April magazine 2015 by Emma Platt

Welcome to Philips High Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S Teaching and Learning Magazine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; April 2015

- Sharing ideas with teachers! 1

â&#x20AC;ŚAnd Relax!! The Easter holidays are nearly here, two weeks of rest and relaxation await! You certainly deserve the break! This has been an interesting term with lots to do!! But we have survived and can slowly start to see the sunshine of the Summer term approaching. So, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to a happy Easter, lots of chocolate and a few wellearned treats! Have an enjoyable and restful two weeks off!! I hope you get a chance to read the magazine this month. There are some interesting articles in here to read whilst devouring a Cream Egg or two maybe?!? Happy reading!

Thanks,

EPl

Contents

1) Effective Revision Strategies

Page 4

2) To line them up or not to line them up?

Page 8

3) Engagement: Just because they’re busy, doesn’t mean they’re learning anything! Page 9 4) The revolution that could change the way your child is taught (A long article from The Guardian – but worth a read!) Page 11 5) Ofsted Preparation and Work Load

Page 24

6) Effective feedback – How do you make your marking count? Page 27

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EFFECTIVE REVISION STRATEGIES HTTP://WWW.HUNTINGENGLISH.COM/2013/04/07/EFFECTIVE-REVISION-STRATEGIES/

There is a lot of cognitive science research that proves what revision strategies work best for embedding information into the long term memory – which is our goal in relation to exam success. Some of it is common sense, but other aspects may surprise you or challenge your thinking. There are many time-consuming revision strategies that actually fool us into thinking we have embedded the knowledge into our long term memory. For example, simply re-reading texts or notes has been seen to have a low impact with regard to memory retention, especially considering how much time this can take, but students are happy because this is a relatively undemanding task that takes little mental effort and it feels like effective revision. Re-reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ for an English Literature exam doesn’t have the impact we need, especially given how time consuming it is as a revision activity, therefore other, better, strategies should be undertaken. Other edu-myths also cloud effective planning for exam revision. There is an old adage abound in education that: “We learn: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we both see and hear; 50 percent of what we discussed with others; 80 percent of what we experience personally; 95 percent of what we teach to someone else.” This is a myth based on no evidence. It has 4

become perpetuated because it is an easily reductive formula, but it is unfounded. David Didau lances this particularly boil to good effect here. We must go beyond these simplifications and seek answers from more reputable research to judge against our experience. The following strategies are underpinned by more reputable scientific research and evidence: – Information retrieval over re-reading: It may prove more challenging in the short term, but getting students to try to remember the content of a given topic is more effective than making revision notes based on their original content, textbooks etc. ‘Concept mapping’ is an ideal teaching tool for this (think of its popular branding, image and colour laden brother ‘mind-mapping’!). At the end of each week for example, have students attempt to retrieve the information, without their notes or books. They create a hierarchy of connections that they can attempt to organise conceptually. Research: http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2012_Karpicke_CDPS.pdf. Thank you to@websofsubstance whose excellent blog post of retrieval helped me source this research:http://websofsubstance.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/golden-retrievers/ – Collaborative retrieval: Typically we associate revision activities and memory as requiring individual focus. Indeed, there is some evidence that group work can inhibit some learning, but there is evidence that students working in groups can have a positive effect, where students work together ‘cross cueing’ the information they are recalling. Put simply, they help one another remember and retrieve aspects of key information they would not have remembered individually. Also, the social nature of working together can create memory cues that help individuals recall well over time. Of course, any errors in retrieval, either individually or collaboratively, need teacher correction. Research: http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/sergievsky/pdfs/shorttermandlongterm.pd f - ‘Spacing’ versus ‘massed’ practice: This finding is common sense really. ‘Spacing‘ is when revising the same information two or three times across a few days improves the likelihood of retaining information in the long term memory (Nuttall, 1999). This may include revising a poem and making connections with another poem, then revisiting the key aspects of that poem in the subsequent lesson, before finally doing a ‘concept map’ at the end of the week to revise the learning from the lessons that week. ‘Massed‘ practice, or ‘cramming‘, can have a good short term effect on memory recall, but it fails in the long term in comparison to ‘spacing’ out revision. There is no exact time or number of days concerning how much ‘spaced’ time should be allocated; however, the research indicted the number of days ‘spacing’ is shorter the nearer the exam. In practical terms, over a half-term, we could revisit 5

a concept after a couple of weeks, but nearer they exam we would cluster a couple more ‘revisions’ of the concept/information. David Didau has written an excellent blog explaining spacing etc. and the implications for curriculum planning, and what ‘progress’ in learning may look like here. Research: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full.pdf?ijkey=Z10jaVH/60XQM&keytype =ref&siteid=sppsi and for an in-depth focus on ‘spacing':http://uweb.cas.usf.edu/~drohrer/pdfs/Carpenter_et_al_2012EPR.pdf – Using ‘worked examples’: This is the common method of using past exemplars or creating your own through ‘shared writing‘ strategies. It gives students a working template for their revision and reduces obstacles that stops them learning more knowledge. Ideally, teachers should lead model worked examples of exam questions, thereby giving students a clear idea of an excellent answer, before fading back and letting students tackle exam questions independently. Of course, once more, quality feedback is key in this process. A great blog by Joe Kirby goes into great depth about the ‘why’ of using ‘worked examples’ here. Research: http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/reading/Renkl_et_al_E P.pdf – Regular in-class testing: Drilling answers to tests, under test conditions, can improve both short term and long term memory to boost revision (Roediger et al 2011). Like the retrieval practice of ‘concept mapping’, the very act of retrieval without resources to support proves more memorable than any ‘re-study’ activity. Taking a test can lead to students becoming less confident, therefore quick and accurate feedback is key to making testing highly effective and building confidence. There is research to say that teachers often drastically overestimate what they believe their students to know (Kelly, 1999) so repeated testing is a practical necessity. In terms of learning, there is much research that testing revision material has a positive impact on long term memory in comparison with simply revisiting material. Another important consideration is that students naturally revise in a ‘massed’ learning style i.e. last minute cramming! It is labelled the ‘procrastination scallop‘ by Jack Michael here. This led to a recommended ‘exam a day’ approach, which forces students to distribute their revision more evenly, rather than just cramming. It may seem excessive, but getting students to do challenging retrieval that informs the teacher what they know and don’t know (and invariably if they have revised or not) regularly, like quizzes etc. could do the job. Research: http://people.duke.edu/~ab259/pubs/Roediger&Butler(2010).pdf and the ‘exam a day’ research: http://www.teachpsych.com/ebooks/tips2011/I-07-01Leeming2002.pdf 6

A lot less scientific, but a fun revision strategy that works for many: – Building a ‘palace of memory’ is a much less scientific way of improving memory recall, but it is apparently thousands of years old, originating with the Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos, in the fifth century BC. See this Guardian article for an excellent example of the method in action:http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/15/memory-palaces-lists How does this equate to a revision programme? I am now avoiding revision activities or homework revision tasks that recommend simply revisiting information. I will plan to interleave different topics each week, to create the necessary ‘spacing’ between topics (in my English GCSE class this will mean studying poetry for English Literature at the start of the week, the novel and short stories in the middle of the week, ending the week with English Language revision). I will give regular mini-tests, drilling individual answers, with ‘worked examples’ in the first instance to model a good answer. The feedback on their answers will be timely and regular. I want to undertake weekly retrieval activities that reflect upon what they have learnt that week (combining ‘spacing’ and ‘retrieval’) It is clear that the process of revision happens inside and outside the classroom. Students who possess the grit and resilience to persist with the humdrum nature of revision tasks will have a greater chance at success, but teachers must also identify and plan revision strategies that work. Of course, our experience and intuition about what will work best for our students is important, but we should challenge our assumptions with the wider research that is easily accessible on the web.

To line them up or not to line them up? https://missdcoxblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/to-line-them-up-or-not-to-line-them-up/ March 22, 2015 2 Comments Uncategorized

Whilst this may seem completely pointless to you I have a real issue with lining up students before they go into an exam. My first school was a challenging one. We had to set high expectations and behaviours to ensure chaos didn’t ensue. Before an exam students had to line up, in silence in alphabetical order. It promoted the seriousness of the coming event and got the students to start as we meant them to go on, into the exam hall. There was a member of SLT present for every exam. Also, the Head of dept was always there at the start of their exam to calm nerves, answer last minute questions and generally check things were OK? So when I at my third school they didn’t really bother with this, I was shocked. Students roughly lined up but weren’t told to stand in silence. In fact, often there was no SLT there. Heads of dept didn’t go down to see the students. It was very laissez-faire. I didn’t like it. I tried to query it but others didn’t seem to think it was important. Whilst the studnets were different in their behaviours from my first school, I still thought that this occasion needed a formalised structure. It was generally their only chance at the exam. As part of the SSAT Outstanding schools programme I visited a school that lined up students in silence before every lesson. Students walked in silence to their classroom. It was regimented, almost robotic. But it set the standard. You knew if a student wasn’t going to line up they probably weren’t going to do as they’re told in class. It’s almost a test of whether they were going to comply further. SLT were there to pick out any that decided not to do as told. Some may call it traditional but I see more benefits of lining up students, in silence beyond tradition. It creates an atmosphere of expectation, you can see who’s not going to comply so you can deal with them before they embark on the activity and it makes the event a special and unique one. So, now I’m at a new school I wonder what will happen. Do you think that lining studnets up is imporatnt or just traditional nonsense? Does the ethos of the school impact this? Is there any sort of correlation between this and other things such as success, behaviour etc?

Engagement: Just because they’re busy, doesn’t mean they’re learning anything. I’ve long thought that one of the weakest proxy indicators of effective learning is engagement, and yet it’s a term persistently used by school leaders (and some researchers) as one of the most important measures of quality. In fact many of the things we’ve traditionally associated with effective teachers may not be indicative of students actually learning anything at all. At the #ascl2015 conference last Friday, the always engaging Professor Rob Coe gave a talk entitled ‘From Evidence to Great Teaching’ and reiterated this claim. Take the following slide – How many ‘outstanding’ lessons have been awarded so based on this checklist?

Prof. Rob Coe From Evidence to Great Teaching ASCL 20 Mar 2015 Now these all seem like key elements of a successful classroom, so what’s the problem? and more specifically, why is engagement is such a poor proxy indicator – surely the busier they are, the more they are learning? This paradox is explored by Graham Nuthall in his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners,’ (2007) in which he writes: “Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50% of what the teacher is teaching.” p.24 Nuthall’s work shows that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they’re comfortable with and already know how to do as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks. A good example of this as Alex Quigley has pointed out is that engagement in the form of the seemingly visible 9

activity of highlighting is often “little more than colouring in.” Furthermore, teachers are more than happy to sanction that kind of stuff in the name of fulfilling that all important ‘engagement’ proxy indicator so prevalent in lesson observation forms. The other difficulty is the now constant exhortation for students to be ‘motivated’ (often at the expense of subject knowledge and depth) but motivation in itself is not enough. Nuthall writes that: “Learning requires motivation, but motivation does not necessarily lead to learning.”p.35 Motivation and engagement and vital elements in learning but it seems to be what they are used in conjunction with that determines impact. It is right to be motivating students but motivated to do what? If they are being motivated to do the types of tasks they already know how to do or focus on the mere performing of superficial tasks at the expense of the assimilation of complex knowledge then the whole enterprise may be a waste of time. Learning is in many cases invisible as outlined many times by David Didau and is certainly not linear but rather more nebulous in actuality. As Prof. Coe reminds us, ‘learning happens when people have to think hard’ but unfortunately there is no easy way of measuring this, so what does he suggest is effective in terms of evidencing quality? Ultimately he argues that it comes down to a more nuanced set of practitioner/student skills, habits and conditions that are very difficult to observe, never mind measure. Things like “selecting, integrating, orchestrating, adapting, monitoring, responding” and which are contingent on “context, history, personalities, relationships” and which all work together to create impact and initiate effective learning. So while engagement and motivation are important elements in learning they should be seen as part of a far more complex conglomerate of factors that traditional lesson observations have little hope of finding in a 20 min drive-by. This is where a more robust climate of research and reflective practice can inform judgements. It’s true that more time for teachers to be critically reflective will improve judgements but we also need to be more explicit in precisely what it is we are looking for and accept that often the most apparent classroom element may also be the most misleading. https://chronotopeblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/engagement-just-because-theyrebusy-doesnt-mean-theyre-learning-anything/

The revolution that could change the way your child is taught Doug Lemov believes great teachers are made, not born – and his ideas are transforming education The video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nineyear-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. “What might a character be feeling in a story?” she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she moves smartly around her classroom. On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of Hinton’s lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third time. Here is what Lemov sees in the video: he sees Hinton placing herself at the vantage points from which she can best scan the faces of her pupils (“hotspots”). He sees that after she first asks a question, hands that spring up immediately go back down again, in response to an almost imperceptible gesture from Hinton, to give the other children more time to think (“wait time”). He sees her repeat the question so that this pause in the conversation doesn’t slow its rhythm. He sees Hinton constantly changing the angle of her gaze to check that every pupil is paying attention to whoever in the room is speaking, and silencing anyone who is not doing so with a subtle wave of her hand. He sees her use similar gestures to gently but effectively recall errant students into line without interrupting her own flow or that of the student speaking at the time (“non-verbal corrections”). He sees Hinton venture away from the hotspots to move down the sides of the class, letting her students know, with her movement, that there is always a chance she will be beside their desk in the next few seconds. He sees that in one particular instance she moves toward a particular student while making it look to the rest of the class as if she is simply changing her perspective, so that she can correct his behaviour without embarrassing him – and he sees that she does so with the grace of an elite tennis player delivering a disguised drop shot.

He sees that Hinton is smiling throughout, beaming warmth to her class, and varying the volume of her voice to convey enthusiasm for her topic. He sees that children from one of the poorest neighbourhoods in America – children who elsewhere might have been tacitly expected to misbehave, or to withhold their attention from a class on English literature – are utterly captivated, eager to pitch in with their own thoughts, avid for learning. He sees, finally, that behind this self-effacing display of apparently effortless mastery there are thousands of hours of deliberate, carefully considered practise. Lemov never considered himself a brilliant teacher. When he taught at a school in a poor neighbourhood of Boston, he enjoyed training days, and left them eager to apply what he had learned in planning the next day’s lessons. Then the next day arrived, and his plan collapsed: instead of inspiring kids with his enthusiasm for English or history, he spent his time imploring them to be quiet when he was talking and to stop throwing pens. In the staffroom one day, a more experienced colleague gave him a piece of advice. “When you want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you’re walking around passing out papers it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you’re doing.” This was a revelation. It was exactly the kind of guidance – clear, practical, precise – that Lemov had been missing. And it worked. Lemov, who has an MBA from Harvard, likes precision, and he likes to break a problem down into its component parts before putting together an answer. That was how he set about solving the problem of becoming a better teacher, and it is also how he thinks about the problem that preoccupies him more than any other: closing the “achievement gap” between poor students and everyone else. In fact he has come to see the two problems as inextricably linked. After leaving the school in Boston, Lemov worked for a time as a consultant to failing schools. He came to realise that although he might be able to help them implement better assessment systems, or to use technology more effectively, nothing would work unless the teachers got better at helping the children learn. How could he help with that? Characteristically, he started with a spreadsheet. Cross-referencing test scores and demographics, he identified which schools were achieving the most exceptional results with poor students. Then he visited the classrooms of the best teachers in those schools with a videographer. He watched and rewatched the lessons he recorded, like a football coach studying the tape of a game, analysing in minute detail what these outstanding teachers 12

were doing. He gave names to the techniques he saw them use. Then he circulated his notes to the teachers he worked with. Those teachers passed them on to teachers they knew, who passed them on in turn, until the document, known at that time only as “the taxonomy”, took on a samizdat life of its own. Lemov realised how far word of it had spread when a teacher from California got in touch to request a copy. In 2010, he was persuaded to turn his notes into a book, which became a surprise best-seller in education circles. In its latest edition, Teach Like a Champion lists “62 techniques that put students on the path to college”. Lemov says that some of the advice in the book is probably wrong, and he does not pretend it is comprehensive. But it has become the key text of an incipient transformation of teaching that has little to do with government edict or official policy. *** Hardly anything matters more than education, yet when we talk about education we spend a lot of time arguing over things that do not matter very much. Class sizes, uniforms, curriculum design, which politician runs the Department for Education – none of our favourite flashpoints make a lot of difference to whether children do well at school. For all that parents worry over which school to send their children to, more important is who teaches them when they get there. Professor John Hattie, of the University of Melbourne, has undertaken a rigorous assessment of the thousands of empirical studies that have been carried out on educational achievement. He concluded that, other than the raw cognitive ability of the child herself, only one variable really counts: “What teachers do, know and care about.” The evidence suggests that a child at a bad school taught by a good teacher is better off than one with a bad teacher at a good school. The benefits of having been in the class of a good teacher cascade down the years; the same is true of the penalty for having had a bad teacher. Such effects do not fall evenly upon the population: the children who gain most from good teachers are those from disadvantaged homes in which parental time, money and books are in short supply. Being in the classroom of a great teacher is the best hope these children have of catching up with their more fortunate peers. In 1992, an economist called Eric Hanushek reached a remarkable conclusion by analysing decades of data on teacher effectiveness: a student in the class of a very ineffective teacher – one ranked in the bottom 5% – will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year, whereas if she was in the class of a very effective teacher – in the top 5% – she would learn a year and a half’s worth of material. In other words, the difference between a good and a bad teacher is worth a whole year.

A child at a bad school taught by a good teacher is better off than one with a bad teacher at a good school Hanushek’s proposed solution to the question of how to raise educational standards was brutally simple: fire the worst 10% of teachers and replace them with better ones. Education reformers in America used his findings to argue that schools should have more power to sack under-performing teachers and attract better ones with higher salaries. This “accountability” movement, backed by politicians such as Barack Obama and philanthropists including Bill Gates, has been closely associated with the rise of charter schools in the US and academies in Britain. But it has turned out to be a lot harder than reformers initially envisaged to raise standards. Performance pay has had mixed results, and it has proven difficult to systematically separate good and bad teachers. The reformers can point to some striking successes, but overall, children at charter schools and academies are no more likely to do well than children at run-of-the-mill schools. Meanwhile, teaching unions on both sides of the Atlantic have stubbornly resisted attempts to differentiate between effective and ineffective teachers – and they are quick to level accusations of “teacher-bashing” at those who attempt to do so. This is understandable. Politicians can take an unholy glee in berating “bad teachers”, and you do not have to be paranoid to see such rhetoric as a thinly disguised attack on the whole profession. On the other hand, given that teaching is such a demanding and complex job, it would be bizarre if there was not a wide gap between the best performers and the worst. Globalisation has increased the pressure on education systems to improve, but the pressure is now coming from the bottom up too. The rise of charter schools and academies has precipitated a Cambrian explosion of new ideas and innovations, stimulating a debate about methodology led by teachers themselves. The internet has provided platforms for teachers to talk to other teachers, beyond their own schools and outside official oversight. On social media, teachers are sharing ideas, evidence and techniques, organising conferences on education research, and arguing about the most effective way to teach reading or maths. After years of debate among academics and politicians over how to raise teacher standards, the problem is being solved by the practitioners. And it has become apparent that the noisy argument over “bad teachers” was drowning out a much better question: how do you turn a bad teacher into a good one? And what makes a good teacher good? *** In 2010, the Los Angeles Times triggered a minor earthquake in a city familiar with such events. The Los Angeles school district – the second largest in the United States – had 14

collected detailed data on the performance of its roughly 6,000 teachers, that it had not released. The newspaper used a freedom of information request to get its hands on this database, and after conducting an analysis, published a list of all the teachers in Los Angeles, ranked by effectiveness. It turned out that the very best teachers were getting results that were not only much better than low-ranked teachers, but twice as good as good teachers. At the very top of the list was a woman called Zenaida Tan. Tan taught at Morningside Elementary, a decent if unremarkable school with an intake of mainly poor students, many of whom struggled with English. Year after year, students were entering Tan’s class with below-average ability in maths and English, and leaving it with above-average scores. You might imagine that before the Los Angeles Times published its rankings, Tan would have already been celebrated for her ability by her peers – that her brilliance would be well-known to fellow teachers eager to learn her secrets. You would be wrong on all counts. When the Los Angeles Times sent a correspondent to interview Tan, they found her quietly carrying out her work, unheralded except by those who had taken her class and knew what a difference it had made to their lives. “Nobody tells me that I’m a strong teacher,” Tan told the reporter. She guessed that her colleagues thought her “strict, even mean”. On a recent evaluation, her headmaster noted she had been late to pick up her students from recess three times. It was as if Lionel Messi’s teammates considered him a useful midfielder who needed to work on his tackling. There is entrenched resistance, in the education establishment, to singling out individuals, even to praise or emulate them. The only options for Tan’s evaluation were “meets standard performance” and “below standard performance”. But if Tan and others like her go unnoticed it is also because they do not look the part. Ask someone to describe a great teacher, and they are likely to conjure up someone like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society: eccentric, flamboyant, prone to leaping on to desks. When we see a teacher effortlessly commanding her class’s attention, our instinct is to put it down to some quality of their personality – great teachers, it is said, just have something. They are possessed of an innate ability to inspire. Sam Freedman, the head of research at Teach First, which places high-achieving graduates into schools with disadvantaged intakes, said that even among teachers, there is hostility to the notion that what they do can be analysed and replicated: “The idea of learning heuristics seems bad because you’re not discovering your inner teacher.” But the myth of the magical teacher subtly undermines the status of teaching, by obscuring the extraordinary skill required to perform the job to a high level. It also implies that great teaching cannot be taught.

At training college, budding teachers learn theories of child development and are told about the importance of concepts such as “feedback” and “high expectations”. But they get surprisingly little help with actual teaching. Imagine being told you need to show high expectations of your students. “It’s like telling a kid to get better GCSEs,” Jenny Thompson, a teacher at Dixons Trinity Academy in Bradford, told me. The reason teachers respond so enthusiastically to Doug Lemov’s ideas is that he is right there with them at the front of the class. Tall and wide-chested, Lemov is built like an American football player. In fact, his favourite sport is soccer, which he played at college in upstate New York. His coaches there did not spend much time discussing the game in the abstract. Instead, they told him to “narrow the angle” or “close the space”. In his books and workshops, Lemov talks about what pace to move around the classroom, what language to use when praising a student, how to adjust the angle of your head to let students know you’re looking at them. Teaching, he says, is “a performance profession”. Sports coaches know that what looks effortlessly achieved, like the way Roger Federer hits a backhand, is in fact the product of countless hours of practice and analysis. Faced with a problem – a weakness in their game – they break it down into parts and work on the execution of each one before putting it all back together. Successful sportspeople have what the psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset” – the belief that talent is intelligently applied effort in disguise. The ones who understand this principle best are those born without the supreme talent of a Federer – the ones who have had to strive for every millimetre of improvement. The best teachers do not necessarily understand how teaching works, because their own technique is invisible to them; sports psychologists call this “expert-induced amnesia”. When the Los Angeles Times asked some of the teachers who topped their list what made them so effective, one replied that great teachers simply love their students and love their job: “You can’t bottle that, and you can’t teach it.” Doug Lemov is on a mission to prove that talented teacher wrong. *** At Lemov’s workshop, the teachers rehearsed asking questions and taking answers – not something I had imagined would require practice. A few minutes earlier, Lemov had cited research that found the average time a teacher leaves between question and answer is 1.5 seconds. That is not enough, he said. The teachers, all of whom had several years of experience, agreed. As they discussed why, I began to understand something about how absurdly difficult the job is, and the fundamental reason for its difficulty: thinking is invisible.

Imagine you’re a teacher, standing in front of your class. You ask a question: “What was the immediate cause of the first world war?” Three hands go up immediately. You decide which one to pick. “OK, Leon.” Leon gives the answer you taught last week: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Things are going well, aren’t they? But what if there is a child in the third row who was on her way to getting the answer right but gives up the moment she sees Leon raise his hand? What if there is another student, in the back row, who does not even bother thinking any more because he knows Leon always gets there first? Lemov played a clip of a teacher called Maggie Johnson. Johnson asks her class: “What does Atticus say about mockingbirds?” After leaving a gap of several seconds, she takes an answer. Lemov played the clip again and this time, with the help of the teachers in the room, he dissected Johnson’s technique – showing how she used “wait time” to enact high expectations and make everyone in her class feel they might have an answer worth sharing. Before she has even finished asking the question, one boy has his hand up. Johnson waits. Two more hands go up. Johnson walks slowly across the front of the classroom, smiling, her gaze criss-crossing the class, as more and more hands spring up. Her movement, and her smile, dissipates any tension before it arises, either in herself or her students. Another lesson that Lemov learned from his football days was that if he really wanted to improve, playing in matches was not enough. He needed to practice techniques and routines, preferably with teammates. Teachers like Maggie Johnson have honed their skills outside the classroom, in countless coffee-fuelled staffroom sessions with colleagues. This means they are able to execute classroom routines with the minimum of conscious effort, leaving them free to concentrate on the headspinning complexities of tracking which child has understood what, and who needs what kind of help. The rhetoric of “bad teachers” and “good teachers” not only reinforces the perception that teaching ability is a gift someone either has or does not have, it also undermines the kind of informal collaboration Lemov advocates (a problem with linking pay to performance is that it incentivises teachers not to help each other improve). Indeed, the set-up of most schools is inimical to collaboration. In a hangover from the days when monks taught in cells, the most important work in a traditional school is done behind closed doors, by individuals separated from their peers (educationalists call it the “egg crate model”). As a consequence, teachers have never developed a shared vocabulary for discussing their work in detail. One reason they enthuse over Teach Like a Champion is that it offers one. A teacher at the workshop told me: “I can say to my colleagues, ‘Have you tried cold calling? And they immediately understand what I mean. That makes a huge difference.” Lemov played the video of Maggie Johnson a third time, and paused it about two-thirds of the way through. He pointed to a girl in the front row, slight and bespectacled, with her hair 17

in neat plaits. At a point when most of the class have their hands in the air, hers is still down. Her teacher waits. The girl stares intently at her notes. Her hand creeps up to her neck, and goes down again. Her teacher is still waiting. The girl puts her hand up, this time with conviction, and this time she holds it there. Lemov is wary of big ideas and educational philosophies. Most of the tools in Teach Like a Champion, he says, remain beneath the notice of theorists of education. But he does have a philosophy, even if he wouldn’t call it that. One of its tenets is that teachers need to maximise the amount of thinking and learning going on in their classroom at any one time, and to ensure that this effort is widely distributed. Take “cold calling”. Instead of asking a question of the class and then picking a hand, you call on a student regardless of whether they have raised their hand. It sounds too simple to be significant. But, to use one of Lemov’s favourite phrases, cold calling is “a small change that cascades”. Cold calling enables the teacher to check on the level of learning of any student in the class; it keeps the pace of the lesson high, because the teacher no longer has to wait for volunteers; it makes the teacher look more authoritative. Crucially, it increases the amount of thinking going on in the classroom at any one time because everyone knows the next question might be for them. Another of Lemov’s tenets is that mundane routines can have magical effects. He often opens his sessions by showing a clip of a teacher called Doug McCurry at Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut – another school that achieves exceptional results with underprivileged students. McCurry is instructing his pupils, on their first day at school, on how to pass out papers. Though it happens several times every hour of teaching, it is not the kind of thing you get taught at training college. McCurry takes a minute to explain how he wants it done (pass across rows, start on his command, only the person passing gets out of his or her seat). Then he has his students practice it while he times them with a stopwatch. “Ten seconds. Pretty good. Let’s see if we can get them back out in eight.” When Lemov plays this clip, many teachers are sceptical. Why is McCurry focusing on this menial task? Is he trying to turn his students into automatons? Quite the opposite, says Lemov. Assume that the average class passes papers out or back 20 times a day, and that they take 80 seconds to do it. If McCurry’s students accomplish this task in 20 seconds, they will save 20 minutes a day. The school has increased its most precious asset – teaching time – by 4%, without any spending any more money. In case that sounds like arid managerialism, consider what it means in practice: 20 minutes not spent passing papers back and forth is 20 minutes that a child who grew up in a home with no books can spend learning about how Charles Dickens uses imagery; 20 minutes not shuffling paper is 20 minutes that a girl who believes she is hopelessly bad at maths can be taught how to calculate the area of a circle. Over a school year, those minutes add up to 18

eight school days: time for a whole unit on 20th-century poetry or coordinate geometry; time enough to get hooked on the life-expanding pleasures of learning difficult things. *** Gareth Cook, a slender young man with feline eyes, is watching himself, on a laptop screen, address a group of 12-year-old boys sitting on artificial grass, clutching footballs. In a crisply delivered speech, Cook, a former school teacher, explains to the children how to react when your team loses possession. When the video is paused, Cook sits back and says, “Too much talking.” Next to him, Martin Diggle nods, pointing to a time code under the picture: “29 minutes of talking in a 90 minute session.” Cook is a junior coach at the academy of Liverpool Football Club. Diggle is employed by the Football Association to mentor club coaches, part of the FA’s effort to raise the technical standards of the national game. Staff at top clubs do not generally relish being told how to do their job by the sport’s governing body, but Diggle, an experienced coach possessed of a reassuring manner, is listened to. “My job isn’t to tell them how to coach,” he told me. “My job is to help them think about what they’re doing.” Earlier in the day I watched Nick Marshall, the academy’s head of operations, deliver an appraisal to another young coach. Topics included the importance of attending to the individual as well as the group, and how to make children want to follow rules rather than feel they have to. “As coaches, we tend to get obsessed by tactics,” Marshall told me afterwards. “But instead of studying tactical diagrams until 3am, why aren’t we reading Carol Dweck, or the neuroscience of the teenage brain?” Just as sports coaches are becoming polymaths, teachers are adopting coaching’s focus on constant, self-reflective improvement. Traditionally, teachers haven’t necessarily been expected to get better at teaching once they have mastered the basics of the job. According to Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of London’s Institute of Education, and a former teacher, the evidence suggests that most new teachers improve for the first two to three years of their career, as they learn how to manage classroom behaviour, and then stop improving. “People make claims about having 20 years’ experience,” Wiliam told me, “but they really just have one year’s experience repeated 20 times.” People make claims about having 20 years’ experience, but they really just have one year’s experience repeated 20 times Dylan Wiliam For years, British football coaching was stymied by a macho disdain for new ideas imported from the European clubs that regularly beat them in competition. In education, when Asian 19

countries top international tables of achievement, we make derisory noises about hothousing. But the reason Shanghai’s schools are recognised as among the best in the world is because their teachers never stop thinking about how to get better at teaching. When Marc Tucker, the president of NCEE, an American education thinktank, went to Shanghai, he discovered a system designed to elicit continual improvement. Staff meet once a week by grade and subject, and break into teams to work on problems of their choice – at one school, the teachers had rearranged their floor plan so that teachers from the same grade level shared an office. Every young teacher has an older mentor, of proven achievement, assigned to them. The Shanghai system, Tucker said, revolves around the premise that “not only is it possible for you to get better, it is your job to get better and it never ends”. Nick Marshall reminded me that there have always been forward-thinking football coaches in this country. But they are now more likely to find a home that makes the most of their talents, and to choose an employer on that basis. Similarly, ambitious teachers now want to work for a school that helps them improve, rather than one where they are so busy struggling to impose their will on the classroom that they cannot develop their skills. “You’d be amazed,” Sam Freedman told me, “at how many schools there are where a teacher can discipline a child by sending him out of the room, only for the deputy head to pass by a few minutes later and send him back in.” At successful schools, everyone abides by the same rules, while at the same time understanding that the rules are a means to an end. The best instil a hunger to learn, and not just in their pupils. Introducing his workshop for educators, Doug Lemov showed a scatter graph, plotting achievement in maths, on the horizontal axis, against socioeconomic status on the vertical axis. Each dot represented a school in America. The dots clustered together into fuzzy but unmistakable line running from top-left to bottom-right: the poorer you are, the less likely you are to achieve the kind of education that might enable you to stop being poor. The same applies here: in England, if you are a high-achieving 11-year-old from a poor family, you are only 30% as likely to attend university as your richer peers. After inviting us to consider anew the enormity of this grim truth, Lemov pointed to some stray dots that had escaped from the main cluster to find their own space. In these schools, children from poor neighbourhoods were doing as well or better than middle-class peers. If they can do it, he said, why can’t any school? And why isn’t every other school in the land scrabbling to find out what these schools are doing right, so that they can copy it? *** Almost the first thing Jenny Thompson does when I arrive at her school on a freezing Monday morning is to take me outside. “Come and stand on the step with me,” she says, “This is what I do every morning.” Thompson, 34, is senior vice principal at Dixons Trinity 20

Academy, which Sam Freedman told me was the best school he had visited in England. It’s early – before 8am – and night still lingers; I wonder if I should go back and get my coat. But now here come the children, some arriving alone, some in twos or threes, some grinning, some with heads down. Thompson has a word for everyone. “How are you this morning, Ahmed? Did you sleep OK, Shazia? Ben, have you recovered?” Academies may not, on average, be better than regular schools, but the best ones are doing astonishing things. Shortly after he started videoing great teachers, Lemov co-founded a chain of charter schools. Uncommon Schools aims to help children born into poverty get to university. Its 40 or so schools, scattered across north-eastern cities such as Boston and New York, serve the urban poor, which means, for the most part, African-Americans. In a reversal of national norms, its black students outperform local white students in tests of maths and reading, and consistently beat state averages, often dramatically so. Lemov’s workshop in London was hosted by All Saints Academy, part of the Ark chain, whose schools are achieving similarly impressive results in underprivileged areas. Dixons Trinity, which opened in 2012, draws its pupils from one of the most deprived parts of Bradford, a town yet to regain the prosperity it enjoyed in its industrial heyday. Around half of the pupils live in the city’s five poorest wards. Many are the children of immigrants from Pakistan or India, and many do not speak English at home. But its students outperform the UK average in English and maths, and the ones who enter Dixons Trinity with the lowest achievement levels do better than anyone else. This is a source of particular satisfaction to the school’s principal, Luke Sparkes, who tells me that the school is designed around its most vulnerable pupils. “If you get it right with them, you get it right with everyone.”

It is 8am now, five minutes before the start of the school day. Children tumble out of parental cars and run. Thompson reassures them: “It’s OK. You’re not late!” By 8.05 all the children are inside. It is an earlier start than at most schools, but the children’s punctuality record – at Dixons Trinity, they keep data on everything – is almost 100%. “The thing is,” Thompson says, “they want to be here on time.” Doug Lemov says his techniques work best when the pupils understand when and why they are being used; they are not intended to be secret weapons. The spirit of transparency permeates Dixons Trinity. When new pupils join they are asked to sign up – literally – to the 21

school’s values of “hard work, trust and fairness”. After that, “we over-explain everything,” Thompson says. There is no rule or routine, from being silent in the corridor to lining up in the playground after lunch, that isn’t painstakingly explained and re-explained to the pupils. “We have high standards, and that means rules,” Sparkes says. “But we don’t want the kids to feel they have to kick against them, so they need to feel part of it.” I watch as Dani Quinn, head of maths, teaches her class how to calculate the area under a curve. She begins with an explanation of why they are doing the lesson at all, given that they covered the same material last week: “We know from research in psychology that when your brain is forced to retrieve something from memory, it sinks in deeper.” When two girls start to whisper to each other as Quinn is talking, she silences them with a swift but detailed explanation of why she is doing so: “It means the others can’t hear me properly, which prevents them learning, which isn’t fair on them and damages the trust we have in each other. OK, so how do we calculate this value?” Sparkes, a self-possessed 35-year-old from Liverpool, was at pains to stress that most of the school’s practices are adopted from other good schools. “Very little of it is new,” he told me, as we stood in the playground and watched two teachers line up the entire school as a postlunch reset. “The only difference is, we do what we say.” At Dixons Trinity, there is no single innovation or magical personality around which everything revolves, just a shared and relentless attention to better execution. That can make it a hard place to work. “You need a self-critical disposition to work here,” said Thompson. On the other hand, there is pleasure to be found in obsessing over the details of an inexhaustibly interesting job. Dani Quinn describes herself as a “pedagogy geek”. On a table in Sparkes’s office are copies of Teach Like a Champion. “We buy it for every teacher,” he told me. At least two mornings a week, the teachers get together in a group or in paired sessions between younger and more experienced teachers. When I visited, they were focused on honing two of Lemov’s techniques: “no opt out” – insisting, when a child gives an answer, that she repeat it until it is 100% correct, and “positive framing” – making critical feedback encouraging. Small things, said Sparkes, but teaching is complex, and in the classroom, “you need to have this stuff down so that you can think”. Not to mention that for pedagogy geeks, this is fun. What the teachers at Dixons Trinity tell the children, they apply to themselves: that it is vital to push yourself, that the road to mastery leads through hard work, that you should never stop trying to get better. Somehow, though, these imperatives do not sound like strictures. The school runs on rules, but it is animated by something else. In the videos that Doug Lemov shows, what impresses you is the teaching, but what moves you is the palpable joy that the students are taking in being taught. In the days after my trip to Dixons Trinity, what stayed with me was the image of Jenny Thompson, radiating bonhomie into the chill Yorkshire air, children rushing up the steps to school. 22

Before I leave, I ask Thompson where she finds the will to get out of bed at 5am every day; to work weekends and evenings; to endure the punishing constraint of thinking self-critically about everything she does. At least in sport or business, I suggest, there are prizes. “Oh, but I think it’s easier for us to get motivated,” Thompson says, noting that she was still paid less than the salary she was offered to join Goldman Sachs as a graduate trainee. She laughs. “I wouldn’t work this hard if I was at a private school.” http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/11/revolution-changing-way-your-childtaught

I have a copy of this book if anyone is interested in reading it.

Ofsted preparation and workload: can teachers working in an RI school have a manageable workload with a school inspection looming? https://teachertweaks.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/ofsted-preparation-and-workload-canteachers-working-in-an-ri-school-have-a-manageable-workload-with-a-school-inspectionlooming/ Since we returned to work after the February half term, I have spent about 50% of my time preparing for an Ofsted visit. It will be nearly two years since we received our ‘requires improvement’ judgement so we know we are due a visit imminently. Coupled with this, a few schools in our borough have been inspected recently so there are the usual predictions about when we’ll be next. I am absolutely swamped with work in a way that I haven’t ever experienced in the past 10 years. It is relentless. Every day, there is something new I have been asked to do in the name of Ofsted preparation. This is on top of the usual SLT paperwork that I would be doing. I understand that there is going to be a fair bit of paperwork associated with this job but if I printed out every piece of paper I’ve been given or have produced myself into my special ‘Ofsted’ folder, we’d have no trees left in our borough (which is known as ‘Queen of the Suburbs’ because of its abundance of parks and greenery!) Every week for the past two months of weekly SLT meetings, we have had an agenda item called ‘Ofsted Preparation’. We have produced documents, questioned each other on our areas, gone over the findings of student interviews, carried out huge work scrutinies, examined new guidance from Ofsted, shared our ‘Ofsted’ folders with each other with myriad data and case studies – these are just the things I can think of off the top of my head. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that all of this is worthless but it is certainly overwhelming. Sometimes I ask myself ‘Is it all worth it? Aren’t we scaring ourselves by going overboard like this?’ Yet when I tentatively (well, perhaps not tentatively) voice this opinion, the response is like something from the most zealous boy scout. I think many of our fears stem from the fact that we were, in hindsight, underprepared to face the previous Ofsted inspection. We had lots of data but we didn’t have enough prepared on our gaps and what we were doing about them. This time round, we have so much evidence coming out of our ears that I don’t know when the inspectors are going to get a chance to leave the room and escape our folders!

This week I’ve been thinking about the rest of our staff. If I’m feeling like this, then how on earth is everyone else feeling? At the start of September, we devoted a fair chunk of time to try and reduce teacher workload before it became the buzz phrase of Nicky Morgan a month later. We pinned up countless bits of paper on the head’s board in his office and tried to work out what we could scrap. The horrible truth was that we scrapped very little because nearly every time we tried to scrap something, different people would say ‘But won’t we need to show this for Ofsted?’ And so the little piece of paper stays on the board accompanied with a plaintive murmur ‘It’ll be ok once Ofsted have gone’. But we’ve been saying that everything will be alright once Ofsted go for far too long; in fact, we’ve said it every week since the start of September and it’s now nearly bloody Easter. How long can we keep saying this? It will come as no surprise to teachers that our biggest workload issue stems from marking and the collection of marking evidence. We were slammed in our last inspection for patchy and ineffective marking. It was a fair cop. Our actual marking policy isn’t too onerous in my opinion. Teachers are asked to identify in advance which pieces of work will be ‘major assessed pieces’. These pieces are assessed, with a WWW comment, subject-specific action and a literacy action. Any other nonassessment pieces of work are either self or peer critiqued, or acknowledged by the teacher but in far less detail. But it’s all the other bits of the marking policy that adds up. Students need time to act upon feedback (fair enough; otherwise, what’s the point?) so teachers need to build in time for student to do this. Yet it’s a blooming miracle if everyone in the class was present the day the assessment was done – don’t even get me started on how many students forget to bring their book so they are clinging onto some crummy piece of paper. Then, when the students have acted upon feedback, which can take anywhere between 15 minutes to 15 hours (or that’s what it can feel like once I’ve found enough green pens) I need to make sure all the key targets and grades are inputted onto these blue assessment tracker sheets so I can see how much wonderful progress my students have made throughout the year. 25

And who is to blame for this? Well, I am partially culpable. Two years ago, I thought this sounded like a great way of showing Ofsted how well we mark and how we are all so ontrack with how students are progressing. Yet assessing students and giving meaningful feedback doesn’t always fit into nice, neat block of times. Departments need some leeway to set their own agenda. If you think your students aren’t ready to sit that test but feel constrained because you need to enter a mark onto the tracker sheet, then something is going terribly wrong. In all the rush to create a perfect, infallible system, we’ve lost what’s at the heart of it all: students learning well. But learning is really messy and messy doesn’t look good if you’re in an RI school and Ofsted knocking on the door. I really believe we need to move away from this one size fits all marking policy and move towards departmental marking policies, acknowledging what subject professionals are telling us will and will not work for them in their areas. However, if we make another change before Ofsted come along, we are worried we will be seen as endlessly changing our minds and never letting initiatives and policies embed properly… How many book looks will be enough? You see, with all this extra marking and trackers to fill in, there’s a lot more stuff to monitor. And monitoring things and filling out more bits of paper to monitor the monitoring eats up a lot of time – not just for SLT but all of the heads of department too. My sincere wish is we had the courage to say ‘No! Forget this! How is this helping the students?’ Although this will be my fourth Ofsted, it’s my first with us going into it with a ‘require improvement’ judgement so I feel on shakier ground. I hope that we all learn from this experience and have much more confidence the next time around to say no to paper for paper’s sake. We have made huge strides with our staff learning culture: teachers are engaging with and participating in research; more and more teachers are taking opportunities to develop their pedagogy; teachers are confirming that the developmental coaching approach is working better than the punitive Ofsted-style lesson observations. Yet the question remains for me: how much more could we achieve if we freed up all of our time to set our own agenda? Last October at TLT14 in Southampton, Tom Sherrington was the opening speaker and he showed his now well-known tweet.

Effective feedback – How do you make your marking count? Summary of Discussion This week’s #ukedchat Thursday discussion was about making marking and feedback count. At the start of every new school year, marking is always high up on my list of resolutions. I always want to be better at it: more efficient, more effective. I want to make my marking count. At the end of the discussion, I had found several ideas to try. Maybe this is the year my resolution will be achieved! Throughout the discussion I tried to pose a variety of questions and in my summary I will try and share the answers and debates which some of those questions prompted. How do we make marking & feedback meaningful? Various contributors discussed the need to ensure pupils engaged with the feedback. @MrAColley offered the suggestion that pupils mark the feedback with a tick if they agree, a cross and a reason if they don’t and a question mark if they haven’t understood. @westylish believes that time needs to be planned for pupils to respond to feedback (see the scoop-it links for a blog on this subject.) How do you check that your feedback has been acted on? What methods do you have for checking that improvements are made? @Jivespin and others discussed using a variety of feedback stamps. I particularly liked @Jivespin’s idea of getting pupils to write down what their verbal feedback had been. Or @mrpeel’s suggestion that they spider-diagram the conversation around the stamp. Simple, quick and, if used to reflect and act on, then no doubt effective. How do you manage your marking to avoid it becoming an overwhelming task? @sgrobinson13 offered the solution of taking ten books home at the weekend and ten books on a Monday. @misstiggr suggested marking every day as students appreciate the frequency and little and often works. @MsKateRyan offered some sage advice (which I would do well to take myself at the moment!) when she suggested: Spread out deadlines between classes and try to mark within 24-48 hours of submission. Stops mountains piling up. I’m also going to go and do some reading about @kevbartle’s ‘Taxonomy of Errors’ thanks to @TeacherTweaks’ tweet: When marking I create numbered targets using Taxonomy of Errors (idea from @kevbartle) to stop writing same points endlessly!

There were so many excellent ideas and advice shared during the hour-long discussion. I’ve tried to pull out as many interesting tweets as I could but I would encourage you to read the archive and check out the scoop-it weblinks. Hopefully you enjoyed the discussion and will be joining us again next Thursday. I think @westylish really summed it up for me with this tweet though: Really good conversation on #ukedchat tonight regarding feedback. Twitter is brilliant #cpd. Remember, you can see all links shared here: http://www.scoop.it/t/links-from-ukedchatsessions. Notable Tweets @MrAColley: #ukedchat Pupils ‘mark the feedback’. Tickfor understood, x for disagree (w reason), ? for don’tunderstand” @shornymorgan: During ‘MAD’ time, I get them to redraft one / write new para of the writing they did which received the feedback @poachermullen: we give banks of targets 4 improvement & write no. of relevant target on work.Then look up, engage & correct wk @jivespin: Give your TA a stamp and a target for selected studentsso their feedback is valued too and evidence of their work @JamesJMatthews: #ukedchat Two stars and a wish works well…..providing the next lesson is personalised to all those wishes! @MissDCox: as much as this is painful, if you don’t markfor the next lesson (or at a push the one after that) youmight as well not bother @mrandmrsteach: Use highlighters to identify areas of strength/improvement. Makes your marking visual @rpd1972: #ukedchat Pink/green marking is a great tool: pink for think, green for great. Chn can instantly see their successes &what needs improving. @Smithie_S: #UkEdChat using alphanumeric marking code for WWWEBI that children have to decipher then act on, now developed next step think questions @WhiteDebs: #ukedchat how about giving work back to pupils withfeedback on post it notes – pupils have to match work tofeedback – groups of 4 @syded06: the ‘ideal’ feedback is a 1:1conversation. We can get very close to this withtechnology at our disposal @mrpeel: I bought a verbalfeedback stamp from Amazon- I stamp: they spider the feedback 28

@rpd1972: #ukedchat pink/green works well in maths too. We are trialling chn only writing on 1page, to give space for marking & responses to marking @mrpeel: key is to give enough time to read the feedback and structure their attitude to receiving and responding from y7 onwards @eylanezekiel: #ukedchat Try to give up on marking and move towards’critique’ / peer and self assessmenthttp://elschools.org/best-practices/ron-berger-critique …From the great Ron Berger @daviderogers: remember that not all feedback needs to be written in books. Plan oral feedback, speak to children in lessons @piersyoung: Wonder sometimes if exercise books are where feedback goes to die. Publicly visible systems (blogs/wikis et al) much more alive. @TeacherTweaks: Using ABC (add, build upon, challenge) model of critique to get students familiar with process of drafting, reviewing & editing. @urban_teacher: One form of feedback never works! You need to use arange of feedback techniques so students understandhow to progress @davidErogers: #ukedchat use social media and other outlets to provide opportunities for feedback from outside the school on work @MsKateRyan: Spread out deadlines between classes and try to mark within 24-48 hours of submission. Stops mountains piling up. @TeacherTweaks: When marking I create numbered targetsusing Taxonomy of Errors (idea from @kevbartle) to stopwriting same points endlessly! Tweets of the Week It was difficult to choose just one tweet of the week: This first one is a definite take-away for me as KS5 is a big focus for our department at the moment. This seems such a simple but brillinat idea: @mrtpolitics: Make 6th form keep all essays with feedback on in a plastic wallet at front of folder. Start revision by rewriting earlier essays. I also liked the simplicity of this idea: @Class_Leading: #ukedchat Separate out praise and feedback, feedback first then praise when improvement made – courtesy of @ebtnetwork

And this made me wish I could do this for all of my classes. It seems like the absolute holy grail of marking… I’m still trying to figure out how I can make this work: @MrPPritchard: I do some focused marking with the child beside me. I explain my thinking, they get immediate feedback…But it takes lots of time. About your Host @dailydenouement: I’m a newly appointed Head of Year, having previously been a 2nd in English for several years. After a brief stint as Acting Head of Department, I’m enjoying the move into all things pastoral. I teach at a Catholic comprehensive in Liverpool. Love teaching, dislike all the politics that surrounds it. Subsequent Responses:

http://ukedchat.com/2013/09/19/session-169/