More tips from Dylan Wiliam
Video transcript
right dylan tip number five please so with things like cold call when you pick on a student who hasn’t raised their hand the instant reaction is don’t know yes so whenever we want to engage more of the classroom a lot of students will say don’t know and dunno is student code for go away and leave me alone so the question is how are you going to react to that and so one way if you’ve asked a higher order question one which might have different answers you might say okay if you don’t know i’ll come back to you and then go around the class and get three or more answers from other members of the class and then say okay so which one of those answers do you like best so now rather than having to construct yes so they just have to select from other people’s answers but you’re making them actually respond in a way to the question obviously if it’s a low order question where there’s only one correct answer that strategy can’t be used but if it’s a multiple choice format you can say to them okay so if you don’t know which one of these four options is correct are any of them definitely incorrect can you make the question go 5050 which suggests some other techniques like phone a friend or ask the audience and so i’m very happy if the students are saying don’t know do you want to phone a friend ask the audience because the really important point here is you mustn’t let don’t know be the end of the conversation yes if students think they can get rid of you by saying don’t know they will use it every single time so if you say don’t know i’m going to keep on going you are going to say something even if it’s just to repeat something that somebody else has said don’t know will never be the end of the conversation and a tip i got from a an educator called ellen keane in the united states if you’re really sure a student is saying don’t know because they can’t be bothered then a really good technique is yes but if you did know what would you say and it’s amazing how often students come up with something because they realize that they’ve been rumbled that they can’t be bothered to think that they’re gonna have to think they’ll come up with something and so don’t let don’t know the end of the conversation um is a really important thing but the other way to avoid that is just to not ask so many questions so rather than asking questions make statements so this is the work of james dillon an american researcher and what he’s shown is that when teachers make statements rather than asking questions just to students responses they tend to get longer and more thoughtful replies so you know you might do lesson american politics and you say um what do democrats believe in and the student says democrats believe in progressive taxation the teacher might say but most republicans also believe in progressive taxation so you’re actually making a statement so it could be just a kind of point back um what you just said seems to critic seems to contradict what james has said that hasn’t been my experience that has been my experience um the student says you know lithium sodium and potassium all have a single electron in the attitude so you’re saying that the first three elements in group one all have a single electrode in the outer shell that idea of a reflective restatement trying to move the conversation off and here’s my hunch about why that works when you’re asked a question you could be wrong [Music] but you can’t be wrong responding to a statement yes and so it’s just an attempt to encourage the child to say more and so that you know that’s why you know if you’re getting don’t know that’s in a way that’s already the problem and so i think one of the things that i encourage teachers to do is to think more reflectively about how you’re going to get the students talking more and what’s interesting is as soon as you think about this as a conversation rather than a q a then a lot more kind of moves become available so i think the what’s under appreciated and very very rarely reflect on something just do it naturally but i think it should be a focus of all our reflections it’s just the power of a non-verbal or even just a hand gesture to invite another student into the conversation and just getting away from this it has to be another question you know don’t rely entirely on questions sometimes making statements can lead to longer more total responses because like i said my hunches you can’t be wrong responding to a statement you can be wrong answering a question that’s fascinating that i’m going to need to reflect about how i can make that work for maths but i sense it i sense it could do i don’t see any reason because math maths is one of those things where you just i’m just question after question after question but i can’t see any reason why i can’t do the statements let’s hold it it’s yeah yeah yeah i mean so um so let me give you an example when i work with teachers i do a workshop and adam boxer reflected on this in his uh talk with you that he now uses these classical formative assessment techniques in his professional development sessions yes yes and so i often ask teachers here’s five options that might have happened in this research study which one of these things do you think was the result and i make her do finger voting one for eighteen and i would say you chose a yeah okay you chose b and it’s just it the difference is just it’s very subtle yeah but it can be really profound it’s it’s just getting it’s just trying to get into out of the habit of asking the questions that we just always ask and it’s really really hard i’m now much better than i used to be so now when i’m wearing a teacher workshop i hardly ever ask any questions in response to a something said by a participant it’s always a kind of statement just to try to lubricate that conversation just making it more like an adult a normal adult conversation rather than a q a session that’s amazing i’m going to definitely try that out dylan let me ask you one more thing on this i’ve been wanting to ask you this for about five years so now now’s the perfect time right cold call i really like the idea of cold call but the problem i always have with it and this this came out my conversation with adam and it’s come out in this conversation here i can’t see the argument why if you’ve got a really good question that you want to ask kids why you wouldn’t want first every child to be thinking about the answer and i think with cold call i don’t think you can guarantee every child’s thinking about the answer i think a lot of kids kind of play a bit of a gamble and think there’s of asking me and if he does i’ll start my thinking there and then so i think that’s potentially problematic and also if i can collect all the responses whether it’s on mini whiteboards or diagnostic questions or whatever i can then choose which responses i discuss with the whole class as opposed to again i’m doing a bit of a gamble that if i ask dylan what do you think you may you know you may have the right answer but actually there may be some really interesting wrong answers that i’ve not heard from from the rest of the class right so my long rambling thing there is under what scenario as a teacher would you choose to cold call versus whole class assessment and can collecting all responses well first of all i think they can be combined so i’ll go on that in a minute but but sometimes a child just hasn’t said something and say john be really interested in your reactions to what tracy just said yes so i just think that kind of thing um because i know you personally i know your experiences have been different from tracy’s so i i i’m valuing so that’s the sort of thing that douglas talks about that kind of cold call but i i’m with you really i think cold call is a stepping stone from asking the usual suspects yeah too yeah whole or what what i call all student response systems yes but i think what’s really interesting i saw a lovely example of this in um the english teacher in the classroom experiment melissa overgrief um she did a lesson on media reporting of emotionally charged events and she chose the household state and tragedy and so the students read some clips about the high-source-taking tragedy and then she asked the students who was to blame the liverpool fans the juventus fans the police the football authorities or the stadium authorities abcde and they all had cards and they held up the car they thought she said leave your choices showing on the desk so then she was able to have a whole class discussion you thought liverpool fans were to blame tell us what you thought juventus were to blame and so the teacher was able to have a much more organized discussion by bringing students into the conversation on the right side and then at the end of the lesson she decided to ask the students to vote again to see if anything had changed and this time every student held up more than one card wow so their views have got much more subtle and nuanced yes and what i like about this story is you couldn’t have done that with an electronic voting system because you know the right answer and one girl katie was waving all five cards in the air now katie is not an angel and therefore it’s entirely possible she was being silly and teachers of katie why are you waving all five cards in the air and katie says because everyone had some responsibility here and so i think that idea of moving you know of using these all student response systems not just as a way of checking on understanding not just a way of getting retrieval practice but it’s giving the teacher information about what kinds of follow-ups would be appropriate so you can bring students into the conversation at the right time that seems to me to be a very powerful idea that’s brilliant you