More tips from Charlie Burkitt
Video transcript
okay tip number four please yeah tip number four sure so um this this is a slightly this is one again i’m hoping these are building on each other so we have behavior we’ve got warmth we’ve got a bit of classroom management in terms of the questioning you’re doing this one is a bit more to do with kind of curriculum and a bit more kind of you long-term vision of what’s happening now for me the tip is develop systematic revision now this is something that i didn’t do well in the beginning you know i suppose when you first start teaching you just think oh well i’ve taught the kids that they’re going to just know it now you know and you know those of us that have been teaching longer know what a fatal error that is you know obviously particularly with younger and again lower ability pupils because they really don’t remember anything for very long and that also is also just human nature you know i don’t remember things you know weeks later if i haven’t been going over it so we all know about i i assume you know forgetting curves and that that knowledge does just decay over time and you have to keep coming back to it now the thing about doing that revision is that i have found it in my teaching career really useful to try and make that as systematic as possible to make sure that i’m not accidentally uh avoiding it not doing it missing topics etc now a big way that we do that at school is through the practice quizzes that i mentioned earlier so essentially where the way that works is that in the homework the pupils are given each week which we call a practice quiz they do questions that are not only what they’ve done recently but also a kind of selection of topics from previous weeks which is then not only in the homework but gone through in uh class that friday so the teacher has a chance to revise those topics which essentially makes our friday lessons a purely revision lesson it’s revision of that week and of previous weeks now what are the other ways we can do that well i think start is a really also fantastic way to embed systematic revision we had previously written lots of revision booklets we’ve actually now moved a little more towards using people might be aware of mr carter maths it’s actually a bit of a throwback for me because i used to use mr carter maths in my teach first days and always found it very useful and we are again using it at mckayla now which we didn’t used to do for starters because it just generates a really lovely set of you know uh revision questions which you can customize and and i do recommend that to people who haven’t checked it out um and that’s again a fantastic way of capturing systematic revision um and another way of doing that is just you know just trying essentially to look through your planning and make sure that you’re putting your online homework as well as a bits of revision because what you know i’m not sure how many schools do online math i’m sure it’s plenty you know hegerty sparks uh etc uh we’ve been using hegerty we’re moving a little bit towards sparks now actually you know we’ve been enjoying the early stages of that um we will look through kind of our long-term plan of what’s happening over the year and we’ll be putting um you know things from previous uh terms into that online math homework so that is essentially purely revision um and you know we’re lucky i have to say we are lucky at michaela because we have um the the plan of kind of the full vision of what’s happening from start to end from year seven all the way to year 11 in terms of what topics uh we’re studying is all kind of laid out nice and neatly and we’ve got all previous practice quizzes um saved in our shared area and it’s you know it’s really well organized and you can dip into that and you can pull out people’s quizzes they’ve used before and and use the revision that they’ve been doing so you’re just the important thing there is that you’re really finding ways to cover your blind spots because as teachers we all have blind spots we have we have those topics that either we forget about or don’t like to teach and we just need to be reminded what they are you know recently i’ve just been when i make my practice quizzes my homework each week i’ve just been grabbing you know a random exam paper and just going through and thinking right what have i not revised in a while putting questions out of it you know and that’s again a very simple but actually pretty effective way to make sure you’re not forgetting stuff it’s fascinating this so so just a couple of points on this one charlie and the first i tend to find when i’m lucky enough i watch hundreds of lessons and i’m very very fortunate i’m always fascinated by the start of the lesson because i it that’s often when retrieval happens that’s often when it’s built in whether teachers use their kind of last lesson last week last topic last year framework or use something like mr carter or corbett’s five a day or something like that and it’s great for retrieval if and only if the kids take it seriously if the kids are just like kind of waiting for the lesson to actually start and proper and they’re just either just copying down the answers or just opting out then they don’t get any of these benefits for retrieval but i’m guessing that you’re kind of hyping up the importance of retrieval and your weekly quiz is how seriously you take those must play a part in that well would that be fair to say yeah that’s that’s absolutely true no one thing i would say is that you know it’s another miracle about working at michaela which is that we wouldn’t ever get kids not just immediately trusting that what we tell them to do is the right thing to do so and i realize that’s a bit unique so you know when you work here i just i will walk into a master classroom and i’ll say right this is what we’re doing and you know it just happens the kids just trust that that’s what’s best for them and you know we’ve got that trust over time because they just see that the lessons everywhere are excellent and they’re learning and then they trust us so i don’t i don’t have to do an enormous cell on why is it we’re doing each thing that we’re doing but i would say that you know if you’re in an environment where you do need to sell that then i would just be i would just be straightforward with the kids because you know i really do believe that you know that the retrieval that revision is is absolutely fundamental to doing well at maths and you know from again from a sort of utilitarian point of view if you’re just trying to sell it rationally to the kids they want to do well in their math gcse so this is how you do well final question on this one i’m intrigued by the kind of schedule or the way how you choose what topics and questions to include in the retrieval opportunities either the do nows or the quizzes now i really like your idea of um taking from an exam paper and thinking what you haven’t taught in a while because what i often find happens i’m this is another area i’m obsessed with is the questions that tend to be included are the ones that are either easier for teachers to write or easier for kids to answer and what i mean by that is it’s very easy just to write a question on of these two fractions together and it’s very easy for the kids to try and answer it just with a pen and paper whereas construct an angle bisector you’ve got to get the compasses out the paper even measure an angle anything geometry or even some of the algebra topics like sketch uh well um plot table of values for straight lines you need the grid and the axes and all this kind of thing so how do you ensure that you don’t have the kind of blind spots to use your phrase the the the kind of painful topics in the in terms of getting the kids to answer aren’t left out of these these schedules yeah such a good question this is something that we’ve spoken about before in our department meetings because it’s you know it’s absolutely true that you know that those topics that are hard to write or answer are the ones that get avoided you know and to a certain extent i think just knowing that that’s the case does help you know knowing that that’s a weakness um and i would go as far as to say that you know look we’ve not completely solved that problem now now what i would say though is that one thing you can do for teachers is to just lower the barriers to entry in terms of revising those topics one really clean way to do that is to have as we have a huge bank of previous homeworks that pupils have been given which include already written into them the structure for those difficult to write questions so you know you were talking about graph questions you know all of that all the kind of graph images and tables etc that’s already there and you just kind of lift it you copy and paste it and bang that’s in your homework so on the kind of teacher writing end of that question i would say that that’s how we manage that and of course there’s wonderful websites like mr corbett maths etc that will that we do heavily draw from if we’re writing questions that are difficult like that um now i would say on on the pupil end in terms of you know they have to grab a uh a compass or a protractor or tracing paper etc that i will admit that it’s a tricky thing that we’ve not fully solved i would say that the the best thing we can do for that is that we’re very hot on kids equipment so we know they always have the right equipment um you know and that’s a kind of clarity and follow-through thing again kind of like my first tip that we do equipment checks every day so we know that they have the compass they have the protractor they have the tracing paper depending of course and what year group they’re in they don’t start with that in year seven but they over time they’ll build up that kind of math specific equipment and then once we know that they have it well then we are free to deliver those questions that require those pieces of equipment and we and we do huge drives on making sure that that’s the case you know it was recently the case that we were looking at protractors for year 11 and you know we go into a huge amount of detail of how can we roll this out how can we make sure that every people picks up that protractor are we following through with the tensions you know how much do they cost in the shop how are we running it you know all those logistical points go into making sure that happens fantastic