More tips from Jo Morgan
Video transcript
all right joe morgan what is your fifth and final tip right tip number five don’t forget the respond part of responsive teaching whoa catching that’s the kind of click date headline i’m looking for that’s good right tell me about this right well what used to be called assessment for learning and now more commonly called responsive teaching it comes up a lot in lesson observations so quite often when you’re observed or if i go and observe someone one of the things that often people are writing on these less motivation forms is um could be more afl how are you assessing what the students know so but when we’re talking about that we’re often talking about how the assessment takes place so we might be talking about are you using mini whiteboards are you using questioning effectively are you using i don’t know exit tickets or diagnostic questions you know if they’ve got ipads you’re getting to do some diagnostic questions at the end before they leave um are you circulating and looking over their shoulders so there’s all these different techniques for assessing but i tend to find that when people are giving feedback on their um on their lessons the focus is on did you do the assessment rather than how did you respond to the assessment that you did and that’s the hard bit and that’s the bit that actually i think a lot of people aren’t i don’t know how to do so when you see them get something wrong how do you then on the fly adapt your lesson or adapt your next lesson to respond to it um and i just i i don’t think it’s happening i don’t think it’s people are adapting their lessons as they should do for a couple of reasons one i think it’s you have to be able to think on your feet and think very quickly and if you’re gonna if you see a big misconception a lesson or you see that you’ve explained something and no one’s got a clue what you’re talking about you have to think very quickly to think you know is there what’s the other way i can explain it what what different examples can i use um how should i you know how should i respond to the fact that half the course of god in half the class have no idea so that’s that’s sort of in the lesson but the other thing is there’s this kind of fashion at the moment for we’re all talking about how why are we all writing our own lessons why aren’t we using centrally planned lessons and there’s like quite a thing at the moment and i’ve heard um i went to a talk recently with the um uh nectm where they were saying you know what how it how silly that all these teachers plan their own lessons on their own what a terrible use of time and there are parts of that argument i strongly agree with but also if we’re going to use a centrally planned bank of lessons where a whole unit of uh teaching has been planned in advance lesson by lesson um that doesn’t really give us the opportunity to respond to our students yes and i i tweeted about this recently about how i did a lesson on scattergrass with yeah eight and i’ve got a pretty i’ve got um a pretty smart class of year rates they’re really good and they they um i can rely on them to to be good at whatever i give them yeah they’re a good class and and they had done scattergraphs in science um and i knew they’d done scattergrass and science because i had asked them in advance and also i had checked with the science teachers and yeah when i so what because i was short on time because math teachers are always short on time like i had i was rushing topics because i spent a long time going to debt for one topic and it left me very little time for scattergraphs i thought i’d go doing two lessons i’ll do one correlation and do one line of best fit because i’ve done it before and of course what happened was in that very first lesson they got the correlation thing no problem and then i gave him a task well i wasn’t really testing a larger correlation because the task said plot a scatter graph and then write down what the correlation is so really the task was testing whether they can plot a scatter scattergraph primarily and they just couldn’t like their scales were out of control crazy awful awful stuff like they had no clue how to draw a grass an axis and the thing is that i hadn’t taught them that i hadn’t modeled it so immediately i thought well that was that that was a that’s my mistake i should never i should have assessed up front i should have i should have checked before i got started whether they could do this particular skill because basically i just made a mess of this so what i did was i scrapped my next lesson plan which i was going to do my best fit i hadn’t planned it yet though because i don’t plan lessons in advance because i know that that’s a silly thing to do so that’s fine i hadn’t planned it so i then went um that evening and i planned the next day’s lesson where i got i taught them about scale and we looked at some scales with mistakes and we talked about why those scales were wrong and we talked about how to draw axes and we practiced that and then by the end of that lesson they were doing axes and scatter graphs much better so i fixed the problem um because i was responsive to what i saw in the lesson now if i was teaching a very regimented pre-planned series of lessons then i wouldn’t have been able to do that unless of course i had um um i i was kind of allowed i guess in some schools they might say yes we have these lessons that you have to use but you are allowed to adapt and veer off them if you want to so i suppose that would have been all right but you know i think i feel like i have to defend myself in the school um as a sometimes as a member of a leadership team i get uh by the other men’s leadership team i get told off for why you play why are you planning your lessons in the evening um and i or while you’re playing your lessons in the afternoon you’ve got other things that are more important to do and why aren’t you just using other people’s lessons why aren’t you sharing lessons in the department um now we do share stuff you know i save myself in a shared area other people are welcome to use it um but the reason i’m planning my lessons the night before is because we have maths uh four days a week um so i’m not like other subjects where i have a nice three-day gap between lessons and and i have to respond to what i saw that day like i can’t you can’t just ignore what you saw in in today’s lesson and just carry on regardless you have to respond to it um so yeah and there’s i mean there are there are other examples where you don’t have to it’s not about changing the next lesson so for example this week i was doing less transformations with year 10 and they were doing some practice on invariants the whole lesson was about invariance and then there was one question they got to on negative which they had to do a negative enlargement and write about which points were invariant and like i had one hand went up first person that got that question i can’t remember how to do a negative enlargement they did it in year nine and then another hand went up and by the time the third hand went up i stopped them all and i said i’m just going to model a negative enlargement question because i can see that everyone’s forgotten how to do this now i don’t like to interrupt people when they’re working on a task but you know that required me to adapt my lesson during the lesson because i was responding to what i saw um so basically there’s a couple of things here one i do see massively the advantages of off-the-shelf uh units of lessons that are planned in advance i definitely see their advantages to teachers that need support and to um to say to for efficiency but we have to make sure that if we’re doing that that we are still allowing our teachers to be responsive to what they see in front of them and adapt those lessons massively if they need to um because being responsive is the right thing for our students high quality lessons are important for our students but being responsive is part of that high quality teaching and you lose the being responsive if you’ve planned the whole thing in advance and then the other part of that is learning techniques to be responsive in the lesson and knowing when it’s the right time to say that i’ve got this plan and i was hoping to get to this point in this hour but actually halfway through i’ve realized that i’m going to have to scrap the second half of the lesson and divert because of what i’m seeing in front of me i think teachers have got really good at the assessment part of responsive teaching but we need to do more work on the responsive part of responsive teaching lovely that joe just a few things about this i think um there are kind of three kind of times in a lesson where i would do kind of what i call kind of formal formative assessment and i think the first one’s probably the key that pre-rec knowledge check if you spoke about with adam boxer about this if you get that bit right you just save yourself a load of potential hassle going forward and i think if any if teachers are going to be responsive anywhere that’s possibly the easiest part to be responsive because you ask this question the prereq knowledge isn’t there so you don’t really have a choice you have to stop and teach that that prerequisite knowledge i think it gets a bit more difficult when you start doing formative assessment midway through a lesson when perhaps the kids are practicing a new concept that you’ve taught them it’s quite tempting just to kind of let them kind of crack on with it and keep practicing but then if you if you stop them there and just do a bit of a sense check of where all the class are either with uh diagnostic questions or any whiteboards or whatever it’s thing sometimes quite difficult to respond there because sometimes it’s all right the rest of you crack on with this whereas the ones who are struggling just watch me at the board or kind of come around in a small group but it’s something it’s so important to do yeah and then that final part as you say whether it’s an exit ticket or a final question at the end that’s quite nice because then as you say you then have a bit of time before the next lesson to think and it might not be scrapping the whole lesson it might be saying right for the first 10 minutes i’m just going to need to go back over this and and so on and so forth and second thing i i’ve definitely been there with this certainly when i was much less experienced your lesson plan it’s almost like it’s set in stone so you’re gonna i’m gonna use this slide then i’m gonna use this slide and so on and so forth i’ve never put the two and two together though joe to start thinking about the pre-prepared resources which are really high quality may actually cause teachers to be less responsive it’s a really interesting thing then it goes back to that story i was talking about previously where this guy was clicking through the powerpoints there was no way he was going to do anything apart from click next slide there was no way he was going to be able to respond because then what’s he going to do he’s going to have to close his powerpoint down get up on the other it just wasn’t going to happen so that’s really interesting that i’m a big proponent of these shared resources for workload and also kind of lesson sequencing reasons but yeah i’d never put two and two together that’s really nice that joe i like that and the final thing and i’m obviously ridiculously biased but i think diagnostic questions are quite good for responsive teaching for two reasons so well three reasons so one they’re very quick to kind of ask and get the whole kids you get a response off all the kids whether it’s abcd cards or mini wipers or whatever two if the kids get it wrong you have a sense of why they’re getting it wrong because of their choice of wrong answer so each wrong answer will give you an insight into the specific nature of their misunderstanding so you can then then you’ve got if you’ve looked at the question in advance it and you think okay loads of my kids are getting are going for a a is wrong and i know why because i’ve looked at the question before you’re then probably in a better position to have a good explanation or a demonstration or whatever but finally i think the most challenging thing about responding in response to teaching as you’ve said is is what how you actually respond if you’ve got half your kids who know what they’re doing and half the kids who don’t that’s potentially difficult but with diagnostic questions what i tend to do is the kids who don’t know what they’re doing i’ve got an insight as to why so i can support them but the kids who do know what they’re doing i can simply say something like well one of my favorite things to say to the kids is for a diagnostic question can you write me three more three more questions which would make each of the wrong answers right so i can give this like okay we know d’s the right answer to this question whilst i’m helping out the rest of the class can you write me a question as similar to the one that you that we’ve just seen here so just change one thing but make a the right answer then change one thing and make b the right answer and that means that i don’t have to give out another worksheet another activity or anything like that they can be busy in a useful way whilst i can help the other kids out because to take you right at the point you may write at the start the reason i think teachers struggle with the responsive bit of responsive teaching is that’s that is the hard bit that’s the hard way and it’s it’s a lot easier when all the kids either know it or all the kids don’t know it but when you have this split it’s quite difficult to respond so that’s some of the kind of things that that i would do did you have any thoughts if you get that position joe where you have a bit of a split in the class of knowledge it’s tricky isn’t it yeah you’re right because you’ve got this thing where if the whole class is users of something then you either change that lesson or you change the next lesson and you just have to teach that thing they all can’t do but yeah it’s it and if it’s one or two students then that’s easier because you just go to them directly but you’re right if you’ve got half this class getting it in half the class not that is that is really challenging so like you say you need to find something um find something that’s going to get the ones who get it doing some reasoning while you’re still um explaining or adapting your explanation for the ones who don’t get it because that’s the thing is it’s about adapting your explanation like if you’ve shown them like if you’ve shown them a way of doing it if you’ve modelled a number of examples and they’re still not getting it you need to model them differently or you need to find a different explanation or you need to find a and a different method and and so it takes a it takes quite a lot of experience and expertise to get it right um it’s definitely definitely the hardest bit of teaching um and um and it’s interesting isn’t it because you think about in other subjects and how you know you could have where they want students to write a paragraph um and and you know like they’re going around seeing that some students are writing these amazing paragraphs and some students are just writing loads of nonsense and i can imagine it’s it’s just as hard there to sort of decide you know without into if there’s too many students to help individually so what are you going to do then and you really need to minimize the amount of times you stop a class and interrupt them particularly for those who are getting on with it like it’s really hard if there’s some who are just happily working away to say right everyone i can see some of you are getting this so my pens down and their eyes back on me yeah because that’s really frustrating for those who are fine with it and so yeah i i don’t have all the answers on the best way of doing it but i do know that i’m really worried about um i really worry about these uh this big trend at the moment for a collaboration is a really good thing and we should be collaborating we should be being efficient but these off-the-shelf lessons they have to be they have to be used with caution and they have to be really strongly emphasized that if you’re using a century i’ll say one teaching department is going to plan all the angles lessons i can see the advantages but it also means if you’re delivering a series of lessons that someone else’s talk you need to have the confidence to not use that less than halfway through the lesson if um if your class depending on what your class say because otherwise all the assessment for learning is just a waste of time if you’re just you know if you’re getting them to do stuff on many white boards or you’re circulating or you’re questioning um and and then you’re saying oh they haven’t quite got this but i need to click on to the next slide then they might as well not have done it um so yeah i do think it’s really really tough um i’ll tell you one more example i use my um so my year nines this year they’ve done they’ve got um a cast of year 9 who struggle with maths and they did uh grid methods last year for expanding double brackets early this year i gave them a end-of-unit test on some topic and i included some retrieval questions in that and i could see that uh three quarters of the class got the double bracket expansion wrong they’ve been taught the grid method last year they made all the common misconceptions you get with that method and particularly that filling in the last box with by adding the numbers like that’s really really common um so then i responded the response of teaching for me there from seeing that one test question that they all got wrong was a couple of months later when i did have the opportunity to know this about algebra because algebra came up on the scheme of work um i tried showing them a different method so i said that you all know how you all taught how to do the grip method i know that some of you have not remembered how to grip method i’m going to show you a different way of doing it and i use the distributive method so um which was modeled very well by chris bolton at a recent mass conference and i used his series of um examples to model it and and it worked really well and at the end of that series of the lessons i did on that i said right so in year eight you were taught the good method for expanding brackets i’ve taught you a different method which basically just requires expertise and single brackets to be successful in which was really good for them because they had the expertise in single brackets and i said and i’ll let you decide going forward which method you’re going to use for this topic um but yeah i if i hadn’t um if i hadn’t spotted that a lot of the class had not coped well with the method they’ve been taught in year eight um then i wouldn’t have adapted my lessons um for year nine so i do think this responsive teaching thing it can be short term like in the lesson or it can be kind of um one lesson to the other or it can even be like over a long period of time um looking at uh how they did in the end of your assessment or how they’re doing an end of unit test and then thinking about how you’re going to do things differently next time so there’s a whole load of responsive teaching that we all need to be thinking about i think it’s a massively important part of what we do and um and yeah i think sometimes like i say in lesson observations the emphasis is on how are you assessing not how you’re responding so yeah we do need to uh i think as a professional we need to get better at thinking about uh the best ways to respond