More videos from Jon Mumford
Video transcript
okay mate tip number three please okay tip number three is um the use of debt as a post assessment formative tool and so i remember years ago and i don’t know whether you might have been at this meeting and it was a teach meet that we held at our school i remember a teacher from colder stones high school in liverpool came to speak to us and she was talking about death and nobody had heard of it before um so dedicated i mean it’s a number of different titles and it’s dedicated improvements and reflective time is what i take it for me to stand for and i think i’ve heard dedicated independent reflective time there’s a number of different um things to describe it um but it’s been a game changer for me in my my lessons because the way i’ve used it is that the whole purpose of it is to to start a dialogue with the students and try and highlight some i know that you you love your misconceptions don’t you don’t well have you ever heard of a misconception before i’ve had my family so it was to give give students an activity which you know might highlight one of those misconceptions or it might um get students to discuss now the important aspect of that i understand by death is to get them to have a little think about it have it think about maybe those common errors that they might be making um and discuss it with their peers and i always think that i think my most enjoyable moments in a classroom is when i’ve set them a debt activity to them the date activities i usually do are i might take a piece of work in um there might be five errors that i pick out from various people’s piece of work and i just put them on the board and i just write okay what’s the area in these centers dead straight forward and talk to you talk to your partner for the next five ten minutes and we’ll discuss what we think the common error might be and i said my best moments my my most precious moments in a classroom when i’m not teaching i’m just walking around i’m listening to these high-level conversations and i know it’s language based but how how french your spanish works and the intricacies of how the language is structured and sometimes i think i would never have heard you speaking in that way in those terms about french or spanish whatever it might be if i hadn’t have done this task because you very rarely do in a language’s classroom especially you don’t get that much time to either speak the language or to offer answers because unfortunately there’s 30 other students in the class all fighting for that you know that that hair time and but those if you can have a collective you know a collaborative activity like a date activity where the students are discussing it together um then i just think it’s such a powerful um powerful tools and to be honest it does tie in with diagnostic questions as well because i i have the same experience when i use diagnostic questions because i i set it off to the students and just okay well which is the right answer and can you have a little discussion about what those other three what what trap have you fallen into with those other three there and the conversation you often don’t give the students enough credit to you because you listen to them i’ve not even thought of that that’s a brilliant i’ve not even thought of that as being a possible answer and so i i just i love using dirt at the start of that especially after an assessment because what i’ll often do is i’ll i’ll take those five centers out and if you’ve got a nice relationship with the students you can say to them you might even recognize one of your own senses here and if you remember it well enough then you can ask that students after they’ve had a conversation with someone do you recognize that one and they’ll say well i do yeah and what do you think it might be haven’t spoken to your partner what do you think it might be um so i i just look not a massive you know game changer um but to be honest it has been for me and it’s probably not something that’s going to revolutionize anyone’s teaching and but at the end of every assessment once i’ve marked the assessments i will do a date activity with the students just to ensure that as a group that we’ve understood what those common errors might be and the better you know as with diagnostic questions the more we discuss the errors the common areas the less likely the students are to make them because they’re better at recognizing them and i’m preempting them and so yeah so that is something which i love using don’t you use that much in well yeah the thing is it’s one of those that has just been it’s got so many different meanings to so many different people i’ve i’ve seen it used so many different times but for me the the power has always been focusing on those common errors as you’ve described there but i’ve often seen it simply being used as time in class where kids just go through and respond to the individual feedback and that comes back to the issues that we were talking about in your first tip where that’s very hard to get the kids to engage in that individual feedback and get stuff out there and whenever i’ve done that i’ve spent my whole time just running around the class trying to either respond to questions or actually get kids doing something and it’s never worked but i really like this idea of focusing on the common errors so just to dive into the logistics of this mate for a second would you so this is essentially whole class feedback right in in a type of whole class feedback yeah so you’re marking the books or the essays or whatever and you’re keeping a note of spotting common themes and you’re coming up with you know three four or five common errors that are happening uh throughout there are you giving the books back first before you do this activity are you holding slower on those yeah i’ll give the exercise box back and then i’ll just say right open up your books on the next page and again they’ve done whether you’re whether you’re like using different color pens and stuff but i just use green pens for their third time especially because slt can see that straight away when things yeah it’s nice get this out mate yeah yeah um and then what i’ll do is i’ll i’ll write the five sensors on the board in black pen i’ll say two might copy these sentences out incorrectly so that these sensors are incorrect as they stand copy them out incorrectly leave the line underneath and then with your colleague with the person sat next to you have a little discussion about what you think the error might be and if you’re confident you think you’ve got the error right then in your green pen underneath right now write the corrected sentence out and then after five or ten minutes we go through them together and obviously pick on various various students to uh talk to i said before i would try and choose the students who’s made the error initially to see if they’ve reflected on it well enough it’s really nice i’m a mat as you know i’m a massive fan of misconceptions and errors just in general and discussing them should i start on the website and this i get a lot of rambo email i don’t know if there’s even a question as part of this but one thing i found really powerful is it’s great for differentiation because you could have a kid who’s got that their essay is perfect or in my case they’ve got 10 out of 10 in in their in their homework and you’ve got another kid who’s done a really poor essay or he’s had an absolute nightmare in in the maths exercise but they can still get something out of this because the child who’s struggled their focus is on trying to identify that error and correcting the error whereas the child has done really well they’re focused once they’ve identified the error i often say to them okay how would you explain to somebody or support somebody who’s made that error how would you can you understand the error and how do you convince them not by just saying look this is how you do it how would you get them to resolve their misconception so it doesn’t matter what kind of level you access this there’s something in it for everyone if that makes sense yeah definitely that’s the beauty of it everyone’s involved aren’t you and no matter what their ability level they’ll contribute something won’t they and quite often they’ll surprise they’ll surprise you as well yeah surprise you at the level of think the level of thought that they’ve got um but i said the thing that i found most most useful in languages is that you can predict you can predict the mistakes that they’re going to make that’s the thing in life you know that they’re gonna the ending of the verb’s gonna be wrong yeah so you can get them looking out for those so that when they you know when you’re doing activities like they’re looking out for the endings of those verbs or they’re looking for the word order whatever it might be when it comes to their own written work they’ll subconsciously know that they’ve got to pay attention to those those aspects of the syntax it’s really nice display and yeah in terms of the you made a really key point there about the fact that the kids will surprise you whereas if you’re trying to differentiate like really explicitly like one kid will get this worksheet one kid will get this task and so on but you’re just playing a guessing game whereas this every child has got that opportunity and kids will surprise you the other way right you the kids who you think will have a real good grasp of this yeah actually won’t do so it’s you know um the um yeah the other thing i was going to say is if you mark a piece of work and perhaps you don’t see like certain areas that you know you’ve seen in the past will you be tempted to kind of chuck those in as part of dirt or will it always be related to things you’ve actually seen in that piece of work i said before it’s usually related to the things that i would have seen in an assessment but just the way the way languages work as i said before you can predict the the types of mistake they’ll make so if they haven’t seen that mistake for a while you might just you might just throw that one in so you might just make one up for example and but one other thing that i’ve done and i don’t know what your take on this might be because when i’ve introduced this to my department some of them said ah i’m not for that at all but what i’ve said i’ve seen this on i think it was on facebook or somewhere that i’ve seen it in the past and it’s still there it’s still classed as there it’s but it’s a death crib sheet so it’s one sheet because what one thing that i don’t know what how you feel about market but marketing is the thing that i despise my high-tech profession correct um and if you there’s nothing more demoralizing than taking 30 bucks into marketing like i’ve got i’ve got to work my way through these so one thing i thought to reduce teacher workload primarily was a crib sheet so just one sheet of a4 and on the a4 sheet there are maybe six or seven different boxes in one of the boxes there might be a praise section in one of the boxes might be presentation one might be common misconceptions or class common errors and there might be um i think one of them are called a polaroid moments where someone produced something absolutely amazing that we want to make a big deal about and as you’re marking the books instead of actually in the regime actually marking the book and inviting them to the exercise but you’re just making notes you’re flicking through the exercise books you’re making notes about those common areas that they’re making or anything that you want to highlight um and then the students all get that same um same crit sheet back so you actually name the shoot so you might even say you know the presentation from craig is not too good here and i don’t what do you think about that about naming and shaming yeah it all comes again i think you’ve alluded to it all comes down to relationships right if you know the kids and you know the class it’s it can be a really powerful thing to do and if you’ve got that culture where we’re all in it together and sometimes some kids are going to do well but sometimes they’re not going to do so well then i think it can work really well but again we can all imagine kids for whom it’s going to be an absolute disaster so yeah it’s all teacher judgment for me on that one but that sounds really it sounds a really interesting one and it’s like again when we were first started our teaching career there was none of this whole class feedback right like it was all kind of it all had to be personalized individualized and so on and yet it saves so much time and it’s super effective isn’t it you know both looking at whole class problems um as we’ve already discussed but also examples of excellence across the class there’s so many benefits to it yeah and you know when if we go back to the eef report as well they mentioned things like live marketing don’t mean things like which collaborative pursuits aren’t anywhere everyone’s involved everyone’s you know getting something from it whereas they said it just doesn’t make sense does it it’s not a good use of time is it to be as you said before going around the room and dealing with every single student and what i think is really important with with this sort of feedback as well is explain to the students why feedback is so important why is important that we’re discussing these common errors and get just get them to appreciate the fact that when they’re doing an activity like this that there’s a real purpose behind it and it’s you know it’s centered in right you’re in the right place um so i i love using um good data after an assessment um but again it’s it’s not for it’s not for everybody and but i think that you’re right that as a collaborative way of giving feedback and getting students to move on and recognize common errors it’s something which i’ve found really useful and it’s again just final point on this um like the fact that you’ve got evidence in books is an important thing right for slt or whatever that’s often a problem with whole class feedback that well how’s it relate to my work what have i got to show from this but the fact that whether the kids are responding to those common errors um and having that discussion or the sticking in the crib sheet or whatever it may be there’s the the the response has happened from that and that that feels like it’s an important part you can ref you know you can reference those those other death activities in the past as well so you can you can say actually we did this error that we’ve just made here we did that in last week you know a dirt activity look back and it’s because it’s in green he can flick back relatively easily as well so yeah it does work well lovely that mate