More tips from Sammy Kempner
Video transcript
right tip number three something what we going for here um use the same questions with different numbers oh another great you’ve really thought these through i like i like the snappy titles yeah as i said as i said that’s the only sappy part the rest is just hot air from me yeah right tell me more about this one sammy so um again in the theme of accountability you let’s say um you introduce a question so constantly saying to students right the most important thing for learning is to ask questions you have to ask questions you have to ask questions um and so you model something questions questions questions no okay fine we’re doing the same question with different numbers and you can literally just rub out the numbers and say if you understood it then this is absolutely no problem because it is the same question and so it might be for white boards it might be with like a do now let’s say you give them a difficulty now and then you say we’re doing this same do now tomorrow with different numbers so you ask questions now you um write down your purple pen notes now so that you can look back at them tomorrow because tomorrow i’m expecting every single person down to every single one of these without any problems um it might be a really so a nice uh nice thing to do which i’ve done a lot of um is with my year 11’s particularly it’s just re-tests i used to literally use tip x to tip x out the numbers and just write new numbers on but now we’ve got like these nice laptops from my school and we can just like get a pdf up and just like column and white and black and rewrite new numbers on but principle is tip x copy style retests and you save them like before you start the review just so we’re going to review the usual ways group work and i’m going to stop you every so often and like ask people to explain things i got wrong but on top of all that at the end of the review period we’re going to do a retest it’s going to be the questions that the class did badly on and it’s going to be the same questions with just different numbers and anyone who doesn’t do well in this i’ll know you just didn’t do this review properly so yeah pretty much that and like there’s all kinds of different like it might be we try not ever to get kids to write just copy stuff down from the board um so when we want a nice example in books it’ll be like that situation we’ll model one then we’ll go by the numbers and be like right now you do this one in your books nicely and obviously if they get it wrong they have to write a purple pen note um because always you want them to be thinking thinking as much as possible um so sam you’ve chucked a couple of things in here that we need to follow up on this this is great so the first thing is the first time i heard something similar to the change numbers thing for for low stakes quizzes was when danny quinn and former head of master michaela was on my podcast years years ago and she described the process where the kids would be given a low stakes quiz um and then they wouldn’t be judged on how they did on that they do it you’re very low stakes they do it in class maybe answers are up on the board teacher goes through it blah blah but then the teacher says to them okay your homework over the weekend is to prepare for the follow-up quiz where you’re going to get the exact same questions but the numbers are going to change and i’ve never heard of this before but the point danny made and i’m assuming it’s a similar point that you’re making here is that how the kids do on that first iteration that’s maybe down to either ability achievement knowledge and so on and so forth but how they do when the numbers change that’s almost all down to efforts they’ve no reason they can’t do that as long as they have given time and opportunity to figure out whether it’s from the group or from the teacher so it’s a real good way to hold them to account because there’s no excuse and danny was saying how parents would because i think danny was this was where i got the nspcc contacts and it was all kicking off because um danny was um would then i think maybe put them in detention or something like that if they did bad on the follow-up test and and everyone was you can imagine people kicking off but her point that got lost was they had every opportunity to do well on that follow-up test because they knew what the questions were going to be it’s just the numbers we’re going to change is that is that a similar kind of kind of philosophy if that makes sense nail nerd absolutely i’m all for that detention there the beyonce you sammy be careful what are you saying no wonder you’re not on twitter yeah as long as you set them up for success fairly um like you’ve given them you you’ve made sure that they’ve had space for questions um you’ve gone you’ve modeled it really cleanly you you have to like hold yourself to account as well and be like have you actually done a good enough job there and giving them time to talk out in groups maybe like uh maybe even getting another question there and then check and be like if you if you check and you let’s say they do do now and they don’t get it right you re-teach one of the questions they do a mini viable question everyone gets it right and you say to them tomorrow look everyone’s got it right every single person this is coming up tomorrow and i’m giving i’m just changing the numbers if you don’t get it right i’m going to keep you afterwards because something like you because because and you say to them tomorrow because like fair enough if they can’t remember i think like if they’re struggling to remember that’s understandable but if you let them look back in their books at the purple pen notes that they’ve made in their strategy there is absolutely it’s completely justified to say to them you must be 100 in this because like either you weren’t asking questions or you copied someone when you’re doing mini whiteboard actually okay um or you were lazy when it came trying purple notes and therefore when it comes back to like you’ve forgotten which isn’t your fault but when when when you get a chance to help yourself because i’ve not made a test i’ve said you can look at your notes whatever notes you made if you can’t if they don’t help you then you obviously did it badly and that’s on you that’s good that i like that and the second thing and that you chucked in towards the end there and this is something i’ve been thinking about some work i’ve been doing with the school at the moment you mentioned about the copying down now this is a massive thing because i would say enough to watch that involve a worked example invariably the kids are asked at some point to copy down that word example and there’s a number of issues with this but the biggest is and i’ve suffered from this myself i call it this the illusion of copying down that there’s this almost this belief that something magical happens from the process of a child copying something down on the board that all of a sudden they understand it more they learn it more or something like that and the my other issue i have with this is i’m not convinced that kids use their exercise books effectively for revision it’s not as if you know you’re looking back through because books sometimes scruffy disorganized blah blah blah blah and this works example yeah anyway so i’m really intrigued what you do there so let me see if i’ve got this right so you’re modeling one kind of version of the word example however you you model it but then you’re ch the kids aren’t writing that down in books but then the version that they get down in books is essentially kind of like a your turn it’s it’s it’s the worst example but with the numbers changing that becomes their model example is that right sammy yeah that’s it yeah yeah so okay so just tell me a little bit about this so i like the rationale that you always want the kids thinking that that’s i’m i’m completely on board with that how do you i guess the big question how do you want your kids using that word for example are you of the belief and are the kids going to be kind of referring back to it what’s the purpose of it so the best way of revising math is to do math like i’m definitely on board what you’ve said there i completely agree i wouldn’t want my kids reading through their notes and stuff um when it comes to revising however a lot of students i i’ve never really been bothered that much about books i’ve never yeah i’ve just never really like cared that much to be honest but um kids do sit like somehow maybe just because we make a big deal like the purple pen and how to reflect on mistakes and stuff and so we do that for first of all so they that to force them to engage mistakes and um they can write down feedback so they understand so they like know what the right thing to do is the strategy may be but also the better like kind of higher level thinking is they’re reflecting on their own mistakes articulating where they went wrong and writing down what they need to do next time it’s a really hard skill like again we never arrive it’s definitely there’s always room for improvement but it’s something we aspire to um i keep saying we like i’m talking about in my school um yeah like but i think um so because we’ve made such a big deal about purple pens students tend they seem to care about their books and they seem to care about the notes that they’re making more than probably i i do yeah and a lot of a lot of them do find it useful to refer back to them um especially if i’m doing something like the do now and i’m saying i write down on top of notes because i’m giving the same questions and you can look back at them tomorrow so i don’t really care but students seem to by by virtue of all the other things in place that we’re trying to do to make them learn um and i think also like like you know as someone as a math teacher now who was alright at maths when i was at school i didn’t really need to look back on my book yeah because i just remembered stuff whereas a lot of the kids who teach actually do need that and it’s helpful if they can do that and also we do a lot of champs we do a champion pretty much every topic um like a call and responds for pretty much every topic and that’s the sort of thing that they write down in purple pen and if that’s written down in their book next to it that’s that kind of question it is helpful them to refer back to it um so the answer is i i and and also for sorry for the same reason that’s also why we get them to have one clean example at least one clean example in their book so that if they want to they can refer back to it and when they’re doing independent practice that lesson or later on that week or whenever it may be if they come to revise um and they really can’t remember and they don’t think to ask a friend or they don’t think to come to their future at least it’s something they can do to help themselves before giving up um so that’s the extent to which i like i i care about neat examples and books um does that mean yeah it makes perfect sense if i’m just check i’ve got this this right i’m always interested in the logistics of this so you are you’re modeling a work example on the board the kids aren’t writing anything down or would they be possibly banging stuff down on mini whiteboards throughout or is it just just watching just watching watching i think in my school everyone’s got slightly different ways but as a general i think if you’re modeling something from the start everyone focus completely um yeah and then you’re then so that you’ve gone through it and then you’re you’re changing the numbers and they’re having to go but they’re writing it in their books so just two questions on that how are you how are you assessing whether they’ve understood that that yeah so sometimes i save the work them writing their books until i know they can do it so sometimes i’ll model it and we’ll do so many whiteboard questions and finally writeable question i will rub out the numbers and say right right you’re going to do this one in your books as your example so it might be then it might also be if you like this all works better for higher attaining classes and if you have lower 10 classes what a lot of teachers our school do is um guide the students through a worked example um but then because but if the knowledge the student hasn’t told the students what’s going on it seems um so it’s something they’ve worked through as a class yeah they then write that down because it’s something they’ve done it’s like arguably it’s copying but i also think because the students have worked through it themselves rather than being told it’s a bit better than that however it was there was something really illuminating uh that was mentioned by a colleague of mine in a mass meeting recently um and she’d been she teaches a the bottom set yeah kind of maybe year seven class for your a class and she was watching them write down a word example but like like that where they’ve gone through it as a class she got the information from them and then she said right now write this down as your neat example and she’d watch them copy down and they’d copied it down from like the bottom right of the example they had they hadn’t copied it like left to right and in the order of the thinking and the writing that um we’d done it they just copy it down as if there’s a picture and it was like it was wow mind blowing and like there’s obviously there’s so much to unpack there wow but essentially like what i’ve taken from that is just really again copying down yeah it’s so not helpful wow sammy that i mean again yeah yeah yeah that is that’s your classic sign of almost kind of just a just a passive process like you say just copying a picture down right yeah that is incredible and final question on this sami just purple pen just just just clear up for me what role does that play in this works example part of the process yeah so if um let’s say so we’re doing it the way that i mentioned first where you do a question yeah rub out the numbers then new numbers they do in their books if it’s like so i will certainly to get a sense i’ll circulate targeting the students at least like you know and yeah then if like then and then i’ll go through the answer and then i’ll say if you’ve got anything wrong you need to purple pen it and so like that might be a sentence it might be with the word with the perfect example like doing it properly the bit they did wrong in purple pen and explaining what they did wrong so the the slight the issue with that is their neat example it might not end up being neat sure but i think it still is still better than copying yeah and for me it’s the ownership thing there like i’m also even if they do copy the example from the board if they’ve got something in their own words some personalized them whether it’s annotations or whatever that for me starts the meanings there and it’s a bit more more active that’s i’ve done a lot of learning walks where i’ve focused on purple pen notes and stuff and the range of quality is incredible and obviously there’s there’s some really bad purple pen notes where students have actually like made an even bigger like mistake with their purple pens um or said some nonsense but i think the principle of something to work towards where they’re reflecting on mistakes is a worthwhile or like really important and um using the purple pen simply for corrections and teacher top tips and chants is still really good and in some ways just training them to reach that stage where they are taking ownership of it and doing their own thing so like it is still worthwhile but i would i don’t want to i don’t want to give off the wrong impressions like all of us all of our students are writing ridiculously good like metacognitive comments and whatever like it’s just not the case but they are do a lot of them do it well and someone do it incredibly well and some of them don’t and um but it’s still a worthwhile thing that’s great savvy just before we move on to uh tip number four you you keep mentioning champs can you give us a couple of these chants get a couple of examples of these adding and subtracting fractions find the lcm uh perimeter is the distance around the 2d shape and there’s a really good one which is uh one of my favorites uh you say right angle triangle pythagoras or trig side side side pie pie labeled longer side side angle side so cur toe uh label the two sides cover up the one you want and use the formula so like you know you can question the pedagogy in in some of those things like you know using the formula triangle for sofa tone whatever but in terms of like it’s it’s quite powerful because you teach that with um you teach as a mind map it’s like you see a triangle are you finding area yes or no if no is it a rival triangle then you go through that whole champ process yeah if if it’s not then you go through two angles two sides and simon will sign will write the one you want on top if not three sides one angle cosine you’re gonna go and you teach it as this mind-map but then the chants reflect it and they take them through the thinking and then it’s really like it’s also because that one that one’s good because it’s got quite a good beat yeah i was gonna go away you have to yeah you have to really like embrace you have to buy into it and someone said i i think you you know it’s ridiculous and the kids know it’s ridiculous yeah if you’re just unashamedly into it yeah and you just but even if they don’t want to do it if you keep doing it and pushing them into it then like and then we’re not going to move on until you’re going to do the same level of enthusiasm as i’m given particularly if you do it from year seven then uh by year 11 they’re just they’re just brought in and it’s just a normal part of life so that’s great that sally that’s brilliant