More tips from Harry Fletcher-Wood
Video transcript
it’s my first tip um do less but better and so concretely i’d say cut whatever you’re planning to do in half um and this idea originally came from i was doing a little talk to some really small group of teachers um about response to teaching my book and and one of them said well look i’m an nqt um what is your what’s one practical thing that i should do tomorrow today and i was like look take a look at your lesson plan it’s never all going to stick there’s loads of stuff in there just like cut half of the things half the activities and then pick a few things that are really valuable important and spend more time on them and and so instead of saying we do seven different activities in maybe six minutes i’m gonna have to prepare each one and say like i’m gonna get one text one problem one thing and we’re gonna spend longer on it but i’m gonna think hard about okay how will i introduce it how will i revisit it what will students do with it so hopefully it will be easier on me and i’ll kind of get more bang for my buck more more thinking out of it um and then for the the fractal part you could do that for a lesson but you could also do that for a school improvement plan you could do it for a professional development session just pick the one or two things that are really important and do them really well and no one’s going to do like your 27 things on your school improvement plan so you might as well not even bother just just make it too this is lovely this harry so if we dive into the lesson aspect of this i’m really intrigued by this because it’s your classic kind of novice teacher and even experienced teacher mistakes and they’re over planning like it happens all the time particularly if you’re being observed you never fit everything in and then you’ve got that awful dilemma of do you just try and whiz through it to try and get through to the really good stuff that you’ve planned you’ve spent ages planning it or do you think no actually i’m going to slow down and and it all it always ends up being a compromise that kind of satisfies a nobody and what i also like about this it reminds me of your classic kind of 80 your stuff is going to deliver 80 of the results so focus on that and how does it work practically so what what kind of things do you often find teachers can cut out from their lessons that aren’t needed are there any certain activities or parts of the lesson that can normally go so so yeah in some ways starting with the cutting is unhelpful because actually the start point is like what is the key thing that you want students to understand what like what they’re going to take away how are you going to know if they’ve got it what are the big misconceptions they might um uh they might suffer i guess is the word um and so so that ideally that cutting would be done around that i mean i guess i think there’s probably a case that um if you come back to the sort of kirchner thing of you know you want cognitive activity and not activity activity well not that activity activity is bad but often it’s like oh how can i get them to see this i’m going to need this we’re going to need colors there’s going to be talking so like where of what will it make them think uh now brought in willingham and curtin like five minutes in um but but so saying okay but like if if we’ve got the key idea in the lesson you probably only need like one or two activities that are going to be around it and you can maybe cut off a lot of the like we’re going to do this we’re going to do it and cut it down to like okay as a historian like here’s a text we’re going to read it we’re going to discuss the different bits in it we might do a bit of writing about it like that we could get a lot out of this one text instead of what i might have done as a less experienced teacher which would be like i’m going to use the text and then there’s going to be a different writing activity and then there’s going to be a different thing well actually the text is probably quite hard so giving students time and the chance to pull it apart and make sense of it is is going to be much more worthwhile that’s a bit of a roundabout answer but hopefully it sort of answers oh it certainly does hurry and just a bit of a follow-up to that um one thing i’ve been dabbling with in maths and i always wonder whether this transfers so i’m thinking you’re the ideal person for me to to kind of test this test this outside here right so in maths a mistake i used to make was i used to have loads of different types of activities that i’d wheel out for different topics so it would be a certain topic when i’m a certain type of task when i’m doing pythagoras and another one when i’m teaching quadratics and so on what i’m trying to do now is have more kind of a collection of high value activities so this would hopefully fit into idea of kind of you know less is more that um one of them would be like a venn diagram the structure of a venn diagram i can use that structure to get kids thinking hard about fractions pythagoras quadratics graphs and so on and it may not lend itself as well as some of these more bespoke activities but because we’re focusing in on that structure i get better as a teacher at using it the kids get better as learners are using it and it just feels like by by reducing the number of types of things i’m doing with the kids over the course of a year i just get the feeling it’s better for everybody does that is that something that come on first does it fit into your tip and does that transfer across to like a subject like history this terror that like well if i do the same thing i did with them two weeks ago though yeah yeah that’s it and and actually if you think about like every activity has uh the content you want them to learn or the thing you want them to do and then they’re like the knowing how the activity works and the content is going to impose some cognitive load and knowing how the activity works is going to impose some cognitive load if the activity is new and the content then you’re making life harder for them so actually you know there’s a sense in which if there were a single format for a lesson that you always did um now that that you know that potentially would would get dull for you or for that for them and there’s definitely value and variety and you want it to feel fresh and sometimes you want to surprise them and so on um but actually the real excitement is that history is really exciting maths is really exciting and the real excitement is about the content not the box that you put it in so actually saying every time that we look at a piece of evidence every time that we try and understand the causes of an event we’re always going to approach it in certain ways is incredibly productive because we can then think much harder about the causes of the event and as a historian that’s the thing that i really want students to care about more than i do the fact that i’ve come up with a really cool debate structure that’s going to help us get into it and and yeah so like it’s efficient for you it’s efficient for them just just standardize and maybe you know like maybe it’s five activities maybe it’s ten activities it doesn’t have to be like just one but i i think it helps everyone that’s lovely that so if we if we kind of dial up from from the lesson level you mentioned kind of school improvement plans and things i mean i’ve i’ve never been in a position thank god to after i write one of those they sound painful is it practical to be able to shelve half of half of those kind of things and other things outside of the classroom i mean i’ve never been in a position to write one of them either i can i can tell you tell you a couple of things one is this i spent five years working doing a program for heads of teaching and learning so i was working like you had a cpd um and something that i quite consistently saw is that over the two-year program they’ve come in with the like here’s the 20 things that we do in our cpd program and gradually they whittle it down they’d end up saying here are the five things but they’re really hard and achieving some kind of change is really difficult and so we spend where previously it was like oh we’ll do questioning in a lesson well question is a half term because we need to like talk about it look at some evidence try it out come back to it and so in that sense it’s like it’s not just desirable it’s it’s unavoidable and the other anecdote i was briefly a school governor so i was in a position that you know wasn’t writing plans but i was commenting on them and i remember saying to the head teacher who’s brilliant head teacher um there are too many things in this you you it was like the primary school was like you know we’re going to rewrite the curriculum and this this this that i’m like this is not going to happen um and she was like yeah no it would be fine and i remember the next governor’s meeting she’s like in retrospect harry might have a point that like we have taken on too many things um and so yeah i think it’s you know like it’s it’s like the classic are you trying to cover the curriculum or are you trying to make sure students have learned it and in the same way if you want to say like we’ve done something about these 20 items and it was a two-minute item in staff briefing you can tick them all off it change changing human beings and changing our practices is slow and hard and if you want that to really happen you’re going to have to make sure that you you give it the time and so you can’t do 20 things at once you can probably do two it’s fascinating there so just one more thing i just wanted to raise on this tip and then i’ll throw over to you just in case there’s anything else um i’ve just um spoken on a previous tips for teachers a video with gemma sherwood who’s a who’s a maths teacher and oversees curriculum at almost an academy and one of her tips was related to this and it but it to do with explanations so essentially try and be don’t try and say too much when you’re explaining things be really kind of clear and concise it feels to me that there’s a similar thing going on here where it’s quite i often made the mistake with my explanations of just trying to keep talking keep talking in the hope that what some of the words are going to hit the kids heads at some point and make some kind of sense but it’s a similar thing isn’t it you can kind of either cognitively overload them overwhelm them with stuff but it’s quite i find it quite hard to be really kind of concise but it’s it’s the key i think to a good explanation and a good lesson and a good school improvement plan picking the kind of hard hitting things the impactful things and focusing in on them and the rest is kind of just noise that needs to go does that make sense so when i when i talk about models with teachers i refer to one of my favorite findings about modern language which is that actually if you’re showing students models or showing students models and giving them an explanation giving an explanation depresses their performance subsequently and my my suggestion is that when we start explaining we start using like big words like elegant or formal or this time and and actually the model does the same work and you know it makes me think of what you talk about in how i wish i taught maths and say well actually some of the best modeling is science modeling because it allows students to concentrate on what’s really going on so yeah the fewest fewest words possible on which note i’m going to stop nice we’ve got a plug-in for my book harry that’s bonus points here that’s brilliant stuff i’ve got three more coming up don’t worry amazing hurry view_moduleinsert_charttrending_up