More tips from Jemma Sherwood
Video transcript
my first tip is to plan sequences not lessons oh i like it right tell me more about this okay so um i probably started doing some kind of version of this maybe about seven or eight years ago now and it absolutely revolutionized the way i thought about teaching because it changed the focus and for me before my focus around what i did was governed by the time frame that i had and in some schools it would be 50 minutes and in some schools it would be an hour and my thought would be i have a fixed amount of time what are we going to do in that time what do i want to cover in that time and the time was kind of the main driver of everything else it was kind of the overarching constraints so when i changed to doing this process it kind of flips on its head because what i do now is i think i need to teach certain things certain ideas certain concepts i want my pupils to have certain types of practice i want them to become fluent in things i want them to be exposed to thinking in different ways about lots of things to do with maths and now i structure what i do by thinking about that first and i essentially for a kind of a unit of learning i have one massive long flip chart or powerpoint and i just go through it but i mean that sounds like i’m kind of slavishly following it that’s not the case what it means is i know key things that i want to do at certain times and if those things happen to go across the kind of now what i see is an artificial boundary of one lesson to the next then fine so i have no problem in something kind of being finished in the middle of a lesson and then we pick it up the next lesson because it’s more important to me that pupils are exposed to certain activities certain tasks and ways of thinking certain lines of questioning and the time frames that we have for our lessons are they just have to kind of be subservient to that really got it right the questions begin here because i have loads to ask you about this so practically speaking you’re talking a big old powerpoint here so just give us a sense for like a two week unit of work or something how many slides might we be talking here probably about are on there like examples is everything on there well okay so yeah um this is this part let me go back a little bit this is partly because what i’m doing at the moment is i’m making resources that lots of teachers can use of varying levels of experience so some teachers who are non-specialists teaching maths will use these some of them are very very experienced so i’m trying to put all sorts in there um so that teachers can can or cannot can choose to use or not use things depending on how confident they feel with the material um so when i’m saying 70 or 80 slides this includes loads of diagnostic questions at certain points and hinge questions and all that kind of thing it includes ways of explaining things it could include example problem pairs it also includes the activities that i want the pupils to do in case the teachers don’t have the capacity to do lots of printing so it’s it’s basically everything across you know two weeks across 70 or first slide that you write there what’s what’s the first thing that you put down oh that’s a very good question i think that defend depends on the content so i wrote one recently for the very start of year seven which is a unit on place value and we started with a bit of the history of number and the history of the number system and how we write and that kind of thing um that whereas the recent one i’ve done on the introduction to algebra there what did that begin with i’ve only just finished writing it that began with um a kind of a do you know i’ve completely forgotten now i’m not even going to try and pretend to answer them it started with a discussion question which was prompting the pupils to think about um basically i had a set of examples um of the form like two times three plus eight times three and uh two times six plus eight times six where it was all two lots of numbers plus eight lots of a number and i wanted them to discuss these and say what they all had in common looking at the fact that they all represented ten lots of a number and then we kind of go into drawing as an area model and then thinking about 2n plus a 10 is 10n and all those kinds of things so it started with a discussion question and is the first thing that you so that’s obviously how your sequence of lessons would start so is that the first thing you write as well when you’re putting together this powerpoint do you start your writing where your lessons would start or do you have like an end question in mind that you want the kids to get to and perhaps that’s the first thing you bang down in your powerpoint if that makes sense these days i start by just thinking about the kind of the broad route i want to take through what we’re trying to learn first so let me stick with this algebra one for instance i wanted to start with this idea of the structure tony garner calls it the structure of arithmetic or structural arithmetic so i wanted to start with that and then i wanted to look at how we use that to write it was kind of to motivate writing expressions as a generalization of um numerical patterns um and then i wanted to move on to a bit more working expressions in more depth and we we’re using algebra tiles and what we’re making so linking into explaining this variable x tile which is a new thing to them um and then i wanted to move on to substitution as like a specific instance so imagine the x tile kind of varies we can kind of fix it a particular number and work out what the value of the expression would be there and what happens if we then fix it at a different number what’s the value of expression then so that was substitution then i wanted to move on to solving an equation which is where imagine this tile is moving and then all of a sudden we fix it there and we know that the value of the expression is work backwards and find what the value of the tile is so it’s all it’s just an introduction to algebra very kind of informal but i start with that overview of where i want it to go and then i go do a bit into a bit more detail into each section and think about um what what do i think would be the best way to explain this how can i link it to what the pupils already know so that it doesn’t seem to just kind of poof appear out of the thin air um and then what kinds of tasks and activities will we do to focus attention in the right places got it so it starts as an overview and then drills on down into each of the sections and then as i go through sometimes i go oh actually i’m going to switch that around now but that kind of happens as you go along that’s great now this this has been a big change for me because maybe similar to you gemma for many many years i planned on a very kind of lesson by lesson basis but i think to kind of play devil’s advocate a little bit there are a few potential pros of doing it lesson by lesson so i’m interested in your take on this so i guess you could make the argument that maybe you’re a lit you could fall into the trap of being a little less responsive if you’ve got everything planned out so let’s say well what happens in this case you do your lesson on algebra and it doesn’t go quite how you anticipated it the kids are getting the hinge questions wrong and so on and so forth is that is it that a case that after that lesson you’re adapting that powerpoint how does that work in terms of being responsive from lesson to lesson so there’s a couple of things there um if i stick to the ones that i’m making at the moment as an example i am deliberately putting in places uh links to sets of questions um so for instance you can generate endless questions on uh simplifying expressions from johnny hall’s matte spot so there’s a link somewhere to these and i know that if i need my pupils to be able to practice this a bit more i can do that um and there’s links to the to these kinds of things throughout so the point when i when i said before that i’d go through the powerpoint that was a really bad choice of phrase there because that’s exactly not what’s happening because what i’m doing is asking questions as i go along and then responding to them and of course i have the benefit of lots of experience so i know that if my pupils are stuck i can generally figure out what to do on the fly the reason i’ve made these so long is because i know that some of some teachers will not have that level of experience yet so i want them to have plenty of um stuff and plenty of activities there for them to do um if they’re not able to make it up as they go along that way it’s perfect so yeah so i would say that i think by having it so well planned and so well structured i’m better able to respond because i’ve got time to think about those things instead got it got it and my other question is often lessons have kind of key features in there so a do now would be a classic a lot of teachers would always start their lesson either with retrieval questions with the last lesson last week or whatever it may be and so on um how does that fit into your model if you essentially don’t really know or care all that much where one lesson starts and one lesson ends how does that work well that’s one of those things you then have to do as you’re going along so wherever you’ve got to at the end of a particular period if your school says you must start every lesson with this kind of retrieval do now starter you make sure that you put the relevant kinds of questions into that it might be that you want to practice something that they they just need a bit more practice on because you’ve identified it from hinged questions that you’ve used previously or it might be something that you know is going to help with what’s coming up that you just want to refresh their minds on but that’s where you have to i think you shouldn’t be planning a long time in advance because that’s because that’s all to do with responding if you want it to be effective it needs to be reactive to what’s actually happening in the classroom i see so there’s opportunities although you’ve got your kind of general overview all play lied out lined out there’s that expectation that you’re gonna be slotting in things as and when when appropriate absolutely yeah so it’s definitely not here is you know the next two weeks worth of work this is absolutely everything you will need because that’s kind of the opposite of what i want to achieve in the classroom but what it is is here’s the um here’s kind of the majority of what you’re going to need use this as your starting point and make it work really well for the people you’ve got in front of you got it right let me put you in the shoes of a novice teacher who doesn’t have gemma sherwood planning out this incredible outline of a lesson and so on and so forth but they want to do this they want to break the cycle that perhaps mean you have been in where they’re planning lesson by lesson and so on and so forth so let’s say it’s a sunday evening or whatever they sit down they know they’ve got a two-week unit of fractions to teach or whatever and this could be no math it could be any subject any advice on on how they start because it’s quite overwhelming isn’t it thinking oh my gosh i’ve five less than six lessons or whatever material where would a novice teacher start with this german do you think so there’s two scenarios i can think of first of all if you’ve got somebody in your department who you think you could talk to who is more experienced and who you know would be willing to kind of get involved in such a project definitely do it go and pick their brains um and and get their help on it if you don’t have anybody like that i think i would probably start by working um with my first lesson and then adapting to it and putting these resources together as i go along into one long thing and at the very end of it stop and look back and reflect and go how well did that work how well did the first bit work related to the second was there something i could have done between those lessons that would have helped though that little group of pupils over there that didn’t get this thing um but it’s about the reflection because with the reflection then comes the fact that you can adapt it and make it better ready for next time but because you’ve then got the initial sequence and you reflected on it then next time you teach it you can just iterate it and improve it a bit more got it final question on this job unless there’s anything you want to add it’s a little bit of a bonus question going off in a bit of the tangent here whilst we’re talking about do nows where do you stand on that are you if you were midway through some fluency practice or something like that and the bell went would you start the next lesson just cracking on without fluency practice or do you have a definite kind of starting point to your lesson whether it’s a do now or something else i think that’s hugely dependent on the context in the school so it may be that if you’re in a school where you need maybe the pupils have come from pe and they’ve come a long way and they need something just to settle them and you know that this kind of routine works really well because they know what’s expected of them then great then then do it if you know that they’re just going to come and they’re going to crack on with whatever you ask them to do i don’t see the need to necessarily do something like that at the start of every lesson but i’m going to kind of totally pull back and be non-committal there and say it really does depend on context but i don’t think that they should be done like as a kind of a blanket rule at the start of every lesson got it fantastic stuff you