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Share and dare!

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Let's get these observations done!

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A great summary of communication theory for teachers.

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Synoptic Critical Discussion / Reviews & Targets 2 / Development Target Setting/Indicative Grade Self-Assessment

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Synoptic Critical Discussion / Reviews & Targets 2 / Development Target Setting/Indicative Grade Self-Assessment

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Install latest version (20/4/2020) which is more secure.
Works better when installed, more options available - like change your background :o)

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Use this to check your portfolio progress against the ETF Standards

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Subject Specialist Pedagogy

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This is a podcast....

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'As [the praise-to-reprimand ratio] increased, so did students' on-task behaviour' ©Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

This podcast from Teacher is supported by EnhanceTV. EnhanceTV streams the best curriculum-linked movies, documentaries and TV shows Australian television has to offer. Use the word 'teacher' in the promo code at sign-up and receive an ongoing free individual account. Subscribe free at enhancetv.com.au today.
From Teacher magazine, I'm Rebecca Vukovic, and you're listening to an episode in our Behaviour Management series.
Researchers from Utah in the United States have found that to improve behaviour in class, teachers should focus on praising students for their good behaviour, rather than telling them off for being disruptive. They spent three years observing over 2500 students aged five to 12, across three US states. The study, published in Educational Psychology, showed a relationship between the praise-to-reprimand ratios used by teachers and the extent to which students focused on class activities. For today's podcast I'm joined on the line by the lead researcher on the project, Professor Paul Caldarella from Brigham Young University. We discuss how they went about conducting the study, what they found, and whether there is indeed an ideal praise-to-reprimand ratio that teachers should be using to improve behaviour in their classrooms. Let's get started. Rebecca Vukovic: Professor Paul Caldarella, thanks for joining Teacher magazine.
Paul Caldarella: Thank you.
RV: To begin, could you share what your motivation was for conducting this research in the first place?
PC: Yes, we were interested in studying whether teacher praise-to-reprimand ratios would have any relationship to student on-task behaviour in the classroom. There have been some studies on teacher praise, but not as many on the teacher praise-to-reprimand ratios - that is the ratio of positive to negative statements to students in the classroom. There had been some recommendations made in the literature that certain ratios would be beneficial to students - such that the more praise and the fewer reprimands, the better behaviour students would likely display in the classroom. And those recommendations were anywhere from 3:1 to 4:1 to 5:1 positive to negative statements for students. So we also wanted to see, was there a particular ratio where we saw the maximum benefit? So, was there a threshold at which we could encourage teachers to reach a certain threshold of praise to reprimand ratios? So those were the reasons for the study.
RV: To conduct the study, you and your research team spent three years observing over 2500 students and that was across three US states, from Kindergarten right through to Sixth Grade, or ages 5-12. Could you tell listeners about the specific research questions that you were trying to answer and then also what steps you took to find those answers?
PC: So the two specific research questions were: First of all, do teacher praise-reprimand ratios predict students' on-task behaviour? And the second question we wanted to investigate was, is there a particular praise-to-reprimand threshold for improving students' on-task behaviour in the classroom? And the way we went about conducting that was, we had two groups of classrooms - one were experimental classrooms and the other were [control] classrooms. So experimental and control classrooms. The experimental classrooms received training on an intervention called CW-FIT which stands for Class-Wide Function-Related Intervention Teams.

As part of the intervention, teachers were trained to increase their praise rate and also increase the quality of their praise to make it more behaviour specific and also to just increase the frequency with which they're displaying praise to students. The control classrooms, teachers were allowed to just teach the way they normally would and we were just there to observe what they were doing and also to watch what was happening in terms of student behaviour. And then we trained our observers, we trained the teachers in the intervention, who were in the treatment condition, and then we went about collecting our data. We collected it over three years as you said, with over 2500 students, five to 12 years of age (so basically Kindergarten through Sixth Grade) and then we basically analysed our data.
RV: And as you said there Paul, teachers in the treatment condition were asked to use the CW-FIT intervention as their primary classroom management tool. I'd like to delve into that a little more now. Could you explain to listeners what the CW-FIT intervention actually is?
PC: So CW-FIT is a multi-tiered behavioural intervention. The first tier of the intervention involves teachers teaching students classroom expectations. So things like following directions, raising your hand when you need assistance - those kinds of behaviours. And then it also involves having students work in teams or groups. So if a teacher has, let's say, 20 students in a classroom, there might be three groups of seven students - they have 21 students and three groups of seven students each and those students are on a team. And basically they're told that the goal when CW-FIT is being played is the students in each team will work together to display the expected behaviours, the classroom expectations, that this teacher has taught them.

So if the students understand I'm supposed to raise my hand when I have a question, I'm supposed to ask politely when I need to get up and go to the restroom or something. So they're taught certain specific social skills and then the teacher, every three to five minutes teachers had a timer on their person, either on their desk or it could be attached to their clothing that would either vibrate or beep and that would be a signal for the teacher to scan the room and look at those groups of students and award them points if they were following the classroom expectations. When the teacher awarded points, the teacher was also asked to praise student behaviour during those time periods as well.

If a group was doing what they were expected to do, the teacher would praise that group and also award them points. At the end of the instructional lesson, those teams that had earned enough points would get access to some type of a group reinforcer, something like maybe they could leave to go to lunch a little bit early or maybe they could put their feet up on their desk, or the teacher would play some music for a few minutes and then would turn the music down and that kind of thing - some kind of a group reinforcer. So that's the tier one of CW-FIT.

The second tier of CW-FIT involves teaching students how to manage their own behaviour through a self-management protocol where students are given a self-management sheet and on the sheet is written down the expected behaviours for them, for their individual situation. And then when that timer would go off, the teacher would look around and award points to those students who were meeting the expectations on the self-management sheet. Students on the self-management sheet could also rate themselves, whether they thought they were displaying the appropriate behaviour in the classroom.

So that's what the intervention CW-FIT is and this study in particular, CW-FIT was kind of happening in the background and was only happening in half of the classrooms. The reason why CW-FIT was helpful was because it helped us to increase the praise rates in classrooms. So without CW-FIT, most teachers would have had probably, maybe a 1:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions. But with CW-FIT, we were able to get much higher praise-to-reprimand ratios, because they received this training on increasing their praise rates.
RV: Let's delve into the results now. On a really simple level, what actually happened when the praise-to-reprimand ratio [PRR] in these classrooms increased?
PC: So what we saw was that as PRR increased, so did students' on-task behaviour. And this actually, we saw this both in control classrooms and in treatment classrooms. So even if the classroom teacher didn't get training in CW-FIT, if they had a high praise-to-reprimand ratio, they tended to have higher on-task behaviour in those classrooms. And we also saw that teachers who might have started off with the lower praise-to-reprimand ratio, after they received the training in CW-FIT, they improved their praise-to-reprimand ratio and also the student behaviour also improved, the on-task behaviour in the classroom. And we found that it averaged, we saw about a 20 to 30 per cent improvement as teachers improved their praise-to-reprimand ratios. So that's a significant amount, because at baseline we saw about 50 to 60 per cent of the time students were on-task but as teachers were able to improve their praise-to-reprimand ratios, we saw that jump to about 70-80 per cent on-task behaviour. So that was a significant improvement.
RV: And given all of this, you found though that there isn't necessarily a praise to reprimand ratio threshold at which behaviour dramatically improves, for example, 3:1 or 4:1 ...
PC: Right, but instead what we found that the more praise and the less reprimanding, the better the students' behaviour tended to be. And so that's what our recommendation is, for teachers to really emphasise praising appropriate behaviour and trying to avoid lots of reprimanding of student inappropriate behaviour.
RV: We'll be back after this quick message from our sponsor.
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RV: Well we know that praise is really a simple classroom management strategy to implement. It's a tool that can be used to reinforce student behaviour and to recognise student engagement, but your paper acknowledges that praise is also greatly underutilised in schools. Why do you believe this is the case?
PC: It's a really good question. I think that part of it is, potentially could be habit, that teachers get into. It's also easier for teachers to pay attention to negative behaviour. It draws teacher's attention, when a student is not doing what they're supposed to be doing, it draws the teacher's attention. And so it might be a natural thing to try to correct that behaviour through a negative statement to the student. But it's kind of counter-intuitive because, instead, if we can focus on reinforcing students who are doing what we expect them to do, it stands to reason and the research kind of supports it that other students who aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing will learn from that. And if we can catch students 'being good' or engaging in appropriate behaviour, that tends to increase that behaviour occurring more in the future.

So I think it's partly maybe the way teachers were socialised into teaching, it might have been the way they were taught themselves, and it also maybe just that negative behaviour or disruptive behaviour tends to grab our attention and so that is what we get attracted to trying to shape that behaviour. But instead, really what we want to do is try to focus on the appropriate behaviours and really reinforce those on a consistent basis to help give students feedback on the appropriate behaviour that they need to display in the classroom to improve their learning and also the learning of everybody in the class.
RV: And in the paper there's a quote that I found really interesting. I'll read it out for listeners now: 'As educators search for feasible evidence-based interventions that fit their students' needs, interventions that result in positive outcomes and require little or no cost, such as PRRs, are particularly encouraging.' Could you expand on this one a little, Paul?
PC: Sure. You know, I think praise is one of those interventions that doesn't require a lot of training in order to be able to praise - we can all display praise statements to students. Now with coaching, the quality of our praise could probably improve, we could go for more general praise like, 'hey good job', to 'good job following along with the class today, that's going to improve your learning'. So if we add that additional rationale about why the behaviour is important, more behaviour specific, we'll get even better outcomes. But, even without training, if teachers could just create a more positive classroom environment through increasing their praise and decreasing their reprimands, this study suggests we're going to see improved classroom behaviour on the students' behalf. And so it's a simple intervention, it doesn't require a lot of training, it doesn't cost anything, and so there's really no reason why it couldn't be more greatly used in schools.
RV: So just to reiterate, Paul, this research says that if teachers increase their praise-to-reprimand ratios, even simply to a 1:1 ratio, students' on-task behaviour will improve. But of course that doesn't mean that other instructional techniques aren't needed ...
PC: Right, yes. I see the praise-to-reprimand ratio as being kind of like a fundamental ... if you don't have that, if you don't have a high praise-to-reprimand ratio to start off with, I think that's the place to start, when you're having issues in the classroom. Now, as you increase that ratio up to, as you said, 1:1 for example, for every negative statement there's a positive statement, that's a good place to start but let's see if we can get up to maybe 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 - because as you can see in the study that we did, the higher that ratio, the better the outcome. So the more we can do that.

[But] you're right in the sense that, it's probably not going to address all behaviour problems in the classroom or all the needs of all students. There are probably more students that are going to need more tier two or tier three interventions, more individualised interventions, to help them to be successful in the classroom.
RV: Yeah fantastic. Well Professor Paul Caldarella, thanks for sharing your work with Teacher magazine.
PC: Thank you for your interest.

That's all for this episode. If you liked this podcast and would like to listen to more from Teacher, you'll find us by searching 'Teacher ACER' wherever you get your podcasts - we're on all the main platforms like Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud or Spotify. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe to the channel. It ensures that new podcasts land in your feed as soon as they're available. You'll also get a notification straight to your device, which is really handy for making sure you never miss an episode.
You've been listening to a podcast from Teacher, supported by EnhanceTV. Subscribe to one of our new school plans, or free as an individual using 'Teacher' as the promo code. We're non-profit, we're for teachers and filmmakers. enhancetv.com.au References
Caldarella, P., Larsen, R. A., Williams, L., Downs, K. R., Wills, H. P., & Wehby, J. H. (2020). Effects of teachers' praise-to-reprimand ratios on elementary students' on-task behaviour. Educational Psychology, 1-17.

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Behaviour Management Episode 7: Effects of teacher praise and...

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This podcast from Teacher is supported by EnhanceTV. EnhanceTV streams the best curriculum-linked movies, documentaries and TV shows Australian television has to offer. Use the word 'teacher' in the promo code at sign-up and receive an ongoing free individual account. Subscribe free at enhancetv.com.au today.

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Guided Reflection on Behaviour Management

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Guided Reflection on Behaviour Management

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Resources to support trainee technical education teachers to develop their subject-specialist pedagogy are now available:
www.improvingtechnicaleducation.org.uk/teacher-education
A team at the University of Huddersfield's School of Education and Professional Development, led by Professor Kevin Orr, has developed resources to support teachers' decision-making by focusing on their subject-specialist pedagogy.

A body of existing work highlights the role played by teachers' subject-specialist pedagogy and awareness of context-specific decision making for good teaching. These arguments, which the Huddersfield team built on as the basis for this project, are covered by the literature review, available here: www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/literature-review-of-subject-specialist-pedagogy.pdf

The online learning resources are designed to support trainee teachers' thinking about what informs the decisions they make in the planning and management of sessions with their students in their own particular context.

The resources encourage exploration of several underpinning concepts that might inform teachers' decision making:

Pedagogical content knowledge (including content representation exercises [CORE])

Occupational identity

Recontextualisation

The resource is made up of learning modules defining key topics, with video materials providing in-depth explanations, and sections prompting trainees to reflect on how these concepts apply in their own teaching practice. Users can create an account to log in and save their progress through the learning journey, completing it at their own pace. The website will also feature important updates and events that may be of interest to FE teachers and teacher trainees.

Complementary pathways for teacher trainers, teachers undertaking CPD, and subject leaders wanting to deepen their understanding of subject-specialist pedagogy will be made available on the site in the coming months.

Watch a video introduction to the resources here:

More background information on the project can be found here: www.gatsby.org.uk/education/programmes/teacher-education-in-FE

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Subject-specialist pedagogy resources for ITE trainees now available

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Resources to support trainee technical education teachers to develop their subject-specialist pedagogy are now available: www.improvingtechnicaleducation.org.uk/teacher-education A team at the University of Huddersfield's School of Education and Professional Development, led by Professor Kevin Orr, has developed resources to support teachers' decision-making by focusing on their subject-specialist pedagogy.

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Functional Skills including 21st Century Skills

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Functional Skills including 21st Century Skills

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Digging into Equality and Diversity Powerpoint Session 9

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Digging into Equality and Diversity Powerpoint Session 9

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Hole in the Wall / Sugata Mitra Ted Talks

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Hole in the Wall / Sugata Mitra Ted Talks

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Watch, enjoy and recognise theoretical influences on the learning..

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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

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Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

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Guidance

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Lesley Saunders on Research informed Practice

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Lesley Saunders on Research informed Practice

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Critical Discussion on research informed practice (PGDip critique?)

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Education Enfowment Foundation Review of Evidence

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In class we read p.110-114

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Pedagogical Knowledge and the Changing Nature of the Teaching Profession | READ online

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Highly qualified and competent teachers are fundamental for equitable and effective education systems. Teachers today are facing higher and more complex expectations to help students reach their full potential and become valuable members of 21st century society.

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Education inspection framework: overview of research

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These papers present the research evidence underpinning Ofsted's proposed education inspection framework.

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on. The late Professor Ted Wragg, of Exeter University, once suggested that if you got a group of headteachers together, the only thing you could get them to agree on would be the need to pick up litter.

Unlike most other professions, teachers spend much of their working lives without much contact with other professionals, marking or planning work on their own, or with their children in the classroom, and although the widespread use of classroom assistants has changed this a little, in most schools, teamwork is not a major part of many teachers' typical working day.

Teaching is also different from most other professions in that there is a continuing debate about whether professional qualifications are needed - something that would be unthinkable in medicine or the law. In five years' time, we will have a shortfall of 7,000 doctors and 66,000 nurses and doctors in the NHS. Solution? Let's just adapt the "Troops to Teachers" scheme. I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that.

Tes Podagogy: 10 podcasts to change the way you teach

Pisa: Comparisons 'not useful'

Research: 'Some research is good - but experience is better '

A further difference between teaching and other professions is the role of research, and who creates it. Very few teachers are involved in academic research, and the vast bulk of published research in education is produced by academics in universities who are rarely involved in teaching the students that are the focus of their research. In other professions, much of the published research is done by those who are still practising.

The role of research in education

The traditional explanation of this is that teaching is not really a profession at all. It is, at best a "partial profession"[1] because its practitioners are not as skilled as those in other professions. While such criticisms do have some measure of truth, I think this is at least partly due to the fact that in the professions that appear to be more "professional" this is not because the state of knowledge is any more advanced, but because those professions have focused on the "low-hanging fruit" and choose not to talk very much about the issues where the evidence is less certain.

For example, in medicine, it is widely agreed that while antibiotics can be effective in the treatment of bacterial infections, they are ineffective against viral infections. This is part of the "knowledge base" in medicine. Except we know that medics often prescribe antibiotics for infections that are likely to be viral in origin. This could be for a number of reasons. Doctors may be prescribing antibiotics "just in case" they are wrong about the viral nature of the infection. It may be that busy GPs feel pressured into giving patients treatments that are unlikely to be effective just to be seen to be doing something (which may, after all, be effective because of the placebo effect). Whatever the reason, what actually happens in what Andrew Pickering calls "the mangle of practice"[2] is a lot more complicated that we generally assume.

More importantly, even in areas where there is a reasonably strong research base, like medicine, that evidence does not provide guidance for a lot of what doctors need to do.

For example, there is reasonably strong agreement amongst medical researchers that it is important that patients complete a course of antibiotics rather than stopping as soon as they feel better, because an incomplete course can result in leaving alive the most resistant bacteria, which will then multiply rapidly. Doctors, therefore, need to make sure that patients understand why, even if they feel better, it is important to complete a course of antibiotics. We don't know much about the best way to do this, because this is an extremely difficult topic to research, requiring an understanding of the quality of the relationship between the patient and the doctor, and a whole host of contextual factors.

In my view, teaching appears to be less "professional" than other professions because the problems that teachers need to solve are just much harder. Physics works because protons and electrons don't have good days and bad days; they behave consistently, and predictably. As soon as humans are part of the picture, things get a lot more complicated.

And that is why I do not think that teaching will ever be a research-based profession. Classrooms are just too complicated for research ever to tell teachers what to do. Teachers need to know about research, to be sure, so that they can make smarter decisions about where to invest their time, but teachers, and school leaders need to become critical consumers of research - using research evidence where it is available and relevant, but also recognising that there are many things teachers need to make decisions about where there is no research evidence, and also realising that sometimes the research that is available may not be applicable in a particular context.

What this means, I think, that those who call for "evidence-based education" are missing the point. Evidence is important, of course, but what is more important is that we need to build teacher expertise and professionalism so that teachers can make better judgments about when, and how, to use research. Two things seem to me to be particularly important here.

First, I think, is that rather than treating teachers as technicians, where we have researchers figuring out how best to teach, and then telling what teachers to do in Lawrence Stenhouse's memorable phrase, treating each teacher as a kind of "intellectual navvy"[3] who is told where to dig, but not why - instead we have to recognise that teacher expertise cannot be put into words. The kind of knowledge that expert teachers have is more like the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle than it is the knowledge of how to solve quadratic equations. I can explain to someone how to solve quadratic equations, but I cannot explain to someone how to ride a bicycle. Each person has to figure it out for themselves. There may be guidance I can give, but there is no set of instructions that will be guaranteed to work.

Second, while there are certainly differences in how good teachers are in their first year of teaching - there is such a thing as natural talent for teaching - what matters far more is the improvement that teachers make, and this is why I think we have failed to make the best of the work of Carol Dweck on mindset. She has shown that some students believe that ability at something like mathematics is more or less fixed - you are either good at mathematics or you are not. This "fixed mindset" as she calls it leads students to believe that when you fail, this must mean you have reached your highest level of achievement, and you might as well give up trying to get better. Other students think that ability is more of a malleable quantity - captured nearly by Jeffrey Howard in the phrase, "Smart is not something that you just are, smart is something you can get."[4] For these students, when they fail, it just means they need to try harder. More importantly, challenging work is not a threat to your self image - a chance to get shown up - but rather a chance to get smarter.

My point is we have been applying Carol Dweck's work to students, and I think we should be applying it just as much to teachers. We all fail as teachers, because we have such high hopes for our students. But the teacher who does not think she or he can get better blames this failure on the students. "What can you expect from students from that part of town?" "From that estate?" "With those kinds of parents?" They fail because all teachers fail, but teachers with a fixed mindset blame this failure on the students: "I taught it, they just didn't learn it."

In contrast, the teacher with a growth mindset says, "What else can I try to help this student learn?" and this has powerful implications for the whole teaching force.

First, a belief that you can get better as a teacher is the key to staying positive about the job. Whatever the management gurus say about the positive possibilities of failure, it is not pleasant. People say "you learn from your mistakes" but that's not quite right. It is much easier to learn from mistakes than from success, but without a desire to improve, failure is just failure. But with a growth mindset, failure is a chance to learn, to improve. I meet many teachers who have improved their practice over the years, and they tell me that they often feel sorry for the students they taught when they were younger. I feel the same way. But the alternative - that we do not improve as teachers - is much worse. It means that every student we ever teach gets the same deal.

Second, and much more powerful, a focus on improvement can transform the teaching force, because it detoxifies professional development. In many schools, in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, managers often operate a kind of educational triage. Figure out which teachers can't be helped, and get rid of them. Figure out which teachers are OK, and leave them alone. And for the ones that are left, the ones who are "struggling", help them get better. With this approach, professional development, or indeed support of any kind, is toxic. Being offered help is a way of saying that you aren't very good, and the goal is therefore not to be identified as being in need of help, and pretending that everything is OK.

If, on the other hand, we accept that every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, professional development becomes welcome - it is just the way we become better.

And that is why I am so proud to be associated with the work of the Tapestry Partnership, and in particular, to be here tonight, presenting these Professional Recognition Certificates from the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). The Tapestry Partnership has worked with local education authorities all over Scotland to support teachers in their quest to improve their practice. The teachers here tonight have shown that they are committed to improving their practice. They have undertaken enhanced, significant and sustained enquiry to support the development of their professional learning in a particular area of their practice. They are a model for us all.

After all, if we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.
Dylan Wiliam is emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London. This is a transcript of the speech he delivered this afternoon at an awards ceremony for teachers who have taken part in the Glasgow in Partnership with Tapestry's Supporting Improvement: Pedagogy and Equity Programme. Some 197 Glasgow teachers are receiving GTCS Professional Recognition awards today, while 90 recently received GTCS Professional Recognition for the Tapestry Making Thinking Visible programme.

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Dylan Wiliam: Teaching not a research-based profession

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on.

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Includes some key practice suggestions

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These questions will support you to ensure adequate review of the methodology and theoretical framework.

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Suggested template for peer observation. (Do not do all of these questions but pick areas of importance for you)

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Helen's sessions. All about professional practice and observation and professional standards.

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Give them a logical name before uploading them

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Review and Targets Mapping Sheet Excel   

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Review and Targets Mapping Sheet Excel   

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Introduction to Paulo Freire and key educational theorists

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Although school based there are many transferable principles.

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Practical Ideas for Classroom Formative Assessment - LSI Dylan Wiliam Center

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By Dylan Wiliam Why I wrote my new book My latest book, written with Siobhán Leahy, is designed specifically to help individual teachers who want to develop their practice of formative assessment on their own or with small groups of colleagues. In this blog, I provide some suggestions for practical…

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Record of a Podcast..

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Are you only hearing from the confident, articulate students? ©Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

This podcast from Teacher magazine is supported by the Australian Student Wellbeing Framework, now live on the Student Wellbeing Hub! There are five interconnected elements, which together, promote better safety, wellbeing and learning. The new Framework is designed to be useful, accessible and easy to apply to your school context. Visit www.studentwellbeinghub.edu.au
Thank you for downloading this podcast from Teacher magazine, I'm Jo Earp.
My guest today is Dylan Wiliam - Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London. He's a former school teacher (more of that later), over the last 15 years his academic career has been focused on the use of assessment to support learning, and he now works with teachers all over the world on developing formative assessment practice. I caught up with him in Melbourne to talk about effective questioning in the classroom. Over the next 20 minutes, he'll be explaining what's wrong with the traditional teacher approach of 'I'll ask a question and you put your hands up to answer', sharing a classroom display technique called 'the parking lot', and describing how to plan your lesson around checkpoints that he calls 'hinge questions'. Jo Earp: Hi Dylan it's always great to catch up with you. Now, our podcast topic today is effective questioning in the classroom. The last time that we spoke in Melbourne you shared your tips for teachers and leaders who want to change their practice. One of the things you mentioned in that video was that it involves lots of small steps and sometimes teachers try to change too much, all at once, their teaching falls to pieces and so they go back to some kind of 'safety' or what they know best, I guess. When it comes to effective questioning in the classroom, one small, simple, but effective change that you recommend is implementing a no hands up policy. So, that's where we'll start. What's the problem with the traditional approach then of - ask a question, hands up to answer?
Dylan Wiliam: The real problem is that teachers tend to ask a question, have the confident, articulate students volunteering to respond, the teacher gets an answer from those students and, therefore, if they give a correct answer the teacher tends to move on. All I'm saying is, if you're only hearing from the confident, articulate students, the quality of your evidence about who is getting it and who is not is rather poor. So the big idea, in terms of classroom questioning, is 'how good is the evidence you have?' - and if you're only hearing from the confident students, you can't be making decisions that reflect the learning needs of a diverse group of 25 or 30 students. So it's about broadening the evidence base, getting better evidence of what's happening in the heads of the students in the classroom, there and then.

... I think there are two good reasons to ask a question. One is to collect evidence that helps you make decisions about what to do next. The other, of course, is to cause students to think. So, I think that there's a range of things we can do with classroom questioning but, in general, if the teacher is asking a question for the purpose of finding out whether to move on or to reinforce a point, then you need better quality evidence than you can get by hearing only from the confident, articulate students.
JE: Of course, they're still being encouraged to put their hands up if they want to ask questions - we're not saying no hands up all in all. But, for answering teacher questions then, students know they can be called upon. We did a podcast with Andria Zafirakou, the UK teacher who won the Global Teacher Prize last year, and she said this about her students: 'I need them to feel that they can fail and that they can really struggle and that it's okay to struggle. I need them to be working with other students and appreciating other students' work. They will be called upon to critique, called upon to evaluate, called upon to give opinions constantly.' That's another aspect - having this no hands up policy means that you need to create an environment where students feel safe, they feel able to contribute, where it's okay to present an alternative view, where it's okay not to know ...
DW: Absolutely, and so for me I think the really important point is what Doug Lemov in his book Teach Like a Champion calls 'no opting out'. I'm not quite so sure that random questioning is necessarily always a good idea - I think the really important idea is that every student in the classroom knows that they can be expected to be asked to respond to a teacher question, or can be asked to comment on something another student has said.

If we want to create a community of learners, it's not enough that students are quiet when other students are speaking - they have to be listening appreciatively to each other. And so, I think, it's also part of making sure that students know that, yes, I expect you to be listening to your peers' comments and I might ask you for a comment on that; not because I'm trying to catch you out with a 'gotcha', I'm genuinely interested in what you think about what somebody else has just said. I think that's the kind of attitude we want teachers to be communicating to students, that you are in this classroom, you are valued, you are important, we care about what you think about these ideas.
JE: And so that might mean setting up some ground rules (well it does mean setting up ground rules), and that atmosphere doesn't it? There's no point in implementing this kind of policy if clearly the students don't want to speak up in the classroom.
DW: And I encourage teachers to allow students to do a kind of 'opt out'. So, some teachers allow students to put their fingers on their chins to show they're still thinking - if the finger is still there for 20 minutes later you might want to challenge the student on it! But the really important idea is, this is meant to be a way of advancing the classroom practice, it's not necessarily a way of intimidating students. Some students are less confident than others.

My own experience, and the experience of teachers that we've worked with, is that students get very quickly used to the idea that they can be called upon at any time and it's far less scary. What is most interesting to me of all, is that it's the high achievers who dislike this more than the low achievers. The low achievers obviously have to pay attention, that they're not used to doing, but the high achievers say the reason they hate this policy of no hands up is they say 'I always seem to get picked on when I don't know the answer'. And so the really important point is, when we see teachers using these kinds of ideas, the classroom becomes more cohesive because students see that even the highest achievers get things wrong. The thing the high achievers hate most of all, they say 'oh, we seem to get picked on when I don't know the answer', which of course they think is horrifying but everybody else thinks is pretty cool.
JE: This is maybe one of the things new teachers, and experienced teachers actually, struggle with - how to cut down on the number of questions that you ask in class. It can become quite overwhelming can't it, that kind of scattergun approach. So, how to slow down. And then, coupled with that, getting students to think (you mentioned that earlier); questions that engage them in productive thinking.
DW: I think the first thing is I think teachers need to plan the questions they want to ask with more attention than they're used to. So, typically, teachers just kind of make up questions on the spur of the moment. The difficulty with that, is that often those questions, if they're not very carefully designed, can be ones where the students can answer correctly without having the thinking or the ideas that the teacher is valuing. So, the worst thing that can happen is you get the right answer but in fact the student is not actually on the right track, but because the question wasn't very well worded, they can get the correct answer for the wrong reason.

So I think that's an important point - just thinking about questions as being much more like a 'set piece' and spending more time on that one question, and maybe getting a response from every single student, for example, by having students use their fingers to show 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 fingers for A, B, C, D or E with a multiple choice question.

The idea is that, again, rather than having just the 'usual suspects' speak, we actually have a randomly selected child speak or then maybe getting answers from every single student. So, a teacher might ask a question like, you know, 'is a square a trapezium?' and ask every single student to vote thumbs up or thumbs down. So 'do you agree with this? Yes or no?' - everybody votes, and that gives the teacher information about who to draw on. So you might actually ask students to vote yes or no on some important issue like which country was most to blame for the outbreak of World War One. And some students might choose Russia, and some students might choose Serbia - but then the teacher can organise a discussion in a more coherent way by drawing responses from some students who think that one agent was more at fault, and then bring in the other ones later on. So the whole idea of trying to orchestrate your classroom discussions by knowing what students are likely to say before you bring them into conversation - that leads to a much more structured conversation.
JE: Actually, just you saying that, yeah it's kind of ... as a former teacher, that situation where you can ask a question, you'll go to one person for an answer and you'll say 'okay, anybody else' and they'll go 'yeah, same answer' - and it prompts people, doesn't it, rather than knowing what their original thoughts were.
DW: Yes. So, we can use multiple choice questions with finger voting for things where the students are correct or incorrect. But we can also use them for opinions, and that allows teachers then just to have a more logically organised discussion, and make sure the issues are dealt with in appropriate depth, rather than having one student forestall discussion by just coming up with an answer that everybody else says 'that's fine'.
JE: That's a great way of looking at it. The other thing I was thinking of - what about 'parking questions' in the sense that, these discussions that lead to further questions that you might not have time for there and then, or maybe they're a little bit off track. What would you recommend there?
DW: I think it's really interesting, in terms of teacher expertise, the difference between experts and novices. So, novice teachers (and I'm talking about very early in their careers, could be still in preservice training), but novice teachers when a student gives an unexpected response or asks a strange question, tend either to completely ignore that or (and this is probably even worse), they go down the rabbit hole.
JE: Yeah, we've all been there as well!
DW: They pursue this answer, even though it is not particularly relevant. Expert teachers are very good at determining whether a strange or off the wall question from a student is something that can be used to advance the whole class's learning. And so one of the things you might do is to say 'that's not relevant to the discussion we're having, I'll sit down with you and talk to you about that afterwards' or the idea I really like is the 'parking lot'. So, you have a formal parking lot on the wall of the classroom where questions are parked and you say 'this is a big question, I don't think we can deal with it here - I want to park it in the parking lot'. Some teachers, if there are three or four questions on the parking lot, they make parking lot time - so, maybe once a week anybody who has been thinking about some of the questions in the parking lot can offer to make some advanced discussion on this question. I think there are two things: one is, it respects the student's questions; but I think it also sends the message that some questions are so big that they can't be dealt with in just a couple of minutes. I think it's very respectful of students' thinking to say 'that's a big question' and 'we need to do that question justice', and I'm not just going to say here's the answer because, actually, we need to think about it in more depth.
JE: That's another great tip - I'm sure people will be trying that one out. Now, is there still a place then for that kind of quick recall learning, that retrieval of information? Is it just going through the motions, for the teacher and for the student, that kind of questioning?
DW: I think there are some things that you just need to check that they know it. So, if I'm teaching Science I want to know that every student knows the units that we use for measuring force.

And there's nothing wrong in practising that quick retrieval, because as the most recent work on memory - especially the work of Robert Bjork at UCLA - has shown, retrieval of things from memory increases how thoroughly you know things. And so this idea of retrieval practise; every time you retrieve something from memory, it makes the memory stronger. We imagine our memories are like CDs that we read off, but when you play a CD it doesn't change the CD at all. Every time you retrieve something from memory, it makes the memory stronger. So that kind of rapid fire can be very useful for improving students' long-term recall.
JE: So, as long as we use that in the right place. Now, of course, you're a former classroom teacher yourself (Maths and Physics). You've said the decision that you used to make most often in the classroom was 'can I move on?'. We've talked about how it needs to be a better process than simply just asking a question, getting kids to put their hands up and so on, saying 'oh well, that's great' and moving on ... it doesn't tell you much, a lot of the time we're none the wiser are we about who understands what. Instead, you suggest teachers use 'hinge questions' at least every 20 to 30 minutes. What is a hinge question then and what does that kind of technique look like in class?
DW: Let's take a step back. The first point is, most teachers plan their lessons as if they're going to go perfectly ...
JE: Yes.
DW: ... and we suddenly find that no lesson plan survives the first contact with real children. And there you are scrabbling to catch up and to figure out what to do. What I'm saying is, let's plan our lessons with checkpoints in them.
JE: Right.
DW: So, if you've got a 45 minute lesson, 20 minutes in check that the students are still with you. The idea is, you write a question that you include as part of your design of the lesson and 'at this point I'm going to check that the students are still with me' - and I carefully plan the question I'm going to ask at that point, so I can get some kind of response from every single student. It could finger voting, it could be ABCD cards, it could be mini whiteboards. It doesn't really matter what technique, the important point is the teacher plans the quick check for understanding into the plan of the lesson, and then you get the evidence, and then you make a decision. So the whole lesson 'hinges' around this point.

There's a hinge in each lesson, and if the students get it correct you move on and if they show that they don't yet understand it you might go back and teach it again or, if half of them get it right and half of them get it wrong, you might pair them up to actually have a discussion. The important point is, every lesson becomes almost like a contingent process - you don't know where you're going to go until you get some evidence.

I sometimes describe formative assessment as being pedagogies of responsiveness and pedagogies of engagement. The idea is, we should actually find out what our students are learning while they're still learning, and then respond to that. And then we can't rely on just the usual suspects, we have to get evidence from every single student. So, as well as being responsive, we have to engage all the students in giving us information, so that we can make decisions that genuinely reflect the learning needs of all the students in the class, rather than those who are happy to share their thinking with us.
JE: Of course, the obvious question not to ask as a hinge question is 'is everybody with me?', 'everybody understand?', 'yes ...'
DW: Exactly. And you can just get students raising their hands. But on the other hand if you, for example, are teaching balancing chemical equations and you've changed it a bit, you've changed the quantities of some of the elements, some of the compounds, you can then say 'is that now correct?' - and often, [you can] leave one deliberate mistake in there and ask students if that's now correct. That's really different because, if they show thumbs up they've shown you they haven't got a clue what they're talking about because there's still a mistake up there, but they also know that if they show thumbs down then you're going to ask them to come up to the board and fix the mistake. So, that's the big idea I think, rather than asking students 'are you having a nice time?' we create a culture where there's no place to hide - you have to get off the fence.
JE: What about, I'm thinking as well we mentioned slowing down, giving students time to respond, not wanting a quick, bam, reflex. ... You've got to give them thinking time.
DW: Right. ... that's the idea behind the hinge question is to have, it's almost like a formal set piece. So, you've spent time thinking of a question - you need to use it well. So, I would say, you ask the hinge question, you maybe then ask the students to think about it. Now, I would actually encourage, because of what we're learning about the importance of retrieval, rather than going straight into the sort of 'think, pair, share/talk to a neighbour' actually ask the students to try to retrieve the answer on their own to begin with. So, giving due weight to the 'think' in think, pair, share. So, first of all students try to retrieve the answer, and then they share their answers - I would typically say, at least a minute, especially if it's a thinking question, for students to assemble their thoughts, to think through the issues, and then also to prepare the words that they might want to use in response to that question, so they're less likely to look like a rabbit in the headlights when we actually pick on them for a response.
JE: An important aspect, as we mentioned, is coming up with a suitable question. It needs to be something that they can't get right for the wrong reason, if you like. So, you mentioned you would you that part of your lesson planning - building in these questions. You definitely wouldn't be able to come up with these questions on the spot - unless you're extremely experienced at this, I guess?
DW: Well, I think for the people who are very, very experienced, maybe that every moment in a lesson is potentially a hinge. But, for most of us, we actually will do much better if we plan those questions carefully. And, of course, the way you do that is by starting from all the misconceptions that you know students might have.

So, the idea is that these questions that we are using, these hinge questions, we often do them in multiple choice format, for example, so that then all the incorrect options can be well known misconceptions. These questions become like a repository of all we know about the difficulties that students have with this content. So, there's one very nice question from Jonathan Osborne at Stanford University about measurement: How many times do you need to measure if you're doing measurement in a Science classroom? And one of the incorrect options is: If she is really careful, she only needs to measure once. Now, that looks like a really plausible response. What makes that a really attractive wrong answer to many students is it looks correct - if she's really careful - but, of course, the correct answer is: She needs to measure many times to know how much they vary before she actually decides how many measurements she needs.

And so, those kinds of questions, basic ideas of all we know that the students get wrong, as being a tool, if you like, for coming up with really helpful multiple choice questions.
JE: And, presumably that's a teachable moment as well where somebody has come up with the wrong answer and you can then discuss that misconception and unpack it a little bit - not stall, but know that that's what's happening.
DW: Absolutely. Typically, when you base the incorrect answers on misconceptions, you can actually get that much clearer guide about what to do next. If they get it wrong, and all you know is they got it wrong you're just being told 'teach it again, but better'. If your incorrect answers relate to well-known misconceptions you not only know what it is they're getting wrong, but why they're getting it wrong and what you might then do to help them move forward.
JE: Finally then, for those teachers wanting to make a change the starting point is always reflecting on current practice. Have you got any tips? Is this something you can do on your own? Is it a case of talking it through with someone else? Would you be inviting a colleague in to observe, for example, and give feedback? Videoing yourself? How would you assess your own, reflect on your own practice and see where you can improve?
DW: My initial answer is 'all of the above'. So, it's often said to me that you can only do this if there's a culture of openness in a school. There's no doubt it's easier if that's the case, but if you can't find anybody else to play with you, you can still do this on your own.

So, I think the first thing is to actually start thinking about questions that you could generally use half way through a lesson to check students are still with you. And, you know, like making pancakes, the first one is often one you have to throw away - so don't worry too much about them, just try them out and if they're not working try making some changes. But then as you get more confident, as you get more experienced, you may invite some colleagues in. Some teachers find it quite useful to stick one of these rotating camera stands, so you can actually take a smartphone with a movie camera and you can actually put these things at the back of your classroom and video your own practice. Some teachers will be happier looking at themselves before inviting a colleague in.

So, I think there's no real standard answer here. The important thing is, formative assessment is really getting teachers to think about two things: one is 'what did I just do as a teacher?'; and 'what did my students learn?'. As long as the teachers are reflecting on that fundamental relationship between what you did and what your students learned, you will always be able to advance your practice. I think that's the key idea, is just constantly exploring the relationship in what you did, what the students learned - that's the key to effective professional development.
That's all for this episode, but if you want to keep listening there are 120 podcasts in the You've been listening to a podcast supported by the new Australian Student Wellbeing Framework. This national framework captures the holistic nature of what contributes to students feeling safe, connected, supported and engaged in their learning. Visit www.studentwellbeinghub.edu.au to discover the Framework, resources and more. Teacher archive available to download for free by visiting acer.ac/teacheritunes or soundcloud.com/teacher-acer. As with all our episodes, the full transcript of my chat with Dylan Wiliam is available at teachermagazine.com.au. That's where you'll also find links to subscribe to our podcast channels on iTunes and SoundCloud, or to our email bulletin, so you never miss a story.

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Podcast Special: Dylan Wiliam on effective questioning in the...

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This podcast from Teacher magazine is supported by the Australian Student Wellbeing Framework, now live on the Student Wellbeing Hub! There are five interconnected elements, which together, promote better safety, wellbeing and learning. The new Framework is designed to be useful, accessible and easy to apply to your school context.

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Feedback is a key part of AfL - here is an expert view

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Well founded questioning ideas..

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How to get into PebblePad, upload work and find feedback

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How to get into PebblePad, upload work and find feedback

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How to share your PebblePad portfolio with a tutor

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How to share your PebblePad portfolio with a tutor

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How to share your portfolio in pebblePad

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Personal Skills Development Tutor Feedback Template

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Personal Skills Development Tutor Feedback Template

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for Certs/PGCE (this is what we will be looking for in the Presentations)

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Use this to reflect on your MICRO TEACH (and the 4 workplace observations). Remember to state, use and reference a model of reflection and refer to the Professional Standards.

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Here is Brookfield's chapter on 4 lenses.

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Critical Incident Questionnaire - evaluating student experience.

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Dylan Wiliam

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Following our discussions in class..

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Remember to talk to us if you are not able to meet a deadline..

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Here are the areas that we work in..

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You can use this to check your academic writing before you submit it...

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I mentioned this in class - set yourself questions before you start reading to focus your investigations

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Form 04 Reflection on teaching observation

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Form 04 Reflection on teaching observation

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You use this to reflect on your MICRO TEACH and the 4 workplace observations - after you get the observation 03 form back from your tutor.

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Observing teacher completes this

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This is for your 4 observations.

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This is the summary poster of his cognitive theories.

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This includes a useful discussion on effective differentiation..

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Think about when planning teaching

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Use for planning teaching

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Form O2 - use this for the Micro Teach (it's the same one you will use for your 4 observations as well)

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Form O3 - you will get one of these after your Micro teach has been observed, typically containing feedback on good points and areas to reflect on for improvement - as part of the teaching cycle.

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This will be your homework from induction session...

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Introduction to digital tools and support

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Introduction to digital tools and support

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Use this to monitor where you are with completing your pebblepad portfolio. Be prepared to share this on Zoom.

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for PGDipE (what we will be looking for in presentation of your work)