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Great Teaching Toolkit - Evidence Review

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Great Teaching Toolkit - Evidence Review

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Teaching and Learning Spotlight Issue 1 October 22

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Teaching and Learning Spotlight Issue 1 October 22

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

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

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

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not all feedback has positive effects. done badly

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

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perhaps not always productively.  historically

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

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

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in addition to a review of current practice

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and refined through consultation with teachers and other experts.

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Six recommendations for using teacher feedback to improve pupil learning

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Designing Good Multiple Choice Questions _ Durrington Research School

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1 A model for school environment and leadership

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Introducing long-term memory and working memory

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Introducing long-term memory and working memory

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Introducing long-term memory and working memory: o Key features and limitations o How do they interact during learning to build (and then use) the knowledge base. o Guidelines to aligning teaching and learning strategies with the learning stages.

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Working memory + long term memory work, and how to structure teaching activities to leverage that knowledge

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Working memory + long term memory work, and how to structure teaching activities to leverage that knowledge

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Think Pair Share is a powerful and important technique that should probably play a key role in every teacher's repertoire. It's the key to giving every student the opportunity to rehearse their ideas, practise explaining and to engage in productive talk using the key vocabulary relevant to the topic. I've written about it before in various contexts, starting with this early post which provides the rationale:

More recently, we've included the technique in Walkthrus Volume 1 and it is certainly one of the most common techniques for schools to explore in their CPD programmes.

We envisage teachers using the technique as part of a wider repertoire:

The key thing is to be able to switch to a Think Pair Share activity whenever you want to, responsively. It's important, therefore, to have a well-established routine for yourself and for the students, so that everyone knows what to do and what to expect.

In this post, we're going to examine some of the finer details of each step in our 5-step Walkthru.

Purpose: If you want to use pair talk regularly, you want students to engage with minimum fuss and hassle. In fact, you want them to be comfortable with it; it should feel absolutely routine; a positive, enjoyable part of the learning process and not a big palaver. Students should be able to exchange ideas more or less equally which has implications for who you pair with who.

Details: It helps to have well-established talk partners for each student so that, any time you choose to engage students in pair talk, they know the routines and get stuck in on cue. The first time you meet a class, take time to establish a good set of working pairs, taking account of their relative confidence and prior knowledge. There are no ideal combinations but you need to avoid pairings where one person is significantly dominant over the other (doing most of the thinking and talking) or where they both have such low confidence that they struggle to hold a meaningful exchange.

Don't just assume that students can self-organise into pairs - very often this needs explicit reinforcement - and adapt from lesson to lesson where students are absent or if you want to mix pairings up a bit. Check that no student is left isolated and that pairs keep in their pairs without drifting into larger groups, thereby reducing each individual student's contribution.

Purpose: Unless the pair talk has a structure, students often either find it hard to get started or they drift from the focus of the learning in hand. Simply saying 'have a discussion about X' can be far too open-ended for many students. A structured question acts as a form of scaffold and has a strong focusing effect on the ensuing pair talk. Similarly, in the absence of a timeframe, students can run out of steam, ending their discussion prematurely without getting into any detail or they waste time and don't complete the task in time to respond.

Details: Design pair-talk questions that have a clear structure. Examples might include:

Think of three key factors that affect X and then rank them in order of importance..

Identify two advantages and two disadvantages of...

Explain the difference between X and Y giving an example of each..

Think of three words that describe the character....

Identify which answer from those shown is correct/the best...

Explain the process in four or five key stages; get ready to talk them through..

Think of two key opposing arguments for X..

This kind of precision helps students to gauge their progress; it keeps them thinking and talking until they have a full answer; it helps them structure their answer if and when called upon. Mostly it keep them focused on the thinking without drifting.

Announce the timeframe in advance. It's a useful discipline to use a visible timer to help the teacher and students to manage the time-monitoring needed to plan pace and depth within the pair talk. It's not essential of course but if you don't use a timer, keep the discussion length under review as they progress.. if students are flagging, call time and bring students in for the sharing.

Purpose: The Think in Think, Pair, Share is really important - but is actually often cut short or missed out entirely. If all students are to engage in generative thinking processes, exploring their schema for the material, rehearsing explanations and generating ideas - then they need time to do this before they are overwhelmed by their partner's ideas. Students are unlikely to engineer their own thinking time so teachers need to deliberately instigate a thinking phase before moving on to the pair share phase.

Details: After explaining the question and the timeframe, ask students to Think, giving them say 30 seconds of silent thinking time. Of course you can't be sure every student is thinking at this moment - but once the routines are established, students learn that this phase will lead into the pair discussion and it is therefore useful to them to use the time they are given productively. The aim is to create conditions such that, once students turn to talk, they have already generated ideas to share - but this requires time for thinking to be built in. Ideally, you yourself are also silent... you're modelling it, allowing a lush, pensive silence to permeate the room.

So, the routine is:

State the question: 'think of three factors ......'

Initiate thinking time: 'on your own, 30 seconds thinking time....Go.'

And then after enough time has passed, initiate the share: 'Now turn to your partner and share'.

In a lesson where students are engaging in multiple short paired discussions on the same theme, you may feel that dedicated solo think time is not always needed every time - because, in the flow of the instructional sequence, students may have already had time to think. It's also possible for 30 seconds to be too long.. so you have to gauge that according to how well students are responding.

Purpose: Once students are talking, sharing their ideas, it's powerful to use the opportunity to listen in to hear the type of things they are saying so that you can reinforce your expectations around the nature of the response, offer support to specific students and gauge the success of the thinking process as students exchange their ideas. If you don't circulate to listen, you are then relying much more heavily on the few responses you sample in the final step.

Details: Set students talking with the 'Share' cue. Reinforce the idea that their goal is to hear each other's ideas and then to agree on a common set - perhaps choosing the best three of their total set of ideas, if asked for 'three things'.

Once they've engaged, busily move among them. It's useful to reinforce the expectation that you will be cold calling them afterwards - so they engage fully, knowing that they each individually might be asked to share their discussion with the class. This form of accountability helps students to sustain the attention needed to properly explore the ideas without drifting off topic in the discussion phase.

You are partly monitoring - checking they're on task, showing an interest in what they're saying.

You are partly listening in to hear some specific responses - all good information to inform your next steps, including highlighting some good ideas and some overheard misconceptions.

You have time to approach some students to support them with the process, perhaps giving them a confidence boost, suggesting that some of their ideas would be good to share with the class.

Purpose: There are two main purposes:

1. You are reinforcing your expectations around engagement and attention; students will form the habit of participating in the pair-share if they learn that, over time, they might well be called to share their thoughts. If you only asked for volunteers, students can choose to opt out and for some this will weaken their engagement as they'll lose a key incentive to rehearse their ideas.

2. You are sampling responses in order to create some common, shared set of ideas that relate to the question, providing information to you as teacher about what to re-teach if needed and allowing students to hear alternative ideas to their own, supporting them in the process of formulating their understanding of what a high quality response might look like.

Details:
Call the class back to listening mode using your routine 'signal, pause, insist' method. Mine is to raise my hand and say '3,2,1 and.....everyone listening..... thank you'.

Scan the class and select a student to reply. ' OK... Daisy, let's hear from you... what were your thoughts?'

From here, you run the same routines as described in the Cold Calling process. You follow up each response with a further question to the same student to deepen or extend their response and then you select more students to respond. 'And Abdi, what were you and Joanna discussing.?". With each successive response, you can compare to the previous ones looking for similarities and differences to deepen the shared understanding of the ideas in hand.

Some students will try to defer to their partner or, conversely butt in to speak for their partner... don't let them. Reinforce the idea that it is the person you selected who you'd like to represent the pair; this is vital in keeping everyone fully involved in this and each subsequent discussion.

Where you supported a less confident student and told them their ideas were good, bring them into the discussion. ' Michael, you had a superb idea, do you want to tell everyone what you were saying to Jenny?' Knowing in advance that his idea is good, gives shy Michael the confidence to share his thoughts, bringing him into the circle. Teaching Assistants can play a key role in flagging when the students they are supporting are ready to share their ideas.

Two further details:

Hands up for ideas: After a number of responses, it's still possible that one or more students in the room have some great ideas that haven't yet been heard. So, after hearing 3 or 4 responses from students you have cold-called, you can say ' Now, hands up if you've got any other ideas we haven't heard yet'. This allows those ideas to surface which can be a very useful contribution. The hands-up responses follow after the cold-called responses so that you get the best of both: every student is focused and ready to engage and individuals with good ideas can share them voluntarily.

Consolidate the key points: With all these ideas floated verbally, it can be overwhelming to some students. The ideas are ephemeral and transient... drifting in the air.. but not yet solidified. So.. take time to pull things together. Sum up the discussion with a list of key points that you can restate verbally or, better still, write on the board or via a visualiser. Try to organise the ideas into something visually coherent that reinforces the meaning rather than create a messy board of scattered ideas.

The written summary allows students to consider the static information, checking against their own understanding and discussion. Without this kind of consolidation, typically the more confident knowledgable students can gain a lot more from the process than the others. Try to leave everyone feeling secure in their knowledge of the material being discussed.

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Think Pair Share is a powerful and important technique that should probably play a key role in every teacher's repertoire. It's the key to giving every student the opportunity to rehearse their ideas, practise explaining and to engage in productive talk using the key vocabulary relevant to the topic.

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Addressing educational disadvantage: from strategy to the classroom

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Addressing educational disadvantage: from strategy to the classroom

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Addressing educational disadvantage: from strategy to the classroom

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Five Ways To: Weave Reading into the Curriculum

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In my travels to various schools, one of the variables that I'm struck by is the emphasis placed on reading. I included this description of the range in a previous post on seven variables between schools:

From extensive reading across subjects, quality texts, established reading routines/norms; high daily volume

To: Reading volume thin, class reading rare outside English except question papers and worksheets. Textbooks rare

It's uncontroversial - uncontested - that reading fluency is a key component in students' wider learning capacity and confidence and yet it is actually possible for some students to go through a school day or week without doing very much reading at all. How does that happen? It's a combination of factors:

most information in most lessons is presented by the teacher via powerpoints and verbal explanations - so there's no reading to be done beyond engaging with what is on the screen. This is absolutely dominant in some settings.

reading is collective so the texts are being read in the class - by the teacher or a series of student readers - but students do not necessarily have to read along and are predominantly engaging with the content by listening rather than reading.

individual reading opportunities are not accountable - ie reading material is given and reading is expected but it is possible not to actually read. Students can sit with a book or sheet in front of them and not read.. they just wait until the time is up and wing it, picking up on what is being said without having actually made sense of the text themselves. (I find that adults do this too in sessions where they are asked to read a passage to discuss).

there is reading to be done but really only in the form of questions for writing tasks, rather than extended prose to be read and understood - except of course in English lessons. In some contexts, in many subjects reading the questions is the only reading students actually have to do.

With these things in mind I would say it is a big win for schools to look at this area, aiming to make reading a significant feature in the daily curriculum diet, not an add-on or an ad hoc element that is strongly dependent on individual teacher preferences. It's probably a better way to expend curriculum design energy than many other fiddles and tweaks in a curriculum sequence. Here are five ways to weave reading into the curriculum:

1. Present information via text rather than powerpoint

Simple eh?! But it needs to be done! It's important to be conscious that unless you actively decide to present information via reading text, students will be relying on your presentation materials to engage with the ideas. They won't be developing their capacity to read for meaning, to rehearse reading strategies - like scanning - or reinforcing their skills in reading the specific text formats from articles to textbooks or even summarised revision resources that they'll need to access in any independent study scenario.

I've seen too many lessons where the teacher powerpoint - with its amateurish graphics and dodgy font selection - has been a depressingly poor way to encounter ideas, especially from the back of the room. The absence of text (with or without images) for students to read themselves puts them at the mercy of a teacher's presentation flow; words are spoken or clicked through all too rapidly, they can seem transient and hard to grasp and there's no chance to practise reading for meaning.

Review your powerpoint addiction! Where could you switch and mix things up so that students are given text to read instead? Then do it! Make the switch; take pride in how much you make your students read. Make it a badge of honour; make it 'the way we do things here'.

2. Buy textbooks or prepare workbooks with embedded reading activities

To make planning easy, source or create resources that embed the reading material well in advance. This ensures the materials are relevant to your curriculum, of high quality and makes lesson planning more about how you engage with the reading and weave it into an instructional teaching sequence rather than seeking out bits of text in a piecemeal fashion.

Textbook selection will be a key factor - it's so great when you have a textbook you know and trust and can distribute responsively during lessons, knowing you can use it as a platform for exploring ideas in class. Textbooks are still dismissed way too readily for my liking - look again! Keep searching. There is no ideal but there are plenty of good ones.

Alternatively - or in addition - make it part of your planning to construct booklets with embedded reading opportunities. Where this is in place, the extent of reading and teachers' confidence with reading routines shoots up. The KS2 booklets from Reach Academy Feltham are superb examples of this excellent approach:

Alongside the text there are images, key definitions, comprehension and extended writing tasks. If you were to teach these units, you have a rich resource to hand and every child has this in front of them. It's just far superior to many powerpoint-driven alternatives.

3. Develop accountable reading routines

An important challenge to recognise and to tackle is the fact that many students can appear to be reading without actually doing it. They even kid themselves, mentally drifting, eyes gazing at words on a page without actually engaging with the meaning. Some level of accountability is often necessary to push students over this mental hurdle - they need to expect to have to do something meaningful with the content of the text to force them to make the mental effort needed to get properly stuck in. This is true of adults as well as children; switching into reading mode is effortful and we need motivation to do so.

Accountable reading at a simple level means anticipating that the content of the text will provide answers to questions that will follow. There are lots of variations around this:

unseen questions: reading first, then looking at some questions. This encourages reading of the full text without skimming

search questions: using a text to find answers to specific questions: This helps develop scanning techniques

summarising: this develops 'reading for gist' which can be important for longer pieces.

If students have to undertake a combination of these questions then the reading has purpose and, as with everything in teaching, if used routinely, students form habits around the whole process. Planned well, if students can answer the questions it means they've done the reading. They learn that this will happen; no short-cuts. The tragedy is that this experience is so rare for some students that they are almost affronted when the teacher dishes out the reading material.

4. Develop oral or echo reading routines to boost fluency

An idea I've picked up recently - explored variously by Alex Quigley and Christopher Such - that I've seen done well and tried out myself to good effect, is the practice of getting students to read back a text that has been read to them. The process is this:

The teacher reads a short section of text aloud, explaining words and concepts as needed.

Students in pairs then read the same text back to each other, simultaneously, perhaps alternating lines or paragraphs or each repeating the same text again.

The value of this is:

The reading of the text is be modelled explicitly first - the teacher shows how key words sound and can emphasis meaning as well as model the prosody of reading - the rhythm, flow, intonation - and the pronunciation.

Then every student gets to read the text themselves. They are not merely following the text with a finger or mentally, they are not just hearing it being read. They all doing the reading, following the version modelled by the teacher.

Because the text is read at least twice, there are more opportunities for meanings to be explored in each student's mind.. there is repetition and reinforcement.

If you want to be certain every student has read the text, this is the way to do it. It can be noisy but routines around reading quietly to your partner can be established. As student habits around accountable independent reading develop, you can do less of it orally in this way. It's a kind of collective scaffold that makes reading explicitly a shared learning activity.

5. Set accountable reading tasks for homework.

Finally, harness the time students have between lessons to extend their reading. I meet an awful lot of students who tell me that they only read at school and they are not given reading to do for homework. It's a wasted opportunity. Usually students don't read at home because they either don't know what to read or there is no purpose to the reading - because, as above, the teacher will explain it all anyway.

The trick is to weave the accountability in. Set a task to read a text - obviously that needs to be a text students can take home! Embedded in that task should be the anticipation that students will need to process the meaning in the text in order to complete a task - either as part of the homework or on returning to class. Doing this routinely as part of a healthy diet of homework (see Mode A: Mode B Homework ) makes it normal and forms habits and expectations. There's no point saying 'there's no point, they just won't do it'. Of course they won't if you don't try or if you don't really expect it. You need to truly demand it of students - they have to do the reading and then be accountable by completing related tasks. A useful form of task would be making notes - so the note making needs to be modelled and checked - or writing a summary in class.

I've seen this done superbly well.

Teacher sets a reading task for homework e.g. 2-3 sides of an article, a textbook section or a book chapter

In class, teacher asks students to summarise the key ideas in the text or answer some substantial knowledge check questions based on the text as a starter activity.

Students then share answers and the teacher probes and checks for understanding.

Students who didn't do the reading are immediately exposed and they learn that it pays to make the effort next time. As with all homework it pays not to succumb to the lowest common denominator response; you focus on those students who engage, normalise that and bring the others up to the standard of the best.

Above all, just make it a goal to create a classroom culture and a curriculum diet where reading is prominent and significant.

Here's a superb one-pager of this post made by David Goodwin. You can download the pdf below.

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Five Ways To: Weave Reading into the Curriculum

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In my travels to various schools, one of the variables that I'm struck by is the emphasis placed on reading. I included this description of the range in a previous post on seven variables between schools: From extensive reading across subjects, quality texts, established reading routines/norms; high daily volumeTo: Reading volume thin, class reading rare outside...

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Today a section from a technique you might describe as a 'fundamental': The Do Now. The best part of it, to me, is the examples (see below). One key thing to remember with a Do Now is the speedy review. When I see Do Nows go wrong it's most often because a teacher loses track of time and reviews for 15 minutes- thereby unintentionally turning the Do Now into the lesson and leaving the lesson truncated and shoe-horned into a space where it can never fit. The result of THAT is usually a dearth of independent practice-arguably the most important part of a lesson. So my advice is to run a stop watch and keep the review of the Do Now to five minutes max. THAT means practicing the art of selective neglect-wherein choosing what NOT to review is as important as choosing what TO review.
The first step in a great lesson is a "Do Now"- a short activity that you have written on the board or that is waiting for students as they enter. It often starts working before you do. While you are greeting students at the door, or finding that stack of copies, or erasing the mark-ups you made to your overhead from the last lesson, students should already be busy, via the Do Now with scholarly work that prepares them to succeed. In fact, students entering your room should never have to ask themselves, "What am I supposed to be doing?" That much should go without saying. The habits of a good classroom should answer, "You should be doing the Do Now, because we always start with the Do Now."

An effective Do Now should conform to four critical criteria to ensure that it remains focused, efficient, and effective:

1. The Do Now should be in the same place every day so taking it and getting started is the habit of all your students. The options for where it goes: 1) You can write it on the Board- ideally in the same place everyday or post it on a piece of newsprint having written it in advance.2) You can put it in writing on a sheet of paper or as the first page in a packet for the day's lesson(see technique #19, Double Plan). You'd then either leave the Do Nows in a stack on a table or desk just inside the door and that students take as soon as they enter or place a Do Now on each student's desk before they enter. (I tend to see this one most at the elementary school level)

2. Students should be able to complete the Do Now without any direction from the teacher, without any discussion with their classmates and in most cases without any other materials save what you provide. So if the Do Now is to write a sentence interpreting a primary source document that is an 19th century Punch cartoon, that cartoon should be posted somewhere easily visible to all or else copied into the Do Now packet. This by the way his a significant benefit to paper-based Do Nows and probably explains why over the past four years I've seen more and more of them-and fewer DO Nows on the Board-in top teachers' classrooms. Some teachers misunderstand the purpose of the Do Now and use a version of the technique that requires them to explain to their students what to do and how to do it: "Okay, class, you can see that the Do Now this morning asks you to solve some typical problems using area. Remember that to solve area problems, you have to multiply." This defeats the purpose of establishing a self-managed habit of productive work. If you have to give directions, it's not independent enough.

3. The activity should take three to five minutes to complete and should require putting a pencil to paper, that is, there should be a written product from it. This not only makes it more rigorous and more engaging, but it allows you to better hold students accountable for doing it since you can clearly see whether they are (and they can see that you can see). And of course this allows you to Check for Understanding (see part 1) while they work, deciding, as I observed Taryn Pritchard do in a recent lesson, which questions to review and possibly who to call on for a quality answer or a common mistake.

4. The activity should generally 1) preview the day's lesson (you are reading The Jacket, and the Do Now asks students to write three sentences about what they'd do if they thought someone stole their little brother's favorite jacket) or 2) review a recent lesson (you want your kids to practice all of the standards they've mastered recently so they don't forget them).

Here's a gallery of Do Nows below plus a few notes on each.

The formatting was tricky so the Do Nows are in the attached PDF but you definitely want to open it. And to intrigue you, here's an index of the samples:
Do Now #1 This is a good example of a teacher using the Do Now to reinforce a wide array of skills the class has mastered over the course of the year in math The goal here is to keep those skills 'alive and kicking.' (Often students initially master skills only to forget them when they stop using them so this kind of shuffle practice can be helpful. Do Now #2 This Do Now emphasizes critical thinking a bit more than the straightforward review in the previous example. It's also more open-ended. This emphasizes student writing but also makes about twice as long to complete. And review-meaning more choices about what to review-and score. Do Now #3 This Do Now is forward-looking. Rather than reviewing previously mastered skils, it's designed to anticipate the discussion in the coming lesson and build context and insight. It includes a block of text for reading and both multiple choice and open response questions. My guess, given the density and challenge of the text, is that it took more than the usual five minutes to complete. If you were inclined to be a little more cautions in this regard you might give students just the first paragraph in the Do Now and the rest in the heart of the lesson. Do Now #4 This Do Now is a "reading check" on Elie Wiesel's Night, the using it to make sure students have done the reading in preparation for class. It's less common for teachers to use the Do Now in this way but if you have a vibrant culture it can be done. It certainly makes sure that you are set up for a successful lesson to create a strong incentive for doing the reading. Interesting to note that even on a quiz there's still a challenge question for those who want to push themselves. There's also a task for when students are done.
Thanks as always to Joaquin Hernandez for helping me put this together. Wait til you see his Plug and Play!!

Do Now, resources

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The Do Now: A Primer - Teach Like a Champion