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How to speak truthfully about what it means to be human: a user’s handbook. – primarytimerydotcom

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The purpose of schools is not chiefly or mainly to prepare children for exams or jobs. Rather, as Ruth Ashbee eloquently explains, it is to teach our children about meaning - about what it means to be human.[1] Through their curriculums, schools are custodians, curators and critics of the magnificent legacy of human meaning-making. By engaging with humankind's intellectual and cultural heritage, our children are enabled to join in with the great conversation about what things mean that has been taking place since the dawn of time.

This conversation discusses and disputes if there are reasons why things happen. Life isn't a completely random and unpredictable series of chaotic events, it isn't just one damn thing after another; there are, it appears, at least some patterns. Just exactly what is and isn't a pattern is one of the main subjects of this conversation. Does the sun return after the winter because we have pleased the gods? Is that the pattern? Or is it caused by some other means? Or is it completely random and unpredictable? Why do people do bad things? Can that be explained? What are the different answers that have been given to that question? Is it the stain of original sin, economic self-interest, demonic possession, psychological disposition, bad blood?

This conversation also expresses these patterns - or frustrating lack of pattern - in various symbolic forms. Sometimes visually, sometimes through story, music or dance. Humans want there to be patterns. We want there to be reason, meaning, coherence, sense. But sometimes things are, despite our deepest wishes, apparently random or meaningless. One meta-pattern that weaves its way through the conversation is the idea of truth; the idea that our craving for patterns, for reasons, does not give us carte blanche to impose our desires about how we want reality to be, regardless. Pattern making by its very nature has rules that need sticking to, or it ceases to be a pattern. But different patterns have different rules and different vocabulary. So we need to learn how the rules differ depending on how we are looking at things, depending on the kinds of patterns we are looking for. Learning the rules and vocabulary and when they do and do not apply is an important part of learning to participate within the conversation. 'Truth' is shaped differently depending on which part of the conversation we are presently involved within. If we are looking for explanations about how flowers reproduce, we will use one type of pattern. If we are trying to make sense of our feelings by painting flowers - we will use others.

This is where different disciplines come in. Disciplines are different ways of making meaning. They are different because they seek to answer different types of questions and therefore do so in different ways. In various talks I've given using Neil Almond's metaphor of the curriculum as boxset, I've talked about renewable conflict. This is, as far as I have been able to find out, an idea from screenwriting. The idea is that if you want to write a successful long running series, you need to make sure it has a conflict at its heart that will never be ultimately resolved. So Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series do not have a renewable conflict at their heart as eventually evil is defeated but Game of Thrones does because the conflict at its heart is about who should rule the realm and how to cope with the woes of nature. Characters can come and go, live and die - and frequently do - but this central conflict endures potentially forever. Now I appreciate that Game of Thrones did eventually come to an end and I am not enough of a fan to know whether potentially that same conflict could fuel a future series, spin off, prequel or whatever. But I think the idea of a renewable conflict is interesting applied to the idea of different disciplines.

For example - and I am not saying that my attempts at formulating the renewable conflicts at the heart of various subjects is in any way definitive - I suggest that these questions could be seen as renewable conflicts for different subjects. See if you can match which question goes with which subject?[2]

1. Natural phenomena vs evidenced explanation

2. The past vs evidenced explanation

3. Human desire to thrive vs physical processes

4. What is the meaning and purpose of life vs conflicting answers vs impossibility of knowing for sure

5. Physical competence vs sloth

6. Creation of meaning/beauty vs taste vs technical competence

7. Power vs people who want or need something

8. Creation of something useful vs technical competence

Because education is about meaning, this can lead some people to believe it needs to feel meaningful and fulfilling at every moment along the way. But learning to participate within the great conversation requires learning conventions, becoming familiar with narratives, honing skills and acquiring vocabulary that will all take effort. If we are to understand complex ideas in meaningful, joined up ways, there will be points where components will need to be learnt in isolation. This isolation is but a step on the way to later integration[3], but this step may be perceived as less purposeful or meaningful by the learner. At these points, teachers should frame the meaning for their students.

This framing can be done more or less well. Framing something as 'this is meaningful because it will help you pass the exam' may not be entirely false but sells a cheapened, instrumentalist view of education, where proof of knowledge is but a bargaining chip, shorn from its moorings within the discourse of meaning making. What is more, it can lead to risibly impoverished practices where learning various short cuts and tricks to pass an exam is more important than letting the subject change you, develop you. If I just study GCSE assessment objectives via various extracts of literature rather than by reading lots of different books, I don't experience the power of literature to change how I see the world. I might be able to describe the effect a text has on the reader but have not been afforded the opportunity for the text to have an effect on me. [4] If I only learn mathematical tricks and tips, I might never experience maths as a powerfully predictive identifier of patterns and relationships but as a series of arcane and meaningless school based rituals. If I can recall historical facts and causes for the periods on the syllabus but don't know much beyond this, I may never understand how historical argument actually works. Nor will I understand the shades of meaning of such loaded terms as 'empire' or 'democracy' unless I have at least some familiarity with the diverse historical narratives within which these terms are central.

But none of this means that I should never be taught tips, short cuts or definitions and that every instance of my education must be deeply imbued with 'Meaning.' The justified horror of the short-cut, exam-driven education is exchanged for an equally mistaken desire to short cut straight to understanding the big ideas all at once, without slowly, slowly building the necessary foundations. This may at times require patient practice of skills and facts learnt for a time in isolation from the bigger picture within which they can then be put to work to do their transformative work of meaning making.

Teachers can frame the meaning for their students during these times in different ways. A simple disposition of encouragement is fundamental. The enthusiastic celebration of incremental successes is important. So is the acknowledgement of the sense of frustration and powerlessness when things are hard and the reassurance that given time and practice (and possibly better explanation on our part), the fog will clear and success will come.

It is a mistake to try to frame meaning by coming up with far-fetched and outlandish potential future 'useful' practical applications of what we are teaching in some desperate attempt to try and persuade our students it is meaningful. Ben Newmark describes the silliness of this well:
'What often follows is teachers parroting learned consequentialist justifications. In my subject, history, this might be a teacher saying "if you understand that people in the past had different views, then you'll understand that people today have too and this will mean you get on with people better when you get a job." But trying to justify the content of our curriculum by its capacity for practical application is flawed. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy most of what is learned in school is not obviously useful in the wider world without making absurd leaps. This is something many of the pupils I have taught have been acutely aware of. While it can be amusing to try and construct contrived situations that justify the teaching of something pupils regard as obscure, for example, "if you become a baker and your till breaks and you have to work out how much Mrs Jones owes you and you don't have a calculator, or a phone, and there's no way you'll be able to get one then this algebra is going to come in really handy. If you remember it. Which given you only learned it to pass an exam, you almost certainly won't." Worse, by indulging this argument we suggest the only subjects which are important are those with a clear and direct link to practical tasks pupils might do in the future. While some might argue this is actually quite right, curriculum developed on this principle would be radically different to most of those we deliver in schools today. In with using Excel and developing a good phone voice! Out with Homer, Angelou and the irrelevant Renaissance artists! Do we really want our young people to learn only what is practically useful?'[5]
Meaningfulness is not the same as usefulness.

If education is to be meaningful it needs to result in something deep and durable that lasts beyond the moment. There is nothing wrong with fleeting pleasures or momentary joys but these are not what learning is. To learn something is to be changed in some way that that lasts beyond the immediate. If we encounter momentary joy or fleeting pleasure along the way, so much the better. But it is the lasting change that makes learning purposeful. Learning enables us to see the world in a new way. Whereas before we only saw trees, now we see elms, oaks and sycamores. Whereas before we only saw rocks, we now see granite, limestone and sandstone. Whereas before we only saw shopping, we now see profit, loss and externalities. Whereas once we saw 'one bad apple', now we see the historical roots of deeply institutionalised patterns of injustice.

As we learn to 'see' in new ways, our very selves are changed. Our minds are changed, physically. Some view this power that education has to change an individual with deep unease. The words 'brainwashing' and indoctrination' are mentioned. [6] However deeply we feel this, surely leaving people ignorant is far, far worse. But Lessing's warning remains. The classic purported antidote to 'indoctrination' is to let students exercise some choice over what they learn. But to do this is itself an ideological imposition. It is not a neutral stance. Children cannot know much of what they don't yet know so the idea of choice here is somewhat meaningless. An uneducated choice is not an informed choice.

Some knowledge is more powerful, more empowering than others. As Michael Young describes[7], there is a kind of powerful knowledge that enables people to predict, to explain, to envisage alternatives, to think in new ways. There is a strange irony in using our power as teachers to deliberately withhold this kind of powerful knowledge because we believe we know best what is good for children.

What is more, there is something rather sinister in the idea of the learner as consumer, endlessly exercising 'choice' over what they wish to engage with, rather than engaging with a tradition that seeks to educate rather than placate them.

As Gert Biesta writes

' We go to school, not to get what we already know that we want, but because we want to receive an education. Here, we would expect teachers not just to give students what they know they want or say they want or are able to identify as what they want, but to move them beyond what they already know that they want. We want teachers to open up new vistas, new opportunities, and help children and young people to interrogate whether what they say they want or desire is actually what they should desire. To turn the student into a customer, and just work on the assumption that education should do what the customer wants is therefore a distortion of what education is about, a distortion that signiﬁcantly undermines the ability of teachers to be teachers and of schools, colleges and universities to be educational institutions rather than shops.[8]

Education is not always comfortable. Education can confront us with realities we would rather remain ignorant of. Education should provoke, jar, push up against what we want to be true. It is easy enough to think of possible scenarios: the child who has been brought up to think that their country is superior and a bastion of justice and fair play encountering for the first time the evidence of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, the child who believes that their religion believes x or y to be terrible sins, only to learn in school that others within the same religion believe both x and y to be perfectly acceptable, the child who has been led to believe that their freedom of expression is the ultimate good, the child who has only ever viewed the world through the lens of their Guardian reading parents.

For Biesta, the power of education lies in introducing children to things that offer resistance to their desires, ideas and assumptions. Education is the process through which children work through that which resists them and come to terms with it.
'From the perspective of the student teaching thus brings something that is strange, something that is not a projection of the student's own mind, but something that is radically and fundamentally other. The encounter with something that is other and strange-that is not of one's own making-is an encounter with something that offers resistance.'[9]
If education is an induction into meaning making, then it is right and proper that questions of 'whose meaning' are held up to scrutiny and argued over. Schools may be custodians and curators of what they see as the best, the most powerful articulations of meaning from within humanity's great conversation, but they also need to be both self-critical and open to critique. The curriculum must include the necessary tools to enable this. We need to borrow the idea from the Protestant theology of semper reformandum - always in need of reform. Any curriculum can only ever share the tiniest fragment of the wealth of human thought so questions about why X has been chosen rather than Y or Z need to be reflected upon and held up for scrutiny. This includes inducting students themselves into the conflicts and assumptions within subjects and drawing their attention to the fact that the curriculum itself is but a partial selection that could have been otherwise. In curating a curriculum, we need to be sure to include those aspects that that give students some power over their own knowledge.[10] We need to draw attention to the parameters of truth telling within each discipline. Without these, students are powerless in knowing if these parameters have been breached. In other words, part of what we curate must include disciplinary knowledge as well as substantive knowledge.

Disciplinary knowledge is knowledge about how knowledge 'earns its stripes' and gets to be regarded as knowledge. It is about the rules within a subject that enable truth claims to be upheld, challenged, contested, refuted, superseded or rendered obsolete. Each discipline has its own rules of engagement which govern the kind of questions it is and isn't possible to ask within a given subject. We need to teach children what those rules are so that children, over time, can join in the conversation about the significance of the content we are teaching them. As Christine Counsell explains:
Disciplinary knowledge... is a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice. It is that part of the subject where pupils understand each discipline as a tradition of enquiry with its own distinctive pursuit of truth. For each subject is just that: a product and an account of an ongoing truth quest, whether through empirical testing in science, argumentation in philosophy/history, logic in mathematics or beauty in the arts. It describes that part of the curriculum where pupils learn about the conditions under which valid claims can be made, and associated conventions such as what constitutes evidence or argument in that subject.[11]
If we want children to appreciate that there are such things as truth claims rather than just a myriad of conflicting opinions, if we want them to see truth-seeking as an ethical endeavour that lies at the heart of human meaning-making, then we need to share with them how 'truth' works. This is particularly important when children encounter ideas in school that offer resistance to cherished assumptions. As Michael Fordham outlines here (in the context of teaching issues such as racism and colonialism):
'When we teach pupils things that can be uncomfortable for them to hear, it is normal in the classroom to get some pushback. Sometimes this even comes from parents. Questions such as "how do you know?" or "isn't this just your opinion?" might...justifiably be asked; more worrying still are those who think this but do not say it. When it comes down to it, what are our answers to these questions? To my mind, these answers must be based on truth, evidence and reason.'[12]
Different subjects have different ways of looking, of explaining which is why trying to teach generic skills of 'observation' or 'explanation' are misplaced. How we look in art is very different from how we look in science. Explanations in history are different from explanations in maths which are again different from those in geography or music. We need to be able to look at the world in all these different ways and know what we are doing, what assumptions we are making, when we do so.

If we want to nurture critical thinkers who have the requisite powerful knowledge, then we have to respect these subject boundaries, even when it is inconvenient. If we want to induct children into the various truth quests that each subject embodies, then we need to resist the temptation to marshal truth claims in one discipline to bolster cherished beliefs in another. Totalitarian regimes are infamous for violating this essential pre-condition for truth telling, for example, warping science to fit with religious convictions or history to fit with political ones.

While it is easy to cast aspersions on the 'false news' of Totalitarians, it is harder to keep away from doing so ourselves when it involves matters we care passionately about. For example, plastic pollution is an obvious scourge of our time and learning about how and why plastic ends up in our oceans and on our beaches, why this is problematic and how communities have responded are all appropriate subject matter for a geography curriculum. Campaigning against plastic pollution is appropriate subject matter for citizenship. But not for geography. History, geography, science, are disciplines for establishing truth; disciplines don't prescribe the 'ought', i.e. what we do about them, only the ethical 'ought' of truth-seeking itself. PSHE, assemblies, citizenship, and school councils are places where schools engage with the products of those disciplines and build moral sensibility for individual and collective action.[13]

As I write, a statue of the 18 th century slaver trader Edward Colston has just been toppled by protestors in Bristol. It is entirely appropriate within the context of history lessons to seek to answer enquiry questions such as 'What was the legacy of the slave trade on the city of Bristol?' Discussing arguments for and against direct action against contested monuments is completely appropriate within a citizenship lesson, but not within a history lesson. (Should the question be asked during a history lesson, the teacher might think it really important to engage with this question in the moment but should clearly signal that history as a discipline does not have the right tools for engaging with moral questions and that they are taking off the 'glasses' of historical discourse and donning the glasses of moral philosophy in order to discuss the issue.) What is important to note here is that in order to debate the moral issue in an informed way, the requisite historical knowledge is necessary. A decolonised curriculum is of necessity a knowledge-led curriculum (though a knowledge-led curriculum is not necessarily a decolonised curriculum). Any UK secondary school history curriculum that does not include detailed enquiry into both empire and slavery is an airbrushed curriculum. The establishment of truth in history depends on scrupulous efforts of avoiding 'presentism', the ahistorical and anachronistic judging of the past by contemporary standards. There are plenty of 18 th century figures who stand in judgment over the pernicious and morally repugnant practice of slavery. These are the voices that should be heard in history lessons.

If the purpose of schools is to teach children about how to speak truthfully what it means to be human, then the conversation must encompass the breadth of humanity, especially those voices it is more convenient to ignore or suppress. It must tell the truth about shameful failings, obfuscations, denials, vested interests and inconvenient facts. And do so in ways that respect each tradition of enquiry and the distinctive way in which it pursues the truth.

[1] Ashby Ruth (2020) Why it's important to understand school subjects - and how to begin to do so in Sealy Clare (ed.) the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum. Woodbridge: John Catt. . p41
'All curricular thinking amounts to either isolation or integration of components. Observing any moment of teaching, this is what we see - the (temporary, artificial isolation and/or integration which makes components functional in a larger set of journeys.'
[2] science, history, geography, RE, PE, the arts, politics, technology.

[3] Christine Counsell's highlights the tension between isolation and integration in her chapter Better conversations with subject leaders in Sealy Clare (ed.) the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum. Woodbridge: John Catt. p104

[4] I have paraphrased and stolen this sentence from Christine Counsell's chapter p108

[5] https://bennewmark.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/why-teach/

[6] http://www.notable-quotes.com/l/lessing_doris.html

[7] Young M and Lambert D (eds) Knowledge and the Future School. London: Bloomsbury

[8] Gert Bietsa. European Journal of Education, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2015

[9] Gert Biesta in Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 6 (2012), No. 2, pp. 35-49. Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher file:///C:/Users/pc/Downloads/19860-Article%20Text-48221-1-10-20130620.pdf

[10] David Lambert ttps://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10042097/1/Lambert_Who_thinks_what_geography.pdf

[11] https://impact.chartered.college/article/taking-curriculum-seriously/

[12] https://twitter.com/mfordhamhistory/status/1269726577534918656

[13] I am indebted to Christine Counsell for these last two sentences which she shared with me in a Twitter exchange as I sought to understand the role of disciplinary knowledge.

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How to speak truthfully about what it means to be human: a user's handbook.

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The purpose of schools is not chiefly or mainly to prepare children for exams or jobs. Rather, as Ruth Ashbee eloquently explains, it is to teach our children about meaning - about what it means to be human.[1] Through their curriculums, schools are custodians, curators and critics of the magnificent legacy of human meaning-making.

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Why Reading Aloud to Students is So Critical to Vocabulary - Teach Like a Champion

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Last night, after reading aloud to my daughter and tucking her in, I was mopping up a bit of work from the day and came across this observation by Isabel Beck:
"The source of later vocabulary learning shifts [as students get older] to written texts-what children read [as opposed to what they hear]. The problem is that it is not so easy to learn [vocabulary] from written context. Written context lacks many of the features of oral language that support learning new word meanings..."
Beck's point is that hearing someone use a word helps kids learn the word better since the emphasis and inflection implicit in spoken language help to communicate a large amount of additional information about the word and how it is working in a given situation. It expands the amount of usable context for a young person to learn from.

On the other hand, as many researchers have pointed out, written language contains far more vocabulary words than oral language. In fact most of the words that comprise a student's reading vocabulary will appear in their lives only in written texts... in one's night's reading from Island of the Blue Dolphins, my daughter and I came across glisten, befall and pelt. Like other vocabulary words they are rarely if ever used in oral conversation. They live almost exclusively in print.

So what do you do if the words that are hardest and most powerful for students to learn appear in a setting with less context to help them learn?

You read aloud to them. One of the great benefits of reading aloud to students is that they are exposed to vocabulary at maximum frequency-written text, especially difficult text, multiples the number of rare words they hear; it ensures exposure to a much wider range of words, with particular emphasis on rare words that only appear in print.

But at the same time they hear those words infused with inflection and expression that communicates more about them about the words and thus enhances meaning. In fact, even hearing a word pronounced correctly is valuable in a way that's often overlooked: it increases the likelihood that a student will use the word, attend to it and or connect it to the previous time she heard it, the next time she encounters it print. If she doesn't know how to pronounce it, though, she will skip over it cognitively.

So reading aloud to-or with-students puts you in the sweet spot for vocabulary development: maximum number of rare words per minute; maximum degree of additional information to expand and cement meaning.

I'd just note that this function-the sweet-spot-ness of reading aloud-does not abate as students get older. In fact, the more critical the vocabulary of a discipline, the more important for older students to occasionally hear it's written discourse read aloud. If you teach high school science or history one of the most valuable things you can do for students is to read aloud to them from the literature of the discipline with expression every so often.

Read Aloud, Vocabulary

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Why Reading Aloud to Students is So Critical to Vocabulary - Teach Like a Champion

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Last night, after reading aloud to my daughter and tucking her in, I was mopping up a bit of work from the day and came across this observation by Isabel Beck: "The source of later vocabulary learning shifts [as students get older] to written texts-what children read [as opposed to what they hear].

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When is a chunk not a chunk? – The Emotional Learner

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Chunking describes the process by which individual pieces of information are broken down and grouped together. The process is said to make the recall of information easier because it helps to bypass the inherent limitations of working memory. However, chunking also relies heavily upon long-term memory.

Chunking is, therefore, related to another aspect of memory known as memory span or digit span (the latter term derives from tests that measure memory span by asking people to repeat back a list of digits that increase incrementally). In education, we often describe these terms in relation to cognitive load, or the demands learning places on our limited mental resources.

The way instructional design can be adapted to help learners cope with these limitation has been encapsulated into a model known as Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). In turn, CLT draws on aspects of memory research that go back as far as the late nineteenth century, including studies that attempted to discover the limitations of human memory.

This is all well and good, but what exactly is a chunk and how does chunking help us enhance our limited working memory?

Unfortunately, there isn't a great deal of consensus on this, even Miller in his famous 1956 paper on capacity noted 'we are not very definite about what constitutes a chunk of information.' Cowan (2001) has defined a chunk as 'groups of items that have strong, preexisting associations to each other but weak associations to other items'. Cowan, like many other theorists, emphasise the role of long-term memory, in that a chunk must be representative of something we already know. Anderson's ACT-R model, however, views chunks as schema-like structures containing pointers that encode their contents. This latter definition does make sense, in that cognitive schemas and chunking can be thought of as similar mental workarounds.

For us to begin to understand the nature of a chunk, we first need to step slightly away and look at the nature of working memory capacity and why it can be so problematic.

Memory limitations

Researchers have known for some time that short-term memory is limited. Possibly the first study into such limitation even pre-dates the separation of memory into short-term and long-term components (the first model to incorporate this separation appeared in 1968, although there was general agreement that memory was probably organised in such a way well before Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model).

A paper published in the January 1887 edition of Mind by Joseph Jacobs details a study of what is now referred to as memory span. Jacobs initially asked his participants (students from North London Collegiate College) to repeat back nonsense syllables (a technique already utilised by experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus) but found they varied too greatly in relative difficulty of pronunciation and 'relative facility to rhythm.' He, therefore, abandoned this idea and instead chose letters (with the exception of W) and numbers (with the exception of seven). These omissions were necessary to ensure equal length and speed of vocalisation. He found that, on average, participants could successfully repeat back around 7 letters and 9 numbers.

Due to the behaviourist ascendency of the early part of the twentieth century, the study of memory fell out of fashion, predominately because of its internal and, therefore, unobservable nature. However, with the shift towards cognitive psychology from around the 1950s, there was renewed interest in mental functions, including memory, attention and perception.

George Miller's 1956 study remains one of the most cited in the history of psychology, while Jacobs' has fallen into relative obscurity. Miller found that, on average, people were able to hold between 5 and 9 pieces of information in short-term memory at any one time, or more precisely, 7 +/- 2 chunks. According to Miller, the capacity of verbal short-term memory is determined by the number of chunks that can be stored in memory, and not the number of items or the amount of information. More recently, Cowan has suggested that the capacity of short-term memory is closer to 4 chunks.

As an aside, these results are highly consistent, both in formal and less controlled settings. I've been using the digit span technique with A-level psychology students since 2004 and it's remarkable how averages rarely shift too far from the research literature.

What's your digit span?

This idea of digit, or memory, span might need a little unpacking, especially as Miller was a little vague about what constituted a chunk.

If I were to read out a series of numbers, lets say 58316724 and ask you to immediately say them back to me in order of presentation (a technique known as serial recall testing), how many you manage to recall before any error occurred would represent your digit span. If you repeated back 583167, your digit span would be six (the actual procedure would consist of several trials). I could also perform the study with letters, for example FBICIATV.

If you have a digit span of 6 and I ask you to repeat back 8 numbers or letters, the first 6 will, in effect, leave no room for the remaining two. However, what if we could recode the information so that it took up less space? Using a computer analogy, could we somehow compress the data? Lets look at those numbers again.

58316724

We could group some of these digits together, such as:

58 31 67 24 or

5831 6724

The first option then recodes 8 digits into 4 pieces of information and the second option into 2 pieces of information.

Chunking or Grouping?

These, then, may (or may not) represent chunks, because Miller makes the distinction between grouping and chunking. The numbers are unlikely to be meaningful so there is no representation of them stored in long-term memory. We may remember them better simply due to the pauses we place between the numbers, very much like the way we remember telephone numbers. Often this grouping of numbers is erroneously described as chunking.

Let's, then, take a look at the letters.

FBICIATV

We could group the letters thus:

FBI CIA TV or even

FB ICI ATV

Chances are the first option in represented in the majority of people's long-term memory, while the second may or may not be (depending on whether your young enough to make Facebook out of FB, know that ICI is a chemical company or are old enough to make Associated Television out of ATV, (or adventurous enough to drive an All Terrain Vehicle).

We, therefore, need the knowledge of these pieces of information already in our long-term memory, otherwise they remain meaningless or, in Cowan's words, they do not have 'strong, preexisting associations to each other' - they are just a string of random letters that have been grouped.

Back to the numbers. In fact, here is a new sequence:

10661914191819391945

There are twenty numbers here and you need to recall them all in sequence without writing them down. We can, however, group them:

1066 1914 1918 1939 1945

In all probability, these are dates that are represented in your long-term memory (so, yes, they are chunks) and you've just increased your digit span from 6 to 20, well, kind of. The thing is that you haven't actually increased your working memory capacity, you've just discovered a way to get around its limitations.

We, therefore, use what we know in order to chunk information together. In a paper from 1980, Ericsson, Chase and Faloon describe the participant 'SF'(later revealed to be Steve Faloon), an avid runner, who made extensive use of his knowledge of running times to recall up to 79 digits. Interestingly, however, he was unable to increase the number of consonants he was able to recall, probably because he was unable to associate them pre-stored long-term information.

The ability to successfully chunk is therefore related to what we already know. This also fits with the widely held notion that learning is cumulative - the more we learn, the more we are able to learn. Learning also becomes quicker and more efficient.

This deeper understanding of chunking can then be used to better implement learning strategies that take advantage of the way long-term memories can be linked to newly acquired information.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might like to visit my TES page

Or buy me a coffee

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Chunking describes the process by which individual pieces of information are broken down and grouped together. The process is said to make the recall of information easier because it helps to bypass the inherent limitations of working memory. However, chunking also relies heavily upon long-term memory.

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Here is the Organising the Graphic Organisers poster I promised. Download it from https://t.co/fGIT8N9wX3. Ionna Vekiri's (2004) summary of dual coding studies shows that teacher wrong choice of visual diminishes, even negates, any dual coding benefit to learning. pic.twitter.com/PsRO1VdEv1
— oliver caviglioli (@olicav) July 8, 2019

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Factors to Consider on GCSE Results Day - Douglas Wise

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GCSE results and linked progress scores for individual classes are unreliable proxies for judging teacher effectiveness. It's tempting to think otherwise, but the truth is that decent teachers don't always achieve decent results and results achieved by individual teachers vary over time. Input doesn't match output. So, when the next set of results are officially published on the 22nd August, it's worth considering the wider impact of the factors below alongside viewpoints on the quality of teaching that has gone before.

Factors to Consider: Whole School Level
1. Culture and climate of the school

2. Curriculum priorities

3. Teaching and learning priorities

4. Approaches to behaviour and inclusion

Factors to Consider: Department Level
1. Breadth of the KS3 curriculum and the quality of its implementation

2. Allocation and division of KS4 curriculum time

3. Consistency of staffing across classes (e.g. split classes, mid-course changes to staffing)

4. Group changes (e.g. students judged not to be making progress switched into a different class)

5. Experience levels and specialisms of staff

6. Quality of schemes of work and shared resources

7. Approaches to setting (students in top sets are likely to make more progress and achieve better results)

8. Approaches to intervention

9. The amount of curriculum time lost through whole-school initiatives (e.g. collapsed timetable days)

10. Level and quality of SLT support

Factors to Consider: Class Level
1. The mobility of students and their routes into the class (e.g. in-year transfers, managed moves, group changes)

2. The attendance of students at school-level

3. The attendance of students at class-level (e.g. lessons missed because of isolation)

4. Level of teacher autonomy (e.g. to teach in a certain way or to prioritise aspects of the curriculum)

5. Student attendance at intervention sessions

6. Effectiveness of intervention

7. Quality of student behaviour

8. Levels of student motivation

9. Levels of parental support and engagement

10. Level and quality of HoD support

Other Factors to Consider: Class Level
1. Gender balance of students

2. Levels of socio-economic disadvantage

3. Ethnicity of students

4. Nature and diversity of special educational needs

5. Nature and diversity of EAL needs

6. Stability of home-life

7. Levels of parental education

8. Access to private tuition

Further Reading
1. Research Brief: Influences on students' GCSE attainment and progress at age 16

2. Research Report: Factors associated with achievement: key stage 4

3. Research Report: Multiple disadvantage and KS4 attainment: evidence from LSYPE2

4. Education Datalab: Long-term disadvantage, part three: Ethnicity, EAL and long-term disadvantage

5. Education Datalab: Key Stage 4 performance tables 2018: Four key points from this year's data

6. 6 findings on latest EEF report

Good, bad or average: lest we forget in a few weeks that a set of GCSE results is not simply the isolated outcome of two years of teaching.

Fingers crossed for mid-August -

Thanks for reading -

Doug
hello@douglaswise.co.uk Subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here>>
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Factors to Consider on GCSE Results Day - Douglas Wise

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GCSE results and linked progress scores for individual classes are unreliable proxies for judging teacher effectiveness. It's tempting to think otherwise, but the truth is that decent teachers don't always achieve decent results and results achieved by individual teachers vary over time. Input doesn't match output.

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What is Dual Coding Theory and How Can it Be Applied in the Classroom? - TeacherOfSci

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By Oliver Caviglioli. Edited by Paul Stevens-Fulbrook.

Back in 1971, Canadian researcher, Allan Paivio, formulated his dual coding theory. And then spent the next four decades researching it, trying to 'break it'.
He didn't manage it.
This learning theory still stands today as one of the most robust ways of understanding the invisible processes that happen in our heads as we attempt to make sense of incoming stimuli.
His most significant discovery was that we have two separate channels that deal with verbal and visual stimuli.
While being independent of each other, they are also able to create what Paivio called "associative connections" between them. So, they are both apart from one another but can cooperate in forming linked pairs of words and images.

By forming such a link, the encoding process is enriched. It leaves a double memory trace and, in the words of Professor Paul Kirschner, results in "double-barrelled learning" because of the resultant double opportunity of being retrieved by either verbal or visual means.

Encoding, of course, is psychologists' term for learning and, so, such a powering up of the encoding and retrieval processes deserves teachers' close attention. It's no surprise then that John Sweller -the originator of the related Cognitive Load Theory- concludes that, "Working memory capacity can be effectively increased, and learning improved, by using a dual-mode presentation." (Cognitive Load Theory, 2011, Sweller, Ayres & Kalyuga)

Often, cognitive science brings bad news to students. They are confronted by the facts that learning happens through thinking hard (Coe), that the comforting habit of rereading and highlighting is very inefficient, and that studying one topic at a time is less than optimal. Dual coding is quite different in that pairing words and images don't incur any additional cognitive load and also greatly helps retrieval. It's a 'freebie'.
But, as good as this news is, it's only half the story.
When Paivio found that the two channels worked as separate systems, he also noted that they were also fundamentally different in structure. Verbal information, you won't be surprised to learn, is sequential in construction. Words are joined together in "concatenation" as philosopher, Bertrand Russell, described it when comparing the relative merits of text and diagrams in conveying meaning.

Visual information was defined by Paivio as being synchronous, or simultaneous' in structure. These two synonymous terms were used to explain that with diagrams, several, if not all, the elements could be viewed in one go. Words, by contrast, have to be processed one at a time.

While Paivio noted these important structural differences, he didn't devote his research to exploring them much further. Others did, I'm glad to say, and we will shortly meet them and learn what they discovered. But, for now, we'll stay with Paivio's studies of the associative links between the two modality systems.

As robust as his findings were over several decades, we ought not to forget that the nature of the content learned by his laboratory subjects was cognitively unchallenging. Like Ebbinghaus in the century before him, Paivio used simple content in order to discount any element of comprehension messing his pure work on retrieval.
That's not how schools work though, they do deal with cognitively challenging content.
The knowledge organiser with its lists of facts -let's acknowledge it-while a very useful document, hardly represents the apex of schools' intellectual aspirations. Instead, different approaches are needed to mesh together such isolated facts into coherent networks and integrated concepts.

That's where Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon come into the picture. In 1987, they wrote a paper that developed Paivio's distinction of sequential and synchronous information structures.

By comparing the time, effort and accuracy involved in understanding concepts communicated in either verbal or visual format, they arrived at what is now called The Visual Argument. In their study, well-constructed diagrams were judged to be more computationally efficient than text.

Behind this somewhat technical term, lies this reasoning. Because of the sequential nature of verbal information, each word is addressed one at a time. That, of course, isn't all that's entailed. To make sense of each word, they need to relate to others.

Sometimes this is simply the ones directly preceding them. But others may well be further apart in a previous phrase or sentence. Such distances require cognitive effort in searching and connecting in order to make the necessary inferences to make sense of the text as a whole.

Diagrams don't work that way!

Constituent parts of a diagram are all significant, unlike the words in a piece of text. In addition, these visual elements can be perceived in one go, and not serially.

This is why Paivio described visual information being synchronous or simultaneous in structure. And this is why psychologists argue ( Clark & Lyons 2004) that diagrams can be largely understood by using our everyday perception.

Gestalt psychology, for nearly a century, has shown us that we immediately understand that proximity of elements represent commonality, as indeed does inclusion within a border (think Euler and Venn diagrams). These natural capacities are at play in the reading of diagrams and require considerably less cognitive resources than in reading texts.

The two cognitive, or computational, tasks that are more efficient with diagrams are the reduced need to search for relevant items within sentences and, correspondingly, the easier use of inference because metacognition is able to take place.
Put simply...
Reading texts involves an almost constant travelling back and forth searching which parts relate to which. This, then, makes inferences so much more difficult, or effortful, to make.

The example below, that I use in my presentations to make the concept of computational efficiency come alive, makes the point more effectively than my explanations.
From the text on the left, try and answer the questions. Difficult isn't it!

Now try to answer the same questions by looking at the image below...

Much easier right?

Convinced of this you may be but, as always, there's more to it than just presenting a diagram to your students.

As cognitive science authors, Clark and Lyons (2004) warn: "Visuals ignored, don't teach".

It's all very well to give your students diagrams that convey information that require less effort to understand, but if you don't then use them to make your students think, not much will be learned.
Diagrams should be thought of as platforms from which to better analyse texts and prepare for speaking and writing.
And then there are other problems to overcome. The Visual Argument only happens when teachers have chosen an appropriate visual tool. Exploring the differences between rural and urban settings is not best represented by a timeline for example. And plotting the plot of Hamlet becomes confusing if a mind map is used.

Graphic organisers can usefully be grouped along these four types of deductive reasoning: defining, comparing, sequencing and linking cause and effect. Identifying the nature of the knowledge task is essential before moving on to choose an appropriate visual tool.

As you might now expect, there's one more danger to avoid. Supposing the correct organiser is chosen to fit the nature of the task, its execution needs to be adequate.

Clark and Lyons (2004) highlight poor execution as a major factor behind dual coding's diminished impact. Above all, teachers need to make their handwriting legible. To be confident of this, printing in a clear, bold style with no flourishes or elaborations, is essential.

Forcing students to decipher a rushed handwritten script is an unnecessary cognitive burden that clearly bears an extraneous, unproductive load.

Other graphic considerations when creating dual coded communications involve the following four principles I devised after responding to requests for feedback from teachers on Twitter.
Firstly...
Simply to cut-reduce the volume presented on page or slide. It's the easiest and most effective of all the principles.
Next...
Chunk the selected content. Identify the categories so it's easier to make sense. And signal the chunks by providing more headings than you normally would.
Then..
Aligning the chunks, and any other element on the page -line or image- makes scanning and search so much easier for the reader. In other words, don't make them 'artistic' and random in placement. Order makes reading and scanning so very much easier.
Finally...
And lastly, continuing on the non-artistic perspective, practice restraint in the number and intensity of colours used, along with the use of a single typeface (font) ensuring it isn't a fancy, hard-to-read display font or Comic Sans. Typographers have a long history of theory, research and practice as to what makes reading easy.
Just look closely at any newspaper or magazine design and you will see these principles in action. Get my eBook (above) FREE with the Kindle unlimited FREE trial.
Affiliate.

For a more detailed explanation of dual coding theory and examples of how it can be included in your classroom practice, Oliver's book; "Dual Coding with Teachers" is perfect, it will be hugely useful to any teacher. You can get it from Amazon on the affiliate links below.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Dual Coding Theory; Why Is It Brilliant In The Classroom?

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By Oliver Caviglioli. Edited by Paul Stevens-Fulbrook. Back in 1971, Canadian researcher, Allan Paivio, formulated his dual coding theory. And then spent the next four decades researching it, trying to 'break it'. He didn't manage it.

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▶ Primary Podcast: Effective Questioning by United Learning

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Primary Podcast: Effective Questioning by United Learning

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In this podcast, our Primary Director, Darran Ellison-Lee, explores the way effective questioning can transform teaching and learning and ensure that pupils are getting the best out of every lesson.

For more information, to ask any questions or to suggest future topics, please contact the Primary Team via dawn.lester@unitedlearning.org.uk.

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Are your lesson observations a wasted opportunity? – Primary Colour

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If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!
William Strunk

Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?
E.B.White

Meet Hannah. She's in her fourth year of teaching. Today she took part in her second formal lesson observation of the year, roughly her 30th observation since she began her PGCE. In preparation, she discussed her lesson plan with colleagues. She spent hours creating resources and differentiating for every possible outcome or detour in her lesson. (Away from the prying eyes of the SLT observers, a stack of unused 'extension tasks' went into the bin at the end of the lesson, unneeded as they turned out to be.) She stuck sheets into children's books so that not a single second of the learning time would be wasted, though usually the kids would do this job themselves. She sharpened pencils, cleaned whiteboards and imagined each part of the lesson with the precise foresight of a military logistician. She told children about the upcoming observation and subtly ensured that children knew that the rewards and sanctions for their actions during this precious period of time would be greater than usual. Immediately after the lesson, she scoured the checklist - the one given to each teacher at the start of the year - to ensure that everything had been included during her 40 minute observation. Cooperative learning? Check. A mention of homework? Check. Mini-plenary? Check. Visible excitement for learning? Check. Thinking skills in one of the agreed school formats? Check. (The observers surely saw on her lesson plan that her plenary explicitly referenced de Bono's red thinking hat.) In short, this was no ordinary lesson. Now, as she skips from the meeting room in which she received glowing feedback, she feels that her hard work has paid off.

Meet Sarah. She is in her third year of teaching, and for the past two years Edutwitter has become a slightly-too-prominent part of her daily routine. While she remembers little of the pedagogy that was discussed during her initial teacher training, since then she has read countless books, blogs and research papers (though often just the abstracts and conclusions of these). Having initially tried to apply all at once everything she had learned - with chaotic results - she is now committed to changing her teaching one element at a time. Most recently, she has focused on improving her questioning. She finds that particular techniques (cold-calling, pose-pounce-bounce, etc) have begun to ensure that all children in the class are listening and that she understands the children's misconceptions better than before. She has read Tom Sherrington's blog-post on the subject at least five times.[i] She is never truly satisfied with her teaching in any given lesson, but she is confident that she is traveling in a positive direction. At this moment, she is sitting quietly in her classroom, having just received her feedback from today's lesson observation. She is not visibly upset; that is just not her style. But she is demoralised. As much as possible, she tried to ensure that she taught the way she usually would. The observing members of SLT said some complimentary things about her lesson, but they were not happy about the desks that were in rows; they were not happy about the amount of time spent on consolidating learning from the previous lesson; they were not happy that the displays on the working wall did not have the date written on them, in line with school policy. ( "Who knows how long they've been on the wall?") These same observers will decide whether she moves up the pay scale at the end of the year and whether she is suitable for a position of responsibility. Sarah occasionally thinks about looking for another school, but she is told by colleagues that this is "just how it is everywhere now". She has a 1st class degree in accountancy and is beginning to think that she isn't a good fit for primary teaching.

Meet Joanne. She is the head teacher, and she dedicates her life to the school. It is 5:30 PM, and she has just realised that she hasn't eaten since breakfast. She is mentally exhausted from a day of observing lessons and giving feedback. It has been worth it, mind. The school is a different place to the one she took over two years ago. Having seen the effects of disappointing Ofsted inspections first-hand as a deputy head in her previous school, she knows that what she is doing is for the best in the long run. This is her first headship, and she is desperate for the next Ofsted inspection to go well; she wants some breathing space so she can begin to create the school she's always wanted to lead. Beyond that, she eventually wants to work in education on a level above any individual school, and developing an "outstanding" school seems like a necessary launchpad for such ambitions. Thus, every structure - from lesson observations to interventions to assessment - has been designed to provide straightforward, easily-argued answers to whichever inspector has to judge the entire workings of a school over the course of just a few hours. She suspects that assessment results will always be paramount, despite Ofsted's claims to the contrary, so she has ensured that SATs booster clubs now start in year 5, though not with that name, of course. Today's lesson observations were another tiny step towards her goal: apart from a few exceptions, the teaching across the school aligned very well with the checklist she created. (Three out of the four NQTs are struggling to meet the school's expectations, but one seems to be doing fine, evidence that the other three just need to pull their socks up.) Ofsted will doubtless want to know how well Joanne understands the teaching across the school, and if everyone sticks to the checklist, she can be confident in every answer she gives. As she so often says, consistency is key. Recently, she's heard a lot about retrieval practice and is convinced of its efficacy. The only question is exactly how much of each lesson should she ask teachers to dedicate to it. Five minutes? Ten? There's no need to decide that now. That one can be added to next year's checklist.

The above cases are all fabrications, obviously. However, they are representative of most of the schools in which I have worked and reflect what I have been told by the majority of primary teachers that I have met. I was tempted to let the above vignettes speak for themselves, but against my better judgement, I'm not going to. Some thoughts:

1. Any lesson observation where a teacher is hoping to impress and puts on a lesson 'for show' is a wasted opportunity to improve their day-to-day teaching. School leaders must ensure that their teachers know this.

2. Before a lesson observation, school leaders should ask a teacher exactly what they are trying to improve in their teaching and why. The observation should then support the teacher in this area of improvement and then discuss future areas that the teacher could work on. (If a teacher is not focused on an area of improvement, then the aim of the lesson observation should be to find one.) Becoming a better teacher is a process of inculcating new habits. This takes weeks or even months and is inevitably achieved (or not) by the teacher when no one is watching. A lesson observation structure that does not recognise this fact and does not consequently work within its confines is a wasted opportunity.

3. I suspect that on some intrinsic level, lesson observations will always mirror the power dynamic of Ofsted inspections. Ofsted inspections are perceived primarily as something 'done to' schools, who are thus more keen to impress than to improve. Due to this, many schools' attitude to Ofsted is similar to Hannah's attitude to lesson observations: Put on a show. Earn praise. Get back to business. It's tempting to blame the individual teacher or school for adapting to their environment in whatever way maximises praise and minimises criticism from those in authority, especially when doing so is patently short-sighted; individual responsibility is important, after all. But at some point we must address the circumstances that incentivise such attitudes.[ii]

[i] https://teacherhead.com/2018/08/24/great-teaching-the-power-of-questioning/

[ii] There are a lot of positive noises coming from Ofsted currently. However, I hope they do not lose sight of the fact that many of the changes that they are suggesting are part of an attempt to undo damage that has already been inflicted by Ofsted themselves. Accountability almost always seems to create perverse incentives; this should inspire caution and humility in those who seek it.

Primary teacher in England View all posts by suchmo83

Published

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Are your lesson observations a wasted opportunity?

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If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!William Strunk Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?E.B.White Meet Hannah. She's in her fourth year of teaching. Today she took part in her second formal lesson observation of the year, roughly her 30th observation since she began her PGCE.

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What can we learn from Direct Instruction 

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New Post

An "Ah-Ha" Moment with Spaced Practice in the Classroom

I was recently given the perfect chance to show my students how powerful spacing practice can be on retrieval of material. https://t.co/dCSrsIYk5h…@RetrieveLearn @AceThatTest @P_A_Kirschner @dylanwiliam pic.twitter.com/89NqZGcs2o
— Blake Harvard (@effortfuleduktr) October 5, 2019

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Mindsets vs Metacognition. Two EEF reports and a clear conclusion. | teacherhead

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At ResearchEd in Cape Town I presented a workshop exploring two relatively recent reports from the Education Endowment Foundation - the 2018 guidance report Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning, and the 2019 report C hanging Mindsets: Effectiveness Trial.

Essentially, my argument is that these papers support the view - one that makes sense to me - that schools are better off investing time and energy in adopting strategies that develop metacognition than those focused on growth mindset interventions. I've made this case via different posts including the following:

School walls are oozing with unhelpful growth mindset cheese.... - where I suggest that the generic messaging that is all too common, isn't helpful. Telling students not to worry or give up or that you can't add fractions yet! - doesn't do enough to help them add those fractions.

Engineering Success. A positive alternative to generic mindset messaging - where I suggest that we should focus on the specific learning steps needed for students to succeed, setting aspirational goals but focusing on achievable next steps within the details of a subject, rather than nebulous mindset messaging.

The EEF Mindset report is about one detailed RCT where students received several sessions teaching them about mindsets and teachers also received training. Here are some excerpts:

Using the EEF's rating the system, the study produces the following outcomes:

Cheap, reliable data - and zero months' progress! Essentially, the outcomes from the study were weak; disappointing for sure. The report suggests some contextual and methodological reasons why this might have been the case. This is important because it would be a big mistake to dismiss potentially good ideas based on flaws in a particular trial. Three possible issues are suggested:
In theory, there are three possible reasons why the intervention's measured impact was not statistically significant:
Each of these factors is discussed in more detail in the report. My interpretation from reading it is simply this: implementing growth mindset interventions, even in controlled conditions with willing and committed schools, is HARD! Even accepting that growth mindset is sound as a concept, I would suggest that there is a long road to walk between altering the attitudes children have to their learning and securing improvement in their application of successful strategies to the learning itself. It's never going to be a major effect because the potential for dilution and diffusion of effort and thinking time away from activities critical to the actual learning is significant.

The Metacognition Report, by comparison, suggests a much stronger outcome in EEF's terms. The guidance report is not based on one specific trial - an important point - but a summary of multiple studies. However, the EEF Toolkit gives metacognition an impact rating of +7, with four locks for validity and very low cost; just one £.

Even if we take these ratings as a very approximate guide, there is a clear difference here. Metacognition and self-regulation strategies are cheap with a strong evidence base yielding a much stronger impact than the mindset intervention. This makes total sense to me . The guidance report details the processes needed for successful delivery of interventions, showing how it moves from teacher guidance and modelling to students using task planning and self-monitoring strategies independently:

All of this is located in subject-specific content. It's not generic at any stage. Metacognition is something you model while teaching maths, science, English, art or French. You don't waffle on about it in assemblies; you don't turn it into laminated poster. It goes to the heart of the learning process and, therefore, yields results in terms of impact. It links to the 'process questions' that Rosenshine talks about in his principles of instruction - whereby teachers explore the 'how do we know?'of the question in hand, narrating their thinking and exploring students' thought processes.

The report also gives seven recommendations for developing this approach in schools:
Conclusion:
I fully accept that the concept of a growth mindset is real and helpful. It would be great if teachers and students all had a growth mindset. The question is: how do we develop growth mindsets? I would suggest that the best bet for this is to focus on engineering success through applying the EEF's recommendations, flooding lessons with metacognitive talk and lots of modelling. I would suggest that teaching students about mindsets forms a light-touch background at most - it's obviously healthy to encourage students to persevere, to take risks, learn from mistakes and not give up. But - it's far better to be a growth mindset school than to say you're a growth mindset school and subject-specific metacognitive strategies are much more likely to foster the mindsets we're after.

If evidence-informed practice means making decisions about where to spend the CPD time budget based on evidence, I'd say it's pretty obvious that metacognition is by far the better bet.

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Mindsets vs Metacognition. Two EEF reports and a clear conclusion.

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At ResearchEd in Cape Town I presented a workshop exploring two relatively recent reports from the Education Endowment Foundation - the 2018 guidance report Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning, and the 2019 report Changing Mindsets: Effectiveness Trial. Essentially, my argument is that these papers support the view - one that makes sense to me - that...

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When You Get Nothing But Crickets | Cult of Pedagogy

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Sponsored by Learners Edge and Microsoft Inclusive Classroom

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

You know that thing where you're talking to a group of people and you ask them a question and no one answers? And you wait a few more seconds, awkwardly, and nothing happens? It's one of those funny little problems faced by a lot of teachers, coaches, speakers, ministers, pretty much anyone who speaks in front of groups: The speaker says something, hoping for a response from students or an audience, and what they most often get back are a couple of weak smiles, a grunt or two, and not much more.

Basically, crickets.

It's mildly uncomfortable for everyone, both the speaker and the audience, but thankfully, the moment passes quickly and it's no big deal. Still, it's a fixable problem.

Why It Happens

Getting the silent treatment from a group you're speaking to happens most of the time for one basic reason: People don't want to look stupid. Within that broad umbrella of not wanting to look dumb, here are some more specific possible causes of your cricket problem:

They know you're not just talking to them.
If you ask a group of people, "How's everybody doing?" very few of them will answer, because it's not the same as if you were alone with them. One on one, you ask someone that question and they can give you some detail about how things are going, but in a group, the question is more or less rhetorical. A few extroverted people might mutter "good" or "great," but no one is going to seriously answer you. The one exception to this is if you're speaking to tens of thousands of people in some kind of stadium situation. In that case you're a big fricking deal and the crowd is already going wild because you walked out on stage, so go ahead with your question.

They think everyone else gets it.
If you say to a group, "Does that make sense?" most people are going to act like it does, even if it doesn't, because they assume everyone else in the room totally gets it and they don't want to look like the lone dummy. Instead of telling you it doesn't make sense, what they'll do is either (A) turn to someone else to ask a clarifying question, which can look to you like rude chit-chat, or (B) come up to you after your presentation and ask the questions then. If this happens with more than a few people, you now have a small crowd to deal with. On top of that, the rest of the group probably would have benefitted from hearing that question and your response, but instead, you're only having the conversation with one person.

You're asking for too much.
Some questions are too hard to answer on the spot. For example, if you ask, "What is your favorite song?" some people will rack their brains trying to think of a song they like more than any other, THE song that totally defines them as a person. But if you just ask them to think of a song they really like, that's much easier.

Someone in the room is intimidating (and it might be you).
When we're in the presence of someone who intimidates us, it gets a lot harder to speak up publicly, especially if there's a chance that what we say might be wrong or different from the norm in any way. This is about a thousand times more true if you're around 13 years old and your whole goal in life is to fit in. So if you have a group that is especially silent, consider who's in the room: Just one super popular kid or a person who is not particularly nice to her peers may be all it takes to keep the rest of the class from opening their mouths. Or the intimidating person might even be you: If you've ever ridiculed students' questions or their responses to questions you have asked, very few of them will be brave enough to keep sticking their necks out.

They don't know what the heck you're talking about.
It could be that your audience is just really confused. This is where it helps to be a good judge of facial expressions: If people in an audience are confused, many of them will show it right on their faces, but if you're not generally good at noticing that kind of thing, it could help to have a colleague come in and observe.

More Effective Ways to Increase Audience Participation

Here are some better ways to get your students-or your audience if you're speaking outside of a classroom-to participate more.

1. Explain what kind of response you want.

Sometimes audiences freeze up when you ask a question because they aren't sure what kind of response you want, if any. So the more specific you are with your expectations, the better they will be at giving you what you want. For example, you could say, "In a minute, I'm going to ask a question. What I want you to do first is think quietly about your answer. Then I'm going to ask for three volunteers to share their answer with the group." Specific instructions like that will put your audience more at ease, and they'll be more likely to give you good responses.

2. Ask for a show of hands.

As long as you're asking about something people won't be embarrassed to admit and that at least some people in your audience will probably say "yes" to, this is a way to start a conversation. So rather than say, "How was everyone's weekend?" you could say, "How many people watched a sporting event this weekend?" From there, you can go to one of the people who raised their hands, ask them what they watched, and you're off and running.

3. Ask one person a direct question.

We established earlier that everyone in your audience knows you're not speaking only to them, so when you throw out a question to the room, individual people aren't likely to move the spotlight to themselves. But if you go to one person directly and ask them a question, they have to respond. So instead of saying, "What did you think of that movie we watched yesterday?", go to the kid in the third row and say, "Hey Paulie, what did you think about that movie?" Now Paulie could probably just shrug this question off or say, "It was alright," so if you want to get a better response, try something like, "Tell me something about that movie that made an impression on you."

4. Have everyone write down a response first.

When you ask a group a question, usually only one or two people will respond. This robs everyone else of the opportunity to answer. If this happens over and over again in the same group, many participants won't even think about their own response, because they'll know one of the more talkative people is going to answer anyway. One way to solve this problem is to have everyone write down a repsonse to the question first, then call on a few people to share what they wrote. This way, even if the room only hears a few responses, everyone actually reflected on and answered the question. And when you give everyone time to process in this way, you're likely to get more and different volunteers than if you just ask the room cold; that's because some students need more processing time before they feel confident enough to share their thoughts. In their book, Total Participation Techniques (see the end of this post), Persida and William Himmele tackle this problem with dozens of strategies that get every student in the room participating.

5. Do a think-pair-share.

Instead of having everyone write an answer, you could instead just have them turn to a partner and respond to them. This can be useful for meaty, content-heavy questions, where participants are processing something they've learned, or just your basic conversational ones. Try it: The next time you're about to say "How's everyone doing?" to a large group, instead, tell them to turn to a partner and answer the same question. If someone in the room is having a crap day, this may be the first opportunity they've had to actually share that with someone and maybe feel a little bit better as a result.

6. Do a better check for understanding.

If you regularly ask "Is that clear?" or "Does everyone understand?" you probably already know that this doesn't always tell you who needs more help. Instead, give participants tools to let you know when they are confused: You could ask everyone to give you a thumbs-up or thumbs-down signal to indicate whether they're getting what you're saying or hold up colored response cards that can serve as answers to a multiple-choice question. Finally, as we mentioned in a previous post called Let's Give Our Teaching Language a Makeover, simply switching from "Are there any questions?" to "What questions do you have?" tends to get many more people to actually ask questions.

Bottom line: If you feel like you're doing all the talking up there, and you want to get more from the people listening to you, you might just need to make a few small changes to your delivery to turn a one-way lecture to a much better conversation.

Recommended Reading

Persida and William Himmele have established themselves as experts in getting all students to participate in class. Their book, Total Participation Techniques, offers 51 alternatives to traditional "stand and deliver" teaching, many of which will be useful to any speaker in any setting.

Come back for more.
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The reasons your students (or audience members) aren't participating the way you want them to, and some new things you can try to get a better response.

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Curriculum: A Warning, Part 3: Thou shalt not pay lip service – Birmingham Teacher

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How teacher behaviours during CPD echo student behaviours during lessons. – teacherhead

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In my job I do lots of training sessions with groups of teachers. Sometimes it's a small group, sometimes a classroom-full; sometimes a giant hall or lecture theatre. I'm fascinated by the ways teachers' behaviours provide a reference point to illustrate student behaviours and responses during our lessons. I often make the point that students behave the way they do, not because they are feckless teenagers, but because they are people; they are human - and teachers do exactly the same kinds of things; they respond in similar ways.

Here are some examples:

Responding to learning activities

In my sessions I use lots of examples of questions and retrieval activities to illustrate the difficulties people have with learning ideas - and the extent to which our memories fail us. Nearly every time, participants in the sessions provide live examples of the struggles our students experience:

Forgetting completely or struggling to remember or explain something that has literally just been explained or discussed in the group seconds previously. One person's response tells you nothing about what any other person might know.

Mis-reading words, not saying them correctly, guessing pronunciations and getting them wrong - but finding it much easier after explicit modelling.

Struggling to explain something they think they know but can't find the words - or realise they didn't know it as well as they thought they did.

Finding it hard to recall information after having had it in laid out in a document to read just seconds or minutes before. The power of using multiple iterations of Shimamura's "Generate-Evaluate" cycle is easily demonstrated.

Sheer panic in the face of being asked a question and opting to say 'I don't know' -or the almost embarrassing level of delight adults have at knowing something and getting it right! The emotional responses we have in relation to learning, succeeding or failing can be strong.

Feeling stupid when getting an answer wrong, following up with something like 'I've always been crap at geography'; f eeling stupid when other people are getting the answer that they can't see - eg in a non-verbal reasoning question, and then labelling themselves as 'a bit thick' - that old fixed mindset defence.

The joy people experience from building confidence and fluency with a bit of old-fashioned repetition and rehearsal. It feels good to know something and get better at explaining it or saying it more fluently,.

Very often I use these adult behaviours to highlight how far we need to go to get all students to learn all the material we're trying to teach. It requires a much more intensive, extensive approach to questioning and recall activities than many people realise.

Group behaviours.

This is hilarious. I love to watch it happen and then highlight it. Anything students might do in unstructured group activities, adults do in theirs. Here's a sample:

Allowing one person to dominate a pair, trio, group - such that the shared response is really just the thinking of one person. I'm often amazed at how comfortable some people are to totally dominate a group or, conversely, how readily they capitulate and let someone else do all the talking or thinking. When six people sit around a table and I ask for pairs - I have to properly insist or else we end up with one person pontificating to the whole table.

Needing to tell others your answers even when you've been asked to think silently - to allow others to think for themselves. This really makes me laugh. Some times I lay down the law and say that I really, very seriously, want people to think to themselves without sharing their thoughts - and I see people bursting, desperate to tell their colleagues that they know the answer. It's a powerful instinct - "look at what I can do". It's also just entirely natural and positive that people want to talk about their ideas; insisting on not talking can feel weirdly stifling and unnatural. Think-Pair-Share is a strategy I continue to promote because of the power that it has to structure learning-focused talk.

Talking about a totally different set of ideas than the ones that you've been asked to discuss. If you wander around a session where adults are talking at their tables - you usually get a mix of discussions related to the question in hand plus a whole bunch of other stuff. People have gone off a tangent, started talking about lunch, are comparing notes on the match or on Love Island from last night. In the safety-bubble of group or paired discussion, adults set their own rules. Why shouldn't they? But of course, this is how students feel too. If adults drift off in this way, you can be sure your students will.

What this highlights is that groups have dynamics that you have to take account of. If you leave it to chance, drift happens. Of course it does, naturally so. If you need to keep everyone to task, discussions need to be quite tightly goal-focused with some level of accountability and some structures that ensure everyone is involved and is able to contribute, to deepen their learning and understanding.

Off-task or non-conforming behaviours.

Again, this can be hilarious. Very occasionally I see it as actually rude - mostly it's just funny that adults think that either they are invisible or they really just don't care what anyone else thinks or whether the instructions apply to them:

Calling out answers despite being asked not to. Why? Happens all the time - someone just has to prove they knew it!

Doing something other than the thing you've asked them to. It's their time, fair enough... which is often how students feel I guess. This is what I want to do so I'm doing it whether you like it or not.

Talking to their neighbour right under your nose, or sat at the back, as if nobody can hear. Or just blatantly having a good old laugh and a chat during the session. It could be in a room of 20 people, two people right in front me, chatting away all the time. It could be a couple at the back of a hall, arms folded, opted out and chatting away merrily. Increasingly I deploy various "pause and make eye contact" techniques to make an issue of it. If you're in my session, I expect your attention! Sometimes there is mild annoyance, sometimes embarrassed acknowledgement.

Texting a friend sitting elsewhere in the room during the session to exchange a joke and looking for a response - as if nobody would notice. Hello??? I called this out only recently. "We've got people texting each other in the room - I'll just wait a minute". (Conference tweeting is different - that's a whole other thing with a protocol of its own.)

Blatantly checking emails or browsing internet on laptop, pretending to make notes, even in a small room where this is obvious. Making notes fine, anything else - not! Reminds me of when a colleague used to bring her marking to Year Team meetings. Please!

Sitting with back to the screen or presenter - and reacting oddly grumpily at the invitation to turn around. Why would you do this? Sometimes I find people are uncomfortable with the eye contact. My teacher-itch kicks in all the time when I can't see someone's face and often pause to wait for people to give attention when I feel they should be. Sorry.. it's the teacher in me.

Filling in from the back leaving front row empty, seeking the position of minimum exposure. Classic behaviour. Almost universal. I get it - adults should sit where they like; they're adults. But the idea that a cloak of invisibility allows back-row chatter and off-task nod-wink whispering to be less conspicuous is a hilarious delusion. I CAN SEE YOU.

The point of this is highlight that students are often doing things that adults also do. We need to recognise the natural inclination people (including adults and teenagers) have to do the stuff they need, that they want, that makes them feel safe, comfortable, at ease, on their own terms, in their own time, in their own space... As Shimamura suggests in MARGE, one study showed that only 45% of university students from a large number were paying attention in a lecture at any one time. These are human behaviours; not the signs of dissent and subversion. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be challenged - they often should be. I have no qualms challenging adults over these things. But it's worth acknowledging that certain behaviours are natural, common in groups of all kinds and need conscious effort and a degree of self-awareness in order to address them when they're problematic.

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How teacher behaviours during CPD echo student behaviours during lessons.

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In my job I do lots of training sessions with groups of teachers. Sometimes it's a small group, sometimes a classroom-full; sometimes a giant hall or lecture theatre. I'm fascinated by the ways teachers' behaviours provide a reference point to illustrate student behaviours and responses during our lessons.

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10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice | teacherhead

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I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative methods for the process of reviewing your students' knowledge and understanding. Before doing that, I would suggest that there are some key principles:

1. Involve everyone: Good techniques involve all students checking their knowledge, not just a few and not just one at a time as you might do when questioning.

2. Make checking accurate and easy: it should be possible for all students to find out what they got right and wrong, what they know well and where they have gaps. Every technique involves students testing their knowledge and then checking their work for accuracy and completeness. (This is not the same as giving students extended mark schemes to mark longer assessments which, for me goes beyond a simple retrieval practice activity)

3. Specify the knowledge: Where appropriate, it's better if students know the set of knowledge any retrieval will be based on, so they can study, prepare and self-check. It must be possible for students to check their own answers which has implications for the way the knowledge requirements are laid out.

4. Keep it generative: students need to explore their memory to check what they know and understand; this means removing cue-cards, prompts, scaffolds and cheat-sheets; it means closing the books and thinking for themselves.

5. Make it time efficient: The idea of each technique is that they can be used repeatedly in an efficient manner without dominating whole lessons.

6. Make it workload efficient: None of these methods involve the teacher checking the students' answers, creating unsustainable workload. A teacher might choose to check the occasional test but that's no use for routine practice.

1. Quick Fire Quiz
Everyone know this one but it can still be done well or badly: Teacher reads out the question or presents them via slides or an audio tape (eg in MFL). The questions can be spontaneously generated or prepared. Questions can be simple factual recall, mental maths or multiple choice;

All students write down their answers. Teacher reveals the answers, one by one or all at once. Students check which they got right. Swapping answers to check is an option but it can be a faff and takes away from the message that students need to be evaluating the depth of their own learning. If you've prepared this in advance, it is much more time efficient if students can see the answers all at once to check rather than wait for each to be read out.

It's important that the teacher discusses common wrong answers - which is one of the main functions. If you can do lots of confidence-building questions quickly (rather than deliberately hard ones) - you can get a great buzz of enjoyment. Knowing things is fun!
2. Paper Quiz
Everyone gets a copy of the questions and writes down answers at their own pace within a time limit. This is much less teacher-directed. It frees the teacher up to circulate and spot common errors as they emerge. It allows for a wider range of question types and makes it easier to engage in with worded questions that can be hard to read from a slide.

The checking process is much better done with pre-prepared answers rather than reading out answers one by one. Why? Because it is quicker, allows for more detail in the answers, it allows students to focus on things they got wrong and helps to build their capacity for self-assessment.
3. Silent Self-Quiz
Try this. Which ones do you know? (Answer provided)

How well can you learn these labels? (Test and then check)

In a test like this, students can generate answers and then check if they were right, silently and privately. They can repeat this multiple times. Any number of resources can be used - blanked diagrams, cue cards with answers on the back, maths questions with answers kept separately. This process keeps the outcome of the assessment with the student - the most important place! They learn what they know and don't know. You can then discuss common errors and problems. It saves a lot of time with asking questions and marking them - all of that is done mentally by the students.
4. Paired Quiz.
Here, we start using Dylan Wiliam's excellent strategy: Activating students as resources for one another. In order to maximise the extent of retrieval practice that goes on, it is fantastic to get students to quiz each other in pairs. One student has the material - questions, answers, cue cards, knowledge organiser, text - and asks the other student questions. "Test me" - it's a well-used technique and can be harnessed in lessons. Give a time limit and then get them to swap around. You get a room full of students checking their knowledge. I've seen this done in superbly well in languages where the teacher circulated to check for accent issues and common errors listening in to the multiple paired quizzing dialogues.
5. Self-Explanation
Beyond simple recall, ask students to explain something to themselves. You simply give students a few silent moments to complete a mental task. They have to generate a version of what they understand that they can either then self-check or write down or use to respond to further question. However the process of mental rehearsal is important.. making this explicit helps to train those who don't do it spontaneously.

What is the story of Henry VIII's Six Wives? Run through it... then check.
6. Demonstration and Performance
Of course LOTS of knowledge isn't simply quiz-able declarative knowledge. You can ask students to show what they know: a procedure; a technique; a routine. Have you learned it? Show me... Of course as a student shows what they can do to a teacher, they are showing themselves what they can do. This is important. Again, the intensity and frequency can be amplified by getting students to show each other in pairs rather than one-by-one with the teacher, as long as they have the tools to evaluate success. This is common in practical areas and performance areas - sport, music, art - but it also has a role in science, maths, English where the modelling process could be framed as 'teaching'. eg teaching the class how to answer a maths problem.
7. Paired or individual elaborative-interrogation
A form of quizzing that can be done in pairs or as a silent private process, is elaborative interrogation. This is where students explore their schema by answering How and Why questions.

Why does this happen? How does it work? Why does it work? Why did she say that? Why do you use that structure? Why is that the most important reason? How do you know?

If you train students to use some of these question stems and give them resources that help them to verify the answers, this makes for a deep retrieval practice exercise
8: Tell the story; rehearse the explanation
Lots of knowledge forms a narrative structure - a series of events, a process, cause and effect. So, the retrieval practice can be formed as 'telling the story' to someone else who can play the role of verifier. Any explanation can then be improved and rehearsed. You can get better at telling a story in more detail.

Here are some examples. Tell the story of a water molecule as if follows the water cycle: (with or without key words provided)

Why does the sun rise in the East?.... How good was your friend's answer? Now you have a go...

Of course this material can be used for self-explanation in the first instance.
9: Summarising
This is a useful recall process although it is less precise in terms of checking - because every summary can be different. A retrieval process can be something like:

Last week we looked at renewable energy. Summarise the main advantages and disadvantages of a wind farm: Go! .

Then show your definitive response for checking:
10. Map and Compare
This method is where you want to check students' capacity to make links. Ask them to make a memory map of the key aspects of a topic... eg: Reactions of Metals OR Themes in Hamlet OR Generating Electricity. These things can be much tighter sections of knowledge too: Types of radiation; the key events and figures in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Students then make mind-maps in a quick, memory -dump style before checking against a good resource - their knowledge organiser, exercise book or a teacher-completed version: What did you get right? What did you miss out completely?

Trial by Ordeal? What can you remember? Go.....

Further reading: Check out these documents. The summaries by @olicav are superb but also read the original papers they relate to.

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Image Credit: https://emptechgroup.com/the-internet-of-things/ I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative methods for the process of reviewing your students' knowledge and understanding. Before doing that, I would suggest that there are some key principles: Involve everyone: Good techniques involve...

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From “I’ve done it” to “I’ve learned it”. Terminate the tyranny of the task. – teacherhead

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If you go into lessons as an observer, it's pretty standard to sit alongside a student and to engage in a short discussion about their work. I might say 'hello, tell me what you're doing this lesson'. The normal response is 'I'm doing this sheet' - as the student points to the worksheet task in hand. I kick myself. What was I expecting them to say? I try again with a better question: 'what are you learning about?' I get a better response but even here, I might get 'we're learning the stuff on this sheet'.

My experience as a lesson observer is that a great many lessons are excessively task focused rather than learning focused. The language in the lesson, reinforced by the teacher, is dominated by task completion cues:

What I'd like you all to do is...; what we're doing today is...

Make sure you finish; you've got five more minutes

Try to write something in every box

When you've done Section B, move onto Section C

Who has finished? Well-done.

Make sure you write down the objectives, stick in the sheet, write the date, underline the title, draw the margin.

Ironically, very often, most of the time teachers talk about learning objectives is spent on the task of writing them down rather than the meaning of the objective. Very often book scrutiny focuses on books looking complete - the horror of gaps and the loose worksheet! - without any triangulation to students' assessment outcomes.

What's the problem? It's that task completion is not a good proxy for learning. This is reinforced by lots of notable people in the field:

Graham Nuthall's Hidden Lives of Learners; Robert Coe's 'poor proxies for learning'; the work of Dylan Wiliam, Dan Willingham, Shimamura - and more - all indicate that, as humans, we are extraordinarily capable of doing things in the short-term without learning how to do them in the longer term. We can perform all manner of tasks and not retain the knowledge of how to do them again later, even if we remember that we did them. We forget things - in some cases incredibly quickly - in the absence of repeated generative, conscious rehearsal, or retrieval practice with time having passed.

Mark McCourt is superb on this in his work on mastery. (His talk at the Festival of Education last week was fabulous.) He explains this in terms of 'recency' and 'cue'. If you are taught how to apply Pythagoras' equation, it's relatively easy to then do multiple problems immediately afterwards just like the ones you were just shown how to do (recency); later you might still be able to do this if you are told again - 'in this question, use Pythagoras' (cue). Mark's argument is that we cannot say real learning has taken place unless students can solve a problem using Pythagoras' equation in the absence of recency and cue. (Especially recency).

What I have observed, is that it is possible for students to go through school lesson to lesson, day to day, week to week, year to year, completing task after task after task - doing the questions, filling in the grid, completing the sheet, doing the task, even giving the impression of being engaged, conscientious and motivated - whilst only ever achieving a surface level of understanding and recall of the material in hand. How do I know this? Because all too obviously they do not ace their tests when left to their own devices and, in discussion, they find it so very hard to talk about the material in any extended fashion when they're on their own with their books are closed and the crib sheets are removed.

The shift that teachers, leaders and students need to make is obvious - and hugely significant: We need to switch our thinking, our emphasis, our language, our mindset away from tasks and towards learning.

This means the following:

Lesson objectives should focus on learning goals - that may span 15 minutes or three weeks. Students should be able to articulate what learning goals are - writing them down is neither here nor there.

We should check students' progress against the learning goals: Has everyone learned it yet? Can everyone explain it, understand it, express it, apply it, remember it? This may or may not correlate to having neatly completed tasks in books.

The shift from tasks to learning requires bringing checking processes to the forefront of lesson structures: activities that enable all students to check their learning against the learning goals, both at the point of instruction and later on in the learning sequence. As I outline in this post https://teacherhead.com/2019/03/03/10-techniques-for-retrieval-practice/ , I think there are some key principles that should apply:

Involve everyone:

Make checking accurate and easy:

Specify the knowledge:

Keep it generative:

Make it time efficient:

Make it workload efficient:

It should be a much stronger routine feature of lessons and of teachers' thinking that, as an embedded element of engaging with any task, we stop to establish and explore what has been learned:

Can you now hold a short dialogue using the new French phrases without looking at the sheet?

Can you explain the five key points of the 'John Snow in 1854' story without your book?

Can you explain the significance of 'Space is a salvo' from Storm on the Island - without looking at your annotated anthology?

Can you explain how the perfume smell travels across the room (diffusion)- in words and pictures - with your books shut, using your own recall and understanding?

Can you work out what needs to be done to work out the angles and lengths in the shape?

Students should experience this so routinely that it forms a habit that they then can pursue when studying in their own time. They should see 'completion' as meaning the point at which they have learned the material, books closed, - not merely completed the sheet using all manner of supports. A pretty major leap for some students I would say - but not impossible to make.

In order for this to work, we need to enact the Generate-Evaluate cycle that Shimamura describes so well. ( Introducing MARGE: A superb ebook about learning by Arthur Shimamura.). In my view, the 'evaluate' aspect - where every student checks their own learning - needs thought. It's not feasible for teachers to check every student's understanding in a responsive manner at the frequency needed. Teachers need to teach students how to self-assess and to deploy students as resources for one another - checking each other's work - as Dylan Wiliam stresses in the five Wiliam/Thompson strategies for formative assessment: Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

It's worth doing a bit of self-review. Do you inadvertently undermine your own learning goals by over-stressing task completion at the expense of the learning? Do you close the books and check for learning enough? Is it systematic? Does it involve all students?

I for one am going to try harder to avoid the trap. I'm going to remember to ask 'what have you learned about X?' and take time probing for understanding and recall - instead of repeating the lame 'what are you doing, what have you done?' which lulls us all into the delusion that all is well.

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From "I've done it" to "I've learned it". Terminate the tyranny of the task.

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If you go into lessons as an observer, it's pretty standard to sit alongside a student and to engage in a short discussion about their work. I might say 'hello, tell me what you're doing this lesson'. The normal response is 'I'm doing this sheet' - as the student points to the worksheet task in...

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Every new school inspection framework has unintended consequences and, if we were betting types, we'd bet that book scrutiny will be at the root of the next time-gobbling activity.

Ofsted have announced that book or work scrutiny will be an important part of the new inspection framework ( from para 102 here). But how can headteachers feel secure that pupil books are fit for inspection? By ensuring regular book inspection itself, of course!

We wanted to create a baseline, against which we can check how book scrutiny in schools changes over the next few years in response to Ofsted. Let's start by finding out how frequently pupil work is reviewed by senior leadership or other teachers.

I n state-funded primary schools, over one-in-five teachers have their pupils' work reviewed at least once a fortnight.

This frequency of review is essentially unheard of in the private sector. It is also far less common in state secondary schools. Almost one-in-five teachers in the independent secondary sector say they don't have book scrutiny at all! As is also the case in almost one-in-ten state schools.

The frequency of book scrutiny also depends on the type of school in which you teach. In the most affluent secondaries, book scrutinies are termly or less, whereas it is typically half-termly in more disadvantaged schools.

This could be a part of wider 'school improvement' activities in these schools as they are more commonly labelled as requires improvement and inadequate - and we see book scrutiny is more common in those schools too.

How many books are reviewed in scrutiny?

Every time books are taken in there's a workload for the person who has to review them, as well as for the teacher who marks them. Take too few, and it's hard to get an accurate sense of what's going on in a class (as you may have taken some outliers). Take too many and the time spent on the review will increase.

In more than a third of cases, SLT are reviewing just 1-3 books. This is tiny!

And when we looked, even in schools where scrutiny only happens a couple of times or once a year, it is still regularly the case that only 1-3 books are looked at. This sounds about as reliable as Ofsted's plan for book scrutiny!

At primary we found the focus is predominantly on English/literacy and maths books. With modern foreign language work practically ignored. So much for a broad and balanced curriculum!

At secondary, we asked after Year 11 had already gone so this may be a bit skewed, but we see a more even focus with only a marginal focus on KS4 (Year 10).

Random vs Selection

How are schools selecting the books they check? In a small percentage of schools the teacher is asked to select a 'random sample'. Do we really think they pick randomly? Really?

In primary the most popular answers was that students of particular prior attainment were selected, whereas secondary schools had another staff member select a random sample.

Most teachers are not present when the book scrutiny happens. Just 26% of primary and 31% of secondary staff were in on the review. On the one hand, this is efficient. Why have the staff member standing around when they could be teaching? On the other hand, it misses an important opportunity for adding context and for the teacher to learn from the scrutiny.

Closing the Feedback Loop

What is it that SLT are looking for? Teachers say their 'marking' is the main focus of a review, closely followed by the presentation of students' work.

Primary teachers felt the standard of students' work was highlighted a substantial proportion of the time (61%) but only around a third of secondary teachers agreed. How depressing that presentation is looked at more than quality!

Does book scrutiny affect your pay? Yes, sometimes.

In 28% of schools, book scrutiny is part of a teacher's overall performance management. This did not vary by school type or Ofsted category.

Finally, what's the point of book scrutiny?

Here's a positive point: 60% of teachers feel that book scrutiny helps improve their teaching.

Primary teachers are A LOT more positive about reviewing students' work than secondary ones. Of course, one advantage they have is that their own senior leadership team is much more likely to understand the students' work since primary teachers teach most subjects. In secondary schools, scrutiny is often carried out by a non-specialists.

However, as is often the case, the less you actually teach, the more likely you are to be positive about book scrutiny! Headteachers overwhelming think it is helpful; 6-in-10 secondary teachers without any management responsibilities feel it is not.

Note also that 35% of secondary classroom teachers strongly disagree that book scrutiny helps their teaching, and middle leaders are not far behind in their negativity. Heads in the secondary sector, meanwhile, remain reasonably positive.

Finally, finally... we know you love the tips so here is what was on the app last week:
Classroom research and cargo cult Same policy, different behavioural outcomes Classroom displays
Teacher effectiveness
The importance of oral teaching Critical thinking

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Book Scrutiny & Ofsted: Will it be a burden?

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Every new school inspection framework has unintended consequences and, if we were betting types, we'd bet that book scrutiny will be at the root of the next time-gobbling activity. Ofsted have announced that book or work scrutiny will be an important part of the new inspection framework ( from para 102 here).

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How to Fix Classroom Behaviour: 7 Body Language Tricks You Need to Know

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Y our class are a nightmare and your students just don't listen.

Well-planned lessons and resources are wasted if behaviour prevents learning.

Improving non-verbal communication can transform your class and help you to be an effective teacher.

Most communication is non-verbal. How you sit and the position of your arms, all send out messages.
Even when you're silent, your body still says lots about your feelings.
Before children can talk, they will have learned that arms opened wide are a signal for a cuddle and a sign of affection, whilst a frown will mean they are in trouble.

By the age of five children can begin to read non-verbal cues to calculate who is in charge.
Non-verbal Cues we Use to Read Emotion: ·Facial Expressions · Body Movement and Posture · Gestures · Eye Contact · Touch · Voice/ Tone
Often behaviour training can focus on using rewards.

From stickers to house points and trips, these reward systems are very effective - in the short term.

However, they will not work consistently for very long in a classroom where the children seem to be in charge.
Sorting your non-verbal cues can send a signal to students that they need to respect you. 1: Posture
Picture someone who has lost their job. Are they hunched over? Looking down?

Within seconds students have analysed how you are feeling about them.

If they see you looking small, vulnerable or anxious, they will begin to show the behaviours you were worried you would be facing.
Imagine the children walking into your classroom.
They see you standing confidently, making an A shape with your body, legs slightly apart.

You look them directly in the eye with hands on hips. You appear welcoming but in charge. The children pick up on your sense of power and respond in a positive way.

Take Action: Check and correct your posture. Imagine a string pulling up your head to help you stand tall.
2: Position in the Classroom
When animals sense danger, their first instinct is to hide.

In your classroom, you might use your desk as a barrier against the class. Avoid this mistake by thinking how you arrange your room and your position within it.

Some teachers have ditched their desks altogether, but if this isn't feasible, push it against a wall to make it a place to go to, rather than hide behind.
Confidently owning your space will show students that they are in your room.
Stand near the door to welcome them and walk the perimeter of your room to show it is your territory.

Take Action: Stand by the door when students enter. Think about moving your desk to prevent you from retreating to it.
3: Gestures
Ever walked past a couple having an argument even though you can't hear them? Chances are you can read the gestures they are using to emphasise their words.

Gestures are an important addition to our language that support and strengthen instructions. Pointing, putting a finger over your lips, and raising eyebrows, all serve to support understanding.
A lively person is far more interesting to watch than a wooden one.
Children who struggle with behaviour face a constant barrage of instructions and reprimands. They switch off from long-winded conversations.
Use Mirroring
Gestures, without all the talk, can create a different way of communicating.

Use 'mirroring' to consciously reflect the position of a student to make them feel comfortable when speaking to you. Copy their posture and watch how relaxed they become.

Take Action: Experiment with reducing speech and increasing gestures with children showing poor behaviour.
4: Eye Contact
Make eye contact with your class from the minute they arrive.

People make a judgment about someone within seconds. Make each time you meet your class an opportunity to sell them a positive impression of you.

When people keep their eyes down, it looks vulnerable and submissive. Children pick up on this and you find your control compromised.

Maintaining deliberate eye-contact shows command of your classroom.

Take Action: Greet your class with a smile and clear eye-contact.
5: Facial Expressions
Showing emotions supports what you are saying. Think of the difference when you praise a child if you also smile and lean slightly towards them.

They don't just hear your praise; they feel it too.

Raised eyebrows, glaring eyes, and pursed lips can make you feel somewhat of a caricature; however, children can struggle to read your emotions through words alone.

Perfecting a 'teacher look' might give you wrinkles but will help you with classroom management.

Child always calling out in your lessons?

· Put your hand to your mouth

Make a tally chart of shout-outs to share privately with the student, to raise their awareness and reward progress made.

Take Action: Try to let your emotions show clearly on your face to support your spoken words.
6: Touch
Schools, quite rightly, have robust policies to safeguard students. Staff must ensure that they never touch students inappropriately.

When used appropriately, social touch can support behaviour.

A high-five, pat on shoulder or handshake can be an effective form of praise. Touch can reinforce the impact of your message and build a rapport.
Remember: · Always follow your school's safeguarding policies · Never touch a student when you are alone with them · Make social touching obvious- never a secret or private · Make your high-fives inclusive - check you don't single out a student or group of students

Be aware: For somechildren, particularly those on the Autistic spectrum, touch may be unhelpful and unsettling and should be avoided.

Take Action: When praising a child, add in a pat on the shoulder or high-five if you feel the student will respond positively.
7: Volume and Tone
When you are shouting, you've already lost.
Try these tips to improve the way you use your voice:
· Go low- Try deliberately dropping your voice. A 3-2-1 countdown in a clear, low voice can work wonders.

· Go loud then quiet- Try a short loud command and then immediately get quieter. Once you have their attention you can modify the volume of the class by making them listen harder.

· Get the right tone- avoid sarcasm and make sure your tone of voice matches your words.

· Avoid shouting- Nothing screams 'out of control' than a shouting teacher. If you feel yourself losing control of yourself, stop and take a few deep breaths before speaking.

· Wait for quiet- Don't battle over the children's voices. Wait for a lull before carrying on.

Simple changes in non-verbal communication can work wonders for behaviour.
You create positive relationships and stop disruptions before they ruin your lessons. Consider how you could modify your non-verbal communication. Plan a few simple changes and review your progress. What difference have you noticed in your classroom?

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How to Fix Classroom Behaviour: 7 Body Language Tricks You Need to Know

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Y our class are a nightmare and your students just don't listen. Well-planned lessons and resources are wasted if behaviour prevents learning. Improving non-verbal communication can transform your class and help you to be an effective teacher. Most communication is non-verbal. How you sit and the position of your arms, all send out messages.

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For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published. 

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7

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For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published. 

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7

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For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published.

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7
— EEF (@EducEndowFoundn) June 6, 2019

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For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published. 

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7

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For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published. 

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
For the late-night crowd... our latest guidance report, 'Improving Behaviour in Schools' - with its 6 recommendations - has just been published. 

Find out more here: https://t.co/fAjFqMirg7

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Use Local History to Give Students a Sense of Identity

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Use Local History to Give Students a Sense of Identity

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Use Local History to Give Students a Sense of Identity

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Necessary, tough conversations often fail. Here's 8 reasons why. - David Weston

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In great work-places, it's okay to have tough conversations. In fact, not just okay, it's an essential habit. Negativity thrives in the spaces that honesty and openness vacate. Bad cultures build where people learn that they can't speak up, that others won't speak up, or that under-performance and problems get swept under the rug.

A key starting point for good conversation and culture is to talk about difficult issues and tackle problems early. But it's hard to confront a problem and improve things.

Improvement requires listening - on both sides. It requires rapport - trust and confidence in each other. If successful, everyone accepts their contribution to the issue and resolves to take responsibility to learn and improve.

But it's tough to have these conversations and we often avoid the issue, reject any contribution or refuse to take action.

Here's five signs that your conversation partner is not engaging and owning the issue. ( the first three of these come originally from 'Fierce Conversations', I believe.)

1. Deflect: they raise an issue about someone else (or something else), instead of focusing on this issue and their contribution to it. "But he did something even worse" or "You're picking on me" or "Why are you talking about this when the real issue is..."

2. Deny: they flat out refuse to accept that they contributed to the issue. "That's just not true, I didn't do that" or "Yes, I did that, but I don't agree that it's a sign of poor performance"

3. Defend: they insist that their actions were justified, reasonable or inevitable. "Well, she had it coming." or "I think anyone would have done the same" or "I have a temper, there's nothing I can do"

4. Diminish: they claim that the issue is minor, irrelevant, unremarkable or that their contribution was insignificant. "I think I was barely late, and only a couple of times at that" or "I don't know why you think this is such a big deal"

5. Disengage: they 'check out' of the conversation, refusing to engage. "Fine, have we finished?" or "Okay, I get it, I'm sorry, can we move on?"

All five tactics move us away from the important discussion and prevent ownership and resolution. They're easy to spot when someone else seems to be evading the issue, but much harder to spot and deal with when we use the same tactics to avoid admitting our own contribution to an issue.

Too many difficult conversations fail to even begin. We use the same five tactics in our own head to justify not having 'the talk'.

"There's something more important going on right now, best save my energy" or "let's not rock the boat right now"

"Maybe it didn't really happen"

"I mean, they're only human, I should cut them some slack"

"I guess it's not that bad really"

"This procrastination feels really important right now!"

Other times, we do set up the meeting, but then go wrong by:

pussyfooting around with small-talk and niceties and never actually have the conversation that's needed,

being so incredibly vague, unspecific and rushed that the other person never really understands what it's about, or

back-peddling: hastily blurting out the issue and then immediately showering the other person with praise and excuses plus diminishing the severity of the issue, all in order to reduce our own feelings of discomfort.

With so many reasons that the discussion can go off track, it's no surprise that necessary, tough conversations frequently fail to happen.

In a future blog, I'll discuss some keys to successful tough conversations. In the meantime, I recommend the following books:

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

Fierce Conversations, by Susan Scott

Discussing the undiscussable by William Noonan

All the above reflections are my attempt to synthesise some of my own learning, reading and experiences in order to help me clarify my own thoughts. I want to publicly express my gratitude to Nicole Fowles (@nfowles5) whose advice, coaching and book recommendations have been transformational! Thank you also to Kathryn Morgan (@KLMorgan_2) for getting me enthusiastic about Fierce Conversations. Please do leave questions, ideas or suggestions for improvement in the comments below!

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Necessary, tough conversations often fail. Here's 8 reasons why. - David Weston

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In great work-places, it's okay to have tough conversations. In fact, not just okay, it's an essential habit. Negativity thrives in the spaces that honesty and openness vacate. Bad cultures build where people learn that they can't speak up, that others won't speak up, or that under-performance and problems get swept under the rug.

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The generic and the disciplinary: finding a balance – A Chemical Orthodoxy

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Thinking About Teaching – Class Teaching

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The importance of holding the line | Thinking about Education

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What Does Ofsted's New Framework Say? | TeacherToolkit

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What does Ofsted's draft consultation say in the proposed inspection framework?

On social media, you would be forgiven for thinking that I was against the work that Ofsted hope to achieve in the year ahead. What I would like to highlight in this post, is the work that Sean Harford has achieved on social media (though, still many myths to bust on the ground) and my hopes for Amanda Spielman. I wish to offer comments in a positive frame and provide a summary for the busy classroom teacher and school leader.

The documentation:

The consultation was published on the Department for Education's website on 16 January 2019 and is open until 5 April 2019. There is a healthy period of opportunity for everyone to engage in how our education settings are evaluated across England.

If you do not respond, then don't complain about the process. Alongside the consultation, Ofsted has published:

Key proposals:

The key areas for evaluation have been reshaped and shown below:

1. Teaching, learning and assessment was clearly too subjective and unreliable to measure, which is why I believe a new 'quality of education' judgement with a curriculum shift, is a positive move forward.

2. The focus on outcomes has shifted to quality of education. How the correlates in inspections themselves remain to be seen. The real issue here is, will and how often will Ofsted report on EBacc compliance that the Department for Education publishes in performance league tables. For example, if a head teacher wishes to ignore the EBacc, I believe this will go against them in an Ofsted inspection, despite Ofsted promoting they have no preferred curriculum. If it's coherent, planned and delivered well, who can argue?

3. Internal performance data will not be used for inspection evidence. Hurrah! No unnecessary work for teachers or decisions that end up closing schools forever.

4. There are now separate judgements about learners' 'personal development' and 'behaviour and attitudes'. Top tip from me, make sure your school leaders ask to sit in on inspector-conversations with pupils.

5. Extending the on-site time for short inspections of good schools to 2 days will ensure inspectors have sufficient opportunity to gather evidence that a school remains good. I believe no-notice is the way forward for all schools. I also believe outstanding schools remaining exempt is unacceptable.

Despite only 19 per cent of parents reading the full inspection report, Ofsted are clear that they wish to continue grading schools on a four-point scale.

Key questions from me:

1. Do inspectors believe they will be able to evaluate a 5-year curriculum offer in just two days?

2. If planning needs to match learning but shouldn't be asked for, how does an inspector believe the can assess this reliably?

3. Do Ofsted hope to improve its gender gap pay at leadership level before 1 April 2019?

4. Will Ofsted continue to use taxpayer cash to provide bonuses to their leadership teams?

5. Will Ofsted continue to ask schools for anonymised performance management data (even though they don't share theirs)?

6. From 1 September 2019, can we have some reassurance that Ofsted will become more transparent? For example, in their complaints procedure, a state school cannot challenge an Ofsted decision.

7. Will Ofsted continue to use machine learning algorithms to predict schools at risk of decline? If so, can they share the formula with schools and explain what parameters are used to calculate this?

8. In Parent View which schools email out to parents at the time of inspection, will Ofsted continue to ask parents for their views on the quality of teaching and learning, considering a parent has never stepped foot into the classroom to observe a teacher?

My research has discovered that our education ministers and Amanda Spielman have simply not visited enough schools. I hope this changes over the coming year key organisations wish to be transparent, evidence-based and research informed. If we truly want to understand why schools become exam focused, then we need to look at why and how we evaluate schools and why we name and shame them in league tables. Put any of these key people in a corner and talk privately with them, and I suspect with a deep heart, they will admit that grading schools is not the future for our English education system.

I welcome the new proposals, even though some schools will never be inspected under this framework. I hope the links and comments are useful. Yesterday, I offered an olive branch to Professor Daniel Muijs and he responded. Like all human beings, we all want to be heard and my intention is that Ofsted should consider views from sharper end of the wedge, not just the positives.

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What Are Ofsted Now Proposing? A Pocket Size Read For The Busy Classroom Teacher by @TeacherToolkit

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What does Ofsted's draft consultation say in the proposed inspection framework? On social media, you would be forgiven for thinking that I was against the work that Ofsted hope to achieve in the year ahead.

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What is Mastery? The good, the bad, the ugly | Daisy Christodoulou

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Over the last couple of years the idea of a 'mastery curriculum' has become ever more popular - and ever more nebulous. I've heard the word 'mastery' applied to very different approaches to the curriculum, and as a result of that, I've seen plenty of people dismiss the entire concept of mastery as just another educational fad. This is a shame, because at the heart of the mastery idea is something distinctive and powerful, even if it has also come to stand for some less effective approaches as well. From 2013-2017 I worked at Ark Schools on their English Mastery curriculum (read more about how you can take part in it here) and we had plenty of discussions about what mastery meant in practice. This blog summarises some of those discussions. Here is the good, the bad and the ugly of mastery.

The good: every pupil understanding everything that's taught

The bad: expecting every pupil to get the same grade

The ugly: applying curriculum statements to assessment

The good: every pupil understanding everything that's taught
The most powerful idea behind a mastery curriculum is that every pupil should understand everything that's been taught. This might sound rather obvious, but if we contrast a mastery approach with a common alternative, the spiral curriculum, we can see the benefits of mastery.

Spiral curriculums teach the same units in different year groups, but in more depth. EG, a common spiral curriculum approach I have seen in English is to teach a 4 - 6 week Writing Skills unit at the start of Year 7, 8 & 9. The idea is that in each unit you tackle similar concepts - sentence structure, punctuation, style, etc - but in greater depth each time. A common structure in maths is to teach the same 10-12 3-week units in years 7, 8 & 9, but again in greater depth each time.

The problem with this spiral approach is twofold. First, 3 - 6 weeks is actually not that long a time. Each unit has quite a bit of content, and if there's only a few weeks then there isn't much time to adjust the pace if pupils don't understand something the first time. Given that everything is repeated again in year 8 and year 9, the temptation is to say that 'don't worry - they'll pick that up when they do it again in year 8'.

Second, the gap between the material being presented in year 7 and in year 8 is too long. Pupils need repetition, but a year-long gap in between presentations means they'll have forgotten almost everything from year 7 by the time they get to year 8.

So the problem with the 6-12 topics-a-year spiral approach is that pupils become very familiar with lots of concepts, but they never truly master them. They are constantly hearing about fractions and the apostrophe, but never really owning them.

A mastery approach to teaching, by contrast, involves teaching one or two lessons a week on writing across a whole year, or teaching number for a whole year and postponing data handling until a later date when pupils have mastered number. So instead of repeating the same concepts each year, you make sure pupils understand a particular foundational concept before moving to the next one. And you build in far more frequent recap and review from one lesson to the next - not from one year's unit to the next! That's how it worked with the writing strand of English Mastery - instead of writing being taught in one six-week unit, it was taught for two lessons every week.

For me, therefore, the biggest practical change of a mastery curriculum is to move away from the common structure of having six or twelve different topics that each last a half-term and which are each fairly self-contained. Instead, structure the curriculum as a coherent and cumulative sequence, where it is obvious how every lesson builds on the previous one, and where content from previous lessons is frequently reviewed and recalled.

It's clear how you can do this in hierarchical subjects like maths and writing. But even in subjects like literature and history, where you might want to move more frequently to a different book or a different era of history, I still think that this approach is important. There has to be a common thread linking the different topics or books. One obvious way to do this in history is with a chronological structure,but you can add in other links too. For example, you can have five or six themes - say, culture, society, technology, military, politics - which are always considered in every new historical era you study. And it isn't enough just for the teacher or curriculum designer to be aware of the chronological structure. There have to be frequent review points built into the curriculum that allow pupils to recap prior topics and explicitly make the links to the newer topics. EG the Egyptians used hieroglyphics, the Greeks used an alphabet and Gutenberg invented a printing press - these different ways of communicating changed the way these societies worked. With English Mastery we took a similar approach for literature. There were only three literature units a year rather than the more standard 5 or 6, and the study of every text involved explicit recap and recall of texts that had been studied in previous units and years.

If you do structure a curriculum like this, it then allows formative assessment to be used in the most effective way. During and at the end of every lesson, you can ask a series of questions about the content you are teaching, and the aim should be for every pupil to get every question right. If pupils don't get the question right, you reteach and review the content until they do. At first sight, the statement: ''Every pupil should get every question right all the time' can sound a bit extreme, but remember these are questions and lessons that either you or a textbook / curriculum designer is planning. They are easy questions, and they are either about the content you have just been teaching, or about content from previous lessons that you have frequently recapped. They aren't trick questions, or complex ones, or ones the pupils haven't seen for ten months. They are simple questions on recently taught or reviewed content.
The bad: expecting every pupil to get the same grade
The statement 'every pupil should get every question right all the time' is incredibly powerful when applied to the formative assessment going on during and at the end of every lesson. However, it is really dangerous when applied to graded summative assessments that take place at less frequent points throughout the year.

Let's imagine you teach a mixed ability class a sequence of great mastery lessons on writing where they all get the formative questions right at the end of the lesson (and if they don't you review and recap the lesson) and where you are repeating material from previous lessons anyway to ensure long-term learning. Every pupil is getting every question right as you go. Let's imagine at the end of, say, 18 weeks, you give the pupils a different kind of assessment: an extended writing test, say, where they are given a picture stimulus and have to respond to it. However superb your teaching has been, every pupil is not going to get - and should not get - the same grade on that test. Even in a class that has been set by ability, you would still expect some variation.

Why is this? That test is testing something very different from whether the pupils have learnt what you've taught them in those lessons. It is testing a much bigger domain of content, and it is doing so in order to give some idea of how those pupils are doing relative to their peers in other schools. The grades and scaled scores produced by summative assessments are designed to produce a shared meaning: a statement about the pupil's performance on a complex domain that has meaning outside of your school context. We know that in these types of assessment, there is a range of achievement. We see such a range in every country and society we have data for. There is a range of achievement in Korea, Finland, Sweden and Japan as much as there is in the US and the UK. The extent and nature of the range varies, but it does exist. Over time we can expect that with good teaching all pupils can improve and we can reduce the range by particularly improving the performance of lower-attaining pupils, but it is likely that a range will remain.

In the worst-case scenario, I've seen mastery interpreted not as 'every pupil can master complex concepts' but as 'every pupil can (and should) achieve the same grade'. I've also seen it interpreted as meaning a big increase in pupil targets which will be achieved not through changing the curriculum, but through having "higher expectations". When this happens, it leads to disillusionment, teaching to the test, gaming and even outright cheating. It makes the difficult structural and curriculum reforms needed for a proper mastery curriculum even less likely.
The ugly: applying curriculum statements to assessment
One approach that I have seen encouraged by some assessment recording systems is to place all the statements from a mastery curriculum onto a spreadsheet, and then track whether pupils have met them or not, usually with some kind of three part system - RAG rating or 'emerging, expected, exceeding' or similar. This is the worst of all systems! First, these statements will not give you helpful formative information. These curriculum statements are not designed to provide useful feedback either to pupils or teachers. As Dylan Wiliam has said, how useful is it to tell a student that 'their scientific investigations need to be planned more systematically'? If they had known how to be more systematic, presumably they would have been so in the first place.

Second, these statements will not give you a shared summative meaning about the pupils' performance, because they are capable of being interpreted in so many different ways. Take the statement 'Pupils can compare fractions and identify which is larger'. That's a fairly precise statement, but even so it is capable of being interpreted in many different ways. 90% of 14-year-olds will give you the right answer when asked to compare 1/7 and 5/7. But only 15% will when asked to compare 5/7 and 5/9. And if that is true of a fairly precise statement in an objective subject like maths, how much more true is it of statements like 'can use vocabulary with originality and flair?'

Third, this approach is enormously time-consuming and again will therefore prevent investment of time into restructuring the curriculum, which is what is really needed.

The most valuable work you can do to create a mastery curriculum to is to structure the lessons so that there are frequent opportunities for you to check if pupils have learnt what you have just taught them, and for pupils to recap, review and consolidate their prior learning. Interpreting it to mean changes in your targets or your tracking system is to miss the point.

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What is Mastery? The good, the bad, the ugly | Daisy Christodoulou

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Over the last couple of years the idea of a 'mastery curriculum' has become ever more popular - and ever more nebulous. I've heard the word 'mastery' applied to very different approaches to the curriculum, and as a result of that, I've seen plenty of people dismiss the entire concept of mastery as just another educational fad.

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Why is teacher assessment biased? | Daisy Christodoulou

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In my last post, I spoke about how disadvantaged pupils do better on tests than on teacher assessments - and also about how many people assume the opposite is the case. It's interesting that today, we seem to think that teacher assessment will help the disadvantaged. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the meritocratic advantages of tests were better understood than they are today, as were the nepotism and prejudice that often resulted from other types of assessment. In the 19th century, the civil service reformers Charles Northcote and Stafford Trevelyan fought a long battle to make entry to the civil service based on test scores, rather than family connections. In the early 20th century, Labour educationalists such as RH Tawney and Beatrice and Sidney Webb fought for an education system based around exams, because they believed that only exams could ensure that underprivileged children were treated fairly. Since then, we have only gathered more evidence about the equalizing power of exams, but oddly, we seem to have forgotten these insights.

In my last post, I explained why it is that tests are fairer - they treat every pupil the same, and every pupil has to answer the same questions. However, whilst I gave plenty of evidence that teacher assessment was biased, I didn't fully explain why this bias happens. As a result, quite a few people said that the solution was simply 'better teacher assessment', perhaps by introducing more moderation and CPD, as a group of teaching unions recommended doing in 2011. How realistic is that? Are the problems with teacher assessment really so insoluble that we have to resort to tests? And what exactly are the nature of these flaws?

Teacher assessment is biased not because it is carried out by teachers, but because it is carried out by humans. Tammy Campbell, the IoE researcher whose recent research showed bias in teacher assessments of 7-year-olds, is at pains to point this out. She says, 'I want to stress that this isn't something unique to teachers. It's human nature. Humans use stereotypes as a cognitive shortcut and we're all prone to it.' A growing body of research reinforces Campbell's point. We all have difficulties making certain complex judgments and decisions, and we resort to shortcuts when the mental strain becomes too great (see Daniel Kahneman's work for more on this). Indeed, it is plausible to speculate that the reason why teacher assessment is biased is because it is so burdensome: when we are faced with difficult cognitive challenges we often default to stereotypes.

And teacher assessment really is burdensome. I thought I had it bad as a secondary teacher marking coursework for GCSE pupils, but I recently spoke to a primary colleague who told me about the hours they spend gathering evidence for KS1 assessments and cross-referencing it against the level descriptors - a task which, as I've said before, is at the limits of human cognitive capacity. When faced with such a difficult challenge, defaulting to stereotypes is in many ways a sensible attempt by our unconscious minds to reduce our workload. We know that on average pupils on free school meals do not attain as well, we know that the essay we are marking isn't great, but it isn't terrible, we know it sort of meets some of the criteria on the mark scheme, we need some more evidence in order to reach a final judgment, we could reread the essay and mark scheme but the mark scheme is hard to interpret...we also know that the pupil who wrote the essay is from the wrong side of the tracks. Done: it's a below average essay. None of us want to admit that this is how our minds work, and for most of us, our minds don't consciously work like this, but there is plenty of evidence that this is how our reasoning goes. That's the nice story: here, Adrian Wooldridge gives the less charitable interpretation of the mental processes of assessors. He says that when you base assessment around 'Oxford dons who pronounce mystically on whether a candidate possesses "a trace of alpha"', don't then be surprised when 'a large number of those who show up favorably on the alpha detectors turn out to be Old Etonians.'

Is it possible to counter such bias in any way? Is it possible to 'do better teacher assessment'? After all, whilst we humans are susceptible to bias, we are also self-aware. We know we make these errors, and in most of the fields where we make these errors, we have found ways around them. I once heard the scientific method described as a collection of practices designed to counteract human bias. Are there practices we can introduce to teacher assessment that would function like this, and counteract human bias? Yes, there are. We could anonymize the work that's being marked. We could standardize tasks, conditions and marking protocols. We could carry out some statistical analysis of the marks different pupils get and that different teachers give. And once we had done all that, we would find that we had eliminated many of the biases associated with teacher assessment, but that we had also pretty much eliminated the teacher assessment and replaced it with a test. The flaws with teacher assessment are inherent in its very nature. Doing teacher assessment better basically means making it more test-like. The whole point of the test is that it, like the practices that characterize the scientific method, is essentially a method for countering human bias. As the Bew report says here, most of the attempts to reduce the bias of teacher assessment have failed, and those that have succeeded do so by making teacher assessment more test-like.

Teacher assessment discriminates against poorer pupils and minorities, and generates significant workload for teachers. Tests are fairer and less burdensome. They deserve a better reputation than they have, and a greater role in our assessment system.

Whilst I'm in favour of tests, and sceptical about the possibility of improving teacher assessment, I still think there are other ways we could improve assessment. In my next few posts I will look at some recent assessment innovations and see if they offer any improvements on the status quo.

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Why is teacher assessment biased? | Daisy Christodoulou

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In my last post, I spoke about how disadvantaged pupils do better on tests than on teacher assessments - and also about how many people assume the opposite is the case. It's interesting that today, we seem to think that teacher assessment will help the disadvantaged.

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The generic and the disciplinary: finding a balance – A Chemical Orthodoxy

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Keeping everyone on the knowledge bus – The Quirky Teacher

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Beyond Knowledge Organisers; building the best curriculum in the world. – Pedfed

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Explaining through Dual Coding – Class Teaching

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS https://t.co/KGNGskSmpB

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS pic.twitter.com/KGNGskSmpB
— Tom Sherrington (@teacherhead) May 7, 2019

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS https://t.co/KGNGskSmpB

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS https://t.co/KGNGskSmpB

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Well @olicav certainly gets around - here are some fab banners for @cijane02 at @StAndrewsHS

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A Case Study in the Power of Academic Procedures and Routines - Teach Like a Champion

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Perhaps the single most powerful way to bring efficiency, focus and rigor to a classroom is by installing strong procedures and routines. You define a right way to do recurring tasks; you practice doing them with students so they roll like clockwork.

This applies at least as much to 'academic' tasks as it does to more procedural ones. When a teacher says, "Turn and Talk to your partner: How will the weight of the nucleus change? Go!" or "Take a minute to jot your thoughts: How will the weight of the nucleus change? Go!" the room should crackle to life with every student engaged within a second or two.

Some skeptics argue that this is controlling or paternalistic, but you would only say that if you didn't understand what students get back when such routines are in place, and this video of Denarius Frazier's math class makes that case perfectly.

EA.CFU.GR11.Frazier.'Solutions.'Clip2858.shorter from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.

You will surely note the rigor of the mathematical discussion, the high "ratio" in the classroom-every student doing every task and the tasks being challenging and worthy. You might also note the outstanding work done by the young woman who begins to defend what turns out to be a wrong answer, and who then recognizes her mistake and changes her thinking without defensiveness or anxiety. Honestly it's a thing of beauty, this class.

And it is what it is in part because of the time Denarius has taken to install procedures for so many recurring academic behaviors and turn them into routine. For example:

Tracking (students looking at the speaker). In the photo below the young woman correcting herself is receiving a powerful message from her classmates: "Your words and ideas matter. We are listening. We support you." No one takes the risk of sharing honest, forthright thoughts into a room where the body language of their peers says: "Yawn. How long til class is over?" or: "I couldn't care less what you think about reciprocals." I'd wager that the people shouting about how coercive and demeaning tracking is have never lived the difference.

Polling/Hand Signals-This lesson works because Denarius is able to understand quickly where his students stand on the math by asking them to digitize their answers on their fingers quickly and seamelessly. When he says, "Where are we? In 3, 2 and 1..." every student responds on cue and without looking at their peers to bail them out. There's a system for gathering data. It starts there. But don't think it didn't take some practice to install it.

Turn and Talk-"We're a little divided," Denarius says. "Turn and Talk: Why?" Within two seconds every student is participating and discussing the math. Even the student sitting without a partner next to her knows how to jump in with the group ahead of her.

Cold Call-Coming out of the Turn and Talk Denarius doesn't wait for hands. He says, "Let's talk about A. Track... Brittany..." and Brittany answers. She hasn't raised her hand, but she's happy to engage. She knows Denarius is, in calling on her, telling her that her voice and her learning matter. She doesn't hesitate for a second because the Cold Calling is a procedure. She and all her classmates know it's coming. Incidentally it's a great tool for building a bit of tacit accountability for the work done during the Turn and Talk.

Snaps for agreement-As she's talking students snap their agreement. This lets them show support and interest for a peer's comments without interrupting. It keeps the energy high and the pacing crisp. It reminds Brittany that her peers are listening carefully to her thoughts about math and that they want her to succeed.

Hands-There's also a system for raising hands. People don't call out in Denarius' class. If they did he could not allow for Wait Time as he brilliantly does several times int he clip

The young scholar who raises her hand to disagree with Brittany cites her notes. Denarius wants that to happen. Note taking matters. So he has a system for how they do it, to make sure they do it and to make sure that their notes are always accessible. You'll notice that the discussion ends with Fagan framing the "takeaways" and Denarius reminding everyone to write them down. On the board, beneath the two answers they've been discussing is the word "stamp." A stamp is an academic procedure too: the thing we do at the end of any discussion where we distill in writing what we've learned.

Anyway, I thought it was important to show what was possible when teachers take the time to make a routine out of key recurring tasks. And thanks to Denarius and his students at Uncommon Collegiate High School for everything they've taught us. (PS Everyone in this year's graduating class is going to college.)

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A Case Study in the Power of Academic Procedures and Routines - Teach Like a Champion

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Perhaps the single most powerful way to bring efficiency, focus and rigor to a classroom is by installing strong procedures and routines. You define a right way to do recurring tasks; you practice doing them with students so they roll like clockwork. This applies at least as much to 'academic' tasks as it does to more...

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Explaining through Dual Coding | Class Teaching

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Useful and Beautiful? | Mary Myatt Learning

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However, what has emerged is that in some schools, the ambitions expressed in the vision have not always been translated into the quality of plans and materials provided for pupils. So I think it is important to have some principles underlying this aspect of work.

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ASSESSMENT IS CURRICULUM IS ASSESSMENT – PT 3 – paul g moss

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Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it. – teacherhead

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At the Heads' Roundtable event this week I was making a pitch for school leaders to get stuck into a deep curriculum review process - as many already have. Not because of the expectations of whatever accountability process is underway, but because it matters so much. To a degree that is underplayed all too often, I would suggest that schools are fundamentally defined by their curriculum.

Every school has its motto - those value statements emblazoned on every letterhead, every blazer, above the entrance... Respect. Courage. Resilience. Ambition. Compassion. Fortiter Ex Animo. Carpe Diem. But these grand ideas only take form in the context of students doing things, learning things, experiencing things, receiving messages about things.. actual things that you have decided on. And those things are your curriculum; the actual tangible real-life curriculum that is enacted across the days, weeks and years of a life in your school.

As I have explored in some detail in this post, 10 Steps for Reviewing Your KS3 Curriculum, there is a process that applies to any curriculum review, starting with getting to know your school curriculum as it is. I'm suggesting that school leaders make sure they have developed a strong set of principles around curriculum design and content informed by exploring their own curriculum and a range of alternatives. What do you believe about what your children should learn across the curriculum? Often leaders are only relatively expert in a narrow set of curriculum ideas - we've all largely been trained in specific knowledge domains so it's difficult to know what the possibilities are; to know what an excellent curriculum might look like in every area. But, whilst it may always be necessary to defer to the expertise of others - inside and outside your school - it pays to get into the detail, to begin to learn about each area and develop some reference points.

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself about your school curriculum:

Maths: How is the maths curriculum organised and sequenced? Is it logical, appropriately designed for mastery, vertical coherence. Where does it start? Number? Sequences? Why does it start there? Who decided? Do they know why?

English: Which books will students read in each year group? If you don't know, this is a good place to start. What's the rationale for each one and the overall sequence? Which books have been left out.. who decided? Do teachers choose or is it a departmental approach? Overall, what's the range of genres, the balance of 'classics' vs contemporary fiction? Is the selection something you feel is bold, interesting, building a secure foundation in the literary canon for future reading, opening doors to the world of literature, challenging and demanding as well as inspiring and engaging?

History: Does your history curriculum provide your students with the knowledge and understanding you'd hope for given who they are and where you live- including those who select if for GCSE and those that don't? What does your curriculum say about your priorities - it is balanced well between UK history and world history, a range of historical periods, a range of types of events - power and politics, social history, wars? Does it allow for alternative perspectives and some depth studies alongside a broad factual overview of events and key figures - the facts that every child should know?

The same questions for English and History apply to art and music and RS. Which artists do they meet? When do students learn about Islam? What do they learn about Islam? Which style of music curriculum do we offer: composition-focused with a contemporary slant or more classical with a strong strand of theory, notation and music history?

In Science- are you confident that the curriculum is designed bottom-up with key concepts - particles, energy, cells - embedded and built-upon. What's the general experience in relation to practical work and hands-on learning? Will students grow those plants or just label diagrams of them in theory? Will they ever design an experiment of their own? Will the Geography and Science curriculum links be strong so that your students definitely all gain a very strong foundation of knowledge about climate change and sustainability? What exactly will they learn? And when?

Across the curriculum, where do students get to develop their oracy skills, to extend their knowledge of their local community, to mentally travel the world, to physically get into the countryside or the city, to see museums, to gain cultural experiences, to hear the Holocaust story, to discuss homophobia and racism, to learn about sex and relationships, to make things and be creative, to engage in an extended learning project of some form, to make a choice about the way they communicate their ideas?

Across the curriculum are you satisfied that it is challenging enough? Challenge is a vague notion until you tie it down to some specific curriculum choices. What's the diet like in Year 5 and Year 8? Are your highest attainers truly stretched? Is there any padding, filler, soft, weak meandering when a bit more rigour might be more appropriate? Where you've had to make compromises because of the constraints of time and resources - are you happy you've arrived at the best possible balance between competing choices?

All of these questions can be answered. And then you have to decide what you think. Is it a good curriculum? Are there different, better choices you could make? Is it a curriculum you feel proud of - that represents the school you want to run and be part of? Because this is what your school actually is. Your curriculum is your school. So, to the greatest extent possible, it pays to own it, to shape it and to celebrate it. It's so powerful if you can be on the front foot before anyone else comes along to test it out. Here's our curriculum: This is what we are. This is what we do. And we're proud of it.

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Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it.

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At the Heads' Roundtable event this week I was making a pitch for school leaders to get stuck into a deep curriculum review process - as many already have. Not because of the expectations of whatever accountability process is underway, but because it matters so much. To a degree that is underplayed all too...

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On our #rEDDurrington presentation: Making the Most of CPD Part 2 (Department and Whole School) – The Learning Profession

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In the first part of our talk we considered the imperative for prioritising well-designed, high-quality CPD that had a strong focus on pupil outcomes. In this second part of our talk we share how to make the most of CPD at both department and whole-school level.

Middle Leaders play a significant role in supporting teachers to implement new approaches in the classroom. One of the most important aspects of the role of a middle leader is to develop your team and take responsibility for the CPD of those in your department. One of the easiest wins can be through ensuring all meetings are strategic and subject/CPD based and not operational.

Take, for example, a one-hour department meeting with five teachers. That's 5 hours of stuff that could get done if not sat around a table talking about something that could be dealt with in an email. The opportunity-cost of a wasted meeting is something we need to keep in mind. The most powerful use of a department meeting is for subject-based CPD. As middle leaders, this should be a far greater part of our role.

One of the best uses of department meetings is for collaborative planning. However, what this does not mean is booking the computer room or bringing laptops and sitting in separate corners of a classroom making your own resources. What it may mean is discussing and breaking down the procedural knowledge required for students to complete a task or a question - for example, how do we break down how to analyse a poem or apply an equation? Or it could be how to we explain a concept.

As example from Claire's English department is that the team agreed upon a specific way to explain the different form of contrasts and positioning in a text i.e. explaining the difference between contrast/juxtaposition/antithesis/oxymoron by using a line on the board with the terms at different positions on the line. It's a very simple but effective way of explaining the concepts and helped to deal with students' misconceptions regarding the nuances of the different terms.

Department meetings could also be used to analyse a text or a historical source, thereby modelling the process, developing subject knowledge and discussing common misconceptions and how to avoid them. Identify misconceptions that are likely to crop up in teaching is a particularly beneficial for less experienced teachers.

Using department time in this way offers ample opportunity for collaboration and expert challenge of ideas and practices (see the DfE standard for teachers' professional development). In addition to this, the benefit to the individual teacher is two-fold: it develops subject knowledge and teaching practice plus it saves teachers' time by helping to plan more than one resource and focuses on a teaching approach that may have multiple applications - an approach to CPD that passes our test of accelerating progress and reducing workload.

There's a lot of interest at the minute about curriculum design - and it's true to say that designing an effective curriculum for any subject ought to be done by subject specialists; department time is a really good time in which to start the process.

But, even if it were possible to design the perfect curriculum in the time your school allows you to work together as a department (ha!), what good is the perfect curriculum if your department teams aren't supported and developed to deliver it effectively?

If we want effective implementation then we need to ask some important questions:
What do your subject teams need to know to be the best subject specialists they can be? What are you doing about it?
It's no good saying 'Sarah hasn't got a bloody clue about Dracula so let's not give her year 9'. Instead we should be identifying subject knowledge gaps and doing what we can to make sure that Sarah really knows her stuff so that she can teach any year group.
What do your subject team need to know about the most effective methods for teaching the topics on the curriculum?
It's no good assuming that Sarah (sorry Sarah) has picked up enough from the one hour twilight session on retrieval practice to be embedding it in her lessons. What does this look like in her subject? Assuming Sarah is now a Maths teacher, what does retrieval practice look like in a Maths lesson? Where can Sarah be directed to go and see this happening in a Maths lesson?
What ongoing support do your subject teams need to ensure their delivery of the curriculum keeps improving?
If you don't know what your subject specialists' needs are then you can't support them. Key to a well-designed CPD programme is building in flexibility to respond to the needs that arise in the year.

Sarah needs a forum to be able to share what she needs support with to be the best teacher she can be and, given enough department time, her head of department will be able to support her professional development more effectively.

Two years ago Rebecca attended the Leading Learning Course at Huntington Research School. Three times she made the journey up to York from Salisbury and it was some of the best professional development of her career. Following the course, Rebecca made a proposal to SLT about the whole school CPD offer and the key change she wanted to implement was the introduction of Disciplined Inquiry.

If you ask teachers this question, what would they say?
When was the last time you learnt something about teaching and learning which inspired you to change what you do in the classroom and, having made that change, your students' outcomes improved?
What would you say?

Whilst teachers most teachers can talk about changes they've made in their teaching, it's often far more challenging to say whether those changes have really had an impact on student outcomes. Why? Because we hadn't evaluated the impact.

We're all a bit guilty of this. We're magpies: we see shiny ideas, give them a go in our classroom and if we like them we stick with them and, if we don't, we abandon them when the next shiny idea comes along (or when SLT move onto a new focus and we don't feel obliged to keep doing it) but we don't necessarily take the time to evaluate the impact on student outcomes.

Disciplined Inquiry offers a clear structure and process for teachers to evaluate the impact of what they're doing in the classroom. In that way, it's a really powerful tool for driving professional development because it guides us to improving the most effective aspects of our practice.

Over the course of last year, teachers at my Rebecca's school developed and worked on an inquiry question for the whole year. An inquiry question requires you to select a specific teacher intervention e.g. dual coding, a specific outcome e.g. improved performance in knowledge quizzes and a targeted cohort of students e.g. a group of boys targeted grade 4 in your year 11 Geography class.

So:

Becomes...

How does dual coding when introducing new concepts in Geography improve the performance in knowledge quizzes of boys targeted grade 4 in my year 11 Gegraphy class?

Teachers devised their own inquiry question based on a specific need of a specific group of students that they identified. They then researched best bets for which intervention might have an impact on student outcomes, designed appropriate pre- and post-tests to enable them to evaluate the impact and then set about implementing their chosen strategy for a period of at least one term (12 weeks or so).

We had MFL teachers inquiring about the impact on a group of year 11 students of translating key verbs into French; Maths teachings inquiring about the impact of interleaving on retention and English teachers inquiring about the effect of self-quizzing on knowledge retention.

One of the most powerful things about this form of CPD is that it is context driven. What's the specific need of students in this particular class and what intervention do I think is going to have an impact? It's also fair to say that lots of this thinking is being done by teachers anyway - we're always trying to figure out what works - but the disciplined nature of the inquiry and the evaluation is key to being better able to work out if something did work or not.

At the end of the year Rebecca held an Inquiry Question Festival (which maybe sounds more glam than it was - she organised biscuits, display boards and tea for the main hall...) in which teachers shared their disciplined inquiry posters (with rationale, findings, next steps etc). A few teachers presented and then we had time to walk around, read other people's posters and discuss with them what they'd discovered over the course of the year.

The aim of Disciplined Inquiry is not that the intervention is successful (though of course that's desirable). It's valuable for teachers to discover, through evaluation, that an intervention has had no impact or a negative impact because that way they can abandon that intervention when they might otherwise have continued with it.

The real value in DI is the process: developing professionals who question, challenge, understand and know deeply about teaching and learning.

Critical reflection on our practice enables us to challenge our assumptions, see our practice differently and make informed decisions about our teaching. We want teachers to question their own practice: What am I doing? How am I doing this? Why am I doing this?
If we have teachers who are inquiring professionals then they'll be shaping their own professional development and evaluating the impact on their students.
It can be quite easy to ensure that Department CPD is based on subject discipline and therefore is relevant and specific. But what about whole-school CPD provision? We know how important it is for CPD to be personalised, specific and not generic as we know that some teaching and learning approaches are irrelevant to other disciplines and trying to transfer one to another can do more harm than good. Choice is powerful and more likely to achieve buy-in. But how do we manage creating provision for these different needs whilst ensuring some coherence in a whole-school approach?

One of the ways Claire's school has tackled this is by finding a little bit of time each week for teachers to engage in CPD with an almost pick 'n' mix approach. As a school , they've identified retrieval practice, cognitive load theory and effective feedback as the areas they want to better understand and develop. Every Tuesday before teachers go to their form groups, everyone gathers in the Hall for a 10 minute session on a strategy or resource teachers are using in their lessons based on these three key strands.

Sessions are sequenced so that at the beginning of each sequence of 4-5 sessions, the research or approach is reintroduced with an explanation reiterating why we are focusing on this aspect. This is important as it ensures the research and the 'why' is kept in mind by over communicating these ideas to ensure they're embedded. This also helps to stop a good idea being badly implemented due to a lack of understanding.

Take for example Knowledge Organisers, which are now quite often used in a way far removed from their original purpose and in some cases have become little more than glorified revision posters. That's not what we want. So research is reiterated with the purpose of trying to avoid these lethal mutations.

The sessions that follow are led by teachers from different subjects explaining what this looks like in their classroom and providing adaptable resources that go with it. Some of these sessions are then used as 'tasters' for longer workshops.

For INSET day at Claire's school, they ran a number of workshops that teachers could choose from with taster sessions for each one delivered in the weeks leading up to the INSET day so that teachers and support staff could make informed choices about which session they would attend. This ensured that the INSET was personalised and relevant for all staff and it drew on the expertise within the school which assisted with buy-in and an assurance that what was delivered was based on 'what works' in their context with their students.

In addition, Claire's school have flexible INSET and CPD hours. The idea is that teachers are expected to engage in a certain number of hours of self-directed CPD with the view that no staff will need to be in school for the last two INSET days of the term. The CPD Tuesday sessions add up to one of these days whilst the second day can be earnt through attending one Saturday event or can be accrued with 6 hours of after school CPD either hosted by in school or at one of local schools e.g. there was an in-school Middle Leader course for 5 sessions over the year which included required reading which was then the equivalent of a day off in lieu at the end of the school year.

As part of Performance Management staff are encouraged to read and reflect in a journal, this time can also be accrued for the day off in lieu. Not only is this approach highly personalised but it rewards people for the time they spend engaging with their own development and places a value on self-directed CPD.

To help with this aim, Claire's school redesigned their approach to Performance Management to make it far more focused on teacher development, ensuring this became the starting point for CPD rather than having targets that seemed to be in addition to the 'main thing'.

They decided that focusing Performance Management on developing specific areas of teaching and learning would be more likely to have a positive impact on pupil outcomes long term, than short term projects such as running a club or a revision class. Therefore, they decided that they should focus more on development than performance, as developing teaching would, by its nature, improve outcomes.

Taking the focus key areas, teachers were asked to choose which aspect they would like to develop over the course of the year. Their PM target would then be something like: to experiment with feedback strategies using research to inform the approach. As we'd already identified key strands, it was then simply a case of providing time, resources and training to support these.

This included having a CPD website that is divided into categories based on aspects of teaching that were a whole-school focus: classroom routines, feedback, questioning, explanations etc. and offers resources in the form of blogs or indicating chapters in books in the CPD library that could be used for to improve an area of T&L. ( www.dggscpd.wordpress.com which needs credit to Jack @GeogMarsh whose original blog Claire shamelessly copied and simply rebranded).

The approaches that came from this focus are then shared in the Department or in Tuesday sessions or evaluated through drop-ins if the teacher would like to show what they have been working on.

These year-long targets focused on improving a specific area of practice thereby meeting the requirement that CPD should be sustained over time rather than a one-off. PM meetings then become discussion of T&L rather than data, often based on notes made by teachers in journals/notebooks based on reading, department meetings and reflections.

These meetings are not confined by forms or checklists or data but genuine discussion of professional development that is more likely to have a positive impact on teaching and learning than any discussion of the percentages of students achieving grades.

The school ensured that professional development was at the heart of everything by having a coordinated whole-school approach that was both personalised and coherent.

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On our #rEDDurrington presentation: Making the Most of CPD Part 2 (Department and Whole School)

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In the first part of our talk we considered the imperative for prioritising well-designed, high-quality CPD that had a strong focus on pupil outcomes. In this second part of our talk we share how to make the most of CPD at both department and whole-school level.

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Sharing the (research) love – A Classroom of One's Own

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Whole-class feedback: saviour or fad? – The No More Marking Blog

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This is the introduction to a three-part series. Click to read the first post, to read the second, and for the the third. Why whole class feedback really is great
Over the last couple of years, whole-class feedback has been enthusiastically adopted by a number of teachers, and we have seen a number of schools who use comparative judgement combine the two approaches very successfully. In this blog, Jamie McNamara explains how his primary school combined comparative judgement and whole class feedback, and in this one here, Tracey Goodyear does the same for her secondary English department.

However, as whole-class feedback grown in popularity there have been a few people questioning whether it really is that amazing or if it is destined to turn into just another edu fad foisted on unwilling teachers by out-of-touch senior managers.

We work with a number of schools who are using whole class feedback and have seen many different approaches to this technique. Here are my thoughts about why whole-class feedback really is amazing, together with three principles for making it as effective as possible.

One of the reasons whole class feedback is so effective is because the thing it is replacing - individual written comments at the bottom of each pupil's piece of work - is so ineffective that it leaves a lot of room for improvement!

There are two problems with these traditional written comments.

1. They take an enormous amount of time

2. They are not that useful.

My favourite example of why they are not useful comes from Dylan Wiliam in Embedded Formative Assessment.

"I remember talking to a middle school student who was looking at the feedback his teacher had given him on a science assignment. The teacher had written, "You need to be more systematic in planning your scientific inquiries." I asked the student what that meant to him, and he said, "I don't know. If I knew how to be more systematic, I would have been more systematic the first time." This kind of feedback is accurate - it is describing what needs to happen - but it is not helpful because the learner does not know how to use the feedback to improve. It is rather like telling an unsuccessful comedian to be funnier - accurate, but not particularly helpful, advice."

Principles for effective feedback
When I first read this, I cringed, because I thought of the hours of time - typically hours on a Sunday evening - I had spent writing comments of this level of vagueness. Things like, 'in order to improve, you need to infer more insightfully'. In The Writing Revolution, Judith Hochman makes a similar point about how this type of feedback just isn't useful.

"I was struck by the difference in how we taught writing as opposed to reading. When I taught reading, I didn't just give my pupils a book and say, 'Read this'. I used a well-researched method, providing explicit instruction in decoding and using carefully sequenced activities that scaffolded skills until students read fluently and accurately. But when it came to teaching writing, arguably a far more difficult task, I had no way to give students the tools they needed. If their writing fell short, as it often did, we simply told them to "make it better" or "add more details". Clearly, that wasn't enough."

Comments like this are TBU: true but useless. Often, it is seen as good practice to give pupils feedback that is taken from the mark scheme, or that is a pupil friendly version of the language in the mark scheme. But the mark scheme is not designed as a feedback tool. It's designed to be descriptive, not analytic, and therefore to be true but useless when given to a pupil. As Dylan Wiliam goes on to say, ' The secret of effective feedback is that saying what's wrong isn't enough; to be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action.'

Done well, whole-class feedback is much better at providing this recipe than traditional written comments. In the next three posts, I will explore three principles that I think can make whole-class feedback as effective as possible.

One: make the feedback a recipe, not a statement

Two: focus on the pupil, not just the piece of work

Three: focus on the curriculum, not just the pupil

We are also about to begin working with some schools on some professional development for our Assessing Primary Writing subscribers that focusses on exactly these issues. Our first one is in Leicestershire later this month. We'll post more about this over the next few weeks. If you're a subscriber who's interested in learning more, please get in touch.

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This is the introduction to a three-part series. Click to read the first post, to read the second, and for the the third. Why whole class feedback really is great Over the last couple of years, whole-class feedback has been enthusiastically adopted by a number of teachers, and we have seen a number of schools who use comparative judgement combine the two approaches very successfully.

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Can knowledge organisers boost students’ exam results? | Tes News

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When two colleagues and I were given the task of redesigning a whole-school CPD package, we immediately knew the first question we should pose to middle leaders: "What are the biggest problems that we are all facing in light of the new curriculum?"

The new curriculum was a hot topic of departmental discussion, so this question seemed an obvious starting point.

What we didn't expect was that all departments would unanimously come back to us with one answer: increased content volume. In most curriculum areas, the amount of information to be covered had hugely increased following the ...

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Can knowledge organisers boost students' exam results?

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When research lead Louise Lewis found students were overwhelmed with the amount of content squeezed into the curriculum, she wondered if knowledge organisers could be the answer. So, she conducted a 'disciplined enquiry' to discover if the approach could open the door to more effective revision

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Growing Great Teachers: Improve not prove – Chris Moyse

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Staying stoical in school | Joe Kirby's blog

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"It's the Most Important Tool for Building Relationships," and Other Insights About Check For Understanding - Teach Like a Champion

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Yesterday was one of the most intellectually intense days I've had in some time, and I came to realize some important things about Check for Understanding.

I'm going to try to summarize some of them here.

1) Check for Understanding is quite possibly the single most important group of techniques in terms of building relationships with students-I had never fully made that connection before and I suspect many other teachers hadn't either.

I realized this over the course of a meeting with our TLAC Fellows in which we set out to discuss and study building relationships in the classroom- something my team and I are interested in studying because we think it's an important topic and because we think it's an oft-misunderstood or misapplied topic.

The first thing we realized was that many teachers focused their relationship building efforts on what happens outside of the core teaching-greeting students in the hallway and asking them about their interests.

Far more important and genuine is something we called relational teaching-using the way you teach to build a trusting relationship. What happens inside the classroom-inside the teaching within the classroom-is the first and foremost driver of relationships. The Fellows were emphatic on this point and on the idea that Check for Understanding, done well, was critical because it constantly communicated a message to each student. We summarized that message as follows:

Your success is important to me

I believe in you

I am highly aware of your progress in this endeavor

I will help you succeed

You can see that in this video.... three examples of teachers Tracking Not Watching... where that message is communicated by a process of careful observation of student work and quick feedback.

As an aside two of the teachers here, Denarius Frazier and Tamesha McGuire, are TLAC Fellows and yes that makes us just a little bit proud.

EA.CFU.GRM.'Relationship building.'Clip2792 from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.

Ironically the first clip, while truly wonderful, offers a bit of a distraction. The interactions are warm and endearing but it's the feedback as much as the warm affect that builds the relationship.

Anyway our takeaway was that relationship building starts in the classroom with attentiveness to the the craft of teaching and with attentiveness to the progress and experience of the learner. What happens inside the classroom is more profound than the outside the classroom efforts at connections that teachers may make. Some of those are also valuable. But without the in-class dynamic none of that moves the needle. If I am struggling and you go blithely on unaware, well, you can ask me about all the movies you like but...

2) On the way to the train station, I had the opportunity to chat with Denarius about one of our favorite CFU clips. This one.

EA.CFU.GR11.Frazier.'Remainder.'Clip2594 from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.

Denarius shared how critical his seating plan is to its success. The two front corners of the room are the places he always starts his observational laps of the room. The first four students he comes across there are essentially a small statistical sample of the room. Two students who often struggle, one student who's about average and one high performer.

"After looking at four kids' work I often have a decent hypothesis for how the room over all is doing. I'm testing that hypothesis already as I work the first column, and by the second column I'm deciding what to do about it."

He also shared this thought re. the tracking of student work he's doing-you can see him making notes on his clipboard.

"A lot of people think I'm tracking who got it right and who got it wrong. I've stopped doing that. I now track the nature of the errors I see. When i finish my observations, knowing what they misunderstand rather than what number of kids got it right is much more useful. And that too helps me develop my plan to re-teach as I work."

Brilliant and fascinating stuff.

building relationships, Check for Understanding

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"It's the Most Important Tool for Building Relationships," and Other Insights About Check For Understanding - Teach Like a Champion

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Yesterday was one of the most intellectually intense days I've had in some time, and I came to realize some important things about Check for Understanding. I'm going to try to summarize some of them here. 1) Check for Understanding is quite possibly the single most important group of techniques in terms of building relationships...

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Setting Great Homework: The Mode A:Mode B approach. | teacherhead

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I have explored issues with homework in various different posts. In particular, the research into homework by John Hattie is covered in detail in this post: Homework: What does the Hattie research actually say?

I'm a firm believer that homework has an important role to play in providing a great education and fostering independent learning, as I expressed in one of my earliest posts Homework matters: Great teachers set great homework. In this post, I want to suggest what might constitute a sensible, effective diet of great homework.

To begin with, here is a diagram I produced several years ago for a post called Journeys

I was trying to capture a sense that a learning journey doesn't only take place during lessons. Lessons are building blocks or stepping stones but successful students don't stop thinking when the bell goes; lessons are just part of the flow: building schemas, exploring ideas, practising. Teachers have an important role in setting up activities for students so this 'between lessons' time is used as constructively as possible.

However, we have to take account of the research evidence that suggests that homework is more effective for younger or less confident students when homework builds confidence and fluency. This requires tasks to be tightly defined, well scaffolded and focused mainly on practising things students can already do. The more confident learners become, the more scope there is for more open-ended and challenging tasks.

Based on my experience as a teacher and parent, I would suggest that there are two main purposes of homework:

To provide opportunities for extended practice: Giving students tasks that enable them to improve their fluency and confidence; tasks that support deeper and more fluent recall. Lesson time is not enough on its own and students need structured guidance to support their practice activities.

To develop students' capacity for independent learning: This includes giving students tasks that encourage them to explore subjects in self-directed and/or creative ways, to develop a sense of responsibility for their own learning and to prepare for lessons so that teachers' input is optimised given the time constraints.

My sense is that, as with the forms of lesson activities I describe as Mode A and Mode B teaching, there is the need to provide a diet of homework that blends these different opportunities and purposes:

Lots of Mode A Homework: Practice, revision, pre-study, questions, exercises.

Some Mode B Homework: Research, open-ended projects, creative product-making, choices.

In general, students need Mode A homework to be the main staple; the routine. However, Mode B homework in important and should be woven in from time to time. If I use my son and daughter as case-studies, without doubt, their success at school has been supported by a strong core diet of routine Mode A homework. Their teachers have done a great job teaching them how to study effectively in each subject so that, by the time their exams came around, they knew what to do with any study time they had. A key factor here was that a high volume of routine homework year on year helped them develop good study habits. It was normal for them to study; no big deal, just a part of the process of learning, of being at school; not tacked on, not separate- just an integrated part of the whole.

At the same time, their school lives were enriched massively by occasional set-piece Mode B homework tasks: tasks that lit a fire; that allowed them to experience deep-end challenge, to broaden their horizons, to get stuck into a topic in ways that gave them a great sense of satisfaction. These are the things they remember.

Mode A Homework:

Here the emphasis is on practice and consolidation. This means students need question and task types they are familiar with in sufficient quantity to constitute sustained practice. At higher levels, this can and should become more extended including essays and longer, more challenging question sets.

Mode A homework might include:

Routine questions similar to those practised in class. Better to do lots of fluency-building questions than a few 'challenge questions' because of the pitfalls when students get stuck with no one to help them. Ideally students can check their own answers to save teacher marking. Online systems are good provided that they provide the repetition needed and don't reward guessing to move from question to question.

Knowledge retrieval: vocabulary, spellings, factual recall, practising explanations - a whole host of self-assessed retrieval practice tasks, along the lines described here: Students need to be taught the methods and then be tested in class to check that what they've learned. (Sometimes these are called 'learning homework' which is rather confusing because surely that's true of any homework!)

Pre-lesson prep: reading ahead, note-making, prior-knowledge reviews. This is more relevant with older students but should certainly be a routine expectation for GCSE and Alevel, L2/L3 students. Again, the relevant procedures need to be taught and there needs to be a form of accountability so that students get into the habit of doing this well.

I firmly believe that students who do really well at school will have learned how to study. They'll know how to practise maths, English, music, art, science, French, history... by themselves. And that will be because over the years they've had a sustained diet of solid Mode A homework. When it's all panic stations and intervention-central in Year 11, it's because those habits never formed.

Mode B Homework:
Opened-ended response.
I've explored this extensively in this post from the Pedagogy Postcard series. Instead of me repeating it, take a detour and dive in for a look. I've got some fab examples and non-examples! Students need to learn to make good choices if they are ever to have the confidence and experience to guide their own learning with any level of rigour. They won't do this if they're never given the chance. Plus you really don't need or want everyone doing the same thing all the time. One of the worst lessons you can have is where you (foolishly) asked a whole class to make powerpoints and then you have sit through them all. It's just so dull and you tend to pull back from any short-run feedback processes that might make them much better - because of the time pressure. If you engineer open-response tasks such that you get a diverse range of responses, then life is more interesting for all concerned and it's easier to re-run things that need improvement.

One of my all-time favourites are these responses from a couple of Year 7s when I taught RE. In the Intro to Islam unit,

They asked: can we make a website?

I said - I don't know; can you make a website?

They said - `Of course; we did it in Year 5 at primary school.

So they made a website: Embracing Islam. It was brilliant - showcasing their knowledge and understanding, with embedded videos galore. They were so encouraged, the next term they made a website called 'Embracing Christianity: From the Award-winning creators of Embracing Islam '. Joy!
Structured Research/ Projects
Just once or twice in a year - a few times across the curriculum - it's great for students to have the opportunity to get stuck into a piece of work that requires a few hours of extended focus. I've seen countless examples of superb outcomes from this. Good projects need structure - a focus. It's no good just saying 'off you go, do a project' with students for whom that's a recipe for mediocrity or floundering. But, with some structure, you can students producing lovely artefacts, writing products - all kinds of 'labour of love' responses.

A simple idea is to extend your curriculum reach - to venture into the hinterland - but asking students to undertake the study of a Person/Place/Book/Event - of their choice, in the relevant subject. I loved the history version shared on twitter: 'Meanwhile elsewhere' - the study of a period of history in a country running in parallel to the UK theme at the time. If you establish the format and model the standards, you get student bringing interesting artists, discoveries, books, stories, ceremonies, living organisms, historical figures, cities... into the classroom.
The Mode B Spirit: 'Dazzle me'; 'Have fun with it'; 'Have a go', 'Go as far as you can'
I think it's important that Mode B homework is regarded as a way of providing students with opportunities without them becoming unwieldy mandated teacher-crucifying albatrosses of excessive marking. It's possible to set these things up so that students do great work, enjoy themselves and receive appropriate teacher validation -without any marking of any kind. You just need to do it in the right spirit. And if students opt out? Well, that's their loss and that's how they should feel.

I sometimes feel that people overplay their angst over excessive parental input or placing demands on children to find resources. Of course, you need to check that students have the tools to do the job without it costing lots of money. But, at the same time, it's important not to strip out good activities in the name of equity: it's better to just explore how students will access the digital or physical resources they need. And so what if once or twice a year, parents have to get involved making something with their kids? I enjoyed making my daughter's Year 4 Tudor house with her. It wasn't a contest; we had a good time sticking it all together and we still talk about it.

Mode A: Mode B Homework Split?

You decide. I'd say maths could all be Mode A - with maybe one annual homework on a famous equation or mathematician. Science might be one Mode B homework per half-term. In general I"m not a fan of mandating rules for these things with teachers and I don't believe in homework timetables - because you get all kinds of nonsense objections and inauthentic homeworks set just to match what the diary says.

Far better, in my view, for school leaders to ask each teacher team: What diet of homework do you think is needed to maximise learning in your area? Ok! Do that - just keep it up. Don't set up expectations you can't sustain - including the idea that all homework must be marked by the teacher - that's the kiss of death to authentic homework right there.

At the same time, whether it's 'little and often' or just a solid chunk at once, I do think high volume is important, increasing with age and confidence - that's my bias. As a parent the teachers you trust are those who, amongst other things, set a ton of high quality homework with a nice Mode A/Mode B split. Lame and/or infrequent homework raises questions. Why would you want to be that kind of teacher? And if either you automatically associate setting more homework with having more marking OR you dismiss the amount of learning that can happen outside of your lessons, then you're doing it wrong!

Have fun with it! Great teachers set great homework. Yup - I said it!

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Setting Great Homework: The Mode A:Mode B approach.

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I have explored issues with homework in various different posts. In particular, the research into homework by John Hattie is covered in detail in this post: Homework: What does the Hattie research actually say? I'm a firm believer that homework has an important role to play in providing a great education and fostering independent learning, as...

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by Steve Adcock
Why Rosenshine?
In 2018 we (United Learning) adopted Rosenshine's principles of instruction as the basis for our approach to teaching and learning across our schools. It's the first time that we've taken a collective position on teaching and learning, rather than leaving this critical issue to each school. Our focus previously was on supporting each school in having an internally coherent and effective T&L strategy. With the adoption of the Rosenshine principles we were attempting to go a step further by ensuring that each school's approach was anchored in a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching.

We did this for a few reasons. Firstly, we wanted to support schools in challenging approaches to teaching that are not supported by good evidence, such as teaching which is overly driven by the exam specification, teaching that is founded on the belief that pupils learn better by discovering things for themselves, teaching that takes differentiation too far by placing different groups of pupils on different 'tracks' in the same lesson, and teaching that is overly focused on securing evidence of progress in each lesson, rather than gradually building a secure long-term understanding of each subject.

As a growing Trust, and a Trust that comprises primary and secondary schools in the state and independent sector, as well as an initial teacher training programme, we could see benefits in building a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching. A trainee teacher could leave their summer institute and arrive at their school in September safe in the knowledge that the philosophy towards teaching and learning would be consistent; a deputy head leading on teaching and learning could share resources with counterparts in our other schools; subject advisors could produce curriculum materials confident that they would be applied in the classroom in similar ways. We would move from each school having an internally coherent approach to teaching and learning, towards a coherent approach across the whole group which would serve as a foundation for great teaching in each school and each subject.

Over time we are using the principles to develop a shared and precise language for the way we talk about teaching and learning. In my experience, the language commonly used to describe teaching and learning is anything but precise. Obvious examples would be phrases such as 'the lesson lacked a bit of oomph' or 'pupils weren't fully engaged' or, more positively, the lesson featured 'awe and wonder'. But even terms that seem more clear such as 'pace' and 'challenge' can lack the precision required to develop teaching practice. Take 'pace' - do we mean that the teacher went through things too slowly or that pupils didn't work quickly enough, or perhaps the teacher wasn't clear on timings, or maybe the start of the lesson drifted and time was squeezed for the challenging stuff at the end? That leads us to 'challenge' - was the content itself too easy, or was it the task, or are we simply saying that not enough pupils produced work at the standard required?

We chose the Rosenshine principles because they're sensible, evidence-informed and provide the shared foundation we were seeking rather than a rigid checklist to be applied to every lesson. As an established set of principles we were able to avoid a long process of navel-gazing which would inevitably have been required if we had attempted to write our own. The fact they've been around for a while also enabled us to reassure our schools that we would commit to these principles for several years ahead, rather than replace them with a passing fad in twelve months' time.

We've got a long way to go, but we're seeing some early fruits of our labour. I write this while returning from an inset day in Shoreham where all teachers from four of our schools started 2019 by gathering together to explore the principles in the context of their own subject. Meanwhile our subject advisors have written case studies on how to apply these principles in their subject. The curriculum resources we are producing contain the modelling, the question prompts and the scaffolds that Rosenshine promotes in his work.
So what might Rosenshine look like in the classroom?
As we've worked with schools in exploring Rosenshine's work we've confronted the question of what his principles look like in the classroom. I'm in two minds here as to how usefully Rosenshine presented his research. On the one hand, I'm grateful that his principles are contained in short, concise pamphlets such as this 2012 one and this 2010 one. One of the simplest things we've done is simply ask schools to ensure that all teachers read all 9 pages of the 2012 paper.

But I do have a few gripes with the way Rosenshine presented his work. Firstly, the 2012 paper contains a list of 17 principles alongside the main list of 10. Rosenshine explains this decision (the list of 17 provides slightly more detail and overlaps with the list of 10) but given Rosenshine's knowledge of the limits of working memory and cognitive load, it seems slightly curious to share two separate lists alongside each other.

We can take this overlap as a reminder that the principles do not seek to provide a checklist to be followed in order in every lesson. This becomes clear when we note his sub-heading for point 6 (check for student understanding): "checking for student understanding at each point can help students learn the material with fewer errors" (my emphasis). So - to be clear - we don't check for understanding between point 5 (guide student practice) and point 7 (obtain a high success rate), we check for understanding throughout the whole process. Tom Sherrington has noted that this becomes clear when we read Rosenshine's 1986 and 1982 papers which emphasise the importance of checking for understanding.

The 1982 paper also helps us understand Rosenshine's intentions in proposing the principles:

There's another gem lurking in his earlier papers that I think gets lost in the latter versions. In his 1986 teaching functions paper Rosenshine writes:
"Three of these functions form the instructional core: demonstration, guided practice, and independent practice. The first step is the demonstration of what is to be learned. This is followed by guided student practice in which the teacher leads the students in practice, provides prompts, checks for understanding, and provides corrections and repetition. When students are firm in their initial learning, the teacher moves them to independent practice where the students work with less guidance. The objective of the independent practice is to provide sufficient practice so that students achieve overlearning (Brophy, 1982) and demonstrate quickness and competence. A simple version of this core is used frequently in the elementary grades when a teacher says: "I'll say it first, then you'll say it with me, and then you'll say it by yourself"."
This seems like critical guidance, and helps us to understand the intention behind Rosenshine's principles, which I think we can now summarise as:

Prior review

Instructional core (I>we>you):

Demonstration (explanation and modelling) of new material in small steps

Guided practice with prompts and scaffolds

Independent practice with monitoring and feedback from teacher

Future review

At each of these points - every single one of them - we check the understanding of all pupils by asking lots of questions and providing correction and feedback.

This model - the instructional core sandwiched between prior review and future review, with checking for understanding at each point - captures the essence of Rosenshine's principles of instruction and provides an answer to that question of what Rosenshine looks like in the classroom.

Rosenshine's back catalogue also helps us understand his 7 th principle 'Obtain a high success rate'. In his 1986 Teaching Functions paper he writes: "Although there are no scientific guidelines as to exactly what the percentage of correct answers should be, a reasonable recommendation at the present time (suggested by Brophy, 1980) is an 80% success rate when practicing new material. When reviewing, the success rate should be very high, perhaps 95% and student responses should be rapid, smooth and confident." So this idea of success rate supports teachers in deciding when to move through the instructional core, particularly when to move from guided practice (when around 80% of student responses are correct) to independent practice (when around 95% of student responses are correct). This 7 th principle seems a bit obvious and not overly helpful in the 2012 pamphlet, but it gains practical use thanks to the 1986 paper.

These principles now serve as a foundation for our support for teaching and learning across our schools. There's a couple of things about foundations - in the sense of a building's foundations - that I think are useful here. One is that we don't tinker with foundations once they're in place. They're built to last. The second is that foundations are designed to be built on. We hope that throughout United Learning our teachers will explore these principles and bring them to life in the context of their school, their subject and their pupils. Rosenshine closes his 1982 paper with this very point:

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Why Rosenshine? In 2018 we (United Learning) adopted Rosenshine's principles of instruction as the basis for our approach to teaching and learning across our schools. It's the first time that we've taken a collective position on teaching and learning, rather than leaving this critical issue to each school.

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How do we roll out (rather than rush out!) an evidence-informed curriculum in our schools? | Huntington Research School

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Part 1: Defining and developing coherence around your curriculum

Jane Elsworth, Director of Huntington Research School

﻿

How do we roll out (rather than rush out!) an evidence-informed curriculum in our schools?

This is the start of a five-part curriculum series about evidence-informed curriculum design with contributions from all the team at Huntington Research School.

What do we mean by the curriculum? I really like Mary Myatt's definition 'The curriculum - taught and untaught - represents the totality of the experience of the child within schooling'. She goes on to say that 'a proper curriculum, grounded in the knowledge, concepts and overarching ideas of individual subjects is an entitlement for every child.' Christine Counsell suggests that we should think of the curriculum 'as continuous, not just a sequence or chronology, it is much more like a narrative... content structured as narrative over time with multiple strands all spinning at once but constantly unifying and pulling things together'.

It is interesting to note the etymology of the word curriculum: it comes from the Latin word 'currere', meaning "to run the course". Now this might be something that chimes with many busy teachers and school leaders, as all too often I hear teachers despairing about how they are 'going to get through the curriculum content'. This also might be all too familiar to our students too as they are rushed through the curriculum at a rapid rate by pressured teachers.

So how can we start to get to curriculum coherence? My attempt to summarise this is illustrated by the diagram below. I suggest we start with the curriculum vision and purpose - the 'what' and the 'why' of the content. Why am I teaching this? Where does it fit into the bigger picture of the curriculum plans? Why is it important to know or master this? What difference would it make to the learning if we didn't do this? I really like Zoe Elder's work as documented by her book Full on Learning for phrases to use in the classroom like 'we are learning this..... so that...' ensuring the purpose is not just clear to staff but also to students.

Knowledge

We need to consider subject knowledge (teacher and student knowledge), vocabulary, cultural capital and pedagogical content knowledge. Claire Sealy in her blog discusses the need for both

Declarative knowledge -the concepts, facts and rules: knowledge that sits and waits to be of service; and Procedural knowledge - produces action or is goal directed: 'to know how'.

Michael Young, Professor of Education at UCL Institute of Education, has argued for the right of all children to be taught what he terms 'powerful knowledge' - The knowledge that comes from specialist communities and centuries of learning, and it does change, but more slowly than people believe. It is context-independent. It can lift children and young people out of their lived experience. It is the job of a teacher to engage with the prior experience of the pupils and give them access to powerful knowledge

Pedagogical content knowledge was originally suggested as a third major component of teaching expertise, by Lee Shulman (1986). Pedagogical content knowledge is a type of knowledge that is unique to teachers, and is based on the manner in which teachers relate their pedagogical knowledge (what they know about teaching) to their subject matter knowledge (what they know about what they teach). Pedagogical content knowledge is a form of knowledge that makes science teachers teachers, rather than scientists (Gudmundsdottir, 1987).

Pedagogy

Does your curriculum consider the following key aspects of pedagogy? Does it keep memory in mind throughout by supporting accurate encoding and rehearsal and retrieval? Do you explicitly teach metacognitive knowledge and regulation? Is there appropriate challenge and differentiation so that all learners have access to a broad curriculum? Is questioning carefully planned? How do you build on and develop literacy and numeracy? For support with evidence-informed strategies to investigate and develop see the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit and the excellent Guidance Reports.

Assessment

'Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning'. Dylan Wiliam

This is the process of gaining insight into what students know, understand and can do. The word assessment comes from the Latin 'to sit alongside' - does your assessment model 'sit alongside' your curriculum, is it an integral part or do the assessment structures in your organisation lead the curriculum? For all things assessment related you might want to search out or re-visit Daisy Christodoulou's fantastic book 'Making Good Progress?', in particular for the use of formative assessment to support schema building and long-term learning. The EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit and 'A Marked Improvement' report for evidence-informed feedback practices.

Getting coherence and cohesion

These are questions you might want to ask at a school level:

Do you have thoughtful conversations with colleagues about the curriculum map for pupils? Is it horizontally and vertically mapped through the school?
What are the key ideas and concepts and are they shared and developed with everyone?
What about the underlying and background knowledge pupils need in order to access that subject in later years?
How are we sequencing our curriculum for long-term learning?

I'll leave you with a final thought from Mary Myatt: 'There are three important things to keep in mind about the curriculum. The first is that it is more complex and simpler than we have come to think. The second is that its status and content now have higher profile than in recent years. And the third is that it is never going to be possible to do it all. And we need to live with that.'

More from the Huntington Research School

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How do we roll out (rather than rush out!) an evidence-informed curriculum in our schools?

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Part 1: Defining and developing coherence around your curriculum Jane Elsworth, Director of Huntington Research School ﻿ This is the start of a five-part curriculum series about evidence-informed curriculum design with contributions from all the team at Huntington Research School. What do we mean by the curriculum?

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Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it. | teacherhead

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At the Heads' Roundtable event this week I was making a pitch for school leaders to get stuck into a deep curriculum review process - as many already have. Not because of the expectations of whatever accountability process is underway, but because it matters so much. To a degree that is underplayed all too often, I would suggest that schools are fundamentally defined by their curriculum.

Every school has its motto - those value statements emblazoned on every letterhead, every blazer, above the entrance... Respect. Courage. Resilience. Ambition. Compassion. Fortiter Ex Animo. Carpe Diem. But these grand ideas only take form in the context of students doing things, learning things, experiencing things, receiving messages about things.. actual things that you have decided on. And those things are your curriculum; the actual tangible real-life curriculum that is enacted across the days, weeks and years of a life in your school.

As I have explored in some detail in this post, 10 Steps for Reviewing Your KS3 Curriculum, there is a process that applies to any curriculum review, starting with getting to know your school curriculum as it is. I'm suggesting that school leaders make sure they have developed a strong set of principles around curriculum design and content informed by exploring their own curriculum and a range of alternatives. What do you believe about what your children should learn across the curriculum? Often leaders are only relatively expert in a narrow set of curriculum ideas - we've all largely been trained in specific knowledge domains so it's difficult to know what the possibilities are; to know what an excellent curriculum might look like in every area. But, whilst it may always be necessary to defer to the expertise of others - inside and outside your school - it pays to get into the detail, to begin to learn about each area and develop some reference points.

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself about your school curriculum:

Maths: How is the maths curriculum organised and sequenced? Is it logical, appropriately designed for mastery, vertical coherence. Where does it start? Number? Sequences? Why does it start there? Who decided? Do they know why?

English: Which books will students read in each year group? If you don't know, this is a good place to start. What's the rationale for each one and the overall sequence? Which books have been left out.. who decided? Do teachers choose or is it a departmental approach? Overall, what's the range of genres, the balance of 'classics' vs contemporary fiction? Is the selection something you feel is bold, interesting, building a secure foundation in the literary canon for future reading, opening doors to the world of literature, challenging and demanding as well as inspiring and engaging?

History: Does your history curriculum provide your students with the knowledge and understanding you'd hope for given who they are and where you live- including those who select if for GCSE and those that don't? What does your curriculum say about your priorities - it is balanced well between UK history and world history, a range of historical periods, a range of types of events - power and politics, social history, wars? Does it allow for alternative perspectives and some depth studies alongside a broad factual overview of events and key figures - the facts that every child should know?

The same questions for English and History apply to art and music and RS. Which artists do they meet? When do students learn about Islam? What do they learn about Islam? Which style of music curriculum do we offer: composition-focused with a contemporary slant or more classical with a strong strand of theory, notation and music history?

In Science- are you confident that the curriculum is designed bottom-up with key concepts - particles, energy, cells - embedded and built-upon. What's the general experience in relation to practical work and hands-on learning? Will students grow those plants or just label diagrams of them in theory? Will they ever design an experiment of their own? Will the Geography and Science curriculum links be strong so that your students definitely all gain a very strong foundation of knowledge about climate change and sustainability? What exactly will they learn? And when?

Across the curriculum, where do students get to develop their oracy skills, to extend their knowledge of their local community, to mentally travel the world, to physically get into the countryside or the city, to see museums, to gain cultural experiences, to hear the Holocaust story, to discuss homophobia and racism, to learn about sex and relationships, to make things and be creative, to engage in an extended learning project of some form, to make a choice about the way they communicate their ideas?

Across the curriculum are you satisfied that it is challenging enough? Challenge is a vague notion until you tie it down to some specific curriculum choices. What's the diet like in Year 5 and Year 8? Are your highest attainers truly stretched? Is there any padding, filler, soft, weak meandering when a bit more rigour might be more appropriate? Where you've had to make compromises because of the constraints of time and resources - are you happy you've arrived at the best possible balance between competing choices?

All of these questions can be answered. And then you have to decide what you think. Is it a good curriculum? Are there different, better choices you could make? Is it a curriculum you feel proud of - that represents the school you want to run and be part of? Because this is what your school actually is. Your curriculum is your school. So, to the greatest extent possible, it pays to own it, to shape it and to celebrate it. It's so powerful if you can be on the front foot before anyone else comes along to test it out. Here's our curriculum: This is what we are. This is what we do. And we're proud of it.

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Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it.

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At the Heads' Roundtable event this week I was making a pitch for school leaders to get stuck into a deep curriculum review process - as many already have. Not because of the expectations of whatever accountability process is underway, but because it matters so much. To a degree that is underplayed all too...

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The Application of Theory: 8 Propositions that Underpin our Approach. – TomNeedham

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ASSESSMENT IS CURRICULUM IS ASSESSMENT – paul g moss

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Responsive Teaching – Improving Teaching

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My working definition of responsive teaching is that it is:

1. Setting clear goals and planning learning carefully

2. Identifying what students have understood and where they are struggling

3. Responding, adapting our teaching to support students to do better.

Responsive teaching is a set of principles addressing six problems which are intrinsic to teaching. Below, I've collected the posts I wrote on the way to writing the book. The most recent posts are nearest the top under each sub-heading.
Problem 1: How can we plan a unit, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time? Using knowledge organisers and medium-term plans to organise the knowledge we need to teach Writing unit plans detailing what we want students to know Problem 2: How can we plan a lesson, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time? Planning lessons using cognitive load theory What is the place of teaching for character, confidence and creativity in teaching?
Of what will it make students think (an example of the kind of thinking around planning which seems to make a difference).
Problem 3: How can we show students what success looks like? Why sharing learning objectives doesn't show students what success looks like Why sharing models is the best way to show what success looks like - and two examples
Experiments helping my students write better essays,
Problem 4: How can we tell what students learned in the lesson?
The power of exit tickets in assessment and planning; encapsulating tasks and their effect on retention (2019 update)
What happened when I tried to mark every book, every lesson Problem 5: How can we tell what students are thinking? Do students understand this well enough to move on? Introducing hinge questions Using hinge questions in history Refining my construction of a hinge question
I've also collected examples of hinge questions from different subjects, and how they can be used here.
Problem 6: How can we help every student improve? Choosing the 'level' of feedback we are offering: what kind of feedback moves students on? When can I delay or avoid giving feedback: a decision tree based on the evidence What alternatives are there to giving feedback?
Ensuring students respond to feedback (2019 update)
Moving from marking to feedback Closing the gap marking
If you've used or developed any of these ideas further, please get in touch: @hfletcherwood.

The book

The book which grew from these ideas is Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice. It's available from Amazon.

It's also available in Czech ( Responzivní výuka), Spanish (Enseñanza Receptiva) and Swedish ( Responsiv Undervisning).

Resources

I get asked to do more professional development sessions than I have time and capacity to do. So I've developed a series of video sessions which capture the key principles and practices of responsive teaching.

Videos are:

30 minutes long

Summarise key ideas from the evidence

Offer practical guidance on applying the evidence

Each video comes with suggested reading, an implementation checklist and possible follow-up activities.

Videos are available on a year's licence for schools, allowing flexibility to use them in departments, Inset days and for independent study, and for trainees and early-career teachers.

You can find out more, and login as a subscriber, here.

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My working definition of responsive teaching is that it is: Setting clear goals and planning learning carefullyIdentifying what students have understood and where they are strugglingResponding...

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This much I know about…how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum – johntomsett

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I have been a teacher for 30 years, a Headteacher for 15 years and, at the age of 54, this much I know about how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum .

My friend and collaborator, Tom Sherrington, recently said this of a school's curriculum: " Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it." His sentiments have stuck with me these past 24 hours and prompted me to share a moment of teaching magic which exemplifies why we do what we do at Huntington School.

We are an old-fashioned, stand-alone local authority comprehensive school of 1,527 students. We serve our local community, which, in socio-economic terms, is diverse. Our students come from the full range of socio-economic backgrounds and arrive at our school with the full range of prior attainment. We teach a great deal of our lessons in mixed prior attainment groups because we find that mixed prior attainment groupings serve our most vulnerable students best.

Currently, however, we have a small group of Year 7s in a nurture group for English. That group has an English lesson for at least one hour every day. We have a curriculum for that nurture group that includes Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not a modern English version of the Scottish play, but a full blown study of the original text. We do that because, in a state comprehensive school we believe that all our students should access "the best that has been thought and said". Those nurture class students' counterparts down the road at the renowned York independent schools will be studying the Bard, so why shouldn't they?

And so it came to pass, on the Friday before February half-term, that I covered that Year 7 nurture group. They were in the computer room, aided by two of our teaching assistants, Libby and Jack, typing up their essays: "To what extent does the character Macbeth change during the play?"

Their teacher is one of our deputy head teachers, erstwhile head of English and one of the best English teachers you could wish for; she had told the class I would be taking them. Every time one of the class, let's call her Mary, saw me in the corridor, she asked me whether I was really going to teach them. Even though I always replied in the affirmative, the next time I saw her she would ask the same question. We both got unbearably excited by the prospect.

The day duly arrived. I hadn't taught Macbeth for a while. I wanted to begin the lesson with a bang! I know (or thought I knew) the first scene by heart. I got them to swivel 180° on their seats, away from their PCs, to face me. I stood in the centre of the room. I got them to imagine we were on a windswept heath. It was raining, the lightning was crashing down and the thunder rolling around our ears. I began, loudly and dramatically, to recite the opening scene..."When shall we three meet again?"

I swung round, getting louder. The ICT teacher in the next room began looking through the door to see what the hell was going on. "In thunder lightning or in rain?" It was at this point that doubt began to set in. As I roared the next line, I was thinking "What the hell comes next?" "When the hurlyburly's done..." And I stopped for more than a beat because I had lost my rhythm and my banging start to the lesson was about to fade into a whimper.

I looked around the room, desperately, when I saw Mary up out of her seat. She caught my eye and, barely able to contain herself, she yelled "When the battle's lost and won, That'll be ere the set of sun." Oh my goodness! I glanced at Libby and Jack who were transfixed in utter delight. Mary carried on and the whole class finished with a rousing, "Fair is foul and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air!"

Now, I recount this primarily because, in a career in the classroom which spans over three decades, it was one of the most magical moments. But I also record it here because it is about Huntington School. It is about putting great teachers with the students who need great teachers most (none of that would have happened without my amazing colleague), it is about deciding that what is good for the highest starters in curriculum terms is good for everyone, and it is about creating a culture where we educate children for the pure joy of it.

So, Tom, we own our curriculum. We have shaped it based on what is best for our students. And, here, and in many other places, we celebrate what our challenging, rich curriculum can do for girls like Mary.

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This much I know about...how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum

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I have been a teacher for 30 years, a Headteacher for 15 years and, at the age of 54, this much I know about how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum. My friend and collaborator, Tom Sh...

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Metacognition and Self-Regulation in the Classroom – Teaching it Real

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Responsive Teaching – Improving Teaching

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My working definition of responsive teaching is that it is:

1. Setting clear goals and planning learning carefully

2. Identifying what students have understood and where they are struggling

3. Responding, adapting our teaching to support students to do better.

Responsive teaching is a set of principles addressing six problems which are intrinsic to teaching. Below, I've collected the posts I wrote on the way to writing the book. The most recent posts are nearest the top under each sub-heading.
Problem 1: How can we plan a unit, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time? Using knowledge organisers and medium-term plans to organise the knowledge we need to teach Writing unit plans detailing what we want students to know Problem 2: How can we plan a lesson, when we want students to learn so much, and have so little time? Planning lessons using cognitive load theory What is the place of teaching for character, confidence and creativity in teaching?
Of what will it make students think (an example of the kind of thinking around planning which seems to make a difference).
Problem 3: How can we show students what success looks like? Why sharing learning objectives doesn't show students what success looks like Why sharing models is the best way to show what success looks like - and two examples
Experiments helping my students write better essays,
Problem 4: How can we tell what students learned in the lesson?
The power of exit tickets in assessment and planning; encapsulating tasks and their effect on retention (2019 update)
What happened when I tried to mark every book, every lesson Problem 5: How can we tell what students are thinking? Do students understand this well enough to move on? Introducing hinge questions Using hinge questions in history Refining my construction of a hinge question
I've also collected examples of hinge questions from different subjects, and how they can be used here.
Problem 6: How can we help every student improve? Choosing the 'level' of feedback we are offering: what kind of feedback moves students on? When can I delay or avoid giving feedback: a decision tree based on the evidence What alternatives are there to giving feedback?
Ensuring students respond to feedback (2019 update)
Moving from marking to feedback Closing the gap marking
If you've used or developed any of these ideas further, please get in touch: @hfletcherwood.

The book

The book which grew from these ideas is Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice. It's available from Amazon.

It's also available in Czech ( Responzivní výuka), Spanish (Enseñanza Receptiva) and Swedish ( Responsiv Undervisning).

Resources

I get asked to do more professional development sessions than I have time and capacity to do. So I've developed a series of video sessions which capture the key principles and practices of responsive teaching.

Videos are:

30 minutes long

Summarise key ideas from the evidence

Offer practical guidance on applying the evidence

Each video comes with suggested reading, an implementation checklist and possible follow-up activities.

Videos are available on a year's licence for schools, allowing flexibility to use them in departments, Inset days and for independent study, and for trainees and early-career teachers.

You can find out more, and login as a subscriber, here.

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My working definition of responsive teaching is that it is: Setting clear goals and planning learning carefullyIdentifying what students have understood and where they are strugglingResponding...

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@history_mrs re our chat last week? https://t.co/Dh2VuAqhLe

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Completed version is here: https://t.co/OgIW5TvbxI
— Miss Sayers (@MissSayers1) April 7, 2019

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@history_mrs re our chat last week? https://t.co/Dh2VuAqhLe

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@history_mrs re our chat last week? https://t.co/Dh2VuAqhLe

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Student science reports 1.0: From scaffolding to assessment - ollie lovell

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This is a record of the how and why behind my first attempt at supporting students to write high quality prac reports. This post has been prompted by: Ben Rogers' interesting post on the same topic, the fact that I've been meaning to write about this for ages, and the fact that it's now time to re-design this process for the coming school year, retaining the wheat and discarding the chaff (hence the 1.0 in the title). If you have any suggestions regarding ways to improve or refine the process outlined below, I'd love to hear them via the comments, twitter, or email.

This post is split into a few sections. It starts off talking about how I started trying to use rubrics and felt they weren't achieving what I wanted them to. It then goes on to how I scaffolded student science report writing using a highly structured example and sentence starters. Then discusses in detail assessment processes, including a peer-marking component. In addition to this, assessment of surface and deep structure are discussed separately. It concludes with my ideas for the coming year, as well as a list of questions that I still have and that I'm trying to answer.

This was meant to be the sharing of a few ideas, but it's ended up being a massive and very detailed post. Hopefully the level of detail is helpful to people, and hopefully it opens up some edifying discussions.

The quest for the perfect rubric

I did my teacher training at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and in our unit Assessment for Teaching there was a massive emphasis on writing quality rubrics and using them to scaffold student learning. We learnt that assessments need to be: Appropriate, assessing the right stuff; Adequate, enough data collected; Accurate, make sure the student wasn't sleep deprived on the day;and Authentic (wasn't done by mum and dad). All handy stuff.

We also learnt that a rubric is made up of 'indicative behaviours' (the things at the bottom of the columns), and its associated 'quality criteria' (the little boxes up each column). We were taught that we should align the levels of our rubrics with those from a developmental taxonomy (e.g., SOLO, Dreyfus or Bloom/ Krathwohl), and that the following rules should be followed when writing rubrics (screen shot from my notes from class).

And so, my fellow teachers and I left our initial teacher education training feeling like we had a really solid feel for what a good rubric was, how to write one, and how to use one.

The effect of this was that, when the opportunity arose for me to scaffold and assess students' science prac writing for the first time, my instinct was to start by writing a rubric. And boy did I spend a bunch of time on this. I spent literally hours pouring over other people's rubrics and trying to construct the best science prac report rubric in-tha-wrld. Here's what I came up with... (click to enlarge)

And so it was that I had scaled the great mountain of rubric and come out victorious. Or had I? I figured the next step was to borrow a few pracs from the previous years' class and have a go at scoring them. This is where the problems really began. Here's an indicative list

It took ages to mark anything:There are 26 quality criteria (individual boxes with stuff in them) in this rubric, and hunting through a paper to try to work out whether a quality criteria was or wasn't fulfilled was super time consuming.

It caused me to have a narrow focus: I found that the impact of trying to work out if a criteria was or wasn't fulfilled meant that I was reading more for tick boxes than for meaning, expression, and scientific accuracy. It moved me away from the ideas behind a students' writing and towards this box ticking in a way that I really didn't like.

It didn't provide a sufficient level of detail: I found that the quality criteria weren't half as binary as I thought they'd be. Take for example 'Describes experimental procedure', well, every student did this to some degree, but some of them just didn't make sense, and some of them were exquisitely composed, yet I'm only supposed to assign a 1 or a 0 to this criteria. This really doesn't help anyone.

It would be pretty unhelpful for students in the task completion phase: What the heck does 'Evaluates errors in data' mean if you've never done it before.

It would be pretty unhelpful for students in the feedback phase: The idea is that if students are at one level of the rubric then they can simply look to the next level and say 'ok, well, to improve my mark, I'm aiming to that next 'square' now'. But in reality this suffers the same problem as in the previous dot point.

So, it didn't seem like this was going to be the best approach after all. Despite all my training I just couldn't se a way to make this marking approach a time efficient and supportive way to scaffold and assess my students. There had to be a better way.

Note: Maybe it was just because my rubric sucked? Well, whilst doing the Assessment for Teaching course we were directed to the website 'reliable rubrics', created by my lecturer. Since I wrote my rubric they've created a rubric for exactly the same physics assignment that I was creating mine for (available here). To my eye it still suffers from all the same challenges.

Hmm...How about work samples?

Turns out I had just had a parallel experience from which I could draw some lessons. A couple of weeks before I had dived into this rubric writing rabbit warren I had finished writing my Masters thesis. This was pretty much the same task in that I had to synthesise a whole heap of ideas into a format that I was unfamiliar with in a way that I'd never done before. When I hit this rubric road block, I thought back to how I'd tackled this similar challenge and realised that what I'd done was: find examples of high quality theses, read them, make notes about what made them great, and translate this into my own context and writing. Maybe I could do this for my student too? This could be summarised as providing work samples to students.

Since this time I've come across others (such as Dylan Wiliam, see technique 1 here) that suggest the same approach. So, this is what I settled on. Unfortunately there weren't any student work samples of a high enough quality that I could find, so I decided to write my own. And instead of simply giving students the work sample, I also wanted to deconstruct it for them in a way that they could easily pull out the key points. Here's how I did it (I did for all sections of the prac report, but I'll just share the intro here).

First this was to list the components that an introduction should include:

Then I broke each step down, explaining its purpose and giving examples. I also tried to explicitly point out the kind of language that I knew students would find it helpful to use (There's probably a better word than 'relational' here, but hey, I'm not an English teacher)

For some of the sections I also provided sentence starters. Here are examples for points 2 and 3 from the above checklist.

And finally, I put it all together in an example, clearly highlighting exactly how each of the bits fit together.
References are in a weird format because I was doing one step at a time and only scaffolded referencing after we'd had all the basics down.
So, how did the students find this as a scaffold? Bloody brilliant! Here's a heap of student work samples from their first crack at the report. I've bolded the sentence starters that they used, and I've underlined the ones in which the students varied a bit from the exact sentence starters that I provided (Keep in mind that around 50% of my class are English language learners, I think that for them this approach was particularly helpful).

The aim of the present investigation is to examine the effect of voltage on current flows in the electric circuit. The dependent variable in this investigation is the current which is dependent on the voltage ( independent variable ). This is an interesting topic to explore because the practice report is based on the voltage and current in the circuit.

The purpose of this experiment was to construct a simple circuit that contains an Ohmic resistor (resistor value may vary with each groups, 10 Ohms, 50 Ohms, 100 Ohms) to explore the impact on the current that flows through the circuit when different voltages are applied. This experiment is relevant to the topic that we are learning in class. By doing this experiment, we can get a better understanding of the relationship between voltage and current, whilst also applying an Ohmic resistor in the circuit.

The current investigation has been designed to explore whether the circuit's current is affected when the voltage of the circuit is altered. The independent variable of the experiment is the voltage applied to the circuit, while the dependent variable is the current of the circuit. This experiment is of particular interest because it shows how voltage and current go hand in hand with each other when there's a ohmic resistor involved. This is especially important because it gives a greater understanding of how electrical circuits work which can be of great use in daily life as they are practically found everywhere.

The experiment aims to investigate the relationship between potential difference, current and resistance, and examine how different voltages applied affect the total current, on a series circuit. This is a topic of interest given, the potential difference, current and resistance are incorporated in common appliances used everyday and therefore the findings, will help develop a deeper understanding of these concepts.

The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the impact of the voltages (the discrete independent variable) on the current (the continuous dependent variable) in the built circuit. Determining an answer to this question is important because this practical helps students to create their own circuit and find out the disproportion between the predicted and actual current depending on the different voltages.

The experiment sets out to investigate the impact of variable voltage on current that passed through Ohmic devices. This is a key question to investigate because the result of this experiment will stand as a solid and practical prove for the Ohmic Law V=IR, which is one of the most fundamental laws in our current field of study of electrical physic.

The purpose of the present investigation is to examine the impact of changing the resistance (the independent variable) on the current and the voltage of the circuit (the dependent variable). This experiment is of particular interest given because it helps us understands Ohm's law in action and determine the circuit with resistors.

This one is classic! The student didn't get that the numbers that I provided were for student reference only, so they included them in their report!

(1/2) The purpose of this current investigation is to explore the effects voltage(which is the independent variable) has on a current(which is the dependent variable) in the circuit.(4) this particular investigation is important because it is related to how voltage and current relate to each other and how they affect each other, also relating to Ohm's Law(V=IR).(5)

Another thing worth noting was that I spaced out these tasks throughout the year. The first task I got students to do was to perform an experiment that I'd designed and to write only the intro and methodology. Second up I got them to do another experiment and write up the intro, methodology, and results. Finally, I 'supported' them each to design their own experiments (though I did this very badly, will improve that this year), and got them to write up all elements of their prac report from start to finish. This also meant I could progressively create the guide, which was obviously a pretty time consuming task.

How the heck do I mark these things?

Thinking about the assessment of these reports in detail, I realised there were two levels at which I could give scaffolding and feedback, surface and deep structure. Surface structure includes stuff like: Does it sound science-y?; have they included all the steps?; etc. Deep structure is: Does their hypothesis make sense?; Have they referred to the correct scientific theories; etc. And it simply doesn't make sense to me to mark each of these structural levels in the same way. Furthermore, we have to give feedback on both levels. If we just give deep structure feedback then students will have good ideas but won't be able to express them well or in a way that accords with the conventions of a scientific report. If we just give surface structure feedback then they'll sound professional but they won't really be communicating ideas of any value. So let's look at each in turn.

Marking surface structure

Surface structure tricks people. It's tricks novice students when they're trying to categorise physics problems - Oh, these problems are all about cars and these ones are about planets , vs. These problems are all about conservation of momentum and these ones conservation of energy, (see Chi, Feltovich and Glaser, (1981)) and they're what tricks inexperienced teachers when they're marking student reports (Which Ben Rogers refers to in his aforementioned blog post).

Frankly, I can't think of anything more boring than marking surface structure. I simply don't want to go through a prac report and go through a tick list of whether or not students have or haven't defined their dependent and independent variables. Further to that, as I stated above in my rubric-critique, I don't feel like I can mark surface and deep structure at the same time. If I'm ticking boxes I can't follow the thread of a students' argument at the same time, and vice versa. So to mark surface and deep structure would require me to go through each assignment twice. Besides, anyone can mark surface structure.

Luckily, anyone can mark surface structure! So it pretty quickly became apparent to me that the the sensible way to do so was peer-marking. Peer marking kills a bunch of birds with one stone, it gives students repeated exposure to the key surface-structure elements that you want them to produce, it gets them talking (if you do it in pairs or small groups) about what does and doesn't qualify as each surface structure element, it gives them opportunities to see more student work samples, it builds community, and it saves the teacher a bunch of time. Here's how I did it.

Group students in marking pairs (different from prac pairs/groups) as follows.

Then each prac report is printed out, de-identified, and placed face down around the room (with the prac group number written clearly on the back). Then students are given a marking sheet, like so (has enough space to mark 3 groups, I just screen shotted half the page)

Thus, each report was marked on surface structure three times by three different groups, and I determined their final surface structure mark by averaging these three results.

I then also gave students an opportunity to provide qualitative feedback to each other, via the following template:

I wanted to see if students like this whole process so I asked them about it. Here are some of their feedback comments:

And here's the kicker!

The comment immediately above is a paradigmatic example of Dylan Wiliam's truism " When students receive both scores and comments, the first thing they look at is their score, and the second thing they look at is...someone else's score" (reference)

Much of this student-feedback (no-one complained, they all liked it) covered things I'd expected: good to see others' work, good to familiarise oneself with the structure of the report. But I was surprised by the number of students who thought that this was more 'fair' or less biased than if a teacher marked it!

The first time we did it as a class I modelled the task for them on the board with a de-identified report then set them off. By the third prac report that we were doing this for, they were totally used to the process and were able to complete the task totally independently.

I was very happy with how this process went and will be continuing it into this year also. The only modification I'm going to make is to allow students to contest a mark if they think it's incorrect.

Marking deep structure

I'm not happy with how this part of the prac marking went, and this is the portion that I'm looking to modify the most going into this year. It also changed each time I marked each report, and, in all honesty, it was messy. Here's what I did in the first iteration:

Cut and paste examples of good and not-so good work into a single document then go through that document as a class, highlighting these things.

Supplement this whole class feedback with a summary of the things that students should avoid in future.

Get students to reflect upon how they plan on improving their reports next time.

Here's an example of one of these reflections, written onto a scaffold that I provided to all students:

As you can see, this basically amounts to something slightly more specific than 'I'll do better next time', but it isn't super convincing that they will do better next time, nor does it express whether or not they know how to do better next time. Additionally, most of the students had lost this sheet by the time we came to write our next report!

In the final iteration I tried writing a whole heap of personalised feedback to each student regarding the deep structure of their report. HOWEVER! In doing so I broke the (or at least one of the) cardinal rules of feedback: Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor (point 4. of Carl Hendrick's awesome summary of key principles of teaching here).And I frankly felt pretty deflated because I knew that students would just look at their mark and pretty much ignore this feedback all together anyway...

Doing better next time?

So, how to mark deep structure this year?

Well, the main thing is to make sure that my feedback is more work for my students than it is for me. The way I'm planning on doing it this year is to make students submit in two phases. Their first submission will be peer-marked on surface structure, and I'll give detailed feedback regarding the deep structure and how the report can be improved. I was thinking that this 'phase 1 marking' will constitute 50% or so of their final mark. Then I'll give students an opportunity to take this away, re-work their reports based upon the feedback, then report to me the changes that they've made. But, I've still got a bunch of things to work out in terms of the specifics. Here are my questions for myself (and anyone who feels like having a crack at answering them):

How do I want the final version of these reports presented to me? Will I read the whole things again? Will I get them to submit them and only look at the sections that students have re-worked? Should I get students to highlight their re-worked sections in a different colour to make it easier to reference? Or should I get them to present to me orally about this final reworked version (I'm leaning towards the latter).

How will I grade these final versions. Will I have a bunch of criteria with a mark from 1-5 (or a percentage chosen by me, in 5% increments). Or, rather than criteria, should I just assign percentages to each of the sections (e.g., Intro is 75%, Methodology 85%, etc). Or can I just give a global mark based upon 'the vibe of it?'.

Should I use comparative judgment here? I'm tempted, and I feel like it could work well. But I also want to give students an opportunity to explicitly reflect upon the feedback given in relation to the first iteration of their prac report. I feel like the comparative judgment approach could be a bit too general and wouldn't reinforce the specific feedback that I've given earlier. I'm also really wary about marking entire prac reports via comparative judgment. Some reports will have a really good intro but a poor conclusion, or vice versa. Putting two of these side by side I just don't see how I could say 'x is better than y' or 'y is better than x' without a more structured approach, especially if they're on different topics. Should I be grading each section via comparative judgment? But then, that probably going to get real messy and kind of defeat the purpose.

Could I just use comparative judgment earlier on in the piece? Do I even need this two-stage marking? Is there any way that comparative judgments can support the kind of deep structure feedback that's necessary for science reports, especially when students are all writing on different topics (I can't see how this would be possible, but I'm very happy to be proved wrong. I'll note that I haven't read Daisy Christodoulou's book on assessment as yet, but I will as soon as it comes out on Kindle, I really dislike paper books).

Is Daisy Christodoulou's book on assessment ever going to come out on Kindle?

If I do go down the 'final assessment as oral presentation' route, how can I do this well? (I've literally never come across a blog post or article that talks about this, though I haven't looked very hard. Where should I be looking?)

What are my blind spots?

So, at this point more questions than answers, but I feel that the basic deep structure assessment approach (two-stages) is going to be better than what I did last year, will prompt more student thinking, and will generate a better end product. At this point I'm leaning towards a simple template (something like the template below, with comments diligently filled in), that can be used both for the first stage marking/feedback, and for the second stage, which I'd really like to do as a discussion with the student.

So, that's where the process is at. If you've got questions, comments, thoughts, reflections, or advice, please share them in the comments below, or via twitter (@ollie_lovell) or email. I'd appreciate any suggestions as to how to improve the process : )

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Student science reports 1.0: From scaffolding to assessment - ollie lovell

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This is a record of the how and why behind my first attempt at supporting students to write high quality prac reports. This post has been prompted by: Ben Rogers' interesting post on the same topic, the fact that I've been meaning to write about this for ages, and the fact that it's now time ...

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How do we know pupils are making progress? Part 2: The curriculum – David Didau

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In my last post, I set out the problems with making predictions about students' progress by drawing a 'flight path' between KS2 ad KS4. This posts begins to discuss what we should do instead. The solution is rooted in addressing three interlinked aspects; curriculum, assessment and instruction. In order to make a meaningful statement about where students are right now and what they need to do next, we need to be very clear about where we are hoping they'll end up.

This post will focus on issues of curriculum.

The main point of the post is that the quality of assessment and instruction cannot exceed the quality of the curriculum. As Black and Wiliam set out in Assessment and Classroom Learning, teachers require, "a sound model of students' progression in the learning of the subject matter, so that the criteria that guide the formative strategy can be matched to students trajectories in learning." The curriculum is a model of what we want students to know and where we want them to go. There are, of course, a host of other factors to consider when designing a curriculum, but, if we want to make judgements about progress and attainment then we need a clear understanding of progression within subject disciplines.

Of course, when planning a curriculum we must acknowledge the tension between breadth and focus. Of course students need to make progress towards achieving in a particular qualification, but that examination ought never be the focus of 5 years of education.

The problem of being constrained by exam specifications is compounded by the vogue for 'planning backwards' from GCSEs or A levels to determine what should be taught at Key Stage 3. Of course, when planning a curriculum we must acknowledge the tension between breadth and focus.

When we plan backwards, our attention is on the build up of a narrow set of knowledge and skill, but when planning forwards we more likely to consider the curriculum in all its messy breadth before later narrowing our focus to the content of specific exams. This allows us to make sure the curriculum include what Christine Counsell has called the 'hinterland' of subject disciplines - areas that are not directly examined but give students the knowledge base to think better.

What this means is that we should know what it means to get better at maths, French, geography, music, English, science etc. Or, put another way, what is the progression model for each subject? In Devising Learning Progressions, Leahy and Wiliam discuss learning hierarchies and learning progressions as being synonymous, but I don't this is necessarily the case. Instead, by looking at mark schemes for mathematics, we can see that progression is much clearer in some subjects: students either know how to solve the problems they're set, or they don't. Progress is limited by what they know; if they're struggling to answer questions on trigonometry then they clearly need additional instruction on that aspect of the course; if they're getting lots of algebra questions wrong, then you can be pretty sure there's going to be an algebra shaped conceptual gap in their knowledge base. Now, as Leahy and Wiliam point out that the hierarchical nature of progress can sometimes seem inevitable:

it seems inconceivable that someone could master multiplication before addition. It might be possible to define multiplication in some other way than as repeated addition, but it is hard to imagine how one could prevent a child from discovering addition before they reached the level of maturity needed to understand an abstract definition of multiplication. A learning hierarchy of this kind could therefore be seen as natural. (p.2)

But, other 'natural' hierarchies are more the result of habit and tradition. For instance, multiplication is almost always taught as a precursor to teaching division despite the evidence that division is often conceptually easier for children to understand. Part of effective curriculum design must be to determine which hierarchies are natural and which are not.

In English literature, for instance, GCSE mark schemes point to a model of progression which is hierarchical and actively unhelpful. We get statements such as "convincing, critical analysis and exploration" at the top of the hierarchy to "clear understanding" to "simple, explicit comments". It's then up to individual examiners to decide whether a particular student's work meets these vague criteria. Basing a curriculum on this sort of thing would make it impossible to assess where students are now and how to help them get where we want them to be.

So, in order to solve the problem of progression across the curriculum, maybe we need to make English a bit more like maths. By that, what I mean is that we should determine in advance what students will need to know in order to be able to do well on an assessment and ensure that these things are taught in such a way that allow students to make progress.

The implicit assumption made by English literature GCSE mark schemes is that it doesn't matter what you study as long as you can show evidence of "convincing, critical analysis and exploration". Clearly, this is not quite true as the course will also specify content so, it's no use being able to convincingly and critically explore the Harry Potter novels, you have to demonstrate your critical analysis on a Shakespeare play and a Victorian novel. The trouble is, when schools 'plan backwards' from GCSE to determine what to teach in Key Stage 3, all too often they ignore the specified content and instead design their curriculum around opportunities to critically analyse any old text.

No matter how hard we try to nail down precisely what it is we intend students to learn, our attempts will be open to a depressingly wide range of interpretations. This is hard enough in a subject like maths, let alone English. Consider the objective that students should "Compare two fractions to identify the larger". Does that mean they can work out whether ⅝ is greater than ⅞? Or whether ¾ is greater than ⅘? Or could it mean that they are able to compare the relative values of ⅜ and ⅗? As should be clear, each of these comparisons fulfil the objective but the third comparison is very much more challenging than the first.

As Leahy and Wiliam point out, "the level of granularity needed by teachers to effectively use learning hierarchies in their own work is generally at a far finer level than those used in educational objectives." They argue that the work of identifying a progression model must be carried out locally, at the level of individual schools and departments for it to have any real meaning. They are also clear that thinking about progression must be empirical; that is, our assertions about what aspects of the curriculum students struggle with more than others must be rooted in objective data.

In his researchED talk, "Fundamental Measurement for Schools," Deep Ghataura, neatly summarises these conclusions by stating that learning progressions must be:

Inherently empirical - based on how children actually learn the thing

Inherently local - what we focus on is our choice

This takes us back to the problem we started with in the last post. Currently, progression data based on a flawed prediction of where students should be at a particular point in the curriculum is garbage. The question we will turn to in Part 3 of this series is how we can better measure students' attainment in order to make better inferences about the progress they are making.

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How do we know pupils are making progress? Part 2: The curriculum

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In my last post, I set out the problems with making predictions about students' progress by drawing a 'flight path' between KS2 ad KS4. This posts begins to discuss what we should do instead. The solution is rooted in addressing three interlinked aspects; curriculum, assessment and instruction.

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One of the best things we've done this year is introduce self-quizzing - an idea I took from reading Joe Kirby's chapter in 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way' entitled 'Homework as Revision'. I thought, after the reaction to a couple of tweets I've posted about it, I'd write this post explaining our approach to self-quizzing homework and share a few examples.

Not only does retrieval practice homework complement our approach to homework (activities which have value but require no marking) but we've also seen students' knowledge improve as well as their confidence. Our girls really know their stuff - we know they're learning and retaining the information on the knowledge organisers we've given them because most lessons begin with a 5-a-Day retrieval practice starter and we're seeing more and more students achieving 5/5. Students' confidence is improving too because they can see how much more they now know - unlike so many things in English, it's measurable.

We provide all students in KS3 and KS4 a Knowledge Organiser for the text they are studying. These set out the key information that we want every student to know. It's important to say here that the KOs are not about setting a limit for what students know about a text but, instead, we use them to set out the knowledge it is most important for students not to forget. The information on the KO is that which we want all students to be able to recall with ease which will free up working memory when they are tackling challenging skills such as writing an essay on a text.

We have given every student an exercise book which is just for their self-quizzing homework and we expect every student from year 7 up to year 11 to spend a minimum of 30 minutes every week self-quizzing on their Knowledge Organiser. We would expect to look in their self-quizzing book and see a minimum of a page of evidence of them self-quizzing every week. This is something as a teacher I can check in a few minutes at the start or end of a lesson by asking students to open up their self-quizzing book and quickly walking around the room to check it has been done. Students' progress is visible to them as they flick through their book and see what they could recall at the start and what they can now recall.

In the past, we gave students Knowledge Organisers and just asked them to revise from them and then we tested their knowledge with our 5-a-Day starters. However, it soon became clear that students didn't know the best way to revise this information and would often just read their Knowledge Organiser and do nothing with it. The self-quizzing requires them to recall the information from memory which not only highlights to them what they do or don't know but also strengthens their ability to recall that information.

When introducing the self-quizzing homework to students I explicitly modelled how to self-quiz. I turned my copy of the knowledge organiser over and then wrote down as much as I could from it as accurately as I could. I then flipped the knowledge organiser back over and checked the accuracy of what I had written down. Using a different coloured pen I corrected any errors and filled in any gaps.

Our students have really taken to self-quizzing; they see the value in it. One of my year 11 students is already on her 7th self-quizzing exercise book! I've also had a couple of really positive revision lessons where I've given my year 11s an A3 blank knowledge to fill with as much as they can recall - they weirdly really enjoy those lessons! There's something inherently satisfying in self-quizzing.

Here's a few examples of students' self-quizzing homework:

Here's a couple of my year 11s filling in a blank A3 'An Inspector Calls' Knowledge Organiser with all they could remember and then making corrections/filling in gaps in a different coloured pen:

Link to our KOs for KS4 ('An Inspector Calls', 'Macbeth' and 'Jekyll and Hyde') here.

Link to blank KOs for KS4 here.

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One of the best things we've done this year is introduce self-quizzing - an idea I took from reading Joe Kirby's chapter in 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way' entitled 'Homework as Revision'. I thought, after the reaction to a couple of tweets I've posted about it, I'd write this post explaining our approach...

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What to do after a mock? Assessment, sampling, inferences and more – A Chemical Orthodoxy

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This much I know about…how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum – johntomsett

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I have been a teacher for 30 years, a Headteacher for 15 years and, at the age of 54, this much I know about how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum .

My friend and collaborator, Tom Sherrington, recently said this of a school's curriculum: " Your curriculum defines your school. Own it. Shape it. Celebrate it." His sentiments have stuck with me these past 24 hours and prompted me to share a moment of teaching magic which exemplifies why we do what we do at Huntington School.

We are an old-fashioned, stand-alone local authority comprehensive school of 1,527 students. We serve our local community, which, in socio-economic terms, is diverse. Our students come from the full range of socio-economic backgrounds and arrive at our school with the full range of prior attainment. We teach a great deal of our lessons in mixed prior attainment groups because we find that mixed prior attainment groupings serve our most vulnerable students best.

Currently, however, we have a small group of Year 7s in a nurture group for English. That group has an English lesson for at least one hour every day. We have a curriculum for that nurture group that includes Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not a modern English version of the Scottish play, but a full blown study of the original text. We do that because, in a state comprehensive school we believe that all our students should access "the best that has been thought and said". Those nurture class students' counterparts down the road at the renowned York independent schools will be studying the Bard, so why shouldn't they?

And so it came to pass, on the Friday before February half-term, that I covered that Year 7 nurture group. They were in the computer room, aided by two of our teaching assistants, Libby and Jack, typing up their essays: "To what extent does the character Macbeth change during the play?"

Their teacher is one of our deputy head teachers, erstwhile head of English and one of the best English teachers you could wish for; she had told the class I would be taking them. Every time one of the class, let's call her Mary, saw me in the corridor, she asked me whether I was really going to teach them. Even though I always replied in the affirmative, the next time I saw her she would ask the same question. We both got unbearably excited by the prospect.

The day duly arrived. I hadn't taught Macbeth for a while. I wanted to begin the lesson with a bang! I know (or thought I knew) the first scene by heart. I got them to swivel 180° on their seats, away from their PCs, to face me. I stood in the centre of the room. I got them to imagine we were on a windswept heath. It was raining, the lightning was crashing down and the thunder rolling around our ears. I began, loudly and dramatically, to recite the opening scene..."When shall we three meet again?"

I swung round, getting louder. The ICT teacher in the next room began looking through the door to see what the hell was going on. "In thunder lightning or in rain?" It was at this point that doubt began to set in. As I roared the next line, I was thinking "What the hell comes next?" "When the hurlyburly's done..." And I stopped for more than a beat because I had lost my rhythm and my banging start to the lesson was about to fade into a whimper.

I looked around the room, desperately, when I saw Mary up out of her seat. She caught my eye and, barely able to contain herself, she yelled "When the battle's lost and won, That'll be ere the set of sun." Oh my goodness! I glanced at Libby and Jack who were transfixed in utter delight. Mary carried on and the whole class finished with a rousing, "Fair is foul and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air!"

Now, I recount this primarily because, in a career in the classroom which spans over three decades, it was one of the most magical moments. But I also record it here because it is about Huntington School. It is about putting great teachers with the students who need great teachers most (none of that would have happened without my amazing colleague), it is about deciding that what is good for the highest starters in curriculum terms is good for everyone, and it is about creating a culture where we educate children for the pure joy of it.

So, Tom, we own our curriculum. We have shaped it based on what is best for our students. And, here, and in many other places, we celebrate what our challenging, rich curriculum can do for girls like Mary.

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This much I know about...how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum

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I have been a teacher for 30 years, a Headteacher for 15 years and, at the age of 54, this much I know about how we own, we shape and we celebrate our curriculum. My friend and collaborator, Tom Sh...

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The 6 Skills part 2: The Three Part Explanation – TomNeedham

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Slow revision – slow teaching – Geogteacher's Blog