You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
David Goodwin’s tips:
- Provide opportunities for students to read in lessons (04:23)
- Develop vocabulary (16:45)
- Rebrand homework as practice (25:08)
- How to improve students’ ability to write (33:33)
- How to make retrieval practice work (45:53)
Links and resources
- On Twitter, David is @MrGoodwin23
- David’s website is: organiseideas.com
- David’s books are:
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View the videos of David Goodwin’s tips
Podcast transcript
Craig Barton 0:01
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast, the show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. This episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to geography teacher, author and expert illustrated, David Goodwin. This is an absolutely brilliant conversation. I love this one. One big piece of news before we crack on with the episode, and that is the tips for teachers book, when you’re listening to this is officially out. And now, I’m so excited about this. From everything I’ve got into this. John cat illustrated the editor on an amazing job making make sense, brilliant. And I’m really excited to to get it out there and see what people think. And if you go to the tipster teachers website, there’s a whole page about the book where you can see all the content and access all the resources and the option to buy it from Amazon, John can’t get anywhere, I thought what I’d do, I’d just give you try and hook you in on the book just tell you a little bit about it. So the tagline is over 400 ideas to improve your teaching. And what I’ve tried to do is make this one of the most practical books out there. So you can dip in at any stage and you’ll come away with loads of ideas, and try the very next time step into a classroom. So if I look here, chapter two is all about habits and routines. And what we’ve got there are things like a tidy is to help introduce a routine for words to consider a movie for the teacher to capillary, at means of participation, that’s a massive chapter that I’m obsessed with the meeting participation. So you’ve got things like 10 ideas to cold call 22 ideas to whiteboard 15 ideas to improve discussions and so on. Or you’ve got checking for understanding, there’s a whole load of tips about wait times, but then you’ve got things like 10 ideas. Tickets are 10 ideas to help create. So on responsive teaching seven ideas ever teach if a student sorry, says I don’t know, prior knowledge, you’ve got how to plan, prioritise, assess and respond to prior knowledge, massive chapter on explanations where you’ve got things like 14 ideas to improve silent teacher five ideas to show students why what we’re learning today matters, and so on and so forth. I’ve tried to cover all the kinds of big ideas in teaching. And the ideas come from two different sources or three different sources really. And they come from the wonderful guests that I’ve spoken on the tips for teachers podcast, they come from my reading, various bits of research, blogs, and so on. But I guess the biggest source of inspiration is the classrooms. And I’m lucky enough to visit every single week in schools all around the country and all around the world. I’m just picking up nuggets of gold from the teachers and students that I’m working with. And I’ve tried to bring it all into the book. And one extra thing to say about the book is that at the end of each tip, there’s a QR code and the URL. And both of those take you to a resources page on the website where I put videos, blogs, research, downloadable resources, and so on if you want to dig deeper into the idea. Anyway, I shall talk about that now. But that’s tips for teachers book out now in all good and evil bookstores. Anyway, back to the show. Let’s get learning with today’s guest though. Wonderful, David Goodwin. Spoiler alert, here are David’s five tips. Tip number one, provide opportunities for students to read in lessons. Tip two, develop vocabulary. Tip three rebrand homework as practice a really interesting one that you know, tip for how to improve student’s ability to write. And Tip Five, how to make retrieval practice work. As ever, all the tips are timestamps. So you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first, and videos of David’s tips like and this is true for all guests are available on the tips of teachers website if you want to share them with colleagues, enjoy. Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome David Goodwin to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, David, how are you?
David Goodwin 3:56
I’m fab, Craig, thank you for thank you for having me. It’s a no, it’s
Craig Barton 3:59
my pleasure. And for the benefit listeners, can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence.
David Goodwin 4:04
I am an assistant principal in charge of teaching and learning. And I do a bit of writing and illustrating education ideas. My subject is geography. And I’m a secondary practitioner.
Craig Barton 4:16
Fantastic. I think this is the first geography teacher we’ve had on here. So yeah, a world first. As for the podcast, I’m very excited about this. Right, David? Let’s dive straight in. What’s tip number one you’ve got for us today.
David Goodwin 4:26
Tip number one, and it might be sort of three tips in one is through reading and providing opportunities for students to read in lessons. So something I’m very, very passionate about. And something I tried to do frequently in my lessons is have students read and it stems really from from my own sort of personal experiences when I was at school and I wasn’t the most, I wasn’t the best reader. And it’s sort of that’s that’s why I’m really really passionate about it. So what I’ll go through is sort of like how I go about selecting the text that I have students read, why, why we do it and how we do it. And some things that I’ve found that have worked and ideas that have sort of pinched from other people, because I’m a bit of a magpie, when it comes to ideas. So the first thing I’d say is this reading, outside of the 6000 most common used words in English language outside those first 6000, you’re more likely to encounter the less frequent words through text. So by the end of secondary school students should know somewhere in the region of 15,000, to 20,000 words. So if we’re not providing opportunities for them to reading our lessons, and we’re providing those opportunities, how are they going to how they’re going to develop them. So the first thing that I would sort of suggest is engaging with your sort of subject communities and finding finding texts and materials that are really, that have been found to be useful for, for whatever it is you’re teaching. You know, I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel. There’s no reason why you can’t use credible resources, such as a textbook, for example, or a book that might be relevant to whatever it is you’re teaching. So the first part is about selecting the text, I really liked this idea that maybe might says about selecting a piece of text that is above the students pay grade, that’s, that’s more ambitious than perhaps that they, they should be able to read at their age. So something that’s a year above the what that would be expected to read at that point. So once I’ve selected a piece of text, the first thing that I’m sort of thinking about is, I’m going to go through that, that that passage of text that I want students to read, even as a whole class or something that I’m going to read to them. And I’ll start by highlighting all of the sort of tier two vocabulary, the sort of words that are not specific to my subject, but are more sophisticated than the tier one everyday vocabulary that we use. So we’re going to highlight them. And I’m going to either do one of two things is I’m going to pre teach those words, or I’m going to think about how I can teach as I’m reading through that piece of text. Or I may, if I think the students have encountered them previously, and might look at some activities around how I can check that they’ve got that prerequisite understanding before we begin reading the text, because if they haven’t got that understanding everything that comes afterwards, you just set the students up to fail. So the first thing is about trying to find out, you know, do they understand that, if not addressing that, and then we can start to get into it’s getting to the read. And so how I go about making it work is there are a variety of things that I do. The first is to make the reading accountable, like we want to set up activities, and we want to set up things that are going to require the students to engage in the reading. One of my my favourite sort of things to do is to have students read to the rest of the class. But I’m aware that there’s some students when the first encounter this is quite daunting, and it can be quite tricky, especially if the, especially if the text is like littered with words that are a bit difficult to put on ca of just things that are really unfamiliar to them. So I’ll go about setting students. So with the confidence, the confidence to do so. So for example, what we will do is the classes will engage in things like choral chants. So for a difficult word like cumulonimbus cloud, for example, I’ll have the whole class say that three or four times so as a class, I’ll go by class. This is how we pronunciate it cumulonimbus, and I’ll display it up on the on the whiteboard in itself phonetic spelling and have a three to one cumulonimbus in the house, I’ll have the whole class chant cumulonimbus, and we’ll do that three or four times, then we’ll select one row, and that one row will will say that and I’ll go to another row, and we’re going to narrow it down. So I get like sort of one or two students to get them say that so that when that one student that encounters that word in that, that reading, when they have to say that they don’t feel as awkward as silly, they haven’t been set up to fail. So I like to use choral chants as a way of sort of building that confidence. And for students that are really reluctant, reluctant when they first start doing this, you know, maybe I’ll start off as small as just having them read one sentence, one paragraph, you know, just really sort of just building them up in terms of that level of confidence to read in front of others. The other thing that I’ve stumbled across more recently, which I wasn’t really aware of and tell everyone about it was Alex Quigley’s echo reading where the teacher reads the body of text first reads a passage of text and then the students in pairs will read that back to one another. And the idea being that the teachers modelled model the reading model, how to pronunciate the words and stuff the pace and and and all of that sort of stuff and then the students can read to one another and again, increasing their ability to engage in attacks. And and also as the teacher is, that is sort of engaging with that echo reading, it’s that chance for you to check for understanding and to listen to what is going on around the classroom. So that’s another thing I do. One of my sort of top tips if you’re going to engage in sort of whole class reading is and it’s super simple is to number though if you if you’ve got the text that is so if the text is electronic, and you’ve been able to copy into Microsoft Word is to insert line numbers. So you insert line numbers, it’s just it’s such a time saver to you. So right Bobby, I want you to read lines one to six. I want you to start from line six, you’re going to keep reading, I’m going to say right stop. And then when it comes to the sort of students having to do something with that information, whether it be some sort of questions some sort of activity wants to do around that and say I’m struggling with this question. I’m struggling with this problem. Alright, well, have you thought about reading back through lines 10 through to 18 for example. So just read out you know, really directs the focus and that was something that a fair see Ben Ranson, geography teacher I don’t know if you if you follow Him, Craig on on Switzer superb, but just such a simple idea. So to summarise so far, my sort of top tips because I’m on the spot, I do this quite a bit, I get get lost in and sort of sub tips pre teach the, you know, the tier two vocabulary precedes the tier two vocabulary. Find, find ways to make the reading accounts bolster designing activities around forcing the students to engage in if you go into engage in whole classroom reading, make sure that any difficult to pronounce words, you pre teach that and you engage all students in sort of those, those choral chants, the kids love it as well as, as well as them not feeling as reluctant to read those words. And the echo reading, so Teacher reads teachers models, and the students read back. So there’s that. Yeah, there’s just something so enjoyable to hear students read it, just as I said, I don’t know what it is. But it’s just there’s something really, really enjoyable about it. And when they can begin to make meaning from that the text that you’re engaging with, it’s just yeah, it’s a joy. It’s a joy to see and hear.
Craig Barton 12:10
Right, this is lovely this David Right. I need to dig into this because one of the main reasons I started this tips for teachers podcast is with my Mr. Barton maths podcast, I was getting too bogged down in the maths, and I wanted to spread it out. And since since I’ve started it, Christopher, such has been on and he’s taught me all about this about reading from from a young age, and it’s blown my mind. So I’m a bit obsessed with this now. So a couple of reflections and then I’ve got a big question for you. So the first is one thing we often discuss on this podcast is means of participation. And whenever I think of reading out loud, I always think of the kind of one to one. So you say to one child, you read this back? Yeah, well, what I love about what you’re saying here is a couple of variations that I love this chant this call and response. I’m a bit obsessed with this just generally as as a way of checking for understanding. But I really like that to deal with those tricky words. And the paired reading sounds fascinating as well, whether it’s combined with the echo thing, which I which sounds a fantastic idea. But just I really like pad work as a means of kind of rehearsing in front of a kind of pair of friendly years versus having to read out loud in front of 30 kids. So I love that. And again, as you’ve said, it gives you an opportunity to wander around the class, get a sense of what’s going on and stuff. So that that feels really, really powerful. And I guess my big question is, obviously you’ve you’re a geography teacher, but you’ve got kind of homeschool responsibilities, and you’ll have a good sense of what’s going on in other subjects. Is this doable? Or do you find maths departments, science departments, and so on doing this? And what advice would you have for teachers of those subjects?
David Goodwin 13:39
So it’s a great question, because I have had conversations with people, maths teachers in particular, but I wouldn’t want to impose or directs you to do something that doesn’t that doesn’t serve the purpose. So for example, there’s not always I’m not going to have students read around everything I teach for my subject. So for example, when when first encountering how a waterfall forms, it might not be the best way to encounter that. And that new knowledge through reading about it might require me with my visualised and actually, a really carefully thought out well scripted explanation. So I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t try to artificially, you know, force force the issue, if there’s not a genuine purpose behind it, but I can’t account for see why the there isn’t an opportunity in all curriculum areas where we’re reading can’t, you know, can’t take place, I’m sure in all subjects and that, you know, I wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of the science community or the mass community, I’m sure there is an opportunity and all subjects, if we if we really carefully think about where we could encounter where we could say we encounter new information via via reading, and what I find quite interested in when we if you study Etymology and the origins of words and how most of the sort of a lot of scientific, mathematical and geographical language derives from, from ancient Greece. So when we start to unpick that typology of words and the prefixes, you can begin, students can begin to identify those patterns, cross curricular, so that sort of those sort of opportunities across curriculum areas, I think, are fascinating and can be very, very rewarding.
Craig Barton 15:29
Yeah, I agree. You, you you often see etymology is one of the big areas that literacy I guess, does find its way into the classroom. And as you say that the common prefixes and suffixes but the irony of all of this, David, is that, like, the questions, I always have my maths hat on whoever I’m talking to, I always find a way to wheel it back to math somehow. So apology, apologies for this. But the irony of all of this is if you look at exam papers in maths, the questions that kids do the worst on invariably are the the ones that have got a bit of a story attached two or three sentences. So there’s, there’s definitely a need for this. It’s just I think, from my perspective, it’s trying to fit what are those kind of texts that we can use that, that enhance students understanding because what you don’t really want to be doing is that reading and math, he’s just reading these worded problems about you know, Tom and Jane are sharing sweets in a ratio three to two. I mean, that’s not quite the inspiring literacy. You know, literature I had in mind just feels feels difficult. But I want to do this because I hear from people like you I feel or hear from people like Chris such and Claire Seeley, that this feels an important thing. It’s just for those trickiest subjects. You want a way to get it in there doesn’t feel shoehorned don’t Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, tricky. Tricky. have anything more to say on this tip, David, before I cut you off and move on to tip two?
David Goodwin 16:45
Yeah. So I mean, tip to sort of build on on on my face. So I’d slip in in terms of reading, which is to develop vocab. So, yeah, so through, through sort of thinking about how we can make meaning from reading and how we get the most out of it, how we go about developing students vocabulary, and I cannot for the life of me, remember who who said, who first said this, I want to say it was Tom Sherrington. About how many words do we have students that we need students to use, but we don’t actually provide opportunities for them to speak the words and say the words. And it really just, it just struck me as I what I’ve been doing for so long, like, I’ve got a fabulous keyword display up at the back of my classroom that no one ever looked at. So what I’ve been doing, my students aren’t seeing these words, so and providing opportunities for students to say the words and to develop the vocabulary is, again, really, really important and really powerful. So here’s some of mathema soft tip, we’ve developed this thing called candle sentences. So this is sort of a sort of an original idea, so to speak, it was through working with Oliver Cabergoline, on our organiser ideas, but the idea is with a candle sentences, you introduce the meaning of a word in as few words as possible. So it’s really, really puffy. And you replace all of the sort of more sophisticated language in your in your sentence with every day, more member words, because the idea here is, what you want to do is just get students saying the word and being able to remember it. So for example, might say, erosion is the breakup and removal of rocks. That’s, that’s that that’s the sentence. So I say to my class, I say, class erosion. So you know, it’s a new terminology we’re going to be using, it’s the breakup of removal of rocks. So when rocks are broken up and removed, we call it erosion. So I’ll go through that three or four times. And then again, we go through a call chant. So I’ll say it’s my class, right? Class erosion is and they call chant. That’s me, the breakup and removal of rocks. And, again, we’ll do it three or four times, and I’ll go row by row, and I’ll pick on one or two students and I usually pick on the students who either unconcerned might not be engaging in it, or might be more reluctant to or other ones that might need, you know, the sort of nudge in the most help. And the idea being if they can do it, I can safely assume in a shot, be assured that the rest of the class come. And the idea here really as simple as just about building students, students fluency and ability to be able to use that word now. If students can recall that erosion is the breakup and removal of rocks that doesn’t mean the fully understood what erosion is, bots Well, I would say is it doesn’t mean that they’ve that they’ve already got they’ve got a hawk, they’ve got something that they can build on top of. So lessons down the line when we begin to introduce different types of erosion and the factors that determine rates of erosion, and not having to reteach the basics of water erosion is so that’s one way in which you do it called chance, again, makes it super memorable. And when you have students then put that into practice in their own rights in and that And then we can generate their own ideas around that it makes it far more likely that they’re going to be able to recall it. So Colonel sentences really, really piffy really sharp. And the idea is about being able to remember being able to remember, word for word, what we’ve sort of rehearsed. And again, you could do this in those sort of that pair dynamic. And I’ve really liked what you said there, Craig about, students rehearse in sort of peer shear before doing it in front of the rest of the class, I’ve got, again, that confidence to share their thinking with the rest of the class over ways in which I sort of go around vocab development is peer Quizzing. So things like using the knowledge organiser, setting them up in a dynamic where they’re going to quiz one another, before I open up to a sort of cold call and a more sort of more formal forum, so to speak. And then building on top of that, having them sort of really delve, train students to really delve deeper into their students understand that, so start to interrogate them and ask more elaborate questions like, what does that word mean? You know, could you use that word in a sentence? wherever else might you encounter this word? Can you think of any other words that that are different, but it might have a similar or the same meaning?
Craig Barton 21:13
Wow, love this. Now, this is again, something that feels definitely relevant to teachers of all subjects, because every subject has obviously its fair share of technical vocabulary. So two reflections? And then one question for you, David. I’m a big fan as well of, I think it was Tom Sherrington. And makes this point that the words we expect our students to write a very different from the normal natural dialogue that may may appear in the classroom without any suggests these kinds of almost stem sentences or verbal prompts to get students to talk in the way they’re right. I mean, it’s really, really powerful idea that, and again, just to just to reiterate what I said before the coral chance, if you’d have asked me a year ago, would my kids ever do any chance and I’d be like, you’ve lost your mind, no chance. But every time I see this in a school, like the way it just brings, like class cohesion, and the kids absolutely love it domain. It is brilliant. Like it’s a, it’s a really good tool of mass participation. It’s quick, it’s snappy, it’s engaging. I’m a big, big fan art. So I’m definitely going to start building that into the vocab. I like that. And as you say, it only works if you have these, these kernel, these really tight sentences. Otherwise, it’s not going to work if the kids are chanting 30 or 40 word, you know, bubble definition. So I love that. My question for you is this, I’ll see where I’ve gone wrong with this, is I go to town on the vocab in the lesson or the sequence of lessons that we’re doing it. So let’s say for example, we’re doing something on shapes, I’m going to town on the etymology of polygons, hexagons, and all that kind of fade. But then I don’t revisit it enough. So like the kids seem to get it in the moment, but then, you know, like anything a month later, you know, the classic forgetting curve, it’s gone. So do you do you kind of factor in retrieval opportunities for this, this kind of vocab so that your kids don’t fall into the traps that my kids have an end up forgetting it? And all the hard work goes to waste, if that makes sense?
David Goodwin 23:04
Yeah, yes. And not necessarily in a sort of quarrel, champ manner. Don’t intentionally do that. But if I start to unpick it, if I start to want to, like sort of, as I’m sampling books, or is sort of looking for feedback, juniors, ever begin to see that, that that sort of degrade and you know, the beginning to forget those terms, then yes, I’ll revisit through that, I suppose what starts to happen is they begin to use the words more frequently in their written pieces. And I’m sort of really intentional about I’m just thinking year 10 example, not long ago, where we’re looking at Coastal landscapes and how I went about how rigorous I went about teaching coastal processes before we introduced the landforms, the teaching of the landforms was so so so much easier for them to grasp, and for them to really to be able to stretch and tangent because they already had really, really secure foundational knowledge of all of those different coastal processes. So I think you have to be really, I suppose, intentionally in terms of curriculum planning, like, What opportunities are there for it? And then geography I hate speaking on behalf of other subjects, but geography just seems to be so rich in connections and linked concepts across subjects. I’m always thinking about what what we’re teaching today. What does that what has come before it that looks like it should? It’s going to help them there. So I’m thinking about, for example, differential heating and why the equator is the warmest place on earth and the formation of ecosystems, as always, those opportunities are there. But I suppose to answer your question, I’m not intentional about necessarily call chanson it again in the future. But there are plenty of opportunities for them to revisit and use those words in some form.
Craig Barton 25:06
Data. Fantastic. Right, David, what is tip number three for us, please.
David Goodwin 25:10
So tip number three is to do homework. So we as a school we are moving away from we’re not call it homework anymore, we’ll call it practice. And I think the biggest problem with homework is when it when you’re expecting students to engage in something that is unfamiliar to them, or, and this is why I’m not the biggest fan of sort of flipped learning where they are, where students have to encounter something that maybe they’re going to learn in the future. Because what you’re sort of setting students up to do is, in my opinion, what I think your students have to do is for them to go home and encounter something on their own or possibly with the help of a parent that isn’t an expert in their in the subjects and the content that you want them to engage in. And the chances are, if they can’t, they’re going to give up very, very quickly. So in terms of homework, my sort of, so it’s not confusing, so it can’t, so there’s no excuse that, that students can’t engage in the content, you want them to make sure that just builds upon what we’re doing in the lessons and provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice. So essentially, our homework policy or our the way in which we’re doing homework now is we’ve created what we’ll call and practice booklets. So it’s essentially two pages of knowledge. And then so many weeks where for practice activities, and it’s so it’s broken up with knowledge, practice, knowledge, practice, knowledge practice. And it just builds upon what is being learned in terms of the curriculum, what’s been learned in the classroom. Simply because, as I’ve said, If we encounter information that’s unfamiliar to us, without the expert being the teacher, there, were far more likely to develop misconceptions, or follow that lead to disengage with it, if it becomes too tricky, too difficult. And we will also have to factor in that for some children, unfortunately, they might not have the means to participate in in the manner that you wish for them to do so. So there’s lots of fantastic platforms, you know, Seneca carrousel, all fantastic, superb packages that students can access. But if they haven’t got the means by which to participate, a they’ve only got one computer and a household of three, three siblings, becomes really difficult. So what I would say is considered how you want your students to participate in the homework, make it something that is going to be simple to understand in terms of how to engage with the activity, and use it as an opportunity to actually build their memory, build their knowledge and develop everything in terms of their long term memory.
Craig Barton 27:51
This is good, this is a biggie homework, I’m really pleased if you brought this up. And again, it’s always interesting to hear this from a different subject perspective. So just a couple of reflections, then a few questions for you here, David. The thing about homework that I like, in principle is it’s the ideal retrieval opportunity, because the kids can spend a lot longer on it or focus on the areas they need. Whereas in class, there’s often this requirement to kind of move at a certain pace. And if you need a bit long run something, but like the class is ready to move on, you don’t get it. So in whole in theory, homeworks great. But as you say, there are there are a number of issues with homework. And we’ve certainly had in our school, a whole cohort of students who just don’t engage in homework for for whatever reason. And one thing that when maths has a big advantage, I think of a lots of subjects, we can go to town and kind of automated marketing. So you know, you can set kids online homework on pretty much all of maths, and it’ll then it’ll mark it for them. And I know that obviously with things like carousel, and Seneca, you can do that to a certain extent with other subjects. But how important is it for you that the kids know what to do when stuck on homework, if that makes sense if you sat at home with to her to a child? And if they come back to the next lesson and say, look, look, so I couldn’t do it? Because I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do. Is that like a valid excuse? Or do you have kind of protocols in there where essentially, if kids are stuck, there’s a definite kind of process they have to go through? If that makes sense.
David Goodwin 29:15
Yeah. So that what I’ve sort of outlined in terms of the the practice booklets that we’re moving, we are moving to them, we haven’t moved to them yet, but the in terms of what they they will do in them, it will be very similar in terms of what they’re doing in the classroom. So it will be a lot of knowledge based questions that require them to engage in the sort of pages of knowledge that that are within the booklet. So it should in theory, it should be relatively. It should be relatively straightforward and self explanatory in terms of what they need to do. But I do think it’s important and we’re going to have this period of time this transition where we are going to need to train the students in terms of the expectations of how to go around you Engaging in it what to do if you ask doc what to do if, you know if you want to get favourite headline, you’ve shown mastery and this element is the opportunity for you to go on and develop in February. So, yeah, absolutely, I think you’ve got to outline your expectations. And you’ve got to follow them through just like in anything that you do in school. But I do think it’s, it is really important that they have the opportunity to practice and to be trained on it. And not just the students as well. But I think the parents as well, that they’ve got an opportunity. So the front of the booklet, there’s sort of like a little blurb to the parents that explains the forgetting curve and the importance of practice and the simple memory model. There’s going to be a video on the school website about how to go about completing the practice tasks. And then, you know, this sort of thing where if your child is stuck, or if they do encounter anything that they can’t do, what do you do in that situation? So it’s sort of a bit of a FAQ a bit of a troubleshooting, so to speak. Yeah, it’s
Craig Barton 31:05
good that I love that. Just that the whole purpose of homework, I think it’s a really interesting one. So I think I’ve made that mistake in the past where, obviously, I know what I’m saying home to the kids, but to the kids. No. And I think that the idea of having a forgetting curve on nothing’s really smart. And just last question on this, David, when Adam Boxer was on on the show, and he made the point that the biggest thing he’s done in terms of homework is to make sure it feeds into lessons and nothing that’s a mistake I’ve made for many years, how much almost like this separate thing, you know, you set it, and then okay, maybe at the start the next lesson, I’ll have a word with a couple of the kids who haven’t done the homework or whatever. But then it’s not quite as we move on. Now it’s back to class work. The more I think about it, the more I’m on board with this, that homework really needs to play a pivotal role in in lessons. I wonder if you agree, and I wonder what role homework plays in your lessons, David?
David Goodwin 31:54
I yeah, I do agree. And one of the sort of piece of work for planning for these practice booklets was I was listening to what Adam had said on your show. And it written a blog, I think, through carousel about the idea of practice and the benefits of it. And I think everything I’ve sort of said so far, probably just builds on what Adam said. I think it’s important, it builds on what’s going on in the lesson for two main reasons. Number one, it takes the guesswork out of how to engage in the activity that the students need to do so that it’s less likely that students are going to get stuck, so I can’t do my homework. And then number two, you build in that strong foundational knowledge, that means students are going to progress students are going to learn and yeah, absolutely, I can’t think of when I reflect on how I’ve done things in the past, I can’t think of why, why I did it like that, it’s there’s got to be I think there’s got to be opportunities from time to time where you go off P, especially in a subject like geography where maybe go off piste, and have some things come up in the news. And it’s gonna it’s going to enrich whatever it is that you’re doing in your curriculum at that moment in time. But what I would say is thinking about Tom sheratons mode, a mode where you know, mode, a mode, bat, that sort of eight to 28 80% of the time 80 plus percent of the time should and should be practising and developing their their knowledge around what is going on in the lessons in your curriculum.
Craig Barton 33:32
Brilliant, fantastic. Okay, David, what tip for please,
David Goodwin 33:36
Tip four. So I’m going to write him, like planning for it and how to develop student’s ability to, to write because I think we greatly this is just my credit, we sort of valorize the unaided mind, like, we want students to be able to independently work and work independently and absolutely want that, but we need to do that at the right time. So when students have got a sufficient amount of knowledge, in terms of sort of how I developed my students writing, it’s about them having enough enough knowledge before I want them to engage in sort of an extended piece of writing. So I’m not just going to say, Okay, class, we, you know, we’ve had a lesson on hard and soft engineering of reverse. And now we’re going to evaluate how successful strategies have been, we’ve worked with that. So we need to make sure that students have got a sufficient amount of knowledge before they before they’re ready to engage in that. So that that comes through through through things like retrieval practice, lots of checking for understanding. So I call colour pair share lots of practice activities, and then we can go about how we’re going to sort of get them to the point where they’re gonna produce a really nice piece of structured rights and and this is really, this is all about scaffold and obviously, eventually, we’re gonna pull that scaffold away. So the first part of this is student Have to retrieve some knowledge, retrieve some retrieve some information. So we’ve collected all of their ideas. And then through sort of like pair share and cold call, we call any ideas that don’t sort of stand up to the to the piece of work that we’re doing, don’t stand up to the question or the purpose of the writing activity. From there, we need to think about how we can organise our ideas. So this is thinking about my work with Oliver in terms of our book organise ideas, how can we organise our ideas so that when it comes to the writing aspects of the activity, the mind is free to engage in the act of writing isn’t opposed to thinking about what it is that I should be writing about. So here we’re thinking about the structure. And if I think about certain things that I’ve done with students that have worked really, really well, if once we’ve gone through collecting the ideas, we represent our ideas through some sort of graphical made like a graphic organiser, a mind map, for example. Once I’ve got students the stage where they’re really, really fluent at doing that, and they’re skilled at doing that, I can show them how each element of their diagram could be transformed and translated into a distinct paragraph within their piece of text. So we go about the Collect the collection of ideas for the retrieval practice, we organise our ideas. And now we’re free to be in writing. And this always, it blows my mind. And I think for some students, I had a year seven student last year said to me, so why can’t all subjects teach me to write like this? Is he just he just flew away with it. And it was, it was so fantastic to see because I fail to see how any other sort of way out any other technique, and I’m sure I’m sure there’s lots of other great ideas out there. But for that student at that time, I failed, see any other way that he would have got to that point without that sort of sequence? So it’s really, really carefully thought out about? What are the main ideas, I want students to be able to express and share their understanding? How are they going to organise it and again, lots of modelling lots of use of the visualizer. And then how they’re going to transform and translate that into their own into their own understanding and how they’re going to write about that. So that final act of the writing, the first part is always me modelling and demonstrating students having a go at the next paragraph on their own and me scrap walking around lots of reading, maybe getting some students work underneath the visualizer. And so I feel confident I say, off you go, you’re free to run away with it. And it’s not something because of the investment in time, it is an investment in time. It’s not something I use frequently. But I do look at one to two opportunities per half term with a class where we’re going to produce an extended piece of writing and we’re going to place emphasis on it, we’re going to provide opportunities afterwards for us to go back and refine it and improve it and redraft that piece of work. So it’s something that at the end of it they can be particularly proud of, but also something that we can really, really push and stretch the students.
Craig Barton 38:11
This is good this, David, this is really good. So this is another area where I’m completely out of my depth. And I’m here because again, all I can relate to here is those kinds of multi step problems in maths where kids have to be quite structured and write a few sensors and a bit of work in and again, Mike, my kids are often terrible at them. So I need to get better. So I’ll tell you where I’m at here. And I’ve got a couple of questions for you. So one mistake I’ve made in the past is just assuming kids can can write in a coherent, organised flute, when advise, faulty assumption, to say the least. One thing I found helps, but I think I’m still missing a key piece here is doing what we talked about earlier, where you get kids to kind of almost talk in sentences as a bridge to them writing in sentences. So using those verbal stems and prompts, simple things in maths, like the answer is this because just to make sure kids get into that habit of not just saying is 27 and so on and so forth. But what I’m really intrigued by here is this almost middle step that you’ve got in because you’ve talked about kind of speaking to collect the ideas, but then you’ve got this organisational part of it. And that feels like the absolute key part of this process. Now, of course, you’ve got a whole book on this, David, but I wonder if you can just give us a few little kind of key takeaways, what does this look like this organising it? Are we talking kind of mind maps diagrams, one simple way for kids to do this.
David Goodwin 39:28
So there are we arrived at for four different types of organiser. And this these four categories are sort of ubiquitous, ubiquitous throughout conversations around knowledge, but they might crop up as different in through using different terms. For example, one group of the organisers would be chunk where you’re defining and you’re categorising things. So if for example, I’m looking at the characteristics of hard and soft engineering strategies of river management And I’m defining I’m chunking. I’m categorising, I’m organising so that I can define something, you could then look at how you can compare and contrast ideas or compare and contrast concepts. So again, that’s a distinct category. So we’ve got chunk, we’ve got compare, and then we’ve got sequence. So certain things that we want students to write about are going to be in some sort of sequence. If I want students to write about the formation of sand dunes, there’s a clear sequence of events that result in the formation of a sand gem. And then finally, if there is the, I want students to engage in cause and effect, there’s a group of organisers that best represent knowledge and information, it for cause and effect. So when it comes to organising, we select one of the organisers that best represents the information that we want the students to then go on to write about. And when they’re organising their ideas. To save time, there was a variety of little tricks can create templates, we, you know, our model, how to go about constructing them in the first instance. And again, it’s really worth pointing out here that it is an investment in time. And it’s not something that I would always do. But if it’s if I think it’s going to serve a purpose, which, when it comes to sort of extended pieces or rites, it does that, you know, that’s why I’m going to do it. So when they go, once they’ve constructed their organiser, there’s, again, a variety of different things we can do in terms of check from the standard. So we can have peer to peer explanations. So we can have students have to engage in in that one of the things I’ve done more recently, which absolutely was just worked so well was, rather than building, creating an organised on a lesson, do it incrementally spread, sort of split the load. So for example, at the start of every two to three lessons, at the end of the lesson, I’d say right class, you’re now going to create a new branch of your mind map. So on that branch of the Mind Map, you’re going to summarise everything that you’ve learned in the last two to three lessons. And then the next lesson that came in and before they did any sort of retrieval practice, the first thing they do is they get the mind map out and they explain that explain each of the branches to their peer, put your Mind Map away, now we’re going to engage in some retrieval practice. And the reason I sort of did that was, was a piece of the there’s been two pieces of research just recently about how having some sort of practice or rehearsal before retrieval practice. And I don’t know that specific neuroscience that ideas behind it, it triggers something in terms of memory traces that enhances the retrieval practice effect. So we had them doing that few lessons down the line, because the spread the load in terms of the terms of constructing the organiser, we haven’t invested so much time in one book or lesson. Now we’re free to use this as some sort of tool to help us learn. And that’s the important thing. Like, we’re not creating a mind map for the sake of creating a mind map. We’re creating it so that it’s a tool that serves a purpose. It helps augment our thinking, helps organise our ideas so that when it comes to writing our minds a little bit more free. Working memory is not constrained. We’re trying to juggle the act of writes in the complexities of syntax, and all of the ideas and concepts we want our students to write about. It’s not overburdened, so to speak.
Craig Barton 43:12
I love this. I love this. And just one final question on this one now, pretty much every episode on tips for teachers podcast, we mentioned mini whiteboards, right, and it always kicks off. So let me I don’t want to break a habit here. And so I’m a big fan of mini whiteboards. And in the past, I’ve used them just for you know, checking for understanding if single question, sorry, single responses. So what five times six, put them on my whiteboard, and so on. But the more I’ve messed around over the last few months, the more I see the potential certainly maths for them to be used for more kind of complex answers. So maybe the kids actually, you know, write five or six lines on these mini whiteboards. And they do them as instead of writing in their text in their exercise book, because they can then swap them more easily with the person next to them. As you mentioned before the teacher can grab them and stick them under the visualizer more or hold them up. Do in terms of getting the kids better at writing to do mini whiteboards play any role at all for you, David in this particular aim,
David Goodwin 44:07
yes, you know, what do you know there’s a few things that I like about them number one, number one is you always have the really really conscientious student that doesn’t want to commit to paper and the because they’re frightened, they’re going to get it wrong. And I don’t want to because if we got across it and my books messy, so I think for that straight away giving them sort of like this is a rough rough draft is your opportunity to rehearse that that’s really useful. I also like to use them as well as I’ve modelled something to the class and I like to model similar problems or similar scenarios but not the you know, not the one that I want them to have a go at themselves. Now you have a go at writing your first two to three sentences on those mini whiteboards right now turn to your partner and read it to them and give give one another feedback like how well does that stand up to the to the model All right. The model example that Mr. Goodman just shared with us give it to a feedback rework. It redraft it and then when they feel confident and this is the teacher when you feel confident that you’re going to get those high levels of success. Now commit to paper. So yeah, absolutely, I think that is a, I sort of walk around now with one of my hands as sort of, as well as I’m working with students like when they’re working independently, and I’m scanning and reading, right, you know, giving them some pointers, leave them in the white pot, they’re coming back collects it, rub it out and give it to someone else. So yeah, as a sort of tool to help students rehearse and practice in ready for commit into paper. Yeah, that super powerful. I did love your session with Adam on mini whiteboards, I think was great.
Craig Barton 45:49
Yeah, he’s good. He’s good. All right, David, what’s tip number five.
David Goodwin 45:56
So tip number five, just retrieval, like retrieval practice, how to make it work, how to how to get the most out of it. So it doesn’t just become sort of pop quiz. And I think we probably as a community spoken about retrieval practice a lot. And it’s arguably the closest thing we’re going to get to a silver bullet. But how do we how do we sort of get the most out of it so that, as I said, it doesn’t sort of become poor, queasy, and simple, simple acts of just just retrieving. So I think I’ve touched upon a few things already the idea of providing opportunities to practice, but also just making sure that whatever, whatever you want, or if you’re about to introduce something new, and it’s the first time that or you might think that students have been taught before, but you don’t want to assume how can you use your retrieval practice as a means by which to check that the prerequisite knowledge is there that there’s a safe level of understanding there so that you are ready to begin introducing the new content. So example that springs to mind immediately, if I want to talk teach my students about the distribution of the tropical rainforest, it would be really, really useful if they can recall why the equator was the warmest place on earth. Like that would be really really useful information. It would be even more useful if they understood APSET atmospheric circulation and why the equator happens to be the wettest place on earth. Because it’s sort of immediately we can get away from this misconception that deserts are found on the equator because it’s really hot, which isn’t the case. There’s it’s out fondle, and the equator, along the equator is really hot and really wet. So I can check they’ve got that prerequisite knowledge about why they equate is the warmest placement, as well as think about how I might be able to on Earth, any sort of misconceptions through Kirt carefully planned out my retrieval practice. So I think it’s really important that I’m sort of going through a phase that we’re not a face or any sort of a transition at whole school level where retrieval practice for a lot of a lot of teachers in my school is going to be something that is relatively new to them. So I’m trying to think about systematically how I’m introducing that to my to my colleagues. So at the moment, we just have what we call sort of like a high five recall. And the idea is that it’s five simple recall questions. But what we’re, we’re sort of doing here is we’re training the teachers and the students to get familiar with the routines around how that’s going to work. And sort of the next step is thinking about how we can be better at create, engineering our questions so that they do build into what is being and so we’re activating those, those concepts that are within our schema to prepare for the new content that’s been introduced, I think it’s really important that, you know, retrieval practice isn’t something that’s taken place in your school, or it’s something that’s new to you, establishing the routines that, you know, as you said earlier, create the means of participation into how we’re going about how we’re going to go about doing retrieval practice is really important. And not to sort of try and sprint before you can walk really sort of progressively build it up so that it becomes more sophisticated. And it becomes, you know, progressively more challenging as well. And it’s sort of a little bit of a journey. I think if I if I think back to three or four years ago, with my own practice, I was pretty much quiz, quiz, quiz, retrieval, but not really carefully thinking about how, how it can be done in a really thoughtful and meaningful way. So that does activate prior knowledge, and does help build you built on what has been what has come before it.
Craig Barton 49:34
I love this. Any opportunity to talk about retrieval, I’m always more than happy. So I’m really pleased you brought this up. So I’ve have two big questions for you here, David. And, again, there’s, well I don’t think there’s easy answers to these because I’m always wrestling with these but I’m always interested in getting other people’s take. So the first one is a mistake I’ve made and you’ve alluded to this is my retrieval practice has always been these kinds of come a shallow knowledge kind of quiz, quiz style quiz. Students and my concern there is that, let’s say on a scheme of work, and I’m intrigued whether this this, this holds true in geography as well, let’s say you’ve got two weeks to teach a topic, whatever it is percentages. By the end of those two weeks, the kids are probably doing some quite sophisticated things with percentages, some quite nice problem solving, and so on and so forth. But then flash forward to four weeks later, and all of a sudden, a percentage question appears in your do now or your start or your homework. Invariably, it’s going to be back to almost kind of surface level knowledge, very rarely do retrieval opportunities, provide the depth of thinking that kids have been exposed to when they’ve been learning the topic on which they need to be exposed to to to understand something. So is that something that you can relate to David, perhaps either in your subject in your prior teaching, or in your school that often retrieval doesn’t go as deep as perhaps it needs to?
David Goodwin 50:49
Yeah, there’s a there’s a time consideration as well as so you’ve got to weigh up. How much time can you invest in the retrieval as well as introducing new content. But I think it’s a bit foolish to sort of move on if if what what they need to know that’s come before it isn’t, isn’t really secure. But then equally, you’ve got, again, you’ve got to think about time. So I look at, again, a few sort of big opportunities within the curriculum where the retrieval that you can do is going to be really meaningful and really challenging. And again, you can’t do this all of the time. But think back to something I did with a yellow elevens a couple of years ago, where we were introducing about three or four lessons into it into a new topic. And what I wanted to do was show students how what they’ve learned previously linked to what they were learning. So the first part was, we did some quite simple retrieval, some basic recall questions. Okay. So right, this first column, this is where you reek, all of the answers are going to go in this fit to set up a simple table, all your answers are going to go in this first column. Now what I want you to think about classes, as some further some questions from some knowledge that we learnt further back in time, and then some questions from even further. So we’ve got three columns of knowledge that had been there previously. Now we’re going to do some retrieval about what we’re what we’re currently learning these last three lessons, and then we’re going to explore between all of these concepts and ideas how these different things link. So now, what we’ve got here is we’re not just superficially, you know, answering loads of those questions, we’re actually thinking about really, where are the links between them? And I’ve thought about it really, really carefully in terms of what, what knowledge did I want students to encounter, but an equally what surprises might come along. So when once we’ve done this sort of retrieval of these three topics, and the current topic we’re learning, we would create a concept map that showed all of the links between all of these these big ideas. But what I found through doing it was some, some students genuinely identified some genuine links that I hadn’t thought about myself. And then from there, we went about actually producing a quite an extended piece of writing that demonstrated what they understood from the whole process. It was, it probably took about one one and a half to two lessons worth of sort of work to get to that point. But again, the the the depth and the breadth of knowledge that they covered, I cannot see any sort of other way that I could have covered that, that quantity. And so to that extent, and again, it’s not something you can do all of the time, but it was a worthy investment, because there was some really, really sort of big meaty concepts that students hadn’t considered in that sort of context before, and how and how everything sort of linked together.
Craig Barton 53:53
It’s really interesting, really interesting maximise, my second one is, and this happens in math, and again, I’m intrigued on your take on this, there are certain things that tend to get left out of retrieval opportunities. And there are kind of two categories for these. So the first is there’s a load of topics in math that are just a bit of a pain to quiz kids on because either they require specialist equipment, you know, like measuring angles, you gotta get up attractors, or constructing perpendicular bisectors outcome, the compasses, and teachers like Oh, for God’s sake, if I start my lesson with that, and the kids, you know what I mean? So they tend to get kind of left out a little bit. And that’s obviously a problem. Because if we don’t provide these retrieval opportunities, kids forget them. So that’s one area that happens in maths. The other thing that I think is quite interesting as well is there are quite a few topics in maths and math teachers may shoot me down for this, but aren’t actually prerequisite for that many of the topics. So a good example here is rotation. So once the kids know how to rotate an object, that’s kind of the end of the story there. It’s not like that skill is going to be prerequisite for something that they then learn in year 10 Or year. haven’t. So if teachers are just relying on retrieval being prior knowledge, there’s a danger that some topics may not bubble up as much as other topics. So I just wonder, do you encounter either of those two things, either the painful to quiz things that tend to get left out? Or things that actually, it’s not fair to say that kind of one offs, but almost they’re not as much prior? They’re not prerequisite as much as other things would be, if that makes sense.
David Goodwin 55:27
Yeah, definitely. The first one is thinking grid references using Matt, just anything where it’s not as a teacher, as well as thinking about everything else that we have just managing time. So like if we want to manage our workload, creating a whole host of practice tasks around? Yeah, create a whole load of practice tasks around four figure six figure grid references, latitude and longitude isn’t it’s not the it’s not the easiest thing. The second, the second one? Yeah, I imagine. It’s not something I can, I can say for sure, just just off my head, but I’m sure there will be some, some concepts, some ideas that are less purposeful than others in terms of their links to, you know, new content, and the idea of them being prerequisite knowledge. Yeah, that absolutely. And I think it’s just really about being really, really meticulous in terms of the curriculum planning and how, you know, that the knowledge begets knowledge and how it builds on each other. And, you know, it’s the idea that curriculum works never done, isn’t it like, it’s, you can think that you’ve, you’ve sort of got retrieval practice mastered. But then you there’s always something like, If I think to, again, two or three years ago, I was doing it, and I was in a brilliant retrieval practice, like this is really good. It’s got to be a lot better than what I’ve done in the past. And it is, but now I think about what I’m doing now. And it’s much better than what I was doing sort of two or three years ago. So yeah, I think we’re really, collectively within your, you know, within your team within your department really thinking about your curriculum, and what are the big sort of concepts and ideas? And those are the ones that spiral through your curriculum, the ones that you’re going to pay more attention to? So then, maybe some of those, you know, like you said, their rotation.
Craig Barton 57:25
That’s brilliant, fascinating. Well, these have been five amazing tips. David, let me hand over to you. What should listeners check out of yours?
David Goodwin 57:34
What should listeners check out? Mark’s got a new book coming out with Michael Charles gear one, which is a book for trainee teachers. Your tips for teachers actually features a lot in terms of quotes and ideas sort of from? Yes, I’ve got got that coming up. My my sort of work with Oliver cavatelli, we not long but I finished the project with Mr. Turner on the extended mind and about how similar to some of the ideas that I talked about, and how about how we can sort of spread the load of thinking to manage our working memory. So it’s, you know, we think about the tools that we can use that can serve serve learning, but also manage limitations of working memory. So that was quite a, an interesting project. Some people might find useful.
Craig Barton 58:26
Fantastic. We’ll put links to all of that in the show notes. And Well, David, this has been fantastic. I’m been a big fan of your work on Twitter for a long time now. So I’m really pleased that you agreed to came on the show. So David, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us. Thank you, Greg.