This week I want to share a lovely tip from Sammy Kempner that should keep your students on their toes and really get them thinking hard.
Sammy described two ways he “tricks” his students to test if they really understand something. First, he often makes deliberate mistakes whilst going through the solution to the problem. He lets the mistake “hang there”, and if his students do not immediately pick up on in, then Sammy knows they have either not been concentrating or not been listening.
But it is the second tip that really caught my attention, because it is a lovely inversion of something I have been doing for years.
What’s the problem? Picture the scene. I have asked Tommy to solve a quadratic equation (lucky boy). His first line of explanation is correct, so I say nothing. So is his second line. But he makes a classic mistake on his third line (a minus sign has gone missing). What do I do? I say something like: Tommy, are you sure about that? And because I have not commented up to this point – and because I only ever comment in this way when I have spotted a mistake – Tommy knows he has made a mistake, and so starts thinking about where the mistake is
What’s the tip? All of this is fine. But how about this as an alternative:
Tommy’s first line of explanation is correct, and I stay quiet. Tommy’s second line is also correct… but now I say: Tommy, are you sure about that? And now Tommy has to really think. He thought he was correct, but now I am questioning him. Is he right? Crucially, Is he confident enough to say: yes, sir, I am sure? And what if I throw this out to the rest of the class: on your mini-whiteboards, copy Tommy’s line of working if you think he is correct, or write a different line of working if you disagree.
A related approach is to regularly ask students to explain how you got that answer following their response to a question. If we ask this whether students are wrong or right then we keep them thinking. Moreover, students explaining incorrect answers provide us with valuable insight into the nature of their misunderstanding so we can support them, and students explaining correct answers can be used to support students who don’t understand yet.
If we challenge our students’ answers when they are correct as well as when they are incorrect we reduce the giveaway signal (or our tell, to use a poker term) and prompt our students to be prepared to back up any answer with sound reasoning.
This is all part of a classroom culture that normalises error and promotes good, hard thinking at all times.
Over to you
Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
You can watch the original video where Sammy shares this tip.
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week. Craig
What’s the problem? For many, many years I have been frustrated by the time and effort that I put into marking and giving feedback, versus the time and effort my students put into to responding to that marking and feedback.
Here is a typical scenario: I spend Sunday afternoon working my way through a pile of 30 books to mark a homework assignment. Book 1 gets a lot of my attention – I mark diligently and respond to any errors with lengthy, carefully considered written feedback, complete with bespoke follow-up tasks for students to complete. 30 minutes later, when I am now on Book 4, my patience is wearing thin – the ticks and crosses get sloppier, the written feedback gets shorter and contains clear traces of my frustration (an exclamation mark at the end of every phrase being a clear giveaway). 3 hours later, when I finally get to that last book and I see another mistake, I want to scream, cover the work in a big, red cross, and scrawl in capital letters: ARE YOU TRYING TO WIND ME UP!!!!!!
And breathe.
I would feel slightly less animosity toward the time I spent marking and giving feedback if it had a significant impact on my students’ learning. But whenever I gave my students their homework back, they tended to do two things: first, look at their score; second, look at the score of their mate. And my carefully considered feedback, written with blood, sweat and tears?… a cursory glance at best.
The equation was all wrong. The time and effort I was putting in nowhere near matched what my students were getting out of it.
What’s the tip? Fortunately, Dylan has an answer – make feedback into detective work.
Rather than thinking about feedback as information, think about feedback as detective work. The idea is that the feedback should cause a puzzle or a challenge for the students to engage in
Here is how it looks for me as a maths teacher.
I go through the pile of 30 books, but instead of placing ticks and crosses on the students’ work, I simply write their score, say 7/10. As I do this for each student I also make a note of any questions that appear troublesome across a number of books so I can engage in whole-class feedback later on.
Then, when I give my students their books back, I set them a challenge: I have told you how many questions you got wrong, but not which questions. Find them, and try to correct them.
I find this works best by giving my students, say, 5 minutes to do as much as they can independently, before then working with their partner to compare answers and support each other. I can then project the full set of correct answers on the board, address the significant issues I identified during the marking with the whole class, and pick up any lingering individual issues later in the lesson.
Much less work for me, much more work for my students, and the gamification of the marking process leads to an engaging, productive activity.
Dylan shared some strategies to make feedback into detective work for other subjects:
‘Here are the 4 sets of comments on your groups’ essays. Match each comment to an essay”
‘You have made 4 apostrophe errors. Find them and fix them.’
‘I have highlighted two of your grammatical mistakes. Work out why they are mistakes, and see if you can find the other three’
Over to you
Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
You can watch the original video where Dylan shares this tip.
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week. Craig
This week I want to share a lovely tip from Tom Sherrington that can really help get the classroom conversation flowing in a positive way.
What’s the problem? Imagine you have set your students some work. It may have been a Low-Stakes Quiz, a homework, an exercise to work through – anything where your students do not yet know the answers. When your students have finished, you reveal the answers, either by reading them out, or by projecting them up on the board. You then want to get a sense of how the class did – which are the questions they struggled on, and just as important: why did they struggle?
My go-to strategy has always been to say: isanybody still stuck on anything? The problem with this is I was often met with a wall of silence, and there is a real danger that we take such silence as a signal of understanding, when in fact it could mask a significant number of students who have difficulties but are reluctant to say so in front of their peers.
What’s the tip? Fortunately, Tom Sherrington has a solution. He suggests the teacher says: put your hand up if you got 8 out of 10 (or the equivalent proportion if the quiz is out of a different number). Let’s imagine that Miran puts her hand up. The teacher can then say: oh wow, that’s a great score, Miran. Which two questions did you get wrong?
Miran is feeling pretty good. She has received praise, 8 out of 10 is a good score, and she has only made two mistakes. As such, she is likely to be willing to share the nature of her struggles.
From here, the teacher is free to ask things like: did anyone else struggle with Question 3 like Miran? And now as the rest of the students realise they are not alone, they are more likely to raise their hand, thus giving the teacher a clear signal whether this is a whole class issue which needs dealing with now, or whether it can be dealt with on an individual or small group basis later on.
The teacher can then find another student who scored 8 out of 10 and repeat the same process.
After this, a question such as is anybody still stuck on anything? is likely to elicit a more reliable response as the floodgates have now been opened, and the discussion of mistakes has been normalised.
8 out of 10 seems to be the sweet spot. Students who have scored 10 out of 10 have no mistakes to discuss, whereas students with lower scores like 5 out of 10 may feel reluctant to share as they are embarrassed about the number of mistakes they have made.
Over to you
Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
You can watch the original video where Tom shares this tip.
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week. Craig
P.S. You can access all the back-issues of the Tips for Teachers newsletter here, and sign-up to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Monday by entering your email in the box at the bottom of the page.
Welcome to the Tips for Teachers Newsletter. Each Monday an email will arrive in your inbox with a tip that you might like to try out during the coming week.
This week I want to share an effective use of technology that I learned from languages teacher Jon Mumford – one that could be really useful for students in the build-up to this summer’s exams and beyond!
What’s the problem? Like most teachers, Jon ensures his students have access to all the resources and revision materials they could ever need to help them prepare for their exams. Previously, Jon spent many hours adding these resources – past papers, quizzes, videos, vocab lists, links, etc – to his school’s VLE in the hope his students would make use of them. But when Jon asked the school’s ICT officer for the data (something I had never thought to do!), he found that very few students were visiting the languages page – indeed, students were hardly using the school’s VLE at all.
When Jon spoke to his students about their revision, many admitted they didn’t know where to start. They found the collection of links and files on the VLE both generic and overwhelming, and so were essentially making up their revision as they went along. Not ideal.
What’s the tip? So, Jon decided to experiment with an application called Trello.
Trello is an online to-do list with some nice extra features. It is more commonly used by productivity gurus to manage large projects. My wife and I used Trello to help plan our wedding – and we are still together (just about).
Jon set up a Trello board for his GCSE French class. He created 3 columns: Red, Amber and Green. He then created a card for each of the key topics in GCSE French: Opinions, Free Time Activities, Travel and Tourism, etc. This is what the Trello board looks like:
Each card contains resources to support students in that topic. In Jon’s case, most cards contain:
A vocab list for that topic
An interactive lesson using Memrise
A quiz built on Quizlet
Trello allows you to add any link or attach any type of file to a card.
Once set up (and this took a while!) Jon can create a copy of the Trello board for each of his students and invite them to join it. Jon also becomes a collaborator on each of the boards he creates.
Now, I am often wary of introducing another piece of technology to my students. It is somewhere else that they need to visit, or yet another password they need to remember. The result can be overwhelming, and negate any of the benefits. Likewise, it can be a hassle for me as their teacher to keep on top of something else alongside all the other plates I am currently spinning.
But, having listened to Jon and done some experimenting myself, I am convinced Trello is worth considering, for the following five reasons:
1. Trello is free For the way Jon uses Trello, it does not cost a penny either for the teacher or the student.
2. Trello helps students stay organised This is the big one. The whole course is mapped out for students. All the resources they need are there. Because you can add links or attach any files to a Trello card, students just need to visit this one site. You can attach pdfs of past papers, links to YouTube videos, whatever you like. Students can even create a card that contains their login details for any websites you link to. And students can add their own links and attachments for any additional resources they find useful, making the Trello board dynamic and personalised.
3. Trello stops students just revising the things they are good at It feels great to watch a video and take a quiz on a subject you know really well. And as the hours tick by and the 10/10s wrack up, students convince themselves that they are in great shape for their exams. But what about the topics they struggle with? Trello can help with this. All cards begin in the Red column. The idea is that as students revise them, they move to Amber and then eventually Green. There needs to be clear criteria for this. So, you might say to your students:
If you score between 50% and 80% on a quiz, move the card to Amber, and if you score 80%+ move it to Green. Your challenge is to move every card across to the Green column, and then see if you can keep them there!
4. Trello works on any system There is a desktop app, an Android app, and an IOS app, all of which are free. So, students can work on Trello in a computer room lesson, on a tablet in class, or on their phones on the bus home. Depending on your school’s mobile phone policy, you may allow students to spend time on their Trello boards during tutor time, in the last 10 minutes of a lesson, or just before a Low-Stakes Quiz.
5. Trello helps students be accountable When Jon sets up the boards for his students, they invite him to be a collaborator. That way, Jon can oversee his students’ progress. He can ask them what topic they are currently working on, where they are struggling, or use it to support students in creating a revision schedule. Students can also invite their parents to view their board so they have an easy to digest overview of what their children are working on.
Of course, this tip is not just for use in the final few weeks in the build-up to exams. Jon introduces his students to Trello at the start of the year. Then they can see what lies in front of them, and start to build effective study habits from the outset.
As Jon explains, the initial set-up takes time, but once it is in place, the potential rewards are significant.
Over to you
Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week. Craig
P.S. You can access all the back-issues of the Tips for Teachers newsletter here, and sign-up to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Monday by entering your email in the box at the bottom of the page.
Welcome to the first Tips for Teachers Newsletter. Each Monday an email will arrive in your inbox with a tip that you might like to try out during the coming week.
To kick things off, here is a simple tip that I have found can make a real difference to how students engage with the retrieval opportunities we provide.
What’s the problem?
Over the years I have found that students seem to take learning new material more seriously than revisiting things they have learned in the past.
They may choose to not engage in a Do Now retrieval starter, saving their mental energy for when the lesson “begins properly”. They may copy their mates’ mixed-topic homework, or leave out questions in a Low-Stakes Quiz, only answering the ones that come easily to them.
Now, we know from decades of research (the Bjorks remain my go-to source on this) that one of the best ways to ensure students do not forget something is to provide opportunities for them to retrieve that knowledge several times over a given period of time. Each instance leads to a boost in the storage and retrieval strength of that knowledge, making it more deeply embedded and more accessible next time they need it.
But if students are not going to put in the required effort when challenged to retrieve something they have learned in the past, then all our efforts to provide these crucial retrieval opportunities will be in vain.
What’s the tip?
One of the most effective ways I have found to encourage my students to take retrieval opportunities more seriously is to show them a model of the famous Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Now there are loads of versions of this knocking about, with a whole manner of numbers on the axes, but this is my favourite:
You can copy and paste this diagram if you find it useful.
I accompany the diagram with dialogue along the lines of:
Okay, so I have some good news and some bad news about how our memories work. First the bad news. As soon as you learn something new, you start to forget it pretty quickly. Look at how steep this first curve is. So, even though you might have nailed it at the time, I am afraid that it will become harder and harder to remember it with each passing minute. But here is the good news! If you try hard to retrieve that memory again in the future, you slow down this rate of forgetting. And each time you do this, that annoying curve gets flatter and flatter until eventually it is lodged in your brain for a long, long time. So, every time I ask you to do a starter, homework or Low Stakes quiz that contains something you have learned before, please try super hard to remember how to do it. Because each time you do, you are using the way your memory works to your advantage.
Now, of course, you will need to tweak the language to suit your students, but hopefully the general principle rings true. If we want our students to take retrieving prior knowledge as seriously as learning new material, then we may well need to convince them why they should bother. And a clear, simple visual aid, backed by a carefully thought-through explanation might just make the difference.
Over to you
Is there a lesson this week where you could try this tip?
What would you need to change to make the tip work for you and your students?
P.S. You can access all the back-issues of the Tips for Teachers newsletter here, and sign-up to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Monday by entering your email in the box at the bottom of the page.
