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English and maths - Geoff Petty

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Time to reflect and act on feedback

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Dedicated improvement reflection time (DIRT)

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Student and Teacher guides on how to carry out 'dirt&'

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Embedding Formative Assessment

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I'm a great fan of Professor Dylan Wiliam, and his book on how to embed formative assessment into your teaching is a stunner. It has some brilliant teaching methods for you to try. Formative assessment has a gigantic effect on student learning and achievement, and benefits the weakest learners most, but as a profession we don't do it well. Wiliam's methods are usually easy to use, and require your students to work harder than you do, which should be our goal for this year!

The first chapter is a gem, making the case that the best way to improve our education system is to improve teaching. The evidence Wiliam quotes is overwhelming, and anyone interested in improving education should read it.
Contrary to popular opinion Wiliam shows there is strong evidence that education has improved very markedly over the past 50 years or so. Students do very much better now on objective tests such as IQ tests. 50 years ago, only the top 15% did as well as an average student does now on the same test! So standards have not slipped. Instead, expectations of parents, employers and governments, have risen faster than education has improved. I feel a letter to the Daily Mail coming on.
Black and Wiliam have dropped the term "Assessment for Learning", though they invented it, because it has become corrupted by the Government's Education Department purloining the term to describe summative practices that have nothing to do with formative assessment or with Black and Wiliams' careful reading of research.

What follows are some strategies from the book, but the book has many more strategies and some vital insights, so do read it, and ask your library to get some copies. If we and our student teachers got formative assessment right, then students would learn about twice as much as from conventional teaching. Try these powerful methods, talk about your experiences with colleagues, and adapt them until they work. You'll need to use them about 5 times to discover whether they will work for you, and about 25 times to get them working 80% effectively. Happy experimenting!

Japanese catch up

Say you have 14 lessons to teach a topic or unit:

1. 12 lessons are used to teach the topic

2. At the end of the 12th lesson you give students a short diagnostic test or quiz

3. The test/quiz papers are not marked by the teacher, who instead looks them over to discover what students find difficult

4. Lessons 13 and 14 are used for remedial activity on the difficulties noticed in '3' above.

Using exemplar work to clarify success criteria and to improve work

1. A task is set, and students work alone to produce draft work.

2. The teacher collects papers, and secretly awards a provisional grade to each student. No comments are made on the work. The teacher chooses the three best pieces of work (exemplars) and photocopies these.

3. Students get their own work back, unmarked, along with copies of the three exemplars.

4. Students work in groups to use the exemplars to decide on assessment criteria for the task.

5. Students redraft their own work, and resubmit. (They are not allowed to simply copy the exemplars)

Peer assessment of draft creative work

1. Students are given a design brief and working alone generate 5 or 6 rough ideas

2. Students decide on their best idea

3. Students swap their draft ideas with those of another student, and secretly choose the best idea presented by the other student

4. Work is handed back to the owner, and discussion follows, especially if the choices are different.

Students write their own assessment questions
After a topic has been completed, students write assessment questions, along with some means of assessing their answers such as:

The students don't do each other's questions, but the teacher can grade each student's questions and assessment guidance.
Peer assessment to improve answers without a model or criteria

1. Students work individually on a practice exam test or quiz

2. Students work in groups of 3 or 4 and share their unmarked papers

3. Students try to create the best composite answer from their individual papers

4. Groups share their answers with the rest of the class

C3B4M
While students are working in class they are asked to consult three peers before asking the teacher for help: ( 'see three before me' = C3B4M)
Traffic-light cups
Each student is given 3 cardboard cups: red, amber, and green. As the lesson progresses, each student shows the level of their understanding by displaying the appropriate coloured cup on top on the desk in front of them:

Red: I don't understand what is going on

Amber: I sort of get it, but I am not confident

Green: I understand it well, and could explain it to others.

The teacher can say to a student displaying an amber cup 'what don't you understand?', and then ask a student displaying a green cup to answer the student's question.

When the teacher judges it necessary, because there are some amber or red cups being displayed, she says:

"Okay, red cups over here with me, those with an amber cup find a student with a green cup and ask them for help"
The anatomy of formative assessment
The diagram below is a summary of aspects of Dylan Wiliam's excellent book "Embedding Formative Assessment". The diagram tries to show that the top two boxes engergise the process in the bottom three boxes.

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Embedding your formative assessment - Geoff Petty

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I'm a great fan of Professor Dylan Wiliam, and his book on how to embed formative assessment into your teaching is a stunner. It has some brilliant teaching methods for you to try. Formative assessment has a gigantic effect on student learning and achievement, and benefits the weakest learners most, but as a profession we don't do it well.

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CETTA Assessment for Learning Process Model (Aug 2016)

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Article from NATE

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Creative Writing

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The new English language GCSE has plenty of critics. Research has even suggested that the new course could be putting pupils off reading.

But I disagree. I think that the new GCSE gives real scope for creativity and for us to make the qualification more accessible to those learners who have had a negative experience of studying English.

Last year I secured funding through Shine's Let Teachers Shine competition to support a project I've been working on called Write On!, which is an approach to the GCSE resits that maximises progress by focussing mainly on written literacy and creative-writing skills.

And while I am working specifically with resit students, I think that the same approaches could benefit other students who struggle with English.

So, why does teaching creative writing help students to do better in GCSE English? In a nutshell, because it means focusing your teaching where the marks are.

'Creative writing is where the marks are'

Critics of the new English language GCSE often cite the 19th-century content as a barrier for less-able students or those with very weak literacy. I don't agree with that premise for a number of pedagogical reasons, but we don't even need to get into those, because the 19th-century component counts for such a small percentage of the available marks.

For example, on the Edexcel specification, the 19th-century literature accounts for just 15 per cent of the GCSE - and that 15 per cent isn't awarded for knowledge of nineteenth-century literature, but for application of skills that could be practised in the classroom just as effectively on any modern text.

The creative tasks, on the other hand, account for 50 per cent of the marks. This means that half of the marks in the GCSE are awarded for two tasks that are, simply put, to write a story and to write a letter or speech. Looking at the raw numbers, if a student scores 5 out of 40 in the story task and 5 out of 40 in the other writing task, they will achieve a grade 1 in their GCSE.

But what does an approach based around these creative elements look like in practice?

I focus lessons on the basic skills of literacy and creative writing: developing imagination, building confidence - and gently supporting the improvement of sentencing, paragraphing and punctuation. Skills essential for all students, regardless of how functional or poetic their real-life literacy needs will be.

Examples from fiction

Then, to make the non-fiction writing element more engaging, I prefer to model it through creative fiction examples. I show students two- or three-minute rousing speeches from films such as Independence Day, Braveheart, and Legally Blonde. These are crammed full of interesting creative features and are a length that's a much more realistic model for students to scavenge and scaffold from than Demosthenes' Third Philippic, or whatever the hell educational publishers are putting in their joyless anthologies these days.

Similarly, you would be hard-pressed to find a more engaging example of creative letter writing than the stylish young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Even the reading section clearly serves writing skills. The basic format is: here are some example texts, take a look at how they use language and structure, evaluate how successful they are, now have a go at something similar yourself. In truth, it is more coherent and rigorous than the outgoing creative writing A level, which didn't survive reform.

For me, this is why there is no need for an alternative qualification and no argument that the GCSE is anything but a gift to those of us teaching students who are belatedly beginning to enjoy English and to make progress in it.
Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in a South West college. He tweets @Education720 Shine's Let Teachers Shine competition offers up to £15,000 to teachers who have brilliant ideas to help disadvantaged children succeed in English, maths or science. Let Teachers Shine 2018 is now open for applications. Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and like Tes on Facebook

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'Want pupils to score more highly in GCSE English? Focus on creative writing'

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The new English language GCSE has plenty of critics. Research has even suggested that the new course could be putting pupils off reading. But I disagree. I think that the new GCSE gives real scope for creativity and for us to make the qualification more accessible to those learners who have had a negative experience of studying English.

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Scheme of Work using AfL task based approach v2.docx

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Scheme of Work using AfL Blank template.docx

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I've finally managed to cobble together my first post since starting back in September. What with starting a new job, teaching A level for the first time in over a decade and languishing in post-publication blues after the release of my (hopefully) first book, I've not had much headspace for writing and I've missed it. Hopefully, this post marks a welcome return to the blogosphere.

There's so much going on that it's been hard to pick what to write about but I've settled on detailing how I've gone about solving the age old problem of what to do about everyone's favourite year group: Year 9.

We took the bold decision to completely overhaul the antiquated SATs hangover of a Year 9 programme of study with something fleet of foot and fit for purpose. It should go without saying that students of English need to begin their studies in Year 10 with the twin skills of analysis (reading) and writing (creativity) well honed, but they also need to have spent Year 9 doing something purposeful. At my last school they bean their GCSE course in Year 9 and this helped: they took the work they did so much more seriously. They could see that it mattered. But, the external pressures applied against early entry and the internal pressure of coming to the conclusion that even though it was great for students' attitude to work, quality suffered. They just weren't ready at aged 13 to be judged against the standards set for 16 year-olds and so ended up doing the work again the following year.

My solution to this quandary was Project Based Learning (PBL). Ron Berger's book An Ethic of Excellence persuaded me that this wasn't (as I'd initially suspected) just a load of educational New Age pap but a way of getting students to produce genuinely fantastic work. Yes, the process of producing it is important but the focus is the crafting of a high quality product. This slots in perfectly with all the thought I've been giving to the idea of Slow Learning (see post below) and giving students the chance to acquire mastery.

The Buck Institute for Education (spiritual home of PBL) advocates that "students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Rigorous projects help students learn key academic content and practice 21st Century Skills (such as collaboration, communication & critical thinking)." Now, it's not that I'm against 21st Century Skills, but I am suspicious of them and a lot of nonsense takes place in their name. But 'rigorous', 'extended' and 'complex ', I like.

One of the essential ingredients for getting PBL right is Critique. For those who've come late to the party or aren't yet sure exactly what this entails you could do worse that watch Berger himself explain:

We all know how important feedback is but there are many pitfalls for the unwary. Most of the feedback given to students is not 'received' or is, to put it bluntly, ignored. Anything which gives feedback a higher profile and presents in a way that it's less likely to fall on stoney ground is a very good thing.

Armed with this and much invaluable help and advice from Darren mead and Martin Said up at that Mecca of innovative pedagogy, Cramlington Learning Village, I started to feel my way into what I wanted to be a completely new approach to learning for the students at my school. The main precept of PBL is that students' learning should be authentic. Most of what we get students to do in school is 'pseudo-learning', that is to say, we as teachers create artificial problems for students to solve. This might be the maths problems which ask to calculate the mileage of imaginary train journeys, the production of a theatre programme for a non-existent production of a play, or the dried up twig of the speaking and listening assessment in which students are supposed to give a monkeys about something in front of a classful of their jeering peers. Either way, not good.

The National Curriculum in its most recent (although imminently doomed) incarnation urges English teachers to adopt real audience and purposes for the work students do. And, God knows we try. But, all too often this merely results in piles of unread persuasive letters to the Headteacher urging him or her to lighten up on school uniform cos, like, it's restricting my individuality, init.

PBL, starts from the other end. it asks us, as teachers, to tap into a real issue in our community and then work out how we could get our students to interact with it in a meaningful way. The Buck Institute for Education suggests applying the 6As to your ideas for a project to ascertain whether it meets their, frankly, deuced high standards:

So far so good, but there are still lots of lightweight, empty projects out there that do little more than keep students busy and I want no truck with them. This articles 8 Essentials for Project Based Learning and Main Course Not Dessert warn of some of the dangers and give sensible advice on how to avoid them. And this project checklist is a handy tool to keep nascent PBLers on the straight and narrow.

The starting point for designing what the year would look like working out what could be salvaged from the existing Year 9 SoLs. The team were keen to keep the units on War Poetry and Dystopia and Shakespeare. This morphed into three broad themes: War and conflict, Love and relationships and Crime and punishment. From this shortlist we selected War & conflict as our first project.

The driving questions we came up with were along the lines of: Why have so many writers written about war and conflict? What makes these themes interesting to readers? We then came up with the following statement:
Throughout history we have been interested in reading about war and conflict. Is this because we want to celebrate violence? Or is it because we need a way to express our feelings about traumatic events and feelings? It might also be that we want to warn others about the consequences of war and conflict. The project will examine the writing around various conflicts including World Wars I and II to investigate what this sort of writing has in common and what makes it so enduring and popular.
Laudable, but it's not really authentic is it? At this stage I started talking about our ideas to the head of History and then we had a breakthrough: we would create a War Museum. We got in touch with the British Legion and local historical society to see if they would be interested in getting involved. They were. Together we conceived the idea of students setting up a Clevedon War Museum on 9th - 11th November to which the whole community would be invited. As part of the exhibition we would present students' creative writing and their response to a variety of writing about war. To get the tone right we felt we needed to give them an experience of a real museum so we planned a trip to the Imperial War Museum to give them a taste of the solemnity and scale of what we hoped they'd produce. Sadly the IWM is closed for refurbishment so we're taking them to the Cold War Museum instead, but still. At this point we decided to involve the Art department to ensure that students' exhibits would have a suitable aesthetic feel and with that we were ready.

The launch for the project was a real extravaganza with sirens, dry ice, flash lights, barbed wire, some actual military vehicles and Edwin Starr blasting out his classic War! What Is It Good For? The students were mesmerised. Staff, dressed in a motley collection Army and Navy surplus, corralled the entire Year group into the transformed school hall and bombarded them with sound and images before revealing what the hell it was all about.

On the way out students were buzzing about what they'd seen and what was going to happen. I'm not sure myself. I feel prepared for the project to fall short of my very expectations and I know we're not able to tick all the BIE boxes on what constitues a proper project. I'm sure there's plenty of folk out there who'll be pleased to point out where we've gone wrong. One of my most notable failures was that I hadn't completed the project myself before embarking on it with the kids, but I am working alongside them and holding up my own work for Public Critique too. But whatever happens this will be better than what they would have had. And next year it'll be even better!

We've planned regular checkpoints into the project and I'll report back on our progress in due course. Wish us luck.
Related posts Feedback: it's better to receive than to give Slow Learning: allowing students to achieve mastery

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Project Based Learning: I did it my way - David Didau: The Learning Spy

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I've finally managed to cobble together my first post since starting back in September. What with starting a new job, teaching A level for the first time in over a decade and languishing in post-publication blues after the release of my (hopefully) first book, I've not had much headspace for writing and I've missed it.

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My pdf Version docx Version Wheel Version Thermometer Version Jigsaw Version for Younger Pupils

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Level 1 (Foundation) resources | Nuffield Foundation

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Nuffield Foundation " Teachers " Nuffield Mathematics " Level 1 (Foundation) resources

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geoff petty generic essay writing skills.doc

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Organisational Guidance