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Peps on Twitter: "How teachers sequence examples influences what students learn.Here's what's useful to know:↓ pic.twitter.com/C384Bau5Ih / Twitter"

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How teachers sequence examples influences what students learn.Here's what's useful to know:↓ pic.twitter.com/C384Bau5Ih

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How teachers sequence examples influences what students learn.

Here's what's useful to know:

↓ pic.twitter.com/C384Bau5Ih
— Peps (@PepsMccrea) July 9, 2023

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Andy(@ _codexterous): Two Strategies for effective live modelling

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Andy(@ _codexterous): Two Strategies for effective live modelling

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If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom.
You can order it right now HERE !
Live modelling is something I do a lot. I think it is up there with one of the most effective and powerful strategies I use in my classroom. The capacity to expose students not only to an exemplar of excellence, but, crucially, the thought process and rationale that helped us to arrive there is of huge benefit.

There is also a lot of benefit to doing this live rather than static, although I do use the latter a lot too. Live modelling means you can control the pace at which the model is delivered, doubling back when needed as well as inviting students to get involved in the process of construction.

Here are two simple but effective strategies I use a lot when live modelling:

1. The Margin:

Whenever I do any live modelling I always start by drawing an extra large margin on my page. This is now what I do for all my modelling and not just specific activities.

Here's an example of what it looks like from a session of live modelling creative writing:

There are a few ways I use this:

As I'm doing the live modelling and verbalising my thought process I'll jot down what I'm doing in the margin. This makes whatever I'm explaining really explicit and clear. It also has the benefit of slowing me down so that I am especially careful and clear to explain the steps I'm taking

As well as me jotting down the steps I'm taking, I might also pause at designated moments and discuss what I've just done with the class. What is working well here? What could be better? The margin becomes a space in which to record this conversation.

Similar to the above, I might ask students to replicate my margin format on their exercise book. As I'm writing I might pause and ask them on their own to write in the margin what they think I'm doing well and why. I'll then sample the room and record the key points in my margin.

If students are doing their own writing I'll often ask them to create a margin too. Like me, I ask them to record as they go what they are doing and why. Or I might pause the class during writing at certain points and ask them to re-read what they've done and jot down their process in the margin. This helps them to be really self-reflective and metacognitively aware.

A variation on the above is to build into homework essays this use of the margin. So, part of the homework assignment is to jot down in the margin the decisions they are making. This helps them to be aware of the choices they are making, but also helps me to better identify misapprehensions and mistakes. I can see exactly where their thinking may have gone wrong.

I also like to use the margin for things like success criteria, which I explain before doing the writing. I then return to this as I'm writing and tick it off as I do it. Again, this works well because it slows the process down and allows me, in the moment, and without moving away from the writing, to address the given success criteria.

The margin can also be a really nice way to scaffold writing. So, I might set the students going on a writing task but display on the board a blank page with a margin. In this margin I might write some tips or what I expect them to write about. They don't need to copy this, but can refer to it during writing like a structure strip or bookmark.

2. Don't Copy, Think:

For a long time my default student action when live modelling was for them to copy down whatever I was writing. The reason for doing this seems self-explanatory. I want them to have a copy of whatever I'm doing for them to learn from. But, does this help?

I started to think about where their attention is being directed in such a scenario. It is probably largely focused on the act of copying itself. Are they keeping up? Have they got exactly the same word that I used? Did they place a comma where I placed it? Have they missed anything? The cognitive focus shifts from thinking about the underpinning process of the model to the job of transcription.

As such, I now rarely ask students to copy down exactly what I'm writing, although I still do sometimes and when I do it is usually in conjunction with the margin strategies above.

Instead, I mostly ask them to first write down a version of the below table, depending on exactly what I want them to thinking about:

In this instance, and it's not always the same table, students can listen and watch what I'm doing without the urgency of copying down every single word. But, equally, I don't want them to do nothing. So as they listen they can be attentive to any ideas I mention that they think are interesting and any stylistic features (a word, a phrase, a transition) they want to remember. They can then jot these down. There's also built into this table a space for them to take over at certain points and continue the model.

I've found this table and similar ones to be a great combination of attentive listening and engagement with the modelling process, but with their cognitive effort diverted away from simply copying down what I'm saying.

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Two Strategies for Effective Live Modelling

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If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE !

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details. Here's a round-up of 10 - each one of which warrants attention and focus in a CPD or coaching process as people build up and hone their repertoire of go-to techniques:

1. Signal, Pause, Insist

2. Sustaining Attention

3. Modelling

4. Explaining

5. Checking for Understanding

6. Cold Calling

7. Think Pair Share

8. Mini Whiteboards

9. Retrieval Practice

10. Feedback as actions

And finally - here's what it looks like put together:

Image Credit: https://emptechgroup.com/the-internet-of-things/ I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative...

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10 Things: The essentials of your pedagogical toolkit.

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When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it's phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I've written about lots of these details over recent years - I like to get into the details.

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Many researchers believe that constructive feedback is a powerful tool for promoting children's social, moral, and intellectual development. However, giving feedback to students can be very risky. Whilst it is necessary for enhancing academic success, it can have detrimental effects if not done appropriately.

All students - but more often those at academic risk - may misinterpret feedback, which can undermine their motivation and self-confidence. This would, obviously, have negative effects on their learning progress. So, how can teachers give criticism that shapes learning and leads to academic success?

What is Wise Feedback?

The term 'Wise Feedback' in the research refers to feedback that emphasises high standards but also alongside a belief that the student can meet them. This combination of high standards and a belief that students can meet them offers a balance between students not settling for their current level (i.e improving motivation) whilst also not damaging their confidence for not meeting the current expected level.

Wise Feedback is an effective tool to increase learning because it can promote the development of a growth mindset in students. It also helps teachers create a focus on developing intelligence and independence to motivate students to become better learners.

What Does The Evidence Say About Wise Feedback?

Research shows that Wise Feedback improved the quality of students' final drafts of an essay they were asked to write for class. After receiving the wise feedback, 64% of students went on to make the necessary changes to their essays, compared to only 27% of students in the standard feedback condition. Such a difference cannot be ignored. The students felt motivated by the constructive criticism and took it into account in order to improve their work.

Wise Feedback is also a tool for facilitating a growth mindset. Evidence suggests that students with a growth mindset are significantly more oriented towards academic goals than students with a fixed mindset. In the study previously linked, 373 students were tested at the start of the school year and then just before the winter holidays. Researchers found that math grades for the growth mindset students continued to increase, whilst those with the fixed mindset suffered a decrease in scores.

3 Tips for Giving Wise Feedback

1. Keep the focus on student learning - Whilst providing students with feedback, try and keep it specific. For example, "Good progress with content, you need some more practice with structure". This way, you avoid implying that this performance is based on the student's natural ability and instead highlights the quality of the work itself.

2. Point out the good bits too! - Very often, we can identify the mistakes a student has made but fail to recognise the areas in which they have excelled. There are many techniques you can use to remind yourself of this - for example, for every three notes you give students on what to improve, find one note you can give on what they have done well. This balance in feedback will motivate them to keep improving, as their hard work is being recognised.

3. Offer the opportunity to discuss your feedback - After marking an assignment, relay to your students that they are welcome to come and see you to discuss any questions they may have regarding your feedback. Sometimes, feedback can be unclear, but it is important for students to fully understand your point and how to action it.

Final Thoughts

Teachers are the catalyst to students' academic progress. Not only does their method of teaching have a huge impact on how students learn, but the type of feedback they provide is crucial too. It is essential to remind students that their time at school is a time for progress. A bad grade on one assignment does not indicate a student's potential, simply their skills at that exact point in time.

As outlined above, giving Wise Feedback ensures that students take the constructive criticism as a motivator instead of a personal attack. By making sure your feedback is specific to the work and not the student, you can reduce the chances of hindering their confidence. There can often be a fine line between good and bad feedback and at times, it can be difficult to judge where your comments lie. However, keeping track of student progress and their responses to you will indicate if your feedback is wise.

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Feedback is a double-edged sword: vital to learning, but hurtful & demotivating if poorly delivered. Here's how to give feedback that leads to improvement.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).
Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of 'evidence-informed' advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam's five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have 'done AfL to death' in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn't get a job unless you said 'AfL' about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam's ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of 'AfL' was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here's how I see it all connecting:
1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Wiliam says 'if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there'. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read 'learning intentions' as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge - in all its forms - they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means 'what does excellence look like?'. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in 'clarifying, understanding and sharing' - teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
In some ways, this 'strategy' is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. 'Discussions, tasks and activities' covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of 'responsive teaching'. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they've learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design - including good diagnostic multiple choice questions - and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Shimamura's 'Generate-Evaluate' model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall's ideas about 'hidden lives' and the idea that we can't be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check - now, and again later.
3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward. It's this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ' feedback as actions ' post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students' learning improves - and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It's got an interpersonal, motivational element that can't be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn't a purely technical, objective task - although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.

The goal is to change the students' capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin's Butterfly is wonderful - because it shows what effective feedback can achieve - but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to 'look like a scientist' or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine's ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we're still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we've succeeded (SatNav style), then we've still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.
4. Activating students as learning resources for one another
I think this is the feature of Wiliam's five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other's learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can't have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out 'where the learner is' and 'how to get to where the learner is going'. This is where disciplined ' think pair share ' becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains - but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners' answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy - because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students' responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie's 'reciprocal teaching', Shimamura's 'think it, say it, teach it', Slavin's collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning
In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of 'noble intent' rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. 'Owning your own learning' is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these 'goals' are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals - the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;

setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.

setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building - as per Shimamura's Relate in MARGE.

providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that 'AfL' or even 'formative assessment' has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it's when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That's the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It's powerful stuff, right there, where it's been for years.
Key References:
Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

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Agarwal et al: Benefits from retrieval practice are greater for students with lower working memory capacity

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Agarwal et al: Benefits from retrieval practice are greater for students with lower working memory capacity

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Via Jamie Clark

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I really like using journeys and travelling as analogies about learning - I've written about them before when I wrote " Let's go for a walk". I love thinking of topics and ideas through the lens of schemas. I've read lots on schemas (and other bits too) and whilst writing about " the kernel of truth ", I realised that slowly an analogy has been developing in my head for schemas that encapsulates some other ideas from cognitive science.

Efrat Furst has some amazing diagrams of schemas, showing them as dots and lines. They clearly show the interconnected network of knowledge that we want to form in the minds of learners about our topics. The individual dots or nodes of network are often thought of as the individual ideas or objects, and the lines are the links between them. Over time we want to add new ideas (new nodes) to the network and increase the number of connections to old ideas too (the lines).

As an expert (in physics), I can pluck stuff out of "thin air" because my schema is very linked together and one idea leads to another. This means that I can quickly whiz around my network of knowledge and I don't get lost. My network is well travelled so the roads are wide and well maintained so I can travel from one idea to the next quickly and I can still get to even the oldest of ideas rapidly. The network is well signposted so I know exactly where I'm going and it's hard to get lost.

The width of the road gives me the ability to travel faster.

The signposting of my network means I know where I am within it.

An expert has a mental network akin to a complicated motorway system - wide roads, well-signposted. You can move from A to B to C very quickly and know where else you could have gone.

Novices are different. We are explicitly trying to build their schema (often from scratch). To begin with, they are much slower to travel around their own network and it's easy for them to lose their way as they travel. They need to spot the footpaths they've only travelled once or twice but there are no signposts (so it's easy to not get to where you intended). The roads are narrow and overgrown so it takes a long time to get around.

A novice has a mental network akin to some newly formed paths in the woods - narrow and not signposted. You take ages moving from A to B to C, possibly getting lost and not knowing alternative routes.

The only way to get from novice to expert is to continue to travel around the network and make more sense of it as you go. Not just creating new paths and new locations (expanding the network/your knowledge), but continually traversing the old paths, widening them and signposting them.

This is a blog for another day but one thing I'm looking into this year is Advanced Organisers - a simple depiction of the ways in which ideas are connected. They look a little like mind maps, but the links between topics are labelled (much in the way that we discussed schemas earlier). This is a work in progress but I've seen ideas from multiple places (Theory of Instruction by Engelmann and Carmine as well as Sarah Cottingham's book about Ausubel's work and Christian Moore Anderson's book on biology teaching) that, in a " kernel of truth " sense, make me think there's definitely something here to delve into.

I've looked at these before and my temptation is to get sucked in and make a HUGE one detailing all of the links and thoughts an expert might have. But on reading Engelmann and certain parts of Sarah's book on Ausubel, I think I see a huge utility in more focussed, smaller ones to begin with to help students explicitly see the links.

As I say, this is a blog for another day as I start to develop them.

The temptation I have is to sample students' schema randomly looking for specific nodes or specific links. And this might strengthen one link or help to ensure that students don't forget a specific link. But I'd like to develop my own practice significantly in this area:

This year, I'm going to be looking more at elaborative interrogation - I'm going to ask students to explain more widely what they have understand about an idea or topic. More open-ended questions that get them to more explicitly interrogate their own understanding and write it down. I think this will take some scaffolding to achieve which is where the advanced organisers will play an important role.

Anyway, back to the analogy...

If you're unsure of the distinction, the Learning Scientists have a great guest blog on the topic

My takeaway is that:

Retrieval strength is how quickly you can bring things to mind. When retrieval strength is high, you bring it to mind quickly. When retrieval strength is low, you bring it to mind still but it takes a while.

Storage strength is how well-embedded an idea is. When storage strength is high the information is stuck forever. When storage strength is low, it won't be remembered long into the future.

You can think of them as being on different axes so an idea being easy to retrieve doesn't mean that it's got high storage strength.

In my road based analogy each of the two ideas appear as:

Retrieval strength is the width of the road and how permanent the road has become (dirt track, gravel path, tarmac path, tarmac road, giant motorwar)- how quickly can I get to the idea?

Storage strength is how well signposted the turnings are - can I get back to the idea at all? If an gets to a point that it's signposted so clearly (high storage strength) that you don't need to travel there frequently, you know it's there and you can always get back to it (because it's clearly signposted). The roads might deteriorate slightly and it might take longer to get there (low retrieval strength), but you will always make it back.

You can imagine roads that are wide and empty but terribly signposted. These are ideas with high retrieval strength (I can feasibly get to them quickly) but low storage strength (it's hard to get to them again later on). This applies to new content that we've learned and is a state we often find our students in.

You can equally imagine the opposite, a well-signposted network but of roads that are not maintained well and have deteriorated with obstacles abounding (think of any major road network in some dystopian future where virus/zombies/war has broken out). Here, you can still get around the network (as it's well signposted) but it's no longer quick as the network is not well-travelled. These are the ideas that you hold onto for ages but may take a while to bring to mind. This is the state we'd actually like our students to be in when they leave us - some ideas or ways of thinking about the world that are stored so deeply that they're always accessible. Considering what these ideas are for each subject is a really interesting way to spend/waste an hour or twelve!

I'd like to explore this idea more over a few more posts. I'd love to hear any feedback! I'm @tchillimamp on Twitter/X or @drchillimamp on Threads.

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I really like using journeys and travelling as analogies about learning - I've written about them before when I wrote "Let's go for a walk". I love thinking of topics and ideas through the lens of...

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It is now hard (near impossible in fact) to go to a staff room, lesson, CPD twilight or education conference without someone mentioning retrieval practice at some stage. The benefits that it can offer are well known. Arguably, it's one of the best bets available to us for accelerating student learning.

Many teachers are exploring the best ways to weave it into their practice. Be it mini-whiteboards, multiple choice tests, cold-calling/wait times or brain-dumps. And yet, this only paints a very partial insight in to how to best utilise this theory.

The next natural stage of the cognitive science journey that many schools are currently going on is focusing on students implementing retrieval practice themselves, as part of their ongoing learning or studying for their exams. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Let's take a look at why...

Students don't naturally choose retrieval practice

Despite its effectiveness, retrieval practice is not the weapon of choice for most students when it comes to their studying.

reporting that 84% of students use re-reading their notes as a revision technique, with 55% of them stating that it was their number one strategy One famous study compared how students felt about spending their study sessions either re-reading lots or mainly doing retrieval. The findings below show that given the choice, most students prefer re-reading. This is because it is safe, comfortable and never forces them to confront what they do or don't know - and as such, students leave their studying sessions with a false sense of confidence and with their short-term self-esteem intact.

In fact, one other study found that this preference for re-reading is probably more pronounced than many of us realise, with recent research

They like retrieval practice when it is fun and easy

A really interesting study that has only just been released found that when retrieval practice was made easy (in this case, by giving lots of hints during it), students rated it as being:

More fun

More effective

Something that they would use in future study sessions

The bad news for all of us is that the researchers also found that when retrieval was made easy, students ended up remembering less. It seems that for it to be effective, retrieval practice has to get students to think hard about the content. And most people don't like thinking hard. They like doing things that are fun and easy - which kind of negates the whole point.

Once they do it, they feel way less stressed about it

So far, we have highlighted that students tend to avoid retrieval practice, favouring re-reading over it, and that when they actually do retrieval practice, they prefer the more fun but less effective version of it.

But how do students feel once they have actually done some retrieval practice?

This study asked students that exact question after using retrieval practice in preparation for their upcoming exams. The researchers found that:

72% of students felt less nervous

22% of students felt the same

6% of students felt more nervous

Find this graphic and many more in our latest book, Teaching & Learning Illuminated!

So, it seems that once we actually get students to practise retrieval, even though they may not have chosen it themselves, they do feel much better for it.

What About SEND students' relationship with retrieval practice?

We often get asked by teachers and parents if retrieval practice is beneficial for SEND students as well.

Evidence suggests that they get the exact same sort of benefit. In this study, both students with or without ADHD benefited for retrieval practice and utilised it in a similar way. Of course, depending on each student's individual needs, we may need to make some adaptions, but it seems that the broad guidelines remain pretty similar.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying that students have an uncomfortable relationship with retrieval practice, at least to start with.

It's mentally taxing and forces you to confront what you don't know. So, you can see why students may be reluctant to choose it themselves when working independently. And even once they start doing it, they tend not to naturally understand the conditions under which it works best.

So, what does this mean? We need to explicitly teach retrieval practice to students (and probably their parents too). Once we do get students to engage with it, not only will they learn from it, they will feel better about their learning too.

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We need to improve students' awkward relationship with retrieval practice

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Students tend to avoid retrieval practice, but also benefit the most from this learning strategy. How can we help them mend this relationship?

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Rob Marchetto - Explicit teaching gradual release of responsibility model

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Rob Marchetto - Explicit teaching gradual release of responsibility model

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Retrieval practice typically focuses on factual recall more than higher-order thinking- according to the EEF review. Popular methods with a focus on eliciting factual recall include multiple choice questions, short answer fact questions, true/​false questions, recitation of quotes and facts, and creating lists.

A recent study by Pooja Agarwal found that if retrieval practice prioritises recalling factual content, it is only pupils' ability to remember these facts that will be improved. As such, retrieval practice is likely to have less of an impact on outcomes if assessments require pupils to complete more complex tasks such as analysing, evaluating and explaining.

If teachers are keen to improve their pupils' ability to answer higher-order questions, retrieval practice could include providing factual statements for pupils to expand upon, including questions or tasks that require pupils to explain, analyse and evaluate.

I have also found ​'because, but, so' questions(where pupils are required to complete three sentences ending in ​'because', ​'but' and ​'so' - borrowed from the popular book, ​'The Writing Revolution') prompt that deeper thinking to explore and elaborate upon information once they have been able to retrieve it.

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retrieval practice – the process of recalling previously learnt material from our long-term memory –has become common practice in schools in recent years. consistent research has shown that retrieval practice can benefit pupils’ learning. the recently published eef report (link) on cognitive science has examined the evidence underpinning retrieval practice

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highlighting its potential to support pupil learning. yet it seems that not all retrieval practice strategies are created equal. the report found that there are four key elements which determine its effectiveness of in the classroom.  1. get the level of difficulty right    firstly

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the level of difficulty has to be appropriate. according to the review

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pupils should be able to access the content they are quizzed about. however

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professor rob coe states that if retrieval questions or tasks are too easy

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they may not generate the challenge required to improve pupils’ memory and subsequent understanding. this can be overcome by using questions or tasks of varying difficulty. in order to achieve this

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teachers could consider the complexity of the material and the length of time they leave between teaching a certain concept and asking their pupils to recall what they have learnt. the longer the delay between the initial learning and the subsequent recall

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the more difficult retrieval is likely to be for children. in my classroom

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i view the retrieval task as a starting point

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using questioning to extend learning and increase challenge

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by asking pupils to explain and expand on their initial answers.  2. pay attention to higher-order thinking    retrieval practice typically focuses on factual recall more than higher-order thinking- according to the eef review. popular methods with a focus on eliciting factual recall include multiple choice questions

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and creating lists. a recent study by pooja agarwal found that if retrieval practice prioritises recalling factual content

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it is only pupils’ ability to remember these facts that will be improved. as such

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retrieval practice is likely to have less of an impact on outcomes if assessments require pupils to complete more complex tasks such as analysing

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evaluating and explaining. if teachers are keen to improve their pupils’ ability to answer higher-order questions

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retrieval practice could include providing factual statements for pupils to expand upon

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including questions or tasks that require pupils to explain

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analyse and evaluate. i have also found ‘because

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so’ questions(where pupils are required to complete three sentences ending in ‘because’

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‘but’ and ‘so’ – borrowed from the popular book

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‘the writing revolution’) prompt that deeper thinking to explore and elaborate upon information once they have been able to retrieve it.  3. addressing misconceptions    one of the main benefits of retrieval practice is that it can highlight misconceptions or content that has not been committed to pupils’ long-term memories

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which can then be addressed by the teacher. for this to happen

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the review highlights the need to deliver feedback which clarifies the correct answers in a way that encourages pupils to fully process and commit them to memory (rather

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than correct answers just being displayed on the board). this does not have to be too time consuming – a simple class discussion whilst pupils record correct answers can be effective to this end.  4. steer self-directed study    finally

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the review suggested that retrieval practice should be used to make pupils aware of gaps in their memory

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thereby supporting self-study. this can be achieved through setting tasks that require pupils to assess or rate their own learning as they complete retrieval practice(pupils’ rag rating their progress is a common example of this). pupils can also be asked to identify the knowledge that they found more difficult to retrieve and use this to form the basis of their independent study. i have found that using a simple grid where p

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Guest Blog: Retrieval practice - A common good or just commonplace?

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The EEF is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement.

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What is interleaving, and why does it work?

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Interleaving, which consists of mixing up study topics within one studying session, is an effective learning strategy because of three main factors.

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I've written a lot about questioning techniques because it's such an important element of responsive teaching in most contexts.

I'm always interested in how teachers weave techniques together in a sequences responsively.... making in-the-moment decisions that flow from students' responses. During my work with schools I've had the privilege to observe some absolutely superb examples of questioning in lessons that illustrate the power of the techniques. In this post I'm going to describe five examples from the last year or so. Each sequence shared some common features:

All the students were involved, expecting to answer; required to think

The teacher was explicitly evaluating answers, ready to re-teach and address errors or misconceptions

The teacher was explicitly seeking to build confidence, supporting students to give good answers

The teacher was blending the need to involve all students with manageable sampling of responses, never assuming one student's answer was representative or immediately heard and understood by everyone else.

The spirit of the exchange supported the least confident students to participate as well as allowing more confident students to feel stretched.

Whiteboards + Cold Calling in Y9 Maths

In this lesson - (in a school where all students have their own A4 whiteboard as standard equipment) - students were using whiteboards to sketch regions defined by inequalities. The question in hand was to sketch the region defined by x < 6 on an x-y graph with four quadrants. The teacher followed the technique to a tee . Thinking time was given then a crisp 3,2,1 and Show Me! Students held boards up. The teacher identified that several had made the same error. He took two examples from the students and help them up for all to see. Both had sketched the region from the x = 0 (y axis) to x = 6 (dotted line was correct).

He then instigated a cold calling routine: Ok, have a think.... what is wrong with these sketches? Students had time to think and then different students were invited to share their thoughts. Three different students offered ideas but none of those called could spot the issue - often focusing on spurious issues with the quality of the shading or side issues like the labels on the axis. So the teacher followed in with a 'hands up for ideas'.. Does anything think they can see the fundamental problem? One student raised a hand and explained that the shading should extend into the negative x region, not be confined by x = 0.

This excellent response was then expanded on by the teacher with a good illustration and a further example of the same type. Students were then given another opportunity to try again and consolidate. The sequence worked well because a) it revealed the extent of the misunderstanding - both in the whiteboard 'show me' and in the cold calling. The 'hands up' allowed a student who did know to share their knowledge without it masking the others' lack of knowledge of this specific point.

Think Pair Share/ Cold Call /Hands up for Ideas in Y7 English nurture

In this lesson, students had read a story about some characters travelling from Rome into an enchanted forest. They were asked to explore the effect of the setting on the narrative. The concept 'effect of the setting' was the core learning point with this story as the vehicle. The teacher initiated a Think Pair Share routine with a task to identify three different features of the enchanted forest that created an effect that influenced the characters and the narrative. Making it three things set nicely achievable parameters for the process that pushed students beyond being happy with just one and then stopping.

The task was set and the teacher asked a student to check back what she'd asked them to do.. a good routine to follow. She clarified that it was the forest, not the city, that they should focus on. Then she asked them to think silently for 30 seconds... time to start generating their own ideas. When 30 seconds was up she said... And Share,,, placing her hands together in a nice 'come together' gesture. This was students' cue to turn to their talk partner - a routine well established in advance. They shared their three ideas with each other in a lovely throng of verbal exchanges. Meanwhile the teacher circulated to attend to some of the least confident students to hear their ideas.

Finally, the teacher called them to attention and went through a cold call routine, asking specific named students to share their ideas with a simple, safe... 'So, Michael, what did you come up with?' or 'Jessica, share three of your ideas'. She took pains to elicit at least three ideas - not just one or two - honouring the task that was set. In order to support students to engage, the shared ideas were written up on a large board for all to see - avoiding the ephemeral transience of words just being floated verbally. Adding to the mix of cold call responses, the teacher invited one of the less confident SEND students to share his ideas. He was with a TA who had flagged that he was up for it. 'James, you had a lovely idea, what effect did you come up with'.. and James shared his idea, beaming, knowing it was a good one.

Finally, sensing that there was more to come that hadn't yet been explored, the teacher asked..'Does anyone have some other ideas we haven't heard yet?' A girl, Ruby, sitting at the back put up her hand and gave a lovely alternative idea about the forest's effect... more sophisticated than the previous ideas. If this step had been missed, we would not have heard Ruby's ideas. So.. the combination was excellent: everyone was involved, ready to share and students at both ends of the confidence range had an opportunity to contribute without impeding the others in any way.

Whiteboard + Pair-Share in Y8 Maths

This combination was used by an ECT. She had placed four expressions on the board involving combinations of operations and brackets and an answer. They were labelled A, B, C, D and students were told that, according to the BIDMAS protocol, only one was correct. She used a good Show Me whiteboard routine, with students asked to select which was correct. Students each wrote down a letter and, on cue, held up their boards. The teacher scanned responses and then did a very clever thing; they didn't tell them the correct answer - she told them most people had put either B or C. 'Now', she said, 'turn to your partner and see if you can agree which one is correct'. This then led to the Pair Share. (The 'think' had already been covered in their solo whiteboard work.)

The pairs of students explored which was correct and why with lots of good discussions about the order of operations. Then, on cue, students were asked to stop talking and to place their agreed answer on their boards one more time. This time nearly all of them had the correct answer, B. The teacher then probed via cold calling, asking some individuals to explain their thinking including where they had changed their mind. It was all done in just a few minutes but gave every individual student the opportunity to rehearse their thinking as well as giving the teacher a good idea of how successful they were all being.

Think-Pair-Share + Scaffolds for Dialogue in Year 5

In this example, the focus was preparation for writing a balanced argument about charging people to climb Snowdon - with a picture like this as a stimulus. Students were asked to think of arguments for and against, using knowledge about erosion of paths, habitat destruction and so on. The teacher used Think, Pair, Share. First, individually, students had to come up with three reasons why charging was a good idea. Then, on cue, students were asked to turn to their partner and to agree their three strongest reasons. The class was buzzing with detailed exchanges. When called together the teacher pointed to a scaffold for a structure they'd previously explored: Firstly, secondly and finally.

When cold called to share their responses, students were encouraged to list them using the structure. Firstly, we thought X; secondly, it's a good idea because Y.. and finally, we thought Z. It all worked so well, linking prep for writing with the sharing of ideas and knowledge. In some subsequent cold calls, students were asked to only add ideas that hadn't been heard so that they had to listen to each other. Others were asked which of their three were the most important, as a probing follow-up.

In a parallel class I observed the same exact lesson but, here the scaffold was 'on one hand, whereas on the other hand' and the pairs had to come up with two opposing arguments, preparing to share them with that structure. On one hand we thought it's a good idea because X, whereas on the other hand, it's not a good idea because Y... These structural scaffolds helped students to frame and formalise their responses ahead of a writing task.

Cold-Call to check for Understanding in Year 2.

My final example comes from a lovely Year 2 class where cold calling was firmly embedded and normalised as children sat on the carpet for story time. The expectation had been established that the teacher would read a passage and from time to time stop to check that people were listening, following, engaged. He read a section and then paused. Ok, let's see.. Jamie, would you summarise for us.. what's happened in the story so far?. Jamie gave his summary, showing he'd been following. Jamie was ready because this was a routine they'd established - anyone, at any time, might be asked to summarise. The teacher reinforced key elements and filled in some gaps and then they moved on, every child listening intently.

At other times, he would say.. Ok then,... so, what do we think is going to happen next.?....pause. Nobody raised a hand; they were all thinking, ready to answer. Then the teacher selected.. Shafiq - what do you think? Shafiq made his suggestion. And why do you think that? - the teacher probed. And Alicia, what do you think? ... And so on. The fact that anyone might be asked, in a low key way was a great example of inclusive cold calling; it kept students focused and interested .. and included, in a low-threat manner.

What these examples illustrate to me is how important it is for teachers to understand the rationale for techniques and to have good routines to deploy them responsively. There's a broad zoomed out set of possible techniques in a repertoire and there's a zoomed in understanding of the specific steps that make each technique really work well. In each of these five examples the teacher was intentionally using each technique but it was the way they linked them all up responsively that made them work so well. Each example shows how it's possible to engage everyone in thinking and talking in an inclusive manner, gaining feedback from the class about their understanding in order to decide on the next steps of the instructional process.

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Brilliant questioning sequences: some examples from the field.

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I've written a lot about questioning techniques because it's such an important element of responsive teaching in most contexts. I'm always interested in how teachers weave techniques together in a sequences responsively.... making in-the-moment decisions that flow from students' responses. During my work with schools I've had the privilege to observe some absolutely superb examples...

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One of the most powerful ideas I've engaged with recently is using a diagram to visualise a shared model of the learning process; using it to get a feel for how learning works in general but also to identify reasons for why it can sometimes not happen. This is the diagram I have in my Rosenshine Principles book, courtesy of Oliver Caviglioli:

I've found it massively helpful as a focus during CPD as we've explored a range of interlocking, overlapping ideas:

Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought' and various ideas in the classic 'Why do students forget everything I say?' chapter.

Rosenshine's Principles: the value of practice, the use of daily review to activate prior learning; weekly and monthly review to enact retrieval practice; the need to break learning down into small steps.

Nuthall's observations from Hidden Lives of Learners: the importance of prior knowledge; his 'three times rule'

Shimamura's MARGE: A: Attend - the need to secure attention and the challenge of mind-wandering; R: teachers' opportunities to build relational models for areas of knowledge; G-E: the generate-evaluate cycle whereby learners bring ideas into working memory (learning is generative), evaluate for accuracy, add to or adjust their schema and then reconsolidate.

The near inevitability of forgetting, the role of retrieval, the need to connect new learning to prior knowledge and a whole host of other issues can be explored in some depth where we have a shared focus for framing the discussion:

( NB: The coloured labels here represent the discussion and thinking we might have around the diagram. They're not meant to complicate the simple diagram itself. I would hesitate to share the labels until I'd had the discussion first in any CPD scenario.)

It always frustrates me when people see a simplified model and jump to the assumption that the thinking is simplistic. Of course it's not. As I've explored before - schema-building is a rich and complex business; 'remembering' and 'learning' as labels encompass nearly anything we can be said to have learned. They're broad terms, not reductive and confining. I also find it frustrating - and fruitless - when people simply suggest that, 'it's a bit more complicated than that' - almost as a kind of free pass not to have to pose an alternative.

If someone suggests, rather pejoratively, that school has been reduced to 'memorising knowledge', I think there's a discussion to be had where, if we re-frame knowledge and memory as broad terms - actually, building schema (formed of knowledge, beliefs, memories, preferences.... of many kinds) in our memory (hence memorised?) is actually good enough as a concept to deal with quite a lot of the things we want to achieve in the field of education. If someone doesn't agree with that, then I'd want them to present a better model - not just tell me this one doesn't work. That way we have competing models to reference and debate, rather than the nebulousness of 'there's more to it than that'.

In a teacher CPD context, the most important reason for exploring a model is that, if the model is any good, it can help to explain things we observe and help suggest solutions to problems. In my experience the model above does exactly that - time and time again. For example, students don't learn what you're trying to teach for all kinds of reasons. It helps to understand why:

Attention deficits: they don't absorb ideas from lesson interactions because their attention is not given to the specific learning points in question; it might be elsewhere. You can't just learn stuff because of a discussion other people are having in the same room. Solution: strategies around securing attention, using narrative structures, inclusive questioning, attention-focusing stimuli.

Memory overload: working memory is finite; often students are dealing with too many ideas and pieces of information; they can't process it all and things don't make sense or stick . Solution: break concepts and tasks into smaller practisable steps and elements.

Lack of prior knowledge:the big hidden variable across the class: students will often not have a schema for the concepts being taught sufficiently well developed to make sense of or retain the new knowledge. Solution: develop a broad curriculum packed with knowledge and experiences across multiple interlocking domains that allow students to fill in knowledge gaps and broaden their schema. Check students' prior knowledge as a routine element of teaching rather than making assumptions.

Insufficient fluency of recall: very often a learning issue is simply a question of practice. Students haven't yet had or taken the opportunity to practise retrieving and applying their knowledge with enough frequency, intensity or variety to have developed the fluency and confidence expected or needed to move to the next stage. Solution: increase the range, intensity and frequency of practice tasks so that students gain confidence and fluency.

Task completion is poor proxy for learning: we can do all kinds of things immediately after being shown or simply by accessing information presented to us, without it forming part of long-term memory or leading to any fluency of recall for use at a later date. Solution: engage in more checking for understanding and more generative activity with supports removed; space practice so that long-term memory and recall are strengthened away from the illusion of knowing through recency.

That's just a sub-set of all kinds of issues that the model deals with. It makes sense of the problems that occur in very many lesson scenarios and provides solutions.

Of course there's a layer of this that is very much related to the everyday business of school subjects: maths, writing, history, creativity in art; understanding science .... There's another layer of how we think and how teaching affects us related to social and emotional development and, very possibly, a more elaborate model could show these things both as separate and then interacting to add further clarity to our understanding. Motivation and our complex responses to feedback would come into this as would other deeper existential elements of who we are: self-image and sense of purpose, for example. It would become a stretch to force everything into a deliberately simple learning and remembering, schema-building cycle.

But the point isn't to have a universal model for all things, burying itself under the weight of complexities it seeks to simplify. The point is to develop useful versatile models that give us insights and offer solutions - within whatever boundaries are needed to maintain their validity and usefulness.

On a very practical level, I can only say that, since introducing the schema-building model into my work, I've found it massively powerful and, given how many areas of teaching and learning it helps with and how much mileage for improvement there is within those areas, I'm not sure I'll need a different one any time soon.

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A model for the learning process. And why it helps to have one.

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One of the most powerful ideas I've engaged with recently is using a diagram to visualise a shared model of the learning process; using it to get a feel for how learning works in general but also to identify reasons for why it can sometimes not happen.

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Effective questioning in the classroom can make or break your lesson. These questioning techniques are ones that I use time and again in my primary school lessons; the questioning examples given are drawn from maths but the principles apply across the curriculum.
I am a Key Stage 2 teacher, but I've seen secondary colleagues use similar questioning techniques in the classroom in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.

What is questioning in the classroom?

Effective questioning is an essential teaching skill that enables the educator to check pupils' understanding, broaden and deepen the topic under discussion, and model clear thinking skills, and speaking and listening skills.

Why do we need effective questioning techniques in the classroom?

"Good learning starts with questions, not answers." Guy Claxton, Professor in Education and Director of CLIO Development, University of Bristol.

And better questions tend to deepen and facilitate the learning process in the limited amount of time you have with your students, so let's make the most of them.

Here's are the top 3 reasons I believe in the importance of teacher questions.

1. Firstly, if we remember our assessment for learning training, we will know that questioning in the classroom in the classroom is a powerful formative assessment tool. Executed properly, higher order questions from the classroom teacher gives the teacher the opportunity to gauge student understanding of the topic as well as enabling students to actively participate in their own learning.

2. Secondly, a well thought out questioning strategy can help to build the relationship between teacher and pupil by encouraging engagement and improving verbal fluency of key concepts whether in primary maths or any other subject.

3. Thirdly, good questions also lead to good class discussions, better student interactions, and ultimately, the shared understanding that is part and parcel of the learning experience.

See also: How To Learn Maths

List of the 9 most effective classroom questioning techniques

This article will guide you through the 9 key questioning skills that, together with other teaching strategies, will have the most impact on your teaching and your classroom practice.

The majority of these 9 are open questions; they require longer, more thought out answers than those that only need a simple, short response (closed questions).

This means these types of questions usually won't have either a correct answer or a wrong answer - an idea pupils may need some time to fully understand and accept.

1. Are you sure?

Developing pupils' metacognition and critical thinking skills are crucial if we want them to be less reliant on the teacher as the person who 'knows'.

If a pupil is used to asking a teacher 'Is this right?' and getting a response then they are likely to not have checked their answer, not gained a deep enough understanding of the concept they are learning or have their need for affirmation so ingrained over years of schooling that they simply have to ask.

Asking 'Are you sure?' with a questioning tone will instantly flip the tables and create blind panic amongst your whole class. Especially when you ask the question as often when they are right as wrong. Even more so if you follow it up with 'Well okay, if you are sure...' or 'If it makes sense to you...'

Now, obviously blind panic is not what we are aiming for, but it is a stage they will need to briefly enter until they get used to this and the other questions in the post.

Soon, especially if you encourage a growth mindset in your primary school, they will pick up the idea that they really have to know if they are right or not and crucially, why. This leads us into a key follow-up question...

Other relevant articles

2. How do you know?

To be able to answer 'Are you sure?' confidently, pupils will have needed to have checked their calculation/explanation themselves, more and more often before they have even given their initial response. Asking 'How do you know?' ensures this by asking them to share their reasoning with you, a group or the whole class.

This question is also a great way to really develop students' thinking skills; they need to be clear not only that they have the right answer, but that they arrived at it by following the right method.

The result of this increased metacognition is children will be more reliant on themselves (and each other) for checking their understanding, method and answer.

3. What do you notice?

Alongside metacognition, developing pupils' ability to generalise can reap huge rewards. In other words, encouraging pupils to be mindful and look for patterns within and outside the mathematical area currently being learnt. This also helps their number sense.

Asking pupils 'What do you notice?' when showing 2 calculations or problems at the same time can help children to see what is similar and different. It's a key question when building procedural variation.

It also uncovers where a pupil's understanding is, showing whether their current line of thinking is relevant to the current learning, in turn enabling you to nudge them towards more relevant thinking where necessary.

In a lesson on exchanging you could ask the following question.

4. What's the same and what's different?

If you want a similar type of question that serves the same purpose as 'What do you notice?' but is more confining in its responses, asking 'What's the same and what's different about these 2 calculations / problems / statements?' will push that conversation on with you still guiding the direction.

5. Can you convince me?

This is another question that can help develop generalisation. Asking individuals or small groups to work together to convince you of something develops their depth of understanding and ability to reason.

Here are some maths question examples:

'Convince me that subtraction is the opposite of addition'

'Convince me that all multiples of 8 are multiples of 2'

Flipping around the previous question's example, 'convince me that you always need to exchange when you subtract a 2 digit number (subtrahend) where the ones are greater than the initial number (minuend)'

6. Is there another way?

'Is there another way to find 25% of £80?'

'Is there another way to work out 47 + 28?'

'Is there another way you could have used to find all the possibilities?'

These kinds of questions help children who have not used a modeled or shared method realise they are not 'wrong' because their problem solving method is different (they may be less or more efficient). It will also highlight to children that in Mathematics, as in life, there are many ways to skin a cat. It can also be used as a general challenge activity for pupils.

7. Is it always, sometimes, or never true?

This is a great higher-order thinking question to further develop children's ability to generalise and, dependent on the specific question used, their number sense. As with all the questions, it develops reasoning skills and can deepen understanding.

For more always sometimes never questions download this free resource of 108 questions to help children get to greater depth

'Is it always, sometimes or never true that you should round and adjust when you subtract 9 from a number?'

8. Can you imagine?

Building pupils' ability to visualise things without actually doing it themselves helps in a number of disciplines such as Computing or Science as well as mathematics. Looking specifically at mathematics, it helps pupils understand problems and raises their ability to reason with greater understanding.

So in a word problem, if you ask a pupil to imagine the train pulling up at that station at that time and then continuing on its journey to the next station, it can help contextualise an abstract time problem.

This type of questioning in the classroom is also a handy way to nudge children away from requiring concrete apparatus when you think they are ready, for example, 'Can you imagine exchanging that ten for ten ones?'

9. I think I understand what you mean, are you saying?

Okay, so our final question is more of a leading question than an open-ended question, but it is still a very valuable tool. You will always find times where a pupil's ability to verbalise their reasoning is not quite at the same stage as their actual thinking and thought process.

Dependent on the situation and the pupil, you may find it supports them, your discussion or the pace of the lesson in general by reflecting on the students response by saying

'I think I understand what you mean, are you saying you would always round and adjust because you know that 9 will always be next to 10 so you will always be able to do the same adjustment afterwards?'

In other words, build on their reasoning, making it sharper or more concise so that the group or whole class can develop their understanding and the pupil giving the explanation can internalise their understanding further.

There are several variations on this question, such as '

You've really tried hard to explain that... are you saying...' or

'It's a really difficult thing to explain, you've helped me understand it I think. Is this what you mean...'

So there you have it. Almost 9 questions that when used across school will significantly impact on teaching and learning and ultimately, enable all pupils, high and low ability students, to achieve with the National Curriculum, SATs and in using mathematics in their general lives.

Don't rush the answers when questioning in the classroom!

One final piece of advice if you're new to these questioning strategies - think about how you're going to be handling the answers to your questions too.

Give students time to think about their answers, prompt them for when you're looking for a long or a short answer, encourage the entire class to think about their own answers using their mini whiteboards to share their own thoughts.

These are the higher order skills from Bloom's Taxonomy at work here, so it can take more time than usual. This is the learning process in action!

Read more excellent teaching and professional development articles

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9 Effective Questioning Strategies in Maths - Third Space Learning

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Effective questioning in the classroom is a key part of good teaching and learning. Here are the 9 best questioning techniques to use.

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Via Jamie Clark

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Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work

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Paul Kirschner, John Sweller & Richard Clark

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Paul Kirschner, John Sweller & Richard Clark

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Agarwal et al: Retrieval Practice Consistently Benefits Student Learning: a Systematic Review of Applied Research in Schools and Classrooms

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Agarwal et al: Retrieval Practice Consistently Benefits Student Learning: a Systematic Review of Applied Research in Schools and Classrooms

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If teachers are going to have a significant impact with the feedback they give, it needs to lead to improved outcomes for students. I am increasingly convinced that feedback needs to be constituted less in terms of a review of what has gone before and more in terms of very specific actions that students should take in order to move forward.

I think that too much effort is wasted in describing the work students produce or in giving generic wishful evaluative feedback - along the lines of 'you need to improve the structure of your paragraphs' or 'try to include more original ideas'. Some of the www/ebi feedback I have seen amounts to little more than telling students to 'get the answers right' or 'try to produce better work'. Instead of running the risk of giving nebulous unactionable feedback, teachers should focus much more on allocating tasks to students that address their learning needs. A student should be able to read or hear their teacher's feedback and then do something very specific and concrete that will improve their learning.

To keep this very simple - using only words beginning with R, because that's how it started to fall out - I think there are broadly five main types of actions that students should be asked to take after their work has been evaluated:
1. Redraft or Re-do
Redraft this piece of work / this paragraph/ this graph.... by doing X, by adding Y, by correcting Z...

Re-do this piece of work but this time make sure you include X, you measure Y, you state Z correctly....

Redrafting is very powerful provided that the actions are very specific and the scale of the task is manageable for both teacher and student.
2. Rehearse or Repeat
This could have been called practise and drill - if I wasn't using R words. As any musician will know, the feedback from most instrumental lessons is to practise something specific: some scales, sections of the piece, some finger exercises, a performance, each time paying attention to some very particular skill element for additional fluency. This could work for many subjects including Maths:

Practise your number bonds to 100 with these questions...

Practise factorising basic common expressions by doing these questions...

In French or English, you could practise writing certain type of sentence: Rehearse your use of future tense/dialogue markers/fronted adverbials/connectives - by re-writing these 20 statements adding the appropriate phrase, punctuation - or anything that can be done repeatedly.

Note, it is no good asking most students to simply 'practise doing X'. They need to be given specific questions so that they are doing X at right level of difficulty and at the right pace and scale. It is also no good giving them lots of one-off questions. Students need to do lots of the same type of questions to consolidate their understanding before being challenged with a wider variety.
3. Revisit and Respond
Very simply, this means 'do these questions'. It means, on the basis of what I'm seeing, you need more practice answering questions like this. It could mean going back over fundamentals or being given extension questions. Instead of a commentary on what students have done before, teachers simply issue new questions informed by their reading of student work or their test performances. This replaces a focus on retrospective marking with the proactive forward-looking approach of issuing questions or giving students work to do. Quite a big shift in emphasis but one that is likely to have much greater impact.
4. Re-learn and Re-test
This is very simply a case of specifying a set of knowledge and asking students to return to the routines of retrieval practice. They may need to re-visit previous learning too but mainly it is a case of self-quizzing repeatedly using a variety of memory techniques to ensure certain ideas, words, equations, facts, details, quotations - are learned. It's a very specific form of feedback: You still don't know all of these facts: go and learn them; prepare for a mini-test. That might be more productive as feedback for a history or geography essay than any number of comments on their paragraph structure.
5. Research and Record
Here, students may have some issues with the scope of their exposure to ideas and are showing the need to show deeper insight, wider references, more imagination. The solution to this could be more reading or more research of a different kind. However the instruction to 'do some more research' could be horribly unproductive or lead down too many blind alleys. Teachers could specify what reading should be done or where exactly students should research - but also require them to record their findings.

If you reconstitute all feedback so that any students can receive it and know precisely what they now need to do, in detail, then you've cracked it. This can replace any number of evaluative comments on previous work. Try it.
Teach First Marking

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#FiveWays of Giving Effective Feedback as Actions

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If teachers are going to have a significant impact with the feedback they give, it needs to lead to improved outcomes for students. I am increasingly convinced that feedback needs to be constituted less in terms of a review of what has gone before and more in terms of very specific actions that students should...

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Arguably one of the most powerful and effective elements of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction is the importance of asking questions. But are some types of questions better than others? Let ' s take a quick look at Rosenshine's principles before highlighting 6 questions he recommends we use in the classroom to help students think more deeply...
Read our complete guide to Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction...
What are Rosenshine ' s Principles of Instruction?

Rosenshine ' s 10 Principles of Instruction come from three research areas:

Cognitive science

Classroom practices

Cognitive support

These principles aim to address how people learn and acquire new information as well as how teachers can implement effective classroom strategies. Currently, these principles are becoming increasingly popular in education - and with good reason: they are offering a much-needed bridge between research and practice.

Rosenshine's third Principle of Instruction in particular is all about asking a high quantity of high-quality questions. As learning itself cannot be directly observed, asking questions can help you check your students ' understanding.

What types of questions should you use in your lesson?

There are different types of questions that students generally get asked within their lessons. These include both factual and process questions.

Factual questions

These types of questions require fact-based answers. For example, it could be specific questions about the material that was just taught or more broad questions such as asking a student to summarise the content.

Using factual questions allow you to use retrieval practice, which is the process of generating an answer to a question. One benefit of doing this is that recalling previously-learnt knowledge can create stronger memory traces, making it more likely to be transferred into your students ' long-term memory.

Process questions

Process questions allow students to explain the process they used to answer the question that was given to them. These types of questions can be used to help your students self-reflect and develop their metacognitive skills. Developing these skills are not only useful for their academic performance but will help them become independent learners, be more resilient and develop more grit.

Do these questions work?

In a previous study, teachers were either trained to use more factual and process questions or did not receive any training before teaching students new material. Researchers found that students whose teachers received the training had much higher scores on the test than those who did not. Therefore, it seems that using these two types of questions can help your students gain more from the lesson.

What are Rosenshine ' s suggested questions?

To help build on this, Rosenshine listed several questions that he thinks can help develop student learning. These include: in his seminal paper ,
1. What is the main idea of ...?

This is a type of factual question. By implementing this question in the lesson, it can promote retrieval practice. It would be helpful to use this question after teaching new material, as it will allow students to consolidate their learning and check their understanding.

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of ...?

This type of question will allow your students to evaluate a topic. It can help encourage deeper thought into the material, which would help them learn the topic better.

3. How does this tie in with what we have learnt before?

Using this question in your classroom will encourage students to make connections between the two topics, helping them remember the material better.

4. Which one is the best ... and why?

You can use this type of question when comparing two different things, as it would encourage your students to be inquisitive. For example, it can be used when learning about different types of energy sources.

The addition of " why " to the question helps your students engage more deeply with the topic and elaborate on their answers. It can also allow the students to explain the process they used to answer the original question.

5. Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ...?

This question encourages group work and helps prompt a discussion about the statement. In turn, it can improve your students ' overall learning experience as well as their ability to overcome conflict.

6. What do you still not understand about ...?

Asking this question helps you establish how well the class engaged with the material and what is missing in their knowledge. It also makes it much easier to fill any gaps they may have in their knowledge. This also develops their ability to self-reflect, which can help improve their grades.

Final Thoughts

It may sound simple to ask a lot of questions during your lessons, but asking the right ones can help your students engage more with their learning. Using Rosenshine ' s suggested questions allows you to understand how well your class has engaged with the material, prompt the use of retrieval practice and help develop your students ' metacognitive skills.

To learn more about Rosenshine ' s Principles and how to use them in the classroom, why not book our Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction CPD workshop?

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6 questions Rosenshine suggested you ask your students

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Asking your students good questions is a great way to help them think more deeply about their learning, and for you to gauge their understanding.

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Spaced Practice - The Learning Scientists

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Retrieval Practice - The Learning Scientists

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Concrete Examples — The Learning Scientists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pupils forget very swiftly. We use daily recaps and knowledge tests to boost pupils' long-term memory retention and prevent forgetting.

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

Knowledge tests are another butterfly - high impact, low effort. What I love about our knowledge tests is that they are cumulative, so that pupils revise and remember what they've learned. We set GCSE-style exams for depth, and we set knowledge exams to test a much fuller breadth of the knowledge pupils have learned. Knowledge exams are 35-question exams that take 60 minutes to complete. They are beautifully simple: they are organised onto 1 sheet of A4 paper, and they can be answered by pupils on one double-sided piece of A4. The breadth we can achieve with these exams is staggering. By Year 9, we have 3 knowledge tests per subject; they organise 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 7 and 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 8, centred on those years' knowledge organisers. Pupils are challenged to revise and remember what they've learned over all the years they spent in secondary school. I am willing to bet that many of our teachers could not beat even our Year 7 pupils on these exams across all subjects! Pages packed with answers for every pupil in the school. The humble knowledge test is a great catcher of knowledge.

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

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

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

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

How much are pupils remembering?

Where are they forgetting?

Where are teachers overloaded?

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

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

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

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Done well, "Show Call" is a powerful tool for supercharging your students' work. Not only does it keep them on their toes because it could be their work that is shown, but it can also create a culture where all students are keen to help one another improve. In this piece, Darren Leslie explores how he uses Show Call in his lessons.
One of my favourite techniques from Teach Like a Champion 3.0 is Show Call. Show Call is where you visually share a student's work with the class using a visualiser or another tool that can project an image. Show Call affords us several opportunities in our teaching, we could live mark a piece of work, we could praise a student by sharing their best work and we could display work that is incomplete and study it with the class with the aim of improving the work. Over time I have come to prefer the latter. Taking a student's incomplete work and helping them to make improvements using their classmates' ideas is becoming a key feature of my classroom.

Lemov asks "what's the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it's to study the error itself". And it is this idea that forms the basis of how I use Show Call in my classroom. I use it to respond to student errors and instead of offering the student feedback in the moment I take their work, project it onto the board, and then proceed to ask their classmates for their ideas of how to improve the work, where they might have gone wrong and to check that we can all identify errors in one another's work.

"what's the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it's to study the error itself" (Lemov)

Building a classroom culture where this is part of the day-to-day workings of the room takes time and in the early days of teaching a class, I will project complete work that is correct and use it as an opportunity to live mark and provide praise for the student whose work is being projected. This helps to normalise the technique and build awareness that at any moment I may take your work and share it with the class. Getting this right is vital if we are to progress to using Show Call to its full potential.

Over time I will begin to take student work that is incomplete, missing a key step or with a few common errors so that we can study the error together, as a class. There are some key ingredients to getting this right and that begins with what Lemov calls 'the take'.
The Take
The goal is to make the take feel familiar to the student, like an everyday occurrence that is safe, and that nothing bad will happen. The first few times I project a student's work I will offer a quiet explanation: "your work is great. I would love to share it with the class" or "this is brilliant. I'd love to share it".

As it becomes routine, I transition to taking their work with them knowing it will be shared. First by letting them know, "this is great. I can't wait to share it" and slowly moving on to seamlessly taking their work with a nod of thanks and appreciation helping to communicate the normalcy of this in the classroom. Throughout, a smile and a thank you go a long way in helping to build a culture where the students are comfortable with sharing their work and the practice of studying errors.

After the students recognise that sharing their work is part and parcel of the classroom, I can then begin my circulation by declaring, "I am coming round to look for great work to Show Call", making it something for the students to strive for in the classroom.

Getting this part right is arguably the most important aspect of a Show Call. We would never want to humiliate a student or make them feel targeted so being super selective on whose work you Show Call, especially at the beginning will help to generate a culture where students' work is studied deeply.
The Reveal
The way that we 'reveal' work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead. Initially, I won't name the student whose work is being beamed onto the projector. I will state that "we are going to look at someone's work and talk about it for a little bit" setting the scene for the discussion to follow. It's important to note that the tone that you use needs to be as casual as possible, like this is the most normal thing in the world to happen.

"The way that we 'reveal' work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead."

As we begin to study errors more deeply naming the author of the work can come into play but often maintaining anonymity can be super powerful. We could move on, saying "let's check someone's work to see if they remembered to simplify their fraction" and if we wanted to use names we could say "Here's how Daisy solved this problem. What do you think?" or "Martin has made a simple common error. Take a minute to look at his work silently to see if you can spot it".

Now that the work has been displayed and the students are giving it their full attention what happens next should always focus on getting better and helping the students get better at the task in hand.
The Cognitive Work
As the work is being beamed onto the projector from under the visualiser an important part is considering how you want the students to interact with it. Perhaps they could read it silently for a minute and compare it with their own work or maybe they could discuss it with a shoulder partner. Whatever path you choose making sure that it is the students that are doing most of the cognitive work is key. You could say "take a minute to silently read Jamie's work" followed by "take thirty seconds to share with your partner how you would solve this problem".

With either option I would then cold call a student to have them share their thoughts "Gabriel, what do you think?" or "Keira, what should Jamie do to fix his error". As the students are offering their thoughts and building on one another's ideas I will chart the conversation on the board over the top of the image being projected, helping everyone to keep on track. By now the students will have concluded and it is time to wrap up the conversation.

Sometimes, I will provide a review to make sure everyone knows how to fix the error we have just studied and other times I will say "as Keira mentioned Jamie needed to do this, so take a minute now to tidy up your work". It is important that time is given for students to tidy their work and make any necessary changes before moving on.

Show Call is a regular feature in my classroom and with time it becomes a rigorous process for studying errors and what makes it powerful is that through questioning and probing it is the students themselves that improve the work of their peers. This builds a scholarly culture to the classroom that keeps the cognitive workout firmly on the side of the students.

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Using Show Call In The Classroom - HWRK Magazine

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Done well, "Show Call" is a powerful tool for supercharging your students' work. Not only does it keep them on their toes because it could be their work that is shown, but it can also create a culture where all students are keen to help one another improve.

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Written marking takes up huge amounts of teachers' time. If the average teacher marks for just over 5 hours a week, that's 200 hours of marking a year. In a secondary school of 100 teachers, that's 20,000 hours of marking.

Written marking is non-renewable: it's a one-off. Each written comment I put in a pupil's book only impacts once on that one pupil. What else could we do with that 20,000 hours, that would impact more positively on future pupils and other teachers? Marking has a very low ratio of impact-to-effort, and a very high opportunity cost.

There are much better ways to share feedback so pupils improve. There are much better ways to focus teachers' limited time. That's why in some schools, teachers no longer mark pupils' books - at all.
Feedback is a butterfly
Feedback is effective when it is timely (not too late after the task), frequent (not too scarce) and acted on (not ignored). Written marking often militates against this: teachers burn out and it becomes less timely, less frequent and less acted on by pupils and teachers.

There are many ways of giving feedback without written marking:

What if we continually worked on making our feedback have the highest-impact possible on learning?

Feedback should maximise the responsibility pupils take for self-checking, correcting, editing and redrafting their work. It should maximise preemptive teaching, preventing frequent errors and common misconceptions; it minimises laborious, slow, reactive written comments. Although teachers should still read pupil books, score exams, and circle misspellings to be corrected within lessons, written marking of pupil books outside lessons might be scrapped altogether. To monitor marking as evidence to hold teachers accountable for pupil progress is an illusion - comforting for managers, but unhelpful for teachers and pupils.

What I've seen is that this shift transforms staff culture. No teacher has to take home books in evenings, weekends and holidays; no manager is scrutinising pupil books for frequent teacher comments; no teacher is desperately marking books at the last minute before an impending book scrutiny. Instead, teachers are trusted. Teachers can focus on teaching well, ensuring every pupil is understanding and remembering, and helping their pupils love their subjects. Pupils are motivated, working harder than they ever have before, and improving their writing fast, as they take responsibility for checking and improving it.

When the school has 100 teachers, stopping teachers from marking even just 5 hours a week will save us 20,000 hours every year. Good school leaders stop people from doing good things, so they focus on better things. Next time, I'll blog about moving from unsustainable marking loads to renewable resourcing.

About Joe Kirby

School leader, education writer, Director of Education and co-founder, Athena Learning Trust, Deputy head and co-founder, Michaela Community School, English teacher

This entry was posted in Education. Bookmark the permalink.

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Written marking takes up huge amounts of teachers' time. If the average teacher marks for just over 5 hours a week, that's 200 hours of marking a year. In a secondary school of 100 teachers, that's 20,000 hours of marking. Written marking is non-renewable: it's a one-off.

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I've written before about marking, but just to summarise: it has always been something I've loved doing. There was something in that Boxer-like satisfaction of ploughing through an unending pile of books, leaving lovingly crafted comments in an array of coloured pens and stickers that just looked like it would work so well. How could pupils fail to make progress when I'd spent so many hours on them?

So something I was nervous about when starting at Michaela was their approach to marking; that is, don't do it. I'd read Joe Kirby's blog and spoken to him at length, but remained steadfastly concerned that marking worked - if you ensured pupils

acted on feedback. I then moved to the idea that marking worked, but at what cost - a teacher with six or ten classes cannot be expected to give the detailed feedback the lightly-timetabled members of SLT seem to manage on a weekly basis.

In my second week at Michaela, we had a department meeting where Joe brought up the excellent question: it's great for workload that we don't mark, but how do we make sure we're giving feedback to make pupils' writing better?

One of the main reasons I think I find marking helpful is because it holds me accountable - I am actually reading if I am putting a pen to paper to say something about it. (I annotate the books I read in the same way - it helps me to remain focused.) But while this is an essential strategy when it is 7am on a Saturday, pre-intervention, and you want to clear the last 20 books to enjoy a semblance of a weekend when you return home that afternoon, or 9pm on a Wednesday when you just want to sleep, actually, I had underestimated my ability to focus.

To begin with at Michaela, I couldn't get out of the habit of marking. I would spend two hours with about 60 books, circling and underlining when I couldn't resist; writing limitless notes to share with the class, photocopying paragraphs to get pupils to annotate their peers' examples. Joe's comments on this kind of feedback were: 'would you want all teachers to be photocopying twice or three times a week? Is it worth the time getting the pupils to annotate a piece of paper they are then just throwing away? What else could you be doing with that time?' Moreover, I was reminded of why marking is not always the best method - if I'd put the merest hint of a mark on a child's book, their hands shot in the air: 'why is this circled?' 'I can't read your writing on this spelling correction.' 'Why is there a question mark here?' Marking breeds over-reliance on the teacher.

Now, I'm getting into the swing of the Michaela way. I read my pupils' books once or twice a week. I teach four classes, each with between 28 and 32 pupils, so it is about 120 books in all. I read 60 books in 30 minutes. As I read, I make notes: spellings lots are getting wrong, things they're all doing well at, and the main issues they need to improve. I note down anyone whose paragraph is amazing to reward with merits or show the class; I note down anyone whose work is messy to give a demerit to. It looks something like this:

In the following lesson, I teach the spellings from the front, and then test pupils. They will write their corrections out in green pen, interleaving the ones they got wrong, or the 'toughest three' if they managed, on this occasion, to score 100%. I'll test them again the following day. I'll share the positive things I found and celebrate the star paragraphs, and then explain carefully, perhaps modelling on the board (as Katie Ashford has described brilliantly here or occasionally putting a great paragraph from the class under the visualiser, how they can all improve their own paragraphs. And then they improve them, in green pen. It looks like this:

The second powerful tool is in-class feedback. With an excellent behaviour system, silent writing for 25 minutes means I can see every child's paragraph twice while circulating, giving them suggestions and tweaks while they write. On my colleague Lucy Newman's suggestion, I've also started using my visualiser more. This way, we can take a pupil's book, display it to the class, and show pupils how to edit their mistakes in that very lesson, just by giving oral feedback on the common errors they are making, or the aspects they really need to focus on improving.

The thing is, what makes the difference in their writing is the quality of the feedback and how timely it is. They don't need feedback on a paragraph they wrote two weeks ago. At Michaela, they can improve the paragraph they wrote yesterday, while it is fresh in their minds. I miss marking, I do. But I'm realising I did it for me, not for the pupils.

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I've written before about marking, but just to summarise: it has always been something I've loved doing. There was something in that Boxer-like satisfaction of ploughing through an unending pile of books, leaving lovingly crafted comments in an array of coloured pens and stickers that just looked like it would work so well.

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Authors: Authors: Victoria Elliott, Jo-Ann Baird, Therese N. Hopfenbeck, Jenni Ingram, Ian Thompson, Natalie Usher, Mae Zantout (University of Oxford, Department of Education); and James Richardson and Robbie Coleman (Education Endowment Foundation)

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Review of the evidence on written marking

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Feedback may have a positive impact through supporting pupils to focus future learning on areas of weakness, through identifying and explaining misconceptions, through supporting them in taking greater responsibility for their own improvement or through increasing pupils' motivation to improve.

Implementing feedback successfully will require:

communicate with pupils, teachers, and parents, about practices and expectations that relate to feedback policies,

assessing pupil understanding, so that you know what needs to be improved,

consider the ​'opportunity cost' associated with different feedback practices,

ensuring that feedback can be acted upon, for example through including specific information on what a pupil has done successfully or not, assisted with an explanation as to why,

carefully considering how feedback will be received, including impacts on self-confidence and motivation,

providing opportunities for pupils to act-upon the feedback after it has been given,
evaluating how effective the feedback has been.

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Feedback is information given to the learner about the learner's performance relative to learning goals or outcomes.

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Principles from psychology to enhance pre-K to 12 teaching and learning.

Psychological science has much to contribute to enhancing teaching and learning in the everyday classroom by providing key insights on:

Effective instruction.

Classroom environments that promote learning.

Appropriate use of assessment-including data, tests, measurement, and research methods that inform practice.

We present here the most important principles from psychology-the Top 20-that would be of greatest use in the context of pre-K to 12 classroom teaching and learning. We encourage consideration and practice of the Top 20 throughout all teacher preparation programs to ensure a solid foundation of psychological knowledge in pre-K to 12 instruction.

Download the Full Report

The Top 20 are categorized into five areas of psychological functioning:

1. Thinking and learning: How do students think and learn?

2. Motivation: What motivates students?

3. Social-emotional learning: Why are social context, interpersonal relations, and emotional well-being important to student learning?

4. Classroom management: How can classroom behavior best be managed?

5. Assessment: How can teachers effectively assess student progress?

Contact Education

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Top 20 Principles for Pre-K to 12 Education

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Key insights from psychology on effective instruction; classroom environments that promote learning; and appropriate use of assessment - including data, tests, measurement and research methods that inform practice.

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I haven't 'marked' a set of exercise books for any of my geography classes in over three years. Before any of you start screaming 'competency measures' at me and wondering how I am still in a job, let me elaborate.

My school has made the move away from traditional written marking as the main form of feedback, towards embracing verbal feedback methods. In 2018, myself and a maths teacher colleague Michelle Marshall, both of us from Reigate School in Surrey, took part in the Verbal Feedback Project, run by UCL and Ross McGill. The project was intended to allow teachers and leaders to begin conversations which would allow them to move away from the onerous and ineffective methods of traditional written marking, towards more immediate, effective and time-reducing methods of verbal feedback. In this blog, I will explain two of the main methods that we now use as a school. However, it is important to realise that each of these methods have one thing in common - they cause students to THINK HARD about any feedback given, and, crucially, the improvements that they subsequently need to make.
Why is thinking hard important?
Placing students in the 'struggle zone' at any point in a lesson is important. Bjork and Bjork coined the phrase 'desirable difficulties', and whilst this is often applied to tasks given during the deliberate practice phase of a lesson, it is pertinent to the feedback stage, too. As Daniel Willingham says, 'memory is the residue of thought'. In other words, what students are made to think hard about, is more likely to stick. Ultimately, our long term goal is to make our students better geographers, mathematicians, etc., so thinking about how we go about doing this is crucial. Writing written comments in exercise books days or weeks after the event for students to passively read and often do nothing with resulted in little to no improvement, with teachers pulling out their hair wondering why in the next round of the marking cycle, their students were still making the same mistakes.

Consequently, any move that a school or individual makes towards verbal feedback needs to be an informed one, embedded in the findings of cognitive science that states that thinking hard is more likely to lead to meaningful learning. Each of the methods described below cause students to take ownership of understanding and identifying why and HOW they need to improve, so that next time they tackle a similar piece of work, they stand a greater chance of doing so with improved outcomes.

Whole class feedback sheet - what is it?

There are plenty of examples of these online with boxes dedicated to improvements that need to be made, common misconceptions, spelling errors, etc. Mrs Humanities has an excellent one on her website, (shown here, along with a completed version) and a Google search will throw up a multitude of other examples. However, a plain piece of paper will work equally well - remember that it is the quality of your verbal feedback that is going to move your students forward, not the jazziness of your whole class verbal feedback sheet.

Completed whole class verbal feedback sheet.

How it is used:
A piece of work that the class has completed that is being checked by the teacher after the lesson, the teacher completes each box, noting down common errors, spelling errors, etc. on the whole class feedback sheet. In addition, improvements that need to be made are also noted on the sheet, with a code next to each improvement. JUST THE CODE (a letter or a number) is written in each student's book. No other comments, other than a grade, if appropriate.

The next time the teacher sees that class, a copy of the whole class feedback sheet is uploaded onto the screen (I place mine under the visualiser) and students write down the improvement that they need to make in full. Rather than simply then being left to get on with the improvement, the teacher verbally explains what each code means, and models a good answer - ideally from scratch, demonstrating their thinking as they do so. It's crucial that students do nothing else whilst this occurs, otherwise their attention and their ability to THINK HARD about the model answer will not take place. Common misconceptions are also addressed at this stage.

Then, having referred to each of the coded improvements during the live modelling (I do this under the visualiser so that I can face and monitor the class. I have a pre-prepared model answer off camera, which I'm now able to complete with the time I have saved due to no longer writing laborious comments repeatedly in students' books), students are given a significant chunk of time to think about (given their improvement code) what their work was lacking compared to the model on the board. They then set about making those improvements.

At first, many will struggle. Stick with it. Remind them that being in the struggle zone is good for them and that it will help them to remember how to do better next time. Hands will shoot up as soon as the improvement time is given, with clamours for you to 'have a look at mine and tell me what I need to do to improve'. Resist the temptation to dive in straight away and tell them - this removes the onus being on the child to think hard for themselves and whilst it might feel counterintuitive, they need to have a little bit of struggle first. If they have been left for a couple of minutes and they are still floundering, then some guidance can be given. As is the case with any stage in the teaching and learning process, some students will require scaffolding to reach the same point as their peers, and the feedback stage is no exception

2. Live marking.

This method utilises the idea that feedback is far better given straight after the students have attempted a piece of work, rather than with a two-week delay. It requires a visualiser (the best piece of tech a classroom can have!) A student's piece of work is chosen - it does not have to be the best piece of work in the class. The teacher asks the class to watch and look at the screen, with pens down and doing nothing else, at the enlarged image of the student's piece of work under the visualiser. Prior to the teacher reading and marking the piece of work, the class are reminded of the success criteria that they should all have been trying to use, eg, a wide range of key terms (on the board already), developed points, PEEL paragraphs. (Ideally, this will have been modelled before the students attempted the piece of work). The teacher picks out what is good about the piece of work, and things that could be improved, and with targeted, hands down questioning, asks the class to help them point out WHY these features are good or require improvement, along with HOW they could be improved. This is annotated onto the work by the teacher. At no point should any students yet be making any changes to their work. This will split their attention and will not result in them thinking hard enough about either activity, and the feedback processes will have been less effective.

Next, and this part is CRUCIAL, time is given for students to look at their work and compare it to the improved student work on the board. After having THOUGHT HARD (the common theme with all feedback), time is given for students to act upon the live marking and make their improvements. The students are again reminded that this process is not just about improving this piece of work, but about improving themselves as geographers, historians, etc. so that next time they complete a similar piece of work, they do so with improved outcomes.

Again, lower prior attaining students may need extra guidance here, but allow for them to enter the struggle zone first. Stand back and convey the expectation that all will think hard about what they have just watched and how those improvements can be applied to their work.
When a good idea can turn bad!
Please, please, resist any requests for you to evidence your verbal feedback. In particular, writing 'verbal feedback given' in books during class. Along with the dreaded verbal feedback stamp (they are there - just look online!!) This feeds into the evidencing machine and removes trust. In their most recent framework (September, 2019), Ofsted state that they do not require evidence of any one particular type or frequency of marking or feedback. Time spend writing 'verbal feedback given' on students' work in class is time that could be better spent doing something else (that directly leads to learning!) and actually, doesn't prove that verbal feedback was given! What's to stop a teacher taking in a set of books and writing it in every book after the lesson?!

In essence, every time a teacher speaks to a student or the class, that is verbal feedback. It doesn't need to be an 'event'. It can be as low-key as circulating around the room, noticing that several students are making the same errors, stopping the class and re-teaching that aspect of the learning. Or speaking to one particular student, suggesting that they re-read a sentence they have just written just to check they are happy with it, and are returned to a minute or two later by the teacher for checking. Or it can be more formal such as the two methods I have discussed. Whatever the methods used, they need to be planned for and time allocated for them to be properly carried out so that they lead to meaningful learning and improvement over time.

A common retort to the suggestion that verbal feedback be used in the classroom is 'I haven't got time to do that, I've got to get through the content.' My response to that would be that there is little point in 'getting through content' if mistakes and misconceptions are not corrected and hence little learning takes place. This leads to a model of 'covered but not learnt'. Clever curriculum design which takes into account cognitive science, that is to say, an evidence-informed approach about how we learn and retain information, is what is needed, in order to sequence a curriculum which not only takes into account prior and future learning, but also allows time for concepts to be embedded through retrieval, high quality explanations, challenging (for all) tasks and effective feedback. With scaffolding woven throughout each of these strands.

So. If you would like to improve outcomes and reduce workload, go and start a conversation with someone of influence on your SLT. Who is in charge of improving teaching and learning in your school? Talk to them about the methods that more and more schools are now using - some for quite some time, now, which put the onus on the student to think hard (crucial at all stages in the learning process) obviously with the teacher's guidance, about how they can improve as learners. Take along a copy of a whole class feedback sheet (exactly what I did) or the Verbal Feedback Project report and Toolkit (links below)

Verbal Feedback Toolkit

It won't be an overnight change, but starting the conversation can be the first step to improving student outcomes and banishing onerous written marking once and for all.

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Making the move from written marking towards verbal feedback. Some practical tips.

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I haven't 'marked' a set of exercise books for any of my geography classes in over three years. Before any of you start screaming 'competency measures' at me and wondering how I am still in a job, let me elaborate. My school has made the move away from traditional written marking as the main form...

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Teacher explanations are a vital part of education. As a profession we now have a greater appreciation for the role cognitive load can play in our students learning experience. Sometimes great explanations can be unravelled by poor management of our student's cognitive load.

Today I want to suggest some simple things we can do to ensure our explanations are cognisant to our students working memory capacities.
We all know that chunking is a great way of ensuring students have time to process the information we provide. We can sometimes get caught up in our own passion for our topic and forget to chunk our explanations.
The simplest way of ensuring the explanation is chunked is by starting with a blank canvas. Planning to live draw can feel daunting at first, but with practice and planning it is the perfect way of directing attention to the most relevant information and avoiding distractions. If you prefer PowerPoints to a visualiser then considering carefully what information appears on each slide is vital. The judicious use of relevant images and text spread over multiple slides is an effective tool. As is using animations to highlight or add relevant information in sequence.
Students can only learn new information by building on their existing knowledge, or schema. Before starting an explanation spend time assessing and activating the relevant prior knowledge of the class and adapt your explanation accordingly. A simple mini whiteboard quiz can get the job done in a few minutes and gives you vital clues about what areas might need a more detail.
The working memory model identifies the paths that visual and sound information follow to be different. By enhancing verbal explanations with relevant images, we can expand a students working memory capacity. This is the crux of effective dual coding. Dual coding often gets conflated with the use iconographic illustrations. While these can be used effectively as dual coding these are not the only way. Simple drawings, well chosen photos and diagrams can effectively dual code information. Dual coding is a concept that is often thought to be more complicated than it really is. Just follow this simple rule: Ensure each image adds to the explanation. If it is aesthetic, then get rid of it.
Daniel Willingham has written about the way the human mind appears to treat stories with a certain amount of privilege. Narrative structures that have characters conflict and consequence seem to be easier to remember than just abstract facts. Teachers should use narrative structures carefully though. Sometimes extra information can distract students from the main points of the story. These are known as seductive details and diminish the explanations effectiveness. When planning a narrative structure to an explanation try to only include extra information that helps to illustrate a difference or similarity between the characters involved and try to avoid just random trivia.
When explaining something we need students' attention. If they do not attend to the relevant information, then they have no chance of learning it. We need to ensure all students can give the teacher their attention by creating a calm and silent environment. As teachers we need to tell the students where to look to get the most relevant information and we need to do our best to ensure other students are not distracting them. We need to modulate our voice to emphasise key features and pause to ensure students are paying attention when needed.
Questions are used to check students understanding but also to ensure all students are paying attention. For example, Cold Call does a brilliant job of keeping all students engaged in the lesson. When giving explanations it is vital, we used sporadic questions to check students are paying attention. This is a double-edged sword as too many questions will disrupt the narrative flow, so it is best to just drop a single question in when there is a natural break in the explanation, but this is very context-specific so you might want to experiment.

Adam Robbins

Teaching secondary science: A complete guide by Adam Boxer has an excellent theoretical model for building explanations that is relevant to most subjects

Cognitive load theory: Research that teachers need to understand by NSW government is a great overall guide to the practical implications of cognitive load theory.

The evolution of a presentation is a blog I wrote during lockdown that illustrates simple ways of adjusting PowerPoints to direct attention

The privileged status of stories is an article by Daniel T Willingham about narrative structures and the mind

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Simple ways to reduce the cognitive load of teacher explanations

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

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

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not all feedback has positive effects. done badly

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

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perhaps not always productively.  historically

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

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

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in addition to a review of current practice

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and refined through consultation with teachers and other experts.

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Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

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Six recommendations for using teacher feedback to improve pupil learning

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For three years, now, my school (Reigate School in Surrey) has embraced the move away from traditional written marking and made the move towards more effective, time-efficient methods which largely involve verbal feedback.

In October 2021, I spoke at ResearchED Surrey about our school's move, along with mine and my colleague Michelle Marshall's involvement in UCL and Ross McGill's (@TeacherToolkit) Verbal Feedback Project. A link to the report can be found at the end of this post. I've spoken at a few conferences about verbal feedback, now, and I didn't want the 2021 presentation to simply be a re-hash of old presentations. The notion of cutting teacher workload whilst simultaneously improving outcomes for students is something I've been passionate about for a few years, now, but I'm conscious of not wanting to stand in front of colleagues at Saturday morning conferences and presenting verbal feedback as a brand new idea. It isn't anymore. And more to the point, neither are the principles underlying the methods my school now uses - a point I will pick up later on. However, as a quick look at educational accounts on Twitter and educational groups on Facebook will prove, there are still many teachers and schools who are relying on traditional written marking as their main form of feedback.

My presentation at ResearchED Surrey sought to not only give guidance to those attendees that were after advice about how to begin a conversation within their school about making the move towards verbal feedback, but also an account of where schools and the wider educational community currently are with the concept of verbal feedback. This blog post will outline some of my findings which I conveyed in my presentation.

One of the main barriers to schools making the move away from onerous written marking still seems to be the view that Ofsted need to see written marking, or at least a record of any feedback, including verbal, given to students. The following is a direct extract taken from their current (2019) framework:
'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, which may cater for different subjects and different age groups of pupils in different ways, in order to be effective and efficient in promoting learning.' 'While inspectors will consider how written and oral feedback is used to promote learning, Ofsted does not expect to see any written record of oral feedback provided to pupils by teachers.'
The acknowledgement in the last sentence that feedback should be 'efficient' is more than a nod to the fact that no feedback methods should be burdensome on teachers' time. Our time is finite, and time spent on ineffective feedback methods is time which can't be spent on things which could have a greater impact on student learning. The reference within the same clause to feedback methods being 'effective' is non-specific, but again, directs teachers towards using methods which are going to have the greatest impact on outcomes.

2. EEF Feedback Guidance Report, June 2021.

Which leads me onto the Feedback Guidance Report published by the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) in June, 2021. The opening sentences to this report read as follows:
'New guidance on feedback encourages schools to prioritise key principles over methods.' 'Schools should focus on the principles which underpin good feedback rather than the way in which it is delivered...'
Within the report, Professor Becky Francis states that in the current, recovery-focussed climate, effective feedback methods have never been more important. The report is also careful to emphasise that effective feedback methods should focus on moving learning forward, and that time is planned in class for students to act on feedback. Many of us are familiar with Dylan Wiliam's statement that feedback is about improving the learner and not just the piece of work. A handy, printable A4 summary sheet is also provided within the report. If you are looking at beginning a conversation within your school or starting to think about CPD within this area, you could do worse than to print off a copy to go armed with when having the conversation, along with the UCL Verbal Feedback Report itself.

3. Early Career Framework, 2021.

A final area where we have recently seen greater reference to a move away from written feedback is within the new Early Career Framework of 2021. The framework is split into the familiar Teaching Standards, and divides these into sub-sections detailing that teachers should 'learn that...' and 'learn how to...'. The following points are taken directly from the details contained within the 'learn how to...' section of Standard 6 - Make Accurate and Productive Use of Assessment:
Make marking manageable and effective, by: * Recording data only when it is useful for improving pupil outcomes.
* Working with colleagues to identify efficient approaches to marking and alternative approaches to providing feedback (eg, using whole class feedback or well supported peer and self-assessment).

* Using verbal feedback during lessons in place of written feedback after lessons where possible.
* Understanding that written marking is only one form of feedback. * Reducing the opportunity cost of marking (e.g. by using abbreviations and codes in written feedback).
* Prioritising the highlighting of errors related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes when marking.

We can see here that the framework does not specify any one type of feedback or particular method. It does, however, steer teachers towards making choices of methods which move pupil outcomes further forward, addressing misconceptions through feedback and considering the opportunity cost in terms of time. It also states that, (point 3), verbal feedback DURING lessons rather than written marking AFTER lessons should be used where possible. Catching students in the moment, being able to address misconceptions so that they do not become embedded and harder to unpick later on, impeding further learning, is crucial if we are to move our students forward.

4. The underlying principles.

At the heart of the content of these reports and frameworks is an evidence base. An evidence base rooted within the world of cognitive science. Over the last few years within education, there has been a growing acceptance that what our students are made to think hard about and where their attention is, is where the greatest understanding and eventually, deep learning will take place (think Robert and Elizabeth Bjork's desirable difficulties and Daniel Willingham's 'memory is the residue of thought'). This concept is at the heart of any form of feedback. Dylan Wiliam points out that 'feedback should be more work for the recipient than for the donor'. Therefore regardless of how feedback looks in your classroom, ask yourself 'is this method going to make my students think hard about how to not only improve upon this piece of work, but also similar pieces of work, so that what they are about to undertake sticks for future use?' 'Am I going to give adequate time for my students to act upon this feedback and to be put into the struggle zone whilst doing so?'

This whistle-stop description has aimed to sign post some of the ways in which the focus away from written marking has been embedded in frameworks and research. Links to each document referred to within the blog post can be found below. I was part of the initial move within my school away from written marking but each time I had a conversation with any middle or senior leader, it was with a document in hand and an idea about how we might implement something within it. Change doesn't happen overnight and staff buy-in is crucial, but with evidence and reference to evidence-informed principles within each of these reports and frameworks, it is clear that we now have a far greater basis for this change to happen. We've all seen fads come and go, but these were indicative of a time prior to the evidence-informed movement.

If we keep the principles and not just the methods at the forefront of everything that we do and any changes that we make, then we can be certain that we are pursuing what cognitive science tells are the current 'best bets' for our students.

Links:

Verbal Feedback Report (UCL and Ross McGill - @TeacherToolkit) - scroll down for the report itself and a 'Toolkit' guide of evidence-informed methods.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/widening-participation/teachers-and-education-professionals/teacher-research-projects/verbal-feedback-project
A link to the EEF's 2021 guidance report of feedback, along with a printable copy of a summary poster of the report, can be found here:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/feedback
A previous blog post of mine detailing how I use whole-class verbal feedback sheets and live marking.

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Verbal feedback - a focus on PRINCIPLES, not just the methods.

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For three years, now, my school (Reigate School in Surrey) has embraced the move away from traditional written marking and made the move towards more effective, time-efficient methods which largely involve verbal feedback. In October 2021, I spoke at ResearchED Surrey about our school's move, along with mine and my colleague Michelle Marshall's involvement in...

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AHT VAL: And once you've finished marking your students' books and they have responded IN DETAIL to your DETAILED comments, you must take them in again and mark them a second time using a different coloured pen!

AHT HARVEY: A page that's marked in only one colour is a useless page!

NQT BENJAMIN: Erm, if you say so. But why?

AHT VAL: It's basic Ofsted-readiness, Benjamin. Without a clearly colour-coded dialogue between teacher and student, how can we prove that the student has made progress as a result of teacher feedback?

NQT BENJAMIN: But I've only got this red biro...

AHT HARVEY GRINS UNPLEASANTLY AND OPENS A CABINET FULL OF PENS OF MANY COLOURS.

AHT HARVEY: In this school we wage a constant battle against teacher sloth and indifference!

(With apologies to The League Of Gentlemen)

I have been a teacher for more than 26 years and I tell you this: I have never marked as much or as often as I am now. We are in the throes of a Marking Apocalypse - a Markopalypse, if you will.

And why am I doing this? Have I had a Damascene-road conversion to the joy of rigorous triple marking?

No. I do it because I have to. I do it because of my school's marking policy. More to the point, I do it because my school expends a great deal of time and energy checking that their staff is following the policy. And my school is not unique in this.

Actually, to be fair, I think my current school has the most nearly-sensible policy of the three schools I have worked in most recently, but it is still an onerous burden even for an experienced teacher who can take a number of time-saving short cuts in terms of lesson planning and preparation.

Many schools now include so-called "deep marking" or "triple marking" in their lists of "non-negotiables", but there are at least two things that I think all teachers should know about these policies.
1. "We have to do deep/triple marking because of Ofsted"
No, actually you don't. In 2016, Sean Harford (Ofsted National Director, Education) wrote:

[I]nspectors should not report on marking practice, or make judgements on it, other than whether it follows the school's assessment policy. Inspectors will also not seek to attribute the degree of progress that pupils have made to marking that they might consider to be either effective or ineffective. Finally, inspectors will not make recommendations for improvement that involve marking, other than when the school's marking/assessment policy is not being followed by a substantial proportion of teachers; this will then be an issue for the leadership and management to resolve.

2. "Students benefit from regular feedback"
Why yes, of course they do. But "feedback" does not necessarily equate to marking.

Hattie and Timperley write:

[F]eedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding. A teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback thus is a "consequence" of performance.

So a textbook, mark scheme or model answer can provide feedback. It does not have to be a paragraph written by the teacher and individualised for each student.

Daisy Christodoulo makes what I think is a telling point about the "typical" feedback paragraphs encouraged by many school policies:

[T]eachers end up writing out whole paragraphs at the end of a pupils' piece of work: 'Well done: you've displayed an emerging knowledge of the past, but in order to improve, you need to develop your knowledge of the past.' These kind of comments are not very useful as feedback because whilst they may be accurate, they are not helpful. How is a pupil supposed to respond to such feedback? As Dylan Wiliam says, feedback like this is like telling an unsuccessful comedian that they need to be funnier.

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AHT VAL: And once you've finished marking your students' books and they have responded IN DETAIL to your DETAILED comments, you must take them in again and mark them a second time using a different coloured pen! AHT HARVEY: A page that's marked in only one colour is a useless page!

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Earlier this school year, my Headteacher (who is a legend) asked me to present to governors on the topic of marking. Internal school politics and policies aside, I have attached the document I wrote for them as well as the slides I used when presenting. It does not represent anyone's views but my own and does not speak for the school or carry its endorsement. I hope it comes in use!**
Marking Review for sharing Marking for governors new abridged (1)
*Unfortunately, I was gazumpted to the best "marking" blog title

**It's been pointed out to me that some of my maths is hilariously wrong in the calculation section. No idea how that happened, other than the fact that I haven't really slept in a while.

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Markageddon* Earlier this school year, my Headteacher (who is a legend) asked me to present to governors on the topic of marking. Internal school politics and policies aside, I have attached the document I wrote for them as well as the slides I used when presenting.

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Agarwal et al: Retrieval Practice & Bloom's Taxonomy: Do Students Need Fact Knowledge Before Higher Order Learning?

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Agarwal et al: Retrieval Practice & Bloom's Taxonomy: Do Students Need Fact Knowledge Before Higher Order Learning?

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Via Jamie Clark

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Via Jamie Clark

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Via Jamie Clark

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Via Jamie Clark

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A look into the application of the I do, we do, you do strategy, sometimes referred to as the 'gradual release of responsibility' model, and how it can be applied across all lessons, not just in teaching maths or equations.

I first came across the I do, we do, you do learning cycle when reading Doug Lemov's excellent Teach Like A Champion (Volume 1, I think). In I do/We do/You do (otherwise known as Direct Instruction, Guided Practice, and Independent Practice) responsibility is gradually released from teacher to the student. The teacher must pay attention to both the sequence in which knowledge is provided to students but also to the rate at which cognitive work is required. There are links between this model and many different widely accepted teaching and learning techniques, including cognitive load theory and metacognition to name a couple.

Sadly, most teaching and learning models, including the two mentioned above, suffer from lethal mutations and become twisted by people's personal style or leadership decisions. I believe this unfortunate outcome is not a result of ignorance or deliberate engineering but in pursuit of the instance for accountability measures and 'quick gains'. Adam Robbins has very recently wrote a blog in this here. In my experience, there is also a psychological phenomenon involved called 'confirmation bias'. This is where people look to have their existing theories confirmed and dismiss or discount anything opposed to those existing view points. This often results in the partial application of concepts or the squeezing in of new ideas in to remaining protocols or structures. Like a square peg in a round hole being battered in by a hammer...

A square peg in a round hole, a metaphor for the forcing of a new idea in to an existing process

Now, the gradual release of responsibility model is not immune to this process of lethal mutations, but in my opinion it's harder to mutate. The simplicity of the approach coupled with the intuitive nature, make it a simple model for educators to adjust to. For example, if I wanted to learn how to change an oil filter in a car, the ideal method I would choose would be to:

1. Seek out an expert to tell me how to do it and, importantly, to show me how (Expert does)

2. Have a go at changing the oil filter with the expert close for support and guidance when I get stuck or confused (Expert and novice do together)

3. Once I have done this a few times with support, I would like to have a few goes on my own to make sure I can really do it (Novice does)

As you can see from my annotations in italics, this is the I do (expert does), We do (expert and novice together), You do (novice practices independently).

I strongly believe that just having knowledge of this teaching model will drastically improve most people's teaching by increasing the potential learning opportunities their students will have access to. The reason for this is that to successfully achieve this cycle in a lesson, you must apply some other equally successful strategies. I, we, you is not a standalone model to be put on a pedestal and followed blindly. It is a model that encompasses good practice and does what effective models do, it enables a common language and a thought experiment for people to discuss good teaching and learning. It is not over complicated or tied to specific subject areas and I have seen it effectively deployed in History, Science, Maths and English lessons.

For those who are not aware of the I do, we do, you do cycle, here are the main highlights:

I do - the teacher provides expert knowledge that the students currently do. This could be disseminated using modelling, worked examples and explanations making it a very powerful tool for teachers to begin the learning process. This essentially involves an expert sharing the knowledge. The power of a worked example is well known and is discussed expertly un Bob Pritchard's EEF Blog found here.

We do - after the teacher has 'taught' the initial information, the teacher's focus shifts to the students and what they have remembered or understood (call and response). This will most commonly take the form of questioning, mini-whiteboards, say it again better and the formative assessment of students to determine the initial success of the explanation or introduction of new knowledge. This could also be referred to as guided practice.

You do - once the teacher is satisfied their explanation has been received and students have a general competency in the new knowledge, the students must practice. This independent practice, for example via SLOP questions, is vital for students to 'think hard' for extended periods and therefore increase the chance of recalling the information later.

The I do, we do, you do model is most commonly associated with maths and the maths or equation style questions of physics and chemistry. This application is obvious and is one most people would be able to identify or apply easily. The teacher models a worked example (I do), then goes through an example with the class (we do) and then gives a worksheet with 50 progressively difficult questions and sets the class off for the rest of the lesson (see Tom Chillimamp's SLOP blog for more on this). Please see some screen grabs below of a recent lesson I taught my year 11 on specific heat capacity. This was followed by further independent SLOP and please ignore the scruffy hand writing, I am still getting used to the new tablet!

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A look into the application of the I do, we do, you do strategy, sometimes referred to as the 'gradual release of responsibility' model, and how it can be applied across all lessons, not just in...

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success and confidence. It can appear and feel very organic but if you deconstruct the range of things a teacher has to do in a successful learning sequence - it's quite an impressive array of specific definable elements. I think it can be helpful - as many others have done - to consider this is various phases. Obviously caveats abound - it depends on what you're teaching, the point in the overall learning journey and who the students are.

But.. for what it's worth, here's an idealised sequence of a what a teacher might do and the techniques they might use:

Phase 1: Clarifying Learning Intentions

Big picture orientation: Setting the scene for the learning to follow. What's the scope of the current topic and where are we in the big schema of ideas.. ? This orientation can really help students to make sense of what follows, giving them a wider sense of purpose and helping make sense of the longer term as ideas connect.

Set learning goals: Here, today, what we are aiming to learn? That is - by the end of this lesson or lesson series, you should know about X, be able to do Y and be able to explain Z. This is different to setting task goals. The key is for students to understand the learning goals - not to write them down. This requires some discussion, some checking for understanding and consolidation.

Phase 2: Activate and consolidate prior knowledge

The core aim is to ensure all students - every single one - has had a chance to consciously explore their existing knowledge related to the learning goals, focusing their attention on key elements. This could be done as follows, using all four elements in sequence as it's worth spending the time here:

Pair Discussion: what are the three main features of X? Or - simply - what is the answer to the question on the board? (A question entirely based on previously taught material.) Discussion helps students explore verbally in a safe pair bubble. They get warmed up.

White boards: Students share their key ideas or answers at once; teacher scans the responses addressing some key issues, giving corrective feedback

A sequence of three diagnostic MCQs on the board: Students have to answer individually, responding with whiteboards. Every student is made to think. The teacher picks up the trends and addresses key issues that arise.

A short round of cold calling to check for understanding, looking for good recap and consolidation of the material required as a starting point for today. The teacher re-teaches as needed - making a judgement to balance the need to consolidate with the need to move on.

Phase 3: Explain and Model

There's huge variation possible here depending on the material but it might include:

Reading -> summarising: A passage from a text is read aloud. The text contains the necessary visuals with some key terms also highlighted. Students then echo-read - taking turns with their talk partner to read back alternate paragraphs to each other. It's noisy as half the class is reading at once but there's lots of practice reading going on. Two students are invited - after cold calling - to summarise the text and explain the diagram. The teacher compares their summaries and consolidates the key points with few bullet points.

Demonstrate and Check for Understanding: Teacher demonstrates how to answer a particular question type based on the text. They do this via a live modelling process writing by hand under the visualiser, narrating their thinking as they go. Periodically, the teacher stops to select students to explain the latest step in the modelled example, checking their understanding. (The reading plus visualiser demonstration feels like a much better intro than clicking through a powerpoint.)

Multiple examples. More than one similar example is modelled. The first two examples are compared side by side so students can see how they are different but also how they follow similar patterns. The teacher models the self-evaluation process: Is it correct? Is it good? Could I do it better? They cold call students to invite critique, identifying key features of success.

Phase 4: Gradual hand-over

After the modelling input, students are ready to start doing things themselves - the hand-over begins:

Scaffolded, guided practice: The first task is exactly like the modelled examples with a couple of partially completed examples on the screen for students to complete. The answers are checked via whiteboards - everyone showing their completed examples.

Short-feedback loops: Students now practice examples of their own, set from the screen; each example is a short-answer form. For each one, students Show Call or respond with the Show Me whiteboard routine so the teacher can check for early success. Corrective feedback is offered; difficulties are discussed.

More extended practice. Now students engage in more extended guided practice, with a task containing repeat examples with gradual variation and difficulty incline. For a writing lesson, this is a more extended written section. During this period, the teacher circulates actively, looking to see that the new learning is being applied successfully around the room.

Students also engage in some self assessment, with responses sampled by the teacher. Which ones did you get wrong? The teacher evaluates students' responses to make the key decision: Are we ready to move to independent practice OR do I need to reteach and reconsolidate more elements of the material, with more guided practice first?

Phase 5: Independent Practice

When ready, students now apply their new learning to a phase of independent practice -working for 10 or more minutes on a series of questions or a writing task, on their own. Anticipating that students will now diverge according to their fluency and confidence, the task is designed with some key features:

Tiered scaffolds: students can access the task with more or less support as required

A gradient of increasing difficulty: there are opportunities to jump forward or to include more complex elements; there are additional practice questions available at various levels.

Sustained attention. The teacher is active in supervision to support students' sustained attention without interrupting the Golden Silence of independent study - providing time cues, prompts and scaffolds in a non-intrusive way with key students that need them.

Phase 6: Review and Consolidate.

The practice phase leads into a stock-taking consolidation phase. Here the teacher selects samples of student work and seeks to establish how well the key learning goals have been met - to support planning for the next lesson.

Show call. Students are invited to share their answers or their work completed during independent practice. This could via reading aloud, showcasing under the visualiser or a gather around routine. Peer Critique helps to engage students in applying the success criteria they're in the process of learning.

Paired Quizzing supports students with knowledge checks. One of each pair of students uses the study materials to ask interrogative questions of their partner -who has to respond unaided. They take turns, swapping roles.

Plan ahead. The teacher evaluates the review activities, revisits the Big Picture and Learning Goals to review the progress made and to set out the journey ahead. Next lesson we'll look at....

Phew! Exhausting isn't it! Of course there's infinite variations to all of these elements. The point here is to get beyond the whole 'teaching is all a bit of an art' thing... to explore the specific components that build up to create that impression. I find that where teachers are able to isolate specific aspects of their craft to review and refine and then seek to implement them with some real intentional fidelity to what they understand as an effective form of the techniques ..it works. The teaching is better; the learning is more secure. Of course the optimal sequence and blend of techniques is subtle, complex.. fluid. But it's not magic. A logical approach informed by an understanding of the learning model and group dynamics helps to craft lessons with a flow and responsiveness that allows schema-building to flourish.. not just for the lucky few, but for everyone.

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Responsive Teaching in action: An idealised sequence.

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success...

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Moving from ‘differentiation’ to ‘adaptive teaching’

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What does adaptive teaching mean for Education South West?

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Via Jamie Clark

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Memory not memories – teaching for long term learning

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It seems like a life time ago but this time last week I should have been at ResearchEd, listening to great speakers and getting butterflies about my session later that day. Except that I slipped on…

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I was overjoyed to be asked to present at Research Ed's national conference last Saturday.

We have massively overcomplicated teaching. In my talk, I explored how we have overcomplicated it, why, why we need to go simple and how that would work, using examples from Michaela Community School.

I began the session with a series of questions, which readers may wish to revisit:

How many activities do you need in a lesson?

How often do the activities change in a lesson?

How many different 'starters' do you create?

How many different 'plenaries' do you have?

How many variations on tasks do you have?

How many slides do you have on a powerpoint?

How many resources do you print for each lesson?

How many ways are you expected to differentiate for children?

How many pages does your scheme of work fill?

How often have you changed schemes of work?

How often have you taught the same curriculum two or more years in a row?

How many intervention sessions have you run after school? Weekends?

How much feedback do you give children?

How much data do you gather? Input? Use?

How many CPD sessions have explored new ways of teaching children?

How many targets do you have to meet for your performance appraisal?

How many trips do you take?

How many forms do you have to fill out to take a trip?

How many forms do you have to fill out to log a behaviour report?

How many external agencies are working with your young people?

How often do children miss your lessons for interventions?

How do you get children to turn up to detentions, and what happens when they don't?

How many action plans have you written?

I spent four years teaching thirty slide powerpoint lessons. Life in a dark room, filled by clicks and mumbles, was uninspiring for both the children and me. The failures of the past, not purely powerpoint-related it must be conceded, have led to what I called 'intervention hell' in the present, something that will be kicking in soon for many teachers, if it hasn't already. We are drowning in data we don't use. External agencies are taking children out of the one thing that will change their life: lessons where they are learning.

Schools are no longer seen as places of learning - in the expectation that we will educate the whole child, prevent radicalisation, encourage healthy eating, and teach financial literacy (among other initiatives), we are missing the crucial thing: kids learning stuff, passing exams, having successful lives. In 2015, only 53% of kids in the country achieved the old benchmark of 5 A*-C including English and Maths. 47% of kids didn't even get five Cs including English and Maths. Schools are categorically failing to teach all kids effectively. Our role has been massively overcomplicated.

But the over-complication is not only the state's fault. We too must accept responsibility. In the 'missionary teacher' or 'martyr teacher' paradigm, too many of us have decided to 'sacrifice our lives on the altar of pupil progress', to borrow a phrase from Joe Kirby's Michaela debate speech. Working fourteen hour days, working weekends, working holidays (as it seemed nearly the whole room was doing or had done at some point) is categorically not sustainable. Who can do that for thirty, forty years? Our martyrdom has spawned an arms race, where ambitious teachers strive to outcompete each other. Add to this soup flawed accountability measures, spurious research (learning styles, anyone?) and the 'teacher as entertainer' model pedalled by teacher training organisations and SLTs up and down the country, and you have a recipe for disastrous burnout, as evidenced by the 50,000 or so teachers leaving the classroom every year.

Why is simplicity better? Three reasons spring to mind: sustainability, consistency, retention. Sustainability for teachers: simpler teaching means we can have lives and carry on doing the job we love for the long-term. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency for children: teachers who stay massively impact on the children. Having the same teachers year in, year out, is undervalued at the moment. (In a later conversation, I mused about school improvement. I think a lot of mediocre schools who achieve great results do so by being strong on two fronts: behaviour, and teachers staying. Behaviour is obvious - better a calm than a chaotic school. But teachers staying, as long as they are middling to excellent and not diabolically harmful to children, has a massive impact on consistency within the school and consistency for children.) And retention: teachers who want to stay in the profession is of obvious benefit to schools who spent enormous sums of money and time on recruitment each year.

How do we simplify teaching? I explored three strands: curriculum, pedagogy and systems.

With the curriculum, I focused on within subject choices, rather than whole-school curriculum. When planning the curriculum, instead of fourteen page schemes of work that no child will ever see (or arguably benefit from), make unit packs. All 'worksheets' can be in the pack. No need for a powerpoint - everything is happier when your curtains are open in the classroom, and technology is an added stress teachers simply don't need in their lives. At Michaela, we use packs to cut workload, but also to benefit kids: the text is central. Kids are reading a vast amount across subjects, not just in English. We add recap questions to strengthen pupil memory, resource comprehension and discussion questions to prevent teachers thinking these up on the spot or the night before, and prepare model exemplars to guide pupils to where we want them to end up.

With pedagogy, I foregrounded the three arms of practice at Michaela: direct instruction, questioning, and extended practice. There is a huge gap between our pupils and their wealthier counterparts, and the gap is partly knowledge and partly practice. To close the knowledge gap, we teach with urgency. We never ask pupils to guess, but instruct upfront by reading text and explaining. We then question to check understanding, and recap to aid memorisation. To close the practice gap, we make sure when we're not questioning and teaching, the kids are reading and writing. Kids are generally great speakers, great debaters and especially great at arguing; that's not where the gap is. Our kids need more reading and more writing, so we make sure they do lots of that. We need to teach with urgency all the way through school - from reception to year 10, we teach like every second is vital (because it is). Hopefully that way we can prevent the intervention hell that is year 11.

I showed some clips of what direct instruction looks like, as it can sound massively off-putting:

Notice how interactive these lessons are. It's certainly not a case of teachers lecturing at bored children. We can't just talk at children - that much is true. We have to constantly question and check they have understood and remembered what we have taught.

Finally, I explored three systems to simplify teaching: behaviour, homework and feedback. Currently, I would imagine the majority of schools 'allow' teachers to set their own detentions. This is great for building teacher-pupil relationships, but I would argue the drawbacks outweigh this benefit. Teachers set detentions of any length they choose, so children can judge different teachers to be stricter or 'easier.' If a pupil doesn't turn up, individual teachers have to hunt the child down. Too often, teachers end up chasing detentions that are multiplying, constantly trying to remember who has and has not turned up, and liaising with form tutors and parents to cajole the children into serving their time. Long-term, many teachers give up. I don't blame them. The administration involved in setting, sitting, chasing detentions is too much. So teachers stop bothering.

Similarly with homework - and homework isn't just challenging in terms of sanctioning non-completion. Teachers are desperately trying to think up new and different homework tasks, setting it, and then marking it. Again, all this administration is overburdening and discourages pupil completion ('son, what's your science homework?' 'No idea. Something about research? It might be due next Tuesday? Dunno.') At Michaela, all teachers set the same homework on a rigid timetable. All kids are revising their subjects for the same length of time in the same way. Absolutely no confusion over what they need to do or when; no excuses. (We use knowledge organisers to set this revision.)

Finally feedback - I've written at length on this before, so I would encourage you to revisit my lengthier piece if you're interested. The long and the short of it: don't do it.

I ended with some advice for leaders. When you have a shining star working 14 hour days, it is tempting to let them get on with it. But that sets unrealistic expectations for others, and could set up unfair comparisons between them and other teachers. They are also too often using their time pointlessly: extra marking, making transient displays, or forty five slide PowerPoints with the requisite resources. Instead, have the conversation with them: could every teacher do what you are doing? Do you want a family one day? Will you be able to do this when you do? When you lead a department, would you want every teacher doing this? Thousands of teachers leave the profession every year - how do we make this a school where people want to stay? What is the impact of your excessive workload on others in the department?

Leaders need to lead by example, teaching rigorous content, actually teaching, limiting their activities, resources and feedback (I suggested teachers carry a red pen around with you when kids are writing, and use icons to set targets instead of laborious written comments). Leaders need to mitigate the impact of school systems on teachers: if you lead a department, you set a centralised detention for that department if your school will not (show the SLT it works).

There were a number of questions and comments following the talk. One common thread in these questions was: where is the room for teacher creativity with such a rigid system? I guess we don't really value creativity as highly as consistency and workload at Michaela. Although there is plenty of space for creativity in delivery (see: Jonny Porter jousting, above), we don't let teachers make whizzy jazzy PowerPoints or decide to teach their own thing in their own way. Michaela is not for everyone.

But I would challenge questioners: sometimes what we enjoy doing most is not the best thing for the kids. And sometimes what we enjoy doing in our own classroom, going above and beyond for our kids, has an adverse impact on the others around us, not to mention our own workload. And finally, great content is exciting in and of itself! I wouldn't choose to teach Julius Caesar - it's not my favourite Shakespeare play. But I absolutely loved teaching it, because it's Shakespeare! Same with Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' - not my favourite poem, but again, it is a great one, and so great to teach.

I was heartened by the people I met afterwards: it was especially lovely to hear teachers say to me: 'I've done this for years and always been told I was wrong!' What I've said is not revolutionary: many, many teachers have always known this. I hope Michaela can shine a light on what works for kids and teachers and allow these brilliant professionals to just teach, and then have a life. Some of what I said was not appreciated by some members of the audience; I had reports of some eye-rolling and tutting as I was speaking. I'd like to say: thank you. Thank you for coming to hear me speak, thank you for not walking out, thank you for taking the time to be challenged. Next time: ask a question, get in touch, tell me what you don't like. It is wonderful to debate these ideas. I really think that in sacrificing some individuality and creativity we can deliver amazing results for pupils, and amazing work-life balance for teachers.

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We Have Overcomplicated Teaching: Research Ed 2016

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I was overjoyed to be asked to present at Research Ed's national conference last Saturday. We have massively overcomplicated teaching. In my talk, I explored how we have overcomplicated it, why, why we need to go simple and how that would work, using examples from Michaela Community School.

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Some cows are so sacred that any criticism of them is fraught with the risk of bumping up against entrenched cognitive bias. We are fantastically bad at recognizing that our beliefs are often not based on evidence but on self-interest, and it's been in everyone's interest to uphold the belief that AfL is the best thing that teachers can do.

When confronted with 'others' who disagree with our most fervently held beliefs, we tend to make the following series of assumptions:

When in the past I have been critical of AfL (or anything else) the most common responses is that I don't understand it. When I present the incontestable evidence that I do understand it, opponents often treat me as if I'm a bit silly: only an idiot could believe anything so ludicrous and patently untrue. When they accept that my counter-arguments are sufficiently cogent that I prove at least a modicum of intelligence, there are only two remaining propositions: either I am evil, or you are wrong. Of these, it is far easier, and massively less damaging to our sense of self to assume that I must in fact be a bad un seeking to poison children's life chances with my toxic spewing of such dark falsehoods.

So, can we just assume that we've already gone through all that unpleasantness and just engage in the argument I'm presenting?

Of course it's important not to throw out the baby along with all this dirty bath water. I'm happy to accept that it's a good thing for teachers to know where pupils currently are, where they need to get to and what they need to do to get there. That bit's fine. But what of the rest?

The 'big idea' of AfL, as defined by its progenitor, Dylan Wiliam is that we should, "Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet student needs." This is then broken down into '5 key strategies' discussed by Wiliam in his comprehensive book, Embedded Formative Assessment:

1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and success criteria

2. Eliciting evidence of learner's achievement

3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward

4. Activating students as instructional resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Some of these strategies contain real merit if undertaken thoughtfully, but there's a very real danger that the 'big idea' of AfL might be fundamentally, and fatally, flawed. AfL is predicated on the assumption that you can assess what pupils have learned in an individual lesson, and then adjust future teaching based on this assumption.

If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.
Kirschner, Sweller & Clark

But you can't. There's no meaningful way to assess what pupils have learned during the lesson in which they are supposed to learning it. There's an impressive body of research that tells us that learning is distinct from performance. You cannot see learning; you can only see performance. If we measure performance then we may be able to infer what might have been learned, but such inferences are highly problematic for two reasons: 1) performance in the classroom is highly dependent on the cues and stimuli provided by the teacher and 2) performance is a very poor indicator of how well pupils might retain or be able to transfer knowledge or skills.

So let's consider the merits of each of the key AfL strategies:
Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and success criteria
I'm happy with the basic premise of letting kids know where they're supposed to be going. Work put into presenting intentions clearly and helping pupils to understand what they are supposed to be learning should always be productive. Too often learning intentions are mechanistic and may actually obfuscate the learning. Time spent on the mechanics of how to share these intentions is fleetingly important: we must simply take care that they do not become 'wall paper', but we must take care not to resort to distracting gimmickry.

But I do have a bone to pick with 'success criteria'. Wiliam recommends sharing rubrics with pupils so that they will know whether they have successfully achieved the learning intention. He explores the merits of 'student-friendly' mark schemes concluding,

Student-friendly language can be useful as students are introduced to a discipline, but it is also important to help students develop the habits of mind that define the discipline. and coming to terms with the 'official' language is part of that process. P 65

Well, now. My view is that many rubrics are inherently meaningless and lead to some very lazy thinking in teachers and rarely provide anything meaningful to students. In subjects like English this is especially pronounced: what's the difference between 'confident' and 'sophisticated' really? Any difference is arbitrary and exam boards are forced to provide exemplar work for teachers to understand the process by which they arrive at their decisions. We are forced into concluding that confident means x whilst sophisticated means y. Instead of wasting their time with vague, unhelpful success criteria, why not spend time deconstructing exemplars and modelling the expert processes we would use to complete a task?
Eliciting evidence of learners' achievement
Basically, this is all about how we use questions. We make decisions about how and what to teach based on what we know about pupils' understanding. Wiliam says it is "unprofessional [to move on] without finding out what the students in the class know", and that questions are "crucially important if we are to improve the quality of students' learning." (p77) He points to a study by Ted Wragg which revealed that less than 10% of the questions asked by teachers "actually caused any new learning." (p 79) But how on earth would we know? All we can infer is that we don't think they caused any learning, and that's not the same thing at all.

Wiliam argues that are only two valid reasons for questioning: "to cause thinking and to provide information for the teacher about what to do next." I'm happy with the first of these reasons and tend to agree with Robert Coe that "Learning happens when people have to think hard." But I'm not quite so sold on the second reason.

If we ask questions, no matter how well designed, and then use the responses we elicit to decide whether we should 'move on' we are in serious danger of missing the point that "as learning occurs, so does forgetting" and that "learning takes time and is not encapsulated in the visible here-and-now of classroom activities." (Nuthall 2005) If pupils don't know the answer to our questions then we can remediate. If misconceptions are revealed then we have an opportunity to explore them. But if they answer our questions correctly, it means very little. Just because they know it now, doesn't mean they'll know it next lesson or in an exam. A correct answer to a question is, perhaps, the least useful student response we can hope for.

But questions might also be important for stimulating discussion. Wiliam tells us that, "Engaging is classroom discussion really does make you smarter." (p. 81) If he's right then it's certainly incumbent on us to ensure all pupils participate in these discussions. But creating the conditions for effective classroom discussions has very little to do with finding out what pupils know and everything to do with provoking thought. Far from hoping for neat answers to Exit Tickets, maybe the ideal circumstances in which to finish a lesson is for pupils to be actively struggling with difficult concepts. Nuthall tells us in The Hidden Lives of Learners that pupils are unlikely to transfer concepts from working to long term memory until they have encountered them on at least 3 occasions. So, who cares what they know at the end of lesson? Let's assume that they are highly likely to forget it.

I've written in more detail about questioning here.
Providing feedback that moves learning forward
Who could argue against providing feedback that moves learning forward? No one, right? Nobody disputes the fact that feedback is powerful, but perhaps we should be using it a little more sparingly then we have been? For a more detailed discussion, have a read of this post. Wiliam says the following in his conclusions on feedback:

We have seen that in almost two out of every five carefully designed scientific studies, information given to people about their performance lowered subsequent performance...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. (p 131-2)

Activating students as instructional resources for one another
Wiliam argues that the whole purpose of feedback is to "increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning," but what does this mean? He argues that 'cooperative learning' is "one of the greatest success stories of educational research." (p 133) But I'm not so sure. He advocates the following as practical techniques for encouraging cooperative learning:

C3B4Me

Peer evaluation of homework

Homework help boards

Two stars and a wish

Student Reporters

If you've learned it, help someone who hasn't

Each of these are about putting the child at the centre of the classroom and moving the teacher to the side. These kinds of techniques have gained a great deal of traction in classrooms. But often at the cost of efficiency. There is always an opportunity cost: If I ask pupils to spend a lesson working things out in groups, that is a lesson I cannot spend teaching them. This has led to widespread condemnation of 'teacher talk' and has, I would argue, been instrumental in lowering standards and expectations. If we force children to work cooperatively all the time they will never know enough to produce thinking or work of any quality. Cooperative learning (or 'independent learning' as it's often called) certainly has a place, but it should come after careful explanation and modelling:

Read more about this teaching sequence here.

Maybe peer assessment might be a useful strategy for improving pupils' attainment, particularly in light of Nuthall's discovery that 80% of the feedback pupils get on their work is from each other, and 80% of that is wrong. If that's true (and I think it might well be) we need to do something about it. One possible solution is discussed in this post.
Activating students as owners of their own learning
No one can teach you anything, they can only help you learn. And yet, as Wiliam points out:

[O]ur classrooms seem to be based on the opposite principle - that if they try really hard, teachers can do the learning for the learners. This is only exacerbated by accountability regimes that mandate sanctions for teachers, schools, and for districts, but not for students. P 145

Wiliam is convinced that pupils can develop sufficient insight into their own learning to improve it, and I'm inclined to agree. My advice, for what it's worth is develop pupils' error checking skills. I discussed in this post how proofreading might be used to force pupils to engage meta-cognitively with their work, and to provide opportunity for the feedback teachers give to be targeted at the point at which pupils are ready to learn.

More on metacognition here.

I'm not sure whether using traffic lights has much if any impact on developing metacognition, but I can't see that it does much harm, so if you're keen, by all means carry on.
In conclusion
Many of the strategies discussed by Wiliam and enshrined in AfL have worth, and if considered carefully enough will have a positive impact on pupils' progress. I'm a big fan of Dylan Wiliam and have been hugely influenced by his body of work. Just have a look at the Dylan Wiliam tag on my blog! But I'm afraid I have to conclude that the 'big idea' of AfL is wrong. Of course, I may well be wrong: I certainly don't know anywhere near as much as many other people. But I do know that there are hugely powerful cognitive biases at work that will protect us from admitting that our belief systems might be wrong. Staying open to the possibility of error is possibly the hardest but most valuable of human endeavours.

Related Posts

Everything we've been told about teaching is wrong, and what to do about it!
Chasing our tails - is AfL all it's cracked up to be?
AfL: cargo cult teaching
Questions that matter: method vs practice?

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Why AfL might be wrong, and what to do about it

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Some cows are so sacred that any criticism of them is fraught with the risk of bumping up against entrenched cognitive bias. We are fantastically bad at recognizing that our beliefs are often not b...

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WHY GOOGLE® CAN’T REPLACE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

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Why curriculum matters: a response to Tim Oates, Dylan William and Daisy Christodoulou

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Why the views of our leading educationalists on the curriculum don’t add up

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I've long thought that one of the weakest proxy indicators of effective learning is engagement, and yet it's a term persistently used by school leaders (and some researchers) as one of the most important measures of quality. In fact many of the things we've traditionally associated with effective teachers may not be indicative of students actually learning anything at all.

At the #ascl2015 conference last Friday, the always engaging Professor Rob Coe gave a talk entitled 'From Evidence to Great Teaching' and reiterated this claim. Take the following slide - How many 'outstanding' lessons have been awarded so based on this checklist?

Now these all seem like key elements of a successful classroom, so what's the problem? and more specifically, why is engagement is such a poor proxy indicator - surely the busier they are, the more they are learning?

This paradox is explored by Graham Nuthall in his book 'The Hidden Lives of Learners,' (2007) in which he writes:

"Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50% of what the teacher is teaching." p.24

Nuthall's work shows that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they're comfortable with and already know how to do as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks. A good example of this as Alex Quigley has pointed out is that engagement in the form of the seemingly visible activity of highlighting is often "little more than colouring in." Furthermore, teachers are more than happy to sanction that kind of stuff in the name of fulfilling that all important 'engagement' proxy indicator so prevalent in lesson observation forms.

The other difficulty is the now constant exhortation for students to be 'motivated' (often at the expense of subject knowledge and depth) but motivation in itself is not enough. Nuthall writes that:

"Learning requires motivation, but motivation does not necessarily lead to learning."p.35

Motivation and engagement are vital elements in learning but it seems to be what they are used in conjunction with that determines impact. It is right to be motivating students but motivated to do what? If they are being motivated to do the types of tasks they already know how to do or focus on the mere performing of superficial tasks at the expense of the assimilation of complex knowledge then the whole enterprise may be a waste of time.

Learning is in many cases invisible as outlined many times by David Didau and is certainly not linear but rather more nebulous in actuality. As Prof. Coe reminds us, 'learning happens when people have to think hard' but unfortunately there is no easy way of measuring this, so what does he suggest is effective in terms of evidencing quality?

Ultimately he argues that it comes down to a more nuanced set of practitioner/student skills, habits and conditions that are very difficult to observe, never mind measure. Things like and which are contingent on "selecting, integrating, orchestrating, adapting, monitoring, responding" " context, history, personalities, relationships" and which all work together to create impact and initiate effective learning. So while engagement and motivation are important elements in learning they should be seen as part of a far more complex conglomerate of factors that traditional lesson observations have little hope of finding in a 20 min drive-by.

This is where a more robust climate of research and reflective practice can inform judgements. It's true that more time for teachers to be critically reflective will improve judgements but we also need to be more explicit in precisely what it is we are looking for and accept that often the most apparent classroom element may also be the most misleading.

Slides: Prof. Rob Coe: From Evidence to Great Teaching ASCL 20 Mar 2015

Nuthall, Graham (2007). The Hidden Lives of Learners. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press

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Engagement: Just because they're busy, doesn't mean they're learning anything.

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I've long thought that one of the weakest proxy indicators of effective learning is engagement, and yet it's a term persistently used by school leaders (and some researchers) as one of the most important measures of quality. In fact many of the things we've traditionally associated with effective teachers may not be indicative of students...

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Via Jamie Clark

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Moving from ‘differentiation’ to ‘adaptive teaching’

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What does adaptive teaching mean for Education South West?

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I've observed a lot of lessons this year. Inside science, outside science, novice teachers, expert teachers. Lots and lots of other people's lessons. I've also been observed lots. As much as I've been in others' classrooms, others have been in mine. In general at TTA we take the philosophy that "feedback is a gift" and that if someone else has been gracious enough to let you into their room to learn from them, the very least you can do is provide them with some feedback that will help them be even better.

Within my department, the stakes are high in terms of the feedback I give. I don't want to give feedback that's so general and generic it can't be acted upon. But I also don't want to give feedback that's so specific it won't be actionable until this time next year when the lesson I observed is repeated. What I really want to do is find something that allows us to think in a general sense about what goes on in our lessons, but come away with specific techniques that can be used in those lessons.

In a lot of the lessons I have seen, and in my own lessons which have been seen, there has been an issue with ratio. This is a concept I first read about in Lemov's Teach Like a Champion 2.0, and below is the training which I led in my department on it. I hope you find it useful and, if you have any, please remember that feedback is a gift.

Ratio is an incredibly powerful concept that allows for sophisticated discussion of classroom practice and its eventual improvement through dedicated strategies. That's a mouthful of a sentence, but I can't think of a better way to put it. Before we look at what Ratio is, we need to start with the work of Professor Coe in his landmark work A Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In that paper, he famously argued that we have become distracted when discussing and judging learning. He decried the fact that we had become preoccupied with observable proxies for learning like busy or engaged students and had patted ourselves on the back when such proxies were achieved or observed in a lesson. But if all that is a distraction, then what should we become focussed on?

I think that line is crucial: learning happens when people have to think hard. Without hard thought, no learning. However many jazzy activities you do in the classroom: no hard thought, no learning.

It's at this point that ratio comes into the picture, as it is a way of describing and delimiting hard thought. There are two types of ratio:

So it is about both individual students and the collective, how much thought is happening both within and across the group. We could set up a neat little axes:

Obviously the golden zone is the top right, where all your students are thinking and they are thinking hard. Let's illustrate with some examples:

Before I give you "the answer" where do you think this sits, but just on the horizontal line (participation ratio)? I don't want to confuse things too much by using both axes at the moment, so just to start with, does asking a question like this get lots of students thinking, or not a lot of students thinking?

You guessed it: calling a student's name and then asking a question is a surefire way to lower your participation ratio, as the other students - whose names haven't been called - are almost guaranteed to not be thinking about the answer. This is why Lemov is so insistent about the use of Cold Call. Ask the question first, then call a student's name. Sounds easy peasy, sounds obvious; yet it's very easy to forget.

Ok so let's go for another scenario. In this case, the teacher uses Cold Call, and the third bulletpoint below is the transcript of what happened in the lesson:

Where do you think that should go? Think about it first...

I reckon it goes right here in green:

A bit better than our last one, but not a lot better. Why? Because the Wait Time wasn't long enough. They posed the question, then asked a student, who then had to pause and think for quite a while before answering. Let me ask you this: while that student was waiting and thinking, what were all the others doing? You betcha: confident that they wouldn't need to answer the question, they switched off and waited for the other student to answer the question. The whole point in doing the Cold Call flies out the window.

So in what ways can we increase participation ratio:

Some of those are obvious, but I'll elaborate on a couple that might not be/

Accountability measures are where you hold a student accountable for their engagement. For example, if I ask a student a question and they don't know the answer and they should, I'll "have a go" at them and tell them how annoyed and disappointed it makes me that they don't know the answer to this. I will warn them that I am going to ask somebody else the same question, and will then come back to them later on with the exact same question (I jot their name down and the question on my mini-whiteboard on my desk so that I can follow through on this later). This lights a bit of a fire under them to be extra attentive, and it builds a culture in your classroom of students paying attention to you and to one another.

The next three bulletpoints are very similar and were promoted at the recent Michaela Science conference, if a student answers a question, I'll jump to a different student and say "what did she say?" or do that with something I've just said. As above, this builds - over the long term - a culture of engagement and thought.

Check for mistakes is also a useful but under-used one. If a student is going to give a long answer, or is asking a long question, there's a danger that the rest of the class will stop listening. A script like "hand on a second Daniel this is really interesting I'd like everyone to listen carefully to what Daniel is saying and put their hand up immediately if they spot something that they think they can answer/say better/use a keyword. Ok, Daniel please start again."

Independent practice here is of course the only surefire way to guarantee that everyone is participating. Students need that nice long period of just sitting quietly and working individually in order to consolidate new information, and it's a great opportunity for you to get your participation ratio high.

Alright, let's start looking at the other axis: think ratio - how hard are your students thinking?

Now you should be able to think about where it goes both on the x axis (how many students are participating) and on the y axis (how hard are they thinking). Where do you reckon?

The mini-whiteboard routine is good, and it puts the participation ratio up. But - and I'm hoping this isn't lost on you if you're not a scientist - they aren't thinking very hard. They do the first one correctly, but all the subsequent ones are exactly the same, just with different numbers. There's nothing that makes them more challenging, so students aren't thinking all that hard.

Regular readers of this blog may recognise the above - it's my attempt to describe what makes some work challenging and other work not challenging. I'm not going to go into that too much now, but suffice to say there are loads of ways to increase the challenge of a task, and if they are getting every question right, you should probably change something to make sure the challenge is kept at a good level. In this particular case you could increase the challenge by any of:

Unit conversion

Rearrangement

Giving values in standard form

Using an eyepiece and objective magnification

Throwing in a question which uses another formula...

So there you have two case studies of times where the ratio isn't optimal, and some ideas as to how to fix that.

Below, I've got a little activity which has 7 further scenarios involving sub-optimal ratio. For each one you write if you think the participation and think ratios are high or low, and based on that what could be done to improve the ratio.

Coming to an agreement about the "right" thing to do in each scenario is an extremely powerful tool as it means you can walk into anyone's lesson and rapidly identify if the essential ingredients are there for a high ratio, and if they're not, have a shared language around what can be done about it. Which brings me right back to my definition at the start:
Ratio is an incredibly powerful concept that allows for sophisticated discussion of classroom practice and its eventual improvement through dedicated strategies.
Further scenarios for activity are below. If you want to know my thoughts on them, click here.

A teacher is questioning students and walking around the classroom, moving towards students who are answering questions. Their movement goes into the classroom as opposed to around the edges and their body and head are facing the student who is answering the question.

Students are working quietly but one of the questions in the practice set relates to material they covered a very long time ago and haven't revisited since. The teacher is moving around the classroom supporting students with that question. The support they are providing is very similar from student to student

Students are learning about organ systems in groups. Each group has been given a fact sheet about a particular organ system, told that they need to learn it and that any member of the group will be asked to explain what is on their sheet to the rest of the class

The teacher is going over an assessment going question by question. The students have their test papers out in front of them. At each question the teacher carefully describes how they would approach the question and models how they would answer it.

A student answers a question and the teacher uses a series of Stretch It follow-ups to test the reliability of that student's responses.

During whole class questioning, a student demonstrates poor behaviour. The teacher tells them to leave the classroom which results in a short conversation. Once the student has left, the questioning continues as before.

The teacher expertly models a difficult concept and does a check for understanding via questioning. Seeing that the students understand the concept, the teacher moves on to the next concept to be taught.

Ratio activity Update 12/7/20: it turns out a version of the graph I used above was displayed at the Michaela Science Conference in January '20 so it could be that the idea for the graph came from there. It's also plausible that we all plagiarised Lemov so hey.

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I've observed a lot of lessons this year. Inside science, outside science, novice teachers, expert teachers. Lots and lots of other people's lessons. I've also been observed lots. As much as I've been in others' classrooms, others have been in mine. In general at TTA we take the philosophy that "feedback is a gift" and...

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This post gives the key points from my ResearchEd Surrey talk at Farnham Heath End School. Firstly, I explored the challenge for teachers in teaching a group of people all at once, with reference to Willingham's ideas about memory and understanding. When children don't understand - there are numerous possible reasons: lack of prior knowledge, insufficient fluency, problems with sustaining mental attention. Teachers need to be conscious of the potential for this to be happening across the class:

Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black has this great insight in their classic work Inside the Black Box. When teachers only select students who volunteer and are worried about getting through the material, they tend to ask less demanding questions in order to keep going forwards:

That's a significant challenge to teachers. Are you making the decision to move on whilst being 'out of touch with the understanding of most of the class?' It's so important to be responsive, ready to move back as well as forward if needed. Rosenshine has a useful set of guidance, comparing more and less effective teachers, stressing the dual purpose of checking students' learning.

He tells us how not to check for understanding - ie by simply asking 'have you understood?' This tells us almost nothing - as students rarely so no or could be wrong in saying yes. But, most importantly, there are always degrees of understanding. Instead of asking if, we should ask what student have understood. Rosenshine gives us a nice list of ways teachers can check for understanding.:

In the flow of instructional teaching, checking for understanding is supported by a range of questioning techniques, all underpinned by cold calling - so that every student engages in thinking and is ready to respond. It can be important to switch between cold calling, asking individuals - and pair-share, where everyone has a change to air their thoughts and rehearse their explanations. This gives the teacher a better sampling of the level of understanding across the class.

We covered many of the ideas in Cold Calling and Cold Call Variations, In our Walkthrus materials, we have a walkthru for Checking for Understanding:

Central to this is that each exchange is a short dialogue. Then by exploring the responses from multiple students we get a sense of the ideas students have grasped and the way they express their idea. It can be useful scaffold student responses, including question stems such as those included in Rosenshine's Principles:

The main decision-making for a teacher is how to respond in light of the information from these exchanges. Re-teaching requires being ready with additional examples and/or the nimble subject knowledge needed to generate new questions and explanations spontaneously. Deferring to another time can be a good decision - often students just need longer to make sense of things and you might choose to return to the ideas next lesson or next week.. to allow time for more ideas to weave together in students' minds.

Checking for understanding is exemplified by some ideas related to deliberate vocabulary development as described in this post. We need to connect need words to ideas and meaning students already have.

Thanks to everyone who came to my session.

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Check for Understanding... why it matters and how to do it. #rEDSurrey21

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Full Slides from researched-2021-surreyDownload This post gives the key points from my ResearchEd Surrey talk at Farnham Heath End School. Firstly, I explored the challenge for teachers in teaching a group of people all at once, with reference to Willingham's ideas about memory and understanding. When children don't understand - there are numerous possible reasons:...

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Sarah Cottingham, Bradley Busch and Jonathan Firth

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Sarah Cottingham, Bradley Busch and Jonathan Firth

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Discussing Interleaving with Jonathan Firth, Sarah Cottingham and Bradley Busch

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success and confidence. It can appear and feel very organic but if you deconstruct the range of things a teacher has to do in a successful learning sequence - it's quite an impressive array of specific definable elements. I think it can be helpful - as many others have done - to consider this is various phases. Obviously caveats abound - it depends on what you're teaching, the point in the overall learning journey and who the students are.

But.. for what it's worth, here's an idealised sequence of a what a teacher might do and the techniques they might use:

Phase 1: Clarifying Learning Intentions

Big picture orientation: Setting the scene for the learning to follow. What's the scope of the current topic and where are we in the big schema of ideas.. ? This orientation can really help students to make sense of what follows, giving them a wider sense of purpose and helping make sense of the longer term as ideas connect.

Set learning goals: Here, today, what we are aiming to learn? That is - by the end of this lesson or lesson series, you should know about X, be able to do Y and be able to explain Z. This is different to setting task goals. The key is for students to understand the learning goals - not to write them down. This requires some discussion, some checking for understanding and consolidation.

Phase 2: Activate and consolidate prior knowledge

The core aim is to ensure all students - every single one - has had a chance to consciously explore their existing knowledge related to the learning goals, focusing their attention on key elements. This could be done as follows, using all four elements in sequence as it's worth spending the time here:

Pair Discussion: what are the three main features of X? Or - simply - what is the answer to the question on the board? (A question entirely based on previously taught material.) Discussion helps students explore verbally in a safe pair bubble. They get warmed up.

White boards: Students share their key ideas or answers at once; teacher scans the responses addressing some key issues, giving corrective feedback

A sequence of three diagnostic MCQs on the board: Students have to answer individually, responding with whiteboards. Every student is made to think. The teacher picks up the trends and addresses key issues that arise.

A short round of cold calling to check for understanding, looking for good recap and consolidation of the material required as a starting point for today. The teacher re-teaches as needed - making a judgement to balance the need to consolidate with the need to move on.

Phase 3: Explain and Model

There's huge variation possible here depending on the material but it might include:

Reading -> summarising: A passage from a text is read aloud. The text contains the necessary visuals with some key terms also highlighted. Students then echo-read - taking turns with their talk partner to read back alternate paragraphs to each other. It's noisy as half the class is reading at once but there's lots of practice reading going on. Two students are invited - after cold calling - to summarise the text and explain the diagram. The teacher compares their summaries and consolidates the key points with few bullet points.

Demonstrate and Check for Understanding: Teacher demonstrates how to answer a particular question type based on the text. They do this via a live modelling process writing by hand under the visualiser, narrating their thinking as they go. Periodically, the teacher stops to select students to explain the latest step in the modelled example, checking their understanding. (The reading plus visualiser demonstration feels like a much better intro than clicking through a powerpoint.)

Multiple examples. More than one similar example is modelled. The first two examples are compared side by side so students can see how they are different but also how they follow similar patterns. The teacher models the self-evaluation process: Is it correct? Is it good? Could I do it better? They cold call students to invite critique, identifying key features of success.

Phase 4: Gradual hand-over

After the modelling input, students are ready to start doing things themselves - the hand-over begins:

Scaffolded, guided practice: The first task is exactly like the modelled examples with a couple of partially completed examples on the screen for students to complete. The answers are checked via whiteboards - everyone showing their completed examples.

Short-feedback loops: Students now practice examples of their own, set from the screen; each example is a short-answer form. For each one, students Show Call or respond with the Show Me whiteboard routine so the teacher can check for early success. Corrective feedback is offered; difficulties are discussed.

More extended practice. Now students engage in more extended guided practice, with a task containing repeat examples with gradual variation and difficulty incline. For a writing lesson, this is a more extended written section. During this period, the teacher circulates actively, looking to see that the new learning is being applied successfully around the room.

Students also engage in some self assessment, with responses sampled by the teacher. Which ones did you get wrong? The teacher evaluates students' responses to make the key decision: Are we ready to move to independent practice OR do I need to reteach and reconsolidate more elements of the material, with more guided practice first?

Phase 5: Independent Practice

When ready, students now apply their new learning to a phase of independent practice -working for 10 or more minutes on a series of questions or a writing task, on their own. Anticipating that students will now diverge according to their fluency and confidence, the task is designed with some key features:

Tiered scaffolds: students can access the task with more or less support as required

A gradient of increasing difficulty: there are opportunities to jump forward or to include more complex elements; there are additional practice questions available at various levels.

Sustained attention. The teacher is active in supervision to support students' sustained attention without interrupting the Golden Silence of independent study - providing time cues, prompts and scaffolds in a non-intrusive way with key students that need them.

Phase 6: Review and Consolidate.

The practice phase leads into a stock-taking consolidation phase. Here the teacher selects samples of student work and seeks to establish how well the key learning goals have been met - to support planning for the next lesson.

Show call. Students are invited to share their answers or their work completed during independent practice. This could via reading aloud, showcasing under the visualiser or a gather around routine. Peer Critique helps to engage students in applying the success criteria they're in the process of learning.

Paired Quizzing supports students with knowledge checks. One of each pair of students uses the study materials to ask interrogative questions of their partner -who has to respond unaided. They take turns, swapping roles.

Plan ahead. The teacher evaluates the review activities, revisits the Big Picture and Learning Goals to review the progress made and to set out the journey ahead. Next lesson we'll look at....

Phew! Exhausting isn't it! Of course there's infinite variations to all of these elements. The point here is to get beyond the whole 'teaching is all a bit of an art' thing... to explore the specific components that build up to create that impression. I find that where teachers are able to isolate specific aspects of their craft to review and refine and then seek to implement them with some real intentional fidelity to what they understand as an effective form of the techniques ..it works. The teaching is better; the learning is more secure. Of course the optimal sequence and blend of techniques is subtle, complex.. fluid. But it's not magic. A logical approach informed by an understanding of the learning model and group dynamics helps to craft lessons with a flow and responsiveness that allows schema-building to flourish.. not just for the lucky few, but for everyone.

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Responsive Teaching in action: An idealised sequence.

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There is no simple formula to teaching well - but there are lots of strong principles that underpin the decision-making processes teachers undertake in any given lesson. Responsive teaching is all about thinking on your feet, using evidence from real-time formative assessment, adjusting instructional inputs and practice activities in response to students' levels of success...

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Via Jamie Clark

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There is no doubt that the field of educational psychology has made remarkable progress over the past century. The discoveries made along the way have given educators worldwide the power to accelerate student learning.

It would be impossible to pick a definitive list of the only studies all educators need to know. However, we feel that some studies are particularly significant. So, let's hit the rewind button and revisit the 10 studies that have shaped the very essence of our educational practices today...

The limited capacity of working memory - 1956

One discovery that formed the basis of Cognitive Load Theory is Miller's 1956 study. He reviewed his own work along with other available literature during the time to investigate memory span, measuring the maximum length of a random word list that could be recalled with the items in order. He found that roughly seven items could be recalled in normal adults, give or take two.

While this number has since been re-investigated, this finding ultimately proved the limited capacity of working memory. It found that presenting students with too much information could lead to an overload and hinder their learning - kickstarting the research into Cognitive Load Theory.

The impact of teachers' expectations - 1966

Rosenthal and Jacobson were one of the earliest to study how teacher expectations can shape students' learning outcomes. They falsely told teachers that some of their students had been identified as potential high achievers that would bloom over the course of the year. These students were in fact chosen at random.

When they went back at the end of the school year, they found that the students who were chosen were more likely to make larger gains in their academic performance over the course of the year than the control group.

This shows that when teachers have high expectations, they subconsciously alter their behaviours to be more supportive, allowing student achievement to be maximised.

Marshmallows and self-control - 1990

In the early 1970s, researchers asked 3-5 years old to refrain from eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes. In return, they would be rewarded with two marshmallows. After 20 years, the researchers conducted follow-up studies and tracked each child's progress in a number of areas.

They found that the longer the students waited for their marshmallows as young children, the more likely they were as adults to be more attentive, socially competent, academically successful, verbally fluent and able to deal to deal with frustration and stress. In order words, the study proved that the ability to delay gratification was critical for success in life.

Growth Mindset - 1998

Mueller and Dweck pioneered the theory of Growth Mindset with their study published in the late 1990s. Students were asked to complete a problem-solving game and were then told that they had gotten 80% of the questions right and praised on different attributes.

They found that children who were praised for their natural intelligence were more likely to choose easier future tasks that would make them look smart, whereas children who had been praised for their effort tended to choose tasks that would help them learn new things, which in turn translated to better future performance.

Subsequent studies on Growth Mindset have produced a fascinating and large range, though a clearer if perhaps more nuanced version of where we are with this area of research has started to emerge.

Delivering feedback effectively - 2007

Understanding the significance of feedback in teaching, researchers Hattie and Timperley dived into the vast sea of literature to uncover the strategies that hold the key to effective feedback in the classroom. They found that in order to be most effective, feedback must answer three questions:

1. Where am I going? - This makes your goal crystal clear

2. How am I going? - This gives an indication of progress

3. Where to next? - It focuses on strategies needed in order to improve

The researchers also identified four types of feedback: self, task, process, and self-regulation. They noted that it's not about one type being superior to another, although self-level feedback can have negative consequences. Each type of feedback offers unique benefits. Task feedback is helpful when students misinterpret instructions, while self-regulation feedback benefits novice learners. Process feedback encourages deeper learning by prompting students to seek more information.

Effective study strategies - 2013

In a comprehensive review of academic papers in 2013, Dunlosky evaluated various learning strategies and ranked them based on their evidence base.

Retrieval Practice and Spacing emerged as the most effective techniques, benefiting learners of all ages and abilities, and consistently enhancing performance across different tasks and educational settings. Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaved practice demonstrated moderate utility, although the evidence supporting their efficacy was somewhat limited.

On the other hand, techniques such as summarisation, highlighting, keyword mnemonic, imagery and re-reading ranked lowest in terms of utility and are not recommended as primary learning tools.

Mobile phones and concentration - 2014

Driven by the increasing prevalence of technology, Thorton's team of researchers became intrigued by the potential influence of mobile phones on concentration. To investigate this, students were asked to complete a concentration task with either a mobile phone or a notepad nearby, within their line of sight.

Interestingly, the presence of a mobile phone, regardless of ownership, resulted in a significant decrease in attention, concentration, and overall task performance. This study, though not replicated in full later, has paved the way for an increasing closer examination of the impact of mobile phones, something that is arguably more important now than ever.

How quickly we forget things - 2015

In the 1880s, psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a famous study revealing that people forget information over time unless they revisit it. His forgetting curve suggested that students usually forget the majority of what they have learned within 24 hours. After that, forgetting continues, albeit at a much slower rate.

More than 130 years later, Murre and Dros replicated and updated Ebbinghaus's findings using modern methods. While their findings generally aligned with the original study, an intriguing discovery emerged: after 24 hours of learning, participants experienced a memory boost, remembering more on the morning of the second day than on the night of the first. This improvement was due to the negative impact of fatigue on memory and the restorative power of sleep.

The key takeaway here is to view the forgetting curve as a guide rather than a rigid rule.

How to foster resilience - 2016

More recently, leading experts in resilience, Fletcher and Sarkar reviewed existing studies on the topic to come up with the most comprehensive set of suggestions to date. They found that creating a programme that develops and enhances resilience should focus on three distinct areas:

1. Developing personal qualities - These include but are not limited to high personal standards, optimism, competitiveness, intrinsic motivation, self-confidence, self-talk, focusing on what is important and what you can control.

2. Providing a facilitative environment - Ensuring the learning environment has high levels of challenge and support.

3. Instilling a challenge mindset - This may be done by asking students to concentrate on positive and helpful thoughts so that they see things as a challenge and not a threat.

By using this three-pronged approach, we can hopefully help our students develop the resilience needed to thrive both in and outside of school.

Metacognition - 2017

With a growing interest in Metacognition, Chen and his research team investigated the impact of enhancing student Metacognition through answering study skills questions. They compared these students with a control group and monitored their study habits and exam performance. They found that to improve metacognition, students should reflect on three questions:

1. Which resources do I need to help me study?

2. Why are those resources helpful?

3. How will I use these resources?

Asking these questions improved students' self-reflection and how effective they found their study resources when learning. They also felt less stressed and went on to score one-third of a grade higher in their classes.

Final thoughts

The last 50 years have witnessed significant advancements in Teaching & Learning, driven by influential studies that have shaped educational practices. From understanding the power of feedback to identifying evidence-informed strategies like Retrieval Practice and Spacing, these studies have revolutionised our approach to education.

It is exciting to think what might happen in the next 50 years - which insights we might gather from research and how this may drive future learning.

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The 10 most important Teaching & Learning studies of the last 50 years

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Read about the most important research into how we learn conducted in the last 50 years, what it found, and what that means in the classroom for teachers.