to express what they know without committing to writing in exercise books, pupils feel more comfortable to take a risk. It also gives the teacher a straightforward way to check pupils are on task and on track.

Advantages of mini whiteboards

They are erasable - Mini whiteboards are infinitely reusable; a simple swipe of an eraser can wipe whiteboards clean, ready to be used again. This allows pupils to write ideas quickly and removes the fear that many students have of making a mistake or having a 'messy' book. This encourages participation of all students.

They are fun - You can create games, quizzes, group activities and much more using whiteboards, creating endless opportunities for fun in the classroom.

They are collaborative - Unlike exercise books that belong to specific students, mini whiteboards enable anyone with a dry wipe pen to contribute their ideas in partner and group activities.

They provide live formative feedback - By using '1-2-3 show me', it takes only a few seconds to analyse pupil progress at a whole class level.

They identify misconceptions - During guided teacher input, it can be tricky to gauge if pupils have really 'got it', especially when approaching new methods in maths. Before moving onto an independent activity, whiteboards can provide a quick opportunity to identify misconceptions.

Disadvantages of mini whiteboards

They can be a distraction - Desktop whiteboards are an extra desk accessory for pupils in the classroom, and therefore something else to have to resist fiddling with or doodling on.

Assessment data may not be accurate - It is easy for students to copy each other's answers so it may not be the most reliable way to check for understanding. However, teachers can reduce this by setting up tasks carefully and creating a safe environment where students feel comfortable making mistakes and understand that making mistakes will help their learning in the long run!

They require a lot of extra equipment - The humble mini whiteboard is nothing without its accompanying erasers and drywipe marker pens. A class set of equipment for 30 pupils needs a lot of space and extra organisation on your part.

They take up budget - A classpack of mini whiteboards can range in cost from £23 ex VAT for basic plastic boards to £53.99 ex VAT for more rigid mdf boards. Other bestsellers include magnetic whiteboards for £46.99 ex VAT. Add on the whiteboard erasers, whiteboard markers and extras, such as easels then costs can quickly add up.

5 top tips for integrating dry wipe mini whiteboards into lessons
1. Plan, plan, plan
As with most things in teaching, getting the most out of using dry wipe boards in lessons requires thorough planning; it is essential that you have considered why and how you are going to use them. Mini whiteboards can be used at various stages of a lesson for very different purposes.

Towards the end of a lesson, they can be used to evaluate pupils' learning with a game or quiz where pupils can apply their new knowledge. Whereas towards the start of a lesson, students can reflect on their learning from a previous lesson through a 'think, pair, share' or 'while you wait' activity.

Alternatively, whiteboards can be used to introduce and explore new concepts.

For example, at the primary level, mini boards can be used in conjunction with cubes or counters to introduce division in Key Stage 1 or to find fractions of an amount in Key Stage 2. Both of these examples require you to consider how you will model this process to the children and what this will look like in practice.

At GCSE, whiteboards can be a great way to encourage students to practise sketching the net of 3D shape to help with calculating the surface area.

When students first learn to solve a quadratic equation using the formula, a whiteboard can encourage them to have a go without worrying about making a small error and having to rewrite the entire calculation.

2. Decide what your key questions are
As with all formative assessment and maths diagnostic tests, you need to know what it is that you are assessing and what pupil outcomes you are looking for.

To utilise drywipe boards effectively, it is advisable to decide upon a few key questions that will help you to determine if pupils are ready to move on with their learning or need further support. In maths, it is also advisable that you consider the sequencing of these questions to ensure you are building up through small steps in conceptual understanding.

Design questions that lend themselves to simple answers can be displayed prominently on the mini white board. Don't be afraid to take a few moments to look up and down the answers to get a good feel of how the class has done.

Consider if you have worded or formatted questions in the best way to collect meaningful data. For example, have you opted for a multiple choice diagnostic question? Are pupils simply required to write the letter of their chosen answer on their whiteboards? You may consider instead using the model of 'I do, We do, You do' where pupils will need to show their working on their mini whiteboards.

Once you've surveyed your pupils' answers, identify a few interesting answers and highlight them for class discussion. This could be answers that are particularly good, answers that are correct but could be improved, answers that have not followed the most efficient method, or answers that are incorrect. Mistakes and misconceptions should be celebrated as opportunities to learn.
3. Know your next steps
Even with the best planned, most engaging lessons, children often need more time to become familiar with a new concept or to develop confidence applying a new method independently. When using drywipe boards to assess pupil understanding, it is important that you are prepared for any outcome.
The flowchart below recommends different paths you can take depending on the outcome from using whiteboards. This assumes that the majority of students are working independently and not copying each other's answers, so it's worth making sure you've established expectations for students before you start!

It's also advisable to, as a first step, ensure your questioning is accurate and clear, before deciding to reteach the whole class and to briskly move onto a new topic without ensuring there's a solid understanding.

4. Have your resources ready
To fully utilise lesson time, it is useful to have whiteboards and dry wipe pens on desks ready for pupils to pick up and put into action within seconds. There are a number of ways this can be done.

In Key Stage 1, it may be useful to have resource stations close to the carpet so that pupils have easy access to them during the teacher's input.

In Key Stage 2, you may choose to allocate each child a set of resources that they keep with them throughout the day, or you could use table trays to hold resources for groups of children working in close proximity to one another.

At secondary level, where students move around the school more frequently and class sizes may vary, it may be preferable to lay mini whiteboards out on tables at the start of a lesson and collect them in at the end. Many school planners also incorporate a dry wipe page, so you may find that many of your students already have a mini board to hand.
5. Train students how to use them
Setting expectations for whiteboard use can not only make formative assessment more straightforward, but it can also lead to a calmer classroom environment.

To prevent white boards becoming a source of distraction during teaching, students should know when and where the whiteboard and white board pen should be on the table at various stages during the lesson.

Additionally, pupils should know how and when to share their answers, for example using a 1-2-3 'show me' approach or asking pupils to reveal their answers only once you say a buzzword. This reduces the possibility of children copying from their peers or creating unwanted noise from flapping boards above their heads.

You may also agree upon an appropriate writing size and colour pen choice. This can ensure you are able to see the whole class' responses from your position at the front of the room, without having to squint your eyes.

7 ideas for mini whiteboards in the classroom

So how could you use mini-whiteboards in your lessons? Below are a few ideas to get you started.
1. 'While you wait' activities
To encourage purposeful starts to lessons, 'while you wait' retrieval questions can help embed prior learning in students' long-term memory.

In Key Stage 1, this may be a simple set of arithmetic questions to help them settle on the carpet. At Key Stage 2, this can become the follow-on activity after writing the date and learning objective to assess skills learnt in previous units.

As students approach their GCSEs, Third Space Learning's Fluent in Five can be used as a valuable use of the time at the start of lessons to practise key maths skills. This consists of diagnostic questions which pupils can answer on their whiteboards to assess their understanding of previously covered material.

Alternatively, you may choose to adapt and display more specific revision questions for pupils to answer on whiteboards, such as the fluency or applied questions from the Third Space Learning worksheets.

The term ' hinge questions ' applies to carefully planned, whole class questions that can be used to check-in on pupils' understanding and help you to respond to their needs. By incorporating 2 or 3 of these checkpoints into your lessons, you can carefully monitor progress and change tact if required. This can be particularly effective in maths where misconceptions can develop over time. And of course, what better place for students to show their workings out than a reusable drywipe board?
3. Think, pair, share
'Turn and talk to your partner' is a common phrase used by teachers from Key Stages 1-5. But how can you be sure that your pupils are making the most of this talk time?

By incorporating drywipe boards into these discussions, you can offer a clearer structure. Giving students time to think independently and jot down ideas before talking to a partner can support even the quietest of pupils to demonstrate their understanding and contribute effectively to partner talk. Erasability also enables pairs to merge their ideas and decide upon their answer or explanation before sharing to a wider group of pupils.

Double-sided whiteboards can be particularly effective here as they offer more space, but can also add some fun e.g. with back-to-back idea generation between partners.
4. I do, we do, you do
Effective modelling is an essential teaching skill, and is particularly pertinent in maths where new content must be broken into manageable chunks to prevent cognitive overload.

When introducing something new, pupils should be given the opportunity to observe an expert (their teacher!) demonstrating the method. From here on, they should be actively involved in their learning, using scaffolds and prompts to guide them towards independent work.

Mini whiteboards come into play at the 'we do' stage of teaching. This is where the teacher and pupils work slowly through a problem together, taking one step at a time. Having their own whiteboards allows pupils to replicate what they can see on the main board, whilst adding in their own thoughts and calculations. Care should be taken to ensure that pupils are not just copying down what the teacher has written. By pausing and questioning at key points, we can ensure that this is a valuable use of learning time.

At the 'you do' stage, students have the opportunity to answer a question more independently, without having to commit their workings to a less erasable exercise book. This is a useful formative assessment checkpoint before moving on with teaching.

5. Worked examples
Drywipe boards are also a useful tool for in-lesson interventions. For example, lower ability pupils and pupils with cognition and learning related special education needs benefit from having a worked example in front of them to refer back to.

This additional scaffold can be produced quickly and easily, either by the teacher or a teaching assistant. In numeracy, gridded whiteboards are particularly useful as they mimic the square paper often seen in maths exercise books.

Below is an example of how to use a gridded mini-whiteboard to model column addition.

6. Combine and create new concrete resources

Drywipe boards provide a versatile base to use in conjunction with various resources. For example, pupils can draw the outline of a bar model that can be reused throughout a lesson combined with counters, base 10 equipment or multilink cubes. Magnetic whiteboards and counters can be very useful here by helping pupils keep track of their workings.

This can be adapted to suit older pupils working with larger integers, decimal numbers and algebra by using tools like place value counters to represent different amounts rather than counters alone. Below you can see how a mini whiteboard has been used in conjunction with place value counters to calculate the value of 𝑥.

7. Exit tickets
Before ending a lesson, it is important to reflect on whether pupils have grasped the core knowledge and are ready to move on, or if more support is required. Using 'exit ticket' style questions to bring a lesson to a close can provide useful assessment for learning.

Exit tickets can be presented in a number of ways: solving calculations, multiple choice, reasoning and problem solving, explanation questions or even a low-stakes quiz combining these approaches. They should always be directly linked to your learning objective.

Mini whiteboards are effective here as they are quick for pupils to use and time effective for assessing from the front of the room. If there are a select few pupils who need further intervention, you can make a quick note of this and incorporate it into future planning.

Conclusion

So there we have it! 7 ways you can use mini whiteboards in your lessons from today. Despite the initial costs and planning, whiteboards are a versatile tool and it's no surprise that it's a teacher-favourite classroom resource.

Looking at improving your feedback process? You may be interested in our blog on whole class feedback.

Do you have pupils who need extra support in maths?
Every week Third Space Learning's maths specialist tutors support thousands of pupils across hundreds of schools with weekly online 1-to-1 lessons and maths interventions designed to address learning gaps and boost progress.

Since 2013 we've helped over 150,000 primary and secondary school pupils become more confident, able mathematicians. Learn more or request a personalised quote for your school to speak to us about your school's needs and how we can help.

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Mini Whiteboards: 7 Ways To Use Teachers' Favourite Classroom Resource

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Mini whiteboards are gaining popularity in classrooms from Key Stage 1 up to GCSE. Learn practical ideas to best use them with your students!

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Most educators are familiar with Think-Pair-Share, a popular technique used to ask questions in class and promote peer collaboration and communication. Yet, as with all classroom practices, it can be executed in a number of ways-some more successful than others.

We highly encourage weaving Think-Pair-Share into your regular classroom routine for all ages. But to do it well, keep the following in mind.

Don't Skimp on the "Think"

One of the biggest challenges to implementing Think-Pair-Share is making sure to not skimp on think. When you pose a question to your class, the first impulse for students will be to turn and talk to a peer, skipping the thinking stage. Ensuring that ample think time is provided before the pair and share steps take place can prevent this impulse.

During thinking time, students can write down their initial responses and engage in necessary retrieval practice-recalling information from long-term memory without any notes or support to make the memory stronger and more accessible in the future. But retrieval practice requires each student to recall information individually. If students are asked to recall information in pairs or groups, some students will miss out on the chance to strengthen their memory of the material. It can also be difficult to gauge whether an individual student recalled the information correctly themselves or is relaying something said by a peer.

Think time prepares students so that when they do talk to their partner, they have something to share, potentially adding another factor: think, pair, compare, and share.

When Pairing, Listen

Make certain that during the pair and share stages,students listen attentively to their talk partners. Students can be tagged "A" and "B" (for example, by the alphabetical order of their names) so that when the teacher tells the "A" students to talk, "B" students listen and then switch. A particularly powerful way of making students accountable for listening to their peers is to make it clear that they are likely to be asked to report to the class what their partner said ("Emily, can you tell us what Sarah told you?").

The response from the peer partner during the pair discussion might prompt students to add further points that they didn't include in their original answer or add depth to existing points. Pair time also provides students with a safe space to discover if their answers and thoughts align with their partner's or to discuss any questions they may have. This can be a powerful method for activating students as learning resources for one another in the classroom. And it provides the chance for students to rehearse the vocabulary that they will use in reporting back to the class.

Listening requires effort, attention, and time. Teachers should actively support student listening, as it's often an underrated element of Think-Pair-Share. In order to learn from each other, students have to listen to each other.

When Sharing, Pause

After the pair discussions have taken place, students share their thinking with the rest of the class. To further boost student confidence before whole-class discussion, award praise to students when walking around the classroom listening to conversations and individual responses, so students feel excited later to share with the whole class. Although overpraising students is ineffective, confirming to students that what they have said is worth sharing with the class is likely to make students more willing to share their ideas, and boost their confidence.

To start group discussion, the teacher can "" a term coined by Doug Lemov, for picking a student at random to answer a question. By this point, the students will have had the chance to recall information independently and rehearse their answer with their partner, making them more likely to be ready for wider discussion.

The teacher can then provide "response time"-at least several seconds-for students to listen and reflect on what others have said. This response time allows for further thinking, before students share their reactions, responses, and elaborations.

After an appropriate interval, a particularly useful technique is "Add. Build. Challenge." or "ABC" for short. Is there anything else that could be added? Can you build on that answer? Does anyone want to challenge the answer, for example, by providing an alternative response?

A particularly powerful way to do Think-Pair-Share is to use mini dry-erase boards. During the think stage, students write down what they can recall or jot down some initial thoughts. During the pair stage, students can add or remove thoughts from their board. Then, in the share stage, students hold up their boards to share what they wrote with the class. Dry-erase boards work best when student responses are short (about four words on each board), so they can be easily read.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, Think-Pair-Share is like all other aspects of teaching, in that the key is careful planning. While a very useful technique, Think-Pair-Share takes more time than traditional classroom questioning, so to make sure that this time is well spent, it is important that the questions posed to students are well-designed and carefully considered. They must be communicated so that students fully understand what is being asked and that the question homes in on key points linked to the lesson.

By making sure that the teacher asks "questions worth thinking about," Think-Pair-Share increases engagement, improves learning, and provides the teacher with actionable evidence about next steps-a uniquely powerful combination.

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Getting the "Think-Pair-Share" Technique Right

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Most educators are familiar with Think-Pair-Share, a popular technique used to ask questions in class and promote peer collaboration and communication. Yet, as with all classroom practices, it can be

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Just a few more weeks now til TLAC 3.0 drops. But of course the new school year is already underway so I've been trying to share excerpts in advance. Here's the beginning of the write-up on Turn and Talk, with amazing video of BreOnna TIndall and Sarah Wright's classrooms.

T urn and Talk -a short, contained pair discussion-is a common teaching tool used in thousands of classrooms and it offers a lot of benefits.

Among others:

It boosts Participation Ratio. You say "Why is Scout afraid? Turn and Talk to your partner for thirty seconds. Go!" and suddenly fifteen voices are going at once instead of just one. In a short time you've allowed almost everyone the chance to share an answer.

It can increase reluctant students' willingness to speak in larger settings. A student rehearses an idea she might not offer in front of thirty people, and finds it comes out well or earns admiration from her partner. She becomes more willing to share her idea with the whole group.

It's a great response when the class appears stuck. You ask a question, get only a smattering of hands or perhaps none at all, and respond: "Hmmm. No one seems quite sure. Turn and Talk with your partner for thirty seconds. See if you can come up with some ideas. Go!" Suddenly you have a workaround for explaining the answer.

It can allow you to listen in on conversations and choose valuable comments to start discussion with, as in, "Maria, would you mind sharing what you and Justine talked about?"

But there are challenges to go with the benefits. Because it can result in fifteen people talking at once does not mean it will, and a disengaged Turn and Talk where there's little turning and even less talking is a culture killer. And there are a variety of accountability challenges:

Conversations may wander off the assigned topic and may never even address the topic at all. (It is, after all, exciting to have the chance to chat with your friend in the middle of class.)

There is the risk that students in a Turn and Talk listen poorly-that their partner is merely a target for their own words and not a source of insight.

Even if everyone is on topic and listening their hardest, erroneous information could still spread. Billy Knowsforsure tells Tammy Tendstobelieve that to take the square root of something means to divide it by two; she nods, begins committing it to memory, and you never know it.

Education researcher Graham Nuthall, carefully observing students during lessons, found that students frequently persuaded their classmates that erroneous information was true. The most credulous were likely to be those with the weakest knowledge on a topic.

So used frequently does not always imply used well. The details of execution are critical. BreOnna Tindall's execution of her Turn and Talk in the video BreOnna Tindall: Keystone provides a road map. Students have read a short passage about the idea of "blind justice" and have been asked to discuss whether the idea of justice being blind is supposed to be a positive or a negative symbol. BreOnna gives a direction: "One minute to Turn and Talk. Share out your response with your face partner. Go!" Suddenly, the room crackles to life.

Her success starts with the directions. They are crisp and clear, without an extraneous word, economy of language exemplified. The speed and energy of the transition capped off by the cue to action "Go!" means that everyone starts at exactly the same time. No one has time or incentive to glance around and see if their peers are really doing it. In these ways her directions exemplify technique 28, Brighten the Lines.

Of course it's critical that Turn and Talk is a familiar procedure. BreOnna has taught her students how to do Turn and Talk well and they've practiced it. You can see their familiarity with it in the video. They know who their partner is without having to ask; they start their conversations comfortably and naturally; they speak at the appropriate volume. And perhaps most of all, the practice has taught them that since everyone is going to join in the Turn and Talk with energy and enthusiasm, they can safely do the same. This lack of hesitation is one of the main reasons why just seconds after the prompt, the room crackles to life.

Interestingly, it's not just one procedure. As the phrase " Turn and Talk with your face partner" implies, there are face partners and also shoulder partners. BreOnna can keep things fresh by shifting which partner students talk to. Her room layout is designed around Turn and Talk!

And don't overlook her phrase "share out your response" as it implies something important. Of course, they have plenty to say. Students have written first and are sharing what they wrote. As with whole group discussions, writing first means a more substantive and inclusive partner discussion (see technique 40, Front the Writing). As we will see, Turn and Talk works best when designed for synergy with what happens before and after.

Finally, BreOnna tells her students they will have (just) one minute to talk. This helps them gauge the appropriate length of their comments. And, ironically, keeping the Turn and Talk short maximizes its value. It's a preliminary to the larger class discussion, so BreOnna wants students to have more to say, still, when it's over. She doesn't want them to say everything yet.

You can see many of the same themes in the video Sarah Wright: Keystone.

First, Sarah asks a question: "Imagine you are Tio Luis [in Pam Muñoz-Ryan's novel Esperanza Rising], what would you say?" This is a reiteration of a question they have already responded to in writing, and now they get to share their brilliance. There are hands in the air. Lots. Students are eager to talk so this might seem like a surprising moment to choose a Turn and Talk. One of its best uses, I noted earlier, is to help build engagement when students are hesitant. But here it's useful for the opposite reason. When you have lots of eager hands, Turn and Talk can be a great way to let everyone get to talk and to minimize the I had a great answer and didn't get to share it frustration.

Like in BreOnna's classroom, Sarah's directions are crisp and clear with no extra words. They end in a consistent in-cue-the same as Breonna's, "Go!"-and again the room crackles to life. You can then see Sarah circulating, listening to answers, sharing her appreciation, and also perhaps deciding whom to call on.

But again, not every Turn and Talk looks like these. How does a teacher build this level of energy and productivity?

The first step is ensuring that students feel responsible for doing the task in front of them to the best of their ability. Once you've done that, you can begin to design the activity for maximum rigor. This "all in" attitude is achieved mostly through intentional habit-building.

In the videos, neither BreOnna nor Sarah tells their students, "Be attentive; be active; do your best, and talk about the topic at hand." Those things are understood. Students do them automatically, which means they are carefully taught and reinforced until they become routine.

Build the Routine

A Turn and Talk is a recurring classroom procedure; a common means for students to engage ideas. The more frequently something recurs in the classroom, the more important to make it a routine-to map the steps of the procedure, then rehearse and repeat it until it happens smoothly and with almost no drain on working memory. You can read more in Chapter Ten about installing routines but some specific aspects of the Turn and Talk routine deserve specific comment.

"My Turn and Talks actually used to be pretty ineffective," BreOnna shared. "[Students] would not talk-or they would talk about something else." Now, though, she builds in "an extensive rollout where I explain 'this is what I'm expecting [active on-topic conversations; asking questions of each other], this is the type of language I want to hear [academic vocabulary]. I want to see these actions [nodding; facing each other; showing your partner you're listening].' It could seem a little Type A but I honestly think kids just don't know how to have an academic conversation in a way that brings out the best in their partner. I try to make sure they have all the tools before they need them."

tlac 3.0, Turn and Talk

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TLAC 3.0: Using Turn & Talk to Make Your Classroom 'Crackle to Life' - Teach Like a Champion

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Just a few more weeks now til TLAC 3.0 drops. But of course the new school year is already underway so I've been trying to share excerpts in advance. Here's the beginning of the write-up on Turn and Talk, with amazing video of BreOnna TIndall and Sarah Wright's classrooms. Turn and Talk-a short, contained pair discussion-is...

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A blog about something really obvious but worth spelling out.

After 25 years of teaching, I've been through a fair amount of dodgy INSET/CPD. As a result I am something of a 'visiting speaker' sceptic. However, it hasn't all been bad; far from it. Some ideas have been very influential such as the ideas behind CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) developed at Kings in the 1990s; also the principles of formative assessment that have trickled into our collective consciousness as teachers since 'Inside the Black Box'. Whilst some ideas have helped me to frame an overarching philosophy for teaching or have augmented my armoury of teaching tools, there is one simple strategy that has transformed the way I teach every lesson, every day:
Think, Pair, Share.
I used to be a 'hands up' merchant just like a lot of people. Then, at an INSET session about 10 years ago, delivered by a superb trainer from Haringey LA (employed through National Strategies - imagine!) the seed was sown that 'hands up' might not be such a great idea. It is so obvious when you think about it. In fact it is rather alarming that such a poor and even harmful strategy is still so deeply ingrained in pedagogical practice. For years I'd fought my way through the forest of hands- "Oo, oo, oo, me, me, me!!!" OR faced the tumbleweed of deathly silence; those 'blood out of stone' moments when you scan the room desperately looking for someone willing to give you an answer and everyone is staring at the floor. And of course there would often have been kids at the back wishing 'please, please, don't ask me, I haven't got a clue.'

But the solution came: Every time you ask a question, get the students to think first, then discuss it in pairs before they answer. Lightening bolt. This simple strategy has transformed how I teach - and helped develop an entirely new way of thinking about teaching. I've since often referred to this as the 'washing hands' of teaching. This is the hospital analogy where the single simplest act with the greatest impact is to ensure every hospital worker washes their hands after each patient contact; i.e. changing something that you do all the time every day has an enormous impact.

I think it is worth revisiting just why 'hands up' is such a poor strategy:

Only one person gets to answer at a time so you have no idea what most people are thinking.

The answer can be offered before others have had a chance to work it out for themselves.

Students can opt out of answering or thinking altogether if they choose to. They can hide.

It is difficult to express confusion or simply to say that you don't know the answer.

In the 'forest of hands' scenario, the competitiveness inhibits less confident students (and there are gender-specific behaviours here that can't be ignored).

In the 'blood out of a stone' scenario, you can't tell if students are really stuck or just too unsure of themselves to offer a public answer.

Very often 'Hands up' goes together with closed questions with very short 'think time. We are not comfortable with silence -and expect responses within seconds of asking a question.

Ingrained patterns of behaviour develop; students who always put a hand up and students who never do.

So, what changes when you ask routinely, 'in your pairs, discuss.....':

Crucially, in doing this you are creating a small bubble of security around each pair; a safe space where they can think for a while and say whatever they like. 'I think X', 'No, I think Y'...'I haven't got a clue', 'I wasn't really listening' 'It is more complicated than that... maybe it is X except when it is Y?'

In this bubble it is safe to admit you don't understand and the pair can pluck up the courage together to report this back. Easier to say 'we don't get it' rather than 'I don't get it'.

Every single student can engage in answering the question; they are all generating answers simultaneously - and there is less chance of hiding. Shy students will speak to their partner; the blood comes out of the stone! It has an immediate effect.

Two heads are better than one. If the question is a good one, pairs can debate their answer. They can then rehearse it and feedback to each other..'yes, that sounds good but maybe also say this....'

When the teacher brings the class together to hear answers, the students are repeating something they have rehearsed. It is easy to report back 'we thought that maybe it is XYZ' when you have already thought this through... compared to being put on the spot with a cold question. It is crucial in the report-back phase to ask selected pairs directly to share their discussion; it means everyone needs to be prepared to report back in case they are asked. Using a building process is also key here - anything to add, to challenge, any better or different answers? And so on. (It is not always time-efficient to get each pair to share their answer.)

I could go on.... it is just such a powerful change. Still now, it is by far the most common piece of feedback I give after lesson observations: 'If you had asked them to discuss in pairs, the learning would have been better'. The question is, why do teachers still ask for hands up or accept it when students take them down the 'hands up' cul-de-sac? What are the barriers to adopting 'in your pairs' as the default mode of questioning?

For some it is about behaviour management. To repeatedly stop and start a class -full of kids talking is more difficult than keeping a lid on them and taking one answer at a time. Good stop-start strategies need to be developed and rehearsed.

It can be overwhelming dealing with all the answers that are generated. After 15 paired discussions - what do you do then? The key is to encourage active listening and the process of building on previous answers as you sample the responses. Sampling is valid - and much much better than only taking a couple of cold hands-up responses.

Students default to hands-up themselves and have to be trained out of it - which can be a drag. Yes, it can, but it soon works if you ignore students with hands up and get the pair discussion going. If you reward 'hands up', that is what you'll get.

It can feel like a sledgehammer to crack a nut if you only want to know 'what is the capital of Spain 'or 'what is 3 x 4'. Well it is. But is that a good question in the first place?

This is the crux; think-pair-share forces us to ask better questions. There is room for a few sharp closed questions in a lesson but if we are looking for higher order thinking, answers that model literacy skills as well as content and, generally, are probing to a deeper level of understanding, then 'hands up' with closed questioning, is never going to be enough.

Once you are into the groove of routine 'in your pairs' questioning, you find yourself asking better questions -it all flows.

So, thank you to Alison from Haringey for showing me the light! I've never looked back.... My hands are clean - are yours!!??

(Thanks to Paul L for providing the illustration...)

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The 'Washing Hands' of Learning: Think Pair Share

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A blog about something really obvious but worth spelling out. After 25 years of teaching, I've been through a fair amount of dodgy INSET/CPD. As a result I am something of a 'visiting speaker' sceptic. However, it hasn't all been bad; far from it. Some ideas have been very influential such as the ideas behind...

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Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Give students enough time to think individually first

2. Give a conversation prompt

3. Ensure students have something to discuss

4. Better too short than too long

5. Ask questions to find the best paired discussions to share

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter

2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast

3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I'm Craig Barton and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five, all about student pair discussion. Now just as a reminder, this is available both as an audio podcast and also is a video. And if you look below, either in the podcast show notes or the video description on YouTube or on tips for teachers, you'll find links so you can access this in both mediums and share it with your colleagues. Okay, so student paired discussions. Now, they're a hallmark of pretty much every lesson that I'm lucky enough to watch. But over the course of the last three years or so, I've been on a bit of a mission to try and find tips from expert practitioners to make student pair discussions as effective and productive as possible. Now, in my tips, a teacher's book available in all good and evil bookstores, I talk about 15 ideas to improve such pair discussions that I call partner talk. But in this video and podcast, I'm going to share five of my favourite of those ideas with you.

So here's the first one. Now, what I often see and I've done this myself is teachers ask students a question or put a question on the board or the verbalise a question. And then they'll say to students, discuss it with your partner. Now, there's two problems with that. First is what happens in the subsequent discussion is the most confident, or the highest achieving students or the student is grasped it the quickest will dominate that conversation because they got their answer straightaway, there'll be like, I think it's this, this, this and this, and the other students simply won't have a chance to think about their thoughts to contemplate what they think. And they end up being very passive as part of the discussion. Or the other thing that happens whenever you kind of launch straight into a pair discussion is it becomes a very, it doesn't become a conversation, it becomes very much one student speaks, whilst the other student instead of actively listening is trying to think what they think the answer to that question is. Whereas instead, if you give students some time to think individually first, before that pair discussion, both students can arrive at that pair discussion and ready to share their thoughts, and also just as important, ready to listen to their thoughts as their partner. Now how long to give students and that's obviously going to be dependent on the class, the complexity of the question, it may be a few seconds, it may be 30 seconds, it's also a good idea to give students an opportunity to jot down their thoughts on a mini whiteboard or on a piece of paper to kind of unburden their working memory. So again, they can use that as a prompt to help them make the most out of the subsequent pad discussion. So tip number one, give students enough time to think individually.

First, at Tip number two, a conversation prompt. Again, this is another mistake I've made, I've said to my students, okay, talk to you, the person next to you talk to your partner. And I'm almost assuming there that being able to have a positive productive pair discussion is a really easy skill, but it's not necessarily. Whereas if we can support students by saying, okay, when you discuss with your partner, I want you to say I think the answer is because something as simple as that just gives a bit of a structure to that pair discussion, make sure that students share both their what they think the answer is, and their reason for it. And it just may help that discussion flow a bit quicker. So a conversation prompting, you'll know yourself for different discussions, what different prompts may be needed.

Tip number three, this is a big one, you know, and often I've given my students something to discuss. And you know, five seconds later, I look at a pair. And I said, Why don't you Why don't you talk to each other? So we have nothing left to talk about. And when you probe a bit deeper, often it's because they both agree on the same answer. And that's it. Okay. Well, III thinks that I think the same done and dusted. You don't really want that. So what I say to students, is this. Usually conversation prompt, I think the answer is because the other person I think the answer is because now if your two answers are different, I want you to argue with each other who do you think's right? Can you convince the other of your way of thinking, but if your two answers are the same? What's the best explanation you can come up with between you to explain this that would help somebody who doesn't know what the answer is? So just making sure that in both scenarios, students know what they've got to do means that those discussions will benefit as many different students as possible.

Tip number four. Now, this is a big one, it's quite hard to get this right. You know, what I've done in the past is hello to my mistakes here, right? Is I've stopped the pair discussion at the point where it's fizzling out. And I say to students, okay, so I'm listening, I'm listening for that noise level, dip in dip in dip and dip in and they'll say, Okay, now let's do either, you know, individual work, or what do you think what do you think whatever comes after the pair discussion? The problem with that is the energy's gone, and you having to try to pick the students back up again. Whereas if you caught the pair discussion off at the point where the noise level, that kind of enthusiasm, the engagement when you're Since then it's almost at its peak, then whatever happens next, the students are going to take that energy into it, whether it's individual work, whether it's discussions, whatever it may be, Doug Lemov, talks about stopping the peer discussion on the crest of the wave, as opposed to letting it crash and burn and then the energy goes. So again, you'll know yourself, whether you use the barometer of noise, or whether you can just sense in your kids, but cut those discussions off at their peak or as close to the peak as possible. And it will make whatever comes next much more impactful.

And finally, I love this one. So pair discussions are after a rehearsal or rehearsal, either for individual work or maybe a rehearsal for you then to choose a few pairs to share their thoughts. But how do you choose which pairs to to ask who you're going to pick? Well, I've got three favourite questions I like to ask. Third, that is going to help me decide which pairs I'm going to ask to share their thinking. So the first is this, I'll say, Okay, after you pay discussion, okay, quite everybody. Now put your hand up, if you disagree with the answer of your partner. And again, you can be sure, then you're going to get two conflicting opinions on something. And that's going to be great for you then to share that with the rest of the class, who agrees with him who agrees with her, and so on and so forth. I also like this one, this is a good one, put your hand up, if you change your mind during your discussion. Again, that's going to give you such a good insight that you're going to want to share with the rest of the class, because a student used to think this, and now they change their mind or why they change their mind what convinced them and the thing that convinced them might just be the thing that convinces other students in the class, or this is a good one as well put your hand up if your partner said something you found useful. This is particularly good if you've got students who perhaps lack a bit of confidence, who aren't going to kind of voice it themselves. If their partner says, You know what I was talking to Emily, she said this, and it really made sense to me, that's gonna be great for me. And it's also going to be great for the rest of the class to benefit for that. So being a bit tactical, asking those questions to filter out, which groups we're going to choose to hear from, I think can work quite well.

So there are five tips for improving student pair discussions. And the thing I always ask teachers to reflect on at this point is which of these you already do and you don't need to worry about? And which of these do you perhaps not do perhaps as much as you'd like to or maybe you've never done but you feel are important that you could build into your practice.

If you found that useful, as I said, there's a load other tips about pair discussions and also on pretty much every other aspect of teaching in my tips for teachers book, you can get that wherever you buy your books. And also if you head to the website tips for teachers dot code at UK, you'll find the tips of teachers podcast, you'll find loads of videos of tips that you can share in departmental meetings. You'll also find a newsletter that you can subscribe to so you get a tip to train your classroom every Monday morning, and you'll also find access to all my CPD both online and in person. Hope you found that useful.

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Paired discussions - Tips for Teachers Top 5s - Tips for teachers

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Five tips to improve student paired discussions from my Tips for Teachers book

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this eef guidance report reviews the best available research to offer schools and teachers four recommendations to support parental engagement in children’s learning.  parents play a crucial role in supporting their children’s learning

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and levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. evidence from our teaching and learning toolkit suggests that effective parental engagement can lead to learning gains of +3 months over the course of a year.  yet it can be difficult to involve all parents in ways that support children’s learning

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especially if parents’ own experiences of school weren’t positive.  this is why we’ve produced this guidance report

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designed to support primary and secondary schools to work with parents – particularly those from disadvantaged homes.  it offers four clear and actionable recommendations which we hope will support an evidence-informed approach.

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Working with Parents to Support Children's Learning

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Four recommendations on working with parents to support their child's learning

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while the number of teachers in mainstream schools in england has remained relatively steady over the last decade or so

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the number of full-time equivalent tas has more than trebled since 2000: from 79

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700. teaching assistants comprise over a quarter of the workforce in mainstream schools in england: 35% of the primary workforce

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and 14% of the secondary school workforce. the number of full-time equivalent tas has more than trebled since 2000: from 79

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there are currently more tas in english nursery and primary schools than teachers: 273

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900.1 about 7% of tas in state-funded schools have higher-level teaching assistant (hlta) status. a key reason for increasing the number of tas was to help deal with problems with teacher workloads. in 2003

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the government introduced the national agreement to help raise pupil standards and tackle excessive teacher workload

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in large part via new and expanded support roles and responsibilities for tas and other support staff. the growth in the numbers of tas has also been driven by the push for greater inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (send) into mainstream schools

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with tas often providing the key means by which inclusion is facilitated. given that sen pupils and low-attaining pupils are more likely to claim free school meals (fsm)1. tas also work more closely with pupils from low-income backgrounds. indeed

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expenditure on tas is one of the most common uses of the pupil premium in primary schools

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a government initiative that assigns funding to schools in proportion to the number of pupils on fsm. a combination of these factors means that schools now spend approximately £4.4 billion each year on tas

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corresponding to 13% of the education budget. this presents an excellent opportunity for improvements in practice

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with such a large and already committed resource in place. the recommendations in this guidance recognise the fact that schools are operating within already tight budgets; however

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noticeable improvements in pupil outcomes can be made through the thoughtful use of existing resources

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Guidance to help primary and secondary schools make the best use of TAs

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Championing evidence use in your region.

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What is researchED?

The goal of researchED is to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. Researchers, teachers, and policy makers come together for a day of information-sharing and myth-busting.

We aim to to bring together as many parties affected by educational research - e.g. teachers, academics, researchers, policy makers, teacher-trainers - in order to establish healthy relationships where field-specific expertise is pooled usefully.

At a researchED event, there are usually 6-7 rounds of sessions. Each session is 40 minutes long. Attendees build their own day using the timetable and programme that is released a couple of weeks before the day of the event.

We've hosted researchED events around world including in London, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Cape Town, Chile, Dubai, Geneva, Melbourne, Toronto and many more!

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researchED Events for Researchers, Teachers & Policy Makers

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researchED puts on events around the globe for education specialists from teachers, researchers, policy makers to information-share.

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Strategies for Effective Teacher-Parent Communication - TeachHUB

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Disengaged parents? Confused teachers? Discover proven strategies to bridge the communication gap in our guide to effective teacher-parent communication.