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At Redmoor, we feel it is important to support our students as much as we can in making progress towards excellent academic success and as citizens of the global community. Knowledge organisers put together the most important information that is needed for each subject.Over time, students will build up a core back of facts, quotes and vocabulary that will help them excel in exams and understand the world around them. The revision and learning of the knowledge organisers will also help students practice skills that will be invaluable when they revise for GCSE exams.

Please click the link below to access your child's knowledge organiser. You will also find information on how to help your child learn key facts and how long they should be revisng for.
2020-2021 Autumn Term
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9
Spring Term
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9

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At Redmoor, we feel it is important to support our students as much as we can in making progress towards excellent academic success and as citizens of the global community. Knowledge organisers put together the most important information that is needed for each subject.Over time, students will build up a core back of facts, quotes [...]

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DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) or ERIC (Everyone Reads in Class) are very common approaches to independent reading that occur each week in countless schools. They are part of the fabric of the school day and can prove a cornerstone of a rich reading culture.

The rationale for implementing sustained opportunities for repeated independent reading makes sense. R eading books presents opportunities for print exposure to the rare vocabulary of books, along with vital experience with complex text structures.

Indeed, there is good research to indicate that reading for pleasure independently aged 14, along with having access to books, correlates with increased vocabulary above and beyond factors such as parental qualifications. Additionally, reading fiction can be a help to build the crucial background knowledge that supports access to a range of curriculum domains.

There are lots of benefits from pupils reading aloud, but silent reading has the unique value of pupils' reading up to 30% more than they would if they read aloud.

Silent reading can also offer a calm, contemplative start to the school day, or an afternoon after a windy lunchtime, which should not be undervalued.

Put simply, reading lots can lead to more learning. Silent reading has value.

What are the problems with silent reading?

So, why might silent reading need 'sorting out'? Along with the benefits that come along with silent reading, there is evidence that it may not be so effective as we may assume.

First, there is the issue of 'f ake reading'. Research evidence has indicated that many pupils will fake reading during DEAR time, or select an easy and narrow range of reading materials.

As reading expert, Professor Tim Shanahan explains in his Reading Rockets article questioning the efficacy of silent reading;

"Some texts are likely to be more supportive of reading development, too. Maybe they use words with particular spelling patterns, academic language, or organizational schemes. Those kinds of texts allow teachers to draw kids' attention to particular features and to show them how to negotiate them effectively."

There are worrying indications that utilising DEAR may see the reading rich get richer and the reading poor get poorer. We all know those pupils who read fluently and with great skill. They better select those Goldilocks texts that are just right for them, staying motivated and focused, as they read voraciously and well.

For those pupils who lack reading fluency and skill to begin with, silent reading is less likely to be profitable, without careful scaffolding and more targeted support. The arguments for independent book choice may be trumped by the flattened reading performance of weaker readers.

There is US research on silent reading indicates that it is more effective and enjoyable for pupils who already have a high prior value put on reading. I don't think this comes as a surprise to many teachers. How many pupils don't have a book in their bag, nor look forward to making a selection from the library? How many teachers are confident in supporting those selections?

Though there is little evidence to offer an easy solution for all pupils, there are some useful prompts for effective implementation. They go some way to defining 'structured silent reading ':

Audit reading habits and reading materials. It can be easy to assume the quiet class is reading and learning. Too often pupils are whipping out the same book as last week, or last month, or even last year.

Support choice and structure rich reading. Lots of schools are highly explicit about cultivating effective reading each day. Secondary Schools like Greenshaw High have a reading curriculum, that also pays attention to balancing fiction and informational texts (indeed, they also managed to transfer this online to good effect). Primary schools like Layton Primary School have a crafted reading spine to steer help steer curricular choice. More independent choice can be scaffolded and celebrated. Additionally, there is a question about how closely such reading is aligned to the curriculum.

Top and tail time spent reading. Highly motivated readers can utilise each moment of their DEAR time. Too often though, many pupils will require explicit teaching both to sustain their effort on reading, but also to help to cohere their comprehension. Asking pupils to summarise the book they are reading before they read can help gain their attention, but also prime them to be focused in their reading. Most importantly, if pupils can expect to summarise and elaborate on what they have read at the end of DEAR, the likelihood of them staying on task is heightened and they are likely to improve their reading comprehension.

Utilise reading time to support the weakest readers. Given the evidence that weaker readers struggle to squeeze learning out of silent reading, we should seize the opportunity to use the time to do targeted work with small groups. We may seize the opportunity for reading fluency approaches, or explicit vocabulary instruction etc.

Define goals for silent reading. It will not be enough to give over curriculum time to silent reading and expect good things to happen for all pupils. We should define the goals of 'structured silent reading' and monitor them accordingly. Are we looking to improve reading stamina; reading motivation and pleasure' reading fluency; build knowledge and vocabulary; or similar? A reading record may be a start, but more nuanced monitoring and evaluation will be needed.

We could just assume good things happen when we promote independent reading, but the likelihood is that this only occurs for fluent, successful readers, and so carrying on without careful intent may widen the attainment gap in our school.

Implementing structured silent reading, along with exploring other approaches that will make reading and learning gains, should be our aim to help address the attainment gap.

It is a desirable end goal that pupils read complex texts independently. More than that, reading can open up imagined worlds, along with crowbarring open doors of opportunity.

And yet, we need to pay close attention to sorting out our approach to reading to that crucial end.

Related Reading

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DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) or ERIC (Everyone Reads in Class) are very common approaches to independent reading that occur each week in countless schools. They are part of the fabric of the school day and can prove a cornerstone of a rich reading culture.

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A series of short posts about specific elements of teaching practice that I think are effective and make life interesting. Some are based on my own lessons and others are borrowed from lessons I've observed.
There are lots of ways of asking questions. Previously I've written about:

Probing Questions: http://headguruteacher.com/2013/01/22/great-lessons-1-probing-questions/

Think-Pair-Share: http://headguruteacher.com/2012/07/17/the-washing-hands-of-learning-think-pair-share/

And there are lots of great posts out there about questioning, like this from Alex Quigley: http://www.huntingenglish.com/2012/11/10/questioning-top-ten-strategies/

It's a natural, sensible tendency for teachers to want to spread questions around a class, involving as many students as possible, keeping them all interested, listening to each other and thinking about the question in hand. However, recently, I've been trying to explore what happens when you focus more intensively on just one student to probe more deeply into a set of ideas. This approach is based on the idea of dialogic teaching that colleagues at KEGS have explored in recent years.

Two issues of Learning Lessons are well worth reading:
Vol 2: Issue 3: Dialogic Teaching Vol 2: Issue 13 Still Talking Dialogic Teaching
Normally, when the class has been set a question to discuss in pairs, I tip-off one pair that I'll be asking them to share their response with the class. This gives them time to be ready; they're not surprised to be asked. Then, I bring the class to attention and focus on one student in this pair asking for ever great clarity in their response.

Here's an example from a Year 10 Chemistry lesson. Looking at rates of reaction curves, what do the graphs tell you about the reactions in each case?

What were you saying in your pair? The reaction finished at the same point in each one, but they just did it at a different speed.

Typically enough.. they stop there without volunteering an extended verbal answer. But then the dialogue starts:

OK, that's right. Is it the acid or the limestone that determines that reaction is finished? The acid is used up.

And how did you control that to make it the same? We measured out the same volume each time.

So what feature of the graph tells you that the reactions have finished? They become a straight line because no more gas is being produced.

Why is it a curve and not a straight line? It goes up quickly to start with because there is more acid to react with and more reactions take place and then it slows right down....it gets less steep.

Good.. and what's a more sophisticated term for 'goes up quickly' ? The gradient is greater?

Excellent...So how is the gradient different for the three different experiments at the start? The gradient was the greatest for the small chips.

Very good...And what is the feature of small chips that makes the gradient greater? They have a greater surface area so there are more reactions on the surface...

Which does what? Which makes the reaction happen more quickly....at a greater rate.

Ok. now try to put that altogether in a full answer all at one go with all the correct terminology saying what happened and why.

Ta-dah! The final response was superb, linking these ideas together.

This approach clarifies the understanding of that student and makes them string ideas together.. but, because everyone else is listening, they all get to put their thoughts together. I think it works well because it models the thought process of one person.. it's not a case of pulling together different people's ideas. There's an intensity to it; a hot-seat aspect that makes that one student really think hard about terminology, sequence of cause and effect and so on. It makes you, as the teacher, listen to their answers closely and, by not moving on to a new student, you create a dialogue that deepens rather than widens the thinking. That's often a powerful effect. In some lessons where question spreading is the norm, students often throw in new ideas rather than deepening the idea that's already in hand.

It's important to finish with a re-constructed answer of the kind you want - a full, extended answer. Students can then write down their versions of the same thing having seen this modelled.

You can't do this all the time, but every so often, Dialogic Questions are very effective.

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Pedagogy Postcard #1: Dialogic Questions

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A series of short posts about specific elements of teaching practice that I think are effective and make life interesting. Some are based on my own lessons and others are borrowed from lessons I've observed. There are lots of ways of asking questions. Previously I've written about: Probing Questions: http://headguruteacher.com/2013/01/22/great-lessons-1-probing-questions/ Think-Pair-Share: http://headguruteacher.com/2012/07/17/the-washing-hands-of-learning-think-pair-share/ And there are lots...

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Walkthrus Guidance - Linked to Rosenshine

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Walkthrus Guidance - Linked to Rosenshine

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ADAPT Model

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When Oliver Caviglioli and I sat down to think about our Teaching WalkThrus project, an early consideration was the problem of "implementation" and the practices that surround it. It's a common and highly problematic concept in CPD that teachers are meant to receive ideas through training that they then deliver; they implement. This leads to all kinds of issues with mutation and resistance as teachers are driven down a path that essentially amounts to doing something somebody else is telling you to do.

This isn't what teaching is like; it's not how teachers improve. In his address to ResearchEd in Cardiff earlier this year, Dylan Wiliam suggested that the knowledge teachers have is like the knowledge you need to ride a bike: you can't give someone that knowledge, you can only create conditions where they develop the knowledge themselves. This might include some theoretical instruction and some feedback, but the real learning comes from the practice; the experience of doing it.

With that in mind, we were keen to stress from the outset that our five-step WalkThrus were not instructions you must follow; a mandatory checklist. They are a reference point to create shared understanding - a kind of definition of what we mean when we refer to a concept or strategy; they are intended to provide a springboard from which teachers can develop their own practice in their context with their students teaching their subjects. This is where the A|D|A|P|T strategy comes in. We were quite pleased with this acronym! We emphasise this multiple times throughout our book, including it on every WalkThru spread, but we also believe is has value for any teaching idea.

Even this isn't rigid. We were asked recently whether it was ok to adapt the ADAPT strategy! Of course it is... it's just a guide to a way of thinking. We recommend it but it's open to being adapted like everything else. So - what does it mean?

These images imagine Chloe looking at the WalkThru 'Feedback as Actions'
Attempt.

Develop

Adapt

Practise

Test

With the ADAPT approach at the core of our approach, we feel that we can support teachers to communicate about ideas that they share in common - using the materials we make as a reference point to ensure shared understanding is maintained - whilst giving the confidence to make them their own. This might be a useful approach to other sets of ideas that are brought in from the outside. Don't make it feel weirdly subversive for teachers to adapt, tweak and re-arrange things - make that an explicit part of the process. Then teachers will be implementing their own ideas, not someone else's - and that's more likely to be something they sustain - so it's more likely to work.

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The A|D|A|P|T approach to implementing teaching ideas.

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When Oliver Caviglioli and I sat down to think about our Teaching WalkThrus project, an early consideration was the problem of "implementation" and the practices that surround it. It's a common and highly problematic concept in CPD that teachers are meant to receive ideas through training that they then deliver; they implement.

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rED Durrington 2020 Harry Fletcher-Wood: How can we get students to 'turn up' to remote learning

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This week I took part in one of the excellent #CPDConnectUp webinars with David Weston for Teacher Development Trust. The theme was 're-establishing teaching routines' as schools begin the path back to being fully open. The format included about 15 minutes input from me, then lots of questions in break-out groups and the full session.

Members of TDT Network will get full access to the recording and slides but here's the gist of what we discussed.

As students return to school, my sense of what the priorities for teachers will be to focus on:

Classroom Interaction

Learning Goals

Checking for Understanding

Guided Practice

Classroom Interaction

Classroom interaction will be a key thing that students have missed so it's going to be important to press a giant re-set button and re-establish all the routines again, balancing a big warm welcome with some sensible rehearsal and reinforcement. It's going to be important to make it feel really good to be back; not too weird; not heavy-handed - just nicely reassuringly welcoming and orderly. Calm. Normal. Friendly. (Personally, I feel that the less you can make your classroom look like a disaster movie or crime scene the better!)

A key thing that everyone will want to do is talk so it's going to be important to re-establish that routine early on: Switching from Everyone Listening (Signal. Pause. Insist) to Everyone talking (Turn to your partner/Think, pair, share). The combination of routines is really worth rehearsing explicitly so that you can do plenty of teacher talk and student talk in a nicely alternating fashion, fluidly moving between the two.

Of course social distancing measures will make the student talk more difficult but I'd suggest trying not to let that be a barrier or too strange. It's just how it is and, yes, we have things to discuss!

Aligned to this will be the need to re-ignite your repertoire of questioning strategies. Using cold call with the teacher choosing who answers so that everyone can contribute, ensuring everyone gets a say, is heard and participates.

Learning Goals

Of course, the most natural thing, right at the start, will be to spend a bit of time just reflecting on the shared experience of lockdown. A bit of a debrief is going to be necessary. But I think a lot of students will be keen to get on with things. Given the inherent weirdness of the whole scenario, the most normal thing you can do as a teacher, is to teach; to get on with the learning in the most no-nonsense fashion possible.

The main teaching focus will be to set explicit learning goals, firstly by looking back at the work that has been set during lockdown and then by looking ahead - to the end of term and, for exam classes, to the end of the course. Whatever your anxieties are about course completion and students' learning gaps, make it all seem fine; possible; salvageable. We're going to be Ok!

Depending on our context, there will be range of experiences with students engaging in the work that's been set. It'll be important to a spend a few lessons exploring the curriculum covered during remote learning. Validate and celebrate the efforts students made - really important for all the most diligent engaged students to feel that it was all worthwhile and that you noticed. At the same time - and this will need some subtlety in your messaging - you need to declare some kind of amnesty for the work you set, if you have students you know found the remote access difficult all along. They don't need a double-whammy of struggling for weeks and now being made to feel terrible for it, in relation to everyone else. Look at set piece bits of work to get everyone to finish; use some super low-stakes knowledge checks to see what people have learned and re-teach accordingly, just to get people up to speed.

I think it's going to be really useful to have Big Picture references for the topics you've covered remotely, so that you can review how far everyone got. Whether it is textbooks, booklets, knowledge organisers - any kind of resource - look at the totality of the knowledge students ought to have so that you and they can evaluate how far they have to go in order to be fully caught up.

Then, looking ahead, do the same. It's good practice for any new learning to set out the scope of what is to come: the key knowledge, the experiences, the key assignments. This is so that everyone can make sense of the ideas, organise their thinking and track their progress. If there's a clear sense of 'this is where we're trying to get to by summer', it helps to frame the remaining weeks of school with the appropriate level of intensity/urgency in the work students need to do and the learning experiences they have to look forward to. Ideally, if you trust and amplify the inherent joy in the subjects you teach, this will seem exciting!

Checking for Understanding and Guided Practice

I think that two of the main deficits in remote learning are the inherent dynamics of good instructional teaching where students have their understanding checked and their first steps in learning carefully guided to build confidence and ensure success. It's going to be so important to make students feel good about learning by engineering success right from the start.

A key element of this is that you use good check for understanding routines in questioning, making it normal and expected that students will have uncertainties and gaps that you are only too willing to explore with them. (Ask 'what have you understood?' rather than 'Have you understood?' )

Another element will be to use plenty of confidence-building low-stakes retrieval practice, building on the routines you had in place before the lockdown but re-establishing them as necessary. In my TDT session I suggested that it might pay off to combine the need to get people talking with their need for plenty of retrieval practice work by using the more interactive, discursive elements in your repertoire of techniques:

Finally, when introducing new material, place a lot of emphasis on guiding the first steps. This close support will be something students will have missed during the lockdown. As far as the distancing rules allow, get close to student work, making the steps small enough to practise repeatedly with tight feedback loops so you can see students getting things right, doing things well, intervening to re-explain or re-model as often as needed - individually or whole-class.

Final thoughts.

The main to emphasise, in my view, is to create a positive feeling in the classroom that leaves students feeling that's it's really good to be back. That's about the positive, inclusive climate you create from the start and getting into a normal-feeling learning-focused groove as soon as you can. Give them that sense that things are under control and that, whatever anxieties they have or problems they've experienced, there's a path ahead that is clear, tangible in the form of the information you provide.

Thanks again to David for inviting me to participate in the #CPDConnectUp events.

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This week I took part in one of the excellent #CPDConnectUp webinars with David Weston for Teacher Development Trust. The theme was 're-establishing teaching routines' as schools begin the path back to being fully open. The format included about 15 minutes input from me, then lots of questions in break-out groups and the full session....

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"Naylor's natter...just talking to teachers"

Naylor's Natter is the brainchild of Phil Naylor , created initially to share musings on evidence, research and CPD. The podcast has grown significantly since its first episode in early 2019 and is now proudly supported by the Teacher Development Trust .

As the podcast has evolved so has its reach, we feel passionately about diversity of opinion and representation of our profession. To ensure we better reflect teaching , we are now proud to add more hosts to the podcast. Opinions are guests and hosts alone.

"Naylor's natter...just talking to teachers"

Naylor's Natter is the brainchild of Phil Naylor , created initially to share musings on evidence, research and CPD. The podcast has grown significantly since its first episode in early 2019 and is now proudly supported by the Teacher Development Trust .

As the podcast has evolved so has its reach, we feel passionately about diversity of opinion and representation of our profession. To ensure we better reflect teaching , we are now proud to add more hosts to the podcast. Opinions are guests and hosts alone.

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naylor's natter podcast 'just talking to teachers'

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‎Naylor's Natter Podcast 'Just talking to Teachers' on Apple Podcasts

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‎"Naylor's natter...just talking to teachers" Naylor's Natter is the brainchild of Phil Naylor , created initially to share musings on evidence, research and CPD. The podcast has grown significantly since its first episode in early 2019 and is now proudly supported by the Teacher Development Trust ....

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Effective Retrieval

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Jeffrey Karpicke, PhD, is the James V. Bradley associate professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. He received a BA in psychology from Indiana University and a PhD in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. Karpicke's research sits at the interface between cognitive science and education, with the goal of identifying effective strategies that promote long-term learning and comprehension. Karpicke's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. Karpicke was the recipient of the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from Association for Psychological Science, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Author website.

The movie "Inside Out" (2015) takes us inside the mind of its young protagonist, an 11-year-old girl named Riley, and depicts memory in a way that is sure to resonate with many people. In Riley's mind, her memories are objects - globes colored with emotions - that are stored in a mental space, just as physical objects are stored in a physical space. When Riley experiences an event and creates a new memory, a new globe is produced in her mind, rolling down a ramp like a ball returning in a bowling alley. When Riley re-experiences a past event, a globe is placed in a projector and events are replayed, projected on a screen in her mind. Cognitive psychologists refer to the mental processes involved in the creation of new memories and the recovery of past memories as encoding and retrieval, respectively.

The depiction of the mind in "Inside Out" follows centuries of thought on how mind and memory work. Throughout history, scholars have used a common metaphor to talk about memory: The mind is a vast storehouse or space; memories are objects stored in that space; and retrieving a memory is akin to searching for and finding an object in a physical space (Roediger, 1980). To learn something new, according to this view, the challenge lies in getting knowledge "in" one's mental space. Getting it back "out" when needed is important, too, but learning is usually identified with the encoding of new knowledge in memory. Retrieval is assumed to be neutral for learning; retrieval is needed to assess what a person has learned, but retrieval processes themselves are not thought to produce learning.

Recent advances in the science of learning and memory have challenged common assumptions about how learning happens. Specifically, recent work has shown that retrieval is critical for robust, durable, long-term learning. Every time a memory is retrieved, that memory becomes more accessible in the future. Retrieval also helps people create coherent and integrated mental representations of complex concepts, the kind of deep learning necessary to solve new problems and draw new inferences. Perhaps most surprisingly, practicing retrieval has been shown to produce more learning than engaging in other effective encoding techniques (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011). This approach, which recognizes the central role of retrieval processes in learning and aims to develop new learning strategies based on retrieval practice, is referred to as retrieval-based learning.

Retrieval Creates Learning

Research dating back a century has shown that retrieval contributes to learning (for a historical review, see Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a), but the past decade has seen a renewed, intense focus on exploring the benefits of retrieval for learning. This recent research has established that repeated retrieval enhances learning with a wide range of materials, in a variety of settings and contexts, and with learners ranging from preschool ages into later adulthood (Balota, Duchek, Sergent-Marshall & Roediger, 2006; Fritz, Morris, Nolan & Singleton, 2007).

A word-learning experiment illustrates some key points about retrieval-based learning. In the experiment (Karpicke & Bauernschmidt, 2011), students learned a list of foreign language words (e.g., Swahili vocabulary words like "mashua - boat") across cycles of study and recall trials. In study trials, the students saw a vocabulary word and its translation on the computer screen, and in recall trials, they saw a vocabulary word and had to recall and type its translation. The students studied a list of vocabulary words, then attempted to retrieve the whole list, studied it again, retrieved it again, and so on across alternating study and retrieval practice blocks.

There were several different conditions in the experiment. In one condition, students simply studied the words once, without trying to recall them at all. In a second condition, students continued studying and recalling the words until they had recalled all of them once. After a word was successfully retrieved once, it was "dropped" from further practice - the students did not see it again in the learning session.

Other conditions in the experiment examined the effects of repeated retrieval practice. Once a word was recalled, the computer program required the students to practice retrieving the items three more times. One repeated retrieval condition had the three recall trials happen immediately, three times in a row. This condition, referred to as massed retrieval practice, is akin to repeating a new piece of information over and over in your head right after you experience it. Finally, in the last condition highlighted here, the students also practiced retrieving the words three times, but the repeated retrievals were spaced throughout the learning session. For instance, once a student correctly recalled the translation for mashua, the program moved on to other vocabulary words, but prompts to practice retrieval of the translation for mashua would pop up later on in the program. In this way, the retrieval opportunities were spaced throughout the learning session.

The key question in this research was, how well would students remember the vocabulary word translations in the long term? Figure 1 shows the proportion of translations that students remembered one week after the initial learning session. Merely studying the words once without ever recalling them produced extremely poor performance (average recall was 1 percent, barely visible on the figure). Practicing until each translation was recalled once was much better. But what about the effects of repeated retrieval practice? Massed retrieval - repeating the translations three times immediately - produced no additional gain in learning. Repeated retrieval enhanced learning only when the repetitions were spaced, and indeed, the effects of repeated spaced retrieval were very large. In a single experiment, simple changes that incorporated spaced retrieval practice took performance from nearly total forgetting to extremely good retention (about 80 percent correct) one week after an initial learning experience (see also Karpicke & Roediger, 2008; Pyc & Rawson, 2010).

Figure 1. Data from Karpicke & Bauernschmidt (2011).

Retrieval Practice is Underappreciated as a Learning Strategy

If retrieval practice is such a potent learning strategy, one would hope that many learners would practice retrieval to learn many different things in many situations. However, as noted earlier, retrieval is not typically considered an important part of the learning process, and unfortunately, many learners do not practice retrieval as often or as effectively as they could.

An emphasis on getting knowledge in memory shows up on surveys of students' learning strategies. In one survey (Karpicke, Butler & Roediger, 2009), college students were asked to list the strategies they use while studying and to rank-order the strategies. The results, shown in Figure 2, indicate that students' most frequent study strategy, by far, is repetitive reading of notes or textbooks. Active retrieval practice lagged far behind repetitive reading and other strategies (for a review of several learning strategies, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013). A wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning (Callender & McDaniel, 2009). Yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the strategy most often listed as students' number one choice, by a large margin.

Why don't learners use repeated retrieval practice more frequently? Many students view retrieval as a "knowledge check"; they test themselves to see if they know something, rather than out of the belief that practicing retrieval itself will help them learn. This means that many students will use a "one-and-done" strategy: If they can recall something once, they believe they have learned it, so they remove it from further practice. Many students study this way when they regulate their own learning (Karpicke, 2009), even though their long-term learning will not benefit from repeated retrieval practice. Instead, a one-and-done strategy will produce long-term performance similar to the recall-once condition in Figure 1. There is some evidence that instructing learners about the benefits of retrieval leads students to report using retrieval practice more frequently when they study on their own (Einstein, Mullet & Harrison, 2012), but the best ways to influence students to practice retrieval remain to be discovered.

Practicing Retrieval Promotes Meaningful Learning

Perhaps another reason retrieval practice is not used more widely is because repeated retrieval may seem like "rote learning." Rote learning - simple memorization based on repetition - is short-lived, poorly organized and does not support the ability to transfer knowledge, make inferences or solve new problems. The outcome of rote learning is obviously not what students and educators aim for. Meaningful learning is essentially the opposite of rote learning: It is long-lasting and durable, coherent and well organized, and supports transfer, inferencing and problem solving. In fact, the past decade of research on retrieval-based learning has firmly established that retrieval practice promotes meaningful learning.

Retrieval-based learning may be a more effective means of achieving meaningful learning than other popular active learning strategies. In one example of this (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011), students studied educational texts about science topics using one of two strategies. In a retrieval practice condition, students read a text, then set it aside and spent time recalling and writing down as much as they could remember from it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b). They then reread the text and recalled it a second time. In a second condition, students created concept maps while they read the texts. Concept maps are node-and-link diagrams that require learners to think about the relational and organizational structure of materials (Novak, 2013). The students spent the same amount of time studying in the two conditions; the difference was whether they created concept maps or practiced actively retrieving while learning.

Figure 3 shows the results of two different final assessments given one week after the learning session. On one assessment, students answered two types of short-answer questions aimed at measuring meaningful learning: verbatim questions, which assessed concepts stated directly in the texts, and inference questions, which required students to make new connections across concepts. On another assessment, the final assessment involved creating a concept map, because concept mapping is often used as an assessment of the coherence and integration of students' knowledge. On the final verbatim and inference questions and on the final concept map assessment, practicing retrieval during learning produced the best performance, even better than studying the material by making concept maps.

Several additional studies have established that retrieval practice promotes meaningful learning. Retrieval practice enhances the learning of educationally relevant materials, including educational texts, multimedia presentations, material explained in classroom lectures and a variety of other complex concepts (Jensen, McDaniel, Woodard & Kummer, 2014; Johnson & Mayer, 2009; Larsen, Butler, Lawson & Roediger, 2013; Lyle & Crawford, 2011; Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel & McDermott, 2011). Retrieval practice also supports students in making inferences, solving new problems and transferring knowledge (Butler, 2010; Chan, 2009; Hinze & Wiley, 2011; McDaniel, Howard & Einstein, 2009; Smith & Karpicke, 2014). Retrieval-based learning is an effective method for improving meaningful learning.

Creating Retrieval-based Learning Activities

Perhaps the best aspect of retrieval-based learning is that it is free. Although there are sophisticated tools that can be used to implement retrieval practice, like classroom clicker systems (Roediger et al., 2011) and other computer-based learning systems (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2014; Lindsey, Shroyer, Pashler, & Mozer, 2014), retrieval practice does not require special equipment or technology. The essence of retrieval-based learning is taking material you are trying to learn, setting it aside, and spending time actively retrieving the information.

Existing educational activities can be converted into retrieval-based learning activities. For instance, answering questions and taking quizzes are effective ways to practice retrieval. In some circumstances, students might answer questions on quizzes or practice worksheets by looking up answers in their notes or books, rather than by attempting to retrieve the answers. One study directly compared this type of open-book questioning to closed-book conditions in which students were required to retrieve the answers to questions rather than looking them up (Agarwal, Karpicke, Kang, Roediger & McDermott, 2008). Answering questions in open-book conditions led to more forgetting over one week than did attempting to retrieve the answers, closed-book and then studying the answers. In other words, closed-book quizzes, which required retrieval practice, were more effective than open-book quizzes, which did not require learners to engage in retrieval.

Another study (Blunt & Karpicke, 2014) examined the effectiveness of using concept mapping as a retrieval practice activity. In the experiment, students read texts about science topics and then created concept maps either with or without viewing the texts. In other words, some students created maps while studying the texts whereas other students had to engage in retrieval to create their maps. On a short-answer assessment one week after the learning session, students did better when they had learned by creating concept maps without viewing the texts, as a retrieval practice activity, than by creating maps while studying the texts. Thus, educational activities can be enhanced when they involve retrieval-based learning.

Take Home Points About Retrieval-based Learning

This article has made the case for four take-home points about retrieval-based learning:

Retrieval is a learning event. Practicing retrieval is a simple and effective way to enhance long-term, meaningful learning.

Some effective learning strategies, like retrieval practice, are underutilized. Conversely, the most popular learning strategy among college students - repetitive reading - leads to very limited levels of learning.

When practicing retrieval, retrieve more than once and space your retrievals, rather than massing them all together. Self-testing as a knowledge check is a good idea, but don't stop at just one successful retrieval (one-and-done). Two or three additional spaced retrievals will bolster long-term learning.

Retrieval can happen in a variety of ways, and many existing activities may be converted into retrieval-based learning activities. The key ingredient is to spend time actively retrieving when trying to learn something new.

References

Agarwal, P.K., Karpicke, J. D., Kang, S.H.K., Roediger, H.L., & McDermott, K.B. (2008). Examining the testing effect with open- and closed-book tests. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22(7), 861-876. doi:10.1002/acp.1391.

Balota, D.A., Duchek, J.M., Sergent-Marshall, S.D., & Roediger, H.L. (2006). Does expanded retrieval produce benefits over equal-interval spacing? Explorations of spacing effects in healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer's disease. Psychology and Aging, 21(1), 19-31. doi:10.1037/0882-7974.21.1.19.

Blunt, J.R., & Karpicke, J.D. (2014). Learning with retrieval-based concept mapping. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 849-858. doi:10.1037/a0035934.

Butler, A.C. (2010). Repeated testing produces superior transfer of learning relative to repeated studying. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(5), 1118-1133. doi:10.1037/a0019902, 10.1037/a0019902.supp.

Callender, A.A., & McDaniel, M.A. (2009). The limited benefits of rereading educational texts. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34(1), 30-41. doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.07.001.

Chan, J.C.K. (2009). When does retrieval induce forgetting and when does it induce facilitation? Implications for retrieval inhibition, testing effect, and text processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(2), 153-170. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.04.004.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. doi:10.1177/1529100612453266.

Einstein, G.O., Mullet, H.G., & Harrison, T.L. (2012). The testing effect: Illustrating a fundamental concept and changing study strategies. Teaching of Psychology, 39(3), 190-193. doi:10.1177/0098628312450432.

Fritz, C.O., Morris, P.E., Nolan, D., & Singleton, J. (2007). Expanding retrieval practice: An effective aid to preschool children's learning. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(7), 991-1004. doi:10.1080/17470210600823595

Grimaldi, P.J., & Karpicke, J.D. (2014). Guided retrieval practice of educational materials using automated scoring. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(1), 58-68. doi:10.1037/a0033208.

Hinze, S.R., & Wiley, J. (2011). Testing the limits of testing effects using completion tests. Memory, 19(3), 290-304. doi:10.1080/09658211.2011.560121.

Jensen, J. L., McDaniel, M.A., Woodard, S.M., & Kummer, T.A. (2014). Teaching to the test ... or testing to teach: Exams requiring higher order thinking skills encourage greater conceptual understanding. Educational Psychology Review, 26(2), 307-329. doi:10.1007/s10648-013-9248-9.

Johnson, C.I., & Mayer, R.E. (2009). A testing effect with multimedia learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 621-629. doi:10.1037/a0015183.

Karpicke, J.D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: Deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(4), 469-486. doi:10.1037/a0017341.

Karpicke, J.D., & Bauernschmidt, A. (2011). Spaced retrieval: Absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(5), 1250-1257. doi:10.1037/a0023436.

Karpicke, J.D., & Blunt, J.R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772-775. doi:10.1126/science.1199327.

Karpicke, J.D., Butler, A.C., & Roediger, H.L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471-479. doi:10.1080/09658210802647009.

Karpicke, J.D., & Roediger, H.L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966-968. doi:10.1126/science.1152408.

Larsen, D.P., Butler, A.C., Lawson, A.L., & Roediger, H.L., III. (2013). The importance of seeing the patient: Test-enhanced learning with standardized patients and written tests improves clinical application of knowledge. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 18(3), 409-425. doi:10.1007/s10459-012-9379-7.

Lindsey, R.V., Shroyer, J.D., Pashler, H., & Mozer, M.C. (2014). Improving students' long-term knowledge retention through personalized review. Psychological Science, 25(3), 639-647. doi:10.1177/0956797613504302.

Lyle, K.B., & Crawford, N.A. (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. Teaching of Psychology, 38(2), 94-97. doi:10.1177/0098628311401587.

McDaniel, M.A., Howard, D.C., & Einstein, G.O. (2009). The read-recite-review study strategy: Effective and portable. Psychological Science, 20(4), 516-522. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02325.x.

Novak, J.D. (2013). Concept mapping. In J. Hattie & E.M. Anderman (Eds.), International Guide to Student Achievement (pp. 362-365). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Pyc, M.A., & Rawson, K.A. (2010). Why testing improves memory: Mediator effectiveness hypothesis. Science, 330(6002), 335. doi:10.1126/science.1191465.

Roediger, H.L. (1980). Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 8(3), 231-246. doi:10.3758/bf03197611.

Roediger, H.L., Agarwal, P.K., McDaniel, M.A., & McDermott, K.B. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in the classroom: Long-term improvements from quizzing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17(4), 382-395. doi:10.1037/a0026252.

Roediger, H.L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006a). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 181-210. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00012.x.

Roediger, H.L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006b). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x.

Smith, M.A., & Karpicke, J.D. (2014). Retrieval practice with short-answer, multiple-choice, and hybrid tests. Memory, 22(7), 784-802. doi:10.1080/09658211.2013.831454.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or policies of APA.

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A powerful way to improve learning and memory

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Jeffrey Karpicke, PhD, is the James V. Bradley associate professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. He received a BA in psychology from Indiana University and a PhD in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. Karpicke's research sits at the interface between cognitive science and education, with the goal of identifying effective strategies that promote long-term learning and comprehension.

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Making kids cleverer. How should we decide what knowledge to teach? 

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Making kids cleverer. How should we decide what knowledge to teach? 

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Last year I wrote two posts on two ways I think we might be getting curriculum thinking wrong at the moment. The first is on cultural capital, the second is on powerful knowledge.

Below is a short presentation on these themes I put together for researchED Durrington:

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How should we decide what knowledge to teach?

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Last year I wrote two posts on two ways I think we might be getting curriculum thinking wrong at the moment. The first is on cultural capital, the second is on powerful knowledge. Below is a short presentation on these themes I put together for researchED Durrington:

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MARGE - Motivate; Attend; Relate; Generate; Evaluate.

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MARGE - Motivate; Attend; Relate; Generate; Evaluate.

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Shimamura - Cognitive Scientist

Helping pupils remember what they have learnt.

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Why do students fail to make progress? Understanding how prior knowledge affects current learning and how to fill the gaps. 

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Why do students fail to make progress? Understanding how prior knowledge affects current learning and how to fill the gaps. 

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"If we are to understand how teaching relates to learning, we have to begin at the closest point to that learning; and that is students' experience." Nuthall. 2001.
Lots of people have written reviews of Graham Nuthall's Hidden Lives of Learners published posthumously in 2007. It's often cited as a must-read by conference speakers, including by me. In fact, in my regular evidence-base pre-amble on an INSET day, I nearly always run through the key findings from Hidden Lives because it's so insightful and powerful as a reference-point for all the subsequent discussions.

Possibly the best account I've found of Nuthall and his work is this 2019 blog Graham Nuthall: Educational research at its best, for ResearchEd by Jan Tishauser. Jan describes Nuthall's research methods in some detail. Hidden Lives is fascinating for the research processes it describes as well as for the findings and conclusions. The forensic approach, using recordings of student dialogues, pre and post-testing and extensive observation, yields the most powerful insights into how learning arises from the complex real world of a classroom.

It's not a long book (160 pages) so really my main recommendation is to buy it and read it. Here I'm going to signpost some of the key themes that he explores that I have found relevant to my work in teacher development.

The message about teacher observation and prescription.

Nuthall makes you feel foolish for ever being deluded enough to think you could walk into a lesson and 'see learning' - or judge teacher quality based on the teacher's actions. He has a fear of 'teaching recipes' and the idea that "research will be used by educational authorities to tell teachers what they should be doing, regardless of their needs or the circumstances in which they are teaching." A well-founded fear given how readily leaders seem to impose checklists! He discusses how teaching is about sensitivity and adaptation - and how the book is about understanding learning, rather than how to teach.

But, importantly, his suggestions are far from being a free-for-all. By understanding learning, teachers are likely to better know what adaptations to make for their learners. "You can do it by a kind of blind trial and error, but it would be much better if you knew what kinds of adaptations were needed, and why.'

Can we tell a good teacher by observing? No " We simply cannot tell by looking". But there are some underlying principles to consider when considering what effective teaching might entail: (p36). On p38 he suggests an ideal learning activity, taking his premises into account, would have the following characteristics:

It focuses on the solution of major question or problem significant in the discipline and in the lives and culture of the students

It engages students continuously in intellectual work appropriate in the discipline

It provides teachers with opportunities to monitor individual students' evolving understandings

It allows students, with experience, to manage their own learning, so they internalise the procedures so they become part of their natural way of thinking.

This encourages me to continue to develop my thinking about observation and feedback focusing on student learning and the challenges they face, rather than observable teacher performance.

p103/4: I t is assumed that learning is the more or less automatic result of engaging in classroom activities. If students do what the teacher expects of them, follow the instructions carefully, complete all the aspects of the tasks, then the students will learn what the teacher expects. .....However our research shows that almost none of this is true.

The difference between 'hidden learning' and 'observable activity' is referenced repeatedly and extensively - with major implications for teachers and observers.

How Learning Happens

It's hard to summarise, but the same messages come up repeatedly throughout the book, particularly after the forensic examination of dialogues in Chapter 5. Here's my attempt to capture some of the key ideas:

Learning happens when students make sense of ideas in relation to what they already know. Students have a wide range of prior knowledge which cannot be seen or entirely knowable; this variability leads to significant variation in what students can and do learn from a common classroom experience or curriculum input. (About a third of what students might learn from a lesson is unique to them!)

Students engage in lesson activities in a range of ways: sometimes this is dictated by peer dynamics but it also includes unseen elements as students generate mental activities and experiences of their own, some of which are helpful - eg metacognitive self-talk; some of which are unhelpful - eg falling back on misconceptions based on previous experiences and influences or limited knowledge. (The numerous dialogues recorded in the book are joy to read and reflect on)

The main solutions to all of this are :

to keep the curriculum frame wide - through big questions; a kind of conceptual umbrella that allows variable routes through

to monitor student learning closely at the individual level.

All of this chimes beautifully with other ideas: Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought'; William's ideas about responsive teaching and formative assessment; Rosenshine's emphasis on checking for understanding.

Nuthall says: there's a need for constant monitoring of students' understandings as the ways they understand and interact with information depends on their prior knowledge and understandings.

This is so important. Learning is built around each individual student's success in developing their existing knowledge through the process of engaging in activities that weave in the new ideas. Nuthall suggests that teachers are creative but, given the nature of learning, need to direct their creativity differently taking account of:

differences in background knowledge, understandings and misunderstandings students bring to any task

the continuing power of peer relationships to shape students' engagement with activities and how they evaluate their own involvement

the need to constantly monitor what students are learning or are not learning and to respond accordingly.

The three-times rule.
Nuthall's team tried to establish a way of predicting whether a student would or would not learn something from the way they experience learning. They concluded that: Provided a student is able to piece together in working memory, the equivalent of three complete definitions or descriptions of a concept, that new concept will be constructed as part of the student's long term memory.
Students need time to process new concepts; not simple repetition but opportunities to come at material in different ways.
Impressively, once the team had identified this rule of three phenomenon, it had 85% predictive power in both directions: ie predicting that students would learn something or would not learn it, depending on their experiences in various lessons.

Again, echoing Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought', Nuthall notes that, when looking at what students remember, we find the curriculum content wrapped up in the nature of the experience, which means that how students experience an activity is as much a part of what they learn as is the intended curriculum content.
Ethnicity, Intelligence and other variables:
Nuthall references scenarios in the US and in NZ where certain ethnic groups underachieve in certain school contexts. Chapter 6 explores the mechanisms for this in detail. In various places he also references the issue of 'intelligence' as a potential factor in predicting learning. His conclusion is that the variability in learning is explained most securely in terms of the different sets of experiences students have during learning and in the past. These can be affected by some aspects of peer culture and classroom dynamics that lead to students engaging in activities (private or public) that misdirect or even impede learning. If students are not learning the required concepts, it will be because their classroom experiences allow scope for these impediments to dominate over those that might support more successful learning. This is essentially a challenge to teachers to take note of this dynamic and to do something about it because there is no inherent reason for a child not to learn given the right experiences. Again, task design and monitoring come to the fore as important elements of teaching.

Summary Chapter 7 by Wilkinson and Anderson

In order to wrap up Nuthall's ideas after his death, Wilkinson and Anderson have written the final chapter in the book. It's worth reading in itself as it distils the book's ideas very succinctly. There are six main sub-headings:

1. Learning is highly individual: different background knowledge + different experience of an activity -> different learning.

2. Learning involves a progressive change in what a student knows or can do:

A student has to make sense of new experiences by relating them to already known concepts and evaluating them

They have to hold the new experiences in working memory and integrate with related successive experiences.

The processes take time and happen in parallel with for multiple other concepts

Conclusion: a combination of experiences is needed to produce student learning.

3. Learning involves extracting information from and making sense of experiences. However it's not certain this happens - e.g. when students don't have the required background knowledge to make sense of experiences

4. Learning frequently comes from self selected or self generated experiences. There is huge variation in the tasks students self-select - eg talking to peers, adding a diagram, reading or writing something.

5. Curriculum and experiences are inextricably linked. Students learn what they do. "Much more than curriculum content occupies the minds of students and connects to what and how they learn. '

6. Learning is multilayered: What creates learning is a sequence of mental processes; links between classroom activities and mental processes are reciprocal; some links are created by the teacher's design, management and assessment of learning - but some are created by the student's active in-the-head attempts to understand these experiences.

Their concluding section is : What does this mean for teaching? which has these six sub-sections:

1. Design learning activities with student's memories in mind

2. Engage students in activities that enable them to revisit concepts

3. Monitor individual students' evolving understanding of concepts

4. Focus on 'big questions'

5. Capitalise on peer culture to foster learning

6. Over time, encourage students to manage their own learning activities

Weaving this together overlaps with multiple other lines of thinking. As I see it these include:

Curriculum Design: a spiral curriculum, with some broad big picture questions allowing details to be encountered multiple times, acknowledging the different rates, paths and directions that individual students will take on the way to acquiring deep understanding. We don't learn things one by one; we learn multiple things in parallel at different rates. Our curriculum planning must anticipate and accommodate that. And if prior knowledge gaps are found - they too need to become part of the curriculum.

Classroom management: providing structure to student talk so that it is purposeful, focused and monitored, minimising scope for drift or the dominance of the negative side of peer interactions. Creating a 'community of learning' is the goal - but this requires structures that are taught, modelled and reinforced. It can't be assumed that collaborative processes support learning - and it pays to recognise the influence of informal chatter that surrounds the moments of focus; it's all playing a role.

Monitoring and Self-Regulation: Nuthall's work directs us very firmly towards embedding formative assessment, using questioning and micro-assessment to establish how the learning is going, checking for understanding; towards instructional teaching that is highly interactive and responsive. At the same time, given how much input students have into choosing activities that support their learning (mental and public), we need to train them into the habits of effective self-checking, self-monitoring and self-regulation. This lends weight to the idea that regular retrieval and review activities should not only check the knowledge in hand but should serve as rehearsals for activities students can do by themselves to check their own knowledge and understanding.

I've already written more than I intended... really, you'd do well just to read the book - or re-read it. It's a true classic.

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Re-reading Nuthall's Hidden Lives of Learners. Insights from a classic.

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"If we are to understand how teaching relates to learning, we have to begin at the closest point to that learning; and that is students' experience." Nuthall. 2001. Lots of people have written reviews of Graham Nuthall's Hidden Lives of Learners published posthumously in 2007. It's often cited as a must-read by conference speakers, including...

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Roshenshine Masterclass - Tom Sherrington - YouTube

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Roshenshine Masterclass - Tom Sherrington - YouTube

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Screen capture of the Rosenshine Masterclass slides in five key videos plus an introduction.

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Estyn Report - Supporting Teaching and Learning

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Estyn Report - Supporting Teaching and Learning

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Improving teaching and learning

Schools that successfully improve the quality of teaching and learning and continually invest in their staff. They:

encourage honest evaluation.

talk openly about their strengths and areas for improvement.

encourage teachers to take reasonable risks and experiment with different approaches, while always keeping the benefits for pupils at the heart of any change.

focus on monitoring the quality of teaching in relation to how well pupils do over time rather than making simplistic judgements about the quality of teaching by grading individual lessons.

use research-based evidence to solve teaching problems.

Teaching and learning, and the new curriculum

The 12 pedagogical principles of good teaching and learning ¹ is vital for schools to consider as they shape the new curriculum for Wales.

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Supporting schools to improve teaching and learning

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Skip to main content Schools that successfully improve the quality of teaching and learning and continually invest in their staff. They: encourage honest evaluation. talk openly about their strengths and areas for improvement. encourage teachers to take reasonable risks and experiment with different approaches, while always keeping the benefits for pupils at the heart of any change.

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Austin's Butterfly - Modelling and Feedback

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Austin's Butterfly: Models, Critique, and Descriptive Feedback

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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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How can teachers teach pupils how to remember things, better?

Our 62nd interview is with Patrice Bain, an author and teacher for over 25 years.

Throughout her career, Patrice worked closely with cognitive scientists to understand how people learn. In this podcast, our 34th women-in-education podcast, listen to Patrice and Teacher Toolkit founder, Ross McGill discuss:

Patrice's movement through the field of education across 25 years

The constant 'newness' of being a teacher and how it presents itself

The importance of teachers understanding how students learn

The recommendations Patrice would give to teachers for retrieval practice

What people can get from reading Patrice's and Dr Pooja Agarwal's book 'Powerful Teaching'

Patrice's typical week, post book launch

We also ask, what the biggest challenges and career achievements have been for Patrice?

Where she finds inspiration?

and her top tips for teachers wanting to carry out action research in the classroom.

Don't forget to grab a copy of this excellent book, Powerful Teaching!

Listen to the podcast

https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Podcast-62.-Patrice-Bain.mp3

Remember, our podcast is available on iTunes!

Follow @PatriceBain1 on Twitter and discover more on her website: PatriceBain.com

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How Can Teachers Teach Better? Rather Than Review The Learning, Teachers Must Retrieve! by @TeacherToolkit

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How can teachers teach pupils how to remember things, better? Our 62nd interview is with Patrice Bain, an author and teacher for over 25 years. Throughout her career, Patrice worked closely with cognitive scientists to understand how people learn.

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Copyright © 2023 No More Marking All Rights Reserved

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Deeper Learning for All: Five things to do more often

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Deeper Learning for All: Five things to do more often

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A couple of weeks into term and, so far, I've had the privilege of observing 40 or more lessons. I've seen lots of excellent lessons - it's such a joy to be around when a teacher is doing great things; where you think how lucky these students are to be here in this room with this teacher.

I've got a growing mental database of observations from the last year or so and, from that reasonably large sample, I'd suggest there are a few things that teachers could make much more use of. Actually, I'd say that there are some things that are not done nearly enough. Here's a sample of five:
Check for Understanding
Straight out of the Rosenshine playbook, this is not nearly a default habit, in my experience. It's still most likely that a teacher will take one student's response to represent the group or that a teacher will assume they've explained everything well enough to presume that checking isn't even needed. Check for Understanding is powerful. That pause to scan the room, zooming in on two, three or four individuals to find out what they have understood, checking for simple acknowledgement of what's been said and then for accuracy, depth, misconceptions... and then deciding: do we move or do we go back over it?

Cutting corners here is what leads to students developing all kinds of masking strategies - pretending they know things they don't. Ideally, Check for Understanding goes hand-in-hand with an approach of seeking wrongness and uncertainty. Way beyond 'can anyone explain X?' is the question 'is anyone still unsure about X?' That should be the dominant mindset. In my view time spent here is a sound investment.
Explain + Check instead of teasing out.
The practice of asking repeated questions, giving hints and clues, teasing out the target knowledge from a class is so common. And yet, I often feel it's hugely inefficient as well as creating a feeling of insecurity. If you're not getting decent answers quite quickly, it means a) they don't know enough and/or b) they don't feel confident enough to respond. What often happens is that this teasing out process drags on and the teacher ends up giving the answer anyway. But, because time has been used up, they then move on without checking.

Far better, in my view, is to reverse it: For sure, sample quickly to see if students have answer but, when they don't, move swiftly to explain the answer and then spend time checking for understanding as in the section above. That way you know that students now know what they need to know. This could be the meaning of a word or anything more complex. It really is ok to ' just tell 'em ' - and then check.
Rehearse and Repeat: Practise explaining
You don't get good at anything without practice. That's obvious enough. However, when it comes to explaining things, the idea of practice often doesn't seem to be applied. Students might be asked to explain:

Why puddles evaporate more quickly on a sunny day

What 'Space is a Salvo' means in Storm on the Island

The process of coastal erosion.

How the Cuban Missile Crisis started.

How well can you explain those things? The chances are that the first time you do it, you miss things out. As you attempt the explanation you become aware of your knowledge gaps - especially if someone listening is checking what you're saying and can prompt you. But what then? To consolidate, you need to have another go. To do it better the second time. This hardly ever happens in lessons: Everyone has a go explaining something and then, after some reflection or feedback, has another attempt.

If we engage in this kind of rehearsal mode explaining practice, in pairs so everyone can be involved - then students are more likely to say all the words, gaining valuable practice, work out their knowledge gaps and deepen their understanding. The teacher just needs to circulate to monitor and then sample afterwards, checking for accuracy. It's a useful and powerful precursor to a writing task.
Short writing practice loops.
From what I see, far too much writing practice is too long, especially for students towards the bottom end of the bell-curve. I see a lot of students being asked to produce multiple paragraphs and finding it hard because every element is difficult for them and they are continually uncertain about what to write and how to write it. The teacher then has the problem of having a class full of paragraphs that are very difficult to read and give feedback on in a timely manner. There's just too much.

What I have seen work well - and would suggest could happen much more often - is the use of short writing practice loops. This might be simply a key sentence or sentence pair in a story or literary analysis piece. Each student is asked to write a good sentence pair of the target type; the teacher then samples responses and students critique them. They then try writing another one and another one. They practise writing good sentences and a get a feel for the possibilities:

Using quotations: The writer describes vividly how John feels a sense of remorse. This is shown clearly when John says ".............". Discuss/Critique/Try again. And again.

Short sentences: The door opened slowly. He froze, terrified. Discuss/Critique/Try again. And again.

The benefit of this approach comes from the repetitive element of practice but also the tighter turn around of feedback. Students can get better at something than ploughing through an extended display of mediocrity. Of course extended writing is needed too - so it's about balancing things. From my observations, the short-form practice isn't happening enough for those students who need it.
Paired Quizzing.
In my view too much retrieval practice is teacher-led quizzing. There's a lot of stuff being written into powerpoint starter activities reinforcing a very specific form of knowledge checking. This can be useful but the problem it generates is that students are not being trained in how to check their own knowledge; at worse, they can develop a kind of learned helplessness, assuming that the process it out of their control. I would like to see a lot more daily/weekly/monthly review activity that involves students checking their own knowledge and supporting each other to do it. If I have a knowledge set that's nicely defined in a resource as a basis, I can ask my partner questions about it. In doing so I am scanning the range of things that both of us should know; I am learning what questions to ask; I am rehearsing saying key terms. This helps me to understand how I might study independently later on. If we swap and quiz each other, we can cover a wide range of ideas.

If this approach is interspersed with the teacher-led review tasks, I think we'd see students gaining a much better understanding of a) what they should know and b) what they're still not sure of. We have to develop students' agency in the learning process and this is a simple way of doing it. Teachers' roles are to circulate, sample, check for errors and misconceptions - and to model the knowledge checking process.

Put together I think these five things help to get into the corners of the class, addressing some of the challenges teachers and students wrestle with day to day. Most of them boil down to one thing: more practice.
Here's a 10-minute video I made explaining these ideas: See also: Solve Learning Problems at the Source: Start back with what they know and build. Schema-building: A blend of experiences and retrieval modes make for deep learning. The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it. 7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching.

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Deeper Learning for All: Five things to do more of.

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A couple of weeks into term and, so far, I've had the privilege of observing 40 or more lessons. I've seen lots of excellent lessons - it's such a joy to be around when a teacher is doing great things; where you think how lucky these students are to be here in this room with...

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If you would like David to speak at a conference, lead some staff training, or discuss how to implement any of the ideas discussed on his blog, please contact Katie via email or call on 01522 708897.

Please be aware that if you do book David for an event there will be no fidget spinners, no emojis, no sugar paper and no group work. If that's the sort of thing you're after we can recommend plenty of folk who'll be happy to provide it.

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The Learning Spy. Skill = knowledge + practice

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Over the years I've thought a lot about whether we should be teaching children knowledge of the world or the skills to flourish within it. The debate has moved on a lot in recent years and today it's rare to find anyone arguing against teaching knowledge, but there are many who would still advocate for a balance of knowledge and skill. The more I've thought about it, the more I've come to see just how meaningless this distinction is. Knowledge and skill are two sides of the same coin. Or, to attempt another analogy, think about teaching as cooking: 'knowledge' is the ingredients, 'skill' is the prepared meal.

This is in no way to suggest that skill is unimportant, it's patently not. I'd go so far as to say that all teachers want their students to be skilled, just as most of us value eating delicious meals. The only dispute is about how we arrive at our intended destination.

Here's the thing: you can't teach skill you can only teach knowledge. That might seem a little extreme but it's equivalent to saying, you can't cook a meal with a prepared meal, you can only cook with ingredients.

Think about it. Pick a skill you'd like to teach. Let's say you want to teach the skill of punctuation, or the skill of multiplying fractions. Or maybe something broader like the skill of reading. Perhaps you prefer something less obviously academic: the skill of scuba diving or juggling. Where would you begin?

You might think that you can teach a skill by showing somebody how to do something. Let's say you decide to teach the skill of punctuation by showing your students how to end a sentence with a full stop. You write your sentence and then at the end add a full stop: look everyone; the full stop shows where you have ended the sentence. You could then go through a few more examples and get children to add their own full stops, first to some pre-prepared examples and then to a few sentences of their own. What will they have learned? Well, perhaps they will now know that at the end of something called a sentence comes a dot which can be made by pressing a pencil onto paper or by tapping a key on a keyboard. Can they punctuate? Of course not. And the reason they can't is because they don't know enough. To avoid just scattering dots throughout their writing they would need to know what a sentence is. Many people struggle to explain what a sentence is, they just know one when they see one; it becomes an instinctive, intuitive sense picked up from doing a lots of reading or writing.

But, the lived experience of a teacher might be that they go through something akin to the full stop exercise and some children seem to have picked up the skill of basic punctuation. Proof positive that you can teach a skill? Well, what about the children who haven't learned the skill? Are they simply less able? That might be the case but more often, the children who seem most resistant to this type of teaching are, on average, the less advantaged. They fail to acquire the skills we teach not because they're less able but because they've done a lot less reading. The children who seem to acquire skills quickly probably already possessed much of the knowledge they needed to make sense of the instruction and so are able to add new information to existing schemas with relative ease.

If we take instead the example of teaching the skill of juggling, things are likely to go differently. Few if any children possess much prior juggling knowledge but all will have the basic folk physics knowledge of what happens if you throw objects in the air and then try to catch them. Juggling requires you to keep track of at least three objects at once, but anyone who wants to teach juggling is likely to start by showing children how to throw and catch just one object. Children need to know that when juggling three balls, they are actually only throwing one ball at a time, while holding the other two. The ball should pop off your hand rather than rolling off your fingertips. If the ball spins, it has been thrown incorrectly. Balls must travel in a figure 8 pattern, with the hand carrying them from outside to inside, so that they don't hit each other. This isn't instinctive and the vast majority of people need it carefully explained and patiently demonstrated before they began to get it.

If you continued your juggling tutorial, children would, eventually, know enough to be able to practise. With practice they would start to acquire skill; the more they practise, the more skilled they become. Eventually, with effort and determination, they will have acquired the skill of juggling. Of course, some children are likely to be better jugglers than others - all abilities tend to distribute normally - but pretty much anyone in possession of the requisite physical attributes can learn to juggle, to drive a car, or to read, punctuate and multiply fractions.

The point is that although we all want students to learn all sorts of skills we can only teach them knowledge. Different kinds of knowledge may be taught differently: some you can explain, some you have to point out during practice, but as all this knowledge accumulates, it begins to chunk together. At the beginning each item is known inflexibly but through repetition and practice it becomes increasingly flexible the more it coheres with other related items. Skill can only be acquired through practice.

Once a skill has been acquired, we stop being able to see the joins between all the knowledge that went into its creation. The more expert we become, the more invisible and automatic our skills become. Eventually, we may start to believe the skill which for us has become so natural and straightforward can be taught to others as a complete edifice. This is like giving someone a cooked meal and telling them to prepare a meal from its ingredients. It might possible for another expert to look at a meal and work out what each in ingredient is and how they should be combined, but it would be next to impossible for a novice. The idea that skill can be taught without the hard work of teaching all the requisite knowledge is an illusion born from the curse of knowledge.

This explains a lot of what goes wrong in schools.

Q: Why are so many children poor at multiplying fractions, reading or punctuation?

A: They don't practice enough.

Q: Why don't children practise enough?

A: Because they learn early on that they "can't do it".

Q: Why do they learn that they "can't do it"?

A: Because they've not had the skill broken down into teachable units of knowledge.

If you want children - all children - to become skilled, teach them the knowledge they need to be able to practise. Skill requires knowledge and the will to practise.

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Over the years I've thought a lot about whether we should be teaching children knowledge of the world or the skills to flourish within it. The debate has moved on a lot in recent years and today it's rare to find anyone arguing against teaching knowledge, but there are many who would still advocate for a balance of knowledge and skill.

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Small change; big impact. Six suggestions.

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Sometimes switching to using different teaching strategies can feel like a fairly major upheaval for some people. That is especially true if they require new resources to be produced. However, very often, I think that a teacher could make a big impact in their practice by making quite small changes to the routine way they...

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Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

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How to use a Knowledge Organiser with pupils

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Every teacher at KEGS is involved in a teaching and learning group called a 'workshop'. We meet several times across the year to explore a particular aspect of pedagogy. Teachers select who to work with and what to work on. In May each year we have a non-pupil day that we call a 'Leading Edge' day where we run a 90 minute marketplace-style showcase of the work we've all been doing in our groups.
The 2012 Marketplace is reported here. The 2013 Marketplace is reported here.
This year, the workshops covered a wide range of ideas although, interestingly, they were clumped around some common ideas:

Learning texts by heart and reading aloud

Testing and feedback from tests

Using Edmodo as a platform for exchanging ideas and information beyond the classroom

Deepening teachers' subject-specific knowledge

Lesson Study and IRIS as tools for self-reflection

Following some input in October, the workshops this year have had a stronger research emphasis with much more evidence gathering beyond teacher reflection. There has been greater use of assessment data and student surveys to evaluate the impact of the work. There is also a stronger tendency for people to express doubts about whether something has worked. Increasingly, people are referencing ideas brought in via a research-engaged outlook. It's good to see Hattie and Willingham references in some of the reports. The refreshed KEGS CPD Library was given a big plug during the event and hopefully these ideas will continue to influence people's thinking.

As always, the displays and examples of work were impressive but it was the discussions during and after the carousel (as it is known) that everyone valued the most. Sharing ideas in this way is a powerful way to energise people as we look ahead. There is so much enthusiasm across the staff for talking about our work; we just don't get enough time to do it. The final element in the process is for everyone to produce an A4 summary of their project: the aims, methodology, conclusions and next steps. These will be compiled and shared before the end of term in an attempt to capture the essence of what we've learned, before we go round again next year.
The 2014 CPD Marketplace included:
An innovative RE syllabus - developing an introductory Y7 syllabus exploring early religions in Britain from Stonehenge to Celtic and Norse Anglo-Saxons a way to explore general concepts in religion.

Economics AS Lesson Study - a report from a group who had undertaken two cycles of lesson study following the NTEN guidelines, working on using exemplar essays to support writing 18 mark essays. A great process and outcome. A more detailed post is here.

Maths A Level Teacher knowledge and confidence. This was a superb example of teacher-led CPD. Across the Maths department the teachers have different strengths in the content of the Further Maths modules. They identified their weaker areas and followed a process of teaching each other, preparing lessons and resources and testing their improved knowledge in the classroom supported by peer observation. Some said it was the best CPD they'd ever done, building confidence and having real impact. They ran a superbly interactive stall too, with puzzles to solve.

Edmodo: In science, geography, drama, DT/electronics, French and politics different teachers have been exploring how Edmodo can be exploited to enhance the learning process in their areas. The different approaches covered resource sharing, coursework tracking, assessment, online debates, pre-reading of material and a superb AS French exchange of ideas with students from our partner school in Lyon.

In this example from politics students engage in a debate about the significance of source material, prior to the lesson, accelerating the process of exploring the issues in the lesson. All students can see the comments but the Edmodo environment provides all the teacher controls needed.

In geography, the teacher is using Edmodo as the basis of an MA study. She has evaluated numerous aspects of the platform and is able to provide a critical analysis - as well as a demonstration of how it works.

Skill development in Hockey: An exploration of a particular set of techniques of drills and feedback to improve skills in a sport that is not a key strength for many in the department.

Using an iPad in Art to document the creative process. A simple application of photos made into slide shows provided a powerful means of illustrating the artistic process creating exemplars for the future as well as a record for the artists.

Making videos for flipped learning in Maths: The Head of Maths had worked on this the previous year and found that, whilst there were plenty of drawbacks, the use of videos did have an impact in certain situations. This year he'd refined the process, using a more streamlined production technique - making and publishing a video within one free lesson - and found that on average students scored 70% on a test based on material they'd only learned via the video. His presentation is highly evaluative - eg what about those that only got 10% on the test? - but he's found a niche where these videos are worth making to allow some acceleration through the content covered in lessons.

Improving behaviour using IRIS as a tool for self-reflection. Here a couple of teachers used IRIS videos of their lessons to evaluate their skills in relation to behaviour management, identifying their verbal and physical mannerisms as key factors - more than their use of the formal sanctions systems. Very interesting work eg: "It's about HOW you consciously develop a postural, gestural repertoire which can have a multiplier effect on instructions and interventions"

Introducing 1:1 interviews as part of teaching AS Biology units. A group of biology teachers had explored the value of conducting individual interviews with students as a built-in part of the teaching process. It was obviously time intensive but they found that it has some very positive gains in terms of getting to know students and setting standards.

Geography Lesson Study: Y9 Redevelopment. The geography department used the lesson study process to develop a unit of work on the topic of redevelopment. They presented some of the student responses - with some more successful than others. The process was reported with clear positives and negatives identified for future development.

Year 8 Reading Aloud Project. This was undertaken by the Head of Year 8 and his team. Students were encouraged to read aloud in tutor time and were involved in a survey of their experience of reading aloud at home. This fed into work in other departments. Confidence and enjoyment were clearly linked as you might expect but this highlighted the need to give students opportunities to develop confidence in this area.

Chemistry tests: Giving more effective test feedback. The Chemistry workshop explored the structure and sequence of their tests alongside the feedback process. They felt that they hadn't been getting enough formative mileage from the testing process and sought to address this. The results were generally positive showing that their new approach could be pursued further.

Physics: Impact of re-testing to secure knowledge and recall. Previously A level Physics topic tests have been mainly: test, go through the answers and then move on. We felt that introducing systematic re-testing might have long-term benefits to lock in the learning. Using identical tests we re-tested a sub-group of students and our data analysis showed that they did improve overall- although not as much as you might hope in some cases. It remains to be seen whether this has a long-term impact. Logistical complications did arise and, in future, we feel that setting shorter mini repeat tests will be more time efficient all round, instead of re-running full hour-long tests.

English, Latin and French: Poetry by Heart: This workshop group was responsible for the superb document highlighted in the Learning by Heart post. Their presentation provided an opportunity to listen to some of the recitals in Latin, French and English, mixing individual and choral samples. It's a magnificent piece of work.

Beginner German Poetry by Heart followed the example of the Latin/English/French work above. Students had used a German literary text as a stimulus to create their own poems (translating from English to German) and to recite them in German by heart. Student responses were only display - astonishing work from Year 7 students.

Using Thinking Hats to improve Y13 essay writing in French. Interestingly, students find the open-ended discursive essay tasks demanding, not because of their French skills but because of their difficulty in thinking of enough things to say off the cuff, in response to a contemporary theme or topic. The thinking hats, taken from De Bono, were used to provide a simple framework for generating multiple responses from different perspectives. (It's merely used as a device, not elevated to some kind of theory of thinking.) The outcomes on display showed how successful this had been.

Open-ended projects for PE GCSE and A level: The teachers in this group were looking to see where our 'personal learning journey' theme from our teaching and learning statement could be developed in practice. By setting students open-ended research and presentation tasks they generated a range of interesting responses. The GCSE students had taken to this slightly more positively than the A level students (on average) - but the students recognised the value in preparing them for their assessments. As a project, it yielded some interesting pointers to support and improve this approach in future.

Feedback loops in German: A German teacher examined the effectiveness of his marking with his AS groups, developing the use of feedback dialogues whereby students asked questions in response to the marking leading to short exchanges. This ensured engagement with the feedback as well as helping students to clarify their understanding.

Examination of role of direct teaching in Music and English. We all know that direct teacher instruction is powerful -right? But we've all also had the experience of being frustrated or even bored to death by a teacher when we just wanted to get on with the work ourselves. - Yes? In this workshop the role of teacher instruction was explored with detailed students surveys about the value of the teacher's input. They explored the area of differentiating teacher input for students of different abilities and the interesting difference in teacher and student perceptions. Fascinating work - probably highly significant for all of us.

The research groups are not exclusively focused on teaching. The mentoring systems used by the pastoral team were evaluated using a mixture of data and teacher/student feedback. The cost benefit analysis in terms of time to outcomes was discussed alongside the issue of which students to target. Given the energy we put into this, it's great to ask questions about what we do. A form tutor had looked at the use of tutor time and had tried running a weekly Newsday activity with some fabulous outcomes captured on video.

Overall, the event was brilliant. There is nothing quite like the enthusiasm of professional people discussing their work. The spirit of the event matters as much as the content in many ways. It works superbly well as a celebration of our research-engaged culture; it's not just about one morning on an INSET day. These are the conversations that we have every week - when we can find the time. We're all trying to find out what works and how to improve what we do. We're also creating a collaborative culture that supports us as individuals as we go about our business. We're in this together and events like this allow us to express that explicitly. It's a wonderful thing.

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Every teacher at KEGS is involved in a teaching and learning group called a 'workshop'. We meet several times across the year to explore a particular aspect of pedagogy. Teachers select who to work with and what to work on. In May each year we have a non-pupil day that we call a 'Leading Edge'...

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Metacognition - Understanding how it works

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Metacognition - Understanding how it works

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Zest for Learning... into the rainforest of teaching

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Flaws in the way free school meals are delivered in schools and a number of lessons learned have been identified after a research project led by disadvantaged students themselves.

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Here are eight key pieces of research that I've come across in the last few years, which have made me re-evaluate beliefs I've had about teaching and learning. I'll reflect on how below.

1. Student achievement
"Strongest evidence on student achievement = (pedagogical) content knowledge and quality of instruction."
I've returned to this report time and time again since 2014. I led an Inset session in April and asked staff to predict (before looking at the report) which of six teacher traits they expected would have the strongest evidence behind them for student achievement.

The room was divided. The results of this extensive study are as interesting as they are significant for professional development in schools.

2. Classroom decor
"Heavily decorated classrooms disrupt attention and learning in young children."
Prescribed knowledge told me that walls should be full to the brim with glossy shiny brilliance. But this study, and several later ones such as this research paper published in the December 2018 edition of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, has made me question the impact of displays in classrooms. I never truly considered the distraction displays could cause to learners. I certainly do now.

3. Lesson content
"On average, around 50 per cent of content presented to students is known before it has been presented."
In how many lessons in my career have I presumed the students didn't know something? I'll hold my hands up and say: plenty.

Yes, sometimes I'll have dedicated time to diagnostic quizzing and questioning at the start of a unit or topic, but how often have I truly acted upon that for each student there?

Sometimes, I would simply forget to go through that fact-finding process with students. Being aware of this research has made me think again about how crucial establishing prior knowledge is and about how regularly I should do it.

4. Practice
"We rated practice testing and distributed practice as the two most effective strategies for raising student achievement."
I always saw the value of revisiting content with students at regular intervals, whether that be in consecutive lessons or "spaced" over weeks or a term or a year. Nevertheless, research studies like this one really bring home the message of how high the impact of "retrieval practice" and "spaced learning" is.

Yes, we can use new-fangled labels, but we are essentially talking about systems of reviewing learning with students so it's embedded into long-term memory - that's the ambition. Of course, that's easier said than done.

5. Cognitive load theory
"Cognitive load theory is a theory about learning built on the premise that, since the brain can only do so many things at once, we should be intentional about what we ask it to do."
This one has wide implications. Although I grasp the concept, the implications for the classroom and pedagogy are extensive. The Australian guidance document Cognitive load theory in practice gives an excellent summary of what it means for teachers, neatly summarised as:

Strategy 1: Tailor lessons according to students' existing knowledge and skills.
Strategy 2: Use lots of worked examples to teach students new content and skills.
Strategy 3: Gradually increase independent problem-solving as students become more proficient.
Strategy 4: Cut out inessential information.
Strategy 5: Present all essential information together.
Strategy 6: Simplify complex information by presenting it both orally and visually.

6. Written marking
"The quality of existing evidence focused specifically on written marking is low. This is surprising and concerning, bearing in mind the importance of feedback to pupils' progress and the time in a teacher's day taken up by marking."
Back in 2007, when I started my teacher training, if someone had said, "Let's stop marking so much and promote feedback (particularly verbal) as much as possible," they surely would have been scoffed at.

This would not have been because teachers didn't believe it: I think they've always known it. But Ofsted, the government and many senior figures in education truly believed the hype around quadruple written exchanges between teachers and students via green ink.

Since then, we've seen a shift, to the point now where many schools are fully embracing the "feedback not marking" agenda. The Education Endowment Foundation's highlighting of the gap in evidence for the impact of written marking has helped.

Teachers and students are seeing the benefits. Matt Pinkett, an English teacher, tweeted last week that he hadn't marked a book all year but students had achieved their best results. In my current teaching and learning role in school, I'm pushing the idea that it's always about the substance rather than the superficial. The evidence is in the learning.

Recently, I read an excellent case study from a secondary school in Walsall. Their marking and feedback policy was built around asking students two simple questions:

1. What are you doing well in this subject?

2. What do you need to do to improve in this subject?

If students could answer these two questions, in subject-specific detail, then they'd have benefited from effective feedback. Nowhere do they state anything about written comments.

7. Teacher talk
"The most effective teachers talked for considerably more of the lesson than less-effective teachers."
At the start of my career, it was common to hear things like: "Teachers shouldn't be talking for more than 10 per cent of any lesson." Barak Rosenshine's paper on the impact of effective instruction in class has really shone a light on such theories.

Mark Enser wrote last week for Tes about dispelling the myth that too much teacher talk is bad, by calling on the profession to focus on better teacher talk rather than less of it.

I echo this call. As I roll into my 13th year as a classroom teacher, I realise more and more that good explanations require time. Yes, I'm still a great believer that students need variety and structure, but I will no longer stop explaining something properly because it's "time for the plenary".

8. Behaviour management
"Behaviour is crucial: a student's behaviour is a much stronger predictor of future success than test scores. Teachers who helped students improve their behaviour were 10 times as effective at improving their students' final grades as teachers who focused on test scores."
For me, this report confirms what I've always believed: the behaviour of students within a school and classroom is more important to educational achievement than any pedagogical development.

Schools and individual teachers who intervene, challenge and focus on behaviour first will see students achieve higher in exams. Approaches to student behaviour can vary, but building a positive attitude, culture and ethos is surely key to major improvements in academic achievement.
Tom Rogers is a teacher who runs rogershistory.com and tweets @RogersHistory

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Eight key pieces of research for teachers

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There are a handful of research findings that have made Tom Rogers rethink his practice as a teacher. He presents them here

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Science of Learning: Research Meets Practice's project goal is to get the science of learning into the hands of teaching professionals as well as to parents,...

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Tom Sherrington - Checking for Understanding 

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Tom Sherrington - Checking for Understanding 

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Low stakes, high impact formative assessment 

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Low stakes, high impact formative assessment 

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Episode 8: Slow Teaching, High Impact Jamie Thom James Ramsey

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Show Notes: In this episode of 'The Staffroom', we chatted with English Teacher and author Jamie Thom ( @teachgratitude1 ) about the way slowing-down and taking stock can lead to better teacher well-being and student outcomes. We also talked to Humanities teacher, James Ramsey about the way low-stakes, high-impact formative assessment strategies are making a difference in his learning area.

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Episode 7: The Cognitive Psychology of Learning Dr Yana Weinstein

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Show Notes: In this episode of 'The Staffroom', we chatted with Dr Yana Weinstein (@doctorwhy ), an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Yana spoke with us about the way research-based cognitive science can be applied to education in order to enhance learning.

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Episode 13: Closing the Vocabulary Gap Alex Quigley

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Show Notes In this special episode of 'The Staffroom', we spoke to UK based former English teacher, author and director of research, Alex Quigley (@HuntingEnglish ). Alex spoke to us about his recent book, ' Closing the Vocabulary Gap' and gave us insightful research based expert knowledge on the importance of vocabulary in education.

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How can teachers use retrieval practice better in the classroom to enable students to improve their memory?

Our 56th interview is with Dr. Pooja Agarwal, a cognitive scientist and teacher. Pooja started her education career teaching 4th and 5th grade and now teaches college students in Boston at Berklee College of Music.

Pooja's education upbringing and background

Explain how a non-musician manages to teach at a music school

The concept of 'retrieval practice' and why it was her PhD focus

How retrieval practice effects Pooja's music students and how and where they naturally apply it: "Use it or lose it!"

How technology has given teachers access to digestible neuroscience research

Pooja's new book 'Powerful Teaching: Unleash the science of learning'

The challenges American teachers face in 2019 and tips to help teachers be more effective

Which thought leaders that have influenced her and where she goes to inspiration

The challenges faced by women in STEM and the 'leaky pipe' concept and,

Offline, we also talk about the possibility of Pooja visiting the U.K. in 2020...

Listen

https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Podcast-56.-Dr.-Pooja-Agarwal.mp3

Remember, our podcast is available on iTunes!

You can follow @PoojaAgarwal on Twitter and discover more about her on her website: www.PoojaAgarwal.com and also discover her excellent platform to support educators, www.RetrievalPractice.org

Don't forget to grab a copy of her excellent book, Powerful Teaching! You can learn how excited I was in this short video ...

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How Can Teachers Unlock the Benefits of Retrieval Practice? by @TeacherToolkit

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How can teachers use retrieval practice better in the classroom to enable students to improve their memory? Our 56th interview is with Dr. Pooja Agarwal, a cognitive scientist and teacher. Pooja started her education career teaching 4th and 5th grade and now teaches college students in Boston at Berklee College of Music.

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Evidence Based Research - How to do it. 

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Evidence Based Research - How to do it. 

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How can a teacher kickstart action research in their classroom?

These three methods are a simple and highly effective model for teachers to develop action research. You can learn more in Just Great Teaching and discover implementation ideas in a practical training day.

What about classroom research?

With the rise of research influencing education, we need to also raise the profile of action research in the classroom. The challenge for all teachers is how to do this in the busy nature of school life. Below I offer some models which can be used in two ways: a) for day to day classroom practice and b) developing as a school culture for teacher appraisal, where teachers set their own targets - a process alien to some schools, which I am pleased to report, is slowly evolving in schools.

1. Where to start?

You may want to consider using the 5 Minute Research Plan as a framework, but here are a set of simple questions to consider:

1. Who? Which student names crop up time and time again? Which students are rewarded the most? Which have few rewards and no behaviour incidents and are generally off the radar? Find a method for identifying a group of students.

2. What? Search for proven programmes to improve, for example, behaviour from nearby schools or organisations that can support particular groups of students.

3. When and where? On which day and at what time should this intervention occur, and in which space?

4. How? Which intervention and adult is best suited to the child?

5. What next? What impact has the intervention had and what progress has been made?

Download these two research templates from the resources section of this website...

2. Accessing research better

1. Sign up to your subject association's magazine or the Chartered College of Teaching. This subscription will give you access to research beyond paywalls.

2. Organisations such as BERA, BELMAS, the EEF, NESTA and various think tanks and other popular organisations offer useful newsletter subscription and do make a difference!

3. Use apps such as Pocket - brilliant for reducing workload and our inbox - to save any interesting articles you come across and would like to read when you find the time.

4. Try Audible to listen to books on the move and subscribe to an ever-increasing range of teacher podcasts.

5. If you are starting to consider a master's or doctoral degree, consider using plugins on your internet browser such as Mendely, Zotero and Google Scholar to save, access and offer citation.

Research tips video for teachers

3. Conducting your own research

Once you've started reading up on research relating to teaching and learning and incorporating some ideas into your teaching practice, you might want to conduct your own action research project on a specific area that interests you. Here is an excellent framework Mark Quinn (UCL) and I provided to fourteen teachers who took part in our Verbal Feedback Research Project.

Ask

What do we know about current practice?

What types of evidence can we gather?

What evidence can we gather that will be valid?

What will be an efficient way of measuring change?

What should the final outcome be?

Investigate

What types of evidence are currently available?

How do we test them for validity and reliability?

What are the pitfalls of evidence collection?

How do we collect evidence without it adding to teachers' workload?

What ethical risks should be considered when collecting the data?

Innovate

What tentative claim could we make once you have your focus and evidence and you are starting to trial ideas?

What is your evidence currently saying?

What is expected, unexpected, overheard and contrary evidence?

How can you transfer this knowledge from research and development?

Reflect

What do we know about effective professional development in this area?

How can your research and development align with this professional development?

How can you share and celebrate your findings?

Later this week and using the above, I will be publishing some research conducted with UCL to answer the Verbal Feedback research Project question: 'To what extent does verbal feedback improve student engagement among disadvantaged pupils in Year 7 or 8?' It may help shape the marking narrative...

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How Can A Teacher Kickstart Action Research In Their Classroom? 3 Helpful Methods To Ease The Burden by @TeacherToolkit...

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How can a teacher kickstart action research in their classroom? These three methods are a simple and highly effective model for teachers to develop action research. You can learn more in Just Great Teaching and discover implementation ideas in a practical training day. What about classroom research?

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Key Ideas to Focus On - Improving Teaching and Learning 

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Key Ideas to Focus On - Improving Teaching and Learning 

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Although it may be true, as Dylan Wiliam has famously phrased it, that in education "Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere," this doesn't mean that all practice in the classroom is of equal value. There are some things that are almost guaranteed to be ineffective for most pupils, and might even end up harming their progress. A common example given here is the concept of learning styles, or tailoring instruction for different pupils based on some expressed preference in terms of modality (usually restricted to verbal, auditory or kinaesthetic).

Not only is there no evidence that adapting instruction to match a child's 'learning style' is effective, there's now evidence that altering instruction in such a manner can be actively harmful to pupils' attainment. After all, I can't think of anything worse than telling a young boy who is struggling to read that 'visual learning' just isn't really his thing, but that he is good with his hands, so perhaps do some construction in the kinaesthetic zone, and leave the books to the other kids.

So what do we know works?

On the other hand, there are some educational practices that seem to benefit pretty much everybody. An example is teaching early reading through explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics (SSP). Professor Pam Snow likens SSP as "fluoride in the teaching water". No guarantee of avoiding every complication or isolated difficulties, but of huge benefit to the population as a whole. Or as Professor Catherine Snow (no relation) and Professor Connie Juel put it: "Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some". Our time with pupils is short, every decision we make carries an opportunity cost; we could have used the same time to do something else. Consequently, it is important to consider both what and how you teach, starting with what evidence suggests is most effective, as opposed to sheer intuition.

Cognitive science

Many insights into effective practice are being revealed through the burgeoning - though admittedly nascent - field of cognitive science. With a greater understanding of how the brain processes, stores and retrieves information, we can begin to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to promote long term retention, transfer and application of key knowledge.

None of the educational practices listed below are silver bullets. Nor do they guarantee success. However, they are based on increasingly empirically validated theoretical models, and as such represent what we might call 'best bets'. That is to say, these practices are most likely to lead to positive educational outcomes for most children, and are least likely to lead to children leaving a lesson feeling confused. As such, they seem like a sensible place to start as a teacher.

A sensible place to start

In what follows, I'd like to briefly outline five 'best bets' underpinned by research which I'll be focusing on from September along with the team at Reach Academy Feltham, my wonderful school in southwest London.

1. Low Stakes Quizzing

Often referred to as 'retrieval practice', low stakes quizzing is based on a phenomena known as the 'testing effect'. In short, the more regularly you try and recall something from memory, the quicker you will be at accurately recalling that piece of information in the future. There are various ways to embed retrieval practice into your lessons. You might like to start with a short multiple choice quiz at the beginning of each lesson. There's also loads of great tech these days to support with quizzing, try stuff like Quizlet and Plickers. A few tips, though. First, keep it low stakes or no stakes. That is to say, it isn't necessary to collect in scores, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to punish pupils for getting questions incorrect. Forgetting is a normal, even a necessary part of learning. Second, try to be as systematic as possible. Include questions from previous lessons, and then slowly increase the spacing before asking the same (or a very similar question) later on in the course.

2. Instructional Coaching

When I started teaching I was observed three times a year, and told a few weeks in advance the time and date of this lesson. The result was a farcical barrage of edugimmicks and showcasing to tick as many boxes in the 'Outstanding' lesson box that was on my observers clipboard. At Reach, we take a different approach. Every teacher receives 'drop in' from a coach each week. It lasts about 10-15 minutes and could be in any lesson at any time. At the end of that day, the teacher and coach get together to have a coaching session. Perhaps this sounds intense, and so it's worth outlining a few more features. First, at Reach Academy everyone is coached. That means that from the headteacher down, every single teacher receives a drop in and an action step to help them improve their practice. This creates a culture of improvement, where being supported to get better is seen as a right and not a punitive measure. To ensure that the process does not become burdensome and add to workload, we ensure each action step has the 'highest leverage', whilst requiring little extra work. This could be, for example, asking all pupils to respond to whole class questioning using mini-whiteboards (explored below in ratio).

3. Sequencing Curriculum

Everyone in education is currently thinking about curriculum, as Ofsted have indicated they will be much more interested in the 'what' during future visits. Curriculum can feel very overwhelming. We've been working on developing our curriculum over the last three or four years, and still have a long way to go. My main insight after thinking about curriculum over this time is that it mostly comes down to sequencing. Across a key stage: are key concepts revisited and developed? Is key knowledge still being retrieved to secure it in long term memory? Across a unit: are the essential core facts necessary to understand the topic being explicitly taught, practiced and applied in increasingly nuanced and unpredictable ways? Across a lesson: are examples and non-examples intelligently ordered to maximise the chances of all pupils 'getting it'. This is a major job, and relies on a very detailed and fine-grained curriculum plan. For this reason, at Reach we have begun to switch to booklets in lessons.

4. Improving Ratio

Ratio is a concept identified and developed by Doug Lemov in his wonderful 'Teach Like a Champion'. Some techniques in this book can be mastered pretty quickly, but I've been working on ratio for years and still have a long way to go. There are two types of ratio. First, 'participation ratio', which alludes to how many pupils in your class are participating in an activity. Consider the following common scenario. In the classroom you teach a bit of information, and then ask a question to the class. Six hands may go up, giving you a participation ratio of 6/30. You then choose one of the kids to answer, and now have a PR of 1/30. Instead, you might teach the same concept, then display a question based on it, and ask all pupils to attempt it on whiteboards or in their exercise books. Now you have PR of 30/30! The second aspect ratio is 'thinking ratio', which relates to how cognitively demanding a task is. You could give all pupils 'busy work', which they are very comfortable doing. You won't get many complaints, pupil tend to really enjoy doing stuff that doesn't push them. But you have a low TR, which is unlikely to add value and improve learning outcomes. Attempting to increase TR is hard, because it may result in a dip in PR. That is to say, as you increase the difficulty of something, fewer pupils may be able to access it, and vice versa. How to hit the sweet spot of high PR and high TR? That's where most of my thinking is when planning lessons.

5. Learning about Cognitive Load Theory

Underpinning much of the techniques above (and more widely in education) is the relatively new theory of cognitive load theory. This theory suggests a model for how the mind processes, stores and retrieves information. Faculties of Education in universities are often criticised for having no fundamental theory necessary to do common scientific investigation. Physics has their standard model, geography has plate tectonics, perhaps education can have CLT. The theory (at its simplest level) suggests that the mind has a very limited working memory, which processes information currently being thought about, and a long term memory, where learnt information is stored in schemas. Our job as teachers could be seen as carefully constructing these schemas in our pupils' minds, helping to make them increasingly sophisticated. However we need to do this without overloading the bottle neck of working memory. If teachers all understood the principles of CLT, it would allow us to think about teaching in a much more sophisticated way whilst providing a common language for discussing learning.

So there we have it, five best bets to prioritise in September. Of course, context is extremely important, and translating these ideas to your own setting will require a lot of thinking. Do let me know how it goes!
Jon Hutchinson is Assistant Headteacher at Reach Academy Feltham. He is also a tutor for Ambition Institute' Masters in Expert Teaching.You can follow Jon on twitter @jon_huchinson_

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Five best bets to improve teaching and learning in the year ahead

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Although it may be true, as Dylan Wiliam has famously phrased it, that in education "Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere," this doesn't mean that all practice in the classroom is of equal value. There are some things that are almost guaranteed to be ineffective for most pupils, and might even end up harming their progress.

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Rosenshine vs Teach Like a Champion (Lemov)

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Rosenshine vs Teach Like a Champion (Lemov)

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Rosenshine vs Teach Like a Champion (Lemov)

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4 ideas for applying Rosenshine's principles

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4 ideas for applying Rosenshine's principles

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The importance of modelling and worked examples

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The importance of modelling and worked examples

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Challenge/Differentiation/Questioning

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Effective Learning
The Learning Scientists

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Evidence Based Learning - Retrieval and Interleaving. 

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Evidence Based Learning - Retrieval and Interleaving. 

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Damien Benney

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Closing the Word Gap - Improving Literacy

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Research Methods in Education - Cohen and Manion

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Research Methods in Education - Cohen and Manion

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Cognitive Theory Load - Improving Long Term Memory

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Cognitive Theory Load - Improving Long Term Memory

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Strategies to improve speaking and listening

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Strategies to improve speaking and listening

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Teach Like a Champion

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In my work I have the privilege of being able to watch lots of teachers teach in a wide range of contexts. I see lots of superb teachers and lots of great lessons. Where I have constructive feedback to give, I find that there are a few common areas for improvement that come up time and time again. Here are the main things I find I say most often under the heading of 'even better if': - now updated to include youtube clips where I explain each one.

Behaviour: Be more assertive; establish what you want to establish

Where lessons do not have impeccable behaviour, most of the time (not all of the time) I find it is because the teacher falls short of absolutely insisting that students meet the standards they would like. They might continue to talk when there are clearly students talking in the room, they might allow off-task chatter to go un-challenged; they might let learning drift as students lose focus with a task without taking action to push them on; they might not sustain the level of reinforcement needed for their particular class.

There are lots of practical things teachers can do to address all of this, before needing to get into sanctions and wider school systems. I find this can usually be summed up by the need for more assertiveness and Bill Rogers' idea of ' you establish what you establish'. In detail this might require:

taking a more prominent position in the physical space of the classroom and being more conscious about using a whole-class radar to scan what is happening all the time.

reinforcing and rehearsing routines for entry, for questioning, for common practical tasks.

making more eye contact, setting up spaces so students can all be seen and looked in the eye.

using an agreed signal for attention instead of raised voices

pausing to secure attention before speaking - from absolutely everyone, always.

setting time cues for tasks and rehearsing good stop/start routines.

Sometimes it's about communicating a stronger, more intense sense of commitment to the standards so a teacher's disapproval for being late, not having equipment, calling out persistently, messing about in any way - is all that is needed to suggest 'do not do this'. Or it can be about using the warnings or consequences system in a way that is consistent and proportionate.

Of course all teachers need the back-up of some form of system - but what I see is that there is a lot of mileage in improving behaviour through teachers' actions setting higher expectations and then insisting on them being met. It's not about blaming teachers for students' behaviour; it's about saying - you have the power to engineer significant change simply through your own actions - so use it.

Questioning: Ask more students more questions; involve everyone.

With questioning, it's often not a black and white case of do X instead of Y - it's about degrees of intensity. Great teachers tend to ask lots of questions in a deep, probing fashion and consciously include everyone in the class. The most common feedback I give where questioning needs to improve includes the following:

Use cold-calling: Avoid letting a small number dominate by allowing them to call out answers or always taking hands-up.

Consciously include the students who are quiet, under the radar, not contributing spontaneously

Probe. For every answer, have a follow-up - or several follow-ups. Why, how did you know, is that always true, what else could you add, are you sure? (See Probing)

Check for understanding: after any exposition or giving instructions, ask students to repeat back what they've understood. Can named/cold-called students explain it back?

Avoid all these Bad Question Klaxons:

Does anyone have any questions?

Is everyone ok with that?

Does everyone understand?

Do you all know what to do?

Give students more practice with the same question type so they can consolidate the skills; I often find there is not enough repetition and students are moved on prematurely. Drills and over-learning can be very powerful - simply practising multiple examples, especially in maths but also in other areas.

Finally, it's often not about doing this stuff or not doing it - it's about how intense. A teacher might think 'I do cold calling; I do probe' - but I'm seeing that it needs to include lots more students. You can ask the same question to lots of students to check they are following, involved, engaged in the reasoning - even if the previous student gave a good response. It pays to keep bringing students in: Do you agree, what was your answer, say it back to me, can you explain it differently.?

Importantly, teachers need to mix the behaviour management with the questioning. Where they are less confident with holding attention, the questioning slips with students dropping out of the whole-class sphere, losing focus. The skill needed is to continually scan, hold attention and bring students into the questioning process; often students answer one question and then drop back assuming their work is done.

Marking and Feedback: Make all marking an instruction for action

When I see books during any lesson observation process, I'm usually looking to see how learning is mapped out over time in terms of curriculum progression, what resources students have to support their learning and the opportunities they have to improve. The 'even better if' feedback I give most often is this:

Don't mark work with comments or suggestions for improvement unless your students will be given time to act on them immediately. Try to regard all marking as an instruction for a task students will undertake as soon as they receive it. ( See this on feedback as actions.)

There is still quite a lot of 'marking to impress the scrutineer' or 'marking to show I read the work' - which is all time-consuming and ultimately pointless in terms of securing improvement unless it is responded to. Another way to see it is this: Marking that is not responded to looks worse than no marking at all - because it suggests that you didn't really mean it.

I suggest using simple systems like green pen (i.e. a commonly understood signal that work is being done in response to feedback) or simply using headings: 2nd draft; DIRT activity - or whatever. Evidence of work improving matters more than evidence of marking or the perverse idea of evidencing verbal feedback. It IS the evidence of feedback.

Knowledge and Recall: Specify what students should know; check that they do; give time for practice

In some lessons I find that the weaker learners can be unsure of what exactly they are meant to know as a result of an exposition or discussion. I often give the feedback that teachers need to be much more explicit about this. So, after reading a section of text, watching a video, hearing an extended discussion, completing a practical task or a comprehension activity - whatever it is - there is significant value in consolidating all the ideas:

The main facts to know are A,B,C,D,E,F

These are the key points in the argument: X,Y,Z.

The sequence of events is always 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

The main advantages are A, B and C; the main disadvantage is D.

The steps in this type of problem are always 1, 2 and then 3.

These points then needed to be recorded. This can all be supported with knowledge organisers, structured note taking or any number of resources provided that everyone, especially the least confident learners, has access. Some students need a lot more scaffolding for note taking than others.

I often need to suggest teachers avoid the trap of assuming that students know things without checking that they do. The first and most important layer of assessment is questioning: Have you understood? This then requires numerous cold call questions checking in with students to establish whether the key points have registered.

I often feel that students needed more time for rehearsal of these key points. For example, with learning new words - have they said them, used them, written them, pronounced them correctly? (See this on learning vocabulary) Can they run through the three key points with their partner to check they've understood?

Finally, crucially, students need to be quizzed on these bits of knowledge at a later point with prior learning reviews forming a routine part of lessons, revisiting knowledge systematically with all students involved in the recall process: What were the main points from yesterday, last week, the previous unit?

Setting the standards: Define excellence for any task.

The last area of common feedback is around the issue of standards. This can sometimes be assumed or teachers focus heavily on task completion rather than the quality of what is meant to be completed - leaving students to see 'finishing' as more important than doing things well.

In nearly every activity students engage in, it is possible to define what would constitute excellence. If you have done this task extremely well, what would it look like? I often suggest that teachers would secure much better outcomes if they have that discussion explicitly before letting student get on:

What is the expected length/scale of the work?

Which features of presentation are expected?

How many questions should you aim to complete in the time given?

Which language features must be included?

Which common errors should you avoid?

If you have examples of excellence to share in advance, that helps to set the standards in a way students can relate to. Sometimes success criteria can be rather obscure until illustrated with an example.

Finally, I often suggest that standards setting begins in verbal exchanges.
That's a good start, but now say it again better; add the correct terminology and try to link those ideas together.
If teachers go through the standard-setting process routinely, expectations rise and students get used to formulating more sophisticated responses. If you always accept one-word answers or half-formed responses, that's what you continue to get. If students are left to guess the pace, the depth or the quality required, then you'll get mediocrity when excellence might have been within reach.

Obviously all of this 'even better if' feedback goes hand in hand with the 'what went well' and there is always a subject specific context and a teaching group context where the feedback needs to focus particular aspects of the curriculum or the needs of learners. However, I've been interested to see just how common improvement issues can be across disciplines that might seem radically different - from construction, to maths, to French, to barbering to history. The nature of the teaching process is basically the same so the feedback often is too.

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The five forms of feedback I give to teachers most often...

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In my work I have the privilege of being able to watch lots of teachers teach in a wide range of contexts. I see lots of superb teachers and lots of great lessons. Where I have constructive feedback to give, I find that there are a few common areas for improvement that come up time and...

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The Secret of Effective Feedback - Dylan William 

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The Secret of Effective Feedback - Dylan William 

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It's a universal process in education-so universal that we regularly fail to appreciate its complexity. Here's how it goes: (1) A teacher looks at a piece of student work; (2) The teacher writes something on the work (sometimes a grade, sometimes a score, sometimes a comment); and (3) Later, the student looks at what the teacher has written.

Of course, the idea is that what the teacher has written on the student's work improves the student's learning. But as many studies have shown, students often learn less when teachers provide feedback than they do when the teacher writes nothing (Kluger &amp; DeNisi, 1996). The apparently simple process of looking at student work and then giving useful feedback turns out to be much more difficult than most people imagine. We could make the whole process considerably more effective by understanding one central idea: The only important thing about feedback is what students do with it.

Keeping Purpose in Mind

In psychology and education, it is common to define feedback as any actions taken by an external agent to provide individuals with information regarding some aspect of their performance. At its simplest, therefore, feedback might identify the quality of the work, as happens when a typing teacher tells a student that his typing speed is 45 words per minute. More helpfully, the feedback might indicate the gap between the current performance and the desired performance-for example, by also telling the student that his target speed is 50 words per minute. More helpfully still, the teacher might tell the student that his typing speed will increase if he uses only his thumb to depress the space bar. In other words, the best feedback provides information not just about current performance, but also about how to improve future performance.

In the typing example above, and in most sports coaching, this point is obvious. When a coach gives a softball pitcher feedback on her pitching action, it's clear that the purpose of the feedback is to help the player improve her pitches. This is also true in many school subjects. For example, a visual arts teacher might give a student advice on how to develop a piece of sculpture or a painting, and a language arts teacher might give feedback on the draft of a story so the next draft is better.

In general, however (and this is what makes feedback so challenging), the main purpose of feedback is to improve the student's ability to perform tasks he or she has not yet attempted. If the language arts teacher advises the student that his story would be improved by swapping around the third and fourth paragraphs, the student can do this, but he will learn little. The intellectual heavy lifting has been done by the teacher, not the student. Similarly, if a math teacher corrects a student's arithmetic errors, there's nothing left for the student to do but note how many of her calculations were incorrect. It's easy to see why such forms of feedback are unlikely to be effective. And if we don't keep the purpose of feedback in mind, the same problems may also crop up in more subtle ways.

For example, many school districts allow students to revise assessed pieces of work and resubmit them for a higher grade after receiving feedback from teachers. Such a system can create incentives for students to turn in poor-quality work, wait for the teacher to tell them how to improve it, and then just follow the instructions. The feedback has improved the work, but the student has probably not learned much from the process.

The real issue is purpose. Why are we looking at student work in the first place? Sometimes we do want to focus on improving the existing work. For instance, when I'm reading a final thesis draft from one of my PhD students before it goes to the bookbinder, it would be rather perverse for me to just tell the student that I saw a typographical error in one of the equations on page 36. It's possible that the student would learn something by checking the equations on page 36 and locating the error herself, but given this particular context, it would be far more sensible for me to tell the student what the error was.

Most of the time, however, the student work we're looking at is not important in and of itself, but rather for what it can tell us about students-what they can do now, what they might be able to do in the future, or what they need to do next. Looking at student work is essentially an assessment process. We give our students tasks, and from their responses we draw conclusions about the students and their learning needs.

When we realize that most of the time the focus of feedback should be on changing the student rather than changing the work, we can give much more purposeful feedback. If our feedback doesn't change the student in some way, it has probably been a waste of time.

Giving Feedback They Can Use

There's an old joke about a driver lost in a remote region, trying to find a way to get to the city. Eventually, he asks a local about how to get there. The local replies, "Well, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here." It's a joke because we can see that this is not a particularly helpful thing to say. The driver has no other choice but to start from where he is.

Yet, we do this to our students all the time. We say things like, "You should be able to do this. You're in 5th grade"-which, when you think about it, is not helpful. The crucial insight here was captured by David Ausubel (1968) many years ago:

The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach ... accordingly. (p. vi)

In other words, we need to start from where the learner is, not where we would like the learner to be. We need to use the information we obtain from looking at the student's work-even through that information may be less than perfect-and give feedback that will move the student's learning forward. Here are a few suggestions about how teachers might do this.

Assign Tasks That Illuminate Students' Thinking

Sometimes, we just want to know whether students can do something. In such situations, it's perfectly appropriate to give them a task that simply tells us whether they can do it or not. However, most of the time, we want to know more than that. We want to know how we can help them get better, and this requires that we carefully design tasks to illuminate each student's thinking.

In language arts and social studies, most tasks are so open that we almost always learn something about a student's thinking by looking at his or her work. For example, even that traditional essay so hated by students returning from vacation, "What I did on my holidays," will provide insights into a student's writing capabilities. In social studies, in responding to a question such as "Why did the Union army want to capture Atlanta?" students are likely to reveal the extent of their understanding of Atlanta as a transportation and logistics hub. However, in math and science, looking at students' work often tells us only that they didn't do it very well and they need to do it again, but better. Designing tasks that, in Ritchhart and Perkins's (2008) phrase, "make thinking visible" takes time, but front-loading the work in this way makes it much more likely that we'll provide useful feedback.

For example, the question below probes students' understanding of the arithmetic mean of a set of numbers. However, rather than asking students to calculate the mean of a set of numbers, as most standardized tests do, the question explores whether the students really understand the concept of the mean:

What can you say about the means of the following two sets of numbers:

Many students choose option (c), which is, of course, incorrect. It takes authentic understanding of the definition of the mean to realize that there is no discretion about whether to count the zero. The only correct response is option (b).

Similarly, in science, the following question helps teachers figure out whether students understand the important distinction between climate change in general and the specific issues related to the depletion of the ozone layer through the use of chlorofluorocarbons.

What can we do to preserve the ozone layer?

What's particularly interesting about this question is that option (e) may look like a fifth option included just to increase the number of choices, but in fact it's the only correct response.

To be sure, no matter how carefully or deeply you probe, you can never make thinking wholly visible. Sometimes you're going to get it wrong. But at least by trying to get a handle on the student's thinking, you're giving yourself the chance to get it right more often than not. Major league hitters are happy getting things right three times out of ten. Don't beat yourself up.

Make Feedback into Detective Work

One way of making sure that students actively use feedback is to make responding to the feedback a task in itself. In other words, make feedback into detective work.

In a previous article in Educational Leadership (Wiliam, 2012), I mentioned Charlotte Kerrigan, a language arts teacher who sometimes responds to her students' essays by writing her comments on strips of paper. She then gives each group of four students their four essays, along with the four strips of paper. The group's task is to figure out which comments apply to which essays.

Or consider a math teacher who provides feedback on 20 solved equations. Rather than telling the student which equations are incorrect, the teacher can instead say, "Five of these are incorrect. Find them and fix them."

The same basic principle can be applied to any school subject. For example, in social studies, if a student has included the Emancipation Proclamation as one of the causes of the U.S. Civil War, instead of telling the student that the Proclamation was issued in the second year of the war, the teacher could point out that one of the causes he has mentioned can't be a cause because it occurred after the start of the war, and ask the student to sort this out.

Such practices ensure that students, the recipients of feedback, do as much work as the teacher who provides the feedback. Making feedback into detective work encourages students to look at the feedback more closely and to think about their original work more analytically.

Build Students' Capacity for Self-Assessment

The amount of feedback we can give our students is limited. In the longer term, the most productive strategy is to develop our students' ability to give themselves feedback. With adults, we do this intuitively. Whenever I observe a lesson by a student teacher, the first question the teacher asks me is, "How did I do?" My response-and the response of most administrators I know-is, "How do you think you did?" If the teacher knows what he or she did well and what still requires work, then my feedback is irrelevant. More important, teachers who can critique their own performance can improve when nobody is observing them.

In my work with music teachers, I've seen the importance of self-feedback. Instrumental music teachers commonly get only 20 to 30 minutes each week with a student. But these teachers realize that most of the progress a student makes in playing a musical instrument happens when the student practices at home. A student could improve his or her performance very little in 30 minutes a week. Therefore, many instrumental music teachers spend most of their instructional session ensuring that students have the skills to practice productively-which requires that students can evaluate how well they've performed and make adjustments accordingly. Contrast this approach with most content-area teaching in schools, where teachers seem to believe that students make most of their progress when the teacher is present, with homework as a kind of optional add-on.

It's important, therefore, to develop students' capacity for self-assessment. At the same time, we need to remember that it can be emotionally challenging to assess one's own work, Therefore, I recommend starting with samples of anonymous student work, and asking students to describe what feedback they would give the creator of the work. After that, students can move on to the work of actual peers, and finally, to self-assessment.

To start with, a simple approach, sometimes called "plus, minus, interesting," is all that is needed. At the end of a task, ask students to identify something they found easy about the task, something they found challenging or difficult, and something they found interesting. Such reflection develops language skills and helps the students become clear about what areas they need to work on.

With any task that has a qualitative element rather than just being correct or incorrect, students can be asked to identify what they would do differently if they did the task again. In science, for instance, students might be prompted to think about what they would change to improve a science experiment they conducted. In mathematics, students might be asked how they might report the result of a mathematical investigation differently. Sometimes it's appropriate to ask students to make the changes they have identified, such as redrafting a literary essay in language arts. Sometimes, however, it's useful to tell students in advance that they won't have to make the improvements they've identified, so they don't have an incentive to say that the work is fine as it is.

The purpose of this exercise is to develop the student's own critical eye. Once a student has that, feedback from others becomes less and less necessary.

A Trusting Relationship for Feedback

In the end, it all comes down to the relationship between the teacher and the student. To give effective feedback, the teacher needs to know the student-to understand what feedback the student needs right now. And to receive feedback in a meaningful way, the student needs to trust the teacher-to believe that the teacher knows what he or she is talking about and has the student's best interests at heart. Without this trust, the student is unlikely to invest the time and effort needed to absorb and use the feedback.

The only thing that matters is what the student does with the feedback. If the feedback you're giving your students is producing more of what you want, it's probably good feedback. But if your feedback is getting you less of what you want, it probably needs to change.

Finally, talk to your students. Ask them, "How are you using the feedback I'm giving to help you learn better?" If they can give you a good answer to that question, then your feedback is probably effective. And if they can't, ask them what they would find useful. After all, they're the clients.

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It's a universal process in education-so universal that we regularly fail to appreciate its complexity. Here's how it goes: (1) A teacher looks at a piece of student work; (2) The teacher writes something on the work (sometimes a grade, sometimes a score, sometimes a comment); and (3) Later, the student looks at what the teacher has written.

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NUMERACY POLICY v2 2018 (with changes highlighted).docx

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In a previous post, I outlined some key ideas from research that teachers should know about: Evidence-Informed Ideas Every Teacher Should Know About.

A lot of the ideas can be found by reading some of these research summaries: Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access. You could also find further ideas in the recent Impact magazine as I describe here: Impact! Superb College of Teachers journal made me think - a lot!

So, once you've read, engaged and started to assimilate these ideas into something coherent, what might it all start looking like in practice? To begin with, you might be more likely to think more explicitly about the learning mechanisms at hand. You'll want to:

Conspicuously enable each student to build a stronger, more extensive schema for the ideas in hand.

Conspicuously support students to embed knowledge in long-term memory

Be very aware that learning is invisible, short-term performance can mask real learning and each student has their 'hidden lives'.

Let's assume you want to teach a specific element of knowledge that you have reason to assume will be new for most students. You need to enable them to connect this to prior learning. However, it's very likely they'll need prompting to activate the prior learning - so you might engage in some activity to stimulate retrieval of related ideas they might have encountered before. You'll ask multiple questions to establish what students already know. You'll test out whether some known misconceptions are held within the class.

Next you will want to explain the next level of ideas, slowly and clearly, taking care not to overload students. This requires breaking down the concepts into ideas they can grapple with piece by piece in a sensible sequence. It's sensible to check for understanding at multiple stages - asking several students to give an account of their understanding, not simply assuming that one or two students represent everyone else.

Modelling will be key. With complex, multi-stage ideas, it will pay to produce several worked examples yourself to illustrate the methods, ideas and steps in logic. This will minimise cognitive load, will build confidence and provide a secure platform for subsequent practice. Multiple examples will help students to see common patterns and important variations within a method.

It will be useful to discuss the idea of standards in order to set some goals. Ideally you will have some exemplars to show students what excellence will look like - and perhaps something less good as a comparison. This will help to highlight what we mean by standards in the detail of the subject at hand, helping to bring any success criteria alive, away from the semantics of any written descriptors.

It will help to engage in a level of metacognitive exposition and questioning. Why do we do what we do? How do we know what we know? What steps do we take when things seem unknown or challenging? What routines can we fall back on to guide our thinking?

You will want to be very deliberate in moving onto a practice phase of the lesson - students will need to think about the material in hand in order to really learn it. That will require direct engagement and repeated practice. However, at first, close guidance from you will be really important - to nip in the bud any emerging misconceptions or stumbles, to redirect to higher standards and to build confidence. Once students seem confident and competent enough to go it alone, you then need to let them practise with the skills and applications of knowledge at hand independently.

Again some checking for understanding will help here. Where possible, this should engage multiple students and, with each one, ask multiple probing questions - ensuring other students are ready to follow-up any other student's response.

Feedback will be important throughout - making sure that you tap into your knowledge of your students to provide the optimum combination of technical feedback for improvement and motivational encouragement. Ideally this will focus on strategies for long term success, not merely improving the particular piece of work in hand.

Next, it might be important to consider longer-term recall. It's no good them just doing it today. So - let's consolidate the learning so far. What are the key points? The key elements of the method? The things to avoid? The things to make sure we include? Can we agree a list of things everyone must know? This can form the basis of subsequent retrieval practice activities. You want all students to know all the key facts - so let's invest time in spelling out what these facts are.

It's hard to get to everyone, to involve everyone yourself directly from the front, so typically you will want to use students as resources for each other. Some peer assessment tasks might help to check work against success criteria or mark schemes; it might provide some practice opportunities. In general, through a range of formative assessment activities, you want to get feedback from your students about the extent of their learning of the material at hand, as dynamically as possible during the lesson so your teaching is responsive; so you can add emphasis, re-explain, give further examples or issue further practice tasks.

As you approach the end, you might want to run through some kind of mental review:

Do I know that every student understood the key ideas? What do I know about the extent of their understanding - individually and collectively.

Did they spend the maximum time thinking about what I wanted them to think about this lesson?

Did we specify the key knowledge required for future retrieval practice?

Did we identify and explore the common misconceptions sufficiently well?

Did I tackle the peer-to-peer influences appropriately, minimising any negative over-ride effects relative to my expert instruction?

Did students do enough practice of the right things or do they need more?

As a class are we ready to go further along the concept and knowledge sequence next time?

Do those students who are struggling perhaps need to go back to practise applying more of the previous foundational knowledge in order to build their confidence?

Did we probe and challenge enough so that the more confident students are still being challenged by the material and not simply playing safe?

It sounds complicated -but, over time, this thinking becomes more organic, more habitual; it forms part of the day-to-day wisdom that informs your practice as a matter of routine. To begin with, it might need to be more of a conscious process, especially if any of this line of thinking represents a change from the way you've gone about things before.

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Evidence-Informed Teaching. Here's what you might be doing...

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In a previous post, I outlined some key ideas from research that teachers should know about: Evidence-Informed Ideas Every Teacher Should Know About. A lot of the ideas can be found by reading some of these research summaries: Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access.

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AFL - Checking for Recall and Understanding

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AFL - Checking for Recall and Understanding

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Teaching Fundamentals - assessing learning.docx

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Study Strategies to Boost Learning. The Best and Worst Retrieval Strategies

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This selection is my current top ten book recommendations for teachers. I've chosen books that have influenced or challenged my thinking significantly, contain really useful, practical ideas for excellent teaching rooted in sound principles and/or cover important theoretical fundamentals about learning, curriculum and assessment. There are others I could have included... but here's the ten that made it. (Each image has a link to Amazon to facilitate making a purchase. I'm not on commission!)

You may also find this popular video compilation useful: https://teacherhead.com/2014/08/18/contemporary-educational-ideas-all-my-staff-should-know-about/

I've written a full blog about this book. It remains my favourite book about education. The trivium - grammar, dialectic, rhetoric - provides a superb framework for thinking about the curriculum - the knowledge and experiences that constitute a great education - and how to deliver it. It's also an education in itself, linking our current debates to those of the past.

Of all the books by teachers for teachers, this is the best - by some distance, in my view. The clarity of the six principles (challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning) and the way they build on each other is superb. It just makes perfect sense, guiding teachers to strong evidence-informed practice in the context of real classrooms.

I've only read this recently but it's a lovely and fascinating book, capturing evidence from detailed studies of children as they engage in learning activities. It's superb on the complexities of memory and the learning-teaching interface - and the fact that we can't judge effective teaching simply by watching. Every learner in room brings a unique set of prior knowledge and engages in the activities in a unique manner, learning a unique set of new knowledge. This is influenced by peer dynamics and a host of other variables. The key message is to explore prior learning and to teach in the full knowledge that each student may or may not be learning what you want them to - unless you go to some lengths to shape the classroom culture.

This is one for anyone really interested in assessment practice - which should be all teachers but should certainly include at least one leader in every school. The logical analysis of formative vs summative assessment is compelling. We should all understand this. We simply have to stop giving students repeated summative tests in the hope that this form of complex practice is helping them prepare for the higher stakes summative tests. Instead we need a lot more short, simple, frequent, precise formative tests to build up knowledge and specific skills. There is also guidance about the issue of sampling the curriculum and different types of assessments appropriate for different domains within the curriculum - the difficulty model where tests are relevant vs the quality model, where comparative judgements are more appropriate. It ends with a call to arms to shake-up deeply embedded bad practice in this area.

Of all the myth-busting books, this is my favourite. Each chapter explores different aspects of cognitive psychology and the implications for teachers. This includes the need to build up prior knowledge explicitly and the powerful ideas that proficiency requires practice and memory is the residue of thought and, thankfully, that intelligence can be changed through hard work.

I'm still reading this because it is not a cover-to-cover read and is deliberately designed not to be. There are some overlaps with Willingham's book but this also references Nuthall, Wiliam, Bjork and many more including lots of research studies. It's got a great opening chapter on how our brains evolved which actually explains a lot about why we learn the way we do. My main take-away so far is the concept of domain-specific schemata and the way these are constructed in long-term memory; this informs our understanding of persistent misconceptions and how to overcome them as teachers. The book has superb chapter summaries that put the ideas into context for teachers in the classroom and challenge some fairly common bits of poor practice that lead to overloading working memory and inhibiting learning.

I haven't actually read the 2.0 version of TLAC but the original is solidly in this top ten list. I like the way each of the strategies is devised around some sound principles about learning and not allowing our expectations of students to drop. It's pretty challenging to implement some of the behaviour strategies outside the context of a school-wide system - it makes you think about where we might be setting our sights too low. However, most of the in-class pedagogical approaches resonate with me in any context. For example, the strategies for structuring discussions and the chapters on reading are superb.

I have now had the privilege of visiting Michaela so this book takes on new meaning. However, even without visiting, the book does a good job of exploring their practice. The Michaela team have deconstructed all the assumptions about routine teaching in regular schools - curriculum planning, marking, homework, reading in class, behaviour management, lunchtimes, detentions - the whole lot. The book captures a lot of this. It's provocative, challenging and, here and there, evangelical and controversial. Mainly, it feels liberating. We get weighed down by too much baggage but, really, it's about time we had a much more fundamental debate about schooling and how it works. This is a brilliant book for ripping into that debate. I've just visited a lovely, friendly school where the standards I saw were exceptional and lessons were full of enthusiastic uber-keen students. There is another way...

Increasingly the Hattie methodology of measuring effect sizes is subject to critique and the crude listing of effective strategies in their effect-size order can be horribly simplistic. But, for me, this original book (not so much the 'for Teachers' version) is a superb book for exploring the whole concept of impact and how to measure it. Throughout the book Hattie links the research findings to the common sense experience of teaching in various contexts - he's fond of analogies with outdoor pursuits tasks like learning to abseil. If you look at the detail - for example the homework chapter as I did here - you also learn about the complexities of education research itself and the importance of avoiding using crude averages from different contexts. It's a real education to read this book at many levels.

I nearly went for the original 'Inside the Black Box' pamphlet because it was so influential back in the 90s when it came out. However, this most recent book is an excellent read with a strong opening section reaffirming the case for formative assessment. Wiliam then expands on each of his five strategies with a chapter on each one - a framework he has maintained developed for several years now. He includes 53 strategies, all listed at the end, that support formative assessment in one way or another. It's a very practical book, not purely an intellectually rewarding read.

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This selection is my current top ten book recommendations for teachers. I've chosen books that have influenced or challenged my thinking significantly, contain really useful, practical ideas for excellent teaching rooted in sound principles and/or cover important theoretical fundamentals about learning, curriculum and assessment. There are others I could have included...

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Questioning

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LMT and VAC - Feedback on effective marking 

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LMT and VAC - Feedback on effective marking 

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Understanding how we learn and improving memory

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Understanding how we learn and improving memory

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Improving Extended Writing using Structure Strips

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Improving Extended Writing using Structure Strips

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Teaching and Learning Policy - on a page

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Teaching and Learning Policy - on a page

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Teaching and Learning on a page Version 2.docx

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Bloom's Taxonomy

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AFL - 10 Teaching Techniques to Practise

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AFL - 10 Teaching Techniques to Practise

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Ten teaching techniques to practise.docx

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Teachers - reboot your classroom behaviour.docx

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There is all kinds of advice out there about what makes a good school leader, from certifications to strategies to taking the latest seminar. But what so many people miss out on what is actually the most fundamental elements of great school leadership - hope.

You would not have reached where you are now if you didn't know how to harness the power of hope. Hope not only in yourself, but also hope in the sincerity of your vision and the future that you are seeking to create for the children in your school. All school leaders need hope. Not just a spoonful of it - bags of it!

The future we all seek - the future we want to create for our young people - can only be created if you know how to hold onto your hope, your vision, your values and the belief that you can - and you will - make things better for the young people in your school.

We all know hope can be incredibly elusive. When external demands and pressures mount and crisis follows crisis, the light at the end of the tunnel can appear to be a very faint and distant glimmer. In such times, hope is just as essential for our own well-being as rain is for flowers in the desert. From the ever-expanding self-help shelves in bookshops to the growing body of research from the eld of social science, it is clear that hope is a human survival mechanism.

Hope, modern researchers are ending, does more than o er a bit of solace amidst affliction. It plays a surprisingly potent role in life, offering an advantage in realms as diverse as school achievement and bearing up in onerous jobs. Goleman (1996)

As you seek to move forward and continue in your endeavour to create new and emboldened futures for our young people, I want to share with you five lessons that I have discovered as a coach, which are essential for helping school leaders keep their hope alive.

Lesson 1-Learn to keep one eye backward and another eye forward

Here is a quote I came across a while ago, from Soren Kierkegaard...
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Kierkegaard (Danish philosopher)
In essence, this is what reflection is about. In order to live more fully and to make progress with our lives, we need to have a process in place that enables us to develop a greater understanding of the journey, so that we can continue that journey with far deeper levels of insight and wisdom.

Throughout your life as a school leader, there will be moments when you can choose to start again. In the natural pauses of school life, there will be times when you can take learning from the past to create new, more aligned realities for yourself. They are, and should be, your personal times of both reflection and renewal.

We all learn to be ourselves though the process of living. It is paradoxical that we learn to be ourselves incidentally! The wider our experience of life and the more we learn to reflect on it and not take it for granted, the more we learn and the more we become whole people. Jarvis (2005)

Lesson 2-Be connected

Leadership does not happen in a vacuum. Leaders need people, not only to follow them, but also to help them on their journey. The connections that you make as you move forward will have a great impact on the degree to which you are able to deal successfully with the challenges of school leadership. In school, and because of the nature of your role, relationships can often be one-dimensional, meaning that your total needs for human connection and relationship.

It might take a stretch of the imagination for you to believe this, but you do have a life outside your school! So it is important to invest in those other relationships that are beyond your life as a school leader.

Actively search for relationships both within and outside your professional context that will:

- Give you constructive challenges.

- Open new learning opportunities.

- Allow you to be yourself.

- Create a space for you to be listened to.

- Affirm your Self-Worth

- Enable you to be in a role where you are not expected to have all the answers!

- Provide a space for you to be taken care of and have your needs met. Remember, you are a living, breathing, human being, not just your role!

Lesson 3-Learn the art of selfless leadership

We become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others. Stengel (2010)

Growing up in the 1980s, I was very much involved in the anti-apartheid movement. When Mandela passed away in 2013, I felt as if I had lost a dearly loved family member.

In an attempt to make sense of my feelings and what Mandela's life had meant to me, I returned to a book that I had read only a few years ago, Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life by Richard Stengel. Reflecting on Mandela's leadership, Stengel writes that:

The African model of leadership is better expressed as Ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others. Stengel (2010)

I'd like to think this is what coaching does. By putting aside one's ego and the perceived need to have all the answers, one can create a space in which a person is empowered through the simple acts of listening and the total giving of one's time and attention to the person they are with.

Lesson 4- Capture the golden moments

They are there and they are precious. They are the parts of your life as a school leader that re-a rm why you do what you do in the school that you are in and for the community you serve.

They are the parts of your school life that cause you to say at the end of each day ' That's the reason why I am here in this school, serving this community.' One of my key golden moments was listening to our school gospel choir sing on a Tuesday after school.

At 4 o'clock I would walk into the school hall and there I would see Daniel, our charismatic choir master, bring his own unique blend of energy, laughter and musical wizardry into our school.

Amongst the many voices that sang out across the hall would be those of some of our most 'challenging' Year 6 boys, singing as though their lives depended on it. I would see the children proudly wearing gowns made from material that had been bought from the local market and made up by one of the parents.

Support staff would step up as leaders and lead the children in song with Daniel. I would see Maggie, a stalwart of a parent from the local estate; she had very little money, but every Monday morning could be depended on to arrive at the staff room door with her trolley of biscuits for all the staff.

She would stand with her mum, whom I affectionately called Nan, and sing along with the children in the choir.

In those moments, even when I had had the toughest of days, I would immediately be connected back to my passion and purpose. The weight of the day would lift and, even if at times it was just a temporary lift, it was enough to help me to continue to strive forward with my vision for the school and the community we served.

Your golden moments will be unique for you and your school. Whatever you do, don't forget to collect them. As far as possible build them into either your daily, weekly or termly routine. They are the moments that will help to keep your flame of hope alive.

Lesson 5- Having the Support You Need

As a school leader, you do an amazing job! Every day you invest enormous amounts of time, energy, passion and commitment - seeking to create better futures for our children and the communities you serve.

This isn't easy to maintain. After a long week and the inevitable challenges of your role, it can often feel as though your energy, hope and emotional reserves are in short supply - and it can be hard to find someone to turn to for support.

If you are a Head it is understandably difficult to share 'fully' with staff. There is always the risk of crossing professional boundaries. Friends and family might offer a listening ear, but again it isn't easy. Unless they have walked in your shoes, it can feel like no-one really fully understands what you are going through.

However, I know from my own experience as a Headteacher and now as an Executive coach that personalised support is vital, if leaders are to keep their hope alive and stay connected to their vision, passion and purpose.

That's why I offer free Coaching calls to give senior leaders a chance to:

- Talk through and get support with the challenges they're currently facing

- Reflect on events and the impact they're having

- Gain clarity about their current situation and plan a way forward
Book Your Call If you feel like you'd benefit from a call like this or perhaps know someone who would, please follow the link above!

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What is the Secret to Great School Leadership? - Integrity Coaching

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There is all kinds of advice out there about what makes a good school leader, from certifications to strategies to taking the latest seminar. But what so many people miss out on what is actually the most fundamental elements of great school leadership - hope.

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Strengthening Memory

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To help your students improve their memory-recall techniques before their exams, it's vital to understand the essential role of memory in learning.

Misconceptions are often based on rote learning and memorisation, or the mistaken notion that remembering mere titbits of knowledge is pointless in the electronic era of Google.

It's a myth that memory is about how you receive information - it has everything to do with how much focus you bring to bear on it. I may remember very little about my cycle home, for example, but recall swathes of complex information about an article I read.

It's essential we teachers know how memory works and why it is inextricably linked to how we learn successfully, especially during the fraught revision season. So how can we help fix memory lapses?

Training your brain

Begin by building your knowledge of the workings of the human brain, memory and learning. Researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch describe short-term memory as "working memory".

In simplistic terms, it works like this. A "central executive" controls two systems: the phonological loop (your inner ear and inner voice, which stores written and auditory information) and the visuo-spatial sketch pad (your inner eye, which stores visual and spatial information).

When information comes into the brain, the central executive stores it in one of these systems temporarily while it decides whether to transfer it to long-term memory or discard it.

As teachers, we want to ensure that the information students learn gets transferred to the promised land of the long-term memory. So how do we do that?

The answers can seem counter-intuitive.

For example: the theory that forgetting is the key to successful learning is nothing new - first shaped by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus with his "forgetting curve" back in 1885. He noted that the duration between repetitions of information influenced how well we remembered it.

The counter-intuitive part is that the bigger the gaps - or the "spacing effect" - between information being retrieved from long-term memory, the stronger our capacity to remember and retrieve that information in future.

The harder the better

The information that a student finds too easy to understand can fail to be sent to long-term memory because it is glossed over by the brain. What we think hard about is what we remember.

We therefore need to be careful about how we repeat what we teach so we don't encourage shallow learning.

For example, for GCSE revision classes, rather than asking students to reread texts, have them work hard at focusing their attention on the essential meanings of the text. Rereading feels familiar and easy, and won't prove memorable - after all, they have read it already.

Rather than teaching in topics or blocks, which feels fluent and natural - but is too easy and too fluent - interleave content. Incorporating gaps into the study of a topic, studying different elements of it at different times and revisiting it in the middle of learning something completely different, forces the brain to do a harder job remembering.

This difficulty is what actually makes the knowledge stick.

It's slower to learn this way, for sure, but it lasts longer. Students may not make what Ofsted calls "rapid progress", but they will remember what they're studying better by undertaking more difficult and slower, deeper learning.

An understanding of memory is not an isolated part of education but something that should underpin all learning, informing what we do and why we do it.

Three more vital memory-recall techniques

1. Asking why

Many of the most successful memory recall techniques are those that get students actively grappling with the material to be learned and, crucially, connecting it to their prior knowledge. One strategy that's robustly supported by research evidence is the simple act of getting pupils to ask "why".

Prompting students to give an explanation for things helps them to create a web of knowledge that better aids their memory of it in future.

The simple act of asking "why" should become integral to lesson planning and revision activities. For example, we know that pi is 3.14159265359, but why is this number so significant?

2. 'Forgetting fortnight'

Most students are able to learn difficult topics in the short term but their memory wanes in the long term.

After first teaching a tricky subject, give students a short test then a fortnight to forget. Return to the topic, embarking on some brief reteaching in less time than was initially given. A third attempt at the topic, a fortnight later, should not only take up less lesson time (eight minutes to include attempt and review), but demonstrate that students have forgotten less.

The students' memory and understanding of the topic should have improved by the time they take their exam.

3. Weekly review

Akin to "forgetting fortnight", a weekly review of learning uses the power of spacing to help memory retention.

Most teachers feel pressured to get through the curriculum, but if a topic hasn't gone into our students' long-term memories we only create problems later on. A quick weekly review doesn't take much time and can have a big impact.

You can ask students to represent the learning of the week in a concept map, a flow diagram or a mind-map. It is the act of reconstructing meaning and getting students to think hard about the main concept that proves memorable.

This is an edited version of an article written by Alex Quigley, director of learning and research at Huntington School in York, in 17 April 2015 issue of TES
Visit our revision hub and wave goodbye to stress during exam season. It's packed with tips, tricks and techniques that can help set your students on the path to success.

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Fail-safe memory-recall techniques for exam students

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To help your students improve their memory-recall techniques before their exams, it's vital to understand the essential role of memory in learning. Misconceptions are often based on rote learning and memorisation, or the mistaken notion that remembering mere titbits of knowledge is pointless in the electronic era of Google.