Category: Podcast

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Charlie Burkitt’s tips:

1. Be clear and follow through (04:20)
2. Enjoy the kids’ company (23:40)
3. Ask the whole class questions (38:35)
4. Develop systematic revision (55:09)
5. Study the teachers you respect (1:04:32)

Links and resources

• My now infamous interview with Dani Quinn can be found here
• You can find out more about Michaela Community School here

Subscribe to the podcast

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Watch the videos of Charlie’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. Each episode I invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside or maybe even outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow, but hopefully something good will come out of it. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as the links resources and audio transcriptions from chapter seven. Better still, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. Now these videos could be used to spark discussion between colleagues maybe in a department meeting a twilight insight, or even just a cosy Friday nights in by the TV. Now just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks to our lovely sponsors, because this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is so proudly supported by our Maths. Maths is a fantastic app designed to help your students remember all the maths content at key stages three and four. It’s built around research into how memory works. Specifically blocks work on the power of retrieval practice and the Spacing Effect. ensuring students don’t just practice what they’ve just studied, but are regularly exposed to content they have encountered days, weeks and months before. If you want to find out more just simply search arc maths and mentioned my name. And remember that’s art with a C and not a cat. Okay, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guests. The wonderful Charlie Burkett. Now you may not be aware of who Charlie is. Charlie is the current head of maths at Mikayla school yet we’re going controversial. Now longtime listeners of my Mr. Barton maths podcast may remember that a former head of maths at the wonderful Danny Quinn appeared on my show and we had a three hour plus epic conversation about exactly what happens at Mikayla. And I’ll tell you why. As a result, it was all kicking off. There was complaints left right and centre. I even got contacted by the NSPCC who were concerned with what was going on because they’d been copied into a number of tweets. Oh, it was it was mental but I’ll tell you why. It was brilliant for for listening figures downloads went through the roof. So good on Charlie for coming on the show to give us a bit of an update about what’s going on at Makayla in the guise of his five tips. And they’re absolutely fantastic and fascinating. So whether you know a lot about Makayla, whether you have preconceptions or whether you’re coming into this fresh, I’m sure you’ll find this conversation fascinating. So spoiler alert, here are Charlie’s five tips that he shares with me today. Tip one, be clear and follow through to enjoy the kids company. Number three, ask the whole class questions. And that’s my personal favourite because we dive into some strategies above and beyond mini whiteboards. Tip Four, develop systematic revision. And Tip Five, study the teachers you respect. Now as I said at the start, the challenge with any tip is to ask yourself what would I need to do to make this work in my situation in my context, that’s particularly true with tips from a school like Michaela that may be very different in the way it operates to your school. So see what you can make of these. And if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll see I’ve timestamped each of the tips so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first. Or if you choose to read listen, you can find straightaway the point that you want to be up to. I’ll shut up now. Enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Charlie Burkett to the tips for teachers podcast. How are you Charlie?

Charlie Burkitt 4:03
I’m very well. Thanks very much for having me.

Craig Barton 4:06
My pleasure. My pleasure. Now, Charlie, for listeners who don’t know, can you tell us a bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?

Charlie Burkitt 4:12
Sure. So I’m the head of maths, Makayla, have been for the last sort of year and a half.

Craig Barton 4:18
Amazing, brilliant stuff. Right? Let’s dive straight in. What’s your first tip for us today?

Charlie Burkitt 4:23
Tip number one is to be clear and follow through. So you know, just just just for a bit of background, I’m going to try and make the tips, you know, as general as I can. And also just to say that, you know, all of these tips I’ve made mistakes on in the past, I wouldn’t want people to think that, you know, I’m by any means an expert on them or always have been or invented them or anything like that. You know, when I was sitting down to think about these, they’re all things that certainly in the beginning of my teaching career, I went wrong on. And also to say that obviously, as you just heard, I’m the head of maths at Michaela. I’ve been working at Mikayla for a number of years now. My current Sex is very different, I suppose to quite a few people. So just to dive in with the tip, you know, I say my context is different. What I mean by that is that the behaviour of Michaela really is impeccable everywhere. You know, you really need to see it to believe it. And I do recommend people come to visit, you know, you can do that really easily through our website. But when I first saw the school where you really couldn’t believe how the kids were behaving, you know, that they’re just in and out of their lessons there, no sat paying attention to the teacher. And that really was very contrasting with how my previous school experience was. I did teach first before before joining Mikayla. So I know a lot of people will know, you know what that experience is like. And so, you know, my first tip of being clear and following through the reason I’m saying that is because I think that really underpins a lot of the behavioural foundations at the school. And that’s what results in the fantastic behaviour that you see everywhere. Obviously, there’s a lot of detail that goes into the final product, and Mikayla, but that’s one of the main principles. And the kind of order I’m going to do my tips today, I hope goes in order of, you know, a sensible order of if you employ these tips in this order, you can you know, if you do tip number one that leads to tip number two, etc. So, the first one about being clear and following through, is just to say that kids obviously, really, really value clarity, they need to be clear on what the rules are, or they’re not going to be able to follow the rules that you have. And that obviously links in really hugely to consistency as well, the more clear and consistent you can be as a teacher, the more you’re going to see results in the children. And, you know, that is obviously within your own classroom, and also across classrooms, if you’re able to achieve that, you know, maybe within a department or within a school, of course, what we have at Mikayla is all the teachers, you know, following exactly the same rules, which are really clearly laid out to the kids, and following them through, you know, in the same way across all the different classrooms. And that really is the thing that results in you know, the miracle, that is Michaela that I walk around in every day. But where this can apply to people who people might be listening and thinking, Oh, Charlie, you know, what’s the point of you talking about? Makayla, I can’t do anything about that in my own room? Well, I think, you know, there are some fundamentals of what we’re doing that you can apply in your own classroom. Certainly, I remember when I was, you know, in my own room, in that sort of island that you’re, you’re in often in a in a teach first school, you can lay out the kids in the beginning, okay, here are the things that really matter to me, here are the things that I’m going to care about, and I’m going to follow through on, they are much more likely to do those things. So, you know, for me, one of the massive things in the beginning was not being spoken over, you know, I’m sure everyone’s had the experience of desperately trying to teach fractions or, you know, equations or whatever it is, and the kids are just essentially talking over you. And, you know, it’s hard for me to think back to that these days, because it feels so far away, but you know, it did happen. So, you know, in the beginning, it’s, you know, I’m not going to be spoken over, that’s just something that’s not going to happen, you know, in order to build a classroom with mutual respect, we’re all going to make progress, you’re not going to be speaking over me. So that’s the clarity end of it to set that up in the first place. And then following through is then you know, when it happens, when inevitably, kids do speak over you, which will happen, you must, must, must stick to your guns and deliver, you know, whatever sanction you have available to you often, I don’t know, demerits or a warning on the board or whatever it is, or, you know, whatever systems you have available to you, you’ve got to follow through on on that point. And you know, that applies, of course, to behaviour in the classroom, like I’m talking about, but it also applies to homework. Anything really involving the children be super clear. Follow through

Craig Barton 8:53
a little bit, right, let’s dig into this a little bit deeper. Charlie, can you give us an example of a few more of these rules that you would have either ones that are school wide, or ones that are personal to you in your classroom? So we’ve got the don’t talk over me just give us another selection, if that’s

Charlie Burkitt 9:07
okay. Yeah, sure. So I’ll go through some of the ones we haven’t Mikayla because that might give people have flavour for for, you know, how we do things here. So, you know, another one of the big expectations that we that we like to lay out early on is for projection in lessons, what we call projection. So that’s people’s just speaking loudly enough to be heard. And there’s a few levels to why that’s important. Obviously, kids need to speak loudly so that everyone in the room can hear them so that everyone in the room can learn from them and so that you as a teacher can hear them and learn from them, and be able to respond to what they’ve said. But there’s also the low level at which kids should just be learning to speak loudly and confidently in order to be you know, productive members of society when they’re older and to come across confidently and interview and things like that. Now, you know, so we have that expectation. We’re very clear about Every teacher across the school is always speaking about it all the time, you know, you want to project you want to project. So the clarity is absolutely there and the kids get that right from the beginning. And then we will follow through on that, you know, both with the positive and with the negative to be clear, you know, I wouldn’t want people to think that this is all a big negative, oh, you’ve got to speak loudly, or we’re going to the afternoon we’re going to give you demerits. It’s not like that at all. And I’ll come on to that a bit more of that warmth, actually, in a in another tip later. But you know, we will give, you know, on one hand merits for kids speaking really loudly and of course we’ll follow through if kids are kind of persistently not speaking loudly enough, then they might pick up demerits. And, yeah, that’s one more example of where we follow through.

Craig Barton 10:41
Give us one more, Charlie, whilst we’re on a roll with this.

Charlie Burkitt 10:45
Okay, one more, I suppose, you know, it is in a way difficult to pinpoint one because there’s so many we have around the school. Okay, so here’s another easy one. We expect silence in the corridors. I know, that’s a controversial one, sometimes in the world of education. But that’s a nice, again, a nice, obvious, clear one for people to have in their heads. And it’s one of the things that results in, you know, just a school that runs incredibly slickly and it’s really clear, you know, we say to kids, you know, you’re not speaking the corridors, they walk in, you know, very orderly silence single files their next lesson, if they were in the corridors to turn around and speak to the person behind them, or in front of them, or just do, you know, do something silly and a bit unprofessional, then we and we will follow through on that, you know, we have duties all around the school, to make sure that happens, obviously, this is part of what I’m saying about follow through that there’s no point in having the rule that you must have silent corridors and being really clear about that, if you aren’t then going to follow through on it. And that means, you know, having the kind of prisons around the school with the staff body to make sure that those rules are followed. And you know, the other the positive side of that is that you then have corridors where not only the pupils are behaving and being silent and moving to their lessons in an orderly way. But you also have this kind of lovely kind of joyous atmosphere where all the pupils are saying and after do miss answer to the teachers, as they go past, you have a little bit banter with the kids, you’re kind of hiring them along. And it’s this kind of lovely, very warm, positive atmosphere that’s created. But the foundation of that atmosphere is that actually we will follow through on the rules that we’ve set out.

Craig Barton 12:28
This is great, Charlie, I want to dig into these two aspects, the clarity and the follow through if that’s okay. So an error I’ve made, is I go big on these classroom expectations first lesson in September. So this is how the classroom is going to be, and so on and so forth. And maybe if I’m feeling particularly organised, I’ll stick up some kind of poster of these are the kinds of ways that we behave in this classroom and so on, or maybe the school has got us, you often see this in schools, or behaviour expectations kind of poster or list that goes at the front of every classroom or somewhere in the classroom. But inevitably, as September ticks on into October, November, these rules, they start to kind of, we expect a more kind of trickled down version of them, and you start to let things go with certain kids and certain classes and so on. And I can feel it happening. And I know it’s wrong. And it just just happens all the time. So I’m interested first in this clarity aspect, particularly that that that second rule that you explained about the projection, I mean, that’ll strike a lot of people as well. That’s an interesting one. Until I’d spoken to Danny Quinn, I’d never heard of that as kind of kind of a rule. But I guess this applies to all rules. How do you do get that clarity? Is it a combination of you modelling it? Does the kids have access to it written down anywhere? Do you practice it? How’d you? How’d you get that clarity?

Charlie Burkitt 13:46
Sure, yeah. So on a whole school level you might have heard before about the boot camp that we run at the start of school, when you’re sevens joins us. Tell

Craig Barton 13:54
us about that, Charlie? Sure. Yeah. So

Charlie Burkitt 13:56
I mean that that’s a huge part of the successful running of the school, to be honest with you. So in the very first week of September, we have all the New Year sevens coming into school. And we have none of the other pupils arriving at school yet, except the year elevens, who are in for their revision for their GCSEs. But what that means is we have, you know, almost an empty building, and lots and lots of members of staff. And importantly, they’re really experienced staff on hand to make sure that the sevens are inducted into the systems we haven’t Mikayla. Now that serves the kind of dual benefit of not only inducting, the year sevens, but also inducting new staff that we have to come join the school. So often, the new staff, of course, aren’t used to the systems, they aren’t used to the rules. They aren’t used to how to deliver a lesson in a Kaler way because there is such a particular style. And it’s a style that I think really works. So that’s a chance for the kids, the sevens and the new teachers, both to be inducted into that culture and into all the systems and rules. And you know, it’s a really amazing sight every year you know, I’ve gone through this have a number of times now that the people’s near seven or they arrive to us on that first day. And honestly, they’re a bit of a ramble, you know. So they, their behaviour is kind of all over the place, they kind of don’t know what they’re doing, they’re walking in order for directions, they, you know, they can’t look us in the eye and greet us with full sentences, and they, and they don’t speak loudly enough for us to hear. And then they generally have, you know, bad habits in terms of their concentration, they can’t, they don’t look at the teacher throughout the lesson. Just all not all manner of bad habits, you know, you can imagine the picture. And then the real miracle, and this is amazing is that within a few days, and certainly by the end of the week, that pupils have just transformed, you know, they just have that their habits are miles better than they weren’t there when they arrived. And you know, they’re speaking loudly, they can look you in the eye, they’re speaking in full sentences, they pay attention in lessons, they’re behaving themselves around the school, they’re orderly, and they’re happier. That’s, that’s the crazy, crazy thing, they are so much happier for it, you know, they arrive, kind of, I suppose, a bit nervous, and that’s natural, but just generally seeming upset, you know, and they’re just so much happier for the order that we provide. And, you know, that’s generated through obviously an amazing push from all the staff here on, you know, the consistency. And as I’m saying, that clarity and the follow through and all the other things that make Michaela great and that, you know, there’s so much I could speak for hours, but I won’t.

Craig Barton 16:25
So, if we just drill it on this projection one, then how are you teaching the kids to project or use? Are you kind of saying this is the kind of level that we speak out now? Can you try you try you try? And is it written down anywhere? I know, booklets often play a play a key role in in some of your work.

Charlie Burkitt 16:40
Yeah. So there are bootcamp booklets. So the kids will in that in that year seven boot camp, they’ll have that written on paper in front of them at some point, but it’s not so much about it being written down on paper, that’s more to remind us to go through it with the kids. But then what will happen is there’s just a culture in the School of we all speak loudly. And you know that that because that is a thread that runs through every single lesson in the building, you can guarantee it, and you know, new staff are inducted into that kind of culture. So it happens, then the kids end up rising to that challenge, you know, so it’s not so much a, here’s how loud speaking now you’re going to do it. Now, of course, there is a bit as a teacher, you will be speaking loudly. And you’ll be saying to the pupils, look how loudly I’m speaking, I’m coming across confidently, this is how to come across confidently as a person, you need to be speaking loudly like this. And you know, the lovely thing is that from the first day or two of bootcamp, there will be pupils in the class who straightaway get that point. And then they start speaking really loudly. And then you can point to x person in the class and say this, this person is doing it well. This is how you do it. That’s a merit love it fantastic dinner Dinner. And you really praise that person. And it just sets that standard for the rest of the class. And they they pretty quickly get the idea of what that looks like. And because it’s happening everywhere, it doesn’t slip. And then it happens like magic.

Craig Barton 17:59
That’s great. And well, let’s turn to the other side, the follow through site, because this is something I’m bad at as well. Because, again, you’re writing names on the board or wherever. And then it’s more work for you. You’ve got to organise maybe the tension or type something up on sims or something like that, and I just can’t be bothered. But I know it’s the wrong thing to do so. So tell me about these follow throughs. You mentioned demerits potentially detentions. Just talk us through how that system works, Charlie, if that’s okay, yeah, of

Charlie Burkitt 18:25
course, you’ve got the systems that are there. And I hope that a lot of people listening to this might have similar systems. You know, these exist everywhere. It’s just essentially a warning, which we call it the Marriott and then a detention after that. And then you have an encore system where the pupils will be sent out of the lesson. If they do that three times. Now that is happening very, very rarely, I have to say in the building. And the reason that is happening rarely is because we know here, not to over rely on those systems, the systems are there to support you. And they’re really, really important. But you also as a teacher, and you know, I’m going to be straying into my other tips here. But you as a teacher, you have to be a source of energy and enthusiasm, and you have to draw the kids in. And there’s an element of performance to teaching that, that you mustn’t miss. And you know, it’s a mistake that I made very much in the early days of my teaching, which is that I thought when I when I heard about Mikayla, I was reading about Mikayla, I thought that it was all and only about the systems. And I pretty quickly realised that actually, there’s so much more to it than that it really is performance you have to be you have to bring some charisma to the table and you have to try and show the kids why you love the subjects and why you love them and and draw them in now to answer your specific question. Of course, if you’re doing all of those performance type things in front of the children and we train new staff at that and you know, people come and this absolutely includes me, people come to the school, not knowing how to teach in the Makayla way, not teaching in a way that you know, is really energetic and purposeful and full of charisma necessarily, you know, so you know, don’t have to come as Mr. Charisma to the school. It’s not like that to I wasn’t that in the least I was Mr. Wooden, if anything, you know, but then, you know, the other staff and Mikayla, they come in, they give you a bit of feedback, you know, which is so useful to hear you get to watch all the other staff teaching in a Mikayla way you slowly get used to what it’s like to teach it. And then before you know it, you’ve you’ve transformed in the way that you teach. And you know, you’re actually engaging the kids on a performance level. But of course, if it comes down to it, you will have to follow those systems, we do follow those systems, and and enforcing them consistently is what it means that we get the excellent behaviour that we do.

Craig Barton 20:40
Got it. Just a couple more on this chart. I could talk to you about this all day because it’s one of I mean, Mikayla fascinates people just just generally, and people have preconceptions about it, and so on and so forth. But I obviously there’s there’s far more to it than the behaviour side. But I think often these the behaviour in the rules is what people kind of latch on to. So I just want to just clear a clear up a couple of things with the with the detentions is, how are they run? Is that is that the person who set the detention runs them? Or are they run centrally? Or within departments? Just how do they run, Charlie?

Charlie Burkitt 21:09
Yeah, they’re run centrally. So after school, there’s detentions that the pupils are kind of read a list of who’s in detention. And then they will go to a centrally run Sr, which is in one of our halls.

Craig Barton 21:21
Got it? That’s great. And my final question is, I’m interested, do you have any rules that are kind of bespoke to your classroom that aren’t kind of universal kind of school governed rules, if that makes sense?

Charlie Burkitt 21:33
No. Interestingly, you know, and I know, maybe some people are thinking, Oh, wow, that’s really, you know, weird or crazy that you would not have any rules in your own classroom that are different to the rest of the school. But the reason for that is because if I had rules in my own classroom, that I thought made sense, and I thought worked, and you know, we’re working for the kids, I’d be buying young Katherine’s door, and I’d be saying, Miss verbal thing, I’ve got a rule that’s working in my classroom, we all need to be doing it, you know, so we have a way we have a vision of what good teaching looks like at the school. And, you know, I think our results have been showing that that is absolutely working. And, you know, you need only visit the school to see that it’s working. Honestly, I knew, you know, I came to visit the school back when it only had up to a year nine here. So there were no results to speak of. But I walked around this school, and I was blown away by what I was seeing absolutely blown away. And that is because there’s a vision of what good teaching should look like. And we all aspire to that vision. And if there were bits and pieces that we thought were wrong in that vision, we just adjust. And that happens all the time. You know, there was a number of years ago, we didn’t do any partner talk in the school, we introduced partner talk. And now that’s a really fundamental feature of all, Mikayla lessons. So we’re always pushing forward, I hope on what we think good teaching looks like I’m really trying to strive for how can we be better? How can we be better? How can we teach the kids more? How can we get them better grades? How can we make them into better people at the end of the day. And so that means that that consistency of vision means now I don’t have extra rules, and I don’t think you would find anyone in the school with extra rules. Now, that’s not to say that if you walk into every classroom, you’re going to see literally identical teaching, of course, you get different styles, you get some people who are you know, one particular way some people who are very sort of maybe sweet and that’s their kind of thing, or maybe some people who are kind of a bit more funny, a bit more of a comedian, a bit more kind of banter. But, you know, you will see bits of all of that in everyone’s teaching and and the rules are the same everywhere.

Craig Barton 23:39
Got it. Fantastic. Right, Charlie? Boss Tip number two, please.

Charlie Burkitt 23:44
Tip number two, I feel like we’ve spoken so long. And tip number one, then I’ll dive into tip number two. Tip number two. Oh, yeah. So this is a really important one it is enjoy the kids company. And what I mean by that is the warmth, the warmth side of teaching, you know, people I’m sure would have heard about warmth strict. And the kind of the first thing I’m talking about there, I guess it’s the strict you know, it’s the it’s that fundamental layer of authority you need to have in a school building, in that the kids will follow the school rules. Now. Once you get that it’s so so important that you have the warmth on top of it otherwise the kids you know that they’ll just be marching around the kind of prison camp and they’re not going to be enjoying themselves and they will not be working hard for you. And everyone’s going to be having just a worse time you know, so it this is something I really miss in the beginning of my teaching career. I thought if only I had the systems they haven’t Mikayla if only I had detentions. If I If only I had centralised detentions then I could just sit back and relax and the lessons would just sort of happened for me and I could just walk in and in a really wouldn’t that way deliver lessons and they would just go well now I’m I’m so sorry to break anyone’s heart who thought the same thing as me any you know, me’s out there right now. Unfortunately Really not unfortunately, fortunately, you know, I’ve come to realise it is the case that we also need to show the kids we love them. And you know, this, this is such a such a wonderful discovery for me and my teaching, because it’s made me enjoy my lessons and my teaching career so much more, being able to have a laugh with the kids being able to show them that you’re on their site, like connecting with them as other human beings having a relationship with them. I used to think and I’m, you know, I’m ashamed to say this. Now, I am ashamed to admit this. But I used to think that relationships was a bit of a dirty words around school, I used to think that people who leaned on their relationships with kids in order to get them to do things, were undermining everyone else, because everyone else was following the systems and they were in some way undermining everyone else. Now, there are subtleties and complications to that that we can get into. But it’s so important that I that I say here, and so that all the me’s out there can hear that you must show the kids, you love them, you must build a connection with them, you must have a laugh with them, you must enjoy their company, because they’ll enjoy your lessons so much more than your classroom and the school will feel like a warmer, more joyous place. And in the end, then this is you know, the utilitarian side of it. And in the end, the kids will work harder, and will get better grades, and it’ll be better for them.

Craig Barton 26:21
Again, this is fascinating this, Charlie, you mentioned warm strips, that’s one of the things that people often latch on to, and say, well, that’s just sounds absolutely ridiculous, is a real contradiction, and so on and so forth. So I’m interested in diving into the practicalities of this because tip one, obviously, you’ve outlined the rules that that exists within the lessons, and so on and so forth. And that can definitely kind of fit into the kind of strict camp there. So how do you get the warmth in lessons to the rules sometimes get in the way of this warmth? For are the rules there to support the warmth? If that makes sense? Oh, yeah,

Charlie Burkitt 26:52
this is the amazing thing about it, the rules actually really enable the warmth, because it’s, I think it’s only when you have that foundation of kind of authority in the room and control of the space and the feeling that the kids are all safe and can trust you and trust that the room is going to be a safe place in which to exist. Then on top of that layer of security and kind of trust and calm, you can build on top of that, or the relationship building stuff. So you know, when you’ve got a room of kids who are just sat, politely looking towards you waiting for you to teach the lesson, that’s the moment at which you can be a bit silly. And you can kind of make a couple of jokes or tease one of the pupils, you know, in a fine way or kind of, you know, sing Happy Birthday to a pupil or put silly glasses on a pupil or all of the all of the silly fun things that we do on top of just normal teaching, to show the kids we love them, that those will happen on top of bedrock of authority and of understanding that we will follow the rules. Now what happens is, their kids, if you’re being silly in front of them and having a laugh with them, they will be laughing along with you safe in the knowledge that it’s not going to get out of control and and people aren’t going to start standing up and throwing things and shouting out and doing all that stuff. Because at the end of the day, we will always follow through with the rules if we start to be silly and loving and warm, and the pupils because you know, they’re real human beings, and this will happen. And they maybe take it too far, they take the joke too far, they start doing something silly, well, then we then we roll it back. And we so actually know the rules or the rules, you know, and of course, we’ll give out demerits, and so on to rein the kids back in a little bit if they start to get out of control. But that’s not to say that you’re afraid to in the first instance, let the grains go just a little bit so that the pupils are enjoying the time in the lesson.

Craig Barton 28:43
Got it? Got it. It sounds tricky to get right, Charlie, again, I can only speak from my experience here. But this kind of given them the freedom to like you can imagine you come in your McCracken a few jokes being a bit silly. So then the kids join in and all of a sudden, it’s kind of bubbling up a bit and then you’ve then you’re in kind of a bit of a tricky position, because it’s almost like you’ve started this process off, you know, with the silliness. And then you’ve got to say, All right, okay, now it’s time to stop. And the kids might be thinking, well, well, you started it. So now we’re just trying to join in and so on, is is it quite tricky sometimes to kind of kind of get this balance? Is it just something that comes with experience?

Charlie Burkitt 29:15
No, it’s certainly tricky. And it’s and it is certainly something that comes with experience. You know, I say, teachers, when they first joined the school, do really struggle to find that balance because people I think when they first come are a little bit on the side of being stricter, actually, and in holding the reins tight and not letting the kids go, you know, even even for an inch. Now, I would say that that is not necessarily a bad strategy. Because it is it is better I would say to err on the side of being in control and purposeful and the lesson going in in a productive academic direction. Rather than just being silly and having a laugh and you know, everything unravelling so our caution with that, and I would say that one way of actually showing the kids that you love Have them and showing them warmth is actually to do the lesson itself as in the content that, you know, for me, it would be maths that I’m teaching in a way that shows that you love your subject and that you love when the kids get it right, and that you’re so happy when they give you the right answer. And you and you’re really enjoying the math, so you’re enjoying your time with them. So to be clear, the warmth that you’re showing doesn’t just have to have to be you being silly and making jokes that that’s part of it, and putting glasses on them and so on and putting wigs on them. That’s part of it. And particularly for the younger kids. That’s a fun thing that I think should exist in education. But you can show them that warmth in a more purposeful way.

Craig Barton 30:42
Got it? Charlie, this question might be a rubbish question. So feel feel free to disregard this. And it’s probably the most obvious question as well, it feels to me that the the kind of warmth of the silliness, I don’t know what the right word is. But it’s kind of one way, in one way kind of the teacher makes the decision that now’s the time, we’re going to kind of be a bit off task, or less focused now feels like the appropriate time where we’re going to be a bit silly and talk and so on. I’m just wondering, is there room for the kind of spontaneity where the kids all you know, maybe it’s the time that they should be quiet, but now actually one of the kid despite something funny, so they’re going to say it, or it’s someone’s birthday, and you don’t know about it, and one of the kids tells you or just those kinds of magical, spontaneous, spontaneous moments. I guess the cliched view of Mikayla will be that they simply can’t happen. Because the kids know that, for example, when you’re modelling, you’re already said, they can’t talk over you, and so on and so forth. So I just wonder, is it very much kind of one way this this warmth? Or is there room for that kind of spontaneity the other way? I don’t know if that makes sense. It

Charlie Burkitt 31:43
doesn’t make sense? No, it’s a good question. I think the thing with this is that what you’re trying to build up with the kids is a sense of, and this is what we want, I think out of all people that are all adults, and at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do for these cases is to raise them up to be, you know, sensible, functioning human adults, you want to try and build up with the kids a sense over time of when is it appropriate to make a joke? And what is an appropriate joke? And you know, so yes, of course you can you can you, you can feed off the kids there in that if they raise that it’s so and so’s birthday or something and you didn’t realise and they’re there, they’re starting the joke, that that is fine. Of course, at the right moment, you know, if you’re in the middle of explaining simultaneous equations, then you don’t want the kids to be interrupting us to tell you something silly, of course. And if that were to happen, we would say, No, now’s not the time kind of thing. But then again, you know, if there’s an appropriate moment, maybe it’s formed time where it’s just a little more relaxed, and you’ve just taken the register. And there is that moment of kind of slightly free time and the kids raise something that is funny, or maybe they come to speak to you in the playground to say something along those lines, then, of course, you’re inviting it, and then you can riff off it and you can play with it. And I think you as a teacher need to be confident to lead the mood of the room and the culture of the room. And if you’re if you feel like the appropriate mood of the room in that moment, is that you can be a bit warmer and and just take your foot off the gas a little bit in terms of being really strict with the kids all the time and getting to see loads of maths, then you need to be a judge of that. And you need to trust your own judgement of that. So if you feel that the kids are taking it too far, or raising a joke at the wrong moment, then then then say, then beat them be the authority in the room and say, You need to dictate dictates the culture of that space. And and the kids should be able to read from your body language, what you’re saying, the moment of the lesson, whether it’s an appropriate moment for that kind of behaviour.

Craig Barton 33:48
Got it. Fantastic. Final question on this one? Charlie, you’ve alluded to it a little bit. How does the warmth play out and showing the kids you love them outside of lessons as what kind of things do you do on kind of break duty form time? And so on to to foster this?

Charlie Burkitt 34:02
Yeah, good question. I mean, this is actually a huge space where you can foster that warmth, because of course, in lessons a lot of the time and you will want to be purposeful. And if you can kind of weave in jokes into your math teaching in a way that, you know, you feel is both productive and getting that relationship then brilliant, but that’s obviously high level teaching. I would say that if you can’t do that in the beginning, and actually all the time, do try and catch the kids in the in the break spaces. You know, for us, there’s obviously break time and then it’s lunchtime. I imagine it’s the same in most schools, at lunchtime, we have basketball happening, we have table tennis happening, I’ll often just hop on, you know, to the table tennis or grab a basketball and just you know, try and aim at the who you know, have have a bit of banter with the kids about scoring, not scoring, whatever happens. Just kind of riff off that a little bit. So yeah, it’s a really great time when when you’re in that slightly more relaxed space to take advantage of that and to show them your human side and to show them that you care about them and you want to enjoy their camp. Honey, you know, which, which was what I started with on this tip. Obviously, there’s also more sort of functional things like we write postcards, for kids who we think are doing particularly well. So you know, in terms of systematising, your warmth, you can think about ways, you know, stickers, stamps, postcards, you know, even marking books were not, but wouldn’t be books in maths from our point of view. But if you’re a subject where you might mark books, or mark essays or mock tests, or whatever it is, that you just you do that in a way, you know that you put a little smiley face on their paper, that’s just one more way to show that you love them, you know, and that’s, that’s what I’m trying to get out here.

Craig Barton 35:42
That’s fantastic. And, Charlie, just before we move on to tip three, I can’t let that little thing you’ve said there in maths, we obviously don’t mark books. If you’re not going to come to mark in a little bit later on. We just tell us just very quickly, what what do you mark in maths because I know most teachers out there will be like, Why is he going on

Charlie Burkitt 35:58
about? Yeah, sure. I mean, we might get derailed here for a good hour. I feel Craig, but I’ll go into it slightly. You might I can’t remember, I did listen to yours. And Danny’s not very long chat you had a number of years ago now. And I think Danny might have spoken about this a little bit. But I’ll just kind of summarise it for those of the listeners that haven’t heard this before. So what we the main thing we mark each week is we mark a quiz that the pupils do in lessons. Now the kind of cycle of that, and I’ll summarise it very, very quickly, because you know, we could go into loads of detail is the pupils do the pupils do a written homework on some maths questions that are partly what we’ve been studying recently, and partly just general revision. They do that on a Thursday night, they bring that in on Friday. And in Friday’s lesson, we go through all those questions, and we make sure the kids understand what’s happening in those bits of maths. And we and we just in general, try and push them their flexibility a bit to make sure they can answer questions that aren’t just the ones in front of them. But around that topic a little bit. They go away over the weekend. And they do a very similar version, really almost identical version of that same homework with the numbers just changed slightly, or the question just changed ever so slightly. But it’s it’s almost the same questions. So they should be able to do it without help can we’ve gone through it on Friday, then they come in on a Monday morning, and they will sit a quiz, which is again, very similar version of the same questions. Now the extent to which it’s similar depends a bit on how old the kids are and their ability. You know, a year seven pupil who has lower ability, their quiz is going to be almost identical to the homework they did. If you have a year 11 pupil whose high ability it might be really quite different, but on the same topics. Now, the main piece of marketing we do is that we’ll take that quiz, and we’ll go mark, we’ll go away. And we’ll mark that in detail. And we produce scores for the pupils. And that’s a way of holding them to account on doing their homework properly. And also doing it it’s just such good practice for the kids constant, constant mini assessments. So they get really used to the idea of you know, you’ve got that piece of paper in front of you, you need those mats, get it out, get it down on paper in a way that you know, is sort of exam style. We will if we have time, and I would say this is not mission critical, but we will look through their homeworks that they’ve done. But the really mission critical bit of marking that we do is that quiz

Craig Barton 38:28
got that was very well summarised, I think, yeah, Danny took about an hour and 40 minutes. So that was really good, Charlie. That’s amazing stuff. Right, Charlie, what is your third tip for us, please?

Charlie Burkitt 38:39
Yeah, sure. So my third tip, this is, um, I mentioned in the beginning that I hope these tips would build on each other. So we’ve got the behaviour, we’ve got the warmth, my next tip is to do with your actual classroom teaching what you’re doing in front of the kids, I think, to try and get the most out of them. Now, I also said this was going to be something that I didn’t do well in the beginning. And that’s certainly true of this one. This tip is to ask the whole class questions. Now I’ll go into what exactly I mean by that. What I mean by this is very high frequency whole class AFL. Now that can be using a number of different bits of AFL, the things we really liked using it. Mikayla are many whiteboards, we use turn to your partner, which is a form of partner talk, we use heads down, hands up, we use coulomb response, I would say those are the main ways that we do it. There are probably others that I’m forgetting. But let me just go briefly into a couple of those. So I’m sure loads of people use mini whiteboards. And they mini whiteboards are a really fantastic way, just to quickly see what everyone’s got in their head. And actually, for the moment, we can just think about many whiteboards when I’m explaining the broader principle here, which is why am I saying to get the whole class answering questions is because you really want to have the whole As proportion of kids possible at any one moment, engaged with the lesson, and any sort of whole class AFLW forces kids to be thinking and participating in what it is you’re doing, if you are constantly asking, and this is 100%, a mistake I’ve made before, if you’re constantly asking just hands up questions, and then choosing pupils, you run the risk of only a few pupils, and in particular, only the pupil you’re asking, really thinking hard about the question you’ve asked. And you also obviously are gathering a bad data set on what the class really are thinking and what they understand. If you speak to one pupil, your data point is one you know that one pupil, you know what they think you don’t know what anyone else in the room thinks. Now whiteboards, which I assume lots of people have used before, are an obvious way of doing this. If you’re asking a question, and all the pupils hold up a board, and this is a bit math specific, I understand in other subjects, it might not be useful, but you can very quickly see, and you’ve got much better data now on what all the classes are thinking. And not only do you have better data on all the classes thinking you forced every single pupil in the room to think and to present an answer. And for us, and Mikayla, that’s huge, because what we have is we have good behaviour. So pupils will sit and they will just appear to be listening. But the pupils, you know, they are real people, and I don’t blame them for this, I’d be the same vibe as them, they get very, very good at just sitting and looking like they’re thinking without doing any thinking at all. So it forces them into thinking forced them into participating. And then they’re getting more out of the lesson. Now whiteboards, I think is a reasonably obvious one. There is also, I mentioned turns your partner partner talk, I’ll just briefly describe that. So we will say to the kids, for example. Let’s just choose a random question, say what is the lowest common multiple here and why tell your partner go? Now what they do is they will turn to the I just hit my coach and hear that they will turn to the person next to them, I got so excited. And they will start speaking straight away. You know, explaining what it is they think and why. And that’s normally the reason I include the and why there is because that is normally a question you’d ask that had a couple of sentences explanation that you want them to express their partner. And then I after just a few seconds, and I must stress this because I feel like in lots of other schools, you would then have the kids talking and talking and talking for ages. We don’t have that it’s very controlled. It’s very sharp, it’s very energetic. So the pupils turn, they speak to each other for just, you know, five, maybe 10 seconds more like five seconds. And then you’re saying right back to me three to one hands up. And the pupils turn back to you. They put their hands in the air, and they’re ready to answer your question straight away. And what that means is, is that you can keep the pace high, you can keep the rhythm of the lesson going, you could not lose focus, but you’ve just had every single pupil in the class, express something to the person next to them. It’s so great for raising the energy of the room. It’s great for getting everyone participating. It’s great for getting the kids expressing their opinions and communicating with one another in a way that’s also controlled and doesn’t derail the lesson.

Craig Barton 43:04
can just kind of just ask on that. So we’ve had a few guests talk about mini whiteboards. But this is the first time we’re really digging into all the forms of whole class assessments. I’m really interested in this the partner talk and this isn’t a stupid question. If they’re just discussing their kind of five or 10 seconds, do you have a protocol of who kind of speaks first? Because I could imagine they’re kind of just shouting at each other trying to try to get in as quick as possible? How does that play out?

Charlie Burkitt 43:27
Yeah, it’s a good question that does vary a bit by the room you’re in. Actually, I would say that there’s no hard and fast rule that we have here. Where we notice that there are pupils who are being kind of deliberately opting out of that partner. And you’ve done well to spot that because that is something that happens, what will tend to do is say, we have in our all of our classrooms that Michaela there’s a window sight and a door side. And what we’ll say is window side, first go or door side first go, you know, and that just, if you’re going to manage the turns, that’s a really good way to do that. It’s not something that we really strictly enforced, but it’s a way of overcoming what you’ve just described.

Craig Barton 44:04
Got it. And just so I can get the logistics of this, right. So they’ve done that, you know, quick quick chat to their partner quick explanation. Then they turn back on what what’s the purpose of the hands up? Is that just so you can see who’s ready? Or is that hands up? If you you’re in a position to explain what what’s the hands up that for?

Charlie Burkitt 44:18
Yeah, that the hands up is just to say, who wants to contribute at that moment. Now, lower down the school. I would say, Makayla, we have a pretty high insistence on very high levels of participation. So we’re expecting there to be a lot of hands in the air at that moment. And because as I mentioned before, that’s the culture everywhere you do then just see pretty much every hand in the room shooting straight up. And you know, if you think about it, there’s no reason that that shouldn’t be happening because they’ve just turned and said something to their partner. Either they’ve heard something from their partner or they’ve said something, they’ve had a moment to think about it. Really they can be participating in that moment, and it’s good to have them doing that so their hands are shooting up. Now, higher up the school that you get, I will admit that But to maintain that level of kind of enthusiasm from the kids isn’t always possible as they get a bit older and you know, more teenagers. So you might not get every single hand in the air shooting straight up, but you’ll get a good number of kids raising their hand to participate. And that’s your chance then to choose someone to speak.

Craig Barton 45:18
And why, again, this sounds like I’m being a real awkward question here. I’m just fascinated. Why would you? Why the hands up? Why not just kind of cold call people at that stage? What’s the benefit of kind of the kids who want to explain, explain if that makes sense? Why not pick somebody who you know, because then you kind of get into that by a sample again?

Charlie Burkitt 45:38
Yeah, true, I would say that we do, we do cold call as well. So you’ll, you’ll there’ll be a mixture. So sometimes you’ll take a kid with a hand up, sometimes you’ll say three to one and just say a kid’s name straightaway. So you’re right to raise that is a very good point, we will often cold call, I would say that the general rule of Hands Up is there because it drives a sense of energy and participation in a lesson. So what we get is that sense of energy participation of not opting out, but without having to always choose a hand. Obviously, as a teacher, you do what you think is right in that moment, and you just choose a kid.

Craig Barton 46:16
Got it? Perfect. Perfect. Was there anything else about the page you wanted to discuss before we move on to the other one, Charlie?

Charlie Burkitt 46:23
About the partner talk? Yeah, yeah. No, no, I think that was everything.

Craig Barton 46:29
Perfect. Perfect. Right. I’m intrigued by this next one. Oops. Did you say Heads? Heads down was involved at some point, right. Tell me about this one.

Charlie Burkitt 46:36
Yeah, sure. So that’s when this is the kind of blind sampling a blind survey. So what it is, is we’ll say heads down. And the kids know in that moment, because they you know, it happens everywhere. And they’ve been drilled on it since year seven, they’ll put just put their heads on the desk, and then they’ll put their hand on top of their head. And they will just, you’ll read out a few options, it’s a multiple choice thing. And they’ll raise their, they’ll just open their hand for the correct answer. It’s just a way of avoiding the kids seeing each other’s answers and getting a kind of more on a sample of what they think the answer is. Now, just a small tip on this, it can be a good idea, actually to have gone through the options before you get them to put their heads down. Because you might have tried this before, but the kids very quickly go to sleep if they’ve got their heads down for too long. So it’ll be something along the lines of You know, here’s the question, is it x? Is it? Why is it Zed? Write heads down? The first option is also a good one to say, I don’t know, because you want to avoid kind of false positives. So often, my first option is I don’t know, I’m not sure. You know, thanks for the honesty. Okay. Do you think it’s actually it’s widely said, the kids are just opening their fist without making too much noise. So you can see who thinks what without them let each other know. And then you quit very quickly heads up again, and you carry on with the lesson. And it’s a lot of you know, a lot like turn to your partner, I really must stress that this happens very quickly. It’s very punchy, there isn’t wasted time, you know, you just get on with the lesson. It’s a quick sample and you move on.

Craig Barton 47:58
And they assume it’s the kind of thing where, if you sense that, well, you can see from the responses, there’s a lack of understanding in the room, you can stop and intervene. But if everyone seems to know what’s going on you just cracking straight on, but But that’d be how it would play out. Yeah,

Charlie Burkitt 48:11
precisely. I mean, it you know, it’s then up to you, as a teacher, how you want to interpret and use that data, but it just, it just gives you a better reflection of what the kids think. And you know, I know, Craig, you’re someone who’s an expert at multiple choice questions. So you know, the better you can make the options, then the more data you’re going to get from that. Now, of course, in the moment, you might be making this up off the top of your head, and you’re not going to be able to create some fantastic, you know, false options. I’m sure there’s a phrase for that I can’t remember. But you know, so it can be a bit more rough and ready than one that you had maybe written on paper beforehand. It just, you know, and the thing with the thing with all of this whole class AFL that I’m describing all the methods, the thing that they’re all doing it, as I said at the beginning, is they’re forcing the kids to think they’re forcing their kids all to participate. And they are also increasing the sense of energy and kind of oomph in the room. Because of the variation. You know, if if, if pupils are in one moment, turning to their partner, the next moment, they’re grabbing their board to raise it up the next moment, their heads on the desk, they’re just doing different things. And it creates that feeling of variation and kind of urgency and energy that you need in a room. You know, if you’re teaching kids maths all day long, and you know, you have the thing with the kids is that they concentrate so hard, you know, particularly at night, I’m sure this this might be true of all pupils, but particularly it Mikayla, they’re concentrating so hard all day long. And in order to kind of get what we need out of them in terms of energy. We need them to be kind of chivvied along through the lesson and that’s what we’re doing it

Craig Barton 49:43
as fast. Absolutely fascinating this and just just on that multiple choice point. You’re absolutely right, Charlie, when I use diagnostic questions, a major problem of this is you get what I call the tactical delay yourself. Alright. 321 Show me your answers. And I tend to use ABCD cards or mini whiteboards, but you’ll get Kids will purposely just hold fire just so they can see what their mates gone for. And then they go, oh, yeah, okay, well, I’ll go for a as well. But I really liked this heads down as a way just to kind of eradicate the tactical delay all at once. So you’re not getting this by a sample. That was the whole reason that we’re asking the whole class. I love that. And what was the fourth one there? Charlie? So we have the we have the whiteboards we have the partner talk we have the hands down was it was a one more strategy.

Charlie Burkitt 50:23
Yeah. So the last one is what we call call and response. I’m sure some people might have heard of this before. All we mean by that, and Makeda is will ask a question. And then we’ll say 123. And the kids know when they hear 123, then they all shout out the answer. At the same time. Now, where this is at its best is really for one word answers. So often in math, it’s it’s one number answers immuno imagine that the answer is either no to then, you know, you would just say okay, what does everyone think? Is the answer? Or what’s the answer this? And then you just pause for, you would pause for a few moments there because you don’t you don’t rush into the 123, you ask? What’s the answer? Pause for a few seconds, let everyone think you want to build that kind of feeling in the room, that sense that everyone knows, you might be having lots of hands in the air at that point. And then you say the 123. And they all just shout out the answer. Now this is obviously, it’s less accurate data than whiteboards and even heads down. Because it’s noisy, you can’t necessarily hear what every pupil has said exactly. But it does the volume that comes back at you does give you a sense of what the room is thinking and feeling. And you might even if you’re lucky, here, a couple of individual pupils say the wrong thing. That does happen to me, and then you can correct that. And then you’ve got that data. But again, you know, a lot of the main function of that, too, is to make everyone think everyone participating, increase the energy,

Craig Barton 51:54
are really like these Charlie’s. So I love the four options. I really like the points about variety, and getting the energy going in the room and so on. And my final question just on this is, do you see any kind of trend in terms of these four and how you use them in terms of the older kids get you tend to use one more than the other? Or does it deep? Is there any trend in terms of the achievement levels of the kids were with a lower achieving set? You might use one more than the other? Or is are the no patterns like that?

Charlie Burkitt 52:23
No, it’s a good question. I would say there are certainly patterns. I would say I was discussing this with the teacher just the other day that often whiteboards we find are actually particularly good for the lower ability pupils for the lower sets. Now the reason I’m saying that is because you don’t want to end up. So both variability and younger pupils here, you don’t want to end up with a situation where the pupils are writing for really, really long times on their whiteboards unless you are then using it as a kind of checkpoint question. And I will I feel like I have never ending tactics here. What I mean by checkpoint question is that the pupil will show you their board and you’re immediately telling them, yep, that’s great, you’re moving on to an exercise. So that’s often a way I’ll use whiteboards as a kind of checkpoint into an exercise from kind of teach teacher explanation. I would say, as a general piece of advice, if you’re not using it as a checkpoint question, and the kids aren’t immediately going on to something, once they’ve shown you that board, then you don’t want them writing for a long time on their board. Because what happens is, some of them finish reasonably quickly. They hold up their board, and then they are just stuck there waiting for everyone to catch up. So whiteboards work really well for quicker, shorter, maybe slightly easier questions. If you’re if you’re not then bouncing straight onto something else. And that tends to be obviously the lower ability and the younger pupils who were doing those easier questions. Now, you can obviously on boards as well not do a whole question on your board, you know, something that I’ve only just recently got better at is getting pupils to do just parts of question on their board, you know, what’s the next line of working? What’s the next, what number goes here? What unit goes here? And they’re just showing you that? And that keeps everything bouncing along at a better rhythm I’d say than when you get bogged down in. Okay, answer this huge, great question on your board.

Craig Barton 54:15
Fantastic. And with the older kids, then what what would it be more? Which of those four strategies would they would they be using?

Charlie Burkitt 54:20
Yeah, I would say it is the case that the partner talk becomes slightly better as the kids get older and more advanced, because then what the pupils are saying to each other is actually sort of better, you know, it’s more eloquent, it’s better maths, it’s more likely to be right. You know, when you ask a bottom set your seven pupils to turn to the person next to them and to explain something, you know that it needs to be a very simple question, or they’re just going to just say, you know, a load of lovely nonsense, that doesn’t make any sense. So, you know, whereas a top set, you know, your 11 People might genuinely have something quite, you know, mathematically interesting to say to the person next to them. So I would say that partners are Work is one that that increases with the increases in use with with age and ability.

Craig Barton 55:07
It’s brilliant, fascinating this, Charlie. Okay, tip number four, please.

Charlie Burkitt 55:11
Yeah, tip number four. Sure. So this, this is a slightly, this is one again that I’m hoping these are building on each other. So we had behaviour, we’ve got warmth, we’ve got a bit of classroom management in terms of the questioning you’re doing. This one is a bit more to do with kind of curriculum and a bit more kind of your long term vision of what’s happening. Now, for me, the tip is develop systematic revision. Now, this is something that I didn’t do well, in the beginning, you know, I suppose when you first start teaching, you just think, Oh, well, I’ve taught the kids that they’re going to just know it now, you know, and, you know, those of us that have been teaching longer know what, what a fatal error that is, you know, obviously, particularly with younger, and again, lower ability, pupils, because they really don’t remember anything for very long. And that also is also just human nature. You know, I don’t remember things, you know, weeks later if I haven’t been going over it. So we will know about, I assume, you know, forgetting curves, and that that knowledge does just decay over time, and you have to keep coming back to it. Now, the thing about doing that revision is that I have found it in my teaching career really useful to try and make that as systematic as possible to make sure that I’m not accidentally avoiding it or not doing it, missing topics, etc. Now, a big way that we do that at school is through the practice quizzes that I mentioned earlier. So essentially, where the way that works is that in the homework that pupils are given each week, which we call a practice quiz. They do questions that are not only what they’ve done recently, but also a kind of selection of topics from previous weeks, which is then not only in the homework, but gone through in class that Friday. So the teacher has a chance to revise those topics, which essentially makes our Friday lessons a purely revision lesson. It’s revision of that week and of previous weeks. Now, what are the other ways we can do that? Well, I think starters are really also fantastic way to embed systematic revision. We had previously written lots of revision booklets, we’ve actually now moved a little more towards using people might be aware of Mr. Carter maths, it’s actually a bit of a throwback for me, because I used to use Mr. Carter maths in my teach first days and always found it very useful. And we are again, using it at Mikayla now, which we didn’t use to do for starters, because it just generates a really lovely set of, you know, revision questions which you can customise and I do recommend that to people who haven’t checked it out. And that’s, again, a fantastic way of capturing systematic revision. Another way of doing that is just, you know, just trying, essentially to look through your planning and make sure that you’re putting your online homework as well as the bits of revision. Because what you know, I’m not sure how many schools do online maths, I’m sure it’s plenty, and I Haggerty sparks, etc. We’ve been using Haggerty, we’re moving a little bit towards sparks. Now actually, we’ve been enjoying the early stages of that, we will look through kind of our long term plan of what’s happening over the year. And we’ll be putting, you know things from previous terms into that online maths homework. So that is essentially purely revision. And, you know, we’re lucky, I have to say, We are lucky to Mikayla because we have the plan of kind of the full vision of what’s happening from start to end from year seven all the way down to year 11, in terms of what topics we’re studying is all kind of laid out nice and neatly. And we’ve got all previous practice quizzes saved in our shared area. And it’s you know, it’s really well organised. And you can dip into that and you can pull out people’s quizzes they’ve used before and youth revision that they’ve been doing. So you’re just the important thing there is that you’re really finding ways to cover your blind spots. Because as teachers, we all have blind spots we have we have those topics that either we forget about or that we don’t like to teach. And we just need to be reminded what they are, you know, recently I’ve just been when I make my practice quizzes, my homework each week, I’ve just been grabbing, you know, random exam paper and just going through and thinking right, what have I not revised in a while putting questions out of it, you know, and that’s, again, a very simple, but actually pretty effective way to make sure you’re not forgetting stuff.

Craig Barton 59:16
It’s fascinating there. So so just a couple of points on this one, Charlie, the first, I tend to find when I’m lucky enough, I watch hundreds of lessons and I’m very, very fortunate and fat always fascinated by the start of the lesson. Because I that’s often when retrieval happens that’s often when it’s built in whether teachers use the kind of last lesson last week last topic last year framework or use something like Mr. Carter or Corbett’s five a day or something like that. And it’s great for retrieval, if and only if the kids take it seriously if the kids are just like kind of waiting for the lesson to actually start proper. And it just either just copying down the answers or just opting out that they don’t get any of these benefits for retrieval. But I’m guessing that you’re kind of hyping up the importance of retrieval and your weekly quizzes. is how seriously you take those most play a part in that? Well, would that be fair to say?

Charlie Burkitt 1:00:04
Yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely true. Now, one thing I would say is that, you know, it’s another miracle about working at Mikayla, which is that we wouldn’t ever get kids, not just immediately trusting that what we tell them to do is the right thing to do. So, and I realised that’s a bit unique. So, you know, when you work here, I just, I will walk into math classroom, and I’ll say, right, this is what we’re doing. And you know, it just happens, the kids just trust that that’s what’s best for them. And, you know, we’ve built up that trust over time, because they just see that the lessons everywhere are excellent, and they’re learning, and then they trust us. So I don’t, I don’t have to do an enormous sell on why is it we’re doing each thing that we’re doing. But I would say that, you know, if you’re in an environment where you do need to sell that, then I would just be I would be straightforward with the kids. Because, you know, I really do believe that the you know, that the retrieval that revision is, is absolutely fundamental to doing well at maths and you know, from again, from a sort of utilitarian point of view, if you’re just trying to sell it rationally to the kids, they want to do well in their maths GCSE. So this is how you do well.

Craig Barton 1:01:06
Final question on this one. And I’m intrigued by the kind of schedule or the the way, how you choose what topics and questions to include in the retrieval opportunities, either the do nails or the quizzes. Now, I really liked your idea of taking from an exam paper and thinking what you haven’t taught in a while, because what I often find happens, this is another area I’m obsessed with is the questions that tend to be included, or the ones that are either easier for teachers to write or easier for kids to answer. And what I mean by that is, it’s very easy just to write a question on are these two fractions together? And it’s very easy for the kids to try and answer it just with a pen and paper. Whereas construct an angle bisector. You’ve got to get the compasses out the paper, even measure an angle, anything geometry, or even some of the algebra topics like sketch, well plot a table of values for straight lines, you need the grid and the axes and all this kind of thing. So how do you ensure that you don’t have the kind of blind spots to use your phrase that they’re kind of painful topics in the in terms of getting the kids to answer aren’t left out of these these schedules?

Charlie Burkitt 1:02:13
Yes, that’s a good question. This is something that we have spoken about before in our department meetings, because it’s, you know, it’s absolutely true that you know, that those topics that are hard to write or answer are the ones that get avoided, you know, and to a certain extent, I think just knowing that that’s the case does help, you know, knowing that that’s a weakness. And I would go as far as to say that, you know, we’ve not completely solved that problem. Now. Now, what I would say, though, is that, one thing you can do for teachers is to just lower the barriers to entry in terms of revising those topics. One really clean way to do that is to have as we have a huge bank of previous homeworks, that pupils have been given, which include already written into them the structure for those difficult to write questions. So you know, you were talking about graph questions, you know, all of that all the kinds of graph images and tables, etc, that’s already there. And you just kind of left that you copy and paste, and bang, that’s in your homework. So on the kind of teacher writing end of that question, I would say that that’s how we manage that. And of course, there’s wonderful websites like Mr. Corbett, maths, etc, that will, that we do heavily draw from if we’re writing questions that are difficult like that. Now, I would say on the pupil end in terms of, you know, they have to grab a compass or a protractor or tracing paper, etc, that I will admit, that is a tricky thing that we’ve not fully solved, I would say that the best thing we can do for that is that we’re very hot on kids equipment. So we know they always have the right equipment. You know, and that’s the kind of clarity and follow through thing, again, kind of like my first tip that we do equipment checks every day. So we know that they have the compass, they have the protractor, they have the tracing paper, depending of course, on what year group they’re in, they don’t start with that, and year seven, but they over time, they will build up that kind of math specific equipment. And then once we know that they have it, well, then we are free to deliver those questions that require those pieces of equipment. And we and we do huge drives on making sure that, that that’s the case. You know, it was recently the case that we were looking at protractors for your 11. And, you know, we go into a huge amount of detail of how can we roll this out? How can we make sure that every pupil picks up that protractor? Are we following through with the sanctions? You know, how much do they cost in the shop? How are we running it? You know, all those logistical points? Go into making sure that that happens.

Craig Barton 1:04:30
Fantastic. Okay, Charlie, fifth and final tip, please.

Charlie Burkitt 1:04:34
Sure. So my final one, it was a huge one for me actually improving my teaching, it’s to study the teachers you respect. Now what I mean by that is in quite a practical sense, in that, I’m sure. So in Michela, it’s the case that I am constantly and I’m so lucky for this surrounded by world class teachers that I can go and watch at any time and learn from and I’m so So lucky for that, and in the early days that I joined the school, I used to walk around the building, just kind of laughing at how ridiculous it was that I would get to see these kind of, you know, best in the world teaching moments happening everywhere, and you can walk into any classroom, and just the standard is so high, it’s ridiculous, and you could study anyone in the building, and you would get better at teaching. Now, I think it is the case that in any school that you go to, you will also have sort of at least pockets of brilliance happening. And I’m sure that anyone listening will be able to think in their school of, of the teachers that they really respect and the teachers who they think really teach lessons brilliantly. Now what you need to do. And this is so, so important, you need to get into those teachers rooms, and you need to just study every little detail of what it is they’re doing. I used to go into teachers rooms, and we do it over email, we have a sort of feedback system, I would open up, you know, an email and I just be writing down almost a transcript of the lesson of everything that’s happening, I’d be saying, okay, said this said this said this, did this with their body did this with their voice, looked at this kid in this way, tried to portray this emotion explained this thing in this way, use this little memory device. And I would just write the transcript down of what I was seeing in front of me. And that really focuses the mind on how is this person producing this magic in this room, because you can walk into a classroom. And you know, Catherine talks about watching Federer play tennis, you know, it can look like Federer playing tennis or Messi playing football. And you just think, well, they’re just kind of a genius. And this is just sort of this God given ability they have. But but the thing we’re teaching, and this is probably true of sport as well, is that if you study it, if you really think to yourself, what exactly is this person doing to create this atmosphere in this room, to get what they’re getting out of the kids right? Now, you can actually boil it down to a kind of set of almost rules and principles, or have kind of tips that you can follow in your own classroom. And then you go back to your own classroom, and you try and embody some of that. Now, of course, in the beginning, you’re going to be doing a little bit of mimicking act as you kind of find your feet and what style works for you. And then what you find is, over time, you kind of settle into what version of you fits in with all the things you’ve seen. Now, of course, you can’t be messy, you can’t be Federer, you’re not trying to be that person, you’re just trying to take some of the essence of what they do brilliantly, and convert that into how can you produce that into brilliant teaching. And just the final thing I’ll say on that is that then a huge part of that is to try and get those people if you can, to come and watch you teaching and to give you feedback on how you’re doing that. And whether you’re getting it right, because it’s very hard to see yourself through through your own eyes, you know, you can film yourself, that’s a great thing to do. We film ourselves off when we get other people to film us. And you know, I remember in the early days of me teaching here, I was shown footage of myself teaching that was so painful to watch. But were so important in showing me you know what I was getting wrong, and what could I do differently. And, and I’m very grateful for that now, and it’s so important.

Craig Barton 1:08:10
It’s brilliant this, Charlie, just three points on that. So we’ll start with the video because that was one of the things I was going to ask you. So what would this be a regular part of kind of CPD and stuff that Mikayla watching clips of other teachers doing things well? Or is it more kind of on a more kind of ad hoc basis? If you happen to be focusing on something? What role does does video play?

Charlie Burkitt 1:08:31
Yeah, so video does sometimes play a role, I would say it’s not constant, it often depends on what we’re talking about, as a whole school CPD. But it will sometimes be the case that if one of the members of the senior team is presenting on a particular piece of a particular aspect of teaching, that they will have gone around and filmed some of the staff who do that really, really well. And then we’ll all watch it through and we’ll talk about it. And that’s obviously really useful, CPD, as well as, as I mentioned, before filming yourself and seeing what’s happening with yourself. And you know, what we do a little bit of is just filming of each of each other. And then you might run it through with the person that filmed it, and just say, oh, yeah, I really liked how you did this bit, maybe that bit could have been better. And obviously, you know, that can be a bit difficult to watch yourself in the beginning. But if fundamentally, you want to improve yourself as a teacher, then it’s going to be worth it in the end. And that one of the really wonderful things we haven’t Mikayla is just kind of a kind of low stakes feedback loop that’s always going on where, you know, it’s a very open door policy, and people are popping in and out. And, you know, you get friends and colleagues and also sometimes, of course, your line manager popping in and saying, Yeah, I really liked that part. This bit could have been a bit different. What do you think about this? And that kind of constant feedback just keeps you open to your again, you’re kind of teaching blind spots and makes you better?

Craig Barton 1:09:49
It’s great. Yeah, I’ve heard myself film numerous times. And it’s painful, isn’t it? Charlie? You think you do a good job. So you watch yourself on film? Second, second question on this. Um, One of the things I often find that goes wrong with lesson observations from an observers point of view is if you don’t go in with a focus, whereas if if a teacher says to me, I want you to come and watch me, and I want you to watch how I do whole class assessment, or I want you to watch how I model, and then I’ve got a specific focus, but it but it sounds to me like you what you’re doing is more of a general thing. Are you going in there just almost not expect not having this focus? And just try to just see what you can see? Or do you sometimes go in looking for something specific, if that makes sense?

Charlie Burkitt 1:10:32
Yeah, totally. It really depends on what it is that the the position you’re in, in the development of yourself as a teacher, because I would say that if if you’re not working on anything in particular, it’s always brilliant to just walk in and see what’s happening. And then note the general. And I’d say, particularly in the early days of, for me working at Makayla, but for anyone listening, maybe just their teaching career, in general, you do want to be quite general, in your view of warmth, is really good teaching, because you’re not at the stage yet to be very, very specific. Now, having said that, of course, if a line manager or someone you respect has been telling you, this particular element of your teaching isn’t going so well, at the moment, then of course, you want to go and you want to focus on that thing. So for me in the early days, it’s that I was very good. When I when I was teaching, I wasn’t showing a kind of range of emotion. And it was all a bit robotic, I went into full kind of robot, Charlie mode, and that, you know, it wasn’t good. And it was kind of boring. And you know, that’s what other video was painful to watch. Now. I then was obviously going to members of staff who I really respected, I thought were doing a brilliant job. And I was kind of watching them and thinking, right, how are they avoiding being robotic? What is it? What is it that they’re doing? That means that they’re not wooden? And I’m being wooden? So obviously, yes, it’s a good idea to be specific as well. But the general can also help.

Craig Barton 1:11:51
Brilliant, final question on this. And it relates to that, Charlie? So what would be like a concrete thing that from one of these lesson observations, you watch the teacher do that you thought, all right, okay, you made a note of that. And then that was something you could act now whether that’s something to do with stopping being wooden, as you say, or something else? What what will be an example of something that you’ve got from one of these observations? Yeah,

Charlie Burkitt 1:12:11
it’s, it’s almost hard to describe to you because it is essentially my entire teaching persona, I have taken from other people. So it’s difficult for me to boil it down into atoms, when it is all of what makes me up over kind of the four or five years that I’ve been Makayla watching other brilliant teachers, learning as much as I can from them. Now, I’ll just give you a small example of something that, you know, I just thought of the other day, and when I was talking to this teacher, I want saw, you know, a really excellent member of staff. There was a kid who tried it was a it was a lower ability kid tried to say something to the, to the teacher. And you’ve probably had this experience, it just came out garbled, you know, they were trying their best, and it came out garbled. And the teacher said, I know what it is that you’re trying to say, sort of I know what’s happening in your head, but we’re not quite there yet. What is something you know, and then and then moved on to someone else. And I just thought that was a lovely way to in a really warm, loving way, say to the pupil, you’re not quite there, but I get what you’re saying. And you know, I these days, I teach your bottom set class. And I find myself using a phrase similar to that all the time, you know, and that that’s just a tiny nugget of something I saw happen in a lesson. I thought, yeah, I like that. I’m taking that and I’ve kind of been using it ever since. And as I say, all of what I do in Makayla classrooms are atoms of that.

Craig Barton 1:13:42
Lovely, that’s fantastic. Well, they’re five absolutely brilliant tips. Charlie, I’ve absolutely loved those and I’ll throw it over to you just to wrap things up. Is there anything you’d recommend listeners check out whether it’s something from you personally something Makayla related something you think of is of general interest? What what what should listeners and viewers check out?

Charlie Burkitt 1:13:59
Yeah, I would say and that you know, this might seem a bit vain to to keep talking about Makayla and I apologise for that. But I would really recommend the power of culture, which is a book that we brought out reasonably recently, people might not have heard of it. It’s come out you know, in the in between time since you spoke with Danny. So I really recommend googling the power of culture. Catherine burble seeing Mikayla and it’ll it’ll come up and you can buy that you know, anywhere. I would also just say one more time I really, really recommend for anyone listening and thinking, Oh, this this sounds interesting. I’m interested to see what this looks like in practice. I’m interested to see you know, this this miracle of what Charlie’s talking about of these Mikayla lessons do come and visit. It’s really easy to book a visit on our website, you just Google Mikayla school, you can click on on the links that come up pretty much straight away, you can book a visit, you know, come have a chat with me. I’ll be very happy to explain anything that I’ve described, you know, show you around a little bit you can have at all, and I really think it has to be seen to be believed, and we’ll have to get you along as well. Craig.

Craig Barton 1:14:58
I’d love to and well to just sell it Bonus bonus thing here, Charlie. And again, this will come out completely the wrong way but but everyone I speak to and to be fair, it’s a very small sample. I don’t know many people from Mikayla, but but all the teachers I speak to. They absolutely love it right. And you can, you can imagine, to the kind of sceptic it almost seems like a bit of a cult like the cult of Michaela. It’s like you’ve been drugged or hypnotised on something to say you love it. But I get the sense it’s definitely genuine. And it’s just is it just something about the place? Is it the systems? Is it just everything? Because you must have gone in a bit like a little bit sceptical? Like if I went for a job at Michaela with you? This could be a bit weird, a bit odd what’s going to happen here? But then everyone just seems happy. And everyone seems to love it, pupils and stuff? What’s going on? What’s going on?

Charlie Burkitt 1:15:43
Well, I’d say that you know, that there are people who come to Mikayla and they think, oh, you know, maybe this isn’t for me, and they go away, you know, and that’s fine. I would say that’s very far and few between. And I would say that, the thing about it is is that you come and you see it, and you think wow, this is amazing. You know, and I think if you’re coming from a particular point of view, which I think a lot of the teachers in, Mikayla are and what that point of view is, is often that we’ve taught in other schools that are struggling to run a school really well. They’re struggling with behaviour, they’re struggling with a lot of the principles I’ve been describing today, and the place is kind of unravelling at the seams. If you come from that background, and then you come and see what’s happening here. And it really is a miracle what’s happening here, you just walk around the building, and you’re kind of thinking to yourself the whole time, oh, my goodness, I can’t believe that this is really real, but it’s really happening, you know, and there’s that sense of kind of all of it. And then you know, so I came and visited and then applied afterwards, then you work here. And you know, I’m very lucky to work alongside, you know, wonderful colleagues who just, you know, I’m learning so much from all the time that they’re, you know, they’re really fantastic teammates, a lot of them are really great friends of mine. So, you know, it’s also the case that people who work here, obviously want to make a difference in education. So, you know, we want to make a difference in education we want kids to do well, we’ve taught in a school where that didn’t happen, we’ve moved here, and it is working here, you know, it’s it’s, we’re making a difference to these kids lives. And so there’s something very there’s something very intoxicating in that I think, which you know, is probably maybe the the culty thing that you’re speaking about where we you know, you speak to us and we kind of just waxing lyrical about how great this school is. You know, that’s, that’s really genuine. That’s just how I feel about the school. It is a wonderful place to work and it is a place that is changing kids lives. And I think it’s you know, it’s really unique and special, and as I say needs to be seen to be believed, you know, and I’d be very happy to chat you know, I on Twitter or or anywhere or in person if anyone wants to ask me questions about it. It’s at burket CR on Twitter, or as I say, do come in and speak to me and I’d be happy to explain more of my my coat like obsession with Mikayla.

Craig Barton 1:18:13
That’s fairly well the offers there for for for listeners. That’s brilliant. Well, Charlie, this has been absolutely brilliant conversation and fascinating. I’ve learned loads I’ve got loads to think about. So thanks so much for for joining us on tips for teachers.

Charlie Burkitt 1:18:23
Thank you very much for having me, Craig. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Sammy Kempner’s tips:

1. Pick the student least likely to know (03:50)
2. When doing group work, make clear the group is responsible (21:20)
3. Use the same questions, with different numbers (47:36)
4. Question, don’t tell (1:04:04)
5. Trick your students to test if they really understand (1:14:59)

Links and resources

• Sammy interview with Ollie Lovell is here
• For information about jobs at Sammy’s school, The Totteridge Academy, click here

Subscribe to the podcast

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Watch the videos of Sammy’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. Each episode invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside or maybe even outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow, but hopefully something good will come out. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers dot code at UK where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as the links resources and audio transcription from each episode. But better than that, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. Now these videos can be used to spark discussion between colleagues and a departmental meeting at Twila insight or maybe even a Friday night moving it. Just before we get going a quick word of folks from our lovely sponsor. So this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported once again by arc maths I’m so grateful for our for supporting this podcast. Art math is a fantastic app designed to help your students remember all the math content at key stages three and four. It’s built around research into how memory works. Specifically blocks work on the power of retrieval practice and the spacing of facts and showing your students don’t just practice what they’ve just studied, but are regularly exposed to the content they have encountered days, weeks and months before that was great for that retrieval and storage strength of their memories. Now if you want to find out more just search arc maths and mentioned my name, remember that arc with a C knots okay. Okay, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful sunny Kembla. Now a bit of background here at some he may not be quite the household name that some of my other guests are but we need to change that. And I first became aware of some of his work when Adam Boxer was mentioning that he had a wonderful head of maths at his school. And then some of you may have listened to Ali Lovells interview with Sammy, which I’ve been on record as saying at the best podcast out of any podcast I listened to in 2021. I had to get somebody on the show and I’ll tell you why he did not disappoint. So spoiler alert, here are some his five tips. Tip one, pick the student least likely to know. Tip two, when doing group work, make clear the group is responsible. And I’ll tell you what that group discussion is unbelievable. Tip three, use the same questions with different numbers. Tip for question, don’t tell. And Tip five. And I love this one trick your students to test if they really understand. Now if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers.co.uk. You’ll see I’ve timestamps each of the tips so you can jump straight to anyone you want to listen to first. Or if you revisit this episode, you can go straight to any tip that you want to revisit. Remember, there are video versions of all these tips on tips for teachers dot code at UK that had a bit of spice to it to the tips if you want to listen to them and watch them. But anyway, I’ll shut up now. Enjoy the show.

Okay, he gives me great pleasure to welcome somebody to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Sammy. How are you?

Sammy Kempner 3:32
Yeah, I’m very good. Thanks, Craig. How are you? Very, very

Craig Barton 3:34
good. Thank you. Right, sorry. Just let listeners know who you are in a sentence if that’s all right.

Sammy Kempner 3:40
Yeah, teach maths to children in London, between the ages of 11 to 18.

Craig Barton 3:46
Fantastic. All right. So let’s dive straight in. What’s your first tip for us tonight?

Sammy Kempner 3:51
Pick the student least likely to know.

Craig Barton 3:55
Whoa, no, I love like a clickbait headline. That’s a great one. You’ve hooked me straight and tried to

Sammy Kempner 4:00
make them snappy. So tell me more. Now watch me not be snappy when I explain it. So

essentially, like you want to where possible. My tips are broadly themed under root on the theme of accountability. And by that, I mean not letting students get away with not thinking or trying to do it putting strategies in place to try to maximise the amount they’re thinking and trying and the amount that they feel like you’re holding them to that. So it might be that when you’re cold calling, so picking students to answer questions without their hands up. Like you might want to pick you want to pick your lower training students to use it as a gauge to assess like the classes understanding when many whiteboards or whatever whole class data isn’t available. So you pick your lowest attaining student the student least likely to know the answer to see like if they do know the answer then There’s a pretty good chance that everyone will know the answer. It might be when you’re doing group work, and you’ve told this class, you’re going to test them somehow afterwards, you test the group’s by giving them a similar question and you’re going to pick someone to explain it, you pick the student least likely to know in that group, to act as a gauge whether or not the group done a good job. It might be when you’re circulating, if you’ve only got time to like, you’ve got 20 seconds, and you’ve asked them to write something down, you go and target the student least likely to like be doing the right thing. Even check instructions, like you give really simply shortly as amazing how often instructions are not understood or followed or listened to. And you give instructions, and you wanted to make sure just made sure that even though you said it very clearly, and you said it very slowly, they’ve understood the instructions, you pick the one that’s least likely to have understood. So that’s, that’s it in a nutshell, I can talk in more detail about it. And obviously, like, you can’t literally always use this one poor kid. But as a general rule, picking students and your lower 10 students are the ones that are less likely to be focused, really, like forces them to if they know that’s going to happen, it’ll force them to engage and if the class know that anyone could be asked, but if I think that there’s a chance, they won’t know they’re going to be asked, then it’s a very powerful tool.

Craig Barton 6:26
Right? So let’s dive into this. I love it. You, you’ve hooked me in straightaway. So a couple of follow up questions here. So I think there’s a real danger. I’ve fallen into this trap before, where you ask one child and they get it right, and you assume that the whole class understands it. So you just crack on. And it’s your classic kind of argument, why we need to do whole class assessment versus kind of one to one stuff. It almost sounds to me like this is the flip side of that. Where is there a danger, you ask your lowest attaining students, or the one who you suspect is going to get it wrong, they get it wrong, and you kind of make an assumption there that everybody’s going to struggle with their so then you spend kind of 510 minutes doing it with the whole class. Whereas maybe like a quick conversation later on in the lesson may have sold it for that one child.

Sammy Kempner 7:10
Yeah, there’s always that danger. I think what, like, so things that I if I, if I really was expecting everyone to know, and that one student doesn’t, I might do a quick chat, or call and respond to just quickly assess the whole class. And I check really carefully, is everyone saying what I expected them to say? Or like, Does it sound like everyone is and if so, then I know that students issue and therefore that we can, like, I might need to deal with that separately. Or it might be just going to a one of your other least likely students to like who in the class and seeing if they know, and if they do, then you know, it’s just an individual problem. And if they don’t, then then maybe it’s wider than that. And maybe that point, you open up other strategies that you have, like, it might be a group conversation to like fit, like if the knowledge that if you suspect the knowledge to be in the room, or and then you go and cold call those ones that don’t know afterwards. Or it might be you have to do a quick, whole class checking for understanding. But I would suggest though, or I would caveat that with saying, if you can do okay, if understanding, then you should have done. Like that’s always the rule, if you can do whole class, and it’s easily accessible. And the data that you can get from it is easy for you to interpret. The dancers aren’t really long sentences or whatever, they’re just so easy to see, then you should have done that in the first place. And you shouldn’t have been targeting the lowest training student with a question, you should have just been doing that. So maybe that’s not the best way of dealing with that. But I think the first few options that I mentioned, probably do a job.

Craig Barton 8:41
Yeah, it’s really interesting. This, this sounds like a big name drop here someday. But I’ve literally had a conversation with Dylan William earlier today about a similar thing here where there was a good name drop that wasn’t it, about how I can’t see a scenario, where if it, if you have the option to do whole class assessment, you would choose to cold call, if that makes sense. Because to take to take your example here with this lowest attaining student, you could have in mind that you want to check the understanding of a specific student, but you might as well get every other child to either write their answer down on mini whiteboards, or have thought of it and so on, because you’ve still got that option to go to that student. But if you can also see responses from you know, the other 25, you may pick up on something that you wouldn’t have if you’ve only just gone to that one student, is that fair or other scenarios where you would deliberately choose to cold call and only get the response from one student that you’re targeting.

Sammy Kempner 9:37
There probably are situations where it’s good to call. I’m trying to think of them. As a principle I agree with you. I think that if you can get hold of that data easily then you should, I think

say on that have something just gone from my head. What was I gonna say?

No, maybe we’ll come back to it. And but ya know, in principle, I agree with you. I think yeah, remembered, if a student wants, if you’re looking for an explanation, like a really detailed explanation of strategy, whatever it may be, and we place quite, I tried to place quite a lot of emphasis on that. In math lessons, it’s not just what or and how but why. And if you’re if you’re really focusing on that, then it’s actually quite often the mini whiteboards aren’t going to suffice. And so what’s quite nice is when you’re cold calling for an explanation, you pick the many students least likely to know the bottom third of the class, let’s say in terms of attainment or engagement, or whatever it may be. And you start off with so and so maybe your lowest attaining, and you move on to the next one, the one least likely to be engaged. And then you move on the next one and over and you find it also by jumping between them in mid explanation, it forces them to really engage with each other’s answers. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be just one student when you’re doing this, but as a general rule, just focus on the ones that are going to actually be a useful gauge and not the ones that you know, are going to like they’re the ones that you expect to be able to answer.

Craig Barton 11:12
Can you give us an example summary of the kind of question where you choose to do that one of these ones that’s perhaps suited to mini whiteboards?

Sammy Kempner 11:20
So we do it and it’s a question came up today, in actually a little off topic test, and I’m going to review it tomorrow, it was quite a complicated, shaded area shaped by the way, the shape was like an L compound shape. But then within it, there was a triangle, a funny angle, which was attached to the sides, and you were given the perimeter, and you had to find the area of the shaded section. Anyway, like, it’s quite likely that in the review of that, like the students were able to say the answer, they might be able to say, the calculations they needed to do to get there. But it’s all about understanding that if you’re given the perimeter and two of the side lengths of the L shape, and you can find the other two sides and the missing side length interferometer. And you have to think about the shaded area being the total minus the shaded area. And so all these kind of descriptive elements to the strategy that don’t mention numbers are really good things to cold call students about rather than getting whole class data on many whiteboards, because that’s just not going to explain that you’re not going to know whether or not they’ve understood it from that. Yeah, so

Craig Barton 12:29
just just again, just to dig really deep into so I’m fascinated about this notion of jumping from student to student maybe mid explanation. So how would that start? Well be a kind of question.

Sammy Kempner 12:39
Okay, so why is this question difficult, please? Muhammad, it’ll say, hopefully, that’s a few nouns are correctly, he’ll say, Okay, fair enough. So it’s because we’ve got the perimeter, we don’t know any parts of the area. We’ve got to somehow figure out from the sidings before we then find the area. What’s the first I’m going to do in order to do this, please, Oscar, Oscar is going to say, well, you need to find the total area and then you’re going to find need, find the unshaded area and you’re going to have to subtract the undertaker from the total. Okay, Okay, nice. What about this? Edie? What do we think about this, I want anyone you just bounce from one to the next. And they’ve got to be really listening. Because they know at any point you might cut them off and bring someone else into it. Sometimes it’s actually made really really jarringly probably effective mid sentence, because I know that they understand and they’re confident, and they’re about to say the right thing. And it can be partly, to check for understanding, but it can also be partly just to, like, hold attention, just stopping them in the meet in that moment and saying you pick up exactly where they were going from where they were, where they were going. And obviously, you know, you can you can you can go from there. Does that. Does that make it clear? Yeah,

Craig Barton 13:53
it does. And is this still your kind of bottom third, in terms of kind of attainers? And the ones that you suspect aren’t engaged? Are you checking this out? To everybody?

Sammy Kempner 14:04
So like the, in general, the proportion of questions of my questions that are aimed at the bottom third is massive, are the questions I asked. But I do see a zoo. So you can just obviously tailor the questions to challenge the highest attainers. And that is equally important. It just doesn’t need to be as frequent, I think, because they’re more likely to be listening and focused. And I did well, maybe that’s me as a value judgement. Maybe that’s my that’s my sort of other day, socialist roots coming through. I care more about bringing up the bottom. No, I it’s right. You have to charge the highest pain is all the time has to be at the forefront of your mind, but I just think it’s in your bread and butter of lessons. The way that you run your models and your questioning. It’s more important to make sure that everyone is listening and then when it’s appropriate you cold call Then move amongst the highest attainers with some really challenging questions. So it’s so important, and I still do it. But it’s definitely the case that the lowest attaining students receive a greater proportion of my questions to answer.

Craig Barton 15:13
That makes perfect sense. Because again, the worst question in the world that I could ask here is, you could well imagine you’ve got a couple of high teens in there, you just think, Oh, he’s not going to ask me this. So I’ll just I’ll just kind of sit off a little bit. But I guess that’s more about the kind of culture that you create in the class, and so on and so forth, you’re pretty confident that that’s not a major, major problem.

Sammy Kempner 15:32
Yeah. And yeah, you’re absolutely right. You have to assess it, as you see it, and part of it is God, and you just kind of and obviously, you can always just check, you can always keep asking the question because your classroom and if your lesson, you can do it how you want. But also, yeah, just to like, just to emphasise the questioning is the most, like most obvious way in which this applies. But it definitely does also apply to just as a general that we’ve got phrases our school, which is Don’t lie to yourself, and we tell the kids that all the time. But it also is words to live by, as an adult. And just in my normal life, I just walk around thinking they lie to myself, if I do anything, but if you really so when I before I did cold calling for the first couple years of my teaching, I don’t I didn’t do this. And I definitely didn’t ask the load the people least likely to know, because if I had, it would actually ruin my lesson. Yeah, because we get stuck, we get stuck every time. From the first minute it’s over. And I think, I think, like these doing doing this, it can. It’s an ultimate, don’t lie to yourself, and you’re teaching because it’s very easy to convince yourself that, like, you’ve done a really good explanation, they’ve all been looking at you you’ve insisted on pens down, there’s no way that they can’t follow this. And so you pick, you know, pick students that ew best students, but you pick, you know, just just just normal students in the class, I think you’ve got to be really honest with yourself, if you’re using questioning as a gauge for understanding of the class, because many whiteboards on appropriate whatever reason, then it’s, yeah, it’s a really good strategy for don’t lie to yourself

Craig Barton 17:13
a lot that don’t lie to yourself. Somebody reminds me never forget, one of my early observation when I was observed, right at the start of my career, I did exactly this, I asked the question, and I picked a kid who I knew was gonna get it right. So I was mid flow, and so on, as I was getting was coming towards the end of the lesson, this was the almost like the big climax. And that’s been observed and so on. And the the teacher observing me, and then congratulated me. So good choice of students to ask that question, too. And I was like, Yeah, but like, it’s the worst thing. You’re absolutely right. It’s the worst thing. But it’s so tempting, isn’t it? Because you know, like you say, you want to think I’m doing a good job here and so on. I’m interesting. Just just on this one, whilst we’re chatting about this. I know from your whole conversation with Olli, that group work is something that plays a really big, big part in in your teaching. Now, we may be talking about this later on. I don’t know. But it just wanted to pick up on that you said, you kind of ask the person in the group who you thought perhaps had not been listening to the instructions to kind of explain and so on, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that. Because that that interests me there? Is that more of kind of a behaviour and an attention kind of thing?

Sammy Kempner 18:21
No, it’s definitely for accountability within the group. If the group knows that, I mean, sometimes people say this, this could be quite harsh, and is, again, context specific. In my, in my classes, we have a very honest culture and policy and like, if consumers have got stuff wrong, and they’re talking about in groups, then they know that I’m going to pick the ones that got it wrong to explain, and that’s fine, because mistakes, learn from them. And it’s all part of that little chat that we do. And like, it’s all part of the era culture is really important for learning and it’s about being honest with each other and but the but knowing if they know the groups know that you’re going to pick the person leaves it to know because they got it wrong. It massively massively alters their, their own expect their own kind of attitude to the task, and their own objectives within the task. They’re not so bothered about making sure they’ve understood all their stuff, they’re thinking themselves, I need to make sure my partners know all their mistakes. Because it’s possible that circuit ask us about any of the ones that they’ve got wrong, and they’re going to ask that person specifically. So make it a new communicating that to them before they do the task, because it’s really important. And then actually doing it afterwards. Again, even though it can be painful, because you might have and it’s not it’s not a bit like occasionally it might be a behavioural thing. And you might sort of, you might notice a group has not been on task and you save you say you save your any kind of disciplining or whatever, until after you’ve stopped all the groups and you pick, you pick the person you’d like to know and they can’t do it. And you say, Well, you know, I was watching. I was watching I was listening and this didn’t happen like That’s quite nice. It’s a good thing to do. But it’s not. It’s not the same accountability that I’m talking about now, isn’t it? It’s a good thing to do. I’m talking about the way that picking the one on the fighter know, the impact that AI has on the ones trying to do the right thing. I think it incentivizes them in the right way to focus on the things that you want to focus on, which is fixing mistakes.

Craig Barton 20:23
It’s brilliant. That summit, I think, again, just to go back to your conversation with Ollie, and what you’ve said there, the thing, the thing that’s made me reluctant is probably the wrong word. But but certainly not to use group work to the extent of the user. I do a lot of hardware, but but not kind of, you know, groups of three and four, is I never get the incentives or the accountability, right? There’s always it’s always too easy to kind of free ride within the group. It’s always too easy for one keen kid to dominate in the group. But it sounds to me that this this strategy in this tip that you’re talking about here, that seems to kind of target that that seems to be the key to getting this, right.

Sammy Kempner 21:01
Yeah, I think it has a really, really big impact. My second tip is specifically to do group work, and it comes it ties in really nicely with this. So I think

Craig Barton 21:15
that’s a good teaser. Why should we dive into it now? Then somebody? Should we go for it now? All right, what’s your second tip for us?

Sammy Kempner 21:21
Okay, so it’s equally snappy. When degree work made clear, the group is responsible, not the individual.

Craig Barton 21:30
I like it, right? Tell me more about this

Sammy Kempner 21:31
stuff. So essentially, if you’ve like in keeping with, I’m going to ask the student least likely to know if the student gets it wrong following group or a task is the group that’s getting blamed, you don’t even mention the individual who’s got it wrong. You like sometimes physics don’t even don’t actively avoid looking at them. And I’ll tell my body to face the other three members of the group. And like, they might sometimes they might even be like, oh, sorry, I meant to say it. I was like, no, no, don’t worry, can you just turn to me say, this is not about you, you’ve done your best, like, these guys just haven’t helped you properly. And you sort of stare like you really like dramatise it all. It’s, it’s a big pantomime. But obviously, equally, if the, if the person gets it, right. You don’t praise them at all. You massively just use it as a taboo, what an amazing job. They’ve understood that so clearly, and so they’ve explained every single bit of it, and I’ve questioned you have questioned them, you’ve done a stretch of questioning and you’ve, you’ve really made sure you’ve got maybe given them a different question that similar. And they’ve got it and you say figure it, this is amazing, superb work. And these two things go hand in hand just for the group responsibility. If the Yeah, it’s transformative, the first time I ever did it. So it was a teacher, we were talking about how to how to review tests. And we were talking about like, I used to give students models solutions, and like, tell them how to do it and think I think I’ve done a quite a good job of explaining really clearly, which is part of it. But they then like this, and I said, How do you know they’ve understood? And I was like, Oh, good question. And maybe maybe a retest sometimes if I have time. Anyway, so they were like we do group, I do group work at the end I project. So I send photos of their mistakes, I’ve taken mass marking on the board. And that person has to explain, like how to do that question. And if they can’t, then I blame the group and if they can appraise the group, but the first time I did this is an amazing tip from this guy that I work with. And then I’ve I physically like did this like whole turning away from the kindergarten role and like looked at told that like, so it’s a great what’s going on, you can see their minds be rewired? Like they were like, I’ve never even considered this before. Wow. Sorry. So it was apologetic. They, like they tried, but they just never had this kind of accountability before. And it was yeah, like, since then, since I can I can literally picture the moment in room 26 or whatever it was. It just, yeah, it’s a really great thing to do.

Craig Barton 24:08
Right. So I mean, we’ve got to dive into this. You you’ve blown my mind here with this one. Firstly, just a practical question. I always love the idea of getting kids work up onto the board kind of as quickly as possible. You’re taking photos just talk us through that warden? What app are you using? What tech are we WhatsApp? Can you talk any? Yeah, so

Sammy Kempner 24:25
I use CamScanner which is just a photo to PDF Converter. But like just as I’m marking if I see a really good mistake, take a photo. I write on my sort of like work solutions that I just got just for myself so that before I start marking, I write their name that student’s name on that question on the on my test. And I do this maybe like three or four times for different students mistakes that are like nice mistakes that are common misconceptions or, you know, things that we’ve talked about during the unit and yet there should have made that mistake, whatever it may be. And then I set like to use this CamScanner app. And it kind of does like a nice kind of like editing things and the colours and brighter and clearer and then usually emailed yourself and I’d open up the email. And then at the end of the review, you before the review, say that I’m going to project mistakes on the board that people may be ready to answer could be anyone, anyone at all, and it really could be anyone and so like, I quite often target Pupil Premium students and like low attaining students, but like, just because I think that’s a generally good rule to follow for things if you’re not in if you’re in two minds. But more important is the like the mistake has been made, if it’s a really nice mistake. Anyway, after the after that when the when the review, part of an agreement has finished, and it’s just like one mistake at a time, this MSA cares. And you can sometimes see the kid who’s mistake it is or the group who’s you really know they’ve got it when the group are like, right, here we go. And then you say right, use your turn, talk, talk us through it. And then if they do it, then obviously you praise the group. And if they don’t, you blame the group to varying degrees of like severity of consequence, like it might be just say, they don’t understand it or like sometimes, it’s quite hard to like they explain it. But then you kind of stretch it a bit, you ask them some more questions and questions, and they get a bit stumped. And like, you’re I would do that for if if the group members that helped them were really high attainers. And I was just trying to like, challenge them even more be like, look, look at the questions that I’ve asked, Did you ask these questions? And they’ll be like, No. And I know that because this person is not able to answer these questions. This is what you’ve got to be doing. So it might be like that quite measured, and like really, really high expectations of what I want them to do in their groups. But it might also be this is quite basic mistake. There’s no way you should have not got this wrong. So you’re not it’s not a detention because you’re not misbehaved. But you’re going to stay behind until this person can explain it. It happened today, my year 11 lesson actually, like they do a paper homework of like mixed exam questions from their most recent, like prep tests that they’re doing. Actually, this is this is another teaser for later on. But anyway, they come they do this every after each lesson they come in. And they immediately that the answers on the board, they immediately started doing group work review. Because I’ve told them for like four and a half years now they’ve done a lot of group work and they’re quiet. They’re all right. And then, but at the end of the 20 minutes, they have to do this, I then like pick someone and the student who I picked was a student who’s actually missed that lesson and hadn’t heard the explanation. But like, it’s crunch time, he has to know what to do for these questions. So I just said like this, this class for this group last day, and then at the end, they had to stay for 20 minutes, 20 out of like 35 minute lunch, which was annoying for me, and then my lunch, but they just he wasn’t getting it. And they made they had to do it. And they didn’t complain because they know how it works and that they do want him to understand. But yeah, that’s the other end of the severity.

Craig Barton 28:10
God saw me so many questions on this. Let me just make sure I’ve definitely got my head around this, this comes come out, you’re taking the photo X converts it to a PDF, you’ll send you’re just emailing to yourself straight away. And you can just go to your kind of tower at the front or whatever, crack open the email, and it’s on the board is that is what they love it. Right groups. So first question about this. I’m intrigued by the type of tasks that you’re setting for your group. Because whenever I’ve used group work in the past, it’s been the more kind of investigative, open ended less structured things. I’m getting the sense that you’re using it for a kind of a broader range of activities. Can you just describe some of the things that you may get your kids working in groups to do? Yeah, so

Sammy Kempner 28:52
there’s before, like, before we start group work is good, you have to know the reason that you’re doing it. And in my mind, there’s three good reasons, those generating ideas, just just entering ideas doesn’t apply so much in maths. Occasionally it does but not not loads, processing or practising something. So you might think of as the we do part of the lesson, but it’s not necessarily teacher led. So usually we do as a teacher, obviously guiding students through questioning and whatever. But it might be that the knowledge is in the room, but it’s not. It’s not like it’s not consolidated yet. And it would be beneficial for them to have the opportunity to kind of explain rehearse, just questioning each other a little bit to like test out a little different sections, because some of them will notice on them won’t. And that one, by the way is a bit risky because if they do have misconceptions, then obviously those can get perpetuated. So you’ve got to be really careful with that. And the third one is when you know the knowledge is in the room, because you’ve tested them somehow it might be mini whiteboards. It might be a topic test, it might be a big, big assessment, and you’ve marked their work or you told them who’s right and who’s wrong, and you’re expecting them to teach you You have to? So those are the three reasons that I will use group work by pretty much. Not at all for investigation. Yeah, probably because I think with investigations I I’m not, I’m not saying there’s never a time in place for it at all, because I like often lessons can take all kinds of forms. And sometimes it’s just good to have something really exciting, which actually isn’t going to help them necessarily do really well in the exam. But if it’s exciting and worthwhile, and maybe relevant, and whatever, then there’s definitely like, I’m all for it. But I think, with investigations at once someone’s realised, and then they just tell the group that the investigation is not a thing anymore for those people. So if I’m ever trying to get into spot patterns, or whatever, it’s more, I’ll be like looking at this board, can you see a pattern here, give them real time, like Silent time when they put their hand up, if they think there’s quite a pattern, and then I’ll get a gauge the room at least to see if they think they’ve understood, which is very different to this, they have understood. But I think that that has to be done silently. And actually, a lot of things need to be done silently, things where once you’re told, then there’s no more thinking. Like, think of an example, done badly. Some, some some questions really lend themselves to group work, regardless of how good the students are a group work. So trying to find the area of compound shape just because like, or the area of a shaded section, I think even if they’re not very good at questioning and stuff, without much subtlety, they can help students get to the answer without just telling them. Whereas by contrast, like let’s say factorising, quadratic expressions, I know this is math specific. But if you’re not very, very, very good at helping people, you might just tell them what goes in the bracket, and then that then there’s no worth to the group work. And so that kind of thing needs to be done silently individually, because they need to get used to thinking in the right way. So you have to be really careful about your when, like when you’re when is a good time to use group work. And it can vary from topic a topic and it can vary from lesson to lesson and subject to subject

Craig Barton 32:11
is fast. problem here somebody’s everything you say? And then write down three more questions of things to ask you. So I mean, treat here. Well, just a very quick question on this. We grew work, would you say majority of lessons would involve some form of group work for you? That’d be fun. Yeah,

Sammy Kempner 32:25
very light, as I say that quite rarely generating ideas. But usually, like, even if it’s just mini whiteboards, if they’re if let’s say two thirds of the class was got it right and a third haven’t, or even less, actually, half and half. And it’s fairly evenly spread throughout the room. With the students trained at welling group work, I think it’s the most productive way to deal with mistakes once they know who’s right. If you just explain it from the front half of them, it’s irrelevant to and if you, you can’t move on, because there’s not enough of them in the classroom. Who knows. So I can’t really imagine teaching without that as my fallback option, because not only does it provide the support for those who got it wrong, but the ones who got it right. Like I really believe it’s really powerful for them, to challenge them to get them to think deeply about it to help somebody doesn’t

Craig Barton 33:14
understand just on that semi, so I have the exact same strategy, but I don’t have the group accountability at the end. So it never works as well. Right? Because it’s the thing there is the the kids who’ve got it right. Sure. I’m saying to them explain to you know, your partner is struggling, blah, blah, blah. But if they do they do if they don’t, doesn’t matter. But then if, if if I’m holding them account, if their partner can’t explain it, well, then they the incentives and stakes are there. So right I’m, I’m on to that one. Here’s my question for you something What does paired work play a role here at all? Is it is it either independent silent work and group work or is there is a room for paired work,

Sammy Kempner 33:52
I bracket paired work, pre it’s principles applied as they do degree work, the same principles. The only thing is, if you’re using pairs, rather than groups, the best thing like the lowest number of people, if you got a group in the class figures or for let’s say, you need eight students in the room. So I’ve understood something properly for the group work to work if you have pairs, you 16 And so it makes it harder to do the teaching and to do the processing becomes a little bit more risky, the teaching is harder. It’s just a little bit harder. I think that what sometimes happens when they’re doing group work because they might naturally just fall into a group of two and two, and like if they’re having different conversations, but I really emphasise it and that’s okay, but they have to be checking each other’s pair as well. Like you have to the people on your table you’re responsible for even if you’ve been talking individually with something because it’s worked out you’re going to fix that while someone else fixes that you still need to grab that test look at their purple pen No. And I’m if they get it wrong, and I asked them later on, I’m still going to be like looking at you To say what happened?

Craig Barton 35:01
I like it. I like it. Right. final few just questions, logistic questions on great work. And then if there’s anything else you want to add that we haven’t covered, please do something. So where to start your size of groups would tend to be false? Or will that will that depend?

Sammy Kempner 35:17
Yeah, so three, so two to four, works, five is hard. Like, because then it’s harder to ensure that you’re not getting people doing nothing. And it’s harder for the kids to notice when people aren’t doing anything as well. And what you often find is a five turns into a three and a two. And then it’s harder to hold them to account as a group, when the one on the one from the two is on one end of the like death, and the one from the three on the other end. Like it’s quite hard for them to hold, it feels like look after each other. But it’s still I mean, in all honesty, like I’ve got quite big classes for my age and nines, and we do often have five and it does work. It’s just a little bit harder.

Craig Barton 35:58
Got it. Choice of kids in the group, are you grouping them in any specific way?

Sammy Kempner 36:03
I like to have it let’s see what age groups highest, attaining second highest saying 13/4 all the way down to eight, and then I will take the ninth highest staining, put them on the table with the aid, and then go backwards the other way. And then I’ll go again. And then again. Obviously, all of this relies heavily on behaviour and personality clashes and so like, and honestly, we’re my year elevens there’s so many personalities in their entire isn’t suddenly entirely about personality, pretty much like I’ve made sure there’s a there’s a high attainment on each group. But beyond that, it’s about who’s gonna work well with who and not get distracted. But with my eight, it’s pretty much exactly by the book that

Craig Barton 36:48
and basing it on. Is it static? Because that was gonna be my follow up question. What? What data? Are you kind of judging this on?

Sammy Kempner 36:56
Yeah, so it’s obviously informed by summative assessment data. But summative assessment, data’s always limited. And I feel like so we’ve I’m fortunate enough to have taught my classes there. I’ve been there seven all of them. So I know them really well. And so I wouldn’t I my gut. And what they understand is much better than the summative data. But it also, I think what summative assessment data is really, really useful for flagging up students to know less than you realise. But I think there are students that know loads that might do badly in a test in a big test. And so I wouldn’t, it’s obviously it’s worth seeing, it’s like it’s very useful data because something’s gone wrong for them. But I’d be much more willing to say, that’s a bad day for them, compared to a student who’s done really, really bad really badly, and is like bottom of the class. I’m like, after major alarm, alarm bells.

Craig Barton 37:52
I would would agree. Would you change the group’s a fair bit then?

Sammy Kempner 37:55
So after? So I bet based on new summative data,

Craig Barton 38:00
yeah, or just any, just anything? How long would a group kind of stay in place before there’s a shuffle?

Sammy Kempner 38:05
It’s a great question, which I’ve been thinking about recently, because I realised with my ace, it’s been pretty much static since the start of this year. So that’s what, seven months. And the advantages of this is that they start to, they start to understand their own, like weaknesses in the groups. And they can start to really work towards that and fill those gaps, which is amazing. And they also they also over time, start to really care. And like there’s, when we do tests, sometimes I’m well, if a group, occasionally a whole group, I say the whole group gets 100%, or something like that. You can say to the class, you know, obviously, it’s great when a kid gets 100%. But if you say the class, this group here, has looked after each other so much in the last few weeks in the topic that we’ve been doing whatever the every single one of them’s got 100%. And they look at each other. And you can see they’re really proud of each other. And it’s just a class. And yeah, that’s so. So that’s not stopping me moving around. Yeah. Because then then equally, when they, as discussed with you 11 Night, sometimes they become very familiar with each other, and it just takes, it can mean that they get overly comfortable. And then obviously, you put the accountability measures to stop that happening, but sometimes just changing it up gives them a fresh impetus, and they’re not familiar, they’re not so familiar. So they’re a bit more professional about it. And yeah, this is all like I definitely don’t have an answer to that I should have probably started with by saying I don’t have an answer to that question. It’s just this is one I’ve been going around in my head recently as I think about it, because it’s been now seven months and Serbia and they haven’t had it hasn’t been much movement. I think if it’s working then keep it I think is a simple solution. And if you have a feeling that it might not be or you have a feeling it could be better than the truck then just change it up. Which I guess the place a lot of things if not everything. So

Craig Barton 39:57
this is great. So the last two questions for me on On great work, I could speak to all night long groups, and I’m intrigued by your room layouts. Well, how do you have your desks?

Sammy Kempner 40:07
So I’ve got it. So let’s say rectangular room. And there’s a teacher’s desk in the corner. Where so if you’re facing the board, and the front teach desk is to the right, and it’s kind of, it’s, I’ve tried this for the first time this year, I’ve never liked being horizontal or while perpendicular or parallel to the board or the board. So I’ve tried just moving it quite grotesquely 45 degrees, which is strange, but like it’s working for me, I’m liking it. Because there’s all kinds of reasons you might want to do that. But I like the fact that I can see the board teach from the front of my laptop, if I’m sat down, I’m modelling but I can also see the class at the same time. So it’s a good combination. But then in front of me. So if we’re still facing the front of the room with the board at the front of the desk to the far right corner, there’s in front of dirt in front of me, there’s, there’s a group of four, and a group of four behind that. So bottom right now. And so the and then there’s two more rows of groups. The middle row has three groups of four, and the left row with the same columns, the left column has three more groups of four as well.

Craig Barton 41:27
Got it? And is it the kids, I assume that when you’re modelling or whatever, it’s quite easy for them to all be facing the front. This was the reason I’m saying this. This is always one of my big arguments in my internal arguments. Why I think no. And I always prefer rows just because the kids are facing the front.

Sammy Kempner 41:42
Yeah, it’s a good it’s a really good question. I like, again, grotesquely have tilted the desks, 45 degrees, and the one that was the one on the side of the room that tilted 45 degrees, so that the ones who would otherwise be kind of having to turn around, see the board only have to sort of tilt the head a little bit. That’s all desks. If you look at the if you look at plan view of the room, would be facing towards the board, some sort of angle so that to minimise the amount they have to turn?

Craig Barton 42:15
Got it? Got it. Perfect. And last question. And it’s the worst question, Sammy, I would love to get kids to the stage where they can do this work in groups like you can, how long do you reckon it takes? And what are some of the things what are some of the things that you’ve learned that are essential to put into place in those early kind of lessons where they’re getting to grips with this?

Sammy Kempner 42:39
I think, genuinely the difference when I started just blaming the group, which is what I guess this tip is all about, and praising the group. That was like an overnight clear difference. Which is, like ridiculous, because these things never worked like that.

Craig Barton 42:55
Yeah.

Sammy Kempner 42:57
But then the, the, if they never arrive, we never arrived, we never know, we’re never gonna get to the point where we’re perfect at anything, but we aspire to get better and better. And it’s the same for the group work, I think the trajectory will go up and down a little bit, and then up a bit more and down a little bit more. But ultimately, there’ll be a positive trend if you keep practising. And you can kind of start adding new things like like, with my year, I’ve got tops a nine at the moment, who I’ve had since year seven. And midway through year seven, I started you had to build up the accountability just in them understanding what how it was working, but then maybe after a few months, you can then start to like doing it regularly in a lot of lessons and doing all the all the consequences and whatever it may be. Starting to teach them to question each other. Which adds a completely new layer to it. And honestly, like some of that questioning is ridiculous. They’re teach me a thing or two, the way they scaffold and guide through questioning and like, but then once you open that up, then you hit a another huge increase in like, productivity. Yeah. And so anyway, like, I think it was just practising for a few months will, you’ll start to notice a difference. But overnight transformation to suddenly blaming and praising the group will like it is really good. Sometimes I should probably like, I feel like I should say, just make sure that you’re judging the situation well, because I can just imagine, like a slightly spicier group of kids suddenly being like, what I’m getting blamed for this, like, this kid hasn’t been listening and like, and you have to really make sure that you’re separating bad behaviour. Like if one of the kids isn’t engaging, like that’s a different thing to group accountability. And I don’t want people to suddenly find themselves getting those fights with kids. Because they’ve like, you know, held them to account with group work in a way they’ve never thought about before. But the principle is there

Craig Barton 44:59
that’s Great. I said last question, somebody just thought of one more. So do apologise. I’m intrigued by what you’re doing as a teacher, whilst the kids are working in their groups on two levels here, one, because you mentioned a potential problem with group work is that the kids can be practising the wrong things, misconceptions can be going around. So I’m intrigued how you keeping on top of that. But also, I mean, I’m intrigued by a point I first heard Colin foster make that as teachers, sometimes we can really get in the way of kids thinking like the kids will be having a great discussion. And we’ll be hovering at the back. And all of a sudden, either the discussion shuts down, or the kids feel they need to perform or it just becomes stilted. So what are you doing as a teacher while she kids, kids are doing the great work?

Sammy Kempner 45:43
Yeah, great question. Trying not to get as not to get involved as much as possible, and trying to keep every group in view as much as possible. So I stand in the corner. So I only have to turn a quarter turn to see the whole room. And I try my best to zone into conversations as much as I can. So that I can figure out whether misconceptions are being perpetuated or but also just like, figure out if they’re on task, in a really basic level, if I have a suspicion that they are off task, try really hard to listen to that conversation and try and read body language. But also, if it’s not working, subtly, try and move to that part of the room, also look at the rest of the classroom view. And then you can maybe do that thing I was talking about where you let them play out. And then you pick someone and you’d be like, right, I was listening, you might have not fully exhausted on the other side of the room. But I was listening. And I can tell, it might have been that. What that’s like, if you most the time, you’ll have to do that. I think that’s a good thing to do. What I’ve started doing with this, you and I in class is when they’re doing their group work, because their behaviour is excellent. And it’s very, very rare that I’ve noticed them being off task. I go around with a mini whiteboard and basically just listen. And it’s like I’m observing a trainee teacher or whatever, just I’m just writing down what was and even bearish in terms of their their help. And then every so often, I’ll just stop the class and give a few individuals feedback publicly. So it might be modelling a bad conversation, it might be modelling really nice line of questioning, which took their partner to the right answer. But just like basically just giving them feedback as I would a teacher. And that’s it. That’s you have to model what good conversations look like. And that is one way of doing it.

Craig Barton 47:31
It’s great. Sami, I want to completely change how it chill it. Listen to this. It’s brilliant stuff. Right? Tip number three, Sammy, what are we going for you?

Sammy Kempner 47:41
you the same question with different numbers.

Craig Barton 47:45
Nothing great. You’ve really thought these through Hello. I like the snappy title.

Sammy Kempner 47:49
Yeah, as I said, as I said, that’s the only sappy part of the rest is just for me just going on tangents. But right. Tell

Craig Barton 47:57
me more about this one, Sammy.

Sammy Kempner 48:00
So, again, now in the theme of accountability, you let’s say you introduce a question. So constantly saying to students, like most important thing for learning is to ask questions, you have to ask questions, you have to ask questions. And so you model something. Questions, questions, questions? No. Okay, fine. We’re doing the same question with different numbers. And you can literally rub out the numbers and say, if you understood it, then this is actually no problem because it is the same question. And so it might be for many whiteboards. It might be with like a do now let’s say you give them a difficulty now and then you say we’re doing this same do now tomorrow with different numbers. So you ask questions. Now, you write down your purple pen notes now, so that you can look back at them tomorrow. Because tomorrow I’m expecting every single person down to every single one of these problems. It might be a rare, so a nice, nice thing to do, which I’ve done a lot of is with my irrelevance particularly just retests. I used to literally use tip X to tip X out of the numbers and just write new numbers on. But now we’ve got like these nice laptops from my school and we can just like, get a PDF up and just like cover them in white and black and rewrite the numbers on but principle is tip X copy style retests. And you say that might wait a bit before you start the review. Just so we’re going to review in the usual way. It’s group work. And I’m going to stop you every so often. And I ask people to explain things I got wrong. But on top of all that, at the end of the review period, we’re going to do a retest is going to be the questions that the class did badly on. And it’s going to be the same questions, but just different numbers. And anyone who doesn’t do well on this, I’ll know you just didn’t do this review properly. So yeah, pretty much that like there’s all kinds of different things like it might be We try not ever to get kids to write just copy stuff down on the board. So when we want a nice example in books, there’ll be like that situation will model one then we’ll run out the numbers and be like right now you do this when your books nicely and obviously if they get it wrong, they have to write a purple pen No. Because always you want them to be thinking so anything as much as possible. So

Craig Barton 50:04
you’ve checked a couple of things in here that we need to follow up on this. This is great. So the first thing is the first time I heard something similar to the change numbers thing for for low stakes quizzes was when Danny Quinn and former head of maths at Mikayla was on my podcast years years ago. And she described the process where the kids would be given a low stakes quiz. And then they wouldn’t be judged on how they did on that they do it very low stakes, they do it in class, maybe answers are up on the board, teacher goes through it, blah, blah, blah. But then the teacher says to them, okay, your homework over the weekend is to prepare for the follow up quiz, where you’re going to get the exact same questions, but the numbers are going to change. And I’ve never heard of this before. But the point that he made, and I’m assuming it’s a similar point that you’re making here is that how the kids do on that first iteration, that’s maybe down to either ability, achievement, knowledge, and so on and so forth. But how they do when the numbers change, that’s almost all down to efforts. They’ve no reason they can’t do that, as long as they have given time and opportunity to figure out whether it’s from the group or from the teacher. So it’s a real good way to hold them to account because there’s there’s no excuse and Danny was saying how parents would for because I think Danny was, this was where I got the NSPCC contacts, and he was all kicking off. Because Danny was with them, I think maybe put them in detention or something like that they did bad on the follow up test. And, and everyone was you can imagine people kicking off but her point that got lost was they have every opportunity to do well on that follow up test because they knew what the questions were going to be just the numbers were going to change. Is that is that a similar kind of kind of philosophy, if that makes sense?

Sammy Kempner 51:38
Mail nerd. Absolutely. I’m all for that detention there to be honest.

Craig Barton 51:42
They’ll be on so you saw me? No wonder you.

Sammy Kempner 51:48
Yeah, as long as you set them up for success fairly, like you’ve given them, you’ve made sure you’ve had space for questions. You’ve gone. You’ve modelled it really cleanly. You You have to like hold yourself to account as well and be like, Have you actually done a good enough job? They’re given them time to talk or in groups, maybe like, maybe even in another question there and then check and be like, if you if you check in, let’s say they do have to do now. They don’t get it right. You reteach one of the questions. They do a mini Bible question. Everyone gets it right. And you say to them tomorrow, that look, everyone’s got it right. Every single person, this is coming up tomorrow, and I’m giving I’m just hitting the numbers. If you don’t get it right, I’m going to keep you afterwards because something like you. Because because I am you say to them tomorrow, because like fair enough, if they can’t remember, I think like if they’re struggling to remember, that’s understandable. But if you let them look back in their books, or the purple pen notes that they’ve made in their strategy, there is absolutely it’s completely justified to say to them, you must be 100% in this, because I you either you weren’t asking questions, or you copied someone when you doing the whiteboard, which is not okay. Or you were lazy when it came to on purpose, a note and therefore when it comes back to like you’ve forgotten, which isn’t your fault. But when when you get the chance to help yourself, because I’ve not made that test. I’ve said you can look at your notes, whatever notes you made. If you can’t, if they don’t help you, then you obviously did it badly. And that’s when you

Craig Barton 53:15
go back like that. And the second thing and that you chucked in towards the end there. And this is something I’ve been thinking about some work I’ve been doing with the school at the moment you mentioned about the copying down. Now this is a massive thing, because I would say 99% 95% of maths lessons that I’m lucky enough to watch that involve a worked example. Invariably, the kids are asked at some point to copy down that worked example. And there’s a number of issues with this. But the biggest is and I’ve suffered from this myself, I call it this the illusion of copying down that there’s this almost this belief that something magical happens from the process of a child copying something down on the board that all of a sudden they understand it more or they learn it more or something like that. And the other issue I have with this is I’m not convinced that kids use their exercise books effectively for revision. It’s not as if you know, you’re looking back through because books sometimes scruffy disorganised bla bla bla bla bla, and this works example. Yeah. Anyway. So I’m really intrigued what you do there. So let me see if I’ve got this right. So you’re modelling one kind of version of the worst example however, you you model it, but then you’re the kids aren’t writing that down in books. But then the version that they get down in books is essentially kind of like a your turn it’s it’s it’s the worst example, but with the numbers change, and that becomes their model example. Is that right? So me? Yeah, so yeah, yeah. So okay, so just to tell me a little bit about this. So I like the rationale that you always want the kids thinking that that’s I’m completely on board with that. How do you I guess the big question, how do you want what your kids using that word for example, I you have the belief and what are the kids going to be kind of referring back to what’s the purpose of it?

Sammy Kempner 54:53
So the best way of revising math is to do math. Like I’m definitely on board with what you’ve said there. I completely agree. I wouldn’t Well, my kids reading through their notes and stuff. When it comes to revising, however, a lot of like, I’ve never really been bothered that much about books. I’ve never, yeah, I’ve just never really like cared that much to be honest. But kids do sit like, somehow, maybe just because we make a big deal out of purple pen and how to reflect on the stakes and stuff. And so we do that for First of all, so they that to force them to engage mistakes, and they can write down feedback, so they understand. So they like know what the right thing to do is a strategy maybe, but also, the better, like kind of higher level thinking is, they’re reflecting on their own mistakes, articulating where they went wrong and writing down what they need to do next time is a really hard skill. Like we again, we never arrived, there’s definitely there’s always room for improvement. But it’s something we aspire to. I keep saying we like I’m talking about my school, like, but I think so because we’ve made since we give a purple pen students tend they seem to care about their books, and they seem to care about the notes that they’re making more than probably I do. And a lot of a lot of them do find it useful to refer back to them. Especially if I’m doing something like that do now. And I’m saying I write down the notes, because I’m giving the same questions, and you can look back at them tomorrow. So I don’t really care. But students seem to buy by virtue of all the other things in place that we’re trying to do to make them learn. And I think also like, like, you know, someone has a maths teacher now, who’s Alright, in maths when I was at school, I didn’t really need to look back at my book, because I just remembered stuff. Whereas a lot of the kids you teach actually do need that. And it’s helpful if they can do that. And also, we do a lot of champs, we do a chamfer, pretty much every topic. I recall and response for pretty much every topic. And that’s the sort of thing that they write down in purple pen. And if that’s written down in their book, we’re next to that silence, that kind of question, it is helpful for them to refer back to it. So the answer is, I and also for sorry, for the same reason. That’s also why we get them to have one clean example, at least one clean example in their book. So if they want to, they can refer back to it, when they’re doing independent practice that lesson or later on that week, or whatever it may be, if they come to revise. And they really can’t remember, and they don’t think to ask a friend or they don’t think to come to their teacher, at least or something they can do to help themselves before giving up. So that’s the extent to which I like I care about neat examples, and books. Does that question?

Craig Barton 57:33
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. If I’m just check, I’ve got this this round. I’m always interested in the logistics of this. So you are you’re modelling a worked example on the board. The kids aren’t writing anything down? Or would they be possibly bringing stuff down on mini whiteboards throughout? Or is it just just watching?

Sammy Kempner 57:49
Just watching, watching? I think I will. In my school, everyone’s got slightly different ways it but as a general rule, I think if you’re modelling something from the start, and everyone focused completely,

Craig Barton 58:00
yeah. And then you’re then so then you’ve gone through it. And then you’re you’re changing the numbers, and they’re having a go, but they’re writing it in their books. So just two questions on that. How are you? How are you assessing whether they’ve understood that that bit? Yeah.

Sammy Kempner 58:15
So sometimes I save the work to them writing their books until I know they can do it. So sometimes I’ll model it. And we’ll do some mini whiteboard questions. And the final mini whiteboard question will rub out the numbers and say, right, right, you’re gonna do this one in your books as your example. So it might be then it might also be if this all works better for higher attending classes. And if you have lower 10 classes, what a lot of teachers our school do is guide the students through a worked example. But then because if their knowledge, the student teacher hasn’t told the students what’s going on, the students says they’ve worked through as a class, they then write that down, because it’s something that they’ve done is like, arguably is copying. But I also think because the students have worked through it themselves, rather than been told it’s a bit better than that. However, it was there was something really illuminating. That was mentioned by a colleague of mine in a math meeting recently. And she’d been wishing teachers a the bottom set. Maybe your seventh class, we have a class. And she was watching them write down a word example that like like that, where they’ve gone through it as a class, she got the information from them, and then show right now write this down as your as your new example. And she’d watched them copy down, and they copied it down from the bottom right of the example. They had, they hadn’t copied it like left to right. And in the order of the thinking and the writing that we’ve done it, they just copy it down to there’s a picture. And it was like it was mind blowing. And like, there’s obviously there’s so much to unpack there. But essentially, like what I’ve taken from that is just really again, copying down is so not helpful.

Craig Barton 59:58
Wow, Sammy, thank you Get Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But is that classic sign of almost kind of just a, just a passive proselyte? You say just copying a picture down? Right. Yeah, that is incredible. And final question on this summary. Just purple pen just just just clear up for me. What role does that play in this worked example? Part of the process? Yeah. So

Sammy Kempner 1:00:18
if, let’s say, so we’re doing it the way that I mentioned first, where you do a question about the numbers, they then new numbers they do in the books, if it’s like, so I will certainly, to get a sense I circulate targeting the students at least like to know, and then if, like, and then and then I’ll go through the answer. And then I’ll say, if you’ve got anything wrong, need a purple pen. And so like that might be a sentence, it might be with the words with the perfect example, like doing it properly, the bit they did wrong in purple pen and explaining what they did wrong. So the slight issue with that is their neat example, might not end up being neat. Sure, but I think it’s still it’s still better than copying.

Craig Barton 1:01:02
Yeah, for me, it’s the it’s the ownership thing. They’re like, I’m also, even if they do copy the example from the board, if they’ve got some in their own words that are personalised to them, whether it’s annotations, or whatever, that for me starts the meanings there. And it’s a bit more more active. That’s,

Sammy Kempner 1:01:18
I could also say like, just to be really honest about it. Like I’ve done a lot of learning walks, I focused on purple pen notes and stuff. And the range of quality is really incredible. And obviously, there’s there’s some really bad purple pen nose where students have actually like, made an even bigger mid line mistake with a purple pen, or said some nonsense, but I think the principle is something to work towards, where they reflect your mistakes is worthwhile is really important. And you in the purple pen simply for corrections and teacher top tips and chants is still really good. And in some ways, it’s training them to reach that stage where they are taking ownership of it and doing their own thing. So it’s still worthwhile, but I would, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna give off the wrong impression here that like all of our all of our students are writing ridiculously good, like metacognitive comments and whatever. Like, it’s just not the case. But they are do a lot of them do it well. And some of them do incredibly well. And some of them don’t. But it’s still a worthwhile thing.

Craig Barton 1:02:19
That’s great. Sorry, just before we move on to tip number four, you keep mentioning Chomsky give us a couple of these chumps, get a couple of examples.

Sammy Kempner 1:02:27
Adding and subtracting fractions, find the LCM. Perimeter is the distance around a 2d shape. There’s a really good one, which is one of my favourites, you say right angled triangle Pythagoras or trig. Side, side, side, pi side, pi side, labelled longer side, side, angle, side. So curve toe, label those two sides, cover up the one you want and use the formula. So like, you know, you can question the pedagogy in some of those things like you know, using the former triangle for so the toe, whatever. But in terms of like, it’s quite powerful, because you teach that with you teach a mind map, if you see a triangle, are you finding area yes or no? If no, is it a rival triangle and you go through that whole chain process? If if it’s not, then you go through two angles, two sides, sign will sign will write the one you want on top, if not three sides, one angle cosine, you’re gonna go and you teach it as this mind map, but then the chance reflect it and they take them through the thinking. And it’s really, it’s also because that one’s that one’s good. It’s got quite good bees. Yeah. You have to Yeah, you have to really like embrace, you have to buy into it. And so I think, you know, it’s ridiculous and the kids know, is ridiculous. But if you’re just unashamedly into it, and you just, even if they don’t want to do it, if you keep doing it and pushing them into it, then like, No, we’re not gonna move on until you’re gonna do the same level of enthusiasm. be doing seven, then by year 11. They’re just, they’re just bought in and it’s just a normal part of life. So

Craig Barton 1:04:02
that’s great. That’s brilliant. Okay, tip number four, please.

Sammy Kempner 1:04:08
This is really stuff that is one question. Don’t tell.

Craig Barton 1:04:13
We treat in question. Don’t tell. Okay, tell me more.

Sammy Kempner 1:04:17
So, again, like this, we we’ve had some slight disagreement, not disagreeing. But I think the way that different departments in our school do this is different. And like, I know, Adam, Adam is the king of modelling and like the way that he models is ridiculous. But in maths, we try always, even when we’re modelling from the front and model through questioning, because I think the idea is, and Adam has been doing some CPD our school like talking about how to go from familiar to unfamiliar, or maybe concrete or abstract or whatever it may be, but the familiar unfamiliar, fade, if you want is that as I found maths teaching works, you take some prior knowledge Is that is needed that they should know, make sure they’ve got it and then you add a little bit to it based on logic. And so if you do that, well, then you can do it through questioning, because it’s only building on stuff that they’ve already known. Like, there are exceptions. Like when I’m first teaching algebraic proportion to the year 10 class or something, I think it’s just quite helpful to say this is general formula, a specific formula, you model like direct portion like this. And in this portion I this because this is all just a bit of a leap. Sometimes, it’s just better just to say like, this is what’s going on. But as a general rule, if you’re teaching something for the first time, or money from the front question, then don’t tell when you’re helping a child once a one. Like question, always try, like if you’re, if you tell them, you’ve got no idea if they’ve understood when they’re when students are working in groups, try and get them to question each other then rather than telling each other. And I think the best way that I can demonstrate why this is so important is everyone has had it, where you’re you’ve explained something, you’ve explained it really well. And to someone who’s not understood it before, and you’re saying in Spanish, when you reach point where that person you’re speaking to goes. I until I started teaching, I would just I just assumed that meant they understood. But it turns out, it’s not true. Like people make that noise all the time, because it’s become so like, it’s become socially awkward for them to go a long without understanding it. And honestly, I’m asking, I asked him do this kids all the time you say, and they go, oh, yeah, oh, I’ve got to stop there. Because you’ve just made that noise, which means that you think you understand or you’d like, want to communicate, you understand. But it’s, it’s amazing. It’s amazing how often they still don’t understand. And that comes about because you told them rather than question them. Because you’re telling someone something they like right now it can be happening, you can just be zoned off right now. I’ve got no idea. Actually, I’m not asking any questions. I’m just talking. And so yeah, like, it’s once I find I do that all the time. As soon as something is not immediately interesting. There’s a chance there’s a danger that I’m my mind might wander a little bit, and I have to bring myself back. And I’m I tried to be self disciplined about it. So hopefully, I don’t miss out on too much. But, you know, like, it gets easier with children, you are very self disciplined, then there’s no chance that they’re going to bring themselves back, even if they’re looking you in the eye. And even if your estimation is amazing, which is why in our department we try to question always

Craig Barton 1:07:38
guys fascinating the summary. So I can, I can certainly see it. Well, I don’t I don’t do it enough. But I can certainly see how this is 100% a good idea. If you if you kind of work in one to one with a child and you’re trying to get help them through something and you want to get a sense of where the kind of gap is in their knowledge where it’s going wrong. So you build up and so on. The modelling is the thing that intrigues me here. Now I’m interested with the kind of big leap things that that certainly seems to be the place where you want the kind of crystal clear explanation and so on because it’s too big a jump, and it’s going to take too long for the kids to get there. Potentially misconceptions bombing around left, right and centre and so on. Can you give me an example of an idea or a new idea where you could get all the way with with with questioning? Or, you know, most of the way?

Sammy Kempner 1:08:26
Yeah, so let’s say if you’re teaching, dividing fractions for the first time. So you talked off by saying like, I’ve got eight pieces of chocolate here. And if I have half of them, half of those pieces of chocolate, how many do I have? When you say like, we’ve got for your question. And this is a question how many chocolate pizza? Yeah, and so you then say, price if I write that down half of eight equals four. And what was another way of saying that? How, like, if I if I if I divided the chocolate into piles, like what would I have divided by divide eight by to make my four divided by two? Okay, so divided by two, and we get four. So let’s look at these next to each other. I said, I’ve written down a half of a literature that and we’ve taught them that already that of in math means times. Okay, so I’ve got half times eight. And so when you’re multiplying things, does it matter what order you multiply them in? No. Okay. So if I write eight times a half, that’s the same as a half times eight. Yeah. Okay. So eight times a half is the same as eight divided by one, two, and two is the same as two over one. And so what do you notice about dividing a by something and timing eight by something? What’s the relationship here? Well, dividing by some fraction is the same as timesing by its reciprocal, and so like you’re getting them to almost fill the gaps in the log and their reasons the logic of way of where you’ve gone with

Craig Barton 1:09:56
it. God this is interesting. So let me just get on the lid. just sticks is that a lot of mini whiteboard stuff in response to

Sammy Kempner 1:10:03
you? This is another situation where yes, me labels could do a job I think the admin of getting a whole class to do anyway was properly you’re covering your answers the hovering when you’re ready, you’re showing the same time. And really, the questions are so constantly there, that it’s too, it’s too late. There’s too much for many whiteboards. So it’s a situation where it’s good to call call. But sometimes I’ll do like a whole class, like, back and forth, because a lot of those questions the whole class could have said, and if I’m, it keeps them engaged, I think it holds their attention and hold them to account for for being involved in listening to your model. Whereas if you don’t do that, if you don’t, if you don’t sometimes just stop and I look at them expectedly. Like, that’s the next thing, I’m gonna say, Well, you really fall in what because if you were following what I was saying, then you should know the next thing because it’s nothing that we haven’t done before. By all these things, they increases the likelihood they’re going to be listening.

Craig Barton 1:10:58
This is interesting this summer, I would imagine the difference between how me and you will do this. And I already think it added the wrong campaign straightaway, is I think I do a lot of the explaining ads, make sure I’ve got the attention sign out of really thought through maybe even gone so far as to scripts or rehearse what I was going to say. Real crystal clear explanation, at least in my head anyway. And then once I’ve gone through that explanation, that’s when the kind of assessment would would start, you know, I’d imagine by the time I’ve asked my first question of the kid, geez, maybe I kind of asked five or six. Possibly, I got there quicker. But maybe you’ve on Earth, more potential problems that the kids could have? Uh, maybe your kids are more focused on it? I don’t know. But I’d imagine that sort of diff our difference.

Sammy Kempner 1:11:51
So, first of all, I it’s not a good assessment for learning, as we talked about, because you’re only asking one kid and you don’t know. But it is a good, you know, the part is the participation ratio, participation ratio is a better like, I think the participation ratio will be higher, if they know that any point they could be involved in the model. I also just want to like really make clear. I’m not saying yes, sometimes, or often. Or even always, it might be a good thing to do to do a really like a really clear model with no student involvement, and then immediately start questioning with the next one. Do the guided practice, I find you’re still I think it’s still at that point, you’re seeking the principle of question, don’t tell, once you’ve done given them the knowledge they have. But if they have the knowledge to answer the question, then you should be asking the question. I think that’s my point.

Craig Barton 1:12:41
That’s intro, would you if we just double back on tip number one, because this is where it could really be derailed, right? So you’re, you’re trying to picture the scene here, somebody you’re trying to do dividing fractions, you want to get to the you know, get to the point where they’ve got this new idea. You’re purposely asking the kids or you suspect might be getting this wrong that so you can just imagine that kind of worked example, going off the rails a little bit here, he’s still sticking to that principle.

Sammy Kempner 1:13:07
You, again, call it based on the situation, your class and the topic you’re teaching, if you think it’s doable, and if it’s prerequisite knowledge that everyone should have, if you’re questioning is so clear that and the way you’ve guided them through, it is so clear that they should be able to answer it, things like have in maths means times and two is the same as two over one. Those are so they should be so fluent in that that anyone can answer it. Yeah, then it won’t cause an obstacle. But you have you do you have to think really carefully. But when you’re first introducing an idea, you have to be so careful with that, like, obviously, and if there is a danger, that they’re not going to get it and you think it’s gonna cause more harm than actually like assault, like helps deal with and don’t do it. But I think the time when it’s most contentious to say question don’t tell is when you’re introducing, like new information. And then from that, so I still think it can be done in the way that I described with the dividing fractions often. But like, let’s say, let’s assume it can’t be done. And you have to give one clean, clear, concise model. From that moment on, there’s only questioning, it’s really only questioning, don’t do any of the heavy lifting or even the light lifting for them. Constantly question. And one. I honestly think one question done really well, that takes 20 minutes, actually 20 minutes, where you’re, you know, every single person is with you, because you’ve been checking the whiteboards and you’ve been tagged in the ones you’d like to know. And you really made them explain every single part of it and you’d be jumping from student to student a student all the time. Like, that is way more worthwhile and doing 30 questions where, you know, maybe they can do it, but they can’t explain why or they, you know, that’s interesting.

Craig Barton 1:14:56
That’s interesting, Sally. All right. Take no Number five, what have you got for us?

Sammy Kempner 1:15:02
So we have a trick your students to test if they really understand

Craig Barton 1:15:11
another good one trick your students. Okay, go on, tell us about this one.

Sammy Kempner 1:15:16
So it’s kind of sad. Basically, it might be just, you know, once, once you I’m not saying treatment at the beginning, they have to know what they have to you have to at least like have a model to work from. But when you are guiding practice in the front, let’s say a student makes a mistake, you’ve asked them a question, because you’re doing all together. And you ask them one of them a question and tell you the wrong thing. Let it hang there. Let let them wait, let it go and see if the class have noticed. And if they haven’t noticed, and you hold them to account, what’s going on here, why have you not like this is a mistake. And no one has never got a handle. So do you not understand or you’re just not listening. And so letting it letting it sit there is really nice, but sometimes maybe in one of the few times that I go directly into like, when we’re doing a guided guided example, and I do a little bit for them. And I just kind of try and like rush to do a few little steps. I want to get to the whatever the next part the lesson is, and then I’ll put it at mistake, I’ll throw in a mistake there and let it sit there for a bit. And I’m hoping and expecting immediately is a whole sea of hands going up and being like, you know what? That’s a mistake. If they don’t, then again, you weren’t listening. We don’t understand the You should have asked a question. But something’s gone wrong.

Craig Barton 1:16:30
I like this. I like this, because it feels high risk. That’s what I like I like

Sammy Kempner 1:16:36
yeah, like it’s worst. I mean, like it’s most harsh. A kid will give a good, good explanation, like an explanation. There’s not perfect, like in the sense that they’ve omitted detail, don’t say anything wrong. And so rather than doing a stretch, a question to test, you just kind of stare at them. Like this, like, do you? Are you actually saying that the answer? Do you really think that? Sometimes you can actually say that you’d like so that you go in with three as the final answer. And then it like, you know, if they really understand, then they’ll be like, Yeah, I do. And obviously, also the culture in the room. If you build this up over time, and they come to expect sometimes you’re going to try to trick them, and they’ll stick to their guns a little bit. But if they’re if they’re not convinced, even with the culture in the room, they know that sometimes I’ll do this. In that moment, they’re so unsure of themselves, because they don’t understand fully. They’ll say, oh, no, actually, that’s not mine. I always just thought that that was that was wrong. Let me have another go. And then. So just just sort of like staring at them or repeating their answer, I think is a really powerful tool, because you see if they really if they really, really competent in what they’re talking about.

Craig Barton 1:17:48
This is fascinating. So a couple of things on this. I am intrigued, just generally about the role that mistakes play, kind of students identifying and explaining mistakes in learning and so on. And my limited. My limited reading on it and from research and I’ve spoken to Michael Persian about this is that obviously, common sense says it’s really important for kids to be able to articulate why something’s wrong, as much as it is just to be able to regurgitate right things all the time. But as you said at the start, they’ve got to attain, have attained some kind of understanding or fluency of the right way to do it before we start introducing the kind of the wrong ways and getting them to comment. But what I love about what you do there, and I genuinely do love this is what I tend to see in lessons and I’ve done this myself many times, is the only time I’ll ever ask a question like that is when there is a mistake. So like a kid, I’ll make a mistake. And I’ll say, oh, okay, is this right? Everybody? Do we think? And the only time I say that is when there is a mistake. So the kids like, oh, no, it’s a mistake. So they suddenly start switching on? I’ve never once thought to flip it and say is this right when it actually is right? But that is like you say, because then they’re really on their toes, right? Because then they’ve got to be thinking, well, he’s done this to me before. I don’t know which way this is going to go. And I imagine as you’ve said that this all comes down to the culture if this is something you’re doing regularly, it’s that the kids are just they must just be on their toes all the time with you something that’s what I that’s what I’m getting from this. Yeah.

Sammy Kempner 1:19:13
Yeah, they I mean, that maybe, you know, I’ll put a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise but I think yeah, I it’s a it’s a simple thing, you know, like, there are probably more important there are there are Amish I’m certain there are way more important tips that people will hear. But it’s just nice to have in your kind of in your pocket as an option with no planning needed, just to test just to test the reliability. And I think yeah, that’s why I like it because it’s just, it’s a good it’s actually a good check of confidence because when it when it comes down to when they get scared and they realise like, oh my god do I actually think this the only thing they can fall back on is their logic and like the reasoning Scotland to there. So if they, if they really understand the logic And then they should say, Yes, that is my answer. Yes. And if they don’t, then they don’t understand the rest of it enough. And so that and that’s fine. And it’s not, it’s not one of those moments where you tell them off or anything like that. But it’s a signal to you that the they saw and understood it well enough. And if the class haven’t picked up on it, you can start, sometimes the class, you know, where the cost of understood, because you can see them sign to like smirk or whatever, like just to themselves. It’s quite a funny moment. But if the rest of class is just like, honestly, they don’t realise that the answer is, as I say, it’s not. It’s not as foolproof, you’re not checking for understanding, but it is testing reliability. Other students in that situation,

Craig Barton 1:20:40
I love it. So me just one question on this. And I have a bit of a thing at the moment, and it is the most obvious thing in the world. But if you’re asking a really good question, then you don’t just want one kid to do the hard thing and you want you want everybody to benefit from that question. And this applies to lots of different things. But it seems to me that this is a real powerful thing that you want every child to be benefiting from so okay, one child has said that the answer is three. And you’ve then said to that gentleman, are you sure? Is it? Is it really three? Are you going with that? How do you ensure that the rest of the class also benefit from that thinking? And it’s not just a moment that’s just happening between you and the child? Yeah, it’s

Sammy Kempner 1:21:18
a really good question. I think a lot of I mean, always, when you specifically ask one student, there’s a danger of this happening. And it’s about how you like sometimes it can be physically just turning to the rest of the class, like just looking lightly make eye contact with them and just seem like, when you make eye contact with them, you’re implicitly saying, What do you think about this? And so, but it might also be like, sometimes if it’s, if it’s, if you’re generally not sure about whether or not they they followed it, my brother, I talked about this in your groups kind of thing. But I think you don’t need to it doesn’t need to drag out they’ll fight they’ll be engaged enough by the moment that just just because it’s not par for the course, it’s not a normal lesson, suddenly, the future suddenly soso in the show about that, that’s gonna that’s that’s anything different to the norm in a lesson is more likely to grab their attention, I think. Yeah, the transformation in their kids faces like, you can almost physically see it, even though you can’t you get when you start telling them a story about something. They say like it’s like something like jolt, like I’m so interested. And it’s a kind of similar thing to that. It’s not there’s not rigorous scientific research and whatever. But it’s, I think it’s still it’s still like, it’s fine. And it’s a handy tip.

Craig Barton 1:22:39
So having some brilliant tips. So just to clarify, sometimes, may you formalise that and it may be a case of right everybody ever think on your own just sit down on your whiteboards discuss. But more often than not, you get the sense that that local and the moment itself or B.

Sammy Kempner 1:22:53
Yeah, I mean, with the one with the one way that I could kind of dramatised this is the way you look at the short like that, in that Yeah, but if there’s the mistake that a student is left on the like, you’ve just written down their mistake on the board, and you’ve tried to play it really cool, not change anything about yourself. And like, if only a few hands go up, after a while, sometimes you go well beyond with it, and the like, I’ve got to stop here because no one’s for the hand up. Yes. And I’m asking myself what we’re doing here, you turn into a big learning point you go like, right, there’s a mistake on the board, put your hand up when you spotted the mistake. And you know, in a similar you know, this is a really good one you know, and I was saying them if you’re doing like try and get in spot a pattern, you don’t want someone to tell them. Same for spotting a mistake. I think if mistakes on the board are really nice thing to do is just in silence look at the board. And when you think about them, say put your hand up and then you get engaged in the class who thinks there’s find a mistake, but then also they’ve got the space to think about it and process it. And if and if if some of them are the hands up away, you can be like write it down and put down what you think this mistake is, or whatever right don’t ride on it, you know? So I think that in those moments, you can really turn it into a big event in the lesson. So the less pantomime moments like that then then you can

Craig Barton 1:24:09
is brilliant some of those brilliant well they are five absolutely fantastic tips and I’ll hand over to you you were saying off Mike before we recorded you don’t have a book out or anything like that. Do you have anything to plug here Sammy? What’s your listeners check out if you want to want to either learn more about you or the school or is there anything else you want to direct anybody to check out?

Sammy Kempner 1:24:30
Yeah, not not loads to be honest. I mean, you mentioned it out like there was a podcast I did with them Ollie which like I wasn’t I wasn’t gonna say it’s just a bit embarrassing really just like saying like, go and listen to this thing that I was in but if you actually like, if you like to hear me just talk about like, like, rambling on about stuff that I do in my lessons. I did that podcast with Ollie, which is the our podcast, which is pretty much I think you invited me on this and And so like, apart from that, no. Obviously loads of people know loads more stuff about all like all teaching than I do. And I know that half of them have been guests on your show so or will be so. Yeah. Not really

Craig Barton 1:25:16
well, I’ll tell you what Sunday as I sent you off Mike and I put on Twitter it was that that conversation was all Lee was the best podcast I heard in 2021. And all I do in my life is listen to podcasts. So it was absolutely brilliant. And this again, will be so well received. It’s just been jam packed full of absolute gold. So I’m sorry. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Thank you so much. Cheers. Cheers.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Dylan Wiliam’s tips:

1. Make feedback into detective work (3:27)
2. Make detention work fit the crime (9:40)
3. Make question planning part of lesson planning (13:40)
4. We have little insight into our learning (20:02)
5. Don’t let “Don’t know” be the end of the conversation (28:19)

Links and resources

• Dylan Wiliam on Twitter
• Dylan’s website
• Adam Boxer’s book: Teaching secondary science

Subscribe to the podcast

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Watch the videos of Dylan’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. Each episode I invite our guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside or maybe even outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow, but hopefully something good will come out of it. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as the links resources and audio transcriptions from each episode. But better than that, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. These clips can be used to spark discussion between colleagues at departmental meeting at twilight inside and so on. Now, just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks for our lovely sponsor, because this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by arc maths. Math is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed at maths. Art. Math is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and space practice on memory. And here’s how it works. Students Krakow Kerbal averse students crack open the art class app and are given a 12 question quiz with follow up practice questions on anything they got wrong, not just straight away, but the next day three days later, a week later, and so on until they have it secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better Ark will get to know your students and with no teacher input required, you can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So do check out art maths and remember that’s arc with a C knots okay. Okay, back to the show. And let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful Dylan William spoiler alert. Here are Dylan’s five tips. Tip one, make feedback into detective work. Tip two, make detention work fit the crime. Tip Three, make it question planning part of lesson planning. Tip four word of caution here we have little insight into our learning. And Tip Five, don’t let don’t know be the end of the conversation. I’ll tell you why. This is an absolute classic. Now if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK you’ll see I’ve timestamps each of the tips so you can jump straight to anyone that you want to listen to first, or when you revisit this you can dive straight into any tip you want to read listen to enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Mr. Dylan William to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Dylan. How are you? Very good. Thanks. How are you? Great. Very good. Thank you. I’m Dylan, please, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence.

Dylan Wiliam 3:09
A former math and science teacher who then went on to train teachers. It’s a research, did some things in university administration, and then oddly left university life to concentrate on teaching and research.

Craig Barton 3:23
Fantastic, brilliant stuff. Right down. And let’s dive straight in. What’s your first tip for us today?

Dylan Wiliam 3:29
My first tip relates to feedback. And there’s a lot of stuff that teachers are told about feedback that really isn’t supported by the research. And there’s a really important review by two American researchers Kluger and NEC. And everybody cites this research. But hardly anybody reads what these two guys said. On the last page of their paper, which is a very, very dense paper. They did a meta analysis of the effects of feedback found the average effect size was point four. But then they said, we don’t think that’s important. We don’t think that’s as important because the effect size or feedback is irrelevant. If you get a high effect size by making the students more dependent on the feedback, what they pointed out was that a feedback intervention that makes students need more feedback in the future is actually not very helpful. And so what they suggested was, rather than looking at the effect size of feedback, we should be looking at what the students do with the feedback. They pointed out, they can change behaviour, change the goal, abandon the goal or reject the feedback. And so this was the first paper. This is 25 years ago now, that really said we should worry less about the kind of feedback and more about what the students do with it. And so I say to teachers, good feedback is feedback that students use. And so the bug isn’t getting getting used by the students. It’s completely irrelevant. And yet still people’s problems figure out what the effect size of feedback is, when it’s a kind of silly question. So recently, a lot of People have started looking at what some researchers call recipients processes for putting in the effort not into getting the feedback perfect, but getting the relationship between the students and the teachers, right to the students act on the feedback. And so I’ve been working on this for about 10 years now trying to think about how we can make feedback more accessible to students. And so, you know, I do think there’s a case for teachers writing comments on students work, I don’t think it should be the primary form of feedback. So I’ve advocated what I call four quarters marking 25%, detailed feedback, 25%, whole class marking 25% peer assessment, 25% self assessment, but I want to focus on that event where the teachers do write comments on students work. And we had this crazy thing in England, which is called triple marking. Teachers wrote on the kids work, then the kids responded to it, and the teacher didn’t check that the students had responded to it. Here’s my point. I think that if you’re going to take time to write individual comments on Stephens work, which is basically one to one tuition, I don’t know a single teacher of a mark two books at the same time. It’s the most expensive form of education we have. So let’s make sure something happens. So I will say to teachers, if it’s worth your while, taking time to write comments on students work, it’s worthwhile taking class time for the students to respond. So I think we should just completely change the way we think about feedback. And if you’re getting feedback, the next 10 minutes, when those students are in the classroom with you, they’ll be responding to the feedback that you give them. But to make it even more effective, I think we have to kind of make that feedback, something that invites a response. So this was triggered by looking at the work of an English teacher named Sharla. Kerrigan, who rather watching comments on her students work. Your 10 class, during an essay on Shakespeare play, they’d read the comments on strips of paper. And each group of four students got back their four essays, and the four strips of paper. And their task was match the comments to the essays. maths teacher said to us, this is all very well for history in English, we can’t do comment on the market in maths, if you take 15 of these equations as correct and put across next to five others, the students could figure out for themselves, they’ve got 15 out of 20, or 75%. So we suggested Well, why not just tell them five of these roles, you find them, you fix them. And so here’s the big idea. Rather than thinking about feedback as information, think about feedback, as detective work, the idea is that the feedback should cause a puzzle or a challenge for the students to engage in. So rather than saying, Remember to use the correct grammatical gender there, D das in Germany, which I call feedback as nagging about, there are five places in this piece of writing where you’ve used the incorrect grammatical gender for dirty does, I’ve highlighted two of them, see if you can find the other three. And so by actually creating kind of invitation to respond to the feedback, I think it makes it far more likely that students respond to the feedback in a positive way. So Tip one is make feedback into detective work.

Craig Barton 8:20
I love it, Dale. And just just one thing on that it was a low point in my teaching career was those Sunday afternoons or went into Sunday evenings, marking through a pile of 30 books, the comments get worse and worse as I go through like child 26. They’re lucky if they get in anything in that book. So I’ve exhausted all my all my efforts and enthusiasm. And then you give it back to the kids. And then you’d have to hand out the purple pen and then have to do that, then you’d respond to the purple with a green pen. And the irony I always found was that the more detailed I made the comments, the less impact it had, because it was so supportive for the kids, they didn’t have to do any thinking they were like, alright, I can see it all there and so on. And whenever I first heard you mentioned this, this feedback as detective work, I loved it for a couple of reasons. I loved it primarily because it made the kids think more and it was much more active part of the of the process. But also it’s less work for the teacher as well in a good way, because I can just do as a math teacher, tick, tick, tick, cross cross. And of course, I’m making a note of general trends in the class, which are the problematic questions, any common misconceptions, but I don’t have to write all these flippin big long comments, give it back to the kids. And they’d like the honest gamification of trying to find where those wrong ones are. It is brilliant. I absolutely love it. It’s great. It’s great. Right down, there’s a danger. You’ve peaked too soon. That’s that’s a brilliant. Well, what’s your what’s your second tip you’ve got for us? Well, I

Dylan Wiliam 9:43
was trying to come up with a series of tips at different levels of specificity and different aspects of teachers work. So the second one concerns detention. Now there’s a big debate about whether detentions are useful or not. But these days, they’re often the only sanction that a teacher has. And so The question for me is what should kids do in detention? So obviously, there’s there is the challenge of getting students to turn up. And that depends on the school policy. So some schools actually have a very clear policy that a teacher issues, student detention. And the student doesn’t turn up, that automatically gets delegated elevated up to a deputy head. And they’re there in the deputy heads detention. So students know that if they don’t set up a detention, it’s gonna get more serious. I think that’s really important. The school culture is important. But I think the really important point for me is what do students do due attention? I think there’s two things. The first is, you must make it absolutely clear that this is not any bother at all for you. So whenever I had kids intention, I always had a stack of marking to do. And so it was a kind of like, I’m gonna be here marking his work, and is not inconveniencing me at all. The other thing you have to watch out is that English teachers don’t like students being made to write lines because it destroys handwriting, they also don’t like them to do be asked to do some kind of writing about what they did wrong, because become broad writing becomes a punishment. And so I think if students have actually not done the work, and the detention is there to help them catch up, then I think it’s appropriate for students to do the work they missed. But I don’t think they should be doing maths questions, because it makes them work, the punishment, I think the big message here is why schoolwork is not a punishment. schoolwork is a privilege that people in other countries who would love to have the opportunity to learn and advance their skills. So I think we should be very careful about the messages we send to different detention. And my personal preference is for students to do absolutely nothing in detention. It doesn’t sit there. And you know, it’s really, really boring, anything you give to do, makes it slightly less boring. And therefore, for me, you know, make the punishment fit the crime to quote Gilbert and Sullivan, if it’s lack of work, then it’s appropriate to the work. But for the rest of the time, I think, just two things, make sure that you they understand that you’d be there anyway, during the marking, and don’t give them work that makes it harder for other teachers make it actually as boring as possible.

Craig Barton 12:25
That’s really interesting. Well, I’ll tell you now I fall into two traps there, I’ve done the opposite of what you’ve said for many years. So first is I dread, when I’m on detention duty, and I make it very clear, when I walk in, I’m fed up, I don’t want to be there. I think I’ll even say that sometimes I don’t want to be a you don’t want to be. So that’s that’s an error straightaway. So I’ve made a note about that one. But the second thing is, I owe it all always turned into almost like an intervention class. Because if the kids are doing maths, and they know I’m a maths teacher, I barely get to sit down and it’s hands on, can you help with this? And then the classic thing is, of course, if they say, if you don’t help them, well, they say, Well, I’m not doing anything, I’m stuck, I can’t help and then the behaviour starts to unravel, and so on. So I’m gonna find it harder think, for them to do nothing. But I like the logic of it. It’s I’m going to find it hard to enact, but I’m on board with a logic I like that.

Dylan Wiliam 13:14
It’s only appropriate if they’re punishing being punished for bad behaviour. If therefore, they’re not doing their work or not doing their homework or whatever, then it’s entirely appropriate for them to make that up. In homework.

Craig Barton 13:27
Make sense? Okay, Dylan, tip number three, please.

Dylan Wiliam 13:33
So in your conversation with Adam boxer, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. He talked a lot about me whiteboards. And so he actually exemplified one aspect of the fundamental principle of classroom formative assessment, better evidence leads to better decisions leads to better learning. Now, of course, as David data has pointed out, we can’t be sure that what they’ve been doing in the lesson results in long term learning. But you can be sure that if they have got the wrong end of the stick in the lesson, you find out about it before the lesson ends. And Adam talked very eloquently about many whiteboards as a way of planning out what is what is going on. And he was rightly criticised critical of cold call. cold call is better than asking the usual suspects. You know, if the smartest kid in the room gives you the correct answer, it doesn’t mean that anybody else has got it. And the staggering thing for me is how prevalent that practice is of relying on evidence from the smartest kid in the room to make a decision about the learning needs of the other 39 kids in the class in the case of Adams class. And so, you know, cold call is better because you’re hearing from somebody who isn’t necessarily the smartest kid in the room. But it’s still weak. You’re only hearing from one student, so many whiteboards. I actually prefer multiple choice questions. We’ve talked about this before. because it makes the job simpler reading 40 minute whiteboards is very difficult scanning 40 ABCD cards or even students, one for a two for B three for sleeve for 35. Three, that makes it much simpler. So multiple choice questions have the benefit of pre processing, that that data analysis tells me for the teacher. So Adam talks eloquently about the breadth of the evidence. I think to go with that we have to talk about the depth of the evidence. So is this a question that is worth asking? And what we’ve discovered in our work with teachers is that good questions are really hard to come up with. So the big idea here is you should plan the question as part of your lesson plan. If I was a head teacher, and we had a policy of looking at teachers lesson plans, which I’m not sure pretty sensible idea, but I’d be very happy with the teacher saying it here’s the objectives of this lesson. And here’s the questions I’m going to use to find out, there’s no point in making teachers lay out the script they’re going to use because they’re going to, they’re going to do what they’ve been doing for 20 years. But I think the question that they asked to find out if the students have been successful, is crucial. And many teachers ask questions where the student can get the right answer with the wrong thinking. So the big idea here is make the questions that you’re going to be asking to check on understanding part of a lesson planning process. The idea is you build that into the lesson, you always build Plan B into Plan A. I’m gonna get to this point in the lesson, I’m going to check to see whether the students are with me. And here’s the question I’m going to ask at that point. I scripted word for word. One of the teachers in the Como FIP project in from Medway Dave toughen. He often if he had a sixth form class in the morning, he would post up with a question that he’d plan to use with his urate class in the afternoon, say, and the class would often discuss whether that was a good question to be using. So making these questions kind of things that we discuss them, maybe changing the word here or there can make it work slightly more effectively, that idea of refining and polishing your questions, and including was part of the lesson plan. That’s my third tip, make it part of lesson planning?

Craig Barton 17:12
I like it just to two things on that one. I think we both agree. It’s hard, isn’t it, as you’ve said that it’s writing these questions is tough. And for many years, as a teacher, that was the last thing I thought I’d be my plan, my plan was all about the activity all about the Bright Shiny Paper wrap round it and so on that one a very rarely check from the stem. And so let’s just put that on the table. But then when I when I did learn that checking for understand was a good thing. I almost thought, well, I’ll just make the question up on the spot, it will be fine. And again, having having written however many 1000 diagnostic questions, you realise how hard it is to write a good question and how planning those in advance and working with perhaps more experienced colleagues and making a collaborative process is a really important part of this. So that’s the first thing I wanted to reflect on. Secondly, I was doing some work just yesterday, actually in a school, and they were looking to improve their scheme of work. And the classic thing they had on this scheme of work, and you see this on every scheme of work, is it so I’d like you know, that too, we in these two weeks, we’re teaching percentages, and these are the objectives. So they’ve got kids have got to be able to find a percentage of an amount without a calculator, percentage of that amount with a calculator, reverse percentages, blah, blah, blah. And the point I was making with the head of department is it’d be so much more powerful if you have examples of the type of questions you wanted kids to be able to answer. And they could be used as those hinge point questions so that every teacher, at some point will ask that question. And it may be at different points if kids are working faster, and so on. But there’s your well thought through hinge point question. And if the kids do well at it, okay, we crack on if they don’t, you’ve got this plan B as you speak about, but I very rarely see, I don’t know, if you do in schemes of work in schemes of learning, kind of examples of questions. And for me, it feels like one of the most important things to put in there. Absolutely. What

Dylan Wiliam 18:52
would it mean to be successful? Yeah. And the thing is, this is a bit of a jargon phrase, but one of my favourite phrases is assessments, operationalize constructs. So we can talk about what it means to be able to add fractions. But the question is, which fractions do you do mean? And so the assessments put flesh on the bones of those ideas. And we might think we agree about what it means to be able to rank fractures in order of magnitude. But until we talk about the questions we’re going to use to determine that. We don’t know that. And in fact, often we find out that we have very different ideas of what it would be to do that in practice. So assessments forced you to get off the fence and say, exactly, you know, if my teaching has been successful, then my student will be able to answer this question correctly. That’s why assessments are so powerful.

Craig Barton 19:43
Yeah, I agree. And that definitely the last thing on this is, it helps the kids as well, right, because you have these lesson objects and they can’t teachers can’t interpret them. The kids certainly don’t have a clue what’s going on with them. Whereas there’s something real concrete about a question, can you answer this question or not? And that that’s the kind of good hinge point Oh, I love that Devin. That’s great. Okay, tip number four, please.

Dylan Wiliam 20:04
Tip number four is more a caution than a tip. But the big idea here comes from the distinction that psychologists make between learning and performance. So Robert Bjork has done a lot of work in this area. And he’s shown that students really like being successful in completing learning activities. But that is often a very poor guide, to whether they’re going to remember it in two or three weeks time, as their performance is the performance in the task is designed to teach them something. And learning is the long term changes in capability that result. And the point is that they’re not the same. There’s some evidence that there’s a slight negative relationship between these two things. Now, obviously, if the task is so challenging, the students give up, little learning will take place, but probably awkward invoke this phrase desirable difficulties, we need to struggle a little bit in the task. Obviously, if we struggled too much, we might be unsuccessful. But I think the thing that is really important for me, is, we have very little insight into our learning. So we are very bad at predicting whether we’re going to remember something in the future. And obviously, if there’s a very strong emotional resonance, I will never forget where I was, when I heard about the death of Princess Diana, more of the assassination of JFK, or the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. I mean, I remember where I was when I heard that. But most of school life isn’t like that. And so we’re actually not very good at predicting whether we’re going to learn something, or we’re gonna remember, I’ve lost track of the number of times, I put something in my freezer. And I haven’t bothered to label it, because I know, I’m gonna remember what it is. And six weeks later, I haven’t got a clue what it is. The fact that I forgot is not interesting. What is interesting is how certain I was that I would remember, we don’t have very good insights into our own learning. And we often use the word learn in a very kind of unhelpful scents. So I’d a leaking tap in the wash basin in our house. And American taps are different from British tap. So I watched the video. And I learned how to change the tap. But I didn’t learn it. Because if I needed to do it again, I would need to watch the video again. So we often use this, I learned how to do this in a way that actually says I learned how to follow a set of instructions to achieve the desired result. And so we often use the word learning when would performance would be more appropriate. I think it’s really important to remember that students because I know this now I’ve got this. First of all, we don’t know whether it’s gonna get through to long term memory. And we also need to remember the Dunning Kruger effect, the less you know about something, the more likely you are to overestimate your achievement. You know, this is why self reports is so inaccurate 93% of American car drivers believe they’re better than average. They can’t be right, can they? And we used to think that the reason for this was because they didn’t want to admit that they didn’t know. And part that is probably the case. But the biggest reason why so many people think they’re good drivers is they don’t know enough about good car driving to know that they’re not very good at car driving. As David Dunning himself says rule, one of Dunning Kruger club is you don’t know you’re in Dunning Kruger club. And so I think we teachers just need to be constantly sceptical about where the students say I get this now. And there’s this thing about student voice and asking students to say what they what they like in learning. They don’t know they are novices. They’re not experts. And so, you know, I think we should listen to our students, we should trust their insights into their own learning. I think that’s the important thing. I’m a big believer in self assessment. self self assessment often make students sharper and clearer in asking for help. But we shouldn’t trust those students saying I understand this means they understand it, because they may not know enough about what it means to understand, to actually really understand it at the level that you want them to understand. So Tip Four is we have lifted, all human beings have little insights into their own learning. And you need to be vigilant to be focusing on the long term learning, not just the improvements in task performance.

Craig Barton 24:19
That’s brilliant that Dell and just a couple of thoughts on that. It goes back to something you said earlier on. Often this is used and I’ve read David died as arguments almost kind of argument kind of not against formative assessment is too strong, but a cautionary tale about formative assessment because of this learning performance. Division. But as you said earlier on, if if you ask a good formative assessment, question, whether it’s a diagnostic question or whatever it is, and the kids can’t do it, you can be pretty sure they’re not going to learn it. So it’s it’s almost kind of a bit of a checking point, isn’t it? It’s not the end of the story, but it’s it’s a necessary step on the path to path muscling. The other thing that I just wanted to raise there is what I’ve started doing now, for a start. It took me about 12 years to realise The distinction between learning and performance, which is error number one again, but when I did learn it event took me another few years to realise the importance of sharing this with the kids, because it’s one thing for teachers to be aware of it. But it’s frustrating for students, right? If they if they think, Oh, I nailed this today. And then next week, they forgotten it or next month. So making them aware of the distinction themselves. And sometimes I will show them a diagram of the forgetting curve just to show students how quickly things go. But the positive side of that is if we retrieve it and think hard about it, then we start to flatten out this forgetting curve, I think visuals like that. And I’m kind of bringing students and kind of behind the curtain on how memory works and things like that, that feels, to me quite important to get that buy in, and also kind of negate some of the frustration they may feel, if that makes sense.

Dylan Wiliam 25:47
Absolutely. I mean, I want to talk about this as a user manual for the human brain, we actually have quite a lot of insights into how learning works. And what’s interesting is, it’s not how most people think that learning works. So John Donne Loski, and his colleagues did a review for the Association for Psychological Science on students self study strategies. And what is interesting is people think that rereading or summarising or highlighting is an effective review technique. And it really isn’t. And I think this distinction between of performance and learning is really important when it comes to revision. Because students read something that they read yesterday, and they think they know it. Yeah, I know this, because I read it yesterday. The point is, probably ox work allows us to say, yes, it’s familiar because retrieval strength is high. You retrieved it from your memory yesterday. So yes, it’s available to you right now. It doesn’t mean you will actually learned it. And so getting students to be much more kind of self critical. Yes, it feels familiar. But, you know, can I close the book and not look at the book and retrieve what’s you know, what’s in it? Can I can I give myself some revision practice from something I last read two weeks ago, rather than yesterday, just getting students to understand how easy is to be seduced by this familiarity? I’ve got it now I know it. Yes, that’s retrieval strength. It’s not storage strength. And of course, retrieval strength is good for passing exams. But if you want long term learning, then we also have to focus on story strength, you know how well it connected is connected to everything else in your memory.

Craig Barton 27:22
Absolutely. Five final point on this gentleman, it just thinking of videos, when you mentioned your story about about the tap there. I see this a lot with kids. I can only speak of maths here. But there’s 1000s of maths videos on YouTube. And kids will often say, Oh, I revised last night because I watched the video on adding fractions or whatever. And this is your classic familiarity. But you can nod your way through a video thing and I get this, I get this, I get this. And at the end of it, you think you’ve understood it, but you don’t have a clue. So I’ll often say to get to two things. One, obviously, the best way to learn maths is to practice math. So as you say, make sure you can do it with no queues around and you’ve got questions and so on. But if you are going to watch videos, keep pausing. And just just asking yourself, what’s just happened there? And what do I think’s going to happen next, just to make it a bit more of an active part of the process, as opposed to just let’s just watch a five minute video not our way through and then we think we’ve learned so there are little tricks out there if the kids are aware how memory works and stuff that we can teach them. Right, Dylan? Tip number five, please.

Dylan Wiliam 28:22
So with things like a cold call, when you pick on a student who hasn’t raised their hand, the instant reaction is done? No. Yes. So whenever we want to engage more of the classroom, a lot of students will say don’t know. And don’t know is student code four, go away and leave me alone. So the question is how you’re going to react to that. And so one way, if you’ve asked a higher order question when which might have different answers, you might say, Okay, if you didn’t know, I’ll come back to you. And then go around the class and get three or more answers or other members of the class and then say, okay, so which one of those answers do you like best?

So now rather than having to construct, so they just have to select from other people’s answers,

but you’re making them actually respond in a way to the question. Obviously, if it’s a loaded question, where there’s only one correct answer, that strategy can’t be used, but if it’s a Multiple Choice format, you can say to them, okay, so if you don’t know which one of these four options is correct, are any of them definitely incorrect? Can you make the question go 5050, which suggests some other techniques like phone a friend, or ask the audience. And so I’m very happy if a student is saying don’t know, you want a phone a friend, you want to ask the audience? Because the really important point here is you mustn’t let don’t know be the end of the conversation. If students think they can get rid of you by saying don’t know they will use it every single time. So If you say don’t know, I’m going to keep on going, you are going to say something, even if it’s just to repeat something that somebody else has said, don’t know will never be the end of the conversation. And a tip I got from an educator called Ellen keen in the United States, if you’re really sure a student is saying, don’t know, because they can’t be bothered. And a really good technique is yes, but if you did, no, what would you say? And it’s amazing how often students come up with something because they realise that they’ve been rumbled, they can’t be bothered to think that they’re gonna have to think they’ll come up with something. And so don’t let don’t know by the end of the conversation is a really important thing. But the other way to avoid that is just to not ask so many questions. So rather than asking questions, make statements. So this is the work of James Dillon, an American researcher. And what he’s shown is that when teachers make statements rather than asking questions, just to students responses, they tend to give longer and more thoughtful replies. So, you know, you might do two dozen American politics, and you say, what are Democrats believe in? And the student says, Democrats believe in progressive taxation, the teacher might say, but most Republicans also believe in progressive taxation. So you actually making a statement. So it could be just a kind of point back. What you just said, seems to criticise seems to contradict what ginger said, that hasn’t been my experience, or that has been my experience. Students says, you know, lithium, sodium, and potassium all have a single electron, in addition to saying that the first three elements in group one all have a single electron in the outer shell. It’s that idea of a reflective restatement, trying to move the conversation on. And here’s my hunch about why that works. When you’re asked a question, you could be wrong. But you can’t be wrong responding to a statement. Yes. And so it’s just an attempt to encourage the child to say more. And so that that’s why, you know, if you get into don’t know, that’s, in a way, that’s already the problem. And so I think one of the things that I encourage teachers to do is to think more reflectively, about how you’re going to get the students talking more. And what’s interesting is, as soon as you think about this as a conversation, rather than a q&a, then a lot more kind of moves become available. So I think the was under appreciated, and very, very rarely reflect on somebody to do it naturally. But I think it should be a focus of all of our reflections is just the power of nonverbal signal. Or even just a hand gesture to to invite another student to the conversation. And just getting away from this, it has to be another question. Don’t rely entirely on questions. Sometimes making statements can lead to longer, more thoughtful responses. Because, as I said, My hunch is you can’t be wrong. Responding to a statement, you can be wrong. Andrea question?

Craig Barton 33:12
That’s fascinating that I’m going to need to reflect about how I can make that work for maths but I sent it I sense he could do I don’t see any reason. Because mathematics is one of those things where he just had just question after question after question, but I can’t see any reason why I can’t do the statements. Let harlot hits ginger.

Dylan Wiliam 33:29
I mean, so. So when I give an example, when I work with teachers, I do a workshop and Adam boxer reflected on this in his talk with you that He now uses these classroom formative assessment techniques in his professional development sessions. Yes. So I often asked teachers, he has five options that might have happened in his research study. Which one of these things do you think was the result? And I make? I do think about a one variety. And I always say, you chose a

Craig Barton 33:58
Yeah, okay.

Dylan Wiliam 34:00
You chose B. Just the difference is just, it’s very subtle. Yeah, it could be really profound. It’s just getting it just trying to get into out of the habit of asking the questions that we always ask. And it’s really, really hard, and now much better than I used to be. So now when I’m wearing a t shirt workshop, I hardly ever ask any questions in response to something said by a participant, it’s always a kind of statement, just to try to lubricate that conversation. Just making it more like an adult, a normal adult conversation, rather than a q&a session.

Craig Barton 34:38
That’s amazing. I’m gonna definitely try that out. Let me ask you one more thing on this. I’ve been wanting to ask you this for about five years. So now now’s the perfect time, right? cold call. I really like the idea of cold call. But the problem I always have with it, and this this came out of my conversation with Adam, and it’s come out in this conversation here. I can’t see the argument why if you’ve got a really good question that you want To ask kids, why you wouldn’t want first every child to be thinking about the answer. And I think with cold call, I don’t think you can guarantee every child’s thinking about the answer. I think a lot of kids kind of play a bit of a gamble and think there’s 30 kids in this class, what are the chances of him asking me? And if he does, I’ll start my thinking there. And then so I think that’s potentially problematic. And also, if I can collect all the responses, whether it’s on mini whiteboards, or diagnostic questions, or whatever, I can then choose which responses I discuss with the whole class as opposed to again, I’m doing a bit of a gamble that if I asked me, Dylan, what do you think you may, you know, you may have the right answer. But actually, there may be some really interesting wrong answers that I’ve not heard from from the rest of the class. So my long rambling thing there is, we’re under what scenario as a teacher, would you choose to cold call versus whole class assessments and collecting all responses?

Dylan Wiliam 35:49
Well, first of all, I think they can be combined. So I’ll get to that in a minute. But but sometimes a child just hasn’t said anything. And so John, I’d be really interested in your reactions to what Tracy just said. Yes. So I just think that kind of thing. Because I know you personally, I know your experiences have been different from Tracy. So I value. So that’s the thing with Doug Lomov talks about that kind of cold call. But I’m with you, really, I think cold call is a stepping stone from asking the usual suspects to hope or what, what I call all student response systems. Yes. But I think what’s really interesting, I mean, so a lovely example of this in the English teacher in the classroom experiment, Melissa overy. She did a lesson on media reporting of emotionally charged events. And she chose her high school state and tragedy. And so the students read some clips about the high school stadium tragedy. And then she asked the students who was to blame Liverpool fan with the Ventus, farmers, the police, the football authorities, or the stadium authorities ABCD. And they all had cards and they held up the car, they thought she said, leave your choices showing on the desk. So then she was able to have a whole class discussion. You thought Liverpool fans were to blame? Tell us what you thought you went as far as what to blame. And so the teacher they would have a much more organised discussion by bringing students into the conversation at the right time. And then, at the end of the lesson, she decided to ask the students to vote again to see if anything had changed. And this time, every student held up more than one card. Wow. So their views got much more subtle and nuanced. And what I like about this story is you couldn’t have done that with an electronic voting system, you’re gonna have one right answer. And one girl, Katie was waving all five cards in here. Now, Katie is not an angel. And therefore it’s entirely possible she was being silly. Katie, why are you waving all five cards in the air. And Katie says, because everyone had some responsibility here. And so I think that idea of moving of using these old student response systems not just as a way of checking on understanding, not just a way of doing retrieval practice, but it’s giving the teacher information about what kinds of follow ups will be appropriate, so you can bring students into the conversation at the right time. That seems to me to be a very powerful idea.

Craig Barton 38:13
That’s brilliant Dylan, just before we go down, is there anything that you would recommend listeners or viewers check out any anything of your work that you’d want to point them towards or anything that’s caught your eye recently?

Dylan Wiliam 38:26
And unboxes book on teaching science, it’s a bit nerdy, but I mean, that’s just seems to be the best thing that I’ve read about teaching science. It’s so comprehensive, so thoughtful. So yeah, that would be that’s top of my list at the moment.

Craig Barton 38:39
That’s a great recommendation. Well, Dylan, it’s always a pleasure speaking to you, and this has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for your time.

Dylan Wiliam 38:44
You’re very welcome. It’s been fun.

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Harry Fletcher-Wood’s tips:

1. Do less, but better [4 minutes 04 seconds]
2. Find a tool that tells you what’s really happening [14 minutes 38 seconds]
3. Build habits, not one-off things [21 minutes 25 seconds]
4. Work out why things work [32 minutes 57 seconds]
5. Maintain perspective [39 minutes 05 seconds]

Links and resources

• Harry Fletcher-Wood on Twitter
• Harry’s blog
• Harry’s book: Responsive Teaching
• Harry’s book: Habits of Success

Subscribe to the podcast

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

Watch the videos of Harry’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. Each episode I invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try out both inside but also maybe outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow. Hopefully something good will come out of it. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links resources and audio transcriptions from each episode. But better than that, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. These can be used to spark discussion between colleagues shoulder departmental meeting, a twilight inset and a sub. Now just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks to our lovely sponsors. So this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported once again by the fantastic arc Maths. Maths is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed at maths. Art. Math is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and spaced practice or memory. And here’s how it works. Students crack open the art maths app and are given a 12 question quiz with follow up practice questions on anything they get wrong. But not just straightaway. But the next day three days later a week later, and so on until they haven’t secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better art will get to know your students and what they need. With no teacher input required. You can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So do check out arc maths and remember that arc with a C knots Okay. All right back to today’s show. So let’s get learning with today’s guests. The fantastic Harry Fletcher ward. Spoiler alert, here are Harry’s five tips. Tip one, do less but better. Number two, find a tool that tells you what’s really happening. Number three, build habits not one off things. Tip Four, work out why things work. And Tip Five, maintain perspective. Now if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers, Dakota, UK, you’ll see a timestamped each of these tips so you can jump straight to any one you want to listen to first or easily find a tip that you want to read listen to enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome to the tips for teachers podcast, the wonderful Harry Fletcher ward. Hello, Harry, how are you?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 2:52
Good, Craig, thanks very much for having me. And really pleased to be with you. Always a

Craig Barton 2:56
pleasure. Fantastic. So Harry, for the people who don’t know, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Ideally NSR s sentence.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 3:04
So I was a history teacher, that I spent a decade learning how to help teachers get better, and trying to help them do that. And now I help school leaders find out what’s really going on in their schools with teachers.

Craig Barton 3:16
Amazing, amazing. Fantastic. Right? Well, let’s dive straight in hurry. What is your first tip for us today?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 3:22
Cool. So I’m gonna give you a tiny bit of preamble, which is that all these tips are kind of framed or dedicated maybe to Brent Madden, who’s a brilliant man now works at Arizona State University working on teacher education. And Brent said, All problems in education are a fractal. And as a math mathematician, you know about fractals, these patterns that look the same at different scales. So as I was thinking, what tips are gonna be useful, I wanted to come up with stuff that was going to be useful for, for leaders and for teachers as well, hopefully. And so all of these things are things that I think could be true at different levels. And I’ll try and sort of suggest why that is.

Craig Barton 3:56
Some build some build on that hurry. This sounds absolutely amazing. You’ve you’ve set this off really shouldn’t.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 4:01
It’s my first tip, do less but better. And So concretely, I’d say cut whatever you’re planning to do in half. And this idea originally came for I was doing a little talk to some really small group of teachers about responsive teach them a book and one of them said, Well, look, I’m an MQ T. What is your what’s one practical thing that I should do? Tomorrow Today, I was like, look, take a look at a lesson plan. It’s never all gonna state there’s loads of stuff in there just like cut half of the things have the activities, and then pick a few things that are really valuable important, and spend more time on them. And so instead of saying we do seven different activities every six minutes and have to prepare each one, when you say like, I’m gonna get one text one problem one thing, and we’re going to spend longer on it, but I’m going to think hard about okay, how will I introduce it? How will I revisit it? What will students do with it? So hopefully it will be easier on me and I’ll kind of get more bang hang from a bit more more thinking out of it. And then for the fractal part you could do that for for a lesson. But you could also do that for a school improvement plan, you could do it for a professional development session, just pick the one or two things that are really important and do them really well. And no one’s gonna do like your 27 things in the school improvement plan. So you might as well not even bother, just just make it to

Craig Barton 5:20
this is lovely this hurry. So if we dive into the lesson aspect of this, I’m really intrigued by this, because it’s your classic kind of novice teacher, and even experienced teacher mistakes in there over planning. Like it happens all the time, particularly if you’ve been observed, you never fit everything in and then you’ve got that awful dilemma of the just trying to whiz through it to try and get through to the really good stuff that you’ve learned you’ve spent ages planning it? Or do you think no, actually, I’m going to slow down and read it and it all it always ends up being a compromise that that kind of satisfies nobody. And what I also like about this, it reminds me of your classic kind of 8020 rule where you know, 20% of your stuff is going to deliver 80% of the results are focused on that. And how does it work practically? So what what kinds of things do you often find teachers can cut out from their lessons that aren’t needed? Are there any certain activities or parts of the lesson that can normally go?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 6:08
So yeah, in some ways, starting with the cutting isn’t helpful, because actually, the start point is like, what is the key thing you want students to understand? What like, what are they going to take away? How are you going to know if they’ve got it? What are the big misconceptions they might? They might suffer, I guess, is the word. And so so that ideally, that cutting would be done around that. And I guess I think there’s probably a case that if you come back to the sort of Kershner thing of you know, you want cognitive activity and not activity activity, or not that activity activity is bad, but often it’s like, oh, how can I get into this and we need bettering the colours that we’re gonna be talking and so like, Where have what will it make them think, to now brought in Wheeling and uncut, like five minutes in? But but so saying, Okay, well, if we’ve got the key idea in the lesson, you probably only need like one or two activities that are going to be around it, and you can maybe cut off a lot of the light, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna go and cut it down to like, okay, as a historian, like, here’s a text, we’re going to read it, we’re going to discuss the different bits in it, we might do a bit of writing about it like, but we could get a lot out of this one text instead of what I might have done as a less experienced teacher, which would be like, I’m gonna introduce the text, and then there’s gonna be a different writing activity, and then there’s gonna be a different thing, when actually, the text is probably quite hard. So giving students time and the chance to pull it apart and make sense of it is going to be much more worthwhile. It’s a bit of a roundabout answer. But hopefully, it sort of answers your question,

Craig Barton 7:38
or it certainly does hurry. And just a bit of a follow up to that. One thing I’ve been dabbling with in maths and I always wonder whether this transfers, so I’m thinking you’re the ideal person for me to kind of test this test this out on here, right? So in maths, a mistake I used to make was, I used to have loads of different types of activities that I’d wheel out for different topics. So it would be a certain topic when I was a certain type of task when I’m doing Pythagoras and another one, when I’m teaching quadratics, and so on, what I’m trying to do now is have more kind of a collection of high value activities. So this would hopefully fit into the idea of kind of, you know, less is more that one of them would be like a Venn diagram, the structure of a Venn diagram, I can use that structure to get kids thinking hard about fractions, Pythagoras, quadratics, graphs, and so on. And it may not lend itself as well as some of these more bespoke activities. But because we’re focusing in on that structure, I get better as a teacher at using it, the kids get better as learners at using it. And it just feels like by by reducing the number of types of things I’m doing with the kids over the course of a year, I just get the feeling it’s better for everybody does that? Is that something that come up first, does it fit into your tip? And does that transfer across to like a subject like history

Harry Fletcher-Wood 8:52
100%. And in as much as I definitely felt this terror that like, Oh, if I do the same thing I did with them two weeks ago, there’ll be bored. Yeah. And actually, if you think about like every activity has, the content you want them to learn or the thing you want them to do. And then they’re like, the knowing how the activity was set. And the content is going to impose some cognitive load and knowing how the activity works is going to impose some cognitive load. If the activity is new, and the contents New, then you’re making life harder for them. So actually, you know, there’s a sense in which if there were a single format for a lesson that you always did, now that that, you know, that potentially would would get too old for you or for them for them. And there’s definitely value in variety and you want it to feel fresh, and sometimes you want to surprise them and so on. But actually, the real excitement is that history is really exciting. Maths is really exciting. And the real excitement is about the content, not the box that you put it in. So actually saying, every time that we look at a piece of evidence, every time that we try and understand the causes of an event, we’re always going to approach it in certain ways, is incredibly productive because we can then think much harder about the causes of the event. As a historian, that’s the thing that I really want students to care about more than I do the fact that I’ve come up with really cool debate structure that’s going to help us get into it. And, and yeah, so soon, like, it’s efficient for you, it’s efficient for them just just standardise and maybe, you know, like, maybe it’s five activities, maybe it’s 10 activities, it doesn’t have to be like just one. But I think it helps everyone.

Craig Barton 10:21
It has lovely vibe. So if we if we kind of dialogue from from the lesson level, you mentioned kind of school improvement plans and things that I mean, I’ve never been in position thank God to after a right one of those they sound painful, is it? Is it practical to be able to shelve half of half of those kinds of things and other things outside of the classroom.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 10:37
I mean, I’ve never been in a position to write one of them either. I can, I can tell you tell you a couple of things. One is that I spent five years working doing a programme for heads of teaching and learning to work in like your head of CPD. And and something that I quite consistently saw is that over the two year programme that come in with like, here’s the 20 things that we do in our CPD programme. And gradually they whittle it down, they end up saying that here are the five things, but they’re really hard. And achieving some kind of change is really difficult. And so we spend, where previously it was like, Oh, we do questioning in a lesson or questions a half term, because we need to like talk about it, look at some evidence, try it out, come back to it. And so in that sense, it’s like, it’s not just desirable, it’s unavoidable. And the other anecdote, I was free flee a school governor. So I was in a position that wasn’t right in the school. And I was commenting on them. And I remember saying to the head teacher, who’s brilliant head teacher, and there are too many things in this, it was like primary school was like, you know, we’re gonna rewrite the curriculum and this, this, this, like, this is not going to happen. And she was like, Yeah, that would be fine. And I remember the next Governors meeting she like, in retrospect, Harry might have had a point that, like, we have taken on too many things. And so yeah, I think it’s, you know, like, it’s like the classic. Are you trying to cover the curriculum? Or are you trying to make sure the students have learned it. And in the same way, if you want to say, like, we’ve done something about these 20 items, and it was a two minute item and stuff briefing, you can take them all off, it changed, changing human beings and changing our practices is slow and hard. And if you want that to really happen, you’re gonna have to make sure that you you give it the time. And so you can’t do 20 things at once, you can probably do two

Craig Barton 12:14
is fascinating there. So I’m just one more thing I just wanted to raise on this tip. And then I’ll throw it over to you just in case there’s anything else. I’ve just spoken on a previous tips for teachers video with Gemma Sherwood who’s as a math teacher, and overseas curriculum, almost an academy. And one of her tips was related to this and it but it has to do with explanations. So essentially, try and be, don’t try and say too much when you’re explaining things be really kind of clear and concise. It feels to me that there’s a similar thing going on here where it’s quite, I often made the mistake with my explanations of just trying to keep talking, keep talking in the hope that what some of the words are going to hit the kids heads at some point and make some kind of sense. But it’s a similar thing, isn’t it? You can kind of either cognitively overload them, overwhelm them with stuff. But it’s quite, I find it quite hard to be really kind of concise, but it’s the key, I think, to a good explanation, adequate lesson and a good school improvement plan, picking the kind of hard hitting things, the impactful things and focusing in on them. And the rest is kind of just noise that needs to go. Does that make sense?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 13:14
So when I when I talk about models with teachers, I refer to one of my favourite findings about modelling which, which is that actually, if you’re showing students models, or showing students models and giving them an explanation, giving an explanation depresses their performance, as subsequently. And my suggestion is that when we start explaining, we start using like big words like elegant or formal this that never. And actually, the the model does his own work. And it you know, makes me think of what you talked about in how I wish I taught maths and say, well, actually, some of the best modelling is just silent modelling because it allows students to concentrate on what’s really going on. So yeah, the fewest, fewest words possible, or which note, I’m going to stop talking.

Craig Barton 13:54
Nice. We got a plug in from a book hurry. That’s bonus points. That’s brilliant stuff.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 13:58
Three more coming up.

Craig Barton 14:01
Amazing, Eric, great. What’s your second tip you’ve got for us.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 14:06
So the tip is find a tool that tells you what’s really happening. And concretely it’s like use a question using an assessment user survey, to find out what people are really thinking. And this is something that’s obsessed me throughout my career. So as a new teacher, I just desperately wanted to know what’s going on my students heads. And the first thing I tried was coloured cups. And I know we’d sort of looked down on that nowadays. But actually, it was amazing. Once I trained my students up and using them, which took quite a long time. I could look around the whole room and say, well, like who’s happy, who thinks they’re struggling? Who thinks they need help now, and instead of going to go around and ask them and stop a room? It’s just there in front in front of

Craig Barton 14:41
us. How can we carry that? Sorry.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 14:44
So you got thrown in. This is a Dylan William formative assessment. Back in the day thing, you’ve got three, you’ve got a green card, an orange card and a red cup. So to buy like, you know, Amazon or whatever it was, each student’s got three in front of the style or green. And then if you’re like, not sure how it’s going you Take the green one off and put the handle one on top. And if you’re totally stuck, you want to help now goes to red. And it to me is you can imagine, particularly teaching history and seeing students two times, three times a week. It took some time I want to help now. But actually, once we’ve gotten used to it, it was that ability to just see what 2530 people were thinking simultaneously. Was was great. I went from there to hinge questions, and I suspect suspect. I don’t need to plug the website diagnostic questions.

Craig Barton 15:27
Never does any harm. Hurry, but yeah, no, that’s

Harry Fletcher-Wood 15:29
okay. Well, so if you’re not familiar with hinge questions, diagnostic questions, multiple choice question where each answer demonstrates a misconception. And so from asking pupils, like, which of these coins is worth the most, I’m going to have A to P, and I’m gonna have a one P, I’m going to have a five p. And like one misconception is likely to be two peas, the most valuable, we’re talking young people here to p is the most valuable, because it’s the biggest, and as a hinge question will allow you to know exactly what the students are thinking. And then if you want the fractal element, I think the same thing, again, applies with with staff, and that is what I do now. So I did a survey of staff once a week for a school leader last year, which I thought was going to be for my PhD. And every couple of weeks, he’d be like this is so useful, just being able to pick up the issues and act on them straightaway. And basically said enough times that I quit my job went to work, teach tap, because I think this is a thing that if school leaders like this, staff know what’s going on. And staff know whether or not a policy is working. And it’s quite hard, particularly in a secondary school, even if you’re like my doors always open and wandering around all the time to really know what’s going on. And so this idea of actually, if you’re a teacher, you need a question. If you’re a school leader, you need some kind of question that’s going to allow you to pick up really quickly, like, what people aren’t happy about, is the new policy working, how our policy says no one meeting a week, how many meetings did you actually go to last week, that kind of thing. And that then provides leaders the information they need to make good decisions.

Craig Barton 16:51
That’s amazing. Right? Just a couple of things on that. So I’m as you are, I’m obsessed with with formative assessment. I think the more I think about it, I think there’s kind of three phases to formative assessment that’s coming up with a good question, which is, which is hard enough? If that question is rubbish, or assesses the wrong thing, which often happens, you’re, you’re you’re asking for a bit of trouble, then you need your means of kind of collecting the information from kids. And again, it may be diagnostic questions with ABCD cards, or mini whiteboards or whatever it may be. And then I think the hardest bit and often is overlooked is then the responding to that because it’s one thing asking the question, getting the results and responding in your ex kind of experience of using formative assessment yourself and also working with other teachers who are using it. Does it feel right that they’re the kind of three components of it? Or do you see, is there a one of those areas that teachers tend to kind of focus more on at the expense of others?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 17:45
I think your take Yeah. I think you’re right. I mean, I think it’s also worth thinking about like the planning aspects. beforehand of like, well, what are the key things that we want to be responding around? Before we even get to the questions at hand, hesitate to say that any one thing is is neglected? But I definitely think if you think about progression, there’s a like, a, I’m interested in formative assessment of design my hinge question, I’ve got my head damage question. What on earth am I going to do with all these responses? And so there’s definitely and this is another good example of like this, this less is more thing. You could have a session on hinge question, we would go and write hinge questions that actually what you really want a session on hinge questions, go and then like, okay, a whole session on what now I’ve realised half of my students have no idea what I was talking about, what am I going to do about it? I do think this is one where actually, we can plan around it, particularly if we think about colleagues who are new to a subject or new to a topic or new to the profession. So if I come out with a basic maths misconception for you, you’ll have in your sort of back of your mind seven different examples you could give me. Whereas actually, if I come up with a maths misconception to a new teacher, they are going to have that like. And so making sure that somewhere in our curricular documents, there’s like, here are the five most likely misconceptions. And here’s one thing you could say even if there’s just one thing, one thing you could say, if they think that so we can prepare, being responsive doesn’t mean you have to make it all up on the hop, you can prepare your responsiveness as well.

Craig Barton 19:19
Absolutely. And the only thing I wanted to mention, but again, feel free to dig deeper. I don’t know if we’re going to talk teach or tap any further in some of your other tips. But it feels to me that that’s like the world’s best assessment for learning tool for you know, the school leaders or whoever whoever it may be, must be just amazing. Just kind of thinking of the questions analysing the response. And so it sounds like a dream job, Harry.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 19:40
It’s Yeah, whenever I get to work with Becky Allen and Laura McInerney, so that’s a pretty good start start, but it is that capacity to find out what the whole profession is thinking overnight in so many sometimes it’s just scratching an itch like you know, how many people we have all these gotten like what a teacher is doing when I think this and I think that and the capacity to be able to find out there and then so if you don’t have the app on your phone Get it on a search for teacher tap to even tap and get it now. And if you’re interested in this school leader stuff, you can get in touch with me,

Craig Barton 20:08
I just put you on the spot hurry, feel free to dodge this one in your relatively short time working in teacher type if you had a favourite question or a favourite response, anything that springs to mind

Harry Fletcher-Wood 20:17
there. So I guess I’m quite interested in and proud of, we’ve asked a lot of questions about the early career framework recently, essentially, because I was everyone I was talking to in schools was telling me interesting things about it. We’ve not yet released our findings, we’ve done a big thing where we’ve surveyed mentors, we surveyed leaders, and we’ve surveyed, teach it adequate teachers. And I think I hope that’d be quite interesting for the profession in making a change, which I think there’s a lot of good in it, but they’ve been tricky elements and trying to make that a little bit better. That’s, that’s, that’s not a straight answer. But yeah, I think there’s, there’s there’s a lot in that.

Craig Barton 20:54
I like it. Fantastic. Right, Harry? Tip number three.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 20:59
Tip number three is build habits, not one off things. And concretely, it’s identifying the lasting changes you want people to make, and the support that is needed to make that happen. And so part of that was I wrote this book about formative assessment, responsive teaching, and a new after that I wanted to do something about okay, you’ve got the best lesson plan in the world, you’ve got the best formative question in the world by literature. And I’ve talked to teachers who are like, Well, alright, give exit tickets, and students just won’t answer them. What am I meant to do about that? And I was particularly interested in in the behavioural science. So you know, we’ve we’ve been working like crazy to make sure that our lesson plans are like, attend to cognitive load and working memory and geocoding. And this that any other? And it’s like, are we? Are we accessing behavioural science? In the same way, when we think about how we motivate and encourage students? Or is it mostly tips and tricks and trial and error? The biggest thing I learned in the process was that actually the title I came up with, which was habits for success came quite late. Because I realised that habits are kind of the key thing that I think we need to address. So we talk a lot about motivation, I get asked a lot, how can I motivate my students to do their homework or try harder or start writing when I ask them to or whatever it is. And the problem of motivation is, let’s say I have this I’ve got a student who isn’t motivated for whatever reason, and I do this like, incredibly inspiring thing, and I’m motivate them to do whatever it is I want them to do. I’ve done it once. And I’m relying on myself to then do it again, tomorrow. And so I’m not actually solving the underlying issue. And so it’s it’s, is there a process whereby we can say, well, what is the thing that I want them to do every lesson? What is the habit that’s going to make a difference for them right now? And how can I partly through motivation, but partly through the prompts, the encouragement, the social norms that are highlight, and get them to do this on a regular basis. And so instead of saying, I’m going to spend five minutes having a negotiation about whether whether I should put pen to paper, it’s I actually want to have it, which is, as soon as you’re asked to start writing, you start writing and even if you’re stuck, you just write stuff, and then you know, fix it later. And the fractal part of this, again, is that if you’re asking teachers to change things, quite often, it’s like, can you do this thing you get asked to do it once? And actually spending a chunk of time pinning down? What are the two or three things and this might be for an individual teachers might be for department, this might be for a whole school? What are the two or three things that are going to most make a difference to our students? And how can we help teachers to change their habits? Or how can I as a teacher, change mine habit is what is going to make a lasting lasting difference because we know we’ve all done it, you know, try this thing for a bit. And then I stopped doing it because I was just too busy and other stuff was going on. And if we want to make lasting improvements, we need to get away from that.

Craig Barton 23:48
Lovelace hurry, right, just two points on this one that springs to mind. First is it ties brilliantly into your one of your previous ones about this less being more, right? Like we have all these designs of there’s 27 things we want our kids to be doing every lesson and it just it just doesn’t happen. So focusing on your big hitters, what are going to be the ones that are going to cause them to learn more, and so on Fit likes fit, we’ll worry about the other ones later. Let’s just focus on the big hitters. And and this is the worst. I mean, I asked him bad questions generally however, this is this is a bad one. I don’t suppose we could perhaps look maybe think of a habit that we want to kind of instil in our students and you could just talk through a few couple of kind of practical ways I know it’s going to be bespoke to different teaching different kids, but that may be worth trying and exploring with with students. You can either choose a habit or I can make one up whatever whatever works for you

Harry Fletcher-Wood 24:33
will tell tell me a challenge. Tell me a thing that you’ve seen students not doing recently that and then we’ll we’ll work out a habit for that or Okay,

Craig Barton 24:41
nice. Nice. All right. So let’s go for that’s a really good one. I got one I got one I got because I saw this in a school the other day. What’s interesting about this, it’s not your kind of obvious kind of just bad behaviour. It’s but it’s something that can potentially derail a lesson. And that is every time The teacher was, was asking a question of the students, one or two students were just kind of shouting out shouting out the answer kind of straight away wherever the teacher wanted them to consider it kind of independently, have a discussion with a partner, and so on and so forth. So, potentially bad habit. But, you know, if you solve that for us, that’d be amazing.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 25:18
Cole, so So this is another area where I think, like think habitual thinking is helpful, because instead of like, you know, we ask students not to do a thing. And then we’re like, if you do that thing, again, you’ll get detention. And then some, some of them just keep doing it. Yeah. Even when we’ve made it as like, unpleasant essentially, for them as we ethically can. And so the, the thing here is to let we’re like habit is an automated response to a situation. And so for some students, for whatever reason, it might, because they’re really keen. And because they’re showing off my customer, they’re genuinely trying to derail the lesson, the automated response, so I know the answer I’m going to show to the shout out. So so the first so So to break a habit, you have to break this link between the situation and the response. Now, one way to do that is to have these motivational conversations. Another way to do that is to punish but often that’s not actually if the responsive, instinctive, it’s not, you’re not going to do the job. And so probably the most obvious thing to do is to change the situation in some way. So instead of for example, instead of saying, I’m going to ask a question and like, I’m going to make really quiet and calm, I’m going to put the question up on the board, we’re going to look at it together. So I’m not asking, I’m not expecting a response. And likewise, it could be like pens or in hand, it’s who’s going to write down the response quickest. And then I’ll take hands up. So you, those who are competitive can still compete in some way. But but you’re sort of creating a situation which makes it sludge some of the theorists call it your, you’re making actively harder for students to do the thing you don’t want them to do without resorting to light. If you do that, again, it’s it’s tension. Because again, if it’s enthusiasm, you don’t want to kill it. But like, yeah, so So something like that, like ever, I’m gonna have a question on the board, everyone’s gonna be totally quiet. Everyone’s gonna write down their answer, then you’re going to turn to partners. And I’m going to be looking for the person who writes it best, because that’s the first person I’m going to call on. And again, you can then you know if that works, or even if it’s promising, make that habit for not cleaning up for every question, because it’ll take forever. But for the big decision, knowing that we’re cutting things in half, we’re gonna cut half our questions and just ask the best questions. And for our top questions, do it that way, make it a habit, students will get used to it and hopefully come to like it.

Craig Barton 27:36
That’s lovely that however, the problem is, you’ve answered that a bit too well, so I’m going to ask you a follow up to that. So the first thing to say just don’t relate back to previous guests on the show, and boxer. He said something one of his tips room seems to fit really well with that he had some kind of catchy way of saying front load the means of participation. And what he was saying there is before asking the question, he would say, right, before I put this guy, I’m gonna put a question up on the board soon, I want you to answer this in silence by writing it down. So whereas in the past what I do, the question goes up on the board. And then I say, oh, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll be quiet, you’re gonna be quiet answer this, and so on. So that that’s been a quite a bit of a game changer for me. And that seems to fit in really well, with this kind of habit forming and what you said there about changing the kind of environment as opposed to try and react to things that I don’t if you want to respond to that, that feels like it fits in well with what you’re saying.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 28:26
Yeah, I mean, it it sort of ties to the classic, like when I say go thing is that you learned like to do this. When I say go didn’t didn’t didn’t do that. But yeah, so definitely front loading the things and thinking about cognitive processing is what needs to happen first, what like, as a student, what do I need to know? I’m going to do this. That’s how I’m going to do it. And now I’m ready to go. So yeah, I completely would would agree with that. But uh, but again, if we can make it habitual, we’re making life a little bit easier for everyone.

Craig Barton 28:54
That’s nice. So my follow up question is another terrible one she wants in my last terrible one. So well, what about teachers you mentioned if we want teachers to change and develop habits, because we the if anything, that worsening kids, right, because you leave a CPD session thinking right? Ah, I’m all over this. Now. I’m gonna do this. And then life gets in the way. So any thoughts on that about how either I’m thinking either from the perspective of a CPD giver or a CPD receiver? What what are some of the things that can help there?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 29:23
So, yeah, let’s think about a sort of prototypical CPD session that I might have led. When I started out leading CPD sessions. We’re going to talk about some stuff, I’ll share some evidence with you, we’ll discuss it and you’re gonna go away and try and do this. That’s exactly and lo and behold, didn’t happen. And again, not you know, like, not a word against my colleagues. Like they were busy. Yeah. And I was saying go off and do this different thing and make time for it and it’s just just not gonna happen. So it’s this thing, okay. Here’s a thing. Going to narrow down like to a fairly tight goal that you’re then going to interpret in a way that’s going to fit your classroom. And but but you know, it’s not to be too vague. We’re going to spend time in the lesson, designing a version of let’s say, it’s a different way, let’s say it is a hinge question. So we’re going to spend time on lesson you’re going to design a hinge question for an upcoming lesson, we’re then going to practice using it so you’ve got experienced doing it, we’re then going to put in place some sort of prompt trigger that so might be like, you’re gonna put a little like polo blue star on the PowerPoint, if you’re using a PowerPoint, put a little time with God or something like that. But reminder, first thing Wednesday morning, it’s gonna go ping, that’s going to say, remember, you’re trying to hinge question, period three, whatever it is, set up some accountability. So ask a colleague, can you pop in and see me do it, and then bring him back so that you’re going to review it again? And then when you review it again, lets you know what we learned what’s gone? Well, this was a disaster. Okay, how can we change it, let’s set another one. So there’s a couple of things going on there. One, you’re trying to reinforce the action and encourage it to happen. But two, you’re getting into a habit of improvement habit of trying stuff, bringing it with your colleagues, finding ways to make it better.

Craig Barton 31:04
It’s really nice that Harry, one thing I’ve started doing now, and again, it’s directly related to that. If I’m asked to do a talk, I always want to have a follow up, if possible to because as you say, get that accountability to get people back together. But if that can’t happen, one one little change I’ve made and it’s exactly what you’ve said there is if I’m doing a session on diagnostic questions, or problem solving, or whatever it may be the example I always ask the teachers to think of a lesson that they’re going to be planning, you know, tomorrow or the next day or whatever, just so any work that they do in that session is almost like time saving, they’ve got every reason then to use it, because it’s saving them time. Whereas in the past, I might have just been, we’ll all be doing the example that I’m doing on the board. And if you’re not teaching that for a term, where’s your incentive, you’re gonna have to start from zero, just little things like that can make make a difference currently.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 31:54
I’m always happy when he gets to an end of CPD session and you see someone turn around to recording that. That’s actually quite useful, because I plan my lessons. Yeah, that sounds like a trick with you know, like, we’ve told you some stuff that might be useful, but actually, you’re going away thinking CPD is useful, and I’m ahead of where it’s at, rather than behind. And that’s a really good incentive then next time instead of turning CBD in session with your marking or with a kind of, I want to be here feeling. Yeah, so I completely agree. I think it’s a really, really, really wise thing to do

Craig Barton 32:23
lovely. That hurry. Now, I realise you’re kind of a habit King. Is there anything else you wanted to say on this tip before we before we move on?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 32:31
I think so. Well, yeah. No, I don’t think so that we may come back to them later. But just habits think habits. The end.

Craig Barton 32:40
Fantastic. Okay, what about Tip number four?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 32:46
So the tip is work out why things work. And concretely, I mean, be really specific about what’s happening. And this this partly is on my mind, because I wrote a blog post the other day about and some research that I did in with with some great colleagues about how professional development works. And what we did, we looked at over 100 studies, we looked at, we tried to pin down what are the mechanisms of change? So instead of saying, like, think about the existing guidance on professional development, it’s tended to be like, is the CPD collaborative? Does it include experts and so on? And it’s like, well, that’s all well and good. But if it includes experts, what are they doing? Like? Are they prancing around on the stage dancing? Are they giving you really specific guidance? Are they sharing models? Are they getting you to practice your next lesson, and so on and so on. And, and what we learned was the mechanisms that were pinned down, could explain a substantial degree of the difference in how much of a difference CPD made to teachers. And so, you know, partly, like, partly, you could say, well just go and learn from these mechanisms. But the underlying point is like, can we be really, really specific about what’s going on? And so in the same way, if you tell me like, I had a great lesson with my year, eighth class the other day, and I’m like, I have a nightmare with them, what do you do, and you tell me, like, I’ve developed a really strong culture of learning. Thanks a bunch. You can help me. But if you if you can tell me when taught habits again, like, well, I’ve built a habit that whenever they get stuck, they have to ask each other. And they’re used to doing that. And they always do that before they asked me and that then allows me to get around. Now, that is a concrete thing I can do. And I will go and try and do that. So getting away from a become incredibly suspicious of the abstract basically, like getting away from big words and big ideas. Because you know, it’s like motherhood and like, strong culture of learning there was against that. But if I don’t know what it means, I can’t use it. And so get really trying to get down to exactly what’s going on in whatever it is we’re trying to do.

Craig Barton 34:45
Oh, this is a fascinating one this hurry. So again, a few things to say about this. The first I love what you’re doing, because these are all kind of building on the prior things that you’ve said. It’s, again, it’s working out what works. Often you’ll have to try and strip out you know, maybe Did 10 things that lesson? Well, what was what was the one or two things that you think had the biggest impact on how that worked? And let’s communicate that that that feels really powerful. And secondly, it’s, it seems to me that this, this has kind of practical applications in terms of lesson observations, because that’s where you often get these kind of vague things about your pace or the culture, and so on and so forth. Whereas, again, it’s the role of an observer for me to try and pinpoint Well, what was the one or two practical things that you did that either cause things to not work quite so well, or cause things to work? And how can we build on that? And it’s, it’s a challenge, though, isn’t it kind of, there’s all these kind of cliches and buzzwords in education, that it’s a challenge to to, to actually pinpoint the practical, actionable things.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 35:44
I mean, it is, but if you if you can’t say what it is, you probably should be keeping your mouth closed. And I complete the lesson. Observation, feedback is a really good example. We’ve all had it of like, you know, I just would have liked, say, a bit more challenge. It’s like, well, if you can’t tell, you’re meant to be the smart person in the room, you’re the one observing me, you can’t tell me what that looks like? Or how you would have done it in the context of that lesson. I’m like, if I was smart enough to do it, I’d have done it. If you can’t tell me how to do it. We’re stuck, aren’t we? And we’re talking about this and feedback. Don’t be like, you know, Dylan, William has these examples of, you know, like, be more systematic and students being like, well, if I knew how to be more systematic and have done it in the first place. So yeah, I think it is, you know, if you are in the dangerous position that you and I are, in, that we’re asked to give advice to others, it is your professional responsibility to give that advice in a way that that is comprehensible. And that is unambiguous, if you if you really believe it. And so yeah, like, it’s don’t, you know, we can use the abstract words, but no one’s going to understand them. So you have to read them in the concrete.

Craig Barton 36:49
Just to put you on the spot again, hurry, you’re too good at dealing with on the spot question. So let me just ask you this one. I’m just thinking about lesson observations. Because I think it’s fascinating, both from the role of the person watching the lesson or a part of lesson, but also from the role of the person who’s being watched, is there anything about related to this tip about working out what works that can be either put in place before the lesson is watched by by the teacher and I’m thinking along the lines of watch out for me doing this, I’m going to do so you know, decide on a focus or something that can happen in in the feedback after the lesson that can really get to the nub of what’s working or what’s not working.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 37:27
What I’m, I’m a really huge fan of instructional coaching and this idea of pinpointing one action step that needs work now, so so it’s not pace, it’s not questioning, it’s not culture, it’s right down to like, you know, it, let’s say it were pace and be like, Okay, let’s think about the way that you get transition from one activity to another and try and find a way that you can give you instructions for a transition in two sentences instead of 10. And that is a vibe. Like, that’s really clear. That’s also a thing that I can viably fix next week, in a way that pace is going to take me years to fix. And in the same way, I think so. So in a in a sort of an idealised instructional coaching, feedback meeting, you talk about one thing that’s going really well, and one thing that you’re going to work on, as the coach that it’s sometimes you really have to narrow things down, because actually, you’ve got someone who wants to talk about seven things, they noticed, they want to be better, and so you’re not gonna manage all of them at once. Let’s, you know, put that in those words. But like, let’s just focus on this one thing for this week, because that’s achievable. And then when you do it, like, wow, it’s working, I feel feel better. So yeah, I think, again, our you and I, and probably most listeners have experience like, here’s 10 things that went well and 10 things you need to work on, you don’t do any of them. It’s no point doing it. So don’t again, cut everything in half. And if it’s less than observation and feedback, cut in half again and again. And then you might have something useful.

Craig Barton 38:54
Fantastic, Harry. Okay, what’s your fifth and final tip for us, please?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 38:59
So having having railed against the abstract, this is maybe the most abstract, I think there’s something in it, so bear with me. So it maintain perspective, and concretely finding a way of stopping, reminding yourself, what matters, looking after yourself and looking at situations afresh. So I think there are different bits of this one is around like changing your mind. So if I if you like, interviewed 10 year ago, me now and I was listening to I’d be like, Who’s that fool? And why does he think those those stupid things he thinks, and I’ve changed my mind about almost everything in education, sometimes more than once. And whatever you think, as a listener, there’s a good chance that and at least some things you might do the same at different points. And so there’s a point there if they don’t mean you know, like work as hard as you can do as well as as well as he can in the moment. But being willing to try out alternative things, test alternative things, except that you might be able To learn from people who think the diametric opposite of you. And then I think tied around this time to this, there’s a sort of workload well being perspective point of saying, like, you get really caught up in like, this one student is one class, this year’s GCSE results, whatever it is. And if we didn’t get a bit caught up in that, we wouldn’t do great work. And so that’s important, but making space and knowing like, there’s the rest of the world, there’s, you know, our families to think about this, whatever else we enjoy in life, and that kind of thing of maintaining perspective and like living a decent life, and being important around teaching. And I think that also ties something I did a project years ago, where I was interviewing teachers who been really successful in quite tricky schools as new teachers. And one of the things that came through was this idea of like, we call it wiping the slate clean that they get to the end of the day, they like wipe the slate clean, come back tomorrow, have a fresh start, give themselves a new chance, give their students a new chance. So something around that of like getting taking a step back and giving yourself a break, like sometimes all the time in between lessons. Yeah, you name it.

Craig Barton 41:14
Lovely rock a couple of questions on this one hairy, so changing your mind and interesting one, I’ve changed on my men many, many times. What What was it for you? What what is it for you that causes you to change your mind? What do what needs to happen? And how do you then go about if it’s a real kind of long standing belief? How do you go about almost kind of building it into a habit that okay, now I’m going to do something differently, because that feels difficult.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 41:40
It’s a slow process, isn’t it. And it’s probably a thing of threshold concepts. And you know, threshold concepts being troublesome and irreversible, and transformational and integrative. And, and this troublesome thing, like, you see a thing, and it nags at you. And your eyesight is not quite right here. But you don’t know what it is. And then, and so you know, like to go from the point where you don’t know what it is to where you do know what it is, a lot of different things have to happen. So maybe I need to come and see you doing something different in my classroom, maybe you need to also pop into my lesson and say, Have you thought about this, maybe I also need to read a book. And those things need to come together. In a way it’s a sort of a light bulb moment insight thing, that it’s very hard to predict, like, it’s it, you could you could sit and say, I’m going to teach Harry the basics of cognitive load theory in this 20 minute period. But the thing of like, revisiting your the whole way you teach around cognitive load is a thing that’s going to be much slower. So this thing around patience and the thing around willingness to learn and just, you know, like, read some of what your opponents those who you don’t believe in a writing and thinking and a willingness to try stuff out, I guess and learn from that. But can I fire? I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this. Can I fire it back at you? Because you know, you wrote a whole book around? This? Oh, yes. Promise to get another plugin of the excellent book, which, which I genuinely recommend to people who are both art and aren’t maths teachers? And what like, what was your experience? Because that it was 12 years? Obviously, I met a lot of it was so Bachleda, wasn’t it? Because he spent a few years doing your Swiss rolls. And then suddenly, later on, you’re like, this, you know, maybe wasn’t the best way. So what helped you to to make those changes?

Craig Barton 43:25
Yeah, it’s an interesting one, Harry, I think what part of it was a gradual shift over time, I was thinking, I’m not convinced by this, I was still the results were still fine. The kids were still enjoying the lessons. But I was never getting through as much as I hoped. And often I’d be really excited about teaching kids or concepts, but they are then and then I think, what’s a full activity to design around this. And they never quite get as excited as I hoped they would do and so on. So there’s a definite gradual shift going on. But then also, there was kind of a bit of a jolt, which would be when I started to speak to people who knew far more about stuff than I did. And I think I was lucky. I did that via the podcast. But I think Twitter’s a great kind of place for this now. And as you say, purposely going out of your way to find smart people who disagree with your points of view and thinking, Well, why do they disagree? And is it worth trying it? But I think the real danger is, I mean, I’d have definite incentive, because I did it in quite a public way. I was speaking to people and I kind of thought, right, well, I do actually have to go off and try something different here. But I think there’s a real danger. And I don’t know if you agree with this, just as teachers, it’s quite easy to avoid doing that change, particularly if you’re if your results are fine. You’re ticking along nicely because making a change is difficult. It’s often time consuming. It’s risky. You often get the short term dip in either performance or whatever or however you label it. It takes something doesn’t it to to make a change as as a kind of busy full time teacher. It’s really hard. I felt like that. I don’t know if you agree.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 44:54
Well, particularly when you’re renouncing things that you’ve believed in Yeah, so like by changing what I So now I’m basically saying I give gave last year’s irrelevance about exactly, yes, incredibly uncomfortable. And so that’s, that’s, again, where I think it’s like, you know, you take a long time potentially denying things, even as it’s gradually dawning on you. And I think that that point of getting on Twitter and finding people you disagree with, obviously, on Twitter, it’s easy to find people who disagree. They’re like, super smart people who disagree with you. I think one thing that’s been really helpful to me is a different change in perspective, which is what Scott Alexander, he would say, is the difference between conflict and mistake theory. So I’d say that one reason why we don’t agree on anything is conflict theory that like people are out to get each other. So in politics, it’s like, you know, the rich are out to get the poor and the whoever’s getting and, you know, in schools is like, the leaders are out to get us and kids are out to get us and so on. And it’s a mistake theory is more around like, life is just hard. And it’s hard to get things right. So maybe the government are incompetent, because they’re like malicious, deliberately trying to ruin everything. And it’s always hard to rule that out. But maybe governing a country is just incredibly different, difficult. And so many of the screw ups are just because people just like ourselves, are tired, overworked and screwing things up. And in the same way, maybe school leaders are awful human beings who you know, we’re just trying to run our lives, or maybe running a school is incredibly difficult. And it’s hard to get right. And so, for me seeing more things in terms of mistake theory than conflict theory has been quite helpful. Because it allows me I think, to learn a little bit more from others, and maybe to be a little bit more humble about, yeah, like that, that clash. But even you know, like, a mistake theorist or conflict theorist would say, you know, I’ve just sold out to the, whoever it is. So it’s, it’s a hard one to push.

Craig Barton 46:51
It’s lovely, that Harry, final question just for me on this particular tip, you mentioned well being and that’s something over the course of this, this, this podcast, and these videos, I really want to dig into because it’s a it’s a massive part of being a teacher and something that’s that’s potentially overlooked. What are some of the things again, you’d speak for this personally, yourself, or work that you’ve done with other teachers that help that teachers can do practically that helped kind of leave the job in the school if, if that makes sense. And it’s difficult to do, because we’ve got to sometimes take the job home for marking but I’m talking more about leaving the bad times and kind of switching off and so on, is there anything you do yourself or that you’ve observed, other teachers do practically that help for this?

Harry Fletcher-Wood 47:31
So my, my first school sat down with the head teacher for I came in with with some of the new teachers, and he was sort of it was retiring to sort of like, you know, talking about various things. But he made this this throwaway comment around, maybe one of the reasons so many teachers cyclists are they, so they can’t take books home with them. And it was one of the things that inspired me to start cycling school a year or two later. And, but there’s something in that. And it’s not to do with necessarily not taking work home, because as you know, as you find with a young family, maybe you want to do pick up and then do some work. But it’s around, I think, some kind of bright lines of knowing where your limits are. And, and so I now have like quite elastic limits, because I do a couple of different jobs, and to try and keep a lot of different people happy. But at least trying to be clear, like there are certain period of time. So I normally have my son on a Thursday. And during that day, I won’t be looking at anything, even if I’m happy to work at other random strange times. So So working out a clear set of limits, I think making space for nice things. So one of the most useful and powerful things that I learned to do, when I was having quite a tough year was in the middle of in the middle of the working day, got lunch, you could sit at your desk and do 15 minutes will work but won’t be very good work and go for a walk. And I was quite lucky there a bit areas of green space around the corner from where I was, go out, walk 15 minutes would just come back like a happier, better person. And so you know, like you might not be lucky enough to live next to or have a school next or park in that way. But find it like, what’s the really nice thing you can do in the middle of the day. That isn’t just more of the same because actually, if you’ve been at your desk since 730, and it’s 130, you’ve taught for lessons, you’re not going to do your best lesson planning or anything. And now so there’s someone the other day is an assistant head now he’s like, Well, I’ve always been ahead of year so I just couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t do that. But if you’re ahead of you and you’ve got a freight, maybe you’ve got one of your freezer that’s allocated, you can take 10 minutes, just go and like, make yourself a posh coffee. I see more and more posh coffee machines in schools. Make yourself a posh coffee like so. Like finding little things that are going to give you a little bit of a little bit of pleasure to throw throw throw those out to you.

Craig Barton 49:42
I like it hurry. That’s fantastic. Well, there were five brilliant tips, Harry and it’s over to you now is there anything you want to plug anything people should check out? So the first thing we’ve got to say and your wonderful books are definitely worth checking out. There’ll be links links to those in the show notes. And you want to talk about any book in particular or anything else any current work you do with teacher tap anything that listeners should, should visit.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 50:03
So I guess two to three. So yeah, latest book habits of success. If you’re interested in getting your students to do more of the things you want them to do, or you teach the more things that you want them to do, hopefully, it’s got something in it for you. Something that we talked about a little bit in during the show is this idea of helping school leaders to understand what their teachers are really thinking. So if you’re interested in seeing what your teachers are thinking, and how that compares to averages in similar schools, get in touch, and it’s Harry dot Fletcher hyphen, word at Teach tap.co.uk. And then the other cool thing that I’ve done, I think it’s cool recently, and so I get asked to go to loads of schools, and I can’t go to all of them because they’re just too many. And I don’t have enough days, unfortunately. So put together a pack of like webinars and resources and little videos, download will check this suggestive reading. If you’re trying to help your colleagues learn responsive teaching, do more responsive teaching, and you can get to know that for Harry at improving teaching.co.uk Those would be my suggestions,

Craig Barton 51:05
and I’ll put links to all those in the show notes. So that’s brilliant. Well, Harry Fletcher. Well, it’s always a pleasure speaking to you. I think I said, then if I said the first time you’re on the show that it was you and Dylan William were my kind of first big influences in terms of formative assessment and diagnostic questions and so on. So I’ll always be forever grateful for that. And as you know, I’m a big fan of your work. So Harry, thank you so much for joining us on their tips for teachers.

Harry Fletcher-Wood 51:27
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Jemma Sherwood’s tips:

1. Plan sequences not lessons [3 minutes 58 seconds]
2. Doing maths is not the same as teaching maths [16 minutes 07 seconds]
3. What you say matters [25 minutes 48 seconds]
4. What you don’t say matters [34 minutes 37 seconds]
5. Teach what you mean to teach [41 minutes 10 seconds]

Links and resources

• Jemma Sherwood on Twitter
• Jemma’s book: How To Enhance Your Mathematics Subject Knowledge
• Mason, J. Effective questioning and responding. 2021. In Ineson & Povey (Eds.) Debates in Mathematics Education, 2nd Edition. Routledge.

Subscribe to the podcast

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Watch the videos of Jemma’s tips

Podcast transcript

Craig Barton 0:02
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. Each episode I invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside or maybe even outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow, but hopefully something good will come out. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links resources and audio transcriptions from each episode. But better than that, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast, and others recorded by me. Now these videos can be used to spark discussion between colleagues in Parliament or meeting at twilight inset, and so on. Now, just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word from our lovely sponsors. This episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by our maths art master is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed at maths. Art. Maths is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and spaced memory, sorry spaced practice on memory. Here’s how it works. Students crack open the arc maths app and are given a 12 question quiz with follow up practice questions on anything they got wrong, but not just straightaway. But the next day three days later, a week later, and so on until they have it secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better art or get to know your students and what they with no teaching required. You can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So check out arc maths and remember that arc with a C knots okay. Okay, so back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guests. The wonderful Gemma Sherwood spoiler alert here are Gemma’s five tips. Tip number one, plan sequences not lessons. Tip two doing maths is not the same as teaching maths. Tip three what you say matters. And then a big twist tip for what you don’t say matters. And finally, tip number five, teach what you mean to teach. If you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers.co. UK, you’ll see a timestamp to each of the tips so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first or re listen at any stage. Enjoy the show

so it gives me great pleasure to welcome Gemma show to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Gemma. How are you?

Jemma Sherwood 2:54
Hi, Craig. I’m good. Thank you. How are you?

Craig Barton 2:55
Very, very good. Thank you, right Gemma for listeners who don’t know, can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence.

Jemma Sherwood 3:01
I am the senior lead practitioner for mass at the almost an academy is trust, which means that I am responsible for CPD and resources and looking after teachers across 40 odd schools.

Craig Barton 3:15
Wow. Nice. Sounds like a dream job. Fantastic structure. Excellent. All right. Let’s dive straight in. What is your first tip for us today?

Jemma Sherwood 3:22
My first tip is to plan sequences, not lessons.

Craig Barton 3:27
I like it right? Tell me more about this.

Jemma Sherwood 3:29
Okay, so I probably started doing some kind of version of this maybe about seven or eight years ago now. And absolutely revelant revolutionise the way I thought about teaching, because it changed the focus. And for me before my focus around what I did was governed by the timeframe that I had, and in some schools, it would be 50 minutes, and in some schools, it would be an hour. And my thought would be I have a fixed amount of time. What are we going to do in that time? What do I want to cover in that time, and the time was kind of the main driver of everything else. It was kind of the the overarching constraints. So when I changed to doing this process, it kind of flipped on its head because what I do now is I think, I need to teach certain things, certain ideas, certain concepts, I want my pupils to have certain types of practice, I want them to become fluid in things, I want them to be exposed to thinking in different ways about lots of things to do with maths. And now I structure what I do I thinking about that first. And I essentially for a kind of a unit of learning. I have one massive long flip chart or PowerPoint. And I just go through it. But I mean that sounds like I’m kind of slavishly following it. That’s not the case. What it means is I know key things that I want to do at certain times. And if those things happen to go across the kind of now what I see as an artificial boundary of one lesson to the next then fine. So I have no problem in something kind of being finished in the middle of a lesson and I would pick it up the next lesson because it’s more are important to me that pupils are exposed to certain activities, certain tasks or ways of thinking certain lines of questioning. And the timeframes that we have for our lessons are, they just have to kind of be subservient to that really

Craig Barton 5:13
got it? Right. The questions begin here. Yeah, because I’m allowed to ask you about this. So practically speaking, you’re talking a big old PowerPoint here. So just give give us a sense for like a two week unit of work or something. How many slides? Might we be talking

Jemma Sherwood 5:25
here? Probably about 70 to 80?

Craig Barton 5:29
And what kinds of things are on there? Like, examples? Is everything on that?

Jemma Sherwood 5:35
Well, okay, so yeah, this is this part, let me go back a little bit. This is partly because what I’m doing at the moment is I’m making resources that lots of teachers can use of varying levels of experience. So some teachers who are non specialists, teaching metal users, some of them are very, very experienced. So I’m trying to put all sorts in there. So that teachers can, can or cannot, can choose to use or not use things depending on how confident they feel with the material. So when I’m saying 70, or 80, slides, this includes loads of diagnostic questions at certain points in hinge questions and all that kind of thing. It includes ways of explaining things, it could include example, problem pairs, it also includes the activities that I want the pupils to do in case the teachers don’t have the capacity to do lots of printing. So it’s, it’s basically everything across, you know, two weeks across 70 or 80. Slides,

Craig Barton 6:29
nice on what tends to be the first slide that you write there, what’s what’s the first thing that you put out?

Jemma Sherwood 6:35
Um, oh, that’s a very good question. I think that depends depends on the content. So I wrote one recently for the very start with you seven, which is unit on place value. And we started with a bit of the history of number and the history of the number system and how we write and that kind of thing. That whereas recent one I’ve done on the introduction to algebra, that what did that begin with? I’ve only just finished writing it that began with a kind of a, you know, I’ve completely forgotten now, I’m not even gonna try and pretend. But it might be I don’t remember what it started with. It started with a discussion question, which was prompting the pupils to think about it basically, I had a set of examples of the form like two times three, plus eight times three, and two times six, plus eight times six, where it was all two, lots of number plus eight, lots of a number. And I wanted them to discuss these and say what they all had in common, looking at the fact that they all represented 10, lots of a number. And then we kind of go into drawing that as an area model. And then thinking about to n plus a 10, is 10, n and all those kinds of things. So it started with a discussion question,

Craig Barton 7:36
I guess the first thing that you so that’s obviously how your sequence of lessons would start. So is that the first thing you write as well, when you’re putting together this PowerPoint? Do you start your writing where your lessons would start? Or do you have like an end question in mind that you want the kids to get to, and perhaps that’s the first thing you bang down in your PowerPoint, if that makes sense. These

Jemma Sherwood 7:55
days, I start by thinking about the kind of the broad route I want to take through what we’re trying to learn first. So let me stick with this algebra one. For instance, I wanted to start with this idea of the structure, Tony Gardner calls it the structure of arithmetic or structural arithmetic. So I wanted to start with that. And then I wanted to look at how we use that to write it’s kind of to motivate writing expressions as a generalisation of numerical patterns. And then I wanted to move on to a bit more work in expressions in more depth. And we were using algebra tiles and what we’re making. So linking into explaining this variable x tile, which is a new thing to them. And then I wanted to move on to substitution as like a specific instance over imagine the x tile kind of areas, we can kind of fix it a particular number, and work out what the value of expression would be there. And what happens if we don’t fix it at a different number, what’s the value of expression then. So that was substitution, then I wanted to move on to solving an equation, which is where imagine this tile is moving, and then all sudden, we fix it there. And we know that the value of expression is nine, that gives us our equation. Now we can work backwards and find what the value of the tile is. So it’s all about it’s just an introduction to algebra, very kind of informal. But I start with that overview of where I want it to go. And then I go down a bit into a bit more detail into each section and think about what what do I think would be the best way to explain this? How can I link it to what the pupils already know? So that it doesn’t seem to just kind of poof appear out of thin air? And then what kinds of tasks and activities will we do to focus attention in the right places, got it, kind of started overview and then drills on down into each of the sections. And then as I go through, sometimes I go, Oh, actually, I’m going to switch that around now. But that kind of happens as you go along.

Craig Barton 9:41
That’s great. Now this, this has been a big change for me, because maybe similar to your job for many, many years, I plan on a very kind of lesson by lesson basis. But I think to kind of play devil’s advocate a little bit, there are a few potential pros of doing it lesson by lesson so I’m interested in your take on this. So I guess you could make the argument that maybe you’re a little you could fall into the trap of being a little less responsive if you’ve got everything planned out. So let’s say, Well what happens in this case you do your lesson on algebra. And it doesn’t go quite how you anticipated it, the kids are getting the hinge questions wrong, and so on and so forth. Is that is it that a case that after that lesson, you’re adapting that PowerPoint, how does that work in terms of being responsive from lesson to lesson?

Jemma Sherwood 10:20
So there’s a couple of things there, if I stick to the ones that I’m making, at the moment, as an example, I am deliberately putting in places, links to sets of questions. So for instance, you can generate endless questions on simplifying expressions from Johnny halls maths bought, so there’s a link somewhere to the ease, and I know that if I need my pupils to be able to practice this a bit more, I can do that. And there’s links to the OT to these kinds of things throughout. So the point when I when I said before that I go through the PowerPoint, that was a really bad choice of phrase that because that’s exactly not what’s happening, because what I’m doing is asking questions as I go along, and then responding to them. And of course, I have the benefit of lots of experience. So I know that if my pupils are stuck, I can generally figure out what to do on the fly. The reason I’ve made these so long is because I know that some of some teachers will not have that level of experience yet. So I want them to have plenty of stuff and plenty of activities there for them to do. If they’re not able to make it up as they go along. That makes perfect sense. So yeah. So I would say that, I think by having it so well planned, and so well structured, I’m better able to respond, because I’ve got time to think about those things instead.

Craig Barton 11:34
got it got it. My other question is often lessons have kind of key features in there. So a do now would be a classic, a lot of teachers would always start the lesson either with retrieval questions with the last lesson last week, or whatever it may be, and so on. How does that fit into your model? If you essentially don’t really know or care all that much where one lesson starts, and one lesson ends? How does that work?

Jemma Sherwood 11:57
Well, that’s one of those things you then have to do as you’re going along. So wherever you’ve got to at the end of a particular period, if your school says you must start every lesson with this kind of retrieval do now starter, you make sure that you put the relevant kinds of questions into that it might be that you want to practice something that they just need a bit more practice on, because you’ve identified it from a hinge questions that you’ve used previously. Or it might be something that you know, is going to help with what’s coming up that you just want to refresh their minds on. But that’s where you have to, I think you shouldn’t be planning a long time in advance. Because that’s the, that’s all to do with responding. If you want it to be effective, it needs to be reactive to what’s actually happening in the classroom.

Craig Barton 12:35
I see. So there’s opportunities, although you’ve got your kind of general overview or play LiDAR, right now, there’s that expectation that you’re going to be slotted in things as and when appropriate?

Jemma Sherwood 12:44
Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s definitely not here is you know, the next two weeks worth of work, this is absolutely everything you will need, because that’s kind of the opposite of what I want to achieve in the classroom. But what it is, is, here’s the, here’s kind of the majority of what you’re going to need. Use this as your starting point and make it work really well for the peoples we’ve got in front of you

Craig Barton 13:03
got it right, let me put you in the shoes of a novice teacher who doesn’t have Gemma Sherwood planning out this incredible outline of a lesson and so on and so forth. But they want to do this, they want to break the cycle that perhaps mean you’ve been in, where they’re plugged in lesson by lesson, and so on and so forth. So let’s say it’s a Sunday evening, or whatever they sit down, they know they’ve got a two week unit of fractions to teach or whatever. And this could be non math, it could be any subject. Any advice on how they start? It’s quite overwhelming, isn’t it thinking, Oh, my gosh, I’ve five lessons, six lessons or whatever material? Where would a novice teacher start with this job? What do you think?

Jemma Sherwood 13:38
So there’s two scenarios I can think of, first of all, if you’ve got somebody in your department who you think you could talk to who is more experienced, and who you know, would be willing to kind of get involved in such a project, definitely do it, go and pick their brains and get their help on it. If you don’t have anybody like that, I think I would probably start by working with my first lesson. And then adapting to it and putting these resources together as I go along into one long thing. And at the very end of it, stop and look back and reflect and go, How well did that work? How well did the first bit work related to the second? Was there something I could have done between those lessons that would have helped though that little group of pupils over there that didn’t get this thing, but it’s about a reflection, because with the reflection, then comes the fact that you can adapt it and make it better ready for next time. But because you’ve then got the initial sequence, and you reflect it on it so that next time you teach it, you can just iterate it and improve it a

Craig Barton 14:35
bit more. Got it. Final question on this Jabra less has anything you want to add. It’s a little bit of a bonus question going off and a bit of a tangent here. Whilst we’re talking about do now as well, where do you stand on that? Are you if you were midway through some fluency practice or something like that, and the bell went, would you start the next lesson just cracking over that fluency practice? Or do you have a definite kind of starting point to your lesson, whether it’s a do now or something else?

Jemma Sherwood 14:57
I think that’s hugely dependent on the context and the School. So it may be that you’re in a school where you need maybe the pupils have come from PE and they’ve come a long way and they need something just to settle them. And you know that this kind of routine works really well, because they know what’s expected of them, then great, then then do it. If you know that they’re just going to come and they’re going to crack on with whatever you ask them to do. I don’t see the need to necessarily do something like that at the start of every lesson. But I’m going to kind of totally pull back by and be non committal there and say it really does depend on context, but I don’t think that they should be done, like as a kind of a blanket rule at the start of every lesson.

Craig Barton 15:35
Got it. Fantastic stuff. Right, Java, what’s your second tip you’ve got for us?

Jemma Sherwood 15:40
Right? Okay, so this one is doing maths is not the same as teaching us

Craig Barton 15:45
how like another good clickbait headline that German that’s good for the viewing figures. That right, tell me a bit more about that.

Jemma Sherwood 15:52
Um, I was started by trying to think whether or not this is actually a kind of non maths specific type thing. Now, other people watching this of other subjects might just laugh me off the screen now. But I was thinking things like writing an essay is not the same as teaching children to write an essay. Or let’s say, in science, doing a scientific experiment is not the same as teaching children to do a scientific experiment like it. Yeah. And I think by thinking it in those ways, that helped me to think a bit more clearly about what I mean in a mass economy in a massive context. Because I think I’m particularly guilty of this as when I started teaching, I had my favourite ways of doing things, my favourite methods, my favourite algorithms. And I naively thought that if I just showed pupils, what these algorithms were, and showed them what the steps were, that they would also then learn how to do these things. And obviously, you know, years of experience have shown me that that’s not necessarily the case. And there are pupils, who will make sense of it as we go along. And that’s great. But I think they are make sense making sense of it, despite my teaching, not because of my teaching. So what I’m particularly more interested in now is the pupils who don’t make sense of things straight away, because that’s where the challenge lies. And that’s where it’s a bit, it’s beholden to me to make sure that I’m actually teaching something really well. So just because I show pupils, the steps of solving an equation doesn’t mean I’ve taught them to solve equations, it doesn’t mean they understand what an equation is, it doesn’t mean they understand what what they’re actually doing when they solve an equation. And as well, if I have different methods for different things, then it kind of presents maths to my pupils. However, unintentionally, it presents it to them as this kind of hodgepodge of stuff that they’ve got to memorise. And if they’re the kind of pupils who struggle to make sense of it straightaway and struggle to make the connections. That’s where you get comments like, Oh, I just got to learn this bit now. And it doesn’t make sense to me. And there’s so much to memorise, and maps and those kinds of things. And that means I’ve not done my job, as well as I could have done it.

Craig Barton 17:55
This is interesting. So how do you how do we kind of break that cycle? Joe? Because I’ve definitely fallen into into this trap myself, well, what are some of the practical things that that you yourself do to avoid falling into this trap?

Jemma Sherwood 18:06
There’s the question. And that’s like the million dollar question, isn’t it? So this is the one where I’ll probably watch this back in a few years time and go, you’re talking absolute nonsense. But I think at the moment, I think it’s about creating coherence. And coherence is the thing that I’m really focused on at the moment. So for me, I in the materials I’m designing, we have a core a key number of representations, for instance, that we are weaving throughout the curriculum. And so the I mentioned them already, so I’ll stick with this with the example of algebra tiles. So the area model in algebra tiles is built in from multiplying and looking at distributivity. And those kinds of things we’re multiplying, then through to using them for simplifying expressions. Before that, sorry, comes positive and negative integers and then weaving it on into area models with the tiles for expanding and factorising brackets. And that goes all the way up through to things like completing the square and into a level you could do polynomial division with that with with a grid method, for instance. So for me, I’m not saying that that is the best way to teach these things. But what I’m saying is if I have it as a constant or a coherent way that goes through everything, that every time I’ve got to teach a new concept, I’m just adding kind of an extra layer of complexity to something that my pupils are already familiar with. And that, I think, is more likely to make it have meaning for more pupils.

Craig Barton 19:33
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Does does it mean Gemma, that sometimes things may seem a lot a little slower or less efficient to teach because you’re you’re trying to not just teach the concept, but also get the kids familiar with as you say, algebra tells like that solving equations is the classic right? Because we all know real quick ways you can get kids to solve some amazing looking equations. But the problem is those methods don’t scale because as soon as you then get into quadratics, then the whole world falls out. part you have to teach something else. So it feels to me like this is definitely the right thing to do. But teachers and the kids need to be aware that there might be. I’ve spoken about this in a previous teach tips for teachers video, this this kind of value of latent potential, where initially there’s a bit of a dip in short term kind of performance and progress, because you’re trying to get to grips with something that’s perhaps not as efficient a tool for doing that specific job. But we know that this tool has got these kind of long term benefits. Does does that make any kind of sense at all?

Jemma Sherwood 20:28
Absolutely. And I completely agree. And I would much rather spend three weeks on operations with directed numbers early on, in the knowledge that then everything we’ve embedded about that I can then apply to simplifying algebraic expressions. And it’s just a tiny step up, rather than being this whole new, completely unusual thing. And all the pupils have then got to see is that oh, now we can do the same thing, but with some unknown numbers, but actually everything else we’re doing is exactly the same. And the gains then become quicker as you go on through.

Craig Barton 21:03
That’s lovely. Final question on this one, Gemma, again, trying to play devil’s advocate a little bit, is the is there a danger that if we have these consistent representations and models, which I you know, hands up, I’m a big, big fan of that we we fall victim to having less variety and methods and kids may have these lots of different approaches and they want to use but we’re actually saying no, no, no, actually, we’re going to use this one because we believe this is the best this is a conflict there. Is that Is that a problem or not?

Jemma Sherwood 21:32
So first of all, I think the kind of traditional situation that we found ourselves in where we have lots of different methods for different things. I don’t think it’s too harsh to say it hasn’t worked for a huge number of pupils. For a huge number of pupils, because if you know, if we’re saying that there’s a massive number of pupils in this country who don’t get above a grade for GCSE, or do you know, don’t even get above a grade seven at GCSE. That’s a huge number of kids who don’t really understand a lot of maths after a long, long time studying it. So what we’ve done so far as a collective has been ineffective for too many pupils. So if you’re saying a variety is important, then I think you’ve got to justify that this variety is good for the pupils who find things difficult. Now, I have no issue with saying right, we’re going to do these consistent methods, because we are going to make sure that we have a coherence of a curriculum for our pupils in our in our school. But if you have pupils who really can’t get their heads around this, I have no problem with teachers having other things, you know, in their arsenal in order to help them explain things. But what I don’t want is the default position to be everybody just throws whichever method they want at the pupils, because that’s ultimately I believe, going to make it too hard for too many pupils as they go through. And we all know that our pupils reach a ceiling. And I feel like at the moment, and this is based on quite a few years of experience doing this. Now I feel like at the moment that fewer of our pupils will, or more of our pupils will kind of push the ceiling higher by taking a more consistent approach.

Craig Barton 23:13
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’ve wrestled with this for a long time. So I assume you as well be a big fan of Joe Morgan’s compendium of mathematical methods, I can ever read through that and think, Whoa, there’s about 10 different methods for finding highest common factor and most common multiple that I’ve never even considered. And best case scenario. That’s really good. Because she can say, right, we’re going to solve this problem this way. But you know, what, there are five other different ways that we can use and let’s spot what’s the same, what’s different, one of the connections and so on. And I think for some students, that’s really, really powerful because they start see different connections and so on. But as you’ve spoken there, for other kids, it’s really overwhelming, right as well. And that then maths becomes, right, what is the problem? So what which one of those weird methods that I didn’t really understand what I need to select to solve this problem, whereas reducing the number of approaches, by having these consistent coherent models, I think for the majority of students is going to be the best thing. And then as you say, there’s always that opportunity, if they’re seeming to grasp things that then we can throw in these alternative methods, not just as a random thing, but to say, what’s the same, what’s different? What’s the connections, and so on? Does that make sense? I absolutely

Jemma Sherwood 24:16
love Joe’s book. And I think it’s brilliant for teachers, because it helps them to see how all these methods are essentially doing the same thing. Because actually, there’s not 20 Odd methods of adding numbers, there is one method. And there’s 20 different ways of presenting that method. And so that’s really helpful for teachers. But I think for us, looking at it with our knowledge and our understanding of adding is brilliant. If you’re going to know if you’re going to show lots of different methods to pupils who are still trying to cement their understanding of adding. I think that’s that’s cognitive overload there. So I don’t think it’s helpful. But like you said, there will be pupils who who can explore that, and I think everything we do In a classroom, we need to do very consciously and very carefully. So if I, if I have a group of pupils who I would like to show a different method to, because I would like to use that to illuminate something to do with this concept that we’ve been learning about, and I know that that would help them to make more sense of something. Brilliant. But I have to make sure that it’s kind of past that litmus test, if you like, before I do it.

Craig Barton 25:23
Makes perfect sense. Fantastic. Right? Jabber. Tip number three, please.

Jemma Sherwood 25:29
Right? This is what you say matters.

Craig Barton 25:33
God, hello, I get cryptic. Go on, tell me what

Jemma Sherwood 25:36
this is probably the worst of me to say, because I’m very, very Wofully. Here we go. So you need to pick your words carefully. It’s very easy to get nervous in the classroom, whether you are novice or experienced. And when you get nervous, you waffle, you repeat the things. You say things in a way that’s not particularly clear. I’m deliberately trying to be very conscious of it. And that’s not helpful because we have pupils, as we’ve said already, who are trying to learn something normally completely new. And they need the explanations to be as clear and as uncluttered as possible, if they’re going to make sense of it quicker. So I think I now believe that people, maths teachers should be or any teachers should be practising their explanations going away and thinking carefully about how they’re going to explain something, what vocabulary they’re going to use what, but not just that what questions they’re going to ask and when and why. It really, it links back to what I said before about being a reflective practitioner. This was something that was taught to me on my PGCE a years ago by Dave here and Pat perks, and they were constantly telling us you’ve got to be reflective, you’ve got to look back at what you’ve done. And when I was early on in my teaching, I suppose I didn’t really know what I was reflecting on because my own kind of schema of teaching maths was so limited. And but you have to start the process so that it becomes embedded and so that it becomes internalised. So I think that it’s hugely important that we plan not only what we want the kids to do in our lessons, but what we are going to say and how we’re going to say it.

Craig Barton 27:20
Lovely that I saw a couple of things on this. It was I don’t know if again, this may not have been true for you, gentlemen, but for many years, it was the last one, I never even thought about what I was going to say. So I’ll just put that on the table. And now I just kind of wing that as I went along. But even like the examples, I was going to ask my kids to what I was going to use for modelling they were the last thing I would plan my plan was all activity driven, task driven, and so on and so forth. So that’s the first thing I completely 100% agree with you about the the words we say I waffle. I mean you think you are for Gemini never shut up. It’s like why say things one way we say it 58 times and I just keep repeating repeat opinion, and it’s too much for the kids. How do you get better at this though? You mentioned there practising? Are we literally talking here? Like in your bedroom or whatever? Like practising how what you how you’re going to talk kids through an example or how you’re going to introduce always is that the best way you find it to do this, at least initially.

Jemma Sherwood 28:16
I think initially Yeah, writing down the key things that you want to say so that you’re you’re conscious of them so that you’re aware of them. But then also, it’s it’s cringe worthy. But if you stand in front of a mirror, and practice the way you’re going to explain something, you’re able to watch yourself and you’re able to pick up on your irritating mannerisms. I I had while I’m early in my second year of teaching, the school I was in had one of those classrooms where they would video you. So they gave me this DVD and they said go away watch this. And I said okay, after every third word, I think Okay, so now we’re gonna do this. Okay. And by the end of watching this video, I just wanted to shoot. Yeah, it was so good, because I didn’t know that I did it. So I think it’s really I think it’s it’s cringe worthy and potentially very frustrating. But if you want to get better at communicating, it’s actually a very important thing to do.

Craig Barton 29:17
So it’s interesting that we’ve, we’ve had on the put on my best about maths podcast a couple of times teachers who use booklets in their lessons and Danny Quinn’s been undefeated and so on. And a lot of people criticise booklets for many reasons. But one thing that and it kind of fits into this mould of kind of in inverted commas the scripted lesson, but if you have a really well thought through explanation that’s in bullet point form, and as you say, removes all the clutter. And a teacher reads out that explanation there’s a lot to be said for that isn’t that particular if you’re a novice teacher, you find it hard to to get that explanation concise and clear and the right amount of information without overwhelming having a kind of script that you perhaps don’t stand in front of the kids or read out but that you’ve rehearsed yourself that an experienced teacher has helped you with? I think there’s a lot to be said for that. What do you think?

Jemma Sherwood 30:03
Absolutely. And at the very least some key words and key phrases that, you know, I absolutely must say this. And I absolutely must emphasise this. Because like we said before, when you stood in front of your classroom, it’s easy to get distracted by things. It’s easy to get nervous, it’s easy to forget stuff, because it’s just the way our brains work, isn’t it? So if you have these things that you know, are the absolute musts that you want to get across, and you’ve practised them, you’re less likely to forget these things. What it’s what it means, of course, is the more you do it, the less you have to rely on that. Yeah. So I I’m relatively confident now that I could walk into a classroom just like that. And I could give a pretty strong explanation on pretty much anything across 11 to 18 months. But that’s because I’ve done it for however many years. But it’s taken that kind of conscious repetition and reflection and practice, to get to that point.

Craig Barton 30:59
I’m going to talk so that I don’t know if this is a good idea, or the worst idea. So I’m just going to run it by you and see what I see what you think of this jabber right. So whatever remote teacher was happening, I did a series of podcasts with people who were teaching from home, and just the tips and so on. And Adam Boxer was on there. And he was saying how he was creating a lot of videos for Froch national and National Academy at the time. And he said, his explanations in those videos were far better than any explanations he would do in the classroom for the very reason you’re speaking about there. Because he could just focus all the only thing he was thinking about was his explanation, because he was recording it into a microphone and a screen. So it got me thinking, and as I say, this is this is where the worst idea I’ve ever heard comes into play. What’s the argument against let’s say that you you’re you’re gonna teach solving equations, and you at home, have written out this, essentially a script, and you’ve recorded yourself explaining it, microphone screen, maybe you’ve used the tablet, or whatever it’s got, you’ve got it, you’ve got it perfect. You’ve got this example, this explanation perfect. What’s the argument against you pre recording that you play in the classroom for your kids, and you’re, they’re kind of on hand, if the kids are stuck, they can pull the handle, you can just kind of have a whisper to them, you’re, you get to put your full attention on to your kids, whilst you’re kind of virtual self is given this crystal clear explanation? Where’s the floor in life if there is a floor?

Jemma Sherwood 32:22
Okay, it’s not interactive enough. And there is a huge difference between teaching something on a video or explaining something on a video, which is more akin to a lecture than and there’s a huge difference between that and teaching something in a classroom and teaching something in the classroom relies on being able to have those very human interactions, being able to respond to cues, nonverbal cues as well. So for me, that would be suboptimal, because I’m not able to interact with what happens as I go along. But if I’ve already thought really carefully about how I want to explain something, then I’ve got my own kind of brain space freed up to actually do those to actually respond and to and to question in the right places, and to go, you’re paying attention Come on, and all of those things, because I am more confident in the in the kind of the core substance of what I’m doing and saying,

Craig Barton 33:24
got it suboptimal is a nice way to support that idea. That was nice. I like that. That’s perfect.

Jemma Sherwood 33:30
And there was something else on that as well. And that was that. When I said what you say matters, I think it’s also important to, to be aware of the things that you want pupils to internalise as well. So there will be certain phrases and concepts that when I’m teaching, I want my pupils to associate with certain ideas. So when I don’t know, let’s say, when we’re solving equations, I want them to know that the second they see an equation and the word soul that they’re going to be thinking about balancing. So I will be saying and what we’re going to do now and I’ll be all the peoples to go balance and getting them to repeat these things over and over again, because they’re more likely to internalise something if they’re rehearsing it as well. Yes. So for me when I say what you say matters, it’s not only about the way I explain something, but it’s about the repetition that I build in for pupils and the opportunities I give for them to be able to actually vocalise things as well. Nice,

Craig Barton 34:23
lovely stuff. Okay, Gemma, what’s Tip number four, please.

Jemma Sherwood 34:28
Okay, it’s kind of a converse, what you don’t say matters.

Craig Barton 34:31
All right. Well, you’ve done that. Okay. Tell me more about this. Right. So

Jemma Sherwood 34:35
two parts of this one. The first one is don’t assume that something is obvious. It’s very easy for us as x as experts in mathematics, to assume that what we think is obvious is obvious to our pupils. When we do that, we tend to not make things explicit, we tend to not say things and then what happens is that it will get a few lessons down the line and you In a pupil makes a mistake or does something and you go, Well, that’s obvious. You should know that. But they don’t. Because I never actually made it clear. Yes, because I just assumed that they would know this thing.

Craig Barton 35:13
So if I don’t say something, it’s sorry. Well, it examples bring to mind that you can think

Jemma Sherwood 35:19
I know you’re gonna say. So, okay, so I have a couple of years ago, I was teaching a lesson on differentiation with your 12. And we had expression is where we’ll there were, they were algebraic fraction type expressions where we had something like x squared plus 3x on the numerator and x on the denominator, something like that. And I said to them, it was something along the lines of right off we go, then we’ve done those differentiation, let’s have a go at this one now. And they all started to do really weird things like differentiating the polynomial the top and then differentiate is pulling the polynomial the bottom and keeping it in a fraction. And I said, I remember stopping at one point going out to one people and stopping it stopping here and going, why are you doing that? And she said, well, because you’ve told us to differentiate like this. And I said, No, but this is this is a different type of function. And I suddenly realised that I hadn’t actually explained to them that we need to split this up into separate terms, and then differentiate, differentiate each term separately. So that was completely on me, because I just assumed that they would know they had to do this. Yes, this is I would like to say this was long time ago, by the way, but this is a perfect example of one of those things where you do you look back and you go, obviously, that’s my fault, because I didn’t explain that to you. That’s a really good example, if you don’t say something, it matters.

Craig Barton 36:42
That’s really good. And I know I’m interrupting you, because I know you’ve a second part to this. But just just on this, do you think that comes down to a well, a lot of that can be solved just by the choice of examples that you use, because I fall foul of this all the time to use your differentiation was a great one there. If you’re really careful about your selection examples, and particularly kind of boundary examples, things that right on the edge of either fits into the concept or does it that it solves quite a few of these kind of curse of knowledge problems, because you’re you’re forcing the kids to attend to a wide variety of examples. So they start to make those connections a bit clearer. And you drag an examples of the key to this?

Jemma Sherwood 37:21
Yes, I know, you’re gonna say, you know, because we can never give examples for every single possible misconception our peoples going to come across. So I think what we need to do is, is direct our examples towards the most common things and what we might perhaps term the most important ideas to communicate. And then as we go through, there are going to be times where something else crops up, and you’re going to have to address it there. And then, but you’re never going to be able to predict all of those things. So what I wouldn’t want to do is say yes, because what I would, because an unintended consequence of that might be that kind of lessons, people’s lessons, turn into just example, after example, after example, and look how this one’s a bit different look on that one’s a bit different. But actually, when our pupils start to get more fluent in the way the mathematics is working, whatever, whatever we’re doing, they are able to deduce these things for themselves in a lot of cases. And that’s okay, as well. And and I would go further and say that’s okay, that’s really important that they start to kind of apply what they’ve learned in unusual contexts, hugely important. But when there are more obvious things, really important things that you want to make sure that the pupils absolutely are aware of, yes, definitely highlight it in an example.

Craig Barton 38:38
Got it? Well, what was your other thing you’re gonna say about this tip German before I cut you off?

Jemma Sherwood 38:42
Oh, well, only just in the context of what you don’t say matters. That also goes towards creating the culture you want in your classroom. So everything you do, as the teacher will contribute, either intentionally or unintentionally to the culture in your classroom. So your body language, the care you show to your pupils, the attention you show them by asking them questions about what they do, John Mason wrote a lovely chapter in a book a while ago, and I’ll send you I’ll send you the link code, about questioning and how you show care to pupils through questioning and show that you value their thinking, and all those things. Although they’re not explicitly about the kind of the maybe like a utilitarian aim of teaching mathematics, what they’re about is showing pupils that their thinking is valued, and their contribution is valued and, and that you have high expectations of them. And it helps to communicate what you expect a mathematics classroom to look like.

Craig Barton 39:39
That’s lovely. That is you just made me made me think of top on top of my head. And again, thoughts off the top of my head are always high risk. They’ve not been processed at all. So this will be suboptimal as well. General, I’ll warn you in advance now. There’s been a lot of chat on the tips for teachers podcast so far, about use of mini whiteboards, and I’ve recorded a few videos on this and so on. I just use saying that maybe think that one of the big advantages of mini whiteboards that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before, is that it communicates to the kids that every answer matters. Whereas, you know, you could if I if I’m teaching and I just asked you that you a question, and Joe Morgan sat in the class, you might be thinking, well, he’s only bothered about Gemma’s answer. He’s not really concerned about him. Whereas if the kids are answering every child answered every question and show you on the mini whiteboard, even if you don’t pick up their answer, you at least communicated that you value their response, if that makes sense. And I don’t often hear that mentioned Absolutely. In the context of mini whiteboards.

Jemma Sherwood 40:31
It I think it’s this I think I mentioned it earlier about being trying to be very conscious about everything you do in the classroom. But understanding that every single action of yours will have an effect. So you want to make sure that your actions communicate that every pupil is important that every pupils thinking is important, and that you expect every pupil to think hard and that you expect that every pupil to work hard. And what you don’t say, is also communicating all of these things.

Craig Barton 41:01
Yes, that’s lovely. Love that one. All right, Jabba fifth and final tip, please

Jemma Sherwood 41:07
write, teach what you mean to teach.

Craig Barton 41:11
You’ve really fought through these these titles, I like this, right and told me about this one.

Jemma Sherwood 41:16
Okay, so I’m going to illustrate this one with an example. A few years ago, I was watching somebody teach a lesson on velocity time graphs. And they were teaching the idea that if you find the gradient of a line, it will give you the acceleration. And the the teacher explained this idea. And they worked through an example. And they got to the point where it was something like acceleration equals six divided by three. And Craig, what six divided by three and the pupil said to and he said, Great, you’ve got it. This, this then happened over and over and over again. And I spoke to the teacher at the end of the lesson. And I just said, I want to point something out to you. Every single question in the 10 minutes that I watched, was around mental arithmetic. And the only things that people had to answer was mental arithmetic. Do you know that they understand understood that the gradient of the line is the acceleration? Or do you know that they knew they know their division factors. And that was the first time I’d ever noticed it. And then I saw it more and more. And then I was aware that I did it as well. And I suddenly realised that we, I think it’s very easy to ask pupils the kind of the simple end bit of the question the mental arithmetic, because we know they know it. And maybe it’s because we want them to feel successful. And we want them we want to be able to go Yeah, well done. Yeah. But actually, if we think about what we know from cognitive science, we know that what pupils think about other things they’re going to remember. And if we can prompt more pupils to be thinking hard for more time, about the key thing we’re trying to teach them, they’re more likely to remember that thing. So if we have one or two pupils thinking about mental arithmetic and knots, that acceleration is the gradient of a lie. We are less likely to have our pupils remembering that concept

Craig Barton 43:09
is great this job but I’ve I’ve done this tonnes and tonnes of times for the exact reason you say is because the kids feel great, you can calm yourself into thinking what a great explanation I’ve done here if this complex thing, because the kid is like the punch line to it, six divided by three is two are brilliant. They’ve understood calculus or whatever is terrible. But I’ll tell you the interesting thing about this, a lot of focus on the kind of classroom techniques is based around formative assessment check for understanding use many whiteboards diagnostic questions, whatever it is. But the point you’re making there, I think anyway, what I’ve taken from it is you’ve got to be careful what understanding you’re checking for. So you can imagine you do the lesson on grading that you’ve described there on velocity time graphs. And the diagnostic question or the mini whiteboard check is okay, so write down what the final gradient is. What if it’s all just checking that they can do the six divided by three, you get a room full of mini whiteboards where everyone’s nail there, and you think, Oh, I’ve done that formative assessment. I’ve checked everyone’s understanding amazing stuff. But it’s what understanding Are you checking for? is the key to that feels quite, it’s quite a complex skill, isn’t it? for a teacher to get to get right. I think

Jemma Sherwood 44:13
it is one thing that I have to say to staff increasingly now, especially when I noticed that they are they are more inclined to do this is as a way of kind of trying to reduce it initially. And as I say, I don’t want you to ask a question, unless it’s about the very specific thing that you’re teaching. So if you’re teaching expanding brackets, for instance, I don’t want you to ask any questions unless it’s one actually about the expansion of that bracket, that bracket and everything else you just got to say it.

Craig Barton 44:39
Yeah, that’s lovely. Love that one.

Jemma Sherwood 44:42
There’s another part to it as well. And it’s kind of very closely related. And that is that if you let’s pick the example of expanding brackets again, if you are doing a kind of a period of instruction in the classroom, and you’ve got this this bracket that you want to expand and you can see the people struggling so you show them how to do the expansion, whichever methods you’ve chosen. And you then ask them questions about just the multiplying but at the end, and let’s imagine that you’re kind of interspersing, this example with all these questions or when and what’s five times 3x? And what’s two times what’s five times two here, you then have it kind of links to my tip from earlier, you then have the problem that you haven’t given a clear explanation at any one point because your your explanation of the process has been punctuated with questions about mental arithmetic. So the pupils who are able to make sense of the process have made sense of the process, but the ones who couldn’t haven’t benefited from a really clear explanation from the teacher, because it’s been they’ve been distracted by all these questions going on.

Craig Barton 45:41
That’s interested. So is the solution to that. And again, this, this could be nonsense, is it if you get your prerequisite knowledge check, right, because that’s when you can sort out all these bitty parts of it, right. So to take your expanding brackets, that’s where you can check that they can multiply A term together, that’s where you can check that their family negative number arithmetic, all the things that they need to, that’s fine to be bitty that bit. And then when they come to do this new concept of expanding brackets, that’s when you can be a bit more coherence in your explanation, because they’re the bitty bit should be familiar to them. You don’t have to assess their understanding of that. So they can focus on on the whole narrative, if that makes sense.

Jemma Sherwood 46:19
Absolutely. And then you once you’ve, you’ve explained it really clearly, you can use as much questioning and as much mini whiteboards as you want to see whether or not they can make sense of this, whether or not they can replicate the process, whether or not and then you go into kind of how they can reason about it in more depth, and all those things that come afterwards. But you’ve got to make sure that you are focusing your let me let me get back a second. Every question you ask will direct people’s attention at something. So you’ve got to make sure that you direct their attention at the thing you want them to learn, not the mental arithmetic.

Craig Barton 46:52
Lovely, lovely. Gemma, they were five fantastic tips. So now it’s over to what you’re going to plug what you’re going to tell people about First off with your book, not enough people know about this, tell us tell us about.

Jemma Sherwood 47:03
Okay, so back in 2018, I wrote a book called How to enhance your mathematics subject knowledge, number and algebra for secondary teachers, which is a beautifully short title. It’s, I did it because I’ve been working with lots of people, lots of people on a subject knowledge enhancement course at the time, for quite a few years. And I wanted a book that teachers could pick up at any point in their career, but particularly at the start, and just kind of pick it up and put it down. And it would help them to deepen their knowledge on school level maths. So it takes things through everything that we would kind of consider 11 to 16 number and algebra, and it goes into loads of depth about it gives them tips for the classroom. And it kind of is got quizzes in it to really kind of push the limits of their understanding of these ideas, talks about where it goes next, be it at a level or beyond brings in elements of history of maths that are relevant to it as well. So the whole point was not to necessarily not to specifically think about pedagogy, but to think about the mathematics at school level and how you can deepen your knowledge of it.

Craig Barton 48:11
Brilliant. It’s a fantastic book, anything else you want to direct listeners to or to be aware of. I see on Twitter, you talked a lot about this kind of curriculum designed the work that you do it in, I saw a tweet. So these can be freely available later later on in the year. Is that Is that true? Is that a world exclusive?

Jemma Sherwood 48:26
You know what, let’s make it a well. Yeah, so I’m, I’m a little bit obsessed with this idea of a coherent curriculum at the moment. So there are multiple ways of doing this. So I have picked my way of doing it. And I am making the resources that go from year seven all the way through to Year 11. And we’ve got some schools at the moment in our trust that are trialling the resources with iOS seven and they’ll eventually be the ones that kind of take you through all five years. And I’m hoping that hope, before the summer holiday, I want to say I’ll be able to kind of go here’s the whole of the year seven resources for people, and it’s going to be completely freely available. Eventually it will be five years and it will be all there for anybody to access. It will be booklets full of all the tasks activities and these associated unit long PowerPoints that I was talking about earlier.

Craig Barton 49:19
It’s a world exclusive. Gemma what ordering Have you gone for Is this your bespoke ordered or have you used NCTM nonstatutory?

Jemma Sherwood 49:25
It’s it’s kind of bespoke. So it’s based on ordering that I have used historically when I was head of maths but kind of the lessons that I learned from that. So changes have been made from that. So it’s kind of comes from a tried and tested base. But then I’ve tried to improve upon it there. We are making things so what we’re doing is we it’s a bit it’s a kind of combination of curation and making things from scratch. So whether our existing activities or tasks that I think are high quality and fit the brief so fits the path of the path that we’ve chosen to take through Then we’re using those with the web, obviously, with people’s permission. And then if not, we are creating the tasks and activities to fit it as well. And the sequencing is kind of broadly based on the ideas of embedding the most important things at the beginning and most important ideas around number and then going out into algebra. There’s, I mean, I could talk to you about this for hours. So I’m not going to do that now. But we’ve made it so that there is flexibility in it as well. So certain units are absolutely prerequisites to others. Because the one thing I will say is that I’m really excited about is the fact that when things are prerequisites to others, we deliberately weave the content in from previous units so that the practice to use a few years time the practice of one skill becomes subordinate to the practice of another skill. So yeah, there’s kind of flexibility in terms of how you can move certain units around certain ones have to go in particular orders. But yeah, eventually it’ll be five year fully resourced, coherent curriculum, a not the coherent curriculum but a coherent curriculum for their

Craig Barton 51:01
work and it’s worth if people don’t already follow you on Twitter because after you’re chucking out ideas at this stage, why she created and getting feedback from people and examples of stuff it’s that exciting anything else to plug Jabba?

Jemma Sherwood 51:15
Not Yeah, asked me that a few months, Craig.

Craig Barton 51:16
Okay. All right. Well jabber showed it’s always a pleasure speaking to you and definitely husband today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Greg. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Tom Sherrington’s tips:

1. Set out the big picture [3 minutes 57 seconds]
2. Provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses [10 minutes 38 seconds]
3. Start with whoever got 8 out of 10 [14 minutes 05 seconds]
4. Foster cross-class accountability [16 minutes 40 seconds]
5. Set occasional open-response tasks [22 minutes 11 seconds]

Links and resources

• Tom Sherrington on Twitter
• Tom’s blog
• WalkThrus – Volume 3
• Mind the Gap podcast

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Watch the videos of Tom’s tips

Podcast transcript

Craig Barton 0:04
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. Each episode invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside and outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration they follow. Hopefully something good will come out of it. Remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links, resources and audio transcriptions for each episode. Better still, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast, and others recorded by me. These could be used to spark discussion between colleagues and a departmental meeting, a twilight insight and so on. Now, just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks from our lovely sponsors, because this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by arc maths. Arc math is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed and maths. Art maths is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and space practice on memory. And here’s how it works. Students crack open the art maths app and are given a 12 question quiz. With four practice questions on anything they got wrong, not just straight away. But the next day three days later, a week later, and so on until they have it secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better Ark will get to know your students and what they mean. With no teacher input required, you can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So please check out arc maths and remember that’s arc with a C knots. Okay. Right back to the show. So let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful Tom Sherrington. Spoiler alert, here are Tom’s five tips. Tip number one set out the big picture. Number two provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses. Tip three, start with whoever got eight out of 10 Number four foster cross class accountability. And tip number five set occasional open response tasks. If you look at the episode description on your podcast player, or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll see our timestamps each of these tips so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first or read listen at any stage. Enjoy the show.

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

Tom Sherrington 2:59
Hello, Craig. Yeah, feeling good. Good to see.

Craig Barton 3:02
Ya. Good to see you too. And for listeners who don’t know, could you tell us a bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?

Tom Sherrington 3:10
Well, I am someone who used to be a head teacher and a teacher. And now I am a teacher, trainer and author of books about teaching.

Craig Barton 3:18
Fantastic. Well summarise. I like it right, let’s dive straight in. What is your first tip for

Tom Sherrington 3:22
us today, Tom? To begin with, I wanted to talk about setting out the big picture. Because I feel like it’s a really helpful way for students for learners to get a sense of direction. And also to sort of make cognitive links with the details of the topic. But it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you meet students and you ask them what they’re doing. And they don’t really know why they’re doing it. But it’s really great when the teacher says like, this is what we’re going to be the study. And a call is like a mini expos over the whole thing, we’re gonna be looking at this, this and this, and here’s the territory we’re in. And, but to begin with, we’re just going to start here, but then people know kind of where they are second orientation. And I could go into more detail. But that is the basic idea that you kind of set the scene so that students know, kind of where the little details fit. And it could be a math topic or history topic or a whole range of like, genres and music has all these classical composers. But we’re going to start by hitting the hearing about Mozart, you know, but they know kind of Mozart’s one of loads of people in that that’s explicit from the beginning.

Craig Barton 4:30
That’s lovely that, yeah, I’ve certainly seen this done well, in maths, I wonder if you could just illustrate it with an example to that. You’ve seen it in other subjects, so we can kind of get there get this visualised?

Tom Sherrington 4:43
Yeah, and I think a classic example would be something like, I don’t know, say the same English literature you’re hearing about, you know, say Jane Austen for the first time and who’s Jane Austen. You know, why are we why are we reading her? Well, you know, you can say well, that It essentially has it novels kind of started more or less in the 19th century. And there was all these books and you have heard of Charles Dickens who wrote all these books. And there were the Bronte’s. And Jane Austen was one of these people, and, you know, those that started this and this and this, and there’s a certain style, so we’re gonna start reading this book. And so you’ve got this feeling. And I’ve seen that done really well, where people go, okay, that’s Jane Austen. Okay, that’s a picture bit of a timeline. And it kind of makes sense. It’s a kind of orientation, it puts it in a context. Otherwise, it’s like who, why and students are confused, and endless tree with say, let’s, let’s say talk about a Vietnam at the Vietnam War. I’ve seen this done really well. Students studied Vietnam, say at GCSE. I’ve heard of it. I don’t know what it is. And they’re thinking, when was it in it? Let’s just get a big picture. There’s World War Two. And here, we are now in Vietnam, Larissa, over here. And while we fight in Vietnam, or wasn’t we, it was the Americans. And so you’re sort of saying it’s a big scene setter, and the significance and the politics around that in the 60s 70s. And then he stopped saying, right, so that stopped getting into the detail, but the students have this picture of where we are in space and time, relative importance. And it just helps you start positioning yourself to receive the kind of the details.

Craig Barton 6:24
It’s lovely that Tom, and I’ve seen this work two different ways in, in, in math. So one is where teachers put maths in terms of the current topic in terms of some kind of historical context, a bit of background where it came from the Greeks or the Egyptians, that works nice. But the other thing that works really well, and I don’t know, if this kind of translates across to other subjects is, let’s say, each year eight, and we’re studying expanding brackets, or something like that, you can say, right, we’re gonna do this topic, expanding brackets. Now, the good news is in year five, where you first encountered, you know, multiplying terms in year six, when you first met algebra, and year seven, when we first expanded a single bracket, all that stuff is going to come into play. Now, when we start doing this, and better still, next year, we’re going to be doing triple brackets. And then when you get to a level, then we’re going to be plotting, and so on and so forth. So showing them where the matters come from, that they’ve experienced themselves and show them where it’s going to, I always think that that’s really nice to kind of set the scene of what they’re about to study. Does that make sense?

Tom Sherrington 7:24
Yeah, exactly. I think it works really well in maths for various other things as well. So and sometimes, it comes the other way. And I feel like there’s a great looking i The analogy I would use as sort of looking back down the mountain that you’ve, you know, you’re in the foothills, and you can’t quite get where you are, but that’s fine. But then when you look back, you can say, Oh, now I see how this all makes sense. And I can sometimes sometimes looking back and saying I can see how all these things all connect now, that also works in maths but so in shape and space, you know, you might be looking at, in a general properties of polygons are something and, you know, you just talking about this, the range of shapes are in and just saying, you know, rectangles, squares, quadrilaterals, that actually, that’s just one of us enormous family. And if you start looking at until saying, Look at a five, size six, size, seven sides, 100 sites, and all these incredible shapes are these interesting properties. And look at this, look at that we have 2d 3d. And it’s such an interesting world of like the possibilities of shapes. And so what we’re gonna start off by looking at just a few simple ones to get a feel for it. But look, it’s already explicitly as part of a journey ahead into this amazing world of shapes. So it doesn’t just feel very kind of really weirdly functional. It just feels like the start of quite an exciting journey.

Craig Barton 8:46
It’s lovely that I know this is an impossible question, Tom. But But how long do you reckon this should take in in lessons? Is this a 10 minute thing? A two minute thing? What what tends to work best?

Tom Sherrington 8:55
I’d say it’s like a 10 Min. And it’s not a big deal as it is sort of it. That’s why I think it’s such an important thing to do, because it really doesn’t take long, it’s sort of I think that scene setting things, it’s, I’d say a 10 minute thing. And I think I started listening just literally yesterday where there was a slideshow talking about measurement is in functional skills and FE college and other slides about you know, what distances and how far is it to a certain place or what sorts of units would be used to measure the length of the track or the height of the building or the distance to Manchester or, and it’s just, it’s just a scene setter, then they were going to do conversions of units and so on. But it was like, getting a feeling of like this whole issue. Yeah, isn’t it cost of the students are going to cost? Yes, I do have to think about this. Because it is part of everyday life that we have different measures for distance. And it was a classic scene setup, just the big picture of this giving purpose to the learning in some kind of other sort of or inspiring way or just kind of connecting to the real world kind of way. So that then I could get on with some practice questions. Words which had some meaning to them.

Craig Barton 10:02
I love it. Fantastic. Right, Tom, what’s your second tip for us today?

Tom Sherrington 10:08
My second tip is to provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses, which means that you help students have some sort of stock phrases that you use relevant to your subject to when they’re giving answers, which has helps them sort of get going with a verbal answer, but it also keeps them to the sort of the depth of the answer you’re expecting, and also can prepare them for writing. So a couple of examples would be, which I’ve seen, where for firstly, secondly, and finally, so you’ve asked students in a pair to come up with three reasons for something or three advantages. And a teacher has written on the board. firstly, secondly, and finally, and she just pointed at that. So when she said, Okay, just to get let’s have her yours, what were you? What did you guys come up with? And she would say, Well, firstly, secondly, and finally, and I thought, That’s a brilliant way of getting them to definitely have three things. And also, that’s the kind of thing you might do when you’re writing. So you’ve practising saying something, and we don’t normally speak like that in normal conversation. So it’s easy to sort of not do that. But it’s an explicit rehearsal for for writing, but also, I just thought, That’s so clever, because they all are coming up with three things. And it just worked so well. And I’ve seen that with lots of other ones like advantages and disadvantages. So I saw a brilliant lesson. Recently, year five lesson they were talking about tourism climbing, snowed tourists and snowed in or whether it was a good thing or bad thing, and had to give an advantage and a disadvantage. And actually, the year five saying, and advantage of tourism on snowed in ears. Whereas a disadvantage is they had to do opposing things. And they were using, whereas I second get that that’s great, because they’re practising saying, whereas like, it’s just a normal word. Of course, when you’re in year five, it’s not a normal word. So that type of thing. It’s like, it’s so simple. And it’s just, but you focus on one at a time. That’s important. It’s not like here’s a list of possible scaffolds, which is a mistake. It’s we’re just practising this particular scaffold now. So that it’s practice is not just a kind of massive options. That’s my sort of tip of how it works best.

Craig Barton 12:27
That’s lovely. That time, what I really like about that is it’s not I’ve made this mistake in the past, diving straight to expecting kids to write things down. So in maths whenever kids have to explain, justify, and so on, they really struggle. But I love the bridge is the fact that first they’re getting used to verbalising it and that’s the natural transition to them writing it down. That seems like an important step in this.

Tom Sherrington 12:50
Yeah, exactly. And I suppose the most obvious one is just full sentences. Now, some people say, you know, you can’t force kids to talk in full sentences. And of course, that’s not what you’re after. You’re just so for example, if you are doing your science teacher and you say, which of these is a metal or a non metal or you know, is sulphur, a metal or metal and the students just saying sulphur or non metal? You just say, well, let’s, let’s have that in a full sentence, then I have to say, the one that sort of non metal is sulphur. And it’s practising now, it’s perfectly legitimate to be faced sulphur as the answer. But it’s just practising saying it in a sentence. Just build some skills around sentence construction for for writing, and it’s a simple scaffold, put it in a sentence. And I’ve seen teachers use that really well.

Craig Barton 13:43
That’s a lovely tip really like that one time. Okay, what about tip number three?

Tom Sherrington 13:49
Okay, and this is, this is a really top tip for creating a culture of error and normalising being wrong and flushing out error. So it’s called start with whoever got eight out of 10. So it doesn’t have to be eight out of 10. Exactly, because it doesn’t matter how many questions but it’s the idea that if you’ve given a quiz with 10, possible answers, 10 questions, and then you’ve gone through the answers. You don’t start by saying who got them all right? Because if you do that, none of them are wrong. So there’s nothing to talk about. And also everyone else who didn’t get them. All right is feeling a little bit. Oh, okay. I’ll bet so many people got them. All right. So if you say, right, so who got eight out of 10 Michael, how did you get on is because he’s put his hand up you say Brilliant, well done. So wish wants you to get wrong and you go straight in with that. And he’s quite happy to say I didn’t get number seven. All right, so why what happened? What did you put? Do what tell me what you think the answer is now than Yeah, okay. Yeah. Great. Well done and can explain it back. Brilliant. And what else did you get wrong? And pretend Okay, that’s good. And did who else got eight out of 10? Susan, okay. All right. So the same Okay, what else? Brilliant. So that’s another one he didn’t know Get one on one. And we’ve got people go meet meet me, because it’s become normalised and an eight out of 10. us are happy to tell you they got them wrong. And then you can you go through a few wrong answers. It’s the what you’re trying to do anyway. And then you say, and who they don’t get them. All right, are well done, guys. That’s brilliant. And then that’s at the end, because you still give them some affirmation. But it’s not the it’s an easiest way of students feeling safe to tell you got answers wrong, and I just didn’t work so well. And that if you don’t have a culture where children can say stuff they got wrong, they hide it. And it can make it really hard for you to find out. And you don’t want to hide that you want them to tell you and that that’s an it’s just a you know, just one of the things I found works really well.

Craig Barton 15:46
That’s, it’s so lovely that time because again, I was just thinking back to the errors I’ve made with this. So I’ve done it both ways around. So if it’s a quiz out of 10, I’ve either said Right, let’s start at the bottom. Anyone gets zero after 10. Anyone get one. And that’s a disaster waiting to happen, because no one wants to be the first kid to put their hand up. But then yeah, if you do it the other way around, and you start at the top. Again, once those first initial hands have gone up, you’re feeling pretty rubbish. If you chose to put your hand up. Yeah. And you’re waiting for it to slide down to your level. So I love that. And I love the fact that it draws out those initial mistakes kids have made and then it becomes Yeah, like you say normalise is the exact phrase. I love that. That’s really nice. Really nice that. Right? So what about Tip number four

Tom Sherrington 16:31
is called foster cross class accountability. Now what this what this is, is, it’s quite common in lessons to see teachers asking lots of students questions, but they often totally tune out when someone else is talking like there’s just not like if I’m not on I’m not interested. And plus cross class accountability means that it’s part of the norm that you’re expected to respond to what other people are saying kind of all the time, which is yet more effortful, but it becomes a habit you form. And the way you do it is by making a routine part of your questioning sequence that you when you’re asking the students question, when you’re cold calling, you’re not just saying what do you think you’re saying? What do you think someone else was saying? Or do you agree with someone else? Or can you can you did you understand? Tell me what you think Susan was saying when she explained that question. And so you have this, and that’s the norm. So people are kind of on their toes a bit more, because they then listen, because at any moment, I might be asked to report back what that person said. And, and that means you get it as a really good way of bringing Shire students into the conversation, because quite often they’re not keen to initiate because they’re worried about being wrong. But because they’ve heard someone else you can, you can get them to just bounce back. So it’s a really good way of sort of checking for understanding that just people are even hearing each other. So I’ve asked Jennifer, she’s given me a great answer. She’s, she’s got it, right. seven cubed is 343. Well done. So I said, let me just check. What do you think Jennifer? said, Did you think she was right? Like, what did she say? And I hear? And it’s like, that’s the first time he’s gonna go, I don’t know, what was she saying? You go, Well, come on. He’s supposed to be listening. And that becomes normal. Did you agree with her method? How did you how did you workout seven cubed? And he’s not just going to think for his own sake, it’s sometimes students will just tell you their own answer. And you say, yeah, that’s your answer. But I was asking you what she was saying. And it just, it just makes it more, a bit more intense. Definitely. But that’s in a bit in a good way. And the other thing is that when you’re talking, if you’re explaining something, you know, the teacher often asked other people to check what you were saying. So you’re more conscious that the audience is everyone, not just a teacher. And so you speak a bit louder, you go into a bit more detail. So I just think that’s a really powerful thing to develop in a class.

Craig Barton 18:55
It’s lovely that Tom every reminds me and I’m interested to get your take on this. So I’m Adam boxes, a previous guest on the tips for teachers podcast, and he spoke about his love of using mini whiteboards. And his argument is always, why would you want to just get one response from a class of 25 when you could get 25 responses? And would mini whiteboards kind of would they work with this idea as well, I’m just thinking that you do cold call on one person. And then everyone on their mini whiteboards could write down what they said and why they said it. And then you know, you could hold them open and dive in. Have you ever seen Would that work kind of fusing the two ideas together at all?

Tom Sherrington 19:32
Yeah, well, I mean, if someone’s given a really good verbal answer, you could just say, Okay, I saw I started lesson a couple of weeks ago a year for kids gave us absolutely blinding answer like tips, and I fell off her chair with that how sophisticated was and it was like, but then she kind of blew it because she was so blown away. She just went Oh, wow, amazing, and then moved on. Yeah, I think but what about everybody else? You know, what about everyone else that that was an opportunity for everyone else to come? capitalise on the fact that this girl in your class is incredibly articulate. So yeah, that’d be good. Let’s all just write down then. What do you think the main two things that Mikayla was saying there? What are the main words she used? Boom, and then whiteboards? And that would that would work? Definitely. It’s just that feeling of, yeah. I mean, I did write about the whiteboards, it’s good. I think it there are some things where it’s easier to sort of give a verbal answer than to vitamin A seven cubed is a classic whiteboard question. That’s not the greatest example. But a more subtle one, which takes quite a long time to write down. It’s definitely you need that, you know, and this is why questioning techniques need to be a repertoire you sort of one minutes whiteboards, so that millionaires sprint, is this checking for understanding that way, that way? And it’s quite good to build confidence of students verbalising an answer. So yeah, I think I think that would make a good combination. We’ve got like, it’s like a boxer. We’ve got moves, one, two, tops, everyone’s been taught it to you.

Craig Barton 21:04
It’s lovely. But I really what I really like about that that tip, just in general, is the fact that the kids have got an incentive to listen hard to their classmates responses, because you’re absolutely right. You get kids will think hard when the questions being asked, but as soon as they realise they’re not the ones answering it. They have a little relax, cognitively switch off a bit. But I really like the fact that they’re just they’ve got that extra incentive to listen hard to their peers that that feels really powerful.

Tom Sherrington 21:29
I just one of the things I see so often is, is it and I don’t think it takes any more time. It’s just that a student has given you a brilliant answer is some teacher have this sort of mental habit of thinking, that is an opportunity for others to learn from that, not just park it there and go lovely, it’s well done. And I just do see that fairly often. That that kind of if you’ve got one great answer, but what about everybody else did they didn’t even hear it didn’t even understand it. And just use using this cross cross accountability kind of expectation just makes it much easier to do that.

Craig Barton 22:03
Lovely stuff. Right, Tom? Tip number five, please.

Tom Sherrington 22:08
Yeah, tip number five, set occasional open response tasks. And I stress occasional because this isn’t something you’ve do a lot. In fact, it only really works really well, if it’s a special status, which is that it’s occasional. So open response tasks are things where you ask the students to report some learning or do something in a form of their choosing, without too much structure to it. Which is cause it inherently brings a risk that the structure, some students will find it harder than others. So you have to think about that. But what it means is that you, you don’t mandate the outcome. Exactly. And so students have to make some choices. And sometimes they just can go crazy, and you get some incredible responses. So I would say, in my time teaching, the best work I ever saw students do was through this task. So because they just went to town on a bit of learning, and they will blow your mind with the effort. And if you wish to prescribe everything, you kind of put a limit on it, because you think well, I can’t make everyone do this incredibly expensive thing. But if you say, you know, do whatever you like or so I have some examples on how to do this and training about stretch and challenge, for example. And I’ve got some great examples to show. So one of my all time favourite one was two boys in year seven through 11. When I taught Ari. And at the end of each unit, where we taught lots of knowledge, I would say Okay, so now summarise the unit in any form you choose. And some students would do like a kind of little pamphlet guide to you know, the key aspects of Christianity or Islam. But these boys, some some people made a video, which was really interesting. A couple of PowerPoints, which I would try to discourage, because everyone, if everyone does a PowerPoint, you don’t want to watch them. But these boys made a website. They said, Can we make a website? I said, I don’t know. Can you make a website? They said, they said, Yeah, we did it in year four, and we know how to make website. So I said, Okay, I thought it’d be absolutely ridiculous, but it was amazing. And it’s just they made this incredible website called embracing Islam. And it’s got all these tabs explaining the science, Islam and science, marriage ceremonies, misconceptions of Islam, the five pillars of Islam, it’s got embedded YouTube clips of them performing the rituals and the five pillars of Islam. The next term, they they upgraded and they made embracing Christianity. And it says from the award winning mate creators of embracing Islam, it’s just epic. It’s got a tab comparing Islam and Christianity is boys are 11. And it’s like, that’s an extraordinary thing to be able to do. But if I had if I just followed the scheme of work, which just said, you know, they would never have done that. They’ve never had that opportunity they’ve never now is just one of several exams. until I give, it’s just interest. Sometimes you think, wow, that’s just isn’t that great. Another example, a girl in year eight, I taught for science and they we’ve done a unit on selective breeding and inheritance, I just said, I want you to come up, I want to tell the story of a kind of an animal or a species or a plant of their choice to Teddy to tell that story in terms of selection, natural selection, and she chose dogs. And she she made us really like a YouTube video like a like a bedroom like a YouTube but it was her and her bedroom, telling everyone about selective breeding of dogs and how they’re the same species. They’re not different. They’re but they’ve just been bred to look different. And I swear to God, I’ve never heard her speak so long in a lesson, she gave us an extended answer. She explained it brilliantly. She’s really passionate. And when she played the video class, people sort of like is that you, that’s just amazing, you know, so much. And you’ll save yourself, say, I literally thought I totally changed my perspective perception of her. Again, it’s the opportunity to do it in a special way. Now, you wouldn’t do that, we can week out. The so you have to set up you say, here’s the task. This is what quality looks like that this is this, this would be low quality, this would be high quality. So but leave some room for choices to be made. And of course, there are some students who you know, like, you’re not, if you’re struggling to just do this, it’s sort of a bedrock kind of structure for you, because you’ll need that, but he let it happen and celebrate what you get. And in my opinion, because it’s so occasional, it doesn’t even matter if everybody even does it really, it’s just that some children really took the opportunity and bring in amazing things. And then you can celebrate that look what we can do, and then the others get the idea, and then they’re more likely to do it the next time. I just think it’s just a lovely feature of a flow of lessons, that you give students that kind of opportunity to express themselves and and they rise to it.

Craig Barton 27:01
It’s lovely that time, I’ll tell you two areas I’ve made with with this in the past. So one you’ve alluded to those the PowerPoint error. So in maths, I’ve had students do a kind of each, each pair of kids was allocated a topic to do like a revision presentation on and then present it to the class. The first first time you watch, you know, first 10 minutes of the lesson is quite good because it’s fresh and novel. But by the time the seventh PowerPoint is on, you are bored out your mind, the kids are bored out your mind is a disaster waiting to happen. So that’s error number one. So I love the fact that there’s a variety of approaches, I really like that era number two, and I’m interested in your take on this is I then got bogged down with trying to assess it, I think that was a real problem. I’m thinking, Alright, if I’ve set this task, and the kids have put effort into it, there needs to be something to come out of it for the kids. So do they need a grade? Do they need a level? What am I doing here? And then it becomes incredibly difficult because you’ve got some kids doing a website, some kids doing a PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah, is assessment important here? Or is it more just that kind of the process of doing it that’s important?

Tom Sherrington 28:02
Oh, it’s definitely the process is the most important. And if you kill the process with the assessment, it kills the Spirit. Remember, it’s, you know, they’re going to do tests they’re going to do on stuff to assess their knowledge. On other ways. This is a celebration. And so you said, you affirm, you have a you have a lesson. But the way you bring it all in and you celebrate what you have, and you focus on all the students who’ve done it, not get bogged down in who hasn’t. And, and I used to be, I used to feel that was a bit of a teacher skills to kind of like make the students who hadn’t done things feel sort of bad for themselves that they weren’t part of it, you know, so they’re motivated in the future. But you can do things like success criteria, so quick, kind of like, does it. And you can get sort of peer feedback on certain things like does it communicate the knowledge and then communicate it well, and I’ve done I’ve done that sort of thing. And but you’re certainly saying, in setting up, it’s like a sort of show and tell sort of moment is like, bring it in and celebrate and will. And that’s why it’s so like you said it’s so important of a variety, it’s useful to have a few things you can look out visually like, as well as a few things that have to be presented in time. And if they’re all time, like video, or videos or PowerPoints or stand up and present, it just takes too long. So it’s great to have like, let’s all get our stuff out and see what we’ve made. So it’s a bit of a subtle skin aside or trying to engineer that diversity. It can’t work though, if it’s sort of open response in terms of the selection. So I’ve done some lovely ones with, say scientists, like you have a sort of set structure like a like, it sounds natural, but it isn’t like a Fact File on, say, a weird and wonderful creature. And we’re not doing natural selection and habitats that people bring and they found as crazy fish. And they’ve done a sort of display of it and everyone’s seeing the things that they’ve picked. And it can be about scientists and in how do you bring all this stuff into the classroom find out that famous person and their discovery and you do a little post it and we put it around the room. That sort of thing, I think is again occasional it’s not an It’s one of the 10, one of the 10. homeworks is an open response task. That’s great. Doesn’t have to It’s not like instead of doing 30, practice questions, it’s a once in a term type deal. And then it keeps it in perspective. And then you can then invest a bit of time and making good.

Craig Barton 30:21
Lovely, that’s fantastic. Well, then five absolutely brilliant tips really practical, really actionable. I love those. And before I let you go, Tom, is there anything you want to plug? Anything that you recommend listeners check out of yours. Now this this could take the length of the podcast with if you start mentioning every book that you’ve written or edited, but talk is what what what what should listeners check out?

Tom Sherrington 30:41
Well, I suppose the two things that are currently one of them is, is the walkthroughs, volume three, which is coming out in April. And I’m I’m really excited about that, not least because it’s got 20 Plus contributors, including Adam boxer has written a walkthrough on behaviour management techniques, which is front loaded behaviour management, for example. I think it’s great that there’s so many different ideas in it. And the other one, I just really enjoyed doing my own podcast with Emma Turner, who’s a fantastic primary specialist and school leader and we have a great time interviewing people. And yeah, so it’s called Mind the gap. So if you ever listen to our podcast, Mind the Gap, you’ll you’ll get some, some good discussions with some really great people. We’re interviewing Christopher such soon. He’s a great person. We interviewed Sonya Thompson and her sister, which is what we reveal in the podcast. Tracy Adams, a head and deputy head. They are sisters, which is absolutely fantastic. So So yeah, so that weird. So we have fun doing that. So if you listen to that, I think you might find that interesting.

Craig Barton 31:53
Guys. Amazing. Well, Tom Sheridan, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been absolutely brilliant.

Tom Sherrington 31:58
Thank you, Craig. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Jo Morgan’s tips:

1. Model techniques live [4 minutes 21 seconds]
2. Make sure students know whether they are right or wrong, and don’t wait until it’s too late [17 minutes 07 seconds]
3. Use calculators with students from the earliest opportunity [23 minutes 43 seconds]
4. Use visual aids, including props and online tools to bring explanations alive [41 minutes 28 seconds]
5. Don’t forget the “respond” part of responsive teaching [53 minutes 17 seconds]

Links and resources

• Jo Morgan on Twitter
• Jo’s blog
• Jo’s A Compendium Of Mathematical Methods book

Subscribe to the podcast

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

Watch the videos of Jo’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. Each episode I invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside and outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow, but hopefully something good will come out of it. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as the links, resources and audio transcriptions from each episode. Better still, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast, and others recorded by me. These video clips can be used to spark discussion between colleagues and departmental meeting, a twilight inset and cellar. Now just before we dive in today’s episode, a quick word of thanks for our sponsor. So this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by Ark maths, though Ark math is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed at maths. Art. Math is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and spaced practice on memory. Here’s how it works. Students crack open the artists app and are given a 12 question quiz. With follow up practice questions on anything they got wrong, not just straightaway. But the next day three days later a week later, and so on. Until they have it secure in long term memory. It really is fantastic. Now the more time students spend on the app, the better Ark will get to know them and what they need. With no teacher input required, you can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So check out art, maths, and remember, that’s art with a C, not a K. Right back to the show. So let’s get learning with today’s guests. The wonderful Joe Morgan. Now, spoiler alert, here are Joe’s five tips. Number one model techniques live. Number two, make sure students know whether they are right or wrong. And don’t wait until it’s too late. Tip three use calculators with students from the earliest opportunity. Tip Four use visual aids including props and online tools to bring explanations alive. And Tip Five, don’t forget the respond part of responsive teaching. Now Joe is of course a maths teacher but many of these tips will transfer no matter what subject you teach. Now remember if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot Coda UK, you’ll see I’ve timestamps each of these tips, so you can jump straight to anyone that you want to listen to first or real listen. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Enjoy the show.

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

Jo Morgan 3:11
Hi, Craig. I’m very well. Thank you. How are you?

Craig Barton 3:13
I’m very good. Thank you. Joke for listeners who don’t know, can you tell us about yourself in a sentence?

Jo Morgan 3:19
Oh, so I am a maths teacher and I blog. It was also hollett.com. And I do various other things in the maths world. I messaged him on Twitter.

Craig Barton 3:29
Nice long sentence, but I’ll give you that. All right, let’s dive in. What’s your first tip for his job?

Jo Morgan 3:35
Right. Tip number one is model technics live.

Craig Barton 3:40
Oh, okay, tell me about it.

Jo Morgan 3:44
Right now, this is something that I think all teachers need to model, we know that modelling is part of good teaching whatever subject. And it’s the live bit that I think is really important. And I’ll talk about modelling live in a mass context compared to modelling not live. But before that, I thought I’d mentioned other subjects and when modelling comes in. So I’m thinking back to Lessons I’ve observed and other subjects. And I remember once I observed a drama lesson, where the teacher kept telling the students what she wanted them to do, and at no point showed them what she wanted them to do. And then my feedback to her was that she should get up and model, the sort of technique that she wanted them to show in this drama lesson. And she said, she was a bit embarrassed. And that was like that was a to me a really key part of any teacher’s job is modelling. And I and I’ve really thought about that. I thought it’s funny that she’s embarrassed about doing the thing that she’s an expert at. And then I realised that actually, this applies in lots of other subjects because I think that some teachers and I’m not saying necessarily the word embarrassment is the right word, but some teachers are a bit anxious in the maths classroom, and perhaps in lots of other subjects about modelling live. And then so since then, I’ve sort of been really looking out for examples of good modelling and I’ve seen it in PE lessons that I’ve observed, I’ve seen no way, you could just watch a PE lesson where they’re teaching a technique. And I watched one where there, the PE teacher was teaching in cricket techniques. And he was showing the students kind of five skills that are used in cricket. And what was really good was he had some students get up to kind of do it while he directed them while the rest of the class watched. But the teacher also was modelling them as well. So he was telling the students, right, I want you to go over there, and then you’re going to do this thing. But then also the teacher got involved in in that modelling. Because the teachers, the expert, the teacher, really threw the ball really far and really showed like how to do that really well. And so I’ve seen it brilliantly in PA. And also I’ve seen live modelling really done well in art with a visualizer. But actually, this is what kind of, I guess I was a semi live modelling. Because what I’ve seen is students in art, who are being taught a technique like a very specific technique to do when I come up with it was it might have involved some kind of etchings or rubbings, or something I don’t know. But it was it was really like specific thing that they were being taught. And what the teacher had done was, she’s used the visualizer. in advance, she recorded her hands doing the whole technique. So she sort of started with a blank piece of paper, she’d done the whole thing, and showed all the technique really, really clearly. And you could just see her hands, she had recorded that. And then she left it on the loop while the students did it. And they were so smart. So that meant that the students could see exactly what they were meant to do. And they could see an actual person doing it. So not just hearing explanation, but see what to do. And then while they were working, they could just look up and reference the board and say, Oh, what did she do next? Oh, yeah, that’s what I need to do. Because it was playing on a loop. They could then look again and again. And if you keep checking that they were doing it right, and see what the,

Craig Barton 6:43
you know, the practicalities of what she used to record in Josie.

Jo Morgan 6:47
Yeah, we’ve got those visualizers, the IP ones which have got this like kind of other arm, you know what I mean? They’re kind of angle, the visualizer. So she had then just angled the visualizer, facing down onto her hands, done the work and use the camera function on the computer to record it. So it’s actually pretty straightforward stuff. And it was I think they use it a lot during lockdown, and the art teachers to recall techniques. And now it’s part of their daily practice, which is fantastic. So I know a lot of maths teachers use visualizers in their day to day lessons, and I don’t use a visualizer I use, you know, I write directly onto an interactive whiteboard. But I did use a visualizer, the other day when I was doing constructions. And when I was doing transformations. So these are two topics, which really lend themselves well to visualizers. And particularly with transformations. I wanted to show students the the rotations with tracing paper thing. And no matter how good your animation is on a whiteboard on some slides, that really is better shown with actual tracing paper, where you’re actually, you know, literally doing exactly what the students would do, and they can see your hands doing it. So I think this kind of live modelling under a visualizer is, is such a helpful technique, and particularly in lessons where there’s something practical to do. But also, you know, we know that, for example, editing work in English onto a visualizer, or in any subject with a written elements sort of showing that kind of live editing is really, really powerful. So I think visualizers are a really good tool for that. But I think all live modelling has to be done under a visualizer. Because the other side of it is the writing on the board live. And so for example, wear masks that would be solving a mask question while I’m going through the workings while the students watch, rather than clicking through the PowerPoint that’s got the steps. And I think it’s a huge difference in those two things. So my slides, and I, you know, I’ll use a slide where there’s just a question at the top, and then it’s a blank slide. So I’ve thought in advance about what example I want to model. The slides will just have the question. And then I’ve got a blank slide where I will go through the workings and write it all up. And it should look exactly how it should look in their books. And this again, was where a visualizer really helps because you could actually have an exercise book, but I think it’s so important that they see me do that rather than click, click through the next stage. I don’t think that’s as powerful. What do you think? Right?

Craig Barton 9:16
Yeah, a couple of things to say about that. So the first is on that one on the NOC clicking through, I see this a lot. Yeah. You see this whenever because there’s so many good resources. We’re obviously we’re mathematicians, so we speak about maths. There’s so many good pre prepared math resources, whether it’s white rose or whatever, where it’s all fully worked out for you all the all the examples or the working out. And if you download something off tears, often the author’s put so much time in and done all the working out for you because they want to communicate, you know, how they’re thinking and so on that there’s almost too much on the slide. And I watch a lot of lessons these days where exactly the teacher clicks, clicks, clicks, and there’s a couple of problems with that. One is if the if the child’s thinking of a slightly different method, or even if they suggest a different method, and it’s not exactly the same one that’s written on the slide, the teacher almost ends up saying, Oh, you’re absolutely right. But we’re just going to do it slightly different here. What’s going on here? I like the mantra, I’m going to get this tattooed on myself, do the maths don’t reveal the maths, I think that’s really feeling the maths is the problem. The other thing I want to say about that is, and this ties into the visualizer thing, I remember, I don’t know if you were the same job. When I first started teaching, I was PowerPoint obsessed in the sense that I wanted everything on my slides. So when you said those transformations, I used to spend hours getting the animation of the rotating tracing paper around. And so I’m thinking that that’s, that was the proper way to do it, because it looked nice on the thing, but you’re absolutely right. Like, it’s, you want to replicate as much as you can, what the kids are doing so that they can follow you doing it, and so on and so forth. And I was just thinking back to what you said about the art teacher, this, I really love this idea of recording what’s still on the visualizer and playing it back on the loop. And I guess you can certainly do that before the lesson, which is really nice, because it shows you that a go at the example yourself and so on. But you could if you are more technical than we are, or certainly you are Joe, no offence, but what you could definitely definitely do is you could record it as you’re doing it live in the class, right, and I’m sure then with a bit of button press, and you could then get that up on the screen going, you know, going on that loop so the kids could could refer to even then get a bit fancier upload it to VLE, or Google classroom or whatever. And then the kids could access that whenever they whenever they want to.

Jo Morgan 11:38
Yeah. And for people that aren’t kind of confident enough with the tech to kind of record live and then immediately get it on the screen. There are ways you can use things alongside each other like you could have, I’m gonna model it live under the visualizer. And then, while you’re doing it, I’ve got like a GIF, because you can just Google these things, you know, I got a GIF running on the screen where it’s just you know, which might not necessarily be my hands doing it, but it’s just, you know, showing it so while they’re practising, they can see it. But I just Yeah, I do think like, that’s, you’re right about that kind of, we shouldn’t just reveal step by step. Sometimes what I do, like, I download, and normally write my own stuff, but I sometimes I will download someone else’s slides. And then I want to use their examples. And I just delete all the answer bit. So I’ve now got my blank slide, I’ve got the question at the top that I want to show. But I delete all the animated examples, because I just don’t think it’s, and I know it’s really, really common practice to click through slides with the, the answers, but it’s just not as powerful as teaching themselves. And I think there is sometimes a lot of anxiety, I remember when I first started teaching a level. And I’d have worked out the questions in advance, I had them on a bit of paper in the room. And it was and I used to like I’ve been modelling on the board, and I knew how to do it. But I’d still occasion look at this paper. And I always thought that the students were judging me when I did that. And they were thinking she doesn’t know what to do next, she’s having to take a note. So I very quickly stopped doing that. Because I thought I don’t want them to think that I need that. But for a while I you know, I just lacked that confidence. I thought, well, what if I mess this up in front of them. But now I’m at the stage. And you know, it’s like when you get more experience, you kind of get that confidence where it’s like, if I mess it up in front of them, that’s actually sometimes quite a good thing, isn’t it? Because they can say, Oh, if they’re paying attention, it’s a really good way to check in and pay attention. They can say, Miss, actually, you’ve made a mistake there. And then you can go back and fix it and say, Yeah, everyone makes mistakes, and well done for spotting that. And hopefully you can all see why right? wrong there. And I’m gonna fix it. So you just need to sort of get to the point where you’re comfortable with the fact that you will occasionally make a mistake on the board. But the live modelling is a really powerful thing for students.

Craig Barton 13:37
Yeah, it’s really good. Just a couple more things on that. Yeah, I was exactly the same. When I first started particularly further maths a little bit of a bloody clue what I was doing. And that’s when if there was pre prepared slides, I was using those left, right and centre because I had much more confidence, the fact that I could then show a line and then explain the line, but it was nowhere near as powerful as me actually kind of kind of hand doing it. And, and the other thing, Joe is a you as well, you’re doing your live modelling, are you doing some kind of explaining your thinking as well, I always think that’s important. What what kind of things you do in there?

Jo Morgan 14:12
I guess. So sometimes I’ll sometimes I’ll stop between each line and ask for their ideas. And there’s sort of pros and cons of that, isn’t it? So sometimes I’ll say, right, this one, I’m going to just I’m going to model and you’re going to watch and you’re going to try and follow my thinking. And it Yeah, each day. So I won’t necessarily be I could suppose if you think about something like your techniques of silent teacher and stuff, I might just be writing down each step. Whereas then there are, there’s, you know, because we can use all these things, you know, you don’t have to just show one technique. So another way you might do it is narrating each line. So now I’m going to subtract 2x from each side, you know, that kind of thing. So there’s that. And then and then there’s the sort of technique of any ideas what I should do next. And then someone might suggest something you say, right, so now I’m going to subtract, you’re extremely excited. So yeah, there’s a kind of combination of stuff and I don’t think I stick exclusively to one side of modelling and then one lesson I might have for examples. And I might do, I might use those, like all those different techniques. In my four different examples, there might be one where I take a bit more input from the class and one where I write each step and one where I’m just writing it down. Yeah, so but I think, yeah, the, I think the thing, there’s what you said about the different methods is really interesting, because actually, on the few occasions where I have clicked through slides, sometimes I’ll say, Oh, they’ve done it differently. Do it. And and it was confusing people that so you know, and then actually, and yeah, it’s nice to, or sometimes I’ll say, right, how would how any ideas and how we do this question, someone might suggest something. And they’ll say, oh, that’s different times gonna do it. So I draw a line down the middle the board, and I say, right, so this is one method. And I write that one up. And I say, No, I’ve got another method. Now. Okay, so let me show you how I was thinking of doing it. And I’ll put it side by side. And I’ll say, look, here’s two different ways. And I don’t mind which way you do it. But it’s you can see two different perspectives. And all that stuff, you lose, if you just got a load of pre filled texts and a PowerPoint that you’re clicking through.

Craig Barton 15:57
I’ll end on this step. I was in a school the other day, I won’t say where I was watching a very experienced teacher. And they were using some pre prepared slides from a well known resource provider. And they, you could tell that I looked at him beforehand, because they were genuinely surprised when the methods were coming up on the board. They were like clicking through like, Oh, right. Okay. And then they were trying to explain, I was like, oh, okay, yeah. There we go. Right joke. Tip number two, please.

Jo Morgan 16:27
Okay, tip number two, make sure students know whether they’re right or wrong. And don’t wait until it’s too late.

Craig Barton 16:34
Oh, I like it. God, tell me more.

Jo Morgan 16:37
Okay, so, again, I’m gonna I’m gonna reference mass, but I think this probably applies in, in all subjects, most subjects, is this idea of having students do an entire chunk of practice or exercise, and they’re getting it all wrong, and they don’t know till the end. And then it’s just kind of a waste of time. So you know, there are various different ways that you can kind of deal with this. And when I, in my first job in teaching, I used to work at a Girls Grammar School, where very much me and all my colleagues had this, this technique of just putting the answers up for an exercise at the beginning, you know, so, so you could hand out your exercise, and you’d have all the answers on the board. And the students would just work it out, check. Oh, yeah, I got that one. Right. And, and that sort of works quite well, a level as well. And then I moved to a school, where immediately, I found that the students would just copy down the answers from the board. So I had to have to think more carefully about how to make sure that students were able to know immediately whether they had the understanding to carry on with the exercise. So what I tend to do now is I’ll put a task up on the board. And I’ll give them say, a minute or so to get that first question going a bit depends on the topic and how long each question takes. But say, I’ll give them a minute to get started. And I might have a little circulate around to make sure everyone’s on task. And then what I’d normally do is I’ll then return to the board, like my whiteboard. So I might have a task up on the screen. And I’ll go and I’ll go back to the whiteboard. And I might do the first question on the board. And so again, that’s me doing it live, they should be getting on with their work at that stage, but some of them might be stuck, and they might watch me do it. And then I’ll work all that out. And then I’ll have an answer at the end. And then I’ll say to them, I don’t like to interrupt them much while they’re working. So I think it’s really important for teachers to not constantly talk over students when they’re doing exercise. But I will say, right, everyone, the first answer is on the board, can you make sure you’ve got that one? Right, before you carry on with the rest of exercise, some of them might already be on Question Three by that stage. And if you’ve got it wrong, put up your hand, I’ll come and help you. And so there’s a few things there. First of all, I’ve got that whole thing modelled on the board. So what that might be is that they look at it and nice. They think, oh, actually, I can see what she has done. And I can see why I’ve got the different answer. And they might immediately be able to self correct and then go on, move on get the next one, right, oh, they might look and say, Oh, my answer is totally wrong. And I have no idea why. And then they put their hands up and I go and help them. But if you don’t do this kind of thing, if you’re not providing them with one or two early answers, then it could be that they get the first one wrong, it’s like I’m on December, we’re all gonna do the whole lot wrong. And then you’ve lost your opportunity to do the what your job is, which is to go round and help them improve. So they’re not going to make any progress. So um, so I think it’s just, you know, there are various techniques, you can provide the answers up front. Another technique is, you quite often get worksheets, where they have the answers jumbled up at the bottom or something. So students can you know, they know if they’re getting an answer that’s not at the bottom, then they know that something’s

Craig Barton 19:21
wrong. So like Question three, the answers this, it’s just as, for example,

Jo Morgan 19:25
MasterCard, have quite a lot of resources where they’ve got a whole load of questions, and then sort of, they’ll have a big chunk of answers all jumbled up. And I say to the students, it’s not a matchup activity, really, it’s an activity where they’re working out the answer, and then just check that your answers at the bottom if it is you can cross it off. And if it’s not down there, you’ve done something wrong. So that’s just another way of kind of making that letting them check as they go. But it’s just so important, isn’t it that that you that you give them the opportunity to know early on, whether they’re on the right track because otherwise you’re just wasting sort of X Sighs 1015 minutes, were getting them all wrong. Imagine they get them all wrong. And at the end, you put the answers up, you say, right, we’re going to babble pen, our answers everyone mark your answers. And then someone might cross cross, cross, cross cross, and say, right, what’s next? So what a waste of time. So I just think it’s really important to find a way of providing answers early on, which will depend on your class to have the way you do it, to make sure that they then get the help they need at the right time.

Craig Barton 20:24
I completely agree, Joe. So three, three things on this. Again, if I go back earlier on in my career, I thought the key thing was that the kids didn’t copy that that was kind of the top thing in my head. So I would always do what you described there, leave the answers till the end. And it’s only when you kind of gain in experience that you realise now, the most important thing here is that the kids are practising the right thing and developing that right fluency. And there is that trade offs of Sure some kids might try and take advantage of it, and just wait till you’ve done it on the board, and so on and so forth. But you’re gonna get far more benefit from the kids who are taking it seriously and practising it practising correctly because they’ve got access to the answers. And my second mantra of our conversation, I like the practice doesn’t make perfect practice makes permanent, I think that’s a really, really good one to to bear in mind, because it’s whatever they can to practice. And that’s what they’re going to remember, we want to make sure that’s that’s the right thing. And final thing, Joe, just on a practical sense. I love your idea that the kids kind of crack on with their work. And then after a minute or so you bang up the answer and the method of question one, two, the board making check, do you would you then if it’s let’s say a 10. Question exercise? Would you then like do the same for kind of question three, or question five a bit later on? How How would you manage that as as the exercise progresses, I

Jo Morgan 21:37
think that it really depends on how they’re getting on. So obviously, I think circulating around the room is just such a vital part of teaching. And that’s why during COVID, we really struggled with our teaching, because we couldn’t get around the room. But I think if I’m circulating around the room, and I can just see there’s like a really high level of success with the with the task, and they all kind of know what they’re doing, then I might just actually wait till the end, put all the answers at the end. But then what I always do when I put the answers up, is I say something like, so here are the answers. But I’m not 100% sure they’re all right, because you know, quite often you get to say, especially if you’ve downloaded the results. So what I want you to do is if your answer doesn’t match while on the board, just challenge it. Just say to me what you’ve got, and then after and actually it’s a really nice technique, because you’ll get some someone who’s like, they’ll put up a hand and say, I got a different answer for Question five. And I’m pretty sure mine’s right. And I’ll say right, so we’re going to do question five on the board now. And then often there’ll be other people who have got that one wrong as well. So even if I’m pretty sure the answers are all right, I’ll often say to them, if you’ve got one that differs to mine, put your hand up, and we’ll go through that one. So I’m not having to go through every single question, but I am going through one or two at the end. So I will do that in an activity if when I’m circulating, I can see a high level success. If I’m circulating around saying that there’s students that are genuinely finding, some of them will say half the cost of doing well and half the cost of making a bit of a mess of it, then I might say, I’m actually going to put up the first five answers halfway through. And if you’re getting them all wrong, I’ll come to you directly or I might gather a little group together or something. But yeah, so that really depends on how they’re getting on, I think.

Craig Barton 23:03
Perfect. Love it. Right, Joe? Tip number three, please.

Jo Morgan 23:09
Right? This is very much a maths tip. Okay, so this is used calculators, from the earliest opportunity. So day one of year seven, get your students using calculators?

Craig Barton 23:18
I’ll tell you what, let’s broaden this out a bit. Right. So I science will be loving this as well. Right? Yeah, but a geography they’ve not ruled it out.

Jo Morgan 23:26
Yeah. And that it’s interesting in science, because it’s, you know, I felt like the maths department takes spot responsibility for calculators and the school were the ones who make sure I’m in my school, perhaps not, you know, were the ones who make sure that every student has a calculator. And then that’s very different ways of doing that, depending on what kind of context your scores in. But we make sure everyone has a calculator, we make sure they bring it every day. And then science kind of piggyback off that, because I use them quite a lot. But you know, we really, we really have to ensure that calculator usage becomes really fluent, because what you end up with is and I think we’ve all seen it, if you’ve if you’ve got some experience in teaching maths, you would have seen that quite sometimes they get to their GCSE exam, and they’ve got to calculate two papers, one on calculator. So we have majority calculator work going on. And they’ll have a question like, fine. Oh, increase 210 pounds by 35% or something. And you’ll see them do like a build up method for signed funding, that’s 85%. And I got a calculator in front of them. And I could do it in a second. Because I know how to use a multiplier and they got a calculator, but they’re not reaching for their calculator. Because they’re not they’ve not they haven’t got the habit of doing that in schools where it’s not been built up as a habit since year seven. And actually, it’s something I really, I really work hard on. So in my school, every student is constant using a calculator and occasionally we’ll have a lesson where I’ll say, Look, we’re doing fractions today to calculators away, because this will normally be on the non calculator people. I need you to know how to do this without a calculator. So I won’t say if it’s the way I’ll just say you’re not using a calculator today. But other than that, like 95% of less than say Got the calculator on the desk and they’re just using it fluently. They’re picking it up to check things, they’re picking it up when they need it. And it’s and it’s just, it’s, I just think it’s my students, I’m hoping when they get to their year 11 exams will not forget, they can use their calculator, because they’re so used to using it. And obviously, they’re, they don’t use it a primary school anymore. That changed on the on the national curriculum. So now, calculators come in, in year seven, it’s massively engaging to get them using them, they love using calculators. And I get that there are really good reasons why schools can’t do or think they can’t do it. You know, there are you got people, lots of people, premium students, and you’re saying that they you know, they can’t afford calculators, in which case, there’s, you know, the head of maths needs to be going to SLT and saying, I need a big chunk of that Pupil Premium budget that has been assigned to those students exactly for this sort of thing. So I can buy a calculator, a set of calculators for every class, and they can use them in the lessons, if not at home, I think it’s really important that we our heads of maths are making sure that that people premium budget is being used appropriately. And buying calculators is a brilliant use of that budget. And there’ll be some schools where it’s not so much they can’t afford them. But the behaviour is not good enough, or they’re just there isn’t a system in place to make sure they bring them. And in which case, you just need to tackle these problems rather than ignore them that you just need to find a way of making sure that every student has a calculator at every lesson.

Craig Barton 26:24
Movie Joe have five things to say about m by COVID. That’s been scribbling them down. So the first thing is, I don’t if you find this, I find it’s the lowest achieving students who are the worst at using their calculator, and they’re the ones who need it most. So to use your example, there have a finding 35% of 200, you’ll get a student who, mentally that’s going to be a real challenge for for them to do it kind of on paper and stuff. But they’re the ones who will do it on paper, whereas they’re the ones who benefit most from using their calculator. And it always does matter when you mark a non calculator like foundation paper, the sorry, a calculator foundation paper, the amount of mental methods that have been written methods that have been used, it’s just mind. I mean,

Jo Morgan 27:07
sometimes you’ll see in a calculator paper they’ve done like long multiplication or long division at the side and got it wrong. So you think, why are you doing that? And I’d get, I’m like, I really use a calculator. But you know, and it’s like, there’s people, I think some people who have little bit precious about, well know, if they use a calculator too much they’re not going to get they’re not going to practice their arithmetic. But there’s plenty of opportunities for them to practice technique, and they do a lot of arithmetic practice at primary school. And there’s been some research recently that does show that using calculator secondary school can really assessed the broad range of maths skills, so it’s not hindering them in any way. And I think there’s a, there’s a little bit of a, it’s almost like people think that students can’t become over reliant on calculators, because then they’ll stop using their brain, but absolutely not like the calculator helps them to Oh, no, it doesn’t help them. It opens up a whole new load of maths to them. So they get to actually do the important maths and not be bogged down in all this arithmetic. That’s, you know, we we will it gets into focus on the right things if they got a calculator to hand.

Craig Barton 28:12
That’s good. Right. So that’s point 1.2. Again, just a very quick and obviously, it’s important that kids use the same calculator, right? We’ve all we’ve all seen this kids coming in with bizarre models of calculator that they’ve Grammy’s lent them or wiped out. Yeah. And then the one they get given in the exam, if they don’t have it, it’s just a completely different model. They don’t have a clue how to do it. That’s that’s obviously, it goes without saying, but this is what you’ve changed my opinion on this, Joe. I know you’re out. Calculate Trump sass. And as a result, I’m about calculate Trump Sass now. So to use, I think your fractions examples are a really interesting one. So in the past, I would never like for the whole fractions unit, the kids would have never gone anywhere near their calculators because I think, well, the whole point of fractions is you’ve got to be able to do it using read and written methods and so on. But now, even in something like addition of fractions, they would always use the calculator to check. And this goes back to what Well, there’s two things here. One, it gets them fluent on their calculator. But two, it goes back to what we were saying earlier on about having the answers available, right? Because, again, that they then have a bespoke answer at the point they’re ready, they can check on their calculator. So yeah, I can’t see an occasion where I wouldn’t want a child having a calculator in their lesson as long as I can trust them, you know, and they the message is right, that obviously, you’re not going to always be able to use this in the exam. But let’s get really fluent with this calculator. And it’s your own private chat. It’s your own private settlement. Yes, that I can only see benefits.

Jo Morgan 29:39
I agree, essentially, because I had some year 10s. Recently, we were doing some work on certs. And there was a it was a question where there were quite a lot of manipulation of certs. I did see some of them using the calculator to simplify the certs. And I said to them like I can it’s good that you know how to do that on your calculator. But obviously, this whole question would be on a non calculator exam so you just need to you need to practice the simplifying asserts And don’t use your calculator to that. But for you, because otherwise, you know, that’s not gonna, you’re not gonna know how to do it yourself. So there are times where you have to just sort of tell them to Yeah, you’ve kind of you need to have that maturity, don’t you where it’s like, yeah, I know you’ve got one on your desk, but you need to be mature enough to know that this won’t benefit you if you use it for this particular thing. But please do use it to check your answers. And it’s interesting about the fractions because I have a, there’s a test that I when I given the end of unit fractions test, we did it this year, and it was mixed in of the fraction test had another topic on it where you had to use a calculator. And so it was a pain because we had to write a fractions test where it was okay to have a calculator. So that was quite challenging. So we did things like it was a fraction division question, but it said, You must show your method in full do not use a calculator here, and that’s fine. So then we can check their workings. But there was one question on there, and I gave a one mark for it. And it was multiplying two mixed numbers. And I said, you may use a calculator for this one. And it was something like one and a third multiplied by five and two fifths or something. And as I expect, because it’s always happens, that half the class got that wrong. And even though it says use a calculator, it’s one more question. And what they’ve done wrong was they had they don’t even know I had actually told this class hadn’t I hadn’t spent I hadn’t modelled it enough, clearly, they don’t know that shift, and the fraction button gives them a mixed number. So you know, if you want to input five and two fifths and use it in a calculation, you do Shift fraction button, and it comes up with the three little boxes. If they don’t know that, then what they do is they input like five, and then they’d press the fraction button, and then they do their two fifths or whatever. And that is actually given them a five multiply by two fifths, so you get totally the wrong answer out of it. And that’s the sort of thing where it’s such a basic thing, but so many students are not told about it. So many students are not told that if you want to input a mixed number, you need to do Shift and the fraction button. And that’s

Craig Barton 31:49
probably it’s probably, it’s probably because they haven’t again, fractions is treated as, as a written Yeah, topic, not a calculator topic.

Jo Morgan 31:56
Yeah. And it’s interesting. I remember, once I took I took over class you’ve been taught Pythagoras? No, it was, as I’ve been taught area of a circle. And what I saw them doing was they weren’t using the square button. They were just doing, say, radius times radius. And it’s not that they didn’t know that it was radius squared. So they didn’t know that they could use the square button, or anything. That’s like, Come on, show them how to use a square button, like, you know, what I mean, this is, again, really good use of visualizers, to show to model those techniques. So it’s like I’m modelling an area of a circle question. And I will literally tell you what buttons, you should press in your calculator. And actually, this is another example that you said, of where you can get into the calculators to check answers. So Oh, or to practice other bits of maths. So for example, if I was teaching over circle, then I might say, right, I want your, I want your answers in terms of pi. And then I also want your answer in decimal form rounded to two decimal places. And so there, they have to know how to do 16 times pi on their calculator, which again, needs modelling because pi is ridiculously hidden in a shift button for no reason. And so you have to model that you have to model the pressing the SD button to turn into a decimal. And then you then need to round it, which is testing another math skill. And in fact, you could even do that in a lesson or rounding in your seven before they’ve ever done circles. Because you could say, right, we’re gonna do some random practice today. But we’re gonna do it by doing 16 times by pressing the button and round that number. So you can actually use that for rounding. calculators are amazing, because you get them to do a whole load of calculator stuff around the answer. And the key topic in the lesson is practice rounding. But at the same time, they’re just practising using a calculator and they’re getting really used to using them, they’ve got the habit of using them.

Craig Barton 33:40
Lovely stuff, right, final two points on this. So the first thing to say is either a bit of a theory on this, you know how, obviously the GCSE used to be one cow on one non cow paper? Yeah, it’s one cow can then to calculate papers. So a must be a nightmare, as you were saying, for for the GCSE examiners to come up with all these questions were? Well yeah, it’s hard, isn’t it to to write a calculate a question where kids are allowed to use a calculator, but also, they can’t just kind of bang it straight into the calculator? If, if that makes sense. So I think that’s a real challenge. And I think you can do a fair bit of paper two and three in the maths GCSE, if you are a bit of a whiz on your calculator. Can you do some amazing stuff on the calculators these days, right. So obviously, you can do all your tables of values stuff, for plotting straight line graphs, you can do all your quadratic formula stuff, there’s, like, when you get to a level, you can do even more stuff. So it’s adding it’s a real wow moment. When you show the kids you teach them how to do it, you know, using written methods, and then you say right now I’m going to show you how you can do this on your calculator. Now, as you say, You’re not always going to have your calculator with you for doing this. But upskilling the kids to do some of the amazing functions that you can use on the calculator, I think is a really, really nice thing to do. And when you get slick on using your calculator, it’s Incredible write some of this stuff. Yeah,

Jo Morgan 35:01
it’s and the thing is, yeah, I’m not like, I’m not massive. I’m a bit old fashioned in a way. And, you know, I like students to use calculators from early on. But I don’t like it that I don’t like it that more expensive calculators give advantages that really really annoys me. So all of our students have the 10 pound you know, the classic Casio that kind of everyone has now. But it frustrates me that they can have a graphical calculator, and it can give them huge advantages. And that really, really annoys me like, I just I just feel like it should be a level playing field. But you’re right.

Craig Barton 35:30
This whole class this old classic, either the class whiz,

Jo Morgan 35:33
isn’t that’s I call that the a level class. Where’s Yeah,

Craig Barton 35:36
yeah, I mean, even that, the stuff you can do on that is mind

Jo Morgan 35:39
blowing. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, like you say, a lot of students aren’t taught these little things. And I think that the good example is the fact that prime factorization, because I had a student, I had a group of students couple of years ago, and they were I’d have chops at year 11, absolutely flying through practices before their GCSE. And they had a question. And it said something like, it was asking them if a number was prime. And all they had to know whether a number is prime. And it was a huge number, it was something like 700, and something on there was a really big number. And they got stuck on this bit of a question. It was a big problem solving question, but they got stuck, because they didn’t know if that was prime. Now they know how to check if a number is prime. But you know, that’s going to take forever. So so that’s when I said, Well, you do know the prime factorization, but we didn’t know. And I said, Well, you can actually, you know, and then thing is I said it shows the prime factorization, but then they need the understanding to know whether that shows its prime. So you know, if they’re, if they’re putting in a number, and it’s saying, if you put in 16, and it comes up with two to the power of four, that’s clearly not a prime number, because we’ve got these factors of two. Whereas if we put in a number and to try and use that button, and it’s just coming back with the same number, that’s because it has no other factors to list. So it’s just it’s a really, it’s a really powerful part of teaching prime factorization, to get using that button and to and to look at what that tells you about numbers. But I just again, loads of students will have never seen that. And I don’t think it offers a huge advantage in having it in GCSE or a level, but it does help build understanding. And it’s just a really nice teaching tool for reasoning to do with primes.

Craig Barton 37:19
Absolutely. And my final point about calculators, yeah, this goes back to something you were saying earlier, as well, you’ve got to be able to visually show the kids the buttons that you as a teacher are pressing on the calculator. So whether you do this using an emulator, or whether you bang it onto the visualizer, it’s not enough. If I’m stood at the front, tapping, and like the kids have got different answers. And then then I’ve got to then try and figure out why they’ve got the different answers. Whereas a big old one on the board or stuck under the visualizer? It’s the key, isn’t it? Oh, absolutely.

Jo Morgan 37:48
Yeah, it’s really interesting when they come up with a different answer on the calculator. And sometimes like, it’s like, Oh, you just had to do it might be a trick question. And they had to do a close bracket or something, are they? And quite often, it’s where they haven’t squared and negative properly. And yet there’s common there’s compensate. So you can once you get experienced, you can kind of say, if they said you miss, I got a different answer. If you know what the common mistakes are, then you can say, just look at what’s on your screen now. Because that’s a good thing. These two calculators The way I still think it’s amazing that you can go back and see what they typed in. Like, you know, go use your cursor to go back look at what you typed in. Did you put brackets around that negative two squared or whatever? Yeah, so it’s that it’s that kind of thing where you get it gets the point where you can, as a teacher, you can predict where they’re going to mess up on their calculator and you can preempt that. But yeah, I absolutely agree they need to see it modelled properly. And you know, I the emulators are expensive, or you know, you can get them free if you buy if you’re going to buy calculators to sell or to give to your your group. You do get the emulators for free from Casio or used to anyway. But yeah, if you don’t have that, then absolutely a calculator onto a visualizer works wonders. But yeah, they actually, I literally say to them, check this in now, check the number on your screen. Tell me if that’s not what you’ve got. And I’ll come to you. Yeah, so when you know, we’re very, I’m very specific and like take the time to make sure that I haven’t just told them to put it in a calculator. But I’ve checked they’ve got the right thing on their screen when they’ve done that.

Craig Barton 39:15
Final word on calculators. Yeah, we’re old menu. Everybody, everybody knows that. I’m still blown away. A big game changer in the world of calculators will be was when fractions look like fractions. So when I was at school and stuff, it was a little ELS. Right? It was like, two thirds was L three. And then whenever the calculators could do fractions, I was like,

Jo Morgan 39:36
I still got students that we’ve got, you know, this was ridiculous. Our uniform supplier put calculators on the website so that when parents were buying uniform come in year six, they were like, oh, there’s a calculator on this website. We’ll buy that and it was like some helix rubbish like absolute nonsense. And so we have some students who would obviously we’ve now told the uniform supplier to get rid of that because that’s not the character to want to use. And then they join in year seven or We say right you have to have this Casio. But yeah, any of my students that have got that rubbish calculator, they when we get to fractions like there, they will say to me, what’s this on my screen? And I’ll say, I’m so sorry. You’ve got that. But yeah, I agree I am still, I’m still impressed with the I love the way that it can go. That SD bus. I don’t know what people call it. I call it the SD. Yeah, I wish I had a proper name. But why does it say? But I like the way that if your answer is a mixed number, you can convert between mixed number improper fraction and decimal version form just by pressing it. And I just love that because I say the calculators from our day. And I also the audiences were different, didn’t it? So like I used to have to check I had to put in the angle and then

Craig Barton 40:47
they were bad. Hey, yeah, yep, sometimes I just press that st button just for a bit of a laugh. Just kind of flicking between them makes me happy. And I should say, I don’t think he’ll ever going to be sponsoring this webcast. Never mind. Right, Joe? What’s your fourth tip, please

Jo Morgan 41:03
write Tip number four. use visual aids including props, images and online tools to bring explanations alive.

Craig Barton 41:11
Oh, okay. Right. Tell me more about this. So again,

Jo Morgan 41:15
I’m going to talk from a sort of masters perspective. But I think this probably applies in lots of other subjects as well, particularly, science, and well, lots of subjects, geography, all sorts of things. I remember going to see a science lesson a few years ago, and the teacher was talking about a balloon and he was talking about filling a balloon with air, and there was no balloon in the room. I just thought he was talking about filling a balloon with air. And he did not fill a balloon with air. And it’s a very, very, very simple thing to do. What I’ve done recently is I’ve taught a lot of volume and surface air, I just happened to teach it like similar topics to three year grips. And when I was teaching surface area, I found a shoe box at home. And I covered my shoe box. In paper, this took about five minutes. I’m not someone who’s going to sit at home and spend ages making props for my lessons. But I’ve covered my shoe box in paper, and I labelled the sides the faces sorry, ABCDE F. And then when I came is that right F. And then when I came in to school, I had my prop for surface area. When whenever I see a cylinder, Pringles tubes are great, I bring it into my classroom, and I have a drawer full of cylinders. And then when I’m talking about surface area of a cylinder, I’m sure lots of I’m sure hope all messages do this, I get a piece of paper and I wrap it around that cylinder. And then I unwrap it and say, hey, look, what’s this? Oh, it’s a rectangle? And what’s the length of that rectangle? You know, so I’m sure most teachers do that sort of thing. But basically, props are really, really powerful. And, and I use props alongside alongside animations, and alongside visuals. So I think these things will work together. But I do think, you know, I’m always on the lookout for things I can use as props. And sometimes they don’t work. Like I remember when I was a trainee or an amputee, I decided I wanted to make props for 3d Pythagoras. And I used I bought pipe cleaners online, old school crafting tools. And I made a cuboid out of pipe cleaners and then made that kind of space diagnosis. And I was, and it was just rubbish. I mean, it was flimsy rubbish that didn’t work at all, and no one had a clue what I’m talking about. And now I talk about the room we’re in and I talk to the students about the classroom. And I talk about the space diagonal, and I go, I literally like they think I’m crazy because I run across the room and I go and stand in that one corner. And I talk about the other corner and the top end, like sort of seven Tie Points of it not tall enough. And I talk about the space segment. So now I’m kind of using the Karlshamn as a prop. So you know, we, I once I mean I haven’t done one. So when I was doing vectors review 13. And you have to do, I can’t even remember because I’m talking so long. But I remember I once attached a bit of wool, from one corner of the room to the other to demonstrate whatever it was I was teaching, I can’t remember. But um, so I don’t I don’t do this very much. But in terms of like, things that take a bit of effort to do because I haven’t got time to do it. But there are some topics where without a prop, you’re really you’re really not helping your students with the with understanding a concept. Now, like I said, it doesn’t have to be a prop though it can be a metre ruler is a good example of a visual, like how can you teach units without for the entire lesson waving a metre ruler around because I don’t put that metre water down when I’m teaching units. I’ve In fact, I pick up the metre ruler in many, many lessons. And then I like sort of like pointing around with it. But really, I’m trying to say to the this is what a metre looks like. And I say so much. Surely they could never possibly forget what a mutable looks like because I think I’m a crazy person that’s just always say, this is a metre, don’t forget. And then things like

lining people like if you’re going to if you’re gonna talk about the concept of a median, I don’t, I don’t necessarily get students out of their seats. I don’t like doing that anymore. But it might have been the time where I lined them up. But now I might say right, I want you to visualise a line of students and we’re gonna lie Send them up in order of what they got on their last maths exam. And I said, I would never do this to you because this is cruel. But let’s imagine that I am a horrible teacher. And I’ve got the person with the lowest marks standing over here. And this person got 43% on their maths exam. And next to them, I’ve got personally got 45%, that did a bit better. I’ve got more lined up and then right over by this wall over here, this person got 100%, that’s kind of a person to really please stand against this wall. And everyone’s thinking, Oh, my gosh, she’s never going to do this issue. And then I said, I’ve got them all picturing this line of students. And then I said, right, so what’s the median score, this find the students standing in line, and it’s pitch to that student, and they’re standing in the middle, and they’re looking, they got the same amount of people over here, they’ve got the same amount people over here, and that students score is the medium. So this is an example of using it’s not even a visual because I haven’t got the students up there, but it’s a visualisation. So, so that’s one part of it. But I also mentioned online tools. And it’s really what was really interesting, Craig is that when I did my PGCE, I reckon like, the only thing they taught me on my PGCE was that I should learn to be a god expert. Like this was the one thing they said a million times, they were like, oh, and at the time, it was geometers, sketchpad and God. And obviously, now we’ve got stuff like Desmos. And we have, well, I suppose it’s autograph and what else there’s loads of stuff, there’s loads of cool tools you can use to, to do like dynamics, software that you can use to show geometry. And I have never, I mean, I know you’re a bit of an expert on these things sort of autograph or things like that. But I’ve never learned how to build things on that. And I don’t think it matters, because you can just Google it, and someone else has done it for you. So that I will Google surface area of a cylinder GeoGebra. And I find that some lovely person has made a Jabra, that where I can move a little slider along and it unwraps that on the board for me. So I would use that as well as physical prop. And I think that a lot of teachers don’t know that you can google GeoGebra. And other people have made all these amazing things. Even last week, I was teaching concrete triangles that didn’t occur to me that if you Google GeoGebra, congruent triangles, there’s some really cool stuff you can use. And basically, you can use dynamic software to explain math concepts, without having to know how to use dynamic software, because lovely people have all put it online for us. So yes, I’m talking about dynamic software, I’m talking about actual props, and I’m talking about visuals, basically anything to help our students get over, remember, and understand the concepts we’re trying to explain.

Craig Barton 47:24
I love it. Right few things about this. So I couldn’t agree couldn’t agree more with you. And God has come on leaps and bounds, right? The things that people can do on that just absolutely blows my mind. I’m exactly the same. I’m a Google GeoGebra surface, well, whatever, whatever it is, I do the same. So a couple of things there. One thing that’s great about all visuals, but particularly I think this works well with the online stuff more is you can change something and observe the effect it has you’re not fixed with this, like hand drawn diagram, this static thing on the board. But one thing I think there’s a danger of I don’t know if you agree here. So obviously, a lot of the Geogebra stuff has these sliders and stuff and things changing everywhere. I think there’s a real danger as teachers, we can just kind of just whiz things from left to right and things magic things happen on the board. And it’s just, it’s almost like watching a movie for the kids. Whereas if you say right, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to increase the length of this dimension, what impact do you predict that’s going to have Think, think about it yourself, maybe put it on a mini whiteboard or something. And now I’m going to do it, that way that they’re a bit more engaged in it, it has meaning to them, they then have an opportunity to explain it discuss. Whereas whenever there’s loads of sliders and same, the same on Desmos, when you when you do like y equals mx plus c, and then you just kind of increase the value of m things are just whizzing around without that time for the kids to just have a think what do I think’s going to happen? Now, this has actually happened? Do I understand why so? Yeah, I’ve been guilty of that in the past. And if you want to say about that, before I tell you,

Jo Morgan 48:51
Well, you’ve made me think of a good example on maths pad and these is that they’re probably God, we’ve got some of these as well. MasterCard has a great animation of exterior angles and a polygon and how if you shrink that polygon down, they all sum to 360. And I think, yeah, I’ve I’ve definitely there’s been times where I’ve just like, let’s look at the five sides, it’s got six sizes, because it keeps adding up 360. And it’s a bit too quick. So thinking about it now, based on what you’ve said, I probably would be better to say, right, so we’re going to start with this fight pentagon. And let’s, let’s watch what happens when I shrink it down and look all those angles summit 360. What should I do next? Miss, can you try six sides? What do you think might happen? So yeah, you’re right. I think I’ve been guilty of going too quickly on those things and getting them to either make a prediction or keep a record of what they’ve seen. So you know, like, five sides? Three 360. And then like, you know them actually keeping a record as you do the demonstration. It’s a good idea. Yeah.

Craig Barton 49:42
Yeah, it’s good. And particularly as you say, they’re getting the kids to say, since these What do you want me to do next? What you want me to try next? That’s always a lovely thing. Okay. So Joe wants me to try this. What do we think’s going to happen here? Write it down at the end? Yeah, really nice. And the final thing I want to say? Dodgy props. He was interesting. You mentioned the PI cleanest I’m crappy, anything creative anything like that. But it was remember when Danny Quinn came on my Mr. Biomass podcasts years and years ago, I think it might have been when I asked her what her favourite failure was. And she described and I don’t know if you’ve done this lesson, I’ve tried this and it’s a disaster. It’s when you’re teaching surface area of a sphere. And Danny describe bringing in and bringing appealing it because of course, I mean, what’s the surface area? I always forget what?

Jo Morgan 50:33
Oh, pi r squared, four pi r squared. Yeah.

Craig Barton 50:35
So the the brilliant ideas, of course, you peel this orange, and it’s gonna fit brilliantly into four circles all of it, and it never ever does. So you end up kind of dis you kind of getting the kids mind that this thing doesn’t work before they even see what the thing is. So yeah, I’m all for the props. But it’s got to be one that you’re pretty sure he’s going to convey the idea. Yeah,

Jo Morgan 50:55
especially because setter is smooth. I’ve never done that one. But I used to have a giant tennis ball, which I lost at one school, I’ve no, I don’t have it. But I bought this, you know, we shouldn’t be spending money on these things for a start. So I should not have bought giant tennis ball just to show some service. But if you look at the markings on a tennis ball, you know how it’s got that kind of it’s like, it’s like two circles that are joined together wrapped around each other, like a tennis ball is the one that shows that you could don’t see it on other types of ball. And then it basically if you unwrap those parts, you get these four circles. And so I always thought that was quite a nice way of showing it. Although again, it’s still not ideal, because it’s like a circle with a bit in the middle of another circle. And they kind of blurred together in the middle, but actually is equivalent to four four circles. But again, it’s not the perfect thing. But yeah, so I think you’re right, there are some things particularly to do with well, a sphere is a really good example of if you’re going to prove or if you’re going to show them the derivation of the surface area or volume of a sphere. I believe you need to use calculus to do that. I might be wrong. I believe that particularly. Yeah, I think I think you need to do that with much more advanced maths, and it is quite frustrating. There are some things that we can’t actually explain the why because the students haven’t done advanced enough maths. So that’s probably one of these ones, where you just have the formula, and that’s fine. And you don’t need to

Craig Barton 52:10
show them. Like an online version that you know works like you know, you can imagine that the font Cgo Jabra one demonstrates

Jo Morgan 52:18
Oh, yeah. And a good example of that is with the ones that you know, I now show for a service account, being a third of a senator, I’ve just got a couple of demonstrations. I’ve got a picture that shows it. And I’ve got a demonstration that shows it. And I am certainly not I mean, I never did this. But I always intended to somehow get hold of a cone and a cylinder that had exactly the same height and radius and fill one with either water or sand and pour it in now I’ve never done that. But I remember I used to want to do it. I just couldn’t get hold of the right equipment. And but yeah, I think that’s fine done with a with an animation. I don’t think we need to take the water in the classroom necessarily. Some people might do it really well. But I don’t think we need to kill ourselves trying to do these things.

Craig Barton 53:00
Right, Joe? Morgan? What is your fifth and final tip?

Jo Morgan 53:04
Right, tip number five, don’t forget the respond part of responsive teaching,

Craig Barton 53:10
or catchy? That’s the kind of clickbait headline I’m looking for that that’s gonna drag on tell me about this.

Jo Morgan 53:16
Right? Well, what used to be called assessment for learning, and now more commonly called responsive teaching, it comes up a lot in Lesson observations. So quite often when you’re observed, or if I go and observe someone, one of the things that often people are writing on these decimalisation forms is could be more iafl? How are you assessing what the students know? So, but when we’re talking about that, we’re often talking about how the assessment takes place. So we might be talking about are using mini whiteboards or using questioning effectively, or using I don’t know exit tickets or diagnostic questions, you know, if they’ve got iPads, you get them to do some diagnostic questions at the end, before they leave, or you circulating and looking over their shoulders. So there’s all these different techniques for assessing. But I tend to find that when people are given feedback on their on their lessons, the focus is on Did you do the assessment rather than how did you respond to the assessment that you did? And that’s the hard bit and that’s the bit that actually I think a lot of people aren’t I aren’t, I don’t know how to do so. When you see them get something wrong? How do you then on the fly, adapt your lesson, or adapt your next lesson to respond to it?

And I just I don’t think it’s happening. I don’t think it’s people are adapting their lessons as they should do it for a couple of reasons. One, I think it’s you have to be able to think on your feet and think very quickly. If you’re gonna if you see a big misconception or lesson, or you see that you’ve explained something and no one’s got a clue what you’re talking about. You have to think very quickly to think, you know, is there a What’s the other way I can explain it? What different examples can I use? How should I you know, how should I respond to the fact that half the cost is more than half the cost? I have no idea. So that’s that’s sort of in the lesson. But the other thing is, there’s this kind of fashion at the moment for we’re all talking about how, why are we all built voting our own lessons, why aren’t we using centrally planned lessons and there’s like quite a thing at the moment. And I’ve heard, I went to a talk recently with the NCTM, where they were saying, You know what, how silly the all these teachers plan their own lessons on their own What a terrible use of time. And there are parts of the argument I’ve strongly agree with. But also, if we’re going to use a centrally planned bank of lessons, where a whole unit of teaching has been planned in advance lesson by lesson that doesn’t really give us the opportunity to respond to our students. And I tweeted about this recently about how I did a lesson on scatter graphs with your aid. And I’ve got a pretty, I’ve got a pretty smart girl class of your rights, they’re really good. Like they, I can rely on them to be good at wherever I give them here, though, a good class. And they had done scatter graphs and science. And I knew they just scatter graphs and science because I had asked them in advance. And also, I had checked with the science teachers. And yet when I saw what because I was short on time, because my stitches are always short on time that I had, I was rushing topics because I spent a long time going to depth for one topic. And it left me very little time for scatter graphs, I thought I could do in two lessons, I would do one correlation and do one line of best fit, because I’ve done it before. And of course, what happened was in that very first lesson, they got the correlation thing, no problem. And then I gave them a task, where I wasn’t really testing an auto correlation, because the task said plot a scatter graph, and then write down what the correlation is. So really, the task was testing wherever they can plus a scatter graph primarily. And they just couldn’t like this scales were out of control. Crazy, awful, awful stuff. Like they had no clue how to draw graphs and axis. And the thing is that I hadn’t taught them that hadn’t modelled it. So immediately, I thought, well, that was that was a, that’s my mistake, I should never I should have assessed upfront, or I should have, I should have checked before I got started whether they could do this particular skill, because basically, I’ve just made a mess of this. So what I did was, was I scrapped my next lesson plan, which I was going to do line of best fit. I hadn’t planned it yet, though, because I don’t plan lessons a long way in advance, because I know that that’s a silly thing to do. So that’s fine hadn’t planned it. So I then when that evening, and I planned the next day’s lesson, where I got, I taught them about scale. And we looked at some scales with mistakes. And we talked about why those scales were wrong. And we talked about how to draw axes. And we practice that. And then by the end of that lesson, they were doing axes and scatter graphs much better. So I fixed the problem. Because I was responsive to what I saw in the lesson. Now, if I was teaching a very regimented pre planned series of lessons, that I wouldn’t have been able to do that unless of course I had, I was kind of allowed, I guess in some schools, they might say, Yes, we have these lessons that you have to use, but you are allowed to adapt and veer off them if you want to. So I suppose that would have been right. But you know, I think I feel like I have to defend myself in the school. As a sometimes as a member of leadership team, I get the Bible, the other men’s leadership team, I get told off for why you play why you plan your lessons in the evening, and I or why you’ve had your lessons in the afternoon, you’ve got other things that are more important to do. Why aren’t you just using other people’s lessons? Why aren’t you sharing lessons in the department? Now we do share stuff, you know, I save my stuff in a shared area, other people are welcome to use it. But the reason I’m planning my lessons the night before, is because we have mass four days a week. So I’m not gonna cover subjects where I have a nice three day gap between lessons. And I have to respond to what I saw that day. Like I can’t, you can’t just ignore what you saw in today’s lesson, and just carry on regardless, you have to respond to it. So yeah. And there’s I mean, there are there are other examples where you don’t have to, it’s not about changing the next lesson. So for example, this week, I was doing lesson on transformations with your team. And they were doing some practice on invariance, the whole lesson was about invariance. And then there was one question they got to on negative, which they had to do negative enlargement and write about which points were invariant. And like I had one hand went up first person that got to that question, I can’t remember how to do a negative enlargement. They did it in year nine, and then another hand went up. And by the time the third time went up, I stopped them all. And I said, I’m just going to model a negative enlargement question, because I can see that everyone’s forgotten how to do this. Now, I don’t like to interrupt people when they’re working on the task. But you know, that required me to adapt my lesson during the lesson, because I was responding to what I saw. So basically, there’s a couple of things. One, I do see massively the advantages of off the shelf units of lessons that are planned in advance, I definitely see their advantages to teachers that need support, and to, to say to for efficiency, but we have to make sure that if we’re doing that, that we are still allowing our teachers to be responsive to what they see in front of them and adapt those lessons massively if they need to. Because being responsive is the right thing for our students. High quality lessons are important for our students, but being responsive as part of that high quality teaching, and you lose the being responsive if you’ve planned the whole thing in advance. And then the other part of that is learning techniques to be responsive in the lesson and knowing when it’s the right time to say that I’ve got this plan and I was hoping to Up to this point in this hour, but actually halfway through, I’ve realised that I’m gonna have to scrap the second half of the lesson and divert because of what I’m seeing in front of me. I think teachers have got really good at the assessment, part of responsive teaching. But we need to do more work on the responsive part of responsive teacher.

Craig Barton 1:00:16
Lovely, that giraffe, just a few thinks about this. I think there were kind of three pillar times in a lesson where I would do kind of what I call kind of formal formative assessment. And I think the first one is probably the key that prereq Knowledge Check. If you get if I spoke about without unboxer about this, if you get that bit, right, you just save yourself a load of potential hassle going forward. And I think, if any, if teachers are going to be responsive anywhere, that’s possibly the easiest part to be responsive, because you ask this question, the prereq knowledge isn’t there. So you don’t really have a choice, you have to stop and teach that that prerequisite knowledge, I think it gets a bit more difficult when you start doing formative assessment midway through a lesson when perhaps the kids are practising a new concept that you’ve taught them. It’s quite tempting just to kind of let them kind of crack on with it and keep practising. But then if you if you stop them there and just do a bit of a sense check of where all the class are either with diagnostic questions on mini whiteboards, or whatever, it’s then sometimes quite difficult to respond there. Because sometimes it’s alright, the rest of you crack on with this. Whereas the ones who are struggling, just watch me at the board or kind of come round in a small group, but it’s something that it’s so important to do. And then that final part, as you say, whether it’s an exit ticket, or a final question at the end, that’s quite nice, because then as you say, you then have a bit of time before the next lesson to think. And it might not be scrapping the whole lesson, it might be saying that for the first 10 minutes, I’m just going to need to go back over this, and so on and so forth. Second thing was, I’ve definitely been there with this, certainly when I was much less experience, your lesson plan, it’s almost like it’s set in stone. So you’re going to I’m going to use this slide, then I’m going to use this slide and so on and so forth. I’d never put the two and two together, though, Joe, to start thinking about the pre prepared resources, which are really high quality, may actually cause teachers to be less responsive. It’s a really interesting thing, then it goes back to that story I was talking about previously with this guy was clicking through the PowerPoint, there was no way he was going to do anything apart from click Next slide, there was no way he was going to be able to respond, because then what was he going to do? He’s gonna have to close his PowerPoint down, get up on the other, it just wasn’t going to happen. So that’s really interesting that I’m a big proponent of these shared resources for workload, and also kind of lesson sequencing reasons. But yeah, I’d never put two and two together. That’s really nice that Joe Well, I like that. And the final thing, and I’m obviously ridiculously bias, but I think diagnostic questions are quite good for responsive teaching for two reasons. Well, three reasons. So one, they’re very quick to kind of ask and get the whole kids, you get a response off all the kids, whether it’s ABCDE, cards, or mini wipers, or whatever, to if the kids get it wrong, you have a sense of why they’re getting it wrong because of their choice of wrong answer. So each wrong answer will give you an insight into the specific nature of their misunderstanding. So you can then put then you’ve got if you’ve looked at the question and advance it, and you think, okay, loads of my kids are getting a going for a a is wrong. And I know why. Because I’ve looked at the question before, you then probably in a better position to have a good explanation or a demonstration or whatever. But finally, I think the most challenging thing about responding in responsive teaching, as you’ve said is, is what how you actually respond. If you’ve got half your kids, you’ve know what they’re doing. And half the kids who don’t, that’s potentially difficult. But with diagnostic questions, what I tend to do is the kids who don’t know what they’re doing, I’ve got an insight as to why so I can support them. But the kids who do know what they’re doing, I can simply say something like or one of my favourite things to say to the kids is for a diagnostic question, can you write me three more days? Three more questions, which would make each of the wrong answers, right. So I can give this like, Okay, we know D is the right answer to this question. Whilst I’m helping out the rest of the class. Can you write me a question as similar to the one that you that we’ve just seen here? So just change one thing, but make a the right answer, then change one thing, it might be the right answer. And that means that I don’t have to give out another worksheet, another activity or anything like that. They can be busy in a useful way, whilst I can help the other kids out? Because to take your right at the point you may right at the start. The reason I think teachers struggle with the responsibility responsive teaching is that that is the hard bit. That’s the hard bit and it’s it’s, it’s a lot easier when all the kids either know it, or all the kids don’t know it, when you have this split, it’s quite difficult to respond. So that’s some of the kind of things that I would do. Did you have any thoughts? If you get that position, Joe, where you have a bit of a split in the class of knowledge is tricky, isn’t it?

Jo Morgan 1:04:37
Yeah, you’re right. Because you’ve got this thing where that if the whole class is useless at something, then you either change that lesson or you change the next lesson, and you just have to teach that thing they all can’t do. But yeah, it’s if it’s one or two students, and that’s easier because you can just go to them directly, but you’re right if you’ve got half as cars getting it in half the class not that is that is really challenging. So like you say, you need to find something fun So I’m saying that it’s going to get the ones who get it doing some reasoning, while you’re still explaining or adapting your explanation for the ones who don’t get it. Because that’s the thing isn’t, it’s about adapting your explanation, like, if you shown them, like, if you’ve shown them a way of doing it, if you’ve modelled a number of examples, and they’re still not getting it, you need to model them differently, or you need to find a different explanation, or you need to find a different method. And so it takes a it takes quite a lot of experience and expertise to get it right. It’s definitely, definitely the hardest bit of teaching. And, and it’s interesting is that because you think about the other subjects and how, you know, you could have where they want students to write a paragraph. And, and, you know, like, they’re going around saying that some students are writing these amazing paragraphs, and some students are just writing nonsense. And I can imagine it’s, it’s just as hard there to sort of decide, you know, without if there’s too many students to help individually, then what are you going to do then, and you really need to minimise the amount of times you stop a class and interrupt them, particularly for those who are getting on with it. Like, it’s really hard if there’s some who are just happily working away. It’s to say, right, everyone, I can see some of you aren’t getting this. So well, pens down and allies back on me, because that’s really frustrating for those who are fine with it. So yeah, I don’t have all the answers on the best way of doing it. But I do know, that I’m really worried about, I really worry about these dis big trend at the moment for collaboration is a really good thing. And we should be collaborating, we should be being efficient. But there’s off the shelf lessons they have to be, they have to be used with caution. And they have to be really strongly emphasised that if you’re using a potentially I’ll say, one teaching departments gonna plan all the angles lessons, I can see the advantages. But it also means that if you’re delivering a series of lessons that someone else has taught, you need to have the confidence to not use that less than halfway through the lesson. If, if your class depending on what your class say, because otherwise all the assessment for learning is just a waste of time. If you’re just you know, if you’re getting into do stuff on the right boards, or you’re circulating, or you’re questioning, and and then you’re saying, Oh, they haven’t quite got this, but I need to click on to the next slide, then they might as well not have done it. So yeah, I do think it’s really, really tough. I say one more example, I use my, so my year nines. This year, they’ve done they’ve got a cast of your nines who struggle with maths. And they did a grid method last year for expanded double brackets. Early this year, I gave them a end of unit tests on some topic. And I included some retrieval questions in that. And I could see that three quarters of the class got the double bracket expansion wrong. They’ve been taught the grid method last year, they made all the common misconceptions you get with that method, particularly that filling in the last box with by adding the numbers like that’s really, really common. So then I responsive, the responsive teaching for me there from seeing that one test question that they all got wrong was a couple of months later, when I did have the opportunity to do some algebra, because algebra came up on the scheme of work. I tried showing them a different methods. So I said that you all know how you’re taught how to do the grip method, I know that some of you have not remembered how she quit method, I’m going to show you a different way of doing it. And I use the distributive method. So which was modelled very well by Chris Bolton at a recent maths conference, and I used his series of examples to model it. And it worked really well. And at the end of that series of lessons I did on that I said, right, so in year eight, you were taught a great method for expanding brackets, I’ve taught you a different method, which basically just requires expertise and single brackets to be successful, and which was really good for them because they had the expertise and single brackets. And I said, and I’ll let you decide going forward, which method you’re going to use for this topic. But yeah, I if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t spotted that a lot of the class had not coped well, with the methods they’ve been taught in your eight, then I wouldn’t have adapted my lessons for your nine. So I do think, this responsive teaching thing, it can be short term, like in the lesson, or it can be kind of one lesson to the other. Or it can even be like over a long period of time, looking at how they did in end of your assessment, or how they do in the end of unit test, and then thinking about how you’re going to do things differently next time. So there’s a whole load of responsive teaching that we all need to be thinking about. I think it’s a massively important part of what we do. And and yeah, I think sometimes, like I say in Lesson observations, the emphasis is on how are you assessing? Not how you’re responding. So yeah, we do need to think as a professional we need to get better at thinking about the best ways to respond.

Craig Barton 1:09:32
Fantastic. Joe Morgan, over to you now what are you going to plug Have you got anything you want listeners to check out here? What are we plugging?

Jo Morgan 1:09:40
Well, I wrote a book a couple years ago and it’s not selling as much as it used to so I couldn’t do it

Craig Barton 1:09:48
I got my royalties through the other day. Yeah.

Jo Morgan 1:09:51
Yesterday I got my

Craig Barton 1:09:54
new car being bought here. I can tell you

Jo Morgan 1:09:57
I’ve the only other thing that I’ve got coming up is I’m speaking at the I’m a conference in the Easter holidays and I’m doing the keynote on the first day. People can attend online for a couple of days and see my keynote. And it’s actually super cheap. But also there’s a third day which is in person and shouted upon Avon and that’s really exciting because you know, these in person conferences coming back is good times, isn’t it? Where we can actually sit in a room for the maths teachers is really nice. So yes, there’s there’s all sorts of stuff coming up. But yeah, I don’t have I don’t have any new websites to plug but I haven’t you do?

Craig Barton 1:10:30
A one day job. Well, Joe Morgan as ever, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jo Morgan 1:10:35
Thanks.

You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Adam Boxer’s tips:

1. To make sure your students are ready to practise, use mini-whiteboards [2 minutes 43 seconds]
2. To lower workload and build a better team ethic, make culture explicit [27 minutes 09 seconds]
3. To reduce “choppy time” in lessons, use a Front Loaded Means of Participation and wait for Golden Silence [43 minutes 10 seconds]
4. To make good use of data, compare to other subjects [54 minutes 53 seconds]
5. To make homework more effective, integrate it with classwork [1 hour 1 minute 03 seconds]

Links and resources

• Adam Boxer on Twitter
• Carousel Learning
• Becky Allen’s blog
• Adam Robins’ blog

Subscribe to the podcast

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

Watch the videos of Adam’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. Each episode I invite our guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try out both inside and outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation to my students, experimentation and frustration may follow. Hopefully something good will come out to them. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links, resources and audio transcriptions for each episode. Better still, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. These could be used to spark discussion between colleagues at departmental meetings at twilight inset, and so on. Anyway, enough from me, let’s get learning with today’s guests for a wonderful album boxer. Now spoiler alert here our albums five tips that he shares with me in this episode number one, to make sure your students are ready to practice. Use mini whiteboards. Tip two to lower workload and build a better team ethic make culture explicit. Number three to reduce choppy time in lessons use a front loaded means of participation. Wait for Golden silence. Tip Four to make good use of data compared to other subjects. And Tip five to make homework more effective. Integrate it with classwork go if you look at the episode description on your podcast player, or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK. You’ll see I timestamp each of the tips so you can jump straight to anyone you want to listen to first or read. Listen at your leisure. And just a warning when we go to town on tip one. The mini whiteboards 2025 minutes on that one but it’s well worth it. Anyway, enjoy the show.

Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Mr. Adam boxer to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Adam. How are you? Dinner? Oh, Craig, how are you? Very, very good. Thank you. Right, Adam? For those of us who don’t know, can you tell us a bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?

Adam Boxer 2:32
Yep. I’m head of science working at the Totteridge Academy in London and I’m the Education Director for carousel learning.

Craig Barton 2:38
Ideal fantastic stuff. Right. Let’s dive straight in. What is your first tip?

Adam Boxer 2:44
Okay, my first tip is to make sure students are ready to practice use mini whiteboards.

Craig Barton 2:50
Mini what you love a mini whiteboard.

Adam Boxer 2:52
I love mini whiteboards. Have you always loved them? No. I am in my 910 incense, something a year of teaching. And I only started using mini whiteboards about two years ago. And they are now an integral part of my practice such the extent that I don’t know how I ever taught without them. And notice that but I don’t know how I would teach if I didn’t have them. The very thoughts stresses me out

Craig Barton 3:27
what changed two years ago to make you start using them.

Adam Boxer 3:31
So I joined my school in September, when he was 21. This year, it was 20 2019. And they were always something that I had sort of wanted to use, but had never really got around to using them. And I’ve been in a school where people had mini whiteboards, but nobody used them. And I got some feedback from my boss who is the best and cleanest observer of Teaching and Learning I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. And he basically just said to me like you ask the question to the students. And you got an answer. But like, there were 25 kids in their room, you could have got 25 answers if you just use mini whiteboards. And I was like, Yeah, but they’re such a faff. And like you didn’t say this in as many words but he was basically just like, get over it and sorted out, you know, you’re a big boy, you can work it out. It’s not it’s not fast once you get used to them, figure out a way to make it work in the physical space that you’ve got. And just go for it. And I’ve never looked back. Well, can you

Craig Barton 4:31
sum sum up as easily as you can? How would you use them? So talk us through a little scenario.

Adam Boxer 4:38
So there’s a physical routine that is associated with mini whiteboards, which is again the physical space is important because different classes have different setups. I have six rows, I’ve got big room and I’ve got six rows. And each row has one basket and in the basket is our enough mini whiteboards enough pens enough rubbers for everyone on that row. And we train. So like in the first lesson when I want them, given our, you know, I explained which student is going to give them out, I explained exactly which direction the basket is gonna move down the table. I tell students, if they don’t have a pen, they don’t just go like, Oh, so I don’t have a pen, they just put their hand up and wait. And then I give the pens to another student to bring them around if there needs to be any space. And we get that down to pretty fine art. And most of my classes can now do it in less than 15 seconds in complete silence. And like one of my classes is 40 students, right? So that’s 40 million whiteboards out, within, you know, 15 seconds or so in complete silence. And

Craig Barton 5:36
can you just give me a sense of how long has it taken to get to that stage? Is that over a number of lessons of a practice? Like

Adam Boxer 5:42
two lessons? Okay, okay. Yeah. And even then, like, the first lesson is, like, 45 seconds. Yeah. So they get fast, pretty quick. And like, to be honest, I have, I have a couple of very, very tricky classes. And, you know, head of department, it’s my job to try and help the rest of department in that way. And so for some groups, or laid them out first, it takes a couple of minutes, or all get the previous class to do the grunt labour, I’ll just say that leave them any whiteboards on the desk where you are. And I just make sure they’re neat and tidy, so that when the students come in there, they’re ready so that we call it shaping the past, you just minimise the chance for any kind of disruption or conflict to start. Because it’s like, it never starts, like problematic, you know, what you’ll have is a kid will be like, Oh, I don’t have a pen. And a kid from the room front would be like, Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got one in the basket, and we’ll throw it at them. Right. And again, like, like, not not not even necessarily disruptively, right. But they’ll just chuck them a pen, and you know, it will go wrong or whatever, or the kid who receives it will make it faster before you know, you’ve just got chaos. Yeah, right. So you just, you just shaped the past. And you just avoid that happening. And yeah, some would say no, that is your responsibility to have high expectations expected that won’t happen and give a consequence of it. And like, yeah, just like put them out before and it will be fine. And you know, then people are like, Oh, well, how do you stop the kids doodling on them. So if your doodles on the mini whiteboards, I make them stay off too isn’t to clean all of the mini whiteboards, and then they don’t do it again, if a kid draws a penis, I will take the mini whiteboard and I’ll take a photo of it and email it to their mum right there. And then, like I’ve got, I’ve got all the email addresses on my phone. So like, I’ll just do it, and then they won’t do it again. And they don’t do it again. Like everybody laughs about it. And it’s funny, but they’re also like, Oh, God, that could have been me. So I’d love

Craig Barton 7:32
to see your camera roll out of on your phone. Hey, that must be

Adam Boxer 7:37
it tonnes of mini whiteboards with genitalia? No, it’s, I tend to delete them afterwards. It’s memory. You’ve got to save the memory. That’s why so so yeah, like, you just you just work out in different schools have different routines. People are like, Oh, how’d you you know, make sure every room has enough pens. And I’m like, it’s it’s like, it’s like drinking water. Yeah. Nobody ever says how do you make sure you’ve got enough drinking water for your staff? Right, like pens are on tech? Yeah, if if a teacher needs mini whiteboard, pens, they get them no questions asked. Yeah, it’s like, you know, obviously, the, you know, if you if I got across with teachers, I mean, there’s chaos in there, kids are throwing the pens all over the place. And then you have to put in a different intervention, right? But if the kids, if the teacher needs more mini whiteboard pens, because the kids are doing loads of mini whiteboard work, it would be ridiculous to say, Well, I’m not buying those. It’s like saying, No, I’m not paying for more exercise books. Yes. It would be insane. So so many whiteboard pens are basically on tap. And other budget would move around that because there’s other stuff that is less necessary. So you know, all of these practical problems, people are like, oh, there’s not the other I was that person. That yeah, it’s just can’t get over it. Because because it’s worth it.

Craig Barton 8:47
Okay, so we’ve got the whiteboards, the handout, the kids have got all the pens and everything. Just talk us through a scenario how you’d use a lot of methods, okay.

Adam Boxer 8:57
Okay, so normally, people talk about using them for checking for understanding, essentially, anytime you want to know whether or not students understand something, you use mini whiteboards, because you can gather, you know, 30 times as much information. It’s wild. When you put it like that. You asked one kid something, you get an answer, but 30 times the information is, is I don’t think people realise just how much bigger that is. Yeah, that is an astonishingly large jump. It’s, it’s it’s an order of magnitude multiplied by three. It’s, it’s crazy. Yeah. When you put it like that. I’m not talking to a mathematician. Okay, for everybody else. Yeah. An order of magnitude means multiplied by 10. Put another zero on it yet. There we go. Just just just for the punches at the back. Where was I in all of that? Realising Well, I’ve lost my you’ve got gathering loads of data, which is great. And you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a routine for it as well. So the students know that they write their answer and then they hover it so that the board facing down. And again, we explain why they want to do that as well. Because if you ask a student why they’ll say, oh, so that nobody else can copy, and then you feel nothing. Okay, well, why is copying beds? And they say, because I don’t want anyone to steal my answer. Yeah, that’s what that’s what they’d normally say. Because people, not children, people are self centred and the things about them, but like the point of mini whiteboard is in assessing that David. David said to me, you know, it’s about stealing. Stealing is So David, actually, you know, it’s not about you. Yeah, if Danny steals your answer, yeah, obviously, it’s not nice, because if stolen from you, yeah. But it also means that I can’t help with any, because like, Danny doesn’t know, then he doesn’t understand. He’s just copied your answer. And now I think he knows it. He’s like, he’s tricked me. And now like, I can’t help him yet. It’s my job to help you. And then if you’re, if you’re lying to me, and you’re saying, I understand this, when you don’t like, how do I even know? And then somebody else gets my time and you lose? So yeah, it’s not it’s not even. It’s not even in your interests. So it’s important to like, a lot of the shift in my teaching has been about moving from thinking about a class is like just a group of individuals and thinking about like, the whole class, and how do I interact with the whole class. And so many whiteboards are about building that sense that we are a class working together. And it’s about me getting information from the class and thinking about everyone in the room, and not just the student I happened to be looking at or whatever. And that’s, that’s part of the shift as well. And in a similar vein, you know, even if it wasn’t about gathering assessment data, yeah. So let’s say, let’s say I’ve got a question, which is long, right? So it’s, you know, it’s a couple of sentences. People like, oh, what’s the point in doing it a mini whiteboards? You can’t read? Everybody? Isn’t? I’m not? Yeah, I mean, I know I can’t, but at least I know that everybody’s written. Yes. So if I asked the question verbally, I’ve got I asked one key, and I know that they’ve thought about the answer. But then anything about the other 29, even if I do the most perfect cold call, you know, everything? Like I don’t know, I don’t know whether or not the other 29 are really thinking about it. Whereas when I use the menu, and whereas, and even if they’re doing independent work in their exercise book, yeah, kids are brilliant at masking, complete lack of work. So it might look to me like students are sat and working, but they could just be rewriting the questions, leaving blanks highlighting underlining the title or whatever. So when I use the mini whiteboards, then I have a much better chance that students are actually writing and thinking and doing even if I’m not going to read everyone’s and I don’t pretend to so you know, I’ll get them to show not be like, not pretend to look at everyone’s, but obviously, you know, like I said, I’ve got 40 Kids in one of my class, I can’t look at everyone’s answer, even if it is only one word. And then you’re just looking at your that your kind of target kids who give you information about the rest of the class. So your I guess your weakest third is a good bet. So you look at five or six responses there. If those kids get it, you can make an assumption that everybody else does. If those kids don’t you do a quick reteach, and then you do it, again, you’re aiming for like 80 90%. And then you can move on something along those lines broadly? And does it say yes, we

Craig Barton 13:02
do tend to use these? Is it kind of midway through an explanation? Or is it sandwich between an explanation and practice when one would be predominantly be used?

Adam Boxer 13:10
Ordinarily, in in two main parts, the first part is before an explanation in what we call a prerequisite check. So for anything that I’m teaching, there’s knowledge that the students need to have. I’ll give you a good example. Here’s something that I didn’t do well enough. I had for the first time in quite a while. Last week, I had a lesson where you know, when you finish the lesson, you’re like, right, they just didn’t get it. Just like we’re just having a right away. I want less than 100 minutes. And I’m like, we were hammering away at it for 100 minutes. I just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand. It was it’s a very weak group. I’ve talked for a long time, the year 11. And we were doing distance time graphs. Nice. Right? And my explanation was, I did a check before, so we know how to calculate speed. They understand what a distance is, they understand what time is they know what the units are all of that. So I thought and the ends by the way, they know how to like, like, understand a graph. So if I point to a point on the graph, they know right, that x equals four, y equals seven or whatever. So all of that was in place. But what I realised as the practice was ongoing, and I’m sorry, and I did that with many whiteboards, okay, yeah. Because it’s crucial for me to get information about whether or not they know this because if they don’t know it, we can’t move on. So when that is like, the purpose of the mini whiteboard at that point, is to gather information. So I gave you already two purposes. Now purpose number one was to gather information. Purpose number two is to make sure that everybody’s working. Yeah, here. I’m hitting purpose, one big time, purpose one big, big, big, big big time. Then what transpired throughout the lesson, the reason why they couldn’t, wasn’t moving them as a few of them really couldn’t get the distance time graphs was because they just struggled with basic number bonds. So seeing things like right if you Going from seven metres to 12 metres How far have you gone? And they were like 19 metres. Yeah. Right. And I’m like, no, no, what’s like, what’s the difference between 12? And seven? They were like, I don’t know what you’re saying. And the second was 12. Takeaway seven, and they’re doing it on their fingers. Right? And like that massively slows everything down. And that’s prerequisite knowledge they didn’t possess and it meant that the lesson was a failure. And that’s, that’s on me. Yeah. Like, I look in the mirror and I say, okay, my prereq check wasn’t good enough, right? Because I didn’t anticipate all of the knowledge that they needed. And I mean, big assumptions. And that’s on me. That’s not them. Yeah. Earlier Adam of five years ago would have got frustrated like how can they not know this incredibly annoying, but like, okay, they they don’t. Simple fact is they don’t and I didn’t check for it

Craig Barton 15:48
is tricky, isn’t it just just as a little interjection, they’re truly trying to get a sense of all the the full scope of prereq knowledge that kids need, it’s very easy to overlook little things like that, isn’t it? You know, stuff that kind of fits a little bit outside? It is not the obvious stuff that you check for whenever you’re thinking of, you know, yeah, look,

Adam Boxer 16:08
yeah, yeah, I don’t, I don’t want to be like, uppity about it, either. But even the obvious stuff isn’t checked for, you know, I, I’m very, I’m very lucky. You know, I worked four days in school, and my other day, I get to go to visit other schools, I get to do all sorts of things, and people send me videos of lessons. You know, I’m very lucky I, you know, there aren’t, there aren’t many science teachers who have seen as many lessons as many different schools as I have. And I consider it a blessing, like a real, like real luck and honour and a privilege and a responsibility to like, give people good feedback. And I’ve seen in, you know, in many lessons, I’ve seen retrieval practice, I’ve seen independent practice, I’ve seen good modelling, I’ve seen good check for understanding of single questioning, I’ve seen great behaviour management. Yeah, outside of my department, I have never seen a good prerequisite check. Wow, it’s, it’s, I’ve just not seen it. People don’t do it. It’s not normal. Because you put up the slides. Yeah. And you say, right, this is our learning objective, and then you launch into your explanation. Yeah, that’s what happens, right? So you describe this, we’re going to describe this, we’re gonna explain that and we’re going to evaluate or the third thing, whatever it is, and then you just like, go straight into explanation. There’s never a check. Right. And I’ve seen people check for understanding after their explanation, which is great. But it’s about doing it before, before the explanation. And it’s not something that’s common practice, even when it’s like obvious stuff. So I still don’t see it.

Craig Barton 17:32
And it’s quick to do, especially with the mini whiteboards right, it’s super fast.

Adam Boxer 17:35
Well, it can be, it’s fast to like, get that snapshot. Yeah, but the process of thinking about it before Yeah, no, of course, and also the the review, and the reteach can sometimes be long. So whereas like your do now, which is just general retrieval practice, should be fast and punchy, and quick and over and done with, you know, within 10 minutes, your prereq check could take a long time. Because, you know, if I’m, if I’m teaching distance time graph, and I realised that my kids don’t understand rate of reaction in the do now, I’m not really teaching it then and there’s a push off. Yeah, I’ll do it another time. But but if I’m about to do my distance, time graph, and I realised that students don’t understand how to plot a point on a graph, then I’ve got to do that now. And I’ve got to jettison what I was planning today. Yes. Is there’s no point. Right?

Craig Barton 18:23
Okay, so we’ve got that one key use of the mini whiteboards is that the prereq chair will be will be the other one.

Adam Boxer 18:29
So the other one is then straight after your explanation. Okay. So if you ask most people why to why you’d use mini whiteboards straight, often explanation and say, again, for assessment and checking for understanding, that is only half right. Because it is correct that that mini whiteboard is a good check for understanding and it’s a great there’s no better check for understanding. But I think there’s also something else that people don’t realise as much, which is what we call consolidation. So when students have just started to learn something new, it’s very kind of hazy in their minds isn’t for anyone. It’s loose. And if you ask them to practice straight away through after explanation, even if they understand it, in the sense that, yeah, I got that. That made sense. Yeah, they might not they might not be ready. I’ll give you a great example. Really recently. I was teaching isotopes with a year 10 class, and I’ve got I’m riffing. Now I’m really gonna have to search back and remember the exact format and weird I’d explained to them. What an isotope was. And I did a quick check for understanding. So you know, these two things isotopes. Yeah, just comparing two things next to each other, these two isotopes. He was like, yes, they’re isotopes because it got sent over protons if a number nutrients. Great. Next question, is these two isotopes? Yes, great. Fine. This is kind of a multiple choice. You type thing with a bit of a push afterwards. And then the firt I was upgrading right you guys ready to do some independent practice? Go for it. And then the first question in independent practice was substantively the same thing. But in terms of its like structure was different. So it wasn’t like, are these two isotopes? I think, if I remember correctly was making full reference to their protons, neutrons, electrons explain why these two are isotopes. Yeah. And the kids were like, it’s like, didn’t even start. They were like, I just don’t understand that I didn’t know what to do. And I’m like, but I just checked, you know, again, pass and would have been like, why just check your understanding didn’t?

The problem is that, that knowledge when it first starts, it’s so flimsy. It’s so hazy, it’s so ephemeral. And it’s so cute about you know, cute, cute See, you eat. So what you’ve just taught that like pushing it even that little bit further, it’s going to be really difficult for the students. And you know, that’s what a well crafted crafted questions it does. Right? It moves it from things I’ve really familiar with. And you know, I know that I’m talking to the doyen of variation theory, and through really slight variations, moves it to things which are further and further away. But like that, that process we call consolidation. And it’s best done on a mini whiteboards, and it’s best done as a whole class. The reason why I like doing it on a mini whiteboard is eight, because everybody writes, I don’t have a kid sitting there and be like, yeah, I get this. And then I’m doing it by questioning or whatever. And then they’ve not they’ve not yet verbalised, anything, they’ve not said anything. So the consolidate part of the consolidation, there is like the act of doing something. Yeah. You know, I look, I’ve got 30 Kids, right. And I ask a question of, say, six of them, and they all give me a great answer. Yeah, I’ve done a good check for understanding. But the other 24 haven’t had a chance to verbalise anything, they haven’t a chance to say anything, they haven’t a chance to, like write anything to get those ideas out there. And what that means is that when they then get to practice, they’re like, I don’t know what to do. And they just don’t do anything. So the mini whiteboard is super powerful, because it does both. Yeah, it lets you check for understanding, it also lets them It also makes sure that everybody is practising, but also in like a format that is that they’re not, no kid has ever stressed out. Sorry, provided you get your culture of error. Right? Kids are more happy to write something when they’re not sure on a mini whiteboard than they are in a book. Yeah, cuz the kids like, Oh, if I get it wrong in the book, I have to cross it out effort, blah, blah, blah, yes. It’s only when really it’s designed there to be like to be ephemeral and like your whole class environment is that what you’re doing at that point is you’re saying, right, we we are hesitant. We’re just getting used to this new knowledge. Yeah, let’s give it a go. Right. And there’s no, there’s no, like formal writing of the things down. And so many white was really powerful for that. And so we don’t actually talk in our department, we talk about what we call a check and consolidate. So we’re doing to within two things at once. We are both checking whether they understand and getting loads of information. But we’re also starting that process of consolidation. And that’s about everybody writes, and it’s about getting started on the independent practice. And it’s and it’s preparing the human race. And I was very, I was very careful. By the way, when I said my tip right at the beginning, I said, I’ll read it. Yeah, I said, to make sure your students are ready to practice use mini whiteboards. So I didn’t say to check your students understanding, I said, to make sure they’re ready to practice. And part of being ready to practice is checking, understanding, but part of being ready to practice also starting that process of consolidation. So they can then go and start doing questions that are, you know, a bit different to what you said. And they feel more comfortable and more confident because their knowledge has started to be solidified them concretized I guess a good way to think about the, you know, with 14 hours teaching your sermons about forces recently now showing them freebody diagrams. And I was saying, you know, I showed them a whole load of different ones. And they said, Is this a freebody? diagram? And the key was that Oh, and again, we did many Why was yes, no, yes. Bla bla bla. Great. And then I moved the slide aside. Yeah. And I just said, I drew a freebody diagram, and I said, What’s the name of this kind of a diagram? Like, alright, well hang on a second. We’ve just done loads of practice on freebody diagram, right? Why does nobody why can anybody tell me what cuz they’ve had the chance to, like, See that word. And they’ve had a chance to, like, get now. So So then, at that point, I did a call and response, right, because the right thing there is they just need to see it. And then and then after that did another example, they had to write down the word freebody diagram, right, but, but like, they’re just not ready at that point. And it’s not about checking for understanding they do understand. Yeah, because they’re just answered five or six questions correctly. They do understand, but they’re not. It’s not consolidated. Yet. Understanding is a spectrum. And you start off with like this hazy ephemeral knowledge, and then it builds and builds and builds and builds, but you’ve got to realise at the beginning, it’s flimsy. It’s strong.

Craig Barton 24:32
One bonus question on your first department before we move on. Okay, final question on mini whiteboards, Adam, I wonder if you’ve got any techniques or advice for getting reluctant staff onboard for using mini whiteboards. And the reason I ask is I saw on Twitter, I believe you were running a CPD session where you can’t use mini whiteboards by stealth. Can you talk a little bit about that if that’s all right,

Adam Boxer 24:54
yes. So. So I, again, I’m lucky and very blessed people asked me to Have a CPD and training and more and more the sessions that I deliver look more and more like my lessons. So I deliver them in the same way that I teach. So the same modelling strategies and questioning strategies, so many whiteboards, strategies. So I always ask to make sure there are many whiteboards out. Sometimes that involves a hunt around the school, normally to the maths department, by the way, but I do always ask for there to be mini whiteboards on the show, because they’re brilliant for me when I’m giving CPD because I want to check for understanding as well. And I want to be able to give people the chance to consolidate and write and practice. And I also want to model the kind of things that I do in the classroom. And basically, you know, across the course of that people sort of get it. So it wasn’t the session about mini whiteboards, but people like, you know, obviously, I talk about them. And I’m like, by the way, do you see how powerful that was, I just use a mini whiteboards, people are used to sitting in CPD like this, and just, you know, gazing into the middle distance, and I’m now kind of forcing them to be engaged in to get involved. And like it’s quite enjoyable. And I’ve always felt that there are some teachers in humans. Yeah. And so there is some humans that will never change. You asked him to do something a bit differently. Now. Notice, no, okay, fine. You know, that’s the minority. Yeah, the majority of teachers want to do a better job. And the problem is like humans are naturally predisposed to think that we’re already doing a good job. And we’re not good at taking feedback that says you can do better. So I think it’s always about showing, it’s either about proving to people that they’ve gone wrong somewhere. Or it’s about showing them that they can do better. So for example, when my boss said to me, Look, you got a you did a really good question was really good check for understand you’ve got one piece of data. Do you not think you could have collected 25? And, and like, I couldn’t sit? How can you say no to that? Yeah, it’s just like so obviously, right? And he sends me you can do better? Yeah. You say you can do more?

Craig Barton 27:07
Got it? Got it. Right. Tip two, Adam, what are we going for?

Adam Boxer 27:11
Oh, close. To here we go to lower workload and build a better team ethic make culture explicit,

Craig Barton 27:20
called Craigslist. Okay, tell me more about this.

Adam Boxer 27:24
So culture is a amorphous and difficult to define. But it’s about kind of, I guess, a shared set of values and an understanding about the way that you work together. And there are what, what happens a lot, is the the most common thing that happens is that is that teams don’t have a culture. You have teams of people who like work together. But there’s no like, the culture is like people have banded together. There’s no culture of like really supporting each other or really being alert to other people’s needs. Or going specifically out your way to know what other people’s workload stuff like that. That’s the most common thing that happens. But there’s, there’s other things that can happen that where you do have that kind of shared understanding when someone new, for example, joins the team, and it’s not like, you know, and sometimes things happen in schools where you’re like, Oh, this is working well, and you don’t see all of the work that’s gone in to make that happen to start with. I’m not doing a very good job of defining this. So I’ll give you some examples. Yeah, one example is about around accountability. Yeah, so people miss deadlines, or people make a mistake, or whatever. So we have this thing in my school called the accountability line, there’s this thing called the accountability ladder, which is basically a ladder of ways to respond to something going wrong. And the bottom is stuff like, It’s not my fault, or it’s someone else’s fault, or I didn’t know about it. Or there’s one lovely phrase, which is wait and hope. So, you know, you’ve missed the deadline or whatever, you just wait and hope that nobody notices. And all of those things are considered being below the accountability line. Being above the heritability line is saying, I’m sorry, that shouldn’t have happened. This is what I’m going to do to sort it next time. And we are department doubled in size this year. And a bunch of times early on in the year, I said, you know, I said to people, Look, I’m going to be above the accountability line here. I’m sorry, this happened, blah, blah. And people were just like this to me, and I didn’t realise but like, I’ve never adequately explained what the accountability line was. So I got the letter, we looked at the pitch together in the department meeting, I explained what it was, I explained why it’s important. I explained that you know, humans make mistakes, and that’s fine. But ignoring your mistake is a conscious and deliberate thing. And it’s crucial that the that we apologise we do that properly in our model that, you know, I apologise regularly for stuff I’ve not done. This week, literally for the Friday I do a morning duty on a Friday. For the first time this year. I missed it. I just completely clean forgot about it. And nobody noticed. Nobody knew I went to the deputy head yesterday and I Say says I said, Tom, I missed my duty on Friday. I don’t want to wait and hope. I just want to tell you that I missed the duty. Fortunately, nothing happens. There were no, I know of no fights or anything. But yeah, and I’ve set a reminder in my Outlook for every Friday, so it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, and I would have to say that I said that to anyone, like missing a duty is a safeguarding issue. It’s not a small thing. Yeah. It’s a big concern. Right. And but I could have just ignored it, and wait and hope and nobody ever would have confronted me about it. But it was a mistake, I owned it. And I would happily tell anyone that I made that mistake. And in the interest of being above the accountability line, like if you don’t have that conversation, you don’t make it clear, people will miss deadlines, and you won’t know about it. Yet, whereas as department, you know, individuals here and there do miss a deadline, but I always know about it. I’m always told it’s not. And it’s normally flagged in advance. And again, like, you know, nobody’s in trouble. Yeah, it’s just a case of, okay, how is this happened? And what do we do next? You know, there are other things as well, so so all of our communications via teams, we don’t email in our department, everything is by teams, if someone puts a message in the wrong channel. Yeah. So if there’s a message that needs to go to your eight teachers, and they put it in the general channel, yeah, that’s not how teams should be used. And it’s annoying for others. Because if they see a message in the general channel, they assume they need to read it, and then they read it, and it doesn’t actually apply to them. So if someone puts a message in the wrong channel, I will come in there, and then I won’t do it behind, you know, quietly, have a quiet word, I will comment there. And then I’ll say, I say, this should be reserved for the year, ah, no, please delete it and put it there.

And again, like, and people will do that, you know, because it’s important that everybody sees that this culture, it doesn’t arrive by accident, it’s done on purpose, we have you know, we, we have, whenever we have departmental action, we make this thing called a Trello card for is just that it’s like an action, and it says exactly what they need to do, and underneath their space to come in. And there are some things where we’ll ask for comments. So for example, if we think teaching learning, we might put a video of a teacher, and I’ll say, please put your comment with your feedback. And in the area underneath, a lot of actions don’t need a comment. And recently, a teacher put a comment under the action about what they’re done, or whatever. And I wrote back and I said, Thank you, that’s really interesting, just that, you know, you, you didn’t need to write a comment for this one. Now, I could have just ignored it. Because people would say, Oh, well, you let You’re embarrassing that person or whatever. But think about everybody else. If one person writes a comment, then the next person wants to come in, then the next person writes a comment, then the next person writes, comment before we know we wasted six people’s time with something they didn’t need to do. So that stuff like you just need to get it out. You need to be explicit, and you need to explain why. Right. So that what I just said to you about that comment, I then took to the department meeting, and I said, that’s why I said it. Because it’s about thinking about everyone. And like, obviously, you know, that comment was brilliant. Yeah, it was really, really interesting. You know, in a sense, I’m glad they wrote it, because I got to read what they were saying. But at the same time, I didn’t want anybody else to think that they had to do that. Which is why I asked, you know, which is why I said that explicitly. You know, we had a good case recently, we don’t, you know, I posted as well, one of my colleagues who doesn’t have any leadership responsibility. Last week, on a Tuesday, wherever I was, I got four emails a day. That’s it for emails. And as opposed to normally, where you get dozens of emails with things that you don’t need to see cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, if someone, anytime I get an email that I don’t need to read, that is that is made, it’s made clear that that email shouldn’t have been sent to me. And now Now, either be by me directly, or if it’s something that keeps happening or be through line management, because and it sounds like a dick move, right? People are like, Oh, how can you be so rude? And I’m like, Look, you know, it’s about workloads, right? And if it takes me 45 seconds to read your stupid email, and realise that I didn’t actually need to read it. That’s 45 seconds that I could have been helping my students. Yeah, I don’t have that time to waste. And if I’m getting 50 of these a day, it’s it’s highly problematic. But again, you make specific conscious actions to make sure that doesn’t happen. Otherwise, it just will. We have one of my one of my colleagues wanted to take a couple of kids out of a lesson to do some kind of enrichment thing. And he emailed the teachers who are outside the department PE teacher and an art teacher and said, Is it okay? If I take them out of this lesson? And he’d copied me in and I immediately messaged him, and I said, I said, I said, it’s not okay. We need to do it in a science lesson. And it was it was a time thing. So it was they were supposed to do at a certain time. I said, I said, we can’t be taking students out of other people’s lessons. And I was very clear about the reason for that. I wasn’t rude. I wasn’t you know, I was blunt, but it wasn’t rude. As I said, in many schools, there is a, you know, people are taking kids out of listeners the whole time for this trip for that trip for the other trip for this P thing to that whatever. Yeah. And before and before you know it, you know, and then you’ve got kids turning up who you thought one turning up and people like, oh, well, why didn’t you read the email that you sent four weeks ago with the name of 17 kids, we’ve all moved class since then it’s absolute chaos and pandemonium, it’s not acceptable. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating. And it ruins the flow and kind of natural harmony of what needs to happen in a good, efficient and professional school. So as I said, all of this semester, I said, look, the reason why you don’t have students coming out of your lessons, which is annoying to you, is because we don’t do stuff like that. Yeah. And if we allow things like that to happen, then it starts here and it moves to somewhere else, and then someone else is doing and someone else is doing it before, before you know it, we’ve got that chaos, which you know, from your previous school, and, and it just doesn’t help anybody in it ends up being annoying and frustrating. You’re getting dozens of emails that, you know, all of that is is conscious and deliberate and explicit. And if you don’t make it explicit, if you’re not clear about those reasons, and like, it’s not like that teacher was like, oh, Adam, you’re being so rude to me, You sent me I can’t do something. Yeah. We just rearranged it for the next day. It’s not a big deal. And they were like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. You know, when you explain to people that the most important things that you do in a school, in terms of deadlines, and making sure things work, and the things that affect other people as well. Yeah, yeah. So setting cover making sure your cover is proper. If people are like, Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be done. Like, no, yeah, this affects somebody else, it needs to be moved to the top of your list immediately. Yeah. And again, you’re explicit about stuff like that. And you’re really clear. And then you show accountability, if you fail to meet that mark. It’s, it just makes the team better. It makes everybody more efficient. It means nobody has this nonsense workloads and things that they have to do that don’t make any sense that don’t apply to them.

It’s just, it’s just better all around. And sometimes, yeah, you do have to be blunt with people and a bit on British. But they’re like, you know, and again, what you would hope is that someone would say to you, you build a culture where some would say, as I think the way you said that, to me wasn’t polite. And I say I say I’m sorry, I apologise. I know that sometimes I’m in a bit of a rush. And sometimes I can speak bluntly and to cut. I’m sorry, please, let me explain my reason, again, is that, okay? Completely different conversation. And it’s just, it just the culture and environment, the ethic, the way that everybody pitches in. Much better.

Craig Barton 37:29
I like it. So the message I’m getting here, regardless of whether people agree or not, with the kind of policies that embody this culture, the key to getting this culture is making it really explicit, be really consistent about it. And would it be the case do you think because obviously, you get these kind of whole school cultures, but can you influence it at a departmental level? Do you think regardless, it’s going on whole school?

Adam Boxer 37:52
Yeah. Like I said, you know, our department only uses teams, right? There’s no other department in the school, or department uses Trello is an organisation that nobody else uses Trello. Yeah, we have specific ways of working. The other departments don’t have, you know, folder curation? Yeah. So this is this relates to the same thing. You know, we have in our folders you go in says, he says three, year seven, you’ve got six folders, one for each unit that we teach, you open the folder, there is one file there. That’s it. And that’s the booklet for that unit. Normally, you open it up, it’s got less than one. And then it’s got six word documents. It’s got four PowerPoints with different initials, blah, blah, blah. And people like, what’s wrong with that? Like, I just, it’s just what I want to put my stuff? No, it’s, it’s wrong, because it means that if I want to know what I’m supposed to do today, I have to look through eight documents in order to figure that out. And what that means is that what you’ve done affects somebody else. So what we have is we have one file, and that’s it. There’s another folder there called archive or other and you can dump your crap there, all you like. But if people put stuff in the wrong place, or if people rename documents, and put their like initial at the end of it, or whatever, or delete it, or delete it, or delete it, it’s made very clear, they get one chance. And the first thing I did, I sent him a message and say just, you know, there’s this document there, please, could you move it? Yeah. And then the next time I delete it, and I explained again, I’ll explain why. And I said, Please, can you move it? The reason we do this is because it means that somebody logging in, goes into the folder and isn’t sure which one to use and spends valuable time trying to figure that out. And then if it happens, again, I just delete it. And I send them a message afterwards. And I say just the you know, there was this document there. And you know, like I said last time, it means that other people will get confused and it will take their time. So I’ve deleted it now. And if they want, they can email it support, and they’ll be able to recover that document. But if you there’s no, if there’s no consequence, people are going to keep doing it. And so I think we have every year at the beginning of the year, we have a couple of teachers who knew to the department and you know, make a mistake once or twice. And again, they get a very polite explanation, and then it doesn’t happen again. It doesn’t happen again. And it means that people don’t waste their time. And the same applies for people editing documents. Yeah, we’re blessed. Now with OneDrive and shared drive. That means like, you can look at version history, right? So if someone’s messed up or the margins in the document, you open the version history, you see who it was, you just got to have a quick conversation with that person and say, Look, if you’re not 100% sure about how the formatting and stuff just asked me and I help, yeah, but But look, and I’ve taken them, I say, look, you see how everything’s cut off now. And it’s moved to the wrong page, and blah, blah, I’m now going to have to go and edit that back. So that when we print it next year, it’s it all works, and all makes sense, okay? That’s why I don’t want you to do it. Okay. And again, you’re just making it clear, you’re being explicit, you’re giving people a chance, you’re telling them and then and then people don’t make that mistake.

Craig Barton 40:45
Again, it’s that interest in this. And because there’s a real dangers of that you can listen to this and think, Oh, God, he’s been petty about this. It’s such like small things. And when you think about reducing workload, you immediately think of the big things, right, you think of your marking policy and all that. But what I’m getting from you is that these small things, these are the real killers in terms of workload, because these are the things that that take 30 seconds of your time here a minute and a half of your time here. They frustrate you, they stretch you they build up, they they prevent you getting focused and cracking on with what you want to do. So eradicating these is possibly just as important as dealing with the kind of big hitters would that be fair?

Adam Boxer 41:20
Oh, 100%, if you’re a frontline teacher, and you’ve got six lessons in a day, and you’ve got a kid coming back in break for help with this, and you’ve got kids coming in lunch for detention, and then after school, you’ve got to call a couple of parents, and you’ve got to do some marking of units and assessment that you did today or whatever. If you get 30 emails on top of that, yeah, like when you’re going to find the time to do that. Right. So So either you’re gonna burn yourself out into the evening doing it, or you’re going to end up ignoring them. And there might be something important in there for you. So if you’re not, if you don’t sweat these details, you know, we like our staff surveys are always off the charts, right? Like every you know, I’m not, I’m not just saying this, we do a big anonymous survey as part of the academy chain every single year, it’s not even run by us, it’s run by an external polling agency. And like, our staff are happy, everyone is happy, we work hard, but we know that our workload is like, sort of really importantly, and all of those many things, they really do add up. And, you know, like we’ve had like, like, I’ve had really big internal debates about like, even the way that we enter data, because we’ve got like a central spreadsheet that we need to put data into, but also the MIS management information system. And I’m like, I’m like stressing out because I’m asking people to put data into two places. And it’s put it into our spreadsheet, so that can calculate the grades or whatever, and then put it into the MIS as well. It’s a Sims arbre, broomcorn, whatever it is that you use, and I’m trying to figure out a way so that we can do it so that it doesn’t involve that double entry. How long does it take a teacher to do that? Five minutes, seven minutes? Yeah, but that’s seven minutes. They could be planning an explanation. Well, that’s all you know, that’s seven minutes. They could be going home earlier to see their their family. Yeah, yeah. So so why would I take that away from them if I can protect it?

Craig Barton 43:07
Make sense? Make sense of them. Tip number three.

Adam Boxer 43:12
Tip number three, to reduce choppy time in lessons. Use a front loaded means the participation and wait for Golden silence.

Craig Barton 43:21
Now there’s a few buzzwords in choppy time loaded and golden silence. Take us through each of these.

Adam Boxer 43:29
Okay, choppy time is like noisy time. Yeah. When kids aren’t misbehaving. Yeah, but there’s noise. So for example, when they’re giving out the mini whiteboards, you say, yeah, so you want mini whiteboards to be given out. So give out the mini whiteboards. That leads to trophy time. Got it. Now, what we saw before earlier, is that that choppy time can escalate. And I had a whole thing that I used to say it was like Yoda star, you know, you there’s like, hey, it’s for suffering, suffering leads to anger leads to jealousy and jealousy. That kind of thing. It basically like noise, leads to hubbub leads to disruption leads to conflict leads to defines Nice. Yeah. And an experienced teachers know that. If you nip it early, it ends up always being better. And that little bit of hubbub and that bubble, that noise that you think is okay, very, very quickly turns into stuff that isn’t okay, and is uncontrollable. So, if you want to, like reduce that, that choppy time, you need to be clear with your instructions. Now telling people to be clear with their instructions is not good advice. Yeah. Because how would you if I said you’d be more clear? Yeah. What like enunciate would it’s like when people tell kids that you didn’t read the question or they read the question. They read the question. No, they need to read the question more carefully. Okay. How do you read more carefully Yeah, what like, you just do it slowly? Like, can you read slowly reading slowly as hard? Yeah, it’s actually work. So it’s just a nonsense. Yeah. So telling people they need to be clear is rubbish, right? So what they need to do is they need to front load their means of participation. Okay? So it means it means the participation is how you want the students to do the thing. So let’s say you’re asking a question you want hands up, you’re saying, hands up. And you’re being explicit about it. If you want them to answer them on the whiteboard, you’re saying, on your mini whiteboards, if you say if you want them to do it in silence, they’re gonna do it in silence. If you’re going to do it quietly talking to your partner, you’re going to do it quietly talking to a partner, that kind of stuff. And front loading is putting that at the beginning of your instruction. Because if you say something like, you know, everybody write down the equation for speed distance anyway. So if you say no, if we didn’t mini whiteboards is better. It’s easier if I say, Okay, on everyone’s get the mini whiteboards, but when you sit quietly, by the time I get to the but I want you to do quietly, they’ve started getting the mini whiteboards, and then noisy Yeah, and you’ve lost it because they’re not listening to you anymore. They’re focused on the mini whiteboards and then noise, hubbub, disruption, chaos, pandemonium, nuclear thermonuclear war, right. All of those can

Craig Barton 46:07
imagine the silence one’s a big one as well, right? If you don’t, already with the silence, they’re already exactly the person next to you

Adam Boxer 46:13
say things like Okay, guys, we’re going to do this next bit in complete silence God, nobody’s going to talk. Quietly. Grab your mini whiteboards. Nice. And then key, wait. And wait, that one of the most important ingredients to an instruction is the wait afterwards. Because what I see a lot is people start instruction, then they take a question from a kid over here, that’s a question and get over there. And then they start talking to someone at the bank. And then they start repeating their instruction or whatever. And before you know it, that hubbub is like, off the charts. You got some kids working some kids chatting, minutes each start circulating talking to this guy. Is that good? Yeah, it’s all about that way. Right? It’s about making sure that everyone’s on the same page. So So you didn’t mean to I wasn’t gonna do that talking completely quietly. Everyone’s going to get them any whiteboards. And then if a kid says also, I didn’t have my pen and you start walking over and you give him a pen. Anyone else not got a pen? Go over there. Go over there before you know it. Kids are talking. Yeah, because why wouldn’t they? Yeah. Okay. So we modified the instruction again, we say okay, we’re gonna we’re gonna do this completely without talking. If you find you don’t have a pen, and again, I’m not even saying them to get them in your eyeballs yet. I’m waiting for that to the end yet. If you find you don’t have a pen. You just raise your hands. I don’t want to hear any noise. I don’t hear you cooling out with speaking to anybody about you. And you just put your hand in the air. What are we going to do if we don’t have a pen, David? Very good. You know? What are you going to call out to me that you don’t have been in a perfect world and it’s just going to go up in the air. Nice and quiet. Excellent. Okay, is back up it? That weight that weight? Good, lovely. Write? Very, very quietly. And if we don’t have a pen, our hands gonna go up. We’re just gonna grab our mini whiteboards go now. And then I wait. Kids put their hand up. I’m still waiting. I go like this. Give me a thumbs up. I signed wait. Yeah, Makaton sign for wait. That’s that one. Okay. It’s funny because like I spend a lot of time in Israel In Israel. Everyone signs wait like this. You put like two units, you go like this. This is like a really common sign. That means wait. And I keep doing this. The kids are like, look at me like I’m completely mad. What is the second you start to introduce that noise? It all flips up. And there’s hubbub noise chaos, etc. So yeah, it’s about that way. And then once everyone’s got their mini whiteboards, and there’s kids who’ve got their pen up, you just quietly cool wonky towards you give them a box, and you just say, go take a pen to everyone with a hand up. Okay, rise up pay guys. Lovely. And then you can ask you a question. You know, and that just like, if you apply that to every single occasion where you give instructions, yeah, let’s say the kids are about to practice. Okay? You okay? So you’ve just done your check for and then you say, Okay, I said who? Please? Oh, here’s a really good one yet when it gets there when when you whiteboard up to show you their answer. Yeah. You have a look. You should have a note you go, okay. I don’t want anyone to rub off their answer. Put it down. Now, why does that work? It works because if you say put it down, some of them start rubbing off others is not rubbing off. You start talking some of the kids are listening to you. Some of the kids aren’t listening to you. You want them to look at their work, but they didn’t have their work. So you say get who wrote someone wrote 24? Who was it the route 24. And it was it Oh, I think it was gone. Lost it. You lost the magic, right? So you make sure you say don’t rip it off. Put it down and they don’t rub off and they put it down and then you talk through the answers and it’s okay guys. I want you now to quietly rub it off. Lovely. Next question. smooth, clean, clear, crisp every time. Kids are about start practising. Is there a guy’s eyes up please? We’ve all finished with them. Anyway, it was lovely eyes up here. Okay. I want everyone quietly to turn in their exercise book. Please do the clean page. Okay, really good. I want everyone’s getting their booklet turned to page 40 In please. Lovely. Question six. Don’t need to write out the question quietly by yourself onto questions six to 14. And even then I missed that. So it’s a question six verse I shouldn’t have done. I should have started by saying, we’re not going to write full sentences. We’re not going to read the question quietly by ourselves. I’m going to ask some questions six to 14. Compare that say to we’ve now finished with a mini whiteboards Okay, everyone, get your books and start questions. Six to 14. Yeah, chaos. Yeah. Yeah. Because some kids are squirrelling looking at the book, wherever and then like, which question was, especially chaos noise? How about blah, blah, blah. Yep.

Craig Barton 50:41
That’s good. Give me Give me the Give me this. I’ve got the lingo right here and give me that tip. One more time. Tell me Tell me though. I haven’t finished it yet. Oh, yeah. Go? Yeah, go go.

Adam Boxer 50:50
Okay, so a quiet class is not necessarily a class you can disturb with noise. Yeah. So so the, the, the example that I like to use is the register. Yeah. So let’s say your kids come in, there’s work for them. So on the board in silence, yeah. And they’ve just got quiet. And then they’re starting to work. If you call the register that then bad call. Yeah, because the I don’t 100% Have a good theory to fully explain this yet. But what I think is that people get engrossed in a task. And when they first start a task, they’re not engrossed in it. And any noise will like disturb them, know this or that or whatever. And if your kid like says, they don’t have a book or whatever, and you start having a conversation with that kids, you you add to the noise, noise, hubbub, etcetera. But once kids are like, focused, and in that task, when you then put a bit of noise in, it’s okay, it works. That point isn’t the point at which silence is reached. That’s, you know, a minute after. And I call that golden silence. Yeah, it’s the point in time at which they are engrossed in their work. And you can interrupt it just a little bit with a little bit of noise, or you register or talking to a kid or whatever. And you don’t flick that noise up. Some classes, by the way, will never reach golden silence. Yeah. And you need to keep a lid on them the whole whole time. Yeah. And classes like that. For example, if you ever you know, if a kid puts their hand up to ask a question, you start having a question with him across the room. Disaster. Yeah, you never ever do that. I mean, you should never do it anyway. But with some clauses worse than others, most classes will reach a point have gone silence which point you can like interact it a bit by going to talk to one key taking your eye off this key and you know, going a little bit of circulation over here or there, whatever. But yeah, if you go too early,

Craig Barton 52:35
you kill it. That century, you know that that answers a problem I’ve had for many years. And that’s I always used to get in trouble for taking the register too late. Like it is not the within the first five minutes of the lesson, some illegal things happen, or something I used to get told regularly.

Adam Boxer 52:48
But was on bells go off in Whitehall.

Craig Barton 52:51
Yeah, exactly. But like taking the register whilst they’re trying to get on with a do now or something. It’s just a disaster waiting to happen, because and now I haven’t heard you describe this because they’re not in that kind of deep focus state where anything for me is distracting them left, right and centre. So the perfect time to do the register, maybe like 20 minutes into the lesson whilst whilst they’re practising away, but sometimes you just can’t do that. That makes perfect sense.

Adam Boxer 53:14
It’s one of those we’re like, we’re like, once you’ve had a bit of experience in the classroom. It like you like oh, right, obviously. And, you know, things like, a kid tricks on a chair. Let’s say kids are quiet and working. Right? Yeah. Imagine two scenarios. Yeah, the same class. Yeah, they’re both quiet. They’re both working. A kid is moving to the bean to put some pencil shavings or whatever, and trips a bit on a chair. In both classes, and one class, everyone starts to turn right at like that. Yeah. In the other class, which is the same kids. People don’t even clock that’s because the second class has hit golden silence in the first class hasn’t. Yeah. And that’s like, it’s like a magic moment when you know that you’re in the clear. Yes, right. And if people tell you to break it before, then they’re wrong.

Craig Barton 54:10
That’s interesting. I like that right. So I’m gonna ask you again give give me the give me the three key phrases there. Alright,

Adam Boxer 54:15
so we had to reduce choppy time, which is that like noisy Vasily. But yet frontloaded is about it. The beginning means participation is how you want them to participate. And so like quietly or in your books, or whatever, and then go on silence is the point at which you could disturb things a little bit and there won’t be chaos. And in terms of phrases that I’ve borrowed, so means participation I’ve stolen from Douglas of choppy time isn’t a real phrase. It’s just like normal. And then front loaded and gone. silence I made up myself. Hey,

Craig Barton 54:48
go. Love it. Love it. Right. Tip number four, please.

Adam Boxer 54:55
All right, to make good use of data compared to other subjects.

Craig Barton 55:00
Yeah, tell told me about this, because and the reason I found this interesting was, it’s very easy, isn’t it just to get kind of in your own silo just focused on, in my case, the math results, and so on and so forth. So why are we bringing in other subjects?

Adam Boxer 55:13
Yeah, so So most data in schools is nonsense. And it’s used really, really badly. And the reason why is because it takes average measures and applies them to individuals. So it’s like, you know, if you have, let’s say, you’ve got a kid who’s in year nine, or whatever. And so they start schooling year seven, and they’re 110 centimetres tall. And then in year nine, they’re 160 centimetres tall. And you go to the little charts on the NHS, and it says, Well, look, you know, 11 year olds who are 110 centimetres tall, on average, end up being 170 centimetres tall. When they’re in year nine. This child is clearly too short. I mean, like, that’s obviously nonsense, right? Because there’s average measures. Yeah, on average, the kids in year seven who are x will end up being being why, you know, and that’s what all school data is. Right? All school data is, you know, secondary, secondary data. Yeah. For the, for the, for the, you’ve got 500,000 students in every cohort. In general, for the 50,000 students that come in at this particular level, they go out at that particular level. And then what we do is we say, right, well, this student was in that bracket. Why aren’t they at that level? Now? Yeah, yeah. They’re below target. Yeah. Well, it’s, you know, it’s normal. It’s natural. Yeah, don’t stress. So a lot of time, that’s a problem. And you get sent data that says, these kids are below target. Do something about it. Yeah. So so the problem is, yeah, for every kid that’s below target, there’ll be a kid who’s above target. And that’s again, normal and natural. And so it’s difficult then to figure out who the kids that you really actually like, Okay, this kids below target their target stupid. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one kid who just got a six, or four or whatever, and their target is a nine, like, yeah, it could be that I’m really shitting my job. Or it could be that their target is rubbish. It can be, of course, you can never really know. But the point is you that’s the point you can’t really know. So what what we tend to do in the department is we say, right, well, these kids are below target. Let’s see how they did in Maths and English. Right? Okay. So let’s say I’ve got a kid whose target is a six. And they got fall in science. I look at their math in English, and they got four in maths and I got four in English. Okay, I don’t care. Kids fine. Kids find targets wrong. Yep. But if I look at that kid is he got four in science got six is six, target. And he’s got six in English six in maths. Okay, what are they doing that? I’m not? Yeah, because? Look, obviously, it could be some kids are really good at English and maths and not good at science. Yeah. But in most cases, you’d expect students to be roughly in the right place and plus or minus one. Yeah, if it gets five in science and six English or math? Yeah, not that bothered. Right. But if a kid is two grades out, then I started thinking, hang on. Could I be doing something differently? That is smart use of data? Yeah. Because it kind of removes that. That natural error around the distance between where they are and their target, and says, you know, if you’ve got a kid who’s got four for you, and they’ve got seven in English and 70 mess, you’re doing something wrong. It’s not necessary. You’re doing something wrong, but you could do something differently to help that kid out more. Yeah, what what’s going on in English and maths that he’s doing fine. And he’s not in science? What’s the story here? Investigate, figure out. Yeah, don’t use that data as a stick to beat people with. But you say, what, what is going on here. And I think that’s a, I think that is a good use of data. I mentioned, some statisticians will say it’s still well dodgy. But I think in general, that’s a better route. And there will be times, you know, so we sit around and look at data like this as a department, because it’s important, if you’re entering data, you do something with it, we don’t enter a lot of data and the data that we do, and we do something with, we look at the data and we say, Look, you know, this kid is this is where they are, this is where they could be, is anything we can do different. And sometimes the teacher will be like, I don’t know what I could do differently. And I say, you know, do you think if I put them on a report to me, do you think that would help? Maybe I don’t know this, that or the other, you have that conversation. And then you tailor your response accordingly. You don’t use a stick to beat someone with and we’re not we don’t have like data targets. So we didn’t have you know, those three targets a year if your performance management or whatever. So yeah, I think that’s just like a quick, it’s not necessarily easy. It depends on your data systems, but you should be able to get someone to teach you how to do a VLOOKUP or pull out from for matrix or whatever, to figure out what they’ve got in English in minutes. But that can give you much, much, much, much, much better information than just looking at their distance from their target. That’s brilliant. That always works. works the other way around. You can have a kid who’s on their target. Yes. If a kid is His target is four, he got four in science, but he’s got eight in English and maths. Yeah. Don’t be resting on your laurels. Yeah, because it’s not good enough.

Craig Barton 1:00:13
That’s interesting. I remember a few years ago, this year 11 class and there was a lot in there. And everyone wanted him to be in their class, because he got a ridiculously low result at SATs at Key Stage two, and you could like he was going to absolutely smash his target. And he was just like, amazing. And you obviously know what a great teacher I am because he’s going to beat his target by three levels or whatever. But then you had other kids in the class who you thought I mean, their targets a joke, but you kind of dismiss that as a joke on celebrate the ones where they

Adam Boxer 1:00:43
and that kid the proof of the pudding is that kid will have been doing the same in English, math and science, etc. Yeah, so I mean, good job, Craig. Yeah, well done. But yeah, but the kid is doing better in maths and they are in science and English and history or whatever. Yeah, that’s the kid to celebrate. Yeah, not to celebrate that kid but to say I’ve done a good job by this guy.

Craig Barton 1:01:03
That’s good. Love it. Final tip of an item. What is it

Adam Boxer 1:01:07
to make homework more effective? Integrate it with classwork?

Craig Barton 1:01:12
This intrigues me Go on, tell me what you mean by this.

Adam Boxer 1:01:16
So I said at the beginning that I am the Education Director, carousel learning, which is not on my platform. It’s it’s an online quizzing platform. And I’ve been thinking very, very hard for for about a year and a half now about homework. And I think the majority of homework doesn’t work. Yeah, I think most schools, most departments, most teachers are like, Yeah, I set homework, but like, it’s just nothing. And I think that I think there’s, there’s a few reasons for that. I think the two main reasons are accountability and value. So accountability is where the students are held to account for their homework performance. So and that can range from a kid who doesn’t do their homework to they get a consequence. Is there a follow up? Normally? No, there is no. And but it can range up to the quality of their homework as well. Yeah, kids hands up, you’ve set them 10 questions at home? They’ve done the first two or so I didn’t understand. Yeah, the rest. Yeah, I mean, what do we need to understand? Well, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t do question three, and I’m all about question four. And I would you mean, I can do question three. What my question, right, so So that happens a lot. There’s accountability there. But that blog also, like, who’s gonna give attention for that? Yeah, because, like, they’ve done homework, they’re just gonna, they’re just gonna resent you never give it attention to a kid who wants it’s never it never has a strong words yet. But giving it attention to a kid who doesn’t understand what they’ve done is wrong. who disagrees with you about whether what they’ve done is wrong? It’s, it’s good, in a sense, because the detention sends a signal to everybody else that this behaviour is unacceptable, right? But for that kid, it’s clearly not going to do anything. It’s just going to breed resentment. Yeah. So if a kid like, like genuine doesn’t get what I just didn’t understand, like, so which one from my life? Yeah, I didn’t understand it. Not putting them in detention. But what that means is that the accountability bar is low. Yeah, there’s no accountability. There’s also value that I think a lot of kids just don’t see the point. They think that homework is something that teachers do, because it’s part of their job, and their parents would complain, and there’s a policy and it just needs to get done. And, and I think both these things are a big problem. And one of the ways to kill those two birds with one stone is about integrating the homework with the classwork. So for example, if you use a do now that’s based off questions from the homework, yeah. And you’re explicit about the fact that you’re going to do a due now based on the homework, you’re explicit about the fact that I’m doing this because the homeworks important, and I want you to see, if you do the homework properly, you do better in class, and I’d be so proud of you, because you’re turned into a brilliant scientist. So what you’re doing is you’re showing them the value by feeding it into class. Right? And you then also raising cans ability because what you’re saying this is key, if you say, if you’re saying it’s okay that you’re going to take questions from the homework and put them in to do now, if they get to do now wrong. It shows whatever they did. They didn’t do the homework properly. proofs in the pudding it? Yeah. You said, Look, guy. Yeah, you’re telling me you did the homework shoot fine. Again. Yeah. But like, you couldn’t do the due now. Something’s going wrong. I’m going to hold you to account for it. This is what we’re going to do. Doesn’t necessarily mean a detention. It might say you might say, you know, we keep kids behind we give them a laptop, we say show me how you do your homework. Let me help. Let me help. Ya, I want you to do better in class. That’s I give you the homework so that you can do better in glasses cleaning, not working. Let me help. Let me see what you’re doing. You do all of that through integration. And you know, I’ve given you a five minute precis like I could spend hours talking about how to do this, you know, we’ve just written a document for carrousel good retrieving better, which goes into this, you know, quite deeply we give webinars about this kind of stuff, because it’s difficult to get right But when you do, you are bawling because the kids like get that the homework and the classwork a one, and that they kind of mutually reinforce each other.

Craig Barton 1:05:11
So a couple of quick couple or just questions or points on this, I think it’s the first one that that kids not knowing the purpose of homework is it is a massive one. And I’m a bit obsessed with this, even like the do now kids not knowing the why we bother with the 10 hour. You know, it’s it’s a big one, isn’t it? Because we kind of assume that they they know, or they’ll take it seriously, but unless they know the purpose of it, it’s it’s it’s really problematic. And my question was, though, does this only work if the kids so imagine you’re a child and you’ve you’ve tried your home? You’ve genuinely tried to home? Can you genuinely got stuck on it? There’s got to be kind of an avenue for them to go down to get some support. I assume that that’s the kind of a prerequisite for this to work.

Adam Boxer 1:05:51
Yeah, but But what but I would expect if a kid turns up and they’ve not done homework, because they didn’t understand it, and I didn’t get an email. I’ll hold them to account.

Craig Barton 1:06:01
Right. Okay. Okay.

Adam Boxer 1:06:03
It’s not it’s not good enough.

Craig Barton 1:06:04
Yeah, yeah. That’s good. Okay. And if you see results from this, this seemed to work in terms of the kids taking the homeworks. More seems this participation rate of homework gone up? And oh, yeah, definitely.

Adam Boxer 1:06:15
Yeah. So we set one homework, where each class gets at least one quiz a week, and I get 95% completion, and to good standards. It took a long time to, you know, months, months, weeks, off a term, maybe a bit longer. And and if

Craig Barton 1:06:39
a teacher is looking to implement this, well, what are some of the key things they’ve got to get right as the message into kids, I assume is going to be fairly high up the list?

Adam Boxer 1:06:46
Yeah, look, it’s difficult. And again, you know, I’m not here to advertise carousel, but you’re, you’re limited by platform as well. If your homework is just, you know, do questions online, or whatever it is do questions from a book booklet, or wherever and you’re not going to be checking them, you’re just gonna be going over them in class, a lot of kids are gonna slip through your net, it’s inevitable. So, you know, we, we built garrison in certain ways, so that it would be easier for people to do stuff like this. So you can look at every student’s response and mark them all. You know, you can mark a 15 question quiz from 30 Kids in less than five minutes. Right, then automatically gives you a display that you can use in class as a do now. It allows you to identify questions that a lot of students found difficult, identify misconceptions, you can mark them in front of the kids, you can even if a homework is not due, you can use the questions as you’re doing now. You put them up on your whiteboard, it allows you to generate quiz from them. So we built it so that you could do that. But if you’ve got a fire and forget programme, and and by the way, even really good programmes, yeah. Which are adaptive and have really good questions and supporting materials and videos and stuff. There’s normally there’s no feed through into class, other than you’ve done it, you’ve done it you’ve not done Yes, yeah. And it doesn’t you know that that’s that that’s that’s going to put a limit. It’s going to put a limit on you.

Craig Barton 1:08:09
Okay, so it’s it’s not just the fact that the kids can get the kind of automated feedback or whatever know whether they’re right or wrong. It’s the key is this feed through into class? That’s the kind of make or break for this.

Adam Boxer 1:08:19
Yeah, that is my opinion. And my experience

Craig Barton 1:08:24
had that has been absolutely fantastic. And now it’s over to you. Is there anything you would recommend our listeners check out on I’ll put a link to this in the show notes.

Adam Boxer 1:08:34
Yes, Teach Like a Champion, which I always recommend. What things did we talk about? We spoke about mini whiteboards. Yeah, Teach Like a Champion is great. Team ethic stuff. There’s some cool books that I’ve heard of that I’ve never read. Radical candour is very I’ve heard about I’ve never read that as well. I’ve never read it sounds smashing. Yeah. data you need to read Becky Allen’s blogs for sure. And also Adam Robbins has a really good blog about target grades as has been Newmark has really good blog about target grades, and then homework and classwork. Look, you’re not here to hawk my wares. If you go on to the carousel learning blog. All of the blogs that I’ve written, I’ve aimed to be useful for everyone, even if you’re not a carousel user. And there aren’t a lot of blogs that I’ve seen about homework and how to get homework to work. It just doesn’t seem to be a particularly well developed area. Everybody be talking about curriculum and cognitive science. And I was like, yeah, how do we actually get kids to do their work?

Craig Barton 1:09:40
Well unbox it. That’s been absolutely fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us on the tips for teachers podcast.

Adam Boxer 1:09:47
My pleasure. Great. Thanks for having me.