More tips from Tom Sherrington
Video transcript
right let’s dive straight in what is your first tip was today tom to begin with i wanted to talk about setting out the big picture because i feel like it’s a really helpful way for students for learners to get a sense of direction and also to sort of make cognitive links with the the details of the topic but it doesn’t always happen sometimes you meet students and you ask them what they’re doing and they don’t really know why they’re doing it but it’s really great when the teacher says like this is what we’re going to be studying and it kind of looks like a mini expose of the whole thing we’re going to be looking at this this and this and here’s the territory we’re in and um but to begin with we’re just going to start here but there people know kind of where they are it’s like an orientation and i could go into more detail but that is the basic idea that you kind of set the scene so the students know where the little details fit and it could be a math topic or a history topic or a whole range of like genres and music there’s all these classical composers but we’re going to start by hearing about mozart you know but they know kind of mozart’s one of loads of people and that that’s explicit from the beginning that’s lovely that um yeah i’ve certainly seen this done well in maths i wonder if you could just illustrate it with a an example or two that you’ve seen it in other subjects so we can kind of get get this visualized yeah i mean i i think for a classic example would be something like i don’t know say the same english literature you you’re hearing about you know i’d like to say jane austen for the first time and who’s jane austen you know why we why are we reading her well you know you could say well the 19th century has novels kind of started more or less in the 19th century and there was all these books and you’ve heard of charles dickens who wrote all these books and there were the brontes and and jane austen was one of these people and you know those that started this and this and this and there’s a certain style so we’re going to start reading this book and so you’ve got this feeling and i’ve seen that done really well where people go okay that’s jane austen i get it it’s a picture bit of a timeline and it kind of makes sense it’s the kind of orientation it puts it in a context otherwise it’s like who why and and students are confused and it’s true would say let let’s say talk about um you know vietnam the vietnam war i’ve seen this done really well students studied vietnam say gcse they’ve heard of it they don’t know what it is and they’re thinking when was it you know let’s just get a big picture there’s world war ii and here we are now and vietnam where is it over here and why are we fighting vietnam or wasn’t we it was the americans and so you’re sort of saying it’s a big scene setter and the significance and the politics around that in the 60s 70s and then you start saying right so let’s start getting into the detail but the students have this picture of where we are in space and time relative importance and it just helps you start positioning yourself to receive the kind of the details it’s lovely that tom i i’ve seen this work two different ways in in math so one is where teachers put maths in terms of the current top in terms of some kind of historical context a bit of background where it came from the greeks or the egyptians that works nice but the other thing that works really well and i don’t if this kind of translates across to other subjects is let’s say it’s year eight and we’re studying um expanding brackets or something like that you can say right we’re going to do this topic expanding brackets now the good news is in year five where you first encountered you know multiplying terms in year six where you first met algebra in year seven when we first expanded a single bracket all that stuff is going to come into play now when we start doing this and better still next year we’re going to be doing triple brackets and then when you get to a level then we’re going to be plotting and so on and so forth so showing them where the matters come from that they’ve experienced themselves and show them where it’s going to i always think that that’s really nice to kind of set the scene of what they’re about to study does that make sense yeah exactly i i i think it works really well in math for various other things as well so and it and sometimes it it it comes the other way i mean i feel like there’s a great looking i i the analogy i would use is sort of looking back down the mountain that you’ve you know you’re in the foothills and you can’t quite get where you are but that’s fine but then when you look back you can say oh i now see how this all makes sense and i can sometimes sometimes looking back and saying like you see how all these things all connect now that also works in maths but so in shape and space you know you might be looking at you know general properties of you know polygons or something and you know you just talking about just the range of shapes there are you know just saying you know rectangle squares quadrilaterals look actually that’s just one of this enormous family and that if you start looking at and start saying you can have five sides six sides seven slides hundred sides and all these incredible shapes have these interesting properties and look at this look at that we have 2d 3d and it’s such an interesting world of like the possibilities of shapes and so what we’re doing we’re going to start off by looking at just a few simple ones to get a feel for it but look it’s already explicitly as part of a journey ahead into this amazing world of shapes so it doesn’t just feel very kind of really weirdly functional it just feels like the start of quite an exciting journey it’s lovely that and i know this is an impossible question tom but how long do you reckon this should take in in lessons is this a 10 minute thing a two minute thing what what tends to work best oh i’d say it’s like a ten minute it’s not a big deal is it it’s sort of that’s why i think it’s such an important thing to do because it really doesn’t take long it’s sort of um i think that scene setting thing it’s i’d say a 10 minute thing and i think i saw a lesson just literally yesterday where there was a slide i was talking about measurements and functional skills in the fe college and those slides about you know what distances and you know how far is it to a certain place or what sort of units would be used to measure the length of the track or the height of the building or the distance to manchester or and it was just it was just i’ve seen such a then they’re going to do conversions of units and so on but it was like getting a feeling of like this whole issue yeah isn’t it good so the students are going golf yes i do have to think about this because it is part of everyday life that we have different measures for distance and it was a classic scene setter it was just the big picture of this giving purpose to the learning in some kind of either sort of or inspiring way or just a kind of connecting to the real world kind of way um so then they could get on with you know practice questions which had some meaning to them i love it fantastic