Author: Mark Miller

Mini whiteboards- the essential classroom tool

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I have not always seen eye to eye with mini whiteboards. I hated handing them out, storing them, pens running out, pens going missing, not having enough, doodles, scribbles, drawings of inappropriate things, drawings of me, inappropriate drawings of me. In the past I would trot them out every so often before inevitably dismissing them as just too much of a hassle. Yet now I use mini whiteboards in every lesson and I can’t imagine teaching without them. Perhaps these are not the most fashionable tools in the education world, but here are the reasons why I find them indispensable.

Whiteboards are a way of getting immediate feedback about student understanding, with an effective sequence always starting with a well-designed task or question. Rather than just waiting as students write, this time can be used to seek the most useful responses. Do most students get it or not? Where are the great examples that can be used as models? Where are the examples of common errors that students can learn from? Which students are making the same errors?

Depending in what our checking tells us, there are many options:

  • Stop the task and reteach something immediately.
  • Give a simple piece of corrective advice to address a common problem e.g. ‘remember to mention the writer’.
  • Choose a range of responses (usually three) for students to compare.
  • Pick one example that is ‘nearly there’ and ask the class to improve it.
  • Sequence the responses shared so that they become increasingly more sophisticated.
  • Find answers with a common thread and ask students to connect them (really useful for language analysis).
  • Find three errors and ask students to connect them.
  • Teach the students who don’t understand in a small group. See in-class interventions.

MWBIf the first board I checked was this one, I would be thinking about spelling, particularly character names. Is this student the only one getting these wrong? I know that in this lesson I shared a model paragraph on the board and the phrase ‘ultimately lead to’ has been lifted from that and used incorrectly, so I need to know if others have made the same error. I could choose this board to look at the spelling of ‘ultimately’. We could use it as a fairly decent first attempt at an opening paragraph and ask students to rework it to make it better. I could seek out another contrasting set of adjectives used to describe Sheila and ask students to compare. Or I might not use this board at all-there are plenty of others to choose from! The main thing is, I don’t want to leave it to a randomly selected student response and hope it tells me something. By getting every student to write a response to a clear and unambiguous question (not ‘hands up if you don’t understand’), I can be reasonably sure of the class picture and do something about it.

There are other benefits of using whiteboards too. One of the issues that we have, as I am sure many schools do, is the use of unnecessary fillers in spoken responses. Part of the reason for this is, I feel, is students’ lack of confidence in what they are saying. Or that they don’t know what they are going to say before they start saying it. The few seconds it takes to write a couple of ideas down on a whiteboard can help to eliminate both of these. Add in grammar issues, not answering in sentences and the ubiquitous ‘innit’, and we have a number of elements that a quickly prepared written response can help to eliminate.

I want my students to develop excellent habits of editing, proofreading and redrafting. Whiteboards help me to create a culture where this is expected. It starts with making sure the first thing they write is high quality, and there’s an increased accountability when students write on whiteboards. When they know it will be held up and discussed, there is an incentive for it to be their best work. It’s easy to edit work quickly on a whiteboard and far less messy. With a constant focus on the quality of these short responses, students start to self edit, even as they are reading out their answers. They can spot the errors in other students’ answers and then fix their own. It’s easy for the teacher to correct the spelling of the word ‘beginning’ on a board and then instruct others in the class to fix it if they made that mistake. It’s great for adding commas or colons in the right place. Even as students write in their exercise books, they can make notes on whiteboards.

AOS 3Every lesson at our school starts with a Do Now which is completed on the whiteboards. It means that lessons start in a calm and prompt manner and it is efficient when we don’t have to wait for books to be handed out. The ability to immediately write something down on whiteboards can also help to eliminate the ridiculous amount of time it takes for some students to write the title and date.

Some argue that teachers might only do work on whiteboards in order to avoid marking books. Well, of course! And there’s nothing wrong with that. The fact is, I’m not going to mark everything students write in their book and I can’t mark it if it is only in their head. If it is written on a whiteboard, I am giving immediate feedback and in a fraction of the time it takes to mark books- in many ways it is more beneficial than marking books.

But what about the problems that I listed before? Surely these won’t go away. Much of what we try and do at Dixons Kings is to make it easy for teachers to teach and students to learn, so behaviour systems and classroom routines are crucial to ensure students don’t often exhibit those off-task behaviours. As for the equipment issues, every classroom has a set of whiteboards on desks and students must carry a pen with them as part of their essential equipment. Without these systems, I wouldn’t use whiteboards, especially as I don’t have my own classroom.

We designed a mini whiteboard routine which is used by all teachers in the school. When we want students to hold up their boards, we say, “3-2-1… show me.” They hold boards up with two hands then we say “track student x” and that student reads their answer out. We come back to these routines in our practice sessions to ensure they are consistent. There are some who might argue that these routines reduce creativity or lead to ‘robotic’ teaching. Yet they have allowed me to be the most creative I have ever been as a teacher and I would welcome anyone to come and visit to see just how much this routine and some of the others free teachers up to actually teach. Without these whole school approaches, you can still design a whiteboard routine that works for you. Consider in advance how equipment is stored and handed out and expectations during the sequence.

So, have a rummage in your stock cupboard, find the discarded whiteboards (I guarantee there will be some) and start using them.

Driving your own CPD

Mark Miller CPD ,

CPD1The drive to work is a nuisance that we would all rather do without. Instead of letting it become dead time, there are ways that your commute can become a productive way to develop teaching. Here are three ideas to use the car journey to get your CPD in gear. (Ok, that is the last pun, I promise.)

Practice and rehearsal

Teachers can improve by practice and rehearsal and the car is a great place to do this. We can practise explanations to ensure that what we say in class is precise and effective. We can think about and prepare responses for the lesson derailing comments that students typically make: “Can we have a fun lesson?”; “I was only talking about the work!”; “When am I ever going to need Shakespeare?” If you deliver training sessions, it helps to rehearse them. When you don’t practise them, like a recent presentation I delivered on threshold concepts, there can be unnecessary confusion. Another thing worth practising is the difficult conversation: with students, with parents and sometimes with colleagues. You might get some funny looks if caught in traffic, but you will get worse looks singing along to ABBA. See this post on Talking to Myself for more.

Audiobooks

If you feel that you never have enough time to read books, audiobooks are priceless. Before you know it, you will have listened to several books on the commute. I tend to choose books that I might not otherwise read in my free time such as those on leadership, organisation and history. My ‘reads’ this year have included Practice Perfect, Getting Things Done (both books I had already read and wanted to recap), The Advantage, Built on Values (both about values driven organisations), The Great Courses: Victorian Britain and Just Listen. All of these have been very useful but I’m not sure if I would have read them were it not for my drive to work. Get a free trial with Audible and give it a go.

Podcasts

While I am not ready to replace Shakespeare with Serial, as one English teacher did, I do love a good podcast. There are none that I listen to that are specifically about teaching, but there are many that focus on things that we often overlook in teacher development such as organisation, productivity, health and wellbeing. Beyond the To Do List, the 5am Miracle, Cool Tools and This is Your Life with Michael Hyatt are some that I have found useful. I also like Steal the Show, which offers advice on how to present to audiences. Podcasts are free, so you can experiment with a few. Mystery Show will do nothing to improve your teaching but you should listen to it anyway.

Not all CPD can take place in a car- don’t try and host a teachmeet in a Corsa.

I coach, therefore I learn

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Weekly coaching observations are an important part of teacher development in our school- my colleague Emma Hickey has written about her experience of being coached here. These are obviously designed to help the teachers being coached but I am increasingly finding that coaching others helps my own development.

Upping my game

My teaching isn’t bad at all, but when I see another teacher doing something I don’t do or something I don’t do well enough, possibilities suddenly open up. On Friday I watched a History lesson where the teacher expertly used paired work, group work and hot-seating, things that are less common in my classroom but which worked brilliantly in his. On Wednesday and Friday I saw amazing-but contrasting- examples of in-class interventions from Maths and MFL teachers. I love when I see something that challenges me to be better- this post from Andrew Warner captures this joy of seeing a great lesson.

The process of giving advice often forces me to reflect on my own teaching. Sometimes when I suggest a way to improve, I could almost be giving myself the same advice. It can be easier to spot an area for development in someone else than notice it about your own teaching.

Improving the quality of CPD

It’s tough to get CPD right, but the more lessons that I see, particularly outside my own subject area, the more confident I am in designing sessions that are useful for everyone, and not just a few. There is generic advice around teaching which doesn’t apply to every subject so seeing lessons and discussing the nuances with others helps me to deliver better training. I have an English teacher’s approach to marking, not a music teacher’s. I have five lessons a week with year 10, not one. Every lesson is a chance for me to learn how another teacher’s experience differs from my own.

I can also see the impact of CPD. I don’t mean checking up and holding people to account, because that is far removed from how coaching should be. I mean whether it is effective enough. Largely, when we introduce something new, or suggest a way of doing things, teachers will do it. That’s a massive responsibility and if something that we say doesn’t work, or isn’t actually helpful, then it is good to see that and do something about it. It works the other way around too- I can see where our CPD has been very effective and then share examples of good practice.

Thinking deeply about teaching

I have more ‘lighbulb moments’ in other people’s lessons than my own. Sometimes, seeing several lessons across a week allows me to think about a particular aspect of teaching in a more than theoretical way. One of my favourite posts, The Space Between the Question and the Answer, was conceived in this way. I had been contemplating questioning and wait time then saw how various teachers went about this and the effect in their classrooms. Sometimes a single moment in a lesson will lead to a massive shift in understanding.

Seeing students in a different light

In one of my coaching observations I see a Maths class made up of many of the students that I teach. It’s fascinating to see a different dynamic at play. Much like when a student sees you in Asda and it blows their mind, seeing students you teach in a different context is an eye-opener. The quiet student who comes to life; the one whose behaviour is much better than it is in your lesson; the hidden world of student behaviours that you miss when you are not looking.

Making me more open to feedback

I am confident in my own teaching but there is a danger that confidence becomes arrogance, and arrogance becomes resistance to feedback. I’ve definitely been there. The culture that we have at DKA- and my own role as a coach- has helped me relish the feedback I receive. When I coach others, I don’t judge or look for problems, I just look for what might be the simplest way to improve. I know that my coach is thinking this too, so it helps me to relax. Each week my coach makes my brain hurt a little with her questions, which is exactly the way I want it.

I would recommend that all teachers get into other classrooms, even for five minutes a week. Those five minutes could make all the difference.

TLT15 Part 2: In-class interventions

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Every lesson has at least one moment where the teacher has to decide whether to move on. ‘Have they got it?’ we ask. The next step seems clear: stay with something when students don’t ‘get it’ and move on when they do. But is it ever as simple as all of the students understanding or not understanding something? Not in my experience- it will usually be proportions of the class who get it. So re-teaching or moving on aren’t the only possibilities. It is much more complicated than that.

The moment we teach something, we may have one, two or fifteen students who don’t get it. We need to know who they are and do something about it. In this, the second part of my TLT15 presentation, I will explain how we can use in-class interventions to close gaps even as they appear.

The right questions > intentional checking > in-class intervention

If we are going to intervene effectively, the information we get needs to be valid and it needs to be from everyone. It can’t just be the odd student, like the one who shouts out “I don’t get it”, leading the teacher to stop the whole class for an explanation that they don’t all need. Questioning a selection of students will only tell about those students and asking students if they get it will only tell us about perception. The only methods that can give us a true picture require every student to participate and give an answer that is unambiguous. Hinge questions are particularly useful for effective diagnosis- read Harry Fletcher-Wood’s excellent series of posts on this topic. Mini whiteboards are the easiest low-tech way to gather accurate student information across a whole class and there are of course some high-tech ways too. We can also make decisions about individual understanding from simply reading students’ work.

We need to be intentional in our data gathering, ready to intervene in the most appropriate way. When students are completing tasks, or when they are answering questions on mini-whiteboards, teachers should be looking for specific things that they will address. When we teach the lesson and design the questions, we know what the common misconceptions are and need to look for them-it shouldn’t only be responding to whatever comes up.

At this point, teachers should be deciding what happens next: the in-class intervention. If 3 or 4 students are struggling with something, then they can be retaught while the rest of the class works. If a small number ‘get it’ then perhaps they can work on an additional task while the whole class is retaught. You might have a case where one group of students has struggled with one aspect while another has struggled with something else- set them all off on a task and then teach each half in turn. There are any number of possibilities.

I watched a Maths lesson recently where the teacher put a question on the board and gave students 3 minutes to complete it on whiteboards. Instead of simply waiting for students to hold them up, the teacher walked round and looked at every single student. When it came to holding boards up, struggling students had already been identified, as had those who understood, common misconceptions were gathered, two different methods spotted. A student was asked to share an example of the misconception, which allowed the teacher to explain the correct method again. After this, a group of three were taken to the front for another go while the rest of the class completed more questions. It was a sequence designed and implemented to ensure that all students understood.

Create the culture for it

I actually don’t think the concept or the implementation of in-class interventions like this are difficult. I think the hardest part is creating a school and classroom culture to allow these to take place effectively.

If teachers are going to teach small groups while the rest of the class work, they need to have classrooms designed to facilitate this. These images of classrooms from my school show areas designed specifically for intervention. In the first image, the table in the corner is used and its position ensures that the teacher can scan the rest of the room as she intervenes. The horseshoe shape of the second image is a space that can accommodate several students and is right at the front to allow the teacher to monitor the rest of the class.

Int1Teachers cannot establish the right culture of diagnosis and immediate intervention if  the rest of the class start misbehaving when they intervene. That is why it is crucial that school systems take the hard work of managing behaviour away from teachers. If teachers have to deal with many incidences of poor behaviour, interventions won’t work, and if they are chasing up detentions and making endless calls home then they are not planning. Clear expectations of behaviour, consistently demonstrated by teachers and supported by senior leaders with centralised detentions, means that this small group teaching is much easier to manage. I have written about our consistent approach to behaviour at Dixons Kings Academy here.

We don’t even get to the intervention stage without useful information, so teachers need to see mini whiteboards as routine and not a nuisance. (How many mini whiteboards sit unloved in stock cupboards?) At DKA, we have whiteboard language and routines designed to make using them hassle-free. Students must carry a whiteboard pen around with them as part of their essential equipment (with a detention on the day if they don’t), once again making it as straightforward as possible to use whiteboards.

I am conscious that an approach which requires planning for different outcomes to a question may in fact lead to excessive planning. While it is true that planning may be made more complex, it doesn’t necessarily require creating resources as intervention can just be teaching. Anyway, any resources created, to use Joe Kirby’s word, are renewable. It’s just feedback- and it will take much less time than marking a set of books. And if you get it right with the initial teaching of concepts then you probably don’t have to waste as much time or energy later coming back and dealing with the problems.

TLT15 Part 1: Closing real gaps with data days

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In education, we are obsessed with closing gaps. Gender gaps, gaps between cohorts, the gap between where a student should be and where they currently are. But we can’t close these gaps easily- at least not directly. They are actually chasms, impossible to fill because they are too abstract and just not specific enough. Gaps tell you nothing about individual students. The only way that we can close these massive gaps is by concentrating on the very specific things students don’t know, and the very specific things they can’t do.

The traditional way of closing these gaps is with written feedback, but it is pretty inefficient. Many others have written about some of the problems with thinking of feedback as equivalent to marking (see links at end of post) and in my own post on solving the problems of feedback, I tried to mitigate for these problems, but if so much effort has to go into making marking more efficient, is it actually the best method? If we count up the hours spent marking books by a typical teacher during the week, can we say that this is an effective use of their time? Over the next couple of posts, I will outline how we can use feedback to greater effect, without spending the hours it takes to write detailed comments in books. In this post, I am looking at how we use data days to close real gaps.

Data Days

At Dixons Kings Academy, we have three ‘Data Days’ throughout the year. Inspired by the book Driven by Data by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, these are days where students don’t come in and teachers look through their class data, discussing with heads of faculty how they can address any problems. These are not meetings where teachers have to justify their data, but ones where they can explore it, spot patterns and identify tangible next steps.Driven

Bambrick-Santoyo suggests starting these meetings with ‘global’ questions, which look at the wider class picture:

How well did the class do as a whole?

What are the strengths and weaknesses? Where do we need to work the most?

How did the class do on old versus new standards? Are they forgetting or improving on old material?

How were the results in the different types of question type (multiple choice vs open ended; reading versus writing?)

Who are the strong and weak students?

Then these are followed up with ‘dig-in’ questions:

Bombed questions- did students all choose the same wrong answer? Why, or why not?

Break down the standards. Did students do similarly on every question within the standard or were some questions harder? Why?

Sort data by students’ scores: are there questions that separate proficient and non-proficient students?

Look horizontally by student: are there any anomalies occurring with certain students.

Assessment design and analysis

It is no use just turning up to these meetings and looking at grades, because grades just don’t tell us anything meaningful- they are not specific enough. They are a starting point, but not much more than that. These meetings are only effective if we have precise and useful information. To get it we have to ensure that our tasks and assessments are designed with this in mind. A well designed assessment tells you much more than simply the grade achieved. It can tell you in exact detail what students can or can’t do or what they do or don’t know- but only if it is designed well. Often, assessments can be arbitrary tasks which we set because we have to. Or we just mark something randomly completed in class: I haven’t marked their books for a while, so I’d best mark this. If we think about some of the questions above, it makes sense that a good assessment will give information at the class level, student level, question level and assessment objective level.

TLT152Assessments can be essays, a mix of different types of questions like a Science exam, or could even be a multiple choice quiz. I often use Quick Key as a highly efficient way of using MCQs to get precise information about students. See here for a walkthrough. If multiple choice questions are designed effectively, they can give us exactly the information we need. In this example, showing itemised data from a quiz, we can see a common wrong answer of B. The wrong answer gives me very useful information about a common misconception. With carefully designed plausible wrong answers, multiple choice questions like this can be incredibly rigorous and often inform you far better than an essay would. It might be more time consuming to input question level data manually, but it wouldn’t take more time than writing comments in books. See the links at the bottom of the page for more on question level analysis.

Intervention planning

Once we have drilled down to exactly what to focus on, we spend the rest of the data day intervention planning. These plans need to start from the gaps, not from the students. If we start from the students, then we end up with a massive gap to close and then try to throw things at the gap, ultimately changing very little. By starting with specific things, the gaps can actually be closed.

I used to start with the student; this is from an old intervention plan: “[student] does not always understand the task. He can produce good work when given very clear instructions but struggles without. Seated at front of class for easy support.” The full intervention plan is littered with similarly vague and useless advice. For this one, moving to the front is my plan. Well, if it was as simple as that, we would design classrooms to be all front! For another, the only thing written was: “Irregular attendance. Hopefully this has been addressed.” Despite the best of intentions, no gap was being closed, at least not as a result of my plan.

TLT153Our intervention planning now starts with the gap to be closed, then the students it affects, then exactly what will be done. Nothing vague. Precise gaps, specific interventions. As you can see, the interventions include different tasks, reteaching, working with other adults etc. There is no guarantee that this closes every gap for good, but at least it is a focussed plan. There are a couple of students on that plan who are not underachieving according to their grade, but have some basic issues that need fixing- these might not be our focus if we started just from the grade. On data day, every teacher produces one of these per class for the following three weeks. The most important thing is that we give teachers time to do it. Time to ask the questions, write the plan and prepare the resources.

Even if data days didn’t exist, the process could still be followed: design effective assessments, ask questions of the data, plan and carry out specific interventions on specific gaps. I contend that the time spent doing this is as valuable as the time spent marking a set of books, and I wonder if this is a more effective proposition. Next time: in-class interventions.

Useful Links

Marking and feedback are not the same from David Didau

Marking is not the same as feedback from Toby French

Is marking the enemy of feedback? from Michael Tidd

Marking is a hornet from Joe Kirby

Exam feedback tool from Kristian Still- this is a timesaving question level analysis and feedback tool

The problem with levels- gaps in basic numeracy skills identified by rigorous diagnostic testing from William Emeny

Is there a place for multiple choice questions in English? Part 1 and Part 2 from Phil Stock

Question Level Analysis with Quick Key

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Quick Key is a tool that I use regularly to provide me with detailed feedback on student understanding. I wrote about it briefly in this post about technology that makes my life easier, but I thought that it merited a more detailed explanation.

QKW1First of all, Quick Key is an app for IOS and Android. It is free, but there is a paid version which allows you to do more. It is still incredibly cheap compared to other tech tools. You set a multiple choice quiz, students fill in one of the tickets and then you scan the tickets in using your phone. Students don’t need to have a device themselves- just a pencil. It takes very little time to create quizzes and very little time to scan them in. On your phone, you can sort the questions to find the ones that students struggled with and sort students by score also. This is great, but when you go to the website, you can do much more with the data, including exporting itemised information.

QKW2Here is the question level data from a recent quiz. The quiz was taken by a year 10 class and was on everything that they have studied this year. They should be able to answer every question as everything has been covered. That doesn’t mean that it has been learnt, however. A quick explanation of what you can see. Student names are down the left, scores down the right. Question numbers and correct answers are along the top. (I have shaded questions on the same topic together to help my analysis.) When there is a dot, this indicates that they answered it correctly, a letter indicates a wrong answer and the option chosen, while an X means that a question wasn’t answered (or wasn’t scannable).

QKW3I have identified the two lowest scoring students here. If I was only interested in scores, I would just give each extra work and be done with it. However, on closer inspection I can see that the first student has performed poorly across all topics, which is quite consistent and is borne out by classwork too. But the other student has actually answered a number of the first questions correctly (1-8 were all on language terminology) and is not underperforming relative to his peers. It is later questions where he has struggled. From this information, I can work out a couple of possibilities: 1) The student doesn’t know the poems from the anthology well, particularly Ozymandias and London. 2) Perhaps the student struggled to answer all of the questions in the given time. My next step? Extra revision on these two poems for homework; extra time on the next quiz.

QKW4This question level analysis allows us to identify the differences between pupils who at first seem to be performing at an identical level. If we look at these two students who both achieved 67%, we can see that, with the exception of question 14, they answered completely different questions incorrectly. If we said that 67% equalled a C and put these two students in a C grade intervention group, neither of them would get exactly what they needed! Question level analysis of this kind allows us to really know what individual students need.

QKW5Now let’s move from students to questions. 13 and 14 were answered poorly across the board. This obviously identifies a gap in knowledge and in this case it tells me that students don’t really understand what the exam will look like. They were ‘taught’ this, but I obviously didn’t do as good a job as I thought. This is good information to have because it is easily addressed on a whole class level.

QKW6But what about question 5? This surprised me, as this question was designed to show that students understood what a metaphor was. And in class, they can do this. But a look at the question itself gives me a clue. I can make an assumption here that a number of students just saw “like or as” and thought simile. From this I can work out a couple of things: 1) My students need to read questions carefully and 2) I need to have a better explanation for similes than “it is a comparison using like or as”. QKW7I pulled on this thread and looked at question 1- why did students not answer this correctly when I expected them to? Once again, a quick check makes me think that students saw “verb” and jumped straight to C without really reading the question. It may of course simply tell me that they don’t know what a verb is and that option was an understandable guess. Both of these questions flag up that some students can identify terminology and give examples, but can’t define them.

I could delve deeper into this data but I think the point of its usefulness is made. The quiz took maybe 30 minutes to create, 10 minutes to complete and 5 minutes to scan. Yet the information it has given me is perhaps more valuable than marking a set of books, something which would have taken considerably more time.

Filling subject knowledge gaps

Mark Miller Teaching , ,

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

Mark Miller Teaching , ,

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…

Mark Miller Teaching ,

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.

Subject specific practice

Mark Miller CPD , , , ,

Last week I wrote about how we practised classroom routines on the very first day back at Dixons Kings Academy and the benefits are still clear two weeks in. But while whole school routines undoubtedly have value, they aren’t the only things worth practising. That is why we followed up that first practice session with one designed by individual departments.

Some departments chose to continue to develop routines unique to their settings, with Science looking at practical lesson routines and P.E. focusing on changing rooms. In English, we considered the teaching of structure in the new GCSE.

The MFL department focused on getting better at using target language and they invited me in to watch a follow up practice session this week. The session was designed by the Principal Teacher of MFL, Amy Evans, following the method designed by Simon Gayle, who leads on practice across school. It was a joy to witness and I thought it would serve as a good model to illustrate the key elements of practice.

Create an effective model

MFL PracticeThe model is crucial, because if you practise something that isn’t good enough, then you are getting better at the wrong thing. In this instance, the MFL department were looking at the language that they would use to manage lesson transitions, explanations of tasks and mini white board work.

While the pre-planned model was strong, the team identified some things they would still need to translate e.g. the best name for working in pairs. It wasn’t as simple as translating word for word because they needed to use cognates, words in the target language (in this case Spanish) which sound similar to their English counterparts. Often, with practice sessions, this discussion would occur after the model had been practised and suggested improvements come to light, but here it was an important part of ensuring that they were practising the right things in the first place.

Practise

Now that the model has been established, one teacher practises. They are the teacher and the others are the students. This is the part where purposeful practice might descend into horrible role-play if we let it. It definitely isn’t about pretending to be kids and acting in a childish manner- there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an adult pretending to be Kevin the Teenager (unless the adult is Harry Enfield). We should be experiencing something that is likely to occur in the classroom- the whole purpose of practise means to effectively rehearse for regular classroom situations. Of course it can never be exactly like a classroom but David Beckham didn’t practise free kicks because the practice was exactly like a game; he practised because when a free kick inevitably came up in a game, he was drilled in exactly what to do.

MFL4The teacher practising needs to try to eliminate self-consciousness, which I know is difficult for some. Once the first tentative steps are made, practising becomes easy and routine. The MFL team, with a shared purpose, were able to put this self-consciousness to one side so they could focus completely on making speaking in target language second nature.

MFL3Like any department, the MFL team has a range of teachers with different levels of experience and different areas of specialism. We have the experienced Head of Faculty still striving to improve their teaching, the Teach First participant developing their craft, the French specialist benefitting from practice in Spanish, the native Spanish speaker reflecting on a novice’s perspective. Well designed practice will have something for everyone.

Throw a spanner in the works

Each round of practice has a ‘spanner in the works’. We felt that an unpredictable element in practice sessions would be beneficial, and the ‘spanners’ are designed to ensure that. They should be about testing the model, rather than just throwing in something ridiculous like a bumblebee in the room (hay un abejorro en el aula). Two examples of ‘spanners’ for this practice session were:

‘Purposefully use the wrong gender when completing the Do Now activity for person 2.’

‘Use ‘me gusta’ + verb in the ‘I form’ e.g. ‘me gusta nado’ for person 3.’

Most of the time, teachers make mistakes practising anyway, so there are always plenty of spanners.

Give feedback

After the teacher has practised, somebody feeds back. Ideally, they then practise again following the feedback, although this isn’t always possible. In many cases, the one practising has already given their own feedback! It’s not unusual to see someone pop out of practice mode to reflect: ‘I wonder if it might be best to…’ or ‘Can I try that again because…’. It was great to see the MFL teachers do this because  this means that they can practise on their own, and can reflect quickly in a real classroom situation.

MFL2Feedback can and should be ‘nitpicky’. In this case, a mispronunciation or a grammatical error here and there needed to be picked up. If a ‘student’ makes an error, accidentally or on purpose, and the teacher didn’t spot it, it must be identified. Here, in this supportive environment, with a focus on a tiny sequence of teaching, the MFL teachers were getting the most helpful subject-specific feedback. Honestly, they won’t get this highly focused feedback from non-specialists.

I hope this is a clear portrayal of the habits and benefits of subject-specific practice. The team clearly value practice, because this actually took place in the time allocated for department meetings, and they had not been ‘directed’ to practise. All admin had been taken care of so they could concentrate solely on improving their teaching. If only all department meetings were like this.