Well-being: What Schools Can Do

Everybody is different when it comes to their well-being, and schools can face difficulty in getting things right for everyone – I can’t see myself in full lycra doing a downward dog with my colleagues but I’d love a bacon roll on a Friday morning. However, I think there are two things that schools should do which are more than a nod to well-being and which for me personally have helped.

Behaviour

I firmly believe that building a positive culture around behaviour is crucial to staff well-being, and I am certain that it has a significant impact on how I feel about my job.  Centralised detentions help. When these are organised and managed well, a number of things happen. Time is freed up by teachers to do other things such as marking, planning and going home. They save the time it takes to arrange and to do the detention. And a clear and consistent message is there for everyone in the school – there is a consequence to poor behaviour.

My own well-being is affected by what happens in the classroom. I love English and I love teaching English. When I can do this properly, when I can plan the optimal sequence of lessons, with no worry that the lesson will be derailed, then those hours I spend in the classroom are a joy. There’s also a real intellectual challenge in teaching well that I relish, and ineffective behaviour policies reduce the chance for this to happen. When you have to design lessons purely to mitigate poor behaviour, they are always less effective.

Also, when behaviour systems are clear and supportive, and there are fewer instances of disruption, it allows me a clear focus on supporting pupils who do struggle with their behaviour, to discuss how we can solve these challenges. It helps to build those positive relationships because there are fewer instances of disruption, fewer fires to fight. I can concentrate on the real needs of pupils that I teach. Being able to do this is part of what makes teaching rewarding. If our behaviour systems seem constructed to make these kind of things harder, then staff will be unhappy.

Behaviour management is an important role of the teacher, and I don’t abdicate responsibility in the name of well-being. Whatever the policy a school has – and I acknowledge that other ways do work – a massive consideration should be in how it supports teachers to do what they do best.

Focus on the Final Foot

Schools should encourage collaboration and the sharing of resources. I would go further and suggest that schools should provide ready-made schemes and lessons for staff to use as the foundation of what they teach. In Completing the Revolution: Delivering on the promise of the 2014 National Curriculum, John Blake makes a case for why we should have what he calls “oven ready resources”.

As well as lowering their workload, such “oven ready” resources will also help teachers focus their professional expertise on “the final foot” between them and the children they teach in the classroom. Instead of hours making different worksheets, their attention can all be on using those resources to help the children they are teaching.

I wrote more about my feelings here, but I don’t think it is right for every member of a department trying to source and resource everything from scratch, particularly new teachers. Of course, there is enormous value in thinking deeply about everything that you teach, but there is also a time cost.  Better to provide as much as we can and say, now make it appropriate for your style, for your class and their needs.

There are  workload demands in putting these resources together and ensuring that they are of decent quality, so schools need to consider this. I also understand that for some teachers – and I can be like this too- teaching someone else’s lessons might feel restricting, so we should never impose that each lesson must always be taught as is.

There are many others things schools can do that impact on workload and well-being, but these feel to me the simplest and most impactful strategies.

A Visit From Imtiaz Dharker

I spent a lovely hour on Friday listening to Imtiaz Dharker, who visited Dixons Kings as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival. I came hoping for the cheat-sheet on Tissue, but I left her talk with a renewed love for poetry and especially for Tissue. Here are some of her words and some of my thoughts.

“Poetry travels without a passport.”

Dharker read some of her poems, including Tissue, Blessing and This Room, explained the inspiration behind them and shared moments from her life. A running theme from the talk was the way that we tend to close ourselves off, pigeonhole each other, say how things should be. “Listen for the human voice that cuts across borderlines,” says Dharker. Dharker says that she is a “Scottish Muslim Calvinist adopted by India and married into Wales” and that, like her own, “your identity is always travelling.” I had no idea that This Room and Blessing, two poems I have taught in the past, were based on her own experiences in India. It was nice to draw this line through those poems and now Tissue, all poems about breaking free, casting aside restrictions that we may face. We see this in Tissue, the way that “The sun shines through/ their borderlines” and we see the “breaking out” and “lifting out” of This Room and the “flow”, “rush” and “bursts” of Blessing. Poetry describes this freedom but poetry is this freedom. It certainly freed Dharker: “Poetry gave me a different kind of freedom.”

 “Listen for the human voice”

Sometimes it’s hard to explain what poetry is or to put into words why it matters. Who better to do this than a poet: “Poetry says things that the heart knows before the mind has a chance to catch up.” The idea of poetry giving a voice is important as when Dharker was a child she used to have ideas, but “my tongue couldn’t catch up.” A moment that changed her relationship with poetry and the world was when her teacher Miss Murray noticed her poem, loved it, typed it up and published it in the school magazine: “It changed my whole world. It changed everything.”

 “One of the jobs of poetry is to pay attention to the detail”

Dharker explained the inspiration for Tissue – a note from her father in the back of the Quran. This was seen at the time when she and her father were out of touch and she hadn’t spoken to him for a long time. This “flimsy piece of paper” brought home to her that it is family and relationships that matter, not the structures we build, not bricks and mortar and stone. Tissue is “written like a love poem” to remember her father. The connections between the most precious and the flimsiest things is explored. Paper is precious and flimsy. Human connections are precious and flimsy. Tissue as a love poem is a wonderful lens to view it through.

Dharker patiently and enthusiastically answered our students’ questions about Tissue. After the talk, some students stayed and had their anthologies autographed. At least one starstruck teacher asked for a selfie, but he will remain nameless…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changes for a Stronger Foundation at GCSE

I’m not a believer in doing lots and lots of new things for the sake of it. If things are working, leave them alone. But there are times when it is good to reflect on what is working and if it means significant changes then so be it. For September, I was asked to tweak the scheme of work I created on Animal Farm a couple of years ago. It would have been fine to change the odd thing, but I realised that this was an opportunity for us to make a few more ambitious changes in how we start the GCSE course. Here are some of the changes.

Reading the book before we study the book

The change that felt most significant was to begin by reading the book from start to finish without studying it. It’s very difficult to study a text until it has been read fully because so many important elements of the text remain hidden. We cannot comment properly on structure, characterisation, context and themes until we see how things pan out over the course of a text. Take Old Major’s speech in Chapter 1. We can study it in isolation on first reading as a rousing speech, a piece of rhetoric. Yet if we study it after reading the book, a line like this reads quite differently: “You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds.”

In addition, when we study a book as we read it, there is an arbitrariness in what we study when. We read a few pages or a chapter then do a lesson based on what we have just read. This can lead to lessons which are dictated by the page number not a deliberate decision. And every lesson is weaker because it is only based on a chapter or what has come before; it is never about the whole book. In the old scheme, we studied Old Major’s speech first only because it comes first in the book. Now it is one element in a lesson that focuses on how power corrupts noble ideas.

Using exercise books as revision guides

Last year I was horrified when year 11 students started clearing out their lockers before their exams were over. There was a skip full of exercise books and I was disappointed that this rich revision resource was wasted. Students clearly didn’t value their books. We need to remind students that they can go back and read answers, read feedback, look at exam questions and resources glued in their books, and we can make explicit how to use exercise books as their ready-made revision guides. We can also design tasks which lend themselves well to restudy.

One way we have encouraged this is by using the Cornell note-taking method as we read the book. After each chapter of the book, we ask students to write up their notes. We explicitly model what good examples of these notes should look like and what each part of the notes is designed to do. In making the rationale explicit, we hope to ensure these students value their notes pages from day one and their exercise books are not quite as disposable.

Explicitly teaching revision strategies

As well as an assembly for all students into the most effective revision strategies, we have explicitly taught how revision should look in English as part of this scheme. We have tried to concentrate on three clear and simple messages around revision using Knowledge Organisers: Retrieval; Elaboration; Organisation. (You can see in this post from our school blog.) General principles like these then get exemplified in lessons. For example, how do we revise quotations in English? We can’t just say ‘use flashcards’ – we have to model how to make them; how to use them; how to reflect on whether they have been successful. It has taken quite a bit of lesson time to teach these strategies properly, but I hope that the benefits will be seen over the next two years. I certainly don’t want to be frustrated in a year about a lack of revision when we can be very explicit from the start about what is expected.

Starting with the Knowledge Organiser

The magical land of gained time gave me an opportunity to really get to grips with a proper Knowledge Organiser. I have spent a lot of time trying to get the general principles of these right as part of my work with Bradford Research school and the Animal Farm Knowledge Organiser helped me to explore it practically. To be honest, it is really hard to produce a decent knowledge organiser, and mine went through several iterations. By really getting to grips with some of the most fundamental aspects of the text, it put me in a much better position to design the scheme. Do Now quizzes, homework tasks and revision were much easier to produce when I had a clearly designed Knowledge Organiser. My knowledge of the text improved. When I created the last scheme, the Knowledge Organiser was an afterthought and was little more than a revision guide.

It’s dangerous to make any bold claims about the effectiveness of these approaches a couple of years before these students sit their exams, but I’m confident that we are laying a strong foundation by reconsidering our approach in this way.

Focus on the Final Foot: Why I’m in Favour of Ready Made Resources

Last week I read this article from John Blake: “The solution to the workload crisis? Stop teachers designing their own lessons.” I found myself agreeing with the sentiments, so I read the full report: Completing the Revolution: Delivering on the promise of the 2014 National Curriculum. I thought it was sensible and attempting to address some very real problems in education – I would recommend reading it.

I understand the issues that some people have with what Blake terms “oven ready resources” and the fear of robotic automatons reading from a script, but my concerns at present are the unhealthy hours that teachers work. Something has to give. My sense is that far from being a restriction, having some well crafted, quality-assured resources and curriculum programmes will help to sharpen up the way that we teach material and improve our work-life balance. The report calls this the Final Foot:

As well as lowering their workload, such “oven ready” resources will also help teachers focus their professional expertise on “the final foot” between them and the children they teach in the classroom. Instead of hours making different worksheets, their attention can all be on using those resources to help the children they are teaching.

In my school, we have well-resourced lessons, and the benefit of these is enormous, letting me concentrate on this so-called final foot. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate it.

Brushing up on subject knowledge

In my post last week, I listed some sources for finding out about George Orwell and the context for Animal Farm. While I try to be efficient by listening to audiobooks and podcasts on the commute, time is finite. Rather than deskilling me and making me less likely to understand what I am teaching, having a good starting point for a lesson frees me up to pursue those aspects that increase my understanding and therefore improve my teaching.

Recently I taught The Charge of the Light Brigade, starting with a pre-planned lesson that already had retrieval practice questions in the Do Now, a model answer which was ready to unpick and even something simple: the poem copied and pasted on slides ready for me to annotate in class. This meant I had more time to think deeply about the poem, reread some notes and explore the context further. It took me to the original Times article which Tennyson would have read. You can see echoes in the language/tone of the poem in the article e.g. “ they flew into the smoke of the batteries”; “exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring”. I learnt much more about the Crimean War and understood that the Crimean War was the first where newspaper reports were ‘live’, albeit taking three weeks to arrive. From then I pursued the shift from event to news to poetry and the complications of stories told third hand, then the links to Ozymandias.

Crafting explanations

A good explanation can be the making of a lesson, but it can often be an afterthought – the planned lesson is seen as the endpoint. It’s all very well having a lesson ready and the notion that you’ll explain dramatic irony here or tell them what a subordinate clause is there. Yet there is an art to explaining these things – use the wrong words and they just don’t get it, or worse a misconception becomes ingrained (see other pitfalls in this great piece by Tom Boulter). A great explanation needs examples and non-examples, it needs analogy, it needs prior thought about the misconceptions that might arise. I think teachers should practise more, and a great explanation gets better with practice. These things can happen when teachers plan their own lessons, but when teachers plan all their lessons from scratch, this’ll happen less, or in the evening or weekend.

An example of a great explanation is this one from @positivteacha on iambic pentameter. You can see how deeply he has considered the sequencing of it and the examples he uses as exemplification. I used this to reconsider my own teaching of iambic pentameter when looking at Ozymandias. I used these lines to explain the metre: “Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone’” and “And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” then asked them to see whether the following line was written in iambic pentameter: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:” which led to some great moments of discussion. Then three questions to explore: How does the regular iambic pentameter combine with the irregular rhyme scheme to reinforce Shelley’s ideas?/ How does the iambic pentameter serve to diminish Ozymandias’ power?/ How does the regular iambic pentameter help to reinforce the idea of the everlasting and inevitable power of nature? Having ‘taught’ iambic pentameter for many years, this is the first time I gave it any real degree of thought. Again, this could happen without pre-planned lessons, but I’m not sure it would.

 

We have this norm in teaching, where it is taken as a given that teachers work long hours. Most professions wouldn’t entertain the thought – the job finishes when it does. We all want to do our best, but when this means that we have zero time for ourselves, our profession is unhealthy and our lives are unhappy.

Would I prefer to plan all my lessons from scratch? Probably. But the reality is that it takes time, and that time often comes in the evenings and weekends. Whether you are someone who disagrees with John Blake on this issue or not, I am firmly in the camp that teaching at present is an unsustainable profession, so I would welcome a range of high quality curriculum and lesson resources. It will make me a better teacher.

As Blake concludes the report:

No textbook or worksheet will ever substitute for a positive relationship between teacher and pupil but these “oven ready resources” can underpin those relationships by reducing teacher workload on activities which can be done effectively by external bodies. That then expands the time and energy available to teachers to deploy their professional skills where they will make the most difference, in “the final foot” between them and their pupils, in the classroom.

Teacher Workload Reports: initial thoughts

I welcome the reports into teacher workload and I hope that school leaders read them and implement some of their recommendations. Here are my initial thoughts on the data, planning and marking reports:

For leaders, not teachers

These reports are ultimately for the benefit for teachers, but if you have no control over your school’s policy, you will find little practical inspiration from them. The problem with workload is that it is often closely linked with your school and your leadership team. In the marking report, it is stated: “If the hours spent do not have the commensurate impact on pupil progress: stop it.” Yet if you are the NQT who does this, you are possibly going to fall foul of the next book scrutiny. You can see that there are only two recommendations specific to teachers in the marking report, two in the data one and two again in the planning, which reinforces the idea that the audience is not actually classroom teachers.

However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that the advice is aimed at leaders and institutions. Teachers are very rarely the sources of their own workload problems. They are at the mercy of the “policy” and the “initiative”. I appreciate that the marking report states:

Evaluate the time implications of any whole school marking assessment policy for all teachers to ensure that the school policy does not make unreasonable demands on any particular members of staff.

The Data report:

Take measures to understand the cumulative impact on workload of new initiatives and guidance before rolling them out and make proportionate and pragmatic demands.

When I filled in the survey myself, this was something that I wrote about. Lots of things are good things to do, but they take up time. It is up to leaders to make these choices. There is a vagueness in what is meant by “unreasonable demands” and I am sure different people will have their own ideas about what this means, but it’s so important that we ask this question.

Broad advice

I do feel that this sense of imprecision runs through all of the reports. For example, the marking report recommends ITT students develop “a repertoire of assessment methods” and teachers use “a range of assessment techniques” without being precise about what these look like.  If you are a teacher struggling with the marking workload, being told to use a range of techniques isn’t helpful when those techniques are not clear.

There are definitely principles that everyone should get behind and there are not many parts of the report that I disagree with. For example, the suggestions of making marking “meaningful, manageable and motivating” seems sensible.  These terms are then defined in more detail, so can serve as a very useful starting point for any marking policy.

Once something is said to be good practice, it can take on a life of its own, so I appreciate why these reports need to be careful. It is much easier to say what shouldn’t be done than to say precisely what should (except posters). There are some case studies on the blog and there will hopefully be more, although this one recommends different coloured pens and writing VF for verbal feedback in books so perhaps we should be careful with these too.

I really like the line in the planning report that “there should be greater flexibility to accommodate different subject demands and needs, as well as the specific demands of primary phases.” It is important to acknowledge that there is much variation in subjects and phases, not just with planning but other demands too. Should an English teacher teach the same load as a maths teacher? Should a teacher who has predominantly KS5 have the same teaching load as one who teaches mainly KS3?

Workload issues in the planning report

The planning report has good intentions but some of its recommendations seem to lead to more time:

School leaders should place great value on collaborative curriculum planning which is where teacher professionalism and creativity can be exercised.

I agree that shared planning can be beneficial, but where does the time for this come from? It has to come from somewhere. Similarly, the demand to create “a fully resourced, collaboratively produced, scheme of work” as a default is a noble one but I can assure you that this is a time-consuming process and someone has to do this. I’m not arguing that this shouldn’t be done, just that to create a really good scheme of work that can be used by anyone takes time.

I have always struggled with the fact that there are not some free central resources that all teachers can access. Ones that they can adapt for their context, change and share back. TES can be useful, but there is a massive quality control issue- try to look for a lesson on similes (smiles/ similies) and you’ll see . Also, the idea of teachers selling their resources runs counter to a profession where we should be interested in helping each other. This happens on Twitter of course but I feel that the DfE should appoint teachers to make schemes, perhaps as a summer project, or recruit experienced, recently retired teachers to do it. Even just creating a quality controlled shared site would be a start.

On textbooks, I agree with the recommendations that we should use them but it is not a “mistrust of textbooks” but a lack of good enough ones that I am more concerned with. Textbooks are a huge investment when curriculum content changes so often, so the DfE should look at ways to make this commercially viable.

All in all, I think the reports make sensible recommendations that will impact positively on workload. We just need more concrete examples of what should be done.

 

Filling subject knowledge gaps

I ended one of my previous blogs with this sentence: “I have become a better teacher in recent years by trying to become a better English teacher”. This is definitely true, but in all honesty I have tended to try to get better at the things that interest me, or the things that are most obvious, such as teaching writing. I get excited about something like rhetoric and then direct all my energies into it, but some areas inevitably get neglected. I am now going to tackle those areas- not weaknesses as such, but subject knowledge gaps that I need to fill.

The 19th Century

I am currently writing a scheme of work on 19th Century Literature and once I started putting together a knowledge organiser I realised that a) I knew nothing about the century and b) fitting a whole century on a knowledge organiser is not a task that should necessarily be undertaken.

So many holes in my knowledge were uncovered as I started. I didn’t know the first passenger trains were in 1825 for example. I didn’t know when the Crimean War was, or even the decades of important moments such as the abolition of slavery. To illustrate how problematic this lack of history is, imagine that we were studying “20th Century Literature.” We know instinctively how a book written in 1950 would be different to one in 1970, how one in 1912 would be different from 1920, but it is harder to understand how 1850 is different from 1870. Lumping everything together into the same 19th Century shaped box is not helpful. Dracula was published in 1897 and Frankenstein so much earlier in 1812, yet they are placed together in the same category of 19th Century Literature, with 85 years between them. To put this time gap in perspective, Tarzan and the Apes and The Lost World were published in 1912 while 1997 saw the publication Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.

SKGAps 2To try and combat this breadth of ignorance, I have been listening to one of the Great Courses on Victorian Britain on my commute this term. I imagined that this would be a bit of a chore but I absolutely love it. The course is 18 hours long and I’m about a third of the way through. It’s constantly surprising and endlessly fascinating. It is changing how I view history and how I consider the texts produced in that time- it will help my teaching of 19th Century Literature no end. No more will I just say, “they were very religious in those days” as a catch-all statement about context for virtually any text before 1950.

Grammar

SKGaps 1I know my grammar fairly well, but looking at the list of terminology that students in year 6 are expected to learn, I know that I couldn’t explain them easily to a novice. I think this is sometimes the case for teachers. We know our stuff, but teaching that stuff is another thing entirely. Even seemingly simple terminology such as ‘verb’ is much more complex than “It’s a doing word”. Mark-schemes for AQA mention ‘sentence functions’- easy to understand but quite difficult to get students to comment on effectively. I need to improve some of my knowledge of, and all of my teaching of, grammar. So the question is how do I get to the point where I am a grammar expert? The answer to this one- as it often is for me- is reading. Gwynne’s Grammar is the guide that I have chosen to read. However, I have owned this since 2013 and not read a word, so that might be easier said than done. I’m going to read 5 pages a day, starting today. By putting it in writing on this blog, at least my 63 readers will hold me to account.

New specifications

I am delighted to see the back of controlled assessment and I am already enjoying teaching new specifications. But the unfamiliarity can be a problem. I have brought myself up to speed with specifications and examinations, but there are always nuances that are not apparent until you start teaching, and sometimes only after you have taught it through. We have started teaching poems from the AQA Power and Conflict cluster and I have made sure that I am very familiar with every poem that I have taught, but I don’t yet know all of the poems that I will be teaching later on in the school year. At first I wasn’t so concerned about this, but it has become apparent to me that an overview of the whole selection of poems would make teaching each individual poem easier- for me and the students. Common patterns across the poems- themes, viewpoints, language techniques- have been discovered almost by accident, and a more thorough understanding of the whole body of poems would have meant that sequences were designed around this, rather than spotting them when they come up. This is my holiday reading for my two weeks off in October- a poem a day.

All of these things at first seem to me like the least exciting parts of being an English teacher: specifications, history and grammar. Yet reading some of the best poetry ever written, finding out about a century that shaped modern Britain and becoming more accomplished at the mechanics of language should never be described as ‘least exciting’, should they?

Further reading on English teaching:

Andy Tharby’s list of essential English teacher blogs: 25 Practical Blogs for the English Teacher

My original post on improving English teacher subject knowledge: Trying to be a Better English Teacher

My post on books to develop subject knowledge in English: An English Teacher’s Library

 

Personalised CPD

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how we practised classroom routines at DKA in order to ensure consistency. With similar behaviours and routines used across the school, it is just much easier to teach. Does this mean that everyone is expected to teach in an identical way, or that individual needs are not important? Of course not.

That is why the CPD programme that we have developed is not built solely around the school’s development needs, but with the individual teacher in mind. It is incredibly difficult to make CPD highly personalised, but I believe that we have a system that works, where every single teacher in the school gets the specific personal development that they need. Here’s what we do.

Low stakes coaching observations

This is the most important professional development that happens in our school. Every teacher-from the principal to the cover supervisor- has a weekly coaching observation which is followed up by a coaching meeting. Each probably lasts for about 15 minutes. The idea is to focus on just one small feature which can have a large impact. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo writes about this in Leverage Leadership:

No single small step will dramatically change a classroom in and of itself. Multiple small changes, though, implemented week after week, add up to extraordinary change.

The low stakes, supportive nature of this is crucial in it being used as a development tool- nobody needs to worry about judgement or grading. Coaching meetings will often include some practice, so improvements can be embedded.

Emma Hickey, head of MFL at Dixons Kings Academy, has written about the benefits of coaching here and Harry Fletcher-Wood has an excellent series of posts which explore leverage observations at length.

Differentiated CPD sessions

In addition to coaching, we still have a version of what you might call ‘traditional’ CPD. The traditional model is not particularly effective, because delivering the same training to all staff can mean that nobody really gets exactly what they need, so in our CPD model every member of staff participates in one CPD session per week, but not everyone is in the same one. Tuesday is for heads of department, heads of year and principal teachers, and often has a focus on the leadership of teaching and learning in the school. The other session, for the rest of the teaching staff, is on a Monday. The CPD will often focus on the same topic but from slightly different perspectives. Here is an extract from our plan:

Personalisation 1Of course, just because someone is a head of department, it doesn’t mean that they don’t need to focus on improving teaching too. And just because someone isn’t in a leadership position, it doesn’t mean that they are less experienced. So, even within this model, we need to be conscious of the fact that there are wide differences between teachers. This is why we will have more than one session every Monday and many Tuesdays. These sessions will be created based on what we learn from staff voice, coaching etc as the term goes on. We also have induction sessions for new staff and weekly Teach First sessions, plus meetings of steering groups such as department literacy reps in the example above.

CPD session design

Having noted all of this, it is still difficult- if not impossible- to pitch a session just right so that everyone gets exactly what they need. You could have just two people in a session and not be able to pitch it right. That’s why we always ask- what’s in it for everyone? One of the best ways that this can be done is to allow staff to reflect, to plan, and to consider what they will do for their own classes. For example, this week we looked at some strategies to help with behaviour management. Time was given for staff to plan exactly which strategies would work best with particular students, even scripting what they might say to specific students to get them back on track. The previous week, after a brief presentation on differentiation and feedback, teachers were given most of the session to plan. (They were also able to leave if they wanted to work elsewhere.) This means that teachers are getting something which directly impacts on their classes.

Subject pedagogy

We have also increased the number of departmental meetings so teachers can focus on improving their pedagogical content knowledge. The Sutton Trust ‘What Makes Great Teaching’ report said that “the most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach”, and we place high value on teachers getting better at teaching their subject. While it is useful to improve in more general aspects of teaching, we can’t do a whole staff training session on how best to teach Shakespeare, which is what an English teacher might need. (Well, I will if the principal lets me). In this post on subject-specific practice, I wrote about how MFL used their meeting to practice speaking in the target language.

It isn’t easy to get CPD right for everyone, and we won’t always manage it, but the pace of improvement when you build a school culture around individual teacher development is incredible.

Doing things so you don’t have to do them…

One of the best things about my job is that I get to see lots of other people teaching, and this week I noticed a common thread in lessons that allowed me to reflect on my questioning, and then, in a roundabout way, on my teaching of writing.

In particular, I saw No Opt Out, a technique taken from Teach Like a Champion, used expertly in several lessons. This is the idea that when a student says “I don’t know”, you stay with them until they get it, or give various cues to support, or ask another student before returning to them. As Lemov writes: “In the end, there’s far less incentive to refuse to try if doing so doesn’t save you any work, so No Opt Out’s attribute of causing students to answer a question they’ve attempted to avoid is a key lever.” It’s something that we practised in CPD last year and it was great to see it being used in lessons.

Yet there are some very real problems that can occur when this is used. Momentum can be lost when you stick with a student, especially when the question might just be a quick check that forms part of an explanation. It can mean that others in the class switch off, which is not great, especially when the strategy is designed to eliminate this kind of thing. I felt a little of this ‘switching off’ in one of my own lessons this week.

These are the pitfalls of No Opt Out. But the strategy exists for the long term gains rather than just for addressing the moment where students don’t get it. This happens over time by building a culture in the classroom where “I don’t know” is rewarded with “Great. I’m going to help you so you will know.” It becomes easier to think when the question is asked than to avoid it. Showing that you will probe is a way of ensuring that you don’t have to probe in the long run, but you have to keep doing it until everyone works it out. This can then mean that the best exponents of No Opt Out rarely have to use it! Or, at the very least, they know that “I don’t know” actually means that and not “I haven’t thought about it.”

So why did this lead me to think about writing? Well, by coincidence I have been teaching redrafting, which is another method which we can make obsolete after a while. When we explicitly teach it well, we can get to a point where we rarely have to do redrafting. Once students have the habits effective in redrafting, they can become proficient in revising work, editing things as they write. I have been using Kelly Gallagher’s STAR Revision mnemonic (which I think is one of the few useful ones in English) to model this. You can read more about this in Revision Before Redrafting.

It takes work to build these habits, but once students know how to do it, they can do it in their head, they can do it mid sentence, they can reorder sentences in paragraphs as they write. You barely have to teach it again.

Revision 1Here are some examples of how this works, taken from one of my classes this week. In the first example, the task was to redraft the opening. You can see lots of changes, with perhaps the most interesting one that it now starts with a simile.

 

Revision 2In the next example, a different student is now consciously revising as they write. This was the very next lesson after the explicit teaching of redrafting. You can see them change their mind halfway through ‘beautifully’ and constantly  revise their writing. Is it perfect? Not yet. But it is almost a second draft without writing the first.

Revision 3The final example has just one word changed. The man holds a photograph on his heart rather than his stomach. I love that.

Looking at the messy examples above reminds me that another keep-doing-it-so-you-don’t-have-to-do-it strategy is being fussy about presentation! Whether it is thinking, revising or using a ruler, persevering at the start means that you will rarely have to do it again.

Technology that makes my life a little easier

My old classroom had a suite of computers, an interactive whiteboard and a visualiser. I loved the visualiser and it was great to not have to book IT suites, but did these things transform my teaching? I’m not sure. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying out sites and doing things on computers because I could rather than I should (I still have nightmares about those ClassDojo monsters). I’m not complaining- I was very fortunate to have that classroom- but I think that the technology that is most helpful to me now as a teacher is all relatively simple. So here are three pieces of technology that make my life easier.

The Clicker

AugustI think this has been the most useful piece of technology I have ever purchased. It has a couple of very simple functions: it clicks slides back and forward; it has a laser pointer. The greatest benefit is that I can move around the classroom when I’m teaching- I’m never stuck behind my laptop. If, when circulating, I need to revisit something with a student, I can click back through slides. Simple but really useful. It was recommended to me by @amsammons and is available here for £7.25.

Quick Key

Quick Key is an app which scans multiple choice quizzes. Results can be broken down by student and by question on the app. You can then export the data in various forms from the website for further analysis.

It’s easiest to illustrate the benefits with an example, in this case a quick homophone activity I used with a class. The first 5 questions had options of your/ you’re and the next five were there/their/they’re. I scanned it in and then exported the data in question level analysis form, which looked like this.

QK1Where there is an X, the question was not answered. If there is a letter, then that indicates that they were wrong and they chose that option.

With the exception of one student on one question, it is clear that the class coped well with your/ you’re. The X in this case was actually a correct answer which just didn’t scan properly. Questions 7 and 10 were answered poorly, particularly Q7. Both of these required ‘there’ as an answer, yet students generally went for ‘they’re’ for Q7 and ‘their’ for Q10.

Q7: ___________________ are nearly 65 million people in Great Britain.

Q10: I saw him standing _______________

The three students who struggled the most with homophones were given additional exercises during class and I also spent some more time teaching them the differences. The class were then given an extended quiz on there/they’re/their just to make sure that guessing was less likely to be a factor in success. We looked together at the specific examples, addressing why they may have used the wrong one. The first one looked to be that the word ‘are’ had confused them but I was surprised with the errors on Q10.

It’s so useful to have this kind of precise individual and question level data, which can be immediately acted upon. One of my colleagues sets Quick Key quizzes as a Do Now activity, marks them straight away and then provides follow up activities and reteaching where necessary within the same lesson. With well designed multiple choice questions, Quick Key is an incredibly effective tool.

QK2It costs around £20* for the annual Pro subscription. I’d recommend this as the free one does much less and you can have a free month’s trial if necessary. It’s not without frustrations. Students will find all sorts of ways to fill the forms in incorrectly and you need to avoid bright lights when scanning. You can always manually enter the answers as a last resort.

*Smartphone not included.

Evernote

EvernoteI think we could do well by talking more about organisation and productivity for teachers. I am envious of those  people for whom organisation seems to come naturally so I have tried to improve my productivity in the same way that I might try to improve my questioning or my feedback.

I read a number of stories about how Evernote had transformed the way people work, had a look at what the fuss was about and am now a convert. Evernote is an app for creating, organising and storing various forms of media. It’s versatile and can be accessed on different devices and synced between them.

If someone grabs me on the corridor and asks me to do something, I can record it immediately. I can clip pages I want read to view later. I can forward emails there. I can make checklists and tag in a way that keeps me organised. I can set alarms, store documents I will need, add images, record voice reminders. By capturing things in an organised, searchable place, I don’t have to hold things in my head or fill endless notebooks. When things need doing, they are there.

I don’t think Evernote would be nearly as effective without an organised system. I use a variation of the ‘Secret Weapon’ method which you can read about here. Without this- and the excellent advice in Getting Things Done– Evernote could just be a messy electronic version of a notebook. As with Quick Key, there’s a free and a premium version. The free version is pretty good with Evernote.

A final point. All of these are things that I’ve been using for a significant period of time, not merely weeks or months. I filed this blog away for many months to ensure that I wasn’t just talking about the latest fads (which is why Plickers is not on here). These might be just what you need, but they might not be.

The space between the question and the answer

Here is a puzzle:

If a great question is asked, but only a small proportion of your class actually think about it, is it a great question?

This post isn’t about the questions we ask and it isn’t really about the answers- it’s about the space in between. It is about ensuring great questions are met with a suitable depth of thought from students, because if we can’t guarantee that students are thinking about our questions, then we can’t guarantee that they are learning anything. Using questioning as a teaching tool, as a diagnostic tool, as a key element of our explanations, becomes ineffective because students are not really participating.

The problem is that thinking is a pretty invisible process. How on earth can we somehow get inside students’ minds and ensure that they are actually thinking?

Visible checks

Thinking is invisible, but there are ways that we can see the effect of thinking.

For example, one strategy I use when asking students to identify something in a text is to place their finger on it. If they can’t find anything, they put their finger on their head. I can scan the room and see the participation at a glance. Students know that I will often go to those who have fingers on their heads first, so the ‘opt outers’ make more of an effort, even though I’m just as likely to pick someone with their finger on something too. Now, there are definitely some chancers who just place their fingers on the page and hope, but they are less and less likely to do this.

Getting students to write an answer down to a question is another simple way of being able to track participation. Mini white boards are particularly useful for this. At Dixons Kings Academy, we have whole school routines and language for MWB use. Teachers have to spend less time establishing their own routines and the consistency of approach makes it easier to focus on responses.

One of my colleagues, Luke, uses whiteboards effectively during continuum tasks- tasks where students place themselves on a line with opposite viewpoints at each end. It is very easy for students to follow their friends, to hide in a larger group or sometimes just to move to the place which is closest to their seat. Luke asks them to take a whiteboard and explain their rationale. This way, it is harder for students to avoid thinking. Even if they take the lazy option in where they stand, they still have to justify it! The physical act of writing on whiteboards is a visible sign of participation (if not of the quality of thinking) and Luke can intervene when they are not writing. He can then use the responses to prompt discussion and diagnose understanding.

The inevitability that anyone can be asked to answer, anyone can be asked to comment on an answer (anyone can be asked to comment on the comment on the answer etc)

In my role, I am lucky to be able to see many examples of excellent questioning from teachers. The thread that runs through them all is the expectation that students answer questions because the teacher wants them to, not because they decide that they want to. Questions are asked, students think about them, and the teacher asks a particular student for their answer. Where this is routine, you get answers of a higher quality, fewer “I don’t knows” and, ultimately, better work. When there is an inkling that a student hasn’t tried to think, these teachers stay with them and make them think. There are no shortcuts from question to answer.

However, even with a culture of strong questioning, it is difficult to ensure that students are focusing on other students’ answers. I have noticed that once I go to one student for an answer, some can switch off. For example, if I stay with a student and ask them further questions, or remain with one who says “I don’t know”, there is a possibility that every other student stops listening because they are not being asked the question.

It has to be a regular feature of lessons that students are asked “Is she right?” or “Can you give me an additional reason?” Otherwise, a supposedly rigorous technique of probing questions becomes a terrible one with impact on only one student. This doesn’t always come easily. It is a day in, day out technique which creates a culture in a classroom and across a school. But just like when the initial question is asked, any follow up questions need to have an expectation that anybody could be called on.

What about random name generators such as lollipops? I am fairly ambivalent on this but I have recently shifted back to the no lollipop camp for a couple of reasons. My justification for the sticks was always that it made it clear that I could pick any student. There was a bit of theatre to it all too. But without lolly sticks, nothing changes: I still pick randomly but I also target questions. (Plus I kept losing sticks). Here are a couple of excellent blogs on the issue: Tom Bennett on the problems and Harry Fletcher-Wood on the benefits.

Waiting

This isn’t a new suggestion but it is sometimes difficult to ensure effective wait time. It can feel awkward and can be particularly difficult with a challenging class. Also, if a student isn’t thinking then giving them ten more seconds is just giving them ten more seconds of not thinking. Often, the issue isn’t opting out but perhaps not knowing how to get to the right answer or a good answer. We have to be explicit about the behaviours that we want during this thinking/ waiting time. Another of my colleagues at DKA, Maria, narrates what students should be doing. For example, she might say, “I can see 5 students checking their notes for answers- excellent,” thus making clear what is expected. We should also value silence in these moments too, as too much narration might hinder quality thinking.

Now I said that this wasn’t about the quality of questions but it is worth saying that if you want students to think deeply, the questions need to be designed so that this is possible. And if the content of the lesson is limited or the text you are studying is just not good enough then no matter how much waiting time you give, the quality of thinking- and the quality of responses- will be poor.