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A fortnightly podcast for colleagues across the education sector brought to you by staff at Michaela Community School looking at educational issues from our collective and individual perspective.

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I would be very surprised if there were many people in the room not familiar with stickers like the ones up on this board. Target grades are so embedded in our schools, so deeply entwined in educational DNA that we have come to take them for granted. I hate them and if I had my way we would stop using them right now. Today I hope to convince you that I am right. I am going to explain where they came from, how some helpful thinking was corrupted and the role unthinking inspectorates played in embedding them in schools. I will go on to explain, using research around goal setting, why they are likely to be at best a waste of time and at worst, actually damaging to learning. I will finish by sketching out a very rough proposal of what we might replace them with, which draws heavily on the work of Michael Fordham and Daisy Christodoulu.

When I left the UK in 2006 there were no Target Grades. When I returned five years later they were everywhere, screaming out from SIMS and multi-coloured Excel spreadsheets, and shouting mindlessly on the front of exercise books

Their greasy fingerprints were all over lessons too. Outcomes, written carefully on every board, were often tagged with the different target grades of students in that particular class. For example in history, my subject:

Describe the Night of the Long Knives (C)

Explain the causes of the Night of the Long Knives (B)

Evaluate the significance of these causes (A).

The expectation was that, in the very best lessons, students should have individual target grades and given different tasks to do, multiplying planning by three. This came as a particularly unpleasant shock. On a training day I heard a consultant ask "why should the higher ability start at the same point the lower ability do?" and saw people around me nodding in agreement. I was baffled. How could a student explain what caused the Night of the Long Knives if they didn't know what happened in the first place? Describing the fire would only take a student with a C target a few minutes. Should I just get them to repeat that in different ways until the end of the lesson? Should I stop them moving onto explaining?"

I thought maybe I'd misunderstood and so anxious to catch up on what I'd missed while away, I read lots and asked lots of questions, but didn't find the answers I got at all illuminating.

I learned that Target Grades were generated from tests children sat at the end of their primary education in English and Maths. From an average of these three grades an acceptable level of progress had been decided upon, and this was used to set a target for other subjects. The success of the child and, by association, their teachers and school, was assessed on whether they failed to meet, achieved or exceeded this target.

I found this simply mind boggling. How could the average attainment of a child in two subjects be used to predict their attainment in completely different disciplines? Most children I taught in Year 7 had never really studied history meaningfully but, as I understood it, I was supposed to assume that they were already as good at it as they were the subjects they had learned. When I raised this I was told "just be glad you don't teach music, art or PE. At least in history they do read and write."

I asked more questions and got myself even more confused. Someone else told me that results of these KS2 tests were used as an assessment of the child's intelligence and capacity to learn; if they had reached a certain standard in one subject it was assumed they could do so in others. To me this made no sense at all. The KS2 tests tested aptitude in discrete subjects and weren't designed to test intelligence. The outcome could be the result of any one or combination of a huge number of variables of which intelligence was only one, including the ability of the teacher, the level of parental support and the degree to which a primary school taught directly to the test. The assessments were not intelligence tests and I didn't think they should be used as a general indicator of a child's capacity to learn.

When I brought this up I got a different answer. I was told that I had misunderstood and these tests were actually used to assess the level of different generic skills a child had reached. Seeing English and Maths as the trunk of a tree with the other subjects as branches initially seemed quite neat. In this conception, children had developed different generic competencies. If a child could describe well in English, as demonstrated on their KS2 test, they would be able to describe well in history too. This helped explain the very Bloom's influenced learning outcomes that had also mushroomed while I was away.

I allowed myself to be satisfied with this for a while but something just did not fit quite right and nagged at me. The first problem was that the various skills that students were assumed to have were very different in history to how they were in other subjects; what I regarded as a good descriptive paragraph was different to the sort of paragraph their English teacher wanted them to write. While their English teacher might be overjoyed to hear Elizabeth's dress described as a 'glowing rainbow waterfall', such linguistic extravagance had me reaching for the sick bucket. It seemed it was also assumed that a child who wrote good historical descriptions of one thing should be able to do so on something they had never learned about before too. The most important part of my subject of all, knowledge, barely got a look in - put simply, knowing more did not seem to be regarded as making progress.

This had led to generic 'skill's becoming something of a red herring as the importance of knowledge was downplayed and vague, subjective and undefinable 'skills' became goals in themselves.

This approach to differentiation, based on target grades, continues to cause big problems in history teaching. In a recently blogged about lesson I saw, judged highly by Ofsted according to the blogger, students were given one of three different versions of a worksheet according to their target grade. Each child was told they could choose a worksheet that was aimed higher than their target but not lower.

This just doesn't make any sense. If a student is capable of doing work, then surely they should do it. Allowing them to choose exposes an important flaw in lessons that use this approach. Even if this model were effective in supporting progress from different starting points, by its very nature it can never close gaps between students; higher ability students do harder work and learn more, lower ability do easier work and learn less. In classrooms and schools that work like this the weak can't ever hope to catch up with the strong, as gaps between students are consolidated and never close.

Target grades also wreak havoc at KS4 where they can easily result in teachers focusing on the wrong things, when they are inappropriately combined with mark schemes. A scheme for an old style 8 mark question may say that students can get 6 marks for a one sided argument. It may appear logical to translate this to a 'B,' and by doing so assume that a good target to set for a student with a 'B' grade target would be to "either agree or disagree with an interpretation and support with evidence." But that 6/8 does not mean a 'B'. It means 6 out of 8 on a paper carrying over 80 marks, which in itself holds only 50% of the total. A quick look through the past exam scripts of my students show what a dangerous misconception this is. Of all my students who have got 'Cs', hardly any have achieved the percentile equivalent of a 'C' consistently on every question. In almost every case, they've got very high marks on some questions and less than half on others. The problem was not that they hadn't grasped a 'B' grade 'skill' as assumed by the target system, but that they had inconsistent knowledge over the breadth of the course. The target for these children should have been more revision, not teaching them to meet self-limiting criteria. If a child is capable of getting full marks on one question, then they are capable of doing the same on all of them, which makes the idea of a generic or skills based target grade still more absurd.

Problems surrounding subjects outside Maths and English have often led to terribly meaningless target setting with action points often vague, non-specific and completely unhelpful. In history, I've seen 'describe in more detail,' 'explain your points' and 'analyse the sources you use,' which, while they may satisfy a school's marking and reporting policy, are all pretty meaningless.

This system casts a shadow half a decade long. In "Making Good Progress" Daisy Christodoulou points out that teachers often unwittingly underscore disadvantaged children and it is plausible that something similar happens as a result of averaged KS2 scores. Less is expected of a child who performs comparatively poorly in their KS2 tests, for whatever reason, than of one who performs well. They are generated a lower target grade, likely to be put in lower sets and typically given easier work to do. It is worth pausing for a moment think through the implications of this; many of us in this room will rail against grammar schools and increased selection, as I do. But if we are putting students in different classes by their KS2 test score aren't we, at least to some degree, doing this already?

Teachers working with subjective mark schemes suffering cognitive overload may unconsciously look for short-cuts when grading work. A target grade provides this short cut, and means they may be more likely to give lower grades to students with lower KS2 data even if the work is of the same standard as that produced by a child with a higher KS2 test score. If the child wasn't really low ability to begin with they can soon become so as they internalise the message that they aren't one of the smart kids, drop further behind and become demoralised. The effect of having low expectations, for whatever reasons, was extensively studied by Rosthental and Jacobson in the 1960s and, while their work has admittedly come in for some robust critique, does provide some evidence that using data to form targets and sharing them with staff may well have the unintended consequence of lowering expectations.

JL Austin's work around the transformative effect of language gives a compelling explanation as to why this might happen. Austin finds that there are many things that people say that don't just describe the world but change it. For example, in a Church of England marriage ceremony when a vicar says "I now pronounce you man and wife" they aren't simply describing something that exists but altering reality itself. We can extend his insight beyond just what people say to things, like the KS2 tests. Those that advocate for these exams and scores might well say that they know that they are intending to change reality. They might say that this is the point. However, the issue is the mismatch between reality that is described in the test and its performativity. It is here that we must be especially careful. While it might be argued that these grades are appropriate for the subjects in which the child actually took tests (Maths and English), clearly we are on much shakier ground when we start using this non-specific data to guide the teaching of students in other subjects. We must be certain what we do has validity, a vicar announces the banns of marriage before the ceremony and so can be confident in its legitimacy. If the data on which targets are based is not legitimate then nor will any performative effects.

There will, of course, be those who seek to defend the policy both within their own schools and across England as a whole. I anticipate the most common will be that they raise aspirations and so lead to faster progress and if there is convincing evidence they do result in better outcomes then the policy, for all its flaws, might be worth continuing with.

But there isn't.

The evidence base on the impact of GCSE target grades based on KS2 data of any type is very scant indeed. Given how widespread it is and the impact it has on the day-to-day working lives of both students and their teachers, this is quite staggering. Of course, this also makes it impossible to say it has no positive impact in individual contexts but given such a confused birth, which I will go into later, and the many problems I hope I have demonstrated it causes, we must do better than that. In the lamentable lack of specific study, I have looked at examples of target setting in other domains to see if there is evidence of either positive or negative impact, while being acutely aware of the irony of this given the problems I've identified with non-specific target grades.

In the absence of research conducted in English schools I am indebted to Ryan Campbell for pointing me towards studies on the impact of Performance and Learning Goals on businesses. While I am aware that there are issues in applying findings from one area to another, I am hopeful some inferences may be illuminating.

Goal-setting theory was originally conceived and developed in industrial/organizational psychology. Studies by psychologists such as Locke and Latham identified two types of goal; Performance Goals and Learning Goals. Performance goals are outcome orientated with typical examples being an increase in productivity or profits, or a reduction in wastage. Learning goals are intended to improve the knowledge or skill of an individual or organisation. While learning goals may eventually contribute to a performance goal they are fundamentally different. Target grades in English schools are, in effect, performance goals because they are measures of the standard reached across wide-ranging domains of disciplinary knowledge and offer no support in achieving them.

Studies by Locke, Latham, Seijts and others found that having specific, challenging performance goals did indeed lead to better performance than easy, vague ones.

This might appear to support the use of target grades, but these findings came with a number of important provisos. In order for performance goals to be effective, those set them had to be personally committed, couldn't feel that they conflicted with other goals they may have and had to have the ability to achieve them. Target grades do not meet any of these criteria.

Firstly, not all students set target grades will be committed to them, especially in subjects they dislike. As teachers we hear this regularly, with "you only care about getting grades so the school looks good' a depressingly familiar refrain. This was most manifest a few years ago when re-sit results counted, which resulted in children happy with their original grade made to retake exams, in a depressing educational version of Groundhog Day, in order to reach targets that had been imposed on them. The failure of children to buy in to the grade set for them may partially be because of a lack of consultation and, interestingly, early on the FFT recognised this and recommended that the data they provided be used as the basis for a conversation between parents, teachers and pupils, which then generated what was described as an 'agreed expected grade.' This approach could be criticised by saying those with low aspirations will set inappropriately low grades, but it is important to remember that any positive impact of setting challenging targets is negated if those involved are not committed to them.

It would probably not be fair to say that all, or indeed most, children see the achievement of a target grade as in conflict with other goals they may have. That said, I do feel that some do see things this way. Children from backgrounds in which academic success is neither common nor valued have other goals which are very important to them. For example such children may derive immense and understandable satisfaction from being a caring sibling, a good footballer, a vivacious party-animal or a cheeky and popular local character. Achieving good grades at school, and the work necessary, might be perceived to be in direct opposition to this; studying hard can mean not doing other things from which these children build self-worth. Locke and Latham (2006) are clear on this in writing that performance goals can only be effective where there is "discontent with one's present condition and the desire to attain an object or outcome." If children are content living in the world in which they do, target grades will be seen as at best an irrelevance, and at worst an implicit criticism of their values. Of course, such issues don't affect all children so perhaps it might be argued that it isn't an argument against target grades in general, but just a suggestion they be applied to those who see no conflict between achieving them and their other aspirations.

My final concern surrounding target grades as performance goals is more fundamental. Seijts and Latham find that performance goals can only be successful if those involved already have the knowledge and skills required to meet them. They use the example of The American Pulpwood Association to illustrate this, which issued performance goals to pulpwood crews, resulting in increased attendance and productivity. Crucially, this only worked because the loggers already had the knowledge and skills to effectively fell and process trees. It was motivational because they had the basics down already. Seijts and Latham explain this is because before the processes needed to perform well have been automated, mastering the required knowledge and skills will fully occupy cognitive resources - the imposition of an external performance goal is a dangerous distraction. The implications for target grades are very clear; if children are guided to think about reaching a grade they don't yet have the knowledge or skills required to reach, they will not be able to focus clearly on the steps they need to make to improve.[4]

This is damning to target grades. Students, by definition, are novices in their fields of study and lack the knowledge and skills required to achieve the grades assigned to them. Seijts and Latham couldn't be more unequivocal on the consequences of this:

This might well make for uncomfortable reading. Although concerned with businesses there are clear parallels in the manner in which target grades are assigned and the consequences of this. I very recently heard of a school that issues detentions to students who fail to achieve their target grade in tests regardless of how hard they studied and am sure few teachers are unaware of instances of 'bending the rules' or even outright cheating on exams, coursework and controlled assessments. Such instances, while of course not excusable, are certainly understandable; teachers are as much victims of the target grade system as their pupils are. They too are not always given the means to attain their performance management goals, typically based on target grades, and they too can be punished when they fail.

Of course, good schools do provide children with the support to reach their targets but these very helpful 'learning goals' which I'd like to discuss in more detail later, are subverted by the performance based target grades that hang so distractingly and pointlessly over their heads.

These serious concerns got me wondering where this all began and why it became so widespread, so I did some digging.

Widespread target setting in English schools began with the Fischer Family Trust. The Trust compiled a wide range of data, including prior attainment ( not ability) and socio-economic variables to make statistical links between them and the outcomes of individuals and groups of students. This information could be used by schools to assess how well their pupils were doing compared to children at other schools. This could be extremely useful and powerful information, allowing schools to see when their expectations of cohorts a whole were too low. Some schools began to use this information to set targets for individual pupils and some began sticking these targets to the front of their pupils' exercise books to give them something to aim for. Schools were in control as to what these should be and most, as a result of a 'my expectations are higher than yours' arms race, set targets at the very top end of what was statistically possible. Many schools set targets that, should all students achieve them, would place the school in the top 5% of those in the country.

The Fischer Family Trust never advocated this. Their original advice was that if schools and students used the data for individuals it should be as a starting point for discussions that would result in an agreed expected grade. To understand how it turned into what it did we need to look at wider political factors.

School league tables and ranking played a significant role. Schools in disadvantaged areas realised that the raw attainment of their students would not compare well to those in more affluent schools so sought a measure that would demonstrate their pupils had made progress from lower starting points. FFT data offered this opportunity; a child who arrived in Year 7 on lower grades from a more socially disadvantaged background was less likely to get as high a grade as one who arrived on higher ones from a more advantaged one and it seemed fairer to judge them on the progress they'd made since joining the school and against other pupils with similar contexts.

Target Grades and data tracking became inseparably linked, enshrined in the Teacher Standards, and encoded in the very DNA of English schools. After 2010 most schools stopped using FFT, which did try to recognise the effect of demographic on attainment, and began to form targets based purely on raw KS2 scores. This was partially because the DFE, under Michael Gove's well-intentioned instruction, got rid of Contextual Value Added (CVA), believing taking into account demographics meant accepting differentiated standards by advantage and the inevitable failure of the poor. Many if not most schools now disregard context completely and simply add three or four levels to a child's averaged KS2 data to make this their target. As well-meaning as this is, outside of English and Maths, it is wrongheaded because the point from which each child is supposed to be progressing has very little, if anything at all, to do with the subject they are studying.

Ofsted inspections embedded this. While they have never officially required schools to share targets or put them on exercise books schools that did were praised and other schools, predictably, followed suit, creating an annual ceremony of cruelty in which children were divided into the clever and not clever in front of their peers, with a sticker placed on their books to remind them daily of which one they were. Head Teachers working between 2008 and 2012 remember the practice spreading like a virus at local and national conferences as the idea that this was what Ofsted wanted took hold. As Alex Ford pointed out in his important post on how inspection regimes promoted extensive marking, praise or condemnation from Ofsted can very quickly become an important driver of school policy even when there is no evidence that the policy is effective, especially for those schools struggling to improve outcomes and wanting to prove that their methods are the same as more successful ones to avoid criticism.

A short analysis of twenty of the most recent Ofsted Reports for schools I've either worked at or know reasonably well suggests this is still fairly common. Of the twenty I looked at thirteen mentioned Target Grades explicitly. In all these instances comments were approving, either praising their use or describing insufficiently challenging target grades as a reason for slow progress. No Ofsted Reports questioned the use of Target Grades or the data on which they were based which, of course, would make it seem logical for SLTs in struggling schools to insist on their use. Some reports included Target Grades in material on teacher appraisal and performance management. One team even reported of one school that "teachers are aware they may not get a pay rise if students do not achieve their Target Grades." Such policies are likely to have really worrying consequences. As I've already mentioned targets in school are no longer typically based on FFT data and are more commonly based on a simple numerical value (either 3 or 4 levels depending on the school) being added to each child's mean KS2 score. This means that the targets of students in a class in a socially disadvantaged area may actually be those achieved by only a very small percentage of children from similar demographics nationally. To successfully meet their appraisal targets teachers at some schools have to achieve this with every one of the children in every one of their classes. Failure is inevitable and such performance management systems has meant that employment at the most disadvantaged of England's schools is perceived as a real career risk, which may well be making the recruitment and retention crisis more acute in the disadvantaged schools where good teachers and leaders are most needed.

So to summarise, the Fischer Family Trust gathered data on the grades students were statistically likely to get and schools turned these into targets for subjects students hadn't get studied. Schools used FFT data to take into account context but in 2010 the DFE said they couldn't, so instead schools started adding either 3 or 4L of progress to raw KS2 data. This has generated targets that some students are statistically highly unlikely to ever achieve. Ofsted didn't tell anyone to put these target grades onto books or share them but somewhere, at sometime around 2008 a school did. Inspectors reported approvingly on this policy and soon most schools were doing it. Some schools have tied this to Performance Related Pay, which has made meeting appraisal targets all but impossible for some teachers. If this sounds a confused mess it is because it is a confused mess. Target Grades are an answer to a question nobody asked. (12) The result was a decade long multi-vehicle wreck of a 'policy' which only happened because nobody was driving.

Despite all these issues, schools often continue to require teachers know the target of all the children in their classes and that children be able to parrot off these grades at the drop of a hat. While Ofsted were originally mainly to blame for this, SLTs must accept some responsibility and step up. We have created a generation of school leaders to which school management is so inseparably entwined with data tracking based on progress towards target grades that they honestly don't know how to run a school without them. This is no excuse. Ofsted have now made it clear that student are not expected to know their target grades and that schools should pursue policies most beneficial to their pupils, and should not be preoccupied with worrying about 'what Ofsted want.' We should take them at their word and SLT should abandon any pretence that target grades can be defended and consign them to the educational dump, with VAK and brain gym, where they belong. The genie is out of the lamp now and refusing to defend the policy or worse, shutting it down by refusing to engage, will increasingly and quite rightly lead to anger, resentment and poor morale.

Ofsted can help. I'd like them to tell inspectors not to ask students or teachers for target grades, certainly outside Maths and English. I'd like them to insist that inspection teams refrain from making comments on students making progress, or not making progress because of either the presence or absence of Target Grades, certainly outside Maths and English. Schools should stop using KS2 data to set children outside subjects in which they took tests, I think they should stop using the achievement of Target Grades, outside English and Maths, as a way of directly assessing the effectiveness of teachers and that schools should not use them to make decisions around career and pay progression.

While I am of the firm belief that abandoning target grades would, at the very least, have no negative impact on the education of England's children I am also pragmatic to know that it is unlikely to happen if nothing is put in place to replace them. It's because of this I'd like to return to Learning Goals and link these to a very rough, embryonic idea for how we could perhaps move to a more sensible assessment and tracking system.

I propose, humbly and with full knowledge that much thinking and critique is necessary, that we replace target grades with subject specific learning goals based on the knowledge organisers gaining traction in English schools.

The knowledge children need to know should be carefully curated and standardised at departmental level and, while informed by content required at GCSE, would not be solely based on it, to avoid the very real concerns Amanda Spielman spoke about recently. Standardised exams would be given at the end of each full term to test the degree to which this knowledge has been embedded. These exams would, as has been well articulated by Michael Fordham and Daisy Christodolou,, contain a range of assessment methods relevant to the subject area, but would not (perhaps should not) be in the same format each time. They would test content over a long period of time, not just on the material taught in the immediate weeks leading up to them.

School data tracking would not track progress against any grade at all, apart from perhaps in the latter stages of Year 11 when it might be appropriate, but on how much the child had improved. Progress could be tracked with a simple 1-3 number, representing improvement, stagnation or regression. This progress number would also take into account, especially in the most knowledge rich subjects, that the amount of material on which children are tested is continually growing, which actually means maintaining a score might actually mean improvement.

Learning targets set by teachers would be subject specific and based on discrete knowledge, not generic skills. For example, in my subject, history, a target might be "revise the reasons why there was a disputed succession to the throne after the death of Edward the Confessor" if this was an area on which a child had performed relatively poorly. The child could then be given the relevant knowledge organiser and a productive homework after the test would be to complete work on this. I am completely certain this would be more productive than the standard "describe features in more detail' sort of nonsense which still seem to be very widespread.

In implementing such a system it would, of course, be very important to ensure that the vast majority of children do make progress and succeed, with careful thought given as to how to best support those that do not. This is not just necessary at an individual level but to the cohort as a whole; if a critical mass of children are not improving then this becomes normalised and students, perhaps more influenced by their peer group than anyone else, would lose motivation to do better.

I hope that the ethos this would create would be one in which continual improvement is expected and that an increasing body of knowledge has intrinsic value. Freeing children from having to think about how close or far away they are from a target grade, with all the other problems these have, would allow them to focus on learning for its own sake from the point at which they are at, which I think would be far more helpful in building intrinsic motivation than the system we struggle with at the moment.

As always, I am up for robust critique of what I have written here and am well aware that there is probably a huge amount I'm too uninformed to have even considered, the unknown unknowns, if you like. I'd be grateful to anyone who can constructively point out where I've gone wrong. Specifically, being very aware that much of the research I have used is not education-based I would very much welcome work on the impact of target grades in English schools, as I would more refined suggestions as to how, if we really must, we should record and track progress in a more meaningful way.

Can we be blunt? Target grades in their current form are a dangerous nonsense. They have already had far too long in the sun. It is time for them to go. Nobody, teacher, parent or child, will miss them.

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I would be very surprised if there were many people in the room not familiar with stickers like the ones up on this board. Target grades are so embedded in our schools, so deeply entwined in educational DNA that we have come to take them for granted.

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I once taught a Year 7 top set and a Year 10 bottom set in consecutive lessons on a Friday afternoon. The proximity of the two classes got me thinking about their relative attainment and progress. Suppose I accidentally mixed up my lessons. Would the Year 10s have found the Year-7 lesson easy? Would the Year 7s have struggled with the Year-10 lesson? What if I'd given both classes the same assessment? Would the Year 10s invariably have done better than the Year 7s? At the end of the year, I wondered how much of each class's improvement was the result of the efforts of my fellow teachers and I - and how much was the result of family background or general maturation.

A new paper from researchers in the UK and the Netherlands addresses some of these questions. The researchers found that younger pupils tend to make more progress. When you compare Year 2 pupils with those in Year 1, there is a big difference of more than one effect size in reading and maths. When you compare Year 6 pupils with those in Year 5, the improvement is still substantial, but the effect size has shrunk to 0.5. The effect size measures the difference between groups. A useful comparison is that an effect size of 0.5 is the difference between the average height of 14-year-old and 18-year-old girls.

In practice, this means that if you were to compare the work of an average Year 1 pupil and an average Year 2 pupil, it would be fairly obvious which pupil was in which year. But if you were to do the same with pupils in Years 5 and 6, it would be less obvious. This study focuses only on primary pupils, but the authors note that other research shows learning gains keep declining in secondary.

Finding 'huge gains' in pupil progress

These researchers have also come up with a clever way to investigate if these improvements are caused by schooling. It would be unethical to set up a "non-schooled" control group, so instead they compared the performance of the very oldest children in one year group and the very youngest in the year above. These pupils were essentially the same age, but owing to the cut-offs for entry into school, some of them had an extra year of school. Using this method, the researchers calculated that about 40 per cent of the improvement in reading and maths was because of the effects of schooling.

What are the implications of this research? It certainly reinforces the importance of primary education, given the huge gains that are made at this age. It also suggests that we might want to evaluate educational programmes differently depending on the age of the pupils. An effect size of 0.2 might not be much in Year 3, but it is a lot in Year 10.

One interesting area of further study involves the progress made in different subjects. As the researchers note, in the later years of education there is more of a focus on applying literacy and numeracy skills in subjects such as history, geography and science. To return to my original musings about the difference between Years 7 and 10: at secondary, high-attaining pupils in younger year groups will often be doing better than lower-attaining pupils in older year groups.

Daisy Christodoulou is director of education at No More Marking and the author of Making Good Progress? and Seven Myths about Education. She tweets @daisychristo
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Primary versus secondary: when do pupils make most progress?

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I once taught a Year 7 top set and a Year 10 bottom set in consecutive lessons on a Friday afternoon. The proximity of the two classes got me thinking about their relative attainment and progress. Suppose I accidentally mixed up my lessons. Would the Year 10s have found the Year-7 lesson easy?

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In this series of blog posts I will write about the Way I Do things in my classroom. The topics will cover a broad range of areas such as planning/preparation, marking/feedback, writing notes, questioning, setting homework and managing behaviour.

In Part 1 I wrote about how I do recall. This was followed by part 2, which was about how my students take notes. This blog, part 3, will be a short post about how I question students in my classroom.

The more I have been teaching and the more time I spend getting to know students and their behaviours, I am beginning to find myself believing that questioning is the best skill that we can equip ourselves with as educators.

(I think humour and presence are extremely important too.)

So, please reflect:

Do we prepare and practice enough our questioning techniques,

Do we plan our questions?

Do we study different ways to question at all?

Do we continually learn? Adapt? Change our questioning styles?

Are there questioning styles?

I visit a lot of classrooms and see many differing ways that educators engage their students. They quiz, the prod, they probe, they expose, they pick, they challenge they tease out answers from a variety of students in a variety of methods.

But, do we consider what to do with who? Meaning, are we clear we are questioning in the right method to the right student?

We have all had lessons like this!

We have also all had feedback where we are told/asked to consider the no hands rule? Or, asked not to focus questions on the same students? Or to try to involve all students in questions. I once was told that I did not question the 'girls' enough in a classroom where there were only 4 girls, and I posed questions to them all!

What I do in my classroom depends on who I have in my classroom.

I expect some basics however:

When ANYBODY or I in the class asks a question, everybody must listen.

When ANYBODY or I in the class answers a question, everybody must listen.

I do not allow 'I do not know.'

When addressing a point made by a classmate/teacher the student must refer to them by their name

I have also been using A, B, C a LOT!
Add Build Challenge
I ask students to start/respond to their answers with I would like to add to the point being made by suggesting... Or, I would like to build on what X has said, as... And, I would like to challenge what Y and Z feel, as I think...

I want/expect them to ABC to either factual, clarification, broadening, justification or hypothetical responses.

I am trying to eradicate the most common response from students... Trying to get them to understand that getting it wrong is OK...

I don't know if this is right, but...

However, garnering enough confidence to publicly make a mistake is a highly difficult emotion to acquire. I have noticed this is more strenuous on adults than young people to be honest. We, as educators, do not want to appear as if we do not know. We also do not want to confirm that we do not know more!

The amount of INSETs and CPD sessions that I deliver where the educators in front of me are extremely reluctant to offer a response amongst their peers, just on the off chance they may be wrong is startling!

More specifically, what do I do about those students who every parents evening, or every report home we say/write; needs to get more involved in classroom discussions, needs to offer his/her views more. Or, is too quiet in class. Well, simply, I speak to them, ask them what they are worried about and inform them that I will be questioning them, sometimes I give them advance warning, sometimes I question, leave them to think and come back. BUT, I COME BACK. Do not forget about them.

It is not a bad thing to be an introvert. It is not a bad thing to sit back and listen to and from others. I have other methods of knowing if my students understand the information I am parting their way.

Here are some crucial factors you must consider when questioning your students:

Think time- how long do you give? Do you give enough? Too much?

What is the emotional buy in to the question? Do students think it is important to respond? Do they want a view? An opinion on the question?

Do not isolate students who want to answer, have an adequate mix of volunteers and conscripts

Allow for support/help- do not vindicate and demonise for not knowing

Word counts- students can't answer a question without a certain number of words/time

Are your questions mostly about recall or requiring higher level thoughts? Are you mixing up closed questions with divergent thinking questions? Blooms Taxonomy? Are you questions rising in cognitive demand?

Ask your question, pause, then pick a student to answer. If you say the name first of the person who you wish to answer the question, it may result in others switching off?

What are the big questions (underlying concepts) for the topics you are studying?

What are the important questions, that need answering

Do not repeat the answer the way you want them to have answered the question

Questioning is the best tool to differentiate, wait, talking is the best way to differentiate, actually, hold on, effective communication depending on our audience is the best way to teach/educate.

With effective questioning we can do the following...

Stimulates thoughts

Motivates, encourages, enthuses

Focusses students attention

Discovery

Build relationships

Organises

Assesses prior/current/future learning

It is a vital cog in the teacher toolkit. We need to make sure we have the biggest tools for it!

If a student gets something wrong, do not respond with,

Or whatever your stock answer to question is. Ask them to consider whether they understood the question clearly, ask for them to repeat their answer, ask for them to ask for support if they need it. If after all this, it is OK to say, No, you are wrong, but well done for trying. Or, great effort. Over praise for incorrect responses can be dangerous. However, you do not want to damage confidence.

Here are some methods/tools/resources I also use to question my students... Try, refine then if they don't work for you ditch.

However you do it, pay it attention, plan for your questioning as much as your resources?

The way you question is your direct route to the hearts and minds of your students.

For further reading see here:

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In this series of blog posts I will write about the Way I Do things in my classroom. The topics will cover a broad range of areas such as planning/preparation, marking/feedback, writing notes, questioning, setting homework and managing behaviour. In Part 1 I wrote about how I do recall.

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.'

Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

We spent hours marking. We spent ages inputting data. And we didn't design assessments cumulatively.

First mistake: we spent exorbitant amounts of time in the first year marking, in particular marking English and History essays and paragraphs. We wrote comments, we set targets, we tried individualised icons, we corrected misspellings, we corrected grammatical errors, we judged and scored written accuracy, we wrote and shared rubrics with pupils. We spent hours every week on this. Over the year, we must have spent hundreds of hours on it.

The hidden pitfall of marking is opportunity cost. Every hour that a teacher spends marking is an hour they can't spend on renewable resourcing: resourcing that endures for years. Marking a book is useful for one pupil once only: creating a knowledge organiser is useful for every pupil (and every teacher) that ever uses it at again. Marking is a hornet. Hornets are high-effort, low-impact; butterflies are high-impact, low-effort. Knowledge organisers are a butterfly; marking is a hornet. We had been blind to just how badly the hornet's nest of marking was stinging us. So we cut marking altogether and now no longer mark at all.

Our second mistake: we spent far too much time in the first few years on data input. We typed in multiple scores for pupils that we didn't use. Preoccupied by progress, we thought we needed as many numbers as we could get our hands on. But the simplistic equation of 'more data, better progress' didn't hold up under scrutiny. Every teacher typed in multiple scores for each assessment, which were then collated so we could analyse the breakdowns. We were deluged in data, but thirsting for insight. There was far too much data to possibly act on. My muddled thinking left us mired in mediocrity, and we had invested 100s of hours for little long-term impact.

What we realised is this: data must serve teachers, rather than teachers serving data. Our axiom now is that we must only collect data that we use. There's no point in drowning in data, or killing ourselves to input data that we don't use.

Our third mistake was this: we had forgotten about forgetting. We designed end-of-unit assessments that tested what pupils had only just learned, and then congratulated ourselves when they did well whilst it was very fresh in the memory. We had pupils write essays just after they had finished the unit. We coached them to superb performances - but they were performances that they would not be able to repeat on that text in English or that period of History even a few weeks later. Certainly, months later, they wouldn't stand a chance. Just as if you asked me to retake for Physics GCSE tomorrow, I would flunk it badly, so just one year on, our pupils would flunk the exact assessment that they had aced one year earlier.

Looking back with hindsight, these three mistakes - on marking, data and design - helped us realise our two great blind spots in assessment: workload and memory. We didn't design our assessments with pupils' memory and teachers' workload in mind.

We were creating unnecessary and unhelpful workload for teachers that prevented them focusing on what matters most. Marking and data were meant to improve teaching and assessment, but assessment and teaching and had ended up being inhibited by them.

We were forgetting just how much our pupils were forgetting. Forgetting is a huge problem amongst pupils and a huge blind spot in teaching. If pupils have forgotten the Shakespeare play they were studying last year, can they really be said to have learned it properly? What if they can't remember the causes or course of the war they studied last year in history? Learning is for nothing if it's all forgotten.
The Battle of the Bridge
Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. There's always a teaching-learning gap. Just because we've taught it, it doesn't mean pupils have learned it. The best teachers close the teaching-learning gap so that their pupils learn - and remember rather than forget - what they are being taught. We've found the idea of assessment as a bridge to be a useful analogy for curriculum and exam design. Once you see assessment as a bridge, you can begin to ask new questions that generate new insights: what principles in teaching are equivalent to the laws of physics that underpin the engineering and construction of the bridge? How can we design and create a bridge that is built to endure? How can we create an assessment model that bridges the teaching-learning gap?

We've found 3 assessment solutions that have exciting potential. Here are the reasons I'm excited about them:
They have absolutely no cost. They are low-effort for staff to create. They have high impact on pupils' learning. They are not tech-dependent at all. They are based on decades of scientific research. They can be immediately implemented by any teacher on Monday morning. They have stood the test of time at Michaela over the last three years. I anticipate we'll still be using them in three, six and even ten years' time, and beyond.
In short: no cost, low effort, high impact, research-based, long-term solutions.

Three of the most effective assessment tools we've found for closing the teaching-learning gap are daily recaps, weekly quizzes and knowledge exams.

Over 100 years of scientific research evidence suggests that the testing effect has powerful impact on remembering and forgetting. If pupils are to remember and learn what we teach them in the subject curriculum, assessment must be and revisit curriculum content. The teaching-learning gap gets worse if pupils forget what they've learned. As cognitive science has shown, ' if nothing has been retained in long-term memory, nothing has been learned'. Assessment, by ensuring pupils revisit what they're learning, can help ensure they remember it.

Pupils forget very swiftly. We use daily recaps, weekly quizzes and biannual knowledge exams to boost pupils' long-term memory retention and prevent forgetting.

Daily recaps are a butterfly: low-effort, high-impact. Departments create recap questions for every single lesson. Every single lesson starts with a recap. They are easy to resource. They consolidate pupils' learning so they don't forget. Every day they spend up to 20 minutes in each lesson applying what they've learned before. In English, for example, we spend those 20 minutes on grammar recaps, spelling recaps, vocabulary recaps, literature recaps (with questions on characters, themes, plots, devices and context). We do recaps on the unit they have been studying over the last few weeks. We do recaps on the previous unit and previous year's units. This daily habit builds very strong retention and motivation: pupils feel motivated because they see how much they are remembering and how much more they are learning than ever before. All recaps are open questions, and weaker forms might be given clues. The recaps are always written; they are no-stakes, without any data being collected; they give instant feedback, as they are swiftly marked, corrected and improved by pupils themselves. We've ask pupils after: 'hands up who got 4 out of 5? Hands up who got 5 out of 5, 100%?' Pupils achieving 100% feel successful and motivated to work hard to revise.

Weekly quizzes are a butterfly: low-effort on workload, high-impact on learning. Departments create quiz questions for every week in the school year. Every week there is a quiz in every subject. They are easy to resource. They challenge and test pupils' understanding. They are mastery tests, where most pupils should be able to achieve a strong result.

We have dramatically, decisively simplified how teachers score them. Instead of marking every single question laboriously, teachers simply sort them into piles. They make swift judgement calls about whether each pupil's quiz is a pass, excellent, or fail. Each judgement is a simple scan of the pupil's quiz paper and a decision as to which of the three piles it should be in. Accuracy isn't perfect, but nor does it need to be: there are diminishing returns to perfecting accuracy.

The data is then inputted in 30 seconds into a beautifully simple tracker. Any pupil failing often is red-flagged, so teachers can focus in lessons on pupils who are struggling. And that is the only data point that our teachers have to keep in mind: which pupils are struggling most?

Knowledge exams are another butterfly - high impact, low effort. What I love about our knowledge exams is that they are cumulative, so that pupils revise and remember what they've learned. We have exam weeks twice yearly, in January and July (not half-termly). We set GCSE-style exams for depth, and we set knowledge exams to test a much fuller breadth of the knowledge pupils have learned. Knowledge exams are 35-question exams that take 60 minutes to complete. They are beautifully simple: they are organised onto 1 sheet of A4 paper, and they can be answered by pupils on one double-sided piece of A4. The breadth we can achieve with these exams is staggering. By Year 9, we have 3 knowledge exams in History, Religion, Science and English alone; they organise 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 7 and 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 8, centred on those years' knowledge organisers. Twice a year, pupils are challenged to revise and remember what they've learned over all the years they spent in secondary school. This means they answer 12 knowledge exams - over 400 questions in total across 4 subjects. I am willing to bet that many of our teachers could not beat even our Year 7 pupils on these exams across all subjects! Imagine more than 24 sides of A4 packed with answers from every pupil in the school. The humble knowledge exam is a great catcher of knowledge.

As for marking them? We simply sort them into three piles: excellent, pass and fail. We don't even record the marks. Teachers just note the names of pupils who failed multiple knowledge exams so we know who's struggled.

Knowledge exams solve the breadth-depth tradeoff in exams. They give pupils maximum practice with minimum marking burden on teachers.

Simplicity must cut through assessment complexity. We should practise what we preach on cognitive overload for teachers as well as pupils. Assessment resources must be renewable, replicable, sustainable, scalable, enduring, long-term.

And the impact of recaps, quizzes and knowledge exams? Well, it's very early days yet, but we've had some (very weak) Y8 or Y9 pupils miss an entire term though unavoidable long-term illness, only to return fully remembering what they've been taught the previous term and previous year. It's an early indicator that the assessment strategy is bridging the teaching-learning gap and overcoming the savage forgetting curve. The real test of its impact will be GCSE results in 2019, A-level results in 2021 and University access and graduation beyond.
Blind, still
The two blind spots we've discovered - memory and workload - provide us with ways of interrogating our teaching and assessment practice:

How much are pupils remembering?

Where are they forgetting?

Where are teachers overloaded?

And I still think that we at Michaela can do more and find better ways of creating assessments with memory and workload in mind. I'm sure our pupils are not yet remembering as much as we'd like them to. I had a conversation with Jonny Porter, our Head of Humanities, just this week, about ramping up the previous-unit daily recaps we do. In this sense, even at Michaela we still feel blind on the blind spot of memory - pupils are still forgetting some of what we are teaching, and we want them to remember what they are learning for the very long-term. Our ambition is that they have learned what we've taught for years to come: for five, ten, twenty years.

Every day, teachers and pupils at Michaela see Churchill's words on the wall: ' success is never final; failure never fatal; it's the courage that counts.' It takes courage to radically simplify assessment - and courage to continually confront our workload and memory blind spots.

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.' Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

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Last week i visited London's faintly notorious Michaela School. A few days ago I wrote an overview framing the visit in the 'big picture' sense. Now I propose to begin sharing a series of posts-the Michaela Files-describing some of the useful things I learned there.

As I walked through London's Michaela School I was struck suddenly by a strong intuition-call it fear maybe-that recalled my days as a teacher in a high performing urban school. I was in my late twenties then, and my colleagues and I were seeking, like Michaela, to engineer every moment for maximum student benefit. God, we loved those kids. And they needed every ounce of what they had and what we had to have a fighting chance. So we pushed them hard and worked long hours. We were going to do every single thing we could. But the hours were often unsustainably long I can now see.

So when I glimpsed the artful intentionality of every moment in student's lives, the impeccable designed and executed systems, I feared that this was also true of Michaela. I knew this would challenge the long term sustainability of the school. Those brilliant teachers would tire. Many would leave. Organizational memory, the culture, the will to sustain it all would be diluted. The school would regress to the mean.

But happily like many intuitions which we presume are accurate, mine appears to have been in large part unfounded. And this is very good news, not just for Michaela but for every school seeking long -term, sustainable excellence-because one reason teachers at Michaela told me they leave by five is that they do something brilliant, simple and replicable to reduce workload without eroding outcomes. And you can copy or adapt it tomorrow.

Ready for it?

Teachers at Michaela do not mark student essays and other writing. They read the essays their students write in English and History and French and Religion and they grade them but the grade is all the written feedback students receive.

How could they? you ask- perhaps thinking of the personal dialogue you establish with your students when, late at night or on Sunday morning, you fill the margins of their essays with individualized comments-"Nice, use of evidence, David, but you've left out an important piece of evidence from page 62." "I love this sentence Sarah. You capture Hurston's vision perfectly."

This task, as Joe Kirby and Jo Facer described it to me is 'maximum effort; minimum impact.' It takes hours. It almost always happens at home for teachers, blurring the lines of the workday and making you feel like you are never done as you stare guiltily at those accusing stacks of essays and writing pieces. Over time you perhaps assign less writing. Or you grade them when you can and give that artful feedback weeks after students wrote the papers-and hardly remember writing them. Or you toil away and just maybe work yourself towards unsustainability. And maybe once or twice you've even wondered- do they read them with as much intentness as you put into the writing of them? Do we know whether they read them at all in some cases?

"We seek the opposite," Joe said, "Maximum impact at minimum effort." So they re-worked marking. And the solution is pretty logical.

When students at Michaela write essays, their teachers read them all and take notes to inform re-teaching the next day. Instead of marking each paper that needs a better topic sentence, they jot down themes and maybe example: "better topic sentences" and "brilliant example of topic sentence from Gabi." The next day show up in class and say: "Many of us are struggling with our topic sentences. So let's look at how to write them better." and then: "Let's look at why Gabi's was so good." And then: "Now go re-write your topic sentences." Or perhaps its content focused: "Many of us misunderstood what the results of the battle were. Let's review the events and then you can rewrite."

And there it is. Time spend writing comments becomes time spent re-teaching. And students then must be responsible for using and applying what they've learned. And the greatest amount of energy can be spent on what's most important to the group. And then-without the disincentive to assign writing-students can write some more.

Honestly, it's brilliant. And it actually draws on what many of us already do during class, when we circulate, observe work and then address common misunderstandings. But it asks the question-is a focus on always individualizing feedback for every student always the best use of our time? Or even usually? Especially if it's in writing? When you consider alternative uses to a teacher's time, the answer is probably no.

Take three hours spent writing comments, allocate 30 minutes to identifying trends and planning a short re-teach and then do other things, including some non-teaching things. This is hugely important because workload has historically been an Achilles heel in the high performing urban schools movement. To change the lives of students otherwise cut off from opportunity is an immense job and often presents a brutal choice. Do you reduce the hours for the adults-the adults you love and honor and who give deeply of themselves to help others-and know that the cost will be lesser outcomes for the students and families you also love and have dedicated you professional life to serving? Or do you push for maximum outcomes for kids and know that people you care about will sometimes-often-work too hard and suffer?

In the end the core social good-the expectation shifting inner-city school-will only be as expandable as we need it to be if we can unlock large scale efficiencies- ways to continue to get maximum value for kids at more sustainable cost for adults. Insights into game changing efficiencies and synergies are rare. But Michaela School is on to one. And, as I pointed out in my first post, you can borrow it no matter what your school's approach.

marking, Michaela School, teacher workload

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Reducing Teacher Workload By Re-Thinking Marking-The Michaela Files, Part 1 - Teach Like a Champion

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Last week i visited London's faintly notorious Michaela School. A few days ago I wrote an overview framing the visit in the 'big picture' sense. Now I propose to begin sharing a series of posts-the Michaela Files-describing some of the useful things I learned there.

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Grit, is trendy, but can it be taught. Daniel Willingham

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Grit, is trendy, but can it be taught. Daniel Willingham

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Less is more: pitfalls to avoid when feeding back mocks

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It's that time of the year when GCSE and A Level students up and down the country are sitting mock assessments. Many of these will be dictated by the school calendar, and many students will sit more than one. Whilst there is not the space here to dissect the relative merits of mocks, one would...

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After reading 'In Praise of Slow' by Carl Honore in February of last year I set off on a mission: an examination of applying slowness to the world of education. Over a year later the book is published by J ohn Catt Educational today and and available to buy from Amazon here. It certainly doesn't advocate a "tortoise teaching" approach, rather it encourages teachers to take more control of finding the most effective way to orchestrate the incredibly busy world of education. That involves focussing more on what research suggests can make a difference, streamlining our teaching and marking for real impact, and developing more of an understanding of how to manage our wellbeing.

The contents page looks like this:
Foreword by Mary Myatt Part I: Silent Slow
1. The Slow Teaching Philosophy

2. The Minimalistic Classroom

3. Streamlined Planning and Teaching

4. An Actor's Paradise: The Non-Verbal in the Classroom
Part II: Slow Talk
5. Efficient Teacher Talk

6. Questioning: Rediscovering the Potential

7. To Praise or Not to Praise?
Part III: Slow Relationships
8. Refining Relationships

9. Serene and Stoical Behaviour Management
Part IV: Slow Classroom Strategies
10. The Power of Modelling

11. Developing Motivated and Reflective Learners

12. Debunking Manic Marking

13. Memory Mysteries.

14. Literacy: Beyond the Quick Fix Solutions

15. Teaching the Secrets of Effective Revision
Part V: Slow Teacher Improvement
16. Reflect and Refine: Growing Passionate Teachers
Part VI: Slow Wellbeing
17. Understanding and Managing Stress

18. Arming Ourselves Against Anxiety

19. Tackling Teacher Insomnia: Sleep Easy

20. Embracing Mindfulness: The Meditating and Mindful Teacher
Part VII: Slow Leadership
21. Value-Driven Leadership
Conclusions
One of the things I have particularly enjoyed about the process of (slowly and at times painfully!) writing a book has been the experience of examining the complexities of all these different areas of teaching. I have shared some of the thinking and research from the book on this website and in other places, and this blog is a collection of ten of those posts

This introduction to the book explores some of the ideas behind it, exploring how speed has become much more of a default way of being in the classroom (remember the obsession with "rapid paced outstanding lessons?")

The book opens with a chapter called the 'Minimalistic Classroom.' This explores the impact of our classroom environment in helping both us and our students feel calm and focussed. This article for the Guardian Teacher Network is a summary of some of the ideas and how minimalism (the idea of less is more) can be applied to our teaching.

The old adage that teachers are actors has a significant grain of truth in it. I wanted to explore the significance of both our 'silent' communication in the classroom, and the impact of how we deliver material. This post 'Ten Public Speaking Tips for Teachers' is a summary of some of the research and ideas.

No learning can function unless the behaviour in the classroom is managed effectively. Stoical philosophy explores the significance of our own reactions to external events, and what we can really control. I first wrote about the idea of applying stoical philosophy to behaviour management and teaching in this post in 2016, and this is a strand that runs through the book.

Marking is one of the real time devourers for busy teachers, and often this is time that could be much better employed. This post is a reflection on some of the research collected on marking, in particular looking at how to encourage young people to take more ownership of their own work.

Questioning is one of the most fascinating aspects of teaching. We use them so often and so frequently, however, that they can lose their real value. Lots of research led to me to collate these questioning traps, that interestingly are often speed related!

Another frequent and arguably overused feature of the classroom is praise, this article for The Guardian Teacher Network is an introduction to some of the more effective ways of employing it in the classroom.

One of the aspects of teacher wellbeing that isn't given enough attention is the importance of sleep. As a fairly useless sleeper myself, this post is a collection of some of the strategies and research that can make a difference.

How can we slowly build and improve our teaching craft over time? I grapple with this question in the book and there are a range of answers. Meaningful and structured reflection, as explored in this article for the Guardian, is one means that can help us to take more ownership and enjoy the process of growing as teachers.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to reflect on ideas about teacher wellbeing and try to consider how we can stop teachers speedily fleeing from the profession after five years. This was partly inspired by my own experience: I spectacularly burnt myself out after I was promoted to an assistant headteacher at the age of twenty seven, when my response to stress was just to work for longer and with more speed. This post for TES looks at the importance of 'lowering the revs' and why we all have a responsibility to embrace more slowness in the school environment.

Two things particularly struck me about writing and researching the book: the exciting potential of how complex and intricate teaching is, and what a remarkably important and wonderful career we are committed to. When we rush through our teaching days in autopilot and stress, however, we inevitably lose sight of this and become the teaching equivalent of a hamster on a wheel. Giving ourselves the space and time to slow down can help us to take more ownership of our teaching, and reconnect with the reason why we idealistically joined the profession in the first place.

It is doing this that motivates and energises us to improve our provision for young people. This inspiring little nugget from Atul Gawande in his book 'Better' sums it up much better than me:

"Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try."

Thank you for reading.

Jamie Thom

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After reading 'In Praise of Slow' by Carl Honore in February of last year I set off on a mission: an examination of applying slowness to the world of education. Over a year later the book is published by John Catt Educational today and and available to buy from Amazon here.

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In this post I will be looking at the work of Artz, Goodall, et al. (2017) and the relationship between 'boss competence and worker-well being. The relationship between 'boss competence and teacher well-being' is particularly relevant to schools given concerns about both teacher workload, stress-levels and well being and the number of teachers leaving the teaching profession. I'll then go onto explore some of the possible implications of the research for schools and school leaders. Finally, I'll undertake a structured critique of Artz et al's research.

Boss competence and worker well-being: a brief summary of the research.

Artz, Goodall, et al. (2017 state that:

Nearly all workers have a supervisor or "boss."

Little is known about how bosses influence the quality of employees' lives.

A boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a worker's job satisfaction.

If a worker stays in the same job and workplace, a rise in the competence of a supervisor is associated with an improvement in the worker's well-being.

In a cross-section of 6000 young U.S. workers, the job satisfaction of employees is positively associated with whether the supervisor worked his or her way up within the company (or started the company).

In a cross-section of 1600 British workers, satisfaction levels are higher among individuals whose supervisor could if necessary step in competently to do that job.

In pooled cross- sections totalling 27,000 individuals, workers' job satisfaction is highly correlated with the competence of supervisors.

These results support the claim that both competence - linked to expert knowledge - and industry experience improve workers' job satisfaction.

Some possible headline implications for schools

There are number of 'first-blush' implications for the leadership and management of schools which members of a school community may choose to draw from these research findings.For example

If you want to increase the well-being of staff increase the competence of 'bosses' and line managers

If you want to increase job satisfaction then internal appointments - with individuals working their way up through the school - may lead to increased job satisfaction of those they supervise.

Senior staff within a school should keep their 'hand-in' as teachers to ensure they can competently cover for absent teaching colleagues.

If you want to increase teacher well-being appoint leaders who have a background in education and schools rather than appointing someone who has generic leadership and management experience.

However, before jumping to these conclusion it is necessary to look at Artz et al's research in more detail to see whether it is useful for schools and school leaders. To help me do this I'm going to use Professor Steve Higgins 6 As model for effective research use: accessibility, accuracy, appropriate, acceptable, applicable, and actionable

Accessibility - given the very high level maths involved in the paper, the research is not easily intellectually accessible to school leaders and others interested in teacher well-bing

Accuracy - again this is extremely difficult for the lay reader to judge.However, the authors do identify some significant limitations in the report, for example, what is meant by boss competence is not clear; there is no reliable and valid instrument to measure boss competence; many of the measures used for boss competence where highly subjective; insufficient attention was paid to external factors that may be influencing both perceptions of boss competence and 'well-being.'

Appropriate - although multiple sources of evidence were used, none of the evidence used appeared to be generated from research into schools and other similar environments.

Acceptable - the findings of the research would appear to be at first sight to be broadly consistent with teachers values and beliefs - i.e. to be a senior leader must still be competent in the classroom.

Applicable - the research is relevant to schools given concerns about both teaching staff retention and well-being.

Actionable - the research does not appear to meet Argyris (2000) criteria for actionable advice in that it does not, 'specifies the detailed, concrete behaviours required to achieve the intended consequences; it must be crafted in the form of designs that contain causal statements; people must have, or be able to be taught, the concepts and the skills required to implement those causal statements; and the context in which it is to be implemented does not prevents its implementation'. p8

So what can we make of the research and the implications for schools

Nevertheless for me, the main value of Artz, et al. (2017) is that it directed my attention to a topic known as 'expert leadership' and the work of Goodall and Bäker (2015). Now, one of the key questions'expert leadership' seeks to explore is whether experts and professionals - such as teachers and headteachers - need to be led by other experts and professionals, those who have a deep understanding of and high ability in the core-business of their organization.In future posts I will examine the notion 'expert leadership' and its implications for schools in more detail.

Argyris, C. (2000). Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Artz, B. M., Goodall, A. H. and Oswald, A. J. (2017). Boss Competence and Worker Well-Being. ILR Review. 70. 2. 419-450.

Goodall, A. H. and Bäker, A. (2015). A Theory Exploring How Expert Leaders Influence Performance in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations. inIncentives and Performance.Springer.

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In this post I will be looking at the work of Artz, Goodall, et al. (2017) and the relationship between 'boss competence and worker-well being. The relationship between 'boss competence and teacher well-being' is particularly relevant to schools given concerns about both teacher workload, stress-levels and well being and the number of teachers leaving the teaching profession.

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Approaching Comparison Essays at A Level

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Hopefully, this blog will be a useful reference point for you when thinking about how to compare. The examples are for Duffy, but this comparison would work when comparing in the coursework in Y12/Y13 and when moving onto compare Duffy and Larkin and the Unseen Poems. The overall structure for Duffy/Larkin is on the slide...

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I Only Have Eyes For You: Themes of perception in GCSE English literature

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As happens from time to time, I've recently become fixated with a song. Released in 1959, The Flamingo's 'I Only Have Eyes For You' is, on the surface, a straightforward tale of romantic love. Set to an alluring, beautifully harmonised doo wop, it tells a much-told tale of attraction and fidelity.

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It's World Book day in 4 days' time. A colleague is incensed that at her 4 year old's school, the theme is Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Era whilst on Twitter there's an amusing thread of suggestions after an exasperated parent shared that at her child's school, the theme was the Bible. I once caused similar consternation by having a non-fiction theme one year - come dressed as the water cycle or lava for example. When my own children were that age, I would thank God each year for Harry Potter - easiest costume in the world. I never dress up - though quite a few of the staff do - if asked I say I am Miss Trunchball.

The dressing up aspect of WBD has taken on a weird life all of its own, joining the ranks of nativity plays, sports days and school photographs, one of those totemic, quasi-compulsory folk education things which put a primary head teacher at risk of being lynched if cancelled. I'm sort of agnostic about the concept of WBD itself. Having a day that particularly focused on books and reading is quite a good idea (leaving aside dressing up) I suppose, though this year we are doing the 100 million minute challenge so having more of a Book Week than a day, which I think might make it less tokenistic. We'll see.

I presume it is blatantly obvious that WBD by itself is not an effective strategy in encouraging children to read for pleasure in their own time. As an icing on the cake celebration event, it's all well and good, but no one gets to love reading because they came to school dressed as batman and coloured in a bookmark. Having a visiting author can help a bit - though why do this during WBD week? But if you are really serious about promoting reading for pleasure, or RfP as the cool cats now call it, you need something altogether more systematic.

That word 'pleasure' though, is a bit awkward, especially for those of us of more traditionalist hue. Reading for rigour is more our sort of thing. Or reading for cultural capital. At the very least, reading for Serious Learning Purposes. Preferably Ibsen. So let's remind ourselves of what research says about reading for pleasure and what that might imply for what we do in school.

The OECD report into reading in 2002 found that reading enjoyment is even more predictive of educational success than familial socio-economic status. The difference in reading ability between a child who reads for pleasure for 30 minutes a day and those who never read was more than a year. This government report from 2012 drew similar conclusions. The link between reading for pleasure and reading proficiency is a correlation. The research does not, cannot, join the dots and prove that the one is causative of the other. But given the wealth of evidence of close correlation, it is a fairly safe bet that there are few things more likely to engender educational success than making sure that the children we teach enjoy reading and choose to do so independently.

Sometimes this gets interpreted as meaning that the books we read in reading lessons should be specifically geared towards ensuring children love them. That's not how I see it. The books we use in reading lessons should be chosen because they are slightly above the level that children could read on their own. This might be because the vocabulary and syntax are demanding, or it might be because while the vocabulary and syntax are quite straightforward the structural complexity is demanding (for example, as in Holes). Reading lessons are precursors to English literature lessons at secondary school and are about exposing children to literature most probably would not choose for themselves. They are about the teacher sharing their subject expertise and widening experiences. We hope, of course, that children grow to love these books and we will try and choose the very best examples that are both challenging and great stories or poems. But we do not select 'for pleasure' in the first instance.

However, the joy of primary school teaching, and one reason why I am less enthusiastic than some about moving too much in the direction of specialist teachers, is that you are not just their English teacher. Among many different roles, academic and pastoral, the class teacher must see one of their most important duties as that of book whisperer 'awakening the inner reader of every child.' Given the link between reading for pleasure and reading attainment, this should not be some optional extra, some nicety, but a (the?) core purpose of every primary class teacher. The two main strategies teachers should use for this are reading aloud - usually during the end of day class story - and the careful, skilful encouragement of reading at home.

Yet stressing story time as a vital tool in school improvement may seem a bit...soft. 'Is Clare having a funny progressive turn?' some may ask. Because story time (which incidentally does not necessarily need to happen at the end of the day) does not require planning or success criteria or assessment, because first and foremost it is about enjoying a lovely book together, this can mislead us into thinking that it's a bit of a cop out, that it lacks the rigour of 'proper' teaching and that therefore it is at the very least dispensable and possibly a waste of time.

This is seriously mistaken. The OECD report goes on to explore the factors that make reading for pleasure at home - what it terms reading engagement - more likely. And socio-economic factors are not the main determiners. What really makes the difference is whether or not the family has a culture of valuing reading and talking about cultural maters and doing cultural things.
'These associations are about twice as strong as between engagement and parental education or occupational status. Thus the most important set of home disadvantages for schools to overcome in getting students to develop positive reading habits and attitudes are not socio-economic but cultural in character.' p17 OECD 2002
Given that one in five parents do not spend any time reading with their children and over half of those surveyed spent less than an hour a week, it's down to us to build that culture. Of course we can try and work with parents too, but that's got to be on top of introducing children to the wonderful world of books at school. We need to help children build an emotional relationship with books. (See this wonderful project that helps do this in the Early Years) and that means trying to replicate, as far as one can in a classroom with 30 children, the experience of snuggling up with a trusted adult and a wonderful book. The snuggling is probably going to be metaphorical, but story time needs to try and emulate at least some of the intimacy and bonding that goes on when a child shares a book with their parent at bed time. Talking about the book together is important - how else will children realise that reading can be an enjoyable social activity? But make sure this does not turn into another literacy lesson. Reading aloud should not be linked to other 'work'. We need 'to recognise the affective impact of reading to 'reassure, to entertain, to bond, to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire' (Trelease, 2013:04)

The other key way that teachers can promote RfP is by being very active in helping children choose what they take home to read. Children need guidance with this; they need us to recommend books for them and for these recommendations to be based on knowledge of the child and what makes them tick allied with our own knowledge of children's books. Being the sort of teacher who can inspire all the children, even the hard cases, to enjoy reading, is grounded in hard work. It involves a different kind of rigour from that involved in planning a science lesson for example. Yet behind both is a need for excellent subject knowledge. It's a different kind of work from that required to plan, teach and assess lessons, but acquiring excellent subject knowledge in children's literature requires a rigorous commitment to read it on a regular basis. I'd suggest that unless a KS2 teacher is reading at least one children's novel every couple of weeks or so, they are not giving the development of their subject knowledge the attention in warrants. Developing excellence in being able to promote reading for pleasure is just as grounded in hard work and developing requisite subject knowledge as any other aspect of developing one's professional repertoire.

In order to help class teachers guide their children's reading in a more personalised way, we have moved a fair amount of the reading stock out of the library and into classrooms. The selection in the library was overwhelming for most teachers, let alone the children. So now each class has a carefully curated selection of books that each teacher is committed to getting to know (over time, as far as possible). (Read this blog for how a senior leader without his own class also does this). We've used a disaggregated INSET day to give teachers a head start on this.

And if we are really serious about promoting reading for pleasure, not because it's nice - although of course it is - but because it's important, then we need to put our money where our mouths are and devote curriculum time to reading for pleasure. So this means time where children can read the books they have chosen (albeit with careful guidance from their wonderfully knowledgeable teacher) rather than the book they are reading in their reading lesson. What is more *trigger warning* - potentially 'progressive-type' advice ahead - these sessions should try and emulate, as far as possible, the sort of environment one inhabits when we read for pleasure ourselves. We probably don't read sitting bolt upright at a desk when we are reading for pleasure at home. While sofas-for-all and cappuccinos are probably not viable in your average class room, we might run to the odd cushion and relax the usual expectation to SLANT. In fact, perhaps children should SLOUCH (Some Lie On oUr Carpet Happily? - yes I know it's weak, tweet me a better one). What is more, these sessions should not be silent. Children should be actually encouraged to read together, to talk together about what they are reading. You know you have grown a vibrant reading for pleasure culture when children make spontaneous reading recommendations to one another and to you. When there is a waiting list for class favourites, but friends recommend alternatives while they wait. We have given over two reading lessons a week to independent reading sessions like this. Which sounds stingy but feels daringly decadent.

Good luck with your World Book Day endeavours. The latest weather forecast in my neck of the woods is for snow - so maybe we will all be closed anyway? Even more reason to make sure they have a good book to read at home!

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Reading for pleasure: a different kind of rigour.

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It's World Book day in 4 days' time. A colleague is incensed that at her 4 year old's school, the theme is Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Era whilst on Twitter there's an amusing thread of suggestions after an exasperated parent shared that at her child's school, the theme was the Bible.

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Why I love...Twitter: What does your timeline say about you?

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If you look at my timeline, undoubtedly you would make assumptions about me and my interests and me as a person and me as an educator/teacher. This is inevitable and there is no way to avoid these inherent assumptions (other than to completely disengage with Twitter and the world of blogging), which I'm not willing...

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Stand back! You're about to be expertised.

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It feels as if the last few years in teaching circles have seen a resurgence of debate about the primacy of knowledge - particularly that of the declarative kind. There has been a proliferation in the publication of books and blogs debunking the once prevalent application of Bloom's taxonomy as a means to skim and...

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The elephant in the room: the academic side of KS2-3 transition

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I began my career as a primary school teacher in Year 6. This was all going swimmingly until I couldn't face the pressure anymore of pretending I knew how to teach football skills to children who were already rooted in county teams; forced to demonstrate how to dribble a ball or shoot a basketball hoop....

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Why I love... Blog Series 22: Linking context to specific text examples (Eduqas Anthology)

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Over the years the way we teach context has changed and what we want students to know about the context of a book and why has also come under scrutiny. Over time and with the advent of the new GCSE...

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It's a fairly well established principle of cognitive science that experts and novices think differently. Being aware of these differences can make a big difference to teachers. For instance, if we assume that most children in most situations are likely to begin as novices this could help point the way to more effective instruction. Here's a summary of some of the main differences between experts and novices.

One of the most interesting findings to come out of the research into Cognitive Load Theory is the finding that experts and novices both experience cognitive overload, but experience it differently. Novices, by definition, lack knowledge and experience in the domain they are trying to solve problems in. This means they lack the robust, interconnected schema in long term memory which allows experts to overcome the limits of working memory. As John Sweller puts it, "Novices, not possessing appropriate schemas, are not able to recognize and memorize problem configurations and are forced to use general problem-solving strategies such as means-ends analysis when faced with a problem." Means-end analysis is likely to lead to cognitive overload because it involves trying to work through and hold in mind multiple possible solutions. A bit like trying to juggle 5 objects at once without any practice.

The implication of Sweller's research into CLT indicates that novices will benefit from explicit explanations, worked examples, goal free problems, and fully guided instruction. For an excellent overview of the strategies most likely to benefit novices learners see Oliver Caviglioli's Teaching HOW2s. So far so good. However, the research of Slava Kalyuga and others has suggested that these techniques actually increase cognitive load for experts.

What's become known as the ' expertise reversal effect ' predicts that as we acquire the schema needed to free up working memory capacity, we start to benefit from less instruction and more freedom. Essentially, what's effective at helping students to acquire schema becomes unhelpful once schema have been acquired. So, the advice is to use fully guided instruction with novices and discovery approaches with experts.

But how do teachers know when their students have crossed the threshold into expertise? I was tagged in to an interesting Twitter debate recently on what it means to be an expert:

For Anders Ericsson, an expert is someone who has achieved true mastery of their subject and has probably spent at least 10 years engaged in deliberate practice. Clearly, this definition is unlikely to apply to many school students. In a classic experiment conducted by , two groups were given a series of physics problems to sort in any way they wished. The first group consisted of physics undergraduates who sorted the problems by their surface features. The experts, who were able to categorised the problems by their deep structure, were physics Michelene Chi and colleagues post graduates. Again, this is not a situation we're likely to encounter with school-age children. So, should we just not worry about this at all and treat all students like novices all the time?

Well, probably not. Christian Bokhove shared this paper from Robert Plomin and colleagues in which 12-year-olds with "exceptional performance on a battery of reading tests such as fluency and comprehension" are identified as expert readers. It stands to reason that if a 12-year-old is reading at the level of an expert then it would be ridiculous to give her detailed, explicit instructions on how to read. From this we can infer that expertise is relative; some students will have acquired more robust schemas than others and therefore it might make sense to use our aware of the expertise reversal effect to treat them differently.

Sweller suggests that in order to minimise extraneous cognitive load, instructional design should address the needs of three broad groups of expertise:

Novice level - "detailed, direct instructional support...preferably in integrated or dual-modality formats"

Intermediate level - "a mix of direct instruction and problem-solving practice with reduced support"

Advanced level - "minimally guided problem-solving tasks...provide cognitively optimal instructional methods" (Cognitive Load Theory, Chapter 12)

This gradual reduction of structure from novice to advanced level is termed the 'guidance fading effect' which makes use of 'completion tasks' to bridge the gap from worked examples to unguided problem-solving. This involves giving students partially worked examples to complete with the partial working helping to support limited working memory and the missing information requiring students to engage in retrieval practice and deeper process thinking.

Asking when students become experts is probably the wrong question; in any meaningful sense, school-children are not experts. Instead teachers might do best to think about students becoming more advanced, and engage protracted baton passing exercise where we assume that students are building up the relevant schemas required for more advanced problem-solving unless proved otherwise. As students become more confident at tackling problems within a subject we should remove scaffolding and support as rapidly as possible, but stand ready to put it back if they struggle too much.

In this post I discussed how this approach might look in regards to how and why we give students feedback, and I'm reasonably sure that the same principle will apply to all aspects of instruction:

So, how do we know if students are becoming more advanced? Assessment. If students perform fluently in one lesson, this does not necessary mean they will remember well enough to perform well the next. We should always assume that schema need to be reinforced and encourage students not to practice until the solve a problem correctly, but to continue practising until they can no longer get it wrong. And if they cannot answer or solve a problem, more explicit instruction is clearly required.

Teaching a class of children is always an uncertain enterprise, and we'll never know precisely who is where on the journey towards mastery in all the various aspects of the subjects we teach. This doesn't really matter, as long as we are prepared to see expertise as a quality of the topic not the individual. My best advice is this: don't let students struggle until they have experienced some measure of success.

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It's a fairly well established principle of cognitive science that experts and novices think differently. Being aware of these differences can make a big difference to teachers. For instance, if we assume that most children in most situations are likely to begin as novices this could help point the way to more effective instruction.

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Spelling is a tricky one for me and I'm sure for many others. I have a fall-back PowerPoint (that I didn't create, but which was sent to me by Mark Hill, who was our 2nd in Department at my previou...

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For far too long I persisted in the belief that source inference in history was a generic skill. Whether this was because of a fault in my training, environments in which this sort of misconception was typical, or my own stupidity for unthinkingly repeating methods that didn't work, the effect was the same. It meant that I taught 'sources' in a decontextualized, bolt-on fashion, as if it were possible to work with them successfully without deep knowledge of period and context.

When pupils performed badly on source based questions, which they invariably did, I thought the answer was to give them more sources to work with. I think my reasoning went, if I thought about it at all, that if I just turned up the volume, at some point something would just sort of click. Of course it never did and, if a workable definition of madness is repeating the same actions again and again in the hope of different results, I should have been certified insane.

While admitting this is embarrassing, it is some comfort to know I am not alone. Even Doug Lemov admits that this was something he got wrong for a long time. The reasons my students were failing to 'infer' was because such a skill, if indeed it exists at all, is rooted in deep, contextual knowledge. Children without it, whether working with Shakespeare or the Bayeux Tapestry, simply cannot make meaningful inferences because they lack the knowledge to understand what they are faced with beyond the superficially obvious. This makes frustrating, facile responses such as "from the Tapestry I can infer that William's soldiers used horses because William's soldiers are using horses" all too common.

My poor understanding of how to best teach sources had the most serious consequences on pupils sitting GCSE source papers. In these exams, all questions are based on historical sources. For a long time I had bought in to the narrative that less knowledge was required for this than for the main paper. While I feel an idiot for believing this for so long, it is only fair on me to say that I was certainly not alone. I remember even an official exam board endorsed revision guide saying as much.

But finally, faced with yet another year of results I was sure should have been better, I did wake up and, four years ago, began to change my approach.

The first change I made was providing students with a list of the key dates, facts and events after teaching the content, at the same time as showing them examples of the sorts of sources which might come up in their exam. While an improvement, this had only limited success. The problem was giving the students the facts didn't guarantee they would learn them. Some did, and these did better on the sources exam but, whether this was because they didn't try, or didn't know how, others did not and their results were no better than those of pupils in previous years.

The change that made the biggest difference was my introduction of a series of lessons that has now become something of a tradition in my lessons. Here is how the Never-Ending Quiz works.

I now end all topics, whether supposedly source based or not, by giving students a knowledge organiser summarising the most important aspects covered in the unit. Then, I tell children that we are beginning a quiz and will keep doing the quiz in every lesson until every student gets 100%. While I may (or may not) differentiate the content of the knowledge organiser, making it shorter or longer depending on the ability of the group and, of course, making considerable adaptations if there is a compelling SEND reason to do so, the pass mark is always the same. I have great fun telling children this, especially when they ask how long we will do this for. "Who knows?", I say, rubbing my hands together and feigning excitement "Could be one lesson, could be until the end of the year! All depends on when we all get 100%."

What follows depends, of course, on absolutely perfect classroom behaviour as the following read/cover/recite/check method relies on children listening hard to each other as well as their teacher.

The lesson begins with a short quiz on the content of the knowledge organiser before pupils have even looked at it. To do this I use my own copy, writing the number of the question I've asked next to the correct answer. This always results in very poor scores, which is deliberate as at the end of the lesson children find seeing the improvements they have made motivating and sometimes even thrilling.

Next, I ask pupils to take their exercise book and use it to cover up everything on their knowledge organiser apart from the first fact, which I read. Then, I tell pupils to cover the fact up and, using cold calling, ask a pupil to repeat this back. Then, I ask all pupils to slide their exercise book down to uncover the first two facts which, again, I read. Pupils then cover up all whole knowledge organiser and, as always, using cold calling I ask one student to recite the second fact and another to recite the first. For some or indeed all of these facts I may add details or explanation, which is an effective way to sneak in more knowledge than is on the sheet without pupils realising. We keep doing this, always going back to the very first fact, until we covered about half the sheet, and then run another short test. I make up this test in the same way I did the first, but use a different coloured pen to label the answers to avoid any confusion.

Whether pupils self or peer mark this test depends on the group. Either way I don't collect marks but find out either by asking or circling the room and checking tests whether there has been improvement. If there has we move onto the second part of the sheet, if there has not we go back to the first part.

At the end of the lesson I run a final, full test, marking the answers on my own knowledge in a third colour. These tests I collect in and mark. If all, or the vast majority (I know, I know), have got all the questions right we are ready to move on. If not, which is actually very rare if the lesson has gone smoothly, we repeat the lesson.

I am sure there will be some reading this who will think this is the very epitome of satanic 'drill and kill'. Indeed, if this process was described to me before I started doing it I might have felt the same. But it doesn't feel at all like that in practice. When children see the dramatic improvements they are making they are exhilarated. There really aren't words for the feeling of going from, say, 2 out of 10 to full marks an hour later. They don't hate it. They hiss with satisfaction when they're right, and groan when they get questions wrong they just knew they knew. They cheer when they get full marks. The classroom is joyful, not depressing.

And the results can be transformative. The year I first did this as preparation for the GCSE paper that sparked all this in the first place, before I gave the class so much as a sniff of a source, was one that showed a dramatic improvement. As a final benefit, lessons like this one provide children with a replicable revision strategy they can apply independently.

It turns out skill had never been the problem. It was knowledge all along.

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Drill and Thrill. On joyful low-stakes testing.

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For far too long I persisted in the belief that source inference in history was a generic skill. Whether this was because of a fault in my training, environments in which this sort of misconception was typical, or my own stupidity for unthinkingly repeating methods that didn't work, the effect was the same.

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For many students, our status quo is killing their aspiration

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What do you accept from students in your classroom? I've been reflecting on this a lot lately and have come to the conclusion that, collectively, if we are not reflecting regularly on our own classroom status quo, and occasionally shift it, then students' aspirations may slowly diminish, and their attainment will suffer.

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Knowledge, Skills and Whole Class Feedback

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There can't be many ideas or initiatives that have saved more teachers more time than whole class feedback. Whether using a specific pro-forma, or taking notes on the closest available piece of scrap paper, focussing on actually reading a set of exercise books and identifying misconceptions rather than writing lots of formative comments relieves much of...

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It has been a busy week! I have been to 4 edu-events this week: Ambition School Leadership graduation/ celebration for Teaching Leaders; DFE Diversity and Equalities Roundtable; Diverse Leaders 'Seizing Opportunities' day and #SRock18. Each event has connected me with fabulous new educators, made me think and deepened my vision and values for education. I am knackered from the travelling but it has been a great week so I am still buzzing!

On Tuesday night I keynoted for a cohort of Middle Leaders on my values-led leadership journey. On Saturday I ran a workshop at #SRocks18 for a group of educators on the same theme and expanded the experiences I shared by building in reflection and discussion points on how to be a values-led educator.

These are the tips I shared at the end of the session - the things I wish I had known earlier in my career, the insights I have gained through my tumultuous leadership journey over the last few years:

I opened my session by asking the room of educators who were voluntarily at a grassroots event on a Saturday, to consider where on the continuum of surviving to thriving they currently were.

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I shared my experience of hitting the wall a few years ago. Having a panic attack in my office at work one day. Realising that something needed to change. I felt a shift in the room, the relief at acknowledging we all go through this at some point in our career, we all feel overwhelmed, we question whether we have the resilience and the tenacity to continue. I gave them some hope, that you do come through it, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You just need to find the strength to make the change, and to weather the storm.

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I shared my experience of losing myself in my role. Of losing sight of Hannah the person, who had become soley Hannah the educator. I reflected on how I had become a chess piece on someone else's chess set and how much this frustrated me. I shared how I had recalibrated, realigned, reframed through coaching and encouraged everyone to go and find a coach and to share the free DFE coaching pledge for women leading in education with their colleagues.

The coaching model I have personally got the most from is the Graydin approach of coaching the person, not the problem, and starting with the heart not the head. The Heart, Head, Step model is a 3-part strategy to finding solutions.

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We moved on to reflecting on our Why for being an educator and used the Simon Sinek 'Golden Circle' model to consider our core values. I challenged them to consider if their core values were present in their current schools. I saw shoulders slump and heard a ripple of sighs around the room. I encouraged them to drill down to their non-negotiables as a frame for the culture and ethos they need to be able to thrive. I saw a penny drop. For those seeking new roles and new contexts I suggested that this should be fundamental to how candidates select whether a school is the right ethos for them or not. I challenged them to prioritise that over the status and salary to find the right fit.

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I looped back to my journey and how my values had not been my beacon to guide me through a storm a few years ago because I had never really considered them before. Coaching has subsequently helped me to make sense of my why, to be able to articulate my values and to reflect on why I was frustrated. This epiphany helped me to get myself back on course and heading in the right direction. I paid homage to the strength I had drawn from the #womened community. With so many educators feeling disempowered, disenfranchised, it is the sense of community that our network has created that truly nourishes the soul.

I reminded them that our values are our moral compass, our vision is our beacon steering us through a storm. Our mission as educators is to survive the storm and make the journey. As Dr Jill Berry has spoken about on several occasions at our #womened events: "Rough seas make the best sailors.... Ships were not built to stay in the harbour". As an English teacher I love this extended metaphor.

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Having survived the rough seas and refined my craft as a sailor / as an educational leader, I moved on to discuss how I had researched and selected the culture and ethos I needed for my next move to move from surviving to thriving. I encouraged everyone to remember that in a profession that is under-recruiting and under-retaining, that there are more jobs than educators, so therefore the power is with those applying and being interviewed. We need to hold on to this power and get what we need from a new role.

I recruited my whole team through sharing my vision and values. I have blogged previously about how I designed a values-led application process. Skills and experience are important, but I wanted to get the right people on the bus. I needed to recruit a team of Ambassadors for the values we wanted to embody in our new school.

Moreover, in a time when everyone is talking about values and plastering them on their marketing/ painting them on their walls, we need to be careful interrogate how the values are being lived. Mary Myatt (in Hopeful Schools) talks about "values lived not laminated" and James Kerr (in Legacy) talks about "living your values out loud". These 2 phrases resonate with me.

The values in our school are palpable. You can cut through the stick of Aureus rock anywhere in our community and you will experience a consistency in our shared vision and values.

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We have invested a lot of time, energy and focus in scoping and embedding our values. Our values have been co-created, we all own them and drive them. Our children have an ethical vocabulary, our staff have a shared language. Sue Webb, from VBE, led our values scoping day, I had to reconcile that not all of my values would resonate with my whole team, but my 3 non-negotiables: Diversity, Equality and Wellbeing would be integral to our vision and culture. Pen Mendonca captured our values scoping today and created the metaphor of our values being our DNA at our STEAM school.

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In the final few minutes of our 45 minute session (I could have spent a whole day on this topic!) I shared what we had agreed to do and more importantly not to do at Aureus. We made some bold decisions early on about some fundamentals that underpin our culture and ethos. We have a very strong sense of who we are as a school and what we will and won't do. With a shared vision, shared values and shared language, it makes strategic decision making easier.

Our school is wholeheartedly child-centred, we are committed to nurturing hearts and minds. We educate the whole child, holistically. We do not shy away from the Fierce Conversations. Our homily embodies everything that we are and I am excited to see my Drama Club deliver it in my 'Love Without Labels' assembly this week to introduce our new value of Love for February, and frame the LGBT+ month of activities. They have learnt it off my heart and have created an action for each of our 12 values so that all of our students can visually see what each value means to them.

So that was my whistle stop distillation of my learning from 2 years, captured in a 15 min keynote and a 45 min workshop. I hope that what I shared resonated with those who attended both events. Keeps those flames burning and remember, if you have hit the wall and find yourself barely surviving, change your school not your profession. Too many educators are leaving the system rather than trying a different context. Just be careful to select the culture and ethos that you need to ensure the conditions for your own personal and professional growth are present.

Hannah, The Hopeful Headteacher
Currently feeling hopeful about:

The pilot cohort of the Ambition School Leadership women-only NPQH in collaboration with Leading Women's Alliance and #WomenEd has just been confirmed. 30 delegates have been offered a place on this bespoke pathway. We are excited to be supporting their progression.
Currently reading and thinking about:

I have a stack of books by my bed to take away with me over half-term to read on the beach.

I am currently thinking about the LP accreditation that launched this week - I will be focusing on oracy and developing public speaking skills in our students - any linked to reading or research in this area would be gratefully received.

Currently feeling grateful for:

Kristian Still, David Rogers and the team at One School, Hindhead, for organising #SROCKS18 and being brilliant hosts.

Ambition School Leadership for inviting me to speak to their Teaching Leaders cohort end of programme celebration.

Anna Cole for initiating the Diversity and Equalities roundtable at the DFE this week.

The Diverse Leaders Programme, co-led by my former colleagues Amy Anderson and Natasha Evans, 2nd cohort of #womened and #bameed participants who I met on Friday.

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Values-led Leadership: Moving from Surviving to Thriving

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It has been a busy week! I have been to 4 edu-events this week: Ambition School Leadership graduation/ celebration for Teaching Leaders; DFE Diversity and Equalities Roundtable; Diverse Leaders 'Seizing Opportunities' day and #SRock18. Each event has connected me with fabulous new educators, made me think and deepened my vision and values for education.

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Bleary, bloodshot eyes glance at the clock: 10pm. Weary hands reach for another strong cup of coffee. The epic to-do list sneers cruelly, and is joined by the set of books that must be marked this evening. Yet again, that most tired of teacher clichés tumbles out of your mouth: "There just isn't enough time!"

I was once the complete embodiment of life in the teaching fast lane, flying through long days in autopilot, fuelled by caffeine and stress. I had no conception of how to reflect on my practice or how to best use my time. It was treadmill-teaching.

As I blindly sped into a management role, this lack of deliberation meant that I became less and less effective and more overwhelmed. Such an approach led to inevitable burnout and disillusionment.

It was then that I began to seriously invest in forging a new, "slow" professional philosophy. My mission: to find a way to orchestrate the busy world of education - one that is calm, organised, and results in the improved progress of young people.

It's all about slow teaching. This is no gimmick and there is no simple solution, but with discipline and reflection, our teaching world need not be so unrelenting.

The passport to a more serene and productive way of teaching in part lies in our ability to think and plan strategically. This involves embracing what Henry Ford called "the calmness that the long view of life gives us".

Education has recently been fixated on the fast: the delivery of rapid-paced, yet still outstanding, lessons has defined what is judged as successful teaching. We are taught little about how to factor in the retention of knowledge, or how to plan holistically for the long-term success of young people.

Now, the slow curriculum conversation is finally gaining momentum. The demanding nature of changes to the curriculum in recent times has necessitated more thoughtful dialogue about the long-term vision of teaching. Gone are speedy coursework fixes.

Excellent new books, such as Peps Mccrae's Memorable Teaching and Alex Quigley's The Confident Teacher, are assisting our understanding of the complexity of memory and how to teach for retention. The new Ofsted chief herself, Amanda Spielman, has made the substance of the curriculum a priority, too.

We are no longer being defined by our ability to put on a show; we are being judged on our capacity to decelerate, to slowly and incrementally deepen young people's knowledge over time.

So how can we, as individual teachers, take ownership of this new direction? We shouldn't fly into the trap of planning for individual lessons; rather, we should take time to consider the skills that we want our students to grasp over a longer period of time. Knowledge organisers are key in facilitating this, allowing complete clarity of the direction and purpose of each unit of work.

In our desire to engage, we may be overlooking the investment in time needed to ensure our own content and examination knowledge is secure; an improved understanding of this would enable us to better address student misconceptions, as well as give us confidence.

Avoiding elaborate PowerPoint fixes may well help us to begin to focus on lesson content, rather than flashy presentation. Slowly crafted dialogue or exemplar material should provide the substance of lessons that carefully guide students toward quality outcomes. We cannot just race through content; by planning in low-stakes testing, we can return periodically to knowledge and ensure that it has been securely, strategically learned.

The theatre of teaching

There is no doubt that there is performance in the art of teaching. We are, of course, a hugely visually breed; how we behave in our classroom has a marked and transferable effect on our students.

Masters of the teaching craft display a confident wisdom coupled with a tranquil everyday persona: they are calm and assertive. The good news is that with deliberate practice, we lesser mortals can engineer our classroom management to achieve a similar poise.

The first step is simple: consciously slowing ourselves down. By reflecting on our range of non-verbal signals and body language, we can start to see more clearly how we are communicating in our classrooms. We may also begin to appreciate how young people mirror our habits; a realisation of this helps to build quieter, more restrained classrooms.

How often are we asked by students to repeat instructions or points? How much of what we say is lost amid the thousands of words young people are exposed to every day? While it would be ludicrous to imply that we should maintain a consistent pace for long periods of time, there is something magical that happens when we drop both the volume and speed of our speech.

When we need our pupils to focus, recall and listen deliberately, slowing down our speech can ensure they lean in; it also helps with retention of information.

To further ensure retention, as all teachers will know, questioning in our classrooms is vital. Yet the frequent use of this pedagogical tool inevitably gives rise to speed-questioning: rattling off questions without due consideration. Not enough reflective thinking time is allowed for after questions have been posed; young people are asked to instantly formulate thoughts so often that they often give up.

Also underused is the process of slowing down to plan out challenging questions, pausing to allow students to consider their own and each other's responses, and granting time to extend answers. This is important for cultivating a classroom culture based on high expectations and real enquiry.

Praise for pupils is another victim of speed-induced practice. Throwing "superb", "excellent" and "outstanding" around like confetti hampers both motivation and effort. Suppressing the instinct to dish out instant praise is vital if we are to ensure young people understand that expectations are high for both verbal and written responses. Praise should instead be directly related to effort and excellence; this in turn should inspire young people to persevere to produce work that is a reflection of their best efforts.

It is a conundrum that drives teachers to despair: we know feedback is important, but it is stealing huge amounts of our energy. What is often a poor use of time, however, is slavish and mindless marking, not feedback. There is a bizarre competitive element at play here, with "warrior markers" proclaiming loudly how they have been up all hours marking. Yet quality feedback does not equate to repetitive comments that are cursorily glanced at by students.

Quality feedback is reflective and strategic, involving careful planning of what will be marked for students' benefit, and when. It is about considering carefully what will happen as a result of time invested: how will this feedback move that young person towards excellence in a particular subject?

Then comes marking's underappreciated cousin: verbal feedback. It is here that young people can develop a real understanding of how to improve their work. Making time for meaningful conversations can transform relationships and the work of young people; a chat can have a much greater impact than hastily scrawled sentences.

When we rush through our days, we miss the numerous joys of teaching: the boundless variety of young people; the passion that we feel and share for our subjects; the gratitude for colleagues who fuel our spirits every day. We forget to smile and gather perspective. But in recognising that teaching is a profession in which we need to reflect, we can then take ownership of how best we use our time.

Jamie Thom is an English teacher at Cramlington Learning Village. His book Slow Teaching: A guide to finding calm, organisation and impact in the classroom will be published in February

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Bleary, bloodshot eyes glance at the clock: 10pm. Weary hands reach for another strong cup of coffee. The epic to-do list sneers cruelly, and is joined by the set of books that must be marked this evening. Yet again, that most tired of teacher clichés tumbles out of your mouth: "There just isn't enough time!"

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New year, new school. On making a good start.

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I started at a new school today. New timetable. New students. New policies, new rules and new ways of doing things. Having done this only once in the last ten years without a position of responsibility, I am a bit nervous. It is a useful and necessary nervousness though, in that it has me thinking...

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Oh dear, we are on the path to the exams for Year 11 now. This week, I have been mainly thinking about revision and how I could get students revising more. If I am honest, I think I have got some bits of revision wrong. For the past few years, I gave each student a brown paper bag full of resources, including past papers, sample answers, revision cards, at Easter. Because I am nice, I even put some Haribo sweets in the bag as a sweetener. I did all this for the whole year group. My thinking was that each and every student in Easter would use the resources to revise. As with all things, the hardworking students used the resources and the non-hardworking students ate the sweets and then binned the bag.

I think we should look at how producers market films. They tempt. They tease. They spoil the audience with a film. They don't just dump the film in one week, expecting everyone to watch the film without any publicity. They pick the right time in the year to capture their audience. The precision to detail is immense. They make sure that the audience can't forget the film and they build up that sense of hype and maintain it for a long period of time. Producers spend a year or months teasing the film before it is in the cinemas. I think schools should look to film producers in how we promote revision. It should all be about the long game and not just quick solutions. Now, I am not expecting people to have teaser trailers at the end of an assembly or have themed merchandise in the school canteen.
Don't forget to pick up you Tiny Tim toy with each sandwich purchased this week. I just think we need to copy and mirror what marketing campaigns do.

So, what are we doing this year? Here's some things we are doing to make revision topical and relevant.

1: Homework - loyalty points

We have made a booklet for Year 11 for each term. The booklet contains five practice questions for Language Paper 1, Language Paper 2, Romeo and Juliet, A Christmas Carol, Conflict Poetry, An Inspector Calls and Unseen Poetry. It also contains five activities for learning quotes, learning vocabulary, learning sentence structures, etc. The majority of these are taken from the AQA KS3 papers.

Students have to spend approximately 15 minutes completing the task. Mainly the emphasis is planning a response to a question. However, students can, if they want, write a response.

On the front of the booklet, is a grid. Students have to sign in a box every time they complete the revision.

Parents and teachers alike can observe how much revision has been done in that term. For each remaining term, there's a booklet. We are no longer assuming they are revise. They can do it all at once or a bit each day.

2: Revision cards - teaser campaign
We have a number of revision cards for the set texts. This year we are providing them a month before a mock exam. We are 'dropping them' as the media refer to a month before the mocks so that students are getting the clear message that they need to revise.

We are doing this for Year 10 and 11.

A later blog will have the revision cards in it. Oh, I am such a tease

This year we have sent an email to parents each term. Parents don't need to know a lot. They need to know some important things. So this year, we have emailed parents the following things:

1: What is revision? An explanation of different revision strategies for revision using 'The Learning Scientists' Blog

2: An electronic booklet - overview of each question on the exam paper

3: Guidance on how parents can support revision

4: An examiner's style feedback on the mocks

4: Reminders - Film Posters

We are lucky to have the Show My Homework system. The great thing is that I am able to message students. And, what do I message? I message them the dates of the mocks and exams. The system them constantly reminds them of this.

5: Lectures - Select Screenings

We invite a select number of students to lectures aimed at pushing for a Grade 9. The parents get the invite and then have to sign students up as there is a limited number of places. We do this across Years 10 and 11. Places are scarce, so be quick otherwise you will miss out.

6: Surgery -Targeting specific audiences

We don't really do extra lessons. Instead we have a surgery for a particular aspect students struggle with. However, we email certain students (well, their parents really) we feel need to work on that area based on teacher suggestion and mock results.

I am telling students and parents that students shouldn't come to a revision session if they don't know the key texts. They have had a year and a half learning the main texts and all too often 'laziness' is the problem. A student rocks up to a revision session hoping to get a bitesized version of the play / novel so they don't have to work. We are spelling out to parents that students should be reading and reading the texts. If they don't know it, read it and use notes and resources given.

I think we need a clear message. Students should be responsible for knowing and retaining the basics.

We have posted to parents clean copies of exam papers, if we feel students have not put enough effort into a mock papers. The parent gets a nice little letter explaining that we think their child isn't working hard enough and they need to work harder or they'll not get the results they want in summer.

This works really well for us as it signals to parents that there child isn't working hard enough.

One thing we are going to do this term is put up lines and quotes from a certain poem in the English classrooms. No labels. No titles. Students are going to have to work out the poem of the week. Each week a different poem. Not everything needs to be big and labour intensive.

We all know how important revision is, but conveying that to students is important. Parents assume students are revising and know how to revise. Students assume that they know how to revise properly. I think schools should be working hard to stop assumptions. Facts. Not assumptions. What revision have they done? How have they revised?

I like the drip-feed principle. Remind students very term and month about revision. Remind parents regularly about revision and what students can do to revise and, more importantly, what does revision actually look like.

Revision needs a PR agent, darling. It is all about maximum exposure, darling. Give it more light, sweetie. Wonderful.

P.S. Things might be a bit quiet for a bit as I work on my 'Pop-up revision sessions', 'Romeo and Juliet' revision themed flavoured drinks and work with the school canteen to rebrand the menus around 'A Christmas Carol'. I am particularly pleased with the Cratchit burger, Scrooge semolina and Fezziwig's triffle.

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Oh dear, we are on the path to the exams for Year 11 now. This week, I have been mainly thinking about revision and how I could get students revising more. If I am honest, I think I have got some bits of revision wrong.

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Last year I took part in the Teaching Leaders programme from Ambition School Leadership. In my latest blog post for them I reflect on a year well spent with the aid of my trusty Teaching Leaders Moleskine notebook.

Read the blog post here: https://www.ambitionschoolleadership.org.uk/blog/looking-back-my-moleskine-moments/

If you are interested in their primary middle leaders programme, click here: https://www.ambitionschoolleadership.org.uk/programmes/teaching-leaders-primary/

And for their secondary programme, click here: https://www.ambitionschoolleadership.org.uk/programmes/teaching-leaders-secondary/

For their other programmes, explore their website: https://www.ambitionschoolleadership.org.uk/programmes/

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On The Ambition School Leadership Blog: Looking Back On My Moleskine Moments

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Last year I took part in the Teaching Leaders programme from Ambition School Leadership. In my latest blog post for them I reflect on a year well spent with the aid of my trusty Teaching Leaders Moleskine notebook.

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I have been a teacher for 29 years, a Headteacher for 14 years and, at the age of 53, this much I know about treating teachers well and helping them manage their workload.
My last post about our Outstanding OFSTED judgement began with this important quotation which encapsulates how we try to run Huntington School:
Too much of sport operates under the tyranny of the result...the core principle at Saracens is that we gather talented people together, treat them unbelievably well and in return they try unbelievably hard. That is it. Everything else - winning or losing matches, winning or losing Cups - are just outcomes. They are not the primary aim. We exist to have a positive impact on as many people as possible.
- Edward Griffiths, CEO, Saracens RFC

Headteachers need to trust their colleagues more than ever. Seneca said, "The first step towards making people trustworthy is to trust them." At our school we teach over 3,360 lessons each fortnight; I cannot teach them all, so what I have to do is develop my colleagues in a safe school environment which allows them to thrive professionally and personally.

Workload...Two members of the DfE Delivery Unit visited us in September to explore workload issues. They met with me and I told them what we have been trying to do here for the past decade. For the rest of the day they met numerous colleagues without me and then we spoke at the end of the day whilst their taxi waited patiently outside. They asked how they could bottle-up the culture we have developed at Huntington and spread it across the system? They reflected that, whilst hours worked is an important metric, another is job satisfaction and that teachers here felt intellectually challenged and interested in their job. We train teachers really well whilst insisting they accept the professional obligation to improve their practice. A few weeks ago I shared the summary notes I gave the colleagues from the DfE Delivery Unit with Sean Harford. This afternoon, the following Twitter conversation sparked this post:

So, here are those summary notes:
DfE Delivery Unit Visit to Huntington School Teacher Workload Wednesday 20 September 2017

1. Trust...Respect, Honesty and Kindness.

2. Culture is hugely important.

3. Supportive yet challenging governance, which understands that teachers are our most valuable resource.

4. Marking and Feedback policy designed from the bottom up, based upon a set of principles, different according to department. We base a lot of what we do on the ideas of Daisy Christodolou.

5. Data capture is measured - we report progress twice a year and attainment at the end of the year.

6. Minimal written reports.

7. Lesson Maps are flexible and relatively non-prescriptive; full/daily/class-by-class.

8. Most policy is designed by the middle-leaders with minimal SLT input, because they know what works best.

9. E-Comms technician to set up IRIS observation cameras and to run the website etc etc.;

10. HR, Finance, Premises - expert operational SLT who are liberated to just get on with it.

11. Minimise admin so meeting time is dedicated to T&L - on alternate Mondays we combine the one hour of meeting time with an hour when the students go home early at 2.30 pm so that teachers can work on T&L in what we call Teaching and Learning Forums (TLFs) from 2.45-4.45 pm. We have 19 TLFs a year. We have less than 25 hours a week contact time with students and we have better results.

12. When we had all the curriculum change 3 years ago we took two extra training days.

13. We have c.35 part-time staff. Flexibility keeps good teachers in the school.

14. Central admin staff are excellent and they drive improvements - changing MIS systems was down to them.

15. One Family Day a year, fully paid.

16. Work scrutiny is designed by SLs and departmentally-based and developmental, rather than penal QA.

17. All funeral requests granted without question.

18. Meetings finish on time. SLT meeting does not go beyond 5pm. No prizes for looking busy - work in a way that suits you. All staff can go home if they are not teaching last period of the day.

19. 44/50 Periods of teaching per fortnight maximum.

20. "No lesson judgements" policy came in three or four years ago. We discuss how to get better.

21. We develop leadership positions and undertake shadow-staffing/succession planning exercises to see who we need to retain.

22. Departmental Administration Support across departments.

23. PM is called Performance Development and everyone completes an Inquiry Question which they have loved, with support from the Research School.

24. We begin from the assumption that everybody will get a pay rise unless their students' outcomes are poor and we use our wisdom when making that call, with utter transparency.

25. Training is planned across the whole year, so people know what is happening.

26. Class size and funding...we would have £800,000 p.a. more in our budget if we had just kept up with inflation since 2010.

Ultimately, the DfE can do very little to reduce workload - it is up to school leaders to set a culture where staff are cared for, well-trained and valued and policies are based on common sense and the principle that we shouldn't be doing things unless they clearly help improve student outcomes.

And here is what the OFSTED report said about our CPD:

Click on the image below for more details about our Leading Learning CPD course.

About johntomsett

Headteacher in York. All views are my own.

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This much I know about...treating teachers well and helping them manage their workload

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I have been a teacher for 29 years, a Headteacher for 14 years and, at the age of 53, this much I know about treating teachers well and helping them manage their workload. My last post about our Outstanding OFSTED judgement began with this important quotation which encapsulates how we try to run Huntington School: Too...

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This post is aimed at teachers who are new to Twitter, but may also be useful to those mentoring a new teacher and want to help them shape their professional learning. It's based on a talk given to colleagues at a recent inset day as part of an ed tech carousel. Twitter for Professional Learning
In 2014, Twitter estimated that 4.2 million tweets on education were sent If you haven't used it before because you think it's simply a passing fad, then you'd be mistaken. I joined Twitter in 2012 after hearing Jill Berry extol its virtues as a vehicle for professional learning. I paraphrase, but she said something like "the old adage has it that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to get a bigger room. Twitter is that bigger room." I'll admit that it was a slow-burn process for me but I eventually got into the habit of using it for reading, and then eventually sharing my own thoughts and getting involved in 'chats'. Looking back I wish I'd started earlier and in more earnest, which might have happened if someone had given me a steer on how to make the most of it. This blog is therefore what I would have written to myself five years ago, but aimed at the time-pressed, Twitter novice teacher who wants professional learning on their own terms.
How to approach Twitter
The first thing I learned was that the term social media is misleading. When you consider the range of platforms and what they all do, labelling them all as 'social' is nebulous. I would classify Twitter (and things like LinkedIn) as professional media. If you want to be 'sociable' and post pictures of you walking the dog/baking a cake/dancing at your mate's wedding, then go for Facebook or Instagram. Keep Twitter separate - it's much better for reading and debating about education. To this end, keep these golden rules in mind:

Everything you post is public. As a teacher you have a duty to uphold public faith in the profession (think Part 2 of the Teaching Standards, if you're in England). The upside to this is you don't need to worry about your permission settings as you do with Facebook. Just know that it's all open.

Assuming you're employed by a school, they don't want you to bring them into disrepute. Each time you write a Tweet, remember that your head/line-manager/pupils might be reading it. This shouldn't put you off - you are absolutely entitled to express your professional opinion. Just make sure you keep it professional.

When you write up your bio, decide whether or not you want to divulge specific information. You can easily say what you are interested in without saying much about who you are or where you work.

Never follow pupils (or parents), or get involved in an exchange with them. They are bound to try to contact you at some point, but politely explain to them, in school, that it isn't an appropriate forum for discussion with them.

Some basic tips
I'm amazed by how many people don't get started on Twitter, despite their curiosity, because they find it confusing. Here are a few very simple things that will help you get underway:

Aim to follow a couple of dozen relevant people to familiarise yourself with it. A very good periodic table of edutweeters is available courtesy of ICT Evangelist Mark Anderson. This will cover a range of education debates and views, but also look for accounts which are relevant for your subject or specialism.

You don't need to express your own opinions or write your own tweets. You can simply retweet things you like. Many people write in their bio that 'retweets are not endorsements' but I don't bother because this is a pretty obvious convention.

If you 'like' a tweet it's a great way of recording things that you'd like to refer back to later, or reread. I 'like' tweets to show that I support the comment, or want to bookmark a blog or website.

Hashtags - the dreaded # symbol - seem to cause confusion. They can be used in two ways. Firstly it can simply be a comment to add spin to a tweet, so this statement could be considered #helpful (or #obvious if you know this already). More importantly, hashtags allow you to follow something specific or join in discussions. There are many good forums that happen at a set time each week, like #UKEdResChat. If you write a tweet and add this hashtag it means anyone else following that thread will see your comment. Try it out by searching for #UKEdResChat, and then click on 'latest' in the menu bar. This will show you all the latest tweets in the thread, not just a select few.

Direct messaging is better if you want to talk to someone privately, or without the character restriction of a regular tweet. For this to be available both parties (or more if you want a larger group chat) need to follow each other. See above advice on not following pupils/parents to protect yourself.

There is a dark side. Some people are trolls (i.e. abusive) and personal attacks do happen. My advice is to ignore this. You can mute or block people you find offensive, or report accounts which are hateful. If you only use Twitter for reading this is unlikely to ever affect you.

What are the benefits?
When you think about it, there are real advantages here. Keeping up to date with the latest in educational thinking is essential and is built into the teaching standards in Scotland. If your focus is entirely on what's happening in your own school and not on the wider trends in education you'll constantly be behind the curve. This leaves you exposed to the sort of fads and faux initiatives that have blighted teachers and pupils, adding to workload without adding to learning. See Twitter as a good bulwark against this, provided you follow people who are research informed and despise learning myths.

Twitter is also a) free and b) something you can do whenever you want. I mainly use the app on my phone because it means I can check in daily for 5 minutes or so to see what's happening in the education news. We all work ridiculously hard as teachers, but there are pockets of time (maybe 3-5 minutes while you wait for something, be it a bus to arrive or a meeting to start) that you can use. It facilitates 'little and often' professional learning and makes your use of time more efficient. Also the blogs that I read via Twitter are usually around the 1,000 word mark so you can get through them swiftly.

If you develop your use of it, you'll find that it can be great for networking. Few people relish the chance to meet new people in a packed room when you attend a conference. However, Twitter is a much easier and less stressful way of connecting with people who have similar interests and concerns. You can pick up great ideas for classroom practice, because no one posts an idea on Twitter to patent it. I've only ever found people to be very positive when you tell them you used their idea and it worked.

As well as a personal account, you can also run a departmental account. Make sure you check your school's acceptable IT use policy and get permission to do so first. Once this is in place, you can share the login details with more than one colleague to divide the workload. You can use it to share resources, celebrate achievement and so forth. It can be a great way of pointing pupils in the direction of good resources and extension material. I found it invaluable as a way of keeping parents informed of what we were doing on school trips, especially when abroad.

From my own perspective, I like being able to talk about things that I'm passionate (or frustrated) about with people outside my own school. I get a broader perspective and conversations are wonderfully free of the type of internal school politics that can be draining to morale and energy. This helps you focus on big issues that matter. It also means that you can start casual conversations about teaching and learning in school, which is very often where the most impactful professional development happens.
Want to know more?
Twitter accounts to follow:

Further reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/apr/20/teachers-on-twitter-why-join-get-started-social-media https://www.theeducator.com/blog/20-uk-teachers-follow-twitter/

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This post is aimed at teachers who are new to Twitter, but may also be useful to those mentoring a new teacher and want to help them shape their professional learning. It's based on a talk given to colleagues at a recent inset day as part of an ed tech carousel.

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In the latest edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, Bradley Busch writes about a new study which compared the effects on memory of reading in silence to those of reading out loud. Noah Forrin and Colin MacLeod's paper, This time it's personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself, explores what's been termed the 'production effect' - a neat name for the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. The speculation is that the effort of saying something out loud appears to make information more cognitively 'sticky', creating stronger schematic connections in long-term memory. This advantages appears to be strongest when we say things out loud ourselves, but also holds true when listening to someone else read aloud.

This has, I think, some important implications for two areas of classroom practice. Earlier this year I wrote about why there's good reason to believe that asking students to listen to a text being read aloud whilst simultaneously expecting them to 'follow along' in silence is likely to over burden working memory and lead to poorer comprehension. I suggested that this was a form of multitasking which human beings are simply incapable of. Instead, we task switch, diverting attention from reading to listening, with a lag of a few seconds with every switch. My conclusion was as follows:

To be absolutely clear: reading aloud to students, especially weaker readers, is a good thing to do. Prosody - the sound and rhythm the words make - really aids comprehension, especially with difficult texts. The problem comes when children are expected to follow along at the same speed. Because they lack the fluency to do this their working memory overloads and derails comprehension.

Reading aloud to students - or even better, having them read aloud - is likely to also boost their memory. There are obvious classroom disadvantages to having all children read aloud, but asking the most skilled reader (probably the teacher) in the room to read aloud is likely to benefit everyone.

The second implication is around improving students' writing. It's been some years now since I first proposed my ' simple theory of writing ', but essentially what I suggest to teachers is that intervening at the point of writing is an ineffective way to improve writing. Intervening at the point of speech seems to be far more effective. Many students are unable to write down their thoughts because they simply don't possess the knowledge of how to express their ideas in written language. If we scaffold students' spoken language by making them 'speak like an essay' then my observation is that the act of speaking in academic language seems to strengthen the schema of how to communicate in academic language and thus writing becomes possible. My anecdotal finding has been that this is far more effective than using writing frames, so it's pleasing to find some empirical support for the idea.

When I'm training teachers in effective instruction, one of the points I make is that if you want students to remember something, you have to make them say it aloud. If you just get one or two students to repeat something, then only one or two students will remember it. If one students finds a way to avoid having to speak, that's the student who will be least likely to remember it. The answer is to use fast paced call and response whenever you want students to pay special attention to memorising a particular idea or phrase.

Of course, none of this is definitive proof that saying things out loud supports memory - the current research is based on participants studying word lists, so it will be important to see if the findings can be replicated with longer texts, but there's a clear and plausible mechanism to explain why we should expect the production effect to be an effective way to teach and study.

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Reading aloud might boost students' memories - David Didau: The Learning Spy

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In the latest edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, Bradley Busch writes about a new study which compared the effects on memory of reading in silence to those of reading out loud.

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Motivating lower attainers -Blog 1/3 -Via Success and the use of (sshh...) Grades

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How do you motivate a lower set group? My recent edu-reads have taken me on different journies towards possible solutions to this potentially game changing question. Since September I have been trialling some new strategies, and some old ones, and I'd like to share three if they can be of use to anyone over the...

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I can still see the concern maybe fear in the teacher's eyes. In days gone by, with me sat observing the lesson; the teaching input has been completed, the hinge point question reveals half the class know the answer and half haven't a clue. What to do next; where to go?

Sadly, more often than not, the teacher would just continue with the lesson as planned leaving half the class clueless about what has happened and with poor foundations on which to build their understanding of the next part of the learning. Observers can often bring out the worst in the teacher. Three different things need to come together in a teacher's classroom armoury at this point. The pre-planning of high quality questions, how to monitor the learning (or performance) of all pupils and "what to do if" scenarios that are well rehearsed and honed.

Each year I have the pleasure of spending a couple of hours working with trainee teachers. In many ways this one off approach is inadequate and needs to be rethought; within these constraints I try to focus on a few essentials. Some simple techniques to get a class of thirty pupils to behave alongside the underpinning theory; the importance of systematically planning the learning rather than the lesson planning, that they tend to focus on, and how to respond, as a teacher, to pupil feedback in the real time maelstrom of a classroom.

Key to the session is stressing the "logical development of knowledge"; what will you teach pupils and in what order and why? Once you have determined a teaching order you need to check that the pupils are with you on the journey; the assessment bit. Pre-planning a few key questions, congruent with the learning flow, and how pupils will respond is a critical part of a teacher's classroom preparation.

When considering how pupils will respond, I tend to promote two key principles behind co-operative learning; namely, there should be individual accountability and simultaneous interaction. In co-operative learning the latter is usually with peers but in the case of whole class questioning the interaction is with the teacher. The pupil whiteboard and pen would be my favoured method; all pupils must answer the question (individual accountability) and show their answer at the same time (simultaneous interaction), with you able to monitor the learning of all. The pupil whiteboard is great for very short written answers or numerical ones; for more complex questions the use of multiple choice questions with pupils giving an A-D/E response can be highly effective.

In the multiple choice question at the bottom of this blog I've included a key misconception pupils have about why metals expand when heated. Add some wait time between the question and answer and you have developed a pretty useful, totally transferable and highly sustainable teaching method.

What I would suggest teachers stop doing is: asking individual pupils questions as the sample size is too small to tell you anything about the learning of the class as a whole and traffic lights/thumbs up. The last two have become pet hates for me; they are not bona fide ways of assessing what pupils learn. At school my aim was to be anonymous in class and play football with my mates at break and lunch. If these techniques were used with me, my schooling pre-dates them, I would have been a thumbs up, green light pupil particularly as the end of lesson bell approached .

With an acknowledgement to Professor Eric Mazur you may want to adopt an 80:20 model of response. The three "what to do if" scenarios:

If 80% of the pupils in the class know the answer then give a quick recap of the learning, note the pupils who may be struggling, and move on. If time allows come back to the pupils who were struggling later in the lesson.

If 20% of pupils know the answer then it's time to rewind the lesson to the point where pupils' learning is more secure; identify gaps in knowledge or misconceptions and reteach.

If the responses are somewhere in between then simply say to the class, "Find someone with a different answer to you and see if you can agree on which one may be correct". Do not give any indication of which answer is correct; it's time for pupils to work hard.

It's low stress on the teacher and has proved a highly effective way to enhance pupils understanding. You have the simultaneous interaction of lots of pupils talking to each other; those who are confident and secure in their learning are able to explain on a 1:1 basis to those who are less secure. The less secure often know that they don't understand so are receptive to listening to another pupil, in a private conversation, with no public loss of face. After a minute or so of pupil discussion; stop the talking and ask the same question again. Look at the pupils' response, go back to the 80:20 rule and follow the appropriate course of action. Don't get too caught up in the 80:20 proportions; feel free to tweak as you see fit at any moment in time.

Hope you'll try this out with one of your classes this week and in the real time maelstrom of teaching thirty pupils be able to respond and react to the feedback they are giving you.

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Responsive Teaching: Questioning Feedback and Follow Up

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I can still see the concern maybe fear in the teacher's eyes. In days gone by, with me sat observing the lesson; the teaching input has been completed, the hinge point question reveals half the class know the answer and half haven't a clue. What to do next; where to go?

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I want to be a great teacher - for the kids, my colleagues, my school and myself - but I also want to be a person, too. I'm keeping my head above water in terms of workload for now, but I need mental space away from my job.

So you're struggling to 'switch off'?

Exactly. I'll be 10 minutes into a TV show before I realise I haven't watched any of it. I've been colour-coding seating plans or sending imaginary emails in my head.

Are you regularly bringing work home with you?

I was, yes, but I've made a conscious effort during the past few months to get work done after school and go home work-free - at least for a couple of nights each week. I've even stopped my phone from alerting me to those dreaded emails at 9pm on a Tuesday night.

Great! So your phone is silent, but what is the volume like inside your head?

It depends what's happening in school. When things are plodding along as usual, the noise is bearable. It's when you throw in extras - data capture deadlines, "aspirational" target grades, new reading initiatives, pupil progress reports, "Mocksted" - that I hear the noise increase. At times like this, my mind feels like a broken jukebox, blaring out the first few seconds of a track before jumping haphazardly to the next.

It sounds to me like you're desperately in need of some mindfulness practice.

I've heard of it. I'm dubious. What is it exactly?

It's about being more aware. Using your senses. Exploring everyday objects, places and situations, as if you've never seen them before. Consciously concentrating on what you are doing, basically, rather than being on autopilot.

Pay more attention to the present moment, you mean? I've actually been doing a little bit of this whenever I eat - I'm trying to curb my life-long habit of overeating. Along the way, I have noticed that it's fascinating to look, taste, smell and feel your food, rather than hoovering it all up unconsciously. But how will not doing work make me less stressed about work?

Mindful eating is a great place to start, because you have to eat, no matter how much work you have. Concentrating on the food gives your brain a break from constantly circulating work problems. Ideally, you want to find a few activities like this, usually performed on autopilot, that you can execute mindfully.

Like my morning shower, maybe? When I make a cup of tea? My drive to school?

Whatever works for you, but you want to try and build this into your daily life. Even better if you can try four to eight minutes of mindful breathing before setting off to work.

I'm not sure that sitting and listening to my inhale and exhale is going to work for me. I don't feel like I have any control of my thoughts - surely this is just going to cause me frustration when I'm hijacked by my own worries and anxieties?

If that happens, let it. Mindfulness isn't about controlling thoughts, it's about watching them as a distant observer. When a thought like this creeps in, just acknowledge it and return to your breath.

I like the idea of observing my thoughts from a distance - like someone sitting on a bench, looking at traffic. A negative thought about school or anything might seem a lot less worrying if I'm looking at it from afar, rather than sitting inside of it.

Absolutely! Train yourself daily in mindfulness and you'll find it easier to concentrate, regulate emotions and find that inner-resilience in times of stress.

I remain slightly cynical, but I'll give it a go. Is there any evidence to back this up?

There's a great interview in Tes with Willem Kuyken, who leads the University of Oxford Mindfulness Centre, which overviews the evidence. I would start there. And remember, this is just one tool of many to tackle this issue. Mindfulness will not reduce your workload, it can only help you cope with it. Good luck!
Jo Steer is a teacher and experienced leader of SEND interventions Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and like Tes on Facebook

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The Quick Q&A: I'm fed up with being a 24/7 teacher, how do I get some headspace?

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I want to be a great teacher - for the kids, my colleagues, my school and myself - but I also want to be a person, too. I'm keeping my head above water in terms of workload for now, but I need mental space away from my job. Exactly.

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Will they remember this next year? 5 key points for long-term learning

28 February 2018

Author: Niki Kaiser

Thanks to all who attended day 1 of our Long-term Learning course. We are really looking forward to hearing back from you on day 2 about the approaches you've begun to embed.

We started the day by considering research by Dunlosky on effective study approaches.

Dr Flavia Belham then introduced us to the neuroscience-based ideas about memory, and some recent research findings. Delegates can access the research papers she spoke about here.

This post summarises the key points we talked about during day 1, and includes relevant links to follow up on.
Information is processed in the Working Memory, but unless we pay attention to it (and "rehearse" it), we undergo "catastrophic" loss, and it cannot be retrieved unless we re-encounter it.
We can use a very simple model to explain how memory works. In fact it's so simple that we all drew it from memory after lunch (as a retrieval practice exercise), but an example can be found here

We encounter a huge amount of information all the time via our senses. If we paid attention to all of it, we would very soon be overloaded and unable to deal with any of it. For this reason, much of what we encounter is very quickly forgotten, unless we pay particular attention to it, and make a point of remembering it.

For example, when I asked everyone to recall various pieces of information, we could all remember things we'd deliberately made an effort to remember (like our phone numbers when we were younger) but we couldn't remember other things, even though they were very recent (like the number of steps we'd just climbed to get to the second floor of the building we were in) or they'd happened multiple times during our lifetime (like the Queen's birthday).

2) Working memory has a limited capacity, whereas long-term memory is potentially unlimited

Research from as far back as the 1950s suggests that working memory can only process a limited number of items. This might be as low as 4 or as high as 7, but the number is not definitely known.

Although there is a limit to the number of items that can be processed by the Working Memory, the items themselves can be very complex. An example of how we process more complex items is "chunking".

For example, which of these number patterns can you remember most easily?
352974310485 or 106618121984
I grew up in Hastings, played in an Orchestra and read a dystopian novel by George Orwell for GCSE English, so the second set jumps out at me as: 1066, 1812 and 1984. These three numbers are easy for me to remember, because I have "chunked" the list.

We build " schema " in our long-term memory by using our prior knowledge to make links between items. For example, we know that these are all trees, even though the individual images are all very different. Schema help us to organize, process and use information.

3) Cognitive Load theory

Working memory is limited, and research suggests that it can't be "trained" in a way that's useful or transferable. So if we reduce the cognitive load that we place on Working Memory, this optimises transfer to long-term memory and aids long-term retention ( Sweller, 1998).

Cognitive Load Theory takes account of 3 types of load, and we should try to reduce the first two as much as possible.

Extraneous cognitive load is anything that occupies the Working Memory, but doesn't contribute to long-term retention. It depends on the way things are presented, and it's increased when we try to multi-task, when we're distracted or when we're presented with reduntant information. We took a lighthearted look at some of the "crimes" we might commit (as teachers).

You don't need to avoid these things completely, just think about how, when and why we do them.

Intrinsic cognitive load is the inherent challenge of any material to be learned. It depends on both the material's complexity and the lerner's background knowledge. So learning the meaning of an isolated word would have low intrinsic cognitive load, but completing a quadratic equation would be easier for someone with a strong maths background than for another person who is a less experienced mathematician.

Before the next session, we are going to read Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, and use Adam Boxer's lesson checklist to analyse a lesson we teach. In the next session, we'll think more about germaine load (and why this is not something we seek to reduce) and Bjork's "desireable difficulties".

Dual Coding is one of the six effective study strategies identified by the Learning Scientists. You can read more about the research behind these strategies in their recent article.

Vicki Barnett recently wrote a long, informative (and very readable) post about Dual Coding, and in the afternoon of Day 1, she demonstrated how words and visuals can enhance learning. She spoke to the whole group about a complex family tree, but asked half of them to turn their backs on her! Those with the visual prompts and clues followed the story and retained information much better than those without them.

We had previously sketched diagrams represnting the key points from Flavia's talk. We discussed how this approach can be used as a basis for elaboration and retrieval practice.

A key point about Dual Coding is that visual and auditory prompts only take up one "slot" in our Working Memory, as long as they are complementary (otherwise they just add to extraneous load).

5) Retrieval practice and space learning

Retrieval practice is the act of bringing previously-learned information to mind, and it has been shown (by a number of studies) to be more effective than simply re-studying material. This review summarises the research, and offers practical applications (as well as summarising current limitations) for the approach.

For example, we know that it is more effective to retrieve 72% of information correctly than is is to re-study 100% of it. Even though the re-studied material will contain 100% correct information, this won't be remembered as effectively as the 72% of correct information that's been retrieved.

We can further increase retention by spacing study and retrieval over time. And it appears that leaving time to forget is just as important as allowing time for retrieval and practice.

Flavia Belham demonstrated how these principles have been used to increase retention at KS4 using a (free) learning platform from Seneca Learning. You can try the demo for yourself here (must be accessed via Google Chrome) and read about their randomised control trial (RCT) with 1,120 Year 9 students in the latest issue of IMPACT, the journal from the Chartered College of Teaching.

Thank you to all who attended and contributed to the day. We look forward to seeing you again in April.

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Will they remember this next year? 5 key points for long-term learning | Norwich Research School at Notre Dame High School

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28 February 2018 Author: Niki Kaiser Thanks to all who attended day 1 of our Long-term Learning course. We are really looking forward to hearing back from you on day 2 about the approaches you've begun to embed. We started the day by considering research by Dunlosky on effective study approaches.

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I have been a teacher of English for 24 years and this much I know about teaching disengaged 15 year old boys (most, if not all, of which will be obvious).

Eighteen months ago we withdrew 14 C/D borderline disengaged Year 10 boys from their English classes and I taught them. It was a win-win - they stopped disrupting others and they made real progress.

I have insider information about how to teach disengaged 15 year old boys; I have one. And it's worth acknowledging that being the Headteacher helps.

Relationships are everything. Fullan says, The single factor common to successful change is that relationships improve. If relationships improve, [things] get better. If relationships remain the same or get worse, ground is lost. Invest lots of time in developing relationships with each boy. Get to know about them personally, so that you have something to discuss with them during those idle moments when they are queuing at the door waiting for the change of lesson, or when you meet them round school.

Boys fart. A lot. Just don't react. Or if you do, shout Doorknob! dead quick. That stops it. See below for full explanation.

Laugh with them and let them laugh at you. One day mid-lesson I was singing Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton (yes, I know that sounds incredible) and they were giggling. I challenged them to name the artist; if they could I pledged I would buy them a copy of Call of Duty 6 each, at £40 a throw, due to be released that week. After some ridiculous guessing, Jordan said that his gran often plays that song and that he thought it was something like Minnie Rip-ton. It took a whole week before he admitted he'd looked it up on his phone, and mobiles are banned at our school.

Know their culture. The fact that I knew who John Cena was and how to do a choke-slam was awesomely good in their eyes.

Trust them. I found this quotation from Seneca in Clive Stafford-Smith's own This much I know in the Observer magazine: The first step towards making someone trustworthy is to trust them. Choose your moment and use the phrase, I'm going to trust you to do this, looking directly into their eyes. It works.

On some things you have to compromise. I know it encourages learned helplessness, but just buy a stack of biros and don't get precious if you lose a load.

No matter what the subject, get them talking. We all have a story to tell. They love to debate a subject. As a one off, sit them round a dining-style table and give them a paper plate and ask them to write down one person they'd like to invite to have a curry. And then have a group discussion about who would be on a shortlist of six; works every time. And if they can talk about their work but cannot write about it, use a dictaphone whilst they're telling you about it; the transcripts are magical.

Give them structure and establish routines. For instance, make finding their work as easy as possible. Even if you are the guardian of their work 99% of the time and you rarely let it out of your sight, that's OK in the long run, because at least they'll have their notes to revise from in May of Year 11.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever diverge publicly from believing that every single one of them will get a minimum of a grade C. Not once.

Don't bother setting homework whose completion is essential. Doling out punishment for incomplete homework detracts from the precious time you have with them in class when you can influence what they do and how they think. They complete homework badly, if at all, and then you waste time writing in their planners at the beginning of the next lesson when a sparky start is crucial if they are going to learn anything. Set extension homework, having made sure all the essentials are covered in lesson time.

Don't drive on with something just because there is a specification to get through when it's clear you are draining them. It is crucial you do something light-hearted and refreshing for an hour instead. If you don't have a break, the consequences are dire.

I know it's unbelievably obvious, but know your sport. Of course I support Manchester United - I was born in Sussex. When we lost the league to City at the end of last season, I walked into the library for our lesson, Monday period 1, and the boys were standing in front of the newspaper rack pretending to read the centre pages of all the papers; every light-blue sports back page faced me in welcome.

Don't give them out individual copies if you are analysing texts - use a single copy on the board so you know who's looking at what.

Feed them a lot. Stupidly, it took me ages to work this one out. I knew my own son wasn't worth talking to if he was remotely hungry; when I made the connection I threw all the cake I could find at the problem. It was sponsored by our Raising Achievement fund. There was a moment, as I walked in with a tray of chocolate Butterfly cakes, when Louis said, Oh Sir, I'm really gonna work hard from now on. It took just a tray of Butterfly cakes to change his behaviours which had been ingrained for nearly 11 years of school. Oh, and serve breakfast before morning examinations and lunch before afternoon ones. BTW, Louis got his grade C in English Language GCSE.

Construct as many learning tasks as you can that get them moving round the room. They have to get rid of that energy somehow.

A reprimand now and again does no harm whatsoever. They're boys - as long as you're fair, they'll be fine.

Let them know you know what they think they know. And always be the adult.

Every time there's a minor victory, celebrate! I have built my whole career around a line from Virgil, Success nourishes them: they can because they think they can, a better version of Henry Ford's famous dictum. And keep things competitive; I'm not averse to awarding hard cash.

Apparently, if you're an adolescent male and one of your mates farts, if you shout Doorknob before he shouts Safety you can hit him as hard as you like until he has touched the handle of a door, hence Doorknob! I told you I had insider info...

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This much I know about...teaching disengaged 15 year old boys

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I have been a teacher of English for 24 years and this much I know about teaching disengaged 15 year old boys (most, if not all, of which will be obvious). Eighteen months ago we withdrew 14 C/D borderline disengaged Year 10 boys from their English classes and I taught them.

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Education for Today and Tomorrow | L'Education Aujourd'hui et Demain

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The concept that boys and girls learn differently is not new. Often, what a student naturally enjoys or is inclined toward will determine his or her success in various school subjects; but what if today's classroom and curriculum structure catered (however unintentionally) to one gender more than the other? Many researchers say this is now the case, with boys facing an upward struggle from primary school on.

For many boys, co-educational public schools can be uncomfortable, unfriendly, unproductive places. Teaching styles and disciplinary habits are often not suited to the average boy and may "lock him into a terrible cycle of punishment and bad behaviour," writes Dr. William Pollack, a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of Real Boys: Rescuing our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. In learning environments biased against their strengths, boys may become turned off or frustrated and may attempt to have their needs met by seeking negative attention. This rebellion completes the circle of failure, Pollack argues, with many boys labelled as troublemakers or diagnosed with hyperactivity. If Pollack is right, schools may need to upgrade many traditional teaching methods; but what about the girls?

Girls' education has been a major focus for researchers since the early 1970s. In 1992, the American Association of University Women published a report called "How Schools Shortchange Girls." The report's claim of a "girl crisis" was widely publicized, the Ms. Foundation declared a "Take our Daughters to Work Day" and the U.S. Congress passed the $360-million Gender Equity in Education Act. Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher argues that school systems put girls at a disadvantage.

However, the latest statistics indicate boys are in greater danger of failing, not girls. In 2001, the Toronto District School Board reported that 10 per cent more girls than boys achieved Level 3 or 4 (4 being the highest) in standardized reading and writing tests in Grades 3 and 6; and girls were holding their own in math, too. In Alberta, boys maintain a slight edge in math and science but lag far behind girls in language arts. Other provinces report similar gaps.

A University of Chicago study, combining the results of six major surveys on educational achievement spanning 30 years and involving thousands of children, also indicates a similar "gender gap" in education - with boys falling to the bottom of the heap. The study reveals that girls, due to a concerted effort, have made steady gains in math and science while outperforming boys in reading and writing.

According to an international study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Unesco, the problem of boys' underachievement in literacy is worldwide. The 2003 study suggests that girls out-performed boys in reading at the age of 15 in all 43 countries that participated in the study. Boys were ahead in math and, when it came to science, there was some evidence of a gender gap. In almost all of the countries involved, girls had higher expectations when it came to job prospects and were more likely to see themselves as white-collar workers than boys.

Why the gender gap? The traditional way North American schools teach boys puts them at risk of underachieving, writes Michael Gurian, educator, child advocate and author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently! In his book, Gurian argues that reading and writing skills do not come as naturally to boys as to girls. Many problems experienced by boys in the classroom stem from them being normal boys in a setting that is not designed to handle them, he writes. Educators often lack understanding of "typical boy traits" like aggression, verbal and emotional reticence, and interest in objects moving through space. An early elementary school student can learn extensive math, geometry, problem solving and social skills from LEGO, building blocks, and woodworking projects. According to Gurian, current curricula and classroom structures deny boys these opportunities.

American educational researchers William Draves and Julie Coates also blame traditional school structure for holding boys back. In their book, Nine-Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Century, they argue that boys are leading society in this, the age of the Internet. According to them, it is not boys who are the problem, but schools. While boys are developing the skills they will need in the "knowledge jobs" of the future, schools are still preparing students for an industrial age that is passing. Draves and Coates believe schools in the U.S. had to go through a similar adjustment between 1900 and 1920, as the education system adapted to produce in students the skills needed for industrial and ofﬁce work instead of jobs in the rural economy. During this period, boys dropped out of school in huge numbers. Yet it was often those same young men, experimenting with technology, who led America's manufacturing boom.

Draves and Coates claim something similar is happening today with computers: boys of almost any age are far more interested in the Internet, video games and technology than girls. They "like taking risks, being entrepreneurial, being collaborative - all the behaviours that lead to success in the workforce today." But while they are rewarded for their behaviour in the workplace, they are punished in school for being non-conformist, poor listeners, and restless.

It is a seductive theory. According to Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who has done substantial research on gender and academic achievement, girls on the whole have always achieved higher grades than boys. "It's always been true - this is not a new phenomenon," she says.

Eccles believes that changing grades have more to do with new demographics than the intellectual capacity of the genders. Many socio-economic groups, particularly in the U.S., are deﬁned by their low educational achievement. This is even more evident among the boys in these groups, who often lack the positive male encouragement necessary to perceive education as a valuable process. In addition, Eccles explains how the supposed "boys crisis" of today also existed in the 1960s, when it became clear that more boys were likely to fail classes and drop out of school.

Pollack's research on American boys yielded the following results. Eighth-grade boys are 50 per cent more likely to be held back a grade than eighth-grade girls. By high school, 67 per cent of special-education students are boys. Boys receive 71 per cent of all school suspensions and are up to 10 times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with a serious emotional disorder (particularly Attention-Deﬁcit Disorder). Boys are now twice as likely as girls to be considered "learning disabled" and boys are up to three times more likely than girls to be the victim of a violent crime and between four and six times more likely to commit suicide.

By the time boys reach high school, another problem appears: peer pressure to shun things academic. Pollack says the boys he interviewed consistently reported that it was not "cool" to be too smart in class or to work hard at academics. Dr. Alan King, professor emeritus with Queen's University's faculty of education, explains that the greater tendency of boys to withdraw and not participate is largely due to the allure of adolescent subcultures - such as skaters and punks - that offer teenage boys the legitimacy and acceptance that deﬁes them in the classroom.

Yet, while dropout rates are on the rise, few boys leave unﬁnished and never return. A more common pattern shows boys to be "stubborn but low achieving," King says. Starting in Grade 11, these boys start skipping class, then entire days and, later, full weeks. They often return to the classroom and make another go of it, only to disappear again. As a result, these boys typically lack the necessary credits to ﬁnish on time and are required to return for a ﬁfth year.

The cycle does not stop at high school, either. According to King - who has done extensive research on secondary school dropout rates - far more women are graduating and going on to college and university than men. In Ontario, this gap has grown even more pronounced since the elimination of Grade 13 in 2003. King says that girls are also doing better in almost every subject, while boys' scores tend to be near the bottom and top of the spectrum. Girls usually do better on pure tests of ability while boys score higher when evaluation is non- standardized. However, King says boys' faltering achievement has "more to do with socialization than raw ability." As he points out, girls typically have more developed career notions and their work habits tend to be passive and more responsive to traditional teaching styles.

Despite the low achievement of boys, King says it has been difﬁcult to create awareness and "make a case for troubled boys." But change is on the way. In a ground-breaking move, several school boards in Ontario now require that all of their schools develop written plans to help boys catch up with girls. Durham District School Board in Whitby, Ontario requires that all its schools develop more "male-centred" teaching methods
to help boost boys' literacy. These include inviting male authors to conduct readings and purchasing more reading material geared toward boys. Many other school boards have taken similar steps by recognizing that, in general, boys gravitate toward non-ﬁction, science ﬁction, horror or adventure stories, and girls toward general ﬁction. Ask boys if they read outside of school and they often assume reading applies only to ﬁction and say no. Clearly, schools need to redeﬁne literacy for all students' sake, says Barbara Bodkin, programs and services manager with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Another approach is to use different media forms to introduce literacy before boys begin to struggle, Bodkin says. For example, boys in Grade 2 and 3 often prefer drawing cartoons to tell a story. "We need to build on that and not dismiss it," she says. "Many boys love violence, blood and gore, and we can't discount that, either. Use of action is part of a writer's craft."

Several schools in Toronto, Hamilton and Peterborough (all in Ontario) are also experimenting with single-gender education in Grades 7 and 8. Given the socio-economic factors at play within traditional single-gender environments (typically private schools), the value of this approach varies for both boys and girls and is difﬁcult to track, Bodkin says. While she agrees that it is worth looking at, Bodkin is quick to point out that there is no quick ﬁx. "If you change the structure but not the teaching, it's not going to have an impact."

The lack of positive male role models in schools has been a concern of parents and educators for many years now. A career in teaching continues to draw far more women than men, particularly in the primary and elementary grades. While many critics of the current school system highlight this absence as one of the chief problems with boys' education, Bodkin feels that more male teachers would not change a systemic problem that may begin at home. Within the family setting, it is typically a female (mother, aunt, babysitter) who follows up with homework and reads with kids.

"It needs to start in the home," she says. "It's not just in school." If a father is going shopping, he could ask his son to write up a list of items they need and budget how much money they will have to spend, Bodkin suggests. And, if this kind of positive male guidance cannot be simulated in the classroom, at least it can be nurtured there. Some schools have developed boys' reading clubs, where older boys mentor younger students to foster reading as both enjoyable and an activity.

Fifteen years ago, it became clear that schools needed to address the ways in which girls learn. At the time, some critics said there could not be change. Now girls have caught up with - even surpassed - boys in the critical areas of math and science where for so long they lagged behind. However, while boys have become the current focus in the classroom, it should not detract from continued work with girls, Bodkin says. "We don't want to create a supremacy for boys at the expense of girls."

Continued research on how both genders learn is key to improving educational achievement across the board, Bodkin says. Even now, with girls' grades on the rise, many female students display little conﬁdence in their abilities. Recent EQAO tests (used to evaluate student performance in Ontario) asked elementary school boys whether they were good at math and sciences; the majority responded "yes." When girls were asked the same question, most said "no." In reality, the truth is the reverse.

"We want to make sure we maximize all students' potential," Bodkin says. "We don't want boys to become more like girls. We want human beings to be multi-faceted."

Originally published in 2004.

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The concept that boys and girls learn differently is not new. Often, what a student naturally enjoys or is inclined toward will determine his or her success in various school subjects; but what if today's classroom and curriculum structure catered (however unintentionally) to one gender more than the other?

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Getting boys hooked on reading: How can digital media help? | Reading Rockets

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Did you know that boys often underestimate their ability to read? That boys, on average, read less than girls? And that boys are often less motivated to read than girls? Not only that: By the time boys reach high school, roughly half of them will describe themselves as "nonreaders."

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Four strategies to engage boys and close the gender gap

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Four strategies to engage boys and close the gender gap

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"I've been working on raising boys' achievement since 1993... you'd have thought I'd have got it sorted by now" is regularly the opening line to one of my INSET days or keynote speeches. It usually provokes mild amusement. "But sadly I'm afraid there aren't that many people working on it." And nobody laughs. Because it's true. Why is it? I always ask. Do people really think that by focusing on the boys the girls are going to suffer? I call that sloppy thinking.

I began working on strategies that hit all the right buttons for boys without disadvantaging girls in 1993 when I had already been teaching in Secondary Schools for fifteen years. 1993 was the first year of OFSTED and we were told: a) there was something wrong with the way we were delivering collective worship, b) there was a problem with the plumbing in the science labs and c) the girls were doing significantly better than the boys. Could we sort it out? So we set to.

What became extremely apparent was that leaving it until boys were in year 11 was definitely too late. By the time boys get to year six, as you will find in most primary schools in the land, there is a small group of boys, the peer police cadets, who are dragging boys off cliffs. If we don't act sooner by the time these boys reach year 10 they can be virtually running the place, telling, as they do, other boys whether its ok to work, to write, to dance, to sing, to care, to read, to share - virtually anything.

So we began to work with our partner primary schools, which I believe is the most effective way of approaching the issue. I discovered the power of using my group of year 8s to help boys in nursery and reception classes with their reading, put together drama projects with year 4 boys. It turned those boys around by giving them a positive focus for their natural leadership ability (the clue's in the name - peer leaders):it allowed them to succeed away from the prying eyes of their peers. I was also challenging gender stereotyping. And didn't those little boys really look up to those big boys!

Throughout these twenty three years I have been in a state of almost total disbelief that the underachievement of some of our boys (it tends to be poor white working class boys at the bottom of the heap) has failed to register in the majority of local authorities and in the country as a whole. Do some people really still think the reason for the underachievement of boys is the lack of male teachers in primary schools? Look, it's not going to happen, get over it, move on. It's not the gender of the teacher that is the most important thing. It's the quality of the teacher and their ability to relate to what's going on in a boy's head, in a boy's world, in a boy's universe. Do some people put it down to laddish behaviour? Well, actually laddish behaviour is a cry for help. Ever seen it that way? Because as far some boys are concerned, it's far better for them to be seen to be not bothered about winning than entering and not winning.

One thing that is certain however, is that for many boys we are simply starting formal education too early, forcing too many boys to read and write before they are mentally and physically ready In Scandinavia, where they don't start school formerly until they're seven, boys and girls achieve in roughly the same way throughout school.

In "The Lost Boys" a report from Save the Children published in July 2016, which looks at how boys are falling behind in their early years, they highlight the situation as thus "Since 2006 there has been a 20% improvement, an 8% reduction in the poverty gap but just 1% reduction in the gender gap". It's not going away. We need to increase the good work with parents pre-school, and the brilliant work that I have seen in many Early Years settings in recent years.

The DFE this year once more presented national statistics that show, yet again, boys being outperformed in every area in the foundation stage, at key stage 1, and in all subjects bar maths at key stage 2. If you'd like to find out more, you can get a quick overview of the results in this infographic.

Perhaps we should take heart that there was a debate in September 2016 in Westminster on the Educational Performance of Boys and that there were calls for action "The issue of our gender education gap and its impact has not been addressed adequately by this house or by successive governments of all colours and the education sector seems reluctant to take action on it. That is a shame." Karl M Cartney MP for Lincoln.

Watch this space.

We should also be encouraged by the many practical strategies that you can implement today that help close the gender attainment gap. Here are four actions that you could try:

1. Try this: In a recent project, part-sponsored by Oxford University Press, we created twenty small groups of peer police cadets.We gave them the name 'THE TRANSFORMERS' (Check out the film on Oxford Owl for School) and gave them responsibility to help out younger boys with their reading, and taking charge of eco projects around the school. Who says we don't have positive male role models? Schools are full of them! Or why not ask your local high school to send you down some of those decent young men on work experience or as Maths Ambassadors or Science Ambassadors.

2. Make a stimulating writing corner in your classroom planned by the children. Instead of having a home corner, have a space research station or a superhero base where missions are planned and reports written for the government. Use the kinds of paraphernalia attached to their favourite superheroes or TV or film characters. You can find lots of ideas from other schools on Pinterest.

3. Seek the boys' help to design and stock an area of the library, giving it real boy appeal. If you need help getting started, take a look at Oxford Bookmatch, a free tool on Oxford Owl for School, that allows you to search hundreds of children's books by genre, children's interests, levels etc.

4. Hold a parents' workshop that looks at boys' achievement to help address these issues. In these sessions you need to highlight the importance of developing independence in boys. Parents need to know the significance of male role models in the family - fathers, grandfathers, uncles, older brothers - and the important role they have in supporting their boys' education. Tell your parents to visit Oxford Owl for Home to access my free advice and 250 free ebooks including boy-friendly Project X eBooks.

Gary Wilson is an Education Consultant on Boys' Achievement, Advisor on (OUP) and author of "Breaking Through the Barriers to Boys' Achievement and Developing a Caring Masculinity" "Help Your Boys Succeed" "Raising Boys' Achievement: Pocket Pal" "100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Raising Boys' Achievement" and (with Linda Tallent) "Boys Will Be BRILLIANT! " Bloomsbury Press.
garywilsonraisingboysachievement.com

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Four strategies to engage boys in literacy and close the gender gap

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"I've been working on raising boys' achievement since 1993... you'd have thought I'd have got it sorted by now" is regularly the opening line to one of my INSET days or keynote speeches. It usually provokes mild amusement. "But sadly I'm afraid there aren't that many people working on it."

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"Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything." -Tomie dePaola

The power of literacy cannot be underestimated. Being articulate, a proficient reader and an effective and efficient writer can open doors to opportunity and make an immeasurable difference to the life chances of the least advantaged pupils.

There are four steps to any improvement:

Know what the problem really is

Use the best evidence to make plans

Take action

Evaluate & refine

What good is it for teachers to use multiple literacy strategies if there is little long-term impact on standards? How do you upskill all teachers to explicitly teach the skills proficient readers and writers use? How do schools avoid literacy being a bolt-on and support every teacher to embrace its importance within their subject?
You recognise and repeatedly articulate that literacy underpins learning, everywhere. Know what the problem is
"Pupils' extended writing is poor."

"They often do not attempt the longer 6-mark questions in GCSE Science. "

"No matter how many times they have been taught punctuation, they still have to be reminded to use capital letters and full stops."

Writing is an easy symptom of poor literacy to recognise, but what's the root cause of these symptoms? Key questions to ask yourself are:

How many pupils are reading below their chronological reading age?

How deep and varied are pupils' vocabulary?

How well are we explicitly teaching oracy skills to support pupils' ability to think & process information clearly?

Use the best evidence to make plans
Just like teaching pupils to master the foundations of multiplication tables in maths, teaching the fundamentals of literacy is no different. Pupils need to be able to articulate their thoughts effectively orally, use accurate vocabulary & refine their use of language verbally, before they'll be able to write coherently. They need to be exposed to great writing through reading, before they will be able to replicate that themselves. Knowing how to be highly literate requires a knowledge base and has a hierarchy of skills just like any other subject.

So, make plans that start with the foundations. Build vocabulary using the 3 tiers of words, Frayer models or Beck & Mckeown's vocabulary development steps. Teach reading by ensuring all your staff know how proficient readers decode, build fluency through low stakes, build in high repetition reading aloud. Know that each literacy skill will pass through three stages of acquisition, accuracy and fluency. Explicitly teach writing by using dual coding, retrieval practice and spaced & interleaved practice to shift knowledge about how to be literate into pupils' long-term memory.

Keep plans simple. Tackle one problem at a time.
Take Action
Make sure all staff are involved. There is no subject where literacy is absent.
Evaluate & Refine
It is crucial that this stage happens as often as possible. Get feedback from staff as quickly as you can and then adapt plans to address their concerns.

We have worked with numerous schools on raising standards through impact on pupils' literacy skills, they include:

Abersychan School - Reading across the school

BTE Academy - Standards at GCSE, specifically coherent answers to 6-10 mark GCSE questions

City of Peterborough Academy - improving literacy standards in an area of high social deprivation

St Julian's School - Raising literacy standards including using dual coding to improve reading comprehension

YGG Llywnderw - using dual coding to improve reading comprehension

Ty Sign Primary - challenging MAT learners to develop higher order reading skills

If you'd like to know more about what we do then contact us at enquiries@impact.wales for a chat.

A Little More About Us

Who are we? - We are Finola & Jane, Literacy & Numeracy specialists, with 35+ years of teaching, training & leadership experience between us.

Can you trust us? - We have both worked for Welsh Government supporting schools & senior leaders across Wales. We have held senior leadership posts, delivered support to strategic education advisers, and published curriculum support guidance with Oxford University Press...but if you need to know more visit our website for testimonials from schools we've worked with.

Why should you buy our support? - Put simply, because we believe in impact. We do exactly what our name suggests. Our school support is always bespoke, high quality and designed specifically for each school we work with. Our focus is on delivering measurable impact for pupils.

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"Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything." -Tomie dePaola The power of literacy cannot be underestimated. Being articulate, a proficient reader and an effective and efficient writer can open doors to opportunity and make an immeasurable difference to the life chances of the least advantaged pupils.

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Sketch Notes - Impact School Improvement

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We are happy for our sketchnotes to be used by schools and teachers for internal training as long as they are not altered in any way and our company name and copyright information remain intact. Commercial use requires permission.