Teaching

Books to transform teaching and leadership

Mark Miller Teaching

I’ll keep the introduction nice and simple: This is a list of books which have had a profound impact on my approach to teaching and leadership.

The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook by Jim Smith

I resisted buying this book for a long time as the title suggested this was a book to get away with teaching less.  In fact, that is partly true but it was about teaching less to ensure that students did all the hard work.  For me, this is the perfect kind of educational book to improve teaching- a quick exploration of the topic at hand and then a wealth of practical examples that can be used immediately. “When you become a Lazy Teacher, you will employ a series of strategies that put the responsibility of learning directly and consistently onto the students.”  It’s also a book to give to someone who doesn’t really want to read an educational book but who loves teaching.  This book left me with a real desire to work a lot smarter.

Professional Capital by Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves

In my current role, I am focussed on helping to develop a school culture of collaboration.  (See this blog) This book was another important driver behind that:  “…teachers who work in professional cultures of collaboration tend to perform better than teachers who work alone.”; “In collaborative cultures, failure and uncertainty are not protected and defended, but instead are shared and discussed with a view to gaining help and support.”  I have benefitted tremendously from this already and I can see the ethos of our school continuing to develop into one of collaboration.

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott

This book has transformed my leadership skills.  In the past, I would avoid conflict and do anything to have to avoid ‘difficult’ conversations.  This meant that I would not always say what I thought if it disagreed with my line managers’ views.  I was also avoiding discussing with colleagues things which needed to be discussed because of egos and politeness.  Instead, I now have models for how conversations should go and now if a conversation needs to happen then it does happen.  The ‘Mineral rights’ method, for example, has been a very powerful tool.  This is where you focus on one issue and drill down to the core of it.  ‘Fierce’ does not mean aggressive in this context- it means real.  Now that I have real conversations and I find that I am happier and more productive.

Mindset by Carol Dweck

I found this book chimed with my own experience and that anything I had achieved in my life and career came about through effort and focussed practice.  Dweck refers to a growth mindset, where we are open to new ideas and see that success comes from effort whereas a ‘fixed’ mindset is where we believe intelligence is fixed and we cannot develop it.  Reading this has changed the language I use in the classroom.  It has also served me well whenever students get into the ‘I want to move sets’ frame of mind.  We have ‘Can do attitude’ as one of our school rules which seems a little trite but it is very useful to refer to when students say ‘I’m thick’ or ‘I’m never going to get this’.  I also understand that mindset is important as a teacher too.  I have met teachers who are struggling but who are open to feedback and put in the effort to improve.  I know how much I struggled in my first couple of years as a teacher too and how a growth mindset has served me well.

An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger

I enjoyed this book for many reasons. (See this blog) It was an inspiring account of a passionate teacher but the book did lead me to really think about true project based learning and how I could apply some of his ideas in my English classroom.  At the top of the list was the idea of using authentic audiences which I have experimented with to mixed success.  I am convinced that a real audience improves motivation and, above all, the quality of work.  Since reading this, my students have performed Shakespeare in schools, taught lessons to primary school students, written letters to the local newspaper and local businesses and are now filming a Shakespeare DVD.

 

Why Don’t Children Like School by Daniel T Willingham

Daniel T Willingham is a cognitive scientist.  In this book, he explores how we learn things and the implications for the classroom.  The examples he uses explain key ideas clearly and in each chapter he goes into further detail about implications for the classroom.  This book has had a massive impact on how I approach lesson design and has particularly helped me to ensure that students remember what I have taught them.  He encourages teachers to provide opportunities for students to think- and what they think about, they remember. He also makes it clear that factual knowledge (not rote learning) is incredibly important as a foundation for learning.

 

Here are some other books I love:

Full On Learning by Zoe Elder

Visible Learning for Teachers by John Hattie

High Performers by Alastair Smith

Dancing About Architecture/ How to Teach by Phil Beadle

When Can you Trust the Experts? by Daniel Willingham

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Developing teachers in the age of ‘no prescribed methodology’

Mark Miller Teaching , ,

I love the idea of ‘no prescribed methodology’ when it comes to teaching.  What’s good is what works.  However, this does pose some interesting questions for those tasked with training staff, particularly new teachers. With this in mind, I want to consider how we train teachers to be brilliant while still saying that there is no right way to teach.

Start with Why

I have delivered two training sessions this week- one on written feedback and one on displays.  In each of them, I did my best to give compelling reasons why these were important and how they help the students.  Often, I have heard sessions begin with ‘this is important because there will be a learning walk’ or  ‘Ofsted want to see this’ and it makes my blood boil.  If it works then let’s do it.  It’s quite lazy to blame Ofsted.  Teachers have to understand why there are certain aspects of lesson design which work.

For example, many people see a plenary as the bit on the end that you have to do and see it as a box-ticking exercise.  A good plenary is a chance for students to reflect, to consolidate understanding and to give the teacher food for thought.  If we develop staff to understand the reasons underpinning aspects of pedagogy then they build lessons where these elements are essential and used where appropriate.

Observe others

The best writers are usually those who have read a lot of books.  I think some of the best teachers are those who see colleagues teaching regularly.  Even as a teacher with 10 years experience, I find that I still learn so much when I visit other teachers’ classrooms.  I much prefer observing in a coaching capacity or in a very informal nature because teachers don’t feel the need to revert to a traditional prescribed method of teaching when that happens. As an English teacher, I like seeing other subjects.  In the last 3 weeks, I watched a science teacher to get help with my tricky class, I saw a humanities teacher use some ICT I haven’t used yet and I stole a bunch of display ideas from a colleague in technology.  *update- This blog on Canons Broadside sums this up even better!*  Equally, I like to invite teachers into my room when I’m doing something unusual or trying something for the first time.  The more you see different ways of approaching lessons, the more you will be able to attempt in your own lesson.  This should be routinely built into training for new teachers.

Even better if they can move from passive observation and…

…Collaborate

Plan lessons with someone else.  Teach them together so they can have that dialogue about what they are doing and why.  Experiment with ways of working that suit the individual.  We build into our NQT training a cross-curricular project which encourages collaboration.  It may be idealistic when budgets and timetables are stretched to the limit but wouldn’t it be great to timetable NQTs to team teach at least one lesson on their timetable?

Be reflective

As part of their training, trainees are asked to reflect on lessons.  Sometimes I get the impression that this is just seen as another evidence building task for a portfolio.  In my experience, if teachers reflect routinely, then they get better.  Reflection can be a couple of bullet points, a blog, a coaching conversation or even just a quick think.  To help develop staff, we all need to be modelling this process and allow time to do this.

Learn models

Much as I love breaking the rules, the largest percentage of my lessons are 3/ 4 part lessons.  It is a good model and one which has been the skeleton for a large number of brilliant lessons. And because I know the rules, I know that I have solid reasons for not following them.  I can reveal the learning objective at the end if I want.  I can skip a starter. I can do jigsaw group work.  I can spend a whole double lesson getting students to redraft work.  Teachers should continue to build a repertoire of lesson models and seek these out in books, blogs etc.  For example, early in my career, I found The Teacher’s Toolkit by Paul Ginnis helpful in exploring different approaches.  When we think about what we want students to learn, we can then choose a model that might work or create our own.

Looking back at my list, perhaps this isn’t just for new teachers.  I think this is pretty good advice for us all really!

 

 

Making Connections

Mark Miller Teaching ,

Fittingly, the idea for this blog post came through a series of connections. Through the power of Twitter, my blog was linked to from this blog from @plestered.  I watched the video on the site and in it the teacher Andy Smith spoke of the way that he finds inspiration for his lessons from TV quiz shows.  Right at that moment I was watching Only Connect on BBC4.  An idea was hatched…

So I stole the word wall idea from the show and created a fairly simple starter activity.  Simple in that it was easy to make but it led to very complex thinking.  You can play some of the word walls here.  The idea is that there are 16 words and the teams must place them into 4 groups of different categories.

In my lesson, I just wrote down 16 things from Of Mice and Men.  Mainly characters, but I threw in some other ideas.  Here is what I made.  It took me about 5 minutes. onlyconnectOMAM

Making connections is an essential higher order skill.  It is explicitly in the markscheme for Band 5 in GCSE English Literature:  “make a sustained discussion of links and comparisons between texts; make apt selection of details for cross reference; at the highest level, make subtle points of comparison and probe links confidently.”

Crucially, the need to make four groups means that a) pupils have to reconsider their ideas and reject some ideas and b) there is some real divergent thinking when students end up with 4 seemingly unconnected ideas.  I was very clear in saying that I didn’t plan any connections so there was no point in asking me ‘is this right?’

It is a brilliantly differentiated activity too.  If I give 4 characters and ask what they have in common or which one is the odd one out, I have restricted the number of answers.  It is also easy to fall into the ‘read my mind’ teacher mode where there is an expected answer.  In trying to find 4 groups of 4, some students can make simple connections and as the options decrease the challenge increases.  Below is an example from one of the students.  The second answer led to a great discussion in class.

I also asked the students to solve a wall from the show (wall 2) and they loved it, although the word ‘gimlet’ sent one student into uncontrollable fits of laughter!

I am pretty sure that this sort of thing has been done many times before in classrooms up and down the country but I love stumbling upon things like this which are easy to create but lead to some complex thought.

Here are further ideas to connect

Hexagons are all the rage.  I love Think Link from Triptico for this and it’s even better because the demo board is based on OMAM.  You can laminate hexagons or use hexagonal post-its.  If you ‘explode the node’ and write a paragraph based around the intersection then it will be ready made with lots of detail.

Triangles are equally useful.  Write whatever you want on the side and ask students to connect.  You can have planned answers with some red herrings or just make them random and see what happens.

…or squares?

I can’t remember where I have stolen this from but if you just write a bunch of words on a page scattered out then students have to draw connections.  They can then write up their findings easily by starting at one point and exploring all the links.  Here is an example from Romeo and Juliet: RandJWordList

How is _______ like a ___________?   Set up a random name selector to pick a character and another to pick a thing.  Or pick them out of a hat.  How is Lennie like a tumble dryer is my favourite so far? “He breaks down/ powerful/needs someone to control” etc.  You can do this in so many ways.  Take two random things and find the connections.

Six Degrees of Separation from @fullonlearning:  Give a starting point and an end point.  This could be images or other stimuli. Students have to get from one to the other in six (or more or less) steps.  This is just one of many excellent ideas on connections and creativity from Zoe Elder’s ‘Full on Learning’.  I used it recently with quotations from Dulce et Decorum Est.  Another way is to turn this into a loop so the last step links to the first step.  This episode of ‘Wikiwars’ is another interesting way of approaching it:

Draw up a grid or create a Blockbusters style honeycomb and challenge students to get from one side to the other by making connections between words/ topics etc.  You could be ambitious and set up a room with ‘stepping stones’ on the floor.  Students can move to the next one only with a valid connection.  The next one across cannot go exactly the same way.

Teach connectives:  As an English teacher, I feel that students who can use a wide range of these can articulate ideas and explore connections easier.

Magic square: arrange topics in a 3×3 grid.  Pupils get a point for every connection they can make: horizontal, vertical, diagonal and 4 corners.

 

 

 

 

 

Ofsted lesson observations

Mark Miller Teaching ,

Today we had a training session delivered from a former HMI on the new inspection framework.  It was actually quite interesting.  She delivered the key messages in a clear (and perhaps a little eccentric!) manner.  We were looking at lesson observations in particular, although the session covered other things.  I went into the training a bit apprehensive and with this question in mind: If Ofsted are focussing on progress over time, then what is the point of a lesson observation?

Now, I am not driven by Ofsted.  They play such a small part in my day to day life that I am clear that I will focus on what is best for students and the idea is that Ofsted come in and see that and say well done.  However, I am not naive.  I know that the judgement Ofsted place on my school will have a profound impact and I want to make sure that I am up to date on their thinking. We have outstanding teachers and great students- I don’t want that to get ignored because we miss out something straightforward that Ofsted want to see.

I have to say that I find very little that I strongly disagree with in their inspection standards.  I do have an issue with the idea that one lesson observation can define my teaching.  What is pleasing to know is that Ofsted seem to agree.  While I acknowledge that individual inspectors may have their own subjective idea on what is an outstanding lesson, here are my conclusions based on today’s session:

It’s all about progress over time

I have a problem with teachers who phone it in for the year and then pull out the same outstanding lesson they’ve taught time and time again.  Inspectors, quite rightly, should dig deeper and find evidence of that sustained progress over time. In addition to the data and markbooks, they find the evidence in the following places:

Pupils’ books: These will show that students work hard and are given feedback that makes a difference.  They won’t be dog-eared, empty and unmarked.

The classroom environment: While she was clear to state that this wouldn’t be a limiting factor, our HMI did say that it made it a heck of a lot easier for her if the classroom environment screamed learning.

The students: “I get what I need from students when I visit a school.”  Maybe this does lend itself to students being pre-programmed with what to say but I don’t think this needs to be the case.  My pupils can say what they need to do to improve- usually in unelegant language but they know it because we work hard on it for the right reasons.

How as well as what

Ofsted are looking for progress in that short space of time but they also like to see the process.  How do students learn it then and over time?  This is where routines and classroom systems come into play.  She mentioned ‘talk partners’ and ‘next steps books’ in a year 2 lesson she had seen.  When it is evident that students are used to working in a certain way then they not only demonstrate learning there and then but it is clear that this goes on over time.  Once again, it is going against the idea of blagging a lesson.

No ‘prescribed methodology’

The HMI described an observation which had no learning objective written on the board.  It was outstanding.  (Here is a great presentation on different approaches to learning objectives.)  There was not a tick box process.  I think schools need to have a shared language of how we construct lessons and I feel that the 3/ 4+ part lesson is a not unhelpful method but I like flexibility and it is good to know that a lesson is judged on its own merits.  I think there are a range of strategies that work and there are a number of ways of putting these strategies together.

Ofsted are keen to stress that Grade descriptors for the Quality of teaching are ‘not designed to be used to judge individual lessons.’  They acknowledge too that ‘not all aspects of learning, for example pupils’ engagement, interest, concentration, determination, resilience and independence, will be seen in a single observation.’

I don’t know if it was just limited to our HMI, but I got a real sense that outstanding lessons have a feel to them that is not always easily explained.  It’s quite hard to put that in an action plan mind you!

 

I am actually quite positive that the work that we do over a long period of time will be acknowledged by inspectors.  We work hard and do a good job but I certainly have some bad lessons that don’t go as planned- this is just as likely to happen during Ofsted.  What makes me look upon Ofsted with less apprehension is if they talk to the kids, look at the grades and look at my books they will see the truth.*

 

*Except my year 9 books.  Please don’t look at my year 9 books.

Without Apology

Mark Miller Teaching
Pupil: Why are we doing this?
Me: You have to do this because it’ll get you a C.
Pupil: But it’s boring.
Me: Yes, you’re right. I’m really sorry about that. I don’t decide what’s in the exam.
 

I have had that conversation- or a version of it- with so many students over the years.

Recently, I have been dipping into ‘Teach Like a Champion’ by Doug Lemov.  It’s an American book and at times is geared towards their school system.  However, there are a large number of simple strategies that I have found very interesting.

One of them, ‘Without apology’, is the idea that we shouldn’t undersell the importance of things.  We shouldn’t assume that something will be boring.  We shouldn’t blame things on an unseen ‘they’.  We certainly shouldn’t dumb things down e.g. ‘It’s okay to use a contemporary song to introduce the idea of the sonnet.  It’s not okay to replace sonnets with contemporary songs in your study of poetry.’

He goes on to list some alternatives to apology:

‘This material is great because it’s so challenging.’
‘This can really help you to succeed…’
‘This gets more and more exciting as you come to understand it better.’ 
 

I have tried this strategy with all my classes this year.  Where it has had the most impact is with my GCSE classes preparing for controlled assessment.  I really struggled last year to get my students to produce CA pieces of a high enough standard.  Part of this could have been because I always told them that we had to get through those boring bits and that I hated it too.  This year, I feel a change of emphasis has really helped students understand why they are doing what they are doing.

My year 10 class, for example, are not studying spoken language because they have to (even though they have to).  Instead, they are studying it because:

The way we speak is a fundamental aspect of who we are
They will do really well in their A levels if they get their heads round it now
Spoken language is all around us and is endlessly fascinating
People judge us by the way we speak- some people think they speak funny
It’s actually quite fun to identify false starts and fillers, especially in their teachers’ spoken language
Oh, and, they need to do it for their GCSE! 
 

Thinking on a wider point, how often do we hear a staff training session begin with something like ‘We need to do this because Ofsted will be looking for this.’  Maybe they will, but if they are looking for it, then there are likely to be some merits to it.  Think how much we get demotivated by that kind of approach to our own learning as teachers.  Doing the same for students must have an equally demoralising effect.

Progress Investigators

Mark Miller Teaching

Inspired by The Lazy Teacher’s ‘Progress Paparazzi’ idea, I have created my own ‘Progress Investigators’.  I am trialling the idea with my year 8 class and plan to roll it out once I iron out any teething problems. Here’s how it works:

 

 

 

 

 

The Progress Investigator is given the scrapbook and a camera.  It is their job to investigate whether progress is being made and to record it in a variety of ways.

The pupils are given several prompts.  They are:

  • Get students to sign the scrapbook, describing what they have learnt.
  • Describe what is going on in the lesson and how this is helping students to progress.
  • Take photographs of pupils’ work to show their progress.
  • Offer your own ideas on how to help the class make even better progress.
  • Speak to anyone who comes into the class about the learning taking place.

You can see the glog here.

It is hoped that this will be real evidence of ‘progress over time’ and that the clear focus on progress will help the students to become more aware of what and how they are learning.

Thoughts after the first couple of weeks:

  • Students take their responsibility seriously- they are really looking for progress.
  • I need to spend more time training the students in how to describe progress.  They have commented on hard work and ‘lots of writing’ but need to refer to specific success criteria.
  • Some of the comments are brilliant: ‘Eben has an itchy eye but continues reading’ is my favourite.
  • I had a lesson where the internet connection was playing up.  One of the progress Investigators wrote (and underlined) ‘Mr Miller says we need to be more resilient!!!!’
  • I have been pleased with the way the Progress Investigators pounce on any adult to enter the room and explain what we are learning.
  • I have started giving some specific  questions to support the Investigators during particular lessons.

 

I will continue to update this post as I refine this way of working.

Building a culture of collaboration

Mark Miller Teaching

Before the summer, I was appointed to my new role as Research and Development Team Leader.  It is a job that allows me to do things that I am passionate about and I feel very fortunate to be taking the role on.  There are a couple of very specific things I have to do but I have a very broad remit around developing innovative practice around school.

Immediately, I drew up a list of things we needed to develop.  Ideas came as quickly as it took my Twitter timeline to fill up.  Lots of summer reading (e.g. An Ethic of Excellence) led to further new things that we just had to do.  As I started to think about all of this, what struck me was that it would be quite impossible to deliver training session after training session and quite irritating for staff to receive lots of informational emails.  So many ideas but bombarding staff with them would not work.  I realised that the way to develop practice across a whole school was not in a top down model but from the bottom up, gradually trialling, adjusting and sharing ideas in classrooms so that by the time they reach a critical mass, teachers are secure in their understanding of not just the what, but the why.  I therefore decided that the first thing to do was create the ways for staff to collaborate, reflect and share practice.

We already have a half-termly ‘Ideas Market’- our version of a Teachmeet. This is an informal gathering attended by a small but committed band.  It is also a key part of our induction process that NQTs (+GTP, TeachFirst etc) work together.  For example, they planned a series of cross-curricular lessons together and led whole staff training on behaviour management.  I have already posted here on working together with my mentee last year.  However, it is safe to say that this collaborative culture is by no means embedded or high profile.

 What next?

 

One of my interesting summer reads was Professional Capital by Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves.  They develop the idea that successful schools should have high ‘social capital’.

Key quotations which struck a chord:

“…teachers who work in professional cultures of collaboration tend to perform better than teachers who work alone.”

“In collaborative cultures, failure and uncertainty are not protected and defended, but instead are shared and discussed with a view to gaining help and support.”

I was also recently inspired by this fantastic blog post by David Fawcett.  He lists so many ways of building a culture of collaboration in a school.

So here are my (constantly evolving) plans:

  • Open classroom system introduced.  Teachers willingly invite other teachers into their classroom. The other teachers can join in, offer support and learn from colleagues.  This is a feature of my classroom, christened the Goldfish Bowl as it is right in the heart of the school and has lots of windows on to the corridor.  This is a picture of our boyband ‘Sen5ation’ using the room in their music video.
  • Development of the Ideas Market e.g. by focussing on particular themes.
  • I have set up our school’s teaching and learning blog, the Leeds West Wire, and have started to encourage teachers to blog as both a way to reflect and a way to share.
  • We will develop our simple teaching and learning booklet into a larger magazine and share this outwith the school.
  • Professional enquiry groups created.  This is an upgrade from the coaching triads that we have used before.  Instead of the focus necessarily being on lesson observation and feedback, staff will be able to choose whatever they want to work on and present their ideas in a celebration event later in the year.  We have a demonstration of IRIS Connect in a couple of weeks which has the possibility of becoming a tool to support this.
  • Chain reaction: two members of staff work together then split and each works with someone else on a project.  Then those two people work with others before closing the ‘loop’ at the end of the year.
  • Any member of staff going on an external CPD course shares what they have learnt and are encouraged to support other staff with similar needs.
  • The VLE is also now set up so that staff can add resources and share ideas easily.

 Another aspect of all this is that I am asking staff to take ownership of these things.  The organisation of the Ideas Market, for example, will be passed around teachers to allow it to evolve and to offer leadership opportunities to others.  In the last week, I have had so many conversations with staff who want to take on projects and get stuck in.  They don’t need a job title or permission to lead teaching and learning projects.

Watch this space.

 

 

Some thoughts on An Ethic of Excellence

Mark Miller Teaching , , ,

 

I have just finished reading An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger and wanted to put down a few thoughts.

I have been looking forward to reading An Ethic of Excellence as it has come highly recommended from a number of sources.  It is one of those books that takes a while to read.  Not just because you have to stop every few seconds to highlight and write on post it notes but you also end up having to get started on work that it inspires. Berger’s passion is evident on every page and there is a real sense of the impact that his approach has had on the students he teaches.  The final paragraph about his former students is lovely.

Much of it chimes with some approaches to teaching that I have adopted this year e.g. involving real audiences and project based work.  However, it is clear that I was only playing at this and Berger proves that the potential is far greater.

He writes about ‘Making Work Public’.  Often, pupils’ work is put on display in classrooms and sometimes in public forums.  This is usually the best work or the prettiest and certainly isn’t something the students are generally bothered about as they do the work.   I am currently reading some homework completed by my year 8 class.  Most of the work is a joy to read, the result of hours of effort and real pride.  The remainder are good but there are a couple of pupils ‘phoning it in’, producing work that is good enough but not the best they can possibly do.  As it stands, I am the only person who will read the work.  They will get good quality feedback but as I mark each piece I can’t help thinking that I am missing a trick.  Would the work be even better if pupils knew that it would be published and visible to the world?  If every piece was to be framed and, say, placed in the Principal’s office, would the quality improve? Also, how much more would they have enjoyed it?  Berger ensures that the exhibition of work is central and the answer to the question ‘what’s the point of this?’ is obvious to the pupils.  Nobody hands in anything less than their very best work.

The approach of ‘critique’ is quite an eye-opener too.  I have seen peer assessment take place where it is frankly a waste of time.  All too often a piece of work is completed and it is ‘marked’ by another pupil.  However, without a structure and a clear understanding of how to effectively critique a piece of work the feedback is rarely very useful.  Also, without the opportunity to redraft, excellent feedback can be wasted.

I was also struck by Berger’s acknowledgement that he is lucky:

“I’m trusted in my job…I’m encouraged to innovate…I have support…lots of support.  I’m not working alone.  I’m part of a community of educators who work together, help and critique each other.”

I am looking forward this year to helping create opportunities for teachers in my school to collaborate and innovate and I have no doubt that Berger’s ideas will heavily influence a lot of what we do.

 

Restriction and Creativity

Mark Miller Teaching

Reading this blog post from Cramlington Learning Village has made me consider the blessings that unexpected circumstances can give us.

Sometimes you are stuck with a last minute room change, or the computers suddenly go down or- CRISIS! – you leave your memory stick at home.  There was a time when I would have hated this but now I just roll with the punches.  That is largely because I have come to realise that some of my most interesting experiences as a teacher have come in those situations.

I remember an example years ago when an unexpected number of pupils were missing from a ‘crucial’ lesson on poetry.  I didn’t want to waste that one so, on a whim, I set up a speed dating activity. (I had been to one of these events myself the week before- but never since!) Each pupil became a poem from the anthology and they had to meet other poems and discuss what they had in common etc.  It went really really well and
I have used variations on that theme ever since.

The only problem is that these opportunities don’t come up all the time so…create them!

I often come back to this set of instructions when considering this kind of thing:

You must not talk
The lesson must take place outside
You have to teach the lesson in role
Half of the pupils are blindfolded
You only use plasticine
The pupils teach the lesson
You are not in the classroom
You are teaching 100 pupils in the theatre
You have 8 different activities on 8 different tables
Nobody can sit down

 

Picking one at random and then going from there can lead to some great lessons.

There is a chapter in Phil Beadle’s brilliant Dancing About Architecture where he discusses random pairings of subjects and sports.  Sometimes the randomness creates amazing ideas which don’t pop into your head without this kind of stimulus.

Other ways to embrace randomness include:

5 card flickr

The story generator

Putting this in practice, it is important to balance the gimmick with real, solid learning.  I like being a bit creative with lessons but I do not like it if no learning takes place.

Looking at the first idea on my list, and reminded by the CLV post, on Friday I decided not to talk in one of my lessons.  My year 8 class are working on projects and in our previous 2 lessons, I had asked them to set targets at the beginning and reflect on their progress at the end.  I
wanted them to work in this way again.  I wanted them to do all of this without needing me to tell them, however, and I wanted them to have to solve problems without me.

What was interesting was that about half of the class immediately started as if nothing had changed while the other half were much more tentative.  This is a class where we experience almost zero examples of negative behaviour but without direct instruction some found it more difficult than others to start.  Once we got going, and once they realised I was not going to answer the questions, the pupils organised themselves
effectively.  Instead of asking me for spellings, they found them out from friends, dictionaries, the internet or frankly just from thinking about them for a bit longer.

What is most interesting is that even if the pupils had not made expected progress, it would still have been a productive experience because we could unpick why things didn’t work as well as normal and address these issues accordingly.  I am going to try it next week with one of my most challenging classes and see the results.

The same but different

Mark Miller Teaching , , ,

As a mentor of an NQT, I was looking to support her with her lesson.  She observed me teaching a lesson with my year 8 group and she delivered a very similar lesson to her year 7 group.

Although this was initially designed to be me team-teaching/ coaching to help improve her practice, I quickly realised that I was picking up tips on how to improve my own teaching.  There were lots of moments where a different spin illuminated an aspect of the lesson that was lacking in my own lesson.

For example, part of my starter activity involved pupils placing post-it notes with their answers on the board.  I then sorted these post-it notes into an order on the board, describing what I was doing and why.  She asked two pupils to sort them and explain why.  It was a tweak that brought that bit more to the lesson. The questioning in the class was also much better than in my lesson.  Pupils were required to  think for longer, to discuss and to feedback.   Actually, I probably don’t mean ‘better’ here,  rather it was different to how I approached it.  I am definitely a teacher who is reflective, but I still have certain entrenched methods which have served me well- but they are not the only  methods.

So many different factors affected the delivery of the same lesson too: the time of day, the room, the make-up of the class so much so that a lesson which was, essentially, exactly the same as mine was in fact quite different.

The less formal approach to this ensured that the experience was different to the norm.  I have undertaken many observations in my time and I know that once you place a judgement on a whole lesson, you then place absolutes on what is good and what is not.  If I had gone into this lesson and judged it, the process would have been nowhere near as revelatory.  I would have been ticking, and notetaking, and checking to see if certain boxes were ticked.   My feedback would have been centred around what would have made it a better lesson observation and not necessarily what would have made it a better lesson. For example, pupils were incredibly engaged with their writing.  The teacher let them continue and scrapped a plenary at the end.  I knew that the start of the next lesson will perform a similar function so I didn’t think anyone needed to panic.

Before I meander off on any number of tangents, I’ll bring the topic back to the initial idea.  In the next few weeks I will be creating more opportunities for this kind of paired experience and will be encouraging teachers to plan and teach lessons together.  I will also make time  to observe my colleagues and learn as much as I can.