More tips from Harry Fletcher-Wood
Video transcript
what’s your second tip you’ve got for us um so the tip is find a tool that tells you what’s really happening and concretely it’s like use a question using an assessment use a survey to find out what people are really thinking and this is a something that’s obsessed me throughout my career as a new teacher i just desperately wanted to know what’s going on my students heads and and the first thing i tried was coloured cups and i know we’d sort of look down on that nowadays um but actually it was amazing once i trained my students up and using them which took quite a long time i could look around the whole room and say well like who’s happy who thinks they’re struggling who thinks they need help now and instead of having to go around and ask them and stop everyone was just there so you’ve got three i mean this is a dylan william formative assessment back in the day thing you’ve got three you’ve got a green card an orange cup and a red cup so i had to buy like coloured cups off amazon or whatever it was each student’s got three in front of me style on green and then if you’re like i’m not sure how it’s going you take the green one off and put the number one on top and if you’re totally stuck and you want help now uh it goes to red and it i mean as you can imagine particularly teaching history and seeing students two times three times a week and it took some time i want help now but actually once we’ve gotten used to it it was that ability to just see what 25 30 people are thinking simultaneously was was great i went from there to hinge questions and i suspect suspect um i don’t need to plug the website diagnostics never does any harm harry but yeah no that’s what we can okay well so if you’re not familiar with hinge questions diagnostic questions multiple choice question where each answer demonstrates a misconception and so if i’m asking pupils like which of these coins is worth the most i’m going to have a 2p and i’m going to have a 1p and i’m going to have a 5p and like one misconception is likely to be two-piece the most valuable we’re talking young pupils here 2p is the most valuable because it’s the biggest and and so hinge question will allow you to know exactly what your students are thinking and then if you want the fractal element i think the same thing again applies with with staff and that is what i do now so i did a survey of staff once a week for a school leader last year which i thought was going to be for my phd and every couple of weeks he’d be like this is so useful just being able to pick up the issues and act on them straight away and basically he said enough times that i quit my job went to work teach tap because i’m like i think this is a thing that if school leader like does staff know what’s going on and staff know whether or not a policy is working and it’s quite hard particularly in a secondary school even if you’re like my door’s always open and wandering around all the time to really know what’s going on and so this idea of actually if you’re a teacher you need a question if you’re a school leader you need some kind of question that’s going to allow you to pick up really quickly like what are people unhappy about is the new policy working um well policy says no one meeting a week how many meetings did you actually go to last week that kind of thing and that then provides leaders the information they need to make good decisions that’s amazing right just a couple of things on that so um as you are i’m obsessed with with formative assessment i think the more i think about it i think there’s kind of three phases to formative assessments coming up with a good question which is which is hard enough if that question is rubbish or or assesses the wrong thing which often happens you you’re asking for a bit of trouble then you need your means of kind of collecting in the information from kids and again it may be diagnostic questions with abcd cards or mini whiteboards or whatever it may be and then i think the hardest bit and often is overlooked is then they’re responding to that because it’s one thing asking the question getting results and and responding in your kind of experience of using formative assessment yourself and also working with all the teachers who are using it does it feel right that they’re the kind of three components of it and do you see is there one of those areas that teachers tend to kind of focus more on at the expense of others i think you said yeah i i think you’re right and i think it’s also worth thinking about like the the planning aspect um beforehand of like what are the key things that we want to be responding around before we even get to the questions um i’d hesitate to say that any one thing is is neglected but i definitely think if you think of that progression there’s a like i’m interested in formative assessment i’ve designed my hinge question i’ve got my hand done message question what am i going to do with all these responses and so there’s definitely and this is another good example of like this this less is more thing you could have a session on a hinge question go away and write hinge questions but actually what you really want is session on hinge questions go away and then like okay a whole session on what now i’ve realized half of my students have no idea what i was talking about what am i going to do about it um i do think this is one where actually we can plan around it particularly if we think about colleagues who are new to a subject or new to a topic or need to the profession and so if i come out with a basic maths misconception for you you’ll have in your sort of back of your mind seven different examples you could give me um whereas actually if i i come up with a math misconception to a new teacher they are going to have that like yeah and so making sure that somewhere in our curricular documents that’s like here are the five most likely misconceptions and here’s one thing you could say it’s just one thing one thing you could say if they think that so we can prepare being responsive doesn’t mean you have to make it all up on the hop you can prepare your responsiveness as well absolutely and the only thing i wanted to mention but again feel free to dig deeper i don’t know if we’re going to talk teacher tap any further in some of your other tips but it feels to me that that’s like the world’s best assessment for learning tool for you know either school leaders or whoever it may be it must be just amazing just kind of thinking of the questions analyzing the response and so it sounds like a dream job harry it’s yeah i mean i get to work with becky allen and laura mcinerney so that’s a pretty good start but it is that capacity to find out what the whole profession is thinking overnight so many sometimes it’s just scratching and it’s like how many people with to have all these kind of like what are teachers doing well i think this and i think that and that capacity to be able to find out um there and then so if you don’t have the app on your phone nice get it on search for teacher tap and tap and and get it now and if you’re interested in this school leader stuff you can get in touch with me i just put you on the spot harry feel free to dodge this one in your relatively short time working at teacher type have you had a favorite question or a favorite response anything that springs to mind there um so i guess i’m quite interested in and proud of we’ve asked a load of questions about the early career framework recently essentially because i was everyone i was talking to in schools was telling me interesting things about it we’ve not yet released our findings we’ve done a big thing where we’ve surveyed mentors we’ve surveyed leaders and we’ve surveyed uh teach early career teachers and i think i hope that would be quite interesting for the profession in making a change which i think there’s a lot of good in it but they’ve been tricky elements and trying to make that uh a little bit better that’s that’s that’s not a straight answer um but yeah i think there’s there’s a lot i like it fantastic you