This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Harry Fletcher-Wood’s tips:
- Do less, but better [4 minutes 04 seconds]
- Find a tool that tells you what’s really happening [14 minutes 38 seconds]
- Build habits, not one-off things [21 minutes 25 seconds]
- Work out why things work [32 minutes 57 seconds]
- Maintain perspective [39 minutes 05 seconds]
Links and resources
- Harry Fletcher-Wood on Twitter
- Harry’s blog
- Harry’s book: Responsive Teaching
- Harry’s book: Habits of Success
Subscribe to the podcast
Watch the videos of Harry’s tips
Podcast transcript
Craig Barton 0:01
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast. The show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. Each episode I invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try out both inside but also maybe outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration may follow. Hopefully something good will come out of it. Now remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links resources and audio transcriptions from each episode. But better than that, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast and others recorded by me. These can be used to spark discussion between colleagues shoulder departmental meeting, a twilight inset and a sub. Now just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks to our lovely sponsors. So this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported once again by the fantastic arc Maths. Maths is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed at maths. Art. Math is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and spaced practice or memory. And here’s how it works. Students crack open the art maths app and are given a 12 question quiz with follow up practice questions on anything they get wrong. But not just straightaway. But the next day three days later a week later, and so on until they haven’t secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better art will get to know your students and what they need. With no teacher input required. You can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So do check out arc maths and remember that arc with a C knots Okay. All right back to today’s show. So let’s get learning with today’s guests. The fantastic Harry Fletcher ward. Spoiler alert, here are Harry’s five tips. Tip one, do less but better. Number two, find a tool that tells you what’s really happening. Number three, build habits not one off things. Tip Four, work out why things work. And Tip Five, maintain perspective. Now if you look at the episode description on your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers, Dakota, UK, you’ll see a timestamped each of these tips so you can jump straight to any one you want to listen to first or easily find a tip that you want to read listen to enjoy the show.
Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome to the tips for teachers podcast, the wonderful Harry Fletcher ward. Hello, Harry, how are you?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 2:52
Good, Craig, thanks very much for having me. And really pleased to be with you. Always a
Craig Barton 2:56
pleasure. Fantastic. So Harry, for the people who don’t know, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Ideally NSR s sentence.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 3:04
So I was a history teacher, that I spent a decade learning how to help teachers get better, and trying to help them do that. And now I help school leaders find out what’s really going on in their schools with teachers.
Craig Barton 3:16
Amazing, amazing. Fantastic. Right? Well, let’s dive straight in hurry. What is your first tip for us today?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 3:22
Cool. So I’m gonna give you a tiny bit of preamble, which is that all these tips are kind of framed or dedicated maybe to Brent Madden, who’s a brilliant man now works at Arizona State University working on teacher education. And Brent said, All problems in education are a fractal. And as a math mathematician, you know about fractals, these patterns that look the same at different scales. So as I was thinking, what tips are gonna be useful, I wanted to come up with stuff that was going to be useful for, for leaders and for teachers as well, hopefully. And so all of these things are things that I think could be true at different levels. And I’ll try and sort of suggest why that is.
Craig Barton 3:56
Some build some build on that hurry. This sounds absolutely amazing. You’ve you’ve set this off really shouldn’t.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 4:01
It’s my first tip, do less but better. And So concretely, I’d say cut whatever you’re planning to do in half. And this idea originally came for I was doing a little talk to some really small group of teachers about responsive teach them a book and one of them said, Well, look, I’m an MQ T. What is your what’s one practical thing that I should do? Tomorrow Today, I was like, look, take a look at a lesson plan. It’s never all gonna state there’s loads of stuff in there just like cut half of the things have the activities, and then pick a few things that are really valuable important, and spend more time on them. And so instead of saying we do seven different activities every six minutes and have to prepare each one, when you say like, I’m gonna get one text one problem one thing, and we’re going to spend longer on it, but I’m going to 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 hang from a bit more more thinking out of it. And then for the fractal part you could do that for 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 gonna do like your 27 things in the school improvement plan. So you might as well not even bother, just just make it to
Craig Barton 5:20
this is lovely this hurry. 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 in there over planning. Like it happens all the time, particularly if you’ve been observed, you never fit everything in and then you’ve got that awful dilemma of the just trying to whiz through it to try and get through to the really good stuff that you’ve learned you’ve spent ages planning it? Or do you think no, actually, I’m going to slow down and read it and it all it always ends up being a compromise that that kind of satisfies nobody. And what I also like about this, it reminds me of your classic kind of 8020 rule where you know, 20% of your stuff is going to deliver 80% of the results are focused on that. And how does it work practically? So what what kinds 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?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 6:08
So yeah, in some ways, starting with the cutting isn’t helpful, because actually, the start point is like, what is the key thing you want students to understand? What like, what are they going to take away? How are you going to know if they’ve got it? What are the big misconceptions they might? They might suffer, I guess, is the word. And so so that ideally, that cutting would be done around that. And I guess I think there’s probably a case that if you come back to the sort of Kershner thing of you know, you want cognitive activity and not activity activity, or not that activity activity is bad, but often it’s like, oh, how can I get into this and we need bettering the colours that we’re gonna be talking and so like, Where have what will it make them think, to now brought in Wheeling and uncut, like five minutes in? But but so saying, Okay, well, 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 light, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna go 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, but 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 gonna introduce the text, and then there’s gonna be a different writing activity, and then there’s gonna be a different thing, when actually, the text is probably quite hard. So giving students time and the chance to pull it apart and make sense of it is going to be much more worthwhile. It’s a bit of a roundabout answer. But hopefully, it sort of answers your question,
Craig Barton 7:38
or it certainly does hurry. And just a bit of a follow up to that. 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 kind of test this test this out on 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 was 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 the idea of kind of, you know, less is more that 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 at 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 up first, does it fit into your tip? And does that transfer across to like a subject like history
Harry Fletcher-Wood 8:52
100%. And in as much as I definitely felt this terror that like, Oh, if I do the same thing I did with them two weeks ago, there’ll be bored. Yeah. And actually, if you think about like every activity has, 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 was set. 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 contents New, 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, now that that, you know, that potentially would would get too old for you or for them for them. And there’s definitely value in variety and you want it to feel fresh, and sometimes you want to surprise them and so on. 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. 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 really cool debate structure that’s going to help us get into it. And, and yeah, so soon, like, it’s efficient for you, it’s efficient for them just just standardise and maybe, you know, like, maybe it’s five activities, maybe it’s 10 activities, it doesn’t have to be like just one. But I think it helps everyone.
Craig Barton 10:21
It has lovely vibe. So if we if we kind of dialogue from from the lesson level, you mentioned kind of school improvement plans and things that I mean, I’ve never been in position thank God to after a right one of those they sound painful, is it? Is it practical to be able to shelve half of half of those kinds of things and other things outside of the classroom.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 10:37
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 that I spent five years working doing a programme for heads of teaching and learning to work in like your head of CPD. And and something that I quite consistently saw is that over the two year programme that come in with like, here’s the 20 things that we do in our CPD programme. And gradually they whittle it down, they end up saying that 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 do questioning in a lesson or questions 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 unavoidable. And the other anecdote, I was free flee a school governor. So I was in a position that wasn’t right in the school. And I was commenting on them. And I remember saying to the head teacher, who’s brilliant head teacher, and there are too many things in this, it was like primary school was like, you know, we’re gonna rewrite the curriculum and this, this, this, like, this is not going to happen. And she was like, Yeah, that would be fine. And I remember the next Governors meeting she like, in retrospect, Harry might have had a point that, like, we have taken on too many things. And so yeah, I think it’s, you know, like, it’s like the classic. Are you trying to cover the curriculum? Or are you trying to make sure the 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 and stuff briefing, you can take them all off, it changed, changing human beings and changing our practices is slow and hard. And if you want that to really happen, you’re gonna 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
Craig Barton 12:14
is fascinating there. So I’m just one more thing I just wanted to raise on this tip. And then I’ll throw it over to you just in case there’s anything else. I’ve just spoken on a previous tips for teachers video with Gemma Sherwood who’s as a math teacher, and overseas curriculum, almost an academy. And one of her tips was related to this and it but it has 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 the key, I think, to a good explanation, adequate 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?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 13:14
So when I when I talk about models with teachers, I refer to one of my favourite findings about modelling which, 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, as subsequently. And my suggestion is that when we start explaining, we start using like big words like elegant or formal this that never. And actually, the the model does his own work. And it you know, makes me think of what you talked about in how I wish I taught maths and say, well, actually, some of the best modelling is just silent modelling because it allows students to concentrate on what’s really going on. So yeah, the fewest, fewest words possible, or which note, I’m going to stop talking.
Craig Barton 13:54
Nice. We got a plug in from a book hurry. That’s bonus points. That’s brilliant stuff.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 13:58
Three more coming up.
Craig Barton 14:01
Amazing, Eric, great. What’s your second tip you’ve got for us.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 14:06
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 user survey, to find out what people are really thinking. And this is something that’s obsessed me throughout my career. So as a new teacher, I just desperately wanted to know what’s going on my students heads. And the first thing I tried was coloured cups. And I know we’d sort of looked down on that nowadays. 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 going to go around and ask them and stop a room? It’s just there in front in front of
Craig Barton 14:41
us. How can we carry that? Sorry.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 14:44
So you got thrown in. This is a Dylan William formative assessment. Back in the day thing, you’ve got three, you’ve got a green card, an orange card and a red cup. So to buy like, you know, Amazon or whatever it was, each student’s got three in front of the style or green. And then if you’re like, not sure how it’s going you Take the green one off and put the handle one on top. And if you’re totally stuck, you want to help now goes to red. And it to me is you can imagine, particularly teaching history and seeing students two times, three times a week. It took some time I want to help now. But actually, once we’ve gotten used to it, it was that ability to just see what 2530 people were thinking simultaneously. Was was great. I went from there to hinge questions, and I suspect suspect. I don’t need to plug the website diagnostic questions.
Craig Barton 15:27
Never does any harm. Hurry, but yeah, no, that’s
Harry Fletcher-Wood 15:29
okay. Well, so if you’re not familiar with hinge questions, diagnostic questions, multiple choice question where each answer demonstrates a misconception. And so from asking pupils, like, which of these coins is worth the most, I’m going to have A to P, and I’m gonna have a one P, I’m going to have a five p. And like one misconception is likely to be two peas, the most valuable, we’re talking young people here to p is the most valuable, because it’s the biggest, and as a hinge question will allow you to know exactly what the 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 straightaway. And basically said enough times that I quit my job went to work, teach tap, because I think this is a thing that if school leaders like this, 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 doors 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 people aren’t happy about, is the new policy working, how our 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.
Craig Barton 16:51
That’s amazing. Right? Just a couple of things on that. So I’m 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 assessment that’s coming up with a good question, which is, which is hard enough? If that question is rubbish, or assesses the wrong thing, which often happens, you’re, you’re you’re asking for a bit of trouble, then you need your means of kind of collecting 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 the responding to that because it’s one thing asking the question, getting the results and responding in your ex kind of experience of using formative assessment yourself and also working with other teachers who are using it. Does it feel right that they’re the kind of three components of it? Or do you see, is there a one of those areas that teachers tend to kind of focus more on at the expense of others?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 17:45
I think your take Yeah. I think you’re right. I mean, I think it’s also worth thinking about like the planning aspects. beforehand of like, well, what are the key things that we want to be responding around? Before we even get to the questions at hand, hesitate to say that any one thing is is neglected? But I definitely think if you think about progression, there’s a like, a, I’m interested in formative assessment of design my hinge question, I’ve got my head damage question. What on earth 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 hinge question, we would go and write hinge questions that actually what you really want a session on hinge questions, go and then like, okay, a whole session on what now I’ve realised half of my students have no idea what I was talking about, what am I going to do about it? 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 new to the profession. 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. Whereas actually, if I come up with a maths misconception to a new teacher, they are going to have that like. And so making sure that somewhere in our curricular documents, there’s like, here are the five most likely misconceptions. And here’s one thing you could say even if there’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.
Craig Barton 19:19
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 teach or 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, the school leaders or whoever whoever it may be, must be just amazing. Just kind of thinking of the questions analysing the response. And so it sounds like a dream job, Harry.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 19:40
It’s Yeah, whenever I get to work with Becky Allen and Laura McInerney, so that’s a pretty good start start, but it is that capacity to find out what the whole profession is thinking overnight in so many sometimes it’s just scratching an itch like you know, how many people we have all these gotten like what a teacher is doing when I think this and I think that and the capacity to be able to find out there and then so if you don’t have the app on your phone Get it on a search for teacher tap to even tap and get it now. And if you’re interested in this school leader stuff, you can get in touch with me,
Craig Barton 20:08
I just put you on the spot hurry, feel free to dodge this one in your relatively short time working in teacher type if you had a favourite question or a favourite response, anything that springs to mind
Harry Fletcher-Wood 20:17
there. So I guess I’m quite interested in and proud of, we’ve asked a lot 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 surveyed leaders, and we’ve surveyed, teach it adequate teachers. And I think I hope that’d 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 a little bit better. That’s, that’s, that’s not a straight answer. But yeah, I think there’s, there’s there’s a lot in that.
Craig Barton 20:54
I like it. Fantastic. Right, Harry? Tip number three.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 20:59
Tip number three is build habits, not one off things. And concretely, it’s identifying the lasting changes you want people to make, and the support that is needed to make that happen. And so part of that was I wrote this book about formative assessment, responsive teaching, and a new after that I wanted to do something about okay, you’ve got the best lesson plan in the world, you’ve got the best formative question in the world by literature. And I’ve talked to teachers who are like, Well, alright, give exit tickets, and students just won’t answer them. What am I meant to do about that? And I was particularly interested in in the behavioural science. So you know, we’ve we’ve been working like crazy to make sure that our lesson plans are like, attend to cognitive load and working memory and geocoding. And this that any other? And it’s like, are we? Are we accessing behavioural science? In the same way, when we think about how we motivate and encourage students? Or is it mostly tips and tricks and trial and error? The biggest thing I learned in the process was that actually the title I came up with, which was habits for success came quite late. Because I realised that habits are kind of the key thing that I think we need to address. So we talk a lot about motivation, I get asked a lot, how can I motivate my students to do their homework or try harder or start writing when I ask them to or whatever it is. And the problem of motivation is, let’s say I have this I’ve got a student who isn’t motivated for whatever reason, and I do this like, incredibly inspiring thing, and I’m motivate them to do whatever it is I want them to do. I’ve done it once. And I’m relying on myself to then do it again, tomorrow. And so I’m not actually solving the underlying issue. And so it’s it’s, is there a process whereby we can say, well, what is the thing that I want them to do every lesson? What is the habit that’s going to make a difference for them right now? And how can I partly through motivation, but partly through the prompts, the encouragement, the social norms that are highlight, and get them to do this on a regular basis. And so instead of saying, I’m going to spend five minutes having a negotiation about whether whether I should put pen to paper, it’s I actually want to have it, which is, as soon as you’re asked to start writing, you start writing and even if you’re stuck, you just write stuff, and then you know, fix it later. And the fractal part of this, again, is that if you’re asking teachers to change things, quite often, it’s like, can you do this thing you get asked to do it once? And actually spending a chunk of time pinning down? What are the two or three things and this might be for an individual teachers might be for department, this might be for a whole school? What are the two or three things that are going to most make a difference to our students? And how can we help teachers to change their habits? Or how can I as a teacher, change mine habit is what is going to make a lasting lasting difference because we know we’ve all done it, you know, try this thing for a bit. And then I stopped doing it because I was just too busy and other stuff was going on. And if we want to make lasting improvements, we need to get away from that.
Craig Barton 23:48
Lovelace hurry, right, just two points on this one that springs to mind. First is it ties brilliantly into your one of your previous ones about this less being more, right? Like we have all these designs of there’s 27 things we want our kids to be doing every lesson and it just it just doesn’t happen. So focusing on your big hitters, what are going to be the ones that are going to cause them to learn more, and so on Fit likes fit, we’ll worry about the other ones later. Let’s just focus on the big hitters. And and this is the worst. I mean, I asked him bad questions generally however, this is this is a bad one. I don’t suppose we could perhaps look maybe think of a habit that we want to kind of instil in our students and you could just talk through a few couple of kind of practical ways I know it’s going to be bespoke to different teaching different kids, but that may be worth trying and exploring with with students. You can either choose a habit or I can make one up whatever whatever works for you
Harry Fletcher-Wood 24:33
will tell tell me a challenge. Tell me a thing that you’ve seen students not doing recently that and then we’ll we’ll work out a habit for that or Okay,
Craig Barton 24:41
nice. Nice. All right. So let’s go for that’s a really good one. I got one I got one I got because I saw this in a school the other day. What’s interesting about this, it’s not your kind of obvious kind of just bad behaviour. It’s but it’s something that can potentially derail a lesson. And that is every time The teacher was, was asking a question of the students, one or two students were just kind of shouting out shouting out the answer kind of straight away wherever the teacher wanted them to consider it kind of independently, have a discussion with a partner, and so on and so forth. So, potentially bad habit. But, you know, if you solve that for us, that’d be amazing.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 25:18
Cole, so So this is another area where I think, like think habitual thinking is helpful, because instead of like, you know, we ask students not to do a thing. And then we’re like, if you do that thing, again, you’ll get detention. And then some, some of them just keep doing it. Yeah. Even when we’ve made it as like, unpleasant essentially, for them as we ethically can. And so the, the thing here is to let we’re like habit is an automated response to a situation. And so for some students, for whatever reason, it might, because they’re really keen. And because they’re showing off my customer, they’re genuinely trying to derail the lesson, the automated response, so I know the answer I’m going to show to the shout out. So so the first so So to break a habit, you have to break this link between the situation and the response. Now, one way to do that is to have these motivational conversations. Another way to do that is to punish but often that’s not actually if the responsive, instinctive, it’s not, you’re not going to do the job. And so probably the most obvious thing to do is to change the situation in some way. So instead of for example, instead of saying, I’m going to ask a question and like, I’m going to make really quiet and calm, I’m going to put the question up on the board, we’re going to look at it together. So I’m not asking, I’m not expecting a response. And likewise, it could be like pens or in hand, it’s who’s going to write down the response quickest. And then I’ll take hands up. So you, those who are competitive can still compete in some way. But but you’re sort of creating a situation which makes it sludge some of the theorists call it your, you’re making actively harder for students to do the thing you don’t want them to do without resorting to light. If you do that, again, it’s it’s tension. Because again, if it’s enthusiasm, you don’t want to kill it. But like, yeah, so So something like that, like ever, I’m gonna have a question on the board, everyone’s gonna be totally quiet. Everyone’s gonna write down their answer, then you’re going to turn to partners. And I’m going to be looking for the person who writes it best, because that’s the first person I’m going to call on. And again, you can then you know if that works, or even if it’s promising, make that habit for not cleaning up for every question, because it’ll take forever. But for the big decision, knowing that we’re cutting things in half, we’re gonna cut half our questions and just ask the best questions. And for our top questions, do it that way, make it a habit, students will get used to it and hopefully come to like it.
Craig Barton 27:36
That’s lovely that however, the problem is, you’ve answered that a bit too well, so I’m going to ask you a follow up to that. So the first thing to say just don’t relate back to previous guests on the show, and boxer. He said something one of his tips room seems to fit really well with that he had some kind of catchy way of saying front load the means of participation. And what he was saying there is before asking the question, he would say, right, before I put this guy, I’m gonna put a question up on the board soon, I want you to answer this in silence by writing it down. So whereas in the past what I do, the question goes up on the board. And then I say, oh, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll be quiet, you’re gonna be quiet answer this, and so on. So that that’s been a quite a bit of a game changer for me. And that seems to fit in really well, with this kind of habit forming and what you said there about changing the kind of environment as opposed to try and react to things that I don’t if you want to respond to that, that feels like it fits in well with what you’re saying.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 28:26
Yeah, I mean, it it sort of ties to the classic, like when I say go thing is that you learned like to do this. When I say go didn’t didn’t didn’t do that. But yeah, so definitely front loading the things and thinking about cognitive processing is what needs to happen first, what like, as a student, what do I need to know? I’m going to do this. That’s how I’m going to do it. And now I’m ready to go. So yeah, I completely would would agree with that. But uh, but again, if we can make it habitual, we’re making life a little bit easier for everyone.
Craig Barton 28:54
That’s nice. So my follow up question is another terrible one she wants in my last terrible one. So well, what about teachers you mentioned if we want teachers to change and develop habits, because we the if anything, that worsening kids, right, because you leave a CPD session thinking right? Ah, I’m all over this. Now. I’m gonna do this. And then life gets in the way. So any thoughts on that about how either I’m thinking either from the perspective of a CPD giver or a CPD receiver? What what are some of the things that can help there?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 29:23
So, yeah, let’s think about a sort of prototypical CPD session that I might have led. When I started out leading CPD sessions. We’re going to talk about some stuff, I’ll share some evidence with you, we’ll discuss it and you’re gonna go away and try and do this. That’s exactly and lo and behold, didn’t happen. And again, not you know, like, not a word against my colleagues. Like they were busy. Yeah. And I was saying go off and do this different thing and make time for it and it’s just just not gonna happen. So it’s this thing, okay. Here’s a thing. Going to narrow down like to a fairly tight goal that you’re then going to interpret in a way that’s going to fit your classroom. And but but you know, it’s not to be too vague. We’re going to spend time in the lesson, designing a version of let’s say, it’s a different way, let’s say it is a hinge question. So we’re going to spend time on lesson you’re going to design a hinge question for an upcoming lesson, we’re then going to practice using it so you’ve got experienced doing it, we’re then going to put in place some sort of prompt trigger that so might be like, you’re gonna put a little like polo blue star on the PowerPoint, if you’re using a PowerPoint, put a little time with God or something like that. But reminder, first thing Wednesday morning, it’s gonna go ping, that’s going to say, remember, you’re trying to hinge question, period three, whatever it is, set up some accountability. So ask a colleague, can you pop in and see me do it, and then bring him back so that you’re going to review it again? And then when you review it again, lets you know what we learned what’s gone? Well, this was a disaster. Okay, how can we change it, let’s set another one. So there’s a couple of things going on there. One, you’re trying to reinforce the action and encourage it to happen. But two, you’re getting into a habit of improvement habit of trying stuff, bringing it with your colleagues, finding ways to make it better.
Craig Barton 31:04
It’s really nice that Harry, one thing I’ve started doing now, and again, it’s directly related to that. If I’m asked to do a talk, I always want to have a follow up, if possible to because as you say, get that accountability to get people back together. But if that can’t happen, one one little change I’ve made and it’s exactly what you’ve said there is if I’m doing a session on diagnostic questions, or problem solving, or whatever it may be the example I always ask the teachers to think of a lesson that they’re going to be planning, you know, tomorrow or the next day or whatever, just so any work that they do in that session is almost like time saving, they’ve got every reason then to use it, because it’s saving them time. Whereas in the past, I might have just been, we’ll all be doing the example that I’m doing on the board. And if you’re not teaching that for a term, where’s your incentive, you’re gonna have to start from zero, just little things like that can make make a difference currently.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 31:54
I’m always happy when he gets to an end of CPD session and you see someone turn around to recording that. That’s actually quite useful, because I plan my lessons. Yeah, that sounds like a trick with you know, like, we’ve told you some stuff that might be useful, but actually, you’re going away thinking CPD is useful, and I’m ahead of where it’s at, rather than behind. And that’s a really good incentive then next time instead of turning CBD in session with your marking or with a kind of, I want to be here feeling. Yeah, so I completely agree. I think it’s a really, really, really wise thing to do
Craig Barton 32:23
lovely. That hurry. Now, I realise you’re kind of a habit King. Is there anything else you wanted to say on this tip before we before we move on?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 32:31
I think so. Well, yeah. No, I don’t think so that we may come back to them later. But just habits think habits. The end.
Craig Barton 32:40
Fantastic. Okay, what about Tip number four?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 32:46
So the tip is work out why things work. And concretely, I mean, be really specific about what’s happening. And this this partly is on my mind, because I wrote a blog post the other day about and some research that I did in with with some great colleagues about how professional development works. And what we did, we looked at over 100 studies, we looked at, we tried to pin down what are the mechanisms of change? So instead of saying, like, think about the existing guidance on professional development, it’s tended to be like, is the CPD collaborative? Does it include experts and so on? And it’s like, well, that’s all well and good. But if it includes experts, what are they doing? Like? Are they prancing around on the stage dancing? Are they giving you really specific guidance? Are they sharing models? Are they getting you to practice your next lesson, and so on and so on. And, and what we learned was the mechanisms that were pinned down, could explain a substantial degree of the difference in how much of a difference CPD made to teachers. And so, you know, partly, like, partly, you could say, well just go and learn from these mechanisms. But the underlying point is like, can we be really, really specific about what’s going on? And so in the same way, if you tell me like, I had a great lesson with my year, eighth class the other day, and I’m like, I have a nightmare with them, what do you do, and you tell me, like, I’ve developed a really strong culture of learning. Thanks a bunch. You can help me. But if you if you can tell me when taught habits again, like, well, I’ve built a habit that whenever they get stuck, they have to ask each other. And they’re used to doing that. And they always do that before they asked me and that then allows me to get around. Now, that is a concrete thing I can do. And I will go and try and do that. So getting away from a become incredibly suspicious of the abstract basically, like getting away from big words and big ideas. Because you know, it’s like motherhood and like, strong culture of learning there was against that. But if I don’t know what it means, I can’t use it. And so get really trying to get down to exactly what’s going on in whatever it is we’re trying to do.
Craig Barton 34:45
Oh, this is a fascinating one this hurry. So again, a few things to say about this. The first I love what you’re doing, because these are all kind of building on the prior things that you’ve said. It’s, again, it’s working out what works. Often you’ll have to try and strip out you know, maybe Did 10 things that lesson? Well, what was what was the one or two things that you think had the biggest impact on how that worked? And let’s communicate that that that feels really powerful. And secondly, it’s, it seems to me that this, this has kind of practical applications in terms of lesson observations, because that’s where you often get these kind of vague things about your pace or the culture, and so on and so forth. Whereas, again, it’s the role of an observer for me to try and pinpoint Well, what was the one or two practical things that you did that either cause things to not work quite so well, or cause things to work? And how can we build on that? And it’s, it’s a challenge, though, isn’t it kind of, there’s all these kind of cliches and buzzwords in education, that it’s a challenge to to, to actually pinpoint the practical, actionable things.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 35:44
I mean, it is, but if you if you can’t say what it is, you probably should be keeping your mouth closed. And I complete the lesson. Observation, feedback is a really good example. We’ve all had it of like, you know, I just would have liked, say, a bit more challenge. It’s like, well, if you can’t tell, you’re meant to be the smart person in the room, you’re the one observing me, you can’t tell me what that looks like? Or how you would have done it in the context of that lesson. I’m like, if I was smart enough to do it, I’d have done it. If you can’t tell me how to do it. We’re stuck, aren’t we? And we’re talking about this and feedback. Don’t be like, you know, Dylan, William has these examples of, you know, like, be more systematic and students being like, well, if I knew how to be more systematic and have done it in the first place. So yeah, I think it is, you know, if you are in the dangerous position that you and I are, in, that we’re asked to give advice to others, it is your professional responsibility to give that advice in a way that that is comprehensible. And that is unambiguous, if you if you really believe it. And so yeah, like, it’s don’t, you know, we can use the abstract words, but no one’s going to understand them. So you have to read them in the concrete.
Craig Barton 36:49
Just to put you on the spot again, hurry, you’re too good at dealing with on the spot question. So let me just ask you this one. I’m just thinking about lesson observations. Because I think it’s fascinating, both from the role of the person watching the lesson or a part of lesson, but also from the role of the person who’s being watched, is there anything about related to this tip about working out what works that can be either put in place before the lesson is watched by by the teacher and I’m thinking along the lines of watch out for me doing this, I’m going to do so you know, decide on a focus or something that can happen in in the feedback after the lesson that can really get to the nub of what’s working or what’s not working.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 37:27
What I’m, I’m a really huge fan of instructional coaching and this idea of pinpointing one action step that needs work now, so so it’s not pace, it’s not questioning, it’s not culture, it’s right down to like, you know, it, let’s say it were pace and be like, Okay, let’s think about the way that you get transition from one activity to another and try and find a way that you can give you instructions for a transition in two sentences instead of 10. And that is a vibe. Like, that’s really clear. That’s also a thing that I can viably fix next week, in a way that pace is going to take me years to fix. And in the same way, I think so. So in a in a sort of an idealised instructional coaching, feedback meeting, you talk about one thing that’s going really well, and one thing that you’re going to work on, as the coach that it’s sometimes you really have to narrow things down, because actually, you’ve got someone who wants to talk about seven things, they noticed, they want to be better, and so you’re not gonna manage all of them at once. Let’s, you know, put that in those words. But like, let’s just focus on this one thing for this week, because that’s achievable. And then when you do it, like, wow, it’s working, I feel feel better. So yeah, I think, again, our you and I, and probably most listeners have experience like, here’s 10 things that went well and 10 things you need to work on, you don’t do any of them. It’s no point doing it. So don’t again, cut everything in half. And if it’s less than observation and feedback, cut in half again and again. And then you might have something useful.
Craig Barton 38:54
Fantastic, Harry. Okay, what’s your fifth and final tip for us, please?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 38:59
So having having railed against the abstract, this is maybe the most abstract, I think there’s something in it, so bear with me. So it maintain perspective, and concretely finding a way of stopping, reminding yourself, what matters, looking after yourself and looking at situations afresh. So I think there are different bits of this one is around like changing your mind. So if I if you like, interviewed 10 year ago, me now and I was listening to I’d be like, Who’s that fool? And why does he think those those stupid things he thinks, and I’ve changed my mind about almost everything in education, sometimes more than once. And whatever you think, as a listener, there’s a good chance that and at least some things you might do the same at different points. And so there’s a point there if they don’t mean you know, like work as hard as you can do as well as as well as he can in the moment. But being willing to try out alternative things, test alternative things, except that you might be able To learn from people who think the diametric opposite of you. And then I think tied around this time to this, there’s a sort of workload well being perspective point of saying, like, you get really caught up in like, this one student is one class, this year’s GCSE results, whatever it is. And if we didn’t get a bit caught up in that, we wouldn’t do great work. And so that’s important, but making space and knowing like, there’s the rest of the world, there’s, you know, our families to think about this, whatever else we enjoy in life, and that kind of thing of maintaining perspective and like living a decent life, and being important around teaching. And I think that also ties something I did a project years ago, where I was interviewing teachers who been really successful in quite tricky schools as new teachers. And one of the things that came through was this idea of like, we call it wiping the slate clean that they get to the end of the day, they like wipe the slate clean, come back tomorrow, have a fresh start, give themselves a new chance, give their students a new chance. So something around that of like getting taking a step back and giving yourself a break, like sometimes all the time in between lessons. Yeah, you name it.
Craig Barton 41:14
Lovely rock a couple of questions on this one hairy, so changing your mind and interesting one, I’ve changed on my men many, many times. What What was it for you? What what is it for you that causes you to change your mind? What do what needs to happen? And how do you then go about if it’s a real kind of long standing belief? How do you go about almost kind of building it into a habit that okay, now I’m going to do something differently, because that feels difficult.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 41:40
It’s a slow process, isn’t it. And it’s probably a thing of threshold concepts. And you know, threshold concepts being troublesome and irreversible, and transformational and integrative. And, and this troublesome thing, like, you see a thing, and it nags at you. And your eyesight is not quite right here. But you don’t know what it is. And then, and so you know, like to go from the point where you don’t know what it is to where you do know what it is, a lot of different things have to happen. So maybe I need to come and see you doing something different in my classroom, maybe you need to also pop into my lesson and say, Have you thought about this, maybe I also need to read a book. And those things need to come together. In a way it’s a sort of a light bulb moment insight thing, that it’s very hard to predict, like, it’s it, you could you could sit and say, I’m going to teach Harry the basics of cognitive load theory in this 20 minute period. But the thing of like, revisiting your the whole way you teach around cognitive load is a thing that’s going to be much slower. So this thing around patience and the thing around willingness to learn and just, you know, like, read some of what your opponents those who you don’t believe in a writing and thinking and a willingness to try stuff out, I guess and learn from that. But can I fire? I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this. Can I fire it back at you? Because you know, you wrote a whole book around? This? Oh, yes. Promise to get another plugin of the excellent book, which, which I genuinely recommend to people who are both art and aren’t maths teachers? And what like, what was your experience? Because that it was 12 years? Obviously, I met a lot of it was so Bachleda, wasn’t it? Because he spent a few years doing your Swiss rolls. And then suddenly, later on, you’re like, this, you know, maybe wasn’t the best way. So what helped you to to make those changes?
Craig Barton 43:25
Yeah, it’s an interesting one, Harry, I think what part of it was a gradual shift over time, I was thinking, I’m not convinced by this, I was still the results were still fine. The kids were still enjoying the lessons. But I was never getting through as much as I hoped. And often I’d be really excited about teaching kids or concepts, but they are then and then I think, what’s a full activity to design around this. And they never quite get as excited as I hoped they would do and so on. So there’s a definite gradual shift going on. But then also, there was kind of a bit of a jolt, which would be when I started to speak to people who knew far more about stuff than I did. And I think I was lucky. I did that via the podcast. But I think Twitter’s a great kind of place for this now. And as you say, purposely going out of your way to find smart people who disagree with your points of view and thinking, Well, why do they disagree? And is it worth trying it? But I think the real danger is, I mean, I’d have definite incentive, because I did it in quite a public way. I was speaking to people and I kind of thought, right, well, I do actually have to go off and try something different here. But I think there’s a real danger. And I don’t know if you agree with this, just as teachers, it’s quite easy to avoid doing that change, particularly if you’re if your results are fine. You’re ticking along nicely because making a change is difficult. It’s often time consuming. It’s risky. You often get the short term dip in either performance or whatever or however you label it. It takes something doesn’t it to to make a change as as a kind of busy full time teacher. It’s really hard. I felt like that. I don’t know if you agree.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 44:54
Well, particularly when you’re renouncing things that you’ve believed in Yeah, so like by changing what I So now I’m basically saying I give gave last year’s irrelevance about exactly, yes, incredibly uncomfortable. And so that’s, that’s, again, where I think it’s like, you know, you take a long time potentially denying things, even as it’s gradually dawning on you. And I think that that point of getting on Twitter and finding people you disagree with, obviously, on Twitter, it’s easy to find people who disagree. They’re like, super smart people who disagree with you. I think one thing that’s been really helpful to me is a different change in perspective, which is what Scott Alexander, he would say, is the difference between conflict and mistake theory. So I’d say that one reason why we don’t agree on anything is conflict theory that like people are out to get each other. So in politics, it’s like, you know, the rich are out to get the poor and the whoever’s getting and, you know, in schools is like, the leaders are out to get us and kids are out to get us and so on. And it’s a mistake theory is more around like, life is just hard. And it’s hard to get things right. So maybe the government are incompetent, because they’re like malicious, deliberately trying to ruin everything. And it’s always hard to rule that out. But maybe governing a country is just incredibly different, difficult. And so many of the screw ups are just because people just like ourselves, are tired, overworked and screwing things up. And in the same way, maybe school leaders are awful human beings who you know, we’re just trying to run our lives, or maybe running a school is incredibly difficult. And it’s hard to get right. And so, for me seeing more things in terms of mistake theory than conflict theory has been quite helpful. Because it allows me I think, to learn a little bit more from others, and maybe to be a little bit more humble about, yeah, like that, that clash. But even you know, like, a mistake theorist or conflict theorist would say, you know, I’ve just sold out to the, whoever it is. So it’s, it’s a hard one to push.
Craig Barton 46:51
It’s lovely, that Harry, final question just for me on this particular tip, you mentioned well being and that’s something over the course of this, this, this podcast, and these videos, I really want to dig into because it’s a it’s a massive part of being a teacher and something that’s that’s potentially overlooked. What are some of the things again, you’d speak for this personally, yourself, or work that you’ve done with other teachers that help that teachers can do practically that helped kind of leave the job in the school if, if that makes sense. And it’s difficult to do, because we’ve got to sometimes take the job home for marking but I’m talking more about leaving the bad times and kind of switching off and so on, is there anything you do yourself or that you’ve observed, other teachers do practically that help for this?
Harry Fletcher-Wood 47:31
So my, my first school sat down with the head teacher for I came in with with some of the new teachers, and he was sort of it was retiring to sort of like, you know, talking about various things. But he made this this throwaway comment around, maybe one of the reasons so many teachers cyclists are they, so they can’t take books home with them. And it was one of the things that inspired me to start cycling school a year or two later. And, but there’s something in that. And it’s not to do with necessarily not taking work home, because as you know, as you find with a young family, maybe you want to do pick up and then do some work. But it’s around, I think, some kind of bright lines of knowing where your limits are. And, and so I now have like quite elastic limits, because I do a couple of different jobs, and to try and keep a lot of different people happy. But at least trying to be clear, like there are certain period of time. So I normally have my son on a Thursday. And during that day, I won’t be looking at anything, even if I’m happy to work at other random strange times. So So working out a clear set of limits, I think making space for nice things. So one of the most useful and powerful things that I learned to do, when I was having quite a tough year was in the middle of in the middle of the working day, got lunch, you could sit at your desk and do 15 minutes will work but won’t be very good work and go for a walk. And I was quite lucky there a bit areas of green space around the corner from where I was, go out, walk 15 minutes would just come back like a happier, better person. And so you know, like you might not be lucky enough to live next to or have a school next or park in that way. But find it like, what’s the really nice thing you can do in the middle of the day. That isn’t just more of the same because actually, if you’ve been at your desk since 730, and it’s 130, you’ve taught for lessons, you’re not going to do your best lesson planning or anything. And now so there’s someone the other day is an assistant head now he’s like, Well, I’ve always been ahead of year so I just couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t do that. But if you’re ahead of you and you’ve got a freight, maybe you’ve got one of your freezer that’s allocated, you can take 10 minutes, just go and like, make yourself a posh coffee. I see more and more posh coffee machines in schools. Make yourself a posh coffee like so. Like finding little things that are going to give you a little bit of a little bit of pleasure to throw throw throw those out to you.
Craig Barton 49:42
I like it hurry. That’s fantastic. Well, there were five brilliant tips, Harry and it’s over to you now is there anything you want to plug anything people should check out? So the first thing we’ve got to say and your wonderful books are definitely worth checking out. There’ll be links links to those in the show notes. And you want to talk about any book in particular or anything else any current work you do with teacher tap anything that listeners should, should visit.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 50:03
So I guess two to three. So yeah, latest book habits of success. If you’re interested in getting your students to do more of the things you want them to do, or you teach the more things that you want them to do, hopefully, it’s got something in it for you. Something that we talked about a little bit in during the show is this idea of helping school leaders to understand what their teachers are really thinking. So if you’re interested in seeing what your teachers are thinking, and how that compares to averages in similar schools, get in touch, and it’s Harry dot Fletcher hyphen, word at Teach tap.co.uk. And then the other cool thing that I’ve done, I think it’s cool recently, and so I get asked to go to loads of schools, and I can’t go to all of them because they’re just too many. And I don’t have enough days, unfortunately. So put together a pack of like webinars and resources and little videos, download will check this suggestive reading. If you’re trying to help your colleagues learn responsive teaching, do more responsive teaching, and you can get to know that for Harry at improving teaching.co.uk Those would be my suggestions,
Craig Barton 51:05
and I’ll put links to all those in the show notes. So that’s brilliant. Well, Harry Fletcher. Well, it’s always a pleasure speaking to you. I think I said, then if I said the first time you’re on the show that it was you and Dylan William were my kind of first big influences in terms of formative assessment and diagnostic questions and so on. So I’ll always be forever grateful for that. And as you know, I’m a big fan of your work. So Harry, thank you so much for joining us on their tips for teachers.
Harry Fletcher-Wood 51:27
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai