More tips from Charlie Burkitt
Video transcript
right charlie what is your third tip for us please yeah sure so my third tip this is um i mentioned in the beginning that i hope these tips would build on each other so we’ve got the behavior we’ve got the warmth my next tip is to do with um your actual classroom teaching what you’re doing in front of the kids i think to try and get the most out of them now i also said this was going to be something that i didn’t do well in the beginning and that’s certainly true of this one this tip is to ask the whole class questions now i’ll go into what exactly i mean by that what i mean by this is very high frequency whole class afl now that can be using a number of different bits of afl the things we really like using at michaela are mini whiteboards we use turn to your partner which is a form of partner talk we use heads down hands up we use call and response i would say those are the main ways that we do it there are probably others that i’m forgetting but let me just go briefly into a couple of those so i’m sure loads of people use mini whiteboards and they many whiteboards are a really fantastic way um just to quickly see what everyone’s got in their head um and actually for the moment we can just think about many whiteboards when i’m explaining the broader principle here which is why am i saying to get the whole class um answering questions it’s because you really want to have the highest proportion of kids possible at any one moment engaged with the lesson and any sort of whole class afl forces kids to be thinking and participating in what it is you’re doing if you are constantly asking and this is 100 a mistake i’ve made before if you’re constantly asking just hands up questions and then choosing pupils you run the risk of only a few pupils and in particular only the people you’re asking really thinking hard about the question you’ve asked and you also obviously are gathering a bad data set on what the class really are thinking and what they understand if you speak to one pupil your data point is one you know that one pupil you know what they think you don’t know what anyone else in the room thinks now whiteboards which i assume lots of people have used before are an obvious way of doing this if you’re asking a question and all the pupils hold up a board and this is a bit math specific i understand in other subjects it might not be useful but you can very quickly see and you’ve got much better data now on what all the class are thinking and not only do you have better data on what all the class are thinking you forced every single pupil in the room to think and to present an answer and and for us michaela that’s huge because what we have is we have good behavior so peoples will sit and they will just appear to be listening but the people’s you know they they are real people and i don’t blame them for this i’d be the same if i was them they get very very good at just sitting and looking like they’re thinking without doing any thinking at all um so it forces them into thinking it forced them into participating and then they’re getting more out of the lesson now whiteboards i think is a reasonably obvious one uh there is also uh i mentioned turns your partner partner talk i’ll just briefly describe that so we will say to the kids uh for example uh well let’s just choose a random question say what is the lowest common multiple here and why tell your partner go now what they do is they’ll turn to the i just hit my muscle uh they will turn to the person next to them i got so excited and they will start speaking straight away um you know explaining what it is they think and why and and that’s normally and the reason i include the and why there is because that is normally a question you asked had a couple of sentences explanation that you want them to express to their partner and then i after just a few seconds and i must stress this because i feel like in lots of other schools you would then have the kids talking and talking and talking for ages we don’t have that it’s very controlled it’s very sharp it’s very energetic so the pupils turn they speak to each other for just um you know five maybe ten seconds more like five seconds and then you’re saying right back to me three two one hands up and the pupils turn back to you they put their hands in the air and they’re ready to answer your questions straight away and what that means is that you can keep the pace high you can keep the rhythm of the lesson going you cannot lose focus but you’ve just had every single people in the class express something to the person next to them it’s so great for raising the energy of the room it’s great for getting everyone participating it’s great for getting the kids expressing their opinions and communicating with one another in a way that’s also controlled and doesn’t derail the lesson on that charlie because we’ve had a few guests talk about mini whiteboards but this is the first time we’re really digging into other forms of whole class assessment so i’m really interested in this the partner talk if this isn’t a stupid question if they’re just discussing that kind of five or ten seconds do you have a protocol of who kind of speaks first because i could imagine they’re kind of just shouting at each other trying to try to get in as quick as possible how does that play out yeah it’s a good question that does vary a bit by the room you’re in actually um i would say that there’s no hard and fast rule that we have here um when we notice that there are pupils who are being kind of deliberately opting out of your partner talking and you’ve done well to spot that because that is something that happens what we’ll tend to do is say we have um in our all of our classrooms at michaela there’s a window side and a door side and what we’ll say is window side first go or door side first go you know and and that just if you’re going to manage the turns that’s a really good way to do that um it’s not something that we really strictly enforce but it’s a way of overcoming what you’ve just described and just so i can get the logistics of this right so they’ve done that you know quick quick chat to their partner quick explanation then they turn back and what’s the purpose of the hands up is that just so you can see who’s ready or is that hands up if you you’re in a position to explain what’s the hands up bit for yeah the hands up is just to say who wants to contribute at that moment now lower down the school i would say michaela we have a pretty high insistence on very high levels of participation so we’re expecting there to be a lot of hands in the air at that moment and because as i’ve mentioned before that’s the culture everywhere you do then just see pretty much every hand in the room shooting straight up and you know if you think about it there’s no reason that that shouldn’t be happening because they’ve just turned and said something to their partner either they’ve heard something from their partner or they’ve said something they’ve had a moment to think about it really they can be participating in that moment and it’s good to have them doing that so their hands are shooting up um now higher up the school that you get i will admit that to to maintain that level of kind of enthusiasm from the kids isn’t always possible as they get a bit older and you know more teenagery so you might not get every single hand in the air shooting straight up but you’ll get a good number of kids raising their hand to participate and that’s your chance then to choose someone to speak and why again this sounds like i’m being a real awkward question here kylie i’m just fascinated why would you why the hands up why not just kind of cold call people at that stage what’s the benefit of kind of the kids who want to explain explain if that makes sense why not pick somebody who you know because then you kind of get by a sample again yeah true um i would say that we do we do cold call as well so you’ll there’ll be a mixture so sometimes you’ll take a kid with a hand up sometimes you will say three two one and just say a kid’s name straight away so you’re right to raise that is a very good point we will often cold call um i would say that it the general rule of hands up is there because it drives a sense of energy and participation in a lesson so what we get is that sense of energy participation of not opting out but without having to always choose a hand obviously as a teacher you do what you think is right in that moment and you just choose a kiss got it perfect perfect was there anything else about the pair you wanted to discuss before we move on to the other one charlie about the partner talk yeah yeah no no i think that was everything no perfect perfect right i’m intrigued by this next one whoops how did you say heads that were heads down was involved at some point right tell me about this oh yeah yeah sure so that’s when um this is a kind of blind sampling a blind survey so what it is is we’ll say heads down and the kids know in that moment because they you know it happens everywhere and they’ve been drilled on it since year seven they’ll just put their heads on the desk and then they’ll put their hand on top of their head and they will just you’ll read out a few options it’s a multiple choice thing and they’ll raise their they’ll just open their hand for the correct answer it’s just a way of avoiding the kids seeing each other’s answers and getting a kind of more honest sample of what they think the answer is now just a small tip on this it can be a good idea actually to have gone through the options before you get them to put their heads down because i don’t know you know you might have tried this before but the kids very quickly go to sleep if they’ve got their heads down for too long so it’ll be something along the lines of you know here’s the question is it x is it y is it zed right heads down the first option is also a good one to say i don’t know because you want to avoid kind of false positives so often my first option is i don’t know i’m not sure you know thanks for honesty okay do you think it’s actually you think it’s why you get zed the kids are just opening their fist without making too much noise so you can see who thinks what without them letting each other know and then you you know quit very quickly heads up again and you carry on with the lesson and it’s a lot you know a lot like turn to your partner i really must stress that this happens very quickly it’s very punchy there isn’t wasted time you know you just get on with the lesson it’s a quick sample and you move on and i assume it’s the kind of thing where if you sense that well you can see from the responses there’s a lack of understanding in the room you can stop and intervene but if everyone seems to know what’s going on you’re just cracking straight on would that be how it would play out yeah precisely i mean you know it’s then up to you as a teacher how you want to interpret and use that data but it just it just gives you a a better reflection of what the kids think and you know i know craig you’re someone who’s an expert on multiple choice questions so you know the better you can make the options then the more data you’re going to get from that now of course in the moment you might be making this up at the top of your head and you’re not going to be able to create some fantastic uh you know false options i’m sure there’s a phrase for that i can’t remember but um you know so it can be a bit more rough and ready than one that you had maybe written on paper beforehand yeah just you know and the thing the thing with all of this whole class afl that i’m describing all the methods the thing that they’re all doing as i said in the beginning is they’re forcing the kids to think they’re forcing their kids all to participate um and they are also increasing the sense of energy and and kind of oomph in the room because of the variation you know if if pupils are in one moment turning to their partner the next moment they’re grabbing their board to raise it up the next moment their heads on the desk they’re just doing different things and it creates that feeling of variation and kind of urgency and energy that you need in a room you know if you’re teaching kids maths all day long and you know you have they the thing with the kids is that they concentrate so hard you know particularly i’m sure this this might be true of all pupils but particularly michaela they’re concentrating so hard all day long and in order to kind of get what we need out of them in terms of energy uh we need them to be kind of chived along through yes and that’s one way of doing it that’s absolutely fascinating this and just just on that multiple choice point you’re absolutely right charlie when i use diagnostic questions a major problem of this is you get what i call the tactical delay you’ll say okay right three two one show me your answers and i tend to use abcd cards or mini whiteboards but you’ll get kids who’ll purposely just hold fire just so they can see what their mate’s gone for and then they go oh yeah okay right i’ll go for a as well but i really like this heads down as a way just to kind of eradicate the tactical delay all at once so you’re not getting this by a sample that was the whole reason that we’re asking the whole class i love that and what was the fourth one there uh charlie so we have the we have the white boards we have the partner talk we have the hands down there’s a one more strategy you mentioned yeah so the last one is what we call call and response i’m sure people might have heard of this before all we mean by that michaela is we’ll ask a question and then we’ll say one two three and the kids know when they hear one two three then they all shout out the answer uh at the same time now where this is at its best is really for one uh word answers so often in math it’s it’s one number answers you know imagine that the answer is i don’t know two then you know you would just say okay what does everyone think is the answer or what’s the answer to this and then you just pause for you would pause for a few moments there because you don’t you don’t rush into the one two three you ask uh what’s the answer pause for a few seconds let everyone think you want to build that kind of feeling in the room the sense that everyone knows you might be having lots of hands in the air at that point and then you say the one two three and they all just shout out the answer now this is obviously um it’s less uh accurate data than white boards and even um heads down because it’s noisier you can’t necessarily hear what every pupil has said exactly but it does the the volume that comes back at you does give you a sense of what the room is thinking and feeling and you might even if you’re lucky here a couple of individual pupils say the wrong thing uh that does happen to me and then you can correct that and then you’ve got that data but again you know a lot of the main function of that tool is to make everyone think get everyone participating increase the energy i really like these charlie so um i i love the four options i i really like the points about variety and getting the energy going in the room and so on and my final question just on this is do you see any kind of trend in terms of these four and how you use them in terms of the older kids get you tend to use one more than the other or does it deep is there any trend in terms of the achievement levels of the kids well with a lower achieving set you might use one more than the other or is or are there no patterns like that no it’s a good question i would say there are certainly patterns i would say i was discussing this with the teacher just the other day that often white boards we find are actually particularly good for the lower ability pupils for the lower sets now the reason i’m saying that is because you don’t want to end up so both lower ability and younger pupils here you don’t want to end up with a situation where the pupils are writing for really really long times on their whiteboards unless you are then using it as a kind of checkpoint question and i will i feel like i have never ending tactics here what i mean by checkpoint question is that that people show you their board and you’re immediately telling them yeah that’s great you’re moving on to an exercise so that’s often a way i’ll use whiteboards as a kind of checkpoint into an exercise from a kind of teach teacher explanation i would say as a general piece of advice if you’re not using it as a checkpoint question and the kids aren’t immediately going on to something once they’ve shown you their board then you don’t want them writing for a long time on their board because what happens is some of them finish reasonably quickly they hold up their board and then they are just stuck there waiting for everyone to catch up so whiteboards work really well for quicker shorter maybe slightly easier questions if you’re if you’re not then bouncing straight onto something else and that tends to be obviously the lower ability and the younger pupils who are doing those easier uh questions um now you can obviously on boards as well not do a whole question on your board you know something that i’ve you know only just recently got better at is getting pupils to do just parts of question on their board you know what’s the next line of working what’s the next what number goes here what unit goes here and they’re just showing you that and that keeps everything bouncing along at a better rhythm i’d say than when you get bogged down in okay answer this huge great question on your board fantastic and with the older kids then what would it be more which of those four strategies would they would they be using yeah i would say it is the case that the partner talk becomes slightly better as the kids get older and uh more advanced because then what the pupils are saying to each other is actually sort of better you know it’s more eloquent it’s better maths it’s more likely to be right you know when you ask a bottom set your seven people to turn to the person next to them and to explain something you know that it needs to be a very simple question or they’re just gonna just say you know a load of lovely nonsense that doesn’t make any sense so you know whereas a top set you know year quite uh you know mathematically interesting to say to the person next to them so i would say that partner talk is one that increases with uh the increases in use with with asian ability it’s brilliant fascinating this charlie