More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now this tips for teachers video is going to be a little bit different to ones that i’ve recorded in the past for a start it’s probably going to be a fair bit longer so i’ll apologize for that in advance but secondly and i think i could be done under the trades descriptions act here i don’t really think i’m going to be offering any tips it’s more that i’m going to be challenging you to think and reflect on your own practice to see if any ideas come from it i don’t know if this is going to work this could be an absolute disaster but let’s give it a go all right so i want to start by my view on formative assessment and i don’t think this is particularly controversial but what i believe is if there’s ever an opportunity to get all your students responses to a question as opposed to just one or two that you may pick by do by saying matthew what do you think about this miranda you agree then we should take it why should we take it well i think there are five benefits of collecting as many responses from your students as possible the first is you don’t get that biased sample if i ask matthew what the answer is and matthew gets it right there’s a real danger i assume that everybody understands it the converse is also true by the way if i ask a question and matthew gets it wrong i may think okay this is a problem that i need to revisit with the whole class whereas in fact it might just be matthew doesn’t understand it you don’t get that if you collect in more responses from your kids and secondly we get the fact that confident students can’t dominate that happens so much right if we allow hands up if we do if we say things like anybody know the answer to this you get the same kids who dominate time and time and time again third i think this one often gets missed and if students um know that they’re all going to be assessed for their understanding there’s an incentive for all students to think if students realize that the teacher just tends to ask one or two students each question even if they’re different students and they do things like cold call then i think students kind of play a bit of a gamble here and think well there’s 25 30 kids in the class here what are the chances that sir or miss is going to ask me here pretty low if they do ask me okay fair enough i’ll start doing my thinking there and then whereas if in fact we’re collecting responses for all from all students then there’s an incentive for all students to think hard fourth this i think is an interesting one as well whenever you and just ask one or two students it’s always going to be a bit of a surprise what answer they’re going to give you can predict what matthew might say and what olivia might say and so on and but you don’t get to see the responses of the rest of the kids whereas if you find some way for all students to respond then you can choose which answers to focus on so you may see an answer that you didn’t expect and you can then use that as a key focus point so the more answers that you see from your students the more information you get so the more you can then tactically choose which answers that you want to focus on and share with the rest of the class the chance of you finding all those answers is drastically reduced if you just pick one or two students and finally you can then do things with the answers if all the students have responded they can then have some really good peer discussions with each other and if it’s just one or two students who’ve responded then you’ve only really got one answer to them focus on and so on so i know that’s all obvious stuff but i just wanted to kind of stay in my case before we start talking about the different lesson phases by the way of course pause the video at any stage if you want to reflect on any of this right i think there are well this isn’t an exhaustive list but i’m going to share five possible phases in a lesson and we’re going to use these phases to then think about how we might go about collecting as much information from our students as possible when we ask questions so we have what’s often known as the do now or the starter and i’m thinking specifically here one that’s designed to enable students to retrieve uh stuff that they’ve learned in the past then we might have a prerequisite knowledge check some people will fuse these two uh two together then we have the explanation or work example or modeling phase of a lesson then we may have some practice in lots of different forms and finally we’ll have however we decide to wrap up the lesson a plenary and exit ticket and so on not every lesson is going to contain these five phases some are gonna contain more some are gonna contain less but i think hopefully this is quite a useful structure to to use to start thinking about our formative assessment strategies all right so let’s start with this retrieval do now so we know from from research into memory this is a really smart thing to do and not necessarily the start of the lesson but at some point in students weeks it’s a really good idea to get them thinking hard about stuff that they’ve learned in the past quite simply so they don’t forget it and one really popular structure for this is the last lesson last topic last term last year i think this is really really nice and it gets students reflecting on something that they’ve learned really recently before they start to forget it but then it bubbles up topics that they’ve learned at different phases in the past i think that’s really nice but what i’m interested in here is and this is the point i’d like you to pause your video is i’d like you to think about the way you if you do one your retrieval or do now or starter how do you get the responses from your students do you or could you get responses from all your students and when and how do you respond to these responses and once you’ve had chance to think about that press play again and i’ll just do a few reflections myself okay welcome back so let’s just think a little bit more about this retrieval or or do now so the first thing i wanted to say is i don’t think the teachers responsive to responses to this are time sensitive so let’s say for example that we um we do a do now and it turns out that everybody’s forgotten how to do question one and question one was something that students studied you know three months ago we don’t necessarily have to respond to that there and then if it’s not prerequisite knowledge for the idea that we’re going to be teaching students we can instead say to the kids look i can see this is a problem don’t worry about it i’m going to go away and think about the best way i can to explain this to you and we’ll revisit this tomorrow or next week secondly there’s a real danger with with all this that we get this or what i call the illusion of retrieval and that is we think that just because we’ve included questions on something students studied three months ago a year ago and so on that we’re actually inducing retrieval but of course unless students engage with it and think really hard about it then they don’t get any of the retrieval benefits mere exposure isn’t enough now i’ve spoken in a previous tips for teachers video how showing the students a model of the forgetting curve is potentially a way to get them to take retrieval a bit more seriously but you’ll have your own ideas about this and finally what’s really important here and this is true of all of these as feedbacks needed in the sense that students need to know whether they’re right or wrong from these answers well what you don’t want here is to do the do the retrieval starter and students then go away thinking oh nice one i got that right when in fact that they didn’t we don’t want them practicing the wrong thing so i always showcase the answers to the retrieval retrieval or the do now task whether it’s just projecting those answers up or having the working out with them and so on and so forth or however you may choose to do it it’s important students know whether they’re right or wrong now how you go about collecting all your all the responses from your kids during the do now is going to be completely up to you the obvious thing that screams out to me is is mini whiteboards here i don’t think there’s a much more efficient way of doing this there are ways with technology potentially and we’ll get into that a little later but mini wide buds for me i think are going to be the most powerful tool for this and that’s going to be a recurring theme but anyway feel free to pause the video again at this stage if you just want to reflect on that more all right let’s move into the second phase of this lesson the prerequisite knowledge check now this is where surprise surprise we assess students knowledge of anything that’s going to be important that they need to know so we can build this new idea on top of it we don’t want to build a new idea on shaky foundations now one of my preferred ways of doing a prerequisite knowledge check is diagnostic questions i might find them really quick and easy to ask we can dig into the misconceptions and so on but also we could just have some open response questions for a prerequisite knowledge check something like that this may be for um i’m about to teach area of area or circumference of a circle so i may choose to do things like this one idea that’s really interesting is doing the prerequisite knowledge check before the lesson this is really nice so you set students a homework or a quiz that consists of questions that’s prerequisite knowledge for that for the next idea they’re going to be taught it automatically marks it for them this is just taking off diagnostic questions but there’s loads of systems that do this of course you then are armed with all that information so the start of the next lesson instead of doing the assessment you can do the responding you can just say okay wow question one this is problematic for our students so let’s focus on that as opposed to question 9 8 and 9 kids have nailed that so we don’t need to worry about that and so on and so forth all right so over to you what does your prerequisite knowledge check look like how do you get the responses from your students is it one-to-one or can you get all the responses from your kids and how do you respond to your the kids responses to your prerequisite knowledge check pause the video and just consider that please okay so just a few thoughts for me on prerequisite knowledge and the first is i would argue this is a bold claim but of all the phases of a lesson where you want to collect information from all your students i think this is the most important one if we go back to that scenario i outlined at the start where my you ask a question and you you ask it to the whole class but you’re just collecting michael’s response and michael gets it right you assume that everyone knows it well if that assumption is false this is going to be really problematic because then we’re building new ideas on shaky foundations so of all the times we want to collect as many responses as possible i think the prerequisite knowledge check is arguably the most important and secondly whatever you decide to do and this is true of everything you want it to be manageable often i do work with maths departments and about assessment for learning and they come up with these amazing strategies what they’re going to do and the kids are going to respond and the teacher’s going to respond the kids are going to respond back and the penis it all sounds great but it’s just not manageable and if it’s not manageable in terms of a workload perspective for the teacher if it’s not manageable in terms of a time perspective within lessons for the kids it just it just doesn’t last it just disappears so anything you come up with has got to be manageable from your perspective and the kids perspective and finally we’ve always got the question of what on earth do we do during a prerequisite knowledge check if half the kids know the answer and half the kids don’t well i’ve spoken about this in in a prior video but one of my preferred ways of dealing with this particularly if i’m if i just flip back if i’m using diagnostic questions is let’s imagine half the class get this right and half the class get this wrong then i’m going to explain the answer to everybody and then i’m going to say okay if you’re still confused by this i want you to listen to me and maybe i’ll come up with another example or do some teaching and so on if you’re happy with this then what i want you to do is i want you to change one thing about this question that makes answer a the correct answer one thing about this question that makes answer d the correct answer and so on so i’m going to use the wrong answers to challenge my students who are secure with this but you all have your different ways of doing that so again perhaps you want to pause the video at this point and just reflect on your prerequisite knowledge check okay halfway explanation the word example face and the modeling phase of the process so i have my way of doing this that many of you will be familiar with my work example which i’ll do silent teacher then we’ll use self-explanation prompts to do the thinking side of things and then they’ll be your turn and so on and when i visit schools there’s lots of different ways of doing this and i see students practicing on devices which are immediately giving them feedback and the teacher can then see the screens of all the kids that they’re working on and so on but i’m interested in in what you do what’s your explanation what’s example phase look like and this i think is really interesting this time how do you get the responses from your students and is it all the kids who are responding when you’re asking questions like why did i do that what happened there and so on or is it just one or two and how and when do you respond to those responses okay so let’s just reflect on this for a bit another bold claim alert of all the phases of a lesson where teachers use formative assessment i think this is the weakest i’m i’m hand on heart i’m i’m saying this for my lessons as well this is where one-to-one questioning seems to dominate so i always use michael i don’t know why uh michael where did this where did the five come from from this line to this line it’s always one-to-one question very rarely do i see whole class assessment during explanations or worked examples or even in the your turn bit that immediately follows it but of course we need we we need we need this because we need to know whether this is sinking in or not it tends to be these one-to-one questions that that are happening and i’ll tell you the thing that’s interesting about this is it’s very easy to be passive as a student during the explanation the modeling in the works example phase you can just nod along oh yeah i’m getting it and not even in a in a deceptive way and you’re not thinking oh i’m consciously trying to trick the teacher here maybe you think you’re understanding it because the teacher’s giving lots of cues lots of scaffolding lots of support so in order to make sure that we’re actually getting an accurate sense of whether our students are understanding what we’re doing i think we need this whole class assessment strategy but as i say i very rarely see it at this stage of the lesson and again i think worked examples examples mini whiteboards are a good way potentially to achieve this so maybe just reflect on on that for a moment okay i want to move to the practice phase now so here students are independently practicing they’re working through some work that you’ve set and so on it may be again i’ll do lots of different types of practice fluency practice this is an example of some intelligent practice that i may do on probability again um i often see technology being used here this is using the dr frost maths platform and the students are practicing independently on this bit the teacher can see the results coming in and so on and so forth what does your practice phase look like and crucially how do you get the responses from your students when they’re practicing how can you see what they’re understanding and what they’re not is it one or two students you get this from could you get it from all your students and how do you respond to these responses how do you react to that information that’s coming in pause the video at this stage okay just a few thoughts on the practice phase a technology can be used quite nicely uh here for this if you’re lucky enough that your students have got access to devices and of course this could be practice at home as well students can be using technology and what’s really nice about technology is that students know whether they’re right or wrong they get that immediate feedback either just as soon as they’ve done a question or when they submit it all at the end of a quiz and that’s really important and that leads me into this as well regardless of whether we use technology or not um joe morgan spoke about this on a tips for teachers video kids need to know whether they’re right or wrong they need access to the answers it’s that classic thing practice doesn’t make perfect practice makes permanent in the past i’ve made the mistake and i’m pretty sure it is a mistake the kids have been working for 15 20 minutes and then at the end of the lesson the answers come up on the board the problem with that of course is if students have gone wrong early on they probably haven’t been practicing and reinforcing that wrong way of doing things of course the flip side of this is you may think well if i have all the answers available kids aren’t going to be doing any thinking they’re going to be copying things down so i think the ways of managing this i think what works quite well if you have a say a 10 question quiz or exercise and the students start working on question one and after a couple of minutes just silently on the board you go through question one so they’ve got the work solution there and then you say to kids okay just so you know sorry to interrupt you but question one’s on the board just have a quick check and that you’ve got it right and if you’re stuck on anything put your hand up and then a few minutes later pick out another key question like question four and then go through the answer to that just so students have always got that kind of check point that they can use so they never go too far practicing the wrong thing then at the end of the lesson they can have access to all the answers and the final thing with the practice it’s really important if you’re um well it’s an opportunity i should say if you’re able to collect students responses as opposed to just what did you get what did you get kids can then share those responses with the person next to them and so they can have peer discussion and also you can share interesting responses interesting methods misconceptions examples of excellence with the whole class if the your students responses to the practice remain hidden from you until you take the books in later on or whenever it may be you don’t have the opportunity to do that or at least it’s nowhere near as powerful whereas if you’re regularly collecting in responses from your kids you can make use of those responses so again just a few thoughts and practice feel free to pause this video at any stage all right the end is in sight and quite ironically we’re at the uh the plenary or the exit ticket so this may be the end of the lesson uh traditionally exit tickets have done paper based i’ve done a done a tips for teachers video on this and i personally prefer to use um diagnostic questions for exit tickets for the reasons i outline in the tips for teachers video on that so check that one out um but again technology can come into play here students answering exit tickets the teacher looking at them as they’re coming in and or looking at them later later on when they’re at home and and so on um exit ticket after the lesson is an interesting thing this often uh i’m recording this well i love to say post pandemic but it’s not really but certainly post kind of school school lockdown and remote teaching and teachers i think got really good at setting exit tickets after the lesson during remote teaching and what that would be the students would do the lesson kind of on the screens remotely and then the teacher would set a homework which was kind of like an exit ticket based on what the kids had just done and it would be automatically marked and so on and so forth and i think this is really nice just in the same sense that i think the prerequisite knowledge before the lesson is nice so setting you know two or three questions using technology based on what the kids have studied that lesson that then gets automatically marked you can see the results and then respond the next lesson i think’s really really nice and there’s loads of tools out there that’ll do it so for the final time um what about your plenary um and exit ticket so how do you get the responses from your students from that is it one or two or can you get all the responses and how and when do you respond to those responses okay final thoughts from me on this one again i don’t think this is time sensitive in the sense that you don’t have to respond to the exit ticket straight away you may and i think you probably do want to respond at the start the next lesson otherwise what’s the point in in asking the exit ticket but it’s not as if you need to collect in all the responses immediately and respond in the moment like you would need to do for example with a pre-requisite knowledge check at the pitch of the exit ticket that i think’s really important i’ve made the mistake in the past that the exit ticket’s always the hardest question and that the kids will do that lesson i don’t think that’s right i want to pitch it somewhere in the middle it’s kind of almost like kind of like a target question that i want all students to be able to answer and we may have gone further than that in the lesson itself but the exit tickets just to give me a sense of of where the kids are at are they on track for where i hope that they would be and finally this goes back to that manageable manageability thing that we talked about earlier on or workload you don’t want exit tickets to take a long time to mark that’s why i like using diagnostic questions zero time to mark i just it just does it all in the lesson or some form of technology if exit tickets are taking ages to mark you’re just not going to do them because you don’t have time so there are five possible phases uh in a lesson and i’d like to set you one final challenge and if this is all right um i’d like to pick one of those phases that you want to try and improve the collection of student responses to and by that i mean pick one of those phases that at the moment you don’t think you get as much information as you could do about how your students are understanding things perhaps you do a lot of one-to-one questions in the explanation or a lot of one-to-one questions in the pre-requisite knowledge check pick one of those that you want to work on and and have a think how are you going to do it is it going to be mini whiteboards are there other ways of doing it how are you going to get all those responses how are you going to respond just pick one and make that your target your focus to try and work on to try and improve that ideally get another colleague to to work on something else and you can then collaborate and share strategies and so on they can even watch you in the lessons whatever works but pick one of those to be your focus to work on and let’s see if we can improve getting as much information as we can from our kids so that we can respond appropriately so what did you think of that as i say slightly different tips for teachers video probably if this has bombed it’ll be the last one of these i ever do but let me know if that’s of any use whatsoever if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel i massively appreciate it and visit tipsforteachers.com at uk for loads more tips thanks so much for watching