You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Daisy Christodoulou’s tips:
- Review every lesson plan in terms of what the student is thinking about (02: 58)
- Ask a question at the end of every lesson that every student should be able to get right (11:22)
- Don’t do written comments (17:36)
- Use examples, not definitions, when teaching & assessing (29:24)
- Get your pupils to spell their name backwards (45:20)
Links and resources
- On Twitter, Dasiy is: @daisychristo
- No More Marking can be found at: nomoremarking.com
- Daisy’s books are: 7 Myths about Education, Making Good Progress and Teachers v Tech
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Watch the videos from Daisy Christodoulou:
Podcast transcript:
Craig Barton 0:01
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast the show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. This episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to former English teacher and now author and the queen of comparative judgement. It is of course, Daisy Christodoulou. And you’ll be not surprised at all to hear that this is a bit of a classic couple of things to tell you about before we get cracking. Firstly, sponsor slots for the tips of teachers podcasts are now open. So if you want to let the world’s most interesting listeners know about your book, product or event, just drop me an email. You can view videos of all of Daisy’s tips, plus the tips of my other guests on the tips for teachers website. These are great to share in a departmental meeting or a training session. You can also sign up for the tips for teachers newsletter to receive a tip in your inbox most Monday mornings to try with your classes in the coming week. And finally, just one little request for me and if you could do it now, that’d be amazing. Just hit pause on the podcast and just give us a quick review. Ideally, a positive one on your podcast player of choice. It really does make a difference. Thanks so much. Right back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guests. The wonderful Daisy Christodoulou. Spoiler alert, here are Daisy’s five tips. Tip one, review each lesson plan in terms of what the student is thinking about. Number two, ask a question at the end of every lesson that every student should be able to get right. Tip three, ready for this one. Don’t do written comments. Tip Four use examples, not definitions when teaching and assessing. And finally, Tip Five, get your pupils to spell their name backwards. Now I think Daisy’s lost the plot a little bit when she gets to Tip five but just stick with it. It’ll let’s just go with it. It’ll be fine. All right. 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 how it’s time stamped each of the tips. So you can jump straight to anyone you want to listen to first of all universal. Enjoy the show.
Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Daisy Christodoulou to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Daisy, how are you? Hi, Craig. I’m well. Thanks. Fantastic. And for the benefit of listeners, can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?
Daisy Christodoulou 2:13
Yeah, sure. I’m the Director of Education at no more marketing. We provide online comparative judgement schools for 1000s of schools in lots of different countries.
Craig Barton 2:22
Fantastic. All right, let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one for us today?
Daisy Christodoulou 2:27
So tip number one are shamelessly stolen from it from Professor Dan Willingham. And it is let me make sure I get it right. It is review every lesson plan in terms of what the students are thinking about. And Dan Willingham says that he’s professor of cognitive science, I think at the University of Virginia. And he’s what he tried to do is tell you what cognitive science can what useful advice cognitive science can give teachers. So what do teachers need to know about how the mind works? And he said, this is actually one of the most useful pieces of advice of advice, given everything we know about cognitive science. So it might sound really simple, it might sound really basic, I’ll say it again, review every lesson plan in terms of what the students are thinking about. You might think that’s really obvious. That’s just really, really silly. But first of all, I’ll explain why it’s important. And then I’ll explain this is something that I did with my own teaching, I’ll explain kind of the difference simply. So why is this important? Why is it important to think about what the students are thinking about? Well, it’s important because it’s also a long term memory, we know that long term memory is really important. And we know that all of the higher order thinking skills that we’re interested in developing in our students depend on the knowledge we have stored in long term memory. And sometimes as adults, we can forget this. But just think of a simple example, you’re just reading the newspaper in the morning, you know, you’re online, you’re flicking through in a few articles on your phone. And just to make sense of a typical article in a in a in a in a kind of a typical newspaper, the amount of background knowledge you have to bring to bear the amount of vocabulary you have to know, just to make sense of that. There’s a lot of knowledge going on there. And as adults, we do all that automatically. We take it for granted. So long term memory is really important. We need stuff in long term memory. So the really key question for teaching then becomes how do we get stuff into long term memory? How do we get students to actually remember things, and willing and makes the point that the brain or that they get what we what happens with the mind with a brain, we remember what we think about, we don’t remember what we want to remember. It’s not that we say to ourselves, I’ve really got to remember this, make sure I remember it. And that works. We all know, that doesn’t work. So the brain kind of makes a bet if I have to think about something a lot, it’s worthwhile hanging on to it, remembering it. And that’s often why there’s a lot of things in life that you never really wanted to remember that have stuck in your mind. Perhaps things that you just, you know, things that are pinned on the wall in front of you for like, I don’t know, you know, in a classroom or on a long bus journey, you know, particular advert, you know, those have been kind of sticking the mind because you’re thinking about them a lot. So that’s, that is therefore where William says review every lesson plan in terms of what the students are think came about, because what they think about is what they’ll remember. And remembering is really important, like remembering is learning in a lot of ways. So when I tried, I tried this out, I remember reading William for the first time thinking Dre, I’m gonna give this a go. And I went through some lesson plans. And I was like, what will the students be thinking about each point? Now obviously, the tricky thing tricky for you is, you don’t always know what the thinking about a lot of them are really daydreaming about dinner. But to the best extent what, what is the aim of what am I trying to get to think about. And what I realised with a lot of my lessons is that there were a lot of maybe quite complicated activities I was trying to set up that involve like a lot of admin and logistics, and a lot of explanation. And so the students were thinking about all of those and trying to work those out, and not necessarily about the content I was teaching. And, and so what it made me do is think, well, how can I simplify this and just strip it back a bit more, and get to a point where we’re just getting to thinking about, you know, the novel that I’m teaching or, you know, whichever grammatical concept, rather than, you know, a complicated worksheet, or kind of jigsaw, some kind of activity or, you know, so keeping it really simple. And then following on from that, I think, then it leads you to think that having a classroom where you do similar activities, all the time is good, because then it reduces the amount of time you have to spend explaining them. So if you particularly like think pair share, and that’s something you think is really powerful, then don’t just do it once or twice actually make it a routine, because then you haven’t got to explain it as much. So that was the impact out of my teaching. I mean, the other thing Willingham says is the example he gives in his book is a teacher who took his class to the computer lab to research the Spanish Civil War. And he said, within minutes, the assignment it went from research to Spanish Civil War to creating PowerPoint slides with cool animations of Spain, in the Spanish flag colours, right. And so that’s the other issue is that a lot of the time you set up a learning objective research or Spanish Civil War? And what are the students thinking about? They’re thinking about esoteric features of PowerPoint. So I think there’s a number of different ways in which that a piece of advice is really powerful. And it’s one of those it seems really simple, but I think give it a go. And it’s really, really interesting.
Craig Barton 7:10
I love it Daisy, one of one of my all time favourites. So I’m really pleased to bring all this up. So two quick observations from me, then one follow up question. So the first is I love the the idea of these kinds of common activity structures like think pair share something that you’re going to use, use them several times, so that you don’t have to think about and much and the kids don’t have to think about them as much. So you can dive straight into thinking about the actual content and the learning, I think is a really, really important one. And the second one just to reflect on a couple of ways this has gone wrong in my teaching. So in one of my first book, I talked about switch roles, I tried to teach fractions via the medium of Swiss rolls, it was an absolute disaster. And four years later, the kids remember the Swiss rolls, but not a thing about the content of the lesson. And Danny Quinn has a great example of this as well, where she tried to teach surface area of a sphere using an orange, and you start peeling the orange and if you peel it, you can lay it out in the exact number of circles that you need. But one it never works. And to the kids just remember all the orange peel and you know juice fine in their eyes and blind in them and left, right and centre. So there’s loads of examples of this. And my follow up question, though, Daisy, is, is this a good idea or a bad idea? Putting it into lesson plans? Because you never see him in lesson plans. It’s all about, you know, what’s the activity? Maybe what’s the teacher doing? Is it worth if you have to do a lesson plan bangin in there, what you hope the students will be thinking about? Is it worth making that explicit? Or do you think that’s that’s a step too far?
Daisy Christodoulou 8:36
I kind of think it depends. I think when I tried to teach, you know, the lesson plan had to be 15 pages long. I think everyone’s just stepped back a bit on that, and quite rightly. So I actually wouldn’t want to say anything that is going to like add to the bureaucracy. And add to that because I know how things can get out of hand with lesson plans. So I wouldn’t want to say that I would say you know, you want it more like a checklist, you know, the way like I don’t know, I guess like pilots have checklists. So I think that when you talk about the oranges there, there’s a really interesting point with that, that I do think the principle I just said review every lesson plan in terms of what the students are thinking about the slight tension that there is with that is the other another thing William talks about is we learn new things by connecting them to old things. And so this is why analogy is so important. And if you think about it, that’s a little bit intention with review every lesson plan in terms what you’re thinking about, because you want the student to think about what you want to teach them. But on the other hand, to teach you something new, you need to activate the prior learning and connect with something previous and often with subjects like maths and, and science, you’re often doing that kind of concrete to abstract and the fractions up by Swiss rolls or pizzas. But then if you’re spending all the time for my pizzas, is that then interfering with actually we’re doing fractions? And I’ve seen this happen with history too, and lots of lessons where you’re trying really hard to come up with an analogy. And actually, the analogy ends up distracting rather than how hoping. And I don’t think there’s an easy solution to that. I think you do need analogies. And I think analogies are really important. I’m not saying never use them. I just think that a good a good analogy is hard. And a lot of analogies that we as adults think are really great. And not actually that useful. They require more explanation than they do. They actually enlightened. So it’s a tricky one.
Craig Barton 10:23
It is a tricky one. Okay, Daisy, what’s Tip number two, please.
Daisy Christodoulou 10:28
So tip number two follows on from review every lesson plan. Tip number two is ask a question at the end of every lesson that every student should be able to get right. And this was something I started doing, following on from reviewing every lesson plan, because you think, well, if I want to be thinking about this, and this is a thing I wanted to be thinking about, in a sense, I’m trying to be really precise about what it is I want them to think about. And if that’s worked, if they really have been thinking about the thing I wanted, they should really all be able to answer a certain question. And by the end of the lesson that I’ve decided at the beginning, this is the question I want to be able to answer. And when I first started doing that, I thought, yeah, this should be really easy. Like, you know, actually, this should be 10 or 15 questions they should all be able to answer and get right. And then you do it. I mean, it’s a it’s a sort of blow for kind of how you know what you’re teaching it, the reality of your teaching, as opposed to what you think it is, is that you can end up asking a really, really simple question that you think surely you must have got this, and, you know, three quarters of the class get it wrong. So I think if you decide upfront, if there’s just one thing that I want you all to walk away, knowing that they didn’t know at the start, what would that be? It really focuses your mind with the planning, and it focuses your mind or makes you think, Okay, this one thing is one question. And that might even be if you’re introducing a new novel, if you’re introducing a new text, or you’re reading a chapter of a text, it might just be like, the main plot point in that chapter. It might just be the main new characters introduced. You know, so could be something. So it’s that the other point of this is, people, it’s one of these things I think people think are just too trivial. But it’s meant to be true. It’s not, it’s not designed to be Trixie. It’s meant to be easy. It’s meant to be something that 100% of students can get right. And actually, I think you’ll actually find you really struggle to find one thing. But it really focuses your teaching, it makes your teaching move, like I want them to know this one thing, obviously, you don’t want it to turn into I spend the 60 minute lesson just you know, regurgitating this one thing. But as I say, if you’re doing it in the context of a novel, that you’re you’re reading the next chapter, or you’re looking at a particular character, is there one thing at the end of this, I want everyone to get? Right? What would that be? And just being really focused on that, and maybe, you know, go on forever, forever long, you can do two or three questions. But I think that’s a really nice thing that really focuses your teaching and planning.
Craig Barton 12:36
I love this Daisy. Right. Again, same thing, two quick observations on this. And then a follow up question for you. The first is this reminds me when Dylan William was on the show a few weeks back saying about how making question planning central to lesson planning, and this feels like fits in really nicely with that. So when you’re thinking about your lesson, almost starting, in a sense with this final question that you want everyone to be able to answer, and how do you shape the lesson around how to get to that point. And that feels like that fits really nicely. Second observation. I’ve messed this up as well, Daisy in the past, which is, the last question I’ve asked kids in a lesson is always the hardest question. It’s like it builds up to this. And that’s quite bad, because, but a lot of the kids don’t get it right. So they feel crap about themselves. And also haven’t got a real good sense of how the majority of kids have understand the core elements of the lesson. Because I haven’t assessed that at the end, I’ve assessed something different, almost like the challenge or the extension. So I like the idea of not ending on the hardest question, but ending on a question that kind of assesses the core knowledge, the thing that you really wanted the all the kids to get. So I really like that. But my kind of follow up question to you on this is, how does this fit in with exit tickets? They see it? Is there is this? Would this be an exit ticket? And what’s your view generally on exit tickets? How do you see this question being asked and and playing out at the end of the lesson?
Daisy Christodoulou 13:56
Yes, I think it can work in a number of different ways. I think it could be an exit ticket, it can be a mini whiteboard. I think. I agree with what you said about too often, you’re kind of building up the lesson, it’s getting more complicated. And then that the thing you do at the end is like the challenge. And actually almost in some ways, it’s better maybe to do a question at the end that recalls something a bit more basic from the beginning. And then it functions as a bit of retrieval practice. So much like your first retrieval, and even if it was something simple that they they got, you know, halfway through the lesson or third of the way into the lesson. Well, if it’s an hour long lesson 20 or 30, or 40 minutes might have passed since they did that. So it’s worth just refreshing it at the end, even if it’s really simple. So I think the challenge always at the end of the lesson is leaving enough time. I always found that I would like Rush, you know, you run out of time towards the end and you know, it’s really important to get it in and then you’re rushing and like the bells ringing. So I think it’s really important to give it give it enough time at the end. And I think it again with exit ticket, mini whiteboard, I you know, whatever kind of works for you. But I would go back to the first principle of, you know, not not getting massively complicated structures around it and trying to keep it as Simple and repeatable and like almost as a routine as possible. So, you know, I think many whiteboards in maps work really well. And I’ve seen them work really well, I think it sometimes I think is can be slightly trickier in English, because you’re maybe looking for maybe like a full sentence, you’re looking for something, you know, might not be right, obviously can work. But I can understand that there might be reasons why you want something a little bit a bit different. So I think, yeah, you know, find something that works for you that’s repeatable. And that isn’t, you know, the admin of it doesn’t take up too much time. You can also do if you want to do a multiple choice question. You can do that on a mini whiteboard, you can do that even simpler, just, you know, five options, raise your hand 12345. So that doesn’t require any kind of special equipment at all. But you then it’s a multiple choice question. You’ve got to really thought of it before. You can’t just come up with that on the fly.
Craig Barton 15:53
Yeah, just just on that, just as a slight aside, I mean, I’m obviously obsessed with diagnostic multiple choice questions. But I think they work really well as this final question in a lesson because they’re quick to get the kids response. And if you identify a problem, you’ve got a better insight as to why it’s a problem based on the specific answers that kids have given. And if the vast majority of kids get it right, you can then turn your attention to the wrong answers to start thinking, Well, why is this wrong, and so on. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds, you get your assessment done quickly. And then you’ve got a kind of path to go if there’s trouble, and then also a natural path to go if the understanding is there. So I’m completely biassed, of course, but I like using diagnostic questions for exit tickets. I think they work quite well as that final last question in the lesson, if that makes sense.
Daisy Christodoulou 16:38
Definitely, yeah, definitely, you know, works well as well. Different
Craig Barton 16:42
legally obliged to say that Daisy, so that’s good. All right, Daisy, what is tip number three, please.
Daisy Christodoulou 16:50
So tip number three. So I’ll be upfront here, the first two tips ones I’ve used myself when I was teaching. The third tip is one that I wish I’d had when I was teaching, but I didn’t have. It’s something that I’ve seen lots of people do, since I left the classroom. And I think it’s brilliant. And I wish it had been around when I was teaching. So my tip is don’t do written comments. It’s my third tip, don’t do written comments. And, again, when I tried to teach lengthy written comments, were all the, you know, all the rage, the real kind of thing that everyone said was you want to give students feedback based on the language in the mark scheme. And the idea was, that’ll make it really transparent, you know, you’ve got this mark scheme, this is what the students are going to do, you’re going to give them the feedback using that language. And take, you know, spent hours doing this. So if Sunday evenings reading through, sort of, you know, 2530 books, writing a comment at the bottom of them taken from the mark scheme, and then you try and find little hacks to kind of shorten it. So you basically realise there’s sort of three main issues going on. And you think, well, there’s three main comments, I’m going to basically write out the kids, we’re gonna get one, one of these free comments. And I’ve seen people kind of hack it a bit further and sort of do this in Excel and have it a bit mal murgee. But the problem with all of this is that written comments are a terrible way of giving feedback. Right? And let me give you I’ll give you a couple of example. I’ll give you three examples. One, this is from Dylan William, he looks, he talks to a student who’s been given the feedback, you need to make your scientific investigations more systematic. So that’s your classic, take the feedback from the marks game. The marks people say, you know, top grade, systematic scientific investigation. So Dylan, William says the student was that mean to you? And the student says, I don’t know, if I thought that if I if I, if I knew how to be more systematic, I would have been more systematic first time. It’s very flippant, but it’s true. And what the one I was guilty of, in that, in that way was you need to infer more insightfully. I remember writing that app more times than I care to mention. Like, what is the student going to do with that? You know, and the problem is, so again, Dylan William, he goes on to say he says, it is true, the student did need more systematic. It was true, my students did need to infer more insightfully. I mean, don’t we all right. But is, is telling a student that going to help them improve. So this kind of feedback is true, but useless. Yeah. So it may well be accurate, but it’s not giving them anything they need to get better. And that is a problem with the nature of written comments. So then people think, oh, I can give more precise comments. That is a problem with the nature of written comments. It is really hard to express some of these some of the information about how to improve to express it in a kind of one sentence prose comment that’s written down. So you know, one example. We need to make more scientific and scientific investigation, more systematic. You need to affirm or insightfully. I’ll give you another example. Imagine you’re in a driving lesson and you do a three point turn. And you know, you’re a bit shaky on it think it’s okay. And you say to the instructor at the end, but how did it go? And he goes, Yeah, I’ll give you a written comment like a week later. Matt, every moment a week later, but what you need is just you just needing to say then and there, him or her to say then and there. Look, you know, the first if you just just stayed too much the first time in probably say, Let’s have another go probably put a bit too much on the first time, you know, take a little bit off, you did really well as you were, as you were, as you were coming round, you checked everything that was great as you know, it, you need them to give you something in real time. And you need some real time it is better verbally. Because those things I’ve just said verbally No, you put a bit too much on first time. That makes sense. If someone’s saying it in real time, that’s incredibly useful. If you wrote that down, it’s just like what I put a bit too much on first time, what is that it’s the same with all kinds of feedback, that if you’re gonna give someone something written a week later, it’s just not gonna be helpful if you give them something verbally in the moment, can be incredibly useful, obviously, and this is going probably some of that verbal feedback in the moment can’t be captured, it can’t be turned into a spreadsheet. And then I know that what you know, managers will therefore say is I don’t know it’s happening, you know, like a head teacher and a deputy or so how do I know that’s happening? People want something that is recordable. They want to be able to show that it’s happening. And so I think we can view feedback almost on a spectrum is that you have these in the moment, verbal bits of feedback, which are incredibly powerful and valuable and very hard to capture and record.
And then I think there’s probably some things which are maybe still can have a bit of best of both worlds. And they’re still able to be recorded and captured, but they still have high value. And that’s why I’d say the multiple choice questions are quite good is that I think there’s something that is very recordable and very able to be put into a spreadsheet, but they’re not as vague and as as unhelpful as a written comment. So I think we’ve got to find a sweet spot, I’m not denying that it is important to catch record things. It is not I’m not trying to say it isn’t. But I think that when you get to written comments, it is like the triumph of wanting to put something into a spreadsheet over doing something that’s useful. So you know, you’ve traded off all the value for them for the wrong thing. So we have to try and get that that trade off. Right. So in terms of don’t do written comments, I’ve you know, I’ve seen so many schools now experimented with whole class feedback. So for the industry like me, where you’ve got, you got 30 books to mark, whatever the idea would be, instead of putting a written comment at the bottom of each of them, you read them all. And you make some notes about how you’re going to pre plan your next lesson, based on what you’ve seen in the writing. So what you would do is if you’ve seen lots of issues with students say the tense is very inconsistent. Instead of writing out 25 times, you need to make the tense more consistent. At the start of the next lesson, you put up two sentences where the tense is inconsistent. And you say, can you correct? Can you change the second sentence into the first thing? It’s a bit like, again, the driving lesson. Let’s do another free point turn, let’s let’s work on you know, your overshooting. So that will be what you do, you come up with an activity with an action step with something you can do that focuses on what you’ve seen. And that is so so, so much more powerful. So I really feel written comments, I think this is a really interesting one too, because there’s something that we’re already familiar with our students as to when we were students ourselves. There’s something that students I think, actually kind of probably are quite attached to, they probably do see it as my teacher cares about me. So I think it is a hard one to move away from it is quite counterintuitive. And I think, you know, people probably do just to have this thing of one of the teachers just not working hard enough, they’re not going to comment. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s one of these classic things where it is your classic sort of busy work, that this is a very visible, highly visible form of work, but it’s quite performative. But how much value does it add? And I’m just really the more and more I think about it, the more I think, I don’t think it adds much value, I think it’s worth it to try it takes away value. And the amount of time it takes is astonishing, really is astonishing.
Craig Barton 23:56
I agree with 100% Everything. I’ve said Daisy, but you’ve got to help me out on something here. Right. So the first thing is just just to reflect on that. I think you’re right. The reason that the stay in schools were why schools insist on written comments is, as you say, so there’s evidence both from you know, at management perspective, or whatever, and also, from students recognising that the teachers look to their books, and probably parents wanting to see it in the books, and so on and so forth. And I also completely agree that whole class feedback is a million times more effective. But here’s the problem I always run into. So your ideal scenario, when you mark in a set of 30 books is either everybody’s nailed everything, and then you can just move on, or everybody’s got the same problem. So you can do whole class feedback. I always find it’s a bit trickier whenever you’ve got Well, a couple of scenarios, one where there’s a scattering of different issues amongst the work. So with this, like seven or eight problems that you’ve identified, and also where you’ve got a significant group of children who really have nailed that kind of a concept, and a significant group of children who really haven’t. And then what do you do in that file? What lesson so if you can solve those problems for me, Daisy, I’m laughing. Yeah,
Daisy Christodoulou 25:03
yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. It is tricky. It is tricky. And I think the thing to say is those things are genuinely tricky issues. They don’t invalidate that none of them mean that written comments work. You know, they still we still have to move away from the written comment. But you’re absolutely right. They do mean that, or what do we do? They still are, you know, issues for what you replace it with and how you optimise optimise that solution. I think that one thing I’d say is, in some ways, I’m coming from a bit of an English teacher perspective here, but you almost don’t want to move to the complex written tasks too soon. And you want to make sure that you when by the time you move to it, you’re not going to be seeing a really wide variety of arrows, you almost want to get to the point that you’ve done enough teaching beforehand, such that they’re not all going to be perfect in this piece of writing. But you’re not going to see a huge variety in terms of quality. So that, you know, yes, there will still be some peoples have absolutely nailed it. Some have got errors. But you know, you’re hopefully, there’s going to be a bit a bit more of a clustering. Now make it easier to feed back. And I think some of the reasons why this can be tricky is you do get this this huge range of responses. And it’s very difficult to tease it out. And that’s because maybe the the teaching beforehand, there hadn’t been much of it. The students have moved to the written task too soon. And that’s again, why I’d say with the multiple choice questions, the short answer questions like, do more of them to begin with in a unit. So start with all those questions where it’s easier to do the diagnosis and don’t put them on to the Open Task, which will always be trickier to assess, until they’ve got to a solid point. So that’d be my first thing like trying to set it up. So you’re anticipating that I’m trying to forestall that problem. Obviously, you will still have a range of responses. And I think it depends slightly, I would still say, you know, we’ve we’ve started again, something like English, I remember from my experience, I was just reading, we’ve just done a big literature assessment on an unseen poem, you do still see, you know, it does tend to be often there will be one or two issues that are cropping up that that are the same. So I feel like even when you’ve got a range of responses, there’s always one or two things you can pick on, you know, then in terms of how you follow up with other students, I think the other thing is, it doesn’t have to necessarily be straightaway that lesson. If there are bigger issues, maybe it’s something where you’re doubting your scheme of work. Okay, so if there’s a bigger issue that they’re struggling with, I mean, an example I give with An Inspector Calls his students confusing, Eric, and Gerald. And if you see that coming up in a, in a lesson in a response, that’s something you can address straight away in the following lesson. But it’s something you can keep addressing in future lessons. You know, you’ve got that on your radar, that’s been an issue. So there’s some things you know, you can address straightaway, there’s something you can keep keep going over. I don’t think if if you’re in a situation, were you lucky enough, or you’ve got a teaching assistant, unknown primary, often that’s more often the case is something a teaching assistant can really help with that. If it’s if you’ve got a small group of students where, you know, maybe it is the Eric and Gerald example. And three of them have made that error and the other, you know, the others in your class absolutely fine. That’s a great thing where the teaching assistant can take them away and walk them through. Okay, this is Eric, this is Gerald, let’s not confuse those again. And that will be the kind of thing a teaching assistant I think could could do really well. So I think you’re absolutely put your put your finger on a really important issue with that. I think and I think it’s, it’s, you have got to think about it. What I would say is, is that even with that issue, that you know, it’s still better than written comments. Definitely don’t do it in comments.
Craig Barton 28:28
Yeah, I completely agree. And final thing I’ll just say on the Stasi, is I always found that when my check for understanding in lessons was poor, I ran into more of these problems with the homeworks. Because homework Yeah, full of surprises. Exactly. It’s better. I got to check in for understanding and less of a surprise, that wasn’t the homework. So the more it lends itself to whole class feedback, if that makes sense. It’s all intertwined, doesn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. I Daisy, tip number four, please.
Daisy Christodoulou 28:55
Yeah. So this also follows on a bit from the one before so I’ve said that written comments are not great. And my fourth tip is to use examples, not definitions when you are teaching and assessing. And this follows on a bit from written comments, because in lots of ways definitions have a lot in common with written comments. So we think of definitions as being maybe something very powerful, something that we want students to memorise, but often the problem with a definition is it only kind of sometimes makes sense when you know, know what it is to begin with. And so I often say to me, have you ever had an experience when you were a kid where it was a word you didn’t know? And you look it up in the dictionary, and you don’t only the words in the definition in the dictionary? And then what you do? Do you go and look up every word in the dictionary definition. And so it’s a bit chicken and egg here. So the paradox, this is why reference sources are great for adults are great for experts, and not so great for novices. Any references not just a dictionary, but Google online searches, is that when you have that basis of knowledge to be able to create a search and interpret what you see reference sources are amazing. If you don’t reference sources, they’re not the place to gain that knowledge. What is the way so then the question is okay, well, how Do we get that knowledge and that’s why so examples, examples of really how we learn. And there’s it’s really interesting stuff on the philosophy of science about this. So, Michael Polanyi, and Thomas Kuhn, they both write about this, in terms of scientific breakthroughs, and how scientists come up with kind of new ideas are in terms of words in sight, word energy, in physics, what does that mean? And you can call out, you can’t really come up with it with a definition for it. And they’ll also say, Thomas Kuhn writes about how a student can read a chapter of a physics textbook, say they’ve understood it, and they can get to the problems at the end of the chapter and not get them right. And he says, it’s the problem set at the end of the chapter that really communicates the concepts. And I think that’s true of all learning. And we learn with examples, not with definitions. And as I say, a lot has been written about this, that the kind of very high end of science of sort of physics and maths and how you have these big, you know, scientific revolutions, but you can see it in everything. And you can see it in the basic that our younger children learn and that the area where I’ve engaged most is in teaching grammar, and particularly, one I’m fascinated with with verbs. Because I just fit a verb, it’s a bit like energy and physics, like there’s no, I’ve just come through, there’s no really good way of defining a verb, but it’s gonna let anyone child or adult, reliably then use that definition to decide what to, you know, get 100%, right, and, you know, finding the verb in, in 200 sentences is just, and then people sort of wrestle over definition. So, obviously, the one that a lot of kids will come up with them know is the verb to doing word. And then you have people who go, oh, that’s just too trivial. And they’ll come up with this more complicated definition, a verb is a state of action or a state of being. And there’s a much better definition. And my point is, we can argue about the definition all day long. Like, I don’t think either of them a good defence, because I just don’t think it’s possible to define it to do what you want it to do. And what is the way you’re really going to learn what a verb is, is lots of examples. And then my favourite sort of, you know, the two examples, which will show where students are up to with their understanding of a verb, is give them a sentence, I run to the shops, say what’s the most students get that right? And most students will say Ron is the verb. And they’ll do that because they probably didn’t verb to doing word, something to do with running that run. So then you give them the sentence, I went for a run, say, what’s the verb? And then also run again. Okay, and then you say, No, when a no go, it can’t be won’t when it’s not doing word, right. But even if you’ve taught them, it’s a state of action or being, when doesn’t sound like a verb, it just kind of does. And yet, it’s one of the top 510 most common verbs, you know, comes from go, which is the same would be the hardest verb of all, to understand, is the most common verb. So to be is the most common word, an ing verb in English. And it’s the hardest verb to understand in terms of if you’re going to define it as a doing word like just doesn’t, doesn’t sound like that. So how do you get around this? It’s just not with definition. It’s with lots and lots and lots of examples, and seeing examples in lots and lots, lots of different contexts. And I think that’s true for all learning, that we need to have those concrete examples. And it’s through encountering lots of those, that we can then start to build them up into something a bit more of an abstract understanding, and start to see why people have come up with the idea of verbs doing word that it probably is given everything, we’ve got the best way we can define it in the abstract, but you have to build up that understanding with the examples and as I say, the reason why I think this is similar to the written comment issue is written comments are these sort of abstract is statements that mean something to an expert. So when you say I need to infer more insightfully, I know that I know the kind of typical piece of GCSE writing that doesn’t infer insightfully, and it’s staying on the surface level, and it’s not digging down any deeper. So it does have some kind of meaning. But it’s not helping the student to infer more insightfully. And so, it’s the same issue with the written comments. It’s the same issue with relying on Mark schemes to give you agreement, it’s the same issue with relying on definitions and it’s one of the reasons I do you have a slight worry about?
Knowledge organisers, and I think knowledge organisers, they can be designed very well. But they can be a bit too reliant on definitions. And I just think you have to be really careful with that. You have to be really careful that the knowledge organiser isn’t too reliant on on definitions, and it is making sure that it’s it’s, you know, it’s giving examples. So, you know, when you’ve got an argument as you’re saying, you know, what is a verb and if what you see on the other side is it’s, it’s, it’s a doing word, I’m bit uneasy about that I’d rather see. You know, what’s, what’s the verb in this sentence?
Craig Barton 34:50
Yes. Yeah. Well, this is when I saw this on your list of tips to discuss I was well happy days because it’s one of my favourite things to talk about. So let me try and sell Do you want the dream of this at once something that works in maths because I’ve been looking for someone to talk to about this, he’s not a mathematician to see if this works elsewhere. So you’re just a person for this. Right? So maths is rampant for definitions. And exactly as you say they are terrible. Like the definitions are far more complicated than the actual thing itself. So when I first started teaching, I was definition crazy, then realised that was a waste of time that I switched to kind of a single example. And that’s a bit problematic. So if we use try triangles, a good one here, the definition for a triangle is terrible. Because you’ve got to understand what a plane figure is, what a side is, what an angle is. So then you give the kids an example of a triangle. But the problem with that is you tend to stick to a really conventional one with a horizontal base, and I saw sleeves, and so on. So that’s not great. So that I learned to do more varied examples. So you have some scalene triangles, and so that’s good as well. But then to truly understand what some of it is, you’ve got to know what it isn’t. So then you switch to non example. So this is a triangle, this is not a triangle, that’s definitely better. But where I’m at at the moment is I like related examples and non examples. And I think this fits in well with your one thing there. So you start with something that is a triangle, and you change one feature on it. So maybe the orientation, and everything else stays the same, the lengths of the side, the angles stay the same, but just one critical features change, then you say, is this still a triangle? Oh, yeah, it is. Okay, so the orientation doesn’t matter. Now, let me change one thing. So let me break one of the sides, all of a sudden, it doesn’t completely close. But everything else is the same the orientation that the size of the site. All right, now, that’s not a triangle. So that critical feature has broken the kind of you know, the it’s crossed the example one example boundary. So I think that examples of non examples, one of the most powerful things you can do, but I think you’ll have a supercharged them if you make them related to each other. So kids can observe the credit, the single critical feature that’s changed, and the impact it’s had. Now, does that translate? Does that make sense? And does it transfer a customer? That’d be something you would do with verbs and things like that?
Daisy Christodoulou 36:57
Yeah, I think it definitely does. So I think what you’re trying to do is set up, it’s all about the choice of examples. I agree. Yeah. And it’s all about can you set up example sequences, essentially, where the examples are exemplifying different features? Yeah. And that you’re carefully choosing them. So they’re exemplifying the different features that are critical to the concept in this case and your case with a triangle. You said, like the orientation is actually not a critical feature. So that’s like a non example. But you know, the sides is a critical feature. So we’re going to set up something like that. And I would say it’s exactly the same with verbs in that you would say, well, the position of a word in a sentence is not a critical feature. So what happens is, the rescue can get the equivalent of just teaching a basic triangle as an example, then that’s what they think it’s the only exotic triangle is always setting up sentences where the verb is a second word in the sentence. So I run to the shops, I go home, I walk around the park, he says, Hello, kind of thing. And then the students just get the wrong idea that well, it’s always a verb, the words the second word attentiveness. So they’ve defined it too tightly in the way, if you’re just giving them a simple triangle, they’re defining it too tightly as that’s the end, it’s the orientation, you know, the base at the bottom, that they’re just saying, that’s the only triangle possible. So that’s the equivalent you would get with a verb. And that’s where I think a lot of students understanding it kind of is. So what you will then want to do is you will you get to come up with example with, with examples of whether or not the first word or the second word in the sentence, where they’re, you know, like the middle of a sentence, you know, third or fourth, that kind of thing. I think then the challenge is, when you’re first introducing something, the best way of almost drip feeding with a complex thing, like a verb or triangle, there’s lots of different features, and lots of examples and non examples. And how many of those do you want to introduce in one go? One of the things that secret England talks about when doing this with verbs, which I can never kind of make my mind up on this is, he says, straightaway, you should be introducing verbs that are more than one word, not just one word. And I sometimes think that’s kind of too hard to begin with, like is that like going in with an isosceles triangle. But I kind of think you do want to start my take is you do want to sort of start with some of the obvious ones. But you don’t want to spend so much time that they just think that obvious one is the only example. And I do think ultimately, these are empirical questions, which you can settle with research. And you can set up different sequences and say, Well, which one leads to the best, the best understanding? And so, and this is why if Engelmann talks a lot about the Picky picky detail, and this is why I think he’s picky detail, but it’s really important. You know, if you teach students to triangle and you introduce an isosceles triangle first or whatever, you know, what impact does that have? You know, how should you be doing this but if you teach them so another thing the other thing is you can’t do it. The other thing I was gonna say up front as well as the problem with all of these complex concepts is you’re never going to teach them in a lesson. Just that they are hard, they are difficult. So you’re not going to get a student to a perfect understand Anything of a verb or a triangle in a 60 minute lesson, however great you and her amazing students are, I just don’t think it’s possible. And I think that’s why the other thing I think about a lot is, again, this is a bit of an England direct instruction thing is, if you set up a perfect learning sequence, could you do it so that students never developed a misconception? And then you’d never have to be in a situation where you’d have to unpick a misconception because you’d have sequenced everything so perfectly. But there’s no chance for a misconception to come in. And like that’s kind of utopian. And I kind of liked the idea, but I just think, no, for two reasons. One reason a lot of the really complex concepts we want to teach students, they kind of exist a bit in the world anyway. So triangles, they’re going to encounter trying before they meet you burbs using verbs every day. So that, you know, they’re not coming in from like a, you know, 00 knowledge. So there’s going to be a chance that they’ve got some misconceptions before they’ve met you. And the second reason is that even if it was, by chance, a concert they’ve never encountered before, so you’re starting from both, because you cannot teach everything in one go. There’s always a chance that some misconception will develop when you’ve only taught part of what the concept is. And because it’s impossible to teach the whole concept in one go, you’re gonna have to choose to start with some kind of triangle, you’re gonna have to choose to start with a verb being somewhere, I just think there’s always going to be you want to definitely you want to minimise misconceptions, but I just think, or it’s like, there’s always going to be a chance for him to come up. So you do have to kind of anticipate and expect and come up with ways of unpicking them when they do arise. So yeah, it’s a bit of a tangent there. But yeah, really?
Craig Barton 41:42
No, I love. Absolutely fascinating. I love that. Just final question on this, before I hand over to you for your fifth tip. Just circling back to definitions, where the definitions come in, then did is it important that kids know the kind of formal definition or is just a knowledge of the concept without being able to articulate it
Daisy Christodoulou 42:00
enough? Yeah. So I mean, so then this is it. So definitions, I think, reason why they do exist. And the reason why we do have dictionaries, the reason why I’m point is when you do get to a certain point, they give you a useful shorthand to that. So if you can, so the way I talk about this, I talk about this a lot in context of the old national cricket levels. And people would say the great thing about national cricket levels, if they give you a shared language, and I would say they don’t give you a shared language, they give you something far more dangerous. That gives you the illusion of a shared language. It’s not we’re all using the word cat. And some of us are using CAT to refer to a four legged mammal and the other rest of us are using CAT to refer to a chair. Okay, so it is not a shared language. But obviously, shared languages do exist, me and you are having a conversation now we’re able to communicate like, you know, so though, when most of us when we use workout, actually, we’ve got a similar concept in mind of what case. So, you know, communication is possible, I’m not going to add some extreme kind of post modernist route here where it isn’t, I’m just saying that the national group levels, were not a good language. So the point is, is that what you want to do is build up if students you can build up their understanding enough, you can get to the point where cat or triangle, a verb, becomes a very convenient shorthand for a concept that everybody agrees so that you do want to get to that point. And Doug Lemov makes this point very well about the value of a definition, which is that he talks about democracy, that’s a really abstract term. And if you are not, if you’re just talking about in a very concrete term, all the time, you’re gonna go, oh, you know, that thing where like, we get out a big bag, and we all have a stone, and we will put the stone in the bag if we agree, or we take it out, if we don’t agree, that’s really convoluted. So if you’re gonna have an abstract word that embodies that very convoluted concrete process, that’s really useful. And that speeds up communication, and it speeds up thinking, and it speeds up the ability to communicate with others and build on thoughts. So I do think definitions are important. And I do think words are important. I just think words can be really dangerous, in that you can use them as I say, we’ve caught on with the national curriculum levels and think everybody is agreeing with you. And actually, you’re all in your own bubble. So for me, it’s about most of the aim of education is getting to a point where all these words do mean roughly the same things. And that is what enables that’s what enables communication. And more than that, that’s what to be honest. That’s what enabled civilization. Because if you can’t talk to each other, you cannot you can’t build anything together. You know, whether that’s something is building a community or a society or whether that’s something is building a complex, complex, you know, complex artefact
Craig Barton 44:35
going deep Daisy.
Daisy Christodoulou 44:39
Absolutely, just the
Craig Barton 44:40
study will be less than just the final final thing on that. That’s why I’m quite a big fan of those, you know, the Freya diagrams or the fray models where at the end of a concept, the kids write a formal definition, but then they have to give an example and a non example of it and I always like to just go one step further and say, give me an interesting example and an interesting non example The words give me an example that someone might think so non example and give me a non example that someone might think is an example because I think if you can push kids right to the boundary of that definition, that’s a really good test of whether they understand something or not. So I quite like doing that.
Daisy Christodoulou 45:16
Just sounds good. Yeah.
Craig Barton 45:19
All right, Daisy, fifth and final tip.
Daisy Christodoulou 45:21
Okay, well, we’ve done for serious one. So for the fifth one, I’m gonna do a jokey one. Alright, so this fifth one is a jokey one. I just think like this the other day, I used to teach when I say I used to teach The Book holes by Louie Sasha, which is something that I was thinking it was a bit of a staple sort of Key Stage Two key stage three book, it’s made into a very good film with Sheila birth, which I can recommend. And the main character in holds his name is Stanley donuts. And a few chapters in the offer kind of reveals that Stanley and donuts it’s the same for the backwards. So if you put Stanley backwards, it’s young acts. And if you don’t, that’s backwards to Stanley. And when the kids learn that, you know, they just love it. Oh, and then you see them starting to scribble it out, Stanley, you’re nuts. And then they want to do it their own name. So my jokey fifth tip, if you’re an English teacher is get to get the kids to you know, do the nine back and forward. It’s quite fun. So mine is INSEAD. And yours is the ark. You would be crazy. Crazy. You’d be crazy IARC or you could be no Trad BARTON I’m INSEAD I’ll be Daisy INSEAD I’m not going to be myself because just impossible. So, you know, that’s just a little bit of fun. If you’re teaching holes,
Craig Barton 46:34
I like it. Love it. Fantastic. Well, Daisy, they’ve been five absolutely brilliant tips. Let me just hand it over to you now and what should listeners check out yours.
Daisy Christodoulou 46:43
So do have a look at no marketing.com. So I work full time to never market.com We provide these online comparative judgement assessments. And we’ve got two really nice new newest developments around so one is we’ve got a website called the writing hub, which is where we store kind of all of our exemplars, writing exemplars from students lessons. So all the things I’ve said about teaching verbs, we have lots of lesson resources and teaching. We have lots of professional development on writing. So do have a look, have a look at what what we’ve got there. And the newest thing we’re about to work on, we’re working on a platform that will automatically mark paper multiple choice questions for you. And it’s called Auto mark, we’ve been trialling it with some schools, and we’ve been trialling it with writing quizzes. So lots of the things I’ve been saying about verbs and identifying the bird, but lots of quizzes set up to do that. And yeah, we’ve been trialling it for for a year, 18 months or so. And it’s about to launch with with more schools. So no more marking.com Writing hub, auto mark, those are the three things we’re working on, take a look at our website blog and find out more about them.
Craig Barton 47:47
Fantastic. And just on that as well. And we’ve spoken over the years on my podcast several times about comparative judgments. And I was lucky enough last year, I think it was to interview, Ian from Loughborough, who taught me how to use grantee judgement in maths and I’ll put a link to that as well because it’s one of those things you could there’s a dangerous and you can think about if judgement is just for a expansive writing and so on but the way in describes assessing like problem solving skills in mathematics using it was it absolutely blew my mind. So
Daisy Christodoulou 48:15
yeah, Ian has done some amazing work on that. He’s really really good. So yeah, definitely have a look at that.
Craig Barton 48:20
Fantastic. Well, Daisy, it’s always a pleasure to speak to I always learn loads and it was really enjoyed. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today.
Daisy Christodoulou 48:28
Really good. Really enjoyed that, Craig. Thanks.
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