More tips from Jo Morgan
Video transcript
right tip number one is um model techniques live oh okay tell me about it right now this is something that i think all teachers need to model we know that modelling is part of good teaching whatever subject um and it’s the live bit that i think is really important and i’ll talk about modeling live in a maths context compared to modelling not live but before that i thought i’d mention other subjects and where modelling comes in so i’m thinking back to lessons i’ve observed in other subjects and i remember once i observed a drama lesson where the teacher kept telling the students what she wanted them to do and at no point showed them what she wanted them to do and then my feedback to her was that she should get up and and model the sort of technique that she wanted them to show in this drama lesson and she said um she was a bit embarrassed too um and i and like that was like that was a to me a really key part of any teacher’s job is modeling um and i and i’ve really thought about that i thought is it funny that she’s embarrassed about doing the thing that she’s an expert at um and then i realized that actually this applies in lots of other subjects because i think that some teachers and i’m not saying necessarily the word embarrassment is the right word but some teachers are a bit anxious in the math classroom and perhaps in lots of other subjects about modeling live um and then so since then i’ve sort of been really looking out for examples of good modelling and i’ve seen it in um pe lessons that i’ve observed i’ve you know where you could watch a pe lesson than where they’re teaching a technique and i watched one where the pe teacher was teaching in qriket techniques and he was showing the students kind of five um skills that are used in cricket and what was really good was he had some students get up to kind of do it while he directed them while the rest of the class watched but the teacher also was modeling them as well so he was telling the students right i want you to go over there and then you’re going to do this thing but then also the teacher got involved in in that modelling because the teacher’s the expert the teacher really threw the ball really far and really showed like how to do that really well and so i’ve seen it um brilliantly um in pe and also i’ve seen live modeling really done well in art um with a visualizer actually this is all kind of like i said semi-live modelling because what i’ve seen is um students in art who are being taught a technique like a very specific technique to do it i don’t know what it was it might have involved some uh kind of etchings or rubbings or something i don’t know but it was it was a really specific thing that they were being taught and what the teacher had done was she’s used a visualizer um in advance she’d recorded her hands doing the whole technique and so she’s sort of starting with a blank piece of paper she’d done the whole thing and showed all the technique really really clearly and she could just see her hands she’d recorded that and then she left it on the loop while the students nice so so smart so that meant that the students could see exactly what they were meant to do and they could see an actual person doing it so not just hear an explanation but see what to do and then while they were working they could just look up and reference the board and say oh what does she do next oh yeah that’s what i need to do and because it was playing on the loop they could then look again and again and they could keep checking that they were doing it right did you know that that is what she’d used to record it was it just kind of screamed in my school yeah we’ve got those visualizers um the um ipvo ones which have got this they’re kind of on an arm you know what i mean you can angle the visualizer so she had then just um angled the visualizer um facing down onto her hands done the work and used the camera function on the computer to record it so it’s actually pretty straightforward stuff and it was i think they used it a lot during lockdown and the art teachers to record techniques and now it’s part of their daily practice which is fantastic so um i know a lot of math teachers use um visualizers um in their day-to-day lessons and i don’t use a visualizer i use you know i write directly onto an interactive whiteboard but i did use a visualizer the other day when i was doing constructions yeah and when i was doing transformation so these are two topics which really lend themselves well to visualizers um and particularly with transformations i i wanted to show students the the rotations with tracing paper thing and no matter how good your animation is on a whiteboard or on some slides that really is better shown with actual tracing paper where you’re actually you know literally doing exactly what the students would do and they can see your hands doing it so i think um this kind of live modelling under a visualizer is um it’s just such a helpful technique and and particularly in lessons where there’s something practical to do and but also you know we know that for example um editing work in english under a visualizer or or in any subject with a written element sort of showing that kind of live editing is really really powerful um so i think visualizers are a really good tool for that but i don’t think all live modelling has to be done under a visualizer because the other side of it is the writing on the board live and so for example in maths that would be solving a math question while or or going through the workings while the students watch rather than clicking through the a powerpoint that’s got the steps and i think it’s a huge difference in those two things so my slides and um you know i’ll use a slide where there’s just a question at the top and then it’s a blank slide so i’ve thought in advance about what example i want to model the slide will just have the uh the question and then i’ve got a blank slide where i will go through the workings and write it all up and it should look exactly how it should look in their books and this again was where visualizer really helps because you could actually have an exercise book but i think it’s so important that they’ve seen me do that rather than click click click through the next stage i don’t think that’s as powerful what do you think yeah a couple of things to say about that um so the first is i’m that one on the not clicking through and i see this a lot you um you see this whenever because there’s so many good resources obviously we’re we’re mathematicians so we we we speak about maps there’s so many good pre-prepared math resources whether it’s white rose or whatever where it’s all fully worked out for you all the examples all the working out and if you download something off test um often the authors put so much time in and done all the working out for you because they want to communicate you know have their thinking and so on there’s always too much on the slide and i watch a lot of lessons these days where exactly the teacher clicks clicks clicks and there’s a couple of problems with that one is if the ch if the child’s thinking of a slightly different method or even if they suggest a different method and it’s not exactly the same one that’s written on the slide the teacher almost ends up saying oh you’re absolutely right but we’re just going to do it slightly different here and the kid’s like well yeah what’s going on here i like the mantra i’m going to get this tattooed on myself do the maths don’t reveal the maths i think that’s really nice is is is is the problem the other thing i want to say about that and is and this ties into the visualizer thing i remember i don’t know if you were the same joke when i first started teaching i was powerpoint obsessed to in the sense that i wanted everything on my slide so when you said those transformations i used to spend hours getting the animation of the rotating tracing paper around and so i’m thinking that that’s that was the proper way to do it because it looked nice on the thing but you’re absolutely right like it’s you want to replicate as much as you can what the kids are doing so that they can follow you doing it and so on and so forth and i was just thinking back to what you said about the art teacher this i really love this idea of recording what’s done on the visualizer and playing it back on the loop and i guess you can certainly do that before the lesson which is really nice because it shows you’ve had a go at the example yourself and so on but you could if you were a tech more technical than we are um well certainly you are joe no offense but what you could definitely definitely do is you could record it as you’re doing it live in the class right and i’m sure then with a bit of button press and you could then get that up on the screen going you know going on that loop so the kids could refer to it even then get a bit fancier upload it to vle or google classroom or whatever and then the kids could access that whenever whenever they want to i think that’s that’s really really nice and for people that aren’t um kind of confident enough for the tech to kind of record live and then immediately get it on the screen there are ways you can use things alongside each other like you could have i’m going to model it live under the visualizer and then while you’re doing it i’ve got like a gif because you can just google these things you know i’ve got a gif running on the screen where it’s just you know which might not necessarily be my hands doing it but it’s just you know showing it so while they’re practicing they can see it but i just yeah i do think like that’s um you’re right about the kind of uh we shouldn’t just reveal step by step sometimes what i do like i download i normally write my own stuff but sometimes i will download someone else’s slides um and then i want to use their examples and i just delete all the answer bits so i’ve now got my blank slide i’ve got the question at the top that i want to show but i delete all the animated examples because yeah i just don’t think it’s um and i know it’s a really really common practice to click through slides um with the the answers but it’s just not as powerful as the teacher doing themselves and i think there is um sometimes a lot of anxiety i remember when i first started teaching a level yeah and i’d have worked out the questions in advance i had them on a bit of paper in the room yeah it was and i used to like i’ve been modeling on the board and i knew how to do it but i’d still occasionally look at these paper and i always thought that the students were judging me when i did that she doesn’t know what to do next she’s having check her notes so i very quickly stopped doing that um because i thought i don’t want them to think that i need that but for a while i you know i just lacked that confidence i thought what if i messed this up in front of them but now i’m at the stage and you know what it’s like when you get more experience you kind of get that confidence where it’s like if i mess it up in front of them that’s actually sometimes quite a good thing isn’t it because they can say oh if they’re paying attention it’s a really good way to check they’re paying attention they can say miss actually you’ve made a mistake there um and then you can go back and fix it and say yeah everyone makes mistakes and well done for spotting that and then hopefully you can all see why i went wrong there and i’m gonna fix it so you just need to sort of get to the point where you’re comfortable with the fact that you will occasionally make a mistake on the board um but the live modelling is is a really powerful thing for students yeah it’s really good just a couple more things on that and yeah i was exactly the same when i first started particularly for the math sale level i didn’t have a bloody clue what i was doing and that’s when if there was pre-prepared slides i was using those left right and center because i had much more confidence the fact that i could then show a line and then explain the line but it was nowhere near as powerful as me actually kind of kind of undoing it um and and the other thing joe is are you as one you’re doing your live modeling are you doing some kind of explaining your thinking as well i i always think that’s important what what kind of things are you doing there i guess so sometimes i’ll sometimes i’ll stop between each line and ask for their ideas and there’s sort of pros and cons of that isn’t that so sometimes i’ll say right this one i’m going to just i’m going to model and you’re going to watch and you’re going to try and follow my thinking and then yeah each day so i won’t necessarily be i could suppose if you think about something like your techniques of silent teaching stuff i might just be writing down each step whereas then there are there’s you know because we can use all these things you know you don’t have to just show one technique so another way you might do it is narrating each line so now i’m going to subtract 2x from each side you know that kind of thing um so there’s that and then and then there’s the sort of technique of um any ideas what i should do next and then someone might suggest something you say right so now i’m going to subtract two books from each side so yeah there’s a kind of combination stuff and i don’t think i stick exclusively to one side of modeling and in one lesson i might have four examples and i might do i might use those like all those different techniques in my four different examples there might be one where i take a bit more input from the class and one where i narrate each step and one where i’m just writing it down um yeah so but i think um yeah the i think the thing what you said about the different methods is really interesting because actually on the few occasions where i have clicked through slides sometimes i’ll say oh they’ve done it differently and they’re just confusing people then so um you know and then actually um and yeah it’s nice to or sometimes i’ll say right is that how would how any ideas on how we do this question someone might suggest something and they’ll think oh that’s different to how i was going to do it so i draw a line down the middle of the board so this is one method and i’ll write that one up and i’ll say anyone got another method no okay so let me show you how i was thinking of doing it and put it side by side and i’ll say look here’s two different ways and i don’t mind which way you do it but so you can see two different perspectives and all that stuff you lose if you just got a load of uh pre-filled text and a powerpoint that you’re clicking through i’ll i’ll end on this with this tip i was in a school the other day i won’t say where and i was watching a very experienced teacher and they were using some pre-prepared slides from a well-known resource provider and they you could tell they hadn’t looked at them beforehand because they were genuinely surprised when the methods were coming up on the board they were like clicking through like oh right okay and then they were trying to explain i was like okay yeah interesting there we go