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The rubric, why we need to differentiate our pass criteria for individual students!

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The rubric, why we need to differentiate our pass criteria for individual students!

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Ensuring challenge is calibrated to the particular needs of a learner at a particular time is one of the most essential roles of the teacher and appears non-negotiable for student growth. Our best understanding suggests that a student only learns when work is moderately challenging that student, and where there is assistance to help the student master at what initially seems out of reach.

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The link between clear learning intentions, the rubric and the SMART target.

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The link between clear learning intentions, the rubric and the SMART target.

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A key issue is that students often need to be explicitly taught the learning intentions and the success criteria. Sandra Hastie (2011) asked about the nature of goals that students set for themselves in the middle school years. She found that, at best, students set performance goals such as: ‘I aim to complete the work faster, better, or make the work longer.’ She then carried out a series of studies to teach the students to set mastery goals (‘I aim to understand the concepts’), but these were not as successful as teaching the teachers how to help students to set mastery goals. The teachers were provided with strategies to show students how to set and write personal best goals, the value of SMART goals (that is, those that are specific, measurable, ambitious, results-oriented, and timely), how students can break goals down into micro-goals, what challenge meant in a goal, what success looked like relative to the goals,

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The clarity and clear understanding of the rubric allows learners to view success

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The clarity and clear understanding of the rubric allows learners to view success

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Learning intentions describe what it is that we want students to learn and their clarity is at the heart of formative assessment. Unless teachers are clear about what they want students to learn (and what the outcome of this learning looks like), they are hardly likely to develop good assessment of that learning. Clarke, Timperley, and Hattie (2003) noted some important features of learning intentions and planning, as follows. Share the learning intentions with students, so that they understand them and what success looks like. This is more than students chanting the learning intentions at the start of the lesson, but a deeper understanding of what is desired, what success will look like, and how the tasks relate to the intention.

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Why you need to reflect on what has been taught prior to planning what and how you are going to teach in order to create and cement that cognitive joining of knowledge and skill!

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Why you need to reflect on what has been taught prior to planning what and how you are going to teach in order to create and cement that cognitive joining of knowledge and skill!

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if I blackout to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: ‘The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.’ (Ausubel, 1968: vi)

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Be an expert? It’s more important than experience!

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Be an expert? It’s more important than experience!

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Expert teachers and experienced teachers do not differ in the amount of knowledge that they have about curriculum matters or knowledge about teaching strategies –but expert teachers do differ in how they organize and use this content knowledge. Experts possess knowledge that is more integrated, in that they combine the introduction of new subject knowledge with students’ prior knowledge; they can relate current lesson content to other subjects in the curriculum; and they make lessons uniquely their own by changing, combining, and adding to the lessons according to their students’ needs and their own teaching goals.

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Over learning! Why we should focus on one idea/strategy/technique before introducing more.  

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Over learning! Why we should focus on one idea/strategy/technique before introducing more.  

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Over-learning is what happens when we reach a stage of knowing what to do without thinking about it; its critical feature is that it reduces the load on our thinking and cognition, allowing us to attend to new ideas. To reach a state of over-learning requires much deliberate practice –that is, extensive engagement in relevant practice activities for improving performance (as when swimmers swim lap after lap aiming to over-learn the key aspects of their strokes, turns, and breathing). It is not deliberate practice for the sake of repetitive training, but deliberate practice focused on improving particular aspects of performance, to better understand how to monitor, self-regulate, and evaluate one's performance, and to reduce errors.

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The act of teaching requires deliberate interventions to ensure that there is cognitive change in the student; thus the key ingredients are being aware of the learning intentions, knowing when a student is successful in attaining those intentions, having sufficient understanding of the student's prior understanding as he or she comes to the task, and knowing enough about the content to provide meaningful and challenging experiences so that there is some sort of progressive development.

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What is visible learning? A focus for ofsted observers! Think of the positives of a rubric!

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What is visible learning? A focus for ofsted observers! Think of the positives of a rubric!

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Visible teaching and learning occurs when learning is the explicit and transparent goal, when it is appropriately challenging, and when the teacher and the student both (in their various ways) seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained. Visible teaching and learning occurs when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate, and engaging people (teacher, students, peers) participating in the act of learning.

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Does your feedback provide a cognitive or emotional response?

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Does your feedback provide a cognitive or emotional response?

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If we are to harness the power of feedback to increase student learning, then we need to ensure that feedback causes a cognitive rather than an emotional reaction—in other words, feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

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Indeed, sharing high-quality questions may be the most significant thing we can do to improve the quality of student learning.

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Evaluative and interpretive listening skills, which is the focus of your teaching practice?

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Evaluative and interpretive listening skills, which is the focus of your teaching practice?

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However, when teachers realize that there is often information about how to teach something better in what students say—and thus how to adjust the instruction to better meet students’ needs—they listen interpretively. What such teachers seek to learn from the students’ responses is not, “Did they get it?” but rather, “What can I learn about the students’ thinking by attending carefully to what they say?” The shift from evaluative to interpretive listening was perhaps most eloquently summarized by a girl in a seventh-grade classroom, who, when asked if she had noticed any change in her teacher over recent months, said, “When Miss used to ask a question, she used to be interested in the right answer. Now she’s interested in what we think” (Hodgen & Wiliam, 2006, p. 16).

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Evidence for my new questioning technique

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Evidence for my new questioning technique

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When teachers do call on students at random—what Doug Lemov (2010) terms cold calling—many students will still resist engagement by responding with, “I don’t know.” How the teacher responds to this is crucial. Some teachers accept this and move on to ask the same question of another student, but this, in effect, allows the student to opt out. By adopting a rule of “no hands up except to ask a question,” the teacher has implied that the classroom should be one in which all students are engaged. However, the student has indicated that she does not wish to engage, and the teacher has, in turn, accepted this. In other words, the student has successfully resisted the teacher’s attempt to change the classroom contract. A better response is for the teacher to say, “OK; I’ll come back to you,” and then go around the classroom and get a number of responses to the question, after which the teacher comes back to the original student and says, “Now, which of those answers do you like best?” Even when the other students have answered with a single correct response, it is still valuable to go back to the original student simply to get her to repeat the correct response, because it emphasizes that this is a classroom in which there are no opt-outs

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I now think more about the content of the lesson. The influence has shifted from “what am I going to teach and what are the pupils going to do?” towards “how am I going to teach this and what are the pupils going to learn?” (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2004,

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Excellent paragraph on the properties of formative assessment.

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Excellent paragraph on the properties of formative assessment.

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An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have made in the absence of that evidence.

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A third principle is that the feedback should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students. If the teacher has provided a scoring rubric, then it is important that the feedback relates to that rubric. If there are learning intentions and success criteria for the work, then the feedback should loop back to those. This sounds obvious, but I have lost count of the number of times I have seen teachers provide students with rubrics or success criteria and yet fail to use these in framing their feedback to the students.

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Creating discussions and diagnostic questions, , diagnostic question are best used mid instruction to check learning before moving on, quick and too the point, discussion questions are good to use to check prior learning or to create a hypothesis. IB

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I suggest there are only two good reasons to ask questions in class: to cause thinking and to provide information for the teacher about what to do next.

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I suggest there are only two good reasons to ask questions in class: to cause thinking and to provide information for the teacher about what to do next.

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Do you agree?? IB