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https://www.hertsforlearning.co.uk/blog/differentiation-maths-scaffolding-or-metaphorical-escalators

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Recently, I have been working a great deal with teachers on developing their skills at scaffolding learning rather than setting different levels of challenge (also referred to as 'Tiered Learning'). Let me start by clarifying one thing. I am not opposed to presenting different levels of challenge. There are times when it is absolutely the most appropriate form of differentiation for the learners. For example, pupils who have significant gaps in learning or cognitive difficulties. However, it is the dominance of this approach within our primary maths classrooms that concerns me.

What is differentiation?

At its most simple level, differentiation is the teacher's response to the variation amongst learners in a classroom. However, differentiation is a vast field, with multiple aspects and opportunities that need to be considered when deciding on the most appropriate adjustments to facilitate maximum learning. There is not a 'one size fits all' approach; nor is there a magic bullet. It relies on our professional knowledge of our pupils and consideration of a few key questions:

1) What is the long term learning outcome that is required?

2) What is the learning goal of the individual lesson?

3) How do we get our diverse classrooms to the desired outcomes? In essence, how do we go from Q1 to Q2 and back again?

Tiered Learning

This is the dominant form of differentiation that I encounter not only in classrooms, but also in published (hard copy or digital) resources. Fundamentally, teachers provide different tasks/activities to meet the needs of different learners. This approach has been used in UK classrooms for a number of years because it does have benefits. It allows pupils access to learning that they can (or should be able to) complete independently. In examples of best practice, this is a short term change in the learning goal to support pupils to acquire the knowledge, skill or experience to allow them to move to the next stage of learning. It is successful when a pupil has:

i) a cognitive difficultly and is working on a detailed personal curriculum that reflects their individual learning needs

ii) a significant gap in conceptual understanding that must be addressed to ensure that they are able to continue to develop their schema with clarity. A short term drop to accelerate rapidly back up to the levels of their peers.

I am not going to discuss those pupils with cognitive difficulties in this blog - it would be far too long. Please refer to our previous blogs here and here for focused conversation if you would like to explore this further.

I ran, and will continue to run, classrooms where self differentiation of tiered learning will be part of my teaching style. Warning: this form of differentiation needs very close monitoring.

Let us consider the ultimate outcomes if some of our pupils constantly access less complex or less challenging learning than their peers (either through teacher direction or self-differentiation). When do they get to reach the age-related expectations (ARE) pitch? If in Year 1 they are constantly exposed to learning experiences that are just below ARE, what happens to them in Year 2? Year 3? The gap continues to get bigger. Many Year 6 teachers feel the eventual outcomes of this - a pupil who was just off ARE in year 1 is now significantly off by Year 6. The pupil has missed many of the key learning experiences and their schema is fragmented, limiting their ability to translate learning across the curriculum. Used constantly and without consideration, children could be placed on metaphorical escalators that have different pre-set outcomes, and once you are on one it is incredibly difficult to jump to the escalator above as the gap increases throughout a school career.
Figure 1: Some of the strategies which can be deployed to support learning
It can be successful though, if carefully managed through clear gap diagnosis, focused intervention, careful small step management, and most importantly, that those expectations are firmly attached to 'getting back on track'. As such, tiered learning is both very time and energy demanding. I would always ask, is there another way to achieve the desired learning outcome?

Scaffolding

But what about these other ways? What else should be considered? This is where the list is almost endless. Figure 2 summarises the more common strategies that a teacher can deploy.

Do bear in mind that other forms of enabling access and tiered learning are not always mutually exclusive. They can have a symbiotic relationship.

For the purpose of this blog, I am going to focus upon scaffolding.
'[a scaffold is] that [which] enables a child or novice to solve a task or achieve a goal that would be beyond his unassisted effort' Wood et al 1976, p90
Scaffolding works in a similar way to its physical counterpart - it allows pupils who are ready to learn the concept but with certain barriers, access to learning that they would not be able, or willing, to reach without it. A key outcome of this approach is that they access the same thinking / learning experiences and continue to develop their understanding on a par with their peers.

When working with teachers, consideration of scaffolding opportunities has shifted their thinking about how to approach the needs of their learners. It makes classrooms more manageable, as through successful scaffolding we can all grapple with the same learning, collective power to conquer together. Then on to the next... together.

So what would this look like in the classroom?

Beware of cognitive overload, try to keep it in mind. Stay focused on the key learning outcome, what exactly do you want them to learn in this sequence or step? For example, if the desired learning outcome is to be able to use the language of multiple and factor accurately, and pupils don't know their multiplication facts, then providing them with a multiplication chart could be the scaffold (after making sure that they how to use it). If they don't know their facts, this is going to be a barrier to understanding and accurately applying the language. By being given access to a simple chart, they can explore, secure and feel confident in the use of the key vocabulary language, and they will be able to apply it rapidly when they acquire more facts. The focus of the learning is not to be able to recall multiplication facts (that's a different much longer journey).

1) Are there any concrete manipulative or printed resources that would ease cognitive load? Do they have access to the same resources that were modelled? Pupils should have access to allow them to model out, explore and confirm for themselves as and when they need to. Some pupils may need a manipulative mat in order to contain/structure their resources - or they might get 'lost in the sea of Dienes'.

2) Speaking frames support pupils to structure responses in full sentences and in how to use new vocabulary appropriately. These have been a hugely successful part of ESSENTIAL maths, as the development of verbal reasoning is closely linked with the ability to construct personal schemas and knowledge into long term memory. In some cases, pupils are not able to track from the modelled speaking frame and need their own personal copy, so that they can track with their fingers etc.

3) Recording frames work as organisers, supporting pupils to stay focused on key learning and enable some pupils to have more practice. Let's take these two key functions separately.

4) Check-it stations support the development of independence and self-correction at the point of learning. It has been proven that to find and identify errors in your own learning is vastly more powerful than having them identified for you. Recently in a classroom, I asked one boy who had completed a set of calculations how he knew if he had them all correct. He shrugged his shoulders and said Mr X would mark his book. How much more powerful would it have been for that pupil to have checked some of his responses as he was working through them? Check-it stations can vary in content and level of support, but the default setting is simply just some of the answers. Then the responsibility lies with the pupil to identify where and what the error is and how the correct solution is reached. This prevents the proliferation of error within a lesson, has the added bonuses of more confident, self-checking pupils and frees the teacher to work with guided groups. Many schools who employ this now have editing pens at their check-it stations as well. A quick word from the experienced check-it station user - have at least 2 in your classroom to avoid the bun fight as everyone heads at the same time.

Staying focused on learning

A maths classroom is full of distractions. A recording frame can support a pupil in internalising a thought process, supporting development of efficient and clear recording, learning to contain their pictorial representations and symbols to ensure that they can follow their own chain of thought. They can also be adapted to enable greater depth.
Figures 2 and 3 Examples of speaking frames from ESSENTIALmaths Figure 5 year 1 recording frame with challenge, 'Can you complete the rest of the recording frame to make this true?'
Imagine you are a child who doesn't write as quickly as your peers. Perhaps you get lost half way through a sentence as you are having to work harder on spelling and letter formation. You get through less practice. You might never get to the 'tricky' questions (this is why misconceptions must be exposed early in a practice sequence, but that's for another time). What is the impact on your learning? Is this because you couldn't 'do the maths'? No, it is possibly because your fine motor skills aren't as well developed as your peers or that your working memory is getting overloaded with other stuff. But you will eventually fall behind and the gap will grow - this isn't fair. This is further explored in this blog here.

We need to get as many pupils as possible to become fluent and confident mathematicians. This is not for school league tables, this is because maths is a key life skill required to function successfully in our society. The longer children stay on parallel curriculums, through constant tiered learning, the harder it is to move them off. Are we content to have different expectations for pupils? Is it okay to leave children trapped on metaphorical learning escalators?

In this blog, I have only outlined a few of the different differentiation strategies that a teacher can deploy. If you would like to explore this further and gain a wider portfolio of strategies, please join us on our central training.

Bringing a realistic approach to managing differentiation in the whole-class teaching of mathematics - Upper Key stage 2 7th March 2019

Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry, 17, 89−100

Berk, L., & Winsler, A. (1995). Scaffolding children's learning: Vygotsky and early childhood learning. Washington, DC: National Association for Education of Young Children

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Differentiation in maths - scaffolding or metaphorical escalators!

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Recently, I have been working a great deal with teachers on developing their skills at scaffolding learning rather than setting different levels of challenge (also referred to as 'Tiered Learning'). Let me start by clarifying one thing. I am not opposed to presenting different levels of challenge.

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This blog is inspired by another by Ruth Walker - E-coli and quality first teaching. I'm basically trying to say the same thing. In her brilliantly punchy post she uses an excellent analogy: when food hygiene is poor, the more vulnerable sectors of a population are most likely to suffer - the elderly and babies are more likely to get sick. But the solution doesn't lie in addressing their needs as sub-groups; it lies in addressing the core issue: poor food hygiene.

I think this is a very important idea. We have spent so long chasing rainbows with sub-group analysis; diving down rabbit holes; grasping at straws; playing whack-a-mole. The recent series of paradigm-busting blogs by Becky Allen have highlighted the folly of this in relation to chasing after Pupil Premium achievement through narrow interventions - largely because the probability of hitting the right students in ways that they need is pretty low.

A major part of the data delusion that has built up over recent years has been that each sub-group in a cohort should, more or less, achieve similar outcomes and that if there are GAPS - the GAPS MUST BE CLOSED. Usually this involves identifying some plausible causal link and then trying to make the lower achieving group catch up to the higher achieving group by intervening around that link. However, this is fraught with difficulty and data-wrongheadedness, too often driven by folk without enough mathematical confidence to apply the notion of 'statistical confidence' to their data.

Boys are not all the same. If boys underperform compared to girls 'Boy-friendly' strategies might not work for them all and may benefit the girls even more. Ethnic groups rarely have neatly homogenous learning characteristics that fit with definable interventions and often the group size is so small as to render the data useless. Every SEND student is different. Higher Prior Attainment students are not a distinct group and can be half your school. Then there is Odd Door/Even Door syndrome - the legendary cautionary tale once shared on David Didau's blog suggesting that spurious door number 'gaps' might be greater than say gender or PP/non-PP gaps: you can find all kinds of patterns and differences between groups even if the cause is entirely random.

And this is the main point: At some point 'intervention' really has to be simply 'teaching'. Given all the variables, uncertainties and unknowns, rather than chasing interventions, it is a far far better bet to focus on teaching everyone better. To spell out Ruth Walker's blog message, the reason why some students underachieve is likely to be a product of some deficit with the core teaching and learning process, not some special feature of it that just applies to them. It's just that - like babies and the elderly with e-coli - they might be more vulnerable and the symptoms will be more evident.

This might be about the overall pitch of your lessons, how well you specify the knowledge requirements of your curriculum, a behaviour management issue, the extent of your probing questioning, the amount of practice students get, how responsive you are in acting on information from your formative assessments, the quality of feedback students receive, the clarity of your explanations, your expectations in relation to recall and your habits around checking for understanding. If you address these areas, everyone benefits and, given the time constraints, focusing on a couple of these things seems like a good bet.

The message is simple: Try to chase gaps directly and you have no real idea what will happen...it's a false prize. Try to teach everyone better and then your sub-groups will do better - because they are part of everyone!

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To address underachieving groups, teach everyone better.

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This blog is inspired by another by Ruth Walker - E-coli and quality first teaching. I'm basically trying to say the same thing. In her brilliantly punchy post she uses an excellent analogy: when food hygiene is poor, the more vulnerable sectors of a population are most likely to suffer - the elderly and babies...

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

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

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

Here are some of the reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewing material:

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

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

Questioning

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

Sequencing Concepts and modelling

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

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

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

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

Stages of Practice

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

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

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

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

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

and finally....

My final messages about engaging with this paper are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"In fact, if we can increase their sense of love of learning, the thrill, we can increase their sense of self," Hattie said. In other words, skill, will and thrill, the three inputs students all have, sometimes work in harmony, but even when that doesn't happen each aspect of a student is worth developing individually, too.

THE LEARNING MODEL

Hattie and Donoghue have tried to take everything they have learned through meta analyses to understand why some strategies that educators swear by, like project-based learning, have low effect sizes in the literature. In their paper and discussions of this proposed model it can seem like a linear progression of learning, but Hattie takes pains to point out that this model is only a conjecture and that the processes he's describing could be happening in cycles within one learning experience. The Science of Learning paper aims to propose the model, but also points out many ways that some of its claims could be further studied.

For Hattie, most learning rests on student understanding of the success criteria for a learning task. Hattie calls this a "prelearning phase" because if students don't understand what it will take to be successful, they often act blindly and without motivation. He says that students who are taught the success criteria are more strategic in their choice of learning strategies, and thus more likely to encounter the thrill of success that will lead to reinvestment in learning.

"Too often students may know the learning intention, but do not [know] how the teacher is going to judge their performance, or how the teacher knows when or whether students have been successful," Hattie and Donoghue write in their article. When students understand how they will be evaluated they can also self-evaluate more effectively, a metacognitive skill that can help students become more independent learners.

How students gain initial content knowledge that they can then manipulate has long been a discussion among educators. Some argue students need to learn basic information before they can begin to use it. Others say students will learn information when it is critical to a problem or project they are trying to understand.

The Hattie/Donoghue learning model dives into that discussion, describing learning strategies that work best at the surface level, and those that help consolidate surface learning, as well as those that develop deep learning and work to consolidate deep learning. Lastly, Hattie and Donoghue deal with the idea of transfer, which broadly means being able to identify similarities and differences between problems and effectively apply previous learning to new situations.

The authors describe surface learning as "studying without much reflecting on either purpose or strategy, learning many ideas without necessarily relating them and memorizing facts and procedures routinely." They say deep learning is characterized by "seeking meaning, relating and extending ideas, looking for patterns and underlying principles, checking evidence and relating it to conclusions, examining arguments cautiously and critically, and becoming actively interested in course content." They don't privilege one kind of learning over the other, but rather say surface and deep learning work together.

When students are acquiring their first knowledge about a topic, there are some learning strategies that seem to work regardless of the content area. Organizing, outlining and summarizing information can help students master surface level content. But Hattie says to consolidate that initial learning, "effort and deliberate practice is critical." At this stage overlearning strategies like practice tests, giving and receiving feedback, and spacing practice out over time are especially helpful. To make consolidation worthwhile the authors stress that practice cannot just be "drill and practice," but instead must change based on feedback. The point of consolidation is to move the surface knowledge to long-term memory, where it is readily available for future use.

"If you're doing this phase just to pass the test, the surface phase, then it's not very effective," Hattie said. "The whole point of overlearning is to go to the deep learning."

When it comes to acquiring deeper learning, "a major purpose is for the student to deliberately activate prior knowledge and then make relations and extensions beyond what they have learned at the surface phase." Elaboration, strategy monitoring and metacognitive strategies all have strong effect sizes at this stage and enhance learning. Consolidation of deep learning is when working with others becomes the most powerful, according to this model. Listening to others in discussion and finding ways to connect and extend knowledge are practices that help students realize what they don't know. Self-questioning and verbalizing, as well as seeking help, are also effective strategies to consolidate deeper learning.

But ultimately most teachers and parents want students to learn information and skills so that they can use them in school and life beyond the specific instance when they were taught. The process of transferring knowledge has not been as well studied as other areas, but Hattie said that learning to detect similarities and differences is a key part of making it happen.

"After a task, the skill seems to be stopping the student rushing into solving a new problem [by] first asking them to elaborate on the similarities and differences of the two problems (the old and new)," Hattie wrote in an email. "Being more aware of the task constraints/ differences is the key to being successful in transfer." Much of Hattie's thinking on transfer is influenced by research done by Ference Marton, whose work is largely qualitative.

Interestingly, the only strategy that seemed to work in all four quadrants (acquiring surface, consolidating surface, acquiring deep, consolidating deep) was the jigsaw activity, which had a large effect size. In a jigsaw activity students are reading new information, discussing it with others who have read the same thing to extend their understanding, and then moving to new groups where they teach peers about what they read and learn new information from group members.
LEARNING IN CONTEXT
Hattie also emphasizes that all of the learning strategies, other than a few surface strategies like outlining, should be taught in the context of content, especially because some may look different depending on the subject area. He's also aware that the key to this model of learning is to know when to apply each strategy and how to help students develop that understanding as well. While in general Hattie believes that students need to know some information before they can do anything with it, indicating a progression from surface knowledge to deeper understanding and finally to transfer, he admits that "these are fuzzy distinctions" and there is often "much overlap in various phases."

For example, when a student is doing a project on a topic of interest, and thus extending knowledge deeper, he may encounter an aspect that he knew nothing about, at which time he may need to gain a surface understanding of that smaller topic in order to continue the project. In other words, the phases Hattie has laid out often overlap and cycle back on one another and should not be taken as a linear process.

Far from being a recipe for the "most effective" teaching strategies, this model of learning relies on teachers' professionalism. When teachers can identify where in the learning cycle a student is and suggest some strategies that might work well at that point, she can have a bigger impact. Hattie also advocates talking to students about the stages of learning so kids can begin to use the language and recognize the strategies that work for where they are. Too often students continue to use ineffective strategies because they don't know others or aren't aware that the ones they are using aren't the most effective.

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How Do You Know When A Teaching Strategy Is Most Effective? John Hattie Has An Idea | KQED

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"In fact, if we can increase their sense of love of learning, the thrill, we can increase their sense of self," Hattie said. In other words, skill, will and thrill, the three inputs students all have, sometimes work in harmony, but even when that doesn't happen each aspect of a student is worth developing individually, too.

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments. The transmission model of education is still the name of the game, although in some circles there are signs of its erosion.

I would like to take you on a journey in this post, starting from the 1950s banking model (Freire, 1968) of instructional design, before comparing it to my own schooling experiences as a digital native at the turn of the century. Then, finally, I would like to share my vision for C21 learning, and propose some ways that we can move forward so that we are meeting the needs of today.

When my parents went to school....

In each of these infographics, students are shown as (S) and teachers as (T). The important focus in each of these images is the direction of the arrow. By looking at where the arrow originates and where it is pointed, we can ask ourselves, Who is doing the thinking? Who is actively using language? Who is leading? What is the relationship between the student and the teacher? And since learning is the ultimate goal, Is learning happening? and Is this how students best learn?

In an industrial-age classroom, with a teacher-centered/teacher directed, one-size-fits-all approach, the arrow always points from the teacher to the student. The directionality of the traditional teaching arrow doesn't differentiate to allow for students to learn from any source but the teacher and the resources prescribed by the teacher. The roles are clearly defined: It is the teacher's job to create memorable lessons, and the student's job to remember them whether or not they are memorable.

The only positive spin I can put on the 20th century compliance model is that learning can potentially happen despite the teacher's illusion of control. My mom, for example, was a Deaf student learning in a 1960's hearing world. She recalls how she would resort to sneaking notes to ask for help from her peers before being caught and punished by her teacher. According to her, and countless other students with similar experiences, it was the help of peers or an adult tutor that saved them from what could potentially have been a lost education. Of course, reconceptualizing the entire learning model to one that allows for personalization and multi-directional dialogue would have done the trick as well.

Now, if you think that things got better for us millennials circa Y2K, I am sad to report that by the time school started for me in 1992, the directionality of the arrow had barely changed at all.

When I went to school....

Let me paint a picture of what it was like when Stephanie and I attended school. In almost all of my classes growing up, teachers put us in groups of 4-6 desks like those depicted above. There were 6-8 iMacs collecting dust around the perimeter of the classroom, and class sets of simple word processing laptops on wheels. We had book bags and class libraries, and we took brain breaks and played learning games, too. There was an increased understanding on the value of pastoral care and differentiation, although they didn't call it that. Despite an overall appearance of progress, the teacher still held the cards. The direction of the arrow didn't change; It still went from teacher to student to nothing.

I don't want to devalue the work that was being done by a handful of forward-thinking teachers in my life. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't have entered the profession. But for the majority of my experience, the focus was on making traditional teaching work for the 21st century, not on shifting the paradigm. Yes, my generation's instructional methods included "turn and talk", for example, where we were asked to turn to a partner and mindlessly babble fake discussion, with one eye on the teacher to make sure she wasn't coming around. Then, when "talk" time was up, we would just share what we were already going to say before the exercise began. This is how we did "discussions"; We were allowed to talk to a partner for 15 seconds, and then those selected by the teacher were allowed to share before the teacher took back the reigns once more.

Again, the arrows of my education were not much different than the linear, teacher-controlled, unidirectional arrow that formed the education of my parents' generation, and the generations of organized schooling that existed for 100 years before. In order to truly reject the pedagogy of the 20th century, which may have been adequate for the time, we literally have to make a 180 ° turn and run the other way.

My dream for school....

It's time to change the direction of the arrow by for once and for all turning it around and allowing it to originate from the student.Imagine a classroom where students are the ones driving the learning and are empowered to pursue things that matter to them. In the infographic above we see multiple modalities being employed by these students as students are accessing human and digital resources to drive their own learning. In a 21st century learning model, learning extends beyond the classroom walls, and students are exchanging, discussing, questioning, reflecting and making connections anywhere, anytime. Most importantly, students are inspired and empowered to act, rather than sit back and have the knowledge brought to them.

Ideal classrooms always change, are a mess & have no teacher desk. They encourage interactions & personalization. #africaed #kicslearns pic.twitter.com/mnAPoa6hJw

- Bradley Arnold (@leybradly) September 14, 2017

This learning is so nonlinear, publicly shared, and student-driven that there is no silver bullet for how to achieve this in your classroom overnight. I'm still learning and reflecting on how best we might do this, and I don't pretend to have arrived the proverbial mountaintop of understanding. Regardless, here are some things I've tried in my class to change the direction of the arrow, with a related blog post explaining below:

With the world of knowledge now available at our students' fingertips, and in a time when we're certain that the workforce of the future is going to look completely different from what it does now, it's time to reject the status quo of how we design learning opportunities for our students. Seeing as we are already well into the 21st Century, my hope is that once and for all we put an end to the 20th century mindset of the teacher as the keeper of knowledge and our students as the passive consumers of information.

- Zach Groshell @mrzachg
You're welcome to join our facebook group, Over-posting Educators.

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It's Time to Throw Out the Playbook

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments.

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Triple Marking

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Assessing and measuring what goes on in the classroom is an attempt to make learning visible. Most of the time, the way we do this is to get pupils to produce some kind of work. We can't see what is in their head, so we get them to try and represent their understanding either by writing something, drawing something, solving a problem, or ticking a box.

What matters is not what they write or draw, but whether we can use what they've produced to work out whether they have understood something or not.

If assessment questions are ambiguous or badly-designed, pupils who do have the right mental understanding can still get the question wrong.

Assessment problems

My favourite example of such a question is this one.
Put these words in alphabetical order: take, value, use.
The "right" answer is: take, use, value. That's the order you'd find these words in a dictionary.

But what about the pupil who writes: aekt, aeluv, esu?

This pupil has put these words in alphabetical order, just not in the way the examiner was expecting.

This problem doesn't just affect pupils. Most of the teacher-accountability systems we see are attempts to make teaching visible: to identify if teachers are causing learning to happen.

Triple problems

One way of doing this is to look at the assessment results of pupils. But other methods involve lesson observations and book scrutinies - and with these, too, badly-designed assessments can give us misleading information.

The development of "triple marking" is a good example of this problem. Schools started with the evidence-based principle that feedback helps pupils improve.

They then moved to the next stage: what can teachers do to give feedback to pupils - and how can managers and inspectors check they have done so?

Surely, if a teacher has written a comment, a pupil has responded and the teacher has responded to that comment, it's proof of a feedback loop?

And so triple marking was born, with many negative consequences. It turned what should have been an immediate five-second classroom conversation into a process that took hours. It forced feedback into the straitjacket of a written dialogue, making it harder to use examples, images and quick oral questions.

Repeated issues

Triple marking did not, therefore, give us an accurate idea of who was and wasn't giving quality feedback. Even worse than that, the focus on triple marking probably made teachers less likely to give quality feedback, because they were spending all their time writing comments in books, rather than thinking about ways they could adapt their next lesson based on what they knew about their pupils.

Triple marking crowded out the process it was supposed to measure. Not only did it give us inaccurate information about who was doing the right thing, but it also made it harder for teachers to do the right thing in the first place.

What's the solution to this problem?

Unfortunately, there aren't any quick fixes. Perhaps one good general piece of advice is to think through the consequences of any new assessment of teachers or pupils. Any assessment will encourage and discourage different types of behaviour, and we should be clear about what those are before we introduce it.

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
Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and Instagram, and like Tes on Facebook

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Triple marking, book scrutiny, lesson observations - the many misguided attempts to make learning visible

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Assessing and measuring what goes on in the classroom is an attempt to make learning visible. Most of the time, the way we do this is to get pupils to produce some kind of work.

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I once observed a teacher whose catchphrase was "That's great!" He used it all the time - when a child was kind, finished a task or answered a question. He said it whenever anyone sneezed. For him, it was a kind of stimulus-response mechanism. Whatever happened in the daily run of classroom life, unless it was heinous, would trigger a kind of Pavlovian bell somewhere deep inside his brain and he would say: "That's great!" The trouble was that it wasn't.

We know that mumbled errors, substandard work and sneezing are not great, but what is? How should we define greatness? And in an age where it's widely perceived as fame, fortune or five minutes of notoriety in the Big Brother house, should we even mention it? If so, we need a definition that is genuine, specific and has integrity.

The Oxford Dictionary defines "great" as "of ability, quality or eminence considerably above average". Considerably above average. That presupposes a certain excellence, a standing out from the crowd, which is surely possible for everyone in some area of their lives, whether it be cooking, spelling or creating unique models from discarded elastic bands.

But we rarely "stumble" across our greatness. Our talents need to be identified and nurtured. This is where a good teacher is key.

Achieving greatness

When teachers see children excelling, we exclaim, hold up work and display it for all to see. This is second nature to most and acts as valuable reinforcement for a child's self-esteem as well as a role model of excellence for all.

But to focus exclusively on achievement as greatness is to miss another, perhaps more significant, element of the dictionary definition: quality that is considerably above average.

Greatness is not solely about what you can do but about who you are. It describes those who have allowed their failures as well as their successes to define them, shaping qualities of character - resilience, self-belief, risk-taking - that are companions on the road to potential.

The word "overcomer" is an old-fashioned one but perhaps sums up this side of success more realistically: greatness is not the odd victory, but victory against the odds.

Personal value

The challenge, in today's increasingly target-driven and competitive society, is to parallel our messages about achievement greatness ("You made it to Step 10! That's great!") with messages about character greatness ("You didn't get Number 7 right, but I'm rewarding you for perseverance").

Children need to know their failures matter as much as their successes. They also need to know that they are unique and interesting as individuals. If your teacher notices and values you just because of the person you are and the qualities you have, you begin to believe you matter. This frees you to pursue greatness, both of character and achievement, because your value does not depend on outcomes but on your inner worth. The theory behind this is "mattering" - being valued personally, not functionally.

As a young teacher, Angela Maiers had a revelation - significance matters more than success. She believes that this understanding, if properly communicated, can change lives and learning. Other studies, such as that by Gordon Flett et al (2016), support her theory: mattering to others results in high self-esteem and is a key element in building resilience and resistance to stress. The researchers write that this is particularly marked when a sense of mattering becomes a strong and stable element of someone's personal identity - I am who I am because of the love of family, respect of co-workers and care of friends.

Others such as Julian Stern (2007) put this in context by comparing the concept of society to that of community. He states that societies are groups who have joined together for external purposes and treat each other primarily as means to an end. By contrast, communities are together for personal reasons and relate to each other as "whole people".

Resilience matters

This poses one of the biggest challenges for us in school in the 21st century. It would seem our growing need to demonstrate success in terms of measurable outcomes (society) poses a threat to the equally important task of nurturing resilient, compassionate individuals for the future (community).

Yet there is evidence to show that strengthening resilience and self-belief may lead to better long-term outcomes, boosting children's capacity to adapt successfully to changing situations and environments (see review by the children's charity NCH). In other words, you cannot have one without the other.

Unless we begin consciously to promote mattering as part of our mission to inspire greatness, we may wake up one day and find we have failed - producing a generation of young adults whose ability to excel is hampered by poor emotional literacy. And that's not great.

I am lucky enough to work in a school where inspiring greatness is high on the agenda. Every week, in assembly, two children from each of four classes stand up to be publicly honoured in front of about 500 people. They are praised explicitly for demonstrating certain qualities - resilience, perseverance, kindness. Last week's theme was "joie de vivre". Imagine being told enthusiastically by your head or deputy that they have noticed you around the school because you're always smiling, you have a great sense of humour, you're fun.

I have seen children transformed by this - looking up, walking taller, because they know they are appreciated for who they are, not what they can do. The message at our school? People are valued here as human beings.

Now, that is great.
Deborah Jenkins is a class teacher at Heathfield Junior School, Whitton

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Greatness lies within every student. Here's how to help them recognise that (Sponsored article)

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I once observed a teacher whose catchphrase was "That's great!" He used it all the time ­- when a child was kind, finished a task or answered a question. He said it whenever anyone sneezed. For him, it was a kind of stimulus-response mechanism.

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The idea that teachers need to plan their lessons is so ingrained that it seems almost beyond challenge. One of my earliest memories from training is being given a lesson plan pro-forma to fill in. The importance of doing this for every lesson was carefully explained, with threats of poor behaviour, lack of learning and being labelled a "bad teacher" if I didn't.

Whether we create a plan, make a note of what we are doing in a planner or create a PowerPoint for each class the effect is the same: we continue to plan our lessons as we have always done.
Lesson plans fill the time available - whether you need to or not
Sadly, this whole process is built on a lie. Consider the following questions. How long does it take to teach a class the different wave processes? How about the causes of migration across the Sahel? The causes of the Indian wet monsoon? All take one hour. Unless your school has 50-minute-long lessons, in which case it magically takes less time.

If we plan lessons in this way it encourages us either to fill the time with one idea when it doesn't need it, or to rush through it so we can start fresh with another topic when we see our students next.

Planning lessons in hour-long blocks also encourages a misguided view of how learning takes place. Learning doesn't happen in neat little segments of time; it happens because we are introduced to a new concept, then start to forget it, then are reminded of it again. We struggle to recall, we apply the information, and we make a link between one idea and another. However, by creating individual lesson plans we start thinking of learning as something that has been "done" in that time.
Focusing on individual lesson plans is inefficient
It also increases workload. The Department for Education-commissioned independent report on reducing workload burdens around planning is clear: "Planning a sequence of lessons is more important than writing individual lesson plans."

Planning is essential for good teaching, but when we try to fit learning into a block of time we start putting too much emphasis on the structure of a lesson. We spend time worrying about a starter, then about finding enough activity to fill 50 minutes so that there is time for a plenary in which they will simply mimic what they have just heard. This is a time-consuming process that is not only ineffective but also inefficient.
Planning for learning goes at a natural pace
Instead of planning lessons we need to plan learning. Ignore the constraints of the lesson block and just focus on what it is you want your pupils to learn and what will make a difference to them learning it. Don't worry if it's going to take 10 minutes, 60 minutes or 300 minutes.

This soon reduces workload as you are not trying to force something into an artificial structure that it just doesn't fit. It is much faster to plan a sequence of learning that takes place over a series of lessons than it is to break a scheme of work into hour-long pieces and plan each one in isolation from the rest. You are in effect teaching your scheme of work as a whole piece or in chunks of your own choosing, unshackled from the clock.
Tips for planning for learning

Start by writing down everything you want your pupils to know by the end of the sequence. Identify the threshold concepts - what do they need to learn first to make sense of the rest? For example, a sequence on coastal processes would start with the action of waves, then weathering, then mass movement, then landforms, then management strategies.

Plan how you would teach each of these areas but don't worry about fitting it into a time block. At the end of a lesson just make a note of where you got up to. At the start of the next lesson begin with a quick quiz of the previous one; this will help with recall.

If you finish one key idea before the lesson has ended just move seamlessly on to the next.

Plan in formative assessment where it works in the sequence of learning, not just because it is the last five minutes of the lesson.

Remember that if it isn't learned, it isn't done. Focus on the learning and not on covering content. Plan for plenty of opportunities to go back and link what pupils are doing to what they have done before. Planning learning as a sequence makes this much easier to do.

The hour-long lesson plan has been a millstone around our necks for too long. It is increasing our workload and making our jobs harder. It is time to change our mindsets and start planning for learning, not lesson planning.
Mark Enser Read more about the government's policies on reducing teacher workload here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-teachers-workload/reducing-teachers-workload is head of geography at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex and blogs at Teachreal.wordpress.com

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What is the difference between planning for learning and lesson-planning? (Sponsored Article)

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The idea that teachers need to plan their lessons is so ingrained that it seems almost beyond challenge. One of my earliest memories from training is being given a lesson plan pro-forma to fill in. The importance of doing this for every lesson was carefully explained, with threats of poor behaviour, lack of learning and being labelled a "bad teacher" if I didn't.

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Nothing makes teachers more animated than discussing marking - some will recount tales of triple marking; debates on coloured pens; how much time it takes; what the school expects. Ofsted, and Sean Harford in particular, have done a great deal to share what is actually expected and I think their 'myth-busters' are starting to really seep into every day practice.

My own view and practice have shifted over time. In 2014 I became the headteacher of an RI school expecting an imminent Section 5. We focused exclusively on marking, books and pupil progress - the idea that everyday performance outweighed lesson observations was a key idea and improved the confidence of teachers in schools. Our books made that inspection flow very smoothly, and indeed the quality of marking, pupil response and presentation were hailed as a great success - we were even presenting our books to local schools, LA training courses etc.

Going through that process ultimately led us to a greater realisation. Our results were consistently strong, but actually never really have we improved beyond a strong staple figure. What could our school do differently that would make our pupils make 'outstanding' progress? Like Team Sky and their famous marginal gains approach, we analysed interventions, implemented cutting edge technology and listened and researched the best of the best.

The answer became even more obvious - cut down on marking and spend more time planning. More time planning the next lesson, intervention, working with the teaching assistant. More time spent on instant feedback that will really make a difference. (Before anyone leaps on the more planning statement, I should clarify that we do not expect planning sheets, annotated and handed in - teachers plan in the most effective way for them!) We have been inspired by some really quality CPD - Isabella Wallace and Claire Gadsby to name two - to 'up' our formative assessment game.

This academic year we have overhauled our marking and feedback policy - 'live' marking and whole class feedback sheets have cut time spent marking down by 2/3 and freed up time to spend on thinking about exactly how the child will need to learn their next steps - not writing laborious comments on books that nobody really read properly enough to actually make a difference to pupil progress. We have tweaked and slim lined the process even more since the beginning of this term.

Presentation and quality of books is still expected and is important. But the days of the teacher writing sentences in each child's book I hope is gone forever. Let marking and feedback unite as one and no longer be seen as separate entities with marking being the loathsome sibling. Marking and Feedback Policy

Published

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Marking and Feedback - the shifting tide

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Nothing makes teachers more animated than discussing marking - some will recount tales of triple marking; debates on coloured pens; how much time it takes; what the school expects. Ofsted, and Sean Harford in particular, have done a great deal to share what is actually expected and I think their 'myth-busters' are starting to really...

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Stop telling children to sit down says Jamie Oliver

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Mark Benden wants you to set your students free from their desks. He wants you to encourage them to stand, lean, rock, fidget - anything, other than be glued to a classroom chair for up to eight hours a day.

Because, according to Benden, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Texas A&M University and director of the university's Ergonomics Centre, the sedentary nature of the traditional classroom has repercussions not only for students' physical health and wellbeing - increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease - but also there's an impact on their ability to focus and learn, too.

Benden has spent the past 20 years researching the effects of our increasingly inactive lifestyles. Initially, he focused on adult office workers and how standing desks - elevated desks, which allow users to stand or sit at a stool, thereby offering the potential to expend more energy - could encourage more activity in their day. But then he turned his attention to how his research might assist schoolchildren.

"Some colleagues showed me data around childhood obesity and I quickly became interested," says Benden.

You can understand why. The World Health Organisation says that the number of obese or overweight children aged 0-5 worldwide increased from 32 million in 1990 to 41 million in 2016 and, if current trends continue, that figure will rise to 70 million by 2025. Research shows that obese children are more likely to become obese adults and, at its most basic level, childhood obesity is down to more calories being consumed than energy expended. It is a problem that celebrity chef Jamie Oliver highlighted recently; he called for standing desks in classrooms.

Benden's solutions centre around what he calls an "activity permissive learning environment", where children aren't urged to sit down and sit still. In the 2009-2010 academic year, Benden and colleagues conducted a small pilot study to see whether using standing desks in first-grade classrooms (children aged around 5-7) increased calorie expenditure. They found that not only were 17-30 per cent more calories burned, but also there was anecdotal evidence from teachers that this new dynamic environment improved classroom behaviour.

"Children become more restless and inattentive with prolonged sitting and it seemed that active workstations were reducing disruption and increasing students' attention by breaking up the monotony of seated work," says Benden.

Then in a two-year study across three schools, assessing 193 students with a mean age of 8.8, exposure to standing desk classrooms led to decreases in average BMI percentiles, compared with increases for students in traditional classrooms.

In 2016, Benden and colleagues published another preliminary study in which sitting time, standing time and step count were assessed in the autumn, at the start of the school year, when students were in traditional seated desks, and again in the spring, when standing desks had been used for three months. After the installation of standing desks, students sat, on average, for one hour less per school day, they stood for around 50 minutes more in a school day and took over 2,200 more steps per day.

Given the correlation between childhood and adolescent obesity and physical activity, Benden concluded that "cutting an hour of sedentary behaviour during the school day while simultaneously increasing their steps taken - without taking away from instruction time, requiring additional school personnel or additional training - is an easy way to help adolescents reduce, or even reverse, the effects of sedentary behaviour".

You might think that schools would seize upon this data and embrace Benden's findings. Not so. Instead, Benden and his team encountered indifference.

"The conversation was a difficult one," he admits. "Because they really aren't charged with the responsibility of how much those children are going to weigh aged 70, are they? We'd say, 'Hey, we think we've found a way for kids to burn more calories in class. They can get up, ambulate more. Can we try it in your school?' And the schools just yawned. Because kids' activity levels aren't what schools are measured on."

Behaviour benefits

Benden was simply not speaking the language of school accountability. But in his results there was data that would enable him to do just that - the behaviour and focus improvements shown in his early studies. So he switched his focus from health benefits to attainment and behaviour benefits.

"Teachers who are able to have better classroom management can spend most of their time teaching, instead of disciplining," he says. "So when teachers were reporting back to us about how engaged the children were, how they felt they were better managing the classroom with standing desks, that's when we started to look at the potential cognitive benefits."

In 2015, Benden and colleagues published a paper called Standing Up for Learning: a pilot investigation on the neurocognitive benefits of stand-biased school desks. It makes for interesting reading.

They looked at executive function - essentially the mental skills that help us to get stuff done and help us to pay attention, focus and organise - and working memory (the system for temporary storage and manipulation of information in the brain) in students using standing desks. Children were given various cognitive tests to complete and their prefrontal cortex brain activity was monitored using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) - this area of the brain plays a vital role in cognition.

Over two semesters, students aged 14-15 showed a 7-14 per cent improvement in cognitive performance.

"Getting those positive results around the brain scans, and the other data from the survey instruments and the teachers reporting back anecdotally of their experiences, we were very encouraged. We definitely felt like 'there's something here'," says Benden.

So why would classroom movement have these potential benefits to children's learning abilities? It's the brain and body connection, says Benden.

"Think about being in a long, post-lunch meeting. You're getting a bit drowsy. You know that if you stand up, move around, orbit the perimeter of the table, you'll become more alert. It's the same with classroom students. Moving around encourages blood flow to the brain," he says.

These findings have given him a small breakthrough. Benden has tested standing desks with students ranging from children age 5 to graduate school students in their 20s and beyond. His desk designs can be found in schools across all 50 states in the US and in "a dozen countries around the world".

He has also tried tools such as wobble boards, foot rests with swings, and exercise balls in classrooms, with varying results. But, he maintains, they're "still better than sitting all day." He has also evaluated treadmill desks, mostly in the lab, and had "decent results."

He says that the younger the child, the more accepting they are of a movement-focused classroom environment.

"Because they're still very active and the idea of sitting down and sitting still is torture to them," he says. "As you get into high school, if kids have never been around a standing desk, you can definitely get some eye rolls and grumbling."

The trouble with all of these options, though, is the cost of replacing classroom furniture with something more expensive "and schools aren't at the point where they can afford that".

"Maybe we'll get to a stage where there's one room where kids can access a treadmill desk for an afternoon lesson, but it's probably not going to be every classroom in every country," Benden says.

And yet, if we know that being relentlessly hunched over a desk isn't a great thing, if there are physical and cognitive reasons to shake things up, can we really keep plonking children into plastic chairs like we have always done?

"Well, have you ever looked at a child's plastic school chair? View it from the side and you'll see that the back and the seat are typically one piece; the angle is tilted backwards," says Benden. "Now, you would assume that an ergonomist had designed that chair with several things in mind. Health and safety, cognition, an optimal learning position - because that's what children are at school for. To learn. But who are school chairs designed for? Janitors. Because they're easy to stack and move. So the whole position of a child's body in their six to eight hours a day at school is determined by the cleaning staff."

He wants teachers to try and force the change, and he says they need to have one thing in mind to do so: children think better on their feet than on their seat.
Christina Quaine is a freelance writer

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Jamie Oliver has a point, according to this US ergonomist: we need to stop telling children to sit down and keep still. Healthy innovations - including 'standing' desks - not only boost pupils' health through exercise but also improve learning and behaviour, Christina Quaine hears

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MindsetWorks | Growth Mindset | Growth Mindset Programs

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When people have a growth mindset they understand they can increase their intelligence through effective effort, deliberate practice, asking questions, and risking mistakes. A growth mindset causes people to persist in the face of setbacks, embrace challenges, and learn from criticism.

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A Free online stopwatch, quick easy to use stopwatch! also an online countdown!

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Transforming learning through formative assessment - Shirley Clarke Media Ltd.

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Watch video clips, book a course or read the latest action research findings from Shirley Clarke, the foremost expert on the practical application of formative assessment. New clips

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Visible Learning | Building the capacity of learners to learn, teachers to teach, leaders to lead and systems to improve

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Visible Learning plus is an in-depth systemwide change model of professional learning and development. It is based on the principles of Visible Learning developed from John Hattie's unprecedented meta-analysis of research studies on student achievement, the largest global research base into what actually works best in schools to improve learning.

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John Hattie Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

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Seesaw | Elementary Learning Experience Platform

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Seesaw | Elementary Learning Experience Platform

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Elementary Learning Experience Platform | Seesaw

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Seesaw is a Learning Experience Platform with 25M+ users, enhancing elementary education, engagement, and school culture while improving academic success.

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Thousands of free teaching resources, exclusive teaching packs, subject specific CPD downloads and advice on improving teaching and learning

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To praise or not to praise, that is the question. After condemnation in reports such as What Makes Great Teaching, confusion reigns around how frequently teachers should use praise in their classrooms and how best to do it.

Everyone values being praised and recognised for their endeavours - it is a huge part of nurturing our self-esteem and confidence. Praise has its place in any lesson; to reject it would be to encourage a clinical and cold environment. When well employed, it can motivate students and help build a positive and optimistic classroom culture. But people can spot disingenuous praise a mile off, and students are no different; they know what constitutes their best efforts and if they are really striving to achieve it.

As an NQT, I was guilty of effusive over-praising. I wanted students to try hard and I wanted them to see that I cared about their efforts, so I resorted to what seemed like an easy win: praise, praise and more praise. Superlatives were tossed around like cheap confetti in response to even the most incoherent of grunted answers. Then one afternoon the reality struck: my obsession with praise was making my students lazy and unresponsive.Giving specific feedback

"Praise usually contains little task-related information and is rarely converted into more engagement, commitment to learning goals, enhanced self-efficacy, or understanding about the task," write John Hattie and Helen Timperley in The Power of Feedback. To counter this, praise in our classrooms needs to move from the generic "good" to giving specific feedback against learning goals. If used judiciously, it can signal to students that they are going in the right direction with the task and clearly define what skills they need to replicate as they continue working.

Moving towards more specific praise has also helped my students become more reflective about their learning; they recognise that if they mirror this specific positive feedback later they will improve the quality of their work.

As a naïve NQT, I was actually demotivating students by praising them too much, making them ambivalent about striving to achieve their best and unclear about what they could achieve. Instead, teachers should use praise to recognise engagement, improvement and perseverance. We should acknowledge the students who have demonstrated graft and resilience in seeking to overcome difficulty, regardless of their intellectual starting point. By praising young people for demonstrating real effort we raise our benchmark for quality.

If we want to inspire our students to believe they can achieve more, we cannot afford to praise them cheaply. "To motivate students - especially older students who are more discerning and better able to appreciate the differences between what is said and what is meant - teachers need to avoid praise that is not truthful ... or has not been earned," writes Daniel T Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia.

Praise for good behaviour can prevent the negativity that often dominates in more challenging groups, and instead celebrates a positive classroom culture. In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath argue that seeking to identify the positives in any organisation can drive improvements: "These flashes of success - these bright spots - can illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible."

Praising these "bright spots" must be based on high expectations; it is not merely about praising students for taking a pen out. Instead, it is vital that teachers set behavioural expectations high, then recognise when students are striving to achieve them. Praising the positives will hopefully lead to other students being keen to mirror these behaviours.

Sensitivity and empathy are vital when considering how to praise students meaningfully. We all know the students who would curl up in embarrassment if they were acknowledged publicly. These are the young people who need quiet and focused moments of sincere praise. Our knowledge of the individuals who use our classrooms will help us to make informed choices about how best to motivate and encourage them.

Effective praise must also be spontaneous, not an after-thought. Using it when young people least expect it, and communicating genuine enthusiasm about the quality of work they have demonstrated can result in a change of energy in lessons.
Jamie Thom is an English teacher. He blo Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network for the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist gs at www.teachergratitude.co.uk and tweets @teachgratitude1. His book Slow Teaching will be out in early 2018.

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Well done? A guide to using praise effectively in the classroom

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To praise or not to praise, that is the question. After condemnation in reports such as What Makes Great Teaching, confusion reigns around how frequently teachers should use praise in their classrooms and how best to do it. Everyone values being praised and recognised for their endeavours - it is a huge part of nurturing our self-esteem and confidence.

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Meet Reece. We join him in Year 5. He has a global learning delay and his expressive and receptive language skills are underdeveloped for his age. Each day, Mandy, a teaching assistant (TA), takes Reece out of the classroom with Sula and Nathan to work on their social language. They practise important skills such as greeting people, talking in turns and not interrupting.

But here's the thing: Sula and Nathan have communication difficulties, too. And while Mandy does a great job of trying to initiate and sustain conversation among the three children, progress is slow.

Fast forward to Year 9. Reece is sat with Jacqui, another TA, at his designated table in bottom-set science. His teacher is explaining that Mars's orbit of the Sun is almost twice as long as Earth's orbit.

It's not dissimilar to the teachers' orbit of the classroom. Because Jacqui is on hand to help, the teacher checks in with Reece about half as often as he does with other pupils.

And these are just snapshots of Reece's time in school. If you were to sit with him every day, you would witness a journey through the education system that is pockmarked with separation, segregation and unintentional outcomes.

Reece's story is a composite one. He is an example of what it is like to be a child with SEND in the school system. Findings from longitudinal research that I led along my UCL Institute of Education colleague, Professor Peter Blatchford, suggest that Reece's experience is a typical one.

We conducted two studies: one in 2011-12, the other in 2015-16. The most recent is the SEN in Secondary Education study, which involved 60 pupils with statements of special needs or education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in Year 9 across England. This project replicated our earlier Making a Statement study, in which we tracked 48 pupils when they were in Year 5. Thirty of the students involved appear in both studies (see box, page 45).

It is, to our knowledge, the largest classroom observation study ever conducted in the UK on pupils with SEND. Our researchers visited 88 schools, shadowing pupils for up to five days. They also collected comparison data on 260 average-attaining pupils. In all, we spent 1,340 hours observing pupils and carried out 490 interviews with staff, parents and pupils.

The findings raise important questions about how schools "do" inclusion. The main one being: do we actually do it at all?

Separation and setting

We found that pupils with EHCPs in primary schools spent the equivalent of more than a day a week away from the mainstream class - effectively separated from the teacher, the curriculum and their peers. When they worked in groups, it was mostly with other low-attainers and those with SEND.

What we found in secondary schools was very close to a form of "streaming". Seventy-five per cent of lessons in English Baccalaureate subjects for pupils with and without SEND were taught in attainment groups. Pupils with EHCPs were taught mainly in what they themselves referred to as "bottom sets", with at least one TA working alongside the teacher.

Compared with average-attainers, pupils with EHCPs spent more time in smaller classes. They were taught in classes of 16 or fewer pupils in 54 per cent of instances (compared to 11 per cent for average-attainers), and in classes of 21 or more in 26 per cent of instances (69 per cent for average-attainers).

School leaders tend to justify "ability" grouping across year groups and within classes as part of a wider teaching strategy. We were struck by how this was described as a main form of differentiation. In some cases, grouping appeared to eliminate the need for providing different tasks for pupils with EHCPs.

This is problematic. Research has consistently found that while "high-ability" pupils benefit from the positive affirmations of being top of the class, there is a corrosive effect for those in "bottom sets" in terms of their confidence, self-concept and how they view their place in school. As one Year 9 we interviewed (see box, below) put it: "I don't like telling my friends I'm in the bottom set, because I think they would find me different."

Becky Francis, director of the IoE, is leading an Education Endowment Foundation-funded trial into ability grouping. She says: "Research shows that pupils in these low-attainment groups make less progress than their peers in higher-attainment groups.

"The present project, Best Practice in Grouping Students, is seeking to address the practices associated with low-attainment groups that research has identified as contributing to these poorer outcomes. The approach includes ensuring that these groups have equal access to experienced, subject-expert teachers, high expectations and a rich curriculum."

The potential self-fulfilling prophecies for those placed in low-attainment groups and labelled "low ability" are harder to address, she adds. "Likewise, while all educators believe we have high expectations of our students, there is a need to think about how this actually translates into practice."

In short, the way we separate out children with SEND into low-attainment groups in secondary, and take children away from the teacher, curriculum and peers in primary, is highly problematic and detrimental to their individuals concerned.

Time with teachers

In Year 5, we found interactions with teachers comprised 35 per cent of average-attainers' overall classroom experience; for pupils with EHCPs, it was 22 per cent.

In secondary settings (where pupils weren't withdrawn from the classroom as much), it's less marked (43 per cent vs 34 per cent).

These results matter, because it shows that the pupils who need the most time with the teacher get the least interaction.

Peer interaction

We found that compared to those without SEND, pupils with EHCPs have strikingly fewer opportunities to interact with their classmates. For average-attainers in primary settings, 32 per cent of all classroom interactions were with peers; for those with EHCPs, it was 13 per cent.

In secondary schools, interaction among average-attaining pupils accounted for 27 per cent of classroom interactions; for those with EHCPs, it was 16 per cent.

To put it more bluntly: pupils with SEND mix and interact mostly with one another. That has numerous downsides.

For example, as our composite scenario with Reece illustrates, pupils who need to practise and develop their communication skills do so together, rather than with peers who can model good speaking.

And pupils who learn together in particular attainment bands tend to form friendships together. Those with SEND can be a vulnerable group, less at ease with the bustle of a crowded playground. The learning support department often doubles up as a place for them to spend break and lunchtimes. While there is nothing intrinsically harmful about this, it does lead to these pupils being isolated in social as well as learning contexts.

The presence of TAs

The explanation for why pupils with EHCPs have fewer interactions with teachers and peers is writ large in our data on interactions with teaching assistants. For typically-developing pupils, TAs make up 1 per cent and 2 per cent of all interactions they have with peers and adults in secondary and primary settings respectively. Yet for pupils with EHCPs, talk with TAs makes up 27 per cent of all interactions in primary school, and 18 per cent in secondary school.

The bulk of these pupil-TA interactions occur on a one-to-one basis. On the face of it, this is common-sense: if you struggle with learning, more individual attention from a TA looks like an appropriate makeweight for less interaction with teachers and classmates. Teachers can then focus on the rest of the class.

Yet research tells us there are three distinct problems with this set-up.

Firstly, it leads to subtle forms of separation, such as "stereo-teaching". This is where a TA will repeat verbatim what the teacher says as she delivers her whole class input. For the teacher, it's like experiencing a satellite delay, as you hear your words echo in a corner of the room. But more importantly, it interrupts the pupil's experience of your teaching, as they have to toggle between talk from two adults: not helpful if one of your primary difficulties is related to attention.

Secondly, it fosters dependency and learned helplessness. At worst, pupils "outsource" their learning to a well-meaning TA, who completes tasks for them.

Thirdly, the more TA support pupils with SEND receive, the less well they perform academically, compared to their less-supported peers ( bit.ly/DISSproj).

This lack of progress isn't due to pupils' underlying SEND or prior attainment, nor because TAs aren't doing a good enough job. What it is, however, is an indication that the model of inclusion we have drifted towards over the last 25 years stands as a proxy for unresolved questions about how pupils with SEND are taught in mainstream settings.

Conclusions

The picture our research paints is best understood in terms of less than effective leadership for SEND. I've seen what great school leaders can do to improve the impact of TAs ( bit.ly/TA4tips) - and, conversely, the confusion and inconsistency that results when important decisions about TAs' role and purpose are left unresolved.

But improving how we include and educate pupils with EHCPs in schools cannot and will not be resolved merely by making better use of classroom TAs.

The quality of SEND coverage in initial teaching training must be addressed. Tensions and flaws in the SEND assessment system - identified by its original architect, Baroness Mary Warnock ( bit.ly/SENDsystem) - must be ironed out. In particular, we need to emphasise that what matters most is the quality of support (what pedagogical inputs are required, who delivers it, and how), not the quantity of support, which is too often couched in the currency of TA hours.

Schools are the best engines for change. We urgently need headteachers to take responsibility and apply the same tenacity to SEND that they devote to other areas of school improvement. In short: it's time to make SEND a priority.

We need to take decisive action to make our schools more inclusive and productive environments for our most vulnerable children and young people.

So, what can leaders do?

First, review the institutional arrangements and classroom practices that get in the way of pupils with SEND being on the receiving end of high-quality teaching. Inclusive practice isn't just where pupils are "in" the class; they need to be "of" the class - actively engaged in learning.

Second, improve the social mix. Schools could take the bold step of introducing mixed attainment grouping for at least some subjects, if this is not something that they do already.

Compared with "ability" grouping, mixed attainment teaching has greater potential to improve outcomes for all pupils. At the least, teachers should ensure pupils with SEND aren't routinely put together for paired or group work, and create opportunities for them to work with, learn from and interact with others.

Third, school leaders should rigorously define the role and contribution of TAs as an effective part of - not the sole solution to - SEND provision. A good place to start is the free guidance that we have developed with the Education Endowment Foundation ( bit.ly/EEFTA).

Finally, schools should institutionalise leadership for SEND in their career progression systems: no-one should move up the leadership ladder without evidencing how great they are at improving outcomes for pupils with SEND.

Will any of this happen? I can only hope so. With the issue of selection continuing to rear its head - most recently in the Conservative manifesto - children and young people with SEND and their families need strong and committed leadership now more than ever.

We need to stand up for these young people and stop this inclusion illusion we are currently all buying into, which continues to undermine the life chances of this already vulnerable group.
Rob Webster is a researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education. He tweets @maximisingTAs. The SEN in Secondary Education (SENSE) study was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Download the SENSE study Final Report from bit.ly/SENSEstudy

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Meet Reece. We join him in Year 5. He has a global learning delay and his expressive and receptive language skills are underdeveloped for his age. Each day, Mandy, a teaching assistant (TA), takes Reece out of the classroom with Sula and Nathan to work on their social language.

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https://literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/what-teachers-do-to-make-every-child-feel-like-a-writer/https://literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/what-teachers-do-to-make-every-child-feel-like-a-writer/

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Schools produce inequality. Work carried out by educational sociologists such as Kalwant Bhopal, David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell shows that the everyday practices of teaching and learning exclude already marginalised groups of students while guaranteeing success for others.

My own research found that in a climate where teachers are under extreme pressure to produce results, practices such as ability setting, continual student assessments, shaming behaviour management approaches and short-hand descriptors of students - such as "low ability" or "SEN" - are commonplace. Students who are already part of minority groups in society - for instance, due to race, class, gender or a disability - are disproportionately represented in so-called low ability groups; often score below average in tests (because of the system rather than the students); and are frequently misrepresented or underrepresented in curriculum material presented in class.

So how can we address educational inequalities from inside the classroom? I spent a year working as a class teacher to find out - observing and recording what happened when I attempted to intervene in the production of inequalities in my primary school classroom. Here are some different approaches I explored, which teachers could try in their own schools.

Rethink ability grouping

Is ability grouping necessary? Try different ways of organising groups of students in the classroom. Rather than creating separate activities based on a preconceived idea of ability, students could work through tasks with differing levels of challenge. This allows them to think about what they can achieve and does not label anyone incapable.

Try providing more open-ended activities that require the students to problem-solve and draw on a range of skills. For example, see if they can make a tower strong enough to hold a marble with a given set of materials, or invite students to plan a class party that needs invitations, decorations and food.

Allow them to work together - one student may be good at writing while another may be more creative. Students can support each other and surprise themselves and you. Sometimes they will all be given the same task and will produce something different from it (writing stories of different lengths and complexities, for example). The important thing is not to predetermine what students can achieve before they have started.

Check your language

Interrogate the language you use to describe your pupils and the language used by students themselves in the classroom. Nobody is inherently low ability, discourses of "boys will be boys" or "hardworking, helpful girls" limit everyone in the class, as do ideas about "lads" and "bitchy girls" - such double standards need challenging.

Some students still use the term "gay" to describe something negative, which can cause those exploring their own sexuality or who come from queer families to feel unsafe. Using labels such as "naughty" or "silly" to describe pupils, even if not used in front of the students themselves, can quickly stick and alter how students are perceived.

Make the curriculum relevant

Who decides the curriculum? Is it representative of the students in the class, reflecting their experiences, histories and questions? It isn't possible to make the curriculum relevant to all of the students all the time, but consider asking them what they would like to learn about. When I did this with the class of six- and seven-year-olds, we planned out a whole term of activities around the topic of babies, through film, writing and other activities - linking together subjects across the curriculum, and reflecting some of the students' own experiences.

Where it's not possible to alter curriculum material, critical conversations could be started around the points of view represented in lessons from history, science or literature. I've changed my questioning to encourage students to think about whose point of view we are hearing. For example, drawing children's attention to the gender of scientists and suggesting they find out about female scientists; or when we learn about kings and queens, who are we not learning about? - if school resources show only white people in Tudor times, for instance, encourage students to ask questions about why people of colour are not represented.

Avoid quick-fix punishments

Many behaviour management systems in schools are incredibly shaming for students. Having your name written under a sad face, being made to stand up during assembly, or being asked to sit on the floor in another classroom, are publicly humiliating practices that would seem shocking if carried out in an adult place of work.

Such practices are a quick fix in a busy school day but, in the long run, rarely result in behavioural changes from a student. Consider where space could be opened up for conversation rather than punishment. Can the language around bad behaviour be challenged to make room for more compassionate understanding of students who don't so easily conform?

Nurture relationships

Ultimately, all of these methods aim to help prioritise teacher-student relationships and the relationships between students in the classroom. It's these relationships that allow the student to be seen as a person, as opposed to, for instance, a middle-ability child.

When we connect with the students in front of us by respecting them as people, listening to their point of view, acknowledging their difficulties and acting from a place of compassion, we end up being able to critique the assessments the students take, rather than the students themselves. It is from here that we build a classroom, a school and an education system that is more inclusive of everyone.
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network for lesson resources and the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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5 ways teachers can challenge inequality in the classroom

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Research shows that everyday teaching practices exclude already marginalised groups of students, but teachers can take steps to redress the balance

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When we're assessing pupils, often, it can be hard to work out if they have really mastered something, or if their understanding is more superficial. Take vocabulary: what does it mean to truly know the meaning of a new word? One of my favourite education books, Bringing Words to Life, by Joan Beck, Linda Kucan, and M G McKeown, has some interesting insights about this question.

One example in this book involves pupils learning the word 'reluctant'. The word is first introduced in the context of a story about a little girl who is reluctant to leave her teddy bear behind in a laundromat. When the teacher asks the class to use the word 'reluctant' in a sentence, the first response she gets is: "I would be reluctant to leave my teddy bear in a laundromat." The teacher asks for another example, and another pupil says, "I would be reluctant to leave my teddy bear in the supermarket." The teacher asks again for another response that doesn't involve teddy bears, and the third child says, "I would be reluctant to leave my drums at my friend's house." The teacher then asks for a use of the word reluctant which doesn't involve leaving something somewhere! The next response she gets is: "I would be reluctant to change a baby's diaper." The authors use this anecdote as an example of the way that children's understanding of a new word is often limited to the context they encountered it in.

Understanding is not binary

We'd all probably accept that the fourth response shows a better understanding of the meaning of the word 'reluctant', as the pupil has managed to transfer the meaning to a very different context. We might want to go even further than that, and say that a pupil doesn't truly understand the word 'reluctant' unless they can use it unprompted in their own writing or speech at an appropriate moment. We can see from this that even for something as apparently simple as the meaning of one word, understanding is not a binary concept. It is probably more accurate to think of understanding as a spectrum. At one end are pupils who have never heard or read the word reluctant, and who have very few experiences to draw on to help them understand the word. At the other end are pupils who have a full and rich understanding of the word, and who can use it spontaneously in appropriate contexts. Most pupils will lie somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. And if this is true of individual words, it's even more true of complex skills like reading or arithmetic.

A combined approach

This is one reason why we need different assessment tasks, because one task alone can't fully capture these different shades of understanding. When assessing word knowledge, a blend of closed and open tasks can achieve a lot more than any one type of task. Frequent short-answer questions can give a teacher a precise idea of a pupil's understanding of a word. These questions can be answered in writing or orally, as in the example above where the teacher probes for different examples of the word in use. Then, to check that pupils really 'own' a word for the long-term, teachers can follow up with less frequent extended writing tasks, where the aim is not to assess the understanding of any one specific word, but to see if pupils are using their improving word knowledge appropriately. Done well, this kind of combined approach doesn't just measure a child's understanding: it helps to develop it as well.

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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'If we rely on one type of assessment, we will never get a full picture of children's understanding'

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When we're assessing pupils, often, it can be hard to work out if they have really mastered something, or if their understanding is more superficial. Take vocabulary: what does it mean to truly know the meaning of a new word?

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Can teachers actually meet the needs of all their students?

Let's recap on the educational silver bullets of the past decades: mandarin, no excuses, traditional versus progressive teaching, brain gym, learning styles, "constructivism and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few ...the elusive panacea that will solve all education's woes has remained, well, elusive." ( Edweek)

This post is lengthy and provocative; a concept that is unlikely to be commonplace for decades, but please stay with me ... Consider students are all over the world when it comes to achievement. Just take a look at the data from any given classroom - starting points determined from standardised tests, special needs and predictions. We all must get better used to being average.

Difficult To Implement

It says in the English Teachers' Standards, "adapt to meet the needs of all students." That's the toughest ask placed upon a classroom teacher right there. I wonder if we could consider removing the word "all"?

Differentiation found its mojo in the 1980s after countless publications showcasing how 'teachers could meet the needs of all their children'. The concept itself offers teachers some hope, because as reflective and caring practitioners, we want to meet the needs of our students. After all, show me any teacher that doesn't. If we didn't believe in differentiation, we would challenging one of our core purposes as teachers - helping every one of them.

We use differentiation to gauge what students already know and what they still need to learn.

We then differentiate through demonstrating what students know through multiple teaching techniques.

Differentiation encourages student/teacher to add depth to the learning/teaching process.

But, have we been sold short? Fine in principle, but difficult in practice for one lesson.

83 percent of teachers nationwide stated that differentiation was "somewhat" or "very" difficult to implement. ( Fordham Institute, 2008)

Here are three scenarios.

1. Swimming Club

Over the past year, my son has been attending swimming lessons at our local pool. When I'm not swimming myself, as a proud father I look across the water and observe how my son is developing his front crawl and backstroke. I watch the instructor carefully and as a teacher and father, you would be correct to assume I observe with pride and with a critical eye.

There are just six students in the class. Each child is approximately six-seven years old. The swimming pool is 1 metre deep and most of the children can stand up with their heads above the water. When the instructor is communicating to each of the children who are standing on the side of the pool, he directs one child at the time to 'jump in' and follow his various instructions to demonstrate their capacity to swim, jump, stand and so forth. Cue, one instructor meeting the needs of one child - whilst the rest look on.

Now, I am being pedantic, but throughout the 30-minute lesson, this process repeats for each child for each technique. On observation, I roughly calculated that my son spends around half of the lesson 'out of water', observing, listening and/or daydreaming. Imagine if there were just 10 students? I don't know if this is legally possible, I don't know what would be dangerous for young children, but let's just move over to the notion that this instructor and my son are now in a maths lesson.

One teacher, thirty students and a 60-minute lesson. The teacher explains how to draw an isosceles triangle and how to calculate each of the angles. He/she questions 4 or 5 students as the lesson moves forward, they try to meet the needs of all students by testing the students' knowledge with recall questions and application of drawing the triangle into exercise books - or at the front of the classroom on the board. At this point, there is a high probability that my son has not yet been asked any question, although he has been listening and following all of the lesson. Other than sampling the mood in the room, the teacher gauging if a child is right or wrong with various questions posed, asks students and works on regardless until they a) asks my son a question and is answered or b) is asked a question by my son himself and his knowledge is tested.

2. Teacher Training

Imagine you are a teacher attended a conference. Whether you are listening to a keynote or attended a workshop, as an adult, there is a high chance you may leave disappointed. This is simply because the person leading the event cannot meet your individual needs because there is likely to be 30 to 500 people or more in a room.

As adults, one would expect that we are little more mature and can look after ourselves in a particular type of learning environment. Keynote? Fine, we know we are being spoken to. Workshop or conference, fine, although we know this is not entirely true, as when we are placed into a learning situation at a conference/workshop, we often expect to take something meaningful away with us - even if we are not enjoying being asked to take part or learn on demand.

Therefore, why do we expect our teachers to be able to do this with our children? What's different for teachers with children in classroom? Is it because they are not so advanced? Do we have lesser expectations of their wide and varied needs?

3. Classroom Myth

For over a decade, I've been training teachers in my school and elsewhere, and although I assumed I was doing fairly good job, I always knew that I could not please everyone and that there was a high probability that I would not be able to do so - despite my best intentions. Over past three months, having worked over 3,000 teachers in all sorts of environments, something has changed and has made me question, why, for nearly 25 years I have lived with this perception as a teacher, that I have believed I can meet the needs of all my children in a classroom situation.

Firstly, there are some schools that still believe, particularly during a lesson observation, that a teacher will be meeting the individual needs of their students. This belief is increased when it is for an appraisal observation or worse, for an external inspection. Mentors, working with teachers new to the profession, once lesson planning and behaviour management is addressed, a mentor will start to ask that the teacher starts to meet the needs of every student as the next major hurdle to tackle.

Secondly, how the 'differentiation bubble' is communicated to every teacher is vital, because if we are not careful, every teacher could be set up to fail for the rest of their career, succumbed by an unattainable illusion of 'you must meet the needs of all your children', every lesson - or during an observation.

It is only now I have become highly sensitive to this fad.

Research by Thomas B. Fordham Institute said "teachers were provided with extensive professional development and ongoing coaching. Three years later, the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating'."

The End of Average

The biggest reason differentiation is a myth, is the way teachers are deployed in our classrooms. Bring "together several students who struggle to learn, along with a smattering of gifted kids, while adding a few English-language learners and a bunch of academically average students and expect a single teacher to differentiate for each of them."

The second reason? We are not really sure what we are differentiating. It may be a worksheet, the curriculum, 30 students in one class versus another 30 in another; one student with a teaching assistant and another 4 or 5 kids requiring literacy intervention. The conclusion to ' Differentiation Doesn't Work ' suggests "differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own."

However, I disagree, but I'm not quite sure what the solution is either.

The Cause

In The End Of Average, Harvard graduate and author, Todd Rose highlights the work of American psychologist, Edward Thorndike. He singlehandedly defined education as we know it. His definition of the purpose of schools and education was to sort students by talent; to predict how a student will perform. Rose writes that "it is deeply ironic, that one of the most influential in people in the history of education, believed that education could do very little to change a student's ability and was therefore limited to identifying those students with a superior brain."

Thorndike opposed the idea that learning should reflect nature, which was the main thought of developmental scientists at that time. He instead thought that schooling should improve upon nature. The Law of Effect.

Thorndike invented a convenient metric for evaluating student performance. That by collecting quantitative information, we could help teachers and educators deal with practical educational problems in the classroom. This now results in those most likely to succeed and those most likely to fail.

I wonder how many of us have been on the receiving end of this metric? For example, placed in the bottom or top sets of a maths class, or defined by a grade and not reach that university or college place. Today, Thorndike's education labyrinth ranks everyone within it walls, and not just the students. It's the same for teachers when ranking performance and pay rise. Teachers are evaluated at the end of each school year which results in promotions, rankings and tenure. Our education systems of entire countries are ranked based on their performance of an international standardised test! e.g. PISA, PIRLS. Today, our education system operates as Thorndike intended.

Above average = you are rewarded

Below average = condescending.

Over the past century, we have perfected education system and as Rose suggests, "it runs like a well-oiled machine squeezing out every possibility." We may believe that our teachers can meet the needs of children over a longer period of time, and we would obviously aspire towards this as teachers, but to consider that it is possible in a single lesson - particularly under observation - is downright ludicrous!

Let's the pop the bubble please.

Sources:

1. Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Michael Petrilli, University of Virginia - All Together Now?

2. High Achieving Students - Fordham Institute, 2008.

3. Education Week article, Differentiation Doesn't Work, 2015.

4. Video: Differentiated Instruction by EducaitonNext, 2010

5. From laws of learning to a science of values: Efficiency and morality in Thorndyke's educational psychology". American Psychologist 53 (10): 1152, Beatty, Barbara (1998).

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Teachers: We Need To Pop The #DifferentiationBubble by @TeacherToolkit

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Can teachers actually meet the needs of all their students? Let's recap on the educational silver bullets of the past decades: mandarin, no excuses, traditional versus progressive teaching, brain gym, learning styles, "constructivism and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few ...the elusive panacea that will solve all education's woes has remained, well, elusive."

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A conversation with John Bayley - Advice for new teacher about behaviour in classroom.

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John is best known for featuring in more than sixty programs in the regular spot "Teaching with Bayley" on Teachers TV. He is an experienced teacher and a skilled mentor. OFSTED described his leadership of the Learning Support Service & Pupil Referral Unit in Southwark as "outstanding".

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The typical way of reporting a set of assessment results looks like this: the percentage of pupils at each grade.

At No More Marking, we provide you with that information, and supplement it with information from other schools, which helps you put it into context.

However, we think this style of reporting is limited. It forces your pupils into three quite arbitrary categories, and doesn't give you an idea of the full range within each grade. At its worst, as we have written about here, this style of reporting can be really distorting.

We also report results as a box and whisker plot. You can see two of these below, based on the same data as the table above. The box and whisker plot on the left represents the results of just one anonymised school. The one on the right represent the results of all 6,273 pupils in our most recent pilot.

I think this tells you a lot more than just a table of grades.

For example, we can see by comparing the two horizontal black lines in each box that this school's overall average results are slightly lower than the national results - but not by that much!

We can see that this school doesn't have many very low or high performers relative to the national performance - apart from the one outlying pupil right at the bottom.

We can see the national grade figures overlaid onto this chart - but we can also see that these are lines that have been superimposed on top of the distribution. Pupils either side of the GDS line are likely to have more in common with each other than with pupils at the other end of their grade.

We can also use the same approach to compare gender and pupil premium. Take a look at the following breakdown by Pupil Premium. We can see that Pupil Premium pupils do about as well as the national Pupil Premium cohort on average, and also that there are almost no really low-attaining PP pupils at this school.

We think the box and whisker plot is an easy way to represent a lot of information without any big distortions. However, they still can't tell you everything, and one thing they don't do is to tell you whether the differences between the groups you are comparing are statistically significant. How big do the differences between two groups have to be before they really mean something? In our next post, we will look at error bar plots, which can tell you this.

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Reporting assessment results with box and whisker plots

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The typical way of reporting a set of assessment results looks like this: the percentage of pupils at each grade. At No More Marking, we provide you with that information, and supplement it with information from other schools, which helps you put it into context. However, we think this style of reporting is limited.

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Sharing Standards involves teachers across the country using Comparative Judgement to judge the writing of pupils from their own school as well as the writing of pupils from other schools. Schools agree to complete a piece of writing with their pupils according to specified conditions. The work is then uploaded where it is anonymised and prepared to be judged.

The teachers of all participating schools judge the writing. The teachers are asked, for a series of pairs of pieces of writing, to select the 'better writing?' The teachers are not provided with criteria on which to base their decisions; rather, we depend on a shared professional understanding of what good writing looks like.

Every piece of writing is judged around 20 times, with the judgements spread across teachers. Comparative Judgement achieves higher reliability than other methods of assessing writing as teachers give very consistent decisions on which is the better piece of writing when presented with two samples. Any individual bias from any single teacher is cancelled out by the aggregation of judgements.

When teachers judge in a national session of Sharing Standards they are asked to make decisions on the work from other schools. Eighty per cent of the judgements teachers make involve comparing the work of their own pupils. The other twenty per cent involves comparing the work of pupils from other schools. Teachers are never asked to directly compare the work of a pupil from their school with a pupil from another school. As a result of this judging pattern, teachers largely determine the rank order of the pupils within their own school, but the relative standard of their pupils compared to pupils in other schools is determined objectively and anonymously.
Year 3 Sharing Standards
For Year 3 we asked pupils to write one page of a narrative under specified conditions. In total, 6,273 pupil from 120 schools across the country completed the project. The sample was representative of the national ability spread in Year 3.

Over one week, 1,393 teachers were involved in making 113,200 judgements on the pupils' writing. The work was judged to a high reliability, with the moderation task judged to a reliability of 0.91.
What does the writing of Year 3 look like?
We use a statistical model to create scaled scores for all pupils from the teachers' judgements. The scale allows us to see what the writing of Year 3 pupils looks like across the scale of ability. Here are a selection of pieces at various points on our scale.

What next?

The year 5 national judging session has now finished, so the next national judging session will be Year 1 and Year 4 in January. Schools need to be signed up by December 8th to take part.

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Sharing Standards Results: Year 3 - The No More Marking Blog

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Sharing Standards involves teachers across the country using Comparative Judgement to judge the writing of pupils from their own school as well as the writing of pupils from other schools. Schools agree to complete a piece of writing with their pupils according to specified conditions.

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The School to School Support Partnership | Suffolk

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Sharing best practice between Suffolk Schools. Submit and share initiatives that have had a measurable impact on pupil outcomes.

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Thank you for visiting Tes Magazine. The article or page that you are looking for, along with thousands of other articles from our archive, is in the process of being migrated to the new Tes Magazine experience.

While this process is being completed, please visit our new homepage for the latest in education news and features.

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Every teacher knows a student like Aaron. At times funny and caring, at others careless and destructive, he would prove maddeningly unreliable inside and outside of my classroom. The only predictable thing about Aaron was that he would leave school prematurely, labelled a failure.

How do we stop students like Aaron from falling through the cracks? How do we engage students turned off by school?

If you mention the word "engagement", you may get caught up in an ill-informed argument that caricatures it as little more than filling the classroom with fun. It has for some become a proxy for dumbing down.

It isn't. Helpfully, Ellen A Skinner and Michael J Belmont defined the crucial concept of engagement: "Children who are engaged show sustained behavioural involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone. They select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration in the implementation of learning tasks" ("Motivation in the Classroom: Reciprocal Effects of Teacher Behaviour and Student Engagement Across the School Year", Journal of Educational Publishing, bit.ly/MotivationITC).

Engagement is more than mere fun. It is more than just being well behaved. It proves instead to be a vital precondition for all successful learning.

Indeed, it could mean the difference between students like Aaron being turned off by school, branded a premature failure, and instead see such students stick at school and even flourish.

Like most matters in education, engagement is much more complex than people may first consider. Researcher James Appleton and his colleagues from the US defined student engagement ("Measuring cognitive and psychological engagement: Validation of the Student Engagement Instrument", Journal of School Psychology, bit.ly/CogEngage), and their four-part model helps make sense of the complexity:

* Academic engagement - reflected by indicators like homework completion and time on task.

* Cognitive engagement - reflected in subtle factors, like students feeling school is part of their goals, or how well students can plan, check and evaluate their learning in class and beyond.

* Behavioural engagement - reflected in factors like attendance and participation in class or extracurricular activities.

* Psychological engagement - as indicated in relationships with peers and teachers, or feeling a sense of belonging in school.

The better we understand engagement, the more able we are as teachers to help identify it, or its absence, in our students.

Let's return to Aaron. I knew that he clearly felt psychologically out of place at school. Apparently, his behaviour for his rugby team proved markedly different. His sense of belonging in the scrum clearly wasn't matched in his science classroom.

What we should not and cannot do is shelve the academic challenges faced by students to instead play endless rugby games or similar, but we should seek out the motivational factors rooted in our students' behaviour.

Perhaps Aaron could find an academic mentor from the PE department? Could his rugby coach be commandeered to help Aaron make meaningful academic goals?

At a time when the rich breadth of school life may appear to be shrinking, with the arts and sports being cut back from school budgets, how we engage our students in school life will need some hard thinking.

Developing engagement

If we use the four-part model of engagement as a starting point, we can look at how we develop engagement in the wider life of school, the classroom, then right down to individual tasks we plan for our students, such as how we wrangle the perennial homework problem.

There are, of course, no simple solutions to complex matters such as students who are disengaged from school.

We can start with the role of the teacher. Ironically, our perception of an "engaging teacher" simply doesn't match up with the research evidence that is available. Edward L Deci and colleagues found that it was not teachers who were "fun", or those who made busy activities, but the ones who provided safe, purposeful classroom environments:

"Teachers who provide clear expectations and instructions, strong guidance during lessons, and constructive feedback have students who are more behaviourally and cognitively engaged." ("Engaging students in learning activities: It is not autonomy support or structure but autonomy support and structure", Journal of Educational Psychology, bit.ly/EngageSILA)

Being cognitively engaged comes down to teachers giving great feedback. For students such as Aaron, this means giving precise, knowledgeable feedback on how he can get better with writing or quadratic equations - it comes with showing we care about them in our every word and action.

The evidence that the teacher-student relationship is integral to engagement is plain good sense. We know that for many students turned off by school, it is the lack of stable, positive role models that can inhibit their engagement in school life.

Our role "in loco parentis", as caring adults, becomes essential for so many of our students and helps build the trust our students need to persist through their failures and struggles.

The research on our students staying engaged shows that if we neglect the wider social activities that attend school life - such as extracurricular music, clubs or sports teams - we miss opportunities to help students like Aaron feel a sense of belonging in school.

It can be in the nooks and crannies of the school year - such as assemblies, school trips and sports day - that relationships are best developed and engagement is fostered.

As school budget cuts become deeper, with students such as Aaron feeling that an academic curriculum is not for them, we need to think hard about how we can cultivate engagement for every child.

Alex Quigley is an English teacher and director of the research school at Huntington School in York. He is the author of The Confident Teacher and tweets @HuntingEnglish

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A teacher's hunt for evidence on... Engaging pupils who are turned off by school

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Every teacher knows a student like Aaron. At times funny and caring, at others careless and destructive, he would prove maddeningly unreliable inside and outside of my classroom. The only predictable thing about Aaron was that he would leave school prematurely, labelled a failure. How do we stop students like Aaron from falling through the cracks?

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The Forth bridge is an iconic structure that spans a distance of 2.5km across the Firth of Forth. The bridge is most famous for the colloquial phrase 'painting the Forth bridge'. This saying comes from the erroneous belief that the bridge was so huge it would need to be continually painted to maintain its upkeep. Such a practice never existed. In 2011 a new coating designed to last 25 years was applied to the Forth bridge. The engineer Colin Hardie of Balfour Beatty Construction was quoted as saying "For the first time in the bridge's history there will be no painters required on the bridge. Job done."

I never really questioned the value of marking. It was something you just did. Of course, children need their books marking. What else are we supposed to do with them? Spending holidays catching up with marking that I had neglected was annoying but self-inflicted. Yes, I resented it but I knew it was my own fault for not using my time more effectively. When it came to light during an Ofsted inspection that a colleague hadn't marked their books for six months we were all stunned. How on earth could you not mark your books? It was heresy!

Like painting the Forth bridge, written marking is a seemingly never-ending task. As you complete that pile of books on a Sunday evening you know full well that Monday will bring a fresh new pile of books waiting to be analysed and responded to (possibly in a particular colour of ink and a range of highlighters). Marking is iconic. For many it is an impressive superstructure towering over teachers' day to day lives. It stands firm and unmoving despite changes in the educational weather.

The phrase 'painting the Forth bridge' passed into everyday use despite never being founded on evidence. Can we now begin to say the same for the convention of written marking?

Well, over the last twelve months I have become increasingly aware of schools across the country eschewing traditional marking policies in favour of 'no written marking' approaches. Through exploring the blogs of Clare Sealy, Joe Kirby, Daisy Christodoulou and Jo Facer. I began to doubt the impact of what I had spent many hundreds of hours of my teaching career doing, namely marking books with written comments. (I have put a list of these brilliant blogs at the bottom of this post)

When the EEF toolkit was published, as a school, we fell into the trap that many did of conflating marking with feedback. This lead to an overemphasis on written marking at the expense of other forms of feedback. Written marking became king. We tinkered with the idea of dialogic marking where teachers responded to a pupil's work, children responded to that response and so on ad infinitum. We were bolstered by the fact that our outcomes across school were rapidly improving so it seemed a reasonable assumption that our marking policy was part of this success.

As I read more widely, I became aware that the marking we asked teachers to undertake was perhaps not having the impact we had convinced ourselves it was having. The words of Michaela Community School's Deputy Headteacher, Joe Kirby, rang loudly in my ear " Written marking is useful for one child, once only". What if all the hours spent marking each week could be used for something else? And what if we could actually improve the quality of feedback to pupils without the Sisyphean task of written marking?
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​Our concerns with our system of marking were three-fold -

1. Was the quality of feedback really as good as it could be? Were children really able to understand how the teacher wanted them to improve from a brief written comment? Were teachers compromising their feedback, truncating complex ideas into short comments with child-friendly language?

2. Were children really taking responsibility for improving their own learning? Or, were they relying on teachers to identify their errors and then simply responding to the teacher's marking? For example, by filling in missing full stops that had been helpfully located by the conscientious teacher. As Dylan Wiliam states in Hendrick and Macpherson's What Does This Look Like In The Classroom ...

"...too many teachers focus on the purpose of feedback as changing or improving the work, whereas the major purpose of feedback should be to improve the student."

3. Were teachers so bogged down with the constant pressure to mark that they were unable to spend time on more valuable activities? Were teachers able to thoughtfully adapt their planning in light of feedback received or creating high quality resources that could be used again and again? (We also had an inkling that staff who were completely burnt out from an eternal marking pile might not actually make the very best teachers).​

​At the end of the Summer Term we started to have serious conversations about replacing the current marking policy. We knew that Ofsted were not looking for a specific type of marking but were merely checking consistency of approach and that schools were able to achieve outstanding grades in an inspection despite being advocates of 'no written marking' policies. The Ofsted Myths document from August 2016 clarified that...

"Ofsted does not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking and feedback; these are for the school to decide through its assessment policy. Marking and feedback should be consistent with that policy."

As we started back in September we took the decision to design a new feedback policy that removed the need for written comments in books and implement a more effective system of giving 'whole class feedback' at the start of the next lesson. We decided to trial this using the following broad approach...

​After a lesson, the teacher looks through the pupils' books for common misconceptions and errors in basic skills. They then sort the books into 3 piles - children who didn't grasp the concept taught, those who showed good understanding and those who did particularly well. Teachers tick each piece of work to show it has been checked and 'star' any parts of work that are worth sharing as good examples. Whilst looking through the books, teachers make notes on the key messages to feedback to pupils at the start of the next lesson using a grid. Here is an example of what one might look like when finished (fleshed out a bit more than would be necessary in practice)...

So far, so good. This book checking process should take no more than 15 minutes for a set of 30 books and where possible, children will have already marked their own work in the lesson to speed up this analysis (particularly in subjects like mathematics).

After this, the teacher plans a whole class feedback session using the notes from the sheet as an aide-memoire. The start of the next lesson begins with the teacher sharing the best work (perhaps using a visualiser), identifying common errors in basic skills (e.g. spellings, number facts) and then addressing common misconceptions that have been identified. This session is flexible in how long it takes but a typical session might be ten minutes or so giving time for children to redress any misconceptions that had arisen and, where useful, check through their work and improve it based on the feedback given (bearing in mind the Dylan Wiliam quote from earlier).

We are now in the throes of the trial and it would be naïve of me to speak authoritatively on the impact this is having on children's learning. One thing I can be fairly certain of, however, is the immediate and profound impact on teachers' workload. For a start, our teachers have happily reported to me that they no longer need to take books home to mark. As @Claire_Hill_ states eloquently in her blogpost ' Research: the gift of time '...

"Teachers are a school's most expensive resource so our time is, quite literally, too valuable to waste on practices that are inefficient. But, being efficient doesn't take any of the love or soul out of teaching; it gives us more time, energy and knowledge to deliver really great lessons." ​

Let's be clear, we are in no way pioneers of this approach. Many schools have gone before us and have thankfully blogged about their approaches with great clarity and conviction. In a way, it is reassuring that a 'normal' primary school like ours is able to make such a move away from established practices to improve the quality of feedback and reduce teachers' workload. There is perhaps hope for other schools.
Is a time coming when headteachers across the land might echo the words of Colin Hardie as he applied that final coat of durable epoxy paint to the Forth bridge?
"For the first time in history there will be no written marking required in books. Job done."

*UPDATE (4th Oct 2017)*
After posting this, I had a number of people asking what the whole class feedback forms looked like in practice. I tweeted some images of our teacher markbooks - Click the image of the tweet to have a look.

After running our trial for a few weeks we have decided to make a change to the nomenclature for our approach. Instead of 'Whole Class Feedback Sheets/Sessions' we felt it better reflected what was actually happening in class to rename these as simply Feedback Sheets/Sessions. We ensure that verbal feedback before the next lesson meets the needs of individuals, groups and the whole class. For example, some teachers during the trial would feedback to individuals on entry to the class, briefly talk to any groups and then give the whole class feedback.

*UPDATE (7th November 2017)*

Our new teacher feedback books arrived in school today (see picture).

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Improving the effectiveness of feedback and reducing teacher workload

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We investigate definitions of quality first teaching and in particular consider how it applies when teaching gifted and talented pupils

The National Strategies suggest that the key to success with all learners is quality first teaching (QFT). This has been used as a mantra across the strategy in guidance, tools, resources and the numerous events the Strategies run across the country. It is surprisingly hard, given their raft of publications, to find positive and useful illustrations of what this universal truth is actually supposed to look like.

QFT originates in the then DCSF's guide to personalised learning published in 2008 which summarises its key characteristics as:

highly focused lesson design with sharp objectives

high demands of pupil involvement and engagement with their learning

high levels of interaction for all pupils

appropriate use of teacher questioning, modelling and explaining

an emphasis on learning through dialogue, with regular opportunities for pupils to talk both individually and in groups

an expectation that pupils will accept responsibility for their own learning and work independently

regular use of encouragement and authentic praise to engage and motivate pupils.

(DCSF, 2008) Personalised learning - a practical guide 00844-2008DOM-EN

Quality first teaching is also described as the Wave 1 of the National Strategies' three Waves of Intervention.

Wave 1 - inclusive quality first teaching

Wave 1 is about what should be on offer for all children: the effective inclusion of all pupils in high-quality everyday personalised teaching. Such teaching will, for example, be based on clear objectives that are shared with the children and returned to at the end of the lesson; carefully explain new vocabulary; use lively, interactive teaching styles and make maximum use of visual and kinaesthetic as well as auditory/verbal learning. Approaches like these are the best way to reduce, from the start, the number of children who need extra help with their learning or behaviour.

Wave 2 is targeted catch up provision for groups to 'put children back on course' and Wave 3 a deeper intervention offering more personalised solution to be used if Wave 2 hasn't worked.

Aside from an only partly ironic observation that very few us teach in waves, this is very much stating the obvious. All teachers are expected to set targets for all pupils that help them progress as far as possible. We also know that progress can be achieved in all sorts of unimaginative ways and the three waves model doesn't do a lot to address this deficit view. And unfortunate to see our old friends V, A and K singled out yet again as something for everyone. Tired ideas.

The National Strategies publication, Excellence for All, which supports the National Challenge G&T Programme states that 'Quality first teaching (QFT) means different things to different people' and that 'a good starting point for all schools is to reach a shared understanding and definition of QFT'. But it doesn't presume to tell us what this might mean.

Three subject publications shed some light on what QFT looks like from a subject perspective. Learning and teaching in science highlights the need to balance different approaches:

directing and telling

demonstrating

explaining and illustrating

questioning and discussing

exploring and investigating

consolidating and embedding

reflecting on and talking through a process

reflecting and evaluating

summarising and reminding

guided learning

The Strategies' Leading improvement using the Primary Framework: Quality first teaching is part of a CPD module for headteachers, providing guidance on how teachers can direct learning and challenge pupils to think. An outline of what good learning looks like is provided for both mathematics and literacy.

So what should be distinctive about it for gifted and talented learners? And how is this different, if at all, from what we would expect to describe as just good teaching and learning? It certainly isn't what the Strategies refer to for learners as 'the quality of their wave 1 experience'. The waves model is a management tool, but children don't come to school to be implemented. So what should we be encouraging our colleagues to do?

G&T training programmes contain 'evidence' from research that tells us that able pupils like learning that includes the following:

variety

real discussion

time-limited tasks

to be treated as intellectual equals

chance to have fun

teachers who get the whole class involved

working with different people

clear targets and how to get there

practical work

thinking activities

investigations, problem solving

group work

drama and role play in ordinary lessons

teachers who break up activities

consistent teachers

freedom and flexibility

alternative forms of recording

working beyond the syllabus

study skills taught through the subjects

teachers who enjoy learning themselves

teachers who have sense of humour

choosing tasks

quizzes

competitions

opportunities to work at their own pace

being allowed to have an off day

learning from mistakes in a supportive environment

being given something interesting to do if they finish early

The usual response to this list is 'yes, but so do all pupils'. Of course, there is no one-sized solution which will apply to all learners all the time. And it's no great leap beyond this to suggest that QFT for G&T should be student-centred.

When we talk to teachers about what they believe is really distinctive about good teaching and learning for G&T, the conversations tend to be remarkably similar. They emphasise:

flexibility to make choices

the opportunity to take risks

the chance to make useful mistakes

questioning and curiosity

extended opportunities for interaction and dialogue

learners becoming less dependent (not just independent)

time to explore

a focus on big ideas

making connections with the real world

challenging beliefs and perceptions

having fun.

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What do we really mean by 'quality first teaching'?

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The National Strategies suggest that the key to success with all learners is quality first teaching (QFT). This has been used as a mantra across the strategy in guidance, tools, resources and the numerous events the Strategies run across the country.