Category: Podcast

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

If you are a Patreon on the Supporter or VIP tiers, you can access an interactive transcript of the conversation here

Alex Quigley’s tips:

1. Ask students to make a pre-topic mind map (02:55)
2. Focus on developing keystone vocabulary (17:58)
3. Try using a collage collection to stimulate ideas (32:24)
4. Play “Just a minute!” (44:32)
5. Support your students using sentence expanding (1:00:30)

Links and resources

• On Twitter, Alex is: @AlexJQuigley
• David’s website is: theconfidentteacher.com
• Alex’s books are:
  • Closing the Vocabulary Gap
  • Closing the Reading Gap
  • Closing the Writing Gap

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View all of Alex Quigley’s tips:

Podcast transcript:

Craig Barton 0:01
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 former English teacher, and best selling author, Alex quickly. And this is one of my favourite conversations, there’s so much power within just a really quick plug for me. My book tips for teachers is out now. It contains over 400 practical tips on all aspects of teaching that you can use the very next time you step into a classroom. The ideas come from the guests on this podcast, and also the hundreds of teachers I’ve been lucky enough to work with over the last few years. Basically, anytime I saw them doing something brilliant, I made a note of it, experimented with it and wrote it up in the book. The tips for teachers both is not just for maths teachers. It’s not just for secondary school teachers. It’s not just for teachers in the UK, is designed to help any teacher improve their teaching one idea at a time. There’s a link to the introduction to the book in the show notes or you can just Google tips for teachers book and you should find Okay, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful Alex quickly. Spoiler alert, here are Alex’s five tips. Tip number one, ask students to make a pre topic mind tip to focus on developing Keystone vocabulary. Tip three, try a collage collection to stimulate ideas. Tip number four, my favourite play just a minute. Um, Tip Five, support your students using sentence at span. All the tips are timestamps so you can get straight to the one you want them to first. And videos of Alex’s tips are available on the tips for teachers website, if you wish to share that with your enjoying the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Alex Quigley to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Alex. How are you? Hi,

Alex Quigley 2:09
Craig. Yeah, good. Thank you.

Craig Barton 2:12
Great. And for the benefit of listeners. Alex, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Ideally in a

Alex Quigley 2:17
sentence? Yeah, former teacher for 15 years now I work writing for teachers, training teachers, and I work for the education Endowment Foundation supporting teachers to access evidence.

Craig Barton 2:29
Fantastic, right. Let’s dive straight in. Alex, what is tip number one.

Alex Quigley 2:33
So my tip number, all my tips are orientated around translating the academic school curriculum. I think some people call that literacy for actually, if you call it literacy, then people sometimes bring baggage to that term. So just to say my five tips are orientated around making the language of our school curriculum accessible and translating it. So Tip one is pretty topic mind maps. Now, I could have given this a whole host of names. And really good teaching strategies often do come in various guises. I could have called it a retrieval map, I could have called it you know, some some other terminology. But for me, ultimately, there’s a principle why. So before you teach a topic, however complex, however advanced however many weeks you to teach that topic. So often, we have that variability in prior knowledge of our students. And we have some assumptions and misconceptions sometimes about what they know, and what they don’t know, and what funds of knowledge they bring to the classroom what misconceptions and insights they bring that you didn’t quite ever imagine. So a pre topic mindmap really simple is about actually getting them to elaborate, okay, and the format can be whatever you like, really, it could be digital, but actually, I prefer a blank piece of paper. So you’re activating that retrieval of what they know you’re activating their prior knowledge, and how they form the map. And what information they put on is your diagnostic assessment. It is the information that triggers where you go next. So I often do this in my English teaching background for famous plays, it could be Romeo and Juliet. It could be you know, certain types of poetry, because I know they’re bringing certain assumptions and some insight and some language. And I need to make sure that I’m not just, you know, taking that, you know, my kind of scheme of learning off the shelf, I’m really speaking to what they know and hooking in to their pre existing insights. So for me that pre topic mindmap is just a diagnostic assessment that gets them thinking hard. And then I use that to then build off and initiate my high quality, I hope, explanations and just on the variation point, depending on what you want to glean from it. It can be an individual activity done in two minutes it can be elaborated upon and give them are a bit more time and that often gives you a bit more insight, it can be something that you can then have them work in pairs. And then even if you have to structure it and feel it was beneficial, you could mobilise that into smaller groups. Because then if the point is effectively to just activate their prior knowledge, then three or four brains on the same topic is more helpful. But if you want that precise diagnostic, maybe you want to concentrate on the individual in that first instance, so that the discussion doesn’t happen. And then you don’t quite know what individuals know what so 100 variations like most good teaching strategies, and quite a few my tip, so variations of a strategy, but for me pre topic mindmaps is my tip number one.

Craig Barton 5:44
Love it right, let’s dive into this. So this This is music to my ears this because I’m in need of spicing up my kind of prerequisite knowledge check. Because I’ve all I’ve gone up my sleeve Alex’s diagnostic questions.

Alex Quigley 5:55
Yeah, you do like those?

Craig Barton 5:56
I do, like I do. I do like that. So I’m right. I’m into this, but I need to dig a bit deeper into it. So first question is what kind of guidance would you give the kids about what to write down? Do you give them like some examples or anything like that? Yeah.

Alex Quigley 6:10
So again, it’s a bit of a, you know, that kind of classically trance, but it depends. So depending on their kind of background knowledge, so if I’m speaking to an A level group, and they’re doing English literature, and I’m asking them about Shakespeare play for the first might be more for the first time, then I’m expecting some significant background knowledge. And to the point where I want that I don’t want to shake too much of their responses, because I almost want to see the difference. I almost want to allow for misconceptions to foster even and for assumptions to play out. But depending on what I want from that diagnostic, I might give more structure. So often, I’ll focus on just words, because I want them to just keep it simple. In the first instance, at the very least, what words do you associate with this topic? So it could be biomes? It could be photosynthesis, it could be MacBeth, what words do you associate and I just want you to map out the words. And the only elaboration on that might be other you might have some arrows between words that connect and you might branch off into particular subcategories if that if that reveals itself. So again, it can depend if I, I might multiple, you know, a pre existing word map, I might model this topic mind map. But that also, again, it depends on what I want out of it. Because sometimes I want to keep it really simple. I want to scaffold it. So I’m getting that vocabulary, knowledge is elicited, or sometimes I want misconceptions, I want a bit of struggle, even I want that kind of deliberate difficulty with the task. I don’t want them all to be floundering and struggling and not know what I mean. But I might keep the boundaries of how they represent that information. I might keep that a bit open. So again, it kind of depends on the purpose of the diagnostic, the how much knowledge I think they’re going to have individually and collectively.

Craig Barton 8:08
Got it. Okay, next question on this, Alex. So one of the reasons I like a diagnostic question for prerequisite knowledge is I get the information super quick. Yeah. within a second. Yeah. All the kids have voted a lot. Yeah. I’m imagining with this, it’s quite difficult to well, how do you collecting the information? How would you How’d you figure out what kids have got? Yeah.

Alex Quigley 8:27
So I think that’s where what you would follow it with could very well be a specific set of questions, because actually, for me, I think my usual core purpose of the PRI topic mindmap is not to give me again, precision of diagnostic, it’s to activate their prior knowledge. And literally, I would walk around the room and identify, you know, the kind of the number of connections, so it would be a an impressionistic diagnostic, and then I would be just identifying some patterns, I would normally then scaffold it into a per discussion, and perhaps a small group discussion, which would allow me further time just to check those, check those visual maps. And then I go back into the discussion for me, it would be inadequate or any any kind of singular question is limited, any map is limited. But what I would do is then have those next steps. So for the I would identify knowledge that they all need to know by the end of the topic. So that’s where I might be more precise with my diagnostic questions where I might be more precise with my debating points and my expectation and what they write about etc. So for me, it’s that walk around the room, get those impressions and initiate that dialogue. And probably, I’d also know the topic well enough to have an assumption about what they might share. So take another English example that I can remember vividly. You’re teaching romantic poetry. I know By mindmap romantic poetry, I will get notions of Valentine’s Day and romance. That is a misconception. That’s not the type of romance we’re talking about here. So even though I would be able to navigate the room and get some precise insight on the language they’re using and what they’re not using, I’d also be quite predictive of those misconceptions. And later on, you know, at the end of lesson one, potentially, we might just have that multiple choice around that, you know, that student running definition of romance. And so for me, it’s that kind of, it’s an impression, it’s a movement around the room, I might zoom in on some details, and I might ask, elicit some questioning verbally in the class. But I’d certainly build on that diagnosis, and ask different different approaches beyond that initial mapping.

Craig Barton 10:48
Lovely this, Alex, few more questions on this, I really like this. And do you like grab a kid’s mind map and show it to the rest of the class? Would that be something you do and what what’s under what circumstance?

Alex Quigley 11:00
So it depends. And this is where, you know, in lots of classrooms, they have, you know, mini whiteboards, and if that was my habit, you know, kind of in science, I have the habit of eliciting some definitions or language using the minimise whiteboard. And they were used to that, and they were trained in that sort of feedback model. I might do that. I think for me, and again, this is where most most kind of teaching practices have 100 variations, don’t they? For me, normally, I would have the visuals around the room. And I would talk to and we create together a mapping that kind of collated some of those insights, and then we do some questioning, and just build upon that. So I wouldn’t necessarily show them a premade. But I would then we’d work together elaborating in my classroom, particularly in in our department, one things we did is create multiple whiteboards in the room. So we would have, instead of you know, your normal displays at the back, we’d have another whiteboard. So what we could do is create this initial mapping together collaboratively based on their discussion, we can leave that I could do my explicit teaching, we could do you know, the next the next piece of work, and then that mapping something to come back to another variation of our mapping. And I’d often do this as a bit of a post topic assessment, actually. So they have this elaborated map that’s much more well connected. And they see us a distinctive progress from this initial, this initial exercise. Another variation, I’d have a wall display, if we had a topic that I thought was complex, it might be a topic like a text like Animal Farm, we’d have a wall despite place, which is a working wall, this initial mapping that they did individually, we translate some of that onto that working word wall. And then we elaborate upon it lesson by lesson and it will be a retrieval resource. And then you can, depending on that initial map, you can keep that you can take it away, and you can use it as a retrieval exercise. So a colleague, law and Randall, I remember, he would use in his teaching, he used these maps, and then he’d actually place a piece of paper over, and they could just see the lines on the mapping and they try and retrieve it. So again, countless variations on that. And it depends what purposes you want, but activating prior knowledge that some FFR retrieval and some elaboration discussion or for me the active ingredients to gather the evidence warrant for why this is an approach that seems to have some traction.

Craig Barton 13:40
Love it final final question I promise on this first tip, Alex the one you know is coming here. I can see this working like a charm in England yeah, see working like a charm in history. Geography. Yeah. Anything for us maths guys. Alex, can you this been a useful so have you seen it working?

Alex Quigley 13:57
So good point in mathematics I can see. So without kind of revealing my next tip, I can I can see how that would be elaborated neatly in mathematics. And I’ve seen it in math lessons. It’s a more vocabulary oriented toward I think for me, this works when the topic has some worldly knowledge and understanding, often misconceptions and then it’s also got some connected moving parts in terms of different insights, etc. Now in mathematics, and this is my my making assumptions that you can just Korea through and crashed in a moment. But you we’ve got topics that you know, there might have been taught multiple times and fractions and in primary, and we might, it’s not a word task, but we might get them to think about past methods they’ve used or kind of everything they know about fractions kind of exploding it but also I can see how they’re specific topics that might just overload them. It might bring up to the surface, you know, some poor kind of strategies. So, in truth, I’ve not seen it across the board. I’ve seen it mainly in my own teaching. And I think the ingredients for me, and it’s kind of activating prior knowledge. That is what the teachers need to graft upon their own subject domain and their own phase and, and the capacity and knowledge of their pupils.

Craig Barton 15:26
Yeah, I really like it. I said, last question. This is just a comment. I like to feel free just just kind of either nod or yeah, this is nonsense. One thing I’m a bit obsessed with at the moment is learning generated examples. I’ve been too much focused in the past on asking the kids questions that I’ve set and the kids give an answer, yes. Whereas the more I get the kids to generate their own examples, the more I think I get a better check of their actual understanding. And one framework I really like for this is called Give an example of in, let’s say, fractions or something, and you want to see what kids know about equivalent fractions, you say, split your whiteboard into four piece paper into the top left, give an example of a fraction equivalent to four fifths, top right, give another example of a fraction equivalent to four fifths, bottom left, give an interesting example of a fraction equivalent to four fifths and bottom right, give an example of a fraction that somebody might think is equivalent to four fifths, but it isn’t. And it feels to me this is the what I like about that. And why I think this ties to the mindmap is it’s it’s kind of like the blank canvas, just with some constraints in there. It’s away from the kid’s head before you kind of get involved. Yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, I like

Alex Quigley 16:40
no, I think that’s really helpful. And I think you’re right, that they both take the same active ingredients, which is the blank canvas, the activating what they know, often revealing some benefits, you know, some things they do know that we can build upon some things that we need to challenge and misconceptions. And that point around, I think you asked it earlier, I assume you’re getting at work, depending there needs to be more structure to it. I think ultimately, we’re talking here about some retrieval, some background knowledge activation, graphic organisers. So a mind map can be a very simple and you know, depending on the domain, not as effective. So a concept map and that hierarchical structure, or the, or the Foursquare you’ve just described, I think I like that effortful thinking about exactly how do we scaffold and break it down. So for me, because my you know, the nature of that knowledge was sometimes a bit sprawling and interconnected, then the mind map is fine as a architecture, and how much I needed to scaffold that is a choice I’d have to make per topic per pupil. And that’s where the variation comes in. So I think your idea does share the same ingredients and sounds really powerful.

Craig Barton 17:57
Love it, Alex. Love it. All right, what is tip number two?

Alex Quigley 18:00
So tip number two, is the explicit teaching of Keystone vocabulary. So I talked a little bit about literacy is is in effect, translating the academic curriculum of school. And I think for a number of years, we’ve talked about this in the past, vocabulary teaching has become, I think, more popular, more recognition of the necessity of that. And both that I think that’s been a big positive, you know, things like Isabel Beckham McKee owns tiers of vocabulary, how we might explicitly teach vocabulary, graphic organisers, like the Frayer model different, these different approaches have emerged and proven, you know, really positive and being adaptive. And I’m seeing only yesterday, I read a test article about a colleague who I know who taken like a bookmark vocabulary strategy, and mobilised it into something really distinctive and interesting. So I’ve chosen the explicit teaching of Keystone vocabulary, because it isn’t new, but actually, it might tackle some of the issues that people face when thinking about vocabulary. Is that word Keystone vocabulary? What do I mean by that? By that? Well, I mean, actually, in a keystone, and infrastructure is a steep singular central stone. And actually, so often with vocabulary, the problem for teachers is well, do I teach all the words you know, where do I start? Where do I stop? And actually, the key aspect is deciding upon which are the key conceptual words, and that those key stones and actually, that then becomes a smaller number of words per concept per topic. So you know, we can elaborate so, you know, take the Great Fire of London in year two really common history topic. Well, one of my Keystone vocabulary might have five or six and no more. One of my terms might be capital, and why capitals so I need to know that when it comes to the Great Fire of London, they understand the place See, that is London as a modern capital, but but London in its historical context. And capital is a word that carries lots of helpful meanings to embed that understanding. So the root cap meaning head of. So it’s where the head of state lives the queen, the king, that the President, also, you know, they know what cat means capital letter, they know capital city, so that links to the geography aspect of the school curriculum. So I’m picking words that have high value, they don’t explain everything about the Great Fire book, they offer deep conceptual understanding, and they help build that structure of insight. But you could call it schema, but they build that connected knowledge about a topic. And, you know, recently, I’ve been looking at different parts of the curriculum. So I’ve been looking at respiration and photosynthesis in science for something I’m writing about. And we know that some of those words come with misconceptions. Some of them come with blurred boundaries, some of them come with a common sense understanding of the word and then a slightly different meaning. And then, you know, we also recognise what chlorophyll comes with, they need to know that they need to understand as part of the process, and the need to be able to spell the finger as well, that’d be helpful and define it. So when you come to photosynthesis and respiration, there is a cluster of words that that raise themselves up as the kind of key conceptual terms. So for me, it’s about identifying that small number, teaching them explicitly, deliberately, often, like the capital example, breaking them down. And it offers us to be more deliberate about translating the language of school. And if I think about mathematics, so it’s a vivid example, with knowing my little boy was last year, year six, his notion of being good at mathematics is being fast. So like, Fast and Furious eight is his homework, he’s trying to get through that. And we know that, you know, for number bonds for multiplication facts, being fast, and fluid is really powerful foundational book, also, he’s reading word problems with air about area and perimeter. And actually, he’s he’s trying to be so fast, not just because Tom work because of his notion of fluency, that he’s missing those terms. And actually, I’m not saying just a bit more attention to those terms are the be all and end all area and perimeter, but we might, with the word perimeter broke back down, we might give examples, non examples, we might be really clear about when you know, an area question, often has these these factors, a perimeter question will indicate these diagrammatic representations, etc. So Keystone vocabulary makes us really zoom in on translating the absolute core tenants of our curriculum.

Craig Barton 22:50
Right, love this, Alex. So I’ve got a quick fire question. And then we’re gonna go to town on the kind of follow up question. So a quick fire question. You alluded to this, but just as a rough number, if you’re teaching a topic, and on the schema workers say two weeks, yeah, would you say good number of kinds of Keystone vocabulary is about five or six? Would that? Would that be fair? Yeah. Number it would,

Alex Quigley 23:10
and I do get asked a lot about well, you know, for this topic in religion, you are a we need 16, we need to know 16. Okay, well, I understand there’s a lot of terms to know. But with, let’s think within that 16 What words feel like they bind quite a few of those ideas and insights together. So it’s like always trying to reduce it down. And that’s not trying to simplify the curriculum, and it’s not trying to dumb things down. It’s trying to think harder about the words that open up knowledge and the connections to the whole 16 To all the words we don’t even think to put on, you know, our planning documents, because, you know, people’s raise words and ideas that we didn’t quite anticipate, and, and textbooks and worksheets use terms that surprise pupils and their meanings. So, yeah, five or six. And I think that’s reducible by thinking hard about the value of those words and where they might, if you’ve taught that one explicitly, it might mean that four or five related terms can be very quickly understood by reading a textbook page without that depth of expressiveness. I think this is another practical element, I have to get feedback about vocabulary, you know, we can’t do all this extra work here. You know, we’ve got to get through the curriculum, or I wouldn’t deem it as extra work I deem it as we need to translate that our subject domain, and it’s just weaving this through what we do, and not not assuming knowledge of terms. And actually, there is you know, we know it lots of examples of just mere familiarity with words that brings with it you know, they might be able to do a diagnostic question, but then they can’t apply that knowledge when they’re given an unfamiliar problem. So I think it helps as well. Just to think not just about the five or six, but to think about the other words, it gets us kind of surveying our kind of topics and what we think they know about it. So for me, it five or six, I can add one point. So I’ll often see them then be put on a knowledge organiser, lovely graphics, whatever else. And then the idea is, well, the people has that knowledge organiser, they’re 15. They can Quizlet once a week. And actually, I think the reality if these are conceptual, complex words that have multiple meanings, then they need explicit teaching. They need retrieval as well. But you can’t outsource your teaching to a knowledge organiser. That’s not how it works. So I think just being deliberate that we might get a shortlist. But that doesn’t mean we just hand it over to our pupils. I’m talking about Keystone vocabulary, high quality, explicit teaching, and I think done well. And I’ve seen it where it means that the rest of the topic, then the next complex step in the process becomes easier and quicker to graft onto that key knowledge. So for me, it should, over time, be a curriculum time saver, not this extra burden. And I don’t want everyone kind of poring over dictionaries and you know, kind of doing arbitrary tasks that don’t relate to being a mathematician or a scientist, or a geographer.

Craig Barton 26:25
Love Ali’s right? Well, here’s my big kind of follow up question for this. So we spoke years ago on my Mr. Amash podcast, I think when you first met, maybe your first book or your second book was out. And you, you introduced me to this. It sounds crazy now. But you introduced me to the notion of etymology of words as being a sensible thing, particularly as a maths teacher to do. And I know that as a result of that conversation, I went etymology crazy, and I was chatting about it, and every talk I was given, and so on, and so forth. But I think I’ve kind of missed a bit of a trick, right, because as you’ve said, you kind of see a bit of a lethal mutation, certainly massive of kind of this, this this insistence, or kind of focus on vocab. And what you get, I don’t know, if you get this in English as well, is all of a sudden kind of key words are appearing on the slide of a PowerPoint or whatever. Maybe the teacher is kind of spending kind of five minutes or so diving into the etymology of the words, you know, it’s quite a lot of fun activity. But as you’ve alluded to, for a start, if there’s, if there’s no kind of high quality, explicit kind of looking at that word, you’re in trouble for a stop, but also like anything, unless you revisit that meaning of that word, also in quite a deep way, like anything else, you’re going to forget it. And what I see there’s there’s quite a common thing happened in math now, where, as part of the kind of four question do now, one of the, one of the questions will be what does this word mean, and it will be kind of calling upon some vocab from a prior topic. But from what I’ve seen, that’s the kind of question that gets the least attention. It’s just an in a super fast way. You hear one kind of vague definition. Yeah, that’s right. And then you kind of crack on. And my fear there is that any hard work, a teacher puts in into explicitly real high quality delving into the etymology of the word, it’s on Dawn, if it isn’t followed up time and time again, by, again, revisiting that word at that deep level? I don’t if any of that kind of makes sense, or you’ve had similar

Alex Quigley 28:20
Yeah, I think that speaks to the knowledge organise example. So I don’t think knowledge organisers are intrinsically a bad thing at all, I think they can be really useful curriculum tools, and I’ve seen them use really well. It’s just thinking really carefully about the purpose is and the insights we’re looking to glean from our, our students. And I think there is a little bit, the capillary is sometimes potentially seen as easy, you know, you’ve got a list, you know, you can quiz that quite regularly. But that knowing doing gap then arises where, you know, you’ve taught that word, but they’re not able to define it, they’re not able to use it in writing, they’re not able to then tackle problems that relate to back in in a more complex composite challenge. So I think, I think, but I also think that over since the last time we talked, actually, I think there’s like this trajectory of kind of adoption, where people take on the strategies. Most people then intelligently adapt and recognise that that didn’t stick that wasn’t translating to better problem solving that wasn’t translating to better athletes in history. And then they make those adaptations and they make sure it’s woven through in a more meaningful way. And in some cases, because, you know, staff change, people leave things go, we almost just forget that loss and that history and and I think that adoption needs to sustain that recognition that this is complex, it needs some deeper teaching. It’s not just a word list, and you can stick it on your PowerPoint, you know, and it can have a nice colour code or whatever else but if it’s not leading to meaningful application, then it’s not worth much more. And, and I think, you know, play out that for wall displays, you know, a big example of, yeah, we really think about vocabulary in our school because we’ve got displays that no one uses, and that don’t feature in explicit teaching and learning. So, you know, we can, it can look good, it can look easy, but it needs to be meaningful and embedded into the work. And that takes time. And it takes intelligent adaptation and some working out what doesn’t work.

Craig Barton 30:32
And last follow up question on this. Alex, I could speak to you about this all day. But what would let’s assume that somebody is taught explicitly taught some key vocab? Keystone vocabulary really, really well? Yeah. What would effective retrieval of that Keystone vocabulary look like for you? So the kids remembered it that deeply?

Alex Quigley 30:49
Yeah, so that’s a really good example, where it might look differently for different domains and different purposes in terms of the use of that language. So for me, you know, take Aryan perimeter, really solid understanding might then be represented in they can, you know, kind of take in parallel problems, they know the difference, take similar problems, they can, you know, recognise the difference. So, for that, actually, it’s not been able to define perimeter, but they’re able to discriminate between different questions and recognise. But in another subject, it might be in our array, I want them in 12, Mark, written response about the great religions, I want them to use this word in an argument in a in a high quality, cogent sentence. So I think effectively, it might depend on the use, they might, we might need for them to be able to explain it. And if they can explain it, we know that they can apply it in a variation of ways. But it might be something that doesn’t look like the quiz answer. It might be applied in a set of problems, it might be applied in an extended piece of writing, it might be something that just conceptually gets them thinking differently about about the world even, you know, so I think that’s a that’s another nuanced one, what I would say is, they might be able to get multiple choice on a Friday with it, but not use that word. And so there’s layers of word knowledge that we’re looking to be precise about.

Craig Barton 32:24
Brilliant. Okay, Alex, what is tip number three, please.

Alex Quigley 32:29
So I, my next one, I think it links back to the first topic, which is the pre topic, mind maps, because it’s about activating prior knowledge. It’s about elaboration, it’s about teasing out misconceptions. And it’s, it’s got elements of retrieval. So it’s about the use of images, but it’s not geocoding kind of that went before. It’s about collage collections. So it’s thinking about, again, a concept or topic, and, and for the teacher to decide. And you can see how immediately in different subjects, you have to think about variations right away. And some you say, No, that doesn’t work for us. But you’re thinking about the different images, and what knowledge that might activate and how many connections that might activate. And actually, you can, you can embed in those images for misconceptions as well. So you can kind of you can create a collage and get them thinking about that topic. And for me, I would use that to generate discussion and to elicit activate their knowledge, that would be my core purpose. And it would be to probe what might some of my assumptions about what I think they know about this topic. One I use quite a lot, I use it in my in my training is I use it for art. So I take a set of paintings in art, and actually, without going to the paintings from Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko. And effectively, there are paintings that are expressionist painting. And they’re all pretty much abstract. So for me, the collage collection, in this instance, is about picking seven or eight paintings. And actually, I want people’s talking potentially writing about what they know already about those paintings. And for me, I know that can be a really basic knowledge or depending on the group, it can be really elaborate. So you know, I could with five year olds, take those self same paintings, and we could initiate talk about that collage. What feelings does these paintings seem to reveal to us what what colours what, what techniques? So you could go really simple or fast forward 15 years you’re working with a level art students and you’re getting them to both activate what they know, they almost always know Starry Night, but you know by Vincent van Gogh, but they don’t know some of the others. And what we’re doing is we’re just doing a bit of a diagnostic again But what activating what techniques can identify? Do they know anything about that art movement. So it’s pretty much another example of that activating prior knowledge, getting them to elaborate us testing out what we think they know, and getting and teasing out misconceptions in some instances, but about using images. And why I use images is because for a lot of people’s the abstraction, and the curriculum we need to translate is closed in language. And that straight away can shut people’s down and shut their thinking down. So you ask, you know, you give them a word list, or you give them kind of, you know, a knowledge organiser even. And straightaway, they feel like they can’t access that, you know, they don’t know what that word means. They don’t perhaps use Etymology and morphology and break the word down, straightaway, they just shut off, I don’t know this, you’re the teacher, it’s your job to teach me all this stuff, our city a rather passively thanks. And I might make some notes as you go. So for me, the collage collection often just opens things up. And I can see how you know, for certain topics, that openness is helpful. And then for others, it’s not so helpful. And like your example earlier, we want to be more structured and tighter and more focused, and then build up more carefully so that we don’t create new misconceptions. So I can see how it doesn’t work in all cases, but in some it does. So you know that that that for me? Why collage collections, it’s got a nice, again, beginning of topic, sometimes beginning of lesson, but kind of an introductory feel about it. And the evidence base kind of it links to there’s no specific evidence base that shows that this works in x and y classrooms. But for me, it’s about the activating prior knowledge, elaboration, and some of those principles of getting them to retrieve what they know. And we teach accordingly.

Craig Barton 36:51
Like Alex, I’ve never heard of this. So this is good there. So just a couple of follow up questions. Yeah, just practically, how does this work? Is this like on a PowerPoint? And you just go for it? Yeah, the images? Yes, or any number of any number of images, but other than any other number?

Alex Quigley 37:05
So I found for this, you just need enough images to generate connections? So I think realistically, no, you could begin at two. But that’s not much of a collage. So I think the likes of four onwards, start to be where I’ve both seen it used and find it generates more of that kinnikinnick connections thinking collaboration. So in the likes of us another one for for younger children about different endangered species. So rather than you know, today, we’re going to teach endangered species, you know, actually, we just have a collection of images. Some of those species are really familiar to them, you know, parrots etc. Pandas. But then some of them are really unique. And, and why, for that, there’s about eight of those different species. And why particularly like that is, again, it activates not just their prior knowledge that they activate to curiosity, a bit like new with pre testing. And even if they get it wrong with pre testing, it almost generates a want to know, and that can go wrong as well, if they don’t know anything, and they feel like a failure, that that’s not so helpful. But actually at the start, if they want to know, well, I know those one or two species, but what are they that one strange, and there are under some funky names and amazing species. So in that instance, I’m walking in to endangered species. With this, you’ve got some prior knowledge here, but we want to build upon it. I’m signalling that to you, you know, and also, I want to provoke your curiosity to want to know more. And we will, we’ll explore some really challenging scientific concepts, geographical concepts, but we’re starting with images, some of which are familiar, some of which had been the zoo and seen. So that’s, that’s my kind of focus on. It’s not necessarily the number of images. It’s the purposefulness and the relevance to whatever you’re trying to generate connections for.

Craig Barton 39:03
I like it. I like it. I can certainly see how this will be a kind of good hook in I certainly like the fact it’s kind of moving away from words. It provokes a curiosity. I like that to follow up questions which are asked at the same time so that they’re quite similar to each other. The first is, I’d love an example from English just so listeners can get as many different kinds of ways to conceptualise Yes, and with that example, would you be able to tell us what prompt or instructions you give the kids when these kind of the images come on? Yeah, what you ask him to do.

Alex Quigley 39:33
So one of the areas I mentioned earlier about romantic poetry. So romantic poetry, you know, an initial conception could be love hearts and Valentine’s and love and love is featured in in my kind of collage. So you could have a love heart, but also for romantic poetry. You’d have a picture of a daffodil. Wordsworth’s daffodils, it’s sort of really central to what we be teaching and learning about we’d also have images of the factory, and how important the onset of industrialization is to romantic poetry. And also we’d have this lovely countryside image. And there’s a classic painting is it Friedrich the painter where there’s a guy standing on right at the edge of a mountainous cliff. And he’s this romantic individual kind of in this, you know, Mother Nature, it’s a bit threatening, it’s a bit dangerous. I’d include about eight images, and they’re all corners of the conceptual inside. And then they need for romantic poetry. The heart love heart is a bit of the misconception, the industrialization image and the lovely pastoral countryside image that key concepts in terms of why you’re writing about daffodils, the daffodils is a very specific poem. And the guy standing on the cliff, this is the sublime power of Mother Nature and a bit of the danger about it. So for me, again, it depends. So I’ve been doing this with the seven pupils who I know would have very little knowledge of Wordsworth, but would recognise a daffodil, whether that’s just, you know, the, you know, around around their house, you know, in April time or down the supermarket. So I know I’m giving them access points. Again, this is where the infinite intelligent variation comes in. Depending, I might have them discuss it for two minutes. Or I might do this individually. For me, in my English classroom, I’m always getting them to make a record that allows me to write ideas down. And I can do that in different ways. And I am less bothered about whether they record that as a set of bullet points or, or a map or a spider diagram. It’s about they, they commit to a record of ideas. For me, one of the things a bit like the moment, for example, earlier, I’m after the big idea, and those connections, so I might have a spider diagram, what’s the big idea in the middle? And then what are the different ideas related to it, but I might keep it open. And, and again, I’d work that on the basis of my class, their prior knowledge, their confidence, and what routines we we’d already practised and work through. But the main thing for me is the activation of prior knowledge, the discussion and the eliciting interest and walking into a complex topic. I’m not necessarily about applying those key words or those images in a kind of really very deliberate, specific way. So lots of opportunities to vary it. And I think that’s what good teachers do that with instinctive intent.

Craig Barton 42:27
It’s interest in the source. I keep thinking of no more followers, but then you say some of that interest in and I’ve got to got to ask you one more thing. So promises the last one on this, if we take the Romantic poets example, I think that’s a really good one this are you saying to the kids, these are a collection of images about romantic poets? What does this bring to mind getting down? Yeah? Or is it almost kind of a bit of a mystery that here are a load of images? Write down what you think? And then it’s almost like the big reveal that we’re going to this is the kind of topic we’re doing? Well, yeah. So because I can see pros and cons. Yeah,

Alex Quigley 42:59
yeah. And again, if I’m wanting to, if I’ve got your seven claps here, like full of eagerness, and I feel like I want to just shrink them along a bit, I can do the reveal. And I’ve done that variation of it. Sometimes I want a bit more structure. Again, there is a there is that choice between how much we want to have this as a structured, we’re going to do romantic poetry in the next four weeks. And I want I know, you know a lot about this already, even if you don’t quite think you know, here’s a set, I’m going to ask you to write a set of images, just write down what you already know, and any ideas that you connect with them. So I can do that very deliberately introduce from answer poetry, or I can hold back on that, and do a bit of a reveal, depending on my confidence with the group about, again, prior knowledge about their motivation, whether I think they like to be told something and then kind of that’s the kind of magic of an individual class, you know, anticipating how they’ll behave, how they’ll respond. Effectively. My key question every time for me is, how am I going to get them to think hard and be motivated to tackle these quite lengthy, some lengthy, really tricky, dense, archaic poems that they don’t quite understand? So both both variations that I think I’ve taught it both ways, depending on my group, normally, I keep a bit more mystery, and do the unveil just for the motivational factor.

Craig Barton 44:29
Of course. Fantastic. Right, Alex? Tip number four, please.

Alex Quigley 44:34
Yeah, tip number four. So again, orientated around, translating the academic curriculum, and you could call it literacy if you like. It’s just a minute. So just a minute. People might be familiar with the radio show just a minute. Actually, it’s an adaptation of that original kind of decades old radio show, and it’s really really simple. It is in effect at can you talk for just a minute about a particular concept about a particular word about a particular topic about something we’ve talked for any period of time. So let me again, unpick what kind of ingredients of that. And then the structural thing of how you do it, and why you might do it, and how you might vary it. So I think for me, just a minute is about self explanation. It’s challenging people’s to explain and connect up their ideas and communicate that verbally. And the challenge of that. It’s also about that elaboration. Again, you know, when you’re asked to speak for something for a minute, it’s actually quite a challenging amount of time. It’s not for you, all right, because we’re on podcasts all the time. So we practice this for a living. But for our pupils in class, they don’t normally speak for any more than a period of seconds. So a minute is a real challenge to elaborate upon that. And actually, to speak for a minute about any term could be romantic poetry, it could be area and perimeter is a real challenge. And actually, you can’t just enter into this randomly, you’re thinking really hard about what we’re talking for just a minute about examples coming up. And then for me, I think it’s also potentially retrieval. Because if you’re talking for just a minute, you’re often recalling what you’ve been getting taught for a period of days or weeks. And there’s an element of reasoning there as well. And sometimes you want to scaffold that just a minute and give them prompts and give them a bit of a structure if you want some specific reasoning to emerge out of that. So when it comes to those ingredients, self, you know, self explanation, retrieval, reasoning elaboration, you can see how this is drawing upon quite a lot of rich theme of learning for me. But it’s a challenge. So just to give it real specifics about it, so we do just a minute, I rarely do it for every pupil in the class, because if you think about the reality of that it takes about half an hour to do that well. So that’ll be a rare occurrence, although I have done that before. But only it’s a rare occurrence. And I’d use that as a, effectively a bit more of a speaking listening assessment and a confidence builder. And, but typically, I’d use just a minute at the openings of lessons or at the end of lessons, in truth anywhere in between, but mainly the opening at the end. And I’d select two or three pupils to do this. And we train as a class, so we’d know what just a minute was. So I wouldn’t have to kind of elaborate every time. But effectively, we begin the lesson, it might be the word metaphor, we’ve been teaching to a best foreign English, it might be the industrial revolution in history, it might be what what caused the Great Fire of London, in in year two, and we give them the structure, okay, we’re gonna use a timer for the minute. And some, some teachers and some of us like to use going digital that’s on the screen, there’s a bomb at the end. But actually, I like to keep it really low phi, and just check it on my phone or watch or wherever else. And actually, the point is, we’re given the minute structure, and you can add in specific kind of parameters. So typically, I don’t want you to repeat anything, I don’t want you to use fillers. And if you stop, then it’s game over. So I would use it as a three strikes, you’re out basis. Now. Can you do with fillers? Yes, you can with some people’s need that? Yes, they would. So there’s a set of variations here that you need to intelligently use. But once you train people that they get the idea, effectively, they can’t cheat by repeating themselves, they can’t use that, you know, the same kind of definition, slightly variation of wording, effectively, you’re asking you to explain something themselves, and introducing reveal their knowledge. And also pupils are listening. And so there’s a bit of consolidation, although I would say, pupils are mainly listening for errors and listening for stops. And, and one of the things for me why it’s a useful diagnostic, if I’ve picked three pupils, at the end of a lesson or at the start, actually, I’d think who those three pupils are. And I think about kind of where I’d expect their knowledge to be, you know, then classic. And I’m not saying top, middle and bottom, but I’m also not saying that wouldn’t be so random, either I’m thinking about right. If if Ray has got it, I’m hoping she can speak for a good 40 seconds about this and make some good connections. So I use it as a diagnostic, but I’d be a bit representative of the group. But I’d also use it as a consolidation opportunity, because they’re hearing, you know, things we’ve talked about. And hopefully, there’s a bit of retrieval there and, and done really well. There’s sometimes even a better explanation than than what we had the first time. So for me, it’s a bit of diagnostic, also baked into it is the fact that some people’s only speak for 20 seconds. And and that’s the thing where this can be done in three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, or it can be done in 20 minutes. And I’m always really conscious of making sure tasks and tips are adaptable for time parameters that we’ve got. But if we’re just using three or four minutes and just two pupils, we might not go for the whole causes repetitions it might just really be about a way to get them to elaborate and explain and give an answer. But within a structure that they’re familiar with and happy with, I think for me that just a minute. For some pupils speaking for 15 seconds, is an achievement is a big success. So I’m often really sensitive to that, and would know when that’s happening, and you know, kind of manage it accordingly. Some people’s without preparation time would panic at the panic at this. So unconscious of individual pupils, I work with a primary school in Nottingham way called Jubilee Academy. And we work with some young children who some children EAL and have just come from Hong Kong and Ukraine, where their language is still developing rapidly, but developing, and some pupils who don’t have that ability to speak in that kind of elaborated way in the classroom. Just a minute, we don’t do it in that kind of, we expect a minute and we kind of we game a fight in front of everyone. Instead, we just use it as a positive framework. And they might do it with a pair, they might just try just a minute about a topic. And I’ve been in the same school in a year five class, just a minute was used to recall what happened in the previous chapter of the story the day before. And two people or three, it was three people’s two girls and a boy, they gave these responses. And the teacher adopted in a couple of words and ideas to give them a prompt that they wanted them to use. So again, intelligent adaptation, think about your peoples, but the core principles of people’s need to reason, explain, have the confidence to connect ideas. And to say that out loud, that’s a life skill. It’s revealing as a diagnostic, it can be powerful. And I think it’s got lots of intelligent variation baked into it.

Craig Barton 51:54
I love this, Alex, because I have never done this. And I goes fast. I’ve never dreamed of doing this. So this is good this. So I’ve got a few questions you’ve covered. So we’ll do a couple of quickies first. So you mentioned kind of be more introverted, quieter students, you just have to be careful of their needs. I’m assuming this is all about knowing your kids and knowing what stage they’re confident enough to, to do this. So that’s perfect. Again, just just to add to that, sorry, just

Alex Quigley 52:22
quickly to add to that, so depending on the topic, depending on the people, we might just bake in some practice as well. So again, it’s just another it’s a format that offers a familiarity for high quality structured talk. So your pupils can do this in pairs. That was one of the things in that year five plus it just mentioned, they did a quick practice where they each had a minute to do it to one another first, and then a few people were selected. So again, if you’ve got that, you know, knowledge of your pupils, you’ll also think about the preparatory work, the practice the confidence building. I think for me, some of the most powerful memories for me teaching are when pupils who you wouldn’t expect, who’d never had the confidence at the start of the year to sit there or stand up and talk. We’re able to talk really cogently and intelligently about a topic, but three weeks later, they didn’t know very much about and so I think we should also not set limits on our pupils, we should scaffold them to reach to the highest heights in our classroom.

Craig Barton 53:22
Yeah, I completely agree. That’s brilliant, that just on the kind of think time and preparation time, would it ever be the case that you wouldn’t give any that you just say to a child speak for a minute on metaphors? And well, they’re all Israel’s case, or a kind of kind of a floor that you never go below in terms of prep time? Yeah, I

Alex Quigley 53:40
think there’s always a lead in I think there’s always a leader. I don’t I can’t recall, a lack of prep. And where I’ve worked with schools recently, there’s always been some preparatory steps, particularly with young children, not exclusively, I think if you can, with a mature confident group who you know, been teaching a topic, you can open up a lesson in an afternoon with some just a minute, but even then, that looks like there’s no preparatory work. But ultimately, it’s because you’ve done just a minute before. And they know the structure and they know the content, that there’s there’s a hidden tacit preparation that’s coming to the task. I think, of course, the less preparation, the less elaborate the response is often. So sometimes it is important not to kind of over practice, because you do want almost you want that reality that they don’t know a lot. They’re not able to speak for a minute. So that’s giving them some motivation to listen hard and to and to try and learn for the next 40 minutes so that they can do that.

Craig Barton 54:42
Interesting and notes Alex, would they be allowed notes with them whilst they’re doing the minute

Alex Quigley 54:46
so that’s another example of it depends. So for me, when you’re doing it for the first few times, you do a lot of peer work you do note making, they can have one flashcard you know, so I think And then that’s where your variation comes in, I would say, I, what am I, what I commonly do is allow a flashcard or not. And there was almost a bit of prestige around not using the flashcard. But you give you give some pupils the support factor of using that flashcards and enough of them do that to not feel isolated by doing so. But I would, I would work up the confidence and the capacity from our peoples, for them to be able by, you know, whatever point in the school year to be able to do it without preparation without support, because ultimately, you know, we don’t want to be capturing them out. But you know, in the real world, we want them to have that confidence to, in a variation context, be able to speak about topics and talk about it and connect up their ideas. And sometimes you need to, you know, you have those pressured situations, if you can do it in the classroom, you can do it anywhere.

Craig Barton 55:56
Absolutely, absolutely. Two follow up questions for this, Alex. I hope anyway. And the first is having never done this, obviously. Yeah. So God knows why I’m even coming from here. I would imagine that if three kids have been picked, and I was the third child, you end up repeating quite a lot of what to say, do you find that? Or is that not a problem.

Alex Quigley 56:18
So again, this is where innovation and adaptation, you can think a little bit carefully about that. So again, you can imagine how the third person is has got some extra support practice, because they’ve listened for an extra two minutes, they’re going to crib some ideas. So I might, in thinking about who my three are, think carefully about that sequence. And I’d often put a pupil in third who I thought might find it a bit harder than the person going first buy, factor that in to their responses. So again, this is about that fine filter of kind of diagnosing what they know what they copying. And actually, if that third person did elaborate and borrow the best ideas, great. I mean, that’s not bad. But I might do some probing with them to check they’re not just parroting as well. So that’s where you can follow up with some questions. It’s a really good question. Because I think, what we’re not treating that, what minute as is an ideal diagnosis of all in Origins. So but I think it’s a meaningful kind of attempt at trying to connect up, you know, their knowledge and be able to elaborate upon it. Got it.

Craig Barton 57:29
And final question on this. Alex, what do you do with the kids response afterwards? Do you then kind of analyse it for the whole class? Or like bringing another child? No, what did you like about what Ben said? Or how does that play?

Alex Quigley 57:40
Yeah. So I mean, what you’re doing, helpfully, Craig is colouring in all the potential adaptations and additions for it. So if I was, if I was doing at the start of the lesson to kind of initiate some retrieval kind of, you know, kind of bring some things back back into our thinking, and to get them looking back at their book, that might be one of the support factors. Okay, you’ve got two minutes to look back through your notes. And then we’re going to do just a minute on x, then it might be okay. Really, you know, you did 40 seconds, you know, I might say, what was what was missing from that? What? What could have James added to reach a minute and beyond the minute and, and that’s where, again, it’s a bit about responsive teaching, isn’t it about kind of what what you’re looking to glean from it? Normally, you know, it wouldn’t just be a kind of shot on the dark, three, have you gone, and then we all go home, it would be three of you. Okay. From those from that pattern of a trio everyone, what we thinking are the key concepts we want to remove being remembering. And if you’re going to do just a minute on Friday about this, what type of thing do you think need to retain by Friday to be able to speak about so that always be I think that wrap around and kind of trying to glean what context is emerge from those from those examples. You know, the best example, you know, or an ideal example is you get three really rich full minutes. And they give slightly different angles on the same topic. They cover off all the misconceptions. They give rich examples. And we all leave knowingly, kind of I’ve done a great job, they’re all knowledgeable, and we all will walk off happy. seldom does that happen. So actually, it’s about being responsive to well, if three of them kind of fell down at half a minute, and actually, clearly they didn’t have enough exemplification or they weren’t able to define one or two of these things that would have allowed them to speak more than actually, I’m being responsive to that. So I think again, infinite opportunities to respond and adapt depending on what you want to pupils to learn and remember, it can my final little warning sign. I do think they can leave you A classroom potentially, with who’s got the longest speaking like 54 seconds, and who got 12 seconds rather than thinking really hard about the topic that we talked about. So there is a danger of gamifying it too far, and engagements remembered rather than the actual knowledge you want them to to

Craig Barton 1:00:20
be interested. Wow, this is something I’m gonna need to think hard about this. Alex, I definitely want to give it a go. I’m definitely nervous. But yeah, I can see this working. Well. That’s brilliant. All right, Alex. Tip number five, please. Last one.

Alex Quigley 1:00:32
So to return to the translating the curriculum, that last tip was about talk, academic talk and trying to elaborate and build upon ideas. We looked at vocabulary knowing that the capillary potentially using that, and we tried to activate prior knowledge with those mind maps and with the collage collections. My final piece is a tip around writing. And it’s sentence expanding. And we might think, Okay, well, if we look at the expanse of the curriculum, in some subjects like Mathematics, we might need to write more than a sentence, it might be a definition of area. And that’s fine appropriate in some subjects, like history, while a sentence feels pretty inadequate for the actual demands of translating the curriculum. In more languages, a sentence is probably the unit of learning that we’re often working with. But we do want to get beyond that. But sentence expanding Why think that’s important, is it’s about explicit high quality teaching, of how pupils need to translate this language of our curriculum domains into writing, and sentences, the unit of sense that pupils can grapple with that novices can take on. And to be honest, I keep on top of my infinite variation, intelligent adaptation, sentence expanding, is that kind of riding with the training wheels on but very quickly, you can motor and you can do all sorts of developments and teaching with it. And if I think about what is the underpinning, again, knowledge, understanding kind of evidence sources for that. So we know a lot that explicit teaching of writing, both improves writing, but also, it can improve thinking and your understanding. So when we write about what we read, we often have a better memory. And we also kind of elaborate upon it. And we build that knowledge, schema, whatever, whatever terms you want to like you want to use. So explicit writing instruction, helps crystallise our knowledge, understanding and helps begin to use that often as well, particularly in those subjects where writing essays and exam questions is the modus operandi kind of our aims.

There’s also with sentence expanding, there’s a bit of elaboration in there as well, we’re trying to stretch their ideas, we’re trying to build their knowledge. And I want to give examples of that. So we’re, we’re using the unit of sentence to build the knowledge and to elaborate and to get them thinking of ideas and connections, but in a very structured, focused way that every novice can can handle. And then there’s that aspect of reasoning as well. So if often, and not always, but can you cogently express this in the written word. It’s not all again, not always necessary. If you’re doing problem solving, then, then you’re writing up how you solve the problem might feel a bit extraneous and just not necessary. But in a lot of cases across the school curriculum, being able to write a sentence summarising something, being able to write a short paragraph or writing an extended essay is the end game. And that reasoning, in written words is pretty typical with a skill we want all of our pupils to have far beyond the school gates in whatever kind of worldly context. So let me give some examples about what are you specifically by sentence expanding. So the evidence on writing instruction does this quite a lot of it, perhaps less so than reading, but there’s quite a lot of good evidence to show that starting with sentences is really valuable, particularly for novice developing writers. But a developing writer can be five years old or 15 years old. And often we make too many assumptions of the teenager. So we we have something called sentence combining, which is you take simple sentences, you add them together into one complex sentence. That’s about grammar, that’s about writing, how you might think developing an English but sentence expanding is about taking the kernel of a sentence. It might be the initial clause, and we’ll give some examples, but then adding to it, it’s expanding the sentence. And that on one on one aspect can be a stylistic thing and English thing, getting better at writing and writing accurate sentences. But often in our school curriculum, it’s about knowledge building. So in history, if we’re writing about the significant figure, William Wilberforce actually expand, expanding the sentence is about using evidence to better characterise William Wilberforce, so you might have a sentence or William Wilberforce because, you know, in kind of in our history writing, we’ll, we’ll have these little strategies and we’ll just go straight to the surname Wilberforce famously helped end slavery, dot dot dot. Now, that first kernel of the sentence, that simple, very simple sentence, William Wilberforce help end slavery within itself is a, there’s a lot of knowledge packed in, there’s a lot of insight. And it’s a historical claim that we want to talk about write about and have historical sources. But of course, if a people was to write in an exam response, or an essay response, that simple sentence, he ended slavery, well, actually, we would recognise it’s a very limited representation of historical knowledge. So we want them to expand on that, and how I often do it, and I model this in when I’m doing some writing work with different teachers is okay, now I want to take that candle, and we’re just going to pop a comma. At the end of it. It’s no longer a full stop. William Wilberforce famously helped end slavery, comma, with, and then we might we give that little connection? And then what’s the evidence? What’s one piece of evidence that show he contributed to the end of slavery, and it might be about his formulation of a certain group, it might be his signing of a proclamation, and how you can expand that sentence, sometimes infinitely, but that but typically, with one addition, or two additions, you do the William Wilberforce ended slavery, Colonel, comma, and then one piece of evidence, you have to model this, you have to scaffold it like most steps in a problem, like most pieces of high quality writing, but what’s that one first piece of evidence, so they give you an extra clause giving that historical fact. So you know, about his him initiating a group that was very significant, then, okay, we talked about that, we might look at that I might model with them, and kind of glean a really good example. And then, okay, we’re going to translate this full stop into another comma. And I might need to give them the little connective word. But what we’re doing is we’re expanding it again, this time, I want two pieces of evidence, you’ve got your Give me your first one, he ended slavery because he set up this proclamation society. And then secondly, what’s another piece of evidence we know for how he contributed to the end of slavery, suddenly, we get to the end of that task, highly scaffolded, well structured, we’ve effectively got a detailed sentence nigh on a paragraph for most of our pupils, often scaffolds are beyond the point, they naturally go to themselves independently. And we’ve got a sentence that is elaborate, but extended, and that feels like historical historians, you know, tackle that piece of response. And if I quickly give some other examples, so please, in design technology, in secondary school, or you’re making in primary school, so my little boy was making a boat, and it was related to Scott of the Antarctic, etc. And you can very easily making a product or making a cushion in you know, in in year, seven, all those variations, you can very, very much just focus on the doing, but actually what we need in those creative design, you know, kind of projects, is some evaluation, some reflection on what I did, and why did it? So, no, I designed a robust bass, you know, we might give them a point. Okay, what did you do with developing this boat to make it successful. And then with Noah, okay, one of the things he created this bass, so I designed a robust bass, then to help no one and the rest of the class expand on that sentence, we’re going to use that. So that clause, so I built this robust base, so that and then he has to elaborate and explain on it. And then you use two or three. So that sentence is suddenly you’ve got people with a really lovely paragraph reflecting evaluating upon their product design, that you know, the thing that they’ve done, and you can see how this can translate to art, you can see how this can translate to creative subjects, but also some reflection, potentially, in terms of different problems and projects and tasks and case studies across the curriculum. But fundamentally, it’s about that scaffolding. And, and one another variation is sometimes let go back to the example for area and perimeter. Sometimes we know that people’s confused sometimes it actually, we want to commit that in their books to writing. So we might have a sentence starter area is different to perimeter in that dot, dot, dot. And again, we’re just every time it’s about expanding the sentence, getting them to elaborate, think a bit harder about why these things are happening. And by writing it down, yes, you might have a bit of challenge about their writing skills and spelling and all those other things, but invariably, people’s need to be able to translate that thinking into the written format. Now, there are boundaries to that. And we shouldn’t extend it to every corner of every subject domain. But invariably, writing that sentence level is something we want to craft, we want to perfect. And the more pupils can do that, then actually, you know, you take William Wilberforce, if you can write that, that brilliant historical sentence, that that claim with evidence, then what is an essay, except Except a kind of an elaboration of that connection of those claims with evidence with counterclaims with sources, etc. So that sentence is that is the kernel and the point that you build upon, and sometimes you just need the sentence, but sometimes that that sentence expansion is the start of a more extended process of extended writing. Or

Craig Barton 1:10:47
I love this Alex, right. Okay, so I’ve one question. And then I’ve got something I’ve been looking forward to asking somebody for about two years. So you’re my man for this site? So I’ll give you that. I’ll give you the question. First a

Alex Quigley 1:10:57
bit nervous about that last one?

Craig Barton 1:11:00
So you mentioned kind of so that an in that is kind of good kind of connectors? Yeah, help expand the center’s and imagine things like because some books would Yeah, are there any other any got any other kind of kind of good ones? That? Yeah.

Alex Quigley 1:11:15
So because, um, but so people might be familiar with the writing revolution, which is an American originated book, but very popular, I think, a lot of history teachers have used etc. So because but so is perhaps their famous kind of sentence structure. And because but so you can see how that’s getting to elaborate. I think, I think that’s super useful, really helpful, and particularly for younger children, a really good framework and scaffold, I think when you get to older students, because and but and so that’s quite a simplistic notion of history, isn’t it? If you think no, this, because that’s so so there’s a, that’s almost a scaffold that for most students is a great starting point. But then you need to make some claims and make connections that are a bit richer, but But how would you get a novice there without those kind of training structures? So for me, because both are really helpful. Ultimately, what we’re talking about is these different terms, but discourse markers are pretty much the kind of the term that’s, I think, the most accurate and useful discourse, meaning language markers, meaning those little markers that signal, kind of the glue of the sentence, the turning points that the key information that’s going to come so things like but however, they are, if you’re making argument writing, however, but whereas that’s when we can structure counterclaims, and contrasts often say in English, we’re looking for more than one point. So we might have firstly, secondly, furthermore, moreover, so there are these patterns. And I think there’s a book I think that might be I say, we say, but in in the US, they’ve created the entire books, which offer these scaffolds and sentence structures. And I think, again, I think there’s intelligent adaptation there, the saw in the middle, where we want to use those structures as training wheels, some phrases for me, so that is just so versatile. But then we also need to remember that the sentence is a unit of sense for definitions for remembering key knowledge, but it doesn’t, we need to go further than that. And at the point where we’re ready to go further, once we’ve perfected sense of expansion, then we might need to drop some of the more artificial kind of discourse markers and get a bit more sophisticated. So I think, yeah, there’s a whole variation of those out there. And it doesn’t take long to find them. I think the key thing there is not, you know, you can have a knowledge organiser with every discourse marker under the sun, or, you know, I’ve got a PowerPoint slide, but lots of them. It’s about using the right ones for the right purpose, and remembering when you use that scaffold for the sentences and the expansion to take it away. Otherwise, you have people’s using this endless parroting formula, which, again, over time stops being the kind of the appropriate academic complexity that’s needed in the school curriculum.

Craig Barton 1:14:17
Perfect. All right, Alex, here’s the question I wanted to ask you, right. So what you tend to see a lot in math classrooms, and I’ve done this for many years is let’s say I asked you, what’s the area of a triangle? And you just say that to me, base multiply by height divided by two and I say brilliant. I say to you watch Pythagoras theorem. You say c squared equals a squared plus base one. Yeah, fantastic. What I’ve started to do now is insist the kids say the full sentence back so I’d say what’s the Arabic triangle? And I’d want you to say back the area of a triangle is a based on Pythagoras theorem is c squared equals a squared plus b. Now I have two bits of logic for this one, I’m quite happy with the second is Dubya. So I need you to comment on the dubious one. Right? Okay, so the the obvious one thing I’m fairly happy with is if another child in the class hasn’t been listening, and they just tune into your answer and you say c squared equals a squared plus b squared, they’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Whereas if they hear you say Pythagoras theorem is C squared equals Yeah, they’ve got that Kinect, so I’m quite happy with that feels like a sensible reason. But the other thing, and I’ve been claiming this, Alex, I’m open it’s true, is whenever kids sit GCSE papers in maths and they’re asked to do like a discourse question or describe or explain. Kids are really bad at it. The marks are terrible, because students struggle writing and communicating in mathematically in written form, they’re not used to it. So my logic has been, the more I get kids to respond verbally in sentences, that’ll ease the transition to writing in sentences. But I have zero evidence to back that up. Yeah. Would you be happy with that? So it’s not the definite yes, I was looking for.

Alex Quigley 1:16:07
So take the first point, I think that point you made about that kind of full recognition of that utterance. And it’s important that it’s important enough to write a sentence about it. So it’s important enough to repeat it with accuracy. So I really liked that. And the Pythagoras example, really helpful. Because people’s do tune into fragments don’t they kind of tune out. I wrote recently about mind wandering, where my mind wander for 30 40% of a lesson, entirely natural. So zooming in, to those full utterances I think is super helpful. I think the second point, I think there’s a partial helpful near truth. But I think what I would say is I don’t think there’s any evidence that you can say you can write it, but there’s, but I’d say it’s a necessary condition, but insufficient to lead to the complete writing that we’re after. So I think broadly, I don’t think there’s there’s I couldn’t cite to you strong evidence to say that is a thing. That’s pretty much kind of solid and replicable. But I would say what you’re what you’re claiming, there feels to me entirely common sense and low effort. And actually, there’s no bad things that can come from that. But it might give me the illusion that it will translate easily to the right thing. And then the reality is, the act of writing a sentence is really complex. It’s kind of this this miniature challenge, which includes handwriting, so motor skills include spelling, it includes word choice, includes grammar. So by writing it, your working memory is just overloaded that little bit more than saying it. So I think I think what you’re doing is a good strategy, I encourage it, I wouldn’t be confident about the evidence claim that works. But I think it’s broadly very sensible. And I think it’s a necessary, beneficial thing to do. But it’d be insufficient to lead to the quality writing that you want. Because that quality writing, just like the sentence expansion requires lots of explicit instruction. And ultimately, you know, all of the tips I’ve shared here are about being super explicit about the vocabulary and the conceptual understanding of those words, about being really explicit about what pupils know, and what we’re about to teach them. And what we activate being really explicit about a singular sentence. So I think what you’re doing is right for me that you’re being really deliberate about the language we’re using in talk, and we’re having a high standard of academic talk. And we want to see that replication in writing, I think, the highest standard of our talk, good things happen. But we need to go that extra mile, but last mile, often to explicitly teach how to write a good definition in maths as well.

Craig Barton 1:18:51
Yeah, that makes perfect. Yeah, I’ll take that, Alex, because it certainly feels like it might not be the case that if they can say it, they can write it, but it certainly feels if they can’t say it, they’re going to struggle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll tell you, I’ll bail you on that. Yeah.

Alex Quigley 1:19:06
And if they, if they can’t say it in a clear, cogent way, that could be an indication, they’re just, you know, in math, they might conceptually have the number bonds to do it, but they can’t quite explain it. So that, you know, there’s nuances to that. But broadly, I think that’s why just a minute, I think so valuable when you want them to be able to say it, and then they can normally explain it, reason it and do it. And it’s one of those kinds of inadequate proxies. We’ve got if they can say it, we think they can write if they can write it and say we think they can do it. But we’ve got to make sure there’s not been knowing doing gap and we’ve got to help them do it as well.

Craig Barton 1:19:40
Brilliant. Perfect. Well, Alex, they’re five amazing tips. So let me hand over to you. Is there anything you would like listeners and viewers to check out of yours?

Alex Quigley 1:19:49
So I write a lot about literacy. So I’ve written a series of books called closing the gap. I’m not achieved obsessive, actually that about closing the book. Have you ever gap closing the reading gap and closing the writing gap? I felt like I spent years as a teacher, cobbling together some ideas. And it was my attempt to try and distil this thing called literacy and how to read, write and be explicit about these things for high quality teaching. I’ve got a blog of the confident teacher, it was based on a book, I’m not claiming I’m the confident teacher, actually, it’s about developing as a confident teacher, and some cases not being overconfident, and kind of testing our knowledge. And then I also have a fortnightly newsletter. So I’ve got substack as well. I’ve got all of all, I could go on Kragle. All day long. With the kind of references you can find me. Lastly, you can find me on Twitter. Far too many hours of the week. Alex J. Quickly.

Craig Barton 1:20:49
That’s fair. There’ll be links to all your books, your blog, your Twitter handle in the show notes. Well, Alex, I’ve been wanting to get you back on the show for ages. So this this has been brilliant five, what I love about them, five tips. Quite a few of them are out of my comfort zone. Just a minute. I’ve never dreamed of doing that sentence and expansion I need to get better at so this is good. It’s given me lots to think about and I’m sure the same is for our listeners. So Alex quickly thank you so much for your time. Thank you

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

David Goodwin’s tips:

1. Provide opportunities for students to read in lessons (04:23)
2. Develop vocabulary (16:45)
3. Rebrand homework as practice (25:08)
4. How to improve students’ ability to write (33:33)
5. How to make retrieval practice work (45:53)

Links and resources

• On Twitter, David is @MrGoodwin23
• David’s website is: organiseideas.com
• David’s books are:
  • Organise Ideas
  • Year One
  • The Extended Mind in Action

Subscribe to the podcast

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View the videos of David Goodwin’s tips

Podcast transcript

Craig Barton 0:01
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 geography teacher, author and expert illustrated, David Goodwin. This is an absolutely brilliant conversation. I love this one. One big piece of news before we crack on with the episode, and that is the tips for teachers book, when you’re listening to this is officially out. And now, I’m so excited about this. From everything I’ve got into this. John cat illustrated the editor on an amazing job making make sense, brilliant. And I’m really excited to to get it out there and see what people think. And if you go to the tipster teachers website, there’s a whole page about the book where you can see all the content and access all the resources and the option to buy it from Amazon, John can’t get anywhere, I thought what I’d do, I’d just give you try and hook you in on the book just tell you a little bit about it. So the tagline is over 400 ideas to improve your teaching. And what I’ve tried to do is make this one of the most practical books out there. So you can dip in at any stage and you’ll come away with loads of ideas, and try the very next time step into a classroom. So if I look here, chapter two is all about habits and routines. And what we’ve got there are things like a tidy is to help introduce a routine for words to consider a movie for the teacher to capillary, at means of participation, that’s a massive chapter that I’m obsessed with the meeting participation. So you’ve got things like 10 ideas to cold call 22 ideas to whiteboard 15 ideas to improve discussions and so on. Or you’ve got checking for understanding, there’s a whole load of tips about wait times, but then you’ve got things like 10 ideas. Tickets are 10 ideas to help create. So on responsive teaching seven ideas ever teach if a student sorry, says I don’t know, prior knowledge, you’ve got how to plan, prioritise, assess and respond to prior knowledge, massive chapter on explanations where you’ve got things like 14 ideas to improve silent teacher five ideas to show students why what we’re learning today matters, and so on and so forth. I’ve tried to cover all the kinds of big ideas in teaching. And the ideas come from two different sources or three different sources really. And they come from the wonderful guests that I’ve spoken on the tips for teachers podcast, they come from my reading, various bits of research, blogs, and so on. But I guess the biggest source of inspiration is the classrooms. And I’m lucky enough to visit every single week in schools all around the country and all around the world. I’m just picking up nuggets of gold from the teachers and students that I’m working with. And I’ve tried to bring it all into the book. And one extra thing to say about the book is that at the end of each tip, there’s a QR code and the URL. And both of those take you to a resources page on the website where I put videos, blogs, research, downloadable resources, and so on if you want to dig deeper into the idea. Anyway, I shall talk about that now. But that’s tips for teachers book out now in all good and evil bookstores. Anyway, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest though. Wonderful, David Goodwin. Spoiler alert, here are David’s five tips. Tip number one, provide opportunities for students to read in lessons. Tip two, develop vocabulary. Tip three rebrand homework as practice a really interesting one that you know, tip for how to improve student’s ability to write. And Tip Five, how to make retrieval practice work. As ever, all the tips are timestamps. So you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first, and videos of David’s tips like and this is true for all guests are available on the tips of teachers website if you want to share them with colleagues, enjoy. Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome David Goodwin to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, David, how are you?

David Goodwin 3:56
I’m fab, Craig, thank you for thank you for having me. It’s a no, it’s

Craig Barton 3:59
my pleasure. And for the benefit listeners, can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence.

David Goodwin 4:04
I am an assistant principal in charge of teaching and learning. And I do a bit of writing and illustrating education ideas. My subject is geography. And I’m a secondary practitioner.

Craig Barton 4:16
Fantastic. I think this is the first geography teacher we’ve had on here. So yeah, a world first. As for the podcast, I’m very excited about this. Right, David? Let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one you’ve got for us today.

David Goodwin 4:26
Tip number one, and it might be sort of three tips in one is through reading and providing opportunities for students to read in lessons. So something I’m very, very passionate about. And something I tried to do frequently in my lessons is have students read and it stems really from from my own sort of personal experiences when I was at school and I wasn’t the most, I wasn’t the best reader. And it’s sort of that’s that’s why I’m really really passionate about it. So what I’ll go through is sort of like how I go about selecting the text that I have students read, why, why we do it and how we do it. And some things that I’ve found that have worked and ideas that have sort of pinched from other people, because I’m a bit of a magpie, when it comes to ideas. So the first thing I’d say is this reading, outside of the 6000 most common used words in English language outside those first 6000, you’re more likely to encounter the less frequent words through text. So by the end of secondary school students should know somewhere in the region of 15,000, to 20,000 words. So if we’re not providing opportunities for them to reading our lessons, and we’re providing those opportunities, how are they going to how they’re going to develop them. So the first thing that I would sort of suggest is engaging with your sort of subject communities and finding finding texts and materials that are really, that have been found to be useful for, for whatever it is you’re teaching. You know, I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel. There’s no reason why you can’t use credible resources, such as a textbook, for example, or a book that might be relevant to whatever it is you’re teaching. So the first part is about selecting the text, I really liked this idea that maybe might says about selecting a piece of text that is above the students pay grade, that’s, that’s more ambitious than perhaps that they, they should be able to read at their age. So something that’s a year above the what that would be expected to read at that point. So once I’ve selected a piece of text, the first thing that I’m sort of thinking about is, I’m going to go through that, that that passage of text that I want students to read, even as a whole class or something that I’m going to read to them. And I’ll start by highlighting all of the sort of tier two vocabulary, the sort of words that are not specific to my subject, but are more sophisticated than the tier one everyday vocabulary that we use. So we’re going to highlight them. And I’m going to either do one of two things is I’m going to pre teach those words, or I’m going to think about how I can teach as I’m reading through that piece of text. Or I may, if I think the students have encountered them previously, and might look at some activities around how I can check that they’ve got that prerequisite understanding before we begin reading the text, because if they haven’t got that understanding everything that comes afterwards, you just set the students up to fail. So the first thing is about trying to find out, you know, do they understand that, if not addressing that, and then we can start to get into it’s getting to the read. And so how I go about making it work is there are a variety of things that I do. The first is to make the reading accountable, like we want to set up activities, and we want to set up things that are going to require the students to engage in the reading. One of my my favourite sort of things to do is to have students read to the rest of the class. But I’m aware that there’s some students when the first encounter this is quite daunting, and it can be quite tricky, especially if the, especially if the text is like littered with words that are a bit difficult to put on ca of just things that are really unfamiliar to them. So I’ll go about setting students. So with the confidence, the confidence to do so. So for example, what we will do is the classes will engage in things like choral chants. So for a difficult word like cumulonimbus cloud, for example, I’ll have the whole class say that three or four times so as a class, I’ll go by class. This is how we pronunciate it cumulonimbus, and I’ll display it up on the on the whiteboard in itself phonetic spelling and have a three to one cumulonimbus in the house, I’ll have the whole class chant cumulonimbus, and we’ll do that three or four times, then we’ll select one row, and that one row will will say that and I’ll go to another row, and we’re going to narrow it down. So I get like sort of one or two students to get them say that so that when that one student that encounters that word in that, that reading, when they have to say that they don’t feel as awkward as silly, they haven’t been set up to fail. So I like to use choral chants as a way of sort of building that confidence. And for students that are really reluctant, reluctant when they first start doing this, you know, maybe I’ll start off as small as just having them read one sentence, one paragraph, you know, just really sort of just building them up in terms of that level of confidence to read in front of others. The other thing that I’ve stumbled across more recently, which I wasn’t really aware of and tell everyone about it was Alex Quigley’s echo reading where the teacher reads the body of text first reads a passage of text and then the students in pairs will read that back to one another. And the idea being that the teachers modelled model the reading model, how to pronunciate the words and stuff the pace and and and all of that sort of stuff and then the students can read to one another and again, increasing their ability to engage in attacks. And and also as the teacher is, that is sort of engaging with that echo reading, it’s that chance for you to check for understanding and to listen to what is going on around the classroom. So that’s another thing I do. One of my sort of top tips if you’re going to engage in sort of whole class reading is and it’s super simple is to number though if you if you’ve got the text that is so if the text is electronic, and you’ve been able to copy into Microsoft Word is to insert line numbers. So you insert line numbers, it’s just it’s such a time saver to you. So right Bobby, I want you to read lines one to six. I want you to start from line six, you’re going to keep reading, I’m going to say right stop. And then when it comes to the sort of students having to do something with that information, whether it be some sort of questions some sort of activity wants to do around that and say I’m struggling with this question. I’m struggling with this problem. Alright, well, have you thought about reading back through lines 10 through to 18 for example. So just read out you know, really directs the focus and that was something that a fair see Ben Ranson, geography teacher I don’t know if you if you follow Him, Craig on on Switzer superb, but just such a simple idea. So to summarise so far, my sort of top tips because I’m on the spot, I do this quite a bit, I get get lost in and sort of sub tips pre teach the, you know, the tier two vocabulary precedes the tier two vocabulary. Find, find ways to make the reading accounts bolster designing activities around forcing the students to engage in if you go into engage in whole classroom reading, make sure that any difficult to pronounce words, you pre teach that and you engage all students in sort of those, those choral chants, the kids love it as well as, as well as them not feeling as reluctant to read those words. And the echo reading, so Teacher reads teachers models, and the students read back. So there’s that. Yeah, there’s just something so enjoyable to hear students read it, just as I said, I don’t know what it is. But it’s just there’s something really, really enjoyable about it. And when they can begin to make meaning from that the text that you’re engaging with, it’s just yeah, it’s a joy. It’s a joy to see and hear.

Craig Barton 12:10
Right, this is lovely this David Right. I need to dig into this because one of the main reasons I started this tips for teachers podcast is with my Mr. Barton maths podcast, I was getting too bogged down in the maths, and I wanted to spread it out. And since since I’ve started it, Christopher, such has been on and he’s taught me all about this about reading from from a young age, and it’s blown my mind. So I’m a bit obsessed with this now. So a couple of reflections and then I’ve got a big question for you. So the first is one thing we often discuss on this podcast is means of participation. And whenever I think of reading out loud, I always think of the kind of one to one. So you say to one child, you read this back? Yeah, well, what I love about what you’re saying here is a couple of variations that I love this chant this call and response. I’m a bit obsessed with this just generally as as a way of checking for understanding. But I really like that to deal with those tricky words. And the paired reading sounds fascinating as well, whether it’s combined with the echo thing, which I which sounds a fantastic idea. But just I really like pad work as a means of kind of rehearsing in front of a kind of pair of friendly years versus having to read out loud in front of 30 kids. So I love that. And again, as you’ve said, it gives you an opportunity to wander around the class, get a sense of what’s going on and stuff. So that that feels really, really powerful. And I guess my big question is, obviously you’ve you’re a geography teacher, but you’ve got kind of homeschool responsibilities, and you’ll have a good sense of what’s going on in other subjects. Is this doable? Or do you find maths departments, science departments, and so on doing this? And what advice would you have for teachers of those subjects?

David Goodwin 13:39
So it’s a great question, because I have had conversations with people, maths teachers in particular, but I wouldn’t want to impose or directs you to do something that doesn’t that doesn’t serve the purpose. So for example, there’s not always I’m not going to have students read around everything I teach for my subject. So for example, when when first encountering how a waterfall forms, it might not be the best way to encounter that. And that new knowledge through reading about it might require me with my visualised and actually, a really carefully thought out well scripted explanation. So I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t try to artificially, you know, force force the issue, if there’s not a genuine purpose behind it, but I can’t account for see why the there isn’t an opportunity in all curriculum areas where we’re reading can’t, you know, can’t take place, I’m sure in all subjects and that, you know, I wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of the science community or the mass community, I’m sure there is an opportunity and all subjects, if we if we really carefully think about where we could encounter where we could say we encounter new information via via reading, and what I find quite interested in when we if you study Etymology and the origins of words and how most of the sort of a lot of scientific, mathematical and geographical language derives from, from ancient Greece. So when we start to unpick that typology of words and the prefixes, you can begin, students can begin to identify those patterns, cross curricular, so that sort of those sort of opportunities across curriculum areas, I think, are fascinating and can be very, very rewarding.

Craig Barton 15:29
Yeah, I agree. You, you you often see etymology is one of the big areas that literacy I guess, does find its way into the classroom. And as you say that the common prefixes and suffixes but the irony of all of this, David, is that, like, the questions, I always have my maths hat on whoever I’m talking to, I always find a way to wheel it back to math somehow. So apology, apologies for this. But the irony of all of this is if you look at exam papers in maths, the questions that kids do the worst on invariably are the the ones that have got a bit of a story attached two or three sentences. So there’s, there’s definitely a need for this. It’s just I think, from my perspective, it’s trying to fit what are those kind of texts that we can use that, that enhance students understanding because what you don’t really want to be doing is that reading and math, he’s just reading these worded problems about you know, Tom and Jane are sharing sweets in a ratio three to two. I mean, that’s not quite the inspiring literacy. You know, literature I had in mind just feels feels difficult. But I want to do this because I hear from people like you I feel or hear from people like Chris such and Claire Seeley, that this feels an important thing. It’s just for those trickiest subjects. You want a way to get it in there doesn’t feel shoehorned don’t Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, tricky. Tricky. have anything more to say on this tip, David, before I cut you off and move on to tip two?

David Goodwin 16:45
Yeah. So I mean, tip to sort of build on on on my face. So I’d slip in in terms of reading, which is to develop vocab. So, yeah, so through, through sort of thinking about how we can make meaning from reading and how we get the most out of it, how we go about developing students vocabulary, and I cannot for the life of me, remember who who said, who first said this, I want to say it was Tom Sherrington. About how many words do we have students that we need students to use, but we don’t actually provide opportunities for them to speak the words and say the words. And it really just, it just struck me as I what I’ve been doing for so long, like, I’ve got a fabulous keyword display up at the back of my classroom that no one ever looked at. So what I’ve been doing, my students aren’t seeing these words, so and providing opportunities for students to say the words and to develop the vocabulary is, again, really, really important and really powerful. So here’s some of mathema soft tip, we’ve developed this thing called candle sentences. So this is sort of a sort of an original idea, so to speak, it was through working with Oliver Cabergoline, on our organiser ideas, but the idea is with a candle sentences, you introduce the meaning of a word in as few words as possible. So it’s really, really puffy. And you replace all of the sort of more sophisticated language in your in your sentence with every day, more member words, because the idea here is, what you want to do is just get students saying the word and being able to remember it. So for example, might say, erosion is the breakup and removal of rocks. That’s, that’s that that’s the sentence. So I say to my class, I say, class erosion. So you know, it’s a new terminology we’re going to be using, it’s the breakup of removal of rocks. So when rocks are broken up and removed, we call it erosion. So I’ll go through that three or four times. And then again, we go through a call chant. So I’ll say it’s my class, right? Class erosion is and they call chant. That’s me, the breakup and removal of rocks. And, again, we’ll do it three or four times, and I’ll go row by row, and I’ll pick on one or two students and I usually pick on the students who either unconcerned might not be engaging in it, or might be more reluctant to or other ones that might need, you know, the sort of nudge in the most help. And the idea being if they can do it, I can safely assume in a shot, be assured that the rest of the class come. And the idea here really as simple as just about building students, students fluency and ability to be able to use that word now. If students can recall that erosion is the breakup and removal of rocks that doesn’t mean the fully understood what erosion is, bots Well, I would say is it doesn’t mean that they’ve that they’ve already got they’ve got a hawk, they’ve got something that they can build on top of. So lessons down the line when we begin to introduce different types of erosion and the factors that determine rates of erosion, and not having to reteach the basics of water erosion is so that’s one way in which you do it called chance, again, makes it super memorable. And when you have students then put that into practice in their own rights in and that And then we can generate their own ideas around that it makes it far more likely that they’re going to be able to recall it. So Colonel sentences really, really piffy really sharp. And the idea is about being able to remember being able to remember, word for word, what we’ve sort of rehearsed. And again, you could do this in those sort of that pair dynamic. And I’ve really liked what you said there, Craig about, students rehearse in sort of peer shear before doing it in front of the rest of the class, I’ve got, again, that confidence to share their thinking with the rest of the class over ways in which I sort of go around vocab development is peer Quizzing. So things like using the knowledge organiser, setting them up in a dynamic where they’re going to quiz one another, before I open up to a sort of cold call and a more sort of more formal forum, so to speak. And then building on top of that, having them sort of really delve, train students to really delve deeper into their students understand that, so start to interrogate them and ask more elaborate questions like, what does that word mean? You know, could you use that word in a sentence? wherever else might you encounter this word? Can you think of any other words that that are different, but it might have a similar or the same meaning?

Craig Barton 21:13
Wow, love this. Now, this is again, something that feels definitely relevant to teachers of all subjects, because every subject has obviously its fair share of technical vocabulary. So two reflections? And then one question for you, David. I’m a big fan as well of, I think it was Tom Sherrington. And makes this point that the words we expect our students to write a very different from the normal natural dialogue that may may appear in the classroom without any suggests these kinds of almost stem sentences or verbal prompts to get students to talk in the way they’re right. I mean, it’s really, really powerful idea that, and again, just to just to reiterate what I said before the coral chance, if you’d have asked me a year ago, would my kids ever do any chance and I’d be like, you’ve lost your mind, no chance. But every time I see this in a school, like the way it just brings, like class cohesion, and the kids absolutely love it domain. It is brilliant. Like it’s a, it’s a really good tool of mass participation. It’s quick, it’s snappy, it’s engaging. I’m a big, big fan art. So I’m definitely going to start building that into the vocab. I like that. And as you say, it only works if you have these, these kernel, these really tight sentences. Otherwise, it’s not going to work if the kids are chanting 30 or 40 word, you know, bubble definition. So I love that. My question for you is this, I’ll see where I’ve gone wrong with this, is I go to town on the vocab in the lesson or the sequence of lessons that we’re doing it. So let’s say for example, we’re doing something on shapes, I’m going to town on the etymology of polygons, hexagons, and all that kind of fade. But then I don’t revisit it enough. So like the kids seem to get it in the moment, but then, you know, like anything a month later, you know, the classic forgetting curve, it’s gone. So do you do you kind of factor in retrieval opportunities for this, this kind of vocab so that your kids don’t fall into the traps that my kids have an end up forgetting it? And all the hard work goes to waste, if that makes sense?

David Goodwin 23:04
Yeah, yes. And not necessarily in a sort of quarrel, champ manner. Don’t intentionally do that. But if I start to unpick it, if I start to want to, like sort of, as I’m sampling books, or is sort of looking for feedback, juniors, ever begin to see that, that that sort of degrade and you know, the beginning to forget those terms, then yes, I’ll revisit through that, I suppose what starts to happen is they begin to use the words more frequently in their written pieces. And I’m sort of really intentional about I’m just thinking year 10 example, not long ago, where we’re looking at Coastal landscapes and how I went about how rigorous I went about teaching coastal processes before we introduced the landforms, the teaching of the landforms was so so so much easier for them to grasp, and for them to really to be able to stretch and tangent because they already had really, really secure foundational knowledge of all of those different coastal processes. So I think you have to be really, I suppose, intentionally in terms of curriculum planning, like, What opportunities are there for it? And then geography I hate speaking on behalf of other subjects, but geography just seems to be so rich in connections and linked concepts across subjects. I’m always thinking about what what we’re teaching today. What does that what has come before it that looks like it should? It’s going to help them there. So I’m thinking about, for example, differential heating and why the equator is the warmest place on earth and the formation of ecosystems, as always, those opportunities are there. But I suppose to answer your question, I’m not intentional about necessarily call chanson it again in the future. But there are plenty of opportunities for them to revisit and use those words in some form.

Craig Barton 25:06
Data. Fantastic. Right, David, what is tip number three for us, please.

David Goodwin 25:10
So tip number three is to do homework. So we as a school we are moving away from we’re not call it homework anymore, we’ll call it practice. And I think the biggest problem with homework is when it when you’re expecting students to engage in something that is unfamiliar to them, or, and this is why I’m not the biggest fan of sort of flipped learning where they are, where students have to encounter something that maybe they’re going to learn in the future. Because what you’re sort of setting students up to do is, in my opinion, what I think your students have to do is for them to go home and encounter something on their own or possibly with the help of a parent that isn’t an expert in their in the subjects and the content that you want them to engage in. And the chances are, if they can’t, they’re going to give up very, very quickly. So in terms of homework, my sort of, so it’s not confusing, so it can’t, so there’s no excuse that, that students can’t engage in the content, you want them to make sure that just builds upon what we’re doing in the lessons and provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice. So essentially, our homework policy or our the way in which we’re doing homework now is we’ve created what we’ll call and practice booklets. So it’s essentially two pages of knowledge. And then so many weeks where for practice activities, and it’s so it’s broken up with knowledge, practice, knowledge, practice, knowledge practice. And it just builds upon what is being learned in terms of the curriculum, what’s been learned in the classroom. Simply because, as I’ve said, If we encounter information that’s unfamiliar to us, without the expert being the teacher, there, were far more likely to develop misconceptions, or follow that lead to disengage with it, if it becomes too tricky, too difficult. And we will also have to factor in that for some children, unfortunately, they might not have the means to participate in in the manner that you wish for them to do so. So there’s lots of fantastic platforms, you know, Seneca carrousel, all fantastic, superb packages that students can access. But if they haven’t got the means by which to participate, a they’ve only got one computer and a household of three, three siblings, becomes really difficult. So what I would say is considered how you want your students to participate in the homework, make it something that is going to be simple to understand in terms of how to engage with the activity, and use it as an opportunity to actually build their memory, build their knowledge and develop everything in terms of their long term memory.

Craig Barton 27:51
This is good, this is a biggie homework, I’m really pleased if you brought this up. And again, it’s always interesting to hear this from a different subject perspective. So just a couple of reflections, then a few questions for you here, David. The thing about homework that I like, in principle is it’s the ideal retrieval opportunity, because the kids can spend a lot longer on it or focus on the areas they need. Whereas in class, there’s often this requirement to kind of move at a certain pace. And if you need a bit long run something, but like the class is ready to move on, you don’t get it. So in whole in theory, homeworks great. But as you say, there are there are a number of issues with homework. And we’ve certainly had in our school, a whole cohort of students who just don’t engage in homework for for whatever reason. And one thing that when maths has a big advantage, I think of a lots of subjects, we can go to town and kind of automated marketing. So you know, you can set kids online homework on pretty much all of maths, and it’ll then it’ll mark it for them. And I know that obviously with things like carousel, and Seneca, you can do that to a certain extent with other subjects. But how important is it for you that the kids know what to do when stuck on homework, if that makes sense if you sat at home with to her to a child? And if they come back to the next lesson and say, look, look, so I couldn’t do it? Because I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do. Is that like a valid excuse? Or do you have kind of protocols in there where essentially, if kids are stuck, there’s a definite kind of process they have to go through? If that makes sense.

David Goodwin 29:15
Yeah. So that what I’ve sort of outlined in terms of the the practice booklets that we’re moving, we are moving to them, we haven’t moved to them yet, but the in terms of what they they will do in them, it will be very similar in terms of what they’re doing in the classroom. So it will be a lot of knowledge based questions that require them to engage in the sort of pages of knowledge that that are within the booklet. So it should in theory, it should be relatively. It should be relatively straightforward and self explanatory in terms of what they need to do. But I do think it’s important and we’re going to have this period of time this transition where we are going to need to train the students in terms of the expectations of how to go around you Engaging in it what to do if you ask doc what to do if, you know if you want to get favourite headline, you’ve shown mastery and this element is the opportunity for you to go on and develop in February. So, yeah, absolutely, I think you’ve got to outline your expectations. And you’ve got to follow them through just like in anything that you do in school. But I do think it’s, it is really important that they have the opportunity to practice and to be trained on it. And not just the students as well. But I think the parents as well, that they’ve got an opportunity. So the front of the booklet, there’s sort of like a little blurb to the parents that explains the forgetting curve and the importance of practice and the simple memory model. There’s going to be a video on the school website about how to go about completing the practice tasks. And then, you know, this sort of thing where if your child is stuck, or if they do encounter anything that they can’t do, what do you do in that situation? So it’s sort of a bit of a FAQ a bit of a troubleshooting, so to speak. Yeah, it’s

Craig Barton 31:05
good that I love that. Just that the whole purpose of homework, I think it’s a really interesting one. So I think I’ve made that mistake in the past where, obviously, I know what I’m saying home to the kids, but to the kids. No. And I think that the idea of having a forgetting curve on nothing’s really smart. And just last question on this, David, when Adam Boxer was on on the show, and he made the point that the biggest thing he’s done in terms of homework is to make sure it feeds into lessons and nothing that’s a mistake I’ve made for many years, how much almost like this separate thing, you know, you set it, and then okay, maybe at the start the next lesson, I’ll have a word with a couple of the kids who haven’t done the homework or whatever. But then it’s not quite as we move on. Now it’s back to class work. The more I think about it, the more I’m on board with this, that homework really needs to play a pivotal role in in lessons. I wonder if you agree, and I wonder what role homework plays in your lessons, David?

David Goodwin 31:54
I yeah, I do agree. And one of the sort of piece of work for planning for these practice booklets was I was listening to what Adam had said on your show. And it written a blog, I think, through carousel about the idea of practice and the benefits of it. And I think everything I’ve sort of said so far, probably just builds on what Adam said. I think it’s important, it builds on what’s going on in the lesson for two main reasons. Number one, it takes the guesswork out of how to engage in the activity that the students need to do so that it’s less likely that students are going to get stuck, so I can’t do my homework. And then number two, you build in that strong foundational knowledge, that means students are going to progress students are going to learn and yeah, absolutely, I can’t think of when I reflect on how I’ve done things in the past, I can’t think of why, why I did it like that, it’s there’s got to be I think there’s got to be opportunities from time to time where you go off P, especially in a subject like geography where maybe go off piste, and have some things come up in the news. And it’s gonna it’s going to enrich whatever it is that you’re doing in your curriculum at that moment in time. But what I would say is thinking about Tom sheratons mode, a mode where you know, mode, a mode, bat, that sort of eight to 28 80% of the time 80 plus percent of the time should and should be practising and developing their their knowledge around what is going on in the lessons in your curriculum.

Craig Barton 33:32
Brilliant, fantastic. Okay, David, what tip for please,

David Goodwin 33:36
Tip four. So I’m going to write him, like planning for it and how to develop student’s ability to, to write because I think we greatly this is just my credit, we sort of valorize the unaided mind, like, we want students to be able to independently work and work independently and absolutely want that, but we need to do that at the right time. So when students have got a sufficient amount of knowledge, in terms of sort of how I developed my students writing, it’s about them having enough enough knowledge before I want them to engage in sort of an extended piece of writing. So I’m not just going to say, Okay, class, we, you know, we’ve had a lesson on hard and soft engineering of reverse. And now we’re going to evaluate how successful strategies have been, we’ve worked with that. So we need to make sure that students have got a sufficient amount of knowledge before they before they’re ready to engage in that. So that that comes through through through things like retrieval practice, lots of checking for understanding. So I call colour pair share lots of practice activities, and then we can go about how we’re going to sort of get them to the point where they’re gonna produce a really nice piece of structured rights and and this is really, this is all about scaffold and obviously, eventually, we’re gonna pull that scaffold away. So the first part of this is student Have to retrieve some knowledge, retrieve some retrieve some information. So we’ve collected all of their ideas. And then through sort of like pair share and cold call, we call any ideas that don’t sort of stand up to the to the piece of work that we’re doing, don’t stand up to the question or the purpose of the writing activity. From there, we need to think about how we can organise our ideas. So this is thinking about my work with Oliver in terms of our book organise ideas, how can we organise our ideas so that when it comes to the writing aspects of the activity, the mind is free to engage in the act of writing isn’t opposed to thinking about what it is that I should be writing about. So here we’re thinking about the structure. And if I think about certain things that I’ve done with students that have worked really, really well, if once we’ve gone through collecting the ideas, we represent our ideas through some sort of graphical made like a graphic organiser, a mind map, for example. Once I’ve got students the stage where they’re really, really fluent at doing that, and they’re skilled at doing that, I can show them how each element of their diagram could be transformed and translated into a distinct paragraph within their piece of text. So we go about the Collect the collection of ideas for the retrieval practice, we organise our ideas. And now we’re free to be in writing. And this always, it blows my mind. And I think for some students, I had a year seven student last year said to me, so why can’t all subjects teach me to write like this? Is he just he just flew away with it. And it was, it was so fantastic to see because I fail to see how any other sort of way out any other technique, and I’m sure I’m sure there’s lots of other great ideas out there. But for that student at that time, I failed, see any other way that he would have got to that point without that sort of sequence? So it’s really, really carefully thought out about? What are the main ideas, I want students to be able to express and share their understanding? How are they going to organise it and again, lots of modelling lots of use of the visualizer. And then how they’re going to transform and translate that into their own into their own understanding and how they’re going to write about that. So that final act of the writing, the first part is always me modelling and demonstrating students having a go at the next paragraph on their own and me scrap walking around lots of reading, maybe getting some students work underneath the visualizer. And so I feel confident I say, off you go, you’re free to run away with it. And it’s not something because of the investment in time, it is an investment in time. It’s not something I use frequently. But I do look at one to two opportunities per half term with a class where we’re going to produce an extended piece of writing and we’re going to place emphasis on it, we’re going to provide opportunities afterwards for us to go back and refine it and improve it and redraft that piece of work. So it’s something that at the end of it they can be particularly proud of, but also something that we can really, really push and stretch the students.

Craig Barton 38:11
This is good this, David, this is really good. So this is another area where I’m completely out of my depth. And I’m here because again, all I can relate to here is those kinds of multi step problems in maths where kids have to be quite structured and write a few sensors and a bit of work in and again, Mike, my kids are often terrible at them. So I need to get better. So I’ll tell you where I’m at here. And I’ve got a couple of questions for you. So one mistake I’ve made in the past is just assuming kids can can write in a coherent, organised flute, when advise, faulty assumption, to say the least. One thing I found helps, but I think I’m still missing a key piece here is doing what we talked about earlier, where you get kids to kind of almost talk in sentences as a bridge to them writing in sentences. So using those verbal stems and prompts, simple things in maths, like the answer is this because just to make sure kids get into that habit of not just saying is 27 and so on and so forth. But what I’m really intrigued by here is this almost middle step that you’ve got in because you’ve talked about kind of speaking to collect the ideas, but then you’ve got this organisational part of it. And that feels like the absolute key part of this process. Now, of course, you’ve got a whole book on this, David, but I wonder if you can just give us a few little kind of key takeaways, what does this look like this organising it? Are we talking kind of mind maps diagrams, one simple way for kids to do this.

David Goodwin 39:28
So there are we arrived at for four different types of organiser. And this these four categories are sort of ubiquitous, ubiquitous throughout conversations around knowledge, but they might crop up as different in through using different terms. For example, one group of the organisers would be chunk where you’re defining and you’re categorising things. So if for example, I’m looking at the characteristics of hard and soft engineering strategies of river management And I’m defining I’m chunking. I’m categorising, I’m organising so that I can define something, you could then look at how you can compare and contrast ideas or compare and contrast concepts. So again, that’s a distinct category. So we’ve got chunk, we’ve got compare, and then we’ve got sequence. So certain things that we want students to write about are going to be in some sort of sequence. If I want students to write about the formation of sand dunes, there’s a clear sequence of events that result in the formation of a sand gem. And then finally, if there is the, I want students to engage in cause and effect, there’s a group of organisers that best represent knowledge and information, it for cause and effect. So when it comes to organising, we select one of the organisers that best represents the information that we want the students to then go on to write about. And when they’re organising their ideas. To save time, there was a variety of little tricks can create templates, we, you know, our model, how to go about constructing them in the first instance. And again, it’s really worth pointing out here that it is an investment in time. And it’s not something that I would always do. But if it’s if I think it’s going to serve a purpose, which, when it comes to sort of extended pieces or rites, it does that, you know, that’s why I’m going to do it. So when they go, once they’ve constructed their organiser, there’s, again, a variety of different things we can do in terms of check from the standard. So we can have peer to peer explanations. So we can have students have to engage in in that one of the things I’ve done more recently, which absolutely was just worked so well was, rather than building, creating an organised on a lesson, do it incrementally spread, sort of split the load. So for example, at the start of every two to three lessons, at the end of the lesson, I’d say right class, you’re now going to create a new branch of your mind map. So on that branch of the Mind Map, you’re going to summarise everything that you’ve learned in the last two to three lessons. And then the next lesson that came in and before they did any sort of retrieval practice, the first thing they do is they get the mind map out and they explain that explain each of the branches to their peer, put your Mind Map away, now we’re going to engage in some retrieval practice. And the reason I sort of did that was, was a piece of the there’s been two pieces of research just recently about how having some sort of practice or rehearsal before retrieval practice. And I don’t know that specific neuroscience that ideas behind it, it triggers something in terms of memory traces that enhances the retrieval practice effect. So we had them doing that few lessons down the line, because the spread the load in terms of the terms of constructing the organiser, we haven’t invested so much time in one book or lesson. Now we’re free to use this as some sort of tool to help us learn. And that’s the important thing. Like, we’re not creating a mind map for the sake of creating a mind map. We’re creating it so that it’s a tool that serves a purpose. It helps augment our thinking, helps organise our ideas so that when it comes to writing our minds a little bit more free. Working memory is not constrained. We’re trying to juggle the act of writes in the complexities of syntax, and all of the ideas and concepts we want our students to write about. It’s not overburdened, so to speak.

Craig Barton 43:12
I love this. I love this. And just one final question on this one now, pretty much every episode on tips for teachers podcast, we mentioned mini whiteboards, right, and it always kicks off. So let me I don’t want to break a habit here. And so I’m a big fan of mini whiteboards. And in the past, I’ve used them just for you know, checking for understanding if single question, sorry, single responses. So what five times six, put them on my whiteboard, and so on. But the more I’ve messed around over the last few months, the more I see the potential certainly maths for them to be used for more kind of complex answers. So maybe the kids actually, you know, write five or six lines on these mini whiteboards. And they do them as instead of writing in their text in their exercise book, because they can then swap them more easily with the person next to them. As you mentioned before the teacher can grab them and stick them under the visualizer more or hold them up. Do in terms of getting the kids better at writing to do mini whiteboards play any role at all for you, David in this particular aim,

David Goodwin 44:07
yes, you know, what do you know there’s a few things that I like about them number one, number one is you always have the really really conscientious student that doesn’t want to commit to paper and the because they’re frightened, they’re going to get it wrong. And I don’t want to because if we got across it and my books messy, so I think for that straight away giving them sort of like this is a rough rough draft is your opportunity to rehearse that that’s really useful. I also like to use them as well as I’ve modelled something to the class and I like to model similar problems or similar scenarios but not the you know, not the one that I want them to have a go at themselves. Now you have a go at writing your first two to three sentences on those mini whiteboards right now turn to your partner and read it to them and give give one another feedback like how well does that stand up to the to the model All right. The model example that Mr. Goodman just shared with us give it to a feedback rework. It redraft it and then when they feel confident and this is the teacher when you feel confident that you’re going to get those high levels of success. Now commit to paper. So yeah, absolutely, I think that is a, I sort of walk around now with one of my hands as sort of, as well as I’m working with students like when they’re working independently, and I’m scanning and reading, right, you know, giving them some pointers, leave them in the white pot, they’re coming back collects it, rub it out and give it to someone else. So yeah, as a sort of tool to help students rehearse and practice in ready for commit into paper. Yeah, that super powerful. I did love your session with Adam on mini whiteboards, I think was great.

Craig Barton 45:49
Yeah, he’s good. He’s good. All right, David, what’s tip number five.

David Goodwin 45:56
So tip number five, just retrieval, like retrieval practice, how to make it work, how to how to get the most out of it. So it doesn’t just become sort of pop quiz. And I think we probably as a community spoken about retrieval practice a lot. And it’s arguably the closest thing we’re going to get to a silver bullet. But how do we how do we sort of get the most out of it so that, as I said, it doesn’t sort of become poor, queasy, and simple, simple acts of just just retrieving. So I think I’ve touched upon a few things already the idea of providing opportunities to practice, but also just making sure that whatever, whatever you want, or if you’re about to introduce something new, and it’s the first time that or you might think that students have been taught before, but you don’t want to assume how can you use your retrieval practice as a means by which to check that the prerequisite knowledge is there that there’s a safe level of understanding there so that you are ready to begin introducing the new content. So example that springs to mind immediately, if I want to talk teach my students about the distribution of the tropical rainforest, it would be really, really useful if they can recall why the equator was the warmest place on earth. Like that would be really really useful information. It would be even more useful if they understood APSET atmospheric circulation and why the equator happens to be the wettest place on earth. Because it’s sort of immediately we can get away from this misconception that deserts are found on the equator because it’s really hot, which isn’t the case. There’s it’s out fondle, and the equator, along the equator is really hot and really wet. So I can check they’ve got that prerequisite knowledge about why they equate is the warmest placement, as well as think about how I might be able to on Earth, any sort of misconceptions through Kirt carefully planned out my retrieval practice. So I think it’s really important that I’m sort of going through a phase that we’re not a face or any sort of a transition at whole school level where retrieval practice for a lot of a lot of teachers in my school is going to be something that is relatively new to them. So I’m trying to think about systematically how I’m introducing that to my to my colleagues. So at the moment, we just have what we call sort of like a high five recall. And the idea is that it’s five simple recall questions. But what we’re, we’re sort of doing here is we’re training the teachers and the students to get familiar with the routines around how that’s going to work. And sort of the next step is thinking about how we can be better at create, engineering our questions so that they do build into what is being and so we’re activating those, those concepts that are within our schema to prepare for the new content that’s been introduced, I think it’s really important that, you know, retrieval practice isn’t something that’s taken place in your school, or it’s something that’s new to you, establishing the routines that, you know, as you said earlier, create the means of participation into how we’re going about how we’re going to go about doing retrieval practice is really important. And not to sort of try and sprint before you can walk really sort of progressively build it up so that it becomes more sophisticated. And it becomes, you know, progressively more challenging as well. And it’s sort of a little bit of a journey. I think if I if I think back to three or four years ago, with my own practice, I was pretty much quiz, quiz, quiz, retrieval, but not really carefully thinking about how, how it can be done in a really thoughtful and meaningful way. So that does activate prior knowledge, and does help build you built on what has been what has come before it.

Craig Barton 49:34
I love this. Any opportunity to talk about retrieval, I’m always more than happy. So I’m really pleased you brought this up. So I’ve have two big questions for you here, David. And, again, there’s, well I don’t think there’s easy answers to these because I’m always wrestling with these but I’m always interested in getting other people’s take. So the first one is a mistake I’ve made and you’ve alluded to this is my retrieval practice has always been these kinds of come a shallow knowledge kind of quiz, quiz style quiz. Students and my concern there is that, let’s say on a scheme of work, and I’m intrigued whether this this, this holds true in geography as well, let’s say you’ve got two weeks to teach a topic, whatever it is percentages. By the end of those two weeks, the kids are probably doing some quite sophisticated things with percentages, some quite nice problem solving, and so on and so forth. But then flash forward to four weeks later, and all of a sudden, a percentage question appears in your do now or your start or your homework. Invariably, it’s going to be back to almost kind of surface level knowledge, very rarely do retrieval opportunities, provide the depth of thinking that kids have been exposed to when they’ve been learning the topic on which they need to be exposed to to to understand something. So is that something that you can relate to David, perhaps either in your subject in your prior teaching, or in your school that often retrieval doesn’t go as deep as perhaps it needs to?

David Goodwin 50:49
Yeah, there’s a there’s a time consideration as well as so you’ve got to weigh up. How much time can you invest in the retrieval as well as introducing new content. But I think it’s a bit foolish to sort of move on if if what what they need to know that’s come before it isn’t, isn’t really secure. But then equally, you’ve got, again, you’ve got to think about time. So I look at, again, a few sort of big opportunities within the curriculum where the retrieval that you can do is going to be really meaningful and really challenging. And again, you can’t do this all of the time. But think back to something I did with a yellow elevens a couple of years ago, where we were introducing about three or four lessons into it into a new topic. And what I wanted to do was show students how what they’ve learned previously linked to what they were learning. So the first part was, we did some quite simple retrieval, some basic recall questions. Okay. So right, this first column, this is where you reek, all of the answers are going to go in this fit to set up a simple table, all your answers are going to go in this first column. Now what I want you to think about classes, as some further some questions from some knowledge that we learnt further back in time, and then some questions from even further. So we’ve got three columns of knowledge that had been there previously. Now we’re going to do some retrieval about what we’re what we’re currently learning these last three lessons, and then we’re going to explore between all of these concepts and ideas how these different things link. So now, what we’ve got here is we’re not just superficially, you know, answering loads of those questions, we’re actually thinking about really, where are the links between them? And I’ve thought about it really, really carefully in terms of what, what knowledge did I want students to encounter, but an equally what surprises might come along. So when once we’ve done this sort of retrieval of these three topics, and the current topic we’re learning, we would create a concept map that showed all of the links between all of these these big ideas. But what I found through doing it was some, some students genuinely identified some genuine links that I hadn’t thought about myself. And then from there, we went about actually producing a quite an extended piece of writing that demonstrated what they understood from the whole process. It was, it probably took about one one and a half to two lessons worth of sort of work to get to that point. But again, the the the depth and the breadth of knowledge that they covered, I cannot see any sort of other way that I could have covered that, that quantity. And so to that extent, and again, it’s not something you can do all of the time, but it was a worthy investment, because there was some really, really sort of big meaty concepts that students hadn’t considered in that sort of context before, and how and how everything sort of linked together.

Craig Barton 53:53
It’s really interesting, really interesting maximise, my second one is, and this happens in math, and again, I’m intrigued on your take on this, there are certain things that tend to get left out of retrieval opportunities. And there are kind of two categories for these. So the first is there’s a load of topics in math that are just a bit of a pain to quiz kids on because either they require specialist equipment, you know, like measuring angles, you gotta get up attractors, or constructing perpendicular bisectors outcome, the compasses, and teachers like Oh, for God’s sake, if I start my lesson with that, and the kids, you know what I mean? So they tend to get kind of left out a little bit. And that’s obviously a problem. Because if we don’t provide these retrieval opportunities, kids forget them. So that’s one area that happens in maths. The other thing that I think is quite interesting as well is there are quite a few topics in maths and math teachers may shoot me down for this, but aren’t actually prerequisite for that many of the topics. So a good example here is rotation. So once the kids know how to rotate an object, that’s kind of the end of the story there. It’s not like that skill is going to be prerequisite for something that they then learn in year 10 Or year. haven’t. So if teachers are just relying on retrieval being prior knowledge, there’s a danger that some topics may not bubble up as much as other topics. So I just wonder, do you encounter either of those two things, either the painful to quiz things that tend to get left out? Or things that actually, it’s not fair to say that kind of one offs, but almost they’re not as much prior? They’re not prerequisite as much as other things would be, if that makes sense.

David Goodwin 55:27
Yeah, definitely. The first one is thinking grid references using Matt, just anything where it’s not as a teacher, as well as thinking about everything else that we have just managing time. So like if we want to manage our workload, creating a whole host of practice tasks around? Yeah, create a whole load of practice tasks around four figure six figure grid references, latitude and longitude isn’t it’s not the it’s not the easiest thing. The second, the second one? Yeah, I imagine. It’s not something I can, I can say for sure, just just off my head, but I’m sure there will be some, some concepts, some ideas that are less purposeful than others in terms of their links to, you know, new content, and the idea of them being prerequisite knowledge. Yeah, that absolutely. And I think it’s just really about being really, really meticulous in terms of the curriculum planning and how, you know, that the knowledge begets knowledge and how it builds on each other. And, you know, it’s the idea that curriculum works never done, isn’t it like, it’s, you can think that you’ve, you’ve sort of got retrieval practice mastered. But then you there’s always something like, If I think to, again, two or three years ago, I was doing it, and I was in a brilliant retrieval practice, like this is really good. It’s got to be a lot better than what I’ve done in the past. And it is, but now I think about what I’m doing now. And it’s much better than what I was doing sort of two or three years ago. So yeah, I think we’re really, collectively within your, you know, within your team within your department really thinking about your curriculum, and what are the big sort of concepts and ideas? And those are the ones that spiral through your curriculum, the ones that you’re going to pay more attention to? So then, maybe some of those, you know, like you said, their rotation.

Craig Barton 57:25
That’s brilliant, fascinating. Well, these have been five amazing tips. David, let me hand over to you. What should listeners check out of yours?

David Goodwin 57:34
What should listeners check out? Mark’s got a new book coming out with Michael Charles gear one, which is a book for trainee teachers. Your tips for teachers actually features a lot in terms of quotes and ideas sort of from? Yes, I’ve got got that coming up. My my sort of work with Oliver cavatelli, we not long but I finished the project with Mr. Turner on the extended mind and about how similar to some of the ideas that I talked about, and how about how we can sort of spread the load of thinking to manage our working memory. So it’s, you know, we think about the tools that we can use that can serve serve learning, but also manage limitations of working memory. So that was quite a, an interesting project. Some people might find useful.

Craig Barton 58:26
Fantastic. We’ll put links to all of that in the show notes. And Well, David, this has been fantastic. I’m been a big fan of your work on Twitter for a long time now. So I’m really pleased that you agreed to came on the show. So David, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us. Thank you, Greg.

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Tell your students why you are doing the Do Now
2. Make the first question easy
3. Consider not asking students to copy the question
4. Circulate the room
5. Consider how you will check for understanding

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

• Amazon
• John Catt

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter
2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast
3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton. And welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about the do now, just before we dive in a quick reminder that this is available both as an audio podcast and also as a video. So you can choose your preferred medium and share with colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either below the podcast in the show notes or below the video in the description or on tips for teachers dot code at UK write the do now.

So the do now is the name commonly given to that activity that you want students to engage in at the very start of the lesson. And I’m very lucky these days, I get to watch hundreds of lessons. And I’m obsessed with the start of the lesson. And what I’ve been trying to do over the last few years is to spot what actions teachers take that make that started the lesson as effective as possible. And in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I’ve compiled together 15 ideas that I’ve learned from teachers far better than me to improve that start the lesson to do now. And in this video, I’m going to share five of those ideas with you.

So tip number one, tell your students why you are doing the due now. So I’ve got a bit of a theory. And that is out of all the parts of the lesson. I think it’s the start of the lesson that students take the least serious. And you can see this either from the child who’s kind of just slowly copying the title down not really engaging, or the student who’s just kind of sat off. And then whenever the lesson in inverted commas starts properly, they suddenly sit up and start concentrating. And I asked students when I see this, I said, What’s going on here? Why are you doing this? And they say, well, it’s just a start, the lesson is just a starter, as if it’s kind of something that teachers doing for a bit of a laugh. So if you want to get your students to engage in the do now one key thing is for them to understand exactly why you’re doing it. And there’s lots of different reasons you might be doing it. It might be a check for retrieval, it might be you’re quizzing students on things that they’ve done in the past, to make sure that you slow down the rate of forgetting. So if that’s the case, tell your students that, or it may be a prerequisite knowledge check, you may be asking them questions to check that they’re in the right place for to build upon the new idea to build a new idea upon later in the lesson. If that’s the case, tell them that while you’re doing that, all they do now might be a reaction to something you did the previous lesson, if so, tell them or it may be a direct response to homework, if so tell them if students don’t know why you’re doing what they’re doing, why you’re doing what you’re doing, there’s much less chance that they’re going to take it seriously and engage in it.

Tip number two, make the first question easy. Now by this I mean two things. Firstly, make me make it easy in terms of difficulty. And the reason for this is you want students to get off to a good start. You want them to be able to just settle down and crack straight on with the first question without saying sir, I’m stuck on this and so on. And you want them to get a sense of success and kind of flow that they then take through to the second question to the third question, and so on on the do now. So I think it’s quite a sensible idea to order your difficulty in your do now from easiest to hardest, but certainly make that first question accessible. But by easy what I also mean is you don’t want easy in terms of access. You don’t want students after certainly a mask to need specialist equipment for it. So imagine kids are sat down. Finally the settle they look up question while and they realise they need a protractor or a compass or even like a ruler or a calculator. Also the hands go up, sir, I don’t have this, sir. I need other rustling around their bags or somewhere like that. No, no, you can destroy that fragile silence or that fragile focus. So that first question easy in terms of difficulty, and no equipment needed, the kids can just crack straight on.

Tip three, this is a bit of a bugbear of mine, you know, consider not asking students to copy the question and saying the majority of do nails that I see. And I can only speak from my experience as a maths teacher. The kids are required to copy the question though, and I don’t I don’t see the point in this. And also what it opens the door for is what Adam boxer calls busy tricking? Where from the front of the room looking out you’ve got to see of kids who are all writing things down in their books. But what are they writing down? The writing the flipping question down. They’re not learning from that it’s slowing them down. And you just got to think why? Why are you asking kids to copy the question down? And often the responses it’s so they can revise from it in the future. But the kids revise from the do now random kind of retrieval do now scattered throughout the book. I’m not so sure so it’s just worth considering whether copying down the question is the best use of limited class time.

Tip Four circulate the room. I’ve been guilty of this, you know, the kids are working on the do now. So you take that opportunity to get yourself ready for the lesson whether it’s do the register handout books, whatever it may be. couple of problems with that. First is that you can’t pick up on this kind of busy tricking or kids sitting off from the front of the room as easily as you can if you’re around all the kids And secondly, what invariably happens when the teacher is kind of tied to the front of the room is they miss time the do now. So the do now is either cut or cut short before kids have got on to the last two questions and then the teacher is going through things on the board that the kids haven’t even had a chance to think about. All the due now lasts far too long. And kids are just sat there bored switching off and so on. The best way to time to do now is to circulate the room and get a sense of where your students are at by looking at their work. So circulate the room during the due now.

And the fifth and final tip. I love this one, you know, consider how you’ll check for understanding. So what tends to happen with the do now is it’s done in books, that’s absolutely fine. But the problem with working books is it becomes very difficult to get a whole class check of understanding and what tends to happen. So in math, so if you have you do now like this is the teachers Okay, let’s go through the answers. And they’ll pick a question like this question here about the regular polygon. And they’ll pick one or two students. So Tom, how did you What did you get for this? Erica, what did you get for this? Two problems with that as a check for understanding? Firstly, it takes quite a long time, because you’re having to hear from one child from another child. And to even if you do hear from two kids, you’ve only heard from two kids potentially two out of 30. So how do you know whether the rest of the students understood it? So what I think it’s much better is that the students do the due now in their books. And then when it’s time to go through the answers you say, right, okay, we’re gonna go through the answer to this question here. So very quickly, on your mini whiteboards Can you all write down not your work? And just your final answer nice and big. Put it on your boards, okay, have a three to one, show me. And then straightaway, you’ve got to very quickly, you’ve got a sense of whole class understanding. So with that understanding is there you can just crack on with the next question. Or if you see a load of problems, you’ve identified that as a problem, you can decide whether you’re going to sort it out there and then I’ll come back to it later. Either way, it’s a quicker and much more reliable check for understanding than simply asking one or two students so what I’m I’m obsessed with mini whiteboards, but one of their main benefits is to get book work out of books, so it can become a whole class check for understanding.

So there’s five tips to improve the do now let’s just go over them. Tip one, tell your students why you’re doing to do now. Tip two, make the first question easy and accessible. Tip three, consider not asking students to copy the question. Tip Four circulate the room. Tip Five, consider how you will check for understanding which of those you already do. And are there any of those that you don’t do that you feel are important that you can build into your practice.

Just as a reminder loads of other stuff. I’m checking for understanding responsive teaching in my tips for teachers, but along with loads of other ideas about loads of different aspects of teaching. And also my tips for teachers website is tips for teachers dot Kota UK, you’ll find the tips of teachers podcast, where I speak to the world’s leading educationalists and inspirational teachers who share practical ideas you can use the very next time you step into a classroom. I also record those conversations as videos so you can share them and use them in CPD sessions. I’ve also got the tips for teachers newsletter where you can sign up to receive a tip in your inbox every Monday morning to try out the very next day in classrooms. And finally, if you’re interested in more CPD, there’s online and face to face CPD available all at tips for teachers dot Coda uk. Thanks so much for watching.

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Tell your students what you are doing and why
2. Use gestures
3. Prompt self-explanation
4. Allow adequate thinking time
5. Ask students to write questions after Silent Teacher

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

• Amazon
• John Catt

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter
2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast
3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton, and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five, all about Silent teacher. Now just before we crack on a reminder that this is available as an audio podcast, but also as a video podcast, so you can choose your preferred medium and share it with your colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either in the podcast show notes, or the video description or on tips for teachers.co.uk.

Right, so silent teacher, what on earth is silent teaching? Well, as you’d imagine, it’s the teacher being silent specifically during the modelling part of a lesson. In maths, this would often be during the worst example. Now, why on earth would a teacher want to be silent during that part? Well, it’s kind of the opposite of what I used to do. While I was doing my work examples, where I’d be writing loads, I’d be chatting loads, and I’d be expecting my students to write and take notes. So I’d be wanting my students to watch, listen and write at the same time, it was just too much for them. So I stripped it right down and said, Okay, the first time I’m going to present this to you, I’m not going to say a word, I want you to watch what I’m doing and think really hard. And it seems to be quite powerful.

So over the last three to four years, or more so actually, I’ve been developing this technique and crucially, I’ve been learning from people who are far better at this than me, and tried to compile together different ways to make it work effectively. Now, in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I share 14 ideas to improve silent teacher. In this video, I’m going to pick out five of my favourites.

So tip number one is to tell your students what you’re doing and why this is really important with with anything really any new idea, it’s important to get the students on board and to justify why you’re doing it’s a good way to do that. But particularly silent teacher, because sound teachers are really weird thing to do. If you all of a sudden you stop talking while you’re doing your modelling, your kids are thinking you’ve lost your mind. Remember, I had a girl in my class called Rachel in my year eight class lovely girl did silent teacher didn’t tell the kids what I was doing and why Rachel’s mum phoned in, say Rachel’s como she’s saying you’re not talking to them anymore. So you can see it’s important to get the kids on board. One way I found is to say to students, look, I’m not going to talk while I’m doing this, this modelling this time. And that’s to reduce all kinds of distractions. So you can focus all your attention on simply watching what I’m doing, and try and understand that. So whatever it takes to kind of get your students on board by offering some kind of justification for this weird thing you’re going to be doing feels important.

Okay, tip number two gestures. So whenever you remove your voice, it’s really important that you bring something else into play to direct students attention. Because if you just go through a word, for example, in silence, you can’t, it’s quite difficult for you to pinpoint exactly where you want your students watching at any one time, when you can’t say things like, look at that too, or see what happens here, and so on. So gestures worked really well. So this can be something as simple as just pointing pointing to the part of the worked example, and the model that you want students to look at at any one time. But what it can also be is kind of gesturing for when you want your students to do the thinking. So maybe stepping away from the board at the point where you want them to think, what’s he just done, and so on, and so forth. So making use of hands pointing, if you want to do a bit of acting like you know, touch your head when you want them thinking something like that. But gestures are really important as part of silent teaching.

Tip three self explanation. Now there’s a real danger that the silent teaching can be a passive experience for students. If you’re not speaking, and the kids aren’t speaking, they can just sit there daydreaming in their minds wandering off anywhere, nobody’s learning anything. So you want silent teacher to be a really active process for students. So to do that, what we’re going to do is prompt self explanation. Now there’s a whole load of research into the power of self explaining. And what I’m going to try and do in silent teacher is to pick out two key things, two key types of self explaining I want students to do that’s principled, that’s where students try to figure out what’s just happened and predictive, that’s where they tried to predict what’s going to happen next. So what I do whilst solid teachers happening is I say to students, every time I pause, and this is where the gesture comes into play. It could just be you could might just stop or you might put your hand on your head or you might step away from the board. Every time students see you do that. This is what I want them thinking about. What’s he just done? And what do I think he’s going to do next principled? Can you explain what I’ve just done? Predictive? Can you predict what I’m going to do next? And if students can engage in this type of self explaining behaviour, they’re going to be more active in the process. They’re gonna start piecing things together in themselves and so on.

Tip four hole this is a biggie Allah Our adequate thinking time, there’s a real danger that we do this all the time, when we’re doing our modelling, we go too fast because of curse of knowledge, we understand this. So we don’t appreciate just how difficult something might be for students. But particularly when you’re kind of doing things in silence, the silence can feel like it’s lasting forever, when actually, it’s only taken a few seconds. So if you want your students to go through that process, we just talked about what’s he just done? What’s he going to do next, they’re going to need time to do that. And it may only be a few seconds, but every time we write a line, a key line, it’s important that we step away from the board, and give students that time to process what’s he just done? What’s he going to do next, then we return and write the next line and pause again. So they have an opportunity to take that in was what happened, what they expected to happen. And as I say, this only needs to be a few seconds each time. But it’s important, we get into that habit that we don’t just race through line after line with no opportunity for students to reflect. And as I say, that’s why I find stepping away from the board can slow me down and also provide that prompt that it’s time for students to self explain.

Fifth and final tip, ask students to write questions after silent teacher. Now I don’t want students making notes during silent teacher that falls back into the trap I used to do with my work examples where students were writing stuff down, and missing key things that was happening on the board. So no writing down while silent teachers happening are all my students eyes on the board. But after I’ve gone through silent teacher, students may be a bit confused. They may be thinking, how did he do that? Where did that seven come from? What’s going on there? Or they may have a question that they want to ask me at some point. Did you do this, because of this, and so on. So it’s a really good idea at the end of silent teacher just to give students a minute, two minutes, whatever feels appropriate, just to jot down anything that they spotted any questions they have anything they’re confused about. Now, it’s up to you what you do with that my preferred thing after that is to then give students an opportunity to discuss with their partner so put their mini whiteboards between them and compare questions. And what you’ll find there is often students can sort out a lot of the problems themselves, or after that period, you can then invite students to ask you questions from their board, whatever. But I just think giving students an opportunity to in a sense, kind of unburden their working memories, all the things that they’ve taken, injuring Santi, she’s given them an opportunity to get it down on paper, and then you can do something with that afterwards.

So there are five tips to help you improve silent teacher, we just go over those tip number one, tell your students what you’re doing and why. Tip two, make full use of gestures. Tip three prompt self explanation. Tip Four, allow adequate thinking time. And Tip Five, ask students to write questions after silent teacher. If you’ve tried silent teacher already, which of those do you already do. And if you have tried silent teacher are there any of those that you don’t do that you feel are important that you can build into your practice.

As a reminder, there’s loads of extra tips on silent teacher and everything about explaining and modelling plus loads of other aspects of teaching in my tips for teachers book. And if you head to tips for teachers dot code at UK you’ll also find the tips for teachers podcast where I speak to incredible teachers and educationalists who share tips with us. I record each of those conversations as a video as well and chop up those videos into individual tips so you can share those Twilights and CPD sessions. And there’s also the free tips for teachers newsletter where you get a tip sent to your inbox every Monday morning to try out in lessons that come in week. And finally, there’s more tips for teachers online CPD sessions and face to face CPD sessions. Again available tips for teachers dot code at UK thanks so much for watching.

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Use a diagnostic question
2. Give an interesting example
3. Give an interesting non-example
4. What do you understand?
5. What is the hardest question you know how to answer?

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

• Amazon
• John Catt

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter
2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast
3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton, and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about checking for understanding. Now just before we dive in a reminder that you can access this as an audio podcast, and also as a video, so you can choose your preferred medium and share with colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either below the podcast in the show notes or below the video in the description, or on tips for teachers.co.uk.

Right checking for understanding now I think you can make the case that checking for understanding is one of if not the most important things that we need to build into our teaching armoury. Because without good checks for understanding, we’ve no idea if our students are learning things, understanding things, developing misconceptions, and so on.

Now, there’s loads of different ways that we can check for understanding. And I’m going to use a kind of concrete example for this as a as a math teacher, I’m going to choose a math specific topic. But hopefully, these ideas will transfer across different maths topics and also across different subjects. So the maths topic I’ve chosen is the wonderful world of equivalent fractions. And I want you to imagine that I just taught a class, the method of how to check fractions are equivalent, how to generate more equivalent fractions and so on. And I want to check their understanding. Now one option is I do it like this, I give them a worksheet or ask them questions of this form. Now notice these are very procedural, very mechanical, very algorithmic, it’s, it’s checking student’s understanding, but only at a very surface level. Now that’s important, these types of questions are important. But if this is all we give our students as part of that check for understanding, I don’t think we have any way of knowing just how deep and secure their understanding is.

So over the last few years, as I’ve been lucky enough to watch hundreds of lessons, I’ve been making notes, or have the different types of checks for understanding that skill teachers do. And in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I’ve shared 10 different types of questions that teachers use when checking for understanding. And in this video, I’m going to share five of my favourite of those, all of which are based around equivalent fractions, but hopefully the idea is transfer.

So the first one is to use diagnostic questions to check for understanding. Now I love a diagnostic question. I’ve got the website diagnostic questions.com 10s of 1000s of free diagnostic questions for all subjects. I think diagnostic questions are great for checking for understanding for two reasons. Firstly, if a child gets a diagnostic question wrong, you learn something about the specific nature of their misunderstanding, because diagnostic questions when they’re designed well, the wrong answers, there’s a reason behind them a common misconception, a common misunderstanding. So if you have a sense of why your students got something wrong, instead of just that they’ve got it wrong, then you can direct your support accordingly. That’s one reason. The second reason I love diagnostic questions is that once you’ve established what the correct answer is, you can turn your attention or your students attention to the wrong answers. So you can say things like, Okay, we know c is wrong. Why am I not a student? Think the correct answer is C, we’ll get the students to write down that can they understand where somebody might go wrong? And I love this one as well. You can say OK, sees the wrong answer. Can you change the question as little as possible to make see the correct answer? So you get more for your money when using diagnostic questions as a check for understanding.

Okay, Tip two, I really like this one, give an interesting example. I’m a bit obsessed. In fact, forget bits are massively obsessed with learner generated examples. And in the tips of teachers book, I do a massive tip all about learning generated examples. But we’ll just do briefly here why I think they’re really good to use as a check for understanding. So we can give our students examples all day long on worksheets once we think up and so on. And that’s important. But a real good way to see what our students understand is to challenge them to generate an example themselves. And I find that asking them to generate an interesting example, gives us a sense of where the boundary of their understanding is. So if I just say, give me an example of an equivalent fraction, that’s fine, but students could come up with something simple, a half and two quarters, give me an interesting example. Well, then they have to think a bit outside the box, and they start pushing towards the boundary of their understanding. And that’s where we want to see what where’s the edge? Where is it for them. And of course, they may tip over, they may tip over into something that isn’t an equivalent fraction. But that’s really important to know. And what we can do with these interesting examples. Students can write them down many white board books, whatever, we can then collect a load of them together, bang them up on the board, and then discuss them as a whole class. Are these two fractions equivalent? How do we know they’re equivalent and so on?

Related to that that kind of sibling of the interesting example is the interesting non example lover non example didn’t do enough of this. Many years as a teacher, non examples are so powerful. But again, interesting non examples I’m interested in, I don’t just want like one half and 2122 2150 2155, or something like that. I want interesting non examples. So a good way to phrase this with students is to say, can you come up with a pair of fractions that somebody might think is equivalent? But in fact, they’re not. So this is a challenge to students? Can they get to the other side of that boundary of that we talked about before? How far can they push their knowledge the and get to the other side? So this is great to do, again, get the students to write down an interesting pair of fractions that are not equivalent, bang, a few up on the board. And again, we can have a discussion, Are these not equivalent? How would we convince somebody that they’re not equivalent, and so on? So asking students for non examples of the things that you’ve just taught them, I think worked really well.

Tip four is nice. So a classic thing I did for many, many years is I’d say to students, do you understand? Are we happy with that? So do you understand equivalent fractions, everybody happy with equivalent fractions? And the problem you’ve got there is, firstly, it’s really easy for students to opt out of that. But secondly, you’re not assessing their understanding, you’re assessing their perception of understanding. Yeah, we think we understand this. No, no, no, no, what we need instead is a natural check for understanding. So flip it on its head a bit. Instead of Do you understand what do you understand write down on a mini whiteboard, write me down three things you understand about equivalent fractions. Really, really powerful check for understanding that and then again, we can collect together some different responses and talk through them.

And fifth and final one. I know I say this all the time, but I really like this one as well. You know, what’s the hardest question you know how to answer? So say two students taught you equivalent fractions? On your mini whiteboard? On one side of the mini whiteboard right? me the hardest equivalent fractions question you know how to answer yourself. And on the other side of the mini whiteboard, write down how you answer it, write me down, the working out, or any annotations in and so on. And of course, what we can do students can swap with their partner or I can collect a few upon the board and we can try them out as a class and so on. I really like that one.

So to recap, there’s five tips to improve your check your understanding to move those checks away from the kind of surface level procedural so the more interesting, the more challenging, the more reliable check for the depth of students understanding. So tip number one use diagnostic questions. Tip number two, challenge students to come up with their own interesting example. Tip three challenge students to come up with their own interesting non example. Tip Four, ask students what they understand. And Tip Five, what is the hardest question you know how to answer.

There’s a load more extra tips on checking for understanding in tips of teachers plus over 400 tips on loads of different aspects of teaching as well. And in addition, if you go to tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll find the tips for teachers podcast where some of the world’s leading educational and inspirational teachers share practical tips you can use the very next time you step into a classroom. I also capture the videos of those conversations and chop them up into individual tips so you can share them with colleagues. And there’s the tips for teachers newsletter, a lovely new tip arrives in your inbox every Monday morning to trading classes that coming week. And finally, I’ve got available, some on demand and face to face tips for teachers CPD sessions, if you want to learn some more, thanks so much for watching.

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Consider getting A3 mini-whiteboards
2. Make use of both sides of the mini-whiteboard
3. Control the flow of information
4. Question students who show you a blank board
5. Use mini-whiteboards to help check book work

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

• Amazon
• John Catt

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter
2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast
3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about effective mini whiteboard use. Just as a reminder, this is available both as an audio podcast and also was a video. And if you want to access either medium just have a look either in the podcast show notes or in the video description or on tips for teachers and you’ll find links to both so you can share it with your colleagues however you choose. Right mini whiteboards a controversial topic for for some teachers, their regular users. And a lot of the things I say may be deemed as obvious. For other teachers. You may be many whiteboard sceptics or perhaps mini whiteboard dabblers, and maybe there’ll be something useful for you in here. Let’s see. And now I should say that in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I share 22 ideas to improve the use of mini whiteboards. In this video and podcast, I’ve chosen my favourite five of those, so hopefully they’ll be useful to you.

So tip number one fairly standard when I’m lucky enough to visit classrooms is to see either a four mini whiteboards or even a five mini whiteboards. I’ll tell you why. If you’ve never tried an a three, one, your life will never be the same again. They’re flippin brilliant. And two reasons why a three whiteboards are good, students can either write more on them, and hence they become much more versatile, they’re more suited in maths for solving more complex problems or in subjects where students write a lot more students can obviously fit more on the board. Or students can write bigger on them, which makes your job when you use them for checking for a whole class understanding much easier. So if you’ve never tried a three before, and perhaps you’re about to order some new ones, or you can convince the person who holds all the cash, just try get a set of a three, you will never look back, I promise you.

Tip number two, this is one of my favourites, this, you know, make use of both sides of the mini whiteboard most mini whiteboards that you’ve got have blank on both sides, or maybe a little bit right and on one of the sides use both of them. What often happens is that students do all their writing and working out on one side of the mini whiteboard. So here’s an example here. Imagine I’ve asked students to expand those double brackets they’ve done their work in out, but they’ve also put their answer. Now when they hold that up, and imagine there’s 30 kids holding up, it’s very difficult for me as the teacher to pick out that answer amidst all the working out. Whereas if instead if I say to students do your work out on one side, then write your final answer nice and big on the other side, students can then hold up the side with the final answer on my check for understanding is there much more simple for me? And then if I then choose to ask a student to articulate why they think the answer is this, they can then use the other side to talk me through they’re working. So working out or notes on one side, the final answer on the other side that they hold on makes a big, big difference.

Tip number three, I really liked this one as well control the flow of information. If you’ve got 25 or 30 students in your class and you say three to one, hold up the board, show me the answers. Visually, it’s very overwhelming to take in all that information, particularly in the kind of five seconds we normally allow ourselves to do it. But if you control the flow of information, it’s much more simple as a teacher to take in what the students are showing you and pick out useful things. So if you’ve got your desks arranged in rows, I say to my students, okay, back row, have your boards three to one, show me your answers. I can then spend a few seconds scanning the background, as I say, That’s okay boards now middle row, have you bought three to one? Show me your answer. So I control the flow of information. Of course, the same thing is going to work. However your room set out if it’s a horseshoe start on the left and the centre then the right, and so on and so forth, but controlling the flow of information, asking one portion of your class to show you them put their boards down and the next portion, I just find I can I can pick out much more interesting answers and get a much better feel of my classes on the standing that way.

Tip number four, the notorious blank board. If you say three to one, show me your answers and a student holds up a blackboard it tells you nothing. Is that due to a lack of understanding? Or is it due to a lack of effort you need to know so whenever you then do your subsequent questioning, question the students who hold up the blank boards first and find out why. Tom, why haven’t you put anything on your board? If Tom says he doesn’t know? Well, then you can use all extra strategies and we’ll talk about these in a subsequent video you can say to tumble What do you know what you can go around the class and say, Okay, Michael, what do you think Emma? What do you think is so now back to you, Tom? Which of those answers do you think is the correct emoji, so on and so on. But the bottom line is, you want it to be effortful. You want the students to notice that if you ever put a blank board, that’s not the end of the story, you’re going to come to them and so on. And if they realise that actually, it’s a lot more hassle to put up a blank board and then be faced with a barrage of questioning, you’re going to filter out straightaway whether it is due to a lack of effort or a lack of understanding, and if in fact it is due to a lack of Understanding you can then help that student out. So questions students who hold up the Blackboard first, and kind of follow up ideas to this as well. You can say to students look, if you don’t know, don’t just put a blank board, either write me down, why don’t you know it? What’s confusing you? Or perhaps write me a question that you’d like to ask me, or write me something that you do know on there, you just want the students to get some information down because a blank board tells you nothing. And the more you start questioning students who have blank boards, and the more you start supporting them with things that they should put down instead, if they’re stuck, the more useful information you’re gonna get.

Final one, I think this is my favourite. Now if I had to pick one, I use mini whiteboards to help chequebook work. Now, certainly maths as a maths teacher, the majority of the work my students do is in their books. The problem with that is it makes it quite difficult to do a whole class check for understanding because students work is tied to their books, and the students kind of hold up their books, the writing is too small, and so on and so forth. So what I do instead is I use the mini whiteboard to help support this. So I’ll give you an example. So this is a classic kind of do now that you might do in maths last last and last topic last term last year. Imagine students are working their way through this, they do it in their books at the start of the lesson. And then you want to get a sense of whole class understanding for that. A second question, a regular polygon has 12 sides, what’s the size of one of the exterior angles? Now what typically happens, certainly my classroom for many years, is I’d say, Erica, what did you get for that question? At Tom, what do you get for that question? The problem with that is I’m only sampling one or two students, I want to get whole class understanding, but the works tied in their books. So what I do instead is they do the due now in their book. And then at the end, they say right, I’m gonna go through the answers now. And can you all write down nice and big? Not the work? And just the answer nice and big? Can you write the answer to that second question, all the students do it three to one, show me. And then I can get a sense of whole class understanding, as opposed to sampling just one or two students that I can say clean your board. Okay. Now, let’s do question three, I only ever do one check for understanding a per per board session, just so it’s nice and clear. And I can take in that information. This works as well, I should say when students are practising. So imagine students have been working through an exercise 10 questions to a question something like that. And you want to do whole class understanding, just pick out a pivotal question. Let’s say it’s question five, and say to the class, right, I’m about to go through the answers. And what you all on your boards, just write me down your final answer to Question five, hover it three to one, show me. And then you can make that decision faced with some reliable evidence whether you need to go through that question or whether we can just move on to something more complex, and so on. But getting book work onto the board in terms of the final answer, I think just works so so well.

So there’s five tips for improving mini whiteboard use. The usual thing I asked teachers to do here is to think which of those you already do you don’t need to worry about doing any more? But are there any of those that you either don’t do or you think you could do a bit better that you find interesting, can you when can you build those into your practice.

And if you found that useful, just a reminder, there’s 22 tips. We’re just scratching the surface here of mini whiteboard, use all available in my tips for teachers book. And also if you had to tip city you start coding UK, you might find for other things that you’ll find useful. And there’s my tips for teachers podcast where I interview guests from the wonderful world of education share tips with me, I also capture each of those interviews as videos that you can use to share with colleagues get loads of ideas there. And there’s also the tips of teachers newsletter, I email you a tip for you to try out in your classroom every Monday morning. And finally, there’s all my tips for teachers online courses, and face to face courses just in case you need a bit more support. Thanks so much for watching. Hope you found that useful.

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

1. Give students enough time to think individually first
2. Give a conversation prompt
3. Ensure students have something to discuss
4. Better too short than too long
5. Ask questions to find the best paired discussions to share

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

• Amazon
• John Catt

Three fun things to do:

1. Sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter
2. Subscribe to the Tips for Teachers podcast
3. Check out online and in-person Tips for Teachers CPD

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five, all about student pair discussion. Now just as a reminder, this is available both as an audio podcast and also is a video. And if you look below, either in the podcast show notes or the video description on YouTube or on tips for teachers, you’ll find links so you can access this in both mediums and share it with your colleagues. Okay, so student paired discussions. Now, they’re a hallmark of pretty much every lesson that I’m lucky enough to watch. But over the course of the last three years or so, I’ve been on a bit of a mission to try and find tips from expert practitioners to make student pair discussions as effective and productive as possible. Now, in my tips, a teacher’s book available in all good and evil bookstores, I talk about 15 ideas to improve such pair discussions that I call partner talk. But in this video and podcast, I’m going to share five of my favourite of those ideas with you.

So here’s the first one. Now, what I often see and I’ve done this myself is teachers ask students a question or put a question on the board or the verbalise a question. And then they’ll say to students, discuss it with your partner. Now, there’s two problems with that. First is what happens in the subsequent discussion is the most confident, or the highest achieving students or the student is grasped it the quickest will dominate that conversation because they got their answer straightaway, there’ll be like, I think it’s this, this, this and this, and the other students simply won’t have a chance to think about their thoughts to contemplate what they think. And they end up being very passive as part of the discussion. Or the other thing that happens whenever you kind of launch straight into a pair discussion is it becomes a very, it doesn’t become a conversation, it becomes very much one student speaks, whilst the other student instead of actively listening is trying to think what they think the answer to that question is. Whereas instead, if you give students some time to think individually first, before that pair discussion, both students can arrive at that pair discussion and ready to share their thoughts, and also just as important, ready to listen to their thoughts as their partner. Now how long to give students and that’s obviously going to be dependent on the class, the complexity of the question, it may be a few seconds, it may be 30 seconds, it’s also a good idea to give students an opportunity to jot down their thoughts on a mini whiteboard or on a piece of paper to kind of unburden their working memory. So again, they can use that as a prompt to help them make the most out of the subsequent pad discussion. So tip number one, give students enough time to think individually.

First, at Tip number two, a conversation prompt. Again, this is another mistake I’ve made, I’ve said to my students, okay, talk to you, the person next to you talk to your partner. And I’m almost assuming there that being able to have a positive productive pair discussion is a really easy skill, but it’s not necessarily. Whereas if we can support students by saying, okay, when you discuss with your partner, I want you to say I think the answer is because something as simple as that just gives a bit of a structure to that pair discussion, make sure that students share both their what they think the answer is, and their reason for it. And it just may help that discussion flow a bit quicker. So a conversation prompting, you’ll know yourself for different discussions, what different prompts may be needed.

Tip number three, this is a big one, you know, and often I’ve given my students something to discuss. And you know, five seconds later, I look at a pair. And I said, Why don’t you Why don’t you talk to each other? So we have nothing left to talk about. And when you probe a bit deeper, often it’s because they both agree on the same answer. And that’s it. Okay. Well, III thinks that I think the same done and dusted. You don’t really want that. So what I say to students, is this. Usually conversation prompt, I think the answer is because the other person I think the answer is because now if your two answers are different, I want you to argue with each other who do you think’s right? Can you convince the other of your way of thinking, but if your two answers are the same? What’s the best explanation you can come up with between you to explain this that would help somebody who doesn’t know what the answer is? So just making sure that in both scenarios, students know what they’ve got to do means that those discussions will benefit as many different students as possible.

Tip number four. Now, this is a big one, it’s quite hard to get this right. You know, what I’ve done in the past is hello to my mistakes here, right? Is I’ve stopped the pair discussion at the point where it’s fizzling out. And I say to students, okay, so I’m listening, I’m listening for that noise level, dip in dip in dip and dip in and they’ll say, Okay, now let’s do either, you know, individual work, or what do you think what do you think whatever comes after the pair discussion? The problem with that is the energy’s gone, and you having to try to pick the students back up again. Whereas if you caught the pair discussion off at the point where the noise level, that kind of enthusiasm, the engagement when you’re Since then it’s almost at its peak, then whatever happens next, the students are going to take that energy into it, whether it’s individual work, whether it’s discussions, whatever it may be, Doug Lemov, talks about stopping the peer discussion on the crest of the wave, as opposed to letting it crash and burn and then the energy goes. So again, you’ll know yourself, whether you use the barometer of noise, or whether you can just sense in your kids, but cut those discussions off at their peak or as close to the peak as possible. And it will make whatever comes next much more impactful.

And finally, I love this one. So pair discussions are after a rehearsal or rehearsal, either for individual work or maybe a rehearsal for you then to choose a few pairs to share their thoughts. But how do you choose which pairs to to ask who you’re going to pick? Well, I’ve got three favourite questions I like to ask. Third, that is going to help me decide which pairs I’m going to ask to share their thinking. So the first is this, I’ll say, Okay, after you pay discussion, okay, quite everybody. Now put your hand up, if you disagree with the answer of your partner. And again, you can be sure, then you’re going to get two conflicting opinions on something. And that’s going to be great for you then to share that with the rest of the class, who agrees with him who agrees with her, and so on and so forth. I also like this one, this is a good one, put your hand up, if you change your mind during your discussion. Again, that’s going to give you such a good insight that you’re going to want to share with the rest of the class, because a student used to think this, and now they change their mind or why they change their mind what convinced them and the thing that convinced them might just be the thing that convinces other students in the class, or this is a good one as well put your hand up if your partner said something you found useful. This is particularly good if you’ve got students who perhaps lack a bit of confidence, who aren’t going to kind of voice it themselves. If their partner says, You know what I was talking to Emily, she said this, and it really made sense to me, that’s gonna be great for me. And it’s also going to be great for the rest of the class to benefit for that. So being a bit tactical, asking those questions to filter out, which groups we’re going to choose to hear from, I think can work quite well.

So there are five tips for improving student pair discussions. And the thing I always ask teachers to reflect on at this point is which of these you already do and you don’t need to worry about? And which of these do you perhaps not do perhaps as much as you’d like to or maybe you’ve never done but you feel are important that you could build into your practice.

If you found that useful, as I said, there’s a load other tips about pair discussions and also on pretty much every other aspect of teaching in my tips for teachers book, you can get that wherever you buy your books. And also if you head to the website tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll find the tips of teachers podcast, you’ll find loads of videos of tips that you can share in departmental meetings. You’ll also find a newsletter that you can subscribe to so you get a tip to train your classroom every Monday morning, and you’ll also find access to all my CPD both online and in person. Hope you found that useful.

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Ollie Lovell’s tips:

1. How to overcome the limits of working memory (03:39)
2. Backwards plan. ALWAYS backwards plan! (22:16)
3. Check for understanding (34:03)
4. Inquire into mechanisms (44:25)
5. You can learn something from everybody (57:43)

Links and resources

• On Twitter, Ollie is: @ollie_lovell
• Ollie’s website is: ollielovell.com
• Ollie’s podcast is: the ERRR podcast
• You can buy Ollie’s book, Cognitive Load Theory in action, here
• And his book, Tools for Teachers, here

Subscribe to the podcast

• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe on Spotify
• Subscribe on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe on Stitcher

View the videos of Ollie Lovell’s tips

Podcast transcript

Craig Barton 0:01
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 teacher, author podcaster. And I’m gonna say it global phenomenon. I’ll leave two pieces of news before we hear from our way. First, a reminder that I’ve now completed the recording of all 10 of my premium online on demand tips for teachers workshops. And here’s the list of the 10 workshops those habits and routines. And number two is the means of participation. It’s one of my favourites when you are checking for understanding responsive teaching, planning prior knowledge. The biggest one explanation is modelling your words examples. Then you’ve got a workshop on student practice, memory and retrieval and homework market feedback. I’ve spent ages recording these the form of short, sharp videos, links to research links to resources, and they’re all available at a pretty reasonable cost. So they’re available on my online CD store. You’ll find a link to that on the tips for teachers website on that CPD and secondly I’m dead excited about listening to the teachers book is released on the sixth of January 2023. At this contains over 400 ideas to improve your teaching the very next time you step into a classroom. The production team at John CAPP done an amazing job, a beautiful looking book. Again, there’s loads of links to online resources and stuff in there. So if you’re interested in either pre ordering or ordering this, depending on where you’re listening to it, again, you’ll find a link on the tips and teachers website under the book section. Anyway, time for me to shut up. So spoiler alert, here are all these five tips. Tip number one, the limits of working memory are only overcome by chunking and automating into long term memory. Tip two, backwards plan, always backwards plan. Tip three, check for understanding. Tip Four, inquire into mechanisms. And Tip five, you can learn something from everybody. As ever, all the tips are timestamp so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first. And videos of all these tips along with all the tips from the tips of teachers guests are available on the tips of teachers website if you want to watch the video and share them with your colleagues enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Mr. Ali Lovell to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Ollie, how are you? Good.

Ollie Lovell 2:41
Thanks, Craig. How you doing?

Craig Barton 2:42
Very well. Thank you very well. I’ll eat for the benefit of listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?

Ollie Lovell 2:49
Sure. Well, a little bit about myself. I’m very confused because my face is being recording, not just my voice.

Craig Barton 2:58
I like it. I like it. It was a bit more I’ll give us

Ollie Lovell 3:02
Yeah, Teacher teacher in Melbourne, Australia, four days a week at the moment, while I do a few other things like run the education research Reading Room podcast, which is why I’m used to having my voice recorded but not my face. So I do strange things in my face. It’s weird, weird old habits. Sorry listeners and watchers in particular. Yeah, I teach maths as you do and have, Craig. And it’s always always a pleasure to have a chat with you.

Craig Barton 3:30
Looking forward to this one I’ve done well to had to go through your many PR agencies to get you these days. Are you getting big these days, but I managed to get a little bit of your time. So I’m very grateful for that. Right, let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one?

Ollie Lovell 3:44
Tip number I’m not used to such such a little intro Craig, I’ve got to get on my horse straightaway. Alright, tip number one. Now, this is kind of a takeaway, there’ll be familiar to people who are familiar with my work. And that is the limits of a working memory are only overcome by chunking. And automating information in long term memory. So the kind of background the background of this one is essentially I when I was at school, I was always of the view that like why would I need to know anything? Why would I need to and particularly you know, I mean history when we were learning dates and things like that. I was like this is an absolute waste of time. Wasn’t until about 2014 When I started to learn Mandarin Chinese and get a bit serious about my learning and and read Dan Williams, why don’t students like school that I learned about this whole working memory long term memory thing? Now? I don’t know. What’s the level of background knowledge of listeners of this Craig, tell me if I need to go into things or if people if everyone’s already knows about the limits

Craig Barton 4:44
of Whoa, give us it always, always good to have a refresher. Anyway,

Ollie Lovell 4:47
I’ll Okay, great. So, and you timestamp all the all the takeaways as because I’m a listener. So I know people if they’re bored, they can jump straight to the next one. So human cognitive architecture. We can think of it in three main components there’s external. So this is the, or the environment, this is where everything is, this is where our ugly mugs are, Craig, if someone’s watching this or listening to our voices, it’s where the internet is. It’s where books are, it’s where colleagues are. And it’s an unlimited external store of information. So people can can access as much as info as they want, without able to access in the environment, when they people pay attention to information in their environment, can make its way into their working memory. And working memory is a limited internal store of information. So depending on whose research you look at, if you look at Miller’s research, it’s seven plus or minus two kinds of elements and, and associated interactions at any one time. And then when we think about things, when we sleep on them, when we connect them to things we already know, and things like that, that information can make its way up into our long term memory. And when it’s in our long term memory, that’s when we kind of say it’s been learned. So the thing is, you know, the odd the odd part out in terms of this whole architecture is the working memory, because it’s the actually the only limited store of information within this whole store of new information within this whole kind of architecture. And what that means is that when our students get overwhelmed when they get confused, and things like that, it’s usually because there’s some sort of overwhelm of their working memory. But then the question becomes, what if if students can only hold about seven plus or minus two things in their working memory at any one time? How can they why can they do more next year than they can this year? And why can they do more the year after that than they could next year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And the answer is by chunking. And automating information in long term memory. And chunking just means we take multiple elements of information. For example, we take the letters in, in memory, M E, M, O ry, they’re originally a number of elements, and then we chunking them into a single word, and we can use that word flexibly, and then we chunk the word memory into long term memory, which then becomes a concept, which then we can use flexibly. And so this, I mean, for people who are familiar with this, this is covering old territory. But for me when it was new, this was absolutely revolutionary. Because I had always thought that noise was a bit of a waste of time, you know, I thought I was a reasonable thinker, I thought I could come up with creative ideas, yada, yada, yada. But it was only really when I learned well, actually, this knowledge is the foundation of all higher order thinking and, and more and more complex and deep thought is actually just more and more knowledge, integrated and interacting in better and better ways. I thought, wow, this is phenomenal. And I completely changed the way that I live my life, I started to be much more focused about building knowledge. And I started to use technology like Anki to try to memorise things. And and if I’m honest, I’m in terms of my ability, like in terms of what’s helped me to kind of build the knowledge required to continually run the podcast first to write sales and action and to write tools for teachers. In many ways, it’s because I’ve had such a commitment to just not forgetting stuff over the last 789 years or so. So that’s kind of that’s kind of the level one of the of the takeaway, I guess the level two of the takeaways is my my learnings since then, I feel guilty for using that word learning’s because I saw Dylan William, tweet on Twitter yesterday, something like, Is there is there a more aggressive word than learning’s? I’m asking for a friend. I didn’t follow the thread. But I thought, oh, no, I’ve got to stop using that word, but it’s probably too ingrained. Now. Anyway, I guess the more recent learning, for me in relation to this is is how important it is for knowledge to be connected in really authentic ways. So since I kind of learned about the importance of, of knowledge stored in long term memory, and in addition, the importance of kind of repeating information spaced repetition to build and consolidate that knowledge, I’ve kind of gone on this whirlwind, like cram stuff into my brain kind of a kind of a journey. And along the way, there’s been a lot of frustration and, and a lot of forgetting, and, and it’s taken me many, many years of trying to cram stuff into my brain to realise that, actually, there’s only so much that you can take in, and it’s only really the stuff that you you’ve in transfer you then apply you then relate to other new things and it kind of forms this like connected chain of knowledge that you can continue with building upon, that it actually becomes ingrained and part of that long term memory in a way that you can use usefully. And so I’ve you know, had to abandon various learning projects along the way. Recognising that I have just enjoyed reading Oliver Burke, Berkman is forfeit 4000 weeks Craig, recognising that you know there isn’t infinite time in our lives and To do some things well, we have to kind of reduce other things. And you know, a further thing. example that is like yesterday someone said, Ali, I was running a pay day they said, Allah, you do the podcast you teach, like, how do you fit it all in? And I said, I have no idea about like any sport in the world. I haven’t watched the sport match for many months. Don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world. In terms of the news. I listened to like the news radio for five minutes, like the summary every morning, but that’s about it. And I don’t know my family’s names now that’s a guy with far but but really, I cut out I’ve just cut out a lot of stuff because because there isn’t time for it. But but also the The final thing about this is that I think that when we do recognise the importance of like these interconnected, progressively built knowledge structures over time, I think that might even raise questions about the way that we kind of structure school and the kind of breadth we expect our students to cover. And then expected to stick and expected to stick in meaningful ways. That yeah, that’s that’s that’s amusing. More than a conclusion or a tip.

Craig Barton 11:08
Love Ally Love it, right? And three things for me on this just to dive into thirst. I’m interested in how this practically plays out in your teaching. So how does this what you’ve learned about the limits of working memory, the importance of connecting knowledge? How does that change what you do day to day?

Ollie Lovell 11:25
Well, it really just means that I try to build in and I’m lucky enough to the school that I work at is very good at this as well, we try to build in really structured ways for students to re encounter core information, core ideas, but also not just kind of re encounter them actually retrieve them, and use them in practical practical ways. So I mean, something that I’ve been talking about a lot in like peds that I’ve been running recently is the benefit of daily reviews. And if you’re looking for someone, if you’re in a primary setting, and you’re looking for someone who does a really good job of this, David Moore Kunis has a great video on YouTube. So shout out to Dave. And if you’re in a secondary setting, there’s lots of different apps and stuff like you know, an inbox carousel, or there’s pudsey, which I’ve been using a bit recently. Or there’s just kind of making your own. So it’s really about trying to give students enough exposure to content over time. But also another thing is, is giving them and like helping them to overload it, and especially overload, like the core content. Because that helps really, really better down.

Craig Barton 12:30
Cool. Okay, just two more things on this. One of my kind of things I’m thinking about a lot at the moment, I’ll let it come back at me if you think there’s a load of rubbish is I think as a profession, we’re a lot more research informed than perhaps we have been certainly when I started teaching them, certainly things have shifted a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. But I think there’s still a bit of a gap from so the research has gone from kind of the studies to the teachers, but I’m not so sure it’s found its way to the kids. And I think as teachers, often we do a lot of things, but perhaps our kids aren’t aware of why we’re doing them and the reasons and so on. So I just wondered, how do we get our kids on board with this? Like, is it important that the kids realise the limits of working memory and so on? Or is it is it just more important, and we just do things in lessons that take account of that?

Ollie Lovell 13:16
I actually think it’s super important. So the podcasts I did just before my most recent one was with a group of two teachers, and a researcher, the two teachers are from Chechi grammar, church, your grammar is like super focused. I don’t know if you saw that episode, Craig, but Jeju grammar is super focused on teaching, or developing self regulated learners. And they’ve got like a four year programme that teaches students about retrieval, practice spacing, all these kinds of ideas, but they use like student friendly language. And, you know, in the research, we call it informed training, it’s basically training people but informing them at the same time, like what you’re training them about, and why you’re training them about it. And it’s, it’s to me, it’s like, it’s the most interesting frontier within education. It’s what I’m doing my PhD in at the moment, because I think it’s just we need to get it right. And it’s, I’m also really excited that the school I’m working on at the moment Brighton grammar over the next couple of years, it seems like we’re going to look into this space a little bit more in a bit more of a focus way. I’m super excited about that.

Craig Barton 14:23
Fantastic. And final question on this. Now, we’re recording this in the start of August. And so I think it was I think it was July, Tom Sherrington put out a really good blog that I know you retweeted and I did as well about quizzing and retrieval practice and how it’s become a bit of a lethal mutation that you know, there’s everyone thinks to do and retrieval practice lots of different ways of doing it. And one of the things that came up from Tom’s blog that really rang an alarm bell for me is this idea that kind of disconnected knowledge is not necessarily a good thing. You know, take your question on 10 Completely different areas. Is it is not, you know the way that we want students thinking about retrieval practice. But then think about how I might start a lesson off with, you know, four questions on four different areas of maths or how I might do a low stakes quiz, where I want 10 different topics from 10 different areas. And I think, Am I doing the wrong thing here? Am I? Because this knowledge isn’t connected? You know, there’s a question on fractions of the question on area and so on. Do you think is math just different in this sense? Are we okay to do that? Or is it something bigger going on here? And and how does it play out in your lessons your retrieval practice?

Ollie Lovell 15:31
So so on that connection point, I would say the important thing is not that the five questions they’re doing on a particular day are linked to the other four questions or the content of the lesson. It’s about the connection to the students prior knowledge. So if if we have five questions, which are meaningfully related to things that the students already know, such that they are able to actually retrieve the content and have a successful retrieving episode, or retrieval episode, or that when given a few tips or hints or working through with a teacher or a partner, they can build upon something that they’ve got stably in their long term memory, then I think that is meaningful, meaningfully interconnected knowledge. And that’s can be a valuable learning activity. I think the challenge comes if if that knowledge isn’t kind of bedded down sufficiently first, second, third time around such that the students really do you feel like this is five questions, all of which they have no idea what the heck they’re doing. And then they just kind of get demotivated or struggled to see connections that could be saying, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess that’s the way I’d say it in terms of what it means in for my own retrieval. It basically just means that I’m constantly adapting the kind of questions that I’m giving students based upon what I’ve seen, in prior lessons to try to make sure it’s in that kind of Goldilocks window of bringing stuff back. So it’s a little while ago, it’s not wasn’t just necessarily last lesson or the easy thing. But but more importantly, than the time break, it’s actually that kind of retrieval, strength break and in in a zone where there’s a bit of effort to retrieve it, but it’s not so hard that it’s out of reach.

Craig Barton 17:22
Got it makes perfect sense. Let me just check one more thing, before we move on to tip two. Another thing I’ve been thinking loads about retrieval practice. So Kate Jones has been on the show, and obviously, she knows infinitely more than than I do about this, I’ll tell you mistake I’ve made Oh, and I wonder whether you’ve either can relate to this or whether you just think what what has he been doing here? Right. So let’s imagine you’re teaching summer for two weeks, whatever it may be straight line graphs, fractions or whatever. By the end of that two week block, you would hope that you’re going a bit deeper into the concept, you’re asking students much more challenging questions, maybe they’re generating their own examples, maybe you’re weaving in other areas of maths, or the contextual stuffs coming in all that kind of stuff. But my fear, then is when we jumped to retrieval practice, so whenever I want to review fractions in a in a do now or low stakes quiz, I seem to by default, jump back to the procedure. So I dropped back to you know, just adding two fractions together, whatever it may be. And my fear is that students only ever go deep at the time when they’re studying the topic. And then retrieval becomes almost this kind of shallow level of knowledge. So what I’ve been trying to do now is build in a variety of questions into retrieval practice. So you do now it may have a couple of procedural questions in there. But also, then it’s going to have either a problem solving or a generating examples, or give me a boundary example, or a non example of this, and so on. Because my fear is if retrieval is always this procedural, shallow, shallow level stuff, the message we communicate to kids there isn’t great, right? It’s, you know, this is the only level you need to learn this. So just just to kind of thought and reflection of my own poor practice, does that resonate with you at all?

Ollie Lovell 18:52
Yeah, that’s really a good, really good point, Craig, I guess my thoughts on that is that retrieval, the function of retrieval can be thought of in a few different ways. And, I mean, this is something that I’ve learned from my own language learning, right? So I’m learning I mentioned learning Mandarin before, I’m trying to learn the German at the moment. And what I’ve found, like I use a spaced repetition software called Anki, it has like, you know, word like phrases in German with a missing word. That’s it, then in English, and I have to retrieve the German version to complete the sentence in in fully in German. And I find that those cards are usually created, they’re created by me from a rich learning environment. I might be listening to a podcast and might be reading an article or a short story or news article, something like that. So it comes out of content, it comes from context. Then I take it out of that context, and I create kind of retrieval cards for myself. Initially, it’s quite a quite a meaningful card because I can kind of remember the story, but over time, the context kind of falls away and it becomes this like, disjointed, like, abstract by it. self’s kind of thing unless it’s from like quite a meaningful chat or something like I’ve got a few cards I made from my recent trip to Germany and, and I think they will retain their context for a bit longer. But it’s also understanding like, how much to expect from retrieval practice. So what I’ve learned is that Anki with language learning is absolutely fantastic for keeping the knowledge of a word, kind of at the edge of my retrievability, such that when I do actually encounter it in a proper context, again, it’s not like it’s a completely pardon the pun foreign word, it’s actually, it’s actually of like, Ah, I know that word, or there’s a level of familiarity. And then I, when I, maybe I just need to check the definition, or maybe I hear it a couple of times in a couple of different sentences. And that’s enough to for me to get Oh, that’s right, it means this thing. And so I often actually see retrieval, as a bit of a placeholder to kind of just maintain this base level of familiarity with the content such that, you know, when we do spend, you know, 15 minutes on it to, in an in an like, in a, in a good classroom contexts, say you’re going to teach another lesson where you know, you’re going to actually draw on that, in this example, vocab, in the maths example, some some other skill, you can quickly activate it, activate prior knowledge, and then you can build upon it. Whereas if you hadn’t done that retrieval in between, the strength of that memory would have degraded so much that you wouldn’t have been activating prior knowledge you’d be re teaching. And so that relates back to the comment I was making earlier, in terms of like the scope of learning that we expect. And the rich enter retrieval can be seen in some contexts, unless, unless it’s really, really thorough, but if it’s a quick thing down at the site, it can sometimes be valuable to see it as like a main maintenance kind of a task for that knowledge. Which is only worthwhile though, if you’re actually going to build on it later. Because if you actually don’t build on it later, then it does become this completely disconnected and irrelevant piece of information. And quite frankly, a bit of a waste of time, because students will forget it.

Craig Barton 22:15
Alright, so what is tip number two, please?

Ollie Lovell 22:19
Do number two is backwards plan, always backwards plan. So this is the first level of this level, one of this tip is, is for people teaching to high stakes exams, right. So in my first year of teaching, I came into a school, there were very few resources. And I had to try to work out. It was actually my second year that I started teaching year 12, which is like the high stakes year here in Australia, I had to work out really quickly what on earth, I needed to teach my students for them to be able to have success in the interview exam. A similar thing has happened happened to myself when I was like at uni and I was doing a couple of subjects. And either there were clashes, so I couldn’t go to the lectures have one or I just been completely slack and left it till two weeks before the exam to try to work out what’s going on. In both cases, there’s there’s kind of there’s there’s a common a common approach, which is in the lecture scenario, like, go through all the lectures, or read all the chapters in the textbook, and then try and perform the exam or in the teaching example. Look at the curriculum, try to work out what’s going on, look at the textbook, use that and try to prepare your students using those resources that other people, ideally experts have created to prepare for the exam. But I am this may be this may be obvious to some people, but over the years, it’s taken me a while to realise that, actually, the hurdle, the bar we’re trying to jump over is actually that examination. And this is obviously in the restricted sense of teaching. But but when we are focused on that particular goal, hopefully we’re balancing with others. But when we’re focusing on that goal, that is that’s the bar we got to jump over. So backwards planning essentially just means work out, do a massive audit of what is in past exams, and use that as your teaching guide. So what this looked like for me, in that first year teaching year 12, and I had very little support to do it is literally printing out single sided, a whole heap of past exams like that 10 years worth physically cutting up every single question. And then, you know, getting on the math staff room floor over one weekend, and just moving them into piles that seem to make sense and be related, and then sequencing those piles and then relating those piles back to the study design. And then when I looked at the study design, and it had some strange thing, like, you know, making make adjacency matrix from a network diagram or something like that, I could go, okay, ah, that’s actually what they’re talking about. This is a thing, or it’s some other abstract point where you’re like, Well, that could that could be taken to eternity. You know, you could keep on analysing that idea forever. But it’s like, well, actually, they’re actually, they’re only going to ask you to analyse it in three different ways. And so by doing that, I was able to very, very quickly ascertain exactly the level of difficulty that was required of my students with the level of capability that was required of my students teach to that, and have a reasonable amount of success in that first year of teaching, and similarly have a reasonable amount of success in my uni subjects, even when I had slacked off on a couple of them throughout the semester. So that’s the that’s the kind of level one of this takeaway that I think the level that level two of this takeaway is when we do broaden out the question of what are we black backwards planning to? So I think the application of that backwards planning idea was very crystal clear when we think about an actual exam but but you know, what’s, what’s the goal of school? I don’t know. But one of the kind of goals is to prepare students for life more broadly. And if we backwards plan from life to school what is it useful for the majority of students to know so I don’t know I’m actually curious to ask you Craig in the last month or two what maths have you used and you know, talking blasphemy hear people say Get ready? What what maths have you used in your real life?

Craig Barton 26:20
Or flipping that call? You know, I’m supposed to be asking the questions here. Are you not allowed to just spring the spring these on? Well, I’ll tell you what, I can give a bit of a cheat answer only because I’ve been doing a lot of maths with my little boy Isaac, but that’s kind of in a bit of an inauthentic context. We’ve we learned about negative numbers this morning. absolutely blew his mind. So that that was nice. But in terms of terms of day to day maths, not counting on my YouTube viewers for this to project outward. So yeah, well, I’m going to hit some certain milestone, but not not not a massive I do quite a lot of recreational math. Sorry, I’m a bit of a geek with that kind of stuff. So I like that kind of thing. But I wouldn’t be doing that much kind of authentic maths, I guess day to day, how come?

Ollie Lovell 27:02
I’m just I’m just trying to backwards plan from life as to what we should be teaching, for example, disengaged your nine year nine students, you know, like, what should we be like? So I actually you know, I’m as I’m sure you do, I use I do use maths in my life, I kind of did a bit of brainstorm before I checked today. One of the one of the areas is around financial stuff, the idea of mortgages and amortisation. I think about a fair bit. And so I need to have a general sense of what’s going on there. Investment and debt are hugely important issues, I was chatting with a friend the other day, and they were trying to work out whether to pay off some loans or not. And the basic principle there is, you know, do expect that the money you’ve taken out on the loan, can you earn a higher return than the interest rate, and if you can, then maybe keep the loan, if you can’t, then probably pay it off. Time, time is really important. And a lot of people struggle with time to just telling the time, percentages, and the ability to use them, heaps ratios, the ability to use them. And, you know, dimensional analysis, I don’t know if this is something people have heard of, but just the idea that you can actually use the unit’s from a question or a scenario to help you work out how to work it out. Um, that’s something I actually use fair bit when I’m working at the prices of things or various ratios. And then the final thing is like spreadsheets, I use spreadsheets a hell of a lot. I’m always summing stuff up. I’m also always doing other weird stuff that like concatenation, and weighted averages and things like that. And, you know, lots of teachers use a lot of those functionalities as well. So, yeah, I guess for me like this, this idea of backwards planning, level one helps us to jump through hoops, and helps our students to jump through hoops. But level two, helps us to ask which hoops should we be jumping through? And which hoops you would be trying to help our city or hurdles? Should we be trying to help our students to jump over? And as a weekly, you know, this isn’t a criticism of particularly anything, the primary curriculum, I think, number sense, the things like that is absolutely crucial. And the way that primaries generally do that is is really valuable. But I think secondary, there’s some questions that should be asked, and it’s pretty, pretty productive to ask those questions. Yeah, but, I mean, again, this sounds like blasphemy. So to approach it one other way, that people who think I’m talking blasphemy might find valuable, it’s the quote Dylan William. And that’s to say that education is about opportunity costs, right. So it’s not about whether it’s valuable for your nine to learn trigonometry or your nines. No doubt it is. The question is, is there something that they could be learning that will be more valuable during that time? And I think I think that’s a question we don’t ask enough. And I think it’s a question asked worth asking. The answer might be well, actually, no algebra is the best use of trigonometry or whatever is the best use of that you know, in time, but I have a I have a sneaking suspicion and maybe not, and maybe not for the whole math curriculum that we have. So so that’s that’s the thing I’d love listeners to keep in the in the back of their mind. It’s not an argument against maths of the value of maths. It’s an argument for a conscious consideration of opportunity cost.

Craig Barton 30:16
Love it. All right. Okay, one, one reflection and two questions on this. So first, this was bad, right? So I remember, however, many years ago it was, I got asked to teach a new app, something I never taught before foot further, further maths was what our kids do. years 12 and 13. And I’ve never taught further maths before, I was always dead excited to do it. But the way I decided to teach it was the opposite. Well, the way I planned it was the opposite of what you did, right? So I didn’t look at any exams. I just had the textbook, and I tried to stay just kind of one chapter ahead of the kids. So the only exposure the kids would get to practice was the practice questions from the textbook. I know he got to the exam, we started doing pass papers, and it was nothing, nothing like the textbook whatsoever. And I’m thinking bloody hell anyway, we it turned out, okay. But the next year, it was very much exam focused, it was very much yeah, let’s let me get a sense of what kids need to do. And you see this with experienced teachers, right. They just know how to pitch things. They know what to put emphasis on, and what not to put emphasis on because they taught a course for many years. The flip side of that is a few years ago in the UK, our GCSE. So the exam our kids take at the end of year 11, the spec changed for that. So nobody had any exams to go off. And the exam boards would release a couple of kind of sample papers. And then you had a real dilemma because you have a real small sample size of things to go off. So do you just put all your eggs in one basket and teach, you know, to the kind of standard and the way these questions are styled? Or do you just kind of think, no, we don’t that’s too small, a sample size? Do we just do what we’ve always done and hope it still works? And it was it’s a real dilemma. So having having a big batch of those final summative tests is is really beneficial. But the flip side of that Oh, and this was the first question I want to ask you is how does that play out for lower years? So you know, your, you know, grade threes? Grundfos, they don’t have the this end of year exam? How do you know how to how can you backwards plan with them?

Ollie Lovell 32:12
It’s a good question. I mean, and I’ve done a bit of this in schools, it’s, I just keep on going backwards, basically saying, you know, we’ve we’ve identified what are your twelves need to be successful? What prior knowledge do they need such that when students come into your 12, when they’re exposed that content, it’s not going to be too big of a jump, and you just work your way backwards, that becomes the kind of core stuff that you know, like to create successful, quote unquote, students, when we talk about in terms of marks, that, you know, if we build our curriculum based upon this, it’s going to be successful. And then depending upon how rich you feel, that is how much time additional time you feel, feel you have, you can add in the the other stuff that you feel is likely more important or equally important. But hopefully, if exams are written well, the content contained within them represents the kind of key ideas and concepts from a domain such that if you do eventually backwards map from that all the way down to down to your seven or something, you’re still going to get to have a lot of quality content there.

Craig Barton 33:17
Got it? And final question on this all? Does this this strategy that was planning? Does it apply on the kind of per lesson basis as well? If you were thinking of teaching a lesson? Would you start at where you want the kids to get to at the end of the lesson and go from there? Or does it not? Does it not kind of transfer down?

Ollie Lovell 33:33
Yeah, so it’s like Oliver Caviglia, always good about this. It’s like put put ideas in containers or concepts in containers and sequence them along a path. So the concepts will be those parts exam questions, you put them in containers of related concepts, then you’ll sequence them along a path, which will become your kind of learning sequence. And then you basically just step cut that up into bite sized chunks that represent lessons. That’s that’s kind of the way to look at it.

Craig Barton 34:01
Fantastic. Right all what’s tip number three, please.

Ollie Lovell 34:06
Tip number three. So tip number three comes from, I’ve talked to lots of people over the years on the trip law podcast. And when I, I’ve asked quite a few pretty switched on people, including like, Tom Sherrington, what’s the absolute most important thing for teachers to do? And the answer is, check for understanding. Okay, if you’re not checking for understanding, you’re not working out the difference between between what you think you’re teaching and what your students are actually taking from the lesson for thinking about this in another way, Dylan William has essentially dedicated his whole career to checking for understanding that’s basically what formative assessment is, but they’re not just checking for understanding actually acting on the data that you collect from that checking for understanding. So I mean, what does that mean practically? It just means things like aux cord means mini whiteboards. It means stuff like Desmos. Teaching students to check understanding for themselves means stuff like up I had Paul Spencer Lee, a science teacher on the podcast, helping students to analyse the types of areas they’re making, things like that, you know, there’s teacher checking for understanding peer and self understanding. Great, great quote from Dylan William in a recent podcast is good feedback Wirtz works towards its own redundancy. So checking for understanding, in a way and supporting students to check for understanding in a way such that you don’t need to keep on doing it for them, but they start to do it for themselves. Coming back to that learn to learn kind of thing we were talking about, is really valuable. So that’s kind of the level one, this takeaway, the level two, helps us understand why it’s really so important. Check for understanding is the basis of working out what works in education? You know, if we think about what is a research study, a research study is essentially a systematic approach to checking for understanding, you do something for to one group, you do something different to another group, then you check for understanding to see what works. So if we do nothing else, if we never teach teachers in teacher education, how to do anything, we only taught them to check for understanding, they would derive pretty much every instructional principle that we have in every technique, because they would know what’s working along the way. And they would know what’s not working. And step back even further check for understanding in many ways is essentially the science the scientific method. So at the classroom level, we need to check for understanding what’s going on in our lesson. But it that process, that cycle of trying stuff out and checking if it’s actually working is the basis of all learning, both inside and outside of education.

Craig Barton 36:53
Love it all biggie. This one right. Okay, so a few things from me here. So first, just a reflection. I think you’re right. One of the things you said early on really resonates with me this, the response to that check for understanding, if you’re not doing that, you might as well not bother with a check for understanding. And when Joe Morgan was on the tips of teachers podcast a while ago, she said that whenever you go to CPD about responsive teaching and checking for understanding, the emphasis is always on the check for understanding it’s not so much on the responding because the responding is that odd, right? Like if you’ve got half the kids know it, and if your kids don’t, that’s when you’ve really got to think what you’re going to do. So yeah, if you’re going to check for understanding, preparing in advance how you’re going to respond for different scenarios feels feels really, really important to follow up questions on this whole. So you mentioned lots of different kind of mechanisms for checking for understanding cold call mini whiteboards, and so on and so forth. And this this often comes up a lot on the podcast, particularly mini whiteboards. If there was a drinking game on the tips for teachers podcast, it’d be have a shot every time somebody mentions mini whiteboard after the album, box or episode, everyone would be everyone would be hammered. But the thing that we think about a lot here is why if you had many whiteboards available, so you could elicit responses from all your kids. Would you ever cold call? Where’s the argument for cold calling if you can get all the responses?

Ollie Lovell 38:14
That’s a really good question. I haven’t thought about that before. And it’s relevant to me because I do both use mini whiteboards. And I cold call things I think I’d say it depends upon timing. Like how much time you have, it also depends upon the type of answer. So many whiteboards are great. In a like time press scenario, when you’re doing like multiple choice questions when you’re doing single answer questions, single word questions, things like that. The pace of the lesson kind of slow and things can get bogged down a little bit as soon as you start doing like extended written answers. Now, mini whiteboards are excellent for that because you can overcome the trends in information effect and you can take a student’s written answer you can put it under a dock a visualizer project up on the board and add to it and and go through it. And that’s awesome as well. But also, I think there’s a there’s a benefit to getting students to verbalise their thinking to vocalise it, and it kind of enables a bit more of a dynamic kind of problem solving, a discussion and refinement in the moment, as well. So yeah, and also, you know, if, if you’re trying to just quickly go through, like, often, I’ll often use cold calling when I’m actually doing like a second worked example. So I’ll do the first worked example, explain every step. Then I have my pop six in one hand, and my marker and the other. And I’ll do the first line of working and say, What am I going to do next, Craig? And Craig will hopefully tell me, that’s exactly what I follow. What am I going to do next? Based on the first work example, Harry and Harry will tell me. So I think it’s really good for that snappy stuff. Whereas if I said, what’s the next step? Everyone meaning whiteboards, it’d be like 30 seconds later, you know, what are they going Right, divide both sides by three or a symbol or like, you know. So I think there’s that kind of, in the moment just keeping everyone engaged kind of pop stick thing that I really like using, but then it’s like, okay, well, not all now we’re going to do a you do. And we’re going to check if like 80%, or more of the class knows before I set you on independent work. And then I know who to follow up with, or I know if like lots of people don’t understand. And then I can go through another couple of examples.

Craig Barton 40:26
Got it? Fantastic. I’ve actually just a couple of two bonus reflections before I asked you this last thing. First is I’m a big fan. Now I call this the holy trinity of checking for understanding. I love this now. So it’s the combo of you ask a question. I like the kids to do if it’s like a more extended thing that working out on the back of the mini whiteboards, and then the final answer on the front of the whiteboards and then I’ll say, okay, 321, hold them up. So I get a bit of a sense of what’s going on. And then without me evaluating it in any way, then they discuss with their partners compare what’s the same, what’s different, and then I warm call based on what I’ve seen on the whiteboard. So you’re getting almost, it slows things down. But you’re getting the best of all worlds, you’ve got the whole class response, you’ve got the pet discussion, then you go because I agree with you. The big advantage for me of cold call is you get that verbal interaction, they can refine the responses as well, well, so I love that I’m going to pay to them that that I think Holy Trinity is a phrase has been taken already. But if I can get the holy trinity of checking for understanding, I think we’re laughing there. Second thing I was gonna say this is a big, big shout out to you ally for one of your interviews. And also your excellent book. Was it who was a neater Archer, who was talking about the importance of we do and I always called out the way do you know what I’m doing? I do in a word to them, I always go from one example to your turn straightaway. And it was only when I listened to that conversation. And in particular, I found powerful when I read your book, and you almost kind of scripted out an example of a we do, where you can really play around with the different means of participation, a bit of call and response, a bit of maybe mini whiteboards a bit of cold call, I thought that was really powerful. So as a key check for understanding within the words example process, I think the we do is really important. But the final question I was gonna say to you is and it relates back something we discussed earlier on Ali, do you think it’s important to vary the types of questions we ask when we check for understanding because again, I’m guilty of this, I use a lot of diagnostic questions. And they’re quite, they’re very good at identifying single steps and multi step procedures, you can do a bit of a conceptual stuff as well. But it’s more kind of procedural. Or if I do like mini whiteboard stuff, as you’ve alluded to, it tends to be more of a kind of procedural question. And I just fear Same with the retrieval that unless we’re kind of testing the depth of understanding by varying these questions around a bit, maybe we’re only getting a sense of that kind of surface level. So where do you stand on kind of different types of questions you asked to check for understanding?

Ollie Lovell 42:50
Yeah, so good question. And again, not something I’ve thought about heaps. But I think maybe that’s just because it’s kind of different concepts and different understandings lend themselves to checking them in different ways. And this is this kind of back to that extraneous versus intrinsic, cognitive, kind of an idea. It’s a question of asking What the What’s what’s intrinsic? what’s at the heart of the knowledge that we’re trying to check for understanding because you’re gonna get that, and then that’s then going to determine how you’re going to check, check for that understanding. So some things if they’re if it’s more of an interrelated, interrelated, kind of a concept that has multiple moving parts, you probably need some kind of verbal, kind of dialogic thing or some written response. Whereas if it’s, if it’s literally what’s the first step? And why that can be a diagnostic question. But I think also good question is in any scenario will always always probe. So you know, that a misconception is revealed. And then the probing will start into with exactly the root of that. And that helps to direct how the kind of responsive teaching follows, because if you just like, Oh, yep, you’ve picked B, that means you have? Well, to be fair, in diagnostic questions, it probably does actually just mean that they have that misconception. But even then, asking a student to articulate it can help you to kind of hit it off even even more directly. So I think, I think to summarise the content determines how to check for understanding.

Craig Barton 44:23
Love it. Right. So what is tip number four, please?

Ollie Lovell 44:28
Tip for? You mentioned previously mechanisms. So Tip Four is inquire into mechanisms. So you might have when you might have tried something in the classroom. Or the your school may have mandated that you do something in the classroom, and you may get a good result, or you may get a bad result. Usually what we do there is we say, oh, that worked or oh, that didn’t work. But inquiring into mechanisms is essentially a nudge for us to go a bit deeper and to actually ask The why. So, for example, I mean, an interesting example is using your kind of sign worked examples, Craig. You know, it’s like, okay, I do sign worked examples, and students learn more. That’s, that’s cool. Like, if that’s the case, but we need to, then we can then ask the question, why is that? Is it because they have increased focus? And there’s there’s less distraction in the classroom? What if so, maybe actually, there’s a better way to do that than being silent tonight? Is it because they’re actually systematically following every step of working that you’re doing? Is that the active ingredient, if so, awesome, but maybe there’s a better way, maybe Michael person’s approach is better. Maybe there’s actually the silence, maybe there’s something about silence that helps students learn maths. I don’t know, in which case, you couldn’t take that silence away. So so when we inquire into mechanisms, we actually work out what part of the thing that we do is most likely to be generating the effect. And this is really valuable. It’s valuable be for a number of reasons, it’s valuable because it helps us to make more love, more reliable predictions of the future. Because if we know what the active ingredient is, we know if taken out, it’s probably not going to work as well, as it allows us to modify strategies and approaches without lethal mutations, which is a phrase that gets bandied around a lot these days. But, you know, a recipe is very, very good in a stable environment. But unfortunately, teaching is not a stable environment, different students, different days, different weather, different cohorts, different amount of sleep that you’ve had, and all these things are factors. And if but if we’re aware of the core part of what we’re trying to do that generates the effect, we can actually adapt what we’re doing in such a way that it’s hopefully has the intended effect, even through those adaptations. And in relating to adaptation, it enables us to save energy time resources, because maybe there’s a strategy we’re doing that has 10 steps, some feedback approach, or whatever it may be. And we know we’ve been doing it for five years, it’s it always gets really good at action from the students or responses from the students good learning. But maybe there’s only three of those steps that actually have have an impact. And we’re doing all these other things like cutting up the staples, or using different coloured highlighters, that’s actually a complete waste of time. So So that’s, that’s, that’s that takeaway, I can’t remember what we’re up to 4345. Now, inquire into mechanisms. That’s a level one. Level two of this takeaway is, I don’t actually know what a mechanism is. So to expand on that, one paper that talked about mechanisms a lot. Last year, October of last year, was won by the E FF from by sans themes. And their definition of mechanisms, a phrase that they use interchangeably with active ingredients was an active ingredient is a component of PD that could not be removed or altered, without changing the impact of the PD on teaching and learning. Now, that sounds sensible, that’s kind of relates to what I was saying. But does that mean that oxygen is an active ingredient of PD? I definitely agree that if you remove the oxygen of the PD, that would likely change the effect. But oxygen itself is like an entity. It’s like an element within it’s not is it a mechanism, I thought that the mechanism is something about that, like causality. So maybe it’s about the connection between. So that’s confusing me a little bit, then I thought, Alright, maybe I know that a really good way to describe mechanisms is with like, if then statements. So if we were thinking about cold call, I gave a presentation at this step lab conference recently, I was trying to look into the we’re trying to dissect the mechanisms of cold call. And this is one of the definitions that was come up with using the if then framework, if students are sufficiently motivated to appear knowledgeable to the class, then knowing that they may be asked a question at any time will drive them to engage with with it and prepare an answer. Right. So that’s one approach or another approach with describing mechanisms using the bias statement, which is I think, Bambrick Santoyo. So coming back to cold call, sustain a high level of student focus throughout the lesson by making it unpredictable when the students will be asked a question, right. But then when I started to think about and dissect that more, I mean, those things, they seem pretty clear. It’s like make sense. Part of the mechanism of cold call another one is the check for understanding part, of course, but then I then I started to think, well, maybe there’s is there actually anything different because then between a mechanism and just having a goal and a step? So the goal could be help students attend to instruction more and the step is, make it unpredictable when you’re calling them like what part of the goal versus step is the next And isn’t isn’t like the in between part? Is it? How they come together? Is it? I don’t know, Craig, I’m confused. What is the mechanism? So I think some other hypotheses I had were like, maybe it’s maybe it’s your ability to answer a number of why questions in between. So that shows you’ve got on samples kind of like this. I don’t know. I’ve read a lot of stuff about mechanisms recently. And I think they’re really important. I just don’t really know what they are. But maybe that’s love, you know, love is really important, but like, What the heck is love? So maybe mechanisms are important with love? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s my that’s the level two, I’m confused.

Craig Barton 50:38
Who were going deeper like this. So again, usual thing one reflection for me then then one question. Something, yeah, he hits home really early on, I’ve done this lots, you change too much. And you just you can’t I mean, even changing one thing, it’s hard to identify what impact it’s had to Dissector. But as soon as you start changing two or three things, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. And I have this myself, you you listen to a podcast like your own or you go to a CPD session, get two or three different ideas. You think, right, I’m going to implement those tomorrow. And then the lesson either goes well, and you don’t know why, or it’s a disaster, and you don’t know why you’ve changed too many variables. So certainly, it feels before we get to the nitty gritty of mechanisms, it feels important just to narrow that change down to just one thing if possible. And the second kind of reflection before I ask you, the question is also sometimes when we change something, almost inevitably, when we change something, we have to stop doing something else. And I think that often gets overlooked a little bit, we may inadvertently stopped doing the one thing that was making all the difference. Sound teachers a good example of this, it may be that the teacher is speaking at that initial exposure. 20 amble is the key thing. And if we take that away, and replace it with sound teacher, maybe sound teacher brings another benefit to it. But we’ve removed a really key thing. So it’s always worth reflecting on what. And sometimes it’s hard to spot what have we taken away here to replace it with it with this new idea? But here’s my question for you all with with all the fact that you confused about these mechanisms, and I don’t have a bloody clue, I can tell you that much for free. What do you do when you’re instigating a change? Then what what’s your what’s your process? Let’s say you listen to a podcast or whatever, or you read some research, you want to change something? How do you go about doing it? And how do you know if it if it works?

Ollie Lovell 52:21
It’s a good question. I think it’s just coming back to maybe that thing I was referring to at the end there. It’s like to what extent can you suggest a potential causal connection between the proposed action and the desired outcome? And if you can say that, yes, there, there’s pretty clearly a causal path here. And you can articulate that causal pathway, which is something you would have seen me write about a little bit in tools for teacher as well, if you got to that chapter, then I think the mechanisms there. But I guess the confusion, for me is like, not whether a mechanism is present or not, but more about like, what part of the causal chain between action and outcome constitutes the mechanism? Is it the whole thing? Is it the step, the mediation? Is it the moderation? Is it the goal? Is it the action? I don’t know?

Craig Barton 53:13
It’s interesting, there’s just just just one final reflection on this all and it’s really interesting, you brought up sound teaching here, because sometimes I see two different things going on when you try and bring in silent teacher. So the first is often you get like a honeymoon period, where the kids because it’s so novel, they’re just like, What is this and their full attention is on it. So the danger there is you do this one or two times you think I’ve cracked it, this is the revolution I’ve been waiting for. But then obviously, the novelty wears off. And the maybe kids go back to being a little bit more disengaged, and so on and so forth. So I think when you bring in something new, be aware of the honeymoon period. But then also, I think we talked about this last time, when you were talking about tools for teachers on my Mr. Biomass podcast, this notion of this value of latent potential, when you bring in a new idea, often there’s a, there’s a, there’s a big lag before you start see the benefits of it, because it’s not been embedded. And students are really focused on the structure of the idea versus the content of the idea, and so on. So that’s just to add extra complications, right? When you when you try and make a change, you’ve got to be aware of this honeymoon period and aware of this kind of, you know, valley of latent potential. So you may only see whether this is work, and it may take a month or something like that. And if it’s not working, that’s a month gone by, you know, where, you know, the opportunity cost you kids could have been doing something more effective. It’s tricky, isn’t it? But yeah, have you considered that this this honeymoon, and this latent, potentially feels like they’re two kind of competing factors that come into play when we try and make a change?

Ollie Lovell 54:40
Yeah, yeah, it’s huge. And I mean, that relates as well to another really important point about mechanisms. And that’s the Hawthorne effect. So this is something that found it a lot of studies, simply by the act of conducting a study if people know they’re being studied, they try harder at whatever the thing is, I think traditionally it was kind of factory workers and their productivity. It’s like change, different change the lighting and the factory. The workers are like, Oh, someone’s watching us and measuring what we’re doing. So we better better act. And so like, what’s the mechanism there? Well, watching surveillance essentially. So, so often, it’s really quite difficult to, to kind of split it apart, I was gonna say something else, I’ve completely forgotten what it was.

Craig Barton 55:23
It’s tricky. And it will do just just that. last final bit of and just just to dig into it practically. Let’s say for example, after our chat today, you think, right, I’m gonna go for it with this silent teacher forget Pirsch. And he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Sound teachers is the way forward? How would you determine whether it works or not? Like, what what are you looking at? And over? What period are you looking for, for it to to get this data back?

Ollie Lovell 55:46
Your question? First, I’ll say the thing that I remembered, I was gonna say before, what I was going to say before was, this valley of latent potential is particularly prevalent, when we come back to that learning to learn or self regulated learning stuff, right? Because teaching, like there’s nothing, there are a few things quicker and more direct route in terms of getting students to high performance to high performance than highly structured instruction, where the teacher is 100% in the driver’s seat, and the students are working really hard to keep up the whole time. And they managed to keep up I think that can you know, and we see a lot of really effective explicit instruction going on. And that’s absolutely fantastic, and a really important tool for teachers to have in their toolbox. But, again, opportunity cost, if we do that 100% of the time, we miss out on a lot of the potential gains and the longer longer term benefits in particular, of creating more independent learners. But when, at the time we’re trying to make that tradition, transition, should I say we’re likely to see a significant dip in scores for extended period of time. Which brings us back to the other question, you just asked how do you know if it’s working? Or check for understanding? Check to check your understanding. But but the other part other part you asked was over kind of what period of time? And like, I don’t know, I don’t know, Craig, to me, it kind of comes back to the what comes back to it does come back to mechanisms that does it seem like the effect that you’re expecting is happening, and doesn’t seem like it’s plausible, it’s happening because of the reason that you think it’s happening. But also, a lot of teaching isn’t all quantifiable. And sometimes you have to just get a sense of things.

Craig Barton 57:41
Absolutely, absolutely. Right. So fifth and final tip, please.

Ollie Lovell 57:45
Tip number five Craig, you can learn something from everybody. Let’s start let’s start with a syllogism. syllogisms are kind of logical puzzles, if you will. I’m going to give you a few Craig. All right, this. This is the classic one. So the challenge with a syllogism is to work out if it’s valid, if the logical if the logical thread within the syllogism is valid or invalid Is that logical fallacy. So, first one, very, very famous syllogism. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Sorry, I said moral I meant to say mortal. Socrates is a man. But hopefully Socrates is mortal. And this relates to something else I was going to talk morality, something else I was going to talk about, but I think I forgot to Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. plays at home can listen to the home can play as long as well. Do you think that was a completely illogical conclusion? From the two statements? Talk us through your thinking, Craig?

Craig Barton 59:01
Oh, geez. Right. Okay. Socrates. Socrates is a man. That was the first one right? Okay. And all men are mortal this way. I don’t like having you on the show early because most guests I can just ask them question. I have a little sit off. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. So it follows that Socrates is mortal. Yeah, yeah. That’s got to be complete, surely, is it?

Ollie Lovell 59:32
Socrates is a man I forgot to check the answer in the back of the book for this one. I thought I knew it. But now you’re confusing me. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Yeah, therefore, yeah, so it’s man. Men are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Okay, I think that’s valid. And if we’re both wrong, then shame on us and someone better writing. Alright, here’s another one for you, Craig. Oh, sorry, the pain the pain is not over. This is again for the listeners at home. for all students, natural discovery should be supported. All students natural discovery should be supported. Some inquiry based teaching should be supported. Therefore, some inquiry based teaching leads to students natural discovery.

Craig Barton 1:00:25
Now that that feels like it doesn’t quite, I’m done kind of drawing circles here with almost like a almost like a bit of a vendor, and that feels like there’s some gaps. They’re gonna say that that’s not

Ollie Lovell 1:00:35
right, let’s try to let’s try another one. All learning is a change in long term memory. Some changes to long term memory should be strengthened by testing. Therefore, something that should be strengthened by testing is learning.

Craig Barton 1:00:58
Give that to me one more time. I

Ollie Lovell 1:01:00
hope everyone is having fun as well. All learning is a change in long term memory. Yeah. Yep. Some changes to long term memory should be strengthened by testing. Yep. Therefore, something that should be strengthened by testing is learning.

Craig Barton 1:01:30
I don’t know this one only? It doesn’t it’s certainly not as tight as old Socrates. I was I was all over him. You know, I was hoping for a few more of them. I don’t I don’t know this one. The I don’t like this. This. This was something chucked in there. It’s yeah, I don’t know this one. Are you then I do you know, this one is the bigger question.

Ollie Lovell 1:01:48
I think I do I actually cross cross check this with like, a philosophy lecture at a university teaches logic. And she did. Give me the answer. If you had to take a punt totally fine. If you’re wrong, if you had to take a punt. Yeah,

Craig Barton 1:02:02
I’d say this one. See this my own bias, right. So I have a bit of long term memory and testing. I’d say this one is Yeah, it’s pretty solid. But I’m not convinced.

Ollie Lovell 1:02:13
Cool. So so this is a educational version of real study that was done by a Russian researcher, whose name I can’t pronounce, I’m not gonna try to. And it was, it was researching a thing called my site bias. And my side bias is the is our where our ability to evaluate the logic of statements or the validity of research and things like that. And the influence that our prior beliefs have on our ability to objectively evaluate things. So for you, Craig, it would be my hypothesis that you’d be more likely to classify that third, logical syllogism as valid based upon your prize and less likely to classify the the middle syllogism as valid because of your prize. The opposite would be different. For some, the opposite would be the case for someone else. It is in fact the case that both the second and third syllogisms were invalid. I’m so glad that worked. That was just like, So twist.

Craig Barton 1:03:22
Yeah, that was that was good that off? Yeah.

Ollie Lovell 1:03:26
So the point here, you know, you can learn something from everybody, what the heck do these syllogisms have? To me, one of the biggest challenges in education is our inability to listen to each other. There is something that you can learn from everybody. I just came back from a trip to the UK, I visited three schools that were the most different schools I could find. In England, I visited the self managed Learning College, which is a school with absolutely no curriculum, almost no structure, they only have structures around the kind of meeting in the morning in the afternoon, I visited XP, which does explicit instruction, but it also does expeditionary learning. And it also has a big focus on pastoral stuff. And then I visited Mikayla, which is, you know, famously the strictest school in the UK. And I learned stuff from all three of them. And it was great. But the point of these syllogisms is, if we find if we do actually find ourselves in a corner, in, you know, in a particular educational paradigm, or educational corner or something like that. And we start to associate aid ourselves and our beliefs with a certain way of thinking or a certain brand or something like that. It doesn’t only have a kind of impact in terms of who our friends are, and kind of what we choose to engage with. It also actually means that if we do say, alright, I’m actually going to have a crack and try to understand this other side of the story. Like we’re actually in capable of, of objectively analysing the facts like you just can’t get past it’s my side bias. And so, to me the only way around that the only potential way around it, because there’s probably no full way around it, the way to lessen the impact is to try to be knowledge driven, rather than belief driven. And this is a big distinction, a lot of people it’s like, it’s like, my goal is to have a bit of a have an impact, or my goal is to be a good teacher, or whatever it might be. That might be a belief driven, but if we’re knowledge of and it’s like, my goal is to truly understand the mechanisms behind this, it’s to truly understand, like whether when I check for understanding my students have lent moral or not, is to truly understand the argument of this person I disagree with, or I feel like I might disagree with that’s the only way we can start to circumvent this. What one other one other point on this. Dylan William has a great quote, which I from he said, In my podcasts, and I have it in tools for teachers, he said, The Measure of a researcher or test the measure of a researcher by asking what are two or more research results that you believe and trust, but that you do not like? I think is another great question. And he said, he said in his case, the two were the importance of IQ for educational achievement. And even more depressingly it’s heritability. And the second is cognitive load theory. He wished that problem solving was best taught through problem solving. So yeah, that’s that’s that takeaway. That’s level one of that takeaway. You can learn something from everybody. The Level Two here is that change in the world often depends upon zealots. Right? I can’t remember exactly. But I think it’s a George Bernard Shaw, quote, Tim Ferriss, pretty fond of it, you’re probably familiar with it to Craig, it’s something like the the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to Himself. So that’s one way to put it. And another way is, you know, often the people who create these interesting schools like the reason why Mikayla exists. And the reason why they’re self managed Learning College exists, is because there are people out there who have such conviction about their beliefs, that they’re willing to put everything on the line, reputation, finances, family relationships, to actually create something in line with those beliefs. And if everyone was was, you know, pontificating about what the what the honest, what the true answer to everything is, we probably wouldn’t end up with these phenomenal schools that take completely different directions, but that actually help us to have a clearer understanding of what works, or more importantly, what works for whom, under what circumstances for what purpose, how and compared to what to quote, Adrienne Simpson, and add a little bit as well. So, you know, being Nigerian is great. Being belief driven is great as well. Everybody wins. But most importantly, you can learn something for everyone.

Craig Barton 1:08:12
Great that Oh, that’s fantastic. One reflection, one question. So first themes, I always like that mantra, find someone smart, who you disagree with, I was like that, like find real smart people who have the alternative view and just try and listen to them. So there’s got to be some some basis to that. So I like that. And my second question is to be my final question for you all. And you mentioned those three schools give just give me just just one takeaway from each something that you learn from from each that maybe either surprised you or has influenced your practice. Sure.

Ollie Lovell 1:08:40
Okay. Self Managed Learning College. A belief in students in a in a young person’s ability to to self govern, and like unfaltering belief in that can actually unlock phenomenal things in young people.

Craig Barton 1:09:02
That’s just what age with these kids are, they

Ollie Lovell 1:09:04
were I think it’s like nine to 16.

Craig Barton 1:09:08
Wow, okay. That’s good. Yeah, I’d love to see that. That’s great.

Ollie Lovell 1:09:11
It’s pretty interesting place XP. Or XP. It’s just like, if if you get relationships, right, so much else follows. Some would say everything else follows but so much follows when you get there. Right. And Mikayla? You don’t know what high standards are until you’ve been to Macau. Have you been there?

Craig Barton 1:09:38
Not yet. No, I can’t wait.

Ollie Lovell 1:09:41
This is absolutely madness. So yeah.

Craig Barton 1:09:46
That was brilliant. That’s brilliant. Well, they were five absolutely fantastic tips. So let me let me hand over to you what should listeners be checking out of yours and I’ll put links to these in the show notes as

Ollie Lovell 1:09:55
well. I’d love it if, if listeners checked out the education research Freedom podcast. See if lots of fun on there. So much fun. I had you on there twice Craig. I’ve recently done it, people have seemed to enjoy Cognitive Load Theory in action as a concise and actionable guide to cognitive load theory. If people are keen to go deeper, I have recently released an online course that you can find them on my site on called Cognitive Load Theory mastery. We’ve had a few people complete that that one now even though it’s only been up for a couple of weeks, and had some really, really positive feedback. tools for teachers is another book. That’s, that’s out now. And it’s now even been used in some kind of university initial teacher education courses. And so that’s really encouraging that people are finding enough value in that. But apart from that, just remember you can learn something from everybody.

Craig Barton 1:10:44
That’s lovely that just final thing for me I just two episodes of yours that I read well while I revisited and while I listen to for the first time, so I love your your dog love interviews, fantastic. I love I love the structure that you do it that way you give yourself a little time to get through. And he really embraces that as well. That’s really good. And what what I liked, I like dogs must have been interviewed 1000s of times, right? And he’s probably been asked the same questions. But he really warm to that structure that that challenge of having to be concise, and he got through so much practical stuff from us, I thought it was a wonderful episode. One of the things I’m trying to do at the moment is, instead of consuming new content, make sure I revisit content that I’ve got something out of in the past, just with this old classic speak to your condition because you probably take something new from it and so on. And that was a definite example of that. But particularly when he talks about paired work and stopping paired work almost too soon riding this crest of the wave because you don’t want it to kind of fizzle out things like that I thought was a wonderful interview. And then you’ll have to forgive me because I’ve forgotten the name of the guy but you alluded to early on that the science teacher guy you had on hold. What was his name? I’ll

Ollie Lovell 1:11:49
post Bensley.

Craig Barton 1:11:51
Yeah, he was good. Hey, he was good. He was good. I really really enjoyed that aback and formative assessment and stuff so I’ll put links to both of those in the show notes because they were great. Wow well this is always been a pleasure speaking to you I got I always give a little behind the curtain appearance here so you’ve got last time we were on the podcast I think you put your name as the best podcast or something like that. Today you’ve got the original t for t creator So what are these claiming here listeners is because he’s got tools for teachers and I’m tips for teachers that there’s some kind of legal battle could ensue here but yeah, I’ll I’ll he was the first with the t for t but we’ll see. We’ll see what happens in the long term.

Ollie Lovell 1:12:27
I think I think last time the last time you came on with the the original podcaster I think I should I just wanted to come back at you with the T 51.

Craig Barton 1:12:37
Well, only novel airs or is always a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Craig. It’s always fun.

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Sarah Donarski’s tips:

1. Know how to effectively assess (03:31)
2. Choose the right feedback type (17:00)
3. Be aware of student bias (29:59)
4. Use, where possible, dialogic teaching (46:25)
5. Ignite the CPD culture (1:04:15)

Links and resources

• On Twitter, Sarah is: @s_donarski
• Sarah’s blog is: perspected.wordpress.com

• 1.Donarski, S. & Bennet, T (2020) ResearchED Guide to Assessment, John Catt Publishers: https://johncattbookshop.com/the-researched-guide-to-assessment-an-evidence-informed-guide-for-teachers…
• 2.Macpherson, R. & Jones, K., (2021) The Teaching Life, John Catt Publishers.
• 3.Mercer, N., Howe, C., (2012), ‘Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The value and potential of sociocultural theory’, 1.1, pp. 12-21 a.Note: Anything by Neil Mercer is excellent here for the dialogic.
• 4.Education and Endowment Foundation (2017) Dialogic Teaching: Evaluation report and executive summary. (Accessed: 26 April 2019)
• 5.Education and Endowment Foundation (2017): Feedback https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/feedback…
• 6.Hendrick, C & Macpherson, R. (2017), What does it look like in the classroom?, John Catt Publishers
• 7.Stuart Kime and Rob Coe’s Research for Evidence Based Education (2017) on Whole-Group Feedback: a.https://evidencebased.education/guest-post-point-marking/… b.https://schoolsweek.co.uk/what-happened-when-teachers-stopped-marking/…
• 8.Dylan Wiliam (2020) on Assessment: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nfAutEWaqOE&ab_channel=DylanWiliam…
• 9.Dunning Kruger Effect (Bias): https://britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect…
• 10.Chiles, M. (2021), The Feedback Pendulum, John Catt Publications.

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View the videos of Sarah Donarski’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 is this episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to head of English and author, a wonderful Sarah and asking. Now two pieces of pretty exciting news before we dive in first, I have finished recording all 10 of my online on demand CPD courses based around the ideas from tips, teachers, I’ll give you the big 10 here the number one course is habits and routines. That means your participation to the one that one checking for understanding is a course on responsive teaching, planning prior knowledge explanations modelling your words examples course at student practice, but it’s memory retrieval. Finally, I’ve kept the cost nice and low. There’s hundreds of short sharp videos in there. You can access it at any time we visit it anytime I hope you find you have to the tip for teachers websites and click on CPD. find details about those. And you can also book me for face to face tips for teachers workshops, keynotes, presentations, and so on. All the details are at tipster teachers dot forward slash d. So that’s exciting piece of news number one. An exciting piece of news number two is that I’m delighted to say that the tipster teachers book will be released on the sixth of January 2023. Just this morning, I’ve signed off on the final proof I’m really excited. It’s called out so well designed isn’t added. Fantastic job on the marketing campaign for this you ready? Tips for teachers. That’s the title of the book 400 Plus ideas to improve your teaching, I’ve tried to make this one of the most practical, actionable CPD books around so many ideas, covering all the things that we’ve talked about on the tips of teachers, podcast, but also all the things that I’ve learned visiting schools and teachers and working with schools and teachers and students all around the world over the last few years. So if you want to make sure you get one in the first print room, you can preorder that now on Amazon or John cat. And there’s if you go to the tips for teachers website, and there’s a book section Ford slash book, you find out all about that, right? Let me shut up now let’s get back to the show. So let’s get learning with today’s guests. But wonderful Sarah Lasky spoiler alert, here are Sara’s five tips. Tip one, know how to effectively assess tip to choose the right feedback type. Tip three, this is my favourite beware of student bias tip for use where possible, dialogic teaching. And finally, Tip five ignite the CPD culture. The really good ones, these you know, and all the tips are timestamps, so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first. And as ever, videos of Sara’s tips are available on the tips for teachers website, if you wish to share them with colleagues enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Sarah and ASCII to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Sarah. How

Sarah Donarski 3:08
are you? Hi, Craig. I’m good. Thank you. How are you?

Craig Barton 3:11
Very good. Thank you very good. Right for the benefit of listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?

Sarah Donarski 3:18
Yeah. So I’m currently head of English in the northwest of England. I’m an educational writer and speaker with particular interests, I’d say in assessment, feedback and bias.

Craig Barton 3:28
Amazing, fantastic. Well, let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one that you’ve got for us today?

Sarah Donarski 3:34
Right. So my tip number one is to know how to effectively assess, obviously, I said that I’m massively interested in assessment,

predominantly, because I think when we have a look at what assessment is, fundamentally, it is controlled. It’s small scale, it’s low stakes. And the sole purpose of it, at least up until the final exams is to improve the learner and identify any misconceptions that a learner has. And I think understanding that definition actually enables us to recalibrate the way we see assessment across the course of our curriculum.

So yeah, so I would probably break that into two areas. I think, first thing, particularly in an English setting, but this happens a bit more naturally in medicine and music, say is to employ incremental assessment. And the second thing is to imply assessment that enables flexible learning. So I’m happy to talk more about both of those.

Craig Barton 4:38
This is good, this this is good. Can you tell us a little bit more about those two, those two facets, so we just dive a bit deeper into those last two things if that’s okay.

Sarah Donarski 4:45
Yeah, no worries. So um, so yeah. So the passerby to employ incremental assessment and I think this is quite a practical way to look at the theories and the discussions that have been coming out perpetually by the big hitter in interest Assmann Dylan William, who probably probably from the get go, regretted he’s spoken quite a lot about this regretting their definitions of formative and summative assessment, because actually, he’s sort of done a complete U turn on that and said that every single assessment is formative until the final examinations. And again, that’s what that’s what we assess for I’m not assessing to judge, I’m assessing to identify misconceptions, right? So when I’m looking at, say, a Macbeth essay, across the course, to get to the end goal, and Dylan William also speaks about this, you know, knowing at first what the end goal is, say, the end goal is that my students can go into a Macbeth exam and write a question or write a response in essay response to any question that comes up about a theme or character. There are so many steps along the way that I need to break down and skills that I need to know they have to get to that goal. And so I think in your curriculum planning, if you break those skills down, so from the tiniest of they understand the play, you know, they have knowledge about the play, to they can write an introduction to they can write an analytical paragraph, to they can do that when I say I give them three themes to study, and then they and then I throw one at them to then the complete unknown of the final assessment. And when you do that, then you actually find that assessment becomes very nice and fluid, because all you’re trying to assess is, do they have knowledge? And you can do that through using multiple choice? Short, very short answers, very short question and answers, to just getting them to write paragraphs and paragraphs about various different themes. Because if they can’t write a paragraph, they’re not going to write an essay. So it actually enables assessment to be that bit more fluid. And again, low stakes, which is what you want, right, we’re going to just kind of write a paragraph today, we’re going to really hone in on that. And I think a plot employing that more in English, particularly, but again, in all subjects is is really the key to making sure that conversations are happening to in the right direction. And that assessment is really being used, like you said, to identify these misconceptions and move the learner forward, which is is fundamentally the core of why we assess prior to the final examination.

Craig Barton 7:29
Love this. I love this one, Sarah. So just a couple of questions here. What was what what are some of the ways you see assessments go wrong? What are some of the kind of classic traps that perhaps teachers will fall into where they’re not gonna get the things that we want to get out of the assessments out of it?

Sarah Donarski 7:47
Well, I think I mean that, I think the biggest mistake and I’ve I’ve 100% done this is teachers will assess without a secure, understanding that their students, so they, they will assess bigger before they start small, like like I said, if we look at this incrementally, so they go straight in for those end goals, like I’m going to throw this Macbeth essay at them. When I haven’t yet assessed that my students understand the play, I haven’t yet assessed that they can recall quotations, I haven’t yet assessed that they understand, you know, what Macbeth is doing at this particular point. And so therefore, if you throw that final assessment at them, actually, it’s a waste of time, not just for the student, but for you as a teacher, because you’ll be marking in it depends on how you mark, but what I envision is, is if you’re throwing that bigger thing, it’s probably more of a traditional written marking thing. And you’ll be like, you need to know your quotations. Whereas had to been quite close monitoring in a low stakes way. How well that’s up to do their quotations in the first place, then it would save the feedback for later if you jump to the bigger assessment too soon.

Craig Barton 8:53
Interesting. Interesting, right? I’ve been I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask this to Sarah, you’re just my personnel. Right? So a mistake? Well, I think it was a mistake that I used to make was all my assessments were topic themed. So an example here, you know, two weeks teaching the kids Pythagoras. And then here comes the Pythagoras and of topic assessment. Now, the reason I think that was a mistake, was because you get this kind of illusion of mastery, you know, the kids nail Pythagoras, and then we move on to the next topic, and then they nail that one. But of course, because I’ve been doing retrieval, it’s all performance and they forgotten it, you know, in the high stakes exam. The problem another problem with it is it gives the message that cramming is actually quite an effective strategy. Because if you know exactly what’s going to be on the test, and you you know, just absolutely hammer that for three hours the night before, you’re probably going to do all right on it, then you get to you know, your GCSE, right could be on anything, and then you realise that that strategy isn’t gonna be affected. So I thought I have that sorted. But then I hear people say that actually, no, it’s a good idea. If the kids know exactly what they’re going to be assessed on, so that they can prepare adequate, adequately, they can learn these effective revision strategies and so on. So where do you stand on kind of topic themed assessment versus kind of anything could be on the assessment?

Sarah Donarski 10:10
I think that’s a great question. And actually, I recently spoke about this. I think if you break down this, this is how I think about it. But I do think it’s an effective way. And I’ve seen educational papers do this in a different level for biology, where they break down the learning journey into these four categories, as a novice learner, a rote Lana, an inflexible learner, and a flexible learner being the final. And I think what we sometimes do, and that was going to be my second point, whereas talking about assessment to encourage flexible learning, is we sometimes when we prepare students incrementally, perhaps too much, we get them from a novice to a rote learner, so they can recall what we’re saying, then we get them to an inflexible learner, like you said, they, they have this mastery in what we’ve given them because they’ve had adequate time. But what they can’t be, then we were not assessing them then in how to be a flexible learner, which is where they get given a situation of the unknown. So I completely agree with you that there needs to be incremental assessment to build confidence towards a particular particular topic. But what we definitely need to throw on top of that is that level of in Flex flexibility, sorry, is where it is completely unknown environments, and they’re able to apply the knowledge to that particular situation. And I think where we can really build this in quite a lot is in the Key Stage Three curriculum, I think, kind of taking what Mary Meyer says about the case history curriculum needing to be the intellectual powerhouse of our curriculum design, I think what we should be doing is spending a lot more time in the case history curriculum, not just rote learning and building mastery towards particular subjects, which we might do more at GCSE. But actually the throwing in very odd, flexible learning situations, such as you know, right, you’ve learned this, you’ve learnt Romeo and Juliet, here’s a picture, apply what you know about Romeo and Juliet, his picture, just enabling that level of play with learning that I think you really make, if you think about it, most students really only get flexible learning when they go into their examinations. And then it’s no wonder that they fall down because we actually haven’t tested them necessarily in the unknown in the ability to apply all of that into a completely unknown situation. And that’s where you get students who get thrown at GCSE when they have, for example, I remember a few years ago, there was a sorry for the English examples, but you know, there was a Jekyll and Hyde question a few years ago, and obviously different Hi, do you think themes, I think, duality, you know, power, concealment? Fear, you know, you think of all of these classic themes, which teachers would have taught, and then they would believe they’re teaching flexible learning, because they’re like, oh, they can go in and do this. But actually, there’s still an element there, of unknown. And the question was help. How does Jacqueline hide, explore help? And, and what they would need to do is go right, well, there’s a fear towards help seeking, you know, there needs to be that complete level of flexible application. But it meant that a lot of students fell down. So I think, I think just teaching to subject specifics, as you’ve given that example, I think, will will have that negative effect, I think, where we could really utilise going a bit beyond that is earlier on, to encourage students to be a bit more confident in situations that they don’t, they’re not prepared for

Craig Barton 13:45
is interested in this. Just Just one more thing for me on this. I don’t know if this is a math specific thing. So I’m interested in your perspective on this. But one good thing about kind of topic specific assessments is you can go a bit deeper. So if I’m asking you, if I’ve taught you pay for progress, and I set you like an eight question assessment, low stakes quiz or whatever on Pythagoras, the chances are the final two questions, we’re going to be going pretty deep, it’s going to be some conceptual understanding. Maybe I’m weaving in some different areas of maths, maybe it’s contextual, all that kind of stuff. Versus if you do mix topic assessments, what tends to happen in maths is that they then almost revert to quite kind of surface level procedural style knowledge because you’ve got all this and you’ve got eight questions. So I’m only going to ask so one, one of those questions is going to be Pythagoras. So I’ll probably just ask kind of a procedural Pythagoras question. Then I’ve got another fraction square, I just asked, you know, quite a straightforward fractions question. And my fear there is when you have these kind of mixed topic assessments, you don’t really get that, that that depth of understanding assessment of that depth of understanding because you try to cover to broader, broader spectrum of content. I don’t know if that makes any sense and if you can relate to that in any way in in in your subject.

Sarah Donarski 14:59
I I can I would come back and it goes with the purpose of the tip that I’m trying to say like, what is the purpose of that assessment? So why are you developing an assessment with five or six? And is it because there is that there is a need that these students will go into an exam or, or go into particularly thing where they’re going to need to switch very quickly between those different schools of knowledge, in which case, assessing that is super important, you know, we will eventually in English, get to a point where students are going to need to stop writing Shakespeare midway through a two hour exam and start writing about poetry. So actually assessing eventually, that they can deal with the exhaustion of that time. And that mental shift is actually really important for us. But if you’re just trying to trick them and trap them, there’s probably no purpose to that assessment. Because, again, where it how useful is that feedback. And again, if we’re just looking at assessment with that core definition of being purposeful, because we are trying to figure out where students misconceptions are in how to move them forward, then then there’s no purpose to trapping them by doing that particular exercise either. So yeah, so I think that’s, that’s where that’s where you would see probably some assessments being planned poorly. And, you know, I’ve had the fortunate experience of moving into our department roll in, and that has given me a lot of autonomy. And every time we have an assessment, we sit down and we say, right, this is what our assessment looks like, is this, what we want our students to know, is this assessing them in all the skills so that we can identify the misconceptions, to move them forward effectively to the next thing that we’re doing? You know, and that because that is that purpose, it’s not to trap them, it’s not to judge them, it is for us to know that they are in the right, academic place to move forwards, comfortably and appropriately.

Craig Barton 16:53
It’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about that practising the switch between topics. That’s really interesting. That’s fantastic. All right. So what is tip number two, please?

Sarah Donarski 17:03
Okay, so tip number two is closely related. And again, it does go with that idea of assessment, but it is to choose the right feedback type. So I actually think that you can’t separate assessment and feedback, especially if you’re looking at assessment as being something to help. When we talk about assessment, it must be integral with feedback. And when I was writing with, with researchers, the original title of the assessment book was actually assessment, marking and feedback, because as a collective, you can’t separate them, we shortened it down, because it’s easier to say I’m assuming, but but it is so important that Okay, so when I’m saying, right, I’m gonna give them a quiz or a short answer question, How am I feeding back on that, so that we are then developing the right movements forward. And so where you sort of imagine the incremental steps towards that final assessment, you can also imagine incremental stages of feedback moving from say, you know, you can peer mark or whole group marking with with a multiple choice test. But then what do you do with that as well. So for when I teach Macbeth, obviously, given that it’s a closed book, and knowledge of the text is key to succeeding, we will start every lesson with a low stakes quiz, where students get their responses wrong, it’s not for me to be like, Oh, you’ve only got 68, I’m going to write that in my MacBook, it’s right, highlight the ones that you’ve you’ve, you know, gotten incorrect, because those are, where your knowledge gaps are. I will test this again in a week. So your homework is to study or your you know, our school is to study those, particularly those areas, because they’re the ones that are obviously falling short when it comes to your memory recall. Yeah, so in terms of then how you can provide feedback, I think that’s a really important discussion for departments to have. Because otherwise, then you do get into this, perhaps poorly planned, immediate recall, like for teachers to go immediately back to just written marking, without anything being done with it. You know, that sort of I receive your work, I will mark it and I deliver it back to you and actually a bit more of a discussion in curriculum planning, alongside assessment with feedback, I think would encourage more discussion about what are we doing with that feedback.

Craig Barton 19:41
This is again, another massive one, you’ve gone for his I love this. Now. We’ve got to do the big issues on the show. I like this. I’ve struggled with this with with with feedback in mathematics. And again, I’m always interested from a cross subject perspective here. There’s certainly been a pleasing shift in both schools away from kind of long form written feedback. Because what tends to happen, teacher spends hours doing it, you give it back to the kids, you’re lucky if they glanced at it. Or if they do, perhaps they can’t then kind of act upon it. It’s quite difficult to act upon it. And Dylan Williams suggests making feedback into detective work and have played around with that idea. I think that can work quite well. I guess my big question is, how are the kids? So let’s take them Macbeth essay. So let’s say you take that in, you do some written feedback? What kind of written feedback? Do you find that kids can then act upon deed? Is there a certain way that you’d rather phrase things or a certain level of depth that you go into where a child can actually read it and then can independently get on with improving that word, because that feels to me the big challenge when you’ve got 30? Kids, you’ve got to give them solid that they can then kind of crack on with how does that play out in English?

Sarah Donarski 20:52
And it’s a great question. And, again, I think this and I know, obviously Daisy would have spoken about this. But I think the you know, you can’t I don’t think you can do feedback effectively without models. And without perhaps a practical breaking down of, again, skills. So returning back to skills that you can assess that that student might need. So again, learning quotations, that’s a nice practical bit of feedback you could give to a student that you could then assess separately and low stakes to then re implement later. So it is about thinking about practical things that the student can move, move forwards with. In terms of written feedback, though, and I think this is why the discussion to me is so important. And I’ll probably mention this in my next tip a little bit as well, is how that feedback is received. And I think if you have a good understanding of where each feedback type has its pitfalls, then I think that it also helps to, to deliver more effective feedback. So for example, if you are saying, Okay, I have fortunate enough to have a smaller level class, and I want to give students one to one feedback, verbal feedback on their essay, right? Then you’ve got to remember that actually, verbal feedback, doesn’t actually isn’t actually better than written feedback, they are, evidentially the same level of effect in the same way that written and whole group feedback is the same. Because there are processes limiting that student from retaining that information. So if I sit down and have a one to one conversation for about 20 minutes with a child on a piece of work they’ve done, we have to think about cognitive overload in that process, that, okay, I might have walked away going, I’ve just given the absolute best verbal feedback to that students. And I have been really thorough and very clear. But what that student walks away with is something that we also need to consider what is happening in their mental processes, whilst we’re giving that 20 minutes and how can we then again, just allow ourselves to use extra resources to make that feedback, the absolute best that it can be such as getting them to record it, if you know your student is not a student who is particularly independent, probably would never listen to that recording again, getting them to minimise what you said in that 20 minutes to five clear things. Like tell me what I’ve told you that what are your next steps, and having that, that conversation a bit more clearly and openly because again, if you don’t understand that cognitive overload can happen in feedback, then you walk away, you think I’ve given this amazing feedback, and then we see those issues happen again and again.

Craig Barton 23:43
That’s great. That’s great. Just one more thing on this for me, Sarah, the I’m really interested in these kinds of next steps, because I think this is where a lot of feedback certainly that I’ve given us fallen down. So let’s get another math example. Let’s imagine you’re teaching your kids to factorise quadratic expressions, or whatever it is, you can, you know, you correct one of them. And then you can say to the kids, okay, right, you find the other mistakes and try and correct them, and so on, that can work well in the moment. But alas, then they’ve got somewhere then to go away, and then further practice that whether they’ve got so that they can then take, you know, this new thing that they’ve got their head round, and then you know, practice it and solidify it, and so on. There’s a danger that we get this classic performance learning thing where kids are just performing in response to that feedback. But then a week later, we give them a question, and you know that they revert back to stage one, I get the sense in maths, this is a little bit easier to do. I’m intrigued how on earth is worse in English. So let’s imagine you’ve given this feedback on the Macbeth essay to a child. Is it a case of they just go away and rewrite the essay or try and apply that to a different essay? What does the follow up kind of work to that feedback look like?

Sarah Donarski 24:51
Yeah. So and again, I think different schools would apply different different ways of doing this, hopefully, but yeah, well One of the things that I like to one of the things I’ve spoken about recently is identifying when you see these, are they mistakes? Or are they misconceptions? I think is the first question is this because you know, sometimes I’m sure is the case, in maths that a student might just write, they know what they’re doing, they’ve just written a three instead of a two because they were being lazy and rushing, or whatever it is. And you will have your knowledge, obviously, and your understanding of your class, but you will be able to say, You know what, actually, I’ve seen this a couple of times. Now, this isn’t a mistake. This is a misconception. A good example of this in in English is capital letters. You know, some students are very lazy with putting capital letters at the start of their sentences, they don’t have a misconception that capital letters aren’t a thing. Mostly, they’re just being lazy. And so they it’s a mistake. And you’ll say, right, you know, look at your capital letters. For misconceptions. I think having a sheets at the front or back of a book with the topics that students have done. So very quick sheet that you just have date, topic, misconception. And if you say to a student, right, I know I’ve had this conversation with the student three or four times about the fact that they, they’re not writing their topic sentences at the beginning of their essays, I know, I’ve had that conversation with them a lot. So be like, right, I’ve had this conversation with you a couple of times, turn to your misconception sheet and write it down for this topic. And then before they hand in any work thereafter, double check your misconception sheet and check that you have actually done the things that I last gave you feedback on. And I think those little nods, and those reminders that you won’t take in that work unless they have actively thought about feedback that you’ve given them before. Is is nice, because then it will force them. You know, like we said, learning comes from, from memory from the fact that you have things at the forefront of your memory, and the things that you’re thinking about. So we as teachers have to make students think about those things, before we just take in their work. Otherwise, we’re thinking about it, but they’re not.

Craig Barton 27:01
Brilliant. Brilliant. And was there anything else you wanted to add on this before we move on to tip three?

Sarah Donarski 27:06
And yeah, I did just want to quickly say, obviously, in sort of thinking about, these are all big, big, nice discussions about feedback, I completely understand. But the complexities of of getting a school to implement these things are actually really, really challenging. And I think partly to do with the reporting system. I think some schools are when we report and it comes with that idea. Like we know, there’s so much research going, right actually, if we take off grades from work, if we if we remove a grade, and we just focus on the feedback, then students will be more encouraged to look at that rather than a grades, right. So Ruth Butler, obviously, in 88, and then numerous studies thereafter. But if you’ve got reporting systems still based on that number system, then it becomes very challenging, because the conversation is still about that. So if I didn’t know, systems of reporting, so one of the things we did a reporting overhaul of years ago, was break down the reporting system about learning behaviours, so does the student does the student respond to feedback, and it’s like a positive or a negative, you know, like ingest actually, the, the way that we were doing reporting was less about the number, and so much more a breakdown of, of, of learning behaviour. And then it also made conversations about learning better at parents conferences, because you were able to track reports not based on numbers, because again, much as probably the same with maths where they might, students might get an eight, an eight and eight in Macbeth, and then a six and a three in poetry. And you have to sit there and explain to a parent, they haven’t gone backwards. We’ve just started a new topic and their knowledge and understanding awareness. And maybe their interest in this is not as strong as Macbeth, and they haven’t quite mastered it. And, you know, we will build them there. Whereas if you say, You know what, actually, I’m looking at their report, and they’ve constantly gotten minuses for responding to feedback. That’s what we need to see changing. It’s less about what they’re achieving, and how to achieve which I think is a better conversation to have, regardless,

Craig Barton 29:18
as approximated. I just want just just one more question on that, sir. How, how are you judging how they’ve responded to feedback? If that’s not a daft question?

Sarah Donarski 29:27
No. So it would be as you said, like, identifying, like I said, tables such as the misconception ones help with that, but it wouldn’t be the case where you didn’t have that resource and you would be receiving essays and and knowing that I’ve said this to that student three or four times I’ve seen this before. Or just yeah, just not. Yeah, not listening to all taking the active steps to make their skills better for the next time.

Craig Barton 29:56
Got it? Right. So what means to go on birth three, please.

Sarah Donarski 30:02
Okay, tip number three is my favourite one, this is my little Geek Love. And it’s one that I spoke about a few years ago, I sort of did some work with Harry Fletcher would on it as well. It is to beware of biases. And it’s something that as a young teacher, I had no idea about. And just as I’ve, I’ve been teaching now for about, Gosh, 11 years. So across the course of those 11 years, just figuring out exactly what is going on, in my students minds, when, for example, I have a student who I’ve given, you know, has not received anything under an A star for an essay across the course of the year, and yet still fundamentally believes that they will do badly, like what is happening in their processing, that is that them being super anxious, you know, I all the feedback I’ve given, will have been positive or have been wow, like, you know, whatever it is, and yet somehow that’s being interpreted as still potential to fail. And on the opposite end of that, students who you have been, you know, hammering, and you have been receiving decencies, and are very confident that they will be completely fine in the final exam. So, just thinking about this a little bit more and, and using that to perhaps, have a bit better conversations with students, by just thinking about where they might be lying on that spectrum of sort of complete negativity bias or a bit of bit too much illusory superiority is the the other way.

Craig Barton 31:52
Wow, I love a bit of bias this this is right up my street. This one, I can certainly relate to teaching both those types of students the the supremely overconfidence, and then the the ones who should be a bit more confident. What can you do, Sarah? What what what are some of the, those conversations that you can have with those students? What what works in both cases?

Sarah Donarski 32:14
Yeah, so. So again, it’s so it’s thinking about where trying to think about exactly where those students are lying in regards to their own belief, with top end students who are particularly critical, I did some studies on this a few years ago, and it was so interesting, because I asked them to rank themselves in the class. And they genuinely believed that they were probably middle, middle to bottom. And I think that is a to even just having that comes a wedding. Where do you think you sit in the class is a really nice way to just see how that students feeling about themselves. But funnily enough, like after doing that, and then you have that conversation, like, no, you’ve you’ve been taught, but then you you become aware of the teacher that actually I know that but of course they don’t. Because in the process of, of taking in work and marking and looking at it, we have a very good overview don’t we have of how all the kids are performing, but they don’t see that. And so again, it does really come down to using models, really, fundamentally using models, but also having very astute and honest discussions with students. So it’s, it’s a bet, I guess, it’s sort of using models with coaching is what I would say is, is the best way to do it. So a really good example is that I had a boy a few years ago, again, he was that perfect, like, really, genuinely believed that he would be fine in the final examination. And I had been giving him an essay for a while. And his context, context was worth sort of 30% in this in this essay was so weak, and I couldn’t tell you the amount of times where I was like, use more content, you need to have more context, you need to include more context. And I decided that I would sit him down. And I sort of asked him to rank the learning objectives for this essay out of 10 to see how strong he was. So he gave himself like, 10 for his ideas. Because, you know, he thought he was really, really good. And his ideas were good. So I didn’t sort of necessarily dispute that one. But then he did say to me, I know you’ve said that I need more context. So I’m giving myself an eight instead of a 10. And I’m like, okay, and I said, Alright, this is really interesting for me, because I would have ranked him out of 10 about a two in context, it was so clear that he he knew it wasn’t his best thing. So actually, my feedback was being completely disregarded because he knew it. He’s like, I’ll listen to him adding more context meant maybe a sentence. So the best the best thing that I I think I did. I did at this point is I took another student’s essay and he said, Look, this is an eight. This is a three, the context here, let’s highlight the context. This is a context eight. And he was like, Oh, my God, I am a two, you know, is that recalibration of where he sat, because he was able to see something that was, you know, again, recalibrating his view of himself. And I think, like I said, I think models are key for this. And coaching is a bit of key, just to enable students to see exactly where they are, and exactly how they sit. And I think models are the best way as well not to make it personal, just like, ask students how, how good you think you are at this, you know, what do you think you’ve done wrong here where, you know, out of 10, quantify, out of 10 quantify this level of skill here for me, and, and even working the other way, a student might say, Oh, I think I material like No, actually, this is a two, you’ll see that you know, as a way to build confidence if you need to.

Craig Barton 35:58
This is interesting, right? I like to try and ask the awkward questions wherever possible on the ship. So here’s it, here’s an awkward one, I can see this working really well, this kind of almost kind of comparative judgement approach or you know, using exemplars, I can see this working really well with two types of students. So your overconfident students who need to kind of realise that they’re not quite as good as perhaps Perhaps they think they are. And also your lower confidence students who are a lot better than they than they kind of think they are. What about your students who are low confident, but also are really struggling? Because I’m thinking, you know, they they think they’re struggling? And then they say, actually, you know, what you are, you are probably getting a three or something on this. Is that going to kind of as soon as you start ranking kids or you know, comparing, you could imagine for some kids, it starts to go the other way? Is that a concern? How does that play

Sarah Donarski 36:53
out? Yeah, no, and that is the complete other end of that. So when we have students with illusory superiority in the bottom end, but you’ve also obviously got the other students, what is really interesting is that some of this, this builds in as well, with the sort of negativity that is employed upon students, when you’re in a setting score, you know, if you completely set for a long time, you see a positive, a positive progress model at the top end, but a negative usually in the middle to low because students get into that bias that I am bad at this, and I’m not good at this. And they build that narrative. So they actually did do a study in this in 2008, comparing the way that students thought about themselves in regards to how much progress they made. And they looked at that exact comparison, so low achieving students, one who believed that they were really good, and one who didn’t. And they saw that the student who believed they were really good, made more progress across the course of the year, not necessarily because they were good, but because they were taking more creative risks. So it was about the sort of positive belief and self that encouraged more risk taking and learning. Whereas when you have that negative belief, there seems to be less obviously less movement into taking taking risk, in general, in the top end, this is a different effect. Because in the top end, if you’ve got a top performing student who has a massive belief in themselves, they actually make more mistakes, because their error detection goes down, because they’re taking more risks and their error detection goes down. So that was a really interesting study, I thought that’s wehrens in 2008, about how you think about yourself, and how that then impacts your motivation. So what you could do about that? I mean, and who was it it was Mark, boys don’t try is a great book for this as well. He speaks about this in regards to learning and identity and memory. And then obviously, that all linking into motivation. So it’s very similar thing with low achieving is to break down that narrative and, and, and really retaliate against that narrative that I you know, I can’t do this, I’m not good that the absolute truth that that student believes is part of their identity. And and showing them where no, actually look, you have done this, you’ve done that really well bear in actually lifting that student up, so that they’re taking more risks, because with more risk will come that progress later.

Craig Barton 39:26
Wow, this is this is fascinating. Just one final reflection for me on this, Sarah. So we have a website diagnostic questions.com. And we did a big study about 334 years ago now where we took 10,000 Kids results. And what what we do on our app is when kids vote whether they think the answer is A, B, C or D for a multiple choice question, we did an experiment where we asked them to decide how confident they felt in the answer, and was like five point emoji scale. So therefore, for each kid, we had a measure of the kind of accuracy and then we also had a measure of their confidence. So it’s kind of a measure of their understanding this is their perception of their understanding. And it was fascinating because the first thing was, the spread of results was all over the show. So you had your classic overconfident kids and you’re under confident kids. And you have that at all kinds of achievement levels, it wasn’t the fact that it was, you know, lower achieving students were underestimated, and it was spread out all over this unit. But most well, I don’t know if it’s surprising, or whatever. But one real clear finding came out was that boys really far more than girls overstate their, their, their perception of our understanding is far greater than their actual understanding, again, at all achievement levels. So it wasn’t just the case that you know, lower achieving boys are more confident than lower achieving girls, or higher achievement boys are more confident than how he because at every achievement level, the boys were more confident the girls, it’s it’s fascinating, isn’t it? Because there’s, there’s no biological reason why that should be the case or whatever. But it’s, and again, it’s probably anecdotally everyone can think of these kinds of overconfident boys. But it’s, it’s fascinating when data isn’t

Sarah Donarski 40:59
completely and I think that’s something again, sort of slightly touched upon by Mark and his, his when he’s, he’s talking about boys and their achievement and boys during trial, etc. That maybe at times when we maybe that’s got to do with how we’re processing our feedback towards those students, you know, that maybe because we see a boy who’s generally a low achiever, and then they do something really well. We say, Oh, my God, that’s so amazing, you know, amazing, maybe we do that sometimes. And then that perpetuates their understanding another great, their understanding sorry, of being better than what they think they are. But I think the best thing to do is try and figure out exactly where that student lies. Because I think even knowing that you’ve got a lower achieving boy who does have that illusory superiority, does think they’re more confident, that is actually really a really useful thing to for you to know as a teacher, because then you can help be like, you know, what, actually, you haven’t done this, right. And you can make sure that you are recalibrating their understanding where they’re at so that they are making progress in the way that you need. A really good example, which was given about this is when you would write, so if in English, if you’re annotating an essay, you would put it on a scale, it would be like a some a clear, a developed and an outstanding, that’s usually how the mark scheme sort of go on evaluative at the top. And so if I was to write some wider reading done on the car on it, that would probably be a level two out of a level five, so that would be a low, some wider, it’s like, it’s okay. But somebody who does have that illusory superiority, it would be like, Yeah, I did. Yes, I did some guided reading, you know, yes, I’m so glad they’re acknowledging that, because some way to reading done is actually can be very much read as a positive. So again, if for that student, maybe perhaps, you know, more wide reading needed is a better a better way to give feedback there or to annotate that that essay, rather than what you might do where you’d like some, because you’re trying to say you’re a level to where it’s actually that’s being misinterpreted.

Craig Barton 43:14
Got it. Last question. I could speak to all day about this. But last question on this on this on this bias thing was kind of a Chico, there’s two parts to this question. So I really liked this phrase kind of calibration. I really like this, this idea of trying to bring students perception of their understanding in line with their actual understanding. So there’s two parts of the question of this. One, is there any exception to that way? Actually, you’d want a child to tell us not realise where their understanding is, is there any case you can make where you want perhaps a lower achieving child, you actually want them to feel, you know, better than perhaps their achievement level warrants? And the second part is, over time, the more you do these kinds of comparative judgement, things and exemplars and feedback, do you find that this calibration improves that kids generally get a better sense of where where they are actually?

Sarah Donarski 44:06
Yeah, so again, I think, again, I would love obviously, this research with biases is quite new. So I think I think ultimately, I think Watch this space on how that’s that’s developing. But what has come out in education so far, does seem to suggest that if we can encourage students to at the lower end to feel a little bit more positive, and then negative, about their ability, that they will then take more risks in their learning, which will lead to better progress, like I said, so I think there is a case to be made. For some students that encouragement and creative risk taking, you know, at least they’re trying and by trying to get to get something down. So fundamentally, they’ll probably do better than if they got nothing done right. So, so there would be quite an obvious reason why a student trying to do better would do better than a student who’s not. So yes, I do think that I think the other really interesting thing that has come out though, is that actually negativity bias can be a motivator. So there are some papers that suggest at the top end. And I guess that sort of drives into a little bit of what we see with with the high performing people not not feeling like they did doing it well enough, that actually their negativity bias is a key motivator in their success. So in understanding that I think it’s interesting to then see, right, is this negatively bias at the top end? Is this detrimental to that students, you know, is that perfectionism is it bordering perfectionism? Which, then then it actually does become something past or really, that you could look into. But otherwise, if if it’s just that they want to succeed, and they want to do better, making sure that again, it’s just about clarity, right? You want to do better, okay, well, let’s work on this, then let’s push that extra level. So it’s not saying, Oh, they’ve got a negative vibe, they need to know they’re amazing, necessarily. Because if that negativity bias is a slight motivator, in that students in work ethic, then it actually can be used and can be sort of, yeah, like captured to help move that student and motivate that student further.

Craig Barton 46:22
fascinate absolutely fascinating stuff. Right, Sarah? What is tip number four, please.

Sarah Donarski 46:28
So tip number four is to use where possible, dialogic teaching. So I just thought I’d bring this one into the mix, having had quite a unique teaching experience, in that I taught in Australia, and I’ve taught in state and academies, and then private and the IB, and all of it. And I think one of the things that really got me into even educational research was, was working with Carl Hendrick when he was doing his PhD on dialogic teaching, and we did a research talk, probably in 2016 on it. But it was because I was teaching the IB alongside a level, I’d never taught the IB before. And part of the IB was that students did an oral presentation, written and oral. So I mean, this is astounding, but a 16 year old, I would have to teach them a particular thing they would walk in there would be unseen envelopes. And they would pick up the envelope. And it would be either an extract from a Shakespeare play we’d studied or a poem from a poet we had studied, and they had to speak to me about it for eight minutes. Without me into interjecting. And so so much of building and assessing for that along the course of the curriculum design was to get students to talk as much as possible and to have confidence in talking. Again, seeing a 16 year old pick up a Keats poem and speak for eight minutes about it, they cannot hide, if you really listening to them, they cannot hide their knowledge to succeed in that, they need to know it incredibly well. And part of the ways that we would build the confidence in this is by using Harkness, or by having lessons where we would say throw that poem in the classroom, and just sit at the desk and say absolutely nothing. And actually, I wouldn’t even listen to the students, I would just track who’s talking and listen to what they’re saying. So I won’t even look at them, I would just be on the desk. Because if you really do in tune into how your students are talking, you will really get an understanding as to how much they know. And I think the more we use this, sometimes when we believe that our students are at that point of mastery, you wouldn’t do this when they don’t know nothing, because then the talk will be empty, much like throwing them into an assessment without any knowledge. But as you walk through does that right? We’re going to just discuss this extract today, I’m going to put it on the table I want you all to discuss. And if you track how those students are responding, it’s a really nice, clean way to assess how much they know.

Craig Barton 49:21
Keep going with Kiki

Sarah Donarski 49:24
Yeah, so um, so one of the ways that I would assess and this isn’t the case for everyone, but I did write about this. And it’s drawn to my Australian roots, but I did you know, we love an acronym in, in teaching. So it was just a nice clear way for me to remember but as a sort of ACDC approach, nailed it. Whereas listening to where the students are just agreeing as the A so when you’re hearing right, so I’m tracking say your boy, I’m not sure if he just sat there agreeing if He’s agreeing, then I think is he listening you know, that would be a really interesting way for them to to me You’ve been and be like, Oh, what do you agree with? You know, if you find them just agreeing, it could be a nice way to identify that. They don’t actually know. So there’s a knowledge gap. The second is, are they contradicting? So that’s quite interesting. Like, are they like, oh, I don’t agree with that. I think that’s in which case, you could be able to see that students are, you know, evaluating internally, they’ve thought about that idea. They’re able to, to say, Actually another idea exist, or that’s a student who’s read a different paper versus other maybe a tutor. She just told them the right answer. So there’s, there’s there’s reasons, if they’re just doing that, then I think that you could then have nice discussions. Right? Well, why did you think that student’s point was relevant? Then, you know, nice discussions to just bring that conversation, that knowledge to the surface? And others are they developing on on those those ideas? And again, you can teach those. So that’s the so yes, I agree with you. No. And I thought that that symbol also represented, you know, so is it a sort of nice development of the idea that’s happening? Or do they just always change the idea, and again, you can see changing the idea as Potat, perhaps that student has a particular school of knowledge. But again, and then moving to that back to what I said earlier about, perhaps routes, knowledge that they have, where like, I know, I can say this and put this idea out there. But I’m not actually responding or engaging to the ideas that are being put forward in a flexible way. So I think that’s a really nice way to think about how students are responding and talking. And again, either intervening as a teacher, if you feel it is right to be like, right, we’re going to stop there. I’m just going to ask this question. And I’m just going to challenge people on that idea. And then enable that to go back to your teacher and be like, right, I definitely know that the student has this particular school of thought, but they haven’t yet developed that. So what can I do in my classroom? How can we build on this? How can we discuss more role? Or how can I reteach this other perspective, so that that student understand that both schools of thought, are a nice way to articulate and I think it was Tom Sherrington. A little while ago, he he said, he sort of spoke about this briefly with you, but it was on classroom talk in general, making sure that all of this happens with sort of the accurate sentence stems up on the board, you know, just giving those platforms to say, Yeah, I absolutely agree. But I would consider, you know, I have a class at the moment. And they are incredible. They’re very, very mixed set. But Oh, quite, quite vulnerable students quite fragile. So we are working every week to have a debate lesson. So every week, we have a debate lesson. And we’ll put up an idea. And, you know, we might do some research around it or whatever. And then I basically say they have to either they have to position themselves in that either agree or disagree. So it has to be predominantly one or the other. Now, they can say, they can say, obviously, that they mostly agree with but also understand, but at the very end of that, I say right, I’m gonna give you a minute now. And I want you to think about your sentence of your one sentence summary. So in summary, I believe that you know, and giving this sentence stem so that they’re able to put forward their argument in a considered measured, but also an evaluative way. And all of that is is modelled for them throughout the process of those discussions. But obviously, as you get to a level or you know, and again, something I stole from the IB that I absolutely use in a level now is just getting my students to have a conversation, they might have to go away and read some articles, different perspectives, different theories that I’d give them, but then this conversation is going to be a Harkness conversation you are talking and I am just there to to really see how well they are engaging with that material and able to articulate that material.

Craig Barton 53:59
Flip X Ira this this is a biggie this is this is good this right? What’s what you’re gonna have to put up with now? It’s just a big ramble where I try and pour our thoughts on this. God knows what’s going on my mouth here. First thing to say, I think my eight minute thing, I would hate that that is hot. That’s hardcore. That right that speak eight minutes on a subject without interrupting that is that serious stuff? Well, one thing that I think certainly gets underrated, I’ve underrated how complex it is to have a converse of a productive conversation with a fellow student. And what I’ve done in the past is, you know, done an example on the board or whatever, discuss it with your partner. And the thing is, I’ve not appreciated what a skill that is to have that kind of conversation. I really like these the idea of these verbal kind of stems the sentence structures to to have it almost feels a bit I don’t know about you, it feels a bit awkward at first when you’re saying to get you know, responding this way, but the more you stick at it, the more they get used to it and as long as do you explain why you’re doing this and it’ll transition to be able to write more fluidly and so on. I think it works works? Well. I’ll tell you where I struggle. And I’m interested in your take on this. I find whenever kids are discussing things in pairs, I find it hard to assess because versus the mall holding up a mini whiteboard or something, because I can’t get round. You know, it’s hard to get around everybody and dedicate enough time to listening. So I’m interested in what you’re when you’re circulating the room, or you mentioned kind of sitting at your desk and listening. Are you targeting particular groups, I’m interested in how you get as much useful information as possible. And the second part is, I’m also interested in how you share good practice. Because if kids are like writing things down in the books and mini whiteboards, I can take a photo of that and grab it up and so on. But if I overhear a good conversation, or you know, a good dialogue is gone. How do I share that with the rest of the class? So that my two questions? How am I How are you assessing? And how are you sharing? Good practice?

Sarah Donarski 56:01
Yeah, again, good question. So I think when I’m talking about these class discussions, they are whole class. Usually, when you get to the point of complete autonomy, you would be looking more at it at a sort of a level thing. Like I said, this is something for the end of you want to put this at the end, probably more so when students have knowledge. And I think for that exact reason that if I put it in pairs, you’re right. I’m not sure I can’t be certain that conversations are happening that are honest. So if I sit at my desk, and every single person is involved in this conversation, then I’m hearing everything that is said. So I did this with a GCSE class, quite recently. And again, it was quite nice, because it was about like, so when when I heard a really great idea, I would then interject and say, right, what, what Steph has just said, is a really brilliant, brilliant idea. Steph, can you drive one’s attention to what page that was on? And can you repeat that for me, please. And then what ended up happening, which was quite nice was that students would then say to each other, oh, I really liked that. Can you repeat that. And again, it’s modelling that idea that we’re all here to share, we’re all here together in that learning journey. And of course, I’m saying this, there’s obviously so many processes behind doing this, such as, you know, learning behaviours, and having that nice environment, if you can, if you can, possibly, if you can possibly get it, where students are listening to each other, but where you build that, that then students can come together and listen to each other. And, and then then even if you notice that a student is quite not not responding to that conversation, you could just obviously give a prompt if if you’re willing, you know, okay, well, what did everyone think about this? And then, and then draw attention to one other student? But I think I think the process of me bringing it up to date is because I think it comes something you’ve touched on just in your questions, I think as teachers actually we accidentally infer far too much. And, and there’s great, great, you know, dialogues and scripts of teachers, and I would 100% encourage every single teacher to to record a part of the lesson and script it and actually see what’s going on with this. It’s the same with verbal feedback. Because often, when a student is saying an idea, a teacher will actually sometimes just infer what the student was sort of saying to the right answer and be like, Oh, yes, yeah, that and then and then conclude that that student understands, because they’ve actually made that leap. Whereas by having more of a dialogical classroom, and it goes back to how I was phrasing before, I think you end up asking better questions. If you’re thinking about right, is the student actually exploring that? Are they developing on that idea? Are they just being contradictory? contradictory to the students? Well, why do you think that’s contributing? Why do you think, and I think it enables you to really dig a little bit more deeper into exactly how much that student does know. And instead of just being like, right, I’m going to ask that question. We’ve had a little bit of a chat that I’ve actually inferred from that student who was sort of on the right track, what they meant, you know, I know what they meant, oh, yes, you meant this. So I write that on the board and then we move on, whereas actually, there’s a lot to be said to be like, right? Is that quite it? Like have a discussion? Can we can we actually get to the purpose of that and throwing it back just that little bit more often?

Craig Barton 59:42
Really interesting, really interesting. Just one bonus question. This is a terrible question to ask. I apologise before we move on to your fifth tip. A really bad question. Um, you mentioned you’ve taught in AWS in the US and also in the UK. Obviously, this is kind of school specific stuff going on and so on. Are there any general agenda general differences that you would pick up between the three countries that you think of fairly valid in terms of in terms of how they approached the teaching of English or teaching in general, and any trends that you think are kind of generalizable.

Sarah Donarski 1:00:13
I will just correct sorry. I’ve taught in the UK and Australia. I’ve taught it just in the UK, I’ve taught in state sector academies, that’s probably where so just

Craig Barton 1:00:25
across, go for that.

Sarah Donarski 1:00:27
So I mean, that’s only two. Yeah, it’s that’s a really, I think it was a general general things, I think it’s hard. It’s really hard thing for me to actually, refract, reflect, reflect on because I don’t think I have the right amount of knowledge to do so. Apologies. But I do think my experience has been very varied, like I taught with Indigenous students in Australia, predominantly. Yeah, so it was for 25% Aboriginal Australian population of the school, which was incredible, but it was so poorly funded that I was teaching English history, geography and maths. And so that was my first job outside of uni. So I was doing all sorts of things there. I think there is a freedom in the state sector in Australia that I loved, and that I missed when I came over. I did feel that moving over to the UK were obviously there’s great things about Ofsted. But I did move over nine years ago, when we’re on that sort of pendulum swing, weren’t we over here of being all about, like, you know, the sort of blown up volleyballs with your learning objectives on them that we threw around the room sort of thing, which blew my mind, I was like, this is why. And it was so difficult for me to arrive from a state sector over in Australia where there was this nice, beautiful freedom to then this very, you know, remember and actually, it’s so interesting that you’ve asked this because I caught up with one of my mentors in my very first school I was I was living in working in Leeds, actually for two and a half years. And she was she she just recently published and we were at a conference together. And I hadn’t seen her in nine years. And we were joking, because I said, I remembered my first lesson observation when I moved and I love teaching like teaching, it’s really lame, but I’m from, you know, quite a low income family, my cat, my cat, my goal was to become a teacher. And I feel like I did that now. I’m like, okay, cool. I didn’t know what else to do. Because I made my goal. You know, I You knew they were like, where do you see yourself in five years, and I was like, just being a really good teacher. So that was always the thing that I wanted to do. But um, so I moved over. She, I was in my first lesson observation, I’ve received really, really good grades and results in Australia, and you know, had sort of came second in my course and loads of stuff. And so, you know, less than observation, I was really excited for it, because no one had seen me teach in the UK. And she took me aside and she said, that was a really good lesson. Like this was a rough school, a really challenging group of pupils who were sat there working quietly, working independently asking great questions. She was like, this was a great lesson, but you would have failed. And I was like, very, and she’s not you know, we’re good friends. She wasn’t that never was criticism at all. I said it actually helped me massively. And because I was confused, and I was like, why would I fail just like, Well, you didn’t do a plenary and then you didn’t check for understanding, like five times and hold up paddle pop sticks. And I was like, Oh, this is this is crazy. This is bonkers. And it probably was partly what influenced me in getting into educational research, because I’m like, This can’t be what good learning needs to be, you know. So yeah, so it was like a fascinating journey. Sorry, I don’t I’m not sure if that answered your question. But lots of observations that I’ve had having done, having done both of those different systems and situations.

Craig Barton 1:04:13
that interesting. Right, so what is your fifth and final tip, please?

Sarah Donarski 1:04:18
So it’s actually quite a nice segue, actually, what you just asked into my final one, which is something that I just recently wrote about, and it’s something that I think I’m more and more becoming quite passionate about, because I think it is super fundamental, and it is a tip to leaders, this one to ignite CPD culture. And I, you know, like I said, I’ve sort of I have been a teacher who thought that CPDs were a waste of time, and that’s probably because of the ones I was going to wear. And, you know, I have been part of being entirely critical of CPD, but I think that if you can get it right If you can explore exactly how to ignite CPD culture within your school, you will fundamentally have special staff staff retention. You know, like we’re looking at all of these numbers, and I thought it was really crucial to bring up with you today because all of these numbers and graphs that are coming out recently about teacher retention, and, you know, not being able to hold young teachers down, and how actually schools are still doing CPD, you know, ineffectually. Yeah, it’s fundamentally that. So

Craig Barton 1:05:33
good one. So I guess the obvious question is, how do we do this error? Because you’re right, I, I visit lots of different schools and see lots of different approaches to CPD. What what’s been your takeaway? What are some of the good things that schools can do?

Sarah Donarski 1:05:46
Yes. So I think I think the reason this is at my forefront is because I was just recently at the festival of education, and I was with quite an amazing few leaders and educators who I honestly just walked away, and I was like, I, I love teaching, I love education, I like walked away, again, just completely buzzing just to talk to people. But I think, you know, fundamentally where schools go wrong, and it’s drawing on, you know, use the term here, Ignite CPD cultures, because I’m drawn back to sort of David Western here, about a sort of Camp Fire leadership idea. But it is to have clear targets for school, like when we we know that educational research is takes time, and needs to be measured. So if you’re a school, it’s, it’s sort of, it’s sort of hard to see that you’re going to an effective CPD session when you every other week, it’s a different topic, and there’s no follow up, and you’re not integrating anything. So actually, if you start from, right, what is our school culture? Who are we? What do we need? And you say, right, we’re gonna implement a year, two years, three years, and it is that longer term sort of slow burn ignition approach, right, we’ve got these three targets, we need to measure before we need to see what’s going on before we need to discuss before with all staff, of course, because then you see, right, there is a purpose of this, we’re evaluating as businesses words, you know, or as, as other pieces, we’re evaluating this area of our school, you know, whatever it is lower achieving, boys, whatever it is, and then we’re going to have a couple of CPDs along the course of the year, to provide our knowledge as well as feedback from departments as to how it’s going, how it’s being implemented. And again, you can you could do this initially, as a sort of opt in approach, it doesn’t need to be every single staff sitting down all the time, you could say, right, we’re gonna have a core group who are sort of fundamentally in charge of feeding back this, obviously, all staff will go to the CPDs. But we have a core group throughout the year feeding back to us or to talking to other departments talking together, and then we can present and discuss and reevaluate at the end and talk to staff about how they’re going. So yeah, so I think that’s the thing, I think schools, you know, sometimes and I’ve definitely seen it where you’ve got like a CPD schedule at the beginning of the year. And it’s sort of like November 3, TVC. And it’s like, well, what’s the point of something that is to be confirmed, if we’re, if we’re going to look at this as being an opportunity to learn and to really engage with what’s happening within our school, it does probably need to have a bit of planning behind it in the first instance, and not just be something that we are tacking on. At the end of the school day.

Craig Barton 1:08:36
This is another biggie, so just just a few few thoughts from me on this one. So I’m very fortunate, I get to visit lots of schools, and I’m obsessed with how they they deliver CPD because often they come in as kind of a bit of an external speaker and, and one of my questions is always what’s going to happen after this, like after I go home or whatever, like I’m, you know, I try wherever possible, say, can I come like, you know, three days over the course of the year as opposed to one but if that’s not possible, what’s what’s the plan once once I go away? What’s the plan after the CPD and even if you have an internal CPD? If it’s just a one off? Like, how do you know it’s like the world’s worst lesson, right? You know, you teach a lesson, you think you’ve nailed it, unless you revisit our memories, you have no way of knowing whatsoever. So a one off simply, actually,

Sarah Donarski 1:09:20
really great, great analogy.

Craig Barton 1:09:22
And the other thing that’s problematic is, I see I saw this the other day in a school so their CPD for the year that they were aiming to box off within 12 months, and they wanted to sort out checking for understanding retrieval. They wanted to do responsive teaching and cognitive load theory to some extent, I’m thinking that that’s a decade’s worth of stuff to try and get your own. Yeah. And that’s, that feeds into the one off thing, right? Well, I’ve our retrieval CPD, then we’ll have a check for understanding CPD and it’s just it’s just a disaster way to talk about what my final thing is. i And I’m interested in your take on this. It what I think is really effective, but it’s quite hard to do but if you can I think it’s brilliant. And that’s where you have CPD, you have it on whatever, you know, check for understanding whatever it may be. And then before people meet up again, you have some way of assessing how they’re kind of responding to it. So whether it’s drop into lessons, whether they record things, whatever it is, and then the start of the next session, as opposed to it being a general, okay, what’s worked and what hasn’t, whoever’s running, the CPD can almost do like examples and non examples, because just like you would do with a lesson, there’s good like, just like, we know, there’s a difference between what we teach kids and what they actually understand. It’s the same with CPD. Right? So if you can go around in the interim, and you’ve seen an example of this, but you’ve also seen a really interesting non example, somebody who’s thinks they do in retrieval practice, but actually, it’s not quite doing it for whatever reason, it’s not quite what we talked about, and so on having those exemplars I think so useful. I don’t know about you, I very rarely see it with with with CPD, it tends to be almost right. We’ll start from scratch when we do the kind of second session. I don’t know what your take is on that.

Sarah Donarski 1:11:03
Yeah, no, that’s I would completely agree. And I think that’s, that’s everything that, you know, sort of leadership does need to look at, again, where you do see yourself in situations where you have worked with inspirational leaders who are getting this right, then you you know it, you feel it, you feel it within the culture. And I think, I think yeah, it does need to be that sort of follow up discussion. Here’s where it’s going, well, this is where you take from this, like, how can you try this in your department? Does it work? If it doesn’t work? Why doesn’t it work? What’s what’s, what’s the difference? What’s the shift there, you know, and really just opening up those conversations about what we’re doing on the practice side of our profession, as well as, as well as the sort of general general subject knowledge and stuff. And of course, a great CPD if you if is a great CPD target, of course, is to enable your staff time to develop the subject knowledge because subject knowledge is key, it’d be like, You know what, I want everyone to just be a bit more reignited in their subject knowledge. Let’s, you know, let’s see that happen. And that’s, again, another great practice target to have to have on CPD. But you’re right, they need to be much more focused. And then again, that constant discussion and evaluation, because otherwise, it’s it is pointless it is, there’s just like that it might be maybe you have a CPD where you you, okay, you get another little practice for your toolbox of teaching. And that’s okay, too. But when you’re looking at school saying, you know, we want to change these things, it can’t just be, it can’t just be the one off. Yeah, like another really good example is, you know, I was talking to a friend who was at a school where they’re like, right, we’re going to put on these like after school CBDs that all about wellbeing and teacher wellbeing so that you can be better by the end of the year. And I was like, well, have they actually captured how teachers are feeling about their well being? And then will they do that at the ends? And even so, they will have to differentiate between the fact that the well being hasn’t been just that we all got a pay raise the day before we gave you the final wellbeing essay, you know, it’s that you fundamentally believe that having these six sessions of school across the course of this year really contributed to your general sense of well being and if it didn’t, is there a point to it?

Craig Barton 1:13:35
That’s brilliant. That’s absolutely brilliant. Well, Sarah, these we don’t find Big Easy, right? There’s no mess. And I’m

Sarah Donarski 1:13:40
so sorry, I wish I could have done that. I was thinking about it. I could do little teacher things. But these are the things that I love. And that I’m I’m really interested in and I know they are a bit bigger, philosophically, but I think they do oversee quite a lot that that we’re talking about on the day to day.

Craig Barton 1:13:59
No, this is why this is absolutely brilliant. We have we have the big five like this. And then we’ll have another guest who will say remember to put your lids on your mini whiteboard pen. So we have everything on this show. So this is this is this is obviously Perfect. So now it’s time for me to hand over to you sir. What should listeners check out of yours? And I’ll put links to these in the show notes.

Sarah Donarski 1:14:16
Yes. So I mean, I’ve got blog. It’s perspect at WordPress. So I regularly write on that. I’ve written quite a few chapters for various people, but I also have my research at assessment book as well. So that’s me personally, but I have given a list of various other readings which are things that I think are really important. Education, Endowment Foundation, evaluations on feedback and of dialogue the dialogic classroom, Robin Macpherson’s, a teaching life, which I wrote about recently, which is on CPD culture. So everything I’ve sort of talked about today, I’ve Yeah, you will put those references up. I’m not gonna Yes, so yeah, some do. Williams stocks everything that sort of underpins the research that underpins the things that I’ve spoken about. I’ve passed on a list for you, which I’m sure you will put up.

Craig Barton 1:15:09
That’s brilliant. Yep, there’ll be they’ll all be in the show notes. Well, Sarah, this has been an absolute pleasure. I’ve learned loads of loads to think about and ask for more. So thank you so much for joining us today.

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Jade Pearce’s tips:

1. Use explicit instruction for novice learners (02:39)
2. How to ensure questioning involves all pupils (14:20)
3. Understand the active ingredients of retrieval practice (25:45)
4. How to improve feedback (38:45)
5. The power of teachers reading research (49:50)

Links and resources

• On Twitter, Jade is: @PearceMrs
• Jade’s book is: What every teacher needs to know

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View the videos of Jade Pearce’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 assistant head teacher and author of the fantastic book what every teacher needs to know JPS and it is a good one really quick one before we dive in last episode, I told you I’d started recording an online versions of my tips for teachers workshops, I hope to seven now seven out of 10. So available now our habits and routines means of participation, checking for understanding responsive teaching, planning, prior knowledge and the biggie explanations, modelling and word examples. So if you’re looking for some high quality on demand, reasonably priced, just go to my CBD store on your show notes. Anyway, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest wonderful JPS. Spoiler alert. Here are Jake’s five tips. Tip number one, use explicit instruction for novice learners. Tip two how to ensure questioning involves all pupils. Tip three, understand the active ingredients of retrieval practice tip for how to improve feedback. And finally, tip number five, the power of teachers research as ever, all the tips are timestamps you can jump straight to the one you want to see first. And also at other videos of Jake’s tips are available with tips for teachers websites, if you wish to share them with your colleagues. Enjoy the show. Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Jake peers to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Jade, how are you?

Jade Pearce 1:43
Hello. I’m great. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Craig Barton 1:46
My pleasure. Right Jake, can you tell listeners a little bit about yourself? Ideally?

Jade Pearce 1:52
Yeah, so I am an assistant head teacher in charge of teaching and learning and CPD at a secondary school in Staffordshire. I’m an evidence lead and education for Staffordshire Rousset school. And I’ve just written my first teaching a learning book. And that is called what every teacher needs to know. And it’s all about evidence informed teaching and learning.

Craig Barton 2:12
Amazing, right? Let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one, please Jade.

Jade Pearce 2:17
Okay, so my first tip is that we should use explicit instruction for novice learners. And I’ll just go into a bit of more depth on that. So first of all, I go through what I mean by explicit instruction. And by that I mean when pupils are fully guided through the learning process, when the learning processes are really teacher led, I mean that for teaching pupils new knowledge or new content and new skills. And I suppose the easiest way to think about it is it’s the opposite of Discovery Learning where we might require people to discover new knowledge or skills for themselves. And then I’ll quickly go through what I mean by novice learner because it’s something I always get asked when I do a session on explicit instruction. So a novice learner is a learner that doesn’t have a large amount of background knowledge on the topic that they’re studying. Now, what that means is, it’s not necessarily that because you are in year 11, on or in year 13, you’re an expert learner in all of the topics that you’re studying, if it’s a new topic, and you don’t have a lot of background knowledge on that topic, you haven’t done a lot on it before, you are a novice. And and there’s a few reasons why I’m saying that explicit instruction is most effective for novice learners. This is all to do with cognitive architecture and cognitive load. And so I’ll just explain what I mean by that. So cognitive architecture is all about our memories, and the fact that if we look at the cognitive science model of memory, we’ve got our working memory where we process new information, but that is really limited in capacity. And then we’ve got our long term memory, which is basically infinite in how much we can store in the long term memory. And that learning occurs when we move information from our working memories over to our long term memory, so that it’d be caught can be recalled in the future. But and I’m sure everyone listening to the podcast will know this. But if we overload our working memory, if we place too much demand on that working memory and ask it to process too much information at once, it becomes overloaded. And then that transfer of that new information from the working memory to the long term memory is hindered. And we will stay learn that and we’ll all have taught lessons where students have really struggled, and we’ve maybe asked them to do too many steps at once, and then they can’t remember how to do whatever we’re asking them to do. Or we’ve given them too much information, new internet new new knowledge at once. And then they forget some of it. And that’s because we’ve overloaded their working memories. And and what we see with explicit instruction is because it’s very teacher led and because you are breaking things down, you’re always thinking about the amount of load that you’re putting on learners, and therefore it’s more of deaf. Now if we contrast that with Discovery Learning, when we are using discovery learning, pupils have to hold lots and lots of information in their heads at once they have to hold all of the things they’re trying to try what they’ve tried so far where they’re trying to get to. And that places much more load on the working memory. And so it’s more likely to lead to that cognitive overload and cognitive overload and then hinder learning. So that’s the kind of first reason. And then the second reason, and it’s linked to that is that novices and experts learn differently. Now when we’re an expert, we have transferred that working memory into our long term memory. So we’ve got a really good scheme, and we would call it and have knowledge about a certain topic or how to perform a certain skill in our long term memories. And then when we when we then bring that back into our working memory is to use it because we actually need to remember that now we need to think about that content, it only takes up one chunk in the working memory. So it doesn’t cause anywhere near as much load as it would do for a novice learner. And again, for that reason, we need to make sure that we’re trying to be as explicit and guided as guide as possible for novice learners so that they don’t experience that out that overload.

Okay, so like I said, that’s the reason why explicit instruction is likely to be much more effective for novice learners. And then I think we can also look at the issue, the other issues with discovery learning, where we’ve asked students to work out new information for themselves or to work out how to, to solve a problem or perform a particular skill by themselves. And we all have done this. And you can see that there’s, there’s often cognitive overload, that maybe there’s misconceptions, because people think they’ve done it in the right way, or solve the problem in the correct correct way, or discovered this new knowledge, and then they haven’t, and it’s something that you actually have to correct. It takes more time. And it can be more motivating if pupils struggle to kind of discover the right content for themselves. So for me explicit instruction is a really big win. And then I think last, my last kind of point here, I’ll just clarify the kind of strategies that I think, are included in explicit instruction, because your definitions and strategies will differ. So for me, it is chunking. So Blake, breaking complex material into small chunks, and only introducing a small chunk of new information or a small part of the skill to pupils in one go. It’s making sure that your explanations are clear and concise. So you’ve really thought about as a teacher, what do the students need to know? And what’s the most concise way that I can tell them that you’ve used examples to make things concrete, you either use non examples or worked examples if that’s appropriate. I’ll then say modelling including teacher led modelling, modelling as a class deconstruction of exemplar material, or, or example pieces of work, scaffolding for complex tax tasks. So writing frame structure, strips, all that kind of thing. And then extended practice moving from fully guided practice where you are using that scaffolding, and then using guidance fading, to kind of reduce that over time until we get to lots and lots of independent practice. And that’s it. So

Craig Barton 7:56
let’s dive into this a little bit. Now, I’m a bit of a big, big explicit instruction found, but I’m going to play the role of devil’s advocate to Jade. So we’ll see if we can we can dive into this because every time I chat about explicit instruction with reference to maths, I get the same questions back so I never I’ve got so so let me hit you with these questions and see what so the so the first thing is, like, you often get like discovery learning. Very rarely, certainly math Anyway, do you see the weight sometimes presented in research papers very, very rarely will you know, it’s sometimes it’s, it’s held up as this thing where the kids just have to kind of figure everything out for themselves. Whereas what you want you see math and I’m interested if this is true in your subject, is it’s more kind of inquiry based in the sense that students are allowed to struggle for a little bit, then perhaps the teacher comes in with a bit of prompt and a support. And often that’s delivered quite explicitly. And then it’s a little bit more struggle, can they get to the next part on their own, and then followed up by a bit more kind of teacher kind of guided instruction, and so on and so forth. I think that’s the kind of thing that I see more than the kind of, you know, I guess, pure version of discovery learning, would that be true in your subjects? Would that also be problematic in your eyes?

Jade Pearce 9:10
So I agree that that was probably what we see more. And then. And that’s because I think as teachers, we don’t want students to struggle on productively for too long, which is probably the right thing to do, we only have a limited amount of time. And there’s a difference between, I think struggling because you’re thinking really hard about a task or some content and kind of struggling on your own because you actually don’t know what to do. And there are two very different things. So I’d say first of all, that’s a distinction that needs to be made really clear, explicit instruction isn’t making everything really easy for the pupils. It’s being explicit about what the new content is. And actually I found that when you introduce new content using explicit instruction, you’ve then got more time to move on to more challenging material as a class together. And, and I would say that that is still problematic because it still has the issue. Use of stop pure form of discovery learning, where if you’re allowing students to struggle, let’s say maths and you say, how do you think you might solve this problem, some of your brightest kids will be able to work out for themselves. They, especially with your helps if they’re struggling for a bit, and then we help them and then they’re struggling for a bit, and then we help them eventually they will work out the right answer, not all your children will be able to do that. And the ones that are least likely to do that, or those who maybe find that subject more difficult, aren’t as able, etc. And they’re the ones that explicit instruction would benefit the most. So I think that’s probably based on a really common myth that explicit instruction is, I’m just going to tell you everything, and you’re not going to have to think about it when it’s not, it’s not like I’m going to introduce you to the new content. And then we’re going to do loads, practice. But I don’t mean practices in solving the same equation again, and again, I mean, we’re going to look at it I’m Business Studies and Economics. So it might be we’re going to look at how this looks out in different countries. How does this look in different countries? How does it look in different businesses, we’re really going to analyse the benefits and the drawbacks and the evaluations. So I think it kind of allows you to get into much more challenging content and much more depth if you introduce any skills or knowledge explicitly from the start.

Craig Barton 11:15
So write two more awkward ones for you. So next one, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the with the research into productive failure, but this is always the kind of thorn in my side when I’m chatting about this. So for for the benefit listeners who aren’t aware of this productive failure is the notion that you essentially give kids a question that they cannot do, they haven’t got the knowledge to do it yet. But the fact that they struggle with it for you know, five minutes, or whatever it is, means that when you then do teach them it explicitly, they take it in a bit more almost as if they’ve the theory suggests they’ve been primed to it, they’ve already started to kind of activate parts of relevant knowledge and long term memory, and so on and so forth. What’s your take on productive failure as a as an approach? I find it problematic, but I’m interested in your view?

Jade Pearce 12:02
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. And I would think I can see where the idea behind that would work in that you’ve started to think about, well, actually, what do I know about this topic already? And how can I then use that to solve the problem? I think I will just do that through recapping prior knowledge, prerequisite knowledge, whether that be through retrieval practice, or you explaining it or looking at, well, what have we done previously? And and again, I probably don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re doing that for a short amount of time, you know, you said five minutes, and then you explicitly explain. And because five minutes, one, you’re not wasting too much lesson time. But also, you’re not going to enable pupils to really develop an embed any of those series misconceptions. So I can see how that would work. And I think if it is that kind of five minutes, it’s probably less of an issue. But certainly, I would just reactivate their their prior knowledge, I suppose.

Craig Barton 12:57
I think I will, too, to be honest. Right is your last one. So this is awkward. So we know that? Well, we we think that explicit instruction is particularly effective for novice learners. And then you get this kind of expertise reversal effect, where once they become an expert, we give them less guided instruction, and so on. So I guess the big question is, when do we switch? Well, when the students go from being novice to expert?

Jade Pearce 13:21
Yeah, really good question. And it’s not something you can quantify, because you can’t say, well, when they’ve got a certain set of questions, right, or when they’ve, I think it’s this is, this is where the role of the teacher in research informed practice is so important, because you have to use your professional judgement as a teacher. And you’ve got to think, do they now have a good, good amount of knowledge about this topic? Can I think you can do it through through that guidance fading? So you know, you’ve done lots and lots of examples together, let’s say or you’ve modelled and then they’ve done some together, they’ve done some part completion questions, once they reach a point where they can independently recite that knowledge, explain that knowledge, show understanding, or performance skill, etc. Without that guidance, and that scaffolding probably that’s

Craig Barton 14:06
fantastic. Right jays, what is tip number two, please.

Jade Pearce 14:12
So tip number two is to ensure questioning involves all pupils, we should use either a whole class response systems, or a combination of wait time, cold call, and everybody, right?

Craig Barton 14:26
Like the sound of this.

Jade Pearce 14:29
Okay, so first of all, I want to explain why I think questioning is so important. And I actually think it’s a really neglected form of part of our teaching that we kind of assume that teachers know how to ask questions. Well, and I think that’s because when you watch an experienced teacher or a teacher who is an expert in questioning, it seems really easy, but actually, you don’t realise the amount of thought and kind of the teacher themselves developing their questioning habits. So I think it’s something which is really overlooked and therefore really important to look at And then questioning we know forms a huge part of assessing people’s knowledge and understanding, allowing for responsive teaching, making sure that you’re correcting any errors or dealing with any misconceptions, but also actually making sure that all of your pupils are engaged and thinking during the cognitive work. So questioning is super, super important. And so because it’s super important, it’s it’s crucial that our questioning involves as many people as possible as much as a time as possible. And so a really popular technique is to use a whole class response system, like mini whiteboards. And I know that lots of people have spoken about that in the past on the podcast, so I’m going to kind of miss over that. And I’m going to say, if you don’t want to use any whiteboard, how else can you make sure that you’re questioning? Just verbal questioning? Doors actually involve as many pupils? So the first thing I think, is that you have to give wait time, or by weight time, we mean the time that you give pupils to think it’s probably I actually call it thinking time, I think it makes it more obvious. The time that you give your pupils to think of an answer. After you’ve asked a question. And before you ask for a response. I think reacher research shows that teachers wait something like naught point two seconds, it’s ridiculously, like short amount of time in between asking a question and then either saying, okay, whoever you know, I’ll take, I’ll take an answer from somebody or answering the question yourself, if no one has put their hand off, you know, we’ve all been in that horrible situation where that’s happened. So we need to massively extend the thinking time that we’re giving to our pupils, and research that I’ve read, so something like three to five seconds for a factual question, but longer if you’re requiring a more detailed response. So if it’s just a short answer, then three to five seconds, but much longer. And if you think how much how often do you do that in your classroom, they’ll tell me when I watch teaching, when I watch teachers teach, there are very few teachers who consistently give that much thinking time. But if you do do that, what you will see is that it allows all of your pupils, not just the fastest thing because it allows all of your pupils to think it gives the expectation, I’ve given you the time to think about it. So you should all be able to come up with an answer. So you get way more volunteers, you get a better quality of response, you you reduce the number of pupils that say I don’t know when you’ve asked, because they’ve had that time to kind of gather their thoughts. So that’s my kind of first age is making sure that you give white time. And then I really like to combine that with everybody writes, and that is essentially what everybody writes down to the question. And I listened to a podcast, it was Oliver Lovell, and Anita Archer. And she was saying that she’d read some research where the quality of responses in doubles basically improves massively. When you make sure that every pupil writes an answer down to the question, you can and you can see that because actually, you you’ve had to really think about what what you think the answer is when you when you write something down. And and also, that forces you to give the wait time because the thinking time, because you’ve got to give pupils time to write an answer to a question. So I would say do that. And then so we’ve given our wait time, either to sue pupils to think in their heads or to write down an answer. And then once we’ve done that, we want to use cold calling. And that’s obviously from Doug Lemov. And that is basically where the teacher selects the pupil to answer the question, not just relying on someone who’s got their hand up, but also that you say the name of the person who’s going to answer after the wait time. So if you haven’t done everybody writes that, again, make sure that everyone is doing the cognitive work, because they don’t know that they aren’t going to be asked. And if you think as soon as you say, Craig, can you tell me to? Well, everybody else apart from Craig has stopped thinking because they know that they’re not going to be asked where if you say, right, this is the question, I’m gonna give you a minute, think about it, or I’m gonna give you 10 seconds, think about it. Okay. Then you ask? Whoever it is, I think that massively increases the engagement. And again, if we look at research on cold call, because there is really, really strong papers that have looked at classrooms that use cold call, pupils feel more confident in their answer, they feel more confident in answering questions, it becomes like comfortable over time, because they get used to it essentially. So do you wait time, maybe get everybody to write and then use cold calling. And actually, I’m going to share an additional tip here and this is one I’ve stolen? It’s not mine. It’s from two teachers at my school who use cold calling with an earache the positive so basically, what you do is you say, right, this is a question and I’m gonna give you however much time let’s say about 30 seconds to think of an answer and when you thought of the answer, or, or an answer, because often like a more open question, it’s not just you know, where there’s one right answer. I want you to put your hand up. And then as pupils put their hand up, you can rate that positively so amazing. I can see two people have already got an answer. Brill, keep thinking if you haven’t, don’t worry about it. If you haven’t got it yet. Just put your hand up when you’ve got one. Excellent. Now foot now now five Have you got an answer? Excellent. 50% did, and you keep going and going, and you get all the benefits of writing the positive about behaviours, where you see it positively enforced, everyone really wants to be involved. It’s the expectation in the room becomes that you will put your hand up to answer questions. So little additional tip from there that I’ve stolen. I like

Craig Barton 20:17
it. I love this right, lots to dive into here. So just a few reflections from me, then I’ll ask you a tricky question, if that’s okay, so, first of all that that wait time, yeah, it always blows my mind when I read the research into that it’s scary. And one thing I’ve started doing now is, as you say, I think three seconds is kind of one of the kind of golden times held up there. So however, whenever I’m ready to ask a child to answer I’ll just try to like, tap out three seconds on me like just to make sure just just to keep it in my head. Because otherwise, it’s so easy

Jade Pearce 20:47
isn’t and it feels like ages, doesn’t it? It feels so long, but you do have to get used to

Craig Barton 20:51
do Yeah, and the second bit as well, I found interesting, um, same research that I read, I think it’s the married board row paper is the wait time after a child’s answered before you evaluate that response. And that that’s a biggie as well, because like, so I say to you, okay, I’m gonna ask you a question, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what’s Pythagoras theorem, Jade, and you told me and then straightaway, I go fantastic, and then move on, you deny in the rest of the kids that opportunity to reflect on that answer, is it the same as what they thought and so on, and so forth. So, but whenever we talk about weight time, it’s always that first one that gets the emphasis. And the second one I get my understanding is really, really important as well. I love this. Everyone writes, I really like that I’ve started messing around with, I’m loosely calling this the holy trinity of participation. I need a better better name for this, but I’ll try and sell you all know that that sounds blasphemous as well, possibly. But I’ll try and I’ll sell you on the dream of it. And then they’ll ask you a question. So I like to do to ask ask is a question. And then everybody writes the response down on mini whiteboards? I like them to do if it’s a long question, like working out on the back, and then like the final answer on the front, so that when they hold it up, I can see the final answer. But they’ve, they’ve kind of written on the back. So I see everybody’s responses. And then so that’s kind of stage one of the Trinity, then it’s discuss your compare your answer with the partner, so you can swap many whiteboards, what’s the same, what’s different, and so on. And then you can either cold call or probably warm call, because you’ve seen some of the responses. So then you can say, you know, Alicia, whatever, tell me about what you’ve got, and so on. And I just like that combo of you get the mass participation from the whiteboard, you get the pair discussion. So everyone’s also verbally, but then you get the advantages of cold call, where you get to kind of build a response with the child, and so on. So I quite like that as I love that. 123

Jade Pearce 22:35
I actually, I actually didn’t put that question in my questioning, because I was thinking, I’m just like, mate, I’m trying to combine too late. It told me it’s not good. I completely agree. I very rarely ask pupils in my classroom to answer questions that they haven’t already discussed in their pair. I think pair discussions are massively overlooked. And actually the confidence that you get from having your answer confirmed, yeah, I’ve got that as well. And then how comfortable you feel in talking about that. And the benefit of reciting the answer. And your explanation is huge. So I’m there with you that

Craig Barton 23:12
I love it. Right. Here’s my awkward question then. So all of this rests on. Like, it’s always one thing, getting our kind of means of participation sorted. But if our questions are crap, we’re kind of wasting our time. And this is hard to do, as you’ve said, so how if we’ve got like a less experienced teacher or a teacher who needs to work on the question, how do you get better at asking good questions?

Jade Pearce 23:32
Yeah, really good point. So first of all, I’d say that it should be part I think of departmental CPD, especially if you’ve got tricky topics, that as a group you discuss what are the most important questions that we need to ask when we’re teaching these topics. So that’s one really powerful way of doing it. Because actually, as teachers, you realise, likely misconceptions, don’t you all, where pupils are going to get stuck or whatever, as you teach your topic, you can pre obviously you can preempt things, but actually, there’s lots of things that come out, and you’ve already taught a topic once or twice, and then you address that straightaway, the next time round. And so I think, definitely taking advantage of your more experienced colleagues who have taught topics before, is really important. And then is is putting thought into it and thinking, right, what actually, do I want to know that the kids understand? And what questions do I need to ask to be able to assess that, and that is a really important skill, but you’ve got to sit down basically. And when I was a new teacher, I’ll write my questions out like script and have them kind of with me, and I’d have right number one, this is the question that I’m going to ask. And then I’d have kind of like strands of sub questions that we’re going to ask stuff after that. So I think it’s just one of those things that takes time and looks natural once you are experienced, but actually, a lot of thought has to go into it. I agree.

Craig Barton 24:52
And just a final reflection, feel free to say anything to this or just move on. The The other thing I find tricky is Well, particularly when I work with less experienced teachers is you think of your question, but then you’ve got to think of that means of participation to assess it, because you can ask a brilliant question. But actually, maybe if it’s requires a long verbal response, you’re only going to hear from one student perhaps. Whereas you could ask, you could perhaps reframe that question in a way that makes it more suitable to mini whiteboards or a diagnostic question or so on. Because you want a good question. And you want as many kids as possible to answer it. And sometimes there’s a bit of a potential trade off, if that makes sense at all between the two. Yeah, completely agree. Yeah, tricky. Tricky. Right jays, what is tip number three, please.

Jade Pearce 25:37
So my third tip is that it is crucial that we understand the active ingredients of retrieval practice. Nice. So why I’ve said that is because we know that retrieval practice is a massively popular strategy. If you I think if you look at how schools are engaging with evidence informed practice where they are, there’ll be one or two things that are most popular retrieval or erosion science. And so, so retrieval is massively important, because it’s one because it has such a huge impact on learning, too, because, you know, it’s got hundreds of yours or 100 years of research, which has proved to be effective for long term retention, but also because of how widespread it is now. And I think that we know, in education, when things become widespread like that there is a risk of lethal mutations. And there’s a risk of retrieval practice not being implemented as as effectively as possible. Where if we understand the active ingredients, and what I mean by that is those parts of the strategy that make it successful, that make it impactful that make it most effective, and have the biggest impact on learning. When we understand those, it’s easier to implement it properly and avoid those kinds of lethal mutations. So, shall I go through what I think the active ingredients are? So okay. So again, I’ve kind of cheated here because I’ve combined lots of tips into one. I hope that’s okay. Okay, so my first point is that retrieval, we know retrieval practice is effective for all learners. And really recent research actually will help to, to prove that to us or to show us that so you’ve got the young Get out 2021, I think it was paper, where they’ve, they’ve shown us that retrieval practice is effective for primary pupils, secondary pupils, post secondary for female and male learners and across a key 80 academic subjects. And then we’ve also got Pooja agar walls 2021 paper, which looked at the research on retrieval practice, but just in classroom settings, and again, found that there’s a consistent benefit of retrieval practice and student learning. So we know that there’s this big impact in all subjects for all pupils. But actually, retrieval practice, to me has got to look different for different pupils in different classes and in different subjects. And that sounds obvious when you think about it, because how can retrieval practice look the same in science than in maths, to English, to PE, to music, to art, like, clearly, there needs to be different things, but also to a child who was in reception to in the fall to in year six to in year 13. So I think we’ve got to be really careful that certainly myself as a senior leader, and other leaders, or teaching or learning across schools, that we allow our teachers to have autonomy so that they decide what retrieval practice best look like, in their subject. So if I’ll give you some examples from my school, in art, for example, their retrieval practice is all skills based. So it’s all practising the skills that they’ve learned previously. And it’s all about encouraging risk and encouraging creativity, not answering five questions on five knowledge, questions on tone or shade, you know, it’s all about practice. Same in PE, you know, it might be that you’re practising a skill that you’ve learned previously even a different sport than then you’ve learned previously. In maths or maths department. It’s all about interleaving, and interleaved quizzes, because we know interleaving has a really big impact in maths not necessarily not the subjects in science. It’s a bit a bit of a mix of short knowledge questions, and they use online quizzing for that, but then longer questions, longer kinds of exam questions. So it should look different in different subjects is my first point. The second point is that retrieval practice must be done from long term memory. And again, this is where teachers have an understanding of that model of memory is super important, because if you understand that, what we’ve done is put in, hopefully, with our teaching is put information into the long term memory, but that we need to practice retrieving that from the long term memory back into the working memory so that it’s not forgotten. Once we understand that we know well obviously that retrieval practice has to be done from long term memory because otherwise it’s revisiting, it’s not retrieval, and you’re not going to get those benefits. So when we first introduced retrieval practice in our school that was about six or seven years ago now, one of the things we realised really quickly, I’d obviously done a rubbish job of introducing it because teachers were allowing kids to use their notes straightaway. Obviously not retrieval practice, you’re using your short term memory or you weren’t, you know, you’re not, or you’re not using your long term memory at all. So making sure that it’s not from long term memory, which also to me actually says that it should be done individually first, not as a pair discussion, because if it’s a pair discussion, one, people will certainly be using less of their long term memory than another if they’re using it at all. So individually and from memory festival, that we know the power of retrieval practice is improved with corrective feedback. So really thinking about right once they’ve done the retrieval task, how are you going to give give feedback so that you are highlighting any misconceptions or confirming correct answers, that it should be spaced from initial learning, and we can look at retrieval strength and storage strength there. And that basically, we need to allow some forgetting so that retrieval strength is lower to get the biggest gains in storage strength. So we don’t want to retrieve information straight away, actually, it’s got to be done after a delay. And that it should be repeated. We want people to encounter those most crucial concepts three or four times I suppose, and that they’re really fully embedded in the long term memory. And that we’ve got to allow pupils to be successful, because otherwise they haven’t actually done the retrieval if you if you’ve given them five questions to answer and haven’t answered any, the class might have done retrieval practice, but they certainly haven’t. So we might use hints or close questions to start off with or cues. But we’ve got to balance that with the need for retrieval practice to be challenging once we make it too easy. And we give too many cues. Again, we don’t get the benefit of that retrieval practice, because we’ve given them too much help and actually haven’t used the long term memories. And then that it should include both factual and higher order retrieval. And this is something that we’ve looked at in MySQL over the last couple of years, because when we first introduced retrieval, it was very much seen as just for factual knowledge, where now obviously, what we’ve seen is that, yeah, that will improve people’s factual knowledge. But it won’t improve their ability to analyse or evaluate or compare or contrast or any of those other higher order skills from memory. And so what we’re moving towards, or what we have moved towards really over the last couple of years is making sure that we’re thinking about right, we might start off with factual recall when we first retrieve a topic, but over time, we need to develop that so that we are expecting people to answer really big questions that combined multiple parts of the course or content for from memory. And that is it for my retrieval practice tips.

Craig Barton 32:32
Right. Okay. This is lovely, this j. So I think the point about the highroad is really important. It’s certainly Matthew, you see that quite a quite a problem quite quite often, I’ve done this myself, where you go a bit deeper when the kids are being taught the topic, but then when you do your retrieval, it’s back to kind of procedural shallow level stuff. So I think that’s a really, really important point. So three questions here. You mentioned that retrieval practice needs to look different across subjects. You also alluded that it looks different across phases, different age groups, Javad, anything more to say on that what what would it look like for younger students versus older students?

Jade Pearce 33:07
Yeah, so I think I for one, I’m a secondary school teacher. So I hope I’m not kind of doing a disservice to any primary experts out there. And I’m sorry if this is wrong, but from from the schools that I’ve worked with, I think that if you are, you know, going all the way down to reception, it is likely to be that we’re expecting a smaller amount of retrieval to be done maybe that you are maybe more concentrating on the factual stuff initially, that asked him some really good stuff. And this was these these ideas are from Emma Turner, so they are not mine I’ve stolen and she does stuff like a retrieval rocket, and they have to like write things that they remembered in their retrieval rocket and she had a spider template as well with like different bits of knowledge coming off the the spiders legs. And so I don’t mean kind of different in terms of we can still ask questions, they can still do a quiz my my daughter’s nine and they do our sticky knowledge quizzes, she calls them. Like, yeah, that’s, that’s retrieval practice. And so you know, where they are be doing some questions about a topic that they’ve taught they’ve learned previously. So I guess it’s the same in terms of the basic mechanisms, but the format, the level of challenge, and the level of support that you give might be different for younger pupils,

Craig Barton 34:22
got it to two more questions. When do you think the best time to retrieve is is there a particular time in our lesson? Is it shifting it to homework? Is it weekly quizzes? Well, what works best for you in your school context?

Jade Pearce 34:35
Good question. So again, we have we allow our departments to decide this completely for themselves. I don’t think there’s a particularly best time in terms of a start of a lesson or the end of a lesson or anything like that. There is research which shows if you switch too much between retrieval and learning new content that can be that can hinder new learning. So again, Yes, don’t switch from all the time. Well, I think that the right, there isn’t a all this is probably the best time, I think it just depends on your curriculum time, what the type of retrieval is, it’s probably, it’s probably important as well. So what we see a lot in our school is that they do factual retrieval at home, because it frees up lesson time, then maybe they do higher order retrieval practice and lessons where, as a teacher, you’re therefore more involved and can give the support to get those really high quality answers. So, I mean, it might object we, I only teach GCSE, you know, level. And we have three lessons a week. And one of our one of our lessons is a retrieval lesson. So basically, they do retrieval practice for homework. And then they come in, and they do a Start Quiz, or a starter activity, because now we’re introducing higher order retrieval. So it’s not always a quiz. And then we go through their retrieval practice homework, and that’s kind of like the single lesson, or the department’s just Do you have a homework or there’s do a start every lesson. So I don’t think there’s a right time.

Craig Barton 35:59
Perfect. And last question on this. And you mentioned, the best time to retrieve is at the point kids are kind of forgetting it most to get this biggest boost in retrieval and storage strength. How much do you go into trying to schedule in retrieval opportunities I use? So kind of, do you think okay, I’ve taught this now. So in one week’s time, I’m gonna ask another question, then in four weeks, how would you spend things out and

Jade Pearce 36:22
soak it all in. So we didn’t use do E, our retrieval used to be very much ad hoc, like, Oh, I’ve haven’t done this for a while, we’ll do that, or I’ve seen a good resource on this. So I’ll use that. Actually, what we’ve moved to now is what we call a retrieval practice curriculum. So you basically had your retrieval practice completely planned out alongside your new taught content. And we give a guide of a round of about four weeks I hate given a figure because obviously, it’s always completely different. But when you tried to be practical for teachers, they they do need some guidance. But then I also say that that will depend on the class, the pupils how difficult the material is, you know how much they’ve struggled with it if it was really complex, and he struggled with it, do it sooner. So we say about four weeks after initial learning, and then you kind of schedule it to recap over the course I suppose, for me at GCSE or the year if you if you’re doing a year group one. But yeah, I think, again, it’s one of those areas where you’ve got to use your professional judgement about what is going to be the point while there, they will remember, but they won’t remember it easily, if that makes sense.

Craig Barton 37:27
Yeah, I think for me that the biggest change has been kind of scheduling in this in advance I was very ad hoc myself, and particularly in math and if you find this in in business studies in economics, there are certain questions are a lot easier to quiz than other things or certain topics I should say. So it’s very easy to include a fractions question in your due now, it’s not quite so easy to include like a rotations question where the kids need a grid and tracing paper and so on. So those topics unless you schedule them in, they don’t tend to be the forefront of teachers mind.

Jade Pearce 37:57
Yeah, I completely agree. And or it’s things that you I do it well, I don’t really like that part of the spec. Just doesn’t jump to that when I’m writing my little quiz. It just never used to jump to mind, or I think it’s probably more resume mentored. And also, I really liked that in the same way of when when you’re writing your talk curriculum, your new content curriculum, really makes you sit down and have some good discussions about what are the most important concepts skills knowledge in our subject that we do want to make sure that we repeat more often what do students struggle with? So that kind of prioritisation, I guess, is a really nice process as well.

Craig Barton 38:34
Yeah, makes perfect sense. That’s brilliant. Okay, Jade, what is tip number four, please.

Jade Pearce 38:40
Tip number four is feedback must improve pupils performance or learning be timely, be acted on by pupils and not create excessive workload. So again, I’m sorry, I’ve got them all in together. So if I think about, I always hated marking, always. So this is I think this is my 15th year now that I’m going into as a teacher, and I absolutely love my job. But I hate marking and I’ve always, always hated it. And that’s because I think when I mark for the first five years or 10 years, probably of my career and feedback was marking you only ever marked it wasn’t actually feedback. It was all written comments. I marked everything as in I gave everything a mark, you know, six out of nine c or whatever the grade was, and then wrote some comments on the bottom. It took ages it was always massively delayed because it took me two weeks to get round to mark in that pile of books. And you give the kids the book the kids the books back and you’ve just spent that last night you know, three hours the night before sat marking, and they don’t even read the comments, you know, because it actually they see oh, I’ve got about nine doesn’t matter what she said because a guy and I or I got four out of nine. Oh my God, that’s rubbish. I didn’t want to see what she said. So and I hated it for that reason that it took so much time and I just didn’t What I was ever getting bang for my buck, I guess in terms of workload. So where now, I kind of say the changes that has come along in my practice and the practices my school. So first of all, I rarely give marks to pupils. That doesn’t mean that I don’t, I might record a mark in my mark Bach, but actually pupils, you know, we’ll do three kind of more summative assessments for our data captures at school, and I’ll mark those properly, to see how they’re getting gone. But now, feedback is about improving. It’s not saying how well they’ve done what they’ve done. And initially, kids really struggle with that. And kids, you say, but Miss, what have I got? I say, right. Okay. Let’s say it’s an essay in economics, and it’s a 25 mile cost essay and I say to you, you’ve got 20 to 25. What does that mean? Because we’ve done loads of the work together, you’ve only just learned the content, you know, I’ve modelled a paragraph for you, then you’ve written it, it’s not in time conditions, you haven’t remembered off by heart, you’ve used all your notes. So it’s not really a true reflection anyway. And then even if it is a true reflection, even if you’ve done it as a timed essay, what does 22 out of 25 mean, it’s not an A level paper, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get an A, because who knows what you’ve got in the rest of the paper. So it’s trying to really show pupils that when you mark their work, the point is not to tell them how well they’re doing, it’s to give them feedback to improve. And then it doesn’t matter how well you doing, because we’re all going to get better, essentially. So moving away from marks, only formative comments, massively feedings forward. So essentially giving feedback before they do the task. And by that will mean scaffolding modelling practice, etc. So the idea there is that pupils know how to complete the task to a good standard before they do it. Well, what I used to do, and now I’m like, I cannot believe I did this is you’d let them write an essay, let’s say, and then afterwards, you told them what was wrong with how they wrote the essay. And I think why did I do that, that’s obviously a ridiculous thing to do. So making sure that they know that beforehand. And then really moving towards either live marking, or you’re marking the work and giving feedback as pupils are completing it. And they’re making the changes immediately, or live whole class feedback. So we’ll often do a paragraph or part maybe one question, and then I’ll say, right, let’s have a look, let’s get some kids works under the visualizer. What’s really good about this brilliant, add that into your work, how could we improve this work? Excellent. If you’ve made the same mistake, can you improve that for me, please. So it’s, it’s all about that kind of instant feedback. So they’re improving their work that that little bit of their work, but then obviously, you hope that they improve the rest of the work that they were going to write with the feedback. Or if you are going to live give delayed feedback massively. Now we depend on hopeless verbal feedback. So taking the work and having a read, making a note of common misconceptions, common errors, really good bits of people’s work that you want to share. And then I found that, because we’re the best will in the world, if you are marking 30 books, 30 pieces of work, and you’re writing, the most you can write is two or three comments, isn’t it because even if you’re willing to spend your entire evening marking that sort of work, the most you can write is two or three comments. We’re actually when you give whole class verbal feedback, the amount of the feedback and the quality of the feedback and the depth of the feedback that you can give is so much better, because you don’t just have to say something like, You need to analyse this further. You can say this is exactly what I mean by analysing further this is an example of when we haven’t analysed this as an example of we had when we have analysed, right, improve your work for me, please. So just massively more beneficial. And that’s, that’s my feedback now, based on that tip.

Craig Barton 43:36
Right, this is nice. So a couple of another biggie and a couple of things that dive into here. How does that play out in in other subjects? Are there any subjects that find that model or approach more difficult than?

Jade Pearce 43:49
Yeah, so definitely, I think English, I think modern foreign languages for similar reasons. In that obviously you are, may be more concerned with the quality of written work. But I think that’s a misconception. The misconception on a whole classroom of feedback is that you’re not picking up on things like spag because you just given kind of general stuff, you still should be. So you should still be taking a note of Spark. And then if there’s a pupil who, let’s say, hasn’t used capital letters, just write their name down. You don’t have to write on their word, use capital letters, although obviously you could do, I would just write Joe, capital letters. And then I would say to Joe, in the next lesson, haven’t used capital letters, correct it for me now, please, before you start anything else, and again, if there’s, you know, spelling mistakes or anything like that, so I think, I think that’s really important. But what I would say is, again, this is all about teacher autonomy. And we now at my school have no requirement for written feedback. So you do not have to give written feedback. But if as a department you decide actually, there’s these however many pieces a year, three, six pieces a year, where we want to give written individual feedback, because we think in this case, it’s going to be really beneficial, and that’s fine.

Craig Barton 44:58
Interesting, interesting, um, I’m really interested in obviously, you’ve got two perspectives here, you’ve got you as a teacher, but also as a senior leader. And when I work with the law schools and obviously, I just chat about maths, this you still you still get schools that have to take in books every two weeks or whatever mark would teach them arts or the classwork, right, all these comments and you get things like Gordon, well done, and all this kind of stuff. And the kickback is always well, SLT need evidence they need evidence and so on and so forth. Are you What’s your stance on this? Or are you not concerned about that as

Jade Pearce 45:35
one? What do you need evidence of, because if it’s, I don’t want to see written marking in books, because I’m like, that is evidence that you are wasting your time. And that actually, you’re probably not giving good quality feedback, because you’ve written two comments there. And unless you’ve combined that with verbal feedback, they’re not that clear, actually normally, about how to improve their work, you know, use more description, well, if the kid could have used more description, they would have done that. So unless it’s, to me, written feedback is often poor quality, and not as clear what the pupil has to do to improve what I want to say. And we do look at books we don’t take books in. But we look at books, when we go, you know, drop into lessons, what I want to see is that there’s a good quantity of work, that there’s good quality of work, that there’s evidence of, of challenge, I want to see evidence of the things that we know are effective. So is there evidence of modelling? Is there evidence of self assessment? Is there evidence of verbal feedback, which is then being acted upon? I don’t have to see the teacher, you know, writing verbal feedback in the margin, because if it gets corrected their work, they’ve used feedback to correct that. So I think it’s just thinking about what what are you trying to evidence? And it’s not necessarily written feedback, which would be the best evidence for that anyway. That was never wrong.

Craig Barton 46:54
No, it’s good. No, it’s really good. And if I’m just gonna take this opportunity to ask you a bit of a curveball question that’s related to what we’re talking about when we’re not necessarily to feedback about books. So often, again, when I visit lots of schools, there’s always different policies knocking around for what has to happen in box, right? So some schools, it’s got to be lesson objectives, written out, title, date, all this kind of thing. Now, whenever I talk about using tools of mass participation, like mini whiteboards, or ABC cards, or whatever it may be, or lots of pet discussion. One of the kickbacks I often get is well, we can’t do that because SLT wants to see evidence in books. And if they if they look through a book, and they saw today, the only thing written down is like a worked example. But everything else has been done on mini whiteboards or discussion. So it’d be it’d be a problem. So where do you stand on that? In terms of kind of what what for you is SLT would you like to see in books? Or is there a minimum you’d like to see there?

Jade Pearce 47:50
No, I am honestly not bothered what I see in books, I want them. I want this really sad. I think that pupils are denied those learning opportunities, because it’s not written down in a book, I can’t believe that, that still happens. It’s a it’s a really narrow view of how learning occurs, I think and on what, why don’t work astounds me that we’d have to provide written evidence of our pupils learning. Now, there’s nothing I want to see in books. And actually, we don’t have books across the school. Some departments use folders, some, some do use books, it’s completely up to them. And I just think you want to see, not necessarily in books, but because it’s more I think, going into lessons and talking to pupils, you want to see evidence of learning. And by that I mean, long term learning, because if you’re looking at a book, what are you going to look at? Oh, it’s neat. Well, okay, I get that that might show pride, and it might show high expectations, absolutely fine. They’ve done lots of written work. They’ve completed a worksheet, what does that mean that they’ve completed a worksheet does? Do they actually understand it? They did that four weeks ago? Do they remember it? And actually, those things are much, much more important to look at when you’re in lessons, and so much more evidence of learning that you can talk to a child and they can say, at the moment, we’re learning this, this is what it is linked to this that we’ve done in the past a few weeks ago, we did this did it and then the fact that they’ve got a nicely filled in table in their book, for example. So I think we’ve got to understand the difference between performance and learning. We’ve got to be brave and trust our teachers, I think is the most important thing and give them autonomy. And realise that learning isn’t necessarily what they’ve written down in the books was what they spent the whole lesson copying that off the board. How much learning had they done? They’ve got a lovely book loads of notes in but probably zero learning. I guess. Sounds a bit ranty too. Sorry.

Craig Barton 49:46
No, by kinda. That’s brilliant. Right Jade, what is your fifth and final tip, please?

Jade Pearce 49:50
Okay, so it’s a bit of a different a different one. Because not related to a kind of individual teaching practice was something that I think is super important. I’m super, super passionate about it. And that is the power of teachers reading research. So when I first started when we I guess as a school actually first started our journey towards evidence informed teaching and learning, as a leader, leader, our teaching learning, I saw it as my role to read everything and then kind of distil that, whether that be in a CPD session or and I used to do a really long Teaching Learning newsletter, which no one ever read, or that kind of thing. And so now, whilst I still see it important that actually teachers are time poor, and there’s very few of us who want to go home at night and read recent papers, read research papers, I mean, I do, but there’s not that many of us that want to do that. So I still think it’s important that we are distilling research for teachers, but also I think equally is important is that we’re giving teachers to read teachers time to read research for themselves, I think it leads to a much better understanding of evidence informed practice, if you read something for yourself, and much bigger commitment to evidence informed practice, if you’ve read research for yourself, it promotes the idea that reading research is the norm, we’ve got an amazing culture in my school now where we’ve got teachers who regularly read research who share blogs, we’ve got, I’ll go through some of the ways that we’ve kind of made sure that teachers can read research, but just a really great culture of a middle leader came to me the other day and said, Can I set up a middle leaders research group where we’re going to read research about middle leadership and house How was best to lead quality assurance in your department, or how best to lead CPD in your department. So we’ve got that kind of culture now. And I think you only get that when you start reading research, we will all have, at some point in our career not had been that interested or not having engaged that much with evidence informed teaching and learning and with evidence with research, you get that little spark, don’t you and you read one thing, you want to read another thing, then you want to read another thing. So I think that initial engagement makes that more likely to happen. And then actually just kind of helping me, it means that you’re not always standing, standing up and saying, well, the research shows or the research says, and actually, teachers are getting that from another voice. And it gives much better credibility to what to what you’re then saying. So I’ll try and give some practical ways because that all sounds like amazing, doesn’t it, but I’ll try and give some practical, practical ways that we can do that. So in my school festival, we’ve got a teaching and learning research group. Now that’s a voluntary group. And we meet once every half term. And we read a piece of research and I send out some questions in advance. And actually, I think that’s really important, because it gives teachers confidence that they feel prepared, especially when you’re starting off, it’s quite daunting to read, you know, quite heavy articles sometimes. So publish the questions in advance. And then we meet and we discuss that as a group. And we talk about well, how is that going to impact our teaching. And then this year, we also have done that with pastoral research group that isn’t led by me it’s led led by some of our pastoral leaders, and they meet and read research regarding pastoral issues. And then like I said, from September, we’ll have our middle leadership one starting as well, which will be great. We do what what I call Flexi insect sessions at my school. So two of our inset days every year are disaggregated. And you accrue the 10 hours during the school year, and you can have those two extra days off. And so one of the things that you can do to accrue those hours is to attend a research session where it’s very much like the Teaching Learning group, but you you’re just recruiting growers, so you call him you read your piece of research, you discuss it, and you bank an hour. And we also for that those hours, allow teachers to do independent reading as well. So I publish a reading listening to our Teaching Learning priorities, we’ve got a really good CPT library, which are advertised with, you know, some information about what you might read if you’re interested in a certain area of pedagogy, but then also stuck in contact me and say, I really want to know about, I don’t know interleaving in maths or

homework, effective homework, and then I can suggest some reading that they can do. So we’d all know things. And then we also do a teaching and learning Inquiry Group. And again, that’s voluntary, and that is where we normally focus on one aspect of teaching and learning. And it’s normally something that we’ve identified that we want to focus on as a whole school. So last year, yeah, that’s just finished, we looked at questioning and checking for understanding, because we noticed that that needs to be a whole school priority for us from September. So basically, I do a reading list and each member reads a piece of research on the reading list. And then we meet in the first meeting or discuss our findings, share the strategies that were kind of advocated by the literature that we’ve read, you choose two or three things you’re going to trial in your teaching over the year. And then we meet kind of regularly to evaluate that say how it’s going. And then at the end of the year, we produce a little guide. So that’s really nice, because next year when I introduce questioning as a as a whole school priority, we’ve got 25 members of staff who already have been focusing on that for a year. And but also we’ve we’ve trialled things in our own contacts and our own subjects with our own people. So we’ve kind of put together a Best Practice Guide. That’s it.

Craig Barton 54:56
Wow. That is That’s brilliant. Okay, I’ll love this I love I love the fact how you structure this. And I love the fact that you make time for it that feels like the most important component of this. I like that incentive as well to bank your hours. And just couple of questions here. How do you choose which papers to kind of direct staff towards? Do you have any kind of criteria that you use?

Jade Pearce 55:20
Know, it’s normally stuff that I have read that I think links in really well with something that we’re focusing on in school. So for example, when we’ve looked at retrieval practice in the past, it might have been the young paper or the Ag wall paper on Bloom’s Taxonomy, taxonomy showing that we need higher order retrieval practice. It’s not always research papers, it might be parts of like the great teacher toolkit or papers like putting students on the path to guided learning, where it’s not necessarily a research paper, but it’s a kind of a journal article. So no, I just tried to find things that I’ve read and found useful. And because we have like a CPD curriculum, where we try to focus most of our CPD on our Teaching Learning priorities, so that we haven’t got loads of people focusing on loads of different stuff, we’re kind of driving towards these things that we’ve identified as being most important. I basically suggest, though, a number of things under each heading five or six things under each priority, whereas if you are working on retrieval practice, or challenge or literacy, these are the things that will be most useful to you to read.

Craig Barton 56:21
Got it? Got it, I’m gonna ask you one more question. And I’ll give you a bit of time to think about it well, so I’ll just shut away for a second, I’m going to ask you to pick out a couple of papers that have had the biggest impact for some of your staff that you’ve suggested. The reason I asked, this is what one thing I wanted to do with tips for teachers, and I’m really pleased this is happening is that people are sending him around the videos of the tips. So for example, at inbox, so with these mini whiteboards, or recently, Chris such on literacy, and that can be quite nice thing, you’ll watch a five minute video seven minute video on this. And then let’s discuss that in a departmental meeting. Because often you’ll get people who’ve distilled the research into into hopefully quite an accessible way. So I like videos and medium alongside audio and alongside reading as well, too, as a way to share this research around. But yeah, anything sprang to mind in terms of kind of big hitters have been big.

Jade Pearce 57:09
In terms of kind of more general things not linked to a specific aspect of teaching. I’ll definitely recommend the great teacher toolkit. I think that’s really extensive in the amount that it covers. I would say in terms of like the cog size stuff done last year 2013 paper, and then there’s actually been a recent one hasn’t that by Hattie where he’s kind of looked into more depth about the findings. So that’s really interesting kind of addition to that. Putting students on the path to guided learning is a really nice accessible one about explicit instruction. And then the longer paper to that, which is why just why? What is the title of it? It’s not on my head. Why Discovery Learning harms learning I can’t believe I can’t remember it, cuz I must have read it. But that one is really nice.

Craig Barton 57:59
Yeah. Minimal guide. Yeah. Well, I

Jade Pearce 58:02
mean, minimally guided instruction, harms learning, I think is what it is. And then in terms of we’ve we’ve looked at cognitive load, and the cognitive load theory, research that teachers really need to understand, you know, the kind of New South Wales I think it is green green booklet is really good. So I think this depends, there’s some general things right and trans principles is obviously very general has lots of implications for lots of areas of teaching and learning. And then I think you’ve got to look at your individual priorities, and there’s lots of papers that would link specifically to each one of them.

Craig Barton 58:37
Got it. Fantastic. Well, Jay, this has been absolutely brilliant. There’s been huge areas we’ve we’ve covered a lot the way you’ve sneakily tipped off Ah, that’s brilliant. So let me hand over to you what should listeners check out of yours

Jade Pearce 58:49
Okay, so I’m you can get me on Twitter and I’m at PS missus on protect because So Mrs. PS. And my book like I said at the start is out for preorder now, and it’s released on the fifth of September I think and that’s probably like lots of this stuff today is obviously from from the book and the most important things I think about teaching so that as well.

Craig Barton 59:14
That’s fantastic. That is brilliant stuff. Well, Jade, this bill, absolute pleasure. I’ve wanted to get you on the show for a while. I’ve followed you on Twitter for a long time. So this has been really, really loud. So thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you so much for having

Jade Pearce 59:25
me.