Category: Teaching

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Questions for Evan Davis on Education

Do you have questions you would like to pose to Evan Davis about education? I shall be interviewing him over the next week or so and would like to get your ideas about what you’d like to ask.

Evan is currently presenting a new show on BBC,  Made in Britain which accompanies the excellent book of the same name. He is a presenter on Radio 4’s Today show, BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den, as well as Radio 4’s The Bottom Line. Until 2008 he was the BBC’s chief Economics editor (see his blog).

One of his key points in his book is that, as a nation, we can be extremely proud of our universities which are among our most successful ‘exports’. In fact Evan stresses the importance of the knowledge economy and of ensuring that we are all able to gain the skills to enable us to move in to high-skill and higher-value industries. I shall be asking him what lessons he feels there are for our school system in ensuring this continues to happen.

You may wish to read a previous, Open University interview with Evan which include some of his thoughts about education and enterprise.

Please post your question ideas, or tweet them to me @informed_edu.

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10 ways I’m changing my teaching

Thanks to a multitude of books, to twitter, and to some amazing people I’ve met I’m trying to make lots of change to my teaching. Here’s some of the things I’m trying:

  1. Rubrics: Thanks to Jennifer Borgioli (@datadiva) I’m trying to pre-prepare rubrics – tables that clearly explain to students the different levels of quality that could be seen in pieces of work. This has already resulted in some fantastic pieces of work and has made my marking much easier as I can explicitly refer back to these to explain how to improve.
  2. Upgrading. Using the aforementioned rubrics I am enforcing a minimum quality standard on certain pieces of work. If students hand in the lowest possible quality or nothing at all I’m asking them to redo it during a lunchtime session. If they hand in a “not-quite-there” quality piece they are asked to redo it at home. I’ve had a couple of students suddenly ‘get it’ when they realise that the quality of what they do is now valued, rather than just ticking a box that it’s done.
  3. Assertive Questionning. This is a method I read in Geoff Petty‘s excellent book Evidence-based teaching (as recommended by Paul Shakesby, @paulshakesby). I pose questions in class and leave students a huge amount more thinking time before asking for ideas – usually working in groups or pairs to brainstorm. I then write up all their responses, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and ask them to comment on each other’s ideas and argue about them. Only after a long discussion (sometimes quite tough) do I finally step in and give my opinion. Some students have told me they find this hard, but that it has really helped them understand previously difficult topics.
  4. Bonus Time. This is an adaptation of Fred Jones‘ idea of “Preferred Activity Time” from his thought-provoking book Tools for Teaching (also recommended by Paul Shakesby). I’ve started reserving my Friday morning tutor time as ‘game time’ where we play various team-building games, sports etc. My students start the week with 10 minutes of this time and can earn extra minutes by having perfect uniform, turning up on time, having their planners signed and filled in properly, going quiet immediately when I ask, and doing good deeds for others. I had a tough start with this (sceptical kids!) but it seems to have started working better now.
  5. Explicit meta-learning. Before and after any extended task in class I’m taking a few minutes to discuss strategies and tactics. I’ve coined the phrase “how to struggle successfully” and I ask students for ideas of how they can avoid being “stranded, helpless, flapping fish”. I try and spend less time with any single student who is encountering difficulties (another Fred Jones idea) and instead jog their memory about which strategy they could use to progress. This hasn’t necessarily made me popular, but I’m already seeing the effect as students develop a few ways to have another go themselves.
  6. Graphic Organisers. Another brilliant Paul Shakesby idea which I also read about in Evidence-based teaching. I’m constantly using Venn diagrams on the board to force students to categorise learning, especially in topics where they are often a bit woolly. For example in Physics I’ll write one circle for “cell” one for “capacitor” and ask them to come up with ideas that are true of either one or both. I’m combining this idea with Assertive Questionning: the graphic organiser helps make the whole thing more concrete.
  7. e-Learning tasks. Setting tasks on our VLE is really rather simple (we use Moodle) and it makes my life easier because I can immediately tell not only who has submitted a task, but who has even looked at the instructions. I sometimes set e-learning tasks while I have taken students’ books in. I’ve tried using this method for research, for answering questions, and for multiple-choice tests. The great part is that as soon as one person creates these tasks, every teacher can use them.
  8. Wikis. I can’t remember who was the first person I saw on Twitter who suggested this, but I have been an avid fan of students creating wikis after every lesson. On our VLE (Moodle) it is childs play to create a blank Wiki in any area, and I’ve been using one with my AS-level Physics classes since February. Some of them absolutely love it, some of them aren’t too bothered, but its a great way of ensuring that all the learning from every lesson is recorded for anyone who was absent. It’s been really useful for revision, and I’ve also spotted a few conceptual issues in the descriptions on there which makes it a good diagnostic tool too.
  9. Reflection. I tend to follow the example of a colleague of mine at school and plan my lessons in an Excel Spreadsheet. In the last few weeks I’ve added an extra column for my thoughts after the lesson. It’s not always been easy to find 5 minutes to do this, but it is always a powerful way of starting my planning for the next lesson. I tend to write notes about learning, behaviour, and the success or failure of new ideas, plus thoughts about what to try next time. This has also been helpful for my colleagues where I share classes with them.
  10. Growth Mindsets. Thanks to Carol Dweck‘s wonderful book Mindset I do tend to talk to students in a different way. Where I would once have said “very clever!” or “you’re very bright”, I now consciously use phrases such as “you worked hard on that” or “you’ve been really trying to improve”. I support this idea by referring to students’ chances graphs to reinforce the idea that resilience, hard work, and a positive attitude to getting stuck and trying again will lead to success.

All of these ideas are making my teaching so much more fun, and I’m beginning to see the difference in the way the students react. Of course, nothing here is a panacea, it is all taking a lot of hard graft to get it to work, and some hard thinking when it doesn’t quite work out. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on the students’ results, their behaviour, and their opinions of me (from surveys) to make sure I’m confronting the hard reality of the situation and not just making myself feel good by applying ‘sticking plaster’ ideas. Talk is cheap, but good teaching lasts forever. Fun stuff!

I’d love to hear your thoughts, tips, reflections and ideas. Write a comment, drop me an email, or send me a tweet (@informed_edu).

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Linking CPD and Performance Management

Performance management is a slightly threatening phrase. I pretty much associate it with the following things:

  • Am I still competent (i.e. can I prove that nobody needs to worry about me)?
  • Can I find something to ‘tick a box’ to show I’m doing something towards school development?
  • Am I allowed to progress up the pay scale?
  • Can I do one reasonably good observed lesson every year?

Hardly inspiring stuff. That aside, I’m a bit of an obsessive about reflecting on my practice and self-improvement, and outside of the performance management structure I do a huge amount of reading and research to improve my teaching. It strikes me that there is a fantastic opportunity for people to really engage with reflective tools (like the collaborative teacher skills rubric that I started), and use collaborative professional learning groups to conduct action research within their school and alongside colleagues at other schools around the world.

What if performance management began each cycle with a meeting with a school coach who had a meeting with you to help you assess your own practice and identify areas in your best lessons that you’d like to develop, and find areas you find challenging where you could benefit from some ideas from colleagues?

You could then go through the year documenting your reading, meetings and reflections in a blog (perhaps a staff area on the school VLE). This would be much of your evidence, and would include observations from your learning-group colleagues as well as mentors/coaches who are all there to help you along the way. Part of your performance management would also be to help other teachers reflect and grow in their own practice.

There could be so many ways to do this. You could decide to spend the first half of the year researching best practice in a certain area and trying new ideas, linking with other teachers via Twitter. Then, in the second half you could run some twilight INSET to start cascading these new ideas down to other teachers who have signed up for this idea.

I’m at the very beginning of a mental journey to develop these ideas, and I’d love to hear what other schools do. I know there must be some amazing examples of enlightened Continuing Professional Performance and Development Management out there and I can’t wait to hear how it works, and how to build on this.

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The power of Twitter

Last night I posed a question on twitter:

@informed_edu: Anyone care to share some good tips for keeping kids on task when they’re doing work from a textbook/worksheet? #ukedchat

I was absolutely blown away with the responses:

@datadiva: how about incorporating meta-reflection during the task. Set up a timer to go off at random intervals. When stds hear chime they can doc what they were doing at time. Off-task? On? If off – what were they doing? If on – what was process? #ukedchat. you can even work in behavior over time graphs (http://bit.ly/itVBBa) I often use them in conjunction w/ mata-cognition work

@paulshakesby: look up Fred Jones – limit setting, working the crowd, responsibility training. Simple and very effective behavior system

@springrose12: Information gap wrk:one group does one part of the sheet, the other works the rest of the part and share the work. #ukedchat

@Mr_D_Cheng: on a sliding scale when textbook revising with my yr 10’s

@tj007: what are their excuses 4 being off task? Is the bk/w.s failing to engage them? What was the lead up like – did it spark intrst are they off task because they don’t want to fail if they try? can they be made to feel confident b4 task? #ukedchat

@teachingofsci: don’t let them use twitter? 🙂 more seriously, interim deadlines, stopwatch on the board? kids can score themselves 1-3 for effort/focus and A-C for understanding (I add A+ for ‘I could teaching this’) #ukedchat

@cocoapony: how about wrking in teams with 1 role as ‘director’/chair 2 keep on track – revolv the role 4each w/sheet or Q2Q?

@javidmahdavi: have you ever considered converting worksheets to interactive ones in something like smartboard notebook?

@eduKatescom: countdown timer on smartboard gives sense of urgency! #ukedchat

@ArronFowler: I have been using time as a tool. Frequent deadlines from 30 sec to 5mins tasks. Kids respond well. The harder the better.

@jenmardunc: Letting them listen to music on headphones helps MANY kids stay focused!

Some amazing suggestions, and I went and looked up Fred Jones’ book (and ordered it on Amazon). One further suggestion sparked a really interesting debate:

@sevim77: #ukedchat don’t use textbooks! Unless essential they can be boring and switch students off!

@informed_edu: Agreed, textbooks are never perfect, but a reasonable compromise when you don’t have time to create resources from scratch?

@janshs: Big Q is how to make them interesting? Maybe use as part of a carousel of activities, or as source material #ukedchat

@sevim77: maybe used as sources to get students to create their own resources?

@janshs: ahhhh now we are talking #ukedchat … collaborative learning???

@sevim77: collaborative learning that also ticks boxes for differentiation, and AFL if students’ level

@informed_edu: Nice! How about taking Textbook questions and collaboratively deciding on the order of difficulty, with reasons.

Inspired by this conversation, I asked my year 9 GCSE Physics class to take a text book double-spread and turn the boringly low-level factual-recall questions in to high-level challenging questions. They came up with some brilliant ideas! For example:

“Given the choice of replacing your single-glazed windows with double-glazing, or changing the single pane of glass to double its U-value, which would you prefer, and why?”

“Put the following insulation choices in order of effectiveness, and explain your reasoning: Loft insulation, Cavity wall insulation, Aluminium foil radiator backing, Double-glazed windows.”

I’ve also been trying another idea I read on Twitter last year (still trying to find the reference) which is getting students to discuss questions or summarise the lesson in pairs or small groups and then asking students to describe what their partner/rest of the group said. It really does seem to focus them so much better.

I’m looking forward to trying some of the metacognition ideas – particularly @datadiva‘s idea about getting the students to reflect on what they’re doing and how well focussed they are. I’m also going to try and get students to reflect more on their work (following @teachingofsci‘s suggestion). I’ve tried doing this at A-level for students rating their own effort but I’m going to use it more widely.

Teaching is so much more fun when you have a stream of interesting ideas and a whole crowd of supportive people on tap. I’m endlessly impressed with the power of Twitter.

 

 

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Collaborative Teacher Training

It’s been fascinating to meet several of the people who I have been tweeting with recently. Every one of them has given me some really interesting insights in to the skills that really superb teachers posess. After some particularly interesting conversations with Loic Menzies (@LKMco) and Chris Padden (@chris_padden), I decided to try and create a sort of rubric for teaching skills. I started this a few weeks ago and then left it while I decided where to take it next.

This week I was delighted to be invited to deliver some training to around 40 PGCE Maths and Science students at Brunel University. They came up with some really thought-provoking questions and ideas about how they would improve their practice next year as NQTs. However, many of them expressed some frustration that it wasn’t clear exactly how to be clear about what areas they needed to improve on. This made me realise that the Teacher Quality rubric was more important than ever.

So, as a result of this I’ve decided to turn the whole thing in to a collaborate project. I’ve created a Google Spreadsheet that is editable by anyone, where people can add, amend, or update descriptions of skills levels for teachers.

Please click on the image or the link above and have a look at what has been created so far. There are tabs at the bottom of the sheet to split it in to different sections. Remember, you can edit anything you see. It would be great to link examples of different levels of teacher skill, and resources for how to achieve it.

What do you think about this? Maybe there could be a better format (a wiki?) or is it better in this simple format?

All thoughts welcome. Do go and have a look and add some detail, and share with colleagues.

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Summarising information

This fascinating snippet from the 2009 PISA report should surely have had higher profile?

“High-performing countries are also those whose students generally know how to summarise information. Across OECD countries, the difference in reading performance between those students who know the most about which strategies are best for summarising information and those who know the least is 107 score points. And students who say that they begin the learning process by figuring out what they need to learn, then ensure that they understand what they read, figure out which concepts they have not fully grasped, try to remember the most important points in a text and look for additional clarifying information when they do not understand something they have read, tend to perform better on the PISA reading scale than those who do not.”

To put this in context, that’s about 1 whole year’s worth of academic progress! Surely a massive endorsement for AfL, graphic organisers, etc.?

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ePLG – the beginning

This week I ran the planning meeting of my professional learning group. The idea was to bring together a group of teachers (in this case the teachers of 5 year 9 maths sets) and collaborate on the planning and assessment of a topic.

I structured the meeting as follows:

Introduction (5 mins)

  • What are we doing here, and how are we doing it?
  • Coordinator outlines key principles and aims. Personal introductions (if necessary).

Brainstorm (15 mins)

  • What could students learn?
  • In pairs, brainstorm ideas for the 4 key planning areas, by writing bulletpoints on a quarter of the whiteboard
    • What prior knowledge will students have?
    • What should students know/be able to do by the end?
    • What are the main difficulties and misconceptions that students are likely to encounter in this topic?
    • What connections would you expect a highly skilled student to make within this topic, and to other topics?

Prioritising (5 mins)

  • What do we want students to learn?
  • Cross out less-important points until the material matches the teaching time available.

Assessment Planning (20 mins)

  • How will we know if students have learnt? (Could be questions – maybe open-ended, work samples, videos, presentations, etc. with related rubric)
  • In pairs, come up with two or three questions or methods of assessment to match each remaining key point (10 mins), write on pieces of A4 and blu-tack them to the board. Share and discuss.

Strategy and Support (10 mins)

  • How might we approach teaching, and what will we do do if students aren’t learning?

Post-it notes on each question or point with strategy suggestions.

De-brief (5 mins)

  • Have we achieved what we wanted?
  • How did it feel?
  • How might this process be improved next time?
  • What comes next?

Discussion

It was a really interesting process. We stormed through planning the four key areas, and then started a good discussion about which ideas were to be explicitly taught, which would be implicit through work, and which would be left for another day.

The tough part came when we started working out questions for the initial formative test and the final summative test. This resulted in some further discussion about what was necessary, as we decided that some of the questions were so important that we had to reinstate some of the learning obectives. We also thought about the key misconceptions with each question, and in doing so decided on extra questions for the initial formative test.

As Maths teachers we’re quite wedded to tests, but we decided that the most beneficial way of comparing the learning of students when they began the topic would be to ask them to write out worked examples of 10 key questions. We will then take samples of this work and compare and contrast the approaches taken by different students, and see how this affected their progress in the unit, and also their performance in the summative test.

We found that using a textbook was a great way to get questions for the final test, as making questions up off the top of our heads was taking too long.

When it came to thinking about strategies for teaching we drew a bit of a blank, as we had already had some discussion about it before, and I think everyone was flagging by that point. This also affected the debrief – I actually completely forgot to demonstrate the VLE/Moodle page that we would be using collaboratively. People were also a little reluctant to give immediate feedback on “how useful the process had been” or “how to improve it next time”. I think that was mainly because it was so new they didn’t have much to compare it with, so hopefully after a little time to reflect there will be more ideas.

Here’s a photo of the ‘art’ we created all over the whiteboards as we collaboratively planned our unit.

A really good first meeting. I’ll report back on how the teaching and summary meetings go. Any thoughts on how to improve this next time?

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Behaviour, for better or for worse?

Many teachers wish that all students would arrive at school ready to learn, respectful and mild-mannered. Of course, that’s not the reality, and there is a regular cycle of hand-wringing as people claim that behaviour is much worse than it used to be.

The debate is, quite necessarily, full to the rafters with anecdote. After all, there is no standardised scale of classroom behaviour, and certainly no measurements that can be used to compare things accurately. Memory is also entirely unreliable in these matters. I suspect the lessons that will really stick out in any student or teacher’s mind would be where great learning took place, where something funny happened, or total chaos reigned. supreme. The day-to-day level of disorder is unlikely to be remembered well.

Another problem is that people reconstruct their memories to suit their narrative. A teacher who rose through the ranks and ended up consulting on behaviour is more likely to remember how they improved behaviour against the odds, whereas someone who struggled and eventually quit teaching is going to justify this as being due to kids’ bad behaviour rather than any of their own deficiency.

So what evidence do we have? @OldAndrewUK pointed out a few interesting books from the 50s and 60s which talk about life in ‘tough schools’ where the worst behaviour mentioned was certainly mild compared to stories that circulate these days. A recent ATL survey claims most teachers think behaviour has deteriorated, and another report suggests that schools are going to extreme lengths to hide problems from inspectors. Certainly there has been emphasis from the new government on problems in schools.

However, on the other side of the fence we have evidence that Ofsted, PISA, and the British Crime Survey all suggest behaviour problems are decreasing.

So is the “behaviour was better in my day” something that can be dismissed as nostalgic rose-coloured-spectacled nonsense for those with a penchant for moral panic? Perhaps the idealistically smug “well *I* don’t have a problem, I just love the kids” brigade are wilfully ignoring a deterioration in behaviour in order to self-justify their careers? Perhaps both are true, in parts.

The truth is, we shall never know, we can’t possibly measure it, and there isn’t anything that remotely resembles hard evidence – it’s layer upon layer of anecdote. What is undoubtedly true is that where schools provide clear leadership, high expectations, engaging lessons, and rigorous, caring discipline, there is good and improving behaviour.

The big behaviour debate serves very little purpose. It becomes a destructive pawn in political games that do the education sector a disservice. You can’t win this argument, and there is little benefit from taking one side or another. I strongly believe people should just focus on what works, share good practice among teachers and parents, and expect nothing but the best from every child, and for every child.

 

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Delivering change requires a cultural shift

I’ve just finished reading Sir Michael Barber’s fascinating book Instruction to Deliver, hot on the heels of the most interesting “Learning by Doing” by DuFour et. al.

Barber describes the exhaustion of relentlessly applying pressure on a reluctant civil service in trying to drive improvement. That will be a familiar feeling to any teacher trying to bring about improvement in their class – it takes vast reserves of energy. Just as soon as an improvement appears in one place, a problem crops up in another. Take your foot of the pedal for an instant and the class/organisation backslides.

What is missing here? Culture! A culture of success, of collaboration, of listening, and of independent learning. Good schools have it – that feeling that everyone is pushing in the same direction, for the same goal.

I heartily agree with Sir Michael that other key ingredients are clear vision and purpose, simple goals with clear measurements of progress, and being held rigorously to account. However, it seems to me that there is no point building an organisation that will only drive in the right direction when you’re holding the whip. You want an organisation where everyone passionately believes in the vision, and will strive to achieve it. To coin Jim Collins‘ analogy, a flywheel is much more likely to gather momentum if everyone pushes it than if one or two people are pushing really hard and everyone else is dragging.

To be a great school, I think the four central pillars must be include this aspect of culture. If I was to have a stab at summarising these interesting books I’ve been reading and list the qualities required then it would be something like these four key principles:

  • Culture – has every teacher bought in to the school vision? Do they feel supported? Are they free to innovate, without fear of retribution, but with careful support, enthusiasm and monitoring from their peers? Is every member of staff pulling in the same direction, reinforcing values, challenging those that don’t comply, and actively seeking ways in which to make new gains?
  • Information – Does every teacher have the necessary information, at classroom and student level, with which to measure the success of their teaching? Do the senior management use this data to offer both praise and support, where necessary? Can the pastoral team spot trends happening in multiple subjects suggesting a problem with a student or group? Is variation in achievement across the school made visible?
  • Collaboration – Does every teacher and leader invite the opinions of colleagues, and feel able to lay difficulties out in the open without fear of being undermined? Do opportunities (time, money, space) exist for teachers to work in small professional learning groups to carry out research and create a positive evidence-led improvement cycle?
  • Leadership – Is there a clear vision of what the school is about? Are resources being (demonstrably) spent on the priorities of the whole school, and does the public praise reflect these priorities? Does the leadership group challenge problems head-on without making excuses? Do staff feel able to contribute ideas, and take responsibility? Do they create systems which are self-sustaining and self-improving, instead of those that require constant decisions from the top?

I’m sure this is only the tip of the iceberg, and this is my first attempt to lay out my thoughts on this. I would very much welcome any feedback, criticism or praise! I would like to develop some illustration or diagram that represents the place of culture within an organisation, and I would love to hear ways in which positive culture can be nurtured and supported.