More tips from Tom Sherrington
Video transcript
okay okay tom what’s your second tip for us my second tip is to provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses which means that you help students have some sort of stock phrases that you use relevant to your subject to when they’re giving answers which has helps them sort of get going with a verbal answer but also keeps them to the sort of the depth of the answer you’re expecting and also can prepare them for writing so a couple of examples would be which i’ve seen were um firstly secondly and finally so you’ve asked students in a pair to come up with three reasons for something or three advantages and a teacher written on the board firstly secondly and finally and she just pointed at that so when she said okay jessica let’s have it here yours what were you what did you guys come up with and she would say well firstly secondly and finally and i thought that’s a brilliant way of getting them to definitely have three things and also that’s the kind of thing you might do in you’re writing so you’re practicing saying something and we don’t normally speak like that in normal conversation so it’s easy to sort of not do that but it’s an explicit rehearsal for for writing but also i just thought that’s so clever because they all are coming up with three things and it just works so well and i’ve seen that with lots of other ones like advantages and disadvantages so i saw a brilliant lesson recently year five lesson they were talking about tourism climbing snow tourists and snowden or whether it was a good thing or bad thing and had to give an advantage and a disadvantage and literally the year five saying an advantage of tourism on snowden is whereas their disadvantage is from and they have to do opposing things and they were using whereas i was thinking get that that’s great because they’re practicing saying whereas like it’s just a normal word and of course when you’re in year five it’s not a normal word so that type of thing that’s like it’s so simple and it’s just uh but you focus on one at a time that’s important it’s not like here’s a list of possible scaffolds which is a mistake it’s we’re just practicing this particular scaffold now so that it’s practiced it’s not just a kind of mess of options and that that’s my sort of tip of how it works that’s lovely that tom what i really like about that is it’s not i’ve made this mistake in the past diving straight to expecting kids to write things down so so in maths whenever kids have to explain justifying someone they really struggle but i love the bridge is the fact that first they’re getting used to verbalizing it and that’s the natural transition to them writing it down that seems like an important step in this yeah exactly and i suppose the most obvious one is just full sentences now some people say you know you can’t force kids to talk in full sentences and of course that’s not what you’re after you’re just say for example if you were doing you’re a science teacher and you say which of these is a is a metal or a non-metal or you know it’s sulfur a metal or non-metal and the students are just saying sulfur or non-metal you if you just say well let’s let’s have that in a full sentence then i have to say um the one that’s a non-metal is sulfur and it’s practicing now it’s perfectly legitimate to be say sulfur is the answer but it’s just practicing saying it in a sentence just build some skills around sentence construction for writing and it’s a simple scaffold put it in a sentence and i’ve seen teachers use that really well it’s a lovely tip i really like that one tom