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JTHS moving to excellence, teacher reflection v2

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high quality lessons expectations with sway links

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The Staffordshire Research School @ John Taylor

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Tweets by JTStaffsRSch

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T&L @ John Taylor High School

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@JTHS_TeachLearn - internal CPD and teaching framework

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Sign up to the free monthly Staffordshire Research School newsletter here.

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Staffordshire Research School, part of the Research School Network

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from the Institute of Effective Education

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from Tom Sherrington @Teacherhead

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There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access. I'll keep adding to it as I find things and when people make suggestions:
John Dunlosky: Strengthening the Student Toolbox

Click to Download

Barak Rosenshine: Principles of Instruction

See also: Rosenshine Re-ordered. A Poster by @olicav
Rob Coe et al: What makes great teaching. Dylan Wiliam: 9 things every teacher should know- via tes
The article is here: https://www.tes.com/news/dylan-wiliam-nine-things-every-teacher-should-know with a nice box inset about that researchers - many of whom are featured in the other summaries represented here.
James Ko et al: Effective Teaching
John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, summarised by Oliver Caviglioli for How2.

Here's another great paper from CESE in New South Wales on Cognitive Load Theory - with thanks to Matthew Benyohai: Summary on page 7 is very helpful.

Daniel Willingham' s Why don't kids like school. Summary.

And here's a link to Willingham's American Educator article:

The Learning Scientists - downloadable materials

Yeager, Walton and Cohen: Addressing achievement gaps with psychological interventions.

Also, for quick reference:

EEF Toolkit: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-toolkit
Chris Husbands and Jo Pearce: Nine claims from research
American Psychology Association Top 20 Principles from Psychology

There's a quick access summary of the 20 principles here:

Clark, Kirschner and Sweller - A readable version of their research into guided (and minimally guided) instruction.

Education Endowment Foundation report on Metacognition: by Professor Daniel Muijs et al .

Robert Slavin on Cooperative Learning - Group work - a short helpful summary via CUREE.
Arthur Shimamura: MARGE: A whole brain learning approach.
See also: Introducing MARGE: A superb ebook about learning by Arthur Shimamura.
Bjork: Desirable Difficulties:
See also: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/desirable-difficulties which includes an excellent video presentation by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork.
The Great Teaching Toolkit
This superb review from Evidence Based Education is a definite must-read. It's a very comprehensive guide to most of the ideas above - grouped into four categories. Download it here

This is summarised in this brilliant A4 summary:

IES Practice Guide Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning -
As recommended by Dylan Wiliam:

Just realized that I've never tweeted a link to the IES's 2007 Practice Guide on "Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning": https://t.co/VU0LJdM4hB. The checklist makes a much better placemat than most of the quick reference guides offered to teachers. pic.twitter.com/onmAYxJvzG
- Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) October 29, 2020

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Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access.

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There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access.

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By Mark Esner

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Including retrieval practice, cognitive load, low stakes testing, recall and revision.

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Nick Rose - Memory Research for the Classroom 

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Nick Rose - Memory Research for the Classroom 

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Slides from the 2019 John Taylor MAT Conference

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10 techniques for Retrieval Practice form Tom Sherrington

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10 techniques for Retrieval Practice form Tom Sherrington

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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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Including exam prep, interleaving, scaffolding, differentiation, literacy and exam prep.

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Including recognition, motivation, pivotal strategies, rewards, focus.

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Including modelling, differentiation, exam techniques

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Including feedback, live marking, praise and recognition

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Including adaptive teaching and engagement

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Retrieval Practice - Key Research Messages

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Retrieval Practice - some messages from the research

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There is a great deal of very strong evidence that retrieval practice is an essential part of the learning process. Retrieval practice is the process of calling information to mind that you have been previously exposed to. By doing this, our memory for that information is strengthened and forgetting is less likely to occur.

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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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EEF's Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools Report

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EEF's Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools Report

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EEF Blog: The Best Laid Plans of Secondary Literacy
Keen to make good on the promise of "a push on literacy" in your school this year? Help is at hand thanks to new resources, developed by the EEF and published today, which support our latest guidance report, 'Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools'. Our national content manager, Alex Quigley, introduces them...
The new school year is an exciting time for school teachers and leaders. The promise of a fresh start and new classes is charged with the energy of summer getaways and lazy days. We return to school with brand new plans and full of best intentions.

For the beleaguered literacy coordinator, the first few days back can prove a chastening experience. New resources and planning proposals get squeezed into the corner of an INSET afternoon, as subject leaders grapple with set lists, exam results and new specs. The promise of "a push on literacy" gets lost in the melee of the new start.

In the summer term, the Education Endowment Foundation released our latest guidance report, Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools. As well as offering practical guidance for subject leaders and senior leaders, we hope it will give literacy coordinators some well-deserved additional support. By drawing upon the best available evidence, we seek to challenge the false notion of literacy as an optional extra.

Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools

Seven recommendations related to reading, writing, talk, vocabulary development and supporting struggling students.

Download PDF get_app

Our guidance makes the case that, by attending to the literacy demands of their subjects, teachers increase their students' change of success in their subjects. For our pupils to confidently access the academic curriculum, we all need to address the challenge of literacy in our teaching, lesson planning, and curriculum development.

From supporting pupils to successfully read word problems in maths, to breaking down writing tasks in physical education, 'disciplinary literacy' - how we read, write and talk in subject specific ways - is not a bolt-on idea posed by an enthusiastic literacy coordinator. It is instead an evidence-informed approach to teaching literacy in subject disciplines which is vital to successful learning.

New Secondary Literacy Supporting Tools

To support literacy coordinators, subject leaders and senior leaders to address the issue of improving literacy in secondary school, we have developed some new resources:

We hope that our growing bank of evidence-informed tools can help ensure your best laid plans for literacy in secondary schools can become embedded successfully in your planning and practices this school year, so that every pupils benefits.

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EEF Blog: The Best Laid Plans of Secondary Literacy | News

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Keen to make good on the promise of "a push on literacy" in your school this year? Help is at hand thanks to new resources, developed by the EEF and published today, which support our latest guidance report, 'Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools'. Our national content manager, Alex Quigley , introduces them...

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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So, what does this mean for educators?

It is not enough to ask questions during lecture because students are unlikely to engage in covert retrieval unless they are pushed to do so. Instead, try having students write down an answer and then possibly share that answer with a partner or the class, but they need to engage in their own retrieval first. Simply asking students to engage in retrieval is not enough as many will likely wait for the answer and then engage in a recognition process ("Oh yeah, I knew that") instead of recalling the response for themselves.

The other important takeaway more directly impacts student group work. When students are engaging in retrieval practice in groups, the person who is in charge of asking the questions would benefit from also writing down a response or they will see little benefit to this group work. Alternatively, it is important that students take turns frequently during group work, making sure that everyone gets asked the same questions so that all students benefit from the retrieval on each question.

References:

(1) Abel, M., & Roediger III, H. L. (2018). The testing effect in a social setting: Does retrieval practice benefit a listener?. Journal of experimental psychology: Applied, 24(3), 347.

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So, what does this mean for educators? It is not enough to ask questions during lecture because students are unlikely to engage in covert retrieval unless they are pushed to do so. Instead, try having students write down an answer and then possibly share that answer with a partner or the class, but they need to engage in their own retrieval first.

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From Bradford Research School

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Should I use a Visualiser to Model Writing?

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visualisers could improve the quality of explanation and modelling if they enable teachers to show pupils a wider range of high-quality models than they would otherwise be able to, or if teachers use the visualiser to increase the precision with which they explain worked examples, which has consistently been found to increase learning (e.g.

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Retrieval Practice and LTM

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Retrieval Practice - 7 sources of research 

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JTHS briefing paper - 4 sources/signposts inside

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Rosenshine Principles in Action - Retrieval Practice.docx

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EEF Guidance report - Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupils Learning

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EEF Guidance report - Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupils Learning

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

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

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not all feedback has positive effects. done badly

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

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perhaps not always productively.  historically

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

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

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in addition to a review of current practice

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and refined through consultation with teachers and other experts.

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Six recommendations for using teacher feedback to improve pupil learning

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From the book, Make it Stick here is a brief summary and example structure for recall, testing and interleaving

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Retrieval Practice - Is asking Questions Enough? 

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Retrieval Practice - Is asking Questions Enough? 

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So, what does this mean for educators?

It is not enough to ask questions during lecture because students are unlikely to engage in covert retrieval unless they are pushed to do so. Instead, try having students write down an answer and then possibly share that answer with a partner or the class, but they need to engage in their own retrieval first. Simply asking students to engage in retrieval is not enough as many will likely wait for the answer and then engage in a recognition process ("Oh yeah, I knew that") instead of recalling the response for themselves.

The other important takeaway more directly impacts student group work. When students are engaging in retrieval practice in groups, the person who is in charge of asking the questions would benefit from also writing down a response or they will see little benefit to this group work. Alternatively, it is important that students take turns frequently during group work, making sure that everyone gets asked the same questions so that all students benefit from the retrieval on each question.

References:

(1) Abel, M., & Roediger III, H. L. (2018). The testing effect in a social setting: Does retrieval practice benefit a listener?. Journal of experimental psychology: Applied, 24(3), 347.

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So, what does this mean for educators? It is not enough to ask questions during lecture because students are unlikely to engage in covert retrieval unless they are pushed to do so. Instead, try having students write down an answer and then possibly share that answer with a partner or the class, but they need to engage in their own retrieval first.

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Doug Lemov

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cultofpedagogy.com

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When you give a test or quiz, do you basically just grade it, give it back to students, go over the answers, then move on? If you don't do anything else with the information, if you don't look carefully at how students answer your test questions, you're missing a BIG opportunity.

Assessments should give us loads of information about what our students understand, what they don't understand, and how well we've taught them. It took me years of teaching before I realized I was using my tests and quizzes to sort out, reward and punish my students, rather than measure and inform my teaching. I needed to make my assessments work harder for me.

So one year, I added an extra step while grading tests: I kept track of all the wrong answers on one page, tallying exactly which items were being chosen instead. Once I started doing this, I found myself far better equipped to respond to wrong answers: I could reteach specific concepts only to students who needed reteaching, rather than wasting everyone's time with unnecessary review. I could identify specific misconceptions students had about the material and get better at addressing those the next time around. I also became a much better test maker.

The best part about this system is you only need a pencil, an answer key, and a few extra minutes.

Here it is:

If you're already doing something like this, I would love to hear about it in the comments. If you have some kind of electronic reporting system that can crunch all these numbers for you and give you the information you need to move forward, awesome. If not, adding this extra step to your assessment routine will make a difference. ♦

Keep in touch.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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When you give a test or quiz, do you basically just grade it, give it back to students, go over the answers, then move on? If you don't do anything else with the information, if you don't look carefully at how students answer your test questions, you're missing a BIG opportunity.

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High level cognitive strategies

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Scaffolding  - High level Cognitive Strategies _Rosenshine

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Spaced and Interleaved Practice

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Using Spaced Practice to Improve Learning

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Using Spaced Practice to Improve Learning

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EEF Report - Improving Secondary Science

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EEF Report - Improving Secondary Science

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While these preconceptions can be hard to shift, presenting pupils with compelling evidence that contradicts them can be a good way to move thinking on. For example, many pupils find it hard to understand that the space between gas particles is empty and will often say it is filled with ​air', ​dust', or ​'bacteria'. However, showing that it is possible to compress a gas, for example by pushing down a syringe, is a good way of opening a discussion about what this means about the spaces between gas particles.

Building on pupils' preconceptions is one of seven recommendations in today's report designed to support secondary schools to provide every pupil - but particularly those from disadvantaged homes - with a high-quality and well-rounded grounding in science and an interest that may lead them to further study. Improving Secondary Science reviews the best available research to offer science teachers practical classroom suggestions.

Previous research by the EEF and the Royal Society found that there is a gap in science outcomes between disadvantaged pupils and their classmates at every stage in the education system. The gap first becomes apparent at Key Stage 1 (ages 5 - 7) and only gets wider throughout primary and secondary school and on to A‑level.

This earlier research found that it is not lack of motivation to learn science that is contributing to the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off classmates. Analysis of attainment data found that the biggest predictors of pupils' attainment in science are their levels of literacy and their scientific reasoning ability.

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seven practical recommendations focused on improving science teaching

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particularly for disadvantaged pupils almost all pupils develop their own explanations for science concepts before they learn about them in lessons but their ideas about things like ‘how plants grow’ or ‘how we see things’ don’t always align with scientific understanding

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according to new guidance for improving science teaching published today by the education endowment foundation (eef) however

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the report suggests that teachers can harness these common misconceptions to improve pupils’ learning.   according to the 'improving secondary science' report

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put together by a panel of teachers and leading experts

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teachers should have a clear understanding of the common misconceptions in the area they’re teaching so that they know the issues that are likely to be problematic for their pupils. teachers should also work to uncover the specific misconceptions their pupils hold through class and group discussion

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before moving on to challenge these.  improving secondary science reviews the best available research to offer science teachers practical classroom suggestions.  while these preconceptions can be hard to shift

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presenting pupils with compelling evidence that contradicts them can be a good way to move thinking on. for example

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many pupils find it hard to understand that the space between gas particles is empty and will often say it is filled with ‘air’

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showing that it is possible to compress a gas

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is a good way of opening a discussion about what this means about the spaces between gas particles. building on pupils’ preconceptions is one of seven recommendations in today’s report designed to support secondary schools to provide every pupil – but particularly those from disadvantaged homes - with a high-quality and well-rounded grounding in science and an interest that may lead them to further study. improving secondary science reviews the best available research to offer science teachers practical classroom suggestions. previous research by the eef and the royal society found that there is a gap in science outcomes between disadvantaged pupils and their classmates at every stage in the education system. the gap first becomes apparent at key stage 1 (ages 5-7) and only gets wider throughout primary and secondary school and on to a-level. this earlier research found that it is not lack of motivation to learn science that is contributing to the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off classmates. analysis of attainment data found that the biggest predictors of pupils’ attainment in science are their levels of literacy and their scientific reasoning ability.  the biggest predictors of pupils' attainment in science are their levels of literacy and their scientific reasoning ability.  a second recommendation in today’s report focuses on developing pupils’ scientific vocabulary to support them to read and write about science. according to the report

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“learning science involves learning a whole new language and it is important that you develop pupils’ fluency in that language.” while pupils need to learn scientific words like photosynthesis or carbon dioxide

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they struggle most with familiar words that have a different meaning in science. the report recommends that pupils are explicitly taught words that have a different meaning in science - like valid

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random or spontaneous – so that they can understand and interpret scientific texts. the other five recommendations focus on:  using models to develop understanding developing children’s abilities to self-regulate aspects of their learning. supporting pupils’ memory skills

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so that they can retain and retrieve knowledge. using experiments purposefully. using structured feedback to move on pupils’ thinking.  sir kevan collins

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chief executive of the education endowment foundation

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said:  many pupils come up with their own explanations for the science concepts they meet on a daily basis

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New EEF guidance report published: Improving Secondary Science

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Tackling pupils' scientific misconceptions is difficult, but can lead to big gains in learning

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Here's a roundup of tech tools that harness retrieval practice and provide features in line with the science of learning. Each tech tool has free options, can be used during and outside of class, and includes instant feedback.

is platform where students respond to brief prompts via informal videos. Powerful for both K-12 and higher education, students engage in without even knowing it. Bonus: Students can respond to each other's videos for interactive and elaborative .

has a "Remind" feature for , providing a desirable difficulty in a low-stakes environment . Bonus: Instead of worksheets, assign Kahoots for homework and even more retrieval practice at home.

have a "Live View" feature that provides for teachers and students, promoting metacognition and transfer of knowledge . Bonus: Students don't use cell phones during class! Students hold up cards with QR-like codes that you can scan using only your device. Perfect for large classes.

PollEverywhere includes many question formats, including open ended polls and Q&A formats. Bonus: PollEverywhere integrates well with PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote. You don't have to launch a separate app.

has a feature where students view questions until they've correctly answered twice. This is supported by research on successive relearning , or the importance of retrieving multiple times, not just once. Bonus: Quizlet is a great tool for students to create and use flashcards outside of class, too.

has a "Jumble" feature that mixes up content - perfect for . Bonus: The random order makes it tough for students to .

includes multiple-choice and short answer questions for retrieval practice. Research demonstrates that both types of questions boost learning . Bonus: Socrative works well on the fly and also for exit tickets.

A few things to keep in mind:

We have not been paid to recommend or endorse these tech tools. We like them because they boost learning with research-based features!

Tech tools promote engagement and motivation, but make sure you emphasize the benefits for learning , too.

Research demonstrates that tech tools can decrease anxiety and increase anxiety . Avoid competitive activities and focus on retrieval.

These tech tools work great for teachers, and more are available for students, including Anki, TrueLearn, and StudyBlue.

For more recommendations on harnessing tech tools for retrieval practice, check out the podcast/blog Teaching in Higher Ed and the blog by Matt Miller .

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Recommended tech tools to make retrieval practice quick and easy - Retrieval Practice

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There are lots of tech tools that make retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and feedback quick and easy. How can you sort through all of them? We've done the work for you. Check out our recommendations! Also, join the Powerful Teaching book tour in a city near you !

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Research-Based Strategies that all Teachers Should Know

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5 Things Every Secondary Teacher should know about Reading

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5 Things Every Secondary Teacher should know about Reading

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Reading's a funny old business. Generally, secondary school teachers expect kids to come with a pre-loaded reading module. If they have it, all well and good. If they don't, we're stuffed. Luckily, the vast majority of students can read by the start of Year 7, even if they say they can't. But being able to read and being able to access the kind of material required to be academically successful are not at all the same thing.

When I started teaching I knew next to nothing about reading, and I was meant to be an English teacher! Because it was something I was able to 'just do' I assumed that would be pretty much the same for everyone. It's not. Some - perhaps even most - students can just do it, but those that can't may well need some extra help. The following five hard-won nuggets of information are the product of long experience and extensive study. I hope they prove useful in the months ahead.
1. Just because students struggle to read doesn't mean they're thick
The ability we call reading is vastly complex. It's made up of two very different skill areas: word recognition and language comprehension.

Teachers rely on children's language comprehension skills to deliver curriculum content, but this is very difficult if students have shaky word recognition skills. Although comprehension is very closely linked to intelligence, decoding, the ability to turn letters (graphemes) into sounds (phonemes) isn't. It's perfectly possible for students to struggle to read and be intelligent. Likewise, it's equally possible for students to find reading easy but struggle with understanding. Struggling to read is a teaching problem and can, for the most part, be solved by better teaching.
2. Working memory affects reading ability 3. Comprehension depends on general knowledge
Teaching comprehension 'skills' like inferring, predicting, questioning and empathising do make a marginal difference to children's ability to understand texts, but they're not worth spending more than a lesson or so on. There's a great story about a woman who went to hear Einstein give a lecture on relativity only to say, "I understood all the words. It was just how they were put together that baffled me." Understanding what you read depends on how much you know about the subject you're reading about. Consider this example:

A manifold, contained in an intuition which I call mine, is represented, by means of the synthesis of the understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness; and this is effected by means of the category.*

Although you probably know what all the individual words mean, you may not have any understanding of the context. Can you work which of the following best represents the main ideas in the passage?

1. Without a manifold, one cannot call an intuition 'mine.'

2. Intuition must precede understanding

3. Intuition must occur through a category.

4. Self-consciousness is necessary to understanding*

Maybe you can, but are you any clearer about what the passage means? Unless you've studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason you're going to be on a back foot. The only way to reliably understand a text is to have sufficient background knowledge to make sense of the concepts. As a teacher, this simply means you need to make sure students understand the concepts that underlie a text before giving it to them to read.
4. Vocabulary matters
Even if you have sufficient general knowledge, you still need to know what the words mean. Surprisingly, we need to know 90-95% of the words in a text in order to understand it ( Nagy & Scott 2000.) This may seem high, but 5% would be about 10-15 words a page. Imagine reading something where you have to look up 10 words a page; your working memory would very quickly become overloaded and you'd probably give up.

Vocabulary breaks down into 3 tiers. Tier 1 is the vocabulary of spoken language and not something we need to worry about much in schools. Tier 3 is specialised, academic language - key words. We're pretty good at teaching these because a conceptual understanding of say, osmosis, depends on knowing what the word means. The problem is with Tier 2. These are words which are common in written texts but rare in speech. Unless you read, you won't encounter these words, but to readers their meaning is so obvious it's hardly worth mentioning. Academic success depends on being familiar with the language used in text books and exam papers. You may understand a concept, but if you don't know the word used to label it you'll be at a huge disadvantage. I've written about some solutions here.
5. Everyone loves stories
Students who read for at least 20 minutes per day and enjoy reading do better at school. Indeed, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, reading ability at age 10 predicts future income at age 42. The more you read, the wider your vocabulary and general knowledge will be. Unfortunately, unless you've embedded word recognition skills in long-term memory you're probably not going to enjoy reading: it will be laborious, effortful and dull. Many many students report 'hating' reading. In a piece of very unscientific research I did with a school students reported that reading was for old people and people with no friends. Not cool.

But even though some children 'hate' reading, everyone loves stories. Stories occupy a 'psychologically privileged' position in how we think and understand the world. One way to harness students love of stories is for teachers to read to them. Primary teachers do this regularly but reading aloud tends to be frowned on in secondary schools. We get our knickers in a twist about trying to prove progress and other such nonsense. This post contains some ideas about how to get students to read for pleasure.

*

Knowing this stuff won't magically make your students read better but it will make you a more effective teacher. Whatever your subject, at some point academic success depends on students' ability to read. If you understand a bit more about the processes and why some children struggle, you will be better placed to adjust your classroom practice and refer students for appropriate support.
I've also written about the five most useful things teachers should know about writing. Further reading
ED Hirsch Jr, Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge- of Words and the World

Beck, McKeown & Kucan, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction

Diane McGuiness, Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Daniel Willingham, Raising Kids Who Read
*I think it's #3

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5 things every new (secondary) teacher should know about reading

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Reading's a funny old business. Generally, secondary school teachers expect kids to come with a pre-loaded reading module. If they have it, all well and good. If they don't, we're stuffed. Luckily, the vast majority of students can read by the start of Year 7, even if they say they can't.

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Seven Simple Rules for Science Teaching 

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Seven Simple Rules for Science Teaching 

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From the Royal Society of Chemistry - linked to the Education Endowment Foundation's Improving Secondary Science Guidance Report.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry will soon be launching a new website that will bring together all of the support that we offer for chemistry teaching in one place - including Education in Chemistry.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry will soon be launching a new website that will bring together all of the support that we offer for chemistry teaching in one place - including Education in Chemistry.

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Learning: What is it and how might we catalyse it?

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Learning: What is it and how might we catalyse it?

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Paper by Peps Mccrea
See Insight 3 & 4 for Attention

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

This updated paper provides a coherent, high-level overview of the domain - organised around nine insights, with a taste of what the implications of these insights are for our classrooms.

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Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

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Breaking the Plane - Teach like a Champion

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Breaking the Plane - Teach like a Champion

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Doug Lemov

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Here's a bit of useful teaching vocabulary for you.

The "plane" of your classroom is the imaginary line that runs the length of the room. It's the red line in the diagram at left. The "plane" can be anywhere but it's often about where the first student desks start. It indicates where "your" space ends and where "theirs" begins. Many teachers are hesitant or slow to " Break the Plane "-to move past this imaginary barrier and out among the desks and rows. But of course what you want to do is to intimate that every part of the classrooms is teacher space-or, if you prefer, equally teacher and student space-and to use that space to maximize learning.

The movement in Breaking the Plane adds energy to your teaching and being out in "their" space allows you to observe what students are doing. You can subtly raise your eyebrows at one student as you ask an intriguing question or place a warm and gentle hand on the shoulder of another as you progress around the room.

It's not just Breaking the Plane that matters, It's breaking it often. You want to signal that it is normal for you to wander just about anywhere as you teach.

It's especially important to break the plane early - getting near to students plays such a critical role in managing behavioral situations and especially in making those interactions more private. If, in contrast, you move out into the classroom to establish proximity only when you need to (to address a behavioral situation), this action will be highly visible. In essence, you tell students that things aren't going well and that they've got you off your game. It also calls heightened attention to your actions when you do break the plane, making it almost impossible to exercise the subtlety necessary to make corrections that don't interrupt instruction (for example, via proximity). If instead you're constantly out and about, you'll be able to correct inconspicuously as you teach-breaking the plane is just a normal part of the routine.

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What is 'Breaking the Plane'? - Teach Like a Champion

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Here's a bit of useful teaching vocabulary for you. The "plane" of your classroom is the imaginary line that runs the length of the room. It's the red line in the diagram at left. The "plane" can be anywhere but it's often about where the first student desks start.

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Learning: What is it and how might we catalyse it? 

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Learning: What is it and how might we catalyse it? 

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Paper by Peps Mccrea from the Ambition Institute  https://www.ambition.org.uk/

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

This updated paper provides a coherent, high-level overview of the domain - organised around nine insights, with a taste of what the implications of these insights are for our classrooms.

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Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?

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This second edition of 'Learning: What is it, and how might we catalyse it?' by our Dean of Learning Design, Peps Mccrea, has been produced to share our thinking, guide our programmes, and stimulate discussion around the nature of learning and teaching.

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Surgeons learn about the body before operating. So why don't more teachers learn about the brain before educating? In this free white paper, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin makes the case for incorporating brain science into the practice of teaching. Knowing how memory works can suggest classroom tactics that aid the acquisition and recall of information, he says. Furthermore, adopting a model for learning, rather than relying solely on the increasingly common (and increasingly detailed) instructional framework, can help teachers layer innovation upon tradition, in much the same way that models help screenwriters and composers to be creative within the audience's expectations.

Goodwin, B. (2018) Student learning that works: How brain science informs a student learning model. Denver, CO: McREL International.

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White Paper | Student Learning That Works: How brain science informs a student learning model (2018) - McREL International

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Surgeons learn about the body before operating. So why don't more teachers learn about the brain before educating? In this free white paper, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin makes the case for incorporating brain science into the practice of teaching. Knowing how memory works can suggest classroom tactics that aid the acquisition and recall of information, he says.

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Institute for Effective Education (IEE) 

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Institute for Effective Education (IEE) 

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The Effect of immediate live marking on progress research
https://the-iee.org.uk/what-we-do/innovation-evaluation-grants/live-marking/

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SecEd 2018 articles

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Immediate feedback through live marking in Science

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This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

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White Paper from McREL international

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Surgeons learn about the body before operating. So why don't more teachers learn about the brain before educating? In this free white paper, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin makes the case for incorporating brain science into the practice of teaching. Knowing how memory works can suggest classroom tactics that aid the acquisition and recall of information, he says. Furthermore, adopting a model for learning, rather than relying solely on the increasingly common (and increasingly detailed) instructional framework, can help teachers layer innovation upon tradition, in much the same way that models help screenwriters and composers to be creative within the audience's expectations.

Goodwin, B. (2018) Student learning that works: How brain science informs a student learning model. Denver, CO: McREL International.

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White Paper | Student Learning That Works: How brain science informs a student learning model (2018) - McREL International

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Surgeons learn about the body before operating. So why don't more teachers learn about the brain before educating? In this free white paper, McREL CEO Bryan Goodwin makes the case for incorporating brain science into the practice of teaching. Knowing how memory works can suggest classroom tactics that aid the acquisition and recall of information, he says.

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Blog from Chris Runeckles from Durrington Research School

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Cognitive Load Theory Research the Teacher Really Need to Understand

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Cognitive Load Theory Research the Teacher Really Need to Understand

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For the classroom on P6 & 7

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The National Forest Teaching School @ John Taylor

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Tweets by NftSchool

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Education Endowment Foundation  - @EducEndowFoundn
Research Schools - @rs_network
Stephen Fraser - @EEFStephenF
ASCD - @ASCD
CUREE - @CUREE_official
Sutton Trust - @suttontrust
Alex Quigley - @HuntingEnglish
David Weston @informed_edu
Tom Sherrington - @teacherhead
Shaun Allison - @shaun_allison
Cat Scutt - @CatScutt

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That’s a claim! Key Concepts for thinking critically about educational claims

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What and how should we teach young people? There are lots of claims about what is and isn't effective, many of which you will have come across. For example, there are claims that extending the school day improves pupils' learning, increases attendance, and adds to teacher stress. How can you know which of these claims are trustworthy? And how should you decide when to act on claims like these?
An educational 'intervention' refers to any kind of change to the practices within a school that is intended to achieve better pupil outcomes - for example, restructuring the curriculum or introducing a new teaching method. An effect is something an intervention makes happen - - like improving pupil attainment or reducing the incidence of problem behaviours.

People make lots of claims about the effects of interventions. How can we tell which claims are right or wrong? To do this, you need to look at what supports their claim - its basis. For example, someone's personal experience is not by itself a good basis for a claim about what is effective teaching. This is because we don't know what would have happened if that person had done something else.

To know if a treatment (like extending the school day) causes an effect (like improved attainment), the intervention has to be compared to something else (like not extending the school day). Researchers compare an intervention given to people in one group with something else given to people in another group. Those comparisons provide evidence - facts to support a conclusion about whether a claim is right or wrong. For those comparisons to be fair, the only important difference between the groups should be the interventions they receive.

A good choice is one that uses the best information available at the time. For education choices, this includes using the best available evidence of intervention effects. Good choices don't guarantee good outcomes, but they make good outcomes more likely.

Claims, comparisons, and choices
Claims: Many claims about the effects of interventions are not trustworthy. Often this is because the basis for the claim is not trustworthy. The first (pink) group of guides are things you should watch out for when you hear or read an education claim. BEWARE of claims that are too good to be true, that are based on faulty logic, or that are based on trust alone.

Comparisons: It is always a good idea to question what evidence there is to support a claim. Evidence about the effects of interventions comes from intervention comparisons. The second (yellow) group of guides can help you decide how trustworthy that evidence is. Make sure that intervention comparisons are FAIR, that summaries of studies comparing interventions are reliable, and that you are not misled by the way that interventions effects are described.

Choices: Knowing how trustworthy the evidence is can help you make good choices. But there are other things you need to think about when you decide what to do and what not to do in schools. The third (blue) group of guides can help you make good choices. TAKE CARE when you decide what to do. Think carefully about what your problem is and what your options are, whether the evidence is relevant, and whether the advantages are better than the disadvantages.
Using the guides
Claims about the effects of interventions that are not supported by trustworthy evidence often turn out to be wrong. Consequently, people who believe and act on these claims waste resources and suffer unnecessarily by doing things that do not help and might be harmful, and by not doing things that do help.

We developed the Assessing Claims in Education (ACE) Key Concepts as part of a research project to help people make informed choices across a range of fields, including education. The original Key Concepts were developed for health and have been adapted here for an educational context. The ACE Key Concepts are the starting point for developing learning resources, such as this website. Descriptions of all the concepts are available here, and summarise in this poster. An introduction to the Key Concepts, with school-based examples, is available here.

The website, poster and introductory summary can be used in different ways. For example, by finding examples of educational claims in the media and - using the guides - thinking critically and discussing how trustworthy those claims are and what you would do. The resources could feed into a training session for staff, support the decision making of a Senior Leadership Team, or be used by the governing body.

Please contact us and share your experience using this website and any suggestions you have.

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What and how should we teach young people? There are lots of claims about what is and isn't effective, many of which you will have come across. For example, there are claims that extending the school day improves pupils' learning, increases attendance, and adds to teacher stress.

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The beneficial side-effects of retrieval practice

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The beneficial side-effects of retrieval practice

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Andy Tharby @atharby

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Should I use a visualiser to model writing? 

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Should I use a visualiser to model writing? 

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Bradford Research School blog

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Should I use a Visualiser to Model Writing?

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visualisers could improve the quality of explanation and modelling if they enable teachers to show pupils a wider range of high-quality models than they would otherwise be able to, or if teachers use the visualiser to increase the precision with which they explain worked examples, which has consistently been found to increase learning (e.g.

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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50 strategies shared on twitter by Lawn Manor Academy, Swindon

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Language learning- the best way to teach

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Language learning- the best way to teach

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Research based article on the best way to teach a second language.

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It doesn't have to be all fun and games. Shutterstock

People often assume that children learn new languages easily and without effort, regardless of the situation they find themselves in. But is it really true that children soak up language like sponges?

Research has shown that children are highly successful learners if they have a lot of exposure to a new language over a long time, such as in the case of child immigrants who are surrounded by the new language all day, every day. In such a scenario, children become much more proficient in the new language over the long term than adults.

But if the amount of language children are exposed to is limited, as in classroom language learning, children are slow learners and overall less successful than teenagers or adults. How can we explain this apparent contrast?

Researchers have argued that children learn implicitly, that is, without conscious thought, reflection or effort. And implicit learning requires a large amount of language input over a long period of time.

As we get older, we develop the ability to learn explicitly - that is, analytically and with deliberate effort. Put differently, adults approach the learning task like scientists. This explains why more mature classroom learners have greater success: they can draw on more highly developed, efficient, explicit learning processes which also require more effort.

Which is best?

When it comes to learning a language, however, it is not a question of either implicit or explicit learning. They can coexist, so it is more often a question of how much of each approach is used.

In our new study, we asked whether younger children who are generally thought to learn implicitly had already developed some ability to learn explicitly as well. What's more, we looked at whether the ability to analyse language can predict foreign language learning success in the classroom.

We worked with over 100 Year 4 children, aged eight to nine, in five primary schools in England. The children took a number of tests, including a measure of their language learning aptitude, which assessed their ability to analyse language (language-analytic ability), to memorise language material (memory ability) and to handle language sounds (phonological awareness).

Over one school year, the children participated in language classes for 75 minutes per week. For this purpose, they were divided into four groups.

In the first half of the school year, each group was taught, respectively, German, Italian, Esperanto or Esperanto with a "focus-on-form method". This method involved the teacher drawing the children's attention to regular patterns in the language, asked them to think about what particular parts of words might mean or how sentences are put together in the language, for example. In other words, the children were encouraged to use their language-analytic ability, taking an explicit approach.

In the other groups, language was taught in a way that is typically used at primary school, that is, entirely playfully with games, songs and worksheets. This method is more likely to result in implicit learning.

Shutterstock

In the second half of the school year, all groups experienced the same type of language class: they all learned French, taught with a focus-on-form method. For our study, we assessed the children's progress in French over the second half of the school year and then looked at whether any components of their aptitude - language-analytic ability, memory ability, phonological awareness - would predict their success in learning French.

If children learn implicitly, we would expect that memory ability would be most important. In other words, the ability to pick up language material as you hear and see it is most relevant. If children learn above all explicitly, we would expect that language-analytic ability would be most important.

The results

Differently to what people might expect, we found that the children's language-analytic ability was most important, followed by phonological awareness. These two abilities contributed to predicting the children's achievement in French, while memory ability was only marginally relevant. This suggests that children as young as eight or nine years can indeed learn explicitly to some extent, if the teaching method they experience encourages them to engage in analysis of the language to be learned.

Our results are in line with a previous study which directly compared children and adults experiencing different teaching methods. Here the researcher also found that learners' use of an explicit approach in the foreign language classroom did not exclusively depend on age, but on how learners were taught. This means that even younger children can approach a learning task like scientists.

Of course, it is important to note that children of primary school age are still developing their ability to learn explicitly. Therefore, we cannot expect to teach them languages in exactly the same way as we would teach teenagers or adults. But some activities that encourage children to consciously reflect on and analyse the language material to be learned can be introduced to make best use of the limited class time that is available for foreign language teaching.

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What's the best way to teach children a second language? New research produces surprising results

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People often assume that children learn new languages easily and without effort, regardless of the situation they find themselves in. But is it really true that children soak up language like sponges?

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Insight Magazine

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Live Modelling with PowerPoint's 'Active X Textbox'

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Live Modelling with PowerPoint's 'Active X Textbox'

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Don't have a visualiser but want to model the perfect paragraph with students? Use this handy guide to create your own interactive PowerPoints.

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A shift in thinking and classroom culture from Tom Sherrington

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The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it.

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I see a lot of lessons - hundreds of them in multiple contexts - and I'm going to suggest that there is one very common challenge that teachers face that is often not addressed well enough, even by experienced teachers. In my view, it's the single biggest reason for lessons being ineffective or certainly less...

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A different take on modelling which combines Rosenshine Principles and Cognitive Load Theory.

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Modelling & Cognitive Load Theory in the practical classroom

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Modelling & Cognitive Load Theory in the practical classroom

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Chartered College of Teaching article

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The basis of teaching in a practical classroom, such as art and design or design technology, is the much repeated and reliable teacher-led demonstration. These demonstrations or modelling approaches allow the teacher to inform, instruct and guide students in their own practical outcomes; however, only recently have I considered the impact of cognitive load theory (CLT) upon how I deliver a modelling session to students.

Much has been mentioned recently on Twitter, in articles like this and in discussion at many school INSET and CPD sessions about CLT and the implications that it can have on us as teachers and our planning of the curriculum; we are encouraged to improve our instructional procedures in the classroom, ensuring that our teaching is tailored to students' knowledge and skills. Use of worked examples is key, as is the removal of inessential information and simplifying complex information by presenting it both orally and visually. However, the research is often heavily weighted towards those subjects that deliver lessons where theory teaching is prevalent, not classrooms where creativity and practical outcomes are a key component and a necessity for successful progression.

Gathercole and Alloway (2007) have stated that the working memory has a limited capacity, and handling too much information or engaging in a demanding task can overwhelm the working memory of students; this builds upon the initial research from Sweller et al. (1998), which asserts that the working memory of our mind can only handle a limited amount of information at one time. With this understanding in mind, my approach to demonstrations over the last year of teaching has adapted in an attempt to support student progress through the application of CLT.

The approach to modelling I initially took was to evaluate my current success rate of student understanding whilst I model a new technique; immediately, before checking student outcomes, it was clear that I used a lot of instructions, some not completely pertinent to the demonstration that I was completing. These wordy demonstrations completely discounted the processing capacity of my students, and this was evident in their outcomes. Within an introduction to the sewing machine lesson, students who succeeded had managed to follow my instructions or asked for support from their peers, whilst those students who needed further support asked considerably more questions or were on the verge of refusing to complete the task.

It then became necessary that I detailed for myself exactly what I wanted to discuss in my modelling, and explained that to students before completing the teacher-led demonstration. For example, in a GCSE art lesson, I was explicit that students must watch my control of the paintbrush when using acrylic paint and not concern themselves with the colour-mixing process. With Year 7 textiles, I decided to make the explicit skill a question that they could answer: how do you complete a successful straight line of sewing on the sewing machine? My modelling to students took a more focused approach and did have a positive impact upon the outcomes; however, it did then mean that, as a result, I was doing more teacher-led modelling sessions to cover all the skill and knowledge that I wished to in one lesson. This was not an approach I wished to maintain in the long term, as it made the modelling and learning process fragmented and unmanageable in the space of an hour's lesson. Therefore, I decided to spend time improving the teacher instruction, which hopefully will lead to the students doing more and doing it better.

After a discussion with a colleague in maths, I was directed to an article by Linsin, 'Why silent modelling is a powerful strategy' (2014). Within this article, Linsin asserts that when you model in silence, you are assured of providing the purest form of instruction. With this in mind, I again adapted my approach to modelling in lessons. This was by no means an easy task; I feel at a loss in demonstrations when I am not talking, and I was once reminded by a Year 7 that I shouldn't be talking.

When modelling in silence, it was clear that both my and student focus were much more intense; a member of staff who observed me silent-model commented on how attentive the students were whilst I was on the sewing machine. It by no means has been an easy approach to modelling; my GCSE classes are much more reticent about watching a silent demonstration and their attention wains far quicker than my Year 7 classes. With the younger years, it is evident that they are more adaptable to new modelling techniques in the classroom, but they also enjoy watching a process come to fruition, whereas the older years are used to being told what to do and how to do it, and have been slower to follow the process and show success in comparison to Year 7 and 8 students. Having explored silent modelling in several practical demonstrations, my overriding concern was that if students missed a step, or if I didn't make a step clear to understand for novice learners who had never seen a teacher demonstration previously and did not know what to look for, how would they feel in the lesson regarding their working memory and lesson outcomes? How would they keep up with the practical process without the feeling of being overwhelmed by information?

It became necessary to find a way that I could still use silent modelling successfully; students would still watch a silent demonstration, but I would support it further with visuals. I had previously trialled showing them online videos of artists working and they had responded well to these and to the related discussions, so I utilised technology to record videos of myself completing the tasks that they would soon be required to do themselves. Instead of recording the whole task, I focused on just key skills that they would need, and played the videos on loop throughout the lesson to complement the initial silent demonstration and support working memory without overloading the students. The student outcomes from this approach were much improved for Years 10 and 11, and student voice from the lesson was clear that the combined approach was something they preferred.

Reflecting on my experience, I like how silence during a demonstration focuses attention - attention being another limited resource, like working memory (Weinstein et al., 2018). As the younger students progress through their creative education, they will have become used to silent modelling and there will be none of the reticence I received from Year 10 and 11 students this year.

Taking this idea forward, it is clear that silent modelling must be more carefully planned in terms of the teacher-led direction and the key skills that you wish students to practically use and develop. When supported with other forms of instruction and planning, silence during modelling in a practical classroom can help to reduce the burden on students' working memory and hopefully, in turn, lead to greater, more successful outcomes.

References

Gathercole SE and Alloway TP (2007) Understanding working memory: A classroom guide. Available at: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/WM-classroom-guide.pdf (accessed 5 August 2019).

Linsin M (2014) Why silent modelling is a powerful strategy. In: Smart Classroom Management. Available at: www.smartclassroommanagement.com/2014/09/27/why-silent-modeling-is-a-powerful-strategy (accessed 5 August 2019).

Sweller J, van Merrienboer JJG and Paas FGWC (1998) Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review 10(3): 251-296.

Weinstein Y, Sumeracki M and Caviglioli O (2018) Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Cognitive Load Theory explored through modelling in the practical classroom | impact.chartered.college

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The basis of teaching in a practical classroom, such as art and design or design technology, is the much repeated and reliable teacher-led demonstration. These demonstrations or modelling approaches allow the teacher to inform, instruct and guide students in their own practical outcomes; however, on

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 

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Rosenshine's Principles V Lemov's Teach Like a Champion

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Blog by Adam Boxer

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by Alex Quigley

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5 Vocabulary Activities for the New School Year

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With a new school year comes the promise of new classes and fresh opportunities. For many teachers, trialling novel strategies around vocabulary instruction will be the order of the day,... | Teachwire News

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Question types, wait time, probing etc.

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Links to positive reinforcement on Pivotal Education's webpage

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We have taken the principle of positive notes home and adapted them for use inside your setting. Provide teachers, learners and visitors the opportunity to reward great behaviour.

This is the price for 10 pads, 1000 A5 sheets in total.

These can be purchased individually, or as a refill for our Behaviour Stars Box.

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You searched for positive - Pivotal Education

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We have taken the principle of positive notes home and adapted them for use inside your setting. Provide teachers, learners and visitors the opportunity to reward great behaviour. This is the price for 10 pads, 1000 A5 sheets in total. These can be purchased individually, or as a refill for our Behaviour Stars Box.

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Variation Theory in Maths

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Working Memory in Mathematica

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Teaching for Mastery in Mathematics

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October 2019 Research updates available here

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In partnership with the Institute for Effective Education (IEE)
Every month The National College provide the Institute for Effective Education's 'Best Evidence in Brief' roundup in video format; focusing on stories with practical implications for schools and policy makers, including only high quality research from around the world.

About The Expert

Jonathan Haslam

Find out more

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In partnership with the Institute for Effective Education (IEE) Every month The National College provide the Institute for Effective Education's 'Best Evidence in Brief' roundup in video format; focusing on stories with practical implications for schools and policy makers, including only high quality research from around the world.

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Aimed at Maths but lots of takeaway points and signposts to further research at the end.

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A shift in teacher mindset and practice required - from Tom Sherrington

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The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it.

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I see a lot of lessons - hundreds of them in multiple contexts - and I'm going to suggest that there is one very common challenge that teachers face that is often not addressed well enough, even by experienced teachers. In my view, it's the single biggest reason for lessons being ineffective or certainly less...

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Structuring your checking of understanding  

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Structuring your checking of understanding  

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From Tom Sherrington

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The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it.

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I see a lot of lessons - hundreds of them in multiple contexts - and I'm going to suggest that there is one very common challenge that teachers face that is often not addressed well enough, even by experienced teachers. In my view, it's the single biggest reason for lessons being ineffective or certainly less...

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Tweet from John Tomsett (08/10/2019)

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Opportunities to maximise feedback by checking understanding on mass

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Opportunities to maximise feedback by checking understanding on mass

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Tweet from John Tomsett (08/10/2019)

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4 pillars of effective teacher-teen  relationships

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4 pillars of effective teacher-teen  relationships

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From the ASCD (Association of School and Curriculum Design)

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Mary Ann Ware and Jodi Rath

Teenagers are renowned for wanting more freedom, and their desire for independence is a normal part of adolescent development. What teenagers want and what teenagers need is not always in perfect harmony. Adults who work with teens are often uncertain how to influence young adults whom they can no longer control. They may sabotage their authority by extending too much freedom, expecting too little, or responding to adolescent frustration with harsh words. By establishing the four pillars of consistency, respect, high expectations, and kindness in the classroom, a teacher can build a rapport with teen students that promotes engagement and success.

Consistency

Freedom without consistent rules and routines is a recipe for disaster. Teenagers need the consistency of clear boundaries, balanced schedules, and regular routines to create a safe, predictable environment conducive to success. While it seems paradoxical, consistent boundaries can increase opportunities for teenagers to experiment with their growing autonomy; total freedom often leads to problems, power struggles, and ultimately more restrictions for teens at school and at home.

This is especially evident in online education. When students transition from the traditional school to the online environment, they may be seduced by the freedom and flexibility. Freedom becomes the enemy if students do not have the self-discipline or the oversight at home to establish consistent boundaries, schedules, and routines without a teacher present. Families who establish consistency often see teenagers who struggled flourish in ways they hadn't before. Families who don't establish order may find their teens scrambling to recover academically after a semester online.

Behavioral problems and lower academic growth often plague traditional classrooms without consistency. Homes without predictability increase the probability of strained relationships and personal struggles. Fortunately, there are many online resources where teachers can learn more about setting up rules and routines, preparing students to learn, enforcing rules fairly, and mastering transitions. Schools can also help educate parents about the importance of supporting student success by establishing consistency at home.

Respect

A respected teacher will find it easier to engage, influence, and inspire students. If respect cannot be demanded of students, how can a teacher create it? Students respect a teacher who makes them feel valued. Teachers who are highly respected focus less on impressing their students and more on highlighting the ways that their students impress others.

Being different can be particularly challenging as a teen. Teachers can facilitate prosocial behavior and illuminate the value of multiple perspectives while teaching diverse student populations. Resources like teachingtolerance.org share critical practices for antibias education to help teachers show respect for the qualities that make each student unique, while teaching students to respect each other's differences.

Teachers may inadvertently foster competition in the classroom, creating a hierarchy of power in which high-achieving students are perceived as more respected than students who are struggling. Such a hierarchy can affect struggling students' self-esteem and decrease teacher influence with the students who may need it most. By focusing on growth rather than achievement, the teacher creates an equal playing field, giving each student's hard work equal value. This both shows respect and garners it.

High Expectations

There will always be students who do not want to be pushed academically. I (Jodi) taught at a district that had an Ohio Work Education (OWE) program, and these students were in my first period English class. Many of them did not like academics and thought that because their jobs paid them, they didn't need school. They were always tired in my class, and having to read and write didn't help. They wanted to be able to sit together in a group in the back of the classroom.

They highly respected their OWE teacher. I had a private conversation with her about my expectations for them. She was a pistol of a teacher and wanted to rip into them-and they would have listened to her, momentarily. I asked our administration if we could get a substitute for her first period one day so that she and I could have a conference with the students. We created an agenda listing our expectations and reasons for these expectations. We also asked for their input to make the class successful. We negotiated that, as long as they met expectations, they could sit together in the middle of the room. We committed to meeting quarterly to reflect on how things were going.

I worried that these students would take advantage of this set up or think I wasn't strict enough, but because we laid it all out, arranged consequences, and allowed them to be heard, they were on board. Students who had barely passed previous English courses were achieving Bs in my class.

These resources can help you promote high expectations for students:

Concordia University Blog post offers suggestions for timely feedback-prioritize grading and comments so students know you are expecting a lot of yourself as well.

Kid's Health provides information an educator can give to parents who want to know how to support their teen in high school. Edutopia provides some stats and simple, daily things to do in the classroom to promote high expectations.

Kindness

When I (Jodi) taught seniors, my substitute teachers would say they could not believe how respectful my students were toward them, but they would have those same students in other classrooms, and many of those same students showed disrespect. Why? I can only think of two reasons. One is that I made it a point daily to say "please" and "thank you" to every student. My students quickly picked up on my manners and would do the same. The second reason is that my students knew I had high expectations for their behavior and the quality of their work. I did not let casual carelessness creep into our classroom community. For example, if a student threw something in the trash can, missed, and then ignored it saying, "That's what the janitor gets paid to do," it was a launchpad to discuss character as a class. Additional resources to promote kindness in the classroom include two articles from PBS and Medium.

Teaching teens is equal parts challenge and reward. If you can build your classroom on the four pillars of consistency, respect, high expectations, and kindness, you will create a platform for teens to thrive in school and in their lives after graduation.

Mary Ann Ware is in her 16th year of teaching high school English. Her blog is stillchasingfireflies.com. Jodi Rath is in her 20th year as an educator. Find out more about her business, MYS ED LLC, at www.jodirath.com.

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 26. Copyright 2019 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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4 Must-Haves for Positive Teacher-Teen Relationships

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Mary Ann Ware and Jodi Rath Teenagers are renowned for wanting more freedom, and their desire for independence is a normal part of adolescent development. What teenagers want and what teenagers need is not always in perfect harmony. Adults who work with teens are often uncertain how to influence young adults whom they can no longer control.

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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DON'T FORGET Innovate My Teaching strategies

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Staff shared>T&L>IMT

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YES! - Interesting article from Jarlath O'Brien

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I'd been a teacher for five years when our school got a new headteacher.

This is a big moment in the life of any school; my colleagues and I sat expectantly in the hall on that first day back in September, waiting to get the measure of our new leader.

They spoke incredibly persuasively for 45 minutes (a lesson in making a first impression that I have never forgotten). And one thing they said, in particular, sticks in my brain:

"The single most effective thing you can do to improve behaviour in your class is to have a seating plan."
Quick read: Quick listen: Want to know more? How tidying up my teaching put the joy back in the job What role does executive function play in the classroom? Why some school rules are made to be broken
Looking back on that statement now, I am not sure if it is strictly true, but I do believe it to be important.

There is good research on seating arrangements (how and where you arrange your desks, as opposed to who is actually sitting in those places).

Unsurprisingly, it has found that off-task behaviour is reduced if children sit in rows when working independently (I emphasise this point as it is often lost in Twitter spats on the topic) in order to make inappropriate interactions between peers more inconvenient and more readily apparent to teachers.

Wannarka and Ruhl (2008) conclude: "There is no single classroom seating arrangement that promotes positive behavioural and academic outcomes for all tasks, because the available research clearly indicates that the nature of the task should dictate the arrangement."

Think of drama, PE and early years colleagues, for example - along with those of us who teach in science labs with hexagonal tables fixed to the floor because of gas and water supplies.

Who, where and how

This research is informative, but it seems to me self-evident that who is sitting where and who they are sitting near and next to is at least as important as where those seats are - and probably more so. This is why seating plans are a good idea.

Schools seem to operate in one of three ways:

1. There is no school policy and teachers are free to decide.

2. The school policy is that all teachers will have seating plans, but the teacher retains autonomy over the details.

3. The school has a rule on how children will be seated.

For the record, I prefer the middle option. The third one is rare, but two colleagues I know run schools with strict policies: in one, children sit alphabetically; and in the other, they sit alphabetically but also boy/girl.

I suspect in both cases that there needs to be a degree of flexibility. Not just because of a likely imbalance in boys and girls, but also for children like my daughter who require specific consideration over where they sit (due to a visual impairment, in her case), or where one child has been bullying another.

Unplanned plan

So I recommend a seating plan, but I admit that, in my 19 years of teaching, this plan has sometimes been to allow children to sit where they liked.

In each case, though, I have made it crystal clear that I always retain the right to seat people where I choose without consultation or notice. Interestingly, the older I've got, the less I do this, preferring to avoid the disruption or standoff that sometimes occurs when moving children.

I have found it easier to adjust my own plans, and children tend to be more accepting than to overturn the decision of another child. There is the added benefit for secondary teachers that it can significantly speed up learning the names of all the new children you're teaching.

Lastly, don't forget support staff. If you're lucky enough to have a colleague with you, where in the room they work can make a big difference.

Yes, they are likely to be working with some children more regularly, but precisely where they place themselves can really help to minimise disruption and maintain on-task behaviour.

Jarlath O'Brien is a school leader and physics teacher in Oxfordshire. His latest book Leading Better Behaviour: a guide for school leaders will be published by Corwin in March 2020

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I'd been a teacher for five years when our school got a new headteacher. This is a big moment in the life of any school; my colleagues and I sat expectantly in the hall on that first day back in September, waiting to get the measure of our new leader.

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YES - for targeted questioning. Interesting article from Jarlath O'Brien

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I'd been a teacher for five years when our school got a new headteacher.

This is a big moment in the life of any school; my colleagues and I sat expectantly in the hall on that first day back in September, waiting to get the measure of our new leader.

They spoke incredibly persuasively for 45 minutes (a lesson in making a first impression that I have never forgotten). And one thing they said, in particular, sticks in my brain:

"The single most effective thing you can do to improve behaviour in your class is to have a seating plan."
Quick read: Quick listen: Want to know more? How tidying up my teaching put the joy back in the job What role does executive function play in the classroom? Why some school rules are made to be broken
Looking back on that statement now, I am not sure if it is strictly true, but I do believe it to be important.

There is good research on seating arrangements (how and where you arrange your desks, as opposed to who is actually sitting in those places).

Unsurprisingly, it has found that off-task behaviour is reduced if children sit in rows when working independently (I emphasise this point as it is often lost in Twitter spats on the topic) in order to make inappropriate interactions between peers more inconvenient and more readily apparent to teachers.

Wannarka and Ruhl (2008) conclude: "There is no single classroom seating arrangement that promotes positive behavioural and academic outcomes for all tasks, because the available research clearly indicates that the nature of the task should dictate the arrangement."

Think of drama, PE and early years colleagues, for example - along with those of us who teach in science labs with hexagonal tables fixed to the floor because of gas and water supplies.

Who, where and how

This research is informative, but it seems to me self-evident that who is sitting where and who they are sitting near and next to is at least as important as where those seats are - and probably more so. This is why seating plans are a good idea.

Schools seem to operate in one of three ways:

1. There is no school policy and teachers are free to decide.

2. The school policy is that all teachers will have seating plans, but the teacher retains autonomy over the details.

3. The school has a rule on how children will be seated.

For the record, I prefer the middle option. The third one is rare, but two colleagues I know run schools with strict policies: in one, children sit alphabetically; and in the other, they sit alphabetically but also boy/girl.

I suspect in both cases that there needs to be a degree of flexibility. Not just because of a likely imbalance in boys and girls, but also for children like my daughter who require specific consideration over where they sit (due to a visual impairment, in her case), or where one child has been bullying another.

Unplanned plan

So I recommend a seating plan, but I admit that, in my 19 years of teaching, this plan has sometimes been to allow children to sit where they liked.

In each case, though, I have made it crystal clear that I always retain the right to seat people where I choose without consultation or notice. Interestingly, the older I've got, the less I do this, preferring to avoid the disruption or standoff that sometimes occurs when moving children.

I have found it easier to adjust my own plans, and children tend to be more accepting than to overturn the decision of another child. There is the added benefit for secondary teachers that it can significantly speed up learning the names of all the new children you're teaching.

Lastly, don't forget support staff. If you're lucky enough to have a colleague with you, where in the room they work can make a big difference.

Yes, they are likely to be working with some children more regularly, but precisely where they place themselves can really help to minimise disruption and maintain on-task behaviour.

Jarlath O'Brien is a school leader and physics teacher in Oxfordshire. His latest book Leading Better Behaviour: a guide for school leaders will be published by Corwin in March 2020

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I'd been a teacher for five years when our school got a new headteacher. This is a big moment in the life of any school; my colleagues and I sat expectantly in the hall on that first day back in September, waiting to get the measure of our new leader.

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Matt Bromley in Insight Magazine

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Insight mag - foundations of effective teaching

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What does it mean for classroom teachers?

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Cognitive Load Theory and what it means for classroom teachers

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Working memory capacity difference, therefore, is one of the main reasons why some students learn less than other students from the same teacher input. However, we should also be aware that the working memory capacity of all humans is very small, even those with a larger than average capacity.

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Google drive full of resources and reflection activities

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Download Our Free Resources – Retrieval Practice

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In our free resources, written by cognitive scientists, we condense research on teaching strategies, why they enhance learning, and how to implement them in the classroom.

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Study strategies to boost learning

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Retrieval Practise and Lower Working Memory

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Retrieval Practise and Lower Working Memory

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Best Revision Resources for English Language

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Best Revision Resources for English Language

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The 10 best ways to revise English Language at GCSE (Teachwire)

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10 of the Best Revision Resources for GCSE English Language - Updated for 2018

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10 of the Best Revision Resources for GCSE English Language - Updated for 2018

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In the annals of being a teacher, hoping to see 20 eager hands raised when you've asked a question but seeing only two or three instead is among the most common challenges.

Since this blog is a judgment free zone I just want to say it's ok. We have all, every single one of us, been there.

But is it ok to just call on those 2 or 3 reliable hand raisers every time? No. Is it beneficial to announce to the class (with a bit of edge in your voice), "Do I need to remind you that your participation is graded?" or "I'm seeing the same three hands... I'd like to hear from some of the gentlemen in the back..." Not really.

So what can you do?

Here's a great video of Alonte Johnson, some time English Teacher and full time Dean of Curriculum and Instruction at Uncommon's Leadership Prep Ocean Hill Middle Academy, that shows a high level model of one solution- we call it a "Responsive Turn and Talk" because the Turn and Talk is a response to a low number of hands.

Alonte Johnson.TResponsive Turn and Talk from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.

Alonte's 7th graders are reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's Poem "The Courage That My Mother Had" and Alonte asks, "If she compares her mother's courage to a rock, what associations can we make about how the speaker views her mother?"

He gets two hands. He leaves four or five seconds of Wait Time and augments it by narrating hands, counting off the number he sees slowly ("I see one... two... three hands..." to show they matter to him and he notices who volunteers. He gets two more. Better but still not enough.

Notice he's calm here. No frustration evident. It's a hard question.

So Alonte goes to a Turn and Talk. The presumption here is that if reinforcing the importance of hand raising isn't enough they may well be genuinely stumped. He lets them talk it out and rehearse some initial thoughts for 30 seconds.You'll notice this is a routine for them. They do this all the time and they know how to do it the right way so when he says, "Turn and Talk to your partner. Go!" everyone engages right away. He circulates and engages during the 30 seconds to show he cares about the quality of their thinking.

Pause. He asks for hands again. He's casual and easy going about the question, repeating it in an easy-going tone.This time there are more hands 9 or 10 at least.

He's sure to tell them he notices the difference, making his goal of engaging the class in the discussion transparent: "Love the increased number of hands."

"Track Sakani," he says.

Sakani has had time to think through her thoughts and get confident. And everyone tracking her reinforces their respect for her ideas and the value they place in her contribution. So she pretty much crushes it:

"The daughter is inspired by her mother. She compares her mother to a rock because her mother is durable..." she begins.

So... the recipe here is:

Leave Wait Time

Narrate Hands to Show They Matter

Insert Turn and Talk if Necessary

Remain easy going and supportive in tone while structured and clear on expectations

Hope you'll let me know how it goes if you try it. Thanks to Alonte for sharing his video!

By the way, if you want to help your teachers crush Turn and Talk like Alonte does, our Turn and Talk Plug and Play might be for you!

Alonte Johnson, Turn and Talk, Wait Time

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Things To Do When You Don't Get Many Hands - Teach Like a Champion

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In the annals of being a teacher, hoping to see 20 eager hands raised when you've asked a question but seeing only two or three instead is among the most common challenges. Since this blog is a judgment free zone I just want to say it's ok.

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Enhancing Long-Term Memory: 7 Strategies For eLearning Professionals

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Wondering What eLearning Professionals Should Know About Long-Term Memory? Check the Enhancing Long-Term Memory: 7 Strategies For eLearning Professionals.

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Classroom Guide- Understanding Working Memory

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Cognitive Load Theory 3 - intrinsic, extraneous, germane.