This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Tom Sherrington’s tips:
- Set out the big picture [3 minutes 57 seconds]
- Provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses [10 minutes 38 seconds]
- Start with whoever got 8 out of 10 [14 minutes 05 seconds]
- Foster cross-class accountability [16 minutes 40 seconds]
- Set occasional open-response tasks [22 minutes 11 seconds]
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Watch the videos of Tom’s tips
Podcast transcript
Craig Barton 0:04
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast. The show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea at a time. Each episode invited guests from the wonderful world of education to share five tips for teachers to try both inside and outside of the classroom. With each tip, the challenge is always to ask yourself, what would I have to do or change to make this work for me, my situation and my students, experimentation and frustration they follow. Hopefully something good will come out of it. Remember to check out our website tips for teachers.co.uk, where you’ll find all the podcasts as well as links, resources and audio transcriptions for each episode. Better still, you’ll also find a selection of video tips, some taken directly from the podcast, and others recorded by me. These could be used to spark discussion between colleagues and a departmental meeting, a twilight insight and so on. Now, just before we dive into today’s episode, a quick word of thanks from our lovely sponsors, because this episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by arc maths. Arc math is an innovative app created by teachers to help students remember all those crucial skills needed to succeed and maths. Art maths is built around research into the power of retrieval practice and space practice on memory. And here’s how it works. Students crack open the art maths app and are given a 12 question quiz. With four practice questions on anything they got wrong, not just straight away. But the next day three days later, a week later, and so on until they have it secure in long term memory. The more time they spend on the app, the better Ark will get to know your students and what they mean. With no teacher input required, you can spend more of your time inspiring your students with new ideas. So please check out arc maths and remember that’s arc with a C knots. Okay. Right back to the show. So let’s get learning with today’s guest the wonderful Tom Sherrington. Spoiler alert, here are Tom’s five tips. Tip number one set out the big picture. Number two provide explicit scaffolds for verbal responses. Tip three, start with whoever got eight out of 10 Number four foster cross class accountability. And tip number five set occasional open response tasks. If you look at the episode description on your podcast player, or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll see our timestamps each of these tips so you can jump straight to the one you want to listen to first or read listen at any stage. Enjoy the show.
Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Tom Sherrington to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Tom. How are you?
Tom Sherrington 2:59
Hello, Craig. Yeah, feeling good. Good to see.
Craig Barton 3:02
Ya. Good to see you too. And for listeners who don’t know, could you tell us a bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?
Tom Sherrington 3:10
Well, I am someone who used to be a head teacher and a teacher. And now I am a teacher, trainer and author of books about teaching.
Craig Barton 3:18
Fantastic. Well summarise. I like it right, let’s dive straight in. What is your first tip for
Tom Sherrington 3:22
us today, Tom? To begin with, I wanted to talk about setting out the big picture. Because I feel like it’s a really helpful way for students for learners to get a sense of direction. And also to sort of make cognitive links with the details of the topic. But it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you meet students and you ask them what they’re doing. And they don’t really know why they’re doing it. But it’s really great when the teacher says like, this is what we’re going to be the study. And a call is like a mini expos over the whole thing, we’re gonna be looking at this, this and this, and here’s the territory we’re in. And, but to begin with, we’re just going to start here, but then people know kind of where they are second orientation. And I could go into more detail. But that is the basic idea that you kind of set the scene so that students know, kind of where the little details fit. And it could be a math topic or history topic or a whole range of like, genres and music has all these classical composers. But we’re going to start by hitting the hearing about Mozart, you know, but they know kind of Mozart’s one of loads of people in that that’s explicit from the beginning.
Craig Barton 4:30
That’s lovely that, yeah, I’ve certainly seen this done well, in maths, I wonder if you could just illustrate it with an example to that. You’ve seen it in other subjects, so we can kind of get there get this visualised?
Tom Sherrington 4:43
Yeah, and I think a classic example would be something like, I don’t know, say the same English literature you’re hearing about, you know, say Jane Austen for the first time and who’s Jane Austen. You know, why are we why are we reading her? Well, you know, you can say well, that It essentially has it novels kind of started more or less in the 19th century. And there was all these books and you have heard of Charles Dickens who wrote all these books. And there were the Bronte’s. And Jane Austen was one of these people, and, you know, those that started this and this and this, and there’s a certain style, so we’re gonna start reading this book. And so you’ve got this feeling. And I’ve seen that done really well, where people go, okay, that’s Jane Austen. Okay, that’s a picture bit of a timeline. And it kind of makes sense. It’s a kind of orientation, it puts it in a context. Otherwise, it’s like who, why and students are confused, and endless tree with say, let’s, let’s say talk about a Vietnam at the Vietnam War. I’ve seen this done really well. Students studied Vietnam, say at GCSE. I’ve heard of it. I don’t know what it is. And they’re thinking, when was it in it? Let’s just get a big picture. There’s World War Two. And here, we are now in Vietnam, Larissa, over here. And while we fight in Vietnam, or wasn’t we, it was the Americans. And so you’re sort of saying it’s a big scene setter, and the significance and the politics around that in the 60s 70s. And then he stopped saying, right, so that stopped getting into the detail, but the students have this picture of where we are in space and time, relative importance. And it just helps you start positioning yourself to receive the kind of the details.
Craig Barton 6:24
It’s lovely that Tom, and I’ve seen this work two different ways in, in, in math. So one is where teachers put maths in terms of the current topic in terms of some kind of historical context, a bit of background where it came from the Greeks or the Egyptians, that works nice. But the other thing that works really well, and I don’t know, if this kind of translates across to other subjects is, let’s say, each year eight, and we’re studying expanding brackets, or something like that, you can say, right, we’re gonna do this topic, expanding brackets. Now, the good news is in year five, where you first encountered, you know, multiplying terms in year six, when you first met algebra, and year seven, when we first expanded a single bracket, all that stuff is going to come into play. Now, when we start doing this, and better still, next year, we’re going to be doing triple brackets. And then when you get to a level, then we’re going to be plotting, and so on and so forth. So showing them where the matters come from, that they’ve experienced themselves and show them where it’s going to, I always think that that’s really nice to kind of set the scene of what they’re about to study. Does that make sense?
Tom Sherrington 7:24
Yeah, exactly. I think it works really well in maths for various other things as well. So and sometimes, it comes the other way. And I feel like there’s a great looking i The analogy I would use as sort of looking back down the mountain that you’ve, you know, you’re in the foothills, and you can’t quite get where you are, but that’s fine. But then when you look back, you can say, Oh, now I see how this all makes sense. And I can sometimes sometimes looking back and saying I can see how all these things all connect now, that also works in maths but so in shape and space, you know, you might be looking at, in a general properties of polygons are something and, you know, you just talking about this, the range of shapes are in and just saying, you know, rectangles, squares, quadrilaterals, that actually, that’s just one of us enormous family. And if you start looking at until saying, Look at a five, size six, size, seven sides, 100 sites, and all these incredible shapes are these interesting properties. And look at this, look at that we have 2d 3d. And it’s such an interesting world of like the possibilities of shapes. And so what we’re gonna start off by looking at just a few simple ones to get a feel for it. But look, it’s already explicitly as part of a journey ahead into this amazing world of shapes. So it doesn’t just feel very kind of really weirdly functional. It just feels like the start of quite an exciting journey.
Craig Barton 8:46
It’s lovely that I know this is an impossible question, Tom. But But how long do you reckon this should take in in lessons? Is this a 10 minute thing? A two minute thing? What what tends to work best?
Tom Sherrington 8:55
I’d say it’s like a 10 Min. And it’s not a big deal as it is sort of it. That’s why I think it’s such an important thing to do, because it really doesn’t take long, it’s sort of I think that scene setting things, it’s, I’d say a 10 minute thing. And I think I started listening just literally yesterday where there was a slideshow talking about measurement is in functional skills and FE college and other slides about you know, what distances and how far is it to a certain place or what sorts of units would be used to measure the length of the track or the height of the building or the distance to Manchester or, and it’s just, it’s just a scene setter, then they were going to do conversions of units and so on. But it was like, getting a feeling of like this whole issue. Yeah, isn’t it cost of the students are going to cost? Yes, I do have to think about this. Because it is part of everyday life that we have different measures for distance. And it was a classic scene setup, just the big picture of this giving purpose to the learning in some kind of other sort of or inspiring way or just kind of connecting to the real world kind of way. So that then I could get on with some practice questions. Words which had some meaning to them.
Craig Barton 10:02
I love it. Fantastic. Right, Tom, what’s your second tip for us today?
Tom Sherrington 10:08
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 it 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, where for 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 has written on the board. firstly, secondly, and finally, and she just pointed at that. So when she said, Okay, just to get let’s have her 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 when you’re writing. So you’ve practising 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 worked 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, snowed tourists and snowed in or whether it was a good thing or bad thing, and had to give an advantage and a disadvantage. And actually, the year five saying, and advantage of tourism on snowed in ears. Whereas a disadvantage is they had to do opposing things. And they were using, whereas I second get that that’s great, because they’re practising saying, whereas like, it’s just a normal word. Of course, when you’re in year five, it’s not a normal word. So that type of thing. It’s like, it’s so simple. And it’s just, 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 practising this particular scaffold now. So that it’s practice is not just a kind of massive options. That’s my sort of tip of how it works best.
Craig Barton 12:27
That’s lovely. That time, 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 in maths whenever kids have to explain, justify, and so on, they really struggle. But I love the bridge is the fact that first they’re getting used to verbalising it and that’s the natural transition to them writing it down. That seems like an important step in this.
Tom Sherrington 12:50
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 so for example, if you are doing your science teacher and you say, which of these is a metal or a non metal or you know, is sulphur, a metal or metal and the students just saying sulphur or non metal? You just say, well, let’s, let’s have that in a full sentence, then I have to say, the one that sort of non metal is sulphur. And it’s practising now, it’s perfectly legitimate to be faced sulphur as the answer. But it’s just practising saying it in a sentence. Just build some skills around sentence construction for for writing, and it’s a simple scaffold, put it in a sentence. And I’ve seen teachers use that really well.
Craig Barton 13:43
That’s a lovely tip really like that one time. Okay, what about tip number three?
Tom Sherrington 13:49
Okay, and this is, this is a really top tip for creating a culture of error and normalising being wrong and flushing out error. So it’s called start with whoever got eight out of 10. So it doesn’t have to be eight out of 10. Exactly, because it doesn’t matter how many questions but it’s the idea that if you’ve given a quiz with 10, possible answers, 10 questions, and then you’ve gone through the answers. You don’t start by saying who got them all right? Because if you do that, none of them are wrong. So there’s nothing to talk about. And also everyone else who didn’t get them. All right is feeling a little bit. Oh, okay. I’ll bet so many people got them. All right. So if you say, right, so who got eight out of 10 Michael, how did you get on is because he’s put his hand up you say Brilliant, well done. So wish wants you to get wrong and you go straight in with that. And he’s quite happy to say I didn’t get number seven. All right, so why what happened? What did you put? Do what tell me what you think the answer is now than Yeah, okay. Yeah. Great. Well done and can explain it back. Brilliant. And what else did you get wrong? And pretend Okay, that’s good. And did who else got eight out of 10? Susan, okay. All right. So the same Okay, what else? Brilliant. So that’s another one he didn’t know Get one on one. And we’ve got people go meet meet me, because it’s become normalised and an eight out of 10. us are happy to tell you they got them wrong. And then you can you go through a few wrong answers. It’s the what you’re trying to do anyway. And then you say, and who they don’t get them. All right, are well done, guys. That’s brilliant. And then that’s at the end, because you still give them some affirmation. But it’s not the it’s an easiest way of students feeling safe to tell you got answers wrong, and I just didn’t work so well. And that if you don’t have a culture where children can say stuff they got wrong, they hide it. And it can make it really hard for you to find out. And you don’t want to hide that you want them to tell you and that that’s an it’s just a you know, just one of the things I found works really well.
Craig Barton 15:46
That’s, it’s so lovely that time because again, I was just thinking back to the errors I’ve made with this. So I’ve done it both ways around. So if it’s a quiz out of 10, I’ve either said Right, let’s start at the bottom. Anyone gets zero after 10. Anyone get one. And that’s a disaster waiting to happen, because no one wants to be the first kid to put their hand up. But then yeah, if you do it the other way around, and you start at the top. Again, once those first initial hands have gone up, you’re feeling pretty rubbish. If you chose to put your hand up. Yeah. And you’re waiting for it to slide down to your level. So I love that. And I love the fact that it draws out those initial mistakes kids have made and then it becomes Yeah, like you say normalise is the exact phrase. I love that. That’s really nice. Really nice that. Right? So what about Tip number four
Tom Sherrington 16:31
is called foster cross class accountability. Now what this what this is, is, it’s quite common in lessons to see teachers asking lots of students questions, but they often totally tune out when someone else is talking like there’s just not like if I’m not on I’m not interested. And plus cross class accountability means that it’s part of the norm that you’re expected to respond to what other people are saying kind of all the time, which is yet more effortful, but it becomes a habit you form. And the way you do it is by making a routine part of your questioning sequence that you when you’re asking the students question, when you’re cold calling, you’re not just saying what do you think you’re saying? What do you think someone else was saying? Or do you agree with someone else? Or can you can you did you understand? Tell me what you think Susan was saying when she explained that question. And so you have this, and that’s the norm. So people are kind of on their toes a bit more, because they then listen, because at any moment, I might be asked to report back what that person said. And, and that means you get it as a really good way of bringing Shire students into the conversation, because quite often they’re not keen to initiate because they’re worried about being wrong. But because they’ve heard someone else you can, you can get them to just bounce back. So it’s a really good way of sort of checking for understanding that just people are even hearing each other. So I’ve asked Jennifer, she’s given me a great answer. She’s, she’s got it, right. seven cubed is 343. Well done. So I said, let me just check. What do you think Jennifer? said, Did you think she was right? Like, what did she say? And I hear? And it’s like, that’s the first time he’s gonna go, I don’t know, what was she saying? You go, Well, come on. He’s supposed to be listening. And that becomes normal. Did you agree with her method? How did you how did you workout seven cubed? And he’s not just going to think for his own sake, it’s sometimes students will just tell you their own answer. And you say, yeah, that’s your answer. But I was asking you what she was saying. And it just, it just makes it more, a bit more intense. Definitely. But that’s in a bit in a good way. And the other thing is that when you’re talking, if you’re explaining something, you know, the teacher often asked other people to check what you were saying. So you’re more conscious that the audience is everyone, not just a teacher. And so you speak a bit louder, you go into a bit more detail. So I just think that’s a really powerful thing to develop in a class.
Craig Barton 18:55
It’s lovely that Tom every reminds me and I’m interested to get your take on this. So I’m Adam boxes, a previous guest on the tips for teachers podcast, and he spoke about his love of using mini whiteboards. And his argument is always, why would you want to just get one response from a class of 25 when you could get 25 responses? And would mini whiteboards kind of would they work with this idea as well, I’m just thinking that you do cold call on one person. And then everyone on their mini whiteboards could write down what they said and why they said it. And then you know, you could hold them open and dive in. Have you ever seen Would that work kind of fusing the two ideas together at all?
Tom Sherrington 19:32
Yeah, well, I mean, if someone’s given a really good verbal answer, you could just say, Okay, I saw I started lesson a couple of weeks ago a year for kids gave us absolutely blinding answer like tips, and I fell off her chair with that how sophisticated was and it was like, but then she kind of blew it because she was so blown away. She just went Oh, wow, amazing, and then moved on. Yeah, I think but what about everybody else? You know, what about everyone else that that was an opportunity for everyone else to come? capitalise on the fact that this girl in your class is incredibly articulate. So yeah, that’d be good. Let’s all just write down then. What do you think the main two things that Mikayla was saying there? What are the main words she used? Boom, and then whiteboards? And that would that would work? Definitely. It’s just that feeling of, yeah. I mean, I did write about the whiteboards, it’s good. I think it there are some things where it’s easier to sort of give a verbal answer than to vitamin A seven cubed is a classic whiteboard question. That’s not the greatest example. But a more subtle one, which takes quite a long time to write down. It’s definitely you need that, you know, and this is why questioning techniques need to be a repertoire you sort of one minutes whiteboards, so that millionaires sprint, is this checking for understanding that way, that way? And it’s quite good to build confidence of students verbalising an answer. So yeah, I think I think that would make a good combination. We’ve got like, it’s like a boxer. We’ve got moves, one, two, tops, everyone’s been taught it to you.
Craig Barton 21:04
It’s lovely. But I really what I really like about that that tip, just in general, is the fact that the kids have got an incentive to listen hard to their classmates responses, because you’re absolutely right. You get kids will think hard when the questions being asked, but as soon as they realise they’re not the ones answering it. They have a little relax, cognitively switch off a bit. But I really like the fact that they’re just they’ve got that extra incentive to listen hard to their peers that that feels really powerful.
Tom Sherrington 21:29
I just one of the things I see so often is, is it and I don’t think it takes any more time. It’s just that a student has given you a brilliant answer is some teacher have this sort of mental habit of thinking, that is an opportunity for others to learn from that, not just park it there and go lovely, it’s well done. And I just do see that fairly often. That that kind of if you’ve got one great answer, but what about everybody else did they didn’t even hear it didn’t even understand it. And just use using this cross cross accountability kind of expectation just makes it much easier to do that.
Craig Barton 22:03
Lovely stuff. Right, Tom? Tip number five, please.
Tom Sherrington 22:08
Yeah, tip number five, set occasional open response tasks. And I stress occasional because this isn’t something you’ve do a lot. In fact, it only really works really well, if it’s a special status, which is that it’s occasional. So open response tasks are things where you ask the students to report some learning or do something in a form of their choosing, without too much structure to it. Which is cause it inherently brings a risk that the structure, some students will find it harder than others. So you have to think about that. But what it means is that you, you don’t mandate the outcome. Exactly. And so students have to make some choices. And sometimes they just can go crazy, and you get some incredible responses. So I would say, in my time teaching, the best work I ever saw students do was through this task. So because they just went to town on a bit of learning, and they will blow your mind with the effort. And if you wish to prescribe everything, you kind of put a limit on it, because you think well, I can’t make everyone do this incredibly expensive thing. But if you say, you know, do whatever you like or so I have some examples on how to do this and training about stretch and challenge, for example. And I’ve got some great examples to show. So one of my all time favourite one was two boys in year seven through 11. When I taught Ari. And at the end of each unit, where we taught lots of knowledge, I would say Okay, so now summarise the unit in any form you choose. And some students would do like a kind of little pamphlet guide to you know, the key aspects of Christianity or Islam. But these boys, some some people made a video, which was really interesting. A couple of PowerPoints, which I would try to discourage, because everyone, if everyone does a PowerPoint, you don’t want to watch them. But these boys made a website. They said, Can we make a website? I said, I don’t know. Can you make a website? They said, they said, Yeah, we did it in year four, and we know how to make website. So I said, Okay, I thought it’d be absolutely ridiculous, but it was amazing. And it’s just they made this incredible website called embracing Islam. And it’s got all these tabs explaining the science, Islam and science, marriage ceremonies, misconceptions of Islam, the five pillars of Islam, it’s got embedded YouTube clips of them performing the rituals and the five pillars of Islam. The next term, they they upgraded and they made embracing Christianity. And it says from the award winning mate creators of embracing Islam, it’s just epic. It’s got a tab comparing Islam and Christianity is boys are 11. And it’s like, that’s an extraordinary thing to be able to do. But if I had if I just followed the scheme of work, which just said, you know, they would never have done that. They’ve never had that opportunity they’ve never now is just one of several exams. until I give, it’s just interest. Sometimes you think, wow, that’s just isn’t that great. Another example, a girl in year eight, I taught for science and they we’ve done a unit on selective breeding and inheritance, I just said, I want you to come up, I want to tell the story of a kind of an animal or a species or a plant of their choice to Teddy to tell that story in terms of selection, natural selection, and she chose dogs. And she she made us really like a YouTube video like a like a bedroom like a YouTube but it was her and her bedroom, telling everyone about selective breeding of dogs and how they’re the same species. They’re not different. They’re but they’ve just been bred to look different. And I swear to God, I’ve never heard her speak so long in a lesson, she gave us an extended answer. She explained it brilliantly. She’s really passionate. And when she played the video class, people sort of like is that you, that’s just amazing, you know, so much. And you’ll save yourself, say, I literally thought I totally changed my perspective perception of her. Again, it’s the opportunity to do it in a special way. Now, you wouldn’t do that, we can week out. The so you have to set up you say, here’s the task. This is what quality looks like that this is this, this would be low quality, this would be high quality. So but leave some room for choices to be made. And of course, there are some students who you know, like, you’re not, if you’re struggling to just do this, it’s sort of a bedrock kind of structure for you, because you’ll need that, but he let it happen and celebrate what you get. And in my opinion, because it’s so occasional, it doesn’t even matter if everybody even does it really, it’s just that some children really took the opportunity and bring in amazing things. And then you can celebrate that look what we can do, and then the others get the idea, and then they’re more likely to do it the next time. I just think it’s just a lovely feature of a flow of lessons, that you give students that kind of opportunity to express themselves and and they rise to it.
Craig Barton 27:01
It’s lovely that time, I’ll tell you two areas I’ve made with with this in the past. So one you’ve alluded to those the PowerPoint error. So in maths, I’ve had students do a kind of each, each pair of kids was allocated a topic to do like a revision presentation on and then present it to the class. The first first time you watch, you know, first 10 minutes of the lesson is quite good because it’s fresh and novel. But by the time the seventh PowerPoint is on, you are bored out your mind, the kids are bored out your mind is a disaster waiting to happen. So that’s error number one. So I love the fact that there’s a variety of approaches, I really like that era number two, and I’m interested in your take on this is I then got bogged down with trying to assess it, I think that was a real problem. I’m thinking, Alright, if I’ve set this task, and the kids have put effort into it, there needs to be something to come out of it for the kids. So do they need a grade? Do they need a level? What am I doing here? And then it becomes incredibly difficult because you’ve got some kids doing a website, some kids doing a PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah, is assessment important here? Or is it more just that kind of the process of doing it that’s important?
Tom Sherrington 28:02
Oh, it’s definitely the process is the most important. And if you kill the process with the assessment, it kills the Spirit. Remember, it’s, you know, they’re going to do tests they’re going to do on stuff to assess their knowledge. On other ways. This is a celebration. And so you said, you affirm, you have a you have a lesson. But the way you bring it all in and you celebrate what you have, and you focus on all the students who’ve done it, not get bogged down in who hasn’t. And, and I used to be, I used to feel that was a bit of a teacher skills to kind of like make the students who hadn’t done things feel sort of bad for themselves that they weren’t part of it, you know, so they’re motivated in the future. But you can do things like success criteria, so quick, kind of like, does it. And you can get sort of peer feedback on certain things like does it communicate the knowledge and then communicate it well, and I’ve done I’ve done that sort of thing. And but you’re certainly saying, in setting up, it’s like a sort of show and tell sort of moment is like, bring it in and celebrate and will. And that’s why it’s so like you said it’s so important of a variety, it’s useful to have a few things you can look out visually like, as well as a few things that have to be presented in time. And if they’re all time, like video, or videos or PowerPoints or stand up and present, it just takes too long. So it’s great to have like, let’s all get our stuff out and see what we’ve made. So it’s a bit of a subtle skin aside or trying to engineer that diversity. It can’t work though, if it’s sort of open response in terms of the selection. So I’ve done some lovely ones with, say scientists, like you have a sort of set structure like a like, it sounds natural, but it isn’t like a Fact File on, say, a weird and wonderful creature. And we’re not doing natural selection and habitats that people bring and they found as crazy fish. And they’ve done a sort of display of it and everyone’s seeing the things that they’ve picked. And it can be about scientists and in how do you bring all this stuff into the classroom find out that famous person and their discovery and you do a little post it and we put it around the room. That sort of thing, I think is again occasional it’s not an It’s one of the 10, one of the 10. homeworks is an open response task. That’s great. Doesn’t have to It’s not like instead of doing 30, practice questions, it’s a once in a term type deal. And then it keeps it in perspective. And then you can then invest a bit of time and making good.
Craig Barton 30:21
Lovely, that’s fantastic. Well, then five absolutely brilliant tips really practical, really actionable. I love those. And before I let you go, Tom, is there anything you want to plug? Anything that you recommend listeners check out of yours. Now this this could take the length of the podcast with if you start mentioning every book that you’ve written or edited, but talk is what what what what should listeners check out?
Tom Sherrington 30:41
Well, I suppose the two things that are currently one of them is, is the walkthroughs, volume three, which is coming out in April. And I’m I’m really excited about that, not least because it’s got 20 Plus contributors, including Adam boxer has written a walkthrough on behaviour management techniques, which is front loaded behaviour management, for example. I think it’s great that there’s so many different ideas in it. And the other one, I just really enjoyed doing my own podcast with Emma Turner, who’s a fantastic primary specialist and school leader and we have a great time interviewing people. And yeah, so it’s called Mind the gap. So if you ever listen to our podcast, Mind the Gap, you’ll you’ll get some, some good discussions with some really great people. We’re interviewing Christopher such soon. He’s a great person. We interviewed Sonya Thompson and her sister, which is what we reveal in the podcast. Tracy Adams, a head and deputy head. They are sisters, which is absolutely fantastic. So So yeah, so that weird. So we have fun doing that. So if you listen to that, I think you might find that interesting.
Craig Barton 31:53
Guys. Amazing. Well, Tom Sheridan, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been absolutely brilliant.
Tom Sherrington 31:58
Thank you, Craig. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai