Author: Mark Miller

Practising classroom routines

Mark Miller CPD , , ,

On Thursday I took a walk around the school during a lesson changeover. Students were walking out of lessons quietly and calmly, teachers were greeting their new classes as they arrived, and within 3 minutes work was taking place. Every lesson was different, but there was a consistency that meant that it was easy for students to learn. This wasn’t left to chance; it was the result of two hours of dedicated practice of classroom routines seven days earlier.

Our routines are so important, but when systems and routines are the sole preserve of the classroom teacher, we get inconsistency. And inconsistency is unfair. It’s especially unfair on the students, because they don’t know what to expect. Behaviour that is acceptable in one lesson suddenly merits a sanction in another lesson. It’s unfair on the experienced teacher who works tirelessly on developing their own classroom routines that are not followed elsewhere. It’s unfair on the new teacher, who needs to create classroom routines on top of the many many other things they must do. It’s unfair on the Teach First participant or the cover supervisor, who haven’t got the benefit of established routines.

So a school approach to classroom routines helps to ensure that consistency. At Dixons Kings Academy, we have tried to unpick the moments in lessons that could benefit from shared expectations and routines, from the habits for individual, paired and group work to the shared routines for mini whiteboard use. Yes, some elements are prescriptive – scripting of how we bring a class to silence for example- but these routines are designed to make it easier for teachers to teach the way that works best.

If we say a routine or expectation is important, then it can’t just be sent out in an email or relayed as a ‘policy’. It needs to be exemplified and practised, which is why we dedicated time to practising our entry and exit routines on our first day back. In addition to building consistency, practice shows us where we are going wrong (or where we might go wrong) and need to improve, but also helps reinforce what we are doing well, making us more confident and comfortable in the classroom.

We practised how teachers line students up, how they greet them, the way they bring them into the classroom, and complete the Do Now activity. We then practised how to end lessons (standing behind chairs in silence, teacher scanning the room to ensure that it is tidy, an orderly dismissal).

It’s a simple practice method. We share a model of what is expected, staff practise once through in groups of about six, receive feedback then repeat. Everyone practises, and everyone feeds back at least once. While the models that we practise are carefully considered, they are open to feedback, and practising will often identify the flaws, creating better models in future.

The group that I practised with had a couple of new members of staff. The practice was useful for them in internalising everything they had been told about- and as you might expect on the first day back- they had been told a lot. Think of that first lesson when students are sizing up their new teacher and the teacher starts the lesson just like the experienced senior leader. Immediately, the new teacher carries just a little more authority. For me, as someone who seems to forget completely how to teach by September, it was great to warm up. I won’t have my own classroom this year, so my entry and exit routines have become even more important. The practice session allowed me to consider things that I may have otherwise left to chance. For example, where do you stand at the end of the lesson? How do you move around the room? How do you dismiss classes from your classroom? How does this change in a completely different room? I don’t think that these are trivial questions at all.

There are more things to practise of course, and we won’t spend every session on the absolute basics, although we should never become complacent. With a relatively small amount of time spent on embedding simple whole school routines, we free teachers up to concentrate on the complex art of teaching.

Next week: how we practise in subjects.

Technology that makes my life a little easier

Mark Miller Teaching , ,

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.

Revision Decisions: proposition composition

Mark Miller English Teaching

Over the last couple of years, sentences have played a prominent role in my classroom. Students know what good sentences look like, can often discuss the mechanics of them, but lately I have encountered a couple of problems.

One is that students decide the type of sentence, then fit the content to it. For example, they will decide to use an embedded clause, then begin to write it, throwing in whatever detail springs to mind. It’s the same way of thinking that leads to random rhetorical questions clunkily arriving in persuasive writing and is perhaps an inevitable consequence of informing students that they must use certain techniques in their writing. I want them instead to have the idea in mind, and the effect, then construct the right sentence to express it, choosing the structures that work best in that instance.

Another problem is that students commit to sentences and once a sentence is written, it is very rarely changed. On redrafts, individual words are often replaced, sentences are added to paragraphs, but the basic sentences don’t change all that much.

So, to help address these issues, I have been trying to model explicitly  all of the decisions that writers make when they construct great sentences. This helps the first problem because students look at different options before committing, and with these additional options they should be more confident in rearranging sentences, addressing the second problem.

To illustrate how I am doing this, let’s look at a sentence from Il Duro by D.H. Lawrence, an 80p Penguin Classic:

He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony.

We can’t see all of the writing decisions that Lawrence made. He had to choose the ideas, the words themselves and then the syntax. To begin to explore the third of these in particular, we can break the sentence up into its basic ideas, or propositions, of which I see eight:

  • He began to speak.
  • He spoke suddenly.
  • He leant forward.
  • He leant on the balcony.
  • The balcony had an iron rail.
  • He was hot.
  • He was feverish.
  • He was yellow.

By my reckoning, there are 40,320 different ways to organise these eight propositions. I like to ask students to put these together, without changing the main ideas or the words (except for verb endings). This means that they have to make some of the choices that the writer had to make. Crucially, they start with the ideas to be expressed and not an arbitrary sentence construction. It is the order and relationship of these propositions that will lead to subtle differences in meaning.

With this sentence, I know in advance the kinds of things that will likely be up for discussion. Why is “He suddenly began to speak” the main clause? Why not “He leant forward”? What happens when we change “leant” to “leaning”? Why “hot and feverish and yellow” and not “yellow and feverish and hot”? And so on. And we can ask questions of the students about their choices too. Then we can compare: students with each other, then students with the writer.

In these discussions, we look at the ways ideas can be combined. Through coordination, subordination, through causal relationships, right branches, left branches, colons, commas, appositives, prepositions and present participles.

Here are the propositions from another sentence in the book:

  • Her head was tied in a kerchief.
  • The kerchief was red.
  • Pieces of hair stuck out over her ears.
  • The hair was short.
  • The hair looked like dirty snow.

At #TMBRAD, we had a go at writing sentences from this:

The actual sentence: “Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears.”

This isn’t a particularly ground-breaking approach- it is pretty much just sentence combining after all- but it’s new for me, and it’s improving my students’ writing. As Jeff Anderson writes, in Revision Decisions:

But the point of combining is not simply to put two sentences together (one sentence…and…another sentence) to make a long sentence. The point of sentence combining is for young writers to see relationships among ideas and to discover more effective ways to show these relationships […] Sentence combining is about playing with ideas and shaping them into effective syntactical patterns that make sense for individual writing situations.

Further reading:

revision-decisions Revision Decisions is another wonderfully practical book from Jeff Anderson, and inspired the ideas above.

Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon covers similar ideas, and there is an audio course from The Great Courses on the same subject by the same writer.

 

The space between the question and the answer

Mark Miller Teaching , ,

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.

Developing the art of the sentence

Mark Miller Teaching , , ,

If you have read Teach Like a Champion 2.0, you’ll be familiar with ‘The Art of the Sentence’.

The technique is described as follows:

Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.

Sentences are the simplest mentor texts and students with a command of effective sentence-building tend to produce the best writing. At my school, Dixons Kings Academy, we’ve been starting every lesson with The Art of the Sentence. It’s a simple strategy with a massive impact.

Improving thinking

A well-constructed sentence is about more than just literacy. The best sentences actually improve the quality of thinking. As Doug Lemov writes, “…helping students learn how to write increasingly complex, subtle, and nuanced sentences is teaching them to develop increasingly complex, subtle, and nuanced thoughts.”

Here is an example from a list of analytical sentences shared by Andy Tharby:

________is motivated not only by… but also by…

This construction enables-or forces- students to think in a specific way about the text. As students are presented with more and more of these sentence constructions, they will reach for just the right one when they want to think precisely about a concept.

AOS 1We asked staff to reflect on the habits of thinking we needed to develop in our students and then designed sentences to promote this. For example, in many subjects there is a need to consider and then express cause and effect. Which sentences might help students to develop this habit of thinking?

As a result of_______________, ______________________.

One inevitable consequence of___________________

____________________________ is a direct result of

 

AOS 3Building vocabulary

Precision of expression is crucial not just at the sentence level, but at the word level. Most words are learnt from context, not through the teaching of them, and a single encounter with a word will be unlikely to ensure full and rich knowledge. But repeated exposure to a range of carefully chosen words is an approach worth taking. (See Choosing which words to teach)

IncAOS 2reasing purposefulness

Every lesson starts with an artful sentence. While the sequence can be extended and sentences studied- as I do repeatedly- this can also be completed quickly at the start and the simple routine makes lesson starts more purposeful. I use mini whiteboards, some teachers use computers, some books and some just ask students to think of their response. The immediate habits of thinking and working set the tone for the rest of the lesson: no minute is wasted in the pursuit of learning. Teachers then transition into the teaching of the subject.

Our Director of Literacy took on the mammoth task of creating slides, trawling the internet for interesting and unusual images to use, and designing just the right sentences.

Initially, there were small issues that needed addressing. Some students were using the sentences without the precise meaning. For example, one student in my class wrote, “Ultimately, there is a cat and a bird.”  This follows the instructions of the task, but with no real understanding of why we should use that word. Also, with the wrong image /sentence combination, sentences don’t really work either. “On the surface” only works if there is something deeper that is not on the surface. The first time that students encounter a word such as “inevitable”, it probably has to be explained. The second time might require another explanation but students soon get it.

In one of my recent lessons, students were writing a paragraph comparing Helena from a Midsummer Night’s Dream with a typical Elizabethan woman and I saw this: “Helena differs from a typical Elizabethan woman in a number of ways respects.” This topic sentence construction had been used on a number of slides. Then, in another lesson, a student wrote: “Ultimately, Romeo is a tragic hero and is fated to die.” I hear the sentences in class discussion and see them in writing with increasing frequency.

Next steps

So far, we have used the same sentences across the school, but we will shift to making them more subject specific, allowing students to develop the vocabulary and precision of thought in a particular subject discipline. We will also increase the complexity of some of the sentences now that students are grasping the concept. At present, we have been constructing sentences based on images but next will be graphs, extracts from literature, historical sources.

Further reading:

Doug Lemov on The Art of the Sentence

David Didau on The Art of Beautifully Crafted Sentences

Chris Curtis’ Death to Sentence Stems! Long Live the Sentence Structures!

Andy Tharby’s Sentence Escalator

Talking to myself

Mark Miller CPD ,

Teaching is a job where what we say matters. Our explanations, our questioning, our modelling, our interactions- they all rely on our talk being focussed and effective. We need clear explanations that bring students who know little about something closer to the level of experts and we need to often say just the right thing in just the right way to ensure that students respond in the way we need. We plan powerpoints, create beautiful resources, mark exhaustively, but nobody has ever asked me to practise what I’m going to say.

Over the last couple of years, I have started talking to myself. In the car, in my house, in my classroom. Here’s why.

Clarity of explanation

Above all, I think that we should practise our explanations. For example, this half term my students in year 10 are studying Romeo and Juliet and I recently taught a lesson which was just me and a visualiser. I explained, discussed, questioned and the students and I annotated. Act 3 Scene 1 is a scene most English teachers know well and I am no exception, so I certainly could have winged it. Instead, as part of my preparation, I practised what I was going to do and what I was going to say. I literally sat at my desk at home, annotated the scene and explained it as I would have explained it to students.

This rehearsal allowed me to do a number of things. It meant that I would not be blindsided by phrases such as ‘alla staccato carries it away’ and I could think of my discussion of the tricky layers of meanings of words like ‘consort’ and avoid saying things that I would have to clarify later. It meant that we could focus on Romeo’s response to loss, the essay topic, and avoid too many tangents (I just can’t manage no tangents). Instead of my questions being improvised, I knew exactly where I would ask which questions to which students.

Now, we cannot reasonably be expected to do this for every single part of every single lesson but I know that my students’ understanding of this scene is far stronger than if I had not rehearsed. Most of my practising takes place in the car on the way to work anyway, making the most of that ‘dead time’, so does not add extra hours to my busy day.

Sometimes they call you Sheamus- or is that just me?
Sometimes they call you ‘Sheamus’- or is that just me?

Be prepared

I do love the unpredictable nature of students (mostly), but there are things that they say again and again. Sometimes I see teachers who have the perfect response to certain behaviours and comments and I wish I was as quick. Except, I don’t have to be quick-witted enough to come up with the perfect response in the moment– I can script it and practise it in advance.

So what are the things that students always say?

“Can we have a fun lesson?”

“I wish we still had Miss…”

“This is boring.”

“Other teachers let us…”

“What do we have to do again?”

“I don’t get it.”

I’m sure that list could go on. If we don’t practise responses, we have to rely on conjuring up the perfect comeback or reply instantly. And if we don’t deescalate these things, they can build up and destroy lessons. I have polished how I reply to “Can we have a fun lesson?” to such a fine art that we can always quickly move on.

It isn’t just what they say. It could be dealing effectively with a late student or someone swinging on a chair. Dare I say it, we might even admit that sometimes behaviour across the class is not acceptable and they need a stern reminder. Practising this is not saying that we want it to happen, or that telling off a class is something great, but that if it has to happen we don’t need to be angry and frustrated, making things worse with an improvised speech.

Training sessions

When I deliver a training session to staff, I like to rehearse it at least once as it makes me familiar with the material. My main reason for saying the thing out loud is it often forces me to consider how what I say is received and allows me to explore whether what I am saying is, well, nonsense. We can often write eduspeak and add received wisdom into what we say. Sometimes I catch myself saying something that I don’t actually think or couldn’t justify.  And there is also the unfortunate business of that extra bullet point on a list that you had forgotten about…

Difficult conversations

Sometimes a difficult conversation needs to be had. There’s nothing worse than addressing a legitimate concern but phrasing it wrong or waffling on to another topic. Before you know it, the conversation is no longer about the one thing that it probably needs to be about. Whether this is with a colleague, a student or a parent, a little bit of practice beforehand will ultimately help the conversation to go where it needs to.

When I attended Teach Like a Champion training in October, these principles of practising talk were clarified and focussed for me. Teaching is a profession where saying the right thing is crucial. From our lessons to our meetings, our training sessions to our calls to parents, talking is teaching. So why leave it all to chance?

Further reading:

Michael Slavinsky’s write up of the first TLAC training day explores similar ideas: Uncommon Schools Training – practising to perform

Julie Ryder discusses the same training here: Teach Like a Champion Part 2: Training the Trainers

 

Trying to be a better English teacher

Mark Miller English Teaching

A few weeks ago I wrote about becoming better teachers of our subjects and concluded with: “I have become a better teacher in recent years by trying to become a better English teacher”. I thought it was worth trying to give examples of general approaches I have taken to improving my teaching. Here are some ideas that work for me, many of which could be transposed into different subject areas.

Collecting models

Whenever I read something interesting, I keep it. If I see an interesting sentence, I write it down. If a print advert makes me smile, I rip it out. If I see a colon used effectively, I save it for a lesson in the future. For students to become better writers, they need to be surrounded by high quality models. Everything we teach should be exemplified. I have a few posts on this, including Working With Mentor Texts, and I think this approach has improved my practice more than anything else.

When it can’t be found, I make it myself. I have found this particularly useful when it comes to essay writing. Students need to read essays and see what a good analytical paragraph might look like. If you don’t then you get the old ‘makes it more interesting’ or as I read the other day, ‘Shakespeare is trying his best for the play.’ The thing is, it’s really hard to comment on the effect of language. More examples=better responses.

Reading around the subject

There are lots of books with ideas on how to teach English, but they often tend to just give a few ideas for activities. Rather than reading books on teaching English, I would definitely recommend delving deeper into the subject, reading books which are not necessarily designed for teachers but will build subject knowledge and provide inspiration for lessons. I have started listening to audiobook lectures on the way to work now that my commute is longer, and already they have improved my teaching.

The great thing about English, is that anything you read can be useful. You can read a YA novel to recommend to students, you can read a history book to help learn about context. Every novel is a source of models and mentor sentences. Here is my list of books I recommend to start with.

Not making excuses and not dumbing down- the subject is exciting enough

It’s easy to apologise when teaching Shakespeare or poetry, subjects which students seem to approach with dislike, and say things like “well, we have to do it” or “I’ll try to make it fun”. Then whole lessons are spent trying to avoid contact with them. So instead of studying poetry, we study song lyrics and instead of writing essays on Macbeth, we design costumes for the witches. I used to do it so often, scouring the internet for ways to make my subject fun and doing lots of misguided things that I thought were necessary to make it all interesting. Obviously this came at the expense of learning. It’s okay to use things like Pop Sonnets as a way in, but students will always rise to the challenge if you teach the difficult stuff and support them to get there. For me, a love of the subject is cultivated by teaching the subject in all its glory and not trying to apologise for it.

Learning from other English teachers

There are so many great English teachers out there and lots of them blog. I love reading blogs because they are immediate, are personal, are often unfiltered, and are written by teachers based on their day to day experience. There are many blogs I enjoy by non English teachers of course, but the English teacher blogs have had the most direct impact on my teaching. Andy Tharby has a great list here to start from. Many tweeting teachers don’t blog but are generous in sharing what they do. A photograph of a classroom display might trigger some ideas, an interesting article might be shared which inspires a sequence of lessons, a throwaway comment might transform your approach to a text. I don’t spend as much time on Twitter as I once did, but it’s an invaluable source of inspiration. Not because it’s Twitter, but because it gives me easy access to these ideas. (Albeit we shouldn’t get too carried away with new ideas)

There is also this other thing called ‘real life’ which has quite a few more teachers! Chatting to colleagues in my department and in other schools is always useful. Seeing other teachers covering familiar topics in their own ways is wonderful and helps me to avoid becoming set in my ways. Our subject based school CPD this week consisted of our English department talking about a couple of poems and how we could teach them. The discussions helped everyone improve and I am sure our teaching of English Literature will be better as a result.

Developing efficient marking strategies

Man, the marking. I don’t think it can be avoided that English teachers mark a great deal. Because of this, English teachers need to develop strategies to make marking simple and effective. I honestly don’t hate marking any more because I have efficient methods and I continue to work on them. Every English teacher should prioritise making marking more efficient.

5 seems like a nice number to stop on. I’d love to see some other suggestions in the comments.

Old year’s resolutions

Mark Miller Teaching

In March my external hard drive died. I couldn’t recover anything from it and I went through all of the stages of grief. I found the back up I had made- in 2011- and frantically searched for any of my new resources to no avail. But as I searched, I was struck by how many schemes of work had been abandoned and how many excellent resources remained unused. Measured in hours, I cannot think how long it took to create those resources, only for them to never be used again.

At this time of year, when we are thinking of resolutions and a new start, it’s important to remember that a lot of what we do is pretty good already and doesn’t necessarily need changing. We have to be careful not to invest time and energy in a bunch of things that appeal not because they are better, but because they are new. Even when they are worthwhile, we can always count the costs in the trail left behind of what we just stop doing to fit them in.

Why do things get abandoned? There are new books to study, new specifications to cover, new school agendas, new Ofsted agendas and original new ways of approaching content. We feel a need to stay current, fearful of missing out on the next innovation. We see another teacher sharing a picture of their classroom display and then that nagging sense we are not good enough kicks in so we drop everything and make a new display. I’ve contributed to this by blogging enthusiastically about what felt like great new ideas (progress investigators anyone?) before I had any indication if they were particularly effective.

Of course, some of those new things are better, and we still need to remain open to new ideas, but much of what will make us better in the new year, we’ve been doing already.

Consequently, I’m making some ‘old year’s resolutions’. Rather than listing all of the new things I’m going to do, I’m going to develop and refine what I’m already doing:

I will read the books I already own.

I can’t stop buying books, particularly ones on education. There are weeks when I’ve spent more time browsing for books than I’ve actually spent reading them. Truth be told, many of the books I’ve read are to all intents and purposes exactly the same book. There’s only so many times someone can tell me that the key to expertise is practice, for example. This abundance of books also means that there is little chance of them having too much of a deep influence on my practice, even when they are useful, because I quickly move on to the next one.

So I will stop buying new books in abundance in order to read those I haven’t touched. I will reread some of the books which were particularly useful but which have lost their impact because I’ve forgotten about them.

I will continue to focus on the basics

Calling them ‘basics’ is not quite the right word, but I’m talking here mainly about questioning, explanations and feedback. I have worked hard to improve the quality of my questioning this year and will continue to work on this, in particular ensuring that when I ask questions, everyone thinks. I am happy with the quality of my feedback but there is a nagging feeling that it isn’t having the desired effects, so there is further work to do. I won’t rip everything up, just refine what I do currently.

I will keep these at the top of my priority list because they can always be worked on. If I come across something interesting which is all shiny and new, I will consider whether it will take me away from these main things.

I will refine my classroom routines

Having started at a new school after working for over a decade at my previous school, the most notable challenges have been in the smaller aspects, the day to day routines that have changed. With a couple of exceptions, I teach double lessons, and it is a shift that I’m not sure I have completely nailed yet. It’s other things like new routines for the distribution and collection of homework. It’s even in where I keep the glues and how I set out my classroom. None of this is particularly exciting or interesting but it is exactly what I need to continue working on.

I’m not going to pretend that I won’t try some new things in 2015. If I think a new idea will improve my classroom practice then I’ll definitely give it a go and when I receive feedback from others, I’ll be open to it.

You could even argue that not doing so many new things is a new thing in itself.

Further reading:

My post on what to do when launching new ideas.

James Theobald on opportunity cost: Why is opportunity cost so important? Bo knows.

 And here is a link to a website where you can buy scratch and sniff cards for all your favourite poems. I MUST HAVE THESE!

 

Teacher workload: Can it be sustained?

Mark Miller Teaching

Like many teachers, I filled in the DfE workload survey. I tried thinking about the external demands that increase teacher workloads but I quickly realised that most of the decisions around what teachers are expected to do comes from within the school.

It then forced me to reflect on the consequences on teacher workload of actions I take and advice I give. I have responsibility for CPD and deliver many training sessions to groups of staff and I need to ensure that my advice doesn’t increase teachers’ workload to unmanageable extents. Our school day is longer than most schools and teaching is a time consuming job anyway. I now try to approach much of my advice to colleagues with the question: Can it be sustained? Can it be sustained over a year and can it be sustained over a teaching career?

I think it is easy to forget just how challenging it is to have a full teaching load when you haven’t had one for a while. You have lots of marking, lots of planning and it can be quite intense to work all day with little time to take a breather. Many leaders don’t suffer the long term draining effects of this because with promotions come reduced teaching loads and it can be easy to downplay the experience of these who have worked these hours over a long period. It has been nearly a decade since I taught a full teaching load and by the end of my one quite busy day I am exhausted- many teachers have 5 of those days!

Whenever a new idea is pitched at staff and they are asked to all do it, we have to consider this context and the cost of the new initiative: Will this increase teachers’ workloads? The answer to this is usually ‘yes’ so we have to carefully consider what we must get rid of in order to accommodate this new amount of work. Otherwise, either teachers have to work harder or things won’t get done. Neither of these consequences are helpful.

Marking is probably the place where we can make our biggest wins with realistic expectations of what we expect from staff. I’ll try not to labour this point as I have already written about 300 blogs on feedback. Suffice to say that that we need to shine a spotlight on feedback and make sure that it is effective and done for the right reasons. It’s the thing that drains teachers’ time so we need to do whatever we can to reduce this time and make it more efficient. No teacher should be giving feedback that will remain unread by students in fear of ‘failing’ a book scrutiny. Mary Myatt writes sensibly about what Ofsted expect to see here.

@Cherrylkd shared a story in this blog about teachers being asked to hand in their planning a week in advance. The story reminded me of a friend who had to prepare detailed lesson plans for every lesson and where snap inspections took place to check. I cannot fathom why schools would place this unnecessary burden on their staff. We work hard enough without additional layers of work which hinder our effectiveness.

When it comes to planning lessons, the majority of my lessons are now pretty simple. It’s not often that you will see something that looks magnificently complex as you would have seen in my classroom in the past: hats and balloons and rhythmic gymnastics. But good lessons- even those deceptively simple ones- take a long time to plan properly. They take time to conceptualise and resource, so asking for a detailed lesson plan is just more work. Asking for it a week in advance is like asking me what I fancy for my tea next Tuesday- or asking me to write the recipe for what I will eat.

We also need to take a sensible approach to things like differentiation and understand that there are differences between what we can do and what it is reasonable to expect teachers to do. See these blogs from Andy Tharby and David Fawcett for ideas.

While Ofsted can be used negatively to increase teacher work load- ‘You need to do it because Ofsted say they want it’– we should also acknowledge that they have made it abundantly clear that there are some ridiculous things that have been done in their name, and they have attempted to quash these myths. (We shouldn’t let Ofsted off the hook completely as many of the myths originated from their reports and from inspectors moonlighting as trainers.)

There are times when I would encourage working hard for a shorter period. For example, I tend to mark books more intensely at the start of the year to a) inform my teaching and b) to set a standard. There are other times when a lot of initial effort reaps rewards e.g. that tough class where you will benefit from speaking to many of the parents early on. I also think that time should be invested in curriculum design which again saves time at a later date. None of these things can be sustained over the year.

Sometimes I get frustrated when I don’t get a reply to an email or when somebody misses a deadline. Yet I also have a massive to-do list of emails I haven’t responded to and deadlines that I too am struggling to make. My complaint is that I keep getting asked to do more things. Which means that the things I ask others to do are having the same effect. They are one thing in many things that teachers have been asked to do. James Theo write about this piecemeal accumulation of workload here.

There are some difficult questions posed when you consider the sustainability of different approaches. For example, how can you decide what to sacrifice? Will we need to stop doing some valuable things because of the burden on teacher workload? I know a number of things which I could do to make my teaching better but if these come at a cost to my well-being, are they truly worth it? Schools tend to live in a culture of short-termism and we can often justify intensive intervention (when this is normalised, is it intervention at all?) by saying it is ‘just this once’.

What I do know is that no child will benefit if they have an exhausted teacher in front of them.

Better teachers of our subjects

Mark Miller CPD , , ,

What makes a good teacher?

Teachers should have good subject knowledge, but anyone who saw David Starkey on Jamie’s Dream School knows that it isn’t enough. Teachers should have good knowledge of pedagogy, but you wouldn’t want me teaching German. Is good teaching just a sum of these two things? Subject knowledge + pedagogy? Not quite. Effective teaching is an understanding of the way that these two combine very specifically in our subject areas.

What makes your subject unique?

In the Venn diagram of subjects, the areas of crossover are quite small. Yet we spend much of our time in school CPD sessions designed to fit around all subjects when this may have little impact. That’s why we have to focus on pedagogical content knowledge– how to teach our subjects well.

Let’s start with behaviour management as an example (This is obviously not about teaching subject content but good behaviour is crucial for good teaching). There are certainly a number of useful strategies that can be shared with everyone. We know that there are ways of using language, certain routines and habits which tend to work in all subjects. However, there are very subject specific issues which can only be addressed by those subject areas. Students in music practice booths. The Wild West of P.E. changing rooms. The moment a student in Science discovers that pulling on goggles makes them hit the face with a satisfying ‘whack’. These are highly specific to each subject area so time should be spent with those departments working on those areas.

Another example. For many years, a typical training session in schools might be designed around ways to identify misconceptions. I’ve delivered them myself. Ways to check on whole class understanding such as using mini whiteboards and hinge questions. But it isn’t just about the methods we use to check for understanding but the depth of knowledge about the types of misconceptions students might have and how best to identify them. The Sutton Trust report into good teaching stated the following on this topic:

As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods, and identify students’ common misconceptions.

Spending time on these aspects will be where the greatest gains are, rather than looking at a hundred ways to identify them. For a great example of a subject teacher doing just this, have a look at Harry Fletcher-Wood’s extensive work on hinge questions in History.

And the list goes on. Feedback. Explanations. Modelling. All unique. Literacy is especially problematic and can lend itself to whole school initiatives that never really have a chance of working because of the different ways that subjects work. Of course there are some things which can be communicated as good practice and getting the whole staff body together can be the most effective way to do it, but time for staff to explore subject implications should always be built in.

Department meetings are a place where this can happen too. The best subject areas are the ones who remove as much admin as possible from their meetings and concentrate on teaching. But subject teams do not always have control of how often they meet and there can often be competing focuses.

Leaders need to know subjects

To support teachers in developing their ability to teach their subjects well, leaders need to develop a clearer understanding of what effective teaching is in every subject. I am seeing a greater number of lessons at the moment in a number of subjects and I find it fairly straightforward to give feedback on general pedagogy but there are some aspects where I am simply not an expert. For example, I have observed a number of science lessons this year. I have tried to familiarise myself with what makes good practice in Science, but I would be unlikely to notice if a basic error in terms of subject knowledge was made. While I feel that I know a little about Mathematics, I would struggle to tell you if a concept had been explained properly and understood. Whereas in an English lesson, I’d be very confident in providing highly developmental feedback because I know the subject very well.

How can leaders develop at least a working knowledge of subjects? I’d recommend reading Ofsted’s subsidiary guidance for each subject as a useful starting point. Not to use as a ticklist, but to get a sense of the kinds of things that might make the subject unique. There are often more detailed subject reports like ‘Moving English Forward’ and ‘Music in schools: wider still, and wider’, where the following is found:

Promote teachers’ use of musical sound as the dominant language of musical teaching and learning by:

–       ensuring that lesson planning includes a strong focus on the teacher’s musical preparation as well as defining lesson structures and procedures

–       establishing musical sound as the ‘target language’ of teaching and learning, with talking and writing about music supporting, rather than driving, the development of pupils’ musical understanding

–       developing and refining teachers’ listening and musical modelling skills, so that they can more accurately interpret and respond to pupils’ music-making and show more effectively how to improve the musical quality of their work.

This won’t make up for my lack of musical knowledge but it will give me a start in understanding a key part of excellent music lessons. The next stage is to listen to the experts- the music teachers. When Ofsted say, ‘establish.. musical sound as the target language of teaching’, we need to work with music teachers in our schools to understand what that means in the classroom. If we don’t know then we can give feedback which is inaccurate and unhelpful- and potentially harmful.

Paired observations with subject experts and meetings with relevant teachers before seeing them teach will help to make the process easier and help us with what we need to know. We need to know that students in P.E. might do well in the half term on badminton but regress when they are assessed in gymnastics (I did!). We need to be aware that ‘target language’ is crucial in MFL. We need to consider that an R.E. teacher may see 20 different classes in a week. We need to know that progress in one subject is different from another nationally. And so on.

I’m not dismissing the need to look at general pedagogy but I feel that I have become a better teacher in recent years by trying to become a better English teacher and the greater focus we place on subject expertise, the better.