Teaching is complex. But there are simple ideas we can enact to help our teaching be more effective. This book contains over 400 such ideas.
You can order the book from Amazon, John Catt, or wherever you get your books.
Below are:
- Tips for Teachers – Top 5s, which are a series of tips taken from the book
- The full contents of the book. Clicking on each tip takes you to the resources page for that tip.
- The Introduction to the book, to give you a flavour of what it is all about
Tips for Teachers – Top 5s
These collections of tips are available in audio and video
The contents of the Tops for Teachers book
Chapter 1: How to use this book
- Tip 1. How to use this book to improve your teaching
- Tip 2. How to give yourself the best chance of making a lasting change
Chapter 2: Habits and routines
- Why are habits and routines important?
- Tip 3. Eight ideas to help introduce a routine
- Tip 4. Beware of the Valley of Latent Potential
- Tip 5. Two ideas to help a routine stick
- Tip 6. Develop a set of high-value activity structures
- Tip 7. Six ideas to help establish positive norms in your classroom
- Tip 8. Four types of words to consider removing from your teaching vocabulary
Chapter 3: The means of participation
- A challenge
- Tip 9. Front-load the means of participation
- Tip 10. Ten ideas to improve Cold Call
- Tip 11. Eight reasons to strive for mass participation more frequently
- Tip 12. Twenty-two ideas to improve the use of mini-whiteboards
- Tip 13. Five ideas to improve the use of voting systems
- Tip 14. Nine ideas to improve Call and Response
- Tip 15. Fifteen ideas to improve Partner Talk
- Tip 16. Six ideas to improve group work
- Tip 17. Use the means of participation holy trinity
- Tip 18. Never rely on a mental note
- Tip 19. The best tool for the long-term might not be the best tool for now
Chapter 4: Checking for understanding
- Tip 20. Think of questions as a check for misunderstanding
- Tip 21. Use the temptation to ask for self-report as a cue to ask a better question
- Tip 22. Lengthen wait times after a question
- Tip 23. Lengthen wait times after an answer
- Tip 24. Ten types of questions to ask when checking for understanding
- Tip 25. Try these three frameworks for learner-generated examples
- Tip 26. Three ways to use diagnostic questions to check for understanding
- Tip 27. Provide scaffolds for verbal responses
- Tip 28. Six key times to check for understanding
- Tip 29. Ten ideas to improve Exit Tickets
- Tip 30. Pick the student least likely to know
- Tip 31. Start with whoever got 8 out of 10
- Tip 32. Ten ideas to help create a culture of error
- Tip 33. Three ideas to encourage students to ask questions
Chapter 5: Responsive teaching
- Tip 34. Trick your students to test if they really understand
- Tip 35. Never round-up
- Tip 36. Seven ideas if a student says “I don’t know”
- Tip 37. What to do when some students understand and some don’t
- Tip 38. What to do when some students still don’t understand
- Tip 39. How students can own and record classroom discussions
- Tip 40. Share students’ work with the rest of the class
Chapter 6: Planning
- Tip 41. Seven ideas to improve a scheme of work
- Tip 42. Six ideas to help start the planning process
- Tip 43. Plan to do less, but better
- Tip 44. Ask yourself: “what are my students likely to be thinking about?”
- Tip 45. Write out ideal student responses
- Tip 46. Four ideas to help you plan for and respond to errors
- Tip 47. Two ideas to help teachers engage in Deep Work
- Tip 48. Aim to close the loop when sending an email
Chapter 7: Prior knowledge
- Tip 49. Plan relevant prior knowledge
- Tip 50. Prioritise relevant prior knowledge
- Tip 51. Assess relevant prior knowledge
- Tip 52. Respond to prior knowledge assessment
- Tip 53. Assess relevant prior knowledge for each idea, not for the whole sequence
Chapter 8: Explanations, modelling and worked examples
- Tip 54. Five ideas to show students why what we are learning today matters
- Tip 55. Use related examples and non-examples to explain technical language
- Tip 56. Fourteen ideas to improve the explanation of a concept
- Tip 57. Teach decision-making separately
- Tip 58. Five ideas to improve our choice of examples
- Tip 59. Model techniques live
- Tip 60. Use a teacher examples book
- Tip 61. Use student example books
- Tip 62. Make use of the power of Example-Problem Pairs
- Tip 63. Fourteen ideas to improve Silent Teacher
- Tip 64. Use self-explanation prompts after a worked example
- Tip 65. Six ideas to improve “copy down the worked example”
- Tip 66. Vary the means of participation for the “We do”
- Tip 67. Three errors to avoid with the “Your Turn” questions
- Tip 68. Reflect after a worked example
- Tip 69. Beware of seductive details
Chapter 9: Student practice
- Tip 70. Eight ideas to improve student practice time
- Tip 71. How to harness the hidden power of interleaving
- Tip 72. Consider using Intelligent Practice
- Tip 73. Consider using “no-number” questions
- Tip 74. Nine ideas to help you observe student work with a purpose
- Tip 75. Occasionally let students do work in someone else’s book
Chapter 10: Memory and retrieval
- Retrieval opportunities
- Tip 76. Show your students the Forgetting Curve
- Tip 77. Show your students the path to high storage and retrieval strength
- Tip 78. Show your students the limits of working memory
- Tip 79. Show your students how long-term memory helps thinking
- Tip 80. Show your students that being familiar with something is not the same as knowing it
- Tip 81. Ensure you provide retrieval opportunities for all content
- Tip 82. When designing retrieval opportunities, aim for 80%
- Tip 83. Vary the types of retrieval questions you ask
- Tip 84. Consider providing prompts and cues during retrieval opportunities
- Tip 85. Get your students to assign confidence scores to their answers
- Tip 86. Make corrections quizzable
- Tip 87. Twenty-one ideas to improve your Low-Stakes Quizzes
- Tip 88. Fifteen ideas to improve the Do Now
- Tip 89. Consider using Trello to help organise the disorganised
Chapter 11: Homework, marking and feedback
- Tip 90. Make homework feed into lessons
- Tip 91. Eight ideas to improve homework
- Tip 92. Two things to check if homework or test scores are a surprise
- Tip 93. Be careful how you respond to “silly” mistakes
- Tip 94. Make feedback into detective work
- Tip 95. Consider recording verbal feedback
- Tip 96. Twelve ideas to improve whole-class feedback
Chapter 12: Improving as a teacher
- Tip 97. Find the expertise within your team
- Tip 98. Five different people to learn from
- Tip 99. Revisit education books and podcast episodes
- Tip 100. Four things to consider when trying something new
- Tip 101. Five ideas to help tackle the negativity radio
- Tip 102. Consider slowing down your career
- Tip 103. Sixteen ideas to improve the delivery of CPD
- Tip 104. Micro tips
- Tip 105. If you want more tips…
The Introduction to the Tips for Teachers book
Not another education book!
I know, I know.
We are in a golden age of education books, with every single aspect of teaching and learning having several weighty tomes dedicated to it. Some of these are probably lying on your bedside table right now, making you feel guilty every time you climb into bed and leave them unopened.
A teacher’s time is short and precious. Time invested in reading a book is time that could be spent reading other books, planning lessons, or (heaven forbid) having a life outside of teaching.
I really do appreciate that you’ve picked this book up and flicked to the introduction. If I can steal your attention for a few more minutes, I’ll tell you quickly what this book is about, and then you can decide if it is worth your time.
The book in a nutshell
Teaching is complex. But there are simple ideas we can enact to help our teaching be more effective. This book contains over 400 such ideas.
The tips
Each idea – or tip – comes from one of two sources:
- The fantastic guests on my Tips for Teachers podcast – education-heavy-weights like Dylan Wiliam, Tom Sherrington and Daisy Christodoulou, but also talented teachers who are not household names
- What I’ve learned from working with amazing teachers and students in hundreds of schools around the world
The tips are born out of years of experience, experimentation, success and (certainly in my case) failure in the classroom.
If you keep reading you will find 21 ideas to enhance mini-whiteboard use, 15 ideas to improve the start of your lesson, 13 ideas to help make Silent Teacher effective, 7 ways to respond if a student says they don’t know, and lots, lots more. Each tip can be tried out the very next time you step into a classroom.
The format
I have arranged the tips into themed chapters, and there is a logic to the order of the tips within each chapter. The tip you are reading might reference a tip from earlier in the book, but by and large, each tip is standalone. This means you can pick up the book and dip straight into a tip that interests you. I will offer two suggestions about how you might choose which tips to focus on in Tip 1.
The resources
At the end of each tip, you will find a QR code to scan with your phone, or a URL to type into a web browser. This will take you to a page of resources relevant to that tip. These resources include:
- Links to relevant research papers
- Links to any websites or tools mentioned
- Links to the videos of my guests describing the tip
I hope you find these a nice compliment to the book, allowing you to dive deeper into any tip and share resources with colleagues.
The audience
My previous two books – How I wish I’d taught maths and Reflect, Expect, Check Explain (both still available in all good, and evil, bookstores) – were written for fellow secondary school maths teachers. That they found an audience outside of my bubble – with primary teachers and teachers of different subjects finding the ideas useful – was a pleasant surprise.
I hope this book does the same, but I want to be honest and clear from the outset.
The guests on my Tips for Teachers podcast have taught a wide variety of subjects and phases. But I can only interpret and experiment with their ideas through the lens of a secondary school maths teacher.
So, while this book will not ask you to solve a pair of simultaneous equations or factorise a quadratic expression, you will be transported into a lot of maths lessons. Lucky you!
Your challenge
I made a key decision when writing this book that the most useful thing I could do for the reader is to describe as clearly as possible how I apply these tips in my classroom, instead of trying to guess how you might apply them in yours.
So, when I describe a tip and how I use it, I will never say things like:
- You could also do this when teaching volcanoes, adverbs or the Second World War
- This will work with students of any age
- You should use this in all your maths classes
Because I simply do not know. No one knows your students, subject, school, culture, challenges, constraints and opportunities like you.
So, your challenge is a big one. For any tip that is of interest, you need to ask yourself: what would I need to change to make this tip work for me, my situation and my students?
Experimentation and frustration may follow, but I believe the effort will be worth it.
You can pre-order the book from Amazon, John Catt, or wherever you get your books.