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Kitchen Pedagogy 1:1 You Establish What You Establish

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Kitchen Pedagogy 1:2  Ask more questions.

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Dylan Wiliam on PPPB - Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce

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Effective questioning in the classroom can make or break your lesson. These questioning techniques are ones that I use time and again in my primary school lessons; the questioning examples given are drawn from maths but the principles apply across the curriculum.
I am a Key Stage 2 teacher, but I've seen secondary colleagues use similar questioning techniques in the classroom in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.

What is questioning in the classroom?

Effective questioning is an essential teaching skill that enables the educator to check pupils' understanding, broaden and deepen the topic under discussion, and model clear thinking skills, and speaking and listening skills.

Why do we need effective questioning techniques in the classroom?

"Good learning starts with questions, not answers." Guy Claxton, Professor in Education and Director of CLIO Development, University of Bristol.

And better questions tend to deepen and facilitate the learning process in the limited amount of time you have with your students, so let's make the most of them.

Here's are the top 3 reasons I believe in the importance of teacher questions.

1. Firstly, if we remember our assessment for learning training, we will know that questioning in the classroom in the classroom is a powerful formative assessment tool. Executed properly, higher order questions from the classroom teacher gives the teacher the opportunity to gauge student understanding of the topic as well as enabling students to actively participate in their own learning.

2. Secondly, a well thought out questioning strategy can help to build the relationship between teacher and pupil by encouraging engagement and improving verbal fluency of key concepts whether in primary maths or any other subject.

3. Thirdly, good questions also lead to good class discussions, better student interactions, and ultimately, the shared understanding that is part and parcel of the learning experience.

See also: How To Learn Maths

List of the 9 most effective classroom questioning techniques

This article will guide you through the 9 key questioning skills that, together with other teaching strategies, will have the most impact on your teaching and your classroom practice.

The majority of these 9 are open questions; they require longer, more thought out answers than those that only need a simple, short response (closed questions).

This means these types of questions usually won't have either a correct answer or a wrong answer - an idea pupils may need some time to fully understand and accept.

1. Are you sure?

Developing pupils' metacognition and critical thinking skills are crucial if we want them to be less reliant on the teacher as the person who 'knows'.

If a pupil is used to asking a teacher 'Is this right?' and getting a response then they are likely to not have checked their answer, not gained a deep enough understanding of the concept they are learning or have their need for affirmation so ingrained over years of schooling that they simply have to ask.

Asking 'Are you sure?' with a questioning tone will instantly flip the tables and create blind panic amongst your whole class. Especially when you ask the question as often when they are right as wrong. Even more so if you follow it up with 'Well okay, if you are sure...' or 'If it makes sense to you...'

Now, obviously blind panic is not what we are aiming for, but it is a stage they will need to briefly enter until they get used to this and the other questions in the post.

Soon, especially if you encourage a growth mindset in your primary school, they will pick up the idea that they really have to know if they are right or not and crucially, why. This leads us into a key follow-up question...

Other relevant articles

2. How do you know?

To be able to answer 'Are you sure?' confidently, pupils will have needed to have checked their calculation/explanation themselves, more and more often before they have even given their initial response. Asking 'How do you know?' ensures this by asking them to share their reasoning with you, a group or the whole class.

This question is also a great way to really develop students' thinking skills; they need to be clear not only that they have the right answer, but that they arrived at it by following the right method.

The result of this increased metacognition is children will be more reliant on themselves (and each other) for checking their understanding, method and answer.

3. What do you notice?

Alongside metacognition, developing pupils' ability to generalise can reap huge rewards. In other words, encouraging pupils to be mindful and look for patterns within and outside the mathematical area currently being learnt. This also helps their number sense.

Asking pupils 'What do you notice?' when showing 2 calculations or problems at the same time can help children to see what is similar and different. It's a key question when building procedural variation.

It also uncovers where a pupil's understanding is, showing whether their current line of thinking is relevant to the current learning, in turn enabling you to nudge them towards more relevant thinking where necessary.

In a lesson on exchanging you could ask the following question.

4. What's the same and what's different?

If you want a similar type of question that serves the same purpose as 'What do you notice?' but is more confining in its responses, asking 'What's the same and what's different about these 2 calculations / problems / statements?' will push that conversation on with you still guiding the direction.

5. Can you convince me?

This is another question that can help develop generalisation. Asking individuals or small groups to work together to convince you of something develops their depth of understanding and ability to reason.

Here are some maths question examples:

'Convince me that subtraction is the opposite of addition'

'Convince me that all multiples of 8 are multiples of 2'

Flipping around the previous question's example, 'convince me that you always need to exchange when you subtract a 2 digit number (subtrahend) where the ones are greater than the initial number (minuend)'

6. Is there another way?

'Is there another way to find 25% of £80?'

'Is there another way to work out 47 + 28?'

'Is there another way you could have used to find all the possibilities?'

These kinds of questions help children who have not used a modeled or shared method realise they are not 'wrong' because their problem solving method is different (they may be less or more efficient). It will also highlight to children that in Mathematics, as in life, there are many ways to skin a cat. It can also be used as a general challenge activity for pupils.

7. Is it always, sometimes, or never true?

This is a great higher-order thinking question to further develop children's ability to generalise and, dependent on the specific question used, their number sense. As with all the questions, it develops reasoning skills and can deepen understanding.

For more always sometimes never questions download this free resource of 108 questions to help children get to greater depth

'Is it always, sometimes or never true that you should round and adjust when you subtract 9 from a number?'

8. Can you imagine?

Building pupils' ability to visualise things without actually doing it themselves helps in a number of disciplines such as Computing or Science as well as mathematics. Looking specifically at mathematics, it helps pupils understand problems and raises their ability to reason with greater understanding.

So in a word problem, if you ask a pupil to imagine the train pulling up at that station at that time and then continuing on its journey to the next station, it can help contextualise an abstract time problem.

This type of questioning in the classroom is also a handy way to nudge children away from requiring concrete apparatus when you think they are ready, for example, 'Can you imagine exchanging that ten for ten ones?'

9. I think I understand what you mean, are you saying?

Okay, so our final question is more of a leading question than an open-ended question, but it is still a very valuable tool. You will always find times where a pupil's ability to verbalise their reasoning is not quite at the same stage as their actual thinking and thought process.

Dependent on the situation and the pupil, you may find it supports them, your discussion or the pace of the lesson in general by reflecting on the students response by saying

'I think I understand what you mean, are you saying you would always round and adjust because you know that 9 will always be next to 10 so you will always be able to do the same adjustment afterwards?'

In other words, build on their reasoning, making it sharper or more concise so that the group or whole class can develop their understanding and the pupil giving the explanation can internalise their understanding further.

There are several variations on this question, such as '

You've really tried hard to explain that... are you saying...' or

'It's a really difficult thing to explain, you've helped me understand it I think. Is this what you mean...'

So there you have it. Almost 9 questions that when used across school will significantly impact on teaching and learning and ultimately, enable all pupils, high and low ability students, to achieve with the National Curriculum, SATs and in using mathematics in their general lives.

Don't rush the answers when questioning in the classroom!

One final piece of advice if you're new to these questioning strategies - think about how you're going to be handling the answers to your questions too.

Give students time to think about their answers, prompt them for when you're looking for a long or a short answer, encourage the entire class to think about their own answers using their mini whiteboards to share their own thoughts.

These are the higher order skills from Bloom's Taxonomy at work here, so it can take more time than usual. This is the learning process in action!

Read more excellent teaching and professional development articles

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9 Effective Questioning Strategies in Maths - Third Space Learning

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Effective questioning in the classroom is a key part of good teaching and learning. Here are the 9 best questioning techniques to use.

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Jay Altman describes a lesson taught by the maths teacher in Boston whose students achieved the best value-added scores in the state. Students entered, listened, practised, wrote exit tickets and left. Surprised, Altman asked what the teacher was doing differently: the teacher responded that he examined the exit tickets and helped any student who had struggled to master the lessons's content. That afternoon.

Imitating a feedback loop achieved in a Boston charter proved challenging in a British comprehensive. But the fundamental idea - frequent assessment of student understanding and rapid action - is incredibly powerful. Moreover, introducing exit seems to have a transformative effect on teachers, modifying their sense of students' understanding and hence of the best actions they can take. After attending to careful setting of objectives, introducing exit tickets may be the most powerful change a teacher can make.

In discussing mastery learning (a relatively well-evidenced approach promoted by the EEF Toolkit), the authors mention it entails breaking:

"learning content into units with clearly specified objectives which are pursued until they are achieved".

This approach requires some frequent measure of exit tickets, like exit tickets. Key features needed are:

"setting clear objectives and providing feedback... a high level of success, at least 80%, should be required before pupils move on".

As to the transformative nature of exit tickets, in discussing feedback, one of its two highest-rated strategies, the EEF mentions that:

Feedback redirects or refocuses either the teacher's or the learner's actions to achieve a goal, by aligning effort and activity with an outcome.

More fundamentally, exit tickets provide a straight answer to a simple question we should be desperate to answer each lesson: what did students learn?

Having discussed, recommended and trained new teachers to use exit tickets, I felt it was time to write about them. Most recently, having worked on a professional development course with some great English teachers adopting and refining exit tickets, I wanted to summarise the training I provided, share example exit tickets from various subjects, and share some of what we learned.

Simple, simple planning

At simplest, a lesson could be planned by creating:

1. Lesson objectives

2. An exit ticket

3. Teaching to get between 1 and 2.

For example:

The strength of this approach is that we are pushed to plan from objectives, rather than from activities. We shift from asking:

"What will I have students do this lesson?"

to:

"What do I want students to know by the end of this lesson?"

Instead of thinking 'I'll hold a debate', 'students will make posters', or 'we'll write an essay', our choices derive from what we want to achieve and how we will measure it. (This, in turn, rests on having a carefully planned curriculum and scheme of work).

Creating objectives and exit tickets is more important than the body of the lesson: the exit ticket will allow you to check if your approach worked. As Doug Lemov puts it in Teach Like a Champion 2.0:

You'll know how effective your lesson was, as measured by how well they learned it, not how well you thought you taught it."

Understanding these ideas was my way of finally acting upon something I'd heard many times from teacher trainers: 'Give teachers a piece of paper to plan a lesson from. The effective ones will start writing at the bottom.'
A prerequisite for good exit tickets: good objectives

A good exit ticket is tightly aligned to the objectives of the lesson and the curriculum. So a necessary prerequisite is a well-framed lesson objective, which:

Focuses on the curriculum

Uses economy of language

Has a specific, measurable aim

This also forces us to confront the vagueness of our goals. Take the line below from the Swedish national curriculum, which expects pupils to be familiar with 'Numbers in fraction and decimal form, and their use in everyday situations'. In reality, it is a little more complicated:

Carefully choosing objectives therefore includes clearly setting out what level of understanding we expect students to reach.

In training teachers, I advocate a simple set of objectives, based on bronze, silver and gold. You can take your pick how you choose to formulate them though, as long as they are clear and specific. This also entails artificially narrowing fascinating topics into chunks which can be taught in a lesson. For example:

Some teachers protest at this point that a single lesson incorporates many different goals and ideas, and that these can't possibly be reduced to one objective: 'Students will be learning Act I Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, debating themes of the play and writing a letter summarising their thoughts'. The implication of this range of aims is that no one assessment can possibly capture everything students are learning in one lesson.

I'd contend that if we want students to get better at any of these three objectives, we should prioritise one. Muddling through - spending ten minutes each on three different aspects of the lesson - and failing to check students' success on any objective limits what students can learn and leaves us ignorant of what they have learned. Better to let students concentrate on understanding the scene this lesson, and focus on the conventions of letter-writing next lesson. Better to maintain simplicity and check our success.
Many teachers I've worked with on this have noted that focusing on exit tickets actually led them to spend much more time formulating lesson objectives - this is one reason why I think focusing on exit tickets can be transformative for teachers.
Designing good exit tickets

With a clear objective - or with the goal of refining objectives over time - we can design exit tickets. An exit ticket will make a simple, 3-5 minute task for the end of the lesson, which will tell us whether students have understood the lesson's objectives. A good exit ticket must:

Include all aspects of the lesson

Differentiate accurately between levels of understanding

Be swift to answer

Be swift to mark

In this light, I try to avoid exit tickets like 'Write 3 things you've learned, 2 things you already knew, 1 thing you'd like to find out'. The looseness of the first question makes it unlikely that you'll find out whether students understood the key aspects of the lesson.

In discussion, our group of English teachers repeatedly debated the extent to which structure is helpful in exit tickets. I think there's merit in offering hints as to the kind of response you expect: 'Include three points from the text in your response'. On the other hand, in my own work using exit tickets in history I've tended to use open questions like 'How did the Tudor kings increase their power?' to help students learn how to approach history questions. So perhaps the answer is to gradually remove structure over time.

Teachers were unanimous that limiting space for writing helped students respond in a focused way - and would encourage other teachers to use them. In the same spirit, formulating a single question incorporating the whole lesson, or two or three sums or grammar points, makes exit tickets manageable and markable.

Whether an exit ticket is a separate slip of paper, a paragraph or set of answers in an exercise book is a matter of taste and convenience: it certainly shouldn't add more work to the lesson. So a teacher may choose one paragraph of a piece of extended writing, or a particular question students have answered, and treat it as an exit ticket.

Examples of exit tickets

Below are example exit tickets I've used in training in maths, biology, physics, English language and literature. Some of them are in subjects I've never taught, but I found so few examples online, I thought they might prove useful. If you can point me towards better collections, please do. All seek to exemplify the simplicity of an exit ticket and the clear links to objectives.

How best to respond to exit tickets?

In training teachers, I have moved towards fewer techniques, more focus on implementation and more practice. Carefully-designed exit tickets just leave you with 100 or 150 slips of paper. Kate Allam described coming to see exit tickets more as aids to planning the next lesson than assessments of the previous one; Rowan Pearson analogised exit tickets to tuning forks, not the end of one lesson, or the beginning of the next, exit tickets pinch the two together.

So how to pinch the two lessons together. On looking through exit tickets, it may be that:

a) All students got the answer right: recycle the exit tickets - students have 'got it', you can move on, the exit tickets are no longer needed.

b) All students got the answer wrong: recycle the exit tickets - students haven't 'got it', you will need to reteach.

c) Some students got it right, some got it wrong (the most likely outcome): you could

1. Briefly revise key points in a starter.

2. Share a model student answer and discuss what makes it good.

3. Share a partial student answer and improve it together.

4. RAG mark the exit tickets and have students revise or extend their work accordingly.

5. Sit down with those students who've struggled at an appropriate part of the lesson.

6. Group students according to the task which is the most suitable next step.

7. Pair students with answers at different levels and ask them to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Whatever you choose to do, it shouldn't take very long. Of the options above, number 6, grouping students by task, is likely to prove onerous, and I'd be unlikely to do it.

Whatever your preferences, it seems important to be:

Utilitarian - seeking the greatest good for the greatest number

Opportunist - picking up ideas and misconceptions as you find them

Efficient - keeping things simple and brief

Mastery-oriented - seeking to get every student to a key level of understanding

If you choose to RAG mark the exit tickets, you can also use this to track how well students are doing over time - either with a particular aspect of learning, or over time. As Kate Allam noted with enthusiasm, it sounds like extra work, but you're likely to reap the rewards.

The other aspect which I emphasise in training is the importance of being upbeat and positive when returning to the last lesson's content - even if students really struggled. Going back to the previous lesson is not a punishment, for you or for students - it is a chance to improve and to understand fully.

The link with hinge questions

I'm baffled now, belatedly, as to why I started improving my teaching using hinge questions, not exit tickets. Hinge questions are amazing, but they are spectacularly hard to use: you have to respond to what you have learned about student understanding on the spot. Exit tickets give you 24 hours breathing space to work out what students have understood and plan accordingly. I've come to see hinge questions as identical to exit tickets, just pulled earlier in the learning process and shaped even more narrowly around specific misconceptions. I now see exit tickets are 'entry level' assessment and hinge tickets as the next step once exit tickets are working well.

Against exit tickets...

There are two obvious complaints about exit tickets I'd like to head off here:

This can be a lot of marking (although as the options above suggest, it need not be). I was struck by Jo Facer's recent, superb post described loving marking and her learning to stop entirely. It's a compelling approach, but I'd argue that the essence of what Jo is doing is aligned to what I'm trying to describe here: she reads students' books once or twice a week:

As I read, I make notes: spellings lots are getting wrong, things they're all doing well at, and the main issues they need to improve. I note down anyone whose paragraph is amazing to reward with merits or show the class; I note down anyone whose work is messy to give a demerit to."

Examining exit tickets is just the same as what Jo is advocating - the important thing is that, for limited time costs, the teacher know what students are understanding and where they're struggling. I like exit tickets, and I suspect they are more palatable in schools than not marking, but the key thing is the engagement with student work as an aid to planning.

David Didau has repeatedly contended that all forms of Assessment for Learning are invalid, since we can never really know how much students understand. It's quite true that knowing something at the end of a lesson does not mean we will know it for all time: we forget what we learn rapidly, and we must plan for this, as I've discussed here. Far better, however, to know what students understood in the lesson - however fleeting that may be - than not to check at all.

The last word on exit tickets...

Rowan Pearson described half a term working on exit tickets as having converted him, from seeing them as "gimmicky add-ons", "quite faddy and an accountability measure", to something "central to the lesson" that you can "use in your week-to-week planning".

I have discussed the value and importance of exit tickets in much greater detail in Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice.

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Using exit tickets to assess and plan: 'The tuning fork of teaching'

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Jay Altman describes a lesson taught by the maths teacher in Boston whose students achieved the best value-added scores in the state. Students entered, listened, practised, wrote exit tickets and left. Surprised, Altman asked what the teacher was doing differently: the teacher responded that he examined the exit tickets and helped any student who had struggled to master the lessons's content.

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

Implementing feedback successfully will require:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This post is based on a talk I gave at ResearchEd in Rugby. The paper in question is Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction published in American Educator in 2012, downloadable in full as a pdf here:

I first came across if after seeing Oliver Caviglioli's superb graphic summary for How2 - available here:

My admiration for Rosenshine is largely informed by my experience working with teachers in various schools and colleges where I've been trying to engage people with research in order to support them to improve their practice. For me, it is the best, most clear and comprehensive guide to evidence-informed teaching there is.

Here are some of the reasons:

It resonates for teachers of all subjects and contexts - because it focuses on aspects of teaching that are pretty much universal: questioning, practice, building knowledge. There are good examples from English and Maths lessons but other teachers could easily extrapolate to their own subject specific issues.

It makes direct links from research to practice - each of the 10 sections are written in two parts: Research Findings and then In The ClassRoom. The paper is fully referenced for future follow-up.

It does an excellent job in helping teachers to link practice to cognitive psychology, supporting the formation of a sound theory of action - that mental model teachers need providing a link between their actions and the learning process. There are multiple explanatory references to ideas about memory and cognitive load theory. For each practical strategy, there is an underpinning model based in evidence.

It has teacher-centred authenticity- it feels like Rosenshine knows what really goes on. The research is often based on linking classroom observations to student outcomes, and the examples given show a strong understanding of the real things teachers do.

The simple language comparing 'teachers who were more effective or more successful' with 'teachers who were less successful' is persuasive. It's not as crude as saying 'good vs bad' - the language lays a path to improvement from less successful to more successful. Who wouldn't want to be in the group of 'more effective teachers'?! The tone of the article feels helpful rather than judgemental - which is pretty hard to achieve.

There are four very clear strands that run through the 10 sections - reviewing material, questioning, explaining and modelling, practice. Each of one these can be a focus areas for improvement so there are multiple ways to engage with the ideas and to find a focus for deliberate practice.

Interestingly, within the document, Barak Rosenshine offers a further list of 17 principles that overlap and flesh out the 10 sections. It's a good simple summary of the whole document. However, as I stress continually, summaries are meant as a prompt - you really need to read the whole thing; it's packed with insights and it warrants multiple close readings.

I find that, in exploring the document with teachers, it helps to break it down into the four strands (NB these are strands that I am suggesting, not Rosenshine.)

Reviewing material:

Daily review is important in helping to resurface prior learning from the last lesson -let's not be surprised that students don't immediately remember everything. They won't! It's a powerful technique for building fluency and confidence and it's especially important if we're about to introduce new learning - to active relevant prior learning in working memory.

Weekly and monthly review is about longer-term retrieval practice - to continue the process of building long-term memory to support future learning.

Questioning

These two sections are brilliant. The main message I always stress is summarised in the mantra: ask more questions to more students in more depth. Rosenshine gives lots of great examples of the types of questions teachers can ask. He also reinforces the importance of process questions - we need ask how students worked things out, not just get answers. He is also really good on stressing that asking questions is about getting feedback to us as teachers about how well we've taught the material and about the need to check understanding to ensure misconceptions are flushed out and tackled.

Sequencing Concepts and modelling

The three stages give a superb guide to how to sequence knowledge.

Small steps - with practice at each stage. We need to break down our concepts and procedures (like multi-stage maths problems or writing) into small steps that each be practised.

Models - including the importance of the worked-example effect to reduce cognitive load. We need to give many worked examples; too often teacher give too few.

Scaffolding is needed to develop expertise - a form of mastery coaching, where cognitive supports are given - such as how to structure extended writing - but they are gradually withdrawn. The sequencing is key. Stabilisers on a bike are really powerful aids to the learning and confidence building- but eventually they need to come off.

Stages of Practice

I haven't read a better explanation of the difference between guided and independent practice. They are both vital.

Teachers needs to be up close to students' initial attempts making sure that they are building confidence and making too many errors. This is a common weakness with 'less effective teachers'. Guided practice requires close supervision and feedback.

High success rate - in questioning and practice - is important. Rosenshine suggests the optimum is 80%. ie - high! Not 95-100% (too easy). He even suggests 70% is too low... (although, in my only quibble with the paper, I would be cautious about getting to worried about the precision here.)

Independent, monitored practice. Successful teachers make time for students to the things they've been taught by themselves... when they're ready. "Students need extensive, successful, independent practice in order for skills and knowledge to become automatic"

Rosenshine concludes the paper by discussing their research process, combining a range sources of evidence. He suggests:

and finally....

My final messages about engaging with this paper are:

1. Don't turn it into a checklist. It's a guide for professional learning - not a ticklist for accountability freaks! Don't kill it!!! Please!!!

2. Take time to explore the implications at a subject-specific level. The ideas of practice, modelling, questioning... each have meaning only in the context of curriculum content. The principles need to be articulated in context, in situ...

Thanks to Barak for giving us this gift - and to Oliver for bringing it to my attention!

This blog by Mark Enser is a superb example of putting Rosenshine's principles into practice - in this case, his subject is Geography. https://heathfieldteachshare.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/putting-theory-into-practice/

Update: Oliver Caviglioli has now produced a new poster using this blog as a basis - reorganising the 10 principles into four themes.
https://headguruteacher.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/124f8-rosenshineprinciplesred.pdf
This is really interesting - the original material that later featured in American Educator is here: https://www.iaoed.org/downloads/EdPractices_21.pdf
Update
Here is a video of me giving my ResearchEd Talk in Haninge, Sweden, recorded for Swedish TV
And here's the man himself....

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Exploring Barak Rosenshine's seminal Principles of Instruction: Why it is THE must-read for all teachers.

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This post is based on a talk I gave at ResearchEd in Rugby. The paper in question is Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction published in American Educator in 2012, downloadable in full as a pdf here: I first came across if after seeing Oliver Caviglioli's superb graphic summary for How2 - available here: My admiration...

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Schemata - Meta. pupils using this and making this explicit. Making connections within, across subjects and year groups in order to embed into LTM. More challenging for younger pupils/ SEND/ 

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Schemata - Meta. pupils using this and making this explicit. Making connections within, across subjects and year groups in order to embed into LTM. More challenging for younger pupils/ SEND/ 

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Planning and Diagnostic questioning is vital. 

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Planning and Diagnostic questioning is vital. 

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Learning outcomes/ intentions. Are we clear enough on what these are? Are they leaning focused or activity lead? 

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Learning outcomes/ intentions. Are we clear enough on what these are? Are they leaning focused or activity lead? 

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies 

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies 

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

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

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

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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

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5 ways of giving Effective Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#FiveWays of Giving Effective Feedback as Actions

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

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The Secret of Effective Feedback.

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

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

Keeping Purpose in Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving Feedback They Can Use

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

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

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

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

Assign Tasks That Illuminate Students' Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we do to preserve the ozone layer?

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

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

Make Feedback into Detective Work

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

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

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

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

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

Build Students' Capacity for Self-Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Trusting Relationship for Feedback

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

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

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

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