More tips from Sammy Kempner
Video transcript
all right Sammy let’s dive straight in what’s your first tip for us tonight pick the student least likely to know whoa now i love like a bait headline that’s a great one you’ve hooked me straight in i’ve tried to make them snappy sorry i like it go tell me more yeah now watch me not be snappy when i explain it so um essentially uh like you want to where possible my my tips are broadly themed on under uh or grouped under the theme of accountability and by that uh i mean not letting students get away with not thinking or trying and so do it putting strategies in place to try to maximize the amount they’re thinking and trying and the amount that they feel like you’re holding them um to that so it might be that when you’re cold calling um so picking students to answer questions without their hands up uh like you might want to pick you you want to pick your lower retaining students to use it as a gauge uh to assess like the classes understanding when mini whiteboards or whatever whole class data isn’t available um so you pick your lowest retaining student the student least likely to know the answer to see like if they do know the answer then there’s pretty good chance that everyone will know the answer um it might be when you’re doing group work and you’ve told this class you’re going to test them somehow afterwards you’re going to test the groups by giving them a similar question and you’re going to pick someone to explain it you pick the student least likely to know in that group to act as a gauge of whether or not the group’s done a good job uh it might be when you’re circulating um if you’ve only got time to like you’ve got 20 seconds and you’ve asked them to write something down you go and target the student least likely to like doing the right thing um even check instructions like you give really simple instructions amazing how often the instructions are not understood or followed or listened to and you give instructions and you want to just make sure just make sure that even though you said it very clearly and you said it very slowly they’ve understood the instructions uh you pick the one that’s least likely to have understood um so that’s that’s it in a nutshell i can talk in more detail about it um and obviously like you can’t literally always choose this one poor kid but as a general rule uh picking students um your lower-tailing students or the ones that are less likely to be focused um really like forces them to if they know that’s going to happen it will force them to engage and if the class know that anyone could be asked and but if i think that there’s a chance they won’t know they’re going to be asked then it’s a very powerful tool right somebody let’s dive into this i love it you you’ve hooked me in straight away so a couple of follow-up questions here so i think there’s a real danger i’ve fallen into this trap before um where you ask one child and they get it right and you assume that the whole class understands it so you just crack on and it’s your classic kind of argument why we need to do whole class assessment versus kind of one-to-one stuff it almost sounds to me like this is the flip side of that where is there a danger you ask your lowest detaining student or the one who you suspect is going to get it wrong they get it wrong and you kind of make an assumption there that everybody’s going to struggle with this so then you spend kind of five ten minutes doing it with the whole class whereas maybe like a quick conversation later on in the lesson may have solved it for that one child yeah there’s always that danger i think what um like so things that i if i if i really was expecting everyone to know and that one student doesn’t i might do a quick chant um or call and response to just quickly assess the whole class and i’ll check really carefully is everyone saying what i expected them to say or like does it sound like everyone is and if so then i know that’s that student’s issue and therefore that we can like i might need to deal with that separately um or it might be just going to a one of your other least likely students to like who who um in the class and seeing if they know and if they do then you know it’s just an individual problem and if they don’t then then maybe it’s wider than that and maybe that point you open up other strategies that you have like it might be a group conversation to like fit like if the knowledge is if you suspect the knowledge to be in the room or and then you go and cold call those ones that don’t know afterwards um or it might be you have to do a quick um whole class checking for understanding but i would suggest though um or i would caveat that with saying if you can do hardcore understanding then you should have done like that’s always the rule if you can do whole class and um and it’s easily accessible and the data that you can get from it is easy for you to interpret and it’s like the answers aren’t really long sentences or whatever they’re just they’re easy to see then you should have done that in the first place and you shouldn’t have been targeting the lowest tailing student um with a question you should have just been doing that so maybe that’s not the best way of dealing with that but i think the first two options that i mentioned probably do a job yeah it’s really interesting this i thought this sounds like a big name drop here something but i’ve literally i had a conversation with dylan william earlier today about a similar thing here where it was a good name drop that wasn’t it um about how i can’t see a scenario where if it if you have the option to do whole class assessment you would choose to cold call if that makes sense because to take to take your example here with this lowest attaining student you could have in mind that you want to check the understanding of a specific student but you might as well get every other child to either write their answer down on mini white boards or have thought of it and so on because you’ve still got that option to go to that student but if you can also see responses from you know the other 25 you may pick up on something that you wouldn’t have if you’ve only just gone to that one student is that fair or other scenarios where you would deliberately choose to cold call and only get the response from one student that you’re targeting there probably are situations where it’s good to call i’m trying to think of them um about as a pr in principle i agree with you i think that if you can get whole class data easily then you should um i think uh what was gonna say on that had something um it’s gone from my head what was i gonna say no maybe i’ll come back to it um but yeah no in principle i agree with you um i think yeah i remembered if a student wants um if you’re looking for an explanation like a really detailed explanation strategy whatever it may be and we placed quite i tried to place quite a lot of emphasis on that um in math lessons it’s not just what or and how but why um and if you’re if you’re really focusing on that then it’s actually quite often the mini whiteboards aren’t going to suffice um and so what’s quite nice is when you’re cold calling for an explanation you pick the many students least likely to know the bottom third of the class let’s say in terms of attainment or engagement or whatever it may be um and you start off with so and so maybe your lowest detaining and you move on to the next one and the one least likely to be engaged and then you move on to the next one and over and you and it also by jumping between them in mid-explanation it forces them to really engage with each other’s um answers so it doesn’t necessarily uh have to be just one student when you’re doing this but as a general rule just focus on the ones that are going to actually be a useful gauge and not the ones that you know are going to like the ones that you expect to be able to answer can you give us an example sami the kind of question where you choose to do that one of these ones that’s perhaps not suited to many whiteboards so uh we do it there’s a question that came up today um in actually a little topic test um and i’m going to review it tomorrow it was quite a complicated a shaded area shape but the way the shape was like uh an l um compound shape but then within it there was a triangle a funny angle right it was attached to the sides and you were given the perimeter and you had to find the area of the shaded section um anyway like it’s quite likely that in the um review of that like the students were able to say the answer they might be able to say the calculations they’ve needed to get there but it’s all about understanding that if you’re given the perimeter and two of the side lengths the of the l shape and you can find the other two side lengths and the missing side lengths in the perimeter and um you have to think about the shadow being the total and minus the unshaded area like so all these kind of descriptive um elements to the strategy that don’t mention numbers um are really good things to cold call students about um rather than getting whole class data on many whiteboards because that’s just not going to explain that you’re not going to know whether or not they’ve understood it from that yes so just just again just to dig really deep into this i’m fascinated about this notion of jumping from student to student maybe mid-explanation so how would that start we’ll be here kind of opening a question okay so um why is this question difficult please uh i don’t know mahmoud i will say hopefully um let’s assume the answer correctly he’ll say okay fair enough so it’s because we’ve got the perimeter we don’t know any parts of the area we’ve got to somehow figure out some of the side lengths before we then find the area um what’s the first thing i’m going to do in order to do this please you know oscar and oscar’s going to say well you need to find the total area and then you’re going to find you need to find the unshaded area and you’re going to have to subtract the other shader from the total okay okay nice uh what about this ed what do we think about this i want and you just bounce from one to the next and they’ve got to be really listening because they know any point you might cut them off and bring someone else into it um sometimes it is actually mid really really jarringly probably because i know that they understand and they’re confident and they’re about to say the right thing and it can be partly um to check for understanding but it can also be partly just to like hold attention to stopping them in the in that moment and saying you pick up exactly where they were going from where they were where they were going um and obviously you’re in like you can you can you can go from there does that make it clear yeah it does and is this still your kind of bottom third in terms of kind of attainers and the ones you can you suspect aren’t engaged or are you chucking this out to everybody yeah so like the in in like the proportion of question of my questions that are aimed at the bottom third is massive um out of the questions i ask but i do you do still you can just obviously tailor the questions to challenge the highest detainers and that is equally important um it just doesn’t need to be as frequent i think because they’re more likely to be listening and focused and um i just well maybe that’s a value judgment maybe that’s my that’s my sort of uh i don’t know socialist roots coming through that i care more about bringing at the bottom no i don’t know i it’s right we have to challenge the highest painters all the time it has to be at the forefront of your mind but i just think it’s um in your bread and butter of lessons the way that you run your models and your questioning it’s more important to make sure that everyone is listening and then when it’s appropriate you cold call and move amongst the highest attainers with some really challenging questions so it is still important and i still do it but it’s definitely the case the lowest attaining students receive a greater uh proportion of my questions to answer that makes perfect sense because again the worst question in the world that i could ask here is you could well imagine you’ve got a couple of higher toners in there who just think oh he’s not going to ask me this so i’ll just kind of sit off a little bit but i guess that’s more about the kind of culture that you create in in the class and so on and so forth that you’re pretty confident that that’s not a major major problem yeah and yeah you’re absolutely right um you have to assess it as you see it and part of it has got and you just kind of and obviously you can always just check you can always kept by asking a question because it’s your classroom and it’s your lesson you can do it how you want um but also yeah just to like just to emphasize the uh the questioning is the most like most obvious way in which this applies um but it definitely does also apply to just as a general we’ve got a phrase at our school which is don’t lie to yourself and we tell the kids that all the time um but it also is words to live by as an adult and just just my normal life i just walk around thinking they lie to myself apply to anything but it’s um it really is before i did um cold calling for the first couple years of my teaching i don’t i didn’t do this and i definitely didn’t ask the lo the people least like you know because if i had it would actually ruin my lessons yes because they just get stuck we get stuck every time from the first minute it’s over and uh i think i think um like these and doing doing this uh it it can it’s an ultimate don’t lie to yourself in your teaching because it’s very easy to convince yourself that like you’ve done a really good explanation they’ve all been looking at you yeah there’s no way that they can’t have followed this and so you pick you know pick students that you don’t put your best students but you pick you know just just just normal students in the class yeah i think you’ve got to be really honest with yourself if you’re using questioning as a gauge um for understanding of the class because many whiteboards aren’t appropriate for whatever reason then it’s uh yeah it’s a really good strategy for don’t lie to yourself i love that don’t lie to yourself somebody reminds me i’ll never forget one of my early observation when i was observed right at the start of my career i did exactly this i asked the question and i picked a kid who i knew was going to get it right so i was mid flow and so on and so it was it was coming towards the end of the last and this was almost like the big climax and i was being observed and so on and the the teacher observing me and then congratulated me said good choice of student to ask that question to and i was like yeah yeah yeah but like it’s the worst thing you’re absolutely right it’s the worst thing but it’s so tempting isn’t it because you know like like you say you want to think i’m doing a good job here and so on i’m interested just just on this whilst we’re chatting about this i know from your conversation with ali that um group work is something that plays a real kind of big big part in your teaching now we may be talking about this later on and i i don’t know but i just wanted to pick up on that you said you’d kind of ask the person in the group who you thought perhaps had not been listening to the instructions to kind of explain and so on i wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that because that that interests me there is that more of kind of a behavior and an attention kind of thing no it’s definitely um for accountability within the group if the group knows that like sometimes people say this this could be quite harsh and like it’s again context specific in my in my classes we have like a very honest culture and policy and like if students have got stuff wrong and they’re talking about in groups then i they know that i’m going to pick the ones that got it wrong to explain and that’s fine because mistakes learned from them and it’s all part that’s a little chant that we do and like it’s it’s all part of the era culture that’s really important for learning and it’s it’s about being honest with each other and uh but the but knowing if they know if the groups know that you’re going to pick the person these likely to know because they got it wrong it massively massively um alters their um uh their own expect their own um kind of attitude to the task and their own objectives within the task they’re not so bothered about making sure they’ve understood all their stuff they’re thinking themselves i need to make sure my partners know all their mistakes because it’s possible that sir could ask us about any of the ones that they’ve got wrong and they’re going to ask that person specifically so make it and you communicating that to them before they do the task is is really important and then actually doing it afterwards again even though it can be painful because you might have and it’s not it’s not a bit like occasionally it might be a behavioral thing and you might sort of you might notice a group has not been on task and um you save you you save your any kind of like disciplining or whatever until after you’ve stopped all the groups then you pick you pick the person you like to know and they can’t do it and you say well you know i was watching i was watching i was listening and this didn’t happen like that’s quite nice uh it’s a good thing to do but it’s not um it’s not the same accountability that i’m talking about now it’s not it’s a good thing to do i’m talking about the way that picking the the one leaf like to know the impact that has on the ones trying to do the right thing i think it is it incentivizes them in the right way to focus on the things that you want to focus on which is fixing mistakes it’s brilliant about something i think again just to go about your conversation with ali and what you’ve said there i the thing the thing that’s made me reluctance probably the wrong word but but certainly not to use group work to the extent that you do i do a lot of paired work but not kind of you know groups of three and four is i never get the incentives or the accountability right there’s all it’s always too easy to kind of free ride within the group it’s always too easy for one keem kid to dominate in the group but it sounds to me that this this strategy in this tip that you’re talking about here that that seems to kind of target that that seems to be the key to to getting this right yeah like it i think it has a really really big impact um my second tip is specifically to do with group work and it comes it ties in really nicely with this um so [Music] that’s a good teaser [Music]