You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Femi Adeniran’s tips:
- Teach behaviour lesson one by making ‘developing the right classroom culture’ your objective for the early lessons (02:56)
- Focus on explanations not resources (14:17)
- Teach in small chunks and fool kids into doing lots of work initially (23:17)
- Have your coffee whilst sitting in the classrooms of effective teachers (31:28)
- Provide answers so pupils can check their work in real-time (42:16)
Links and resources
- On Twitter, Femi is: @BeyondGoodPod
- Femi’s podcast is: Beyond Good
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View the videos of Femi Adeniran’s tips
Podcast transcript
Craig Barton 0:00
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast. The show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. This episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to head of maths and co host of the excellent beyond good podcast, Femi D’Andrea, and you are in for an absolute treat. Four quick ones before we dive in. Firstly, sponsors lots of the podcasts are open. So if you want to let the world’s most interesting listeners know about your book, product or event, just drop me an email. You can view videos of all famous tips on the tips for teachers website. These are ideal to share on a departmental meeting or a training session. Number three, you can sign up to the all new tips for teachers newsletter. I’ve been working on this over the summer, I’m dead happy with this new format. You’ll get a tip in your inbox on Monday mornings to try out that week. You’ll get a video to share with a colleague and you’ll also get a podcast to listen to on your way home. And finally, if you find this podcast useful, please could you take a moment of your time to review it on your podcast player of choice? Pause the episode now if you can just give us a quick rating. It really does make a difference. Thanks so much. Okay, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest, the wonderful Femi ademir. Spoiler alert here are Fermi’s five tips. Tip One, Teach behaviour lesson one by making developing the right classroom culture your objective for the early lessons. Tip two, focus on explanations, not resources. Number three, teaching small chunks and four kids into doing lots of work. Tip Four, have your coffee while sitting in the classrooms of effective teachers. And Tip five provide answers so pupils can check their work in real time. If you look on the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers.co. UK, you’ll see I’ve timestamp each of these tips so you can jump straight to anyone you want to listen to first, or we listen. Enjoy the show. Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Femi adeniran to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Femi. How are you?
Femi Adeniran 2:13
Hello. Nice to speak to you, Craig. Thank you having me on.
Craig Barton 2:17
Nice to speak. Nice to speak to you too. Dr. Femi. For the benefit of listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?
Femi Adeniran 2:24
Yeah, so I am head of math in a large, private school. That’s after 13 years of being a math teacher, a second department and a head of department in the in the state sector.
Craig Barton 2:37
Fantastic. Right. Let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one for us today.
Femi Adeniran 2:42
So tip number one is teach behaviour lesson one, by making developing the right classroom culture, your lesson objective in those early lessons.
Craig Barton 2:53
Like, tell me about this?
Femi Adeniran 2:56
Well, I think this one really comes from me, first of all, explaining what I believe the goal should be as as a teacher of any subject. So you know, I’m, I’m maths, but it could be any subject, I honestly do believe that the goal should be that you’re aiming for 100% of the things that you say in the lesson or about your subject, and 0% or about behaviour. Now clay has a very high failure to have. And you’re never going to achieve that every lesson every day. But I do think it’s what you should be aiming for. And it’s really interesting. So that day there was a young lady on Twitter who I think very genuinely put a message on saying, I’m an EC T started a few weeks time, how should I start a September, and loads of people came in with with similar things, what I’m saying. So start with being very clear about where you stand, how you want the class to run and running the room, and Tom Bennett and all that sort of stuff. And a lot of people just came back to saying that no, I don’t believe that just start teaching, they’ll pick it up. The school should have explained the rules to them. They’re already teenagers, they should know all this. And I just don’t buy into that at all. Really, I really don’t think that as educators we can criticise young people for not behaving, if we haven’t explained to them what that behaviour should look like or should be. So I’m all for starting with how we’re going to run this class. And it also you know, I listen to Tom Bennett. And it was it was really good to hear him because I was kind of doing all this stuff to get away back really before I was really any Tom Bennett or listening to podcasts. And it was really interesting to Him Come on and say exactly the same thing. So I mean, what I will say is this is not a rules lesson. This is not a whole hour where you’re at the front going through my 45 rules of my class and write them all down and annoying. I’m going to test it’s not it’s not nothing like that. It’s just being really clear about how you want the class to to function.
Craig Barton 4:43
Right, this is great. Let’s dive in. dive into this a little bit. So I’ve I’ve done both sides of this. I’ve tried both. When I first started teaching, I was all about laying down the kind of rules first, and then I thought, I’m not so sure maybe it’s do the content first and the rules kind of come a bit later. I’m swinging back The other way around. But I’m really interested in the in the practicalities of this for me. So I want to Can you talk us through what what would this first lesson look like perhaps starting out with these Lesson Objectives? Because that’s an area where it often kicks off here. Are you? Are you writing those down on the board? And no, no, I say objectives? No, I
Femi Adeniran 5:16
don’t mean that. What I mean is that often teachers will say, Oh, yes, lesson one. Today, I’m starting off with Pythagoras, what are you doing, or I’m going to do expanding brackets. And they’ve already got a lesson objective, which is maths related. In their head, they want the people in the hour to understand how to expand single brackets, which, of course, is what we would normally do, what I’m advocating more is my Lesson Objective. Lesson one, Lesson Two is that we create the right culture. So of course, you’re teaching maths, but actually, I’m not that interested in how much matters learn in those few lessons, or I’m interested in is do I get the culture right, so that I can teach maths very quickly, and effectively in the lessons that come after the first couple. So I’m not I’m not putting up anywhere, it’s just that I’m having that in my mind is how I want this to go. So I would always be you know, if you have less than one and you say to your colleague in the class next door, how did it go? And he or she says, Oh, yeah, they can all expand brackets. Now. They’re all finding multipliers really good. That’s not really kind of what I was asking. What would I be asking for is how did it go in terms of setting the tone for the year?
Craig Barton 6:18
Got it? Got it? All right. Well, let’s talk about setting the tone for me. What what are some of the things you’re looking for in that first lesson? And how are you bringing them about? Is it? Are you modelling it and then getting the kids to practice? How does this play out practically?
Femi Adeniran 6:31
So I think very similar to what you said earlier, is that I got it a little bit wrong in my earlier years of going for too much depth and rules. And trying to go through sort of eight, nine things I wanted the kids to know, now I’ve boiled it down to just three things that I explained very clearly, I do make the kids write it down. We never ever refer back to that those those bullet points. But I do write the write it down, I think to get across to them that this is really something that’s really important to me. And those rules are just three things. One is seating plan, you will sit where I’ve asked you to sit. And the reason for that is that if I had you in a seating plan, I straightaway know who all of you are. And I can address you all by name. So it’s not about behaviour. I haven’t gone to check with your head of year or your tutors who the worst behaved people in year eight, were nothing like that. It’s just I want to be able to eyeball you and say, Tom, how do you feel about question for Liam, and if you know, and I could do that, if I’ve got your the seating plan. That’s the first one. The second word is status. I always say to them that other than this lesson, because of course, it’s less than one. When you walk into this room straightaway, there will be a starter on the board, and you are expected to come in and get on with that immediately, you’re not going to open the window, you’re not going to go get a bottle of Coke off your mate, you’re not gonna go check out your phone or anything like that you are straight in sat down and get get on whether you call it star so retrieval do now whatever it is, it’s all just something that we’ve learned in the past that you’re recapping. And the last one is social skills. There is one of me, there are 2530 of you. This can only work if, if you’ve got something to say you put your hand up. And I just basically just kick off. But they’ve written that down. They’ve got it in their book. And I think the really key thing from there is that you you devilishly follow through with that. So oft quite often very early on, you’ll see someone just just either quite honestly, sometimes or genuinely just, sir. Depends. Sorry, mom. But that’s that’s calling out, you know, or in lesson two, you’ll see a pupil come in and just wander over to the back of the room because it hasn’t been your classroom before. And he just wants to see the rugby pitch because you can see it from your club, and he wants to see if he can see his bike. No, that is that is that is that is not coming in and getting on with the style straightaway. So you’re setting these up, and then you’re then you’re always going back to them or you’re kind of being a bit of a dog with a bone with it. And I think that’s really important.
Craig Barton 8:54
I like it. Okay, just one observation. And then just a couple follow up questions. Our team where I see this go wrong for me is Yeah, with your scheme of work with with schemes of work, particularly those that are jam packed around that first term, and particularly schemes of work that are lesson by lesson and have a big problem with them just just full stop anyway, a teacher can look and think, Oh, I’ve got I’ve got to get through these objectives in this lesson. So I don’t have time for this behaviour thing. I’m guessing that because you said you’re not that bothered how much maths gets done, but you can imagine for a less experienced teacher, it’s quite hard to make that call isn’t it and say I’m going to essentially sacrifice content in the short term because I’m going to get dividends in the long term is quite big shout for less experienced teacher.
Femi Adeniran 9:35
No, no, it is it actually isn’t as you’ve heard that because I’m because I’ve asked him to work at my school, which I’ve written myself they specifically in lesson in week one, say something like classroom routines and setting culture. And that’s all it says for the week. Now now, I wouldn’t expect a teacher to be doing that for a week. But I’ve deliberately put that there so that there isn’t straight away pressure of how far are you out with your eighth grade what you want? I want All behind the way I don’t want that. So it’s not it’s not going to happen for a week I would expect that teachers will be teaching the scheme of work in less than one or definitely less than two. But I put it there to take away that pressure but uh, but that’s only my school. So I agree with you and I’ve worked in schools before I was a head of department, right miscues work myself, where you go in and it is straightaway circle theorems, lesson one. And I think you know that that comes something from leadership really is heads department should be realising that actually probably for a young teacher, the number one thing that’s making them sweat and worry a little bit over the summer will be the behaviour, it won’t be teaching expanding brackets, it won’t be circling, these people have got degrees, it will be it will be guest setting the climate of their classroom. So that’s the kind of conversation that people should be having with their mentors or their heads of department. And if that isn’t happening, that go and have that conversation with your mentor, your head department, or actually, I’ve got another tip later on, which will help with that as well.
Craig Barton 10:53
Fantastic. Just two more quick points on this. And how long roughly family would it take to go through these, these these three rules in that first lesson?
Femi Adeniran 11:01
Yeah, well, again, I mean, I made the mistake in my early is it my first of all of it taking half an hour, 45 minutes, and it shouldn’t be that we are talking before between the last pupil walking in, and the first bit of maths be done at most 10 to 15 minutes by people. So we’re so we’re pretty quickly getting on to math. Yeah.
Craig Barton 11:25
Got it. Got it. And final question. You mentioned, kind of revisiting these rules, retrieving these rules, keeping the standards high. And in subsequent lessons. Is that a case of just you looking out for the behaviour? And if it’s not where you want it, kind of picking the kids up on it? Or are you explicitly providing retrieval opportunities? I’m thinking along the lines of in your start, and maybe saying things like, what are three rules in this classroom? Or is it more just a more organic process than that?
Femi Adeniran 11:52
Yeah, no, I’d see, I’d see I would personally see referring back to those rules with teenagers or kids who are secondary, as being a little bit corny, you know, my daughter’s eighth year are going into year one. And I would say it’d be perfectly reasonable for the teachers there to say like, yeah, what were our rules for hand washing, or we always do it, but that’s alright. But I think we’ve teenagers I wouldn’t be I wouldn’t be putting it in a star, sir. But I would be constantly going, going back to it, I can still remember in my in one school, I worked in teaching a boss was set you 11. And I did all this stuff. And I started teaching. And I was about 10 minutes into my first topic of whatever it was I was doing, and a kid in a well meaning way, because I got to know him better actually, just to shout it out. So is it true, it used to be doctor and that was him just because he was he was he was that kind of quite jumpy. I want to ask, I want to say for the clinic kid. And straightaway, just bang, I got on a straightaway with you know, what did we say about calling out? What did I say to you 10 minutes ago about how I want to, and you can always see the mood of the class which to okay, this isn’t just a teacher who’s got rules. This is how he’s actually going to follow up on that. And we just basically didn’t have that for the rest of the year. I’ve made in my mind a little corrections. But it’s really important that you’ve that you follow through it.
Craig Barton 13:07
Fantastic. Right.
Femi Adeniran 13:09
So I’m actually Oh, sorry, I’m sorry. I’m actually really hostile as head of department as well. People not interrupting those first lessons. I’ve been known to send people away because they’ve come less than one. Hi, sir. We just want to can we borrow a set of compasses for the sun? No, sorry, you can’t. Now that would never be happening in less than 567. But in less than one, you know, I want to show the pupils. There’s nothing more important for me that setting up the culture of this class. I actually I’ve actually sent that person away. And you often see kids like, he just he just said what happened? You know, you know, I think it’s quite good message. Send the kids there’s nothing more important than being you having this conversation.
Craig Barton 13:52
I like it. I mean, who on earth is doing it using compasses lesson one? That be my question. Well,
Femi Adeniran 13:56
there you go. There you go. It does happen.
Craig Barton 14:00
Right. What is tip number two, please.
Femi Adeniran 14:03
Okay, so tip number two is focused on explanations, not resources. And this is quite an issue and it’s in no way criticising you know, you know, what you do with your podcasts or or my podcast that I do, or any any books that you can read or Twister. But I do think there’s a big problem in education with teachers spreading too long discussing resources, and not enough time discussing pure pedagogy. And I think actually a lot of teachers incorrectly think that a pedagogical discussion is a discussion about websites and whether or not you use maths watch or my maths or corporate maths or Pixi maths or whatever, and all that it’s got a purpose and it all needs to be discussed. And there are definitely some things that are better than others to use at a math lesson. But But actually, real pedagogy in my opinion is discussing how we’re transmitting what we know as mathematicians or math teachers into the minds of the pupils. And that’s more about how you favourite things, because I actually believe that the resources are just like a sort of a tool of practice for the pupils. And I’ve been to lessons, I can think of one teacher, my second school, who used to use some resources that nobody would touch. Now, he always used his book called LBN revision and practice. And it was this really dusty old book for the 1970s. And he had to photocopy it and blow up the photocopier so that it was big enough, because these tiny little exercises, but you’d go into his class and watch him teach. And he was an absolute expert. And you could hear a pin drop and the kids were on it and working well and loving them out and focusing on working really hard, because he’d got his explanations absolutely watertight. And I’d actually went to another school quite recently, just for the day to have a look at what they were doing. This is a private school, really quite expensive, private school. And every lesson I walked into, I wanted to steal their resources, because they were really good. And you could say, Why do you get this wrong? But actually, the the explanations, and the pedagogy of their teaching was was was poor, and the kids actually weren’t making much progress. So I really do believe that we need to talk about explanations less than we talk about resources. And actually, in my last school, I had department just for one or two years, we had a really, really strong team. And we really got this and we had a lot of what I call sitting on tables, which is when after school, you could walk down the corridor and the math teacher to sat on the table talking to each other. And they’d be saying things like, yeah, Craig, I was teaching, rationalising though later this morning, and I started with example, that had three plus root five on the boss said, what didn’t go very well. What would you do? Oh, no, I’d never do that. Let me show you what I use. I always felt this example because it helps you to link it to normal. All right. That’s, that’s what I think pedagogy is not, you know, if he worksheets and talks to talking about apps and things like that.
Craig Barton 16:48
This is nice. I love this one. Right. Okay, so let’s, let’s dive into this a little bit. So first, just a very quick reflection. I often hear teachers, whether it’s in person or on Twitter, you often get the question. Have you got anything good on this? So I’m teaching straight lines? If you got anything good on straight lines? Or if you got if you got on that? Yeah. And again, you’re absolutely right. It’s always resource focused. So I completely agree with you that the emphasis is always on resources. And the other thing Well, there’s a few things I’m interested in here. Your I think there’s a difference between that explanation, but also something else you picked up on, which is the choice of example, and sometimes even the best explanation in the world. But if that choice of examples wrong, either kids are going to overgeneralize, or they’re going to pick up on something that shouldn’t be there. So there’s two parts to it in the family. There’s there’s getting how you explain it will be for that. One example you’re going to choose to start with and that feels like a big part of this.
Femi Adeniran 17:40
Absolutely. And I just don’t, even in schools I’ve worked in recently, I just don’t hear enough conversations about this stuff. Because it can it can win or lose a lesson, knowing what to pick what examples to go with how many examples to do, how to understand when the kids got that look in their eyes when Yeah, you’ve got this. Okay, we could do some practice now. Or no, I think you need one more example on this. So we want more guys. Yeah, okay. Well, that is that is where when I go watch lessons, I see the be won or lost. It’s not on what it was rarely on the example the teacher the the the exercises that the teachers are using, because there’s so much stuff out there now.
Craig Barton 18:20
They say really interested in this. So another reflection, I see a lot of departmental meetings, when I visit schools, I’m obsessed with departmental meetings. And what what you often see in there is that they just add their their admin Central and that that’s a disaster waiting to happen. It’s all about discussions about targets and so on. Whenever you shift the emphasis more to in inverted commas, pedagogy, what that pedagogy often looks like is what you’re describing where it’s it’s not a discussion on explanations. It’s okay, here’s a good resource I’ve used for straight line graphs. Here’s a good resource I’ve used for sequences. So I wonder what does an effective pedagogy focus departmental meeting look like for you semi
Femi Adeniran 18:58
Cray, brilliant, brilliant chat. I love that question. And my honest answer to that is, I’m still working on it. And it’s still one error in my leadership that I want to get better at. But we have now gotten to the point in my school where we have what I call no non admin meetings. So there is absolutely zero admin discuss at all. And it’s really interesting actually, because when I first started doing it, I knew that people probably would be a bit uncomfortable with that. So I used to say at the I used to put on the agenda at the end item three admin discussion and people would often at the end and nice and fast right okay guys really good, meaty anything for item three admin, people often just feel quite uncomfortable and they say something. Yeah. Can we just discuss the year nine target grades? Are we going to still go with the higher grade that we have? Yeah, I put that email. We’re still gonna do that still going to be the same as the email I sent yesterday. Okay, good. And actually, I thought and over time, people stopped doing that. And now I still put it on there. But everyone just goes no fine lunch. We’re done. Now. We move on. So there’s lots of things I’ve tried, I would say the most effective thing that I’ve done that I really liked doing is recording lessons. And actually, on the board, and it’s so easy to do now with an iPad, just having an example of someone teaching a lesson from our department, to our kids, and asking the team to do to do three things. Firstly, is write down one thing that you thought that was effective. One thing that you noticed, and one question you would have for the teacher, and it’s quite a vulnerable place to put someone I’ve deliberately started with people that I know, won’t have a problem with that. And I’m quite confident in their practice. Because I think it’s you know, ideally, we want everyone to do this. But it really is opening us up to write we’re really going to discuss what’s really happening in the lessons we’re not going to talk about our my eight terrible today they are they couldn’t be straight line graph. Oh, by with the same, this is a pointless conversation, because we can’t see what happened. And actually, one person’s bad lesson is another person’s greatness.
Craig Barton 21:08
This is great. I love this final question on this Femi. As a head of department, how concerned are you with consistency of of explanation and examples across across your team? And I’m just thinking, if you, you know, you have this discussion, this pedagogical discussion, perhaps you start drawing out, okay, this is a really good way of explaining this, this is a good example, are you then happy for teachers to then make their own mind up about whether they use that
Femi Adeniran 21:33
is really interesting, you say, so when I when I started a small amount. Now, I really wanted we have a real drive on pedagogy. And I knew that as a department, we weren’t yet ready to start talking about, we’re all going to teach expand our brackets in the same way. We’re all going to teach Pythagoras in the same way, there was variation across the across the school, across the department. But actually, I think the general pedagogy of things like recap starters, and where the kids are talking, or you’re talking to kids are silent, all that sorts of needed addressing. Before we got to that, we’re now at a point where we’re starting to think about actually, as I go around the department as I do a lot, I do see lots of different methods be used for things. And we do need to start bringing that together. Because there’s no point in year 10, having peoples who have been taught six different ways of doing something, because the teacher, the town’s gonna have to try and pick that. So we are now starting to talk about let’s have some uniformity, over the way that we’re explaining things. But we but it’s by no means PowerPoints, it’s by no means email at the PowerPoints, and you just go through that. And it’s all there. I’m actually quite, I’m actually quite against that I don’t I don’t like that. I’m for teachers to start to, you know, planning their own lessons and deciding how they’re going to example, show things. I was really pleased when I listened to your point we had a boxer on he was talking about modelling, you must model rather than click click click. So they can explain it how they like but I think we do need to have some kind of uniformity about how we’re going to do it so that it’s consistent as I got school.
Craig Barton 23:02
All right. For me, what is tip number three, please.
Femi Adeniran 23:06
Okay, so tip number three is teach in small chunks. And for kids, it’s doing lots and lots of work. And this is especially important in the initial stages of the so this comes from I would say I’ve got no data on this right. But I would say that I think that the number one reason why teachers across the country get frustrated in maths lessons is that they during the practice part of the lesson where the kids are working, teachers are trying to circulate the room and you see this all the time where you can observe lessons and they’re having to do two things at once to have to try and correct maths and having to also try and keep kids on task. So they go over to one pupil it’s alright Tom No, no x times x is x squared you’ve put to it all right, okay. Boys, boys turnaround place. I’ve said you already right you weren’t What’s that? What are they get that well, and actually, we no one wants to do that. And it’s one of the reasons what makes teaching just really tiring doing that all day, five lessons a day successes day is really tiring. And it and it’s probably happens more in tougher in inverted commas schools. So the way that I actually first got interested in maths from my uncle was he used to get little scraps of paper. And he was set me five questions to do on a bit of paper. So when I was like eight, nine years old, and he told me off, go go do those. And I go back to him. And I said I’ve done them all and he go right number one is right number twos, right, number three is right, our fours roll for our right three out of four. Okay, have a go again, and like off again. When I started teaching us I sort of thought, what can we bring that kind of dopamine hit that you get as a child doing a couple of questions to find out whether they’re right or wrong. Can we bring it and use it on the on the wider scale? So so often with more tricky classes, or classes that haven’t got a really strong work ethic, I use that model. So I will teach them something and I will give them five to do plus some extensions that I will go through those five, and they’ll get instant feedback and how they’ve gone with lots of cold calling lots of questioning, okay, I think you’ve got that now, now five or something else. And then I’ll go through those. And then five more of the two things combined. And actually, you could fall of pupils into doing lots of work, and lots of questions in a lesson. By doing it like that, rather than a bottle that you see a lot of teachers try, which is, I’ll do till the board, and then on your desk is she and you’ve got 40 minutes, come on, stay on task, please come on what you’re doing, guys. And actually, I think you need to sometimes form kids into working hard. So for the model that I’ve described, I wouldn’t advocate using for the whole year, if you came into my class in December, I wouldn’t be doing that so much anymore. But in those early lessons, you can fool people into do lots of work. And you know, you’ve cracked it. Because they’ll say things like, listen, there’s so much work I’ve done, I’ve talked to I’ve done more this year, in less than a halt. And that’s what you want, you want them to do loads and loads of practice. So it’s teaching in really, really small chunks. So I’m gonna get tissue. From here, I’ll try to
do Sorry about that. So it’s itchy, really, really small trunks and getting the kids do lots of work in really small periods, rather than in, in really long periods. You see a lot in sport, actually, I’m quite into rugby. And a really, really skilled rugby coach will get a group of undenied or under twelves, doing little short drills for five minutes that will pull them all in right what we learned there guys are we learned that you’ve got to spaced out as a tee Right? Good. Now you’re going to try this, by the mid what you learned here, or you learned that kicking the ball can be really useful to create space, good, bring the back end, that is a really good sports method that I think you could bring into the classroom.
Craig Barton 26:52
Or this is a really, really good one this family. So I’ve got a couple of thoughts on this. And I’d be interested to get your your take on. So I’m very lucky these days, I get to visit loads and loads of schools and I see some really, really ropey classes approaching the teachers. Exactly, exactly what you describe the kind of long periods of sustained work, and it’s just a car crash. And it’s an absolute car crash because as you say, the teacher is just running around the room, and and so on and so forth. So my advice, I always think, Okay, right? Well, let’s flip this on its head, let’s go for the short, sharp kind of periods of work. Here’s some questions you have ago, let’s feed back and so on. But then a little voice in my head says, Well, how are these kids ever going to get to the point where they can do those prolonged periods of focused work? So what is the transition look like for your family? How, if I came to see your class later in the year, how have you got them kind of almost off this model to being able to work for say 20 minutes independently?
Femi Adeniran 27:48
I think that the number one thing there is you’ve you’ve bred a culture of success. People, people, humans, not just children, Huber’s like doing things that they are succeeding at. So so if you’ve got a high success rate, and I was really, really excited when I first read rose and shine a couple of years ago, and it talked about a high success rate, because effective teachers have been talking to me about that for years. And it’s like, yes, of course that makes sense. So if you’ve got a background of them having a higher success rate on these little mini sections of work, that if you came later in the year, they will be doing big sheets working for 25 minutes, 35 minutes, because the culture in the room is one of quiet study independent on the whole practice. And they’ve got used to doing that in your classroom of Edward M one or m nine or whatever it is. So suddenly, when you ask them to do a worksheet for 50 minutes, well, we always work quite hard and quite quite lamest about this class. So of course, I’m not gonna start walking around the room or chucking a pen or being rude or shouting out or getting my phone up, because we never do that in here. You’ve trained them. But I think it’s a mistake to think they’re going to do that in September. And I know that the Olympus AP teachers make is often classes will do that less than one or two in September, because they’re they’ve been off for six weeks, and they’re quite pleased to be back. And it’s a new teacher. They don’t know you en que te or someone haven’t met before and it’s a new class. They’re in a different room sat with somebody they don’t really know that well. They will kind of work quite quietly. You know, I always worry a little bit. What do you hear teachers coming out? So yeah, yeah, those eights I had, I was told it was quite difficult. But yeah, you hear a pin drop for the whole hour in there. Well, okay. I hope that when I come back in in November or October, it’s going to be the same. So you’re breathing success, basically is the answer to your question.
Craig Barton 29:34
Let me play devil’s advocate a little bit here, Femi. Justice. I think I’m on board with you on this. But is there a danger that we sacrifice depth in those earlier months because I’m a great, I love Cal Newports kind of work on deep work and this notion that you really get some valuable stuff done. You need this sustained period of focus and I can see how you’re going to get it maybe you know, January onwards, but how are you going to get the kids you know, thinking deep Play for in September thoroughly ever doing the short chunks?
Femi Adeniran 30:04
Well, the short chunks are not necessarily only very brief video activities. So it’s not only, you know, expand to open bracket x plus three, it can’t be something deeper. But the key thing to it is it’s not for that longer period. So it could be a deeper question, it could be something that involves a little bit more thought. But I would also say that, you know, I by no means get around schools as much as you do. But so often, the number one reason that I would say that pupils are not willing to do deep thought, deep work, as you quite rightly call it, if they haven’t got the components in place to do it. So I’ll go into lessons and some schools that I visit, and you’ll say a kids want to do a really deep difficult for them, you know, trigonometry question of a kite attached to a house and a kid’s holding the string of a kite, and the angle of elevation is 45 degrees and they want to know, and you say to a kid, okay, just okay, you can’t do that. That’s fine. That’s one side project. All right angled triangle here, just forget about all the Kyla, how would you find that? How would you label it? Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t. Well, this is why we haven’t got the deep thought and the deep work. So I think it can it will come if the components are in place.
Craig Barton 31:17
Got it. Got it. right for me. What’s Tip number four, please.
Femi Adeniran 31:23
Tip number four is have your coffee whilst sat in effective teachers classrooms. At this goes back to why you know, we started our own podcast a few months ago. I believe that too often, this isn’t all schools that when people listen to this saying not in my school, and that’s great if it’s not in your school, but too often in schools, there is a culture of being a good teacher means that you basically get your ticket to be left alone. So be a good teacher means that you’re nowhere near competency. Your general you’re not necessarily going on to middle leadership or head or SLT, but you’re quite good. There’s no behaviour issues, there’s no practical planes, and oh, Jared, and five gets left alone. And I actually believe that there’s some there’s some great stuff in terms of pedagogy, no, sorry, CPD from things like this podcast and books you can read. But there’s always so much really rich knowledge that comes in your own school. And two things always blows my mind in education. One is that people are willing to get on a train to go west London for a course. But they won’t go watch people who are in school teach. And the second is that people will discuss other members of their department, sometimes very positively that he’s great. Craig’s great, or sometimes very negatively, are Craig noise in his classroom, but haven’t actually ever been seen as people teach. They haven’t ever been to see the people that they are working with Teach. And departments will sit around tables at four o’clock, discussing things quite right. Like you said earlier, you know, admin and setting target grades, and I haven’t seen it. So the teach. So I’m a real advocate for getting around the school and seeing other teachers teach. And don’t Iran, I know that in schools, time is really tight. And you may only have one free in a day, or you may only have one free across two days. And it is really difficult to do. But there’s no better CPD in my view than taking your cup of coffee, and you’re marking or your laptop, and just sitting in a classroom of another teacher that you think is effective. And just soaking up what is going wrong. It doesn’t mean sitting there taking notes. It doesn’t mean sitting there and watching everything that’s going on a lot of that you’ll know that, okay, they’re just doing this data. And everyone’s quiet, I don’t need to sit and watch this. I could do a bit of marking, I could do females. But but you will learn a lot from just being in that classroom. The best teacher I’ve ever worked with in my early years guy called Hugh that we talk about on our podcast. And I used to do that a lot with him. And the things that I would pick up from just being in his room and just seeing him in action. I just don’t think you could get any better CPD than that.
Craig Barton 33:58
I love this. I absolutely love this. So I completely agree with this. I again, I visit lots of schools. And What’s always interesting there is in the mornings, I always ask if I can see as many teachers as possible in as many lessons as possible. And prior to my visit, I’ve had a chat with the head of department and they’ve said right, we’re a bit weak in this area, we need a bit of support in this area. And invariably, and it happens every single time, I always see examples of the very kind of practice the head of department wants to bring into play in the team that I’m watching, you know, the drill more during the morning session. And it’s because the head of department hasn’t had an opportunity or a willingness to go and kind of see all his team in action. And as you say the expertise is almost always found within the school. And it’s it’s even better than you know, going on on a train to London because it’s contextual. You know, it’s teachers doing it with the kids that you teach, and so on and so forth. But here’s my two questions for your family. So I’m fully on board with this. But my first question is, how do you get the teachers on board to you know, allow or want to be happy? He with teachers coming in to watch them. Because that for a lot of teachers, that’s quite a big, isn’t it? You know, because we, especially teachers who’ve grown up in this observation culture where being observed is, you know, high stakes and so on and so forth. How do you develop the culture where it’s absolutely fine for anybody to come into your classroom and sit and watch you teach?
Femi Adeniran 35:17
Yeah, it’s, it’s not easy. And I think one of the benefits that I’ve got is that when you do your second stint as a head department, you often know the things that you maybe didn’t get right in your first. So I know that in the school that I work in now, I told the team day one, BT one, I’m going to be getting around loads less than that, of course, it’s just because I want to go and see how maths is taught here. And I want to be visible to the pupils. And I want to know what’s going on with the department and get to know people. And I think people because I was new, accepted that more as a kind of new thing that the guy new guy wants to do more than they would be if it if a head department of four years, announced in September, I’m going to start coming out to watch a UT flip, we’ve never been in once we’re going to start even four years. So it is difficult. And I think that anybody who’s starting new as a head department or ahead of year, because partially you should do it as well. You know, tutor groups and things get around and watch your tutor groups in your your group. It’s good to do it and announce it early. I think also big, big really transparent, and saying to people, please, you know, that also works backwards as well come into my classroom, any lesson anytime and watch anything that I’m doing. And that’s why I think you have to be good at what you’re doing to be head department, you know, if you’re, if you’re head department, but you’re still not too sure about your year ninth class, because they’re a bit difficult. And you haven’t really got your year sevens where you want to be that you’re kind of going to open yourself up to criticism if you try and go into other people’s classrooms. So I think you’ve got to make sure that you spent a good few years honing your craft first. And then I think just just positivity. So there will always be things that when you go and see a class that you think are effective. And if you can start to get people having their coffee, and say yeah, Craig Craig came into my lesson today just unannounced just kind of walked into that labour. Oh, did he? What did he say? Oh, he just said how effective it was that I was using my visualizer. And how nice he thought it was that the kids were all sort of working on a recap start to say quietly. Alright, so So the word gets around that this isn’t kind of a stick to beat people with. You know, we introduce now Strickland recently. And he was he does the same thing. I think he said he devotes two hours as a head per day to just walk in the corridors, which is incredible. And and he talks about how this is not, this is not deliberate stocktaking, this is not quality assurance, this is not a clipboard going around, ticking off the good ones and crossing the bad ones. He just gets around and wants to make sure that everything is I think he’s a phrase like, is everything to the teachers liking. So he’s actually coming at it from the point of view of, uh, you’re right in here, rather than I’ve come to watch you teach and critique you, I think there is a time when that possibly has to come. So if you’re constantly go back into a teacher’s classroom, you’re seeing something that needs to be corrected, you’ve got to be willing to have those tough conversations, but initially, just just be in there and get used to the fact that that you’re coming in, and that’s happening.
Craig Barton 38:09
Nice. Well, I guess the flip side to that is what about how do you convince a teacher who is you know, doing okay, they’re getting good results, that everything’s going fine. But they’re also really busy. They’ve got, you know, a couple of free periods throughout the week, they’ve got a load of stuff on how do you convince them to use that free time to go and see somebody else?
Femi Adeniran 38:27
Ya know that that is difficult, because because I think teachers are busy. And it is often nice to have some time away from children when you’re during during the school day. And it may be you’ve already got one hour and that school day. I think the number one way I would say is to not get loads and loads of meaningless thing to do that make them really busy. So I would say that in my department, you know, this isn’t this isn’t on my list of five things. But but in terms of in terms of things like marking, we are only marking one piece of work per week for pupils. We are not not bookmarking. I’m completely happy with people using textbooks. I’m completely happy people using corporate maths sheets, because they’re just really good. So why you sat there with a ruler and a pen making your own wood, they’re really good. So let’s try and create a culture where we have actually got a little bit of time, we’re not kind of frantically running around and doing things that are not that useful, you know, sticky targets on books, and you’re filling in rag rag sheets on Excel, and it’s all been deleted by the previous teacher and you can’t work out why they spent their whole free period, sorting it out. All that sort of stuff shouldn’t be going on really. And also I think, try to create a culture where people see how excited you are by talking about pedagogy. There is no more beautiful thing I think, than watching somebody who’s really skillful at anything, doing doing their doing their thing, whether it’s a builder, whether it’s a teacher, whether it’s someone who’s really good at juggling, and if you can get make people realise that actually See, this is a really difficult job that we do. There aren’t that many people who are beyond good. So so let’s talk about it. And let’s kind of try and get better as we as together. I mean, you know, that doesn’t answer the question extensively, there are still people who are saying that I am happy just teaching my lessons and they go home. And I get that. But I think if you can build a culture of it, then that it does start to grow the department and also interview day, just try and sound people out on this sort of stuff. You know, what, tell me about the last bass lesson you went to watch? You know, you can start to see who does that and who doesn’t.
Craig Barton 40:36
That’s great. Again, you just want one extra point to add to this for me, I really like it as well, whenever you’ve got teachers who regularly dip into each other’s lesson within a department, I think it sends a really strong message to the kids to say, look, we’re all in this together, you know, okay, I’m your teacher. But also, you know, the rest of the department, this is a math department, this is a math team. And, you know, often behaviour improves when another Merc colleagues in the class but also it’s, it’s nice to have somebody else in there another adult in there, you can sometimes bring them into the lesson and so on. It’s a it’s just a really nice positive feeling whenever staff dip in and it’s not, you know, to observe or to crack down on behaviour. It’s just there to, you know, be a part of the learning environment. I think it’s a lovely thing. But when that works,
Femi Adeniran 41:20
absolutely, I can still remember right? Okay, taking you back to about 1995. Now under 12 rugby, my first game for the school team, and a teacher called Mr. child came along to watch the game, even though he wasn’t coaching, he’d have like, it’s a Saturday, right? So you get you get off his Saturdays come in and watch the game. And, you know, I scored a couple of tries. And he pulled me over at the end, he said, You know what, you were really good today. And that meant more to me than any other teacher or parents say. And he’d given up his time to come on a Saturday to watch the game and then said you were really good. And if that happens in math lessons, so if another teacher comes in to watch another, another teacher teach, and then says to a group of kids girls at the back, you know, you guys were awesome. Today, your ability to manipulate said is so strong for you. And I want girls, that is gonna mean so much to them. And that’s another reason why I think it’s really important.
Craig Barton 42:12
Love it. Love it. Right. Okay, for me, what is your fifth and final tip, please?
Femi Adeniran 42:18
To the last one. And I’m not ashamed to say that I was really excited on the night when I was listening to your podcast. And I heard Joe Morgan saying the exact same thing. So I’m afraid we are sharing a tip. But it is answers on real time. And explain to kids how to use them answers in real time, I should say. So this is moving away from the way that I was taught maths right. When the teacher had got the front. They do two examples. They didn’t say Right guys, exercise 40 B. And then they sit down and read my books. And we do work or well the exercise. And at the end she says Oh, oh, seven minutes to go. Right. Okay, let’s go through the answers. The Question one is, is five root three? Yes, I’ve got it right. Question two is 10. root three is Yeah. Question three is five, root three plus four are nine. And the next six all wrong. You’ve got cross cross cross. And this is right. Okay, off you go guys have a nice lunch. I mean, that is that is just ridiculous. And then I went to do my levels, and a different school. And we were very much encouraged there to use the textbook and check our answers in real time. So we’d work through an exercise, and we would mark it ourselves. And we know whether we were right or wrong. So we knew we were making progress. We knew where we needed to ask the teacher for help, because we got an answer of 16.2. But the book says 38.6. We knew where we were we were equipped to help somebody else. Because Craig’s got it right. And I’ve got it wrong. So Craig, can I have some help? And it was just so obvious and so much more powerful, that when I started teaching myself, I just thought I’ve got to give the people’s answers as well as the questions. And then they can check their work in real time. And I as a teacher could circulate the room and only deal with problems, rather than having to go over a tip. take someone’s work. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And also, you don’t get the classic thing of the boy who gets the ball rolling and leaves with his head down or no good at maths I do I wasn’t, you get rid of that, because then you get to find out how he’s doing as we go. So it’s a really simple tip, but I use it pretty much all the time. There are some times when you can’t use it, right? So things like negative numbers with your seven, I might be doing minus two minus five. And the answer is minus seven. You can’t have the answer at the bottom, because you’ve got no idea whether that kid has just written down the answer from the bottom. So there are other ways of doing that. But with things like trigonometry, or the quadratic formula, or solving equations of complicated equations, where the answer is X is sick, you got to have lots of lines of working, get them marking their own work. It’s just so obvious. And it blows my mind the number of teachers who still revert back to this kind of like answers at the end kind of a war take your books in the market. So answers in real time.
Craig Barton 44:58
I love it right. Okay, so three questions. is on this family for years. So the first one is the obvious objection to this, which is, some kids are just going to use that as an excuse to not do work and just kind of copy stuff down. How would you counteract that?
Femi Adeniran 45:13
My answer that would be similar to what I said to you earlier, really, which is people like having success. So why is it that people go to escape rooms, and will spend hours in escape rooms, and we could all and they could easily get their phones out Google the answers to all the all the escape rooms, but they don’t, because they want to work it out for themselves. Children are no different to that they on the whole, and I’m talking like some quite tough inner city schools that I’ve worked in, I’ve done this won’t do that. If they feel they are equipped with the understanding to do it themselves. You often see that happening when kids just don’t get it. So they just think off flipping out? Well, I don’t know. 1824. There you go. I’ve done it. Yeah, tick, tick, tick. Got all right. So they won’t do that. If they’ve been if they’ve been taught? Well, it’s been explained to them. Clearly, they’ve had a couple of check questions to do before they went on to the sheet, where they got the chance to find out if they are right without the answers, and they got those right and are happy with the method, they then will will will work without cheating. In my in my experience, I’m talking about you know, low ability or low periods prior attaining kids in tough areas will do this if it if the environment is created for them. The other thing I’ll say about actually, is it really helps what I call the seven side of the students. And that is roughly I say in every class of 30, there are about seven students, I’ve got no research phase, it’s just kind of my estimation, who unless they’re directly spoken to and challenged, or spoken to, will say nothing at all, they’re not beaut they’re not kind of nothing wrong with it, they’re quite vocal at home with their mates. But in an ESA, they just don’t like to say too much. And it really helps them as well, because they often get left behind, because the bigger personalities will dominate with behaviour or with being really bright or better than you know better than the others in the class. And he goes to them first. And these guys just want to get on. But they often get things wrong and just very quietly have found ways of kind of masking that without ever having to speak to the teacher, whether they got the answer as well, they could go for it and know whether they’re getting it right or wrong. So I think it really helps them.
Craig Barton 47:13
God. Okay, so follow up question number two, I think this works quite straight easily in terms of sixth form or a level classes because perhaps they’re working from textbooks and so on. And they you know, they can flip to the back or whatever it is, if you’ve got a year seven, eight or nine class and you’re maybe doing it from a worksheet or something, or questions on the board, how practically do you give access to the answers?
Femi Adeniran 47:37
So normally, if I’m working on a worksheet, they are on the back. So there’s not really he just to fit your eyes down to the bottom. And you can see, well the answer is five. So there you go, they will be on the back. And I would be very much circulating the room. And as well as I am checking them out. So making sure that people are adding two to both sides and divided by 11. But I’m also checking that people are using the exercise in the right way. So I will go is now behind kids as they work, just watch them yet. Okay, I can see. And you can see the difference with a kid who is solving equations and checking in there, right? And a kid who is making sure they check the answer first and then using that and working backwards. So just by circulating it by creating that culture. Of course we would do that, you know? Yeah, again, it comes down to martial culture. But uh, but but but I will say I get we say about about year seven and year eight. But But normally, I find in my experience anyway, the work we’re doing in secondary school has at least got some steps to it. So not that much of what I do it is to have an upwards is just one step. So I don’t know, find 10% or 42? Well, the answer is 4.2. There’s no working out, there’s really needed there, a kid could just write down 42 quite quickly with low ability kids, I’m getting on to something that requires some kind of work. So it might be five to 15% or 42. Right, we’ve got to write down 10% is 4.25% is 2.1 50. I want to see all that written down before you turn on the sheet over and check your answer. And I want to go through that on the board before I let loose on the sheet.
Craig Barton 49:12
Well, my final question on this, for me kind of comes back to that because I think there’s quite a few areas of mathematics, particularly the fundamentals where if you have the answer, you kind of have everything so we’ll go back to your negative numbers one before so you negative number operations, you know it’s if you have if the answer is there, it’s hard to do you know what work and you want the kid support for you know, negative five Yeah, to even something like expanding a single bracket, expanding a single bracket. If you see the answer there. It’s you know, it’s kind of done and dusted rounding. There’s a whole host of maths where if you have the answer that’s he’s kind of everything sort of is what you do with that kind of stuff.
Femi Adeniran 49:51
Yeah, so things like that. I think you still can use the same approach. And I found it really interesting actually on your public domain. Morgan said very honestly, she said there may Be a few pupils in my class who are sneakily using the answers to some extent, to gain an advantage. But but I’m still gaining a lot more than I’m using losing if they weren’t there. And the second thing I’d say to that is also, at least once a week in my department and other departments I’ve worked in, we are taking all of that away. And they do do a mini assessment on the test conditions on all the work we’ve done recently. So over time, they not that we ever would explicitly say this, but they do realise that what we’re doing in the practice phase and lessons we’re practising, we’re training if you like, so there’s no point going back to the rugby analogy. You talk about rugby, have in our trading session, we throw the ball forward, because it’s easier. And we can score lots of tries doing that, but and on Saturday, we play or the referee actually stops us doing that. And that week, so we can’t do anymore. So we’re going to struggle on Saturday, aren’t we because we can’t do that. So they do realise that this is just kind of practice for my weekly assessment for my independent tests for my GCSE. And I don’t honestly don’t think if he came to one of my lessons and spoke to even some of the year sevens and eights and variability and said to them, just out of interest, do you use the answers to cheat? Or do you use them to actually check you out? I think they would say, Hey, mister, I use it because I want to know if it’s right or not. So I do five, and I check them and then I either work out that, that I’ve got got wrong, or I put my hand out and he comes round. And then he he checks because it’s actually quite interesting. Something that I have had from non maths observers that come in, is they’re not recognising that this can be done until they see it done. So I think it definitely can be done if they realised that it’s practice, you’re gaining nothing for doing this.
Craig Barton 51:44
That’s brilliant eyes. Brilliant, right? Love those semi, they are fine, absolutely great tips. And I love them, because there’s some brand new stuff that we’ve not considered there, but also stuff that builds upon things that other guests have said. So that’s fantastic. So let me hand over to you. What should listeners be checking out of yours?
Femi Adeniran 52:01
So myself and a friend Matt Finley, a good friend of mine who worked with in my second school, we have another math podcast, which we call beyond good. It’s called Beyond Good, because something that I talked about earlier. And I think we should always be striving to go beyond that kind of very standard. He’s He’s law right math teacher that you see in a lot of schools or he serviceable, you know, no parental complaints gets all right exam results, and the kids are quite well behaved, all that sort of stuff. So it’s really a discussion, a discussion about what can we be doing in our classroom to go beyond good? And it’s not, it’s not the amount of thinking that we are the we are the experts of this, that we know it all. We’ve got as many questions as we have answered, you know, that’s one thing I love about your podcasts, and that you speak to people, lots different people, people who are very well known, and a boxer, you know, people who are not well known like the but you’ve got as many questions as you have answers. And I think that’s how we should be. So we speak to other teachers, we speak to head teachers, we’ve got a recent couple episodes with pupils, which we love, because we just asked pupils, how do you feel when you’re just when you’re putting sets? How do you feel when a teacher says right, pick someone to work with. It’s just, it’s just fascinating people voice. So we do that, and we just love talking about it. So that’s, that’s beyond good, which you can find in most podcast places. Also, I would recommend a book called The behaviour manual by Sam Strickland, which is actually a manual, right. So it’s got like 105 chapters or something, little bits that you could just dip into, if you will learn about behaviour, or setting or settling a class down or assembly or whatever it is, he’s really good on just giving little nuggets. So it’s like you’re getting five minutes of his time. Every time that you you read a chapter. That’s pretty good. And another book called nails Natta, which is a book guy called Phil Naylor, who used to do a podcast and has now put together a book, which is all the brilliant conversations that he’s had with people on his podcast. And the really cool thing about his book is that if you read something, you think that’s really interesting. You can just scan your phone or the page, the QR code, and it takes you into the podcast, and then you can listen to it. So I think that’s really cool. So that’s really good. And the last one are really big plug for school visits, go and see other schools, ask your head of department, can I go visit that big private school down the road? Because I want to see what they’re doing? Can I go visit that pupil referral unit because I want to see what they do with really, really challenging kids. That in my view is the basketball was CPD.
Craig Barton 54:33
Fantastic, brilliant stuff. And yeah, as you know, for me, I’m a huge fan of your podcast. I think you’ve got a really good dynamic go in there and you cover things that not a lot of other podcasts do. So I’m a big fan of that. I’m I’m a regular listener, and I’m really pleased you’ve been able to come on this show and share some of your insights. So Femi, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you. Thanks. Great. Thanks for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
